I just logged on to my computer, and had this error message displayed on the screen. I am pretty savvy when it comes to web technologies, and I have a vague notion of what certificates are and how they are used. My problem is that I don’t know what application popped this up, nor why. I don’t know or understand what can or will happen with either the yes choice or the no choice. Does this mean a trusted website has been compromised? Whatever application opened this did a poor job with the UI. What will happen when I just close the dialog (top right X).

What are less techy people supposed to do with this dialog. I think that software developers around the world do a pretty poor job of writing to the lowest common denominator. This is just one example of pretty horrible user interfaces (UI) I have seen.

From a developers perspective I know it can be difficult to create a good UI that flows nicely, works, and makes sense. Sometimes it is easier to just make it work, and explain it in the documentation. For this example, what documents should I read?

It really is no wonder some people get so frustrated with computers and software.

I have been playing with the new Gallery software that has been released recently. I’m going to hold off a bit before I take it mainstream. I know they won’t continue the current 1.5 stream, but as of now I prefer it. Quick, fast, intuitive, easy, stable. That is how I see 1.5

How do I see 2.0? Incomplete, slow, lacking featres that I know will be released soon. I might wait a bit. It doesn’t help in the fact that in my 5 test installs, I only got it to properly install once. The successful attempt was on a regular install, and all the failed attempts were a multi-site install. I have several Drupal installs (my CMS of choice), and I recently globbed them all together in a multi-site install. I saw that G2 supported multi-site installs, but I just can’t get it to work. The mulsti-site documentation didn’t help, and I think I was just missing an important concept. I will try again, and watch the documentation to see if it gets updated. For now I have put it on hold.

I feel defeated, and I hate that.

The one successful install was alright. I didn’t like the default theme, and I had to hunt around a bit for others. The main Gallery site seems to be a bit flaky today too, so that isn’t helping my mood at all. It also seems pretty slow. *sigh* I know progress will be made, but how long should I have to wait? I want a working install so I can test the supposed integration with Drupal. Maybe in a couple weeks.

I still haven’t even tried importing an existing gallery. That should provide a few headaches the way my experiences have gone.

Finally got rid of some malware off my desktop machine today. I tried several times to uninstall Noron Antivirus 2002, but each time it said it uninstalled, it messes up my connection to the Internet. Today I did another Google search and found out that perhaps the uninstall was failing leaving some registry keys laying around. Sure enough, a quick delete, and everything was working fine. Funny thing though, after one uninstall/reinstall of Norton Antivirus I learned that it thought it hadn’t been installed before, and that I had a one year subscription. Hmm. Too bad I have turned into a hater of Norton AV.

I am so very pissed off right now. Actually, I started being mad last night. You see, I bought a Universal Wireless Keyboard for my Tungsten T3 PDA.

When I got home last night I ripped open the package, grabbed the manual, and the disc, and installed the driver on to my pda. A quick resynch later, and I was good to go. I tapped the icon to launch the driver so I could enable receiving keyboard input, and WHAM WSOD (white screen o death). Strange that a PALMONE released beyboard driver would crash on my T3. No problem, a quick reboot should get things in order.

Here is where the problem is. The reset button wouldn’t work. I tried all the combos for hard resetting, and soft resetting, but my nice, expensive PDA was a steaming pile of slag. Nothing but the white screen.

I jumped onto the net, and lo and behold I find this. Turns out many people have had serious issues on their T3 with this driver. Many people report waiting until the battery drains completely. When this happens everything on the PDA is lost. Thankfully there are a couple solutions for this.

When I do get it running again, I can resynch with my computer. This should restore everything that used to be on there. Downside is that it will also reinstall the problematic driver.

My other course of action is when the PDA is back up and running I can slide my SD card into the T3, bring up my copy of BackupMan, and restore the last save point. Thankfully this software runs flawlessly, and every night at 3am it was doing backups, so I will only have lost changes I made yesterday.

In all I still don’t know the state of my PDA. This morning it looked like the battery was drained, but when I placed it in the cradle, the charging light didn’t come on. This is a bad sign in my book, so I may have to call PalmOne and complain. Shitty thing is that it is just out of warranty (I bought it on Dec 27 2003). I am hoping that tonight when I get home things will be in a better state.

I will have to remember to update the PalmOs before I slam in the SD card too since the T3 had issues with those before too.

I got my new/old theme up but there are definitely some kinks to work out. For now I am going to leave it up, and hope that I can look into the bugs soon. The big one I see right now is that the left column isn’t quite wide enough. Oh well. I will get to it.

Aaaah. Long week at work. Thankfully I got a lot done this week despite working out bugs with support coming from India (12.5 hour time difference makes for difficulties in transferring information).

So now I sit here at my desk relaxing a little, enjoying a beer :guzzle:

Yum.

Must go home soon. Suede and I are heading out to our favorite restaurant for dinner with her Dad and step-mom.

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