31 December 2015

Cloudy PC Future

A post at the end of year should be about the future :). Guess wee all know how bad PC business right now, only goes to decline eaten by mobile device platform and more company start looking for an exit. At least what I always complain inevitably become a trigger. The conspiracy (or rather that's how business work) between hardware vendor and software vendor can't last forever. XP is one of the evident, how hard MS try to shut it down and yet Windows 10 sales has been predicted as "temporary relief" for PC sales' ongoing decline.

What happened to mobile device market now is "the re-invent process of PC in another form". Back in early 2000's I still read CPU speed war, even CISC vs RISC was relevant though most RISC died shortly killed by commodity x86 CISC then it was multi-core x86 war. Windows make it relevant by having more background services (bundling stronger firewall, AV etc), software framework has been in higher level with  more layer added after layer, all to make multi-core utilized. No doubt current mobile device usability is more or less like PC we have in early 2000s (but with more connectivity) thus still has huge room for improvement, more profitable. PC are stuck, x86 CPU makers either go green and challenge ARM or focus to server and cloud data services leaving high-end CPU/GPU to niche market such workstation (Scientific/Labs, 3D, HD-Video) and desktop gamers. How far general-purpose software company will "keep it bloated, keep it changed" I think it will backfired.

PC Software sales also declining, have been seeing more and more (supposedly) high-end software offered as freeware by misfortune or as a bait. For example Fusion, I wonder if youtubers will use it to enhance their video :-), MS even release (and to some extend discontinue) more freeware than ever before. All start to shift to services as the main revenue. However company such Autodesk (arguably monopolize 3D, CAD and DCC) may continue sell outrageously and less affected by declined PC demand so does Game publisher. With more commercial turned to freeware and more HQ opensource software available, these freebies will give commercial offering hard time in the future.

Cloud software is no less susceptible to conspiracy especially those company who own *both* online apps and browser technology (Adobe got AIR/Flash). They keep pushing the limit on their own pace, deprecating others on the way. Make sure the users believe they should make a switch and they bloat the software as they bloat their online apps so that hardware maker can make super computer solution for our colorful online "experience". It's the same business pattern again, won't be surprised if there would be a leaner and more standard solution by OSS but right now LibreOffice is busy conquering the traditional market.

Sometime we often forgot that most of the tasks we do are basically the same, only how we doing it that changed. Who knows if the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" will become louder? but generation always have their times, I meant nowadays it rather non-sense to ask youngsters if they can operate PC when they had android/iPhone to begin with. In world-wide context the kind of technology (tablet, smartphone or traditional PC) being adopted will get more diverse than ever, depends on what they can afford.
 

09 December 2015

How to repack Visual Studio 2010 Express for SVCPACK installation

VS 2010 is the last for XP so I want to have convenient up-to-date package that I can slipstream into XP iso.
Firstly this post http://www.itninja.com/question/visual-studio-2010-express have all the ingredient for us to cook. Lets go!

- Extract all Ixp*.exe file with 7zip (ignore the warning).
- Make admin installer from each extracted vs_setup.msi (msiexec /a)
- Edit each of administrative version of vs_setup.msi with Orca:
  - Remove CA*LaunchCondition in all Install*Sequence tables (to allow running and updating)
  - Remove *SETUP entries from all Feature* tables (to remove copy of the whole cabinet installer)
  - Remove entries with CSETUPMM directory from Component table
  - Replace PIDKEY in Property table with your serial (without hyphens)
  - In Registry table find "UninstallString" (on first occurrence) and replace value of "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\[ProductName]" with "MsiExec.exe /X[ProductCode] "also remove its "UninstallPath" entry
- Save your edited vs_setup.msi
- Now you can remove all files in root except vs_setup.msi and remove CSETUPMM folder from "Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0"
- Apply all applicable updates (SP1, etc) into vs_setup.msi (use the *msp file from VS10SP1*.exe )

Beware about your OS situation (.NET version, MSI, etc) cause after this you're on your own.

In my test compressing all (C++, C#, VB, Web Developer and its dependencies) with 7zip produce just about 150MB! Quite a saving eh

Edit:
- After merging patches we need to reset the package-code (Orca View > Summary) with the original one (and change the description as well if you wish)

29 June 2015

SWFDec Windows

Not to be confused with SWFDec = SWF Decompiler, this one is decoder http://swfdec.freedesktop.org. And it is not that I interested in the player itself (Flash will soon die) but rather the fact that it use cairo canvas so it can export its rendered scene to SVG/PDF easily.

Swfdec itself need little patch for Windows because of its local file URI mangling. This tool is the inverse of svg2swf and based on existing swfdec-thumbnailer (swfdec-gnome). It still ongoing, I want to make it more like rsvg-convert plus ability to set particular timeline to snap but at moment it just convert flash movie up to version 7 (version 8 or 9 may crashed) into pdf, ps, png or svg. The final version would be included in the Converter homepage here.

Command: swfdec-convert [-s minimum width/height] input output
Download: swfdec-convert.exe 1.6 Mb

24 June 2015

Windows version of djvudigital

Long time no write.. didn't meant I'm not around. This post is yet another prove that I'm a faithful Windows user :-). Admittedly I have using Windows 8.1 for months now, and damn what a buggy explorer!

You probably heard about djvu format about 5 years ago. But it kinda failed to gain momentum against the venerable PDF. Despite its rather simple (or rather "sufficient") feature, it meant to be less malice format than PDF.

Djvudigital has been around with no cmd batch port... its Ghostscript driver also a bit controversial (for linux zealot). But in this windows world anything is good as long as it apparently works. duh

This batch of djvudigital is converted into exe for convenience and will act just like batch file (aka it *need* cmd) see "BAT to EXE" page for info. It not complete port of bash version but parameters is the same as linux one, note:  it doesn't do sanity check of the Ghostscript executable whether it support djvu or not.

Requirements:
- Ghostscript with djvusep device
- Csepdjvu (part of djvulibre)
- and off course working CMD
- optionally gzip or 7za/7z

Installation:
Put all executables above in the same directory as djvudigital, you may put it in your PATH environment so you can called it anywhere. Type djvudigital --help for manual

Download:
djvudigital.exe 83 Kb

I've been using/abusing online-convert.com for a while for on-the-fly 'downversion' stuff from the internet, but no djvu there.