Common Sense 4 Common People

The all new Millenium Bug

It seems people never learn... Or maybe some people in the IT business are too young to remember the millenium bug and its associated costs :-P

This comes from a security camera manual.

Have Fun!
Dimitrios Staikos 

It's the browser stupid

<object width="640" height="390"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/BrXPcaRlBqo&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/BrXPcaRlBqo&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="390"></embed></object>

I am done with the browser wars, now is time for mobile wars!

史德衡

 

 

 

 

 

Cats make my kids allergic, so I'll just listen to WhiteSnake in low whispers...

Process Explorer contest

Here is a screenshot of Process Explorer from my workstation.

From this photo, which is intentionally small, the one with the appropriate understanding should be able to derive that Process Explorer has a serious flaw, or so I think :-) That's why I call it "flaw" and not "bug".

The one who finds what I think is the flaw will get as prize my precious OSR Online WDK Bug Bash technical award t-shirt:

To make things just a bit interesting, I will accept a challenge from the first that claims that "This is not a flaw, it is intended by design". However the challenger must bet something that's of value equivalent to my t-shirt.

The contest is open to anyone who publicly declares his entry in the comments section of this post.

Hint: "I just clicked one menu item of PE" .
Hint: This is not an artificially generated situation. It is real usage.

Have Fun!

Dimitrios Staikos - Δημήτρης Στάικος - 史德衡

PS: I didn't check the Process Explorer forums about this. If I can't see why this is intended by design then most likely no one has noticed. If I am such a grand fool, then I deserve grand humiliation :-)

Desktop Magic: a Practical Joke from an engineer

I am in a baaaaad mood today...

Thank God I am not the bastard administrator from hell. Or I might do this to a friend who left his workstation unlocked:

1. Minimize all windows.
2. Press PRINTSCREEN
3. Save the image to disk as BMP.
4. Create a new folder on the desktop, call it "Got ya".
5. Select and move all desktop shortcuts in this folder.
6. Set the desktop background as the new image :-)
7. Watch the fun :-D

If you are really nasty then do the following too:

• Blur the image a bit before setting it as background.
• Select a blurred icon for the GotYa icon, or some innocent looking icon.
• When your friend sees his desktop and ask you to help him then tell him everything looks OK to you, not blurred.
• Help him take a day off ;-)
• Make sure your friend is sitting, because he might get scared and think he got a stroke or something and faint...

Have Fun,

Dimitrios Staikos

Digital Misfortunes: Mouse "Snap To"

Some features are meant for the advanced users, some for the lazy.

The mouse "Snap To" default button option is so poorly implemented (in Windows at least) that it is potentially dangerous.

I enabled it for some testing. Later I started a print operation, but for some reason the print dialog box took ages to appear so in the meanwhile I shifted my attention and the mouse cursor to the 2nd monitor doing other stuff... Guess what... While I was looking at the 2nd monitor the print dialog appeared (on the first monitor) exactly as I was about to click on something, so I clicked blindly at the OK button and the print job started with wrong settings...

DISQUALIFIED

Funny Software: Don't think too much

不要想太多！

I have two masterpieces today!

The first one was captured from the EVA Airways web site, but I have seen that elsewhere too:

Please enlighten me... What am I supposed to do here? Wait for something to happen and THEN press OK or press OK and then wait (for what)?

The second masterpiece comes from Visual Studio Team System. You can understand that we are talking about sophisticated "way too much thinking":

FIVE buttons and a checkbox??? Who let such thing go into a product?
For starters I don't get what happens if I check the checkbox. Will it remember my selection for ever? Because the explanatory text inside the parentheses describes something that will anyway happen if I press the first three buttons, so what the heck? This was a dialog box that really disrupted my work! I was trying to inspect some code changes and suddenly I am trying to dechiper a dialog box thiking "Oh the author is probably very wise since they work for VS team, so it must be something dangerous I am doing right now... let's pay attention".

Moreover, what I actually did and caused this to happen is the following: open the project, check out the whole directory, then unzip an update of the sources into that directory (the zip also contained the project file).

Ok, big deal so VS needs to reload the project. But WHY COULD I POSSIBLY want an undo checkout is what beats the heck out of me. Oh and "Check In" is a good option too... Check in the newly overwritten files without first examining the changes, then reload the project, that's so wise...

Have Fun!
Dimitrios Staikos

Disk space disappearing mysteriously in Windows?

Oh I feel so happy whenever I solve yet another mystery in the wonderful ways that Windows works :-) So happy that I desperately need to blog about it :-P

Last year I bought a ThinkPad laptop with Windows Vista. Lately I was running out of disk space. It just had an 150GB drive, so I was running low. I bought a new drive and with lots of failed attempts and some magic utility finally managed to restore the original disk with its mystery Lenovo partitions into the new disk and have the laptop actually boot! Then I had an extra partition which I decided (I now I am adventurous...) to mount as a folder on my C: drive. Just to see how that will work.

Then I moved lots and lots of stuff to this mounted-partition and got around 40GB free space in the main partition. Plus another 100GB or so on the mounted partition, I thought I was good.

However... the free disk space of the main partition continued to drop and drop and drop without any apparent explanation. When it reached down to 2GB, I moved some other stuff and got it back to 10GB. Then drop and drop again and today I had only 1.5GB free on the main partition. That was a challenge that simply begged to be tackled!

Microsoft update KB967723 installation error

For days now Vista has been bugging me about an update that just would not install (KB967723).
Even if I would shutdown the machine, it would just try and fail.
And not simply fail... but give me an amazing error code (80070490) which to cut a long story short meant that some internal database of updates was corrupt and I had to repair installation from the Vista CD. What???? Over my dead body!

Can you see the big picture here? I was minding my own business and one more Digital Misfortune came my way uninvited. But don't get me wrong here. If there is ONE technological feat that I admire in this world that is Microsoft Update. I just can believe such a thing is working. One major screw up (or security breach) and millions of computers can become unusable; just the security requirements of this blew my mind away... So I forgive them some glitches.

Anyway, since I had to debug this issue, I thought I might as well write a couple of lines about it, so that other poor souls like me might get a better chance when searching for an answer.

By searching the net and reading other posts I found some people mentioning that in similar situations they downloaded the standalone installer for the update and surprisingly enough it installed without problems.
Now that should ring some bells...
It is a seemingly non-rational action but it often has results.
So I downloaded the standalone installer for KB967723 and bingo! It installed and problem solved :-)
Isn't digital life so sweet?

Have Fun!
Dimitris Staikos

Too much power management can kill you

QUIZ
You can tell that something is wrong when:

1. Something that usually takes half an hour is not finished after 5 hours OR
2. Yet another piece of technology is functioning in unintended ways.

A couple of days ago I read a tip about 4 mistakes that can kill VM performance.
#4 was: The default power option of Windows Server 2008 upon installation is set to "Balanced".
Sure as hell it was set to Balanced, so I corrected that one.
But tonight something else happened that was related to power management.
A backup to network folder was taking far too long.
How nice... One more problem to solve...
I check the network utilization and see that it was 100%.
Now that's a bit unusual... Just a bit...
I take a better look and what do I see?
Link Speed 10Mbps!!!!!
Excuse me??? Where did that come from?
To cut a long story short, the Intel network adapters came with a default setting that made them reduce the link speed if the machine is idle. The machine was certainly not idle, but still the link speed was reduced... go figure.
I deactivated the setting and got back my 1Gbps with a healthy 30% utilization and my backup was finished in the next 10 minutes.

That's why I say too much power management will kill you...

Have Fun!
Dimitris Staikos

Irrational By Design

Compared to the average person I would probably rank as a pretty experienced computer user. This unfortunately means (and that’s not Windows specific) that I am often expected to take irrational actions in order to produce the desired outcome. Lately, more often than not, the desired outcome falls under the label "Troubleshoot a Digital Misfortune".

There is a small problem with semantics here, as the concept of Expected Irrational Behavior that Leads to a Desired Outcome is a self-destructing concept. Have many people repeat any behavior often enough for long enough and in the end it will be considered rational... Or maybe not? I don’t know. I am confused here...

To make matters even worse, obviously any of these irrational behaviors is really only seemingly irrational. Somewhere under the hood there is a good reason why it works, but as far as I am concerned as long as we don’t know that reason the behavior remains irrational. And even when we know the reasons, all too often we get the "this behavior is by design" disclaimer. It should really say that "this behavior is by irrational design".