I’m replaying network traffic at 1000 packets per second into a vmware client that’s hosted on a vista machine. It’s losing quite a few packets. the Vista OS does not appear to be losing the packets, they are simple missing on the guest operating system. This is a lot like crap, really.
No unicode file names in cygwin
Not always a problem. Except when I’ve got international characters in my filenames. Which seems to be quite common with the import albums I’m downloading.
Dang. There is a patcharound, but it’s unsupported. Honestly, this backwards compatibility is a pain in the ass.
The next issue is cygwin/X. It’s hanging on Vista. Seems to be related to dwm and the pretty aero effects and the occasional toggle to non-aero mode caused by some applications (not java 1.6, though).
Fascinating concept of ‘sharing’ in Vista
It turns out that if the privileges on a file/folder contain users/groups other than the standard set (Owner – explicit or CREATOR OWNER, SYSTEM and for the most part Administrators) then it assumes that you’re sharing it – even if the users in question have no privileges on the file. While I agree with the idea in concept, the terminology is too vague. There’s sharing, in the local concept – which is to say that the privileges are relaxed enough to allow access to the file by users other than yourself and then there’s sharing in the remote sense – which is to say that the file can be accessed from a remote system. Honestly, I’d not have used the moniker of ‘sharing’ the file.
hardware DEP on vista has interesting interactions
Well vista is being a bit of a pain. When hardware DEP was switched on in XP service pack 2, I immediately went and turned on the ‘opt out’ policy – i.e. I would selectively switch on the applications that needed to have hardware DEP disabled. Most of my applications worked well, and the few exceptions were easy to take care of.
For some bizarre reason I don’t get the option of disabling hardware dep on applications that crash under vista; or at least it may be selective.
dvdidle pro is one of those applications which started crashing under Vista. The problem was that it only said ‘this program has stopped working’, no explanations given. When I went and manually disabled DEP for it it all started running just fine again. I prefer to have a longer lasting battery, thank you very much.
nview is in conflict with copernic
Let’s see. I have copernic desktop search, which injects itself into pretty much every process that’s running on my desktop.
then we have the nvidia nview desktop manager, which is pretty useful in a multi-monitor setting. It also insinuates itself into every process that runs on the desktop.
The end result … they keep hitting each other over the back of the head.
Evil steam keeping the prices jacked up
Steam is a great idea. You get to download your games and you can play anywhere that you can log in to steam. The problem is that the prices of the games are a bit on the high side. For example today Eidos have announced a load of their games are now on steam. Hitman: blood money is $35.95. It’s cheaper to walk into your local game store and get it there.
For some reason the re-release on steam pumps the price up over what you can get in the stores. And then it stays there. You get the occasional reduction in price, but overall the price of each game remains reasonably static for it’s life on the system. Which is frustrating.
swapping, binaries and the pagefile attack
It was something brought up by Joanna Rutkowska that her original pagefile attack on Vista was now stalled because Microsoft removed the ability of administrative users to perform write operations on the physical disk. So what happens to all those developers of undelete utilities (use a second disk?).
Firstly, lets look at the attack in more detail. What happens is that the kernel is forced to swap out pages of memory from drivers that are loaded in the kernel. These pages are swapped out to disk. I for one find this to be an incredibly stupid place to swap out the pages, as after all, until the kernel is completely done with a driver the original copy remains on disk.
Ok, maybe it had something to do with the new paging mentality of vista (you can page onto a usb memory device if it’s fast enough).
Damn, I’m talking myself out of my own argument.
No, paging of code from binaries should revert to the on-disk copy unless they have made COW modifications to their segments (does windows do this?)
My Frelling Documents
The old new thing has a short article about the use of the My Documents, which links to a short entry about the use of the Documents folder on the Mac.
Let’s see how many folders I have on my little box that are not of my creation
05/05/2006 13:39 <DIR> ACT Projects 05/05/2006 13:40 <DIR> AdobeStockPhotos 24/11/2006 19:30 <DIR> Bluetooth Exchange Folder 04/12/2006 22:29 <DIR> Borland Studio Projects 23/08/2006 17:15 <DIR> History 04/05/2006 14:02 <DIR> InterVideo 06/12/2006 22:01 <DIR> Java Development 12/10/2006 13:07 <DIR> My Albums 05/05/2006 13:49 <DIR> My Data Sources 01/11/2006 15:29 <DIR> My Digital Editions 29/12/2006 03:06 <DIR> My Downloads 05/08/2006 16:19 <DIR> My DVDs 08/08/2006 18:26 <DIR> My Games 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> My MMS 25/12/2006 21:04 <DIR> My Music 28/12/2006 11:42 <DIR> My Pictures 11/05/2006 10:19 <DIR> My Received Files 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> My Shapes 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> My Skype Content 11/05/2006 10:19 <DIR> My Skype Pictures 27/12/2006 22:10 <DIR> My Videos 07/12/2006 14:43 <DIR> My Virtual Machines 21/12/2006 09:34 <DIR> My Widgets 12/12/2006 10:11 <DIR> Nero Recode 05/05/2006 13:53 <DIR> NeroVision 27/11/2006 14:40 <DIR> PSP Games 27/11/2006 14:56 <DIR> PSP Sync 06/10/2006 17:18 <DIR> Rogue Trooper 05/05/2006 18:23 <DIR> SimCity 4 15/10/2006 23:57 <DIR> Source Insight 05/10/2006 20:16 <DIR> Tomb Raider - Legend 05/05/2006 13:59 <DIR> TT Installer Logs 14/11/2006 12:14 <DIR> Updater 05/05/2006 13:37 <DIR> Visual FoxPro Projects 17/11/2006 22:39 <DIR> Visual Studio 2005 25/09/2006 18:02 <DIR> Visual Studio Projects
I mean, what the frel is TT Installer logs? For the most part, all code goes into a version controlled sub directory, which is not under my documents (that would be silly). Bleugh… the save game location being under My Games is fine, but not in my documents; maybe under Application Data/Local Settings/Games would make more sense. You can’t load them except from the game so why have them there.
Double agent… enjoyable, but buggy
Finally deactivated that fracking red mercury bomb. For the last mission I decided that all bets were off for all the other characters in the game – really should not have done that as it sent my stats into the floor. Prior to this mission it was practically 100% intact bad guys, for some places. Well, leaving the boat blow up doesn’t count, does it?
don’t pass your shortcuts through the installer
God, this one really annoys me. I’ve installed an application and it puts the shortcuts into the root of all programs. I move it where I want it to be (There was no choice on install). Then I run said program. Up pops the windows installer and recreates the shortcuts in the root of the start menu.
You ignorant stupid rat b*****d wh***son of a b****h. What; do you think you own my computer? Away with you and your crappy force fix of my choices as a customer. This complaint brought to you by shite software and a harkening back to why is there no programmatic access to the Start menu pin list. Thank you for small mercies.