A while ago I bought this LaCie 500Gb external hard drive and I was rather satisfied with it. With the occasion of the horrible Easter holidays I finally turned off my computer (after weeks of it working continuously). So imagine my dismay when I came back home, turned the LaCie on, then the computer and all I had to show for it was an USB mass storage controller error in the Hardware Manager.

After trying a few things (and noticing that the hard drive would not actually turn on, instead a tick-tock sound was heard from inside) I decided to open up the drive box, proudly written on it "Designed by F. A. Porsche". Well, fuck you, Porsche! I had to almost destroy the box to open it, then the insides had so many "one installation, no after service" components that I felt like walking on broken glass.

Anyway, inside the LaCie there is a small USB controller and an SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drive. I installed the hard drive as an internal drive and... nothing! Windows XP blue screen 0x0000007B. The computer wouldn't even recognize the drive in the boot up screen.

Well, after looking for drivers and stuff like that, I was resolved that the hard drive was defective and all my music, movies and books were lost. But shutting the computer down I noticed that the drive was actually spinning in its internal setup configuration. So, desperately, I tried to use the power from the internal computer power source and the rest of the drive in its USB setup... and IT WORKED!

Now I am going to buy another drive and get all data from this one, but still, if you are desperate that your USB hard drive is lost, try to open it up and power the internal drive with a normal computer power chord.

As for why the internal drive did not work directly on the computer? I have almost no idea. The Seagate site says clearly that SATA drives do not require drivers, but the various SATA controllers do! Since I already have a SATA internal drive, I think that that is not the issue. Rather, the people at LaCie used another drive firmware! The Seagate drive also provides with some downloadable firmware so it is clearly possible. As a completely desperate option to recover your lost data, I guess trying to rewrite the hard drive firmware could work, but I don't recommend it and I wonder how it is possible, considering it wouldn't allow me to boot Windows.

I hope this helps somebody. And Happy Easter everybody!

Update September 2012: after three years and a half, the drive (powered by both USB and internal computer power) started to develop bad sectors. It still works, mind you, I just removed it because I didn't need it as much. Thus ends the saga of the mutant harddrive in the computer that never sleeps and never dies [creepy music in the background] :)

Today Internet Explorer 8 appeared to me in the Automatic Updates list. I have been using IE8 for months now and so I was glad that the official release finally came out. So I downloaded and installed IE8.

The installation process has several steps. First is the removal of any previous version of IE, then a reboot, then several small steps of the setup program: Downloading IE8, Downloading IE8 updates, Installing IE8, Installing updates, Finishing installation. Well, for me, at the Installing updates step it threw an error that said the installation cannot complete because the station is shutting down, then my computer restarted.

I did have Internet Explorer available, though, so I tried a few pages. After the pages loaded, I was invariably getting an error and IE closed. "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.". Well, so was I!

I was trying the installation of IE the third time now and suddenly a Java update traybar icon appeared. I updated Java, then I was amazed to see that IE was no longer crashing! So, my solution for Microsoft IE errors: update Sun Java! :)

Well, the Java update probably completed some steps that the installer failed to. But still :)

And interesting link I found regarding any IE error that causes the browser to excuse itself and leave is on Sandi's Site

The finale of what seemed to become my favourite sci-fi series ever (at its beginning) left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Not only it makes no sense, but it is overall incredibly idiotic. If you haven't watched the end of the series, don't read further, because this is the mother of all ranty spoilers ever.

What makes it so emotional for me is not only that I really liked the show, but that this was not a show that was ended because of lack of planning or budget or the economical crisis, so nothing was rushed or changed. This was "meant to happen". And it sucked! Sucked worse that a vampire caught in the event horizon of a black hole that is falling into another black hole!

Not only did it not explain anything in a manner that would make sense to me, but instead it went completely overboard on all the things that I hated in the show. God exists, he somehow planned all this (oh, yeah, real modesty here, mr. Moore!), the model 6 in Gaiuses head was an angel, so was Kara Thrace, in the end they all reach Earth (this Earth) and decide to leave all technology behind (they throw the ships in the sun!!!) in the hope that starting anew would make them "break the cycle" and Hera became the chromosomal mother of all future humans. I guess leaving all that technology behind wasn't a good survival strategy for the rest of the 38000 people left alive, was it?!

If everything was God's plan, then there was no cycle except in its brain!! Forgetting mistakes is NOT a step towards not repeating them. Leaving behind technology is just as stupid! And ending the show with a couple of angels walking on Earth now and making bets on if we repeat the mistakes again or not, with background videos of the latest developments in robotics was.... there is no word in the English language for it. It is dumber than creationist! And the last half of the last episode was all about people saying goodbye to one another then going to live alone (read DIE!!) somewhere!

There is a glimmer of hope left though. The centurions were given their freedom and the last baseship. I will be looking at the sky hoping for them to return, nuke Moore and then air an all Cylon TV show about how they didn't repeat any mistake and just carried on!! Gods, this was frakking retarded!

And, of course, there is one more good thing in the series, and that is the Bear McCreary's remix of Bob Dylan's/Jimmi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower. I am embedding the video with the cool transition from simple piano to all the instruments. Pretty cool!.

Guess what? F***ing YouTube removed the video because of a copyright infringement. What? One minute and a half of a movie scene? Geez! Couldn't find the same scene, so I am embedding All Along The Watchtower.

[youtube:qMo7WybtTWI]

The sound bit of the scene, sans the scene, can be found here. You can also see the live performance of the song here. You might also want to try Bob Dylan's original song.

Update: check out this Google event with McCreary playing the BSG theme with Raya Yarbrough as the vocalist.

This is how Dexter, the animated character in Dexter's Laboratory, begins his days. His enthusiasm for his work is amazing and inspirational, but real people rarely feel this way. Today is one of those great days for me! I woke up late, I took a long shower, I've eaten some good food, I've watched one of my favourite anime shows while getting dressed and I came to work in a beautiful sunny spring morning.

What amazing energy and how great a feeling! I feel I can do anything! Throw your legacy ASP applications at me, make me do stupid changes in even dumber web CRMs, give me the most menial degrading tasks you can think of, I will eat them whole and spit out gold! I am unstoppable!

The new spring heat seems to have brought not only flies out of hibernation, but also some cats! Their behaviour is strangely similar to that of the flies, though, hmm :)

I haven't been writing for a while, but that is because I was working! Amazingly so, as I am not known for my willingness to work. But that also has its boons, you know, as I will not only gain material wealth for my wife's shoes, but also material for the blog! :) You will have to wait a bit for that, though.

Instead, I will talk about three little gems I found while browsing ShellCity. In case you don't know, ShellCity is a blog dedicated to the tools, not the result. Every day four free utilities are being presented in this retro looking site. Anyway, without further ado:

Fences. This allows you to organize your many desktop icons by grouping them into labeled transparent folder like structures. Not only does it make your desktop look better and feel better, but when you change your desktop resolution, it also remembers the location of these groups so that when you revert, you get them in the same position! Great thing to have and my favourite in this post.

MSVDM, or the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Manager. This is pretty old stuff, but I've only recently discovered it. It is NOT an exe file and it will not be installed in the Start menu! Instead it is a taskbar toolbar. It shows four buttons which allow you to switch between four different desktops. The desktop icons remain on all of the desktops, but you can define a different background for each and the opened windows are different from desktop to desktop. So, what you use it for is to open a group of utilities based on context. As an example, open a Visual Studio and some browser windows regarding a certain project, then open another Visual Studio and some other browser windows for another project that you work on simultaneously.

WizMouse. This one is not something you immediately go Wow! about. It sits in the traybar and does only one thing: it scrolls windows when you move the scrollwheel. But it doesn't scroll the active window, but the window directly under the mouse pointer! A lot of annoyance is saved by this.

Hope it helps you all. Till next time!

No, I didn't leave my current job. This is more or less a quote from some blog I read. Probably Jean Paul S. Boodhoo, but I couldn't find the reference when I looked for it.

Anyway, the gist of the article was that, even if he did enjoy his position, the guy chose to look further and expand his horizons and that, in the end, made him a better developer and a better person. Is that a general idea? Of course not. I am willing to bet that changing one's job more often leads to bad things than good, but in the end you try a few options and you get to some place you can live with.

And, well, I can't stop thinking about the beginning of my career when, even if I wasn't really doing a lot of programming, I was learning a lot by the simple fact of changing jobs. Usually, the first month is extraordinary as you learn new skills, you get to know new people and new methods of doing new things. After that you "get used" to the job, like a shoe on someone's foot. It can also get smelly pretty fast, as well.

Sure, having a new job every 8 months doesn't sound so good now, but the memory of that "living on the edge" feeling still lingers. And who knows? I may find something worthwhile just by looking over the fence. What do you guys think?

Update: the manga is now completed, after 65 chapters. The ending was a bit disappointing, but at least it didn't drag on for ages like in other situations.

You can read Pluto, by Naoki Urasawa, up to chapter 62 on onemanga.com. It is updated often and I found it impossible to stop reading. The entire story is placed in a possible future where people and high intelligence robots coexist. There are only a few robots that have human like appearance and intelligence, and they are just beginning to understand feelings. A terrible killer is destroying them one by one, though. Who is he and what does he want?

I can hardly talk about the plot without spoiling it for you, but I can speak about my own impressions. Even if the logic/science in the series is not very consistent, the overall feeling is of great attention to detail, especially since the science is not as important as the philosophical perspective on consciousness and the soul. The drawing is also very carefully done and many of the slides are in color, as well. The plot is fascinating and it belongs to the group of stories the Japanese are so good at: the perils of too much power and the discovery of one's own limits.

I highly recommend this to lovers of manga and scifi alike. I will try to get the anime for Monster and I will probably get into reading the manga as well.

Update: There are some major issues with this addon, because on some sites (like YouTube, but not only) Internet Explorer simply closes with an error. It has become more and more annoying until I've decided to uninstall it.

What a nice little gem this is. I've just installed it, so I can't really say it is all good, but from what I've seen so far it is a wonderful addition to Internet Explorer (7 or 8!).

A few of the features that I've already observed:

• It automatically recovers the pages and tabs opened when an computer or INTERNET explorer crash occurred.
• Small download manager, FireFox style
• Ad blocker - although it doesn't protect you from the javascript errors that occur when blocking ads
• Mouse gestures
• Background preloading of links when computer is idle enough and DNS prefetching
• User scripts that can do all kinds of stuff, from moving YouTube windows where there is space and then showing them bigger to showing frames next to Google search results so you can open and preview the sites directly.
• Tab history manager

.

But it does so much more. I am quite amazed by it. So get it, it's free: IE7Pro

At first, I thought it was a coincidence, but it turns out it was all deliberate. This dog would come out from the park and then shit on the sidewalk. And not any kind of poop, but that smelly, sticky, yellow crap that only dogs seem able to manufacture. Then the dog would go back into the park, just far enough so that its presence would not be obvious, and it would watch. People would eventually step in the shit, all reacting to it in different ways. The ears of the dog would jump straight up, its eyes focused on the target, absorbing everything that happened.
He did that for three days in a row, so it couldn't have been a coincidence. However, when faced with the facts, they didn't seem so strange to me. Actually it makes perfect sense for predators to ambush their prey and learn from its behavior as much as possible. I admit, for a dog it was a pretty sick and smart thing to do, but it was all within reason. After all, I was doing the same thing, staking the man up, watching his every move, learning his habits.

I can remember the days when this filled me with excitement, the thrill of the hunt reverberating from some place deep inside my skull, but now I could only feel calm. Not boredom, though; boredom is dangerous, makes people sloppy, gets them hurt. I was missing a certain element, something that, in the past, made all this fun, but I couldn't quite find it now. That's why this was the last one. And only because it was necessary.

The guy showed up at exactly the time I was expecting him to do. Small time thug, acting cool while pretending to be larger than he was capable of ever being. I let him go up to his apartment, slightly amused at the concentrated look-around that he pretended to throw before entering the building. If he wouldn't have been pretending, he would have been able to notice me, watching him from a car for three days in a row. A different car, I admit, but who would be dumb enough to do it differently? Maybe the cops... and the guy was looking out for police presence, I guess. Unfortunately for him, I was no policeman.

I gave him 5 minutes to change his mind. Maybe he would feel the wrongness of the situation, maybe luck would be with him and make him leave for some reason. Maybe he would just grab a beer and drop in his big armchair, watching mind numbing TV shows, as I knew he would. Yet, I always like to allow for the unknown, for the unexplainable, makes it seem more real. Although, when doing this thing for a long time, one sees all kinds of shit and knows almost every way people react when stepping in it. I got out of my car.


I smashed the door lock with my foot and entered the room. Dirty, sloppy, typical bachelor room with a twinge of gangsta. What a dump! My guy froze for a second on his armchair, then, to my surprise, moved really fast and produced a revolver from underneath the small table next to him. He pointed it at me and shouted something along the lines of inquiring on my identity. Of course, a lot of "fuck" and "mudafucka" was involved, although that sounded a bit off coming from an oversized white guy.

I froze for a moment, too. A gun, who would have thought? I closed the door behind me, then turned to him and started telling him what had to be said. I did have three days to think it over in my head, after all.

"There is a saying", I calmly conversed, completely ignoring the vulgar threats coming from my target, " that every boy kills his father to become a man. Of course, it's a metaphor most of the time".

I waited for a reaction, watching how the feeling of control provided by the gun was slightly fading away. He decided to enforce it by standing up and aiming the gun at me from somewhere above his head, throwing profanities at me while doing so. Doesn't he know he can hurt his wrist by firing that way? Not to mention having almost no accuracy whatsoever.

"In other words, no man is complete without killing his father first, metaphorically speaking of course". It was almost hilarious; for a second, the guy thought I was talking about him and me. I could see on his face how he considered being my father or vice-versa. Well, at least not all of this will have been devoid of fun.

"Shut da fuck up, mudafucka! Who da fuck are you anyway? You escaped from some loony ... mental... "

I ignored him "However, it was you that actually killed my father. I therefore seem to be entitled to feel... incomplete.".
I could see the reaction right away. Killing one's father was a serious thing even for a brain dead thug. He knew he was in danger now, maybe he even felt guilty, even if he had no idea who my father was. He did take a step back and aimed the gun with both hands at me. Now, that was better. I could tell he was considering squeezing the trigger right then, but people are always too curious for their own good. He had to know how it plays out.

"I have decided to pursue my quest for completeness by killing you.", I then added, gently pushing him over the edge with a hard look. He fired.


There is something slightly poetic in having your own gun explode in your hands, killing you instantly with a stray piece of metal through the eye and brain. Of course, the cement in the barrel and the well planned weakening of the metal of the revolver cock would be obvious during the police investigation, but it would also be clear that the gun was unregistered and that the victim pulled the trigger voluntarily.

I didn't quite feel complete, though. He hadn't kill my father, either, so I guess it was to be expected, but I was sure he did kill someone's parent at some point in time, so I also expected a bit more gratification.

After all, it was a good call to stop doing this. No fun at all. Well, maybe not a complete stop, more like a sabbatical, to clear one's thoughts. I may never do it again.

A while ago, I was writing about my interest in great tits. Now, I am expanding that study, by linking to the explanation of what cleavage is. Every day we learn new things.

Another pearl in the anime pond. One just has to dive and grab this fairy tale and watch it. Seirei no Moribito is the story of a female bodyguard, bound by honor and personal history to defend a child prince from the assassins sent by his father, the emperor. The anime is not really a fighting anime, though, no one battles for the sake of battle. More than that, the "ona yojimbo" has vowed to save lives, not take them, so she never kills anyone. All characters in the story are clearly drawn up, with their own particularities and personal motivations to do things and in the end, there is even a eco green moral. :)

My advice it to watch it, as it is both a beautiful story, as well as a complex one, fit for both adults and young children. Only 26 episodes, but it is worth it. I would really like to see animes for the rest of the books in the series. You can also read the first two chapters of the manga at Mangafox.

Dennou Coil is a cross between Ghost in the Shell and Tonari no Totoro. How can it be possible? Simple! First remove all that usual Japanese obsession with boys in high schools (you know, everything happends to some high school children, usually boys, all in the same class, maybe some opinionated women, they fight, they grow in "level", etc). Instead use girls in elementary school. Then move it in some future world where people merged the real world with the virtual, and add cute creatures like from Tonari no Totoro (and the girls) in the virtual world! Yatta! :)

Anyway, getting more serious now, the anime is really nice. The Augmented Reality concept is pretty cool and (even if towards the end it gets a little spiritual and unnecessarily action like) stays pretty consistent. Imagine wearing clear glasses that add to your usual display of reality information like virtual pets, virtual laptops, keyboards and displays, maps of your current location and so on.

The children are all drawn towards a strange phenomenon that adults seem to regard as fantasy, called Dennou Coil, where the consciousness of people gets transferred to a virtual nether world via the quantum circuits in the glasses.

Towards the end, adults try to confiscate the glasses from the children and, after a hearty discourse about how real things can be touched, I thought the whole cool idea of the series would be perverted towards some social goal of keeping children "real", but it was not so. You will have to watch the series to know what I mean :)

Bottom line: pretty interesting and captivating. A little too childish, but without resorting to silly behaviour or self referential comedy that I see so much lately in animes. The anime has only 26 episodes, with little chance of more. The manga itself is complete as well. Couldn't find the manga free online. If you know where to find it, leave me a comment.

Recommendation: watch it!

The previous post was the 500^th post in this blog! And I haven't even noticed. Let's celebrate late with news about the end of the world!

How bored can I be? I've read this article about the asteroid Apophis striking the Earth in 2029 or 2036 and my first thought was "oh man! Why so late?". I was already calculating how unfair it is that I would have to live to be 59 years old before the world ends. So I have to cope with it until then, then, close to my retirement, the pleasant moment when I get money from the state and do nothing while my mind slowly rots away, it all goes away. Then it hit me: I am a complete idiot! What was I thinking? Sheesh!

Anyway, here is a cute animation made by a guy on youtube. I personally prefer the first one, the one that is only graphics and no realism. Again, who wants real? But it wouldn't be in the spirit of the blog :) So watch the second one, the one made to satisfy the critics.

Update: the guy REMOVED (who does that?!) the videos from YouTube. I am putting another ridiculously grand video of a possible asteroid (although this seems more like a dwarf planet :) ) destruction of the Earth to satisfy the ones hungry for obliteration.

[youtube:InPNk44v7uw]

Wow, think how many blog posts I would have written until 2036!

I heard a bit of this song in a super market and remembered it and couldn't get it out of my head. The funny thing is that when I listened to it properly, it didn't sound so good as I remembered it... Is there another version or is my memory playing tricks on me?

Anyway, here it is, British singer Bryan Ferry playing with his band Roxy Music.