Live from Austin!

1. Calumny
2. Candelabra
3. Colonic
4. Cabalist
5. Canker
6. Capitulate
7. Cadaver
8. Cornhole
9. Catamite
10. Colostomy

Seriously, though, who thought it would be a good idea to give them all nondescript one-word names beginning with ‘C’?

At the weekend I cleaned the windows. A downside to a 2-storey house that I hadn’t considered is the difficulty of cleaning the windows on the upper floor. Rather than clamber on the roof or try to handle an 8m ladder, I bought a dispenser of window cleaner that attaches to the hose and sprays suds quite a distance. You then leave them for 15-20 seconds, and hose off. It did an adequate job. The ground floor windows I cleaned the old fashioned way, so we now have a much clearer view of passing arboreal rodents.

One day I may be rich enough that I’ll be able to buy furniture that doesn’t come in flat cardboard boxes and doesn’t need assembly. Not yet, though. So I also assembled our last remaining major piece of furniture, the sideboard for the dining room. The individual pieces were heavy enough that I had to be careful lifting them, so I carefully built the thing already in its final resting place. I also modified the assembly instructions to build it from the ground up, rather than build the entire thing and then have to flip it over to put the feet on the bottom.

As a result, pain. My back’s OK, but my legs are sore, which suggests that I’ve at least learned to lift things properly now.

Then on Monday, a woman in an SUV reversed into the Prius. Apparently her truck has a proximity sensor to stop you reversing into things, and it didn’t beep, so she assumed the coast was clear and carried on reversing. A great example of how a supposedly safety-enhancing feature can reduce safety.

So, tomorrow we need to go have the car looked at, and find out how much it’s going to cost us. I’m guessing it’s safe to assume a minimum of $500, as that’s our deductible. Also on Monday, rothko found out she needs some cracked teeth seen to.

So it’s basically been ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch so far this week.

Microsoft has announced its new tenets to “promote competition”, so I thought I’d take a look at them. I wasn’t impressed.

1. Installation of any software. Computer manufacturers and customers are free to add any software to PCs that run Windows.

Translation: “Your computer belongs to you, not us.”

Yes, you’re actually allowed to install any software you like on the computer you build or purchase. It’s hard to believe that Microsoft even have to write this down. That they feel it’s some kind of new principle to apply “going forward” is a shocking admission.

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First Windows Vista viruses published.

A few months ago people were telling me that Windows XP Service Pack 2 would be secure, and that they were running the beta release and were therefore safe.

As with every previous Microsoft promise of security, this one has turned out to be an illusion. A new worm called Phel infects systems running the final XP SP2. All you have to do is visit a web page, and it downloads and installs itself and puts a backdoor on your machine.

Microsoft Windows XP SP 2, the new service pack promised to improve the shoddy insecurity of Windows systems, has already had two critical holes found in it.

The result is that innocent looking files with non-executable extensions like .gif can execute arbitrary code on your machine when launched, without XP SP2 warning you in any way.

Microsoft press release, 2002:

Microsoft has announced that the BMW 7 Series features its real-time embedded operating system, Windows CE. This comes shortly after Microsoft’s Automotive Business Unit launched Windows CE for Automotive v3.5. This latest telematics software version based on Windows CE is an open platform that allows developers to create powerful in-car computing systems. It offers flexibility and choice of hardware platforms, peripherals and software components, as well as being able to take advantage of the growing community of experienced CE developers.

Siemens VDO Automotive AG, BMW’s preferred navigation supplier used CE in the Control Display, part of the BMW’s iDrive concept which gives easy operation and access to in-car features including the navigation, telephone, climate control and entertainment systems.

And the inevitable Reuters news story, 2003:

BANGKOK (Reuters)—Security guards smashed their way into an official limousine with sledgehammers on Monday to rescue Thailand’s finance minister after his car’s computer failed.

Suchart Jaovisidha and his driver were trapped inside the BMW for more than 10 minutes before guards broke a window. All doors and windows had locked automatically when the computer crashed, and the air-conditioning stopped, officials said.

“We could hardly breathe for over 10 minutes,” Suchart told reporters. “It took my guard a long time to realize that we really wanted the window smashed so that we could crawl out. It was a harrowing experience.”

At the weekend, I was installing a software update on the ThinkPad when the Microsoft installer decided to fail for permissions reasons. It didn’t think to tell me it needed to be administrator before running through the entire install, no, that would be too easy. And somehow although it wasn’t privileged enough to install the software update, it was privileged enough to wipe out several vital system files. So Windows started demanding the Windows 2000 CD. This is, of course, a classic example of misbehavior, as computers that ship with Windows very rarely ship with the CD.

Anyhow, I took the ThinkPad to work, fed it the CD, made it happy again. Then on Tuesday evening, it suddenly died. On rebooting, I got a blue screen of death. A slightly different BSoD from normal; this one indicated a hardware failure.

Further investigation revealed that the hard drive had had a head crash, and gouged out a nice chunk of the OS. Attempting to boot resulted in grinding noises and a BSoD. Attempting to safe boot resulted in grinding noises and a BSoD. Attempting to boot from the Windows 2000 CD also resulted in grinding noises and a BSoD, stupidly enough.

I managed to boot and install most of RedHat Linux, however, and in doing so verified that the grinding really was the hard drive, and not just a Windows feature.

No data loss. However, the only spare hard drive in the office is an old slow 5GB drive. I’m not sure I can even fit the OS and applications I need in that amount of space.

Of course, some would think that I ought to have a more recent laptop than the kind that sells for $600 in Tiger Direct’s clearance catalog. I’m going to have another go at persuading the management, as a catastrophic hardware failure seems like a good moment to remind them that the rest of the machine is four years old as well.

In completely unrelated news, I made a War Mix to practice using the new version of Cubase. It’s 55 minutes of stuff Clear Channel would probably have on their banned list if they’d ever heard of it, one continuous mix with layering and fading and shortwave radio transmissions and so on. I think I’m going to burn some CDs and send them to people.

Windows 2000 has just this minute decided to disable the clipboard. Suddenly, the cut, copy and paste menu entries don’t do anything in any application. The keystrokes don’t work either.

Oh well, time to reboot again…

And no, I hadn’t touched the machine’s configuration or installed anything in days.

Microsoft released Windows XP on Oct. 25, 2001. That same day, in what may be a record, the company posted 18 megabytes of patches on its Web site: bug fixes, compatibility updates, and enhancements. Two patches fixed important security holes. Or rather, one of them did; the other patch didn’t work. Microsoft advised (and still advises) users to back up critical files before installing the patches. Buyers of the home version of Windows XP, however, discovered that the system provided no way to restore these backup files if things went awry. As Microsoft’s online Knowledge Base blandly explained, the special backup floppy disks created by Windows XP Home “do not work with Windows XP Home.”

—MIT Technology Review on why software sucks