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.

The bad:

PPTP VPN to Monowall doesn’t work.  XP worked fine.

Onecare keeps putting up little messages to tell me it is up to date.  Please tell me if it has a problem staying up to date, but messages like that are pointless.

The good:

I bought a new network printer and the installation was so simple.  If drivers exist, installation of devices appears to be very smooth.  It didn’t detect that the printer had a duplexing unit built in, but that was simple to change.  Printing appears very quick and stable, although for some reason if you multi-click more than about 10 files and right-click to Print, the menu disappears.  Not sure why you cannot bulk print 100 files as easily as 10.

Standby now appears to work as expected.  I think the problem is that you press a key to bring the system awake, but the screens stay blank until the mouse is moved – just like the screens have gone to sleep and not been woken up.

Generally I’m feeling happier about Vista now.  The search tool being on the start menu is nicer than desktop search that stole some of your taskbar.  The search is really quick and is a faster way to find programs that drilling through the start menu.  A really neat feature.

The media player feels better than WMP11 on XP did too.  I liked the feature that when I played a video file, it permitted me to resume playing my previous playlist.  I hadn’t seen that under XP.

I’m getting used to the new explorer layout and can say that the favorites section is actually really useful.  So many times you open an explorer to drill down to the same location.  Initially I thought it was wasted space, but having put 5 or so key directories on the favorites list, it actually is much quicker to get to where you want.

Now things are up and running I’m much happier.  More tomorrow.

Today the system was running a little more smoothly. Mostly. I think that the defragmenter and search indexers that had been running in the background have finally finished re-organizing my PC.

However I tried to have a Skype conversation and that was disastrous. While I could hear the other person fine all the time, they could only sometimes hear me. For some reason my microphone audio would drop out. To start with I thought it was when the CPU hit 100% due to me using an application while talking with them, but I’m not convinced that was the total reason. A PC not being able to steam audio is not good though.

It could equally have been the network dropping UDP packets, but why only outbound traffic? Basically Skype is worthless on Vista though – perhaps by design (conspiracy theories commence), but most likely due to driver issues.

I now have the IBM TPM driver for Vista installed, hoping that it would enable me to use the BitLocker protection, but the control panel for that says it doesn’t support it. Worse, it looks like you have to partition your drive in a weird manner to use BitLocker. I’ve no idea why… I hate dual partitions so maybe I won’t use that.

Still no sign of IBM Active Protection for Vista, or any Biometrics.

Oh yes, Sleep mode, that supposedly instant on, took about 2 minutes to un-sleep this morning. I think a full boot may be quicker.

Also, yesterday I did a hibernate, my usual way of turning the machine off overnight, and the screen goes black where you used to have that progress bar showing the percent saved to disk. Talk about taking a step back.

On a positive note, it is pretty. The new window design really is sweet.

Well today was a mix, with probably more bad than good.

I ‘ve found that sometimes Vista isn’t responsive.  In fact it has a nasty habit of occasionally disappearing into the dust for a few minutes with the hard disk rattling away.  I’m guessing this is what happens when there isn’t enough memory, even though I have 1.5GB RAM.

My shock today was a very dangerous Explorer bug.  Basically right click doesn’t always act on the directory you right click on.  I’ve reported it in the Vista Newsgroups on MS – it is reproducable but I won’t repeat myself here.

UAC turns out to be not as bad as you’d expect in real life, but I have serious concerns as to the usefulness of it.  After all, I always press Yes to permit the program to do what it needs, and while I might know when something unexpected happens that I should press No, I’m sure the general public will get used to pressing Yes so often that they will press it when they shouldn’t.  Not really security then is it?  More a continuous pain that offers no gain.

Amazing. Mid-typing I got one of those other strange occurrances – the system almost locks up and the mouse jumps in slow massive steps across the screen.  No obvious hard drive access that time, but there has to be a kernel driver issue somewhere to cause the whole OS to block.

My sound breaks up when using Skype if there is >90% CPU utilization.

That’s all for today. So far.

Serious: My Western Digital USB external drive is not flagged as removable, making it dangerous to unplug as I might loose data.

Trivial: In Control Panel, Turn Windows Features on or off, under IIS/WWW/Performance, the description of the help tag is wrong for Http Compression Dynamic. It duplicates the text about Classic ASP from a few options above.

Missing drivers: Thinkpad biometrics, Intel ICH-6 LCP, Quatach DSP-100. I used the XP drivers for the Quatech card and ignored the others for the moment.

The good: Vista does ‘feel’ faster once you’re in it than XP.  I get the feeling the memory management is better too as things don’t appear to have to page in as frequently.  When doing lots of things at once, the system feels more responsive.

Apparently a competition was run to create some videos showing the effects of DRM on your life. The results are here: http://freeculture.org/blog/2006/10/13/contestwinners/

I particularly liked this one:

Sounds rude? Really it’s all good fun

How to put on a bra

Oh yes, this is Holly Valance from the movie Dead or Alive.  Just in case you were wondering…

A video view on DRM.  Why don’t I buy music online?  Here’s your answer in a funny video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKI_w_VBoTQ

Currently the music and movie industry is trying to yet again restrict your use of the music, movies and tv you buy, watch and listen too. Today you have the right to make a mix CD from the radio and record some TV to watch later, but soon that freedom will be lost unless you voice your opinion now.

The EFF have an amusing take on a serious message:

http://www.eff.org/corrupt/

I’ve been using the Windows Media Player 11 Beta (WMP 11) for a couple of days now as a test really.  My music collection is a little curious as it is a mix of MP3 files, OGG files and AAC files.  I guess over the years I’ve tried different players and they’ve ripped CDs in different formats, hence the variety.    WMP 11 doesn’t actually help play anything other than WMA and MP3 files, however with the addition of a few codecs, I’ve found it is possible to play all my files better than in iTunes.  I say that because while you can squeeze an OGG file into iTunes, it is impossible to use the graphic equalizer to customize the way it sounds!  Fortunately WMP 11 employs the simpler concept of if it plays it, you can manipulate the sound.

Things haven’t been completely rosy though.  The album lookup tool is a real pain at times:

- It can’t find some tracks.  Sometimes this is because someone added a – sign to a name.  Sometimes it is more fundamental:  if the name employs one or two simple words (you/at/in/on etc), it is impossible to find a track.  And I mean impossible.  Even though you can view the track in the Album Details link on another track you cannot select or locate the missing one!

- It is annoying that you have to select each track in turn.  Surely there must be a way to select the album and have it allocate the correct details to the rest of the tracks using the track number or names.  It takes forever to find the XYZ album for each track.

Other annoyances include the music stores functionality.  The URGE store if you select it appears down the side and is hard to get rid of.  I like the iTunes method of disabling all store functions.  One for Microsoft to learn from.

A few of the scroll bars don’t actually work either, but I guess it is a Beta product – in fact it is a very stable Beta.  No crashes to date.

The new user interface is very intuitive and looks pretty too.

Under the hood it looks like you can now create Converter plug-ins which will be very useful for file synchronization to mobile devices if you have your music in different file formats.  This will enable say an OGG converter plug-in to be written by someone that will automatically convert any say OGG files in your play list into a lower bit rate WMV file if you plug in your PDA or mobile phone for synchronizing.

There appears to be a slight performance issue on the visualizations front – mine stutters every so often.  There are also no new visualizations, but perhaps that will change before release.  Personally I don’t use them so what is there is probably fine for everyone, if a little dated.

One annoying thing for me is lack of use of the mouse scroll wheel on the volume control.  This is so basic and is in every player these days… click on the volume or hover over it and scroll up and down to change the volume.  Please add this feature!

The task bar integration looks pretty rubbish.  I just don’t like the black and grey color down there that takes up so much space.  An icon in the notification area as used by Every Other Player ™ would take up a lot less space and fit in color-wize.

Other than that, it plays music ok, so I guess it’s about as good as WMP 10.  Now if they’d just finish it by adding these suggestions then it might be an upgrade worth installing.