Monthly Archives: June 2005

ADSL breaks even

Well, iPrimus are selling 200Mb/mo ADSL for $13/mo, so that was cheap enough to drag me in. But it’s been weeks and the ADSL modem still hasn’t turned up. Should I buy my own and tell them to sod off? It’s meant to be ADSL2 capable…

Now all I need is a bulletproof OS that can hook up to the net at 256Mb/s without turning into a zombie. I’m thinking that Multimedia PC I’m building has to be turned on all the time, so perhaps to hang the modem off it and have it act as a secondary firewall and NAT. Yet another reason to use Fedora.

Fedora Core 4 is out now – do you think I should go there?

Green sites, dead pixels and Remote Desktop

Keep your web site green by hosting it in an environmentally sustainable data centre.

Unstick your dead pixels by flashing rapid colour changes through them. 60% success rate, apparently. What have you got to lose?

These guys claim to have got round the limitation of Windows XP Remote Desktop of only one user at a time, by replacing one of the Terminal Server DLLs with that from an older build of SP2.

Solaris goes open source

Sun has announced Solaris has gone open source — or at least bits of it, with the rest following soon. An interesting move, against what must be seen as the threat from Linux.

It’s not, of course, under the GNU licence, oh no, but under something called the Common Development and Distribution Licence, which Sun claims is basically pretty flexible, but without requiring derivative works to also be open source.

If you feel like trying it but don’t want the hassle of the 2.5Gb download, Solaris found its way onto magazine cover DVDs recently, including Australian Personal Computer.

Running Out Of Scissors and Clag in Firefox

Yesterday after a browser crash I suddenly lost the ability to cut and paste anything to, from and within Firefox. A little hunting told me my initialisation file, user.js, must have been corrupted and that it was – so corrupted it had disappeared completely.

The solution to not being able to cut, copy or paste in Firefox is thankfully simple. If you have a user.js file simply paste the following in to it :

user_pref(“capability.policy.policynames”, “allowclipboard”);
user_pref(“capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.cutcopy”,
“allAccess”);
user_pref(“capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.paste”, “allAccess”);

If you don’t have, or can’t find, your user.js file download the ChromEdit extension from http://cdn.mozdev.org/chromedit/, select the user.js tab and paste the above in to the box.

Of course, if you’ve found this page via Google you probably have the problem and can’t cut and paste from here so you may need the IE View (view this page in IE) extension.

Music in Powerpoint

George Skarbek’s column in The Age this week answers this question:

Q: How can I set up a music file to play through an entire PowerPoint presentation? I can get it into one slide, but it stops when the slide changes. P. Turnham

My suggested answer: You shouldn’t. Are you trying to fecking torture your audience or what? Just because you found some tinny bit of computer music that would have the original composer turning in their grave doesn’t mean anybody else wants to hear it, let alone for the duration of a complete presentation. It’s crap, dude, pure crap.

Show your slides, know your facts, talk to your audience, take questions at the end, and don’t over-do the cutesy clipart or animations. That’s how to do it.

Open right here please

Oi you browser writers, this is what I want: When I right-click a link, I can open in a new window or a new tab. Please give me an option to open in the window/tab I’m already in (overriding the web site’s wish to open in a new one).

Mac… Intel inside

Apple has announced Power-PC OS-X applications will run on the future Intel Macs via an emulation layer called Rosetta, developed by some ex-Manchester Uni people. Obviously there has to be a performance hit in doing so, but you’d hope by the time the Intel Macs hit the streets, processor speeds would have come along enough that it’s not very noticeable, at least over today’s Macs.

What may be interesting is how Virtual PC for Mac runs on Intel Macs. An upgraded Intel version I mean, not the PowerPC version under Rosetta!

It now sounds as if the new Macs will have not just chips made by Intel, but chips that are theoretically the x86 we all know and love. If so, and assuming Virtual PC gets a re-write, people who love Macs but have to run a little bit of Windows software may be in for a very pleasant surprise when the new Macs arrive.

Pssst… Wanna buy a domain?

I’ve owned custard.net.au for many years. It’s named after my (perhaps poorly thought-up) business name. Indeed, net.au and com.au names have to be attached to a registered business name.

It used to be that generic .com.au names weren’t generally available, so custard.net.au couldn’t be bought — though sausage.com.au somehow got through the net. When they opened them up, some bakery grabbed custard.com.au, then completely failed to use it.

I forgot all about this until today, when the good folk at Melbourne IT, Australia’s longest running registrar, gave me a ring to let me know it had lapsed, and asked if I’d like to buy it.

The lady on the phone made one fatal mistake: she tried to sell it as part of a package, with some kind of pre-built placeholder whiz-bang web site attached to it, for the grand total of A$595. It should have been obvious from looking at my existing site that not only do I know how to put a web site up, but also that I’m not exactly doing stellar things with the site I do have, so it’s not exactly compelling for me to own the .com.au. And therefore if I wanted to buy the domain, it would be for as little dosh as possible. She really should have pitched it at the budget level.

I declined. Though of course, depending on how quickly I move, I could buy it anyway, though them or anybody else.

But I don’t think I will. It’s a business name I haven’t been entirely comfortable with recently, and it’s only maintained because I have to have a shelf-company to do contracting work through (well, and because breaking my existing email addresses and web pages hosted on it is against my religion).

The Cheek!

I just got a spam, yawn, we all say – but I noticed this one in the Outlook notification has a message ‘Get a decent capable HTML mail program’.

Not only are they spamming me, but now they’re insulting me too.

IE Gets Tabs

Internet Explorer now has tabs.

You can get them by installing the MSN Toolbar, which should also give you the fantastic (yes, I a truly wonderful Microsoft product, even it it based on Lookout) MSN desktop search.

I’ve only just installed it but it looks okay so far.

Just a user on Windows

This topic has come up in discussions at work and at home and elsewhere recently: You shouldn’t need to be Administrator to run software. This has one of the primary failings of Windows over the years, and something which Linux and Apple and others have led the way.

The guidelines for applications go into some detail on this*. Most of it comes down to your application working out where it should be writing files and settings (and it’s only a single API call to find out) and using those locations. Not rocket science.

Yet it lives on… even while Microsoft is encouraging people not to routinely run as Administrator, far too many Windows applications (even those provided by Microsoft) continue to assume the user has permissions to write anywhere on the disk.

This article, for instance, lists a couple of dozen recent Microsoft games that have to be run as Administrator to work (and misinforms about the Runas command, to boot. Hint: you need to specify the user as /user:X, not just /X).

Unfortunately, the one I’m trying to get working, Train Simulator, is resistant to this solution, and won’t work even if you give all users full access to its own directory and to its entries under HKey_LocalMachine in the registry. Grrrrrr.

From the sounds of it, the coming versions of Windows (Longhorn) and IE and other applications will be better at this, with default users having few system privileges. And not before time.

*WTF did they make it an EXE download, with a compressed Word document inside? Could they make it any LESS friendly for non-Wintel users to read? How’s about using HTML fellas, or at least PDF?

Office goes XML

Microsoft has announced the next version of Office will use XML by default — that is, Word, Excel and Powerpoint will use XML documents embedded in Zip files. They will also issue updates to those Office products back to the 2000 versions so they can use the new formats.

The XML will be documented, and open — to the extent that you will need to acquire a free licence from Microsoft to use it, on their terms presumably.

The terms of the licence will be interesting. You could contrast this to the MDB (Jet) format, which while it isn’t XML, and isn’t an open format, is quite well documented in its use via the various Microsoft libraries you can use to get at it (ADO/MDAC, DAO, etc). It’s interesting to note that Jet is royalty free, so you can give Jet databases to anybody if you have a Microsoft developer tool, though the one thing you can’t do is build a solution that does much the same thing as Microsoft Access. (It’s a similar story for all their other develop tools).

So the question is: will the MS licence preclude people from building, say, an alternative word processor or spreadsheet that can read and write the format? Will OpenOffice be able to use the format for interopability?

They imply no such restrictions will exist, with this to say on whether opposing products will make use of the format: Customers also know that the true value of a desktop application is not the format in which data is stored but the full breadth of capabilities offered by that application, along with the quality and security of the user experience that it provides — Steven Sinofsky, Senior VP, Office.

Obviously switching to XML opens up a number of possibilities, making it much easier for third party applications to delve into documents to read/write data, without mucking about in the Office object models (which in turn ties you to COM and Windows). You could use XSLT to convert documents into other formats, or to display on new devices or applications.

It should lead to interesting developments, and let’s hope the other Office applications follow suit.