November 17th, 2008 Rusty
Lou, of OckhamResearch.com, had an old IBM Thinkpad 600e sitting on a shelf elevating some boxes of archived papers. My 5yo son was visiting me at work and wanted to "type on the computer" so I tried to fire it up. It booted to the log in screen but I didn’t have the password. My son proceeded to draw on the white board. When he’s 15, I’ll just be a geek with a dorky job but for now daddy’s office is fun.
Stop Taunting Me You Silly Twit!
The thinkpad sat there, requesting a password, for several weeks. Lou didn’t know the password either so there it sat, taunting me.
Showing My Age
I grew tired of staring at a Windows NT Workstation…
Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
…prompt so I tried to wipe it and install Windows XP. The machine boasts a mind blowing Pentium II 366mhz processor with 280MB RAM and a 12 Gig Hard Drive.
Crash & Burn
Upon installing XP, I was greeted by the always ever popular Windows BSOD (blue screen of death). I don’t keep a copy of NT lying around so it was off to Linux world for something that might not crash on this barely used, completely not useful little IBM notebook.
p.s. Wouldn’t it be funny if computers got grey hair and wrinkles like we do?
Plan B
I burned a cd of Ubuntu from their website using my Mac…
Friday night and I need a fight
My motorcycle and a switchblade knife
Handful of grease in my hair feels right
But what I need to make me tight are those…
…uh, where was I? I ran the installer, answered several questions about where I am and how I like my stuff displayed, and launched into a fully functional, very useful and pleasing to use Ubuntu desktop. For the uninitiated, it comes pre-installed with the O/S (duh), Open Office (Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentation), Firefox Internet Browser, a bunch of games, a sound recorder, Gimp Image Editor, Photo Manager, Open Office Drawing, Ekiga Soft Phone, Pidgin IM, Transmission BitTorrent Client, Movie Player, Rhythmbox Music Player, the list goes on… it comes loaded with useful programs. It does not however have any of the following included with the installation: trials to aol, msn or netzero; dell notifications irritator, Lenovo restore manager; background update managers; heavy device management utilities; alternate network management or power profile sub systems; OEM crapware. Of course, a fresh install of XP doesn’t have that junk either but then you have to spend several hours assembling all that other stuff and it is not, well, free.
Sweeeeeeeeeeeet, psych!
To see if my new Linux dog could hunt, I launched Firefox. Aw, snap! No wireless. Wireless was a luxury in 1999. I can hardly remember such a time. So I looked into the possibilities and found that this old monster used cardbus architecture. Those were little laptop cards we used to have to buy to enable mobility in mobile computers. You kids are too young to remember.
I seem to recognize your face
Haunting, familiar, yet I cant seem to place it
Cannot find the candle of thought to light your name
Lifetimes are catching up with me
Amazon had a 802.11G Wireless Xtreme Cardbus Adapter (D-Link Wireless 108G) for $8 plus shipping. For $15 I was willing to give it a shot. In two business days, my new cardbus adapter and "Programming in Objective C" book arrived (I never order just one thing from Amazon). I opened it up (the card) and hoped to see a Linux install option…
The time is right your perfume fills my head, the stars get red
And oh the night’s so blue
And then I go and spoil it all, by saying something stupid
My heart sank as I realized I have no experience with Linux and I didn’t know how to get, much less install, drivers for Linux. Visions of vi filled my head. In the mean time, I shoved the card in the slot and watched as the green lights began to blink. Then, as I clicked on the network icon near the top of the screen, I found that it had "installed itself". The computer discovered and enabled the card and the networks were listed in the available networks box. I had to provide my password 3 times, resulting in a timeout on the first 2, but since that time it just connects when it boots like a good little computer should.
Wow is all I can say.
So now we have, for the investment of about 30 minutes and $15 for a wireless card, an extra laptop. It works perfectly for browsing the Internets and will be a perfect machine for my son to type on when he visits me at work. Should he spill his chocolate milk slammer down into the keyboard, it will go back on the shelf from whence it came.
I can’t speak to whether it would be a good choice for a student as their teacher is going to be using Windows. I don’t know exactly how interoperable Open Office is with MS Office but I can tell you that its not as sexy or easy to use. MS Office sets the standard there. However, for an extra computer that is constrained on cpu or memory or both, its a perfect way to get a little extra life out of something that was otherwise beyond its functional lifespan. You don’t have to worry about viruses and its inherently secure and stable.
Posted in Linux, Mac, Windows | No Comments »
November 5th, 2008 Rusty
I was surprised today that I could not find a post about "Getting Vistaed". Its become such a common term in my small office that I was sure it was ubiquitous. Not so. In fact, the only reference I found was a reference to that silly, fake experiment where people were shown Vista and told it was the next OS to see if they rated it higher than their current perception of Vista (media and community influenced). Sure, when I first used Vista, I liked it better than XP. I still do. However, the improvements were incremental, not monumental. The increased footprint and elevated hardware performance requirements were more significant than the useful features. As a software developer, I can completely understand the fact that this was the bridge that Microsoft needed to cross to evolve their platform and the old Windows Kernel couldn’t come across. That is a HUGE undertaking and I sympathize with Microsoft and the Vista teams for the public beating they’ve taken as a result.
Getting Vistaed (Vista’d)
Getting Vistaed : get-ting vis⋅taed
[get-ting vis-tuhd] –verb
1. Experiencing a spinning blue disk, sometimes accompanied by a darkened screen, where a computer running Windows Vista stops responding for an extended, indeterminate amount of time, after which the screen will return to normal display without any indication as to WTF it was doing. Usually occurs when nothing resource intensive was initiated such as typing an email or answering a nearby telephone.
2. The act of accepting Vista’s prompt to install "updates" whereby the computer spends the next 0.5 to 2 hours showing inaccurate progress indicators of software installations. During this time the computer is unavailable for productive work of any kind and the user is encouraged to catch up on reading or go to the gym and have a good long workout.
Growing up after going overboard
Vista has definitely come a long way in the last 3 years (has it really been that long?). I now use it regularly without complaining that its getting in my way. The features that were added certainly give it an edge over XP. I don’t game or use video intense applications so I can’t attest to the improvements in UI and video, but I expect that a Vista machine can do things no XP machine could. There’s still that lagging WPF framework that developers like me haven’t yet embraced and exploited. I haven’t heard of a virus corrupting someone’s machine since its release. I almost never see the BSOD using Vista. I remember Windows 2000 as a really stable operating system. I recently used a computer running Windows 2000 and I can promise you that no one would want to return to that computing experience. We’ve all grown up. We’ve all come to expect more. That’s why Vista got the shaft when it didn’t rock out of the box. It needed an awful lot of tweaking to bring it back up to snuff with the mature, but old as dirt and unable to evolve, Windows 3.1 kernel. Its there now, sort of.
Apple just got there sooner
Steve Jobs, after a short hiatus doing amazing things, rejoined Apple in 1997. Apple (sans SJ) had been developing a long overdue, next gen OS code-named Copland. Apparently, it sucked. They dumped it, scrapped it, fitted it with cement shoes and tossed it overboard. They then developed and released OSX. When the most recent update to OSX came out, there were problems. Apple got them remedied quickly. The point is, Apple "started over" 10 years ago and now their OS absolutely rocks. Microsoft did the same just 3 years ago. They are certainly a little behind. I’ve heard that Windows 7 is nice. I am hopeful, like a Barack Obama campaign speech, that Microsoft has been heads down for the last three years, focusing on the future and on innovation and on what their OS could be, rather than what it is or what it used to be. With Vista will pass the term "Getting Vistaed", I hope…
Posted in Mac, Vista | No Comments »
August 19th, 2008 Rusty
I ran across this, quite by accident, and it was spot on: http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2008/07/06/iphone-sdk.aspx
I have family to pay attention to, having spent way, way too much time trying to write an iPhone app, so I’ll be brief and to the point.
The iPhone is probably the most disruptive, innovative and important personal technology device in the last 10 years. It changes everything. It is worth paying attention to and worth investing in.
That being said, the platform for developing iPhone apps is far from ready for prime time. Innovative and thoughtful early adopters will profit, most certainly, but most apps are going to fade into oblivion.
The sdk, Objective C, XCode and the entire iPhone development toolset is disappointing. This is probably underscored by my recent experiences using Microsoft tools. The recent development of Asp.Net MVC from Microsoft has brought web development into the realm of productivity and satisfaction. I thoroughly enjoy building web apps using the modern tools and language features and can’t say enough positive things about it. Jumping off to xCode and iPhone development has been trying to say the least.
First, and foremost, iPhone sdk documentation is pathetic. The best one can find are a few scattered tutorials where some teen age kid is putting together a UI that gets the intended screens in place but wreaks of the most costly and short sighted practices I’ve seen since VB 5. Yes, you can point and click and cut and paste until your heart is content but the minute you wish to change something you will be paying the price for your technical debt to bad architecture and design. If I google something in Asp.Net MVC, I find 10 resources immediately. Its still a preview technology. iPhone is out, released, production. Googling basic issues results in nothing. Part of that is the Apple “must be logged in to see this” nonsense. Please, Apple, stop it. Take the passwords off your documentation. Let Google bring me to the resources I need. When I do find tutorials, they are often based on the last drop of the sdk and they don’t work. This is very frustrating. If there were documentation or tutorials that worked, then I’d accept it. But there aren’t any.
Finally, there is this Apple iPhone MVC thing that is supposed to provide a pattern for implementation. However, I can’t seem to figure out how to actually implement MVC for the iPhone sdk! There are xib files and UIView classes. These make up most of the outlets and actions. Then there are UIViewControllers but they don’t receive nor host the actions. Then there are delegates. It seems to me that we’re in a more event driven UI-centric environment where nothing is documented and you are supposed to just discover the right path. Inevitably, the wrong path leads to the screen you need and some high-school kid with more time then foundation puts together a video tutorial and explains, in his braces enhanced D&D DM narrative, how to wire it all up.
The last thing I want to point out is that tabbed Visual Studio is amazing once you see what happens when Windows get loose all over your desktop. Holy crap can you get lost with Interface Builder, xCode, and all the little windows it manages strewn all over your desktop.
So, where credit is due: thank you Microsoft….and where work is needed, Apple, please consider improving your documentation and tutorials and doing some consumer research with developers who have never touched cocoa before.Let me close by saying I still LOVE my mac and absolutely think Apple does amazing things. I’m your biggest fan! But then I am also a Microsoft fan so that makes me “different”
Posted in Mac, iPhone | 2 Comments »
April 2nd, 2008 Rusty
I’m presently writing this post using Windows Live Writer, running on Windows Vista, sand-boxed within VMWare fusion, hosted on my MacBook Pro with 4G ram. That may seem like a lot of overhead but rest assured, its screaming fast, stable, reliable and a pleasure to use. First, I can’t say enough about my Mac. After spending ten years learning the intricacies of managing and optimizing a Windows OS, I can honestly say I have had to learn almost nothing about managing or optimizing a Mac OS. I have played in Terminal only because I think its fun. However, the only thing I’ve changed from default is to install the magic SmartSleep preference pane from Patrick Stein. More on that in a sec… My motivation for posting this was what I consider to be complete dribble. Rather than even entertain the moron who posted the article that I found on Digg and wasted my time, I’ll link to the first debunk. The only reason to switch from Mac to PC is that the users of the computer do not justify the added up front expense and their time, and the time of their systems support, is worth less than that difference in cost or they are really, really good at multi-tasking. more on that in a sec…
Volume Might Invalidate my Opinion Entirely
Now… if you are buying twelve laptops for a group of sales people who are somewhat likely to drop their computer and the only app they use is MS Office, buy PC and stop reading.
PC is More Productive than Mac? Nonsense
Perhaps it is an April Fools joke? The reality is that I moved to the mac so I could have a better Windows experience. I was tired of fixing my Windows machines, tired of reinstalling the OS, tired of driver incompatibilities, tired of not being able to print to network attached printers, tired of being "Vista’d", tired of the spinning blue circle and no explanation for WTF it was doing. Tired of everything that Vista brought to my otherwise happy programming world. I now experience none of this. that’s right, none. Twice since I’ve had this device, Vista has crumbled and needed a reboot. I happily rebooted. I’m inside VMWare so this is completely tolerable. I can continue working while I reboot, on the same computer. That is incredible! In fact, I just timed a few things for the record. Vista takes about 90 seconds to boot from powered down in VMWare. When it wakes, it is ready to rock, network available, no spinning mystery cursors. There is absolutely no extra crap loading into memory because Dell wants to remind me to buy ink or some nonsense. OS, necessary drivers, go.
Super Fast Sleep, Super Fast Wake
I set my sleep mode to smartSleep so that, when battery is good, it will not write to disk before allowing itself to be bagged. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pulled a laptop out of the case only to find the battery dead, fan screaming, case red hot and in a state that is anything but sleeping. This is true of my previous Windows based machines and my Mac. I’ve learned to watch for the blinky light. But not no more! Now, with sleep (rather than hibernate), 6 seconds to bag, 3 seconds to ready. Open the case, count to 3, work, right where you left off. I the battery is below 20% when you close the case, it will write to disk.
Windows CAN be Stable - Vista Suckertude is Dell’s Fault
I keep Windows open all day, usually on my external right monitor. I use Mac for my gmail and general browsing. This set up is rock solid reliable, fast, and highly productive. I can always print (if Vista refuses, I just copy my file to my mac OS and print). I can always work (if Vista dies, I can continue working while I reboot). I never have to install something on my critical OS that I am not 100% certain is not going to cause issues. So far, nothing I’ve tried quite compares to blogging with Windows Live Writer. I am free to use my Windows apps at will. I also get to be part of the exclusive club of geeks who paste apple stickers on the back of their cars.
Mac Productivity Wins
I am significantly more productive with a MacBook Pro than I was with my previous Dell or Lenovo laptops. The cost? Go price a base model MacBook Pro, $40 for VMWare fusion from Amazon, $70 for 4G ram from New Egg, a Vista or XP OS license and then compare that to the price of, say, a Toshiba with similar specs. Its not cheap. If your time is more valuable then the difference in price, pull the trigger and thank me later. I still owe Mark Jones drinks! (thanks dude)
Posted in Mac, Vista | 1 Comment »
February 27th, 2008 Rusty
Much like having the opportunity to unwrap a Blackberry and an iPhone at the same time, I’ve been building a clean Windows Server and setting up windows software development environments inside VMWare on both Windows and Mac.
Windows Native Install
I started a new job this week and have been building a new development / integration server for the new gig. The server was resistant to my intentions and required many hours of trial and error to find drivers that work. The solution ended up being simple but HP provided zero support or documentation, nVidia did not list support for Server 2003 (32bit) and there are now dozens of driver search sites that are even more ambiguous and misleading than the manufacturers. Its really not Microsoft’s fault that Vistal sucks right now but it seams as though hardware vendors aren’t really held accountable for supporting advanced use of the platform. Eventually, I got the server up and running and am quite happy with the performance so far.
Windows Virtual Install on MacBook Pro
Apple, however, made me get excited to use their machine. It was packaged nicely and, when I plugged it in, it worked. I had Vista installed and running in an hour. Of course, it is definitely worth noting that I only had to ckick a few times and was able to perform other functions during the install because it was all within a virtual environment on VMWare Fusion. So far, I’ve only clicked around in Vista under VMWare on Mac but it seems to be snappy and responsive. I have not enabled graphics accelleration so I do not have transparent windows. I think I can live with that but i may give accelleration a try later.
Windows Virtual Install on Windows
Windows just completed a VMWare installation of Vista now. It also completed quickly and required little interaction. It came up without networking and the responsiveness inside the virtual environment is very slow. I don’t think I could use it fulltime as it is. I’m sure more ram and moving it to an external hard drive would help. However, no network is a bit of a pisser. …following up, I installed VMWare tools and the networking problem resolved itself. Additionally, mouse responsiveness was corrected and the machine is now much more comparable to the Mac instance.
Results
The Mac experience was infinitely better from start to finish. The fact that Windows did not bridge networking is ironic and typical. Again, I can’t blame Microsoft for VMWare’s support of Windows 2003 Server on an HP Pavilion as a host but I sure can give credit to Apple for building a platform where I can accomplish my tasks without obstacles. I’m sure with extended use, the gap would narrow and experience would compensate for intuitiveness and ease of use. However, I am looking forward to more first experience enjoyment and less time learning non-essential, transient skills such as driver incompatability diagnostics and configuration tricks.
Tags: apple, virtualization, Vista
Posted in Mac, Vista | No Comments »