Archive for December, 2005

Service Pack saga

By On Tue, Dec 27th, 2005 In Software I use With No Comments Permanent Link to Service Pack sagaPermalink

I tried last night to install Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003 on my home computer. I did the same thing yesterday in the office – which worked ok – and followed the same procedure at home. Booted into Safe mode and started the install, as upgrade, as I used installation disk of Win2k3 with SP1 already applied.

It first halted while installing devices. It asked to de-install nVidia’s Ethernet drivers (?!), then asked me to confirm installation of ATI Catalyst drivers for primary screen and…stopped. No response for more than 10 minutes. Puzzled, I rebooted the comp and setup restarted, by doing installing devices again. Again it came just after primary display installation and stopped. I left it be – as it has not hanged, just nothing was happening – and after a very long time (could be 20mins, have no idea) it asked me to confirm installation of secondary display (my graphic card has TV output).

Note 1: 20+ fraking minutes?! Why in the hell waits so long to detect something? Why it does not wait 1 minute? If the damn device – any device – does not respond, it should ask me would I like to wait more or ignore it and continue.

After all this has finished, it went to restart…then restarted again…then restarted again…no end.

Note 2: service pack – the very thing that should make Windows work better – fucked itself up! I could not even enter Safe mode. At the moment when BIOS hardware detection finished and when it should start loading Windows, it restarts.

The very same thing happened few months ago when I tried to install SP1 on the office computer, using downloadable SP1 .exe file from MS site. Exactly the same thing and I had to do a repair of entire Windows installation. That’s why I tried with the upgrade thing – which worked in the office. But not at home.

So, what to do now? The only thing I could do is to start repair at home too. However, since I have disks on SATA RAID0 and Windows install do not have drivers for it – I needed to supply those drivers during installation.

Note 3: in the time of flash disks and DVDs, the only medium that Windows install accepts as the source for the drivers is floppy drive. Floppy?! I do not own floppy drive for over one year or something. Bloody idiots – why can’t you accept CD, DVD, USB flash – something not belonging to last century?

So, now I have Windows installation which fucked itself up and gives me no option to repair it because installation procedure do not see any disks in my system. Splendid. This kind of fuckups is the reason why I dislike Windows (and I’m far from alone). Modern operating system should accept modern input devices, not some ancient ones, only because MS thinks it’s not worth the time to add the support for them.

I will borrow the damn floppy from the office and connect it to repair this piece of crap, but this whole unfortunate thing shows how important little details are.

p.s. If you wonder why I even bothered to install it after the first failed attempt…Visual Studio.NET 2005 (or any derivative) will not install on Server2003 unless you have SP1 applied.

Craziest web page title

By On Sat, Dec 24th, 2005 In General With 4 Comments Permanent Link to Craziest web page titlePermalink
Home page title: Frank, if you're reading this...I slept with Becky. Sorry dude. See you at karaoke tonight.

These guys are crazy. Totally. :)

Confusing?

By On Sat, Dec 24th, 2005 In Sports With No Comments Permanent Link to Confusing?Permalink

The qualifying system for the races in 2006 is going to be very tough to understand

Maybe for you Mr. Mosley…maybe for you.

I stated several times in the past that Mosley and co. are trying hard to kill off F1 as I love it. And now he thinks that one of the most interesting ideas in years is going to be confusing. What the fuck is confusing here:

  • All cars go out in the 1st 15 mins
  • Slowest five are eliminated
  • The remaining cars go out again and run for another 15mins
  • Slowest five are eliminated
  • What’s left of the cars (10 or 12) fight for top positions in the remaining 20mins

Man – this is going to be more interesting than the race itself. Ever since they changed the old format where drivers were fighting until the last few seconds, the Saturday crowd numbers were declining – it was just not interesting with one or two runs. I mostly stopped watching the qualifications in the last two years.

I bet this will bring the people back. Mosley, please kindly keep your nose out of this.

Ugly is trendy?

By On Thu, Dec 22nd, 2005 In Web dev With 20 Comments Permanent Link to Ugly is trendy?Permalink
Signal vs. Noise

Garret Dimon

Whitespace

Superfluous Banter

Some of the ugliest sites I have ever seen in my life.

Simplicity is fine, but (almost) total lack of visual design has nothing to do with making sites better. Just uglier. The way these sites look now, they firmly fall in the same category as this guy below.

Jakob's UseIt.com

Which is far from envious, IMO. At least Scrivs does it intentionally.

Fernando goes to McLaren for ’07

By On Mon, Dec 19th, 2005 In Sports With No Comments Permanent Link to Fernando goes to McLaren for ’07Permalink

Wow. I really did not expected this. McLaren announced that Fernando will be driving for them since 2007. Coupled with the earlier announcement that Vodafone has switched from Ferrari to McLaren, it is clear that Ron Dennis is sick of finishing below the 1st place.

I believe that this was long time in preparation and I sense that this bit of development was known to Vodafone people when they decided to switch sides. Vodafone and Ferrari was a natural alliance, since both share strong red branding. That’s why I think that something extra was needed to convince them to move away from the prancing horse.

McLaren on the other hand, with almost a decade of black/gray/white branding, sits on the opposite end of Vodafone branding. I really like those colours and I’m half-fearful to see what will come out of this. Not that colours will have anything to do with my allegiance to the team, but if they change them it will be strange. They had different colours in the past, especially the red/white of Senna’s Marlboro McLaren. Somehow, the fact that McLaren was strong black and Ferrari the strong red was the trade mark of the battles they had.

On the driver side of things… McLaren always maintained the position that they don’t have the 1st and 2nd driver and actually proved that many times in the past, always opting for two strong drivers instead of star & backup line-up that Ferrari had. The fact that Kimi and Juan Pablo will be racing each other next season as much as other teams is…well, something to look forward to and something to fear a bit.

However, I’m inclined to think rumours of Ferrari strongly chasing Kimi Raikkonen will see the fruitition: I now fully expect that Kimi goes to Ferrari and Schumacher to retire after next season.

The dream of Kimi and Fernando in the same team is too much to hope for…although we did have Senna and Prost once…

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