While trying to move some user’s documents from an old computer to a newly assigned one, I stumbled upon a folder which Windows Explorer refused to copy, the error message saying “Cannot copy file:”, then a blank for the file name (sorry, no screen shot for this one, I simply didn’t think of it at the time).

First thing that crossed my mind was that this was a path length problem, as I was copying the files through the network using UNC paths (\\<server>\<share>\<path>), operation which most often than not suffers from this kind of problems. So I mapped the network path to a drive letter to slightly shorten it, but it still wouldn’t want to copy the damned folder.

So I manually copied each sub-folder in order to pinpoint the troublemaker. In the first screen shot you will see the full path of the folder, as displayed in explorer’s folders pane:

The path is 132 characters long, not counting the backslashes:

D:\Backup\2006\0 Research\1 Competitii\1 Competitii vechi\Competitii 2005 si 2006 Ian-Iun\Competitie Renault\2005\Informatii necesare\articles\

But this next screen shot will show you the full name of the file which was causing the problem (see the yellow tooltip):

The file name is 126 characters long:

Dacia a vandut aproape 164_000 de vehicule in 2005 – analize, stiri auto moto reportaje interviuri analize piata de masini.html

So the file name containing the path is 258 characters long, just 3 over the 255 limit imposed by explorer (which probably uses an ANSI file function, instead of a Unicode one).

It is obvious that the file was created using the Save As command of a browser (probably IE 6) and not manually named by the user. Usually browsers name saved pages using the text from the HTML title tag (this is also true for my current version of Firefox — 2.0.0.11 at the time of writing).

Yet Windows Explorer refused to do anything to that file: renaming failed silently without any visual feedback, while copy/move operations would fail with a stupid error message. This is nothing new in Windows, but I find it totally inadmissible in a 32bit operating system which dominates the market for such a long time. In my view it’s just proof of Microsoft’s total lack of respect for its customers.

Which is not something one would normally say about this one:

Just too bad the code for the badge they provide on the site contains a shameless link to their dating service. Not nice. Oh well…

Update December 11^th: I have removed the badge code because the background images linked externally were slowing down the page display. The code was also displaying inconsistently across browsers, so I just rendered the badges as images. I have kept the links to the quizzes, but not the ones to the dating service though.

I must confess the story of this first screenshot is a little blurry, I took it several weeks ago but couldn’t find the time to write about it until now.

I do remember though that I was trying to copy some files by dragging and dropping between two explorer windows. First mistake: since the windows were created by pressing Win+E, which is a system-wide shortcut for Windows Explorer, why on earth should the alert’s title bar read “Internet Explorer”?!

The next point may not be valid for native English speakers, but it sure was for me at the time. I understand English pretty well, I think I speak it decently (although the sequence of tenses is still a challenge even after so many years), but I’m aware that thinking in ones native tongue and reading messages in another can be a problem at times. At a first glance and swiftly translated to Romanian, the message seems to be asking the user to choose whether he or she wants to move or to copy files, but this is a question that can not be answered with yes or no. This is anyway a clear example of programmer laziness, since this situation would have been very easily avoided by presenting two different messages based on the circumstances. If the user was trying to move files (by holding the shift key while dragging), then the message should have read “Are you sure you want to move files from this zone?”. You get the idea. I also believe that asking “Do you want to…” is condescending. Of course I want to move or copy files, that’s why I was dragging files between windows, dumb ass!

Next candidate for the Shitty Software Award (SSA) is… (drum roll)… Roxio!

This is what you get from Roxio’s Easy Media Creator 9 if you are trying to burn multiple copies of the same project. After successfully burning the first copy, the progress indicator freezes saying “Current task: Please wait (100%)”. The Cancel button is also dead in the watter, you can break your mouse by clicking on it and nothing will happen, the program is frozen for good. Completely stupid!

And what bothers me the most is that Roxio’s Toast, the mac burning software, is a great piece of software, a lot more user friendly and a lot less bug-ridden.

Not now when I’m in the process of changing jobs… again! But more about this when it happens.

Also the site runs on new hardware, a long awaited and deserved upgrade to Pentium 4 2.8GHz HT (overclocked to 3.1GHz, of course), 1.2GB memory and 190GB storage space (2 × 80GB drives, plus a 30GB one).

The old hardware (Pentium III 550MHz, 512MB RAM) has been retired for good, but the Fedora Core 5 installation lives on, running on my workstation in a VMware virtual machine right off the 8GB drive that was once inside the old server. It still serves as a mail server until I’ll be able to find some more time and migrate the service to the new server as well. But I must say I was amazed that it ran without a glitch in a virtual machine, away from the original hardware. Try this with Windows!

The old server is dead, long live the new server! And Linux! And WMware! And last but not least — WordPress!

They are all decent computers, they are doing their job admirably under the tough circumstances, and although their cases are really ugly (see below), they have good thermal design. The power supplies with passive cooling and the air flow guides on the processors make them whisper quiet, which is really nice.

I have included a slightly larger detail of the front panel because that’s what has been causing me headaches since I begun working here. Note: The images above are copyrighted material. I have “borrowed” them from fujitsu-siemens.com and composited them for illustration purposes.

The microphone and headphone connectors on the front panel are incredibly poor quality and it usually takes just a few plugs/unplugs to break them completely useless. The user then has to unplug the cable of the monitor speakers from the back panel and try to use that connector for his/hers headphones. Which theoretically should be fine.

Except the ass-wipes programmers at Realtek (or who the hell they are outsourcing to) thought that is really a no-no. You can plug your headphones in each and every connector on the back panel, the internal speaker is not cut off and there’s no sound in the headphones at all. And then there’s this really annoying popup (if configured, which it is by default) that keeps asking you what device have you just plugged in. But the best part is that, despite the fact the dialog allows you to select headphones from that list, once you dismiss the dialog it shows a tray balloon saying they don’t support that type of device plugged into that connector! This is absolutely precious!

The only way to restore predictable behavior to the back panel connectors is to completely uninstall the Realtek software and drivers, then update the drivers from Microsoft, through windows update.

Unfortunately this is not a 100% reliable workaround: it worked on two of the problem computers, but not on a third. I still have to find a failsafe solution to this…

The only time I remember having to deal with software created by such incompetent jerks was a few years back, when Crenguţa was still employed, and her employer bought an HP scanner (sorry, I don’t remember the name and model, but I’m fairly sure it was a low-end one — not that this could be an excuse). It lacked the most basic functionality like saving the scan settings between sessions, so you had to re-set each and every knob for each scan, because even the default values were so stupid they were unusable. That, together with a clumsy and ugly web-based interface that was running in a defaced instance of IE, were making even the simplest scan a pain in the ass. So although the scanner was of decent quality, the bundled software was rendering it almost unusable.

I cannot help thinking about the iPod, as surprising this association may be for some. The hardware is not rocket science, let’s face it. The industrial design (the case, the controls) is great, but the thing that matters the most in every day usage is the software. And the software is just brilliant. It has snappy reactions to every command, and there are plenty of other usability highlights regarding the user interface. The only feature I’m missing is the possibility of chronologically sorting albums of the same artist, but that’s not a big thing and is probably an indication of the many issues I have these days (speaking of issues, of course I have quickly put together a script that prepends the year to the album name — problem solved!).

What I’m trying to say is that, with all it’s great design, the iPod would have been just another device, not a great music player. And poorly designed software could have easily killed it. Kudos to Apple, everybody else take notes, especially Realtek.

Edit June 22^nd: Speaking of stupid software, here’s a little supplement for you from a product very high on my personal scale for shitty software — Microsoft Windows XP.

I currently have Office 2007 fully installed, and only Word and Excel from the Office 2003 suite. Apparently not having Outlook 2003 is not a good enough reason for Windows Update to stop asking me to update the junk email filter for it! I’ve ticked the “don’t notify” option three times already, and the update available balloon keeps popping up after 3 minutes. Oh, how I hate this…

Having a little spare time on my hands, It seemed like a good opportunity to check out the new Flash CS3, and also do something about that audio player in the process.

Yet, to my deepest grief, I have discovered that since leaving Teamcode in October last year, I have forgot a really big chunk of what I new about Flash!

I mean I was aware at the time I still have a lot to learn about it (I’m a long time fan of Director and never seemed to get the same level of acquaintance with Flash) but this is really annoying!

Oh, well… like everything else these days, it seems it’s going to be a lot harder than I was hoping.

Nothing interesting happened in the meantime, really. Except for two nights ago, when I decided to swap the hard drive in Crenguţa’s laptop. If only I knew from the beginning what a hassle is going to be, and that the very next day she was going to ask me to swap it back with the old one again …

From the very beginning when she got her hands on this old Compaq Armada 110, the hard drive, a 10GB IBM Travelstar, had some weird clicks and pops while reading and writing. So I thought I’m doing her a favor if I change it with a 10GB Fujitsu drive I had lying around.

Well, not really. The Fujitsu doesn’t make very loud noises during I/O operations, but the motor that spins the plates has a very loud and sharp hiss, which turns out it’s a lot more distracting because it’s permanent and constant, as opposed to the occasional clicks of the old drive.

But the best part was that I had to take the damn thing completely apart to reach the hard drive! And tonight I’ll have to do it again, to put the old drive back .

Another really sweet moment was when I discovered the IBM drive has an opening that fully exposes part of the pins, which the other drive hasn’t. And the wise guys at Compaq just had to take advantage of that opening, cramming in the ridge of an underlying heatsink!

Needless to say the new drive didn’t fit because of that heatsink’s ridge, so the best solution I could come up with at 2 A.M. was to loosen up the motherboard screws so that I could lift the corner holding the HDD connector just enough to squeeze the new drive in.

I didn’t feel like laughing back then, but I sure did when discovering the quick specs page above: what an appropriate schematic for this laptop!

After years of drooling, my dream has finally came true, thanks to my incredible wife Crenguţa, whose idea I believe it was, and with the financial help from my sister Ancuţa, my sister-in-law Alina and my mother-in-law Iuliana. Thank you, I love you!

My wife never ceases to amaze me, even after all these years (we were class mates in primary school, and our love story took off during highschool — although according to family folklore I had a crush on her since the first grade, and we were more or less flirting since the seventh or eighth grade).

She is to be committed to the hospital again tomorrow for the second hip replacement surgery, yet she finds the time, the energy and the will to think about my birthday! I know she’s really worried and has a lot on her mind right now, and this shows just what kind of person she is: so caring, so thoughtful and so altruist…

I must confess that I would have probably behaved completely different in her situation. I think I would have felt so low and unable to think of anything else. But not my baby! That’s why she is so special, and I must be really lucky to have her in my life.

I love you very much, get well soon so we can get on with our life, OK?

For example today I got a call from someone in the PR Department that sounded something like this (approximate quotation from the top of my head):

When I’m opening e-mail attachments, if I scroll up or down I can see some other attachments, some of them sensitive information from other e-mails. Can you confirm the client doesn’t also get the other attachments? Because that would be really bad…

As you can imagine, I didn’t understand anything from that, so I went to the lady’s desk to see it happening “live”. It turns out she was double-clicking some image attachment in Outlook (a sorry excuse for an e-mail client, if you ask me), which was then getting saved to the temp folder and opened up with the default application for the file type — ACDSee in this particular case. Using the scroll wheel of the mouse, one can go to next/previous images in the same folder, so that’s how she was seeing attachments from other mails, they were previously saved in the same temp folder . I told her she’s safe, no client has been receiving anything else than the documents she actually attached to her messages.

Another cool one was from a new intern. I had an iMac set up for her and everything was fine, except the next morning she came by my desk to report that someone had stolen her mouse and she can’t work . Of course nobody had taken her mouse, it was hanging over the side of her desk, probably pushed by some cleaning lady.

But the best has to be the one when a lady in the Production Department (all of them were women, have you noticed?) called me pretty panicked and said:

You have to come quick, a voice started to come out of my computer! It speaks English, I don’t know what’s saying, it seems to be counting or something, but it sounds pretty upset!

First I thought it’s a prank, the “let’s play the new IT guy a good one” type. But she was genuinely concerned. Of course no voice came out of the computer while I was there, so I guess I can say I failed to answer this particular request .