I got enough with all the software that is trying to update. I don’t want to go to a webpage, download the new version, probably to close the application, install the new version (if it does not require you to remove the old version first, and in many cases even reboot the entire system.

Why can’t you update yourself in the background without annoying me?

I’m wondering if there are any good user experience designers for software – I bet none of them considered that by not doing the update in the background (with zero user intervention) the software maintenance  can became a full-time job.

I know that this problem is Windows and OS X specific because on Linux the package managers can to the job very well and only people with limited brain usage would not use them to deploy their products. I’m sure that Microsoft and Apple considered opening their updaters but some people at them considered that it would break their monopoly and it’s ‘better’ to keep this only for them.

This post is not about complaining is more about taking action. What can we do about this? We can complain to each software developer, creating a bug, voting for it or posting an email on their forum. If they will see the how much people are complaining about this they will probably take action.

So I created a list with products failing to comply with this and with links to the bugs so you could express your opinion. In case you are a software developer and you are interested in adding this feature to your product you could take a look at there two projects made open-source by Google: Update Engine (OS X)  and Google Update / Omaha (Windows).

Whitelist

Currently I did not find any Windows software that is able to update silently.

Blacklist

The below list contains links to bugs where you can vote or to the mailing list or forums where you can post a feature request.
* Firefox 446342, 489138
* TortoiseSVN – forum – the bug tracker is read-only
* Pidgin

I was surprised that I’ve found that many application developers are missing important things about the way they are publishing their new application installers (or releases if they do not have installers) on the web.

Use a permanent path to the current release, without versions, like: “http://myproject.org/latest.zip”

I will try to explain a simple and effective set of rules that can really improve the delivery of the latest versions of your application to the users.

1. Do not name your installer setup.exe, use something like projectname_setup.exe or similar.
2. Do not use the version in the setup name but put the version on the first page of the installer.
3. Provide a permanent URL (permalink) for your latest release. This URL must link always to the latest versions of your installer. If you really want to change this URL you must provide a 301 or 302 HTTP redirect to the new URL.
4. Make sure that your installer supports unattended mode (silent mode)
5. Make sure it doesn’t require you to uninstall an existing older version of the software. If you really have to do this you must do it silently.

If you want to keep a history of your old releases you can implement this by having verioned filenames and by keeping a symlink from the latest.zip file to the current version.

How to setup your own scheduled install / update task

The batch sequence bellow can be added as a scheduled task. It’s very effective: it will download a newer version only when needed and will install it silently. Sometime simple things are working much better that complex ones – so no updater service or other things to slow down your computer.
@echo off
rem This line does download the latest version
wget --timestamp http://myproject.org/download/myproject.exe
rem This lines does an silent install of the latest version
myproject.exe /SILENT


The unattended parameters differs between different installers you may use:

• NullSoft Installation Systems (NSIS): /S
• MSI: /s /v”/qb”
• InstallShield with MSI: /s /a /s /v”/qb”
• Wise Installer: /s
• Inno Setup: /silent or /verysilent

If you need more information about unattended switches you can check here.

How to install other applications from your installer (dependencies)

If you want to install another application from your installer all you have to do is to download the latest version from the URL above and run the installer running in silent mode.

You don’t have to include it in your installer because the user may already have it installed and you don’t need to update your installer if a new version of your dependency is released.

So if you solved this problem in your application please add a comment here, I will add you application to the list of software complying with this small requirement.

Already ready: Sysinternals Utilities,

Wanted list: 7-Zip, Pidgin, Notepad++, Media Player Classic.

Have you every been annoyed about not being able to use shortcuts like Ctrl-W, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-L, Ctrl-T on some pages? If you didn’t figure it out this is happening only on pages with plug-ins, like Flash or Acrobat. The reason for this is due to the the way the keyboard messages are working.

Because on Windows platform the keyboard messages are sent only to the window with focus at least the plug-ins should send the unprocessed keyboard messages to the parent window (the browser). Nobody took the responsibility to solve it because it is a “technology limitation” so user experience is just bad as it was 8 years ago when the bug was fist filled on Mozilla site.

Right now the only way you could help is by voting on these two places:

• Mozilla’s 8 years old bug on keyboard shortcuts and plugins
• Request for Adobe to update Flash player plugin to send unprocessed keyboard messages to the browser – already #6 request for Flash on DearAdobe.com
• Request to Adobe to update the Adobat plugin in order to keep browser shortcuts working.

On Linux there is a way of solving this issue by using an extension.

I’m using wikis all the time and I am a fun of MediaWiki engine but there is one feature that I consider having a bad implementation. It’s about the page comments – or “discussions”. I think these are quite important that MediaWiki should switch to something similar to the way Atlassian Confluence is dealing with the page comments.In fact, I think there are very few things where Confluence is better:

• Comments
• Default theme (skin)
• Foldered structure or “spaces” – where you can assign pages to spaces. MediaWiki has something like this: namespaces – but they are not easy to manage and the URLs are looking quite bad.

Comments should be:

• displayed at the end of each page – not in a different tab
• assigned to a wiki user and not combined all in a wiki like page.
• (optional) rateable

I will post a picture so you could understand better the difference between comments these two implementations:

Comments on MediaWiki versus Confluence. Click for details.

In this vacation I’ve spend more than a day looking for a reliable way of syncing my contacts between Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Gmail (or other Google email accounts). So I decided to share my “synchronizing” experience. Like many of you am currently using Outlook (2007) for storing my >300 contacts. Outlook and iPhone integration works very well and if you are using Exchange you don’t even need to sync again because the latest iPhone firmware (2.2) does this totally transparent. My requirements:

• Folders/Groups – possibility to keep contacts in different folders like Work, Family, Friends,…
• Pictures – I really like to add picture to most of my contacts because it’s more easy to learn who am I corresponding to and also I get free sync of pictures with my iPhone.

Limitations:

• Multiple IM addresses – Outlook does not support multiple IM addresses – you can add only 3 emails and 1 IM address per contact
• Categories/Tags – iPhone doesn’t support them at all. It would be nice if they would add support for them.

First, I’ve tried to find a free (preferably open-source) web based synchronization solution. In the past I’ve used ScheduleWorld and I decided to test the new version but found that they cannot sync contact pictures at all. They are using Funambol client for Outlook but it seams that the picture sync doesn’t work. Other thing I’ve tested and didn’t met my criteria: myFunambol, Zyb.

gSyncit : Syncing Outlook with Google Contacts & Calendar

After a while I’ve discovered gSyncit – a small, commercial Outlook plugin (only 10$) that is doing the job quite fine. I’ve tested the 20 contacts limited demo and decided that my time values much more than ten bucks and ordered it. By the way, I was interested only about the synchronization of Contacts provided be gSyncIt but it can do also sync Calendar. Now the “review” split into good and bad things ordered by the importance (from my point of view): Good

• Support is amazing: the developer, David Levinson, is giving very good support: it does really give answers and take action when you find a bug. The true it’s that I’ve found some bugs and exchanges some emails with him about them. I was quite pleased.
• Stability: I’ve been starting using it from January 4th (testing several releases) and I didn’t get any crash – ever! From my past experience with Outlook plugins I was expecting crashes and possible slow performance.
• Maintenance: Application is under current development and new versions are appearing every week, with less bugs.
• Does sync photos!

Bad

• Google Contacts API is not quite bug free and they have some notable bugs like: no support for default groups Friends, Family and Co-workers. If you are interested about this please vote here by clicking on the star icon before the bug title.
• No merge features: in case you have a conflict you cannot choose what fields to synchronize. You can only choose one overwrite option or ignore.
• Loose pictures quality but currently I’m waiting for a new release that should solve this issue caused by a Goggle email picture size limitation.
• I still get 3-4 errors syncing >300 contacts:
  • errors of type 400 (bad request): only ignore/continue or stop – usually because Gmail does not support all phone types from Outlook
• it does not handle well the case when I move a contact from one folder to another in Outlook.

Overall: I think that very soon this application could become a real success and if it was about giving a score I would give it 90% and I hope that Google will solve it’s issues because the ones from gSyncIt were solved by David in less than 48h.

It’s sad that NVIDIA and AMD(ATI) does not let you install the latest drivers for your card. They had a policy regarding that the notebook manufacturer is supposed to give you updated drivers for you card.

The true is that the manufacturers never kept heir drivers updated so well and with the current economical crisis and their layoffs I’m quite sure that this is one of the places where they will drop the workforce.

An now the solution:

1. Download the drivers from NVIDIA or AMD (choose a driver for card from the same generation but not mobile – anyway they should let you download anything because they are all in the same installer)
2. Try to install them. You’ll receive an error but now you have the drivers unpacked into C:\NVIDIA.
3. Download NVIDIA Mobility Modder or AMD(ATI) Mobility Moder – a small application that does make some very small changes in the .INF files of the driver in order to be able to install them without the “OEM manufacturer error”
4. Run the Mobility Modder on the C:\NVIDIA or C:\ATI folder in order to patch the INF files
5. Now install the unpacked and patched drivers, using the installer from the folder above, and enjoy them.

You should know that:

• the patch does not make any binary change to the drivers
• it worked every time for me in the last 3 years.

First I should clarify what an Orthodox File Manager (OFM) is just a file manger inspired by the father of all OFM: Norton Commander. NC was written by John Socha and released in 1986. There is even an website dedicated for storing information about and the history of these Orthodox file managers: OFM.

Currently I’m using FAR Manager and Midnight Commander, both of them free and open-source but I’m not too happy with them because:

• MC is wrote in C and in maintenance mode for ages, I’ve looked over the code and only a masochist would be happy to improve it.
• FAR Manager became open-source an is developed by a team of Russian programmers. The biggest problem I’ve faces with it is that the development team is communicating mostly in Russian and they do not agree to switch to English. Even the source control commits are in Russian and the code is full of Russian texts.

What other file manager I used in the past:

• Total Commander – commercial and they added Unicode a “little” bit too late
• Dos Navigator – I’ve loved it in the MS-DOS age but sad that it was coded in Pascal – it’s something without a real future.

I was hoping for quite some years to have some time and start working on a new, open-source, file manager having these features:

• multiplatform: Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
• TUI and GUI interface implemented using MVC pattern
• possibility to run operations (like copy) in background as tasks
• extensible using plug-ins

As a development language I would choose Python because the code would be really easy to extend and the development speed would be quite good.

I would spend time working on an editor because it would be very time consuming and because you can always integrate a good existing editor with the file manager.

The problem is that this kind of project required quite some time and more than one developer in order to succeed.

I’ve looked over the net looking for others looking for something similar but failed to find something interesting – just abandonware like pyAdmiral.

So any one interested?!

I was amazed to discover that buddy icons (png files) from Yahoo Messenger are not passing PNG tests and to render bad in mod programs including in Windows XP, Microsoft Paint, and others. In fact the only place where I was able to see the files well was Pidgin messenger (GTK) – a multi-network messenger I would really recommend to anyone. I’ve even make a feature request to them to recompress the png files in order to eliminate this yahoo created problem.I wouldn’t recommend the usage of Yahoo Messenger to anyone because I consider it’s one of the most bloated piece of software. I would even give it a #1 position in annoyware software products. Still most people around me keep using it, maybe they are all masochists

You may wonder why I’m interested about the buddy icons. I save them as contact icons in Outlook and synchronize them with my iPhone in order to have a picture for every contact.

First time, I suspected that the bug is inside Windows XP code because I wasn’t able to reproduce it on Vista so I’ve filled a bug at Microsoft. I was surprised to get a fast response and well documented, written in my native language (Romanian) – the conclusion the bug is not at them.

Here are some results of my investigations:

• reproducing on Windows XP SP3 (and SP2) (3 tests)
• did not reproduce on Vista (1 test)
• garbage on: Explorer, Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, Paint, Paint.NET
• different garbage on Outlook 2007 (partial load)
• loads ok on: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Adobe Photoshop, Gimp
• 

The above PNG files are available for download: xp_png_rendering_bug_files

I’ve run the pngcheck utility on all files from C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Cache\Icon\ The results are below:


OK: 1BA5271FDE68D1E29C94736867C7FCE (96x96, 32-bit RGB+alpha, non-interlaced, 50.1%).
2517D58A367E9AD7E34D97D81A89126 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: 2517D58A367E9AD7E34D97D81A89126
OK: 2F2DAD93E92CF24DFDAC3477354E0B3 (96x96, 24-bit RGB, non-interlaced, 98.1%).
OK: 2F76CE45D21E4F2DCACC9DAB7771CCAE (96x96, 24-bit RGB, non-interlaced, 88.1%).
324991D224071D89CE21A5C67F287AA zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: 324991D224071D89CE21A5C67F287AA
38EAC9B6564D3398AD1214EA7B89014 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: 38EAC9B6564D3398AD1214EA7B89014
OK: 482B65B54B746615F6312B512A57F611 (96x96, 24-bit RGB, non-interlaced, 21.6%).
4F6D8712BE6BBA8B522648A065AAB8D5 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: 4F6D8712BE6BBA8B522648A065AAB8D5
5825A359D7E5C85F3BCD268D238A358 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: 5825A359D7E5C85F3BCD268D238A358
60B345DBB55CDB53AD56F50F49CC9F zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: 60B345DBB55CDB53AD56F50F49CC9F
63CD7FE0B2334C79D535B6BC6453B69F zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: 63CD7FE0B2334C79D535B6BC6453B69F
6827B456EDCBEF38B2AB658410AC88B8 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: 6827B456EDCBEF38B2AB658410AC88B8
OK: 7111FB3485F9326D935B5CD247151 (96x96, 24-bit RGB, non-interlaced, 27.0%).
7121E5314CC81D1843987419456F367 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: 7121E5314CC81D1843987419456F367
A3C20657EE6BA3632CB9511DB73C112 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: A3C20657EE6BA3632CB9511DB73C112
A8F5AA39DF6DECC0EF7889FA9119B zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: A8F5AA39DF6DECC0EF7889FA9119B
AB88745E3DE17EC8FFCA427ADFEB5 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: AB88745E3DE17EC8FFCA427ADFEB5
AC1BD51EA3C4C4E33BC7CAB570FE89 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: AC1BD51EA3C4C4E33BC7CAB570FE89
C1B8D2AEF4322DBB5B6E1A38375B34 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: C1B8D2AEF4322DBB5B6E1A38375B34
C2D6D7FCA95CA272582CF4E39CE98D5 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: C2D6D7FCA95CA272582CF4E39CE98D5
OK: CBDAE9CEC4B694AD449960C1C1B427 (96x72, 24-bit RGB, non-interlaced, 27.8%).
D599D01D1AB7547EF179DB5E45753DF5 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: D599D01D1AB7547EF179DB5E45753DF5
OK: D64DC7F946B8D664C5BA1FAE9D228CA (60x60, 24-bit RGB, non-interlaced, 29.6%).
DB299D16BDEB2A8C8A5BDBEDD65597C5 zlib: inflate error = -3 (data error)
ERROR: DB299D16BDEB2A8C8A5BDBEDD65597C5
OK: F0AF65BABF10ACF86A3C5276EE52A5A0 (96x96, 24-bit RGB, non-interlaced, 53.4%).

Errors were detected in 17 of the 25 files tested.
No errors were detected in 8 of the 25 files tested.

So it’s clearly a bug in Yahoo Messenger and I wasn’t able to find a bug tracker or a bug submit form on the web. The only way we could make them solve this issue is to create bug reports directly from YM using menu Help > Report a problem to Yahoo! (choose Other/Display images).

RSYNC it’s a fast incremental file transfer protocol developed by Samba. It’s very smart – for example if you modify one byte in a 600mb ISO file rsync will know and will update the file by transferring only few bytes between the source and the destination.

It’s reliable? Shortly yes. As an example: all Linux package distribution is made by mirroring with rsync.

If you are a Windows guy, you should know that you could use cwRsync

About backups

An another very useful function of rsync is to make backups using rsnapshot – a simple perl for making backups of local and remote system. It does use rsync and the biggest advantage of using it is that you can mirror daily your entire OS installation by minimizing the disk usage. If you wonder how it does this: it does this by creating hardlinks between unchanged files between backups. By the way, configuring rsnapshot is very easy – only one line to add in the configuration file: “backup source destination” – where source and destination can be local paths or rsync shares.

How to setup a simple, safe and cheap backup system using rsync

1. Find a cheap spare machine that is going to do nothing else than backups. Nobody else than the sysop must have access to it.
2. Add a big harddrive to it – speed is not important. You’ll need around twice the size of one snapshot for maintaining a history of backup of 6 months IF your are going to use rsnapshot.
   

How is this possible? Rsnapshot does initially mirror your harddrive but for the additional snapshots it will create hardlinks to existing files so the space increase between two snapshots is minimal.

Other remarks

• There is no archival process involved so you don’t need to assign CPU time
• Network transfer is big only at first snapshot.
• Remember to create the RSYNC share on the machines you want to backup from and put rsnapshot on the backup server. This is important because if someone breaks one of the machines it will not be able to remove the backups.
• You’ll be able to put back online any of your machines very easy
• You may be able to run diff tools in case you need to see the changes between two snapshots.