Archives

Sell By dates and Open Source | November 27, 2003

The defunct Opcode used to make a great MIDI interface/patchbay/TC sync/everything-and-the-kitchen-sink type box, the 64XTC. Unfortunately, they only ever released Windows 98 (1st ed.) drivers for it. Hence the thing has been sitting around in my attic collecting dust for the past few years. However, much to my surprise, I recently discovered some obscure drivers for Windows 2000/XP which someone seems to have reverse-engineered.
This kind of thing seems to happening more and more often. The DigiTech PMC10 was/is a very powerful MIDI pedalboard which has long since been discontinued. Thanks to people like Sean and Raymond it's possible to keep these great machines going. Not that he had any help from the manufacturer. He took it upon himself to build software for programming the device thus extending its usable life beyond DigiTech's Sell By date.
Strong user communities count for a lot in this age of supershort product lifecycles. They pick up where manufacturer support left off. There's obviously a lesson to be learned from the Open Source movement here. Companies would surely stand to gain a lot - not necessarily in tangible assets but in mindshare - if at least their discontinued products were Open Sourced.

Update: It appears the 64XTC drivers are no longer available at the aforementioned site so I'm making them available here: Download (330KB)

Posted at 12:06 PM CET

Oracle Install on P4 | November 14, 2003

The Oracle Installer (as of 8i) will not start on at least some Pentium 4 machines. Apparently, the Symantec Just-In-Time Compiler (symcjit.dll) which they've used does not recognize the processor type properly. To work around this, do a search for the above DLL on the directory into which you've expanded the Oracle archive. This may return multiple copies of the file. Rename every one of them to symcjit.old. Running setup.exe should now bring up the familiar Oracle Universal Installer.

Posted at 10:14 AM CET

Now Blog This | November 13, 2003

I've just noticed that O'Reilly have added a 'Blog this' button to their technology articles on O'Reilly Network. Neat.

Posted at 04:05 PM CET

Strutin' | November 12, 2003

I've been trying to get my head around the Jakarta Struts framework for the past couple of days. Looks like there's a lot of potential there for simplifying and better managing things in a web application. In addition to Programming Jakarta Struts from O'Reilly (which is very good) there's a useful tutorial here by Stephan Wiesner as well as an article by the author of the aforementioned book here.

Posted at 10:35 AM CET

Is It Love? | November 08, 2003

Now, I wouldn't normally blog something like this, but we took delivery of our first car on Thursday. Awesome!

Posted at 07:14 PM CET