I like Fedora/Red Hat it's the only linux distro I've used in the last 5 years, but Core 9 is DOA. Any OS that doesn't properly start its networking (and I'm not the only one to experience this) doesn't make the grade. I've now down graded to Core 8 which seems much more stable (is Fedora turning into the Star Trek franchise?) Core 9 looks nice, but I'm going to wait for 10 after this experience, namely "no networking", start the network via /etc/init.d/network and then login, guess what the UI doesn't recognize the active network, and I say piss of.

If you ask me the Java installer is broken, at least from a usability perspective.

Here's a breif list:

• You have to install demos and samples (I don't want them installed)
• The installer spawns at least one other installer (this installer doesn't pick up the path from the previous install, very dum)
• Even though you want to install things in some place other than  "Program Files" the  JavaDB is  installed there (idiots)
• If you grab the Java EE + SD, it doesn't install the JRE, WTF, so I'm not going the other route install the JRE/JDK and then install Java EE
• I'm probably going to uninstall JavaDB and download the standalone installer to install it again (sheesh)
• The JavaDB (any platform) installer isn't one, just a zip, somehow I find this more comforting (but the download page lists Windows 2000 as one of the options, what is this 1999?)
• Too many options on their download page Java EE/JDK Update 3/Net Beans blah blah blah http://developers.sun.com/downloads/

Sun, do yourself a favour (and everyone else at the same time) and get your act together.

Are you prone to fits of rage, do you get easily frustrated? If so, avoid OpenBSD. Just when I thought an operating system couldn't get any worse than FreeBSD, OpenBSD lowered the bar, yah!

The installer is pretty lame, instead of having a directory with a bunch of files and other crap in it, including very poorly written documentation, what would be nice is the entire release in one CD image, not spread all over hell's half acre. Of course there is no BASH shell included, oh there is a binary package but there are a number of shared libraries required, and the package doesn't really indicate any dependencies that bash has, so off to play detective, folks I have better things to do with my time than figure out what packages contain what shared libraries that are needed. Just to add insult to injury the binary package is linked with a very old version of libintl, thanks for coming out, this is easy enough to cheat.

For completeness sake, your need the following two packages to complete the bash install libiconv and gettext which contains libintl, install in their respective usual places (/usr/local) and add a link for libintl.so.3.0 -> ./libintl.so.8.1 or whatever version is in the current gettext package.

For the most part OpenBSD is a lot like FreeBSD but there are lots of things OpenBSD doesn't support like bzip2 natively, this also means tar doesn't support bzip either, all of which is very frustrating.

There is no MySQL Binary install for OpenBSD, which isn't their fault, but it is an indicator of how important an OS OpenBSD is, not very.

ldconfig doesn't work as expected as on other OS's for non-root users, bummer.

There will probably be other updates to come, but I'm getting ready to abandon OpenBSD.

I kept with it, but I'm ready to take my LCD display and keyboard and throw them out the window I'm so frustrated with the incompetence that is OpenBSD. Apparently, IPv6 is installed by default and if you read the OpenBSD mailing lists there is no possible reason you would ever want to disable v6, since it is the "future." Well OpenBSD'tards with Apache installed it wants to bind only to the IPv6 interface and since I don't have any other IPv6 machines I cannot connect to Apache using our default configuration, I have to explicitly bind it to the IPv4 interface which means someone has to manually do this, what a joke. If I could disable IPv6 I could have figured out this issue much sooner, I don't know if this is an Apache problem or strictly and OpenBSD but I've never run into this on any other OS.

I've been pretty critical of VMWare, and I've been using Virtual PC since before Microsoft got their grubby little hands on it. Virtual PC in my opinion is generally easier to use and worked very well up until recently and for the most part supported Linux very well.

This weekend I tried to install Fedora Core 7 on Virtual PC 2004 (on my laptop) and of course it didn't work, so I figured, hey I'll upgrade to VPC 2007. After upgrading to 2007 the Virtual PC networking no longer worked so VPC was no longer of any use, after trying to fix the problem and jumping through all the stupid MS'isms I gave up and thought I'd downgrade to 2004, of course the network was totally screwed for 2004 as well. During this I also tried to install Fedora Core 5 on 2007 which I have working on another VPC instance on another machine, of course it doesn't work anymore. Now if I was a conspiracy nut I'd be thinking MS has purposely tweaked VPC to prevent Linux from running, the jury is still out on this one.

So VMWare to the rescue, having finally setup VMWare server for Linux and getting all manner of OS's running and being quite happy, I switched to VMWare and it worked perfectly, bye bye VPC.

So MS you may be giving VPC away, but if it can't do the job what's the point, I'd rather pay VMWare for a working product any day, MS's loss is VMWare's gain.

I installed the latest Microsoft updates last night, things went as they should, and then I turned off my machine (it gets a little warm in the office these days)

Only to wake up to my first system crash sans blue screen of death, it just spontaneously rebooted. I wasn't doing much to stress the system either, reading blogs, email, listening to ATI FM radio and I had an ssh session going.

To that end, I'm blaming the MS'Tards for this instability. so I'd be wary of applying the patch until we here more about what's happening out in the wild. Hopefully, there will be a patch to follow shortly.

Caveat emptor.

Update:

So far no more spontaneous reboots, but I'm always very wary when machines do strange things.

Update II:

Things are still fine which is reassuring, I've decided to upgrade my laptop we'll see how things progress. 

So, I've been doing some testing with FreeBSD and boy has it been a long time since I've used a pure BSD implementation, and I have to say it feels very dated. The installer definitely errs on the expert user side of things. No wonder Linux has and does mop the floor with BSD.

I never realized how much I've come to like and depend on the System V'isms that are present in Linux and of course Solaris since they changed their numbering scheme way back.

There's a bunch of little things like the installer is stuck back in 1997 and not very user friendly. Where the heck is curl? I installed all the supplemental packages and no curl annoying. Bash is in /usr/local/bin, what! bash isn't a first class shell, all very odd. It's probably me, but I don't see any BSD in my future. There's more things to come I'm sure, as I've just scratched the surface.

The default out of the box ssh is setup only for root/wheel sure it's secure, but you might as well disconnect the Ethernet cable if you're that worried about your server, stuff like this would drive a novice to distraction as opposed to being really really annoying, c'mon guys get a grip.

No SVN, I installed disc2 of the "extras" packages, no SVN, huh? No curl either which seems very odd.

No unzip either, have these guys been coding under a rock somewhere, time to wake up folks.

No dos2unix, I guess DOS is just to lowbrow for the FreeBSD crowd.

Oh FreeBSD why do you torment me so,  for heaven's sake why on earth do you link /home to /usr/home you !@&#@? FreeBSDtards!

I love Firefox its a great browser and the plugin options are awesome, but this latest update doesn't seem to be working with secure sites like e*trade and even my.yahoo.com portfolios very odd. All of this just  led me to change my e*trade password thinking I had some sort of major brain fart, unfortunately it was Firefox and the QA folks who had the brain fart. It would be really nice if Firefox didn't force you to upgrade on a restart or at least gave you the option to defer the upgrade.

Here's a letter I mailed to Rogers today, not email, not submitted via web form, I had to get all old school because their web site sucks so bad I can't submit a "contact us" form and they don't publish any email addresses, so it's back to old school, who would of thought in the 21st century I'd be sending a complaint via mail, needless to say I'm totally pissed off and when your pissed off I understand the best thing to do is to act immediately!

So here's my little missive to good old Rogers:

To the Rogers Web Site group,

When trying to view my bill on-line I’m experiencing a number of problems. In Internet Explorer when selecting “Download Bill” I get a new browser window that eventually gives me the standard IE “cannot find the webpage”. In Firefox selecting “View Bill” tells me I don’t have a plugin installed, I have the Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 plugin installed so there should be problem, when selecting “Download Bill” I get a new blank window, no error message this time. Your session timeouts are too short, the first time I composed this message using your “contact us” form when I selected submit I was told the session had timed out and I would have to sign in again, very frustrating. After signing in I was taken to the main page not to the “contact us” page where presumably I would see your comments were successfully submitted message. So now I don’t know if my comments were submitted or not, doubly frustrating (So I’m forced to compose this message off-line and cut and paste it into the form) Your Web Presence is truly underwhelming and unwelcoming. AND YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER FIELD WILL NOT TAKE MY ROGERS CABLE BILL ACCOUNT NUMBER AND TELLS ME I NEED A VALID ROGERS WIRELESS OR HOME PHONE NUMBER, I TRIED MY FIDO PHONE NUMBER WHICH IS OWNED BY ROGERS AND YOU STILL DON’T GET IT. I CANNOT SUBMIT THIS COMMENT, and pray tell why do you need a Rogers phone number instead of a Rogers Cable account number (by the way the field length won’t support a cable account number either) when I’m LOGGED into your system, you should already have this information. What if I’m a consumer interested in some aspect of you services and I don’t have a Rogers home phone but want one, how on earth can I contact you via your on-line form.

Honestly this is way beyond common sense. I’m forced to send this via plain old mail, thank you for bringing us into the 21^st Century, Bell Satellite TV is looking better and better.

Disgusted,

Postscript:

Rogers finally responded via email of all things, the galling thing is they ask you to phone them to get help. Here's the email, what a bunch of buffoons. Even better the email didn't even have a subject, WTF? I originally posted this email on March 26, so it took them 3 months to the day to respond, lightning customer service in the new millennium. It would appear that they fixed their problem a few days after my original complaint, it sure is hard to find good help these days.

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, we appreciate your use of online customer service.

In your recent email, you have informed us that you are unable to access your online bill due to technical problems.

In response to your email,  we are sorry to hear about the difficulty experienced with your online account, as its somewhat difficult to troubleshoot via email, As this will necessitate some dialogue on the specifics of the problem, we do recommend that this be done over the phone. This will enable our technical representatives to assess the situation, determine the best course of action.

We suggest you contact the Website Support department at 1-877-343-5745, open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.  They will be able to assist you further regarding this matter.

We apologize for the inconvenience that we may have caused. Thank you for choosing Rogers.

For future reference with respect to this e-mail, please quote reference number

Regards,

Suzanne V.

I'm trying to watch Larry Ellison's keynote from last year, and I get to see 30 seconds and the real media starts this annoying "communicating ..." shtick, which goes on for 10's of minutes at a time. No wonder they are almost forgotten in 2007, to those of you who think real media is the way to go for your streaming media concerns, get a clue and switch to you tube, you'll have much happier customers, and no annoying install ware. At the current rate it's going to take me 3 or 4 hours to watch his keynote in 30 second chunks, fun wow.

I know eclipse is free, but come on, I don't know how people actually use this piece of shit to build software. I like open source as much as the next guy, I just like "high quality open source" which may be an oxymoron.

Here are a bunch of my pet peeves so far:

• When debugging your warped to a new tab with the screen in a completely brain dead configuration. So I'm forced to reorganize the screen so it looks somewhat simple. Listen this isn't mission control I don't need to see everything at once.
• When debugging the first message you see in the console is "The application will continue after a brief delay" all I can say is WTF, I want to debug now, not after the intermission you tools As it turns out this isn't Eclipses fault, but copy protection in one of the libraries I'm using so mea culpa on this one.
• When debugging the only way to see the "step over, step into" buttons is to switch to the debug tab, your kidding me right? So far I haven't found a way to get those buttons to appear in the top tool/button bar.
• Maybe I have a buggy eclipse, but it took me three or four tries before eclipse would stop at my break point, the previous runs just stopped running, didn't high light my break point line nothing, thanks for coming out.
• Why is it when eclipse pops up the bubble for the arguments of a function your using it insists of calling the arguments "Type arg0, ..." I mean come on, your killing me here, this also happens in the debugger as well when looking at the variables of the functions, totally lame.
• When you high light a secion of code and click the right mouse button you get a big list of options and where are the "copy and paste" items, down in the middle, I'm not sure about this but I bet "copy and paste" are to of the most common options when you have selected text, yet you make me scroll down the menu to the middle, tools. Yeah I know there are keystroke short cuts.
• When I'm editing and hit save, eclipse feels compelled to warp me to somewhere else in my code i.e. where the program has stopped in debug mode. Dudes I'm not in the debug view don't warp me to the program counter, maybe I want to continue editing, I just like to save a lot 'cause I don't trust eclipse.
• The default keystroke for search again is ctrl-k give me a break if my hands were that big I'd be a much better basketball player, maybe I should get a smaller keyboard.

I just saw this head line on Ars Technica: Windows Genuine Advantage falsely accuses millions

Windows Genuine Advantage is a controversy wrapped in an enigma buried inside a migraine headache. Or at least that's what it is for the millions of users who have been falsely identified as software pirates as a result of WGA's attempt to root out piracy.

Since July 2005, one in five computers running Windows have failed so-called Windows Genuine Advantage tests according to data from Microsoft. More than 22 percent of over 500 million systems that were subjected to the browser-based validation scheme were identified as invalid copies of Windows.

I'd like to add my own 2 cents, one of the biggest problems with WGA is that if you're building a brand new machine in a post service pack 2 world, you can't update any of your Microsoft packages like Direct X (to name one) with out registering your machine, which means if I later run into some incompatible driver down the road in my install, I'm hosed and I can't wipe the machine and reinstall the OS from scratch and start again, a real bummer. I'm hoping I'm wrong about that, but I've not found anything on the web about how to reinstall a registered copy of windows from scratch. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is for me, I've run into situations in the past where drivers (ATI and Roxio) conflicted on XP and I was forced to reinstall the OS 3 times to find the magic sequence that worked, fun wow, fortunately this was prior to SP2.

WGA also destroys the 30 day trial for Windows XP, since you can't update any Microsoft software, MS is right on top of that marketing opportunity.

I'd love to be wrong about all of the above, so please let me know.

The WGA FAQ, not very helpful as is to be expected...