Javascript – the devil’s tool?
I spent this morning renewing my aquaintance with javascript…my boss has gone off on a tangent and branched into the cane furniture market and asked me to sort out a website for it. It’s very basic right now (apart from the javascript image scroller which I’m very pleased with…) but I’ll post a link when it gets to a presentable state. In other news – I FINALLY got my new mobile phone. After sending my old one off on January 16 for a warranty repair/replacement – my replacement arrived on Saturday (the next model up though – Samsung D600 – which is quite nice). It’s novel for me to actually carry a phone around again, although I’m sure the novelty will wear off when I’m contacted to come into work at all hours again…
I have one of those ultra-compact laptops – an IBM Thinkpad 240X. When I got it, it was running Windows ME (Ha!), something I was adamant to rid it of. Now, as it is an ultra compact – it has no CD drive (I DO have an external floppy drive for it though), so my only option was to copy the XP installation folder from the CD to the hard drive via the network – this was done and XP successfully loaded.
I decided last night that I was going to wipe the hard drive and install a pristine copy, rather than having ‘upgraded’ Windows ME. This gave me several methods:
1) Using a network boot floppy to access my network and load the necessary files or run an installer. 2) Using a USB enable boot floppy to run installer off a USB flash drive.
Now, I started using method 1 – and ran straight into a problem – my 3com wireless card wasn’t recognised. Cue me trawling the web looking for necessary files to tweak the network floppy. I finally gave up and tried method 2. This ended almost before it started – the 240X will see a USB CD drive from a boot floppy, but not my flash drive. I couldn’t be bothered with following this up with anything so I did the most drastic thing I could…
I have one of those laptop hard drive to IDE drive adaptors, so I plugged the laptop drive into my PC, booted it up – surprise, surprise, explorer failed to see it. Opened Disk Management (right click ‘My Computer’, choose ‘Manage’) and initialised and formatted the drive. Yay! first result of the night. Next step was to copy the installation folder across ready to install Windows XP from DOS (bet y’all never knew you could do that huh? the installation folder on a Windows XP CD is the ‘I386’ folder – run ‘winnt32.exe’ from windows, or ‘winnt.exe’ from DOS – DOS method also requires ‘smartdrv.exe’ to be running or it moans…). Anyway, I digress. Copied the folder across to my newly formatted FAT32 drive (so I can access it from DOS – forward thinking eh?), shut down, disconnected the laptop drive, refitted it to the laptop and booted into DOS.
To cut a long story (somewhat) shorter – it took me about 4 times before I got a GOOD copy of the files on the drive and the DOS installer did it’s thing – by this time, it was time for me to go to work, so when it got to the ‘The DOS part of the installation is finished – remove the floppy boot disc and reboot to continue’, I did that, shutdown and bought the laptop to work with me to continue (and finish the basic installation…sigh – here I sit with a blank screen – so now I have to wait until I finish and get home to reconnect the floppy drive and start the installer over…
Sigh…so Spurs are out of the FA cup to Leicester…never mind eh? at least we can now concentrate on finishing (primarily) above arsenal and maybe (ultimately) qualifying for European football (maybe even Champion’s League?) next season. Say what you will about the Yids, but thay have surpassed every fan’s hopes so far this season and will only get better. Martin Jol…what can I say? he’s gracious in defeat (even when we were blatantly robbed) and doesn’t crow (like the Spurs cockerel) when we win – he IS Spurs – and I hope he stays to reap the rewards he deserves. Well, enough of my sport rant (but ‘COME ON YOU SPURS’) – watch this space…
