caloso

Thanks, BDS. I'll give it a shot.

mollusk

I am beginning to hate Windows 7 a lot.

I have to supply a software deployment cd iso-image that is kind of complicated because it sequentially installs a specific version of Python, two specific Python site-packages, another piece of software that has within it a Python site-package installation, and some updated files with bug fixes that I did for them. And it must automatically set an environment variable as well as automatically updating the internal path in Matlab.

There is some very sneaky crap that I have to take care of if they are running Win7. (They won't be running Vista. No large scale corporation would be running that.)

Being somebody that has lived in the "XP and before" Windows world it looked like a simple batch file would cover all the bases. Not so. One problem is that the last piece of software installs everything under c:\Program Files\ but it is critical to the operation of the software that the user is able to write to a sub-directory within c:\Program Files\ from a Python script. If you ain't running Python as administrator with full credentials under Windows 7 python will throw an error because it can't write to the specified location. And the default for any user, including administrators, is to run with "regular" user permissions. Invoking Python is fine as far as UAC is concerned, but it throws a fit when you want to write to a "protected" directory and by then it is too late for UAC to ask for the proper credentials. To my mind this is a major flaw in the UAC implementation.

So now I have to create an executable that requires administrator credentials so that the user can "elevate" that calls cmd. Now when cmd is invoked the user has already given administrator credentials and then they can run a batch file just like the old days. What a pain in the ass (thank you, umd, wherever you are!). So now I have to launch my batch file from a Visual Basic executable. This allows the batch file script to change the attributes on the directory that the "regular" user must write to as well as to delete and write new files to "protected" directories.

What a pain.

UAC doesn't really protect the idiot users. Under Win7 they only have to click once on a "plain vanilla" prompt for some malicious stuff to be installed by doing it the way I described.

kensuf

ubuntu live cd?

mollusk

I wish.

My clients are tied to Window$ so I have to do as they say. The customer is always right even when they are wrong. And anything that I do has to pass a corporate "sniff" test and if I get out of their comfort zone it will fail.

kensuf

https://positivesharing.com/2006/07/w...tomer-service/

kensuf

https://www.brw.com.au/Page/Uuid/77e5...2-2d2db36d76a6

mollusk

Ken-

I'm posting from a Ubunto machine. For EVERYTHING that I do it would be a better platform. For all of the things that I am developing for my client it would be a superior platform. The inertia in such a large organisation makes such a change impossible without a huge lead time that is beyond the timeline of what i have to deliver.

I have the same problems in my department. If I go Linux I get ZERO support. Come to think about it that might be OK.

kensuf

lol. If you go windows, you're off the reservation and on your own in our environment.

mattm

Maybe Win8 will solve all yer problems?? https://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2...windows-8.aspx

Fwiw you can do the UAC elevation prompt via vb-script; maybe not much better than your VB app tho.. best of luck!

mollusk

A geek post that is not computer oriented!

I did some reading in Spawn1's Physics 2 textbook and I was appalled! The First Law of Thermo was presented in an ass-backwards manner. In his textbook it is taken as fact that energy is conserved and from that the differential form of the first law of thermo follows. This is a crap way to look at this. First, it presumes that heat and mechanical energy are manifestations of the same thing. That should be a consequence of the First Law, not a way to get to it. And this was a huge breakthrough when it was finally figured out. Secondly, the concept of energy should come from the first law (work done and heat transferred are proportional to each other when a pure substance undergoes a complete cycle, hence (skipping a number of logical steps) there exists and exact differential that we will call energy) and not be a concept required before stating the first law.

I am so disappointed.

soma5

You will only irritate him/her by pointing this out, causing him/her to resist asking you questions about the course. Been there, done that. I still don't understand why it happens that way.

mollusk

The problem is that I have taught the "follow-on" thermo course for engineering students as well as the graduate level classical thermo course. When I teach the undergraduate thermo course I do it in such a way as to not undermine the intellectual under pinnings of the "real" presentation of the material. I know that I might actually be lecturing to only a handful of kids in a lecture hall with 200 when I go theoretical, but i feel that I must do so.

bostongarden

BF pages load significantly faster on my iPad than on any of my computers (which aren't that old and have decent processors and memory). It's actually a bit speedy on the iPad. Chipset amazing?

Enthalpic

Thank you.

waterrockets 

I'm really happy I stayed with my current employer. I just get the coolest assignments for our Android app. Stuff that's way out in left field, requires a lot of learning, and ends up making a big splash.

mollusk

Very cool WR. Sounds like a fun project.

Spawn1's school now forbids the dorm residents from having wireless routers connected to the dorm ethernet, so I brought home his D-Link DIr-615 router to play with. I installed dd-wrt on it just to play around with wireless bridging.

mollusk

i find that a lot of the slowness of BF page loads is the slowness of the ad downloads. Perhaps Apple gets paid to speed up ads.

waterrockets 

Sounds like a good reason to have a rooted Anroid for free WiFi hotspot loving.

mollusk

Spawn1 was not happy that he lost his locally controlled wireless plugged into the school's reasonably large internet "pipe".

They have WiFi in the dorms, but he tells me that it bogs down with traffic. They also have a more secure WiFi network that can be very painful to set-up (I know because I did it for him when I was up there for his laptop and his iPod Touch). Perhaps the set up hurdle will keep most of the kids off of that network and it will be relatively open.

I don't know why they now forbid this. Last year you could do it, but your wireless had to be WPA secure or else they would "kill" your ethernet connection. Maybe it encouraged too much Xbox gaming.

bostongarden

Aha. So, is download speed a benefit of paying and viewing sans adverts?? I might see the light now!! (It only took me, what, 3+ years.)

Nate552

firefox + ad block plus.

Nate552

My Blackberry bold is long in the tooth, and I have the upgrade option available to me through ATT (have for some time now). I just can't decide on whether to get the soon to be available Samsung Galaxy II Android phone, or wait until the QNX BB phones come out in Q1 2012. I've never had an Android phone, and I love BB's for their email capabilities, but I can't help but thinking they are a sinking ship...

mmmdonuts

2nd.

mollusk

Very productive day. My client uses some engineering analysis software (combustion related stuff) and in certain situations it was giving them something other than what they expected. It turns out that the highly non-linear problem that they are solving has multiple solutions for certain boundary conditions. The solution algorithm would sometimes converge to a solution that they were not interested in. I figured out how it make it converge to the solution that they want. I am not getting paid (as of yet) to rewrite the code to do what they want. For this part of the task I am just supposed to "exercise" the code to demonstrate when it gives good results and when it is "lacking". I did do some "quick and dirty" code changes to get the "right" solutions outside of the parameter space that worked with the unmodified code and explained how/why it works. They are getting a bargain.

mollusk

Wow. Is Windows Vista screwed up! (Yeah, I know: <sarcasm>Late breaking news!</sarcasm>).I was testing some installation scripts that need to run under 32 and 64 bit XP and Windows 7 and I thought that I would give it a whirl on my wife's 64-bit Vista machine. It was a major failure. I found out the reason why when I entered "echo %homedrive%" at a prompt in a command window as both a regular user (useless to me for my script) and running as an administrator (what I need to do for a bunch of installation stuff). They are not the same. All I can say is OMG. Luckily this is fixed in Windows 7.