Chaucery Blog

Though I'm not a fan of Starforce I have been living with it on my PC due my desire to race cars around the weird and wacky courses of (the free) Trackmania. When I heard that there was a new free version of this game without Starforce I rushed to install it, and finding it to my liking, removed all traces of Starforce from my machine (uninstalling the old Trackmania does not remove Starforce, you need to run the linked driver-removal software too). To my delight, the removal of Starforce also cured a seemingly unrelated fault. Whenever I started any program my whole computer would hang for a few seconds - even the mouse cursor would seize up. Now that no longer happens.

Goodbye Starforce, you won't be missed,

Posted by James at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you have an mp3 player that doesn't remember its position within a track when it's turned off, and has no fast-forward or rewind, then listening to long audio books on short commutes is impossible (because you can't resume midway through a track on a later journey). One workaround is to split your mp3 files into shorter parts, and for this I recommend the delightful free open source, GPL-licensed mpgedit (which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux).

It works on CBR and VBR files, and does the splitting without reencoding.

I also had a look at the free mp3DirectCut, which did a similar job through a GUI. For my needs, though, I wanted a simple command-line operation, for which mpgedit was better suited.

Its use is simple. For example, to split a 36 minute audio book into two 18 minute halves:

mpgedit -e -18:00 -e 18:00 -f audioBook.mp3

Here, each -e parameter indicates a separate output file, the first containing everything up to the 18 minute mark, the second everything after 18 minutes. Since 18 minutes is my commute time, I set up a batch file so that I only need to pass in the filename to split.

For files that are longer than 36 minutes, just repeat the split. For example, with a 38 minute file after one split, you end up with:

• audioBook_1.mp3 (18 minutes) and
• audioBook_2.mp3 (30 minutes)

After a second split, passing in audioBook_2.mp3 as the file to be split, you then have:

• audioBook_1.mp3 (18 minutes)
• audioBook_2_1.mp3 (18 minutes)
• audioBook_2_2.mp3 (12 minutes)

Quite elegant, really.

Posted by James at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's easy to import your old emails from Pegasus mail into GMail, but it does have a few steps. I've used Mozilla Thunderbird as an intermediary, because it turned out to be good at massaging the data into a mutually acceptable form.

1. Create new mailbox in Pegasus in Unix mailbox format (instead of the default Pegasus mail format)
2. Move desired emails into this new mailbox
3. In Windows Explorer find the name of this new mailbox file. It ends with .mbx. (More details in Mozillazine)
4. Move the mailbox file into Thunderbird's Local Folders, in your profile directory.
5. Start Thunderbird and click on this new folder. This is when the file is actually tidied up.
6. Exit Thunderbird.
7. Run Google GMail Loader (GML), which processes the mbx file, and sends each email one by one to Gmail.

If you skip the Thunderbird step, then GML complains about the mbx file, though it may still work.

Posted by James at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've updated Fleace with a couple of small improvements.

When I tested the original release on my brother's computer I found that it always popped up an error saying that it couldn't connect to Flickr. That happened because Fleace was running before his network had a chance to get going. I've added an extra 30 seconds of silent retries before the program will question whether you want to try again manually.

In addition, I had a request for some way of only downloading high-resolution wallpapers. Although I couldn't add that to this version, I did add an optional note beneath the thumbnail image in the preview window stating the dimensions of the full size image. This can be turned on in the options dialog.

Posted by James at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It has been noted that OpenOffice 2.0 is slow to start. One of the tricks that is used to keep users from being too annoyed whilst they wait it to start is to show a progress bar, which gives a visual indication of how long the user will have to wait. In fact, users prefer a longer wait with a progress bar than a slightly shorter wait without the progress bar.

In OpenOffice's case, on my computer at least, the progress bar is decidedly useless. When I start any of the OpenOffice programs, the progress bar pops up and reaches 100% in under half a second. It then stays in that state for another 8 seconds until the program has fully loaded. Whilst I believe that 8 seconds is a long time to wait for a simple program to load on a fast computer, an improvement in the relation between the progress bar and what is actually happening will go a long way to improving the end-user experience.

Posted by James at 5:47 PM | Permalink

If you've been checking the Pricelessware.org site for updates to their list of top freeware of 2004 then you've been missing out. For mysterious reasons that site has been abandoned, and its activity moved to Pricelesswarehome.org.

The 2005 list is available, though it is not as nicely formatted as the 2004 list. However, the all-important information is as reliable as ever.

Posted by James at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The May 2005 edition of Australian Personal Computer magazine is carrying the Personal edition of Borland Delphi 2005. I usually find that APC is so content-free that it's not even worth browsing, but I justified the purchase this month by thinking of it as a free magazine attached to a $10 copy of Delphi.

I have only had a cursory glance at the software so far, but it promises to unify the IDE for my last two major projects, FractalPeaks (.Net, done in C# Builder) and WimpWall (Delphi 6). The old C# Builder was pleasantly lightweight, but carried some unfortunate bugs, so this new version is welcome. The new Delphi, on the other hand, carries a sense of forboding, given that no version since 3 has improved on its predecessor.

Update 3 Jan 2006: The French version can be downloaded from Developpez.com.

You may also still be able to order back issues of magazines which had it on their cover discs. These include:

• Australian Personal Computer - May 2005 - now sold out
• Germany's PC Magazin - May 2005
• UK's PC Plus Issue 232
• UK's PC Pro - May 2005

Update 5 Oct 2006: Doom9 has another source, and good information about 3rd-party fixes.

Posted by James at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Apart from the electric lawnmower, the NumLock key, and the perm, NASA hasn't produced much that has been useful to mankind. But that has changed with their Open Source World Wind software, which anyone with even a vague interest in geography would love. It lets you zoom in from outer space down to ground level, to view cities, streets, and even cars in close up. Even better, height data is used, so mountains and valleys are realistically portrayed in full 3D.

There are lots of different data sets to choose from. The most detailed is the USGS urban area ortho, but it only has data for some US cities. Community LandSat (Pseudo Color) seems pretty good for many areas. NASA is busy processing more data, so higher resolutions should be available soon.

In use, the software downloads large amounts of data, so it may be a little slow if you don't have broadband. On my 6Mb/s connection I have to sometimes wait up to a minute for more detailed landscapes to be drawn. However, it can be strangely mesmerising watching a mountainous landscape such as New Zealand being gradually drawn in increasing realism.

I have demonstrated it to my family and other relatives passing by, and they have been universally impressed. And the fact that this is a free gift from NASA makes it a guilt-free experience.

Posted by James at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday I unleashed FractalPeaks, my 3D fractal explorer, on to the world. Unfortunately, it appears that the world is not ready. The trouble is that I wrote it using Microsoft's latest technology, the .NET Framework and Managed DirectX 9c. Whilst it has been great for the developer, it appears that non-developers will have a hard time getting their machines capable of running it.

I assumed that it would just be a matter of installing the .Net Framework and DirectX, but it seems that DirectX does not by default install the managed extensions required by .NET.

Once I've found out more about this whole topic I'll update my instuctions on installing FractalPeaks. I know that it's possible because the delightful MediaPortal has no problem; they don't even require the installation of DirectX with managed extensions. I might have to peek into their source code (one of the many benefits of open source).

After that's all sorted I'll do some more interesting blog articles about FractalPeaks itself.

Posted by James at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I used to use Photoshop to edit digital photos. But it was getting a bit long in the tooth, so I switched over to the Gimp, which has more than enough functionality for my needs. But, with the recent release of Picasa 2, I felt obliged to give it a go. I had tried Picasa before, but I didn't seem to offer enough for me to learn how it worked properly. This version seemed to offer a lot more, so it looked to be in my interests to fully explore it.

I'm used to graphics editors, where you load a picture, edit it, then save it, often to a different file. Picasa is a photo manager, not just a photo editor, so it works a bit differently. To load a picture, the picture must be in one of the folders that Picasa is monitoring.

When you modify a picture in Picasa, perhaps crop it, and do some red-eye reduction, then Picasa uses its picasa.ini file (stored in the same folder as the photo) to store the details of the modifications that you make. Although within Picasa it looks like the picture has changed, it hasn't really. Picasa never modifies your original picture. However, when you want to use the modified picture outside of Picasa then you can export it, or do as Save As.

This is a whole new way of operating for me. Instead of ending up with a multitude of altered pictures, I end up with the original plus a description of the modifications. For example, if I want to email the picture using Picasa's built-in Gmail facility, then I don't even need to export the picture, and it can be resized automatically.

Briefly:
- The picture tuning features are much easier to use than The Gimp's (and Photoshop's), so you're much more likely to fix up pictures before you get them printed.

- I used Picasa's labelling feature to categorise the pictures that I will be sending off to get printed. It's very similar to Gmail's label system.

- You can make Picasa rename your photos to include the date in the filename of the photo. Then, when they get printed professionally, this information will be printed on the back.

Finally, and most importantly, everything comes together in a package with such a great UI that anyone can have a go a fixing and organising their photos. And it's free.

Posted by James at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been running Windows 2000 Professional since beta 3 in 1999. The only time that I've touched Windows XP was a brief play with an 64-bit beta a few months ago. It's just never been that enticing.

• prettier
• better software support (eg. Windows Media Player 10 is only available for XP)
• better security updates (eg. see problems with KB885835 and KB835732)
• the Wikipedia's list

• costs money
• uses more memory
• doesn't offer substantial improvements, as seen by the following table

  Marketing name	Internal name	Release date
  NT 4	NT 4	1996
  2000	NT 5	2000
  XP	NT 5.1	2001

Well, the price finally dropped far enough for me to overcome my pecuniary objections, so I bought it a few days ago. I was going to do a fresh installation (as recommended by most people on the net), but at the last moment switched to doing an upgrade just to see how well it would go. To my surprise, it went very well. When the system came up in XP for the first time, my desktop was just as I had left it. All of my programs appeared to work properly, and it seemed to be all systems go.

After a few days of use my summary of its use is:

• Boot time went from 2 minutes to 28 seconds (including POST), and restarting from hibernation from 35 seconds to 20 seconds).
• Most software looks much nicer. Even flashier widgets in Firefox make a difference.

• The Battle for Middle-Earth thought it was now a pirated copy, and insisted of killing armies for no reason in the middle of games. This was solved by reinstalling it.
• The flashy XP theme is barely configurable at all, with just three colour schemes, and no setting of specific colours.
• RAM usage has increased somewhat
• Sharing folders on Windows XP box with a Windows 98 PC broke. After some investigation I found out about a new security setting in XP that was not in Windows 2000. By default, accounts with blank passwords can't access file shares. The symptoms of this on the Win 98 box include a myriad of "access denied", "share not found", and "unknown error 31" messages. This can be easily remedied with the group policy editor (if you don't want to set a password).

Posted by James at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't mind the endless security patches for Windows 2000, except when they break something. In April, I mentioned how KB835732 broke my standby and hibernate timers. A similar problem presented itself after installing KB885835 a few days ago. In a Usenet post, Andrew Aronoff describes this in more detail:

Installation of MS04-044 (KB 885835) broke the S3 Standby
(suspend-to-RAM) timer on my system running W2K SP4. After
installation of the hotfix, the timer under Control Panel -> Power
Options -> Power Schemes (tab), "System standby:" would work if set to
5 minutes or less. The timer failed if set to 10 minutes or longer.
The timers for "Turn off monitor:" and "Turn off hard disks:" seemed
to work normally. The system would still go into standby via Start,
Shut Down..., Stand by.

Event Viewer, as usual for power management (PM), showed nothing.

Uninstallation of the hotfix restored full standby timer
functionality. Reinstallation of the hotfix broke the timer again.

Since all hardware and software on my system is otherwise working
normally, I fully expect this problem to be observed elsewhere.

<...>

I hope MS will fix this bug and, more importantly, test PM
functionality before releasing future security hotfixes.

Unfortunately, MS's track record is dismal. I already reported this
same problem after installing MS04-011 (KB 835732). (All but two of
the 25 files updated by MS04-044 were also updated by MS04-011.) The
Usenet post can be viewed here: http://tinyurl.com/5brk2 I also
reported it to MS Tech Support. The Microsoft case number is
SRX040507600406 AFAIK, there was never any followup.

Since the anomaly is identical in both hotfixes, it's obvious that MS
is omitting a step in hotfix testing to check for power management
compatibility. It's also obvious that posting here and reporting the
problem to MS Tech Support will, most likely, not result in a fix.
This post is therefore for info only. :-(

Some cynics might suggest that this is Microsoft's subtle way of forcing people to migrate to Windows XP, but I can't believe that a company as attuned to its customers as MS would attempt such a ploy.

Posted by James at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In my ongoing quest to replace all of my software with free alternatives I recently turned my attention to the venerable WinZip. I was looking for a utility with the following features:

• shell extension to add and extract (denoted shell)
• pleasant streamlined graphical user interface (GUI)
• full command-line interface (CLI)
• 7-Zip support (the reigning champion in compression)

I gathered the most promising candidates from NoNags and the more discerning Pricelessware list and took them for a test drive.

QuickZip 4.5b11

• [GUI] non-standard UI - icons in weird places
• [GUI] after testing an archive, doesn't show the result
• [GUI] options dialog hideously complicated and over-tabbed
• [GUI] many poorly-explained extra features
• [CLI] no command-line operation
• website is obscure about software functionality

7-Zip 4.12b

• Open Source (feel-good factor)
• [GUI] Nice simple interface.
• [Shell] No right-click explorer menu after dragging (third-party fix available)
• [Shell] No icon in right-click explorer menu
• [CLI] Virtually complete command-line interface (similar to WinZip)
• [CLI] Some command-line options buggy or counterintutive, eg. exclude
  (Aside 2-Dec-2004: the usage may be obtuse, but the author is willing and prompt to respond to queries on the 7-Zip forum)
• Small.

IZArc 3.4.1.6

• [GUI] Modern configurable GUI.
• [GUI] Slight lack of GUI polish.
• [GUI] Excellent tree view of archives.
• [CLI] Only basic command-line interface.

TugZip 3.1

• [GUI] Modern configurable GUI.
• [GUI] Excellent tree view of archives.
• Comprehensive scripting language (dissimilar to WinZip, so not useful to people who don't want to learn another language)

ZipGenius 5.11

• [GUI] Modern GUI, but too fussy and unconfigurable.

As there were no products that completely satisfied my needs, I decided to stick with a combination of two, 7-Zip for its command-line interface, to use in scripts, and either IZArc or TugZip for the GUI and shell extensions. Of those two, IZArc's GUI was less polished, but made more sense to me, so that's my winner.

I was considering switching to using 7-Zip (.7z) archives as my default for backups, but have decided to stick with the old zip format for the moment, because few programs can test .7z archives, and their creation takes much longer than for similarly sized zips.

Finally, I must note my surprise at how much better the interfaces of IZArc (and perhaps these other archivers) is than WinZip 8 (and presumably 9). It's certainly well worth trialling free alternatives before you decide to purchase any software.

Posted by James at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The news that the main developers of Winamp have now left AOL has prompted me to give up hope that my major problem with Winamp would be resolved. Most of the music I listen to is via internet streaming audio, and usually it's from Icecast relays. However, when I use Winamp to listen it always gets stuck after a random time (4 seconds to an hour), with the display permanently at buffer 0%, until I press play, at which point the music plays on.

Despite much lurking on the Winamp.com forums I could never find a reasonable explanation, so I thought I might as well try other media players to see if any acted better. I knew that it was possible, because XMMS in Linux always worked perfectly on these same streams.

In summary, I was looking for a player that, in order of importance (most first):

• could play m3u and/or pls icecast streams without stopping
• was as small and functional as Winamp's classic winshade mode
• would scroll the song title in the task bar
• allowed volume adjustment by scroll-wheel with program active

I got the most advanced-looking and highest rated media players from Tucows.com and Nonags.com and had a play. I separated the results into those that could play streams continously for extended periods of time, and those that couldn't, or could only briefly.

Stream-friendly

• Quintessential Player (v4.51): Copes with most network errors, though not all. Lots of skins to choose from - found Minibar was about Winamp's size.
• Sonique (v1.96): perfect audio quality. Could not get pls or m3u to work. Not being developed any more, so no good new skins. No winshade mode. Didn't like the interface - much too cluttered.
• Windows Media Player (v9) (v10 unavailable for Windows 2000): no tiny usable skin found. Absolutely no problems playing streamed audio. Perfect recovery from breaks in the stream.

Stream problematic

• Coolplayer (v2.15). Could not play pls or m3u.
• Foobar2000 (v0.8.3). No built-in fancy UI. Stopped on network error.
• Media Player Classic (v6.4.8.2). Could not play pls or m3u streams.
• Real Player (v10.0). Stopped on network error.
• XMPlayer (v3.1). Promising, but couldn't cope with network errors.
• VLC (v0.8.1). Despite the network problems it was never brought to a complete halt. However, it did produce rather a lot of breaks in sound, which were enough to make it unlistenable. It did, however, provide a very useful message window, which told me exactly what was going on at all times, so I could see why the sound was breaking up. For this reason, I shall keep VLC installed - not as a media player, but as a media player debugger.

By the way, according to VLC, the errors are:

main warning: buffer is 48083 in advance, triggering downsampling
main warning: resampling stopped after 2656273 usec (drift: -85163)
main warning: buffer is 87911 late, triggering upsampling
main warning: audio drift is too big (122221), dropping buffer
main warning: audio drift is too big (120485), dropping buffer
main warning: audio drift is too big (-121331), clearing out
main warning: timing screwed, stopping resampling
main warning: mixer start isn't output start (-10120)
main warning: audio drift is too big (-122427), clearing out
main debug: audio output is starving (199650), playing silence

If any can give me a guess as to a possible cause then I'd be delighted to see your comment.

Posted by James at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For many years I've been dual-booting my PC, using Windows most of the time, but sometimes switching to some flavour of Linux for development or experimentation. With each release of Mandrake (and presumably other distributions) it becomes easier, such that today I can set up quite a complicated arrangement in only a few minutes. Here's how to install Mandrake 10.1 and add it to your Windows boot menu.

1. When you initially set up your hard disk leave one or two small partitions free at the end of the disk for Linux
2. Install Windows
3. Burn CD 1 of Mandrake to a CD-RW (you won't need it after installation - just download packages from the internet)
4. Boot from Mandrake CD and install
5. Install the bootloader to your Linux partition (not your Windows partition) - it'll probably end in 5 or 6, eg /sda6
6. Boot with Mandrake CD in rescue mode
7. From rescue menu - mount disks
8. From rescue menu - go to console
9. Copy boot sector to from Linux partition to Windows partition, eg. dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/mnt/win_c/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1
10. Edit boot.ini in Windows partition to show Linux, eg. add c:\bootsect.lnx = "Linux (Mandrake)"

Obviously there's a lot more detail about these steps in the relevant Linux HOW-TOs, but I think it shows how straightforward things have become.

Posted by James at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I recently installed Windows XP on a freshly-built computer I found that the rather necessary Windows Update feature was not working. After much fiddling, uninstalling and installing I found a solution documented on Computing.Net, involving re-registering the Windows Update client:

1. Quit all programs that are running.

2. Click Start, and then click Run.

3. Type "regsvr32 jscript.dll" (without the quotation marks), and then click OK.

4. When you receive the "DllRegisterServer in urlmon.dll succeeded" message, click OK.

If this does not resolve the problem, repeat inputting the following commands and click OK after each command.

regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wuauserv.dll (May have the error " DllRegisterServer entry point was not found". It is normal.)
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll
regsvr32 iuengine.dll (May have the error " DllRegisterServer entry point was not found". It is normal.)

Posted by James at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I like to keep my Windows 2000 system tray clean and tidy, I do my best to remove icons that I do not find necessary. The latest of these is for Ahead's packet-writing software InCD, which has a remarkably ugly yellow blob to denote that InCD is running, and that the optical drive is empty.

If you right-click on the icon and choose options, then you will see that you can tick 'Hide tray icon'. However, what if you do this, but decide later that you want the icon back? Well, one option is to right-click the drive in windows explorer and choose 'InCD Format'. This will not format straight away, but goes to the format options screen. From there you can return to the InCD options screen that you've been looking for, and then you can untick 'Hide tray icon'. It's a slightly roundabout route, but I think it's a fair comprimise for people who are fussy enough to remove the tray icon UI in the first place.

Posted by James at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although virus scanners are a necessary evil, resident virus scanners are not. Through some perhaps misguided sense of control of my PC I prefer to manually scan suspicious files as the need arises, keeping memory and CPU time available for more interesting purposes.

Being the frugal person that I am, I rely on the free and sufficient AVG Anti-Virus. It has served me well, but has had one small annoyance. Even though it is not performing its resident virus scanning function, it places an AVG icon in the system tray. Although this icon can be clicked, and the AVG Control Centre shut down, it always returns at startup.

When I reinstalled Windows a few weeks ago I took special care when installing AVG to include only the minimal components necessary. The result of this was that the icon no longer appears automatically. It turns up when I manually run the AVG Control Centre, but when I shut it down it remains closed.

Although it's a bit annoying for a product to not include a feature such as the ability to shut itself down once and for all after installation, I accept these little eccentricities as the price of using free software.

Posted by James at 9:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by James at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by James at 3:38 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by James at 9:36 PM | Permalink

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

Posted by James at 3:58 PM | Permalink

For the past week or so my Windows 2000 PC has refused to drop back to stand by mode of its own accord. It did if I told it to do so manually, or if the stand by timeout was under 10 minutes, but anything longer than that and it just ignored it.

I had thought that it might be related to the SATA disk I had just installed, but the system still went into stand by in Linux, and if the timeout was less than 10 minutes, so that didn't really make sense.

Now, I have learnt that it was caused by Microsoft's security patch KB835732.

Installation of MS04-011 (KB 835732) broke the S3 Standby
(suspend-to-RAM) timer on my system running W2K SP4. After
installation of the hotfix, the timer under Control Panel -> Power
Options -> Power Schemes (tab), "System standby:" would work if set to
5 minutes or less. The timer failed if set to 10 minutes or longer.
The timer for "Turn off monitor:" continued to work normally; that for
"Turn off hard disks:" was erratic. The system would still go into
standby via Start, Shut Down..., Stand by.

Event Viewer, as usual for power management (PM), showed nothing. I'm
unaware of any tool (resource kit or third party) to troubleshoot W2K
PM.

Uninstallation of the hot fix restored full standby timer
functionality. Reinstallation of the hotfix broke the timer again.

Sure enough, removing that patch fixed the problem. As of this time, Microsoft has not acknowledged this problem with the patch, but its problems are mentioned on The Register.

Update (6 June 2004) This problem is mentioned on Annoyances.org, but without a solution yet.

Posted by James at 1:45 PM | Permalink

A month or so ago the amount of spam I was receiving (30 a day) was getting annoying. Each day, 5 or so of these junk mails would get past my filters, and I'd have to manually delete them. Since making some changes, and installing some nice new software, I now spend only a couple of minutes every week on spam-related activities. I've had one spam get past my filters in the past week - well, I think it was spam. I couldn't actually work out what it was, as it didn't appear to be advertising. It seemed like just a misdirected mail, so I don't blame my filters for missing it.

I now use PopTray to check my POP mailbox, and delete emails on the server that are not properly addressed to me, or that SpamAssassin (run by the ISP before it reaches me) has labelled as absolutely positively spam. This gets rid of about 20 and 1 spams respectively each day.

I then retrieve any emails via the K9 proxy, which adds its own labels to spam. This filters another 2 spams a day, which my email program then moves into a junk folder, for safekeeping.

In the last month I've had only one email labelled as spam which wasn't. I found it during my 2 minutes of checking each week, where I look in K9 at the ratings of the emails it processed, and check the spams that it thought were least like spam.

This whole setup works so well that I am not irritated by spam at all nowadays. Bliss!

Posted by James at 10:16 PM | Permalink

It's been a while since I've seen a good comparison of word processors. It seems that Microsoft Word has become so dominant that it's overwhelmed the contenders into obscurity. So, I read Comparing Word Processors: A Writer's Perspective with interest.

The price is far too high for what you're getting, and the licensing can best be described as draconian. Three or four years ago Word was the best word processor on the market, but now that there are more choices available to consumers I strongly suggest you consider one of the other software programs in this review before making a purchasing decision. If you're dead-set on Word, try to find a copy of Word XP or 2000 instead of 2003.

Posted by James at 11:13 AM | Permalink

After getting broadband I thought I should put it to good use by upgrading my Linux Mandrake, version 8.1, to the almost latest 9.1. I was going to download the ISOs and install from CD, but it looked faster doing a network install of only the bits I needed.

Completing the network install was ridiculously easy. Download a bootdisk image and Windows bootdisk creator, then boot from the aforementioned disk. When prompted, tell the install program the FTP or HTTP site to install from, and leave for many hours.

That part of the upgrade went well. Booting into Mandrake was more troublesome. Note that this installation is on a triple boot system (Win98/Win2000/Linux), with the Win2000 bootloader as boss.

Firstly, LILO stopped at LI. To resolve this I copied the bootsector from linux to the FAT32 boot partition again. This procedure is described by Anandtech.

The lovely detailed Linux boot info started scrolling past, but disconcertingly stopped at:

warning: unable to open initial console

After some investigation this turned out to be a /dev problem. Apparently the /dev file system was completely rewritten for Mandrake 9, and the upgrade hadn't fully compesated for it. Anyway, I solved this by booting with rescue disk, mounting the root filesystem, doing a chroot, and running makedev /dev, as described here.

The final error stopping the boot was

mounting proc filesystem Bad file descriptor

So, I got into X Windows only to find all my menu items had disappeared. This was cured by going into MenuDrake and selecting a (new) menu type.

After doing all this I now agree with those who recommend installing Mandrake afresh, rather than upgrading.

Posted by James at 11:11 AM | Permalink