02.24.07
Posted in General at 2:01 am by jw
Moving this weekend so packing up computers to take over to the new house. Internet is already connected there, so I won’t be offline too long. While I’m gone, a couple of things that have interested me recently:
Mono is really cool. Not the disease, the open source implementation of .NET. I actually took my .NET 1.1 web application, SQL Server database connections and all and it just ran on Apache and Mono. I had to pick my jaw off the floor I was so surprised. Absolutely amazing.
Vanguard is a lot of fun. I’m currently level 24 and it’s slower progress than any other MMOG I’ve played. Means I get to see everything there is in the game before outlevelling it!
Be back in a couple of days. Same email, same blog, new home!
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02.12.07
Posted in General at 11:00 am by jw
Well, we had our house for almost a week before we broke it. Not a bad record for us really – normally it takes us only a day or two to break new stuff.
The long story is during closing, we asked the previous owner when we should be filling up the oil tank (we have oil heating as there are no public gas or water lines out to our house) and he told us he usually fills up in November and March. The poor assumption on our part was that we figured this meant he’d done his normal thing and filled the tank up the previous November. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case.
Over the last week, Pittsburgh (and most of the northeastern US) has had some of the coldest weather in decades. We’ve seen a maximum temperature outside of about 25F (-5C) with it dropping to -5F (-22C) or lower at night. Last Wednesday the house started to get cooler and by Wednesday night we knew there was some problem as the furnace just wasn’t coming on and the temperature inside the house was noticeably below freezing (the layer of ice in the toilet reinforced this). So, after some effort trying to get the furnace running I quickly made a trip out to Home Depot and got some electric heaters to at least get the place up above freezing. Fortunately all the taps were still running and we could still hear water circulating in the pipes so I think things are going to be ok.
Having the three new electric heaters brought the temperature up to 50–60F (10–15C for those who use real units), so the worst problems really have passed but we still have no oil. Cash is a little tight after closing so we’re just on the waiting list for 150 gallons but hopefully things will just start working after that. In the meantime though, Tahnia’s decided rather firmly that it’s far too cold there for sensible people to actually go and work in the place so we’re just organizing for other people to come in and do stuff right now. At least we should have the floors all fixed up and polished by the time we move in!
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02.05.07
Posted in Shorts at 2:37 am by jw
It hurts! Especially when the previous owner thought driving over the snow in a four wheel drive to make lots of ice was a cool idea.
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01.29.07
Posted in General at 12:45 pm by jw
I can’t believe Microsoft’s stupidity on this one, and the support costs are really going to hurt them in the long run. According to their support site, there is no way to do a completely clean installation of a Vista upgrade. You have to put a copy of a previous operating system down first, then you can do a “clean” install (which wipes your hard drive anyway) from the Vista CD. Too bad if you’ve tossed your XP CDs out when you bought Vista. Too bad if you don’t want to waste the hour or two installing a system that is just going to be erased anyway.
This is pure marketing stupidity.
So, now I can only reinforce my original recommendations – don’t upgrade to Vista. It’s only worthwhile if you get it with a new PC.
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01.23.07
Posted in General at 2:55 pm by jw
Everyone else has their Vista reviews up, figured it was time to put mine up seeing I get all worked up when I read some of the junk that is out there.
The Good
- DirectX 10. Nothing is going to truly use it for a while though and you need a GF8800 to take advantage of it right now. Eventually, it will be the only version of DX worth writing to though.
- Aero interface. I don’t care if it uses more resources, it’s pretty and smooth.
- New streamlined graphics driver model. Allows multiple applications to make efficient use of the graphics card capabilities at the same time.
- Search engine. Like Google Desktop’s search, but much better integrated into the shell – there’s search boxes everywhere that are practically instantaneous to use. I particularly like the search on the start menu – no more browsing through start menu folders – just type the first few letters and hit ‘Enter’.
- ReadyBoost. Moves disk cache to USB memory sticks and aggressively prefetches common applications and files. Questionable benefit for gaming, but superb for office and development work. By the way – most reviewers write this up as “providing extra memory”. It doesn’t. It’s disk cache only.
- Reworked memory manager. Theoretically better, especially on multi-core and multi-cpu systems.
- Reworked kernel and base system for more multicore efficiency. Again, theoretically better.
- Sidebar. Gimmick really, but I do like the weather there, especially the weather in Brisbane, Australia…
- Much faster boot times. Seriously.
- More secure, especially if you can put up with the message box popping up every time you want to do something to the system that might lead to insecurity. Similarly, IE runs in a mode where it has no access to your system so malware can’t get to it (again, theoretically).
- Virtualized sound drivers. This gives you an individual volume control for each application.
- User mode USB and audio drivers. Bad USB drivers now only crash themselves, not the whole system.
- Networking improvements, especially for laptops. System recognizes your network and adjusts security accordingly (Home, Work, Public etc.)
- Improved power management. All systems sleep by default now, laptop battery use is improved, system doesn’t wait for bad apps when trying to sleep the same way XP does.
- Theoretically equivalent 64 and 32 bit versions, though this is not really different from XP’s 32 and 64 bit versions.
- Awesome new version of Minesweeper!!!! (My wife loves this)
- Full drive encryption if you have a Trusted Platform Module on your PC.
- Previous versions of files. Accidentally saved or overwrote something? There’s a good chance the old version is still there!
- Supports WebDAV over https. I know “Web Folders” worked in XP, but you couldn’t map a drive to a https URL. In Vista it works. Weirdly enough, I’ve not seen Microsoft publicizing this at all.
The Bad
- Even more intrusive activation/genuine advantage stuff.
- Flashier UI does use more system resources (though if you want you can turn it all off).
- 64 bit versions requires all drivers to be signed (indirectly) by Microsoft. No more quick beta updates or Omega hacked drivers. Note that some people think this is “good” because it stops users putting untested stuff on their machines. I disagree – it’s your machine, you can crash it if you want.
- All the bugs that come with a new OS. Let’s not fool ourselves. Bugs will come out for a while.
- New audio, USB and video drivers mean you have to make sure all your stuff is supported before upgrading.
- Some incompatibilities with older apps, especially when using the Aero interface. Java pre-1.6 is a prime example as it likes both turning Aero off, and annoying you every few minutes to give it permission to check for an update.
The Ugly
- DRM (digital “rights” management, more accurately termed digital restrictions management). Lots of DRM. Incredible amounts of it that can disable your machine, steal your sports car, kill your dog and marry your grandmother. If you haven’t already read it, read this for a very accurate and from what I can tell unbiased report on what the DRM junk they’ve coded into Vista is all about. If there’s anything that’s going to encourage people to get ripped copies of their movies, it’s the stupidity they’ve put into Vista.
My Summary
I’ve been running the release version of Vista on my laptop since November and I’m quite happy with the way it’s turning out. Some of the new stuff takes a bit to get used to but it’s every bit as responsive as XP was and has only had limited incompatibilities. I’m waiting for Saitek to release drivers for their P2600 gamepad and X52 joystick before I think about the upgrade on my home machine, but I’m pretty sure I’ll do it as soon as possible.
What I won’t be doing is using Vista for any sort of multimedia/video applications. The DRM levels are just silly, and it’s pretty much encouraged me to finish building my MythTV box for a free alternative to Windows. To echo the thoughts of one reader on the DRM link above, I won’t be going anywhere near a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive until I can either rip movies to disk and play them how I want, or HD-DVD/Blu-Ray are the minimum you can.
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