Once bitten, twice shy…

Made an alarming discovery on my XP machine today – it was infected!

I noticed it was taking longer and longer to boot up, and being fairly unresponsive at times even though nothing was happening. Then the dreaded happened – the ‘unrelated’ pop-up window when accidently launching Internet Explorer. This set alarm bells ringing and a quick scan of my task list highlighted two suspects – bargains.exe and msbb.exe.

I downloaded Ad-Aware to try and remove them, but I checked the registry beforehand to see where they were being launched from, and after Ad-Aware claimed to have ‘quarantined” them, the entries were still there.

I decided not to risk it, and proceeded with a re-build (all of my data lives on other drives or another machine), followed by SP2 and then for the first time ever Anti-Virus! I’ve never been a big fan of Anti-Virus, believing instead that being sensible was better protection. I still do, and I believe my machine got infected through my own stupidity (I can trace the infection down to one of three actions), but still I decided to bite the bullet and take advantage of Computer Associates offer in conjunction with Microsoft of 12 months free Anti-Virus and Firewall.

The Anti-Virus does what it’s supposed to, and the firewall appears to be branded version of ZoneAlarm which is very good if you want to know everything your computer is sending/receiving.

I’m tempted to ditch my XP partition though, and invest in a copy of VMWare for those times that I really need it. Of course, if I can get my scanner working with Linux I shouldn’t need XP anymore…

Common Apathy

Jono Bacon talks about toolkit differences on Linux and how to resolve them.

First of all I was just going to add a comment to his post, but I decided to post here instead. Then my original post was going to be about how this is a nice idea but isn’t really a big deal – look at all the different toolkits and UI components on Windows (especially Microsoft apps!) or Apple happily ignoring their own HIG with their ‘brushed metal’ iApps (these are now in their HIG though) – but then I started thinking about it a bit more…

As a user

The main reasons¹ I prefer GNOME over KDE a) the fact that one is a Desktop Environment (DE) that runs applications and the other is a bunch of applications that make up a DE (I’ll let you figure out which is which…) and b) the GNOME feels more consistant than KDE. Sure, KDE is more consistant as long as you are using the bundled apps, but thanks to the GNOME HIG you can pick up a GNOME app from the ‘net and it will feel like part of the desktop.

Because of this I (sub)conciously² choose GTK+ / GNOME apps over their QT / KDE counterparts when googling for apps and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

For example: Quanta Plus seems like a great web development tool (although it desperately needs a new website, but that’s a post for another day) but it really looks out of place on my desktop, so I’m more likely to look at Bluefish or Screem for my needs.

As a developer

When I’m developing applications, I strive to make them look ‘natural’. This means that they look like part of the desktop they are running on by either following the GNOME HIG or supporting Windows XP themes (ridiculously easy with .NET 1.1) and using the common dialogs.

Far too many ‘developers’ are obsessed with making their application stand out with skins, themes and strange interface designs – at a recent LUG conversation we discussed media players and how Russ & Jen preferred Foobar2000 over the likes of Winamp and iTunes because it just looks like a Microsoft Windows application, not a miniature stereo system or whatever.

Instead, they should be letting their choice of toolkit do the heavy lifting for them and concentrating on functionality and usability.

So, getting back to Jono’s idea, if there was an interface that would allow me to call the common dialogs of whichever DE my application was running in, I would use it. This shouldn’t just be a purely technical solution though – maybe freedesktop.org could produce some sort of meta Human Interface Guidelines to help educate people.

Apathetic

Now, going back to my original idea for this post – how having different toolkits/dialogs wasn’t that big a deal – I realised I was being apathetic. Just because other operating systems have these discrepancies doesn’t mean Linux should emulate them. Kudos to Jono for actually trying to do something about it.

¹ Reason c) is simply that I prefer the GTK+ apps.

² Reason d) is that I really don’t care how good your app is it’s name doesn’t need to start with a K just bescause it’s running on KDE!

Growing up?

This quote from the last entry on my old site makes me chuckle…

Apart from the fact that a) it was nearly two years between the previous entry and that one and b) it was another three years before I seriously updated the site (holding pages not included), it was that I wanted to do another games site.

Back then, and in fact up until recently, I was seriously into games. Spent a fortune on them (ask my wife!). I had my Dreamcast on the day of release. I pre-ordered and queued up at midnight for my Playstation 2. I had a GeForce 256 practically as they came out. I used to spend hours on Unreal Tournament online. I had to have most games on their day of release, and regularly bought several games a month. A week sometimes.

Now…nothing.

I still own:

But I don’t play them. At all. The X-Box sees occasional use as a DVD Player in the bedroom, but that’s it.

It’s not been a conscious descision – it’s just that sometime in the past twelve-to-eighteen months I seem to have grown out of playing games…

Insert witty slogan here…

“Sparkes”: has just updated his list of links in which I am included (cool!) and he has given me a better tagline than I had (cooler!):

Which I have now adopted. It is visible in my feed and the title of the main page.

Cheers Sparkes!