July 2009 Archives

This is kind of silly... paid and renewed ages ago. There is a huge backlog of checking this, apparently.

I have been buying sound cards for a loooooong time – my first add-on card was for a 512K Amsdrad PC512 and it produced either MIDI-based sound or replicated sample audio. It was not a cheap purchase at the time – I can't remember the price any more, but it was quite a bit of savings at the time.

It came with a literal 'wodge' of 5.25" driver diskettes. you could use it to steady a table there were so many of them.

Later on, the disks changed to 3.5". This meant that they were thicker than the older disks, and amounted to a pile that simply got progressively larger. By the purchase of my last soundblaster card, I was looking at IIRC 10 disks, only a few of which were usable for drivers for DOS, the remainder were 'assistant' programs such as Dr. Sbaitso, which were to purposes useless.

I spent a long time kind-of caring about my sound card. I bought an SB live card for my main desktop and for several years things just worked. About 2 years ago got an SoundBlaster X-Fi card for notebooks for my Dell Insipron M1710. Honestly, the internal card was better than the add-on card. I didn't really care as I paid for it in Yen, so it didn't count towards cost.

In the last 6 months I bought a new rig. Reasonable price, and harkening back to my memories, I got an SB X-Fi XtremeGamer card. Not a large outlay (<€80). It no longer comes with a wodge of disks – it downloads software and updates from the internet.

The smallest update for this software seems to be 50MB. The sum total of the latest software update (to fix problems and to increase compatibility on Vista) is 235MB. I am 44MB into the update and I'm being told that there's another 2.5 hours to go. I'm not on a slow link either. It just seems to be on their side.

Just to put this into perspective - The download for my soundcard is about 1/2 the size of a reasonable Linux distro… and it's as slow as a wet weekend in June. By the time this update has downloaded I could have watched the entirety of the latest Harry Potter movie and still had time for a pint. It's damned slow.

This is a sound card. Not the World Management Software Suite®. The update for my graphics card was 90MB and that was Driver + Support Software + PhysX Drivers. And it downloaded in less than 10 minutes.

Now that I recall, all the problems I seemed to have on the older machine could always be traced to limitations or issues with my sound card. A driver that wasn't playing by the rules. Maybe it thought it was being edgy? I've seen too many BSODs to want edgy. I just want something that works…. and doesn't need a 250MB update (that's twice the size of OpenOffice)…

Oh, and Windows Live Writer — please convert euro, trademark and em-dash symbols before posting… we're not all using UCS-16 encoding here. Some of us actually try to use the web in a platform independent manner…

Nothing more than a rant....
It's not that tough - when using most english locales, we sort case insensitively. a==A, B==B and so on. Pragmatically, the only reason for picking a locale other than UTF-8.generic is because I would really, really like these rules obeyed.
I am sick to death of having to work around stupidity.
I'm just complaining as I look at the output from ls and it's pretty much a case sensitive sort. I'm sure that accents are sorted correctly in EN_ie - after all á is the same as a, but apparently it's different to A.
Sorting it difficult... the rules are so complicated... stop complaining! you're able to perform at least 600 million operations per second, and a table lookup for a case insensitive sort is probably going to cost 20.
Bear in mind that the number above was a quick back of the envelope number of an iPhone. I'm sure a real computer will be able to do something a little better...

Update:

Looks like it's not Linux, it's only Leopard that doesn't understand EN_ie collation. Oh well, that's life I suppose…

Created a little icon (it's the white quote mark in the red loop), added MMS information and tethering support.
To install it, rename the downloaded file without the .zip extension (it should be Vodafone_ie.ipcc). Quit iTunes.
On the mac open a terminal and type: defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
On windows(32 bit) in a cmd prompt type: "%CommonProgramFiles%\Apple\Mobile Device Support\bin\defaults.exe" write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
On windows(64 bit) type: "%CommonProgramFiles(x86)%\Apple\Mobile Device Support\bin\defaults.exe" write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
Restart iTunes, option/alt click on the 'Check for updates' button in the iphone's Summary page.
Get the Vodafone Ireland IPCC file.