Dirk.Net

And here’s another hack to enable the GPS settings applet on Windows Mobile 5. I’m still using the PHM registry editor to edit the registry, but this classic program is not really working well on Windows Mobile 5. There might be better Compact Framework based tools today, such as this one. Anyway, it’s ironic that Microsoft just delivered serial port programmability with the Compact Framework 2.0 (System.IO.Ports namespace), and at the same time provided the serial-port-less GPSID programming interface of the gpsapi.dll, luring developers from the more generic serial GPS interfaces towards easy-to-use vendor lock-in, and dealing Windows Mobile 2003 another blow.

Highly interesting hacks to install and run WPF/E and even Silverlight on the best MS OS ever, Windows 2000. Rock on, Win2K!

When installing Spamfighter’s web version (downloaded file name spamfighter_web.exe) you may receive the “Error applying transforms. Verify that the specified transform paths are valid.” error on some systems. Before delving deep into the registry to fix dead *.mst references (which might or might not work), it might be quicker to download the full version instead of the web installer. Also check out the Spamfighter support pages. Hope it helps.

An expert exposition of Vista DRM (Digital Rights Management) examines not only the intrusive spyware Microsoft has the right to install on your Vista system, it also hints at the perfidious plan MS might be hatching to control the pipeline for all kinds of content including software and applications. Very scary indeed!
Not only does Vista introduce few new features as many announced “improvements” had to be abandoned for time concerns and MS incompetence, it also drains your Notebook battery and will require a system update for most users to make use of the shiny new features.
While user’s have hardly any benefits besides eye-candy, Microsoft benefits a great deal, especially in the areas of piracy protection and digital rights management. The latter prescribe a rigorous process of driver evaluation and certificate checking to ensure that no digital content is ever present on a computer system in unencrypted form. These techniques can later be expanded to other kinds of content such as music, DVD movies, and eventually application software. Your purchased software will only run if Microsoft says it’s ok.
Vista is like a behemoth not only for users but also for developers. The learning curve has been collapsing over many with of them with .NET and Visual Studio in three iterations, all kinds of XML techniques and countless technology offerings and server components introduced over the last fiver years. And now Win32 is thrown out in favour of .NET 3.0 and WCF, WWF and WPF introducing a brand new programming paradigm. No wonder there is a groundswell of defection from the Microsoft platform (.NET) to open source software and especially Ruby on Rails for web development. Even Microsoft guru Mike Gunderloy has left to get himself a fresh cup. 

Having bought a new SD card for my Pocket PC I discovered it came pre-formatted with the FAT (FAT 16) file system of yore. This file system has a volume size limit of 2 GB and some drawback regarding cluster size and fragmetation. So wouldn’t it be preferable to use the newer FAT 32 file system? It turns out that due to technical reasons detailed here classic FAT is actually better and delivers better performance in most cases. It seems like the old dog still has some bark in him.