Monthly Archive for April, 2006

IE7 Beta 2 brickbats and bouquets…

Published
by
Howard
on April 28th 2006
in Internet, Microsoft and Software
. 1 Comment

Internet Explorer 7The public beta of Internet Explorer 7 has been out for a while now, and like the good Microsoft soldier I am, I installed it this week.  It’s very nice.  If you’ve only ever used IE it’ll be full of neat new toys that you’ve never seen before.  If you’ve been using Firefox or Safari, or most any other browser there will be little that’ll surprise you.  Tabbed browsing is there of course, and the thumbnail previews of all your tabs is a nice feature.  It incorporates RSS feeds (keeping them along with your favourites) which is a feature I’ve been waiting for on Windows for ages.

All good things then?  Well, no, unfortunately.  The first casualty of IE7 was my online banking.  Natwest Online failed to let me log in with IE7 - not that it recognised I was on an unsupported browser, just that IE7 refused to work with the form controls.  Worse than that thought was the realisation that IE7 would not let me log into the Outlook Web Access account I use to check my microsoft.com email address!  Yesterday I actually ended up using Firefox to check my microsoft email.  The irony was not lost on me.

So, I uninstalled IE7, only to find that the problems I’d found had been left behind: HTML form elements were no longer processed in any web page, and after further investigation it seemed that the jscript and vbscript engines had been unregistered.  So from Start->Run I did the following:

regsvr32 jscript
regsvr32 vbscript
regsvr32 /i mshtml

Which seems to have fixed everything. 

It’s a shame, because IE7 looks like it’s going to be great, but right now, on my system, it appears to be quite broken. 

As usual with a beta, caveat emptor: you get what you pay for!

Philosophy majors shouldn’t write technology editorials

Published
by
Howard
on April 19th 2006
in Apple, Games, Hardware, Internet, Microsoft, Software and Virtualisation
. 0 Comments

Richard sent me an email yesterday with a link to this article along with the message “You’ll love this one…”  If you’ve followed the Windows on Mac saga recently go and read it now, if you’re anything like me and Richard you’ll have plenty to say on the subject once you’ve finished reading.

I couldn’t believe that any publication would bother to publish something like that, even as an “opinion” piece in a student paper and even only on their website.  The author, who may be a veritable genius when it comes to philosophy, clearly has no idea what he (she?) is talking about when it comes to technology.  They don’t seem to understand the difference between emulation, virtualisation and dual booting, and have apparently very little grasp of hardware specifics…

When a Mac starts to emulate a Windows platform completely, the computer must provide additional voltage to provide the computing power.

Ignoring the author’s misconception that the Mac is emulating Windows (it is running Windows natively on an X86 chip remember…) what’s this about additional voltage?!  What?!  The intel chip in my MacBook - when running XP - is pulling the same power as when it runs OS X, or the same as the identical chip that runs Windows XP in the latest HP notebook.  Windows XP playing games such as UT2004 on the MacBook causes it to generate as much heat as OS X playing the Universal Binary of UT2004.  It’s hot (really hot), granted, but the idea that Windows is magically making the processor run hotter than OS X will ever allow is false.  It just gets as hot only quicker.

getting a Mac to run PC games will result in heartache - this I can guarantee

The author doesn’t specify exactly what heartache it will result in… My MacBook runs Half Life 2, CountStrike: Source, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Rise of Nations in some cases significantly faster/smoother than my Dell.  What heartache?  Heat-ache maybe, but no worse than OS X causes!

For reiteration, Macs cannot run Windows like PCs can.

Urm, yes.  Yes they can.  That’s rather what all the fuss was about when Apple put Intel chips inside.  INTEL.  x86 chips.  The same instruction set that nearly every PC on the planet uses to run, oh, for example, Windows!  Do you think the author understands the difference between a PPC and an Intel chip, and the reason why a Mac can now run exactly like a PC?

I can’t bring myself to refute the fifth paragraph (”My third point references to the industry.”) as it is so full of misunderstandings of the technology, the businesses involved and the computer industry’s recent history that it’s just not worth it.

Boot Camp crashes and burns?  Hardly.  It’s beta software.  It came with a warning.  Anyone who chose to ignore that warning and install it on a production machine deserves any hassle they get.  That said, my installation of Boot Camp was utterly without problems and I’ve heard lots of other positive reports on various forums.  I’m grateful to Apple for providing Boot Camp and the driver suite - I’d just like some of my minor niggles addressed!

Why my primary Windows XP machine is still a Dell

Published
by
Howard
on April 12th 2006
in Apple, Games, Hardware, Microsoft, Software and Virtualisation
. 1 Comment

MacBook ProThe MacBook Pro is great running XP; but has several flaws which mean it probably won’t become my primary machine just yet…

 

  • No Audio Routing
    If you plug headphones into the headphone socket audio continues to come out of the speakers. This is known (and documented by Apple) but is still irritating. If I’m in the office I quite often listen to mp3s/the radio on headphones. Also, when I play games I nearly always do so with headphones on for the immersive experience…
  • Limited Bluetooth Support
    I use my phone’s Bluetooth headset as a headset in games that support it (UT2004, CounterStrike) and for Skype calls. Either the driver in the MacBook doesn’t support the headset profile, or the hardware doesn’t support it. Either way, it’s an annoying limitation.
  • Heat
    This is the real killer. The MacBook Pro runs hot… Even in OS X - when you push the CPU - it gets very hot. Running in XP though, without the advanced power management, it gets hot quickly. So hot in fact that the grill to the left of the keyboard becomes painful to touch. That’s no good for prolonged periods of typing!
  • The Trackpad
    In OS X there is a tickbox for trackpad settings that “ignored unintended input” - so if you knock it with your wrist while typing it knows to disregard it. Not so for XP. Try typing for any length of time and you find the cursor jumping all over the place as you accidentally click all over your document. Grrr!

I imagine that further updates to the beta will fix some of these niggles, but for now I’m still using the Dell for day to day work and games.

One thing I did manage to do with the MacBook Pro was remap the keyboard. Now \ is in the correct place (next to left shift) as is the back tick (next to the 1 key) and I’ve given myself a right-alt key (the right command key) and a del key (next to the left cursor). So I can hit ctrl-alt-del and I have a right-alt to control MS Virtual Server properly now!

It’s a fantastic games machine; HalfLife 2, UT2004 and RoN all perform flawlessly… I just worry about the heat. I hope Apple issue a BootCamp driver update for APM.

Would you like to check it again?

Published
by
Howard
on April 11th 2006
in Cinema, General and Security
. 0 Comments

Flexible Friends

At the cinema tonight I paid for the tickets with a card that was issued very soon after Chip & Pin came out, as such I had never used the card in a situation where I needed to sign - it has only been used with Chip & Pin (progress, woo!). Until tonight, where the cinema haven’t upgraded their point of sale systems yet still require a signature for verification.

So, I handed over the card. The clerk looked at it, flipped it over, looked at it some more and then said falteringly, “It’s not, urm, signed…” He handed it back. He was right, it wasn’t - I’d obviously never got round to signing the strip on the back and having only ever paid with Chip & Pin no one else had ever noticed. Oops. What happened next was brilliant, and I thought only the stuff of urban legend… he handed me a pen. Then he watched me sign the back of the card. Then he handed me the payment slip and watched me sign that too. Then, and this is what really made me laugh: he checked them!

I asked him “Do they match?” at which point he realised how dumb the whole process had been. I then showed him other cards in my wallet that proved my signature was mine. A saluatory lesson in what happens when you train people to blindly follow a process without actually thinking about the security requirement behind it…

Oh and Alien Autopsy is a fun little film which gets away with the trick of making you forget that Ant & Dec are, well, Ant & Dec. Also worth it for Jimmy Carr and Omid Djalilli’s appearances.

That’s a long flight…

Published
by
Howard
on April 11th 2006
in Internet
. 0 Comments

I managed to create the worst set of flights ever while trying to work out an itinery for my US trip.  Using the multi-city planner I wanted to go from London to New York, then on to Vegas, then back from Vegas to London at the end of the trip. Fairly simple you’d have thought?

I was interested to note that the site was listing a “coach” transfer between a couple of airports to get from NY to Vegas, weird - I clicked on for more detail and here’s what it was recommending…

  • Fly from Heathrow to JFK on 27th April.
  • On 2nd May, fly from JFK to Heathrow, take coach to Gatwick, fly to Vegas.
  • On 6th May, fly from Vegas to Gatwick, coach to Heathrow.

Spot the time consuming mistake!  Fun and games.  I can’t repeat it now, and with a bit of tweaking Expedia is producing some far more reasonable suggestions, so I’ll forgive it!

The Best Windows PC is… a Mac?

Published
by
Howard
on April 6th 2006
in Apple, Hardware, Microsoft and Software
. 1 Comment

Windows XP Installing on a MacBook Pro

Some of you will know of my odd status as a PC and Mac user.  I switch between both depending on where I am and what I’m doing; you’ll also know of my weakness for shiny Apple hardware and my purchase of a MacBook Pro within hours of their release.  So I followed with interest the competition to get Windows XP running on the MacBook, and even tried out the open source effort that resulted; eventually giving up on it when I realised that driver support just wasn’t there.

Until now.  Apple just officially sanctioned dual booting on their Intel-based machines with “Boot Camp”.  A preview for now (apparently of Leopard code) it creates a driver CD and then allows an XP SP2 CD to boot and install.  Of course I had to try it within hours of finding out about it.  Here’s how I got on….

Luckily last night I’d already downloaded and installed the latest OS X update (10.4.6).  This whole “Boot Camp” thing explains why the update for the MacBook was considerably larger than the same update on my PPC based G5.  The only thing left to do was download the MacBook Pro firmware update, and the Boot Camp assistant itself.  With the firmware updated I could go ahead and run the assistant.

After accepting the dire warnings that this is preview software and shouldn’t be used in a production environment it allowed me to burn a CD with XP drivers for all the MacBook Pro hardware.  (Well, nearly all the hardware - see later on for what’s not included.)

After building the driver CD, you must choose how much of the OS X drive to partition for Windows.  I chose to give up about 25Gb for Windows - that should be adequate for testing and installing games.  Also, with MacDrive I should be able to access data on the Mac partition from Windows.  This was a very simple process - drag the slider around until happy and then click the button, it had finished in less than 60 seconds.  Then, stick the XP Pro SP2 CD in and reboot the MacBook…

The system booted from the XP CD into a standard setup screen.  No sign of any behind the scenes magic (patching system files on the fly) like in the open-source effort, it just worked… I may dig out my Vista DVD and see if whatever Apple have done will allow that to boot. :)

Unfortunately the first try failed at the partition selection screen when the system hung - to the point where I had to power off.  I unplugged all the usb devices I had in, and started again - this time it worked perfectly.  I selected the partition to format and it started copying files across.  Checking the FAQ reveals that there is a known issue: the Mighty Mouse can’t be plugged in during the first install of XP.

After the usual thrashing about, and a little over an hour after I downloaded the file I was looking at an (admittedly low res) Windows XP desktop.  Success!

I put the Apple created driver CD in and let it unpack everything.  The entire install runs unattended - it does the Intel Chipset, then the ATI graphics.  I didn’t notice the network install happen, but all of a sudden the icons popped up for wireless and LAN in the system tray.  After that came the audio install and a reboot.

When it came back up the panel was running at its native resolution.  One more new hardware found wizard later (BlueTooth) and the entire system was working.  Just over an hour from a machine with just OS X on to a machine running a fully patched copy of Windows XP Pro SP2.

Hardware that doesn’t work:  the IR remote, the iSight camera, the sudden-motion-sensor, the ambient light sensor.

The next important things:

  • How fast can it run Microsoft Virtual Server R2, and with how many concurrent virtual machines.
  • And, perhaps most important: can it run UT2004, Rise of Nations and Counter-Strike: Source ?

More info to come…

Kodama

Published
by
Howard
on April 2nd 2006
in Cinema
. 1 Comment

Kodama This friendly looking little fellow is a Kodama - one of the rattle-headed tree spirits than inhabit the forest in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” which I watched for the first time recently. It’s an outstanding bit of anime that I’d not heard of before despite already having on DVD some of Miyazaki’s more obscure work. If you’ve seen Spirited Away or My Neighbour Totorro you’ll know what to expect. I have a copy which includes the english adaptation (edited by Neil Gaiman no less) which uses Billy Bob Thornton and Billy Crudup as voice talent, but I watched it in the original Japanese with subtitles. I’m a bit of a purist like that - I always watch films in their original language wherever possible. I find dubbed movies - even when done well - extremely offputting.

AshitakaThe film starts with Prince Ashitaka at the edge of his village noticing something “not human” in the forest beyond the watch towers. It is a demon - consumed by rage and hate it has come to destroy Ashitaka’s village. Ashitaka, armed with bow and arrow, and on the back of his red Elk “Yakkul” defeats the demon, but not before being cursed by its touch. The wise woman of the village explains what has happened. The demon is a boar-God from the West of the land, it has been shot, and the iron pellet inside it has driven it to this all consuming hatred.

Now cursed, Ashitaka must leave the village before he is consumed by the same rage; and the film follows his journey to the west to discover who or what is causing the imbalance in the world. This is not a cartoon with black and white answers, and obvious good or bad guys - shades of grey abound as the forces of humans, of nature, and of the nature Gods all vie for control of the bounty of the natural world.

I shan’t give any more away, suffice to say that if you have any liking of anime at all, you should definitely add this to your list of things to see!

I liked the Kodama in the film so much I’ve made the image above my MSN picture. :)

Next I shall watch Grave of the Fireflies; another anime recommended by the same friend who pointed me at Princess Mononoke.

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