Feb 03 2012

The Windows Bootloader is a Steaming Pile

...of llama excrement. I have never before worked with such an insanely idiotic, badly designed, horribly broken, desperately fragile piece of software, and I've worked with LILO before.

Pray to whatever god(s) you worship if your root disk starts throwing SMART errors signaling it's taking a turn for the worse, because when you get to work actually swapping disks out, you're signing up for a road trip through a valley of insanity populated by insane Microsoft Windows developers and guarded by their demented friends in the marketing department.

Only Microsoft could devise such a devilishly incompetent boot loader mechanism, one so brittle that its own tools, designed to repair the miserable thing, mind you, routinely have to reboot the affected system several times before getting things "right." Only Microsoft could develop and sell an operating system whose boot loader, so very trivial to break even on a good day, can somehow convince it that a fully licensed installation is actually pirated.

... my Ubuntu installation remains unharmed ...

Rant completed. Carry on.

About

I'm a 35-year-old software engineer and author. I work for a small research and development company in Orlando, Florida in modeling, simulation and gaming.

I am an atheist, and a secular humanitarian. I firmly believe in the U.S. Constitution and its Amendments (including the firm conviction that its principles, especially the separation of church and state, trump any modern-day commercial, political, or religious interests). I support and prefer open source platforms, tools, and languages like Linux, LibreOffice, Eclipse, and C/C++/Python, and believe closed-source companies like Microsoft and Apple are destroying genuine innovation in computer science, at least in the United States, with constant patent trolling and litigation instead of competing on merit. I oppose software patents. I donate to worthy causes and I vote. I call people out in public for bad behavior, including displays of bigotry, racism, homophobia, and the many other flavors of hatred I find offensive.

My hobbies include photography, writing, gaming, computer science, and this little slice of the web.

Honors and Awards

  • Dean's List, Valencia College (3.5 GPA, Fall 2011)
  • Dean's List, Valencia CC (3.5 GPA, Spring 2011)
  • President's List, Valencia CC (4.0 GPA, Fall 2010)
  • ΦΘΚ Int'l Honor Society Valencia CC (Inducted Nov. 7, 2010)
  • Dean's List, Valencia CC (3.7 GPA, Summer 2010)
  • President's List, Valencia CC (4.0 GPA, Spring 2010)

Memberships

Projects and Contributions

  • LCDproc (original developer, 1999-2001, contributing developer, 2001-present)
  • PyKaraoke (contributing developer, 2005-2006)
  • SEDRIS (core team, developer, 2010 to present)

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