Geek Drivel

Last Friday, I discovered that I needed a 64-bit version of Windows for development purposes. I had a 64-bit version of Windows XP on a spare machine, but I haven’t set it up since the recent move, and until we get more stuff organized, I frankly don’t have the room. But it occurred to me that I’m running a 64-bit machine now, so at least in theory, I should be able to install a 64-bit version of Windows in a virtual machine under VMware Fusion. So I figure, what the heck, let’s give it a try. And while I’m at it, I might as well finally take a look at Windows 7 too.

MSDN supplied a 64-bit copy of Windows 7 “Ultimate”, and a key for it. When I created a virtual machine for it, VMware Fusion obligingly recognized the downloaded ISO file and installed it for me with no further instruction on my part. After the obligatory round of updates and reboots, I settled down to figure out how to use it.

In any new Windows OS, I have to figure out how to change a few things immediately. The “don’t show hidden files” option has to come off, and especially the “hide extensions on known files types” option — I’m a big boy, I can stand seeing file extensions and files that Microsoft thinks are too dangerous or scary for delicate eyes. I do not want it to automatically reboot if it crashes — I want to see that it has crashed, and any diagnostics that it produces, before I (manually!) reboot it. And turn off those damned animations, I don’t care about them and you’re running in a virtual machine so don’t waste the CPU cycles.

Since Microsoft always moves the settings around between versions, I had to poke around awhile to find them, and I got a good look at the OS as I did so. And I have to say, I’m impressed. The user interface is a lot better than it was before — easier to use, easier to navigate around, and it mostly stays out of your way until you need it. The system is pretty responsive, something that you couldn’t always say about earlier incarnations. It’s using roughly half of the one gigabyte of memory that VMware Fusion allocated to it, leaving half a gigabyte of memory for programs to use without swapping. Even the security stuff didn’t cause me much trouble, I just had to tell it that it was okay to run programs from a network drive without panicking and warning me about them each time.

But it wasn’t until I installed Visual Studio that I really saw the biggest difference. All of my programs compiled 33% to 50% faster! I’d anticipated that the compiler would be a little faster under a 64-bit operating system, despite the fact that it’s only a 32-bit program itself, but that’s a lot more than I’d expected!

All told, it was one of the most painless Windows installs I’ve ever done, and it didn’t take me too long to decide that this was going to be my new development VM. I did run into one minor but baffling glitch, which I still haven’t determined the cause of (could be Windows 7, could be Visual Studio 2005, might even be something else entirely), but I found a work-around for it, so everything is working fine now.

I’m still not going to use Windows for anything Internet-related, only for games and software development. Linux is a lot safer on the ‘net at present. But for the foreseeable future, when I use Windows, I’ll definitely be using Windows 7.

Very intriguing. Unfortunately it sounds too good to be true, so it probably isn’t.

I’ve spent the last few days integrating my new math library into the Windows project I started coding it for. Yesterday morning I was ready to try running the integrated copy, but I had some kind of problem starting it up. I couldn’t track it down very easily though, due to how long it took to do a full compile of that project.

As you might remember, I’m now using a MacBook Pro, and doing Windows development under VMware Fusion. I expected that things would be a little slower under VMware Fusion than on a bare-metal machine, and for the most part I didn’t really notice the difference… until I started working with this very large project again. I remembered it taking a long time to compile this one from scratch, but I remembered that “long time” as being closer to ten minutes. It was taking well over an hour now, which was simply ridiculous.

I’m also still running my Linux virtual machine at the same time, for web access and such. I had some trouble getting the two virtual machines to play well together… whenever I started the Windows VM, the Linux one suddenly started losing memory, for reasons I couldn’t understand. I tweaked the memory usage on both of them… it helped, but they still seemed to be fighting over memory at times, even though the system itself had plenty of memory for both of them and itself too, without swapping.

I finally found out the reason for all of that when I went to locate a fix for the slow Windows compiles yesterday. It turns out that VMware Fusion, unbeknownst to me, was sharing memory between the two, allowing the Windows machine to steal the Linux machine’s resources. (Just what I’d expect a Microsoft product to do. ). On VMware’s site, I discovered a page with a note at the bottom:

Adding the following settings to a virtual machine can reduce the I/O load on the hard disk, however these adjustments require additional memory on the host. Only add these settings if there is sufficient free memory on the host to accommodate all the memory allocated to the virtual machine, otherwise you may cause a memory starvation condition that can reduce performance of all the running virtual machines or possibly affect the host operating system.

I had plenty of memory, so bring it on! After shutting down the Windows VM, I added the four lines that the page suggested to the virtual machine’s vmx file:

    MemTrimRate = "0"
    mainMem.useNamedFile=false
    sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
    prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"

That helped, a lot. Not only with the speed of the compiles, either — the Windows system was no longer stealing the Linux machine’s memory. But the compiles were still pretty slow, and it took me a while to discover why.

During a compile, I popped up the Windows Task Manager program, to see whether the system was swapping a lot of memory or something. And lo, what do I see, but that there’s another process who’s memory and CPU usage were going up while the compiler was trying to run. It turned out to be Microsoft Security Essentials, the free anti-malware program that I’d installed a little while back because the VPN software that one of the companies I work with uses insisted that I have some kind of virus protection. It was supposed to have no noticeable impact on the machine. Well, it had a very noticeable impact in this case.

After turning off its “real-time protection” option (and ignoring the dire warnings about how my computer was now At Risk!), full compiles were much faster. Still noticeably slower than on a similarly-equipped bare-metal system, but a lot more tolerable. I can’t say exactly how fast yet because I’m still improving it as I work on the code; I’ll run a thorough test once I’m done.

So equipped, I finally tracked down that startup problem — it was an instance of the static initialization order fiasco, which I should have thought of a lot sooner since I’d run into it just last week too. Oh well, live and learn. For now it’s back to the real task, developing the software.

In one of the science fiction series that I used to read, the hero kept in constant contact with his robot companion through a surgically implanted microphone and earphone. This isn’t quite in that league, but it sounds like a solid piece of work.

I have to wonder if it would work on denture-wearers, though.

“Seriously, though, wouldn’t you have killed for this when you were 14?” I certainly would have. Sometimes I regret the inevitability of growing up (or at least older ).

(Via LifeHacker’s “Remains of the Day” feature)

Geek Drivel is suddenly ridiculously popular with would-be blog spammers. I’m told that my primary defenses have blocked more than 400 automated spam messages in the last week, and maybe a dozen have gotten past them — all caught by my secondary defenses, I’m happy to say.

I’m not sure what prompted this sudden surge of interest, but the spammers are welcome to give up at any time.

I’ve dealt a lot with software piracy issues, primarily with Project Badger (detecting and preventing piracy is one of its primary purposes). And I didn’t have to learn the hard way that you have to be very careful before calling any user a pirate, or allowing your software to do so — paying customers don’t like being accused of theft. If there’s any chance at all that you could be wrong about it, you have to give the customer the benefit of the doubt.

For some reason, Microsoft did have to learn that the hard way. Their first antipiracy attempt, three or four years ago, was secretly installed onto systems disguised as an “important security update.” And it “caught” far too many of their legitimate, paying customers, baldly and unapologetically calling them thieves. It was clumsy and heavy-handed, too — it essentially made the system unusable until the “caught” person called Microsoft to correct the problem. Even if you didn’t experience it yourself, it’s easy to see how that could royally piss people off.

But by the sound of it, they’ve fixed all of those problems. They’re going out of their way to be open and honest about the process now; the false-detection problems seem to be fixed; and when it does think that it has caught someone, it allows the system to continue working as normal, simply informing the user of the problem.

I still don’t particularly like Windows, but it’s easier to deal with it now.

I try to keep an open mind on most subjects, but I’ve been skeptical of “electrosensitives” ever since I heard of them. While it’s possible that some people can sense some forms of electromagnetic radiation that most of us can’t, the only way I can see that such an ability could cause the problems that they claim to have is by psychosomatic means. And their demands that everyone around them revert to the 1800s is simply ludicrous. This article just bolsters that opinion.

(Hm… it seems that general science agrees too.)

An interesting idea for getting cargo into space. Oddly enough, it’s not something that I’ve heard about in science fiction, so maybe it’s not as obvious as it looks in hindsight.

Tired of having to remember to charge your cell phone every night, or of running out of juice in the middle of a call? Scientists may have come up with a solution for you: just go for a walk.

Oddly enough, I’ve never seen this kind of thing mentioned in science fiction. It seems obvious in retrospect. But then, most science fiction assumes that perfect batteries with enormous capacities will be developed, and plugging a phone into a wall socket or the lighter socket of a car every couple weeks won’t be a major hassle.