Thursday, January 31, 2008

Bloatware

I was removing Adobe Acrobat Reader 6 from an old Win2000 machine. The Add/Remove Program applet showed it used 43.5MB space. The computer also has Adobe Acrobat (full version) 4 installed by the side, which only takes a meager 8.77MB. The new Adobe Reader 8 I think takes more than 90 MB. You'd wonder how much functionality stuffed in the bloated package actually gets used once in a hundred years. On-demand functionality, anyone?

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

The pesty ffdshow filter

Now both WMP and RealPlayer crashed on me (DEP message) when playing some media files. I tried Media Player Classic, same thing. Well, that looks like a codec issue since the crash happens with all players. I GSpot the files and found out they are all DivX/Xvid coded. I found the utility InstalledCodec and ran it to id my codecs. I first disabled my DivX5/6 and Xvid DirectShow filter/drivers. Didn't help. Then I spotted the ffdshow filter for MPEG-4. Disabling that fixed the issue. The ffdshow filter is 1.0.0.1 (size 1761280) at C:\WINDOWS\SysWow64\ffdshow.ax. It might the relic of a few video converters I tried.

RM converter

RealMedia V10 files are hard to deal with - tried at least 5 converters to transform them into other formats but none worked. Eventually I did find one that worked: Ultra RM Converter 3.3.0916 (older versions didn't work either).

Monday, January 28, 2008

Putting an OS on CF

I bought a cheap CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter to use with a Lexar 266x CF card. After figuring out which one is pin 1 on the IDE socket and how to use the 3-pin jumper to set master/slave - the instruction sheet and markings are very scant at best, I tried to install an OS directly. The result is: nothing worked so far. Here're the things I tried:

  • I made the CF the only device on the primary IDE. Windows XP and Server 2003 would simply hang upon booting from CD. Ubuntu 6.06's graphical installer would fail as well, but I could indeed mount the CF (shown as /dev/hda) with its FAT partition (dev/hda1) after the installer quit into bash.
  • The device is shown as floppy with no disk under an Win2003 installation (takes a very long time for the system to boot). I guess the card is marked as removable somehow, which probably contributes to the Windows installer failure.
  • Acronis Home will identify it as a 3.84 Gb drive after thinking for a while.
I'll probably try a cloned installation later.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Junction point is a no go for desktop search engines

I've tried both GDS and MDS and neither could index a volume mounted on a folder. I couldn't find a way to force MDS at all. I did manage to add the folder in GDS but it didn't really index anything even when it shows "up-to-date" on the status. Strange enough, it does have 2 files indexed that I can confirm. I wish there's a way I can "browse" what's indexed.

The other thing is, GDS couldn't index my Edge DiskGo USB drive. I have the locking turned on but the time I tried to add the drive to indexing, it's unlocked. GDS just said "invalid location".