Argh wise people of the Internet, tell me how to make this dialog go away. Randomly, when using my PC I get a message box saying “Exception processing message c0000013″ and if I press “Cancel” 108 times it goes away for a while.

I can’t spot a pattern to it though, it just appears. There’s one on my screen now taunting me, and if I shut it 108 times it’ll come back again after a few minutes. Do I really have to reinstall my PC to fix this?

Windows - No Disk error dialog

I’ve just been sifting through my photos using Picasa, looking for ones to add to my Retro Computing Collection. Amongst the masses of outdoor photos and I came across a small group of pictures like this one - public information displays, Internet kiosks, cash machines, etc that all have one thing in common - they’re all broken or not behaving as they should be.

Consider this album a celebration of when tech goes wrong and nobody is around to reboot it. I’m always on the lookout for this stuff, it’s funny.

There’s also some curiously dumped monitors that I found in the middle of North Wales, miles from anywhere. Some thoughtless sod had evidently parked his car near the wall and thrown them over the side. And while in Oxford one year we found this monitor just lying on the pavement.

I’ve not done this in ages Sat, in pieces, in my office is a Compaq 486 all-in-one PC that Amy has given to me. It came preloaded with Windows 3.11 and contains a network card. My aim was simple - get it on the network, then see if it would go on the Internet.

Getting it on the network was easy, all I had to do was install the Windows 3.11 TCP/IP update and configure it. The machine popped up on my network and managed to install Netscape 4.0 off my Linux server. It had no idea what to make of the long filenames, but coped very well.

I ran out of disk space, the tiny 100meg HDD only having 7 meg free. So out it went and in its place went a 256MB CF card in a CF-to-IDE converter. Some farting around with fdisk and xcopy gave me a neat clone of the original HDD that booted.

Netscape didn’t run too well on the weedy 486SX/25 CPU and with only 4 meg of ram it was constantly swapping to the disk. Fortunately I had 8 meg of ram in another old PC so in that went, bringing the machine up to 20 meg of ram and instantly the disk swapping stopped. But it was still quite slow overall, so out of the old 486 came its DX2/66 CPU.

And here’s the current state of things. The CPU is designed for a ZIF socket because DX2/66s need heatsinks and fans to keep them cool. Originally I got around this issue by supergluing the heatsink and fan to the top of the CPU. This worked, but the superglue has gone brittle and the heatsink fell off. My next plan is to somehow attach a Pentium MMX class CPU cooler and heatsink to the processor, probably using cable ties and luck.

It’s fun though, and it’s been ages since I sat up for half the night fiddling with a PC.

Well they’ve made this a bit easy! I’ve spent the day following the beginner’s tutorial and have a rudimentary spaceship shooting game working. It shouldn’t have taken all day, but the tutorial videos are aimed at someone who’s never used Visual Studio or C# before. I know what an “if” loop is now, at least

MS appear to have made it quite straight forward to get things moving around the screen, which is good.

In other news, my Internet connection is having problems and is currently grinding along at 3MBits after spending the past half-hour having a fit and disconnecting every two minutes.

It’s pretty foggy out there. I’ve just been ‘over the border’ (between Yorkshire and Lancashire) along the M62 to visit Steve to sort out some things we’re doing. The weather wasn’t so bad when I left, just the usual drizzle and rain, but over the tops it’s a near whiteout. Coming back in the dark was a slow and difficult affair, playing the game of ’spot the red lights’ and avoiding the trucks.

Steve’s local pub has wifi, and also a rather poorly chosen password on the router. We did the slightly poncy thing of installing Visual Studio on my Macbook in VirtualBox while eating our tea.

Printed out the example Space Invaders clone, scribbled all over it to make sense of it. Turns out the old method of learning how to program still works pretty well. I guess I’m a visual learner since the simple act of printing the code onto sheets of paper so I could draw on them caused the code to make sense. I sat on my settee and by cross-referencing the code to the Javadocs was able to work out the boilerplate code from the actual game logic.

I also found the possibly dead, but handy Pixen pixel art package for my Mac.

I’m experimenting with some woolly psychobabble ideas too. My PC is in my office and I do work on it. The work is quite interesting and motivating. I also have my Macbook which I could do work on, if I bought the VMWare Fusion key that I need. My Mac has Eclipse installed though, and the SlickSet stuff all set up. It’s turning into a portable devkit quite nicely, and is currently being my “fun” coding environment.

Sure, I could sit at my PC with its twin 19″ monitors, a mouse and a clacky IBM Model M keyboard and run Eclipse. But my Mac lets me sit in my bedroom and code, or do it downstairs in front of the telly. This portability lets me code when I want to, where I want to. Personal coding is supposed to be fun and amusing, rather than something rigid that you’re paid to do. So anything that makes it more fun is going to help with motivation.

I’ll install Eclipse on my PC at some point, just to check the code runs OK in Windows and Linux. I’ll also commandeer Amy’s PPC iBook to see what it’s like on that too She doesn’t know this yet though

On my server, PC and Mac… where’s it all gone? What am I going to do?

I think I need to buy some bigger disks and put them in my server. A terabyte should do me. My PC needs its disk sorting out, there’s Linux and Windows squashed in there, along with a data partition. Then I installed a few virtual machines in Windows and now the Windows partition is full.

If I can offload the data partition onto my server, that can be used for virtual machines instead.

After trying to read something on tabletblog.com my work PC decided to curl up its toes and fall over. MSIE completely failed to do anything until I’d repeatedly mashed the “X” in the corner and someone noticed. How did I trigger this fatal death of my web browser? Did I run some crazy Javascript or ActiveX control? No, I did the outrageous thing of clicking on a hyperlink.

Helpfully Microsoft offered me some further information about the crash. Here it is:

Problem caused by Windows

This problem was caused by Windows, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. Currently, there is no solution for the problem that you reported.

Also, when attempting to edit things on my Wordpress site I got this moronic error from our stupid web filter:

Access to the page:

http://www.piku.org.uk/diary/wp-admin/edit-comments.php

… has been denied for the following reason:

Weighted phrase limit exceeded.

Whisky Tango Foxtrot…

And of course, I have now completely forgotten what I was doing.

From Wikipedia:

Focus stealing is when a program not in focus (e.g minimised or the in background) places a window in the foreground and redirects all keyboard input to that window. This is considered a major annoyance by most users because the program may steal the focus while their attention is not on the computer screen, such as when typing while reading copy to the side. This will cause everything typed after the window appeared to be lost.

(From their entry on Focus Stealing)

Not only might it cause you to lose work, accidentally delete data or send things to the printer, but it really disrupts your workflow. A few minutes ago I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and had Outlook open in the background. Without warning it just forced its way to the front to ask me the terribly important question of whether I want to AutoArchive my emails.

Would have been much better if it’d flashed the task bar at me instead. With the exception of a critical event such as a battery about to run out, a hard disk in danger of catastrophic failure, or something else where there is an immediate danger of data loss/hardware damage should the user be interrupted.

It’s not just Windows that does this. Yesterday I managed to disable my UPS on my Linux server, but kept the USP software running. Being a critical event, the UPS software started sending alerts to every logged in console in the hope I would see it. I did because it smeared all over my IRC client’s display.

This is a valid time when focus stealing is appropriate. Unfortunately it then became highly irritating since the error message kept appearing even when I was attempting to fix the problem. It’s not easy reading documentation or editing config files when

Broadcast message from (root):

Device ‘BelkinUPS’ is not responding, blah blah blah fix it now blah blah

Is being scrawled all over your screen every 30 seconds.

I woke up 14 hours ago, and except for a few hours thoughout the day for mundane things like eating, having a bath and “watching TV to avoid going insane” I’ve spent the time sat at my PC churning out code as if my compiler had an expiry date. The program I’m working on now has stuff that can be demonstrated to the client, and I’ve not managed to crash it yet, which is good.

There’s a large hole in the software that I can’t quite fill correctly. This project is a rewrite of an older Visual C++  version of the software and initially I simply ported all the code and database across to C#. Now the database has been rearranged and redundant data stripped, big bits need rewriting. Somewhere along the rewrite a database table has either vanished or been folded into another table. I think I’ve found the definition for it in some notes I have, but I’ll need to sit down with a really hot cup of tea to go through things and sort them out.

My brain hurts though so that’s job for tomorrow before my parents come to visit.