the corner office

This is a before-and-after mood experiment. I'm due to leave in about an hour's time for my Database Design and Implementation exam. Right now it promises to be about as much fun as sticking blunt pencils up my nose.

The work isn't exactly rocket science and I know exactly what type of stuff will be in the paper. Firstly there'll be a pisswilly application that needs an ERD, dependency diagram and relations. Then a zillion exotic SQL queries to do weird stuff, then how-to style questions on using M$ Access or Delphi, and then general theory and a couple of arb questions on concurrency control. Like I said, no rocket science there.

The devil is in the details, though. Of course I could be a zillion times more prepared than I am now, but this stuff is rather mind-numbingly boring. I don't do a lot of SQL but I know my way around. I can generally get complex queries going, but there is an element of trial-and-error when it's the 3 nested subqueries, needle-in-a-haystack variety. But... trial-and-error doesn't work when you're writing the queries down on paper. I also don't have a off-the-cuff 'show step-by-step how a lost update can happen when there is no record locking' response, although I know I can muddle one out with brute mental force. So, I'm doing a bit of revision and then off we go.

Bleh.

Since it's a lot more fun than studying for my Database Design and Bloody Implementation exam tomorrow, I took a squizz at my referrers over the past couple of days. It seems someone has subbed to my RSS feed via Bloglines. Looking at their 'new blogs' page, I found a link to Ian Murdock's blog. Ian Murdock is the 'ian' in Debian, and also started out studying accounting. So there's hope for all of us :-)

From his site I also found a link to Miguel de Icaza's blog. He's the 'm', in well, Gnome and Mono, I suppose. A quick once-over tells me his blog is a good way to learn more about C# and .Net without feeling dirty :-)

Because I can, other Linux 'diary-keepers' I follow are Dave Jones and Alan Cox. Well, I used to follow Alan's diary until he started writing in Welsh. So now I just follow his wife Telsa's diary instead. Hers was more colourful even when I understood what Alan was writing about :-)

I'm not sure if she's planning to stay over, but Tupac is napping on an old towel, next to my desk. She's also letting loose some seriously miasmic vapours, but that's another story.

Something I've never understood, is why every time dogs get ready to go to sleep, they circle a good few times before settling down and dozing off. Is it because one good turn deserves another?

Trawling one of my favourite geek sites - Kerneltrap.

I'm not quite sure what to make of ReactOS, an open-source NT clone. Other than when I saw mention of working with WINE, my brain clicked into Notes sans Windows mode. The project is still a bit young, but you never know...

This leads me into an introspective digression. I'm always slightly awed by folks who're willing to sit down and put this much work into a body of code for software that is in essence, dead. The site mentions OS/2 cloners, for example. Right... there are people out there cloning OS/2. Uh-huh. This work is academically interesting, I'm sure, but that's about it (unless you come up with a more extensible technology with wider use). Years of work for an audience of a few dozen, perhaps? Just how many people on this planet are really going to dish out kudos and love and fuzzy moonbeams because they want to run a shaky implementation of OS/2 for free? Ditto for NT4. By the time ReactOS is fully-functional, kids coming out of school won't have a clue what NT4/Win95 looked like. Y'know? I saw Win98 today and thought 'gee...'

Then again, I do recall somebody passing me a link back in the late 90's for a crowd of people working on an open-source Notes client implementation. I recall the project was named after another Asian flower. A quick Google doesn't shed much light. Always wondered what happened to that project...

I got an unexpected phone call this morning from a Telkom technician. A little over a month after me ordering it, Telskum have converted my ISDN line to an ADSL line!

I haven't 'used it in anger' yet, but being able to sit at home, post a blog, check my mail, and then leave for work without worrying about whether my modem is disconnected is, well, weird. Good weird :-)

Rightyo, then. I'm going to become a walking clarification. Context can't be taken for granted in a blog, so I'm going to follow up yesterday's dishes comment by pointing out that my dish-washing failings have nothing to do with chauvinism and everything to do with possessing a healthy dislike for washing dishes, as all healthy humans should. As a result I have traditionally lagged behind my dearest in the keeping-crockery-clean stakes, although that seems to be changing these past few months.

(This has yet to be independently verified, but I'm convinced of it in a Dubya/Tony Blair kind of way). Regardless, I try to make up for it with other household chores. Promise :-)

I heralded the onset of summer a little too soon. There's some weird air swirling around over Botswana or something, and as a result, the Mother Of All Cold Fronts is currently making its way over us on the escarpment. It started raining last night, and it's been pouring down almost non-stop ever since. That on its own is great - I love rain, and good, long showers now means a green, green summer awaits. But the temperatures... Joburg tonight is 2 degrees Celsius. Tomorrow's high is forecast at 8 degrees. That's colder than an average winter's day!

Now, if the Springboks had accomplished the impossible yesterday I would have had something to jokingly tie this in to. But since they didn't and I'm not much of a rugger fan meself, I can't. Perhaps it's because I offered to do the dishes yesterday and Ronwen said 'not to worry, I'll do them' The fact that I offered, could explain the rain, and the fact that she declined, could explain the temperature :-)

A good long nap has me well-rested from the ordeal (not to put too melodramatic a point on it) of the past 2 days, and I'm back in the swing of things.

One thing which I have to admit to, is a bit of after-the-fact self-censorship of my previous post. While I've included a disclaimer.html (_since gone. Ed.) and made it clear (I hope) that this is a personal site, I'm still mulling the pros and cons of any tone of language I choose to use. I'm new to this blogging gig and I'm still finding a 'public voice' I'm comfortable with, so to speak. I don't want to sterilise everything I say since I don't necessarily do that in real life (especially after the comedy of errors yesterday), but I don't want to needlessly put people off, either. So now 'tits-up' is probably the worst word of the post. Since even The Register uses that, I don't feel too bad :)

My weekend agenda now comprises getting back to work after losing two days, and taking a look around for decent hard drive recovery utilities. As mentioned, I don't desperately need to get anything off of the corrupted drive, but if I can it saves some restoring of backups yadda yadda. Also, we've lost a couple of hard drives over the past few months, and I'm thinking that some decent recovery software may help us down the line. I'll be sure to post my findings and opinions.

Dear Diary

God is out to get me. Short version: my 120GB and my 60GB hard drives at work both decided to die on me yesterday. 60GB drive which normally has my OS etc, wouldn't boot. Managed to plug into another machine and recover data though. Less luck with 120GB, but most files backed up to varying degrees, so no great loss. Except for a couple of of mp3's and a spreadsheet or two from the last week, which I can live without.

The loss of data is thus not the biggie. And normally having a workstation go tits-up is not a biggie, either. (Neither?) We keep spare machines and hard drives. But this was special. The stuff-up after stuff-up after stuff-up after stuff-up that took me from noon yesterday to 5pm today, to recover what data I could and get my machine reinstalled (I lie: just a frigging Notes client up and running), is best not recounted.

But in summary:

• number of skilled IT professionals who wasted varying amounts of time on this: 3

• number of dead hard drives: 2, perhaps 3. Read on...

• number of motherboards discovered to be dodgy (no, not mine: the machine I was planning to use as a 'spare':) 1. Although I can't say I'm comfortable about using a machine that saw two HDD's die at the same time. So perhaps 2.

• number of hard drives which fell right through an anti-static would've-been-a-bag-if-it-weren't-open-on-both-ends, from chest height: 1

• condition of said hard drive after falling from chest height: fine, miraculously. Apart from a bent power pin. Would you trust this drive, though?

• swear-words uttered upon realising that Win2K doesn't have an easily-findable command-line fdisk utility: many. Very, very many.

• number of floppy disks which died trying to create a boot disk: 1. Now it is about 17 little pieces of floppy disk, scattered across the support office.

• number of hours it took to finally notice that GRUB was on the hard drive with the seemingly broken partition tables: about 2, felt like 2,743,849,384

• number of PCs which all (unsuccessfully) played a part in trying to clear partitions on the spare hard drive that turned out to have GRUB on it: 3. Including a Linux box.

• name of little assembler utility finally used clean up the drive's partition table: MBRWIPE.COM. l33t.

• number of errors reported by Windows 2000 while trying to read toasted drive: 0

Yes, that's right dear reader. Windows 2000 seemed to have a difficult time coming to terms with the notion of unreadable disks. While Linux dumped a ton of errors into the system logs, Windows 2000 did nothing of the sort with the same drive. Instead, it sat for hours on end, doing absolutely nothing, while the hard drive churned. And churned. And churned. And churned. XP did more or less the same thing, but seemed a little cleverer at actually reading broken NTFS disks.

I hate Windows, and I hate Maxtor hard drives just as much. I have a ton of mail and blogs and stuff to catch up on, but right now I'm going to curl up in bed, and pretend I'm in a sensory and intellectual deprivation chamber for about a month, or alternatively, as long as Ronwen will let me.

The poor Americans are tied up in their usual legal wrangles over their National Do Not Call Registry thingummy, but I think it's a great idea.

For whatever reason, I've always flown under the telemarketing radar, but these sharks now have my phone number. When we moved into our current flat/duplex/townhouse/home/spot/pozzie we took over the phone line from the landlady. Now when I work from home I get at least one or two calls a day. Would you like to sell your flat? No, I'm renting. Would you like a complimentary carpet shampoo? No, we're tiled. Are you interested in a timeshare holiday? What's a holiday? You have won a great prize! Thanks, when can I collect it? Well, there's a ceremony first, and a draw...

What really sucks is that it creates a moral dilemma for me. Spam email you just delete. But when some poor soul who's just trying to make ends meet calls me up, I can't be rude. I want to tell 'em to get knotted, but I can't bring myself to do that. I empathise with them. I try to end the call as quickly as possible but I can imagine how soul-destroying it must be to get rejected time and again, and I spend the next 5 minutes pitying the poor voice which dejectedly said goodbye to me. I resent the companies who employ these poor buggers even more, because they're the real culprits, not the sad voices.

But we all reach an empathy breaking point and I think I'm reaching mine. I need to do something to vent the frustration, to feel like I'm taking a stand. Perhaps I should just answer all calls from 2 - 6 (their hunting hours) with a hoarse 'Sataaaaaaaaaaaaan', and take things from there.

I probably wouldn't have the guts to do it. I'm such a softie.