KeePass

I entered some more stuff into KeePass tonight. I’m up to the letter “B” now. Hoo boy, do I have a way to go. In looking through my Vault database, I realize now that I’ve been using Vault at least since 1999, which certainly explains why there’s so much stuff in there. In all that time, I’ve never had a problem with Vault’s database getting corrupted or anything like that. Oh, and I’ve always been able to run the program just by taking my c:vault directory from one machine to another. Nice and easy.

I’m almost talking myself into keeping it, but I need to remember that it does absolutely no encryption and isn’t cross-platform. Of course, now that I think about it, I haven’t tried KeePass on the Vista laptop yet. I should probably make sure it works under Vista before I enter too much stuff in there!

password managers

I was going to try copying all my passwords from Vault to KeePass tonight. I really like Vault, but it uses an unencrypted database, and it’s not cross-platform. KeePass runs on both PC and Mac (via KeePassX), and uses good encryption. Unfortunately, I just figured out that I have a little over 200 passwords in my Vault file. It’s going to take quite a while to do all that copying and pasting. Vault isn’t really structured like KeePass either, so there’s no easy way I could cobble together an export/import program. I have to decide whether or not I want to bite the bullet on this right now, or wait. I guess it’ll only get worse if I wait, right?

burning coasters

Well, I tried to burn some files to CD-R on my Vista laptop for the first time. I didn’t look too closely at what I was doing on the first CD; I just accepted the defaults. It looks like Vista now defaults to burning a “live” CD in, apparently, UDF format. On the second CD, I looked more closely at what I was doing, and noticed the UDF thing. The instructions seemed to indicate that the CDs would be readable under XP, though, so I went ahead with the burn. When I tried the CDs on XP, though, they appeared to be blank. I tried them on the Mac, just for yuks, and they were totally unreadable. I did some digging, and I figured out that I can read them under XP if I have a proper UDF reader installed. Here’s a Microsoft KB article on the subject. Digging a little deeper, it looks like maybe Vista uses a newer version of UDF that’s incompatible with the UDF reading capabilities built into XP? After reading up a little more, I figured out that the latest Nero InCD would probably read the discs. I’d been meaning to upgrade my Nero install from 7.0 to 7.7 anyway, so I went ahead and did that, and made sure to install InCD. I can now read the discs. I wish Vista had made it clear that the discs wouldn’t necessarily be readable under a normal XP install though.

WonderCon

Mark Evanier has posted the list of panels he’ll be hosting at WonderCon. Looks like some good stuff, including a spotlight on Gene Colan, one of my favorite artists.

The main WonderCon site has an updated program schedule posted. They’ve got a Pixar panel on Saturday that I’m definitely interested in, with Brad Bird and Patton Oswalt.

I’m a bit worried about what the weather might do to my flight out of Newark, but it’s looking like the snow and rain will likely clear up by Thursday.

desktop Vista upgrade?

Just for yuks, I re-ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my desktop machine. It seems that a few of the issues that were present the last time I ran it have been straightened out. And those that the advisor still listed are probably correctable. There are drivers for my scanner and audio card now. And there are new versions of Nero and Retrospect, which are really the only incompatible software packages on my system.

This leaves me in the frightening position of being able to upgrade this box to Vista, if I really want to. I wasn’t planning on upgrading this thing to Vista any time soon, but now I’m tempted. Especially since I just did a full backup. I really think I need to resist the urge for another few months though. I’ve got the new laptop to use to learn Vista, and there’s really no reason I need it on the desktop. I can wait for other people to work through some more of the oddball problems out there.

almost done

Well, the sun is setting, and the backup of my main desktop machine is done, with no errors. I’m creating a disaster recovery ISO through Retrospect right now. Basically, Retrospect has a process that reads your Windows install CD and creates a new CD image that re-installs Windows and restores your backup. I’ve had to use this once before (on my machine at work, after a hard drive crash) and it works pretty well.

The one weird thing that gave me trouble today is that Retrospect was having trouble reading my Windows CD. After going through a number of things to figure out why that might be, I wound up just copying the CD to my hard drive first, then letting Retrospect read from the hard drive. My best guess as to why Retrospect can’t read from the CD drive would be that it’s loading some special drivers to make backups go faster, and that’s screwing up the regular CD drivers.

I’ve also finished setting up the old Gateway laptop. I reinstalled Windows XP, loaded all the Gateway drivers and software, upgraded to SP2, installed 73 patches, then went back and installed IE 7 and WMP 11. It’s in a pretty good state right now, though I don’t have any anti-virus software on there. There’s a trial version of Norton Anti-Virus 2003 on one of the Gateway CDs, but I don’t think I want to install that. Maybe I’ll install the 90-day trial version of OneCare, or maybe the free Avast or AVG. Or maybe I’ll let the next guy worry about that.

lots of computers

Right now, I’m running a full backup of my desktop PC to my new 500 GB external drive. I’m also working on wiping my old Gateway and reinstalling Windows XP on it, so I can hand it off to a friend who has some use for it. And I’m also installing various things on my new Vista laptop. So I’m jumping around from machine to machine, checking on stuff, pressing “OK” a lot, and stuff like that.

On the Vista laptop, I’ve spent several hours trying to get Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express set up. Everything seems to be working now, but it sure takes a long time to get that all set up. First, you have to install the original VS 2005 package from DVD. That takes a while. Then, you have to install SP 1. That can take quite a while: several hours. There’s a good explanation for this lengthy install here, and apparently Vista adds even more of a complication to this, so it takes even longer under Vista vs. XP.

After SP1, you need to install the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta. I’m a little alarmed that this is still a beta; you’d think that one of Microsoft’s first priorities would be getting a good solid development environment running on Vista.

And, if you want to bring SQL Express up to date, you need to install SQL 2005 Service Pack 2. I’m not 100% if I had to do both of these, but I installed “SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services” and “SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit”. Then, I went back and installed the latest Books Online files.

So, all that took about four hours. Call me crazy, but that really seems like too long just to set up your development environment. Back in the old days, it’d take maybe 5 minutes to install, say, Clipper 5.2 or Turbo Pascal. I guess this is progress, but it doesn’t feel like it!

progress

I hooked up my new 500 GB external drive to my desktop computer today, so I’ll be ready to try a full backup tomorrow. I’m probably going to take my old 100 GB drive and use it to do full backups on the new Vista laptop and my old iBook. I’m not sure if I really want to keep that drive though; I don’t really have any place to keep it. (I’m just running out of room in my apartment!)

I also figured out that the DVDs I used to backup my Vista laptop at work yesterday were probably DVD+R (rather than DVD-R), which may explain why they worked while my DVD-R media wouldn’t. Maybe the drive just doesn’t work well with DVD-R? I’ve seen reference to the idea that DVD+R is more reliable, but that was on Wikipedia, so who knows it that’s accurate.

If I can manage to get my full backup(s) done tomorrow, then I can finally get around to installing Office 2007 on both my desktop and laptop. Maybe I can get some of the other installs I need to do on the laptop done too. Of course, I’d really like to get out of the apartment for a little while this weekend!