WillWybrow.com

God sake, computers, what is wrong with you?

Running Fedora 12 as my main OS at the moment. It’s fine for some things but I honestly prefer Windows Seven to anything else and I long to go back to it.

But my stupid Windows installation is fucked. Some bits in the registry must seriously be corrupted beyond all hell. I don’t know where the Windows serial number information is stored in the registry but it cannot currently be a valid entry because selecting Computer » Properties displays some generic error message under serial information. And I can’t read or edit it using third party tools so I don’t know what’s gone wrong there. I tried reinstalling it at one point but I’ll lose all my settings if I do a from-scratch installation and it won’t allow me to do an in-place upgrade because my user data is on a different partition from my Windows installation (some monumentally stupid restrictions on Windows installation there that amounted to the most trouble I’ve ever had with a Windows upgrade when I switched from Vista to Seven).

What’s more is that my Windows BCD is also fucked. That can’t be read or written by BCDEdit.exe or EasyBCD for again some unknown (and maybe unknowable) reason. But my Windows Seven installation still boots when I ask it to. Could this be my GRUB bootloader interfering? Maybe, but I’m pretty sure EasyBCD should know what’s going on there. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t even load to the main interface to let me see what it thinks is going on. Great. But my Windows installation’s serial information is still messed up so Windows thinks it’s not genuine and therefore powers off after whatever set amount of time that is. A few hours maybe? It’s not long, at any rate.

I really want to reinstall Windows Seven but I can’t decide how to go about doing it. If I format everything it means a long, drawn-out reinstallation of all my Windows software (Office, browser, games, μTorrent etc.) and reconfiguring it to have all my custom shell folders and appearances and everything else that I’ve had to do to make Windows less of a piece of shit to use. But I can’t see any other way around it and I’m very wary of putting in installation CDs because they tend to silently change boot settings that will make it impossible or difficult to boot back into Fedora which is currently my most usable OS.

If I get some time this weekend in between all the other real-life jobs I’ve got to get done in preparation for my trip the following weekend, I might image my whole boot drive to my spare HD and then go about trying to patch up my broken installations. It’d be useful to be able to dual-boot Fedora and Seven until someone gets their act together to make one OS that can do all the good things of both but failing that I’d much rather have my Seven installation fully-functional than have it broken and dormant on my hard drive while I use Linux, forever lurking in the back of my mind and brought to the forefront every time I am frustrated by how pathetic Gnome is for anyone who actually uses a PC (Nautilus seems to have this great feature that means sometimes windows open with no address bar and navigating the filesystem spawns new windows every time I want to change directory – as if anyone’s ever found that Windows 95-esque interface helpful at all, ever) which is basically every time I want to open a file.

This isn’t really a request for advice although I suspect many of you will have “opinions” on the matter and suggestions from “learn2Linux” to “go and buy a Mac lol” which I of course would read and give full consideration to. And if anyone tells me to just scrap the box and all of technology and go live in a cave somewhere, well, I might take their advice because at the moment avoiding all the hassle forever and becoming a hermit is a very tempting option.

I figure I spend a bunch of time Googling syntax or functions in code if I can’t remember them. And sometimes I’ll even lift out a whole section of example code from a search result and try and change as little of it as possible to maximise the time I spend not doing work. These little shortcuts make life bearable.

So I’ve decided to invent a new programming language. Each line is a search query you’d type in to bring up a reference page and an example of what you’re trying to do. Then, at compile time, the compiler does the searches, lifts out the example code from the top hit and then builds the binary from the collection of sample code.

It would probably be a fruitless and very tiresome (if not never-ending) effort to list ALL the things that could do with being shaken up around here. So for the moment I am going to settle for this very brief but presently high-profile list of some shit that needs changing.

1. Decriminalisation of Drugs

   I am sure I don’t need to link you to any of the number of articles online about the decriminalisation of drugs in Portugal. Google it if you want to. This, from the TIME.com article about it:

   “Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research [into its success]. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

   In light of the news about the mephedrone deaths that have just happened, the government will inevitably end up adding it to the list of banned substances, like they did with synthetic cannabinoids at the end of last year. That they still have to keep banning the new ways people find to get themselves high suggests that people are going to try it regardless. The only real way we can increase the safety of those who do choose to try it is by regulating the quality of the drugs sold (so that they’re not cut with rat poison) and to fully understand through scientific experimentation the effects so any short- and long-term effects can be made clear through education. Legalising the old-school drugs that everyone knows about will cause users to gravitate towards them. They’ve been more extensively studied than these new ‘legal highs’, so that bodes better for education and treatment of ill-effects and addiction.

2. Libel Law Reform

   In case you haven’t been keeping abreast of one of the most (if not the most) high profile libel lawsuits of late, Simon Singh was recently accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association. He wrote that any chiropractic practitioner who claimed to be able to cure things like colic in babies was lying, with plenty of demonstrable evidence showing it to be ineffective. As well as in being counter-intuitive to assume that spinal manipulation can solve all your problems. While with any reasonable set of laws, the chiropractors would have no hope of achieving anything from suing someone with stacks of scientific evidence to back up their claims, actually suing someone for libel is no longer about who wins or loses. Because of the incredibly dramatic cost of being sued for libel, often the accused has no choice but to back down and not fight if the accuser is financially well-endowed. With a relatively small cost to a corporation, it can silence any individual or small organisation it wants to with the threat of expensive legal action, and thus hide any of its wrongdoings. The Libel Reform campaign seeks to raise awareness with the ultimate goal of getting this changed. And while it might not benefit the majority of people directly, it is a freedom of speech/censorship matter that needs to be addressed and corrected lest it remain an affront to liberty forever.

3. The Digital Economy Bill

   Sometimes I think Lord Mandelson doesn’t see things the way the rest of us do. His perspective on certain subjects is so skewed, I think maybe he might benefit from some psychiatric evaluation.

   Even if he passes the lunatic test, though, this doesn’t make his Digital Economy Bill any less insane. Mandelson wants to be given unlimited power to amend copyright legislation. He wants rights holders, via the courts, to be able to disconnect people suspected of filesharing without requiring any proof. He is willing to deny internet access to whole households to punish (and that’s punish, not rehabilitate or force repayment from) copyright infringers. There has also been a clause added that says ISPs would be obligated to block access to certain websites that facilitate copyright infringement (which could even include YouTube and possibly Google), but again this seems to only take place at Mandelson’s command.

   I’m also interested in the overlooked modifications to Nominet. It’s a kind of nationalisation of the service for registering domain names in the UK. Might not mean much to most people, but putting more of the internet in the hands of this government unnecessarily (Nominet is functioning fine as an independent body at the moment and can’t possibly benefit from being under government control) is an unmistakably bad thing. Some of us have registered domain names and don’t want ownership of them revoked at the whim of Lord Mandelson.

That’ll be all for now, I think. I will do some more when I get back to my chat logs and assemble all the ideas I came up with when Chris put me on the spot yesterday evening with all the policies I’d have if I formed a political party.

You may have heard of two technology-related stories in the news recently.

The first is that Gordon Brown is going to spend £300 million on his Home Access scheme to bring free laptops and one year’s worth of free broadband subscription to poorer families across the country.

The second is that Lord Mandelson is pushing for tough counter-piracy measures for internet filesharers, including disconnecting entire households from the internet.

What Labour seem to be doing is giving out internet access with one hand while taking it away with the other. Education Secretary Ed Balls has declared that there are educational, economic and social benefits to being on the internet that cannot be ignored. Indeed, the internet is so vital that part of the criteria you need to fill to qualify for the Home Access scheme is that you are a child on free school meals. That means these laptops and free internet access come with a similar priority level as providing food for underprivileged children. If that doesn’t sound like an opinion leaning towards classing internet access as a human right, I don’t know what does.

But Mandy obviously is unconvinced, since it is still his intention to cut off entire households from the internet because of the action of one of the house’s residents – or even the action of a neighbour – even when there’s every likelihood that a disconnection would result in more ‘innocent’ people (non-filesharers) than ‘guilty’ people (filesharers) being denied all those social and educational benefits.

A disconnection from the internet today is more crippling than ever. Apart from the real inconvenience it would cause to people no longer being able to look things up or check their online banking at their leisure, it would also stand in the way of anyone who occasionally works from home (seemingly more and more people nowadays), and it’s tantamount to capital punishment for anyone with lots of social networking contacts they can’t see very often in person.

And so far I haven’t even addressed the real problem. Buying DVDs and music is fine for those able to afford it and who are also ignorant enough to presume that £15 is a fair price for a DVD or CD (it isn’t). But those more technologically inclined will find ways around being tracked if they want to continue filesharing. Downloading will never, ever stop. But handing out free laptops and free broadband to poor children is going to give them the previously unseen option of downloading music or watching TV shows online. What will the Government do when its own broadband users commit copyright infringement? Disconnect them as fast as possible?

The internet is either a vital resource or it isn’t, Labour. Perhaps Brown should make sure everyone in his cabinet agrees which before they start making contradictory comments to the media.

Or just lynch Mandelson and let the crows have his eyes, whichever.

I would say that the best training you can have prior to switching to Windows Vista is a good knowledge of Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows XP.

2000 Advanced Server got me to grips with the Microsoft Management Console; a thing useless in itself but that comes with “snap-ins” — sets of settings and how they can be altered — which correspond, I am starting to think, with raw entries in the Windows Registry.

There is a directory full of these snap-ins in a start menu folder called “Administrative Tools” that can be turned on in your start menu properties. They come turned on by default in 2000 Advanced Server, and they can be turned on in 2000, XP and Vista. Some can also be accessed in other ways (right-clicking on “My Computer” and clicking “Manage” will bring up the “Computer Management” snap-in, for example).

Times when I’ve looked up how to make Vista Ultimate Edition less of a wimp and put some of that blunt Windows 2000 charm back into it — things like htting CtrlAltDel to log on, typing your username in instead of selecting it from a list (one thing you should never have to worry about, ladies and gentlemen, is what “display picture” the Adminstrator account has) and activating the built-in Administrator account — I’ve come across tutorials on the web that give you a guide on how to change the registry or run a shell command or (worst case) “download this .reg file and run it.” These tutorials might get the job done, but they’re stupid. That’s why I never used them. All the settings that you’ll need to change are found in the Administrative Tools snap-ins.

Note, however, that I’m not against hacking the registry when it’s necessary. I love finding and messing with the dirty, gritty Windows system settings to get something extraordinary done. But things like enabling user accounts or changing the logon screen just shouldn’t require so much work, especially when mentioning the Windows Registry to a user who doesn’t know what it’s all about is just paving the way to irreversible system instability.

Moving on, Windows Vista is not as bad as everyone makes out. The problems with it come when you install it on a laptop (because no laptop will ever be able to run Windows Vista well) or a computer that just isn’t ready for it. I believe that Microsoft should keep supporting and updating XP for those who are using low-end machines.

But install it on a system that is actually capable of running it and it becomes quite natural to use. Not a huge deal has changed since XP, really. The start menu is upside-down and doesn’t pop out properly, and the taskbars are a bit more shiny. Oh, and Windows Explorer now looks like IE8. That’s virtually it.

One thing I am having a difficult time making my mind up over is the new file structure for “My Documents.” Instead of one directory for all user files, there are now lots. Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Music and Pictures, to name a few.

Only some of these appear in the start menu by default. “Downloads” isn’t one of them. To add it, you have to add it as a normal shortcut, and it is placed somewhere else on the menu. That’s quite annoying. Adding your own directories isn’t particularly advantageous either. There’s no reason you should create a directory there instead of anywhere else on your hard drive, which makes us less inclined to use Microsoft’s directory structure. This is a customisation option that I’d like to see — the ability to specify your own often-used locations.

At least in XP, you had one root directory, and your pictures and downloads and music went in subdirectories from there. Now you’ve got many; it doesn’t make sense to have to click two times to get to some of them, and three times to get to others. It should be all or none, Microsoft.

Finally, I suppose I should mention something about the UAC. I like it. It’ll be good against stuff that tries to install itself to my registry without my consent, and it doesn’t get in the way nearly as much as it seems to do on other people’s (slower) Vista machines.

I’ve got the Windows 7 beta around here somewhere, I think I’ll try that one next.

The next step in human evolution, guys, is polydactlyism.

Make sure you find this kid and breed with him so we can have more fingers in the future.

As promised, here is a list of specs for you all to go “wow that looks cool” or “ah man, why’d you get that shitty thing?”

• Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition (Quad core, 3.0GHz)
• RAM: 8GB Dual-channel DDR2
• Graphics Card: ATi Radeon HD 4870 1024MB

That’s the essentials, I guess. I could give you the model of my motherboard or the capacity of my hard-drives but they’re much more boring.

Hope you all followed the excitement this morning/afternoon on Twitter — unless you were all too fucking distracted by the weather.

Tower Complete

This is the bomb site of my bedroom about three hours after the DHL man came and gave me three boxes. Blogging from the laptop right now as I’m still setting up software. Not even got to Office yet. Wow, Windows!

I don’t really fancy doing another Linux post. It’s boring and annoying and it attracts readers from Google who know lots more about these things than I do. But when I realised my comment-response on COASM was getting a bit too long, I snipped it short and brought my ideas over here for a re-write.

It should be noted that I’m not actually going to go through everything that was wrong with that post (it was a lot), I’m doing my own thing here.

Linux and Typical Home Users: Why Switching Should Be Possible

From dealing with typical, non-technical users of PCs (be it in a work or home environment), there are really two diverse subsets of user which, I think, are distinct in how they look at, see and interact with computers. By ‘typical,’ here, I mean those who’ve used Windows their whole computing life (probably buying a computer with it pre-installed) and don’t know about alternatives to it (i.e., GNU/Linux). I can easily think in terms of these subsets because my sister belongs to one and my dad belongs to the other.

My Sister

The first set of users I’ve observed are the ones who sort of understand what’s going on. They know that when you double-click an icon, the program “loads up,” they understand that a browser and an image-editing software are distinct entities from each other and from the desktop. They learn by being shown how to do things, but also by their interactions with the computers.

My Dad

My dad doesn’t really “get” what’s happening with the computer. I figure this is the category where PC-using grandparents reside, though I do appreciate that some of them belong to the “sister” category above. This user doesn’t understand the difference between a browser and the desktop. Telling them that one “has a list of shortcut icons” and the other “displays web pages” would probably only confuse them. These users learn by being shown how to accomplish a task (printing a picture, for example) and then repeating those steps each time. Showing off how there are two or three ways to do something (copying and pasting, for example, can be done with the Edit menu, right clicking or keyboard shortcuts) hinders more than it helps. To them, the computer is like a toaster or a microwave. It’s got buttons to press to do certain things - why would there be any other way of doing it? You wouldn’t put three different buttons on a toaster to start it — buttons that are completely different from each other and not always obvious — would you?

What the fuck are you talking about, Will?

Hopefully my explanations were sufficient for you to see things as I roughly see them (even if they’re not strictly accurate — it’s incredibly simplified). Now on to better matters: why making the switch to GNU/Linux shouldn’t be a problem for either.

Just because Microsoft Windows is on everyone’s computer, it doesn’t automatically make it more difficult to learn how to use a GNU free desktop environment (I’m going to use KDE3.5 for my examples here because it defaults to one taskbar at the bottom, applications menu in the bottom left and system tray in the bottom right, like a certain Windows shell does). If you’re in the “my sister” subset of users, all an instructor really has to do is point out the parallels to that which they’re already familiar with and point out the things that are different for them. “Sister” users are going to stumble a bit at first, but they will learn the differences just as they learned how to use Windows in the first place. Yes there’s a learning curve, yes it will take some time, yes it is very worth it in terms of spreading the word about Linux and keeping your users’ systems malware free and generally stable.

“Dad” users, on the other hand, are going to be in the position they were in before they started using Windows. They’re going to need the same toaster buttons pointed out and explained to them. They can scrap their mental lists of steps of how to get things done (it’s easier to start over than to explain the similarities and differences, trust me) and replace them with new ones. If they can work Windows Explorer, they can work KDE3.5 for sure.

Windows Changes Too

If you’re really sceptical about whether your non-technical friends and family could manage using Linux instead of Windows, just take a look at some of Windows’ own changes. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know about the differences between Windows 3.1/3.11/WFW and the next releases, 95 and NT4. That look and feel stuck around for a few years until — suddenly — BAM, Windows XP.

The shift from 98/ME to XP is probably one of the most common ones you’ll have seen amongst home users. I claim that the differences a user sees between Windows 98 and Windows XP are no smaller than the differences between XP and KDE. Then if we’re talking Vista, well… the user is really fucked in that case; the shift from XP to Vista is huge in terms of user interface differences. If your users aren’t going to survive a Windows to Linux shift, they’re not going to survive an XP to Vista/W7 shift.

Ugh… effort

I know it’s hassle to teach your fellows how to use all this different stuff, but in my house, when new Internet Explorer toolbars appear on a weekly basis (don’t give me any FagFox crap - IE is so heavily anchored in Windows that it’s not possible to avoid it) and worthless daemons from Adobe and printer software and all that kind of shit install themselves without any warning, and Windows Live Messenger is packed with bloat, and malware is rampantly crawling up inside stuff and argh fuckggnkrls

Linux is nicer, it can run much better (if you configure it right) and it’s safer against user idiocy. It’ll take getting used to, but the important thing to take away from reading this is that taking some getting used to is not synonymous with impossible to adapt to or not worth the effort switching to.

Unless you ever want to play games.

02/02