Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
Stuff about PC software packages.
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.
Continue reading “Was this a UTF-8 WTF?”
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.
Continue reading “Minimum Viable (Replacement) Product – The Teams Example”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.
Continue reading “Microsoft Windows memset Optimization – Stores are Free”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.
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.
Continue reading “Failing to See WiFi Login Page [Captive Portal] / Solved”
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.
Continue reading “Intel Blog: Simics 6 Device Register Coverage”
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.
Continue reading “Excel 2016 & CSV Import – Hilariously Broken”
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.
Continue reading “DOOM Black Book – This is Brilliant!”
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.
Continue reading “Off-Topic: Windows Explorer Tip: Shift Right-Click”
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.
Continue reading “Windows 10 Reboot Loop – CUDA & Alienware”
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 7th 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.
Continue reading “Off-Topic: Pocket Casts – How I Listen to Podcasts”
The new Windows 10 Controlled Folder Access (CFA) feature is a great idea – prevent unknown programs from modifying your files, to stop ransomware in its tracks. It is so good that I forced an early update to Windows 10 Build 1709 (“Fall Creators Update”) on a couple of my home machines and enabled it. Now, I have quickly disabled it, as it is not possible to actually use it in a real environment. It just stops things a bit too hard.
Continue reading “Windows 10 Controlled Folder Access – Good Idea, Implementation not Quite There”
Skype for Business is an interesting beast. It is a nice little program for internal collaboration, but some of its behaviors are just super-annoying. One my pet peeves is the fact that when you get into a meeting with screen sharing you have a bunch of big heads covering up a sometimes significant chunk of the materials being presented. I finally figured out how to get rid of them. It comes down to the view mode. This little icon in the toolbar:
Continue reading “Off-Topic: Getting Rid of the Heads in Skype for Business”
A recent update to the Amazon Kindle app on my Android devices introduced a severely annoying page curl animation when flipping through pages in a book. This unnecessary animation slows things down and disrupts the reading flow, or at least that is my opinion. It was really hard to find any kind of help on the Amazon pages or elsewhere on the Internet for how to turn it off. I finally figured it out, and here is how I did it so that other people with the same problem can search and find a solution…
Continue reading “Kindle App on Android: Turning off Annoying Page Curl”
In my sporadic series of IT fixes that I happen to find, here is another one about how to fix the load behavior of plugins in Outlook.
This is a solution to a problem that I have had myself with plugins for Outlook. I assume it works the same for other office programs. Basically, some plugins, in particular the Skype Meeting/Lync Meeting plugin, would not load when Outlook started and I was forced to manually enable it in the add-ons manager each time. Highly annoying. I managed to fix it by doing a small registry fix.
Continue reading “Off-Topic: Outlook Plugins do not activate when program starts – registry fix”