However, it is not without its faults. On Vista, when typing text in Fireworks things can occasionally go very, very wrong. The solution at least initially is to turn off the “Auto Kern” option in the Properties dialog — but this removes one of the big benefits of using Fireworks in the first place!

There are other options. The problem will go away (sometimes) when the file is closed and Fireworks is restarted — this is hit and miss. More permanently, disabling Vista’s fancy-pants Aero theme (the thing that makes all window borders transparent, gives that snazzy Start + Tab effect, etc.) will ensure you have a glitch-free Fireworks font experience.

The real solution? Sneak into Adobe HQ and write a patch to fix the stupid thing!

Not to mention the OEM copy of XP MCE sitting in a draw that I’d lost track of (I think the system is now using a regular XP Pro license) or the miscellaneous systems that have affixed OEM licenses but for which there is no (misplaced) physical media.

Accordingly, if I want to obey the OEM sticker directive, I’ve got to download a CD ISO from a torrent site (because I don’t fork out for MSDN). But MSDN is increasingly attractive; it effectively offers the desired outcome. Unlicensed, unactivated systems that work perfectly well on a subscription basis… sure, subs suck, but whenever they stop their XP activation servers we’re all going to be screwed, anyway, so it hardly matters.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here making a list (on paper, which I’ll store with the physical media) of all the licenses in use, and roughly where. Thanks to the unauthorised rebuilding of systems that I own and have built from scratch so often (resourcefulness in anyone else’s book, evil work of a pirate to the draconian OEM overlords) whatever descriptions are attached to aforementioned systems is likely to be rendered completely untrue in eighteen months time when I once again get around to the wholesale slaughter rebuilding of them all. Intermittent reinstalls will probably happen, too, unless I’m driven so insane by the inability to discern one license from another I end up, as I do now, simply taking out the lot and shooting them all a new install.

To Microsoft: whatthehelldoyouwantmetodo? I am so not forking out the at-least-$2000 you would have me pay for retail Vista licenses for this lot–it’s that much because Vista Business retail licenses come in at a delicious $500 each. Say it with me: hell no. I’ve heard from a reliable system builder source that you’ve been telling them that the new OEM rules work in their favour as it’ll bring them more business. Sure, but it’s pretty crappy business if I don’t say so myself. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a Microsoft certified system anything, simply because it’d mean dealing with your crap in a professional capacity, and I deal with it quite enough in a professional capacity trying to do other sorts of development as my job, thankyouverymuch. I’m not going to pay a Microsoft tax twice (first for certification, second for individual licenses) just because you claim that your crappy system builders do it better than DIY-ers.

Whenever the time comes around to upgrade to Vista, if I ever deem it worthwhile on the other home desktops here not for any commercial pursuits (still running Business in response to the crippling networking capabilities of all Home line products), I’ll be making a trip to my local store, who, for what it’s worth, don’t even offer retail Vista Business for sale on their website, but mention the OEM edition an awful lot, with the token “(only sold w/ new system or to a system builder)” tacked on to placate anyone from officialdom who comes looking. I haven’t had the pleasure of breaking OEM conditions-of-sale (that’s all they are… are such things even legally enforcable in this country?!) just yet, but have no doubts there will be ample places that want to take my money when and/or if I do.

I’m actually in the position of having one spare XP license (two if you count XP MCE) at this point, but am sorely tempted to install Linux on at least one of the three systems I’m taking care of tonight just to avoid having to deal with these mediocre attempts at extortion in the future. It’s not morally defensible to refuse to acknowledge system builders as “original equipment manufacturers” when they are, in fact, conducting exactly the same tasks as their so-called ‘certified’ builders. Clearly, it’s not being pursued for retail sale: the only retail products that belong in an operating system product mix are upgrades for people who enjoy having computers that don’t work (i.e. most of the population, anyway).

It’s an indictment upon the difficulty of upgrading/reinstalling Windows that so few people take this route: quite frankly, the products don’t work. Everyone who is unqualified (in the literal, capable-of sense, not some arbitrary didacourse, paidMSsomemoney sense) to build a computer, in my experience, is unqualified to successfully install Windows independently. Even if they succeed at booting from a CD, negotiating the installer prompts (admittedly better than they used to be), manually answering questions about daylight savings and other such things that should long since have been dealt with automagically (c’mon, we’ve had GeoIP products for what, ten years now? Longer?), or at least correct from the outset (two HP machines last week were insistent the default timezone should be Singapore. They shipped in Australia. Is it so bloody hard to pick a populous east-coast state zone as the default?), chances of users correctly installing things such as drivers in post-install stages are slim to none. Nearly all phone a tech-saavy friend (I know no-one who’s ever called the Microsoft support line for OS installs… more should, but few do).

The point stands: retail licenses are for newbies, OEM licenses should be accessible to everyone who doesn’t give a crap about shiny packaging, manuals, and shooting their wallet to bits.

Here endeth the rant.

By vendor, that constitutes 176 crashes/hangs/‘not-respondings’ of Microsoft software to 21 of Adobe software over the same period. Now, it feels like I’m cheating the numbers here by reporting Windows Problem Reporting itself, because probably 90% of its crashes occur when reporting on Internet Explorer, but hey — these are the numbers Microsoft’s software itself gave me, so who’s complaining?

In case you think this isn’t a fair comparison for reasons of time spent using various programmes, exclude Problem Reporting crashes (though you shouldn’t) and the Microsoft stat comes down to 124. That is, lots.

I can’t think of a day since owning this computer I wouldn’t have used at least one piece of Adobe software, most commonly more. To be fair, Adobe software is more likely to do weird things (like, ya know, refusing to save) causing me to restart the application rather than letting it ‘crash’ per se… but Microsoft’s junk is vastly less likely to give me any sort of warning before flaking out.

These crashes are reported over a three-month period spanning November 26 until January 25.

Vista SP1 continues to be eagerly awaited.

(screenshotted for posterity if they go editing)

They say they don’t know why it sunk. I blame Vista ;-)

Update:

So perhaps SMH’s typo was mixed up. ABC (Australia) are running a story on their website wherein it’s universally called the MS Explorer. An ill-fated name for a ship, no doubt!

Perhaps Midnight Commander or Finder would be a more successful name? ;-)

Turns out it doesn’t use Eclipse’s HTTP Proxy settings, but needs setting elsewhere.

On Windows XP, this will be in your Application Data path under Subversion. Mine is as follows:

C:\Documents and Settings\joshs\Application Data\Subversion

I haven’t got a Vista machine to test on, but it will still be the Application Data\Subversion folder within the user’s path. (I will confirm this next time I’m on a Vista box.)

Linux users, look in ~/.subversion/

Open the file “servers” (no extension) and scroll to the bottom section, [Global].

Un-comment and edit the http-proxy-host and http-proxy-port settings (and user/password if required, it wasn’t for me) as appropriate and everything will start working. You don’t even need to reload Eclipse.

Productivity just soared!

Of course, if they’d got it right from the start, I’d be running Vista already… as it stands, I’m not too likely to drop $200 on something that runs slower than XP, supports less hardware, has arguably-worse power management, and makes the occasionally excruciating UI mistake (most notable is the automatic replacement of the “sleep” button with “install updates and shutdown” where updates are available). Really, the main reason I’d switch is to have consistent UI between Office 2007 and the rest of the system (instead of the presently absurd Vista-ish (but not actually Vista) UI available on XP), newer hardware (insofar as XP isn’t available), and a paid-for upgrade path… I’d rather fork out my money now and trust that another 3 service packs are coming, rather than pay full price for an OS and then pay full price again, and again. I acknowledge this is partially a psychological thing stemming from my opposition for paying for point-releases, but even so… many of the alleged ‘upgrades’ in OS X are thoroughly trivial.

I’ve not used this much on anyone else’s system, but haven’t done anything particularly crazy with it and it still sucks… soooo… I blame Windows. I’m almost certain mainstream Linux distros can handle this better, but know nothing about how OS X deals with it… shrug.

The new version of Word is a thing of beauty. It just works, and makes sense, and is generally a usability wonder. I’m sure someone will publish a study to the contrary in the next week, but I don’t care — it is perfectly intuitive to a non-Office literate user. Yes, that is myself–I’ve battled with OO.org for years, and am utterly convinced it sucks. I have occasionally fought with MS Office products in this time, and battled slightly less, but still it’s felt like I’m doing things the slow way. Every essay I’ve written over the last eighteen months is stored in LyX (LaTeX) format: I’ve basically not used a word processor for anything serious in at least that long. And I haven’t used a Microsoft word processor at home for three years (on a horrible laptop), and not on my primary desktop computer for four, or possibly five. Historical perspective: I started using Windows when I was 7, stopped when I was 15 or 16, and returned at 18 ½ — Microsoft have got good reason to be trying to bring me back into the family, because I’ve been away for a long time.

I am as upset as the next web developer about the Outlook team’s brain-dead decision to switch back to Word as the primary rich email rendering engine, but will wax lyrical about the new calendaring features in Outlook!! For they are greatly beautiful. Observe my three calendars (Organised into: Personal & Work; Uni; Church) layered together here:

Groove makes me shrug enormously, it does nothing useful for me. Unless it’s like Sharepoint only… good. But even then, I’ve never dug that whole Intranet collaborative thang. Really, if I were going to run bloat-inducing collaborative software, I should start with Adobe’s Version Cue. But I don’t use it because… too many apps in my tray annoys me, and Firefox eats all my memory as is (screeny from yesterday… it peaked at about 1GB but I couldn’t be bothered taking another):

The only reason I still use that bloody browser is its extensions support: Firebug has stolen my heart where Office 2007 hasn’t yet. Here’s its asset download graphy thingamijig:

It’s even better than Chris Pederick’s toolbar. But oh how I’d love to switch to Opera (or even, shock, IE) full time now. Firefox really isn’t doing it for me with its bloat these days.

Speaking of bloat, Office 2007 is one 500MB download. It doesn’t download a 500MB stub and then install the rest — no, that includes Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Publisher, … and all the other random crap I installed but will probably never use. Fantastic.

Everything is pretty fast (but it emphatically encourages you to install Windows Live Desktop, and seeing as I’m a beta tester for other Live stuff pretty willingly, I figured I may as well, and when you first install that indexing makes everything chug) which is excellent — but I’m still looking to buy a new dual core 939 sometime soon. Graphics are fine because I have no intention of upgrading to Vista (read: needing DirectX 10 and a $1000 graphics card) in the next 18 months at least, but… well, another 2GB of RAM would go down nicely. Shame it’s still relatively expensive, though.

Microsoft, I wasn’t going to pirate your software because it’s not that good, but thanks for the discount, anyway!

And then today I took a look at OEM pricing of it (incidentally, I was looking for something else) and wondered what on earth all the fuss was about. Vista Business is $190, and Ultimate weighs in at about $250. It occurred to me at that point that those who had been complaining have probably never paid for software in their life. Newsflash: XP Pro OEM has cost around $200 for the last couple of years and I don’t hear anyone whining about the cost of that.

Maybe I’m getting older and grumpier, but it seems like a lot of the Internet’s self-professed geeks really don’t have the foggiest sense of real-world perspective.

Microsoft have released a series of press images from their Professional Developers Conference 2005, some of which give shots of the new Office platform — creatively code-named “12” (yes, 2003 was 11). Whilst there hasn’t been much significant change to Office in recent years (dare I say since 97) aside from UI enhancements (2003 did that properly, with a little bit of groupware stuff thrown in on the side), this version looks as if it’s going to break that pattern. Certainly, Vista’s internal font-rendering engine must have something to do with it, but it seems to me from the released screenshots as though Office has changed, also, in the way it handles graphics and layout. Personally, I’m dying to see what justified text looks like in Word.

So, I’m a sucker for graphics. Hopefully this upcoming release will reflect aesthetic advancement in the documents it produces, as well as the interface that surrounds this. (Alas, there appears no hope of Microsoft natively embracing PDF format, as they seek to make Word documents the ubiquitous format. Even if it doesn’t display properly in other versions of the same application, or have font embedding. Doh.)