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September 02, 2011

Windows 8 Explorer and Ribbon Toolbar vs Right-Click?

The more I think about proposed ‘improvement’s for Windows 8 Explorer, the crankier I get.

In case you missed it, Microsoft posted a ginormous blog entry detailing the rationale behind adding a ribbon toolbar to Windows 8 Explorer.

win8heatmap

Even though I love the Office ‘Ribbon’ toolbar in Office, I HATE the idea of a ribbon toolbar in Explorer.

Because EVERY SINGLE OPTION listed in the ribbon can be accomplished with the FRIGGIN right-button on a mouse.

Stated differently: What I STILL hate to this day about Apple/Macs is that they only have one mouse button. And, apparently, Microsoft has spent a lot of time confirming that too many users of Windows only know how to use one-button. So, rather than try to teach users to use the right-mouse button, they’re going to LUMP every single possible command up top to clutter the UI.

Poor move.

In fact, I think what all of this research proves is that the average PC user should really be using a Mac.

Instead, just make the ‘New Folder’ button a bit bigger (or more visibly obvious) from what it is in Win7 and you’ve REACHED perfection as far as I’m concerned. But then again, I’m one of those crazy people who likes mice with lots of buttons.

Posted on September 02, 2011 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

July 20, 2009

Why More Government Intervention Won't Help

My cell phone rang this morning. Caller ID showed 866 498 5357 as the caller. I don't know anyone from that number… but since I do give out my cell phone number as a way for potential clients to contact me, I decided to answers.

And got a recording – of some woman telling me that I could consolidate my credit card debt or up my numbers or some other crap.

All I had to do was push "1" to talk to a live operator.

So I pushed 1, and got a cheerful young female who wanted to help.

I politely asked her to take my name off her registry.

Click – the phone was dead.

Enter the Conundrum:
Here's the thing though – this is just one of a few telemarketing calls I've gotten on my cell phone in the past few days.

The Federal Trade Commission wants me to know that Telemarketers may not call cell phone numbers:

Federal Communications Commission regulations prohibit telemarketers from using automated dialers to call cell phone numbers.
-- From the FTC Website.

And, you can file a complaint if you are getting calls.

Only problem is: you can't file a complaint if your # isn't in the registry.

EndGame:
According to our well-funded government: Telemarketers can't call my cell phone. So there's no need to file a complaint, since they can't call me.

Posted on July 20, 2009 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

June 03, 2009

Dell 20" 2009W 'UltraSharp' Panels SUCK

I've got 3 20" monitors on my desk.

The Good
2 of them are Dell 20" 2007WFPs. Some tech reviews of those monitors said they were good – but had slow response times for when it came to games. I figured that was crap before I ended up buying one, and it was SUCH an awesome monitor I bought another. dell-2009w-lcd-1I also bought a 17" 'UltraSharp' around the same time. It's viewing angle wasn't spectactacular, and I hated having 2 monitors at 1680x1050 and a third at 1280x1024. (The missing 26 pixels in height really messed with my anal-retentive tendencies.)

The Bad
So, fast-forward a few years, and I snagged what I assumed was the new 'version' of these same monitors: a Dell 2009W. Same KILLER housing/mounting equipment. Same awesome stand, same fantastic built-in USB hub. And hell, the specs looked better. Much better – at least on paper.

Only it was all lies.

The Ugly
My buddy Carson bought one of these pigs too at about the same time I did. Within a few days we both noticed that these new monitors just… sucked. They couldn't hold their color very well, couldn't come CLOSE to generating anything remotely close to rich greys like their predecessors, and (to make matters worse) colors/visibility changed depending upon what angle you were looking at them from.

And, frankly, that last point is such a crime. Used to be that 'UltraSharp' meant that you were getting a monitor with a solid viewing angle. With my older 2007WFPs no matter which direction/angle I look at something from, the colors stay the same. With these new replacements, I can shift my head just a bit, and everything is different. Let alone the fact that these monitors are seriously over-saturated (even after turning contrast and brightness WAY down).

More Ugly Still
And… of course, we all know that I'm a bit hyper-critical some times and prone to be a bit cranky (hey, that's just branding right – the site IS called AngryPets.com). But I'm not the only person complaining about it.

This review NAILS it:

Shame on Dell for not using S-IPS panels anymore. I bought this monitor coming out of a 2001FP. WOW did i get jipped.
Don't be fooled by the specs. This LCD sounds amazing on paper for the money.
2000:1 dynamic contrast, 102% color gamut, 1680 x 1050 pixels tightly packed into 20 inches. All for 259 bucks?? Sure I'll take one.
Bad idea. All I was left with was an over- saturated (and trust me the colours are wayyy intense) Almost too contrasty monitor that has a bad viewing angle.
Now more about the viewing angle. Sure it touts 170 degrees. but that's just the image. Not the colour. There's MAJOR colour shifting even at a slight angle.
When in portrait mode, the viewing angles are even worse-to-unusable(unless you don't move your head AT ALL)
      (source: cnet.com)

Likewise, geeks/readers out at Engadget nailed the craptastic choices Dell made when bolting this bucket of crap together down in their comments – where statements like this NAIL what went wrong:

Another TN panel. *sigh*
I really hate that Dell is now calling their sub-par monitors "UltraSharps". What it used to mean was a better-quality IPS or VA panel which offered better viewing angles and better colour depth. The older 2007WFP is a far better LCD than this 2009W.

So if you're in the market for a new 20" – skip past the GREAT looks of these 2009W's – they're total crap.

Shame On Dell
Yeah, I know. Shame on me for not doing a bit more homework. Especially with Dell – whose company motto seems to be: "The consumer will get over it…".

But honestly, despite the fact that I'm a fairly geeky guy and I could have done some research on these new models, why would I have needed to? The predecessor 'UltraSharps' were exactly that. These monitors (apart from their gorgeous hardware) are PURE crap.

And Dell, since you're going to find this post via Google or whatever, here's what I'm hoping: Either send me a 20" that's TRULY UltraSharp along with an apology, or I hope that someone mounts a class-action suit because you've patently decided to pull a bait-and-switch with your own 'UltraSharp' brand name.

Posted on June 03, 2009 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

March 31, 2009

Video Card Woes

Nearly 2 years ago I bought a new gaming work rig.

It's hands-down been one of the best investments I've ever made. Since purchasing it, I've upgraded it into a new case (one that looks nicer, and has better airflow with a slightly smaller footprint/chassis), upgraded it to 8GB of RAM, and slapped in an SSD RAID-0. It's still so snappy and responsive that it's hard to even quantify. Eventually I'll probably put a Core 2 Quad into it, and maybe swap out my slower RAM for some faster RAM, but otherwise, the system is great.

BaseScore

GeForce 8800 GTS
There has been one let down though – my 8800 GTS video cards. Despite how INSANELY awesome they were from a performance standpoint – and despite how insanely awesome it was to have TWO of them, they just didn't seem to like being a part of my awesome system.

8800GTS

As you can see from the picture of pure awesomeness above, I had 2 EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS cards (okay, so the photo only shows one card) with 320MB of RAM each. Paired up, that was 192 stream processors, a whole bunch of GHz and MHz of Memory and Processor speeds, and 640MB of Video Memory.

Only, about a year ago, one of them just up and died on me. (Sadly, after the warranty had expired.) So I ponied up for another one… and things have been just fine. Until last Friday, when the OTHER one died. So, in less than two years, the failure rate on both of these pigs was 100%. Which, despite their insane awesomeness, just wasn't well… awesome (or, frankly, even acceptable).

The New/Lesser Coolness
So, rather than taking another gamble on a now discontinued card, I decided to downgrade a bit. Truth is, I never really ran in SLI other than a few times to see what it was like – because as cool as SLI is, you only get one monitor. So, as much as I liked having an SLI compatible machine, all I really need 2 video cards for is to be able to run more than 2 monitors. (I'm up to three now and would TOTALLY grab a fourth except three kick off a lot of heat and I'm worried about what 4 would do.)

8600GTS

So, I snagged an EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS. It 'only' has 32 stream processors, and only has 256MB of RAM, but actually has faster bus speeds than my 8800 GTS (as it came out later). So, while it's not a gaming replacement for my remaining GTS 8800, it does JUST fine running a third monitor (and will support my need for a fourth if I ever decide to just take a risk on the heat issues). And since it uses the exact same driver as my 8800GTS, I can run Aero Glass JUST FINE on it and so on.

Best of all, it was only $55 instead of $180… and comes with a 2 year warranty instead of a 1 year warranty. And, for the record, I swear I read something about NVidia having problems with HIGH FAILURE rates on some of their cards – and I blame them, NOT EVGA because EVGA literally has the best customer service and support of any hardware vendor that I know of…

Posted on March 31, 2009 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

December 29, 2008

I'm Not Sure

Frankly, I'm not sure who's more stoooopid:

Exhibit A: Politicians
They couldn't wait to shell out $4 Trillion to MAKE SURE that we wouldn't go into a recession.

Well, it didn't work.

That, and while I SUCK at math, the way I see it, 300M Americans and $1T equals more than $3K for every man, woman, and child in this country that will eventually have to be paid back. For my family of 6, that amounts to a paltry $72,000  ($4T/300M x 6).

Exhibit B: Environmentalists
While my idea of a good time isn't burning styrofoam or acres of tires, I'm SICK TO DEATH of environmentalists pushing their religion off on me.

That, and how stupid do they think I am?

Once again, we see another group of hand-wringing, "let's save the POLAR BEARS", self-righteous, knuckle-dragging, numbskull, environmentalists trying to equate human calamity and misery with Global Warming.

And, once again - they're trying to equate EARTHQUAKES as proof of global warming:

Natural disasters killed over 220,000 people in 2008, making it one of the most devastating years on record and underlining the need for a global climate deal, the world's number two reinsurer said Monday.
...
Just days later an earthquake shook China's Sichuan province, leaving 70,000 dead, 18,000 missing and almost five million homeless, according to official figures, Munich Re said.  

Uh... yeah. The way I see it, nearly 1/3rd of those deaths were tragically caused by human negligence. But not of the sinful carbon-emissions kind. (Unless those corrupt Chinese builders wasted the money they should have spent on building strong buildings on gleeful and wanton tire, coal, and jet-fuel burning. Bastards!)

A Fitting Solution
My guess though is that there's probably some way we can get American Tax Payers to bail out German Re-Insurers - given the HELL that volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteor-strikes are going to cause with humanity's refusal to pay attention to global warming ...

Posted on December 29, 2008 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

December 18, 2008

An Open Letter to SSD Manufacturers

Dear SSD Manufacturers,

No seriously. Go ahead. Just do it.

Start making your gnarly SSD drives in 3.5-inch form factors.

It will make it easier for real IT wonks to take you more seriously.

It will also make it tons easier to mount SSD drives in non-laptops.

That larger form-factor will also likely give us enough extra GBs that we won't be able to look the other way any longer.

--Mike

P.S. Toshiba, I'm talking to you - cuz you've got the speed where I want it, and the GBs are great. But do I REALLY have to buy conversion brackets?

Posted on December 18, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

October 07, 2008

FireFox 3 Sucks

Worst Browser Ever.

And I've been in love with FireFox for a very long time. (Ironically, I still like it more than IE, but I think I'm going to switch to Chrome.)

But frankly, other than the fact that I love how FF3 renders, I think it's one of the worst browsers ever built. It's so insanely buggy, crashes all the time, and feels like a damned tug-boat.

When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad...
I simply remember a few of my favorite things, like:
a) The fact that FF3 crashes 4-5 times per day
b) That whole: Firefox is still running so you can't launch it. But feel free to either use task-manager to kill it or restart your machine.
c) The fact that it 100% broke the WMP plugin.  (And that FF knows about it as a posted/confirmed bug yet refuses to do anything about it.)
d) The way it frequently looses its friggin mind when accessing content on a local network. (I do my dev locally, and when I hit F5 to refresh changes from my dev server, FF3 frequently just completely forgets where to grab that content and won't load the requested page for minutes. Yet I can fire up IE and Chrome and the page loads instantly.)
e) The fact that it goes completely limp 15-20 times per day - and becomes completely un-responsive for 2-3 seconds while it's apparently either choking on a bone, or waiting to see whether or not it will crash again.

Yeah, it definitely feels like it was rushed into production.

It's the plugins, stupid
And before some-one pipes-up and blames my plugins:
a) I’ve only got 4 installed (a password import/export plugin, delicious, and firebug + yslow)
b) If plugins can make the entire browser so unstable and buggy/crash-prone, then that’s not an issue with the plugins, it’s an issue with the browser’s ability to sand-box correctly.

Guess I'll be curious to see what IE8 is like too. (Though I'm just getting too old to bother installing the beta.)

Posted on October 07, 2008 | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

June 28, 2008

Why Securing MS Apps is a PITA

As a Developer and IT Pro one of the things I really hate is seeing an example install everything as Administrator, or just completely fail to use good security practices.

Therefore as a Technical Evangelist, one of the things I really strive for in the examples and content I create is to use something OTHER than Domain Admin to run my services in and so on. Though... I'm starting to rethink that based on the hideous number of hours it always cause me to lose.

Case in point, I'm working on some content for a pretty cool new product from Microsoft. And there are a lot of components that make up this product. Those components can be installed on a single machine or distributed across a number of machines.

Rather than just installing everything on a single machine, I went with the more real-world approach of doing it like people would do it in... the real world. And I created separate domain accounts for my services and so on.

And, when interacting with the tool, I'm doing it like a real users would - as I think that makes my tutorials more viable and realistic (especially when part of my job is to watch out for 'icebergs' if you will - and steer readers, viewers, whatever around those problems when they're working with these tools).

Only, I'm really getting sick of the way Microsoft makes security exponentially more and more difficult. By spreading it out over so many different control points, gateways, ACLs, and other points of interaction.

For example, while working with this project I'm on now, there's the ability to deploy my projects to a 'preview' location that's a web site. I try to push to that location, and I'm told, very bluntly, that 'deployment failed'. (Yeah... killer error message there.)

Hmmm. Let's see... there's my security context, the context of the web service I'm working with, and the context of the site I'm routing to via the WS. That also means a couple of places to put ACLs on folders.

That's tedious enough, but hey... it's all ... part of the job of using the principle of least privilege. So I go through all those possibilities and make sure the account I'm using (and the account the service is using) has the right perms on sites and folders.

No love.

Ahhh wait.. the service itself has it's own security accounts and authorization (i.e. like SQL Server). Maybe the account I'm using or the service account I'm using needs the 'Creator' perms/role?

No love.

Google? A few people reporting the same problems - and aside from the obvious suggestions of checking perms.. there's still no love.

Well... it IS a demo after all... and...just to see what's up as part of troubleshooting I make the service account an admin.

No Love.

Just to see... how'z about: Domain Admins?

Still: No Love.

Damnit! What more could you want????!!!111

Fine. Log out as CONTOSO\Mike, log back in as ADMINISTRATOR.

Love. Only... now I don't want it.

Posted on June 28, 2008 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 27, 2008

On Acronyms and the IRS

Acronyms are pretty cool.

Some pretty faithfully match the words they're comprised of:
SCUBA - Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus
TLA - Three (or Two) Letter Acronym

Others a bit more of a stretch:
MDX - Multidimensional eXpressions
DNA - Deoxyribonucleic Acid

And a few don't come even close:
IRS - Blood Sucking Bastards

Me? I'm just a wee bit bitter that they 100% robbed me of $1068 this year - and that if I don't pay THEM (the robbers/thieves) then, ironically, I go to jail.

Early 2008 I filed, retroactively, as an S-Corp for 2007. Congress specifically instructed the IRS BSB to allow these late filings. And, happily, they accepted my election without issue.

Only, all during 2007 I was paying estimated personal taxes. To keep things simple, let's say that was $15k. Meaning, that at the end of 2007, the IRS had $15k of my $$ in their grubby little hands. By changing to an S-Corp, the way I pay taxes as a corporation radically changed - and instead of paying quarterly estimated taxes, I now need to pay monthly withholding taxes (i.e. the kind of tax you pay to an employee).

The problem, by retroactively becoming an S-Corp for 2007 the IRS was expecting (let's say) $15k in withholding taxes. I didn't have that. As far as they were concerned, I was Wesley Snipes.

So they fined me.

Yeah, I could get an expensive lawyer and fight this - but I'd lose way more than what I've already lost.

Yeah, they're a gigantic bureaucracy, and I'm not surprised that I got screwed this way.

But by the same token, they're immoral. No other business or organization would operate this way. (If you had a $15k tab with the hospital, and owed $15k ... I'm sure they could figure out how to make that just work.)

I asked that they review my records, and note that I always pay on time, and abate or remove the penalty. They sent me a trial-size package of Vaseline, and told me to pay up. Blood Sucking Bastards....

UPDATE: After contacting the IRS... it looks like they're still trying to decide whether I have to pay the fines or not. i.e. they haven't yet processed my letter asking them to remove the fines. (Hmm... maybe I should take this post down while they're considering... )

Posted on May 27, 2008 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

May 05, 2008

An Open Letter to My Keyboard

Dear Keyboard,

There's really, never, ever, ever, ever, ever a time when I don't want the NUM LOCK key off. I have a keyboard with a 10-key because I like those keys.

And I don't use that side of my keyboard as a drink-holder. Ever.

So, I'd prefer it if we could work something out where my 10-key always worked. Cuz having the ability to turn off my 10-key/Toggle NUM LOCK is tantamount to having keys that turn off 'right hand' or 'left hand' keys - i.e., totally useless.

Love,

--Mike

No, really: When did 'they' decide that a 10-key was just too much for some users to handle? What was the conversation like?

"Dood, this 10-key thing is nice, but it's just too much power. Stop the insanity and give people a way to turn that thing off for the love of all that's holy - otherwise someone will shoot their foot off with that thing"....

Posted on May 05, 2008 | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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