January 16, 2005
Adware/Spyware Uninstaller Trickery
I couldn't resist posting because this is the most absurb thing I've seen in a while. I was doing a little cleanup and removing some unused programs from my laptop. When looking through the list I see this entry called "BullsEye Network". I figure this is definitely adware so I proceed to uninstall it.
I click the uninstall button and then click "Yes" and nothing happens. I do this two or three more times before I get a little aggravated and decide to read the prompt. If you've uninstalled software in the past then I'm sure you're familiar with the "Are you sure you want...." and you click "Yes" without even thinking about it. Well read Figure 1 carefully and you'll notice that I was prompted with "Do you want to discontinue the uninstall process?".
Figure 1
This was a trip because I can't believe they try stuff like this to prevent users from uninstalling their hooptie software. I love how they act like you're going to lose all this functionality if you unistall their program. So I'm over that and proceed to the next step. I receive the prompt in Figure 2:
Figure 2
So what do I do again? I click uninstall because this process has already taken way too much of my time. I'm going to send the company a bill saying my valuable time is worth $100/hr and I've already spent 5 minutes jacking with their software. After clicking uninstall I get the prompt in Figure 3:
Figure 3
You've got to be kidding me! You mean I have to fill out a survey to remove their program, no freakin way! Do they think users are going to give legitimate feedback when trying to uninstall adware. These people are on crack and I can't believe there are people on the web attempting to build businesses around this type of software.
January 01, 2005
FlashComm Server and Fedora Core 3
I decided to take the next step and move my FlashComm install from Windows to Linux (Fedora Core 3). I wanted to be able to develop locally on Windows and use FlashComm on my remote server running FC3. Now I won't have to worry about bogging down my local machine with audio/video streams and all sorts of shared objects.
I'm writing this entry because I spent about 4 hours trying to figure out why my FC3 install was flawless but I kept getting the following error when running my application:
Connection rejected by server. Reason : [ Server.Reject ] : (_defaultRoot_, _defaultVHost_) : Application (chat) is not defined..
It turns out that my Vhost.xml file was configured incorrectly. This could be an issue with FC3 not being supported. I had to modify Vhost.xml and specify the AppsDir path (was initially empty). I added the following path to point to my applications directory:
<AppsDir>/{FCSInstallDir}/applications/</AppsDir>
I think with a proper install this would have been picked up, but it's useful information in case you'd like to change the location of your applications. The Vhost.xml file is located at:
/{FCSInstallDir}/conf/_defaultRoot_/_defaultVHost_/Vhost.xml
One last thing that I'd like to mention is that there's a -platformWarnOnly flag that you can supply to the installer script. This might solve the problem listed above but I haven't tried it. For more information on this flag click here.