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Twhirl & Adobe Air: Catch-22

Posted on May 14, 2008 ·

My favorite Twitter app, Twhirl died on me two days ago. Actually, it’ snot Twhirl itself, the error message clearly identifies Adobe Air, stating the installation is damaged.

Fixing it should be easy: just reinstall Air. Except… I can’t. Adobe installer says: This version of Adobe Air is already installed on your system. Yeah, thank you, I know, but it’s corrupted.

Oh, well, next step is uninstalling Air, then installing it again. Except… I can’t do that, either. A quick search shows I am not alone: several users report that in Vista Adobe Air does not show as an installed application, hence you can’t uninstall it, either.

Catch-22.smile_angry I hope Adobe proves otherwise.

Update (5/16): I found a forum tip: run the Adobe Air installer from a command prompt with the -uninstall parameter. It worked, I got Air off the system, then installed it again. Guess what: Twhirl still reports damaged Air file. Next I thought I would uninstall Twhirl – I can’t. Unlike Air, this one is listed in the Control Panel, you can click on Uninstall – nothing happened.

I’ve been off twitter for several days now, have seen evidence of users reporting this issue but received no response whatsoever from either Twhirl or Adobe yet. This s*cks, big time.

Update (5/16):  Adobe Support came through, the recommended the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. It helped, although not in a straightforward way. Steps involved:

  1. Install Windows Installer Cleanup Util
  2. Cleanup Adobe Air and Twhirl
  3. Now Adobe Air shows up  in Control Panel, so I click Uninstall.  Error: This app requires a version of Adobe Air which is no longer supported.  Oh, well, on to the next steps…
  4. Install current Air version
  5. Try Twhir: still shows Air error, the installation of the application is damaged.
  6. But there is hope, at least now I can uninstall Air from the Control Panel.
  7. Install Air again (same installer I just did minutes before)
  8. Try twhirl again: still shows “damaged” message.
  9. Try uninstalling twhirl from control panel – can’t.  Air error again.
  10. Try re-installing twhirl again.  Can’t: already exist in current location… but that’s a good clue.
  11. Installed Twhirl in new directory, and voila! it works now.   To bad i have leftover crap from previous install.

In the end, after several days and many  hoops, I am back on twitter (twhirl) again.   Still like twhirl as a product, but their support sucks. thumbs_down Non-existent – at least on the very media they live and die for: twitter.   5 calls for help over 5 days left unanswered.  I received better support from Comcast on Twitter.

Filed Under: Software · Tagged: , , , , , ,
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Windows 7 = Vista Final

Posted on April 21, 2008 ·

I like Jason Hiner’s prediction @ TechRepublik: Microsoft will leapfrog Vista, release Windows 7 early, and change its OS business:

And that’s why Microsoft will ultimately try to quell the embarrassing Windows Vista debacle by making a bold move with Windows 7 to win back customer loyalty and generate positive spin for its most important product.

What will happen next?

My prognosis is that Microsoft will use smoke and mirrors to conjure up an early release of Windows 7, the next edition of the world’s most widely-used operating system. Then they will quietly and unofficially allow IT departments to migrate straight from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Yes, we’re almost there. Except that it doesn’t take care of customers (including yours truly) royally sc***ed by Vista. I wasn’t kidding when I said:

Windows 7, whenever it comes, should be released as “Vista Final”, free to all Vista victims along with Microsoft’s letter of apology.

Related articles

Filed Under: Software · Tagged: , , , , ,
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Failed SP1 Update: Vista Still Sucks

Posted on April 15, 2008 ·

Pardon my French.. it’s not exactly my style, especially not in the title, but enough is enough. I’ve long given up detailing Vista’s countless failures, but somehow, unconsciously I still hoped things would get better after installing SP1.

Not that I could get it – I was one of the “few” who had an offending Intel graphics chip in my HP PC, so I could not get it for a while. Then today it showed up on Windows Update, so off I went to a spare laptop (XP) since I knew the update would take about an hour or so.

Checking it an hour later:

Service Pack did not install. Reverting Changes. Do not turn off your computer.

WTF? So now it’s gonna spend another hour, a total cost of two hours to get back to where I was in the first place? And they wonder (?) why everyone says Vista Sucks.

P.S. Windows 7, whenever it comes, should be released as “Vista Final”, free to all Vista victims along with Microsoft’s letter of apology.

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged: , , , ,
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The Microsoft Vista Fiasco: Who is Evil Now?

Posted on March 9, 2008 ·

Yes, it’s a harsh title. Yes, I’ve long been critical of Vista. But so far I thought it was just incompetence, the Behemoth having lost their edge. Naive me… this piece in The New York Times is a true eye-opener.

It starts with what appears to be average users’ stories (bare with me, it gets better):

  • Jon upgrades two XP machines to Vista, only to find none of his peripherals work anymore
  • Steven confirms drivers are missing in the entire ecosystem
  • Mike buys a “Windows Vista Capable” laptop which turns out to be a $2,100 email machine, as it doesn’t run his favorite programs, and only can handled the castrated version of Vista that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

If these users didn’t know better, I wonder who should. They are all senior Microsoft Execs:

  • Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member.
  • Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft senior vice president responsible for Windows.
  • Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management.

They and several other Microsofties warned about the consequences of reducing the original strict hardware requirements and labeling underrated computers as Vista Capable:

The decision to drop the original hardware requirements is accompanied by considerable internal protest. The minimum hardware configuration was set so low that “even a piece of junk will qualify,” Anantha Kancherla, a Microsoft program manager, said in an internal e-mail message among those recently unsealed, adding, “It will be a complete tragedy if we allowed it.”

That this would result in disaster was foreseeable:

“It would be a lot less costly to do the right thing for the customer now,” said Robin Leonard, a Microsoft sales manager, in an e-mail message sent to her superiors, “than to spend dollars on the back end trying to fix the problem.”

He and others were not listened to. Now Microsoft is facing a class action lawsuit: nothing new to the Redmond giant, just a calculated risk. “Where does Microsoft go to buy back its lost credibility?” asks The New York Times.

Nowhere. They stopped caring a long time ago. The Monopolist does not have customers: they have loyal subjects used to pay their taxes to Microsoft. Except that they are not that loyal anymore, and there are visible cracks on the walls of the empire. There is Linux, Mac OS, Web Applications – customers are slowly realizing they actually have a choice. Choice is the end of all monopolies, it’s just a matter of time. The Borg could slow the process by trying to be user-friendly, at least pretend to care about customers. Deceptive behavior like this shows they don’t care. They are digging their own grave.

(Please, don’t get me started on how profitable Microsoft is doing – I am talking about a trend, and it takes time….)

Filed Under: Business, Software · Tagged: , , , , , ,
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The Vista Copy Story: Perception *IS* Reality

Posted on March 3, 2008 ·

Windows Vista’s file copy performance is actually faster than that of XP – tells us Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror. He cites Mark Russinovich’s extensive analysis of Vista’s file copy algorithm, and comes to the conclusion that “perceived performance is more important than actual performance.”

…perception is reality: if users see file copying as slower, it is slower. Despite all the algorithmic improvements, in spite of the superior file copy benchmark results, Vista’s file copy performance is worse than Windows XP.

I can’t dispute the quoted analysis, am simply not competent enough, but here’s a key part:

…for copies involving a large group of files between 256KB and tens of MB in size, the perceived performance of the copy can be significantly worse than on Windows XP.

So the problem is with large number of files. My question: how large? Is two considered large? As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Yes, I know, this is “delete”, not copy, but it’s a file operation nevertheless, and I suspect the same problem. Perception *is* indeed reality… and I suspect we have more than just perception here.thumbs_down

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, Software · Tagged: , , , ,
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Sales Pitch: We Remove Vista

Posted on January 31, 2008 ·

Via Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog.

Update (2/1): It’s on Engadget now.

Filed Under: Humor, Software · Tagged: , , , ,
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Proof that Vista is Slooooow

Posted on January 23, 2008 ·

No comment.smile_angry

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, Software · Tagged: , , ,
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Intuit’s Update Fiasco: There is a Better Way

Posted on December 17, 2007 ·

Intuit appears to have entered a new market, that of permanent file deletion. Whether you want it or notsmile_angry:

“Mac users who installed an update to their QuickBooks software over the weekend were met with a nasty surprise: missing data.

The update caused several Mac users to lose data from their Desktop folders, infuriating many who were hoping to close their books this week for 2007, only to lose valuable purchase orders and spreadsheets” – reports News.com.

Intuit’s recommendation:

“For those of you who have been affected, we are testing out options for recovering the deleted files. Our recommendation for now is to turn off your computer and do not use it further. If you continue using your computer or reboot, you may over-write the area on the disk where the deleted data is stored, preventing any recovery efforts from being effective.”

Hm…considering the type/size of businesses typically using QuickBooks, not touching their computer in the middle of the year-end rush may not be a viable option.smile_sad. Intuit is clearly throwing in support resources, customers can register and will be called back to individually assess their situation. For many, the damage may very well be more than losing a few hours:

(This is where I wanted to quote an Intuit forum message claiming lost file, lost business damage – I saw the post 15 minutes ago, now it’s gone. Could it have been deleted?)

We’re living in the age of crappy software. QuickBooks is not alone, this incident is just more dramatic than the typical update failures. Even when updates don’t fail, they are becoming a nuisance. Last week I just pinged someone on Skype, when my Internet connection dropped again – a “standard” Vista feature, to be remedied by a reboot. So there I was, waiting to resume the chat session when the machine decided to implement 9 updates. This being a ‘screamer’ PC the update only took 7 minutes before shut-off, and a few more to configure on re-start; by the time I could come back online, my chat partner was gone. The two XP laptops in the house are a lot slower, so I just left them alone to complete their 11 updates… experience tells me sometimes these take half an hour or more.clock Who has time for this? Between the applications we actually use and all the crapware needed just to keep our computers running (virus scan, firewall, anti-spy, desktop search, backup, synchronization …etc), it’s just getting way too much to deal with.

By now my regular readers probably know where I am heading: there is a better, safer, easier way. Proponents of Cloud computing (On-demand, SaaS) typically point out portability, collaboration as key benefits, but there’s another huge benefit: ease of mind. The web applications I often use (Gmail, the Zoho Productivity Suite, CRM..etc) get updated just as frequently (actually, more) than their desktop counterparts, but I don’t have to worry about these updates: the service provider takes care of them. The whole process is not transparent to me, the user. I dumped the responsibility on the service provider: they work for me. smile_wink

Are you ready to have peace of mind?

Update: I could not have made this up: just as I was about to post this, I checked TechMeme for updates to the Intuit story, only to see this headline: Microsoft security update cripples IE .

I rest my case.

Related posts: support.quickbooks.intuit.com, CNET News.com, The Apple Core, CrunchGear, MacUser, Macsimum News, Ubergizmo, Apple Gazette, O’Grady’s PowerPage, Zero Day , Donna’s SecurityFlash, AccMan Pro.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Windows XP Twice as Fast as Vista?

Posted on November 24, 2007 ·

Ouch. This hurts. Devil Mountain Software, the outfit that had previously declared Vista SP1 a Performance Dud came to the conclusion that Windows XP SP3 Yields Performance Gains – about 10% compared to XP SP2. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the very same tests show the outgoing operating system, XP twice as fast as Vista, the “flagship” OS. No wonder Forrester Research says Vista’s biggest problem is XP. smile_omg

Of course most users won’t notice it. Why? Because very few upgrade their existing computers from XP to Vista. We don’t buy operating systems, we buy computers: try to get one without Vista. (Fact: most of Microsoft’s Vista Revenue comes from the OEM channel.)

The Vista-based new screamer clearly runs a lot faster than the 3-year-old laptop running XP, but in reality it’s running at half-speed – the other half eaten by the Operating System. Which proves my earlier argument abut this being a pointless arms race: buying faster and faster machines only so they can maintain themselves and barely let us use basic applications.

Unless those applications are in the cloud. smile_wink

Related posts: PC World, Hardware 2.0 and TECH.BLORGE.com

Update (12/14): Coding Sanity has found a solution.

Filed Under: Software, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Gmail … Microsoft Style

Posted on November 20, 2007 ·

It’s definitely Holiday time: slow day, no news, my feed-reader is empty… took a walk outside, did not meet anyone. But for a minute I got confused, thinking we’re heading into April Fools’ Day, not Thanksgiving. It’s all because of Philipp Lenssen’s brilliant post: What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

I won’t spoil the fun, I want you to read his piece, here’s just a little teaser. Starting point, regular gmail:

He then rebrands Gmail to something longer, like Windows Live Gmail, change the URL to the more professional looking http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home, adds new panes, breaks up messages from conversation threads into their individual parts, adjust the spam filter to be a bit more MS-like … etc. Here’s the final result:

I actually think this last pic is overdone…nevertheless, it’s good reading. Tomorrow Philipp plans to discuss “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista.” Artful play with the words. You could read it like this: “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista” – but we know that is the case, so that leaves us with the only possible interpretation: “What if Microsoft had designed Windows Vista.” smile_tongue

Filed Under: Humor, Software · Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
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