Oh what a week! Security Myth #3 delayed...
This has turned out to be one of those weeks I didn’t plan for and suddenly it’s the Friday before a week’s vacation and I haven’t managed to achieve even half the things I’d hoped, so sadly, Security Myth #3 “Cryptography is too hard” will have to wait another week before I can really give it the time to do it justice.
“Expect the unexpected” they tell you or “plan for the unknown”. Hmmm, I’m neither psychic or good at guessing games. If only I knew that Monday morning would see the demise of my hard disk. It had indicated a few warning signs – the mouse becoming jerky as the CPU got tied up waiting for disk IO to complete. So, ‘run chkdsk’ I thought ‘that will fix these kind of problems’. Alas, on the reboot so the checker could lock the system partition the disk made a tremendous ‘THUNK’ noise and that was it – dead disk.
I replaced the laptop disk with the one from my external USB storage device and started the rebuild, getting back as much backed up data as possible. Fortunately for me, one of my colleagues, Alastair Dick, used to be an engineer at Dell and knows a thing or two about disks. With his help, standing the old disk at an obscure angle and keeping it extra cool I was eventually able to recover much of my lost data – all proving to be a tedious activity.
Ha ha! I can hear the echos on the internet – ‘why didn’t he just restore from his backup?’. Well I have an 80Gig drive – 20Gigs for system and apps, the rest for data – lots of Virtual PC images for all the demos and things I do – how do you easily back up 60Gigs of data from your laptop?
One of those virtual images was critical to the demos I will be giving at an event in Reading on 11th August. The session I’m responsible for at the event ‘What’s new in Visual Studio .NET 2005’ is on Visual Studio Team System. An impossible task to do justice to the enormity of the product in only 75 minutes!
So sadly my week was not quite what I’d planned and please accept my apologies that Myth #3 will be postponed until I’m back from my vacation in sunnier climes…