Faux’s Blog

Yay, Vista arrived, thanks to Microsoft for running the developer “competition”, and thanks to Ian Moulster for keeping us posted.

Everything worked fine, even automatically grabbing the drivers for my (unflashed) SI3114 card up off Windows Update, and telling me to install the drivers for my X-fi.

So far, I’ve only had one major problem: The GUI is slow. Far too slow.

I expect that some of the slowness is actually being caused by Windows itself, but the one-second-plus black screen whilst switching to the secure desktop for UAC sounds incredibly unlikely. I’ve not worked out what to blame for this yet, but the nvidia drivers and the creative drivers are high up the list of possible candidates.

For reference, I currently have a Windows Experience index of 4.2 (RAM and CPU limited), and have tried disabling Aero and desktop composition, updating graphics drivers, etc.

I find it strange that, despite getting a 5.9 Experience index for “Graphics” (ie. desktop), the Vista required specs, quotes some rather vague definitions for “adequate graphics memory”, which makes no suggestions as to what would be recommended for ~4MP (3520×1200). Some event log messages suggest I’m running out at 256MB, which is bad. :/

Other minor things (note that, bar Miranda, Daemon Tools and BOINC I’ve been sticking to mostly Microsoft apps (yes, even IE7 and Windows Media Player)):

• The “official” OpenSSL binaries use an old version of MSVCR71.dll, which I didn’t feel like installing (I’m sure I’ll pick it up when I install some crap later), building them is easy:
perl Configure --openssldir=c:/openssl VC-WIN32
ms\do_masm
nmake -f ms\ntdll.mak
nmake -f ms\ntdll.mak test
nmake -f ms\ntdll.mak install

• Textpad 4 (I didn’t get along with 5) needs to be run as Administrator to add itself to right-click menus.
• You can no-longer set a PNG as your wallpaper?!
• It’d be nice if there was some official support for XVid and Ogg/Vorbis (and maybe some other free (as in, to implement(ish)) standards, the second doesn’t even have an unofficial solution for WMP/Vista.
• Aero picks up the artefacts in my tft quite spectacularily, damn.
• And, most importantly, I suck at pre-format backups.

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Having decided to look at Dvorak again, and having completely failed to find any software that was even remotely interesting (I couldn’t cajole Typing of the Dead into working with Dvorak) to teach typing, I reverted to the classic “look at a layout and try and type with it”.

I got bored of looking for the keys.

After having played with SVG/javascript as an alternative to Flash with ‘motes’ (temporary hosting, might not be up), I thought I’d have a go at adjusting it into a mini typing tutor.

Note that that’s almost completely clientside, the php is used only to dump the default message in the text box, which could be done in JavaScript (probably easier, too, die, magic quotes, die).

It completely doesn’t work in IE (I haven’t tested any SVG plugins), and has a weird JavaScript array bug in Opera (still works, just doesn’t look perfect). So, much to my shame, I’d suggest trying it in Firefox.

And, on a related note, it strikes me as odd that Scalable Vector Graphics use absolute coordinates for everything internally.

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I was minorly confused today as to why all of my lovely compiled programs were disappearing and, instead, I was left with some empty files called ut.

For example, a test C++ file:
echo int main(){} > empty.cpp

Compile it:
>cl empty.cpp
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 14.00.50727.762 for 80x86

/out:empty.exe
empty.obj


As it clearly says, this /out:puts to “empty.exe”. Okay, I don’t want it to output to “empty.exe”, I want it to be called “full.exe”. So, I add /out:full.exe to my build script (along with all the normal junk like /MD and /nologo), and the output is now:

C:\Desktop>cl /nologo empty.cpp /out:full.exe
cl : Command line warning D9035 : option 'o' has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release
empty.cpp

Curious, but only a warning, let’s ignore it.

..and full.exe doesn’t exist. Neither does empty.exe. There’s just this empty, zero-byte (according to Explorer) file called “ut”.

What’s happening, and what’s not immediately obvious if you don’t read boring warnings, is that the compiler it outputting (/ofilename to write the output to filename) to “ut:wrong.exe”, which is the NTFS alternate data stream called “wrong.exe”. Woops.

For reference, the message comes from the linker, not the compiler, which does use /out:filename, and the non-deprecated version of /o for the compiler is /Fefilename. Much clearer and easier to remember. Not.

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