Installing Ati Radeon X1400 Drivers on Windows8

I really had a hard time trying to get the right drivers for Windows 8. Installing the old drivers from my previous post on this topic failed. I tried various things like modding old drivers. http://www.hardwareheaven.com/modtool.php Changing the inf files to make it think that it is a supported driver.. didnt work either.. After a lot of looking I found a Windows 7 driver that works perfectly with Windows 8 as well. Here is the link the download with instructions.... Working Windows 8 Drivers for ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 I hope this helps save time for others who are trying to get their Windows 8 PC running on X1400 Radeon Graphics Card.

Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview Experience

I was very excited to see the keynote from the Build Conference.
I downloaded the developer preview and planned to install it on my old Dell Inspiron E1505 Laptop.


Please find the download information for the ISO here
http://www.redmondpie.com/download-windows-8-developer-preview-iso-64-bit-32-bit-now/


Windows 8 Developer Preview: Install

The install Actually went quite smoothly. The installer UI was similar to what was shipped with windows Vista and Windows 7.
Very few questions asked during the installation.
The system auto restarted smoothly no issues here either.

RATING 4/5

Windows 8 Developer Preview: Setup
First I had to setup the network ... similar to chromeos and android setups...
After restart the setup phase required me to login with a LiveID. Although I had a LiveID, i wanted to see the exprience of using a new one.

After going through 4 screens, I finally had a new LiveID linked to my yahoo mail.

This is where it went downhill....
After the setup Windows 8 tried to log me in and failed as my LiveID is not verified.

This required me to login to yahoo and YAHOO DOES NOT SUPPORT IE 10.
After the verification which happened on the MetroUI version of IE, There wasnt an intuitive way for me to go back to the previous application.

Since my laptop was not touch enabled the ALT-TAB didnt work as expected.
Windows button switched between the LRU app and METRO home.

Finally after logging in again. I was in...

It was all Metro UI goodness except it was using software rendering.
Slow and lagging.

There was no warning or message to find the right drivers or .......
Very very frustrating first tiem use experience.

I thought they would have done better with Win8.
Hardware and drivers are the hardest part of installing or upgrading to new OS but windows with its OEM partnerships doesnt find fresh installs to be a major use case and thus leaves a sucky experience for drivers installation.


Rating 1/5


Windows 8 Developer Preview: Metro UI

The new METRO UI is a refreshing change.
It is a tough problem to move new users to a completely new interface.
Microsoft has gone with a dual stack approach. Pressing windows key switches between the two interfaces.

They need to work on this a little bit more... thw switching is easy but does have a jarring experience....

Applications on Metro UI
Internet Explorer : The "chromeless" browsing experience again was interesting but has its share of flaws. Creating new tabs or even closing the application was not a clear user experience...

I had trouble moving between pages and also closing the app....
It isnt intuitive and can get frustrating for first time users...
Needs a little bit more thinking....

Rating 3/5

The connected app framework
This framework is interesting and similar to intents on Android platform...
This is non existent on IOS and am sure Apple is working hard to add this...
It worked like is expected...

Rating 4/5


Please watch this space for blog on my future experience on windows 8..

Solved : UrlRewrite.xml validation issue within xml

I have run into this issue with UrlRewrite
What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Validate the 3.2 urlrewrite.xml using the doctype ' "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite3.2.dtd">' (in eclipse for me)



Solution::

THe tucker.org server seems to have a rewrite rule to redirect all calls without www to the home page
Simple change the doctype header to the following.

This is the right solution rather than a lot of hacks.


DOCTYPE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 3.2//EN" "http://www.tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite3.2.dtd

Unable to see windows shares in ubuntu / linux

Often people end up trying to look for samba in search terms in order to resolve an issue with linux unable to find windows shared folders on the network.

The answers in not samba but wins.
Wins allows you to resolves windows domain names ....

wins is not enabled as a host resolution mechanism in /etc/nsswitch.conf;

Step 1: install wins
sudo apt-get install winbind


Step 2: Enasble wins in nsswitch.conf and ensure the hosts you are adding wins (The order matters depending on the server & network setup ).
This is an example of what it might look like
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns


Step 3: Restart the network service
sudo service networking restart


Thats all there is to it....

Social Engineering Beware

Today I got a call from an unknown number
361-597-301

The IVR system said, that they have tried contacting me multiple time by mail.
It also said that they will close the account if I donot respond back.

Naturally I pressed 1 on the keypad to figure out what was wrong.
A guy picked and asked about my visa card details.
I asked which bank he was calling from and he hung up.

I tried calling back and it was an invalid number.

Imagine had I not asked the number he could have easily even tried to ask my credit card number for any of the popular banks and I probably would have complied.


Despite knowing that social engineering calls are growing in number, I almost fell for it.

My advice :- if you have not initiated the call to a bank yourself, do your best to verify that it is an agent at the bank.
You could even try telling him the wrong account number/ pin at first to verify if he is at the system.


All in all I am writing this post for you guys to read and also for google to crawl and spread the news to anyone else interested...

Java Pass By Reference or Value and the state of our programming cumminities

I was reading an article by a very frustrated programmer and I have to say I feel the frustration of the author.

The question that irked him was a discussion group posting if java is a pass by value or by reference language.
his posting on the serverside.com

I have to side with the author on the technical aspects of this. Java is indeed pass by value but the outcome of passing an object is indirectly allowing people to see it as pass by reference. In my last few years of working I have come across many such articles that had made me think that most Computer Science Engineers have become mere programmers and dont have end to end understanding of the products they are building.

There were the days back then when an engineer would not be satisfied with just writing a program but to understand how the program gets interpreted by the compiler, then the operating system calls involved that need to be made and then what happens on the driver to eventually print the output on screen.

This thought process has halped us make good choice on design and reducing programmer effort and coding just becomes the last thing that comes to mind.

The days of now are of abstraction :- write one line of code and run a command to build an executable or a package deployable to the Application Server. These abstraction have taken out the deep end to end understanding that engineers needs to have when designing real world applications..

People are more used to using the code completion functionality of IDE's without even reading the documentation. The pressure of producing a working program quickly has led to many engineers become programmers.

I rarely see real engineers anymore and cherish the few real discussions I have with them............................... :-(

Tis a sad but true state of our programming world.


(It seems more likely that a C++ programmer with network programming understands more e2e working of a web-application than a good percentage of web-developers)