Computing related collection of stuff

Quoting the Microsoft Service Agreement (which seems to be obligatory for those using Windows Live applications):

4. How You May Not Use the Service.

In using the service, you may not:
use the service in a way that harms us or our affiliates, resellers, distributors, and/or vendors (collectively, the "Microsoft parties"), or any customer of a Microsoft party;

Unless there’s a more precise definition of "use in a way that harms", that just won’t work.
Is it "harm" if I merely work on some project (commercial or in my spare time, open source or not - doesn’t matter) that interferes with the business of such an affiliate etc.?

I guess Phoenix - one of the big guys in PC BIOS development - might be somewhere in that list - their software interacts in some way with Windows, and they probably coordinate their efforts.
Phoenix probably don’t like linuxbios too much - oops, I worked on that, and used e-mail while doing so. Would this clause prevent me from legally reading and sending linuxbios mails with Windows Live Mail?

My Ogg player broke when I tried to install its software on my XP machine - it seems that the software tried to update the firmware (without asking me) and failed for some reason.

A friend of mine is here for a visit and for fun, we plugged the stick in his vista notebook - and it instantly found some "STMP3500" "player recovery device". After searching for STMP3500, I’ve found an XP driver (different player vendor, but it worked perfectly) which allowed the firmware updater to do its magic: and now it works :-)

I just plugged my CBM1541 drive into the parallel port of my PC (with the appropriate adapter cable, of course), and it just worked. Even the very good CBM computer emulator suite VICE knows how to directly access it!

Now I only have to copy those 200 floppies I have at home and can dive into some nostalgia again :-)

I encountered some problems reading one audio CD into a flac file (I like to keep them in a one-file-per-cd format, with integrated cuesheet, etc) - not even good old trusty cdrdao on win32 managed to read it (but did just fine on DragonFly).

Searching a bit, I found that the ASPI driver (which provides the interface to lowlevel SCSI-and-similar devices for userspace applications) requires some flags in the registry. cdrdao even has the necessary changes in its cvs repository. Just apply, reboot (took me a while to remember that) and it works (for me).

Now, while foobar2000 is a nice player for my cd images, its ripping routine relies on the default TOC - which is the one in the latest session. so I’m back at scripting cdrdao and flac to create proper images (using the first session’s TOC, and fixing it up - which requires a local patch by me - like a red-book cd audio player would do)

So one of my next steps in that regard will be doing my own cdrdao build (with my own patches, etc), and creating a small rip-flac-freedb interface. I guess, that’s a good way to learn about win32 development, too.

After 8 Years of UNIX desktop (where not much changed - sure, glitzy-shiny features in the dozen, but still lacking in the usability and integration department), I bought a Windows license.

No Operating System without some weird corners, so I think I’ll collect such issues here (while looking for solutions). Sooo…

Episode 1: Try to delete a movie in a folder you just opened a few seconds ago. "This file is in use".. That thumbnailer/metadata extractor stuff again, with no obvious way to get rid of it (or to teach it how to read that file in a non-blocking way)

The "get rid of it" part is easy: regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll