My Windows Vista Home Premium installation was on one of the Seagate 7200.11 drives with the bad firmware, so I’ve been trying to do something about it for a while now. This weekend I used SelfImage to copy my installation from one drive to another via my windows XP machine. After 12 hours of waiting (plus a day of failed attempts), I finally got it copied over. The new drive refused to boot, saying something about winload.exe, but it suggested putting in my installation disc and repairing the installation. After doing that, I allowed Vista to run chkdsk. That took about 5 minutes.

So far, things seem to be running smoothly. Not bad, Microsoft.

February 15th, 2009 | Mental Note: Add Category | No comments

I wanted to write a Greasemonkey script to modify all mailto: links on a page, but to do that, I have to find them first.

Here’s my first attempt:

//a[@href]/text()[contains(.,"@")]

It’s pretty bad. I wanted to find links starting with “mailto:” but couldn’t figure out how to operate on the href attribute.

second attempt:

//a/@href[contains(.,"mailto:")]/..

Here you can see that I managed to operate on the href attribute, and then back back up to the a node. I learned how to select the attribute, instead of using the attribute to select the node.

third attempt:

//a[contains(@href,"mailto:")]

Simplified even further!

fourth attempt:

//a[starts-with(@href,"mailto:")]

I knew there was a starts with function… I just had to look it up.

February 11th, 2009 | Neato!, Nerd | No comments