Posts tagged as:
Vista
Daily del.icio.us for April 4th through April 6th
- Visual SourceSafe to Subversion Migration - This migration script will take all live files in a VSS project and migrate them to Subversion. Additionally, for those live files, all file history will be preserved. Without this, it wouldn't be a migration, merely an import.
- VisualSVN Server - All-in-one installer for Subversion and Apache - VisualSVN Server is a package that contains everything you need to install, configure and manage Subversion server for your team on Windows platform. It includes Subversion, Apache and a management console.
- Coding Horror: Setting up Subversion on Windows - When it comes to readily available, free source control, I don't think you can do better than Subversion at the moment. Allow me to illustrate how straightforward it is to get a small Subversion server and client going on Windows. It'll take all of 30 min
- JRuby 1.1 is out! - The Empty Way - The long awaited JRuby 1.1 is finally out. Working on it was fun, much more fun than I expected — so much to do, so many interesting things, so little time! It is a perfect mixture of Java and Ruby
- Executive Pay: The Bottom Line for Those at the Top - The New York Times - Compensation and accumulated wealth of 200 chief executives for large public companies that filed proxies for last year by March 28.
- Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900 - Or maybe that's just what I tell myself when I only have $1,000 bucks to spend. Either way, multi-core CPUs made powerful computers far more affordable. You can build a fine quad-core, 8-gig server within that budget
- My Essential Twitter Tools - If you’re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client, you’ll need the right tools to find and engage the discussions.
Here are the tools that I’m using to improve my Twitter experience
- Windows Vista source code - Windows Vista source code
- Forbes.com - Dial D for Disruption - With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco, Nortel or Avaya.
- dangertree techblog » Blog Archive » Groovy vs. Google Collections: Round #1 - In my last post, Dan Lewis responded with some counter-code from Google’s collections package. Instead of attempting to snap back with some witty technical retort, I challenged Dan to a code-off. Groovy collections vs. Google collections (in Java)
- Adam Bien's Weblog : Huge discussion about JavaDoc …and no one cares about Fat Clients - I really wondered about the discussion about JavaDoc - but actually no one complained about this statement "Therefore, a fat client with a local embedded database, such as Java DB, is the simplest possible solution — everything else is a workaround.".
- IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » Migrating to EJB 3 with IntelliJ IDEA is Easy - IntelliJ IDEA has the full-blown support for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). Supporting EJB specs from 1.x to 3.0 and leveraging it through all of its productivity-boosting features, from coding assistance to refactoring, IntelliJ IDEA stands for the weapon
- Gartner: Open source will quietly take over - ZDNet.co.uk - "By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms," predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a "stealth" impact for the technology in embedded form:
- Ext.ux.PrinterFriendly - Ext JS Forums - I'm happy to announce the first release of my (first) Ext JS extension - Ext.ux.PrinterFriendly which allows you to easily build printer friendly layouts and grids for your Ext JS pages.
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Daily del.icio.us for March 16th through March 19th
- reForm: CSS Form Design Template for Any Layout (Part 2) | CSS Zone - formReForm is a methodology to style HTML forms without a huge amount of markup (or [gasp] a Table-based layout). Taking it one step further, this article discusses how to use the formReForm javascript library to create usable, accessible and beautiful us
- Seifi.org » Blog Archive » Safari 3.1 Features Review - Apple claims that Safari 3.1 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 2
- Google about to drop the other Enterprise shoe on Microsoft? « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger - I’m hearing about a few things that Google is planning to do to newly compete with Microsoft’s enterprise offerings.
- The long awaited HTC Shift is now coming to you from Sprint, 140+ hands-on photos | The Mobile Gadgeteer | ZDNet.com - I’ve been using an HTC Shift from Sprint for over a week now and as you can see in over 140 photos and screenshots found in my extensive image gallery I have had a chance to try out most all aspects of the device
- Microsoft working with Eclipse on Vista, ID links - Yahoo! News - Microsoft's much-anticipated revelations about collaborations with the Eclipse Foundation did not include joining the open-source tools foundation. But the two are working together to enable use of Eclipse technology to build Java applications for Vista.
- James Ward - RIA Cowboy » Blog Archive » New Flex Screencast and VideoCoverFlow Component - For Flex 3 I recorded a new version of that screencast. In the new version I used Doug McCune’s CoverFlow component but extended it to easily support playing videos. Check out a demo of the VideoCoverFlow component .
- James Ward - RIA Cowboy » Video: Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour - In case you missed the Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour that went on around the world in January you can watch a recording of the session Serge Jespers and I did in Amsterdam
- Ajax World Conference - Day 1 « dambalah - Yakov believes that Flex is the better technology today, that Microsoft will catch up next year with Silverlight and that Sun still has some work to do before JavaFX becomes stable and competitive.
- The Atlassian Blog - Launching JIRA Studio - After a couple of months in Beta, today JIRA Studio launches into production! JIRA Studio integrates JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, Crucible & Crowd, and then adds in Subversion, Streams, the JIRA Studio toolbar, and makes them all available as a hosted, on-d
- Web Developer 1.1.5 and User Agent Switcher 0.6.11 on Blog on chrispederick.com - New versions of the Web Developer and User Agent Switcher extensions have been released. These releases are mainly to add support for the upcoming Firefox 3, but also contain a few other bug fixes.
- Adam Bien's Weblog : EJB 3 and Memory Consumption Myths or Is it worth to use POJOs instead of EJB 3 in terms of memory? - I'm often asked about the usage Stateless Session Beans (EJB 3) regarding memory consumption and comparing them to POJOs. The nice Markus Kohler's comment for my recent post made me curious - and I started some evaluation.
- Google Open Source Blog: "Look! Actual Code!" - We recently launched a new source code browsing tool as part of Google Code's project hosting feature. This new tool makes it easy to navigate through a project's SVN repository. Key features include: fast directory browsing tree, syntax highlighting, etc
- Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit - Welcome to the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit, the first place to look when you’re ready to optimize web sites and applications for Internet Explorer 8. Here is a message from Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect:
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Daily del.icio.us for February 10th through February 14th
- Zimbra's new Desktop: Look ma, no browser! | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs - It's very cool. You should give it a spin. This is the best e-mail "client" ever built…largely because of its successful marriage of the Web with the desktop. In the future, all applications will be like this–or should be.
- Ext Road Map - Our goals for 2008 are to continue improving the 2.x version line by adding new components and enhancing some of the existing areas of functionality in Ext as shown below. Looking ahead to 3.0, there are some big new areas that we'll be getting into. In a
- The Making of MarkMail: Announcing an Informal Partnership with Codehaus - We're happy to announce we've developed an informal partnership with Codehaus to load all their mail archives and receive automatic notification of new Codehaus lists as they get created.
- A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) - A few weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) came by Yahoo to talk to a bunch of Yahoo! bloggers about the current and future state of WordPress. After the meeting, I sat down with him for our Developer Spotlight series on YDN Theater to catch u
- Andres Almiray's Weblog : Weblog - JSON-lib is a java library for transforming beans, maps and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans. It is based on the work by Douglas Crockford in http://www.json.org/java.
- The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog - The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI ov
- Starbucks ditches T-Mobile for AT&T | Crave : The gadget blog - The new AT&T plan allows all customers 2 free hours per day, with a $3.99 fee for additional 2-hour chunks of time. Monthly subscriptions will cost $19.99 and will enable access to other AT&T hot-spot locations in addition to Starbucks.
- Anthony Park :: 100% Geek Content by Volume » New Vista Media Center Plugin - MyNetflix (beta) - I’ve kept this pretty quiet, but I’ve been working on a new Media Center plugin for a little while now. It is now ready for beta testing, and I’ve decided to run a public beta for this one. MyNetflix features * View your Netflix queue * Browse movie
- Humanized > Our Products > Enso Launcher - Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows.
- Martin Wolf : Advanced Java 5 Generics - Here's an article about a few of the more subtle aspects of Java 5 Generics. This is hardly the 1st article about this particular subject, but none of them explain it quite the way I would have wanted to see it when I was wrestling with this issue myself.
- Panopticon: The Power of Pre-Attentive Processing - Our visualization software is easy to use and is a great way to explore large datasets, identify outliers and find hidden patterns.
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Daily del.icio.us for January 19th through January 20th
- Memcached 1.2.2 on RHEL/Centos using DAG rpms | MDLog:/sysadmin - This article will show how you can easily install memcached 1.2.2 and libevent 1.3b using DAG/rpmforge repository.
- Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: Oracle and BEA: A Day of Reckoning for Portal Implementers - Despite Alfred Chuang's statement during the analyst call that "our two businesses are a natural strategic fit", I would say that their two businesses are instead natural competitors for much of what BEA offers.
- The GigaSpaces Blog » Blog Archives » An Open Letter to BEA WebLogic Customers - A single product that handles messaging, business logic and transactional data through an open-source, commonly used programming model, so your developers can focus on what they do best: quickly deliver new applications and functionality to your business
- Trial By Fire: Windows Vista: Past Its Due Date Already - You become so involved in the idea of the product that you forget about what it's like to be a customer. You assume that it must be good because that's what the market share tells you.
- Java Authentication and Authorization - Free JAAS Book - This site contains the book I wrote sometime back about the Java Authentication and Authorization Service, or JAAS.
- Alfresco Press Releases - Alfresco Selected as One of Linux Magazine?s Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008 - Alfresco Software today announced it has been named one of Linux Magazine?s Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008
- Coderspiel / The right tool for the slob - How is it that some fancy-pants framework is always the right tool for an abstract job and PHP is the right tool for a real job?
- Java Thoughts: A Year of Wicket - I've been working with Wicket for almost a year. We've just released our first product that uses Wicket for the user interface, and so it seems like a good time to take stock. Here's the executive summary: Wicket rocks!
- Groovy not Enterprise-ready, you're kidding? - [ Guillaume Laforge ] - Groovy has been very stable and mature for a long time already. It is being used by many high-profile companies and institutions throughout the world with great success.
- The Impact of Culture on Innovation « The Abstract Truth - BEA eventually built a portal product and acquired another one, and an early opportunity to build a suite of now-indispensable products on top of WebLogic evaporated.
- JBoss (and possibly TomCat) should never have happened. « The Abstract Truth - BEA made a lot of mistakes. Letting JBoss out of the box was probably its biggest. While BEA was looking ?up? at its biggest competitor IBM, JBoss was busily undercutting BEA at the bottom end
- JBoss Matrix - A BEA-utiful Week - JBoss launched an innovators dilemma attack against BEA, not with a revolutionary product, but with a revolutionary business model, one that BEA couldn?t hope to copy without cannibalizing its existing revenue stream. BEA fell right into the trap.
- LatencyTOP - Measuring and fixing Linux latency - LatencyTOP is a Linux* tool for software developers (both kernel and userspace), aimed at identifying where in the system latency is happening, and what kind of operation/action is causing the latency to happen so that the code can be changed to avoid the
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Goodbye Carbonite - Hello Mozy
I have or should say had been a Carbonite user for almost an year but issues after issues finally got to me and the lack of new features that were long promised but never delivered forced me to start looking at the automated online backup again and I am so glad I did, as I've found Mozy. I've had numerous problems with Carbonite and their customer service was crappy. So I decided to give up on Carbonite even though I had already pre-paid for 2 years – I guess it's better to lose $80.00 than all your data.
Mozy is similar to Carbonite in some regards but has a much richer feature set that makes it a better offering. Like Carbonite, Mozy installs a small client on your Windows XP/Vista or OS X desktop that runs in the background and backs up files over the Internet using your broadband connection. But that's where the similarities end. Carbonite is a fairly bare-bones offering which may be ok for most novice users but Mozy offers several configuration options like creation of backup sets, file versions, access to your files via the web and many other features.
One of the best and most important feature that set Mozy and Carbonite apart is the fact that you can actually get your backed files back. Wow! What a concept - I know I know. When I first installed Carbonite, I did several test restores and they worked fine but when I had been backing up for several months and really need to restore something, Carbonite let me down. Mozy on the other hand has never done that. Another awesome feature of Mozy is that fact they don't really throttle your bandwidth after you've uploaded 50 GB. Carbonite seems to limit upload bandwidth to about 2 GB a day and then throttle it down after you reach 50 GB. Mozy doesn't seem to play any of those games and allows uploads that are supported by your bandwidth. On an average day, I think I was uploading about 5+ GB.
Another recent event that makes Mozy even more attractive to me is the purchase of Berkeley Data Systems, providers of Mozy online backup by EMC Corporation. As you probably know, EMC is the leader is the storage market and owns Documentum, VMWare, and RSA among other technology companies.
So if you are looking for a great, reliable and affordable backup solution for your home computer, you should check out Mozy.
Tags: backup, bandwidth, broadband, carbonite, data, emc, mozy, storage, Vista, vmwareRelated posts
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Daily del.icio.us for Feb 19, 2007
These are my links for Feb 19, 2007:
- Census Mashups Using StrikeIron Web Services and Yahoo Maps in Flex 2 - Census Dashboard Mashup is a mashup using StrikeIron's Zip Code Information Web Service, StrikeIron's Population Demographics By ZIP Code Web Service and Yahoo Maps to give detailed information for a specific US zip code. I find it to actually be a really
- Sun Updates Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 - O'Reilly ONJava Blog - Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 is a package which allows parsing HTML pages into a Java Document object. Wonder how it stacks up against HtmlCleaner (http://htmlcleaner.sourceforge.net/)
- dmiessler.com | study | lsof - lsof is the Linux/Unix über-tool. I use it most for getting network connection related information from a system, but that's just the beginning for this amazing and little-known application
- chalain: So Beautiful, So Disturbing - She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night.
- Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things - Engadget - When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you're using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you've probably got a a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives
- Raible Designs | Slick looking Confluence sites - Wicket and Cayenne have nice looking websites backed by Confluence. Wicket has a Writing documentation page that explains how it works.
- Upselling your architecture - The Pragmatic Architect - As an architect, you'll probably need to present to different audiences at different levels. When you do, it's worth thinking about whether you need to upsell your architecture or not.
- MyEclipse Delivers Tools to IntelliJ IDEA Users - Developers using IDEA are now able to utilize the MyEclipse Visual HTML Designer, XML Editor, Database Explorer and Image Editor SNAPs directly in their own environment.
- IntelliJ IDEA: Inspections by Sections … - Static code analysis doesn't just improve your code quality, it can also teach you some cool ideas and best practices about programming
- Java Power Tools: Home - "Java Power Tools" is about software tools and techniques that can contribute to improving the SDLC which includes build tools such as Maven and Ant, CI tools, code quality tools, testing tools, collaborative tools, source version control, and more!
- Rod Johnson » Sun's GlassFish Embracing Spring - I think part of what's making Sun more relevant in the enterprise Java space is that they are now more plugged into what's happening in the wider world, and are willing to take the input on board and act on it
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Daily del.icio.us for Feb 17, 2007 through Feb 19, 2007
These are my links for Feb 17, 2007 through Feb 19, 2007:
- Census Mashups Using StrikeIron Web Services and Yahoo Maps in Flex 2 - Census Dashboard Mashup is a mashup using StrikeIron's Zip Code Information Web Service, StrikeIron's Population Demographics By ZIP Code Web Service and Yahoo Maps to give detailed information for a specific US zip code. I find it to actually be a really
- Sun Updates Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 - O'Reilly ONJava Blog - Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 is a package which allows parsing HTML pages into a Java Document object. Wonder how it stacks up against HtmlCleaner (http://htmlcleaner.sourceforge.net/)
- dmiessler.com | study | lsof - lsof is the Linux/Unix über-tool. I use it most for getting network connection related information from a system, but that's just the beginning for this amazing and little-known application
- chalain: So Beautiful, So Disturbing - She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night.
- Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things - Engadget - When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you're using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you've probably got a a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives
- Raible Designs | Slick looking Confluence sites - Wicket and Cayenne have nice looking websites backed by Confluence. Wicket has a Writing documentation page that explains how it works.
- Upselling your architecture - The Pragmatic Architect - As an architect, you'll probably need to present to different audiences at different levels. When you do, it's worth thinking about whether you need to upsell your architecture or not.
- MyEclipse Delivers Tools to IntelliJ IDEA Users - Developers using IDEA are now able to utilize the MyEclipse Visual HTML Designer, XML Editor, Database Explorer and Image Editor SNAPs directly in their own environment.
- IntelliJ IDEA: Inspections by Sections … - Static code analysis doesn't just improve your code quality, it can also teach you some cool ideas and best practices about programming
- Java Power Tools: Home - "Java Power Tools" is about software tools and techniques that can contribute to improving the SDLC which includes build tools such as Maven and Ant, CI tools, code quality tools, testing tools, collaborative tools, source version control, and more!
- Rod Johnson » Sun's GlassFish Embracing Spring - I think part of what's making Sun more relevant in the enterprise Java space is that they are now more plugged into what's happening in the wider world, and are willing to take the input on board and act on it
- Is Bruce Eckel Right? Maybe not. at Simon?s Blog - Bruce Eckel has written an interesting piece about Java and user interfaces. I?d recommend that you read it, as it?s pretty thought-provoking.
- The Fishbowl: Job Satisfaction - We spend a lot of time at work. If we?re not doing something that we?re passionate about, that gives us some kind of fulfillment, we?re wasting a big part of our lives.
- BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » A day at NPR - I've thoroughly enjoyed my day at NPR. Smart people, but then that?s obvious.
- Coding Horror: The cost of leaving your PC on - So leaving my server on is costing me $200 / year, or $16.68 per month. My home theater PC is a bit more frugal at 65 watts. Using the same formulas, that costs me $81 / year or $6.75 per month.
- The Future Won?t Be Statically Typed « Skunk Works - I'm more and more convinced that statically typed languages will come to an end, replaced by duck typing based languages
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Daily del.icio.us for Jan 08, 2007
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The S3InfiDisk for EC2 takes the form of a mountable Linux file system, creating an infinite storage disk for EC2 instances. The file systems can be mounted on any running EC2 instance, with data cached in local RAM and on the instance's hard disk
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Enterprise 2.0 platforms can provide highly general purpose, freeform, do-it-yourself (DIY) tools that have the potential to solve an entire group of related and overlapping problems in collaboration, knowledge management, SOA adoption, self-service IT, a
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Portege R400 is a beautifully crafted convertible tablet laptop with built-in EV-DO, and a small LED readout on the front edge that shows the time, battery level, and wireless signal strength. It can also alert you to new e-mail messages while the lid is
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How to survive Vista - Kiss UAC goodbye
As I've blogged before, the whole idea of User Account Control or UAC has been driving me crazy. Annoying dialog boxes that keep popping up asking for your permission before doing anything is NOT security. I'm sure Microsoft will certify and validate more applications and actions so that these annoying popup dialog boxes will soon go away but I've finally had enough and turned them off. This is exactly what I was afraid of - Annoy users with STUPID dialogs and they will disable the security features of your OS. Security should be transparent to the user and NOT in your face, asking users questions that they are not likely to understand.
To disable UAC, navigate to Start -> Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety -> Users Accounts and then select 'Turn User Account Control on or off'. I've turned mine OFF - You should make your own choice.
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Microsoft Vista: The Good, Bad and Ugly
My brother was visiting this past weekend and so instead of us spending quality time together, I decided to upgrade my computer from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Here are some of my initial thoughts that I'll try to break down in the good, the bad and the ugly. And boy there is still some ugliness that I hope Microsoft (and partners) solves soon. (Full disclosure - My brother works for Microsoft). Going back to my brother for a second, we are both true geeks at heart and so quality time for us is being locked up in my office with lots of coffee, 4 computers and 8 USB external drives humming away.
The install of Windows Vista RTM was on my new DELL dual-core 3.2 GHz PC with 2 GB of RAM and 256MB PCI Express ATI Radeon X600 video card. (Full specs on the hardware). Instead of choosing a clean and fresh install, I decided to opt for the 'in place upgrade' which replaces the Windows XP system/core files while retaining your existing applications, personal files and settings. I should also note that I installed the Ultimate version of Windows Vista.
The Good
There are a lot of really good things about Vista - The first and most striking difference between XP and Vista is Aero and the translucent effect of Aero Glass. Aero Glass is the eye-candy in Vista that fades in/out windows with smooth animation and does create a really nice visual effect. I'm sure the Mac OSX folks will jump in and say that OSX does this already and I think OSX does do this today and has done this for many years already. My brother is very impressed with the sidebar that allows you to drop in widgets or gadgets in Microsoft speak on your desktop. Having used Yahoo Widgets for a while now, this is nothing new to me and didn't get me excited. I like the idea that Windows will now have a widget engine and this will hopefully allow people to create some interesting applications. I see a huge potential for this on the Enterprise side where a widget or gadget sitting on a user's desktop could ping out and get the latest news, updates, prices, promotions, alerts, etc.
The other thing that's worth mentioning is that installation process. With the exception of McAfee virus scan which I'll describe in detail in the 'bad' section, the installation was very smooth. Once the install was off and running, it churned for about 80-90 minutes to get Vista installed and this included a couple of reboots.
I should also mention that the application that I really cared about worked just fine. It will probably take me days to make sure all or most of my applications are working correctly under Vista but the apps I use the most are Firefox, IntelliJ IDEA, FeedDemon, Putty, Java, WebLogic, Tomcat, Glassfish and UltraEdit and they all worked. The only app that I've had major problems with is iTunes and more on that later.
Another cool and I think innovate feature of Vista is the idea of ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost helps make your PCs more responsive by using flash memory devices (like USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards) to boost performance instead of swapping to disk. Hopefully new PC will start shipping with the new hybrid hard disks that have integrated flash memory to help improve performance, reliability, and battery-life in case of an laptop. The idea of using flash memory instead of swapping to disk is really cool and I hope other OS's take this feature from Windows and implement it themselves.
The last item on the good-list is the Windows Media Center application. The Windows XP Media Center was slow and ugly but did the job and the new Media Center app is significantly faster than the old XP version and seems to perform a lot better. It's still interesting to see how CPU intensive Media Center still is where the dual-core as at 70-80% utilization pretty much all the time while I am watching Live TV.
The Bad
While it's only been about 2 days since I've had the RTM version of Vista on my computer, there are quite a few things I don't like about Vista. I know Joel talked about the shutdown button and so I won't bother with that but there are a lot of really annoying things about Vista. I know - A lot of you are probably shaking your heads thinking I'm probably one of those guys that doesn't like change. Quite the contrary - I love change, but only if it's for the better. For example, the latest version of Office will have the new 'ribbon' interface and I absolutely love that interface. It took me a couple of hours to feel comfortable with the ribbon and find the things that I actually needed to do but I commend Microsoft for taking this bold move and creating a really sensible and usable user interface. There are a lot of things that I wouldn't have changed with Vista and maybe I'll learn to love them with time but I just hate the new start menu. While it's nice that I can search for 'word' to have it bring up Microsoft Word, I would like to be able to just see the menu and sort/arrange in a way that makes sense to me.
Another thing that I also completely hate is the new Windows Explorer and the Navigation Pane. What happened to My Documents and My Pictures and My Videos? I don't know what genius made this decision but instead of storing user profile information under 'C:\Documents and Settings\', Microsoft decided to move that to C:\Users. Why the hell would you do that? What about applications that are using the 'C:\Documents and Settings\' structure and now that whole directory is gone and now applications that rely on that or use hard coded paths will certainly break. Case in point - iTunes. I have about 50 GB of music under iTunes with a majority of it being music that I've personally ripped as MP3 over the last many years and probably 300-400 songs that I've purchased from iTunes. I had all my music under 'C:\Documents and settings\login\My Documents\My Music' and so the iTunes database had that path internally. Hopefully applications would use the registry and so the soft reference to 'My Music' would travel to the new location but apparently iTunes doesn't do that and all of my purchased music wouldn't play. So I reauthorized my computer and it still wouldn't work. I've been playing with it for a couple of hours and I've made the problem worse as I've managed to create 2 copies of every song in my library. Thank god for backups.
The Ugly
I guess I am careful when it comes to my computer and so I have the McAfee suite of products and I typically only use the VirusScan and Firewall features of the suite. But the Vista installer wouldn't run till I uninstalled McAfee. Now I've been reading a lot of new kernel security in Vista and the new PatchGuard technology built into 64-bit Vista that will not allow any third-party tool from making Windows API calls in order to modify their behavior or do something malicious. So I had to uninstall McAfee to even install Vista and that doesn't give me a good feeling. I don't like running with a memory resident virus scan program running at all times - Having a good virus scan gives me the license to download any piece of crap I see on the Internet and installing it. The installer didn't give me any help by pointing out a list of other supported virus scan programs that are approved to work with Vista. After the install, I was able to go to McAfee's site and download a new version of the software that worked under Vista.
I have a major problem with the idea of User Account Control and the false sense of security people are going to get from consenting to actions that require additional access. In the first two hours, I had 15 of these popup asking me things like can the firewall run and block something and unblock something. I paid attention for a while but then was tempted to turn off the feature or just click ok. So how is someone like my dad who loves his computer he is not computer savvy enough to understand the question he is being asked or the function he is consenting to by clicking ok. I know this is a tough problem to solve instead of just locking out the user while allowing them to install software, control the computer but other OS's have this figured out.
The last item that fell in the ugly-section was Vista Office. After Vista was installed and working. I decided to install the latest version of Office. Much to my disappointment, the Office installer was not able to upgrade my copy of Office 2003 because of some file permission issue. I re-ran the installer a few times to no avail - I know uninstall/reinstall is cleaner and better than upgrade but upgrade should work and I could not get Office to install of my Vista PC. Go figure.
In conclusion, Vista does have quite a few compelling features that will make this a required upgrade for pretty much everyone. But I wonder if Microsoft would have been better by taking the BSD or Linux core and adding their UI on top of a working UNIX kernel? Mac's have certainly gotten that to work and Microsoft could have done that instead of writing the whole OS from scratch or borrowing some of the XP code, which came from Windows 2000, which probably came from NT which probably came from Dave Culter and Digital. Yikes
Tags: annoying, mac, microsoft, pc, performance, quality, security, software, Vista
