not42

Serial ports must be such a security risk these days. Let’s face it, most PC’s don’t even come with them but for Vista, unless you run a program as an administrator, you cannot open a serial port.

Enough said.

It took me about 2 hours to get WinAVR to run on my Vista PC. I almost gave up and installed it into a Virtual PC, but by fudging with symbolics links and some selective file copying, I managed to get it going. No ideal, in fact far from it but for me, it works which is all I need. Hopefully by the time I upgrade again someone will have fixed things properly.

While generally things look much prettier, the fonts have taken a backward step. In XP they were readable, in Vista, well you have look:

It should say ‘view’ and ‘VISTA’.  In other places, the left margains don’t line up. Perhaps a consequence of offloading the graphics to your super high-tech graphics card is that it doesn’t render as well?

There was another oddity in Acrobat Reader today as well. I was viewing a PDF in a web page and pressed the save button. The standard save dialog - a standard part of windows - was displayed and I browsed through the structure to the location where I wanted to save the file. We’re good till that point. Next I did what I normally do when a filename is long like a session variable - I clicked on an existing file ‘25_aug_2005.pdf’, and over-wrote the name in the filename area below. Then I clicked save, to which I was asked if I wanted to overwrite my file! This was despite there being a totally new name in the filename box. It turns out that if you first select a file you cannot type a filename in the editing box. Oops. I’m not sure if this is Acrobat Reader only, but since it was that standard dialog, I suspect it does this everywhere.

I started the day thinking that I’d write a positive review finally, but my day was ruined by the WinAVR exercise, so yet another day of Vista troubles. This really does feel like RC3, not RTM.