Civilization Of Upgrades

Today it is not going to be optimistic. I am tired. My WiFi works. The Squeezeboxes keep on pumping music from the Slimserver. And my laptop that was dying for several days feels fresh. But I am tired. Have spent last couple of days trying to put several things together, and yesterday at 2am I realized I upgraded almost everything I touched. Do we have a gadget or a piece of equipment that does not require upgrading? Possibly my Nixie clock, it keeps on going. And does not require new functionality and improved performance. No, I do not want a clock that runs faster. No, I am not worried it draws too much electricity.

Last Friday I met our Admin working on a PC of one of our colleagues. He seemed frustrated, showing me 100% CPU utilization and a white screen of a machine that tried to upgrade itself. We have Windows Automatic Upgrades turned on via active directory policies. This seemed natural, the world is evil, Windows has holes, so at least have the mandatory patches installed automatically to prevent some disaster (the last one hitting us, the Slammer, was back in early 2003). Since then the automatic updates worked ore or less OK, at least no second event at that scale has happened. And automatic updates started to show in other applications. But what happened last week was something that eventually must have happened. Microsoft patched us with a bug. Serious enough to bog down the machines, with one process eating all the available resources. I had this symptom for a while. I _think_ it must have started back when I ranted about IBM Thinkpad battery meter eating my CPU and my batteries. So I kept on killing the SVCHOST process to free the CPU, but yesterday the symptoms doubled, there were TWO SVCHOST processes fighting for CPU. One was the IBM Power meter, the other was probably the new, improved Windows Upgrade, resulting from former "upgrade". The laptop was so overloaded I could not even google for solution, fortunately I have a few other machines at home, so I left the dying machine and found the solution on the other. If you need it, it is so called KB927891, described on the Microsoft website.

During the weekend two of my Squeezeboxes upgraded their firmware automatically. After sorting out the Windows bug, I connected my iPod to my laptop. iTunes fired up and reported there was a newer version and I should upgrade. When I went to www.itunes.com to see what had changed, Firefox reported there was a new 2.0.0.2 version ready for upgrade and shut down. After upgrading Firefox and iTunes, I found out the firmware on my iPod Photo was outdated as well, so an upgrade was needed. Same with recently purchased 8GB iPod Nano - 3 weeks old and an upgrade is waiting. Civilization of upgrades. Google is not different, but they even don't ask. I see my Picasa has some new features, the Google Reader has just traded some blue underlined links for white buttons (that is what I can see, I have no idea what new dynamite features are beneath the changed GUI). What comes down to us in form of an upgrade is absolutely out of our control. We simply trust (or do not care) the manufacturers and their devices. When Windows pops up a balloon saying I should upgrade, I have no chance to verify whether it is safe. I have to trust. But all the other devices can potentially download some crap code from the Net and stay dead after reset. Sometimes it is better not to think that way.

A year ago when I was offered an upgrade to business class on a transatlantic Lufthansa flight, I thought I would be nice to have a wider seat for a long flight. The pity was my seat was not working. It was not moving / reclining / whatsoever. I was instructed by a flight attendant to use two strings to unlock some latches and recline the seat. But later they found out there was some problem with the software running the seat. They ended up resetting the seat and all the headrests, footrests, started moving, reacting to the commands from the seat remote controller.

But this time, I am tired. And when offered again an upgrade I will probably say thank you and will stay in coach. Remember... some upgrades can be deadly.