Hopefully finished flexing

This morning I was trying to do a backup, but the drive kept disappearing from Windows partway through backing up my VMWare Virtual Machine image. It did a similar thing yesterday evening, disappearing partway through a backup of some photos.

When I say disappearing, I mean that Windows can no longer see or write to the drive (so any writes in progress fail), but the drive's activity light on the PC case was staying lit.

So I did some googling and found this thread: Hard drive disappears. Lots of possible causes are given in there, one of which was a faulty cable. So I found an alternative SATA cable and replaced the one I was using. I also attached the SATA cable directly to the drive, instead of using the SATA hot-swap bay I normally use, in case the problem was the SATA hot-swap bay.

It was very difficult to plug the replacement cable in, and then to push the drive into a space bay inside the case, but I managed it eventually. I ran the backup again, and it ran okay. So possibly it was the SATA cable or the SATA hot-swap drive bay, or maybe it is a problem with the drive and it was just co-incidence that the backup ran okay this time.

Anyway, I put everything back how it was before (except with the cable changed), and will see how it goes.

After that I processed a photo.

In the afternoon I did some more work on my XMP File Info panel. I tried changing the panel class from examples.panels.dkphoto to just dkphoto, and when that didn't work, I tried dk.panels.dkphoto. But although I changed the folder structure and references in relevant files, when I tried to view the panel in Photoshop or Bridge, the panel would not even be available to view.

My guess is that in CS5 only panels in the classes com.adobe.xmp.panels or examples.panels are shown. In CS4 my panel showed up okay, and it had a panelClass of DKimageXMP.

Next I tried to find out why my panel would appear blank whenever I included any CSS declarations or an external stylesheet. I did a similar thing to how I tried to debug why adding a dataProvider was causing the same problem yesterday, i.e. starting with a basic panel with a CSS declaration, then gradually building it up into my own panel, building and testing the panel still works after each addition/modification.

And I found exactly the same thing that I found yesterday - including the CSS in my own panel now magically worked, when for the last few days it hasn't. While I am happy my panel can be styled by CSS and include dataProviders, it is annoying how there doesn't seem to be any logic as to why they weren't working before, causing me to spend a lot of time debugging a problem that doesn't exist.

I had a couple of other problems, but they were both due to things I'd done wrong, and easily fixed.

FlashBuilder 4 seems to use a very large amount of memory - at the moment it is using just over 600,000K, with just one mxml and one actionscript file open.

I finished working on getting my XMP File Info panel compatible with CS5 (I just hope it still works with CS4), then sorted photos most of the evening.