Author Archives: daniel

Outlook’s HTML message bloat

I was cleaning up my work mail, which is in Outlook using Exchange. I was staggered to see a relatively short email taking an inordinate amount of space.

Copied the text including headers to a text editor. It was 6300 bytes. But Outlook claimed it was taking 485 Kb — some 76 times the amount of text.

How can this be?

The message was in HTML format. Ah… Microsoft-generated HTML, a receipe for bloat. It seems particularly bad when the message contains a whole email trail.

So, using Outlook’s very handy Edit Message function (I’m surprised it’s not abused more often), I changed it to Plain Text. It’s not as if anything in there relied on the HTML in order to be legible.

Switcheroo, save, presto! 17 Kb. Not 6, but not 485 either. Much better.

Shame there isn’t an option to clean up MS HTML.

Another thing one can do is zip the attachments.

Don’t panic

This is not a Towel Day post. Rather, it’s just to say I’m upgrading WordPress tonight to 2.9.2, so things may be a little weird.

Update 10:07pm. Done. The big question is: have they fixed this bug?

If they have, I’ll be able to say Lynx with a space after it (in a post or a comment) and not have it give me back an error.

No. It still does it. (I’ve used a   above.)

Windows 7 temporary profiles part 2

Windows 7 temporary profile

I haven’t found the root cause of the Windows 7 temporary profiles troubles I’m having, though one suspect is still Google’s updater (as it popped up again last night after installing Google Sketchup).

Sure, a reboot will clear the problem, but what if you have a job running on the machine that you don’t want to stop? Like MediaCenter recording a TV show?

Here’s another way of clearing it: log onto another account (not the one you’re having problems with, but it doesn’t matter if once again you get a temporary profile), and run Regedit as Administrator. Go to HKEY_USERS, and look for the keys matching the affected user(s), eg HOSTNAME_USERNAME. Select the key and choose File / Unload Hive.

That user should then be cleared.

(via an answer in this post).

Still hunting for the root cause, but in my case it really does seem to happen when Google’s Updater is on the plot. Apparently you can use Process Explorer to work out which process has c:\users\USER\ntuser.dat locked, though when I tried that, it didn’t seem to find it. But certainly some Google processes were running at the time.

Google Pac-man!

To celebrate Pacman’s 30th anniversary, Google’s banner today is not only Pac-man-based, it’s a playable game if you wait for a few seconds.

Google Pacman

And yes, if you clear the first two boards, you get the traditional cut-scene.

Google Pacman

Google Pacman

Is that totally awesome or what?

Am I correct in thinking it’s not actually written in Flash, but in some clever HTML-type thingy?

Update: Yes. CNet reports: ccording to Germick, the company worked with Pac-Man’s publisher, Namco Bandai, to make the project as realistic as possible. Yet the Google team, with the inspirational lead of Marcin Wichary, a Google senior user experience designer, built their version of the game from the ground up using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

Update 4pm: If you click Insert Coin twice, you get a two-player game (W/A/S/Z controls Ms Pac-Man). And there is one minor bug I’ve noticed — sometimes when chasing ghosts after eating a power pill, you can pass right through them.

Update 9:30pm: Google Pac-Man: The FAQ + Kill Screen Winners — contains more details on how it was written, where to find it when it’s gone from the main Google page, and a picture of the”kill” screen.

Update Monday: It’s gone from Google’s home page now, but is still online here: www.google.com/pacman

Advice please: CPUs

I’m definitely more of a software person than a hardware person. I can wade knee-deep through Registry settings, but throw me into a PC box and if it’s anything more complicated than installing a hard drive or swapping over RAM, I’m a bit lost.

So I’m trying to figure out if the older of my computers (“Tintin”) can have a cheap CPU upgrade using the current motherboard. (It’s already had a hard drive and RAM upgrade.)

The specs say it’s a Gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2, currently with an Athlon 64 3500 (2.2 GHz) CPU, and I believe from looking at msinfo32 that the BIOS is version F2. (Which I suppose I could upgrade if I’m brave enough.)

The CPU support list from Gigabyte suggests the existing CPU is using an AM2 socket.

From the looks of it the fastest CPU supported using the same socket and the F1 BIOS is the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3GHz, indicative cost A$128. I note that it burns 125W compared to the 62W of the old one. Does that mean it would run hotter? Possible cooling implications for the overall PC?

There’s also the Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 3GHz, almost as fast, at 89W, indicative cost A$119.

If I update to BIOS version F10A, I can go the Athlon X2 7750+ at 2.7GHz at 95W, $114.

(Costs from a providers listed on StaticIce; I’ve never used them, so just trying to get a rough idea of costs.)

So is it just as simple as going and buying one of these, pulling the old one out and plugging the new one in?

And what pitfalls should I be aware of?

Coles runs on Windows

The other day a McAfee stuff-up led to thousands of Windows XP machines getting a virus data file which deleted SVCHOST.EXE, a vital part of the operating system.

As Ed Bott remarked: I’m not sure any virus writer has ever developed a piece of malware that shut down as many machines as quickly as McAfee did today.

In Australia, one high-profile company hit was Coles, with around 10% of registers knocked out of action causing a number of their supermarkets to have to stop trading while they fixed it.

Yes, Coles runs on Windows.

About 12 years ago Coles ran a project (which I worked on for a short time) to move off NCR cash registers in favour of Windows-based POS systems (then on NT4) developed in-house for the company, with the initial rollout being in Coles. The plan was to subsequently roll it out across other then-subsidiaries such as Target, K-Mart, Myer and so on.

They did a fair bit of interesting workflow analysis, for instance coming up with the Windows Start Menu-style interaction for the cashier to select which fruit/veg they were putting on the scales. It was all designed to cut training requirements and transaction times, and improve backoffice operations, as well as freeing them from dependence on NCR, which at the time had told them support was ending for the registers they’d been using.

Obviously Thursday’s problems showed a down side of the plan!

Perhaps the lesson here is that if your Windows PCs are secure (you wouldn’t imagine they’d allow people to slip in a disc or USB stick and run any old program on them) and fundamental to your company operation, you shouldn’t allow any automated updates onto them (not McAfee, Microsoft, nor anything else) without verifying that it works okay first.

Windows 7 temporary user profiles

Windows 7 has impressed me, with one exception: it periodically logs in using a “temporary user profile”. This seems to happen only after a previous user has logged off.

Various people around the Interwebs have had the same problem. The only firm answer I’ve seen so far is that it appears to relate to Google’s automatic updates services for Chrome (and possibly other software).

So if it’s happening to you, get into the list of Services, and disable anything to do with Google updates. Seems to work for me — though at one point I thought I had it licked, with the Google Update Service disabled, but it started happening again. I took another look and from nowhere, the Google Software Updater had arrived on the scene, and had to be disabled separately.

(I wanted to post a picture of the error message, but that, like everything else to do with the temporary profile, has now disappeared into the ether.)

HTML5test.com

Less crazy than the Acid Tests is www.html5test.com

Here’s what I get from a few random browsers I have lying around the place:

Firefox 3.5.9 scores 100 out of 160.

Chrome 4.1 scores 118 out of 160.

IE6? 11 out of 160.

IE8? Surprisingly, only 19 out of 160.

The browser on my Nokia N95 phone doesn’t load the page properly; it just says “Working…” and 0 out of 4 (eg it stalls on the first round of tests).

Interestingly, I also tried IE6 with the Google Chrome Frame in it; it scored 137 out of 160, better than Chrome itself. Weird.

Obviously all the browser authors have a way to go to support this if it’s going to be the bold new standard on the web.

(Found via Andrew)

Splitters!

TV splitterI want to share a TV signal between the VCR and the shiny new media PC.

So I went along to Dick Smith and bought a coax splitter thingy, pictured.

But why on earth does it have a male connection on the input, and a female connection on the output? I know cables vary, but surely it should assume the opposite?

It looks like the other one they stock is the same.

As it is, to make this work I’m going to need to use gender bender adapter thingies on all three connections. That’s just silly.

(Or have I somehow got myself some kind of unique antenna cable setup?)