Monthly Archives: October 2009

The Patient is Dead

Posted by in General

Well this morning an unsuccessful attempt to install Gentoo onto mtekktux failed horribly. Memtest86 does not get past 50 seconds before it completely hangs (keyboard lights flash). Something is very wrong with the motherboard/IDE controller. Tonight, the backup motherboard will be tried (have to see if one can find the memory that goes in that one). If all else fails, one will probably get one of those Atom 330 miniITX boards. Though the atom is quite anemic, it should be good at the occasional print job, running apache, and a few other miscellaneous tasks.

Update: It’s dead, the memory that is. The error presents itself with the backup motherboard and a different, known to be good CPU. So that means, mtektux will not get running this week.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Updated:

Data Recovery Status Report

Posted by in General

Well, it looks like all of the code from the testbed was recoverable off of Mtekktux’s hard drive. As was most of the temporary “pass around” folder. However, everything backed up from the laptop before one reinstalled Vista last fall is gone. The entire /home directory is what was corrupted. Everything else seems to be fine. Now off to resuscitate Mtekktux.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

RIP Mtekktux

Posted by in General

Well, last night the local file server and development testbed had a hard drive failure. Like always, one did not keep good backups of its data, and may have lost some semi important code. Mtekktux was slated for retirement this summer, had one completed the summer project. The funny thing is, it wasn’t the actual hard drive that died this time, it was due to an unexpected loss of power while performing a disk check. Tonight, the process of data recovery of the Ext3 partition will probably begin. Depending on how that goes, this weekend may see some development work on Breadcrumb NavXT take place.

The real downer is that Mtekktux was one’s local WordPress testbed. With it down, testing of Breadcrumb NavXT must be done on this blog. Due to this, the release of 3.4.0 will be pushed off until at least the 26th of October.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Product Coherency

Posted by in Reviews > Software

One of the leading reasons, other than it’s the de facto standard, to use Microsoft Office is its coherency between member products. Work, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. all have a similar look and feel. When Microsoft released Office 2007 with the ribbon interface, they chose not to migrate to this interface for all of the member products. In particular Visio, which makes it feel like an outsider. In a way it is, Visio 2007 is not included in any of the Office 2007 packages. However, the old interface makes it look dated in a Windows 7 environment, where all of the included applications use ribbon. If Microsoft seriously want’s everyone to migrate to the ribbon interface, they should use it on all of their new products (well, maybe where it works, Visual Studio may not be a good candidate for it, but who knows).

Notice the lack of content in the peek view?

Notice the lack of content in the peek view?

Powerpoint 2007 seems to have a few bugs in Windows 7. The first is that if there are two documents open, it will not open two concurrently open windows. Thus, it’s impossible to do a “two up” with two different presentations, which is possible in Word and Excel. The second bug, illustrated in the above image, is Powerpoint does not render a scene for the Windows Taskbar peek feature. This makes it a royal pain for switching between two open presentations. Again, the other Office products exhibit the correct behavior.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]