After getting both Boot Camp and Parallels Workstation installed on our iMac at work I decided to venture into Visual Studio land to see if I could build some of our projects.  So I got all the code I needed, fired up Visual Studio, and eeewwwww!  What the hell is that!?  Courier!?  

I can't stand Courier.  Windows or Mac, it doesn't matter.  Courier has got to be the worst fixed-width font ever created.  It's hideous.  So before I even try to build the 3 file project I just opened I had to spend 5 or 10 minutes fidgeting around with Visual Studio's menus trying to find out where you change the font.  It's been a long time since I used VS, probably 6 years or more. 

Apparently I'm not the only one that thinks Courier sucks.  I heard that one of my Windows colleagues at work designed his own fixed-width font because he too hates Courier.  I'll have to confirm that.  Also, my level of disgust with Courier is so deep that I even filed a bug report when Apple changed their Java VM to use Courier as the default Monospaced font instead of Monaco.

Anyway, I finally found where you change the font in Visual Studio.  So then I have my fingers crossed - It's possible that Monaco is installed on Windows right?  Bzzt! Wrong!  For those that don't know, Monaco is the best fixed-width font.  There's no arguing here, Monaco is the best.  Courier - the worst.  Monaco - the best. 

OK, no Monaco on Windows, I'll just search the Internet right?  Well, it wasn't nearly as easy as I thought it would be.  After digging through a lot of search results I finally found a site that had it.  Woohoo!  Monaco for Windows, now I'm set.  I still haven't built that 3 file VS project by the way.

I get Monaco installed, change the font in VS and now I'm ready right?  Well, almost.  I look at Monaco on Windows and it doesn't quite look right.  Sure, it's Monaco but not quite the same Monaco that I see on the Mac.  I'll have to include some screenshots, but needless to say it doesn't look quite the same.  I think that the reason for this is because I believe the Mac font has special bitmap versions for small sizes that are displayed on the screen.  That is, for font size 9 & 10 I think the Mac version just uses a bitmap representation of the font.  I don't think it does this on Windows.  The result is that on the Mac you get a clean, crisp font that has been hand-tuned to look good on a computer screen.  On Windows, however, you just get a rendering of the font using the same glyph information that it would use to render it at all sizes.  It still looks good and is lightyears ahead of Courier, but it just isn't as nice and crisp as it is on the Mac.  Oh well, it will do.

Now I can finally build that 3 file project.

Get Monaco.ttf  

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Finally!!! I got Windows XP installed on our Intel iMac at work. It only took 4 different WinXP SP2 install CDs until I found one that worked. And now I think the ntkrnlmp.exe error I had might have just been due to a bad CD, though I'm not sure. At any rate I think the biggest problem with most of the install CDs that I tried was with the keyboard. For some reason the keyboard (the standard Apple USB keyboard) just wasn't recognized. I don't know what was different in the final install CD I used, but the keyboard worked with it.

So now that I've got Boot Camp working with Windows XP installed along comes Parallels and introduces a beta of their virtualization application for Mac OS X. This is just like VirtualPC or VMWare in that it lets you run another operating system on top of your current OS. This is really the type of solution I think most people will want to use. I really don't want to be rebooting all the time when I need to test something on Windows. Having a virtual machine to just run Windows for a few minutes when I need it is the ideal solution. There's only one thing lacking right now with Parallels' VM - it doesn't support multiple CPUs. That is, the Intel iMac has two CPUs - a dual-core Intel Core Duo processor - Now that's a nice mouthful. Parallels' current application only virtualizes a single CPU, though they say that they have plans to support SMP in future versions. Now that would be juicy! As it is, it does run quite speedy and I look forward to using it more in the future.

I like John Gruber's description of the whole situation - Windows: The New Classic.

Ain't that the truth! As I installed Windows today a long with a bunch of other applications I must have restarted at least 6 or 7 times. It was almost like every single application was forcing me to restart. Plus I had to be sure to get an Anti-Virus program running, download Firefox, wrestle with the task bar, etc. Running Windows was a continual reminder as to how much I prefer Mac OS X over Windows.

I'm sure the novelty will wear off in a few days. After a week or so I'll probably forget that I ever installed Windows on the iMac. The memory will fade into a shadow of other nightmares such as those from June 6, 2005. That is until someone remembers that I can run Windows on my iMac and wants me to help track down some bugs.

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Installing Windows is a lot like Boot Camp.

Alright, so Hell must have frozen over today. As most everyone has probably heard by now, Apple released a new utility called Boot Camp to allow you to easily install and run Windows on your brand new Intel Mac. So why did I put easily in italics? Well, because if you don't do it just right then it won't work at all.

So let's examine what the requirements are for using Boot Camp. Apple says that in order to install Boot Camp you must use a single-disk, Windows XP SP2 installation CD. But why not a normal Window XP CD, why must it include SP2? Is there some major reason why WinXP sans XP2 won't run? Probably not, my guess is that it's just a bug in the WinXP installer that keeps you from being able to install any old WinXP version.

So what might the problem be? Well, I tried to install Windows XP SP2 today on our Intel iMac at work. The first thing I tried was to use an MSDN DVD from our large collection of MSDN disks that includes several versions of Windows including Windows XP SP2. The disk started up and presented me with a selection screen where I could choose the version of Windows I wanted to install. I tried to select WinXP SP2 but the keyboard wouldn't work. (And yes, it's a wired USB keyboard and yes I installed the iMac Firmware update.)

So then we thought that we'd try just a plain WinXP SP2 CD. We didn't have any of those around but our MSDN collection included a disk with a WinXP SP2 ISO that we could create a CD from. So we tried that and the installer looked like it was starting up and running. But then it got hung up and eventually returned an error:

File \i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded.
The error code is 7

Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit.

That was it, there was no getting past this. Oh, and to top it off I still couldn't use the keyboard to press the Any key. ;-) Next I googled for ntkrnlmp.exe and found that this is a known issue. Microsoft's workaround for it is to press the F7 key when the installer prompts you to press F6 to install any custom SCSI drivers. Press F7 when it asks you to press F6!? Oh isn't that completely obvious. I guess we have to leave it to Microsoft keep things simple, right? Anyway, I can't do this either because the damn keyboard still doesn't work at this point in the installation. So assuming that this workaround would work, I still can't do it. Right now, I'm waiting for a true Win XP SP2 CD and hoping that it works. We're guessing that the ones we got from MSDN are somehow different from the SP2 CD you get in stores or with computers.

Which leads me to my last point, which is really just a wild-ass guess. I'm guessing that the reason why Apple requires Windows XP SP2 install disks is because they're probably the first installation CDs that fix the ntkrnlmp.exe bug. If it weren't for this stupid bug I'd bet that you could install any version of Win XP. So thank you Microsoft for producing such great, bug-free software!

So why install Windows on a Mac anyway? I despise Windows but we could really use a Multi-CPU/Mulit-Core Windows box right now to help in reproducing and debugging threading issues that only show up on multi-CPU machines. Right now almost everything we have that has more than one CPU is a Mac. Multi-CPU Windows machines just haven't been very common until recently. Plus I'd like to be able to build and run my profiling application on Windows whenever I need to.

Oh yeah, and I really need to play some computer Solitaire. What else is Windows good for other than games?

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OK, GCC instruction scheduling and register usage is retarded. I've got a nice big, complex Altivec function that I've been optimizing and the biggest problem I've had with it is running out of registers. I was using around 31-32 and GCC was spilling registers left and right. So I've been reducing the register usage to try and fix this. I can count the maximum number of registers that should be used and it's well under 32, it's more like 23-25. And a good compiler should be able to reduce that number even further. But even after reducing the number of registers used to 23-25 GCC was still spilling registers like crazy.

So I happened to see a post by Sanjay Patel on the Altivec mailing list about some GCC compiler options that you can use for hand-tuned code:

-fno-schedule-insns -fno-schedule-insns2 
   

I found a PPCZone forum thread about these options as well. Sure enough if I use these options then I don't have any problems with registers spilling onto the stack. So why is GCC so retarded when these options aren't used!? The problem is that these options basically disable any optimized instruction scheduling that GCC might try to do. For hand-tuned Altivec code this is fine, but for generic scalar code it's usually bad. Since the file that my Altivec code is in has both generic scalar code & hand-tuned Altivec code I'm not sure if using these compiler options is a good thing overall.

Why can't GCC just do the right thing in the first place and not be so damn retarded!?

PS - I should mention that I'm still using GCC 3.3. =( I'm hoping to be able to start using GCC 4 soon so I'll have to see if it's any less retarded than GCC 3.3.

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