Internet Explorer drives me insane

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LOL ... don't get me started on it, either. I finally have mine set up the way I want it, but it took me a couple thousand years to find everything and figure out how to do everything.

I was cursing it again the other day. I set up an account for the Mrs on my computer and needed to set up Windows Media Player... anyone observing would have thought I had Tourettes Why do they hide the menu bar by default? I couldn't remember how to make it appear and spent several minutes clicking here and there and then right clicking here and there to make it appear and to get the right options set.

I've also found it isn't very stable if you resize it - it loses the plot and some things disappear never to be seen again unless you stretch the media player full size then maximise then shrink and generally do lots of aerobic exercises until the desired bit of information (minutes and seconds elapsed while playing) actually appears again in the reduced view - I've never known a user interface that is such a wrestling match to configure.

Guys... there's a reason they invented VLC.

What is VLC?

An open source multimedia player which supports every format known to man. Very light-weight. I use it to watch encrypted DVDs under Linux, and also to upload DVDs to my hard drive.

Here's the download link.

Thanks. It is downloading now. The must have feature which I hope it has is variable speed playback of MP3 audio files. I listen to French talking books at 80% speed. Great practice with my French and surprisingly not distorted by the slowdown - it actually makes the enunciation clearer.

Learn to AdBlock Plus.

I use SeaMonkey, and the process of getting Adblock Plus up and running is simple. On Firefox, there is a slight hiccup - where people think they have to set all the blocks manually. It's just not quite straightforward, to subscribe to the appropriate site that will keep your blocks going automatically.

Basically, in Firefox...

Tools / Add-ons / Get Add-ons / Browse All Add-ons
and grab Adblock Plus

Once that's sorted, you need to:
Tools / Adblock Plus Preferences... / View All Subscriptions

and then "Easylist" is what you probably want to click on.

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PS. And IE drives me insane... in many ways, but the worse part is not being able to cut&paste with the mouse only. I'm so used to just highlighting text, then going where I want it, and middle clicking. (No keyboard needed.) When I'm using IE, I try to do that, and it doesn't work, because I'm in a silly OS.

I thought it was a Subway® sandwich

I didn't actually know that, thanks for the advice.

And yes, IE is irritating in many respects. I refuse to use it anymore. I'm tempted to delete it forever, but I can't be bothered and it might just reappear anyway as soon as I restart my computer, courtesy of Microsoft...

And to computerlove, VLC is very useful, even if it is a Subway sandwich.

That makes me think "Very Large Condom".

For videos, I prefer Media Player Classic Home Cinema.

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt with the Google Chrome flying saucer abducting the letter 'e'.

Also my friend downloaded Firefox for me.

and tasty (;



Venice Legislative Circus

I converted to Firefox about a year ago. Amazing how many internet-viewing problems went away. I'm not a Microsoft basher by any means, but they'd do well to toss IE out the window, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't know how it is that the world's richest software company can produce such crap, but I'm guessing it's because of their practice of wanting their products to be built from programmable COM objects (or has something superceded COM now? It's been a while since I've traveled in that world).

COM is (or was) slow, clumsy, and a general pain in the ass, not to mention presenting a juicy target for trojan writers world-wide.

Anyway, I like Firefox just fine. It does the job without a hitch, and it's simple enough you can learn all the ins and outs you need to know in a couple hours.

I've been a software developer for 30 years. At the moment I'm programming using Visual Studio 2008. It has good and bad points. My biggest problems with it are the lack of decent help information. Microsoft produce new components but often don't give enough joined-up help on how they should be implemented. So there is a lot of trial and error... does this work, no try that, no, finally getting something that hangs together without runtime errors. Not the best way to program. Sometimes the documentation is so bad for the newer MS technologies that I still use old MS technologies or write my own components from scratch - at least I know they will work. Even the most trivial things Microsoft do are often messed up. Take splash screens. Can't get more simple than that? They have a preconfigured splash screen. Great I thought that will save time. It worked on Vista but not on XP - it didn't auto close after program startup. Hours then wasted on forums to discover everyone else got the same problem and Microsoft were issuing work arounds that didn't work. In the end I threw out the Microsoft splash screen and wrote my own from scratch - a common situation.

In every new version of Visual Studio there are new ways of accessing databases. Sometimes I need to turn code around like yesterday, there is no time to spend hours searching the internet and forums for documentation. The documentation for "SOAP" was so bad I threw it out of one application (I don't know if it is any better now) and pulled all the data out into a binary file and wrote my own database access algorithms and coding. It was only a small read-only database but it was quicker to do this than spend many hours researching and using trial and error to get it working the latest and greatest Microsoft way.