My First Thoughts on Windows 7

My father-in-law, Kyle, upgraded his laptop to windows 7 tonight. I am surprised he didn't upgrade sooner with how much he hated Vista. It makes me wonder if Vista was a big planned marketing scheme, but I digress. On to the real topic.

He asked me why something didn't work prior to the upgrade so took a look at the machine. I was actually pleasantly surprised. I found a few things quite refreshing,
* The directory structures are a much welcomed improvement. By contrast however I couldn't add something to the start menu because I couldn't find the directory. All the forums I found refereed to non-existent directories.
* The power shell is actually useful. And familiar commands such as 'ls' and 'man' actually work. It makes me wonder if that has something to do with this article from slashdot.
* The system monitor in the management pane is actually useful and customizable.
* They fixed the problem with windows explorer not burning DVD's (the original complaint) so Kyle was happy.
* I was pleased to find that the computer ran rather snappy. Didn't seem sluggish at all.
* It is pretty, but you know what, most of the tray icons and things look like the ones in ubuntu Karmic.

Otherwise I was perplexed that in the upgrade it moved the entire Vista windows folder to Windows.Old and I was able to run programs that were in the 'Program Files' folder within that. I am not sure why, it seems very strange to me because Windows relies so heavily on registry entries to run anything.

It seems to suffer from some of the same old problems. The home version is watered down to the point of being crippled and you still have the default share of C$. Also viruses are a concern, but otherwise I was actually pleasantly surprised.

Oh My

This article from Groklaw literally makes me sick.

How can they do that? How can someone take a patent out on something that exist completely outside the realm of what their company even does? Has SUDO ever even been used in any version of any of Microsoft's products.

Really, I am sick. My stomach is just twisted up. I see this as a direct slap in the face at freedom.

Upgrade to Karmic

I upgraded to ubuntu 9.10, or as I like to call it kosmic kangaroo. I think this was pottentially my most problematic upgrade.

First, let me clarify, I did fresh installs. So it really isn't an upgrade, but still. I tried it on the desktop first. If my wife can't check her email during the day . . . oh well, right? She wouldn't say that. But oh well. The desktop install was really smooth. Had a small issue with sound but I got that worked out.

The laptop on the other hand was . . . a problem. The MacBook Pro was quite a pain in the butt. The real issue is grub2. It took two install tries to get the machine to boot. It boots now, so that is good. But it took a bit. Other things: the wireless doesn't resume after suspend. I have to remove and modprobe the module and restart wicd.

For my friends machine we tried to have two hard drives in there and the machine would not, would not install grub. We couldn't get the thing to boot at all. We tried RAID, LVM, LVM with /boot outside the LVM, no LVM at all. Grub just kept saying it couldn't figure out the filesystem type, and wouldn't install.

After the install I think the only 'new' thing that I really like is the further integration of pulseaudio. It is much easier to set up the pulse audio stuff. Otherwise, just the standard re-installation changes.

Droid

I have been super excited about an Android phone coming to verizon. I am forced to have Verizon because I have a company cell phone and that is who our account in through. But now I am happy about it thanks to the Motorola Droid. Very cool. I was standing in line Friday morning to be one of the first to get the phone. Which is really against my usual nature. I usually wait especially on critical stuff, like my phone. But here is my thoughts so far:

Pros:
* It is Android which is Linux under the hood. Really, a huge selling point for me.
* There really is a lot of Apps and so far I have been able to do everything that I want to.
* Verizon didn't dick with the GPS stuff like they did my BlackBerry. I can use my turn by turn GPS directions
* Syncing calendar and contacts has never been so easy. It is almost sinful.
* Touch screen is awesome, the slider keyboard is smooth and comfortable to use.
Cons:
* Battery life is just ok. I took it off the charger this morning with 100% and now at 9:00 PM I am at 60% battery. I have a 24 hour job and I really need to have 2 days of phone usage.
* When dialling: to search for contacts I go to dial and then I have to enter the contacts tab, use the keyboard to quick search a name, and then select it. It feels very cumbersome.
* It seems there are no speed dials and while I really like the keyboard, it would be nice for it to be a little more like a phone.

Well, so far that is it. I like it way better than I did my BlackBerry and Palm Centro. So far, Droid wins.

Review: binclockoe

Ok, so really, why have a clock that is in binary. I can't read it any faster. In fact there are enough timepieces around me that I really don't need another clock at all. The only reason that I like to have it is because it is fun to brag to my friends and co-workers "hey, I can read the binary clock".

Really though, there are some practical uses. I do have it in a dvtm session so I can see the current time at a glance. I also am getting way better at reading binary.

Install was fairly easy. I downloaded the tar from here and untared. Then run the binclock.py and you have the clock. A couple of side notes. I did have to edit binclock.py so that the begining read: #! /usr/bin/python. Prior to doing that I got an error. Also, so that I would not have to type the full path to the py file I did a symlink to it from /usr/local/bin and now I just have to run binclock.

I picked this binclock over the one in the ubuntu repos for one simple reason. Looks. Really, if you are going to have a binary clock so that you look cool to those that don't read binary why not have one that looks good? I would even contend that it must look good lest you look like a dork. Gotta protect your image here.

Review: dvtm

At the Utah Open Source Conference I heard Jared
Bernards presentation on using the command line to do anything that you could
want to do. I found this intriguing and he showed how to even watch movies
using just a commandline system. Very cool.

One of the systems that he said to use was dvtm. dvtm is a 'window
manager' that allows you to view multiple 'windows' at once. It also gives you
a 'maximize' and 'minimize' ability.

The good:
* Gives you verticle and horizantol split unlike screen
* Captures mouse inputs to change 'windows'

The bummer:
* Caputers mouse inputs. If you have a ncurses program that can use the
mouse you are SOL because you can't use it. dvtm catches the mouse prior
to the underlying program. Got really agrivating when I couldn't scroll.
* No easy way to kill a 'window' once you have made it.

So far dvtm doesn't annoy me to the point that I stop using it. I don't think
it is in my arsinal of must have programs though.

New zsh prompt

So, I have been playing around with zsh and even though there are some things
that I am not quite used to. It is still pretty cool. I had been using Phil's zsh prompt but found it nearly overbearing. I thought at first it would be
really cool to have a line at every command. That I would be so much faster
having that visual delimitter in my shell. But really I wasn't and it was just
distracting. But I live having both a right and left font so I stole a large
portion of Aaron
Toponce's zshrc and have made my new prompt that I am rather
happy with. Check it out and share what you think.