I am back from a wonderful vacation in Ooty and the Deepawali holidays. Before going on vacation, I discovered that my Creative 52x CD-ROM drive had gone completely bonkers, randomly opening and closing by itself under any operating system. Apparently, this is not uncommon for these drives from Creative. In any case, I have taken it out and have put in a hard disc that I had lying around in the IDE slot that was thus freed. This was a remarkable coincidence as GCC also moved to Subversion in the interim and I was looking for extra space to fit the bloated copies of the SVN repositories. However, I must first take a backup of the existing stuff on the hard disc onto CDs and that is a painful process I am not really looking forward to.