Category Archives: Technology

Software, Technology

Windows Vista: not for the tame of spirit

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My big personal tech project over the last couple of weeks has been migrating to Vista. Why, I hear you ask? The answer, I’m afraid, is essentially ‘for the hell or it’. A longer answer: my XP install had been clunkering along since I bought my current desktop PC in early 2005. As Windows is wont to do, it had begun to bloat to an unacceptable level and performance was, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. So; rather than reinstall the 5 year old Windows XP, or the 3 year old XP SP2, I opted to get that new hard drive I’d been needing (a 250GB WD drive with 16 meg cache), Windows Vista Home Premium OEM and some new RAM to manage the transition.

That’s already quite an involved process: I knew an upgrade to Vista wouldn’t be a good thing from a performance perspective so I opted for a fresh new install. When the parts arrived, I hit my first stumbling block – Dell only provided one SATA power cable. So I couldn’t get the new hard drive to work. Much fiddling and one cable purchase further, with everything plugged in, I installed Vista clean on my new hard drive. The Vista advisor had suggested that some of my hardware, including my network card, wouldn’t work, but (some fiddling later) I got it all up and running. Bizarrely, my Soundblaster Audigy 2 (from the most popular manufacturer of sound card hardware in the world?) required me to download beta drivers from the its website. Windows caught most other things.

Given the amount of hardware I have (I have things plugged into 22 USB sockets) it was quite impressive that it managed this. But still; non-trivial for a casual PC user.

Other things that went wrong / require(d) fiddling:

(1) My iPod required the Apple Ipod fix for Vista.
(2) My NAS drive isn’t supported as a NAS drive – will need to get a generic storage network adaptor rather than the proprietary Freecom one I used
(3) I’ll have to reinstall a stack of applications/freeware/etc., which I can’t quite bring myself to do with my PC working this well
(4) RAM demands are big
(5) The permissions thing (that spawned this Mac ad) is annoying as hell, although Lifehacker does have a workaround somewhere.

Things that work really well / much better than under XP:

(1) File system is improved
(2) Search is fantastic
(3) Aero is SO pretty / Flip3D is cute ;-)
(4) Task manager is much more useful
(4) Multimedia / pictures / music etc., are all improved, and Media Player/sharing integration is good

So; in essence, a lot of subtle polishing and some good performance tweaks, but its really not easy to migrate yourself over and probably not worth it for these changes. If you are buying a new PC, for most of your requirements, odds are that things will work and you will be better protected against spyware and potentially self-inflicted damage. Most people shouldn’t even try to upgrade, especially if you’re on a laptop and don’t have scope to upgrade your hardware as well.

Still, if you’re up for a challenge, Vista is damn pretty. And fun. For those curious, the current spec of my PC is a P4 3Ghz (single core), 3GB of RAM, an Nvidia 7950GT graphics card (sadly not DirectX10 compatible), and the aformentioned WD hard drive add up to a performance index of 4.2 (current max is 6, but I vaguely remember reading that its open ended). Simon, thanks for the encouragement – well worth the efforts.

Media & Marketing, Technology, Television

Joost, BBC iPlayer invites wanted

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Please can someone send me these? I’d really like to see what they look like.

For those who don’t know, Joost is an internet TV service that’s undergoing a trial phase. It was created by the founders of Skype. The BBC iPlayer is another internet TV service for BBC programming – an evolution of the BBC iMP, which I tested last year.

I like to be up with these cool tech trends but have been left off the list this time :-( — hoping someone can send them my way soon! Thanks.

Internet, Technology

DSL down: week 2

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The escalation of the fault is absurd. As far as I can tell, it’s gone:

Stage 1 technical support
Stage 2 technical support
BT Exchange technical support
Ericcson technical support

And now the fault is being managed by some kind of crack ninja network technical support team. If anyone knows of a simpler way to resolve this, please let me know: what’s happened is that, despite the DSL being in sync at 17 meg / 1 meg, the ATM/PPPoA connection won’t resolve, so I gots me no t’internet.

I may write a song about this.

Meme, Technology

Last night a DJ stole my life

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Well, when I stole, I mean borrowed, when I say night, I mean afternoon, when I say DJ I mean colleague, and when I say life, I mean ability to interact with my digital world; by which I mean laptop. Without my customisations, configurations etc, I was without:

    passwords (no big deal, but a bit annoying)
    FF toolbar folder (very frustrating – my favourite web ‘apps’ on there!)
    all those Windows tweaks you just do (took some fiddling!)
    No Windows favourites (slightly annoying)
    No customised keyboard shortcuts for Office (grr)

And so on. Although it is probably possible to reconfigure the way Windows logs us on so all this stuff is stored on the server, this would almost certainly drive our server requirements up quite significantly and potentially be quite inconvenient for remote use. Not sure.

But the point I wanted to make (I’m a fan of the thin client world) was that if I could just log on to Firefox remotely when I fired it up, half my customisations would be in place, which would be great. Although I appreciate it’s a massive security risk. And if I could save my Windows preferences somewhere and temporarily apply them to a system that I have to use on occasion, that would also rock. Although, again, probably a security risk.

All the good things are security risks. The world would be better without malicious hackers, criminal masterminds and Noel Edmonds (I’m just kidding, I used to love his show).

What are the top 5 things you miss when you have to use someone else’s PC? Chris? Tom?

Internet, Technology

C:\> is dead. Long live search

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I remember one incident in 1994 very clearly. I was doing work experience at a development lab in Malaysia, and one of the programmers who was coaching me handed me a copy of the Win95 beta surreptiously. Scrawled in faint pencil on the cover of the CD-Rom was the following text:

C:\> is dead. Long live the start menu!

It was all a bit odd. But to my point.

Scoble asks why Google would need an OS: various people have already commented on ‘web OS’ versus ‘desktop OS’… which I think is perhaps a layer of abstraction too far.

The reality is… Google Search itself is an OS. Think about it; you know the command line interface: how to search for things such that you’ll find them again. How upset are you when you repeat a search and, for whatever reason, the result you were thinking of doesn’t come up on the first page? Ok, maybe not literally upset, but it can cause some frustration.

Search is your gateway to every application you use on the interweb — in fact, you may not use bookmarks anymore, or a spelling checker, or anything… Just fire up Yahoo!, or Google, or whatever, and you’re away. It’s why (I suspect) people show so much brand loyalty to their search provider — when you’ve learned the syntax of one, why would you switch? It’s the same reason many PC users who might otherwise be swayed by the slick appeal of Apple stay put (not me, I have lots of reasons for not swaying from the good ‘ol PC platform).

And it’s why many search engines, at their most basic level, are homogenizing: the neutral, clean look of Live.com etc. mimics the success of Google in (what’s probably the hope!) that people won’t notice they’re not actually using Google when they fire up their browser of choice.

Everyone wants to be the new C:\> (the start menu really isn’t iconic enough for this).

Music, Technology

iTunes 7.0.2 – not totally sucky

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Ok, the latest release of iTunes seems to have fixed some of the performance issues with v7 I blogged about recently. Skipping is greatly reduced, but the whole app still seems bloated and memory dependent. Maybe they should take a leaf out of Nullsoft‘s book and release ‘lite’ versions of the player…

If you haven’t let iTunes auto-update, I recommend you do so. Unless you’re using version 6, in which case, stick with that for the moment…!

Internet, Technology

Birthday admin (a tech story)

I love having big birthday bashes, no matter how irrelevant the occasion – in this case my 26th, which, other than being the 5th anniversary of my 21st, is completely pointless.

The tech story (how do I always find one?) – is that I’ve been using Google spreadsheets to manage the dinner reservation (it involves tedious working out of set-menus in advance) — it’s very useful. 5 years ago the concept of an online-only service would have driven me nuts, but am actually finding myself moving away from the ‘thick client’ MS model – and there are two key motivations for it.

    1) I need to access the content from multiple locations, usually at least home and work. Being online makes this easier.
    2) I really, really can never be bothered to wait for my Office apps to load. Even on quite fast machines. It’s why I so often end up taking notes in ‘Notepad’.

So here’s my guidance for MS in their next release of Office.

    1) Provide a pared down, simpler, SAAS, web-based version of all the apps online.
    2) FIX Windows Live Mail so it is as quick and easy to use as Gmail
    3) Work out some clever integrated online storage scheme so that people can store large amounts of data securely online

If you do all that, reduce the license fee and provide the basic versions for free or a low subscription cost, you might make Google nervous. With broadband everywhere, and rumours of Mesh cities popping up here, there and everywhere… More people will be happy about moving online for basic software needs.

Music, Technology

Hi Fi indie house

I’ve done two things lately: first, got a bit carried away on eBay and used some knowledge (and hi-fi prejudices) acquired from time spent with my father when I was younger to get a new (2nd hand) sound system. B&W 601 series 2 speakers matched with a Cambridge Audio A300 amp has got me some sweeeeeeet, awesome value bi-wired sound. Works well for the music recording too, but note for all wannabe rockstars: the A300 doesn’t have a headphones output (!!) so to monitor recording you’ll need to split the signal coming out of your soundcard and run the sound through headphones there. Or find some similar solution.

The thing that’s probably more interesting is the music I’ve been playing through it lately. I had a pretty hard-rockin’ 90s. Not death metal or anything – but lots of G&R, Nirvana, the Foo Fighters, Weezer, Metallica, Ugly Kid Joe etc… Hard rockin’. Recently I’ve been acquiring a taste for more indie music… partly influence of some of the people I’ve been hanging out with (like Chris and Tom) but also was pointed to Athlete by Mazmo and have pretty much been listening to their album on repeat for a week now, as you’ll see if you check out my Last.fm page. I’m enjoying the music (Athelete are chilled, catchy, singalongtoable). I am slightly worried that by the 2010’s I’ll be onto folk music, and by 2020 I’ll be listening to Mongolian throat singing. My hard-rockin’ ness is degrading…

;-)

Also really getting into Gorrilaz. I need more exposure to music generally, I think. At school, we used to visit each other with a stack of CDs and go ‘listen to this’… and so got a lot recommendations on a lot of new music. A similar thing happened at Uni with MP3s… but more recently this has subsided somewhat. Ah well – am signed up to an Indie night next weekend so hopefully get some new recommendations then (might need to use Shazam a little…).

In the meantime, if you think of anything I should listen to let me know in the comments. Some further useful indications of my musical tastes from Last.fm – but be warned – a couple of occasions when I left iTunes playing on random has somewhat messed with my history there**.

** also my excuse for listening to any really awful music. I’m sure I don’t own the Hanson album. I can’t do. Can I?

Internet, Software, Technology

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live WriterSo I’m checking out Windows Live Writer; in fact this post, and the post before it were written using it. For those not in the know, it’s a ‘super exciting’ (thanks for the tip, Simon ;)) WYSIWIG blog editor. Well, it seems more than that and I’ve only been using it for five minutes – it’s a highly extensible blog publishing application, integrating with a number of blogging engines (including WordPress).

The community around it is impressive; its been around for all of a month and already there are numerous plugins (including one for Flickr, which is already up, running and more stable than my Tantan plugin). I may add more Flickr images to my posts than strictly speaking necessary in the days to come…

In short; excellent. Try it out if you find you’re not a fan of your blogging engines normal back-end. Expect it to do the standard MS trick of inserting random crap into your HTML if you edit in rich text mode, though. One of those inevitabilities.

(ah, I see there’s a problem with the Flickr API that’s messing with theTantan plugin. I should fix that…)

[tags]microsoft, software, internet, blogging, technology, windows, wordpress, flickr[/tags]