pwned by Windows

I am starting to put together a new piece of a continuous integration framework (the self-test part, of course). This one has to be done on a Windows platform, specifically it has to run on XP and Vista, a first for me.

I am used to having everything that I could possibly need at my fingertips on a base install of Linux. I can’t remember EVER having to go and hunt for some tool that I would need to get something like this done that was not already installed.

I first decided to see how far I could go with a base Windows install; that is, the minimum amount of tools that are not part of the original install. This means that I tried to resort to pure .bat scripting.

Syncing different Windows machines

As is often the case, this has to run on multiple machines. I am just too lazy (and error prone) to go and make one small change on every single machine every time I update something. I want the framework to be self-updating! In order to achieve that, I had to install SVN on all he machines. My first rule broken, and I did not even get started. I did not even try to work around this one: some sick munched up network test if a drive is mounted properly, copy over network if the machine is not down, verify the copied files, decide which one is considered the master, …

Getting the day of week on Windows

I want different tests to run on different days of the week – this is strictly a management decision, there was no technical reason to do this. No big deal. In pure .bat scripting this is quite difficult to get, but not impossible … or is it?

The only command that I could find that gives you the day of week is date /T. It dumps out something in the format: “day date”, where “day” is a three-letter code for the day of week, like “Mon”, “Tue”, etc; and “date” is the current date. Now how to parse that? After like an hour of Googling and browsing the specs, I ended up with:

for /F "tokens=1" %%d in ("%date%") do set day=%%d

Nice, huh? They even have a different way of naming the variables inside the loop, depending if you are doing it from the command line or from a script! To tell you the honest truth, I am not really certain how this actually works. However, the first time I ran it on one of my test machines, %day% ended up being something like “18/08/09″. I’m thinking WTF? Tried it on another machine and got “Tue”. After some more trial and error, I discovered that the output of the date command varies depending on what locale you have set in your preferences. What sick sadistic MF over at Redmond thought this would be a good idea?

Scheduling things in Windows

Of course not everything everywhere is the same. Some parts of the tests need to change between different machines. From the Linux world, I normally did this through environment variables. Bill’s posse decided to outdo Linux by introducing three types of environment variables, only two of which are properly documented! After some trial and error I found a combination that worked … until I tried to run my tests as a Scheduled task. The facts that the tools for scheduling a task 1) are found in completely different location between XP and Vista, 2) have completely redesigned interface, and not for better, and 3) have their file formats that you export/import totally incompatible between the two, no longer dissuaded me. It makes work that much more interesting. But the fact that different variables are passed to the scheduled tasks in different versions of the OS, is another example of Windows’ big middle finger for the programming world.

There was a time once that I used to run a liberated version of Windows on my machine. Today, they could not pay me enough to install that piece of dung on my machine. I wouldn’t want it even for free!

Next: PowerShell.

Happenings?

Not much actually.

So my Noki is now officially outdated. Man, €500 and 19 months later, and stuff is no good anymore. Am I the only one who thinks that a device I pay that much money for should last me at least a decade? Yea, naïve, I know.

Update 09/08/21: Now I know why. Nokia N900 running full Linux. Yea baby!

I am so over 64bit operating systems, regardless of the vendor. I suspect the biggest problem that is killing the whole thing are peripheral vendors. Apparently 64bit support was available in CPUs from 2003, and OS supported it from 2001 – both on the desktop. However, five years after the fact, support from (closed source) hardware vendors is flaky at best! Here is just one example of a miserable issue I recently ran headlong into.

Here is a good one. The other day, while I am installing something – something that I have been installing the same way at work for the past 6 months – out of nowhere pops up the following:

This is a 10-year old product And I get this popup only when I am installing over the network. Anyone know where the heck this comes from

Wine-ing

For the past several days, I have been experimenting with Wine – the WINdows (not!) Emulator. The first, perfectly valid, question is: why bother? Well, I have several devices (iPod, Nokia smart phone, Magellan GPS) that all come with some supporting software – software that will only run under Windows. Allegedly Wine has come a long way. However, I was met with disappointment in every single case. In several cases, the software did not even install, even though the installer said it did. If it did manage to install, it certainly did not work properly, and in most cases it was not able to detect the device it belongs with. Wine is not even able to keep track of what is where, and was not able to uninstall any of the software – rm -rf ~/.wine does the trick nicely. Lucky for me, there are Linux-native replacements that do what I need done.

For my buck, wine is a waste of effort; if I actually need Windows then I will stick with running it in a virtual machine.

Winblows in Frankfurt too

Not an uncommon site on my recent stop-over in Frankfurt:

Here is what you get if you try to fix it:

Here is what happens when a professional fixes it:

Man, I can’t believe that people still pay for this stuff.

OpenOffice.org: not colourful enough!

I am big fan of FOSS. I don’t know what existed before the Netscape suite, and I don’t much care for anything outside of that family of products today. I always looked at MS competition, but their Office suite was usually forced down my throat due to compatibility issues with management and marketing at work. OpenOffice.org really grabbed me only after version 2.

The other day, I needed to generate some birthday party invitations for my 8y.o. daughter. How hard can that be? Just grab a nice template off the net and off you go. Right?

“Anything nice here?”

“No,” says my daughter, “I like horsies.”

“OK,” resisting the knee-jerk reaction. “Let us see what we can find on the Internet.”

“I don’t like any of those either. Why don’t you go to that really colourful one daddy?” I know she is talking about MS-Office, and you should know that she has never seen 2007 version.

“Well let’s try just one more look.”

“Daddy, is this going to take long?” Still looking over my shoulder, but a little more impatient. Actually, so am I; this should not be that difficult!

Screw it! Three clicks later, I’m staring at Active-X errors in Firefox.

Why is it that anytime I have a chance to show somebody something relatively simple in some office suite, keep in mind that I am not an office drone and so I am no guru with any office suite, I can usually come up with a better, but more importantly faster, solution in MS?

Tell me I’m wrong

There are people who would describe me as a Microsoft-hater. I don’t actually hate their technology, and I believe there’s even a place for it. I am a software tester by trade, and all software is flawed and buggy, it’s only a matter of degrees. What I don’t like about MS is their marketing strategy and their stance on many other things that matter. Right from the start little Bill let the world know that he is in it for the money! MS has had its share of dumb luck over the years. But when they realized that the free-loading, commie loving, open sourcie guys actually had something, they opted for all out war. They used some down right evil strategies over the years and are still doing it today, and in doing so they made the world a worse place to be. In the end, when they finally discover they can’t beat them they decide to join them? Gimme a break!

So why a WP blog, why not a Yahoo! 360 blog? I mean I have been a long-time user of Y! Whenever I needed anything, I would usually turn to Y! as my first choice. My first blog was a 360 blog. I have been a fan of Y! search, even when everyone else around me was using HotBot and AltaVista. I have had GeoCities websites before (and after) the buyout. I was the first in line to sign up for Y! e-mail. And there were other services that I tried and even actively used over the years. The problem is that Y!, IMHO, has a nasty habit of taking a good idea and totally crippling it to the point of uselessness. Are you allowed to have non-Y! friends? What about something slightly simpler, like any visitor (even a non-Y! one) being able to leave a comment on your 360 blog? Once they realize the execution of the idea is shit they completely abandon the product and just let it bit-rot. Has anyone today heard of Y! briefcase? Unfortunately, the most useful (and still documented) feature is now turned off and has been for a very long time. How long has Y! 360 been in beta? The list is endless. I’m not even going to get into the recent public affair between Y! and MS. The one single thing that speaks for itself though, is the Yodel Anecdotal: the Yahoo! Corporate blog. Once the page loads up, check the source (somewhere under the View menu of your browser), and look at line 9 – the one that starts with <meta name="generator". Hey, what’s good enough for Jerry is good enough for me!

Blogger is in a different category … for now. I will admit that my choice between Blogger and WordPress was based solely on this Slashdot article – admittely, not a very informed choice. I already use some of the Google’s other services (mail, search), and there are some that I am afraid suffer from bit-rot (browser sync). But overall, I get the impression that Google is everything the above two are not.

In the news recently

For the past several months, especially since I started reinstalling thetao on a weekly basis, my workstation distro of choice has been KNOPPIX. I was actually surprised how little customization (1 script, 10 lines long, runs about 10 seconds) on top of the KNOPPIX configuration I had to make, in order to have it automatically access all machines that I need on our work network and to be able to do everything that I need to do. I have been eagerly awaiting the next major release of KNOPPIX for quite some time. Because I plan on making several (tiny) changes to some of the KNOPPIX scripts and submitting them back to the developers, I got onto the debian-knoppix mailing list. I was glad to see this totally unofficial announcement … however, considering that I am writing this the next day after the post and still nothing, I wonder.

SCO, the the scourge of all things Linux, have been making news all over the place and have finally admitted they are in deep shit. Good for them and more so for us.

Microsoft have suffered a major defeat in the EU courts. Now, while I’m no Mickey lover, there is one item in this particular ruling that I find troubling. As part of the deal, Microsoft are forced to sell a version of Windows that does not include their Media Player. I believe that any vendor of any software should be allowed to enhance / cripple their software in any way they please. It is theirs after all. Having lawyers dictate what should or should not be bundled with software will lead to no good! That is how we got Windows in the first place.

Windows 2000 SP5 and Linux Ghost

How do you backup stuff? Do you even bother? I took some time today to go through a proof of concept exercise for myself, just to see if I could do it; actually, it was a couple of different exercises strung together in a row.

Slipstreaming Windows

I recently updated etanol from WinXPx64 to Win2k. I used an SP1 CD to perform the install, and I had previously downloaded SP4 which had to be installed afterwards, and after that Microsoft also released an Update Rollup, and then about 50 additional fixes. After that, IE needs to be upgraded to version 6, and WMP is now up to version 9, and… To make a long story short, to install the basic system with all updates takes a very long time. In order to make this easier, you can slipstream all this stuff into the install CD.

I created a Windows 2000 SP5 install CD using the hfslip utility; vg’f yvprafr serr, yrzzr xabj vs lbh jnag n pbcl! The utility even allows you to update IE, OE, WMP, .NET, Java and some other stuff all to latest versions! If nothing else, the page is an interesting read on the incompetence of Microsoft. The process of creating the CD and then installing it, is much faster than installing everything separately. Tried the resulting install CD on my test machine, and it seemed to have gone fine. The really kool thing is: the entire utility is a 220k batch script!

Backups

I knew about this *NIX utility from before, but only after reading Hack #48 in Knoppix Hacks did I find out actually how easy this thing is!

To backup the entire drive, you just run sudo dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/sda2/hda.ing &, where /dev/hda is the entire disk you want to backup and /media/sda2 is a mounted location where the backup image hda.img will be created. You can watch the progress with watch ls -l /media/sda2/hda.img as it will take some time. Since everything in *NIX is a file, you can backup only one partition by telling dd if=/dev/hda1 or whichever. Have a read through the man page to see what all it can do.

To whack the entire disk, just to prove a point, I used the shred utility, described next door in Hack #49.

To restore the backup you just switch the targets of the if= and of= that you passed to dd.

As with everything else in *NIX world, dd can be piped to / from a remote machine across a network. And for those that are a little squeamish about the command line, there is even a menu-driven front end.

Man, screw that other thing!

The MS-bluff?

What is it with these guys? I say MS is bluffing; but at the same time, these companies are no fools. What do they know that we don’t?

Another one.

Nutter one. Am I wrong or are all the dying distros getting on this bandwagon?

Neškodná destrukce

Tak jsem se zase jednou dostal na blog. Nemám nic zvláštního, jenom pár drobných novinek / historek. Dejte si .

Tento týden jsem trochu povolil uzdu mého duševního pyromaniaka. Doma používáme svíčky, spíše pro efekt než hospodárnost. Jedna konkrétní svíčka je asi 15cm v průměru, 15cm vysoká, má tři knoty, a je obalená kusem břízové kůry. V úterý knoty už dojely do konce a svíčka naposledy zhasla. Anebo? Zrovna dohořívalo v krbu, tak jsem tam ten zbytek hodil. Během asi půl minuty se 100cm³ vosku transformovalo na 10L hořlavého plynu. To byla prdel! Hukot komínem se rozléhal klidnou nocí. Jak se studené a permanentně provlhlé zdi kolem komínu moc rychle ohřáli (a roztáhli), začal cely barák praskat jako by se připravoval zhroutit, a viditelně se začala vypařovat vlhkost. Vyběhl jsem podívat na show z venku. Při zemi byl docela dost hustý čmoud jak se začali spalovat saze v komínu – odhaduji, že od postavení baráku na začátku 70 let, komín nikdo nikdy nečistil. Z komínu lítali ven rozžhavené kusy hořícího materiálu, a čas od času i plameny. Krásně to rozsvítilo zahradu a okolí. Celé show trvalo asi tak čtvrt hodiny. Teď mám sice zákaz cokoli přikládat do krbu, ale stálo to za to!

Zase jsem se dal na čtení. Poslední roky dost málo čtu, a už tomu bylo hodně dlouho co jsem přečetl něco opravdu dobrého. Našel jsem stránku kde je mnoho odkazů na různé knížky po Internetu, a na jeden typ se pustím do Accelerando.

Začínají se mi formulovat plány na léto. Vypadá to, že asi budu v Čechách na přelomu července-srpna; posledních pár dní bych mohl dostat i vycházku. Je dost lidí kterých bych rád viděl, a nevím jestli všechny stihnu. Doufám, že problém se zmenší nebo vyřeší tím, že lidi už budou sami na jejich dovolené…

No a taky něco o mích mazlíčcích.

etanol měl hard-drive crash – jeden ze tří jednotek zapojených do RAID0! Samozřejmě jsem neměl úplné zálohy. Ztratil jsem pár důležitých dokumentů, několik mailů během posledního půl roku, asi 5GB programů, asi 15GB knížek, kolem 100GB filmů, a přes 50GB opravdu dobrého porno. Shodou okolností jsem alespoň den před tím udělal kompletní zálohy všech fotek. První věc jsem si vylil zlost na instalačním CD pro WinXPx64 – viz obrázek. Vadný disk jsem tam zatím nechal, a přehodil jsem to celé na RAID5 – špatný disk je takhle alespoň částečně použitelný. Pak jsem komp upgradoval z WinXPx64 na Win2k – tedy z rychlého ale nefunkčního systému, na pomalý ale skoro funkční. Zvolil jsem tentokrát jednoduchou instalaci: celý systém na jedné partition, jeden super-uživatel, jeden administrátor. Nainstaloval jsem všechny ovladače (zvukovka ještě dělá problémy), poslední Windows opravy, samozřejmě antivirák a firewall, během třech večerů. Potom jsem zapnul Internet a automatické opravy: přes jednu noc se tam objevilo asi tři stránky dalších oprav. Taky jsem se zklamáním zjistil, že Linux 2.6.19 nemá správné ovladače aby přečetl disk v této konfiguraci.

Instalace Gentoo na thetao zatím čeká. Mám za prvé hodně jiné práce (v práci), a za druhé jsem se nějak poslední dobou vrátil ke staré lásce: Knoppix. Určitě s tím strávím nějakou dobu. Pohrávám si i s nápadem, že bych zkusil být contributor pro Knoppix. Už delší dobu plánuji přepálit si svojí verzi Knopixu a mám několik nápadů co na něm bude. Potom určitě chci přepsat asi dva Knoppix hacks: 21 a 36.

Asi měsíc se flákám s překladem pro DistroWatch. Až (jestli?) to jednou bude, tak to bude tady. Potom si chci přepálit W2kSP1 CD na W2kSP4, jen tak jestli to zvládnu. Přemýšlím, že bych chtěl začít být trochu víc aktivní (a taky produktivní ve volném čase) ve FOSS projektech, no a tak zase přemýšlím o laptopu – něco levného, hračka, starší P3. No stále co dělat.

Lidi, hezký víkend!

I think I’m turning into a Luddite

copyright Russell Kightley, rkm.com.au

Lately, technology just hates me. Either that or I am a walking computer virus!

etanol is further deteriorating. More and more shit just inexplicably stops working: spell check in MS-Word for one user (out of four) does not start up, opening MS-Word files downloaded from the Internet for (a different) one user does not work, one user’s personal documents do not appear under the Administrator computer menu. Then there are the explainable, but still absolutely mind-boggling things like some user programs need to have administrator access to the machine, other programs that must have write privileges to the C:\Program Files hierarchy. This one got me really good: my bank has security certificates for signing in and for sending any kind of payment. I had no problems signing in, but for like half a year I could not send any transactions. The errors that their application was throwing did not give any kind of hint as to the actual problem: Windows one day started shipping without any Java engine! The best is, that the x64 version of I-Explorer cannot even see that a Java engine has been installed! Not to mention all the small things that have stopped working, which I have now just come to accept as normal MS-SNAFU. I have now completely given up on etanol until this summer, at which point I hope I will be allowed to reinstall him. I will be upgrading to Windows 2000 for the benefit of harmony with the people that I must cohabit with and Linux dual-boot.

A while back I convinced my GF to get a Mac – my first exposure to it. Number one reason: it just works! What the hell are they talking ’bout? First off: no localization to Czech; all the free software that she got for it NeoOffice, Thunderbird, FireFox, all with perfect Czech localization. The multi-billion dollar company apparently thinks this is not worth their effort. Next, I could not get the thing to connect to a wireless modem using (default) WEP authentication; I am now running my household on WAP. For no reason whatsoever, it will not download mail from Yahoo! Speaking of Apple’s mail, that has to be one of the most unintuitive applications that I have seen so far on a Mac – it is next to impossible to discover how to make it use SSL, which today is almost a standard. But by far the best one: one night my GF is not home, the MacBook is lying on the table, I got a Knoppix CD in hand… The thing is supposed to have an Intel processor inside, so I thought I’d give it a try. Took me around 10 minutes to figure out how to boot it from a CD – “just press the Options button” BS did not work, tried it several times. Eventually I found something in the control centre (I think it is), where it asked what do you want to boot from – one of the options was CD. Tried that, and Knoppix booted up perfectly fine, and completely in Czech. Showed it to my GF, who was not impressed. Well, this is Knoppix I though, just take out the CD and reboot the machine, everything is back to original. After reboot, all I got was a text message on an otherwise black screen telling me that there is no bootable CD. No shit Sherlock, I’m thinking, I just took it out! The thing would not default to the internal hard drive. There was several very tense moments, of my GF watching over my shoulder and me struggling to figure out how to convince an unresponsive MacBook, that there is in fact an internal hard drive that it can and should boot from. Eventually, I tried the OS X install DVD – I immediately quit the install program, and it asks I you want to reboot from the DVD or perhaps the internal hard drive. I am now forbidden from coming anywhere near my GF’s MacBook. “Just works” … my ass!

I seem to be the only person (or at least in the minority) for whom the Browser Sync plugin does not work. This was just another very kool idea, executed poorly.

Then I found another very kool plugin. I consider myself a bit of a OpenOffice.org power user. I am always interested in increasing my productivity in OOo. After reading this article, I just had to get the Tabbed Windows Extension. This ended up as just another disappointment. After crashing OOo twice in one day, I was looking only for how to uninstall / disable it. Not to mention that since OOo version 2.0, I can longer edit HTML, because on my installation the HTML source button seems to have disappeared.

Knoppix, one of my favourite Linux distros, is giving me a hard time!

I prematurely posted an entry here on my latest achievement: finally installing Gentoo on thetao, only to discover on rebooting after the post that I screwed up something – kernel panic. Took that entry down PDQ. I was absolutely beside myself when I found out a few days later that the next version of Gentoo was released. Downloaded the live CD and first thing tried it at home. I was fully expecting issues with my disks. The first surprise: it found all the disks correctly on the first try! The second surprise: from the messages flying by, it seemed to have detected that I have an ATI X300 graphics card – not very high end stuff – however, X server had no idea what to do with it. Back to installing Gentoo via Knoppix.

As much as I would like to help out, I simply don’t have the time to be filing bugs and tracking down every single failure that I find in every application that I try. I actually get paid to find bugs in shit.

Man, I’m already pondering my retirement. I am definitely going to read a lot. I discovered the joy of reading very late in my life (when I was in my early 20’s), and recently I do not have anywhere near enough time to do it. Oddly enough, I have a huge (well, I would estimate it at about hundred pieces) collection of books that I have never read. I am going to sit someplace on a beach, and drink those drinks with umbrellas in them. But most importantly: no computers anywhere in sight!

Installing etanol – day 3

“Day 3″ is just a symbolic label now used strictly for consistency as I have been working on this for like two months. [self-censored] This is actually my first blog post from etanol.

As I mentioned the last time, I changed the disk configuration to RAID 0 which now reports 447.2GB of total storage. So far no problems losing the redundancy of RAID 5.

During installation Windows XPx64 requires an extra registration step – product activation – on top of the standard license key that you have to punch into it. I needed to wait for Internet access for this. Same for my edition of Word 2002 CZ. Both of these went without a problem through the Internet – must be something wrong?

The webcam also went without giving me any trouble. The drivers are available directly from Creative – beta release only. Yahoo! Messenger picks it up without a problem.

Other things, however, took a little more effort.

Multimedia Video Controller

At first, I mistakingly thought that this is the Sapphire video card, but in fact this was the TV card. Totally by coincidence I ran across an article on the Internet which talks about some HW support issues under WinXPx64. It actually scared the crap out of me, especially when I got to the part about video card support.

In the end, the TV card was actually easy: search the Hauppage website, followed by the Internet, as last resort contact the manufacturer directly:

Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2006 Hi, There are no 64 bit drivers for the PVR 350 at the present time. I'm afraid we haven't been given a timescale for release for them either. Best Regards

It now sits, disabled, inside the box.

Sapphire video card

This one was actually kinda funny – in a I wanna stab myself in the eye sorta way.

Windows detected the card correctly as ATI Radeon X300SE. However, I think it is capable of higher resolution that what the Microsoft supplied drivers are giving me; as well as the ATI supplied Catalyst control center, which gives you a whole bunch of optimizations for 3D graphics. I downloaded the ATI drivers, and tried the install. At some point early in the beginning the installer tells you that “the CATALYST Control Center requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 prior to installation” and happily continues on after that warning until it eventually freezes up. The ATI (AMD now) website actually points you to Microsoft’s .NET Framework 1.1 download page. Since I was in a hurry, I tried that. The ATI driver again complains that it does not have .NET 2.0, but this time the install completes. Just for the heck of it, once I had a little more time, I hunted around for the .NET framework 2.0 (x64), and tried the whole thing all over again. This worked, with one small annoyance: it did not uninstall the previous 1.1 .NET framework. Maybe I’m just too demanding.

Internet access

This continues to be a source of joy (that’s sarcasm, for the humour-impaired) to this day. I am actually very proud of myself that I did not go on a killing rampage while hooking up my Internet.

The first step was to hunt, err: find, an ISP. Due to my professional and personal time commitments, it took me approximately a week to discover that Internet through cable TV is not available in my area.

On to the telephone companies then. Since my love was by now getting on my case with: “I can’t believe that I cannot get on the Internet at a geek’s house!“, right now became more of a priority over anything else. Ireland has only one monopoly (sarcasm, again) that supplies all wired telephone service: Eircom. These people are willing to sell you Internet only under the condition that you also buy telephone service from them. Since I don’t even know how to use a standard telephone unit, I thought I’ll go elsewhere. I quickly discovered two things. 1) There are companies that do indeed offer cheaper Internet than Eircom, unfortunately they make you purchase more packages from them that I have no use for which all together make it more expensive than from the Monopoly. And 2), all of the competition has to use the Monopoly’s telephone lines, which the Monopoly rents out to them at (conveniently) the same price as what it costs to get a telephone line from the Monopoly. By this time, my love comes home from the 20 minute walk to the local Internet café, and just rolls her eyes.

Back to broadband.Eircom.ie. I first tried to order it online, since they had a promotion that the first month is free only if ordered online. Apparently to hook a phone will take them up to 15 days. Fine! I did not immediately get an e-mail confirmation, so I thought I would call them back, just to make sure: “Well sir, sometimes it takes up to three days for the e-mail confirmation to be generated.” WTF!?!? OK, fine! 15 days later, nothing. So I call them back to get the same runaround: promotion is available only through ordering online, takes three days to get an e-mail, takes 15 day to find out if it worked, and then maybe. So this time I took the three more days to find out that the online order did not work again, until I decided that it will be better for my health just to phone order it.

The lady that I talked to – not mentioning any names to protect the incompetent – took my order. She convinced me, that the only ADSL modem they have is a wireless one, and since I do not have a wireless card in my desktop computer, I will need to purchase an adaptor from them. Apparently the adaptor is USB, and there should be no problems with a driver. Yea, right I thought! But I need the Internet.

This time, the telephone got hooked up in a few days. Several days after that, the wireless adaptor came in the mail. It was a Netopia 3D Reach wireless G USB, and of course the drivers did not work! Tech support from Eircom played (very effectively) brainless and useless. I tried Netopia (aka: Sun) directly. They pointed me to RT2500USB driver from Ralink, which surprisingly worked just fine. However, the story does not end there. A few days later the modem arrived. The modem is a Netopia 2247NWG wireless and 4-port ethernet gateway. Back on the phone with Eircom to return the wireless adaptor. I am still going to have to call them up at some point, as my last service bill was over €70, which I think is a little too steep for one month of Internet access.

other pieces of Windows

There are several applications and small items that are still not working, and probably never will. Perhaps it’s just that I am too demanding (not unreasonable I think, considering the price that you have to fork out for this OS), or perhaps it is due to user error (also entirely possible).

I wanted streaming radio from the Internet. Most of the stations that I like are streamed through Real Player. I could not get the basic download to install, so I contacted their support. They told me that they do not support XPx64, because “the Windows 64 operating system has many advantages that can help run games in general, but because we have not tested on this operating system, we are unable to offer technical support for games on it.” I tried to reassure them, that I am only interested in the streaming radio and not games. I got a reply, that said they are sorry they could not help me immediately, and they will bump me up to “level 2″ support. Fine… “Level 2″ support replied to me a day later, that they have no record of me as a paying customer, but that they will make a one-time exception. “Unfortunately at this time we do not have a version that is compatible with Windows XPx64.” Are you like for real? There are people that actually pay for this? I mean at one time Real used to be a somewhat lousy player, today it’s a really lousy operating system. Whatever…

BOINC screen saver. This is one of the most worth-while projects that I like to support. It costs the user, next to nothing and helps out a great deal. Unfortunately, I could not get the graphics to work. Apparently, there are people on the net that have experienced the same problem and have somehow resolved it, but I could not be bothered, considering all the other problems that I am having with this system.

I have three accounts on the box. When I first wanted to make another account it forced me that the first one must have administrator privileges. What I did not know, is that it will disable the administrator account. OK, I guess I will go along with that. Then I have one user account for my love, that has a password so that the babies do not mess up any of her stuff – she is more than capable of messing it up herself. And one account for the babies, with like no privileges, that is password-less. Creepy thing is: when my love wants to download a Word .doc from her mail (accessed through http), it freezes up the application (I-Explorer and Word). The exact same file on my account or the babies account, no problems!?!? Tried reinstalling Word, tried even reinstalling that account… nothing. Luckily it only happens under Internet-Explorer. I prefer Firefox anyway, so I juts have to disable that piece of crap from the menus.

Windows XP comes with a new hip theme – whatever. On my administrator account I switched it to the classic Windows theme. Then I went ahead and created the other accounts – where it erased the administrator account. Well along with the administrator, it also erased the Windows XP theme!!!

After installing Firefox 2.0, I could no longer set icons for HTML documents. In fact, when I right-click on on an HTML document, and ask to pick what I want to open it with, Firefox appears twice in the list – always leads to the same thing. When I try to go into the File Types and change the icon, it always ignores me.

Conclusions

I made a new year’s resolution, actually two. I normally don’t go for this kinda stuff, but this year I made an exception.

By the end of the year I want to have all my stuff 100% on Linux. This is not to say that I am completely going uninstall Windows – I still have to live with my family, all of whom have bought into the big lie. I just want myself to be running on Linux, and this is the year! The amount of time I spent trying to get this to work, I could probably have learned how to write Linux drivers and written the appropriate drivers myself. Now I just have to make it functional for the rest of the family.

Also, never buy top-of-the-line stuff again, ever.