Operating Systems

How to bring OSX Lion’s Natural Scrolling to Windows 7

If, like me, you move between Windows and Mac on a daily basis you may have found yourself finding it a little hard to figure out which way to scroll the mouse.  With OS-X Lion Apple introduced ‘natural’ scrolling which means that when you scroll the wheel on the mouse an upwards push sends the scroll bar down, that might sound weird but in essence your upward movement of the wheel actually pushes the screen upwards – very much like a touch gesture on a smartphone or tablet.

Whether you love it out loath it, getting used to switching between the two is difficult and you could either turn it off on the Mac or if you like it you could bring the same feature to Windows.  As it happens the feature is already there, to enable it you need to edit a registry key and if you’re not familiar with this process I would advise caution since a mistake in the Registry can make your machine quite unstable but if you’re comfortable with RegEdit you’ll need to modify the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\????\????\Device Parameters\FlipFlopWheel

Set the value from 0 (default) to 1 where the ????\???? section are whatever device IDs you can see.  I changed the FlipFlopWheel property for all of the devices I could see, unplugged and re-plugged the mouse and the then it worked – natural scrolling on Windows.

Credits go to darkfader on the NeoSmart forums for the original solution.

The Seven Best Features of OS X 10.7 Lion (and the bad bits)

It’s always a risk upgrading to a brand new operating system and clearly so on the day of release so why have I done it?  Because I’m insane?  Because I’m an Apple fanboy?  Not really (though maybe a little bit of both), I’ve only upgraded my laptop which isn’t really used for anything overly critical so I’m free to have a play and chase down the gremlins before upgrading the development boxes and production hardware.

So, on to the meat and potatoes of the post – is it any good?

The Good Bits

1. File Vault 2 – now with whole disk encryption, a must for road warriors and anyone whose laptop is regularly out of the house and clearly missing from previous versions.
2. Mail – I’m loving the favourites bar in the new mail app and the conversation style view is pretty slick without being annoying – a UI that adds to but doesn’t dominate the user’s attention.
3. Dashboard – I couldn’t say quite why but I used to find the old dashboard irritating, the new one seems better but only time will tell if I actually use it.
4. Calendar – oooh it’s pretty.  That’s not a reason to love it but it is pretty, it may sound kinda wooly and like one of those things that PC users hate but it just feels nicer.
5. Full Screen Apps – I was skeptical and to some degree I am still but when you go full-screen the apps really do look nicer and it’s especially handy for reading PDFs in Preview.
6. Quicktime - exporting the audio portion of a video  is a great feature and something I’ve often needed to do.  The ability to make screencast recordings is brilliant, coupled with the trim feature and instant sharing to YouTube and Vimeo just makes it so easy to produce quick tutorial videos.
7. Electronic Distribution – you might think this is a lame pick but downloading from the Mac App Store just worked and it’s clear to me that it will be the future of software distribution.

Where I’m Nonplussed

Sure, there’s a whole load of shiny in Lion but there are a couple features that I’m underwhelmed by, namely…

1. Launchpad – provides an iOS style application launcher but whilst you can make folders by dragging icons on top of one-another you can’t rename the folder whilst double-clicking and you can’t drag a folder to the dock.  It’s one of the few examples of Apple UX design where I’ve found that what feels natural doesn’t work.
2. Facetime and iChat – having both never made sense and solidfying this in the new release makes even less.

The Bad Bits

On a new upgrade there will always be a few third-party apps that won’t work and in this Lion is no exception, so far I’ve only had trouble with the LastPass plugin for Safari but the FireFox version works just fine so it’s no biggie – I’ll update the post if I find anything else but you should check out the community compatibility wiki at roaringapps.com.

Overall I will say that the new look and feel is a tad blocky, I suppose I’ll get used to it but it does seem a little bit 1994.  The additional UI tweaks also push my old black MacBook a little close to the edge performance wise, the fans seem to be running a little more often than they used to do.

Internet Explorer Using 2.7GB RAM!

Erm, something’s not right here…

… I only had about eight tabs open, although one was Google Reader.

Enabling Hyper-V Dynamic Memory in Windows Server 2008 R2

Last week saw the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 and with it one of the feature’s I’ve been waiting for – Hyper-V Dynamic Memory.  Until now if you were running a Hyper-V host with (for example) 16GB of RAM your guests could never exceed that amount, e.g. you could have 4 x 4GB, 2 x 4GB + 1 x 8GB, etc. but never more than 16GB in total. 

With the addition of Dynamic Memory you can finally over-commit RAM enabling you to make better use of available resources, as with CPU usage you still need to balance your workloads carefully and it only really makes sense to combine workloads that have high memory pressures at different times otherwise you could end up with poor performance or experience system failures when memory is unavailable. 

Please note that Dynamic Memory is configured on a host-by-host basis so nothing will change until you follow the process below, Microsoft have a really helpful TechNet page explaining how to configure Dynamic Memory but in a nutshell you should follow these steps…

Update both the Host and the Guest to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 then use Hyper-V Manager to connect to the Guest then choose Action >> Insert Integration Services Setup Disk and reinstall the integration components. 

Shut down the Guest and in Hyper-V Manager right-click on the guest and pick Settings in the memory panel choose Dynamic then set the Startup RAM and Maximum RAM.  There’s also a configurable buffer percentage (Hyper-V reserves this extra amount but will give it up under pressure).  I’d leave it on the default 20% unless you’ve got a good reason not to. 

Set  a priority for this guest (e.g. you could set this higher for servers that could fail with too little memory). 

Restart the guest and check in Hyper-V Manager…

Here you can see that I’ve exceeded my Startup memory of 2GB but only have a current demand of 1795MB and since there’s no memory pressure on the host the status shows as OK.  If the host is unable to reserver the entire buffer amount (in my case 20%) the status will show as “Low” and if the host is unable to allocate any buffer it will show “Warning”.

Using 32-bit Task Scheduler + CScript on Windows 2008 R2

One of my primary data sources for Business Objects is a replicated pair of MySQL servers where I am asked by the DBAs to report against the slave however during maintenance replication can fall behind and reports that require up-to-date data will be incomplete.  Since we don’t live in an ideal world we can’t always plan our maintenance windows so I wrote a small VBScript routine that will detect the replication delay and if if it exceeds a threshold will change the ODBC source to point to the master. 

If you’ve caught my earlier article on 32-bit ODBC Drivers in Windows Server 2008 R2 you’ll know that there’s plenty of fun to be had since my ODBC drivers are 32-bit.  This means that I need to run the VBScript using the 32-bit version of CScript and the schedule it using the 32-bit Task Scheduler and once again the solution is to use the 32-bit tools provided in the SysWOW64 directory….

• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cscript
• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\taskschd.msc

Beyond that you shouldn’t have too much trouble but if you do please leave a comment below with details and I’ll get back to you if I can help.

Quick Tip: Print Current Time in Batch File

I just had cause to monitor the progress of a batch file to see if there are any particular sticking points, to do this I wanted to simply print the current time along with a little text describing the process being run.  To do this I used the %time% variable as follows…

ECHO Batch Started at %time%

[commands, commands, commands]
ECHO Step 1 Completed at %time%

[commands, commands, commands]
ECHO Step 2 Completed at %time%

ECHO Batch Completed at %time%