novolocus.com

Dear Microsoft,

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.

Yes. Simply. I tried today to find out how to mount my Windows partition on startup of Ubuntu. I looked it up - finding ubuntuguide.org en route - and had it sorted in 5 minutes.

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

So, on a whim I decided to have a bit of a look at Ubuntu Linux. Boy did I get a surprise

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

So the court case about Windows Media player rolls on, albeit that it’s somewhat obsolete. The court case, not the software. More on it in a minute…

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? Read more »

So, lately at work we’ve started dealing more with Microsoft products, so I sort of think I should blog about them, if only to remind myself of the things I’ve discovered - like yesterday and my efforts with Sharepoint. Anyway, that’s for another posting.

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.

In short, they’re fat. I’ve spent the entire morning installing Visual Studio .NET, and all it’s prerequisites. The damn thing is gigabytes in size, and I’m only installing it because I need it to do some work on their “Content Management Server”. Oh, and Biztalk needs it too. And they both need SQL server. And IIS. And Frontpage Extensions. And Internet Explorer extensions. And so on. And Office, I think.

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.

VMWare is one of my favourite development tools - being able to build (and trash during development, only to restore to a stable state) virtual machines is great. Anyway, they now have VMWare Player. This will be superb for us to do demos on! And I’ll be able to install it at home, and use it for development there (I think) (or maybe, I hope).

What an interesting idea - no login/passwords, just a hard to quess URL. Provided that there’s nothing very valuable there, this seems a simple way of giving adequate security for some things - such as the invites app mentioned. I like it.

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

News of a VMWare Service for developers to subscribe to developers licences, and to download preconfigured machines. Neat.

At work, sometimes I get to see some truly bad bits of design - and my current winner is some awful design from Installshield and their ‘Update Engine’. There is, quite simply, no easy way of turning the damn thing off, disabling it, stopping the service, or uninstalling it. What crap! I did find a solution eventually…

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.