Personal Dork Assistant

On Duplication

Used (a pirated copy of) Norton Ghost for the first time to clone my installation over to a new hard disk. I started with Windows NT, which meant that the main C: partition had to less than 4 Gigabytes, and that was getting a little tight with Windows XP, even with installing all the programs on the D: drive. And in the continuing quixotic quest to quiet an Athlon PC, I replaced the Western Digital hard disk with a Seagate Barracuda IV. Ghost cloned the partitions from the old hard disk onto the new disk at a brisk 1 GB/min clip, and after a couple of false starts (had to select the Active Partition on the new disk to make it boot, hello random stupid arbitrary switches), the machine booted off the new disk as if nothing had changed, which is a freakin' miracle, far as I'm concerned. Of course, it shouldn't require a 3rd-party program and heartfelt prayers to move a Windows installation around, but it worked and I'm not going to quibble too much about it, lest the Computer Gods (the geeky relatives of the Football Gods) smite my platters. Besides, with all the fiddly Unix bits hidden away, it takes a (almost free) program to move a MacOS X installation to a new home, too.

There's finally a decent drag-and-drop GUI frontend to rip DVDs on MacOS X. There were always the suite of ported Linux tools, but who the fuck wants to set a million cryptic parameters on the command line? Unfortunately, after one weekend at version 1.0, the developers are already whining about the lack of donations for their efforts. Considering the audience for this type of stuff, what were they expecting? Unfortunately, for something this processor-intensive, the Mac probably isn't the right tool for the job anyway. It took my poor 500 MHz G4 more than 12 hours to encode The Matrix into a 700 MB DivX file, running flat-out the whole time. Did I mention that most DivX players on MacOS X suck interface-wise? More stupid Linux ports.