Yay! Internet Explorer 3!
You experts probably beat me to the punch on this — after all, the original technique for this was first conjured up three whole years ago — but it wasn’t until today that I found out about Multiple-IE. This handy package lets you install any previous version of Internet Explorer — all the way back to 3.0 — on your Windows XP system, simultaneously.
As a web developer, this is particularly exciting for me. Since the release of IE7, I’ve been running into this problem where I need to test a web app against both IE6 and IE7, but I have no easy way to do that since Microsoft only lets you keep one version of IE on your machine at a time. Until now, I’ve had to keep my laptop handy, and specifically avoid the IE7 upgrade on it.
However, Multiple-IE solves that problem, so now I’m running IE6 (and 5.5 for good measure) on my primary workstation. Every version of IE, all the way back to 3.0, is included in one handy installer that you can download, and when you run it, you can simply select which legacy version(s) of IE you want to install. It won’t mess up your IE7 at all — at least, it didn’t for me.
Yep…Internet Explorer 3, baby. In case you wanted to, you know, hit up www.whataburger.com and giggle yourself silly like it’s 1996 all over again. (“You mean they have a Coca-Cola website? Who the hell would want to go to a website about Coca-Cola?” – Me, eleven years ago)
Ultimately, Vista Fails To Deliver
By the end of the week, I will once again be running Windows XP.
Although it wasn’t long ago that I wrote about upgrading to Windows Vista, and how it was going pretty well so far, I’ve now had a few weeks to work with Microsoft’s new OS. Having used Vista in both a business and leisure capacity, I’ve come to the conclusion that this OS is just not ready for prime time. Or, at the very least, it’s just not ready for me.
In the beginning, I actually had very few problems with Vista. Sure; my firewall of choice wasn’t compatible, but I found a new one. Yeah; file transfers take longer than it seemed they should, but I learned to live with it. But over time, more and more of these little idiosyncrasies started to pile up, culminating in the huge headache I had to deal with today when I attempted to install Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition.
Visual Studio 2005, a Microsoft product, has “known compatibility issues” with Windows Vista, another Microsoft product. At least, that’s what I was told in a dialog bog about halfway through the installation of Visual Studio. I admit I had a chuckle over this, since practically every piece of non-Microsoft software I’ve used so far has been perfectly compatible, but one of Microsoft’s own most prominent development tools isn’t. However, it wasn’t a big deal, because this same dialog box also informed me that a service pack for Visual Studio was available for download, and it would fix these issues. Great, I’ll get the service pack and be on my way.
I completed the install (which took more than half an hour, as VS2005 is such a huge piece of software that gets its tendrils into everything). Then, I used Vista’s built-in update manager to go out to the web and get that service pack. It was almost 500 MB, so it took a little while to download. When it finally came in, Vista proceeded to install it — and then seemingly got stuck.
The installation progress bar quit moving, and all hard drive activity stopped. I could still use the computer, but that wasn’t very helpful, given that I needed to use Visual Studio for something. I decided to give Vista a bit more time, and in the meanwhile, got out my laptop — which runs Windows XP, and already has Visual Studio installed — to finish my assigned task.
Fifteen minutes later, with that task finished and ready to be emailed out, the Vista update still hadn’t installed. In fact, it hadn’t budged.
Saying And Doing Are Two Different Things
Some 40 percent of Americans would curb their driving habits if retail gasoline prices shot up to $3.50 a gallon, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.
Reuters
Did Reuters go back in time to 1997 so they could write this story? In case you’ve forgotten, America, gas already costs that much in some states — and has for a while. Across the board, almost every region of the country is within 50 cents of that mark right now. I’ve been paying near that price for premium unleaded for as long as I can remember. And even at $3.50, gasoline is still a bigger bargain for us than it is anywhere else in the world.
But more than anything else, you know those 40 percent of Americans are also full of bullcrap — because saying “Yeah, I’d do that” takes far, far less effort than actually doing it. When gas hits $3.50, they’ll still be driving. When it hits $4.00, they’ll still be driving. And when it hits $5.00 — yep, you guessed it, they’ll still be driving (although they might be driving compacts instead of SUVs, by that point). And why? Here’s why:
- As a nation, we love freedom. Driving = freedom.
- Unless you live in a major city center, the United States has practically zero public transportation. What are you going to do — stop going to work?
- Where public transportation exists, its efficiency cannot be relied upon for the schedules by which business people need to run. Unlike in Japan, where if the train’s 10 minutes late, everyone on it gets a written excuse to give to their boss.
- Most Americans will start to cut many, many other conveniences out of their lives before they stop exercising their freedom to move about their own country.
My point: Collecting and reporting statistics like this helps no one. Decide for yourself how to live your own life, and stop telling me what everybody else is doing in your worthless attempts to scare and worry me. I quit caring a long time ago.
Windows Vista Infiltrates Oddball Headquarters
It’s been a long time since I posted — nearly two weeks, I think. Since that just won’t do, here’s a piece about my recent experience with Microsoft’s newest operating system, Windows Vista.
Historically, I always move up to the latest edition of Windows within two weeks of its arrival. More often than not, these upgrades are “gotta have it” responses, rather than motivated by any tangible reason. Yeah, I even bought Windows Millennium Edition, although I wound up regretting it in a scant few hours. But I’ve held off from upgrading to Windows Vista, even though this is the first new version of Windows that won’t cost me a dime (thanks to my company’s Microsoft partnership).
Last year, when the Vista beta was floating around, I was just as excited as usual. I signed up for the program and installed the beta on a spare machine. Unfortunately, the results were not encouraging. Vista’s new security features (particularly User Account Control) were supremely annoying, simple file copy procedures took dreadfully long, half of my old PC’s hardware did not have any driver support, and worst of all, the Vista beta hosed the hard drive it was installed on, rendering it unbootable and invisible to every machine’s BIOS. Needless to say, I decided that I was going to steer clear of Vista for a while, and see how things went after its release.
The release date came in January, but still I held off, hearing lots of bitching and moaning — more so, it seemed to me, than is usual for a Microsoft OS launch. At first there were a lot of driver support issues, but gradually, these were remedied. By the time June arrived, I could feel that “gotta have it” impulse gnawing at me, and decided it was time to give Vista a real-world try and see what would happen.
Because my computer is my workstation now, and the device I use to make my living, I needed to be careful about this. I backed up a complete image of my Windows XP installation, to which I could seamlessly restore in case Vista really just started to suck. With this safety measure taken care of, I then cloned my XP install onto a spare hard drive and set up a dual-boot, so I could still fire up XP and do my day’s work before I finished preparing my Vista install. Finally, I burned an image of Windows Vista Business from our Microsoft partner library, obtained the key from management, and got it installed.
