I’m sure that if you’ve read the title for this entry you’re most confused as to what the FAT file system has to do with PrePay Credit Cards. I have to admit that if I were in your position I would also be confused, indeed I have now confused myself in an attempt to see if there are any similarities, the answer to which I have concluded to be that there are none, other than perhaps they are both mentioned in this entry and have already taken up far too much space - having successfully distracted me totally from the originally point of this blog entry.  Good Oh!

I suppose I ought to explain. Last week I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that it might be a good idea to get one of these ‘PrePay Credit Card things’ that seem to be taking off. The idea is very simple. You buy a card (Visa, MasterCard or Maestro) and top it up with money online, via another credit/debit card, in the post office, or using top-up points in shops. Having done this you go out and spend all your money in places where normal debit cards are not accepted - one such example being hotel and flight reservations etc. As far as everyone who views and uses the card is concerned you’ve got a bog standard, normal credit card… as far as you’re concerned it’s the best credit card ever as you don’t have to pay anything back!

I think there are a number of focus groups for these cards. Those people with poor credit history who can’t get a credit card. Those people who don’t want a credit card - but need an alternative for paying for hotels, flights, hire cars etc, and teenagers who want a more ‘modern’ way of dealing with their pocket money/paper round wages. Personally I decided that getting one of these cards would be an excellent way to sort out my hotels and stuff in France without having to increase my real credit card limit - and so far I have been most impressed. My only gripe with the card that I got (but this could just be a Virgin Money thing) is that, instead of having embossed numbers it has printed numbers meaning that the card says “ELECTRONIC USE ONLY” on the front in small letters. Basically this means the card can’t be used in one of those old machines where they used to take a carbon copy of your card. Ah well, gone are the good old days I suppose.

Anyway - enough about PrePay cards. I spent this weekend programming some more stuff for MouthOS. Specifically I fixed a few bugs in my floppy disk driver (which now fully supports writing and reading of whole disk sectors) and started to implement my FAT file system driver.

I was truly amazed at how easy it was to start writing a FAT driver. Microsoft have for once (and I thought I would never ever say this) done something right and released a lovely (well, fairly good) document (found here)  which details  everything you could ever want to know about the FAT file system. Whilst FAT may be a bit antiquated nowadays it’s a nice simple file system that people writing Operating Systems can easily and quickly adapt so they don’t have to (initially) think about designing their own file system. Furthermore, because GRUB supports the FAT file system it means that you don’t have to go through all the hassle of partitioning a floppy disk into a FAT and a “MouthFS” partition… for the moment anyway.

Anyway. It’s now getting on a bit and I fear that if I don’t get to bed soon I shall have trouble getting up in the morning. Until my next post I bid you all good bye…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under MouthOS, Operating Systems, Play, Random, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.