Miscellaneous meanderings and myriad mumblings

kittens and computers

2008-05-17T17:33:19Z

today has involved a lie in, some minor computer fettling and putting spot on onto the cats (a non trivial exercise)
I sense a 'all hardware sucks' post soon featuring the crappiness of pc cooling, the shit motherboard software from intel on intel motherboards, the simultaneous flexibility of pcs and inflexibility of products to just work without tweaking, the inflexibility of mac hardware configurations and the insane second hand prices

Laplink's PC Mover free today (for not much longer)

2008-05-17T00:43:43Z

PC Mover is free until 11:59PM today in honour of their 25th birthday.

Of course, Laplink is US based, so it's anyone's guess whether they mean EST, EDT, PDT or whatever (they don't mean BST or GMT, because I've recently downloaded it...)

PC Mover seems to move settings and data from an old PC to a new one (or even a PC to an Intel Mac), so could be useful. You'd better hurry up if you're interested!

I can't say I've used laplink much, but at one point it was one of the very few reliable file transfer programs out there and certainly has one heck of a legacy.

more stuff : computer games, doctor who, foot

2008-05-12T13:19:20Z

I finished Freedom Force vs Third Reich on Thursday - the last but one mission was a bit rock hard (I probably chose the wrong characters), but it ended well and I've thoroughly enjoyed the game. May try some of the better mods for it at some point. I have so many other games I've not finished, either.

Also played a bit more Discworld 1 - it's a good game, but some of the solutions are a bit illogical to say the least. I may have looked at the solution once or twice..

My ankle hurts a tad. I'm sure this is absolutely nothing to do with the several bike rides and dancing to the aforesaid 18 minute extended remix including lots of jumping up and down.. Hopefully it will be better if I decide to go to Bollox on Friday.

Now, Doctor Who.. I'd eagerly anticipated this episode and was a little disappointed. Although the episode wasn't necessary that bad, I'm so far rating this as another Fear Her (now that was a crappy episode).

The twist in the plot was good, and the Doctor's 'daughter' was very cute, however I had severe problems with :

1) How quickly and easily the clones could be made. I know Who isn't even internally consistent, but being able to easily clone the Doctor has such obvious implications I don't think it should have been approached. It's even worse than the burning sky in last week's episode.

2) The fact the leader of the human resistance was so old. Was he a member of the original crew? So far this is the only way I can rationalise this, as the alternative is some form of accelerated aging.
2a) If it is accelerated aging, all planet inhabitants will be dead in days as will the Doctor's daughter..

3) The Doctor's 'daughter' being able to regenerate. This does seem to overturn some established Who continuity.

4) Even if the twist was reasonably clever, have they never heard of clocks and diaries?

5) The terraforming that was pretty much as bad as Total Recall's..

So, on first view a bit of fun and some great acting, at second glance serious suspension of disbelief problems, and at third look fucking huge damage to Who continuity.

I'm especially unimpressed because this could have been easily addressed with a little more work. Let's hope this coming week is much better.

Weekend - biking, party, mower, computer, kittens

2008-05-12T12:45:19Z

Weekend started off rather well with a quick 17 mile bike ride up to White Coppice and back, then home for a deep clean of the bathroom and pubbage.

Saturday featured a lie in (apart from getting up to feed two insistent kittens) and some faffing around with my main PC. Unfortunately it's rather hot internally (up to 41°C); ironically I think this is due to the fscking huge Tuniq Tower CPU heatsink which is actually impeding airflow. I've not yet swapped that out for the standard Intel cooler to see if it makes much difference (hopefully CPU temperature up, case temperature down) - first I added an extra fan (no difference), and then went down to one graphics card (also no difference - a max of 51W removed and no temperature drop!).

Of course, to make matters worse when I got up this morning the system had hung and will currently not boot into Vista. Even safe mode produces a corrupt screen. Duff video card?

Anyway PC aside there was some general sorting, letting cats into the garden, retrieving a fluffy spotty kitten from under a car three houses away where he'd discovered there were Other Cats and was hiding..

Then there was L's 50th birthday party. This was rather fun, after a slow start. Good chat, drinks, dancing - I even got teenage kudos for keeping up with an 18 minute extended remix (of course this was for being an Old Bastard that can keep up, rather than actually being young and cool).

Sunday featured lots of kitten cuddles, fixing the lawn mower (just needed wonky cable cutting, stripping and reseating), watching Dr. Who whilst it rained hard, then another bike ride (managed to spot a hare).

I was also rather pleased to find I was also fractionally under 11 stone, and can fit into my small stretchy t shirts again. I may be in danger of going down a trouser size if I'm not careful!

I'm not planning to be ridiculously zealous about weight, but I feel stabilising a few pounds below 11 stone is quite a good healthy target.

This week will feature drinkies on Tuesday for L's real 50th birthday, Bollox Friday maybe? Also lots of furniture re-arranging. I think I shall have a real go at the study, after sorting this bloody PC out.

Bad, good

2008-05-08T09:55:10Z

Bad : mowed the front lawn last night. Got 90% of the way through and the control unit sparked and had the distinct smell of Magic Smoke :(. Hopefully this will be easy to fix and not require the purchase of a new mower. Grrrrrr.

Good-ish : Alchemy for Audigy will be free - free EAX on Vista. Of course this is probably because daniel_k of modded Creative drivers fame produced a free (hacked) Alchemy, but this may go a very small way to recover the shitty reputation Creative has studiously developed.

Let the cats out into the garden again. Maisie loves running and playing, Cairo is a bit of a roamer. Unfortunately far from calming him down he then wanted to play fetch when back indoors over and over and over and over again. I eventually had to close the study door to actually do something useful. I suspect in the cat mind sitting down=available for play.

(Also, standing up=potentially available for play, lying down=available for play after nagging, etc etc)

Cats, Computer games

2008-05-07T13:06:33Z

On Thursday I finally took the cats to be chipped and to purchase some spot on to prevent fleas/ticks/worms (another £70 on top of everything else, but chipping only needs to be done once and it works out at £5.50 per cat, per month to keep them flea free..).

This of course meant I could then take them out into the garden! :). They generally enjoyed this, although I have taken some measures to stop them exploring the building site beyond the rear fence. Maisie loves running madly after me with a bootlace, but Cairo is still more lazy - I need to do something about his podge. I'm trying to encourage them not to go into the front so much, but they do like to explore. I suppose everyone needs to let their babies do their own thing sooner or later though.

At the moment I'm only letting them out when I can supervise them, and opening the patio door. A cat flap will require reglazing/a new patio door and will not be cheap.

Sunday was computer game day as it was miserable. There was a bit of Freedom Force vs Third Reich. There was some Discworld (1) to test out the Sound Canvas, a run of Ultima 7 to confirm that even if a sound module is a league ahead of an older one the sound can be poor if it has not been remapped to suit the instruments of the new one..

I got Cyro Interactive's Ring working (for varied values of working) to which I can only say : don't bother, as the game is irritating, obscure and dull even if it contains Solti conducting Wagner. Finally, there was a little Rise of the Triad, which remains an extremely fun game even if technically dated - is there a modern alternative to it?

Finally, at some point last week I had a go of Beyond Divinity and am finding it a little uninspiring to get into. May require a little effort to make the most of that.

Progress on hacking exult has been slow; I need a half decent memory profiler - any suggestions? (I'm sure I have some links somewhere).

Cats, weekend, biking, biphoria etc

2008-05-07T12:50:57Z

Things were going well last week until a few unexpected expenses materialised.

First, there was deliberate shiny buying in the shape of a cheap Sound Canvas 55 off ebay. It's somewhat more modern than the MT-32 I got a while back - the piano actually sounds like a proper piano and it can be mapped for proper General MIDI compatibility (even if it's capable of a superset of that) although my modern standards the note polyphony is a bit low..

Then the UPS died at home (it was cheap, and has lasted a couple of years) encouraging the purchase of a second hand with new batteries one (this also showed that the old one was never doing a fan test, which may be why it failed). The new one carries on the tradition of the old one in continually trimming the input voltage - it appears the household voltage is a bit high.

Eye and dentist appointments hit simultaneously, and I think it's likely I'll need a new prescription - probably the same frame though.

Thus, despite the fact there are lovely people I wanted to see in London, I stayed around Manchester - particularly as it was therainbowqueen's 30th birthday, and that only comes around once!

Due to the rainbow theme, there was a last minute dash on Thursday to grab some orange machine dye. An old pair of white jeans magically became burnt orange, coupled with my Stuff Is Awesome orange t shirt with a rainbow on it :).

Saturday consisted of going to Futuresonic with T. I was confused here, and actually thought it was Eurocultured - which is on the coming bank holiday weekend. Anyway, it was a decent diversion and some drinks and chat were also had. Then, onwards to see the RQ in all her splendid rainbowy glory together with various colours in the rainbow friends (S in green and C in an orange jumpsuit were particularly good).

Sunday was spent vegging on games (it rained) and Monday a bit of snoozing and a quick 17 mile bike ride - jolly good.

Last night was Biphoria.. I'm pondering looking at running Manchester Bifest in November.. Any suggestions or offers of help (workshops, cake, crafts, decorations, entertainment) welcome!

Interesting juxtaposition of the day

2008-05-07T10:55:10Z

Driving to work watching two people walking down the road.

On the left - a woman wearing a robe
On the right - a man in a hoodie

The similarity is rather amusing.

Fuck :(

2008-04-26T00:24:30Z

Humphrey Lyttleton is dead. FUCK :(.

Appropriately I heard about this on the way back from the pub on the radio (behold, the joys of a Nokia E51 with radio built in).

Humph will be sadly missed. 86 isn't a particularly bad innings but it's still not bloody fair :(.

I really liked ISIHAC, and although I'm more into Blues than Jazz, Humph remained a veritable British Institution. He will be sorely missed :(.

w00t! Doctor Who S4 ep 1

2008-04-25T09:36:51Z

Nipped off to Trafford Centre to find presents - after some fruitless searching I located some decent items. Then back home for some chat and watching the beginning of Doctor Who series 4 - it was a bit late so I listened with headphones, which didn't work too badly.

I was rather relieved to find out that Catherine Tate was not, in fact, fantastically irritating as she was in the xmas special. Fiesty I have no problem with. Decent episode, although I suspect that if asked many people would just welcome the Adipose with open arms! It's been a while since aliens have been so cute, too.

I also watched a bit of Doctor Who Confidential; the person who used the same music for them walking down the street as to that in Austin Powers : International Man of Mystery needs a bit of a spanking if it's not a coincidence..

Bad, Worse, sort of good

2008-04-22T21:56:49Z

Bad : chain snapped on bike
Worse : no tool to fix it
Sort of good : only a few miles from home

Fucking bike. I'm taking it into the bike shop tomorrow, I'll get a better front derailleur and the chain fixed. Whilst I'm at it I might as well get a chain fixing tool so I can fix it myself in the future.

Bikes. feh.

Weekend, the remainder

2008-04-21T10:16:55Z

I was up rather late on Saturday due to the 4am bedtime, and had a speedy mow of the front lawn and collecting of cat food before dashing off to Manchester to spend £30 of vouchers I'd been given for my birthday and find presents for my mother and sister.

I found a rather nice wooden cat in Shared Earth, visited Lush, and then managed to get a haul with my vouchers, to whit on the films front : Curse of the Golden Flower, Seven Swords (opinion is a bit divided on whether this is good or not), The Hustler, Shadowlands, Serenity.

On the computer games front, despite already having too many to play I obtained three for a tenner - Freedom Force and the Third Reich (this does not help with early bedtimes). I was never very taken with the demo of the original Freedom Force, but FFvTR works extremely well; the 3D presented-as-isometric view is lovely and working out how to use the heroes powers is fun. It really is rather cheesy, and someone should be mildly chastised for creating a character called Red Oktober which then leads to the next objective being 'The Hunt for Red Oktober'. Oh dear :).

I also obtained Beyond Divinity - which is supposed to be a bit of a flawed gem, just like the original Divine Divinity that was fantastic up until the ending, then turned into a boring battlefest.

Finally, Tunguska appears to be a competent adventure.

All the above for 30 quid? Bargain!

Of course, the fact I intend to catch up with Torchwood and watch all the Dr. Who to date by Saturday does not really help in watching all these films. I don't want to wait long to find out what happens in Doctor Who episode four, though...

Finally, Sunday involved playing FFvTR, going on a 16 mile bike ride, some more FFvTR and a couple of drinkies. splendid weekend :).

Yay Bollox

2008-04-19T03:03:06Z

I nipped off to Taurus and then Bollox tonight. It was jolly good, and is undoutedly better for being upstairs. I had fun sitting in the saddles and shouting 'rawhide' and other silly things. etriganuk was there as was C, S, H, M, S and others.

Sleep now, although Cairo would prefer to play fetch...

Weekend, Torchwood, ankle, pcs

2008-04-15T13:09:13Z

I spent much of Saturday swearing very loudly at my bike. In essence the front derailleur is simple, but actually understanding the precise techniques is more tricky. By late afternoon I had achieved bugger all other than a deeper understanding of derailleurs (T's suggestion of Sheldon Brown did not really help although another suggestion (on Monday) of Park Tools seems rather good). I was in a foul mood, so stayed in and watched a bit more Torchwood. Somewhat later I dragged myself out to the Bowling Green and found a guy singing that was actually entertaining. There was some beer and chat and I felt rather less fed up.

Sunday, being a complete masochist, I tried to fix the bike again. This time, however, I gave up after only 1.5 hours and went for a walk/run on the moors which was lovely.

Other points of note are :

H&B are coming round tomorrow to see my kittens and help me work on my bike :)
My ankle is again knackered - must do some yoga, and possibly get someone to look at it, as something is clearly wrong :(. Certainly I must not do any more running on it.
Computer hasn't crashed again yet - it was up for 3.5 days after switching both CRTs to be on one card. Have now switched one CRT back and it's up to about a day and a half - hopefully it will now crash, so that I can pinpoint the problem.

So far Torchwood series 2 has been rather good; episode 5 ('Adam') probably being the weakest one so far. Owen seems to be the only remaining member of the team who is not bi (the kiss to get out of an awkward situation in series 1 episode 1 doesn't really count..)

I did make a small amount of progress with exult last week - it runs fine (I made a stupid linking error, and am still finding my way round Visual Studio 2008). However, the debug version is a) slow (understandable) and b) occupies about 30Meg. Some of that will be debug code, but given that I want to get it under 10MB, that's rather a lot!

[geek] Conway's Life, space, retro games

2008-04-14T12:42:47Z

Conway's Game of Life

Golly is a rather good Life simulator

Yesterday's APOD is very pretty

It's worth checking out www.ovine.net for all manner of reimplemented retro games, including Dan Dare.

Die, Die fucking gears!

2008-04-12T01:29:52Z

My front derailleur has been playing up for weeks, culminating in losing everything except second gear. I managed to fix it, but the switch from second to third gear wasn't perfect and the chain was rubbing on the derailleur when the lowest gear was selected.

So I had a go at sorting it tonight. Gahhh... It appears to need a lot of practice and three arms.

I've gone from losing all my front gears, to regaining them all but losing some rear gears.

I suspect I shall have to do a from the groundup check starting with the rear derailleur then prolonged fiddling with the front. Gah.

May pop over to see B sometime soon, as they've offered to fix my bike and show me how it's done.

Pun pain -- please make it stop....

2008-04-10T15:04:16Z

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrghh

Cats - things I have to deal with. No 1 - The Pillow

2008-04-10T09:48:27Z

This is one of the toys regularly dropped on my head/pillow.

Torchwood in Owen not a complete wanker shocker

2008-04-09T17:29:46Z

Finished watching Torchwood series 1

Out of Time was jolly good, and there was even a sympathetic portrayal of Owen - will wonders never cease?
Combat wasn't too bad either; I could possibly even see it as being vaguely realistic if the Weevils did exist.
Captain Jack Harkness was really rather fun, and the final dance sequence was extremely well done.
...unfortunately this was all spoiled by the final End of Days. The inevitable comparison is with The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit. The difference is, that whilst both are unoriginal, TIP/TSP had a great implementation and EoD did not..

Still, I think it's fair to give Torchwood some credit here. Whilst it had a somewhat shaky start, the overall count of decent episodes is somewhere between 4-6 out of 13. That's not a great ratio (by comparison, I would rate New Dr. Who series 3 as having had 2 average to poor episodes), but it's a damn sight better than a) Heroes and b) Blackadder series 1 (we all know what a huge leap Blackadder 2 was). I'm actually looking forward to series 2, instead of dreading it; I may promote it from watching on a computer with headphones on to sticking it on the big screen.

Had lovely tapas with my parents last night; the kittens loved the attention and Maisie in particular was very friendly :).

Torchwood catchup

2008-04-08T09:29:02Z

The great Torchwood catchup has started - first the second half of series one, then series two, followed by the new Dr. Who. Watching it in one of my three monitors whilst doing other things, because generally I'm not that interested in Torchwood.

In summary :

Greeks Bearing Gifts - not bad. Fairly predictable. Seems like all of Torchwood have now shagged someone/an alien.
They Keep Killing Suzy - wow. This episode is definitely worth watching; some definite originality (now *that's* plotting!).
Random Shoes - I can't help feeling this is Love and Monsters for Torchwood. It's decent enough, although I never really found it particularly engaging. Fortunately the ending is much improved over L&M.

In other news my PC appears to be hanging after long periods of uptime. Personally I suspect this is a combination of Vista, multiple monitors and Nvidia's shitty drivers. Diagnosis has begun..

Weekend - 'birthday', sleepiness, plan9

2008-04-07T11:05:14Z

Although my birthday was some time ago, this weekend basically worked as a belated birthday weekend.

First, persons unknown (probably my sister) sent me a Mogfather T shirt on Friday. I therefore wore it to the pub that night, and had to explain what it meant to someone dim. 'What's the T shirt?' 'I have two kittens' 'Still not getting it' *sigh*.

Saturday, I encountered the uselessness that is Horwich's Cobblers, as my pair of Cats' heels were a bit poorly. I tried to drop them off last Saturday, and I'm sure the opening hours were 9:30-17:00 on a Saturday, however they were shut when I cycled round at 10 to 5. I eventually dropped it off midweek, to pick up this Saturday. Of course when I went round, they were shut *again*. After checking out another shop, the shopkeeper finally returned and claimed they shut at 2pm on Saturdays. Me, I think he was skiving for the Grand National.

They do seem to have done a good job, but I'd rather use somewhere with better opening hours. Sadly, there appears to be nowhere else that doesn't require a large detour :(.

Anyway, that night was a 'birthday' meal at the Green House - a splendid vegan/veggie restaurant. The food was lovely; I had curried patra leaves, followed by butternut and nut roast and chocolate fudge cake with ice cream (everything was vegan). It's well worth going, however it should be noted a) the website is crap b) it is a good idea to book in advance as space can be limited at weekends and c) it looks *horrid* from the outside - broken and dilapidated. Fear not, because inside it is rather nice :).

In this culinary adventure I was joined by T, S, C, lownote and H. We had some jolly good chat, then departed for a couple more beers before going home. I plan to have a catch up lunch with a few people that were unable to make the meal. Obviously we all missed Dr. Who, but that's what video recorders and downloads are for ;).

Sunday I planned to have a bike ride.. However, after getting up a bit late, pottering around and having lunch, I had a bit more bread than usual. Feeling dozy I went for a quick lie down and woke up - four hours later! Oops. I therefore sorted the study a bit more (this shall probably be the week of furniture rearranging) and played with Plan9 in a qemu VM. I may have to assess my carbohydrate intake if it's having this effect on me, although Sunday generally does seem to be worse for some reason.

There was a Sunday night beer at the Bowling Green. For once, it appeared deserted, as did the rest of Horwich - where had everyone gone?!. Still I had good chat with S[1] and we even got Free Beer! The Bowling Green is definitely the best pub in Horwich at the moment; the landlady is trying very hard to keep to a high standard and it deserves to succeed. We were a bit shocked to learn on Friday that The Bridge is currently selling Stella at £3.20; I tend to prefer real ale, but lager at more than it costs in central Manchester? *boggle*.

[1] You should realise that that's S - not S or S; all three are clearly different!

Vista stuff

2008-04-05T15:13:27Z

I've not been doing much coding this week as I was busy on Monday, at biphoria on Tuesday and the pub on Friday, leaving two days to achieve stuff. My Vista install has been a bit unhappy, so I took the opportunity to rebuild it onto the new Hitachi SATA II disk I had. It has, afterall, had a load of SP1 builds and drivers on it.

I've also upgraded from 2GB of PC640 DDR2 non ECC RAM to 4GB of ECC (non buffered) 5300 RAM, and bought a 2GB ReadyBoost compatible USB2 flash drive at the same time to see if it had any effect.

Overall, I've managed to move things into a state I'm reasonably happy with, thoughts :

ReadyBoost (cacheing disk swaps onto a fast flash device) seems to clear the cache every time it powers off. This seems suboptimal : I'd suggest that sticking a SuperFetch cache on the flash device so that it can retrieve commonly accessed applications quickly on startup might be valuable.

Vista's performance index seems to assess hard drives properly, by testing transfer rates on various parts of the disk (outer is faster than inner). I wonder if things like diskkeeper enable you to relocate programs to faster bits of the spindle - AIX certainly used to have sophisticated partition placement tools and suchlike.

The Windows Easy Transfer tool is utter shit. It won't let you take an existing Vista install on an external disk and suck all the data off it. It will let you backup from the old to new system, however it seems to miss out lots of application settings. I had to manually copy files over. Rating : -1/10 (negative, as it can potentially allow you to lose data..)

I strongly disagree with comments elsewhere that 'style is substance'. I'd quite happily use a much less blingified system as long as it runs all the programs I want at decent speed. As such I've turned off all the crappy menu, window and animation transitions that actually slow down bringing up programs. My one concession is to have pretty wallpaper on my desktop, although I may even turn that off soon..

Then again, Vista seems less happy with the DWM turned off and everything returned to classic. There are repainting errors, which might of course be a fault of the Nvidia drivers.

The much improved event logs (that seem to equate to an unrelated comment by customer at work that it 'logs if a dog farts in the general direction of the store') keep reminding me that the graphics cards are being stressed. This could be Vista, but I would again suggest this is fucking Nvidia. Yes, it isn't common to have 1920x1440 and 1280x1024 monitors on one card, and 2048x1536 on the other, but modern cards have fast RAMDACs and lots of memory. This is not acceptable. Graphics cards should produce high quality 2D first, and 3D second..

I'd look at buying ATI instead, but a) I can see the exact same symptoms reported for some versions of Catalyst and b) their Linux drivers are much worse.

Windows Media Player remains slow to start up regardless of operating system or hardware. It's said that third party alternatives are much improved, but in my experience they fail in other areas, particularly synching audio and video tracks..

Write cacheing seems to be turned off by default for many drives, which is suboptimal. I realise most people don't have a UPS, but it might be an idea to at least alert them and let them make the choice.

Thunderbird needs a spring clean, as it's beginning to hang. This may be to do with having well over 15,000 messages in its inbox..

I can't seem to see a way to index zip files by default... must research that.

Relating to external drive boxes, spride noted he didn't trust fanless external drive boxes. I echo this, and in particular do not recommend buying an IB-361-STUS-B black Icybox SATA to e-SATA/USB 2 caddy. First, the mechanism uses an easily losable key that can't even be attached to a keyring, it doesn't fit thicker SATA drives, they get rather hot, and the power adaptor and cable are of poor quality. Buy something else..

On the other hand, I do recommend the caddy less internal Icybox IB-168SK-B. There's also a version with a fan, or things like the Scythe Kama Bay can be installed above it. If you need to swap drives in a case, this is strongly recommended!

Still, at the moment everything seems to be nice and fast - which it bloody should be, considering the amonut of hardware it's got.

Remember the date!

2008-04-01T10:00:17Z

Holy crap, it's flying penguins! :)

(no doubt has been posted everywhere else)

Bad/good news - Vera Lynn is well hot, and shit.

2008-03-28T11:54:46Z

In mildly annoying news, coughing badly last night revealed I was less over this stupid cold than I thought.

On the good side I was coughing due to laughing at Armstrong and Miller clips on Youtube, after being pointed at it by codepope and thunderbox. I especially like 'dedicated teacher' ('Right, fuck off'). The RAF men are funny too, but not quite on the same level (having Vera Lynn described as 'well hot' is hilarious :) ). It's light years ahead of Little Britain. Then again, most comedy is light years ahead of Little Britain..

I may have to buy their DVD.

More exult, palm, Vista...

2008-03-28T02:09:15Z

All went quiet on my journal about exult porting to PalmOS, but that doesn't mean I've been entirely idle. I have, however, been less than single minded on it because frankly I'm going through the bits of stuff I don't want to do. There seems to be a tidier house, some more food, some happier kittens, less books to read and I've at least *looked* at the source code each night.

As mentioned, the shittiness of Palm memory management means that even a Zodiac 2 (an 128MB memory device with 2 SD cards) has only 10MB heap, so I decided to have a quick look at optimising the memory.

Suffice it to say I have spent far too long farting around with compilers, libraries and debuggers. Tonight, I have managed to compile exult. Of course it dies on startup..

Anyway, useful information to remind me and others is

Visual C++ 2008 is out (has been for a bit) and works properly in Vista x64 without whinging about admin privileges. There are 64 bit versions of SQL Server Express.

The latest platform SDK contains both 32 and 64 bit compilers.

The platform SDK contains most things, but not DirectX. That's another 448MB download.. (Not really unexpected; things like the Exchange SDK are separate too. At least everything is free.)

SDLMain.lib is broken in Visual C++ 2008, and probably other versions (2005) too, due to a dependency on fprintf/other file i/o functions and linking problems with msvcrt etc. I can't be arsed to fix it and used the horrid workaround of just sticking the win32_sdl_main.c direct into exult. I could compile in MingW, but I suspect the compiler is VC++ is more optimised.

Remember that there are *two* registries under Windows 64 bit. The 32 bit registry is branched off KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node, KEY_WOW64_64KEY allows 32 bit code to write to the 64 bit registry. This explained why editing Aedebug and/or 'Image File Execution Options' was doing precisely bugger all (I was compiling exult 32 bit under 64 bit Windows).

WinDBG -IS on the windows debugger will install it as a postmortem debugger. Of course a) you'll need to edit the properties to insist on admin privileges when run under Vista as otherwise it won't have permission to stick values in the registry and b) If you run the 64 bit debugger under 64 bit Vista it'll stick the values under Aedebug on the 64 bit registry, and thus you'll have to manually fix it for 32 bit apps.

The symbol path should be SRV*<local path>*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols