Microsoft has launched the 2 millionth web portal where I can get the same useless stuff I don’t really want. But wait, there’s more…see http://ideas.live.com/.

Now I am confused. Where does Microsoft want me to go today? To live.com or start.com. Maybe I won’t go to any of them.

If you buy a copy-protected CD, beware…you may unknowingly bring some unwelcome guests on your computer.

Like many other ASP.Net developers, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the final VS.Net 2005, SQL 2005 and ASP.Net 2 bits off the MSDN site. This past weekend, after what seemed like an eternity, I managed to get the 4GB+ DVD images downloaded. Knowing that the installation programs would want a clean slate, I first uninstalled everything, including .Net 2 beta.

I then proceeded to install the release version of .Net 2 (small download) just to test some apps that I have sitting around. Everything worked as expected. Great!

When my downloads were finally completed, I proceeded to install VS.Net 2005. The install program complained right away that the old bits need to be uninstalled. And it was right…I had missed the Document Explorer. Click – click – click…it’s uninstalled. Nope…that didn’t do it. Still complaining about something.

I couldn’t figure it out and finally decided to take a shot in the dark and uninstall .Net 2 Release version. That did it!

Now, I may be exaggerating, but that is just INSANE. To require uninstallation of the .Net framework (release version) to get VS.Net 2005 installed is just plain stupid.

Microsoft needs to fix this, and while they are at it, can we dispense with installation programs altogether. With all the talented engineers on Microsoft’s payroll, isn’t there a small team that can replicate what has been available on the Mac for two decades now…just copy (or XCopy in Winspeak) files and you are done. Microsoft should stop trying to impress us with spiffy U.I.’s and focus on getting the basics right first. 

I want to be able to copy a folder containing an app’s files from a CD or DVD onto my computer and have the application work without sitting through five minutes of progress bar hell. (And don’t even get me started on app restarts and system reboots.)

So Scoble and whoever else at Microsoft is listening…for the love of God…fix this!!! Free us from installation and progress bar hell.

Maybe we should add up all the time people worldwide have spent staring at progress bars for the last decade and send Microsoft a bill. Let’s see, if 50 million people each spent two hours waiting on app installations in the past decade and the average hourly rate is $25/hour, that’s a cool $2.5 billion. Spend even 1/1000th of that and the problem can be solved.

If Microsoft’s engineers were forced to evaluate features in terms of productivity dollars, Windows would be a very different beast. Too bad for us that user productivity is only a marketing mantra at Microsoft.

In the past few weeks, I have had multiple people email me that my blog was no longer working. The behavior described is that the browser would hang forever on the page. I believed them, but could not reproduce the problem. No matter which system I typed in the URL from, it worked. Quite puzzling.

The mystery continued until today, when I got multiple such emails and I finally decided I have to do something about it. Through the process of elimination, I was able to figure out that the problem occurred only when a link from another web page is used to access the blog (or from a bookmark). I was never seeing the problem because my test case was to type in the URL. Having figured out when the problem occurs, the general reason for the problem was obvious, but not a specific one. Since the problem only occurred through a link, it pointed to a referral tracking/logging issue.

Digging around, I chanced upon this post in Scott Hanselman’s blog. The problem occurs if DasBlog’s “Movable Type Blacklist” setting is enabled. Turns out that not very long ago, Jay Allen, who maintains the MT Blacklist that DasBlog refers to at startup, has started banning IP addresses, but returns a valid HTML document with comments instead of an HTTP 302. This causes issues with DasBlog’s referral logic and prevents the page from loading.

Glad I got this one figured out…it was driving me nuts.

Not sure if this is a good idea or another candidate for “USB Devices Gone Wild”:

http://customusb.com/images/access-warm.jpg