Thoughts on Freebase

I have been evaluating Freebase a fairly new site that is aiming to create an open database of everything. Think Wikipedia, but with user definable relational structure.

Here are my thoughts:

Weaknesses:

• Permissions too lapse.
  Not extendible for uses such as a social network, could not easily be used to store private data for a website.
• No notion of functions.
  Wouldn't it be really cool if users could submit functions as well as types, e.g. a function from post codes to latitude and longitude.
• Can Metaweb Technologies be trusted?
  This is a lot more complicated than Wikipedia for other organisations to replicate. If Metaweb goes bust or bad is all the data lost?
• Needs more data.
  It will be interesting to see at what rate the size of the database grows and what the typical method of inserting data will be. Many users will not go as far as learning the API but the current user interface is a bit too clunky for contributors. Refactoring using the Freebase site is currently more-or-less impossible, and a lot of refactoring should be expected for an openly writable database of everything in such an early stage!

Cool:

• Users can create HTML only data driven web applications.

Possible (Mis-)uses:

• To store low sensitivity, yet private, data (using cryptography).
  Think of it as a replacement for Amazon S3.
• A truly open social network.
  At some point soon Facebook, Myspace, etc. have to face the openness interrogation that awaits most successful technology companies.
• Free hosting with unlimited bandwidth.
  When the site is out of alpha anybody will be able to query the database.

Joost (on Vista)

I got myself a Joost invite the other day. First things first, I had to make it work with Vista (it moans about C:\Windows\AppPatch\AcGenral.dll). I found running:

cd /cygdrive/c/Windows/AppPatch
mv AcGenral.dll AcGenral.dll.temp
mv AcGenral.dll.temp AcGenral.dll

at a Cygwin prompt did the trick (the AcGenral.dll file is then owned by the user I am running Joost as and it stops complaining). If you don't use Cygwin, using a DOS prompt instead and running:

c:
cd \Windows\AppPatch
ren AcGenral.dll AcGenral.dll.temp
ren AcGenral.dll.temp AcGenral.dll

probably works just as well. As for Joost itself, there is a shortage of content so besides my short little test I have no reason to use it. The channels do start playing very fast after selection albeit at a slightly too low quality (you wouldn't want to pipe it into a nice TV). I'll certainly keep an eye out for improvements though.

Make the Vista Alt+TAB more like the Mac task switcher

I was really excited to here about Flip 3D but was a bit disappointed when I actually saw it. The previews are big, and they are live which is great, but they are all on top of each other and only use one monitor -- not great. I wanted something a bit like when you press F10 on a Mac.

The closest I have managed to get is some registry tweaks to make Alt+TAB behave a bit like I want, here is what I have come up with:

REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AltTab] "OverlayIconPx"=dword:00000064 "OverlayIconDXPx"=dword:00000000 "OverlayIconDYPx"=dword:00000000 "ThumbSpacingXPx"=dword:00000014 "ThumbSpacingYPx"=dword:00000014 "SideMarginPx"=dword:0a000000 "BottomMarginPx"=dword:00000064 "MinThumbSizePcent"=dword:00000064 "MinWidthPx"=dword:0000015e "TopMarginPx"=dword:00000258 "MaxThumbSizePx"=dword:000007d0 "MaxIconSizePx"=dword:0000015e "TextBottomPx"=dword:000001f4

It is not great, the way it spans monitors could be more tidy, if the tops of the monitors are not aligned some of the live previews go off screen and the previews could be bigger. However it is, in my opinion, better than the default Alt+TAB behaviour.

Fixing Windows

Ok, I used to do technical support a while back (for a local computer retailer). The trouble is a person can only take so much technical support work before they do all they can to avoid it (ask any geeky computer scientist type whether they'd prefer to troubleshoot a problems with some Windows drivers or write a Sudoku solver). It becomes far to easy to write off the majority of computer users as porn addicts on a kamikaze spyware installation mission and one even tries as hard as possible to avoid ones own problems.

Well, I'm not a spyware junkie, but my computer has had a problem for a while now. After it has been on a few days it will decide it doesn't want to draw any more windows. You'll try to, fire up a new browser window, maybe even right click on a button in the task bar, each action ends in the same "Exclamation" sound, a sudden beep, no new browser, no context menu. You have to close one window before you can open another (by double clicking the control box of course -- remember, no new popups allowed). Quite frustrating, and most unexpected for a computer with 2GB of physical RAM and large page files on two different physical hard drives to choose between.

It was time to act, be my own technical support expert, and there is no easy way out with blaming the user here...

At first I wanted to blame Directory Opus or GVIM, these were usually the programs I was dabbling in when the problem occurred. One or both may be at fault, or I may be jumping to conclusions as very often when I am in a frenzy of work new instances of both of these applications will be loaded at an alarming rate. I went looking for a more low level solution and came across this little gem: <hi84d.130$hIO1.7@news04.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>

Adjust your desktop heap size: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems.

The "Windows" value has a long string, including "SharedSection=xxxx,yyyy,zzzz". The second number (yyyy) is the one that you want to increase. It is probably at 3MB (3072) which allegedly supports 15,000 elements (windows, menus, etc.). While arbitrarily high values are not recommended, other users found 8MB fixed the problem (8192).

I took the advice, and all seems good so far. Quite possibly I have some software somewhere to blame. Maybe I have just delayed the time it takes for this behaviour to occur. But initial tests are looking good.

What a 5* service, I wont even test my prediction that a call to technical support for my hardware vendor would result in the good old format/reload.

How to fix Media Center

The last Windows Update for Media Center managed to break my installation. I started getting a notice saying something along the lines of "Some files needed to play back radio or tv are missing or corrupt, try restarting your computer" whenever I paused a video and tried to play it again, and the entire application would crash when pressing the green button to return to the main screen.

I ran through the steps described on Aaron Stebner's WebLog and found that doing the following fixed my problem:

1. regsvr32.exe atl.dll
2. C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehSched /unregServer
3. C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehSched /service
4. C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRecvr /unregServer
5. C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRecvr /service
6. C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRec.exe /unregServer
7. C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRec.exe /regserver
8. C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehmsas.exe /unregServer
9. C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehmsas.exe /regserver