Vista



  • So, I need to install the latest verison of our software on a Vista machine to try to reproduce a bug.


    1) Try to connect to the fileserver to download the installer.  Doesn't work: Vista insists on prefixing my username with the computer name.
    2) Email the installer to myself as an attachment.
    3) Drag and drop the attachment to the desktop: Doesn't work: "File transfer failed because File write Error [1210:4102]".
    4) Save the attachment to the FirstClass default location: a folder called "download" somewhere on the hard disk.
    5) Forget where the folder is.  Open "Search for files or folders" to find it.
    6) Click "Advanced Search", "Local hard drives", and "Search non-indexed folders" to make sure I'm searching everywhere on the computer.
    7) Specify a filename of "download".
    8) Wait 15 minutes.
    9) Search through results with names like "downloadprogress.state" or "$$_downloaded_program_files_64cda47462a16ff0.cdf-ms" for the few folders that actually have the name I specified.
    10) Double-click one to see if it's the folder I'm looking for.  It isn't.
    11) Click "back" to return to the search results.
    12) Wait 15 minutes for Windows to regenerate the search results.  Go to lunch.
    13) Double-click another likely-looking folder.  This time it's the correct one.
    14) Open the zip file and extract the installer.
    15) Wait 3 minutes for Windows to extract a single 10MB file.
    16) Run the installer.
    17) Click "Allow" at the "An unidentified program wants access to your computer" prompt.
    18) Wait 5 minutes while the installer does a full-disk search for previous versions of the software.  On WinXP, this is a very fast operation.
    19) Install the software.



  • Pfff...

    How hard could that be.



  • @Carnildo said:

    1) Try to connect to the fileserver to download the installer. Doesn't work: Vista insists on prefixing my username with the computer name.

    Windows gets confused over this pretty often, but you can deal with it by forcing computername\username. Or username@computername, but for some reason that gives me errors sometimes so I always use the first. (This is also the only way to connect from a standalone machine to a domain computer.) I have yet to come up with a good reason why connecting to a remote computer with the local machine name is considered a good idea, when the remote system will require its own name.



  • @foxyshadis said:

    @Carnildo said:

    1) Try to connect to the fileserver to download the installer. Doesn't work: Vista insists on prefixing my username with the computer name.

    Windows gets confused over this pretty often, but you can deal with it by forcing computername\username. Or username@computername, but for some reason that gives me errors sometimes so I always use the first. (This is also the only way to connect from a standalone machine to a domain computer.) I have yet to come up with a good reason why connecting to a remote computer with the local machine name is considered a good idea, when the remote system will require its own name.


    Neither works.  I think it might be because the server is a Mac exporting SMB shares via Samba.



  • I know it is 'hip' to bash Vista, but maybe the real WTF is the monkey at the keyboard?

    @Carnildo said:

    4) Save the attachment to the FirstClass default location: a folder called "download" somewhere on the hard disk.

    User mistake #1. 

    @Carnildo said:

    7) Specify a filename of "download"

    Try a file name of [whatever your actual file is called]. User mistake #2.

    @Carnildo said:

    12) Wait 15 minutes for Windows to regenerate the search results. Go to lunch.

    You know you can right-click and choose 'open' and it'll open in another window? User mistake #3.

    @Carnildo said:

    15) Wait 3 minutes for Windows to extract a single 10MB file.

    Nobody uses Windows Compressed Folders for serious purposes. I know I don't, because many times I've had to turn off the power to my old Win9x computer because I'd foolishly tried to unzip a file spread over several diskettes, one diskette was missing or unreadable, and the danged thing froze Explorer and presented a dialog requesting 'Disk 4/16' with no cancel button. Hard reset time.

    @Carnildo said:

    17) Click "Allow" at the "An unidentified program wants access to your computer" prompt.

    Annoying, but not as annoying as late Clippy. You can turn it off quite easily, too. (As opposed to the function of the shutdown button in the start menu, which is located under 'advanced power management')

    @Carnildo said:

    18) Wait 5 minutes while the installer does a full-disk search for previous versions of the software.  On WinXP, this is a very fast operation.

    This computer is five weeks old and has about 900,000 files on the hard drive. I have no idea what all that junk is, but I suspect it may be thousands of unused drivers. (Yet the damnable thing still freezes in sleep mode due to buggy video card drivers. I guess making the drivers for the only DX10 card on the market work properly with the only OS that supports DX10 was not high enough on their priority list)



  • @Brother Laz said:

    I know it is 'hip' to bash Vista, but maybe the real WTF is the monkey at the keyboard?

    @Carnildo said:

    4) Save the attachment to the FirstClass default location: a folder called "download" somewhere on the hard disk.

    User mistake #1. 

    Yes, but usually one that's pretty easy to fix.  There's a reason why almost every operating system ever written has a utility for finding files.

    [quote user="Brother Laz"]

    @Carnildo said:

    7) Specify a filename of "download"

    Try a file name of [whatever your actual file is called]. User mistake #2.

    [/quote]

    Would still take 15 minutes to search, and "setup.zip" would produce almost as many search results.

    @Brother Laz said:

    @Carnildo said:

    12) Wait 15 minutes for Windows to regenerate the search results. Go to lunch.

    You know you can right-click and choose 'open' and it'll open in another window? User mistake #3.

    That's exactly what I did.  No new window.

    @Brother Laz said:

    @Carnildo said:

    15) Wait 3 minutes for Windows to extract a single 10MB file.

    Nobody
    uses Windows Compressed Folders for serious purposes. I know I don't,
    because many times I've had to turn off the power to my old Win9x
    computer because I'd foolishly tried to unzip a file spread over
    several diskettes, one diskette was missing or unreadable, and the
    danged thing froze Explorer and presented a dialog requesting 'Disk
    4/16' with no cancel button. Hard reset time.

    This is a zip file.  As in, the thing produced by WinZip on the computer that built the installer.



  • What version of Samba?

    Vista default to using NTLMv2 and refuses to talk to anything less.
    Late versions of Samba (~3.24+ or something like that) can be configured to work perfectly with this, but with earlier versions you need to reduce the security in Vista (google for the registry setting, I don't know it).

    NTLMv2 has been around and used for ages, but Vista defaults to only allowing v2.



  • @Brother Laz said:

    @Carnildo said:

    15) Wait 3 minutes for Windows to extract a single 10MB file.

    Nobody
    uses Windows Compressed Folders for serious purposes. I know I don't,
    because many times I've had to turn off the power to my old Win9x
    computer because I'd foolishly tried to unzip a file spread over
    several diskettes, one diskette was missing or unreadable, and the
    danged thing froze Explorer and presented a dialog requesting 'Disk
    4/16' with no cancel button. Hard reset time.

    I must agree that Windows Compressed Folders sucks. My dad downloaded the source zip for .NET Nuke yesterday, and trying to extract it via WCF made it eat 100% CPU and take like 2 minutes to get 1 block on the progress bar. So I had him cancel the extract and install 7-Zip. Extracted in ~half a minute.


  • Considered Harmful

    @aquanight said:

    @Brother Laz said:

    @Carnildo said:

    15) Wait 3 minutes for Windows to extract a single 10MB file.

    Nobody uses Windows Compressed Folders for serious purposes. I know I don't, because many times I've had to turn off the power to my old Win9x computer because I'd foolishly tried to unzip a file spread over several diskettes, one diskette was missing or unreadable, and the danged thing froze Explorer and presented a dialog requesting 'Disk 4/16' with no cancel button. Hard reset time.

    I must agree that Windows Compressed Folders sucks. My dad downloaded the source zip for .NET Nuke yesterday, and trying to extract it via WCF made it eat 100% CPU and take like 2 minutes to get 1 block on the progress bar. So I had him cancel the extract and install 7-Zip. Extracted in ~half a minute.

    A word of advice about DotNetNuke: Steer clear.  Steer far clear.  Run away and never look back.



  • @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    A word of advice about DotNetNuke: Steer clear.  Steer far clear.  Run away and never look back.

    Explain.

    I mean, I don't even know what .NetNuke is, but please, if you will, for the community,

    explain. 



  • Just to let you know, the Download folder is located under C:\Users[Your Username]\Downloads.
    It's side by side with the Documents, Music, Desktop, Favorites, Videos, Pictures, Searches,...
    I must say that I prefer this new directory layout.

    And if you wanted to search, and left the "Search non-indexed folders" unchecked it would have been pretty instant.
    Oh btw, you can also enable the Search complete index in your Start Menu, so that you can just press Win, and type setup.zip



  • No user error. The problem is not choosing a bad work-around (and these aren't). The problem is the system who needs a work-around in the first place... Pretty simple. Let alone a work-around of the work-around !!!

    I think I understood your theory that makes MS compressed folders a good product, we just should know how to use them : To use MS products correctly, only one rule : don't use them. That makes me a perfect Windows elite user... I mean... When I'm on Linux.

    Ok I think we agree now and I finally caught MS philosophy to not use their product the most productively.



  • @foxyshadis said:

    I have yet to come up with a good reason why connecting to a remote computer with the local machine name is considered a good idea, when the remote system will require its own name.

    It's not that it's using the local machine name, it's that that is your fully qualified user name. On a standalone machine (or logged into the machine itself rather than the domain) it's "machine\user", when logged in with a domain user account it's "domain\user". I assume that the software either doesn't bother to check what sort of account you're logged in with, or that there's no way to check it. Either way, it's trying to authenticate you as the user you're logged in as. I concede that when it gets it wrong it certainly looks odd... 



  • They aren't work-arounds.  In Windows I click the X in the upper right hand corner of a window to close it.  I don't consider this a work-around of double clicking the upper left hand corner OR clicking in the upper left hand corner and clicking close (or File > Exit).  It's the smarter, faster way to do something.

     That's like going to a store and buying a pack of cigarettes.  Then you come home and lose them.  So you tell people how crappy your house is because it takes so long to find your pack of cigarettes you lost.


  • Considered Harmful

    @dhromed said:

    @joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:

    A word of advice about DotNetNuke: Steer clear.  Steer far clear.  Run away and never look back.

    Explain.

    I mean, I don't even know what .NetNuke is, but please, if you will, for the community,

    explain. 

    I could rant for quite a long time on this subject.  The company I work for used DotNetNuke commercially for a couple years, and we've finally stopped.  Perhaps we were using it for something it wasn't intended for, but I became intimately familiar with it and realized that it's really not suitable for anything.  DotNetNuke is an open source VB.NET ASP.NET web portal.  It's free to use and has a very liberal license that allows, among other things, for it to be used in closed-source systems and resold.  We used to create content managed websites for a variety of high profile clients.  It cost us tens of thousands in maintenence because it broke frequently without provocation and was generally very brittle.  I've dug through the codebase and it was terrible in a way that defies description.

    One time I set the debugger to break whenever an exception was thrown.  I loaded a page with no errors, and counted the number of times the debugger stopped on an exception.  It was over 250, for a successful page load.  They used exceptions for logic, for example: loop until exception, to enumerate values.  Their data provider model was a bit weird.  There were tons of helper objects that had no reason to require an instance but did anyway (should have been Shared or static), and throughout the code they were instantiated, used once, and thrown away.

    Each "module" (and there were hundreds) was required to have it's own "data provider" abstract class that _had_ to be implemented in a separate assembly, and used their helper class to use reflection and bind an IDataReader to an object.  Builds that worked one day would be broken the next, inexplicably.  We ended up having to backup and re-install several times a week while developing.  The filesystem and database had to constantly be re-synchronized and agree with each other at times, making it difficult to move a site or restore a database backup.

    The error messages it gives are flat out wrong, for example: "Minmax persistance[sic] type of cookie requires a ModuleId" usally means you forgot to add your module as a reference to the BuildSupport project.  Intuitive.  "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" or "an error has occured" are the other messages seen.  I tracked all of these down and realized that most of these are exceptions thrown in the exception handling code AFTER the real error occured, or errors that occured later because the original errors had been ignored with empty try...catch blocks (which were all over the place).  Uncaught exceptions resulted in a page saying "Upgrade failed" with some details about a database version mismatch, regardless of what actually caused the exception.

    I haven't even scratched the surface of how horrible it is but I won't go into any further detail here.  I think I made my point.



  • That "module" pattern (apart from the name) sounds familiar. If that thing is from the same guys as PHPNuke then yeah, no more questions...

    I suppose the "Nuke" stands for "will contaminate your projects and turn all sensible life into horrible mutations..."

    One of the funnies: <meta name="keywords" value="php, linux, hackers, programming, geeks, computers..."> HARD CODED into the page generation code of this (supposed) GENERAL PURPOSE cms. Because there is obviously no site on the net that doesn't deal with computers...



  • @yaytay said:

    What version of Samba?

    Vista default to using NTLMv2 and refuses to talk to anything less.
    Late versions of Samba (~3.24+ or something like that) can be configured to work perfectly with this, but with earlier versions you need to reduce the security in Vista (google for the registry setting, I don't know it).

    That would be the problem: MacOSX 10.4 is running Samba 3.0.10.



  • @Brother Laz said:


    @Carnildo said:

    12) Wait 15 minutes for Windows to regenerate the search results. Go to lunch.

    You know you can right-click and choose 'open' and it'll open in another window? User mistake #3.



    Yes, generally opening in a new window (or tab if your software supports it) is more conveniant when you expect there's a good chance
    you'll be going right back to where you started. But I wouldn't expect to have to wait for the search to run again when using "back". Windows
    should be remembering those results and not generate them again until you hit search again.



  • "Open Source Web Portal/CMS for all purposes!!!"

    I usually don't trust the words in the above sentence!

    Well, maybe I do trust Open Source, I am not sure, I never really "tried" it.

    But all that PHP software for hobby-sites, always seem to be so WTF'ed. 

    All that PHP stuff for every hobby site I have ever been on (Forums, Clan-Sites, News Scripts) have been hacked.

    DotNETNuke must be no better then when I read your post.



  • well, phpBB at least tries to bring in some structure.
    In the old version, they had abstraction layers for the database access and the HTML output, along with coding guidelines that you had to obey when you wanted a mod to be approved. I don't know yet how they are handling the new version.



    I believe non-hacky PHP IS possible if you try hard enough.



  • @PSWorx said:



    I believe non-hacky PHP *IS* possible if you try hard enough.

    "And with that, he set off into the desert, never to be seen again" 



  • @Ice^^Heat said:

    "Open Source Web Portal/CMS for all purposes!!!"

    I usually don't trust the words in the above sentence!

    Well, maybe I do trust Open Source, I am not sure, I never really "tried" it.


    It's the combination of "Open source" and "for all purposes" that's got me worried.  Open source that follows the "do one thing and do it well" model is generally quite successful -- see Apache or the GNU command-line tools.  It's when an open-source project tries to be all things for all people that you get problems.



  • @Ice^^Heat said:


    But all that PHP software for hobby-sites, always seem to be so WTF'ed. 

    All that PHP stuff for every hobby site I have ever been on (Forums, Clan-Sites, News Scripts) have been hacked.



    Have you tried SMF (www.simplemachines.org)? SMF is very secure, its code is quite nice (well set out, easy to understand), and presentational logic is seperated from business logic (business logic is in files in the Sources directory, presentational logic is in the Themes directory) :).


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