Within 24 hours I had two separate conversations about PC crashes that resulted in the loss of nearly all data. This got me frightened, and realized that I have not completed a legitimate backup of my system since I upgraded my PC's hard drive.

For a quick and dirty solution all I actually needed was to backup my digital music files so that I could recover from a catastrophic hardware failure. As I had no money in the budget I decided to rely on the XP's Backup Utility.

Now with XP Home Edition this is not installed by default and will have to be updated manually. You do this by going to D:\VALUEADD\MSFT\NTBACKUP on the XP Home CD and installing the NTBACKUP.MSI. XP Professional will have this installed by default.

I did not use the Wizard but the Advanced Option is pretty straight forward. Select the folders that you want to backup and/or the System State and away you go! To backup my critical files, which include a metric crap load of wave files (and excluded system state), took an 1 hour 48 minutes. At almost 14 gb of information that was not bad at all.

If you are so inclined this application can be set up from the command line, but I did not have the time to get into that ... the sky was falling for me!

The biggest drawback for this solution is that I could find no way to make the backup file conveniently sized for burning to CD, however, as I have an  additional drive connected this was no big hassle for me.

Backup Utility also gives you the opportunity to Append or replace the backups, and also provides the ability to execute Incremental and Differential backups.

There remains no excuse for anyone out there to lose critical data! Unless you have the resources for a RAID configuration you may want to consider this stop gap solution!

"Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not." - Henry Fielding

I have been using ieHTTPHeaders recently as my HTTP sniffer of choice, it installs as an explorer tool bar for Microsoft Internet Explorer bar.

I find it necessary to explain the very basics of HTTP for some reason, it struck me that there are probably many developers who have added a button and a text box to a ASP.NET page without really thinking about the plumbing between the browser and the web server. While these additional layers are designed for ease of use and rapid application development, I do fear the collective is being dumbed down ... so ...

HTTP is a request/response protocol between clients and servers. An HTTP client initiates a request by establishing TCP connection to a  port on a web server (port 80 by default). A HTTP server (e.g. IIS) listens for these afore mentioned requests message on the selected port.

Upon receiving the request, the server will send back a status line e.g "HTTP/1.1 200 OK", and a message of its own, the body could be the the requested file or some other information. Resources to be accessed by HTTP are identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs/URLs) using the http: or https URI schemes.

The request message from the above, requests a JavaServer Page from the /scores directory as follows:
GET /scores/SimpleScoreboard.jsp HTTP/1.1

"Knowledge is the life of the mind." - Abu Bakr

My "Field Museum, Chicago!" posting was originally to be entitled the "Soup Nazi" after the famous Seinfeld episode. However, when I clicked the Publish button I was confronted with the following message.

My item contains profanity? I never use profanity ... ever. I realized after a while that in fact the word "Nazi" itself was considered profane. In fact while you can create a blog with the "N word" in it you are not permitted to put the "N" word in the title.

I completely understand why we would not want someone insane Neo Nazis to be blogging hate speech with tools created by Microsoft, I am just curious about all the words that are on the black list ... or maybe I should not ask too many questions just in case...

GEORGE: "I didn't get any bread."
JERRY: "Just forget it. Let it go."
GEORGE: "Um, excuse me, I, I think you forgot my bread."
SOUP NAZI: "Bread two dollars extra."
GEORGE: "Two dollars? But everyone in front of me got free bread."
SOUP NAZI: "You want bread?"
GEORGE: "Yes, please."
SOUP NAZI: "Three dollars!"
GEORGE: "What?"
SOUP NAZI: "No Soup for you!"

"Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address." - Lane Olinghouse

I have come across my first major issue with WMP 11, last week I was trying to setup sharing on my home network (mistake # 1) and at some point during the whole debacle my whole library was no longer available to me. I could not add any of the files back to the library and it would not scan any of the file on my machine. In fact every time I would open WMP11 it would ask me to setup sharing for the network, I had just purchased the Corrine Bailey Rae CD and was looking forward to ripping it to my library but nothing.

This was ultra annoying! I tried uninstalling WMP 11 several different ways, and even went as far as installing when the moon was at its zenith, but nothing worked. There was no useful troubleshooting information I could find from Windows support website's. However some judicious Google searches led me to try the following:

• Close WMP11.
• Stop "Window Media Player Network Sharing Service".
• Delete "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player" ... trust me!
• Simply restart WMP11 and under Library select "Add to Library" and you should start to see activity and your music files start to replenish its depleted store!

Of course this should not have been necessary as one of the main points to using WMP11 was the improved database integrity. I never had a problem with WMP10, but then I guess I did not have the option to try to share my media across networks ... probably will not try that again!

"Knowledge is power." - Francis Bacon

My wife and I had a wonderful week in Chicago we took the opportunity to visit the Field Museum and spent a wonderful couple of hours looking at stuffed animals (sounds bad but was actually very interesting).

Just before we leave we decide to get a bite to eat at the over priced cafeteria. We here shouts from the front of the line. "You want soup ... does anyone want soup?!"

At first we were not sure who was aggressively shout out this petition for potential customers, but knowing my wife's personal love of soup on cold days I knew we were heading toward a confrontation. We get a little closer to the front and we see the source of the voice himself as he jabs a finger in our direction and says "Soup, do YOU want soup!?".

My wife nods an affirmative towards the guy behind the counter and he quickly turns to me "You, what about you?". The place was deathly quiet, I shook my head scared that I may have somehow ruined it for my wife. I was just waiting to hear him shout "NO SOUP FOR YOU!".

What an excellent weekend!!

I had to jump on this one! After the recent discussions on FizzBuzz and how to measure the goods on a good programmer.

In my last job I interviewed what seemed like an unending stream of really bad people. What strikes me about our industry of software development is that we have no way of taking our important work with us and showing it to anybody. In fact most companies insist you sign away the rights to show any code you write. My wife on the other hand, who is a Graphic Designer, has a metric tonne of work in her portfolio. She can walk into an interview and immediately state "this is how good I am ... This is what I did for this marketing campaign ... and this was my time constraint". As developers we are required to somehow prove our competency within a few short hours by describing our understanding of some abstract concepts that we may or may not have used recently.

I have worked on a lot of great code in my life, along with some really talented developers, I have had those great ideas that appear as inspiration from the heavens (imagine the beam of light and heavenly music). Yet I find it difficult to describe how beautifully weighted and measured my code was to a potential employer without showing them. I am left with simply listing the projects I have worked on and hope they ask me an intelligent question that unleashes the true triumph of all my accomplishments.

Another problem is that a good developer, IMHO, is also just a good problem solver. I do not necessarily care that they do not remember the exact syntax of a command, or in the FizzBuzz example, whether they remembers how to use Modulus. My concern is what kind and variety of projects has worked on, does he know how to find answers and finally can he follow instructions well.

I think the problem is a two way street! Good developers need a good means to show they are good developers too.

"He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time." - Oscar Wilde