Post a Comment On: cbloom rants

Perforce Server was being a pain in my ass to start up because the fucking P4S service doesn't get my P4ROOT environment variable. Rather than try to figure out the fucking Win 7 per-user environment variable shite, the easy solution is just to move your P4S.exe into your P4ROOT directory, that way when it sees no P4ROOT setting it will just use current directory. New P4 Installs don't include P4Win , but you can just copy it from your old install and keep using it. This is not a Win7 problem so much as a "newer MS systems" problem, but non-antialiased / non-cleartype text rendering is getting nerfed. Old stuff that uses GDI will still render good old bitmap fonts fine, but newer stuff that uses WPF has NO BITMAP FONT SUPPORT. That is, they are always using antialiasing, which is totally inappropriate for small text (especially without cleartype). (For example MSVC 2010 has no bitmap font support (* yes I know there are some workarounds for this)). This is a huge fucking LOSE for serious developers. MS used to actually have better small text than Apple, Apple always did way better at smooth large blurry WYSIWYG text shit. Now MS is just worse all around because they have intentionally nerfed the thing they were winning at. I'm very disappointed because I always run no-cleartype, no-antialias because small bitmap fonts are so much better. A human font craftsman carefully choosing which pixels should be on or off is so much better than some fucking algorithm trying to approximate a smooth curve in 3 pixels and instead giving me fucking blue and red fringes. Obviously anti-aliased text is the *future* of text rendering, but that future is still pretty far away. My 24" 1920x1200 that I like to work on is 94 dpi (a 30" 2560x2600 is 100 dpi, almost the same). My 17" lappy at 1920x1200 has some of the highest pixel density that you can get for a reasonable price, it's pretty awesome for photos, but it's still only 133 dpi which is shit for text (*). To actually do good looking antialiased text you need at least 200 dpi, and 300 would be better. This is 5-10 years away for consumer price points. (In fact the lappy screen is the unfortunate uncanny valley; the 24" at 1920x1200 is the perfect res where non-atialiased stuff is the right size on screen and has the right amount of detail. If you just go to slightly higher dpi, like 133, then everything is too small. If you then scale it up in software to make it the right size for the eye, you don't actually have enough pixels to do that scale up. The problem is that until you get above 200 dpi where you can do arbitrary scaling of GUI elements, the physical size of the pixel is important, and the 100 dpi pixel is just about perfect). (* = shit for anti-aliased text, obviously great for raster fonts at 14 pels or so). ( ADDENDUM : Urg I keep trying to turn on Cleartype and be okay with it. No no no it's not okay. They should call it "Clear Chromatic Abberation" or "Clearly the Developers who thing this is okay are colorblind". Do they think our eyes only see luma !? WTF !? Introducing colors into my black and white text is just such a huge visual artifact that no amount of improvement to the curve shapes can make up for that. ) It's actually pretty sweet right now living in a world where our CPU's are nice and multi-core, but most apps are still single core. It means I can control the load on my machine myself, which is damn nice. For example I can run 4 apps and know that they will all be pretty nice and snappy. These days I am frequently keeping 3 copies of my video test app running various tests all the time, and since it's single core I know I have one free core to still fuck around on the computer and it's full speed. The sad thing is that once apps actually all go multi-core this is going to go away, because when you actually have to share cores, Windows goes to shit. Christ why is the registry still so fucking broken? 1. If you are a developer, please please make your apps not use the registry. Put config files in the same dir as your .exe. 2. The Registry is just a bunch of text strings, why is it not fucking version controlled? I want a log of the changes and I want to know what app made the change when. WTF. The only decent way to get environment variables set is with TCC "set /S" or "set /U". "C:\Program Files (x86)" is a huge fucking annoyance. Not only does it break by muscle memory and break a ton of batch files I had that looked for program files, but now I have a fucking quandary every time I'm trying to hunt down a program.. err is it in x86 or not? I really don't like that decision. I understand it's needed for if you actually have an x86 and x64 version of the same app installed, but that is very rare, and you should have only bifurcated paths on apps that actually do have a dual install. (also because lots of apps hard code to c:\program files , they have a horrible hack where they let 32 bit apps think they are actually in c:\program files when they are in "C:\Program Files (x86)"). Blurg. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters] "EnableSuperfetch"=dword:00000000 "EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] "NoWinKeys"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] "MenuShowDelay"="10" Some links : Types - Vista/Win7 has borked the "File Associations" setup. You need a 3rd party app like Types now to configure your file types (eg. to change default icons). Shark007.net - Windows 7 Codecs - WMP12 Codecs - seem to work. Pismo Technic Inc. - Pismo File Mount - nicest ISO mounter I've found (Daemon tools feels like it's made out of spit and straw). Hot Key Plus by Brian Apps - ancient app that still works and I like because it's super simple. Change Windows 7 Default Folder Icon - Windows 7 Forums ; presumably you have the Preview stuff for Folders turned off, so now make the icon not so ugly. - how to move your perforce depot Annoyingly I used a different machine name for new lappy and thus a different clientview, so MSVC P4SCC fails to make the connection and wants to rebind every project. The easiest way to fix this is just to not use P4SCC and kill all your bindings and just use NiftyPerforce without P4SCC. (Currently that's not a great option for me because I talk to both my home P4 server and my work P4 server, and P4 stupidly does not have a way to set the server by local directory. That is, if I'm working on stuff in c:\home I want to use one env spec and if I'm in c:\work, use another env spec. This fucks up things like NiftyPerforce and p4.exe because they just use a global environment setting for server, so if I have some work code and some home code open at the same time they shit their pants. I think that I'll make my own replacement p4.exe that does this the right way at some point; I guess the right way is probably to do something like CVS/SVN does and have a config file in dirs, and walk up the dir tree and take the first config you find). allSnap make all windows snap - AllSnap for x64/Win7 seems to be broken, but the old 32 bit one seems to work just fine still. (ADDENDUM : nope, old allsnap randomly crashes in Win 7, do not use) KeyTweak Homepage - I used KeyTweak to remap my Caps Lock to Alt. Firefox addons : DownThemAll Flashblock PDF Download Stop Autoplay Adblock Plus DownloadHelper ADDENDUM : I found the last few guys who are ticking my disk : One that you obviously want to disable is Windows Media Player Media sharing serivcee : Fix wmpnetwk.exe In Windows 7 . It just constantly scans your media dirs for shit to serve. Fuck you. The next big culprit is the Windows Reliability stuff. Go ahead and disable the RAC scheduled task, but that's not the real problem. The nasty one is the "last alive stamp" which windows writes once a minute by default. This is to help diagnose crashes. You could change TimeStampInterval to 30 or so to make it once every 30 minutes, but I set it to zero to disable it. See :
Shutdown Event Tracker Tools and Settings System Reliability
How to disable hard disk thrashing with Vista - Page 7
And this is a decent summary/repeat of what I've said : How to greatly reduce harddisk grinding noises in Vista .