Listening To: Frequencies Will Move Together : Biftek

I’ve got a little bone to pick with programmers today, friends and fans.

Y’see, I’ve been fairly busy at work as usual. On top of that however, I’ve spent a fair bit of time patching software … and it’s starting to give me the shits ! First off there’s Wordpress itself - the ‘engine’ which powers this blog. Since moving over from Blogger to Wordpress, I’ve already had to upgrade the installation not less than four times in the space of two months !

We started off with version 1.5, moved over to 1.5.1 (which wasn’t strictly neccessary), then 1.5.1.2 (security patch) and today I had to upgrade again over to version 1.5.1.3 (ANOTHER security patch) ! What’s the story, morning glory ? OK, it’s open-source, and therefore free software, but it still irks me a bit that the guys are releasing versions which are ostensibly ’stable’, only to then have to issue upgrades because security holes have been discovered.

‘Closed source’ doesn’t fare much better I’m afraid. I spent a few hours last night, and most of this morning, cleaning up the HDD on my laptop and re-installing a ‘clean’ copy of Win2K. For those who know me personally, you would be aware I have a bit of a love-hate relationship going on with my lappy. It’s about 3 or 4 years old now, the battery is dead as a dodo meaning it doesn’t actually function as a ‘laptop’ anymore (always has to be plugged in), it doesn’t have enough memory although I’ve already upgraded that 2 times (still only sitting on 256 MB) , and the screen is prone to going through periods of burnout. I’m prone to cursing it as a “piece of shit computer ! Argh !!!” when it doesn’t do what I want, and one day when I have enough money I will discard it with no hesitation for a newer, sexier, faster model. Nonetheless, I’ve still got a soft-spot for it, because I remember the first 6 months after I got it when it actually kicked arse.

One of the other reasons my laptop has been prone to brain-upsets for the last year or so is because I had to grudginly install Win2K in order to run my (finally) legit copies of Director & Studio. So I went out and bought a copy of W2K SP4 … so you’d think this would work, right ? Naaah … this fŨcking O/S has been nothing but trouble from day one, as is always the story with Microsoft operating systems it seems ! As such, I’ve had to periodically re-install a few times now to keep the laptop running and clean up accumulated dross from system registry and other places. Nonetheless, performance has never been perfect, so this time round I thought I’d try something new and actually apply all the patches Microsoft has released for W2K since SP4 came out. You wanna know how many patches I found on the website ? Sixty-smegging-four !

We’re only talking moderate to critical-level patches here too - I didn’t even bother with the low-level ones. Out of those, I actually had to apply about 50 or so to close all the security holes and other nastiness still present in the Win2K code. These included around 4 or 5 KERNEL PATCHES, which is pretty major if you ask me ! Given the nature of the patches, most of them involved reboot cycles after application as well. FØcking hell !!! This is the ‘industry leader’ of the IT sector ? The real irony is Windows 2000 is supposed to be more stable than other MS Operating Systems. I guess this proves once again the old addage - “Treat your programmers like monkeys, and expect to get code that could have been WRITTEN by monkeys !”

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH !!!!!