Category: software

a little more griping about Windows 10

My VS 2013 update did finish installing, eventually, and now VS seems to be working fine. No clue what went wrong there. (Or maybe that’s just how long this update takes to install? No, that can’t be right…)

And I just bought Start10 from Stardock ($4 to upgrade from Start8) and installed it. The Windows 10 start menu isn’t horrible, but Start10 is better. The install was quick and easy.

Meanwhile, I decided to try playing solitaire. Well, that was a bad idea. When I started up “Microsoft Solitaire Collection” it gave me an error code while trying to sign in, and an URL to the FAQ. The URL wasn’t clickable and couldn’t be copied to the clipboard, so I had to type it in manually. Then, the URL turned out to be a redirect to a Facebook page, which is kind of weird, but ok, I guess. The FAQ says that the error code I got likely indicates that XBox Live is down. Checking on that, I see that it is, and least partially.

So here’s my full list of WTFs involved in trying to play Solitaire on Windows 10:

  1. Tying solitaire to XBox Live.
  2. Showing a numeric error code instead of a useful description for the error.
  3. Showing a link to an FAQ page that isn’t clickable and can’t be copied to the clipboard.
  4. Having your FAQ hosted at Facebook, when you’re Microsoft, and certainly have the ability to host your own web pages.
  5. XBox Live being down for no good reason.

Well, it’s possible to play solitaire, even without XBox Live. but I didn’t really want to play solitaire anyway, I just wanted to see what it looked like. So, mission accomplished, I guess, and I got some entertainment value out of the error message, so there’s that.

Visual Studio 2013 update 5

After upgrading my laptop to Windows 10, I thought about maybe taking a shot at installing Visual Studio 2015. I may do that eventually, but I don’t have any reason to do it right away. But last night, I decided to at least apply the latest update to VS 2013, which is update 5. I’ve had some bad luck with Visual Studio updates in the past (going back to VS 2005 and 2008), but recent updates have been pretty smooth. Well, I don’t know what went wrong with this one, but I started installing it last night, and it’s still going this morning. It seemed to hang at about the halfway point. Rather than cancel it, I decided to just let it keep running overnight.

When I woke up this morning, it had made a lot of progress. Right now, it’s at the step that says “Configuring your system. This might take a while.” So it’s pretty close to the end, I think. I guess I’ll let it keep going while I’m at work, then see if it’s done when I get home. So this could well be a full 24-hour update install. I understand that updating a complex product like Visual Studio isn’t easy, but really, there has to be a better way to do it.

Windows 10 upgrade – ThinkPad

I upgraded my ThinkPad to Windows 10 yesterday. It was a pretty uneventful upgrade. All of my software seems to work, including some stuff that I thought might be dicey, like Norton, VirtualBox, and OpenVPN. (Well, technically, I installed an upgrade to VirtualBox right after the Windows 10 upgrade, so I’m sure that fixed up the network stuff and whatnot.)

The new start menu is OK, I guess, but I’m not super excited about it. I was using Start8 with Windows 8, and I’ll probably install Start10 at some point.

I haven’t had a reason to play around at the command-line much yet, but I’m happy to see that they’ve made some (much overdue) improvements to it.

The ThinkPad upgrade was smooth enough that I now feel like it would be relatively safe to try the upgrade on my main desktop PC. I may do that next weekend, if I’ve got nothing else to do.

Windows 10

I haven’t upgraded either of my Windows 8.1 machines to Windows 10 yet. Neither machine has popped up a notification saying that it’s ready yet. Per Microsoft’s FAQ, “Your notification to upgrade could come as soon as a few days or weeks.” I know I can just download an ISO, and I might do that if I get too bored this weekend. But I’m not in a hurry. I’m probably going to use Start10 rather than the fancy new start menu anyway, so Windows 10 will look much like Windows 8 (with Start8) and Windows 7 for me.

I’m thinking about watching a few Scott Hanselman videos today to learn a bit more about Windows 10. And I should probably run backups on both machines too.

The Amiga’s 30th Anniversary

The Amiga 30th Anniversary Event at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View this weekend looks like it should be really fun. Too bad I’m in NJ and not CA.

I get nostalgic about the Amiga once in a while. I keep thinking I should try the emulator from Amiga Forever, but I never get around to it. (There’s enough current technology that I don’t have time for; not much point in messing around with a 30-year-old dead OS. Heck, I’ve done almost nothing with the Windows 10 preview that’s installed on my laptop, and working with that would actually be useful.)

The Amiga 500 was my third computer. (The first was a TRS-80, and the second was a Commodore 64.) I bought it when I was in college. It was the first computer I owned that had a real OS, and multi-tasking, and all that good stuff. I could actually use it for some of my programming assignments! (Prior to that, they were all done on the school mainframe, or on shared Unix machines.) I remember that picking up a copy of the Lattice C compiler was a big deal for me. It wasn’t hugely expensive, but it was a significant purchase for a college student.

I wonder if I have printouts of any of my old programs around here somewhere. If so, it’s probably best to leave them buried. I’m sure the memories are better than the actual code!

Trying out Blogo

So now I’m trying out Blogo, another Mac blogging tool. It’s kind of nice, but there doesn’t seem to be any option to view/edit a post in HTML; there’s only the rich-text WYSIWYG editor.

So I think maybe this would be a good tool for someone who didn’t want to get too fiddly and just wanted to stick to WYSIWYG editing. But I know I’m going to want to at least look at the HTML once in a while.

It’s kind of a shame that it doesn’t have HTML editing, since, otherwise, it’s got a really nice user interface. But, I think MarsEdit is more my speed, if I’m going to use a desktop editor at all.

trying out MarsEdit

I’m writing this post in MarsEdit, just to see if I like it better than the normal WordPress admin interface. So far, it works fine, but I’m not sure it’s that much better than just using the WordPress admin. I think maybe if I could memorize the keyboard shortcuts, it would be quite nice.

I’ll keep it on my Mac until the trial period runs out, at least, then make up my mind if it’s worth spending money on.

I’d heard of MarsEdit before, of course, but hadn’t really thought about it much lately. I was reminded of it when listening to MPU 264 with John Gruber. He uses MarsEdit with Movable Type, which I did not realize was still around and being used as a viable blogging platform. (Shows how little I know!) I’ve never been that interested in Gruber’s blog, Daring Fireball, but he does have an interesting history, and has been involved in some interesting work, so that episode of MPU was definitely worth listening to. And of course his big thing is Markdown, which the MPU hosts also love, but which I’ve never been able to talk myself into trying. I like the general idea, but I just haven’t been able to find a good use case for it, for myself.

iTunes 12.2

I’ve got today off from work, since tomorrow is Independence Day. I really didn’t make any plans, so I’m sitting around at home right now just reading a book and messing around. I wanted to do some stuff in iTunes, but geez, the new version of iTunes is a mess. The audiobook section is messed up (none of the books show up in the “authors” view). And trying to get to the “apps” section locks up iTunes entirely, and I have to force quit it. Other people are reporting really major screw-ups with their music libraries, like having millions of copies of the same song randomly added to a playlist, and stuff like that. (Luckily, my music library seems to be fine, for now.) Here’s hoping they get a fixed version out soon. (And that they maybe learn from this and do a bit more testing next time?)

I guess I should turn off the computer and get back to my book. Or, better yet, go outside!

new Evernote pricing and plans

Evernote announced new plans and pricing today. In a nutshell, there’s a new “plus” plan for $25/year, and the “premium” plan is now $50/year. The old premium plan was $45/year, so that’s a fairly minor increase. My premium subscription is up in early 2016. Rather than renew, I’ll probably switch to the “plus” plan, as it seems to be more than adequate for my needs.

I’ve known for a while that they were likely to make some pricing changes this year, but wasn’t sure what they were going to do. I was a little bit afraid that they might decide to make their premium plan $99/year or something like that. I’m glad to see that they haven’t bumped it up too much, and have actually added a cheaper plan that should be more than enough for many people.

Text Editors

Possibly the most time-honored and effective way for a programmer to procrastinate on his or her work is to spend time messing around with text editors and/or IDEs. There’s a good case to be made that spending time selecting the right editor/IDE, and tweaking it appropriately, pays off in spades, due to increased productivity over time. But honestly, I can’t say that I haven’t sometimes spent time messing around with my text editor or IDE just as a procrastination tactic.

Yesterday, a new beta of Sublime Text 3 was released, along with the new version of Komodo Edit/IDE, so it makes sense to think about editors a bit.

I bought a personal copy of Komodo IDE about a year ago, and I’ve been using it on the Mac and on Windows, mostly for PHP programming. And now I’m using it for Ruby too. It’s a little heavy to use it as a general text editor. For quick text file editing, I’m using Notepad++ on Windows and TextMate on the Mac. But Komodo is pretty good for PHP and Ruby.

I messed around with Sublime Text a few years ago, but didn’t really like it enough to stick with it. (And, at the time, I didn’t really have a good use case for it anyway, given the kind of work I was doing then.) Occasionally, I think about giving it another try.

At work, I don’t really need to worry about text editors much, since nearly all of the work I do is being done in either MorphX (the Dynamics AX IDE) or Visual Studio. Both of those environments work fine, for their intended use, and (in both cases) it wouldn’t be realistic to consider using a different tool for text editing.

But, for my recreational programming, whether that be PHP, Ruby, or whatever else, it’s nice to have a good programmer’s editor handy. I’ve already shelled out the $59 to upgrade my personal license for Komodo IDE to version 9. (If I thought I was going to need to do any serious Ruby development, I’d probably give Sublime Text another shot and see if it was significantly better than Komodo.)

I keep thinking I should be a real programmer, and learn more about VIM and/or Emacs, but I never quite get around to it. VIM Adventures looks like it might be a fun way to learn VIM. (Of course, I’ve been saying that I should learn more about VIM and Emacs for years; I just found blog posts from 2008 and 2005 saying basically the same thing I just wrote here.)