Product Anxiety

Like many, I take great pride in my work and do my best to make whatever I build as good as it can be. Now and then when I give a product to someone to go over and test, I tend to get a little anxious because I of course want it to do well. The same goes for when a demo or full version is shown to customers, I don't want anything to break, I want it to work perfectly and be as clear as can be without the anything thinking "gee, I wish it could do ___ as well" or "I wish it would do it this way instead." Traditionally, I do not feel the same way about the products of others, either from my company or elsewhere.

As an owner of an iPod who has an hour commute each day, I began with simply throwing my headphones and listening to tunes. This is legal in my state (SD), but every now and then when I visit my parents in Minnesota it becomes illegal at the border.

I like many was happy to hear about the Alpine KCA-420i iPod Interface that would make your iPod look like a CD Changer to many Alpine decks.

When it was finally released, I went down to my local Ultimate Electronics with a couple of friends who know far more about car audio than I to take a look. Suffice to say, I was not impressed. I first played with the adapter plugged into my iPod and a $1500 head unit... it was a joke, it was rarely able to display all of my songs, was a nightmare to use to scroll through to a specific one and was painful just to have play a random track.

I was, disappointed, not a state I am in very often and my friend Chad quickly noticed. A frequent phrase that he kept saying when I'd run into an oddity, flaw or general usability issue was: "God damn Alpine", not to be confused with similar and often heard phrases like "Stupid Alpine" and "F*#@ing Alpine".

Being ready to spend several hundred on a nice deck and the iPod adapter, I ended up buying a nice Pioneer deck as well as an aux input cable so that I could run my iPod to it that way.

Not long later, I heard of the CD-IB100, an upcoming product from Pioneer to do what the Alpine product did. Being curious, I went back to the local Ultimate to take a look and see if it "sucked less" (yes that was the term I used when talking with the sales person at Ultimate).

I would really like to be able to have a clean way of controlling my iPod from my deck, however if the CD-IB100 is anything like the Alpine one, I am going to be quiet angry, and in the mean time I feel a bit of anxiety regarding this as I am very much looking forward to the release of this product.

Within the next month it should be out, and I'll try to give it a try at Ultimate, or just drop $100 bucks, plug it into my own and hope it's better, or more likely, see if it "sucks less". I'm hopeful... but still skeptical.

St Patrick’s Day

This is of course the day when everyone is Irish and many partake in green beer.

This evening I joined some friends at the bar for the birthday party of our friend James. Later in the evening someone put on some so called Irish music, by Flogging Molly, the sort that was enough to cause a good Irishman to consider defecting to the six counties.

Next year I am going to have to burn a CD with some quality (and authentic) Irish drinking songs... you know

Seven Drunken Nights
and
Beer, Beer, Beer

Hell, I’d even be up for some Whiskey In The Jar (non Metallica)

Some Corrs would also be nice and appropriate, even if non-drinking related.

But then, St. Patrick’s Day isn’t about drinking, it’s about the St. Patrick, who drove the snakes from Ireland. Legend has it he said: "All snakes who wish to remain in Ireland will please raise their right hands."

Before closing, I would like to leave you with an old Irish blessing:

May those who love us, love us
And those who don't love us,
May God turn their hearts
And if he can't turn their hearts,
May he turn their ankles
So we will know them by their limping!

Upgrading IE2 -> IE6 Under NT4

Yesterday I broke out VMware to test a .NET based application I am developing under a few different versions of Windows.

As expected, 95 could not take the .NET Framework.

98 worked fine, requiring only an install of IE6 (5+ required) with a few minor drawing issues.

2000, XP and 2003 all worked like a charm.

NT4 on the other hand was... interesting.

With VMware, it’s simple enough to drag and drop files into the emulated OS. Attempting to install the .NET framework I was told that it needed IE 5 or better. Being curious I double checked the current version, 2.0.

Ordinarily when you want to update something like IE, where do you go? Personally, I head to Windows Update, unfortunately, I was greeted by the following screen:

Click for larger version

Not pretty... but not the end of the road, a Google search (which rendered very nicely) found where I could download IE6 from the Microsoft Download Center. While navigating through a few Microsoft pages I began to shudder at the ugliness of the pages as they displayed javascript and other behind the scenes code that IE2 didn’t know what to do with (I should note that I did check out some other sites and just about everything looked horrid in IE2 (no background colors, no frames, no CSS, etc).

And now... back to our story. Reaching the link I clicked on it and was moments later greeted with:

Click for larger version

Kind of funny when you think about it... the two main ways of updating software on a Windows box are out of reach because of the software you are trying to update.

I ended up DLing the needed installer (ie6setup.exe) on another PC and sharing it over the network to the NT box, after that everything went smoothly, still a funny set of problems.

"Same price, more fscking"

Great title eh? Something one would almost expect to hear from a hooker.

Last night I got a call from a friend, inquiring if I was interested in a bit of bar time. Having been several months since last I went to the bar, I decided to go and hang out with some friends.

A couple of beers in, I decided it wasn’t doing much for me so I asked Molly, the person serving our table for something more potent. She suggested some odd concoction and said "Same price, more fscking."

Granted this is not the most interesting post, I just thought it a great, multi-purpose line and had to share it.

Cobuyitaphobia Wars: Conclusion

I almost forgot to mention, I am proud to announce that the epoch Cobuyitaphobia Wars have ended. Recently my worthy (yet inferior) opponent conceded the victory to me. Luckily, this occurred on the same day the war was scheduled to end.

An interesting side effect of our battle is my increased pagerank over all on Google for the name of this blog, I Hate Linux (without quotes). Prior to this battle, my results on that search were quite low, now, I am #2 behind a very old CNN article.

Throw quotes into the search for "I Hate Linux" and I am #1 with CNN no where in sight... which makes sense given the tone of the article.

I wonder if I can take #1 for I Hate Linux (without quotes) as well.

Popup Blocker Failings

For a while the Google Toolbar was enough for me to keep the popups at bay. Later I got a new PC at work running Windows XP with SP2 and it's popup blocker ended up catching more than Google’s (SP2's obviously has first crack at it)... so now and then one would make it through SP2's protection and Google's would stop it.

More and more lately though I've been seeing more and more popups from numerous sites. From the looks of it, most of them target IE and not Firefox as in limited side by side testing Firefox seems to be blocking a few more than the Google Toolbar and XPSP2 combined... quite odd.

I’m forced to wonder how many of those programmers building popups and other related code to bypass popup blocking are targeting FireFox and how that # will change as/if it's user base increases.