Random Thoughts of Mike Bunton

You know, as long as your computer works, everything in the world is great.

If you are a web developer, losing what data is on your computer is definitely not a good thing.

Especially if you haven’t backed up in a while.

So here I sit last week, just completing a night of work, and all is well.

I get up the next morning, turn on the laptop, and nothing.

So somehow Windows XP decided to have part of the registry to get corrupted.

Now what do I do? I have a ton of work on the laptop that I definitely don’t want to lose.

So where it gets interesting. I need a site to show me how to correct the problem, but not lose what I have on my system.

And now after over 4 days of nothing, I finally am back up and running.

The main two sites that I found that really helped where:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

and

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=295

Both of these (which were difficult to find in regards to the problem I was having) provided excellent information on how to fix the problem I was having.

So what did I learn?

1) Backup on a more regular basis
2) Set restore points in Windows XP on a regular basis
3) Don’t keep your most important data in a folder on your Desktop, because if you have to do a repair install of windows, it will overwrite this folder so keep your data in a folder in the root.
4) See #1 - very important.

Well, it is nice that at least I didn’t lose everything on my hard drive. About the only ill effect from this was that I had to reinstall a number of applications.

It is nice to be back!

tags: General author: mike comments: No Comments

I am always on the lokout for some helpful extensions for the Firefox browser and here is one that every developer should use - FireBug.

You can download FireBug here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1843/

Here are the features of FireBug:
* JavaScript debugger for stepping through code one line at a time
* Status bar icon shows you when there is an error in a web page
* A console that shows errors from JavaScript and CSS
* Log messages from JavaScript in your web page to the console (bye bye “alert debugging”)
* An JavaScript command line (no more “javascript:” in the URL bar)
* Spy on XMLHttpRequest traffic
* Inspect HTML source, computed style, events, layout and the DOM

I have used this over the last couple of weeks and have found it to be of great help to my development.

Maybe you will as well.

tags: Firefox author: mike comments: No Comments

My good friend, Lee Dodd and three other web gurus are putting on a new type of conference, the Elite Retreat.

I had blogged a while ago about attending conferences where it seems like the speakers were just there to tell everyone how much of a guru they were and how each attendee needed to get that ‘bonus material’ that would only cost $1000 and would only be offered to conference attendees. I have had it happen to me. It happened (to a certain degree) at Photoshop World where I was in one lecture and the guy spent the majority of time telling us how good he was at using Photoshop without really teaching us anything.

Well, Lee (and the other leaders of ER), will be showing you a new type of conference.

So what makes this different?

1) Only 30-40 attendees. I hate being in a room with 1000 people because you never get to talk to the speaker. Not here. You are guaranteed one-on-one time with each of the leaders. Cool.

2) No hard sells. Just pick their brains. Ask them direct questions and get direct answers. These guys won’t be selling anything. They are just there to help you grow your online business. Very cool.

3) Networking. With this small of a group, you are bound to be able to network with some web gurus who make a lot of $$ on the web - both attendees and leaders.

So take a moment and read http://www.eliteretreat.info for some more information and do yourself a favor, sign up today!

tags: General author: mike comments: 1 Comment