I never realised how much I hated floppy disks until today. They’re slow, clunky and unreliable. It should be a simple matter to transfer a 1.1Mb RAID card firmware update to a machine with no O/S but no.. first the floppy drive in my PC doesn’t have the power connected, then it fails to recognise any disk I put in there.
After a reboot, it finds the drive, finds the disk, formats the disk (one of a box of 10). Copy the files onto it and insert into drive on other machine.
Data error reading drive A.
Tried the same thing on 3 different disks and two different PCs but still no luck.
I ended up writing 1MB to a 700MB CDR – what a waste!
Author: Simon
A poolside seat
Bought a small paddling pool for the kids today – 6ft diameter, 25 inches high. Got it home from B&Q and found that it was more the kind of thing you fill up and leave out for the summer than a 10 minute fill and empty when you’re done sort of pool.
Weekend break
We popped over to North Wales (Llandudno) last weekend with barely 18 hours warning. Note to new visitors – we’ve been there before.. see 26 July 2003 for more.
It was Friday evening and we just figured we’d get away from the mess of a gutted bathroom in the early stages of being replaced. Decided roughly where to go, phoned a load of large hotels, no spaces anywhere, change plans, phone a load more hotels and finally find somewhere that has a room/suite for 2 adults and 2 children. Packed a few things and head off around lunchtime Saturday.
Offensive fonts! What next?
Windows Update says there’s a critical update for Windows. Critical to me implies that it’s absolutely vital to the smooth running of your PC. The description of the update left me wondering so I took a couple of screenshots of character map before and after the update.
The update description says “This item updates the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font included in some Microsoft products. The font has been found to contain unacceptable symbols.”
One of those moments
When attempting to make a slave disk into a master disk (and remove the previous master), it always helps to look at the documentation for the correct manufacturer and model of disk.
Invasion of the ant people
Ok, so they’re not ant people as such.. just your average run-of-the-mill black ants. Unfortunately they were all over the dining room and downstairs toilet – not just normal ants but winged ones as well. After trying Nippon bait, B&Q ant spray (on the ones outside) and still no luck, we had to call in the professionals. The last thing anyone wants is flying ants in the downstairs toilet after all!
Argh!
Managed to drop my powerbook (and bag) today and although the padding in the bag prevented any major damage, there’s now a bit of a dent in one corner where the bag landed upside-down on the one part that had virtually no padding. 🙁
I really must invest in some kind of protective case that has padding all round instead of just on the front and back and a little at the sides.
Oven clock
Just happened to walk past our oven at midnight and it said “24:00”. A minute later it was back to “0:01”. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a digital clock say 24:00 before, usually they run from 00:00 to 23:59.
Gateshead Trip and Angel of the North
We went for a daytrip to Gateshead yesterday with the main purpose of visiting an art gallery. On the way there, we passed the “Angel of the North” sculpture and stopped to take some pictures. There was also plenty to take pictures of down by the river near the art gallery.
Network programming tutorial
Updated my network programming tutorial to answer a question that someone emailed me about it. Tried to compile the library on my mac last night and found that half the makefile was wrong, some of the includes didn’t exist on OSX and that you have to use ranlib on the .a file as well as using ar to create it.
Maybe one day I’ll actually finish it or maybe amend it to include Perl examples as well.