I tried to copy a file off of my external USB drive only to be greeted with a Cyclic Redundancy something or other. I googled what this meant to me (ie: was the data lost) and saw suggestions to run chkdsk /r on the drive.

Can you even fathom how ridiculously long it takes to run chkdsk /r on a 300gb USB drive? On my lighting fast new Dell D820, it’s been going for 90 minutes. So far it’s only on step 4 of 5.

There has got to be a way to make this tool quicker.

I’m pretty surprised that I haven’t seen more fuss about XPathMania, which is a fantastic tool put together by DonXml Demsak.

This little Visual Studio addin creates a VS tool window where a developer can write an XPath statement and test it against the current document. After running the XPath query, it will list and highlight the nodes returned from the query.

This is bliss… I’ve been looking for something like this for a long, long time. Great work, Don!

I have to say that I’m completely baffled by the verdict that came down today in the Andrea Yates trial (not guilty by reason of insanity). For those few that may not have heard what’s going on here, this is the lady that drowned her five kids in the bathtub.

Never once was it disputed that she killed her kids, she’s repeatedly admitted to it. The question I have is: If she says she did it and no one disputes this, how on earth can you be found not guilty of killing your children?

Not guilty by reason of insanity is probably one of the dumbest things I’ve heard of. What a complete crock of shit. Let me get this straight, a person can go out and do whatever they want, and then hide behind a “I didn’t know it was wrong because I was insane” excuse? I think this is precisely what’s going wrong with our society… Nobody wants to be accountable for any of their actions anymore.

She killed those kids… she admitted it. I don’t care why she did it. She did it, and that in my book constitutes a guilty verdict regardless of whether or not your “insane”.

Come on judicial system… get with it and start treating these people like what they are… criminals.

You really have to give it to Microsoft… They’ve finally decided to give away a two year old, inferior product. That’s right, Virtual PC *2004* is now free.

I’ve been using VMWare for the past year or so, and it really is much more performant through and through. Cross platform capabilities are nice too, as are the many many more supported OSs. I really like being able to *easily* spool up a VM of Linux or FreeBSD, or whatever.

By the way, VMWare Server just went 1.0, and its also free…

I’ve just gone through and made the necessary changes to upgrade the ATOM feed to 1.0 from 0.3.

Hopefully this gets around some funkiness that has been reported from some users. If you see any crazy behaviour, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.