Category Archives: Platforms

Throwing backwards compatibility away

If I had name the biggest difference between the attitudes at Microsoft vs Apple as to how they build their operating systems, it’s that one of Microsoft’s primary concerns is backwards compatibility, whereas Apple isn’t afraid to jump off the cliff to a better place, knowing it can’t go back.

A lot of what is going on underneath the hood of Windows involves shims, workarounds, and downright kludges to allow old apps and a gazillion third-party devices to work. From a purist’s point of view, it’s got to be ugly. — Ed Bott

You wouldn’t see Microsoft making a jump across processor lines like Apple did to Intel, saying a (prolonged but firm) bye-bye to anybody who bought a Mac before this year. Microsoft would get crucified for such behaviour.

But now that Microsoft has mature, stable (and free) virtualisation technology, maybe they can make a leap. What’s to stop them totally re-engineering Windows to remove all the messy stuff (some of which dates right back to the early versions of DOS) and telling anybody who wants to run an old application that they’ll have to do so on a virtual machine?

(From an idea out of a discussion with Matt.)

Cheap and cheerful disk benchmarking

Freebie disk benchmarking: Disk Bench. Does quick tests by reading/writing/copying files of your preferred size, and tells you the speed. The only downside is it requires the Dot Net Framework. (Explains why the Disk Bench download is so small.)

I found this while pondering why my secondary computer is running so slowly. Confirmed my suspicions: Windows is installed on the slowest of the old drives in the beast. Time for a quick re-install.

Pinnacle 310i TV tuner first impressions

I picked up a Pinnacle 310i digital/analogue TV tuner card last week. APC had listed it in its top products section, which from what I’ve seen, is usually a reasonable bet. The kids were keen to try out the video editing software (Studio QuickStart), because even though it’s a cut-down version of Pinnacle’s Studio product, they wanted a change from Windows Movie Maker.

Me? I wanted a video capture card that would work in XP. My old FlyVideo card was okay-ish under Win95 (but even then the built-in apps were a bit dodgy; the TV viewing never seemed to work properly), just about bearable under Win2K (I could do captures using the Windows Media Capture utility, but it was pretty ugly setting it up). But it doesn’t work at all under XP.

TV tuning was a bonus, since it would allow recording direct off telly without going via the VCR. The 310i appeared to fit the bill. Retail is A$199, but I found it for A$169 at Landmark Computers in Melbourne, and it’s probably a similar price elsewhere.

Installing the card appeared to be pretty straightforward. Find a spare PCI slot, bung it in, and connect the lead from the card’s Audio Out to something approximating the PC’s internal Audio In. (Okay I admit I couldn’t find anything marked Audio In, and settled for CD in instead. Given that was unoccupied, it’s got me wondering if I can normally play CDs on the box… I’m not sure I’ve ever tried.)

Grabbed the first of the two CDs: MediaManager, and ran the install. The first hurdle was that despite the software claiming the CD key was on the sleeve, it wasn’t, it was on the CD itself.

Now, I don’t splurge a lot on new IT products. Part of being a geek luddite, I suppose. But this is the first mass-market consumer product I’ve come across that is built on the Dot Net Framework (version 1.1) and… wait for it… SQL Server Express Edition. That’s a hefty overhead for any end-user PC, and I’m glad mine has enough headroom that it doesn’t take a disk space (70Mb or so) or seemingly a performance hit, though I’ll be checking if it’s now running by default the service is set to start automatically. Personally I’d stick to an Access/Jet backend for any consumer-level products I was writing. It may be outdated, but it’s super-efficient in comparison.

Fired up the software and after a couple of false starts tuning the channels (one involving cancelling radio tuning, which took ages; one at the end where it appeared to hang, and I ended up rebooting the machine) it seemed to be playing nicely. The digital (and especially the HD) signals are brilliantly clear. Adhoc recording worked okay, too. In due course I’ll try the “burn live programmes” and timed recording functionality.

Mind you, I do wish software manufacturers would stop re-inventing how Windows should look. Dealing with iTunes and its permanently grey title bar is bad enough. Pinnacle’s software goes for all sorts of wacky icons for such basic tasks as minimising and maximising the window — all breaking the user’s colour and size preferences, and probably using way more PC resources than is necessary.

Next I ran the Studio Quickstart install. That took ages — it seemed to take an awfully long time to unpack the sample sounds in particular. When it eventually finished I had a little play with it. Pretty basic stuff. Plenty of transition and sound effects. Maybe the kids will be happy with it, but I couldn’t see any huge advantages over Windows MovieMaker (though outputting something other than WMV is definitely a plus).

All the best stuff (like chroma key/bluescreen, which they’d love to be able to do) seems to be locked away and requires separate payment. I might eventually do the upgrade to the full version, but I really wanted the recording functionality first and foremost.

I’ll keep playing and if I find anything worth mentioning will update later.

2007-07-12: Followup: Pinnacle TV viewing software

Nostalgia++

Could this prune iPod’s market share with the power of Nostalgia? Commodore (yes, that Commodore) announces a portable media player. Gawd knows why it’s called “Gravel In Pocket” though. They’re also readying a home media product.

Oh, there’s speculation new iPods aren’t far away.

Meanwhile this guy has built a USB keyboard out of an old Commodore 64.

This is a fun read: Halcyon Days: Interviews with classic games programmers.

Windows Vista startup sound

There’s a lot of fuss about this idea of Microsoft’s to have a non-customisable, non-removable Windows Vista startup sound. That is, real startup, as the logon screen appears.

I reckon that’s one of the stupidest ideas they’ve had in a long time. At least nobody had to buy Microsoft Bob. At least you could (eventually) turn off Clippy. Not that anybody has to upgrade to Vista either, but you can bet it’ll be very difficult to get anything else on a new PC by this time next year, and not all of us want to migrate to Mac or Linux.

As Ed Bott says, there are lots of reasons you might not want an unstoppable sound when starting up the computer. Sometimes you just want the computer to be silent (there’s a reason some people disable sounds in web browsers) and you may not be able to get to the volume control/mute quick enough to shut it up. In fact, some speakers don’t have volume knobs; it’s all done within Windows, after you logon.

How many times in the past have you heard someone setting up Windows and it blaring out the startup sound during the first boot? Imagine that on every boot, and not adjustable. Bleuch.

If they go ahead with this plan, it’ll be just another reason for me to hold back and avoid upgrading… at least until someone works out a hack for it.

Let the games begin

Given my ancient history in dabbling with games development, I’m looking forward to this: XNA Game Studio Express is a Visual C#-based game development environment, which will be free for use on (and for) Windows. To write for XBox-360 it’ll cost you US$99 per year, with professionally-priced versions as well. The beta will be out on August 30th.

I’m hoping it’ll be easy enough for my kids to use too… or, well, at least easy enough for the one who is really interested in computers to try out some programming. And (given time, which admittedly I’m not overburdened with) it might be fun to muck about with.

Who knows, it might lead to a new age of home-grown computer games of the type we saw back in the 1980s, before computers got so hard to program. (Whether any of them will be any good is a fair question.)

Rolling your own certificates in Windows

Forget what I said a few weeks ago about creating your own certificates, at least for testing secure web services. You can do this from within Windows server; this KB article gives all the details.

There’s heaps more detail hidden away in this Word document… which probably would have come up in my Googling if MS would just put this information on a web page somewhere instead of as a Download.

Don’t have a Windows Server? Grab a trial download of one, and chuck it on one of those free Virtual Servers!

Review: Nokia 6230i

Nokia 6230i (from Nokia AU web site)Like many people, I don’t just use my phone for making phone calls. It’s a calendar, address book, alarm clock…

In recently upgrading from my old reliable Nokia 6100 to a Nokia 6230i, I’ve added camera, radio and MP3 player to that.

(The 6100 still works fine. It’ll go into storage for when my kids start needing/wanting a mobile.)

Why the 6230i? In my position as tech luddite, I judged it to be a good balance of price (free, that is totally subisidied, on a $30 Telstra business plan, which has very decent call rates, in fact well below what I was previously paying) and features. I wasn’t willing to pay the premium for something super-fancy like the Nokia N-Series, which would have given me 3G. Video phone calls might be fun, but are pretty useless to me. Not worth the extra dosh.

It’s also (unlike some of the camera phones) not much bigger than the 6100, which is pretty titchy. If I’m going to carry a phone with me practically everywhere, it’d better be small. Err, but with a keyboard big enough for my manly adult fingers, and a screen big enough to be productive. Ah, conflicting requirements, but not insurmountable.

I should emphasise that I wasn’t looking for a phone to read emails on, or browse the web with. The 6230i will do both of these, but not well. How much can you fit onto a tiny screen? Not much. If you want to do that, I’d be looking at a proper PDA.

And yes, I wanted another Nokia phone. I know how they work. They’re easy to use, and I’d prefer not to wrestle with an unfamiliar OS. And those I’ve had have been fairly reliable.

It’s worth noting however that the first 6230i I got was faulty. Not in a major way, but the “1” key needed to be pressed quite hard to work. I took it back to the shop for another one.
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Where did my Security tab go?

Directory securityI’m thoroughly used to the security options on resources (files, directories) that has been around in Windows (XP, 2000, NT) for years.

So it completely threw me when it vanished from the new XP SP2 installation I set up on the secondary PC. I was trying to get Midtown Madness 2 working for non-Admin users, and couldn’t find anywhere a way of making its directory writable to everybody.

The Security properties would only show me some dumb-arse sharing options that related only to sharing across the network. I didn’t want to do that.

“Put the directory in the Shared Folders!” said the help. Uhh yeah, like that’s gonna happen. It’s in smegging C:\Program Files.

I checked the drive format. NTFS; should be fine. I checked it against my other PC, which was showing the security tab for every file system object. Why was this not appearing?

With Jeremy keen to play the game, but me not keen to let him loose on an Admin account (even for a few minutes; it’s not a habit we should be encouraging), I searched MS support. Nothing. I Googled.

Finally I found it… some obscure yet useless setting called “Simple sharing” was turned on. Default if you are in a workgroup, apparently.

Simple sharing is so useless it must be designed for Simpletons. And I can’t understand why the Windows Help and the MS support web site were unable to give me the solution — (at least, until I knew the magic words Simple sharing).

Bloody Microsoft.

Shut the window!

Jensen Harris remarks that many people still double-click on the top-left of a window to close it.

How do you most often close a window in Windows?

  • a. Double-click top-left
  • b. Click on the Close X, top-right
  • c. Use the menu via keyboard or mouse: File / Exit or Close
  • d. Alt-F4 (and Ctrl-F4 closes individual document windows — w00t!)
  • e. Alt-Space, then choose Close on the menu
  • f. Right-click on the taskbar, then Close
  • g. (Going to the extremes now) Open Task Manager, go to the Applications list and End Task
  • h. (Even more extreme) Task Manager / Processes / End process
  • i. I never shut any. I just fill the screen up with windows until it runs so slowly I have to reboot

Or some other way I haven’t thought of? Or some other way on another operating system?