Ramble On

The continued lack of Atom 1.0 in wordpress reminded me that my feeds were most likely shifted back to RSS2 due to the politics of the wordpress leaders - and recent upgrades and me not paying attention.

Thanks to this plugin for making it easier.

If any of the estimated 6.5 readers of the blog have their feed readers broken - get a new feed reader.

p.s. See also Shelley’s post - with the appropriate quote:

There’s nothing like syndication to bring out the schoolyard in supposedly reasonable adults. I don’t think even the “vi versus emacs” wars compare.

Internet Jerry Springer. I’ve said it multiple times.

Sometimes the interpreted language equivalent of “compiler warnings” get really quite annoying (this might explain why subconsciously I have always been incredibly pedantic about compiler warnings).

Anyway, with advent of RubyGems 0.9.0, the “require gem” command is deprecated.

And as of 0.9.1 of RubyGems (to which you might want to update because of a security hole) - you know get lovely little warnings scattered all over the place

Warning: require_gem is obsolete. Use gem instead.

And of course things like the mongrel_rails command include “require_gem” - as does feed_tools - which of course is kicked off by cron jobs in our environment, and is now happily filling my root mail with the warning messages.

Sigh.

So because we can’t buy Windows XP anymore, I ended up getting “Vista Business Licenses” for the additional copies of XP that we needed in order to run XP under Parallels so that we can test our web applications with the other Microsoft flaming pile of crap that is Internet Explorer (version 6).

Well, of course I was going to take a look at the product, it’s what I do. As far as I can tell in the maybe 20 minutes total that I’ve had it running over the last month or two is that it’s a fine enough update. I mean, all operating systems stink, some more or less than others. And like OS X 10.4 is better than OS X 10.3 is better than 10.2, etc. Vista seems better than XP.

I was actually looking forward to using it more.

Well, until today, when it told me that my copy of Windows wasn’t legitimate. That is, the official Volume License media that I got from our Volume License vendor, and used the License Key that I officially received from Microsoft - when I called them and asked for a Windows Vista Business License Key.

We have some kind of Key managment service set up on campus, but I apparently can’t run the commands to set that because of whatever reason.

The key provided by Microsoft is “not genuine” anymore apparently.

And I get an error code when I try to activate.

I’m sure there’s a solution in all of this, it’s code, Microsoft has changed to a new asinine activation model, etc.

But life’s really too short for me to try to debug this stupidity. When the official media and official license keys don’t work. What else is supposed to?