It’s sad that Microsoft keeps giving me bad experiences, despite having Bill Buxton and other wonderful people on their team. (Yeah, Buxton is in MS Research, not the “product”. Whatever. Still Microsoft.) My intent is not to bash them or anybody else just for the sake of bashing, but just now I came across something that made me again go just “sigh…” and shake my head.

So here’s the situation. I am trying to install Windows Media Player on my Mac. It’s not a bad piece of software at all for using Windows Media content on Mac. Yes, you can have Flip4Mac that integrates with Quicktime and is sometimes more convenient. Yet at other times, I’ve found Media Player gives me better experience, because it is Microsoft native so they have all the codecs and logic packaged up inside their own app and don’t need to interface with QuickTime.

Estonia is going to have two national e-votes this year. First for European Parliament, second for municipalities. I am going to vote over the Internet on both occasions.

The first e-vote is in about a month. Today, they published the application for public, so that people can test whether their computers, ID card readers and ID card readers work correctly. I tried it out, of course. See the screenshot walkthrough here. All worked well, apart from one strange warning when opening the disk image with the application. I hope they fix it.

Read also my longer rant about ID cards, e-voting and the associated topics. Sadly, many so-called “e-voting” around the world in other countries have been complete jokes or disasters, and have undermined the validity of the concept in the eyes of the public.

I continue to believe that correctly, securely implemented Internet-based voting (or derivatives thereof, such as mobile etc) is currently rare outside Estonia, but is going to happen sooner or later anyway, and Estonia serves as a model of this.