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.

This week my family will travel to Charlotte, North Carolina to visit with my brother and his family. My wife and I have two small children our daughter just turned 3 and our son 1 1/2 and this will be our second trip aboard an airplane, the first having been a few weeks ago to Southern California and lasting only an hour. Since this flight is considerably longer we decided a portable DVD player might be the way to go. We're frequent Costco (think big warehouse store) shoppers so I browsed to the Costco web site, found the Philips 7" TFT LCD Portable DVD Player and read some great reviews about it on Amazon. Perfect. We hop in the car and as our luck would have it our local Costco doesn't carry that model so off to Circuit City.

Once at CC, leaving wife and kids sitting in the car, I ran in, quickly located the portable DVD players and found that while they carried the Philips there weren't any on the shelf. I headed to the cashier and asked she to check the stock. With me peering over her shoulder I saw first looked up the product model number on the circuitcity.com then checked the in-store stock from another system. They had two left and I said "I'll take one" and she proceeded to ring it up, but the price came out $20 higher than what was listed online?? I asked her if I could get the web price and she said I could if I ordered it through the web. She then told me I could try to order it from of the broadband kiosks "if they're working". Scratching my head I'm thinking "who dreams up this stuff?" Anyway, I run over to the kiosk and find the machine locked up with a Windows BSOD. Great. Ctrl-Alt-Del. Nothing. So, I head over to the computer department, ask about net access and I'm pointed towards the demo laptops. The first four didn't have any connectivity but the fifth one worked and I placed an in-store order for in-store pickup and no I'm not kidding. I then walk back to the cash register hand them my order number having saved $20 in the process.

Anyway, I'll let you know how well it worked later next week.

A funny aside, on our first plane trip to Southern California my daughter was really tired one day and said "Daddy, I want to go home" and I said "But we'd have to get packed up and back on the plane". She replied, in a very matter of fact tone, "No Daddy, we've already been on the plane."

I tried logging into my Bank of America account this morning and got the following error message:

"Error 500: Server caught unhandled exception from servlet [sas]: Error creating
bean with name 'profanityService' defined in ServletContext resource 
[/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml]: Initialization of bean failed; nested 
exception is bofa.olb.sas.exceptions.DataAccessException: ECSL returned error"

Hmm, the "profanityService" that sounds interesting. My brother works for BofA and perhaps I'll ping him on this one.

• CD: $0.29
• Microwave: $99
• Photo of some of the most talented software engineers on the planet watching it get nuked: Priceless.

In a thread on b.p.d.non-tech Anders Ohlsson joked "we may have QA'd a CD in the microwave" but little did he know that the QA staff included (from left to right) Allen Bauer, Chuck Jazdzewski, Mark Edington, Anders Hejlsberg, and Kevin Driscoll seen here nuking a Delphi 3 Field Test CD in the microwave.

Well, just reading this thread and recalling that I had a picture gave me a good laugh and hopefully it will do the same for you.

Update Jan 30, 2007: Fixed image URL

I know this is a bit late considering the Delphi 1.0 anniversary was Feb 14 but I was thinking the other day about those days and remember something that made me laugh. I was working in QA at the time and we were putting in lots (and I mean lots) of long days, nights and weekends. Toward the latter part of the project the FPS game Descent came out. I think at first it was just the shareware version but I don't really remember. I do however remember the battles that ensued long after every other Borland employee had left the building and the only people remaining were members of the Delphi team.

It was perfect.

There was a hint of tension in the air when the company network traffic all but dried up for the day and we were left with ample bandwidth to chew up killing each other hundreds of times. Then it would happen. Someone would start a game and people would scramble back to their offices/cubes to join in before hitting the 8 player limit. At that time, QA was located in cubes on the second floor of the B mod and R&D was on the third here in SV. The games were wild, people were yelling and it could last for hours. I remember nights when we left the building after midnight. It was crazy but a much needed stress reliever . In the beginning everyone started at about at the same skill level but as the weeks wore on some rose to the top while others were relagated to status of "shield factory" (in Descent, when you finally destroyed another players ship their remaining shield was released for anyone to grab). I'll never forget Ramin Halviatti (our QA manager at the time) clearing off a huge section of his desk to use as a mouse runway to navigate his ship on. I really don't think mice were intended to be used the way he played the game but then again he'd previously done hardware QA so this was really no surprise.

The Delphi 1.0 QA team was a closely knit group of people who worked hard and played equally as hard and the interesting thing was we did both together. That was a special time and one I won't soon forget.