I'm currently in the plane en route for the PDC. I just spent 15 minutes trying to write my first PDC blog entry using Ink Recognition on Xceed's TabletPC. I must admit I'm not ready for this. I made many mistakes while writing, and trying to fix those errors made me only more bitter about the technology. On the other side, I'm currently writing with very little room for my arms since the guy in front of me decided to lay down and moved his seat back. Planes are not for laptops nor tablet PCs. Sure, I would have more room in first class, but I can't afford it.
I would have used my Pocket PC for blogging, has it not been out of power because I forgot the battery charger at work. A colleague travelling with me brought it, but I did not have time to recharge it yet. I'm getting pretty fast in writing with it, though I use the keyboard mode, not the handwriting.
I don't know what to expect of this PDC yet. I didn't have time to prepare my schedule. I just hope to see a lot of WinFS content. I'll probably go to the Mono meeting Tuesday, as the agenda Miguel has put forth is really promising. I can't hide that I will want to talk about Xceed Zip for .NET to the other attendees. Too bad Xceed FTP for .NET only works on the Windows platform. I tried it a few weeks ago on Linux, and it fails, as expected, because the SSL support requires some Crypt32 calls. Even if you don't need SSL, some initialization code is messing up. I'll add to my agenda to look at how to overcome such limitations without having to provide separate assemblies to Windows and non-Windows customers. I may just find my answer at the Mono meeting.
The main reason why I'm a little late on my preparation isn't my last two weeks of vacation. Actually, it should have gave me some spare time. Instead, I was busy reinstalling my home computer. Just before leaving for vacation, the hard drive crashed. 9 months old, and it died on me. Actually, it started dying, as the drive was fully seekable, but read errors were present all over the disks. I could not read it from Windows anymore. None of my data was accessible. And guess what? Yup, you're right, I didn't have a decent backup. The only backup I had was 9 months old, when I upgraded my machine. I could live without my latest emails. I could live without my Word and Excel documents, so could my wife. I could live without my recently ripped music library, as I had an exact and full quality copy on my Dell DJ. No, the bummer wasn't all that. The bummer was all my digital pictures. I had no backup. None. Well, only a few printed photos. Yikes!
I first tried SpinRite, to try to recover lost sectors, but the task was mostly vain, and it took three days to scan 3% of my 160 gigs hard drive (yawn). Then I searched for a software that could try to locate files and folders on readable sectors. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack. I had to try one, so I went for Restorer 2000. I could try it with files smaller than 64kb, and it would list all found contents. I could see all my digital gallery, so I bought it and tried to recover the most I could. Turns out most bad sectors ended up on system files or my music library. I could recover everything else, except my Money database and backup. Restorer 2000 proved a life saver. The good thing about it is that you can configure how many times it will try to read a bad sector. Since I knew there were a lot and SpinRite could not even recover them, I set this option to 1, to save me time. In an afternoon, I had everything important recovered, except for the Outlook database I forgot to locate. Now that I returned the defective hard drive to Dell, it's too late.
The hard drive was a Maxtor, and I hear a lot of bad things about them. I'm glad Dell replaced it with a Seagate. And now, I've learned my lesson the hard way: back-up, and back-up often. I'll probably buy myself a second hard drive, do regular drive to drive backups, and occasional DVD backups.