Apophenia

For a year or two mittel has had only one pane of her Win XP task manager visible - and it's not even a pane, it's become the whole dialog. No menus, no way to change it. Can only see CPU usage, can never see tasks. I google periodically, can't find the problem.

Today, successful google:

Double-click the gray area of the dialog and suddenly all the hidden panes and menus and things reappear!

What bizarre quasi-human came up with this user interface, and why was it ever approved and implemented? (Whether or not it has any utility is another matter.)

And I thought it was bad when our website added a "click and then press enter" flash interface for viewing images.

Now I want to open every XP dialog and double and triple click, and find the magic one that lets me order mexican food online instead of just pizza.

Today we ship the new version of the software with the architectural change that i slaved over for two or three years. And it's almost entirely hidden from the user, and not mentioned anywhere in new features, since the goal was to make the application behave exactly the same as before, but not cost us certain licensing fees.

So now I get to hurray if nobody notices that I did anything.

My body must know that I'm planning on taking Zoloft again soon because my sleep schedule is getting whacked. I think I'm about ready to start the day soon.

Someday i have to decide between I and i and stick with it.

The Graphing Calculator Story — via epi_lj

In October, when we thought we were almost finished, engineers who had been helping us had me demonstrate our software to their managers. A dozen people packed into my office. I didn't expect their support, but I felt obliged to make a good-faith effort to go through their official channels. I gave a twenty-minute demonstration, eliciting "oohs" and "ahhs." Afterward, they asked, "Who do you report to? What group are you in? Why haven't we seen this earlier?" I explained that I had been sneaking into the building and that the project didn't exist. They laughed, until they realized I was serious. Then they told me, "Don't repeat this story."

Your task is to think of some software that had a version 13, and to remember if it sold well compared to version 12.

I keep wanting to like UML, and keep finding the look of the diagrams to be aggressively anti-intuitive and/or overly vague. +/- ugly.

I have very complex code that I want to document better though.

Mrum.

Microsoft asks weird interview questions, allegedly to find people that are smart and creative.

I wonder if the reason why so much of their software is buggy and insecure and horrible is because of that interview process and the resulting kinds of people hired.

There's a bit in the beginning about a recruiter asking someone about writing software to run a microwave oven. The someone gives reasons why that's a really stupid idea, and asks why they would want to do that. The recruiter loses interest in him and sends him on his way. Too me, that's completely bass-ackwards.

Maybe if they'd hired him, "Microsoft Bob" wouldn't have said You seem to have forgotten your password, here pick a new one and I'll let you in anyway.

Is there a good, inexpensive, visual web site editing tool available for Windows?

Claim: there is not.

Microsoft Word is such a piece of shit.

Dear Microsoft: please remove the Win16 subsystem, so nobody can use it, so I don't have to reboot because it's all used up. 64? see? not 16? modern? yes? k. (PS: IE isn't really using it? Is it? Is it?)

There's this horrible malware called "Windows Automatic Updates". Perhaps you've lost some work when it helpfully restarted your machine for you, trashing all unsaved work? Perhaps you've cursed Microsoft as being a totally fucked slobbering moron for thinking it a good idea to do the practical equivalent of a system crash in order to protect you from something that probably wasn't an immediate threat? Perhaps you've seen similarities between this and certain political policies?

Well, there was at least one brain cell operating at Microsoft, so you can still have your automatic updates without it fucking you over. (Microsoft: if you want to trademark that phrase and use it in advertising, go right ahead.)

Go to Start menu, then Run..., and type regedit
Navigate as far down this path as you can:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU

Mine existed to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows

Create the rest of the path by right clicking on the parent folder, choosing New...Key and typing the next part (repeating as needed):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU

Once there, choose New...DWORD value, and name it NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers. Double-click it and change the value data from 0 to 1.

Note: I haven't had a chance to actually test this yet, but I assume it works.


As soon as I figure out what to do with
HKEY_LOCAL_REALITY\GOVERNMENT\US\Policies\
I'll let you know.