Category Archives: Platforms

Gatesy-baby! Argh! My eyes!

Well, I think we now have proof that Bill Gates is not a crazed megalomaniac billionaire. If he was, he’d have had all copies of these pictures destroyed, and anybody involved killed.

Bill Gates in Teen Beat, 1985Bill Gates in Teen Beat, 1985

Apparently these pics were taken for a magazine called Teen Beat, around 1985.

(Via Monkey Methods, whose commenters are debating whether it was 1983 as first claimed, or if the fact that there’s a Mac in the background means it must have been after 1984.)

Update 19-Oct-2005: Snopes says these were publicity shots taken for the release of Microsoft Windows in 1985.

Apple, Mini Wow

Apple have released a great machine that shows their keen grasp of marketing and user based technology – the Mac mini. I can see myself getting a base model version to use as my iPod machine and for the Mac’s wonderful media applications while keeping my PC as my work station. It’s a fantastic idea Apple, well done.

Stupid KDE print dialog

The print dialog in KDE is tabbed, and one of the tabs allows you to pick via a radio button:
a) Print everything (default)
b) The following page range, from x to y.
The x and y boxes are enabled. Fiddle with them, drop your enormous graphics document to a single page, press ‘Print’.

And you’ll get the whole document. Because you didn’t pick (b), even though you clearly wanted it, what with changing the page range. And the developers haven’t either greyed out the x and y boxes in response to (b) not being picked, or made it so that changing x or y causes (b) to be selected.

Stupid Linux developers.

Subsequent investigations have discovered that it’s the print dialog from the Gnome PDF viewer. What’s that doing under KDE?
Gnome PDF viewer print dialog

Legacy machines

Win2K winver screenTony just upgraded one of the PCs in his house to Windows 2000, from Win98.

“What?” I can hear some people saying. “Upgraded, to Windows 2000?”

Certainly. I’m a bit of a Windows luddite, and I am firmly opposed to trying to overburden old machines with OSs beyond their grasp. I’m betting the PC in question is a few years old. XP may be a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t run well on machines slower than about 1GHz, even though MS claims 300Mhz is okay.

Hell, I have a shiny new 2 point something GHz machine at work, and some functions in XP still run slowly. That’s why my (to be replaced sometime soon, probably as soon as I need to start looking seriously at .Net) 650Mhz machine at home remains on Win2K.

Old machines live on… and on… and on. And if they’re being used by people who only want them for email, web, word processing and so on, there’s no compelling reason to throw them away, no matter how much MS and Intel and Dell might wish you’d keep upgrading. As long as they’re patched up to the eyeballs, virus and firewall protected, they run okay.

For machines from about 233Mhz to 1GHz, Windows 2000 is probably the best. It’s still actively supported by Microsoft (say a thank-you to all those corporates still using it), and MS haven’t gone to the lengths of making the latest Office versions incompatible with it to make people upgrade. (Yeah, sure, convince me there was a technical reason Office 2003 couldn’t run on NT4). While it misses out on the bells and whistles of XP, for a lot of users, it’s all they need.

Slower than that, you’re probably aiming for Windows 98 SE. It may be ancient, but it’s the most stable of all the 16-32-transition Windows versions, and runs well even on a lot of machines going back 8, 9, 10 years. Patch it up with the unofficial SP, then dig out that ancient copy of Office 97 SP2 (which, frankly, does everything for Office that most people want) and non-power-users will be perfectly happy.

Okay, apart from Outlook 97. Give that a miss. 98 was okay if you can find it, but 97 was fawful. Better to give them Outlook Express. And of course you’d need to fiddle the IE security settings from their “wide open barn door” defaults.

Linux? Well, it may suit some people, but most will want a high level of Office compatability, and it just doesn’t seem to quite cut it for that yet.

EU busts MSFT

Okay in theory I’m all for reining in companies when they’re being monopolistic, but this decision of the Europeans to make them ship a copy of Windows without MediaPlayer strikes me as just a tad silly. Microsoft are about to launch this version in Europe, which they’re calling — wait for it — Windows XP Reduced Media Edition.

From the sounds of it, it’s basically XP (in Home or Pro versions) without MediaPlayer. SoundRec and the movie making thingy are still included.

Why would anybody choose to buy this? Unless it’s cheaper… in which case, couldn’t you just go and download MediaPlayer from Microsoft later?

And bear in mind the major competition here is… well, it’s RealPlayer, isn’t it. Ah yes, that mob whose web site sneakily tries to steer you to the paid version when you’re looking for the free one (and there’s no direct URL to the free one), insists on an e-mail address they can send advertising to, defaults to including a useless applet that sits in your icon tray, splashes advertising over itself when you start it, and sends lots of juicy info back to home base. (I do use RealPlayer, for all the BBC webcasts… I really must check out the alternatives at free-codecs.com. Thankfully the BBC have their own licensed RealPlayer freebie download which isn’t quite so objectionable.)

Now the ruling on opening up the interface code, that sounds like the sort of thing that is more likely to level the playing field.

Clock rant

One of the things I find annoying is that when my computer’s busy, it stops doing the niceties. So if I want a little reminder of what the date is, I put my mouse over the clock, and… nothing. Dammit. Likewise, while the computer is busy processing something, I go surfing, so I start typing a URL into my browser and hope it autocompletes… and… nothing. I assume some of this stuff only triggers when the CPU isn’t busy, but maybe it needs to be tweaked, if the user is obviously hoping it’ll kick in. If I’m slowly nudging my mouse around over the clock, then dammit, I want to know the date.

On a similar note, how many people double-click the clock when they want to look at a calendar? I certainly do, at least if Outlook isn’t in the foreground. Alas, on locked-down machines (eg servers, which probably don’t even have Outlook), this gives you an error about not having permissions to change the clock. Dude, I don’t want to change the clock, I just want to look at the calendar.

Oh yeah. Servers. Outlook/Office. Unlikely. But they all come with Outlook Express installed by default. It’s a flippin’ server, why would I want Outlook Express on it?! Like I’m going to go sit in the server room freezing my arse off, reading Usenet and sending mail?!

Windows permissions

In an effort to secure my home computers, I have been setting up accounts for my kids on both of them. Very easy. They get to play around with their favourite screensavers and wallpaper settings and so on. And I’m making them regular “users”, not “power users”, so they can’t “accidentally” install anything they find on the Web into the Windows directory or Program Files. (The school computers are riddled with stuff found from some super-dooper smilies and “mini games” web sites).

It’s times like these that you begin to understand why it’s so handy to have the Documents And Settings directories and the Registry, which have areas writable by all users. And you also begin to wonder why some software writers (including Microsoft) ignore them.

Example 1: Midtown Madness 2 (which my son Jeremy loves) needs write access to its own directory, for storing player data and some other guff. Easily fixed, but WHY?

Example 2: the DVD player software that came with one of the computers obviously wants to do something in one of the verboten directories and gracefully crashes and burns when it’s not run as Administrator. Haven’t had time to sort out why, exactly, yet. Must upgrade to PowerDVD — I wonder if it does that.

This is pretty basic stuff. Software authors really should know better.

Quickies

Sick of that stupid “Open With” offering to find you a web service? Me too.

Oh great: MPs will be not only allowed, but funded to send SMS spam.

Most musos say the Net has increased incomes for their work, inspite of P2P sharing and piracy.

More on EA’s exploitation of programmers from the spouse of an EA employee. (via Bleeblog). Jeez. Should we started boycotting EA’s games?!

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.” — Emo Philips.

Winhelp vs HTMLHelp

Popup helpI know the move from the ol’ Winhelp to HTML Help was meant to be a good thing (and at the time made my life easier, as I could re-use HTML formatted text more easily), but the loss of the very handy “What Is?” help originally trumpeted in Win95 is a shame.

Nowadays if you click the question mark on Word 2003’s options screen, for instance, it just chucks you onto a help page which covers the entire dialog. Doesn’t even open the bit that talks about the tab you were on. They really should have ensured that all the functionality of Winhelp 4 (that fine granularity of context-senstivity) was available in HTMLHelp. (Is it? Did the Word 2003 people just get lazy?)

In fact, I reckon what they should have done was improve the help development tools, but leave the underlying technology alone. Winhelp4 worked well for users, but its authoring was a real pain. That’s why tools like RoboHelp won sales. If MS could have come up with a way of easily developing your help in HTML, but having it compile into Winhelp4, they would have been onto a winner. In the days before everyone had IE, it would have got around the issues with poor Win95 users having to install HTMLHelp (and thus, IE 3+), and suffering the performance hit of having to load up the browser just to look at the help.

Of course, at the time MS would have been trying to entrench IE’s hold on every desktop. Which I guess explains why they did it their way.

MSXML HTTP Post: Access Denied error

In MSXML 4 SP2 (and later, I assume in advance) if you try to send Post data using the ServerXMLHTTP40 object to a site that’s in the Internet Zone, you get an Access Denied error.

This is another of those things that had me banging my head in frustration until I eventually solved the problem. Contrary to what you may first think, it’s not a bug.

It’s actually upgraded security in this release: it uses the IE settings, and if you try to send unencrypted Post data by HTTP to Internet zone sites, you run into trouble. Details are at the end of the readme for the SP2 release and in KB 820882, but the workaround given does not work in Windows 2000 because the MMC Snapin referred to is only in Windows XP.

Apparently now there’s a Windows 2000 hotfix you can get, but as with all hotfixes, it involves mucking about ringing up Microsoft PSS to get it. (And when it says “Applies to Microsoft Windows 2000 Standard Edition”… what is that, exactly? Maybe they mean Professional?)

You can also get into IE and change the zone settings, but it has to be the same user that runs your process. If the process is some kind of robot, it’s not always possible to do this.

Eventually I dug around in some MSKB articles and eventually found article 182569 that talked about how to change the relevant settings via the registry.

To tell Windows to ignore user-specific settings, and always use the zone setting you are about to define, create or edit the following Registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE; Software; Policies; Microsoft; Windows; CurrentVersion; Internet Settings; Security_HKLM_only (DWord value) = 1

The alternative would be to change the following setting for each user that will try and do the HTTP post, eg in HKCU/HKU instead of HKLM.

Okay, so to tell it to allow unencrypted HTTP Post data into the Internet zone:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE; Software; Microsoft; Windows; CurrentVersion; Internet Settings; Zones; 3; 1601 (DWord value) = 0

See MSKB 182569 for more details.

Windows XP search

Windows XP Search isn’t quite as good as it first appears to be. Oh sure, it’ll find stuff in files… sometimes. After almost banging my head on the table wondering why it couldn’t find some file content I knew to be there, I initially wrote it off, guessing that it had problems with the Unix-style LFs I’d given it.

But no… a little more fiddling and I discovered that it ignores file types that aren’t registered in Windows. It doesn’t seem to say this on the search options anywhere, but I proved it by creating two identical files, one called textfile.txt and the other called textfile.randomextension. Searching for content I knew to be in both, it consistently would only find textfile.txt

Is this sensible? Is this right? Well okay, I can understand that you’d write a search tool that didn’t want to search particular types of files, for speed purposes. But why stop the user switching it to search everything? And why hide this fact so well? I can find no mention of it in the help or on the screens. Sure, you can search with an animated screen character (Clippy lives… almost), but how about looking in all files, and I mean ALL files?

Windows XP search results

Eventually I found a KB article that shows how to dodge around it:

309173: Using the “A word or phrase in the file” search criterion may not work. This lets you switch on searching for specified extensions, or to tell the Index Service to index absolutely everything, which I assume would burn up lots of disk space. There seems to be no way of searching everything on-the-fly without using Index Service.

Registering your weirdo extension as a text file doesn’t work. Renaming your file does. If there’s lots of them, you can always go to DOS and: ren *.randomextension *.txt then back again when you’re finished. (Windows XP Command Line Reference.)

And of course, there’s always DOS’s FIND "phrase" *.* >resultsfile.txt