Hooray! After a night of letting it cool down, the old hard drive responded well to the repair procedure on the vendor's diagnostic/recovery CD. This means that I've been able to grab all the data I care about from the old disk. Since this is the second time that this drive has decided to fail within the past few months, I no longer trust it and I bought a replacement for it this morning. Since the failing drive is still under warranty I'm going to get the vendor to send me a replacement also. It will be nice to have two hard disks because I will then be able to take all the tedium out of making backups through the magic of RAID 1 (which does disk mirroring).

Bah! My hard drive seems to have died as of a few hours ago. Fortunately, I'm well-prepared, so the computer is back online again with a small replacement drive that I've got handy for just such an emergency. My last data backup was made a month ago, so the loss is stinging, but not staggering. You'll notice that the diary entries in the past 30 days or so have disappeared, and that is why. If anyone happens to have copies of those old diary entries saved somewhere, I'd be happy to accept them. If I'm lucky, I might be able to pry some data off of the old drive, but it's not to be counted on. This sort of thing is still very annoying, no matter how prepared you are.

Yikes! I've been tagged by Steve, so now I must participate in this silly game. Apparently the rules are as follows:

Like Phil!, I think tagging other people borders on obnoxious, but I'll encourage anyone who thinks this is cute to reciprocate. And also, I'd replace "lj" in the rules with "web log of your choice" to be a little less ethnocentric.

1. I prefer to sit in very unusual positions, such as with my legs folded right up against my body so that my knees are at my chin, or with my legs folded in any number of odd ways, really.
2. I write in a very non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth between the various components of a composition, concurrently growing them from initial stubs and skeletons, swapping sentences and paragraphs in and out and around. This applies both to writing in English and to writing in formal computer languages, though the habit may be considered less weird in the latter case.
3. When I type something like parentheses or HTML tags or anything else which has both an opening symbol and a closing symbol, I'll type out both the opening and the closing symbols before going back to type the content in the middle. I think this is mostly motivated by a strong drive to maintain correctness when the nesting gets deep.
4. I prefer text-based computer interfaces, as opposed to GUIs. By this I mean "verbal" interfaces in which I communicate with the computer with words strung together according to well-defined syntactical rules instead of by pointing at pictures. When I feel like being insulting, I'll refer to GUIs as "playing charades".
5. I'm mildly synaesthetic. Mostly with respect to music that occupies my attention, but potentially to anything.

After a couple weeks of warm sunniness and pink puffy clouds, I was getting more than a little bored with the weather, so last night I was happy to feel the humidity rise and the temperature drop, and see the fog roll in and the lightning flashes in the distance. The promise of rain was fulfilled very early this morning and it's been both pittering and pattering all day. There's something mystical about staring out your window and seeing nothing but the pearly mists swirling around. Itai is coming over for Shabbos again, and we're eating both meals out at the tables of different families I know in town. Now it's time for me to tramp through the puddles to the grocery store with my umbrella and coat, all the while counting the minutes till my dear-heart pierces the veil and arrives on my doorstep.

Yesterday afternoon, Chava called me up and asked me if I could change her Web site so that a sample song would start playing as soon as someone visited the site. I figured that the best and easiest way to do this would be to create a Flash applet, and it seems I was right.

Some googling around turned up a lot of possibilities for software that I could use to author this little snippet, but I fell in love with the swftools suite as soon as I discovered it. The centerpiece of this tool set is the compiler for the tiny little scripting language that the authors cooked up for describing the actions possible in a Flash animation. This simple language makes easy things easy, as attested by the fact that I was able to whip up a solution to my problem in just a few hours and in a hair under a kilobyte of code, despite the fact that I'd never even thought about creating Flash before. And most of those hours were spent hunting down a decent reference guide for ActionScript (since the documentation provided by Macromedia seems to go out of its way to be as useless as possible for anyone who isn't using their overpriced authoring application).

Picking up ActionScript itself was surprisingly easy. ActionScript is the language used for programming how a Flash animation reacts to user input. It's just like JavaScript, but set in the context of a different library of classes and objects. And even though I don't think I've ever spent more than 30 minutes cumulatively over the course of my life purposely learning about JavaScript, I seem to have picked up everything I need to know about it by osmosis.

The truth is, I could have put even less effort into this micro-project than I did. One of the programs in swftools lets you convert a sound file into a Flash file in one trivial step. I could have simply embedded the resulting Flash file into Chava's site and the desired music would have started playing quite plainly. But then a person viewing the site would have no convenient way of turning off the music without leaving the site, and I certainly would not tolerate such inconsiderate behavior from any Web page that I visit. To tell the truth, I'm not certain that playing music on the audience's computers without any warning is the most polite thing to do anyway. After all, people visiting the site might be in an environment where they'd prefer to keep quiet, or they might already be listening to something and they wouldn't welcome the intrusion of an unexpected song. I'm going to ask Chava if it wouldn't be a better idea to default to leaving this background music off until the user specifically turns it on by clicking on the relevant button.

In any case, you're welcome to help me test out this little creation before it goes live. I'm open to any feedback you might have.