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The weather outside is getting hotter, and all those lovely air conditioners are sucking the power right out of my computers… It happens every year.

So far this year, it happened twice… within 24 hours. I learned long ago to live by the words "save early, save often," but losing 10-30 minutes of work is still 10-30 minutes of work.

At my last job, I had a UPS on my workstation. It was the same one the servers were plugged into, a side effect of having them directly behind my desk.

However, since last summer, I've been working from home and no longer have that benefit. I didn’t' have the money last year to go out and buy a big enough UPS to sustain me, so I lived with it. I probably lost power a dozen or so times in 12 months. Very annoying.

This year, I'd had enough (and happened to have the money in my pocket at the time), so I went out and bought one after the second time. I ended up buying a GeekSquad brand UPS from Best Buy (which is really a CyberPower UPS with a different cover on it) because I didn't have quite enough on me to buy the equivalent unit from APC (a brand I know and love, at least on it's higher end products). We'll see how it does. I haven't had another outage to test it on, but it didn't seem to mind too much when I unplugged it to clean behind my desk earlier today.

In an attempt at a witty subject line for an email, I set out on a quest to find the name for an irrational fear of ninjas. But alas, the Internet has failed me today. I could find no references other than "ninja-phobia" (which is just silly) or "fear of ninjas" (which would not be witty).

During my search, I did come across astraphobia, which made me laugh. I have a friend I like to give a hard time about that one, and my computers no longer suffer from it, but that's another story….

What is it?

A "simple" program to sort files on a FAT file system. The target scenario for it is to sort the files and folders on a USB flash drive alphabetically, so they are loaded properly on devices that read them.

But why?

I bought a cheap car stereo about a year ago that plays MP3 files from either CD or from a USB flash drive or a compact flash memory card. However, it plays them in the order that they were added to the device.

Sometimes, Windows doesn't copy the files over in the right order, or if files are added at a later date, they stay at the end. When I listen to full albums in the car, it bugs me when they play out of order.

I searched around for a utility to correct the problem, but none of them supported recursion of subfolders. So I decided to make one.

Why it is necessary

The FAT file system doesn't support sorting directory entries. However, this is the only file system for USB flash drives that is widely supported. Unless the hardware or software accessing the device (like your computer) resorts them for display, the files will show in the order they were added to the directory.

How we get around it

To get around the problem, we cheat. By making a temporary directory, moving all the files to it, and then moving them back, in the new order, we effectively resort the directory. We then repeat the process in each directory listed. Sorter does this in reverse order, but not for any reason other than it makes the progress bar more accurate, because it knows how many files are there before it starts.

Why do you say it's a "simple" program

The actual sorting process is fairly straight forward. However, it offered me an excuse to play with technologies I hadn't gotten to use yet, like WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) and threading. I've also added basic support for localization, but as I don't speak any other languages, I haven't made any translations for it. With all that in mind, the program ended up quite a bit more complicated than necessary, but it doesn't hurt anything.

What does it require?

The program requires Windows XP or later and the .NET Framework 3.5. It will allow you to download the framework when you install it, so you don't have to install it beforehand.

Where can I get it?

You can download the file directly here. It also includes (most of) the source code for the program, if you want to take a look. I've released it as open source (see the included license for details).

The short answer is, it broke.

I'm not entirely sure what happened. I think part of the GeekLog installation the site was running on got corrupted during the migration to the new server several months back, but I'm not certain. I went to use part of the site I hadn't used since before then, and it wouldn't work at all. I tried updating to a newer version of GeekLog and that only made things worse.

At this point, I had two options at this point. I could either trying rebuilding the installation from the existing data using GeekLog, or I could rebuild the whole site from something else. I've gone with the latter.

However, this time around, I building the site software up from scratch using CakePHP. I've been itching to play with their 1.2 beta version for awhile now anyway. The 1.1 version serves as the foundation a few sites I've written, but the beta has some new toys for me.

So far, I've gotten very basic entry functionality up and running, as well as the list of links. I'm hoping to have the comments, files and gallery added within the next month, as I get time to add them. We'll see how that goes.

And for the record, I haven't written any of the admin interface for the site yet. I'm posting this entry directly into the database.

Adding sounds via javascript is a pain. After trying out several APIs, I finally came across SoundManager 2. It's the only API that worked immediately for me.

On a related note, I've also been trying to find some royalty free sounds for use in the project and I came across a pretty good source.

I set up a website for them called Daily Wisdom. There's also an RSS feed for those that use them.

I'm having fun with the project and I hope you're enjoying it too. I feel like today's comic captures the American Spirit rather well.

I got another gigabyte of RAM for Spectre today. Now, hopefully, I won't have to watch the memory usage spike and the machine drag every time I switch between the 15-20 programs I have running at once. That's only a slight exaggeration, but Zend Studio and Photoshop both should count as 5 each.

I'm sitting at work on my lunch break looking at the stick of RAM as it sits on my desk. And I'm laughing to myself because there's not a single computer in the building that I can recall using DDR2. My work computer needs an upgrade, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

I've been noticing a lot of problems with Wraith lately. First, it was a bad stick of RAM, then it started turning off by itself at random. The best I could figure out was that it was a bad power supply. All the signs were there. Luckily, I had a spare power supply lying around, or so I though.

I installed the spare power supply and when I went to connect the 4-pin connector to the motherboard, it wouldn't go in. I pulled it out and looked into the connector on the motherboard, and it looked like something was stuck in there. So I looked at the connector on the old power supply. I was suprised by what I found. I've never seen anything like that before.

The best I can figure out is that it shorted out at some point in time, but it looks like it had been that way for awhile. But after thinking about it some more, the only way I could imagine it shorting where it would do that is when it was installed. I hadn't installed the power supply in that case or motherboard. I blame Duck.

So here I was, left with a dilemma. I have my old P4 2.4 GHz processor and motherboard I could install, but it has problems too. It wouldn't support the 3.2 GHz P4 from Wraith either. So I went out and spent $300 I shouldn't have. But it was either that, or work from my laptop for a long time. That's just not acceptable.

So now, I have Spectre. On the bright side, Spectre has a dual core AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ and 1 GB of DDR2 RAM. It's a nice speed bump.

The downside of all of it was that I had to do a fresh install of Windows Vista. I'm posting from it now, but I've still got a lot of software to reinstall today.