Tsukasa no Hibi

More nice game-related (and unrelated) pictures on the artist’s website 🙂 .

Today I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 RC1. Yes, I know it is supposed to be a testversion but hey, I simply cannot resist that many new cool features.

WordPress finally has support for galleries and YouTube goodness right from the bat. The new Dashboard looks awesome (yay, no more Tiger Administration!) and is a real step forward. The only thing I’m a little sad about is the fact that OpenID auth doesn’t work anymore (plugin simply didn’t make it through the conversion, Jim!).

Take a look at the great new features that are coming up and please look amazed. May be the right time for Adobe to finally get their team together for a version of Air Linux. That’d be awesome because the new WordPress just screams for a blogging client in Air, tailored especially for WP 🙂 .

Zur Abwechslung mal wieder ein Post mit Niveau 😀 .

With all these buyouts, account changings and whatnot I’m seriously starting to go nuts I guess.

Wanted to login into my flickr account today and had to probe for the correct combination of OpenID, Yahoo id, Live! pass and Ene Mene Miste usernames/passwords. Gosh, I wish more applications would be OpenID compatible.

That… or just stop buying/selling all your webservices 🙂 .

A while ago something terrible happened to me: My beloved old keyboard reached it’s critical mass and gave up. A catastrophe for me, I always considered that keyboard as "just right" for me. Sure, the insides were corroded after all these years, the keys had lost their printing and you wouldn’t want to look into the thing because it was yuck… but it was "just right".

So I had to get a new keyboard. And not just any keyboard would do. I don’t fancy things like displays or buttloads of extra keys on my keyboard, for a very simple reason: First of all, they probably don’t work out of the box in Linux and even more important — I simply don’t use shit like that.

I spent some time doing research and came up with my two choices:

• Cherry eVolution STREAM
• Cherry G80-3000

Let’s take a look at each of the keyboards. You can find photos of the devices on my flickr account.

The Cherry eVolution STREAM is a very flat, notebook-like keyboard. It features 6 extra hotkeys (of which none work in Linux out-of-the-box). It isn’t as flat as Apple’s grotesque creation but way smaller than the G80-3000. Included is a PS/2 adapter so you can use your brand new USB keyboard on the good ol’ PS/2 port as well. Price was about 20 Euro.

Typing on the eVolution STREAM is a breeze for people who’re used to notebook keyboards. Personally I find it quite irritating that the Windows key is so big and the spacebar so small, but I’m probably just nitpicking. Really nasty and a showstopper is the fact that some keys start acting funny when you pour dirt and other stuff (i.e. salt) onto them, the keys get stuck, it’s a pain.

The keys have a hard, greasy feedback just as I’d expect it from something that resembles a notebook keyboard.

The Cherry G80-3000 is a monster. I decided to get it because it is the base for Das Keyboard II, a gadget I admire a lot but I’m too much of cheapskate to get it. I said it is a monster. If you take a look at the photos I uploaded you may get an idea of what dimensions this keyboard has. It is less of the width but more the height that make it so nice; the keyboard resembles the old IBM ones I always enjoyed typing on.

The G80-3000 does not have any fancy extra keys. Just as the eVolution STREAM it is a USB device and comes with a PS/2 adapter. Price hits the 50 Euro mark, so it is definetively in another league than the eVolution STREAM.

The special thing about this keyboard is that it uses gold-plated mechanical switches instead of your run-of-the-mill rubber plate thingy. Because of that the device is loud. Yes, a keyboard that is loud. If you enjoy placing baseball cards onto your bike, you’ll just love how loud it is. The tactile feedback from this keyboard is just great. The keys are "just right". It is hard to explain but if you’ve ever had the chance of typing on a IBM keyboard you’ll know what I mean.

The design and key layout is old-goes-well, no fancy experiments here. It is definetively for the better, why change something that works fine. It is virtually impossible to make the keys not work.

So, what kind of review is this? No comparison? Only a brief overview? Good lord, yes.

What can I say? I like both keyboards but I like the G80-3000 better. Sure, it costs more than twice as much as the eVolution STREAM but it pays: The STREAM feels a little cheapo, the keys won’t last for more than 4 years if you work with it extensively. The G80 on the other hand will last for about 10 years (according to the maker).

Gamers should stay away from both of these keyboards I guess. None of them are really "optimized" for playing your 233th installment of Counter-Halo or whatever. Gamers will also miss all the flashing lights, displays and extra keys. But to get work done (i.e. programming) both keyboards are fabulous. The G80 is still better though, the special characters are easier to reach thanks to a little more standard key placement and the different "levels" of the keys (I can’t get used to that on notebook keyboards, sorry).

So, are 50 Euros well spent on a keyboard? I sure think they are. It is a companion through your daily amount of work and when you get to know it better you’ll probably increase your characters per minute.

Is the 20 Euro eVolution STREAM bad, then? By all means, no. It is a stylish keyboard for people how enjoy typing on a flat device. I’m probably just not cut our for that and always prefer a "real" keyboard. The money is well spent, though, it works perfect as a second keyboard (for your notebook, i.e.) and should not be disregarded.

What is the conclusion then? I guess, Cherry makes good keyboards. There are better and cheaper ways to find this out but it has been a fun week and I’m happy to have great input devices en masse now. Just in case the G80 should fail me within the next 10 years 😉 .

Other people seem to have this nasty problem as well.

Unlucky, nobody gives a damn.

My notebook initially shipped with a load of crap like McAfee Internet Security (the trial of course), I had to uninstall all that stuff before it became usable. Now the problem is that obviously nobody at McAfee had the idea that some people would actually uninstall the software.

I did, though, and was left with some undeleted entries in the Security Center, q.e.d., which proves to be a royal p.i.t.a. if you get this analogy. So, to remove these buggers I did…

1. Stop the Windows Management Interface service
2. Delete C:\Windows\System32\Wbem\Recovery
3. Start the service again
4. Reboot

Now Windows only shows the software that is actually installed instead of bazillions of dead, non-existent ghosts. The Windows Management Interface service keeps a cache that gets rebuilt on every reboot (or so the wise interweb says).

Problem solved, Tsukasa happy.

Since we’ve got access to all classes and namespaces in the .net Framework in PowerShell, let’s have some fun.

Normally you install Windows services through the sc command or the installutil tool from Microsoft. But what does the installutil, exactly?

Basically it parses the incoming input and — if not specified otherwise — passes it through into a function called InstallHelper() in the System.Configuration.Install namespace. We can do the same with PowerShell, leaving out all the pesky problems of finding a suitable instance of installutil:

[System.Configuration.Install.ManagedInstallerClass]::InstallHelper("MyService.exe")

If run with elevated rights you should see that the transaction is successful and your service should show up in Computer Management.

Now that I finally have some time on my hands to get a little into Microsoft PowerShell again I decided to work on small things to remember what I learned once (aeons ago 😉 ).

And guess what, there was a practical command I always lack on Windows, it’s the great sudo command from the Unix/Linux world. It basically starts a program with elevated rights (just the rough idea).

Because doing it yourself is fine but looking how other people do it is just as nice I decided to consult Google and found Peter Provost’s great post for a PowerShell script that does exactly what I wanted.

The script launches a new process with elevated rights, only one thing was bugging me a little (yeah, I’m nitpicking now!): I had to provide the full path to the executable. Gee-wiz, how dare you!

Easy to fix with the addition of a few lines of code:

if([System.IO.File]::Exists("$(get-location)\$file"))
{
$file = "$(Get-Location)\$file";
}

Now I can just type i.e. “sudo MyApp.exe” or “sudo MyDir\MyApp.exe” when the application is in that very directory and it launches.

I really enjoy myself working with PowerShell again. Personally I think it’s a shame this great piece of software isn’t a default part of Windows Server 2008 just because it’s .net based (yes, that’s the reason, you can’t install .net on Server Core setups without kinks)…