This much laughing hurts

I don’t often end up laughing hysterically at musical instruments!

In today’s feeds, an article from the Annals of Improbable Research blog linked to a Mr. Jay C. Easton, who plays the saxophone. Well, not just the saxophone, since there are many different types. Many more than the traditional four.

Including this monster.

There are some very smart saxophone makers out there, and the sound is actually pretty good. Well, except for the very lowest notes. I’m sure you can guess what they sound like, but there are plenty of clips on Easton’s site and Mr Eppelsheim’s. Another player, Fred Bayer, has had his Tubax modified to play much higher notes too (click on Tubax under Music in the navigation frame – a direct link takes you to the German language site).

Revisiting .NET CF Whinges

18 months ago, I wrote an article called “.NET CF whinging”. Now that Compact Framework 2.0 has been released, what’s been fixed?

• I complained that only DrawLine was available, not DrawLines (which maps better to the underlying Polyline call). In .NET CF 2.0, you can now use DrawLines.
• Previously, you could only create a one-pixel-wide pen. Now you can create pens of any width.
• The System.Diagnostics.Process class has been added.
• WaitHandle.WaitOne now offers a timeout overload. WaitAny is still missing.
• Thread.Abort and Thread.Join are now present.
• Control.InvokeRequired makes an appearance, and the Control.Invoke overload that takes an array of object parameters to pass to the delegate is now present. However, the documentation still contains a note that for .NET Compact Framework, you must use the EventHandler delegate, which only offers an empty EventArgs. This appears to be a documentation error – passing other delegate types and parameters does now work! The new BackgroundWorker class of the desktop Framework is not offered.

Rumour has it that the marshalling’s better in this version too.

HOWTO: Program Symbol MC3000 function keys

With my powers of intuition, I divine that someone out there needs to handle or program the function keys on the Symbol MC3000 device.

(Well, OK, it turned up in my referrer log – click the tracker icon at the bottom of the right-hand bar!)

The 28–key variant has F1 through F10 available through pressing the blue Func button and then the corresponding number key. The 38–key variant has F1 through F10 keys, then F11 through F14 on Func+F1 to Func+F4. The 48–key variant has F1 to F13 on Func+A to Func+M. (Nothing like consistency). When pressed, these will appear as VK_F1 through VK_F14 in your application’s WM_KEYDOWN and WM_KEYUP handlers or their equivalent in your environment (Control.KeyDown and Control.KeyUp events in the .NET Compact Framework, the value of KeyEventArgs.KeyCode will be Key.F1 through Key.F14).

That’s the default keyboard map. If you want to change the keyboard map, on any Symbol device, you need the Device Configuration Package for that device, which you can download from Symbol DevZone. In the package, you’ll find under Tools\kbtool a bunch of C++ files and a VC6 project. This is a program for your desktop computer which generates the keyboard map files. Open this with VC6 or later.

Each keyboard layout has (up to) three files associated with it – for the MC3000, MC3000KeynnM, R and S.cpp, where nn is the number of keys. The M file controls the multiple-press key operations, such as the mobile-phone-style input on the 28–key variant. The R file controls remapping key functions in different shift states. Finally the S file controls the scan code that’s output by each key – this is normally the one you want to edit. The available scan codes can be found in the accompanying ScanCode.h file.

Running the program generates the files that the keyboard driver is looking for. For the MC3000 these are named MC3000–{28,38,48}.{sct,rmt,mmt}. You can either overwrite these files in their normal location (\Platform\Keyboard) or modify the registry under HKLM\Hardware\DeviceMap\KEYBD to point to your version of the files.

We did this for New Look to make the two keys below the screen – with the red and green surrounds – perform ‘soft key’ functions in their applications.

Do I look old to you?

I met up with some of the people from Channel 9 last Saturday – Dave Oliver, Barry Dorrans, Sarah Blow and Richard Peat (and his lovely wife Beth, who I don’t think has her own blog). Richard’s already written it up here.

Separately, Dave and Barry both told me that I looked older than my tender years (ahem) of 27, and suggested that I get rid of my beard. Barry also reckoned the ponytail should go (can’t remember what Dave thought but he did admit he’d had one when younger!)

For comparison:

What I looked like in 1998, the last photo I have to hand of me with short hair and no beard (digital snapshot of my passport photo!)

What I looked like last year (taken at my friend’s wedding in Toppenish, WA, USA).

The length of hair and beard varies. I was short-haired and clean-shaven at my graduation ceremony in 2001 and frankly I thought I still looked a bit too young in the photo (and very pale!) I’ve been letting the hair grow pretty much since then and it now just reaches the small of my back. I trim my beard every few weeks, normally when it starts itching too much – it’s quite short right now as you can see in Richard’s picture from Saturday where we’re attempting to play Barry’s card game Fluxx while waiting for food and/or Ian to arrive.

So, should I follow their advice?

Can the Windows Vista Network Map Control Panel detect a non-functioning switch?

Adam Nathan blogged today about some new features in the Windows Vista December CTP. One of them is a new Control Panel applet: Network Map.

At work we commonly have problems with our switched network fabric. Sometimes after a power failure (a regrettably common occurrence at our location) the cheap 5-port switches at each desk will give all the signs of working, but not actually forward network frames – quite literally, “the lights are on, but no-one’s home.” Only power-cycling them gets them working again. Unfortunately there are chains of these in some places before reaching one of the wall sockets which connects to the main switch.

We also have a problem where, if one particular machine is switched on and connected, the entire LAN seems to go nuts, intermittently or permanently causing some routes to fail, unpredictably. We think this is due to the switches’ internal mapping of MAC addresses to ports somehow becoming incorrect, and forwarding packets to the wrong ports, or not at all. This is a mystery to all of us, especially since we’ve replaced the network card with a different model, tried it with different operating systems, tried it on a different wall socket, and repatched the wall socket/main switch connection. Nothing helps! If you have any ideas, leave a comment!

If this Network Map can tell you which device seems to be malfunctioning, that would be a serious boost to network administrators everywhere.

Idiotic things to do

Look on Flickr for your own photos, from the machine you uploaded them from.

Doh!

The two-minute Xbox 360 and PGR3 review

I’m underwhelmed.

OK, that evaluation is based on playing a guy for one race on multiplayer on a demo pod yesterday. The shop was pretty loud and the console quiet, which made it not very involving. The rumble didn’t feel that great. The graphics are better than the current generation but actually not that much better than PGR2 – but I had a one foot view, not a ten foot view since the controllers are hard-attached to the pod. I think the screen was set up correctly but I don’t actually know.

We were lost in the game’s UI. Very lost. We ended up having a race with one computer car which zoomed off into the distance – and that was only on Medium skill. I lost – I kept crashing into the corners due to the lack of feedback from the game (audio and rumble), and lost when I crashed into the last corner on the last lap. I lost so badly that I didn’t even reach the finish line before the 30 second timer ran out after the computer car crossed the line (hence ending the game).

Maybe I should go back when it’s quieter and have a go at Career Mode.

Coining a word

horricious (adj): Mind-numbingly awful. Descriptive of the speed of Microsoft’s first attempt at a ‘real’ Windows CE emulator.

A colleague asked if there was an emulator for one of Symbol’s hand-helds – a customer wanted to evaluate it with some software. While eVC 4.0 and VS.NET 2003 do ship an emulation platform, and Symbol supplies an emulator image for this platform, it is pretty slow. In describing this emulator to my colleague, I inadvertently coined this word. I’d just used ‘horrible’ and ‘horrendous’ and was searching for a third – lists of three, you know – and somehow got ‘horrific’ and ‘atrocious’ mangled together.

Oops.

The Pocket PC 2000 emulator, and earlier Windows CE emulators, ran weirdly compiled x86 code inside an app running on top of Windows. Stable it was not, and it didn’t emulate a CE device at all accurately. This made it completely unusable for actually developing apps.

The Pocket PC 2002 and later emulators were a little better. Now they were based on Connectix’ Virtual PC technology, which virtualises your PC’s processor and other resources (Microsoft bought out Connectix soon after). Unfortunately that’s still a virtualised x86, which is different from the actual Pocket PC 2002 devices, which use ARM processors. The result is that you had to do a special build for the emulator, meaning again that you’re not testing the same code you’re going to ship – and it was very hard to get libraries built for the emulator.

Windows CE on the x86 has always been a slug – Microsoft have never really taken it seriously as a platform, most hand-helds using MIPS or SH3 to begin with, then later ARM. Virtual PC wasn’t really designed to run Windows CE. Putting some form of Additions on the image would have been a) hard and b) defeated the object a little.

Visual Studio 2005 (at least, some editions) includes the Microsoft Device Emulator 1.0. This, finally, emulates an ARM processor. And you know what? It’s quicker than the virtualised x86! At last, it’s possible to use virtually a real OS image and real binaries in an emulated environment.

It’s still quite a bit slower than a real device though, even a 400MHz PXA255.

A rant on programming books

Matt Pietrek – he of the erstwhile MSDN Magazine column ‘Under The Hood’ – has an interesting post:

In a nut shell, there are a lot of books out there, and people are relying on them less and less as search engines become the dominant way to find information. It's pretty hard to pour massive amounts of work into something when you know most people just want the code snippet that gets them past their current problem. No actual learning required.

 ...and then they have no idea how the code works, so cannot adapt it to new requirements, or debug it when it doesn't work.

To me, a good tutorial is worth a thousand times a code snippet - although I do find that often MS Press books (at least, of a certain vintage) will print the entire source of a sample program which leads to the new stuff being lost among the boilerplate.

How new Windows programmers are supposed to learn what's going on when truly excellent books like Jeff Richter's "Programming Applications for Windows" go out of print I don't know. All abstractions leak, and I think you're better off understanding what leaks through the abstraction.

I only really ‘got’ MFC once I’d read “MFC Internals”, and understood the boilerplate that Visual Studio generates for a new MFC project.

How media companies root your system

…and why you shouldn’t insert an audio CD into your computer if you’re running as an administrator: what Mark Russinovich found on one of his systems.

(If you’re not running as an administrator you, or software running on your behalf, cannot install a driver).

MetaBlog: CAPTCHA enabled

Over the last week or so, comment spammers have found this blog. I’ve therefore turned on Blogger’s only security feature, word-recognition (sometimes known as CAPTCHA). It’s probably not enough to fool a determined comment spammer but I hope it will reduce it a bit.

I’ve also enabled ‘backlinks’ which I hope are just a Blogger name for referrers or some such.

Project Gotham Racing 3 videos

Some shakycam footage of a presentation of Project Gotham Racing 3.

Xbox360 News has six videos. They link to another which is still downloading as I write this.

I have to admit that graphically, it’s very, very good. There’s no substitute for actually playing it though. Looking at these videos does make me think that the game may well actually be ready for launch day – for an idea of software manufacturing schedules, note that Visual Studio 2005 is due to RTM on 14 October with physical product supposedly available on 7 November. In both cases the manuals and boxes can be pre-prepared, with only the DVD duplication required. Bizarre Creations still have probably a month to fine-tune the game.

There’s something worrying me. In the first video (actually the fifth link, named ‘pgr3gp1.wmv’) the menu has ‘Buy A New Car’ and ‘Sell Car’. I’ve played many games where you have to earn money to buy new cars and they’re universally a pain – you can never, ever afford a decent car, and the sale price is a small fraction of what you paid to buy it. It doesn’t look like PGR3 will have ‘repair’ requirements though, where you have to pay to repair your car. This was one of the many, many things that made Sega GT (a freebie with my Xbox) completely annoying and unplayable (on the other hand, the other freebie game, Jet Set Radio Future, is one of my all-time favourites and one of the major reasons I bought the console).

I recall that PGR2 has ‘Kudos Tokens’ which you earn by gaining a level, which you do simply by earning Kudos (basically by racing well or doing tricks like sliding the back end out or doing donuts, although I hope that’s easier on the new game). You unlock cars by exchanging Kudos Tokens, and in PGR2 you can’t sell a pony that you’ve bought. Having said that in PGR2 it’s rare that you’ll buy a complete dud because the car stats are pretty accurate (indicating that the Porsche Cayenne Turbo is by far the best SUV for example). As long as you’re not penalised too heavily for making a bad car choice, I’m happy. PGR2 also had a test drive feature but I’ll confess I never used it! PGR3 is meant to have much more level car sets, so there isn’t one ‘right’ car to use for a section of the game.

Here’s hoping they skip the American Muscle section this time. Last time out you’d got used to the nice-handling-but-a-little-slow cars in the early stages of the game, only to suddenly encounter cars which accelerate fast but lurch all over the place, and have no brakes to speak of. These cars were uniformly awful, there was no good one in the bunch. Making it through this section was a tedious slog, and it was a definite relief when I finished that section and could move onto some cars which, you know, handled.

What does the (VB.NET) ComClass attribute do?

A former colleague emailed me this week to ask about registering C# assemblies for COM Interop. He was convinced that you needed to do something special to advertise a COM object from C#, since we’d used the ComClass attribute in VB.NET. Also, Rockford Lhotka wrote (in July 2004):

“There are several COM interop features in VB that require much more work in C#. VB has the ComClass attribute and the CreateObject method for instance.”

I was able to assure him that for his scenario – late-bound use of an object – all you need to do is use regasm to register the assembly. That registers every public class in the assembly, except any that are marked [ComVisible(false)]. (A quick aside here – the registration time is longer the more public classes you have, so you should only make the classes you actually want to expose to COM public.)

But if regasm registers all public classes in an assembly, what is the ComClass attribute for? The documentation suggests it’s required but as we’ve just seen it isn’t, at least not for this scenario.

It’s a signal to the VB.NET compiler to do three things:

• Emit an interface definition automatically generated from the methods and properties in the class – a so-called Class Interface.
• Add this interface to the Implements list for the class (so the class appears to implement this interface).
• Emit a <ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.None)> attribute to suppress auto-generation of a class interface.

That last one is interesting. The .NET Framework supports automatic generation of class interfaces at registration time using the ClassInterfaceAttribute attribute. That generated interface is either a dispatch-only or a dual interface depending on the type selected. So what’s the difference?

Let’s take a simple test:

Imports System.Runtime.InteropServices

<ComClass()> _

Public Class WithComClassAttribute

    Sub Test()

    End Sub

End Class

Public Class WithNoAttribute

    Sub Test()

    End Sub

End Class

<ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.AutoDual)> _

Public Class WithClassInterfaceAttribute

    Sub Test()

    End Sub

End Class

First, let’s look at the generated code with the help of Reflector (in C# mode):

namespace VbComTlbTest
{
      [ClassInterface(2)]
      public class WithClassInterfaceAttribute
      {
            // Methods
            public WithClassInterfaceAttribute();
            public void Test();
      }

      [ClassInterface(0), ComClass]
      public class WithComClassAttribute : _WithComClassAttribute
      {
            // Methods
            public WithComClassAttribute();
            public void Test();

            // Nested Types
            public interface _WithComClassAttribute
            {
                  // Methods
                  [DispId(1)]
                  void Test();
            }
      }

      public class WithNoAttribute
      {
            // Methods
            public WithNoAttribute();
            public void Test();
      }
}

Notice that VB has generated the automatic class interface as a nested type, inside the class it belongs to.

To see the difference from a COM perspective, we need to look at the type library. Export it using tlbexp, then use OLE View from the Platform SDK (also supplied with VS.NET) to load the type library (File/View TypeLib).

I’m not going to post the entire type library IDL shown by OLE View, but note that not setting an attribute generates an empty class interface definition (equivalent to setting ClassInterfaceType.AutoDispatch), and that setting AutoDual generates a class interface containing all inherited methods, including ToString, Equals, GetHashCode and GetType from System.Object.

So to duplicate VB.NET’s behaviour with the ComClass attribute in C# – if you need to, bearing in mind that this really only applies to early-binding scenarios – you need to define an interface then implement that interface, and use ClassInterfaceType.None. This (declaring interfaces) is, of course, what you have to do in traditional C++.

Answering the mail - anatomy of a solution

I’m a bit slow in answering questions from the contact box. A couple of months ago, a commenter asked how the MC3000 application for New Look was implemented. Since we’re using this system as a case study it’s probably fair to post details if I don’t go into too much detail.

Actually I’m not sure where New Look’s name came up. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here. It must have been some other forum.

As far as the MC3000 software goes, the main application is just Meteor Client. Meteor is our application server product which allows text-mode applications to be written using Windows-based desktop/server development tools – typically more rapidly than the equivalent handheld application. On this occasion, the four applications (Price Check, Stock Availability and the ancillary Menu and Head Office applications) were developed with Visual Basic .NET using a SQL Server 2000 data source. The total number of handhelds deployed is over 1200 I believe.

Meteor Client was originally written for Symbol’s Series 3000 DOS handhelds and the original/common code is written in C targetting a Symbol library called ADL and Symbol’s BiosXxx routines (wrappers around both the standard IBM PC BIOS interrupts and Symbol’s own BIOS features). It was ported to a Windows console application which is mainly used for development and testing although it has been used in deployment occasionally. It was also ported to PalmOS for the Symbol SPT 1700 and Monarch’s Pathfinder Ultra DOS device, although those ports are not currently maintained.

Meteor Client on Windows CE was originally targetted at Pocket PC-based devices such as the PPT 2700. I started the porting work about three years ago. Pocket PC devices don’t have console support and even if they did, the console would still – I think – have ended up with a certain amount of ‘furniture’ we didn’t want. Meteor Client is meant to be a locked-down application, no other applications can be used.

Without this console support, I had to provide all on-screen rendering. The only monospaced font I could rely on was Courier New, which I detest – it would be illegible at the screen sizes we need – and we needed the potential for custom font capabilities anyway. Therefore we use bitmapped fonts using bitmaps I drew, designed to use the maximum space available on the Pocket PC screen and others at two sizes, 8 rows by 20 columns (matching the PDT 3100) and 16 rows by 21 columns (matching the PDT 6800). Further fonts have been drawn to offer better displays on devices with different screen sizes – the MC3000 has a 320x320 screen which can all be used – and there are now 8 sizes ranging from a 9x9 pixel character cell up to a 15x39 pixel character.

The Windows CE port uses C++ for the Windows CE-specific code, and uses ATL for windowing support and a small amount of additional data structure support. MFC is overkill and I’d originally intended to do without it, but when it came to integrating barcode support I remembered that the code I’d written up to that point used bits of MFC since the new CE apps we were writing at that point were all written with MFC (the .NET Compact Framework wasn’t released until 2003). As part of the process to turn the port code into a separate library for porting DOS applications, I’ve eliminated this dependency.

Actually, the core of the porting library is really the keyboard buffer. Windows’ keyboard system requires that a window accept keyboard input messages. There’s a bit of a mismatch between the DOS behaviour, which made both scan code and character code available at the same time, and Windows, which generates a WM_CHAR message with the character code after the WM_KEYDOWN message with the virtual key code, but this wasn’t too hard to work around. Originally all the screen and keyboard code ran on the same thread as the application code, which meant that the screen didn’t update until you called either a keyboard wait function or a delay function, but I’ve recently – as part of the porting library effort – moved all the screen functions, and hence the keyboard functions, to their own thread. Cue some fairly complicated synchronisation code.

For barcode scanning I originally used a chunk of code that was, although slightly enhanced and made into a static library, some of the first code I wrote after graduating. Its main problem was that it only supported Symbol’s scanning APIs – it would run on a non-Symbol device but barcode scanning would be disabled. Over December to February 2002 we came up with a more abstract API that we call the Scanner Hardware Abstraction Layer, or ScanHAL for short. We now support Intermec and HHP’s APIs as well as Symbol’s, and have a package that can detect what device it’s running on and therefore install the right ScanHAL (there’s a null stub for devices with no scanner). This code is all C++ and, due to an error that was overlooked when building the first few versions, is tricky to use from C as all the entry point names are type-decorated (i.e. using the C++ linkage naming convention – we forgot to use ‘extern “C”’). We use this library, enhancing it as new features are required, in all our .NET Compact Framework applications too (if scanning is required). A colleague wrote the API and the initial version of the Symbol and Intermec HALs; I’ve enhanced both and wrote the HHP HAL, while Ian’s extended all the HALs at least once.

The New Look handheld software doesn’t just consist of Meteor Client though. There are a few other things too. Primary among them is support for firmware updates over-the-air (i.e. over the network). Symbol’s AirBEAM supports over-the-air upgrade but it doesn’t support scheduling an upgrade and for obvious reasons we didn’t want to push a firmware upgrade – which since they’re using the colour terminal is over 30MB – during work hours. Symbol do have a tool intended for making an update image on an SD card which we’ve adapted. Meteor Server pushes a notification of a new version to Meteor Client, which schedules the upgrade to occur at a random time within an administrator-specified time window. When that time occurs the updater program I wrote downloads the required files over HTTP (using the WinInet library), checks that the files downloaded correctly using the CRC32 algorithm, then runs our unpacker for Meteor Client and the other software, then Symbol’s updater. When the updater finishes successfully it cold boots the device which causes the new software to install. The install-after-cold-boot mechanism is another tool that’s evolved over my four years with the company – primarily my work.

To ensure that the update happens when the administrator wants it to, the device’s clock must be fairly accurate. Windows CE does supply a Simple Network Time Protocol client, but Symbol didn’t include that component in the MC3000 platform. We’d had trouble with its reliability on another device previously. I therefore wrote one myself, which took a couple of days – it’s less than 750 lines of C++ code (including blanks and comments) which includes converting from UTC to the local time zone since this part of Windows CE is often unreliable – it will tend not to take daylight saving into account, or do it twice. We therefore turn off the AutoDST setting in the registry – we update the clock every few hours anyway so being slightly wrong at the start and end of daylight saving doesn’t matter. It’s somewhat simplified code – the time is only computed to an accuracy of one second, which means no fixed point maths, and no roundtrip delay calculation is done. This provides plenty of accuracy for our purposes though.

The final part is the keyboard map. We do two things here: first, we map the two keys at the top of the MC3000’s keyboard which have, respectively, a green and a red surround so that they get key codes. The default keyboard map leaves them unmapped. These keys, being directly below the screen, are used as soft keys in the applications. Secondly, we found that since there’s no indicator light near the Alpha key, users could not tell when Alpha mode was active – we had a few support calls in the trial deployment asking why the handheld was simply beeping when any key was pressed, which was simply because Alpha was on. New Look use the 28–key keyboard. Style codes, colour codes and SKUs are all numeric, so there’s little need for alphabetic input, but the customer wanted to keep access to alphabetic characters for future applications. We therefore remap Alpha to a function key code and, in Meteor Client, toggle the on-screen keyboard when that key code is received.

That’s just the client side. This project, being the first to use multiple co-operating Meteor Servers to provide scale-out and failover capability, required some extensive work on the server side too.

Aaarrgh!

In my last post I said Microsoft would be releasing some official information on a topic that had caused plenty of FUD on forums. They haven’t yet done so. This is kind of annoying. The guy I was talking to hasn’t responded to my query about where the statement would appear. So the world – or at least, that part of the world that discusses these things on forums – carries on consuming and spreading FUD.

Some parts of the Windows team reacted very quickly to the suggestion that Monad could allow the spread of viruses. This team needs a boot up the backside, IMO. Scoble, are you listening?

OK, enough beating about the bush – I asked about OpenGL, and specifically this topic. Now I come to re-read the topic, it’s clear – if the app asks for accelerated pixel formats, and there is an Installable Client Driver available, Windows Vista will switch off the desktop compositor while the ICD is in use. What effect this will actually have I don’t know – presumably it will temporarily revert to using software desktop rendering, i.e. directing each window to draw in turn, clipping the parts that are obscured, as Windows has done for about 18 years (Windows 1.0 only allowed tiled, not overlapping windows). And of course you’ll only notice this if you’re using a windowed OpenGL app – full-screen apps (like games) will no doubt want the desktop compositor turned off!

The stuff about taking a 50% performance hit is simply FUD, IMO. The presumption is that translating OpenGL calls to Direct3D calls is expensive, but I don’t really see that. Numerous sites have had posters claiming that OpenGL is a more performant API than D3D, but without a program released for both APIs with as much time spent on both implementations, benchmarked on a range of hardware to eliminate driver variability, there really is no way to tell. I think the basis for this is essentially iD fanboys – since iD use OpenGL for their Quake, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom 3 engines, it must obviously be better, right? I honestly don’t know, except to say that the games I’ve played have always seemed ‘fast enough’ if my system’s been within recommended spec, whatever API was used.

If you want to know something, ask

Conspiracy theorists: if you want to know why Microsoft are doing something, try asking them.

I recently saw some information on forums that seemed wrong, so I did a bit of research and found a presentation that seemed to apply. Microsoft presenters normally put their email addresses on the cover, and this was no exception, so I emailed the presenter asking him to clarify a few points. I got a nice reply back which covered what I was after.

Yes, I know that’s very wooly. I asked if I could blog the conversation and he said no. However, there should be some official information appearing later today. When it does, I’ll update (if I remember).

When in doubt, ask. If they can’t say, they’ll normally say so.

Where's the damn SDK?

As I’m sure you’ve already seen, Windows Vista beta 1 was released about a week ago. This means I’m thinking about resurrecting my Changes to Win32 API in Longhorn series. Except, I can’t yet – because the SDK hasn’t been released yet!

Some kind of developer preview this is…

(Yeah, OK, the WinFX SDK has been released. But I’m still something of an unreconstructed Win32 guy.)

Loving the new monitor

I finally decided I needed more desktop space: both computer desktop, and the real desktop my monitor sits on – and this computer sits under. So I decided it was time to replace my old faithful Iiyama VisionMaster Pro 400 17” CRT with a flat panel. I looked at a number of sites and picked the ViewSonic VP191b 19” panel. So I can now use 1280x1024 comfortably.

It took a little while to adjust it to how I like it – colours seemed a little washed out – and it’s very bright. For tips on adjusting your monitor, see Charles Poynton’s article on ‘Brightness’ and ‘Contrast’ controls.

It cost a lot – nearly £400 after VAT and delivery – but I reckon it’ll last. It’s got something to live up to – the Iiyama lasted seven years with me, and is still going strong.

The Little Button That Could

Good story today on The Daily WTF.

The reason I posted this, though, was this fantastic comment: “It's like he tried to reinvent the wheel and some how came up with a Platypus or something.”

No2ID Flair

Following Ian's example, I've added the No2ID PledgeBank petition flair to this site. It looks like this:

The counter updates with the number of people who have signed up. Meta: I need to think about moving off Blogger. Republishing the whole site (e.g. when changing the template) takes an age.