Slinky links

On the track of deleting traces of my old Vista install and re-installing Windows XP, I ran into some interesting information. It appears that Vista (and XP before that) has the ability to create symbolic links, or, as they are more commonly known in Linux circles, symlinks 🙂 No, I don’t mean those dreary old shortcuts, I mean real symlinks which are tied to the file system :p

Here’s how it all came about. I started deleting all the dreck left over from my Vista upgrade install prior to installing XP. In the process, I ran into certain folders which just would not delete – even when I had assigned all permissions/ownerships to my user account. I was completely puzzled but left the issue till later and went ahead with my XP install. However, once XP was up, I went back to trying to delete these odd folders and they still wouldn’t delete. Somewhere in there, in between pulling my hair out in frustration and doing a gazillion Google searches for the answer, I happened to do a directory listing in DOS and it listed these strange, non-deletable folders as junctions instead of directories. The light suddenly went on as the clue-dart hit me squarely between the eyes :p

Now I had known about NTFS streams (another really nifty but way underused file system feature), way back when they were introduced. But I had not known that NTFS had the capability to add junction points even though the ability had been there in both Windows 2000 and XP! Further reading led me to the Systinternals tool named Junction, which allows you to create and delete junction points. I used the tool to delete most of the junction points which were giving me trouble and was finally able to get rid of all the extra folders left over from the previous Vista installation. I later discovered a few other shell extensions which let me do the same thing from within Windows Explorer itself – NTFS Link Shellextension, Junction Link Magic and NTFS Link.

But what’s the use of all this extra stuff when Windows itself doesn’t support it, would be the question, right? 🙂 Well, I came up with one use almost immediately. I normally have all my data on a separate partition so that I can wipe the OS partition and reinstall everything without losing any data. But one thing which bites me all the time is the fact that most of my account specific data goes in C:\Documents and Settings – especially the My Documents folder. Sure, I can use TweakUI and set the My Documents folder to a different location. In fact, that’s how I used to do it till now :p But the issue with that is that sometimes, certain apps will still go to C:\Documents and Settings\Fahim\My Documents (or wherevere your documents folder is) instead of going to where My Documents has now been re-pointed to (usually on D drive). With junction points, I can simply set up the C:\Documents and Settings\Fahim\My Documents to point to my D:\My Documents folder and everything would go to the correct place! And that’s exactly what I did. Ah, the joys of discovering something new :p

Vista wins and wobbles

Yes, I know, I was supposed to write this one about a fresh install of Vista but I was prevented from doing so by Vista itself :p The actual fresh install, which I did several days ago, went really fast. The fabled 20 minute install was (almost) true. The copying, extraction and installation took about 15-20 minutes but then there were several reboots while Vista did all of the other configuration and customization stuff and that took about half an hour or so. Still, it did feel much, much faster than an update install.

Most of the issues that I’d faced with my upgrade install of Vista were gone but there were new issues to replace them :p I could run Explorer fine now but I had to re-install most of the programs that I use again before I discovered that a couple of ones that are really important to me would not work correctly or would have issues. Then, FireFox started showing erratic behaviour – I lost bookmarks and settings and had to restore and then toolbar customizations and window positions would not be saved. I am not absolutely certain that this was all due to Windows Vista but I had enough troubles to make using Visa a bit of an issue.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are lots neat features to Vista that I really want. The alternate clocks are one thing – you can add two extra clocks so that when you hover your mouse pointer over the system clock, you can see the time at two other locations. I used to have to use a third-party application to do that in the past. Then there is the Vista start up, it starts up fast and feels very responsive – none of the sluggishness you experience with XP when you first start up and have all your start-up items starting at once :p

However, I had so many issues with Vista, that I was forced to go back to XP. And that was a story in itself because it took me about a day to get all the Vista stuff off my partition and to put XP back in :p Sure, I could have simply formatted the partition but I didn’t want to and so, most of that time was spent struggling with all the folders that Vista had added and setting the permissions on them back so that I could actually delete the folders. One thing Vista seems to do right is to set good security permissions – the bad part is that even the XP installer cannot overcome the security to overwrite existing Windows files :p Anyway, after a day of struggling, installing SP2 and then all the patches and so on, I’m back in XP. I still have my new Vista install on my machine but I’m not sure I will be booting into it anytime soon. Maybe when Vista goes gold and more of my apps actually work there …

Vista woes

Yes, I know, I’ve been silent for a while. It’s mostly because I’ve been struggling with my system. The cause? Windows Vista :p But let me begin at the beginning …

I’ve been a participant in the Microsoft Customer Preview Program (CPP) for Windows Vista. But though I did get a copy of Vista Beta 2, running it under VMWare wasn’t good enough due to the fact that the OS wasn’t getting a full workout that way – I just don’t use VMWare or dual-boot installations that much becuase I’m busily using my main Windows installation all the time :p So, when Vista RC1 was announced, I decided that I would put Vista through its paces and also try out the upgrade feature in Vista by upgrading my production machine to Vista RC1.

"Big mistake", I hear you saying. Well, yes and no 🙂 The actual upgrade (which I ran about 7-8 times at least) takes anywhere from one and a half hours to two hours. I had to run it multiple times because the upgrade would crap out at some point and roll back to the previous installation. And I have to say this about the rollback – it was flawless … I’m impressed 🙂 After figuring out all the little glitch points in the upgrade (for instance, when it reboots after launching the upgrade from XP, you I had to boot into Safe Mode if I didn’t want it crashing out), I finally got the upgrade to complete successfully.

Everything was good. Everything looked good. All my installed software appeared to work – even stuff that I couldn’t get installed from a clean installation of Vista when I was using beta 2. Then I found the problem – there has to be one, right? Windows Explorer just would not work. Sure, the Explorer instance acting as the shell worked fine but I couldn’t launch any other Explorer instances in Normal mode. So no Windows Update, no Network Settings, no Control Panel and basically, no changes to the system. The funny thing is that I could run Explorer fine if I booted into Safe Mode :p

I tried everything I could think of – I uninstalled any programs which installed shell-extensions and so might be interfering with Explorer, I used Autoruns and disabled any non-Windows DLLs which were being loaded by Explorer, I tried disabling the Aero interface and went to classic mode – no luck. The weirdest thing was that Explorer would not crash – it would simply pop up for a second and then close with no error message. I tried loading WinDBG and finding out what cause the crash but all I learnt was that it crashed from ntdll.dll (I think ….) I finally found out that if I clicked on something in the Explorer window when it flashed up for a second, that I could get it to pop up a C++ error dialog which didn’t say anything helpful. When I did that though, it did send an error report to Microsoft 🙂

I tried contacting a few Microsoft managers in the shell division but have yet to hear back from any of them :p I posted in the Microsoft newsgroups but didn’t get any feedback – not even somebody telling me how to log Explorer crashes to see what is causing them (and that’s something that I’d still like to find out – whether there is a commandline switch to enable logging for Windows Explorer). I finally chalked this up to a bug that nobody else has seen before and since it looks as if I won’t hear anything from MS (at least not soon), I decided to do a fresh install of Vista 🙂 I’m actually writing this from that fresh install but I’ll write all about that tomorrow …

Where, oh, where, oh, where, is my agent?

I’ve been researching and compiling a long list of agents over the last couple of years in my effort to find somebody to represent "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog". I still haven’t found representation, but I certainly have a pretty big list of agents which is not doing me much good till I finish my second novel and start querying them again 🙂

So, I thought, why not set up a page online which lists all these agents and publishers so that somebody else can benefit from my research as well? I originally wanted to add an export feature to WriteTrack (I keep agent information in WriteTrack, my submission management software) so that I could export the database to HTML. But the more I thought about it, the less efficient an HTML page seemed. It would be a long static list of agents/publishers which would take forever to load and would be hard to search.

So I began thinking about a way to quickly code up a nice little interface to access and manage the data and to even provide a way for users to give feedback on the agents/publishers. The first thing I thought of was – Adobe Flex. Basically, it’s a new development environment (as well as a suit of technologies) which uses Flash to provide a spiffy interface which is also extremely fast to design and develop. I had not used Flex before but I had been meaning to and after about a day of mucking around, I came up with this page.

The page works fine but it takes a little bit of time to load and needs Flash 9 to work. While I am happy enough with the interface for the moment, I am considering going the AJAX route and redoing the interface so that it loads even faster and doesn’t depend on third-party technology so much. Since the data will remain the same, you can continue to use this interface till I do something new which will hopefully have even more features and will work even better 🙂

A horse with no name

I’ve been playing with the idea of self-publishing "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" again. In considering the process and what needed to be done, I also thought about doing the cover myself. Of course, me being the kind of person I am, thinking about doing the cover meant that I went overboard on the whole idea and started collecting 3D objects and images and meshes and what not even before I had actually figured out what I was going to do.

In the middle of all of this (and learning about various 3D software to boot), I thought, "Hey, why not do a comic strip about Normal and Johnny?" In case you’re wondering, Normal and Johnny are two of the characters from "Honest" :p There was only one problem, I hadn’t really gotten everything together for doing the comic yet. Being the impatient type, I wasn’t going to let that stop me. So instead of a comic about Normal and Johnny, I came up with a cartoon which involved (of all things) a crash test dummy and a scorpion 🙂

I made two versions of the cartoon – one for Simon Haynes, because he’s such a great guy, about his Hal Spacejock and the other my original idea for the cartoon. As to whether it’s any good, you can judge for yourself :p

[pg-image src="http://farook.org/images/Desert1.jpg" caption="Cartoon – Hal Spacejock version"] [pg-image src="http://farook.org/images/Desert2.jpg" caption="Cartoon – original version"]

Vacillations of the vague kind

I am thinking of switching back to MovableType once again :p The reason? I am tired of dynamic pages and the headaches they bring with them 🙂 At one point in time, when I first switched to WordPress from MovableType, I was really happy with dynamic pages and all the nifty things they allow you to do. But as time has passed and I’ve come to consider load on the server, spidering by search engine robots etc., I’m beginning to think that perhaps static pages are a much better option.

For instance, I notice that the Google spiders are hitting my WP-Cache pages. Those pages are ephemeral – they will be there for an hour today but gone tomorrow. So why are the search spiders looking for old pages again and again. How much load does that put on the system?

Being in website hosting, I know how much load is put on the server by dynamic sites which depend on database queries. I don’t really want to put that kind of load on my host’s server. I know that I don’t actually put that kind of load on their server because I don’t have a really popular site. But what if the traffic to my site were to increase? I am not sure and I don’t know if I want to find out.

Of course, there are other reasons. I don’t like the pace at which WP development is going nor the direction they seem to be taking. There isn’t that much being done about combating spam for instance. The efforts are all in the form of plugins and none of them seem to be really effective.

So, I’ve been looking at MovableType. They do have the features I want from a blogging platform. The free personal version even allows multiple blogs – something that I’ve been complaining about in WordPress for a while now :p The only snag at the moment is that I hate MT’s import feature because it relies on a text file. All of the WP to MT migration scripts rely on MT’s clunky text-file based import. I think I might have to write a new script which simply transfers the content from one database to another and I should be set to start testing the new MT to see if I can work with it 🙂

Breaking the partitions

Yesterday was my day off and I thought, "What would be a fun thing to do today?" and decided to install Mac OS X for Intel on one of the computers … just for kicks :p OK, I exaggerate. I had been planning on trying out OS X and yesterday was the first chance I got to give it a whirl.

The first machine I tried would not get beyond the boot up stage. But then again, that one’s about two years old. So I decided to try the newest machine we have in the house – my work machine. Yes, bad idea :p But you know how it is, when you really want something badly, you gotta go ahead and do the best you can … or something like that 🙂

Anyway, I had about 20GB free on an extra partition that I’d used to install Windows Vista on. I had heard so much about how Mac OS X would not install in a partition but needed a drive of its own that I wasn’t sure that this was going to work the way things were set up. But I wanted to see for myself and so I booted up with the OS X disk and what do you know? It came up fine but had no destination disk selected. However, on nosing around a bit, I found a utility which would allow me to browse my disks, create partitions, format them etc. I discovered that all I had to do was actually format an existing partition into HPFS+ and I could install OS X on that. And that’s what I did.

It took about two hours to complete the installation and once it was complete, I ran into my first hurdle. The new OS X installation would not boot up. It would boot fine with the installation CD but not into the OS X installation on the hard disk. After some nosing around, I figured out how to get things to boot into the OS X installation but then I hit my second hurdle – there was no dual booting and so I was unable to boot back into my Windows install on the same machine!

I spent about three hours booting via a Windows XP installation CD into the recovery console and trying various disk fixing methods but nothing worked. I knew what had to be done – just set the Windows partition as the active one so that the computer would boot into XP. But there was no fdisk in the recovery console and diskpart did not seem to have the option to set an active partition 🙁 I also spent quite a bit of time trying to get a USB thumb drive bootable so that I could boot via the USB stick and use fdisk but that didn’t work either. Finally, I remembered that I had an old LiveCD of Mandrake Move (or Mandriva Move as it is now known). I booted into Linux using that CD, ran fdisk and set the Windows partition as the active one and was finally able to boot into Windows 🙂 (And the interesting thing was that soon after that, I was able to get my machine to boot using the USB stick as well. Then again, that’s how it always goes, isn’t it?)

Are spammers winning?

I don’t know what is going on anymore. There used to be several highly touted spam prevention efforts for WordPress a few months ago. But there has been no word from any of them in a while and comment and trackback spam actually seems to be on the rise again. Have the spammers won? Have the developers given up? (Or to get really paranoid, been bought off by the spammers? :p)

For quite a long time, I would get one or two spam messages a day and that was OK. It would be caught by whatever spam combatting plugin I was using and it would sit there in my moderation/spam queue and I would come by every couple of days and delete the messages. The spam still gets caught but now there’s like 20-30 messages a day instead of the 2 or 3 a day. Me being a lazy guy, it is much more time consuming to have to go through all the caught spam, verify that none of it is legit and then to delete it all.

I tried WordPress Hashcash in the hope that that would stop the spam being submitted in the first place. It didn’t even seem to slow them down :p I then tried Anti-spam Image but I still got around 25 spam comments overnight. So, the methods designed to ensure that spam never gets submitted to your blog at all don’t seem to work too well. The methods designed to stop spam from getting published do work but end up in creating a lot of work for you because you have to spend time wading through the chaff just on the off-chance there is some wheat hiding in there. What do you do? I don’t know. I guess the solution would be to code something of my own but I really don’t want to get into coding right now :p

My first view of Vista :p

OK, fine, this is not my first view of Vista but the title sounded nice :p I’ve been reading up all that has come out regarding the new features and improvements in Windows Vista and was itching to get my hands on beta 2 when it was announced. Of course, I had to wait till the public beta 2 build was available via the Vista CPP (Customer Preview Program) 🙂

It took about one and a half days to download the 3.2 GB ISO for Vista and then I had to burn a new DVD copy of it. My first few installation attempts (on a two year old Acer Ferrari notebook) failed completely. I then decided to throw caution to the wind (somewhat) and try installing it on my new, Windows Vista Capable certified, Acer Aspire 🙂 Of course, I wasn’t foolish enough to wipe my production machine and install Vista – instead, I wanted to set up the system as a dual-boot machine.

The first snag? When you install Vista via an existing install of Windows, it doesn’t seem to allow you to do any hard disk maintenance (or maybe I missed the option). The space I wanted to utilize was not allocated to a drive and so I had to exit the Vista installer, setup the disk space as a new drive, re-launch the installer and then get going on the installation. About three hours later, I finally was able to dual-boot into Vista 🙂

First impressions? It feels speed? There is none of the application sluggishness that I’ve seen with XP but maybe it’s just early days yet :p I do like some of the customizations and UI tweaks that they’ve done but hate some of the other stuff. (I’ll probably write more on this in another post – either here or elsewhere). I don’t like the fact that some of the familiar power-user options are now hidden away. I like the breadcrumb trail in Explorer (something I loved in IRIX) but don’t like the new explorer overall. It feel kludgy and there aren’t enough customization options. For instance, I don’t believe there is a list view like in XP and I hate having to scroll through screens and screens of details (or big icons) to get to the file I want.

A lot of people say that Vista is not very stable and it should not be run on a production machine. So far, I haven’t had any stability issues at all. I will grant you that it should not be run on a production machine but that’s mostly because quite a bit of your software will not run under it :p So far, I’ve had about 80% success rate with my standard apps. Some refuse to work outright and some have certain UI quirks. But I think I’m going to use Vista more and more in the coming weeks just because it feels so much more smoother for some reason 🙂

Coding again …

I started working on Blog again. Despite all the research that I did into other blogging tools which supported the MetaWeblog API, I just couldn’t find an app which worked exactly the way my rather picky tastes dictate :p Sure, I found a couple which came close but nothing was quite there. If everything else was there, then live spellchecking wasn’t there and I do like knowing if I make a spelling mistake instead of having to check on words over and over to make sure that I wasn’t imagining things 🙂

So back to Blog it was. The first issue I faced was, the question of how to implement the UI so that somebody could select either to publish a post or to save as draft easily. The current menuing system I was using wasn’t very good at displaying toolbar buttons with multiple options :p I had originally given up on the standard Delphi components because I had run into issues with setting up custom menus/toolbars buttons on the fly but by now I had forgotten what the exact issue had been. So I decided to give the standard Delphi components one more try. I ditched the custom menuing system and went back to Delphi components. I’ll know soon enough how that goes …

I did manage to get the posting as draft to a MetaWeblog system working soon after that. All it needed was changing a few lines of code 🙂 I then wanted to get uploading of images via the MetaWeblog API system working. While this involved fairly few code changes to implement, detecting new images and ensuring duplicates are not uploaded proved to be a lot more difficult. So I put that on hold for the moment in favour of another objective – getting custom tag support working with the WYSIWYG editor. Still working on that one …