How experience can save you money.

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

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.....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.