I recently upgraded my laptop hard drive from 80 GB to 160 GB.  You may be in a similar situation to me where your laptop is a little older and the drive is running out of space so you bought a 2.5″ external hard drive to help out.  What I found was that the extra space is nice but I actually didn’t need the entire 160 GB to be portable.  So, I decided to swap the drives (80 GB is still pretty good to take with you).

The procedure was quite simple:

• Clear the mobile hard drive of content
• Clone the drive
• Swap the drives

Of course, the devil is in the details.  Removing content from the mobile drive is quite simple.  Cloning the drive was also pretty simple.  To do this I used Acronis Migrate Easy for Windows XP.  It is not free, but a free trial is available so if this is a one time clone then the trial will work fine since it has full functionality.  The software worked great, the only limitation was since I was cloning to a larger drive the resizing and repartitioning options were a not as flexible as I would have liked.   That deficiency could probably be fixed after the fact using partitioning software (e.g. Partition Magic etc.).  In the end, it cost me about 40 MB of space which is not a big issue and not worth trying to fix.

Swapping the drives can be the tricky part.  My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1300 and removing the hard drive was straight forward.  The external drive was a Lacie 2.5″ Mobile Hard Drive.

The external drive can be a wild card since each one is different and it can be hard to tell how to open the case.  Luckily with the Lacie there are 4 screws on each side (these can be seen in the large image).  When all 8 screws are removed the top and bottom of the drive separate giving good access to the actual hard drive.  From there it is just a matter of unscrewing the drive, placing the new drive in the dell chassis and replacing the chassis in the bottom of the laptop.  Then boot up and hopefully everything goes fine.  If there are issues, then replace the original hard drive.

A good overview of the process can be found here.

Categories: Tech
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Firefox 3.0 was released yesterday to great success with 8 million downloads.  So much so that the demand brought the mozilla download servers down intermittently;  it took quite a bit of patience to download.  (To be fair, they sort of begged people to crash their servers with their desire for a world download record.  )  After only a day of playing with the new version, I really like it.  The new UI is nice but my favorite feature (so far) is the increased performance I’m seeing.  I’m not talking about any Javascript benchmarks but what I care about — how fast the pages I visit load and render.  GMail and my customized google home page are rendering noticeably faster.

It feels great to install a software upgrade that actually delivers a better product instead of a more bloated product chock-full of useless features that I will never use.  Psst, I’m looking at you Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Categories: Tech
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As anyone who has bought anything or even used Amazon knows, they have an active product announcement program. This is where they notify you of new products via email. Sometimes these are extremely popular items with mass appeal (e.g. Harry Potter) but more frequently they use your history to find items that you would probably be interested in. In my experience, this works very well. I can’t say for sure whether I have bought anything based on their emails but I’m usually interested in the product and will browse to find out more information.

With that said, I was really surprised to receive the following from Amazon.ca: “We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Sergio Leone by Christopher Frayling have also purchased Moments Like This by Donna Hill.”

At this point I’m confused. The cover doesn’t look like something I would usually be interested in. At the bottom of the email it indicates that the book is from the Subjects -> Romance category. Now I know I’m not interested. At all.

Then a funny thing happened. No, I didn’t buy the book! But I did start wondering how this could happen.

• Are flocks of huge Sergio Leone fans really buying this book? If so, why? Leone films barely have any female characters let alone actual romance.
• Maybe one person who bought Sergio Leone actually bought the book? It could have been a gift?!
• Could it be a bug with Amazon’s software?

I’m secretly hoping that it is the third option — the other two options are too damaging to my world view.

Categories: Misc, Movies, Tech
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I was perusing some JavaScript the other day and saw a strange notation that I had never seen before:

$("report")

"What is this?", I thought. It looks like Perl or PHP -- have I missed some big piece of JavaScript or is this some new feature? In a word: No.

It turns out that this is actually a function contained in the Prototype JavaScript Framework. The definition of the function is along the lines of:

Functionally, this is nothing special: pass in a name and get back the object. Or pass in an array and get back an array of objects. The really cool thing is the simple elegance of this method and how it cleans up your code.

This is so simple, that it seems obvious! This saves on programmer typing, saves on page size and makes the code more readable.

In a word: beautiful.

Categories: IT, Tech
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Stop the presses! Bell actually did something right. It seems that ExpressVu PVRs now have a 9 day guide! This replaces the measly 2 day guide we had to live. This really enhances the usability of the PVR -- good job, Bell.

Now maybe they should look at the billing system.

Categories: Tech
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I've taken up trying to develop a stock system. The main tool I've been using is AmiBroker, a technical analysis tool. It also lets you run back tests etc.

The results can be seen at StockPickr:

http://www.stockpickr.com/members/port/tuzopickr

So, far the performance has been very good -- although the US markets have been doing very nicely during the same time.

Not to be a shill, but AmiBroker is a really nice product and very programmer friendly. It has it's own scripting language, let's you call out to code from the scripting language, has a COM interface so you're programs can manipulate the program and has an SDK for developing c++ plugins.

Categories: Finance, Tech
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Future Shop (and Best Buy Canada) started Boxing Day early at 8pm EST on December 24th. http://marketnews.ca/news_detail.asp?nid=2424

It seems that they were totally overwhelmed by the response. The servers were getting hammered resulting in many errors. Service Unavailable was a frequent message along with HTTP Server Too Busy as well as random vbscript errors (a common message was dictContext.Value is null or not an object). I also saw some HTTP 403 errors saying that there was a permission problem running a CGI script. After limping along for a couple of hours where it was almost impossible to pull a page up they tried to free up some processing by turning off some images and turning off the inventory information on the product pages. Also, they put a limit in so that you would be blocked from using the site; a page with no images would appear instead of the page you want with an invitation to browse the flyer with a message they no new users were allowed on the site at the current time (or words to that effect). As of 12:45am the site seems to be functioning much better.

BestBuy.ca was also affected but not to the same extent. I was able to place an order on BestBuy.ca within half and hour whereas futureshop.ca took me almost 3 hours to place an order. I think they share the same infrastructure and code base so I don't attribute it to any technical differences between the sites. I think it just shows how much more popular Future Shop is than Best Buy (Future Shop also had better deals ).

It will be interesting to see if they do this same promotion this year. Customers may be put off by the technology problems but the real people that I feel sorry for are the technical staff who must have been fighting fires like crazy trying to get (and keep) the site up and running. Not how I would want to spend my Christmas Eve.

I'm surprised that Futureshop/Best Buy haven't moved to a .NET implementation yet -- it's been at least 4 years of being in the mainstream.

Categories: IT, Tech
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Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have done two amazingly funny videos for Microsoft where he plays his character from the BBC version of "The Office". These are internal Microsoft training videos about values where he insults virtually everyone. Totally Hilarious!

Part 1: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=9076288729387457440

Part 2: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=959125392868390030

Here is more information on the videos.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2326336,00.html

Categories: Humour, IT, Tech
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I wanted to change the way the main page displayed posts in WordPress.

I found a good post that explains the simple changes to make: http://justinblanton.com/2005/02/limit-number-of-posts-with-wordpress

Further to that note, the index.php page that you need to modify for the main page is in the wp-content/themes/themename directory. The default theme directory is, not surprisingly, default. If you are new to WordPress that may save some time searching for the right file.

Categories: Tech
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I've been trying to setup Exact Audio Copy on my new laptop and was getting the message “Error - Write blocks - Invalid field in CDB” when trying to burn a CD. This would happen on test write as well. I couldn't figure out what the exact problem was but the workaround is to change the drive options to only eject the CD after burning and not reset the drive. (Drive Options -> Writer -> After burning finished only eject CD-R.) This seems to eliminate the issue.

Categories: Tech
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