Microsoft shuts down Autopatcher, Windows users mourn its loss

Microsoft, in yet another instance of kicking it's most loyal user in the teeth, yesterday e-mailed Autopatcher.com requesting the "immediate takedown" of the download page. As a Windows technician and user for many years, this decision is gut-wrenchingly disappointing. As anyone who has had to repair PC's either in the field or in a workshop will tell you, Auto patcher is the time saving labour saving and most utterly useful utility you could ever ask for. Without Auto patcher we face a minefield of trying to keep updates on our PC, installing them one by one. Using Windows Update is sometimes not an option, a PC that may not even have a network connection available in the workshop (if the customer only has dial-up, or perhaps an incompatible ISP such as ADSL when you have Cable)

This is not just a sad day, it is bitterly disappointing. So much so, that I'm even going to write a paper letter of complaint to Microsoft themselves.

Do the improved security features of Windows Vista adversely affect system performance?

Check it out, you can read this post on ezinearticles.com

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While Windows Vista continues to frustrate some users, driver support and software compatibility is steadily improving and many users are starting to warm to at least some of its new features. There is no escaping the fact that Vista is slower than XP for many tasks though, The users who continue to be most disappointed with Vista are the high-end gamers, who have invested heavily in their gaming PC only to be faced with degraded performance and poor driver support under the new operating system. If we are looking for reasons why games run slower in Vista than XP, then looking into DirectX 10 and Vistas OpenGL support would be the sensible place to start. However, speculation has been rife on the internet as to what are the causes of poorer performance in Vista. Jeff Atwood, in a recent article on his blog pointed the finger squarely at Vistas improved security measures, namely User Account Control and Windows Defender. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” Jeff said and of course this is true, everything you run on your PC will consume at least some RAM and processor time, but how big an effect does Vista's new security measures have on performance? In order to investigate I decided to collect some benchmarks using various games under Vista, to determine the extent of slowdown that is caused by Vistas new security measures. Games are some of the most demanding applications your average end user wants to run and so make good candidates for testing performance.

The test O.S:-

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate, fully patched up until April 9th. Background disk de-fragmenting was disabled, but everything else was left as-is with a fresh install of the operating system. Most of the hardware drivers came directly from Microsoft, either as part of the Vista install or from Windows update. The exception to this being Nvidia’s now somewhat infamous video drivers, version 100.65 of the Forceware drivers for Vista were downloaded from Nvidia’s website and installed.

The test machine:-

The test machine was a mid to high end gaming rig, with the following specs:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9

Processor: AMD Athlon X2 4800 Dual Core Socket 939

RAM: 2GB DDR

Graphics: BFG NVidia Gforce 7900 GTX 512mb

Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS

Hard Drive: Western Digital Raptor SATA

The games:-

It was the intention to also collect benchmarks from 3DMark 2006 and Battlefield 2142, however it was not possible to consistently run these applications under Vista at the time of writing without experiencing frequent crashes. In the end, three games with different underlying engines were chosen, the games were:-

Unreal Tournament 2004

Far Cry

Prey

Test software:-

The benchmarking programs used in these tests are freely available over the internet.

UMark, which was used to benchmark Unreal Tournament 2004, can be obtained here.

Hardware OC Far Cry Benchmark, which was used to benchmark Far Cry, can be obtained here.

Hardware OC Prey Benchmark, which was used to benchmark Prey, can be obtained here.

Each game was run for 10 passes (15 for Far Cry, as the benchmark program did not offer 10 runs) and the final score was an average of each of the runs. The runs were done once with UAC and Defender turned off, once with UAC only and once with Windows Defender only.

The results:-

Unreal Tournament 2004 V3369 – Umark V 2.0.0 - Umark-DM Demo.4 (Deck 17 Deathmatch) - 1280x1024 – High Image Quality

UAC/Win Defender off: 102.64

UAC On: 102.52

Win Defender On: 102.65

Identical except for the tiniest fraction, the result with Windows Defender enabled actually clocking up a fraction higher. Fairly convincing proof that Windows defender has no effect on UT2004's performance. Unreal Tournament is an OpenGL based game and OpenGL is known to be somewhat slower in Vista. This would explain performance differences between XP and Vista when running OpenGL games.

Far Cry V1.4 – Hardware OC Far Cry Benchmark V1.5 - PC Games Hardware Demo – 1280x1024 – Ultra details, Default Shader, Direct 3D Renderer, No HDR.

UAC/Win Defender off: 71.12

UAC On: 71.8

Win Defender On: 70.94

Again, the difference is barely noticeable, turning Windows defender off did make Far Cry 1.21% quicker, not exactly likely to make the game play experience any better.

Prey V1.3 – Hardware OC Prey Benchmark V1.0 - Guru3D demo – 1280x1024 – Shader detail Highest – Filtering None, AA None, Boost Graphics OFF.

UAC/Win Defender off: 110.51

UAC On: 108.77

Win Defender On: 110.49

Windows Defender once again makes no difference, however turning UAC off made prey run 1.6% quicker. Again, not a performance boost that is likely to be noticeable when actually playing the game.

Conclusions:-

It would appear that neither Windows Defender nor UAC has any significant effect on gaming performance. However, there are some points to keep in mind when considering this data. Firstly, these tests do not take into consideration disk I/O times, which could be adversely affected by real-time file scanners such as Windows Defender. Naturally this could affect the time a game or level takes to load, as well as placing some extra strain on the CPU. Secondly, these benchmarks were collected on a dual-core system. According to the benchmarks on this site, Far Cry takes virtually no advantage of a dual core processor, with Prey speeding up around 17% when run on a dual core. If the games are under using one of the available cores, this theoretically leaves a lot of processing time free on the other core to take care of background tasks such as UAC or Windows Defender.

Once driver support improves and newer games start taking advantage of dual core processors, it would be prudent to run tests like these again. For the present crop of games however, there seems to be little if any point in disabling Vista security measures to try to improve performance.

Phantasy Star Universe

So, if anyone actually visits my blog who found out about it from my PSU card, please leave your comment here! :)

ADDQ #0,0D

At work recently I have spent the better part of around 3 days looking over some code that was malfunctioning. This particular piece of code is code that has been in our products for probably the better part of a decade. Recently it was updated and part of the update necessitated changing some data types from char to int. To cut a long story short, the problem wasn't actually due to any mistakes in the C code at all, but due to a bug in our cross compiler. Fortunately, our office eccentric is also an assembly language hero who was able to study the assembler listings our compiler generated and eventually determine that part of a register was not getting cleared.

Which got me thinking, how would we have solved this problem without someone like that to help us? I wasn’t taught anything about low level programming at university past the fact that it existed, they were too busy teaching me how to make polymorphic C classes and why I should never use arrays over vectors. It wasn’t even an option on the software engineering course, but as we all know, things go wrong, and eventually someone’s still got to know how to communicate with the computer at the lowest levels, especially when programming embedded systems. I can’t help but wonder where the next generation of assembly language programmers are going to come from, now that assembly language isn’t fashionable any more. After all, it is not like assembly is just some obsolete language like Cobol we can happily discard.

If this post as piqued your interest, go check out http://www.monroeccc.edu/ckelly/EASy68K.htm - I really should, but you know, there’s still so much more C++ I need to learn :)

Wisbar - My New Favourite PocketPC App

It's been a while since I saw any cool new PocketPC applications so when a friend showed me Wisbar I decided to pull my finger out and actually write a blog post about it. Wisbar gives you (amongst other things) a much nicer start menu and task switcher, yes I know that Pocket Plus already did a task switcher, but come on, stabbing away at that little X icon was still not quite as intuitive as it should have been was it?

Check it out at http://www.lakeridgesoftware.com/ I've only tried it on my Axim so far, I'm not sure how it will fare on the smaller screen of my MDA Vario but I do plan to give it a try.

10 of the Best - Nintendo Gamecube Games

10 of the best – Gamecube Games

Eurogamer (http://www.eurogamer.net) recently ran several articles on the best ever games on the original Xbox. Several friends who are planning to buy a Wii but missed out on the Gamecube have recently asked me about the best of the Gamecubes back catalog, so here is my list of 10 of the best the cube had to offer.

Animal Crossing

Although strictly coming on the N64 first, Animal Crossing on the Gamecube was the first version to bring the concept to the masses. Animal Crossing is part sims, part role-playing game and part something entirely new altogether. There’s no time limits, health bars or hit points, the player is left to do pretty much what he or she pleases, be it fishing, digging for fossils or selling fruit to pay off their mortgage. Quirky, sedate yet strangely compelling, Animal Crossing is one of those titles that can make hours seem like minutes. Some people just don’t ‘get it’ but for the rest of us, fond memories of fishing tournaments and writing letters to computer controlled sheep are unlikely to fade any time soon.

Chibi Robo

Chibi Robo came along later in the life of the Gamecube, at a time when many gamers had turned their attention elsewhere. A shame, because Chibi Robo shines as one of the best platform adventures of the Gamecubes hardware generation. Playing as a tiny robot house-maid, you make your way around the Sanderson’s family home, trying to spread happiness. No small task with the Sanderson’s marriage on the rocks and their only daughter traumatised so much that she think she is a frog. As well as the Sanderson’s, Chibi must deal with the houses toys, which come to life after dark and include a lovesick squeaky dog toy, a psychopath teddy bear and Mr Sanderson’s favourite action figure. The game has a wonderful light hearted sense of humour about it, the same kind of humour that endears ‘The Simpson’s’ to adults and children alike. While the main quest is unlikely to pose a great challenge to experienced gamers, there’s more than enough here to justify the asking price and it’s so much fun to play. An essential part of any self-respecting Gamecube owners collection.

F-Zero GX

Microsoft may have muscled into the console race with their big brash X-Box but for the Nintendo fan-boys this was proof that the small efficient little box had some tremendous polygon pushing power under its hood. As fast as any racing title on X-box or PS2 for that matter, F-Zero looks absolutely stunning played on a HDTV at 480p (an option sadly only available in the US and Japanese versions) A futuristic racer with a grid full of comic-book style competitors, various story and grand prix mode and a host of customisation options, including the option to take your own craft design and play it on the superb coin-op version (if you were lucky enough ever to find one) the only disappointment was that it’s not possible to play the game online.

Legend of Zelda – The Four Swords

Played without a GBA owning friend or two, Four Swords can feel like nothing more than an easy remake of an (admittedly rather good) GBA title. Find yourself 1 to 3 friends who also own GBA’s however and this becomes one of the most enjoyable multiplayer titles on the system outside of Wario Ware. Play is split between the main screen and each players Gameboy Advance. When the party is split up, the action continues on the small screen until you are reunited again. You’ll have to cooperate to get through the games many dungeons, and to defeat some brilliantly designed boss creatures. To top it off the irksome but strangely likable fairy Tingle hosts some fantastic mini-games that would make for an enjoyable package in their own right. If you can find enough friends with GBA’s this is an essential purchase for your Gamecube library.

Metroid Prime 1 and 2

A triumph of game design, Metroid prime is a shining example of just how to take a 2D game concept and apply it to 3D perfectly. An absolutely stunning single player first person shooter, Metroid Prime (and its sequel Echos) dispenses with the obsession FPS designers have with emulating reality and instead moulds the games reality to fit in perfectly with the players ability to control Samus (the lead character). Instead of making the player perform awkward jumps and intricate platform sections, which serve to remind just how clumsy you are when trying to control a person just using a joypad or a mouse and keyboard, the platforms and pitfalls in Metroid are perfectly tailored to Samus’s abilities. With free-roaming games becoming all the rage, it is disappointing that the bulk of FPS titles are still limited to getting from point A to point B along a predetermined route. Not so Metroid Prime, which features a huge and vast map to explore across several varied and stunningly beautiful landscapes. While trawling across the huge map to a new area can on rare occasions become tiresome, the overwhelming sense of curiosity you now have to explore the next section of the game easily makes up for that. Add to the package a mixture of huge and brilliantly designed boss characters, a superbly atmospheric soundtrack and it’s easy to see why Metroid Prime became one of the best selling Gamecube games of all time.

Resident Evil 4

Although it was launched on the PS2 as well, it’s the Gamecube Resident Evil 4 that really shines. Graphically it’s noticeably more beautiful than the PS2 version and thus is certainly the version you want to opt for given the choice. The game takes the Resident Evil formula and removes the Zombies, replacing them with faster moving, more lethal humans. “He is not a Zombie” says the game when you search your first corpse, and it isn’t kidding. Be prepared for an intense atmospheric and superbly designed action adventure. Even the post game extras are worth playing through too.

Super Mario Sunshine

No Nintendo software library can be complete without at least one Mario title and this is the Gamecubes. After the sheer brilliance of Super Mario 64, perhaps some critics were expecting too much of this Gamecube offering. In the game, Mario is framed for vandalising the island resort he was visiting, and tasked with cleaning up the island and returning the shines (magical items that make the sun shine on the island.) Bright, bold colourful and happy, occasional awkward moments with the camera dilute, but do not spoil an otherwise hugely entertaining (and on occasion extremely challenging) platform game which is still probably the best platformer of the Gamecubes generation, but not of all time.

Super Monkey Ball

A launch title created by Segas Amusement Vision division, Monkey Ball (and its sequel) remained firm favourites amongst Gamecube users throughout the consoles life. The main game takes the Marble Madness game play concept and brings it up-to-date with bright crisp 3D visuals. Instead of guiding an inanimate marble, you are now tasked with rolling a monkey in a ball through all sorts of hazards and pitfalls. Later levels are insanely challenging and the game will keep average players occupied for months. Furthermore, it offers some of the best multiplayer mini-games on the system (even better than the ones offered with Monkey Ball 2) Monkey Target, as unlikely as it sounds, is one of the most fun post-pub games on any system.

Viewtiful Joe

Sega were the first to use Cel Shading on their brilliant Dreamcast title “Jet Set Radio” Since then other software houses have slapped the style onto all sorts of games. Viewtiful Joe uses the style brilliantly for its comic-book style capers. Essentially a sideways scrolling beat-em-up, with some platforming elements. Viewtiful Joe is an extremely polished product. As the game progresses the player earns VFX powers which allow them to slow down or speed up the action, allowing for some truly spectacular special moves to be executed. In spite of this, the game can be viciously difficult at times, sometimes to the point of feeling unfair. For players who are willing to persevere however, Viewtiful Joe proves to be a superbly designed and extremely exciting action game that is every bit of an adrenaline rush as any title on the other supposedly more ‘grown up’ consoles.

Wario Ware

Explaining Wario-Ware to the unenlightened is sometimes a little difficult. You have around 3 seconds to complete each mini-game, yes you read correctly, around 3 seconds. The mini-games range from snippets from Nintendo’s back catalogue to utterly bizarre tasks like inserting fingers into noses or slicing vegetables. Far more entertaining than it sounds (ask anyone who’s played it) what makes the Gamecube version stand out is its fantastic array of multiplayer modes. “Listen to the Doctor” in particular is a firm favourite with children, in this mode you are required to complete your mini-game challenge while doing something equally as stupid with your body, such as rubbing your head or telling a funny story. Complete your challenge but fail to do your silly task, and the other players will not applaud you by repeatedly pressing their controllers green buttons, resulting in a loss of points. An absolutely essential Gamecube purchase for anyone with a sense of humour.

Honourable mentions must also go to:

Donkey Konga

Donkey Kong – Jungle Beat

Eternal Darkness – Sanities Requiem

Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Metal Gear Solid – The Twin Snakes

Paper Mario

Skies of Arcadia – Legends

Soul Calibur 2

Wave Race Blue Storm

New version of Safeguard PDA

Utimaco have launched a new version of Safeguard PDA that seems to fix the security problem in the previous version. The new version is 4.11.1.2 and you should upgrade immediatley if you use this software.

Security flaw in Utimaco Safeguard PDA

I was delighted when Utimaco (https://www.utimaco.co.uk/) announced that their latest version of Safeguard PDA would include PIM (E-mail, organiser etc) encryption for Windows Mobile 5 devices. As far as I am aware they are the first company to the market to offer this.

Unfortunately, from my experiences it seems that the product has a little way to go before it becomes really useful or even secure. Annoyances with the current version include the fact that it is impossible to uninstall the program short of performing a hard reset, furthermore, if you use your PDA for TomTom or other navigation aids, watch out, because even if you disable auto-lock in the settings the software ignores this and automatically locks your PDA after about half an hour.

Much more worrying than this though, it is possible to bypass the log on procedure altogether, here is how. This works when using the Dell Axim X51v PDA. I had PIM encryption turned on and no PrivateDisk volumes set up.

Log into the PDA as normal, now fill up all the available memory on the unit (not the storage card) an easy way of doing this is to use the recording option. Set the recorder going and leave it until all available memory on the PDA is used up. When this happens recording will stop and Windows will probably warn you that memory space is critically low.

At this point, wait until Safeguard locks the PDA and the Safeguard Authentication screen appears.

When this screen appears, try to authenticate, Safeguard PDA will reject your password even if entered correctly. Try it a couple of times to be sure that you entered it correctly and the software is rejecting it.

Now, perform a soft reset on the PDA. System will reset and instead of presenting the Authentication screen, it will present the Safeguard setup wizard and tell you that Safeguard is not yet configured.

Now Cancel the setup procedure. You are now given full access to the PDA including PIM without entering any password whatsoever. I have repeated these steps twice now and got into the PDA both times.

Of course I let Utimaco know about this problem immediately. In the meantime if you use safeguard be extra careful not to fill up your PDA's internal memory. Beware of any executables downloaded from the net or Bluetooth as these could exploit this flaw.

I'll blog again if I find out any more about this issue.

Psion's Iconic, Ultrasmall 5mx

Tom's Hardware have an interesting article on the Psion Ultrasmall 5mx. I vaguely remember these units and they certainly made an impression back in the early 90's. The author calls for a modern version, which would certainly be interesting and probably a lot more useful than the recent ultra-portable offerings from Microsoft.

Have a read of the article here: http://tomshardware.co.uk/2006/10/05/help_mobilityguru_design_a_tiny_modern_psion_5mx_uk/


The author cites the lack of popularity tablets and PDA's have on the lack of a decent keyboard for touch typing. Though to be honest I can't imagine sitting down to touch type on my PDA, after all that is what desktops are for. I'd much rather have a nice big screen for checking e-mails, showing off photos and doing a bit of light web surfing, but it all depends what you use your portable device for I guess.

If we are talking early ultra-portables, one should not forget the lovely little Atari Portfolio too, I got the chance to use one of these when I was on holiday in South Africa, great little units. Have a look Here if you are not familiar with them: http://www.atari-portfolio.co.uk/

More on the X51v Problem

Seems like this is definitely a problem introduced with the latest firmware upgrade on the X51v. Further investigation and experimentation revealed that:

- Upgrading Activesync to 4.2.0 did not cure the problem

- Using a different compact flash card (a 128mb one) did not result in corrupted files

- Using the same compact flash card in a different X51v (ROM version A06) did NOT result in corrupted files.

- Using the third party utility "Cardexport" (which basically turns your PDA into a USB Flash card reader) instead of Activesync to copy the files across did not result in corrupted files.

So if you use large capacity flash cards in your PDA and you have not upgraded already I would strongly advise you to hold off at least for the time being!

Serious X51v probem encountered!

I was recently using the x51v as an mp3 player and I noticed as one of my songs was playing that there were several clicks and pops that I had not noticed before. When I got home I listened to the original file on my desktop PC and everything seemed fine.

Investigating further, I deleted the faulty mp3 file off my PDA and copied it over again, only to find that the glitches in the file were present again.

Determined to get to the bottom of the problem, I deleted the file again, then before copying it over I took an md5 hash of the file. I then renamed the file and copied the file over with activesync, then back again to my desktop. I took another md5 and guess what? Yep, the Activesync had screwed the file up, the md5's were different.

It is not just mp3's either, I tried archiving the file and sending it up, and it still came back with a different md5.

I repeated the same experiment but using my compact flash reader and the md5's came back the same, I then repeated the same experiment but using a different PDA (my T-Mobile MDA vario) and the md5's came back the same.

This is rather worrying since I use the x51 as a compact flash reader at work. I doubt Dell customer service will be overly helpful (I can just imagine trying to explain all this to a customer service rep)

If anyone else has had this problem on a Windows Mobile device please leave a comment!

Arcade fire

There's pictures available for this post on my splashblog (http://www.splashblog.com/buckoa51/)

Nothing like a visit to the seaside to remind you what a sad state the arcade industry is in. I remember back when I was a kid how excited I'd get over a trip to the seaside, which meant for me at least, playing the latest arcade games until the ten pence coins in my short pockets were totally exhausted (and then scrounging more money off my parents) With visuals and sounds that blew away even the most expensive home computers, going to the arcades in those days was truly a magical experience for gamers.

I also remember the sheer number of coin operated games in those days. Arcades that are now full of fruit machines were once wall to wall with video games. Games of all kinds, not just games in fancy cabinets. You could browse in and out of arcades and find new games and every year there were dozens more.

Today its a sorry site to walk into the arcades at Skegness and see machines I remember from back then in disrepair, with faulty monitors and broken controllers they beg "insert coin" but frankly nobodies going to play them in that condition. Things are definitely getting worse too, with the only new game I noticed being "Mario Kart" and even that nobody was playing, probably because it demands you deposit an extra coin regardless of weather or not you won the race.

The industry doesn't help itself either. Machines are poorly maintained and in the case of the Outrun Coast to Coast I played (which incidentally was the only machine I had to queue for) sited badly. The machine was right opposite the entrance to the arcade meaning that the screen was obscured by light from outside reflecting on it.

It's hard to convince people to play coin-op versions of games they have at home already anyway. That is the big difference today, of course. Visually coin-ops are not that much different from what people get on their Gamecubes, Playstations or X-Boxes. For a long time now the coin-ops have relied on offering cabinets and peripherals that enhance the game experience beyond what would normally be possible in your home, but when the experience doesn't even live up to what you get at home, as it so often doesn't, I doubt anyone is going to be inserting any coins.

The industry needs some fresh ideas and fresh thinking to save itself, if indeed it is even possible. Perhaps merging arcades and game retail stores into one might be the way forward? Stores could operate machines via cards and lose the gambling machines altogether, making them more family friendly venues. Cards would not only store loyalty points but allow for the store to award free credits for the arcade machines after the customer purchased a new game. Couple that with high score saving and bring back the old idea of some sort of memory card or account accessible from both home and arcades and their might be life left in the coin operated concept yet... maybe..

Windows Mobile Upgrade pt2

Ok so I promised I'd let you know how it went when I upgraded the x51 to the latest version of Windows Mobile.

Well, it was not without it's problems. After following the first two steps of the upgrade process and actually getting the flash file onto the device, I was instructed to perform a hard reset. However, for some reason the upgrade process had rendered it impossible to do a hard reset on the device!

After much googling around and reading other peoples problems I discovered a hard reset wasn't actually necessary. I disabled my password and the upgrade process went through without any further incident.

So aside from some pretty poor software support from Dell, the X51 upgrade went OK. Activesync copied all my contacts and notes back onto the device OK, and after entering all my account settings I had no problems pulling e-mail down off the IMAP server again. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and the disappearing compact flash problem that seemed to affect a lot of WM5 devices seems to be fixed.

Oh how I look forward to the future when Microsoft will push their operating systems onto everything else we use too.

(that WAS a joke, honestly, in spite of me owning three computers and two PDA's with Windows operating systems, oh and an Xbox and and Xbox 360, I am not a Microsoft fanboy!)

So far away

Remember the Boxing Day Tsunami? Chances are, like me, you paused only momentarily to consider those people so far away, as you were so busy enjoying your Christmas. Sad but true. Now one of my friends has a cousin in Israel, remarkably they still have e-mail, which they use to communicate with him and suddenly the whole thing seems more real. We have a lot to be grateful for living in peaceful times. Heres an extract from one of the emails:

Half the world, or so it seems, has been in contact with me by email or phone to ask if all is well.

Well, in one sense the answer is "Yes, all is well. I'm here." But, in another sense, all is not well because we are living in a totally nervewracking, unnatural, demoraliziing situation which seems to have increasing ill effects each day.

Our days begin about 5 or 6 a.m. when we crawl out of our makeshift beds in the shelter and attempt to stretch those abused bones and muscles which did not totally relax all night. We turn up the radio (we never close it) and listen if there is any news about Safed or towns close to us.

One has to listen for news because the siren situation is not like it was in London as I recall from second World War. There is no "All Clear" perhaps because how can they know. Sometimes there are the sounds of rockets falling long after the sirens have been silent and other times, there is a second siren to keep you in your shelter...

We have our breakfast and my neighbor even waters the flowers on the porch (and the cactus are in flower).

After I answer messages in the email, I try to pass on some jokes or act as on a normal day - but it comes hard. The underlying tension is awful. My plan daily is to go down before 9 so that people can come to the library - and many have come and are endlessly grateful for material which breaks the boredom of the shelters..

Being handicapped by the cane and the bad hip (well, the substitute one..) I have to plan a day so I won't need to come back upstairs. One issue is always the telephone. Do I leave the upstairs one in its cradle and use the library one? Have to handle this issue in an organized way.

When you hear the thump, bump, thud as I am hearing even while I type this, one wonders if these are our thuds or theirs. And one hopes a siren will warn if some are coming our way.

Yesterday, I managed the one flight of stairs to go up to my neighbor for lunch - but in midswallow, I heard that dreadful siren, put down my fork and made for the door, the stairs and the shelter... Later, my neighbor got our plates and brought them down to the shelter where we finished our meal.

I was finishing a jigsaw puzzle when my son Aryeh and his friend appeared. They drove here from Jerusalem and brought with them a lot of vegetables and fruit purchased en route. They travel the Jordan valley road thru many Arab villages and it's not ideal at night but the usual roads could be even more dangerous now (A man was killed in his car by a ketyusha yesterday).

Time was when I wrote fairly well.
I find that my skills have evaporated with the situation.. Sorry about that and hope that withal, I have given a bit of the feel of what goes on... We had the siren 5 times yesterday but all is OK with all whom I know. We finished the jigsaw puzzles and my neighbor just packed up the games and puzzles I found around to give to people for their very bored kids. And we have a new puzzle ready to do and I also soak stamps for the stamp club which hopefully will be reactivated after this mess...

Xbox 360 'modding'

One or two people who know I'm a hardcore gamer have asked me about the new 360 'mod' and if I am considering getting it done, some even believe it is the first step in getting home brew and other such niceness running on the console.

Well no, I don't intend to carry out this modification, legal and ethical issues aside if you think this mod is a good idea you probably don't understand how the security on the 360 actually works and what has and has not been broken. I will try to explain.

When Microsoft designed the 360, they decided to allow for certain programs to run from DVD recordable. This was probably to allow stores to quickly and easily duplicate demo or promotional disks. In order to accommodate this, an Xbox 360 executable file has several flags or markers embedded into it, that tell the 360 if it can load the file based on what sort of media it is on.

The mod that the pirate community is currently distributing works by getting the 360's DVD drive to lie about what kind of disk you put in it, basically it tells the machine that the disk is actually a factory pressed disk and not one you just bought down the market and recorded.

Now, here comes the technical part. All the 360's software is protected with a digital signature. This is basically an encrypted 'fingerprint' of the file. If you change the file then the fingerprint no longer matches. This is why nobody has produced their own software and put it on DVD-R and managed to load it into the 360. Since the fingerprint is encrypted, you cannot simply change the fingerprint based on what you have done to the file. In fact you cannot change this fingerprint unless you are in possession of the key that originally created it and only Microsoft is likely to have that and they aren't going to be sharing it any time soon. This isn't some sort of voodoo, it based on tried and tested encryption techniques that are used all over in business and the Internet, generally by paranoid geeky people who like to pretend someone might actually go to the trouble of intercepting their e-mails :)

So, obviously this means no home brew, but what else does it mean? Well, you are likely to get banned from Xbox live if you use this mod, if not now then certainly at some point in the near future. Since Xbox live is pretty much the best part of many X360 titles and also a lot of fun to use just to keep in contact with your gaming mates, its a bit of a large chunk of functionality to sacrifice. Furthermore, even staying off Xbox live isn't likely to do you much good in the future. Future titles are likely to require an update to the 360's BIOS before they will run(much like the PSP titles do now) It is a pretty safe bet that these updates will check for such things as this mod, and prevent the game booting. Many believe that the hackers will simply hack new titles that do this and remove the firmware check, but of course thats not actually possible because of the digital signing. Remember that changing even one bit of a file will mean that the digital signature won't match and thus the game will no longer boot.

So, to sum up, this mod will let you play pirate copies of the current crop of games and possibly a few in the near future, and only off line. So unless you are happy with the current selection of games and don't use Xbox live (including Xbox live arcade) this really is a waste of time.

Windows Mobile Upgrade Woes

So those of you with Pocket PCs that don't run Palm might have noticed that Microsoft have recently updated Windows Mobile 5. By now most manufacturers have issued the firmware upgrades to allow you to upgrade your PDA or Smartphone to the latest version.

I decided I would try doing this on my MDA Vario this Sunday. Before I began I took a complete backup with Sprite Backup, as updating Windows Mobile will reset everything on your device (Imagine if updating Windows did that :) )

Everything went fairly smoothly as far as flashing goes, it took about 15-20 mins to fully complete and Activesync was able to restore all my contacts. However, the problems began when I tried to restore everything else from my backup.

OK, so doing a full restore was probably not a good idea, the system has been updated and sure enough trying this approach ended in disaster. Hard reset later and I do a restore of my e-mails and documents with sprite. Everything seems to go according to plan and I even get my text messages back. But lo and behold I now have a phantom IMAP account on my today screen. Clicking this account (which says it has 10 unread e-mails in it) does nothing, and trying to set up an account with the same name in Pocket Outlook brings up a "Account already exists" error. but you cannot change the settings of the phantom account because it is nowhere to be seen in Pocket Outlook. I even tried deleting all registry keys pertaining to "IMAP4-HOME" (the name of my account) but still it would not go away. Kind of disappointed with Sprite backup as it is supposed to be the best backup program and this is the first time I've actually had to use it and its performance has been less than stellar.

Oh well, at least I have all my important information back, I just hope I don't have to restore again any time soon as I don't want two phantom accounts on my device!

I'll post again when I update the Dell X51, don't think I'll bother with sprite for that as there are no SMS or E-mail messages on it that are not already on my IMAP server.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. Here you can expect to read mostly techno-babble related nonsense as I play, err I mean experiment with my toys, err I mean PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS. You can probably also expect some video game related musings too.