Category: Annoyances

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Microsoft’s automatic update system is now offering an update to the Windows Installer. That’s the program that handles all those .msi files you use to install new applications, keeps track of what’s currently installed, and lets you uninstall them.

And it needs to reboot after installing?

WHY? What low-level system file did they have to change? There is a Windows Installer service, but it’s not running, and even if it were, they should just be able to restart the service. Why do I have to reboot the entire #@!$ computer because I agreed to install an update to something that isn’t running? Is the design so broken it can’t update itself?

I’ve never had to reboot a Linux box after upgrading RPM, Yum, or Apt (the equivalent software on many Linux systems). Never, in the seven years I’ve been using Linux.

And you know, it would have been nice to know that this update would require a restart before I decided, “what the heck, it doesn’t look like anything that’ll require me to restart, I might as well grab it now.” Telling me that some updates may require a restart is like labeling a box of cookies “Processed in the same state as a peanut farm.” It’s useless. It gets ignored. Kind of like this rant probably will.

Update 1: I’d love to make this change to the dialog box:

No, it’s not F*ing OK but you’re going to make me restart anyway!
Mouldypunk (link dead)

Update 2 (years later): “OK I guess” would have at least been amusing. And thank you sooooo much, Gnome Software, for bringing this behavior to Linux. There’s a reason I still use the command line to install updates.

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Looking at the list of “most popular” links on Del.icio.us, it seems someone has scanned the entire Book of Bunny Suicides and its sequel, both by Andy Riley.

Good grief, people—you can pick up the book for $7.00 at any bookstore. I can understand posting a couple of excerpts, but from what I can tell, these people have scanned and posted the entire book. They haven’t even credited the source! In the blog postings that show up on a “bunny suicides” search, most of them don’t even seem to know where the cartoons are from. Heck, even with pirated MP3s you usually know who sang the song.

Google has pulled a few of the sites from their index in response to a DMCA complaint. (Interestingly, Google themselves linked to the Chilling Effects entry.)

It always amazes me how rude people can be.

Book of Bunny Suicides Return of the Bunny Suicides

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A new Angel comic book mini-series (from IDW, rather than Dark Horse), Angel: The Curse, picks up after the end of the TV series.

In this first issue of a new Angel tale, Angel has survived the conclusion of his TV show and finds himself in a mysterious Romanian forest. There, his search for the Gypsy tribe that cursed him years ago takes a turn for the worse.

I suspect we’ll get a “once out of the pit…” explanation (i.e. no explanation at all) and the cliffhanger’s resolution will remain open for Joss to deal with in a movie-of-the-week or something.

But what galls me is that the book is supposed to have four covers. OK, one variant every once in a while is nice, and I can even go for Dark Horse’s early efforts to have one drawn cover and one photo cover to get the newsstand audience (is there such a thing anymore?)… but the only reason to do four covers for one book is to get collectors to buy four copies. It was an insulting gimmick in the early 1990s, and it annoys me that the practice never quite went away. Worse, TV Guide took it mainstream. I guess we’ll know we’re in trouble when Time or National Geographic starts doing multiple collectors’ covers.

*grumble*

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An intense deluge woke us up briefly around 5:00 this morning. I think I was awake enough to say “Damn!” and fall back asleep. It reminded me of something that’s been bugging me.

I looked through the first few pages of Otherworld #2 in the comic store yesterday. As at the end of the first issue, one character made a big deal about how it never rains in L.A.

Admittedly, people drive as if it were true. It starts drizzling, and people freak out. Three days of rain is billed as Stormwatch 2005 on the TV news. Some years we don’t get much rain at all.

But every 7 or 8 years, we get drenched.

I’ve heard people cite this year’s near-record rainfall as an example of the extreme weather that climate models predict for global warming. While I do think there are plenty of valid examples, this isn’t one of them. We got just as much rain in 1997—eight years ago—when the UCI campus flooded, stairs turned into waterfalls, streets and underpasses became rivers, and one student infamously bodysurfed naked down the hill next to the Student Center. (A yearbook(?) ad later remarked, “Who says nothing happens in Irvine?”) We got nearly as much rain two years before that. I knew someone from Vermont who brought friends out to visit during the heaviest period of rain. They got their preconceptions handed to them.

Every once in a while the cycle skips. Those skips coincide suspiciously with droughts. I remember tons of rain and the occasional hailstorm in the early 1980s, then it was all dry until 1995.

The thing is, while a very wet winter is uncommon for Southern California, it’s not unusual. In fact, it’s very regular. I recommend looking up El Niño as a starting point.

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From the Gnome 2.10 release notes:

In the past, while typing something into one application when suddenly your instant messenger offered a chat request from your friend, your words would be typed into the chat window. Imagine if you were typing your password at the time. This should no longer happen in GNOME 2.10.

In addition, if an application takes a long time to start, your work will not be interrupted when it finally opens its window.

About time someone fixed this! The window focus-stealing problem has plagued just about every desktop out there. I think Windows is the first one I noticed that attempted a solution (blinking the taskbar button instead of switching to the dialog box). And since I often fire up several programs at once, it can get really annoying when I start typing my password into one, hoping I’ll finish before the other window appears and drops the last three letters into my web browser or something.

Unfortunately I’ll probably have to wait for Fedora Core 4 to really use it, unless I want to go even more bleeding-edge than I already am.

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In the past few weeks, advertising developers have come up with scripts that will work around Firefox’s pop-up blocking. This is rather like a telemarketer calling someone on the do-not-call list. We installed a browser that blocks pop-ups for a reason. We are not your target audience; we are the people for whom pop-up ads are an invitation to boycott the advertiser.

If you’re selling something door-to-door, some people will buy, some will not, and some will be annoyed. But if someone has posted a “No Soliciting” sign, it’s a sure bet that they’re going to slam the door in your face. Why go to the effort when you know it’s going to be counterproductive?

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You’d think with the number of years we’ve been sharing files across networks we’d be able to do it somewhat reliably.

Windows: Try to connect to a computer that’s down or misconfigured, and sit for at least 30 seconds, unable to use an explorer window, click on your desktop, or, if you’re really unlucky, use the taskbar or Start menu, until it realizes it can’t connect. (I don’t know if this has been fixed in Windows XP, but it’s still a problem in Windows 2000.)

Unix: On one hand processes are separated better so you don’t normally get a full system lock-up unless it’s trying to connect while starting up…but if you have a modern GNOME desktop, and you have a file in your recent documents list on an auto-mounted NFS share that isn’t available anymore (say, because you turned the computer off), it can lock up your desktop while it tries to connect to create a thumbnail. (This happened to me last night.) And don’t get me started with trying to disconnect from an NFS share that isn’t available.

Mac: Have you got a folder on a server with lots and lots of files in it? Especially images? Hope you can wait for it to transfer every single image over the network and create a thumbnail, because you aren’t going to be able to see anything in that Finder window until it does. (To be fair, I’m basing this on connecting to a Linux box via Netatalk, which implements Mac file sharing. For all I know, connecting to an actual Mac would pull thumbnails out of the images’ resource forks or something.)

Hmm, now that I think about it, generating thumbnails of files on network shares seems to be a problem in itself.