Windows Vista = Switch to Linux

I recently installed Microsoft's beta of the upcoming Windows Vista. Shortly afterward, I started researching which version of Linux I will be switching to.

Right now, I make my living developing software for, and have Microsoft certifications in, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server. I spend thousands of dollars a year on Microsoft software just to keep current and employable. But after seeing Windows Vista, it is my intention to make myself employable in Linux/MySQL/Oracle by the time Vista has been out for a year. I assume I can stay employed developing for current versions of Windows for at least a year after doomsday (The day Vista is released publicly). By switching to Linux/MySQL/Oracle development professionally, it will also free me up to quit using Microsoft products at home.

With every version of Windows since the revolutionary Windows 95, Microsoft seems to have forgotten more and more of what they had learned before. While there have been usability improvements in most new Windows versions, including Vista, it has continuously surprised me how many things that worked well were made worse just for the sake of change.

Now the things that Microsoft is changing, just for the sake of change, in Windows Vista make it so frustrating to use that it is time to look for alternatives, especially when you combine the usability issues with the privacy issues.

Is Windows XP Media Center Edition Descended From HAL 9000? Part III

In part II of this series, I described a flaw in Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition that is in direct violation of their published privacy policy. It connects to the Internet, retrieves data, and updates the files on your PC even though you specifically configure it to not do so.

Well, I am anal about my media files. Once I get a thought in my head, I don't let go. It is MY PC, and they are my files. They have to be right and that means keeping Microsoft's low-quality data out of it.

And I am smart. I know PC's and I know networking. I know how to keep the Media Center PC from accessing the Internet at all, thereby preventing it from updating any music files, once and for all. Of course, in doing so, I also give up functionality (web browsing) that I paid for and now cannot use. But we seldom use the Media Center pc for anything other than media so I could live with it.

Let me describe my home network. I don't have broadband Internet access available where I live so, on my wife's PC, I have enabled Internet Connection Sharing. That means she has dial-up access to the Internet via her modem. The rest of the PCs connect to her PC and share her dial-up connection (SLOW!!!!!).

To share her connection, there are two TCP/IP settings that have to point to my wife's PC on each of the other PCs. Even those not really experienced with TCP/IP will probably have heard of these settings as they have configured their own Internet access from time to time. The settings involved are the DNS Server and the Default Gateway settings.

Without getting into a dissertation on TCP/IP, let me just say that if those two settings don't point to her PC, the other PC's can't get on the net. It's that easy. I changed those settings on the Media Center PC to IP addresses that don't exist on my network. Now the Media Center PC can't do anything on the Internet, including update my media files! Take that, Bill Gates!

I did it and it worked! Overnight, there were no changes to my music files! I was proud of myself until my wife rebooted her PC in the morning. This morning. When I got up, I merrily worked on scanning some CD covers, a requirement now that I am maintaining my own CD database for my own music, when I discovered another bug in a different Microsoft product: Microsoft Office Picture Manager. It wiped out half of my work! But that's a future blog article while still being the inspiration for this one.

I opened Internet Explorer to go into Blogger.com in order to write the article about Microsoft Office Picture Manager and found that I could not access the Internet through my wife's PC. No problem. I disconnected and re-connected her PC. Still nothing. I rebooted her PC and still nothing. I tried my laptop and nothing from there either. I plugged in my work laptop and couldn't get on the Internet with it either. I was able to access my wife's pc using Remote Desktop which is a high bandwidth application so I know the network itself was good. The connections were good. The only thing that wouldn't work was access to the Internet through her PC. From her PC directly, she could get to the Internet.

Now, I am a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and have been for about 10 years. I know Microsoft networking and I know it well. I can certainly get these PC's using the Internet Connection Sharing on my wife's PC. But then, it's worked flawlessly for almost 4 years, ever since XP came out. So, what happened? I had a clue because I knew I had tried to deny Bill Gates access to my media server but the settings I made there should not have effected anything else.

I verified that all the TCP/IP settings and firewall settings were as they had always been on my wife's PC and on each of the other PC's. Everything was right. The DNS and Default Gateway settings on all of them were correct. I deleted all the TCP/IP settings on all of the PC's (except the Media Center because I wanted it to be broken) and re-created them manually. It didn't work.

Finally, I looked over at the console for the Media Center PC. Obviously it had taken over. If it could not access the Internet, it was not going to let any other PC access the Internet.

I snuck over carefully, saying something outloud about going into the kitchen for a soda. Just at the last second, with total disregard for my personal safety, I reached down and hit the power switch on my HAL 9000 descendent.

I still could not get to the Internet from any PC through my wife's. Again, I deleted all of the connections and followed all the exact same steps as before to re-create them and, lo and behold, this time it worked! With the Media Center PC off the network, I could access the Internet from my other PCs.

Crossing my fingers, I booted the Media Center PC and, so far, it is all working according to my plan. Everything on the network can access the Internet except the Media Center PC. If it does not shut us down, wipe out our PC's and burn down the house, I will let you know later if this is the final episode of DiskSpace Odessy 2005.

Is Windows XP Media Center Edition Descended From HAL 9000? Part II

In Part I of this multi-part article, I talked about the problems with Microsoft's CD database. This part picks up from there to talk about problems if you try to not use Microsoft's CD database for identifying your CD's, but I should probably talk about why you may use an online CD database in the first place.

For some reason, Phillips and Sony, the inventors of the music CD technology and standards, neglected to include, anywhere on the CD, identifying information about the CD, the artist or artists, and the tracks or songs. All of those 650,000,000 1's and 0's running arwound on those CDs and they chose not to reserve a thousand or so for identifying information. There's not even an encoded serial number or product ID that can reliably look up the data online. CD identification is made by doing some calculations based upon the number of tracks and the length of each track in minutes and seconds. Your media player program calculates this psuedo-identification number and searches its associated online database for any, or all, matching CD's. Even as bad as this sounds, as you know, unique identification of CD's is pretty reliable. Even Microsoft's database almost always identifies the CD properly - it's the data about the CD that sucks.

So, fed up with Microsoft's database inaccuracies, I decided I would quit using Microsoft's database. When I put a CD in, I would rather have to type all the data about the CD, tracks, and artist manually and scan the CD cover myself to get an album image for the player. It is the only way the data would meet my stringent requirement: Be accurate! I followed Microsoft's instructions to disable retrieving information from their CD.

I have four PCs on my home network right now. My desktop, my laptop, my wife's desktop, and my Media Center pc which serves as my media server. All the PCs share a common set of media files for their library which is stored on the media server. No matter which PC a CD is ripped from, it is stored on the media server and shows up in the media library for all of the PCs.

To prevent updates from Microsoft, I followed their own instructions, taken verbatim from their published privacy policy, on each PC:

To prevent Windows Media Player from requesting related media information for CDs and DVDs from WindowsMedia.com, and to prevent your Windows Media Audio files that have been copied from CDs from being updated:
On the Tools menu, click Options.
On the Privacy tab, clear the Update music files by retrieving media info from the Internet check box.

This setting does not affect your online music store.

Since Media Center uses the Media Player program for managing the media library, no special settings are required or available for Media Center other than to configure the Media Player on the Media Center PC. (Media Center is the Windows version, Media Player is what plays the music, just in case you're not aware of the difference.)

Next, I spent hours correcting errors in my media library. Errors including incorrect album images, incorrect CD, artist, or song titles, and more. So, when it was all fixed, I sighed a big sigh of relief. I had finally stopped Microsoft from corrupting my data.

You can imagine how surprised I was when, just an hour or so later, I was my playing Beck, Bogert, & Appice CD and the CD cover shown was wrong...Again!

Regular readers (all three of them) of my blog will remember my article about Media Center ignoring the setting in Media Player for disabling the screen saver. Well, here it is again. In direct violation of their published privacy policy, which is a violation of the Fair Trade act, Windows XP Media Center Edition updates your files regardless of the settings you configure!

Is Windows XP Media Center Edition Descended From HAL 9000? Part I

It must be. It took control of my home network and I have struggled all day to get it back. The story encompasses what was originally to have been several blog articles before today's meltdown. I will still make this topic several articles long to break it into logical parts.

It starts with Microsoft's CD database at metaservices.windowsmedia.com. What a worthless database. I am a certified database administrator. I know databases. And one thing that I know about databases is what makes a good one and what makes a bad one. There's one characteristic that differentiates the two: User confidence.

All the other characteristics are trivial in comparison. Things like accuracy, reliability, speed or performance don't mean a thing if the users have no faith in the data. And many users have blindly and happily used bad data when they had confidence. Confidence is king when it comes to databases.

I have no confidence in Microsoft's CD database. Not because everything is bad in it. In fact, it is right probably 80% of the time. But when I play my music and Microsoft tells the name of the song is Neil Young's "Soldier" even though I can plainly hear that it is Neil Young's "Old Man", I begin to lose faith. When it happens often enough, you look for alternatives, and it just happens too much.

Some of the problems with Microsoft's database are only indirectly Microsoft's fault. It is a "user-supported" database, meaning that if you put a CD in your PC and MediaPlayer can't find the CD in Microsoft's database, it will allow you to enter the CD information and everyone forever will use what you put in the database unless someone else updates it. If someone enters incorrect data about a CD, we're all stuck. Much of the data is entered carelessly, apparently by products of the public education philosophy that says "it can be spelled however you want to spell it as long as it can be deciphered." The spelling, capitalization, and punctuation on the user entered data is just plain offensive and reflects the same indifference to quality that seems pervasive in so many other facets of modern life.

If you put a CD in the database and the information is wrong, it has an interface that allows you to supposedly correct the data but it just does not work. And that is the main problem. I don't mind making the corrections, but since they are not reflected in the database properly, MediaPlayer insists on downloading the incorrect data and writing it over the top of your changes on your local PC. But that is the subject of part two of Is Windows XP Media Center Edition descended from HAL 9000.

There are alternative online CD Databases available: Gracenote's cddb at http://www.gracenote.com/music/index_old.html and the Freedb.org database at http://freedb.org/freedb_search.php.

Unfortunately, you can't configure most media players, including Microsoft's, to use alternative databases for looking up music online. Besides Microsoft's MediaPlayer, I have Roxio's player, which uses the Gracenote cddb database and I have Nero's player, which uses the Freedb.org database. Of the three, only Nero's allows you to enter an alternative database but, because there is no standard for delivering the database content, it is not really possible to use an alternative source, even if you do change the setting to point to one of the other sources.

I don't like the Nero player at all, or any of the Nero products, for that matter. They're just not user friendly – they're cute, just not friendly. As a result, I haven't used it often enough to have an opinion on the Freedb.org database.

Roxio, on the other hand, is my favorite media player. It is a bit immature, as far as media player features go, but it suits me well and the Gracenote database seems to be very accurate. I have confidence in it. The only problem is, I use Windows 2003 Server as my desktop operating system because I develop software for Windows 2003 Server and Roxio won't run on this version of Windows. Also, Media Center, which I use for my media server and is really Windows XP, won't use Roxio; it only uses Microsoft's MediaPlayer.

Windows XP Media Center Screen Saver Problems

There are two things I have learned to count on from Microsoft products:

1. Inconsistency
2. Incompleteness

Microsoft has produced a number of almost-great products which are, by virtue of being almost-great, also almost-awful. A set of good features that work great would be much better than a great bunch of features that don't work well. Today's almost-great, almost-awful product is Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

Windows XP Media Center Edition insists on activating the screen saver while the Media Center program is in use. It should disable the screen saver while the Media Center PC is running in Media Center mode.

Media Center 2005 is tightly intertwined with Microsoft Media Player (another almost-great, almost-awful product). Considering that close relationship, there is no excuse for this problem. There is a setting in Media Player that prevents the screen saver while playing media in Media Player. If I play the songs on my Media Center PC using Media Player, the setting works as designed: no screen saver. If I start the Media Center application, then the screen saver comes on. If you're using Media Center to watch a movie on your TV and have to get up every 15 minutes to shake the mouse to recover from the screen saver, it is just not a useful product.

What is worse, Microsoft refuses to fix or patch the problem. The only thing I could find online to fix the problem is at The Green Button.com's downloads page. They have a Screen Saver Prevention utility that you can download. The description for the utility says:

This utility will stay in the systray and will ping the system every 45 seconds. If Media Center is found running it will prevent the screen saver. If Media Center is not running the screen saver will operate as normal.

The application is from someone named FrogBoy. Now, I don't know FrogBoy, and have nothing against him, but let's get real here. In the days of viruses, script kiddies, and spyware, I would prefer a fix from Microsoft. Then again, since Windows XP itself is the biggest spyware application in the world (but that will have to be the topic of another article), perhaps I should be looking to people like FrogBoy for my software.

Get it right Microsoft! If you saw the sense of having the screen saver setting in Windows Media Player, why did you suddenly forget what you knew when it comes to Media Center and just ignore the setting?