From Private Browsing to Sandbox Browsing

Private browsing is a great feature, but I do feel it can be quite limiting.  It concerns me greatly how many websites track what you do and share that information.  It seem everywhere I go, Facebook sits in an IFRAME showing me what friends have read the article that I am currently reading.  For a few months now, I have been splitting up my web browsing experience.  I have both Firefox and Chrome installed on my laptop.  I use Firefox to access Facebook and a few trusted websites.  I use Chrome for most other sites.  I use Chrome's Incognito mode when I price compare for things like airline tickets (I have heard they jack up the price if they detect that you are shopping around).  This pseudo-sandboxing allows me to keep Facebook away from all the sites that track using Facebook.  I use Firefox to implement the sandbox because Chrome only supports two modes, remember everything and forget everything.  What I really want is two different "remember everything" zones that don't know about each other.  Websites rendered in Chrome cannot see the Firefox Facebook cookie.

What I want is the ability to sandbox websites so that I choose which sites see which cookies.  This is similar to Incognito mode, except the browser doesn't forget everything that happened.  I would keep Facebook in its own sandbox, since a lot of sites like to integrate with it.  I don't like how I go on a site and an Amazon appears displaying something I was pricing out on Amazon, so I would keep Amazon in its own sandbox.  I would keep all my Google accounts in one sandbox.  This level of sandboxing would allow users to control which sites got to see which cookies.  Advertisers would still be able to track some of your activity, but your private information can be secured.

I haven't figured out how to manage the user interface for this feature.  How do you know which sandbox the tab you currently in belongs to?  Do you put a customizable icon somewhere?  Do you use border colors?  How do you choose which sandbox to use when you open a new tab?  Would it be better to assign a website to a specific sandbox?

This is something that Chrome might be able to support with relative ease.  Since Firefox still doesn't support having a private browsing session while having a regular session open, I don't think Firefox can easily support this feature.  With this feature, you give users a tool to enhance security and prevent tracking without turning tracking completely off.  Users can create as many sandboxes or zones as they want.

The Disappearing Used market

The greatest threat to the media market is the used media market.  That is what publishers think.  It is not piracy.  It is not recession.  It is the second hand market.  Because of this, we are slowly losing the right to buy and sell used material.  The first major example was the e-book revolution.  The e-book revolution promised consumers cheaper books, because the entire manufacturing step was removed.  It promised vast libraries of books on a tiny device that you can take with you anywhere.  Neither of those things came true, though.

E-books cost the same as the physical book.  The DoJ is currently going after book publishers because of this fact.  They were colluding to keep book prices higher.  Second, you can't sell back the book or give it to a friend.  My wife's grandmother would buy a book.  After reading it, she would give it to my mother-in-law.  After she read it, she would give it to my wife.  With e-books, they can no longer do that.  Since e-books are not cheaper, you don't have the ability to buy a vast collection of books.  Your e-collection ends up being smaller than the physical collection you would have had.  Your book budget doesn't increase just because you went digital.  If anything, it decreases because you had to pay for the e-book reader.  The only people I know with a vast book collection downloaded the books via alternative means.

A rumor has been circulating that the to-be-released Xbox 720 will lock game discs to the console that you own.  This doesn't just attack the used game market, it destroys it.  This is a major attack on the First Sale Doctrine.  This "feature" kills console gaming for me.  I think this will decrease game sales drastically.  With sports titles, the gamers who buy the newest games pay for the new games by selling the old versions to a second set of gamers: the ones that don't need the latest version.  Then you have people like me who won't pay full price for a game unless I absolutely know I will love the game.  For other games, I check the local Game Stop periodically to check the used game price until it is low enough for me to buy.

This new e-world will reduce the amount of media honest consumers will have access to.  The only people with access to large collections are the ones who pirate the material.  The producers will accuse the pirates of causing the slow sales.  Something needs to be done to this single-direct-sale-per-person business model.

Waiting for PVUSB

When I upgraded to Xen 4.2, I was gently pushed to upgrade from XM to XL.  XM has been officially deprecated in the 4.2 release.  XL is the preferred tool stack.  After some initial pain with PCI Passthrough, I got my system upgraded.  The pain was a result of the fact that XL didn't support Legacy PCI (not PCI-Express) passthrough.  I started looking into what other features XL has missing. That is when I discovered the USB 1.0 Passthrough is not supported.

I set up a second Windows VM because I have a USB device that I can't get working in Linux.  This VM is pretty useless at this point because I can't give the VM control of the USB device.  I don't have another USB controller card to passthrough to the VM.  XL won't support USB 1.0 Passthrough until the 4.3 release.  The only "option" is PVUSB.  Unfortunately, PVUSB isn't supported in any modern kernels!  Patches have been submitted to support xen-usb-backend in the mainline kernel's pv_opts code, but it hasn't been accepted yet.  Xen has a feature matrix telling you which versions are supported, but I use a newer kernel version than is supported.  For now, all I can do is wait until either 4.3 when XL supports the Qemu 1.0 passthrough or wait until the PVUSB patches get added to the mainline kernel.

http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Kernel_Feature_Matrix

Windows scaling

Typical power users try to get the best resolution out of their computer.  This often means the icons and text are small.  When you are 10 inches from the screen, this isn't a big deal.  When you are 10 feet from the screen, this can be a problem.  I didn't want to decrease the resolution, because I liked the crispness of HD.  Windows does provide the ability to change the font size and the DPI.  I bumped up the font size and I changed the DPI to 200%.  This made the icons on my desktop readable and recognizable from the couch.

Some windows did not scale very well.  Specifically, when something was coded to have a fixed size, things didn't flow correctly.  This problem isn't specific to Windows, or even desktop applications.  This problem occurs in Linux and many webpages do not resize correctly.  The result is usually an awkward looking window.  Sometimes, the window gets so large that you can't  see the title bar.  This means you can't move the window.  Although this happens in Linux as well, it isn't as much of a problem.  On an X-Windows-based user interface, you can Alt+Drag a window and it will move.  You don't need to click on the title bar to move the window.  At least one program (Project 64's Input Plugin window) was unusable at 200% DPI.  I had to drop down the DPI to 150%.  At 150%, the fixed-size window was usable, but the desktop icons were smaller.  I still have not found any launchers that I was happy with to replace the desktop.

My next problem occurred when I launched Angry Birds.  The Windows 7 start bar didn't hide itself.  Angry Birds claimed that I was running in a lower resolution.  I was supposed to hit a button to continue, but the mouse clicks weren't working.  I struggled for a while, but I finally listened to my wife and googled start bar's that don't go away.  One of the first results claimed that some apps don't work well when you change the DPI.  If you right-click on the shortcut, there is a Compatibility tab.  In that tab, if you check off "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings", that will fix the problem.  Apparently Google Chrome and a lot of other programs have this issue as well.  If I find (or write) a launcher that works well on the TV, I might set the DPI back to 100% so that I don't have such massive issues with display scaling.

Travelling with an MK802 II

I started off having two MK802 II's, one for my living room and one for my bedroom.  When the MK802 III's were released, I decided to buy two of them and upgrade both rooms.  I packaged up one of the generation 2's to travel with.  Although I couldn't get Hulu Plus or Crackle working on it, Youtube, Netflix and MX Player worked on it.  I recently visited some family and I decided to take MK802 with me.  Before I left for the visit, I loaded a Micro-SD card with shows and movies.  The device has been off since I upgraded, so I also turned it on to update the software.

The device worked out really well.  I was able to run an HDMI cable to the TV mounted on the wall.  I brought my air mouse with me as well.  I was able to tuck away the MK802 behind the DVD player that they had.  I mostly brought the device to display pictures on the TV, but we ended up watching a lot of video.  Something unplanned happened, and my family had to visit someone for a few hours.  Luckily, I had the MK802.  I played the movies that I had loaded.  At the end of the visit, I packed everything back up and left.

Controlling Windows startup apps

Windows has various ways to launch programs on startup.  You can put shortcuts in the Start Menu.  You can put commands in your netlogon.bat file.  You can modify the Windows Registry.  There are programs out there that allow you too see most of the startup programs and enable/disable then.  The problem I have is I do not have admin access to my work computer.  I started a program at work one day, and it decided to modify the Windows Registry so that it starts up every day when I logon.  It is a Java process, though, so it takes up a lot of memory that I don't have available (I'm on 32bit Windows). When I log into my computer, a few things start up so it takes forever.  I don't have admin access, so I don't know how to prevent the program from starting up.

Blackberries Everywhere!

I was at an airport and I wanted to mate my Bluetooth headphones to my tablet.  I told the headphones to become visible and told my tablet to look for visible Bluetooth devices.  I was shocked to see about 8  Blackberries and 1 device that did not identify itself.  I was travelling on a Friday, so the airport was filled with business travelers.  That explains the number of Blackberries.  I noticed the guy sitting next to me was using a Blackberry, so that accounts for one of them.  That still doesn't explain why they were all visible, though.  Bluetooth devices are supposed to remain hidden until you want to mate them with another device.  It is considered a security risk to leave something visible all the time.  Do Blackberries default to being visible all the time?

Qemu snapshots to backup Windows

Qemu's snapshot feature is the best backup solution for Windows that I have found.  Although Windows System Restore is similar, it operates on a completely different layer.  My Windows VM has a 40GB C drive that is on an SSD and a 200GB D drive on regular spindle disk.  I rebooted my VM and something failed during the boot up process, which forced me to reboot the Dom0.  When the Windows VM came back up, my D drive was missing!  I opened the disk partitioning tool and it told me the disk was fine but there were no partitions.  If I relied on System Restore, how would I restore this disk?  If System Restore is part of the file system, and the entire partition disappears, what do you do?  Instead, I shut down the VM and applied the last snapshot that I created.  Funny enough, the last snapshot was created right before the reboot that hosed the virtual disk.  I have a cron job that creates a weekly snapshot of the disk.

Lost all of my Bag Piggies progress

The PC version of Bag Piggies is based on Angry Birds.  You can tell the engines are similar based on the interface and the physics that occur.  The high scores and progress are stored differently, though.  I still don't know where Bad Piggies stores its data.  Angry Birds stores it data in lua files inside of the Windows user's App Data.  As part of my upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7, then copied the Angry Birds saved data from the Windows XP VM.  It looks like I have lost all my Bad Piggies data for now.  I do have backups of the XP disks, so if I ever figure it out in the future, I can recover it.

Reading Stack Traces

I was on one of the www.cheezburger.com websites, and I got an error.  A .Net stack trace showed up.  Since I read Java stack traces all the time, I decided to read this one.  I couldn't diagnose the issue but I did notice something.  They use an xml-based cache.  I wonder if that is why their website is so slow now.

Dropbox on Android doesn't sync

I have been using Dropbox to store my saved game information with a friend of mine.  While I normally play games on my Windows VM, I have been trying to use the MK802 III to play games as well.  One problem I noticed was that the Dropbox Android app doesn't actually support syncing with your Dropbox.  The only sync functionality that is supported is via the Camera Upload.  This means I can't auto-upload game progress as I play the game.  I tried saving the game data directly to the internal Dropbox storage area.  That worked for a while, but it ended up having some conflict issues.  I am starting to research syncing the files with other computers that have Dropbox installed.  That process would sync to the computer, then that computer would sync to Dropbox.  It is not a very elegant solution, but it may actually work.

Windows 7 install size

When I installed Windows 7 in a VM, I was surprised at the size of the install.  The QCOW2 image file was 7.7GB.  This was a base install with no apps installed.  This isn't the largest I have seen, but larger operation systems usually come with more pre-loaded.  For instance, I just installed Ubuntu 12.10 in a VM and it took 9.7GB for the install.  Ubuntu comes with many of the programs you use on a day-to-day basis.  Windows does not.  You learn a little more about operating systems when you have to size them to share disks.

LibreCAD

Every once in a while I need to do some drafting.  Every single time, I look for an open source drafting tool, but end up giving up.  I end up dusting off my copy of AutoCad R14 that I have had since high school.  This time around, I decided to try out LibreCAD.  The reviews inside of Ubuntu's software center said the tool was hard to use and that the documentation was either non-existent or poorly translated.

LibreCAD was a little hard to get used to, but it did remind me a bit of AutoCAD.  I was able to draw up the floor plan relatively easily.  The target point for the line could be expressed as the distance-then-angle notation.  One thing that took me a bit to get used to, was the fact that you couldn't directly type "@2>90".  You have to click on the Console input, then you can type.  The fact that the console requires focus is something that slows me down considerably.  It isn't a deal-breaker, though.

The multi-copy functionality is different between AutoCAD and LibreCAD.  In AutoCAD, after you give the reference and target points for the copy, the object gets copied and you have an opportunity to put in another reference and target point to perform another copy.  You can keep doing this over and over again.  The first major difference is in LibreCAD, the copy and move commands are the same.  After you give the reference and target points, a window pops up.  This popup gives you the opportunity to select if this is a move, a single copy, or a multi-copy.  In the multi-copy scenario, you give a copy count.  This means you can only repeatly copy the object in the same vector in a repeating pattern.

I have not fully figured out how to use the trim function.  It seems to be similar to AutoCAD.  First, you select a line that forms the barrier to trim based off of.  In AutoCAD, you can select multiple barriers.  In LibreCAD, you can only select one.  This gets annoying, but I have been able to work around it.  Second, in AutoCAD, you select the side of the line that should get removed.  In LibreCAD, you select the side of the line that should be kept.  For straight lines, this seemed to work well.  When I was trimming circles, weird things started to occur.  I was able to use it, but I can't fully describe how it works.

One function I haven't been able to find is the join command.  I drew a rectangle with rounded corners and I wanted all the lines to join together.  I tried to fire up the help, but I got an error that said the documentation was not available.  I have not found a pan function like in AutoCAD.  I mostly used pan because AutoCAD's scrollbars did not work very well.  The pan was pretty fast as well.  Although I would prefer pan because of the speed, it hasn't hurt LibreCAD much.  In LibreCAD, the scrollbars work better than AutoCAD.

A major different between the two products is how snapping works.  In AutoCAD, you have checkboxes that let you enable and disable the various different ways you can snap to.  When you hover over something snappable, the snap logo for the type of snap shows up.  If it is an intersection, it is a diamond.  If its an end point, its a square.  At times, complicated diagrams end up having too many snappable points together.  You end up having to zoom to isolate the snappable points.

In LibreCAD, you are only allowed to have one snappable type enabled at a time.  The menu at the top allows you to quickly change which snappable type is active.  I don't exactly know how I feel about this.  On one hand, I found myself going to the menu a lot to switch between the snappable types.  On the other hand, I did not have the need to zoom in as much, since there wasn't a concentration of snappable points that were close together.  This seems like a good example of using two different strategies to solve a problem.

One thing that has really annoyed me is the fact that I can only move one object to another layer at a time.  There is a properties command.  You select the single object you want to change, and a window pops up.  In the window, you can change the layer.  I have not been able to pick multiple objects, then open up the properties window.  This wouldn't be as much of a deal if I could join objects together before trying to move them to another layer.  This problem is almost a deal breaker.  I have a habit of starting my work in a single layer, then creating new layers based on the complexity of the diagram.

At this point, I have not used the product enough to really rule it out.  I spent two hours drafting up two rooms in my house as well as all the furniture in the rooms.  Two hours was enough to get a good feel out of the program, though.  I think I will continue to use it for now.  I wouldn't recommend it for someone new to drafting, though.  I feel like I have been able to use it because of my experience with AutoCAD.

Transferring Angry Birds Data

I was able to transport all of my Angry Birds progress from my Windows XP VM to my Windows 7 VM.  All the Angry Birds PC games store saved progress in two files: settings.lua and highscores.lua.  They get stored in your Profile's AppData or Application Data folders.  If you transfer these files over, then you retain all your progress.  What I haven't figured out is how to transfer the saved progress for Bad Piggies.  Although the core interface looks similar to the Angry Birds games, the saved progress is not stored in the same location.  Other than that, all the games work better on Windows 7 than they did on Windows XP.  Angry Birds in 1080p on a 42" TV is still amazing.

Do video drivers slow down over time?

Whenever I read about performance problems in Windows, someone always recommends that you should upgrade your "Video Drivers".  What confuses me about that statement, is that people usually ask about performance issues when they notice degradation   That means the system used to run faster, and it is now running noticeably slower.  This begs the question, why would updating your video drivers make the system faster?  I get the fact that newer drivers could give you better performance out of your video card, but that won't help if you are suffering degradation.  It won't reclaim the speed that you have lost.  Making this statement seems to imply that drivers degrade in performance over time.  It makes me feel like my video card is a car and upgrading drivers is giving it an oil change.

Sim City: The Real Review

I was finally able to log into Sim City to play this weekend.  Now that I was able to play, I was able to confirm what I thought all along: Sim City is an awesome game.  It still doesn't excuse the DRM and launch debacle, but at least I can play now.  I was only kicked out four times.

For starters, the game is partially usable at 10ft away.  My gaming PC is hooked up to my HDTV and I tend to play from the couch.  I had to play for about an hour up close to the TV, but as I got used to the interface, I was able to play farther away.  There are still some scenarios where you need to get close for.  Specifically, when you need to place a building in a small space or when you are reading something that a sim is saying.  I am really glad I can play from my couch.  I purchased Dark Spore and it wasn't usable from my couch.

I found the finances to be different but good.  The buildings tend to be more expensive, but I found it a lot easier to manage a balanced book.  In older games, it was a lot easier to build to quickly and have a negative income.  Also, the game/advisors/protestors tend to direct you to the infrastructure that you need at the time.  This helps to prevent over building.  Also, the bond's tend to be more reasonably priced.  This is the first game that I actually took advantage of bonds.  The bonds allowed me to gain some quick capital to purchase some of the expensive buildings.  I usually buy the bond to buy a building that increases my income rate.  After a few game hours, I regain enough capitol to pay back the entire bond.

I have a habit of trying to use the right mouse click to rotate around.  This comes from my AutoCAD experience.  I haven't quite gotten used to using the left mouse click to rotate around.  I don't quite know how I feel about having to expand the City Hall to be able to build certain structures.  I love the ability to expand the other buildings, however.  I love the Upgrade Road feature.  I didn't know about this feature at first, so I built my first city with more expensive roads right off the bat.  When I started my second city, I was able to build using cheaper roads and updated them as I need them upgraded.  This helped out a lot, since sims told me when they were ready to expand.

The non-DRM portions of the game are really well done.  If (and its a big if) you can get passed the logon and DRM issues, then this is a great game for Sim City fans.

EA vs Dropbox

As a software engineer, I have had my fair share of bad launches.  I have had my share of great launches.  That is the life of a software engineer.  There are a lot of people criticizing EA for such a bad game launch.  There are those who defend EA and characterize the critics as complainers.  I decided to do a comparison to explain how epic of a failure EA's launch of SimCity is.

	EA	Dropbox
Employees	9,225	237 + one Panda
Revenue (2011)	$3,800 M	$240 M
Platforms	Windows and sometimes Mac	Pretty much all of them
Concurrent Users	Thousands (SimCity)	Millions

SimCity is a single player game.  The "network" play feature is basically saving your city on EA's servers.  Notice I said servers and not cloud, because it appears EA decided not to invest in a cloud based solution.  By storing your saved games on EA's servers, you can....well, I don't exactly know what it lets you do, since you aren't really supposed to install the game on multiple computers.  It does allow you be the mayor of a city next to one of your friends, but you don't need a lot of network traffic for that.  If you think about it, storing your saved games on a server is similar to my idea of storing saved games on Dropbox.  I decided to compare EA's infrastructure with Dropbox's infrastructure.

Dropbox is a cloud-based solution.  The Dropbox team is small, but they make due with the resources they have.  They have 100 million registered users.  I can go from place to place, device to device, and access my files.  Although I am not a power user, I don't ever remember a Dropbox outage.  Dropbox allows sharing of files between users.  Millions of those people maintain a constant connection with Dropbox's cloud.

EA's Lucy Bradshaw has said that thousands of people are playing the game.  EA's Kip Katsarelis seemed proud that these thousands of people are playing longer and are essentially hogging the nine servers that EA had allocated to the game.  You read that right: nine servers!  EA is now scrambling to build new servers to accommodate this load.  They even released patches to disable some of the features to alleviate the load on those nine servers.

Just calling SimCity's launch a failure can seem like its complaining.  Product launchers rarely go off without a hitch.  When you compare EA's infrastructure to Dropbox's infrastructure, though, it shows just how staggering of a failure this launch has been.  EA was not been able to handle a spike to a few thousand concurrent users.  Dropbox regularly handles millions of concurrent users.  Maybe EA should just outsource the SimCity backend infrastructure to Dropbox.

Youtube streaming issues lately

Lately, Youtube has been having streaming issues.  I have noticed it on both my MK802 IIIs as well as on my laptop.  I didn't know if it was my network or if it was Youtube itself.  I was travelling recently and I brought my old MK802 II with me.  I was in a different state, and Youtube was still having issues.  HD almost never plays.  I end up switching to SD at the start of every video.  Even in SD mode, many videos were buffering.  The commercials tends to have a worse time with buffering.  This annoyed me greatly since Sony is running an ad campaign to launch the PS4.  This campaign seemed to play a commercial for every video I tried to watch.  If Youtube wants to launch Premium Channels, then they will need to step up their game.  End users will not pay for channels if they buffer.

Sim City 5: Day 2

How EA Ripped Me Off

I have been a loyal Maxis customer for years.  I have purchased all the Sim City games as well as a bunch of other games in the series.  I was very unhappy about the DRM in Spore, but I didn't run into any issues, so I didn't complain to EA about it.  I was unhappy with how the DRM escalated in Sim City 5, but I decided to overlook the issue and pre-ordered my copy anyways.  Now EA has $60 of my hard earned money and I have nothing to show for it.

I got my copy of Sim City 5 in the mail yesterday.  I heard some stories about people having problems playing the game.  I popped the DVD in and installed the game.  I have been watching Youtube videos put out by the Beta testers, so I had an idea of what the user interface looked like.  The install process took a while, since it had to download Origin and Sim City 5 from the internet (I don't exactly know what the 2GB on the DVD was for).  After the install, I started the game and was told there was an update that had to be installed.  I waited for the download again.

After a few minutes, I was finally able to start the game.  The Beta testers said you have to run through the tutorial before you can start the game, so I started the tutorial.  I had a few complaints, but I will reserve that for another day.  Today, my biggest complaint is that the tutorial didn't tell me to do anything.  The mouse worked.  I could fly around the tutorial city.  I could hit the non-game related buttons, but I couldn't actually build anything.  I tried multiple times.  I exited the game and tried again. The tutorial still didn't work.

Finally, I decided to check ea.com's support site.  That is when I found this forum post that describes my issue exactly.  You know your app has some problems if on 8:33am on launch day, you have to put a post saying most of your customers can't actually play the game they paid for:

When you start on a server for the first time you will be prompted to play the tutorial. In addition to teaching you the fundamentals about our game it also registers you on our system and secures your place in that server. We are seeing continuing reports that the tutorial isn't loading for some players. If the tutorial doesn't load, those players will be unable to play on that specific server.

This is a server-side issue and we are working around the clock to fix this as quickly as possible. In the meantime you can circumvent this problem by choosing to play on a different server while we resolve this issue. You will be able to rejoin the server after our maintenance is complete.

Thank you for your patience

Opening the thread up: Please post any details of which servers you are playing on in here!

Thank you

This is a perfect example of why DRM is a bad idea.  Honest people end up paying money for a product that doesn't work.  Who are the ones that can actually play the game?  Its the people who stole the game and cracked it.

Upgrading my Gaming VM to Windows 7: Part 2

I reverted my virtual disk to a snapshot I created just after installing Windows 7.  I installed the USB controller card drivers then took another snapshot.  I installed the AMD drivers again.  This time, during the "Applying update operation 44 of 44" step, the physical computer froze.  I rebooted the computer and immediately look another snapshot.  After booting again, I got a bad error message.

At first, I clicked "Launch Startup Repair" and nothing really happened.  I rebooted the VM and picked "Start Windows Normally".  It wanted to do a check disk, but it booted.  Then, my TV showed the login screen.  Sound and Video were working.  I played around a bit, then shutdown to take another snapshot.  I tried to start the VM, and my Dom0 froze again.  This would happen to me in my old setup.  If I took down the VM that was using the VGA card, then trying to bring it back up would freeze the Dom0.  I decided to let the Launch Startup Repair run for a while.  Eventually, a window popped up saying that I should replace the card that caused the problem and let me reboot.  I rebooted the Dom0 and then the DomU.  My TV finally displayed the logon screen.

Upgrading my Gaming VM to Windows 7: Part 1

In a previous post, I talked about how my Windows XP Gaming VM somehow lost performance.  It was all of a sudden, and nothing changed in the VM.  In fact, the VM was off for a period of two weeks.  Before then, no performance problem.  After then, performance problem.  I tried various things to regain the lost performance, but I gave up.  I have now decided to upgrade to Windows 7 64bit.

I few things led me down this path.  First, my wife hasn't had the time to play Angry Birds (hence the VM being off for two weeks).  It doesn't seem like she's going to be playing any time soon, so its a good time for an upgrade.  Second, I really need to upgrade from XM to XL.  To upgrade to XL, I have to stop using my PCI USB controller card.  If I upgrade to Windows 7, then I can use a PCI-Express USB controller card.  I have verified that card works in Windows 7, because I had a Windows 7 VM that I used to upgrade my phone.  The PCI-Express card did not work in Windows XP, though.  By upgrading to the PCI-Express card, that removed my only obstacle to using XL.

After performing the base install, I shut down the VM and made a snapshot.  I then installed the AMD drivers for my HD7870.  The AMD install asked to reboot.  It got stuck on "Applying update operation 44 of 44 (\Registry\Machine\System\Curre....) for over 1/2 hour.

I was just about to force a virtual hardware reboot when I heard the Windows 7 boot sound.  I looked up and my TV was displaying the log in screen!  I didn't even have to enable gfx_passthrough=1.  I got my mouse and keyboard and they didn't work!  I forgot to set up the USB controller card or set up remote desktop.  I shut down the VM, took out the video card from the pci passthrough list.  I booted up the VM, enabled remote desktop, and installed the USB controller card drivers.  I rebooted with the video card back in the pci passthrough list.  The boot sound played, then an aweful stuck sound occured.  My VNC window showed a BSOD.  The system kept rebooting with the Windows boot sound, the aweful stuck sound, and a BSOD of the VNC window.  The BSOD disappeard too fast, but I think it was the atikmap.sys file that it was complaining about.  I found a forum post that talked about some of the problems.  Apparently XL is buggier than XM when it comes to VGA Passthrough.   I tried various different things, but to no avail.  I decided to revert to my post-install snapshot and try again.

Google Play Movies on MK802

My buddy said that he purchased and watches movies on his MK802 II.  This conflicted with some of the research that I read online about Google Play blocking devices that are rooted.  I posted about the conundrum because MK802's come pre-rooted.  I decided that it was time to give it a shot on my MK802 III.  I navigated to the Play Store and found something interesting: I owned had super-rented a video already!  It turns out that when the Nexus 7 launched, Google ran a promotion giving renting Transformers: Dark of the Moon to everyone who purchased a Nexus 7.  Since my MK802's and my Nexus 7 are all under the same Google account, I was able to watch it on my TV!  Now, I didn't actually watch the movie, but I did play it for a few minutes.  I skipped around just to see what the quality was like.  It seemed better than Netflix and a lot better than Hulu Plus, but I don't know the exact quality that was streaming.  Although very restricted, I now have a new way to purchase rent movies.

Eclipse and Windows file locks

I use Eclipse on Windows at work.  Lately, it has been driving me crazy.  Windows tends to use exclusive locks.  This means, if one process is using a file, another process cannot do anything with that file.  When I have multiple projects in Eclipse, I sometimes have one project use the jar output of another project.  This causes problems in Windows, though.  One project locks the jar file because it wants the ability to build against it in the future.  What happens when I have to rebuild the first project? In Windows, you can't.  You either have to restart Eclipse, or you have to temporarily change the build path of the second project.  This problem doesn't occur in Linux.