That DOS knowledge still comes in handy: CHKDSK saves the day

Last year we had a power outage and our home desktop computer crashed, and I could no longer bring up the Windows operating system on it.

I thought the machine was completely hosed, but I put the main drive into a USB enclosure that we borrowed from a friend, and connected it to a laptop, and ran a
chkdsk \f
command on the drive, from the DOS prompt.

The command found a bunch of lost chains on the disk, and fixed them, and afterwards, I was able to reinstall the drive and boot it normally. Everything was fine.

Not only that, but I found some e-mail files that had been "lost" before. I assume the chkdsk command recovered those.

You lecture me...

A couple of Saturdays ago, I took my eight-year-old daughter to Wal Mart. She'd been wanting to go, asking almost every day, because she wanted a particular "Littlest Pet Shop" toy.

She buys it. Then at checkout, she sees a roly-poly lantern she wants. She buys that too.

On the way out, I tell her, "You know you just spent all your money. You should keep some back, in case of an emergency, or something else you want to buy."

She gets real serious. "Daddy, I'm a kid." She waits a beat.

"I don't really have emergencies." Another beat.

"And if there was an emergency, you'd pay for it."

That was true enough. But she kept going on. "The only emergency I'll ever have is a toy I can't afford." "If I really needed something, you'd buy it for me." She said it several more ways, amounting to the same thing, until finally I said, "Stop, stop! I get it, okay?"

Then she said, "You lecture me, I lecture you!"

Bat cartoon figure

At the risk of ridicule, I will begin to now reveal some of the cute cartoons I've been routinely doodling. In honor of my oldest daughter, a bat...her favorite animal.

NASA is funding science workshops for SF writers

This is a sweet deal. NASA is funding science workshops to teach scifi writers better astro science. It's all-expenses-paid, too. But the catch is, sounds like you have to be a writer with a bunch of publications to your name. This is going to be my favorite use of government funds this year, I think. Are there any other public funds devoted to the furtherance of science fiction? That can't be a big category.

Here's a report on the most recent workshop, from an attendee. He said it was like a mini and very exclusive scifi con. Jay Lake, a writer I've recently read a lot of , was one of the attendees, as well as Mary Robinette Kowal.

Why should we criticize Sarah Palin because her daughter has a baby?

I was catching up on the news and read that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, veep hopeful, has a teenage daughter who is pregnant. I guess that's embarrassing when you're a Republican. But all the candidates in the world seem to be lining up to support the idea that people shouldn't be judged by their kids. I'm sure they'll get no trouble from the vast numbers of voters who are parents.

But I was struck by this item:

She and her husband, Todd, have four children, Track, Bristol, Willow and Piper

That's a heck of a string of unusual names. Clearly they learned as they went along. I like Willow and Piper. But Track? Bristol? Makes me wish I'd named a kid Liverpool.

No: name them Essex and Sussex, but preach to them about abstinence their whole lives.

Printing houses

BoingBoing just posted this one, but I can't resist posting it, because one of my favorite jobs ever was working for a company, DTM Corporation, that made a rapid prototyping device -- a sort of 3D printer that creates physical objects from computer models.

There are lots of different 3D printing methods, and several of the technologies rely on extruding or squirting out pastes onto a surface from above. One company is working on a technology to extrude concrete and make buildings with it. Very spacey, very interesting idea, and there's the thought that we might use something like this to construct habitats on other planets. Neat stuff.

100th bike ride

Today I biked to work for the 100th time this year. Yea me! I have to have a new goal now, since it's only September. I'm going to try to hit 150 ride replacements...that number will include any days I work from home.

I'd buy myself a present, but I just bought a copy of the Grant Morrison graphic novel The Invisibles Vol. 1. I've read about half of it, it looks good. Secret groups associated with magic and battling behind the scenes of the workaday world.

Parenthood is changing me

I understand some things now....the protectiveness that parents feel. I remember before we had kids, I wondered whether I would be willing to sacrifice myself for my kid in some way. I can sort of see myself doing it now.

For example, I'm scared of large dogs. But I think I would fight a medium-sized dog with my bare hands to save one of my kids.

But I don't think I'd face a lion for one of them. I mean, I've got other kids.

Maybe I can work my way up to lion-tamer status. Start with wolves, for example. Is there a computer simulation for this kind of thing?

And heights are right out.

Can I have my search results as a link list, please?

The classic word processing search function isn't so useful in large documents, and there's a much better way to handle things that I've encountered in a few applications: returning search results as a list or report, with one hit per row, and making the rows clickable links back to the location of the search hit in the text. I'll call this a search report.

I want one of these in every future version of every word processor, please.

You've seen this on any web search page. You're just probably not used to seeing it in a desktop application. This feature is awesome, and I'll tell you why.

Suppose you're editing a document for variations on a term like WebLogic. You want to inspect all the places where it's used and make sure they're correct. Maybe you want to use the longer name "BEA WebLogic" in some places, not in others. A good search report will give you lots of help:

• It'll display a total of hits, so you know instantly how much editing you've got ahead of you.
• It'll show the hits in context, highlighting the search term.
• You can use this feature to edit incrementally and check your progress. For example, you can make some changes, then rerun the search and see how many items you have left to fix.

Emacs has a good implementation of this through its occur feature, which also supports regular expressions. You can do lots of fun things with this. I do things like mark lines with special strings so that I can list them....creating touchpoints in my document that I can use to jump around and navigate it. For example, in a text document I create titles and put the marker "@#@" on the title lines, to delineate sections. Then I can issue an occur command for all lines containing @#@, and I get a linked list of those lines...effectively an ad-hoc table of contents for the document.

UPDATED 9/4/08: I was just using Emacs, and realized another neat aspect of an occur search. I couldn't remember a word I'd used earlier in the file I was working on. I knew it ended in "ium". So I did an occur search for "ium." Emacs then splits the screen and shows me the search hits in the lower half. I could see the information I needed without ever leaving the place where I was writing. Now that's service!