uberconcept.com

I’ve loaded up some of the honeymoon photos. This was done in a bit of a hurry so I’m not sure I got captions for them all.

Windows locks files that are currently in use. This is true for dlls, exe files (and pretty much any application file) and some data files. To understand what happens (briefly), when an application or dll is in use, it is loaded into memory from the file system.

The decision to lock files while they are in use makes some sense. Suppose an application uses a dll. That application start running and uses that dll, but having used it unloads in from memory. Later on the application needs the dll again so it gets reloaded from memory again. If you can delete the file before it gets reloaded, it may cause problems.

However the implications of this decision cause problems:
1. An application can go wrong and lock a file you want to remove. I’ve certainly often had problems with ‘unkillable’ files. In the worst case, the application was Explorer. When you killed and restarted Explorer, it locked the file again.
2. Reformat, Reinstall, Reboot, the 3 Rs of windows. The reason you have to reboot is that is the only way to ensure you can actually remove the files. Often the way that applications delete files after uninstalling is to use the Move on boot registry keys.

A better way is not to lock the files in the first place. If an application uses a file, the application should be stopped, the file removed and the application restarted.

I’m not expecting that Vista will fix this, given Vista is based on Windows 2003. Incidentally Linux doesn’t lock files while in use.

Focus stealing is one of the worst ‘features’ of windows. Focus stealing happens when an application grabs focus (ie opens over the top) of another application.

A classic example of this is Visual Studio .Net 2003. If I open a project in Visual Studio and alt-tab to another application while it is loading, it grabs focus twice: first when the project has been selected and second when the project has finished loading. The underlying assumption behind this seem to be that people only work on one thing at a time. I choose not to waste the time waiting for a project to load. I should be allowed to do so.

I’m not expecting Vista to fix this flaw.

I notice that Warner is jumping on the online sales bandwagon, following iTunes etc in offering DRMed files for download.

With all of these offerings (iTunes included), they are priced at approximately the same price as physical media (CDs and DVDs). Can someone explain the logic of this to me?

On one hand I have a DVD/CD that I can rip and convert to other formats if needed (eg DVD -> video for an iPod). I also get physical media (which can provide a backup) and any cover art that might ship with it.

On the other hand I have a file that I can only play on one computer (or in the case of iTunes a limited number of computers), that is more difficult or impossible to convert to another format.

What is more, the costs of the studio are lower because there is nothing to ship. Sure bandwidth costs something, and it must cost something to develop a DRM scheme and a storefront, but those costs don’t compare to the cost of pressing CDs/DVDs, cases, cover art, shipping. It also makes it easy for them to ship just the right number of items. That is there are no losses as a result of making too many CDs/DVDs.

These initiatives deserve to fail, and the probability is that they will.

The only venture of this sort that has been a success to date is iTunes. This is for (IMO) two major reasons:

1. The iTunes DRM is less invasive. You can burn a CD of songs downloaded from iTunes (although there is a loss in quality). You can also play any songs you download on more than one computer.

2. With iTunes you can buy single songs. When you buy a physical CD (even a single), you are buying more than one song, even though you might be interested in one song on that CD. So while a physical CD costs about the same as buying all those songs on iTunes, the cost of just one song from iTunes is much less that a whole CD.

Even with the iPod driving sales, I think that the iTunes music store would have failed commercially if they had more invasive DRM and/or had forced the sale of entire CDs.

I recently had the dubious pleasure of trying to install the drivers for a Netgear wireless PCI card. The short version is that the drivers Netgear provides are really unpleasant.

The longer version:

Having downloaded and installed the Netgear drivers (a bundled exe) I found that the wireless config tool they shipped with wasn’t as good as the Windows XP config tool (UI was a little strange and I couldn’t find a way to disconnect from an Access Point). So I decided to try to just install the drivers and not the config tool.

I uninstalled the Netgear config tool and hit the first problem: it removes the drivers too. Not to be deterred, I thought I’d decompress the exe installer for the drivers to get a driver file. Inside that exe was another compressed exe, which I also unzipped. Feeling like I was playing with a Russian doll set, I tried to decompress that resulting cab files. Unfortunately Netgear is using some file format not recognised by 7Zip and I couldn’t decompress the cab files.

I was at a bit of a dead end at this point. After thinking about it for a bit, I reinstalled the Netgear config tool, reasoning that the driver files had to be on the machine after installation. After some hunting around and some guesses as to what the name might contain, I found the drivers in C:\Windows\inf and C:\Windows\System32\drivers. I copied the drivers to another location, uninstalled the Netgear config tool and installed the card with those drivers.

I shouldn’t have to jump through these hoops to get the driver files.

Netgear clearly doesn’t want to let you get access to the actual drivers, instead they want to force you to use their tool for managing the wireless card. My problem with this is that it doesn’t matter whether the Netgear config tool is good or bad, I should have the option of using whatever tool I like. In this case the tool is inferior.

BTW I’ve had this problem with two Netgear cards now (WG511v2 PCMCIA card & WG511T PCI card).