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nray's comments

nray | 1 year ago | on: New MacBook Setup

And the bar icons ... in the end I just bought Bartender to cope with the notch.

nray | 1 year ago | on: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

In my experience large Microsoft customers deployed applications with SCCM, now perhaps moving to Intune. Distributing MSIs via group policy is fairly primitive compared to what endpoint management platforms can offer.

But my point was that large commercial installer kits were always required to produce MSIs, in the absence of something like the WiX Toolset.

nray | 1 year ago | on: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

I'm wondering how much of the frustration in the comments here is due as much to the arcane design of the Windows Installer format as to shortfalls in WiX and its documentation. I would say that you need a good understanding of MSI databases before trying to use WiX, which implies thinking about the installer while developing the app, which was the goal of the toolkit.

Packaging can be hard on any platform but Microsoft really outdid itsself with MSI. If you already have a finished product and just need to package it then NSIS or Inno were much simpler to pick up.

Many products are released as MSI files because that's what enterprise deployment tooling supported, but inside is a setup executable, which defeats the entire transactional rollback design of the thing.

nray | 1 year ago | on: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

When Microsoft launched the (let's face it, baroque) complexity that is Windows Installer (MSI), we didn't get the WiX Toolset, instead we got an expensive proprietary profiling tool for capturing before/after snapshots, and an entry-level version bundled on the Windows 2000 CD which didn't really solve anybody's problem. No suprises then that the MSI format didn't immediately take over, and Microsoft would presume all the way to Intune that their customers were deploying MSI packages when mostly we weren't.

I always wondered what would have happened if the WiX Toolset had been available from the start, and I like to compare the more organic success of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) being more open and hackable as an example. I guess the time just wasn't right.

nray | 2 years ago | on: Reconstructing Obsidian Features in Vim and Bash

Isn't the licensing an issue? As far as I can tell you can't use Obsidian at your workplace without an annual commercial license, which is fair enough but maybe too heavy a lift for many.

nray | 2 years ago | on: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

You'll care about it if you can't pay for you coffee at Starbucks or whatever. I'm not if there is overlap between Oracle's public cloud and their own hosted services, but a lot of hospitality runs on Oracle (formerly Micros Fidelio) Simphony, and they are moving their customers from on-prem to Oracle Cloud.

nray | 4 years ago | on: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

The JRE security horrorshow might have started before the Oracle aquisition, and we wanted rid of java on the desktop for the same reason we wanted rid of flash. Apple used to advertise that only Windows suffered from viruses until their own unpatched JRE was exploited widely. Oracle contributed by making updates burdensome to download, and now unavailable without a support agreement, but what stopped java GUI apps from succeeding is at least partly the truly endless stream of remote code execution vulns if the JRE was available to the browser.

nray | 5 years ago | on: John Peel Sessions

In New Zealand as a young teen you had to wait until midnight before pop radio was turned over to one of Peel-inspired DJs until five in the morning, playing all this plus Aussie and Kiwi music. Sometimes it was easier to leave a C-90 taping and see what you got the next day. The Fall, The Birthday Party, Hunters & Collectors, Cabaret Voltaire

nray | 5 years ago | on: WinUI – The modern native UI platform of Windows

I assume it's going to ignore the system-wide autocorrect settings, and lack any option to disable spellcheck, which is one more reason to use the web version. With Teams I just rename "node-spellchkr.OFF" each time it updates.

nray | 6 years ago | on: Sudo vulnerability

> Windows gets this right.

_If_ you turn it all the way up. The default setting "3" allows certain "approved" apps to be launched without the UAC prompt, based on what's in their manifest I think. Turn it up to "4" and it works as expected.

If you're looking for a quick way to elevate the Explorer shell, run `hh \` (the Html Help viewer) from an elevated prompt.

nray | 6 years ago | on: Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

Where did Epstein's money come from? He claimed to be a hedge fund manager for select clients, however in the aftermath of his rearrest after the Miami Herald series there were comments from Wall Street people that there was little evidence of how he actually made so much money. Pure speculation, but the original source of Epstein's donations might also prove a problem.

nray | 7 years ago | on: Heat Pumps Work Miracles

Homes are heated with communal hot water, wood gassification (pellet burners), heat exchange with the ground or deeper bore-holes, or electricity. Not much gas, heating oil was gone by the 80's sometime.

nray | 7 years ago | on: Heat Pumps Work Miracles

Many Swedish suburbs are supplied with communal hot water for heating (fjärrvärme) produced by burning non-recyclable rubbish or maybe a local factory. The last stage of houses built near us was so thermally efficient that the supplier refused to extend the heating network, as there was not enough consumption to generate a profit. When I lived in New Zealand I could see my breath indoors in the winter. Insulation? I'm a convert.
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