Two events in the last week have convinced me that the management of Microsoft does not believe that their company has a future. The management are, it seems, the sort of grey people who took over Apple, expelled Steve Jobs, and ran the company into the ground. The first event took place at my PC in my workplace, where I was working on something delicate. Windows 10 popped up an announcement that it wanted to do an upgrade. I reset the schedule for a couple of hours hence and carried on. And then, in the middle of my work, suddenly it closed all my work and tried to reboot. Windows had ignored my request and just restarted.
Obviously some petty upgrade was way more important than my work. But imagine that I was a broker, doing a deal for a hundred million dollars? Well, my deal could wait. As far as Microsoft was concerned, their update mattered more. The second event took place in the evening, or rather over several evenings, in my hotel. While at work, I realised that I needed to write a small windows application.
I’ve not written anything for windows in a long time, but I remember how to do it. A quick Visual Basic.Net application would be quite adequate.
So I went to the Microsoft site to get the tools, and found that um you can’t download Visual Basic.Net any more. You have to download some obese monster called “Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition”.
Except you can’t download it. You can install it off the web; but you can’t keep the media locally. When you do install it, it demands to know which of a baffling array of options you want installed, nearly all of them irrelevant. Bear in mind that I want to create a tiny Windows application – the environment that Microsoft control – and I want to do it in Basic, the language they control. Surely that is the beginners’ path?
Why is it so hard? Well I found my way through the menus and installed this THREE GIGABYTE (????) environment on my laptop. Then I tried to set to work. But everything was hard. Despite a decade of experience with Microsoft tools, and knowing clearly what I wanted to do, I was quite unable to work out how to do it.
The last straw came when I wanted to embed two icons in the project. This should be trivial.
You could, with difficulty, insert icons into your project. But you couldn’t edit them. The toolbars were greyed out. Much googling later, I discovered that this was just how it was; you had to create them as external files. The only people who could possibly work with Visual Studio would be a large professional corporate software department. The individual tinkering at home is excluded.
It requires immense effort just to create a trivial application. I remember VB6 – it was easy to do this. I remember the original VB.Net – harder, but still not that hard. But now nobody new will develop for Microsoft.
It’s just too hard. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Microsoft is now run by people who do not use Windows seriously, and none of whom write software. Anybody who did either would not allow their products to get so out of shape.
But if Windows now is a relic, doomed to die – at least in the opinion of its owners – the rest of us still use it. We would like it to work, thank you. And if it is now impossible to easily develop new software for Windows, as seems to be the case, this again reinforces the feeling that the owners of Microsoft do not care. They don’t believe that any real new software will be delivered. They don’t believe in the hobbyist at home.
The hobbyist is now writing web applications, where he can run up an application with ease. I saw this week a website which mimicked Microsoft Paint! It was done in Javascript.
I guarantee it was easier to do than working with Visual Studio. But Microsoft management don’t care what the hobbyist does. They don’t give him any access. It’s sad really.
Whither the desktop computer? Posted in Tagged. This evening I’m in a hotel, as so often. I turned on my travelling laptop.
I wanted to download Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria, from Academia.edu, in order to OCR it and make the PDF searchable.
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But something was wrong. The machine kept stuttering. Eventually I got the file; and set it to OCR. And then, to my horror, a message appeared on-screen: Windows10 has silently and without my permission downloaded a huge “update” – now I understand the stuttering – and is now going to install it. That was almost two hours ago now.
Lotus Smartsuite 9.8.2 Millennium Torrent Online
These precious minutes, in which I could have done things, all gone. Microsoft decided their needs took precedence. On my computer.
This is the second time in a few weeks that I have been locked out of my own computer by an arrogant US corporation. I carry a laptop around with me so that I can work in the evening if need be. This pattern of activity means that I can’t be sure that the laptop will be available to use.
Which defeats the whole purpose of having it. I’ve had enough. This is too much. I am going to revert my travelling laptop to Windows 7, where at least I got a voice in whether downloads happened.
I gather the key is on a sticker on the underside of the machine, and media can be downloaded. But it will cost me some hours of nuisance.
But it is intolerable to be prevented from using the machine. Posted in Tagged. I’ve been looking some more at Byzantine science. My original intention was to write a series of posts on each area of science.
But I’m finding that in fact I don’t know enough about the subjects to do so. In particular knowledge of Byzantine mathematics and astronomy seems to require more knowledge of the works of Aristotle than I possess. So I will probably do no more on this. Yesterday I was looking at an English translation of a poem by al-Akhtal, the court poet of the early Ummayads, whom I wrote about. This led me to wonder how to post a poem on WordPress, which is what this blog runs on. There is no feature in the blogging platform to support the sort of alternately indented lines that a regular poem has. I found quite a number of posts asking why there is not a plugin to make this possible.
A bit of experimentation, and I developed a basic wordpress plugin with very little difficulty, that added a drop-down to the editor with a set of new and custom styles to apply to the text. A told me what a simple plugin looked like. Another told me, which I did, although I had to create a GitHub account to use it.
Finally on how to do the changes manually; which I did instead inside my plugin, adding the PHP code to the main generated plugin.php file, and sticking a css file in the root. It all sort of worked, and I.
But it just did not work to format poetry. The problem is not the plugin. The problem is that WordPress strips whitespace in a manner impossible to control. You can insert stuff in a poetic format.
But the moment you open the post in the visual editor, that format is destroyed. This is a fundamental problem with poetry in WordPress.
It can’t be fixed, unless or until the main developers address the whitespace handling issue. The only possible approach is to format it all as, which is not much of an answer and looks terrible.
Perhaps it says something about the importance of poetry in our society, that the main blogging platform for writing online makes it impossible to post verse? I need to return to translating Eutychius of Alexandria. I have a couple of books to review. My trip to Rome later this month will not now happen, after my travelling companion became ill. I read this morning that the publishing industry continues its campaign against the SciHub pirate website, through which alone normal people can access most journal articles.
Apparently a. That should certainly give China an advantage! The site itself is apparently hosted in Russia, fortunately. To finish, let me attempt to post the poem by al-Akhtal, in preformatted format, as translated by Suzanne Stetkevych. I laid it out in Notepad; but my attempt to create a preformatted block and paste it in was a complete failure. Even preformatted text is not handled well by the visual editor, it seems.
In the end I switched to text view and pasted it in there, with tags around it. This gives the following appearance: How long will it remain formatted, I wonder? Well, let’s see! Here is the complete poem, that al-Akhtal delivered before the caliph, while drunk.
Al-Akhtal's Khaffa al-Qatinu: The Nasib 1. Those that dwelt with you have left in haste, departing at evening or at dawn, Alarmed and driven out by fate's caprice, they head for distant lands.
And I, on the day fate took them off, was like one drunk On wine from Hims or Jadar that sends shivers down the spine, 3. Poured generously from a brimming wine-jar, lined with pitch and dark with age, Its clay seal broken off its mouth, 4.
A wine so strong it strikes the vital organs of the reveller, His heart, hungover, can barely sober up. I was like that, or like a man whose joints are racked with pain, Or like a man whose heart is struck by charms and amulets, Out of longing for them and yearning on the day I sent my glance after them As they journeyed in small bands on Kawkab Hill's two slopes.
They urged on their mounts, turning their backs on us, while in veiled howdahs, if you spoke softly to them, were maidens lovely as statues. They entice the tribesmen until they ensnare them, Yet they seem feeble-minded when questioned. Forget about union with beautiful women when they are sure That you are a man whom old age's blossom has demeaned! They turned away from me when my bow's stringer bent it And when my once jet-black locks turned white. They do not heed the man who calls them to fulfill his need, Nor do they set their sights upon a white-haired man.
They headed east when summer's blast had wrung the branches dry, And, except where ploughshares run, all green had withered. So the eye is troubled by tears shed for a now-distant campsite Whose folk will find it hard to ever meet again.
They are cut off, like a rope, and the eye follows after them, Between al-Shaqiq and al-Maqsim Spring, 15. Until they descended to a land on the side of a river bed Where the tribes of Shayban and Ghubar alight, 16. Until when they left behind the sandy tamarisk ground And had reached high ground, or said, 'This is the trench that Khosroes dug.' They alighted in the evening, and we turned aside our noble-bred camels: For the man in need, the time had come to journey. To a man whose gifts do not elude us, whom God has made victorious, So let him in his victory long delight! He who wades into the deep of battle, auspicious his augury, The Caliph of God through whom men pray for rain. When his soul whispers its intention to him it sends him resolutely forth, His courage and his caution like two keen blades.
In him the common weal resides, and after his assurance No peril can seduce him from his pledge. Not even the Euphrates when its tributaries pour seething into it And sweep the giant swallow-wort from its two banks into the middle of its rushing stream, 23. And the summer winds churn it until its waves Form agitated puddles on the prows of ships, 24.
Racing in a vast and mighty torrent from the mountains of Byzance Whose foothills shield them from it and divert its course, 25. Is ever more generous than he is to the supplicant Or more dazzling to the beholder's eye. They did not desist from their treachery and cunning against you Until, unknowingly, they portioned out the maysir-players' flesh.
Then whoever witholds his counsel from us And whose hand is niggardly to those beneath us 28. Will be the ransom of the Commander of the Faithful, When a fierce and glowering battle-day bares its teeth. Like a crouching lion, poised to pounce, his chest low to the ground, For a battle in which there is prey for him, 30. The Caliph advances with an army two-hundred thousand strong, The likes of which no man or jinn has ever seen. He comes to bridges which he builds and then destroys, He brands his steeds with battle-scars, above him fly banners and battle-dust, 32. Until at al-Taff they wreaked carnage, And at al-Thawiyyah where no bowstring twanged.
The tribesmen saw clearly the error of their ways, And he straightened out the smirk upon their faces. Single-handed, he assumed the burdens of the people of Iraq, Among whom he once had bestowed a store of grace and favor. In the mighty nab'-tree of Quraysh round which they gather, No other tree can top its lofty crown. It overtops the high hills, and they dwell in its roots and stem; They are the people of bounty, and, when they boast, of glory, 37. Rallying behind the truth, recoiling from foul speech, disdainful, In the face of war's calamities they stand steadfast.
If a darkening cloud casts its pall over the horizons, They have a refuge from it and a haven. God allotted to them the good fortune that made them victorious, And after theirs all other lots are small, contemptible. They do not exult in it since they are its masters; Any other tribe, were this their lot, would be exultant, vain.
Ruthless toward their foe, till they submit; In victory, the most clement of men. Those that harbor rancor toward them cannot endure their battle-wrath; When their rods are tested no flaw is found. It is they who vie with the rain-bearing wind to bring sustenance When impoverished supplicants find scant food. O Banu Umayyah, your munificence is like a widespread rain; It is perfect, unsullied by reproach. O Banu Umayyah, it was I who defended you From the men of a tribe that sheltered and aided the Prophet. I silenced the Banu Najjir's endless braying against you With poems that reached the ears of every chieftain of Ma'add, 47.
Until they submitted, smarting from my words- For words can often pierce where sword-points fail. O Banu Umayyah, I offer you sound counsel: Don't let Zufar dwell secure among you, 49. But take him as an enemy, for what you see of him And what lies hid within is all corruption.
For in the end you'll meet with ancient rancor: Like mange, it lies latent for awhile only to break out once more. The poem grows on you, as you read it. The caliph was well pleased, as. 1 Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “ Umayyad Panegyric and the Poetics of Islamic Hegemony: al-Akhṭal’s “Khaffa al-Qaṭīnu” (“Those That Dwelt with You Have Left in Haste”) “, Journal of Arabic Literature 28 (1997), pp.
Posted in Tagged,. A beautiful morning, I have just got up, and already I hate Microsoft. That’s because part of my routine is to turn on my laptop and look at my email.
This I did and it wouldn’t let me in. I don’t have a password on my laptop; it never leaves my house, and only I use it. But yesterday I installed some software via the Windows Store – a first – and it made me login with my “Microsoft account”, and then reset the password, and a load of other nonsense.
Then Apple made me do the same. I did my task and thought no more about it. This morning I discover that Windows silently applied that “Microsoft Account”, not to the Windows Store as the display suggested, but to my entire computer. And that is why I was presented with a demand for a password. Of course I don’t know it – it’s a junk password. I don’t.want.
to login to my PC using that account. So I requested shutdown, to see if I might get the option to “login as another user”. What I got was “we are installing an upgrade”. Very very slowly. They’re still doing it. Almost half an hour later, it’s “working on updates 15%”. I’d like my breakfast, please, but Microsoft have forced me this morning – twice – to fight with their software.
I’m typing this from a backup laptop. I’ve found easily some Google results that suggest I can get rid of the unwanted account from my PC. I imagine that an hour’s work will undo the havoc: an hour of my life gone, simply because of corporate arrogance.
Is it too much to ask, Microsoft, that you ask me before you screw up my morning? UPDATE: An hour and a half after I first guilelessly wandered into my study, things seem to be back to normal. I’ve returned the PC to use a local account. In the process I found that Microsoft decided that I wanted to use tapping on my touchpad, so I had to work out where that was and disable it. Then, when I restarted, it didn’t go to the desktop, but sat, displaying some pretty landscape picture – yes, they’d decided, silently, to force display of a picture on the “lock screen”.
I disabled that too. Amusingly they also fiddled with my taskbar. I don’t use Edge – does anyone? – so I put Internet Explorer as the left-most icon.
Microsoft primly moved Edge back to the prime position, and moved IE two along. We need legislation. This is a lovely morning, and half of it is gone, and I have no redress, purely because of arrogance by someone whom I have never heard of.
Posted in Tagged. Where have all the atheist forums ( sic) gone? I was reading Twitter earlier this evening, and did a search on “atheism”. I found some stale jeering, a few self-important or foolish tweets; and a mass of muslim propaganda. If ever I saw an area dying for lack of participants, it was this. This made me think of the atheist discussion groups of yesteryear.
First before all others, there was usenet. I remember alt.atheism, where you could get a good fight, if not much common sense. There were other usenet groups where interesting discussion might be had. Often the baby atheists would trot out some outlandish historical claims, culled from some ignorant or mendacious source, in the belief that few would know better. It was a real pleasure to track these claims down. It provided stimulus. Then there was the Internet Infidels forum, which morphed into Freeratio.org, whose BC&H forum had quite a bit of useful historical stuff.
Dirtier, and pretty irrational, was TalkRational. A strange US atheist called Sam Harris had his forum, with some of the dimmest followers that I ever met.
Acharya S had her forum, although you never quite knew how many of the “posters” were actually her in disguise! Richard Dawkins had a bunch of discussion groups on his website.
Yet today all of these are gone. Usenet was first to go, as people stopped using usenet clients and relied on DejaNews website, which was replaced by Google Groups, and then discreetly rendered useless. I suspect that some of the Google hierarchs prefer that the antics of their younger days are no longer accessible, in these intolerant days. Internet Infidels spun off their forums, which were eventually taken over by some strange woman who picked fights with the regulars and then closed the whole thing down, for no apparent reason. Acharya S is dead.
Dawkins closed down his forums. TalkRational has gone.
And, as I found today, the atheists don’t really use Twitter that much any more. I never found Theology Web that interesting, but I wandered over and it was still there. But I could find nothing of interest. In fact it has been so long since I visited that they have deleted my user account. So where do they go to, the people, as Peter Sarstedt might have sung? The cranks, the atheists, and so on?
Truly I do not know. But something has passed from the web, that was interesting and useful, and a valuable stimulus for work. Posted in Tagged. Paypal is pretty much the only game in town for online payments.
But as with every monopoly, that causes poor customer service. I needed to pay a translator yesterday, but I fumbled. I entered the wrong password three times. When I did manage to log in, I entered the details of my payment – to someone that I have paid many times before – and got the unhelpful message: We’re sorry, but we can’t send your payment right now. Which means nothing.
After several attempts, I contacted Paypal customer service via the link – and got back a form letter which told me nothing. I responded to that and never heard anything more. Poor service indeed. But 24 hours later, I tried again and it worked!
It seems that Paypal lock the account for certain transfers for 24 hours, after which you can try again. But they don’t tell you this! I suppose it helps reduce their losses from fraud. But it’s bad luck for anyone who urgently needs to send money. Effectively Paypal becomes unreliable. I wish one of the big banks would roll out some competition for them; really I do. It is much the best way to send money overseas.
Posted in Tagged. A correspondent has sent me a link to a dissertation, which, he assures me, it is possible to download as a PDF.
Unfortunately his email was vague as to how, and I simply can’t work it out. It’s presented in some obscure online viewer software, which, to my eye, simply doesn’t have a download option. Can anyone work out how to download the blasted thing?
I am reminded of the curse in The Dying Earth, “May Kraan hold his living brain in acid”. That summarises how I feel about all these pieces of useless “viewer” software. I merely wish that the authors of such viewers be forced to use their own frustrating creations! Posted in Tagged. In my post, I discussed what I did with some files from the early 90s, that I found archived on my PC, and how I got them into a modern file format.
Some of the files were in.drw format. These were produced by a long-vanished DOS-based drawing package, Lotus Freelance Graphics. I read online that Lotus SmartSuite 9.8.2 Millennium – itself long vanished – should be able to open them, and save the results to PowerPoint.
Copies of SmartSuite are available on eBay, so I ordered one, and it arrived yesterday. I popped the CD into my PC, and ran the installer. I marked every part of it, other than Lotus Freelance Graphics, as “do not install”. Freelance installed fine on Windows 7 (64-bit), and started fine. I then tried to open some.drw files, and found that it would not play. But the same site advised me: I can open a DRW file and store it in another format (like PowerPoint 97 or one of the many alternatives).
I installed Freelance only from SmartSuite 9.8 on a Window 7 PC, no problem. Open the DRW file in a blank page, use ‘save as’ to convert. And that’s the trick.
You will probably wish to avoid this by setting a user preference: File User Setup Freelance Properties Skip the startup dialogs and bring up a blank page with no look. Note also that the “blank page” will be in landscape, whereas you probably want portrait (since that was the Freelance for DOS default). This is File Page Setup Portrait.
I have yet to discover how to change this by default; or how to fiddle with the page size either. Once you have a blank page open in Freelance, then when you do File Open you get a long list of file types. There are two.drw imports – use the Freelance one at the bottom!
Here using keyboard shortcuts will speed things up quite a bit – e.g. Tab, Down arrow, End, Up arrow, to choose files! It is very clunky doing the imports, I must say. Also I get a warning: Lotus Freelance Graphics – import warning for Freelance for DOS files “Freelance Graphics cannot duplicate the colors that were used when this file was saved.” Which is impenetrable. And “the device that the file was saved for”? But then, in the days of DOS, when printer drivers were the responsibility of the application, not the operating system, you got extreme coupling like this. What device is involved I don’t know, of course.
Probably some long forgotten screen or printer. Anyway if you OK that, you get your diagram imported. Mine all seem to be black and white, but I hazily remember that this was the case back then. It was a marvel, in 1988, to be able to draw at all on a PC! So this strategy does work.
For most of the files, anyway. A few simply were blank. This may be fixable, tho. In one case, it was blank if I imported into a landscape page, but when I saved it anyway to PPT, a load of text was scrunched up at the top of the page. So I tried again, imported it to a portrait page, and it worked fine. One problem that I encountered was where bitmap files had been imported.
Even when these were in the same directory, Freelance refused to find them. I’m unclear how to fix this. I wouldn’t try to do new work with Lotus Freelance Graphics, tho. After a while, “f32main.exe” started to crash when I saved as.ppt. Why this happened I don’t know, but no doubt has something to do with being a very old piece of software. We can do rescue stuff only. About to reboot.
Hope that fixes it! UPDATE: It didn’t. But I found that if I saved a few files as.jpg instead, then turned back to.ppt, it worked. Posted in Tagged.
Contents. Status SmartSuite is in, and supported with fixes and fixpacks on and. SmartSuite is not officially supported by IBM on versions of Windows after XP, but it does work well on both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista and of Windows 7, if the installer and applications are run with XP compatibility mode set for the executable files. IBM has no plans to release an official Windows 7-compatible version of SmartSuite. In 2007, IBM introduced a new office suite called, unrelated to the integrated application suite that Lotus previously released. In July 2012 the price for a user licence of Lotus SmartSuite 9.8 was US-$342.00 when purchased directly through the IBM website. In May 2013, IBM announced the withdrawal of SmartSuite.
Marketing of the product ended in June 2013, followed by all support ceasing in September 2014. IBM has also announced that there will be no replacement for SmartSuite.