Imagine the scenario:

1. You have a PC.. quite old. And you fancy a new one. The old one can go to some friends, to replace their P4 running at something like 2.8Hz.

2. You get a portable USB hard drive, and back up everything that you think you’ll need to take to the new PC.

3. You burn a DVD of some of the goo as well.. just incase.

4. You format the old PC down, and reinstall Vista.. that way, your friends get a nice PC, all ready to go.

5. You get your new PC setup, and restore everything.. it’s all looking really rather good.

6. Several days pass…

7. When checking some stuff out on your media server (TwonkyMedia on PC, looking at stuff on PS3 via DLNA), you notice that your pictures are not showing up. All 1.5GB of them are not there.

8. You look on the USB hard drive, as it’s obvious you just forgot to restore them, right? Only to find that they are not there either.

9. You look to your DVD backup.. put the disk into your new PC (Vista 64-bit), and it decides that there’s nothing on the disk, and creates a new session on it for you to drag and drop on. Sweating, you realise that the photos you want are likely to be on that drive.. and that you can’t get ‘em.

10. You extract a full ISO of the DVD-R.. a hefty 4GB. And then, due to other software being incapable of recovering the fucked up session, you end up knocking up an application that scans the entire ISO looking for JPG headers, writing out the files. It’s a hack job.. but it just might work.

11. Go to some friends for a meal and a natter.. come back 6 hours later. You have a directory full of JPG files.. all with non-familiar names (strictly speaking, they were barking to start with.. DSC000204.JPG etc).. you spend an hour separating them into the right directories.

12. You back them all up.. twice. And then you go to bed.. relieved that you got your pictures back, but painfully aware that your incompetence nearly landed you in the shit. It’s fair to say that you dodged a bullet this time. While you put important stuff (mail archive, MS Money data files, source code) onto Amazon storage (as described months ago by Christer in his blog), you obviously didn’t consider pictures to be important. Until they vanished from before your eyes.

Lesson is to think more carefully about the bits you want to save, before trashing your old PC, and to plan a strict backup system so that this doesn’t happen again.

Jeesh.. I make an innocuous post on Beyond3D, and everyone becomes a comedian, wondering why I’ve not updated this blog! Well, here’s a quick run down of what I’ve been doing since the last update to this site (in really rough chronological order).

1. Medium amounts of drinking. This is ongoing, so simply imagine I’ve been boozing fairly regularly, over the following run down. Don’t be fooled though, it’s not like I’m an alcoholic with a liver the size of the Hindenburg. I leave that kind of alcohol abuse to other people that I have met on my travels.

2. Helped out in the scramble to get Heavenly Sword out of the door.

3. Testing out ********** with a new ******** from ** *******.

4. Doing general comparisons between *** and new builds of ***, detailing differences in **** ********** and **** ****. Oh, and *********** ****. This also includes testing a new ******.

5. Bought a new TV… a Sony KDL40X3000. The discounts (when ***** ***** actually *****. It’s become a bit of a joke recently) were too much a draw. Blu-ray movies at 1080p/24Hz are seriously bloody good. And as it’s got multiple HDMI connections, I managed to get rid of my HDMI switcher box.

6. Went to GDC (preceded by an internal Sony conference) where I met friends and colleagues. And where I had one of the most expensive (and delicious) meals I’ve ever had.

7. Discussed issues (and created a number of reports) regarding ****** ********* and everything that impacts.

8. General platform help around the studio, some of it more tightly focused on development of ***.

9. Read a boat load of documents dealing with ******* ***, and the plans associated with that work. There’s a load of ********* **** though with ********* ****** knowing ********* ******. But at the moment, them’s the breaks.

10. Finally got off my arse and joined a gym. Not the stinky hell-hole of a (free) gym that’s at work, but a real one. With decent equipment. But which unfortunately costs money.

11. Decided that I want an iPhone, but that I’m not getting one until that 3G model comes out in June. And will it really have GPS? If so, that would be fucking awesome..

12. Started doing some work on *** ******. Although the work is mostly ****-related at the moment, it’s all useful stuff. And developers love it.

13. More ******* evaluation work on ******** *. Mostly involving *********. But interesting nonetheless.

14. Initial testing on new ******** for ***. *** *** should be pretty well received when it comes out in ****.

15. Watched Manchester United win the Premier League.

Apologies for the government-style censorship.. but it’s ******* necessary. If you don’t like it, then **** ***.

So yes.. I’m aware that, contrary to my earlier post, the site is as it’s always been. No new content.. no new look. A lack of free time conspires against any moves I make on that front.

While I’m here making lame excuses, I may as well explain what’s going on in the world of my DDS plugin for Paint.NET. With the 3.10 version of Paint.NET (and this includes the current public betas), the DDS plugin is now distributed/installed as part of the main Paint.NET setup. As well as some work towards localising the plugin, Rick has also made some modifications to the Squish side of things too, such that it uses OpenMP to fully utilise multi-processor systems.

It’s definately worth checking out the public beta.. go grab it from the Paint.NET homepage.

I read Beyond3D quite a bit, and someone there was kind enough to paste up Christer’s latest entry about LogLuv colour spaces. It’s interesting stuff, but I felt deep shame when I saw the link to this site referring to my ‘never-updated’ blog. Oh dear..

In fairness to Christer, this blog isn’t updated very often. Ok, so ‘never-updated’ might be pushing it a little, but the point is taken.

While I’m posting this, I’ll also take all of the older posts (pretty much all of which were just DDS plugin announcements) out to the trash too. I might even find time to spruce up the look of the site over the weekend, and then start posting up some more meaningful content.