Fingerprinting

When I bought my new laptop (HP 6730b), there was one thing that made my eyes glow. It had fingerprint reader. Imagine all possibilities of using it as fancy tool to unlock your laptop by the power of finger. :)

Only problem is that it didn’t look cool. It looked like I am little bit disturbed. I pass my finger over sensor - it does not even see that finger exists. I pass it again - cannot read it properly. Again - oh, no, I am sliding my finger too fast. After a while, people around me went betting whether I will be able to logon within three swipes.

I installed Windows 7 and only device without driver is my fingerprint reader. As one can imagine, I didn’t miss it so much. But suddenly Windows notified me that there is solution for my problem - you guess it - I got a link to driver. It was not my usual driver - original was from HP - this one was directly from AuthenTec.

What have I lost compared to HP’s one? Only thing that seems relevant is connection to TPM which, in security sense, was nice thing to have. However, I cannot believe that there is still same hardware beneath it. Now I really use my fingerprint reader for logging on. Oh, what difference, can a driver make. Not only that, if you uninstall HP’s driver and put this one on Vista, same thing happens - it just starts working.

I can only conclude one thing. Works better without HP garbage.

VB 6.0 in Windows 7

Visual Basic 6.0 will be supported under Windows 7. That means ten more years of runtime being shipped with OS and all applications “just working”. This support is for runtime and supported runtime files (mostly those that came with it). There is no support for controls that were not part of VB 6 delivery (some VB 5 compatibility files).

Development environment (IDE) hasn’t had same fortune. It’s officially supported life already ended but it does work fine on Windows 7 beta 1. I just hope that it will stay like that for final version also.

MobiReg - Beta 1

I created small registry editor for windows mobile devices. With it you can browse your registry and perform whatever change you wish. It supports string, binary, DWord (32-bit), QWord (64-bit), multi-string and expandable-string data types. Additionally to that, there is support for both Smartphone (Windows Mobile Classic) and Pocket PC (Windows Mobile Professional) platform in single executable.

You can download first beta here (cab installer) [2009-04-21: final version is out]. In order to run it, you may need .NET Compact Framework 2.0 or higher (if it is not already installed).

Starcraft Color Problem

[2010-08-12: It seems that perfect solution is found. Start reading article from bottom. :)]

I like Starcraft. Both playing and watching it. However, since I installed Windows 7, each time I run it, screen goes into weird color. Half of color palette just goes into cyan.

This is usually restricted to menus. Once game starts, everything looks fine (ok, water has artefacts too), but from time to time, whole game gets garbled. There is nothing to do other than exiting game.

I tried various settings on compatibility mode without real success. Setting compatibility mode to Windows XP (where game looks good) made things even worse since Starcraft started reporting that it cannot load a file (font\font.gid). Neither combination of settings got palette problem solved.

Unrelated googling threw me a solution. Just open Screen Resolution window and run Starcraft (with that window still open). Colors are as they should be.

I haven’t tested this on Vista yet, but if you have a same problem, it is worth a shot.

Why exactly this works - I have no idea.

[2009-03-06: Notice that you still need some compatibility settings. Here are ones that work for me in Windows 7. Disabling display scaling enables me to have higher DPI (120%) and still use my map (otherwise, place I select on map isn’t place where I end up). Without disabling desktop composition, I cannot even switch to game and without administrative rights you may stumble upon some problems if you are running from Program Files folder (write forbidden for normal users). Checking other stuff didn’t make anything better, so I left it off.]

[2009-06-09: With Windows 7 RC, things got worse. Even with every checkbox selected, Windows 95 compatibility mode and resolution screen open, I cannot reproduce proper screen every time. Sometimes it works properly, sometimes you can get it to work by pressing Alt+Tab repeatedly, and sometimes it is best to exit and enter again.]

[2009-08-28: This workaround works for final version of Windows 7. It does not work every time but success ratio is well over 50%.]

[2010-08-12: One annonymous commenter suggested solution that includes registry changes. All I can say is that it really works. I did test it only on Windows 7 (64-bit version) and it works perfectly. I do hope that it works on other versions (Vista also). I took liberty of packing those two hacks into one zip file. Do leave comment if you find it working (or not) on other versions.]

[2017-04-19: With patch 1.18, issue is finally resolved.

Dice 1.10

There is new version of Dice for Windows Mobile. It now supports landscape devices. You may download it here.