Is It Byte or Is It Octet

If you read RFC for some network protocol, you will notice that word octet is used quite a lot. I hear quite a lot that they should write byte instead. However, there is subtle difference here.

Octet is always eight bits. Although one may argue that byte is also eight bits, but not so long ago one byte had seven bits of data (remember ASCII). If you go even before that, there were some machines that used lower or higher number of bits to represent one byte (6-bit, 10-bit…). At that time, byte was smallest accessible data unit - no matter how many bits it had. Only with very popular IBM/360, everyone moved toward eight bit bytes.

When writing specification of something on really low level (like RFCs do) with need to communicate across different generations of equipment, this difference is important.

Since byte (at current time) is always eight bits, whole argument seems purely academic, but tradition and precision is important. That is why RFC will never use byte when octet is needed.

Keyboard

I accidentally “de-enterized” keyboard on my laptop (HP 6730b). Somehow one CD left in my backpack managed to get under my enter key. Plastic beneath could not handle pressure and small piece went off. Although that piece had less than two millimeters in length, my enter key would not stay in it’s place with it missing.

Solution was simple and new keyboard (~40 €) arrived in two weeks (it may seem long, but this is quick for Croatia). Once I decided that I was competent enough to replace it, I took a look at documentation on how to do it.

I was surprised - not only that there was great manual, but there were also videos on how to perform small-scale part replacements.

Keyboard was replaced in less than ten minutes without a hitch. I finally got my enter key back and good feeling about Hewlett-Packard. Although they did nothing other than put some documents on-line, those documents were so good that they made me happy customer.

My next laptop will also be HP.

64-Bit, Where Art Thou

Well, presentation is over. I must confess that it was really strange feeling speaking and not seeing anybody. It is so unnatural.

It wasn’t without hitch (even incorrect code was working by accident) but hopefully it was good enough for everybody listening.

Here are source files used during presentation.

I will give link to presentation recording as soon as it goes up.

TechDays

Tomorrow (2009-04-01) I am giving presentation at TechDays virtual conference. Presentation is titled “64-bit where art thou” and it will be about transition to 64-bit framework and issues that can arise. I will try to keep it low on power point and illustrate all through C#.

Averatec-Intel Classic Season 3

As you can see on GOMTV.net, we have official start date for season 3 of my favorite Starcraft tournament.

F1 race and Starcraft game, can one day get any better?

HTC S740 Hard Reset

In HTC S740 manual there is procedure for hard reset that uses program called Clear Storage in order to reinitialize phone. That will not help you if you forgot password or your phone cannot boot.

In order to perform real hard reset on this device, you need to connect your phone to power (via mini-USB cable) and turn it off. Once it is off, press D-Pad Center key together with Volume Down key. While holding those two, shortly press power button. You should get white screen with instructions. You can release those two keys and press Volume Up if you are sure that complete deletion is fine with you. Any other key will cancel process and continue with boot.

Please notice that if you complete procedure ALL your data stored on mobile phone is gone and there is no way to get it back.

[2009-06-30: FAQ entry was added on HTC support site with this procedure described.]

The History of Microsoft

For those who are interested in history of Microsoft, Channel 9 has some videos. At this moment they cover years 1975-1980, but they do update it weekly.

It is few minutes each so you will not waste much time. :)

HTC S740 and XT9

If you own Smartphone with dual keyboard (phone-like and QUERTY one), live in country that is not supported with T9 input, you may be annoyed that it cannot be disabled in threaded SMS view. Every other text box remembers whether it is disabled or enabled, but this one will not.

One thing that worked for me is Creating DWORD value named CarrierDefaultTextMode under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Tegic\eT9\IME and giving it value of 0. This forces phone to ignore language settings and default to multi-press entry.

Also notice that, since we haven’t destroyed anything, you can switch to XT9 on per-message basic.

For editing you can use any registry editor out there, but do be careful.

Special Match

For those wanting to bridge Starcraft gap between GOM TV’s Averatec-Intel Classic 2 and next one, there is special match. It is between Bisu (current champion) and Jaedong (season one champion).

Very exciting.

P.S. New season will start on march, 15th 2009 (may be changed “according to players’ status”).

[2009-03-23: It seems that “may be changed” part prevailed. Next season hasn’t started yet.] [2009-03-24: New season start date is 2009-03-29.]

Windays 2009

I got my piece of action at next Windays conference. I will give presentation about Virtual disk support in Windows 7 during technology part of conference.

It cover news regarding support for virtual disks in Windows 7 (hopefully, RC will be out by then), booting inside them and programming API support from C# perspective.

After presentation, I will “leak” content here also.