Beta software, Microsoft, Windows and other shit things

A while ago when the first release candidate of Windows XP Servcie pack 3 came out I read a couple of reviews and got sold on the fact that it promised some speed increases over SP2. Now I'm no fool and I knew it wouldn't be anywhere near the equivalent of getting some hardware underneath the thing but I didn't think I'd experience anything near as retarded as I have done.

Shortly after the release candidate was made available I formatted my laptop ready for a clean install. The first thing I installed after my fresh windows was SP 3. Now I know you're about to say "It's your own fault for using pre-release software" and it completely is! I doubt I'll ever use a pre-release of something so fundamental as an operating system ever again.

So what happened? Well, I came into the office Tuesday after being ill on Monday to find I couldn't use remote desktop as "this beta software has expired"...
After a quick chat to James I discovered he had had the same problems and that you needed to install a "technical refresh". This involved uninstalling the previous version, which was installed before any other software on my system.

So I uninstalled it, spent about half an hour trying to get IE back on my system as the uninstall had shagged it up royal and made the decision never to use pre-release software again.

Now I don't blame myself completely for my world of shit. Sure I installed it in the first place but Microsoft made it a bag of shit!!!

Why and how?? Well this is many-fold

1) By making it time limited in some way

This is ridiculous; if someone has gone to the trouble of installing Beta/RC software you can pretty much guess they are going to be tech-savvy enough to know when to upgrade to the full release or get the new / updated release candidate. Don’t all of a sudden make their system unusable!

2) Make uninstallers that work.

Once I’d taken the plunge into uninstalling SP3, and waited hours for it to happen I decided NOT to install the technical refresh and stick with good old SP2. Which you would have imagined would be what I was left with after removing SP3 as it was a SP2 disk I used in the first place. But no, it wasn’t! It was some clagged up hybrid crock of shit which windows update wouldn’t even recognise. I had to download the SP2 installer and run all of that again to get my system back to “working”

2.1) Make installers that work / don’t fuck your computer up

So after all that I was left with IE6 so I installed IE7 and which now refuses to accept cookies, loads of sites complain about security and loads of other shit has gone wrong.

At 1st opportunity I’m installing Mac OS 8.1 and having done with it! Well maybe not but it just baffles me why developers make things so overly complicated. Ok, it’s Beta and you’d prefer people not to run it forever so stick a warning in there. Don’t cripple their system for them and force them to brick their computers. You have a responsibility to the end user as much as to the business objectives, unless one of those objectives it to piss users off!

WOW

This is ace.

It's like all that microsoft *seadragon* or what ever it was called

http://www.cooliris.com/

Firefox PHP Function search plugin

15/07/2008 : Updated the link to the plugin as we have moved offices. I might try and get a wordpress blog set up instead of this thing.

A while ago I was bored in the office so I decided to have a faff about for twenty minutes making something that might be useful to the folks I work with.

Most of the development work we do here at twentysix Leeds is done in .NET but most of us (everyone apart from the TD) are from a PHP background and while at one point it was my language of preference, the amount of .NET I have learnt recently has forced most of the PHP knowledge out the other ear! and this seems to be the situation for the other lads too. So I thought I'd do something about it and create a search plug-in for Firefox and IE7 that allowed us to search the on-line PHP docs directly from your browser.

So after having read a few articles I wrote the plug-in that is now available from this page, just click the search provider in Firefox (next to the search field) and then click ‘Add “PHP Function Search: By Greg Brant” ' and there you go.

I would apologies to IE users but I'm not going to because it's not my fault that it wont work for you guys. My original intention was that the plug-in would work for Firefox and IE after having read that they both support the OpenSearch format for search providers (Firefox also supports MozSearch plugins too). However; the PHP search only works with GET method forms and IE only supports search providers the use POST.

OK. so, this software (if you can in fact call a search provider software) is provided free of charge with no warranty of any kind what-so-ever! install it at your own risk. All copyrights remain with the owner and all the rest of it.