Because it is two days until WindyCon, I should have expected that the hard drive in my main home machine -- the one with all the interesting data on it, including the Girl Genius presentation that I spent two hours working on last night -- would pick this moment to fail. *sigh*

Fortunately, that hard drive is part of a mirrored pair, so I've recovered the presentation from the working drive and will shut this down in just a minute. Then it's off to Fry's to buy another drive to replace the dead one.

I didn't have the hour to spare, but I surely don't have the data to spare.

After having looked at kevinnickerson talking about buying one, I wandered down to Fry's today and found the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with two 500 GB drives on sale with a $100 rebate. And I bought it.

Now, I'm backing up my office computer's data to it. We'll see how that goes. :)

Rock Band: Beatles for the Wii arrived just before we left for ConClave. I carefully did not open it on Monday, because the cleaning lady was coming on Tuesday and increasing the amount of mess around seemed counter-productive.

Tonight, I set it up and we gave it a try. Katie is interested in the drums and guitar, but we have to get her to actually pay attention to the game long enough to do something.

Of course, she's not three yet. :)

So in Visual Studio 2008, I got a GPF in the code that loads the toolbar information from the registry. It turns out that they have an assertion if a particular pointer is NULL, which is good. The assertion has been there for a very long time.

It would be better if they then NULL-tested the pointer before proceeding to use it in the new code below.

Of course, given that we just tripped over a NULL pointer bug in my own code, I suppose I shouldn't laugh too loud.

I did file a bug report.

I got the new dual monitor KVM switch yesterday and brought it into work to try it out. It seems to work, mostly, although I'm having trouble getting the hotkey switching to work at all.

But it will make things much better when I have to take all this home.

Well, I figured out how to get my computer back on the network at work. That was about 4 hours before the support guys finally called.

Now, I just need to fix up the remaining collateral damage.

When the DHCP service says "Access is denied", you start to get the impression that you won't be getting online from the work computer. I've filed a support ticket. We'll see how long this takes to get resolved.

Supposedly, the modern versions of Windows have lots and lots of resources available. It was, thus, with some disappointment that I discovered that there appears to be a limit on how many menus an application can open. The CMenu::LoadMenu call in MFC returns a NULL pointer (which I did cleverly check for), but when you call GetLastError to find out why you failed, the answer is an uninformative value of "0".

Isn't that special?

We actually haven't had much time to investigate the Wii, but I did play a bit with the Wii Sports disk. As a result, I promptly went out and bought the set of Nerf baseball bat, tennis racket, and golf club. Because it just works better that way. :)

In a few minutes, daisy_knotwise and I are going to try a race in Mario Kart, unencumbered by Katie's attempts to grab the wheel away from Gretchen.

Well, downloading Vista Service Pack 2 didn't make the occasional tendency of my main office computer here at home to hang up in Windows Explorer so that you can't start any new programs go away. If it did this all the time, I'd be at wits end, but a reboot usually cures the problem.

My latest attempt to fix the problem led me to read through the event log and remove the "Bonjour Service". Given that it was installed by Adobe Creative Suite 3 and this is both the only computer with CS3 installed on it and the only computer with this particular problem gives me hope.

We'll see if it works.

Eventually.

Since the problem is intermittent. *sigh*

I bought a new DVR for the bedroom that's essentially identical to the one in the family room, save for being labeled Magnavox instead of Philips. I did so partly because it will tune the digital HD channels off of cable so that we can watch them upstairs and partly so that we can watch shows like CSI and Medium in the bedroom after the girls have gone to bed. Katie's getting to an age where there are things on those shows -- mostly dead people -- that I would just as soon not have to explain. :)

Of course, I've done this just in time for the end of the regular TV season. Timing is everything, I suppose.

Now the DVR has an HDMI connector and the set in the bedroom is old enough that it only takes DVI input, so I needed an appropriate cable. The most likely cheap place to find one was Fry's, so we went down there after lunch and I ended up buying a standard HDMI cable and a small adapter, on the grounds that I might be able to reuse and HDMI cable should the set in the bedroom buy the farm. And that was all I was going to get.

Until we were heading for the door and I realized that I needed a phone for my home office so that I could hook it to the VOIP line that I'm getting when I start working from home. And I wanted it to have a speaker phone in the base unit, unlike our current set of portables, and I wanted it to have multiple extensions so I could grab one no matter where I was at. So I bought that too.

And I was on my way out the door when I saw the Mother's Day display which included a cordless mouse and I realized that the Acer mouse on the new computer is really pretty cruddy, so I went back and bought a nice Microsoft Comfort Mouse with the magnifier function. And daisy_knotwise wanted a mouse pad, so I bought the one with the puppies on it, which has delighted Katie.

So I was heading down the checkout line and the rack of DVDs caught my eye, because it included Mamma Mia. And I threw a copy in the cart, figuring that Katie dancing to the music videos at the end of the show would be less annoying than her dancing to the very loud demo song built into the keyboard that catalana kindly passed along to us when she moved. (We don't mind her playing on the keyboard -- it's when the demo song is blasting at top volume that we start to go slowly insane. Ok, maybe rapidly insane. :) )

Not bad for going to the store for a cable.

When I got home, I wired up the new mouse and the DVR, finding Katie's missing copy of Bolt (which she was trying to get us to buy a Blu-Ray copy of at Fry's -- Gretchen stubbornly explaining that we don't have a Blu-Ray player, nor will we at any time in the foreseeable future) stuck on top of the old Toshiba DVR that doesn't tune the digital channels, but which does have TV Guide On Screen, which makes it excellent for hunting down My Friends, Tigger and Pooh on the Disney Channel. Everything is working, Katie is watching Bolt, Julie is napping, Gretchen is relaxing.

And me? I'm going to go call up Speakeasy and order my DSL upgrade and VOIP line.

Having acquired and replaced the pigtail cable for my video card, the red channel on my main monitor works again. My eyes are happy to see that.

Molex: It puts the red in.

Well, no, I can't actually fix the bent pin on my monitor cable, but I did find someplace on-line that will ship me a new cable to arrive on Tuesday at fairly reasonable rates, so I only have another day and a half or so of eyestrain. (I'm working at home today so daisy_knotwise can take Katie to her class.)

Supposedly, the particular odd connector on this card is designed to allow you to squeeze more ports into the same space. This would be a more convincing argument if there were more than one connector on the card...

The good news is that I've successfully upgraded the RAM in my work machine.

The bad news is that I've managed to bend a pin on the proprietary IBM dual-head monitor cable. Now I need a new one, because the pin is done. Thinking about it, I recall that the pin got bent when I first got the machine. And it is now an ex-pin...

In the meantime, my main monitor has lost the red channel. This is a bit hard on the eyes. *sigh*

My Vista machine that I built last year has the annoying habit of occasionally starting up badly so that you can't access the Internet. The reason why has been pretty much a mystery and I've tried lots of things to fix it. And as of today, I have a new theory.

The problem is that every damned piece of software that you install seems to want to add a program to sit in your tray and run at startup time. Some of them are useful. Some of them are complete crapware. Some of them are useful when you choose to run them, but don't need to be in there messing up your Windows startup sequence.

And if you want to get them out of your Windows startup sequence, you can do it with the MSCONFIG utility. Here's a handy web page that explains how to do it.

Now, isn't that better? :)

My last HP laptop (with apologies to bedlamhouse) is sitting downstairs incapacitated with two keys that are no longer going to stay attached to the keyboard. This is the third or fourth time that this laptop has lost keys, because the attachment is just that flimsy. Had I realized how lousy this keyboard is, I never would have bought the machine, certainly not to reside in the same household with small children, the elder of whom managed to detach four to five keys with one swipe of her hand this afternoon while I was at work.

My previous HP laptop had a much more stable keyboard. Unfortunately, it had a bogus design for the power connector which eventually led to it breaking loose from the motherboard. I passed that one along to someone who worked in a place with the appropriate soldering tools to try to fix the beast. I think he succeeded.

Mercifully, the new keyboard isn't that expensive. The several hours of swearing that it'll take to install the new keyboard, well, that's a different story.

I have been coding software for various computers since 1973. The one thing that I am firmly convinced of is that there is no magic bullet in terms of language, library, or methodology that is going to solve all our problems.

So why do I keep running into people who believe that this mythical -- to my mind! -- magic bullet actually exists?