DISCLAIMER: What you’re about to read may contain harsh language. It contains stories of feces-throwing gorillas and crying children. Opinions will be biased. Proceed at your own risk!

Education is usually a very quiet thing, a thing without big feelings, outbursts and whatnot. It’s about immersing oneself in new and unchartered territory. About curiosity, longing, and yes, sometimes even passion. More often than not, it’s a stressful thing, sure, but that’s usually attributed to the effort it takes to focus, concentrate and create abstractions in one’s mind, synthesize and understand things, their perspective and impact, on a larger scale.

Then again, sometimes it’s just plain boring. But, just once in awhile you get carried away in that great flow of passion when you actually feel your horizon widen, your perception deepen and your entire world becoming more detailed, more finely grained, and yet still more focused.

I’d never thought education would one day actually enrage me. Until today, that is.

I’m attending a six-week course in ASP.NET version 4, which will enable me to cough up some more dough for the “70-515″ exam earning me a title of “Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist” in “Web Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4″. As weeks go by, this title is starting to feel more and more like a misnomer, actually being more equivalent to a “Web Professional Turd Stacker”.

So why am I so angry? What’s wrong? Is my teacher an idiot? Possibly, but if so he’s doing a mighty good job of hiding it. Well, are your classmates idiots then? No, I don’t believe they are, no. Well, then, are Microsoft idiots? Well, for the love of all that’s good and true in this world, and for their sakes if they believe in any type of after-life purgatory, I hope that they are. Because if they’re not, they’re simply just evil. Although I believe that actually both may apply.

I’ve been developing web solutions for a while now. It’s a trade that can be very tricky in practice, as many actors are involved in defining the playgrounds, with differing ideas about how the web should be expressed and interpreted. Well, maybe not that differing – it’s been more like a lot of serious actors trying to come to an agreement while one monolithic retarded gorilla decided to defecate on all the initiatives of others and poison the interwebs with non-standard, buggy and poorly written junk applications that have plagued our profession for about a decade or so. Unless, of course you were Certified by that particular retarded feces throwing gorilla in which case you’d just be one more minion wrapping more turds in IP packets.

Even though the retarded gorilla was very rich indeed, as luck would have it, its massive ineptitude prevented it from actually inventing anything new, and over time, people started discovering cuddly chimpanzees, apes of a more intelligent and friendly nature, throwing tasty bananas instead of turds. Lovable and patient panda bears took on the daunting task of catching the flying feces mid-air, churning it through a magic waste management processing plant, and presenting it as beautiful flowers. The crap gorilla’s iron grip was loosening, storm clouds were dissolving and the tears on the cheeks of the Earth’s children were licked off by purring kittens.

Well, okay… I may get carried away a bit here, but it helps calm my rage talking about kittens, so that’s how the story went. Anyway, the evil retarded gorilla found he had to listen to these annoying little wise-ass chimpanzees and start doing things more like every other ape with a quarter of a brain was doing it, so he put on a diaper and started dealing in bananas, too! They weren’t as yellow and ripe as the chimpanzees’ bananas, and every once in a while you’d find a shard of broken glass or a little strychnine in your banana, but all in all it was a step up from having feces thrown at you all day.

So, basically that’s where we are today. The future will tell how wide rips HTML5 will put in the retarded gorilla’s diaper and consequently how much feces it’ll manage to pollute that with, but things in general are looking up.

So, starting this course a while back now, I was actually looking forward to seeing what the big gorilla was up to these days. My roads have mostly been tread with a backpack full of Ruby on Rails, RESTful interfaces, PHP, jQuery, AJAX, XML/XS(D|LT), SOAP, etc., so I’ve been exceedingly religious about doing things the “right” way, be it either using proven design patterns or utilizing the infrastructure that’s already there, the way it’s supposed to be used, rather than piling some “Not Invented Here” custom crap on top of the stack.

I’ve previously used Visual Studio for hacking a bit on the DC++ application, and in the mid-2000s used VS.NET to create a backup application in C# for Windows Mobile devices for the company Bullguard. The latter experience was really good – I found C# to be a pretty nicely constructed language, coming from C++ and Java it was pretty much self-explanatory, and Visual Studio itself was about the best IDE I had ever used. Never mind that the actual development for the mobile devices was a nightmare in marshaling Outlook DLLs and juggling low-level SIM stuff, what I came out with was a good feeling of VS, .NET and C#. Given the recent boost in adherence to standards by the gorilla, things were looking up!

Until the gorilla’s diaper started bursting on the first day. Lesson 1. Create a new project, what do you get? An html page with a form. Now, any web developer that’s not completely beyond salvation would utter out a little, “Eeck!”, jump in his (or her) chair, and immediately delete that atrocity until he actually needs it. Bad idea. If you do, you can pretty much forget about doing anything else with your project. The form is what was there at the dawn of time, for Windows applications. The form is what people know. The form is omnipotent. The form is good. Praise the fooooorrrmmm. Everything goes in the form. And by default, everything you do will POST feces around your site, unless you actively stop it.

Not just your own feces, mind you – remember the gorilla – the “viewstate” object will drag things around everywhere, requiring pretty much any interaction with the server to be a complete POST of your data, the frameworks’s data, and who know how many layers of monkeys’ data in order to keep up the facade that is ASP.NET.

Now, keeping state is of course of grave importance in any web application. And there are many ways to do it – Lord knows, it’s not always pretty, especially when hives of AJAX are thrown in the game, with page sections, modules and templates being refreshed and causing state changes on their very own. It’s not an easy task keeping state like this (especially across sessions), even with a defined domain and reduced business logic. Imagine trying to keep state invisibly in a framework like .NET not knowing the application and its domain. Yeah, that’s not gonna be easy, unless you’re completely indifferent to standards, performance, simplicity of code, or anything else that keeps developers and the internet in general sane.

So what do you do in this scenario when realizing you’re about to break patterns and standards in order to support a monolithic and opaque framework? You could either,

1. Pay attention to the fact that you’re creating developer tools, choose to respect the developers and empower them, and force them to learn how the internet works, which would result in faster, better, more standards-compliant web applications.
2. Assume that only idiots would develop for Gorilla Inc., wrap everything in familiar turds and leave it for the “idiots” to stack them so that on the surface, things still work (but don’t look underneath, oooooh, please don’t).

Apparently, option 2 was chosen, and once that rip was torn in the gorilla’s diaper, the stench amassed. Right after this sucker punch to the face, we were set to drag-and-drop first a “Label Control” to our page (which was rendered as a span, thank you very much), then a “Calendar Control”, which rendered as a table-in-table monstrosity with in-line css in every cell, defaulting to round-trip to the server onclick, and leaving any designer to throw away her CSS knowledge and get a copy of Visual Studio to start making hideous “design templates” in it. Hello, early 1990s.

This was on day one. Over the weeks, to keep me from going insane and “professionally aggressive”, I’ve started phasing out a bit I must admit. But today, I actually got really angry. We were doing jQuery and web services.

Okay, jQuery I know very well (it’s fantastic, absolutely beautiful, as is Javascript), and web services I’ve written, so the first thing that pops in to my mind is, “Well… jQuery doesn’t connect with web services, at least not without a plugin, so what do they really mean?” Fair enough, the lesson is about getting some JSON from ASP.NET using jQuery, so I’m just assuming we’re using the term loosely here, the same way we’re using the term AJAX for any kind of DHTML that fades or moves around or whatever, regardless of whether server interaction is taking place.

Things start to get strange when the example tells us to query the example “web service” using jQuery .ajax notation like this,

// [...]
  type : 'POST',
  url : 'Service.masx/HelloWorld',
  data : "{'a':230,'b':0}",
// [...]

Anyone who knows jQuery would wonder why that data object is quoted – that would just send an anonymous string containing the JSON payload as cleartext while its members should’ve made up the key/value pairs in the request. Obviously a typo, right? Obviously, this is not piercing a turd, is it? Clearly the gorilla is not defecating on our jQuery, too?

Well. Yes. Yes, he is. The gorilla is lose and on the crapper. And when you look at the response from the web service, returned in C# in the method like,

  return "Hello World.";

It becomes, as a JSON response,

{"d" : "Hello World."}

D? Is this Boyz n the Hood? “D, motherfucker, D!!!!!”? What’s with that ‘d’? Which, coincidentally, is presented to us course takers as “jQuery notation” WTF?! Dark rain clouds once again appeared, mothers leapt for safety while crying children were at the mercy of wolves on the prowl…

The dirty, rotten truth is that the feces-throwing retarded gorilla is stacking more turds on top of its pile of shit. Its mental capacity was just adequate enough to somehow put an erroneous equality mark between SOAP web services and an AJAJ request. Now how do we accomodate that? Well, we smear some more feces on our turd pile that is the web service stack, make it require being POSTed to, have it expect its parameters as a string containing JSON encoded data and then just crap out mangled JSON in return (if you’re lucky, because the equivalent jQuery code using .post() will actually result in XML output even if all your POST request headers are correct – XML that doesn’t represent the same objects as the mangled JSON, BTW).

Why on earth would a web service, no matter how mangled and raped, ever want its input as a string containing JSON? Why on earth would you not use the HTTP standard way of using key/value pairs that every friendly banana dealing chimpanzee has been using for decades? Why on earth would you wrap your response in an object assigning the return value to a single member, ‘d’?

Because you’re living on a pile of turds, and you just gotta keep stacking them, that’s why. If you took away that .d, the entire framework would be shedded.

I walked away with an adrenaline overload and gorilla feces all over me. My professional pride is stung. It’s not so much that someone would do these things, it’s that some big gorilla would have hundreds of thousands of minions do it with him. I’ve often wondered what makes some developers so weird, so utterly bitter, anti-social and dysfunctional. Well, having to work with this framework professionally would definitely do that to me.

This gorilla is not just retarded and feces-throwing, he’s also destroying all that’s good about development, taking away all the joy, taking away all the power of the people involved. I used to think that IntelliSense was the best auto-completion I’d ever seen. Now it’s just apparent that it’s not about quickly auto-completing code that you were about to write, it’s about navigating you through a dark, cold and confusing cave filled with HIV-ridden needles and bear traps.

This is why I’d rather be homeless than working as an ASP.NET developer. It’s not thinking, it’s not creating, it’s stacking turds like you were once stacking Lego blocks. Except, if my mother were ever to complement me on my stacking of ASP.NET turds, I’d want to go crying in the shower.

As Homer Simpson once said, “Kids – just avoid eye contact and very slowly walk away.”

2011-04-15: The gorilla keeps crapping: Groklaw: Microsoft Cloud Services Aren’t FISMA Certified

When I was a Windows guy, I was a warm advocate for the commercial media jukebox application, J. River Media Center. It’s an extremely versatile app sporting a sleek design and a wealth of features, while being able to play back pretty much every codec known to man and interfacing with a slew of portable devices. I’ve bought every release from when it was called Media Jukebox, IIRC version 8 to version 14.

Having gone exclusively Linux on all but one of my systems (my Digital Audio Workstation and gaming rig), I’ve been trying to get JRMC to run there. WINE is sort-of possible using the latest beta and a number of winetricks, but you’ll find yourself restricted to the audio-part of JRMC only, and the app will crash when you sneeze. Even if it didn’t, the interface is so horrible slow that it’s practically unusable (the UI is slow on Windows, too, but nothing like this).

I also tried setting up a VMware guest system exclusively for JRMC, but that left me with two major headaches:

• Skipping sound (which doesn’t happen on a non-virtualized Windows, mind you, JRMC never skips in that scenario. Ever.)
• A volume output level from the emulated soundcard in VMware of about -20 dB (perceived). That means more than 3 bits lost, and an effective audio resolution of one tenth of the original file. Not acceptable.

Neither of these issues can be blaimed on JRMC, I’m just very verbosely tracking my moves that led me to where I am today

So, I searched high and low for some acceptable alternative in Linux. I never expected to find anything even remotely as advanced as JRMC – basically I just needed something that properly supported Album Artist tags at the very least. I was quite shocked to find not only an application that offered the same level of versatility and customizability as JRMC, but actually one that surpasses JRMC, namely foobar2000, or fb2k for short. Wait, you might say, isn’t that a Windows app? Yes, yes indeed it is, but this is one that runs great under WINE. There’s the occasional glitch and crash, but in general it runs perfectly, and it’s extremely fast. In fact, it uses about the same amount of CPU time (~4%) running maximized and playing audio with an oscilloscope and a vu meter visualization that Amarok uses doing nothing, minimized to the system tray. If that doesn’t speak for quality code, I don’t know what does.

Anyway, I could go into the longest rant about how absolutely kick-ass fb2k is, but I have to remember the subject of this post, The Trail of Destruction Left by J. River Media Center. Sure, that’s somewhat a dramatic title, but if you happen to be a JRMC user, fear not – your audio is safe, it’s just the tags that may be destroyed.

Over the course of time since I started seriously migrating from Windows to Linux, I’ve tried different players. I’ve been bitching a bit to myself about how messy their tag systems were, as all my very neatly organized files would show up pretty much as organized as a drunken drug-addict with alzheimer’s. Even those claiming to support ordering by Album Artist would just show my files all jumbled about. I never thought to blame JRMC.

That is until now, when I have a tool that actually lets me scrutinize my tags in detail (and a HEX editor for that extra-detailed look-see). I discovered two shocking facts:

• About half of my files were missing field values completely, mostly in the ALBUM ARTIST field, but also in other fields. This is only visible outside JRMC and explains why my files always got all mixed up when I tried using them in other players.
• Now that I’m cleaning up tags and removing unwanted ones (including “TOOL NAME” and “TOOL VERSION”, added by JRMC), I find that all my carefully written COMMENT tags have been completely destroyed by JRMC. It looks in a way like the missing tags mentioned before, along with other app-specific meta data, has been serialized into the COMMENT field by JRMC.

Here’re some good examples of how great that can look (some of the shorter ones):

• 0000402A 000046CB 0001767B 00018F15 00066C63 00066DD0 0000910D 00008E85 0006FE4E 0006C3D6; 0;  00000000 00000210 000007F0 0000000001923800 00000000 016CBB6E 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000; 39448
• 000012D7 00001073 00007D39 00004020 0002230E 0002230E 00008000 00008000 00009C6E 0000755E; Music Never Dies; Media Center; 12.0.529; 37622; Vive la Fête
• , AG# 6B2E6829; Media Center; 12.0.529; 35796; µ-Ziq
• LAME 3.91 -k –alt-preset standard -q 0; Media Center; 12.0.473; 38718; The Strokes
• .; 38353

And so on and so forth. Isn’t that lovely? Wouldn’t you just love it if all your comments looked like that? Well, you can have them look like that, too! Just use JRMC!!!

Now, I can only guess at the reasoning behind this mayhem, and so I will. It looks like JRMC is serializing metadata that it needs and putting it into the standard COMMENT field. I would guess that it’s using the COMMENT field because that field is available whether you’re using APE, ID3 or some other tag system. Now you have to wonder why anyone would ever destroy a user-editable field by shoving in application logic. Why you wouldn’t use a TXXX field since they’re free for anything you like. And why it would put the (album) artist name in there in the first place.

At least it had the decency to leave its DNA so that the phorensics crew could identify the criminal, the public could try it, and the judge sentence it to death. RIP J. River Media Center. You will not be missed.

Jajajaja, så er det håbløst utjekket at anmelde et køleskab, men jeg er simpelthen bare så glad for mit nye køleskab, så nu kommer det alligevel!

Jeg prøvede netop at finde et godt sted at anmelde det. Pricerunner var en fucking joke, og så var der Pribot.dk, som bare venter på et SQL injection-angreb. Tænkte til sidst, at jeg ligeså godt kunne copy/paste mit “review” (dén var til Google ) her (kopieret fra en tekstkasse hos pribot):

Man får helt åndssvagt meget for pengene her. Jeg har haft skabet i godt en måned nu, og er helt vildt glad for det. Der er luftcirkulering, så kulden bliver fordelt rigtig fint og jævnt. Køleskabsdelen kan indstilles fra 2-8 grader, frysedelen fra -24 til -16 grader.

“ChillerSafe”-skuffen i bunden skal man lige være opmærksom på godt kan ryge ned under frysepunktet, i modsætning til de noget dyrere modeller, hvor temperaturen er garanteret. Der er ikke en decideret køling specifikt til dette område, og det er min fornemmelse, at der er to faktorer, der bestemmer temperaturen: hvad man har sat køleskabstemperaturen til, og hvor meget “nyt” mad, man har smidt i skabet. F.eks. har jeg sat temperaturen til 4 gr., og det termometer, jeg har liggende dernede siger stort set altid liiiige lidt over 0 grader, men hvis jeg kaster en masse nye varer ind og køleskabet går i gang med at køle igennem, har jeg set temperaturen ryge ned på -4 grader! Det var dog ekstremen, og min erfaring er at med 4 gr. i skabet er det meget sjældent, at temperaturen når under 0 grader dernede. Jeg tror 5 gr. i skabet vil sikre en temperatur dernede omkring 1 gr.

Ift. hvor godt det køler, sådan generelt, er jeg ligeledes megabegejstret. Mælk åbnet for fire dage siden er stadig helt frisk. Chili con carne lavet for to uger siden, smidt på glas og puttet i chill-dimsen er stadig frisk, og hvis man kaster en flaske vand fra hanen i fryseren, som stort set er fuld, er der isklumper i efter 15-20 minutter. Man kan virkelig godt mærke, at der er en stor kompressor i skabet! (Og høre det; det laver sådan en wooo-lyd, når det køler ned efter man har haft det åbent

AntiFrost-tingen fungerer også fantastisk. Jeg har aldrig haft det før, så jeg var lidt skeptisk ift. effekten. Men uden grund, lader det til, for mine frosne varer er bare altid helt i orden, og uden rim og frostsnask!

Flaskehylden er meget cool, men kan ikke tage en 2-liters-cola. 1½-liter går lige, men to”eren skal i døren. Det er nemt at rykke hylderne rundt og køledelen er godt oplyst med to lamper.

Der er ikke helt så mange muligheder for at rykke hylderne rundt i døren, hvor der øverst mest er plads til mindre ting såsom småtuber, marmeladeglas osv.

Der følger en tjekket lille æggeholder med, som man kan hive i i enderne, så der er plads til enten 6, 8, 10, eller 12 æg. Så er der en dingenot til at putte på kanten af flaskeholderen i døren, så tingen ikke klirrer, når man åbner og lukker. Der er en bakke til at lægge oven på en af fryseskufferne + tre isterningbakker med låg på (da antifrost-tingen ellers ville “spise” isterningerne over tid). Der er ikke “katastrofe”-frost-elementer i døren som i de dyrere modeller, men til gengæld er holderen glimrende brugt til isterningbakkerne, når de er frosset

Frontens børstede stål er helt vildt flot. Meget enkelt med en svag kurve, diskret “BOSCH”-logo. Siderne er stål malet med noget halv-mat metallic-maling. Jeg var lidt nervøs for om det ville være grimt, men det er det overhovedet ikke. Det er ikke børstet stål, men det er heller ikke “wanna-be” børstet stål. Det ligner ikke et hjælpeløst forsøg på at imitere børstet stål. Det ligner bare stål malet med let koksgrå metallic-maling. Meget pænt. Og meget rengøringsvenligt, i øvrigt.

Hjulene under skabet er rimeligt store og ruller fint på mit malede bræddegulv, uden at lave mærker. De justérbare fødder foran fungerer også fint, selv på mit 1886”er-gulv, som skråner ret meget. Bagtil er der en sortlakeret grill, som kun stikker meget lidt ud.
Når man åbner dørene, kan man se, at hængslerne sidder sådan, at der på intet tidspunkt “stikker noget ud” mod væggen… Altså hvis der er meget trang plads, er det ikke ved hængslerne mens man åbner dørene, der kan opstå problemer, det er kun hvis der ikke skulle være plads til håndtagene eller den lille bue, der er i dørene.

Der står “AirFreshFilter” på bagvæggen i køleskabet, men enten læser jeg instruktionsbogen forkert, eller også er der ikke noget sted at sætte filteret i, og ergo ikke noget filter… Jeg er lidt usikker på det, men jeg havde noget knap så god grønkål liggende i sidste uge, som i hvert fald gjorde, at der ikke lugtede så godt, sååå…

Den nederste skuffe i fryseren er ikke så dyb som resten af skabet, da der skal være plads til kompressortingene, men det er nok forventet. Synes bare lige jeg ville sige det

Okay, så. Dårlige ting? Ingen, ud over at man lige skal være opmærksom på de mulige minusgrader i chill-delen, men så har man jo heller ikke betalt for at have garanteret temperatur dernede. Og selv hvis den skulle ryge under 0, så er det et fantastisk sted at lægge øl, hvidvin, parmesanost og andre “tørre” varer, der skal være på køl.

Jeg er heeeelt vildt glad for at have købt det her køleskab, og jeg kan kun anbefale det. Om det nu holder i længden vil vise sig, men indtil videre er det i hvert fald top spitze!!!

Oookay…

Jeg har jo bitchet lidt tidligere over dårlige restauranter. Og grunden til at jeg skriver nu, er lige så meget min oplevelse hos Burger and Bun i går, som det faktum at jeg netop har fået hul igennem til en gigantisk røvfuld emails til mit domæne; bl.a. svar fra Madklubben på en tidligere anmeldelse – fortsættelse følger.

Anyway. I går tog kæresten og jeg på udflugt til Vesterbro. Brormand bor der, jeg har et par venner der, og al den bedste is er der (hey, fuck Paradis), så vi er der også. Oooog så er der også detaljen med at Burger & Bun er der. Og Burger & Bun er jo Kiin Kiin. Og Kiin Kiin har fået en Michelin-stjerne. Så hvis folkene med pengene bag Kiin Kiin bestemmer sig for at servere burgere er det jo Michelin-burgere, ikke?

Hmmm… Eller vent lidt. Kiin Kiin fik stjerne for deres mad… Og maden er lavet af menneskene i køkkenet. Køkkenet på Kiin Kiin. Ikke køkkenet på Burger & Bun. Disse mennesker laver ikke maden på Burger & Bun… Eller gør de? Hvis de nu løber frem og tilbage?… Hmm…

Okay, okay, realitetstjek, let’s dumb it down: Nogle mennesker med penge, har åbnet en burger joint. Phew, var helt forvirret et øjeblik. Nu er vi tilbage til square one. Ny burgerbar på Istedgade. Konya var en nyhed, Kebabistan havde det fedeste navn nogensinde (kebabistan.dk nogen? go for it!), men det her er bare en burgerbar som alle andre indtil videre.

Med mindre, selvfølgelig, at en masse medier videreleverer det selvproklamerede budskab: “Vi vil lave Københavns bedste burger!”

Sjovt nok det, der fik kæresten og mig ned til Burger & Bun. “Københavns bedste burger”? Wow. Waaaauuuwww. DET er noget, man glæder sig til.

Jeg har selv fået at vide adskillige gange, at jeg laver byens bedste burger, men mener nu nok, der findes bedre alternativer. Min stående favorit er Kalaset (ikke deres Barcelona-burger, og jeg blev lidt skuffet sidst over deres regulære burger, men stadig…).

Either way er jeg totalt fucking hooked på burgere, så når nogen siger, at de vil lave Københavns bedste burger får jeg megastivert på og savler ud over alt. Men no need  to join in, babies, Burger & Bun er blot et komplet retarderet bud på noget, der overhovedet kommer i nærheden af kvalitetsburger.

Lad os kigge på hvad målgruppen er vant til: Det er netop caféburgere à la Halifax, Rosas eller Kalaset. Gode burgere, lavet i køkkenet af fornuftige råvarer. En eller anden klovn siger om Burger & Bun at det smager af rigtigt oksekød? Øhhh… Det er lidt ligesom at sige, at min g-streng ikke presser svolsyre op i fissen. Hvad er det, vi sammenligner med her? Lort på en tallerken? En burger er lavet af kød, fuck dig!

Okay, så vi har nu et overleveret vidnesbyrd om at Buger & Buns burger smager af oksekød, hvilket bringer os ét skridt over McDonald’s, og vi har fra hestens mund løftet om den bedste burger i København. Enter mig og min kæreste i Burger & Bun i går.

Vi havde ringet i forvejen for at høre om man kunne booke et bord. Afvisningen var den sødeste, jeg har fået nogensinde, på trods af at hvis man står nede i biksen og skuer over etablissementet, må det synes så himmelråbende dumt at spørge om. Vi taler om 15 kvadratmeter

Vi fandt dog et hjørne med ansigtet mod væggen (jojo, vi kom da efter burgeren, ikke efter decoret). Vi fik også at vide – af de meget søde på trods af at være mega-travle – ekspeditricer, at der ville være op til 30 min. ventetid på maden. I og med at vi sad i restauranten virkede det jo egentlig ikke så vildt, så no worries der. Jeg studsede godt nok over en fyr til venstre for mig, der stod og bekymrede sig over temperaturen på sine burger, som havde ventet i posen over ti minutter, mens de tilhørende pommes boblede i frituren. Jojo, tænker man, den kan jo smutte, mon ikke vi får vores burgere varme?

Naaaahhhh. Vi havde bestilt vores to Americana-burgere til at begynde med. Jeg bestilte en American Ale à la Mikkeller, og søde ville gerne have en rabarber-dims (kan ikke huske hvad den hed på kortet), som dog måtte blive til en jordbærdims, da det var den eneste type dimser, der var tilbage. Ligeledes måtte frites-dippen blive ketchup, da der heller ikke var andre alternativer tilbage. Det på trods af at den søde ekspedient først listede alle mulighederne, hvorefter jeg sagde at vi så gerne ville have mayo med urter, hvorefter hun erklærede at der kun var ketchup tilbage. Og jeg havde slet ikke spurgt. Vi skulle åbenbart bare lige føle at vi gik glip af de ting, de plejede at have?

Righty-o. Så vi hyggede os godt. Vi havde en Madrid-bog med (til efterårsferien), og blev glade da teenageren råbte “Daniel” og havde vores bestilling på en bakke i hånden.

Nu skal jeg ikke kede længere med lange historier om alle detaljerne, her kommer den korte version: Kærestens burger var lun, min var kold, og bøffen var ikke ordentligt stegt. Pommes lå våde inde i deres papirindviklede pap-bakke (men var meget velsmagende). Burgerbollerne var våde i bunden af at have været viklet ind i samme åndssvage McDonald’s-agtige indpakning (fint, I kører et amerikansk koncept, men der er noget I har misforstået: Sidder du i en diner i USA og får en burger, kommer den satme ikke wrappet, men på en varm tallerken med maden rigtigt anrettet. Igen er ambitionsniveauet åbenbart kun at nå ét skridt over McDonald’s (hvor burgerne dog er varme, når man får dem)).

Jeg nåede to bidder, inden jeg leverede hele lortet tilbage til disken, hvor vi i det mindste fik vores penge retur. Og jeg er sådan set egentlig glad for at de mislykkedes så horribelt med eksekveringen, for smagen af de to bidder, jeg fik, var tættere på Den Sorte Gryde end noget, der endog mindede om en ordentlig burger.

Jeg er træt af at blive holdt for nar af idiotiske kæde-koncept-magere, som sprøjter konceptrestauranter ud af røven og tørrer sig med mine penge.

Fuck jer, Kiin Kiin.

So this is the damage control for the Apple iPhone 4 antenna shit?

Okay, so because retards spent $100 million on non-real-world testing scenarios and put people in 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque chambers with a phone in their hand to take great pictures, we’re supposed to ignore the facts? What the fuck kind of retarded PR stunt is this? Oh yeah, sorry, it’s the same kind of retarded PR stunt that usually get the dicks hard on Apple monkeys on the prowl for more locked-in bananas.

Screw your pathetic excuses, the problem isn’t your antenna, it’s your attitude.

WHERE’S OUR FLASH? Where’s our freedom?

Ja, så er jeg klar endnu engang med lidt brokkeri over et spisested. Men for at det ikke skal blive alt for forudsigeligt, vil jeg lægge ud med en positiv anmeldelse, jeg har haft til gode at skrive siden min forrige forretningsrejse til Århus.

Forretningsrejser kan hurtigt blive en kedelig affære. Lange togture, intetsigende værelser på Cab-inn, kæresten i den anden ende af landet, og en mærkværdig følelse af ikke at høre til hvor man er, at være uden et helle.

Til gengæld er der de positive sider af sagen: Den horribelt dyre 30-grams-pose med peanuts fra DSB-servitricen bliver arbejdet bonnet for, og når man skal stille den større sult, er der kun én mulighed: at gå ud at spise!

Grappa Piccolo

Grappa Piccolo er “den lille” af Gappaerne ved vadestedet ved åen i Århus midtby, og ud over at fungere som restaurant, er den også en vinbar. Jeg har tidligere spist en til prisen forbløffende god fireretters ved Grappa-storebroderen, så på min solotur denne gang så Piccolo ganske attraktiv ud. Egentlig havde jeg tænkt, at jeg bare ville snuppe en burger på Café Faust, som ligger i gadeniveauet af Cab-inns bygning, og som bagtil har en dør direkte til og fra Cab-inns trappeopgang. Men da jeg nåede ned til døren var den låst, så jeg endte altså med at stå uden for Piccolo og kigge på menukortet. Og det så jo dejligt ud!

Så bevæbnet med min Cormac McCarthy-paperback og en spændt mave indlogerede jeg mig derfor i hjørnet af den utroligt hyggeligt indrettede lille restaurant. Stilfuld, intim, behagelig. Det samme kan i øvrigt siges om betjeningen.

Nok var maven spændt, men specielt rumlende var den nu ikke, og da det samtidig var meget sent på aftenen, skippede jeg forretten og nøjedes med et stykke ristet laks, lagt på en solid bund af porrerisotto med parmesan.

Nu har jeg jo tidligere brokket mig over risotto, i min anmeldelse af Cofoco i København, men her fejlede konsistensen intet. Helt perfekte al dente-ris uden fare for hverken at blive fanget i tænderne eller ryge over i den anden grøft og blive bløde som kogeris. Til gengæld var porresmagen en anelse for dominerende – lidt for langt ovre i løgtemaet til rigtig at være delikat, og saltniveauet kunne også godt reduceres en kende uden at det ville skade retten.

Laksen på toppen var desværre ikke i orden. Kødstykket fejlede ikke noget, men det var overstegt. Og det er vel derfor, vi går på restaurant og bestiller noget så enkelt som et stykke grillet laks; fordi kokkene her forventes at kunne det, vi andre ikke kan. Nemlig at stege kødet, så det får den der magiske tekstur, hvor det både bærer grillaromaerne og sprødhden fra den varme pande og saftigheden og porøsiteten, man finder i sashimi. Jeg har sagt det før, jeg siger det igen (og igen lidt senere): Det er en dødssynd ikke at kunne stege sit kød ordentligt, hvis man kalder sig kok!

Nå, så jeg var nu lidt skuffet. Stemningen var fantastisk, personalet utroligt søde og opmærksomme, men retten havde fejlet. Dagen efter, tænkte jeg derfor, ville jeg tage på Café Faust og snuppe en mørbradsburger.

Grappa Piccolo, dag to

Så næste dag listede jeg igen ned i bunden af trappeopgangen og greb i håndtaget til døren ind til Faust. Låst. Igen.

Mærkeligt, tænkte jeg. Mandag aften kl. 19? Lukket? Lød mystisk. Jeg fandt vej op igen, kom ud af hotellet, og gik ned til vadestedet. Til min overraskelse kunne jeg se, at Faust mindsandten var åben. Et øjeblik var jeg allerede mentalt på vej derhen indtil min brokkenerve standsede mig; skulle jeg virkelig smide mine forplejningspenge ved en café som nu på anden dag havde lokket mig ned ad alle trapperne for at ruske i en dør, de ikke gad åbne? Næh, det syntes jeg jo egentlig ikke.

Så jeg bestemte mig for at give Piccolo en chance til. Atmosfæren derinde var på toppen, og det var detaljerne, der havde gjort at retten dagen før fejlede. Den kan jo smutte for alle. Og så havde jeg faktisk også lidt lyst til pizza. Ind en gang til, denne gang mødt af en anden betjening, men ikke mindre imødekommende eller professionel end dagen før. Mon ikke de har et ret godt arbejdsmiljø på Piccolo? Noget tyder på det.

Nå, men i dag var der seriøs rumlen i maven, så der skulle en forret til. Det frøs ca. 10 grader, så en suppe lå lige til højrebenet. Tomatsuppe på en italiensk ligger også lige til højrebenet, lidt for meget til højrebenet, faktisk, så jeg bestemte mig for en squashsuppe. Efterfulgt af en djævlepizza, Diavola, som nok også burde kunne varme lidt.

Efter lidt tid ankom så aftenens store overraskelse, nemlig squashsuppen. Eller squash/bønne-suppen med krydderurter, skulle man måske lige præcisere. Med saliccia. Og peberfrugt. Og parmesan. Lidt olivenolie. Og brød… nede i suppen, vel at mærke. Og pølser.

Det første, jeg tænkte, var “Jesus Christ, what happened to less-is-more?!”. Det, der flød rundt der virkede så overdrevet og ukontrolleret, da helt bestemt umuligt at harmonisere? Det kunne kun falde… helt… fantastisk ud. For de utallige ingredienser, som i øvrigt tog sig fantastisk ud i den klare suppe, ikke alene komplimenterede hinanden, de var faktisk også fantastisk delikate, og alle smagsnuancerne var accentuerede, adskillelige og genkendelige. Det var, hands-down, en af mit livs bedste supper. Jeg kommer igen efter mere – don’t you dare take it off the menu!

Pizzaen, der fulgte efter, var solidt håndværk. Ingen dikkedarer, ingen overraskelser som sådan, bare glimrende italiensk stil med tynd, sprød bund og få, men gode råvarer. Og så en bådfuld chili, så vær advaret: er du ikke til seriøs chili action, så er djævlen ikke din ven hos Piccolo. Bestil ekstra vand til.

Meget opløftet, og en mental notits om at vende tilbage snarest muligt, sagde jeg farvel til Piccolo og Århus for denne omgang.

Café Faust

Jeg vendte så tilbage her til aften, og efter at have checket ind nærmest småløb ned til vadestedet for at kræve retten til mit boghjørne i Piccolos hyggelige lokale, mit nye hjem her i byen. Denne gang fandt jeg ingen grund til at prøve døren i bunden af Cab-inn.

Men chok. Piccolo var lukket. Mørke vinduer. Ingen hyggelige lys og smilende tjenere. Øv. Hvad gør man så? Nu må jeg da give den Faustburger en chance, tænkte jeg, og satte kursen på vej mod Faust.

Det første, der slog mig, var at Faust ikke når Piccolo i atmosfære, det er tydeligt allerede fra uden for døren. Ikke at Faust ikke har hygge, men der er bare lidt for højt til loftet, lidt for åbent omkring de lidt for café-agtige borde, og lidt for lidt forståelse for lyssætning.

Til gengæld havde de nogle på papiret lækre bud på kombinationsmenuer, så jeg satte kursen gennem døren og fandt mig et bord i relativ fred, hvor jeg kunne nyde min mad og min bog. Jeg blev budt velkommen af en sød kvindelig tjener, som senere fik følge af en anden sød kvindelig tjener, og minsandten også en engelsktalende mandlig kok fra køkkenet, som bragte hovedretten. Lidt forvirrende, men okay, igen er der tale om meget venlige og servicemindede mennesker her på Faust.

Jeg rettede min kærlighed mod en “tun-tataki” til forret og oksemørbradstournedo til hovedret og tranebærsaft til glasset.

En brødkurv kom hurtigt på bordet, men glimrende hvidt brød i, og en slice smør med noget, der lignede groft sydesalt dryset over. Jeg kastede mig over det med rumlende mave, men umiddelbart efter fik jeg en lille overraskelse i form af en appetizer. En lille fiskefrikadelle med lidt urter og frugt ved; persille, løg, mango, spirer etc. Meget fin lille gestus.

Lidt senere kom så forretten, min tun-tataki, hvilket vel groft sagt svarer til seared sashimi, hvis man kender det fra japanske restauranter. Altså rå tun, som lige er svitset på overfladen. Her kom det som to små skiver, rullet i sorte og hvide sesamfrø, på en puré af lime og ingefær. Langs fisken og puréen lå et lille hegn af nødder, karamelisseret i noget “spicy” stads og garneret med lidt røde spirer.

Superflot anretning, virkelig en fornøjelse for øjet. For munden knap så meget. Jeg er overbevist om, at tunen var lækker. Konsistensen var lige i øjet, og den var perfekt rå i midten mens den var perfekt svitset i kanterne. Til gengæld var de sesamfrø, den var rullet i, ligeledes svitset, og det til det punkt, hvor de var lettere brændt af. Dvs. at de bidrog med let kularoma og bitterstoffer, som igen blev understreget af lime/ingefærpuréen, som enten havde decideret limeblade i sig, eller også havde noget ikke-økologisk limeskal i sig. Det var i hvert fald essensen af det, man fik i munden; skalbitterhed og brændte sesamfrø.

Nødderne, som faktisk var den bedre del af tallerkenen, led under samme skæbne: en lidt for varm pande, lidt for længe. Ikke så meget at sige der.

Jeg satte min lid til hovedretten (i øvrigt en taktik, der ind til videre ikke rigtig har givet pote i min erfaring).

Efter lidt ventetid dukkede den engelsktalende køkkenperson op med hovedretten, og jeg blev instrueret i “not to touch the plate, it’s very hot”. Det kan jeg godt lide at få at vide, for det tyder på at man har tænkt lidt mere over tingene end nogle andre steder, når man serverer mørbrad på en meget varm tallerken.

Igen et fantastisk syn. En ordentlig motherfucker af en tournedo i den ene ende af den rektangulære tallerken, grillstegt, tyk og tung. Overfor, i den anden ende af tallerkenen, to “pommes fondant” (kartofler skåret i murstensfirkanter) og to lange slanke pastinakker, sirligt stablet på en bund af sauce, eller “glace”, af oksen og gulerodspuré.

Jeg skærer lidt i tournedoen, og det første, der slår mig, er at det egentlig ikke lugter så godt. Normalt når man får et stykke grillet oksemørbrad, fyldes lokalet af mundvandsfremkaldende umami i æterform. Her var det lidt mere lugten af lidt for billigt hakket oksekød med lidt for meget fedt i, der ramte næsen. I ved, det der hint af talg i lugten, som oksekød kan have, når det enten er for dårlig kvalitet eller for gammelt.

Så da tournedoen så viser sig at være rå indeni, gør det mig egentlig ikke så meget. Forstå mig ret – jeg har bestemt ingen aversioner mod rødt kød, tværtimod. Problemet er lilla kød, som ikke er nået at blive varmt. Hverken lækkert eller ansvarligt, rent sundhedsmæssigt.

I hvert fald sætter jeg min lid til, at det nye stykke kød, der bliver stegt, måske også er lidt bedre, eller nyere, eller hvad end der var galt med det foregående. Den fuldkomne skuffelse sætte ind, da min tallerken vender tilbage, nu kold, med det samme stykke kød, nu lidt varmere, ved siden af den samme garniture, nu også kold.

Det er sgu at pisse på sine kunder. Der er så mange ting helt galt her, at jeg ikke helt ved, hvor jeg skal starte. Han kunne lige så godt have givet mig fingeren i samme ombæring. Eller spyttet på tallerkenen ved bordet. Det her skal forestille at være en seriøs restaurant. Ét er, at de ikke kan finde ud af at stege et stykke mørbrad (og der har vi så dødssynden igen), noget andet er at de har nosserne til at forsøge at stege det igen, når man sender det ud, og returnere det med kold garniture. Floras kaffebar på Blågårds Plads har mere stil end det. Viser din hakkedreng i burgeren sig ikke at være gennemstegt her, får du en helt ny omgang af alt på tallerkenen.

Syret, at man kunne henvise restauratørerne på Faust til en burgerjoint på Nørrebro for at lære dem noget om både service og håndværk.

Det værste ved det hele var, at jeg var så sulten, at jeg fandt mig i det. Så jeg prøvede at spise mere af bøffen, som nu både var tør yderst og momentvis rå i midten, men den smagte så skidt af dårligt kød, at jeg lod den ligge. Derimod spiste jeg rodfrugterne, som med undtagelse af pastinakkerne også var totalt uden charme, smag og ambition.

En af de søde tjenerinder trak min tranebærsaft fra regningen som et plaster på såret (hvilket syret nok virkede endnu mere provokerende), men needless to say røg der ingen drikkepenge på i aften.

Jeg forlod stedet semideprimeret med en vigtig mental note: jeg sætter aldrig mine fødder på Café eller Restaurant Faust igen.

In my previous post I gave Windows 7 quite a beating. If you’ve read anything that even resembles a review on my blog, it should be pretty apparent by now that if I muster up the effort to get behind the keyboard and actually express my opinion about something, it’s usually because I hate it. That’s not to say I hate everything, just think of it this way: if I’m not publicly dissing it, I love it I didn’t bash your favorite movie? It’s because it’s the best… movie… ever!

Anyway, obviously I’m writing about something right now, so obviously I hate it. Yup, it’s my battle with Windows, Windows 7 this time. If you read the previous installment, you’ll know that I was using Windows 7 as it came with my newly purchased ASUS laptop. Since then I’ve had the unfortunate experience that my workstation at work (Kubuntu Karmic) had grown exceedingly quirky. As in the same crap I ranted about last time with disk IO being prioritized so highly that even moving the mouse wasn’t possible when files were being moved about. Install a kernel update, and forget about using the computer for several minutes. That kind of prioritization. Add to that that at an otherwise critical point in time (we were moving servers) my Eclipse PDT install started completely barfing on PHP5.3, the new VPN solution in our company didn’t work with any Kubuntu installment since Feisty, and Firefox started crashing on every file upload, attempt to use Firebug, and attempt to use our time-tracking software’s web interface (which is a study in WTFs, by the way, so I can’t really blame it). Google results mentioned incompatibilities between 64-bit Linuxes and current Firebug, and I seriously needed to use the VPN as I had to work from at home during the weekend. All in all, it seemed like there was really not a lot of options. I turned my head and asked my colleague if perhaps there was an extra Windows 7 Professional license I could use.

Now this may seem like nothing special, but for me it was quite tragic, really. I hate a lot of things, and I do hate computers and OSes in particular (great career choice then, eh?), and I really hate OS fan boys regardless of their color and shape, because to be honest: All OSes suck. I just found Linux to suck the least, and adding to that, when it sucks, it’s always because of a legimate bug, a technical shortcoming or a missing piece of software. It’s never the Apple way of “you’ll take what we give you, and only what we give you, up the ass and you’ll look trendy while you smile” or the Microsoft one of “we don’t care if it’s the simplest task ever invented, we will easily turn it into the most intertwined, non-standard, and complicated equivalent, then we’ll make it partly work and give you a billion irrelevant and incomprehensible options to configure it, minus the ones that you actually need, oh, and we’ll fix the bugs once we’re finished making new software”. With Linux, I’ve always felt completely free and empowered, no matter what crappy thing made me shout at my monitor in frustration.

So, really, making this decision felt utterly awful, I may sound like a drama queen, but my girlfriend can attest to the fact that I was literally depressed following that. But, you win some, you lose some, and so I ventured back into Redmond from whence long ago I so joyfully departed.

Oh, such a long introduction such a short story! Well, if it’s a rant, it’s a rant But, that was the story of my abandoning Linux on my workstation at work, let’s get to the next part: The bitching about Windows 7. This time: Network performance.

Let’s see… Any Eclipse user out there knows that the IDE is quite fond of messing about with files in its projects. It’s a necessity for doing all the wonderful things it does in the background, such as validating your code, analyzing it to offer magical code assist features, and all sorts of funky stuff that makes it just that bit more fun to be a developer. Also, being a web developer, I’m pretty sure I won’t be the first of my kind to be having his or her project code on a network share, as a local installation of LAMP will rarely suffice as the backbone of a development environment.

This means that there’s gonna be a whole lot of network traffic going on when a developer of my breed is working in Eclipse (or any equivalent derivate, for that matter). Which also means that network performance is pretty crucial for being productive. You can’t afford to wait too long for your searches, saves, loads, check ins and outs, whatever, to complete, or your groove is gonna be seriously disturbed.

At first I didn’t notice the problems with networking in Windows 7. I had to move a lot of documents from my XFS partition to my NTFS drive, and I did that by way of a network share, since I had to clear out my /home partition to be able to increase the size of the NTFS partition so that there was actually room for all my files there. Obviously Windows doesn’t access XFS partitions. It’s a gigabit tether, so putting them up there went at the speed of my aging 2.5″ HDD, and getting them back went pretty fast, too, nothing made me wonder at that time.

It seems, though, that this was mainly because of the size of the files. Moving large files in Windows 7 to or from a network share is sufficiently fast (like 15-20 MBps, not the 30-something that Kubuntu provided, but still plenty speed for what you need a network share for in the first place). It’s when you start juggling small files that things start to smell, well, …fishy…

Now, what is typically the nature of files in a programming project directory? That’s right, they’re small. Like <10k. And then there’s the subversion metafiles, tons of stuff in each .svn directory. You really need a network stack capable of pushing those babies through like slugs from a minigun. Well, maybe I’ve spoiled in Linux, but I really don’t think so – my other OS X colleagues don’t feel spoiled either, when we pull 710 MB of these small files from the network share in 6½ minutes. Or when a fresh Subversion checkout takes 1-2 minutes tops. Or “Refreshing workspace” completes in 15 seconds.

To tell the truth, I’ve actually been kinda pissed about that kind of delays. I even wrote a PHP script based on inotify that enabled me to keep a local copy of my projects which were mirrored onto the network share transparently and on-the-fly triggered by file changes. Something that Microsoft actually made some kind of implementation of in Windows 7, called “Transparent Caching”. Except it doesn’t work. Wonder if I should mail them my script?

Anyway, my jaw slowly (very slowly) dropped to the floor when I checked out ~3MB of project files from SVN in Eclipse on my fresh Windows 7 installation and it took more than two hours. Following that, I tried copying the same 710 MB of development files as mentioned before, and Explorer’s finish estimate just continued to climb. The time used to stat the directories was more than 10 minutes, and the transfer speed once it finished that ranged from 11 kBps to 20-something kBps. I soon killed the process and attempted a 7-zip “Store” operation on the directory, as I’ve previously experienced extremely crappy transfer speeds with early Vistas and USB drives which were caused by Explorer, and alleviated when using either a command prompt or 7-zip or any other 3rd party application. I let it run for awhile until it seemed pretty certain that the process would take 7 hours, give or take a few minutes. 7 hours. Compare that to the 6½ minutes in Kubuntu, and I suddenly understood why my 3MB checkout in Eclipse took more than two hours.

Obviously, something was very wrong, and I started googling for solutions. Lots of posts by other users with exactly the same problem, or with the same sort of problem only related to external devices. My return to searching for solutions to problems with Windows just brought me back to a long-forgotten hell hole. People asking legitimate questions about legitimate problems with their crappy Redmond-based OS being met by fan boy idiots telling them that Microsoft isn’t at fault for their hardware vendors not providing proper drivers, idiots suggesting them to format and reinstall… WTF? I thought that was a joke by now?

I tried all the shebangs, disabling all kinds of crap, uninstalling antivirus software, upgrading my network adapter drivers from the vendor, but to no avail. Then I tested my colleague’s computer, and it exhibited the exact same problem. It became apparent to me that Windows definitely still wasn’t ready for the desktop, and I kinda went into a dark place where I had to find some kind of solution besides Windows or Linux, and so I tried to install FreeBSD and PC-BSD. Both would either kernel panic when booting the installation CDs (both were FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE based, so I guess the problem lies there somewhere), or continue (seemed to happen if I didn’t interact with the computer unless absolutely required, go figure). PC-BSD would fuck up my partition table, recreating every partition it touched resulting in “partition does not end on a cylinder boundary” warnings from fdisk, and it would always fail at some point in the installation with errors. Both, however, would succeed in installing as such, only their boot loaders would leave me with some weird prompt because it couldn’t find the boot code. Sucks.

So, to finish up… What I did was go back to where I’ve never been really let down, and that was with Kubuntu. I knew by experience that the Karmic Koala wouldn’t help me even if bribed with lots of eucalyptus leaves, so I got the Lucid Lynx Alpha 2 cd and tried that instead. Seriously beta. Well, no, not even that as it’s alpha, but still seriously beta Either way, it failed to install grub, so I had to go with LILO. I also switched back from XFS to my old friend ReiserFS. Let me tell you: Either the Linux kernel just got a serious refurbishing or all my troubles with user responsiveness are really founded in XFS. Because the Lucid Lynx on ReiserFS is faster and more responsive than any OS I’ve ever tried. No more stutters with the mouse or interface, even when mirrordir’ing 12 GB to my drive while installing 470+ updates via apt-get. Not… one… Everything felt like a rocket had been shoved into my old laptop’s bong hole. I’m gonna try installing with XFS and Reiser on my own laptop and do some comparisons, so that I can maybe confirm (hopefully) that the responsiveness issues I’ve been experiencing over the last few years are to blame on XFS, not the kernel. That would make the next post indeed

Either way, that’s my rant for now. Hope it was waaayyy to long for ya

Ok, so I recently bought an ASUS U30 laptop which came preinstalled with Windows 7. I’m mainly a Kubuntu person myself, so I resized that Windows partition to fit and put Kubuntu on the rest of the drive.

The recent years of kernel development, scheduling in particular, seem to have brought an increasingly annoying trend: prioritizing IO operations in favor of user interaction responsiveness. While the KDE desktop has never been more attractive (beats Windows 7 by lengths, IMHO), that doesn’t matter a whole lot if you can’t move your mouse because updates are being installed or you’re copying some large file over the network.

Add to that a bunch of annoyances such as generally being completely unable to get vertical sync to work on any output, using any media player, on any graphics card. Or, the KDE 4.x branch in general being a Windows 95 story in rewriting in terms of beta-ish stability. Or, the inability to properly configure my multi-touch touchpad, negative 1 or 2 hours on the battery when compared to W7, going from sleep to operational every time causing a second sleep for no apparent reason then presenting an “Error 1 when suspending” or something like that, the WiFi constantly disconnecting sometimes needing an rmmod && modprobe to come back up, and so on and so forth in a seemingly endless array of problems that seem to be increasing in numbers rather than decreasing.

Quite frankly, Linux in my experience is getting worse, not better.

So, as heart-breaking as it is, I’ve decided to opt out of Kubuntu on my laptop for a while, and try out that Windows 7 thing that came with the thing in the first place.

As Windowses go, this one certainly looks better. OOB it performs way better than Vista, it seems to have fixed a few of the most idiotic usability flaws while still retaining others that were introduced with Vista; like hunting for where to change system fonts… Now where would that logically reside? Well, affordance tells us that we’d right-click the desktop, choose Properties and go to the appearance tab or whatever. Well, affordance counts for nothing, so there’s no Properties there anymore. There’s a Personalize, though, but nothing in there hints at anything about fonts… Well, maybe “Display” does a bit. But that’s not it. Although there’s an Andjust ClearType Text in there. Not it either. Set Custom Text Size (DPI)? Nope. Change Display Settings! Sorry, donuts all out. Hmmm… Try again, back. Let’s try the search input at the top. It looks like what we know from Mac OS X and KDE. Certainly, searching for “font” gives results, yay! Oh, there’s a whole section of font-related options! “Preview, delete, or show and hide fonts”, “Change Font Settings”, and “View installed fonts”. There’s also a “Display” group, but we’ve already tried those, and they didn’t do us any good. So, of course, the “Change Font Settings” must be it, it’s pretty much named after what we’re trying to accomplish, right? Well, not quite… This pane just allows us to chose whether or not to “Hide fonts based on language settings” (Huh? You can do that? I mean, what the hell does that even do?) or to “Allow fonts to be installed using a shortcut (advanced)”. Well, apart from being completely incomprehensible settings, why the hell would you even make a Control Panel page for these settings? This sounds like something that belongs in a registry setting, safely tucked away from tired eyes trying to find a useful settings page. So, the “Change Font Settings” page wasn’t actually a page to change anything sensible about fonts. I won’t bore you any further with exploring the last two options returned by our control panel “font” search word, suffice it to say they are equally useless.

So where the hell do you change the size or type or fonts used in Windows? Searching for it helps not, neither does common logic. Well, stupid, how dumb are you? Use your brain! It’s “Control Panel”, then “Appearance and Personalization”, then “Personalize”, then “Window Color”, then “Advanced Appearance Settings”! You should know that fonts are a type of window color! Sheeesh…

As mindbafflingly stupid that user interaction has been designed, luckily I haven’t spend enough time here yet to stumble upon other equally retarded annoyances. If I had, I’d probably be smoking crack right now trying to calm my nerves.

I have, on the other hand, just experience the glorious genius of the “Recommended” and default settings for automatic updates. The epic fail quality of the genius is two-fold, the first one destroying your work, the second one potentially destroying your computer. Please read on.

1) The default behavior is to download updates, install them, and restart the computer. Just. Like. That.

Don’t leave that thing unattended if you were actually doing something important before picking up the phone, checking how the dinner was coming along, taking a trip to the crapper, or anything other that normal people do every once in a while.

Windows 7 seems to say,

“Hey, there’s these purdy important updates that I needs to gets. I’m just gonna install those for ya, then I’m gonna be restarting, but never you worry, once I’m back, all dem Explory windows is gonna be aaaalll right back, see?”

“Sure, alright, but what about that Windows AIK instance that was open with all my changes to the WIM that I’d been preparing that I wanted to export once I had finished it?”

“Oooh, you needed that? Really? It’s just… You weren’t there, so I figured…”

“Yeah, that’s fantastic, great! What about the x264 process that was running along transcoding at 4 hours, with 4 more hours to finish? You gonna bring that back, too?”

“Uh, well, see, I kinda figured that wasn’t important, seeing as how it was just using pretty much all the CPU. Ya know, it kinda looked like a runaway process and all…”

“Or, an intensively hard-working process, not to be disturbed? Well, one final question. The Putty instance with an open SSH connection to my Kubuntu box where I was running an SFV batch process on 1.2 TB of data in the session that was killed when you rebooted my computer… I’d like to see you bring that back?”

2) Believe it or not, but the automatic updates are also triggered when sleeping. That is, when your laptop’s sleeping, not the flatline brain activity kind of sleep that is the logic behind Windows 7′s automatic updates. Yes, that’s right. This entire process can and will happen when you’ve put your computer into sleep mode. That means do a little work, close the lid so your laptop sleeps, and stow it away. Someplace safe, like where you’d usually put it. Like a carrying bag or sleeve. You know the kind that obstructs air intake? The kind you’d never dream of putting you laptop in if it were on? Because if you did, you’d probably end up damaging it severely as it overheats until the battery’s drained, or the CPU or some other vital component like the graphics card fries and shuts it down? Yup, this is the comfy cramped little place your laptop would suddenly awaken to install updates and do a reboot. A reboot which could end anyplace, really. At a BIOS password prompt, for instance. A boot manager screen. A hard drive encryption password prompt, or simply the login prompt of your favorite window manager.

So thank you, Microsoft, for once again proving that stupidity comes in many forms. Oh, and for still not having fixed the auto-hiding task bar so that overlapping windows actually don’t get to be placed on top of it. But of course, it’s only been 15 years since that issue was first reported. And it’s not like the other operating systems don’t have that same problem. Oh yeah, sorry, that’s right, they don’t.

As Niels Bohr put it, the opposite of a truth is not a lie, it’s simplification.

A perfect thruth’s inverted companion is the perfectly reflected lie. No such lie can exist that does not also carry with it the truth. Misinformation is not missing information, it is just information that needs extra attention in order to decode. It is only when information is discarded that we really start lying, and start to miss out on things.

This is a mantra to live by, professionally as well as privately. Any approach to software development, beit traditional, agile, or other, will be subject to evaluation and scrutiny if we hold this statement true.

It is of course, in the terminology of Martin Fowler, the traditional engineering methods with their roots in natural sciences and hard systems thinking that lie foremostly subject to special attention, with their prime focus on functional analysis and strategies of decomposition.

Abstraction through such approaches is not just interpretation, abstraction is a disciplined simplification of a problem area, to make it fit into a possible, visualized problem solution. It is the simplification imposed by this abstract visualization that we must never hold as neither truth, nor lie.

But is it at all possible to uncover every aspect of a particular situation to avoid discarding information, to avoid lying? I don’t think so. But the question should not be whether decompositioning approaches, functional analysis and abstraction are valid or invalid as tools, the real question must be what degree of validity we are attributing the artefacts produced by performing such abstractions and interpretations, and to which extent we’re going to base our development on these kinds of artefacts.

No software development project can take place without the use of any of these disciplines, no matter how extreme. We cannot escape having to use these approaches, so we need guidance in ensuring that when we lie, we do so about the most insignificant things. We need people. We need to stay social. We need to continuously question ourselves, our interpretations, and what we hold to be true. We can only do so through continuous sparring and feedback with and from the people who are going to take what we create into actual use. It’s not what we do that makes us great developers, it’s what we learn underway.

Stay true

Trashy Black Girl Shakes Her Stuff, Trashy Mulato Girl Shakes Her Stuff, Trashy White Girl Shakes Her Stuff, Equal Rights Prostitute Shakes Her Stuff, Nondescript Retarded Female Audience Go Woo-hoo!, Nondescript Retarded Male Audience Caress Their Penises, What a Bunch of Crap.

Worst… Scheisse… in a Long Time…