Windows wow, Macs meh

First day back at work = first time in nearly a fortnight of having to sit and stare at this lump of obstructive machinery perched on my desk in front of me, otherwise known as an Apple Mac Pro 3.1. Mac OS X Version 10.5.8; processor 2.8Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon; Memory 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM. Apparently.

All kinds of wibble is spoken by either side in the endless Windows vs Mac debate. The Mac camp generally plug for assertions of superior technology, easier troubleshooting, better software ...

Let me state my definitive case on this.

I DON’T CARE.

One thing and one thing only am I interested in where computers are concerned: how they arrange their files, and how they let me interface with them. Two things only am I concerned with. How they actually achieve this is of the sublimest indifference. I have stated before that I don’t care if a little goblin climbs up behind the screen every time I press a key and inks in my chosen letter. I consider the possibility my computer is so energy-inefficient that an entire parallel universe might suffer heat death just to supply the power for a game of Minesweeper, and the ennui overpowers me. If it does what I want, when I want it, that’s good enough for me.

I am remarkably consistent in my views, might I add, because I used to think Macs were better – back in the days of DOS and then Windows 3.1. This is hardly a meaningful statement because throwing darts at the keyboard across the room was a better way of interfacing with the computer than Windows 3.1 allowed, but I do want to emphasise the consistency of my philosophy. I’m not grinding a technological axe here, folk.

So here is why, in their current incarnations, Macs fail and Windowses win.

1. The desktop ornament has no hash key. Let me repeat that. The desktop ornament has no hash key. Having repeated, let me rephrase that. The stupid pile of overrated junk lacks one of the most common symbols required for HTML coding. It’s not quite like leaving the letter ‘e’ off the keyboard but it’s pretty similar to leaving out the ‘r’s or ‘n’s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, you get a # by pressing ALT+3. Hardly intuitive.

2. Minimising applications. I gladly admit that a strength of the Mac is the ability to minimise all open applications with a simply keystroke, specifically F11. Windows could well do with this. However, Macs then go and blow this advantage by having all the applications pop back into view when you select just one of them, missing the point that you actually had a reason for choosing to minimise them all in the first place. I wonder what it could have been?

3. CMD/CTRL + TAB. Related to (2), Macs nicked the Windows shortcut of cycling through minimised applications by pressing CMD+TAB. Except that once again they singularly miss the point of what the user is trying to achieve. The chosen application comes back to the front, i.e. the menu bar in the top left of the screen now relates to that application. But the open window of that application stays resolutely minimised, requiring you to click on it with the mouse anyway, missing the point of a freakin’ keyboard shortcut, you morons.

A Macficionado once tried to explain to me how I could recreate this Windows effect using Spaces - in other words, jump through one extra hoop to get what I can already do in Windows because the system is helpfully designed that way.

4. The inexplicable hang-ups. Even when running a native Mac app, the thing can inexplicably freeze for a few seconds, then remember that it has a fuming user sitting not too far away who is entertaining thoughts of what he could usefully do with a pickaxe, so decide to show a pretty coloured spinning wheel to defuse the situation while it tries to remember what it was doing. Mac software runs more quickly? My nads it does.

5. File selection. Windows and Macs both allow you to choose different icon styles when looking at a folder: small, big, thumbnail etc. But only Windows allows you to select multiple files with a single sweep of the mouse regardless of the icon view.

Let me turn to C.S. Lewis here, possibly for the first time ever in this particular debate. He commented that when he was small he liked lemonade but disliked wine; as an adult, he liked both wine and lemonade. Therefore the growing up has enriched him with an additional experience. He would be impoverished by adulthood if he now liked wine but disliked lemonade, keeping the net total of likes at one.

If Windows lets you do two things, and Macs only one, the superiority or otherwise of the underlying technology is irrelevant. Windows is better. It’s simple maths.

6. Folder listing. Related to 5: Windows and Macs list the contents of folders alphabetically (or by size, or by type etc.) In the alfy view, however, Windows lists first the folders, then the files. Macs list the whole lot in simple alfy order.

It is likely that I might select multiple files to copy/move/whatever. How likely is it that I might select a mixture of files and folders? The answer you’re looking for (hint) is ‘unlikely’. The Windows way of doing it is more helpful.

7. Shortcuts. In Windows, the pop-up menu buttons often have shortcut keys associated with them: rather than click on ‘Save’ or ‘Discard’ you can just hit S or D. On a Mac you have to move the mouse. Again I invoke C.S. Lewis. Windows lets you do more things, more easily, therefore is better.

8. Menu bars. I won’t go into the plusses and minuses of a menu bar that stays in one place as opposed to a menu bar for each open window. I suppose they both have their points. But guess which one I prefer and which one I find prissy and didactic.

So there you have it. A definitive set of arguments that will surely settle this old chestnut once and for all and bring the Applistas defecting over in flocks. Y’know, I might have brought down a mighty empire today. I feel pretty good about that.

New computer

Is black and shiny. Lots of RAM. Is Windows 7. Is not a Mac. All these good.

It's been nearly 10 years since the last completely new computer, and that was bargain basement stuff that ran on Windows ME and got updated to Windows 2000 as soon as decently possible. For the last four years I've been using a secondhand Windows XP PC, which was the bee's knees when it arrived but since then the bee has grown steadily more arthritic. Upgrading is always at least mildly fraught and in this case it was hanging over me throughout our trip in Sweden, due to the computer arriving the day before we left.

In fact, it's been possibly the most minimally fraught upgrade yet. Everything important has been installed, a few little-used programs remaining to be added when and as. Documents, photos and music backups all just fell into place (even if I did have to reinstate the playlists manually in iTunes, as it couldn't read the library file "because it was created by an earlier version of iTunes". Well of course it was, you fool; you're the one asking me to upgrade by a decimal point every couple of weeks ...). Unlike the old machine, the new (22") screen can display a double page spread in InDesign CS4 of the Delightfully Dotty Car Club magazine that I design and edit, with fully legible text rather than grey blurs. I looked at the spread and felt that warm glow within that says there may be trouble ahead but it's dealable with; the worst is over. That was the primary objective: everything else is gravy.

I like the design of the interface. Of course, "pretty" <> necessarily "more functional" - the TARDIS console can't really travel in time, you know - and the computer would work equally well if the tops of the windows were solid and opaque so you can't see the desktop behind them, and if the close and minimise buttons didn't glow slightly as if lit from within - but it ties in well with what the machine actually does. For the first time ever I am forced to use the words "nice piece of design" in the context of Windows.

This is Windows, though, so obviously it can't do everything perfectly. It finds new ways to insist on being helpful: like when you call up Task Manager to kill a frozen programme (it still happens), it tries to diagnose the fault after you have told it you just want it to drop the programme where it is and walk away. It also keeps asking permission to install stuff, or rather, to make changes to the hard disk. Oh, come on! When did you ever ask that before? And when did I ever say no?

I've had to say goodbye to some old friends which are no longer compatible on a 64-bit system. My Windows Cardfile address book, which has been with me ever since Windows 3.1, couldn't hack the new oxygen-rich atmosphere and so perished. All the data was backed up and has been copied into Google Mail contacts, but even so. The principle. And some long cherished games have gone the way of all things, but I hadn't actually played any for a long time. They were just junk on the mantlepiece, tedious stuff that you have to move and dust around and never use but you don't throw them out because they're there.

I have previously ranted about Office 2007, and just because Office 2010 is three years older, don't think that changes anything. However, after careful consideration it didn't really seem uninstalling it just so I could install my comfortable familiar copy of Word 2000 (which came with the ME machine, if I remember correctly). Into every life a little clunky software must fall.

Further fraughtnesses arose in finding that I hadn't put the installation disc for the old Actiontec wireless router with all the other disks, and anyway the router was't compatible due to its desire to connect to the main computer by USB. The new router from Virgin (also shiny, also black) has two aerials and WPA2 encryption and four ethernet ports: in fact everything is done by ethernet rather than trying to be clever with USB ports. All of these are good things too. During the installation process, run off an .exe file rather than an .html file as advised in the documentation, I only had to guess (not being told) that I had to turn the modem off and on again twice.

Round about now someone always starts trying to extol the virtues of Macs or Linux because "they just work" or "they're modern technology" or some other equally vapid reason. What these people never get - are incapable of getting - is I don't care how it works. I don't care if a little goblin climbs up behind the screen every time I press a key and inks in my chosen letter (in reverse writing, obviously) on the glass while another follows behind it colouring in the pictures. And I don't care if this process is inevitably fatal, like a bee stinging, so that having performed this task the goblin then falls to its death and is blown away by the internal fan. It does what I want, when I want it.

So, looking forward to what 2020 might bring ...

Back when pad didn't even mean "pad" ...

What do you mean, what is it?

It's a JNT PAD. It says so on the front, in a font that looks suspiciously like Comic Sans, only that didn't exist back when this baby was made.

JNT = the Joint Network Team, the group set up to research and ultimately implement a UK-wide computer network for research and education, which lives today as JANET. PAD = Packet Assembler / Disassembler - a device used to connect circuit-based computer terminals to a packet-switching network such as ... oh, I dunno ... the Internet.

In other words, this little gadget - well, I say little, it measures 21 x 27 x 46 cm - was quite important in the history of networking.

It could presumably connect 16 terminals to a network, judging by the connections on the back - plus, which makes it so sweet, in the top left corner, a socket for connecting a cassette facility. Bless! That was the point at which I actually wanted to hug it.



The JNT sponsored its development in 1980 and placed an initial market-glutting order of 50 with Camtec. A further impetuous (gasp) 85 were ordered in 1981. The mad, mad fools! It'll never catch on.

Photos taken by friend and colleague Sue, who is available at reasonable costs for any respectable function requiring skilled photography.

No one but the pure in heart can find google.co.uk

• Or, for the benefit of the search engines, "How to change the default search engine in Firefox".

Have you ever known someone reasonably well, got on okay, even ventured beyond that into a rewarding friendship ... but every now and then you find a hangup in their lives that just defies all rational explanation?

Like convincing Firefox that you'd like it to use Google.co.uk as a search engine rather than Google.com. So easy, surely? And not likely to be a rare requirement: so, something Mozilla would have slipped in right up front. They are friendly and cuddly and not Microsoft so they love you and want to make your life easy in every way. Except that they don't and frankly they have no intention of doing so.

First, and most obvious, option - click on the little arrow in the search box that lists the search engines available, click on "Manage Search Engines" and change the Google URL. Except that you can't.

Okay ... why not, in an amusingly ironic Zen-type way, use Google to solve the problem? Enter a search term like "change default search engine in Firefox". And we're away.

The first option has an excitingly hack feel to it: it tells you to locate the file GOOGLE.XML in the folder C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins and change every instance of google.com to google.co.uk. Fine, easy, except that it doesn't work. Firefox still defaults to google.com.

Second option, and this one comes from Mozilla so it must be right! Type "about.config" in the URL bar, then type "keyword.url" in the filter box. Right click on the keyword.url option that appears below it and change the url in the pop-up box to google.co.uk. Fine, easy, doesn't work either.

Third option: go to http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html. This is a page that lets you select a brand new search engine (which, for the purposes of this argument, Google UK is). You're presented with a variety of search boxes but hey, you're clever. You tell it to search for Google in the UK ... easy, right?

Well, no, because what pops up is every instance of a Google UK-based search page. Universities, companies ... they all use the thing. You don't want to make any of them the default search engine. But, go back to that search page and this time ignore the search boxes - click on "2. Google" in the list of popular domains below. Now you get a list of every country-specific Google page in the world and this time - right at the end, of course, since that's where U is in the alphabet, above only Uruguay, Venezuela and South Africa - you get the Holy Grail, Google UK. Do I want to install it? Yes! Oh, yes! Do I want to start using it right away? Hit me with it, baby!

If Galahad had used computers, he'd feel like I do now.

Laptop dancing

This is a bonding exercise with my stepson. We're sitting about five feet apart in the living room tapping away on our laptops. And I'm doing it wirelessly.

His is/was a pretty decent nearish state of the art 16th birthday present. Mine is a retired company laptop with a small crack in the lid bound together by brown parcel tape (which I removed to see exactly that it was meant to be holding together). This is mostly an exercise to acquaint myself with the keyboard and layout. It's pretty good for writing on. Better than the desktop ornament, anyway. I'm pretty certain Best Beloved is on the main machine in our room as I write this. We have finally achieved the goal of all twenty first century families, each of us being on his or her own separate computer and not talking to anyone else.

When the firm announced one of its periodic purges of no longer maintained equipment, I put myself down for a laptop on the offchance. I thought I could do with a typewriter to replace my 10-year-old, much loved but essentially defunct IBM Thinkpad (which I bought with money received for His Majesty's Starship. A true writer's laptop.). This came with hard disk wiped and a copy of Windows XP - nothing else. Then Bonusbarn pointed out we have some wireless adapters knocking around and I thought why not?

And so, apropos of nothing, I thought I would share my thoughts on the saga of our Home Secretary and her avant garde art movie loving husband. First off, it's pretty clear what happened. She gets phone, TV and everything as a package from a single firm, as do we. She gets a monthly bill stating everything, as do we. It runs to several pages but that's just the way it's laid out. The bill includes movies watched. So far the biggest surprise we've had is that Bonusbarn watched Pulp Fiction at 2 in the morning over halfterm (we've since tightened up the parental controls). Ms Smith must wish she shared the experience. Anyway, she's a busy women. She can't remember the last time she manually went through the phone bill. She Has People Who Do That. She threw the pile of paper at a People and said "that's the bill, deal with it." And sadly they did.

What absolutely no one seems to be obsessing on is that somewhere in the House of Commons is a mole leaking paperwork like this to the papers. That is a disgrace and this person must be hunted down and destroyed. Though it's probably not a priority in the House of Speaker Martin, where the historic privileges of our elected representatives that were literally won in blood are secondary to who gets to wear the nice robes.

Also worrying is that the national domestic budget is in the hands of a woman who can't check her phone bill. Not even to weed out the business calls. I'm sure she racks up a hefty phone bill in the course of her duties, and naturally it should be claimed as an expense, but I can't believe every single call was work-related. Or maybe she just makes domestic calls from her sister's flat.

I would have liked to call this post "the porn ultimatum" but sadly the Sun got there first. I don't often say this to the Sun, but, nice one.

Ada plus One

Yesterday, 24 March, was the first ever Ada Lovelace Day. This is what happens when I don't keep my ear to the ground.

Ada, as I'm sure you already knew (I did - hah!) was the daughter of Lord Byron who because of her work with Charles Babbage is often credited as being the first programmer. From the day's official website:

"Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless."

What an excellent idea. Thanks to Pennski for bringing it to my attention.

I won't blog at length on the general awesomeness of anyone, (a) because I don't generally and (b) because I'd feel the need to ask permission and that takes time. But I will mention a few (by no means all; omission from this list implies absolutely nothing) of the several IT-related women I have known. In alphabetical order to avoid any hint of favouritism or bias:

• Joella, former colleague, who was a reporter and then editor on Information World Review. This means that for >50% of the 1990s she and her lovely but somewhat vague editor were the totality of UK-based IT reporting. (Correct me if I'm wrong, Jo ...) She also, more recently, introduced me to the blogging concept.
• L, former colleague, now working for Oxford Uni. Twenty years before we met she was working for Locomotive Software, proof reading their manuals, which would include the manuals that came with my Amstrad PCW all those years ago. I think that's where she met her husband. She now programs Javascripty sort of stuff.
  
• S, head of my division but I'm not crawling. Now responsible for heading communications and customer support on a 40Gbit/s optical network that links every university in the country, she started here in the mid eighties when it was basically two cans and a bit of string.
  
• T, fellow writer, longest acquaintance of all the above, bisexual witch and freelance IT consultant. See where a degree in theology from Durham can get you?

Next year I may mention some others ...

Smugness lost and regained

Lost: Just as I was looking forward to another session of doing immeasurable good for very little personal loss, the National Blood Service tell me I can't give blood platelets and be a blood donor. It's one register or the other. I'm sure that's the first time they've mentioned it, and since they signed me up for the platelets at a donor session you'd think they could have worked it out. But no. When I phoned today to postpone tomorrow's session, and mentioned I'm giving blood next week, the lady reacted as if I'd said I wanted to come round and have her on the spot. One of them had to go, and as giving platelets requires a trip into the JR and blood requires popping round the corner from the office, it wasn't a hard choice to make.

Regained: Firefox crashed on me (irritating) immediately followed by the automatic Apple Crash Reporter (quite amusing). Even more amusing, the latter caused a window to pop up asking if I wanted to relaunch Crash Reporter. I did, and it told me you can't run Crash Reporter directly, you have to wait for something to crash first. "Quis reportiet ipsos reporter?" I thought to myself with bilingual classically inclined cleverness, and resolved to spend the rest of the day pointing out the badly designed native Mac software to anyone who'll listen, and a few who won't.

It's a Mac trap, and we've been caught

There are occasional advantages to IT Support's geological speed of response. It's been a full four months since I was forced to submit a request for a Mac. Now it's arrived, it took me a full four minutes to decide we weren't going to get on. My gay trill of laughter when it looked like my email files (a) hadn't transferred to the new system and (b) wouldn't be compatible if they did made the windows rattle. (My recent discovery that, even though I can still use Firefox to compose this, the keystroke on my PC that made the cursor jump between words here just closes the tab has had a similar result.)

Fortunately that little giggle seems to have been resolved. After a morning's acquaintance I have decided we can have a relationship, as long as I can go home at the end of each day and tell my PC at home all about it.

The "genie" effect, whereby a minimised application seems to be sucked into the dock, made me queasy and I've replaced it with the good old shrink effect that Windows uses (which, I know, it got off Apple). The fact that there's only one toolbar regardless of the application is an annoyance but I'll get over it. What fool thought it would be neat to swap the " and @ keys around, and why, I will never guess.

Sadly, my biggest and loudest complaint about the Mac isn't actually Apple's fault. This one is all Microsoft's. In using Word 2008 for Mac I've regressed over a decade. Ever since I switched to PCs from my old Amstrad, ever since, I've recorded a macro to swap two misplaced letters around. The commonest spelling mistake, as you may recall me saying before. On early PCs I used the Windows macro recorder. Then Word grew up enough to record its own macros and so I used that instead. Every time I have moved to a new computer or got a new verison of Word, that is the first change I've made.

No more. Word 2008 for Mac doesn't let you record macros. I am flabbergasted. What do they think they're doing?

(Answer, courtesy of my manager: they know exactly what they're doing. They grudgingly admit that there are Microsoft users who use Apples, and they cater for the market, but they don't make it easy in the hope that said users will see the light and switch to PCs. Easy)

You can still assign keystrokes to existing menu commands. All is not lost. And in some ways, the return to the classic Word interface after months of struggling with Office 2007 [spit] is a relief. Maybe we'll call this a draw.

I'll try to be positive. The overall look of the Mac is nice. I will gladly bow to Apple's ability to make technology attractive; to slip into your life and be part of it, rather than a beast growling in the corner. The downside is of course that you do it Apple's way or not at all. To make my point I've changed the wallpaper to <geek>a screen shot of the TARDIS console room</geek> (<ubergeek>specifically the secondary console room as used in series 14</ubergeek>), that being the ultimate machine where the user's requirements are paramount.

Most satisfying of all is that once you've got your head back on you notice a certain strange sense of familiarity. The CMD+Tab combination to cycle through applications, which is almost like ALT+Tab ... oh, and the keyboard. The keyboards of early Macs were truly alien beasts. This has a forward-delete key; the funny Apple key is labelled ALT; there's a CTRL key too. The overall effect is ... Windows-like. Okay, so it's about as convincing as Del-Boy's attempts to appear classy by speaking French, but you recognise that it's trying.

Note this well. The two systems did not meet halfway. They came to us.

Hah.

No computers for the kids, though

This 1969 vision of the computer-enabled household is surprisingly close, in some areas. There's still the occasional gem ...

"What the wife selects at her console will be paid for by the husband at his counterpart console." (We see husband shaking his head dolefully as he survives the wife's expenditure ...)

Share the pain

With a heavy heart I report that circumstances have forced me to make the following formal request to my manager.

"Dear R,

To increase my ability to interoperate with N’s work and to maximise conformity in the department, may I request that my computer be switched to an Apple.

Regards,

Ben"

I hope my choice of words silently expresses my feelings on the matter.

N joined us a year ago on condition he would get a Mac. And he's very good with it; but he will go and design stuff with all those fancy Apple fonts that I can't match. Meaning I can't work on it myself.

And R has now upgraded changed over himself. He has had a full 24 hours with his Apple and not yet head-butted the screen. I am really out of excuses.

The phrase "glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults" continues to come to mind.

At least the version of Office I'll be getting - I've checked - still looks like the old type. I take consolation where I can.

Bah.

Open letter to Microsoft

Dear Morons,

Office 2007 sucks to three decimal places.

Now, I will concede that (apparently) the new version can do all kinds of clever things. That's what your marketing people tell us, anyway, and I can't think of any instance in the past when they've made overblown claims with no factual basis. No, really.

But you've gone the extra mile and made it look different. The official view is that everything is now arranged much more logically and is easier to find, spread out in full view over various ribbons. But WHY??

I even concede that one interface is pretty well like another, and if this is what it had looked like 15 years ago when I started using Windows then I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. In fact I would be as irritated as I am now if you had suddenly started to use a strange system of drop-down menus for the latest release. But here's the rub. In those 15 years I've picked up the basics of Office pretty well. I know its strengths and I know its weaknesses. I know exactly how much I can achieve with it and I know - I knew - how to achieve it without even thinking about it.

And no, I'm not going to quietly unlearn 15 years of experience just because you lot think I should. It's your job to keep up with me, not vice versa. At my level of usership you haven't made a single improvement with your mindless tinkering.

Even this wouldn't be an issue if you could have an option to display the old menus. You even do this with Windows, kindly giving us the option of New SuperDuper Windows Look or Classic Windows look. Why not do the same for Office?

This is actually possible, a quick Google tells me: there is an add-on that I can purchase that will bring back the old menus. But I don't want to pay for what should come for free, and if I did I very much doubt IT Support would install it for me. (You may guess from mention of IT Support that this is a work-based problem. Home runs Office 97 just fine, thanks very much, and has no intention of changing.)

Fiddling with software is a bit like the age of consent at 16. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Fogeyishly,
Ben

PS anyone leaving a comment that even hints at the existence of OpenOffice will receive a cold, hard stare.

So that's what the inside of a keyboard looks like

Bonusbarn's laptop means that the remaining computers in the family can be redistributed. At long last Best Beloved gets her own PC!

Meaning that first it must be debonusbarned.

Lord knows what he's done to it in the last two years but the 30 second boot up time had somehow deterioriated to several minutes. The simplest solution was to restore Windows XP to its old settings. By a miracle similar to the loaves and fishes, he had kept the restoration disk. That bit was no problem.

With the software crud out of the way it was time tackle the hardware crud, which was the most fun bit. A combination of Mr Muscle and Henry dislodged about a ton of biological waste from the keyboard. He is now quite hairy; well, he would look like Cousin It if that lot was still on his head rather than stuck between the keys. And then we unscrewed the back - by now, more out of a sense of adventure and "because we can". The Page Down key was sticky; something very similar to jam (but we weren't going to taste it to check) had accumulated around it on the rubber membrane that the keys stick in to. More Mr Muscle. Marvellous stuff.

The wine glass is to keep the screws from the keyboard in. Trust me.

It's a plot

Bonusbarn was getting so irritated at our ISP's frequent downtimes - not counting the previously reported times when I'm backing up - that I've started keeping a log of them.

For some reason it tickles me that there is therefore a file on my desktop called "Virgin failure log". But "Virgin failure record" would sound even stranger.

Final options

Yesterday's shenanigans with Firefox made me all the more appreciative of this.

Firefox is fired

Thanks to Semicolon for alerting me to a page that explains some of the improvements in Firefox 3. Yeah, okay, improvements. I admit it.

But the fact was the font rendering of some sites was simply unacceptable. And this was the official release, for crying out loud - how bad was it for the beta testers? Anyway, I'm now back on Firefox 2 and here I shall stay until it's fixed.

All credit to Mozilla, the uninstall feature includes an option to tell them why you're uninstalling - and then it displays the reasons to date. Which, as of 21.40 on 22 June are:

• Performance (load delays, memory usage) 15393
• Hard to use/confusing (menus, display, etc.) 11969
• Missing features 11189
• Security 8358
• Some features didn't work 13792
• Printing 6094
• Plugin compatibility (Flash, Adobe Acrobat, Windows Media Player, etc.) 12377
• Some web pages wouldn't work 21951
• Just temporary, I'm planning to install Firefox again soon 14659
• Other 22943

So the most popular apart from "Other" appears to be "Some web pages wouldn't work". Kind of a basic requirement for most browsers, you'd have thought.

Software development and the democratic mandate

Two facts of life are there that really bug me.

One is the way that over time each release of a particular type of software becomes bigger and bigger, more and more bloated. I can remember (children) when a perfectly reasonable Windows-based word processor would install off floppies - floppies! - rather than a minimum of one CD. Exactly the same Word file can weigh in at approx. 30k (if I work on it at home) or 45k (if I work on it at work), due to the different versions of Office used. And so on. Fill in your own examples.

The other is the way that the longer a government stays in power, the more it has to fiddle with what already works perfectly well. And when you have what was already a pretty fiddlesome government by nature right at the start, 11 years later its fiddling is endemic. As m'friend David recently pointed out, Labour is now driven to fiddling with its own previous fiddles, so urgent is their need to appear to be doing stuff. But they're hardly unique in this. Just cast your mind back to the last days of Thatcher.

And therein lies the problem. It's not what needs doing, it's what they think it would be nice to be doing, and what they can do, so hey, let's do it. Look busy! In the fifteen or so years that I have been a Word user, I don't think there is a single feature that I regularly use that wasn't available right from the start; whereas, I can't think of a single new feature that I use at all. No, I tell a lie. The ability to have more than one document open at once is useful. But that's all. And I cannot think of one way that New Labour has improved my life.

All this comes from having downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday. I'm sure it does everything it says on the packet - makes my computer more secure, opens web pages quicker, etc. It also has - wait for it - a "back" button that is bigger than the "forward" button! Because - wait for it - users use the "back" button more! Gee-whillickers! This is as revolutionary, and as necessary, as increasing the size of the door handles on doors that I use most often. Thanks, I really feel I can work this out. The human brain is meant to have vast areas of unused memory so I might as well apply all that processing power to something.

Click on the address bar to enter a new URL and instead of what you used to get - a list of previously entered URLs, in declining order of likelihood - you get the URLs, plus their page titles, plus some kind of star rating that I'm sure I'll work out. Thanks again. I was the one who looked at those pages, I know what they are, I don't need their titles and I certainly don't need to know what my computer thought of them.

And meanwhile, to counter all these "advantages", when Best Beloved or I try to use our work webmail accounts, the screen now displays the messages in some ghastly unicode lookalike rather than a decent typeface. I would gladly trade all the star-rated URLs for the ability to check email without my eyes watering.

Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle.

You ought not to swear at your stepson

For the last week or so Bonusbarn and I have each been faced with a puzzle in our respective computing activities. I - the householder, the breadwinner, the one who pays for and regards our household broadband connection as a business expense - was wondering why the automatic backup wasn't backing up at 6pm each evening, as it's supposed to. It would start. I would go off to have dinner. I would come back to find it had given up.

He, freeloading parasite off the network by my grace and that alone, was wondering why around 6pm each day the available bandwidth for World of Warcraft shrunk down so low that WoW becomes unplayable.

Problem solved! Backup starts. Bandwidth shrinks. Unaware of the backup, he resets the router without thinking to tell me about it. Backup ends prematurely. WoW back to normal. At 6pm the next day, the cycle recommences.

We finally worked this out yesterday. He came in to reset the router and found me staring at the backup status on the monitor, trying to catch the moment it stopped. Um.

He was most put out to learn that I regard WoW as a frippery, not a basic human right that should be provided by the state. My 100% lack of interest in his ability to make pixels run around the screen and pretend to kill each other was a personal affront. This was not what Alan Turing did all that work for. Still, I tried to be reasonable, I really did. The backup (unlike WoW), I pointed out, is actually necessary. It's a duty of care to the people on whose behalf I do work. So what does he suggest I do? Ideas and solutions were batted about, but the sad fact is that any backing up be while I'm around in the evening (I don't leave the computer on all day) and thus would inevitably cut into the time that he might like to be playing WoW.

Or, of course, he could just do some revision or get a life while it happens.

"Well," he said, "it's a bit inconvenient ..."

And that, I'm afraid, is when it just blurted out. A paraphrase of God's command to Creation, but in a more vulgate version. It took him aback. Me too.

But isn't it nice that after (nearly) two years of familyness we can still learn new things about each other.

If she senses your fear, she goes for your throat

Took me a while to work out why this site is so creepy.

Finally I decided it's because her eyes are a little blood shot. It gives the final, juddering edge of ooh-ooh-ooh to her smile.