Scott Hanselman wrote today about family backup plans and alerted me to MozBackup. MozBackup can backup all of your crucial Firefox and Thun­der­bird files to a single, con­sol­i­dat­ed PCV file, saving you the hassle of figuring out where all the crucial files live on your hard disk.

You still have to back that PCV file up to a CD or an external drive, but now you have one file to back up instead of several dozen, scattered across several different, deeply hidden directory trees with non-obvious names.

Speaking of backup plans, I need a better one for myself. I regularly do a manual backup of my crucial data to a rotating set of thumb­drives and …continue.

Paging through the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, I spotted the obituary for Tsai-Fan Yu, the physician who developed effective treatments for gout, including al­lop­uri­nol and colchicine.

I take al­lop­uri­nol every day, topping up with colchicine when I feel gouty, so I owe her a great debt of gratitude.

I blogged before about my gout. (Indeed, this is why I put up the mega repost yesterday of my old EraBlog posts, to make my gout post available before writing this one.)

Nothing has changed, for better or for worse, regarding my gout. I take al­lop­uri­nol every day and expect to do so for the rest of my life, unless a cure for …continue.

I use Clipboard.NET as a clipboard manager on Windows. It stores the last few entries sent to the clipboard.

There’s one problem: the default hotkey is Ctrl+Comma, which also happens to be an important key for Outlook (previous message). I figured out a while ago how to change the hotkey, but my report doesn’t show up when you search for it.

Net: using a key name from the ConsoleKey table, change the value of Short­cutKey in %Pro­gram­Files%\­Tom Med­hurst\­Clip­board.NET\clipmon32.exe.config:

<applicationSettings>
    <clipmon32.Properties.Settings>
          <setting name="ShortcutKey" serializeAs="String">
                  

In Blast from the Past I, I presented about half of the posts that I made on my original blog at EraBlog.

I’m reposting the remaining posts now.

2003/03/18: Red, White, and Green

2003/03/21: Rallying at the Seattle Federal Building

2003/03/21: The Unseen Gulf War

2003/03/24: When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History

2003/03/30: Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

2003/04/22: Her Left Foot

2003/04/24: Sleep Apnea

2003/05/16: Nat­u­ral­iza­tion

2003/06/11: Bloomsday

2003/06/12: Howard Dean for President

2003/07/07: Bloomsday Speech

2003/07/10: Ping-Pong Reloaded

2003/07/23: Iraqi Dead Parrot

2003/07/25: U.S. Citizen

2003/07/27: What Makes a Con­ser­v­a­tive?

2003/08/14: Spinning our Hearts and Minds

2003/10/07: Spolin Games

2003/10/11: Gout

2003/10/18: Bob Beckel

2003/12/02: Free Ruslan Sharipov

2004/02/11: Things you have to believe to be a Republican today

2004/02/11: Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment

2004/06/25: Moved to weblogs.asp.net

2005/12/05: Moved to GeorgeVReil­ly.com/blog

There are a few old posts at weblogs.asp.net that I should repost here for com­plete­ness.

Robin wakes up in a 27th-century clinic missing most of his memories, apparently arranged by his earlier self. After a few weeks of re­cu­per­a­tion, he agrees to take part in an experiment, the YFH polity, to recreate a microcosm of the 20th century, an era largely lost to historians.

Robin awakes in a female body called Reeve. (The post-Sin­gu­lar­i­ty society has advanced technology which can reassemble human bodies and replicate just about anything you can think of.) Forced to get along in the very conformist society that the ex­per­i­menters are building, Reeve ex­pe­ri­ences a …continue.

Over the last few days, I’ve been adapting an existing native C++ library so that it can be called from managed code. I had written a large number of unit tests with CppUnit and I wanted to be able to call the tests from NUnit.

I suppose that I could have written a new CppUnit TestRunner so that I could call it from NUnit. Instead, I took the cheap-n-dirty route, playing with #define and include paths. It took less time to get working than it did to write this blog post.

Here’s the original native CppUnit test code

//-------------------------------
// native\FooTest.h
//-------------------------------

#include <cppunit/extensions/HelperMacros.h>

class FooTest : public CppUnit::TestFixture
{
    CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE( FooTest );
  

The Algebraist is Iain M. Banks‘ most recent science-fiction novel. Most of his SF novels are set in the universe of the Culture. This one is assuredly not. Artificial In­tel­li­gences are hated and persecuted.

Fassin Taak is a human Slow Seer, a sort of an­thro­pol­o­gist who studies the Dwellers, an extremely long-lived race who live on gas-giant planets scattered across the galaxy. He is recruited by his government to in­ves­ti­gate rumors of a secret list of wormholes, which would yield new, high-speed routes across the galaxy. At the same time, …continue.

Another book from the 1632 series and a direct sequel to 1634: The Galileo Affair. For­tu­nate­ly, this one is much better than Grantville Gazette III.

The Americans from the future have es­tab­lished an embassy in Rome, as well as a tavern catering to the rev­o­lu­tion­ary-minded elements. Cardinal Borja, head of the Spanish In­qui­si­tion, is enraged by the ac­com­mo­da­tion reached by Pope Urban, and he foments unrest leading to an attempt to overthrow the pope.

Fairly en­ter­tain­ing with a coherent plot and engaging characters. The first half moves slowly as the …continue.

In The Golden Compass, Lyra Belacqua is a young girl living at Jordan College, Oxford. A ward of her distant uncle, Lord Asriel, she is rather absently looked after by the staff and scholars, but prefers to spend her time rough­hous­ing with the local …continue.

The Ides of March rolls around again, and it’s my birthday. I am now the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Emma gave me the messenger bag shown here. I picked it up from R.E.Load Baggage. The 17" MacBook Pro is too large for my previous shoulder bag.

The video clip below shows the Bugatti Veyron, the world’s fastest and most expensive street-legal car attempting to hit its top speed of 253-mph. I guess I’m not getting one of these for my birthday.