Ed’s Tech Blog

How to improve UI for me.

Media Player:

Let me access the damn CD drive from the Library! What moron blocked the CD/DVD drives from this view? Obviously, no one at Microsoft has ever tried to DJ a party with their player? A DJ has to be able to adjust the playlist without stopping the current music or losing the current playlist. If I pop in a new CD and want to add some songs to the playist, it can’t be done. I can’t even use Windows Exporer to drag a song to the playlist. Fix this.

Also, the library feature just sucks compared to winamp and itunes.
Winamp and Itunes.

One thing MS got right was the seemless movement between video and audio file. I queue up a playlist of music videos and mp3s. Media Player correctly switches between the video to the visualization without switching screens. Itunes and Winamp, Learn from this. Don’t put Visualizations and Video in different windows that conflict with each other. Guess how many times a user wants a video to run in a separate window at the same time as a visualization? Zero.

Winamp and MediaPlayer:

Itunes gives you basic controls in full screen mode without losing full screen mode. This is the correct behavior.

All:

Don’t make the music skip when going from fullscreen to windowed mode. Ever.

Itunes:

Don’t crash the entire program when you import an unknown video file. Winamp and Media Player never crash on importing any of my files. Itunes crashes on several. There’s no excuse for this.

Well hell, I just found the preference in Itunes to give the correct video to visualization option. Nice. Now it just needs to stop crashing when importing my media so that I can actually use it.

btw, here’s a smart feature.

Let’s say I make a playlist, and then the music gets shuffled around on the filesystem. No player can recreate that playlist even though all the music is in the player’s media library. How about a feature to at least try to repair the playlist. It ain’t that hard if you think about it. Not hard at all to get it partially right.

One word: “stupid”.

No three words: “stupid”, “stupid”, “stupid.”

They don’t cover it in the TexnicCenter help. I’ve been through three online tutorials and no one has given the correct instructions for producing a left hand double quote.

Inexcusably bad usability.

Usability should be a required class for all Computer Science students. It would save the world a lot of time.

Google Spreadsheets are not encrypted, but Google’s Help section tells the user over and over again that the entire experience is secure. That’s Evil.
Think anyone on the spreadsheet development team stores their bank account login credentials on a ’secure’ Google spreadsheet? Would a developer tell his own mother that it is secure to store her passwords in a google spreadsheet?
Well, the jackasses that wrote and approved the Help section just told every mother in the world that it is safe and secure.

Evil.

On the other hand, many other google offerings in their office suite support SSL for the entire experience.

https://www.google.com/calendar/

https://docs.google.com (Supports secure Word Processing, but clicking on spreadsheets from here removes the encryption.)

https://mail.google.com

-Ed

Terrible, terrible, terrible. From installation to end.

a. Installer didn’t work. Had to get a registry hack to get it installed. (should have tipped me off.)

b. Repeatedly crashes importing my library of music or videos.

I’m done.

My roommate has an ipod. She got angry just telling me about how terrible her experience was. Nothing worked right, good functionality was missing from version 6. Ipod wouldn’t synch. Crashed all the time.

Crap.

Oh, and I used latest available: 7.0.1.8

Running Winxp sp2. All latest drivers and security updates.

Steve must have been shitting himself during the keynote presentation when he showed off v7.

Or maybe it’s only the windows version that is jacked.

I’m going back to Winamp.

Thunderbird is crashing 1 - 2x a day now against http://1and1.com imap servers.

It never saves Sent items correctly with imap, and frequently mixes up saving Drafts into the Sent items folder. Either way, it’s pathetic that this crashes the whole program, and loses my in progress compositions. ie. Loses the user’s data!

Might have to test Outlook again, and see if it still crashes all day on imap servers.

First, credit to Michael at this site:

http://blog.opsan.com/archive/2005/04/17/395.aspx

ok, now for my cookbook description.
1.
to secure a whole website.
in iis mmc, properties of website, directory security, secure communications,
click the ‘Require secure channel, require 128-bit encryption’.

2.
now in c:\inetpub\wwwroot, make a nonssl directory in windows explorer.
now in iis mcc, make a virtual directory and point to the
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\nonssl directory.

3.
in iis mmc, right click the new virtual nonssl directory.
goto directory security, secure communications, and uncheck require secure channel.

4.
Drop a file named sslredirect.asp into this directory. Put the following script into it.

—————-
< %
If Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_PORT")=80 Then
Dim strQUERY_STRING
Dim strSecureURL
Dim strWork

' Get server variables
strQUERY_STRING = Request.ServerVariables("QUERY_STRING")

' Fix the query string:
strWork = Replace(strQUERY_STRING,"http","https")
strWork = Replace(strWork,"403;","")
strWork = Replace(strWork,"80","")

' Now, set the new, secure URL:
strSecureURL = strWork
'response.write(strSecureURL) ' uncomment for sanity check.
Response.Redirect strSecureURL
End If

%>
————

5.
Goto iis mmc website properties, custom errors, 403;4.
Switch it to URL and location of:
/nonssl/redirectssl.asp

6. done.

Some good resources:
http://blog.opsan.com/archive/2005/04/17/395.aspx?Pending=true
http://weblogs.asp.net/pwilson/archive/2004/12/23/331455.aspx

Mac PowerWhatever Laptop with 4 cores.

Vmware ESX Server w/ OSX, Windows XP as the main OS’s. And at least one linux flavor too.

Also Vmware should dual boot with another small partition of either XP or OSX for times when you ESX Server truly wipes out performance of the hardware. For example, 3D intensive tasks.

Probably put an image of Win2k3, OSX server on there for development.
Next hardware option for workstation laptops:

2 hard drives for:

a. Raid 1

b. Speed: so all these OS images don’t have to share one drive.

I am in charge of 4 different installations of EMC Retrospect 7.5 in Windows Domains and Workgroups.
Not a single one of them works as advertised, even after days on days with tech support.

In case you don’t know, Retrospect is backup and disaster recovery software. Guess what it doesn’t do half the time? Backup data.

Really, it’s the Proactive feature that is completely bug ridden. But everything we wanted it for was based on that feature working as advertised.

Anyway, if you need that feature, use a different vendor. Please, please don’t use EMC Retrospect! Your data will NOT be backed up correctly and your clients will have your head on a stick when disaster strikes.

Any alternative recommendations are welcome.

Microsoft Outlook Signatures. How could they screw up something so simple?

By trying to force Microsoft ’standards’ on users. You can’t use valid HTML in the signatures. You can only use bastardized MS Word HTML. Plus, even simple things like fonts and line spacing are impossible to set/unset in many circumstances. To top it off, MS Word 2003 isn’t truly compatible with it either. The line spacing fiasco immediately comes to mind.
In contrast, Mozilla Thunderbird accepts standards based HTML, and it just plain works.
I understand Microsoft’s unrelenting decision to make Outlook break with all standard linux IMAP email servers because that would cut into their Exchange Server cash cow. But doing the same trick with email signatures? Grow up.

What moron put this together? Complete bitch to swap a hard drive out, and for no good reason.