james mckay dot net

One of the systems that we have developed serves up WMA files dynamically and plays them in an embedded Windows Media Player. Because this system has been around for a few years now, it still uses the old classID for Windows Media Player 6.4 rather than the newer one for versions 7-11. That was all very well: this works fine with the later versions, it doesn’t have to do anything particularly fancy, and besides, it did the job admirably well.

Until Microsoft rolled out their latest set of Windows updates this week, that is. All of a sudden, users were reporting that Internet Explorer was crashing all over the place. However, if they rolled back to IE6, everything worked fine.

It turned out that we were serving up some of our sound files with a content type of “application/octet-stream” rather than with the expected “audio/x-ms-wma”. This was fair enough: Postel’s Law says that you should be liberal in what you accept, but conservative in what you do. So even if we weren’t getting it quite right, Windows Media Player was forgiving us.

Unfortunately, on Patch Tuesday, Postel’s Law went out the window at Microsoft’s end as well as ours. And rather rudely, to boot. No “invalid content type” messages or anything: Internet Explorer would just freeze.

To fix the problem, you need to do one of the following (preferably all three, despite the fact that there may be certain logistical issues with the third):

1. Make sure you are serving up the correct MIME type with your media files. For WMA audio files it should be “audio/x-ms-wma”. For other media types see here.
2. Change your web pages to use the newer class ID for Windows Media Player. It should be 6BF52A52-394A-11D3-B153-00C04F79FAA6 rather than 22D6F312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95. Note that some properties change names between versions: in particular, you use “url” rather than “src” in the later version.
3. Tell your users to jettison Internet Explorer altogether and switch to Firefox or Safari.

Talking of point 3: can someone please explain why the Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin doesn’t install on Windows Server 2003? Windows Server 2003 is just supposed to be Windows XP on steroids with a bunch of configuration tweaks and extra bells and whistles and an inflated price tag, surely? Or is there some genuine good technical reason for this seemingly inexplicable design decision?

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Posted at 14:20 on 10 April 2008.
Tagged: Windows, Windows Media Player

After three weeks or so of running Ubuntu on my laptop at home as my primary OS, I reinstalled Windows on it yesterday evening. No doubt this is a move that will meet with howls of derision from everyone who expects me to be an über-geek, and the bearded sandal-wearing idealists who think that Microsoft should be nuked, but the fact is that I just don’t think much of Linux on the desktop. It’s more secure and more stable than Windows, and less prone to spyware and all that, and it has some great geeky features (I just love that 3D Sierpinski screensaver) but it has one big problem: visual aesthetics.

Besides Ubuntu’s depressing brown colour scheme, which makes it look like a plate of mince, the biggest problem is fonts. Ubuntu’s default out of the box fonts are ghastly, dumpy, squat monstrosities, and the rendering engines in both Gnome and KDE are pathetic, giving uneven stroke widths and nasty colour fringing even on the Windows core fonts, no matter what settings I used for the sub-pixel rendering. I think they must be using a similar approach to Apple, in attempting to preserve font shapes over and above on-screen crispness and readability, though Apple does it a lot better. Or maybe I’m just spoilt: once you have seen ClearType in action on Windows, the Linux sub-pixel font rendering seems pretty lame by comparison.

Another thing about Linux is software. I really missed Windows Live Writer, especially having used the new beta 2 version with its much improved WordPress support, and while I guess I could have tried installing it using Wine, I decided in the light of the fonts issue not to bother. There are a couple of equivalents available for Linux, such as Drivel, but they are nowhere near as slick as Windows Live Writer. I also much prefer Corel Draw (and Paint.NET for the simpler stuff) to the Gimp, Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, and of course I was missing out on Visual Studio.

This isn’t to say that I won’t be using Linux at all of course. I have been running Ubuntu servers on VMWare both at work and at home and I will almost certainly continue to do so. I don’t know if I’ll try a desktop installation of Ubuntu on VMWare though: when I’ve done this in the past it tends to get neglected somewhat, though it does occasionally come in useful for things such as testing cross-browser compatibility. However, I don’t think I’ll be making much use of it as a primary OS in the immediate future.

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Posted at 22:41 on 30 June 2007.
Tagged: laptop, Ubuntu, Windows, Windows Live Writer