Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

The REALLY annoying bug that I posted about before has reappeared. Since Yahoo doesn’t seem to respond to any support requests on the subject, I thought I might try to help them debug the issue. Here are the Window’s messages that are processed by the main window every second or so:

<00002> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00003> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00004> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00005> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00006> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED lpwp:0012F23C
<00007> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED
<00008> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00009> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00010> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00011> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00012> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00013> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00014>000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED lpwp:0012F23C
<00015> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED
<00016> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00017> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00018> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00019> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00020> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00021> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00022> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED lpwp:0012F23C
<00023> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED
<00024> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00025> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00026> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00027> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00028> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00029> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00030>000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED lpwp:0012F23C
<00031> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED
<00032> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00033> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00034> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00035> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203

Another bit of information that I thought was interesting: When this bug is occurring, Yahoo Messenger won’t pop-up in front of Command Prompt windows. Start->Run->cmd. As long as they are in the foreground.

At least that is what this expression says to me. It is hard to tell what an 8 month old is thinking sometimes. This time it isn’t much of a mystery.

It has been said that music is a means of broadening perspective. I believe this to be true. It isn’t always a good thing, though. On the way to school this morning, we were listening to Weird Al’s “Running With Scissors” album, and came across the “Jerry Springer” track. He has listened to it many times before and never asked questions about things in the song he didn’t understand. Today was an exception. He posed the question “What is a she-male?” a block from school.

Morgan is nine. This isn’t the sort of question I would expect to come out of a nine-year-old’s mouth. I encourage him to ask when he doesn’t understand something, and this is a good example. I’ve yet to come up with an answer he will understand, though. I managed to avoid the question temporarily because he was moments from school, but it still deserves an answer. I want him to keep asking questions. Any ideas?

Yahoo has released version 8.1 on the Yahoo Messenger page that seems to fix that annoying bug I posted about earlier.

Given my experience with this issue I think Yahoo! could learn a few things about software distribution:

1. Respond to user queries through your customer service.
2. Tell users when there is a new version of software.
3. Put a release notes document on the messenger page so you can actually figure out what to expect in the new version.

Of course, you get what you pay for, and Messenger is “free” software.

I like the features of the Yahoo! software (Messenger, and Jukebox), but they are both resource pigs. I stopped running the Jukebox regularly because the thing chews up so much RAM.