lifebsideben

Wow, just saw this today: Google Applications. Yes, I know they had all of these offerings individually, but didn’t know there was a “professional bundle” sort of thing, with support. For $50/seat/year, I don’t think microsoft is going to be too worried… yet.

Now, how to make that offering a lot more compelling? Match it up with the awesomeness of the 37signals apps, maybe? I think so. That would be worth $50/seat/year for any small business I’d run, especially if they continue to improve the Docs and Calc apps. (Calc especially… it’s “ok”, but really could use to be a lot better before it can supplant Excel for anything but the most mundane small sheets.) [And don't get me started on OOO, it's really no better.]

GOOG M&A–are you listening? OK, not to me, since only 4 of my friends even randomly read my blog :), but I hope this has occurred to them.

Tags: 37signals, excel, google, microsoft, productivity

So, I buy a Microsoft wireless desktop (mouse+keyboard) from Costco the other day, and gave my old optical mouse to the wife for her Mac. Everything seemed fine, software installed OK, la-di-da… the mouse worked OK on the fairly reflective white keyboard tray on my el cheapo Ikea desk (a problem in the past), etc. But then… I noticed something odd. Like a bad smell, but only faint, it crept up on me until I realized, what the hell? What have they done with the Inser/Delete key area?!?

On most PC/104 (I guess they’re still called that) style keyboards, there are six keys to the right of the main QWERTY section, typically above the inverted-T arrow keys. These keys are Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down. Makes sense. Logical layout. Easy to learn.

But on this new keyboard I bought? Nope. Rearranged. Minus one key. WTF? “Insert” is just gone. Delete is now twice as high (including essentially the space where Insert used to be, ohhh now that is handy!), and Home and End are no longer in the same column. Whaaaa? I suppose 80% of users never use the insert key; they probably don’t use home and end much either. But the other 20% of us do… so stop penalizing those that DO use something, for the supposed benefit of those that DON’T!

Now I understand why the link entitled “Learn how Microsoft leads the industry in the design and production of ergonomic hardware” on this page goes to a 404 error! This sucks ergonomically. Now to do cut/copy/paste, I need to use these one-hand-bending ctrl+x, ctrl+c, ctrl+v keystrokes, instead of the easy-to-reach (left hand on ctrl or shift…) tap insert or delete. That’s not better from an ergonomic standpoint! Oh, wait, maybe I’m supposed to use the function keys that are now assigned to ‘cut’ ‘copy’ ‘paste’… yeah because reaching up there to learn NEW keys, that are ALREADY assigned functions in most apps, is useful. Did I mention you need to put on “F lock” to use the function keys as regular F keys? So I guess learning F2 for ‘modify’ and F5 for ‘refresh’ and ‘ctrl+f4′ for close, etc. etc. were a waste of time. Grrrrr.

I would blame Microsoft for all of this, but it looks like maybe this keyboard is just a rebranded Logitech device. I wouldn’t be surprised, as my previous Logitech keyboard also had this F-lock stupidity which was another reason I wanted to get a different keyboard in the first place! At least this one does let me reprogram all the silly ‘multimedia’ keys at the very top… although I have never used them on previous keyboards anyhow. But, I suppose assigning a key to Firefox, to iTunes, etc. is OK… but it’s not like they’re not always loaded, anyhow.

Tags: apple, hardware, microsoft

One of my developers asked how to get a .sh file to be runnable from windows today. I told him it should probably just work, with Cygwin… but apparently, it doesn’t. He went to lunch, so I gave it a go… my first attempt at making the file association through the GUI wasn’t fruitful, so Googling got me on the right track. Actually, the second bit of info was most elegant, and shows how to make file associations from the windows command prompt… slick. Here it is: (idea stolen from here)…

To make cygwin able to run “.sh” shell scripts (like .bat batch files), automatically, you need to do this on the machine:

C:\> assoc .sh=bash
C:\> ftype bash=c:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe %1 %*

I never knew about the ‘assoc’ and ‘ftype’ commands at the cmd.exe prompt before. Cool!
You can then double-click on .sh files and they’ll run properly (assuming of course you have cygwin installed in c:\cygwin… but this is where it is on our Copenhagen servers…)

Tags: microsoft, software

I have a team of developers who work for me. Some are Linux/PHP/Perl/mysql guys, some are IIS/ASP/MSSQL guys (and apparently from their behavior, never the ‘twain should meet). My background is definitely biased towards the former camp, but I try to be impartial. Sometimes, though, I really see stuff that just blows my mind.
We have a payment partner who shall remain nameless (but it rhymes with “iBill”). We used to use a value from their admin interface to calculate some stats. This page changed. The 500+ line vbscript that, among other things, scraped for this value, is broken. The developer gave up on making it work. Customer service complained enough that I just sat and wrote a 1-page LWP-based script to fetch down not only that number, but the entire list of active customers, which is useful in many ways. I told the developer of the vbscript about this, and he was interested in getting at the data (it’s cron’d to pull every morning.) So, I told him the directory and server (it’s on a linux box), how he’d need a ssh client (and where to get one), and said give a holler if there’s any problems. I was curious to see what’d happen.
Cut to later that day. He tells me he can’t get on the machine because there’s too many people already connected (huh?) He shows me, sure enough, Remote Desktop says it can’t connect. I inform him that true, the linux box doesn’t support microsoft’s remote desktop. I explain again about ssh, and he must have at least read the mail, because he had installed PuTTY. He fires that up, and can’t get in. Nope, really, SSH–telnet ain’t gonna do it. OK, now password doesn’t work. Right, the linux box doesn’t understand your microsoft domain password–but it’s the same as your cvs login, which is on the same machine. OK, now he’s in. Command line. Boom. Now what? I say “well, it’s command line, but you know, like DOS”. “DOS? That’s like 50 years old!”. Sigh.
I say, “I sent you what directory it’s in in the email”, and watch. He figures out “cd” is the way to get there… good start: “cd home/pmt_logs”. No go, I tell him “you need a slash before that”. “/cd home/pmt_logs”. I correct him, he gets there. Types “dir”, and thanks to years of bash shell alias hacks being now standard on RH9, it works. After a few more moments I realize he hasn’t the faintest clue how to examine the contents of a file. He indignantly asks how is he supposed to access these files?!
I give in and just make a readonly Samba share on the box.

Why is it that the commandline is so scary to these folks? I know CMD.EXE sucks ass, but if you are a coder on windows, shouldn’t you know at least something about it, or commandlines in general? I’m not going to offer any insight that wasn’t already much more eloquently delivered in Neal Stephenson’s “In the beginning, was the commandline” book, but seriously… all Windows coders should install cygwin and read a book. I don’t hire people who can’t explain at least the concepts, if not the final meaning of a commandline shown to me by Marc Slayton years ago. (It’s goes something like this… what does this do? “cat /var/logs/httpd/access_log.tgz | tar xzf - | fgrep -v ‘.jpg’ | cut -d’ ‘ -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -50″). Needless to say, I didn’t hire any of the MS guys, they were all inherited. But I did get this same programmer from above, interested in learning some Perl [on win32], much to my surprise, so maybe there’s hope for skill expansion yet.

Tags: bitching, engineering, microsoft, software