Windows, NVIDIA, and oversaturated colours
After a recent power dip, I had to reboot my machine and the colours went completely crazy. I have an HP 2475w wide-gamut monitor which can produce some seriously "dayglo" colours - e.g. the orange in the Firefox icon became an eye-searing hypersaturated red. Since my PC is on 24/7 for long intervals at a time, it was absolutely impossible to tell what had caused this. I had been evaluating some new raw converters recently so my initial guess was that some software I installed had made the change. After much frustration, uninstalling apps, and several reboots later, it turns out that the culprit is the latest NVIDIA drivers which default the "digital vibrance" setting to 90% (where it had previously been 50%).
WTF, NVIDIA? Please don't screw with my colours and focus on building better hardware instead. Secondly, how did this update get WHQL approval and made it into Microsoft's Windows Update? It's little things like this that have made all the pros move to Mac.
Developers, developers, developers
Yes, what else, I'm referring to the infamous Steve Ballmer going crazy on stage scene. Bruce Eckel recently wrote in a blog post:
He's right, developers are important. And if you only go to Microsoft conferences, it looks like all developers are using Windows. But if you go to any other developer conference, everyone is using Macs.
Which got me thinking, WTF is up with the Windows command prompt? If there's one thing developers need, it's a solid command line interface which lets them manipulate OS primitives with the minimum of fuss. So why do I find myself installing Cygwin and puttycyg on every Windows machine that I need to get some work done with? Maybe I'm just a *nix die-hard who's too stubborn to learn something new but it works great, for the most part (what's wrong is the subject of another rant altogether).
Some will probably say that PowerShell is meant to be the answer but I disagree. It may be nice for scripted rolling out of patches and performing other sysadmin-type tasks en masse but c'mon, who wants to use that as their shell? Even if you were willing to dig deeper and learn the arcane syntax, you're still stuck in the same old DOS box "terminal" that the regular cmd.exe runs in. Even trivial operations like resizing the window or copy & paste are a misson. A Google search for "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly" returns a similar rant about PowerShell as one of the top results so clearly I'm not the only one frustrated by it. It all sounds very good on paper what with the pipes on steroids and .NET integration but it somehow fails to provide a shell replacement.
Are all Windows developers hopelessly stuck somewhere deep inside the Visual Studio GUI? (The ones that haven't migrated to the Mac yet, anyway?)
Vista and file deletion
I've been running Windows Vista for about a year and a half (my desktop hasn't been reinstalled once), and find it to be great. But every once in a while I still encounter the ridiculously slow performance issue where file operations take forever - even simply browsing into a folder with Explorer. Here is an example of a folder deletion of a small source project with a bunch of Git history in it that Windows has been busy deleting for a good half an hour now:
A whole bunch of fixes were supposed to have been included in SP1 but it seems like some problems still remain 
UPDATE: it's something to do with the folder being shared - and unsharing takes extremely long, while keeping the hard drive very busy. Possibly some kind of dodgy recursive file system metadata update? Deleting from the command line with "rmdir /s" solved the problem in the end.
Random rants
- Is the SOAP Stack an Embarrassing Failure? (Or should that be "Java's SOAP Stack" rather?) Axis 2, um, "leads the pack" in that regard. WS-* not complicated enough for you? Let's reinvent the app server wheel while we're at it too. If you have to do Web Services in Java, I recommend you check out Spring Web Services.
- Enabling Media Sharing in Vista doesn't unblock the Windows Firewall ports it uses. A while ago I got this to work with my Xbox 360 (though it was much slower and never worked with video compared to the free, 3rd party app TVersity). Then one day it decided to stop working. Turns out that Windows Firewall decided to block it for no apparent reason. This despite me re-enabling Media Sharing several times afterwards. @#$%! And this, kids, is why Apple is winning this round.
- Badly implemented Ajax is worse than no Ajax. We survived for many years without dynamic web pages but now everyone feels the need to Web 2.0-ify their online presence. Looking at you, Good Reads. Rendering badly in Firefox is not hip in this day and age
P.S. Don't you just hate it when they put footnotes at the end of a book?
Useful Reading for Game Developers
Established game studios' staff as well as would-be game developers should check out The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey over at Cracked.com. Commandments #5 and #6 sum up everything that is wrong with Assassin's Creed, but it's #7 - be playable with real friends in the same room as you - that I wish more games paid attention to. Even among the few games that do offer split screen, too many manage to get it so horribly wrong it's worth asking why they bothered in the first place. Just look at the various G.R.A.W. and Rainbow 6: Vegas titles - Ubisoft devs should sit down and play Halo 3 and Gears of War end to end with a buddy to see where the bar is at.