Opera Software, the makers of Opera internet browser, is convincing EU commissioners that Microsoft is bad, bad again because they put IE together with Windows. I am not a big M$ fan and I do consider IE to be one of the worst browsers. But what Opera Software demands from EU is sick. They just asked to have Microsoft not remove IE from Windows, but rather package it together with other browsers to give them competitive edge. Are those guys sick or what?
Maybe every maker of calculator, every maker of text editor and every maker of clock software should have right to include their piece of work together with Windows? Why not... just free distribution for everyone because Microsoft will have to pay for it.
Opera Software do not realize that they sell a commercial product and they should be able to compete with others the same way as shoemakers do compete with each other. Recently I have bough a mobile phone and I got a free pair of slippers with it. Should Nike or Ecco shoemakers sue my phone dealer because he did not bundle demo version of their shoes together with my phone?

Or maybe I am wrong? Maybe Opera Software wants to deliver a free fully functional version of their browser to all users of Windows?

Today I faced a case of DLL Hell.

The problem this time was that the error message was rather ambiguous, something like "the software isn't installed properly".. WTF ?!

To make a long story short: Visual Studio 2005 now has this manifest thing which describes DLLs that have to be included and that automatically doesn't dell you which DLL is missing.
I had to disable the manifest thing from the linker to get an EXE that would run and complain properly about the missing DLLs.  read more »

So, I got a new notebook... Acer Aspire 5580. A nice piece of hardware with Core 2 Duo, GeForce 7300 and 2GB of RAM. Not too bad, considering that I need to use M$ Office :)
So HW is nice, but I could not find ANY notebook that I could buy with Windows XP. I just had to get one with Vista and this already scared me at the beginning. Every shop was showing me how good is Vista, that it can play DVD and also run videoconferencing AT THE SAME TIME!!! :)
Anyway... I am disappointed. Vista gives me nothing that XP was not giving me, but gives me headache.. HW is good enough but the system (bare and clean!) is constantly messing with HDD even being idle and with 2GB of RAM. IE7 crashed on me a few times... so replaced it with Firefox.  read more »

Microsoft with Visual Studio 2005 and their .Net 3.0 went together with their Side-By-Side assemblies (WinSxS) which should make life of deploying applications to different Windows system easier. So far I have been only having a big problem with it, because no single program compiled with VS2005 can be used on a system where VS2005 has not been installed. Of course, one can somehow download SxS redistributable binaries, but how to find them on MSDN website is a one big mystery. Another thing is that applications do not complain what is wrong, they just do not start at all. Or sometimes they say "A program could not be started". Great!  read more »

For a few days I have been running Linux on my machine at work. More because my laptop is gone and I was forced to use different computer. Anyway, Linux is not the way to go, but I wanted to talk about something else. Just because I do not like Linux and this machine can be reinstalled I was thinking about giving Vista a try. Finally sooner or later we all will have to switch to Vista. Because I do not have license to do it I was going to look at some websites to see how can I pirate it so I could test it. Finally I understood that you can try Vista for 30 days and then you need to activate it or it's features will be fading away. So I will go this way, but there is more to that...  read more »