Random Rants & Raves

Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 is now available at MSDN, Technet and Connect. If you have access to any of these, go and download the RC - NOW.

Also, while you’re there, don’t forget to pick up the latest version of the VPC product called Windows Virtual PC. It’s got ton of new stuff over VPC2007. 

Well, it’s official now. Release Candidate 1 of Windows 7 will be available of MSDN/Technet users on April 30th and for the general public on May 5th. There are a ton of changes from the official beta (build 7000) to the RC (build 7100). You can read about many of the changes here and here.

One other major new feature is that the Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows 7 will now have a “free” license of Windows XP along as well. No, it doesn’t mean that you get a Windows XP CD and you get to dual boot with Windows 7.

You use this license in what is known as Windows XP Mode. This lets you install Windows XP in a “virtual” environment and install applications into this virtual environment. You can launch these applications directly from the Windows 7 Start Menu and get the applications running within this virtual XP environment - which means that you have got 100% application compatibility. You can read more about this here. The free XP Mode will be available as a download for the afore mentioned SKUs of Win7. There will also be a new version of Virtual PC being released for Windows 7 with a beta for these coming out at the same time as the RC.

Ever since news broke about the surprising takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, people have started discussing the future of some of the important platforms in this context. This is what I think:

The Future of Java

Oracle is not traditionally a framework platform company. Sun, on the other hand, is the creator of one of the most widely used application frameworks – Java. So what happens once this takeover is done?

• Oracle continues innovating in Java: This is fairly possible – however may be unlikely. After all for Oracle, Java is more of a application platform that they use rather than something they contribute to.
• Oracle kills off Java slowly: This is very unlikely as they do have something that is used by a large number in the developer community and is also a competitor to Microsoft’s .NET.
• Oracle makes Java completely open source under the GPL*: this is something that I see as very likely. Not only will they win a ton of brownie points with the FOSS folks, but to a great extent get rid of the development and maintenance overhead of keeping Java fully internal.

* Java is quite open sourced already. However as the FAQ states, there are still a bunch of things that remain to be opened.

The Future of MySQL

This is where I see more of an issue. After all, MySQL was a competitor in the same space (or at least, that’s what MySQL followers claim). So will Oracle continue to develop and support MySQL? If they do, not only will they have different “divisions” competing with each other in the same space, but also will need to provide an “official” migration path forward.

As I see it, MySQL as a “brand” will probably go away in a couple of years. Oracle will incorporate some of its features into the lower end database platforms it currently offers. Open Source “forks” of the last MySQL version to be released will come up and try to take up the place let vacant by its departure.

Others

Solaris, though now fully open source, has not really got the momentum of something like Linux. And I don’t see Oracle changing that too much. I think Oracle will downplay the Solaris significance and slowly end it mercifully. However…

Sun’s cloud computing initiative on Solaris combined with Java and the Oracle database make it a powerful stack – quite enough to compete with the Amazon and Microsoft Azure platforms.

It’ll be interesting to note the reactions from companies like IBM, HP, Microsoft and others to see what they think of this as well.

Well, after a ton of delays and discussions, the Indian Premier League Season II has finally kicked off in South Africa. The IPL is rated as the biggest and most expensive Cricket league in the world and is watched by not only most Indians but also by most of the cricket playing countries as well.

It was great to see that the IPL official website not just contains all the latest news and live match scores, it also has the matches streamed live as well as archived highlights. And the best part is that the video is shown to you through the Silverlight player.

The player allows you to watch high definition video with almost no buffering and gives an extremely smooth playback. I’m really glad to see that Silverlight is being used in such a way and in something that will ensure that a lot more installs of the Silverlight runtime.

Whether you are a designer or developer, Silverlight is something that you should be looking at seriously. With an established set of credentials (the Olympics, Obama’s presidential inauguration, and many, many more), Silverlight seems to be the future for both Web and Windows based applications.

Update: Added new links and a screenshot of the interactive Silverlight player.

If you use a large LCD HDTV for watching movies you might come across a situation where you might see black bars around your playing video. Vertical bars (pillarboxing) or horizontal bars (letterboxing) are caused by wrong encoding of videos for the aspect ratio of your widescreen television. I was having this issue with a number of older DVDs that I ripped to watch on my HDTV. There are a few different ways to correct these.

Usually the playing device (DVD player, Media Tank, etc.) should take care of this if the encoding has least anamorphic encoding on. If this is not there, you will not see the aspect ration getting corrected automatically.

You can try and re-encode the video using Super or AutoMKV to the correct aspect ratio. This will require a while in case you have a number of videos to correct but will give the best possible conversion.

The third way is probably the easiest – at least when it comes to converting Divx videos. There is a small utility called MPEG4 Modifier that you can download. This utility changes the AVI header to match the widescreen format that you wish. Take a look at the screen below:

  Simply select the Display AR to 16:9 and save

The important thing to remember is to change the DISPLAY ASPECT RATIO and not the PIXEL ASPECT RATIO for the conversion. The PAR changes the aspect ratio of the pixels comprising the video whereas the DAR only changes the header so that the video can be auto-sized in the player.

If you wish to convert a bunch of files, there is a command line version of the application as well available from the same link as above. However, there is one difference between the GUI and console version. The latter doesn’t have an option to modify the DAR, only the PAR.

Since source code is available for both, I downloaded the one for the console app and added the calculations required to use DAR from the GUI version of the app. I take NO credit for any of these calculations – all of it goes to the original author of the program. The program is now compiled in .NET 3.5SP1 for x64. You can now convert an AVI file from the command line like this:

mmcl.exe –-dar 16:9 in.avi out.avi

Simply run the console app to see the different options. You can download the binaries and source code below:

MPEG4 Modifier Console: Source x64 x32 (coming soon)

if you write applications for Windows, you might want to check out the latest release of the Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit v5.5 that has just been released. This finally adds full support for testing your applications on Windows 7. You can also now use the current release of the Microsoft Application Verifier v4.0.665 that allows you to use the Standard User Analyzer bundled with the earlier suite to check your applications for common issues related to the “Standard User” token in Vista and Win7. Make sure you download the build for your machine and OS architecture (x86, AMD64/x64 or IA64) to be able to use it to debug your applications.