Brian Jepson’s Weblog

Anyone who’s talked to me about Vista in the past couple of months knows that I’m impressed with it. And I’ve even been known to say kind things about how Microsoft cleaned up the User Access Control (UAC) prompts in post-beta versions of Vista. But I read today that an installation package with a lot of digitally signed files can take a long time for the UAC prompt to come up; up to an hour in this case:

When installing on Windows Vista with User Account Control (UAC) active, there can be a substantial delay before the initial setup dialog is displayed. During this time, a UAC function is verifying digital signatures within the installation package. This service pack carries a large number of files causing the process to take up to one hour in some cases.

This explains a lot, actually. I’ve run into this exact problem (well, not an hour, but sometimes a few minutes or more), and the result is that I ended up clicking the installer several times wondering WTF is going on. Even if there’s no quick solution to this problem, Microsoft might want to have some kind of progress indicator explaining what’s going on. Although it seems sensible to turn off UAC while I’m installing this package, I’m going to leave it on and see how long it takes for the prompt to pop up.

Update: it took only three minutes to appear.

One thing I love about my Mac is the ability to set the color of a folder. I’m in the habit of naming folders for various stages of my workflow: CE (copyedit), QC1 (first set of galleys), and QC2 (second set of galleys), and by coloring the current stage green, I’m less likely to accidentally open ch01.pdf from the wrong stage. Additionally, whenever I have something I know I need to remember at a given stage, I can go into the folder, mkdir or touch “Do not forget to blah blah blah” and color the new item red so I see it when I finally reach that stage.

Now that I’m using Windows a bit more, I miss that feature. I tried to use a custom folder icon, but all hell broke loose when I tried to sync to my Mac using unison. First of all, Windows marks the folder as read-only when you use a custom icon. Then, unison dutifully propagates the property change over to my Mac, which changes the folder permisions to r-xr-xr-x, so I start getting errors from unison along the lines of “Failed: Error in processing a transfer instruction: Permission denied”.

So, I can mark the directory as read/write, but according that KB entry, “Windows sets the read-only attribute on the folder to instruct Windows to look for the Desktop.ini file.” How strange. Isn’t there some metadata attribute that Windows could use rather than overloading the read-only flag?

After all the news coming out of Macworld and CES, I find I’m thinking less about MacBooks than I am about dual core Intel chips. Over the past few months, my computers have been taking on very specific roles:

• My Athlon XP system that I built is really my games machine (recently upgraded as cheaply as possible to the minimum requirements of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast)

• The Dell laptop is more and more becoming my work machine (Word, Thunderbird, OpenOffice 2.0, etc.)

• And my 12″ PowerBook spends most of its time plugged into a 20″ monitor. I use it for organizing my music, scanning and editing my family’s slides from the 60s and 70s, and just about anything that has to do with digital media.

Now that core duo laptops are appearing everywhere, I have the opportunity to either buy a new Mac, or put that power where I really need it: a Windows notebook that has the muscle I need for gaming and my day-to-day work, and I could retire my current laptop and desktop.

And then there’s Vista… all these PC laptops coming out seem very much to be Vista-ready, but then again, it’s possible that the MacBook Pro is, as well. So if I wait a little while, maybe I can eliminate the three computers in my office by getting the one that really does everything I
need.

I’m increasingly switching between my Mac and PC these days, and I like to keep everything in sync. I think I’ve come up with a pretty good solution, so I’m writing it down in case I do what I did yesterday (spent about six hours trying to get something pointless to work).

For files, it’s simple. I use unison to keep 4GB of database between my Mac and PC in sync. On my PC, I keep the synced files in a TrueCrypt repository that’s compressed with NTFS compression. If you use TrueCrypt with unison, make sure you format the TrueCrypt volume as NTFS–when I tried FAT32, unison couldn’t do fast checks.

For personal data, my Nokia 3650 is the sync point, even though I’m using a Pocket PC as my phone right now. I use iSync on the
Mac, and PC Suite for Nokia 3650 on the PC. I tried Missing Sync and PocketMac (with the idea that I could use my Pocket PC as the bridge between the Mac and the PC), in fact I’ve tried them many times, but something always goes
wrong. With the latest Missing Sync , it was a bonanza this weekend:

• One complete lockup of Mac OS X
• Uncountable times where Missing Sync wouldn’t even see the Pocket PC
• Duplicate events in my calendar
• Every event in the holiday calendar shifting by one day

I also tried the latest Pocket Mac Lite, but it wouldn’t recognize the Pocket PC. I love screwing around with computers and handhelds, but sometimes there’s something that I wish would just work.

So now, I use Outlook mainly as a backup of my calendars and contacts on my PC, do most of my data entry and maintenance on the Pocket PC, and occasionally sync the PC and Mac by way of the Nokia.

To think, this all started because I was reading the galley proofs of Retro Gaming Hacks and realized what I really needed in my pocket is a phone that can emulate an Atari 800!

I’m in the middle of selling my 15″ PowerBook so I can switch
to a 12″. This is taking longer than I expected because PayPal, for
reasons they are not articulating well, is taking forever to give me
their money. The most lucid thing I got out of them is an agreement from
their escalation rep that payment by check would have been faster. But
that’s a rant for another time.

So, in the meantime, I’ve been working on a Dell
Inspiron 700m. As much as I loved my Actius,
I needed something faster and with a bit more screen. That last criteria
might make you ask why the hell I’m getting a 12″ PowerBook? The answer
is that I need a Mac I can open on a plane, and it will be plugged into
a 20″ monitor most of the time.

I’ve adapted pretty well to Windows XP, but it’s taking some getting
used to. Here are some of the things I’ve had to deal with in case this
helps out people who have to temporarily switch back:

Games

For a system with embedded video (64MB Intel Extreme Graphics 2 with
shared memory), this thing is not bad! The 700m plays Unreal 2004 quite
well, and Quake III does great. It will play DOOM 3, but poorly. (Cue rant
on how we need better quality ports of games on the Mac).

Out-of-the-Box Experience

What a nightmare. Dell installs all kinds of shit I don’t need. The
Intel Centrino software was a total nightmare. I uninstalled it, and
ended up getting rid of something like four totally pointless startup
items. And then there was the Sonic Update Manager, which was hitting
the disk every second. I had to spend a lot of time Googling to see if I
needed something, uninstalling, and crossing my fingers. I probably got
back 64MB of free RAM and plenty of CPU cycles, but to all the PC
manufacturers out there: I’d rather add stuff after I buy the PC, not
delete it!

Noise

This was a noisy brute. I swapped out the 40GB drive it came with
and installed a 60GB 7200RPM Hitachi drive that I like. I learned some
more about it, particularly that it has a quiet mode I was able to turn
on with the Feature Tool CD-ROM from Hitachi.
The machine is very quiet now.

Unix

I haven’t been able to live without Cygwin. Virtual PC runs really well on
this machine, so I’ve got Ubuntu with me all the time, too. I’m still
finding Linux power management on laptops to be too painful, but I plan
to set up Ubuntu soon on a spare hard drive (would rather swap than
partition) and see which OS gets the most love.

Mail

Thunderbird is OK, but every now and then, it seems to lose track of
where it is (mail messages either appear as blank pages, or I keep
seeing another message even when I click on different ones). I think
that Thunderbird just does a bad job of telling the user when it’s busy,
and I really miss Mail.app.

The Web

Not much different here–I use Firefox on both platforms, and Safari
on the Mac once in a while, so the experience is pretty mellow. I
usually don’t click on
the blue E these days.

I’ll probably come back to this post and add a few things to this list,
but overall, I don’t mind working on this Windows box. I look forward to
getting my new Mac, though!

Continuing my theme of running a RADIUS server on different operating
systems today, I tried to set up Windows 2000 Server’s Internet
Authentication Services as the RADIUS authentication for a D-Link
DWL-900AP+ (a cheap Wi-Fi access point that does 802.1x). I got
stuck trying to configure PEAP–it kept telling me that ” A certificate
could not be found that can be used with this Extensible Authentication
Protocol”. Google
Groups to the rescue.

I just grabbed the 180-day trial of Windows Server 2003 (180 days should
be plenty for the mucking around I need to do), and here are some tips
that I found useful (most of these can be found somewhere in The Unofficial FAQ
for Windows Server 2003:

Speed up your Display

Open Display Properties, choose Settings, Click Advanced and select
the Troubleshoot tab, and then set Hardware acceleration to Full.

Disable the Shutdown Event Tracker

Select Run from the Start menu, type in “gpedit.msc” and press
enter, then drill down
to Local Computer Policy->Administrative Templates->System. Open
the properties for Display Shutdown Event Tracker, and disable this
service.

Automatic Login

See http://support.microsoft.com/?id=324737

Loosen Up Internet Explorer

It’s locked down pretty hard by default. The first time you launch
IE, you’ll get a big story about what’s going on. For more details,
load res://shdoclc.dll/IESecHelp.htm#effects
on your Windows Server machine. You can disable this
by going to Add/Remove Programs in the control panel,
clicking Add/Remove Windows components, and removing the Internet
Explorer Advanced Security Configuration component. If you don’t want to
remove it completely, you can
customize it by clicking the Details button.

Sound

Don’t bother with sound; it just slows emulation down. The problem
is that the Sound Blaster 16 drivers are completely missing. They may be
available on the Windows Update site. If you do manage to find the
drivers, you’ll also need to enable and start Windows Audio in
Administrative Tools->Services.

Incessant
Ramblings: “Ever wanted to connect to the console session of a
Win2k3 box via RDP?”