Darn - one of my hard disks just suffered sudden death!

Looks like something killed the electronics; it still spins up and all, and the
system recognizes that it's there, but it doesn't even disclose its model name
to the BIOS anymore.

Fortunately it was "only" the brand-new Western Digital drive of my
just-as-brand-new Linux machine, and not the main HD in my Windows system... so
the only thing lost are a few shell scripts, a few hours' worth of rendering
time on some standard scenes, and a small deal of installation and
configuration work... plus a few minor updates to the radiosity tutorial I
posted not long ago. Nothing that couldn't be reconstructed in a few hours'
time.

If the same thing had happened to the - significantly older - main HD of my
Windows machine, it would have meant sayonara to something like a week of
brain-wrecking radiosity thinking and coding...

I just checked whether I was smart enough when setting up my project versioning
database: I was. If I should lose any single HD of my Windows system, I might
lose either recent work or the complete version history, but not both... phew!

Might also be a good occasion to dump the current versioning database to CD-ROM.


The nasty thing about it is that with the Linux system I lost my primary
performance testbed for the radiosity code, so unless I get a replacement soon
this might slow progress.

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