Daniel’s new box – part 2

Part 2. Took the day off to pick up the machine. My friendly computer shop guy let me know he’d found a better keyboard/mouse bundle which saved me a few bucks, so the total cost was exactly $1200.

12:25. Just the basics plugged in — monitor, mouse, keyboard. Power it up. Certainly boots into XP fast. “27 days left for activation.”

Fiddle around with the defaults. The shop thoughtfully named the main account after my company name, but I want it to be Daniel… try renaming it, but the Docs & Settings subdirectory won’t rename. MyDocuments can be moved, but not its parent. So eventually I just create a fresh account for myself. Accounts for the kids too — no Administrator privileges for them, oh no.

14:10. Speakers plugged in and working. More playing about with settings (Hello Windows Classic theme). Tested a DVD. All works well though the eject button on the drive isn’t overly responsive. Hooray, the bundled PowerDVD happily grabs frames, something I sometimes want to do. The bundled Nero looks a bit light-on though… will want to be getting a real copy for DVD burning.

That’ll do for now, other stuff to do.

New console wars start

Microsoft announces a bunch of XBox 360 game collaborations and confirms XBox 360 will be compatible with (old) XBox games, though there’s some doubt over how it will be achieved, and evidently it won’t be clean: Microsoft representatives did say they would start with more popular titles such as “Halo,” then move down the line.. Yeuch, sounds messy.

Meanwhile Sony has pulled the covers off the Playstation 3, with what sound like some very impressive performance stats.

Oh, and some mob called Nintendo with a console called Revolution appears to be destined yet again for third place.

(Thanks Tony)

Daniel’s new box – part 1

I’ve got a new PC. After the old one died, I’ve been surviving on a single machine for a while, but it was time to have a second one again, if only so both the kids can play games at once while I’m busy on the XBox!

Part 1… the purchase. Well I considered various things…

Notebook or desktop? Notebooks are getting more powerful, and I love the idea of surfing from the couch. But really I need a good, speedy workhorse machine with plenty of connections.

Mac or Windows or Linux? My brother-in-law is a strong Mac advocate, and I love my iPod, but ultimately I wanted to stay in my comfort zone. I’ve used Windows for many years, at work and at home, and I’ll continue to do so for quite some time. And on occasion I need to do work from home, and some of that involves Microsoft proprietary tools (cough, cough) like Visual Basic. So for now it’s gotta be Windows.

Which vendor? I’ve had my share of little companies and of big ones when buying PCs. But over the years I’ve heard from various friends about the good work of Landmark Computers, a medium-sized company here in Melbourne. So I decided to try them.

So I went along last Thursday to their city shop and talked to one of their guys, figured out what I wanted by starting with their “Predator” model, fiddled the config a bit (no monitor as I already had one, no floppy, no modem, 1Gb RAM, XP Pro instead of Home, that kind of thing) and put in the order. I was hoping it’d be ready by Saturday, as it would be very convenient to drive in and get it. They said they couldn’t promise that, so points for honesty.

On Friday they rang to say there was an issue with the graphics card, and if it was okay they’d bump me to a higher model for an extra $25. They also said they’d go for a better case for no extra cost, and that it wouldn’t be ready before Monday. Cool, I replied.

Stand by for part 2…

Xbox 360

XBox 360As everyone on the planet would know by now, Microsoft has revealed the design of the new version of the XBox — which they’ve called the XBox 360, which shows the marketing bods have won over the dev geeks, who I’m sure would have been happy to call it the XBox 2.0.

There’s a bunch of info on the hardware specs which make it sound suitably groovy, with the most notable thing being a move away from Intel CPUs over to the Power PC. Presumably this will give it more power for the money, which after all is MS’s money, since it’s not like Wintel machines where they just tell the manufacturers the spec — oh no, this thing they have to build themselves, so they’ll want it to be as cheap as possible.

There seems to be no official word on XBox 1 compatibility with this thing, though evidently a user survey hinted that the 360 would play the old games. They must have some pretty good brains working on getting that going, but then I suppose these days you can run PC software on Macs using Virtual PC, so software Intel emulation on a PowerPC isn’t anything new.

And the price and availability? Well they’re saying end of the year for US and Japan (and Europe???). The rest of us will have to wait for sometime next year. With the price of the console likely to be about double what an XBox costs now, it remains to be seen if the games for it will really blow people away enough to shell out for it though.

Hey I wonder if, unlike the PS2, it’ll stand up like in all the pictures without you having to buy an optional stand?

Ten years ago…

Yesterday, I bought a computer. With a bit of luck it’ll be ready on Saturday.

As it happens, it’s not quite ten years since I bought my first “new” PC. (Before that I’d used 8-bit computers and an aging 286.)

Just for a little nostalgia, here is part of the advert from the company I bought it from all those years ago, the now defunct Rod Irving Electronics, of A’Beckett Street in Melbourne. This is from the 6th June 1995 edition of The Age “Green Guide”.

The system I bought from them was the Pentium 60 on the right hand side. I’m sure you’ll be impressed at the spec, as well as the marketing. (At the time, the Australian Peso was worth about USD0.60, by the way).

Rod Irving Electronics catalogue from 1995

This computer was finally disposed of in rather spectacular fashion in 2003, though the speakers and that mighty 4x CD player still work (currently stored as spares).

MSDN fun

A couple of rather silly-sounding entries from MSDN…

Visual Basic: Class ContainedControls

Member of VBRUN – A collection that allows access to the controls contained within the control that were added to the control by the developer who uses the control. — What?

Win32 API: DeleteFile (via Josh)

Windows 95: The DeleteFile function deletes a file even if it is open for normal I/O or as a memory-mapped file. To prevent loss of data, close files before attempting to delete them. — uh huh.

New iTunes stores

iPod (from apple.com)Apple has opened new iTunes stores in… Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with a free track for every Swiss citizen. (Großmutter! Schnell! Was ist Ihr voller Name und Geburtsdatum?)

And Australia? Well The Register says It was claimed this week that only major label troubles prevented the company from opening ITMS Australia last month as planned. Damn labels.

Meanwhile Apple continues to dominate in sales of music players, with new stats showing the iPod Shuffle has more than half of the US flash player market, and iTunes recently sold its 350 millionth song download.

All this is good news for the continued availability of non-copy-protected music. While Apple continues to sell and support MP3, but not WMA, and remains dominant in sales of hardware, MP3 will remain strong.

I don’t want a music format that’s copy protected. I don’t want to pay for music and have it die with my player. Like CDs, it has to last (I’ve got 17 year old discs that are still going strong) and be copyable, so I can move the music onto whatever the Next Great Device for my music is — whether it be a replacement iPod when my battery eventually gives up, or some other new and shiny device in a few years when the iPod seems old and clunky.

Though of course, in Australia at present, even just ripping your CDs to MP3 is illegal.

PS. 11pm. Actually I should probably use iTunes Store before blessing Apple too much, since there seems to be a lot of rumbling about whatever DRM they use.

Firefox critical vulnerability

Firefox - Safer, faster, betterWith Firefox trumpeting itself as “Safer, faster, better” it’s fashionable to think of the product as being inherently safer than its opposition (primarily IE). It’s not. Mozilla has acknowledged a major vulnerability in Firefox, and with no fix available, is saying that the workaround is to switch off Javascript, and disable software installation.

Switching off Javascript renders a large chunk of the web unusable. Yeah, you can manually turn it back on for sites you trust… but who has the time to do that? And among the general non-geek populace, who has the knowledge to do it?

Of course, the likelihood of actually falling victim to this problem is pretty small. But if you’re tempted to switch back to IE, make sure it’s securely set up. One option is to use a security lockdown registry hack.

Meanwhile the neato Tiger Dashboard widgets facility that Andy’s been talking about appears to have its weaknesses too. Whoops.

Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t be so critical, especially since the stuff I code isn’t necessarily miraculously vulnerability-free. But then, I’m not coding browsers installed on millions of desktops.

Soundcard problem fixed

Remember my noisy soundcard at work?

Well, the problem has been fixed – by getting a new computer. Naturally, it wasn’t the only reason for an upgrade, but it was the main reason. 😉

But that’s not the impressive thing; the impressive thing has been the upgrade process. It was the smoothest I’ve ever experienced. Old parallel IDE drive out, plugged into new SATA computer’s CD ROM cable; boot OS, copy a couple of directories over, shutdown computer; remove old parallel IDE drive, reassemble box; boot OS, work. And that was it. Must have taken 15 minutes tops – I was expecting two days of downtime or lowered productivity. Every piece of software I need was installed and ready to go, I only had to tweak a couple of preferences. Similar process for all the other upgrades the team has undertaken this week.

So, my opinion of Dean, the guy that organised it all, has gone through the roof. Dean rules. He rocks.

And all because he arranged to not waste my time. What a guy.

Dashboard improvements

Here’s a couple of things I’d like to see for Dashboard in future release, at least as an option:

  1. The first time Dashboard starts up, and sometimes when it hasn’t been used for a while, it takes a while for many of them to respond, even things like ‘Stickies’ and ‘Dictionary’ which are local. I presume it’s because many widgets access the Internet for the latest information, but there should be an option to either do this at startup (as Dashboard runs in the background anyway) rather than the first time it is invoked, and it should allow other widgets to be used whilst it’s doing it. This may just be because I am on a slower machine, though even on an iBook G3 it flies when it’s working, so I doubt this.
  2. After a while, if you use a lot of widgets, you start to run out of space, despite being able to tile widgets. What would be nice is a way of having more than one widget ‘page’ – say one for games, one for searches, one for shell apps, all user-defined of course. This would remove the need to move/hide widgets or add/remove them from the main screen (which takes time) just to use the one you want. I currently have 17 widgets open and with judicious placement, they look good, but I don’t know how many more I’d happily accommodate, and given that Dashboard is about speedy access to applications, just adding and removing them from the dashboard toolbar is not an acceptable solution.

I have to say, though, that with new widgets being coded all the time, I am loving it more and more (it was a bit boring with just the default ones after the initial ‘wow’ factor of the desktop graphics)

Dashboard Widgets: Some useful ‘geek’ tools

Here’s a brief look at some widgets which will be of more use to the geeks / techies.

  • Whoisdget 1.0 – WHOIS database checker – opens results in an Internet browser window. Shame it doesn’t put the results right in the Dashboard as an option.
  • QuickCommand – puts four most used UNIX shell commands on buttons. Outputs results to the widget’s window.
  • bonSearch:info 1.1 – an interface for searching information in sources such as Google, Wikipedia, Britannica, CDDB, Creative Commons. Results are opened up in a new Internet browser window. For this number of sources, it’s quicker than going to each individual site and you can hop to and fro from Dashboard with the same search term.
  • Lasso Reference If you use Lasso (I don’t) this is an online reference searcher. As per others, it’s really just a quick way of launching the website you need with the search term already plugged in. May save you some seconds.
  • Shell Watcher – monitor any shell command with customisable update period.
  • Network Stat 1.0 – displays your LAN and WAN IP addresses.