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It's been a while since I've posted on this blog. This time, I will not be talking about bluetooth, but still about some .NET powered code :)

I've been busy lately, but I've found some time to work on something that will help me a lot, and I think a lot of Windows Mobile users and mobile users in general.

Montreal's Bus network is somehow large, but its representation in the digital world is quite poor, and inexistent when talking about mobile internet. The web site in question is generating some quite large pages and is not suited for mobile web browsing.

Most of the time, you may want to know the schedule of the next bus, and this is quite hard to get this way.

There's been some effort lately to offer this kind of service on the iPhone, but I wanted to give the opportonity to other users to have the same information, with some Geo Localization features.

This is where google gears comes into action, where their latest release offers a Geo-Location API, which approximates a position using the nearest GSM cells location. Unfortunately, it only works on Windows Mobile devices. But don't worry, if you don't have a Gears enable device, it will still work ! You'll only have to type a bit, by entering your streets intersection.

After getting that location, I'm querying a database (using Linq to SQL) to get the nearest Bus Stops and their next schedule. I'm also querying Google Maps to get some markers pointing at the bus stops. That can be helpful since the Geo-Location is only an approximation by nature, because of the GSM 'triangulation'. It can also be used to query the schedule of a specific bus stop, using the number placed at the bottom of the bus stop signs. A small plus here, compared to the original site, is that schedules from the past half hour are still visible, making possible to have determine if a bus has missed its schedule using a great long street.

Anyway, if you're in Montreal and have an internet connected device (or a normal PC), give it a try by connecting to this adress : http://jaylee.org/stm

Any comments or suggestions are welcome !

I've been interrogating myself a lot lately about the current state of mobile internet in Canada. I'm using my cell phone with a 25$ a month (excluding taxes) data plan for 5 Megabytes, which makes it almost useless for web browsing. Besides, using an HSDPA cell phone, I would deplete my data plan in about 5 minutes.

There's been a lot of buzz around the price of Canada data plans and the absence of the iPhone in Canada for the past year. Projections showed that using an iPhone would cost something like 300$ a month with data plans comparable to what AT&T is offering. I'm guessing that noone would be interested in paying that much to have a 500MB almost unlimited data plan. It seems that Rogers is not willing to let go of the current data plan rates to offer a service that appropriate to the iPhone.

I'm new to the Canadian environment, but for what I can tell when I sometimes hear that Canadians are not really into cell phones -- that they can live without it and do not really need it -- I have an impression of 'déjà vu'. French people had this kind of state of mind when there were only two carriers. People at that time also though they did not need cell phones. Except that it was not that they were technophics, it only was because it was darn too expensive !!

Now, prices in france have dropped a lot, and people are using a lot of services offered by the cell phone carriers. I'm insisting on the services word because I'm sensing that this is where canadians carriers are shooting themselves in the foot by only focusing on being "data pipes". They could expand their business by offering services that would be far more lucrative than only conveying data or voice. If I consider my own use of the voice plan, knowing that the person I am calling is paying the call when he did not initiate the call, makes me talk less.

Ok, there were some improvements the past few months, which Mark is pointing out, but which seem to have halted. Bell released a 7$/month plan which made Canada coming from the most expensive country for data plans to the less expensive in the world, which is a bit odd. With a twist though, it's HTC Touch only. The rest of "improvements" are crippled data plans that are only interesting if you're willing to use the internet that existed 10 years ago...

I'm guessing that breaking the monopoly will change the current state, and that the bidding for new frequencies will force existing carriers to lower their prices to keep their customer base. This is one bit of a stretch, but I'm comparing the state of the industry to the bad phase the music and movie industry is going through right now... There are now forced to understand that they can't sell their music as a product but as a service if they want to keep their business going.

The cell phone industry can be forced to do so to keep their customers, if some newcomer is not playing by the established rules by giving for instance, a flat rate of 45$/month, everything included. I'm not giving this example randomly; I'm referring to the French ISP Free.fr which made quite a perturbation when they offered for something like 45$ a month 100 TV channels, free phone calls to 100 countries in the world, 25Mbps internet, Wifi access point, and a lot more. All this with an excellent quality of service. They did not play by the established rules, and they are now the second most important player in the market and growing every day. I do not see any reason this would not happen for cell phone carriers the same way it did in France.

But maybe there is a good reason for all this though... Canada's a big "empty" space, and maybe expanding the cell coverage is not as money efficient as it is in France, or USA. I don't know all the details, so maybe I'm missing some things.

We'll see in the next few months...

This is one of the biggest missing features of VPC 2007, the lack of USB passthrough support. The lack of a proper snapshot feature is annoying too, even though it is possible to move Undo Disks to simulate snapshots. But I still prefer VPC 2007 over VMWare, mainly because I find the latter to be too intrusive and unstable...

Anyway, I was looking for any update to VPC 2007 for the support of USB devices, in one form or another, maybe with a beta VPC 2008 or 2009. This is still not happening but, I came across this software, Usb over Network, which does exactly what I need to do.

This software is particularly easy to install, and it works right after being installed. I'm able to "export" my integrated USB Bluetooth dongle to the VPC, and it works like a charm ! I'm able to run both bluetooth stacks in controlled environments, without crippling my main OS with multiple stacks.

A really nice software, not free, but really useful if you're depending on USB hardware and you want to test it in a virtual environment.

There's been a lot of Buzz lately about a "Windows Workstation 2008", which actually does not quite exist, but that should. It is actually installing Windows Server 2008 and making it a workstation platform, by enabling every workstation component that is disabled by default.

From my point of view, Vista is definitely interesting, though it has too many services that are enabled by default and that do not make sense in every situation. For a computer savvy user, all this stuff is not really interesting, and Windows Server 2008 with its "do not enable unused components" policy, is quite interesting.

I decided to give it a shot by installing it as my main (and only) laptop OS, and quite frankly, I'm pleasantly surprised ! I do get the same user experience that I did have with Windows Vista with Aero, the nifty new features like the new start menu, and I seem to get a performance improvement over Vista. (Performance improvement is only a feeling; I don't have any numbers to show, though some did).

Everything works as expected, except for the bluetooth part, for which I do not seem to be the only one having problem with. The microsoft stack does not seem to install completely, as there are three "unknown devices" left : BTH\MS_RFCOMM, BTH\MS_BTHBRB and BTH\MS_BTHPAN. All three of them are core components of the bluetooth stack, and are obiously needed to get bluetooth related software working properly. The interesting part is that there are actually all the driver and metadata files required to install these devices, but for some reason, Win2008 does not want to use them. The driver files seem to be identical to the files Vista SP1, so this is one bit of a mystery to me. Added to that, this installation issue seems to be related to the KB940199 where the infcache.1 file could not be found. Screwing with that file did not help either...

So as a backup plan, I decided to fall back on the Widcomm/Broadcom Stack with this guide, which seems to work fine, at least for the part I'm interested in, Bluetooth Remote Control . I still don't understand the licensing policy on this software... You need the hardware to get that software to work, why bother having an licensing scheme over this, haven't you already paid for it buying the hardware ?

Anyway, if you're a tech savvy user, give Windows Server 2008 a try as your workstation OS, you might be surprised :)

Now, I'm going back to adding new features to Bluetooth Remote Control !

C++, my almost favorite language. This language had good intentions, really. But this is such a pain -- a  pit of despair -- to have to deal with library compatibility and compilation parameters matching issues, where it should be handled by the system.

Anyway, if you're trying to use the Broadcom Bluetooth SDK for Windows CE with VS2005 or VS2008, you might encounter this pretty message :

error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "__declspec(dllimport) public: int __cdecl CRfCommIf::SetSecurityLevel(wchar_t *,unsigned char,int)" (__imp_?SetSecurityLevel@CRfCommIf@@QAAHPA_WEH@Z)

The symbol actually exists in the broadcom provided library (BtSdkCE30.lib or BtSdkCE30.lib)  but is defined like this :

SetSecurityLevel@CRfCommIf@@QAAHPAGEH@Z

which, undecorated, means :

int CRfCommIf::SetSecurityLevel(unsigned short *,unsigned char,int)

See the difference ? The wchar_t type the compiler is using should be an unsigned short. Basically, both types are binary equivalents but the compiler is treating them as different, hence the different signature.

To fix this, just set the option "Treat wchar_t as Built-in Type" to No.

This way, the wchar_t will go back to being a short, and then match the method built in the static library.

I'm going back to my C# code, now.

Alex Ionescu's been searching a bit about Protected Processes, and he's managed to get around that protected state.

I'm no expert on that part nor have I read enough documentation on how that works, but since a goal of that particular feature is the "Protected Media Path" (PMP) to prevent anyone from eavesdropping a protected media, this is not good.

Since that implementation is based on a driver, that won't work on Vista 64, well, as long as you don't boot in that particular mode that allows you to load unsigned drivers. That's a good news for malware protection, since a virus shoud not be able to hide itself under normal conditions, but this is not for PMP. It seems that protected processes can check for a "tainted" environment, but how long is it going to take for someone to fool programs into thinking the system is clean... ? As always, that won't prevent evil dvd rippers to copy the media... but that'll piss a legitimate user.

Moreover, since it is easily possible in Vista 32, as alex is pointing it out, it probably won't take long for viruses to hide themselves using this technique and just a bit longer for antiviruses to unprotected any running process.

What a mess :)

Among the many hidden new features of vista which belong to the category of "why didn't they do this in the first place", there is the new and improved support for displays and external displays in particular for a laptop.

In Windows XP, when you were attaching a display to your laptop, the resolution (and color depth) used was attached to the physical port, not to the display itself. So if you were moving around a lot with your laptop attaching many displays with many different resolutions, you had to reconfigure each time.

Vista's way is a bit different since the resolution and color depth are now attached to each specific display, and are automatically recalled upon connecting the cable. Now, when you attach a display, you can hear the "device connected" sound, the same used when connecting an USB device or PCMCIA card.

This also goes along with the presentation mode which allows to hide your trolling background when hosting a presentation. This is particularly useful at Epitech :)

Jean-Michel Hervé, aka TuO, has left us yesterday. I've worked with him a few times during my demomaking years when I was an active member of Orion, and I had a lot of respect for the guy.

He was a particularly gifted coder, and will be remembered for many things like the excellent VIP2 invitation demo released in June 2000 when he was a member of the PoPsY TeAm. Lately, he was working in lyon as a developer at Eden Games.

Rest in peace, my friend.

If you follow the news surrounding Windows Vista, this must not be a surprise for you but, Vista's commercial offer can be quite confusing. Confusing enough for jokes to surface like these two here and there.

Of course, Paul's trying to explain it simple enough by breaking down version features, but I'm not sure that end real end user's going to get it. Plus, if you add the OEM/Retail differenciation, that confuses it a bit more. And I too don't know which version I'm going to get...

Anyway, with "upgraders" the biggest problem for Vista is that there is no "gotta get" feature, but reather a myriad of features that are worth looking into but that are not visible at first sight.

One that is definitely not visible at first sight is SuperFetch, which actually has no UI. This one's tweaking your computer by trying to guess what you'll be doing next and prefetch files that you'll probably need. All that based on your computer usage. Obviously, if it is based on comptuer usage, and you just look at it for 2 hours, you're not going to get the best out of it. And this one's pretty effective.

So, my advice for people in that position, just give it a try and don't tell yourself  "Oh yeah, right... that's Windows XP with a fancy UI, that's all...", that's not the way to go.

Just my two cents...

Vista's new reliability monitor is kind of great when you want check on your computer's overall performance. You get an index from 0 to 10 giving an overall performance rating of the system, which seems to be pretty accurate for what I can tell so far. It tracks hardware failures, software failures, windows failures, software (un)installs and some other failures, then gives you an index based on that info.

Actually, on a developer machine, this is a little biaised because any exception you raise from any of your program ends up lowering the index. That should invite you not to let unhandled exceptions exiting your programs... :)

Anyway, a few days ago, I went to look at that index and found that the only history I had was on the 01/01/1970... Rings any bell ? :)

Well, if you ever encounter this particular problem in case vista's not detecting that by itself and resets its database, just go there :

%ProgramData%\Microsoft\RAC

and remove the two directories that should be there. The Reliability monitor should detect it and restart just fine.