Published on February 9, 2007
in General.
Continuing my notes on Vista usage:
- User Access Control or UAC is really as annoying as Apple depicts it in the famous ad. I have switched it off after an hour of clicking “Allow” all the time. Not only it is annoying, it also prevents the programs that are not aware of it from copying certain files which UAC thinks it has to “protect”. I use a program called Far Manager to work with files and it was just complaining about not being able to copy certain files (not even sure what was so special about them, not the system files certainly). When I disabled UAC the copying started working without problems.
- Constant disk activity can drive you mad. In my case it was caused by one of the “features” which I think lots of Vista users will be turning off. It is a “shadowing” feature which you can enable for each hard drive separately. It basically saves the copies of all your data so that you can later go back to a previous version of any file, directory or even all hard drive.
That’s great of course. In theory. In reality I have a 500 Gb hard drive which is half full already with data, movies, games and other big files. This data is constantly updated by me and Vista constantly copies everything. Not only the constant disk activity is annoying, but this eats the hard drive space too. When I disabled the feature I immediately got back 50 Gb of free space. I’ve decided that I’ll better use good old undelete from a 3rd party vendor to get the accidentally deleted files back.
Both of these “misfeatures” reminded me about one thing that I hate in programs like Putty. The developers do not let you save the password by design. They think that this is the best way to provide maximum security for the password. If the password is not saved anywhere in the program, then no one has any chance to hack the program and steal it. Right? Wrong!
The only thing that they achieve with this approach is that the users have to write their passwords elsewhere. On piece of paper, in the notepad, everywhere. Is this more secure then letting the user store the password in the program and then using some advanced technique to properly encrypt it? Nope, this only makes security a bigger problem. Of course, it becomes the users own problem, the software developers can not be held responsible if someone stills that paper with a password from the user’s desk. That’s so wrong in my opinion.
And the same happens with that 2 features in Vista. A person like me just turns them off because of their annoyance. Both features are great in theory and I definitely like to use them but not at the cost of such annoyance.
UAC is actually so wrong that I am quite sure Microsoft will be fixing it in the first Service Pack for Vista.
Published on February 5, 2007
in General.
Upgraded PC and installed Vista. Some notes:
- Little known fact — if you will upgrade your PC with 4Gb of RAM, 32-bit version of Vista (the most common one) won’t be able to use all of the memory due to how 32-bit architecture works (PCI devices memory also has to be addressed within the same 4Gb). On my new PC, Vista only saw 2.93Gb (from 4Gb total).
- Device drivers could be a problem — usually installation disks that came with the hardware do not work, giving strange errors. Far from all manufactures have updated the drivers or updated the software.
- On the other hand my WiFi card which requires drivers installation in XP, worked out of the box in Vista, with no additional drivers installation.
- Still says stupid things like “About 1 hour and 0 minutes remaining” when files are copied. 0 minutes?
- When I was copying “My Documents” folder from the old PC, in the middle of the copying process, when it got to My Pictures, My Music and My Videos folders, Vista suggested to move them to the new Pictures, Music and Videos folders respectively. Smart!
The next 1.2.0 version of Factory Nova will be able to display Quicktime and AVI videos directly on the file discussion page (and it already is capable to do the same with Flash SWF files).
Sometimes it is easier to show something (a bug for example) using a screen capture video and now it will be possible to view the video directly in Factory Nova (and discuss it on the same page)!
Watch a video demonstrating this feature:
Video (Quicktime, 4.2 Mb)
Published on January 14, 2007
in General.
iPhone is certainly great and revolutionary, but what’s up with all these fingerprints on the screen?
Maybe after all there is a reason why mobile phone manufacturers use a stylus?
We are introducing skins support in the next 1.1.0 version of Factory Nova.
Our skins have one interesting feature, they can inherit some of their templates and even images from other skins. So, for example, you can create a skin which will have our “default” skin specified as a parent and the only file that would be changed in that new skin would be a file with CSS styles. All other files Factory Nova will automatically take from the parent skin.
To demonstrate this functionality we are adding a second standard skin to FN, which is called Obsidian. It only changes several icons and the header image, everything else is automatically inherited from the default skin.
Apparently, there is a new term “stuffed tracking” now:
We’ve finally released the long-awaited version of Stuffed Tracker with reports caching.
Ivan actually started to work on caching back in February or January 2006 (don’t remember exactly now). So it took a really long time to finish as you can see (though Ivan has been constantly distracted by other internal projects).
I really like the end result. We’ve managed to combine the idea of static reports which are updated continuously on the side of the server with our fancy dynamic reports constructor.
To be honest, it wasn’t clear for us how to pull this off with the reports constructor still being present in the product (and it is the main way to work with the aggregated statistics in Stuffed Tracker). But after a 2-month testing period of the new version on our client’s server with a tracking database close to 1Gb in size, I can now safely say that the new caching feature works great and it does solve the “slow reports” problem that any statistical software is plagued with by definition.
Working with the tracker that has to make queries in a 1Gb MySQL database is now fast and convenient (with caching enabled of course).
We’ve even introduced a so called “smart caching” feature. With this feature enabled Stuffed Tracker constantly analyzes how long it took to prepare each report and displays fast reports in real time and slow reports through the caching feature. This effectively means that you can enable smart caching and as soon as some of your reports will become too slow to generate they will be cached, while the others, which are still fast, will still display in real time.
With caching problem gone, we now have only two major problems that have to be solved:
- Complete deleting of the old data (probably, this will include automatic deleting via cron script) — to solve the problem that the database grows too big and doesn’t fit into the accounts of some of our clients.
- Archiving of the old data — this one should obviously come together with complete deleting, because it’s not good to just lose the data completely, even if it’s old.
These 2 problems are much easier to solve then caching and I am thinking that at the very beginning of the next year we will get rid of them.
This all means that we are finally reaching the stage in the Stuffed Tracker development when we will start to add tons of new exciting features instead of just solving the current problems.
Published on December 5, 2006
in General.
I can now talk via Skype and SkypeOut with an (extra)ordinary cordless DECT phone!
Here are my toys:
- Gigaset SL560 — a very nice DECT phone from Siemens with Bluetooth.
- Gigaset M34 USB — a special dongle again from Siemens which plugs in the USB port and also connects to the Gigaset’s DECT base station.
- An old-and-not-so-sexy-anymore Bluetooth headset from Motorola.
Here is how it works.
I can see M34 dongle as another handset in the internal menu of the base station (accessible from any handset connected to it). I connect to M34 and I see its own menu, where one of the options is “Skype”. I select Skype — and all of my contacts from Skype are displayed. I can choose any of the contacts, press the “call” button on the handset and a Skype call is done on the PC. After the contact answers the phone I can hear her and speak to her using my handset. A miracle!
But that’s not all. Thanks to the wonderful bluetooth capabilities of SL560 I can connect a bluetooth headset to it and then communicate with my Skype contacts using the headset. Don’t forget that it connects to the handset, not to the computer. So I can carry the handset with me, go away from the base station for up to 300 meters and still talk via Skype via DECT phone via Bluetooth headset.
Today is an interesting day. Exactly 1 year ago, 29 Sep 2005, we released a completely new version of Stuffed Tracker as well as a our redesigned site.
Well, what do you know! Today we finally released the first public version of our project management software — Factory Nova. This wasn’t done on purpose, even today we were still working on the product’s mini-site, documentation and testing.
That’s actually a really good example of coincidences that we experience from time to time.
We’ve also set a new record today — the first purchase of Factory Nova came in just 50 minutes after the release was announced!
It’s a little bit old mini, but still works great.
We can finally test our software under Safari on Mac. If you are working with our software from a Mac, you can now expect to see the interface glitches that you might have experienced to go away.
PS. Thanks to Shal for providing us with the hardware.
