not42

As probably the biggest web server farm in the world, with their entire business based on providing a reliable service, it is amusing to see that even Google occasionally has its hiccups:

Apparently Office 2007 now provides a blogging capability from Word 2007. If this is true, then this post will appear on my blog.

Wow! And to think I couldn’t blog before this!

Off to click Publish now…

Ok, it worked.. Just don’t try and use smileys or anything like that.

Welcome to the state of Britain:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=441329&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770

Let’s face it, current governments are spying on their population, none more so than the United Kingdom. It is done in the name of national security – using fear of terrorism as a method of bypassing people’s normal questioning minds. The new acceptance appears to be: “If it is against terrorism, then it’s good!” But this is not always true. The changes being made today are the implementation of systems that allow your government to spy on you, and therefore control you. It is time to start questioning this invasion of privacy.

This video shows some of the story: http://www.bigbrotherstate.com/

For some reason Microsoft decided to stop distributing the Netscape plug-in with the Media Player in Windows Vista. Clearly the ability to play Windows Media is required in all web browsers on all Microsoft operating systems, Microsoft having made the technology one of the most common Internet media formats.

The workaround I have found involves 3 simple steps:

• Downloading the Netscape plug-in from Microsoft
• Extract the file contents
• Install it in FireFox.

The following Microsoft page lists the Netscape plug-in at the bottom:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/alldownloads.aspx

The download you need to save (not run) is called: “Windows Media Player Plug-In for Netscape”.

Download the file to your desktop. Using an archive manager such as 7-zip, extract the EXE file contents. With 7-zip, this is as simple as right-clicking and saying “Extract Files…” to extract all files to a folder.

Inside the archive there are several DLL files. To install support for Media Player, simply copy the file “npdsplay.dll” to your FireFox plug-in directory. Typically this is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins.

You can check the plug-in is installed correctly by clicking here: about:plugins

You should see the plug-in listed as “Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library”

DRM – Digital Rights Management – has been a very contentious issue in my life. To date I have refused to part with any money for music containing DRM and instead buy my own CDs and rip them onto my own PC, enabling me to have my own digital jukeboxes that I feel I control.

Not alone, many people resent the idea that they are being controlled by the music or movie industry, for good reason:

• You are restricted in use of what you buy. iTunes, PlayForSure and the Zune are all good examples of this – you buy for one player and are then locked in. You then have to re-purchase something you feel you already own just because you’ve bought a new digital player. Compare this to buying a new CD player.
• You cannot protect your purchase. Unlike houses, cars and banks, PCs are inherently unreliable devices. If you buy a CD you can take a copy and use that while protecting your investment. Your house is unlikely to burn down and if it does you typically have insurance to cover that. PCs can catch a data destroying virus, corrupt themselves or simply break down meaning loss of investment. Some DRM systems permit backup copies to be taken but typically the process is to complex for the casual user.

From the industries perspective, they are looking to protect an investment. The Internet makes file sharing far too simple in their eyes – programs like Kazza robbing them of revenue. So they attempt to protect their investment, the bad thing being it is only an attempt and not a solution.

Unfortunately there is currently no technology that will ever be a fool proof method of protection. There is no magic pill that can taken. For every layer of protection added, a cracker goes and gets a debugger out and bypasses it. Unless we get to a fully-implemented Trusted Computing world, there can be no way that you guarantee that a program or operating system hasn’t been subverted into bypassing a protection mechanism. With the release of Microsoft Windows Vista, we are given small reasons for hardware manufacturers to bring TPM technology into their PCs with the introduction of BitKeeper technology – this is the first step on a slippery slope that has both positive and negative social implications. Personally I am against a full TC implementation, so I think simpler solutions have to be found.

From a practical perspective, I actually have no problem with a file having extra security information added, providing it offers this:

• I can use the file on any device I want
• If I loose the file, I can get it back again. For free.

This sounds as if it completely conflicts against the aims of DRM, and I guess it does. Rather than focus on the file owner and their rights, industry should move the focus to the consumer. Introduce a system whose aim is not to try and lock the CD in a vault, but one whose aim is merely to identify whose CD it is. A new system not managed by Microsoft, or the music industry, or a government. Rather one managed by the people. An open standard. Managed by a non-profit independent group. A group whose job isn’t to care about what a file is. What it contains or what its value is. A group solely responsible for signing it with the purchaser’s details. A digital certificate. Just like SSL.
Yes, this will never be fully secure, but that is not really the aim. A CD can be copied. Yes there will be abuse. People will download files to multiple computers. A CD can be ripped many times. There is no perfect world, but there should be an platform that exists, that can be openly implemented on any operating system that enables a person to purchase a music file, have evidence that they have bought it and a way of identifying whose file it is. Think any file too. Books, personal documents. Images. Anything made of bytes.

There will never be a DRM lock-in system that works, so the industry should take a new less restrictive approach and give us the flexibility of the CD back.  Then I’ll spend my $ online too.

Something that I’ve noticed recently is that Vista spends a lot of time continually accessing my hard disks, and thanks to the Resource Monitor, it is possible to see what files are being accessed now days.

On my system, 100’s of megabytes were being read from my .VMDK files. At first I thought this was just VMWare, but I’ve realised that actually the Vista search indexer is indexing these files in the background because they are stored under my profile directory.

Everytime I run VMWare, the disk files are modified causing Vista to re-index them.

A speed up is to go into the Vista Control Panel, into the search options and remove these file types from being indexed:

.VMDK (VMWare Disk)
.VHD (A Microsoft Virtual PC disk image I believe)
.VMEM (VMWare Memory dump)
If you remove (uncheck) these, you will find that the indexer spends much less time eating your hard disk, resulting in a system speedup. (Note: You may have to add .vhd as a filetype).

Ok, here’s the solution to a problem that I had that took me a while to work out.

This solution isn’t posted anywhere on the internet and the closest to it is ‘I re-installed my PC’.

What I had happening was when I was changing the Location of a Crystal Reports table to change the database details:

foreach (CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.Table crTable in crTables)
{
crTableLogOnInfo = crTable.LogOnInfo;
crTableLogOnInfo.ConnectionInfo = crConnectionInfo;
crTable.ApplyLogOnInfo(crTableLogOnInfo);
crTable.Location = DatabaseName+”.dbo.” + crTable.Location.Substring(crTable.Location.LastIndexOf(“.”) + 1);
}

This final line would error out with an Invalid Table Number. The cause it turns out is not a bad Crystal version or installation, but rather a broken ASPNET user account.

When Crystal runs, it runs in the aspnet_wp.exe process, which runs as ASPNET local user. Somehow when I renamed my computer name, it messed up the SQL server authentication of that user. And re-adding the COMPUTER\ASPNET user to SQL didn’t seem to want to work. It acted exactly like my ASPNET user was not really COMPUTER\ASPNET. Stranger still, my ASPNET webpages did work, just not Crystal.

The solution: I manually deleted my Windows ASPNET user, used “aspnet_regiis -i” to then re-create the user correctly, re-added that user to my SQL Server and then re-booted my PC.

As if by magic, problem solved.

This thing is buggier than I thought. Somehow my CD/DVD is now unusable from the Vista Explorer. I stick a disk in the drive and if I click on the D: drive, it prompts me to Burn a Disc. This is despite the disc being un-burnable.

I cannot see any files or anything, however if I go to a CMD prompt, I can see everything perfectly. Likewise, a VMWare machine sees the disc perfectly too.

I’m guessing this is a corrupt registry or something… either way, it should work and now doesn’t.

Thankfully manufacturers are starting to put out drivers for Vista.  An example is Lenovo who this week released a Power Management driver and Active Protection System version specifically for Vista.

The Power Management was odd because when I first installed Vista I had the battery icon, but a short time after that it vanished never to come back.  This new driver now means I can see the state of the battery, even if it doesn’t appear to change the actual workings – my batteries now last what appears to be the same time as before.   Neither times being anywhere near that of XP – Vista is a power hog.

There are some oddities still – for instance you browse to a network server, provide credentials and login, checking the box that says Remember Me or whatever it is.  Under XP next time you browsed back it would just log you in.  Now you have to re-type everything and it doesn’t remember the login.

I’ve decided that ReadyBoost does perhaps help.  I updated my SD card drivers and the I/O appears slightly quicker and so doesn’t destroy the computer when mirroring data.  That and the fact that I changed the SD card options to performance – I run the risk of loosing data more, but the SD card now operates much quicker and so makes ReadyBoost actually help a little.  Especially when the PC has many programs loaded.

There are some memory bugs for sure.  At a low level somewhere.  Twice I’ve had Vista just spin off into infinity, churning the hard drive – one of those times I was watching in Task Manager and something allocated over 3 GB pagefile.  The trouble is everything continues to run but new things stop working when that happens – you can swap windows but not start a new program.  I’m guessing there is a bug in the new Desktop Window Manager as it seems to be random as to the application that causes it.

Oh yes, a good thing: Extended desktops are accelerated in Vista.  Unlike in XP where my second desktop appeared to have a software driver for DirectX.  Under Vista a DirectX appears to run the same speed on either screen.

One amusing thing is the new Reliability Monitor.  On my system the graph is headed downhill.

The new icon view is very cool – you can scale the icons to any size.  The picture browser/printer is really powerful too.