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Got a new 500 gig hard drive the other day to replace the 120 gigger I've had for long time. I knew it would be rough replacing my existing hard drive with another one thanks to my dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Gutsy configuration, but I wanted to do the deed to learn what was involved. I'm funny that way about computers.
The story that follows is primarily geared toward techies. Other readers may want to leave the entry now, heheh.
Tools used: Ubuntu Gutsy AMD 64-bit CD, Recovery is Possible Linux boot CD, Windows XP Pro original setup CD.
Both drives are SATA drives, and because of the way that the SATA controllers are physically placed on my motherboard, my old drive is seen by Linux as /dev/sda2, while my new drive was /dev/sda1. Since my motherboard BIOS has a setting for which hard drive to boot from, this is fine.
I started by adding the new drive into the system and booting up under Ubuntu. I ran gparted to partition the new drive. Since my original drive was initially formatted as a single NTFS partition, then I added Ubuntu on as a dual-boot, my first partition is the NTFS Windows partition, second partition is ext3 for Ubuntu, and then I have an extended partition with 2.5 gigs of Linux swap space. I mirrored this setup on the new drive, roughly matching the proportions of the NTFS and ext3 partitions but leaving 3 gigs for swap space.
I rebooted the system into Ubuntu Gutsy using the Live CD so I could manipulate file systems "from on high". I can't express how cool Live CDs are to me now. Anyway, I copied the old Windows and Ubuntu data to the proper new partitions using rsync. Here's where I blew it on the Windows side to start with, but more about that later.
I had the presence of mind after reading some other Ubuntu hard drive upgrade stories to find out the uuid of the new partitions and edit both the /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab files on the new drive to update their uuid entries with the new partition information. Note for the future: Looking under /dev/[disk]/by-uuid/ you find links to the /dev/[partition] so you can figure out which uuid goes to what partition without guessing. Lost about an hour to guessing on those before I figured that one out.
I rebooted using the Recovery Is Possible (RIP) CD, which I now highly recommend in any Linux user's toolkit. I dropped to a command line from GRUB (type "c") and typed in "setup (hd0) (hd0,1)" to install GRUB into the new MBR and tell it to look at the second partition on the drive for boot information (remember Windows is on the first partition). That went fine.
Then I pulled the old hard drive out of the configuration and booted into Ubuntu Gutsy. Bada boom, bada bing.
Windows wasn't booting right yet, because I hadn't put system information on the Windows partition yet. DOH! So I booted up the Windows XP setup CD, told it to reformat the first partition, and let it start installing off the CD. There's a point partway through the XP installation where it restarts the system to boot from the hard drive and install more off the CD. This was where I pulled the CD out of the drive and booted instead into the RIP CD configuration, because at this point I know the Windows XP system information has been written. I also know that in the process, XP has overwritten the master boot record with its own boot information, so I redid the GRUB setup trick from the RIP CD again and rebooted into my Ubuntu Gutsy configuration. The Windows XP partition mounted as usual because I have it automount on startup in Ubuntu Gutsy, so I rsync'd files from the old Windows configuration to the new one, then rebooted the system into Windows XP. There have been a few hiccups with Windows, notably things like the desktop.ini files showing up all over the place because they aren't hidden anymore, and the recycle bin got corrupted, but overall things look like they're playing well. Why? rsync probably didn't keep Windows file attributes, my attempt at getting at the Windows admin password through an Ultimate Boot CD utility to boot into a Windows XP recovery console mangled some parts of the registry, or both. Either way, I'll probably copy old to new through Windows XP next time.
So the new drive's now running both my Windows XP and Ubuntu Gutsy configurations and I've pulled out the old drive to keep as a spare. The new drive's noticeably faster than the previous one, which is nice. Total time on the upgrade, including headscratching and booboo resolution was about a day. Total work time was probably about 8 hours, most of which was copying files hither and yon.
This exercise has shown me a few things. I have a much better understanding of Linux's hard drive "guts" and where in Ubuntu to look for device and boot configuration data. Ubuntu is easier to migrate than Windows XP. I don't think I have a use for the Ultimate Boot CD anymore, much as I used to like it. Recovery Is Possible is an excellent resource for Linux hard drive upgrades and recovery. Most importantly, though, I now know that I can rebuild my entire configuration from backups if there's a catastrophic meltdown. This last one makes me mighty happy, and I feel like my Ubuntu-fu is almost as good as my Windows-fu now. Am I going to get Vista-fu? I'll try not to for as long as possible. I'll just keep getting mo' better with Ubuntu.
The story that follows is primarily geared toward techies. Other readers may want to leave the entry now, heheh.
Tools used: Ubuntu Gutsy AMD 64-bit CD, Recovery is Possible Linux boot CD, Windows XP Pro original setup CD.
Both drives are SATA drives, and because of the way that the SATA controllers are physically placed on my motherboard, my old drive is seen by Linux as /dev/sda2, while my new drive was /dev/sda1. Since my motherboard BIOS has a setting for which hard drive to boot from, this is fine.
I started by adding the new drive into the system and booting up under Ubuntu. I ran gparted to partition the new drive. Since my original drive was initially formatted as a single NTFS partition, then I added Ubuntu on as a dual-boot, my first partition is the NTFS Windows partition, second partition is ext3 for Ubuntu, and then I have an extended partition with 2.5 gigs of Linux swap space. I mirrored this setup on the new drive, roughly matching the proportions of the NTFS and ext3 partitions but leaving 3 gigs for swap space.
I rebooted the system into Ubuntu Gutsy using the Live CD so I could manipulate file systems "from on high". I can't express how cool Live CDs are to me now. Anyway, I copied the old Windows and Ubuntu data to the proper new partitions using rsync. Here's where I blew it on the Windows side to start with, but more about that later.
I had the presence of mind after reading some other Ubuntu hard drive upgrade stories to find out the uuid of the new partitions and edit both the /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab files on the new drive to update their uuid entries with the new partition information. Note for the future: Looking under /dev/[disk]/by-uuid/ you find links to the /dev/[partition] so you can figure out which uuid goes to what partition without guessing. Lost about an hour to guessing on those before I figured that one out.
I rebooted using the Recovery Is Possible (RIP) CD, which I now highly recommend in any Linux user's toolkit. I dropped to a command line from GRUB (type "c") and typed in "setup (hd0) (hd0,1)" to install GRUB into the new MBR and tell it to look at the second partition on the drive for boot information (remember Windows is on the first partition). That went fine.
Then I pulled the old hard drive out of the configuration and booted into Ubuntu Gutsy. Bada boom, bada bing.
Windows wasn't booting right yet, because I hadn't put system information on the Windows partition yet. DOH! So I booted up the Windows XP setup CD, told it to reformat the first partition, and let it start installing off the CD. There's a point partway through the XP installation where it restarts the system to boot from the hard drive and install more off the CD. This was where I pulled the CD out of the drive and booted instead into the RIP CD configuration, because at this point I know the Windows XP system information has been written. I also know that in the process, XP has overwritten the master boot record with its own boot information, so I redid the GRUB setup trick from the RIP CD again and rebooted into my Ubuntu Gutsy configuration. The Windows XP partition mounted as usual because I have it automount on startup in Ubuntu Gutsy, so I rsync'd files from the old Windows configuration to the new one, then rebooted the system into Windows XP. There have been a few hiccups with Windows, notably things like the desktop.ini files showing up all over the place because they aren't hidden anymore, and the recycle bin got corrupted, but overall things look like they're playing well. Why? rsync probably didn't keep Windows file attributes, my attempt at getting at the Windows admin password through an Ultimate Boot CD utility to boot into a Windows XP recovery console mangled some parts of the registry, or both. Either way, I'll probably copy old to new through Windows XP next time.
So the new drive's now running both my Windows XP and Ubuntu Gutsy configurations and I've pulled out the old drive to keep as a spare. The new drive's noticeably faster than the previous one, which is nice. Total time on the upgrade, including headscratching and booboo resolution was about a day. Total work time was probably about 8 hours, most of which was copying files hither and yon.
This exercise has shown me a few things. I have a much better understanding of Linux's hard drive "guts" and where in Ubuntu to look for device and boot configuration data. Ubuntu is easier to migrate than Windows XP. I don't think I have a use for the Ultimate Boot CD anymore, much as I used to like it. Recovery Is Possible is an excellent resource for Linux hard drive upgrades and recovery. Most importantly, though, I now know that I can rebuild my entire configuration from backups if there's a catastrophic meltdown. This last one makes me mighty happy, and I feel like my Ubuntu-fu is almost as good as my Windows-fu now. Am I going to get Vista-fu? I'll try not to for as long as possible. I'll just keep getting mo' better with Ubuntu.
I'm still using Linux for my primary desktop for the foreseeable future and wanted to weigh in on the state of multimedia compatibility. Well, at least my own experiences. To catch up some readers, I've jailbroken my iPod Touch, it's running the 1.3 firmware, and I'm able to connect to it in Linux through SSH. Which brings me to the crux of this, a commentary on the state of multimedia apps on Linux. Frankly, they're behind Windows apps, which makes me grumpy enough to not put links in this post.
Amarok, for whatever reason, doesn't play well with my GNOME-based Linux setup. I have no idea why, but it locks right up on startup. Maybe I should try it again since the KDE libraries have been upgraded recently. This left me with gtkpod as my Linux iPod-related music manager. gtkpod wants to look at my existing file library when it starts up, when I change some information on a song, etc. It becomes a click, do something else for a few minutes, click, do something else for a few minutes routine. Not good. Synching to the iPod Touch is slow, mainly because I have most of my music library in Ogg Vorbis format that gtkpod happily converts to mp3 for me on the fly. This I like.
On the Windows side, there's iTunes, which is functional but system-intrusive, and the latest beta of MediaMonkey, which I purchased because it does what gtkpod does, doesn't intrude like iTunes, and is fairly speedy except for the ogg-to-mp3 conversions. iTunes doesn't let me put 3/4 of my library onto my iPod Touch because it doesn't want to even look at Ogg Vorbis files in its default configuration. Screw dat.
So my best iPod Touch manager is a Windows application now. 'Sokay, I'm in Windows playing games fairly often anyway. But it's irritating. The problem is Apple's dopey attempt to control the iPod's content. This is hardware that's being marketed to tech-savvy, Apple, the community will find workarounds. Open it up! I have an iRiver H340 that I can directly access like a hard drive (actually it is a hard drive) through USB. No special software's needed, I just plunk files onto the thing. If there's something new on the unit when it powers up, it updates its database and away we go. The iRiver also plays .ogg files, which probably make up over 75% of my music. But you guys have probably heard about that enough already in my blog.
OK, so after writing this so far, I noticed that my Audacious configuration is playing my freshly-ripped music with pops and clicks. I dropped the CPU usage on my BOINC configuration without any relief. Thinking maybe it was the original file, I played the same file flawlessly through XMMS. DAMMIT! I'll play with it more some other time.
My point is this: Linux's amazing flexibility has a serious drawback in the form of a lack of stable and cohesive media handling. While I'm no slouch when it comes to doing crazy stuff to get something to work on Linux and understand the value of such as learning experience, I'd rather not have to do it. I'd also rather be able to have one or two applications to do my media than one that's better at handling my 5.1 speaker setup or WMV files or DVDs with deep menu systems than another.
Linux leet hax0rz, please can I have something that works as well for me as MediaMonkey for organizing my music and interacting with my iPod Touch, and something with the excellent playback capabilities of foobar2000? I'm too dumb and busy to figure it out on my own. Actually, I may try foobar2000 using Wine. I already know MediaMonkey doesn't work under Wine.
Sometimes I miss Windows's "it just works" when it comes to multimedia.
Amarok, for whatever reason, doesn't play well with my GNOME-based Linux setup. I have no idea why, but it locks right up on startup. Maybe I should try it again since the KDE libraries have been upgraded recently. This left me with gtkpod as my Linux iPod-related music manager. gtkpod wants to look at my existing file library when it starts up, when I change some information on a song, etc. It becomes a click, do something else for a few minutes, click, do something else for a few minutes routine. Not good. Synching to the iPod Touch is slow, mainly because I have most of my music library in Ogg Vorbis format that gtkpod happily converts to mp3 for me on the fly. This I like.
On the Windows side, there's iTunes, which is functional but system-intrusive, and the latest beta of MediaMonkey, which I purchased because it does what gtkpod does, doesn't intrude like iTunes, and is fairly speedy except for the ogg-to-mp3 conversions. iTunes doesn't let me put 3/4 of my library onto my iPod Touch because it doesn't want to even look at Ogg Vorbis files in its default configuration. Screw dat.
So my best iPod Touch manager is a Windows application now. 'Sokay, I'm in Windows playing games fairly often anyway. But it's irritating. The problem is Apple's dopey attempt to control the iPod's content. This is hardware that's being marketed to tech-savvy, Apple, the community will find workarounds. Open it up! I have an iRiver H340 that I can directly access like a hard drive (actually it is a hard drive) through USB. No special software's needed, I just plunk files onto the thing. If there's something new on the unit when it powers up, it updates its database and away we go. The iRiver also plays .ogg files, which probably make up over 75% of my music. But you guys have probably heard about that enough already in my blog.
OK, so after writing this so far, I noticed that my Audacious configuration is playing my freshly-ripped music with pops and clicks. I dropped the CPU usage on my BOINC configuration without any relief. Thinking maybe it was the original file, I played the same file flawlessly through XMMS. DAMMIT! I'll play with it more some other time.
My point is this: Linux's amazing flexibility has a serious drawback in the form of a lack of stable and cohesive media handling. While I'm no slouch when it comes to doing crazy stuff to get something to work on Linux and understand the value of such as learning experience, I'd rather not have to do it. I'd also rather be able to have one or two applications to do my media than one that's better at handling my 5.1 speaker setup or WMV files or DVDs with deep menu systems than another.
Linux leet hax0rz, please can I have something that works as well for me as MediaMonkey for organizing my music and interacting with my iPod Touch, and something with the excellent playback capabilities of foobar2000? I'm too dumb and busy to figure it out on my own. Actually, I may try foobar2000 using Wine. I already know MediaMonkey doesn't work under Wine.
Sometimes I miss Windows's "it just works" when it comes to multimedia.
A quick gripe: When marketing folk say "Works on PC and Mac" they almost always really mean "Works on Windows and Mac". They could mean "Might work on Wine under Linux, but definitely is supposed to work on Windows and Mac", but probably not.
This comes after reading about Apple's new transfer a DVD to your computer thingy.
This comes after reading about Apple's new transfer a DVD to your computer thingy.
Ars Technica reviews the iPhone, including a stress test to determine what it takes to kill one off. Impressive. I still don't want one yet, though. I can't see a reason to web surf or check my email with my phone.
Here's an interesting piece on whether or not emptying your inbox is worth the time. My thoughts? I delete stuff from my inbox that's not important, filing other emails into other folders, but I leave quite a bit in my inbox as a short term information storage, dumping emails more than a couple of weeks old by deleting or filing them into the aforementioned other folders. How do you folks manage your inboxes?
I finished up Snow Crash, loving it as usual. I think it may be time to revisit The Book of the New Sun again to see how it reads for me the second time through. On the other hand, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows should be in my hands in the next week or so, so maybe I should reread the previous HP books... Tough call there. Anyone else looking forward to reading the new HP book? And I find that I'm missing information about the third Eragon book. Have to look that one up.
As a final thing this time around, here's a link to a long visual rant by Chris Pirillo, who "upgraded" from Vista to XP as his main operating system. It's a long look at Vista's shortcomings six months after its release. He loves Microsoft, but doesn't care much for Vista in its current form. Interesting.
Here's an interesting piece on whether or not emptying your inbox is worth the time. My thoughts? I delete stuff from my inbox that's not important, filing other emails into other folders, but I leave quite a bit in my inbox as a short term information storage, dumping emails more than a couple of weeks old by deleting or filing them into the aforementioned other folders. How do you folks manage your inboxes?
I finished up Snow Crash, loving it as usual. I think it may be time to revisit The Book of the New Sun again to see how it reads for me the second time through. On the other hand, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows should be in my hands in the next week or so, so maybe I should reread the previous HP books... Tough call there. Anyone else looking forward to reading the new HP book? And I find that I'm missing information about the third Eragon book. Have to look that one up.
As a final thing this time around, here's a link to a long visual rant by Chris Pirillo, who "upgraded" from Vista to XP as his main operating system. It's a long look at Vista's shortcomings six months after its release. He loves Microsoft, but doesn't care much for Vista in its current form. Interesting.
I worked out something on Feisty Fawn that I should have thought of earlier.... When Firestarter, a nice, simple, graphical firewall for Linux, is in use, it tends to block some DHCP activity that is mighty helpful in connecting to a wireless network. So I allow DHCP traffic through Firestarter and the connection issues I'd had with initial connection to the haus network have gone from being somewhat minor to vanishing completely. Aw yeah.
I also decided that it would be fun to have the laptop on my desk next to my main system's screen. In preparation for this, I hunted around for something that would allow for seamless Windows/Unix remote control over TCP-IP. I'd seen such a critter a while ago, but couldn't remember what it was. Well, I settled on a free, difficult to configure, yet very nice when set up application called Synergy.
Synergy's free and Lifehacker has a short tutorial on it that helped me out. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has two packages available: synergy, the base application, and quicksynergy, a GUI interface for the base synergy package. I pulled those down and installed them. quicksynergy is actually much easier to use than the Windows interface for Synergy, somewhat amusingly, but it's not as flexible as the Windows menus for more complex configurations.
I set up my Windows box as the server, and after a bit of juggling had the network traffic between the two systems flowing but locked down in both firewalls so that I can run the laptop as if it were another monitor attached to the right side of my Windows system. Now I can do away with having to use separate keyboard and mouse for the laptop, and if I want to, say, research on the laptop while composing in Windows, I can.
Ees nice.
I also decided that it would be fun to have the laptop on my desk next to my main system's screen. In preparation for this, I hunted around for something that would allow for seamless Windows/Unix remote control over TCP-IP. I'd seen such a critter a while ago, but couldn't remember what it was. Well, I settled on a free, difficult to configure, yet very nice when set up application called Synergy.
Synergy's free and Lifehacker has a short tutorial on it that helped me out. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has two packages available: synergy, the base application, and quicksynergy, a GUI interface for the base synergy package. I pulled those down and installed them. quicksynergy is actually much easier to use than the Windows interface for Synergy, somewhat amusingly, but it's not as flexible as the Windows menus for more complex configurations.
I set up my Windows box as the server, and after a bit of juggling had the network traffic between the two systems flowing but locked down in both firewalls so that I can run the laptop as if it were another monitor attached to the right side of my Windows system. Now I can do away with having to use separate keyboard and mouse for the laptop, and if I want to, say, research on the laptop while composing in Windows, I can.
Ees nice.
The Windows "upgrade" of Feisty Fawn involves repartitioning the hard drive into Linux and Windows sections, an expected effect, but it's fairly seamless, giving a few options for the partitioning and then acting on its own from there. Once installed, Feisty Fawn offers XP booting on the boot menu, though it defaults, of course, to starting up Ubuntu. The first time I went into XP after the repartitioning, a file system check was forced, along with another reboot, then XP booted fine. XP doesn't see the Linux partition, something I expected, though Feisty sees all if you work at it. There is a bit of finagling required to get to the Windows section of the hard drive from Ubuntu, but I think that's a good thing. Additional data security/separation is provided by the Windows partition being mounted in read-only by default under Feisty. I just copied a few things over to the Linux partition and am considering reducing the size of the Windows partition even further.
I liked Wine a lot before running Feisty Fawn, but Wine has been even better integrated into the main desktop in Feisty. Wine installation puts a couple of administration apps onto Ubuntu's System/Administration folder, which is nice. Wine runs just about every Windows app I've thrown at it, and if it hasn't, well, it's typically my fault for trying something weird. I decided to try running foobar2000, my favorite Windows music player, directly from the XP partition through Wine to see what happened. My jaw dropped: it worked without any odd behavior. Foobar 2000 didn't see the network drive for my main music repository, since it's not "mounted" as something that Wine would see, but after I copied an OGG file from the network drive to the desktop, foobar 2000 could see it and played it. I was expecting that foobar 2000 would fit into that "weird" category of applications for some reason. I was also expecting that Wine would have trouble finding any extra DLLs or anything that foobar 2000 needed because the application wasn't installed in the Linux partition. Not so. Well done, Wine devs, well done! I'm looking forward to trying some other apps out as well.
My USB sound works great, I just plug it in, switch to the different hardware in the Sound setup, and restart any apps that are using sound. Bada boom, bada bing. When I want to disconnect it, I stop any apps using it, change the Sound setup back to normal, and disconnect the hardware again.
My mini USB hub appears to be working fine in Feisty also, handling not only swapping my USB trackball out of a main laptop USB port and into the USB hub port with no complaints or oddities, but also my Kinesis keyboard with its USB to PS/2 adapter. I haven't plugged in an external USB drive yet, though I expect that to work fine, too, if needed.
I'm using a workaround for printing. I can print directly to my HP LaserJet 1200 if I swap the printer's USB cable from my main system to the laptop. But I can also create a PDF of anything I want to print, send it to the network share, and print it from my main system if I want to. I don't feel the need to muck around with a print server just yet.
The last thing to tackle was the ever-troublesome wireless connectivity. ndiswrapper came into play on that, along with disabling a kernel driver. I had to jimmy with some other settings here and there, reboot a few times, resolve a small issue with the interface file in /etc, but wireless connectivity's now consistent here at the haus with Feisty Fawn. It was much much less hassle than the Dapper wireless setup, though perhaps some of that has to do with my increased familiarity with the morass of parts to get the whole thing running. It definitely helped considerably that Feisty has more of the pieces already in place by default to get wireless WPA working.
So there it is. All of the hardware that I need to have working on the laptop is now working, and I have workarounds for anything that isn't, such as scanning from my main system and transferring the results through the network to the laptop. The ability to run Windows apps fairly well through Wine even further reduces the need to keep running Windows. In short, this is a rockin' version of Ubuntu. I hear there's another one coming out later this year. I'll be there....
I liked Wine a lot before running Feisty Fawn, but Wine has been even better integrated into the main desktop in Feisty. Wine installation puts a couple of administration apps onto Ubuntu's System/Administration folder, which is nice. Wine runs just about every Windows app I've thrown at it, and if it hasn't, well, it's typically my fault for trying something weird. I decided to try running foobar2000, my favorite Windows music player, directly from the XP partition through Wine to see what happened. My jaw dropped: it worked without any odd behavior. Foobar 2000 didn't see the network drive for my main music repository, since it's not "mounted" as something that Wine would see, but after I copied an OGG file from the network drive to the desktop, foobar 2000 could see it and played it. I was expecting that foobar 2000 would fit into that "weird" category of applications for some reason. I was also expecting that Wine would have trouble finding any extra DLLs or anything that foobar 2000 needed because the application wasn't installed in the Linux partition. Not so. Well done, Wine devs, well done! I'm looking forward to trying some other apps out as well.
My USB sound works great, I just plug it in, switch to the different hardware in the Sound setup, and restart any apps that are using sound. Bada boom, bada bing. When I want to disconnect it, I stop any apps using it, change the Sound setup back to normal, and disconnect the hardware again.
My mini USB hub appears to be working fine in Feisty also, handling not only swapping my USB trackball out of a main laptop USB port and into the USB hub port with no complaints or oddities, but also my Kinesis keyboard with its USB to PS/2 adapter. I haven't plugged in an external USB drive yet, though I expect that to work fine, too, if needed.
I'm using a workaround for printing. I can print directly to my HP LaserJet 1200 if I swap the printer's USB cable from my main system to the laptop. But I can also create a PDF of anything I want to print, send it to the network share, and print it from my main system if I want to. I don't feel the need to muck around with a print server just yet.
The last thing to tackle was the ever-troublesome wireless connectivity. ndiswrapper came into play on that, along with disabling a kernel driver. I had to jimmy with some other settings here and there, reboot a few times, resolve a small issue with the interface file in /etc, but wireless connectivity's now consistent here at the haus with Feisty Fawn. It was much much less hassle than the Dapper wireless setup, though perhaps some of that has to do with my increased familiarity with the morass of parts to get the whole thing running. It definitely helped considerably that Feisty has more of the pieces already in place by default to get wireless WPA working.
So there it is. All of the hardware that I need to have working on the laptop is now working, and I have workarounds for anything that isn't, such as scanning from my main system and transferring the results through the network to the laptop. The ability to run Windows apps fairly well through Wine even further reduces the need to keep running Windows. In short, this is a rockin' version of Ubuntu. I hear there's another one coming out later this year. I'll be there....
Five ways to use Windows apps in Linux covers everything from switching to an open source alternative software to running apps on a remote Windows box. It's timely information considering the slow swell of people who are considering running Linux vs. Vista.
Me? I'm still fiddling with Ubuntu, but have things pretty much worked out on it to the point where I think I can do everything I want to on it besides connect securely to the wireless segment of my home network. One of my to-do tasks for today is to find a wireless PC card that does 54g and has WPA compatibility in Ubuntu for my laptop.
Some of you might recall that I was trying to get an outliner working under Ubuntu a while back. I've resolved the issue by trying out KeyNote, a free Windows outliner app that has a very big following. I fell in love with it and guess what? Yes, it runs very nicely under Wine, with one issue: coloring the background of text doesn't work correctly, but I don't desperately need text highlighting other than changing the foreground text coloration anyway.
KeyNote's also replaced ADM as my outliner of choice in general, but I still need something to collect web data with, so I'll be looking at NetSnippets and other such toys later. Meanwhile, copy and paste works just fine.
Meanwhile, back to Vista backlash and looking at Linux as a main OS. The sentiment seems pretty rampant among the geek "priesthood". I think we all know that having to learn Vista's inevitable for those of us who support others' computers, but the timing is perfect for desktop Linux usage to really take off. This could be the year.
Me? I'm still fiddling with Ubuntu, but have things pretty much worked out on it to the point where I think I can do everything I want to on it besides connect securely to the wireless segment of my home network. One of my to-do tasks for today is to find a wireless PC card that does 54g and has WPA compatibility in Ubuntu for my laptop.
Some of you might recall that I was trying to get an outliner working under Ubuntu a while back. I've resolved the issue by trying out KeyNote, a free Windows outliner app that has a very big following. I fell in love with it and guess what? Yes, it runs very nicely under Wine, with one issue: coloring the background of text doesn't work correctly, but I don't desperately need text highlighting other than changing the foreground text coloration anyway.
KeyNote's also replaced ADM as my outliner of choice in general, but I still need something to collect web data with, so I'll be looking at NetSnippets and other such toys later. Meanwhile, copy and paste works just fine.
Meanwhile, back to Vista backlash and looking at Linux as a main OS. The sentiment seems pretty rampant among the geek "priesthood". I think we all know that having to learn Vista's inevitable for those of us who support others' computers, but the timing is perfect for desktop Linux usage to really take off. This could be the year.
More on Vista. Yeah, I know, it's an old topic, but I wanted to put forth a some general notions I have kicking around. Vista doesn't seem to have a particularly good reason for purchase except for those interested in development and having the latest and greatest.
Microsoft's trying to court gamers by tying DirectX 10 to it, but I can't see many games coming out that will require DX10 that I'm very interested in. Maybe I'm missing some, or I'm just not the gamer newshound I used to be, but XP is the PC game OS of choice and will be for some time. Even if I did go after the new games that I do know of, I'd pretty much have to buy a new PC to run them anyway. It don't make sense.
If you just want to do biz things, XP has extensive, robust support for it. There aren't any Vista-only business apps out there and there aren't likely to be any for quite some time. It just doesn't make sense for developers. MS Office for Vista might come out someday, but I just can't see what it might bring to the table that only Vista can do. MS may tie this new hypothetical Office version to just the OS, but that alienates many many happy existing customers for no good reasons other than their profit and potential ease of support, since it would only run on Vista instead of many other Windows versions.
Vista's supposed to be pretty, but if you want pretty you can run any number of add-ons for XP or better yet, run Enlightenment on a Linux box. Personally, I dabble in pretty Windows, but I almost always go back to the classic layout with the XP Start Menu changes. It's fast, I know where to get things, it's stable, and it's not reminding me of playing with Legos. Who in their right mind pays hundreds of bucks for an operating system just for its looks?
The Ultimate version of Vista is supposed to have some cool media features in it that make it more valuable to buyers. These features are probably going to be duplicated and improved on by third party developers pretty quickly for non-Ultimate Vista installations. That's the nature of the beast.
One thing that does catch my eye in Vista is the 64-bit CPU support, but I don't see why I'd really want my operating system to take advantage of that at this point. It's not like I'm asking it to do much memory-intensive stuff besides play some 32-bit games. If I did want 64-bit support, I could go Linux on the main system or 64-bit XP.
It's not like there's going to be hardware that requires Vista in the near future either. Some big software vendors are irritated with Microsoft over various things in Vista, too, meaning slower releases of new Vista versions of their various wares. Consequently, their dedicated customers will probably be reluctant to try the new platform, too.
Vista doesn't have anything that I can point at that gives me a good reason to upgrade, not a single thing. The big drive for its acceptance is going to be the bundling of Vista on new computers and the accompanying call for PC gurus to assist new Vista PC owners. Eventually the gurus have to learn Vista to some degree to be able to support their support tree. PC vendors will have to do the same thing. I know I'll have to learn it eventually, but not on my dime, at least not for the next twelve or more months.
Microsoft had to come out with another iteration of Windows, one they could point at and say "More secure! More stable! More features!" Really, though, they're just saying, "More money!" for some bling. Maybe something will come up as a killer app later, but right now, Vista don't make sense for PC users.
Just for grins, I found a story about Microsoft Vista turning this person into a Mac fan. I think we're going to see a lot more of this kind of platform switching going on, especially as virtualization becomes more popular.
Microsoft's trying to court gamers by tying DirectX 10 to it, but I can't see many games coming out that will require DX10 that I'm very interested in. Maybe I'm missing some, or I'm just not the gamer newshound I used to be, but XP is the PC game OS of choice and will be for some time. Even if I did go after the new games that I do know of, I'd pretty much have to buy a new PC to run them anyway. It don't make sense.
If you just want to do biz things, XP has extensive, robust support for it. There aren't any Vista-only business apps out there and there aren't likely to be any for quite some time. It just doesn't make sense for developers. MS Office for Vista might come out someday, but I just can't see what it might bring to the table that only Vista can do. MS may tie this new hypothetical Office version to just the OS, but that alienates many many happy existing customers for no good reasons other than their profit and potential ease of support, since it would only run on Vista instead of many other Windows versions.
Vista's supposed to be pretty, but if you want pretty you can run any number of add-ons for XP or better yet, run Enlightenment on a Linux box. Personally, I dabble in pretty Windows, but I almost always go back to the classic layout with the XP Start Menu changes. It's fast, I know where to get things, it's stable, and it's not reminding me of playing with Legos. Who in their right mind pays hundreds of bucks for an operating system just for its looks?
The Ultimate version of Vista is supposed to have some cool media features in it that make it more valuable to buyers. These features are probably going to be duplicated and improved on by third party developers pretty quickly for non-Ultimate Vista installations. That's the nature of the beast.
One thing that does catch my eye in Vista is the 64-bit CPU support, but I don't see why I'd really want my operating system to take advantage of that at this point. It's not like I'm asking it to do much memory-intensive stuff besides play some 32-bit games. If I did want 64-bit support, I could go Linux on the main system or 64-bit XP.
It's not like there's going to be hardware that requires Vista in the near future either. Some big software vendors are irritated with Microsoft over various things in Vista, too, meaning slower releases of new Vista versions of their various wares. Consequently, their dedicated customers will probably be reluctant to try the new platform, too.
Vista doesn't have anything that I can point at that gives me a good reason to upgrade, not a single thing. The big drive for its acceptance is going to be the bundling of Vista on new computers and the accompanying call for PC gurus to assist new Vista PC owners. Eventually the gurus have to learn Vista to some degree to be able to support their support tree. PC vendors will have to do the same thing. I know I'll have to learn it eventually, but not on my dime, at least not for the next twelve or more months.
Microsoft had to come out with another iteration of Windows, one they could point at and say "More secure! More stable! More features!" Really, though, they're just saying, "More money!" for some bling. Maybe something will come up as a killer app later, but right now, Vista don't make sense for PC users.
Just for grins, I found a story about Microsoft Vista turning this person into a Mac fan. I think we're going to see a lot more of this kind of platform switching going on, especially as virtualization becomes more popular.
Wow, it's been many a day since my discourse concerning Frankenstein. I'll chalk up the time off from blogging here to working many solo shifts that for whatever reason ended up being totally insane. How is it that the times when no one is working at the site I'm at are the times that everything that my team manages that doesn't have directly to do with other people working on the network goes to shite? So today's a recovery day, a slow burning down to ash, though not completely burning out, and catching up on stuff I've missed and neglected.
Linux users using non-SUSE Linux distros owe Microsoft. Ah, M$'s strategy in the Novell deal comes to light. It will be extremely interesting to see how all of this plays out. My prediction? Novell will be financially beaten to death except for Microsoft keeping it propped up. I can't see a bunch of casual Linux users rushing out to get SUSE or OpenSUSE. However, I can see some businesses legitimizing their Linux usage and giving money to this unholy pairing. M$ and Novell are banking on this, but I don't see it being enough to do more than allow M$ to purchase Novell in the future. Wait, they kind of already have, haven't they? Good luck, Novell, on surviving your astoundingly foolish and hugely publicized deal with the devil. You've become a sad shell of your former self, and your founder is probably spinning in his grave enough to affect planetary rotation. Bravo.
Speaking of predictions, New Scientist has a buncha forecasts from a buncha brilliant people up for a buncha perusal. I haven't read many of them yet, but I predict that I will read a few more. I know, I'm awesome at determining what might happen in the future. Now someone needs to pay me for it.
We have VMWare running some servers at my place of employment and income generation. I've been fortunate enough to see some of the amazing things its high end versions are capable of firsthand as a result. I've witnessed a RUNNING virtual server migrating entirely from one physical server to another with very little, if any disruption to service availability on the virtual server. It took about a minute to complete the migration, too. Fast. We're going to be using it to remove most of a row of server racks, among other things, moving to just couple server racks with higher availability. BUT I don't want to run VMWare under Ubuntu to get Windows stuff working on my laptop. It costs bucks if you want to use VMWare the way I'd use it. Still, another .5GB of RAM would be a good thing in the laptop, so I'm thinking about that.
My laptop-on-Ubuntu progress has halted for the moment, by the way, though I have just about everything running under it that I want to run on my laptop. 'Cept wireless, now that I think of it. I should mess with that later today. My mad tweaker rises to the fore from time to time, you know.
Meanwhile, back to Microsoft. Vista's going to be released to biz customers in a couple of days. Why the HELL would any non-software development business switch to it right away? Someone please tell me. Maybe it's a shiny new tweak-aholic thing, but from a business standpoint, where stability is a key deployment factor, rolling out a brand new 1.0 OS version seems like a great way to get most of your help desk staff to quit.
Linux users using non-SUSE Linux distros owe Microsoft. Ah, M$'s strategy in the Novell deal comes to light. It will be extremely interesting to see how all of this plays out. My prediction? Novell will be financially beaten to death except for Microsoft keeping it propped up. I can't see a bunch of casual Linux users rushing out to get SUSE or OpenSUSE. However, I can see some businesses legitimizing their Linux usage and giving money to this unholy pairing. M$ and Novell are banking on this, but I don't see it being enough to do more than allow M$ to purchase Novell in the future. Wait, they kind of already have, haven't they? Good luck, Novell, on surviving your astoundingly foolish and hugely publicized deal with the devil. You've become a sad shell of your former self, and your founder is probably spinning in his grave enough to affect planetary rotation. Bravo.
Speaking of predictions, New Scientist has a buncha forecasts from a buncha brilliant people up for a buncha perusal. I haven't read many of them yet, but I predict that I will read a few more. I know, I'm awesome at determining what might happen in the future. Now someone needs to pay me for it.
We have VMWare running some servers at my place of employment and income generation. I've been fortunate enough to see some of the amazing things its high end versions are capable of firsthand as a result. I've witnessed a RUNNING virtual server migrating entirely from one physical server to another with very little, if any disruption to service availability on the virtual server. It took about a minute to complete the migration, too. Fast. We're going to be using it to remove most of a row of server racks, among other things, moving to just couple server racks with higher availability. BUT I don't want to run VMWare under Ubuntu to get Windows stuff working on my laptop. It costs bucks if you want to use VMWare the way I'd use it. Still, another .5GB of RAM would be a good thing in the laptop, so I'm thinking about that.
My laptop-on-Ubuntu progress has halted for the moment, by the way, though I have just about everything running under it that I want to run on my laptop. 'Cept wireless, now that I think of it. I should mess with that later today. My mad tweaker rises to the fore from time to time, you know.
Meanwhile, back to Microsoft. Vista's going to be released to biz customers in a couple of days. Why the HELL would any non-software development business switch to it right away? Someone please tell me. Maybe it's a shiny new tweak-aholic thing, but from a business standpoint, where stability is a key deployment factor, rolling out a brand new 1.0 OS version seems like a great way to get most of your help desk staff to quit.
I've been making some changes to my basic Windows configuration layout lately. Lemme give a rundown just because I'm thinking about it.
I'm testing out BitDefender v10 as an antivirus suite. I like it very much overall so far and have more confidence in it than I did in Avast! Why am I looking to switch away from Avast!? I think I got a bug a few days ago that got past Avast! and after looking at Avira's Antivir, I decided that I might want to join the ranks of paying Windows antivirus customers. Whatever I end up with will most likely get my money for two systems, my main one and my fiancee's system.
BitDefender has good anti-spyware stuff and doesn't like Ad-Aware for some reason, but it gets along great with Spybot Search & Destroy, so I'm using that as a second layer of protection against malware. I'm not using S&D's special blocking software, though I did "immunize" with it, but I had been using SpywareBlaster for a long time. Great little piece of free software that appears to just set up blocked sites in your browsers.
By the way, yes, I managed to clean up my system using a bunch of different tools. I'm still thinking about nuking it from orbit, though. It is, after all, the only way to be sure.
My laptop's running Ubuntu Dapper Drake for now and will get ClamAV when I get around to it. I'll stick Avira's free Antivir version on the laptop it goes back to Windows XP. Antivir has a higher detection rate than AVG or Avast! according to a couple of Web sites, though I don't think it included email checking. So on the laptop I'd go with Antivir plus Spybot Search & Destroy plus ZoneAlarm's free personal firewall for my front line defenses. All free, all good tools.
That leads to my current personal Windows firewall of choice: ZoneAlarm's free version. Norton gobbled up Sygate earlier this year and with it my previous free favorite: Sygate Personal Firewall. Bastards. I still miss Conseal firewall's simplicity and speed, but they were eaten up, too. BitDefender's got a firewall included in one of their suites as well, but I think they want $10 more per system for it per year, and ZA's free version is doing very well for me now.
Foobar2000 may be getting replaced by Quintessential Player for music playback. I loooove foobar2000 for its playback quality, ability to upmix stereo to 5.1, and other things, but its most recent versions have been taking a second or two per song to get data from OGG files. It must have something to do with the tag formats in the files, but this means that indexing my entire collection, which is mostly OGG format because that's what I ripped in, takes literally hours. I might be able to find a masstagger that can resolve this for me, or I might see if foobar2000's masstagger can do something about it. Dunno there. Quintessential Player is good, purty, but I've gotten addicted to listening to environment-filling 5.1.
And that's it for the moment for Windows.
By the way, ADM's a no-go under WINE. Too many interface widgets that aren't handled properly. Sniffle. So I'm going to drop Ubuntu for now, go back to XP on the laptop, and watch Ubuntu's Edgy Eft release and WINE mature a bit more. Vista ain't touching the laptop in the foreseeable future, but Linux is not quite set enough for me to keep it on there. It's definitely been a fine experiment, though, and I might mess more with other apps under WINE and printing before I install XP again.
I'm testing out BitDefender v10 as an antivirus suite. I like it very much overall so far and have more confidence in it than I did in Avast! Why am I looking to switch away from Avast!? I think I got a bug a few days ago that got past Avast! and after looking at Avira's Antivir, I decided that I might want to join the ranks of paying Windows antivirus customers. Whatever I end up with will most likely get my money for two systems, my main one and my fiancee's system.
BitDefender has good anti-spyware stuff and doesn't like Ad-Aware for some reason, but it gets along great with Spybot Search & Destroy, so I'm using that as a second layer of protection against malware. I'm not using S&D's special blocking software, though I did "immunize" with it, but I had been using SpywareBlaster for a long time. Great little piece of free software that appears to just set up blocked sites in your browsers.
By the way, yes, I managed to clean up my system using a bunch of different tools. I'm still thinking about nuking it from orbit, though. It is, after all, the only way to be sure.
My laptop's running Ubuntu Dapper Drake for now and will get ClamAV when I get around to it. I'll stick Avira's free Antivir version on the laptop it goes back to Windows XP. Antivir has a higher detection rate than AVG or Avast! according to a couple of Web sites, though I don't think it included email checking. So on the laptop I'd go with Antivir plus Spybot Search & Destroy plus ZoneAlarm's free personal firewall for my front line defenses. All free, all good tools.
That leads to my current personal Windows firewall of choice: ZoneAlarm's free version. Norton gobbled up Sygate earlier this year and with it my previous free favorite: Sygate Personal Firewall. Bastards. I still miss Conseal firewall's simplicity and speed, but they were eaten up, too. BitDefender's got a firewall included in one of their suites as well, but I think they want $10 more per system for it per year, and ZA's free version is doing very well for me now.
Foobar2000 may be getting replaced by Quintessential Player for music playback. I loooove foobar2000 for its playback quality, ability to upmix stereo to 5.1, and other things, but its most recent versions have been taking a second or two per song to get data from OGG files. It must have something to do with the tag formats in the files, but this means that indexing my entire collection, which is mostly OGG format because that's what I ripped in, takes literally hours. I might be able to find a masstagger that can resolve this for me, or I might see if foobar2000's masstagger can do something about it. Dunno there. Quintessential Player is good, purty, but I've gotten addicted to listening to environment-filling 5.1.
And that's it for the moment for Windows.
By the way, ADM's a no-go under WINE. Too many interface widgets that aren't handled properly. Sniffle. So I'm going to drop Ubuntu for now, go back to XP on the laptop, and watch Ubuntu's Edgy Eft release and WINE mature a bit more. Vista ain't touching the laptop in the foreseeable future, but Linux is not quite set enough for me to keep it on there. It's definitely been a fine experiment, though, and I might mess more with other apps under WINE and printing before I install XP again.
A dude messes with Windows XP after using Macs and Unices for a few years. The read is a little long, with the last page having the most interesting information. He says that XP is stable, but bloated, and that there are too many things to manage manually as compared to other operating systems. I tend to agree, but dammit, I must have my GAMES! And the hardware compatibility of XP is way beyond other PC operating systems.
So what does Windows have that a Linux distro doesn't for me?
Hardware compatibility for the basic stuff is pretty good in Linux, but not as solid as XP's. I don't think I'd find a driver for the USB cable for my cell phone for Linux, but I haven't looked yet. My printer is hooked up to a network print server that looks to have Unix compatibility, so that's not a problem. Scanner? I'm not sure, but it's a pretty mainstream HP. The odd input peripherals might be workable, overall. Probably not the n52 SpeedPad, but then I wouldn't be able to play Guild Wars or the like under Linux anyway.
Multimedia's much more better under Windows XP for what I do. I wouldn't be able to upmix stereo stuff to use 4 channels when I'm playing things back under Linux like I can with Windows. DVD playback .. well, I'd have to mess with that, but I don't know if there are Linux drivers and playback apps that allow me to get Dolby 5.1 sound and the video. I mean, I have an NVidia card, so drivers are there, but codecs? Dunno.
Apps in general: I can drop my blogging stuff for using LiveJournal's online interface. I have my personal info manager running under Windows and have had it for years. Email's not a problem, I'm flexible with my email clients. I could find an IM suite that works like Trillian, or a few different apps. ADM isn't Linux-y. Web development shouldn't be a problem under Linux. Dunno about ripping CDs to OGG format, but there has to be something out there for Linux to do that. I've heard that AVG's free version for Linux is a good antivirus solution. OpenOffice.org is a no-brainer. Roleplaying stuff... I could probably manage the basics, but if I were to really GM something, my tools are Windows ones.
Games. No question, Windows is required for my gaming neeeeeds.
That means definitely a dual boot XP/Linux to handle everything. That means moving between the two platforms when I want to take a short break from working on a paper for school to play a game. Figuring in boot times and shutdown times, that's probably five minutes of sitting around watching things indicate that the computer's doing something while you can't actually interact. Not good.
Maybe I should just use all normal hardware and play no games. Then I could go to Linux and not lose much. Moving my laptop to an entirely Linux unit isn't an option because I use it for roleplaying games. I guess I could try dual-booting it, though, since I don't do games on it. Hmm. I'll have to think about that some more.
I know I've covered this general debate before, but what're your personal experiences and thoughts?
So what does Windows have that a Linux distro doesn't for me?
Hardware compatibility for the basic stuff is pretty good in Linux, but not as solid as XP's. I don't think I'd find a driver for the USB cable for my cell phone for Linux, but I haven't looked yet. My printer is hooked up to a network print server that looks to have Unix compatibility, so that's not a problem. Scanner? I'm not sure, but it's a pretty mainstream HP. The odd input peripherals might be workable, overall. Probably not the n52 SpeedPad, but then I wouldn't be able to play Guild Wars or the like under Linux anyway.
Multimedia's much more better under Windows XP for what I do. I wouldn't be able to upmix stereo stuff to use 4 channels when I'm playing things back under Linux like I can with Windows. DVD playback .. well, I'd have to mess with that, but I don't know if there are Linux drivers and playback apps that allow me to get Dolby 5.1 sound and the video. I mean, I have an NVidia card, so drivers are there, but codecs? Dunno.
Apps in general: I can drop my blogging stuff for using LiveJournal's online interface. I have my personal info manager running under Windows and have had it for years. Email's not a problem, I'm flexible with my email clients. I could find an IM suite that works like Trillian, or a few different apps. ADM isn't Linux-y. Web development shouldn't be a problem under Linux. Dunno about ripping CDs to OGG format, but there has to be something out there for Linux to do that. I've heard that AVG's free version for Linux is a good antivirus solution. OpenOffice.org is a no-brainer. Roleplaying stuff... I could probably manage the basics, but if I were to really GM something, my tools are Windows ones.
Games. No question, Windows is required for my gaming neeeeeds.
That means definitely a dual boot XP/Linux to handle everything. That means moving between the two platforms when I want to take a short break from working on a paper for school to play a game. Figuring in boot times and shutdown times, that's probably five minutes of sitting around watching things indicate that the computer's doing something while you can't actually interact. Not good.
Maybe I should just use all normal hardware and play no games. Then I could go to Linux and not lose much. Moving my laptop to an entirely Linux unit isn't an option because I use it for roleplaying games. I guess I could try dual-booting it, though, since I don't do games on it. Hmm. I'll have to think about that some more.
I know I've covered this general debate before, but what're your personal experiences and thoughts?
Vista RC2 has been released. Anyone playing with it? Not I. Why? I like my existing setup... mostly. I tried GeoShell again and that sad anecdote lingers near the bottom of this post. Before going there, though, I wanted to blather about user interfaces and give you a link to one of the best user interface (hereinafter referred to as "UI") reads on the Web.
While looking for assistance with a GeoShell plugin I ran across a comment that reminded me of an article by Treetog, an extremely famous skinner and UI guru, that's called "A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts." In it, Treetog gives a brief quiz designed to generate thought about how many commonly used UIs could be improved.
There is an ulterior motive to the quiz, though, since he follows the test with Fitts' Law: "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target." In Treetog's words, Fitts' Law "is simple, absolute, and immutable." It should be a guiding fundamental principle in UI design, and yet it's ignored utterly so often.... Well, I'll let you read the article to see how. Treetog's much better than I am at making the points.
One of the most important concepts that I took away from reading the article was the idea that the edges of a screen can be considered as infinite in size to a pointer that is trying to move off the edge of the screen. This is assuming, of course, that the pointer isn't going to traverse to another screen. But think about it: If you move your cursor to the rightmost edge of your screen and keep moving your pointing device to the right, the cursor just sits there on the edge of the screen. If there's a target there, users don't have to worry about stopping their right-ward motion to hit the target, they just have to worry about whether they hit it on the vertical axis. Putting a target in a screen corner makes hitting it even easier.
That's one reason I like my Start button at the top left of my screen. I can nail it with a flick to the upper-left and a click. It's also a big reason I don't like autohiding my taskbar: I don't have to move to the edge of the screen, wait for the taskbar to pop up, then move again to hit the Start button. Anyway, you get the general point, I reckon, that having popular targets at the screen edges helps to increase usability. I've said it before, try putting your task bar on the left side of the screen and see what you think.
I've changed a little bit, though, on my configuration since last I blogged about it. Rather than having two columns of large-size Quick Launch icons, I have one column of small Quick Launch icons with text. Bigger targets and all are right up next to the left edge of the screen thanks to using the "classic" Windows look instead of XP's default. I shrink the width as small as it will go and still have enough room at the bottom of the system tray that I see the time, weekday, and date all at the bottom with four columns of small icons in the system tray, which works fine for me because most of those are notifications.
Anyway, with UI flexibility in mind, I tried GeoShell again with an eye toward setting things up so that I had my system menus at the edges of the screen. I had things just about right when the Start menu stopped working correctly, then after a few more movements and clicks my system flat out locked up. Now, this system's been rock stable since I finished the after-build tweak phase. My only crashes have been with ill-behaved applications and games, so this was a big concern to me. Time to remove GeoShell again, I thought, so I hit the reset button and waited for the restart.
Windows came up, I uninstalled GeoShell, then surfed the Web a bit. Finding an interesting link to share, I pulled up my text editor and my "scratchpad" file to save it for spreading around later. I was shocked, though, to find that my scratchpad file had been replaced with some null characters. Not only that, but the settings for NotePad Pro, my favorite text editor, had been reset to defaults. No backup. Boom. Adios. What the HELL!? Ok, could have been part of the lockup, I was pretty sure that the scratchpad file was open in NoteTab Pro at the time and things got messed up. Not a big problem, but definitely something to keep in mind. I pulled up foobar 2000, my favorite music player, and found that its settings had also been reset to defaults. Foobar 2000 had definitely been running when I had my lockup. GAAAH!
The moral of the story isn't that GeoShell sucks. It's pretty cool, but doesn't seem stable. Hell, none of the big alternate Windows shells have been updated in months, and none of them are in "final release" status, which tells me something. The point here is about that stability thing. Don't mess with your system's stability if you can help it, whether you use a Mac, a PC, whatever, while you have important data that's being used by the system. You overclockers and other speed fiends know that with speed comes a higher chance of data integrity loss. Hardware can be fairly easily replaced. Data, once it's lost, can't.
Maybe I'll try out some of Stardock's latest alternate menus next or some free menu bar stuff... I may never learn... heheh.
While looking for assistance with a GeoShell plugin I ran across a comment that reminded me of an article by Treetog, an extremely famous skinner and UI guru, that's called "A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts." In it, Treetog gives a brief quiz designed to generate thought about how many commonly used UIs could be improved.
There is an ulterior motive to the quiz, though, since he follows the test with Fitts' Law: "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target." In Treetog's words, Fitts' Law "is simple, absolute, and immutable." It should be a guiding fundamental principle in UI design, and yet it's ignored utterly so often.... Well, I'll let you read the article to see how. Treetog's much better than I am at making the points.
One of the most important concepts that I took away from reading the article was the idea that the edges of a screen can be considered as infinite in size to a pointer that is trying to move off the edge of the screen. This is assuming, of course, that the pointer isn't going to traverse to another screen. But think about it: If you move your cursor to the rightmost edge of your screen and keep moving your pointing device to the right, the cursor just sits there on the edge of the screen. If there's a target there, users don't have to worry about stopping their right-ward motion to hit the target, they just have to worry about whether they hit it on the vertical axis. Putting a target in a screen corner makes hitting it even easier.
That's one reason I like my Start button at the top left of my screen. I can nail it with a flick to the upper-left and a click. It's also a big reason I don't like autohiding my taskbar: I don't have to move to the edge of the screen, wait for the taskbar to pop up, then move again to hit the Start button. Anyway, you get the general point, I reckon, that having popular targets at the screen edges helps to increase usability. I've said it before, try putting your task bar on the left side of the screen and see what you think.
I've changed a little bit, though, on my configuration since last I blogged about it. Rather than having two columns of large-size Quick Launch icons, I have one column of small Quick Launch icons with text. Bigger targets and all are right up next to the left edge of the screen thanks to using the "classic" Windows look instead of XP's default. I shrink the width as small as it will go and still have enough room at the bottom of the system tray that I see the time, weekday, and date all at the bottom with four columns of small icons in the system tray, which works fine for me because most of those are notifications.
Anyway, with UI flexibility in mind, I tried GeoShell again with an eye toward setting things up so that I had my system menus at the edges of the screen. I had things just about right when the Start menu stopped working correctly, then after a few more movements and clicks my system flat out locked up. Now, this system's been rock stable since I finished the after-build tweak phase. My only crashes have been with ill-behaved applications and games, so this was a big concern to me. Time to remove GeoShell again, I thought, so I hit the reset button and waited for the restart.
Windows came up, I uninstalled GeoShell, then surfed the Web a bit. Finding an interesting link to share, I pulled up my text editor and my "scratchpad" file to save it for spreading around later. I was shocked, though, to find that my scratchpad file had been replaced with some null characters. Not only that, but the settings for NotePad Pro, my favorite text editor, had been reset to defaults. No backup. Boom. Adios. What the HELL!? Ok, could have been part of the lockup, I was pretty sure that the scratchpad file was open in NoteTab Pro at the time and things got messed up. Not a big problem, but definitely something to keep in mind. I pulled up foobar 2000, my favorite music player, and found that its settings had also been reset to defaults. Foobar 2000 had definitely been running when I had my lockup. GAAAH!
The moral of the story isn't that GeoShell sucks. It's pretty cool, but doesn't seem stable. Hell, none of the big alternate Windows shells have been updated in months, and none of them are in "final release" status, which tells me something. The point here is about that stability thing. Don't mess with your system's stability if you can help it, whether you use a Mac, a PC, whatever, while you have important data that's being used by the system. You overclockers and other speed fiends know that with speed comes a higher chance of data integrity loss. Hardware can be fairly easily replaced. Data, once it's lost, can't.
Maybe I'll try out some of Stardock's latest alternate menus next or some free menu bar stuff... I may never learn... heheh.
- Mood:
tired - Music:Devo - Mr. B's Ballroom
[In our last episode, Brant discussed not having the tech/media lust that used to overcome him when he went to Fry's. He didn't speak about himself in the third person in the last installment, but he is in this one, but mostly just for this short introductory blurb! How will Brant deal with this crisis? Will he ever want any gadgets again? Find out in the following paragraphs! - Brant]
But first, I have to mention that I'm still getting "suck my catling" spams. I think it's about every three days that I get one or two in my "This is VERY likely spam, but I'm holding it here so you can check it out" folder. They must mean "pussy," I guess, but you don't suck that.. technically. I'm not going to penetrate deeper into that topic here, though. There's not enough "womb" for it. [We've removed the part of Brant's brain that makes horrifying puns for the rest of this post. You can thank us later - Brant {a royal "we"? Will this madness never end!? - Brant}]
I do have nerdy desires. You have to say "desires" like this: dee ZI erz. Try it a few times. I got it from Frank Zappa's album "Joe's Garage," in case you're wondering. But no matter! I do have things that I want from somewhere geeky.
I have been waiting months for Sony's PRS-500 to come out. Now their site says it won't be out until on or before the end of October. Bastards, it was supposed to be out at the end of Spring earlier this year and they keep pushing it back. There's an offering by some other European company that's like $650 that uses eInk, too, but that seems a bit much. The MSRP on Sony's offering was $349, I think. I don't know if it'll ever be available, though.
Sam and Max has gone GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD! I must have it. Sam and Max Hit the Road is one of my favorite and most-replayed games of all time. I even have a Sam and Max Windows desktop theme, I love them so.
I want a coffee mug that I can write stuff on and a green laser pointer and am thinking about getting a Zuca thingy. I don't have needs for any of this stuff. I could use the Zuca if I start gaming in meatspace again, though.
I've been considering getting the x64 version of Windows XP since I have a dual core AMD x64 CPU. It'll be faster right? Probably not noticeably. I could just switch to one of the more recent Linuxes [Linuces? - B], but then my gaming needs would go unfulfilled. Unacceptable.
So I'm not completely techlust-less yet. Just not as .. techlusty.
I occasionally try out alternative Windows shells just to remind myself why I'm running the Windows "standard" interface with XP's "recently used applications" on the Start menu. The most recent test was geoShell, a cute little thing that needs MUCH better customization tools and would still be in use here if there were a way to set the geoBars to take up space along the sides of the screens when docked rather than floating on top of everything. If I maximize something, I don't want to have little bars covering up potentially important pieces of information in my maximized app window, and I don't want to have to hover over a handle to get the rest of a geoBar to open up so I can click on a button before the geoBar closes again. Just let me tell Windows, however it can be done, not to use the space that the geoBar is docked in. The regular taskbar does it, why not a geoBar?
I'd really like to have BeOS's (or in this case ZETA's) setup, which is possible with stuff from Stardock's Object Desktop, but last time I tried Object Desktop there were many crashings. The shell's one of the last places you want crashings to happen. So I'm back to my usual basic XP with the taskbar on the left side.
I guess with that I've reclaimed my geekdom enough. w00t!
But first, I have to mention that I'm still getting "suck my catling" spams. I think it's about every three days that I get one or two in my "This is VERY likely spam, but I'm holding it here so you can check it out" folder. They must mean "pussy," I guess, but you don't suck that.. technically. I'm not going to penetrate deeper into that topic here, though. There's not enough "womb" for it. [We've removed the part of Brant's brain that makes horrifying puns for the rest of this post. You can thank us later - Brant {a royal "we"? Will this madness never end!? - Brant}]
I do have nerdy desires. You have to say "desires" like this: dee ZI erz. Try it a few times. I got it from Frank Zappa's album "Joe's Garage," in case you're wondering. But no matter! I do have things that I want from somewhere geeky.
I have been waiting months for Sony's PRS-500 to come out. Now their site says it won't be out until on or before the end of October. Bastards, it was supposed to be out at the end of Spring earlier this year and they keep pushing it back. There's an offering by some other European company that's like $650 that uses eInk, too, but that seems a bit much. The MSRP on Sony's offering was $349, I think. I don't know if it'll ever be available, though.
Sam and Max has gone GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD! I must have it. Sam and Max Hit the Road is one of my favorite and most-replayed games of all time. I even have a Sam and Max Windows desktop theme, I love them so.
I want a coffee mug that I can write stuff on and a green laser pointer and am thinking about getting a Zuca thingy. I don't have needs for any of this stuff. I could use the Zuca if I start gaming in meatspace again, though.
I've been considering getting the x64 version of Windows XP since I have a dual core AMD x64 CPU. It'll be faster right? Probably not noticeably. I could just switch to one of the more recent Linuxes [Linuces? - B], but then my gaming needs would go unfulfilled. Unacceptable.
So I'm not completely techlust-less yet. Just not as .. techlusty.
I occasionally try out alternative Windows shells just to remind myself why I'm running the Windows "standard" interface with XP's "recently used applications" on the Start menu. The most recent test was geoShell, a cute little thing that needs MUCH better customization tools and would still be in use here if there were a way to set the geoBars to take up space along the sides of the screens when docked rather than floating on top of everything. If I maximize something, I don't want to have little bars covering up potentially important pieces of information in my maximized app window, and I don't want to have to hover over a handle to get the rest of a geoBar to open up so I can click on a button before the geoBar closes again. Just let me tell Windows, however it can be done, not to use the space that the geoBar is docked in. The regular taskbar does it, why not a geoBar?
I'd really like to have BeOS's (or in this case ZETA's) setup, which is possible with stuff from Stardock's Object Desktop, but last time I tried Object Desktop there were many crashings. The shell's one of the last places you want crashings to happen. So I'm back to my usual basic XP with the taskbar on the left side.
I guess with that I've reclaimed my geekdom enough. w00t!
I have some generally techy ramblings this time around and a note about reading Mark Twain. Let's get to it.
Salon.com has an excellent article up about kids and codewrangling. "Why Johnny Can't Code" discusses the ubiquitous nature of BASIC a couple of decades back and its impact on an entire generation of young nerds. I was there, daddy-o, even going so far as to get myself locked into the school library one night to play on the computers. Good times.
I have a current subscription to Salon.com, so sorry if you guys have ads or can't read the article. I do recommend Salon.com as an excellent Web source of opinions and information. I got the subscription as part of a Poli Sci class and have enjoyed it since.
ExtremeTech went out to build a high performance desktop Vista machine. Um, guys, the OS isn't even in a final release form yet. From what we've seen of past Windows iterations, six months after final release the sweet spot for PC parts purchasing will reach the "runs the new Windows nicely" point. And hopefully many important bugs in Vista will hopefully have been patched by MS. So why .. ?
I guess I don't understand the visceral gonad-jolting rush that many techies get now from experimenting with the latest versions of Windows. Didn't have it for XP and its bright, bold, icky interface that reminded me of playing with Legos. I didn't have it for Windows 2000 either. I guess I've passed the point where I've learned that new tech doesn't necessarily mean it's actually better. Why would I want to run an OS that eats a bunch of resources from my games, anyway?
The new cordless Logitech trackball is working out well. I'm still fiddling with how to have my hand on it and all that, but it's just been learning how to mesh my normal interaction with my PC with this new toy. It's a keeper. Adios, Microsoft pointing devices.
Which leads me to a new keyboard by Microsoft. I'll just point you guys to it and wait for some other comments to roll in. Well, ok, just a preliminary thing from me. It looks light, the key placement is interesting, cordless is probably good, but it's got too many buttons to make it more than a toy for a MS media center box. MS is pushing further into that space, looks like. We knew that before, but this is a mouse and keyboard combo that might bring mainstream PC computing to the living room. You guys have any thoughts?
A friend of mine called and asked if I knew XML. I don't... yet. But I'm getting the feeling that it's one of those things that I should find out more about. So if you guys have any potential sources for learning about it, drop me a line! Thanks!
One non-techy thing must be added here. I've seen a few visual paraphrasings of what someone thought was the major content of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, things that showed the Yankee and his adventures with revolutionizing Britain. They're wrong. The novel is most definitely a sociopolitical commentary. Many of the illustrations are effectively political cartoons, for example. If you get the chance to read the novel, get the original illustrated version. Interestingly, there is a bit of the social status juxtaposition that forms the central basis for The Prince and the Pauper here as well. I haven't looked to see which came first, the Prince or the Yankee, but there's a definite link there, showing how much Twain considered social stratification.
Salon.com has an excellent article up about kids and codewrangling. "Why Johnny Can't Code" discusses the ubiquitous nature of BASIC a couple of decades back and its impact on an entire generation of young nerds. I was there, daddy-o, even going so far as to get myself locked into the school library one night to play on the computers. Good times.
I have a current subscription to Salon.com, so sorry if you guys have ads or can't read the article. I do recommend Salon.com as an excellent Web source of opinions and information. I got the subscription as part of a Poli Sci class and have enjoyed it since.
ExtremeTech went out to build a high performance desktop Vista machine. Um, guys, the OS isn't even in a final release form yet. From what we've seen of past Windows iterations, six months after final release the sweet spot for PC parts purchasing will reach the "runs the new Windows nicely" point. And hopefully many important bugs in Vista will hopefully have been patched by MS. So why .. ?
I guess I don't understand the visceral gonad-jolting rush that many techies get now from experimenting with the latest versions of Windows. Didn't have it for XP and its bright, bold, icky interface that reminded me of playing with Legos. I didn't have it for Windows 2000 either. I guess I've passed the point where I've learned that new tech doesn't necessarily mean it's actually better. Why would I want to run an OS that eats a bunch of resources from my games, anyway?
The new cordless Logitech trackball is working out well. I'm still fiddling with how to have my hand on it and all that, but it's just been learning how to mesh my normal interaction with my PC with this new toy. It's a keeper. Adios, Microsoft pointing devices.
Which leads me to a new keyboard by Microsoft. I'll just point you guys to it and wait for some other comments to roll in. Well, ok, just a preliminary thing from me. It looks light, the key placement is interesting, cordless is probably good, but it's got too many buttons to make it more than a toy for a MS media center box. MS is pushing further into that space, looks like. We knew that before, but this is a mouse and keyboard combo that might bring mainstream PC computing to the living room. You guys have any thoughts?
A friend of mine called and asked if I knew XML. I don't... yet. But I'm getting the feeling that it's one of those things that I should find out more about. So if you guys have any potential sources for learning about it, drop me a line! Thanks!
One non-techy thing must be added here. I've seen a few visual paraphrasings of what someone thought was the major content of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, things that showed the Yankee and his adventures with revolutionizing Britain. They're wrong. The novel is most definitely a sociopolitical commentary. Many of the illustrations are effectively political cartoons, for example. If you get the chance to read the novel, get the original illustrated version. Interestingly, there is a bit of the social status juxtaposition that forms the central basis for The Prince and the Pauper here as well. I haven't looked to see which came first, the Prince or the Yankee, but there's a definite link there, showing how much Twain considered social stratification.
Hey, still catching up on the news since I was on vacation for a few days. I was actually off the grid and didn't mind too much, how weird is that!? Anyway, one noteworthy news bit hit me: SysInternals and Winternals have been purchased by Microsoft.
If you don't know about SysInternals and Winternals, they've been writing astoundingly useful utilities for Windows and releasing them for free or decently-priced for years. Go check them out if you have any kind of curiosity in what your system is doing while Windows is running. I guarantee that you'll find one or more applications that will be of interest.
What's cool about this is that some of the Windows knowledge that these guys have used to create their excellent utilities will be going into Windows directly. The bad thing is that Microsoft will have final say on how that knowledge will be used, and thus how much of it reaches end users. Hopefully the result won't be a slew of costly developer-only applications, we'll see.
So congratulations to the SysInternals and Winternals guys. Go browse their sites and get some goodies today!
If you don't know about SysInternals and Winternals, they've been writing astoundingly useful utilities for Windows and releasing them for free or decently-priced for years. Go check them out if you have any kind of curiosity in what your system is doing while Windows is running. I guarantee that you'll find one or more applications that will be of interest.
What's cool about this is that some of the Windows knowledge that these guys have used to create their excellent utilities will be going into Windows directly. The bad thing is that Microsoft will have final say on how that knowledge will be used, and thus how much of it reaches end users. Hopefully the result won't be a slew of costly developer-only applications, we'll see.
So congratulations to the SysInternals and Winternals guys. Go browse their sites and get some goodies today!
Scattered bits...
D-Link's manual for router to router VPN configuration is pretty good, though their online knowledge base stipulates explicitly that the routers have to be in the same subnet to work correctly while the manual doesn't. We'll be testing that in the next two weeks, I think, to see which source is correct. Hopefully the subnet issue isn't valid, but we'll see.
I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up a VPN tunnel between the two routers through the administration interface. Consumer routers have come a LONG way, baby. See what happens when there's a lot of competition in a market? On the other hand, there are a ton of competing "standards" out there that aren't necessarily mutually compatible across differing manufacturers or products, so competition's not always good. But that's a story for another time.
Before that time comes, here's a link to YouOS, a web-based operating system. It looks pretty cool, working well with my Firefox configuration, but I have no idea where the storage is at for it. When I saved a text file, I couldn't find it in the File Explorer, though when I relaunched the text file editor I was able to open the file again. Anyway, this concept of a thin client running via very standardized Web programming is very interesting, and a possible "GoogleOS" candidate to consider.
With the recent explosion of Web-based tools like text editors and spreadsheets, I think it's not going to be long before someone comes up with a basic client OS that just rolls out Firefox in a manner that an administrator can point at a Web-based desktop solution and start denting the Microsoft Windows monopoly on business desktops. Thin clients died a hideous death a few years back, but this type of thing may resurrect the general concept.
I'm not quite in a position right now to dive back into school this semester, but I'm going to see about some Fast Trak classes once my new employment gets settled to finish off the AA. I have to get back in touch with some of my profs for sure.
D-Link's manual for router to router VPN configuration is pretty good, though their online knowledge base stipulates explicitly that the routers have to be in the same subnet to work correctly while the manual doesn't. We'll be testing that in the next two weeks, I think, to see which source is correct. Hopefully the subnet issue isn't valid, but we'll see.
I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up a VPN tunnel between the two routers through the administration interface. Consumer routers have come a LONG way, baby. See what happens when there's a lot of competition in a market? On the other hand, there are a ton of competing "standards" out there that aren't necessarily mutually compatible across differing manufacturers or products, so competition's not always good. But that's a story for another time.
Before that time comes, here's a link to YouOS, a web-based operating system. It looks pretty cool, working well with my Firefox configuration, but I have no idea where the storage is at for it. When I saved a text file, I couldn't find it in the File Explorer, though when I relaunched the text file editor I was able to open the file again. Anyway, this concept of a thin client running via very standardized Web programming is very interesting, and a possible "GoogleOS" candidate to consider.
With the recent explosion of Web-based tools like text editors and spreadsheets, I think it's not going to be long before someone comes up with a basic client OS that just rolls out Firefox in a manner that an administrator can point at a Web-based desktop solution and start denting the Microsoft Windows monopoly on business desktops. Thin clients died a hideous death a few years back, but this type of thing may resurrect the general concept.
I'm not quite in a position right now to dive back into school this semester, but I'm going to see about some Fast Trak classes once my new employment gets settled to finish off the AA. I have to get back in touch with some of my profs for sure.
There's a decent heads up on the Internet Storm Center about the recent increase in 0-day exploits in MS Office and other products. It's kind of amusing to me (and I think the tone of the note on ISC agrees) that so many people are clamoring for more security in applications that I'm truly shocked have not been more commonly targeted for exploitation. Outlook is about the only MS Office suite application that has had major security increases, even though macros have been disabled by default in other MSO apps.
Another thing that amuses me is how much fearmongering there is about OpenOffice.org. OOo had a security issue crop up recently involving macros that is similar to the well-known longstanding macro issues in Word. The fix? Just like Word, don't allow macros to run unless you know the source of the document. Duh. But the Web was ablaze for a few days with experts and supposed experts who insisted that OOo was unsafe because of this and that people should be using Microsoft's Office products instead. I wonder how much Microsoft pays said experts to spread FUD about OOo. It's probably just MS lovers. Yes, I'm biased against MS Office. Read my earlier rant about it if you'd like to know why.
But back to the ISC comment about 0-day exploits. I agree with about the exploits being targeted more toward government and financial institutions on the Web than your average Web presence, but everyone needs to know about and be aware of the possibility of a new exploit, from the techno wizards directly controlling the copper, fibre, and iron to the end users, and policies have to be in place and followed by end users to keep attacks from succeeding as frequently.
This is a mantra that most IT managers know already, but it's seldom followed because the industry as a whole moves so quickly that there is little time for the people actually in the IT trenches to train others, much less for others in companies to listen to IT-related seminars that might help everyone with workflow and reduced service disruption. It's a big problem that needs a resolution.
0-day exploits are here to stay and will only increase in number for the next year as black hats continue to monitor white hat security bulletins. Be careful out there, folks.
Another thing that amuses me is how much fearmongering there is about OpenOffice.org. OOo had a security issue crop up recently involving macros that is similar to the well-known longstanding macro issues in Word. The fix? Just like Word, don't allow macros to run unless you know the source of the document. Duh. But the Web was ablaze for a few days with experts and supposed experts who insisted that OOo was unsafe because of this and that people should be using Microsoft's Office products instead. I wonder how much Microsoft pays said experts to spread FUD about OOo. It's probably just MS lovers. Yes, I'm biased against MS Office. Read my earlier rant about it if you'd like to know why.
But back to the ISC comment about 0-day exploits. I agree with about the exploits being targeted more toward government and financial institutions on the Web than your average Web presence, but everyone needs to know about and be aware of the possibility of a new exploit, from the techno wizards directly controlling the copper, fibre, and iron to the end users, and policies have to be in place and followed by end users to keep attacks from succeeding as frequently.
This is a mantra that most IT managers know already, but it's seldom followed because the industry as a whole moves so quickly that there is little time for the people actually in the IT trenches to train others, much less for others in companies to listen to IT-related seminars that might help everyone with workflow and reduced service disruption. It's a big problem that needs a resolution.
0-day exploits are here to stay and will only increase in number for the next year as black hats continue to monitor white hat security bulletins. Be careful out there, folks.
Vista is coming. Supposedly it's purty. I could care less about how it looks, thanks, as long as it doesn't lock me into the same kind of candy-colored dreck of an interface that is the Windows XP default.
One of the major reasons that I didn't adopt XP right away was an intense hatred of using an interface that reminded me of Legos and Fisher Price toys. XP's shiny, happy look makes me feel like the whole OS is condescending to me. Actually, many of its changes do condescend to the user, but that's another story. So the first things I do when I install a new XP configuration for myself involve reverting back to the classic interface in various ways. I do like the organization of the new Start menu, so that stays, with some modifications, but I get rid of the candy stuff, the fading in and out of view, the smooth scrolling, and other interface options so I can just do what I want to do without feeling like the interface is one of the friendly talking doors on HHGTTG's Heart of Gold.
I want an interface that's easy to use and logically organized more than something that's sparkly/shiny. I realize that I might be in the minority here, but really, how many serious computer users really like stuff flying all over the place when they know exactly where they want to go in the interface to do what they want to do? Vista's high-end Aero interface can just sit in permanent development hell for all I care.
I've played a lot with Stardock's excellent WindowBlinds product, but keep uninstalling it after finding various things that don't work well with it. While I love the concept, enough that I purchased WB, it seems that WB is a patch to the Windows UI requiring custom settings for many applications. As cool as WB is, I just want to work or play, folks. I'm done with my tweaking the computer just for the sake of tweaking days... heheh.
That said, here's my basic personal recipe for the Windows XP interface, mainly the task bar:
1. Choose the Windows Classic look for XP.
2. Unlock the taskbar.
3. Drag the taskbar to the left side of the screen. Why? I'll go over that in a moment.
4. Turn on the Quick Launch toolbar if it's not already on.
5. Set the Quick Launch icons to Large size.
6. Drag the Quick Launch section so that it fills the full width of the space on the taskbar just below the Start button and the application notification area is below it, covering the region of the taskbar between the Quick Launch toolbar and the system tray.
6. Drag the width of the taskbar so that two Quick Launch icons sit side by side.
At this point, from the top of the taskbar to the bottom there should be the Start button, then the Quick Launch toolbar, then the regular application notification area, then the system tray. Voila, done.
The Start button is at the top left of the screen in this configuration, the place that English readers' eyes go first to find things. MS puts the Start button at the bottom of the screen because it's different from where Apple smartly puts their menuing information. Note that almost all Windows applications have their menu bars at the top of their respective windows, but MS persists in setting the Start button at the bottom of the screen by default. At least they didn't put the button on the right side of the screen.
I fill up the Quick Launch area with apps that I use a lot rather than having them tacked onto the Start Menu. This way I don't have to click as much to get to my most used applications, and I don't have to dig through the Desktop to find them either.
Autohide stays turned off in the taskbar so that I can get to applications more quickly and so I can see when things change in the system tray or application notification area. Autohide also works a bit strangely in XP, popping up the taskbar when you don't necessarily need to know something is going on and taking the cursor focus inconsistently. I don't dig that kind of thing.
Finally, as applications are opened, they have a lot of vertical space to fill on the taskbar that are all the same width rather than having resized sections stack up horizontally and get squished up. The hunt for an open application is a bit speedier with this configuration than even a double-height taskbar on the bottom of the screen.
Your mileage may vary, but try this out for a day or two to see what you think.
PC World has an article up called The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. The list primarily contains software products or services, which .. I dunno. I mean, when I see mention of a tech product, I think of things like the aptly-dissed iSmell that is on PC World's list rather than dBASE IV. I guess really it just comes down to what people think are bad tech, but I'd have put the iSmell a bit higher on the list and dropped Sony BMG's music CD's in favor of an entry on CDs that try to take advantage of Windows Autoplay.
Let me rant about this dubious Windows feature myself, since it isn't present on PC World's hugely more professionally-formatted and public list. Autoplay bugs me, especially the implementation in Windows XP. Why? I can't completely turn the damn thing off through regular menus in the OS. I don't want my MP3 player to be autoscanned every time I hook it up as a USB drive, for example. I've plugged in the drive, cancelled the automatic scanning that happens, and told the Autoplay dialog window that I want it to perform NO FRIGGIN' ACTION entirely too many times. Sometimes there's a checkbox enabled on the Autoplay dialog that you can check to tell it not to scan this particular drive anymore, but it's greyed out with my USB drives so I can't turn autoplay off on that drive.
I just want to interact with the data on the MP3 player at a file level when I plug it into my PC, otherwise I'd plug in some earphones and hit Play, mmkay? At least one of the options that Autoplay presents asks if I want to Explore the drive, but guess what? I don't use Explorer much, preferring another file manager. Can I easily tell XP that I'd really like it to pull up the root directory of a USB drive that I've plugged in with this other file manager? Of course not, that might make sense, like having to press the Start button to shut down the PC.
When a CD is put into a CD-ROM drive, XP executes whatever it finds in the autoplay files on it indiscriminately. This is great for games or utilities that are above-board with asking about installation and such, and it's also great for less scrupulous purposes, such as the much-hyped and aforementioned Sony BMG music CD "protection" that installed a root kit on systems by utilizing Windows XP's Autoplay feature.
Thank you, Microsoft, for allowing Windows Autoplay to remain enabled on Joe User systems across the planet. The stern lack of attention to security and common sense in this feature of Windows XP is greatly unappreciated.
Let me rant about this dubious Windows feature myself, since it isn't present on PC World's hugely more professionally-formatted and public list. Autoplay bugs me, especially the implementation in Windows XP. Why? I can't completely turn the damn thing off through regular menus in the OS. I don't want my MP3 player to be autoscanned every time I hook it up as a USB drive, for example. I've plugged in the drive, cancelled the automatic scanning that happens, and told the Autoplay dialog window that I want it to perform NO FRIGGIN' ACTION entirely too many times. Sometimes there's a checkbox enabled on the Autoplay dialog that you can check to tell it not to scan this particular drive anymore, but it's greyed out with my USB drives so I can't turn autoplay off on that drive.
I just want to interact with the data on the MP3 player at a file level when I plug it into my PC, otherwise I'd plug in some earphones and hit Play, mmkay? At least one of the options that Autoplay presents asks if I want to Explore the drive, but guess what? I don't use Explorer much, preferring another file manager. Can I easily tell XP that I'd really like it to pull up the root directory of a USB drive that I've plugged in with this other file manager? Of course not, that might make sense, like having to press the Start button to shut down the PC.
When a CD is put into a CD-ROM drive, XP executes whatever it finds in the autoplay files on it indiscriminately. This is great for games or utilities that are above-board with asking about installation and such, and it's also great for less scrupulous purposes, such as the much-hyped and aforementioned Sony BMG music CD "protection" that installed a root kit on systems by utilizing Windows XP's Autoplay feature.
Thank you, Microsoft, for allowing Windows Autoplay to remain enabled on Joe User systems across the planet. The stern lack of attention to security and common sense in this feature of Windows XP is greatly unappreciated.
So, Microsoft's next version of Windows, called Vista, of course, is getting "injuncted" by Symantec, and is therefore potentially delayed further. Aww. I'm not surprised that Symantec's suing Microsoft about the volume management in Windows, I'm surprised that it's taken this long to actually come to public blows.
See, Symantec and MS have had an interesting relationship for some time now, stemming from when the Norton line of utilities became entangled with Microsoft's operating systems. Norton Desktop was a pretty cool Windows shell enhancement, but it was the Norton disk utilities and antivirus that really took off. Central Point was competing with Norton in the utility suite department with an antivirus and desktop package as well as a backup solution. Any PC power user had the Norton and Central Point utilities handy as they were invaluable for working through issues on Microsoft DOS and Windows 3 setups. Money was made by all parties, and life was good.
Symantec bought up both the Norton properties and Central Point, and rolled their technologies together into new and improved Norton goodies for Windows 95. This was still pretty good, though it was sad that Central Point took back stage to Norton. Someone had to go, though, and the tech was evidently kept around. Somewhere along the way, Windows 9x's built-in defragger became based on Symantec technology, though. My thought at the time was that MS had licensed Symantec technology and that they were working together to build a better base OS with utilities that would keep things from breaking quite as frequently. This was good, reducing reliance on third party programs to keep a Windows installation alive.
But as time went by, MS started to build more and more of its own utilities into Windows, encroaching on the utility suite market more and more. I didn't know for certain if this was through behind-the-scenes collaboration with Symantec and others or if it was just MS's well-known assimilation tactics. (You might want to put on shades before clicking the link.) MS is probably the best company in the world at absorb-and-extend, as you probably know.
I didn't think much further about this until I came into close, near-personal contact with Veritas Volume Manager while working as a tech support rep at Zzyzx Peripherals. While working with high end data storage management, I got to compare Volume Manager with various hardware RAID solutions and Windows's built-in disk management. Holy crapola Volume Manager is expensive, I thought, but MS seems to be zipping along with making its own versions as they update Windows. No notices of licensed technology were to be found in Microsoft's disk management software, so this was very interesting indeed.
It was also fascinating to me that the Windows version of Veritas Volume Manager took over the regular Windows disk management menus and displays. Disk management is a fairly deep and important section of the operating system, something that MS would not want regular users to mess with, so Volume Manager's complete replacement of the normal Windows disk management without massive MS warnings smacked to me of strong cooperation between Veritas and MS, or at least Veritas's development team having an extremely intimate knowledge of MS's disk management. Or maybe MS was working on their own version of Volume Manager, studying it while they worked more on their new server OS. I think that last is what happened, but that's just a guess.
When Symantec bought Veritas, I wondered how things would work out. According to what I've read about the current Symantec/MS dispute, they've been talking about what to do for a long time and finally decided to let the courts make the decision. At least they tried working things out before going public.
Microsoft and Symantec have been fairly closely joined as software technology providers for years. As MS works its absorb-and-extend strategy to expand the in-Windows utility offerings without including technology partners such as Symantec it wreaks havoc on those relationships, and that just don't seem smart at all. I foresee lots of money being thrown around for an interesting court debacle that really shouldn't be happening at all. New licensing terms for Symantec technology should be drawn up and MS should work with Symantec to get the tech into Vista so money can flow to all and users end up with a better overall experience with Vista. MS isn't doing so hot on getting their own technology into Vista, so why not bring in other tech and save face?
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