briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Windows Sucks)

Windows7 Crash of the Day

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:29:21 -0700

I should start a running series of these.

Windows7: Welcome to 1990

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:43:49 -0800

Approximately one in twenty times when I try to log on to my work computer (running Windows 7 Professional™), it lags for 2 minutes and then I see this:

That's the Microsoft I know and love. (By "love", I mean the opposite of love.) Just like the good old days. I'm glad my employer bought this computer and I didn't have to spend my own money.

80% of the time on this machine I'm sitting in Virtualbox using Ubuntu, thankfully.

Working remotely

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:59:46 -0800

I'm sitting here in Canada trying to work for my employer back in the US for a month. It's been a few weeks already, and I'm surprisingly pleased (or pleasantly surprised) with how well it's working. At the same time, certain aspects of this rather suck.

One huge obstacle so far is (of course) Windows. Aside from the Linux server that I convinced IT to let me run out of a closet, the whole place is Microsoft. Whatever MS VPN software we're using is slow, clunky, unreliable, and generally annoying.

At one point I tried to fetch a file from a network drive and watched it download at 0.2 k/sec. Then I had someone back home copy it onto my Linux box, and I downloaded from there at 120 k/sec. The Windows and Linux servers are in the same room in the same building behind the same network connection; I don't understand how VPN overhead slowed things down by that many orders of magnitude.

After connecting to VPN, there's about a 25% chance that Outlook will be able to connect to the Exchange server at work. Generally I have to fire up the VPN, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on and then Outlook will find it. Sometimes I close Outlook, but it lives on as a zombie, futilely hammering away at the server but unable to find it, until I CTRL-ALT-DEL and kill it. This is with Office 2007.

But the work I do on the Linux server is (of course) easy. No problems whatsoever. Working over SSH is how I did things when I was sitting in my office anyways. I tunnel in and use local GUI SQL clients. I put VirtualBox on my laptop and I do a bunch of stuff in a Linux VM and rsync it back home with no problems. I can edit files over SSH right in Emacs as if they were on my local box, if I care to.

Sometimes I wonder if my dislike of Microsoft is irrational. Any belief that is caused by or results in a strong emotional response should be subject to questioning. Then reality comes waltzing by and reminds me that no, MS software really does suck.

I've worked for this company for over two years before moving. I don't know how well I'd be doing if this was a company I just started with. It's hard to see how important face-to-face communication is until it's impossible. Email is OK, but the benefit of knowing people in person and knowing how they talk and how they think really goes a long way to being able to interpret and understand plaintext communication.

Time to pay the Windows tax

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:39:13 -0700

Now that Windows 7 is out, it's only a matter of time before I'm forced to buy it. I don't want it. I won't use it. But as a programmer, it's nearly impossible to survive without owning a copy of the ~~latest and greatest~~ latest version of Windows.

Why? Because if you want a job, unless you're one of the fortunate few who get to pick your development platform AND dictate the platform for all of your users, you need to know Windows. You need to know how to navigate around it when you're forced to use it on your work computer. You need to know how to troubleshoot (to some degree) your users' Windowsy problems as they try to install and use your program. If you want to communicate with people in the world, inevitably they're going to send you a bunch of MS Word documents and nothing is ever going to read them properly 100% of the time except MS Word itself.

I have a copy of Vista Business on my laptop which I am deeply ashamed for having bought, but at the same time it helped me land a very nice work contract. Without being able to VPN into the company's network (via some MS proprietary VPN software that I tried VERY hard and failed to get to work in Linux) I wouldn't have been able to complete the job on time, and I might be living in a cardboard box under a bridge right now.

For this contract I actually developed the app at home entirely in Linux. I used only Linux-centric tools (Vim, Gimp, Firefox, Ruby etc.). Thank God most of those tools have Windows versions, because deploying it to Windows land at work and working on it there when necessary was (mostly) trivial. But I still needed Windows to finish the job. And all the users of this app were Windows users. The specs for the app were sent to me in Word and Excel documents. The website frontend is being viewed in IE much of the time in spite of my pleadings to the contrary, so I have to support it.

Such is the life of a programmer. I'll probably buy Windows 7 eventually but it'll sting. It'll rankle.

Ker-crash

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:56:52 -0700

I can pretty consistently crash my X server nowadays just by opening too many programs. I think I need a new computer.

Or maybe my idea of "too many programs" has been warped by how well Linux multi-tasks. Let's see. I'm seeding 20 torrents in KTorrent, I have Amarok playing, Konversation has a few IRC channels open, Kopete is doing some Jabber for me, Akregator is fetching feeds every 10 minutes, Gimp has a dozen PNGs open, Emacs is visiting around 20 files (and running SLIME + Clojure obviously), Squirrel SQL is running so I can peek at mysql, I have maybe 5 or 6 Konsole windows open, and I have four browsers running (Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Konq) for testing my websites while I develop (multiple tabs in each obviously). And so on.

In Windows not only would the single, sucky taskbar be full to overflowing, but all of my programs would be slowed to a crawl. In Linux I somehow get away with this level of activity for days at a time, but eventually I do something wrong and something crashes. Just now, it was opening one Konsole window too many. I think it's KDE4 instability, or else my ancient video card can't handle the screen resolution I'm running. But I get crashes in Gentoo and Arch both so I don't know.

Buying a computer is such a pain. I never know what to get. I don't keep up with hardware news. Every time I turn around there are twelve new processor families. I know whatever I buy will suck in a month. My current computer is from way back in 2006 and I haven't upgraded it since. My geek cred is non-existent if judged by the computer I'm using. It's embarrassing.

Windows Powershell: Can you handle the power?

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:50:38 -0700

MS Powershell is Microsoft's ripoff of Bash. I don't think this is a bad thing necessarily. Bash is a good tool and it's open source. If Windows bundled a sensible, full-fledged Bash and got rid of CMD.EXE I would dance for joy.

So Powershell lets you refer to your home directory as ~ and a bunch of commands have *nix aliases like ls and cat. This is nice for those who have *nix commands firmly internalized. You have to use .\foo.bat to run things in the current directory instead of just foo.bat, which I thought was cool.

But Powershell is not without its problems. For one thing I see this a lot:

The redirection operator '<' is not supported yet.

How hard is it to implement input redirection, really? For another thing, tab completion continues to be broken. When you hit Tab it still doesn't put a slash at the end of the text it inserts. You have to type a manual \ every time you hit Tab, to continue tabbing your way through directories. Thus doubling the number of keystrokes you're forced to type. This continues to drive me crazy. There's a small amount of evidence that someday it'll be fixed, but I'm not holding my breath.

You also usually can't bundle flags together. e.g. rm -rf would have to be rm -r -f in Powershell. This is just annoying enough to bother me, but I can look past it.

Sadly, Powershell also runs slower than a geriatric sea turtle. I don't understand what it's doing that takes 10-20 seconds to startup. Or why tab completion often lags for 5+ seconds itself.

My happiest surprise was when I tried to uninstall Powershell (so I could try version 2) and got this:

This dialog listed every program installed on my computer (in random order) including every Windows Update I'd ever installed. The worst part is that I couldn't even dismiss this dialog as an error. For all I know, uninstalling Powershell could cause every program on my computer to stop working. I've seen stranger things happen in Windows.

A person walking past my office when I saw this would have heard the crazed, maniacal, tortured laughter that only the experience of being forced to use Windows can elicit.

Microsoft, you still surprise me

Mon, 11 May 2009 23:18:21 -0700

I use Windows XP at work (not by choice) and I've been continually saying "no" when it tried to install SP3. Why? No tangible reason other than that decades of experience with Windows has shown me that any time you touch any system files or settings in Windows, crap breaks. When it comes to Windows, you set things up and then like a teetering house of playing cards, you back away slowly and try not to breathe.

Which brings us to the other day. I first noticed something was up when a got a popup dialog on my work machine asking me every 15 minutes whether I wanted to Reboot Now or Reboot Later. Confused, I clicked "later" but again and again and again this prompt appeared. After hours of this interrupting my futile attempts at work I relented; I laboriously shut down my half-dozen command prompts and carefully-placed Vim sessions and various server daemons and all the tools I got to look forward to re-opening after Yet Another Unnecessary Reboot, and then I rebooted.

So then XP left me alone and all was well with the world. Ha, just kidding, it started doing the same thing again almost immediately. Reboot Now or Reboot Later? I hatefully tolerated this for as long as I could but it was a futile battle. Microsoft won in the end and I rebooted again.

A few other people at work reported the same thing on their systems, so I thought maybe it was a virus, but I checked a few things and noticed a shiny new SP3 installed on my system (so my initial guess was close). Somehow SP3 was forced onto my machine, not sure if it was the sysadmins pushing it out or Microsoft's doing, but either way: why was it possible to install a Service Pack on my machine without my even being aware it happened? I do not consider this a good thing.

In any case, after the second reboot, strange things happened. My taskbar settings were all reverted to defaults and I noticed my Address Bar was missing. The Address Bar is a little URL/file path bar in the taskbar where you can type a file path and open an Explorer window quickly. One of the very few semi-useful bits of the XP interface.

But it was gone. What happened? A short Google later and I learned that Microsoft removed the feature in SP3 permanently, by design. Why? Because of anti-monopoly regulatory concerns.

Wow. So it turns out I wasn't disappointed, and a few dozen cards toppled from the shaky tower as I watched, helpless. Not the end of the world, but what an annoyance.

The reason I bothered blogging this is because, hilariously enough, you can still add the Address Bar back in SP3. As I read somewhere or other, probably here, you simply 1) Drag a "My Computer" icon to the top of the screen to make a useless "My Computer" toolbar, 2) Right click that and add the Address Bar, which is still an option there, 3) Drag that Address Bar to your main taskbar, 4) Remove the useless toolbar from above. And then you have your Address Bar back. Oops!

So, in summary:

Two forced reboots via 20 repeated un-ignorable popup prompts.
Service Pack installed without my knowledge or consent.
Useful piece of functionality removed.
Item 3 caused by a history of monopolistic business practices and the resulting legal fallout.
Functionality in question removed so incompetently that it can be added back anyways in a matter of seconds.
Another hour of my life sucked into the black hole of the Microsoft Windows User Experience?, forever lost.

Uptime

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:29:35 -0800

How about that...

$ uptime
 18:19:53 up 208 days,  2:51,  2 users,  load average: 0.32, 0.16, 0.10

Not bad for my old crappy desktop machine running on the floor in my apartment without any kind of backup power supply or anything. I run it with the case off all the time, and wires and components are spilled out all over the floor. It's a wonder I haven't crashed it yet just by stepping on it.

Every couple months I notice my machine is running slow and look at top and it turns out X or some stray KDE app is using half a GB of RAM or something, so I restart it and I'm back to normal. Takes a long time to get to that point though.

Weird thing is, this doesn't even impress me any longer. I just take it for granted that Linux works.

Meanwhile my Vista machine locks up constantly. How can anyone at Microsoft sleep at night? (Answer: On top of huge piles of ill-gotten money.)

Copy/paste in Linux: Eureka

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:42:53 -0700

It's been a few years since I officially grasped Linux's (well, X Windows') weird concept of copying and pasting, with its multiple discrete copy/paste methods: the highlight + middle click version, and "clipboard" Edit->Copy" + "Edit->Paste version.

But once in a blue moon, copying and pasting in X still surprises me. Try this:

Open Firefox and a text editor. I'm trying with Vim.
Highlight some text in Firefox.
Middle-click paste it into the editor. The highlighted text is pasted, as expected.
Close Firefox.
Middle-click into the editor again.

Can you guess what happens at the end? If you said "Some random text from another application and/or nothing at all is pasted rather than the stuff from Firefox", you're right!

But today I read this article on jwz.org and finally understood how copy/paste works in X. Highlighting text doesn't copy anything, it just announces to the world "If any applications want to middle-click paste something, come ask me for it". So if you close the application you wanted to paste text from before you actually do the pasting, the application isn't around to give you the text you wanted any more, so you can't get it. The Edit->Copy / Edit->Paste version of copy/paste behaves the same way. You can't "Copy", close app, "Paste".

Note, this is different from how MS Windows works. When you copy some text in Windows it really copies to another location. You can close the app and still paste away. But Windows has a different (inconsistent) behavior when copy/pasting files in Explorer. There, it behaves like X in Linux: if right click a file and "Copy", it doesn't actually do anything with the data until you paste. If you right-click, "Copy", delete the file, "Paste", you don't get an error until you try to Paste.

In Vim in Linux, the "* register lets you access the "primary selection" (highlight / middle click selection), and the "+ register lets you access the clipboard.

In Vim in Windows, "* and "+ do the same thing, and use the clipboard.

Stupid Vim trick (and mental illness)

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:48:07 -0700

The OS on my first computer was Windows 3.1, and I lived with Windows 95/98/ME for a long time. When you live their formative years in this kind of environment, you develop an obsessive need to save your work all the time, because at any moment, the program you were using could crash. With Vim, a save is just a :w away. I hit that combination so often it's a wonder I haven't worn a hole through my w key yet. It takes no effort or thinking at this point, just a quick reflex flick of the wrist.

Did you ever wonder just how often you save your work in a given day? I wondered, so I put this into ~/.vimrc:

cabbrev w <c-r>=(getcmdtype()==':' && getcmdpos()==1 ? 'W' : 'w')<CR>
command! -nargs=* W :execute("silent !echo " . strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") . " >> ~/timestamps")|w <args>

Now every time I do :w, it will append a timestamp to a text file. It's not quite perfect and :w won't work right in certain cases but it was good enough for a quick hack.

I let Vim go like this for one whole day at work. I got in a good six and a half hours of coding on Tuesday (keeping in mind that I was using other programs all day too, messing with our DB, running and debugging the script I was writing, responding to emails, and so on).

It turns out I hit :w 356 times that day. Here's a chart of saves per hour.

Clearly either my productivity or my data-loss paranoia increases as the day progresses. I think I got up to make a cup of tea at around 2:00 so that may explain the fall-off. And the last hour isn't quite a full hour of work because I went home.

So as a rough estimate, it looks like I save my work about once per minute. Looking at the data, it's not at all uncommon for me to have saved my work twice within a 5-second period of time. There are even a few cases where I saved twice within two seconds.

Cool feature in Vista

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:05:30 -0700

Vista has this really cool feature. When I log in to work via VPN and then close my laptop's lid to put it to sleep, when I open the lid later, I get the CTRL+ALT+DEL login screen as normal, except that my mouse cursor is now invisible! If I can somehow manage to position the invisible mouse cursor over a button, let's say the one to shut the computer down, and I click it, Vista says something about not having enough memory to perform that operation, and crashes or hangs!

Oh wait, that's not a feature. That's a big hairy stinking bug. My mistake.

Hello again, world

Sun, 04 May 2008 20:04:07 -0700

Computers are a love/hate thing for me. I love all things digital, but I desperately need to get away from it sometimes too. So I had a nice vacation away from my computer last week. I couldn't keep myself from reading some mailing lists and hitting Slashdot once a day, but I didn't write a single line of code and didn't give my websites or work projects or anything much thought.

But now my vacation is over, and it's so easy to fall back into old habits, endlessly looking at webcomics and reading articles about Common Lisp unit testing suites and cringing at the latest drama amongst Gentoo devs and minding my message board like a crusty old beat cop making his rounds. It's the life I've chosen, and I do like it, but I do like getting away sometimes too.

I fulfilled one of my dreams last week when I finally caved and ordered a solid glass mousepad. They're pretty cheap on newegg.com, depending on the color you want. I happened to want green, and it happened to be the cheapest, so all is well. It looks very nice, and it's big and hopefully the surface won't degrade over time; I tend to eat through mousepads via a slow yet inexorable process of erosion.

Unfortunately my laser mouse doesn't work on it. However, I have learned that if I upgrade my mouse's firmware, it will magically be able to work on a solid glass mousepad. Who would've thought my mouse had updateable firmware, let alone that updating the firmware would allow it to work on new surfaces? Not I.

The bad thing is that I need freaking Windows XP to upgrade the firmware on my mouse. I don't have any computer that has XP on it and I'm afraid to try anything in a virtual machine that involves something as dangerous as fiddling with the innards of connected peripherals. So I tried to install XP on my laptop, desperate times calling for desperate measures. But of course the install failed because my XP install CD is so old (pre-SP1, received free from my college 7 years ago) that it didn't recognize most of my hardware. In fact, the XP install CD blue-screened, which set a new record for how low Windows could sink in my opinion.

So I tried slipstreaming SP2 into my install CD. But it failed because, get this, the filenames of some drivers on the CD, namely usbehci.sys, ended up in lower case rather than uppercase and the CD's install program couldn't locate them. I kid you not. Since when is anything in Windows case-sensitive? Is it running Linux? I had to burn another CD after renaming all the files into uppercase. Then the CD worked, but it couldn't find my hard drive, probably due to missing SATA drivers. At that point I gave up, and plan to take my mouse to work tomorrow to upgrade the firmware on a work machine that has XP on it.

And so the score up to this point in my life is Windows: 947, Brian: 0. Windows remains undefeated.

Thanks go out to Logitech for not letting me use Vista (or, say, LINUX) to upgrade my mouse's firmware, and of course to Microsoft, for yet another gloriously broken and frustrating computing experience.