Angle Brackets Uber Alles

Extensible Programming for the 21st Century by Gregory Wilson. Has a lot in common with intentions, generative programming, abstraction, etc. If you read it, you'll see where I'm going with this. At a basic level, some of the things he talks about seem to me to be things you can do or should be able to do with systems like CodeDOM, though I admit to not having played very much with CodeDOM yet.

Model Citizens

Mike Salisbury, QA & Support Manager at Quantrix got back to me after my rant about updating Quantrix Modeler yesterday and was very helpful making my trial 1.1 copy usable again. I say this because I want to be clear that the company is very responsive, and he apologized for the problems I experienced. I think there's room for improvement, and generally think serial numbers, software keys, hardware tokens, and other "anti-piracy" methods are a complete waste of time and massive user hassle, but at least Mike took the time to make things right. Thanks Mike.

Lessons in Software Failrures: Installing and Updating

Today was a hectic day at work; I'm still at the office, but only until these ISO images finish downloading. I installed some software I had been meaning to get on my laptop today, including Microsoft Project and Microsoft OneNote. I also noticed that a software product I'm evaluating, Quantrix Modeler, had an update on May 8th, and so updated it as well. While all three included some amount of pain, the Quantrix Modeler update, from a 1.0 trial version to a 1.1 trial version, is so annoying that I'm considering just cutting the evaluation short and moving on. I realize it's a new product and that Quantrix is a small company, but the update was entirely too hostile.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that I downloaded a trial copy of Quantrix Modeler 1.0 about seven days ago. It was a monolithic executable, packaged with InstallAnywhere, and was relatively painless as those kinds of installs go. Quantrix also uses InstallAnywhere to manage updates. I logged in to Quantrix's online forum today just to poke around at the documentation and noticed that the 1.1 update had been released. The relevant page with update information gave instructions, which basically asked me to launch Quantrix Modeler, use a drop-down menu item to have it check for updates, and then confirm that I wanted it to update itself when I exited the program. So I did all that, exited, and InstallAnywhere did its thing. However, when I launched the new 1.1 version, the splash screen said that my trial period had expired, and prompted me for either Internet or telephone based reigistration.

Huh? What? My trial period isn't over, unless the 1.1 update changed the terms of the trial license. What the hell? I didn't need a software key to install the 1.0 trial, why would I need one now? Why didn't the update functionality just preserve my 23 remaining trial days, at the very least?

I submit to this punishment and go back to the Quantrix website and try to figure out how to get a trial key. Seems you can only get a trial key, which, again, I didn't need seven days ago for a minor point revision before this release, if you download the 30 MB installer all over again. Then the system will email you one. Joy. I start the download and obsessively hit "Check" in my email client to wait for the key to come in; as soon as it does, I kill the download and delete the partially completed file. I launch Quantrix Modeler again, and attempt to enter in my key via the phone option, on the off chance this won't require some painful Internet-based intervention. Of course, it wants both a serial key and an activation key, and the later I can only get if I call Quantrix in Maine with some other string of numbers and digits that they give me when I put the trial serial key they emailed me into the dialog box.

It gets better; in the email they sent me with the trial key, it mentions:

NOTE: Our records indicate that this serial number was provided for an
earlier trial download. If you already activated your earlier trial, then
you will be unable to use this serial number to activate another trial. If
you would like to receive an additional serial number for your trial
version, please contact Quantrix Customer Service at ###.###.####.

That's just priceless. I never did get this serial number at any time in the past. I never needed it.

I thought about posting last week on Quantrix Modeler because it looked really neat: I was looking around for something more powerful than Excel that had a Lotus Improv-like nature. Quantrix was originally built for NextStep; it's now in Java and sports a native XML file format, Excel and Improv import functionality, and other cool things, but to be honest, I haven't had any time to try them out, let alone see if it's what I want going forward with the project I had in mind for it, and this whole update nonsense has really irked me. Quantrix, if you're listening, please fix these problems as soon as possible. Nothing is more annoying than over-zealous copy protection schemes, especially with a trial version.