Technology Blog

iTunes 100% CPU in Windows - solution: lower priority

2007-04-08T09:31:00.001-07:00

Sick of iTunes hammering your machine when it's downloading or playing a video? A method I've found to reduce its affect on system performance is to change its priority from Normal to Below Normal. This seems to have no negative affect on iTunes itself from my experience, even when downloading a few files. You can change this when needed by right-clicking on the process in Task Manager, but you can also use the start command.

Simply create yourself a cmd file as so:

@echo off
cd /d c:\Program Files\iTunes
start /belownormal iTunes.exe
exit

Save this file as c:\StartiTunes.cmd or whatever you like. Make sure the location of iTunes matches.

You can now create a shortcut on your desktop, etc, to run it.

Syntax highlighting in colour in HTML

2007-03-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

I recently found a fantastic feature in GVIM that allows me to syntax highlight my code and turns it into HTML. I'm sure there are tools out there specifically for this job, but given the convenience of having this built into my editor I couldn't help but mention it.

You can get GVIM from their website. When you've loaded your code up (and practically every language is supported), click the Syntax -> Convert to HTML menu option.

Here's a sample:


<?php

if (isset($_GET['album']))
{
        //echo 'gallery: ' . $_GET['album'];
        $d = dir('Photos/' . $_GET['album']);

        $bFirst = true;
        while ( ($file = $d->read()) !== false)
        {
                if (strpos($file, 'tb.jpg') !== false)
                {

FIX: Microsoft Word 2003 Backspace Doesn't Work

2007-03-01T03:59:00.000-08:00

I just came across some really annoying behaviour with Word 2003 (I dare say it's the same with 2000 and XP too). I somehow managed to change the behaviour so when I selected some text and pressed backspace the text remained there and the cursor moved to the start of the selection. Equally if I selected a word and tried typing over it the original word remained there and the new word would be typed immediately before it.

Solution: Turn on 'Typing replaces selection' mode.

Options -> Edit tab -> Tick 'Typing replaces selection'

Search Engine Effectiveness - Practical Test

2007-01-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

I've been wondering recently how effective alternate search engines are compared to Google. As a small test I decided to take 25 searches I had performed in the last week and search on Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search to compare results.

The following table shows the results. A score of zero means the target info was found on the search page itself (I didn't have to click through to the site). A number 1-10 is the position of the search result with the target info. A blank score means the target info was not found on the first page of links.

The score is a sum of each search position negated from 11. As so:

Target info on search page: 11-0 = 11
Target info on page result 4: 11-4 = 7
Target info on page result 10: 11-10 = 1
Target info not found: 0

Conclusions:

I was pretty suprised Google was so far ahead compared to Yahoo and MSN. Google won because it was better at finding more niche searches, whereas Yahoo and MSN failed completely. For more obvious searches all three performed flawlessly and may do for day-to-day searches.

Google tended to either have the result first, or not at all. Yahoo had a few useful results in the top five. MSN had some results nearer the bottom of the top 10. This is significant for MSN because much lower results seriously increases the time taken to find what you want.

Some oddities included Yahoo having numerous entries that were highly irrelevant and MSN having a curious slant to open source results, particularly source code.

Where is the mobile phone market going?

2007-01-15T08:21:00.000-08:00

To answer this question let's think back around 25 years. These were the days when computers used proprietary hardware and proprietary operating systems. Companies like Commodore, Sinclair and Apple were selling their combined hardware and software solutions. The market was largely fragmented, and the systems available varied widely in functionality.

It was only in 1982 that we saw the start of what now represents the vast majority of computer sales: clones. Compaq Computer Corp introduced the first IBM PC clone. As a result, by luck, Microsoft's operating system was able to run on computers from two hardware companies; it was no longer at the mercy of a single manufacturer. Soon this would become three, then four, then many. Whilst hardware manufacturers were able to concentrate on improving hardware technology and manufacturing process, Microsoft was able to concentrate on improving the operating system.

The above is relevant because we see the same story playing out today in the mobile phone marketplace. Manufacturers with proprietary operating systems are moving to those that are common.

A few years ago mobile manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson used proprietary firmware. They did this because, just like the Commodore PET, the firmware performed such a simple function that writing it was no major overhead on development.

In the last few years we've seen mobile phone power and functionality increase dramatically, and as a result the use for a common, complex operating system has become more attractive. Quite simply, mobile manufacturers have an increasing burden to create what has gone from being a simple firmware, to a rich operating system.

Microsoft, much as they did 25 years ago, has been one of the companies to provide a common operating system for multiple hardware manufacturers. Unfortunately for Microsoft, not all hardware manufacturers were as naive as computer manufacturers when they first seized the computer OS market.

One very real competitor to Microsoft Windows Mobile is Symbian OS, originally developed by Psion and now co-owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Panasonic and others. In July 2006, it had 67% of the 'smart mobile device' market. This operating system achieves by design exactly what Microsoft achieved by luck: being a common OS capable of running on many manufacturers' hardware.

With Microsoft a very competitive player, Symbian OS having a strong grip on the market, and Apple joining the party with the market awareness and sex appeal to have an impact, only time will tell if in 25 years time, the mobile phone market will have played out exactly as the computer market has. This time around, however, Microsoft has some strong competitors to reconcile.

Of course I could also have mentioned Linux as another competitor, but I'll save this for another post.

iTunes 7.0.2 takes up 100% CPU when downloading?

2006-12-29T08:06:00.000-08:00

This is something I've noticed with previous version of iTunes for Windows, but 7.0.2 seems especially bad. Why should downloading one file cause iTunes to max out my Athlon 3200+ CPU??

As soon as the file has finished transferring iTunes resumes low CPU usage:

Fanboy Christmas Wishlist

2006-12-24T04:40:00.000-08:00

Here's the start of my fanboy Christmas wishlist.. Comment if you'd like to add your own!

Digg Fanboy Wishlist

1. Kevin Rose distributes $60m among users
2. Netscape admits to being a cheap clone of Digg
3. Diggnation moves to daily shows
4. Lala co-hosts Diggnation... in fact, replaces Kevin/Alex

PS3 Fanboy Wishlist

1. Someone takes the PS3 seriously (anyone...)
2. Developers realise writing code for 8 processing units is actually easy
3. Wii fanboys get Wii Tennis Elbow and cannot comment on Digg
4. Sony decide they're not selling the PS3 at enough of a loss and drop price to $200

Microsoft Fanboy Wishlist

1. Mac owners stop being smug about lack of malware for OSX
2. Mac owners think Windows is shit, but still buy it (done)
3. Apple move hardware and essentially become a PC (done)
4. Vista works on their mediocre hardware and doesn't take up 10 GB to install

Apple Fanboy Wishlist

1. Microsoft release Zune in colour associated with shit (done)
2. iMobile/iPhone/iWhatever released for $99 and is better than a Treo/Blackberry
3. OSX released for all PCs... and it works with the millions of hardware configurations
4. Apple rumour sites are in fact well informed
5. All products everywhere come with shiny white plastic cases

Wii Fanboy Wishlist

1. PS3 becomes huge failure (done?)
2. Nintendo admit fault in wiimote wrist strap, replace "my broken 50" HDTV"

Disabling U3 on USB Stick (Non-destructively!)

2006-10-27T03:46:00.000-07:00

I have a Sandisk Cruzer 4 GB, which I wanted to disable U3 on. Although you can uninstall U3 completely from the drive I didn't want to do something I could reverse later if needed.

The way U3 works is by emulating a CD partition on the USB stick. Windows will autorun a CD much more readily than a removeable mass media partition, so U3 will autorun even though technically it's not an actual CD drive.

One way to prevent the U3 autorun is by removing the drive letter association for the disk, which can be put back later if needed.

Step 1. Load Computer Manager.

Control Panel -> Administrative tools -> Computer Management

Step 2. Select Disk Management

Step 3. Locate the U3 CD emulation drive, which will probably be circa 5 MB.

Step 4. Right click on the drive partition and select 'Change Drive Letter and Paths'.

Step 5. 'Remove' the drive letter.

You will now find when you insert the USB stick U3 will not load because the drive no longer exists as far as autorun is concerned.

To reverse this configuration perform the same steps and 'Add' a new drive.

Visual C++ "Error Invoking ATL Object Wizard Component"

2006-08-18T04:44:00.000-07:00

In Visual Studio 6 in an ATL project when select Insert->New ATL Object from the menu I received an error:

"Error Invoking ATL Object Wizard Component"

I traced this to Visual Studio having moved locations (I don't even remember moving it, but our company puts tools in strange directories).

To find out what the location the VS registry keys point to try the menu option: Tools->Visual Component Manager. If VS has moved directory locations this will fail and tell you where it should be found.

Demo of Windows Live Writer

2006-08-16T05:09:00.000-07:00

Well this is my first post using Microsoft's latest Live brain-child "Writer". This is designed to offer WYSIWYG blog posting for MSN Spaces and a pile of third party blogs. Writer also boasts strong support for imaging/file posting, which I will now try to demonstrate...

...and that image was pasted inline with no fiddling from me. I can also choose size as well as add a watermark ("CALCARIA") and use filers such as sepia tone, saturation, etc.

Here endth the post. Now I'm going to really push Writer and try and to publish via the Blogger API. I wonder how it's going to get the image onto my third party FTP site??

Parsing AOL Search Data

2006-08-09T11:11:00.000-07:00

Here's some quick-and-dirty parsing code for parsing the recently 'released' AOL search data. Instructions are specifically for SQL Server 2005 (as CSV import is a nightmare), but it should be ok for SQL Server 2000 and you can modify the Perl for MySQL I'd imagine.

1) Create a database called AOL

2) Create the table:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[AllData](
 [AnonID] [varchar](10)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL,
 [Query] [varchar](150)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL,
 [QueryTime] [varchar](50)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL,
 [ItemRank] [varchar](50)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL,
 [ClickURL] [varchar](250)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]

3) Create a DSN for your database:

Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Data Sources (ODBC)

4) Install ActivePerl or your favourite perl interpreter if you haven't already

5) Install DBI and DBD::ODBC if you haven't already by running ppm3-bin from your Perl\bin directory (in the case of ActivePerl anyway) and type:

install dbi
install dbd-odbc

6) Copy the following Perl into a file and run it. Change the filename (user-....) for each of the ten files and amend as required.

use DBI;
use DBD::ODBC;

$dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:ODBC:aol', "", "");

if (!$dbh)
{
 print "z $DBI::err\n$DBI::errstr\n$DBI::state";
}

my $sth = $dbh->prepare(<<SQL);
INSERT INTO AllData
(AnonID, Query, QueryTime, ItemRank, ClickURL)
VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)
SQL

$FILE = "user-ct-test-collection-01.txt";
open FILE;
$sText = <FILE>;

print "Entering loop\n";

while ($sText ne "")
{
 my ($v1, $v2, $v3, $v4, $v5) = split /\t/, $sText;

 #print "v1:$v1 v2:$v2 v3:$v3 v4:$v4 v5:$v5\n";

 $sth->execute($v1, $v2, $v3, $v4, $v5);

 $sText = <FILE>;
}

close FILE;

print "End\n";

http://pvra1.newmedia.nl/ is back up!!

2006-07-09T04:17:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Bob Sisson for passing on this information on how to fix his Mustek PVR-A1 with the "PVR Error":

"The web site has the details, but basically the PVR error in my case was
acorrupted "desktop" or theme.
Once I found a copy of the Theme JPGs and loaded them onto the removable
memory, you invoke the Loader routine to read the files and put them wherethey
need to be... It then powered its self off and when I powered it up it was
happy.
Lots of pressing three buttons at once to access hidden menus...
There is quite an extensive user group, forum and technical information onthe
website...."

Again, thanks go to Bob!

UPDATE: PVR Error - Mustek PVRA1 or Goodmans GPDR-1 / GPDR1 / GDPR 1

2006-06-22T09:02:00.000-07:00

David Lopez emails:

"Hi!
I've a Mustek PVR-A1 and I've had the same PVR ERROR.
Did you know where can I get that firmware update? The page you talk about
is no longer online.
Did you fix it with that?"

I have not fixed any device with a new firmware. My original device that had PVR Error I returned and my replacement device has been fine. I installed the latest firmware on this replacement (working) device hoping I would guard against it happening again.

I did some Googling and found Google has some cached versions of the pages I linked to. Unfortunately Google doesn't cache the downloads. However, some good news: I still have some of the files saved.

The following files and pages I make absolutely no warranty on either expressed or implied. The files were downloaded from the web and I provide them on face value. Upon downloading the files you accept FULL responsibility for any harm they may do to your device, your person, or your dog. I cannot guarantee they will work. I cannot guarantee upon using them they will not harm your device, potentially permentantly.

Cached files (originally obtained from http://pvra1.newmedia.nl/firmware) and also available from the Google link above:

Firmware information: pvra1.newmedia.nl_firmware.html

Information on change the theme of your device (this may help in resetting the icons): pvra1.newmedia.nl_themes.html

How to firmware update the device: pvra1.newmedia.nl_howtoupdate.html

The latest firmware, 2.7A, that I downloaded from pvra1.newmedia.nl before it closed down: pvra1.newmedia.nl_PVR-V27A.zip

The Mustek updater app: pvra1.newmedia.nl_ISP_Updater.zip. Please note this is zipped up from my Program Files directory. I didn't have the original zip, but I did have it installed. I believe there are no dependencies, so this should work ok. Note you will probably need to install the video downloader software that came with your device. This worked fine with my Goodmans GPDR-1, even though it's Mustek branded.

This is all the files and info I currently have. Sorry it's not more! If you have any luck sorting out the device please let me know and I will update my posts accordingly.

Good luck if you're having this problem. Please leave a comment below or email me so I can keep this page up to date with fixes.

Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type int

2006-05-23T00:20:00.000-07:00

In SQL Server I get the following error when I try to COUNT(*) rows in very large tables:

"Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type int."

Googling and sifting through pages about the same problem for SUM( ), I found you can use this function:

COUNT_BIG(*)

This uses a bigint rather than int for storage.

PVR Error - Mustek PVRA1 or Goodmans GPDR-1 / GPDR1 / GDPR 1

2006-05-21T09:49:00.000-07:00

I have the Goodmans GPDR-1, a quite handy little MP4 video recorder. Unfortunately it has an issue where (under what looks like a race condition when you press multiple buttons simultaneously) it sometimes replaces the menu icons with white on black text saying "PVR Error". The device itself works fine, but you can't understand the menu!

I took my first GPDR-1 back to Argos and got a replacement and (touch wood) other than momentarily seeing the "PVR Error" icons (and turning it straight off and on again to recover), I've not had the problem.

Goodmans tech support is useless, saying they haven't seen this problem before. I've recently come across a couple of useful links:

You can flash upgrade the Goodmans (and I assume Mustek, although I've not tried it) from this firmware:

http://pvra1.newmedia.nl/firmware/index.html

I have successfully upgraded my 2.5 device to 2.7.

This page also gives a hint on how you may be able to recover the "PVR Error" icons to their proper equivalent:

http://pvra1.newmedia.nl/gui/manual.html

I haven't tried this yet.

Good luck if you're having this problem. Please leave a comment below or email me so I can keep this page up to date with fixes.

Exchange Server '12' requires Microsoft Management Console 3.0

2006-05-15T07:34:00.000-07:00

Today I was installing an Exchange 12 Community Technology Preview (CTP) release and came across the following message:

"Exchange Server '12' requires Microsoft Management Console 3.0"

That was even though I was installing on Windows 2003 Server R2 64 bit (which already comes with MMC3) and also took the precaution to install it!

Turns out Exchange 12 CTP requires an earlier version of MMC3 so it doesn't think it's installed.

Thanks to Jim McBee's Blog I was pointed to a post by Nino Bilic, one of the MS Exchange team:

Resolving MMC 3.0 errors when installing Exchange 12 CTP release

This involves either installing an earlier version or setting a simple reg key. Thanks Jim and Nino!

Microsoft Live Mail Desktop - Beta Preview

2006-04-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

Here's some screengrabs of Microsoft Live Mail Desktop.