I had a real adventure last night, installing Windows 7. I ran into a problem so infuriating, and yet so completely boneheaded and ridiculous that I had to laugh. It’s described here. In essence, if you bought the EDU $29.95 Windows 7 Home Premium from Microsoft, the download file won’t actually work on 32-bit Windows XP. It unpacks all the files, and then tries to run a 64-bit
executable. Then it claims it can’t write to the install directory, instead of telling you the real problem — it can’t run the installer program.

Thank Jebus for the Internets — googling the error message turned up the forum discussion linked above and these
instructions on building a bootable Windows 7 Installation Disk.

I ran into another problem then — it might have been my issue, selecting the wrong install option from the menu, but I tried installs onto an existing Windows XP partition, and both ended up in an unbootable disk. Finally I punted — in XP, I deleted the partition on my new Windows 7 boot hard disk, and told it to do a full install. I was concerned this wouldn’t work, since I had the Upgrade and not the Full version, but apparently having a bootable XP disk elsewhere in the system let it do a clean install on an unformatted disk. Huzzah.

So I’ve spent several hours installing hardware drivers and my working set of software. Windows 7 feels faster than XP on the same hardware, but I’m not sure how much is actual performance improvements, and how much is having my main hard drive be a newer, faster hard drive.

The one big boo-hiss goes to M-Audio, who don’t have drivers for the Midisport 2×2 for 64 bit Vista or 7. WTF guys? Everything else seems to work great!

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

So I tried a little experiment last night.  To try and see if I could get better latency for my firewire audio interface, I downloaded the specific driver for my Firewire PCI card.   In case you haven’t had the ‘pleasure’ of their acquaintance, if you have a TI Chipset firewire card, the drivers are by a company called Unibrain.

Only problem is, the Unibrain drivers don’t fucking work at all. Luckily I thought a head and saved a restore point for my XP installation so I could roll back the driver install.

But this is just crazy. It’s great that XP has working drivers for my card, but how the hell is it that the ‘native’ drivers for TI cards are completely useless?

It is really weird how the whole USB vs Firewire thing has fallen out. Firewire is clearly the superior serial protocol for a lot of things, but for a variety of reasons, it has never caught on the way it should. And TI and Unibrain aren’t doing Firewire any favors.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Something has been irking me that probably should not.  To wit: electronic messages that don’t say anything but “That’s Excellent!” or “Nice job!” or “Happy Birthday!”

Maybe it’s rude of me to be irked, but messages that have information other than that seem kind of pointless.  They are, in effect, like the ‘ACK’ in communications protocol, whose only content is ‘message received.’

Case in point, I’ve achieved some sort of critical mass on facebook where I received nearly 50 messages on my birthday.  On the one hand, awesome that you all noticed. On the other hand, as email programs will tell you sometimes, “message has no body.”

My tendency is to follow these guidelines 1) No blog post unless I have something to say I don’t hear anyone else saying 2) No two word e-mails, unless I’m answering a direct question. 3) No e-mailing someone to see why they didn’t answer my e-mail.

Does this make me seem uncommunicative? Maybe.  But I’m a computer programmer, I’m a big fan of the ‘no news is good news’ theory: the nominal behavior of any system is to be silent unless it has a problem or news.  I think what people are trying to do is to convey a one bit message — I acknowledge you.  I enjoy being acknowledged but somehow wish for more.

So hey, for all y’all. If you don’t hear from me, assume I still love you and think you’re the most. Except for you, and you, and you. You know who you are.

PS I was actually kind of touched by the person who e-mailed me yesterday and apologized for not sending me a facebook ‘Happy Birthday!!!’  Somehow,  apologizing for not doing something that I’m not sure I wanted him to do in the first place feels better than if he’d gone and done it.  Confused? Me too!

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

So way back when a friend who worked pretty high up at Microsoft signed me up as a Windows beta tester, something I never really took seriously once I realized what a PITA Vista was. But it did have it’s benefits — I was a Windows 7 Beta Tester as well, something I didn’t do anything with.

At any rate, now that I want to put Windows 7 on a new machine, I can get a legit copy of the RC build and get going with it.

The unfortunate thing is that when my commercial copy of 7 arrives in October, it will want a fresh install. I was going to put XP on and then do a fresh install, but now there’s no reason not to put 7 on.

As someone who in the past has had OK luck with doing Microsoft upgrade installs, this is a little annoying, especially since my ‘working set’ of software takes several hours to install.

What I’m hoping is that some clever person figures out how to circumvent this baloney somehow. Theoretically the RC I downloaded is no different than the release version that will arrive in October on DVD. If that’s the case all that would really have to happen is to get rid of the expiration timebomb, change the version information down in Window’s guts, and brand it with the new activation code.

Or maybe I’ll just put XP SP3 on. I already made a DVD of XP with the service pack and all the drivers slipstreamed in.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

The big buzz (and trending Twitter topic of the day) is Google OS. This will apparently comprise a minimal Linux Kernel, a graphical rendering engine, and Google Chrome. It will be perfect for what people spend 95% of their computing time on: dicking around in a web browser, and running web applicaitons.

This is all well and good for 99% of users, and not so good at all for people who actually do CPU-intensive computing. That means any sort of scientific computation, CAD, Image Processing, Gaming, and Music Software. All those applications require optimized native code processing, and are usually written in low level languages like C++. While the average person had enough computing power 10 years ago to satisfy their needs, those applications have no trouble soaking up all available CPU bandwidth.

If you read Slashdot or any mainstream Computer publications, they run articles every 6 months or so about how “Today’s software doesn’t take advantage of new Multi-core processors.” That might be true for applications (like Web browsers or Word processors) that spend most of their time waiting for a user to hit the next key or click the mouse, but it is not true of music software or any of the other applications mentioned above. I write software that routinely saturates as many processor cores as it can, and software like Cubase and Ableton Live do so as well.

When Google talks about the browser being the only interface to Chrome OS, and only portable web applications being available, it seems like a missed opportunity. They should allow native development, and expose an API for presentation, because it would allow people to write computationally expensive software that will run very well on their platform. A minimal Linux core and a streamlined GUI platform would be perfect for e.g. music software, and Google has the market presence to finally make Linux a viable commercial software platform.

But once again, as with Microsoft and Apple, the needs of musicians, graphic artists and scientists come last after the unwashed masses who just want to watch kittens play piano, and send nude pics of themselves to their innamorata or innamorato. This seems really short-sighted.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

So for ‘fun’ I ran http://www.cornwarning.com/Tickertape through the W3C Markup Validator.

Actually, the thing I was concerned about is that the page looked fucked up in IE8, and presumably other browsers. Haven’t rechecked it yet, since I’m on a Mac at work. But at a minimum it found a bunch of small coding errors. No doubt I wouldn’t have had these problems if I’d been using an HTML editor more capable than emacs, but I haven’t yet found a WYSIWYG editor that’s free and doesn’t screw you somehow…

Anyway I learned some stuff, like XHTML transitional wants ’self contained’ tags to self terminate, e.g. <br> should be <br />, and attribute values should always be in quotes. I’m not sure the permissive nature of web browsers’ HTML parsers has done us any favors.

I also (DUH) am a big believer in standards compliance. Yeah I’m looking at you Microsoft.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

I figured this out yesterday, and it is the sort of thing a lot of people would like to do and haven’t figured out yet.

First off, this is the audio player:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

and you can read up on it at the AudioPlayer website. It’s very easy to integrate in Wordpress, and putting a player in a post looks like this:

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/quicktime-vs-the-upsetter.mp3]

Second off, my ‘easy’ way to integrate it outside Wordpress:
0. Make sure you can use PHP with your web server. This is pretty standard anymore; you’d probably have to install your own build of Apache to avoid having PHP.

1. First put this php function in a file. My version is here:http://www.cornwarning.com/php-includes/audioplayer.php

<?php
function audioplayer($audioURL,$playerIndex )
{
echo "<script language=\"JavaScript\"
src=\"http://YOURPATH/audio-player.js\">
</script>
<object type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"
data=\"http://YOURPATH/player.swf\"
id=\"audioplayer1\" height=\"24\" width=\"150\">
<param name=\"movie\" value=\"http://YOURPATH/player.swf\">
<param name=\"FlashVars\"
value=\"playerID=$playerIndex&soundFile=$audioURL\">
<param name=\"quality\" value=\"high\">
<param name=\"menu\" value=\"false\">
<param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\">
</object>";
}
?>

2. You will need two files to make the player work: audio-player.js, and player.swf. In a WordPress install these will be in wp-content/plugins/audio-player/assets. Copy these someplace in your web directory — maybe the same place you put audioplayer.php. Then replace YOURPATH with the URL for that directory.

3. To use the audioplayer PHP function in an html page:

<?php include("http://YOURPATH/audioplayer.php"); ?>
<?php audioplayer("YourMP3URL",1); ?>


There you have it. Now I realize, not everyone writes their own web pages and most of the above might be pretty forbidding, but I hope that if you can write a simple web page and manage the files in your public_html, this is enough information to get you going.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

You can pre-order Windows 7 upgrades 1/2 price right now, which is kind of a good deal. If you don’t need a 64-bit OS right effing now, you’ll never get a better deal.

What I don’t get is this:”There are a limited number of copies available. The offer will end when they’re gone, or July 11—whichever comes first.”

So Microsoft is saying that something digital and infinitely copyable is limited? That’s absurd. Beyond that they’re saying there’s a limited quantity of something that doesn’t exist yet. Maybe I’m being curmudgeonly, but it would be more accurate to say “We will only sell a limited number of copies at this price.” or “we will only honor this price until July 11th.”

But unless Microsoft actually says “We’re only selling X number” and sticks to it, I think they’re lying. I think this is nothing more than a marketing ploy to gauge interest in the new release. Why would they leave money on the table, if people are willing to buy right now? And if their concern is that this pre-order promotion might cannibalize future sales, then maybe they shouldn’t have made the offer at all.

Besides which, the number of people buying a retail OS upgrade is a rounding error with respect to their OS sales. Nearly all Microsoft OS are pre-installed on new computers, and only the geekiest among us ever install a new OS, let alone pay for it. They can’t even get a lot of people to update their current system to fix security problems.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

So I have 2 Western Digital drives to send back and the one big Seagate. On the one hand that will be 2.5 terabytes of disk space to stick somewhere when I get them back. On the other hand, I have to like physically put them in boxes and mail them.

Oh well, I’ve got an MMT8 I promised to mail Shawn Rudiman gathering dust next to the front door too. I might have to stoop to interacting with the world of Fermions, Boogers and the Post Office long enough to get all this stuff out the door…

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

I just had a brand new 1.5TB hard drive fail, making it the 4th hard drive to fail in my desktop system since the beginning of the year. So far I’ve lost 2 IDE drives and 2 SATA drives.

What’s confusing to me is that there are 3 drives in the system that have had no problems, and the system is rock solid apart from eating the occasional hard drive. The Power Supply is an Antec 500W supply less than a year old.

And ironically, all this hard drive failure has happened since I started backing up frequently to an external firewire drive.

I don’t know what to think really, but it’s annoying as fuck.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Thanks to Ronnie from Rekkerd.org for the tip — you can now move forwards and backwards in time in my blog. I will at some point replace the text tags with images, Preferably pointing skeleton hand with flaming torches.

It points up something a little annoying about Wordpress. The entry on post_nav_link neglects to say “oh this would go here in this file, most of the time, here’s what it will look like.” It’s one of those things where you can’t really understand what the fuck is going on in the wordpress codebase until you understand a large percentage of what’s going on.

A lot of things are like that — learning to build applications on Windows or Mac, OpenGL, Tcl, Qt, etc. But WordPress isn’t supposed to be MS Comp Sci Hackerish stuff — anyone should be able to use it. At this point I can’t update the theme I’m using because I hacked on it to get the image in my header, and change colors. If I upgrade my theme, any customizations I’ve made will be gone.

In order to NOT lose my customizations I’ll have to try and find the stock code for the version I’m using, do a diff on it, install the new version, and then reapply the changes. This is doable, but it’s the sort of low level, detail-oriented code-gardening that takes up my time at the day job. I hate doing it when I’m not being paid to do it.

I’m not whining, mind you, I’m just saying that WordPress is in dire need of a WYSIWYG theme editor, or the themes need to have customization panels that are easy to use. Otherwise they’re just going to drive people nuts. The best thing about WordPress imho is that it isn’t Blogger.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

I’ve now gotten three unsolicited requests for help setting up websites. This is flattering of course, and you know, but other than general figure-shit-out skills developed as a programmer for 25 years, I’ve very little web-specific knowlege — just what I know to get by. A more accurate way to put it is that I know fuck all about developing the sort of websites my friends want me to help them build.

I thought if you threw a rock you hit a web developer these days, why me? Anyone with moderate Google skills and a not-completely-fucktarded web host can figure out setting up a WordPress blog.

Maybe it’s that I’m a nice guy and don’t charge people.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

UAD-1e Express Pack at AudioMidi.com for $99

Apparently Audiomidi isn’t the only place with this deal, but it’s an insane price. It lists at $499, and Audiomidi regularly has them at $299. At that price, you can buy more than one, and the drivers support up to 4 in one system.

This is a SHARC based hardware accelerator for running VST audio plugins. I tested both a UAD-1 PCI and a TCI Powercore for Grooves Magazine years ago and thought the UAD-1 was killer.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

After my last post, and a few more days of free-floating annoyance, I took the plunge and uninstalled EndPoint. Instead I put on AVG Free. Everything about AVG Free feels faster and less intrusive than EndPoint, and it did find all the same virii on the few infected files I had laying around. And when you turn off real-time virus protection, it freaking stays turned off!

And if you Symantec Endpoint Computer Performance, my blog entry is the top result. If you google Symantec Endpoint Performance the top result is Symantec FAQ answer about computers becoming slow after installing Endpoint.

Let it be known, that none of their suggestions would really help anyone not working in the managed corporate Endpoint environment.

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday I noticed two things: google searches were getting hijacked, and I couldn’t run certain programs, particularly cmd.exe and regedit.exe.

I always think that I can beat those fucking viruses and trojans, but 5 hours spent hammering on the problem with a multitude of programs, and a lot of google searching convinced me I needed to re-install Windows.

Luckily I had an unused SATA drive laying around, so I 1) Made a Slipstreamed SP3 Disk with motherboard and SATA drivers, fiddled around in the BIOS to get the new disk at the head of the boot order, and we’re off to the races.

What is gradually dawning on me is that when you have to install Cubase, Live, Wavelab, Reaktor, Pro-53, Kontakt3, FM8, Battery 3, Pluggo, Hipno, and a bazillion other things, it takes for-fucking-ever.

The upside will be having a much less garbaged-up windows installation on a much faster boot disk. And NLite is great; I didn’t get very fancy, but you can make a bootable Windows disk with every device driver necessary to make your system run, configure it to do an unattended install, remove components you don’t need from Windows, etc, etc, etc. And you don’t have to be a computer genius to use it. If you can figure out downloading drivers and unpacking them, you can use NLite. For people who support Windows PCs, it would be a godsend — you could make a disk image that has all the drivers you’ll ever need that will do unattended installs complete with network configuration and user management.

I don’t know if I can blame this on Microsoft, because according to what I’ve gathered in poking around on forums, you get this particular infection either from a Java or Adobe Acrobat exploit. It seems like Computer virii and worms are co-evolving with the software meant to control them, just like their biological counterparts.

And it was just my luck I see m to have picked up a new virus that none of the virus scanners can find and fix… or rootkit. Or whatever.

Right now I’m running the Kontakt 3 install, a deep virus scan, and Windows Update. The fun never ends….

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.

Testing the Livejournal cross-post plugin. If it works, you won’t have to friend the scarycrusher feed on Livejournal if you want to see my blog posts…

And if that makes no sense at all to you, as you were!

Originally published at Do My Eyes Look Scary?. You can comment here or there.