There is a better way.

Just right-click on the desktop, select “View” and then “Show desktop icons”. So simple.

Should have found this years ago. Works on Windows Vista and Windows 7 as far as I know.

0 [main] us 0 init_cheap: VirtualAlloc pointer is null,
Win32 error 487 AllocationBase 0x0, BaseAddress 0x68540000,
RegionSize 0x480000, State 0x10000
c:\msysgit\bin\sh.exe:
*** Couldn't reserve space for cygwin's heap, Win32 error 0

More than mildly annoying.

I tried searching the web, and found a number of discussions on similar issues. It was not easy to find one that worked, but in the end it turns out that playing with the base address of the msys-1.0.dll file worked. The error is not really in TortoiseGit per se, but rather in msysgit (which tortoisegit relies on to actually do its work).

The magic incantation that I wound up using:

c:\msysgit\bin>rebase.exe -b 0x50000000 msys-1.0.dll

Posting it here for the benefit of any other poor soul who is hit by the same. Apparently, you might have to change to use different other addresses.

The details of my setup for reference:

• msysgit 1.7.4
• tortoisegit 1.6.5.0
• Windows 7, 64-bit

Why do I think it would have been impossible?

In the white paper, some techniques are cited which were published in the late 1990s. Thus, they weren’t even around when the Commodore 64 was new. We have come a long way in our understanding of digital signal and sound processing since 1982. Thanks to the incredible increase in available computing power, many techniques have been invented over the past few decades that were not available to the first generation of home computer hackers.

A more interesting reason is the amount of compute power needed to prepare the samples. Due  to the tiny memory of the Commodore 64 (in 32kB you cannot store more than a few seconds of audio samples at any kind of reasonable resolution and sampling frequency), as well as the way the samples are played, the audio is heavily compressed and preprocessed before being loaded into the Commodore 64.

This process is reported as having taken 25 minutes on a modern 2 GHz PC. How long would that have taken on a Commodore 64 in 1982? The clock frequency is 2000 x higher. If we assume this is plain floating point math, the PC can get about 1 operation through each cycle on average. The C64 would probably require at least 1000 cycles per floating point operation, emulating it using 8-bit integer math. That gives us a factor of 2,000,000 (give or take an order of magnitude). Thus, the computation would have taken  about 95 years (or as little as 10 years, or as much as 1000 years) back in 1982 (I don’t think this kind of operation is easily parallelized). It would also have required an unheard-of incredibly large memory of several megabytes.

OK, so maybe if you were  a billionaire and could have rented a few IBM mainframes you could have done it. Just to stand before a bemused crowd showing the little box making music. Would have been much easier to just buy an early CD player which played music at much higher quality.

But don’t get me wrong – I really like this work. It is impressive to see what you can do in terms of media replay on a small and slow device if you are willing to put incredible effort into the compression of the media. The way that the author finds ways to achieve various effects within the confines of the Commodore 64.

When retro computing is at its best, it shows how human ingenuity can overcome limitations and get things done even when it should not be possible. This kind of engineering spirit has been crucial many times in the past, in particular when saving space missions from seemingly impossible odds. If you only work with systems with power in abundance and few hard limits, you just don’t develop that kind of creativity.

Here is the scenario.

We have a wiki system on our Intranet at Wind River, where I attached a Powerpoint 2007 presentation to a file in the wiki. This file has the extension .pptx, as they tend to do. I do this in Firefox, and I can download and save and view the files with no problems:

A colleague of mine tried to do download the presentation, but failed. The problem for her was that she was using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, rather than Firefox. IE did not recognize .pptx, and instead did some kind of magic lookup and decided that the file is a .zip file:

So here we have a case where Firefox is able to recognize a file extension, but not Microsoft’s own web browser. The reason that IE and Firefox are using the file extension is that our wiki did not have a MIME filetype set for the .pptx files, leaving each client to figure it out on their own.

To compound the problem, the simple fix to change the file extension of the downloaded file from .zip to .pptx is not available per default on modern Windows systems. The default policy is to  hide extensions for known file types, so they are unavailable to be edited. The fix is to reveal all file extensions, which at least for me is the first thing I do when I get a new system setup. As  a programmer, I need to know exactly what things are, and quite often change their extensions.

I guess that Microsoft only tested things in a completely homogeneous system. I assume that if you use Microsoft ISS as your webserver (in a recent version), it will give you the right MIME type automatically. Testing with an Apache server or an old server version might not have been in the plans for Microsoft IE8. Once again, we see that testing requires some imagination to do well.

I would like to note that this problem is not new, and there is a writeup at http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00911.htm explaining the issue and some related issues as well.

Turned out that the problem was not at all related to the names of the parameters to the VM. Xmx is the right way to grow the heap.This set of parameters does work when put into an eclipse.ini file (for Eclipse 3.5):

-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms40m
-Xmx1024m

The problem was that Eclipse actually never read its eclipse.ini file, because I had changed the name of the main Eclipse binary. I have several Eclipse installations with different versions active at the same time, and to bring some sanity to shortcuts and Windows start menu items, I started renaming the executables to include the version name. Thus, I had “eclipse-3.5.1.exe” rather than “eclipse.exe” in the problematic case.

It seems that eclipse when starting reads a file like “my-file-name”.ini, and thus all changes to the file “eclipse.ini” has no effect for “eclipse-3.5.1.exe”.

Why do I always find these bugs?

Turned out this is a fairly common problem, with a documented solution.

It is MS knowledge base article 211494.

For some reason, you need to go into Excel options and have it allow other programs to access Excel via DDE, as in the screenshot below:

What I ended up doing to keep using my scanner (whose hardware is still very much intact and solid) is fairly obvious: I installed my old Windows XP license on a VMWare virtual machine (I had the good luck to have a full license with physical media), and then install the Canon LIDE30 driver on that virtualized XP.

VMWare Player is sufficient to let me attach the physical scanner to the virtual machine’s USB interface, and drive it without the host Vista 64 machine being any the wiser. To get the scanned pictures out, I have to resort to drag-and-drop, as I have failed to get shared folders to work with Player for some unknown reason.

The end result can be pretty complex… To send some emails from my work computer including scans with this scanner, I had to:

• Scan on the virtual XP machine
• Drag-and-drop to the Pictures folder on my Vista 64 machine
• Use file-sharing in Windows to move to my work laptop
• Attach in Outlook

Workable. It is also a pretty good demo of the power afforded by modern consumer operating systems. Imagine trying to do that in 1995… would not have been quite as fun.

An interesting point made is that the light-weight user-level threading of the virtual machine in Erlang optimizes for massively threaded performance. The key property is that the context for each thread is very small compared to an OS-level application thread (like pthreads, for example), and this means that the context switch cost is dramatically smaller thanks to less cache and TLB contents needing to be swapped in and out. Thus, for lots of threads, Erlang tends to get more work done per time unit, as there is less execution time lost to friction in the memory system. I am not sure you can emulate this in C using a user-level package. The very small initial stack and heap size of the Erlang VM is partially achieved by the very fact that in a VM, you have more insight into and control over when memory allocation happens, and thus you can more easily do stack and heap grow operations in small units.

Another interesting aspect of Erlang as opposed to C/C++ brought out in the interview is how to do error handling. In Erlang, this is part of the language, while in C/C++, writing code to handle all cases (and handle them correctly) quickly gets painful and overwhelming. Instead in Erlang, you have a system policy to kill any thread that does something bad and restart it. With that simple strategy imposed on you, the code gets much simpler.

The podcast also brought up a StackOverflow question about CouchDB that resulted in a good explanation of the concurrency model (optimistic concurrency on entire documents, an nothing smaller or larger than that). Damien Katz came in with some more insights on transactions and CouchDB, in a discussion on how to solve the classic bank account problem: moving money from one account to another. The “ACID” solution is to make sure that changes to two accounts are always both done or none done. The CouchDB solution is to put in a record of the account-to-account money transfer (I won’t use the word “transaction” as that is overloaded in this context) in the database, and just go through all records pertaining to a particular account to arrive at its current balance. That does feel more like proper bookkeeping practice, rather than having a single unauditable  balance in an account record…

Overall, worth its time to listen to.

However, moving to Vista has made the printing bit harder.

In Windows XP, there were drivers available for the printer, since it was fairly recent when XP was released. In Vista, no such luck. So you have to resort to using “LPR” printing (optional install), and using the generic “Microsoft Imagesetter” as the printer profile. This, somewhat surprisingly, works pretty well.

With one exception: Acrobat.

It seems that Acrobat is trying so hard to be smart about printing that it gets confused by the Imagesetter bit, and decides that the thing on the other end is not a Postscript printer. And thus, it needs to have a 600 dpi bitmap of the page being printed sent to it. Needless to say, my old printer with its upgraded 12 MB of RAM (it came with 4, and I scavenged 8 more MB from some old dead PC that passed through my hands in the late 1990′s) usually chokes on this.

When my last XP machine was retired, this did indeed create a problem, since all official online forms tend to be Acrobat-based.

However, by accident and luck I decided to try the Foxit Reader as an Acrobat Reader alternative. This has turned out to be the perfect to solution to my printing woes. With Foxit, a PDF file prints as a small nice regular vector graphics file that my LaserWriter has little problem printing. It makes printing PDFs feasible and reliable again, and means that I do not have to go out and figure out which new printer to buy. It is kind of cool to have such a decade-old technology icon at home, and still in working order.

A final note: 12 MB in my printer. My first hard drive back in 1990 had 20 MB on it. My new desktop Core i7 machine just got upped to 9 GB of RAM. Back in 1991, I had my high school’s most powerful home computer: a Macintosh SE/30 with all of 5 MB of RAM (which cost a fortune at the time).

But note that the application IS written in C++ still: that is the only choice on the xbox where the project started, by design by Microsoft. However, you can use my favorite scripting language Python to script and skin the application.

On YouTube, the following clips of old songs that I like absolutely tore me up, leaving my 4-year old wondering what got into the head of his daddy… for him, it was just some music.

• White Wedding, which apparently was a country tune.
• Enter Sandman, in classic synth style.
• Blue Monday, with
• We will Rock You, as a light salsa.
• There is a blog with a series of classic hits fed through Songsmith…
• And just follow the related links, I know I will do all night.

Thanks to Simon Kågströms post (and the even better second-generation with screenshots) about using Eclipse for the Linux kernel, I have a much nicer work environment now for my ongoing work in learning Linux device drivers on PowerPC, which has helped me work my way through several hard-to-figure-out system calls. Here is a screenshot that I found pretty cool… the tool has found the definition and comments for the IRQ registration function:

2009-Feb-01:

I had to rebuild my indexing from scratch in the past weekend, and as a result, I have a word of warning: you have to create a “C project” in Eclipse, if you accidentally create a “Project”, the Eclipse workspace file will have the wrong name (.project instead of .cproject), and the autoconf-to-eclipse script will not work.

To get it installed, I found good instructions in the WinhelpOnline Blog. The only annoyance was that it was put on the top level of accessories folder, and not under Tablet PC… despite being a part of that toolset. It is here on my machine:

Still note that for professional heavy-duty screen dumping and capturing, nothing beats SnagIt!

In the end, it turned out it was really dead easy!

The steps are the following (please refer to this guide at iLounge for more background and details):

• On the new machine, start iTunes and authorize it using user iTunes store account.
• Make sure the folder you use as your iTunes library folder is within the Windows standard user data places, like the default location inside “Documents\Music” on XP and “C:\User\username\Music” on  Vista. It needs not be in your user’s hierarchy, I had mine in the shared hierarchy and that worked fine.
• Consolidate your iTunes library, using the iTunes 8 File-Library-Consolidate Library option.
• Copy everything in that iTunes library folder to the corresponding location on the new machine. In my case, this was the folder called “Shared Music” in the “Public” part of the file system.
• The iTunes database is separate from the storage of files. On Vista, it was located in User\Username\Music\iTunes. This is easy to find, as it is created when iTunes is started. After locating it, simply replace the iTunes folder on the new machine with the one from the old machine (without iTunes running!).
• Start iTunes on the new machine, and all your data and music should be there!

For me, this worked on the first try. The key thing that I had to do was the consolidation phase… there were some files outside of the managed iTunes folder that needed to be copied into it in order to make this work completely.

To do this, it seems that you need to have a display driver that supports rotation and installs the keyboard shortcuts for it:

• ctrl-alt-up/down/left/right arrow

It seems that children tend to hit the left or right arrow, leaving the screen rotated. This rotation survives reboots it seems,

To fix it, just press ctrl-alt-up arrow and the screen should be right fine.

I have not been able to duplicate this on any of my own machines, as that shortcut does not seem to be active on them.

So I dove into the help system, and the first hit was the right one.

A topic called, of all things, “The text of my message is larger or smaller than usual”:

If you read that closely, you realize that what we have here is a really bad case of product design and bug fixing. Essentially, they have put in a documentation fix for a bad UI problem. This text is a plain admission that people do this by mistake and have no idea what they did to cause it, or even that they are seeing a zoomed view. The root problem is that the zoom activitity can be done by mistake, by the shortcut “ctrl-scrollwheel-on-mouse”. Microsoft must have noticed this in testing, and put in a piece of help to help you out. But before you can find that, you need to figure out that you should search the help for the issue.

If you do not have a scroll wheel or don’t know this, the solution is to get to the format text tab, click zoom, and then change settings in a dialog box. Amazingly bad, consdering the effort going into Outlook:

The correct solution is NOT to document it like this, but rather to just have the same little zoom control as all other Office programs and remove the easy-to-hit-by-accident shortcut (maybe it can remain if the effect is clearly seen in the zoom control).

But that was not so easy. I quickly realized that ActiveSync was pointless for me, since the setup I have for my data is not “everything on the corporate server, period”, which is the usecase ActiveSync is built for. But when I told ActiveSync to stop synchronizing certain categories of data, that lock it had put up still applied it turned out. With no way I could find to turn it off. So suddenly my phone just did not want to synchronize with my PC.

The solution I came up with borders on the desperate: by completely removing the program from the phone (using the uninstall control panel on the phone) I got my synchronization back.

The only snag is that happened to move pretty much every event on my calendar that was posted as a whole-day event back one day. Which is kind of annoying and took a while to fix — especially the recurring occurences for all my friend’s birthdays and similar important recurring events had moved. Exasperating!

But now it works.

Both IE8 and Chrome have taken to running each tab of a multi-tab browser as its own protected process, to make it both parallel processing and to increase robustness. I think that is a very good idea, and I am waiting for Firefox to catch up.

Why does running a browser as a parallel program make sense? If you look at the tradition, when the web started, you would load a page, render it, and read it for a long time. With multiple tabs and windows, each such display was really also just a set of static prints of pages that you flipped between. No point in being parallel there. However, in recent years, the web page model is changing. Pages are becoming far more active, starting a long time ago with Java applets, Active-X controls, and similar, and today the main drivers seem to be Javascript/AJAX/Web 2.0 pages and media players like Flash and Silverlight.

Basically, we see another example of a domain change enabling parallel processing to be applied. The domain of web pages has changed from single-shot renderings of single pages at a time, which is essentially serial, to lots of active programs running at the same time.

I think we are going to see more of parallel processing being used to enable richer user experience. This is one way that the world is making use of the increase in computing power and communications bandwidth, just because it is there. It gives us a nice sea of threads to run in parallel — the only issue probably being IO bandwidth and cache restrictions of single chips.

The use of processes for robustness is kind of an application-level virutalization. The OS provides isolation between processes, just like virtualization provide isolation between operating systems.