The internets are alive at the moment with discussion of the newly discovered ‘God Mode” for Windows 7. To take part in the fun, create a folder with the name:
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
The folder magically becomes a “one stop shop” for all the Windows 7 control panels. I don’t think it lets you do anything you couldn’t do before, but it does put lots of useful things in one place.
If you are making use of your Dreamspark access to get hold of lovely free Microsoft software then you might have noticed that a lot of the good stuff arrives as ISO disk images. The idea is that you burn these images to disk and then install the software on them.
However, if you have a netbook with no CD-ROM drive, or are simply in a hurry I can recommend IsoBuster. This tool lets you copy files from ISO images onto your hard disk or memory key so that you can install programs from the disks without needing a physical disk.
There is a copy you can pay for, but I’m told that the free version will do all you need to get hold files from a disk image. IsoBuster is also useful if you have a damaged disk that you need to recover.
Thanks for all your constructive reponses. Boss reccomends Virtual CloneDrive which also looks rather good.
I really like Live Mesh. This is a Microsoft file synchronisation thingy where selected folders on your machine are reflected onto the Live Mesh storage out in the cloud, and also onto other machines that run the Live Mesh add-in. It runs quietly in the background and doesn’t seem to intrude much on normal life (unless you are daft enough to make changes to files on two different machine before connecting them both to the network – at which point you will have to resolve a bunch of conflicts).
I’ve got all my courseware for the current year stored on Live Mesh. You get up to 5G of space on the server behind the system and this is plenty for a year’s worth of PowerPoint slides and Word documents.
The really good news for me is that I now no longer care which machine I’m using. As long as I allow it a few minutes to “catch up” with the latest versions (if I’ve not used that particular machine for a while) then I can use any device. The net result of this is that I no longer carry the same laptop to and from work.
I guess I could have used an external drive for this, but I’m always afraid of dropping/losing/having stolen the device which holds the only copy of my stuff. Live Mesh means my data is held on multiple machines, as well as on the central server.
However, my bag is now much lighter and easier to carry, and this means that I’m missing out on some exercise and will probably gain some weight as a result.
But I reckon it is worth it.
I’m collecting stupid error messages. This is one of my favourites:
Every time I see it (which is often because our eBridge system has some links to insecure pages in amongst its https) my brain does a double flip as to what it might mean. Show someone that message and ask them which of the buttons is the dangerous one and I’ll bet they’ll look at you as if you were from Mars. Why can’t they just say:
If you are a UK student I have some very good news for you. The Ultimate Steal is back. This is a deal from Microsoft that puts its software into your hands at less than video game prices. You can get Office Ultimate for 39 pounds and Windows 7 Home Premium for 30.
Well worth checking out.
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/default.aspx
Andy pointed me at a feature of Expression Web that does a similar job to the Balsamiq user interface designer:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Sketchflow_Overview.aspx
I had a quick play and you can make diagrams and design the navigation between the forms in your use interface. However, I found it a bit more complex to use than Balsamiq (although it has to be said that it does an awful lot more, and actually lets you construct the interfaces as well as play with them).
For students the interesting thing is that it is available for free from DreamSpark:
If you are a student on an academic course (and have an Athens username to prove it) then you can get hold of all kinds of goodies here, including operating systems and Visual Studio. You can even get XNA Creators Club memberships so you can deploy your XNA programs to an Xbox 360. Well worth a look.
Adam put me on to this software. He plans to use it for his design documents for his Final Year Project. It is really nice if you want to make mockups of your user interfaces and storyboard your programs before building them.
The supplied templates look really good, in fact I’m tempted to get a copy myself…
I’ve been using Windows Live Mesh now for a while and I must admit I love it. I now no longer have to bother about keeping files on my various machines up to date. I just have a couple of Live Mesh synchronised folders and I lob all the important stuff into there.
Live Mesh gives you on-line storage that is synchronised to the hard disk of one or more computers. Each computer runs the Live Mesh software which makes sure that whenever you change a file on one of the machines the copies on the other devices are automatically updated next time they connect to the network. It even provides a log of your activity, so you can track back what you have been up to.
Now, when I take my portable along to a lecture I don’t have to worry about putting the latest presentations onto it because I know they are already there. If I forgot the machine completely I could even use a web browser to pull the files off the Live Mesh online storage.
You get 5Gbytes of storage for free, and that is more than enough for a year’s worth of lecture notes and other teaching stuff. In fact, the service is so good that I’d pay to have more than that. If there was an annual subscription like I could put all my important stuff out there and I’d be happy to pay for that.
For students I can’t think why you wouldn’t use it. It would mean that you never lost your notes or programs, even if someone made off with your precious laptop.
Find out more at:
I’ve updated the C# Yellow Book ready for the next academic session. The changes are minor, just fixes to mistakes that have bee pointed out over the last year. You can download the new copy from here:
I’m really pleased to find out that there is now a Digital Community in Hull:
They are organising a live event in October which has some interesting speakers:
I’ve persuaded my boss to pay for a ticket, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m pleased to find that they do student pricing for the event (which seems to me quite reasonable) and with a bit of luck we can involve some of our students in their events in the future.
One of the most important things about computing is that the field is constantly changing and professional development is something you really need to work at if you want to keep your skills up to date. Hull Digital looks like it will be a neat way of doing this.
We put Windows 7 on the Media PC today. I got hold of a 1 Terabyte hard disk, slapped it in a spare drive bay and left the machine to get on with it while we went out shopping. When we got back the system was pretty much sorted and except for some kerfuffle with the (now very old) TV tuner cards that needed some blast from the past drivers the install went very smoothly.
It works a treat. I was looking forward to some tweaks to the Media Centre and I wasn’t disappointed. It now supports digital Teletext, which is great, and it also has some really neat user interface touches. My favourite is that when you move through a recorded programme you get a little thumbnail of the image at that point in the show.
Windows 7 provides the speedup that I was expecting (which is nice) and the whole thing has given my two and a half year old media PC a new lease of life. I’m actually bringing machines out of retirement so that I can put Windows 7 on them and make them useful again. My old Toshiba Tablet loves Windows 7 and I’ve persuaded the boss to buy me a new battery for it so I can take it on the road again.
There was a tradition that new versions of Windows drove hardware sales, as people upgraded their machines to cope with the demands of the new operating system. Whilst it is always nice to have a new machine (I love shiny boxes) I think this time you won’t have to. In fact the upgrade will feel like a real upgrade (which I guess is how it is supposed to be).
The good news for students is that the Microsoft Academic Alliance version of Windows 7 being given away free is the Professional edition, which includes the Media Centre component. Previously students were given the Business edition of Vista, which didn’t have media centre support. If you are lucky enough to go to an institution which, like the University of Hull, has joined the alliance then you will be able to get your own free copy of this rather nice operating system.
Google is a verb. It means “to search for on the internet”. Perhaps one day it will also mean “to take over the world”. Perhaps not.
Anyhoo, like everyone else I’ve used Google for all my searching needs since forever. Today I had a go with the Microsoft competitor, bing. I’d heard nice things about it, and so I thought I’d give it a go. And the big surprise is that it is actually quite good. I’m not convinced it is as good as Google for everything, but it is certainly good enough to make make wish I had two search boxes on my browser toolbar, one for Google searching and another for Bing. The two actually complement each other quite nicely.
Bing is good for entertainment and travel, and displays its home page and the search results with a graphical pizzazz that Google lacks. Google is good for stuff a bit more off the beaten track and does maps better. But it is nice to see some proper competition in the search arena.
I hate breaking changes. They are like getting into your car and finding that the steering wheel is now the gear lever, and the seats are facing the other way.
Generally speaking the people who make the software try to avoid them too, which is as it should be. But every now and then they make the judgement call that somebody else’s pain is worth their gain, and so they go and move the universe around a bit.
They have done it with the move to XNA 3.1 from XNA 3.0. XNA 3.0 introduced a new SoundEffect type which made it much easier to make sound. Unfortunately, in its original incarnation this type also made it easy to inadvertently make sound that stole all the sound channels by mistake, and so they have fixed this in version 3.1.
Essentially, in XNA 3.0 the SoundEffect.Play() method used to return a reference to a SoundEffectInstance object, that you could then tweak to change some of the properties of the playing sound. This was kind of neat, except that if you ignored the return from Play it meant that the SoundEffectInstance that was created ended up being left hanging around, probably hogging a sound channel, until the garbage man got around to killing it off. If your game was well designed and looked after memory properly this may not happen of course, and so you would run out of sound channels for no good reason.
In XNA 3.1 the same Play method returns something different. It just sends back a boolean value that indicates that the sound is playing correctly. To get hold of a SoundEffectInstace you have to call the aptly named CreateInstance method on your SoundEffect. All very sensible, and much less likely to hog all the sound channels.
However, if you have just written a book which carefully describes the way that XNA 3.0 works in this respect (just like I have) then you are left wondering why they didn’t add an extra method (perhaps called QuickPlay or something) and leave the old Play intact…
Oh well.
If you want a really, and I mean really, in depth description of just what happens when you visit a secure website you should take a look here:
http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html
Fantastic.
If you have a Canon T1i/500D you have a lovely camera, but it gets less lovely if you want to import the raw image files it produces into your copy of Photoshop Elements. The problem is that the camera has a new sensor design, which means that the CR2 files that it produces are not compatible with the Raw importer that Adobe supply.
They have recently released a Release Candidate for version 5.4 of the filter, but rather annoyingly they’ve only supplied the installer for the big, expensive, versions of Photoshop. Which I don’t have.
Turns out though, that you can extract the required filter from the distribution that they do send out, and it works a treat.
cameraraw_5-4_rc_win_052109.zip\extensions\AdobeCameraRaw5.0All-190509032617\Assets
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0\Plug-Ins\File Formats
Updating your raw importer is actually a good idea whatever kind of camera you have. Adobe keep adding new features to this tool.
The plan was to add Unreal Bot programming to our Summer Bash. This is a great way to use your C# smarts to control a player in an Unreal Tournament game and try your hand at writing game playing AI.
Unfortunately, fate had heard me thinking this, and so the server promptly broke. It is an aging Dell machine that sits in the corner of my office quietly chuntering to itself. I took it’s lid off, blew out the dust, re-seated the RAM and it still didn’t work. So I had a word with Adam, who came up with a pair of probably compatible memory SIMMs that I put in and it seems to work now, which is nice. It has twice as much memory as it used to have, and so it fair whizzes along now.
I then spent an entire lunch hour writing a Bot that gets itself stuck in corners.
Aside from a few niggles with Nero, I must admit that Windows 7 is speeding me up. Moving around windows and getting things done is faster with the new system, and the generally quicker performance (apart from strange delays at certain times, for example importing Raw images into Photoshop) is much appreciated.
In fact, I like it so much that I’m not going to put Vista back on my machine.
Windows 7 is now installed on my machine. And it wants to bring along all it’s friends. It spent most of the day installing updates. I’ve had a day off the computer though, I’ve even done some tidying up.
Fortunately the weather was too wet for gardening.
Decided to celebrate my completion of everything by putting Windows 7 Release Candidate on my laptop. I did an upgrade, which seems to have worked fine except for my Nero InCd service, which I didn’t even know I had.
The desktop looks much nicer and seems quite a bit snappier than before. The system has even spotted the broken battery and told me that I might need to buy a new one, which is quite clever.
Last year I wrote a little programming introduction course packed full of XNA insights and dodgy clipart. Microsoft have now published it in their Faculty Resource Center, and you can get a copy here. If you are thinking about teaching programming using XNA it might be worth a look, if only for the jokes (there are two) and my quirky English spelling.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
