We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: windows

  • a small form of happiness is

    … a USB key with the irritating U3 software uninstalled.

    Seriously, U3 is a major annoyance if you:

    • use Mac
    • use Linux
    • work on a PC with locked-down permissions
    • work on a PC with a one-letter drive gap (like having D: and F:, but no E:); U3‘s read-only system will appear in the gap, but your data won’t be accessible.
      (It’s not really U3‘s fault. The fact that Windows still has drive letters amazes me; why don’t they go for the whole 70s thing and have punch cards and gargantuan 5MB hard disk packs?)

    All four of the above apply to me, so u3 uninstall.exe is my friend.

  • the great lost opportunity

    I’ve always thought that Adobe missed a great opportunity when they didn’t make their basic PDF writer freely available for Windows. Other OSs now have transparent print-to-PDF options. If you’re lucky, a corporate PC might have MS Office Document Image Writer installed, but a 300dpi monochrome TIFF can’t compare to a PDF.

    Still, one can always install PDFCreator (if you have admin rights to the PC, of course). It’s a shame they decide to bundle a marginally dodgy toolbar/spyware package with it, but you don’t get that if you use the MSI installer package.

  • deadly windows

    Millions of birds perish every year from crashing into glass windows. And architects don’t need to do costly and time-consuming migration studies.

    But us wind guys get it in the neck.

  • go train chkdsk

    so *that\'s* what these displays are running!
    One of the GO information signs was knowing a difficulty this morning. Looks like they’re something like a Mini-ITX box running Windows XP, but I’d rather I didn’t know that.

    At least the signs (when they work) are better than they used to be.

  • OS bad craziness

    DSL running on top of Windows XP
    Yes, it’s really a linux box booting inside windows. Thank Damn Small Linux and QEMU for that.

    It opens up an X session, and passes through most system services — so I was able to print to my network printer.

  • aargh, why’d ya do it

    yes, it is windows
    Because the Mini-ITX box was sitting doing nothing all these months while there was much bickering amongst the driver developers. At least this will work, for smallish values of ‘work’.

  • keyed up

    Aiee, I forgot how a keyboard under Windows works! I’m hitting Backspace when it’s wanting Delete, and Alt when it wants Ctrl.

    Macs’ll do that to ya, eh?

  • CanWEA 2005

    I’m going to the CanWEA Conference & Trade Show in October; are you?

    It’s a shame their registration process only works under Windows, though.

  • How to make Windows suck 10001 fewer times: AllChars

    Allchars is a Compose key for Windows. This, as Lenny Henry used to say, is what the people want.

  • windows is killing usability, pt. 314

    Sent some urgent data to a client yesterday. This morning, a couple of frantic e-mails in my inbox: “Our IT dept has blocked zip files ‘cos they’re a security threat. Please resend!”

    So basically, Windows now means we have to:

    1. create the zip file
    2. rename it to .zap, .zep, .zop, .zup, … or whatever
    3. send the file
    4. the recipient has to save the attachment, and rename the file.

    Listen, I want to go to a sensible place today. How long will it be before those alternative endings are compromised (or that Windows gets a less lobotomised security model)?

  • compose yourself!

    Just one of the things that I really, really hate about Windows is its lack of a sane way of entering accented characters. People are forced to do is remember arcane character codes, like Alt+0235 to get ë. I’m sorry, but I don’t get why one should need to remember these numbers.

    Suns have a Compose key, that works conceptually a little like backspacing on a manual typewriter. To get e-umlaut, you type Compose + “ (either together, or one after the other) then e. It’s a system thing, and it works in all applications. A table of compose key sequences shows the huge range of special characters you can access in this way. Most Linux machines support this too; I have right Alt bound as the Compose key.

    I need the same facility for Windows. An MS tech staff blog entry basically hints that it can’t be done. But it is being done, admittedly half-heartedly, by MS-Word; if you search for accent in the Help, you can find Insert an international character by using a shortcut key. Word has done this for years, so why isn’t it in the OS?

    Update, 2025: You need samhocevar/wincompose: 🔣 Compose Key for Windows

  • the so-called alleged memory error

    the so-called alleged memory error
    Scare quotes in a dialogue box? Who knew?!

  • happy mailing : Blat online

    need to send simple mail messages from the Windows command line, optionally with MIME attachments? Blat is your friend!

  • why i hate windows …

    why i hate windows ...

  • How To Fix A Crashed & Screaming QuickBooks Timer

    We use QuickBooks Timer to track our billing hours. It seems to crash with great regularity whenever you finish entering an item. When it does this, its usual two note happy acceptance chirp turns into a squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that goes on and on and on …

    I’ve found a way of fixing this without rebooting:

    1. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, and call up the Task Manager
    2. Select QuickBooks Timer, and ‘End Task’ (it may take several tries)
    3. Open a command prompt, and hit Ctrl-G, then Enter
    4. After beeping, and complaining that ” is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file, the beeping will stop.

    This has been a public sanity announcement.

  • Oh yeah, and what does *this* mean?

    "click here to begin"
    Windows says, “click here to begin”. Begin what? The insanity? A nice wee story about elves and flower fairies? Making embarrassing smells in public places?

  • No tourism for you

    crashed tourist kiosk
    The Eye On Tourism kiosk in Union Station seems permanently crashed. It only used to seem to crash if anyone looked up Sudbury …

  • why I hate windows, part 314

    I’m due to give a presentation now. It was prepared in WordPerfect Presentations. Exporting it to PowerPoint breaks the formatting. Exporting that to OpenOffice breaks it even further.

    You’d think that printing from WordPerfect Presentations to Adobe PDFWriter might give bearable results. You’d be wrong; the formatting’s off, words are missing, the whole thing’s really ugly. Bleah.

  • using MIME::Lite from ActiveState Perl on Windows

    Wouldn’t you know it, but Windows just has to do things its own way. I’ve just started writing periodic system monitoring programs for our met station network, and needed to send e-mail. Under Unix, it was a simple matter of using MIME::Lite, and calling:

    $msg->send();

    But Windows doesn’t do sendmail, so you have to talk to the SMTP server directly:

    $msg->send_by_smtp('your.SMTP.server.here');

    That seems to work.

  • my monitor crashed!

    I use a Samsung SyncMaster 171s, and it has this weird quirk every now and again. It decides to fade to white with chilling slowness. I used to think it was Windows 2000 crashing, but the system’s okay if I hit the ‘Auto Calibrate’ button on the monitor.

    Maybe it needs exorcism.