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Like most of you, I have a USB key that I store some of my portable stuff on (quite useful if you move computers – say from home to work).  I’ve found it extremely invaluable, especially when combined with PStart and RoboForm2Go.  To make my life even easier, I whipped up an autorun.inf file for my USB key that would load up PStart for me when I plugged it in to the computer (well, close to it – it initiates Windows Vista’s AutoPlay feature which shows me a “Load Start Menu” action which I click to run PStart).

However, there was one very big problem that I encountered early on – the “shellexecute” and “shell\verb\command” actions did not work very well when there were spaces in the path names.  Now, most of you would say, “well, did you quote the path names in double quotes?” – the answer is yes, I tried that.  In fact, I tried all sorts of things and found that the only way I could get it to work was by using double quotes and having to specify the drive letter.  That sucked – that meant that my portable USB key was no longer really portable, since if the drive letter wasn’t what was in my autorun.inf file, it wouldn’t run (or worse, run the wrong program).  So that solution wasn’t acceptable – I had to find a solution.
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So I was poking around my old emails today trying to locate my “Welcome” email to the Trillian Astra beta program so I could download the latest build when I came across this little jem of a thread. Unfortunately I don’t have all the correspondence… seems I decided to just keep the ending part (which was the best).
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I’ve spent the last week with a very very odd networking problem, and all my attempts at figuring it out and fixing it have yielded nothing but more questions than answers.

I first noticed the problem after having taken my network apart because I got a new Rogers VOIP cable box (Rogers Home Phone service) added, and I opted to hook it up myself so I could do a nice wiring job. I got that done and hooked everything back up just the way it was – powered on my firewall/server box, cable modem and router all hooked up just they were before. Things seemed normal until I tried to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and my browser stalled half way trying to load it up – refreshes wouldn’t help much, sometimes it would get a bit further, but it never got to loading the ActiveX part of it. Other sites were working fine though which was really confusing.

I thought maybe Windows XP was pwned or something, so I tried Vista – it worked which led me to think XP was in trouble – so I spent countless hours searching for anything – something – that I thought might be the cause. I tried fixing *everything* from network stacks, registry, hardware, drivers, WSH reinstall – you name it. Nothing worked. Then I noticed file transfers were very slow for uploads through XP and Vista, so I got to tinkering with stuff to figure that out.
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I’ve been using RoboForm2Go for a while now – started using it back when it was still called Pass2Go. I like it, it’s a decent program and works fairly well. I like how it’s data is organized and it’s a few steps ahead stuff like KeePass (though KeePass does seem to be catching up).

I did notice a problem with RoboForm’s Firefox XPI toolbar plugin however, in that when you had a “minimalistic” window open (such as view source, or a JavaScript popup that had no toolbars specified), it would still attach the RoboForm toolbar to it at the bottom, usually hiding any horizontal scroll bar the window had. Now it’s not such a big deal to just click the little close box on the toolbar so I could use the scrollbar, but it is still very annoying since I tend to use the “view source” feature quite a bit. I also know that this is very much a bug in their program or adapter because I have other toolbars in Firefox which do not exhibit this same behaviour.

So I figured I’d be nice and bug-report the problem for them to ensure they were aware of it. I was somewhat surprised however with how their support staff (William, or so he decided to call himself since his Indian name is probably not “customer friendly” or something) has decided to handle it.
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I’m sorry to say, but it’s true. The current state of most of the potentially great Linux distributions is disgusting. I don’t even know if the maintainers of the distributions are aware that they have a problem or not, but they do – and it’s a big one.

I’ve been using Linux for many, many years and I have used quite a few of the various distributions of Linux available over those years and have never been happy with any of them. I started off using Slackware about 9 years ago and just didn’t know enough about Linux back then to be aware of how much of a mess that installation was – but it was bad. After a while of upgrading the system manually (packages referred to grabbing the .tar.gz manually and reading up on how to configure and make the entire thing yourself back then), I was quickly aware of how much crap was on the system that just didn’t need to be there.
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