Author Archives: daniel

Letting non-Admin users see the calendar

Some time ago I ranted about the Windows date/time control (double-click on the clock) not being accessible to mere (non-Admin) users on Win2K. This is an issue because a lot of people use it as a calendar to check dates, even if they have no intention of changing the date/time setting.

Raymond Chen writes that to use it in that way causes all kinds of havoc on older versions of Windows, and points us to an article which explains how to let non-Power/Admin users see the calendar. (It’s on a blog which I may have to read in more detail, about running Windows with non-Admin rights.)

Paint.net

Sick of MS Paint? Courtesy of the good people at Washington State University, try its free (and open source) replacement: Paint.Net. Packed with features, though a little slow on some computers if you leave the handy dandy transparent windows turned on.

While the multiple layers are great for a freebie product, would you honestly want to save all your graphical IP in its rare PDN format? Though arguably it’s at least partially future-proof as it’s open-source.

Paint.net requires the .Net Framework. By the way, how silly is this: the .Net home page contains no link to the Framework download. Obviously it’s a marketing site targetted at people who might be convinced to take on .Net as part of their IT strategy, but surely some of the people who hit it would be looking for the download so they can run some .Net program. Thankfully it is offered via Windows Update.

Hotspots, iPod and the death of cassettes

The Hotspot index says Melbourne has 26,243 people per hotspot. Sydney comes in at 36,000, Australia as a whole at 42,850. US 38,632. UK 22,963. But the modern Asian megacities beat all, with HK at 19,654 and Singapore 12,604. In Melbourne (and I assume other cities) they were investigating the idea of hotspots on trains, which could be a moneyspinner. Would almost make an hour-long commute from somewhere like Frankston or Belgrave bearable.

The Queen has an iPod. Hmmm, can’t see her rocking out to Bohemian Rhapsody.

Meanwhile MP3 players and CDs appear to be killing off cassettes. Yeah, and good riddance, say I. Poor sound quality and no random access combined with a fragile physical media. But it does remind me of a classic line from Alas Smith & Jones: “What is Dolby? It’s basically a very complicated system for playing cassettes with the little green light on, or off.”

The pros and cons of Windows Movie Maker

The pros and cons of Windows (XP) Movie Maker 2.1.

Good: It’s easy to use, it’s a freebie with WinXP, it produces nice looking results.

Bad: It will only output MiniDV (huge files) or Windows Media (which a lot of people can’t play). Would it have killed them to at least let you spit MPEG out of it? It’s a very 1994 attitude towards interopability. On the other hand, if they’d done so, they’d probably have Adobe and ULead screaming about monopolies.

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.

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).

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?