Sunday, February 24, 2008

Problems uninstalling VS 2003?

Recently I was just trying to get rid of some apps I would not use any more. I found out that I still have VS 2003 installed. VS and MSDN takes about 3GB of space so I almost immediately launech "Add Remove Programs" and clicked "Remove". As for my surprise VS did not want to unistall. It just showed me again the dialog box where I could choose which features I would like to install. I repeated procedure several times, but nothing changed. In the act of desperation, I just deselected everything and clicked "install". Then (just at the very begging of installation) clicked "cancel", and started the procedure again from clicking "remove" in "Add Remove Programs". And... it worked.

One thing that struck my mind is that installing / uninstalling applications is still a pain. If you are to install / uninstall several applications... you are to waste some time sitting in front of your PC and waiting for any actions you should take. Why there is no possibility to choose many apps to deinstall? Why is it still so hard to install several apps one after another? Why can't you just have the possibility to "batch" installation processes? Why nobody though of making installers able to read some "setup configuration" (so that you could specify some basic options for installation like: destination folder, type of installation: full / minimal - custom will need of course your assistance...). PC hardware and OS'es changed a lot in recent years, but maintaining your software is still not as painful as it should be. When will we see new better setup technology? Will we see it at all?

Saturday, February 09, 2008

GMail coloured labels hack

A while ago Google announced that their GMail accounts offer label coloring (you may define color for every label you've created). I checked it immediately after I had heard about it. It worked, and I really like this feature. But some of my friends were unable to use it. Their GMail just did not have any label-palete that is used to define labels colors. The thing just drove me crazy. I did not know what was the reason of such a behaviour of Google's mail service. I thought that it takes time to migrate all account, but... I just found a solution ;) It appears that you have to change language of your GMail account into English-US. I've tried it and it works! So... if you would like to use coloured labels - try to set language into 'English-US'. It should work for you (unless your account is not migrated... ;)