Today, I deceided to track the daily PC-problems I have to solve, just because I wondered why I generally think that PC’s suck and to learn how much time I lose just for fixing things that should work.
Today’s list of software-stupidity I’ve had to learn:
- floAt’s Mobile Agent has a feature to react when the connected BT phone comes out of range. I’ve configured fma to lock the workstation as soon as I leave it. Quite nice. Every time the BT connection now drops, the screen is locked. Unfortunatly, it does not check for the cause of the connection drop: If it’s because I’m just quitting fma, it locks the screen anyway. This stupid thing happend to me just one time too many, so I decided to post this whole entry here.
- I’ve 1 GB of RAM in my Thinkpad which, I think should be enough for the machine to swap only very rarely. Then: Why is my system virtually unusable because of swapping if I bring Firefox in the forground after is lied in the background for an hour or so? I’m not blaming Firefox for this. I’m blaming windows for it’s less-than-optimum memory handling. Why swap if it’s not needed? Why has the system to stop responding when it’s swapping?
- On the Exchange Server, I’ve set up a daily backup-task using Microsoft Backup. It never run and did not provide any error-message at all. Why? Because the command-line created from MS-Backup’s planning assistant was too long to be executed by windows. Why is such invalid command line created? Why is there no error message?
- I had to support one computer where surfing to any website immediatly created a 404-error. I’ve double checked – the pages where there, the websited did in fact work. Cleaning the browser-cache (the supported person insists on using IE) helped. Why? What was the problem?
Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.
I mean: I’m writing software myself and I really check not to do such stupid things. They happen. They happen all the time when programming. Your mind is thinking completly differently when you are buried deep in program code. But then: Why don’t the people take some time to actually test theiur products? Why do such stupid things happen? Why can’t we live in a world without bugs? Without software-stupidity?
Apple, you are coming closer and closer…
gnegg 