Boot Camp almost had me there

Posted by Trejkaz Sat, 22 Apr 2006 14:36:00 GMT

Phew… that was a hard few hours. :-)

This afternoon, I had decided to give Boot Camp a spin, mainly to see if I could use my laptop as a Windows testing environment for the app I develop for work.

Windows worked relatively well. Problem was, the machine would no longer boot back into OSX. This is a typical problem with Windows – it has a habit of clobbering every other operating system when you install it. I was under the impression that Apple had found a way around that problem, but it seems that they haven’t.

Anyway, a lot of people had the same problem, and a number of potential solutions were found, but none of them actually worked in my case. Most of the solutions involved booting from the OSX install disk, but the system didn’t even want to boot the disk. Eventually out of frustration, I left the machine turned off for a while, and somehow (luck?) on the fifth or sixth attempt the install disk finally booted.

So I had managed to get into Disk Utility, but it couldn’t find an error. Getting it to “repair” the disk just resulted in it doing nothing. So that route was useless, but it did give me a way to at least erase Windows. I erased it and then tried rebooting to see if that worked. Nope, then it just tried to boot from the erased disk, and failed because there was no OS on it.

But there was one way out of it all, the installer had a feature which forces the machine to boot from a given partition. I pointed it at the partition which wouldn’t boot, and it booted up properly into my main OSX install.

Then I just went into the Boot Camp app and returned my disk to a single partition, and everything is back in order again. Close call, but I have to wonder if there might be other untold problems it’s caused on my system.

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Quick Fix for Japanese IME on Windows XP

Posted by Trejkaz Thu, 08 Dec 2005 05:17:00 GMT

If you have ever had the need to enter Japanese text on your PC, and your PC is under the oppressive reign of a company which won’t let you run a decent OS, you’ve probably discovered that the Japanese IME stops working after a while, more or less at random.

I can’t reproduce this in a controlled fashion, but I can’t go a week without it happening. What happens is all the options on the language bar go away and you only see the “Caps” and “Kana” buttons, and it’s a common problem. During my search, I found many web sites mentioning the problem and not one offering the solution.

Well, it turns out there is a simple solution, which I obtained via trial and error. I went to a machine which had never had Japanese enabled on it, and installed it there. Then I found the portion of the registry where all these settings were kept (searched for “Kana”, found it pretty quickly) and exported that key.

All I did then was imported that .reg file into my other PC and rebooted (urgh), and after that everything worked.

The problem is not exactly solved so I fully expect that it will break once in a while still, but at least I have a fairly quick set-and-reboot means of fixing the symptoms now.

The .reg file is attached here, just in case someone has this problem and doesn’t have access to a machine where the problem isn’t happening. :-)

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Mouse Follies II

Posted by Trejkaz Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:11:00 GMT

A helpful soul has pointed me to a nice utility called TXMouse which performs X-style copy/paste on Windows right on time for me to go back to work tomorrow. :-)

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Just Shoehorn It

Posted by Trejkaz Mon, 24 Jan 2005 01:42:00 GMT

In today’s news, a certain Windows user/developer hacks copy-on-select into a certain IM client (names withheld to protect the innocent/guilty.)

I found a better solution to this problem years ago I call it “using Linux.”

This solution is “better,” because in Linux, you get it in every application as if for free.

But while we’re on the topic, there are a great deal of UI deficiencies in Windows which need to be tackled at the OS level.

  • Lack of copy-on-select, as just mentioned;
  • Needing to aim for a thin titlebar, thus violating Fitts’ Law in the most horrible way (a large number of X window managers allow you to hold Alt and click anywhere in the window, which is much more comfortable);
  • Needing to click on a window in order to use the scrollwheel to scroll it. If I wanted to click on the window and scroll the window, I would have clicked on the scrollbar.

Those three are the ones that bite my butt on a regular basis around once every 10-15 minutes while at work on a Windows machine. I think if they fixed these few issues, the entire OS might just become pleasant enough to use as a real desktop OS (crashes and hardware issues notwithstanding.)

So I dunno. Is shoehorning Windows into Linux on an application-by-application basis really getting anywhere? Instead of adding copy-on-select to Psi, Firefox, mIRC, PuTTY, and the other dozens of applications, people could have spent time adding it to the OS itself, or even just spent the time installing another OS. It doesn’t take that long. :-/

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Windows Media Player DRM Vulnerability

Posted by Trejkaz Wed, 12 Jan 2005 01:41:00 GMT

Looks like people have figured out how to create [viruses][1] which run inside Windows Media Player (WMP)’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) framework.

So in case anyone actually runs WMP with the “Acquire licenses automatically” option turned on

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Ironic

Posted by Trejkaz Fri, 07 Jan 2005 01:41:00 GMT

Microsoft Anti-Spyware. I wonder if it removes Internet Explorer and Windows Messenger

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