Dev-Picayune

I had the weirdest computer problem with my desktop machine today. I went to rip a new CD I just got (via eBay) and the rip process was dog slow. At first I thought my new DVD burner was acting up but after disconnecting it and rebooting there were more problems: booting was slow, audio was garbled or interupted, and the computer seemed to hesitate. I finally lucked into guessing that the hard drive might be to blame (the unusually loud head noise from it was also a clue). I used my version of Casper XP (I actually have version 2) to copy the operating system partition (thank goodness I decided to switch to a multi-partition setup) to a spare smaller drive I had sitting around. Using just the spare drive (after the lengthy copy), the machine was back to normal. So after a quick trip to MicroCenter, I am now running a brand new Samsung 160GB Serial ATA drive ($99.99). It’s faster than my 120GB Maxtor that seems to be in its final throws (even when it was health) and quieter too. It’s nice having just the smaller cables and luckily my new Antec case and power supply offer Serial ATA style power connecters as well. So now, after all this trouble, I ended up with essentially a brand new machine. New motherboard, CPU, case, power supply, memory, video card, monitor, DVD drive, keyboard and now the hard drive. I guess I ought to just replace the speakers because they’ll probably be next (plus they don’t match the black and silver scheme I now have).

I wondered if some of the CSS guru types would ever end up going overboard with their standard methods of markup and not use tables for the things they were designed for. I have often found myself doing a similar thing thinking that I needed to avoid tables because that was the thing to do. It appears that the famous Dave Shea has done just that. But luckily he was able to identify his possible folly. But again, I am not convinced that this was all bad. If we truly are to separate content from presentation, I think making things wrapped in classed and id’d div’s is the way to go. But browser support of table based display types is not quite there… so for now I guess we need to use tables the way they were intended.