A programmer’s paranoia

It’s a lot of time I do not touch a windows box. I never have gone beyond the sp1. This does not mean that I’ve stopped years ago, it does mean that I never installed system core components from the day the sp1 was published. Well in the last 9 months I’ve touched my windows box only for playing a bit Chaos Legion. Today a friend of my dad bring me his computer (with XP) asking me to fix it. I was pretty astonished.

There was. A lot. Of useless shit. I’m not speaking of all the porn movies he has illegally downloaded. Nor I am speaking of all the browser bar, add-on and installed components of internet explorer. I’m speaking of the shits circulating on our times.

For example his antivirus (no name provided), his anti-dialer (he use an analog connection) and other programs like that continually prompt useless and insistent messages from the tray-bar on the right bottom of the screen.

It seems that there is also a new menace (scary) on the windows world. The root-kit. I have not investigated a lot cause I do not want to be infected for too long time. Basically speaking if someone creates a registry-key with some wild-cards like “*” then regedit.exe cannot find that key and eventually delete it. I have no words that could describe this hilarious situation.

But the real thing I want to discuss is the ati driver control center. First time I saw that panel I’ve done some research over the net in order to dissipate all that scary thoughts that where circulating on my mind.

Yes. It is done in .NET. Yes you can change the skin of the panel. First of all: why in hell a core component, an interface that query a driver have been done in .NET? Secondly: why in hell this interface has a skin that can be personalized?

I can answer with a little story. They hire some new fresh graduated programmers/artists. The programmers are newbie and don’t know how to use a real language like c++. The artist are newbie and cannot create fresh rendermonkey example shaders. Put those two things together and you have the new shiny control panel.

But wait. The .NET environment is safer. Garbage collected. And today I feel so blue. I can choose the blue theme. It’s good that the control center is what it is. I use it everyday. I think that I can open it 2^16 times and every single time I change a lot of graphic driver settings. It’s a good thing that the control center run in .NET and that it has a mutable interface. Oh my God.

Anyway I hope that windows vista has solved the problems that affect windows from 1995. I do not want to check if it’s true. Mac OSX, Debian sarge and nextSTEP just make me sleep with a smile stamped on my face.