Four trading days later and BORL has bounced back a bit up ~20% off its low on December 5th. The last month has proved to be quite the ride though its still 42% off its June 28th mark.

Two and a half weeks ago I blogged about how the add remove programs icon was missing in Windows Vista. Via my blog stats it's clear (at least to me) this was simply a bad idea. Here are the various searches people used to find the above page over just the past two days:

how do you remove programs with vista (www.google.com)
add or remove programs vista (www.google.com)
change or remove programs on Vista (www.google.com)
remove windows vista control panel icon (www.google.no)
add remove programs missing (www.google.com)
addor remove programs in windows vista (www.google.co.in)
add/remove in vista (www.google.co.in)
how to remove programs from vista (www.google.com)
Windows Vista remove programs (www.google.com)
Add or Remove Programs on Microsoft Vista (www.google.com)
add or remove programs missing (www.google.com)
add and remove programs in vista (www.google.co.uk)
where is add remove icon in control panel in windows vista ? (www.google.com)
control panel + add remove programs + vista (www.google.com)
"windows vista" add and remove (www.google.co.uk)
remove from control panel vista (www.google.co.uk)
add/remove program start vista (www.google.com.jm)
vista add or remove problems (www.google.com)
how to get to add or remove programs on windows vista (www.google.com)
how to add or remove programs on windows vista (www.google.co.uk)
windows vista add or remove programs (www.google.com.sg)
vista add remove programs (www.google.com)
add remove programs in vista (www.google.com.my)
add remove programs vista ultimate (www.google.com)
how to add or remove programs in vista (www.google.com)
add/remove program missing (www.google.com)
Add or Remove Programs icon (www.google.de)
add remove programs vista (www.google.nl)
remove vista control panel icons (www.google.nl)
where is add/remove programs in net vista (www.google.com)
add or remove programs vista (www.google.ca)
add/remove in vista (www.google.ca)

This is definitely going to hit me in family based IT support in the coming months/years. :-)

Raymond Chen posted this entry about not playing mind games with your users when it comes to presenting dialogs where they have to make a decision. Well, I just ran into the Windows Vista Copy File dialog which popped up when I attempted to drag a file into a zip folder which already contained a file of the same name:

This totally threw me off, while everything on the dialog is grammatically correct the logic is completely backwards from what I expected. Here's why:

NOTE: For this screenshot I placed the mouse over the "Copy and Replace" option so it would appear highlighted since there was no other visual indication of what actually should be clicked.

• The title says "There is already a file with the same name in this location" but the first location mentioned is the source location not the destination. Why isn't the title "The destination already contains a file with the same name."?
• The directions say "Click the file you want to keep", but the filenames are the same it's the paths which are slightly different but that's not what's highlighted.
• The "Copy and Replace" option mentions the file that's being copied not the one I'm about to replace. Why doesn't it say the opposite and tell me loud and clear "Here is the file you are about to replace:"
• The "Don't Copy" option doesn't mention the file that won't be copied but rather the file that won't be replaced.
• I felt overwhelmed with too much file detail information like "Size" and "Date modified" for both files, which is the same btw, and could have been provided via a details/dropdown next to each filename.
  
• Why is there a "Cancel" button? How is it different than "Don't Copy" given that there is no explanation about what it's not going to do.
• The subtitle says "Click the file you want to keep". What does that mean for the file I don't click?
  

This dialog seems far more concerned about the Source file not the Destination which is about to be overwritten.

The only guess I can come up with as to how Microsoft ended up here would be something along the lines of The Windows Shutdown crapfest.

[Updated: March 15] Added one more case

While reading though my feeds I stumbled into this video on YouTube where this guy is trying to write a Perl script using Vista's voice recognition features. Damn, that's funny!

Update: I've been debating about correcting this but I should have said speech, not "voice" recognition. So, there you go, I've now cleared that up.

I continue to run into problems with the UI in Windows Vista. For example, here is a screenshot of Explorer where the treeview displays a single folder under my D: drive but clearly there are multiple folders as is seen in the listview on the right(pressing F5 to refresh fails to update the treeview):

Another problem is clicking on the footer (above) frequently fails to bring the Explorer window to the front of the Z-Order nor does it get focus. The previously active window however does lose focus and if you press Tab the Explorer window will actually gain focus so it's just some sort of wierd state.

Yet another issue is what's pictured below where the combobox at the top of the Explorer window animates like a progress bar and I'm not sure why?? It's been doing this for the past 10 minutes and I'm guessing at this point it's just stuck:

Btw, the file open is still driving me crazy with it's tab/focus problems.

Today marks 12 years since Anders Hejlsberg demo'ed Delphi in front of several thousand developers during Software Development Conference 95 West in Moscone Center. The whole development team was in attendance and the room was packed. Later that day we all took a buses over to the Discover Museum and I remember sitting next to a few developers who were talking about the Delphi demo. They were very skeptical about having an IDE actually write code, like event handlers, for you. They didn't know I worked on the dev team and I turned around and assured them that it worked just fine. Based on the look on their faces I'm not sure they believed me. :-)

Happy Birthday Delphi!

I have a ReplayTV 4500 and this past weekend I had it set to record 4.5 hours of the Superbowl extravaganza. Yesterday, when I woke up at started to download it to my PC using DVArchive and moments later my wife went down stairs and turned on the ReplayTV at which point things went downhill. I immediately noticed that the transfer rate had dropped way down so I went downstairs to have a look and found my wife had turned the Replay on which meant it was trying to stream and play an 11.4GB file at the same time. It didn't work.

After several minutes waiting for it to respond to the remote it was clear something had gone wrong. Eventually, I rebooted it and when I got back into the channel guide I noticed the Superbowl along with about 3/4th of our other recorded shows were gone. Things got worse when I attempted to restore our scheduled shows which caused scheduling conflicts with programs that were no longer recording!

At that point, I downloaded the remaining contents and performed a factory reset (382 zones, for those of you who have a Replay). That worked but required me to completely reset everything from the network settings to our entire recording schedule.

I actually watch very little TV these days, mostly stuff from Netflix (recorded onto the Replay) but when I do I have to use commercial advance or chances are I won't make it through the entire show.

Anyway, so much for watching the Superbowl commercials from the comfort of my couch.