Okay, so far so good, I managed to cheat and I got away with it. I'm now writing this post under my own user, without seeming to suffer from any data / configuration loss.

Actually, I noticed only three changes (my left monitor is suddenly brighter then the right), VS.Net icon seems different, but I can't quite say how, and I can't debug.

The can't debbug is a serious issue, I know why, I lost the user & groups on this computer, so this means that there is no Debugger Users group. I created the group, and added myself to it, then I granted the group the ability to debug programs in Group Policy Editor, but it still doesn't work.

I'm going to buy a HD and then I'll work on it again.

To the tune of Abba's Me And I

Sometimes when I'm mad
There's a part of me that seems to be a little sad
Sometimes when I scream
There's a voice in me that says, "You shouldn't be so mean"
The I go and watch this page
And know that this too shall pass...

I'm posting this message from my own computer, and I think that I managed to save it. I use PE Builder to overwrite the SAM file (c:\windows\system32\config\sam) with the original one from the install process. This means that I appears to have lost the user "Ayende", (but non of the data). The only user on this machine now is the pissed off Administrator.

I've re-created my user, but the problem is how to convince the computer to attach the old files to the new users. From my experiance, what would happen if I try to login right now (with an existing c:\Documents And Settings\Ayende directory) a new user directory will be created under the <Username>.<Machine-name> format, which isn't what I want.

I'm going to have to see if I can create a user, then log-off and change the directories again, so I'll have the old user directory back. Will post more when I'll have more info.

Well, I managed to get some progress and definately confirmed that this is a HD error. I used  PE Builder to run a thorough chkdsk on my HD, and it definately found some errors.

Right now I'm in a state where the computer boots and throws the following message:

 lsass.exe - System Error <br> Security Accounts Manager initialization failed because of the following error: A device attached to the system is not functioning. Error Status: 0xC0000001. Please click OK to shutdown this system and reboot into Safe Mode, check the event log for more detailed information

This page seems to contain some information about it, and it appears that my SAM file was deleted and I will need to re-create it. Yuck! I'm planning of getting a new HD (big one, and fast :-)) as soon as the stores open. Then I'll have to deal with copying everything from one HD to another, another yuck.

Maybe I can cheat? I'll post more soon.

I was happily banging on the keyboard when the monitors started to shake and quake and look like a television with bad reception. This immediately made me think of this, but appernatly I didn't upgrade to Longhorn without noticing. I had to power cycle the computer to get any response from it, as nothing seemed to work.

When I tried to reboot after ward, I got repeated restarts during boot process. When I told it to stop rebooting on error, I got a BSOD with a message about being unable to load the registery and security. I got into recovery console and run chkdsk, and it did found some problems there, but I still can't boot.

This is a good reason to buy a new HD, but I want my computer to just work!

At least I didn't lose any data that I can tell (at least from what the recovery console is showing. I'll try to recover with PE  builder and see if that goes.

I've often spoke of how much I want an easy-to-use bug tracking software, but I never did much about it since no free package was able to satisfy everything that I needed. Specifically, free, open source and working with MySQL. A big plus would've been if it would've been written in C# or Boo.

Now, bug tracking is certainly not a hard problem, is mostly direct work against database, some reports and a lot of thinking about work flow. Beyond that, it's mostly grunt work of adding features that are neccecary, but quite boring. (Prove me wrong, show me a feature of a bug tracking system that excites you.) Create a way to search bugs with enough flexibility is a must, for example, but it isn't really interesting.

I've now found a package that I'm glad to be able to use: FlySpray is a free (LGPL) bug tracking software that has quite a bit of features that I consider neccecary, has a good UI (unlike some other systems) and seems to be capable. It has one big minus as far as I'm concerned, which is that it's written in PHP. I don't have anything against PHP*, but it does bring back the bad old days of ASP and the mess that can happen there.

Unline the usual, the longest part was not cutomizing the UI to integrate with the rest of the site (although it took quite some time). The long part was integrating with the bug tracking system (and vice versa). It had to do with writing shell scripts on a remote system which I only have shell access to. I'm not a unix guy, and shell scripts require some deep knowledge in the ability of the system in order to get them to work as expected. I couldn't even get the script to execute properly and in the end I just used FlySpray' script as is. In addition: command line editing seems to require far too much knowledge.

Anyway, you can see the latest addition to my sites here: http://bugs.ayende.com

* I was able to understand enough that I could dig in the code and fix some problems without ever writing a single line of PHP code.

I've a strange problem, I want to allow access to my blog using http://blog.ayende.com/ but the way that sub domains are implemented on my host gets in the way. The problem is that it's possible to access sub domains by doing: http://www.ayende.com/blog/, so in essense I've two physical paths to the same place. Usually it means that I would've to take care for paths in the html, but here I've another problem.

The root site, http://www.ayende.com/ runs Cuyahoga and this require that the blog application (dasBlog) to remove several httpModules in its own web.config. That didn't cause troubles so far, but now that I want to change the path, I'm getting very nasty error about the non existing httpModules that I'm removing.

So right now I can either:

• Remove the entries from the web.config, which will enable blog.ayende.com but not www.ayende.com/blog
• Keep the entries, which will kill www.ayende.com/blog but enable blog.ayende.com (and better seperation between the applications).

Any suggestions how to make it work? Currently I'm going with the second method so as not to break links.

When you're using ssh tunneling, the password dialog is often hiding behind other winodws, and is not modal to tortoise's windows. This means that I often start a commit / update / whatever, and if I don't wait until the password dialog appear, I just lose it.

I just spent an hour tracking a bug in Dynamic Proxy, I solved it and was about to send a patch when I run svn update and got a few conflicts. Imagine my horror to discover that the bug has already been fixed (and in a better way), that will teach me to always update before doing work, I guess.

Anyway, there is a new version that fix a problem with overloaded indexers that you can use. Since all I did was merely to update the dynamic proxy dll, I edited the bulid script a little bit, just to feel better :-), this release also offer fix for calling virtual method in the constrcutor, which used to throw.

http://www.ayende.com/projects/rhino-mocks/downloads.aspx

I just read this post which isn't really about college, but more about life choices.

I've to say that the way I understand the college system in the USA is that upon finishing high school a person is expect to go to college and get a degree in something, after which it's possible to find a "good" job somewhere. The advantages are that it get the kids out of the home and hopefully teach some independance (and how to throw a party). It works quite differently here; upon finishing high school you get draft to the Army, which more or less takes care for teaching you how to rely on yourself and how to handle responsability.

I decided not to continue in the army for a very simple reason, even though I currently am in a position where I've a good job, with very good advancement path and the ability to plan for a very long range. Why, you (and most of the immediate family :-) ) ask? For a very simple reason, that is not what I want to do with my life. When I get up in the morning and I think "Let's just get through this day" I know that I'm not enjoying myself. And that is not a way to live your life.

About the usefulness of college*, I know that the chief reason I want to go is to have solid theory that I can implement. I sometimes find myself struggling with things that should be simple if I can just get the idea, but to get that I need this, and for this I need just the one over there, etc. I probably can learn those subjects (compiler theory, math - with all the fields attached, advance algorithms, AI, etc) on my own, but it would be much harder and I probably would only learn the least that I need to do something, and that is not good. The moment I've a firm foundation, I could use that to built much more.

* Is there a difference between college and university? I don't think so and in here we only have universities.