Back from being gone

I’m a bit of a failure as a geek. I’m never up to speed with the latest technologies, and I’m never one to install a new version of a software just to get the additional features. So, because my PC had been running along happily since two or three years ago I’ve never updated most of the software on my PC since then. Switching to a new OS basically forced me to update all my drivers, and I figured it was finally time to ditch some of the other software that I’ve grown too comfortable with as well. (*cough* NotAgain *cough*).

So here’s a summary of things that surprised me , both pleasantly and less pleasantly. I’ll start with the good stuff.

• New CrystalFontz LCD software! The tiny LCD can now display visualizations from Foobar as well as awesome racing game-related stuff, like RPM, gears and other info. Brililant! (I haven’t tried it yet though o_0)
• System color configuration. I’m not sure if this is a plus or a minus, but after switching to Win7 I noticed that some of my edited photos look horrible. Back in WinXP I couldn’t distinguish between some of the darker black colors, so this time I took the effort of setting up the screen properly.
• Picasa has face detection! We are living in the future!
• Desktop gadgets FTW. Hard disks and free space, CPU temperature, torrents currently being downloaded, network traffic. All the stuff you never really cared about can now be monitored instantly
• Docking windows to the left or right side of the screen. This is perhaps the best feature ever for people with widescreen screen screens.
• GMail notifier on the start bar is quite nice. I no longer have to keep a Chrome window open all the time to see if I have new messages (at least when combined with the Google Talk app so you can still chat to people).

It’s not all good though.

• New version of Office: what a failure. Not easy to use at all. I prefer OpenOffice. Oh, and thank you Microsoft Office for restarting my PC without my consent while I was taking a pee, thereby breaking the backup that I was making at that moment. Not very nice.
• Some software simply doesn’t work on WIn7 x64. No big losses, but one program I will really miss: GBTimelapse. It doesn’t even start, even in compatibility mode. I’ll have to rely on my WinXP laptop to make time lapse videos..
• No working printer driver. Thank you Lexmark for the great support. (No)
• I’m experiencing a general discomfort with new versions of program placing the buttons somewhere else, or hiding areas of their program behind menus that were not there before. I’m like the grandpa who suddenly finds his home town changed while he got old. I must be getting senile…

Unrelated to all of this, what’s with all the damn quick start applications hogging up memory? If you install your default applications like you would normally do then you’ll get a whole bunch of services running at startup that will help you start your applications faster. To name a few: Adobe Reader, OpenOffice, Java, Quicktime, Logitech Gaming Software, Steam, and finally a bunch of Google stuff . All of these apps install something to make themselves start quicker or to check for updates. Quite annoying if you ask me. If I want to read a PDF I’ll wait one more second for the damn reader to start, but I don’t want the thing to pollute my memory with something that I will almost never use.

/Rant!

Optimum Flow rate

Things have been faring well at work recently. After a couple of weeks of developing for the iPhone I finally feel that I can be as efficient as I was when working in Java. It took some brain adjustments and a lot of working environment adjustments (different keyboard, different mouse, IDE hotkey changes, …) but I’m finally up to speed, and starting to enjoy it. Which is good, cause there’s a deadline approaching. Yet it is perhaps thanks to this deadline that I am able to achieve flow once again. Just the right combination of pressure and skill. It’s like a drug, really.

I think I underestimated developing for a mobile phone in the beginning, and that was the reason why I couldn’t quite enjoy it. I felt limited by the framework cause the things I wanted to do were simply not directly possible. I never really felt that when programming in Java. That shouldn’t really be a problem, because normally if you notice something missing, you create it. That’s what programmers do: create code. Yet I was very reluctant to do so at first. The first thing Objective-C throws at you is memory management, which is scary as hell when coming from a garbage-collected language. Then the second thing that’s easy to notice is the documentation. Every other line in Apple’s iPhone documentation states “but be careful because processing resources are scarce! you need to code very carefully and smartly”. Putting the elephant in the porcelain closet, and telling it to collect its own garbage. Ya.

I found that it’s best to completely ignore these warnings altogether. Aside from a few basic rules that programmers must stick to when dealing with memory management there’s really not that much to it. If you’re neat and tidy, which I am in the process of becoming thanks to Apple. Great memory profiler too by the way. In the beginning I was reluctant to create a new re-usable component every time I face a problem, because I couldn’t directly justify the extra time needed to make the component elegant enough to be reusable. Especially on a mobile platform I think it won’t happen very often that I’ll be able to re-use one of the components that I’ve created.

As a result the code that I wrote was quite ugly. And unmanageable. I made the assumption that on a mobile platform with a rather dodgy object-oriented implementation the rules of programming must somehow be different. Well, I can be very clear on this: they’re not. It pays off to create reusable components and an elegant structure. Don’t worry about resources or performance until it actually becomes a bother, and then refactor it into something faster. A cleaner design is always worth spending the extra time, even on mobile platforms.

Side note: Windows 7. Hmmmmm. It’s clean.

It’s dere!

Solid State Disk arrived ^_^

It’s actually 2.5 inch and I have no ‘professional’ way to mount it in my case. I considered duct-taping it to the side but it seems to fit snugly on top of the other harddisk.

I’m experimenting with Windows 7 x64 a bit. So far it’s been hell trying to install all the software I used, but that would have been the same if I was using XP. So far I’m liking Win7, even though it completely looks like Vista to me.

One nasty thing that caught me off guard was when I tried to write this blogpost and suddenly my internet connection speed dropped down to about 900 bytes per second. Apparently this is a known issue and it can be fixed by disabling some obscure network components deep in the bowels of the OS. Did that, works fine now.

I am EXTREMELY pleased with the startup speed of applications. It’s practically instant. Especially Photoshop loves the SSD. Other than that I don’t have much to report yet. I’ll still need several days to reinstall all drivers and applications…

 

Restoring files that chkdsk messed up

So, as you can read in the previous posts I have a hard drive that has crashed. But not completely. After running “chkdsk /f” on the thing I am left with 9999 files that have been restored, very conveniently called FILExxxx.CHK. How wonderful. I’m rather annoyed that only 9999 files were restored, and not more. At this point I am suspecting that only the file table broke, and the files themselves should be intact. Now I can access my files again, but I have no idea which file is which, and I sure as hell am not going to click every individual file to find out what it is. Being the software engineer that I am, I wrote a script.

I should mention here that I was rather fortunate/foresighted to have made a regular directory index of all my files, and my latest listing was from two days before the crash. That’s very lucky. I have in my possession a huge text file containing the exact output of a “dir /a/s>out.txt” call. What to do with that? Well, for once my laziness paid off. Had I bothered to add the ‘/b’ option, output would only contain the filenames, but omitting this causes the file sizes to be output as well.

So we have a listing of a file containing its name and its file size, and a mystery file xxxx.CHK containing ’something’, which also has a file size. So… I think you can see where I’m going with this. I doubt that there’s many people in a similar situation as me though, as usually hard drives crash a bit harder than this, and usually people don’t run the kind of script that I was running to index my disk. I did not envision this use case either though..

Linking the two pieces of information together turns out to be harder than I thought, though. The file size of the mystery files seems to be off by a tiny amount, which I guess is a result of chkdsk not being able to guess the file boundary exactly. As a result, exact file size matching results in zero matches, so a bit of fuzziness must be added. I haven’t had time to do this yet, but at first glance it seems that all mystery files are a tiny bit larger (at most 32kb) than the ones in the directory listing, so I’m thinking I’ll just grab the closest match that is larger than the original. This will probably mix up at least some of the files on the disk, though, but that should be easily solved. Once I know which two files are swapped it’s easy to get back the data that I want. This works for most of my personal files and some hard-to-get stuff, but most of the files I can download again without too much trouble.

When/If I finish the perl script (yes, yuck) I’ll post it online somewhere. When it’s done.

PC woes times two!

Right, so yesterday my PC would no longer boot up, today one of my external hard drives dies. Just great. Fortunately the disk did not contain anything important (such as my photos :O). I didn’t have a backup, but I do run a program every day that lists all the files on the disk, so I can figure out what it is exactly that I’d lost. It would be rather nice of the fairy diskmother if she would let me have my files back…

PC woes

For months now my PC has been a bit grumpy sometimes in the morning, refusing to boot up for the first time, or crashing after logging in to windows for the first time. The problems always disappeared after the first restart though. Until today.

After checking and concluding that there’s something horribly wrong with my Windows installation, I reconfigured my desk to use my laptop as primary PC and I went surfing for some upgrades. I figured since I have to reinstall Windows anyway, now is a perfect time to do some upgrades. The first thing I did was buy a solid state disk which should improve startup time and program load times significantly. This should help me a lot when I’m editing in Photoshop, cause PS does require an awful lot of memory.

After ordering the harddisk online I enthousiastically proceeded to the second step: acquiring a new OS. I had my eyes set on Windows 7, of course. So far I’ve only heard good things about it, and I think it’s worth a try. So I went to the Microsoft site, purchased it, downloaded it and installed it. Oh wait. No, I didn’t. Let me explain why.

I spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out which version I should get, checking which features the ultimate version has over the pro version, and deciding if it’s worth it or not. Then I had to spend about 15 minutes figuring out if I was eligible for an upgrade license or if I should buy the full version. Mind you, it’s not a cheap OS! Especially considering that all other available consumer OSes for the PC are FECKING FREE then it’s well worth considering the price tag.

Well, I did finally figure out that I was eligible for an upgrade cause I recently bought XP, and I decided on the pro edition cause I didn’t really see a use for all the extra features of ultimate. At least not for the money that MS is asking. So, why, you might ask, did I not but it? Well, the reason is quite simple. I got terribly frustrated at the vagueness about different versions and different licenses. After deciding on the version I found some more information online which stated that if you change your motherboard then technically MS considers it a new PC, and you need a new license. This was the beginning of a lose-lose scenario for me.

I spent another 20 minutes trying to find a reliable source that countered this argument, but I couldn’t find any. It was at this point that my frustration meter maxed out and I basically thought ‘Screw it!’ and gave up. If it’s true that you need a new license when you replace your motherboard then that’s the most retarded decision ever. I want to upgrade my PC later and I’ll either throw away or sell my old motherboard, and I certainly don’t want my windows license to end up in the same way. If ’s not true then that’s great, but does it really take one bloody hour of investigating on the web to even find that out? That’s not very customer-friendly, even if most customers don’t generally replace motherboards.

So, let’s summarize on the alternatives to upgrading to Windows 7. One: don’t upgrade. XP is still fine. The only problem I have with this is that I won’t be able to use DirectX 10 to play the latest games but I’ll put up with that for the sake of convenience. Two: switch to Linux. Again, the games issue, times ten. Not an option for me. Three: download the illegal version of 7. Not \quite\ morally right… The option that pleases me the most in a moral sense is this: get the illegal version, use it until you upgrade and then buy it. This is of course not in accordance to the law in many countries. That’s why they call it illegal, you know.

The point I made is a point that I’ve made before against Apple: if it takes such a large amount of effort to do things the ‘proper’ way, then why even bother? This illustrates perfectly why people download software through illegal means. It’s just more convenient. I think the problem here is that I, and (dare I make a guess) many people like me would feel morally justified to download software instead of buying it, and that’s something that could have been avoided if the legal ways of getting software would be more user-friendly.