Whatever Turns You On

I've just spent five minutes staring at a blank screen.

Not something I do as a matter of choice but rather something that I am required to do by someone with a skewed idea of what is 'acceptable'. Five minutes on the face of it doesn't sound like a very long time but when you have work to do and it is stopping you do it, five minutes can feel like an eternity. This particular pause for reflection came courtesy of, who else but Microsoft, a company so firmly rooted in the past it ought to wear a stovepipe hat.

I made the rookie mistake of turning on my second computer - the one that shares my main workstation monitor via a KVM switch that needs to be switched to whichever computer is booted up or else the screen resolution goes haywire. Once the 'on' button is pressed you are committed, and on this occasion I was ambushed by one of those Windows updates that waits till the computer is turned back on to finish installing. The 'installing upgrades' screen, otherwise known as the 'Blue Screen of Tedium', appeared and I just had to wait.

And wait.

Then it rebooted again and I was left staring at the aforementioned blank screen for the aforementioned five minutes. What fun. Eventually it got as bored as I was with this game and fired up but not before I had plenty of time to muse about an oft-considered question: Why?

Specifically, Why does it need to be this way?

Back in the day when Windows was but a small child it would be demanding of time spending an extended period getting itself ready when the on button was pressed. We came to accept that this must be necessary, I mean, why would they take all that time out of your day if it wasn't for some good reason?

I am from a generation when many things were mechanical. Cameras for instance. They didn't need a battery or a USB charge cable, they relied upon the energy put into the system by the simple action of pressing a button to do all they needed to take picture. Brilliant, and instantaneous. They moved on to a point when they needed batteries to do stuff but were still quick. It is a good idea to be quick when taking a picture but modern digital cameras have ignored this managing to do a lot of tedious messing about after the button is pressed and I have lost count of the number of things I have taken a picture of that are no longer there. This is not progress in my book.

Since my first computer in 1994 they have got faster. My first one would process 188,000,000 instructions per second. My current one can process 91,100,000,000 instructions per second - nearly 500 times faster and, if you take into account all the other improvements it should have left that first machine in its dust but it hasn't. The problem is that the growth in software bloat has nearly outpaced Moore's Law. The most obvious result is that programs sprawl all over hard drives that should by now have hardly noticed them. Possibly the most irritating result is that the time between pressing the on button and everything being ready for action is barely any quicker. 

Knowing nothing of the internal processes of a computer I couldn't see why it took over a minute to turn a machine on when a Google search returning millions of hits could be done in a fraction of a second. I mean, what was Windows doing for all that time? It must be a massive task to use up that much time and resource. I put this down to naivety but in recent time Microsoft has found itself with competitors and they seem to have managed the near instant start-up. My Nexus 7 runs on Android and the instant I open the flap on its protective case it fires up. Not quite as quickly as a fridge light but getting there. It is ready for action without having to wait. This is what we want.

Granted, it isn't a serious workstation and I would have trouble running my computer modelling software on it but the principle is established. Even digital cameras are getting with it by constantly 'taking pictures' until you press the button and select one. A bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach but it does reduce the number of oddly empty photos.

I am of the opinion that Microsoft's days are numbered. They have been repeatedly late to the party as new developments have come along. They were too complacent. They had too big a market share to fail - or so they thought. Like the dreaded Autodesk they had foisted an inferior product on the

market that had become the de facto standard and everyone was too afraid to not be there with the crowd. Once they had reached that position they felt free to do everything on their terms using their outdated notions of what their customer base could be expected to put up with. But times are changing and the people who have had to put up with their foibles are now in a position to put up serious opposition.

Can anyone port my modelling software to Android?

Ode To A Wasted Morning.

So. I am sat at my computer trying to kick start my working day when a 'nag window' pops up. 

This is yet another one from Nvidia who, after sitting in the background letting their graphics card offspring quietly get on with its job, have suddenly started to get needy and attention grabbing of late. Updates promising a better gaming experience have been dangled in front of me repeatedly.

I don't really 'do' games, certainly not on my work computers. But I do need a reasonably serious graphics card to handle the computer modelling and rendering tasks I throw at it, so I hit the 'install' button - what could possibly go wrong? A few minutes twiddling my thumbs should see me experiencing a new level of graphics handling capability, whole new worlds of visual pleasure will be opened up. Not that any of the previous updates have made any discernible difference in performance.

The 148Mb file starts to download. 148MB! What is that all about? My first serious computer had a hard drive smaller than that and this is just yet another update to what was then called a video card. Alarm bells start to ring as the progress bar fails to do much of that. Progress, I mean. What could be slowing things down? It is a fast computer with a fast broadband connection: I can only put it down to their servers creaking under the load.

I click to install, and wait.

I go and make a coffee.

I unload the dishwasher.

I wind up the clock in the study.

I prove that branching ratios of the Higgs Boson are consistent with the standard model.

I lied about the last one.

The installation bar continues to creep slowly across the screen so I try to buy a couple of things on eBay. Twenty five minutes have now passed. Then the screen goes black.

No problem. I expected something like this to happen. It has presumably got to the stage when it needs to disable the graphics card to update the software. A bit rude of it to not ask first, but so be it. The screen lights up again but with a resolution that has dropped to something I haven't had to work with for the best part of twenty years and the installer progress bar moves slowly on.

Then it stops.

A dialogue box appears. It says that the installation has failed, thank you and good night - though possibly not quite that politely. I am left staring at a screen with hugely magnified icons dripping off the edges. Good grief. Thanks Nvidia.

I manage to navigate my way to the unfeasibly large control panel and click on the Nvidia icon hoping that I can at least find a more user-friendly screen resolution before I attempt to fix it. A dialogue box appears telling me that I haven't got an Nvidia graphics card. Something of a surprise as I had been using it earlier.

There is only one way forward. Turn it off and on again. So I hit the shutdown button only to be informed that it will 'install updates and shutdown'. Updates. What updates? It must mean the Nvidia update but why are there six of them? What is going on? Is this some sort of cruel joke?

It takes over thirty long, grinding, minutes to install the updates and for the screen to go black. I press the on button with my fingers crossed that all will be well. And it is. Well, nearly. It comes back at low resolution and spends another six minutes to search the 'preconfigured driver folder' and asks for a reboot before all is back to normal.

So. Pressing that innocent looking 'install update' button has cut a swath through my morning with no discernible benefit - another PR triumph for the software companies. I could, of course have resorted to using my other work computer but that was sitting tantalisingly behind a KVM switch and past experience told me that a rebooting computer needs to have control of the monitor or else all manner of horrors will result. I just have to be patient.

The moral of this story is: 'When your graphics card asks to upgrade consider taking it to the nearest computer shop and having it levered out with a screwdriver - It may be quicker'. 

Have You Got Something To Prise This Key Out With?

I have just hit the damned 'insert' button again.

The problem is that, being located right next to the 'delete' button it is a key that can be pressed without you knowing. But you certainly know that something just happened because all of a sudden everytime you type a character it deletes the one in front of it. Not being a touch typist, I tend to look at the keyboard rather than the screen which means that this little monster can cut vast swathes through my carefully crafted prose before I realise what is going on. I don't do it very often so, every time that it rears its ugly head I forget which button I am supposed to press to cure it and I am reduced to trying to Google it. Which is when the word 'overwrite' would be useful if it came to mind - but it never does.

So what is the 'insert' button for, and why is it in such a stupid place? Heaven alone knows. The answer is presumably the same for the question; what is a 'caps lock' for in this day and age and why did some idiot put it next to the 'a'?

Accepting that there are a lot of keyboards out there, and there may be someone who finds these things useful, it is doubtful that we will ever be rid of them, but is it really beyond the wit of man to come up with a bit of 'keyboard management' software that allows people like me to turn these irritating keys off?

There is, actually, a method being peddled that involves 'adding some keyboard scancode mapping information to your Windows registry' Unfortunately even the description lost me at the word 'adding' so the chances of me succesfully disabling these keys without disabling the whole computer are slim to nill. The other technique often ventured is 'prising the offending keys out' - nice.

While Microsoft spend all their time messing up user interfaces why don't they divert some of that creative energy into something really useful like an idiot proof way of customising the keyboard? Something with a nice friendly graphic interface maybe? They're probably still trying to figure out why the letters keep disappearing while they type.

Java Java it likes me

Periodically I get bugged by a Java update. I have no idea what Java does anymore so whenever I receive an update the knee-jerk reaction is to go along with it and go through the update process.

I mean, what could happen if I don't? Presumably this is just another of those bits of legacy software on my computer that has security issues and if I don't update it when they demand that I do then my machine is going to catch a very nasty bug or topple over because a vital bit is no longer up to date. Right?

Well. Not necessarily. 

Every time Java wants to update it uses that nasty little trick of making you opt out of installing an Ask toolbar. I don't want an Ask toolbar. It is a bit of meaningless clutter that gets in the way of me using Google. But every time Java forces you to update it the Ask toolbar is there ready to be installed unless you actively opt out. The problem is you probably have a life and, as a result, are doing other things. More important things. While you are going through another uninvited and tedious update of a bit of software that you don't understand the purpose of you can easily overlook the task of un-clicking a radio button and you have another bit of trash installed on your machine.

I can do without this!

The latest 'update' to Java has appeared, and do you know what I did?

I uninstalled it. 

Hopefully this will bring the irritating updates to an end and nothing untoward will happen to my machine.

If it does this is probably my last blog for a while.

If it doesn't it will be business as usual and I have just saved myself from another computer-related irritation.

Watch this space...

So Much For Not Being Evil

I think that the title just about says it all.

Reductio ad absurdum

The reason why many older people do not follow fashion isn't because they don't understand it, but because they have seen it all before. This is also the reason why there is a tendency to get grumpier with age. The first time round fashions can have a certain novelty and, occasionally, something new does come along. People who now stick to a particular style have probably followed fashion at some time in their past. But a lot of fashion is just change for change's (or commercial gain's) sake, and that can get  wearing, very wearing. Resisting fashion can become a heroic fight as retailers are completely in its thrall and you can find that things simply become unavailable. A couple of years ago there was a fashion for purple clothing. It became quite amusing looking at shop window displays in Italy and seeing nothing but a sea of purple in all its shades. Anyone who didn't like purple would, presumably, have to wait till the next fashion bus came along.

Fashion, of course, makes itself felt in all areas of life. Clothing is the first thing that comes to mind when the word is mentioned but it also shapes the environment in which we live, infecting everything from the way food is presented to the shape of waste bins. Architecture is at the whim of fashion but, unfortunately for architects, any mistakes tend to linger and mean that buildings can become dated very quickly. Consequently architects will reign in some of their more extreme reactions to fashion in fear of leaving an embarrassing edifice to haunt them.

Not so software designers.

Microsoft have turned their back on anything that suggests three dimensions in their Windows 8 operating system and 'flattened' everything out into simple areas of colour. They call them 'tiles' and the whole idea of reducing everything in a GUI to its most simple and impenetrable form has met with some resistance. So you would think that other software companies would take note and steer another course. Actually, no you wouldn't, because if you are old enough to have seen it all before you know that the headlong rush into a particular design dead-end is unstoppable. Google are currently following the path to minimalism. I have mentioned this before but Google keep reminding me so I can't resist protesting again. Their latest roll-out of their search page has banished the menu bar. This now means that operations that used to be carried out with one button click now require two. This could, of course, be because Amazon have patented 'one-click' but it is more likely that useful things clutter up their nice minimal work space and need to be banished. Preferably somewhere difficult to find.

My wife has an Android phone and it has just updated itself. Mine has yet to receive the command from above but it will, doubtless, appear any day now. Without asking anyone if they want the interface with their most commonly accessed piece of technology messed around with they have now flattened everything. No choice is given, you are supposed now to be eager for a 'new look' and thankful that they have decided for you what it is going to be. Resistance is futile. They have also chosen to move some of the furniture around and their end users will just have to put up with banging into things for a while, for the sake of fashion.

If fashion went in a straight line introducing us to new and exciting things along the path to some sort of design Nirvana it wouldn't be so bad. But the reality is that the next wave of 'bright young things' will be along in a while and everything will rush headlong in another direction, probably backwards. The current BYT's will presumably recognize this as a 'retrograde' step and join the ranks of the grumpy.

In days gone by we had to put up with all of this because the infrastructure wasn't there to allow people to find and adopt their own style. Things are different now. Software can be designed to allow everyone complete control over the look and feel of things. By allowing 'user preferences' they can allow their customer base to locate their own comfort zone and opt to stay there. The computer modelling software that I have used for the last nearly twenty years allowed this. Each time they released a new version you could opt to stick with the old interface and not have to go through a new learning curve. Microsoft bought that company and then pulled the plug on it a few months later so it is permanently in stasis now. It won't develop as new technology comes along but then again I won't be bothered by BYTs gaining control either. On balance that is probably a good thing, and you never know it may become a design classic.

An Attack of Sticky Cursor.

Something I have been noticing lately is that when I use Google Street View the cursor gets 'sticky'. By which I mean that if you try and click to rotate the viewpoint it sticks to the little grey zone used to zoom in or move and won't let go so when you release the mouse button you move position. This has been getting increasingly annoying but I had thought the problem was at my end. Google wouldn't have updated one of their flagship pieces of software so that it no longer works would they? 

Wrong. Apparently they have. When I eventually found out what the forums were calling this phenomenon i.e. 'sticky cursor', I found that plenty of other people have been having the same problem - and it apparently goes back a long way. To at least 2011 in fact depending on which combination of hardware and browser you use.

However. On this occasion there is a fix, and it is simple. Just click on 'Full Screen' and the problem goes away. Now if the chaps at Google can just figure out why that is maybe they can break that too.