Switching to a new laptop

Wednesday 23 June 2004 — This is more than 20 years old. Be careful.

I’m switching over to a new laptop (actually, the same old laptop, but with a new disk with new software installed to try to run away from the badness the old software had: a long story). It’s a huge pain to re-install everything I had surrounded myself with. While a fresh start is appealing, I fear leaving something behind, or overlooking some crucial data or setting that will be difficult to recreate.

And of course, the new software will be the latest versions of everything, so there’s the risk that something will break because of those upgrades. For example, the software that creates this web site is broken, I think because of an upgrade to Pyana 0.9.0. I’m creating this entry on the old laptop, running the risk of getting the two machines out-of-synch after copying my personal data.

Update: the problem was a difference in how Pyana deals with newlines after XML declarations in files, and my Python code assumed the declarations would be on their own line. The problem is fixed, and this site is now live from the new laptop!

Comments

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Joe W. 9:14 AM on 23 Jun 2004
my Python code assumed the declarations would be on their own line

Are you parsing XML with regexes? ;)
[gravatar]
Ned Batchelder 9:16 AM on 23 Jun 2004
Part of the process of building this site is to take a tree of xml files, and create one gigantic xml file from it. I used to parse each file and create the tree file from the combined DOMs. But it was much faster to paste them together textually. The only thing that needed fixing up was the XML declaration at the head of each file. So that code needed a tweak to accomodate the XML declaration on the same line as the root element.
[gravatar]
Peter Bengtsson 3:01 PM on 23 Jun 2004
"this site is now live from the new laptop!"
Are you running this site on a laptop?

So is mine: http://www.peterbe.com/About
[gravatar]
Ned Batchelder 3:25 PM on 23 Jun 2004
No, "live" was perhaps the wrong word. What I should have said was: "this site's source files are now on the new laptop, and the site has been successfully updated from that new laptop." The other way was shorter! :-)
[gravatar]
Ralph Waldo Emerson 6:05 AM on 24 Jun 2004
When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

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