Ubuntu-created DVDs won’t play under Windows

I had a little project for my wife to take some videos that she had made with Windows MovieMaker and create a DVD playable on both DVD players and Windows. After some small amount of pain, I was able to use DVD Styler to create a DVD under Ubuntu. However, while it would play under Ubuntu and on a DVD player, it would not play under Windows. In fact, the DVD appeared empty when examined with Windows explorer. Windows had gotten me again!

After a lot of pain and effort, I found the problem was with mkisofs. Apparently a not too good fork was made from the cdrtools project (see here for a discussion) which is used in the Ubuntu distribution rather than the original. /usr/bin/mkisofs is actually linked to genisoimage. Genisoimage currently has a bug in it such that dvd images created with it (e.g., using “mkisofs -dvd-video dvd > dvd.iso”) will not work on Windows. My solution: build the cdrtools from http://cdrecord.berlios.de. Note that there were some errors in the build (because I used GNU make rather than their particular make), but these seem to not effect mkisofs. I copied mkisofs to /usr/bin.

By the way, I tried using both QDVDAuthor and DVDStyler. QDVDAuthor seemed to break a lot and had a somewhat confusing interface. DVDStyler did not. For what I was trying to do (which was pretty simple), DVD Styler worked much better.

Ars Technica had an interesting article on why Windows is so mediocre, part two of which is “From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user’s conversion to Mac OS X—Part II“. One insight that I got out of it was that you can make some general classifications of programmers, a software developer taxonomy. He divided them into three categories: business analysts, journeyman developers, and conscientious developers.

The “business analyst” programmers do their work using Excel, Visual Basic, or Access. Their major focus is, of course, the business problem that they are trying to solve. They generally don’t care what their code looks like since it’s not their main focus; it’s just a necessary evil.

He defines the journeyman developers as “proper” programmers. It’s just a job to these people and they generally use whatever the most popular tool/language is. Their focus is on just getting their required task done, and they generally create mediocre software. This is the group that Microsoft focuses on since they are the largest segment of the ‘real’ programmers and this group ignores the warts and idiosyncrasies of Windows and Microsoft tools. They don’t care about the long-term consequences of using Windows/Microsoft. For example, they don’t worry about standards or the maintainability of their software, e.g., that it becomes unmaintainable when Microsoft radically changes it’s architecture (e.g. dropping MFC in favor of .NET).

Finally, he defines the conscientious developers as the ones who “care about what they’re doing.” These are the ones to whom software development is a passion and not just a job. They’re the ones who are most willing to be innovative. They’re the ones who strive to be excellent and are most bothered by Windows/Microsoft mediocrity. In my opinion, your conscientious developers are the ones who will generally be the Linux and Mac users when their jobs permit.

Migrating a Windows Ap to VxWorks

I’m starting a new internal research project to determine the feasibility of porting a large open-source GUI-based Windows application to VxWorks. This is not a trivial task. Typically VxWorks’ applications have little or no user interface (think of your laser printer). The Windows ap in question is written in C++ and makes heavy use of MFC and COM, neither of which translates at all to VxWorks.

Eventually, we decided that the way to go was to recode the application to a cross-platform framework that supports more than one OS. We ended up selecting Qt from Trolltech for a number of reasons. First, it is very widely used (KDE, Opera, Google Earth, Adobe Photoshop Album, etc.) and has been around for a long time. It also comes in versions that support a variety of embedded processors, and others have used it for VxWorks. Finally, it is open-source, allowing you to get all of the source-code. This is very important since 1) it gives us the freedom to make any necessary changes, and 2) it gives us visibility into problems.

At this point, I’ve built both Qt and Qtopia which is the Qt version for embedded Linux. I can run the demo programs so it all seems to be right. Now, I’ve got to figure out what to do next.

Micro-ISVs – Getting Rich Writing Software

I encountered a new term that I had never heard of before, ‘Micro-ISV‘, which is just a fancy way of defining a business that generally consists of a single software developer. Apparently there are quite a few Micro-ISVs out there.

An interesting example is Ashley Qualls. I’ve always find it inspiring to see a small business succeed.

Windows Bloat – Fatter and Slower as the Years Pass

Here’s an interesting article discussing the Windows-Intel connection as it has progressed over the years: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/14/16TC-winoffice-performance_1.html As memory and processor speed have increased over the years, Microsoft has bloated out its OS and tools accordingly to the point that performance has gotten worse:

“The net result is that, surprise, Vista and Office 2007 on today’s state-of-the-art hardware delivers throughput that’s still only 22 percent slower than Windows XP and Office 2003 on the previous generation of state-of-the-art hardware. In other words, the hardware gets faster, the code base gets fatter, and the user experience, as measured in terms of application response times and overall execution throughput, remains relatively intact. The Great Moore’s Law Compensator is vindicated.”