I have a four year old Acer Aspire 1680 which yesterday refused to boot, complaining about a missing hal.dll file.

This laptop came with a system recovery disk but not a Win XP install disk.

The laptop didn’t see the system recovery disk as bootable. So no chance of repairing or reinstalling it from that.

I stuck in the Win XP disk from my desktop and went into Repair mode. This couldn’t detect any installations of Windows on the laptop. So no chance of repairing it that way either.

I installed Windows from the desktop’s disk and then stuck the laptop’s system disk in to install drivers, etc. This worked and I now have a working Windows system; but, of course, I can’t activate it as the laptop’s product code doesn’t match the desktop’s install disk. And there’s no wireless at all despite isntalling the correct drivers, and no LAN either - it always says the cable is unplugged.

Any ideas of where to go from here?

Install linux instead? How much pain will it be to find wireless drivers that work?

[Update] - Got the wireless working, and the LAN works sometimes, but the DVD drive has packed up. How useful will it be to phone MS and explain that I have two legitimate copies of XP but only one working install disk?

Very True Mood: frustrated

Any XSLT/XPath experts out there? I’m a little bit stuck. I have a stylesheet that is effectively transforming XHTML into XHTML (best not to ask) and is matching any element with select = "xhtml:*". However, sometimes empty a elements creep into the original XHTML and get copied across to the output. These can play havoc with the CSS and JavaScript used on the final web page so I’d like to supress them.

How do I modify the select statement above to select all XHTML elements except for a elements that have either no text node children or have text node children composed solely of white space?

In other words if the input contains <a></a> or <a /> or <a> </a> then it should be skipped (assume for now that any attributes are irrelevant and that we’ll deal with the case where it contains another element node but no text nodes later).

I tried select = "xhtml:*[not(self::a[not(text())])][not(self::a[not(text() = ' ')])]” as a first stab but as well as being very ugly it doesn’t seem to be working. Any ideas?

Heavy rain and other extreme weather conditions can affect the speed of your broadband connection. In some cases this may also cause connection problems. You should bear this in mind before reporting a broadband fault.

Very True Mood: confused

Via ggreig, the Programmer Personality Test

Your programmer personality type is: DLSB

You’re a Doer.

You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level.

You’re from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don’t mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation.

The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.

Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Bearing in mind that I’m not actually a programmer (XSLT so doesn’t count. My PHP is mere dabbling. So the closest I come is JavaScript which forces so many atypical habits on you that it distorts the results) that’s not a bad assessment. If was to program full time I’d probably tend more towards High level but otherwise my habits would be as described.

I’m now scared to think what some people I know will come out as.

Day one of @media was really good. I’m feeling more enthused and fired up and full of ideas about both what to do at work and with my own sites than I have for a long time. I’ll write about it fully over the weekend.

However, my good mood was ruined by the discovery upon getting home that my desktop computer is kaput (I’m writing this on the laptop), either Windows or the hard drive or both are refusing to work properly. In fact for once I think it genuinely is a hardware fault and Windows is just an innocent victim.

I want to spend my weekend adding cool new stuff to my web site, not staring at a Windows Recovery Console.

Very True Mood: cranky

Spilling olive oil on the keyboard.
Pros: gives it that nice shiny look.
Cons: too many to mention really.

Sigh. Not a bad weekend really. Lovely weather, which I saw out the window as I was working. Got some nice JavaScript written and identified a few more IE CSS bugs that will need to be worked around. And a cracking episode of Doctor Who yesterday.

Very True Mood: morose

I must post the conclusion of the City Link saga and an unexpected piece of good customer service from another company that happened soon afterwards, but for now it’s enough to know that I got my new computer and have been busy installing software.

First thing I installed was anti-virus (that’s a lie, first thing was Opera to make downloading all the other things less of a pain). But so far I haven’t installed a firewall, so I’m running with AVG Anti-Virus and Windows Firewall. I’d like a better firewall but I don’t know what to pick.

On my old laptop I’ve been using Kaspersky Anti-Hacker which is a bit old but reliable. This came as part of System Mechanic which I’ve found to be very handy. But, Iolo have produced a new version of System Mechanic and I get a spam pop up everytime I start it. I e-mailed them asking where I could a change log for the new version and they haven’t replied, but from the web site it looks like Kaspersky is no longer part of the package. I’m not sure whether to buy the latest Kaspersky product, or the latest version of System Mechanic, or both, or something else entirely. Any advice for a free or cheap firewall for a Windows XP machine?

I also have installed a BitTorrent client yet. The one built into Opera downloads much slower than the standalone ones I’ve used before. Which have mainly been Azureus, but that seems to have a memory leak in it somewhere ‘cos even when I shut it down completely the system is still clogged up until I reboot (or use System Mechanic to reclaim the RAM). I keep on hearing about μTorrent, is that any good? What’s your BitTorrent client of choice?

Finally, is there a site out there that could be described as LibraryThing for DVDs? I’ve found DVD Spot but it’s not really tickling my web 2.0 fabcy in the way that LT does. I could use Squirl, indeed I could use Squirl for just about any collection, but I’d like to see if there’s anything a bit more specialised first.

Very True Mood: curious

Evidence One

Evidence Two

Evidence Three

But don’t be too quick to blame Microsoft, etc. ‘cos this is nothing new. A couple of hundred years ago aristocrats would send illustrations of their coats of arms over to China to have them painted on china in order to produce the sort of dinner service that any self respecting stately home should possess. One nobleman decided to save a penny or two and instead of sending a colour illustration sent a black and white illustration with the colours indicated via labels, in English. You can guess the rest.

Very True Mood: amused

Got a short e-mail today about my StarDate Converter:

Have you considered making the current stardate available via RSS?

Hmm, interesting. First of all I’d have to translate the calculator to PHP or whatever to do the calculations on the server, but after that making the output available via RSS would be easy enough.

But would it be practical: the second decimal place represents a period of little over five minutes, so if someone wanted this to create a stardate ‘clock’ they’d be hitting my server at least that often. Not a disaster on its own but something that would need keeping an eye on if it proved popular.

Maybe I should test it out with the French Revolutionary Calendar first (I really need to convert that to PHP anyway so that the dates on this blog aren’t reliant on JavaScript). Hmmm, let’s see where this leads.

Very True Mood: curious

My iPod’s dead. And guess what? It’s about fourteen months old and so just out of warranty. Fucking typical.

[Update] - For the curious, here’s what’s wrong.

• The screen faintly displays the diagnostic tests menu but the backlight is off
• It doesn’t respond to any of the controls
• When connecting it to the computer, it isn’t detected by either iTunes or even Windows. So I can’t try a reinstall.
• When plugging it into the wall charger the display doesn’t change to indicate that any charging is taking place

I didn’t have time before work this morning to do any further tests, but it doesn’t look good.

Very True Mood: angry