Brother MFC-J435W Startup

I was trying to scan quite a big stack of documents in Brother’s MFC-J435W multifunctional device and I was hitting some driver error after couple of pages. What made whole affair annoying wasn’t the error. It was the fact that scanner would continue pulling pages. That made it impossible to easily continue scanning of nonfailed batch.

Proper behavior is to stop pulling new pages in case of an error. No programmer (and let’s face it, firmware and driver programmers are ones deciding about this) would think to continue printing after paper jam. Why would they think that pulling paper after scan has failed is any different? If something fails, stop the feeder!

Since printer was on for a long time I figured that quick reboot would make it work properly. First I was asked some stupid question about losing all fax data even though I haven’t used fax functionality on it. If you are going to stop user action with question, first check whether question is even necessary!

And, guess what, feeder starts working upon startup and picks each and every one of your papers through. For what purpose is this? And don’t tell me it is to verify feeder. Of what possible use is information that feeder is not working during startup?

Whether feeder is functional or not matters only when user attempts to use it. At that time you can do quick self-test if you really must. However, you might as well actually use feeder and scan pages. If you retrieve data and move pages through, it works. Yep, you can do self-test and actual work at the same time.

I find current behavior very annoying because somebody had to write code in order to make product worse. If they were lazy and made no effort to write verification procedure and include it in startup, everything would be fine.

Writing code is not hard. Knowing when to stop is.

PS: While I use Brother’s device as an example, most other devices make the same unnecessary check.

How Long Is a Month

Most of car rentals have a contract with other companies where companies get various discounts and addons in exchange for continuous business. It is good deal for everybody involved. But sometime curious things happen.

For example company I work for has benefit of “Monthly charge up to 31 days”. Simplified it means that your rental comes at cheaper price a bit earlier. For me that has an even better benefit of getting reimbursed on month basis. In ideal world, if I rent car on 1st, I get an receipt on the same date next month. Except it isn’t so.

For some reasons National has also an policy of closing each contract every 30 days. If you imagine a world where some months have a day longer you will see a problem. Let’s assume my rental starts on September 1st. First bill is due on October 1th. Next bill after that is October 31st. One after that is November 30th. Congratulations, you have just lost a day.

In reality this is not really an cost issue. Although you have monthly rate actual calculations are still done per day so everything evens out. However, person has an interesting choice between sending to accounting two bills for all months that have 31 day or sending them “monthly” bills that end on funny dates.

It only shows that for system design you must consider edge cases (and test for them) or users might get confused…

A Bit Annoying

As my kid started with school I felt more and more pressure to get a printer. Since I am here temporary and carrying printer across ocean is not my sport, only choice was cheap inkjet. Few twenties later I had my Brother MFC-J435W. Nice multi-functional device with separate ink cartridge for each color (CMYK).

With inkjets one always needs to be aware of ink level since those things can drink a lot. Therefore almost all have some sort of warning when ink gets low. Brother moves that to completely new level.

Already at 50% it starts complaining about ink getting too low. Since this is probably time to get a new cartridge, simple notice is probably in order. But this annoying window just keeps on popping at every boot, at every print, and few times for no apparent reason. And all that while I am still at 50% capacity. WTF?

Yes, I do expect printer to warn me once it is low. But being at 50% is nowhere low. And aggressiveness of these warnings can lead me only to conclusion that someone was on speed while writing this code. I propose getting him into rehab and forcing him to use printer with all these popups.

Frankly, this printer could do without this warning completely. It has nice display just above paper output and there (when ink is low) you can see warning too. And it is big yellow exclamation mark that is hard to miss. Perfect and unobtrusive solution. I am not sure who needs this software solution at all.

And this is not only beef I have with this printer. I went ahead and upgraded its firmware few nights ago. During WHOLE procedure printer kept beeping few times a second. Not because of error but because some smartass though it to be nice touch.

Quite often software actually works better if you skip a “feature” or two.

Bastards

I am always happy when someone chooses to distribute my software. If nothing else they often host software install themselfs and thus they lower load on my own server. Everybody wins. Usually.

Bastards at IrcFast (no, I will not include their link) decided to bundle VHD Attach with Babylon toolbar and something called Coupish. I view both those packages as borderline spyware. And I would never bundle my program with them. If you install VHD Attach and you are not careful, you will soon be looking for removal procedure. Let’s just get it in clear: THIS IS NOT ENDORSED NOR BUNDLED BY ME.

Are they doing anything illegal? No, license I selected is quite permissive and it does allow for almost anything. As long as software is intact anyone can bundle it as much as they want. And even if I had it under any other license I am not sure it would matter. Those idiots would bundle it anyhow.

I can only do one thing. I can warn everybody to stay clear of this site.

Why the Wait?

I am MSDN subscriber and I am currently paying for it myself. That gives me privilege of being among first ones to download newest Windows and Visual Studio.

For example, Windows 8 went RTM on August 1st and I can get it on August 15th; Visual Studio 2012 went RTM on 3rd and I will get it on 15th. Public usually gets things few weeks afterward.

I am more than annoyed by the fact that it takes Microsoft two weeks to make RTM available for download without any good reason. Image is ready, pirates already have a copy. Why not release it for download? What is there to lose?

Way I see it, MSDN customers are either big companies which will probably install your new stuff in ten years or enthusiasts that want download now. Early release does not mean much to companies but it means everything to an enthusiast. If pirates can get software sooner, why bother paying MSDN?

Sometime I just feel like a money-wasting idiot…

DVD Legacy

Last week I finished my work in Virginia. Next week I have to start anew in Washington. Since that leaves one week and couple of thousand miles in between, road-trip seemed like perfect choice for wife, kids and me. How hard can it be?

One of items that I brought on trip to keep kids occupied were DVDs with Croatian cartoons and, since car did have a DVD player, third day of a trip seemed like a perfect time to introduce that possibility to kids. We hyped them a little just to bring anticipation levels to brand new high.

Daddy placed DVD into slot. Player took it and churned a little. And then threw DiscRegionError. No play for you. My kids were full of joy when I informed them that our ORIGINAL DVDs were not playable.

What is solution? Buying brand new DVDs in order to bring another boost to dying american movie industry was not really a choice. It seems that US market is quite limited when it comes to Croatian cartoons.

Another obvious one would be removing region protection. Of course this is quite illegal in US since DMCA and it’s protection circumvention clause. It is only logical that while KKK has right to freedom of speach, I would be forbidden to play my own original DVDs. Nice to see priority management in action.

And even if I was in mood for breaking law, I had no DVD media with me. We were on major interstate roads and entering a town in order to search for writtable DVD media seemed like a time wasting move. Single laptop with DVD writter would anyhow run out of battery long before I could copy them all.

I just gave up. Kids had more fun with their toys and we all learned valuable lesson. If I have only brought pirated DVDs I would not have this issue.

Nice, With Crap

There is a trend to piggyback totally unrelated applications together in setup. Example that I faced recently was GOM Player bundled with AVG “security toolbar”.

I am surprised with two things here. AVG was quite reputable company for some time and they had quite a good free antivirus client. They do not seem like company that needs this kind of “distribution”.

Second thing is description that reads “set, keep and protect AVG secure search as my default …”. Frankly, that sounds like description of an toolbar that get installed when you visit naughty pages. Those toolbars also set, keep and protect their defaults. It is quite a fall from grace when security software and malware have exactly same description.

And, of course, standard installation includes all malware by default. You must actively make total of three clicks to remove it. It might not seem much but that also means that I cannot just Next/Next/Finish through installation. And that means that I cannot recommend this application to any inexperienced user. Explaining them how to remove crap would just take too much energy and I can bet that half of them would install everything.

Do not misunderstand me, I am fine (or even in favor) with piggybacking as long as other program has anything to do with program I am installing. Great example would be Wireshark including WinPcap. That is match that works. And that is software I trust.

When software goes on junkware route, there is only one thing to do. I will stop using GOM Player, like I stopped using BSPlayer before it. Irony is that I liked both of them and I am leaving them for same reason. Anybody has any decent (and junk-free) multimedia player to recommend?

Pain in the *Ss

Being in USA these days is getting annoying.

I am in EDT time zone for a few days now and rest of world is still on standard (aka winter) time. That means that difference between myself and my home Croatia is one hour less than it normally is. Or is it one hour more? This is getting confusing.

I would understand if US decided to stop using daylight savings (or better, make it permanent). That way I could blame rest of world for being too backward to kill useless tradition. However, some idiots politicians decided that it would be great thing if USA could be out-of-sync with rest of world’s time zones for two weeks.

Thank you.

Cheap Bastards

It is very sad to see illegal downloads driving Sony Music so poor that they cannot afford to have proper SSL certificate. It is either that or team creating these pages just didn’t give a damn.

Well, at least they do offer SSL…

Canon SX230 Communication Error

After taking a lot of pictures in Washington Aquarium, came time to transfer them from Canon PowerShot SX230 HS camera to laptop. And then I was greeted with “Communication Error” displayed on camera’s screen. I tried multiple cables, tried resetting everything, every wiggling motion that I knew, but to no avail.

Quick search on Internet gave hint that this happens when there is too much pictures on camera. I connected SD card directly to computer, deleted some old pictures, reconnected camera and, like magic, it was working again. Happy ending.

For the sake of it, I cannot grasp why idiots who made camera’s firmware thought having 3000 pictures on camera that accepts SDXC cards should be a problem. 16 GB is not even biggest card there is and it was half full. How can you make camera fail on something that should be it’s basic operation?

Even worse they found it necessary to hide such error behind obscure message like “Communication Error”. Which part of that message has any connection to number of files? Only connection what-so-ever was in manual where, as sole source of this message, they said “Images could not be transferred to the computer or printed due to the large amount of images (aprox. 1000) stored on the memory card.” If this is sole source of error, how about giving “Too much files” message. Or “Sorry, but our product is shit if you actually want to transfer images”. Either message would do.

Or, dare I say it, they could fix their broken product…