Category: Microsoft

New Year, new Microsoft fuckup

At work, someone else on my team is responsible for pushing out desktop software, and the decision has been to remove Adobe Acrobat and use Microsoft Edge instead. That’s fine; I agree with simplifying the environment and only installing Adobe stuff if one has a license because one’s job is creating or editing PDF files. The fuckup is that Edge notified me this morning of a new feature in Edge: “We’re picking up where you left off. If you don’t want this feature, you can turn it off in Settings”

Liars.

The settings button is right there – the icon looks like a gear – but clicking it brings up only “Pin toolbar”, “Hide all annotations”, and “View document properties”.

No, the document properties don’t control anything.

Even Microsoft Copilot doesn’t know where this new setting is. It says it should be found behind the three dots menu … and inside that, the gear icon for Settings, and inside that, the Cookies menu, but that is fruitless.

Mostly, I’m complaining about two things:

  1. Someone on the Edge team created a new gear icon for their random three settings, and QA didn’t reject it with “We already have a Settings section – put your stuff there!” No, they let the stupid design ship into production.
  2. By making the new option default to “on”, Microsoft is reinforcing what is wrong with them: “it’s not your computer, we will do whatever the hell we want because it is our computer.”

Perhaps the fuckup is that upper management at Microsoft has so emasculated their QA department that they don’t have the ability to prevent stupid from shipping into production.

And as always, someone at Microsoft did not conceive that their new idea might be half-baked. “We’ve created a new feature! Of course everyone should be inflicted with it!”

Grrr.

Once per week, our help desk system runs a report I created, and it sends out a file attachment with the exact same file name. This is a report and does not need to stored long term – it is a snapshot of what happened during the last week. There is zero reason to add a date to the file name and end up with 52 new files per year. The idea that a new file with the old file name is a different file apparently didn’t occur to whomever was pushing the new feature.

What I don’t want, is to start reading this document on page 17. This week is a new file, even though the file name is the same. Last week, I got to page 17 because that is where the summary finished and the detail began. This week, I want to start on page 1, because that’s where the summary starts.

I would like the ability to disable this pick up where you left off feature1, but that option appears missing in all the settings menus I could find.

So not only did Microsoft ship into production a duplicate gear icon with lame options, but they didn’t get the new option into the real settings. I cannot turn this new feature off.

I am so looking forward to retirement, when I won’t have to put up with Microsoft’s dysfunction.

  1. Microsoft, famously as I remember it, was the inventor of the phrase “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” a.k.a. “It is working as (poorly) designed. Pray that I don’t design it further.” ↩︎

Microsoft added AI to Bing (fail)

For the first time ever for me, today MS Edge gave me a search result that automatically sent me to their AI chatbot. Of course, the result wasn’t helpful – I needed information about how to do the task with PowerShell, not interactively. So I clicked the button to copy the AI chatbot prompt, did new search, typed in “powershell” and pasted the original query in. It came back with results.

The results were wrong. Completely wrong. But they looked like they might be right.

If I were some new sysadmin trying to figure out something I was unfamiliar with, this would have so fouled me over.

I just have to laugh at Microsoft being so incompetent.

I mean, I know I have a chip on my shoulder about Microsoft. But man they keep shooting themselves in the foot. It’s hilarious.

Microsoft’s company motto appears to be “Quality is Job Secondhundredandthirteenth”.

Microsoft moving their documentation to GitHub – What could go wrong?

I’m not a Windows expert: as much as I dislike Microsoft for their lack of ethics, this should be no surprise. So when I do need to do Microsofty-sorts-of-things, I need to RTFM – which I’m fine with. They took the time to write the manual so I wouldn’t waste valuable people’s time with basic questions. I should Read The Friendly Manual.

I also know that things people link to might change behind the scenes. There’s no way for the changer to know that something else on the planet links here, so yes dead links happen. It should be a temporary problem; and as soon as someone who knows where the page moved to can supply the answer, the dead link can be fixed.

Recently I got a 404 This is not the web page you are looking for on Github. The source document is on Microsoft’s GitHub for PowerShell. Specifically the paragraph that said “Install PowerShell using Winget (recommended)”. That contained the sentence “Note: see the winget documentation for install instructions.”

I’ve never dealt with Winget before, so yes, please, let me read how to install it.

As of this moment, if you were to click on the link winget documentation you get 404 This is not the web page you are looking for.

Okay, this can happen. I have zero idea of what the actual link should be; but, I can let someone know there is a problem. I opened an issue in GitHub.

And it was closed, with the comment “The URL is correct on the published docs site. The links in the markdown source files are relative to the docs site, not to Github”

Well that’s nice. Between that and 404 pennies, I can get a coffee at Starbucks.

Microsoft did something good in Windows 11

I know that I dislike Microsoft because they cheat. But if I’m going to have at least a little bit of integrity, I need to admit it when Microsoft does something good. Yes, they did something good in Windows 11, even if it took them 30+ years to copy the idea.

In Windows 11, you can select a file and right-click on it, and the popup menu lets you copy the path of the file to the clipboard.

If you didn’t know about this, and you start using it, you may be surprised at just how useful this is. I’m not, because I’ve had that functionality all along these last 30 years in WinBatch. For 30 years, I’ve had an easier time of it than you, because I’ve always had right-click clipboard tricks at my fingertips.

And I do have some sympathy for Microsoft taking so long to implement this feature. Microsoft had been caught stealing ideas from software vendors who sold (or wanted to sell) Windows utilities. Wilson WindowWare, the publisher of WinBatch, made Windows better by providing a macro recorder for Windows. It was kind of a sham though, because playing back the same mouse and keystrokes – without the ability to edit the macro – was more teaser to buy a product than helpful.

But if you bought the product, it was magical.

And Microsoft decided (this time) to not stab their partner in the back by implementing the partner’s idea themselves.

I did buy WinBatch. I bought it for my personal use. And in fact, I conviced my employer to buy the compiler, at $500 per year. What that gave me was an unlimited site license to run as many WinBatch scripts as I wanted on every machine in my environment. The compiler embedded the scripts inside a .exe much like the Perl PAR modules do, so you get a Windows .exe that runs your Perl script. The interpreter is embedded, the DLLs are embedded, and the script is embedded, and it all launches from the .exe

At work, I put the runtime DLLs on the public folder of every NetWare server where users log in. I compiled scripts to the small .exe option, and then copied the .exe to the file servers. Well, I didn’t copy them, I had a WinBatch copy them for me. Then I edited the Novell login script to launch the WinBatch exes.

Did I need to take an inventory of every drive letter mapping on a machine? Yes. Could I do that for 2,500 machines and write the results to a shared drive? Yes. Oh, and by the way, how about listing which printers were installed too? This was reasonably competent tech for 2005. WinBatch had a set of Windows Registry search-and-replace calls, so I could launch from a login script a utility that changed registry keys on your machine after we migrated you to a new server.

Anyway, I loved WinBatch, and used it daily. And it came with clipboard tricks: any file, any folder, mulitple files and folders: you could right-click and copy either the name(s) or the full path (including file names) to the Windows clipboard.

So when I saw that Windows 11 added right-click copy path to clipboard I was impressed. Microsoft finally did something good.

Now technically, this feature has been in Windows for a decade or more, but you needed to know to shift+right-click to get the menu option. With Windows 11, they finally just made it available without any weird key combinations. Good job, Microsoft.

Dang it Microsoft: can’t you even follow your own instructions?

This morning, Outlook popped up “Allow this website to configure mailbox@domain server settings?” No, I don’t want to, because it messes things up. The website mentioned is the autodiscover.xml serving web site. The dialog box says “Your account was redirected to this website for settings. You should only allow settings from sources you know and trust”

I click the checkbox “Don’t ask me about this website again”.

Then I click the Cancel button. The other button is “Allow” which is specifically what I don’t want to do, ever again.

That’s the combo: “Don’t ask me about this website again” plus “Don’t allow the change”. That’s what the dialog box prompts for, and that’s what I choose, and the dialog box goes away.

And of course it’s nagging me with the same prompt an hour later. It will continue to nag me for all eternity if I have the fortitude to resist it’s nagging.

I have to wonder if somewhere in the souce code commments, someone had to add above the “Don’t ask me about this website again” checkbox “Just kidding. We don’t record or care if the user doesn’t want to be asked again. Stupid user.”

It was Microsoft who presented the checkbox. I’m just asking them to implement what they presented. But apparently they aren’t competent to do that.

I probably ought to write a WinBatch to wait for that dialog box to pop up, and automatically close it with the options I want. And having thought that, I expect that at some time soon Microsoft will offer to sell me a Windows Copilot skill, for the low low price of $1 per month, to auto-dismiss the nag they implemented. Ain’t Microsoft grand?

At Microsoft, some stupid people are in charge

I got prompt to try out the New Outlook (preview release). Sure, why not? Probably some of our clients are going to upgrade, and it would be good to know ahead of time what they will encounter.

I chose the button to “switch” and got a prompt to import the old settings. Sure, go for it. I got a progress bar as it imported.

I don’t know if Microsoft invented the progress bar; probably it was on the Apple Lisa (and before that, the Xerox Alto). The first one I ever saw was on Windows, though. They are fundamentally a good idea, and a kindness to the user. “We know this is taking a while, so here’s an estimate of how long it’s going to take, with real time updates.”

And they can be tough to do, too. The amount of time it takes to project when a thing is done isn’t necessarily known ahead of time. Just figuring how long something might take could be as long as simply doing the thing. If you have to traverse a list to find out how long the list is, and the amount of time to work on each item in the list is small, you might have been better off just working the list in the first traversal, and not bothering with the progress bar.

Turns out, the “progress bar” in the new Outlook import settings dialog box is not a progress bar at all. It’s a flag wave. It does nothing except to waste your time and try to keep your attention.

Back in the 1990’s, there was a Spanish language television show, the Xuxa Show, which used to employ people to stand in the background and slowly wave flags. That’s all they did. You could tell the flag wavers were bored. They needed to keep the flags (slowly) waving, but they brought nothing to the show except (visual) background noise. It was known that people’s attention can be grabbed by seeing movement. Since the show was aimed at children, the audience was known to have short attention spans. How to increase attention? Wave a flag.

It’s stupid, but it works.

Someone at Microsoft decided that this import settings dialog box should have a flag wave; but wait – we’ll make it even better: we’ll disguise it as a progress bar!

The flag wave kind of an insult to the audience though. You aren’t worth actual content, but we want to keep you staring at the screen, so here’s a waving flag. I also see this in a lot of news type television shows, where the camera slowly slides around or gradually zooms in. It’s like the Ken Burn’s Effect, except they attempt to be so slow that you don’t notice it consciously. When I do notice it, I’m annoyed. It’s a cheap trick and an insult.

So I’m annoyed that someone at Microsoft proposed a flag wave instead of a progress bar, and, they disguised it as a progress bar, and no-one at Microsoft has enough respect for their end users to say “stop it!”

Windows 11 first impression: it is awful

I want to have a shortcut open cmd.exe with a starting folder location. Not difficult at all in Windows 10.

In Windows 10, I could scroll through the Windows menu and find Command Prompt and then click-and-drag to make a shortcut on my desktop. Then I could modify the properties as I want.

Windows 11 doesn’t let you do this. It will launch the command prompt, and it will let you pin it to either the task bar or the start menu – but those shortcuts do not have properties you can modify. Well, one of them did, but starting folder was not a property I could set.

“Well David, how about choosing New Shortcut and following the prompt?” Okay, sure. Right-click the desktop, choose New ==> Shortcut. It asks “What item would you like to create a shortcut for?” You tell me, dimwits. Under Windows 10, I’d copy the existing shortcut and that would be defined for me already. Does your dialog box have a search function in it? No.

Great. I need to crank up a Windows 10 machine so I can find the location on that box, and on the Windows 11 box browse through arcane mysteries of %windir%\system32\

Finally, I’m getting a shortcut started, and now I need to set the starting directory. Windows 11 helpfully removed the Browse button….

I swear, it seems like whomever is in charge of Windows hates their users and are doing shit just so that the next time their annual review comes up, they can say that they did shit. Sure, it was shit that made user’s lives worse, but there isn’t a feedback mechanism for that, now is there? So that didn’t happen.

At least the icon picker still has a Browse button.

Microsoft Outlook.com is playing Catch-22 with me

My SMTP mail server is relatively new, and it took a few weeks, but Microsoft has blocked it’s IP address. The non-delivery report (NDR) says this:

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

Care to guess what gets rejected because I’m on their block list? That’s right: postmaster@live.com and postmaster@outlook.com

For what it is worth, I’m currently getting a 9.8 out of 10 on mail-tester.com: https://www.mail-tester.com/test-1dcmfmxh8

Microsoft idiocy again

Work wanted to implement Windows Hello. We got cameras, and it seems like a good idea.

First problem: during setup, it tells me I need to install Microsoft Authenticator, and leads me to the Microsoft App Store. Authenticator is only available for smartphones, and this is a laptop. Y’all couldn’t tell that?

Second problem: I click Logout, and Windows Hello logs me right back in. So, no-one during product testing considered that I might need to log out so I could log in as someone else?

Ah – my mistake was assuming Microsoft does product testing. They don’t need to test; they have 100 million users who will test for them, for free. Of course the hidden cost is that their idiocy is on full display with this scheme.

Back to Windows Hello: instead of logging out, you choose Switch User. Okay, do that. See some software on the box I don’t need. Try to un-install it.

“There are other users logged on to this computer. To properly uninstall this program, switch to and log off each user before you continue.”

Thank you for telling me to perform an impossible operation (logging off) when Windows Hello is installed.

Idiots.