Fried hardware
Published Sat, May 8 2010 7:49 AM
When I went back to Covington last month, I shut down my desktop PC. I was gone for two weeks, and after I returned I didn’t turn it on for a week. After all, my laptop is much more capable, although it doesn’t have quite as much disk capacity. Still, all of the source code for my web site and my other projects is on the desktop (yes, I have a backup as well), together with the development tools. Anyway, when I wanted to get started on one of my development projects I turned on the power switch.
The silly thing wouldn’t boot up. All it did was beep at me. Then the power supply fan seemed to go into overdrive. It turns out a power surge (when?) had fried several of the capacitors on the motherboard. The machine was toast. Fortunately the hard drive was undamaged. For a fairly low price, I had the machine re-built around the hard drive, costing me less than the original computer did by far, and actually being somewhat more capable. It’s still nowhere near as capable as my laptop, but that’s OK.
I can’t honestly say I’ve missed writing software – I do it every day at work. But… none of what I write at work belongs to me. What I write at home (or at least in this studio suite I call my temporary domicile), on my own time, with my own resources belongs to me. There are some projects that I want to work on, including a complete re-write of my blogging platform that I had started before I left.
I’ve wanted to refactor the code for this platform for quite a while, and I’ve also wanted to modify it a bit so that it can support multiple blogs properly. The code is written for ASP.NET 1.1 as well, and that platform is getting old and crusty. Upgrading to a more recent platform will probably be in my interest anyway, since eventually ASP.NET 1.1 will be demised. Or maybe not. I still see a few sites out there running plain old ASP – but they’re definitely in the minority.
There won’t be too many changes to this site immediately, but they are coming. Most of what I’m going to do will involve the back-end of the site. I’ve wanted to implement a sort of template-driven environment for a while, and I’ll try to make the first templates match the current look and feel of the site. At the same time, I’ve wanted to add new features, and to clean up the generated HTML.
It’s been a long time since I made any serious updates to this platform. I think it’s overdue.
Ah, but maybe it won't be as easy as all that. The shop that's working on the computer is having a hard time getting it to boot into anything other than "safe" mode. I don't have to worry about my data - it's all backed up, but the software – that's the problem. All of the installations disks are about 800 miles away from here, sitting in boxes at home.
One way or another, I’m going to start working on code for my own purposes again. There are lots of things I want to try out.
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T.F. Stern responded with:
 | I have program discs for programs that are still on floppy discs, ancient stuff for when computers didn't even have hard drives. Wouldn't it be funny if these were all that survived our time here and were found by future inhabitants. "What a primitive civilization they must have been" as they sorted through a stack of old Word Star discs or Windows 3.1 discs.
I hope you get it the way you like so it becomes useful; but it sure is nice having the original program discs as a back up. |
Angel responded with:
 | hey Perri!..as long as u have fun while youre doing it my friend!!:) |
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