el peregringo

Scott Anguish is an old friend, and I’m damn proud to be able to say so. I met Scott online through Stepwise right after the Apple /NeXT merger. I was working at Middlebury College at the time and we were in the process of moving our development over to OpenStep. He was a major help early on, and we were fortunate enough to entice him to actually come to work for our project for a few years until the College got a new President and systematically dismantled the team, replacing it with charlatans and idiots. (but I digress)

I helped Scott move to the US. He lives just up the road a few miles from our Vermont house now. I don’t see him much anymore since I’m no longer working in tech and we’ve been out of the country for over a year, but I still read his stuff and I’m proud of the relationship we’ve had.

It’s funny, a couple of weeks back I followed a link from somewhere to the Rixstep site. I poked around and tried to figure out who the hell this guy was. He had an attitude that didn’t seem to make much sense to me. Most of the posts at his site smelled holier-than-thou, “I’m a unix guru and everyone else is moron.” I looked at a few of the utilities available and even downloaded one. As near as I could tell, virtually everything at his site already existed in some other, easier to use format. Most of it was fugly (much like the site itself). He had some asinine comment about how content was king at his site and that they wouldn’t mess up their content with unnecessary crap.

But it turns out, it isn’t his content. He’s stolen significant portions of it from Stepwise. Except for my own site, Stepwise is the only place where I’ve ever published anything. My content (First Year / 3400 Install) is on Stepwise (it’s pretty darn old–kind of like me–but it’s still there). The First Year piece was borrowed (with permission) by Apple to use as an introduction OpenStep technologies for pre-NeXT Apple engineers. Scott is thus my publisher, and now this asswipe at Rixstep is ripping off Scott, my publisher. Will my stuff be next?

I can assure you I will not ever be buying anything from Rixstep. Aside from the fact that most of it is useless, fugly reinterpretation of stuff that already exists, the guy is a thief (oh, and an asswipe, as I’ve already mentioned).

I’ve just spent several hours trying to do a clean install of my father-in-law’s pc. It’s a POS Fujitsu-Siemens something or other, and after I found the original restore discs which came with it, I figured it would be a simple matter to boot from the CD, reformat the drive, and re-install.

So, the first time through, near the end of the installation, it failed saying that it found a file in an incorrect format on the CD. So, I reboot and start over again. This time instead of failing, it put up a dialog at the same spot saying that it needed me to insert the service pack 2 CD to copy a particular file–of course that was the CD that was already in the drive. Clicking OK after locating the file allowed the installation to continue.

I was then presented with a dialog asking me to create the user accounts. I created one for my father-in-law and one for me. No where did it ask me to create passwords for those users, just to name the accounts. After the reboot, there we were at the log in screen. One problem–no passwords for either account and no attempt to log in was successful since no passwords had been assigned (nor did an empty password work).

Another reboot and a complete format and reinstallation. Only interestingly, this time around, following exactly the same steps as before, I am presented with entirely different dialogs along the way. This time I am asked to name the work group and assign an administrator password. That didn’t happen the first time through. Furthermore, this time at the same point where it failed the first time, and asked me to locate the file the second time, we sailed right by with no dialogs at all.

This time around, however, I only created one account instead of two. Rather than stopping at the log in screen, the installer logged in the single user automatically without having to enter any password.

Are the windows engineers actually as frigging retarded as they appear to be? Raw linux installations are easier than this–and far more consistent. Mac OS X installations are of course about as straight forward as one could imagine.

So after another battle with winblows, I am left once again with nothing but questions. Retarded engineers/designers at MS? Retarded users who put up with this shit? The only way I can figure any of this out is that I know that by definition, 50% of the people I encounter any day are of below average intelligence. That explains 50% of the market share this POS has, but I’m baffled by what the other 30% are doing. Are they honestly that many sado-masochists on the planet?