customising life

There are many criticisms of closed source or proprietary software.  I just want to whine about one in particular; the inability to fix bugs in the program.

Recently someone ‘upgraded’ a fairly well known piece of office software (no not that one) and in the process broke another program that was working in between said program and a custom DB system I had made.

Needless to say I was right pissed, only being told after the event; with no time to assess the upgrade, check that the new version would be compatible or to make sure it was done correctly.

The upgrade being done incorrectly left pieces of an old ODBC driver lying about the Windows registry (shudder), which took a long time to scour and clean up. It took me just as long to find the cause and solution to the problem as it did to fix it, due to poor documentation.

Anyway, finally, even after getting this driver working again, the second program, which runs between the two DB systems was still broken because it was not patched for this upgrade.

Their tech support tells me they are working on a patch, which won’t be ready until the end of the week. In the meantime, I am ferrying data between the two systems manually, and am ever so slightly, going crazy.

The final straw and the case for my argument was that the purpose of this so called ‘patch’ is to fix the part of the program that checks the version of the aforementioned DB program. If I could have modified the code, all I’d need to do is change it so it would allow the latest version. Apparently it would have been as easy as modifying a ‘10′ to an ‘11′.

Ai! Where’s my wine?

The conditions had to be just right.

I tried out Kubuntu in my first days of using GNU/Linux, and absolutely hated it. I thought it was too much, too tacky with the cutsy looking icons, boucning cursor and every application began with a K. GNOME was a much s simpler step for me coming from Windows. This seemed to go against popular ‘opinion’ or at least as I percieved it; that KDE is more like Windows (aysiu has some nice dissections on this topic and many others).

Anyway, it’s almost 2 years since I first used Kubuntu; I’m ready for a second go.

I’ve been going great running Edgy at home, I skipped Feisty due to freezing issues, but now feel like I’m left behind in terms of leading edge developments. Simply stated I’m talking Compiz-Fusion. But I’ll get to that another day.

I’ve been very impressed with several KDE applications I’ve picked up along the way; KTorrent, Yakuake and KDiff3 come to mind.

I’ve also just finished an extensive project at work (for now), which required daily usage of .NET. Now I’m done with that I’m really keen to liberate this machine and turn my other box running Xubuntu into a local network server (for our project files, Bugzilla, Plone and other goodies).

So the conditions were just right to try out Gutsy Tribe 5.

The installation was simple and smooth as I’ve come to expect from installing Ubuntu . The issue had installing Feisty with Ubiquity and partitions didn’t re-appear, although it may have been because I was starting from a fresh partition.

My initial impression of Kubuntu this time, that it is very comprehensive. From applications to settings and the ability to customise, I could see there was many things I could play around with.

The first was installing the NVIDIA drivers so I could get Kubuntu across both of my monitors. The restricted drivers manager handles this easily, and setting up the second monitor in the NVIDIA settings dialog was simple.

The result….

And with a little time and effort (and GNU/Linux experience) I quickly changed those things that irked me most; opening files with a single-click, bouncing cursor and the original theme (it just makes me think of candy that is way tooo sweet!). I think this could be the start of something great.

Finally found some time to quickly jot this down.

We had a two and a half day romp in the snow last weekend, which was uncharacteristically good for Aussie snow in July.

Thredbo has such a poor year of snow in 2006 (check out the Snow Depth Chart (1 MB PDF); possibly the worst in 40 years!), so I was anxious about our ski trip this year.

Fears were alleviated in the week leading up to last weekend, where the snow was just dumping down. In my history of Australian snow experiences, this was an unusual treat. The snow was fantastic!

We’ve already planned at least one return trip this season, maybe even two.

Around the office I am more often than not turned to as the technology/computer/network/database/website/email expert. I really wish we had an IT tech or something.

Some users in the office recently were given Office 2007 on their PCs. Why some and not all I don’t understand, but already I’ve had many complaints about it. I’ve never used or even seen Office 2007 until this, and quite frankly don’t ever want too.

But sadly, I know that I will have to as part of my extra-employment activities.

I’ve already had one or two on how the interface works and a good discussion on how the new file formats will (or most likely won’t) work in the context of the office. In our case they certainly won’t work as people are creating new documents in Office 2007, which other staff simply can’t read. I don’t want to be around when this blows out.

But the most interesting was one this morning. Office 2007 killed the spelling tool in Outlook Express. One of our staff is using Windows XP (and Outlook-Express) and since someone installed Office 2007 on his PC it has completely borked his Outlook Express spell checker.

It tries to correct almost every word, yet offers no sensible alternative, whilst also denying the ability to add the proper word to the dictionary.

For example, this ordinary sentence;

Dear <Name>,
Please find attached the latest price list … <blah, blah , blah>

The spell check will query the following words;

Please, find, attached, latest, price, list

While this person was fuming over the inability to spell check their emails, without using Word 2007 as an intermediate step, I was quietly laughing (and cringing) in my cup of coffee.

I went back to Edgy.

Sorry for the misleading title.  I just couldn’t get anywhere with Feisty, and I’d had enough.
Down-grading was an issue-and-a-half too; a week full of frustration.

I went for my Ubuntu Edgy CD, but after installing was unable to log into a GNOME session, the screen froze before anything had loaded. I tried the same thing with my Xubuntu Edgy CD and was able to log into a XFCE session, but not a GNOME one.

After squeezing my home folder into some backup space, I re-installed this time starting with the /home folder fresh. This time there was no problem getting into GNOME so I assumed there was some configuration issue.

After copying back most of my /home folder, save any .gnome, .gnome2, etc folders, I proceeded to re-install all the programs I need, only to find the same freeze on starting a GNOME session.

Rather than re-installing (I was getting pretty hot around the collar), I worked my way through each configuration file; finally resting on my ALSA sound configuration file; .asoundrc.

I don’t know what’s wrong with it, as it hasn’t changed since I got my sound card working a while back. I do miss surround sound, but for now I’m just happy to have a working, non-freezing PC.