Category Archives: Operating Systems

Windows 7 and the case of the dropped network traffic

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So the good news of Windows 7 is that they removed the TCP half-open limits.

The bad news is that quite a fair number of people have problems with their network interface card (NIC) dropping dead on them as soon as they push their system to sustained high throughput, think of leeching newsgroups, using torrents, but also downloading ISOs (BSD or Linux releases) or even watching YouTube clips and downloading a driver.

The suggested ‘fixes’ have been ranging from absurd to interesting.

Things I have done so far:

  • rolled back the driver from NVIDIA to Microsoft’s stock driver, did NOT help
  • disabled power management features, did NOT help
  • disabled autotuninglevel (netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled), still in testing

Things to try still:

  • disable all Quality of Service (QoS) stuff
  • disable all offloading (netsh int ip set global taskoffload=disabled)
  • disable Gigabit related features

Windows 7 and the Windows Audio Service

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Strange thing, after logging in my Windows 7 task tray suddenly showed my volume icon as a red cross and hovering over it said that the “Audio Service is not running”. Looking at the services by means of services.msc shows that my Creative Audio Service and Windows Audio Service are both running. Restarting the Windows Audio Service and Creative Audio Service fixed the display issue. Apparently just changing the volume ought to fix the display of the icon as well.

Office 2010 Chinese language pack font list

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It looks like the Chinese Office 2010 font list is the following (Changzhou SinoType, Founder, Microsoft, Stone):

  • FZShuTi
  • FZYaoTi
  • LiSu
  • Microsoft YaHei
  • Microsoft YaHei Bold
  • STCaiyun
  • STFangsong
  • STHupo
  • STKaiti
  • STLiti
  • STSong
  • STXihei
  • STXingkai
  • STXinwei
  • STZhongsong
  • YouYuan

From the language pack make sure to select 国际字体 (international fonts) and 校对工具 (proofing tools). Under 国际字体 we have 典型字体 (typical fonts) and under 校对工具 we have 简体中文校对工具 (Simplified Chinese proofing tools) and 英语校对工具 (English proofing tools).

Office 2010 Japanese language pack font list

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It looks like the Japanese Office 2010 font list is the following (all by RICOH):

  • HGGothicE
  • HGGothicM Medium
  • HGGyoshotai Medium
  • HGKyokashotai Medium
  • HGMaruGothicMPRO
  • HGMinchoB Bold
  • HGMinchoE
  • HGPGothicE
  • HGPGothicM Medium
  • HGPGyoshotai Medium
  • HGPKyokashotai Medium
  • HGPMinchoB Bold
  • HGPMinchoE
  • HGPSoeiKakugothicUB
  • HGPSoeiKakupoptai
  • HGPSoeiPresence EB Extra-Bold
  • HGSeikaishotaiPRO
  • HGSGothicE
  • HGSGothicM Medium
  • HGSGyoshotai Medium
  • HGSKyokashotai Medium
  • HGSMinchoB Bold
  • HGSMinchoE
  • HGSoeiKakugothicUB
  • HGSoeiKakupoptai
  • HGSoeiPresenceE Extra-Bold
  • HGSSoeiKakugothicUB
  • HGSSoeiKakupoptai
  • HGSSoeiPresence EB Extra-Bold

Office 2010 font list

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It seems the Office 2010 font list is the following (English installation):

  • Algerian
  • Arial Unicode MS
  • Baskerville Old Face
  • Bauhaus 93
  • Bell MT
  • Berlin Sans FB
  • Bernard MT Condensed
  • Bodoni MT Poster Compressed Light
  • Book Antiqua
  • Bookman Old Style
  • Bookshelf Symbol 7
  • Britannic Bold
  • Broadway
  • Brush Script MT Italic
  • Californian FB
  • Centaur
  • Century Gothic
  • Century
  • Chiller
  • Colonna MT
  • Cooper Black
  • Footlight MT Light
  • Freestyle Script
  • Garamond
  • Haettenschweiler
  • Harlow Solid Semi Expanded Italic
  • Harrington
  • High Tower Text
  • Informal Roman
  • Jokerman
  • Juice ITC
  • Kristen ITC
  • Kunstler Script
  • Latin Wide
  • Lucide Bright
  • Lucida Calligraphy Italic
  • Lucida Fax
  • Lucida Handwriting Italic
  • Magneto Bold
  • Matura MT Script Capitals
  • Mistral
  • Modern No. 20
  • Modern
  • Monotype Corsiva Italic
  • MS Outlook
  • MS Reference Sans Serif
  • MS Reference Specialty
  • MS Sans Serif
  • MS Serif
  • MT Extra
  • Niagara Engraved
  • Niagara Solid
  • OCRB Regular
  • Old English Text MT
  • Onyx
  • Parchment
  • Playbill
  • Poor Richard
  • Ravie
  • Roman
  • Showcard Gothic
  • Snap ITC
  • Stencil
  • Tempus Sans ITC
  • Viner Hand ITC
  • Vivaldi Italic
  • Vladimir Script
  • Wingdings 2
  • Wingdings 3

Microsoft Office 2010, typography, and proofing tools

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Microsoft has released Office 2010 as a beta that you can use up to and including October 2010 (scheduled to be released in June 2010). You can download it as either 32 or 64 bit, although it seems the 64 bit download is a bit hidden since many buttons for downloading seem to lead to the default 32 bit download. If you follow the link at the Professional Plus site to ‘Get It Now’ you should be presented with links to both versions. At the moment Microsoft supports Chinese (Simplified), English, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. If you are like me you just use the application in English, but then miss some of the proofing tools for, say, Japanese.

You can download language packs from the Microsoft Download Center. If you change the language to, say, Japanese you are presented with two download links at the bottom for the Japanese language pack. This language pack includes user interface changes for Japanese as well as proofing tools, OCR support, and fonts.

Once the pack is downloaded just run it and you can customize want you want to install. Since I am not interested in the UI aspects of the pack, I selected the top part and toggled selection for all to not install. Then for the entries 国際フォント (international fonts) and 文章校正ツール (proofing tools) I made sure to install everything. 文章校正ツール includes both 日本語用校正ツール and 英語用校正ツール and I guess you can most likely skip 英語用校正ツール since it is already installed. 国際フォント includes 標準フォント (standards font), which I am guessing is related to JIS X standards for font encodings.

Basic Windows 7 has 134 fonts installed. A basic English Office 2010 install increases this to 198 fonts installed. Installing the Japanese language pack proofing tools with fonts brings this to 228 fonts installed.

If you press the expansion arrow at the bottom-right of the Home part of the ribbon (or press CTRL-D) you will get the Font dialog. If you select the Advanced tab you can turn on features such as OpenType ligatures. This will mean that with text such as ‘fl’ or ‘ffi’ certain parts of the letters will connect instead of showing white space between the letters. This is the same technique used in printed media such as books.

Update: Michael Hendry was kind enough to point out that I was mistaking 標準 with (standard/default) with 基準 (standards/JIS/ISO).

Dead on arrival

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So I bought a Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB external hard disk yesterday. Got home and plugged in on my Windows XP 64 box, USB triggers to find a new device, Windows churns, installs the appropriate support. According the documentation some virtual CD should start installing the appropriate software to use the advanced features (not that I will use them). But nothing happens. So I check disk management and see that it is there, as disk 8, with 2047 GB as size. Wait a second, it’s only a 500 GB version (Hint #1). Next I try updating the firmware from .30 to .32 and the application says it tried too often and failed (Hint #2). Then the downloaded software to manage the drive sees the drive, but cannot do anything with it (Hint #3). Trying from Windows disk management to initialize the drive in order to just format it gives the message that the drive is write protected (Hint #4). Listening to the hard drive yields the typical distinct sound of ‘ticking’ which is a clear indicator that the hard disk is most likely dead.

Time to return it to the shop and get a replacement.

sendfile() mishandling

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As I said in http://www.in-nomine.org/2009/02/22/tinymce-in-wordpress-271-not-working-on-freebsd/ I had problems making TinyMCE work.

After some digging I discovered that the tiny_mce.js file was being oddly truncated and repeated when fetched. Subsequent tests showed that md5 hashes differed every single time with the original file.

During these fetch tests my kernel crashed twice in the network stack. Since my lighttpd configuration uses kqueue and the likes I suspected that perhaps something was not right in lighttpd 1.4.21, which was only released a couple of days ago. So I downgraded to 1.4.20. ‘Lo and behold, the problems disappeared. To be absolutely sure, I recompiled lighttpd 1.4.21 as well. And at first it seemed to work, but then the corruption kicked in again. After talking about it on the #lighttpd channel on FreeNode I found out it was a problem with lighttpd 1.4.21′s handling of sendfile() on FreeBSD.

The fix is now also in the lighttpd port of FreeBSD, so other people should not encounter this problem.

TinyMCE in WordPress 2.7.1 not working on FreeBSD?

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Discovered today that with both Firefox 3.0 and Opera 9.63 on FreeBSD, TinyMCE within WordPress 2.7.1 is not allowing me to use the visual editing mode. I tried the example of TinyMCE and it works without problems. Based on this and the fact it works on Windows, there must be something weird in either WordPress or its included version of TinyMCE with FreeBSD. I logged a post over at the WordPress forums.