Rubenerd

So you want to get sound working in your Windows NT 4.0 VirtualBox virtual machine to relieve the glory days of your electronic youth, or some other reason you're too embarrased to discuss? Don't we all.

Caveats, mmm, must be Russian for bug larvae

Before we go any further, two quick points.

Unlike newer operating systems, Windows NT 4.0 is accorded VirtualBox additions that don't bother to set up the sound system. How dreadfully inconsiderate. Fortunately, after you've installed Service Pack 6 and the VirtualBox additions (in that order), it only takes a few minor adjustments to get sound.

The other point is, these instructions work and are current as of VirtualBox 3.2.10, build r66523. That's very close to a satanic number, just saying. I've been using NT 4 in VirtualBox for many years and the software has a habit of requiring different sound settings and drivers with subsequent releases.

The procedure

1. Click your Windows NT 4.0 VM and hit Settings. Under the Audio tab, change the Audio Controller to SoundBlaster 16.

2. Start the VM (always helps). Navigate to Start → Settings → Control Panel and choose Multimedia. Under the Devices tab, click Add….

3. Choose Create Labs Sound Blaster 1.X, Pro, 16 and hit OK. You’ll need to specify the location of your Windows NT 4 installation files. I installed mine from CD, so I mounted the installation CD at this point, then hit OK

4. Leave the I/O Address at "220" and click Continue, then under MPU401 I/O Address, change the value from "330" to "Disable" and hit OK.

5. If you’ve mounted the installation CD, unmount it now otherwise when you restart it’ll boot into that instead of your VM!

6. Hit Restart Now. Surprisingly for a Redmond product, this is an example of a voluntary restart.

Now go grab yourself a 2.x series version of Winamp from OldVersions.com and relive the old days!

Link arms, don’t make them

• VirtualBox
• Microsoft Downloads for Windows NT
• Winamp 2.95 from OldVersions

Dear Optus,

If you're not going to deliver all my phone messages to their intended recipients, whether it be from any of my current handsets, I expect to be compensated with a lower monthy rate. This seems fair.

Sincerely,
Ruben

PS: SingTel, please whip your boy into shape. And get him to stop with the "unlimited" advertising too, you might get into trouble for that with a four letter acronym.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of those gloriously simple squares of coloured paper and adhesive that were a godsend to people like my father (who's probably bought and used more of them than anyone else) and the bane of people like me who constantly have to pluck discarded ones from the soles of my shoes like Paul Simon diamonds, I created the above screenshot and this post.

Anyone remember these?

I've used more than my share of these obnixous little squares, but the thing I remember the most about them was their electronic manifestations, the first being Post-It Software Notes. I can still remember when my father triumphantly brought home a bright yellow floppy disk one fateful afternoon in the 90s for our Windows 9x desktop. I hadn't seen him that excited about anything in a long time before or since. I mean, real, authorised, Post-It Note brand notes for your computer desktop, it was genius!

As of today, you can still download the classic "lite" version of Post-It Software Notes, albeit through a third party in the form of Tucows. If I had a Windows machine handy, I'd give it a shot ;). REMEMBER TUCOWS? I remember Tucows!!!

I wonder if that yellow disk my dad brought home was made by 3M?

The Mac is the Smack

Of course classic Mac users didn't need a third party utility to fill their screens with clutter… for one thing they could cover their monitors with real pieces of paper and achieve the same effect. They could also elect to use Stickies, a small application that also drew coloured boxes on the screen for people to type things in. I remember creating Stickies simply for the sake of creating Stickies on my first iMac DV back in 2000.

What's cool is even the latest versions of Mac OS X have modern cocoa implementations of Stickies in the form of Stickies.app, and slightly more realistic versions in the Dashboard. At least, I think they do, I haven't used the Dashboard since Tiger, except for this afternoon to generate this screenshot:

You can’t spell conclusion without Bird is The Word

Post-It Notes are the classic example of that ever-so-rare collision between an elegant and easy to understand invention and the fulfilling of a need in the marketplace. When I was a kid I once made a computer mouse with a pen taped on the top so you'd need one less thing on your table, because the mouse had a built in pen! Obviously very elegant, but it didn't satisfy that market demand for… wait it wasn't elegant either, it was butt ugly and fell apart instantly. Good thing I didn't get into engineering.

In terms of their electronic brethren, I do remember thinking at the time how deliciously silly the whole concept of taking these notes and making electronic versions of them was, especially when graphical computer interfaces are so malleable and able to store notes in far more efficient and easy to use ways.

In any case, happy birthday my friends, may you continue to coat office surfaces the world over for many years to come ^___^.

Remember all that obsessive hubub and media speculation regarding Microsoft's potential awkward marriage to Adobe? It seems their CEO has (or rather had) other ideas. Warning, two digressions in this post.

"Adobe’s growth prospects are so great that our focus is on seizing these opportunities as an independent company," Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen was quoted as saying by daily Financial Times Deutschland on Monday.

So what did the two heavyweights have to meet up about? If this Reuters report is to be believed… they were discussing software compatibility as so many people from tech companies regularly do.

Ship, meet people jumping

There was a bit of a pun there. People who eat lots of meat are probably very heavy. But I digress. Did the Adobe CEO just admit that the media worked itself up into a gigantic frenzy for nothing? How could anyone EVER assume the tech media would be capable of such a thing?! It boggles the mind! Of course this could also just be an elaborate smokescreen, which would make more sense owing to the fact Adobe Premiere may be able to be used to generate such effects. I'm more inclined to believe the former for now.

While the rest of the tech community was foaming at the mouth at the idea of Midobe or Adobesoft or some other silly combination of words (like Ruben and Nerd, how patently ridiculous is that?), I never thought it made much sense. They have largely different portfolios of software, but enough overlap to cause problems. Microsoft has far too much pride to discontinue software like Silverlight despite the fact nobody in the real world uses or cares about it, and it would make sense for them to do so in place of Flash.

As an aside, this screenshot of Patented FreeBSD Flash Fail was taken around Christmas 2007 for this post about Adobe Air. I've never really watched any Type-Moon anime but I really like their art style. This was also before KDE 4 came out and broke my heart. KDE 3 was epic. But I digress, again.

Everybody is entitled to my opinion

At least all this Microsoft and Adobe whatnot is just my opinion, but then again I don't really use either of their companies products other than Air (for TweetDeck) and Visio. I also didn't think it made sense to discontinue PageMaker either, or to have Adobe buy Macromedia. Heck I'm just skeptical about mergers full stop, the only super successful one I can think of off the top of my head was Apple buying NeXT, and that only worked because the nimbler and infinitely more talented NeXT team took the reigns.

HP, Microsoft, Adobe… I'd bet a gigantic sushi train dinner they'd never let a smaller company dictate terms to them, to say nothing of being essentially run by the companies they buy. Can you imagine Steve Ballmer giving up the top job for Shantanu Narayen? Then again given Microsoft's decade long stagnant stock price, maybe its time for a change anyway.

Aside from everything else, Microsoft Photoshop is simply a terrifying thought.

Taken straight from the camera without any editing. Usually the sky around here fills with fairly uniform clouds, but this morning there were so many layers with light piercing the thinner bands, the detail and colours were amazing. Earlwood, inner west Sydney. Full sized image on Flickr.

I'm tempted to start quoting a Paul Simon song… maybe I'll just leave it at that :).

My Saturday is made… Slashdot is quoting today one of my favourite poets and purveyors of delightful nonsense! My favourite of his is still "The Lord in His wisdom made the fly, and then he forgot to tell us why."

A small but diehard portion of the intertubes are all abuzz about the latest Windows Phone 7 handsets and their associated operating system of which I just mentioned. If they're abuzz, this would imply they have their phones on silent.

I don't often accord Microsoft's efforts with anything more than abject disdain or complete apathy, but in this case I'm impressed they didn't release another me-too device. As Blackberry and Android scramble to copy anything and everything from the iPhone, in this case at least Microsoft's GUI desiners took a step back and tried to differentiate their platform with an entirely new interface and working paradigm.

When I was a kid, I thought paradigm was pronounced para-digm, not para-dime. English really is a nonsensical language.

But I digress. Like a boss

Microsoft faces several problems with their new operating system.

• Apple (and to a far less extent Google) have captured the app market for mobile devices. Perhaps this was part of Microsoft’s logic behind the new interface that emphasises the OS rather than individual applications. I don’t like it when people refer to it as "data centric"… anytime you use an application that modifies stuff you’re changing data.

• Aside from the diehard fans who thought having a squirt feature on a brown music player was amazing, Microsoft is awfully uncool. Coolness isn’t a consideration when I buy Apple gear, but for some people it is.

• WM7 doesn’t appeal to open source people the way Android does (slightly disingenuously, I’d add), nor does it offer the vertically integrated model Apple does. Android is also free to licence, and arguably does everything WM7 does and then some. At this stage, I’m really not sure who they’re targeting.

• Kin. Sidekick. Zune. Recent history isn’t on their side.

• It took Microsoft years to realise what some consider a true contender to the iTelephone; their painfully slow reaction time exposed their weaknesses in this area. This will only become more apparent when newer iOS and Android devices are released and Microsoft is left scrambling. At least with Android the time it takes them to copy the iPhone is mere months.

Coffee break!

• Android has a really cute mascot, and Apple has their invincible branding. Perhaps Microsoft needs to recruit Madobe Nanami to help them with WM7 too.

• Developers who want to write applications for iOS and Android have access to many different classes of devices, currently Windows Phone 7 software would be limited to the namesake of their new platform: phones. It seems short sighted for Microsoft to ignore anything other than phones, such as media players and tablets for their new OS, unless they really intend to ship Windows 7 tablets which I’m sure would be just as horrifying as their previous iterations

• Microsoft wants desperately to avoid the developer mess Android is in and that Apple is able to avoid by forcing manufacturers to adhere to specific software and hardware guidelines and minimum specifications. Problem is, hardware makers want desperately to differentiate their products so consumers will purchase their generic hardware instead of someone else’s. To me, its unclear how well this will play out.

• People like to think in pairs. Windows and Mac OS X. iPhone and Android. They’re generally unkind to the third kid, or pay it no attention. Heck, I want one of those new Palm Pre phones that HP has rolled out, but I know I’m in the minority!

• Does it have copy and paste? Or will we need another Paul Thurrott backflip and Chris Gran pointing it out?

The Conclusion is the Word. That didn’t even rhyme

We really need more competition in the mobile phone space. I absolutely adored my Nokia E61i and I admit I do like Symbian, but they're basically dead in the water. HP doesn't seem terribly interested in Palm, at least for now. Android is interesting, but not revolutionary. I doubt Windows Phone 7 will be any kind of success, but I'd like at least for other companies like Google and Apple to feel threatened a little.

Competition is good for consumers.

Responding to my sickness of these fonts in reverse order:
YES, YES, YES, YES, NO HOW COULD YOU!?

Of course I didn't notice this until this morning, but yesterday was the United Nations' World Statistics Day!

Say what?

The celebration of the World Statistics Day will acknowledge the service provided by the global statistical system at national and international level, and hope to help strengthen the awareness and trust of the public in official statistics. It serves as an advocacy tool to further support the work of statisticians across different settings, cultures, and domains.

I'll admit right up front that while mathematics is not one of my strong suits (owing to the fact its hard to make an affordable suit out of carbon fibre), I love statistics and maps. I used to read atlases as a kid, and I've always loved looking at graphs. I'm weird.

Anyway this event served to highlight that the UN has a UN Data website with statistics from countries around the world, as opposed to countries from the same place. Remarkably, there are very few of those places around. Unfortunately the page is served up from Active Server Pages which is fairly disappointing, I would think a world body agency thingy would be using something more… open? There's a joke there about the functioning and effectiveness of the UN somewhere, but I can't think of one right now.

"Do you kids want to be like the real UN?"

Unfortunately for me, while Australia has a fairly well fleshed out article, Singapore's seems not to exist, ditto for Malaysia. The Republic of China doesn't either, but for other reasons.

I celebrated World Statistics Day by wearing a purple scarf.

Whole Wheat Radio and its mission of providing a grassroots, all-volunteer, donation supported website and webcast that competently and without mainstream advertising supports independent musicians and their craft is currently offline.

Having just checked this morning, the Whole Wheat Radio webcast and wiki are offline, with a message from its founder Jim Kloss. For those not familiar with the site this post might not make much sense, if I had more time I'd delve into what WWR is all about, for now consider this an "in" thing.

So here’s what happened, I think

I've largely avoided Facebook for the last year or so because to me the site represents all that is wrong with my generation (The Zuck) and it depresses me, but I logged into it again this morning to find out what was going on.

I'm not entirely sure how all this went down, but as I understand from his explanation on the site, some listeners of the station formed a seperate Facebook group for wheatheads to converse that was outside the channel Jim had set up for the site. As a result, conversations and collaboration were occuring outside the official site which, as a collaborative wiki, has a dramatic effect on the effectiveness of the platform. Whole Wheat Radio only works if there are people collaborating and helping out on the site itself, and; to be blunt; a seperate group leeches off this.

From a personal perspective, I had no idea about this new group but, as Jim so rightly observes, I was added to it automatically. Having visited it, I noticed a link to "Leave the group" despite never agreeing to join it. If this is an issue with Facebook, there are grave ramifications. (UPDATE: Apparently it is, and I missed it. What I get for not being in the loop with the tech media for the last month).

Thinking out loud

I've always so deeply appreciated all the work and effort Jim has put into maintaining such an open, advertisement free and honest site over the years when many others in his position would have long ago sold out. It takes conviction and a well placed moral compass to do this.

As a result, I felt it was my obligation… no scratch that, it implies I was forced to… I felt compelled to help out. Sometimes I didn't agree with Jim's approach to the site, for example I was nervous when he deeply integrated Facebook and essentially began hosting discussions with them instead of on the local wiki; but I figured he had solid reasons for doing so, and I respected all the work he put into it that I had no problem whatsoever accomodating.

If you're reading this Jim, I deeply hope that whatever has happened and wherever your life is taking you right now, I hope you figure things out and are comfortable again soon. Above all else, I respect your position and admire your convictions. A lesser person would have let this (and other issues over the years) slide, taking the integrity and honesty of the site down with them.

manhug

That reminds me!

I was going to delete my current Facebook account and start fresh. All my previous records would still be there forever, but at least with a new account with a fake name (I'm think Ruben GrilledCheeseSandwich or something) then my contributions to their hive mind would be less valuable from now on. Plus, I'll only be adding friends like Jim to it instead of everyone I've ever met. More on that later.