Marsden is Here

So Thursday necessitated an immediate re-install of Windows (which was tentatively scheduled for today anyway). The file-system delays were tedious but tolerable - but when .exes start corrupting (like my FTP program) there's no point waiting.

Mostly back now, and the machine is running much snappier. In addition to reinstalling Windows this time I'm going through the process of moving everything off the other partitions, formatting then moving the data back to fix up any file-table issues. This is not going to be a short job, but it can also be done piecemeal.

First up is the applications partition, because this had to be done in conjunction with the reinstall (stupid applications storing data in the windows user directory). A purge is well overdue.

Health & Safety
Swapped out the virus checker and firewall because I'm not convinced Comodo's real-time and on-access scanning wasn't behind some of the issues. Bit sad because it's otherwise really good.

Browsers
I installed the Xmarks plugin for Firefox pre-reinstall to save those bookmarks, of course My Opera already took care of those, and there weren't any to speak of in Chrome, but if I was running the beta I could have used Xmarks there too.

All three of the above browsers have portable versions, which I am now using exclusively. Safari doesn't but I only use it for occasional testing and as a loan browser when someone else wants to borrow my internets, so I'll reinstall that at some point. I've an idea Avant does but I hardly ever use it anyway.

I had previously hacked Opera to keep mail outside Windows, so getting that back was a straightforward import in to the new version. RSS not so much - I'd exported my list of feeds but had no way of including the information about what was present, nor would Opera export the articles as mail items. So I lost all the articles I had saved and had to clean up about 500 I'd already read that were re-downloaded after the import.

Web development
I'm sadly breaking myself of using the old (2002) Dreamweaver suite. Notepad++ seems to be an adequate substitute for coding (after a couple of tweaks to the syntax colours). Fireworks was wonderful but sadly is starting not to pick up on some of the elements in modern .psds. I haven't (open) sourced a replacement for that yet.

I was already using Filezilla Portable (FTP) and WinMerge portable (File comparison) and those just copied back in.

Documents
With the help of Google docs I'm hoping to avoid reinstalling MSOffice (again 2002) for anything. I may have succumb to Excel for HeroForge, but I still have it on the Tablet (and of course writing a web-based equivalent is still on the project list).

Foxit portable reads pdfs just fine :)

Evernote
Fortunately I already stored Evernote data outside the Windows directory. Unfortunately it decided to sync everything down from the web before giving me the chance to import it back locally. Either way, I have all the data.

Picasa
Ah Picasa, how I love/hate thee. You store some information in the file meta-data (good, especially captions thank ghod), some in .ini-s in the directories (OK) and your databases including the faces in the windows. user. directory.

My plan for not losing all that hard work mostly worked
- copy out the relevant directories pre-reinstall,
- post-reinstall initialising Picasa then quickly closing it before it could get far in it's scanning
- copy back in the relevant directories

Unfortunately I'd made the initial backups a few weeks ago, so I lost some data that had been added since and a few other quirks appeared (groups of faces without names attached for example).

I really do need a better photo management application, I just haven't found one yet. On a related note now that the reinstall is done I can finally go ahead with testing the new Fotobounce beta that has been sitting in my mailbox since before New Year

Games
Now to find out if whatever had rorted CivII from running on this computer has been resolved :D

(Although if the wind has in fact gone down I might pop out and do some gardening first. No, there it goes again.)

There are about 10000 images, mostly photos that Picasa has access to. According to it's status bar it was trying to index ~25000 somethings. It stopped with ~10000 whatever-they-are to go, and won't restart indexing. I know it hasn't identified every face including some very clear ones that it should have no trouble with.

Reading the help forums it seems this isn't a unique problem, especially for people with large photo collections. There is a possibility that once all existing faces are assigned it will restart indexing. I have a hunch it reached about 10000.

There are 2104 left to do - I can't remember if I saw 8000+ at one stage or only 6000+ but I was assigning while it was still indexing. So I assigned 4-8000 faces yesterday. (It's suggestion and grouping features still leave much to be desired. There is no quick way to recover from mis-labelling a face, But the effective autocomplete feature makes labelling so much faster.)

There's still the question of retaining this data over my planned New Years system wipe & reinstall. But at least I have a feel for how long it will take if I have to do it all over again.

On the one hand this is proof that I can still focus obscenely on a project that interests me (or perhaps that just triggers my OCD) and it's gratifying that my brain has been able to drag quite a few names up from the murky past (while only 2008/2009 KAOS pics are in the system I have family and gaming (SAGA/OURS/KapCon) collections stretching back to the early 2000s)

On the other hand
- My spine is feeling quite compressed from the hours I put in yesterday, although I managed to retain fairly good posture for the day (I think)
- The photos include Kaye & Martyn's wedding, which was an uneccessariy bittersweet reminder this close to the anniversary of their accident
- Plowing through faces brings ... unhelpful associations as well as good. In particular repeatedly seeing the faces of various women I've been attracted to over the years is not having a positive effect on my state of mind.

~~~
The Creative Space BBQ is this afternoon - I'm not really sure I'm up to going out and socialising with a bunch of people I barely know but it will get me out of the house.

So I was having some problems with defragging C drive.There were these few really large files which just couldn't defrag, because little green system files were in the way of creating enough space.

I still haven't found a way of moving the system files, but I did download WinDirStat, a marvelous visual tool for showing you what files take up how much space on your drive. Lo, the big troublesome files were all Picasa cache files - one was over a Gig in size.

"C'mere, Picasa," said I. "I want to have a word about your settings".

Under interrogation Picasa revealed a "Clear the Cache" option which was duly exercised to remove the offending files. "Now Picasa" I said, "how about keeping that cache somewhere different? I've plenty of space on these other drives."
"I'm sorry," replied Picasa, "I can't do that."

So I asked the internet, which unfortunately agreed with Picasa. The curse of the Windows profile directory strikes again. Next reinstall I put that somewhere else from the word go - I'm not quite willing to risk moving it on an established system right now, although I have successfully done so in the past.