We’ve been hard at work for the past couple of months developing a new and ridiculously easy to use translation toolkit (that we’ve decided to open source) which will power the upcoming EasyBCD 2.2 release, giving it the superior intellect required to speak dozens of languages fluently… with your help.

While we have some volunteers already working on translating EasyBCD into a few languages, we need your help to get the word out there and get quality translations for as many languages as possible. The process itself couldn’t be easier, and the end result is both satisfactory and rewarding! (What could be more satisfactory than helping millions, or more rewarding than having your name in EasyBCD’s “About” box and on our website?)

How to Help
Download a copy of the NeoSmart Localization Toolkit (currently in beta) from this thread in our forums. While you’re there, drop us a line letting us know you’re interested in translating language insert language name here so no one else wastes their time when you’re already on it. Then just run the exe, load up the translation files, and get cracking. More info and picture-by-picture instructions are in the previously mentioned thread. We’ll have another post here soon to officially introduce the NLT and our reasons for creating a new localization framework soon.

Please note that you’ll need to either download a copy of EasyBCD 2.2 beta or grab the latest version of the language files from the GitHub page to get translating.

We’re especially looking for help translating EasyBCD into the following languages (in alphabetical order):

• Arabic
• Chinese (Simplified)
• French
• German
• Hindi
• Japanese
• Korean
• Russian
• Spanish

And before we bid you goodbye, salaam, adiós, au revoir, bis dann, or sayonara, we leave you with this screenshot:

Unlike some of the affected open source software that is listed on CNet, EasyBCD does not use a copyleft license that lets companies and individuals do whatever they want with EasyBCD and repackage it in whichever manner they choose. In fact, in the past whenever we were asked why one of the most popular freeware products available online was not open source, we have repeatedly insisted that the ability to maintain control over the distribution and packing of EasyBCD to ensure an ongoing comfortable and friendly user experience has been our number one reason.

CNet is of course not the only download site using these so-called “downloaders” to bundle unwanted software that unsuspecting users would normally not install. They are, however, one of the largest and prior to this, also one of the more respected download entities. As of today, we shall be contacting any and all companies and sites that use custom “installers” to download/install EasyBCD as this is in direct violation of the EasyBCD license.

While this could not come at a less opportune time, with EasyBCD currently being the 11th most popular download in the System Utilities category on Download.com, we feel that maintaining a fluid and smooth end user experience, uncluttered by various intrusive softwares, is a tradeoff well worth making in order to never be associated with an unsavory experience in the minds of our users.

NeoSmart Technologies would be thrilled to maintain our listings for EasyBCD and other NeoSmart products on Download.com, and we have historically directed many users there to get their downloads. As such, our offer is simply as follows:

• If CNET and other download companies wish to continue, as they did at one point, hosting EasyBCD on their own servers, then it must be in unaltered, unmodified, and non-bundled form.
• If CNET and other download sites do not wish to host the setup package themselves, then they should hotlink the latest version of EasyBCD directly from our servers. The direct download links provided in our PAD files always permit the hotlinking of the latest version of our software, providing direct access to the downloads in question.
• If CNET and other download companies are not willing to refrain from bundling EasyBCD with any other package, installer, downloader, or other non-authorized bundleware nor willing to link to EasyBCD off of our official download servers, then we must unfortunately and with much regret demand the the immediate delisting of all NeoSmart products being provided in anything other than their virgin installer package as it was originally created.

The latest versions of the EasyBCD installer, as well as those of our other popular software and products, are all digitally signed by NeoSmart Technologies. In short, any download for a NeoSmart product must make available the untampered, digitally signed installer as it was originally released by ourselves. Authentic NeoSmart setup packages can be recognized by means of the following digital signature when viewing the file properties:

We are sorry to have to be making these demands, but are left with no other choice as we have always and forever prided ourselves in providing top-notch quality products and a wonderful user experience. We constantly turn down very lucrative and alluring offers to bundle EasyBCD with other “unwanted products” in exchange for rather princely sums of money. Fortunately, our custom, non-GPL/non-opensource license for these softwares allows us to stipulate and demand that download partners conform to our distribution policies. We look forward to updating this post soon with the good news that CNet and others (currently Softonic) have complied with our terms of distribution. A copy of this request has been filed with Upload.com support under case number 111205-000208.

In the meantime, anyone looking to obtain EasyBCD and other freeware or shareware from a download catalog should look at Softpedia (our EasyBCD listing there) and FileHippo (not currently hosting EasyBCD) as good alternatives. In fact, both have text on their site indicating that they pride themselves in providing clean and non-intrusive downloads to original and unmodified packages. We also advise any other freeware authors and developers hosting their files with Download.com to double-check and make sure that their users are not being taken advantage of unawares, and to follow suit if necessary.

Update (11:05 AM CST): We have just received an email from CNet informing us that they are no longer using what’s officially called “CNET-Installer” for our products. As such, we have no problem linking to the EasyBCD listing on Download.com once again.

The New Windows 8 Bootloader

Literally the very first thing you notice when installing and testing Windows 8 Developer Preview is the new boot screen. I personally find it to be very cluttered and unorganized, and generally aesthetically unappealing. However, compared to the decades of text-based boot selection menus that people are accustomed to, reviewers are seeing this as a dramatic improvement.

Some of the interesting things we’ve noticed about the new Windows 8 bootloader:

1. The new look
2. Completely new process of loading an OS
3. Integration of repair tools into the bootloader itself

New Look

Hopefully the designers at Microsoft can get their hands on the new boot screen before Windows 8 goes RTM. That said, Microsoft has explained the rationale behind the redesign as being purely function over form – the new boot screen is part of the general overhaul of Windows to use the touch-friendly Metro UI. Microsoft is claiming that the new boot menu is intended to be a more touch-friendly interface – and you can’t really disagree with that, as the appallingly-oversized buttons and labels make it very hard to miss-click “miss-press” with one’s fingers. However, just how many people will be dual-booting on a PC with a touch-only input device, ummm, remains to be seen.

That out of the way, the new boot menu is more than just a visual overhaul, it’s virtually a complete rewrite of the BOOTMGR/BCD bootloader that was first revealed during the Windows Longhorn/Vista beta program. Some of the changes are a little subtle, but the Windows 8 DP builds have introduced some very tricky concepts, evolving the bootloader from just a selection menu to something rather more complicated.

New Boot Sequence

For reasons we have not yet been able to discover, though we are confident they will be revealed in time, Microsoft has chosen to completely change the manner in which operating systems are loaded once selected from the boot menu. The usual boot process that just about any bootloader goes through is something like this:

With Windows 8, this boot process has been changed completely, and now something more along these lines takes place:

It’s a subtle change as the boot menu is not shown the second time around, but the PC actually reboots after making the selection. We’re not clear on why Microsoft is doing this, but if I’d had to hazard a really wild guess, I’d say it’s to clean up the environment that’s been altered/modified/corrupted by the new boot menu. Basically, it seems that the new boot menu interface has become it’s own mini-OS, and is possibly running in protected mode (vs the traditional real-mode bootloader), and as such, needs to reboot to bring the system back into a real-mode that the Windows 8 kernel can initialize from and bring the system from real to protected mode itself. In short: the new boot menu is more of an OS and less of a boot menu than ever before.

Repair Tools Integration

If you were still in any doubt as to just how different the new bootloader was, and how much more of a complete and standalone OS it has turned into, you need look no further than the new repair tools integration. Windows Vista introduced the recovery center, a WinPE-based environment with some tools for both automated and manual repair, on the setup DVD, Windows 7 (in some SKUs and as of certain revisions) copied the recovery center image to the local hard drive and could, if the bootloader itself has not been wiped out, automatically provide an option of loading the recovery center from disk. With Windows 8, Microsoft has gone a step further, integrating the repair tools into the Windows 8 boot menu itself.

As you can see from the screenshots above, the bootloader no longer contains an entry/link to the repair center WIM image, the bootloader and the repair center have instead been merged together. Still, the same problem with the Windows 7 implementation remains: if the bootloader itself has been wiped (which is the most common problem), the recovery center cannot be accessed. In fact, we see no benefits for this implementation over the Windows 7 method, and can only see the drawbacks of enormously-increased complexity and longer load times.

EasyBCD and Windows 8 Developer Preview

Now for what you’ve all been asking: how does EasyBCD play with the Windows 8 Developer Preview? The short answer is, EasyBCD supports Windows 8 DP. The long answer is rather more complicated.

It seems that out-of-the-box, the Windows 8 “pretty” (and we use that word very loosely) boot screen supports only Vista and up. It will not show Windows XP, Linux, or other OS entries (in preparation for Secure Boot? Perhaps). EasyBCD can be installed on Windows 8 (though it will attempt to download the .NET Framework if you haven’t manually activated it, because Microsoft has done a 180 and biting the hand of the developers that powers it, has disabled .NET 1.0 – 3.5 compatibility out-of-the-box in Windows 8), and can be used to add, remove, rename, configure, and generally do whatever you want with entries and the Windows 8 boot menu.

The catch is that as soon as you use EasyBCD, Windows 8 will detect something along the lines of unsupported changes to the bootloader and cease to use the new boot menu / boot screen. It will revert to the Windows 7-style boot menu, including the text-based interface and the original boot sequence. Now, while we personally prefer the older menu, we realize that the majority of Windows 8 DP users are rather anxious to both keep the Windows 8 touch-enabled boot screen and retain usage of EasyBCD’s wonderful goodiness, having apparently never heard of the saying “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” ;-)

Now we’re not sure how/why the Windows 8 boot menu reverts to the Windows 7 menu, because in fact, it is possible to force the Windows 8 boot menu to add unsupported entries if you use only very particular bcdedit commands; but as even something as minor and unimportant as changing the order of boot menu entries in EasyBCD causes Windows to use the old boot menu, it seems we’re missing something. Rest assured, this will all be taken care of in due time, though at the moment it seems rather folly to waste time trying to implement support for what is clearly the alpha stages of the new boot menu and the appropriate course of action would appear to be waiting for the next Windows 8 beta build (rumored to be sometime around February 2012).

EasyBCD, when used from within Windows XP – 7, can be used to add a Windows 8 entry to the bootloader in the same manner that you would a Windows Vista/7 entry. So, in short, EasyBCD supports Windows 8, but Windows 8 does not support EasyBCD :)

EasyBCD 2.1.2 supports the recently-released Fedora 16, which is the first Fedora Linux version to feature the usage of GRUB2 (instead of the old Legacy GRUB). EasyBCD has supported GRUB2 for years now, but it required the addition of a new profile with the names and paths that Fedora 16 uses. EasyBCD also has a new homepage at http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ which is both prettier and easier to remember.

The full EasyBCD changelog is available in the usual place.

Downloads have been posted for both commercial and non-profit/personal users. We’d like to remind everyone that EasyBCD now requires a paid license for use in commercial or other for-profit environments and purposes. Please don’t forget to press the Google +1 and Facebook Like buttons on the download page below! Also, follow us on twitter @neosmart and like us on Facebook to get the latest updates and news!

Download EasyBCD 2.1.2 1.5 MiB

As always, registered users can download EasyBCD from their user control panel.

EasyBCD 2.1.1 is the first of our products to be digitally signed! This is fairly exciting news as it was one of the very last finishing touches that EasyBCD (and the rest of our products, for that matter) has lacked over the years. Today, all this changes as we have finally obtained a digital certificate with which we shall be signing all future releases. No more ugly orange warnings when trying to install a NeoSmart product or a nasty red bar when downloading our software with Internet Explorer 9, we can now prove what you’ve all known for years: our products are top-notch quality and absolutely safe and malware-free.

Now, back to EasyBCD. Here are some of the more important changes in this release:

• Fixed: Advanced settings are not available for PE images
• Fixed: EasyBCD can read and write internationalized names for entries!
• New: Added option to auto-load certain BCD path on startup
• New: Much-improved intelligent loading of BTX Bootloader for FreeBSD and PC-BSD

We’ve worked long and hard on creating an entirely rewritten BTX chainloading stack for EasyBCD, working hand-in-hand with the PC-BSD team to perfect the dual-boot process over a period of several weeks (thank you Dru and Kris!). All BSD users should notice a much more streamlined dual-boot process with this release onwards. We’ve also taken the first steps towards full internationalization support for EasyBCD, EasyBCD can now read and write foreign language names and attributes from/to the BCD store.

Download EasyBCD 2.1.1 (1.4 MiB)

The full changelog is available in the usual place. As always, registered users can download EasyBCD from their user control panel.

All joking aside, synchronization objects such as mutexes and semaphores are essential to safe multithreading and are found on just about any platform under the sun. Mutexes and semaphores alike have one purpose: to keep different threads from messing around with bits and bytes at the same time another thread is, keeping your code free of segfaults and memory access violations alike. But that’s about where the similarities between the synchronization primitives on different platforms end.

POSIX-compliant operating systems with pthreads offer additional really neat synchronization primitives not found on Windows, such as condition variables and read-write locks (the latter is now available on Windows Vista+). And Windows programmers have at their disposal automatic and manual reset events, which make designing certain types of multithreaded software incredibly easy, abstracting away much of the hard-core synchronization logic that lies beneath the hood.

We’ve decided to open source two libraries we’ve found useful in transitioning from Windows development to Linux and from Linux development to Windows. The first (and most important) is an implementation of WIN32 manual/auto-reset events for Linux. While there’s nothing WIN32 events can do that POSIX condition variables can’t, the differences between the syntax and usage semantics of both has resulted in entirely different programming paradigms on the different platforms, making it hard for some developers to port code from one platform to the other or even write code from scratch on the platform they’re unfamiliar with.

Enter pevents. pevents is a C++ library (easily portable to C) for *nix platforms that provides an implementation of WIN32 events on Linux, giving developers access to the CreateEvent, SetEvent, ResetEvent, and WaitForSingleObject functions that make them feel warm and fuzzy inside. More importantly and unlike all the other efforts at porting WIN32 events to *nix in the past, pevents also has support for the all-important WaitForMultipleObjects. WFMO is an important concept in multithreaded programming on Windows, and allows a developer to wait in the kernel until one or more events has fired (or, alternatively, until they have all fired) with a single line of code, resulting in high-performance synchronization waits.

While *nix zealots have long maintained that WaitForMultipleObjects encourages bad programming practices, the fact remains that it can be a powerful tool in the arsenal of a good developer… and any claims that WaitForMultipleObjects is inherently flawed as it leads to the loss of events are outright incorrect statements that only those unfamiliar with correct multithreaded programming on Windows would say. With pevents, Windows developers can feel right at home on Linux/*nix with access to WIN32 events in both manual and auto-reset flavors (MSDN explanation for the uninitiated) with both WaitForSingleObject and WaitForMultipleObjects functions.

On the other hand, *nix developers have long had at their fingertips powerful and lightweight locks adapted for the readers-writers problem (Wikipedia overview). ReadWrite locks (pthread_rwlock_t) are powerful objects that can drastically improve multithreaded performance by allowing unlimited simultaneous read-only access to shared variables while only limiting access to one thread at a time for writing purposes. Microsoft has realized the importance of this over time, and with Windows Vista now has support for read-write locks in the kernel (SRW Locks).

However, as very few developers today are free to target only Vista and above, we have written RWLocks for Windows, a library which provides access to three different flavors of read-write locks, with advanced features not found in either pthread_rwlock_t on POSIX and SRW Locks on Vista such as support for cross-process synchronization, reentrance support, and writer -> reader declination.

Both these libraries are released under the terms of the MIT license and hosted on github. These libraries were developed from the ground-up to be as minimalistic, lightweight and fast as possible (though WFMO requires a bit more overhead and can be disabled at compile-time for better performance). Fork, use, and contribute your changes back. Enjoy!

pevents Linux/OS X/*nix

RWLock for Windows

Please note that these are on-going projects still undergoing development and maintenance. WFMO support in particular is in BETA and can be #define’d out if it’s not required.

Find anything wrong? Drop us an email at neosmart@neosmart.net, comment below, or fork the code at github.

While each of these fine web browsers has its own way doing things, ranging from keyboard shortcuts to tab management and process handling, they all more or less pull these off a bit nicer than Internet Explorer ever code. But the one Internet Explorer feature I can honestly say I miss when using Google Chrome is the ability to submit the form being currently modified/filled-in with a keyboard shortcut, especially if it works even if there are multiple forms on the screen.

Searching about for a cross-platform solution to this problem, perhaps a previously unknown keyboard shortcut or else some method of assigning a keyboard shortcut that would let Google Chrome intelligently submit the current form via a keyboard shortcut on both Mac and Windows, it became clear that this feature just doesn’t exist for Chrome. Well, as of yesterday, at any rate…

As of today, this feature does exist and it can be yours by just installing Chrome Form QuickSubmit, a Google Chrome extension that will add the keyboard shortcut alt+shift+s on Windows/Linux and cmd+shift+s on Mac to your Chrome, letting you easily and quickly submit the form you’re filling in without needing to resort to tabs, or gasp the mouse:

Google Chrome QuickSubmit 0.2

Again, the keyboard shortcuts are alt+shift+s on Windows/Linux and cmd+shift+s on OS X. These shortcuts do not, to the best of my knowledge, conflict with any others and there aren’t any known issues with this extension. So go ahead, click the link above, authorize the extension, refresh this page, and test it out in the box below!

What’s different with Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 is that Microsoft chooses to deflect the blame from itself, and pin it instead on the unfortunate owners of the website that the user had last visited. In the following screenshot, Internet Explorer 10 has crashed after being unable to handle some of the web scripting on our website. Except instead of the error dialog you would expect (something to the effect of “Internet Explorer has stopped responding,” an error caption which we are all familiar with and of which the web is full), the error dialog instead reads:

neosmart.net is not responding.

Come again? Really? To us, this seems like a rather mean and dishonest approach to dealing with the shortcomings of the web browser. While it is true that at this moment in time, Internet Explorer is more prone to crashes and hangs than it would be in the final (RTM) release of Windows 8, this does not in any way give Microsoft the right to assume that in the future any hangs or crashes in IE are to be blamed on the designers/coders of the website being visited.

In fact, no code even if purposely meant to crash the browser should succeed in doing so, and certainly should not be held to blame. If Microsoft cannot make a crash-proof browser, that does not mean that they should dishonestly deflect and redirect the blame towards and innocent third party.

Almost four years ago, NeoSmart Technologies published a Windows Vista repair and recovery CD that could be used to treat common boot issues and recover from catastrophic system failure in case you didn’t have a Windows setup CD handy.

Over the years, we’ve added more recovery CDs to the collection, ending up with a complete portfolio of repair CDs for Windows Vista and Windows 7 in both 32- and 64-bit flavors. We’ve had the good fortune of being able to host these CDs on our site in one form or the other for free download to millions of users around the globe.

Three months ago, we were contacted by the legal department at Microsoft Corporation asking us to discontinue hosting these files. Until this point, we were not aware that Microsoft was displeased with our hosting of the CDs and in fact enjoyed a rather healthy relationship with the Microsoft support forums where victims of PC crashes would be directed to our site to download a copy of the repair CDs.

Since then, we have been in talks and negotiations with the Microsoft legal and licensing divisions, trying to work out a method whereby we could provide our users and visitors with access to these CDs once again. Today we’re excited to announce that these CDs are once more available for download!

There’s some mixed good and bad news, however. The good news is that all downloads will be direct HTTP links, so no need to learn how to use a torrent client or fiddle around with open network ports: just plain, standard, direct, and very fast HTTP downloads for all our ISO images. We’ve also taken this opportunity to update the repair CDs and add a virus scanner (powered by ClamWin) as well as some command-line tools and utilities that were missing from some of the images.

The bad news is that there will now be a nine dollar download charge for each CD. There was no way for us to avoid charging this, as we now pay a licensing fee to Microsoft in exchange for making these CDs available, and also pay per download to outsource the high-speed web hosting for these large CD images (150 to 200 MiB, each) to an outside service.

We look forward to updating these repair and recovery CDs over time and adding more tools and utilities to help you save your PCs from the brink of death. We thank you for your patience with us over the past few months during which the downloads were suspended, and truly appreciate your understanding of the situation.

Download Links

Windows Vista Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

Windows 7 Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

For all our loving users, readers, and members out there, EasyBCD 2.1 has just been released and is ready for consumption. Freshly baked, tenderly prepared, and lovingly made, it brings the usual host of new features and updates that a new version of EasyBCD usually brings.

But this build of EasyBCD is a little special — we focused a lot more on improving the user experience over adding new features. We’ve fine-tuned every line of text, every button, every icon. We’ve hidden all we can hide, automated all we can automate, but never at the cost of advanced options; instead, everything is just that much smarter and more intelligent, cutting out the extra steps that left room for confusion. Simply put, EasyBCD 2.1 is all about smoothing out the edges of what has become the world’s most popular bootloader utility.

With EasyBCD 2.1 also comes some exciting changes from the developmental side of things. As you all may or may not know, development at NeoSmart Technologies has largely been a one-man show, with Mahmoud doing the coding and research, with help from an amazing team of moderators (chief of which are Terry, Justin, and Peter) providing most of the ever-important tech suport on our forums. What most people don’t know is that while NeoSmart Technologies has, alhamdulilah, reached epic heights over the past few years, it’s being run entirely on a part-time basis by all of its volunteers.

As a result of this, development has never been as fast-paced as our users would like and the documentation has somewhat stagnated over the years. We have always had some exciting ideas we wanted to try out, new projects we’d like to share, and guides we’d love to write, but unfortunately as hard-pressed for time as we were, these things just never happened. But we’d like that to change, and we’ll soon have people working full-time on NeoSmart projects.

This, combined with what some in the industry have taken to calling the “divide-by-zero” error: a lot of people from big corporations to individual users want to use free software, but have this terrible misconception that because it’s free it must be inferior, which as we all know, is simply not the case. There are also other issues involving EasyBCD and commercial use — it turns out that while we were publishing EasyBCD under a catch-all free license, some of the components we included in EasyBCD could only be redistributed for personal, non-commercial use; thus putting us and our users in a small dilemma.

The solution that we arrived at after much deliberation was to start a commercial licensing program for EasyBCD. Now, we need to say loud and clear: EasyBCD has always been and will always be free for personal use. We hate developers that turn on their own users, preying on their loyalty and support, forcing them to fork out money for software that’s always been free.

That said, as of EasyBCD 2.1, companies and individuals using EasyBCD in commercial settings, as a part of a commercial package, etc. will need to obtain a commercial license. Commercial licenses are currently priced at $24.95 a seat (flexibly defined as per-user or per-machine, your call) with volume licensing available at reduced rates. Simply, if you’re using EasyBCD to make money, you can help invest in making it a better product for yourself and everyone.

Licensed EasyBCD users are given priority support, with the option of discussing custom deployment and/or product customization options. All EasyBCD licenses are lifetime licenses, future updates and releases forever included. We hope you will all stand by us during this transition, and we look forward to bringing new and exciting products to bear in the near future.

Download EasyBCD 2.1 (1.377 MiB)

Buy Commercial License ($24.95)

Major new features:

• EasyBCD setup detects missing or out-of-date .NET 2.0 pre-requirement, and automatically installs.
• New options to boot from hard disk or floppy images. No longer just VHDs, raw disk images now work too!
• Much-improved BCD parsing methodology that works even when bcdedit doesn’t!
• Intelligent external BCD handling. Automatically determines drive settings, and warns if entries aren’t portable as created.
• Added a “No Timeout” option of the boot menu, wherein the selection screen will hang until a selection is made.
• As usual, EasyBCD now features improved and more-resilient support for even more Linux configurations.

A complete list of changes can be found in the full changelog.

Cheers and don’t forget to Like us on Facebook and follow us on twitter @NeoSmart!

There were issues pertaining to dual-displays in a mixed VGA/DVI environment (one display DVI, the second VGA) which were never resolved by ATi (to the best of my knowledge) and were worked around by initially downgrading the DVI to a VGA connection and later replacing the older monitor with a new DVI-based display. There were issues related to the refresh rate. There were issues related to the resolution. There were issues related to the games. There were issues related to the OS. Basically, wherever you look, there were problems caused by poor development practices and crappy QA all around.

There were issues that Microsoft/Windows’ new WDM model caught, triggering a restart of the graphics subsystem without causing a BSoD. And there were (unfortunately the majority) of the ATi display driver crashes that caused BSoDs left, right, and center.

Today, my Windows 7 PC surprised me with an interesting question:

ATI display driver has stopped working properly. [big surprise!]

At this time we don’t know the exact cause of this problem [again, no surprises here!]. Hewlett-Packard [!!!] is interested in gathering additional feedback. Please visit the Hewlett-Packard website to provide information about the problem.

Pin-drop silence. Remember, this PC is homebuilt. HP has nothing to do with it. If it said “report to ATi,” or “report to AMD,” or “report to Microsoft,” I’d understand. But HP?

And it wasn’t a mistake. Following the link presented takes me to this HP page. And the first question? Did this crash occur on an HP PC?

So it’s not a mistake on Microsoft’s behalf — HP is making a real effort to track down a bug caused by ATi drivers running ATi hardware. Wow.

All I know are two things:

1. Having been in contact with ATi over these problems for several years, I’m glad someone else is looking into it now.
2. I’m not getting another ATi/AMD graphics card ever again!

Google Chrome has a new logo, and it wants to make sure everyone knows.

Those of you updating to the latest Chrome builds (in this case, 11.0.696.12 dev, running on Mac OS X 10.7) will find that the new version comes with a bold new icon. We’re not sure if we like it just yet, because it definitely takes some getting used to.

The new icon is at the top-right of this post. For comparison, here’s the old one:

The new one is distinctly more 2d, less shiny, and far more abstract. They say that’s the natural progression of logos, but Chrome and its logo certainly haven’t been around since the 60s for us to be discussing that.

Us? We can’t stop seeing a big, colorful ’9′ whenever we glance at the icon.

And (after the jump), here’s the new Chrome logo in super-size. [Click it on it to load the image itself at full resolution]

Follow us on Twitter @neosmart or on Facebook at http://facebook.com/NeoSmart

Depending on who you ask, they all have different terms for Pi. Transcendental, irrational, easy, hard… but we prefer the term ‘magical.’

(If only that pie tasted as wonderful as it looks! Alas, it was good, but not that good!)

Happy Pi Day 2011!

Go out, have some fun, bake a pie, read a math journal, write some geeky code, and tell some math jokes. This is the one day each year you’re allowed to let your inner geek show and not worry about being too geeky. On Pi Day, it’s cool to be nerdy!

Follow NeoSmart Technologies on twitter @neosmart and on Facebook.

However, there are a few things that have forever irked us about the ln lookalike called mklink.exe:

• It’s called mklink and not ln. (I mean, you just get can’t get around that fact)
• The arguments are switched around. `mklink something_doesnt_exist actual_file` is just…….. wrong!
• By default, mklink will create softlinks and not hardlinks. ln requires the /h flag to create a hardlink.
• mklink isn’t smart enough to distinguish between files and folders. You need explicitly tell it via the commandline.
• Even then, mklink has two different switches depending on the type of directory link you want. /D for softlink’d directories, and /J for hardlink’d directories.
• mklink can’t be used outside of cmd.exe (such as in PowerShell). (Hat tip: Jason)
• And, of course,  mklink isn’t open source.

So we made our own.

ln-win is available in 32-bit and 64-bit, uses the same syntax, names, switches, and argument ordering as ln on *nix. And pursuant to our promise to contribute more to open source, ln-win and our Junction Point library is 100% open source, freely licensed under the generous terms of the MIT license.

Perhaps more importantly, ln-win contains an open source Junction Point library. While Win32 APIs exist to create symlinks (on Vista and up), there is no API for creating hardlinks of any kind (for files or folders). The NeoSmart JunctionPoint library provides the following APIs:

	bool CreateJunctionPoint(LPCTSTR origin, LPCTSTR junction);
	bool IsDirectoryJunction(LPCTSTR path);
	bool GetJunctionDestination(LPCTSTR path, OUT LPTSTR destination);
	bool DeleteJunctionPoint(LPCTSTR path);

As you can see, the NeoSmart JunctionPoint library provides all the APIs you need both to create and interact with hardlinks. IsDirectoryJunction can be used for both symlinks and hardlinks, making it a snap to make your code symlink/hardlink aware, letting you intelligently avoid cyclic paths and data duplication for any filesystem traversal needs.

Binaries for Windows x86 and x64

ln-win Source Code on GitHub

Quick: if you’re fighting with a friend and want to let your BFF know what’s going on as you send your frenemy a nasty messsage — what’s the best way to pull that off?

If you’ve completed the switch to Facebook mindset, your convoluted answer would consist of something to effect “Send a message to X, copy and paste it, and send it to Y.” And you’d be right – Facebook doesn’t give you another way of pulling this off. FAIL!

Let’s say your technical skills are not in such a pitiful state and you have enough sense to still use email for day-to-day communications. What’s your answer then? “I’ll just send X an email, then forward my result to Y.” aaaaaaaaand that’s another fail.

See, there’s this oft-overlooked feature my commandline mail client from the 80s has that solves this. It’s called “Blind Carbon Copy,” or BCC for short. You can send an email to more than one person without all your recipients knowing who you sent it to!

Unfortunately, to use BCC it isn’t enough to just know about it and want to use it yourself – the people you’re BCCing in your emails need to have enough sense to look up at the “To:” line in their email client and find out what exactly is their role in this message. Are they the primary recipients of this email? Or perhaps they’re only officially in the loop, so that they can have a copy of this email for future reference and, if necessary, can step in when needed in the future? Or have they been BCC’d in the message – invisibly copied in on the contents of the email, because the sender wants them to see it without necessarily divulging this fact to the original recipient?

But if people don’t look to see what status they’ve been delegated to in this email, then it just doesn’t work. And unfortunately, those of us that do use BCC no longer can. Imagine this email below:

To: Margaret

BCC: Jane

Subject: The secret you told me about!

Dear Margaret,

I just wanted to say thanks for confiding in me. I was really sorry to hear about ________, hopefully things will work out.

Chin up!

Carl

Carl felt it would be OK to share this tidbit of info with Jane, his long time confidante. Margaret didn’t want anyone to know. Later that day, Jane sees Margaret at the supermarket, and before you know it:

Jane: Hey Margaret! How are you doing? Fancy seeing you here!

Margaret: Oh, hi Jane!

Jane: How’s the baby coming along?

Margaret: CAAAAARL!!!!

Yep. Because Carl hadn’t made it clear to Jane that Margaret didn’t know she knew, Jane figured everyone in the original conversation was “in on it.”

Given the unfortunately high percentage of people that fall into the same category as our Jane here, Carl just can’t use this technique any more. He simply can’t trust that Jane will have enough sense to realize she’s being invisibly BCC’d in the conversation, and has to result to this crude technique of letting her know:

To: Jane

Subject: FWD: The secret you told me about!

Hi Jane. This is a secret, Marge doesn’t know I told anyone! See you later!

-Carl

To: Margaret

Subject: The secret you told me about!

Dear Margaret,

I just wanted to say thanks for confiding in me. I was really sorry to hear about ________, hopefully things will work out.

Chin up!

Carl

I’m always shocked to find “techie friends” just don’t get BCC. To illustrate the point, one of my more well-versed friends in the arcane art of email called me up the other day: “I just wanted to double-check – if I have a list of 400 people I need to email at once but I don’t want them all to know each other’s emails…. It’s possible with BCC somehow, right? And how?”

Shame, really. Rest in peace, BCC. You were a good friend and we had some great times together.