shdon: Signs of a bad website: looking for the product name on Wikipedia to find out what the h*ck it actually is, as the official site is unclear.shdon: Wow. I didn't know this. Software patents killed Commodore/Amiga. http://xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2005-February/002587.htmlshdon: Don't you just hate it when you make a good product, the customer rapes it, and then you don't even want to place it on your resume anymore?shdon: Getting to play The Silver Lining. Intro made me feel warm and fuzzy, then cold shivers as it unfolded. It works well, even without voices.shdon: Yes, this happens surprisingly often: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hellshdon: A gotta-love-my-boss moment: telling him you don't like heat just before the weekend starts, him installing an air conditioner on Monday.Windows Update is a great technology. It ensures that most Windows users are automatically kept up to date with the latest security patches for their OS. Especially now that is no longer tied to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, I'm a big fan (with one exception). Unfortunately, on rare occasions, the Windows Update client gets in a corrupted state and things get messed up in a big way. This can be difficult to diagnose or troubleshoot.
If, like roughly 90% of computer users, you run Microsoft Windows, you hopefully have Automatic Updates enabled. In that case, I predict the chances are virtually 100% that you've been annoyed more than once by the restart reminders pictured below.
Tomasz Szynalski wrote a blog post about using the English language versions of the software. His primary argument for doing this is one that I agree with wholeheartedly... it makes searching for answers or solutions to problems on the internet a lot easier. Far more people use the English versions than the localised versions. The English versions are often the originals, too. This means that you're more likely to get more results when you search for any error messages received in English.
Apple make some really nice hardware and maybe the software they create for the Mac is good, but their Windows developers must be complete morons. Although I think iTunes for Windows is probably the second-worst piece of software ever to be released, I do occasionally use it when I have to transfer music to my iPod. For a while now, it had been throwing up this error message an error message about how "the registry settings used by the iTunes drivers for importing and burning CDs and DVDs are missing".
Being the most computer literate person in my extended family, I end up providing tech support for that extended family. Honestly, I don't mind. I love to help out whenever I can. Today was another good example. I got a phonecall from my dad that some error message popped up and he could no longer browse the internet. To his credit, he had written down the error message in case it would not be reproducible by the time I would have a chance to look at it. In this case, it was "Validation failed for C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\VSINIT.dll. You are probably missing a necessary root certificate."