Not So Live

Last night I decided to do a big step - I wanted to update wife’s HP mini 5101 to Windows 8. It was nice Atom machine to start with and I further upgraded it to 2 GB RAM and 120 GB SSD. With relaxed graphic card requirements on Windows 8 it seemed like a perfect fit.

New Windows 8 interface is a bit controversial. Lot of people hate it, most users just bear with it and there are even some poor souls that actually like it. I was very curious in which group will my wife belong.

Well, involuntary haters it seems. Whichever tile gets selected, same greeting follows: “This app cannot open. The screen resolution is too low for this app to run.” Bummer.

And this is fantastic example how Windows 8 is botched. It is not one big wrong decision, it is bunch of small ones. One team makes decision that tiles will not be supported at certain resolution. Nothing wrong with that. As a developer I can only greet it.

But then another team makes decision that you cannot boot directly into desktop. Nobody can say with a straight face that this is technical issue. It is just some dickhead deciding that everybody wants this new stuff. And that idiot of course forgot to take valid technical issue into consideration - not all users can use it.

Why do you show these tiles to me? It is doubtful that monitor will grow with time. If tiles cannot be used, I do not want to see them. Allow me to boot directly into desktop interface and deal with tiles only when I can (e.g. on external monitor). Until that time, do not fill my screen with unusable clutter.

Technically Windows 8 might be best Windows so far. I dare to say that even backtracking on their Aero UI is correct step. However it seems that Microsoft lost their designer’s compass. Whole OS looks like unfinished alpha build. There are lots of potentially nice features but none of them got proper polish.

Lets hope that Windows 9 beta is right behind a corner.

Uri Escaping

Either I need to download a certain page for further processing or I need to just post some data, code for generating url is quite similar. Just take two strings and merge them together. I usually then convert resulting string into Uri because most methods tend to require it, or even if they accept string, they convert it into Uri internally. For example:

var uriString = string.Format("http://www.example.com/{0}/", "ABC");
var uri = new Uri(uriString);
Debug.WriteLine(uriString + "\t" + uri.ToString());
// http://www.example.com/ABC/    http://www.example.com/ABC/

This, of course, does not deal with having special characters. All you need for those is escaping. Fortunately Uri class already has a method for that:

var uriString = string.Format("http://www.example.com/{0}/", Uri.EscapeDataString("A/BC"));
var uri = new Uri(uriString);
Debug.WriteLine(uriString + "\t" + uri.ToString());
// http://www.example.com/A%2FBC/  http://www.example.com/A/BC/

As you can see peculiar thing happened. While our string is escaped, transforming it to Uri actually loses this. Instead of encoded “A%2FBC” as one segment we get separate “A” and “BC”. Querying server with later will not result in expected content.

Solution here is to use double escaping.

var uriString = string.Format("http://www.example.com/{0}/", Uri.EscapeDataString(Uri.EscapeDataString("A/BC")));
var uri = new Uri(uriString);
Debug.WriteLine(uriString + "\t" + uri.ToString());
// http://www.example.com/A%252FBC/    http://www.example.com/A%252FBC/

End result might look ugly but it will get you that page every time.

P.S. Example.com does not contain said directories/files. To see double encoding example, you can check this link toward DigiKey (http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/DS2482S-100%252B/DS2482S-100%252B-ND/1197435) or just roll your own.

Bastards

I am always happy when someone chooses to distribute my software. If nothing else they often host software install themselfs and thus they lower load on my own server. Everybody wins. Usually.

Bastards at IrcFast (no, I will not include their link) decided to bundle VHD Attach with Babylon toolbar and something called Coupish. I view both those packages as borderline spyware. And I would never bundle my program with them. If you install VHD Attach and you are not careful, you will soon be looking for removal procedure. Let’s just get it in clear: THIS IS NOT ENDORSED NOR BUNDLED BY ME.

Are they doing anything illegal? No, license I selected is quite permissive and it does allow for almost anything. As long as software is intact anyone can bundle it as much as they want. And even if I had it under any other license I am not sure it would matter. Those idiots would bundle it anyhow.

I can only do one thing. I can warn everybody to stay clear of this site.

VHD Attach 3.61

Nothing much here. Just a single bug fix that makes VHD Attach work properly on German Windows. :)

Update from within application or from web site.

KulenDayz 2012

For next three days Beli Manastir will host crème de la crème of Croatian IT community. Whoever comes there can expect a lot of quality lectures delivered by people all around world. And that will be mixed with huge amounts of fun and mingling.

For all community members sessions are free while other pay nominal fee. Post conference events do require additional payment but they are well worth it.

Unfortunately this year everybody will have to live without me present and no session will hold my ramblings. But do not worry, next year I am back. :)

P.S. If you see Bernard, give him a hug - this conference is his baby and every year he puts enormous amounts of love and energy into it.