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Geekery: Need some disk space? Look no further...
Thu, 26 May 2005

Really, theres a point to this, and it might even be remotely useful to someone. No, really.

I've got this very old laptop (and computer years are somewhere about 5 times faster than dog years) that I absolutely adore and use for pretty much everything. Sure I'd really like to pick up a nice new Apple kit, but I'm the sort of fellow who drives a car until it absolutely falls into sub-atomic dust, and who uses a laptop until it burns a hole through its own display, ductapes a replacement display in and burns that one out too.

(And aside, we're a little excited about our Tony Little Gazelle thats waiting to be picked up at the courier. Sad I know, but should be fun. Each time The Simpsons comes on, one of us has to do 30 mins on there..)

Anyway, sed laptop is used for development so has a couple operating systems on it amongst the rediculous quantities of documentation and SDK's and compilers used for producing applications and games for a half dozen entirely different systems. (Hmm, at current count, this one rig can build an application for the various flavours of Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, Palm OS, Pocket PC, GP32, Dreamcast and PS2. OSX is done somewhere else. Yes, DC and PS2 setups are just so I can feel cooler than I really am, but it does look cool to string cables across the living room from laptop to PS2 .. Neo would cop me a serious attitude.)

Needless to say, theres no disk space here. I wish I had time to play games, but I don't... and when I do, I don't have disk space. No problem, right? Though today, after muddling through some headache action, I figured I'd fire up an mediumly-retro classy game that I first played some six years back. Theres got to be enough space to play a six year old game on a five year old laptop right? (One year difference must mean theres a virtually inexaustable disk supply!).. but alas, there wasn't.. but fellow Spidey-fans I was determined, and a motivated and vengeful coder is a powerful force for disk cleansing and mass file deletion. After poking around I was able to locate some pile of files I hadn't expected to be there, and I'd already asked IE (never used) and Mozilla/Firefox (preferred) to wipe out their caches... hmm.

Well, there is apparently a hidden directory that contained some gigabyte of files. Silly me, its actually in the Temporary Internet Files directory, in a double-plus-hidden directory called Content.IE5 - You can set Windows Explorer to "show all hidden files" in the options and it still won't show. You can use 'cmd' and other DOS-like shells, and they won't show it with "dir /AH" or the like. But being a Unix weenie I've got cygwin installed, and naturally its "ls" directory tool shows the extra-craftily-hidden Content.IE5 no problem. Of course, the bright Windows-nerds among you will note that you can just go into IE and hit "View Files" and it'll open up the directory, but I've got a headache so relax ;) Anyway, for whatever reason, IE wasn't removing these files when told to. Nuking them by hand cleared up a pile of space. Laptop visitors...

Naturally, after all that and ranting about it here, I've blown away my timeslot for a little gaming, so its back to work for me. Code to write, bugs to slay. But there will be some Thief 2 for me soon enough, or maybe some Civilization III. (And Apex better not read this, or he'll be after me for some Halflife 2 multiplayer.)

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