May 16, 2007
The "Wow" Ended Yesterday
That's it, after putting up with Vista just over a month I've reformatted my laptop back to Windows XP. Vista may look pretty, and don't get me wrong, my beefed-up DELL XPS M1710 (2gb RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo T 7400) has enough juice to run Vista ... for home user that is.
Unfortunately, I'm not a typical home computer or business laptop user. I'm a developer and use my laptop for home development etc. Running Vista is putting extra strain that I don't need. I've put up with it for a while before deciding it ain't worth it. On top of that I have a few more grief with Vista:
- It's too damn chatty. Dialog boxes keep popping out asking me to do something. It's annoying. There's gotta be a way to turn this off.
- Windows Media Player (WMP) stutters near the end of the song. Something that I can't figure out how to fix yet, at the last few seconds of a song, WMP seems to have problem playing back and it introduces a couple of second of "WMP remix".
- WMP takes aaaages to move from one track to another if you force it to move.
- Heavy disk access. Vista seems to keep reading/writing the disk all the time. I've turned off indexing and disk IO is still noticeably (much) higher than XP.
- No nVidia driver for Vista just yet. nVidia hasn't released the GeForce Go 7800/7900 driver for Vista.
- It tries too hard (to be smart that is). There should be a "I know what I'm doing" option that will automatically set everything to "Advanced" mode. For example, not allowing you to do "select all" in read-only and protected folders is probably a life safer for some, but totally annoying for me.
Is it all doom for Vista then? I don't think so. For a start it's very good looking bordering MAC OS X' sexiness. Compare Vista to XP side-by-side you'll notice the big jump in UI.
Also most of my grief above can be attributed to my type of user (developer). A typical home user who use the computer for simple internet/email, games, simple Word & Excel will probably benefit for Vista's new features and the rather harsh safety options. I for one will wait until I absolutely have to upgrade to Vista.
Posted by vhadiant at 08:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 12, 2007
Fixing AVG after Vista upgrade
After the upgrade of my Dell's XPS M1710 to Windows Vista, AVG stopped working. It keeps complaining that my key is not valid, which is strange since it's a free product.
Initially I thought this was a simple problem, simply uninstall then re-install. Well I was wrong, it turned out to be quite serious and common problems. Despite following suggestions from AVG forums which other people seemed to be quite successful, I can't uninstall AVG. Downloading a new executable, run as Admin, uninstall doesn't work. Installing it over the existing install also doesn't work too well.
Simply put, I should have uninstalled AVG before upgrading to Vista. Anyway I thought I was screwed and need to reinstall Vista from scratch, kinda a drastic method. I'd rather not.
Well the solution turned out to be quite simple. Suddenly I realised what if I supplied AVG with a new and valid license? So if you double click AVG's installation, just before the install starts it'll show you the license (generated I presume) for you. So copy that license into a notepad. Reboot Vista, AVG will complain about the license thingy. Paste the license that you took down earlier and voila, it's all good.
Posted by vhadiant at 07:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 07, 2006
Using command line to install Windows Service
This usefull command is not the most intuitive command. The sc command allows you to install/delete Windows Services. I have used this nifty command quite often in the past project to remove erroneous Windows Service. Microsoft has a good KB article.
Things to watch out is the escaping of the binPath. If there are spaces in your binPath you must escape it using the " character which must be escaped again using the \ character.
For example:
c:\sc create MyService binPath= "\"c:\program files\my service\service.exe\""
Posted by vhadiant at 08:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 02, 2006
New photo gallery
Phew after four months on the road, I finally have a bit of time to do some website maintenance. First thing first is to migrate all my photos into the new Coppermine based gallery. I installed Coppermine just before I left for my trip, it is pretty powerful and customisable engine.
So migrated the photos, added the Creative Commons copyright and that's pretty much it. I still need to tweak bits and pieces of it, but I'm quite pleased that it's been working really well. This is my third attempt at online photo album heh, hopefully this Coppermine will stay for a while.
Posted by vhadiant at 05:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 07, 2006
Mac's Boot Camp
The drawing is on the wall and people have been trying to do it eversince Mac goes Intel. Well, now it's official.
What does this mean for Mac OS X? Is it a move by Apple to lean toward a yet another PC builder company? Or is it to attract PC gamers, who have paltry support for games running in Mac OS X? Maybe it's a damn good bait for a Windows PC users to try Mac. This certainly perk my interest. Not that I'll rush to buy one. However, before Boot Camp, I wouldn't even consider getting a Mac, regardless how good looking it is. But now I will at least consider it.
Posted by vhadiant at 07:55 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 07, 2005
Commerce Server 2002 and XP
The original Commerce Server 2002 can't be installed in XP causing a major headache for me to do a proof of concept for my next project. After asking The Oracle turned out that you can install Commerce Server 2002 in XP. You just have to download Commerce Server 2002 SP3 and install the SP3. You still need to original Commerce Server 2002 installation disc.
Microsoft® Commerce Server Service Pack 3 (Commerce Server SP3) includes a setup program that enables you to install Commerce 2002 Developer Edition on Windows® XP or Windows 2000 Professional.To install Commerce Server 2002 Developer Edition on Windows XP or Windows 2000 Professional :
1. On the Windows XP computer, download and extract Commerce Server SP3
2. Browse to the folder to which you extracted the service pack, and then double-click SetupDevEdition.exe.
3. When prompted, select the product installer (.msi file) for Commerce Server 2002 Developer Edition, and then proceed with the installation.
4. For Windows 2000 Professional, copy comdlg32.ocx from the \System32\Redist\MS\System folder to:\WinNT\System.
5. After installing Commerce Server 2002 Developer Edition, double-click SP3Setup.exe to apply Commerce Server SP3.
6. For instructions about running SP3Setup.exe, see Installing Commerce Server Service Pack 3 on One Computer.
Posted by vhadiant at 06:25 PM | TrackBack
November 18, 2005
Google Base
Posted by vhadiant at 08:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 13, 2005
Agent Ransack
Agent Ransack is a much better alternative than the Windows' standard search functionality and it supports regular expression too!
Use this if you don't want to install Google Desktop Search, MSN Desktop Search or enabling Windows Index Server service. It doesn't run in the background, create any indexes or that kind of stuff, kinda a (good) grep alternative for Windows.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 12, 2005
Google toolbar spell checker rocks!
Finally a spell check that works in almost all kind of web forms. No longer do I need to copy and paste from MS Word when blogging for spell checking, I can just use Google toolbar new spell check feature to check my blog post. It works beautifully with MovableType's text boxes. The only draw back is that it's a bit slow and even slower in Firefox. Now if only they have basic grammar check as well that will be gold.
Posted by vhadiant at 07:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 01, 2005
Windows Vista
Windows Vista (formerly "Longhorn"). It sounds so corny. Longhorn would have been a better choice, IMHO.
Disclaimer: I'm not good with names and couldn't figure out a name for what had become Sauce Reader.
Posted by vhadiant at 12:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 23, 2005
A necessary evil
VssReporter. Tool to quickly show who have done the changes since a certain point in time.
Posted by vhadiant at 12:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 09, 2005
700 spam a month
So I didn't clear my GMail spam folder for a month now and I have around 700 spams. As usual GMail still confuse some of the newsletter that I've subscribed and classify them as spam but it doesn't matter really. The one that I want to read I simply add the sender in my contact list and it'll never be classified as spam again.
Anyway 700 spam a month ... so that's more than 20 spam a day, not as bad as some other people's spam rate but can be debilitating if I have to do it manually. It becomes a chore, thank god for GMail.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 19, 2005
Piracy is Good
[Via Frank Arrigo]
A well written two part article by Mark Pesce:
Part 1: How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV
Part 2: The New Laws of Television
This is interesting as the Australian FTA is still have no f'ing idea about it: Seven's desperate ploy looks lost on viewers
Even the "analyst" (Peter Cox, of Peter J. Cox and Associates) quoted in that article haven't got a clue what he's talking about, check this out: "Anyone can spoil it for themselves by looking at the internet but it's a bit like reading the last page of a book before you've finished it."
Either that's a misquote or one of the dumbest statements ever made it to the newspaper. What do you mean spoiled, of course people is not going to be spoiled. You don't download the last episode, you download it in order buddy. Take BSG for example, the entire first season is available for download, would you download the last episode? Of course not! And this is coming for the err ... "expert". If these are the "experts" that the Australian FTA are using then they're really screwed.
Forget FTA, use channel BT exclusively and you'll never turn back. Commercial FTA (excluding SBS and ABC of course, I'm talking about 7, 9, and 10 here) are only good for the live sports broadcast, TV news, aussie soapies/reality TV if that's your thing and that's about it.
Posted by vhadiant at 01:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 11, 2005
Indonesian government pays $1 per unlicensed Windows XP
Nathan forwarded me this link. BSA reckons that 87% of all software in Indonesia are pirated. This is absolutely rubbish, crap, and utter nonsense. Once again BSA has proven that they really have no clue what they're talking about.
99% of all software in Indonesia are pirated.
Posted by vhadiant at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2005
Is it truly open?
In an article on BetaNews Jean Paoli from Microsoft answers the is it really 'Open' question.
Microsoft to 'Open' Office File Formats...
When faced with the decision of adopting open standards or remaining proprietary, Microsoft opted to preserve the "full fidelity" of past Office functionality and instead developed its own "open" XML-based format. In saying that the format is "open" Microsoft acquiesces to the state of Massachusetts. Under the state's "Open Standards" policy, a format is open if it is fully documented and anyone can use it.For comparison's sake, it should be noted that Adobe's PDF format is also designated as being "open" under the state's guidelines.
...
FWIW, to me as long it is properly documented without any hidden features left right and centre it is open.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 02, 2005
New Office will use XML as default format
I think we all have been expecting this for a while since Microsoft introduced the XML format in Office 2003. Now they're going full on and going to use XML (with zip compression) as their default Office format. It's certainly very interesting development and it'll make things hell lot easier for other software to be err compatible with MS Office. It'll be even more interesting how the other office suit will react on this news.
Not only portability with other office suites, but even a simple text indexing will now be easier. If you want to index the old MS Office document, you'd have to be able to extract the text first. This has somewhat become an industry by itself with tools costing tens of thousands dollars to do exactly this. With the new XML format it practically render those tools useless, well not straight away maybe but definitely less important.
Also worth noting that they picked the zip format for compression rather than the god-awful cab format. Will this trend to continue? Microsoft opening its own format and using more standard formats? Well I bloody hope so!
Now .. let's hope the PST format is next heh :) I'm dreaming I know, but hey who would have thought Microsoft will use XML format for their Office app 5 years ago?
Posted by vhadiant at 09:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 31, 2005
It's getting weird
OK now it's getting weird. My entries on Destination is appearing on Misspelt and now the duplicate is on the Panic! post. I suspect some database corruption.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 30, 2005
Lost 2 post.
Crap I just lost 2 posts from Misspelt, had to recreate the damn thing again. This is getting really annoying :(
Posted by vhadiant at 10:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2005
100 GB Blue Ray disc
100 GB disc holy cow ....
Posted by vhadiant at 07:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
