The market has matured and plateaued. I knew there would be a business buying fall off for about 5 years after 2000 as people spent several years worth of hardware budgets to avoid problems. There just hasn’t been any reason to buy something new since then. Things are incrementally better, but there hasn’t been any great new thing that you had to have.

Your problem with Stella’s router sounds like what was happening to my brother with my router. I know we worked it out in software, but I don’t remember if we changed the router settings or his settings. That may have been when I switched to MAC on the router, or he may have tweaked his addressing settings. It was too long ago.

I believe I’ve read that MS has revised the way Windows installs apps that come with their own DLLs so that each app has its own space that it checks first before it looks in windows\system for a DLL. This avoids my 1997 problem, at the cost of apps’ not sharing DLLs on disk or in RAM… a small price to pay in this day and age.

Just using naming conventions would help, i.e. unique names for an individual’s modules.

While I didn’t upgrade to SP3 based on the EULA, the client had to back it out because it wouldn’t work with their network. [Linksys – who doesn’t work with fricking Linksys?! It may be a firmware problem with the router, but this client should not be allowed near a firmware writer.]

Back to topic… with Win XP SP3 and Firefox 3.0.3 (IEview is the only extension I use), I have no crashes while viewing your site.

OTOH, SP3 on a laptop messes up WiFi with certain pairs of WiFi cards and routers… e.g., my laptop works with my router, but not (damn it) with Stella’s. This problem is widely acknowledged on the boards, but none of the suggested fixes remedies the problem in my case.

=====

(With a deep but not solemn bow to Ogden Nash…)

A Version Therapy

You’re a programmer, and you’ve just written this
   wonderful application and alpha-tested it
   and created an installation which carefully
   checks the version of each and every component,
And you install the application on a user’s machine
   and are overjoyed when it works and feel certain
   it will work forever and ever, but it wonent,
Because some application the user installs later
   was created by a bunch of idiots on whose parentage
   you may rightly cast aspersion,
And their application used components of the same name,
   and their installation blithely neglected to check
   of each control the version,
So without checking, they overwrote your newer component
   with their older,
After which their application works wonderfully well,
   and yours suddenly will not even load to the point of
   displaying the splash screen, and your user assumes that
   because their application works and yours doesn’t, you are
   at fault, and they may as well uninstall your application
   and delete the whole folder,
Because every component-based application depends on having
   of each control a sufficiently new version,
And when you get the call, you know exactly what
   has happened, and at that instant you to murder
   have no aversion,
Because the bloke who wrote the other installation
   didn’t with his fellow developers cooperate,
And your only recourse is to be sure that for
   the time you spend on this idiocy, you bill
   your complaining client at the proper rate,
Nevertheless, this devil-may-care behavior by the other
   developer just kills your soul,
And also your application, as both it and you
   suffer a loss of control.

— Steve Bates
   1/2/1997

I hear you, Kryten. It’s like the old days when every new program on a DOS machine played with the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to optimize its performance without regard to anything else. As a group we programmers are an egotistical lot, believing that whatever we write is the most important thing on anyone’s machine, so all of out decisions are the right ones.

I found another reason I had FF crash was after an automated extension update which suddenly made it incompatible with another one. That’s a regular annoyance! So, I update manually, one by one / day now. That way, if I get problems, I know which is the culprit!

Ahhhh… the pain of using Windoze for Dev work! LOL

I just had a hell of a time getting Python/mod_python/spyce running on my Windoze dev system. It killed apache until I edited a couple scripts ind .ini files. Now I’m having trouble getting Vtiger CRM to play nice with Joomla! 1.5. I’ll get it in the end! 😉 One way or another… LOL I suspect it’s incompatible versions of SQLite (used by Apache/PHP/Python/Vtiger/Perl… etc!) They were all different… so I’ve now standardised on one version. So far… so good! LOL

*sigh* As if there’s not enough problems just making code work! 😉

/rant