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This was too good not to share (even if it is techie/geekie).
I just had a good computer moment. That is a rare thing. I am smiling. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that I would probably start coughing, I'd be laughing out loud.
OK. Here's the story. I bought a new computer October '03. A generic AMD Athalon 1800 MHz system. Quite an adequate box. There was only one problem: it came with Windows XP Home. That, in and of itself, was not a problem. The problem happened due to the fact that it also has a gadget installed that will read four different memory card formats.
This is a good thing as I am a digital photographer. The problem is, unlike Windows 2000 Professional, XP Home doesn’t “hold on to” drive letters when you reassign them. The memory card reader grabs the first four available drive letters. Most people would not see this as a problem, for me it was something major.
You see, a couple of years ago I bought a MP3 jukebox. Specifically, an early model Creative Labs Nomad with a 6gig hard drive. It holds over 1,100 songs (at the sampling rate that I ripped at). Let’s do a little math. A typical LP used to contain around 10 songs. That means that my little box holds over a hundred albums. That’s a lot of listening time! I don’t know if the math works, and it might depend on your driving speed and traffic delays, but I like to think that I could drive coast-to-coast without hearing the same song twice.
So let’s see: new MP3 jukebox, big music collection, sounds like time to buy a new hard drive and do a lot of ripping. One 40gig HD later, I start ripping music. I already had Roxio EZ CD Creator 4 and it did something really cool. My (then) computer had two CD drives, one was a R/W, the other was just a reader. I could put two discs and the program would rip them sequentially. It’d take 30-40 minutes (P3/750 MHz) to do both discs. I had over 400 discs to rip. Do the math yourself, it took a lot of work to rip them all, and that doesn’t count the discs that CDDB.com could not identify that I had to type in all the CD information on.
(Trust me – a lot of my stories drag on like this, so if you don’t like my going back and forth in my narrative, you probably ought to stop reading my blog now. I won’t be offended.)
SO, I get all the discs ripped. It occupies (now, with a few additions) almost 30gig of that new 40gig drive.
Time for another side-step. There are a lot of things that I hate about Windows. I love long file names, but I ABSOLUTELY HATE the fact that you can put spaces in file or directory names. Additionally, I hate having big hard drives that are not partitioned into multiple drive letters. For example, in the “Ideal Microsoft World” (TM pending) if you buy a 200gig drive, MS says it should all be one. That’s fine and dandy, but think about the amount of data that represents. Again, in the “IMW”, all your documents go in your My Documents folder. In fact, until recently, they didn’t suggest keeping your music in one subdirectory, your photos in another. Just put it all in one place – trust us! We wouldn’t lie to you! (We might try to obfuscate things a bit, but we wouldn’t lie!)
How are you going to find anything?
If you need a 200gig drive, you’re either working with really big files (video editing) or with literally tons of smaller files. In my data directories I have 2200 files in 220 directories occupying over 2gig of space. That does not include my HTML for my web site (shameless plug: www.sparebrains.biz) or my music: by itself, my MP3 collection has 5000 files in 41 directories taking over 26gig of space.
Do you really want to have to find a needle in that haystack?
I don’t.
So I fell back to a drive management that a friend and I devised while working for the State. We created a directory called, cleverly enough, Data. Beneath the data directory were Spreadsheets, Documents, and Databases. Then you would create additional directories at lower levels as needed, let's say you have a copy of the corporate documents and correspondence with your homeowner’s association. I have it in its own directory.
We devised that scheme in the late 80’s, back when your operating system would fit on a single floppy and 10megabyte hard drives were really cool and had lots of room. Then networks became commonplace. This organizational model, with a little bit of modification, worked quite well in a networked environment. And it offered another advantage that was not immediately apparent: safety.
We quickly, thorough very painful lessons, learned that it was a good idea to not have anything on your C: drive except the operating system and key utilities, such as your backup software and anti-virus. Data began on the D: drive, sometimes later. The lesson was that sometimes operating systems freak out, or who knows what happens, but the C: drive goes away. Your operating system just got hosed, and the only way you’re going to get the computer back is to reformat the C:. Alright, pop quiz: everyone out there who regularly backs up their data raise their hand. I don’t see very many hands. Most people are of the opinion that they don’t really care about their data, I am not one of them. I place great value on my data. (I’ll rant about backups at some later date, guaranteed.) There was a very quick way to recover a server when the OS died: boot with a floppy, reformat the drive, install Windows (in this case NT) into A DIFFERENT DIRECTORY than the copy that failed. Boot it. Install your tape backup software. Restore the original OS from the previous night’s backup (you backup nightly whenever possible in a production environment). Reboot, and the server will be up in an hour or two if you’re lucky.
And the rest of the data on the rest of the partitions is still there, utterly intact.
I have applied this to my home system for organization and defense. I know that there is no user data on my C:, it’s almost entirely on D:. All my games are on E: (Diablo II, Rainbow Six, etc.), my gaming development stuff is on G: along with my HTML for my web sites, my music is on M:, my programs are on P:. Oh, another standard of mine is my CD drives are Z: and lower. Everything is organized. We’re talking two 40gig HDs representing a total available space of 77gig with 23gig available. 54gig of programs and user data. A lot, a HUGE lot, as a matter of fact, is digital photographs (I’m a photographer among many other things) and music.
Anyway, that’s my system.
SO, back to my original story!
My computer, before October 2003 was a P3 running Windows 2000 Pro. I had mapped my music to M: It didn’t matter that there were several vacant drive letters before and after it. Everything was good.
Then the drive failed.
It was actually part of a chain of catastrophic events that culminated in me buying a new computer, the Athalon 1800 as previously mentioned. So I get the new computer, I hook up my second hard drive that contained all my music, and power it up.
This is when the problems started.
I couldn’t map it to M: and make it stick.
The problem was the memory card reader. It grabbed the first four drive letters, and it didn’t care what else was out there. So my music ended up elsewhere than M:. Unfortunately the card reader was not configurable, I couldn’t force it to go somewhere else so that I could get my music back on M:.
Until tonight.
I don’t know what happened. Friday morning I plugged my 256meg compact flash in and downloaded some photos in preparation to big events Saturday. No problems. Tonight I go to see my brother’s band do a live performance (they’re at www.icn3d.net, yet another shameless plug) and take about 20 available light photos. I want to clear them off my camera and see what some initial tweaking in Photoshop might produce, so I eject the card from my camera and plug it into my PC.
Nothing happens.
I poke and twiddle and do what I can, and I cannot get the card reader to work. Which is when it strikes me: I can fix my drive mapping! Now here is the sick part: I created six “scratch” drives of 7megabytes each, their sole purpose is to eat drive letters. It forces my music back to the M: drive and I am happy. Everything else is mapped as it should be. As the saying goes, God is in his heavens and all is right in the world.
Now here’s the part that made me smile: I fire up Creative Lab’s jukebox software, tell it to play random, and the first music out the speakers is Here Comes The Sun by The Beatles. I don’t think I could have picked a more perfect song to cap off all I’ve gone through to get this computer the way that I, not Bill Gates, want it.
The memory card reader still doesn’t work, but I don’t care because I can work around it with my laptop and a USB memory drive.
I didn’t intend on talking about computers for my first real blog entry, but I’m smiling, I’m in a good mood (probably due to exhaustion), and I have music once again. And no, I’m not this anal retentive about everything.
(A slight disclaimer, I’m posting this without really proofing it. So some thoughts might be a little disjointed as my brain is a little disjointed right now. Tough.)
Posted 2/6/2004 at 11:28 PM - email it
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4 Comments
Dude, think of a blog as a diary that you're willing to share with whoever comes along to read it. "Disjointed" is just a style of writing, and there's really no need to identify a "shameless plug" as such. Just write whatever it is you want to share with whosoever reads it (or is crazy enough to subscribe to it).
At least you're one entry ahead of Jim now. That's something (not much, but something).
Posted 2/7/2004 at 1:01 AM by Magic_Rat - delete - block user
Damn you're verbose. I'm surprized I could follow about 85% if that.
Interesting and cool. Looking forward to more.
Posted 2/7/2004 at 6:01 AM by JoeCthulhu - delete - block user
After reading your blog, I'm almost glad that I have the cheapest digital camera possible now. It doesn't even have a memory card, just a USB cable to funnel the pics onto the PC. Don't have a portable MP3 player either; I just burn music to cds to play on regular stereos. We run WinXP Pro also. Don't be surprised if at some point it too 'forgets' a drive map. We've run into it losing touch with the Z drive we've mapped on our server for automated backups.
Posted 2/7/2004 at 6:30 AM by deborak - delete - block user
Glad you could follow at least 85%, Joe. I'm actually pretty good at teaching and explaining computer concepts to novice users. And frighteningly, I kind of enjoy doing it. I'm entertaining the concept of teaching SQL database at some point in the future.
Posted 2/8/2004 at 10:56 AM by The_Wayne - delete
I just had a good computer moment. That is a rare thing. I am smiling. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that I would probably start coughing, I'd be laughing out loud.
OK. Here's the story. I bought a new computer October '03. A generic AMD Athalon 1800 MHz system. Quite an adequate box. There was only one problem: it came with Windows XP Home. That, in and of itself, was not a problem. The problem happened due to the fact that it also has a gadget installed that will read four different memory card formats.
This is a good thing as I am a digital photographer. The problem is, unlike Windows 2000 Professional, XP Home doesn’t “hold on to” drive letters when you reassign them. The memory card reader grabs the first four available drive letters. Most people would not see this as a problem, for me it was something major.
You see, a couple of years ago I bought a MP3 jukebox. Specifically, an early model Creative Labs Nomad with a 6gig hard drive. It holds over 1,100 songs (at the sampling rate that I ripped at). Let’s do a little math. A typical LP used to contain around 10 songs. That means that my little box holds over a hundred albums. That’s a lot of listening time! I don’t know if the math works, and it might depend on your driving speed and traffic delays, but I like to think that I could drive coast-to-coast without hearing the same song twice.
So let’s see: new MP3 jukebox, big music collection, sounds like time to buy a new hard drive and do a lot of ripping. One 40gig HD later, I start ripping music. I already had Roxio EZ CD Creator 4 and it did something really cool. My (then) computer had two CD drives, one was a R/W, the other was just a reader. I could put two discs and the program would rip them sequentially. It’d take 30-40 minutes (P3/750 MHz) to do both discs. I had over 400 discs to rip. Do the math yourself, it took a lot of work to rip them all, and that doesn’t count the discs that CDDB.com could not identify that I had to type in all the CD information on.
(Trust me – a lot of my stories drag on like this, so if you don’t like my going back and forth in my narrative, you probably ought to stop reading my blog now. I won’t be offended.)
SO, I get all the discs ripped. It occupies (now, with a few additions) almost 30gig of that new 40gig drive.
Time for another side-step. There are a lot of things that I hate about Windows. I love long file names, but I ABSOLUTELY HATE the fact that you can put spaces in file or directory names. Additionally, I hate having big hard drives that are not partitioned into multiple drive letters. For example, in the “Ideal Microsoft World” (TM pending) if you buy a 200gig drive, MS says it should all be one. That’s fine and dandy, but think about the amount of data that represents. Again, in the “IMW”, all your documents go in your My Documents folder. In fact, until recently, they didn’t suggest keeping your music in one subdirectory, your photos in another. Just put it all in one place – trust us! We wouldn’t lie to you! (We might try to obfuscate things a bit, but we wouldn’t lie!)
How are you going to find anything?
If you need a 200gig drive, you’re either working with really big files (video editing) or with literally tons of smaller files. In my data directories I have 2200 files in 220 directories occupying over 2gig of space. That does not include my HTML for my web site (shameless plug: www.sparebrains.biz) or my music: by itself, my MP3 collection has 5000 files in 41 directories taking over 26gig of space.
Do you really want to have to find a needle in that haystack?
I don’t.
So I fell back to a drive management that a friend and I devised while working for the State. We created a directory called, cleverly enough, Data. Beneath the data directory were Spreadsheets, Documents, and Databases. Then you would create additional directories at lower levels as needed, let's say you have a copy of the corporate documents and correspondence with your homeowner’s association. I have it in its own directory.
We devised that scheme in the late 80’s, back when your operating system would fit on a single floppy and 10megabyte hard drives were really cool and had lots of room. Then networks became commonplace. This organizational model, with a little bit of modification, worked quite well in a networked environment. And it offered another advantage that was not immediately apparent: safety.
We quickly, thorough very painful lessons, learned that it was a good idea to not have anything on your C: drive except the operating system and key utilities, such as your backup software and anti-virus. Data began on the D: drive, sometimes later. The lesson was that sometimes operating systems freak out, or who knows what happens, but the C: drive goes away. Your operating system just got hosed, and the only way you’re going to get the computer back is to reformat the C:. Alright, pop quiz: everyone out there who regularly backs up their data raise their hand. I don’t see very many hands. Most people are of the opinion that they don’t really care about their data, I am not one of them. I place great value on my data. (I’ll rant about backups at some later date, guaranteed.) There was a very quick way to recover a server when the OS died: boot with a floppy, reformat the drive, install Windows (in this case NT) into A DIFFERENT DIRECTORY than the copy that failed. Boot it. Install your tape backup software. Restore the original OS from the previous night’s backup (you backup nightly whenever possible in a production environment). Reboot, and the server will be up in an hour or two if you’re lucky.
And the rest of the data on the rest of the partitions is still there, utterly intact.
I have applied this to my home system for organization and defense. I know that there is no user data on my C:, it’s almost entirely on D:. All my games are on E: (Diablo II, Rainbow Six, etc.), my gaming development stuff is on G: along with my HTML for my web sites, my music is on M:, my programs are on P:. Oh, another standard of mine is my CD drives are Z: and lower. Everything is organized. We’re talking two 40gig HDs representing a total available space of 77gig with 23gig available. 54gig of programs and user data. A lot, a HUGE lot, as a matter of fact, is digital photographs (I’m a photographer among many other things) and music.
Anyway, that’s my system.
SO, back to my original story!
My computer, before October 2003 was a P3 running Windows 2000 Pro. I had mapped my music to M: It didn’t matter that there were several vacant drive letters before and after it. Everything was good.
Then the drive failed.
It was actually part of a chain of catastrophic events that culminated in me buying a new computer, the Athalon 1800 as previously mentioned. So I get the new computer, I hook up my second hard drive that contained all my music, and power it up.
This is when the problems started.
I couldn’t map it to M: and make it stick.
The problem was the memory card reader. It grabbed the first four drive letters, and it didn’t care what else was out there. So my music ended up elsewhere than M:. Unfortunately the card reader was not configurable, I couldn’t force it to go somewhere else so that I could get my music back on M:.
Until tonight.
I don’t know what happened. Friday morning I plugged my 256meg compact flash in and downloaded some photos in preparation to big events Saturday. No problems. Tonight I go to see my brother’s band do a live performance (they’re at www.icn3d.net, yet another shameless plug) and take about 20 available light photos. I want to clear them off my camera and see what some initial tweaking in Photoshop might produce, so I eject the card from my camera and plug it into my PC.
Nothing happens.
I poke and twiddle and do what I can, and I cannot get the card reader to work. Which is when it strikes me: I can fix my drive mapping! Now here is the sick part: I created six “scratch” drives of 7megabytes each, their sole purpose is to eat drive letters. It forces my music back to the M: drive and I am happy. Everything else is mapped as it should be. As the saying goes, God is in his heavens and all is right in the world.
Now here’s the part that made me smile: I fire up Creative Lab’s jukebox software, tell it to play random, and the first music out the speakers is Here Comes The Sun by The Beatles. I don’t think I could have picked a more perfect song to cap off all I’ve gone through to get this computer the way that I, not Bill Gates, want it.
The memory card reader still doesn’t work, but I don’t care because I can work around it with my laptop and a USB memory drive.
I didn’t intend on talking about computers for my first real blog entry, but I’m smiling, I’m in a good mood (probably due to exhaustion), and I have music once again. And no, I’m not this anal retentive about everything.
(A slight disclaimer, I’m posting this without really proofing it. So some thoughts might be a little disjointed as my brain is a little disjointed right now. Tough.
Posted 2/6/2004 at 11:28 PM - email it
Give eProps or Post a Comment
4 Comments
Dude, think of a blog as a diary that you're willing to share with whoever comes along to read it. "Disjointed" is just a style of writing, and there's really no need to identify a "shameless plug" as such. Just write whatever it is you want to share with whosoever reads it (or is crazy enough to subscribe to it).
At least you're one entry ahead of Jim now. That's something (not much, but something).
Posted 2/7/2004 at 1:01 AM by Magic_Rat - delete - block user
Damn you're verbose. I'm surprized I could follow about 85% if that.
Interesting and cool. Looking forward to more.
Posted 2/7/2004 at 6:01 AM by JoeCthulhu - delete - block user
After reading your blog, I'm almost glad that I have the cheapest digital camera possible now. It doesn't even have a memory card, just a USB cable to funnel the pics onto the PC. Don't have a portable MP3 player either; I just burn music to cds to play on regular stereos. We run WinXP Pro also. Don't be surprised if at some point it too 'forgets' a drive map. We've run into it losing touch with the Z drive we've mapped on our server for automated backups.
Posted 2/7/2004 at 6:30 AM by deborak - delete - block user
Glad you could follow at least 85%, Joe. I'm actually pretty good at teaching and explaining computer concepts to novice users. And frighteningly, I kind of enjoy doing it. I'm entertaining the concept of teaching SQL database at some point in the future.
Posted 2/8/2004 at 10:56 AM by The_Wayne - delete
