All posts by onlyconnect

software, windows

Vista, Office 2007 changes: cosmetic, or not?

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This is the statement that most intrigued me in Walter Mossberg’s review of Office 2007:

These changes in Office, while much less publicized, are far bolder and more important than the mostly cosmetic user interface changes in the highly hyped new version of Windows, called Vista, which comes out on the same day.

Mossberg’s reviews are not deeply technical but he represents a good example of intelligent opinion on technology issues. Is he right about Vista? I’ve puzzled a bit over what he is saying here. I think he is only referring to the user interface, yet one could argue that all user interfaces are “cosmetic” since they are about appearance in contrast to underlying functionality.

My own view is that it is difficult to describe the user interface changes in Vista as cosmetic, though I am unclear how to define what is “user interface” and what is not. This is from an MSDN article on the Desktop Window Manager:

The new Microsoft Windows Vista desktop composition feature fundamentally changes the way applications display pixels on the screen. When desktop composition is enabled, individual windows no longer draw directly to the screen or primary display device as they did in previous versions of Windows. Instead, their drawing is redirected to off-screen surfaces in video memory, which are then rendered into a desktop image and presented on the display.

That said, the user just sees windows on the screen: it is not obvious that this is so different from XP. That makes Vista’s UI changes the opposite of “cosmetic”: it looks the same, but underneath it is radically different.

How about the little search box at the bottom of the Vista Start menu? A small detail, yet once you learn that you can start Excel just by typing “ex” and hitting Enter, it becomes a big deal. I could ramble on here about search as UI. Not cosmetic.

Another change which I think falls in the UI category is that Vista now treats the user’s home directory sensibly. I ranted about this on XP. The home directory is a key part of the Windows operating system, but on XP it is hidden under Documents and Settings and both hard to find and intimidating for users. Vista promotes the home directory to the Start menu, renames the obscure Documents and Settings to “Users”, and sensibly moves things like Music and Pictures out of My Documents to the top level; it also gets rid of the annoying “My” prefix. You could argue that this is a cosmetic change, though I think it is an important one.

For sure, there are cosmetic changes in Vista. I think transparency, which Mossberg or any user will soon notice, is an example. Cool, but of little practical benefit as currently implemented. What about the way that Window key – Tab displays a 3D view of all your open applications (the update to Alt-Tab)? Is that cosmetic? Actually, I don’t think it is. If you have, for example, multiple documents open in Word and Excel, seeing the preview image makes it easier to find the one you want. The same applies to the pop-up previews on the task bar. This is information the user interface did not give us before. My vote: Not cosmetic.

I like Mossberg’s take on the new Office UI, though I still think there is more than just usability behind Microsoft’s strategy here. Yet I am still using the same Office features that I used in Office 2003. The changes are do with appearance, not functionality. Doesn’t that make the new stuff in Office 2007 more “cosmetic” than those in Vista, important though they are?

internet, windows

Elementary error breaks Outlook 2007 POP3 mail, say users

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Users are reporting that Outlook 2007 is immensely slow for POP3 email retrieval, because of an elementary error in the way it negotiates with email servers.

Specifically, it sends AUTH as the first command after connection. The server rejects this with an error response. The ensuing time-outs and consequent errors result in much slower mail retrieval, though it does arrive eventually.

I have 8 POP3 accounts that OL 2003 used to query in a minute or two (with 80 spams downloaded). OL 2007 takes 6 minutes. Plus I reckon there are other problems in the UI threading…..

says CW in a comment to an earlier blog post about Outlook 2007 performance. Corroboration comes from user Ken in a comment to this post.

I’ve not yet tested this myself, but will do shortly. It has a kind of horrific plausibility, since everyone at Microsoft uses Exchange for email, not POP3. Therefore POP3 performance will receive much less scrutiny, though you would have thought that the wider beta testing would have picked it up.

I think we will here a lot more about Outlook 2007 performance issues in the coming months, unless Microsoft comes up with a speedy fix for this and other problems.

Update

I’ve run some tests of my own and looked up some RFCs, with a little help from the microsoft.public.outlook.general newsgroup.

I tried Outlook 2007 with two POP3 servers. One is dovecot; the other is also running on Linux though I’m not sure which POP3 daemon it is. With dovecot, my ethernet trace does show a sequence similar to the one the above users are complaining about, something like:

Server: +OK dovecot ready.”

Client: AUTH

Server: -ERR Unsupported authentication mechanism

However, there is no significant delay introduced; it goes right ahead with user and password.

On the other POP3 server AUTH is again sent, but this time does not trigger an error.

There is something that puzzles me though: according to RFC 1734 AUTH should be followed by an authentication mechanism, not left without an argument. And there doesn’t appear to be any need to send AUTH at all in the standard plain setup.

The lack of an argument would explain the error the other users saw:

Server: -ERR An authentication mechanism MUST be entered

May be an email guru can tell me definitively whether Outlook is in the wrong here. However, it strikes me that the problem is only making a minor contribution to the poor performance. Even the timeout of 3 seconds which the user CW refers to is hardly going to make a huge difference.

That said – the fact remains that Outlook 2007 does have performance issues.

Uncategorized

New Order’s fantastic 12″ singles

If you have the tiniest shred of affection for old-fashioned vinyl records, you have to love the 12″ singles created by New Order in the 80s. They have Peter Saville’s beautiful, minimalist designs, they sound superb, and the songs themselves still pack a punch. Yesterday I played Blue Monday followed by both versions of Ceremony … stunning. I don’t believe that vinyl has any magic properties; yet I have never heard CDs that sound as good.

 

java, software development

Is Eclipse adoption peaking?

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The rise and rise of Eclipse, the open-source tools platform, is now an old and familiar story. It’s possible though that Eclipse adoption is nearing its peak. I’ve just received issue 43 of the EclipseSource newsletter, which includes the results of BZMedia’s November 2006 survey. Here are some snippets that interested me:

  • The survey is in its third year, and shows Eclipse Enterprise adoption at 54% in 2004, 62% in 2005 and now 67% (the survey says “two thirds”). Still growing, but a flattening curve.
  • The single most popular feature of Eclipse is its low cost (cited by 65% of respondents)
  • By far the primary use of Eclipse is for Java development (more than 70%), despite its support for other languages. In terms of languages, the next most used is SQL at 25% and C++ at 24% (of course these stats overlap).

Although Eclipse clearly still dominates Java development, I’ve picked up some dissatisfaction among developers I’ve talked to at conferences. Some of the complaints are the variable quality of Eclipse plug-ins, difficulty in managing plug-in dependencies especially across a team, and the view that Eclipse is less productive than favourites such as IntelliJ IDEA.

I also note that “free” is not such an unique feature these days, and that the Sun-sponsored NetBeans is winning praise for advances in its Java tools.

Don’t misunderstand me; Eclipse is not under threat. But I would not be surprised to see further levelling off of its adoption curve, or even a small decline in the next year or two.

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software development, windows

Using MSBuild from the command line

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Now that the holidays are over, here’s some hardcore tweakery for Visual Studio 2005 developers. Visual Studio 2005 includes a completely new build system based on XML build files and a standalone build utility called MSBuild. Visual Studio project files are in fact MSBuild files. Open them up in a text editor and you’ll see that they begin like this:

<Project DefaultTargets=”Build” xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003″>

You can also build entire solutions from the command line. Just open up a Visual Studio 2005 command prompt (an easy way of setting up the correct path and enviromental variables), navigate to the project directory, and type:

msbuild yourapp.sln

This is NOT dependent on Visual Studio, since MSBuild is actually part of the .NET Framework redistributable package. This means you can take your project files and build them on machines that don’t have Visual Studio installed, which can be handy for servers.

But what if you want to edit the solution build file? Curiously, solutions are defined in .sln files which are not msbuild files. When you run MSBuild against an .sln file, it actually creates a new in-memory build file for compilation, making it hard to edit.

This is where the tweak comes in. If you define the enviroment variable msbuildemitsolution, then MSBuild generates the solution build file and leaves it there for you to edit. It is given the name yourapp.sln.proj. For the next build, you can run msbuild against this file directly, thus incorporating any manual changes.

Why it works like this, who knows? Still, it’s an intriguing tip and as you can guess I didn’t discover it by accident. I got it from Sayed Ibrahim Hashim’s excellent blog. He is the author of the MSBuild/ClickOnce book Deploying .NET applications. I haven’t seen the book, but I recommend the blog if you want to know more about msbuild; the book is likely good as well.

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multimedia

The loudness wars: why many CDs sound bad

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It’s tough being an audiophile. Once upon a time, there were LPs. They could sound good, but suffered from surface noise, scratches, wear and tear, and inner groove distortion. Enter the CD. Perfect sound forever, said Philips. It fixed all the aforementioned defects.

Trouble is, to some ears there were CDs that didn’t sound as good as the LPs they replaced. Various theories were put forward as to why that might be the case. Some claimed that 16 digital bits were insufficient. Others said that early CDs were being made from LP cutting masters, which sound artifically bright to compensate for limitations of vinyl, or that engineers could not kick bad LP-based habits. The answer was to wait for improved remasters.

Twenty-five years on from the arrival of CD, and remasters are abundant. And guess what: audiophiles are now seeking out those early CDs, saying how much better they sound. Others are digging out their old LPs. It’s all to escape a recent, insidious trend in digital mastering, often called the loudness wars, but more accurately described as excessive compression.

Compression is a technique for reducing the dynamic range of a piece of music by boosting the quieter passages and perhaps limiting or clipping the louder passages. The result is that the music sounds louder when played with the same settings as less compressed music. That doesn’t mean it is actually played louder, as listeners simply turn down the volume to compensate. Unfortunately excessive compression also robs the music of its detail and makes it sound unnatural. This is the reason many of today’s hits sound worse than recordings made thirty years ago and released on LP. Along with the public’s appetite for lossy-compressed audio such as that sold by Apple’s iTunes music store, it’s enough to drive audiophiles to despair.

A picture paints a thousand words so … here’s the wave form in Audacity (an excellent freeware sound file editor) for the Who’s classic Pinball Wizard, as it appeared on a 1990 CD from the audiophile label Mobile Fidelity:

In 2004 Tommy was remastered for a deluxe edition. The image below shows the same song, same mix, but it sounds louder. That’s partly because the audio engineer has maxed out the volume available on a CD (not in itself a bad thing), but also because the sound is more compressed. The waveform is tending more towards a solid block with straight edges top and bottom. Still, this level of compression is mild as you will see in a moment.

What follows is a much worse example. It’s McFly and the band’s recent single Star Girl. I’ve noticed that highly compressed/loud mastering is common on material aimed at a young pop audience. Other examples I’m aware of are CDs from Lily Allen and from the Arctic Monkeys. The straight edges likely indicate clipping of the louder sounds as well as boosting of the quieter ones.

This doesn’t apply to next illustration, which is even more severe. It’s the song Pablo Picasso from David Bowie’s 2003 CD Reality. Even looking at these images is enough to make your ears hurt.

Let me emphasize: if you purchase an overly compressed CD, there is nothing you can do to fix it. Turning the volume up and down, or fiddling with an equalizer, will do nothing to restore the detail or fix the unnatural sound.

Why I am writing here on a subject that has been well covered elsewhere? Simply because I feel strongly about it; these over-compressed CDs are sub-standard products.

It’s unlikely that the average person will recognize the problem for what it is. The effect is more subtle; the sound is fatiguing and the CD will likely be played less frequently; fewer copies will be bought.

I’m doing my bit to publicize the issue. As awareness is raised, there must be some chance that the industry will moderate its practice and that standards will improve.

Links:

Youtube video with excellent visual and audio explanation – view this if you don’t get the point yet

Discussion of the above on Steve Hoffman’s audio forum – Hoffman is a respected mastering engineer

Wikipedia article on The Loudness War

Complaint from despairing David Bowie fan

Article: Everything louder than everything else

Article: Imperfect sound forever

Barry Diament: Declaring an end to the loudness wars – an audio engineer’s perspective

Uncategorized

System impact of Outlook 2007

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Back in November I blogged about the slow performance of Outlook 2007 (the comments are worth reading too), following up with another post about how it seemed to slow down the whole system.

I’ve now got more evidence of this:

Note that this is on Vista, which has proved substantially better for Outlook 2007 than XP. You might think there is nothing very exceptional about Outlook.exe grabbing nearly 40% of the CPU time, but consider the context:

I took this screenshot while troubleshooting another problem. Interesting point: I had not opened Outlook since the last reboot. Msconfig does not show it as a startup app either. Maybe this is some Office pre-loading trickery; or more likely it has been started by Vista’s desktop search engine. Yet this is meant not to interfere with your work.

RSS sync in Outlook is turned off.

Outlook isn’t grabbing this CPU all the time, but in regular brief bursts.

I’d like to know what it is doing.

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blogging, internet

What you’re reading

The new year beckons, so here’s a quick look back at my web stats.

I’m surprised by the most popular search phrase. Believe it or not, it’s vb.net database. I wrote a short article on getting started with a vb.net database app. This was in .NET 1.1 days. My presumption was that when you fire up VB.NET with the intention of writing a simple database application, it is not particularly obvious how to go about it. I wasn’t altogether happy with the piece; yet the number of hits suggests that this is indeed a common source of puzzlement.

Next up is dreamweaver 9. Back in June I picked up some information about the next version of Adobe’s web design tool. There’s clearly keen interest out there.

Other bit hits are .net mac (are you listening Microsoft?), htmleditor (looking for this) and wpfe, attracting more interest now that the CTP is out (here’s the interview on the subject).

The list in full:

  1. vb.net database
  2. dreamweaver 9
  3. jbuilder
  4. htmleditor
  5. .net mac
  6. private bytes
  7. tablet pc
  8. wpfe
  9. sqlite delphi
  10. msi editor

What about pages retrieved? At the top is the blog, of course, with twice as many hits to the blog home page than there are RSS retrievals. When you consider that each RSS subscriber typically creates several hits per day, that’s surprising.

Here are the other most read articles:

  1. The htmleditor phorum, now a useful archive of information on mshtml, and the c# htmleditor download page.
  2. Why does my dot net app use so much memory? – lot of people shocked to see what Task Manager is telling them 
  3. Wrestling with the Windows installer – reflecting your frustrations with MSI
  4. Notes on Sqlite – out of date now
  5. ipodphoto.php – also out of date, though I gather these older iPods are sought-after for things like the firewire port and according to some, superior audio quality
  6. wpfe.php – as mentioned above 
  7. Sqlite wrapper for Delphi
  8. Running .NET on a Mac – very out of date, but reflects the interest in this subject 
  9. VB.NET Database sample as mentioned above 
  10. Why Microsoft froze VB 6.0 – a subject of enduring interest

Other points of interest:

Browsers: 79% Windows but only 60% Internet Explorer, 14% Firefox. I reckon the figures are distorted somewhat by bots that awstats is failing to detect.

Search engines: 93% Google. 2.1% MSN, 1.6% Yahoo. This is not only an indicator of Google’s market dominance. For some reason Google tends to rank pages on this site higher than the other search engines. This makes a big difference to the hits.

How many visits? Around 1 million, from 250,000 unique visitors.

Finally, tons of spambots, mostly trying to post comments, but some just trying to get into referral stats (as far as I can tell). It is a huge and offensive problem. Very little muck actually gets posted, but some of it gets into the stats, so don’t take the figures above too seriously.

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apple, multimedia

The backward march of iPod/MP3 devices

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I was astonished to read of how the iLink dock brings digital output to iPod – at a price of $2000 or so. Nearly three years ago I purchased an iRiver H140 for around the same cost as an iPod, but with additional features including built-in digital i/o, mic input with adjustable gain, and direct recording to either MP3 or lossless WAV. I still use the device today – it’s ideal for recording interviews as well as portable music – but when it wears out it may not be easy to replace. Even today, most devices lack these audiophile features or provide them only through expensive and inconvenient add-ons. Lossless recording and digital i/o are hard to find anywhere. Even iRiver’s own range has gone backwards, with nothing comparable currently available.

I’m not sure of all reasons for this, but a big factor is Apple. The dominant iPod may be great on usability and small size, but rich features don’t fit with Apple’s minimalist philosophy. You might think that would give an opportunity to other vendors, but in many cases they seem content to follow rather than innovate.

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apple, drm, itunes, multimedia, windows

The best and worst of Vista multimedia

A friend called on Christmas day. She was away from home and had forgotten to set the video to record a couple of TV programmes. We’re testing Vista media center, so it was a matter of going to Vista’s TV guide, scrolling to the programmes she wanted, and selecting Record. What about the transfer to DVD? Next day, I selected Recorded TV, and scrolled through the recordings, each of which has a preview image. When I found the right one, I clicked on it and noticed that Burn CD/DVD was one of the menu choices. So I stuck a blank DVD -R in the drive, clicked Burn CD/DVD, and a while later (quite a long while) it was done. Tested the DVD in a standalone DVD player and it worked fine. I don’t miss VHS one bit.

Now have a read of Peter Gutmann’s Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. Gutmann is a security specialist who describes himself as a professional paranoid, which perhaps explains the tone of the piece – he calls Vista’s content protection a “suicide note”. I doubt he is correct in all his conclusions, but nevertheless it shines a fascinating spotlight on this aspect of Windows Vista.

It has always been possible to make unlicensed copies of media such as music and film, but in the pre-digital world it was inconvenient and always involved some loss of quality. Personal computers changed all that, particularly when combined with the cheap storage which we now have in abundance. This is bad news for industries that depend on selling this content rather than giving it away. Hence Vista tries to put media back into its uncopyable box, so that once again you have to purchase the official item.

A single pinprick is enough to burst a balloon, no matter how airtight the rest of it is. Similarly, to protect media you have to protect every link in the chain, from digital source to final output. Vista calls this the Protected Media Path; read the MSDN article here. The system is intricate and complex, and as Gutmann notes there are undesirable implications. The Protected Environment (PE) relies on “trusted components” such as drivers, codecs and content processors. Each component must therefore be signed by Microsoft after a verification process. But what if a bug or design flaw has slipped through, allowing content to be pirated (a pinprick)? Then the component can be “revoked”, which means some hardware or feature in your system will no longer work properly. Content publishers can even specify that their content will not play if a component known to be unsafe is present, by checking against a revocation list.

Ideally, a revoked component will be replaced by an automatically downloaded update. However, Microsoft’s document on the subject acknowledges that this may not always be the case:

In rare cases, an updated version of the component may not be available, for example, the company that implemented the component has gone out of business. If the component is not essential, the PE can work around the issue by not loading the component. If the component is essential, the application is provided with a URL that directs the user to a Web page that has information on the issue.

That might mean no more protected content for you unless you actually replaced the hardware with something else for which trusted components exist. I presume however that you would still be able to play unprotected content. Still, this would be a severe outcome if, for example, you had a large collection of HD-DVD movies that you played on the system.

It is understandable if hardware vendors such as ATI are unenthusiastic about all this. They have to do the work of creating suitable hardware and drivers, but the beneficiaries are the owners of the protected content.

Several obvious questions come to mind:

  • Will this really work? Such a complex system must be vulnerable to the efforts of determined hackers, as other DRM schemes have been in the past.
  • When playing protected content, what are the performance implications?
  • How about when playing unprotected content ? What, if any, is the performance impact of all this content protection then? Perhaps there is none. It strikes me though that there could be unwanted side-effects.

The existence of this DRM edifice also impacts all of us as consumers. When we purchase content, we’d like to be able to play it on as many devices as possible: home stereo, wireless streaming around the house, computers, portable devices. Technology is at last enabling this freedom, but now technology is also taking it away.

I’ll come back to where I started. Whether Vista content protection stands or falls will depend on the user experience. If it is good, as with my DVD burning from media center, then consumers will forgive a lot, to the frustration of anti-DRM advocates. That’s why Apple gets away with the iTunes store/iPod lock-in. If it is bad, this will damage Vista and Microsoft.

Update

Interesting thread here on audio processing in Vista. Here’s what Amir Majidimehr, digital media VP at Microsoft, has to say about DRM in Vista audio (and referring specifically to Gutmann’s piece):

The writer unfortunately, is misinformed about the Vista content protection capabilities. Yes, it is true that Vista has a substantially upgraded *infrastructure* for content protection. However, its usage is optional and no application is forced to use it. To wit, current HD DVD/BD players do not use any of it and as such, are only subject to provisions of copy protection for those formats (namely, AACS). Ditto for any third-party application that you may run on Vista. As long as they don’t call the new facilities, they run as they did always.

So for all practial purposes, Vista and XP behave the same wrt to playback of digital media.

Vista does allow new applications to provide a new level of robustness against attacks should they wish to provide this level of content protection. That may enable them to get access to content that would not be available otherwise (think HD downloads near Theater release window). As this feature required core operating system changes, we incorporated them into Vista. As with all new facilities, it may be years before they are taken advantage of.

That’s reassuring with respect to my third question above.