A little talk with Steve Ballmer

Apparently, Blogger doesn't approve of 900px high picture, so click to enlarge, or check his Facebook page for the nice conversation.

Feed hungy Americans by downloading IE8

Microsoft is making totally crazy really intensive advertising campaign for his new baby IE8. Everything is to be found in the new ads.

First, my favourite, meritorical discussion:


Mmm, yeah, how very meritorical, I couln't agree more with these points.

Second, a marketing sure-thing, controversy:


This ad, a video of a woman so shocked by her husband's browsing history that she vomits, has been removed - and thus talked about a lot. "Browsing better", according to Microsoft, is visiting filthy websites, just as long as you don't leave them in your history. Needless to say, my definition of "browsing better" is slightly different.

But, but, but, however, after all the brainstorms that lead to this variety of ads, they finally got me. What made me download the thingy? The promise of provinding 8 meals for Americans in need fo every download. I clicked "downlad" and saw 4 versions to choose from:


You might think that since I'm using Windows 7, I've already got IE8 and none of this versions is for me. But this doesn't matter when it comes to fighting hunger - I downloaded all four versions, proving a month of food on Microsoft for someone. Then I deleted them.

You too can visit browserforthebetter.com and help fight hunger in America!

7 weeks with Windows 7

I've been trying Windows 7 RC for over 7 weeks now. It's high time to open my big mouth about the new shiny features and the stuff that sucks. (Please note that I haven't touched Vista with a pole and hope things stay that way, which means I don't know what waslready introduced in Vista.)

Let's start positively. Windows 7 is really shiny. I does have a professional look and feel. Well, not the wallpapers, but overall.


More importantly, it's fast. Rumors say it will work just fine on netbooks!

The usability is enhanced. That goes both ways, unfortunately. On one side, I love the new taskbar with huge icons that you can pin, hover,... do try this at home. I love the merging of the folders instead of the "replace or resign" that used to be.

But... it's the little things. And the frustration they bring.

Windows Media Player is now twelve - that's like two per Windows. It manages my music library well, but doesn't understand that in the universal language of humanity, that loooong key you could find even in the dark in a fraction of a second means "pause". "Pause" is Ctrl + P. "Pause" is Ctrl + P. "Pause" is "I don't care the water is boiling, the phone ringing and the best scene coming, find Ctrl+P if you want to pause". That alone makes me want to go back to the best ever VPlayer (or AllPlayer).

Paint got redesigned. I'm still using PSP7. 7 - oh the irony.

Microsoft is one for those software companies that don't really see the huge difference between "user friendly" and "looser friendly", which leads to odd situtations. See what that is?


That's Windows 7 vs. me. I'm on an admin account. Any software installation makes that question pop out:

Do you wany to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?

Yeah, admin acount. And it warns me that installing a program will make changes on my hard drive! So I clicked "change when these notifications appear" to see less of that and got the window above, politely asking wether Mr UserAccountControlSettings could make changes to my computer.

One last thing hard to forgive. It won't get to sleep when Windows Media Center is running, but it will while Firefox is downloading a big file. Boo.

Okay, enough complaining. It's just a release candidate, and Microsoft deeply values my opinion about the improvement opportunities and usability challenges.

If you want something more constructive to read, I recommend Lifehackers's "Get Windows 7's Best Features Right Now".

Things are really wrong when BBspot is right.

BBspot is my favourite fake geek news site and you most probably have read their legendary article "Microsoft purchases evil from Satan":


Good one. Some time later, BBspot wrote about Microsoft forcing users to upgrade from XP to Vista. On a serious note, a friend is making good cash in the UK helping people downgrade. But back to the point. BBspot quoted Vance Fredericks (whoever that is) saying:

"This project is targeted at XP users who don't see the benefits of upgrading to Vista. The first change will be to install a desktop wallpaper of a naked Steve Ballmer during the next update. Customers will be unable to change the background, unless they upgrade to Vista."

Now that's some serious blackmailing.


But that was supposed to be a joke, right? As it turns out, not entirely. Microsoft is working on a special edition of Windows 7 for netbooks (the sweet tiny computers that might save Windows XP), "special" not having a positive meaning here, and in that version, you won't be able to change the wallpaper!

Now, that wallpaper probably won't be a picture of Steve Ballmer. But it might be that:



Or that:


Which makes that wallpaper look really cool:


BBspot was right, so things are really, really wrong. Still, the worst question is: how many sick ideas will Microsoft take from BBspot?

I knew I forgot to blog about something

I knew I forgot to blog about something: I passed the70-536 exam!

I got 841 points and 700 was the passing score, so I was pretty well prepared. And they had good coffee at the center.

What's next? The asp.net one, as I have a bit of experience in that. And then maybe WPF, as it's the closest thing to Silverlight - or is there a Silverlight certificate coming up? I don't know about any so far.

I just registered for the 70-536 exam

Wish me luck, everyone! I'm taking the 70-536 exam (Microsoft .NET Framework - Application Development Foundation) on the 16th of December. So I have a bit less than three weeks to get ready. Maybe the fact that two colleagues from work are doing something isn't reason enough to do it, but I don't care - I'm doing it.

Okay, so how do I get prepared? Boss bought us the training kit:

It's a book with practice tests, so I'm reading it when I can and taking the tests. I really hope it will work. I'm a bit worried as I haven't heard the best opinions about it, but, well, we'll see.

My 6-months programming experience should help too, I recently learned how to use reflexions, for example. Basically, that's what the exam is supposed to measure: your level of experience.

The dilmena of updating Windows

Once again, I am confused by Windows. Where's the talking paperclip when you need him to share his wisdom with you?

Updating Windows has always been a tough decision. Once a friend updated Windows and then he could only have three explorer windows opened at the same time. Once a friend updated windows and then he had to recover his data with the help of a company specializing in burned drives. And of course, once you've updated, you'll be constantly nagged to reboot until you reboot.

While none of the above is pleasant, the alternative has just gotten unimaginably worse as a new vulnerability has seen the day:

On Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 systems, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability without authentication to run arbitrary code.

See the Microsoft Security Bulletin for more details. And update your windows now. Or wait for arbitrary code to be executed on your computer. Or congratulate yourself having chosen a safer operating system.

Geek goes lazy

School starts on Wednesday. Or Thursday. (Anyone knows, by the way?) Anyway, I'm making the most of the last days of freedom, which, besides work, includes mainly this:

Yep, I'm playing the Sims with the newest expansion pack, Apartment Life. Here's a short review and a long review.

Oh, did I mention that I have a brand new hard drive? With a brand new Windows installation out-of-the-box annoying as can be. I got my documents, but my beautifully ordered inbox is gone. I had to google my own father's e-mail address today.

Silverlight and text-align:justify.

Silverlight has no such thing as text-align: justify! There is an explanation, but I'm not buying it, but I believe it will be soon fixed, as well as the right-to-left direction.

Okay, the future is bright, Silverlight is still beta, but I want text justified now. As I was saying, I am working on something more like a website than an application, and I chose HTML overlay to display more text. Still, there's one place where there are a few sentences about my company, that I'd prefer to keep in a stylish Silverlight control. Stylish like this:



Doesn't the bit of text just beg to be justified? It does to me and it's fortunately short so I can justify it by hand. So, here are a few tries, read on to learn about my adventures in text justifying or scroll down to the last one to see what finally worked.

First, I manually split the texblock into a few smaller ones, one for each line. Then I just assigned the the right width. Result below:

Well, the texblocks do have the required width, as you see on the framed one, but the text inside doesn't.

Second try: scaling them horizontally with a transformation. Take Blender, type the right thing (1.1) in the right box, like this:



And you get this:

So it's scaled. But: now it goes further on both sides. I just wanted to extend it to the right. We could now push it to the right too, but that would be a mess to find the right values for both transformations. There's a much easier way: move the origin point. It's by default at the center of the obeject, thus the RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5". Setting it to "0,0" will move it to the left top corner. As we're not scaling vertically, we don't care about the top coordinate, so let's just put "0,0". Now all there is to do is find the right scale, I just binary searched between 1 and 1.1. The first line, for instance, got 1.03:


Here's the final result: six delightfully justified lines.
Phew, we're done. So that was a bit of work, but it was okay for such a short text. However, if the width of the frame was to change, I'd have to start all over! Split the textblock in lines again and scale each line again. If someone feels like it, you can try and write a piece of code that would do that programmatically. Yes, MS developers, I'm talking to you.

Adventures in HTML overlaying

Wow, the demand for articles about Silverlight is overwhelming! I've just been featured on Silverlight Cream #342 and I don't have that much to share yet. But, don't worry, my Silverlight masterpiece will be released soon and I'm learning everyday, so more goodies are to come.

I was saying I would try HTML overlay - I did and it works great. The most useful resource was this thread on silverlight.net, which is about displaying pdf files, but HTML overlay works in exactly the same way. (And why not gifs or Flash while we're at it?)

So here's what I did:
The grey rounded border is in Silverlight (as the stuff outside of it), and everything inside is HTML+CSS displayed in an iframe. The orange thingy is a link to a Wikipedia page, so let's click it.

Wow! That looks funny! It shouldn't be a surprise, but the link opened in the iframe. I know exactly how to prevent this, but... it looks kinda cool! Okay, let's close this window to ensure the iframe will disappear with it.
Ooops! Recognize those rectangles from the previous picture? They're tables and they disappear in FF, but IE has to be IE and cause issues. Fortunately, that was easy to work around (reset the iframe source while hiding it), but why, oh why, when I try to make peace with the M-corporation products, do they have to remind me how annoying they can be?

What you can and can't in Silverlight

You can: insert a calendar in a button.

Who would want to do that anyway?

You can't: insert a link in text. Who would want to do that anyway?

You can: insert a link in a button. Now try clicking one so fast the other won't notice.

You can't: click on a control like a dumbass. At least when the VisualStateManager is involved, it raises a critical exception.

You can: control you treadmill from Silverlight. I'd exchange that for the links in the text, but it's still a nice feature to have.

You can't: inherit like a normal person. It's a bug if it's working fine.

I love this company!

So I'm playing with this Silverlight thing and I want User Control inheritance. I'm not asking for much, right? Inheritance in object-oriented programming? Turns out I am.

I'm making this tree. Nodes have different stuff in them, like text or a slideshow, but they're all nodes of the same big tree. Smells like inheritance, right? So I go and google "silverlight control inheritance". And end up on the official Silverlight forum.

Over there, cool quotes. An MVP says:

I don't know of any good workarounds for it at this point, I've tried a bunch of different things to get around this.

And another guy goes:

I'm surprised to see this works: (...) This is likely to be a bug. I'll redirect this to our product team.

And after another one:

This is a bug if it's working fine

I can say with all my heart: I love this company!

First day of work

The title of the post is misleading: today is my second day of work. But I was so busy on the first one that I didn't get to tell my fascinating adventures.

I had to get there after 11p.m., so I decided to learn a bit of C#. I printed made Brother print for me the advanced chapters of "C# Programming" on Wikibooks - cool and useful. That page lead me to a tutorial entitled "learning C# in 5 minutes" which I tried in the 5 minutes before going out, but I don't really feel like that made me learn C#.

And the I went to the real work. Finally. And spent the whole day preparing my workstation, whcih means mostly installing Windows XP. That went not too bad, reinstalling my systems in March was a good idea as I knew pretty well everything I had to do.

Well, and that was all on my first day. Today I installed Office and I'm gonna discuss with the boss wich project I will join and therefore what developement environment to set up.

Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer

Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer! Seriously! (But not without some help from a Windows test manager.)

Full story here.

This just in: Steve Baller egged!

My, do I love the "this just in" expression... and the M-corporation...

Anyway, to the point: on Monday, at the Hungarian University of Economics, a student threw eggs at Steve Ballmer. This is horrible! He missed!
[Source]

Off my wishlist: Amy Studt's "My Paper Made Men"

I finally managed to get Amy Studt's new album "My Paper Made Men" I mentionned a few days ago. Man, was that a journey!

iTunes didn't let me buy because I'm from Poland. HMV (link works in IE only, sorry) didn't validate my card. No Polish mp3 store had the album, as it has only been released in the UK. 7digital was tricky because the album didn't appear on Amy's page, so I went there quite a few times, throught it wasn't avaliable and closed the page before finding it. But I finally did, paid with PayPal, and got wma files. While I was there, I also downloaded four b-sides.

The wma files turned out to be DRM-protected and Winamp wouldn't let me validate them. Windows Media Player did, but didn't let me burn a CD. Well, as it turns out, DRM removal is way easier than coping with DRM. That's the type of security I adore - the one that causes more problems to honest paying users than to pirates. But, there's no point in ranting, the point is that I got the album legally, contributed to its charts positions and most of all, that the music is simply delightful.

So there is a "no to all" option in WinXP

If anyone's been waiting all week for me to post something, I'm sorry. I'm going through a bit of health issues and writer's block at the moment. So a shortie tonight.

From the earliest times humanity looked for ways of copying files from one folder to another. Under WinXP, in the 21st century, the drag'n'drop method gained the most popularity. It had however a huge lack: there were options "yes", "yes to all", "no" and even "cancel", but no "not to all"! Or so I thought until I read this article.

As it turns out, if you hold the shift key while clicking on "no", it acts as "no to all". I really wonder why is such a useful option hidden in such an unintuitive way. The same goes for hibernating Windows. This OS really is full of shi[f]t.

Doesn't it make you wanna click everywhere with the shift button pressed to see what happens? Out of curiosity, it kinda does to me. But then I think of what could happen. Maybe the paperclip from hell would resurrect... not worth that risk!

Installing, installing, installing....

Today is a pretty typical geek day. Basically, it means sitting at the computer all day long.

Having formatted my hard drive on Friday, I re-installed Windows XP from my recovery CD. Then I installed Ubuntu 7.10, only 34 days before Ubuntu 8.04 is out (you can get the beta if you can't wait, but I don't like the word "beta", or read a review here).

Sunday was Easter, so all I did was install The Sims 2, among with the expansion packs: Open For Business, Bon Voyage and Free Time. Then played a lot.

On Monday, I continued celebrating and installed Visual Studio C# and Visual Web Developer, both express editions of course. However, I didn't even have the time to run one of them.

Today, back to the serious stuff. Right now, getting the 204 important security updates Ubuntu has got for me. Then, installing Java and Eclipse. Then, Sugar, because One Laptop Per Child has been accepted for Google Summer of Code and I'd love to do something with them. Then, Thunderbird, which I'd love to see working under both Linux and Windows, using the same mail folders of course. Then, some SVN client, then, the libraries I need for my team project, namely Tuscany SDO and Apache Maven. Then, getting to work.

Ah, an entire day at the computer. I'm feeling so good right now.

Adventures in disk formatting

Nothing is as cool as formatting your hard drives and installing operating systems. I decided that there was no better way to start my Easter break.

I decide to do so because after installing and uninstalling Linuxes, my partitions got pretty messy, with 24 GB of unusable disk space (not that I nedded them bad, but recovering them meant formatting disks anyway and who wouldn't want 24 GB). My Windows got messy after a year and a half of using it, my Ubuntu was unconfigured and I needed it, so it was a great time to clean everything up.

So, I copied all my files, of course, and tried a Windows recovery CD. Failed with "free space not found". How stupid is that?

Reloaded Windows, removed all partitions but "recovery" and C, and that was as stupid of me as the M-corporation is for not giving normal install CDs but some kinda working recoveries.

Retried the recovery, failed again.

Retried loading Windows, but removing the drives damaged Grub, so it failed.

Tried Super Fdisk. Didn't boot.

Tried Partition Logic. Wanted me to click on "OK" without any mouse. I failed.

Looked for Ubuntu 7.10 CD. It turned out a brother lent it to a friend a few months ago.

Added "downloading Ubuntu 7.10" to my to-do list. At least this one didn't fail.

Tried Suse 10.1 Install CD. Failed, or I didn't wait long enough. I'm usually patient, but not when it comes to watching black computer screens in hope for a change.

Tried Ubuntu 5.10 Install CD. Failed. Don't even remember how.

[EDIT] Linux has some problems with my graphic card. To run Ubuntu on an Asus A6RP-A069 or some similar stuff, add "hpet=disable" to the boot options.

Read the instructions again.

"Take your notebook PC to an authorized ASUS service center if you have problems with the recovery process."

Asked myself where the nearest authorized ASUS service center could be. There had to be one in Warsaw, so it was not that bad, but what if I didn't make it before closing time? A notebook-less Easter? Nightmare.

"Daddy, do you have a Win XP CD?
-Let me check... no.
-Do you have anything that installs something?"
He had a Windows 2000 Professional Install CD. Boyfriend told me to give it a try, remove all the partitions except for "recovery". Listened to Boyfriend and retried the recovery CD. Worked. I got those 24 GB I wanted back. Now just gotta install and configure my applications.

By the way, here's an article on how to fix your Windows MBR with an Ubuntu liveCD, looks interesting. Thumbs up for Ubuntu for having such functions.

Microsoft strikes again

I learned that Microsoft bid $44 billion for Yahoo!. What wouldn't they do to divert attention from the concerning facts I wrote about recently.

Anyway, good for Yahoo!, I guess. They definitely need some refreshement, judging by how the page http://features.yahoo.com/webceleb/britney/ looks like. (Not even a menu! That's wrong, even for April 1999!)