desktop software – Observations from Uppsala

That’s Odd: How iCue and Windows 11 Ruin Simics Performance

While working on some screenshots for an upcoming blog, I noticed something that something was off with the performance of Simics on my Windows 11 laptop. The CPU load did not quite go as high as I am used to – typically, compute-intense run should get close to 100% processor load using a single host thread to execute the simulation. Instead, I got to no more than about 50%, which was decidedly odd. I also had a screenshot from a few days earlier that showed some 90% CPU load. Turns out the culprit was a combination of factors, including the Windows 11 scheduler and the Corsair iCUE software pack.

Paste as Plain Text

Windows PowerToys is a fantastic set of utilities for Windows, and it just got better with the addition of “Paste as Plain Text”. Just like the mouse pointer locator I blogged about before, it is a small thing that you get used to and immediately notice if it is absent.

Setting the Font in Windows 11 “Terminal”

I finally got updated to Windows 11 on my work machine, and suddenly I have to figure out how to use Windows 11 for real work. The redesigned start menu is terribly bad compared to the Windows 10 variant. What is nice though is the new Terminal app, along with the quite pleasing Cascadia font. However, I found the default size of Cascadia to be a tad big. Which lead to the question: “just how on earth are you supposed to control the font on this thing?” The font adjustment is probably the least logical I have ever found, and without some help from the Internet I would never have figured out. So here is how you do it.

Finding the Cursor on Windows

In the last year, I noticed that my Windows machines started to grey the screen and show a highlight around the cursor when I accidentally hit the CTRL key twice. At first, I had no idea what was going on, but then I figured out it was connected to CTRL. So I assumed that this was a brilliant new feature added by Microsoft in some recent Windows update (to both Windows 10 and 11, thank you very much!). However, then I tried to help a colleague find the function and realized it was missing on his machine. What was going on?

Was this a UTF-8 WTF?

Today I observed something very odd in Powerpoint. I was pasting in some text from the Simics command-line interface into a text box in Powerpoint to show the output of some commands. Commands whose output relied on box-drawing characters to produce nice tables. But for some reason… it did not work in Powerpoint. Weird.

Minimum Viable (Replacement) Product – The Teams Example

During 2020 and 2021, Intel switched from using Microsoft Skype for Business (also known as Lync) to Microsoft Teams as the primary internal calling, chatting, and conferencing tool. While (finally) Teams has turned into quite a decent communications tool, the transition started a bit too early from a feature completeness perspective. Microsoft in essence gave us an enterprise Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Not a proper Replacement Product (RP). Teams left out many rather important and useful features, degrading the user experience and value, and making my life harder. I don’t think that was particularly well handled. I can understand it as a product manager, but as a user, I don’t like it all.

Microsoft Windows memset Optimization – Stores are Free

I recently stumbled on a blog post called Building Faster AMD64 Memset Routines, written by Joe Bialek of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). The blog describes his efforts to improve the performance of the Windows kernel memset() function, across all sizes of memory to set. The reported optimizations are quite fascinating, and could be summed by avoiding branches even at the cost of doing redundant stores. Basically, stores are free while branches are expensive.

Adjusting to Work-from-Home: Remote Live Simics Training

In the current world-wide lockdown due to Covid-19, many things that were done in-person in the past have to become virtual. The Simics® New User Training that we run at Intel and with our customers and partners is no different. In normal times, we run in-person classes around the world, but that is not an option right now. Thus, we shifted to running remote live classes as a substitute for the time being. This blog shares some of my experience from running remote live classes.

We changed the cover page of the Simics training to symbolize the change.

Failing to See WiFi Login Page [Captive Portal] / Solved

I have had some annoying problems in recent months with my work laptop refusing to connect to certain WiFi login pages (more technically known as Captive Portals), essentially locking me out of the WiFi in certain places. Here is how I solved it.

Intel Blog: Simics 6 Device Register Coverage

I have a new blog post out on the Intel Developer Zone, about the Simics 6 device register coverage feature. I use device register coverage to look at how different operating systems use the same hardware. The differences are significant, demonstrating the (rather expected) observation that different software stacks use the same hardware in different ways.

Excel 2016 & CSV Import – Hilariously Broken

I just started using Office 365 at work, and almost immediately I hit a hilariously bad problem in the core simple “import CSV” functionality. Basically, the Excel 2016 that I got (it is 2016, not the latest 365 that my home machine all use) does not understand Windows line endings or decimal numbers.

DOOM Black Book – This is Brilliant!

I heard about the DOOM Game Engine Black Book by Fabien Sanglard on the Hanselminutes podcast episode 666, and immediately ordered the book. It was a riveting read – at least for someone who likes technology and computer history like I do. The book walks through how the ID Software classic DOOM game from 1993 works and the tricks and techniques used to get sufficient performance out of the hardware of 1993. As background to how the software was written, the book contains a great description of the hardware design of IBM-compatible PCs, gaming consoles, and NeXT machines circa 1992-1994. It covers software design, game design, marketing, and how ID Software worked.

Off-Topic: Windows Explorer Tip: Shift Right-Click

For some reason, Microsoft has decided to hide some decidedly useful features in Windows 10 explorer behind the non-intuitive and rather unknown “shift-key + right-click” combination.

Windows 10 Reboot Loop – CUDA & Alienware

Late last year I was trying to do some machine learning work on my brand new Alienware 15 R4 gaming laptop. I had bought the laptop in order to have something portable with sufficient performance to actually do convolutional neural network (CNN) training and inference “on the road”. The GTX 1060 in the laptop is just as powerful as my home desktop machine, and should run Tensorflow and Keras well. I had the setup working on the desktop already, and copied the code over to the laptop. When trying to run the code the first time, I got some rather strange errors that I finally figured out meant that I was missing the CUDA toolkit. I downloaded CUDA version 10, installed, and the machine rebooted into the Windows 10 automatic repair mode.

Off-Topic: Pocket Casts – How I Listen to Podcasts

I am an avid podcast listener, using podcasts as the main source of entertainment on my commute, when I go to gym, go shopping, cook at home, et cetera. In the past, I have used a long line of iPod nano devices to serve my listening needs (see my review of the 7^th and final generation iPod Nano), downloading podcasts to a Windows PC and then syncing them over to the device. This worked well enough, and I kind of liked separating out the battery used for listening from the battery my phone used for calls and data traffic. But nothing lasts, and now that Apple killed off the iPods I had to find a replacement solution before my last iPod broke.

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