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Gadget Time: iRiver Clix 2
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Loading ...Every time I get a new gadget or some new piece of software I will write something about it. Well this time round it’s the iRiver Clix gen 2.
I’ve been looking into getting a new MP3 player for some time and I looked over the Creative, iPod, Philips and Sony series. But finally I choose for the iRiver Clix gen 2. Why, well I’ll try and explain below.
First steps towards a HTPC
I finally decided that it was time to build a media center a couple of weeks ago. In this relative short post I’ll describe the first things to after making this decision.
For me it was quite easy. To start my new quest 
I first decided to look at buying an assembled HTPC or building one myself. Wasn’t a hard decision looking at the prices. The cheapest HTPC’s I could find where around 1.6oo euros. Yikes.
So in short I will build the HTPC myself. This has to be cheaper 
. So first my wish list:
- It has to be able to play DVD / CD
- Must be relatively small (which limits the casing)
- Quick enough to decode HDTV and X-264 on the fly
- Silent, silent and oh yeah silent
- Be able to play DVB-C, which means digital cable
Asus doesn’t Like Vista
I tried to install Windows Vista yesterday. Was about time, since I’m a developer and we now need to test on this OS as well! No biggy you’d think. Wrong!!!!!
Apperantly Asus choose to not support Vista just yet. Well all notebooks have the label ‘Vista capable’, but most aren’t. More accurately spoken the hardware is just the BIOS aint. Let me tell you what happens if you try and install Vista on a new laptop. You insert the Vista CD. Laptop starts up. It sees the CD and decides lets boot again. And it keeps on doing so!
Now I haven’t a clue on what is actually going on with it, but according to this guy it’s got something to do with the BitLocker technology. As it turns out windows is making a call to the BIOS to check if BitLocker is supported or not. And as genius as the people are at Asus they decided that if this call is made the laptop shall reboot. Smart aint it!
There is a way around it though, you could wait for a BIOS update of Asus. Which in my case wasn’t needed as Asus released version 306 in january this year, fixing this. But I’ve heard there are still models out there without a fix. (Guess that’s the advantage of having a high end bussiness model ). So what do you need to do (again I didn’t figure this out, but have translated it to english:
- Before continuing make a bootable disk with BartPE and put the following files on there:
- Bootloader image
- WinImage, for overwriting the MBR (master boot record)
- Since you can’t install Vista from the CD you’ll first need to install another version of windows. After this is done you can install Vista from that version of windows.
- At some point during the installation Vista will reboot your computer. At this point you’re screwed , not really but you’ll need to do the following:
- Put your bootable disk in to boot from BartPE
- Start WinImage and select ‘Disk’ selecting the ‘Edit Master boot record properties’
- Select the checkbox ‘Include non-removable hard disks’, otherwise your HDD might not be visible
- Press ‘Import’ and select the bootloader image you’ve downloaded
- Reboot and the installation will continue
- After some time Vista will again reboot and you’ll be screwed again in the loop. At this point repeat the steps described in point 3.
- Complete the installation and voila a working copy of Windows Vista.
Please note that if you experience any problems you’ll need to perform some additional steps One problem is no longer being able to boot Windows XP, at least I couldn’t. Until an official BIOS update is available you won’t be able to fix that. I’ll explain how to fix that problem in a later post.
Edit: added some links to more information on BitLocker
XML, The Future For Standardization or The Problem
As developers of software you have a few chooses to store information. In database format, be it in a actual database like MySQL or MS SQL or an own created text format. This is all fine and will work, as it has for ages. But when you have to share information with other applications it starts to form problems. That’s were many people say XML comes in to play.
But does it really. I mean sure it can help you to share information between the various programs. That’s cool and exactly what it was made for. But when you read the papers surrounding XML you also find there are no rules that help you define how the content should look.
Sure you have rules stating you must close tags (those things starting with <). And the words are case sensitive. But who is to know what the tags stand for. If I were to email you the XML output of a program, would you then now what it’s content meant? Would you be able to track down an application that understands it?
I think XML is a great step in making information more readable and accessible, but there should be some standard notations for the various applications. Like one standard for text editors and one fixed standard for financial programs. Otherwise XML isn’t going to help us at all. (Note that the first steps are taken with the OpenDocumen Format)
Don’t Like The Code, Do Something About It
All developers sometimes get an assignment to modify an already existing program over and over again. Over time that leads to unreadable and badly designed code. Which is a nightmare and is being b*tched about a lot.
I recently had the same problem. I had to modify a class that did some checks to determine if software was allowed to start-up or perform specific tasks. Well I took a look at the code and said forget it. It’s a complete mess.
Now I have only myself to blame, I wrote the entire code (and all updates that were required). To solve it I made the first wise decision in a long time:). Forget the code change for a while. Instead I made the choice to first refacter the entire class.
Making more functions, more comments and a shipload more sense. It may sound like a counter productive thing to rewrite code, but it safes a lot of time in maintenance!
