21-IX-2009.

Long, documented rant on the blogue yesterday.

Hardware fashions 4: Office 2007

After all the entertainment I had in the previous installments of installation of nothing new but the motherboard (and processor, cooler and memory), everything seemed to work just the same, only a bit faster. That is, because I wasn't using Office, except via automation. I do write a lot, but I do that on forums, or in tools I wrote, like the one I use to maintain my website. Documents, not as much, and even that - I use Open Office. For the features I need it's more than enough; for automation (i.e. what my apps should do at users' machines), I have a copy of Office (Home & Student, no fancy corporate stuff), the installation of which didn't pass without extensive blogging of this same kind.

So it happened that I was testing a routine which exports into a csv file, and wanted to compare results against those of the previous version. I selected both files and rightclicked Open, and all of a sudden Office begins to install something. Wait a minute... I installed everything I wanted, and this worked fine last time I did it.

Oh yeah, I deleted some files from the cache last time I cleaned up. Well, so what - any software that uses caching uses it only to speed up some information, though I don't see why would caching to disk speed up access to disk... it would make sense if it was picking anything off the web and caching it, but it isn't - my firewall didn't let it. It did try to call home, though:

...which I won't allow, either. It's a bit annoying, every time something wants to install, it calls Microsoft? Even a knowing printer driver , or some piece of freeware! Why would Microsoft have such a marketing tool and use it to gather information on what we install, except to gain information that nobody else will have? Well, I will definitely not help them with my information. They don't provide any info to me, even their error messages are misleading.

The piece it was missing is

...well, whatever. I wonder why M$ never made these dialogs resizable. The names are getting longer and longer, and these look like they weren't revisited since Windows 95. And, another misnomer: F: drive is local, it's not shared on any network, so "network resource" it is definitely not.

Anyway, no need to call home - I still haven't thrown away the install disk, so when it asked for it...

...it was unable to find it. This is the trouble with Windows installers since day one (which was, IIRC, in 1990 or 1995): they wrongly remember the location from which they were set up. This is a clear case of relative path mistaken for absolute. The directory exists, but it's under X:\something\. The X: path is not the other option in the combo,that other option is something equally wrong. In part II I saw a worse version of this: the installation would unpack into a temp directory, which gets deleted. Then the next installation looks for files in that deleted directory. Which is still good, compared with cases when I had two installs in two directories (to avoid "now insert disk...") and when it would repeatedly forget to look for a file in one of the directories given a minute ago, so it was an endless battle of navigating to location A, then location B...

I told it where the file was (at least it's accepting entry from clipboard, so I didn't have to click my way through desktop-my computer-disk-directory-directory-directory...) and let's see what we now have in the infamous f:\MSOCache directory:

Why would any sane programmer put installation files into a directory called "cache", when anyone knows that the cache is something that's routinely deleted? Caches are the first to go when we run out of disk space.

And why put that on the root directory of a drive (albeit as a hidden directory - but hey, anyone who puts hidden directories to my disk is a suspect nowadays, that's been in the books since the days when today's virus writers wore diapers)... creating directories off the root without prompting the user is a dirty practice nowadays. There's sound advice as to where to put your temp files, cached data etc, coming from none other than... Microsoft.

Anyway, even if this "cache" is actually an install temp directory, well, I should have deleted it long ago then, because my installation ended 18 months ago. Or maybe I shouldn't, maybe this isn't cache at all? It's caché, hidden stash? Of what, I wonder.

On repeated attempt to open the csv file, it again ran the setup, installed something for me (not telling me what nor where nor why), and then came up with... ta-dah:

What's exactly my option if I don't want to "ensure"? I don't need it to "function properly", I want it to work as clumsily as before. And why is Office 2007 detecting changes on my computer? Is it an office tool, or a hardware sniffer? What did we learn about n-tiered programming? Each tier minds its own business; drivers deal with hardware; OS communicates with hardware through drivers; applications communicate with OS and the user. Now an end-user application is somehow snooping through my hardware? Know you!

I canceled the dialog and let it lie for a while. Nihil faciamus irati.

Now that it's installed everything it wanted, let's try again. Launching Excel by doubleclicking a csv file automatically shows another attempt by setup.exe (which one? there are dozens on my disks) to call 84.53.144.9:80. When I deny the request, msiexec.exe is trying to get there, denied. Meanwhile, Windows installer (sorry, Installer) says the same thing as in picture #3, having forgotten yet again where my install disk is. The alternate location it offers is in f:\MSOCache... again, the old directory there which doesn't exist; it is blissfully unaware of the new one it created the last time. OK, navigating to my DVD drive. Clicking the Browse button takes me straight to the appropriate directory on the DVD - so, it knew where to look, except it didn't (!).

Preparing to install... and I get the "...detected changes... to ensure it functins properly". The "privacy statement" says

Activation Privacy Statement for the 2007 Microsoft Office system
Activation is aimed at reducing software piracy as well as helping to ensure that Microsoft customers are receiving the software quality that they expect. Activation means that a specific Product Key becomes associated with the hardware it is installed on. The Microsoft Software License Terms for 2007 Microsoft Office system state the number of times your Product Key can be used for activation. Once you have used the Product Key for the specified number of times on the same or different computers, that Product Key can no longer be used for activation on other computers. Activation does not require any personal information.

Activation is mandatory. After the grace period expires, you must activate the software to be able to continue using it.

There's a link about activation, but it doesn't open in a regular (i.e. registered) browser; it opens in Internet Explorer instead. Since the internet option ("(recommended)") tries to push something through port 443, which is the HTTPS, it sounds like downright snooping - because it doesn't even try to tell me what it's sending. The privacy statement doesn't say what info may be sent, other than a "non-unique" machine ID and product key... and I figure, any accompanying info about what I have installed etc. Microsoft can't be trusted, as I have witnessed over the last 23 years, so I'm not letting them snoop, period. I deny the request on port 43, and get a

...which sounds familiar :) [blogged „at this time“ previously].

So let's see what's the other option - ah, phone. First, "Telephone contact numbers vary by license and country/region.", wow. In these days when even one Dell has support in India, and all the customers call the same 800 number as provided on the box - Microsoft chooses to have regional numbers? Why?

"In step 2 of the Activation..." ...never materialized. There's no further dialog if I select activation by phone and click Next. So my choice is either to divulge unknown amount of information about who knows what to the democratically elected Microsoft, or nothing.

Suppose it worked and I managed to somehow find the phone number (and if I did, I'd have the call recorded for quality control purposes - it's legal in Virginia, and would be a nice gesture to return the courtesy). Here's what it says:

  1. "select the country/region where you reside and where you plan to use the product" What do they care who am I and where I live? What are my options if I am a reporter and plan to use Word across 20-some timezones?
  2. "The customer service representative asks you for your installation ID (displayed on your screen) and other relevant information." - now this is nice. If this is against piracy, the ID shouldn't be on the screen; I should have to spell it from the DVD box. Anyone who managed to hack the thing would have a nice ID ready. BTW, what's "other relevant information"?
  3. Then you get a confirmation ID that you just type in and you're done.
Hmmm... this will not be the first time I've paid something to Microsoft that I'm not using. I'm strongly inclined to revert to Office 2003 (that I got in lieu of a severance package from some of my previous employers - probably the most expensive software deal ever) which doesn't need activation.

Throughout the text, I have replaced „fuck“ with it biblical politically rectified term, „know“. It'll be even more interesting in serbian, where Vuk Karadžić and Đura Daničić used „poznati“, which is more like „get to know“, „be acquainted with“, but nowadays mostly means „recognize [when you see the person]“. Which would lead to some interesting plots, like „so he dined richly with his wife, and recognized her later in the night“. The whole game with these expressions came after Alphonse, probably pressed by a loud few very puritan subscribers, tried to enforce language police, and added to his saveMessage() script the validation, whereby any message containing „shit“, „piss“ or „fuck“. So for a couple of years I replaced them with excrement, urinate and know (two latin, one biblical). Even this blogue had a general tagline „deurinated at large“.

This is sunrise... not 7:00 yet.

This is sunrise... not 7:00 yet.

Despite Obama being for whole nine months in the armchair, Bush's tax cuts to the big guys are still felt, and in some respect it's just beginning to be felt. The federal tax dough was mostly spread to the member states, but that tap was gradually closing during his term, now they get less. The states then (next year) smooth it out by reducing what they spread down to counties and cities, which is then (next year) felt on public services...

The school district has reduced the number of school buses. That is, they didn't sell the vehicles, they just fired some percentage of drivers or otherwise reduced the number of lines. Which means they put a few lines together, so Lena's line was attached to another one, on the slower end. That is, she'd have to get up some 40 minutes earlier and would come home that much later. The other part of the passengers would stay with their own schedule, staying asleep longer and coming home sooner. And guess what, these guys are all in that affluent area, between the highway and the bay. That part where they didn't raze the forest but kept the trees and built between them. Tsk, tsk...

So we decided that I'll take her to school this year. Drive in the morning, drive in the afternoon. This started this monday or tuesday, or the next or previous - the old schedule held for a while, with some hiccups, but it worked more or less. Then it completely stopped and we got a new schedule.

From UA, one of these days, responding to Nick:

Therefore the only viable solution to global warming is nothing less than a large reduction in the planet's human population. If we do not begin a humane reduction through natural attrition Mother Nature shall find a way to reduce our population in a very very ugly way. The dialogue on this pressing issue must begin now.

How many proponents of this have committed suicide, or at least castrated themselves?

Planting thyme

Planting thyme

These days we planted a couple of figs out front, assuming them to be pretty much coastal trees and considering that fresh figs can't be found (and "are nowhere to be" too, as the natives would say). Haven't eaten a fresh fig since... dunno, twenty years.

Lena is planting the thyme for her matricular work. The subject of it is comparison between four methods for extraction of thymol from it, and she's doing it from scratch, starting with seeds and ending in the chemical lab.

Mentions: Alphonse D'Alchembert, blogue, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Majkrosoft (m$), Nick Greene, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian

6-VIII-2017 - 5-VII-2026