However, I think I’ve just found my first big gripe. Performing standard system maintenance on my desktop, which is used pretty much exclusively as a VM host, I noticed that my primary drive was using 40Gb. That seemed rather high for Vista, Office ‘07, SharePoint Designer and Adobe Reader. Naturally, I broke out Treesize:

So, 28% of my drive is being taken up by the winsxs folder. What the hell is that?  Well, I Googled - and Vista Club has a good description … 

In Vista, there isn’t a ‘dllcache’ folder and nor can you find the ‘i386′ folder, where the system caches (like in XP) all it’s source modules. It is this WinSxS folder which stores the shared components of side-by-side applications. These files can be multiple versions of the same assembly or application. Every side-by-side assembly has a unique identity. One of the attributes of the assembly identity is its version.

Okay, but why so big? Well, it carries on…

As mentioned, Windows stores the old dll’s and library components in the WinSxS folder. Now if a newer version of this file is a part of the OS, but a particular application requires a particular older version for running, then the older version from the winsxs folder will be used, leaving the newer version in its present place, for other applications which may require it.
 
So obviously you cannot delete this directory or move it elsewhere. Nor is it advisable to delete anything here, as such a step could probably make your applications un-workable or even break your system! If you have many applications installed, you can expect to have a jumbo sized winsxs folder.
 
If you delete components from the WinSxS folder like the manifets or the assemblies, etc, you could be in trouble.

….

Compressing the folder is also a no-no, as it could cause problems during WindowsUpdates or while installing a Hotfix.

Holy crap! It’s a 13Gb directory that I can’t tidy up, delete, move or compress! Who designed that, and were their brains on holiday? I get why they did it - to maintain backward compatibility - but sometimes, maybe it’s just best not to. I mean, VB.NET isn’t backwardly compatible with VB6. Office 2003 and 2007 files are only somewhat compatible. Win 95 wasn’t backwardly compatible with 3.1. The .NET framework 2 wasn’t backwardly compatible with 1.1. And in all those cases, it’s worked out for the better. Please Microsoft, break with backwardly compatibility and get rid of this folder.

Go to Settings > Recent Comments and hit Update Recent Comment Options. ‘Nuff said.

Automatic filtering of content that is deemed to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable is filtered.

Yes, we all love a good jolt of lawyerspeak that is completely unconnected with what is possible for a computer to do ‘automatically’. I mean, let’s ignore that the court cases for what counts as, well, any of those things can be less than clear cut - if they were, cases would be short, and lawyers would earn less.

(As it happens, I am legally an ethnic minority in England - which I object to!)

Anyway, obviously complex decisions that require the judgement of human intelligence (let alone Judges) are beyond the wit of a computer program - hell, if it can’t find my printer, how’ll it find a bit of text ‘defamatory’?

But perhaps they requirements are for something a bit simpler - such as the screening of rude or politically incorrect words? Well, my memories of when this had gone wrong made me laugh! The first time I heard of this was AOL banning “Scunthorpe” ‘cos it’s name contained an Anglo-Saxon four-letter-word. Their suggestion was that the UK might like to call it “Sconthorpe” instead. Idiots.

In researching this, I found there’s actually an entry on Wikipedia about the problem - it’s called the Scunthorpe Problem (what a lovely name!) It’s got a lovely list of examples, but missed some:

• A long time ago the Times had to write a correction to an article about economics - where the line said “and this will put America back in the Afro-American” should have read “and this will put America back in the black”
• Recently the sprinter Tyson Gay was ‘outed’ by the American Family Association with the headline “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials”. Nice. I mean, what’s wrong with ‘Gay’? Or are they objecting to its use as meaning ‘weak or ineffectual’? It’d be a brave man called Tyson Gay weak or ineffectual!
• Discussions of Peter Jacksons plans to remake the Dambusters were hampered - because the squadron’s dog in the film was called ‘Nigger’. Definitely not politically correct now, but it was at the time. I guess I agree with Peter Jackson though - the dog’s name isn’t that important.

I found that the more I thought about it, the more examples I could think of, especially in media and music. What about mention of ‘Never mind the bollocks, here’s the Sex Pistols’?

I suppose the thing is that context matters, and computers don’t understand context. It would be far better to just flag items that have possibly objectionable words in them, and then have a human brain review them. And that’s what I’ll keep saying to people who want “Automatical content filtering”.

Edit: Jeff Atwood is now asking if they’re an ‘Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea‘. And he likes the Scunthorpe Problem too.

Unfortunately, I wanted to show some of out Sales and pre-sales guys some of the ’standard’ customisations to search that I was working on last month. I could do screenshots and Powerpoint - but it’s slower to create, and not as easy to see as a video.

Well, I’d heard of Camtasia, and it transpires they’ve a 30 day free, so I thought I’d give it a go. Well, it is very good. Clearly, there is a lot to the program - much more than I’ve used - but I was able to get a video recorded showing my stuff in an hour. Not bad when the film itself is 20 minutes long!

It has some really neat features, too, like zooming and panning to where you’ve clicked, so that if you’ve only got a small video resolution you can still see the important bits on an activity at 100% zoom.

What I would say is that the documentation and introductory videos do seem to gently suggest that planning what you’re going to demonstrate might be useful - and they’re right. I’d say from my short experience that planning what you’re going to do is essential. As is a decent mike - my seemed to struggle a bit.

Anyway, would I pay $300 for it? Well, for the company, yes, it’s a snap. It isn’t something that a ‘home’ user is likely to pay that for, but for business quality screen recordings, I wouldn’t look any further.

I can deal with the fact that the Admin UI isn’t as good as it was - although the Dashboard has improved - but authoring posts has got worse:

• Uploading an image - didn’t work out of the box. I had to install a plugin to make that work. Now it reports that the upload failed, though it succeeded.
• Image thumbnailing is not as good - my thumbnails keep getting their left and right edges cut off.
• Creating links in the WYSIWYG text editor just shows me a blank box - I have to switch to edit HTML view and put them in there.

Come on chaps, this isn’t release ready - you shouldn’t have been advising users to upgrade yet. Everyone, steer clear until these issues are fixed. Perhaps it would be a lot easier to not use Flash, eh?

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n, /e, /select, C:\

I found this advice here. And if you’re wondering why I’d want this - I have a laptop for business stuff, and a desktop for Virtual Machines only. Now I just have to figure out how to work across the two machines…

Unfortunately, on firing up the machine and connecting it to my wireless hub, it could only see parts of the web. With my work laptop, sat right next to it, I could see any site that I tried to look at, but my new Vista laptop couldn’t - it couldn’t find microsoft sites, McAfee, Mozilla.com, cNet.com, etc.. But it could find google (and other sites) right away.

So, I tried pinging these sites - and got a response. But I couldn’t ever get a web page back. Curious.

I’ve seen this before, so I tried changing the MTU (Maximum Transfer Unit) settings for my machine - only to discover that they’ve moved in Vista. So, I found a little application to change the settings. I restarted, and it continued to not work.

Curious. So I took my laptop to work, and tried the problem sites there. Over my work connection, I could see whatever sites I wanted to. This upped it to Curious and Frustrating - it was some sort of inter-relationship between Vista, and my connection at home.

Thus, I contacted Belkin support. They took a wee while over replying, but I received a response, the guts of which is below:

To get the issue resolved, we suggest you to change the MTU on the Vista computer.The first method to set the MTU is using DrTCP (http://www.dslreports/drtcp). You will need to run DrTCP as Administrator (right click the executable and select `Run as administrator`), otherwise it will not work. The other tricky thing is that the names of the network interface are shown a bit cryptic - see the screenshot - but you should be able to identify them. As usual, enter the MTU value, click Save and click Exit. After making the change, you will need to reboot the PC.

When the PC has rebooted, you can check if the MTU is set correctly by going to a command prompt and issuing the command: netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces, which you can abbreviate to netsh int ip show int, as the screenshot shows. This will list all the network interfaces with their MTU`s in a readable way. (In case you were wondering, the MTU shown for the Loopback interface is a dummy value of 2^32-1 - or 32 binary 1`s).

You can also set the MTU using the command line, for that purpose open the command prompt as administrator (right click it and select `Run as administrator`), and issue the command: netsh int ip set interface “9″ mtu=1400, where the 9 is the number of the interface for the previous screenshot (be sure to include the quotes) and you can change the MTU to any value desired. The change is effective immediately but will not survive a reboot. To make it permanent, repeat the command and append “store=persistent” to it: netsh int ip set interface “9″ mtu=1400 store=persistent.

If you only run the last command and not the one without the store= option, you`ll need to reboot for the new MTU to take effect.

To test if the MTU is effective, ping the router with the -f and -l options: the maximum size of the ping packet should be 28 less than the MTU. In this example ping 192.168.2.1 -f -l 1372 should give a reply, ping 192.168.2.1 -f -l 1373 should give the message that fragmentation is needed but the DF flag is set.

“Okay”, I thought, “I’ve tried the MTU settings and that didn’t work. But I’ll try their way anyway”. I used the DrTCP application, followed their instructions - and the problem continued. Arse. Finally, as a last gasp, I used the command line instructions they’d also given and success! The MTU setting changes worked this time, although why they didn’t when I’d changed them both times before is a mystery.

Of course, by this time I’d gotten so annoyed with it all that I’d tried a reinstall of Vista, so I’ll have to reinstall all of the stuff it came with. This isn’t as daft as it might seem - I’ve had a similar problem to this before, but it turned out that it was a problem applying Windows 2000 SP4, and that I had to reinstall the service pack to fix it.

Oh well, I prefer a clean system anyway.

Anyway, kudos to Belkin UK tech support. I was impressed.

This strikes me as very wrong. It’s not like they had to do anything complicated - they’re just transformers. The technology has been understood for a long time. I mean, batteries are one thing, but transformers?

The complication then comes that there are dozens of almost identical connectors, and finding out what connector you had is hard work.

So, couldn’t electronics companies build better power supplies? With fewer ’standard’ connectors (and none of this proprietry bollocks like some laptop manufacturers use - there’s no need)? And perhaps some system of colour coding, or at least documentation of what the connector is? Would that be too much to ask?

Please fix the Microsoft Passport, or the applications that use it, ‘cos it never works when I try to use it. In fact, it is the most unreliable, useless heap of crap I’ve ever had to use to try to login to a website - and I’ve seen some that are pretty rubbish - but at least they didn’t, in effect, say ‘Site Closed’ all the time.

While you’re at it, please find the monkey who came up with the idea of the Microsoft Passport, and fire them. From a cannon. Into a lake of piranhas. Angry ones.

Fix it or ditch it, I don’t care, just let me at the content I need to do my job.

If a pub always says ‘We’re closed’, I stop going to it.

When was the last time I looked up something like that about Windows and go an answer that quick? Um, never…

Previously when I’ve had a look at linux distros, I’ve had some problems. My home PC is a fairly antique laptop, with AMD powersaving built in, and an even older PCMCIA wireless network card. What that meant in the past was 1)No wireless network, and 2) a blisteringly hot CPU as it didn’t throttle back when there was nothing going on. That made Mandrake Linux, for me, interesting but not usable.

Ubuntu - well, it picked up the wireless quite happily. I’m writing this on it. And the CPU is running cool - it is truly excellent. I downloaded the ‘live’ CD (bootable CD that loads Ubuntu), and it was painless.

Very Impressed. I shall be making my machine dual boot - there are some applications I don’t want to do without - but this is a VERY usable system. And who’d have thought that a faintly brown colour could look so good - why is Windows so grey?

Anyway, it gives me pause for thought - Sharepoint and all those things I’m being trained up in aside, what does Windows give me that Ubuntu doesn’t? Open office gives me a word processor. I can browse the web. I have email. Yup, it’s a no brainer - as a home user, I’m a convert. I’ll keep using Windows for now - like I say, I have a number of applications I just don’t want to leave yet - but long term, I think I’ll move away. ‘Course I’m stuck with it for work - that’s their problem.

Anyway, Ubuntu - good enough for a

Comments from my old blog:

You know you’re really making me think about it too - I have an old laptop at home that *might* work too.

By Jonathan at 16:48:32 Thursday 11th May 2006

Microsoft contend that customers don’t want a media player free version of Windows. They’ve not sold a copy. This isn’t, perhaps, surprising. I’d have bought one, except none were actually available to consumers. Also, given the choice between the two versions, just with or without Media player, for the same price, well, people will choose with. Even if they don’t want it.

It’s like, given the choice of a burger with a gherkin, or searching all over the place for a burger without a gherkin, most people will accept the easy to find burger, and TAKE OUT THE GHERKIN. Much the same has happened here - except that people can’t take the gherkin out as Microsoft have tied it to the OS. Again. Internet Explorer - ring any bell? And that worked, didn’t it?

I digress. Instead, what most people have to do is just put up with having Windows Media Player, and use another if they want to. And people are, and Microsoft point to this as being a sign of how it hasn’t monopolised the market.

Well, they’re right, they haven’t taken the market - their product isn’t good enough. Windows Media player has a rubbish user interface, and the only thing I’ve been able to reliably view with it are Microsoft Webcasts. Everything else, I seem to have problems with codecs, and so on.

So it isn’t good enough - yet. And that’s the thing, that’s what the court case should be about. When it is a good enough media player, that’ll be it for the competition. Just like Internet Explorer.

I’ve not found a media player I’m entirely happy with - but Winamp is (surprisingly) pretty okay. I guess if it does follow the history of IE, I’ll have to wait for a bunch of enthusiastic, disgruntled techies to write something better.

It sort of goes against the grain to talk about Microsoft stuff, but some of the things I’ve been working with lately - Sharepoint, Biztalk, Content Management Server - are actually pretty good. Okay, so they tie you to MS SQL-Server, IIS, IE, Visual Studio (uck), Windows, Office, and the kitchen sink, but in terms of what they give users, they’re neat products actually. Sharepoint - well, it’s not a master of anything, but it’s pretty good at many things. CMS, well, it did what it said on the tin. Biztalk - silly name, but a good idea.

If they could just unbundle the browser, web server, database and IDE, that’d be great.

Compare this with Ruby Rails - a little MySQL DB installation, a little Rails installation, maybe some GEMs - and a text editor to do your development in. I know it isn’t exactly a like for like comparision - you can create lots more than Web applications with Visual Studio - but given that that is what we’re dealing with in the CMS product, I don’t see why it all has to be so complicated. It’s like taking your entire collection of Snap-On tools to fix a leaky pipe - when a pipe wrench will do.

And the installation speed! Slow doesn’t cut it. Hours for Visual Studio, despite the fact that I could copy the entire DVD in less time.

All in all, I’d better be impressed with the functionality of all this, ‘cos right now I’m looking at the pipe wrench thinking that it is small, cheap, flexible and easy to use.

Comments from my old blog:

What about Search Engine’s spidering it? Of course you’ll want to include a <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>, but even then, I’ve read that certain search engines like askjeeves.com IGNORE those tags.

Brandon@Cstone

By Brandon@Cstone at 04:12:01 Thursday 29th September 2005

Well, I guess as you say it’ll have to be for urls that aren’t linked to anywhere. The URL itself is sent out by email in the example. That’s my guess anyway.

By Andy at 21:43:46 Saturday 19th November 2005

I found the answer here and I’d give Pluck a 10/10 for walking away from an installer program like this. I had installed some software that we were reselling to a customer, to check it worked. Now, I know that the supplier won’t be updating through installshield - it really isn’t that kind of a program. But it still installed this update engine. “Okay”, I thought, “I’ll turn it off”.

So now it’s disabled for all programs, never checks for updates, and it still pops up a window asking to check for updates. F$%king thing! It positively fails Andy’s test for Software - it doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin.

Anyway, the solution. Run ‘msconfig’ from the ’start menu > run…’. Find ‘issch’ and uncheck the checkbox next to it. It is still installed, but it doesn’t run, at least.

And I’d recommend to everyone that they use a different installer. I like Innosetup myself, and use it at work. It does what it says on the tin, and is free, although I’d suggest donating.