Multiple disk failure!

Posted by Greg in mac on September 17, 2008

I shot quite a few photos at my cousin Anne’s wedding. The next night, I downloaded them to my brand new MacBook Pro’s hard drive, and showed them to people. A few shots were good, most were decent. (A few terrible ones; I wasn’t working the manual focus correctly!)

I flew home, worked on the photos a bit, and then took my laptop with me to the Bookstore. While I was there, I turned it on … and it wouldn’t boot. Ultimately, the Apple Store told me the drive was irretrievably lost. And so were the pictures.

Fortunately, I hadn’t taken very many photos with my digicam since the day of the wedding. I downloaded TouchStoneSoftware’s UndeletePlus program and ran it on the CompactFlash card I used… and it worked! It recovered the images you see here (plus a few more that weren’t very good).

I’m already pretty good about backing up data (thanks to Mozy), but I hadn’t set it up on my MacBook. And it’s a good thing I have been using Mozy. Because then the (also new) media hard drive on my desktop died!

This failure is, to be honest, much more damaging, because that drive contained the music collection I’ve been building since high school. More than 30 gigabytes of music (I’m not positive the exact number, to be honest it’s probably closer to 40) up in, well, smoke.

Yeesh.

I’ll be RMAing it back to NewEgg. (And not buying any Samsung hard drives for a couple years!) But the damage it’s caused me is probably irreparable. On the upside, I’ve found a few songs in random places, including the small MP3 player Rob gave me, and my GPS.

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Oops.

Posted by Greg in Gregschwartz.net on September 9, 2008

Ran into some server problems (so my website was blank for the past few days). Once I got it working again, I upgraded WordPress… and managed to bork my old theme. So, Gregschwartz.net will look VERY default for a little while; new design will be out sometime in October.

For now, if you’re coming here you’re probably looking for
my photos.

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iPhoneDevCamp!

Posted by Greg in Web Development on August 16, 2008

Two weeks ago I attended iPhoneDevCamp in SF. I don’t have an iPhone and I didn’t have any ideas for what to work on for the hackathon; I went figuring I’d meet people, make a team [with an iPhone], and go from there.

Rode CalTrain up to SF, walked to the building, got my swag bag, and then walked around a bit. Met a guy from eyeFi with some cool ideas around his product, and then ran into Nicole Lazzaro (XEODesign) who had a couple different game ideas. She introduced me to some others, and we proceeded to brainstorm game ideas. By the end of the night we were a team.

So we built a prototype, turned that into a rough version of the game, play tested it, changed the game a bit, play tested it more, cleaned up … and presented!

The game is called TattleTalz (only works on Safari & iPhone). It’s basically an online version of the party game “Two Truths and a Lie”: there are three statements, two of which are true; you guess which one isn’t. It integrates with Facebook, which it uses to find questions your friends have submitted. The purpose of the game is to let you strengthen your friend network (since many “friends” on Facebook are people you don’t actually know well) by learning things about those “friends”.

People liked the idea a lot, and we’re going to leave the game running for a while. I actually just put up version 2 of the game, which has Facebook integration working, as well as question submission. Go play!

In fact, it was so well liked that our game won the Best Game category! The prize was a 17″ MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and a service contract. Obviously you can’t split a computer three ways, so I talked to the rest of the team and bought them out of their shares. Mwahaha, it’s all mine!

Thus: I’m going Mac! Although I still have a windows box, and I got a free copy of VMWare Fusion, which will be good for running WinXP (games, utilities, Win-only apps, etc). It’s going to be interesting, but I’ve been trying it out on a work machine all summer, so I’m starting to get used to it. (No, I’m not gonna be a die-hard Mac fan boy. For one thing, there are far fewer of my beloved keyboard shortcuts!)

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