Play FLAC with Windows Media Player

Just tried out the xiph.org DirectShow plugin to play some FLAC in Windows Media Player.  Seemed to work for playback but I’m not sure how to do tag editing yet.

Windows MultiPoint Mouse SDK

While I’m not a huge fan of thin client type solutions like the MultiPoint server  the Windows MultiPoint Mouse SDK seems like it has some possibilities. The tic-tac-toe sample in the SDK is pretty fun. Would probably add some fun to other simple desktop games if they supported multiple mice. 

You can also get the SDK as a Visual Studio 2010 Extension.

Log Parser Charts on 64-bit Windows Boxes

I need to generate some charts from Windows Event Log files on a couple of 64-bit Win2008 and Win7 boxes and got the following error from Log Parser:

LogParser.exe : Error creating output format "CHART": This output format requires a licensed Microsoft Office Chart Web Component to be installed on the local machine

A quick web search revealed that Log Parser requires a copy Microsoft Office Web Components (OWC) to generate charts. I downloaded a copy, installed, and Log Parser started producing charts. 

The OWC install includes some programming references that can be located with the help of KB319793.  The documentation is in “C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Components\10\1033” on my Win7 x64 box. Or you can check out the ChartSpace Object Model documentation on MSDN.

After spelunking the LogParser and OWC docs it appears OWC supports GIF, JPG and PNG output. Unfortunately,  LogParser only supports GIF and JPG charts. I’d really prefer a scalable vector format.

HDMI CEC interface for PC

The state of HDMI Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) interfaces for PCs seems pretty dismal.  Neither ATI or nVidia currently have CEC support built into their graphics devices with HDMI interfaces.  So you can’t directly send or receive CEC data over the CEC-line (pin 13/17).
One bright spot is the RainShadow HDMI-CEC to USB bridge/converter.  Supposedly it’s also been hacked into a regular video card.  While it's not a direct HDMI CEC interface for a PC a Raspberry Pi with Pulse-Eight's libCEC could provide control over a network connection.

Classic DOS and Windows games…

Well if you’re pining for the glory days of DOS games go get D-Fend Reloaded (a great DOSBox front-end).  Then head over to RGB Classic Games. 

Or you could check out GOG.com for some classic DOS and Windows games at a reasonable price.

Convert Apple Disk Image (.dmg) to ISO Image (.iso)

Found a couple of ways to turn a Apple Disk Image (.dmg) into an ISO Image (.iso).  First was dmg2img, second was DMGExtractor.  I ended up using DMGExtractor probably because the author posted the source at SourceForge.

I wanted to use the GUI interface so I added the –gui flag to the Windows Batch file in the bin directory.

@echo off setlocal set DMGX_CP="%~dp0..\lib\dmgextractor.jar" java -cp %DMGX_CP% org.catacombae.dmgextractor.DMGExtractor -startupcommand dmgx -gui %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 endlocal

Create 32-bit ODBC DSN on 64-bit Windows

Needed to create a 32-bit compatible ODBC DSN to output Log Parser results from a 64-bit version of Windows to a MySQL instance.
Log Parser gave me an architecture mismatch error:

Error connecting to ODBC Server   SQL State:     IM014   Native Error:  0   Error Message: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] The specified DSN contains   an architecture mismatch between the Driver and Application

NOTE: Log Parser did not work well with the more modern 32-bit version 5.1 ODBC Connector so I had to use the 32-bit version 3.51 ODBC Connector.
Then used the [WindowsDir]\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe to create a 32-bit System DSN. (See the MS KB942976 for more detail.)
And finally, started pushing event logs into the MySQL database with the DSN created above.  (Where X is the server name and XXX is the DSN name.)

LogParser “SELECT * INTO Events FROM *.evtx” –server:X –i:EVT –o:SQL –dsn:XXX –fixColNames:ON –maxStrFieldLen:2048

Or if you prefer from PowerShell. (Where X is the server name and XXX is the DSN name.)

dir *.evtx | foreach-object {LogParser “SELECT * INTO Events FROM ‘$_.’” –server:X –i:EVT –o:SQL –dsn:XXX –fixColNames:ON –maxStrFieldLen:2048}

I used the PowerShell option because the event logs were rather large (~500K events each) so the connector kept running out of RAM with the *.evtx source.  Also, I needed a specific timeframe from the event logs so I added a where clause to get:

dir *.evtx | foreach-object {LogParser “SELECT * INTO Events FROM '$_.' WHERE TimeGenerated > TIMESTAMP('2010-07-05 00:00:00','yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss') AND TimeGenerated < TIMESTAMP('2010-07-21 00:00:00','yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss')” –server:X –i:EVT –o:SQL –dsn:XXX –fixColNames:ON –maxStrFieldLen:2048}