Fixing A Chair

So I went to use the office chair upstairs. I bought that chair a few years ago when the company I worked for was getting rid of some furniture. It was one of the last to go so I got it for $20. It was made by Haworth back in 1987. It's blue and weighs 4 and a half tons. At least it feels like it.

The chair weighs so much because it is a good solid chair. The fact that I was going to stand on a rolling, tipping chair to change a light bulb is not really the point. Yes, it seems risky. It probably is. But again, that is not the point.

The point is when I looked at the chair, the right arm rest was laying over to the side, someone had broken it. I don't know how they broke it, but they did. The other day, I knew the arm rest was a bit loose, but today it was laying down sideways almost.

To say I was miffed is an understatement. I was ticked off. And really, what bothered me most was not that the arm rest was broken. I was pretty sure it could be fixed, or I would simply throw out a $20 chair that I had used for about 3 years. The chair being broken was not my biggest annoyance.

What really ticked me off was knowing without a doubt that when I asked the kids about the chair, no one, not one would know anything about it. Each will swear they never saw it broken and had no idea how it happened. That is typical of problems like this. Apparently someone sneaks into my house and then breaks random things, leaving without ever being seen.

So I took the chair apart, found that 2 bolts, each 1/4 inch in diameter had sheared off. Whatever happened, it wasn't something light. Due to not paying attention, I had to disassemble and reassemble the chair twice. In the end, I had 3 bolts in my parts box that worked.

So 3 bolts, some sweat, 3 chunks of skin, and 2 hours of using a screwdriver and I had it fixed. And honestly it is better now than it was before.

I looked up the specs on this chair and tried to find an equivalent chair from the manufacturer just for grins to see how much it costs. The current generation equivalent Haworth chair goes for about $600 new, and about $200 used.

I asked the kids who knew anything about it. None did. Of course. Oh well. I guess I need to put up surveillance cameras and catch that guy that sneaks in to my house just to break things.

Copyright 2012, Kevin Farley (a.k.a. sixdrift, a.k.a. neuronstatic)

Someone Open My Windows Please?

After 5 years of using Linux full time, I finally landed in an organization that really is Windows-only and I am now forced to use Windows full time again. So here I am with a Windows 7 laptop - a Dell no less, not one of my favorites.

So I was given a cryptic set of documentation that indicates there is certain software I need to install. It is scattered over a plethora of systems and servers. Each of them with their own installer and their own peculiar way of doing things. Sure they basically follow the same pattern, but each is different, and not by necessity. And not everything wants to install correctly into this Win 7 64 bit OS. Some things complain or require some tweaking.

But I need these things, these proprietary tools that only run on Windows. I need them because they represent the only way to compile and link the software I will be working on. I need them because some of the applications were chosen to support developers and testers and the software is very much Windows only.

And so I threw myself into making the best of things. After just a few hours I remembered how frustrating it is to work in Windows. To be fair, it's not hard to work in any one specific Windows based application. What is hard is trying to switch back and forth between applications in Windows. That is where frustration builds to new heights. That is where any ideas of "ease of use" do not apply to MS Windows.

First of all, some people may like the aggregation of application instances on the bottom bar, but to figure out the one you want to click on takes forever. Windows is slow to reveal the individual instances and then they are so small I have to wait longer for it to highlight the full window. Sure, I could alt-tab through a few dozen application instances, but that is not all that efficient either.

The second thing is the obvious lack of virtual desktops. I mean seriously? It's 2012 and MS still does not have native support for multiple virtual desktops?

Also there is no way to add "launcher groups" they way I was used to working in Gnome on Linux. I know I can drag a shortcut to the Taskbar and "pin it". But I have not figured out how - or if I can - create a "group" of items. So for now I create folders of shortcuts and then add them as Toolbars. It sort of accomplishes what I wanted, but the result is not all that great. For example, the toolbar pins to the taskbar but you have only a tiny >> thing to click on. And once you do that, sometimes it takes several seconds to display the toolbar. Not always, and not predictably, but sometimes it does.

So, I need command line access - yes people, I really do, developers have to do things that require command line tools at times and that is not a bad thing - but the Windows "cmd" box is really, really bad. That thing has not changed in years and has basically existed as-is for several major releases. Here is an example of its ancient roots: you can't drag and resize the width of the terminal window it provides. You can drag it down and up, but not sideways. It really is just a piece of crap. I also needed a real command line shell, not that weak, limited "cmd" shell. So I opted for the cygwin solution, as I have for many years when having to use Windows.

I installed cygwin and spiffed up the colors of the terminal window to make it easier to see. I decided to change the display font. I found a nice looking font called TTF Terminus which I downloaded and installed. Now when I look in the Control Panel at fonts, there it is. When I run any app and look for the fonts, it is not there. A minor nuisance but indicative of a problem if you ask me.

You know, I find it appalling that Microsoft is shipping brain-dead Notepad after all these years. Surely they have the talent to make something better than that marginal thing.  Notepad should be called "Notpad" because anything other than displaying and typing characters is something it can NOT do.

Well, needing a decent editor (or three), I installed some open source tools because they are not only what I know, they are excellent tools for free. I installed the Geany IDE, gVim (graphical vi editor), and Gedit (Gnome's default text editor, their "Notepad" if you will). All three of these have syntax highlighting for dozens (and more) of programming languages, support various add-ons and have many features Notepad will never have. The trick here was hooking these Windows executables into my BASH command line in cygwin. It wasn't hard, just had to figure out where Windows would break.

So back into my command line I go. Already having command line Vim, I added in cscope (mlcscope to be precise) so I could quickly look through C files using tags. I added in a few more tricks and tools in cygwin. Then I started going through source code files similar to what I had been doing for the last several years.

The problem is, even though I was able to just about mimic my environment, it still suffered from the ponderousness of Windows when it came to switching between windows. Being so used to middle-mouse clicks, being able to scroll any window under the cursor without taking focus, and segmenting work into virtual desktops, I felt like someone was dragging my arms backwards when I tried to work.

Actually, its worse than that. It feels like I was given stone knives and bear skins, placed in a straight jacket, and then told to perform fuel injector repair on a Buick. With some MacGyvering I can get the job done. But seriously, the work paradigm for Windows is so lacking for those of us that do a lot of multi-tasking and concurrent work flows.

Perhaps the real issue is that Windows is for "average users" that don't do serious work and that is why it seems to be tuned for full-screening apps and doing one thing at a time.  As far as I am concerned, Windows 7 is only moderately usable. Give me Linux Mint with Gnome 3 shell and MGSE any day, it blows the doors off the tired old Windows work paradigm.

No virtual desktops, no mounting of ISOs and other file systems, ancient Notepad, inconsistencies in how things are done (not everything has been updated over the years of versions), and the complete lack of a solid "applications center" make Microsoft Windows look like something that is still in the dark ages of computing.


Copyright 2012, Kevin Farley (a.k.a. sixdrift, a.k.a. neuronstatic)