My current laptop is running Windows XP Media Center Edition. It came pre-installed, it wasn’t really my idea of a good time. (At the time, my understanding was that it would come with a free upgrade voucher to Windows Vista Business. This turned out to be Vista Home Premium instead. Either way, Vista will never be installed on this machine.)
So MCE doesn’t really allow you to “lock” your desktop. That feature isn’t in the OS. Instead, when you attempt to lock the desktop with the WinKey-L combination, you get the “switch user” screen. OK, maybe not so bad, you still have to enter a password to get back in to the desktop.
What I find very annoying is that you can see how many unread emails the user has. Even if Outlook isn’t currently running! It’s things like this that make me want to switch to Thunderbird or some other non-MSFT email client.
Considering I want to leave my laptop open, but locked, in my cubical while I am away from my desk, I really don’t like having information spewed out like this. It gets worse: if you hover the mouse over the current user icon, you can see their email address. Who thought that one was a good feature to implement?
I know, I know, the glib answer is that I shouldn’t be running a non-business grade OS on a business laptop. Windows XP Professional would give me the security I want. It’s my fault for deciding I could live with Windows XP Media Center edition on my work machine. These are the trade-offs.
Why do I do this? After I promised I would never install another peice of Microsoft Software on my laptop if I could help it. I’m attempting to install the Expression Web upgrade (replaces FrontPage 2003):
Can someone please tell me why it doesn’t like OneNote? I like OneNote. I use it a lot. Please God tell me this is an error in the message string table and nothing to do with some kind of horrible incompatibility with Office 2003.
[UPDATE: It installed fine. It didn’t kill OneNote. It must be a visual error only. Probably meant to say “Microsoft Office FrontPage” or similar.]
It could be that one of the reasons that I find the new user interface in Windows Vista to be so distasteful is that I run Windows XP using the best theme ever: Royale Noir:
I find this so pleasant to work in that anything else looks like crap. It’s not exactly an official theme, but you should be able to find it with a little bit of work if you google “Royale Noir”. The best theory I’ve read about it so far is that it is an early version of the theme released with the Microsoft Zune media player software. In my opinion, Microsoft should have stopped at Royale Noir because the final Zune theme does not compare favorably.
I’m currently recovering from a catastrophic hard drive failure on my main machine, my wonderful toshiba laptop.
This is not fun, let me tell you.
A hard drive failure sounds at first like a bee is stuck somewhere inside the computer’s chassis. Then it progresses to sounding more like what you hear in your head when eating a crunchy breakfast cereal.
My advice is, back up everything when you hear the bee.
Editor’s Note, August 2020:
Correction: If you can’t hear the bee, it’s time to back up.
In my session sample code for the Advisor Summit on Visual FoxPro, I showed using the gpColor class in the FFC\_gdiplus.vcx class library to convert a color from foxpro RGB to the GDI+ style ARGB, including the alpha channel byte:
The U.K. periodical Windows Vista Magazine* touts the following as a “great new feature”. It’s the “warning you are overwriting a file of the same name” dialog:
One major difference from XP here is that instead of being interrupted as soon as the conflict is detected, it will copy everything else and then ask you what to do about the conflicts at the end. I’m not the only person to think this dialog could be improved, but in my opinion, there are so many things wrong about this dialog that I’m going to discuss each of them. The first is process-related but the rest of them are UI related:
1. I’d really like to be warned of the conflict before the files are copied.
It’s possible you expected to overwrite some files, but I’d suggest that most of the time, this dialog comes as a surprise. What are the chances that in this case, you don’t want to do the copy operation at all? I’d say they’re good. I’ll take 50/50. Maybe that’s what the Cancel button is for.
2. What happens if you press Cancel?
Can you tell? It’s not obvious. The dialog goes away, but all those other files have still been copied. Were you perhaps expecting the operation to roll back? I was. What if you press Skip?
3. “Do this for the next 4 conflicts”
The number 4 actually reflects the total number of conflicts. So why doesn’t it say, “Do this for all 4 conflicts” then? Then I wouldn’t be concerned about whether I should worry about a fifth or sixth one.
4. How many font & color combinations do you need for this?
I count at least 4. And my eyes hurt. This is symptomatic of the failure of the UI designers currently working on Vista.
5. Transparent window borders are *ahem* clearly a mistake.
I mean, really. Just look at the screen shot. I have enough trouble with my eyes as it is without Vista deliberately fuzzing things for me. Microsoft’s Vista web site describes this effect thusly:
A noticeably new element of the Aero experience is the translucent effect of Aero Glass, featuring dynamic reflections and smooth animations. The glass windows create an open, lightweight environment – and more importantly, help you to better focus on your content, rather than on the surrounding interface.
That explains why every review I’ve seen of Aero Glass focusses on the “cool transparent window borders”. Ok, cheap shot. Let me just disagree and say that the transparent effects do not do it for me. And remember – assuming your laptop has video hardware capable of rendering the nice effects, you can enjoy it for all of 30 minutes while the battery lasts, while burning the palms of your hands. (Fancy rendering = work = heat, you know.)
Now, kudos to Microsoft for trying to fix the deficiencies of the same dialog in XP:
But I award zero points for execution. Sorry.
* Seriously, how long has this magazine been in existence, do you think? And just how unbiased editorially can they afford to be?
In hindsight, it should be obvious. But it turns out that in Visual FoxPro 9.0 (and, I suspect, every previous version as well) the SYS(16) function returns different results depending on the setting of the Debug Info checkbox in the Project Information dialog. So if you are relying on these results, you’d better make sure you understand the difference.
To recap, here are some extracts from the Help file:
SYS( 16 ) returns the file name of the program being executed.
[..]
If n is 0 or 1, SYS( 16, n ) returns the name of the main program (the program first executed). The name of the currently executing program is returned if n is omitted. The empty string is returned if n is greater than the program nesting depth.
[..]
When the executing program is part of an application (.app), SYS(16) returns only the name of the program, that is, without the path. SYS(16) returns the name of the executable file if called from an executable (.exe) file. If a procedure or function is being executed, SYS(16) returns the name of the file containing the procedure or function after the procedure or function name.
I’m not sure I completely understood that, so when in doubt, I do some empirical tests. Using the source code to ReportBuilder.App (conveniently included in the XSOURCE.ZIP file in the TOOLS directory in the Visual FoxPro home directory) I added a breakpoint on a particular method and displayed the Watch Window and took a look around in the call stack using SYS(16,n):
This is all fine and good. It may even match the documentation, it’s a little hard to be sure. The interesting thing that does not appear to be documented is that these results are affected by the “debug info” checkbox in the Project Information dialog box. Here’s a picture of it in case you don’t remember seeing it before. Open a project, and select Project->Project Info from the menu (or press Ctrl-J):
Normally, it’s checked. So I cleared the checkbox (indicating that I did not want additional debug information compiled into the application), recompiled, ran, and suspended at the same point:
Interesting. We can still read the names of the procedure (.FXP) files, but not the class library (.VCT) files. I wonder why that is? Your guess is as good as mine.
The attitude expressed by the MSFT representative, however, I can totally believe.
I got the first WGA update through the Windows Update process – I manually review all the suggested updates but like most people I had no clue what WGA was doing. I have not accepted the later update to WGA, and I have actually removed these files from my SYSTEM32 directory:
wgalogon.dll
wgatray.exe
wgatray.exe-0ED38BED.pf
So far, they haven’t come back but that probably doesn’t mean anything. I can still reboot, browse the internet, and get email.
However, when I launch Windows Update (the application) from the Start menu or IE’s Tools menu, I am instructed that I must first install WGA.
Interestingly, if I configure Windows Update (the system tray icon) to warn me when updates are ready, it appears that from there, I can select to install updates – and they apparently install successfully.
Alex Sosa asked a question on the Universal Thread recently about right-aligned text in Visual Foxpro 9.0. After some back-and-forth email messages, I decided to summarise my findings in a small article.
This is a place for me to share some thoughts about database development, user interfaces, data visualizations, and rants about the software industry in general.
It contains my own personal opinions and does not necessarily represent the opinions of my clients or employer.
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