This stuff makes me wonder!
I can’t believe that for SP1 [Office 2007] that there are 322Mb of actual code changes – I mean the complete bloody product is only [only!] 532Mb to begin with! [BTW, despite what the text says regarding Ultimate Extras, the chosen updates were *just* the Office 2007 SP1 updates]
So what we’re getting here is component updates as opposed to, for want of a better term, code updates – it goes like this:
- Microsoft fixes a bug with a code change.
- The code is recompiled – the result being, of course, that the entire component changes [of which the fix is a tiny part].
- The entire component is then wrapped-up in a Microsoft update, and then the update is downloaded and installed by the consumer.
What *should* happen is:
- Microsoft fixes a bug with a code change.
- The code is recompiled – the result being, of course, that the entire component changes [of which the fix is a tiny part].
- The difference between the now out-of-date component and the ‘new’ is determined – this is called ‘a delta’.
- The delta is then wrapped-up in a Microsoft update, and then the update is downloaded and installed by the consumer. The update is of course a little ‘smarter’ now – as the installer has to ‘patch’ the old component with just the changes – rather than replacing the complete thing.
Now I *know* that Microsoft can do this sort of thing, so why don’t they? I’d certainly like to know how much extra energy and bandwidth would be saved if they did it the right way!
I hate gaming/gamers! Probably because A) I can’t see the point [read a book, go for a walk, ...], and B) because two people I [thought I] knew very well are very sadly addicts – one for The Sims [or practically anything else that might distract them from normality/life], and the other for the World of Warcraft [where she's a kiss-ass Elf, or some such shite!]. Oh, and C), my twelve-year-old son also plays too much! Sad individuals indeed. I truly can’t see the point.
Anyway, rant over, my son received a one month’s free trial on XBox [Saddoes] Live – or some such thing – and asked me if I could get his XBox 360 to connect to the Internet. As he’s in a room where there’s no wired network point, this meant doing it via a wireless connection.
So, on checking out the various sockets on the back of the 360 box, I tried connecting the thing using a LinkSys USB wireless adapter I had laying around. It didn’t work, and upon further reading, I’m led to believe that one requires a special Microsoft adapter.
That’s the bad news.
Now for the good news … if you’ve a wireless laptop, that also has a wired network-interface, there’s a workaround:
1. Connect your laptop to the Internet, via its built-in wireless;
2. Connect your XBox to your laptop, via a standard network cable [one is supplied with an XBox 360];
3. Bridge the laptop’s wired and wireless connections.
So, here’s the steps I went through on my ThinkPad [with XP installed]:
1. Boot/connect the machine to the network, via its wireless;
2. Connect the XBox to the ThinkPad’s wired network interface using a standard network cable;
3. Open your laptop’s Network Connections [Start | Control Panel | Network Connections];
4. Select both the wireless and wired connections;
5. Right-click on the selected connections, and select Bridge
Here’s the result:
And that was it: son-networked, playing even more games … hmmmmm – did I do the right thing?
For ages, at every boot, I’ve run a small program called TempClean: all this really does is to clear my Temp folder of stuff that’s left over by programs that don’t clear up after themselves [like a man]. Ok, so it does a little bit more than that [unlike a man] – but that’s its main function.
Anyway, I’d be really interested in knowing how much litter [unwanted files] you have on your Windows machine, and so rather than ask you run the real TempClean [it doesn't have an installer - just save it somewhere and run it!] – which you might be unsure/wary off – here’s a small VBScript ‘script’ so that you can find 0ut for yourself. BTW, this doesn’t remove anything!
Here’s the code:
dim fso
dim fld
dim fle
dim l
set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set fld = fso.GetSpecialFolder(2)
wscript.echo "Your Temp folder is set to: " & fld.path
sub walk(fld)
wscript.echo vbCrLf & "Looking in: " & fld.path
if fld.files.Count > 0 then
for each fle in fld.files
wscript.echo vbTab & "Found: " & fle.name
l = l + fle.size
next
else
wscript.echo vbTab & "No files found"
end if
for each fld in fld.SubFolders
walk(fld)
next
end sub
walk(fld)
wscript.echo vbCrLf & "The total bytes taken up by your temp files is: " & l
All you need to do to run this is:
- copy ‘n paste it into Notepad [or just download it here];
- save it as, say, tempfiles.vbs;
- run it from a Command Prompt [I'll assume you know how to open a Command Prompt, unlike a woman, to quote Colin Hay "or a woman, if you are one" ... ask a man"].
For example, if I’d saved it to my root folder on C, I’d run it like this, in a DOS/Command prompt:
C:\cscript tempfiles.vbs
BTW, cscript is a Microsoft VBScript interpreter that you’ll almost certainly have on your machine already.
Note again that running this script doesn’t remove anything – it just reports what you’ve got hanging around, and that’s taking up space unnecessarily. And, on that last bit, you might like to output the results of running this to a file – else the output might disappear off the top, never to reappear!
You could do that like this:
C:\cscript tempfiles.vbs > dump.txt
The > redirects the output into a file call dump.txt. So you can then open dump.txt in Notepad and have a look at what you’ve got hanging around – which you might find A) interesting, and B) a lot!!
BTW, if you’d like to remove these temporary files, you can just add either these two lines after the l = l + fle.size, e.g.
l = l + fle.size
on error resume next
fso.deletefile fle
Or, if you want to do a proper job [like a woman], download and run the real program [link to TempClean above].
Please post up your results, from whichever method, and in summary preferably!
Following on from my Where.exe post, I thought I’d knock up another version; in Java this time.
This was actually done using Visual J++ … a simply wonderful product in my opinion. Pity it went the way of the fairies [thanks Sun!].
- As this was done in VJ++, I couldn’t use the String split() method [I believe that appeared in a later JDK]. However I reckon the tokeniser does a better job for me here; and is the right choice imho.
- I also had some trouble finding a way to read my PATH environment variable. Seems like this ability is not built into Java. Still, GetEnvironmentVariable came to the rescue.
- I also used just static methods throughout – that saved me one line of code in not creating an instance!
- One other thing. When it first ran, it threw exceptions [WinIOException]- which took a little debugging. After some head scratching, I realised it was due to my path containing a sub-path that pointed to a non-existent folder.
import com.ms.wfc.io.*;
import com.ms.win32.Kernel32;
import java.util.*;
public class whereis
{
public static void main (String[] args)
{
findIt(args[0]);
}
static public void findIt(String arg)
{
StringBuffer strBuf = new StringBuffer(2000);
int ret = com.ms.win32.Kernel32.GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", strBuf, strBuf.capacity());
StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(strBuf.toString(), ";");
while(st.hasMoreTokens())
{
whereisWorker(st.nextToken(), arg);
}
}
static private void whereisWorker(String path, String file)
{
try
{
FileEnumerator e = new FileEnumerator(File.combine(path, file));
while(e.hasMoreFiles())
{
System.out.println(File.combine(path, e.getName()));
e.getNextFile();
}
}
catch(WinIOException e)
{
// Can get here if a segment of the PATH doesn't actually exist!
}
}
}
It’s on another page on peetm.com, but as I’ve been asked where it was lately, I’ll just link to it here.
