Skip to main content

The WD Anti-Propaganda Campaign !!!

Thanks to the internet. If nobody else bothers or understands what loss of data means, you can shout it aloud here. I lost 500GB of data - every moment of my personal and professional life captured in bits and bytes.

It is a Western Digital Premium Edition external hard disk (USB/Firewire). I bought it despite my friend warning of bad sectors and hardware issues that WD is known to have. As with any story, one fine morning, I was copying some songs, pictures from my pen drive to the hard disk. All of a sudden, the hard disk and my laptop hung up. I restarted the system thinking I would make fresh start. But to my dismay, all my drives on the hard disk had vanished like dust. I tried connecting and reconnecting a few times, the drives showed up once or twice like a sick man's last few breadths.

The other similar incident was the hard disk crash at my office last month. It was also a WD 160GB hard disk (IDE). And it took with it more than 5 years of email storage, project documents, code and other official data. My friend's warning until it happened seemed to be a rumour but is proven now. I think it is fair on my part to make polite anti-propoganda against WD.

The drive not only took with it gobs and gobs of data, it took the proof of my existence.
Labels:
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Passing CComPtr By Value !!!

This is about a killer bug identified by our chief software engineer in our software. What was devised for ease of use and write smart code ended up in this killer defect due to improper perception. Ok, let us go!CComPtr is a template class in ATL designed to wrap the discrete functionality of COM object management - AddRef and Release. Technically it is a smart pointer for a COM object.void SomeMethod() { CComPtr siPtr; HRESULT hr = siPtr.CoCreateInstance(CLSID_SomeComponent); siPtr->MethodOne(20, L"Hello"); }Without CComPtr, the code wouldn't be as elegant as above. The code would be spilled with AddRef and Release. Besides, writing code to Release after use under any circumstance is either hard or ugly. CComPtr automatically takes care of releasing in its destructor just like std::auto_ptr. As a C++ programmer, we must be able to appreciate the inevitability of the destructor and its immense use in writing smart code. However there is a difference between …
Read more

jqGrid: Handling array data !!!

This post is primarily a personal reference. I also consider this a tribute to Oleg, who was fundamental in improving my understanding of the jqGrid internals - the way it handles source data types, which if I may say led him in discovering a bug in jqGrid.

If you are working with local array data as the source for jqGrid, meaning you will get the data from the server but want the jqGrid not to talk to the server anymore, and want to have custom handling of the edit functionality/form and delete functionality, it is not going to be straightforward - you need to have a decent understanding of how jqGrid works, and you should be aware of the bug Oleg pointed in our discussion. I repeat this is all about using jqGrid to manage array data locally, no posting to server when you edit or delete, which is where the bug is.

$('#grid').jqGrid('navGrid', '#pager', { recreateForm: true, add: false, search: false, refresh: false, …
Read more

Offering __FILE__ and __LINE__ for C# !!!

THIS POST USES SYNTAXHIGHLIGHTER AND HAS ISSUES RENDERING CODE ONLY IN CHROME
Not the same way but we could say better.
Visual Studio 2012, another power packed release of Visual Studio, among a lot of other powerful fancy language features, offers the ability to deduce the method caller details at compile time.
C++ offered the compiler defined macros __FILE__ and __LINE__ (and __DATE__ and __TIME__), which are primarily intended for diagnostic purposes in a program, whereby the caller information is captured and logged. For instance, using __LINE__ would be replaced with the exact line number in the file where this macro has been used. That sometimes beats the purpose and doesn't gives us what we actually expect. Let's see.

For instance, suppose you wish to write a verbose Log method with an idea to print rich diagnostic details, it would look something like this.
void LogException(const std::string& logText, const std::string& fileName, …
Read more