Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) Is Utterly Useless

Or more precisely the reports from this product are utterly useless.

I'm trying to update a spreadsheet that's used to keep track of program migration information (may be not a brilliant idea but that's how my employer wants it).

The reports can be copied to the clipboard but...

Can I get a list of files with their version numbers, checkin user, last checked in date? No, I can get some of this information in a format that's not easily manipulated by anything really.

Can I get a list of files that I could cut and paste into a spreadsheet with out much manipulation? Kind of, but if the file names are long they get broken into two lines with the rest of the useless information about the file effectively corrupting the file name.

There's a little pop up window that shows the version with the file name but it can’t be re-sized and of course the info doesn't fit in the window making even screen dumping a non-trivial task. The content of this window can’t, as far as I can tell, be copied to the clipboard.

You can also preview the reports but they don't resemble what’s printed and a report that previews acceptably seems to only print in the left 1/3rd of the paper.

At the moment I'm using a combination of screen dumps from the main screen (which doesn’t show version numbers) for my file list and right clicking on each file to find out what the latest version number and checkin user is and typing this information into the spread sheet.

You’d have thought that something that controls versions of files might actually display the version number of the file with the file.

Also, VSS starts very slowly (minutes sometimes) and when I Googled for a fix to this I started reading about all the horror stories of VSS.

Apparently Microsoft don't use VSS for source control. I don't blame them.

The American Health Care System

I've just seen Michael Moore's new film, Sicko. I knew that the American "health care? system?" was broken but I had no idea that the health insurance companies are about as criminal as the tobacco companies. Some years ago I considered moving to the USA (from the UK). I'm glad I didn't. I moved to Australia instead.

I note that some Presidential candidates have promised to fix health insurance so that every one has it. But, that won't fix the problem because the insurance companies will just take the premiums whilst denying treatment (unless this is legislated against and I don't imagine the insurance companies would take such a thing lying down.)

As a little aside, I'm always amazed how cheaply American politicians can be bought through campaign donations. In Moore's film he mentions the donations made to politicians for what amounts to not many millions of dollars for what must be billions in benefits such as lack of regulation, low corporate taxes, poor consumer protection etc.

The table below uses figures from the World Health Organisation from a small sample of English speaking OECD countries. Even though the USA has a private, and therefore supposedly efficient health system; as opposed to an inefficient, supposedly, public system the USA actually spends more as a percentage of its GDP on health care to reach considerably less than 100% of the population. How efficient is that? I also note that a a similar proportion of government revenue is spent on the public health care system as other countries in the sample. A double whammy for your average American citizen.

English speaking OECD countries	Total expenditure on health as % of gross domestic product	General government expenditure on health as % of total government expenditure
Australia	9.6	18.5
Canada	9.8	17.1
New Zealand	8.4	18.2
United Kingdom	8.1	15.9
United States of America	15.4	18.9

A publicly funded health care system is much cheaper for the average citizen (through taxation) than rip off premiums for "insurance". Glad I live in the land of the free; freedom from fear that I'll end up a pauper if I become ill.

John Howard asks "Am I the Problem?"

No John you aren't, it's your government.

Like all political parties that have been in government for too long they look tired, stale and have long since run out of ideas. Last year John Howard looked invincible but if the Liberal party gets desperate about it's prospects for the next election John Howard will be stabbed in the back by his own party, just like Margaret Thatcher was (after a similar length of time as prime minister).

He's stayed on too long and will not go out on a high note (just about every politician that achieves high office makes this mistake). Perhaps John Howard should have done a Bob Carr or Steve Bracks (former premiers of New South Wales and Victoria respectively) and announce, out of the blue, that he's resigning and handover to Peter Costello (who seems to think he's entitled to the job.) But it's too late for that.

Enoch Powell warned "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs." He was right.

Windows Networking

Can windows computers be networked together or is it just one of those Internet myths?

I once tried to get my desktop and laptop to talk to each other. I spent hours googling, turning off fire walls, trying to follow threads on forums with conflicting advice, following steps on troubleshooting guides, using diagnostic utilities and trying to find out what the error and warning messages actually mean. All to no avail.

I even contacted Microsoft and was surprised to get a response.

In the end I bought a plug in memory stick to transfer files between my computers, they actually work.

I did eventually manage to get my laptop and desktop to talk to each other, I could even print from the laptop using the desktop's printer. But, somewhere along the line either I've inadvertently changed my network settings or installed something that did so now I'm back to square one. I'm not going through the trauma of trying to get the computers to talk to each other again.

By the way I have a FreeBSD server which I run under VMware on my desktop. I can actually log into that server from my laptop across the network but can I see my desktop Windows machine from my laptop? Well, not really. I can see the desktop in the 'Computers Near Me' window, sometimes. I used to be able to browse the desktop from the laptop by using the desktop's ip address. That doesn't work anymore.

So now I'm back to sneaker networking. That works.

Atheism and Freedom

During the past year there has been quite a backlash against religion. I'm thinking here in particular about Richard Dawkins' book 'The God Delusion' and Christopher Hitchens' book 'God is not Great'.

I've been an atheist for most of my life. And as an an atheist I'm free, free of fear (of God, fairies, Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other made up deity) and free to think for myself. I have no need waste my time attending pointless ceremonies to venerate a supernatural creator. I don't have to take the unexplained 'on faith'. I have no fear that I'll be subject to unending torture because I might have missed some pointless ceremony or been judged to have fallen short of a standard of behaviour that just about nobody will ever achieve.

Religion has been and still is used to keep people in line. There's not really much difference between Religious states, Communist states and other fascist states. The fact that Communist countries are 'godless' or atheistic is irrelevant. The object of the fascist state is pursuit of the power to control people's lives not the pursuit of atheism or religion for their own sake.

Am I a moral person? I like to think so. I obey man made laws. I like to think I treat people decently but that's not because of some 'faith' but because I'm a human who's brain has evolved this innate behaviour and whose behaviour has been learnt from his parents, teachers and peers.

Finally as an atheist I don't think that my lack of belief in a supernatural creator should be forced on anybody or that I should be able to 'prove' that a supernatural creator doesn't exist. I would ask those who think that atheists should be able to prove that God doesn't exist to prove that the Invisible Pink Unicorn or the Flying Spaghetti Monster don't exist, I'm sure they wouldn't believe such ridiculous notions.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spagetti_monster and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Pink_Unicorn