Woe is the boot pallete of SP3

as the decompilation of serenity goes forth there have been a number of small hiccups that have somewhat halted progress such as rediscovering hex addresses that have moved or seemingly no longer exist.
now the first batch of patches all went fairly well, uxtheme, tcpip, sfc_os and winntbbu have all been successfully patched however one stumbling block has been ntoskrnl.
now i’ll admit that the file itself is not usually an easy one to patch however in SP3 the pallete that determines how everything looks no longer exists in any noticeable form.
as they say a picture speaks more than a thousand words, here goes nothing:

you see, it just looks crap with its default pallete.
so, anybody want to give me a heads up about the new pallete location? or better yet, email/pm/comment me and i’ll give out some handy resources.

SP3 RTMS!

well, it’s been a frickin’ long time, but SP3 has finally gone gold.
5512 (xpsp.080413-2113) weighs in at 316MB and is fully slipstream-able into an existing disk.
this also means that serenity will be rebuilt using this build. stay tuned for news on this blog as toms hosting is going down

Nostalgia #1

A small yet interesting note, anybody remember Aquila? Man that show rocked, the premise was two kids find a badass spaceship that looks like a rock and do all sorts of crazy crap with it.
Still not sold on the idea? what if i were to tell you it had laz0rs and some sort of sleeping ray and ate shopping to survive. if you’re not sold by now then i just give up, watch some episodes online through the power of the google.

Merging Multi-File Movies

as a few of my fellow pirates may know some movies are split up into 700 meg chunks for easy burning. well, if you’re keeping these files on HDD forever more then its juat an annoying habit to flip over to part two when you’re watching a film.
so, with the help of a super fun app often known as ‘AVI Mux’. so, a super fun walkthrough is as follows:
add your compatible files to the ‘open files’ section, select the files you want to merge and use the ‘generate data source from files’. fo finish the process click start and specify your output file.
all going well you should have a slightly smaller single file which makes sorting movies a shedload easier.

Zenos, two weeks on

so, it’s now been two weeks since i started at zenos. as far as opinions go it seems to be going fairly well.
the work pace is fairly slow as they leaders seem to have adopted a god awful ‘no child left behind’ sort of regime which to be honest i would have thought the interview everybody needed to pass would have wittled out the morons.
but still, as we trugg along learning the basics of office i still feel as though im not wasting my time. the majority of the people there are pretty cool and friendly, transport is sorted, lunches and late breakfasts are nice, tutors are above average and finances are worrying. need i say more on the situation?

Lunix!

well as the wireless router was seemingly broken and i was looking forward to an important email i decided to lug my desktop downstairs to unleash the raw power on the interwubz directly to my unsuspecting PC.
i had installed ubuntu months ago in an effort to experience me so berly/compiz/xgl goodness but restricted drivers were holding me back from doing anything (my wireless firmware was a ‘restricted driver’, thus effectively disabling the internet and everything related to it), so.. i turned on the computer however as i hadn’t changed the default grub entry i found myself looking at the oh-so well planned gnome desktop with an active interweb connection.
hastily grabbing updated sources, restricted drivers and 200+ updates everything was complete. now all i need to do is ‘fix’ the annoying as hell sudo (srsly, almost as bad as vistas UAC) and get a new TB drive and format it as Ext3 so i don’t need to manually mount it every boot to make my wallpaper display.
so… yay linux!

Further Longhorn Patches

after finally fixing a static date in VPC i sat down one evening (and morning) and plan to install every single missing longhorn build so that i can finally add activation patches for all of them. so, without further ado, i present to you and intended patch list:

• 4011.0 (main.030305-2045)
• 4028.0 (Lab01_N.030701-2000)
• 4029.0 (main.030619-0000)
• 4051.0 (idx02.031001-1340)
• 4093.0 (main.040819-1215)
• 5048.0 (winmain_idx02.050401-0536)

i have also cleaned up the local version of the repository in preparation for a possible move.
thanks to hounsell and rob for doing some of the leg work on this small scale project, thanks again you two!
edit: now they’re all done, here are the spoils of war: bada-whoop!.

Vista SP1

so after a bit of guess work as to which version was RTM i finally got my exe verified by mikey and did a clean install of vista on to my 15GB partition so i could multiboot with xp 3180 (awesome build btw, can’t wait RTM) vista was running as clean install of vista RTM usually does with its niggling problems, lack of drivers, super uber amounts of bloat and stupid defaults. so, i was all prepared to be wowed by sp1 as reviews had been good however it was not to be as to install it you need 3GB of free space which to be honest i should have expected as it was vista afterall.
it should have been easy to shift some spare GB from my system partition using vistas touted new drive management features but could only trim a feeble 200MB which i couldn’t move to my vista parition in the end anyway.

all in all, a very vista like experience which i’ll need to fix later by shifting around space when i get around to installing serenity.

An Update on the Zenos Situation

so, after my place had been guaranteed and my arrival date scheduled for the 25th all that is left to do before the big day is to finish filling out the handy dandy, oh-so outdated and misinformation filled welcome pack and do a trial run of my public transport quest. a rough outline is wake up at 6:30, get ready and leave at 7:30, leave from brighouse at 8:00 get there for 9:00. If you do the maths then thats 2 hours a day spent travelling or 10 hours a week or 520 hours a year which equates to 21.6 days per year spent travelling. how marvellously miserable that will be.

anyway, where would i be criticising the welcome pack without providing proof. i refer you to the most glaring example on page 18 where it references the intel pentium 5 processor citing clock speeds of  5-7GHz. not only doesn’t this processr exist but they also leave out every single AMD processor and interestingly forget to mention multi core processors which is fairly suspicious now a home user can opt for a quad core and oct cores are emerging into the server market.
a sign of things to come? i remain hopeful.

Site Update on the Horizon?

for a month or so now i’ve been contemplating moving all of my individual sites (namely my blog, personal stevey.biz website, project pages, serenity website and lastly my repository) into a single site with a clean interface coupled with intersite integration.
all going well for either £5 or £10 (can’t quite remember as the original amount was  in  either USD or GBP) and by smooth talking tom and with a shifty trade for a website design i should be able to get some badass hosting thrown in to boot.

reviews on previews have thus far been positive so all going well and with a bit of sorting out and re-jigging of my online presence i should have stuff set up sooner or later.