Archive for General
11.29.05
Posted in General at 7:16 pm by jw
My wife got tired of having her adventure games (like Myst etc.) ruined by me playing some FPS or other noisy thing in the background so has been making me wear a set of headphones when I play the PC lately. Well, the crappy headphones I had just don’t cut it after a while because they were giving me headaches and sore ears so I went out and got a new pair from Best Buy. I decided to go wireless mainly because I was tired of getting tangled up in the cords.
Overall the headphones worked out ok – great sound, almost no interference (though an extreme audiophile wouldn’t be happy) and they definitely don’t hurt or give me headaches any more – even with my stupidly big oversized head. The real star though in my opinion was the AAA batteries I got from Radio Shack the next day – 15 minutes of charge time for over 7 hours of headphone operation is just insanely good. Those batteries really make the whole thing worthwhile!
It was good to have a wireless device work properly for once – I was really disappointed in the Saitek wireless controller I got because it just doesn’t seem to work properly or the batteries run down incredibly fast. Definitely have to get rid of that one on eBay to someone who needs a wireless controller more than I do. Now to convince the wife that I really need their new X52 joystick…
Lastly, I’m still amused by Sony’s troubles over their DRM software. Maybe the execs will finally figure out that pissing off your customers isn’t good business?
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11.09.05
Posted in General at 5:16 am by jw
Comment spam started to get me down after receiving 20 notifications of comments to moderate all in the space of an hour, so now there’s two choices – either create an account and log in or read the twisted images it puts up!
Hopefully this will cut down on my maintenance time, and no thanks to tor which is effectively removing my ability to block the spammers with IP based filters. (Yeah, I understand the point of tor, it’s just frustrating to have it used against you).
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11.04.05
Posted in General at 4:54 am by jw
Looks like Sony has turned to rootkits (an advanced technique used in virus writing) to infect people’s computers when you play some of their CDs. The full story is over on the Sysinternals blog but to summarize, Sony secretly installs code on your computer then hacks the kernel to prevent you detecting that they’ve actually done anything. If you try to remove the problem by deleting the files (no uninstall is provided) then your CD drive vanishes!
You have to love DRM, don’t you?
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10.24.05
Posted in General at 1:34 pm by jw
I went to install Rational Application Developer (IBM’s branded version of Eclipse) on my desktop machine at work and found to my surprise that it would crash every time I tried to run it. Assuming this was something to do with the fact I was running Windows 2003 x64, I decided that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back and reinstalled Windows 2003 using the 32 bit version.
Well… on installing RAD it still crashed. This didn’t make me happy at all, especially given that reinstalling the OS and all the apps I need wasn’t really a trivial exercise and I didn’t really want to be on a 32 bit OS again. So, some quick investigation with a debugger showed it was crashing on a CPUID instruction with an “Access Denied” fault (ie a normal general protection error). Some more investigation showed that there’s no special privileges required to run the CPUID instruction, so it wasn’t immediately obvious what was going on.
5 minutes before leaving work on Friday, inspiration hit me – Data Execution Prevention is on by default on Windows 2003. Quickly going into the appropriate control panel I turned it off and rebooted and what do you know – RAD suddenly started working! Well, I wasn’t going to live in 32 bit land if DEP was the only thing holding me back, so I took my machine home for the weekend and ran it up with x64 again, turned DEP off for 32 bit apps and installed RAD (and WAS, and Portal, and all the other IBM junk) without a hitch.
Now, you’d think a company like IBM would be able to tell you somewhere in the installer that DEP needed to be off for this product, or at least the documentation, or even the online knowledge base. In fact, you’d think a company like IBM would be able to make a product that didn’t try to execute code inside non-executable memory regions. Sometimes I think I just expect a little much though.
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09.26.05
Posted in General at 5:31 pm by jw
My laptop has been undergoing some pretty gruelling system changes lately. I honestly gave Vista a good try this time with the PDC build and I could really start to see some usefulness growing out of it but things just bogged down as the different versions of the .NET runtimes started to play havoc with the installations I wanted to do – most notably the lastest builds of Visual Studio 2005. So… off came Vista and on went Windows XP (again). I just got XP up and going with the VS2005 builds when I realized I hadn’t tried out all the new stuff in Server 2003R2 (and had also neglected to blow away Vista’s program files directory), so XP came off and Server 2003R2 went on.
With all the reinstalling, I learned a few interesting things about how to do clean reinstallations without having to wipe the disk, so I thought I’d collect the few hints I remember for other people to learn from:
Installing Vista:
Creates a Windows.Old directory which contains all the stuff it would have overwritten had it been left in the original location. Basically this is the old “Windows” directory, “Program Files” directory and “Documents and Settings” directory with a few others if you’ve got directories laying around with inappropriate names (Boot and Build were the two I had).
Overall, it’s pretty well behaved and there’s no real preparations you need to do to maintain old data. The only thing to know is that “Documents and Settings” becomes “Users” so there’s no real conflict there anyway.
Installing XP or Server 2003:
The install process deletes your Windows directory. There shouldn’t really be anything in there you want to keep anyway so it’s not a big problem.
“Program Files” and “Documents and Settings” are left in place so if you want a clean install you have to somehow rename them before you reinstall. I ended up making a DOS boot disk with read/write NTFS drivers loaded so I could rename the directories before doing the installation. (This was the step I forgot going from Vista to XP which left a bunch of Vista binaries in my Program Files directory).
I think the laptop is finally up and running well on RC0 of Server 2003R2 now, with all the pretty Unix utilities installed and running well (even the Bash shell). Now if only I could find an X Server that wasn’t Cygwin (not that I have anything against Cygwin, but seems a waste to have TWO Unix emulation environments on one machine). I tried working with the “free” X-Win32LX but found that installing it on my work desktop used up my “free” copy and now I can’t get another one for my laptop. Useless idea of a “free” download in my opinion…
I’ve also given up Google’s Desktop Search for MSN’s Desktop Search as the Google search was being a pain and crashing or chewing 100% of my CPU and refusing to give it up in more than a few cases. The MSN search seems a little more friendly, though it won’t install on x64 versions of Windows, which makes me sad.
Apps that have made me happy for natively supporting x64 shell integration on the other had have been WinRAR and Tortoise Subverion, both of which play happily with the 64 bit explorer shell. Now if only my other favorite utilities would pull their fingers out and do the same thing.
One last thing – make sure you disable Symantec Antivirus if you want to do anything file system intensive. Installing the Unix Compatibility stuff on my laptop was slowed down by a factor of approximately 10(!!) when SAV was running and checking all of the 10,000 files as it was installing. I shudder to think how much it’s slowing my compiles and have to start to question whether this slowdown is actually more or less expensive than being hit by a virus.
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