I’ve today posted an update to the original 03 July 2007 article about the demise of the venerable Microsoft Trackball Explorer pointing device. Check out the original article, the update (following the original article), and the countless comments the post has received over the past year. What’s the matter with Microsoft?!
Archive for the 'Rants' Category
I’ve been using Marteau’s Total Uninstall for quite some time now, and generally it works very well. It keeps the system clean of the junk programs generally leave behind when they’re uninstalled. However, couple of days ago Total Uninstall totally uninstalled my system. I needed to print a listing of the contents of a folder, and I remembered a program I had tried at some point, ExpPrint. I downloaded and installed the latest version of ExpPrint, 3.1.0.1, and printed the directory. Few hours later it occurred to me that the excellent file manager that has long been part of my core utilities, Directory Opus, might have the directory printing functionality built in — something which I confirmed quickly. It also turned out that that the directory printing features of Directory Opus worked better and were more configurable than those of ExpPrint… so I decided to uninstall ExpPrint. I fired up Total Uninstall, selected ExpPrint, and started application uninstall which quickly completed. I then clicked on the “Uninstall” button of Total Uninstall to remove the scraps left behind by the software.
Only this time I would be treated to a total uninstall of my Windows XP as I was about to find out. Total Uninstall first displayed few items that “were added after the program [to be uninstalled] was installed”. They were generic context-menu items, so I made sure they were unselected, and proceeded. Program worked for some 20 seconds and then produced a lengthy list of all the registry values it had deemed part of the ExpPrint, and thus removed. Only the list contained good part of my XP’s registry values including all context-menu items, all file associations, etc. Needless to say, after that nothing worked, including the system restore.
Nor did it help to attempt to restore system state (there would have been a very recent system state available) from the recovery console as outlined in a TechTarget article. Windows would just not start. Realizing that even if I were able to get it back up and running, the configuration would likely never work very well, I resigned to a full reinstall with a sigh. Since the filesystem was intact and since I keep good backups, I lost no data, just time.
Lesson learned: it’s worth keeping a restorable image backup of the system/program files partition in addition to data backups.
Update 17 September 2008: I’m still using Total Unintall, or at least “have been using it”. Yesterday I was installing some Photoshop plugins, and while doing so accidentally installed a plugin into inDesign’s plugin folder. So I fired up Total Uninstall to remove the software. The result: the entire plugins folder of inDesign was wiped out. Fortunately only files were touched, and fortunately Total Uninstall removed them to Recycle Bin, so restoring them was fairly easy without a lengthy repair/reinstall of inDesign. But as it seems Total Uninstall doesn’t have a feature to preview what is about to be uninstalled, I’m now questioning how good of an idea its continued use is. I’ve found the program quite effective, but errors like this make it hazardous to use. I’m going to suggest a preview as a new feature, but meanwhile—until/if such feature is added; see my feature request on Martau.com—I may opt to use some other uninstaller that does provide the preview as well as the option to choose whether or not to remove the “left over” items the uninstaller has found, or if no software provides such feature I may lay off 3rd party uninstallers for now—it’s better to have clutter in the system than to have to have to reinstall everything. I took a quick peek at Total Install’s competition (including Your Uninstaller!, Advanced Uninstaller PRO, free Revo Uninstaller, and the popular, also free CCleaner), and I wasn’t impressed. Let’s hope Martau adds the uninstall preview; it’s otherwise the best tool for the job!
Update 21 September 2008: My over-zealous spam-filter had caught Martau’s response to the initial problem in August. It has been addressed in the current release and “total uninstall” should no longer happen! Also, it turns out that the detected changes display (the “Changes” tab) in Total Uninstall displays all the changes that the program has detected for each installed program, and that will be reverted or removed during the uninstall. Thus, by reviewing the detected changes in prior to starting the uninstallation process any unpleasant surprises can be avoided. This is pretty much what I was looking for with the “uninstall preview” feature (as outlined in 17 September 2008 update above). Good job, Martau! Now I can continue to recommend Total Uninstall as the best uninstall tool available for Windows!
Some years ago slot-load CD and DVD drives were abound. Plextor, Pioneer, Sony, Toshiba all made some models that lacked the tray. Now if you try to find one you’re out of luck (except, perhaps, on eBay where you might still find a second hand slot-load drive).
So what happened? The slot-loaders clearly cannot be as fragile as the tray units – the trays are flimsy! Especially laptop DVD-drive trays almost self-destruct on slightest breeze! Perhaps there were issues with the alignment… but then a slot-load DVD-ROM drive that I have had in use from the early part of this decade is still working fine and I’ve never had any trouble with it. Perhaps it’s difficult to make writers that are slot-load? But there is still a place for read-only units. Two of the three computers our kids use (each has their own) has currently a destroyed DVD-ROM drive. You guessed it, the tray’s been bent or ripped out. If they were slot-load drives, perhaps some items would’ve been stuffed into them, but likely they would not have been destroyed. Slot-load drives would also be perfect for laptops: no super-flimsy trays, just a slot where a disk would sleekly slide in.
Clearly it is possible to continue manufacturing reliable slot-load drives as, for example, the popular game-console Wii that was released less than two years ago, comes with a slot-load DVD-drive. Wii drive reads both 4.7Gb and 9Gb DVD disks so clearly alignment can not be a major issue.
Manufacturers, please bring back the slot-load drives!
I spent most of today dealing with server emergencies. Last night we had severe thunderstorms pummeling through the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area with high winds, even few tornado alerts. No tornadoes were officially spotted in the city area, but winds and the lightning were strong enough to do some damage to the power grid. Servers were still working normally at night (I was up, watching the weather radar at 4am), but by the morning the dedicated servers I manage were unreachable. A quick call to CI Host’s tech support produced no help: a busy tone. Dialing repeatedly for the next half an hour didn’t make any difference, so there didn’t seem to be support available today. According to the recorded “current network status” at the company’s main phone number there were “no current network outages or other issues”. Yeah, right. Being only 20 minutes or so away from the facility I decided to go to investigate.
At the hosting company’s Bedford facility (”CDC-01″) chaos reigned supreme. All the doors were open, diesel generators were spewing fumes into the air (while being cooled by rigged water-hoses), and a mixture of technicians and concerned looking nerds were running around. Being one of the nerds, I joined in. There was no usual security, I strolled in to the lobby and chatted with one of the CI Host’s admins. Mains power was down as I had gathered from the diesel generators running outside of the building. Since I was there, I decided to take a look at the co-located servers on two different floors. Elevators were not working, of course, so it was up the stairs. Approaching the 2nd floor server room the temperature was increasing on every step — the generators were able to provide electricity for the servers, but not for the A/C!. Inside the room, the thermometer on the wall was displaying 90°F (32°C), but someone who had been there for several hours working on their server swore the thermometer was pegged to not go over the 90°F mark. My server’s internal temperature sensors were indicating 43°C for the case temperature.
After a few moments I decided to shut down the servers to prevent hardware damage.. the CPU temperatures were reasonable but the hard drives were running rather hot — normally the server room is some 30-40 degrees (C) cooler.
After shutting down the servers I was ready to leave, and picked up the phone to have someone to come to let me out. Line busy! Was I trapped in the sauna? No… I forgot there was no security today; all the doors were unlocked. So I decided to pay a visit to the third floor co-lo room where the A/C was supposed to be running and where another of the servers I manage is located. Once I made it there (through a staircase), I found just another hot room full of concerned nerds and their baking computers. I switched off the server there, too, and left.
According to the case temperature sensors the A/C started working again around 10:30 in the evening. I switched the servers back online through remote access.
With the dust settled, I’m starting to look for alternative co-lo facilities. While the power outage was not the fault of CI Host, their level (or lack of) disaster preparedness is disheartening. Firstly, it is very irresponsible to let the clients’ servers run in that kind of “torture test” environment — I think they should not provide electricity for the servers if there is no electricity for the A/C. This exact same thing happened few years back after a major storm, but early summer rather than in the spring, so the temperatures were even higher. Clearly there has been no improvement in the emergency power since that time.
The strongest contender at the moment is Colo4Dallas. I’m going to tour their facility in the next few days, and likely start planning a move there.
The last of the two domains I registered on February 14 was finally live on Feb 24th.. after several calls to NSI technical support (and probably total of 2 hours on hold). Even though both of the domains were included in the initial trobule ticket on Feb 17th, only one of them was fixed and operational on the 19th. The second domain took additional five days to get online. Good going, NSI!
One thing I did learn, though: apparently it is possible to have the reservation deleted. In other words, if you or someone else looks up a domain name using NSI’s home page and they “do you a favor” by reserving the name for the next seven days “so that the scalpers can’t register it” (I can’t really see how that improves the situation — they have no way of knowing who checked the availability of the domain name initially), you can call NSI’s tech support and request the name to be removed from the reservation list immediately, thus opening it up for reservation at other registrars.
Stay away from NSI!
The two domains I was forced to register via Network Solutions (see the previous post) are still not live, two days later. I set the name servers correctly immediately after the domains were registered, created the corresponding name server records, and tested them. Then I waited. 24 hours.. no live domains. 48 hours.. no live domains! I called NSI’s technical support and, after about 30 minutes on hold, was told to preferably use their internal managed name servers, or if I really had to use my own name servers, reassign the name servers to the internal, then back to my own. In other words, “flip the switch” few times. Click. Click. Click. And then call them back some hours later if nothing happens. For this I had to pay $20 more per domain per year! Generally at GoDaddy the domains are live instantly, and at latest within an hour or two after registration. No fuss. I’m sure the same is true with many other good registrars out there, Network Solutions is just not one of them.
Network Solutions is now apparently resorting to rather questionable marketing tactics to be able to continue to charge the excessive $35/year for .com registrations while stellar competition (such as GoDaddy) offers the same for $9.99/year and you get better customer service and easier to use management interface.
There are many snazzy AJAX-based whois tools on the web, such as ajaxwhois.com. Some of them abuse the collected lookup information so that when a user finds a cool sounding domain name that is available but doesn’t register it right away, the owner of the whois-tool goes and registers the domain name and slaps a $5,000 sticker on it. Few people go for that, but what if the increased sticker was $35? This is what Network Solutions now does! If you look up a domain name at networksolutions.com, and it is currently free, the cost is $9.00/year. That’s ¢95 less for the first year than the same registration through, for example, GoDaddy. But if you don’t register the domain right away, let’s say you wait couple of hours, Network Solutions snaps it up, and the price suddenly increases to the NSI’s old $35/year (since now you don’t have the option to use a competing registrar). Lookup at, for example, GoDaddy tells that the domain name you looked up “is already taken”. Command line Whois, on the other hand, says:
Registrant:
This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com
13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300
HERNDON, VA 20171
USDomain Name: THE-DOMAIN-I-LOOKED-UP-COUPLE-OF-HOURS-AGO.COM
————————————————————————
This Domain is Available - Register it Now!
600,000 domain names are registered daily! Don’t delay; there’s no guarantee
that a domain name you see today will still be here tomorrow!
Register it Now at www.NetworkSolutions.com.
————————————————————————Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Network Solutions, LLC domainsupport@networksolutions.com
13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300
HERNDON, VA 20171
US
1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620Record expires on 14-Feb-2009.
Record created on 14-Feb-2008.
Database last updated on 14-Feb-2008 17:20:18 EST.Domain servers in listed order:
ns1.reserveddomainname.com 205.178.190.55
ns2.reserveddomainname.com 205.178.189.55
Swell, eh? When you don’t have what it takes to offer better service than the competition, then you use shady tactics to extract money from the unwilling clientele. NSI is a bit akin to SBC/AT&T in that both originate from the time when they had the monopoly in their respective business areas. Times change, but procedures and even more importantly the old corporate mind-set stick hard.
Today I registered two domain names through NSI at the elevated $35/year cost because the names were needed, and because my boss looked up their availability earlier today using Network Solutions homepage. I will be transferring the domains to GoDaddy shortly, and will from now on advice everyone stay away from NSI (well, I already have been doing so but this is yet another reason to continue do so).
Being a fan of Firefox I gave Mozilla’s Thunderbird a try today. Granted, it’s a lot lighter than Outlook (currently using 2007), but… perhaps it’s too light. Yes, there are plug-ins to augment functionality and features, but..
Perhaps the biggest thing that bugged me about it was the lack of an option to set images from all remote sites to load by default. I realize it’s perhaps not a "safe" thing to do, or that it might increase the amount of spam, but the fact that I always have to click on "Load Images" to load the embedded images slows down processing emails. Emails arrive from so many domains/senders that setting a specific sites on the image-loading-whitelist doesn’t cut it.
I’ll give it another try later.. and if I happen to have missed a setting to set remote images to load by default (I couldn’t find anything on the topic by quick Googling, either), please write a comment.
I’ve been meaning to try out SkypeOut as a possible even less expensive replacement for our current VOIP service, and when a IOGear GBU321 USB-to-Bluetooth dongle arrived today, I paired it with my cell phone’s Plantronics Discovery 655 headset, and gave SkypeOut a try. Basically, that (three months of SkypeOut service) was waste of eight or so dollars. The call quality is so terrible that even if the poor call quality is an “occasional” occurrence, the service is not useable for anything but testing it as a hobby, or for curiosity’s sake (sort of like a HAM radio).
I’m on Comcast cable ISP with speedtest.net giving 6240kb/s downstream and 484kb/s upstream; at the time of the SkypeOut test there was negligible network traffic, and no other major apps open on my PC. I also made a recording test from my bluetooth headset using Sound Forge to make sure the bluetooth link wasn’t at fault (it wasn’t – the recording sounded like a very clear PSTN call). Apparently, I’m not the only person who doesn’t find SkypeOut call quality satisfactory.
So I continue to use VoipYourLife. I initially switched from POTS to Vonage, but after Vonage quietly raised their rate to Finland last summer from 4¢/min to 27¢/min (it took 2½ months after the rate increase before I happened to glance the automatically charged phone bill and thus notice the almost 7x rate hike), I switched to VoipYourLife and it has worked fairly well. While perhaps not worth “ten stars”, VoipYourLife has been at least as good call quality-wise as Vonage and their customer service is considerably better than that of Vonage’s (which of course doesn’t say much 
.. but they are actually quite responsive), so they’re probably about as consumer good as VOIP services go (corporate VOIP services aren’t trouble-free, either). But considering that the monthly fee is about 1/3 of equivalent AT&T service — and I can dial overseas calls directly at a reasonable cost without having to resort to the “prefix” calling services, I think it’s worth it.
Finally a word for those who found this post while searching info about IOGear GBU321 and/or/with Plantronics Discovery 655. They seem to work well together; IOGear driver installation got stuck on the first run, but my PC was having some issues, and rebooting and reinstalling the driver fixed the problem. Pairing with Discovery 655 was easy once I found the manual as the pass code, “0000″, was needed to complete pairing. The range is not very long, but it was to be expected. The quality starts to degrade after about 30 feet, just like it does with a cell phone. But while sitting at the computer, or while moving around in the same room, the connection quality is very good. The driver disk that came with the bluetooth dongle was out of date (or at least a new version several versions ahead was available from the IOGear website).
I’m in the process of migrating an Exchange server to new hardware. At the same time the Exchange organization name and structure were changed and reorganized, so the only way to move the existing mails between the servers was to use exmerge.
I was scratching my head (and pulling my hair) for several hours with strange errors. Extraction of many mailboxes failed with errors such as “MAPI_W_PARTIAL_COMPLETION” in the log files. I killed anti-virus and anti-spam services on the server but that made no difference. So I increased logging level and got a new error message: “Error opening message store (MSEMS).” With the “help” from that error message (and Google) I found a MS support page that resolved the problem; the server’s Administrative account had “deny” permissions set for Receive As and Send As.
So far so good, now all the smaller mailboxes seem to be extracting fine. But there are five mailboxes whose sizes range from 2.7Gb to over 5Gb. The PST files have a 2Gb limit, so now I’ll have to do multiple runs for those mailboxes with date ranges, such as pre-2005, 2005, 2006, and 2007 (I found some tips on date-limiting extraction here)… that should break the large mailboxes to small enough pieces so that the corresponding PST files will be below the 2Gb limit. I find it strange that this is the only method of transferring data from an Exchange installation to another (when not in the same forest). If the data store file could not be migrated, why not offer some kind of binary transfer file format that could be of any size? Or—at least—why not offer an automated splitting of the output PST files; when one reaches 1.9Gb, it would automatically be closed and a new one opened with a sequential number after the name. The current way is awfully cumbersome, especially considering that it’s rather common for users to have large mailboxes in Exchange that doesn’t have the size-limitation of the PST files.
And what’s with the X.500 sender addresses after the move?! Considering that Microsoft periodically releases new versions of Exchange, and that they assumably want people to upgrade, why to make upgrading so painful? All this would be so simple in the UNIX world, for example, with Postfix + Dovecot.