15 March 1998: Is It Working, or Is It Not Working?

Sunday, 15 March 1998:

Is It Working, or Is It Not Working?

So, I seem to have my computer working again. Naturally, I don't have a very high confidence that it will keep working, so I may hedge my bets by buying myself a nice laptop in the event that it goes belly-up again. But I managed to reconstitute the hard drive on Friday (by reformatting it), and have got most of the data restored. (I happily was able to recover all the data I didn't have backed up before I did the reformat, including about eight hours of fantasy baseball prep I did the few days before the crash.)

The mysterious thing is this: Last time this happened, in January, my hard drive fried completely not long after reconstituting it. It exhibited the same symptoms this time, but it seems to be working okay now that I've rebuilt it. A fried hard drive is a hardware problem, but I suspect what I'm seeing here is a software problem. So why isn't this one fried, as one might expect if the true problem were, say, a power supply problem?

I think what's happening is that Netscape is munging my file system. Netscape is a pretty wondrous creation, but the Mac version has a big problem: It apparently does some twiddling with the file system to handle its caching - messing with the data tree and so forth. Now, to call me an operating systems guru would be an insult to people who really are OS gurus, but I feel confident that I know more about operating systems than 99.5% of the programmers out there. And it seems to me that there are few more boneheaded application techniques than twiddling directly with the filesystem data structures. Indeed, I'd say that if you're writing an application that requires that you do this, that you go spend another few weeks at the drawing board to find another way rather than inflict your software on us innocent users.

So, what I think is happening is that Netscape occasionally stomps on some of my system files, which of course makes it difficult to boot up my Mac. Go figure. So once I reformat the drive and re-install the system, everything is peachy.

So why did my old disk go belly-up? Possibly because it was a crappy disk, and my new one (from APS) is a better, more reliable piece of hardware which does destroy itself when Netscape tries frenziedly to write to five sectors of the disk at once.

If I'm right, then I'm safe, as long as I don't try to display three graphics-intensive Web pages in Netscape in the future (as I sometimes do when I get bored with waiting for large graphics, files, or pages from slow servers to finish their loading). If I'm wrong, then I might see a G3 Mac in my future.

If so, then I'm gonna buy genuine Apple hardware this time. Sheesh!

At any rate, this time I formatted my hard drive with two partitions and put Netscape in the partition that doesn't contain the system folder, and put its cache directory there, too. So hopefully this will make it safer to use Netscape on my computer. (I will also let me get more bang for my buck out of the space on my hard drive, due to the way MacOS 7.6.1 allocates disk blocks, but this is not a big plus since I've never come close to filling up a 2 Gb disk anyway.)

This weekend I played the conspicuous consumer again. I received a bunch of comic books in the mail that I'd won auctions for on eBay (a few 1960s Justice Leagues and the first hardcover collection of Fantastic Four), which were fun to read.

I also went out and picked up some CDs I'd had in mind to buy.

I know very little about black music, where "black music" can be defined as R&B, blues, jazz, Motown, or many dozens of other American and non-American styles that I am barely aware of. Eventually I'm sure this will change, but slowly. I took a small step toward this when I bought a couple of Stevie Wonder albums: Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. I like Innervisions a lot, with its neat synth rhythms and subtle-but-powerful melodies and harmonies. Songs is also good, but it didn't grab me as much, as it seemed more torn between obvious singles and slightly narcoleptic tunes. However, since I was mainly only familiar with Wonder's 1980s singles, I was pleasantly surprised at how good these albums are.

I also picked up three albums by Hothouse Flowers, an Irish rock group who got their break at the height of U2-mania, when labels wanted to sign Irish artists to capitalize on the novelty. This band relies on an interesting combination of powerful vocals, piano melodies, and strong bass and drum interplay, and there's certainly nothing about them to say, "This is an Irish group"; they're a good, solid rock band, with a number of solid songs. I especially recommend their People album, but Home and Songs From The Rain are also both good.

World Party's Goodbye Jumbo has been overshadowed this weekend by those other albums, so I don't have much to say about it at this time. But I do like their singles, so I'll listen to it more closely tomorrow.

I bought a lot of this stuff used (I got one of the Hothouse Flowers albums free in a buy-three-get-one-free deal), so it didn't even break the bank.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with this journal. I've felt for the last month or so that I haven't been writing very interesting stuff in it, and I've been spending a lot of time on it for little return. I'm kind of loathe to give it up, since it gives me a place I don't otherwise have to write about some things. But I think I need to cut back on it. I haven't really worked out the details. Hopefully my computer won't make the decision for me by deciding to die the final death. At any rate, I'll keep you posted.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)