25 Jan 2008
Windows Vista ships with a delightful tool by the aid of which it regularly digs itself a grave. Here are some findings after three months of use, sorted by number of crashes.
|
Microsoft Internet Explorer
|
92
|
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Windows Problem Reporting
|
52
|
|
Application Launcher
|
17
|
|
Windows Explorer
|
12
|
|
Adobe Photoshop CS3
|
8
|
|
Microsoft Outlook
|
6
|
|
Microsoft Zune
|
4
|
|
Mobile Networking Wizard
|
4
|
|
Skype
|
4
|
|
Windows Media Player
|
4
|
|
Adobe Bridge CS3
|
3
|
|
Adobe Illustrator CS3
|
3
|
|
Adobe Dreamweaver 8
|
3
|
|
Firefox
|
3
|
|
Sync manager
|
3
|
|
Windows Task Manager
|
3
|
|
Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
|
2
|
|
Eclipse
|
2
|
|
Gephex
|
2
|
|
Windows Live Messenger
|
2
|
|
Adobe OnLocation CS3
|
1
|
|
Adobe Photoshop CS2
|
1
|
|
Driver software installation
|
1
|
|
Filezilla client
|
1
|
|
Microsoft Powerpoint
|
1
|
|
VLC
|
1
|
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.
26 Nov 2007
This image makes 60,000 indexed items. A fair whack of that would be email, but far out that’s a lot of information. (It’s not just a count of files on a system, that’s just indexed documents in my home dir, projects workspace, and email accounts)
New laptop arrives Monday morning, and I’m trying to decide if I even want to move everything off this desktop or not! The laptop has half a TB of disc space across 2 drives (17″ monster), so I’m considering it. I purchased it as a desktop replacement system and it is quite capable of that (specs at end of post)! The desktop provides a good backup should the laptop die/get stolen/run over by a bus, but at present the data is organised to be used, not archived.
By “used”, of course, I mean that liberally disorganised but most-recently-used-on-top sort of structure we fall into so easily. So I have a spot of sorting to do to get everything onto the laptop.
My last computer still has some stuff I’d like to get off it (particularly uni work… to the critics, yes, I do still go to uni!) but it’s been in at Youthworks not doing much since we moved offices, but heavy enough I haven’t bothered bringing it home again, since late last year.
The problem with desktops in particular is that they aren’t worth selling for their potential usefulness. My several-years-old computer (2.4GHz/768MB/somethingsomething… Ubuntu) in at Youthworks could maybe just sell for $350 given a clueless enough eBayer. My current desktop (no great slouch, AMD64 X2 4200+/2GB/7600GS) would be worth about the same to someone who knew what they were talking about… or perhaps $750 on eBay!
Even so — it’s useful to have spare machines ‘just in case’ (for production stuff especially). I’d love to be able to swap those two desktops for laptops of similar vintage, but it’s just never going to be cost-effective. When people get rid of laptops, it’s because they suck (falling apart/general abuse, crap battery life, rubbish specs to start with, etc.). Not so with desktops, wherein most faults are redeemable at minimal cost. And even that minimal cost is often negated by the fact that there’s so much in the way of ‘spare’ parts around the place!
24 Nov 2007
This story appeared in today’s SMH — note the erroneous (yet highly amusing) caption on the lead photo:
(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? ;-)
22 Nov 2007
Django’s django-registration version 3 introduces a new class, RegistrationFormTermsOfService, that replaces the tos field in RegistrationForm.
Our app had done that but django-registration’s version change slipped past me (so I had django-registration, just the wrong version), easily fixed with a svn -co http://django-registration.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/registration/ into site-packages.
16 Nov 2007
Finally, Subversion’s PROPFIND is enabled on the proxy server at one place I work, but for some reason Subclipse was still being a little bit special.
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!