I love the feel of the Matias Tactile Pro keyboards. The plastic case is so cheap that my first two are now held together with gaffer tape, but the key action is great. So, back in January, I bought the new 2.0 version, with programmability that I don’t need and a USB 2 “hub” “dock” extension cord that turns out to be spectacularly useless. And the same horribly cheap plastic case.

I haven’t broken the case on the new one yet, but in the past few days, the damn thing’s come close to breaking me. It generates spurious keystrokes, you see, and its current trick is generating “/tmpu/” roughly 1/3 of the time when I type “/tmp/”. If I plug it into a Windows box, it generates “/tmp/u” instead, and more frequently.

For weeks, now, I’ve been wondering about the gradual increase in the number of typos I’ve been generating. I just thought I was tired from all the late-night testing sessions and the stubborn persistence of my sinus whateverthehellitis problem.

Nope, my keyboard is trying to kill me. Do you have any idea how many times a day I type “/tmp/”? Aaaargh.

“We are not responsible for any mutations that cause your virus-infected laptop to wipe out human civilization after your return to Earth. Unless you land in Berkeley, in which case we’re totally claiming the credit.”

from the BBC: "Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.

"The worm was first detected on Earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games."

Blow me.

“Hi, I’m a badly-written installer for a small utility that does only one thing, and does it poorly. You’re stuck with me, though, so I can fuck up your machine as much as I want and make you spend half an hour getting your environment back the way you like it.”

“PS: this update might fix your problem. Or not. But I’m going to make you reboot just to find out. Nyah nyah.”

I think I’ve figured out why the Creative Suite 3.3 Standard (upgrade version) installer insists that you exit every running application and not try to use your computer at all until it’s finished: you don’t want anyone to find out that the guy who wrote it doesn’t know how to manage memory.

I made the mistake of trying to open a file containing all my software licenses, so I could look up my CS2 keys if they were needed to validate my upgrade, and I couldn’t fork a process to do so.

What’s more, the act of opening a terminal window to look at the file caused the installer to fail on the current and pending pieces of the application. I had to stop, undo the partial install, clean up some other cruft, and do it all again.

Later, after I started using my computer again, I ran the updater, and since it looked like it was going to take forever, left it overnight. Sometime in the wee hours, the InDesign update noticed that Safari was running and aborted, throwing up a dialog box that blocked the rest of the updates as well.

Gosh, thanks. I just remembered why I hate upgrading your software: my time is worthless to you.

PS: remember when complicated expensive professional software came with documentation? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Here’s what I think of your “modes”:

(defun perl-mode (&optional foo) (interactive "p") (fundamental-mode))
(defun cperl-mode (&optional foo) (interactive "p") (fundamental-mode))
(defun text-mode (&optional foo) (interactive "p") (fundamental-mode))
(defun html-mode (&optional foo) (interactive "p") (fundamental-mode))
(defun sgml-mode (&optional foo) (interactive "p") (fundamental-mode))
(defun sh-mode (&optional foo) (interactive "p") (fundamental-mode))
(defun java-mode (&optional foo) (interactive "p") (fundamental-mode))
(global-set-key (kbd "TAB") 'self-insert-command)
(setq-default inhibit-eol-conversion t)
(setq default-tab-width 4)
(put 'narrow-to-region 'disabled nil)

I’m sorry, but companies who forge email headers do not inspire customer confidence:

From: 
To: "J Greely" <______@ooma.com>
Reply-To: "Parallels, Inc." 
Subject: 2 Licenses. Only $20 Each! Parallels Desktop 2-Pack
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:03:40 -0700
Message-ID: 

Please fire the idiots responsible.

[Update: they sent it out again with a decent From: header:
“From: “Parallels Inc” central@parallels.com]

Please tell me that the new GUI package manager is an early alpha, and that the dreadful performance, almost-invisible feedback, downright misleading “install security updates?” dialog box, and reduced functionality is a temporary aberration.

With that minor gripe out of the way, I just need to build the EEE wireless and ACPI packages on a VMware session, grab the updated RPMs that fix Japanese text entry, and then reinstall with a slightly-less-insane package selection, but out of the box, F9 has decent sound, video, and wired ethernet support for the EEE. I found it fairly easy to switch to a full Sun Java install, which got our Juniper VPN software working.

As a side note, while playing around with the new install, I finally confirmed that the furigana and vertical-text-layout features in OpenOffice interoperate with MS Word correctly; the UI is completely different, but it sucks in both, so that’s not necessarily a criticism. Given what an ugly hack furigana is in Word to begin with, I’d say one of the OO developers earned his lunch money on that one.

[this is mostly a theoretical issue for me, since a Word license costs me less than lunch at McDonalds, but it’s nice to know that people for whom Word costs a few burgers can get by for free]

[Update: to clarify a bit on one of the above points, when I turned on my EEE this morning, F9 popped up a dialog informing me that three important security updates were available. Unfortunately, clicking the “Update computer now” button silently installs eight updates, and I can’t even get a list of them without closing the dialog, clicking on the star-bang icon at the top of the screen, selecting “show updates”, and then selecting “review”. In addition to the security updates, it also updates libvorbis, the UpnP SDK, PPP, some Japanese bitmap fonts, and the OS release notes. Bad design.]

[Update: the pop-up window doesn’t have a scrollbar, either, so when I booted up a small-screen machine that had 21 security updates, I couldn’t even see the buttons.]

We’re used to getting our laptops back in… “worn” condition. Usually just cosmetic wear and loose display hinges, but some of them get dropped or otherwise abused (our CEO apparently uses his MacBook Pro to stop bullets), and a few have been completely trashed.

The one we recently got back from our copy-writer when she left the company (“Hi, Sue!”) was special.

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