If you still have Visual Studio 2003, the only way to build 64 bit applications for Windows seems to be the Platform SDK. This, however, is downward compatible with Visual Studio 6. And most of us probably remember what that means: The STL in there is shite. It’s an implementation from back in 1995. A lot of projects simply don’t support it and recommend you use STLport instead.

OMG, should I really have to install that thing again?

Since my earlier troubles, things have progressed rather nicely. I managed to install Visual Studio 2003 on the x64 machine, and a 64 bit compiler that came with the Platform SDK. I could have compiled my first 64 bit executable today, but I need to find out if any of the libraries I use are ported. I’ll need boost, libxml2, iconv, lua and luabind. Yeah, fat chance.

OpenOffice is still being difficult. Writer is the only part I can make work, and it doesn’t seem to be the dual-coreness of the machine that’s the problem – setting affinity to only one CPU made no difference.

Something positive: Miranda IM works nicely (as a 32 bit app), there is a 64 bit Java VM and 64 bit Python from ActiveState.

What this platform really needs though is a few machines in the Sourceforge compile farm and 64 bit MinGW.

I had the damndest time figuring out why my ICQ avatar was not showing up for other people. Since it isn’t obvious, I’ll post it here, someone else might find it useful:

• make sure your avatar image is less than 4 KB.
• make sure it is no bigger than 64×64 pixels.

ICQ seems to take both these restrictions serious, and Miranda doesn’t give a hoot. Less than 4 KB means that JPEG is most likely the format you’ll want to use unless you have a simple drawing for an avatar.

Speaking of Miranda: I tried out some other messengers lately, and they all fall short on one of my basic requirements:

• Full keyboard control (open contacts, open message, select contact all without mouse)
• Avatar support
• Clean look (Win2K classic, preferably)
• Support for Jabber, ICQ and MSN
• Compact, no-nonsense contact list

Neither Trillian nor Gaim were satisfactory. Gaim isn’t so bad, but I hate their UI controls, and the contact list needs to much space per entry. Trillian completely lacks keyboard controls, has no support for Gaim and I didn’t think I’d have to include “searchable history” in my list of requirements, but the fact that it hasn’t got one taught me to expect nothing and everything. Of course, if I chose to pay, I’d get the latter two, but still no keyboard shortcuts.