Code Retard

On Microsoft Windows 7’s public beta release timeframe of “afternoon” on Friday last week, Windows 7 was no where to be found. Citing server problems handling the huge number of people trying to download Windows 7 beta to try for free for the first time, Microsofts servers provided a less than ideal download experience. We personally weren’t able to secure the download until Saturday morning when the download was finally available. No word on whether the 2.5 million download cap was hit and no matter. To compensate for the delayed release, Microsoft has chosen to lift the 2.5 million download cap and extend the Windows 7 download for another two weeks until January 24. So if you didn’t get a chance to see what Windows 7 was about, you have two weeks to do so. The download was a 2.44 GB iso file that needs to be burned to DVD.

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Starting sometime in the afternoon today (PST – where Remond is natch), the much anticipated Microsoft Windows 7 operating system will be available for free download on Microsoft’s Windows 7 website. This beta release will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions for the first 2.5 million people to download after which it is uncertain if Microsoft will extend the deadline so you better download Microsoft Windows 7 fast if you want to give it a try. If you haven’t checked out any Windows 7 demos yet, you are doing yourself a great disservice. Windows 7 looks to be way more promising than Windows Vista and has a host of innovative new features that you just have to watch in action to know what you’re missing out on in today’s operating systems. If you have Vista-capable hardware, then you can rest assured you have sufficient hardware to support Windows 7.

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According to BBC, the mighty OS from Microsoft that simply refuses to die will be allowed to live for another five months. The original cutoff date of January 31, 2009 will be scrapped and a new one of May 30, 2009 will be adopted instead. This allows OEMs to continue to purchase Microsoft Windows XP licenses up until January 31, but they must wait until May 30 to get them shipped. This is different from the 2010 cutoff period Microsoft set for XP running on ultra mobile computing platforms like the Eee PC.

This annoying bubble message pops up repeatedly when you are low on disk space (under 200MB) and there is no way to disable it through Windows preferences. To eliminate the low disk space warning, you need to dig through you system registry and add a key value that disables it by default. The steps are simple to follow and will only take one minute.

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I can’t tell you how many countless remote machine connections I’ve lost and how much work in progress has been thrown away no thanks to the automatic restart in Windows XP after installing a Windows update. No matter if keep telling your dumb machine to “Restart Later,” the nag box keeps popping up and when it detects a slight weakness in your armor, when you are not at your desk for a prolonged period of time – booyah! it’s time to restart sucka.

Well now you can take matters into your own hands by disabling the restart. It’s an option that’s hidden away in the group policy settings for Windows XP Pro users, and XP Home users will need to make a small registry change. After setting this up, you won’t need to worry about the automatic restart kicking in at the most inopportune time so you can restart your PC on your own terms.

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Windows Vista / Server 2008 SP2 Beta out now to MSDN and TechNet subscribers:

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 SP2 Beta is in the wild, and Microsoft is planning to making it publicly available via TechNet this Thursday.

Pidgin is my preferred all-in-one chat application. One of its features is the ability to log your chat sessions to text or HTML format. The problem with that is the Pidgin chat logs are saved to some undisclosed location on your computer which varies depending on your operating system platform and unfortunately cannot be set through any Pidgin setting.

Formerly known as gaim, Pidgin is a completely freeware chat program and simultaneously connects you to all the major chat networks like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and Google Talk to name a few. I like it because of its easy usability and no-nonsense interface, very much unlike Trillian which I loathe (disclaimer: I have not looked at Trillian since I last used it seven years ago, it may have changed since, but it sucked in 2001). It’s cross platform so it runs on everything, but requires GTK which is a slight hassle for Windows users who have to install it as well. Fortunately for Mac and Linux users it is usually installed.

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If you want to use a keyboard that was manufactured some time ago before Windows was honored with its own key on most keyboards, you can actually still add Windows key functionality to it. These steps don’t call for you to take your keyboard apart or cut any holes in it because no hardware modification is needed.* The caveat: you’ll need to sacrifice an existing key to the keyboard gods if you want Windows key functionality. The program that performs the sacrifice? It’s a nifty application called KeyTweak.

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If you installed Windows XP SP2 or later, the Messenger service was disabled in order to prevent the net send spam that was getting popular a few years ago. As a result, the fun net send command stopped working for most people, as they did not know how to enable it again. But you can manually re-enable the messenger service again to allow you to send and receive net send messages again.

Without it, you get an error message like this:

An error occurred while sending a message to x.x.x.x. The message alias could not be found on the network. More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 2273.

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I was happily tagging away my just-released source code on my Cygwin Linux for Windows emulation layer using the good old fashioned Cygwin command prompt with the good old fashioned ‘cvs’ command when my tag aborted suddenly and spit out this error:

cvs [tag aborted]: cannot rename file /my/cvs/repo/,userguide.pdf, to /my/cvs/repo/userguide.pdf,v: File exists

…Much to my horror since it was in the middle of a CVS tag operation. This occurs because of a permissions problem, namely that the file cannot be renamed because you don’t have write permissions for it. This is a peculiar anomaly on Windows only, since I certainly did not have userguide.pdf open anywhere. It turns out that WinCVS, like Cygwin, has this problem as well. It seems to occur because the file doesn’t get closed properly for some reason on Windows. If you’re using WinCVS, try shutting it down and restarting it again. Hopefully it will properly close the file. On Cygwin, there’s not really any way to “restart” anything except your entire OS. To get around this, I simply executed the CVS tag again from a proper Linux terminal. On Linux you won’t get this sort of problem. The tagging operation then resumed seamlessly without any problems, even though it had quit halfway on Windows. Or if you must use Cygwin, restart the OS as I mentioned earlier.