I should start a running series of these.

An xbox360 wireless card is $100, and it's theoretically the only wireless card that works with an xbox, so if you want wireless internet, you have to buy that card. I guess the idea is to sell the console cheap (for sufficiently large values of "cheap") and then gouge customers on proprietary cables and addons afterward. Microsoft isn't the only company that does this, by far. (Not nearly as bad as $20 for 8MB worth of PS2 memory card. Ughhhh.)

Fortunately, if you have a spare Linksys router lying around (as I do) you can throw DD-WRT on it, put it into Client Mode, connect your xbox to the router via a bit of ethernet cable, and there you go. I can also plug my aging desktop machine (sans wireless card) into the same router, and two other devices if I can find any.

Installing DD-WRT was surprisingly straightforward if you take the time to read through the wiki instructions first very carefully. A bit of healthy paranoia of turning your hardware into a brick goes a long way.

15 minutes, $100+ savings. Thanks again, Linux and open-source community.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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.