Home tomorrow
It’s been quite a while since I last posted on here, but then I haven’t really had anything to write about. Following up from my last post on Windows 7 I am still using it and haven’t had any problems with it so far. I have installed Power Pack 3 on my Windows Home Server now and this had improved Windows 7 support, I can now add shared folders to my libraries without having to make them available offline. It has also fixed a few issues with running backups.
Today is my last day of work before Christmas. Tomorrow I will be flying back to England and leaving the cold and snow behind me until after the new year. It has been snowing this afternoon and is forecast to continue long all weekend. I have been quite busy for a while now at work, we recently made a beta release of my program and so I have been fixing bugs and getting it ready for the final release. There are so many different configurations and environments that it runs in there was no way that I could test them all prior to a release. Just this week I have fixed over a dozen bugs and added a couple of new features.
While at home I may start to look at my FYP properly and start to do some research. I have considering getting myself an e-reader for Christmas as this will help with all the reading I plan to do. I am currently torn between writing it in C# or C++. I have already done a lot of the simple reusable code in C++ for previous assignments so I would be tempted to use that and build on it rather than rewriting it all in C#. It would make it easier to use OpenGL as well rather than having to rely on a third party library. I have plenty of time to decide anyway.
I have downloaded Windows Live Writer, I heard about it yesterday and thought that I would try it out. I’m writing this with it now. It seems to be quite good. It recognises that this is a WordPress blog and downloaded my theme so that I can edit it in a window that looks like it will when it is on the site. It isn’t perfect but close enough.
Windows 7
This weekend I finally got annoyed with how slow my laptop was being and decided that it was time to format. Despite not being out in shops yet, I have been able to get Windows 7 Professional through the MSDN Academic Alliance with my university for about a month so after a long download on my 2 Mb connection, I have it running now.
I have only been using it for 4 days now but there is a definite improvement over Vista. I never had any major problems with Vista and have been using it for the past 2 years, both Home Premium on my laptop and Business on my desktop PC. Despite this, I thought I should try out Windows 7.
I never looked at any of the beta or release candidate versions of Windows 7 in much detail so this was really my first time with the operating system. At first I didn’t know if I liked the new task bar but after a few days of using it I have grown to like it. It has integrated the quick launch bar and the task bar into one and it works well. The task bar is a lot less cluttered even with a lot of windows open. This is the only major, visible change that I have come across. There are a few others but nothing significant enough to be worth noting.
I see that there are libraries now, collections of multiple different folders. The defaults are for documents, pictures, music and videos. They are both the users folder and public folder. I don’t really have much use for these since I only have a single user system and don’t use the public folders at all. I can see that libraries would be useful to a lot of users though, especially those on multi-user system. It does make the process of working with shared files easier. I store my photos on a network drive, I tried to add this to the picture’s library but it said that I couldn’t as the directory was not indexed. I looked into this and it seems that I would have to make it available offline. I don’t really want to have to do that so that was out.
I have also seen something called Home Group, I haven’t really looked into what this is but it seems to be a simpler way of sharing resources on a network. I have no use for this so haven’t really looked into it.
None of my day-to-day applications refused to work so no problems there. The day after getting everything set up though, I was having one problem where explorer would crash every time I right-clicked. It would recognise this and automatically restart but it was quite annoying. I found online that 7-zip caused this problem so I un-installed it and all was well. I have since re-installed it and there is still no problems so I don’t know if that was just a coincidence or not.
From a performance point of view it is not much faster on my laptop, there is a speed improvement but then that was from a 2-year-old Vista install that was long overdue some maintenance so I don’t really know how fair of a comparison that is. I opted for the 32-bit version of Windows 7, I was reading online about it and found that the general consensus seemed to be that if you have 4GB of RAM, or might do in the future, then get 64-bit. Those, like me, with only 2GB then get 32-bit. I thought about buying more RAM but it would be about £70 for me to buy 4GB of laptop memory and it doesn’t seem worth it. Once I go back to England next year I will have my desktop PC again. I wouldn’t bother upgrading my laptop anyway, it is over 2 years old and doesn’t seem worth spending money on. Especially since new laptops are so much cheaper.
Windows 7 has integrated perfectly with Windows Home Server. The connector software is working without any problems and the backups are working so no problems there. I have seen that Power Pack 3 will include better support for Windows 7 but I am not having any problems running on Power Pack 2. It has not been waking up my laptop to run backups at night as it should, but this morning, I noticed that Wake On LAN was disabled in the network adapter’s drivers yesterday so I thought that might be something to do with it. I enabled the option but it still didn’t wake up last night to run the backup so I don’t know what to do now. I need to look around a bit for the problem but maybe it is something that Power Pack 3 will fix.
Overall it does seem to be a perfectly good operating system. Maybe people will now finally upgrade from the 9-year-old Windows XP. We will have to wait and see if tomorrow’s release goes better than Vista’s release date, but from my few days of using I can see no reason why not.
Sightseeing in and around Munich
This weekend we went for a walk around Munich and also went on a tour to the castles of Ludwig II, Linderhof and Neuschwanstein. The photos are below. The walk around Munich wasn’t in the best weather but we saw quite a lot and finished it off with a trip up the Olympic Tower in Olympiapark.
The tour out to the castles was fantastic, we went on the tour inside as well, although they wouldn’t let us take photographs. Linderhof was very over-decorated. Nearly every room was covered in gold. Neuschwanstein was very gothic, it also wasn’t finished. The tour took us to the rooms that were finished. It is a huge castle half way up a mountain. It took us about 25 minutes to get up to it on foot but once there, the view was magnificent.
Walk around Munich
View from the top of the Olympic Tower
Linderhof and Neuschwanstein Visit
Xbox back, again
My Xbox has finally come back. Not a replacement this time but then the last one was only 4 days old. Hopefully it will last a little longer now. I have been playing on it a bit but I’ve only been back from work an hour. We will have to wait and see.
Oktoberfest
We went to Oktoberfest last night. We didn’t end up staying long though, we took a few photos, there are also a couple of around Munich since we went walking after leaving the festival.
Red ring of death again
Only a couple of days since my Xbox has arrived back from the repair centre and I am getting a red ring of death again. It is a new Xbox they have sent me so this is quite annoying. I will be without it for at least another week now. I have just filled out the repair request on the website again so hopefully I will be able to send it off tomorrow and it will be back before the end of the week. I have owned an Xbox for almost 3 years and this has never happened once, then, I get it twice in one week. The same week that all the new games start to come out. My copy of ODST still hasn’t arrived. So much for fast air mail, it was shipped last Wednesday. It doesn’t really matter when it arrives now.
We started to play Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 yesterday, I have seen mixed reviews of it but I think it is a vast improvement on the old one. The story seems to be a lot more cohesive rather than in the first game where it felt like it had just been tacked on to the game play. With the two different story lines as well it gives a greater re-playability. There have been a few small glitches but nothing that causes a major problem to the game. The only problem that I have found is that, as a second player in coop, the game doesn’t remember my stats and achievement progress between loads. This is particularly frustrating because some of them will take a long time get and there is no way that I would be able to get them in 1 sitting or even 1 play through.
I have also now completed ODST, I was playing it on split screen since I don’t have my copy yet. I think that it is much better game and the story line is and improvement on previous Halo titles. I always felt like the story was kind of superficial to the game but in ODST it did feel a lot more like the story was an important aspect. While the game play isn’t significantly different, I don’t see this as a bad thing. Halo 3 is one of the most popular titles on the Xbox and why change it if there is nothing wrong with it. The subtle changes do make you feel weaker than a Spartan, you are a little slower, can’t just as high, have health. These small differences add up to change the feeling of the game without taking away from what made Halo 3 a great game.
I recently downloaded the demo for Batman: Arkham Asylum. I hadn’t previously looked at this, but I had seen some good reviews and thought I would give it a try. I enjoyed playing the demo and think that I will buy the game at some point. Obviously not much point now, I don’t have a working Xbox, but in a couple of weeks when I get it back I think it will bridge the gap of October between releases nicely.
Xbox back
Yesterday I got my Xbox back from the repair centre. They have just shipped me a new one so it’s all shiny. It is just in time for ODST, my copy hasn’t arrived yet but we were playing it last night. I will write a mini review when we have completed it although it seems to be good so far.
I am quite impressed with the repair process Microsoft have put in place for the Xbox. Despite it being nearly 3 years old, they sent a courier to pick it up, take it to the repair centre and then send me a new console in under a week and they throw in a month of gold membership for live. I was hoping that I would get a new one with a HDMI connector, mine predates the first ones to have them but alas no, it identical to the new ones. I am tempted to get a bigger hard drive for it although £90 for a 120gb is quite steep. I only have a 20GB one and now with more DLC, game installs, arcade games etc. it all adds up to needing a lot more space. I am forever having to clean up old videos and demos, I can only have one game installed at once maybe 2 if it is a smaller one.
Hopefully ODST will arrive by tomorrow so I will be able to play it over the weekend. We also have Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 coming next week so we will be playing that as well. The autumn games schedule has started at last and there is a lot of good titles coming out in the coming months to keep us busy. There is at least 7-8 that I want and a couple more that I might get as well.
Red ring of death
My Xbox has developed the red ring of death. 3 little red lights flashing away. It took a few days to get to this after it started crashing. Since it is nearly 3 years old I thought I would have to pay for a repair, then, while on the phone to the repair line, it started to red ring. The only reason that I had phoned was because while filling out the repair request on the website I couldn’t have a German address with a UK billing address. Originally it would just beep and freeze, it was only while on the phone and going through all of his diagnosis steps that it first red ringed, fortunately, this means that no billing information is required so that solves that problem.
My Xbox did need to go for repair last summer as well, at the time they also extended my warranty by a year, this has now just ran out so I would have had to pay if it wasn’t the red ring problem. I am now waiting for the UPS shipping label to arrive so that I can send it off. I am hoping that it will arrive before I leave work today so that I can sort it out on the way home. I want to send it off as soon as possible in the hope that it will be back for the release on Halo 3: ODST next week which I already have on preorder. I have also just bought Trials HD on XBLA. Didn’t get much chance to play it but it seems like a good game.
Windows Home Server
A couple of weeks ago I had my server shipped over to me in Germany. The hassle that was caused by not having it and instead swapping between several different hard drives became more hassle than it was worth. Including my monitor and Xbox it was £110 to UPS it all. When it arrived, I thought I would try out using Windows Home Server after recommendation by Tom, and before today have had no problems with it. I am quite impressed with it so far, the problem I am having I think might be more due to hard drive failure than anything else. I might have to buy a new one and clone it on to it before it dies completely.
As for Windows Home Server though, I think the drive pool is a great idea. I have a lot of data and media and being able to just add more drives as needed and not have to worry about data being spread around multiple drives is incredibly useful. Until I switched I was using Windows XP in my server and I have to say that it is a great improvement.
The drive pool’s ability to have automatic folder duplication in case of drive failure is another useful feature, while I don’t have this enabled on all my drives, I do have it on the ones with important data that I would be lost without. I would use it on everything but don’t have enough space for that.
I have been using it to back up my laptop as well. Each day in the middle of the night, my laptop wakes up, performs a full system backup, and then, it should go to sleep again. For some reason it doesn’t but other than that it is an excellent system, I have been backing it up everyday for a week now and it is only taking up about 50gb on the server. It only saves the changes each day so the space used is very low. It then automatically maintains the backups as well so will delete them after a certain amount of time.
I have been having a lot of problems with this server’s hardware and think that when I’m back in England next summer I will build a new one. I was trying to remember what parts I have at home and think I might be able to build one with just a new system hard drive and motherboard. The problem is that the CPU I have is a socket 939 and motherboards seems to be increasingly rare. A new processor would then probably mean more RAM as well as it would need to be DDR2 but I figure there isn’t much sense looking into it now because hardware prices vary so much that it could be completely different in a years time.
In other news we have now booked our flights home for christmas, they were disappearing quickly so we thought we should get in there early, just 3 months left to go…
Starting external processes in Java
This is mainly for my own reference in the future but thought that I would post it here as well as I couldn’t really find anything on this while looking it up.
Launching an external process in Java is done through the ProcessBuilder class. Runtime.exec can be used as well but this just calls ProcessBuilder itself.
The constructor for ProcessBuilder takes a String vararg of the executable and the arguments. There is also the method ProcessBuilder.directory(File directory) to set the directory the process is launched from. ProcessBuilder.start() starts the process and then returns a Process object for the process.
ProcessBuilder builder =
new ProcessBuilder("exe", "arg 1", "arg 2", "arg 3");
builder.directory(new File("/path/to/working/dir"));
Process process = builder.start();
The part that I found the be awkward is the way that arguments are handled. You have to have 1 element per argument, as in the example above, having spaces doesn’t matter, the program will still treat it as one argument. Passing it as “\”arg 1\”" is unnecessary, the program will receive it as “arg 1″ with speech marks included. The example where I was having problems involved start ksh and getting it to run a program and pipe that into another. From command line it was:
ksh -c “exec arg | tee exec.log”
However, to run this from ProcessBuilder I needed
ProcessBuilder builder =
new ProcessBuilder("ksh", "-c", "exec arg | tee exec.log");
Where the value of the -c parameter was passed as one argument. Some things I tried that didn’t work were:
ProcessBuilder builder =
new ProcessBuilder("ksh", "-c", "\"exec arg | tee exec.log\"");
ProcessBuilder builder =
new ProcessBuilder("ksh", "-c", "exec", "arg", "|", "tee", "exec.log");
ProcessBuilder builder =
new ProcessBuilder("ksh", "-c exec arg | tee exec.log");
There were a few others as well. The problem is that with the first one of them, ksh would execute “exec arg | tee exec.log” including the speech marks so it wouldn’t find it, just as if you had typed that into a terminal. The second one, ksh would execute exec but then arg would be passed as an argument to ksh rather than exec and the same for all the others after it. The final one, ksh would receive the whole thing as single argument and so wouldn’t recognize it as it is expecting [-c] [command] as 2 arguments rather than one.