August 2004 Archives

So what does blurred vision have to do with the crucifixion wounds of Jesus?

It starts with the branding of slaves with a tattoo. This mark was known as a stigma, from stig, to prick (tattoos are created by pricking the skin with ink-filled needles). The term stigma was then generalised to apply to the slaves themselves, and thence to a distinguishing mark of social disgrace, such as 'the stigma of being in prison'. From a similar origin came the meaning of any mark on the skin, and of the marks of crucifixion in particular.

Back on a different track, but to the same source, the blurred vision of astigmatism is caused by an oddly-shaped eyeball preventing light rays from merging at a single point on the retina. Thus we have a + stigma, where 'a' means 'not', and stigma is from the greek for 'point' (and 'prick').

Incidentally, stigmata and stigmas are both acceptable plurals for stigma.

In building a new Athlon64-based PC the following points of interest were found:

• The highly-praised Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard is good, but has a rather large unresolved bug. Described in an Asus FAQ, it means that if you plug an SATA hard disk into one of the two main SATA ports then the hard disk light does not ever get activated. With hard disks getting quieter, I'm finding it more useful than ever to watch the HDD activity light to see if the PC is actually doing anything. As such, this is a monumental bug, and one that Asus have known about for at least 4 months, but not fixed. The two mitigating factors with this are that Asus has great technical support. If you contact them via their web site, then a human actually responds in half a day or so. Secondly, this motherboard has a second SATA controller built in. It's not as integral as the first, but it works fine, and the light goes on with it.


• This is the first Antec case (an Antec Performance II SX635BII) that I've played with, and it's great compared to my five-year old Aopen one. The design is spiffy and finger-friendly. Even so, one complaint is that the wires connected to the front firewire and USB ports are identical, and unlabelled. So when it comes to plugging them into the motherboard, you have to either dismantle the front of the case to trace which is which, or note that though the cables have the same ends, they have different pins unconnected.
  
  Update (1-Oct-2004) After building another PC using the same model of case, and finding that the firewire and USB plugs are labelled, I shall adjust this complaint to one of quality control, unless this labelling is a new innovation, in which case I say well done.


• The motherboard came with a sticker of the motherboard layout to affix to the (inside of the) case. Very useful.


• The Benq (FP767-Ver2) 17" LCD monitor was described as purple, and I was expecting purple, with perhaps a little bit of black. If I'd studied the picture on the web site closely before purchasing, I'd have seen that a better description would be white, with a dash of purple. Still, I'm, impressed by the huge viewable area compared with my old ADI Microscan 5V+ (16" viewable) CRT


• The heatsink for the Athlon64 is of a greatly improved design compared to the Athlon XP (and previous CPUs). It's pretty foolproof now, and doesn't even require the dangerous high pressure screwdriver manoeuvre to install.

Being in possession of a new Athlon64 system I took the opportunity of trying out the free trial of the 64-bit Windows XP. As I usually use Windows 2000 I was interested to see what benefits I would get from upgrading, especially after this beta's positive review at GamePC.

The first bit of bad news is that if you want to install onto an SATA hard disk, then you have to hope that there's a driver specifically for your SATA interface to work with x64. Few companies have released even beta drivers, so you have to rely on leaked drivers that have made their way to the only good accumulation at PlanetAMD64 (you have to register, for free, to access their Online Driver Database).

Onto the installation itself, and it's certainly a bit more flash than the Win2K one. It also had drivers built-in for my Radeon 9600XT, so at first boot it had a pleasant hi-res display already set up at my LCD monitor's native resolution.

Again, I had to resort to leaked drivers for various components, but I did get every element of the hardware (ie. LAN, audio, etc.) working.

Now to the software. I was happy to find that almost everything worked perfectly. Mozilla Firefox popped up a Data Execution Protection warning, but you could tell the OS to whitelist Firefox to allow it to work. I only tried one game, the free commerical game Hidden and Dangerous, and that worked well.

There was some stuff that didn't work. The Nero Express software that came with the CD writer stated that it wouldn't work with the 64-bit OS, and that I should buy the Enterprise version. Similarly, the Microsoft Intellipoint software would not install, and so the tilt-wheel mouse lost its tilt.

The difficulty of obtaining drivers, and the lack of general support for software to explicitly work on x64 were enough to dissuade me from keeping the OS for more than a couple of days of experimentation. I have gone back to the safety of Windows 2000.

This contrasts with the beta of Windows 2000, which I happily ran for a six months or longer till the proper release with no qualms. I think that was because it felt more solid. I can't recall any software that I used that didn't work. Even drivers for NT4 tended to work at a pinch. x64 feels like too much of a jump from real-world support, and there doesn't feel like a very large community of users around yet. In addition, the jump in stability from Windows 95/98 to Windows 2000 was so great that any minor inconveniences were easily forgiven. From 2000 to XP x64 there's no similar major leap in functionality or robustness that I could detect.

I know that bug 246078, where Firefox doesn't set itself as the default browser properly, is fixed in the nightlies. However, until a release version is fixed, the way that I workaround the problem is to edit the N/A Hyperlink file type properties such that:

application: D:\NET\MOZILL~2\FIREFOX.EXE -url "%1"
--- DDE stuff ---
DDE message: "%1",,-1,0,,,,
application: Firefox
topic: WWW_OpenURL

If I cure it the way that other people suggest, then I seem to always open a new browser window when clicking a URL from another application, instead of reusing the active one.

A few days ago the government introduced the Green Vehicle Guide, that purports to inform consumers of the most environmentally friendly vehicles in the Australian market. I was interested to see that the Toyota Prius, lauded worldwide for its clean nature, was nowhere near the top of the list. In fact, if you search all vehicle types, and sort them by their air pollution rating, you'll find the Jeep KJ Cherokee Sport on top, closely followed by the Mercedes-Benz CL55K, a 5.5 litre V8.

I find these results slightly alarming, and not quite in tune with what the average person would consider as pollution. The guide gives a pollution rating based on the most stringent emission standard that the manufacturer claims. Cars that conform to the Australian standard, such as the Toyota Prius, receive a 5 out of 10. The Jeep mentioned above claims to conform to a stricter standard.

The unfortunate thing is that the cars are not actually tested to see what emissions they actually produce. As a result, we have weird situations such as this, where manufacturers' claims take precedence over physics.

The final creative step in creating WimpWall was to design a new icon to replace the default Delphi one. This is an essential step in creating a professional program. No matter how simple it is, you must have a unique icon.

I had two main problems. I am not good at designing icons, and I don't have any (working) icon design software. Delphi actually comes with an image editor, but for some reason it would only save corrupted icons for me. So, I abandoned that and had a quick look for a free icon editor on the net.

My requirements were: small, completely free (no nags or ads), load and save BMP and ICO, and a functional UI. I found all of these satisfied in @icon sushi. There were larger, more functional programs around, but being small is a virtue to me.

Finally, after a few brief aborted efforts, I again concluded that designing icons was far beyond me, so I grabbed the Mandelbrot icon from JM's Mandelbrot Explorer (which was created by that program), imported it into Photoshop, changed the hue, and saved it as a new icon. I'll just use a family of Mandebrot icons for all my software in future.

I bought a digital television tuner card for my PC a couple of days ago, just to see what all the fuss was about. It's a Dvico Fusion HDTV DVB-T, and it has a forum, and Windows and (unofficial) Linux drivers. There's a full review of its US-oriented sister product, the Fusion III QAM, at AMDPower.

So, what is there to watch on digital television? All of the free-to-air networks (ABC, Seven, Nine, Ten and SBS) have a digital version of their analogue offerings. They also have extra channels, which can be varied by the channels for special events. For example, Seven will have a digital channel exclusively for the Olympics.

There's a program guide showing what's on widescreen and high-definition (HD) for each day. In summary, a lot of the popular stuff, such as news, sport and high-rating UK and USA serials are shown in wide-screen. A few regular programs, and a few films are in HD, but that includes nothing that I normally watch. They don't broadcast in HD in the UK, so programs from there are never HD.

There is very little extra programming content on digital television. The ABC has one digital radio station, SBS has a world news channel (continuous unsubtitled foreign news bulletins) and a weather and news summary channel, consisting of maps and text with classical music. The ABC had two additional televison channels until 2003, when their (overall) funding was cut by the federal government.

I am not in a position to comment on the quality of HD broadcasts, because my monitor has a resolution of 1024x768, which is far below the (interlaced) HD resolution of 1920x1080. However, I am able to comment on the reception. Using my gimcrack antenna I can get all channels clearly (with 70-80% signal strength), whereas with my analogue VCR sitting next to my PC with the same antenna I can only receive 3 of the 5 channels with clarity.

Watching widescreen programming on a normal old (4:3) television (via tv-out from my PC) is not a pleasant experience. I find that I need to use pan and scan to fill up the whole screen, whilst losing the sides of the picture.

So, I can see that digital television is the future, but that there is so little content at the moment that it's not worth expending any money on it yet. I certainly would not consider getting a standard definition set-top box for my main television. If I could pay $50 extra to have a digital decoder built-in to the tv then I'd go for that.

If the government wants to encourage people to go digital so that they can release analogue radio spectrum for other uses, then they'll have to encourage better content for the digital channels.

SUMMARY

If you're buying or already have a wide screen tv, go digital.

Everyone else should ignore it until there's better content.

Burgle and burglarize: Two words, invented at around the same time to describe what a burglar does, are pretty strictly divided between British and US usage. In Australia, and in Britain, you'd be looked upon quizzically, if not openly mocked, for using burglariz(s)e when the simpler and more common option is available. On the other hand, in the US the term burgle would seem rather jocular.

I've just put WimpWall, the wimpiest way to change your Windows wallpaper, out into the world.

There's a remarkable number of wallpaper changers already out there, basically because it's so simple to code. The actual work to tell Windows to set its desktop to use this_nice_picture.bmp is one simple well-documented line. Where the fun comes in is automating this process, and making it a little more functional. For example, unless you use the resource-hog of Active Desktop you can only use BMP format pictures. So you'd probably want your wallpaper changer to cope with JPEGs, by doing a conversion.

Another thing that I wanted, but couldn't find in one package with my other wants, was the ability to run once, such as at startup, then exit, so as not to use memory all the time. Also, I have my wallpapers categorised into different folders within a wallpaper folder, so I wanted to be able to just specify that main folder, and have the changer recurse down into the others.

I actually found some software that did both of these things. It was tiny, and had a minimal GUI interface. However, it offered no options on how to display the image (eg. tile, stretch or centre), and it sometimes chose the ugliest possiblity.

So, I installed Borland Delphi 6 Personal, from a magazine CD, and spent a few days writing the changer of my dreams. After finishing the major functionality, and polishing the GUI, I added a final convenience option. I gave a little 5 second warning before the picture is changed, allowing it to be cancelled. This was for those times when I'd set a wallpaper that I was particularly fond of, and I wasn't ready for it to be changed.

To finish my work on it today, I set up its web page, created a program icon for it (by changing the colour of my Mandelbrot Explorer program icon - I decided to keep the fractal theme), and finished documenting the code.

So, I installed Delphi 6 last Thursday, started WimpWall on Friday, and put it on the net today, Thursday of the following week. I guess it really is RAD.

I remember fondly the pleasant days of churning out Windows utility after Windows utility in the RAD world of Borland Delphi 2 and 3. The Object Pascal language was a cohesive delight, and the IDE with "Code Insight" made finding the write variables a breeze. I used Delphi 3 until 2000, when my work took me in other directions.

Seeing the free downloads of the first beta of Visual C# Express, a lightweight version of Visual Studio for C# programming picqued my interest, so I grabbed and installed the hefty download. As well as the program itself, it also wanted to install the MS SQL client, Server Desktop engine, MS XML 6 and the .Net 2 framework beta (if I recall correctly). Anyway, you'd want broadband to get it.

Now, this is hardly a fair or comprehensive comparison. Delphi 6 is three years old, and Visual C# Express is only in its first beta.

• The IDE was much smaller and lighter, and thus faster to load and exit
• The IDE did not crash
• Delphi programs do not require the .Net framework to run
• Delphi has been popular for such a long time that any problems developer come up against are already documented on the web

• The IDE seemed hardly to have been updated since Delphi 3, and so felt old
• "Code Insight" only worked occasionaly. Usually it didn't pop up any help.
• The debugger was always a few lines out when flagging errors in my code
• After a lot of programming in Javascript, C#, Perl and Python, the Pascal language seems overly verbose
• Lots of work with elements integral to Windows, such as popping up a dialog to select a folder, and working with shortcut files, are reliant on finding and installing third-party components

• The "Intellisense" was informative and worked perfectly
• The .Net framework is comprehensive
• C# is much less verbose than Pascal
• Modern standards are fully supported and easy to use, such as retrieving and manipulating XML and SOAP

• It was a resource hog
• It produced the biggest crashes I've ever seen, taking down my whole (Windows 2000) machine regularly
• Developed software requires the .Net framework to be installed