Category: Waffle and randomness

A few weeks back, we had new windows and doors fitted to our house. As no-one could ever find the old doorbell and I didn’t want to drill holes in the frame of our pristine new plastic to mount the button in a more obvious location, I picked up a wireless doorchime kit from B&Q yesterday.

Our new doorbell is set to play a simple “ding dong” but sometimes it’s been playing a “Westminster” chime, seemingly randomly. Very strange. I had been concerned that we could experience interference either with or from our wireless network, DECT phones, microwave oven (hopefully not) or baby monitor but everything else seems to be working as expected.

One possible cause for concern was that the instructions said that the device was not suitable for PVCu doors because the metal inside the door would affect the signal range. Well, clearly it works from across the street as it turns out that a neighbour’s button is setting off our chime! Strangely, our button doesn’t seem to set off their chime but thankfully I can change the frequency that we are using – and I thought keeping up a reliable WiFi connection from the office to the living room was hard enough.

Just give me a length of copper cable… at least I know where that starts and ends!

A few days back, I wrote about the 15th anniversary of the world wide web. Robert Cailliau, who worked with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the creation of the web, commented that, at the time, his only reservation about the name was that “it is difficult to pronounce in French“.

Since then, those of us whose native tongue is English have grown used saying “double-you-double-you-double-you”, to the point where there are now a number of abbreviations (I tend to say “dub-dub-dub” – a habit I picked up from antipodean radio adverts a few years back), or often the www gets dropped entirely. This topic has been discussed at length on the back pages of IT Week over the last couple of months and one suggestion for reducing the number of syllables was “wibble”. Of course, once you change the language it starts to get more interesting… apparently the Welsh version is “ooh-ooh-ooh”.

Not that I’m about to start doing movie reviews here, but when they exclusively use CGI then I think that falls under my technology remit…

Last Friday, I dragged my wife along to the cinema to see Cars (the latest release from Pixar Animation Studios).

It’s the first time that I’ve been to a film where all the trailers are for animations too; although if they are a judge of what’s coming then Pixar don’t have too much to worry about from the competition. Toy Story goes down in history as the first fully computer animated feature film but that was a long time back and these days the fact that a film is exclusively generated using computer graphics is not enough – it needs to have all the other elements of a great film in place too.

Now I must confess that I’m a fan of Pixar movies and I’ve been waiting to see this film since I first caught sight of a teaser a couple of years back – I’m pleased to say that it did not disappoint.

As do all successful animations, the film caters to both adult and child audiences; however at 121 minutes it is a bit lengthy, considering that many of the viewers will be children. After the initial NASCAR excitement it slowed down and took a while to build as the characters were introduced and the scene set; but the second hour more than made up for the first. Making a bunch of cars seem human is no mean feat and Pixar have done a fantastic job, from Lightning McQueen the rookie racecar to Doc Hudson the reluctant retiree with a cast of supporting characters including Sally Porsche, Mater the towtruck, the delightful Luigi the Fiat (and his sidekick Guido the Italian forklift), Sheriff the Police cruiser, Sarge the WW2 Jeep and my favourite – Fillmore – the hippy VW Microbus. With cameo appearances from none other than Jeremy Clarkson (as Lightning McQueen’s agent – in the UK release only) and Michael Schumacher, this may not be the best Pixar film ever, but they are all pretty excellent and this one’s at least a 9/10.

Windows PCs come in for a lot of critism about reliability but most of that is unfounded. You see, it’s not that Windows is particularly bad, but it’s actually down to the sheer number of permutations of hardware and software that are available and quality of the applications that we load on top of Windows (or inside Windows in the case of device drivers).

My wife’s PC is an old Compaq Deskpro EN6350 SFF that I gave her when she set up her public relations consultancy business a few years back. I originally installed Windows 2000 Professional on it before I moved to Australia in 2001. When I returned to the UK the next year I upgraded it to Windows XP, and since then I’ve applied software patches, anti-virus and anti-spyware updates and added a Wireless network adapter. That’s it. And although it’s a bit on the slow side now, it’s fine for Internet access, e-mail and a bit of word processing – which covers 99% of what my wife does with the PC. My point is, that after 5 or 6 years I haven’t had to rebuild Windows, clean out the registry, or do anything else with it, and it generally only needs a reboot when a software update requires that the system is restarted. I have similarly reliable PCs of my own – basically well maintained, with nothing that’s likely to upset system stability – and it all works very nicely.

The trouble is that now I’m entering the world of cheap software packages for consumer use (you know the sort of thing – the CD/DVD that’s free with the Sunday newspaper or found for a fiver or less in the bargain bin at PC World) and having written about my experiences of installing childrens’ software last weekend, I then experienced the other extreme of educational software – a little package called “Noddy – Let’s Get Ready for School“.

It didn’t start off well as running the application installer initially produced a really unhelpful dialog with a red stop icon and an OK button (no title or error message), so I tried again as Administrator and the InstallShield installer ran as expected. Once installed, I launched the application to find that a) it wasn’t really installed at all (the CD was still required throughout and the installer appears to have just created a few icons) and b) the program reset the screen to 640×480 mode before crashing.

I checked the specifications on the box: Pentium processor at 90MHz or better (I was using a 1.4GHz Pentium 4 M); 16-bit colour (I was using 32-bit color) and Windows 95 or 98 (I was using XP – Windows 9x operating systems are now unsupported so I would hope that vendors would stop selling appllications that rely on them, even if they do cost only a few pounds).

Running the application in Windows XP’s Windows 95 compatibility mode solved the crash issue but even so, it still insisted on me downgrading the graphics to 16 or 24-bit colour. After running successfully as Administrator, I logged out and logged back on with my son’s (unprivileged) account to find that running the application produced the following error message:

Director Player 6.0

Unable to copy the driver file C:\WINDOWS\xobglu16.dll to your Windows directory.

Your disk may be full.

The disk was far from full, but writing to the system root folder would be subject to NTFS access permissions. Indeed, using RunAs to elevate my permissions let me run the application with no apparant issues (except that I don’t want a toddler to have to enter a password to run a game), so I tried to copy the xobglu16.dll file myself (the file doesn’t appear on the CD, but is present in %systemroot% whilst running the application using an account with the necessary privileges – e.g. Administrator – along with a similarly-named xobglu32.dll). It seems crazy that a program would copy DLLs to %systemroot% each time it is run but, nevertheless, that seems to be the case; however if I copy them myself it crashes.

In the end I resorted to making my son’s account a power user on the machine (running a sandboxed Windows 98 installation in a virtual machine would have been another option, but less user friendly). Still, at least I didn’t have to make him an administrator.

In fairness, I should have been ready for this, having spent many hours trying to get various items of software aimed at little people to run successfully on my friends’ PCs but I did think the fact that this particular package was produced by BBC Multimedia would be a good thing. Clearly I was wrong and the BBC should stick to television programming (maybe it’s no coincidence that BBC Multimedia no longer publishes computer and video games).

Apologies for the lack of blogging these last couple of weeks (well, it will be a couple of weeks by the time I upload this to the blog), but I’m currently sitting in the shade, enjoying a nice drink, in 29 degrees of sunshine, in France’s Loire Valley. Normally, a family holiday would mean a ban on anything related to computers, strictly enforced by my wife, but the merger between my twin hobbies of photography and computing means that I do need to take a laptop away on holiday with me to at least back up my photos!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that our fantastic holiday cottage (La Sarmenti̬re, in Montsoreau Рbooked via French Country Cottages) had a funky Wanadoo.fr Livebox ADSL router installed.

I’m not sure if the owners intend it to be used by guests (the wireless connection was secured) but I always carry at least on CAT5 Ethernet cable. Except this time. Because I’m not supposed to be using the Internet on holiday. But I neeeeeeed to. Just think of all the tourist information that I could research on the ‘net.