26 posts tagged “software”

Gosh, don’t these computer boffins test anything any more?
   I installed Firefox 3.5.3 today on my laptop. I had heard that most of my plug-ins were compatible with the program, and as it is the fourth incarnation of the 3.5 series, I thought: surely the errors had gone. But I kept some healthy scepticism on the grounds that ‘improvement’ in the computer world usually means that I would waste time downloading something and have it blow up in my face.
   This was no exception.
   It not only created a bug with one of our sites, which could have been coincidental, I found some rudimentary interface issues. Pressing down on the mouse wheel, on some sites, did not open the page in a new tab. Again, I doubt I am alone.
   In Firefox 3 in the past, one could select text and drag it into the Google Toolbar search box. The behaviour then would be: the text would be, if it was comprised of multiple words, framed in dumb quotation marks. The text existing inside the box would disappear in favour of the new phrase. The Google Toolbar would automatically begin the search.
   Not any more. And this is not Google’s fault. The latest toolbar works fine with Firefox 3.0.14 on my desktop machine. It just doesn’t work with 3.5.
   All that happens is that the text is pasted in to the box, wherever the cursor happens to land. The old text is not deleted. The search does not activate.
   This is one of the most basic, oft-used, everyday features in a web browser in 2009—but Firefox 3.5 does not support it.
   I was advised to upgrade on the Mozilla forums. That’ll teach me to listen to computer boffins. I now have a buggy browser that has caused me some frustrations already in its first few hours. It is also not that noticeably faster than its predecessor.
   People: test, test, test. I am not asking the world here. I am just asking that things work reasonably.
   Ten to one no one has bothered filing a big report because they are quite happy to tolerate crap. I shouldn’t judge: after all, I am still on Facebook. If I was that intolerant, I would file a complaint with them every day. Instead, I only file one every two weeks and still manage to refrain from calling Mark Zuckerberg a nonce.
   So a nickel’s worth of advice today: if you haven’t “upgraded” to 3.5, don’t.

I have written to the creator of the WP-Cufón plug-in for Wordpress about this bug, which caused some missing characters at the Lucire website today:

It turns out that the ligatures (such as the fi character) are missing from the Javascript version of my JY Fiduci typeface family which we converted. Upon discovering this, I disabled the Cufón plug-in so that the text could display normally, albeit in whatever typeface the reader has on the receiving end.
   At least when we have bugs, I act on them (hello, Facebook?).
   But the above video is a great one. Click here to have a view of it—and watch it right to the end, if you don’t know how it finishes. I also put it here on Vox.

You’d think that I learned my lesson the first time I tried to upgrade Wordpress using its innocent little button that read, ‘Upgrade to 2.8.1’. But, I figured, what if I messed up, and the program was OK? I’d feel bad about rubbishing the software, right?
   So tonight I pressed the button again on another blog we are working on.
   I am doing nothing wrong. The program is stuffed. This is all that happens:

Half an hour and counting.
   If you see the update button on Wordpress: do not press it! Save yourself some heartache and do it the long way.
   This blog isn’t even customized much, and it still doesn’t work.

PS.: Last time, I let Wordpress run for about 15 minutes before giving up, and this stuffed everything up. This time, I estimate I let Wordpress stay on the blank screen above for around 35 minutes. I then clicked the ‘Dashboard’ button and Wordpress claimed that it had performed the upgrade, and I needed to click one more button to upgrade the database. Surprisingly, that has worked.
   So: this does not take a few minutes as some users claim, and there is certainly no progress bar. The entire process takes over half an hour, during which time one should not touch that particular tab on one’s browser. After that is done (you won’t know when: you’ll have to guess, but that is better than reading erroneous instructions), click ‘Dashboard’.
   For those who are having issues, please give the above a try. However, I can’t believe one has to rely on guesswork and I still reckon Wordpress should have tested its update program a lot more.

Got to love technology.
   For the last few days, Windows Vista has been trying to find drivers for my Nokia 6275i. It has failed most days. Today, it downloaded the driver by itself, but failed to install it.
   I have noticed that Nokia PC Suite no longer works. I was running the latest version.
   So, I hopped along to the Nokia website. However, it refuses to let me just download a new PC Suite. I had to select the 6275i model first (a process which took minutes before the website finally realized I had, indeed, clicked on the model icon). It led me to a link, which allowed me to download the version that was compatible with my phone.
   Only thing is, this version does not install. It claims I have a newer one already on the system. Never mind that the newer one does not work: that’s not Nokia’s problem.
   Again, as I have said many, many times before: (a) doesn’t anyone ever test this software?; and (b) is it so hard for computer boffins to make things that just do what they say on the box?
   Or is this someone having a grown-up rendition of the old ‘40 GOTO 10’ command line we used to do in BASIC just to be stupid?

Oh well, that was four hours gone trying to get Bluetooth to work on my new laptop (sorry, Stanley).
   I was surprised that Bluetooth wasn’t built in to the new Asus. So I bought a Digitus dongle and expected it to work flawlessly with Nokia PC Suite, as Tanya’s one had. Not so.
   Windows Vista could not find a suitable driver so my first port of call was Digitus’s site. The driver worked, but it conflicted with Nokia PC Suite, which ceased to work. I wouldn’t have minded, but the Obex file transfer put in a new timestamp for my cellphone pics. For legal reasons, sometimes, I prefer having the correct timestamp.
   Windows Vista suggested that I go to the Broadcom site to see if I could get a newer driver, after it failed to install one. Fair enough. I noticed that the Digitus driver was a Broadcom v. 5 (which Windows Vista insisted did not need upgrading), so a v. 7 on the Broadcom site seemed a better bet.
   Problem: Broadcom v. 7’s set-up program could not update my driver. It needed something called a Microsoft Windows Bluetooth stack. The error message was ‘Could not start Microsoft Bluetooth stack’, one that was so new that no one had ever mentioned it for Google to pick up! (That changes with this post!)
   The only Stack that came to mind was that dude off The Untouchables. Had no idea what it was talking about.
   The irony was that I think my laptop had such a stack (which I gather just means a driver, but the word sounds more butch), but the first Digitus installation killed it. I think that was how Tanya’s D-Link dongle got working in the first place. So in terms of Broadcom software, it seems that one application killed the very program that its successor required. Way to go.
   I went to Asus next to see if its driver would work, but that failed to install, too. And I went to Google to find where I could download the stack from, but no one seemed to have it.
   To keep a long story short I should note that I was installing and uninstalling the programs and drivers during this time. That much I knew I had to do after tinkering with this stuff since the early 1980s.
   When I realized that Nokia PC Suite worked with Broadcom v. 6 and up, and we knew v. 7 would not work, I set about looking for a driver for v. 6. I found it at Gateway’s site. I opened the archive, but never got around to installing it.
   On my last driver removal, I pulled out the Digitus dongle and restarted the machine, then reinserted the dongle. Getting ready to install the v. 6 driver, I told Windows Vista to not search for a new driver, but to ‘Ask me later’.
   Obviously at Microsoft, this means ‘Install the Microsoft Bluetooth stack’, as this is exactly what Windows Vista proceeded to do! Result: there is a Broadcom driver and a Microsoft Bluetooth stack existing side by side, working perfectly (something the experts say is not recommended), Nokia PC Suite works perfectly, and I can add more devices using the dongle, whose light now flashes confidently (it did not with some of the earlier drivers).
   The lesson, as I have documented here and elsewhere over the years, is to do the exact opposite to what instruction manuals, software companies and boffins tell you, and that will serve you very well when fiddling around with computers.

Anyone else having this problem with Vox? You’re typing away and the browser goes back a page or two by itself. I noticed it was loading something called pixel.quantserve.com (or a file with a name similar to that) at the time. This happened three times when I was replying to Robin a minute ago—I didn’t even re-read my comment because I was in a rush to press ‘Post’ before I lost it again.

When I first complained that Twitter did not know how to count, I had some well-meaning friends ask me if I forgot to count the spaces, etc. Come on, folks, I am not that stupid. It’s Twitter’s own counter telling me how many characters I have left, such as in this update:

Two characters left. Good. I am within the 140-character limit.
   Then Twitter returns: No, 138 is not over 140 characters. Again, among my friends I seem to be only one of two people who have ever experienced this. (As I always say, I can break any program just by following instructions and using it.)
   The result is this: The entire update is in ‘Latest’ (suggesting it was within 140 characters) but Twitter has placed ellipses after the Tweet at the bottom. If you click on them, you’ll see there aren’t additional characters.
   I tried to find you an example yesterday, even one with zero characters remaining, but Twitter managed to feed them through without the error message.
   And remember how I complained yesterday that Twitter lopped some characters off my bio? I had to retype it and I manually counted that it was within the 160-character limit. I even took a screen shot, because I knew it was doing something to it.
   I am glad I did because here’s how it looks today: It’s now taken six characters off (it was only four the day before). I counted the characters out, darn it (there is no counter for the bio field)—so why can’t the collective geek minds of Twitter work out how to count to 160? Do I have to type my bio daily now? The answer appears to be yes.
   So, as we leave this subject today, here is the bio, typed as it was yesterday: Any bets on whether Twitter will again take some characters off this by tomorrow?
   I can’t believe such a popular site would have these errors, or that no one picked it up during beta.

After discovering a lot of bugs with Eudora 6.2.5 (why are there more bugs with newer software?) I bit the bullet and installed Eudora 7.1.0.9 (the last-ever release) just before I went to bed. Fortunately, the bugs that I found have been overcome with version 7, which is at least something: now I am back nearly to the functionality I had with version 4.3.2. Hooray—version 7 gets me back to the functionality I had in 1999–2000!
   Of course, it no longer works in Paid mode (because the last time I paid was 1999) and really, if it were not for the SMTP authentication issues, I would have stuck with the old Eudora, which caused me far fewer problems. I do have a distracting Eudora box for Sponsored mode in the way, though there is a method for removing, or at least hiding, it.
   Because Eudora 6 refused to load after being closed down, I dare not shut down Eudora 7 at the moment, so that is one thing I have not tested yet. Newer software gives me the creeps.
   I think I am right to prefer the old stuff. First, the code was more compact and, therefore, better “proofread”. I notice that the installer for Eudora 7 was nearly double the size of Eudora 6. Yet the program functions exactly the same.
   Secondly, the programmers kept things simple, without bloating the software.
   Throughout my computing history, the old stuff has generally worked better. WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS worked fine. The Windows version was good, too, but then WordPerfect 6 came on the market. That was a piece of junk: I seem to recall it even had trouble switching to italics. It was also far more bloated than 5.1. WordPerfect 8, which I later bought, was fine for the most part, but it had trouble working out the distances between columns. Good old 5.1 never had these issues, though it was pretty bad at updating printer drivers. It is only with WordPerfect X4 (14) that some of the bugs have been ironed out—over a decade later. Maybe someone started caring again.
   Netscape was the same. Everything was fine up to 4.7, then 6 took ages to load and could no longer handle PostScript fonts. It also could not handle some basic things such as displaying quotation marks in the prescribed fonts. As of version 7.1, Netscape still could not handle these things. Even Mozilla took till version 3 before it rectified these typographic problems, though now it is easily (in terms of typography) the superior browser.
   Internet Explorer 5 was a good product, 6 was tolerable but bigger, 7 kept crashing. I never found out what 8 was like.
   There are programs which break these rules. Adobe seems to consistently deliver good stuff, real improvements on earlier versions. But it is one of the few exceptions that proves the rule.

As I always say, the newer the program, the more likely it will be buggy.
   I needed to move to Eudora 6 because of the way version 4.3 could not authenticate properly with our SMTP server.
   I’m kind of OK with it except for certain issues.

• Eudora now longer feeds advertising through its Sponsored Mode, yet there is no way to close the old sponsorship window.
• The ability to preview the last selected message in the inbox through the preview window no longer works when multiple messages are selected.
• More spam gets through, as though McAfee SpamKiller has been rendered useless by the upgrade.
• When marking certain messages as spam (because SpamKiller is less effective now), Eudora reorders the inbox without my permission.

   As this is version 6, and not the current one, there will be no point informing the manufacturer of these problems. However, I am surprised that as it is v. 6.2.5—i.e. it has been through quite a few revisions already—that these very obvious bugs have not been ironed out. And I am unwilling to pay for a program, as I once did with the old Eudora, if it is buggier than something they came up with a decade ago.
   It is typical, sadly, of the way software has developed: some really are worse today, and I am a very good witness to it, having moved from a 10-year-old version of Eudora to a three-year-old one today, and finding the decade-old one more reliable on most counts.
   Here’s the real kicker: according to the Add and Remove Programs dialogue box in Windows, Eudora is by far and away the biggest program ever conceived for general use:

While some big programs take a few hundred megabytes, according to the above Eudora takes some eight gigabytes!
   Incidentally, I have used Thunderbird. It reminds me too much of Outlook, which I find unusable. I declined to upgrade to Thunderbird tonight as a result.

I like being a bit of a Luddite when it comes to things like email programs. I have used Eudora 4 since the 1990s, and my particular 4.3.2.7 version since 2000. And why not? It works and I don’t need the flashest. Also, I have been immune from the viruses that have plagued newer email programs. That always made me feel pretty smug. The old stuff was more reliable.

   But, it appears, its time is up. There are SMTP authentication issues with the old version 4s with our new server, and I am looking at getting something newer. I tried Thunderbird just now but it looks too much like Outlook, a program which I find unusable. It’s going to be Eudora again, probably an older one such as v. 6.2.5.
   Bye, bye, Eudora 4: you have served me well for a decade.