This one is the bastard child of an annoying bug and one of the most braindead
UI policy I have ever seen.
So I have a cellular modem, that I use on my Mac. You connect it to a USB port,
then activate it using a Vodafone-provided piece of software that requires
you to enter a pin number (tied to the SIM card in the modem). After a few
time of doing this, you figure out that there is an option for the software
to store the PIN and to send it automatically. Great.
Now for some odd reason, every now and then, the software messes up the
PIN number. I don't know why, I don't know how, but it claims that the PIN
is wrong. After what it displays a single message: "the software will now
exit". And it does.
WITHOUT EVER GIVING ME A CHANCE TO ENTER THE BLOODY DARN PIN!
Successive attempts are met with the same behaviour.
The only way to get the nice box where I can enter the PIN, short of
reinstalling the software from scratch which means I loose my usage statistics
for the month, is to be quick-fingered and to bring up the preference menu
before the modem has had a chance to deny the PIN (which thanksfully takes
an astonishingly long 3/10th of a second), change the preference to not send
the PIN automatically, and restart the software one last time.
I guess I shouldn't complain though, it's all probably due to the PIN being
stored in an XML file that becomes corrupted, causing the parser to die, and
then the application.
--
mirod
