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New article published: Load keyboard-dlls in a 64-bit enviroment

I have been working on a OnScreenkeyboard for a while, and I wanted to use the available resources for a easy multilingual system.

In windows there are kbd**.dll-files that contain arrays of scan codes, virtual keys and characters linked to VK/SC. To avoid inventing the wheel again, I tried to use these.

My developer computer is a Win7-x64, and I have a VM running WinXP (32-bit) on it.
I created a 32-bit application, with default MFC-configuration.
I noticed that the pVkToWcharTable is NULL on the 64-bit machine and not NULL on the 32-bit machine after running the init KbdLayerDescriptor(). This occurred even if they loaded the same 32-bit-dll.

I tried several solutions, but all of them required to compile one 32-bit and one 64-bit version of the program. That wasn’t a satisfying solution for me, so I created a wrapper to handle such special events.

Read the article Load and init keyboard-dlls in a 64-bit enviroment (KbdLayerDescriptor), to read and download my example from the picture above.

If there are other clever souls out there who have a better way of doing it, please let me know!

Western Digital (WD) Red *do* have TLER!

Update2! Check out the comments, it shows clearly that the drive has TLER. I’m pretty frustrated that WD Support don’t really know their own product!
I’ll let them know about this post and see if they are willing to respond.

Update! I have been told that these drives DO have TLER: http://www.pcper.com/news/Storage/WD-Red-drives-do-support-TLER, but there are other threads stating that is has TLER-similar functions.

The TLER is present, but you probably should run the drives in RAID 6 because of the low URE rating of 10^14!

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After the grand launch of Western Digital Red drives I got excited!
At last a TLER (similar to ERC or CCTL) affordable drive, they have commercials stating that this is for RAID-systems.
The excitement went sour after contacting WD support.

We sincerely apologize for the inconveniences, we will be more than glad to assist you with this issue, only the WD RE drives have the TLER feature in order to avoid any dropouts from the raid. If you want to use a WD Red drive on a RAID environment, it will work however, this drive does not have the TLER feature.

In my main server I have an Adaptec 3805 hardware RAID-controller.
Earlier I used 8xWD Green 1 TB drives with RAID 6 on it. They worked ok, very few dropout.
For 6 months ago I bought 8xWD Green 2 TB drives (WD20EARX) and now the “Abort”-count is sky-high

Adaptec support replied to me that the WD Green drives does not have TLER and are the worst kind to put into a RAID.

I replied to WD support asking why the WD Red drives are so RAID-friendly, since they do not have TLER.

We apologize for the inconveniences. The WD Red and the WD Green work the same in a RAID environment because they do not have the TLER feature. However, the WD Red have been tested in the following NAS systems:
WD Red Compatibility
WD Support ref: ref:_00DU0Jpn7._500U04E2hu:ref

Most disturbing reply is that WD Red and WD Green work the same in RAID, they couldn’t state any difference.

Acrobat MDI-ish v0.8.9.2 released!

What is this?
Acrobat MDI-ish is a wrapper application that take all of your Acrobat Reader/Write windows and present them into a single window.
Take back the control over your taskbar again with this practical little tool!

New features
* Dragable icons in Windows taskbar, change the order as you like (only left / right)
* Hotkey support
* Several bugfixes (eg forever tab-mode)

Hotkeys
Ctrl + Tab = Change tab to the right
Ctrl + Shift + Tab = Change tab to the left
Ctrl + F4 = Close current tab
Ctrl + N = New window
Ctrl + Shift + N = Change name on window
(Note: Last two only works if the main window is active!)

Download
Please download the updated version of Acrobat MDI-ish from this page

Earlier included features
* Tab-browser feature (all windows are forced maximized)
* Autostart with Windows (not when portable)
* Installer
* Gets the MDI feature back to your Acrobat!
* Multimonitor support with MDI!
* Systray control
* Multiple looks on the frame; Windows 2000/XP, Office 2003 / 2007