Today, I wanted to try out xchat for Windows. Since I tried to use it on a Linux box at university, I kind of like IRC chat. Especially when there are many people whom you can directly ask if you need information about technical stuff or events at university.

So usually, due to the people who encouraged to use IRC, I hang out in the #osuosl and #osu-lug channels on freenode.

Sometimes I also use Windows so I wanted to install the windows port of this beautiful piece of software on my laptop. However, I didn’t manage to connect to the IRC network at first, xchat claiming something like

“Software caused connection abort”.

After some research I found out that the McAfee ViruScan Enterprise I installed for virus protection (thanks to the campus-wide license free to us students) is blocking IRC traffic in its standard configuration. Nobody knows, why. (Okay I assume there are viruses spreading on the IRC network… blah blah…) Anyways, I finally found a site to give me a hint on the anti-virus monster sitting in my task bar.

So just in case you wonder, too, why your IRC client doesn’t work – remember McAfee is in no way better than Norton Antivirus: It tries just as hard to make good software unusable on your machine. *tzzz*

I don’t tell you anything new if I mention that FAT32 sucks. In my experience, it is simply one of the weakest and slowest known filesystems you can use.

But, unlike NTFS or all of the possible Linux filesystems, it is supported widely on most of the current operating systems such as Windows, Linux or even Mac OS X.

For that reason, I used to have my external USB hard drive formatted with FAT32. I didn’t really feel comfortable about having 80 Gigs as a FAT32 filesystem, but I wanted to access the drive on Linux and Windows equally so it seemed to be the only possibility.

Two days ago, the drive died. Windows said it was unformatted, Linux gave the (more useful) information, it had a specific error in the superblock information. Tests with both the harddrive and its USB enclosure led to the assumption that the hardware was still intact. However I could not repair the file system that used to be on there – let alone even accessing it at all.

So, eventually I had to re-format the drive and on a fellow student’s advice (thanks, hughesw!!) I tried out to use the – fairly new – ext2 installable file system driver for Windows.

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