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• Running Windows XP In 2016

  2 janvier 2016, par Multimedia Mike

  I have an interest in getting a 32-bit Windows XP machine up and running. I have a really good yet slightly dated and discarded computer that seemed like a good candidate for dedicating to this task. So the question is : Can Windows XP still be installed from scratch on a computer, activated, and used in 2016 ? I wasn’t quite sure since I have heard stories about how Microsoft has formally ended support for Windows XP as of the first half of 2014 and I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.

  Spoiler : It’s still possible to install and activate Windows XP as of the writing of this post. It’s also possible to download and install all the updates published up until support ended.

  The Candidate Computer
  This computer was assembled either in late 2008 or early 2009. It was a beast at the time.

  
  
  Click for a larger image
  

  It was built around the newly-released NVIDIA GTX 280 video card. The case is a Thermaltake DH-101, which is a home theater PC thing. The motherboard is an Asus P5N32-SLI Premium with a Core 2 Duo X6800 2.93 GHz CPU on board. 2 GB of RAM and a 1.5 TB hard drive are also present.

  The original owner handed it off to me because their family didn’t have much use for it anymore (too many other machines in the house). Plus it was really, obnoxiously loud. The noisy culprit was the stock blue fan that came packaged with the Intel processor (seen in the photo) whining at around 65 dB. I replaced the fan and brought the noise level way down.

  As for connectivity, the motherboard has dual gigabit NICs (of 2 different chipsets for some reason) and onboard wireless 802.11g. I couldn’t make the latter work and this project was taking place a significant distance from my wired network. Instead, I connected a USB 802.11ac dongle and antenna which is advertised to work in both Windows XP and Linux. It works great under Windows XP. Meanwhile, making the adapter work under Linux provided a retro-computing adventure in which I had to modify C code to make the driver work.

  So, score 1 for Windows XP over Linux here.

  The Simple Joy of Retro-computing
  One thing you have to watch out for when you get into retro-computing is fighting the urge to rant about the good old days of computing. Most long-time computer users have a good understanding of the frustration that computers keep getting faster by orders of magnitude and yet using them somehow feels slower and slower over successive software generations.
  

  This really hits home when you get old software running, especially on high-end hardware (relative to what was standard contemporary hardware). After I got this new Windows XP machine running, as usual, I was left wondering why software was so much faster a few generations ago.

  Of course, as mentioned, it helps when you get to run old software on hardware that would have been unthinkably high end at the software’s release. Apparently, the minimum WinXP specs as set by MS are a 233 MHz Pentium CPU and 64 MB of RAM, with 1.5 GB of hard drive space. This machine has more than 10x the clock speed (and 2 CPUs), 32x the RAM, and 1000x the HD space. Further, I’m pretty sure 100 Mbit ethernet was the standard consumer gear in 2001 while 802.11b wireless was gaining traction. The 802.11ac adapter makes networking quite pleasant.

  Purpose
  Retro-computing really seems to be ramping up in popularity lately. For some reason, I feel compelled to declare at this juncture that I was into it before it was cool.

  Why am I doing this ? I have a huge collection of old DOS/Windows computer games. I also have this nerdy obsession with documenting old video games in the MobyGames database. I used to do a lot of this a few years ago, tracking the effort on my gaming blog. In the intervening years, I have still collected a lot of old, unused, unloved video games, usually either free or very cheap while documenting my collection efforts on that same blog.

  So I want to work my way through some of this backlog, particularly the games that are not yet represented in the MobyGames database, and even more pressing, ones that the internet (viewed through Google at least) does not seem to know about. To that end, I thought this was a good excuse to get Windows XP on this old machine. A 32-bit Windows XP machine is capable of running any software advertised as supporting Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95, and even 16-bit Windows 3.x (I have games for all these systems). That covers a significant chunk of PC history. It can probably be made to run DOS games as well, but those are (usually) better run under DosBox. In order to get the right display feel, I even invested in a (used) monitor sporting a 4:3 aspect ratio. If I know these old games, most will be engineered and optimized for that ratio rather than the widescreen resolutions seen nowadays.

  I would also like to get back to that Xbox optical disc experimentation I was working on a few years ago. Another nice feature of this motherboard is that it still provides a 40-pin IDE/PATA adapter which makes the machine useful for continuing that old investigation (and explains why I have that long IDE cable to no where pictured hanging off the board).

  The Messy Details
  I did the entire installation process twice. The first time was a bumbling journey of discovery and copious note-taking. I still have Windows XP installation media that includes service pack 2 (SP2), along with 2 separate licenses that haven’t been activated for a long time. My plan was to install it fresh, then install the relevant drivers. Then I would investigate the Windows update and activation issues and everything should be fine.

  So what’s the deal with Windows Update for XP, and with activations ? Second item first : it IS possible to still activate Windows XP. The servers are still alive and respond quickly. However, as always, you don’t activate until you’re sure everything is working at some baseline. It took awhile to get there.

  As for whether Windows Update still works for XP, that’s a tougher question. Short answer is yes ; longer answer is that it can be difficult to kick off the update process. At least on SP2, the “Windows Update” program launches IE6 and navigates to a special microsoft.com URL which initiates the update process (starting with an ActiveX control). This URL no longer exists.

  From what I can piece together from my notes, this seems to be the route I eventually took :

  1. Install Windows XP fresh
  2. Install drivers for the hardware ; fortunately, Asus still has all the latest drivers necessary for the motherboard and its components but it’s necessary to download these from another network-connected PC since the networking probably won’t be running “out of the box”
  3. Download the .NET 3.5 runtime, which is the last one supported by Windows XP, and install it
  4. Download the latest NVIDIA drivers ; this needs to be done after the previous step because the installer requires the .NET runtime ; run the driver installer and don’t try to understand why it insists on re-downloading .NET 3.5 runtime before installation
  5. While you’re downloading stuff on other computers to be transported to this new machine, be sure to download either Chrome or Firefox per your preference ; if you try to download via IE6, you may find that their download pages aren’t compatible with IE6
  6. Somewhere along the line (I’m guessing as a side effect of the .NET 3.5 installation), the proper, non-IE6-based Windows Update program magically springs to life ; once this happens, there will be 144 updates (in my case anyway) ; installing these will probably require multiple reboots, but SP3 and all known pre-deprecation security fixes will be installed
  7. Expect that, even after installing all of these, a few more updates will appear ; eventually, you’ll be at the end of the update road
  8. Once you’re satisfied everything is working satisfactorily, take the plunge and activate your installation

  Residual Quirks
  Steam runs great on Windows XP, as do numerous games I have purchased through the service. So that opens up a whole bunch more games that I could play on this machine. Steam’s installer highlights a curious legacy problem of Windows XP– it seems there are many languages that it does not support “out of the box” :

  
  
  

  It looks like the Chinese options and a few others that are standard now weren’t standard 15 years ago.

  Also, a little while after booting up, I’ll get a crashing error concerning a process called geoforms.scr. This appears to be NVIDIA-related. However, I don’t notice anything obviously operationally wrong with the system.

  Regarding DirectX support, DirectX 9 is the highest version officially supported by Windows XP. There are allegedly methods to get DirectX 10 running as well, but I don’t care that much. I did care, briefly, when I realized that a bunch of the demos for the NVIDIA GTX 280 required DX10 which left me wondering why it was possible to install them on Windows XP.

  Eventually, by installing enough of these old games, I fully expect to have numerous versions of .NET, DirectX, QT, and Video for Windows installed side by side.

  Out of curiosity, I tried playing a YouTube HD/1080p video. I wanted to see if the video was accelerated through my card. The video played at full speed but I noticed some tearing. Then I inspected the CPU usage and noticed that the CPU was quite loaded. So either the GTX 280 doesn’t have video acceleration, or Windows XP doesn’t provide the right APIs, or Chrome is not able to access the APIs in Windows XP, or perhaps some combination of the foregoing.

  Games are working well, though. I tried one of my favorite casual games and got sucked into that for, like, an entire night because that’s what casual games do. But then, I booted up a copy of WarCraft III that I procured sometime ago. I don’t have any experience with the WarCraft universe (RTS or MMO) but I developed a keen interest in StarCraft II over the past few years and wanted to try WarCraft III. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get WarCraft III to work correctly on several different Windows 7 installations (movies didn’t play, which left me slightly confused as to what I was supposed to do).

  Still works beautifully on the new old Windows XP machine.

  The post Running Windows XP In 2016 first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• How to configure and validate a Funnel in Piwik Analytics

  16 janvier 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  In the last blog post we have covered how the conversion Funnel plugin enriches your Piwik experience. This post will focus on how to configure and validate your funnel in Piwik so you get the correct data when you view the funnel reports. When you set up a funnel, it is crucial to have it configured correctly as the funnel report will be only as good as its configuration. When we built this Funnel feature, we focused on making the configuration and validation real simple because it is so important to get it right.

  To recap quickly : A Funnel defines a series of steps that you expect your visitors to take on their way to converting a goal or a sale. Funnels, a premium feature for Piwik developed by InnoCraft, lets you define funnels so you can improve your websites and mobile apps based on this data. Learn more about Funnel.

  Configuring a funnel

  As you will notice Funnels integrates nicely into the Piwik Goals management. You can configure a funnel whenever you create or update a goal. You can access the Goals Management either via “Administration => Goals” or via the reporting menu “Goals => Manage”. Then click on either “Add a new goal” or select an existing goal to edit it. At the bottom of the goal form, you will see a new row letting you configure a funnel. As with all our premium features we focused on displaying lots of inline help and explain directly in the UI what a funnel is about, what the steps are in order to configure a funnel, how a funnel helps you and more. This lets you use the Funnel feature even if you have never created or analyzed a funnel before.

  Preparing your Funnel configuration

  Before starting to configure a Funnel we usually have a brainstorm session identifying the funnels on a website or app and the paths we expect users to take there. Once we have identified each step, we click through those identified pages in our website and we note the URLs for each page as the URLs will be needed when you configure a funnel.

  Setting up a Goal

  Once we have finished the planning phase it is time to log into Piwik. We start by either adding a new goal or selecting an existing goal. If you are unfamiliar with setting up goals, have a look at the Piwik Goals user guide. At the bottom of a goal form when you create or update a goal, you can configure your funnel. The UI will first explain you everything about Funnels, what they are, how they help you and which steps you need to take in order to configure it.

  Configuring Funnel steps

  We start by configuring the steps we have identified in the planning phase. Those are the steps we expect our users to take when they convert a goal or purchase something. Now we need to add a step for each page we expect users to take, each step consists of a name and a pattern.

  The name will be shown to you in the funnel reporting so think of a good name that describes each step best, for example “Product”, “Cart”, “Checkout” and “Order”.

  The pattern is needed to define when a visitor will enter this step. Here it comes in handy to have already notes for each URL from the planning phase. You can select lots of different patterns based on “URL Path”, “URL” and “URL parameter”. For example “URL starts with”, “Path ends with”, “URL contains”, “URL matches the regular expression”, and more. Most tools make this configuration unnecessarily hard because they only allow you to choose from one or two patterns (only complicated pattern like regular expressions) and they don’t let you validate whether the URL you have in mind actually matches the pattern. There are three ways to validate your step configurations.

  

  Validating funnel steps

  When we configure a funnel, we validate our steps in the following three ways.

  1. Via the help icon next to the step configuration

  When you click on the help icon, you will receive valuable tips about configuring steps, what “required” means and how to match popular pages. It will also show you a list of all URLs that were tracked in your Piwik in the past and match your specified pattern. For example say you specify a pattern “Path starts with /products”, then Piwik will list all URLs that were tracked in the past matching this pattern. This lets you validate whether your pattern actually matches the URLs you had in mind. It will also show you if the pattern doesn’t match any known URL which can indicate that your configuration may be wrong.

  

  2. Via the URL validator

  Below the steps configuration you find a form field that lets you enter any URL.

  

  We recommend to enter each URL that you have noted before in the planning phase. Once you enter a URL, the configurations will be validated immediately and the result will be shown to you in the step configuration. When a step matches your specified URL, the background will become green, when a step does not match the URL, the background will be red.

  

  If the URL does not match the expected step, simply change your step configuration and the steps will be re-validated as you change the configuration. This way you will see instantly as soon as you got the configuration right.

  What you don’t want is that either all of your steps don’t match (red background) or that several steps match a certain URL (green background). When several step match one URL, then one visitor might enter several funnel steps on just one page. This usually indicates a problem with the step configuration.

  3. Manual funnel validation

  After we have created or updated the goal (more about this soon), we always test a funnel configuration manually. This means we now open our website and click through the pages that we hand in mind and check afterwards whether the steps we took actually appear in the funnel report as expected. This is just another safety net to make sure your funnel configuration is right.

  It is really crucial to have a correct funnel configuration as otherwise the shown data in the funnel reports might not be as helpful. That’s why we focused so much on making the validation part real easy.

  Activating and saving the funnel

  Once you are happy with your configuration, it is time to activate your funnel. As soon as you activate your funnel, a report for this funnel will be generated and the links and reports for this funnel will be visible in the UI. If you are later no longer interested in the funnel, simply deactivate the funnel so it won’t appear in the reporting UI anymore.

  

  To save your funnel configuration simply click on either “Add goal” or “Update goal”. The funnel will be automatically saved whenever you update your goal.

  Goals Management

  The funnel plugin also enriches the list of goals in the Piwik goal management. At a glance you can see whether a funnel for a goal is configured and activated (green tick in the funnel column), whether a funnel is configured but not activated (grey tick in the funnel column) or whether no funnel is configured for a goal (no tick at all).

  

  How to get Funnels and related features

  You can get Funnels on the Piwik Marketplace. If you want to learn more about Funnels you might be also interested in the Funnel User Guide and the Funnel FAQ.

  Similar to Funnels we also offer Users Flow which lets you visualize the flow of your users and visitors across several interactions.

• Zlib vs. XZ on 2SF

  21 juillet 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General, psf, saltygme, xz, zlib

  I recently released my Game Music Appreciation website. It allows users to play an enormous range of video game music directly in their browsers. To do this, the site has to host the music. And since I’m a compression bore, I have to know how small I can practically make these music files. I already published the results of my effort to see if XZ could beat RAR (RAR won, but only slightly, and I still went with XZ for the project) on the corpus of Super Nintendo chiptune sets. Next is the corpus of Nintendo DS chiptunes.

  Repacking Nintendo DS 2SF
  The prevailing chiptune format for storing Nintendo DS songs is the .2sf format. This is a subtype of the Portable Sound Format (PSF). The designers had the foresight to build compression directly into the format. Much of payload data in a PSF file is compressed with zlib. Since I already incorporated Embedded XZ into the player project, I decided to try repacking the PSF payload data from zlib -> xz.

  In an effort to not corrupt standards too much, I changed the ’PSF’ file signature (seen in the first 3 bytes of a file) to ’psf’.

  Results
  There are about 900 Nintendo DS games currently represented in my website’s archive. Total size of the original PSF archive, payloads packed with zlib : 2.992 GB. Total size of the same archive with payloads packed as xz : 2.059 GB.

  Using xz vs. zlib saved me nearly a gigabyte of storage. That extra storage doesn’t really impact my hosting plan very much (I have 1/2 TB, which is why I’m so nonchalant about hosting the massive MPlayer Samples Archive). However, smaller individual files translates to a better user experience since the files are faster to download.

  Here is a pretty picture to illustrate the space savings :

  
  
  

  The blue occasionally appears to dip below the orange but the data indicates that xz is always more efficient than zlib. Here’s the raw data (comes in vanilla CSV flavor too).

  Interface Impact
  So the good news for the end user is that the songs are faster to load up front. The downside is that there can be a noticeable delay when changing tracks. Even though all songs are packaged into one file for download, and the entire file is downloaded before playback begins, each song is individually compressed. Thus, changing tracks triggers another decompression operation. I’m toying the possibility of some sort of background process that decompresses song (n+1) while playing song (n) in order to help compensate for this.

  I don’t like the idea of decompressing everything up front because A) it would take even longer to start playing ; and B) it would take a huge amount of memory.

  Corner Case
  There was at least one case in which I found zlib to be better than xz. It looks like zlib’s minimum block size is smaller than xz’s. I think I discovered xz to be unable to compress a few bytes to a block any smaller than about 60-64 bytes while zlib got it down into the teens. However, in those cases, it was more efficient to just leave the data uncompressed anyway.