windows seven

right….for the record, i’d like to make known that i am no fanboy of windows neither am i an evangelist of microsoft’s products & solutions. as far as the current state of OS market share goes, it’s near impossible to find a business that has absolutely no microsoft (“ms”) products what-so-ever (perhaps linux & unix solution providers, apple doesn’t count, they have office 2008 :p). as a person cursed with the interest of technology, its hard not to run one’s hands down the body work when its offered free. as a consumer – as long as it allows me to be productive and work with anything i throw at it, i don’t care who its made by or whats its called (but i’ll scream bloody murder if someone took away my somethings called os x and linux).

as first impressions goes, the 7th incarnation of windows has a lot to like. contrary to the reported issues ms faced with its download service not being able to handle the sheer volume of requests, the 2.8gb download was somewhat speedy for its size. i fired up vmware fusion and trodded along with setting up a new vm to attach the iso to. a few clicks later, while the screen shows “installing”, i headed over the kitchen to fix up a mugfull of caffiene. i was pleasantly suprised that when i got back to a welcome screen awaiting password entry. ok, installation is fast, mighty fast (anyone remember the “39mins” text on the left side of the windows xp installation? – heh).

as expected by way of all the os level competition that ms gets, visuals on windows seven are stunning (perhaps because it is running on a mac while i am writing this). flowing graphics and translucence are concepts of choice for providing users with the visual stimuli to make them proud to have one. one thing to note, the “windows sidebar” (its called “windows gadgets” in the 7) from vista is gone and gadgets will now float freely on the desktop when activated from the control panel. they were a hog to resources in the vista but its cool to see that them code monkeys at ms were smart enough not to make them load default at startup.

one thing vista was notorious for was resource utilization – it was an absolute pig. so much so that a machine with 2gb can somewhat make one think that the cpu & ram burglar has struck again . memory utilization for the 7 , i am glad to say, is very much similar to what you see on the xp. i haven’t taken taken it out for a real spin just yet to be able to comment on its performance at full tilt (outlook + word + 3 excel 2007, 5 rdp sessions, itunes, internet explorer and firefox with >5 tabs are common day to day where i work) but so far its looks positive.

its only been a few hours that the 7 was installed on vmware fusion, so far its been living up to its hype. then again, it bsod-ed on me while i was typing out the first paragraph – perhaps it needs to cement the fact that this is still microsoft (i think blue is the ms colour of the 90s). or, it could be due to other reasons :p

nonetheless, professionally at least, i’d recommend the 7 over vista or xp. no release date announced yet but do look out for it.

discovering xee

in my short time that i have been using the mac, i find that the default “preview” app for viewing pictures kinda sucks. top of the list is having to select files then right clicking and select “open with preview” before you can preview multiple pictures – wastes precious mouse movement seconds. on top of that, you can only “preview” the files that were selected and loaded; if you need to view the ones that weren’t selected, you need to go back to finder and double click it again (hand needs to move off keyboard to the mouse to navigate and double click – wastes time). “use a media manager to view all  photo/picture files instead you bloody oaf” others might say but what is the point if the purpose is just to have a quick view and not have to fire up an app then loading the file in before you can?

xee is a “preview” replacement that works a lot like windows picture viewer (i can’t find a better app to compare to. it’s not that its any good but it does at least work the basics proper). install it, set it to be the default viewer and one will be easily able to browse through a folders worth of picture/photo files with the mouse wheel or left/right keys. file download’s mighty small (1.3mb) and its free too!

not sure if “preview” has been updated/upgraded to include such simple features with leopard, but my take is that the guys at apple should just adopt xee as a standard in their future os releases.

the zesty ape

the excitement of ubuntu’s next release was at fever pitch when i caught up with my linux os news updates of late (i kinda found out that i only have six months to squeeze the most out of my ubuntu installs before a new one gets released and i yearn an upgrade) – gusty gibbon was released amongst much fanfare (from the fans at least – heh). i fired the wget in the office box and drove down hours later to cut it into a dvd.

installation was preety much standard easy, not much changed since the last. did have an issue with updating packages though, possibly due to the large number of users accessing the same server or starhub was very stingy with their bandwidth (in which i pay 80 bloody dollars per month – gawddammed rip off). first impressions were very positive with new eye candy and what-nots, but digging deeper i found some things that were a deal breaker for me. restarting the machine or starting up took longer – like minutes longer. never had that problem on my x31 with feisty but somehow starting up gusty took yonks to get to its login prompt. then there was the oversized fonts on the console that were so big that you’d only see only the first few letters of a line. even the prompt is hidden somewhere off screen. desktop effects (via compiz) were supposedly turned on by default with the gibbon, i can’t even turn it on manually without getting an error (was working fine in feisty – which was still in its “experimental” stage).

i tried find the fixes to listed gripes (and a lot more) but since the official release was only a few days old, its kinda tough to come by.

(update)since this has been sitting in my “drafts” section for about a month:-

i gave ubuntu’s gusty gibbon another go when i got back from vietnam (all the issues with windows that i faced in vietnam left a very bad taste so much so that i didn’t want to see another windows machine for a while. besides, running vista on the x31 would be the equivalent of asking a bi-plane to go supersonic). yup the listed gripes were all there but this time there were numerous forum threads on them.

with increased user base numbers, a community driven operating system benefits from its users as more and more people eyeball every detail of the release. moving along the same lines as the community, loads of developers and powerusers are also getting on board with helping out others with issues on their installs. its amazing to see a free operating system getting this much attention as compared to multi-million dollar closed sourced OS release.

almost all of my gripes have been solved though it does take a little technical massaging to coax my aging machine to run the gibbon to its full glory. imagine taking all of vista’s eye candy (transparent windows, glassy window frames and animated transitions), add the ability to customise every aspect of the system (from the design and type of the login window to splash screens to even the size of window frames), then include multiple virtual windows and also a good dollop of speed to keep everything running harmoniously to the user. all these on a tiny notebook with 1.4ghz mobile processor and 768mb of ram (as compared to vista which needs a more “gusty” processor and at least 2gb to get its eye candy working properly)

i see grim everyday

 

icing on the cake fact : i got photoshop 9 and elements to work on the gusty…woot!

24 inches of pleasure

the mac finally arrived. and we’ve been busy getting acquainted thus the lack of postings.

i must say, its been a dream so far (‘cept for the time when i loaded a whole shit load of applications that i know has no use and finder went kabluey) – lightroom & photoshop on mac, 24 inches of desktop real estate and the new slim mac keyboards are just simply superb.

nonetheless there are somethings that i really miss about windows :-

1) shortcut keys (winkey+r, winkey+d, winkey+e , alt+spacebar, alt+f etc) – i am impartial to shortcut keys and use them extensively in my day to day usage. i can get to the command line in 1.5 seconds with “winkey+r – type cmd – enter” and i’ve kinda even memorized a good bunch of photoshop shortcut keys to work really fast on my photos. with the mac, key assignments are a little weird – takes a while to open finder, navigate to “utilities” then to terminal and “alt+i+p” no longer crops the picture to the selected area in photoshop. i know, you can customise key combinations in OSX but its kinda a pain to balance which key combinations has been taken up and whats not used yet.

2) forms + the tab key – option buttons (ok, cancel, radio buttons etc) used to be so easy to click with the tab and space bar. tab only works for the field inserts but wont tab into the option buttons on the mac. you need to take you hand off the keyboard, move the cursor to “OK” and click it no matter what.

3) remote desktop – used to be able to access my home machine with copssh and rdp from work to sort our internet connection issues for the family or to manage torrent downloads. need to install vnc on the mac (which i am not a fan of due to security concerns) before remote desktop access is achievable.

4) remote desktop connection (for mac) – we do work from home a lot via vpn. the mac equivalent of remote desktop connection client can’t handle multiple instances. i can’t access my sms server and domain controller at the same time!

i am sure that it’ll take a little while before i get used to working with the mac then get around to really customising it to the way i can really be efficient with it. apart from the listed gripes, everything else is super – pictures and photographs look really really good, system purrs along even with a number of memory intensive programs loaded and of course, it’s a really beautiful hunk of aluminum & glass to display on the table.