Another mark of leadership from Edwards

TPMCafe's Election Central is reporting that John Edwards will refuse to participate in a debate co-sponsored by Fox News and the Congressional Black Caucus. He will participate in another CBC debate broadcast on CNN. Good for him. Sure, he doesn't want to alienate black voters, but he sees it as a no-win situation to appear on a channel that is a Republican propaganda organ. The campaign said:

"...we believe there's just no reason for Democrats to give Fox a platform to advance the right-wing agenda while pretending they're objective. If there was any uncertainty as to Fox's objectivity, it was put to rest when they attacked Democratic candidates, Democratic constituency groups, and the Nevada Democratic party when their last proposed debate was cancelled for lack of support."

Let's hope that this signals the start of a widespread move by all the candidates to show some backbone and refuse to be complicit in Fox News' smears.

This stupid stuff doesn't happen on a Mac

I've got Windows Vista installed on my MacBook via Boot Camp. I also have Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux available via Parallels. That way I can use the MacBook to take screenshots for books for just about any OS I might care about, though it still amuses me that I have four different operating systems on one machine.

I installed a Program that Shall Remain Nameless (because of my beta NDA) onto the Mac and the Vista partition last week. The DVD, which had worked perfectly well on the Mac side (I'd just used it to install the program on OS X), was acting weird on the Vista side, having problems reading. But after a few ejects-and-reinserts, the disc mounted and I installed the software.

Today, I got around to downloading the latest Boot Camp, which is officially compatible with Vista. So I burned a CD with the updated drivers while running OS X, then rebooted into Vista.

And my DVD drive was dead in Vista.

No DVD drive showed up under My Computer. I do not have mad Windows troubleshooting skillz, so I feared the worst. Still, I began poking around. Device Manager saw the drive, but with a yellow warning icon. Getting Properties on the drive entry gave me an error message:

Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)

Hmmm. OK, so it sounds like the DVD driver got munged somehow. I learn that it is the standard Vista DVD driver, not a special driver from BootCamp. Annoying, but I'll just update the driver, right? So I click the button that checks for a new version of the driver, and it comes back and tells me no new version is needed, I have the latest version, thank you for playing.

But the drive still doesn't work.

OK, I'll uninstall the driver, then scan for new devices and let Vista reinstall it. I do that, still in Device Manager.

But the drive still doesn't work.

Now, I'm a little pissed. Off to Googleland. And I discover that the DVD drive suddenly failing is a known problem. It's been known in Vista. And in Windows XP. And in Windows 2000. So this problem with Windows has been around for what, seven freaking years? And Microsoft never reworked things to actually, you know, prevent the problem from happening?

So I find a Microsoft Knowledge Base document that seems to be on point, but isn't clear that the problem exists in the released version of Vista, even though the document was updated just last month. It refers to XP and a beta of Vista. It helpfully (hah!) gives me a procedure to fix the problem.

But the drive still doesn't work.

So I look at the other suggested procedure. Let me share it with you. It involves editing the Windows Registry.

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.
3. Locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Class/{4d36e965-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}
4. On the File menu, click Export.
5. In the File name box, type savedkey, and then click Save.
6. Click the REG_MULTI_SZ data type UpperFilters, and then click Delete on the Edit menu. When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.
Note: If this data type is missing, go to Method 2.

[This data type was missing on my machine. I'd already tried Method 2, but what the hell, I tried it again. The drive still didn't work. Now, I'd left the procedure because the data type was missing, so I didn't continue with the rest of it. I was a fool.]

7. Click the REG_MULTI_SZ data type LowerFilters, and then click Delete on the Edit menu. When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.
8. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.

So I'd fiddled with the Registry, and no joy. I began to think about wiping the Boot Camp partition and reinstalling Vista. But that would be a huge pain, because I'd also have to reinstall Office 2007 and other programs. Back to more Googling. And I ran across a post on a forum that suggested that the solution was to delete both the UpperFilters and the LowerFilters data types in the Registry entry, no matter what. Back in the Registry Editor, I found the right entry, deleted the LowerFilters data type, quit the Editor, then rebooted Vista.

And lo and behold, the DVD drive was back.

Gosh, after only two hours of screwing around, I had successfully fixed my Windows problem! But somehow, rather than relieved, I find myself more annoyed than ever. Want to know the last time I had to do something this arcane with Mac OS X? Try never. And I'm not a light-duty Mac user; I'm installing beta software all the time, and I've been a Mac user for 23 years. For much of that time, I was a Mac consultant, and I've worked on hundreds of Macs. Not once did I have to do something this stupid and tweaky on a Mac.

When I mention to friends that I've been using Vista, they ask me what I think. For months, I've been telling them the truth: "It definitely sucks less." And it does. But that doesn't mean that Windows doesn't still suck.