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…

8 Grams of Bullshit

My last visit to McDonald I noticed that my meal has “8 grams of whole wheat” printed on package. I was quite surprised to see US company use Système international d’unités to express how much of health they pack in the box.

To put things into perspective 8 grams is almost 4 times less than legal amount of marijuana in California. That whole grain thing is really potent stuff indeed.

While someone might say that McDonald is not doing anything wrong and that this is just reporting fact I would not agree. I think that this is pure game of numbers that targets USA citizens that quite often have no feeling what grams are (as I have no feeling for ounces). This is pure sham intended to represent their food as a healthy choice.

McDonald food is probably the next best thing one can do to his body after a car crash and that probably holds true for fast food in general. Of course I will grab occasional meal or two because I don’t have time for anything better and because (shame) I do like taste of it. Just please stop bullshitting be. Let my cholesterol rise in peace.

P.S. For my SI challenged USA friends 8 grams is 0.28 ounces. :)

Reasoning

Most of reading that I do is on Amazon Kindle and there I have noticed disturbing trend. Quite a large number of books have Kindle version priced higher than paperback.

I just cannot figure why any cost involved would be any higher for an e-book when compared to a physical book that needs both printing and physical distribution.

Call me old fashioned but I will not buy Kindle book that costs more than physical copy out of principle.

One Man's Feature, Another Man's Annoyance

Being programmer I need to do send executable files a lot. However my mail client, Google Mail, does not like this. Since it check for executable files is done even in zipped archives, easiest solution for me was to use my trusty WinRAR. Google had no idea that .exe was hidden inside it.

Not any more. Google now supports RAR archives also. While that does help with preview, it also enables Google to check my RAR files for executables. And to annoy me with “Our system detected an illegal attachment on your message.”

Now only way to send executables is to change archive extension to e.g. rarx… Annoyances…

Fujitsu and Search

I needed some Windows 7 drivers for Fujitsu LifeBook S710. At first glance support page looked promising.

It asked for serial number and I gave it one but this hasn’t worked for some reason. However, I did got link to Fujitsu tool that reads your system and it promised that it will take me to correct page. I executed it and it got me back where I started. Tool just read serial number and it redirected me to the same page that failed me first time.

I would have gone through model selection but that part of page was also broken. It just kept showing single item: “Please select the product line”. I spent quite some time having fun making circles around Fujitsu web pages. I found driver’s bits here and there but some of them haven’t worked at all and some of them were meant for other notebook models. It took some googling to find useful product search page that gave proper list of drivers.

When manufacturer shows that level of laziness and lack of quality control, it really inspires confidence in it’s computers.

Crazy Feed

MSDN subscribers have two choices when it comes to getting new software. Either you will visit MSDN site every few days to see what is new or you will subscribe to their feed. Logic would dictate that MSDN feed should be preferred way of doing this - every time something new arrives you get notification in your RSS reader.

Because of some idiotic programming MSDN feed is worse than useless. For example today I had total of 370 of new items in my feed. Those are probably quite a same items that were available yesterday when I had around 200 items. Or day before that when another 200 ended up in my reader. Who knows, maybe there was some new software inside. I haven’t got a clue since I was too lazy to read everything.

I am not sure why this happens - I am too lazy to investigate thoroughly. And no, it is not a RSS reader’s fault since no other feed exhibits such behavior. My guess would be that missing GUID and pubDate that keeps on changing are one to blame. Without unique GUID for each item it is very difficult for any program to say what remains same and what is really different.

It would be easy for Microsoft to fix RSS feed but they haven’t in last three years so I am not holding my breath. After all, they never said that developer’s satisfaction is their priority.

P.S. As I wrote this, I noticed another 300+ waiting…

Losing Battle

Apple is screwing their customers again. This time literary - there is new screw head called “Pentalobe” that is slowly working it’s way in Apple products.

Current effect is that nobody can open iPhone without risking damage to screw but I wonder what net effect will be. There are already products that enable you to replace that “secure” screw with normal Phillips one. I wonder how long it will take for everybody to get proper pentalobe screwdriver. A week? A month?