Virtualizing Windows 8 Developer Preview

It would seem a fairly obvious choice to try out the new, exciting Windows 8 in a virtual environment.

Apparently virtualizing the Windows 8 Developer Preview isn’t so easy, however – at least it doesn’t seem work  in Virtual PC 2007 and VMware Player 3.0.1, but quickly stops with this message:

I’m currently trying with VirtualBox, and at least it’s now brought me to the “Installing Windows” screen – I’ll report back if that works any better. Currently it’s been “pining for the fiords” or whatever for a good while:

Update. I think it was disk formatting that took a while, but here is Windows 8 Developer Preview 32bit in all its glory running in VirtualBox :

I only just got it running, so no testing so far. It seems that VirtualBox is the way to go for the time being.

WordPress from Android

I am now testing an HTC Desire Z. Compared to Windows Phone 7 it is much more a nerds phone, and I love the jungle of apps available, but WP7 is so clean and easy so declaring one to be better than the other is just not possible – usage scenarios have to decide the road to follow…

The image shows my office view.

WordPress from Windows Phone 7

As it says below, this is a test of the new free app for wp7. Not one for long posts, but seems like a great management tool!

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone

How much disk space do you need for your old DV tapes?

Before all this new SD card-recording and  MPEG-4 came along, you’ve probably used DV tapes for your videos. But how much space are your old tapes going to take on that brand new NAS you’ve installed, before you have them all edited and possibly rerendered? It would definitely be a good idea to do before the tapes deteriorate or get obsolete.

Well, DV has a fixed compression factor, meaning that it will use3.6 megabytes of disk space per second. This turns into somewhere around 12.7 gigabytes per 60 minutes – the usual tape size. So 1 TB should fit around 78 tapes – which should be enough for everyone (or was that a bad quote?).

Here’s a graphic to help with the calculation:

With today’s disk prices, I would recommend that you avoid re-rendering even final edits and possibly loose on quality, but instead just store edits and tapes as-is in DV as the least lossy format – or am I just old fashioned?

Faulty (Fawlty?) menus in Visual Studio 2010 beta2 running in VMware

Wanting to test VS2010 beta2 in VMware, I installed in my trusty old XP image but unfortunately the dropdown menus didn’t work right – the subitems would only appear one by one if the mouse cursor is moved slowly downwards.

Thinking this might have something to do with the fact that VS 2010 is WPF based, I turned off the VM, went to the VM settings for the display, unchecked the “Accelerate 3D graphics” checkbox, and the world seemed to be good again!

I’ve yet to investigate the further (performance) implications of this.

Previously I’ve had similar problems trying to install Blend 3 on the same XP image (splash screen and OK-button didn’t show up) and I think that the graphics setting may have something to do with this also.

Windows LiveWriter is here…

Yet another blog authoring tool came along last week – this time from the MS sweatshops. 

It seems real easy to use – the hard part was, as I am not in the US, to find a download. The danish download link just literally took me round in circles, but luckily Roy Osherove had the magic link that takes you directly to  the download.

I’ve used w.bloggar for a while now, and I’ve been basically very satisfied with blog-posting from a desktop client, instead of the more cumbersome web-based editor in WordPress.

Make a recording sound like old vinyl record (for free) in Audacity

Audacity is truly an awesome tool for recording and sound editing. I have used it for a long time for recording video-voiceovers, mixing sound-bites etc. It is both quite advanced with editing capabilities and at the same time easy enough to use to give an end-user for recording.

Yesterday a friend asked me how to take a new recording and make it sound old. This was a bit of a challenge: there are plenty of tools that will let you record your vinyl-records and clean them with various filters, but easily adding the clicks and scratches noise of good old vinyl took some Google’ing.

I came upon a free vinyl simulation filter made by a company called Izotope. This filter is in the standard Virtual Studio Technology (VST) format, and can therefore be used in a number of audio applications.

Luckily Audacity has an extensible architecture, so it is possible to use filters in various formats, among them are VST which can be used via the Audacity VST enabler plugin.

So, here’s the shopping-list:

1. register on the Izotope site
2. download and install the Izotrope plugin
3. get the registration code in the mail
4. copy the “Izotrope Vinyl.DLL” file to the Audacity plugin-directory (you can also make path references, but this is the easy way)
5. download the Audacity VST plugin as a zip file
6. copy the vst-bridge.dll to the Audacity plugin-directory
7. start up Audacity, enter the Izotrope registration details, and look in the “Effects” menu

You will have to play a bit with the various settings – to begin with try moving the “Dust” and “Wear” parameters all the way to the right.

Excel 2000 incompatibility with Internet Explorer (MSIE) 7.0

Today I came upon a strange incompatibility: A user with Excel 2000 had upgraded to Internet Explorer 7.0, and when he tried to open a specific XLS file got the message “File Error: Data may have been lost!”

Apparently there is no Microsoft problem registered for this, and not much on the web either (hence this blogpost). Searching the newsgroups however revealed that at least one person has tried to report it to Microsoft, and got the following answer:

“…there’s a general problem with Office 2000 opening workbooks containing shapes or images with underlying hyperlinks on systems which have Internet Explorer 7 installed on it. In such situations, the workbook either raises this error message and opens up showing the pure data without any images, shapes and other contents, or the Excel session crashes.”

See the full posting here

Not many people are likely to hit this particular situation, but if you do, I hope this posting is of value

Getting in trouble with Enterprise Library 3.0 – Strong Name confusion

I just got myself into trouble with the Logging Quickstart sample.

Not being content with the Winform app, I wanted to use it as a basis for a very simple console app, just logging a simple “Hello world” entry so I could play with the rather complex configuration setting. I copied the app.config from the Microsoft sample over to my own, referenced the EL projects, and all went fine, until I tried using the Enterprise Library Configuration application – then, boom! Errors all over, trying to load the Logging.DLL.

Well, looking behind the curtains it became clear that the configuration program inserts references to strongly named assemblies that reside in the installation folder for Enterprise Library, but the source projects in the QuickStart do not have strong names. The quick answer was, of course, to reference the assemblies directly from the installation directory instead of using the source projects.

Strong Naming has apparently long been a problem with Enterprise Library, so the Patterns & Practices team have listened what was said about version 2.0 and changed the way that Enterprise Library modules are installed. This is somewhat of a caveat to look out for. You might even want to read the documentation on this before starting out – it is probably already in there somewhere

Update: Tom Hollander has now posted about this in detail on his blog.

At-sign in Spanish

The text in the title is what I was googling for today, finding nothing of value. So I include this post for others who might be looking for the same thing.

The answer is: “aroba” ie. persona (aroba) lared.es

Knowing this, led me to a page called A Natural History of the @ Sign where this information can be found for many different languages.

As an aside, it is fascinating to notice how the new computer and internet words are treated in different languages, from trying to translate everything (my favorite is the German “befehls-taste” for a function-key – it has a distinct stereotype prussian military kind of ring to it) to complete laissez-faire and adoption of all the English words, though sometimes pronounced in very much native dialect.

Is this a new thing? Hardly. The only thing that is new since the 1940′s, is that English is now the “lingua franca” – one Danish/Norwegian playwright put it like this in the 1700′s: “The Danes speak French with their wives, German to their servants, and Danish to their dogs”.