The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for 2010

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Windows 7 x64 on ThinkPad T61p

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/06

Somehow, the latest Windows Vista automatic update screwed my laptop.

It didn’t manage to make a System Restore Point, but in stead managed to remove all previous restore points.

In addition, my laptop now performed like a dog because of excessive disk activity on the primary HDD (login took 30 minutes).
Safe Mode and Safe Mode with Network were fine, so I tried to figure out what was wrong, but gave up after a day of investigating with Process Monitor and Process Explorer, and stopping/pausing allmost all services and killing/pausing almost all processes.

So: I bit the bullet and Installed Windows 7 x64 on my fully loaded T61p.

The machine has dual 7200 rpm 500 Gb drives (I have not used physical DVD’s or CD’s in years), with 4 Gb of memory (the official maximum, but I recently heard it can actually handle 8 gigabyte fine).
It functions as a host (my work is almost exclusively in a virtual machines so I can separate things), so it needs to be a balance of functional but lean installation.

Most of the installation process was straight forward (in fact much more straightforward than getting Vista on it).

Here is the run-down that includes the things I bumped into:

  1. Installed the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to copy the installation DVD to a bootable USB stick (I know there many guides on doing this by hand, but I like to be pragmatic).
  2. Booted from the USB stick and did basic install
  3. Be surprised about how much hardware was supported out of the box
  4. Installed these Lenovo drivers (most from the T61p drivers and software matrix):
    UltraNav driver (for thehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrackPoint– which I love – and the TouchPad – which I disabled)
    FingerPrint driver (I really like the biometric fingerprint login over typing my password)
    Hotkey driver (more formally called “features integration”)
    4-in-1 Ricoh  multi card reader driver (which is not on the driver matrix, and supports SD/SDIO/MMC/MMCplus, MS/MS-Pro, xD Picture Card, and IEEE 1394/FireWire)
  5. DAEMON Tools Lite (a virtual CD/DVD player – ideal on a 2 HDD setup)
  6. GhostScript and FreePDF (so I can print to PDF files and view PostScript files)
  7. Adobe Reader (there are faster and smaller PDF viewers, but nothing beats the original)
  8. Google Chrome (my favorite browser, I use other browsers for testing web-stuff, but those are in virtual machines)
  9. Fiddler2 (for monitoring HTTP/HTTPS traffic when things go wrong, or I need a direct download URL of something
  10. Skype (the new 4.x, even though it is almost unworkable compared to the old 3.8.0.188, the old version keeps crashing under Windows 7. I moved my Skype Chat History)
  11. VMware Workstation (note that officially you need version 7 to run Windows as host or guest, 6.5.3 does seem to work for some people)
  12. 7zip (my favourite compression tool)
  13. My standard BIN directory with my favourite light weight command-line tools (did I mention I’m from they keyboard age? Hence the love for the TrackPoint)

Windows 7 feels a lot faster than Windows Vista, and requires a lot less memory for itself (slightly more than 1 gigabyte, where Vista needs almost half a gigabyte more).

–jeroen

Ref: Re: Device Manager unknown devices T61p – lenovo community.

Posted in Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, RSI, ThinkPad, UltraNav keyboards | 6 Comments »

Stars on Google Search (references Official Google Blog: Stars make search more personal)

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/05

If you use Google Bookmarks or Google Toolbar, then bookmarks satisfying your search result will appear starred in Google Search.

Cool!

If only Google Chrome Bookmarks could be synced with Google Bookmarks (no, they cannot)….

Ref: Official Google Blog: Stars make search more personal.

Posted in Google, Google Apps, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Boem is Ho

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/02/21

Zaterdag na de exercitie van Adest Musica nog even de instrumenten terugbrengen naar het Onderdak liep iets uit.

De dame achter me had 40 centimeter meer nodig…

Gelukkig niemand gewond.
En gelukkig zijn we beide goed verzekerd.
Zij moest vannochtend om 06:00 voor haar werk al in een ziekenhuis in Utrecht zijn, met vervangend vervoer.
Ik heb ook vervangend vervoer, en met dank aan Karel van Breda (van Mitsubishi Polderman), kon ik meteen mijn auto omruilen: ze nemen me alle ‘zooi’ uit handen.
Kan ik met een gerust hart komende week een kwaliteits workshop geven op de Entwickler Tage 2010


Boem is Ho

Posted in About, Adest Musica, Personal | 1 Comment »

Formatted sourcecode in WordPress now supports even more languages

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/02/15

I just found out that the sourcecode tag in WordPress now supports even more languages.

This is the list of languages is below, it contains links to Wikipedia for each language.
Starred ones (bold and hyperlinks in this theme are the same ) are new since my post last year.

This is a follow up on the original article Including formatted sourcecode in WordPress « The Wiert Corner – Jeroen Pluimers’ irregular stream of Wiert stuff.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, CSS, Database Development, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Java, Software Development, SQL Server, Web Development, WordPress, XML, XML/XSD | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

Web means Unicode

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/02/12

Google published an interesting graph generated from their internal data based on their indexed web pages.Encodings on the web

A quick summary of popular encodings based on the graph:

  1. Unicode – almost 50% and rapidly rising
  2. ASCII – 20% and falling
  3. Western European* – 20% and falling
  4. Rest – 10% and falling

Conclusion: if you do something with the web, make sure you support Unicode.

When you are using Delphi, and need help with transitioning to Unicode: contact me.

–jeroen

* Western European encodings: Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15.

Reference: Official Google Blog: Unicode nearing 50% of the web.

Edit: 20100212T1500

Some people mentioned (either in the comments or otherwise) that a some sites pretend they emit Unicode, but in fact they don’t.
This doesn’t relieve you from making sure you support Unicode: Don’t pretend you support Unicode, but do it properly!

Examples of bad support for Unicode are not limited to the visible web, but also applications talking to the web, and to webservices (one of my own experiences is explained in StUF – receiving data from a provider where UTF-8 is in fact ISO-8859: it shows an example where a vendor does Unicode support really wrong).

So: when you support Unicode, support it properly.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, C#, Database Development, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Firebird, IIS, InterBase, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Prism, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development, SQL Server, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Visual Studio and tools, Web Development | 7 Comments »

Windows Vista/7 – solution for multimedia (Flash!) throttles your network: NetworkThrottlingIndex

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/02/09

When you play multimedia on Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008, your network performance is throttled.

This behaviour was not present in Windows XP, but was introduced in Windows Vista and still present in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008.

From Vista SP1 on (including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008), this behaviour is configurable in the registry by changing a registry value.
The Microsoft knowledge base explains this is the NetworkThrottlingIndex value, but falsely indicates at the bottom it is for Windows Vista SP1 only (it actually works since Vista SP1, so this includes both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008). Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development, XP-embedded | Leave a Comment »

Google Chrome just got enriched with 30+thousands scripts (link to “Fire Outfoxed: Greasemonkey Creator Builds Native Support Into Chrome”)

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/02/07

The recently launched Google Chrome 4 introduced plugin support (they call it support for  extensions).

Greasemonkey is a scripting plugin allowing you to on-the-fly modify the HTML in your browser. Originally it was Mozilla Firefox only.

On February 1st, Aaron Boodman – the original Geasemonkey developer who now works as Google – announced that Greasmonkey support it is available natively in Google Chrome 4.

There are some 40-thousand scripts available on userscripts.org, lots of them written by people like you and me (from simple things like filling out forms and removing ads to complex stuff like re-layouting complete pages).
The vast majority of those scripts will work in Google just as well as in Firefox, the rest (some 15 to 25 percent) need adaption. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Google Apps, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | 2 Comments »

Delphi – 2010/2009 code-completion changes making life harder..

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/02/01

I’m trying to create a list of code completion changes in Delphi 2009 and 2010 that make life a harder (as compared to Delphi 2007).
The reason is that I want to post a summary in a QC report, so they get fixed.

Please comment below to add your own.
I’ll summarize in a week or 2.

These are the ones I found:

  1. When the code completion list is visible, pressing the Enter key would select the topmost item and complete it
  2. When you press ctrl-space to activate the code completion list, and you had already typed part of an identifier, the topmost item would match this identifier

I have the idea that this is caused by the fact that when the code completion list becomes visible, the topmost item in the list is not automatically being selected in Delphi 2009/2010, where in Delphi 2007 (and before) it was.

It seems you now need to press the down-arrow once to select it.
That means one action extra, while the code completion list has always meant to be a productivity boost.

Please comment….

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 21 Comments »

gmail harmless error message when editing settings: “Your changes have not been saved. Discard changes?”

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/01/28

When you edit your gmail settings, recently you often  get this message if you move the focus away from the settings pane:

Your changes have not been saved.
Discard changes?

The odd thing is that the settings are indeed saved just before you move the focus away.

So I always wondered if the message can be really ignored, and this thread confirms the message indeed is harmless.

I do still wonder why I get this message mostly in FireFox and Internet Explorer, but almost never in Chrome :-)

–jeroen

Posted in Chrome, Chrome, Firefox, GMail, Google, Internet Explorer, Power User, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

Brilliantly simple webpage: Get URLs

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/01/27

Fill in an URL on this page, and it will extract all the URLs it finds on that page.

Simple. Brilliant.

Get URLs.

Posted in Development, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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