As Kjetil put it, my new PC at work puts me way ahead of the curve. I got a AMD 64 bit Dual-Core machine, with 2 GB of RAM and 2×250 GB RAID-0. I figured XP Professional 64 bit would be the right OS to run.

There is not a lot of software availabel for 64 bit Windows. Luckily, it runs 32 bit legacy applications nicely, so it’s okay to mix and match. Still, there’s some trouble.

The first problem came after I installed Thunderbird. I installed the official 32 bit release, because the 64 bit releases struck me as pretty experimental. When I fired it up, it almost immediately reported “connection timed out connecting to server” on my IMAP account. Turns out, there’s a known bug in Thunderbird with dual core machines: The timing code uses the QueryPerformanceCounter() fucntion. It can be fixed by assigning a processor affinity to the program, so it only runs on one of the two cores. You can do this either manually from the taskmanager, or once and for all using a progam called imagecfg.exe (goolge for it if you need it).

The next issue was more serious: There are no 64 bit versions of TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN. The reason that’s serious is that they are explorer shell extensions, and to extend the 64 bit Windows Explorer, your program has to be a 64 bit application. There’s a 32 bit version of Explorer for those cases, but I was hoping to avoid that kind of switching around. I mean, I’ll have the 64 bit Explorer open by default, so CVS will be cumbersome. Let’s hope they get on the case soon.

The third issue is compilers. We use VS2003 to make Anarchy Onlie, and while we’re not switching AO to 64 bit, I really want to be able to compile my own 64 bit apps. There’s no 64 bit compiler with VS2003, though (I hear that VS2005 has one), so I’m not sure where to get one from. Intel has one, but I’ve found it cumbersome to use. Which reminds me, I have to look into 64 bit cygwin. I guess that’s not ready yet.

But man, this thing is nice.

Last friday I got reports that on Windows 98, my new patches for the longest journey don’t load their savegames. Somehow, the game didn’t seem to find them. I had one player send me his saves, and verified that they were healthy, so it was definitely the loading.

I found the bug this morning: Windows 98 doesn’t like doubel backslashes in a filename. So if I write C:\TLJ\\Save1, that won’t work, because it’s not the same as C:\TLJ\Save1, and although all later versions of windows seem to just collapse multiple backslashes if they aren’t at the beginning of a pathname, Win98 doesn’t. So yes, I’m guilty of adding that bug, and I feel slightly stupid for that, but not too stupid.

The interesting part about this was that it was nigh impossible to find a Windows 98 machine in the house. Noone has that stuff anymore, and frankly, I’d feel bad about connecting it to the network. So I installed MS Virtual PC, and in the Virtual PC I installed Windows 98. And in that Windows 98 I installed the longest journey for testing, and then Visual Studio and everything else I needed for debugging.

And I did all that through remote desktop, because I was sitting at home. Everything worked like a charm. That virtual machine stuff is pure magic every time I play with it, and so is remote desktop. Fun!

I made some cosmetic changes to the site. Most importantly, I hae a working blogroll now (see the “Blinkenlights” section on the right). Much better than the hand-kept linklist I had before, and easier to update, too.

I was Geocaching in Budapest last week, and I sorely missed a good overview map that showed me nearby caches. My GPS doesn’t have a map, you see, and I’m used to the good overview from www.sjohagen.net.

So I went ahead and built me a little Google mapping web application. You type in the coordinates, it shows you a map of the area with the 25 first caches as clickable links. So say I’ll be in London next week, all I need to do is find the coordinates of my Hotel, put them in, and voila, I get a map.

Try it for yourself here, but please don’t punish the server too much, it’s on a very old machine.

TODO:

• Make it faster
• Make it use proper icons for different cache types
• Let me hide the ones I’ve already found
• Show more than 25 caches

“Microsoft last updated its web browser in August 2001 – when cellphones still had monochrome screens and Ken Lay was in charge of the invicible Enron business empire.”

Sometimes I love The Register.

I want a 64 bit OS to play with. Trouble is, I have no 64 bit CPU.

But since bochs now apparently emulates AMD64 CPUs, shouldn’t I be able to run e.g. the 64 bit version of ubuntu on it, while running on my old 32 bit hardware? It seems to me that that’s possible, but I can’t find a whole lot of documentation on it.

A simple HOWTO would be real nice 🙁