Everything within Reason

Yes, you read it correctly. I f#cking hate windows. Why? Well, let me explain;

Microsoft has this nice feature called Automatic Updates. Basically nothing wrong with that. It makes sure that you have the latest patches and updates without having to think too much about it.

Every now and then you get a mildly annoying question if you want to reboot (no, off course not… I’m working at this moment), but you can postpone those during the day. So when you shutdown the laptop/PC at the end of the day, the changes are taken into effect, and you can be (pretty) sure that your system is up-to-date the next time you boot it up.
So far nothing wrong…….

Somehow there are certain updates which enforces a reboot of itself (see the screenshot below). This is a reboot from hell, because no matter what documents you have open, no matter how many things you need to save before restarting. This bug-from-hell (I have no other words for it), will close everything by force and reboots your system. And with force I really do mean force.

Automatic Update Reboot

Normally, when you close a program, you get a question if you would like to save the document if it has changed. Even when you shutdown the PC the official way, the shutdown process stops (actually, it hangs, because stuff stops responding) at those dialogs. Waiting for your input. But this enforced reboot ignores this all together.

After the first message appears on your screen you’ve got exactly 5 minutes to change its mind. So if you’re at lunch, or on the toilet, you might be in deep sh#t. Because when you come back, the OS has rebooted. Every open document (saved or NOT) is closed, and you can start over again.

The worst part is that a unwanted shutdown can (and will at some point) corrupt data. Something you don’t want, but just happened to me….

Damages:

• Corrupt Outlook PST file
  which was an archived mail file, which can be recovered from an earlier backup.
• Corrupt MS-Word document
  thankfully the auto-save function was enabled and recovery seemed to work. No idea what content is missing yet.
• Lost several notepad files which were open with several to-do things, and pieces of code I was working on.

And that’s why I love Apple OSX, and f#cking hate Windows.

B.t.w. I already blogged about this feature a while back, but I hadn’t lost any data that time. This time it’s personal.

Oh, and spare me the advise on reconfiguring Automatic Updates, because this feature should not even exist.

…. for me at this moment.

I’m still in the fase of migrating my Windows server to a more ‘reliable’ Operating System. The new server should cover the following basic functionalities:

• Filesharing (either via Samba or NFS)
• Webserver with PHP and Coldfusion
• SSH server
• RADIUS Server
• Central user database (e.g. an LDAP server)
• a NZB downloader of some sort
• etc.

Up till now I’ve tried several Linux distros (Ubuntu 7, Ubuntu 8, and CentOS 5), and none of them are that easy to configure. Read more…

Microsoft Windows (no matter what version) is the favorite platform for virusses, trojans, malware and other crap. The way to keep the operating system neat and tidy you should use protection. Protection in the form of anti-virus software and other (required) software to guarantee your survival on the World Wide Web.

Well, protection isn’t what it used to be . It seems that an update of AVG antivirus recognizes user32.dll as a bit of malicious code. Is this bad you ask? Well…. Windows won’t work/boot without it. Ironic?

The solution for this problem is to ask someone with proper knowledge and follow this procedure (dutch forum).

According to Apple.

Well, they have a point after the (failed) Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld ‘commercials’.

If you think that things are going (relatively) well, they come right back at ya….

This time it’s my laptop from work. I used to enjoy my HP NX8220 widescreen laptop. It served its purpose well over the last 3 years. Since it was out of warranty (and noisy), it had to be replaced by a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook E8310.

Personally, I never liked the Fujitsu Lifebooks. They feel like cheap plastic laptops that might fall apart with every keystroke. Apart from the physical look and feel, there’s the ‘need’ to use hardware which can only be used by installing a gazzilion Fujitsu installers/drivers (on the HP I only needed half the drivers to get a functioning laptop).
The quality of these drivers are questionable. On a default Windows XP Pro SP2 OS with ALL the tools/drivers recommended by Fujitsu the hardware and Windows OS don’t seem to get along. Without any reason, the OS seems to hang every once in a while. And lately things have gotten worse….

Read more…

I ran into the most annoying (understatement) thing about certain Microsoft automatic updates (on Windows XP Pro). It seems that last Tuesday was yet another ‘patch-Tuesday’. Nothing unexpected about that, but this update (or at least one of them) required a reboot of the PC (yet, still nothing wrong with that).

Normally, the automatic update process bugs you about rebooting, but somehow this reboot interface had a timer. A timer of 5 minutes. After these 5 minutes the PC will reboot.

Totally ignorant to open (modified) documents. The shutdown process kills all open programs / documents and reboots. Without waiting for user input on e.g. saving files.

I tested this with opening a notepad document, altering it and leaving it open. After 7 minutes, the PC had rebooted, and all changes to the document were lost.

Yet another ‘Thank You, Microsoft’

The title should cover the topic appropriately…. The last couple of days there’s this delay on opening Office documents on my work laptop. Every MS-Word or Excel document I open (by double clicking the document) takes approximately 25 to 30 seconds to open.

Using tools like procmon (formerly known as filemon from SysInternals) displayed nothing interesting. Apart from a 15 to 20 seconds delay between the WINWORD.EXE appearances in the logging.
Since this nagged the hell out of me, I tried some stuff (in a non-chronological order);

• Removed McAfee AV
• Removed all tooling I installed in the last couple of days
• Removed  MS-Word
• Removed Office 2003 completely
• Removing all references to Office, MS-Word or Excel in the registry, and on the filesystem.

Nothing seems to work. The funny thing is that when I launch Word without a document it appears within 2 seconds. Opening a document from within Word adds another second or 2 (depending on the size of the document). So no problem here.
Running Word with the /a switch or even typing winword.exe c:\test.doc works fine. Everything works, except the default opening of a file by double clicking it.

Someone suggested to add another user on the system and try it with that user account. So I did. I logged on as the new user and every document launched as it’s supposed to do . So I logged out, and tried the original user, and guess what? The document opened lightning fast. I couldn’t be more happy, because I didn’t feel like reinstalling the entire system.

After working a couple of hours I restarted the system (application update), and everything went back to ‘normal’… Opening documents took forever again…..
It seems that launching Word from a FRESH user account resets something. Everything afterwards works fine, just as long as you don’t reboot… And since it’s Windows…… Well, Friday is gonna be a re-installment day. Am I looking forward to that (that’s something of a rhetorical thing).

As of yesterday, the latest Ubuntu release ‘Hardy Heron‘ is available for download (both client and server). Every time a major Linux distri(bution) hits ‘the shelves’, the Linux community roars. With each release (Ubuntu or whatever flavor) the Linux community gets closer, and closer to Windows.

Even though the OS itself is getting better and better. It still lacks the support of decent major software like Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It’s missing the software people use in every day (business)life.
Sure, there a million different ways of running Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop on a Linux OS, but these require a commercial piece of software (CrossOver) , or in depth knowledge of the OS to make it work (Wine in some cases). Two things that shouldn’t be required. Not if you’re used to Windows (or Apple’s OSX). And even if you find a ’substitute’ it’s most likely to have an awful user experience.

The average housewife won’t use Linux, because her friends all use Windows. All those nice little Windows programs, which makes life easier (or a living hell with all the mal/spyware out there). So if the Linux community wants to make a difference they need to create some sort of critical mass (by their selves, or by Microsoft screwing up) to get the attention of the ‘normal’ user. But in a community where there’s no real (commercial) business model, it’s gonna be damn hard.

Microsoft created this critical mass by playing (probably) the best marketing trick in the world; Release Windows 95, and turn a blind eye to those who use a pirated copy at home. The home users create demand on the workfloor, so businesses start to use it on their workstations. Soon everyone was addicted. And now it’s damn hard to beat the addiction.

B.t.w., Apple is doing it a lot better. They created a nice and stable OS (just like the average Linux desktop distribution), BUT the OS has ALL the relevant drivers for the hardware used. ALSO they have a complete (and cheap) software suite (iLife and iWork), which is more than enough for the average family. No need to search the caverns of the Internet for software, and they look and feel the same as the OS.

So, I guess that my conclusion is that the OS is nearing perfection, but it (Linux in general) lacks good and decent third party software (and a good marketing machine )

In the mean time; I’m gonna upgrade my Linux (mail, web, and ssh) servers at work to ‘Hardy Heron’.

Since I have an iMac with OSX 10.5 (Leopard), I use TimeMachine for my backups. This works great actually. But I also need an off-site backup of some sort. Just in case the house burns down or that some f*cker decides to steal my hardware.
So I bought an external Freecom 160GB USB2 drive (USB powered) for my off-site backups.

I encrypted the entire harddisk with TrueCrypt 5.0 on my iMac, and copied the data I needed to preserve. After that I wanted to access the data from my work laptop (Windows XP SP2 with TrueCrypt v5.0)….. This didn’t work. TrueCrypt didn’t recognize the password, or the encrypted disk (AES / SHA-256 full disk encryption).
I tried to access the data on my Mac and everything worked, so there’s no data corruption of some sort. Eventually, I recreated the encrypted drive on my Windows XP laptop (lost the backup in the process). This time the disk would mount, and could also be read/mounted by my Mac.

So, I guess that TrueCrypt is Cross-platform, but with the current version (v5.0a) you need to make sure to create the volume on Windows if you also want to mount it on OSX.

I reported this through their bug-reporting tool to the developers. No idea if there are similar problems with Linux.

UPDATE: Pretty soon they released v5.0a, and today v5.1 was released. So development goes on

Tried to use my new Nokia E61i for surfing the Internet with my laptop (Windows XP), but this just wouldn’t work. Errors were plenty, but no bit made it to the Internet for some reason. Strange, because my older 6230 (or whatever model it was) worked perfectly.

After cursing a couple of times, I needed to make sure that this wasn’t a defect in the phone, so I tried it with my Mac Book Pro (which is for sale by the way ). Obviously, this worked straight away. Just used the same settings / profile from my older phone….

Windows never keeps to amaze me (in a negative way that is).