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Breaking news! Palm® and Microsoft will be announcing the availability of Windows Mobile® 6.0 on the Palm Treo™ 750 Smartphone at Microsoft Tech.Ed in August. Check out the Palm booth, BP9 for a sneak preview!

Treo 750 users throughout Australia can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Now for Samsung to catch up and release the Blackjack update too …

ITWire: Diagnose and manage your network with these five great open-source tools, most of which come bundled already with Linux but can be easily found online, and for Windows too. If you master these tools, you can use them in any network environment anywhere to troubleshoot problems without spending a cent.

Are you a Digg user? If so, you can Digg the story here.

Here it is!!!!!!! My very own Treasure Quest – written 1988!

You can also download Nogard here.

And this is it!!!!! I’ve found it!!! This is my Quilled adventure game that I sold to Compute! – my first ever commercial success. It was called Mega-Adventure, being the best I could come up with. The descriptions were based largely on things that interested me – note the Jean-Michel Jarre music, the Stainless Steel Rat stories (by sci-fi writer Harry Harrison), Amiga computers (which used the 68000 CPU), a leather jacket (I was so cool), hacking software, Mandelbrot’s Fractal book and so on.

You know, I may have been considered a nerd back at school but the things that interested me have endured. Jean-Michel Jarre is still composing, the movie Soylent Green was based on a Harry Harrison book and is part of popular culture, everyone has computers now, and fractal images are appreciated.

Obviously there was no such thing as an Amiga A9000 – at the time, the highest version was the A2000 – but I imagined some exciting future machine. Of course, the best I came up with still had a dial-up modem and 3.5″ floppy drive!

So that’s it – the first ever program I sold.

Paul Stovell has, in usual fashion, written a very humourous post about one of his first ever programs.

What were your first applications?

I began programming back in 1984 on a Vic 20 and soon after a Commodore 64. I was quite fascinated by it and a lot of my first programs were made by copying out listings from the computers’ manuals and programming reference guide as well as magazines like Australian Commodore Review and Australian Personal Computer (both of which I have written regular features for!). I experimented with these programs and made tweaks and modifications as I learned more or came up with ideas.

One of my first “successes” was an adventure game, the name of which I have completely forgotten. Game piracy was rampant in my school, albeit mostly via cassette tape although ultimately reaching the dizzying heights of 5.25″ floppy disks. I put my game on tape for some friends and it was well received. It was actually fairly basic; it was a text-based adventure game – which was a popular format back then, especially thanks to Infocom – but only accepted very simple commands like “take sword” and “open door”.

Eventually I wrote another text-based game called Treasure Quest which remarkably saw the light of day on the Internet when emulation became possible. Somebody converted their old games library to D64 emulator images and I was pleasantly astonished to find Treasure Quest available for download many years later. I can’t find the link right now – it seems Treasure Quest is a popular adventure game title – but I did find a screenshot (pictured here) of one of my less ambitious projects from the same era called Maze of Nogard (which was “Dragon” backwards.) It blows me away that someone has run it and made a screenshot! Such dizzying fame preserved on the Internet!

These games were all written in the Commodore’s built-in BASIC v2. I wrote another game using a tool called the Quill which was a great adventure gaming shell that handled all the parsing of complex phrases as well as the mechanics of navigation and inventory management, etc. I put as much effort as I could into textual descriptions of the environment and of physical objects. I tried to put loads of humour in it. I remember making myself laugh when I had a coin as an object in one location but when the user tried to collect it they failed because it was glued to the pavement. I really wish I could remember what I called this game. I think it was something pretty vague like ‘Big Adventure’.

I submitted this game to an Australian computer gaming magazine – whose name escapes me – and they published a positive review of it. Alas, I had just one enquiry. I did end up selling it to the then-popular American magazine, Compute!’s Gazette, while I was at University. That was exciting and although I had been published several times in Australian Commodore Review even while I was still at High School this was undoubtedly the first ever application I sold.

I sold a few more games to Compute! over that year and the next – before it, like most 8-bit magazines, folded. Another was Stepman – my first real attempt at graphics. This game had a little animated sprite jump up and down steps as you attempted to correct mispelled words presented onscreen. There were nifty spirals and shapes as background images. I wrote this using the Commodore 128′s tremendous BASIC v7. The C128 was a brilliant machine. Sadly it never enjoyed the huge commercial success of its predecessor. Stepman was possibly the only widely-distributed spelling game for that platform!

At the end of my first year at University I wrote a typing test to help out a girl I knew who was looking for vacational employment and wanted to improve her typing, as well as rate it. I may have sold that to Compute! too.

Believe it or not, I never owned a PC until after I finished University. All my assignments were typed up on the Commodore 128 and although I did purchase Pascal and C compilers for it, all my programming was on the UNIX-based Gould at the Computer Science faculty. Actually, the Commodore Pascal compiler was rubbish with non-standard syntax. I wrote a letter to the company who produced it, complaining, and they sent me a free version of their C compiler which was very nice (and which was much better.)

My first PC was a ’386 laptop with 2Mb of RAM and a whopping 80Mb hard disk. In fact, the hard disk was so large that it had to be partitioned into three partitions so DOS 3.3 could work with it, having a built-in limit of 32Mb – but I digress.

For my early working career I wrote most everything on VAX VMS and Sun SunOS/Solaris systems. It wasn’t until 1996 that I really got into programming on the PC and I fell in love with Borland’s Delphi 2.0. My Win32 Font Lister – originally released in 1998 – was written in Delphi.

So! What were your first apps?

This Wednesday at the Newcastle Coders’ Group, we have Andrew Rutherford demonstrating the locally-developed Common Knowledge business rule software.

Wednesday, 1st August, 6pm at the Forsythes IT Training rooms. As always, the meeting is free with food supplied by Microsoft, and prize giveaways including a $100 book voucher from Hudson.

Also, Peter Drew was a bit bored and worked out some speaker stats:

Most of these speakers have attended many meetings, also, especially Adam Cogan and Andrew Coates. In fact, both those guys have been a huge asset to the group and were instrumental in getting it off the ground.

We’ve held 18 monthly meetings and two social events. And there’s no hope of recalling all the prizes we’ve given away – LOTS! (Let alone the number of pizzas we’ve eaten!)

Hot off the presses: All you wanted to know about Linux certification but were afraid to ask on ITWire.

A while ago Andrew Coates passed the virtual baton on, the task being to list five facts about me which were previously unknown or arcane.

I imagine this is a good way to bring a bit of personality to a blog, enhancing its sense of community and dialog between the author and the readers.

I gave my list but at the time none of my buddies blogged so the chain ceased with me. (And thank goodness it wasn’t a chain letter, who knows what plagues would have befallen me!)

Happily, now I have two comrades to distress by naming them here: ok, lads – Steve and Peter, spill the beans!

Check out this Exchange 2007 wiki for excellent tips and scripts. I like the domain name – Exchange Ninjas, heh.

I took exam 70-236 last month so now I’m an MCTS in Exchange 2007 configuration. (Actually, I have to confess I had to take the exam twice … but I passed second time!)

I administer servers so Microsoft’s adminpak.msi has been a boon, by allowing server tools to be run on a client machine. However, this has not been as simple with Windows Vista. Sure, adminpak.msi runs and installs ok but as soon as you fire up the oft-needed Active Directory Users and Computers there’s no joy; just an error message that MMC could not open the snap-in.

Happily, it can be made to work! For whatever reason, various essential DLLs fail to register during the installation. It can’t be due to lack of privileges because the installation can’t happen without administrative consent anyway. Nevertheless, make a bat file with the following lines, run it as administrator, and your Vista days will be filled with joy:

c:
cd \windows\system32
regsvr32 /s adprop.dll
regsvr32 /s azroles.dll
regsvr32 /s azroleui.dll
regsvr32 /s ccfg95.dll
regsvr32 /s certadm.dll
regsvr32 /s certmmc.dll
regsvr32 /s certpdef.dll
regsvr32 /s certtmpl.dll
regsvr32 /s certxds.dll
regsvr32 /s cladmwiz.dll
regsvr32 /s clcfgsrv.dll
regsvr32 /s clnetrex.dll
regsvr32 /s cluadmex.dll
regsvr32 /s cluadmmc.dll
regsvr32 /s cmproxy.dll
regsvr32 /s cmroute.dll
regsvr32 /s cmutoa.dll
regsvr32 /s cnet16.dll
regsvr32 /s debugex.dll
regsvr32 /s dfscore.dll
regsvr32 /s dfsgui.dll
regsvr32 /s dhcpsnap.dll
regsvr32 /s dnsmgr.dll
regsvr32 /s domadmin.dll
regsvr32 /s dsadmin.dll
regsvr32 /s dsuiwiz.dll
regsvr32 /s imadmui.dll
regsvr32 /s lrwizdll.dll
regsvr32 /s mprsnap.dll
regsvr32 /s msclus.dll
regsvr32 /s mstsmhst.dll
regsvr32 /s mstsmmc.dll
regsvr32 /s nntpadm.dll
regsvr32 /s nntpapi.dll
regsvr32 /s nntpsnap.dll
regsvr32 /s ntdsbsrv.dll
regsvr32 /s ntfrsapi.dll
regsvr32 /s rasuser.dll
regsvr32 /s rigpsnap.dll
regsvr32 /s rsadmin.dll
regsvr32 /s rscommon.dll
regsvr32 /s rsconn.dll
regsvr32 /s rsengps.dll
regsvr32 /s rsjob.dll
regsvr32 /s rsservps.dll
regsvr32 /s rsshell.dll
regsvr32 /s rssubps.dll
regsvr32 /s rtrfiltr.dll
regsvr32 /s schmmgmt.dll
regsvr32 /s tapisnap.dll
regsvr32 /s tsuserex.dll
regsvr32 /s uddi.mmc.dll
regsvr32 /s vsstskex.dll
regsvr32 /s w95inf16.dll
regsvr32 /s w95inf32.dll
regsvr32 /s winsevnt.dll
regsvr32 /s winsmon.dll
regsvr32 /s winsrpc.dll
regsvr32 /s winssnap.dll
regsvr32 /s ws03res.dll

Some of those may be overkill, but there’s no harm in registering a DLL which has already been registered.

On a related note, gpmc.msi – the Group Policy Management Console – fails to install unless the .NET framework 1.1 is available. So be sure to install that too!

Breaking news: Microsoft have announced this year’s Australian Tech-Ed has sold out before opening day – still three weeks away – for the first time ever.

Also, well-known Microsoft expert and evangelist and blogger, Frank Arrigo has taken a position with Microsoft U.S. He’ll say a farewell at this Tech-Ed. Here’s his Macbeth.ed presentation. Notice the great meh shirt?