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The new version of Movable Type that I'm using allows me to make posts that get published on a schedule. This is going to be a strangely recursive image, but notice how I seledct "Future" in the Post Status in this screenshot.
I don't know exactly when this post will show up. We'll just have to wait and find out.
I had trouble installing the Windows Update for the .NET Framework 1.1 SP1. If you have similar problems, uninstall the .NET Framework 1.1 SDK. I think there was an update or “hotfix” to the SDK at some point, which the 1.1 SP1 redistributable complained about.
Once I removed the SDK, I was able to re-install the 1.1 SP1 with no problems.
I’m trying out Feedburner. A colleague sent me the link a few weeks ago, but I didn’t “get it” at the time. Now I get it, but “it” requires all of you to change your links to the feedburner virtual link. This is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/PrimordialOoze
Although http://www.primordia.com/blog/index.xml will continue to be updated, I won’t publicize it anymore. Feedburner will allow me to enrich the feed easier than I can do myself. I can also get some interesting statistics that are hard or impossible to get from the default Movable Type software or my web host’s statistics package.
Again, please change your links to http://feeds.feedburner.com/PrimordialOoze and I hope this doesn’t cause you any problems.
The topic here is Norton Ghost, which helped me do something that I’ve been dreading for a long time. The only downside is that although Norton Ghost had all of the capabilities I eventually needed, I didn’t really know how to use it (I refused to go through any tutorials) and I made a few mistakes along the way.
I bought a pair of 300GB 7200 Maxtor DiamondMax SATA drives a few months ago. I have a somewhat cheap Dell Dimension 4600 whose case only supports two internal 3.5” hard drives. The 5.25 drive bays are both full. I immediately replaced my secondary 20GB drive with one of the DiamondMax drives. This was easy and I lived like this for about a month.
The Problem
I wanted to replace my main system drive but I didn't want to re-install Windows.
This is an atypical task for me. I'm usually the first one to blow away Windows and start over when faced with a problem like this. This time around, I must admit that my Windows XP Pro installation is holding up just fine despite the fact that it's been running for almost a year. I do have an enormous investment in it's setup and configuration so I though to myself, "It's worth a try".
The Process
The process involved Norton Ghost 2003. It's a version behind but not a dollar short. In the end, the transfer took me 6 hours. Now that I know what I'm doing, I could reproduce it in about 2 hours. I could step
Ghost works by copying from a real drive to another drive, or from a real drive to an image, or an image to a real drive, etc. It does this after a reboot into PC DOS, which works fine despite the shock of going back into DOS like that.
The version of PC DOS used has the necessary drivers to read all of my SATA and USB 2.0 drives. Cool.
To start, I selected my primary drive as the source. It's a 40GB IDE connected to my primary IDE controller.. I also have a D: drive connected to my secondary SATA port. I did this by accident, but it worked out well that I did. When I replaced the IDE drive with the second SATA drive, it connected to my primary SATA port and booted from that primary drive.
I formatted the new drive as NTFS and assigned a drive letter of E:. This turned out to be my biggest mistake and I made it early on. Even though Ghost blows away your drive, the letter assignment sticks.
I created an image file of the IDE drive on D:. I rebooted into the image, only to see SYSTEMROOT set to E:. However, tons of registry entries still point to C: and that drive was not found.
I connected the IDE back. So C: was available. I booted into the SATA (E:) and the boot worked, but god knows what was going on under the hood. SYSTEMROOT was E:, but plenty of stuff on the IDE drive (C:) was getting accessed.
Many boots and images later, I determined that I should delete all of the partitions on the SATA (E:) and leave it's drive letter unassigned.
This did the trick. I rebooted onto the SATA drive with my current install of Windows XP and life was at last good. This last leg was actually accomplished on Christmas Eve morning, as the last image was kicked off before I went to bed.
Now I had plenty of space on C: and I had all of my programs and settings preserved. Norton Ghost did the trick.
Conclusion
Like anything, this whole thing taught me a bunch of things. Unfortnately, I should have known all of this by now. It's nice to know that I can take an image pretty easily now with Ghost as a backup. Unfortunately, now that I have a 300GB drive, the backup will likely be huge. I'll probably stick to STOMP Backup My PC for my backups, allowing me to select directories.
Notes
Oddly, the drive change was enough for Photoshop to take notice. It asked me to activate my copy of Photoshop CS once again. This went off without a hitch, so that's good.
Do you see the steam on the window in this picture? Do you know what that means? That means that it’s fucking cold outside.
I tweaked my installation in two ways early this morning. First, I enabled MT-Blacklist, an anti-spam plugin for Movable Type. This might allow me to allow anonymous comments (which would be ideal).
Second, I configured my site to use dynamic archive page generation. Actually, all pages should be dynamically generated. This works out better since tweaks to m y site won’t require the long rebuild times that I’ve traditionally seen. I’m curious as to the effect this will have on my old archive pages and how the new posts will look. This post is kind of a test and a notification rolled into one.
Third, I changed the format of the archive pages from the “old format” to the “new format”. Basically, this puts posts into directories per year and month rather than encoding the date in the html filename.
I should be all set up to allow more web authors to come on now. I have some colleagues who have been interested in starting a blog on my site so this could happen soon now.
If you want to post comments on Primordial Ooze, you will need to register with TypeKey. The registration process is minimal and I’m hoping no one will mind the extra step. I don’t require you to provide an e-mail address so hopefully it will be a no-brainer.
If this is a problem for anyone, please notify me: nick@primordia.com and raise your objections.
I upgraded the site to Movable Type 3.121, which gave me significantly more control over comment management. I’m hoping my comment spam problem will go away. We’ll see.
Taken this morning on the train. The image is a bit dirty because the train window has all sorts of crap growing on its surface.
I had a much better sunrise shot about 10 minutes earlier, but I couldn't get the camera out in time before the train turned and spoiled my shot.
Fun LIRR advertisement defacements...
My brother sent these to me this morning and I laughed so hard the whole office would have taken notice if anyone was in at this hour.
Things that make me believe this last one is a fake:
It was funny anyway.
This is not as easy as it looks. Not for me, anyway.
I saw this on my way in this morning…
What has the world come to?
I played around with the rather noisy image of this morning's sunrise using a piece of software called Neat Image. My brother tipped me off to the software, which does an amazing job at reducing the amound of noise that most digital cameras with small sensors (which is most digital cameras) produce.
The resulting image is a bit "blurry" but you can tweak the engine quite a bit. I modified the "noise profile" and created this image which is sharper than the original result, but still has the noise significantly reduced if not eliminated.
However, I got the best results by taking the filtered image and superimpositing the original image on top of it but setting the original image layer style to "Color" (in Photoshop). The results bring back all of the detail I could want in the clouds, while still reducing the noise.
I'm pretty amazed by this filtering. It even comes with an Adobe Photoshop plugin. This is definitely a very important addition to my digital photography. Lots to experiment with. Go check it out.
I took it this morning at dawn.
When I bring up the photo properties, I see the exact time as 6:40am which makes sense since I was aiming to get on the 6:46 train to Penn Station.
There are a few interesting things about this photo.
First, it looks like the moon is visible in the photo, but I can't remember seeing it when I took the picture. Starry Night tells me t hat the moon was a waning crescent at this time. It's too bad that Venus isn't visible in the photo, because it was prominently glowing below and to the left of the moon. I suppose the thick cloud cover is the cause.
Second, notice that there is a parking lot in the lower right-hand corner of the photo. It appears as if all of the tail lights are on. What's probably happening is that the flash from my camera went off and the tail lights are actually lit up by it! I took a few shots without my flash and confirmed that this must be the case. In the pictures without the flash, the tail lights are unlit.
Here is the Starry night Pro image:
Via a tip from a colleague who read Chris Sells’ blog, I poked around with Sean Gerety’s Sparklines XAML samples. I’m still a XAML newbie, but I struggled through the syntax and created a XAML sample that is closer to Tufte’s Sparklines samples on the Tufte site.
And here is my XamlPad window:
The point of this graphic, which I think might have been lost in Sean’s version, is that the red dot represents the last data point in the sparkline and that red color is associated with the red ticker price after the MSFT symbol. There is nothing wrong with Sean’s sample, but I didn’t feel like the sparkline was a word-sized graphic the way Tufte envisoned them. That said, the concept can be stretched many ways, I’m sure and Sean’s interpretation is probably very valid.
Here is my code.
<Border ID="root" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/xaml" Height="30" Width="200">
<Canvas>
<Canvas Left="0" Top="13"><Text>Blah, blah, blah</Text></Canvas>
<Canvas Left="80" Top="-10">
<TransformDecorator>
<TransformDecorator.Transform>
<ScaleTransform ScaleX="0.3" ScaleY="1.2" />
</TransformDecorator.Transform>
<Polyline Points="1,26.23
2,26.19
3,26.14
4,26.1
5,25.76
6,25.89
7,25.73
8,25.62
9,25.83
10,25.54
11,25.86
12,26.1
13,25.94
14,25.94
15,25.93
16,25.78
17,26.12
18,26.3
19,26.33
20,26.35
21,26.13
22,26.48
23,26.56
24,27.22
25,27.24
26,27.54
27,25.95
28,25.45
29,25.33
30,25.53
31,25.16
32,25.22
33,25.51
34,25.45
35,25.61
36,25.48
37,25.59
38,25.8
39,25.95
40,25.85
41,25.08
42,24.93
43,25.2
44,25.31
45,25.03
46,25.19
47,24.41
48,24.15
49,24.5
50,24.63
51,24.89
52,25.13
53,25.18
54,25.16
55,25.38
56,25.09
57,25.37
57,25.72
59,25.83
60,26.35
61,26.37
62,26.37
63,26.39
64,26.7
65,26.53
66,26.5
67,26.7
68,26.88
69,26.61
70,26.57
71,26.46
72,26.77
73,26.99
74,26.59
75,26.95
76,27.15
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78,26.9
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82,27.29
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90,28.01
91,28.3
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99,28.16
100,28.21
101,28.24
102,28.14
103,27.45
104,27.37
105,27.52
106,27.46
107,27.21
108,27.04
109,27.15
110,27.18
111,27.36
112,27.4
113,27.04
114,27.06
115,26.74
116,26.65
117,26.61
118,26.59
119,26.38
120,26.24
121,25.98
122,26.2
123,25.67
124,25.66
125,25.84
126,25.71
127,25.45
128,25.4
129,25.73
130,25.11
131,25.1
132,25.35
133,25.15
134,25.15
135,25.5
136,25.69
137,25.98
138,25.8
139,26
140,26.1
141,26.23
142,26.1
143,26.07
144,26.68
145,26.14
146,26.12
147,26.74
148,27.2
149,26.91
150,26.61
151,28.91
152,28.89
153,29.35
154,29.35
155,28.93
156,29.23
157,29.07
157,28.68
159,28.78
160,28.91
161,28.94
162,28.82
163,29.14
164,29.19
165,29.08
166,28.5
167,28.52
168,27.8
169,28.83
170,28.19
171,28.24
172,28.46
173,29.6
174,29.07
175,29.96
176,29.5
177,28.5
178,28.9
179,28.36
180,28.34
181,27.84
182,27.55
183,28.37
184,28.84
185,28.38
186,28.43
187,28.3
188,27.26
189,26.52
190,26.51
191,26.42
192,26.57
193,26.5
194,26.22
195,26.24
196,26.45
197,26.62
198,25.7
199,25.54
200,25.63
201,25.6
202,25.73
203,25.61
204,25.58
205,25.71
206,25.65
207,25.66
208,26.18
209,26.17
210,26.41
211,26.23
212,26.47
213,26.61
214,26.89
215,26
216,26.45
217,26.38
218,26.04
219,26.89
220,26.69
221,27.52
222,27.27
223,27.4
224,27.31
225,26.91
226,27.47
227,27.7
228,27.42
229,26.5
230,26.88
231,26.15
232,25.64
233,25.63
234,25.75
235,25.26
236,25.7
237,25.78
238,26.33
239,26.07
240,26.07
241,25.96
242,25.39
243,24.65
244,24.99
245,24.88
246,24.68
247,23.75
248,23.67
249,24.09
250,24.87
251,24.88
252,24.64
253,24.61
254,24.4
255,24.41
256,24.79
257,24.22
257,24.16
259,24.03
260,24.63
261,24.76
262,25.57
263,25.79
264,25.62
265,25.99
266,26.2
267,26.36
268,25.74
269,25.99
270,26.37
271,25.86
272,26.1
273,25.72
" Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="0.5" Opacity="1"/>
</TransformDecorator>
<Ellipse CenterX="83" CenterY="31" RadiusX="2.0" RadiusY="2.0" Fill="red"/>
</Canvas>
<Canvas Left="170" Top="13"><Text>MSFT</Text></Canvas>
<Canvas Left="199" Top="13"><Text Foreground="Red">29.96</Text></Canvas>
</Canvas>
</Border>
The major problem with my code, of course, is that I manually placed the text elements via pixel coordinates. I don’t know enough about XAML layout to avoid this. This is unfortunate as it would have been a beautiful syngergy between the XAML layout model and the visual use of the sparkline as a graphical word amidst the rest of the text.
But that is a lesson for another day. I suppose I’ll experiment with creating a Sparklines class where I can grab data from an XML file or some arbitrary query and lay it out like text, like so:
<Text>This is a test and here is Microsoft’s performance: </Text><Sparkline Type=”Graph” data=”msft.xml” Foreground=”Black” DotColor=”Red”/><Text>MSFT</Text><Text Foreground=”Red”><Sparkline Type=”LastValue” data=”msft.xml” Foreground=”Red”/>
A colleague’s new blog. Max's Maddnes at http://xamdam.blogspot.com/
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