Credit to St. Kate’s Computing Services
A while back, I complained about an annoyance in update scheduling on the computers at St. Catherine University. While my experience was disrupted for that one night, I don't think I made it clear enough that overall, the St. Kate's IT department runs things very well. Because of when that incident occurred — during tech week for Guys and Dolls—I wasn't in the best of moods, and I think my writing the following day reflected that.
Compared to other institutions at which I've had the privilege of computing, St. Kate's actually leads the pack in most areas. Augsburg College provides an especially good contrast to St. Kate's:
- Operating System: Windows Vista (Augsburg)1 vs. Windows XP (St. Kate's)
- Time To Internet:2 3 min. (at least, Augsburg) vs. < 2 min. (St. Kate's)
- Startup Annoyances: Novell iPrint demands a second login, ZENworks and Novell run slow scripts before the user can do anything, Internet Explorer and PaperCut NG automatically open (Augsburg) vs. Internet Explorer and PaperCut automatically open (St. Kate's)
Of course there are little annoyances. Auto-startup of Internet Explorer and PaperCut is common to both institutions, as is Firefox's demand to be restarted to fully disable the unstable MetaStream 3 plugin. (In true Murphy's Law style, the prompt always pops up right when I'm in the middle of something. And restarting FF logs me out of most websites. Of course, I could ignore the prompt, but experience has shown that all I'll accomplish is a Firefox crash. At least it isn't lying that the plugin is unstable.)3 However, once one gets past these start-of-session annoyances, the experience is very smooth and pleasant. The configuration stays out of the way for the rest of the session, and that's exactly how computers intended for work unrelated to computing should behave: Pipe down and let users get things done.
When St. Kate's is held up to institutions like Hamline University and Concordia University, the others pale in comparison. Neither Concordia nor Hamline offers a browser alternative to Internet Explorer. Fortunately it's relatively easy to run Google Chrome from my flash drive or temporarily install it on the local machine, or computing at such locations would be unbearable.
Starting Internet Explorer at Concordia, even just to get a copy of Chrome downloaded, is an adventure in frustration. So many browser add-ins load on startup that IE loads frozen and takes 30 to 60 seconds just to initialize and begin loading the homepage. Concordia's computers also have an annoying tendency to pop up notifications about all sorts of things. InstallShield constantly wants to update something, and Adobe's Flash and Reader products run updaters every chance they get.
In this mess of different experiences, only St. Kate's truly stays out of one's way most of the time. For that reason, I consider it a great pleasure to have the privilege of sometimes using their systems, and I applaud Computing Services for creating such a uniquely user-friendly experience.
As a side note, I'd like to mention that I prepped this post for publication using a workstation at Augsburg College. I spent a lot of time waiting for Windows Vista to stop screwing around long enough to do what I needed it to do. Just to illustrate my point...
Notes:
- It should be noted that Augsburg's use of Windows Vista is unmatched in all the institutional computer facilities I have visited in the past two years. St. Catherine University, Colorado College, Hamline University, Concordia University, Emerson College, Normandale Community College, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and the University of Minnesota all (to my most recent knowledge) continue to use Windows XP. The performance advantages held over Augsburg's workstations by all of the aforementioned institutions is amazing. Windows Vista at Augsburg College is run on machines designed for XP, and is abysmally slow when doing just about anything, even logging in/out. [↩]
- I define this as the shortest possible time between entering login credentials and convincing the computer to cough up a Firefox window ready to browse the Web [↩]
- Also, the public libraries in my area have begun having this issue too, much to my dismay. [↩]
A Thought About Efficient IT Administration
I'm kind of calling out St. Kate's Enterprise Computing Services department in a way, because I want to know why they would schedule a restart-required software deployment an hour before the computer lab is to close.
Can anyone with experience in Information Technology and management of company/school computer networks tell me why the times chosen to deploy new software are chosen? My experience last night of a new software deploy completely disrupting my very limited time on the computer happened at Saint Catherine University, which has a generally great library (unlike Concordia University in Saint Paul, though Concordia used to be greater).
Plenty of people were using the computers, and all got interrupted. Why? Why not schedule the deploy for after-hours and save everyone the hassle? When logging in, the computers at St. Kate's even display a message encouraging users to log off their computers at night so updates and new software can be deployed during off hours. I would define off hours as the times when labs are closed, not an arbitrary time like 21:00 (as was chosen a few days ago for a non-restart-required installation) or 23:00 (as was chosen for last night's disruptive reboot-required deploy).
Maybe the IT staff go home at the usual lab closing time and they don't want to stick around after closing to monitor the deploy. Perhaps they want to have extra time to debug any problems that might crop up before the morning rush. Admittedly, the labs are rather underutilized late at night, but those users there are generally working on something very important that really shouldn't be interrupted. It adds to their stress. Having to wait five minutes for the computer to finish "Applying computer settings..." and "Running startup scripts..." doesn't help frayed nerves.
Having no information on which to base any conclusions, I can only speculate wildly as to why the installation time was chosen. But I know that I was not the only user in that lab that was very frustrated at all the computers being forcibly taken offline for five minutes to install a software package.
I also wonder if it wouldn't be possible to have idle computers install the package immediately, but allow in-use workstations to delay installation and restart until the current user logs off. It seems like that would be much more efficient than having everyone in the room sit and stare at a Windows status dialog for five minutes.
Well, at least St. Kate's and Concordia haven't moved to Windows Vista. 
Augsburg College, when I have occasion to go there, has and their systems are a royal PITA, not to mention slow as molasses ("Designed for Windows XP" — the front of every PC tower at Augsburg).
Oh, and even if you're not in IT, I'd still love to hear your opinion. 
Windows Vista: Problems and Advice for Microsoft
I've been sitting on this post idea for a while, since about the beginning of last month, if not a few days before that. In that time I've tried to come up with some good answers to the question Chris Pirillo posed at the end of his "Windows Vista's Rants" video (it starts around 16:30 into the clip). Here are my thoughts on Vista (rather than that video) and, if I'm lucky, a few good ideas that Microsoft would do well to take to heart.
The Complaints
Don't take this post the wrong way; I haven't forgiven Vista in the least for any of its annoyances. I still think the UI design is atrocious hideous (changed on 05/13; more accurately describes my reaction); I still dislike the idea of the UAC dialogs; I still wonder why Microsoft builds everything but the kitchen sink into the operating system. (I can't actually fault them for that; Firefox includes a kitchen sink.
There is no reason for me, personally, to upgrade my existing operating system. I'm comfortable with the way it works, I know what problems can arise, and all the hardware I've ever seen works perfectly in XP. What's more, some of the programs I use don't work under Vista, which means hunting down replacements.
Aside from software issues, Vista's interface is just plain ugly. Nobody I've talked to about the system, from friends to robotics club members to even my dad (my mom couldn't care less about computers, unfortunately, and my grandmother uses OS X now) has anything good to say about it. All the time Microsoft spent designing the glitzy (and ugly, again) Aero interface could have been spent working on other things like WinFS that were dropped so the new OS could be shipped less than three years late. I prefer the XP look to anything else I've seen (the Mac design could work, if the buttons were moved to the right). There's no option to go back to it in Vista that I know of.
Note that I haven't even mentioned the countless hardware compatibility issues.
But as Chris Pirillo said, we know it sucks. There's no need for any more bashing. I officially declare this post's bash section finished. From here, it's suggestions and thoughts on how to improve the situation.
The Ideas
So what can Microsoft (or OEMs, or both) do to help consumers through Vista until Windows 7 (hopefully much-improved over the current new version!) is released? The options are quite likely endless, and I only came up with a few; but that's the power of the crowd. The more people who answer this question, the better.
Option one is to simply keep selling Windows XP until a decent replacement is available. Microsoft obviously doesn't want to do that because of the hassle of maintaining two mountains of code. People have already adopted Vista in some measure, so yanking it wouldn't free Microsoft from having to provide updates.
Option two is to offer the option, as part of a Vista installation, to downgrade the system for free. Again this would mean maintaining XP alongside Vista, but if Microsoft wants to keep its customers happy, they have to adhere to the age-old business doctrine: "The customer is always right."
Option three involves updating Vista as much as possible, improving compatibility with old software and adding options to make the interface more like XP. I have at least some confidence that the hardware issues will gradually fade away as time goes on, since peripheral device developers are continuing to upgrade their drivers.
Conclusion
These are just a few ideas, brainstormed in the space of a couple dozen minutes while I was pondering what to write this morning. I have by no means come up with everything possible, or even anything useful (that's the risk you run by reading a personal blog . My ideas are based upon my specific feelings regarding Vista, and might not satisfy anyone else. Obviously I hope that Microsoft will read them and use them, but I have doubts about that happening. Microsoft's response to feedback lately has been less than passionate.
I think there is hope for Vista yet, if Microsoft makes the right choices. Sitting back and letting the new operating system take hold in the marketplace by itself obviously isn't converting very many people. By pro-actively responding to user complaints and implementing fixes for common hardware and software issues, Microsoft could convince people to move to the new version of Windows.
This is my last year at my current school, and I will be needing to send back my laptop after graduation in June. I'm considering purchasing a laptop of my own, one that doesn't have any restrictions as to what I can do with it, for use over the next few years, but I refuse to buy anything pre-loaded with that Vista crapware (pardon my French). It's either XP or Linux with Wine and/or mono to run my Windows programs. That is, unless Microsoft makes some serious improvements to Windows Vista very, very soon.
So do you have any ideas that I didn't come up with? (Improvements to mine are welcome, too. Share your feelings in the comments; I always love to hear my readers' reactions!
Internet Explorer Upgrade Nags
Fortunately, Microsoft hasn't pushed out a required upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP yet. They're definitely trying to get people to upgrade, though. A few times now, I've had the Internet Explorer download page from Microsoft.com open on me, instead of my homepage (iGoogle over HTTPS).
At the moment, it says, "Upgrade with confidence," right under the first heading (normal text, below "Internet Explorer 7 downloads"). Sure I have confidence in how much better IE7's rendering engine is, but I don't like the new interface or their implementation of tabs. That's why I still use Internet Explorer 6. I know that the sites I design look better in IE7 than in IE6 (though I've fixed a lot of bugs; and in all honesty they were designed with better CSS support in mind, i.e. Firefox 2).
So it bugs me when IE6 tries to get me to dump it for its younger sibling. All the sites I use in IE work fine in version 6, and in fact I was told that version 7 is unsupported by the most critical sites of all: my school's. Being nagged to upgrade when I have been told not to is annoying.
Microsoft: If you're going to offer an optional software upgrade, offer it in Windows Update, and/or a download. Don't bug users who can't (or shouldn't) do anything to change what version they use.
Update (03/16): Just got another one when I opened IE6 today. Grr...
Windows Update Reboot Prompts
No, I wasn't recently annoyed by one of these, but I thought I'd mention them while I'm out of town and unable to keep up on the latest news.
So every PC user has probably seen a restart prompt by now. Windows pops them up every ten minutes after installing updates, trying to get you to reboot the computer and apply the new code. What Windows doesn't take into account is the fact that you might be in the middle of something that takes more than ten minutes.
Granted, there are workarounds (like using the Group Policy Editor), but it's an unnecessary annoyance for power users. While the system policies are an OK way to turn them off, a simple checkbox in the Windows Update control panel wouldn't hurt for those of us using, say, Windows XP Home Edition (which lacks the policy editor) or who just don't want to bother mucking with convoluted settings.
So yeah, I don't have an image because I wasn't thinking about a post like this the last time I got updates, and I couldn't find a way to force the dialog (there must be a way to fool Windows into thinking it just installed updates; if you know one, a comment would be useful . I do have a screenshot for my next annoyance, though.
There, that was a nice, not-so-graceful segue into the subject of the dialog where a choice isn't really a choice.
Windows has a very annoying way of severely limiting your control over the system's update process if you're a limited user. If you use a computer managed by someone else -- say school, company, or whatever -- you might have seen this dialog:
It gives you an amount of time (in this case it was five minutes) after which the system will reboot whether you're ready or not. What really burns me is how it has both "Restart Now" and "Restart Later" buttons, but the latter button is disabled. It's probably there because the same function is used for creating all the restart prompts with a conditional to enable/disable the timer. But that's getting pretty technical.
Suffice it to say that not having the option to stop the timer and finish what I'm doing if I need an hour is a large annoyance. (That screenshot was taken several months ago for submission to This Is Broken, now shut down, but was never acknowledged and has been sitting in my email account ever since.)
Funny Randomization: Microsoft Downgrades Vista
Found a little site called isyournewbicycle.com, which allows you to plug in any word before the domain (such as I did for this with microsoft.isyournewbicycle.com) and get back a randomized phrase. On the third or fourth try, I got this little gem:
Great fit for the company that made the worst operating system I've ever heard of, eh? Just thought it was funny. Any takers? Beg-to-disagree-ers? Hit the comments; I'm waiting to hear from you!
Q4 2007 Site Stats Review
As promised back in October, I'm reviewing the browser and operating system statistics for this site again. All data is from the period 2007-10-04/2007-12-31.
So, on to business. First up is the overall browser chart. Firefox leads with 57%, followed by Internet Explorer at 29% and Safari at 10%. I also got some negligible visits (less than 2%) from Mozilla, Opera, Camino, Netscape, and Konqueror, plus a very few hits from what appear to have been mobile browsers, such as HTC_TyTN_II Mozilla and Palm680.
Drilling into per-browser version information, Firefox had a pretty good spread of versions, even getting about 80 hits from Firefox 3.0, though 2.0.0.11 (the latest update to the 2.x series) was on top with 40% of Firefox visits. Some people were still using FF1.5 or even version 1.0 -- to you Luddites, I say, "Upgrade already!" You know who you are.
Internet Explorer 7 led the IE sector, with 58.34% to IE6's 41.54%. Those numbers don't add up to 100% for a reason: I had one Internet Explorer 4.01 visitor. Whoever you are, my note to the Firefox 1.0 and 1.5 Luddites above goes for you, too.
Safari's version spread is pretty much indecipherable to me, because the version numbers appear to actually be build numbers. All I can say is that 43% of Safari visits were using version 523.10, with 20% using v419.3 and 11% using v523.12. I have no idea what the corresponding version numbers are; sorry!
For Opera and Mozilla, the most popular versions were 9 and 1.9, respectively (Opera only had the one version, plus a few "not set" values). I won't get into detail about browsers under 1%.
Onward to operating systems, then. Windows was 73% of visits, followed by Macintosh at 20% and Linux at 5.5%. Windows Vista again bit the dust in the Windows version spread, trailing behind XP at 14.7%, while Windows XP had a whopping 81% of the chart. Versions below Vista all held less than 3% each, led by Windows 2000 at 2.7%.
Macintosh only reported the chipset (Intel or PPC), so I can't do a version comparison there. That is a little annoying; I've been getting so many visits to Leopard-related posts, I was kind of wondering how many of those were actual Leopard users. Intel had 75% and PPC 25%, with a trace 68K visit (0.17%). That's all I can say.
There were no Linux version values set, so that's unfortunately going to remain a mystery to everyone.
So the answers to the questions I posed in October are:
Will Vista catch up to and/or surpass XP?
- Nope, not even close.
Will IE take over Firefox?
- Nuh-uh. Thank goodness it didn't!
It's interesting that the statistics' indications mirror my feelings so closely. I'm actually starting to like IE7 better than IE6, at least from a coding perspective; but I don't know anyone -- including myself -- who likes Windows Vista. Perhaps I'm attracting a like-minded readership, or perhaps my statistics are indicative of a real Vista-hating trend in the world. Who knows? Can that judgment really be made with a 3,000-visit sample?
In closing, I'd just like to say that I'm really happy about these statistics. If other sites are showing similar stats (at least about Vista vs. XP), that makes me even happier. May Vista die a painful death, and may Internet Explorer 8 improve even more on version 7's CSS enhancements. (It's already passed the Acid2 test from the Web Standards Project, which is very cool. Not even Firefox 2 passes it, though I haven't tested Firefox 3 yet.)
Internet Explorer Patch Fix Released
Microsoft has released instructions for fixing the Internet Explorer installations messed up earlier this week by an update. The fix entails editing the Windows Registry, that hulking configuration database that is the bane of all consumers (due to how often it gets corrupted).
Apparently, the problem affects certain customized installations of IE6 on WinXP SP2. While Microsoft didn't say what customizations caused the problem, users of some newsgroups speculate that the problem was related to antivirus software, seeing as how users of Norton (Symantec) and McAfee users who experienced the problem were able to solve it by uninstalling the patch, uninstalling the antivirus software, reinstalling the patch, and reinstalling the security suites.
So, Microsoft issues instructions involving editing the Registry. Why do they always do that? Can't they provide a simple patch file to do it automatically? So often I have seen Knowledge Base articles with instructions for delving into the Registry, but it is rare to find someone comfortable with tweaking those values. I myself shudder at the thought of messing with my Registry. My grandmother, more the average computer user, would be lost. Same goes for those convoluted configuration file edits. Make an EXE or an MSI package, Microsoft; don't leave your often-clueless users to fend for themselves!
IE7’s Blocking of prompt()
I haven't experienced the supposed goodness that is IE7 first-hand as of yet, but I have heard plenty about its shortcomings and annoyances. Another I just read about today is the default settings that blocks websites from using the built-in prompt() method in JavaScript.
It wouldn't be super annoying if Microsoft handled user permission intelligently, though. As it is, IE7 displays the by-now familiar Information Bar (introduced in IE6 with Windows XP's Service Pack 2) and the user can allow "scripted windows" on the page. Unfortunately, the scripting engine simply ignores the prompt and moves on through the rest of the script, which does nobody any good. Choosing to allow scripted windows reloads the page, but for some reason still blocks the method. I have seen hundreds of sites use this technique, and I am sure there are hundreds of thousands more.
Microsoft's release notes for IE7 say:
Generic Spoofing Risk Reduction in Internet Explorer 7--The window.prompt script method is blocked and the gold Information bar is displayed by default in Internet Zone for Internet Explorer 7. The helps prevent websites from spoofing things such as the logon screens of other websites. This is a new security enhancement for Internet Explorer 7.
This can obviously be remedied by changing the setting (located in the Advanced Settings tab, of course) or trusting the site ("default Internet Zone" means sites that are not trusted or restricted), but the fact that it requires a conscious effort on the part of the user is ridiculous. Most people using IE don't even know what prompt() is, much less why they should allow it or what it does for them. I think Microsoft should add a change to this in the upcoming Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, disabling the option by default.
I complain mostly because I used to use this function a lot, and I know a lot of sites still do. (I've moved to DHTML-style overlays now.) I really hope Microsoft makes this better, because as it is, the Information Bar isn't going to tell users much about what they're allowing, nor does it actually fix the problem.
Cool Stuff: XsX Alpha-Blended Cursors for Windows XP and Vista
A little idea got to me through Google Reader today. About an hour ago, I installed the XsX alpha-blended cursors on my computer and already I'm loving them. It's neat because almost all the cursors are the same shape, just with different colors. They're bigger than the default Windows set, and they look almost Mac-like, which is generally a plus. I suggest you try them, if you're on a PC. There's an "untested" pre-XP instruction set for those willing to experiment. I highly recommend them.
You can find instructions and the self-extracting download at Tiensivu.com.
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