Tag Archives: Windows

What’s *not* wrong with setup.exe?

Jeff Atwood asks “What’s wrong with setup.exe?”
Short answer: That depends on the implementation. Truth is, most of them are plain awful.
It should be simple, but all too often there are too many steps, too many unnecessary technical questions, reboots required, and worst of all, multiple attempts to up-sell to a paid version and nagging “register [...]

Tool of the Day: Synergy

I do website development. I also care that my websites should display correctly, or at least be usable, on a wide range of browsers and platforms. This comes at a cost of course: to get the full-on cross-platform experience, you’ll need the full-on cross-platform setup.
You could use virtual machines (rather slow in my experience, even [...]

Now is the Time!

I promised myself I wouldn’t write any gratuitously snarky things about Microsoft, but the way they’ve been behaving lately with the whole “235 patents” nonsense, I just couldn’t help it, especially when I accidentally stumbled upon Jim Allchin’s Windows Vista: Now is the Time! sales-pitch to developers on MSDN (it turned up in a mostly [...]

Tool of the Day: console (Windows)

Sometimes I’m stuck with using Windows. Fortunately Cygwin helps out and gives me a nice Unix-y command line where I can get things done in a way I’m comfortable with.
But, the default Windows command line tool found in XP is, frankly, awful. It dates back to Windows 95 (or at least, it looks and feels [...]

Mouseless Windows - things that make you go ARGH!

I’m continuing my drive to minimize mouse usage where I can, because it really is faster to use the keyboard once you’ve learned the shortcuts, especially for things you do a lot, and particularly when you are a two-handed typist.
But it’s obvious that most user interface designers have forgotten this. All too often I find [...]

Triple booting MacBook: OS X, Ubuntu Edgy, Windows XP

This week I had the opportunity to play with a MacBook. Well, by “play” I really mean “get it to triple boot”. Sadly, its sleek whiteness doesn’t belong to me.
OS X is the main OS, Windows XP is needed for work, and Linux is there as a tinkertoy.

Bucking trends

Doing the morning boot up at work this week, it crossed my mind that the inevitable trend toward faster computers isn’t necessarily helping us do things faster.
Well, duh.
That’s no big shock, it’s well known that software, like gas, expands to fill the available space.
Or does it? Something else occurred to me, too.
This rule only holds [...]

WGA = What?? Get Attorneys!

Time for Microsoft to change their corporate motto. “Who do you want to falsely accuse of piracy today?” sounds like a winner.
Microsoft hides under duvet | The Register
Makes me wonder about the sanity of those Royal Navy and US Navy warships which are controlled by Windows boxes. Would kind of stink to be in the [...]

Critical Bug Report

Ahhh, this Ubuntu Linux bug report made me smile this morning.

True X-Mouse for Windows

If, like me, you’re accustomed to working with Unix/Linux X-Windows type environments, but have to use the “other” Windows(TM) for some reason, you may lament the fact that you have to keep hitting CTRL-C/V for copy and paste operations. And also that Microsoft’s attempt at “window activation follows mouse” is not particularly good compared to [...]