Anyway…as I said, I installed VirtualBox (here a good tutorial for Ubuntu), then installed my client OSs.  The first client was Windows XP, then Ubuntu 32-bit, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and finally I created a “catch-all” virtual machine.  The catch-all has two virtual hard drives and triple-boots DOS 6.21, Windows 3.1, and Windows 2000.  DOS is there because it is still a widely used OS for single purpose embedded devices like cash registers.  Windows 3.1 is there for nostalgia because it was my first version of Windows, and Windows 2000 is there mainly to make it easy to update the other two.

Here is a screen shot of my desktop:

The screenshot above is from my dual wide-screen monitor setup.  From right to left: Windows XP in fullscreen mode running the free Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition, DOS 6.21 (you youngsters may have never seen MS-DOS Shell), then finally OpenSolaris.

Later I plan to set up FreeDOS, Haiku (inspired by BeOS), GNU HURD, other BSDs including PureDarwin (Darwin is the core of Mac OS X), and other Linux distros.  Testing out new OSs or distros has never been easier!  Now on to some serious cross-platform programming…..

is there the maximum UDP datagram size?

is there some recomendation to chose one based on the application /network?

My reply:

getsockopt() with SO_MAX_MSG_SIZE option will get you the size, but it is normally 65508 bytes.

Due to packet loss, generally apps do not send UDP packets larger than 16K. And it is most efficient to send a multiple of the MTU less the UDP header size, or for Ethernet 1500 – 28 = 1472 bytes.

I love to answer programming questions.  Feel free to send me your questions.  Use the subject “Ask Phil” to insure I spot it, and I will do my best to get you a useful answer.

I quickly switched to NT 5.0, er, Windows 2000, shortly after it came out, and I used that for about 6 years before finally moving to Windows XP.  I have been happy with XP, as have most users, and never even considered moving to Vista (ME 2.0?).  Delaying or avoiding new versions of Windows is easy when you build your own computers like I usually do, but many of my friends and family are not so lucky, and my lack of experience with the new Vista layout and features, such as a user access control, make it difficult to provide phone support.

So, when I saw an opportunity to purchase an HP computer with Windows 7 for what I had expected to pay to upgrade my current PC, I decided to go for it.  And even though I am writing this while running Ubuntu Linux, Windows is close by in a virtual machine (more on this another time).

So, while my first impression of Windows 7, coming straight from Windows XP, was not very good (Why does Microsoft think that hiding options makes Windows easier to use?), I have grown accustomed to the interface, and like the glass look of the windows.  The Office 2007 ribbon bar drove me crazy until I figured out how it was partitioned (my Office 2002 would not install on Windows 7, and both my wife and I agree that the ribbon is NOT easier to use than the old menus).

The bottom line is that with Windows XP support winding down, Windows 7 will now be my Windows version of choice for as long as I remain using Windows – not because it is better than XP, but because it does not annoy me TOO much.

As young children we made mistakes all the time, but we LEARNED from those mistakes.  The adults who excel have either re-embraced the idea that mistakes are not bad, or they were lucky and did not succumb to conditioning.  They are not afraid to learn and try new things, to push themselves into situations which are not comfortable, and others notice them.  They are the ideal employees, who do not hesitate to take on new challenges where others would balk or  say it was not in their job description!

More importantly, not being afraid to make mistakes is the first step to innovation, because if you are REALLY pushing the envelope, working on the bleeding edge, or blazing a new trail, most of your ideas will not work as expected.  However, if you carefully evaluate those mistakes you WILL learn something you can apply to your next try, and you will be far ahead of those who play it safe.

Innovators will always have work because most businesses realize that innovation is a large part of staying competitive.  So go ahead, I dare you to make mistakes!  Push yourself.  Learn how to innovate.

i want to know the abbreviation for CE in WinCE. help me pls..

I replied:

Compact Edition

To which an eMVP (a Microsoft embedded Most Valuable Professional) retorted:

Microsoft is _very_ adamant that CE has no official meaning.

To which I replied:

Yes, they say that NOW, just like they say NT does not mean ‘New Technology’.

This is a little like Fahrenheit 451 if you know what I mean

Anyway…Here is a KB article that provides some hints:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q166915/

(this clip is complete, but with poor punctuation corrected)

“In the name ‘Windows CE,’ the letters ‘CE’ are not an abbreviation for  anything, but rather they imply a number of the precepts around which Windows CE  is designed, including ‘Compact’, ‘Connectable’, ‘Compatible’, ‘Companion’, and ‘Efficient’.”

I think ‘Compact Edition’ is reasonable, and goes along with SE meaning ‘Second Edition’ and ME meaning ‘Millennium Edition’.

I have been on the Internet since its stone age period (the fall of 1993 for you youngsters).  Back then the World Wide Web was just beginning to take off. Heck, Microsoft did not have a web presence yet, not even an FTP server!  Anyone else remember downloading Windows 3.1 driver updates from Microsoft by dialing long distance to Redmond to use their BBS (bulletin board service) by modem? Or later when Windows 95 was released and Microsoft provided updates by CompuServe?  Yes, those were the good old days (NOT!).

Anyway, back then servers for different protocols tended to be physically separate, and using a prefix to designate the type of server( www [HTTP], ftp, gopher, mail [SMTP]) made sense.   And software was separate too: you had an FTP program to access FTP sites, a browser (Mosaic) for HTTP, etc.

But things are different now. Most traffic is HTTP or SMTP, with various multimedia protocols and good old FTP hidden behind URIs.  Many web sites, including this one, no longer use the www prefix.  Sure, you can access this site with the www, but your browser will get a permanent redirect (301) to a URI without the www.  My feeling is that the www is redundant, and just makes the URI longer and harder to remember.  I have no public FTP, or anything else in my domain (yet).

Most Internet users would not even notice whether a URI they click on has the www prefix, or would even notice if the browser was redirected.  To these users the Internet is whatever they access through a browser, or browser enabled software such as RealPlayer.  Most do not even consider e-mail to be the Internet!  So, unless some new protocol comes along to challenge HTTP, I will continue to leave off the redundant www prefix on the sites I manage.

When creating a page, it can help to visualize the headings like this:

<h1> page name
    <h2> major section
        <h3> subsection
        <h3> subsection
    <h2> another section
    <h2> another section
        <h3> subsection
        <h3> subsection

And if that is not enough motivation to properly use headings, it is likely that search engines use headings when calculating page rankings.

Why can’t I open more than (number usually varies from 3970 to 3974) sockets on Windows?

My response:

You have run into the ephemeral port limit on Windows.  Windows versions through XP and Server 2003 use a port range of 1024 though 5000 for ephemeral, or short-lived, ports.  These ports are the ones used if you call bind() on a socket and pass zero as the port number, allowing  Windows to assign a port for you.  This limit is not normally a problem, but usually manifests when testing the limits of programs.  In HawkNL I provide my own bind() which uses 1024 through 65535.  There is also a registry modification which can increase the range.

The next step is system preparation.  The very first thing I do when I purchase or build a new system is to run Memtest86 on it to insure I will not have any memory problems.  This has saved me several times when I either purchased bad memory, or the motherboard used too aggressive  timing settings on a module.  It is also a tool I use on existing systems when they show any sort of flakiness, since memory errors can manifest themselves in all sorts of strange ways.

After I ran Memtest86 for two full passes, I booted into Windows for more testing, and here is where I took a wrong turn!  I downloaded Prime95 and loaded up all 4 AMD CPU cores overnight with no problems.  Of course, to download Prime95 I automatically installed Firefox first (I avoid browsing with Internet Explorer at all costs).   And I automatically uninstalled the Norton free trial and installed AVG for virus protection.

At this point I wanted to try freeing up some disk space for Ubuntu by shrinking the Windows 7 (Win7) partition from within Win7.  I have always relied upon Ubuntu to repartition  a drive, and it has always worked in the past, but I like looking at new ways of doing things.  My goal was to shrink the partition down to about 100GB so that I would have about 500GB for Ubuntu.  But there was a problem: the Win7 partition, which only had about 18GB of data, would not shrink below 280GB.  It seems when I installed the additional software it wrote some files way out in the partition, and Win7 will not move files during a shrink.  No problem I thought, I will just go ahead and install Ubuntu and let it move those files.

So, I boot up Ubuntu, perform the install (shrinking the Win7 partition to about 100GB), and then reboot back into Win7.  Or at least, I tried to boot into Win7.  Win7 complained about a dirty shutdown (as it should after Linux shrinks an NTFS partition).  But it crashed before getting to the desktop, even in safe mode. SIGH!  Good thing HP provides a simple system recovery.  So I recover the system, and this time before booting into Win7 I install Ubuntu and shrink the partition.  Ha! There is always more than one way to do things.

So I now boot into Win7 to go through the first-boot ritual again, and it crashes!  Win7 does not like the dirty flag set on an NTFS partition on the “first” boot. There is no safe boot on the first boot, and apparently there is also no chkdsk either to scan the partition and reset the dirty flag.  So, I run the HP system recovery again….

Third try!  Boot into Win7, and soon as the first boot was finished I shrunk the partition to about 100MB.

Now I installed Ubuntu and could finally begin to set up my virtual machines…

As  planned to begin blogging, I allocated a number of hours per week to compose blog entries.  I was not naive; I knew there would be spam comments which would need to be weeded out.  But I thought that I could lift the manual approval after determining how much of an issue it really was, and simply delete spam and improper entries periodically, perhaps once per week.  Well, that is NOT going to happen anytime soon.

No, the spam problem is WAY bigger than I anticipated.  For every post I approve (and I have really tried to be lenient), there are 5 to 8 others that do not make it.  So, in the interest of saving your time, and mine, here is how NOT to get your comment approved:

• Cut and paste the same seemingly sincere comment more than once. Like Star Trek philosopher Montgomery Scott (Scotty) once said, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
• Include a link to male performance drugs, or any other type of drugs.
• Include a link to a blog that has been up for weeks with no content.
• Include a link to illegal content (warez).
• Comment in a language other than English.  How can (or should) I approve something I cannot read?
• Include a link to a business without a sincere comment.

Reviewing each comment carefully and following the links takes time; time I could be writing.  However, I will keep plugging away at this to try to post useful content.