Well, I’ve been saying I was going to stick some flavour of Unix onto my laptop for a while now, and yesterday I finally did it. I’ve read about the two releases of PC-BSD, and since I’ve always had Linux before I decided to go with a BSD distribution this time to see what all the fuss was about.

Getting it to like my laptop was fun, I kept getting this message:

acd0: WARNING: SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE transqueue timeout - completing request directly

Except the problem is, it didn’t ‘complete [the] request directly’ it just repeated the message. So after half an hour and still no luck, I started playing. As PC-BSD boots up, it gives you about 2 seconds to hit a key after the kernel modules have loaded before it starts booting the Operating System.

The command ’show’ will show a list of environment variables - this is what was causing my problem:

hw.ata.atapi_dma=1

Changing this to 0 with the command:

set hw.ata.atapi_dma=0

Enabled me to start the operating system. I’ve eventually got my wireless working, although it seems to get disconnected after a while, although that may be my crappy router, which has been on its way out for a while.

This post has actually been written in Konquerer on PC-BSD, so I must have done something right!

Recently there’s been a tidal wave blogs, websites etc harping on about usability. Indeed a friend of mine, Henning, recently posted about this very topic, and how hyped up it all is.

Indeed, a lot of those who have ‘mastered’ usability appear to believe
so because they’ve learned how to split their content from their
presentation by applying CSS to all formatting on their pages. Well
done, here’s a badge.

Henning’s post got me thinking about real usability, and how it
applies to software that I use every day. One thing I do every day i
use my computer at home, is to check for antivirus updates, firewall
updates, Windows updates, and less regularly updates for drivers and
other software I keep on my computer and use at least once or twice a
month.

What occurs to me is that there is no central place to update all these
- each application has its own individual update routines which run
independantly of one another. Aside from the fact that windows words
its critical updates as ‘updates for your computer’, and ‘keep your
computer up to date’ when it actually means Windows, not everything on
there, I believe that a centralised update centre would make security a
much easier process for the average home user to keep a tab on. Windows
updates come under several headings - critical security updates, driver
updates, windows updates, etc - and that’s just Windows itself!

Surely an average home PC user should have an easier way to spend less
time trying to keep their computer secure from hackers and the like, as
well as upgrading software to the latest featureset, and actually using the software itself?

My idea is to have an open ‘plugin’ architecture to replace (or extend)
the current Windows Update system. On install, applications could
register themselves as a client of the ‘Windows Update’ system
(accompanied by an alert to the user of having done so, to attempt to
prevent malicious software sneaking in and disabling updates).

When Windows Update was then run on the PC (or checks for updates in
the background) each individual application would be able to invisibly
start its own process of looking for updates, and reporting its
findings back to Windows Update.

The end result would be a fully centralised automatic updates system
which would leave the user more time to use the PC and less time
worrying about keeping all their applications up to date.

Comments would be appreciated.

I’d just like to say one thing to all the application developers out there:

Stop bloating my registry

Windows can crawl at times as it is, without ‘professional’ software
developers leaving their crap behind when I uninstall an application.
When I uninstall a piece of software, I do it because I don’t intend on
using it any more. Which means I don’t want its settings left all over
my computer ‘just in case’ I choose to install it again.

At least give me the option to choose whether to keep the settings in my registry, just in case I decide to install the application later.

One thing I cannot understand is why developers insist on writing
unnecessary values to the registry anyway. The registry is a shared
repository of configuration and other metadata. Surely if an
application doesn’t need to share its settings, it could store them in
a good old-fashioned plaintext configuration file?