So I went to go play Katamari last night, right? I stopped by Hollywood Video on my way to the grocery store. Not there. So I went over to Blockbuster. Nope, not there. So then I went to some strange place I've never been (another video store). Nope, not there. And when I say "not there" -- I mean they don't own it. So now I figure that this is either A) a pile of shit, or B) a cult classic. I knew it was B because I trust my friend's judgement. So off to WalMart I head. Nope, not there. Circuit City? Nope. Best Buy? Nope. Screw it, sayeth the Aaron. I picked up my groceries and some conciliatory Taco Bell.
I get home, and Becky had left me a message on my machine -- so I called her back, and she (being awesome) snagged the game from her roomie (Rachel) and came over to play. As an extra added bonus, her little brother, Dan, came over. So Becky, Dano and I all played Katamari for a few hours.
So in other news, I won my eBay auction this morning. Hopefully the game will get shipped to me before Wed of next week (when I go back down to Austin). Tee hee, yeah, I bought the game. It freaking rocks, and I'd like to thank people for suggesting it to me -- and thanks to Becky for bringing it over!
Microsoft, oh how you annoy me sometimes! I ran one of the automatic updates last night, and it keeps telling me I need to reboot. I constantly hit the Restart Later button, but it pops itself back up every 5 or 10 minutes, stealing the focus from whatever it was I was doing. Ya know what? I'll reboot when I'm damned good and ready.. STOP ASKING ALREADY! It's intrusive, and it's taught me to not do automatic updates until the very last minute (which is when I usually forget to do them). Apple pisses me off with this too -- they made it so you cannot minimize the reboot window. I just think that's terribly invasive -- ask the user and if they say "I'll do it later", then honor that and stop bugging. At least with Apple, you can force quit the stupid thing. Microsoft's abhorration cannot be force quit (it is automatically restarted by a watcher service). When are people going to realize that the user is in charge of the system, not vice versa?
I recently changed my opinion on something I used to feel fairly strongly about before: a way to terminate a thread in REALbasic. I used to think it was a horrible idea, because I assumed it'd act like every other thread API and terminate immediately without doing any cleanup. If this would happen, then all sorts of bad things would come to light with your code -- files wouldn't be closed, destructors wouldn't be called, etc. Horrible idea, really. But then I realized that we could easily kill a thread AND allow it to cleanup code by unwinding the stack. Now the idea appeals to me much more because it's safe (just as safe as immediately returning from the Run event manually). Yay for thinking on a topic for a while. :-)
It's poker night tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to it. Most of the people coming I haven't seen in a long while because they suck and missed the last poker night. ;-) Which, of course, was the first poker night where I actually won.
On next Wed, I fly down to Austin for almost two weeks. Plane tickets over the holidays have gotten so freakin expensive. Pretty soon I'll be relegated to taking a train down to Texas! But since I'm flying on a Wed and coming back on a Tue, the price wasn't too horrible. I found a ticket out of St Cloud for $350, which is great because it saves me the hassle of driving to and from the cities.
I am going to drive down to visit my Uncle Paul and his family on Sunday. One of my aunt's (Patty) dropped some stuff (a dresser and some end tables) off at Paul's house for me to come pick up. So I'm hoping to snag mom into coming down with me (Paul is mom's brother) and go for a visit. Hopefully the weather holds up so that I don't have to tarp everything.
End Ramble.
>>Microsoft, oh how you annoy me sometimes! I ran one of the automatic updates last night, and it keeps telling me I need to reboot. I constantly hit the Restart Later button, but it pops itself back up every 5 or 10 minutes, stealing the focus from whatever it was I was doing.
Can you blame them? They get nailed when people don't patch (like with Code Red) and now you're nailing them for ensuring they DO patch. You can't have it both ways.
Personally, I love that it annoys people to finish installing the patch. If I had my way, I'd automatically reboot after each patch (warning before the process began, of course) and not be nearly as "nice" as Microsoft or Apple's systems.
(Apple's is particularly annoying, because it pops up a window you can't close saying you need to reboot or shutdown. So I finish up what I'm doing, I hit the Apple menu and choose Shutdown. What do I get? "The shutdown was cancelled by the application 'Software Update.'" So Software Update, the application getting its panties in a bunch because I haven't rebooted, actually CANCELS the reboot. What happened to Apple's QA department? They've been on vacation like 4 years now.)
The problem is that they are NOT ensuring that I patch. I determine when the updates are actually installed (and IF they're installed). So I'm being a good citizen and doing my patches when it's convenient to me. They're penalizing me however by trying to force me to do something which I do not want to do. So this sticks me in a bind. I either a) Go the hard route and reboot immediately, which screws up my entire work-flow. Or b) save the update for when I already am going to reboot, which means I'll probably forget about it.
Warn me that I need to reboot ONCE and let me pick an option that says "don't warn me again for this set of updates -- I'll get around to it."
You can hide the Apple dialog with Cmd-H. Or force quit.
It doesn't matter whether you want to do it or not, you *have* to do it. The mechanism to turn it off should be so difficult to find as to make sure that only the most advanced of advanced users can find and make use of it. If it just warned once, then went away forever, 99% of users would run the update, hit "don't warn me again" and *never* apply the updates by rebooting. You're different; I understand that, but Microsoft has to make an OS that everybody can use, not just use.
This is all moot if you just set your computer to update itself at 3:00 AM or something. Why not just do that? Then the worst you get is that you have to log in in the morning instead of just unlocking it.
"not just use" is supposed to be "not just you" of course.
Microsoft *could* easily allow this behavior -- don't automatically restarted the damned thing if I end task it. It's just that simple. Even Apple managed to figure this out.
And I don't want to have my computer update itself; I pick which updates I want installed. For example, anything that says DRM in the name doesn't get installed. And plus, I've run into problems with auto updates breaking things (like the time it broke access to the internet. That was a blast.)
You could have packed me in your suitcase:) LOL!
I have generally been against the automatic update things. For my Windows XP box, I have the automatic install disabled, but set it to notify me when something is available... that way I choose when I download the patch/update and do a restart at the same time.
I have always been under the impression that installing any OS patches that require a restart is kinda playing with fire if you do not restart... what if some critical component is overridden and you are asking for a crash or worse (data corruption?) because you force quit a legitimate warning? This is just my impression and I don't really know how these updates work.
You aren't actually overwriting the files (you can't, since they're loaded into memory and in-use by the OS). The replacement files are listed in a special place and the replacement happens as the computer shuts down or starts up (once the files have been unloaded from memory).
You are only marginally playing with fire by staying in a half-cocked state. The only situation I can think of that things would go wrong is if you happened to be running an application which expected the new file (which isn't there) based on another new file (which is there). But I think the number of times that happens is small enough that it's not an issue.
Thanks for your comments.
Other than the two Osbornes my dad bought, we have always had Macintosh computers while I was growing up. I didn't have any real experience with the Windows OS until I had to learn Window 95B for work, but it was only used about 10% of the time since most of our clients had Macintosh computers as well (graphic design shop). I think I assembled about 15 PCs over the years, but I never really got into learning the Windows OS more than how to install/upgrade, administer, troublee-shoot and perform standard maintenance -- basically I am a Power User, but not a guru.
Unwind the stack when killing a thread? Hmm. That sounds like something an exceptions does. Maybe the two things are related somehow.
Entirely possible. ;-)
Why would one need to force-quit software update? I just switch SU to the back and it doesn't come back to bother me. I vaguely recall this not being possible in the early days (10.1 or so), but it definitely works for me now. Are you using a different installer or why would you have to force-quit it on a Mac?
@Uli -- because it's a window taking up valuable screen real estate. I can't minimize the window, I can only force quit the app or move it to some other location.
@Aaron.... or hide it....
Yeah Aaron... sheesh... learn to use your computer ;^)
Heh, hiding stopped working for me in 10.4, but it might also be the lack of an option key due to my KVM. What's so terrible about a minimize button on the window that Apple had to remove it from this dialog in the first place.
Dialogs by nature don't have minimize buttons. They're modal. :^)
Hmm... must be my ignorance showing through. Modal != Can't be minimized to me. It just means you cannot continue with the current operation in a particular application until you've completed the modal action. That doesn't mean your modal dialog should annoy the ever-loving piss out of the user by taking screen real estate from other applications. Just because your app wants me to do some action shouldn't require me to halt what I'm working on in all my applications.