The Computing Curmudgeon's Corner

Hello Best Buy - Ever hear of testing software?

2011-12-03T15:15:00.001-05:00

Do you have any idea how to code?

Take a look at this screen shot. Can you identify the coding problem?

The lower box claims that I can compare up to 4 items. However when I try to add a fourth item, the popup box appears stating I can only add 3.

By the way while railing on Best Buy, the Reward Zone program and the Best Buy web sites do not share usernames, passwords, or anything it seems. However when you tell it to reset your reward zone password the email looks like it comes from Best Buy not Reward Zone. What a gigantic lose.

Best Buy please let me know if you'd like some help in getting this right!

Google Finance Still Broken

2011-11-10T10:40:00.000-05:00

If you click the S&P 500 link - what would you expect to see. I expected to see a chart of the S&P 500.

Here's what you see instead:

What a pile of junk!

How experience can save you money.

2010-04-17T10:46:00.001-04:00

Today I was moving some stuff around my home office and turned off the external drive.

When I finally got things re-organized and re-connected the drive had that old familiar "heads stuck in park position" click happening. It is a 150GB drive, I recalled a moment almost 20 years ago when I unstuck some 104MB drives by spinning them around the axis of rotation.

1,000 times bigger drive - same solution - my drive is working.

http://www.sunmanagers.org/archives/1992/0084.html

Google Buzz is Broken

2010-03-25T13:35:00.001-04:00

If you are reading this in Buzz there is a high likelihood that the title of this blog has a & # 39 in it. Why, because lame-o programmer's have no idea how to process text and make it look right. This Ajax stuff - or whatever is used to do Buzz is yet another example of inadequate testing and just get it out there, however horrible and crappy it happens to be, mentality that is pervasive today.

Why is Vista so slow? I have a clue.....

2010-03-01T20:50:00.006-05:00

While looking to see what could be slowing down my computer today I decided to look at the operation event viewer. (Click picture below to see full view)

Hey cool - 15 events in the past 4 seconds - heck that can't be slowing me down at all. Hmmm, let's see - something is slowing me down, perhaps I should try to open up a file and write about it, no wait that will make me even slower, in which case I shall have to open up a file and write about it, and so it goes ad infinitum until the machine screws itself into the ground and requires a power off reboot.

Alas - I shall never again have a machine capable of doing simple tasks simply.....

Microsoft Silverlight

2010-02-21T15:55:00.000-05:00

As evident by this Wiki post Microsoft's Silverlight which I think is supposed to be competition to Flash is 100% buzzword compliant. The first paragraph of the entry is chock full of buzzwords. Unfortunately the product is about a big a lose as one can imagine.

Right now I am trying to watch some Olympic coverage on NBC's website. It forced this upon me. First the controls - I hate them - now I can't say if this is NBC's doing or Microsoft's, either way - complete junk.

The wiki entry alone shows that this product epitomizes the need for this blog. This is hopelessly and needlessly complex. First, the plug-in didn't even notice that it was a plug-in. I had to download, install and restart my browser step-by-step. Again, don't know if this is NBC or Microsoft.

The view of the screen and "progress" bar gave no indication of buffering. When I tried to back up a bit, it reloaded and paused for a while, then finally showed me something.

If this is meant to be a competitor to youtube or google video - to use one word - FAIL!

How can we communicate with Microsoft about Office

2010-02-19T19:21:00.000-05:00

Today I was ranting about the number of things that Microsoft has messed up in the new version of office.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/flyoutoverview.mspx

I looked around for some pagination problems a friend was having. It was a monumental effort to get it to change to something manageable. The page number problems have abounded since Word 2000. Yes that's a decade people. How incredibly hard can it be to get page numbering right. Oh and by the way bullet numbering is frequently if not more often more frustrating than page numbering. How is it possible that bullets and levels are so darned hard. I worked for a company 25 years ago called Unilogic that made a product called Scribe. This would format all manner of documents and do it mostly correct from what I recall. How can things have gotten so hard to do now. Answer: needless complexity.

GnuCash didn't work out

2010-02-02T12:25:00.001-05:00

I just couldn't tackle the double entry bookkeeping thing. Also while I successfully managed to get the thing to pull my balance from my banks using OFX, pulling transaction records proved impossible.

Back to Quicken '06 - it works - it isn't great - but I have it.

BTW - Great comic strip I just was turned onto by a friend of mine:

http://xkcd.com/327/

New Quicken for MAC will be a major downgrade

2010-01-24T09:07:00.000-05:00

Looks like Quicken for MAC will be a downgrade of major sorts.
Watch the video - it is spectacular viewing - all about how you should simply want to do things in the childish fashion and live in the here & now.

Seems like the same crew that created the Quicken Online version I referenced several months ago is at it again.

Seems they are creating a version of Quicken for Mac (QFM) that will allow you to quickly see where your investments are today with no view of how much you spent to buy them. Looks like Quicken has let the whiz-bang crew create the new version with no thoughts as to functionality, just make it look cool!

I am now downloading GNU-Cash, and will report on its capabilities after a few tests.

Choosing settings

2009-12-22T10:07:00.000-05:00

Just exactly when did it become the norm to only display the "other" setting that I can get by pushing a button and not the setting that is current. Far too often I have noticed that many web sites, subscriptions, and such offer you the choice to change your setting to something new without appropriately telling you what the current state is. Apparently it is implied that you are in the opposite state: on vs. off, subscribed vs. unsubscribed, however I find this to be a very irritating way to display information. Perhaps I simply want to look at my settings and review them, which is exceedingly difficult with this futuristic view. This permeates the web, video games (see below) and car functions (my radio in my car is frustrating to all get out) IP Phones (Cisco phones being especially irritating in this).

Programmers should be aware that when there are two settings On/Off, simply setting one of them to a color that is somewhat different than the other is not indicative of anything in particular. Perfect example of the is the F1 game on Wii, settings are on/off and indicated by Red vs. White - problem is it isn't clear which is selected. Perhaps a display that simply showed the current state and some method for choosing between the current state and the other state would be useful.

CNN take note of the above - by now many people know that the "yellow" score is the winning or leading team - however without pre-knowledge looking at two things - one yellow and one white - it would not be clear what was supposed to be indicated.

First view of Windows 7

2009-12-20T21:28:00.000-05:00

I just knew there would be inane change for change sake. Now instead of having a folder that contains your documents, music, pictures, etc. We now have "Libraries" you have a Document Library, a Music Library, etc. The folder icon looks different than it ever has in the past. This is completely ridiculous, while I fully support enhancement - changing the name of things simply to change the name of things and make stuff look different to justify a revenue stream is just flat out silly.

Editing a document should not consume a CPU

2009-12-19T13:02:00.000-05:00

Aah my old friend MS-Word. Today I had a document opened and was editing for my daughter. I had change marks turned on so that I could send her the edits and she could review it. I needed to move down a few lines in the document so rather than sliding the mouse I decided to move with the cursor keys. It took forever to move a few lines - I remembered that a while ago I had measured that moving the cursor in MS-Word with change marks on could peg one of my dual core CPUs. Truly amazing that user interaction can peg a CPU. I think it may be impossible to truly express my feelings for the state of MS-Office.

More do it and move on from Google - this time comics

2009-12-15T10:01:00.000-05:00

For the past few weeks I have noticed that the Google comics interface no longer allows you to look back at prior dates. This isn't to say the buttons aren't displayed - they simply don't work. Just keep moving forward Google - don't bother to keep stuff working.

Why does Microsoft make life so difficult

2009-12-15T09:42:00.003-05:00

Over the past few days I have spent significant time working with Office 2007 specifically Excel. I realized that my client was unable to use my file and "saved it down" as a 2003 version. Of course there were incompatibilities - which is fine - and Excel told me about it - again fine. What it provided no means for - was for me to go to the specific elements and remediate the issues identified. It told me the sheets that were problematic and the types of errors but not the cells themselves. Nor did it offer a good method for validating how the material would look when my client received it. Perhaps, just perhaps they could be considerate.

Crazy ridiculous requirements for Windows 7

2009-12-05T16:34:00.000-05:00

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:

* 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
* 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
* 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
* DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

This stuff wouldn't even run on my refrigerator sized Sun 4/490 from back at Westinghouse. How incredibly ridiculous is that!

Time and Date format in Vista

2009-10-19T10:22:00.001-04:00

I know I know Windows 7 is out in 3 days, but today this irritated me a lot.

Per this reference @ Microsoft:

I should be able to set the date / time format for all utilities in one place.

Seems only partially true. I was able to at least get 24-hour.

Here's what the time format control panel states:

Here's what I see in outlook which is sort of a blend of long and short formats, but not precisely what I've asked for, where did the ":" come from in the time stamp - I didn't ask for that?!?!?!?. Let's see if W7 is any better - kind of doubt it.

Google stock applet gets worse - yeah that's progress......

2009-10-14T13:08:00.001-04:00

So today I took a glance at my google front page. Decided to take a look at the stocks.

This shows the google applet that has been there for quite some time.

Now when I click the link for the DOW - I get a list of things to choose from rather than just a detailed chart of the DOW. What a gigantic pile of junk. Let's continue to break things that worked. Has nobody ever heard of regression testing?????

In case you are wondering here is the chart that I can now get with another click that I used to get (for at least 10 months now) via a single click.

Printing should work!

2009-10-06T14:48:00.000-04:00

Today I lost 3 hours of my life trying to get a Power Point document to print on 11x17 paper. No matter what I tried it continually pushed the margins in about 3-inches all the way around and would never set the document to print @ 10x16 which is what I had set the document size to so that I would have .5" borders all the way around the document. It is truly amazing how incredibly horrible the new versions of the office tools have become. They make things incredibly difficult and yet I was reading yesterday that their goal was to make it easy to produce beautiful documents. Well I for one don't believe it. It is a gigantic pain to do just about anything that I have spent the last 10 years of my life doing. What a lose!!!

Railing on OLE - Again!

2009-07-06T19:31:00.006-04:00

I know, it isn't fair, I should choose another target. This is like kicking someone when they are down. I can't help it. In former lives I was a programmer, and I did a lot of interesting things with computers, alas I have been deprecated and now live with MS-Office - Word, Excel, PPT, and Outlook as 90-95% of what I do so I really need these tools to work for me. Contained below is an error that has plagued me for about 3 or 4 years.

This happens - somewhat at random when trying to open a file from outlook by double-clicking. Now if this isn't supposed to work, then fine I'll simply copy the file to my hard drive and open it from there. Oops! --- You Lose!!!
I'm sure that this has something to do with the fact the Word or Excel or PowerPoint take 2-3 minutes to start and by the time the process has started the inter-process communication has timed out and now the file is gone but wait it isn't gone I don't know. Alls I do know is now if I click the file without closing the application it will once again work correctly. This isn't a Vista thing, this isn't an Office-V.Whatever thing this has been happening on-and-off for me as I said for the past 2 or 3 years. Seems to be odd numbered "dot revs" of MS-Office with even numbered "Service Paks" of Windows, released on Tuesdays that have a full moon, or some such other phase-of-the-moon bug.

CBS MarketWatch - Changes I can live without

2009-05-16T09:23:00.003-04:00

Yet another web site lambasted today. CBS MarketWatch decided to change their charting software over the past week. This site formerly had a decent site that showed some interesting things that Google and Yahoo didn't support. It had a lot more detail and insight - oh - and their news feed actually worked better than Google's which I spoke about a few weeks ago. At least they had a way to contact them and provide feedback. Here's the note I sent the - let's see what happens.

A few weeks ago I set up my charts to show 50,100,200 day moving averages. Today I came back to view charts and the charts had changed a lot. I understand change, however now I can no longer get 50,100,200 day MA, my choices are: 9,50 the click boxes look like they want to offer me the choice of 100,200 alas these do not work. Yet another fine piece of software engineering released upon the the world before it was ready. Which would be fine if you claimed it was Beta - but you didn't you just foisted it onto the world as a brand new feature. Care to discuss - send me an email. You won't.

The trend continues - Get it mostly there, call it a day.

Copying and Pasting Should Work - Shouldn't It?

2009-04-28T18:40:00.000-04:00

So today I was instantly frustrated when copying a piece of a powerpoint document and sending it to a colleague for review. When I pasted it into outlook, it changed colors from a shade of green to a shade of red. Now I ask you - what could possibly be a valid explanation for this. I don't want to hear about palettes, templates, color cubes, and the like. If I select something in one window, and click copy, it should paste cleanly and properly into another window. This is OLE gone mad. When moving pieces of text from one document to another - it seems like it never gets the formatting right. In the never-ending attempt to get better and cooler, seems many have forgotten that "working simply" is an important thing. Per my quote at the top of the page:

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler. - Albert Einstein

Wiki Sorting Problems

2009-04-10T16:39:00.003-04:00

Today I was looking up something about HBO. I noticed that there were a few tables on the site. I wanted to see what was the first show that they had produced. I tried to sort by broadcast date. Much to my dismay the sort was skewed. This seems to be yet another example of "get it close" "call it a day". I remember studying the various types of sorts and the efficiency thereof in my very first computer science class. It is truly unfortunate the state that things have become. I can't describe precisely how to fix this because the Wiki stuff is "needlessly complex". Here's the site

Quick Screen shot - last time I checked 2009 was after 1973 - then again perhaps it was because I clicked some of those links (see how they are red) - then again that shouldn't matter should it!?!?!

I am done with QuickenOnline!

2009-04-10T08:37:00.002-04:00

I have now deleted all of my quicken online accounts

Let me explain the straw that broke it for me. I just downloaded and synchronized my Mac quicken. Even though I hadn't use it in a few weeks it went mostly smooth and I was able to reconcile all of the outstanding items. It matched very well and the payee information downloaded from my bank looked like reasonable transactions:

Sample Sam's Club. Showed up in Mac as Sam's Club, in QuickenOnline it showed up as: Check Card Purchase XXXXX7509 as did all of my purchases.

My bank provides additional information about the transaction that the Mac version of Quicken pulls in but the online version does not.

It seems dreadfully wrong that as you advance into the online world products would become LESS USEFUL. I CANNOT ADEQUATELY EXPRESS MY LEVEL OF DISAPPOINTMENT.

I AM TRULY AMAZED AT THE LACK OF QUALITY OF THIS OFFERING.

The statement below is clearly created by someone under the age of 25, and is why I will be looking for some other way and perhaps even going so far as to break all ties to Quicken.

Reconciling - Reconciling is useful for matching up your paper checkbook register with the transactions on your bank statement. But who keeps a paper checkbook register these days? With Quicken Online, you're seeing your bank's transactions right on the screen. To match up your receipts with your bank's list of transactions, you can make an entry in the Note field for each transaction as you check it off as valid.

My Coke Rewards Site is Horrific

2009-04-02T21:16:00.003-04:00

As anyone who knows me knows, I am an avid drinker of Diet Coke. I collect caps and enter my codes, and get my coupons. This site is loaded with every sort of web control and snazzy, jazzy do-dad you can think of, all rolled into one incredibly slow, hard to use, and difficult to access site. Today I received an "Error during the invocation of the business service". I am confident this is due to the "SOA" craze - Service Oriented Architecture. Unfortunately the business service seems unable to be invoked, and here I thought an invocation was for church. I wasn't sure if this should be a curmudgeon post or a regular post, so I put it here.
Here's the note I just sent them. We'll see if they call.

I am writing to express my EXTREME displeasure at the use of the mycokerewards.com web site. I have been a loyal diet coke drinker for about 15 years. I have entered many many codes, received coupons and free coke. Today I received a "Error during the invocation of the business service" each time I tried to enter my email and password. This is at least the 10th time I have tried to enter or redeem codes, only to have the site frustrate me. I have been a software developer for 25+ years and I can say that while the mycokerewards.com site may not necessarily be the worst site from a "time to load" "overall design" and "user experience" perspective, it is undoubtedly in the top 3 I have encountered. I cannot think of a worse site - although I suppose it is possible one exists. Thankfully your core business is coke and the product continues to be delicious. Should you like to discuss this with me - I would welcome the opportunity for a live discussion with the developers or development management team regarding human interface design and overuse of technology. It certainly seems like every possible thing that can be on a web site is on this web site. Too bad most of them don't work.

Another Google Rant

2009-03-25T21:04:00.005-04:00

Once again I must jump onto my high horse about lack of caring in programming and follow through. Google - aka big brother of information collection and dissemination has created a wealth of things from their 'labs' to try out. BTW - almost everything @ Google is in perpetual beta - a great excuse to the question - "why doesn't this.....". Today's object of my disdain - Google finance -- which of course is Beta.

I'm confident after HAL learns of my speakings my account will be disabled or something.

Within this front screen which provides a goodly amount of information, then allows clicks to additional information. In true beta fashion - it also has a way to be displayed in their igoogle interface. This happens to be the method I use. With the market being mostly crazy the past 6 months I click through and read stuff with some level of frequency throughout the day. When clicking "Dow" you come to a screen that shows a 3-month or some other cool looking graph that is scrollable and in general has nice information. On the right is some news feeds - now for the past 6 days the news feeds on the right have been hit or miss at best with miss being far more operative. I haven't seen a real news update in over 6 days, and item "B" is still telling me about Chilean stocks from March 19. Something is clearly amiss in their reporting enginge.

Again - get it mostly there, call it a day - go check Google stock options, play some ping-pong, eat some donuts - or whatever it is developers do now.

BTW - also no way to send them a note and tell them it is broken. At least not that I can find.

Zune Date Problems

2009-01-01T08:25:00.000-05:00

So today the Urban word of the day was: Y2K9 - The simultaneous worldwide crash of every 30GB Zune worldwide during the early hours of the morning on Dec 31, 2008. Seems it is related to the following stub of C-code.

year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */

while (days > 365)
{
    if (IsLeapYear(year))
    {
        if (days > 366)
        {
            days -= 366;
            year += 1;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        days -= 365;
        year += 1;
    }
}

This site has some good discussion of the problem. When in a leap-year and it reaches the last day of the year and can't break out of the outer loop. Hmmm, perhaps a little bit of TESTING! Trying this function with perhaps just a few samples would have revealed this. First off - this is a precise case where this code is needlessy complex, and quite honestly for no reason whatever. There are probably somewhere in the neighborhood of a few thousand routines for dates. Why did they need to invent something new. By the way - the fix is simply to change the days>366 to days>=366.

I am a DEC guy

2008-12-14T17:28:00.000-05:00

What does that mean? Well Digital Equipment Corporation (aka DEC) was the first computers that I worked on when I was at the University of Pittsburgh. I started on punch cards - working in FORTRAN using the SITGO - The Steven's Institute of Technology - Load and Go FORTRAN compiler. This was my introduction to formal computing and that which changed me from a chemistry major into a computer science major. From there I learned about Pascal, LISP, ALGOL, Simula and MACRO all on the DEC PDP-10 machines. They were 36-bit machines - 12 Octal digits. For this reason, to this day I still am not very good at Hex, but can do Octal math very well, and know a good chunk of the ASCII chart in Octal but not decimal. I struggled to work with Intel machines due to their handling of words, and the order they looked at bytes to create long-words. When at the software translation companies - we created various mechanisms to deal with the "endianness" of words and long-words. It also means that I never learned a solid appreciation for the big-iron machines of IBM. When starting work I worked on a VAX-11/785 - another DEC machine. I worked in LISP - but learned a lot about BLISS and C. It was there that I was introduced to Unix and the world of the Internet - my company had accounts @ Carnegie Mellon that we could dial-in to to read email. I still have yet to learn much about "The Mainframe" even though I did a brief stint at a subsidiary of IBM - Transarc. My big leap into Unix was on Sun Microsystems that were Motorola 68k based so the "endianness" was preserved and I did a lot of cool and interesting things with databases, networks, file systems and the like. The Sun-3 that I worked on had a spectacular keyboard that you could type extra-fast on and could take a pounding. I spent 5 years @ Westinghouse working on Suns, connecting the corporate network to the Internet, re-addressing the internal network from a C-Class to a sub-netted B-Class and in general learning a lot about networking and systems management.

Crypto Advances

2008-12-11T19:32:00.001-05:00

Seems I have been out of touch a little bit with the world of cryptography. Looks like there is a contest to devise a new hash algorithm which will become SHA-3. The good news is I think that the algorithms will be held up to some intense scrutiny and therefore we may actually get some decent code out of it. Code that runs fast, might have decent data structures associated with it, does what it is supposed to do, and hopefully nothing more than that. I think that's really the problem I have - creaping featurism, just keep piling on features to keep the "new version" revenue stream going, meanwhile never bother fixing the old stuff that didn't work. Much like a colleague of mine Bruce Leverett once wrote in a book he published: But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses. Yes - albeit not quite to the extent of Dr. Leverett - I was a compiler jock of sorts back when I worked with Bruce at the software translation company. One interesting tidbit was we worked in LISP - a language that had a lot of interesting variable names. One of the more interesting was Bliss32$Bruce - named after one Bruce Leverett - this variable contained various portions, up to and including the entire Bliss source file that was being processed and transformed into GIF (not the picture GIF - Generic Internal Form) for later processing. BTW - While creating this post - I realized that blogspot no longer provides an easy method for having your post title have a link associated with it. Yes indeed - that's what I'd call an advance. Why would you do away with functionality that existed in the past. Now overall I like blogger and blogspot - especially the new publish feature, that doesn't require needless generation time, but some things were better before.

Lack of caring in coding procedures

2008-12-10T20:55:00.000-05:00

Today it seems that everyone simply wants to slam out some code, get it to the 90% mark then call it a day and grab a sandwich. If you are reading this blog, take a look at the pictures of the folks following this blog to see the evidence of this. Both pictures are poorly cropped images of the full size image you will see if you simply click the picture. I know for a fact that software to shrink an image is fairly straight forward, and I fully understand that the image presented may become illegible, however right now Scott is just a nose and eyes, and Tim is basically just the middle of his black and red jacket. If only people could care just a little bit about the code that they are creating and take some pride in what they are doing, perhaps things would not be so poor. More evidence of this is evident for those out there using google reader. Try subscribing to this blog Then go look in your feeds. You should see: "Secretary Mike Leavitt's Blog" There is however a good chance you will see: "Secretary Mike Leavitt 's Blog" WHY - BECAUSE NOBODY CARED THAT QUOTED CHARACTERS MIGHT CAUSE A PROBLEM AND JUST EITHER ENCODED EVERYTHING OR DIDN'T ENCODE ANYTHING!!! My motto - when you claim that something is "done" you should consider whether or not you would want to present it to your mother as evidence of the kind of work that you do.

Bits and bytes and things like that

2008-12-08T21:24:00.001-05:00

Being a curmudgeon I can remember back to the days of punch cards and assembly language. It seems to me as though there is a plethora of high level languages and due to this all connection to how computers work seems to have been lost. In a conversation today with a long time friend I was discussing a time when I was debugging some code. Now this was back in the days when "dual-processing" meant I had 2 VT-100 class terminals on my desk. Background - I was working at a software translation company that translated one computer language into another - the specific languages in question were Bliss-32 and C. Both were on Vax 11/785 machines, running VMS. My friends were stepping through some code and there was an error in the code that they could not decipher. The translator had a nasty habit of generating a "*4" error. That is - C would automatically increment a pointer by the size of the structure being added, whereas Bliss-32 would not. We had all become familiar with finding the "*4" bug and fixing it. This particular structure however would not comply with the normal multiples - 2, 4, 8 - all failed. I was asked to have a look. I perused the source code, looked at the translated code, re-read the source and pronounced "11" to be the appropriate divisor. Flabbergasted my friends denounced me stating I must clearly be insane - 11 is prime, how could it possibly be the right divisor. I stated please try it. They did - and it worked. Moral - if you have the source - and understand the underlying behavior of computer languages, systems and architecture, you really can understand and predict what a system will do. I understand that the world has advanced and perhaps there isn't as much use for the understanding of bits and bytes and octal and decimal, but this is precisely what makes me a curmudgeon, I like some things the way that they were.

Why Another Blog

2008-11-30T18:33:00.001-05:00

This blog will focus primarily on the history of computing as I remember it. This isn't to say it will always be 100% accurate, but I will do my best. I think that there are a lot of things that have managed to get very very complex in the world of computing and my sense is that it isn't all necessary. I'll try to collect many of the more needlessly complex things as I encounter them.