Do not, under any circumstances, do the following:

• Walk past your cow-orker’s computer while he’s on a bathroom break.
• Notice that he’s using Excel 2007 to work on some spreadsheets.
• Create a new spreadsheet.
• Move to the extreme bottom-right cell (in Excel 2007 that’s row 1,048,576, column 16,384).
• Enter a single space into that cell.
• Save the file as the default template (click here for directions).
• Quit and re-launch Excel.

Don’t ever, ever do that.

Because if you do that, every time your cow-orker creates a new spreadsheet and goes to print it, Excel will try to print 40 million pages. And that’s just not very nice.

I’m finally on the mend, after four days of the whole one-watery-eye, one-drippy-nostril routine, plus a sore throat, throbbing sinuses and sneezes violent enough to loosen my shoelaces. Fortunately, getting through the cold now means that I should be healthy for my Spring Break trip down to Squeaky’s place in Memphis!

There’s precious little else to report; I’ve been too doped-up on cold medicine to do anything noteworthy this week. I did discover that a local computer shop sells a lot of old Sun gear dirt-cheap; I’m thinking very seriously about buying some Ultra 5s or 10s on Friday afternoon, just so I can play around with SPARC hardware for 1/100th of its original cost.

Yeah, I’m a geek; I’ll cop to it.

Blogging’s been light due to the usual confluence of work, school and side projects.

Last night I spent WAY too much time wrangling with a profoundly broken Linux framebuffer driver which could not be brought to heel even with custom mode tables. I eventually gave up and used the old vesafb, which works just fine despite having been originally written for the flight computers in the Apollo spacecraft.

That kind of brokenness drives me right up the goddamn wall, though. It’s 2008. We have 3D desktops so sophisticated they’re on the edge of self-parody, and yet a simple framebuffer driver can’t handle an entirely reasonable request to serve up a 640×480, 60Hz, 8-bit display; it just shits its pants and spews garbage all over the screen on the RARE occasions when it actually snycs up to the monitor. And this isn’t a reverse-engineered driver for undocumented hardware; the driver was WRITTEN BY the people who made the hardware!

On the bright side, I had ample opportunities to confirm that the “video out of range” damage-protection circuitry in my monitor does its job.

Oh, and apologies to those of you who (A) aren’t Dr. Strangegun or ExistingThing or Sebastian and (B) actually slogged through the technobabble above; I’m sure it meant nothing to you.

… but it’d be awful nice to have this one.

My current laptop is a ThinkPad T42, one of the last machines designed by IBM before the laptop line was sold to Lenovo. It’s been a rock-solid, highly reliable performer and it still does almost everything I need.

That said, I’m starting to bump up against its limitations. I use Linux as my primary operating system, with Windows XP running in a virtual machine as needed for school and work. And it’d be really nice to have a dual-core processor with VT support for faster virtualization, especially when I’m compiling programs inside Windows.

But I’m going to be a reasonable, responsible adult and forgo a new laptop… so I can buy a Ruger Redhawk instead

EDIT: Oooh, a similarly-spec’d T61 for only $50 more. Hmm… Anyone wanna buy a gently-used laptop?

Just wrapped up the hands-on final in my hardware course, during which the dude next to me released all the magic smoke from his motherboard. Which is not, technically speaking, the way to pass said final exam.

I love the smell of burning electronics in the morning.

About a year ago I wrote a post about an ideal laptop that no one was willing to make.

Well, Asus came up with something passably close. Two pounds, 7″ 800×480 screen, 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of flash, 3.5 hour battery life, and running Linux out of the box.

I’ll take mine in black, plzkthx.

… but apparently dd can, under the right circumstances, be a rather useful method of installing an operating system.

Wired: $200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart

The cool part: that system is built on a Mini-ITX motherboard with a 1.5GHz Via C7 processor. Boards like that usually sell for $200 all by themselves; with this deal you’re basically getting the RAM, hard drive, DVD drive, case, power supply, keyboard, mouse and speakers for free.

It would make a great home server as-is, or you could use the components to build a very capable HTPC or carputer. Oh, and the Via C7 has a hardware AES accelerator, so performance with encrypted filesystems should be excellent.

Yep, that’s going on the Christmas list.

Friend of the Blog MauserMedic asked for advice on backing up his hard drive last week. I’ve been meaning to write up a little guide but, well, I had a pretty rigorous drinking schedule over the weekend…

You can read a dozen different articles on backup strategies and you’ll get a dozen different versions of the “best” way to do it. Here’s my highly sophisticated method:

• Buy a big external hard drive and copy your personal data to it on a regular basis.

Alright, I guess I should expand on that a bit further. You really don’t need to back up EVERYTHING on your hard drive; you only have to worry about your personal files (your MP3s, pictures, emails, Word documents, etc.). Assuming you’re running Windows and you don’t save things in random locations all over the hard drive, you can just copy the entire C:\Documents and Settings\ folder to your external hard drive and you’re all set.

What about everything else? Well, that’s why you already have (or should have) CDs or DVDs to restore your operating system and programs. Your computer probably came with a set of “System Restore” discs that you can use to reinstall Windows and get running again after a hard drive crash. Then you just need to reinstall your programs and copy your personal data over from your external hard drive.

One potential snag: some new computers are coming with the “System Restore” stuff installed on a hidden partition of the hard drive instead of on disc. This is a profoundly stupid thing for manufacturers to do, in that it (A) wastes a big chunk of hard drive space and (B) destroys your ability to fix your computer after a hard drive failure.

The good news is, you should have a program somewhere on your PC that allows you to burn a set of “System Restore” discs with your CD/DVD burner. You might have to poke around on the manufacturer’s website or (horrors!) call their tech-support drones to find out how to do this, but you REALLY, REALLY want to either burn those discs yourself or get the manufacturer to send you a set.

Finally, there’s a whole bunch of backup programs you can buy to automate the backup process for you. I can’t recommend ANY of the ones I’ve used; caveat emptor.

So… that’s my take on backups. Just plug in your external drive, copy the whole Documents and Settings folder, paste it in the external drive, and have a few drinks while you wait for your computer to copy all your dirty pictures valuable documents to your backup drive.

You people are backing up your damn hard drives, right?

I ask because the 160-gig Seagate in my Power Mac went tits-up today, within a few days of its fourth birthday.

Fortunately, I do actually back up my systems. But I only back up my pr0n data files, not the entire disk. So recovering from a dead drive is a bit time-consuming. Swap in a new hard drive, reinstall the OS, update the OS, reinstall all my applications, reconfigure everything, and copy all my data over from the backup drive. [grumble] hours later, I’m up and running again.

Remember, folks, there are only two kinds of hard drives: those that have failed, and those that WILL fail.