Tags: geek, leopard, mac, windows

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Tags: geek, nonsense, windows

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This image raises two issues:

1. Why does the Mac disk get an anti-aliased font and the Windows one a pixelated one?
2. Just how many fonts does a boot loader actually need?

Tags: geek, leopard, mac, questions, windows

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Apparently five year old video hardware is too new for Windows:

(The popup lies, that was the best it could do without downloading some extra drivers. XP Pro SP2, so mid-2004 at the earliest, and Intel on-board video in a PC bought (at the latest) in January 2003.)

Also, have a duck:

Tags: ducks, geek, photography, windows

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Further to my remarks on Leopard one of the reasons for buying it was to add a Windows partition to my Mac via Boot Camp.

Boot Camp comprises a partitioning tool, support for dual boot and a collection of drivers (on the Leopard install disk) for running Windows on Apple hardware. You need an Intel Mac and a sufficiently recent copy of XP or Vista. In this version only 32-bit software is supported even though I have a 64-bit CPU, but I hear that more recent Macs are shipping with 64-bit capable Boot Camp. 64-bit operation isn't particularly important for what I current want out of Windows anyway (games and the odd bit of software development).

Partitioning was perfectly easy. On booting into the Windows XP installer the keyboard didn't work initially; after I unplugged my USB card reader and rebooted it was OK, however. I'm not sure if this is Apple's bug or Microsoft's but it seems to be a common problem.

The network setup decided to apply the address I gave it to the firewire port rather than either of the ethernet ports. I disabled the firewire port (under windows) and the non-connected ethernet and it was happier. (As with my Windows/Linux dual-boot system) I'd given the Windows partition a different name and address to the MacOS partition.

SHIFT 3 on my UK keyboard produces £, which is not what I wanted; I type # much more often than £. Under Mac OS I was able to select a US keyboard layout but Windows doesn't offer me a US Apple layout (and the US layouts it does have have other keys in the wrong places).

Here's what I did to get around this:

1. Install the keyboard layout creator from http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx and run it
2. Load the Apple UK layout
3. Change £ to # and vica versa, using CTRL+ALT+3 to type #
4. Select Project->Properties and edit the name etc
5. Select Project->Test Keyboard Layout to make sure it works
6. Save the source file
7. Selected Project->Build DLL and Setup Package
8. Quit the layout creator
9. Install the new layout package
10. Go to Control Panel->Regional And Language Options->Languages and make the new keyboard layout the default

Rather surpringly the choice of keyboard layout doesn't seem to be reachable via Control Panel->Keyboard.

I installed the following things without any difficulty:

• PuTTY
• Firefox
• Windows updates (needed 2 restarts)
• IE7
• Starcraft and Brood War
• Rome: Total War
• Warcraft III
• Visual C++ 2008
• RealVNC
• DirectX SDK (March 2008)

Half Life said it didn't like my OS (it predates XP by some years) and needed a patch, but after rather fruitlessly poking around the web for the right thing (which used to be on Sierra's website but isn't any more) I installed Opposing Force and it installed a patch and ran OK anyway.

Tags: geek, leopard, mac, windows

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XXXXX.c(118) : warning C4996: 'fopen' was declared deprecated
        c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 8\VC\include\stdio.h(234) : see
declaration of 'fopen'
        Message: 'This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using fopen_
s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE. See online help
 for details.'

Tags: geek, software development, windows

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I now have:

• A Mingw install on one of my Linux boxes
• A win32 .a of PCRE, which is one of the dependencies of my backup program
• Eliminated the gcrypt dependency by dropping the SHA-1 implementation from the RFC in
• Installed the free VC++ on my Windows box

Installing the PSDK's a bit steam-driven, isn't it? (I'm not sure whether I actually need it or not but I decided to just install everything.)

So all I have to do now is provide windows-friendly alternatives to all the POSIX-specific bits.

Tags: geek, software development, windows

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I have a C++ program which works under Linux and MacOS (and will probably port nicely to other UNIXes). I also have a Windows XP system, which I want to run it on.

What's the most convenient way to get a C++-friendly build environment on Windows, preferrably without paying anything and preferrably without incurring a (runtime) dependency on Cygwin? I don't need (or particularly want) an IDE.

(The program in question being my backup software. Linux's NTFS implementation does not cut the mustard.)

Tags: geek, software development, windows

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More and more computers seems to be black. I approve, on aesthetic and historical grounds.

Setting up LNR's new computer last night went fairly smoothly though I did run into a small wrinkle.

One of the installation screens asks you want kind of keyboard you have. Among the bewildering array of options are 'United Kingdom' and 'United Kingdom extended'. So, which did she have? The keyboard had neither description printed anywhere on it, nor did the box it came in. Obviously I hit the help button, which was very good at using animated arrows to tell me which menu the list of keyboards was in but did not describe how to discover what kind of keyboard you actually had.

This has been a running sore in the computer world, actually. X11's configuration often names keyboards for the number of keys; all well and good, but do they really expect you to count the keys on the keyboard to find out how many it has (given that the numbers are typically just over 100)?

Obviously diagrams would help, and doubtless there are plenty on the web (though the MS site which claimed to have them that I tried from my Mac didn't work in Firefox or Safari) but no matter how good they are, unless you have an already-working computer they're going to be of rather limited usefulness. Would it really have hurt to include diagrams in the installer?For that matter you'd have thought that the transition to USB would be the ideal point at which to make keyboards plug-and-play. But, apparently this didn't occur to anyone, or if it did then nobody's taking advantage of it.

Tags: geek, life, windows

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