Author Archives: daniel

Online trip planners

Outlook now has links to MSN Mappoint, providing driving directions. Though I never drive in or out of central Melbourne unless I absolutely have to, I decided to see if it and a competitor, Multimap.com, could plot me a path home.

The main problems with these types of map sites is

  • the data is inadequate (often a problem with international companies trying to cover lots of cities), or
  • the mapping software decides you should do something wacky (which I’ll admit, is often down to the data again, though sometimes it seems to be the algorithms used)

Mappoint wanted to know which of two identical “247 Flinders Lane” addresses I wanted to use. I tried both, and both gave the wrong position along Flinders Lane. (Not bad, but a search for an address on Collins Street gave me 8 to choose from.)

Mappoint question

Mappoint also told me to drive down Kingsway/Queens Road, then do a right hand turn at St Kilda Road. Most Melbourne locals would know that you can’t do a right hand turn there. Like, physically, you can’t. Queens Road passes under St Kilda Road. If you want to do a right hand turn, you have to do a left a bit earlier and go via Union Street.

Mappoint directions

Multimap found the right spot in Flinders Lane. It then suggested I go left into Elizabeth Street (okay), left into Flinders (okay), then right into St Kilda Road — wrong! No right turn allowed there.

Rather than send me straight down St Kilda Road, it had me take a right via Albert Road to Queens Road, then left via Union Street back onto St Kilda Road. Pointless and confusing.

But it gets better. Rather than drive straight down St Kilda Road/Brighton Road/Nepean Highway, it got me to do a quick diversion around some of the side streets of Elsternwick, before turning back onto the highway. WTF?!

And according to Street-Directory, one of those side streets is actually blocked off to through-traffic. Pure genius!

Multimap directions

Lest you give up and decide to catch public transport, rest assured, the Connex trip planner is no better. Instead of telling me to walk half a block to Flinders Street station, it instead got me to unnecessarily wait for a tram to go three blocks to Flagstaff station.

In the past it’s provided even more stupid directions, suggesting you catch a tram in the wrong direction, then another back again, or needlessly change trains.

(PT umbrella organisation Metlink is working on a better planner, and are considering feeding their data into the new Google PT planner, too.)

It seems no matter which way you’re travelling, it doesn’t pay to trust the online trip planners just yet.

Adventures with the Windows XP video screensaver

Doctor Who trailerA new trailer for Doctor Who, so time to switch my screensaver to playing videos again.

The old Windows XP Video Screensaver (once a semi-official MS Powertoy), in my humble opinion was always a bit dodgy (some of the options never worked, for instance, and it would stop working if you upgraded Windows Media Player 9 to version 10).

Happily it’s been superseded by a newer seemingly fully official Microsoft video screensaver (requires Windows genuine validation).

A catch though: the video I wanted to play was MPEG2, and both the old and new screensavers choked on it on one machine, even though MediaPlayer would happily play it. The whole machine would turn to mush.

Plan B was to try and convert the MPEG2 to WMV, by simply loading it into Windows Movie Maker. Oddly, WMM wouldn’t read it.

I noticed a process called igfxext.exe ended up grabbing way too much CPU than is sensible. The errant EXE is associated with Intel graphics adapters, and evidently under some circumstances decides to go ape when MPEG2s come along.

Through this page I found that PowerDVD (which evidently does some of the work playing MPEG2s) needed patching.

This done, and things started to behave. Almost. It wouldn’t crash, but performance was crap. Probably the onboard video not cutting it.

I tried Windows Movie Maker again. This time it worked. Converted it to WMV, plays okay now, and while the quality isn’t as good (what is the deal with Movie Maker and its restrictive output options, anyway?!), it hardly matters that much for a screensaver.

(The other machine has a decent video card, and plays the MPEG2 okay.)

New stuff in Gmail

Google has changed GMail around a bit in recent days.

“Move to trash” is now called “Delete”. Woo hoo.

A trash icon is next to items in the Trash folder.

View some attachments as HTML.

“Web clips” let you view RSS headlines on the GMail screen… but only if English (US) is your display language.

Disable the Insert key for good

I’ve finally got rid of the Insert key once and for all (and not just in MS-Word). Here’s how:

1. Download the Windows Resource kit. It’s the Windows Server 2003 edition, but will also work on XP. (Not supported on others, but hopefully Win2K and maybe some earlier versions?).

2. Run C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\remapkey.exe

3. On the top keyboard image, drag another key onto Insert. I made it another Shift key.

4. Save, reboot. Voila!

The catch? There had to be one, right? Shift-Insert no longer works for pasting things. You’ll have to Ctrl-V instead.

(Thanks to, of all things, The Washington Monthly).

Focus

Pet hate about Windows: when you open an application, or click around to get an application processing something, then flick to another task to get something else done while it happens, and it keeps grabbing focus even though it hasn’t finished.

Example culprits: Outlook 2003; Internet Explorer 6.

Now hear this, app writers: Maybe you can’t speed up your app so it does its thing faster. That’s okay, I can live with that. I can get on with something else while it thinks about things. What I don’t want to see is that something else interrupted by your splash screen. I don’t want to read your splash screen. I don’t care how nice your logo is or how authoritative your copyright message is. I don’t want my something else interrupted by your half-drawn application window randomly seeking attention while it’s thinking about things. And I don’t want it flashing in the taskbar unless it’s ready for my input.

And for heaven’s sake, if the app is busy, change the goddamn pointer to an hourglass, so I know it’s busy.

Rambling about Remote Desktop Connection aka Terminal Services

Remote Desktop Connection (aka Terminal Services) is a marvellous way of connecting to remote Windows computers. Okay, it isn’t completely cross-platform (server and client) and open source like VNC. It won’t get you onto the console like PCAnywhere (unless you’re already logged on at the box). But it’s free (for Windows users) and very fast (a major downfall of vanilla VNC over slower connections… say, anything less than oooh, about a T3).

It used to be that Microsoft guarded its Terminal Services technology like it was golddust. (Maybe they had paid Citrix a lot of dosh for the technology?) Even the TS client could only be obtained by running a special program on the server, which produced installation floppy images. When you installed, it saved your registration name/company back to the floppies, and chastised you if you tried to install again (“I’m gonna let you do it, but I’m very suspicious”), refusing thereafter to let you enter a different name. For a while, as far as my work installation of TS client was concerned, my name was Stanley.

Thankfully that’s all different now. Microsoft have realised it’s a way of selling more Windows licences. It’s been renamed to Remote Desktop Connection and comes built into Windows, though it may not get installed at setup time by default.

What’s super-dooper handy is XP Pro (and higher — but not XP Home) can be setup so you can connect into them from afar using Remote Desktop (Control Panel -> System -> Remote -> Allow users to connect remotely to this computer). Unfortunately it kicks off any user who is physically using the box when you do this on XP SP2, which allows a single user only. There is a hack for this to allow multiple users, though strictly speaking it’s a bit naughty, breaking the conditions of the EULA.

If Remote Desktop client is not already on your machine, here’s how to install it off the Windows CD. Or you can download it — this is intended for earlier versions of Windows, but should work in XP. It has the added bonus of being a better featured TS client than the old version of the TS Client, with mucho options, and a neato fullscreen mode.

(When I installed it the other day onto Win2K, I couldn’t find the icon afterwards and it doesn’t have its own directory. The icon is squirreled away in Accessories / Communications, or otherwise if you can’t find it, the EXE to run is %SystemRoot%\System32\mstsc.exe).

There’s an official Mac client too. And for Linux users wanting to connect to Windows, there’s a Linux client.

This page has general help in using it. It’s also possible to set up your server to connect via the web — useful if you’re battling with firewalls that preclude using a conventional client.

Playing around with Knoppix

Linux penguinMy 7-year-old son Jeremy shows a fascination for computers. He’s a pretty skilled Windows user (it’s what we run at home), and loves using my sister’s Mac laptop when we visit her. So I thought I’d show him Linux, in the easiest way possible: a bootable version.

Knoppix was tried first. The BitTorrent download (yes, there is a legitimate use for BitTorrent) came down the line at a blistering 150kbps. Simplicity itself to burn the ISO to a CD using Nero, and chuck it into the older of my two PCs.

Alas, ’twas not to be. After doing the auto-configuration thing, it stopped dead. This turned out to be my video card, an aging Diamond Viper V-550. Theoretically a good card (well, for five years ago), it’s hampered by a lack of support, not only from Microsoft via DirectX, but also apparently from Linux distributions. (I know they can’t support everything, but it’s particularly galling with DirectX, because earlier versions worked okay with it, and once you’ve got an incompatible later version, it’s impossible to downgrade, unless you’re feeling very brave or feel like re-installing the entire OS.)

It’s a cinch to change the BIOS settings to disable the Viper, and go for the on-board video, of course. Plus plug the monitor into the other socket. Just not quite the seamless experience I was looking for though.

It did boot up then, though the other thing Knoppix didn’t like was my USB mouse, so it was keyboard-only. Somewhere I have a USB to PS2 mouse adapter, which I can use for this.

By contrast, Knoppix booted up flawlessly on my newer PC, which evidently doesn’t have an orphaned graphics card and a weirdo mouse.

(Though when I rebooted into Windows XP, oddly it thought initially it had two monitors. Coincidence? Maybe.)

I could fiddle with Knoppix to get it working on the older PC, but time constraints and laziness may mean I try other bootable distros first. Other contenders include Ubuntu and Damn Small Linux.

Though now I come to think of it, if I want to do a bit more LAMP dabbling, I should look for something more permanent.

RSS isn’t mainstream yet

Scoble argues that RSS’s importance isn’t in how many people are using it, but who those people are.

He’s right, but the other point to make is that RSS isn’t mainstream yet. Email and the web are mainstream, but took years to catch on with the general public, even after being widely available. RSS is widely available, but only used by a minority of the general online population.

That will change, as the tools used by the great unwashed pick up and highlight RSS functionality. That’s not Newsgator or Firefox, but IE and Windows.

It’ll change as the influential early-adopters persuade others.

And it’ll change as the standard is sorted out — not just the XML, but how it’s advertised — that orange button needs to be ubiquituous, just like “www” and “.com” in URLs are now.

So if your site doesn’t support RSS now, it’s important to get it doing so very very soon.