Dave's Workshop - Workbench June 10th

Workbench

Week of June 10^th - 16^th 2001

Sunday

No entry

Monday

No entry

Tuesday

I woke up this morning to find Tallahassee has received over 10 inches of rain in the preceding 24 hours, setting a new record. That's good because we need rain. And bad because all coming at once does far less to help us then if it were spread over a month or even a week. It also caused the only street in and out of the subdivision I live in to flood. 200 or so feet of road that runs along the side a holding pond (great planning there...) is currently under a couple, three feet of water. Seeing a SUV stuck in it made it a very easy decision to not try it in my Volvo. Another onlooker told me that around five years ago it flooded worse then this and they were cut off for three days till the city pumped out enough water to make the road passable. So far the weather has been clear today and a number of trucks have braved the water and made it. We're forecasted for more rain tonight though, so we'll see how it is tomorrow.

Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say. Unable to go to work, I decided to get serious about this web site. I had started a ground up rebuilding a few weeks ago and hadn't gotten very far. With today's free time that has changed and Dave's Workshop has been reborn. It's still very much a work in progress, but after almost 2 years of inactivity, "in progress" is pretty exiting.

Wednesday

The waters have subsided. At least enough that I only had to drive through inches of water this morning to get to work. Much better then the feet of water covering the road yesterday. Hopefully the worst is over. It was pretty clear yesterday, and so far has only rained for a few minutes today.

We use Outlook and Exchange for our email at work. This morning, when I tried to move a email in to a folder, I got a message that the personal folder was corrupt and to shut down Outlook and run the repair tool. Luckily, I've run into this problem a couple of times before so I know what to do. The repair tool is called scanpst.exe. First I looked on the start menu to see if Office 2000 had placed a shortcut to it for me, no luck. I also checked where I installed Office, not there. I found it by searching my drive for 'scan*.*' and found two versions of it, both in odd places I would have never thought to look in. Thankfully that was the hardest part of the problem. I double-clicked on scanpst.exe. It let me browse for the problem pst file. It scanned the file, detected the errors, asked if I wanted to fix them and offered to back up the file as well. What's more it worked, and over the network. So my personal folders are letting me file emails again and life is good.

It was good. Then I started working on some draft web pages for a section I support. We're a Microsoft house. If Microsoft makes software that even remotely meets the need we use it. Trust me, it wasn't my call. I'm working on web pages, so I fire up FrontPage and get to work. FrontPage is a WYSIWYG program or What You See Is What You Get. You type in your content, like you're using a word processor, and FrontPage automagically turns it into HTML. Fine in theory, doesn't really work in real life. Like most HTML authoring programs I've seen, the HTML produced is, well, lets be nice and say it doesn't follow HTML standards. I like standards. So I spend most of my time in the window that lets you directly edit the HTML. I'm trying to write for the XHTML standard where possible. One of the big differences between HTML and XHTML is every tag must have an end tag. For example, the tag for a line break is <br>. Normally you just keep going, but XHTML wants an end tag. End tags are just like start tag but with a '/'. So, to create a break in XHTML you write <br></br>. Easy right? Well when I saved the file, FrontPage deleted the end tags. I know, I know, FrontPage just doesn't support XHTML right? Even if that's the reason, it's a bad one. It supports Internet Explorer non-standard tags. And XHTML isn't brand new. It may not be widely followed yet, but with support like this I can see why. Anyway, it just re-enforces my own feeling that the best why to create web pages is to write them your-self with a text editor of something similar. The 'do it for you' programs sound great, but in my opinion, cause more trouble then they're worth.

Thursday

Have you ever had a day when you got nothing done you set out to do? That was my day today at work. Don't get me wrong, what I ended up doing was important, but I didn't plan on restoring deleted files from tape, unlocking user accounts, updating exchange permissions, etc... That's why I'm there though. I may not get my work done, but at least my users will get theirs.

One thing that came up was a user running out of space on their C drive. They were using a statistical program called SPSS that likes a lot of free space in the temp directory. They had none. When I set up the machine, I made a 2 GB primary partition (drive C), with the remainder, around 28 GB, an extended partition (drive D). For most of my users that's fine. All they're running is MS Office. In this case though, something had to be done. The traditional solution would be to back up all the data on the computer, repartition the drive, reinstall the OS, and restore the data. In some cases you can back up the OS, saving you from reinstalling. However, this machine was running Windows NT and I'm not sure how well that would work. In fact it's NT's fault it was partitioned like that in the first place. In theory you can create one large NTFS partition. However, when you set up NT you're restricted to either a 2 GB FAT16 partition or a 4 GB NTFS partition. The only way to get around this is to take out the hard drive and put it in another computer with NT already installed and format it there. Even then you run into problems because NT's system partition, the one it boots off, is limited to 8 GB.

However, there are other solutions. One of them is Power Quest's Partition Magic. I had just received version 6 as part of Drive Image Professional, a program I'll talk about another time, so I made the boot floppies (not as easy as it should have been) and fired it up. Briefly, all I had to do was boot off the floppies, decrease the size of the logical partition (drive D) by 6 GB, decrease the size of the extended partition by the same, and increase the primary partition (drive C) by the now freed up 6 GB. I hit apply to make my changes take effect, waited about fifteen minutes while the program made the changes and checked the drive for errors and rebooted. I now had an 8 GB 'C' drive, with plenty of room for temp files. Not too bad. I plan on writing up a full review in the near future, so I'll save some details for that. Maybe tomorrow I can get some real work done.

Friday

Fridays are either dead at work or very, very busy. Today was Busy. Nothing very interesting, I updated some web pages and tock care of some odds and ends. The only real problem I've got going Is trying to import mail messages from Outlook Express into Outlook. It shouldn't be that hard right, they're both Microsoft products. One could even argue Express is intended to get people used to MS mail clients in hopes they upgrade to Outlook. Oh well, I'll keep at it.

When I got home from work last night I found a package under the mat. The copy of Nero Burning Rom I ordered had arrived. I've used the demo and liked it. When I went to buy Nero I was presented with two options: pay $50 for a serial number to unlock the demo (it's full featured with a time limit) or get a retail version shipped to me for $70. I chose the $70 box. Why you may ask. Well that's complicated. First, paying $50 for a number just doesn't seem right. For only $20 more you get you get a physical product, one you can hold in you hands. Second, money wasn't the biggest issue. I wanted to support AHEAD software, who makes Nero. If I was looking for the cheapest way I would have just kept using the demo (it's time limited, but there are ways around that). Third, if I got the full product I could write about it and let you know the pro's and con's of ordering it or just paying for a serial number. So I've got it ... and soon you'll know if you should too.

Saturday

HOME

WORKBENCH

COMPUTERS

HOBBIES

ABOUT

Workbench

Week of June 10^th - 16^th 2001

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

HOME

WORKBENCH

COMPUTERS

HOBBIES

ABOUT

Workbench

Week of June 10th - 16th 2001

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Week of June 10^th - 16^th 2001