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Mac VS Windows
Jun. 2nd, 2009 01:02 pmWhat am I doing right now? I'm not doing my project at work. No. I'm fighting with Windows and after several hours, screw it. I'm bitching about Windows too. Feel free to skip this post. I just need to vent a little frustration.
So.. Where to begin? Our software runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows. For a variety of reasons I do nearly all of my development on Linux followed by Mac. (I'm more familiar with the tools and we have more distributed build hosts for Linux and Mac. Not to mention SSH keys are easier to configure and more friendly, svn checkouts are about 1000x faster than Windows, and so on. Windows is just crap slow to work on)
So... Anyhow... I generally work out my code, then send it to parabuild which does builds of it for all three platforms. If one of the platforms doesn't like something (they all have their own pet peeves) then I go and fix it. Generally I can do this without even needing to copy my branch to another machine, but now this time. I was forced to boot into Windows for the first time in six months.
So... After an hour of service pack updates and virus scanner updates and renewing licenses for virus checkers and other crap that you don't need on decent platforms, I finally get to where I can work... Except we've upgraded C compilers in the past six months and this requires I update a bunch of stuff.
Now on Mac or Linux, the C++ compiler is free and it ends up under the automatic system update stuff, so you have to do nothing to get it updated. On Windows, it's an entirely different product, meaning it must be installed and configured more or less from scratch. Better yet, if you're using any odd SDKs, odds are they'll be broken and you'll be spending a few hours updating those too.
Now... I'm at a Satellite office and that means for our site license, some of the disks aren't here, they're on a central server which takes about a half hour to pull 2G of data from. The files are just written there are .iso disk images.
My first bit of fun came from Windows crappiness in the form of not being able to detect writable DVDs in the DVD-R drive. This drive works fine in linux on the same machine. It could read already-created disks. It could not write to them (and no, it isn't a +r drive)
Apparently you can purchase an app called 'PhantomDisk' for windows which mounts ISO files as a virtual drive, but guess what Microsoft installers won't let you do? Go on. Guess. So... After an hour of pulling my hair out with the drive. Screw it. I send the .iso file over to my mac (which, since Windows seems to be unable to see the Samba served spot I created for it, I eventually end up using FTP with the raw IP address)
On the mac, double-clicking a .iso file mounts it as a virtual drive or I can throw in a blank CD, mount it with disk utility, point it at the iso file, and burn it, which is what I do.
Next, there are the service packs for Visual Studio. Since I'm not eager to spend more time burning CDs, I foolishly try loading them from MicroSoft's website. Microsoft Visual Studio SDKs require that you turn off your firewall and various other things and put your computer in "PLEASE RAPE ME" mode on the outside internet. Their website also ONLY lets you do installs from it if you're using Internet Explore $CURRENT_VERSION. Awesome.
So... 5 hours in and I'm still not working on the code I planned to be working on at 8 this morning. Why are people still using this piece of shit OS again?
So.. Where to begin? Our software runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows. For a variety of reasons I do nearly all of my development on Linux followed by Mac. (I'm more familiar with the tools and we have more distributed build hosts for Linux and Mac. Not to mention SSH keys are easier to configure and more friendly, svn checkouts are about 1000x faster than Windows, and so on. Windows is just crap slow to work on)
So... Anyhow... I generally work out my code, then send it to parabuild which does builds of it for all three platforms. If one of the platforms doesn't like something (they all have their own pet peeves) then I go and fix it. Generally I can do this without even needing to copy my branch to another machine, but now this time. I was forced to boot into Windows for the first time in six months.
So... After an hour of service pack updates and virus scanner updates and renewing licenses for virus checkers and other crap that you don't need on decent platforms, I finally get to where I can work... Except we've upgraded C compilers in the past six months and this requires I update a bunch of stuff.
Now on Mac or Linux, the C++ compiler is free and it ends up under the automatic system update stuff, so you have to do nothing to get it updated. On Windows, it's an entirely different product, meaning it must be installed and configured more or less from scratch. Better yet, if you're using any odd SDKs, odds are they'll be broken and you'll be spending a few hours updating those too.
Now... I'm at a Satellite office and that means for our site license, some of the disks aren't here, they're on a central server which takes about a half hour to pull 2G of data from. The files are just written there are .iso disk images.
My first bit of fun came from Windows crappiness in the form of not being able to detect writable DVDs in the DVD-R drive. This drive works fine in linux on the same machine. It could read already-created disks. It could not write to them (and no, it isn't a +r drive)
Apparently you can purchase an app called 'PhantomDisk' for windows which mounts ISO files as a virtual drive, but guess what Microsoft installers won't let you do? Go on. Guess. So... After an hour of pulling my hair out with the drive. Screw it. I send the .iso file over to my mac (which, since Windows seems to be unable to see the Samba served spot I created for it, I eventually end up using FTP with the raw IP address)
On the mac, double-clicking a .iso file mounts it as a virtual drive or I can throw in a blank CD, mount it with disk utility, point it at the iso file, and burn it, which is what I do.
Next, there are the service packs for Visual Studio. Since I'm not eager to spend more time burning CDs, I foolishly try loading them from MicroSoft's website. Microsoft Visual Studio SDKs require that you turn off your firewall and various other things and put your computer in "PLEASE RAPE ME" mode on the outside internet. Their website also ONLY lets you do installs from it if you're using Internet Explore $CURRENT_VERSION. Awesome.
So... 5 hours in and I'm still not working on the code I planned to be working on at 8 this morning. Why are people still using this piece of shit OS again?
