Quietly, and without much fanfare, nerds.de released an updated version of LoopBe30, a virtual MIDI patchcable driver, which now supports 64-bit operating systems, such as Vista 64 and XP 64.

Users of 64-bit operating systems have been getting the middle finger from many audio companies (such as these guys, although recently they have taken a slightly softer approach). It is/was really short-sighted, because 64-bit operating systems are, in general, higher performance and can address more RAM, which are both monumentally important to audio production. It doesn't matter that audio width greater than 32-bits provides little more (no perceptible) clarity than 32-bit. That is not the issue. If the OS has less overhead and greater bandwidth, more registers, and more RAM, the entire system will be faster, releasing resource pressure for the audio application, leading to overall higher performance. These guys understood and were the first to fully embrace 64-bit computing. Good for them.

Whoa, I went on a rant there. Sorry. The point of this post is to introduce you to the first (that I know of) 64-bit version of a virtual midi patchcable. What the heck does that do? It allows you to pipe midi-enabled software and hardware through multiple chains of midi within your computer. A good example is to pipe your sequencer's output through the mighty, mighty Midi-Ox, which will send the signal out your interface's midi-out to your hardware device.

Now 64-bitters can join the party! It's a niche market, for sure, but it's important when you rely on it!

It's worth noting that developing a 64-bit driver is not trivial because Microsoft requires that all 64-bit drivers be signed, which takes time and money, working with MS's quality labs, to make sure it won't crash the operating system and follows "best practices" set up by MS (a good thing). Thankfully, nerds.de took the time to do it.

I'll give a review of LoopBe30 in a later post. This is just to announce it's release! The big question for me? Will it work with the old school 32-bit Midi-Ox (another powerful program that refuses to make the jump to 64-bit at this point).

By default, ostensibly for security purposes, Microsoft makes it very difficult to modify folder permissions on C:\Windows\Tasks -- the "Scheduled Tasks" folder. You'll notice there is no security or sharing tab in the properties of this folder. The only way to modify it is to use CACLS.EXE, XCACLS.EXE, or XCACLS.VBS, or a similar program which manipulates the NTFS permission flags directly. This is not really the ideal way to do it. It's much easier to use Explorer's view, so you can be sure of the permissions you are assigning, without messing up other permissions.

I found a fairly reasonable work-around for this problem. It's a multi-step process, but it is worth the trouble. Although command line operations with CACLS is still required, you can use the Explorer interface to assign the new permissions before applying them to the Tasks folder.

Be VERY cautious when following these steps, or you may inadvertently open up serious security holes -- there IS a reason Microsoft locks this folder down tightly.

1. Open a command prompt.

2. Type

XCOPY C:\WINDOWS\TASKS c:\TASKPERM /s /e /k /o

This will copy the tasks folder, in its entirety, including permissions and attributes. This essentially gives you a "mirrored" version of the scheduled tasks at C:\TASKPERM. It is probably not necessary to copy the tasks within the "Tasks" folder (the /S flag does this), but I like to be complete. :-)

3. Go to Windows Explorer and modify the ACL of C:\TASKPERM to suit your needs. Remember that if the user/group you are assigning permissions to should not be able to modify ALL tasks, it is important to set the "Apply To" attribute to "This folder only."

4. Back at the command prompt, type

CACLS C:\TASKPERM /S

Select the SDDL string (the stuff between the quotes) into the clipboard. Since the command prompt does not support line-wrapping text copy, you may have to post a larger string into notepad, and then trim out the stuff on either side of the quotes. You only want the bare SDDL string in the clipboard.

5. Type

CACLS C:\WINDOWS\TASKS /S:

...replacing/pasting the part with the SDDL string you put into the clipboard in step 4 -- do not include quotes.

6. Test!

7. Delete the C:\TASKPERM folder.

Not too bad, right? If you screw up your C:\WINDOWS\TASKS folder, the default ACL for Windows Server 2003 is D:P(A;OICIIO;FA;;;CO)(A;;0x1200ab;;;BO)(A;;0x1200ab;;;SO)(A;OICI;FA;;;BA)(A;OICI;FA;;;SY)

CD Baby has finished setting up my CD for sale. You can now buy it at the following link for the low, low price of $10.95: http://cdbaby.com/cd/avianwaves.

Unbelievably, I've already sold a copy, before any promotion. I think I like this CD Baby thing...

In case you haven't noticed, I have a thing for birds. I just read this article on Yahoo (happened upon it by accident, like most things on the internets) about how a new avian species was just discovered. It's wonderful to read about new species being discovered when so many other species are going extinct every day.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080314/sc_nm/bird_indonesia_dc

I am writing an application for Windows Mobile 5/6 that needs to enumerate all running processes on the system (in order to find the main window handle of another program). I found example code on MSDN here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446560.aspx. Half the time it works and half the time it gives me the "Unable to create snapshot" exception.

Well, it turns out the problem has to do with flags being sent to the CreateToolhelp32Snapshot function in toolhelp.dll. I found a great blog post on how to fix it here: http://nativemobile.blogspot.com/2006/01/k-jam-and-toolhelp.html. The author did this to fix a bug for K-Jam (HTC Wizard) phones, but the problem happens at least also on my Sprint Mogul (HTC Mogul/Titan) phone and I suspect other WM5 or WM6 devices.

As a side note, for some reason the developer of the MSDN sample code stores the PID of the process in a property he calls "handle." Do not be confused as I was at first. This is NOT the window handle (hWnd). It is actually the PID of the process! And he stores it in an IntPtr to make it even more confusing (even though he always uses it as the casted "int" value). To get the window handle (if you need it), you have to use the managed .Net "Process" class like this:

Dim p As ToolHelp.Process = ToolHelp.Process.GetProcesses(0)
Dim hWnd as IntPtr = Process.GetProcessById(p.handle.toInt32).MainWindowHandle

The SNOCAP store on the front page and the MySpace page is currently offline as new MP3s are validated by SNOCAP and come online. In support of the new album release, I've re-encoded ALL singles from the self-titled album using LAME. I used the original 96Khz/24bit masters as the input files and used LAME's "extreme" quality option, which uses variable bitrate compression for maximum quality. The files are a little bit bigger, but none exceed 16 MB (and that's two songs in one file: Out of Darkness + Toward the Light). Price is 99 cents per song (the usual cost).

Note for DJs: The SNOCAP singles are not cross-faded together (except for Out of Darkness + Toward the Light, which were recorded together and so are not easy to break apart), like on the retail CD. I have my artistic vision and all that for the album, but the SNOCAP singles can be arranged however you want. That makes these singles ideal for radio/club play.

Coming soon: Ring tones!

So you painstakingly set up your Quick Access Toolbar preferences in every Office 2007 application to your liking. You have your favorite shortcuts for composing Outlook emails, setting up charts in Excel documents, and your obscure not-so-easy-to-get-to-in-the-Ribbon formatting control in Word. But now you have to set it all up again at home. There has to be an easier way!

Well, the officially supported way is to fire up Windows Easy Transfer or the User State Migration Tool, since Office 2007 defers settings transfers to those tools instead still offering the greatly missed "File and Settings Transfer Wizard" made famous in Office 2003. But both of those methods require (A) administrative access and (B) a lot of time. Maybe just setting it up again is easier...

Well it's not! The easiest way to transfer the Quick Access Toolbar from one computer to another is simply copying a few files in your Application Data folder. Here are the locations:

XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\*.qat

Vista:
C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\*.qat

Simply copy the QAT file associated with the application (or form) you want the customized quick access toolbar for from your source computer to your destination. Done!

Additionally, if you are interested in exporting other settings (kids: don't try this at home), HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0 contains a wealth of settings that are ripe for exporting and importing. However, DON'T WRITE OVER THE "Registration" KEY! If you do, you will invalidate your Office Activation and you might have trouble reactivating it.

Well it took forever and a day, but the Avian Waves CDs are now in my hot little hands. Once I get some mailed off to CD Baby, they will be available for purchase! Now I just have to figure out how to market them so I can, you know, make a little money here and there...

This is absolutely frightening.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/28/chief-justice-roberts-defends-exxon/

To my readers not in the USA, Chief Justice Roberts serves on the U.S. Supreme Court and was appointed by President Bush. For him to worry more about the bottom line of a multinational corporation MORE than a previously pristine environmental habitat shows EXACTLY what is wrong with American politics in the 21st century. This sums it up better than anything else I can possibly think of. And this tool gets to serve on the court until he (1) decides to retire or (2) dies. He's only 53, so he's a long way away from either.

I was installing XP on a virtual machine recently and ran into a problem while installing the Windows Genuine Advantage update. Basically, it starts the update, then tells you WgaNotify setup canceled (sic). See below...

I then searched the google, but (surprisingly) found more help from the Live Search this time. From a site I found there, I got a link to the manual WGA installer.

When Microsoft Update doesn't work, sometimes the manual installer gives you more clues about why it is crashing. However, it just threw the same error with no additional clues (not even in the Event Viewer).

Well, nobody I could find on the google or the live search posted anything else helpful, so it was time to dig into this mystery on my own.

Acting on a gut feeling that it might be permissions related, despite being a fresh install of XP, I fired up SysInternal's ProcMon. I ran the setup again while capturing all activity. I then searched for Access Denied error messages and found this...

That looks promising! I fired up regedit and looked at that registry key. Sure enough, I had no permissions to write to that key...

I added "full control" for local administrators, re-ran the manual WGA installer and it worked! Mystery solved.