electric relaxation

This is definitely one of the best gifts I’ve ever received, and it comes (unsurprisingly) courtesy of Ms. Chan. I just beat the game on Medium; it finishes with possibly the best incorporation of Free Bird ever.

I’m a bit worried that I’m starting to plateau already. I haven’t really mastered the art of when to keep low frets held down, nor can I strum in both directions. You don’t really need either of these skills to beat most songs on Medium, but there are several where I’ll probably be stuck with a 3 star rating until I master such advanced techniques. I can’t even imagine what Hard and Expert are going to be like.

The reason this game is so awesome is the same reason why I liked Ninja Gaiden on the XBox so much: the game is just hard enough to make you feel like you’re a bad ass for doing so well. But unlike Ninja Gaiden, where you just run into a wall, the learning curve seems much more smooth and satisfying. Of course, I haven’t tried a single Hard song yet so maybe I’m speaking too soon.

I sent this patch to the maintainers of WDaliClock a long time ago but they never responded. Well anyway, here’s a patched version of WDaliClock which does not appear in the window cycle list (a.k.a. the “Alt-Tab” list) while running. The fix is a one-liner: I simply applied WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW to the window style.

Patched WDaliClock Binary (.exe)
Patched WDaliClock Source Code (.zip)

A quick summary of all the reasons why I can’t use Windows Vista. Any single one of these should have been a showstopper, but I was too stubborn for my own good.

• No SSL VPN Client support. Cisco has a beta VPN client that trashes Vista’s networking stack when suspending/resuming on a laptop. Juniper’s SSL VPN client just doesn’t work; both IE7 and Vista are blockers there.
• Horrible flickering on my ThinkPad T42 with ATI Radeon Mobility 9600. It’s hard to say who’s to blame for this one, but I’m guessing it’s the ThinkPad’s fault for not reporting EDID information correctly, and ATI’s fault for writing retarded drivers that crap all over themselves given the slightest opportunity. I managed a half-ass work around for this issue using PowerStrip, but that required me to run it manually on each boot, because it doesn’t play nice with Windows Defender, and reset the display settings after each suspend/resume or undock cycle.
• Outlook Web Access crashes IE7. Yet another depressingly retarded confluence of suck. Microsoft has a fix for this, but it has to be applied server-side, and requires temporarily stopping the Exchange server; I didn’t even bother running that past our IT department.
• No Dial-Up Networking with my BlackBerry. Perhaps this is BlackBerry’s fault, but I’m guessing it’s Vista’s problem. This was the last straw; it’s such a useful thing to be able to surf the Internet from anywhere, and nothing Vista gives me was good enough to overcome this huge deficit.

Success! I finally got dial-up networking over Bluetooth working with my Blackberry Pearl and ThinkPad T42.

I spent hours trying to get this working with Vista RTM, to no avail. Vista’s Bluetooth stack appears to have been tweaked in such a way that it no longer recognizes the DUN profile exposed by the Pearl. Moreover, I couldn’t even get it working over a USB cable; in that case, Vista refuses to recognize the Pearl as a USB modem.

So I finally gave up and switched back to Windows XP. After that, it took all of 60 seconds to get this working, just by following the BlackBerry Modem Laptop guide available in the excellent BlackBerry forums.

Small note: I use guest a the username and password for the dial-up connection. Also, on the Pearl under Settings->Advanced->TCP, I set the APN to wap.voicestream.com and guest for the username and password.