Last Thursday I was watching a really bad spanish movie on my computer when it just died. No power up, so I though that it was a problem with the power suply or the motherboard. It was a really old computer: 1998. I upgraded it twice, with a new hd and later, two years ago with an old motherboard/micro that my friend Luis Mago gave me. So it was a good time to buy a new desktop computer. On Friday I went to verkkokauppa, a computer store very close to Nokia NCR in Helsinki, with moi. So on Saturday morning I set up my new computer, with a very big surprise: my old hard disk was also dead. Only a little bit of noise on power on, and nothing, no more. Everything lost: my music, my documents, my writtings, my pictures... 8 years of stuff. It is a big coincidence, because some days ago Jesus warned me about hard disk failures, so I bought a dvd writer for doing backups. But I got this lumbago pain so I delayed the dvdrw instalation a few days...and then it died! :(

The instalation of the new machine was funny, I got a asus motherboard with the JMB363 SATA chipset. None of my on-cd distros (thanks Novell for the SuSE boxes) recognized this chipset, and the DVD drive was not functional. I googled a bit, and I needed some brand-new kernel to make it work with the all-generic-ide param. No luck. I tried Fedora Core 6test2 with a pretty kernel panic. I need to hack a little bit to get a Fedora rawhide 2.6.17-1.2586 kernel booting on my machine and inside a bootable CD. After that I tried to do a network installation. FTP failed a lot, so I finally got the minimal installation with HTTP.

Now it's time to try to recover all my data from the dead hd. So, lazy web:
Do you have any experience with data recovering companies?
It's a 120 GiB HD with 7 ext3 partitions. Something giving me the full data on DVDs and not very expensive would be great. If you can recommend me any company it would be great.Thanks!

Yesterday I assembled my new IKEA desk. It's nice to have my computer again on a desk :). In Madrid I used to connect my computer audio output to my Hi-Fi system to be able to listen to my mp3/ogg/flac music on the living room with a long RCA audio wire. However that is not anymore possible in my new apartment. I though about some other solution to play my music. First I considered buying an Apple Airport Express: 130$. Then I realized that I already have a gadget with wireless and audio output: my Nokia 770 so let's code it!.

• First I need a music server: after some web crawling tangerine was the perfect piece of software, quick, easy and just works.
• Then I needed some DAAP client code for the 770: python-daap looked great, so I could write a quick 770 python player.
• I did some local testing on my computer and I had to hack python-daap to connect/disconnect after each request, because downloading more than one song was failing: ugly hack for python daap
• Finally a quick and dirty test player in python for the 770, based on the Muine idea: Add -- Play/Enqueue

So after ~200 lines of python I got it:

My Hi-Fi system with the 770 connected wih a jack2RCA wire


Main play window


Add Song window

Here are the files:

• pythondaap_1.0-1_armel.deb
• n770.py

• add some Avahi python code to search for music servers
• Make stop works
• download next song 10 secs before playing it to avoid delays
• Support for remote playlists (in client and tangerine)
• Create real .deb packages with .desktop files so you don't need to run it in a console with

  run-standalone.sh python2.4 ./n770.py

• ...