Fighting with Microsoft Technologies
September 17th, 2004 by Mark
I got home this morning and noticed that my house had been covered in toilet paper. My brother is on the volleyball team at his high school, and we’re pretty sure it was the girl’s volleyball team that did it. They did a pretty good job, and my brother is going to have some cleaning up to do later on today.
We didn’t have a very good day with Microsoft technologies at work yesterday. Mike spent most of the day fighting with the update for Microsoft Office that fixes a hole in their JPEG rendering library thing. I understand their wanting to make sure that you purchased the copy of Office by having you put the Office CD in your drive during updates, but that is terribly inconvenient. First off, if you’re going to do that, it has to work all of the time. One of the machines in our office still doesn’t have the update because we couldn’t convince the updater that we actually own the copy of Office that was on the laptop. Of course we do, and still had the CD to prove it, but the updater wasn’t convinced. Besides, how many people really have all of the CDs that they’ve ever used to install software? We have an entire filing cabinet devoted to this stuff, but I don’t think that is common practice. It’s probably better to let users of pirated copies get the updates than to put your real customers through all of the hassle of finding their old CDs, having that only occasionally work, and wasting a whole lot of someone’s day updating all of the machines in the office. I also had a run in with Internet Explorer. I guess that isn’t much news. Sometimes I feel like my job is just to get neat things to work in Internet Explorer. I spend a lot of time doing it. It might take me 1 hour to get something to work in Firefox, then I have to spend 3 hours trying to get IE to do the same damn thing. We ended up with something pretty neat, so I’m happy. But, it did require a little bit of hackery to convince IE that it could do what I wanted. Luckily, Firefox’s numbers are up. The market share is either 8% or 15% depending on where you hear it from, but everyone is reporting that IEs market share is down and Firefox’s is up. So, if you haven’t switched your browser over to firefox yet, stop wasting your time on the web and get it now.
