Despite the Soviet Union clearly not existing today, the domain is actually still about, and in 2001, the domain managers started accepting new registrations, which is apparently upsetting ICANN just a teeny bit (who want to get rid of it). Problem is, and I’ve just contributed to the problem, it’s still recieving active registrations.

Fun bit of history for you, and without further ado, I present my new domain (which just points to my blog while I think of something to do with it);

http://www.insovietrussiadomainregistersyou.su

See, I like my Outlook to be able to display all the stuff I want to do on the left hand pane, without any need for a scrollbar. I have my RSS feeds permanently expanded, and as a result, my total number of RSS feeds is kind of limited by screen real estate. It’s a nightmare of my making, but still. I have a whole bunch of tech/gadget/smartphone/development RSS feeds (I’ll post a list some day), and I wanted to add some feeds for people I know. So I thought of making a People folder, then adding the RSS feeds and dragging the feed’s respective folders to the People folder, and well, that didn’t get me anywhere (it works though) because then I still have a scrollbar when I expand that folder. No deal. What I need is the entries from multiple feeds to go into one folder, and it turns out it’s pretty easy. It’s in how you do it.

You can do this when you add a new feed or editing a curent feed. In Outlook 2010 for an existing feed;

• Create the target folder. Right click on ‘RSS Feeds’ and click ‘New Folder’. Give it a name and hit OK.
• Press the Backstage button (Orange one in the top left labelled ‘File’).
• Click the ‘Account Settings’ drop down, and then select ‘Account Settings’. Redundancy is awesome.
• Go to the ‘RSS Feeds’ tab.
• Select the RSS feed you want to change delivery location for, and hit ‘Change’.
• Under ‘Delivery Location’, hit ‘Change Folder’.
• Select the folder you made earlier, and hit OK.
• Job Done!

If you want to do this when you add a feed, you just have to add it from this Backstage RSS Feeds view. If you just right-click RSS Feeds on the left hand pane and select ‘Add a New RSS Feed’, it will create a new folder with the feed’s title as the folder name. If you add it from Backstage RSS Feeds View, you can choose feed name, and delivery location.

Couple of interesting tidbits I found out about Photogallery; it uses some nice Windows 7 tech. I just saw it light up the Sensors and Location platform (so it can get your location), but more importantly, and relevant to what this is about, WIC, or Windows Imaging Component. It’s understandable for Microsoft’s own software to support Microsoft’s own technologies, especially when both have Windows in the name, but it’s great to see it there.

What Windows Imaging Component is; well honestly, I don’t actually know in entirety. I’m sure you could bing for it, but the long and the short that actually matters is that it enables codec support for imaging supports. For a lot people, you probably won’t care, if your camera generates a JPEG in camera, you upload a JPEG to Facebook/Flickr, and as far as you’re concerned, JPEG is where it starts and ends, but some of us use more interesting and exotic formats for various reasons (if you’re in the jpeg4lyfe crowd, you might want to stop reading and go do something else, cos otherwise you’re going to wonder why you wasted your time).

In the same way that you can install a codec (encoder/decoder) to allow various software to access different video formats and containers beyond their original abilities, and how you can do the same for audio formats, WIC allows Camera manufacturers to release codecs that allow the display and decoding of their formats. And Photogallery is WIC aware. See where I’m going with this? Photogallery can display, and show, and otherwise handle fun formats like Canon’s RAW (CR2) format, Nikon’s RAW (NEF) format, and my favourite and probably most important, Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) format. I’m sure there’s codec support for other manufacturers as well, but again, I’ll leave you to bing that one on your own, you just install them and…it works. And that’s how it works for the above mentioned codecs; you just install say, Adobe’s DNG codec, and you’ll be able to view DNG files in Photogallery. You’ll also be able to view them in Explorer, and you’ll probably bump into a few hidden suprises application-wise about where you see them.

That’s where the awesome stops, but I’m about to go one further.

64-bit love. Something approaching 50% of Windows 7 installations are 64-bit, and you’d be left high and dry here. WIC works in 64bit, but to date, no manufacturers I know about have released 64bit codecs, and none of the ‘big three’ mentioned above have released 64bit codecs. Crap. What’s more, if you go to install Adobe’s 32bit DNG codec on a 64bit system, it will block the installation. Crap, again. We’re going to have to get a bit dirty.

We’re going to have to modify stuff. Adobe have conveniently released their DNG codec as an MSI package (no, not the electronics manufacturer, a Windows Installer package, silly). MSI packages contain their payload, some instructions, and a database of stuff to do. Or not to do. In the case of the DNG codec, not to install on anything that’s not Vista or better, and not to install on 64bit OSes. Fortunately, we can change this (before any one asks, no, I am not redistributing modified, copyrighted Adobe files).

So, for EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES, here’s how one could hypothetically modify an MSI package. I’m going to use Adobe’s DNG codec for this example, as a completely random choice (hawhaw);
You will need either Orca, or SuperOrca (free yo!). Open the MSI file (duh), and navigate to ‘LaunchCondition’ on the left. Click it. You’ll see the Launch Conditions in the main window:

At this point, you could just drop the ‘Not VersionNT64′ row, by right clicking it and doing ‘Drop Row’ but let’s get all terminator on it and go a bit more serious. You might want to use the DNG Codec on XP (WIC was introduced with SP3), and besides, it’s more fun. Right click on ‘LaunchCondition’ in the left pane, and hit ‘Drop Table’. Do a File -> Save As and save it as ‘Awesomedobe DNG Converter.msi’, or something equally sweet, and then just run it, and install it as normal. It will…just work.

And here’s the quick and nerdy magic – your operating system may be 64bit, but Photogallery is a 32bit process. It will use a 32bit WIC codec, like the one you just installed.

Plus you know, you stuck it to the man real good there, and made Photogallery much more useful. Go you!

*Just kidding. I love Adobe, and their products (especially Photoshop/Bridge/Lightroom) are fantastic. I also have no idea what will actually happen if you install this on XP. If it breaks, it’s all your fault. If it works, I’m brilliant, but let me know either way.

Stay classy San Diego.

The CPU usage on my laptop had been running high. I’d been wondering what it could be, it didn’t seem to be a specific application, as all apps seemed to spike CPU load, and their individual CPU usage too high. Internet explorer was using 49% CPU doing menial tasks (cue internet exploder jokes), Zune software was using far too much CPU and so on. I was assuming it had to be an interrupt problem, so I started looking at kernel times, and then I looked at Resource Monitor.

And resource monitor showed processor frequency to be at 28%, in tiny blue text, so much so I nearly missed it. I wondered wtf, and then I ran CPU-Z. It showed my 2.8GHz C2E x9000 to be running at 399.98MHz. My 2800Mhz processor was running at 400Mhz. It wasn’t that programs were running badly by using high CPU time, it’s that they needed high CPU time because the processor was running slowly.

The plot thickens. I was looking around for all kinds of problems – flicked open the BIOS to see if there was some errant SpeedStep problem, played with Windows power management of the processor minimum states and so on, and nothing seemed to work. On a hunch, I pulled the plug out, turned the laptop off and on again.

CPU-Z on boot showed a frequency of 798MHz, which fluctuated to about 1200MHz, and then 1600MHz, and then back to 798MHz. Speedstep, and clock multiplier changes were working properly. Assuming the problem was fixed, I plugged the plug back in. 400MHz. wtf?

At this point, it seemed strange, but the only possibility that there was something wrong with the AC line (insert Holmes quote here). I took a look at my laptop cable, and indeed, there was a small nick in the power cable. I took the cable into the next room, and set to it with electrical tape (do not try this at home, and above all, do not consider doing this with normal tape). Cable seemingly fixed, plugged it back in…and…2798MHz.

Problem solved. I will be ordering a new adaptor from HP, because this shouldn’t by any means be a long term solution. But I’ll leave this on the internet – if your laptop CPU clock is woefully low, take a look at the power supply, it could be because you’re on a foreign power source, or a transformer on it’s way out, delivering lower wattage. It’s probably a strange leap from CPU usage problems to electrical tape on a power cable, but the process is the process.

Sidenote – Windows 7 ran impressively well, retrospectively being on a 400MHz processor. Indeed, it wasn’t as responsive as it should have been, which is what twigged me to the problem, but running on a 400Mhz processor, even a dual core with modern processor extensions, and running actually quite well, is nothing short of awesome.

For the record, it should be noted that HP’s official comment on the subject at the moment is ‘We don’t comment on rumors or speculation’. Fair enough.

Engadget are citing the reason for HP ‘slating’ (hahaha) the Slate being that HP aren’t ‘thrilled’ with Windows 7′s performance on the tablet.

Heres the deal though – Windows 7 runs just fine on devices of the Slate’s spec. Hardware wise, apart from the form-factor, the Slate really is nothing new – a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB of RAM. And this spec runs Windows 7 just fine. Sure, it’s not blazingly fast, but it is snappy, and for netbook activities, just fine.

As a platform, it also has some great tricks (Windows 7 multitouch and gestures, incredible handwriting recognition). And six-core i7 processors suck down a fair bit of juice and aren’t really suitable for the form factor, so it’s not really a problem with the hardware / operating system.

The other thing is, the Slate’s release date would be in June. About a month. HP have poured significant time and money into the Slate project. Admittedly, for a company with resources such as HP’s, money isn’t really the object, but time is something of a more precious thing that you can’t get, no matter how much you spend. If HP were to cancel the Slate device, assuming they were interested in the tablet market, the time spent/wasted on the Slate wouldn’t be recoverable, and would delay HP’s entry to the market for quite a while.

HP’s recent purchase of Palm certainly suggests a WebOS tablet is something of an inevitability, and sure, I don’t doubt that. Thing is, it would take HP at an absolutely minimum six months to bring a WebOS tablet to market, and realistically speaking, it wouldn’t see retail within a year.

It would make far more sense to bring the Slate to market now, enter it, learn something about it, and gain some experience for when they do develop the WebOS slate. Especially when the Slate is at this point pretty much fully developed, been hyped by HP, and is so close.

I’m sure HP are slightly busy integrating Palm into their company, having a good look at the selection of patents they’ve acquired, thinking of what they can do with WebOS, and are pretty busy bunnies at HP Towers right now. The HP slate might even see a small delay as a result, but I really don’t see the product being canned.

It doesn’t make much or any sense really. I’m sure I could be wrong, anything could happen, and this is just speculation, but I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

In Orange cinema advert style, here’s the whole thing; synopsisised;

• The HP Slate is about a month away from release
• HP have spent piles of money and time on the Slate
• It’s finished & ready to go
• Windows 7 runs just fine on 1.6GHz Atoms; HP even sell devices like this
• Windows 7 makes a suitable tablet OS due to its touchyness
• If HP do make a WebOS tablet, it will take about a year to come out. The Slate is ready to go now.

And for good reasons. Let’s take a look at a nice selection of threads from popular hobbyist/phone hacking community, XDA-Developers;

WP7 is complete FAIL,  Do you use your phone without data plan like me? If so WP7 isn’t for us =(, Why only high end devices?,  Microsoft Not Supplying 2D/ 3D Drivers

Paints a pretty negative picture. There’s a lot of hate and animosity floating around over there. It’s also a total waste of time. WP7 isn’t aimed at people who hack about with their phones and flash ROMs every other day, it’s not for people who are concerned that Microsoft aren’t supplying 2D/3D drivers. That’s not to say that WP7 isn’t aimed at the technically minded – it is. It is however, aimed at Microsoft’s so-called life-maximisers; for managing professional and personal lives, for using their smartphone devices to the full. Their target market probably understand perfectly how most of WP7′s technology works. But the fundamental is that while they might understand it, they don’t give a damn; they just want it to work and work well.

WP7 is for people who use their phones, not for people who fight their phones. If you’re trying to fight with WP7, you’re doing it wrong.

Have a nice day

According to DigiTimes, ‘Compal Electronics will manufacture two tablet PCs for Toshiba with shipments scheduled for the end of 2010 or early 2011.’. Which is kinda cool. But what’s more interesting is the actual Tablet devices; besides a blah Android tablet, one of the devices is a Windows CE7 device, with Dual 7″ Screens, powered by nVidia’s Tegra 2 platform. Incidentally, the last known information about what the Courier device was, states it as a device powered by Windows CEsomething (described as same CE based to the Zune HD and Windows Phone 7), having Dual 7″ Screens, and powered by Tegra 2.

So it smells like Toshiba are making themselves a Courier device. It smells somewhat like that indeed.

CE7? Check.
Dual 7″ Screens? Check.
Tegra 2? Check.

All the important stuff seems there

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100419PD217.html

via http://pocketnow.com/rumor/windows-ce-7-to-power-toshiba-dual-screen-tablet

Readability massively improved. I had to be beaten with a stick to do this. Time spent arguing and complaining; 20 minutes. Time spent implementing; <20 seconds.

Don’t look at me like that.

Multitasking is, essentially as it says on the tin. Multiple tasks. Simultaneously. But with the iPhone OS 4 release, and WP7’s model with regarding, well, not multitasking…multitasking, hybrid multitasking (WTF?), it seems a bit complex as to what multitasking is, and what it’s become. So let’s take it from the top. With MT being thrown around as one of the important things for devices like Windows Phones and the iPhone, it’s probably important to bash out why it’s kind of not-really-an-issue-at-all.

First up of course, is classical, thread based multithreading. This takes a ‘task’ (aka process, or ‘app’ or ‘program’ it will be process from herein, later explained) and splits it into even more fundamental components; threads. These are essentially the fundamental units that execute, and a program, properly written will probably, depending what it is and how it does it, have multiple threads. Ignoring stuff like hyperthreading, crazy IBM chips that can run multiple threads simultaneously per core, and of course, multiple-core processors and multiprocessor systems, a processor is only capable of executing a single thread at any one given time. The illusion of multithreading is very transparently handled by switching between these threads extremely rapidly, so that in the space of a second, hundreds of thousands of threads have all executed a bit, and that apparently, progress has been made on lots of threads at the same time. You then get a complex thread lifecycle, which I’ll diagram but not detail too much, that looks a bit like this;

What you have is a system that’s capable of switching between threads and running multiple threads in sequence very quickly. It allows for threads to yield when they can’t do anything (waiting on data, disk reads etc), and generally, it’s pretty solid. What’s more, it’s absolutely vital for doing more than one thing; a single serial process that serviced everything in turn would be a nightmare. With this is mind, it’s important to note, that at the operating system, nearly everything implements this in an extremely similar or identical manner. This includes your desktop computer, your laptop, your BlackBerry, your Windows Phone, your iPhone, your featurephone, your crappy £20 pay-as-you-go dumbphone, your Sky box and so on. At the OS level, this is implemented by everything. iPhones multitask, Windows Phones multitask, they have to.

But iPhones (iPhone OS 3) can’t multitask, and Windows Phone 7 devices can’t multitask. And Android devices can, and your laptop can, and Windows Phone 6.5 devices can, and this is where it starts to get a bit more complex as to what multitasking actually means. As already covered, all these platforms can, they have to. It’s more about how the operating system treats non-system threads and API stuff. On the iPhone, the first-party apps have the benefit of being essentially system threads; you can open iPod, play music, carry on what you’re doing. It multithreads in the background as an allowed system thread. Do the same with, Pandora (as seems to be the popular use-case, I’ve actually never used it!), and you close the app and…the music stops. Equally, if you bust out a task manager on the iPhone or on the Windows Phone 7 emulator, you can see a whole bunch of tasks running, such as services, communications, updating stuff, Exchange clients, etc.

This actually has nothing to do with technical implementation of multitasking, as the OS is perfectly capable, it’s about what restrictions are placed on third-party apps. However, unlike desktop processors, you want to keep processing to a minimum to save on power, and the truth is, even the Apple A4 in the iPad, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon line on 1GHz+ processors just aren’t that powerful to have tons of threads running.

What iPhone OS 4 and Windows Phone 7 do is have this smart multitasking. Essentially, when you hit the Windows button on a WP7 device, it bumps you out to the start menu. Your app’s ‘state’ is saved to memory, and it’s threads essentially killed off. You do what you do, and go back to the app. It’s threads are started up, and its state reloaded from memory. Microsoft call this ‘dehydrating’ and ‘rehydrating’ the app, and it’s a pretty good analogy. It’s still there, but it’s been freeze-dried and doing nothing. But, just add water, and it’s right back, where it was. The approach taken in iPhone OS 4 is nearly identical. And the thing is, it’s pretty damn clever. Multitasking of the desktop type just isn’t suitable for low-power devices like phones.

The only downsides are for certain types of apps; persistent network based communications clients, music programs and so on; which HAVE to be running to work. You can’t play music from a dehydrated thread, you can’t have Windows Live Messenger running in the background but not actually running. So the solution is exceptions for these few cases. Apple are allowing exceptions of the following; audio streaming, VoIP, GPS, and completing important tasks (such as completing upload of photos to Flickr). Windows Phone 7 takes a similar approach; apps like Last.fm and Pandora run through the Music hub, Flickr runs through the Pictures hub, communications like Windows Live Messenger are handled at OS level, and GPS is managed at the OS level, so it’s kept warm and spun up so it doesn’t have to re-lock when you switch back to your navigation app. Equally, locally and network generated notifications allow dehydrated apps to react to external activity, such as receiving an IM, an alarm going off, reaching a location. When these notifications cook off, you can then bounce to the app, and it’s as if it was…running. Smart-multitasking with these platform exceptions allow WP7 and iPhone OS 4 to satisfy the massive majority of multitasking critical situations without actually…multitasking.

It sounds like trickery, it sounds like you’re being cheated, and as Android and Pre users would probably have you believe, it’s not ‘true’ multitasking. Well, no, it’s not. But ‘true’ multitasking would be kind of stupid, now that you know what is, how it works, and what smart-multitasking is. Phones aren’t desktop computers, they don’t look like them, you don’t interact with them in the same way, and they shouldn’t have the same end metaphor of how stuff works as them. Because phones are not desktops.

What it really boils down to at the end of the day is this; users want to be able to bounce between apps, play music in the background, be available to talk to on IM programs. And what matters is that you can do this. How you do it isn’t so important; but doing it right is important. This ‘true’ multitasking crap is getting thrown around, with ‘Windows Phone 7 can’t multitask’, and ‘iPhone OS 4 can multitask’, or ‘Android multitasks’, but it’s just that; crap.

Addendum;

Processes vs Programs – You think of software as a ‘Program’, or as the term on smartphones seems to be, an ‘app’. The distinction between a process and a program is that a program can just be software on disk. A process is a running task. A program can run processes, but it may just be doing nothing. It’s an important distinction when you get down to threads and processes and stuff running, and it’s something I’m glad was slapped into me, semantic though it may be.

Thanks to William Hook for the iPhone process list. I don’t have an iPhone. trolololo