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Too long – Vista review part 1 – The good

January 12, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Yes, yes, yes.
It has been far too long since an update. I’ve been fiddling with getting a WordPress replacement for my homebrewed blogging tool; but it’s time to admit I need to just keep doing this until I get the new one up. At any rate, I’ve been making updates in text files with the hope of putting them on the new blog framework, so I’ll just slowly start releasing them here.

First up – VISTA! I’ve been using Vista for a month or so and thought I’d chime in on my impressions as other have. Since all things are mixes of good and bad, I divided my review up after the spirit of one of Clint Eastwoods classics: “Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo” (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). One coming each day this week.

Day 1. Il Buono (The good)

Memory requirements/system requirements:
Remember the horrified forum doomsayers that said you need at least 2 gigs (if not 4) of memory just to get Vista up and a latest shader-based DX10 compliant video card? I’m here to say that’s completely not true. I was running Vista with 1 gig on a core solo laptop with an ATI 200m and on another system with an Intel integrated graphics card. After a week, I can attest the performance was just as zippy (if not more so) than when it was on XP. That’s with Aeroglass running too. Even if your graphics card doesn’t have vista drivers, the non-aeroglass interface is perfectly fine. More memory does help, but 1 gig was more than enough to get full performance and full functionality. 512meg will get you swapping though…

Aeroglass and new interfaces:
If you’re like me, you are NOT impressed by WindowsBlinds and the myriad of other unbelievably sub-standard attempts to snazzy-up windows interfaces. Don’t get me wrong, the ability to customize your interfaces is a good idea in itself. The problem is these ‘customizations’ or themes are usually done by a teenager who had a 3-day online course on Photoshop and now thinks he is Leonardo Divinci. With no knowledge or concern of color theory, he slaps together some near-pornographic images of hot girls he stole off the internet after a 5 day drinking bender.

Up until now, users were given the ability to control sizes and colors for all the UI items independently. Unfortunately, it makes it terribly difficult to maintain uniform look and feel between the UI elements. Raw magenta, cyan, yellow, pure reds/blues/greens were NEVER meant to appear on screen together. Yet that’s what is on the default windows color picker palette aren’t they? Why in the world would you want to change the title bar size and not the text size with it so that it adheres to rules of proportionality? It’s completely wrong to give users control knobs of an interface’s look/feel all independent of each other when basic design principles dictate they should be linked/proportioned together.

Unfortunatley, this means we are now awash in Geiger/Aliens-esk interfaces with win95 hot-dog stand color schemes on top of semi-nude model wallpapers and button shapes/sizes/icons that rivals the utter ugliness of the original X-windows Motif interface elements. Microsoft’s ‘give them all the knobs and let them figure it out’ approach is why 50 year old teachers and car salesmen’s computers have window sizes/colors that look like a paint factory exploded on randomly sized pieces of lumber. For heaven’s sake, the default windows color chooser still had you enter 0-255 RGB values instead of something as basic as a color wheel that shows you the current selection’s complementary color pairings and triads so you automatically get harmonic colors. It’s like telling a musician to compose by entering the frequencies to make a chord. So instead of saying “play a C chord here with feeling” which encapsulates the knowledge of what is harmonic and pleasing, they’d be forced to enter: play 16.35hz (C), 20.60hz(E) and 24.50hz (G) with vibrato of .5hz/sec. Argh!

Even with the good enhancements and expansion to the user interface experience that came in XP, I’m even happier with Vista’s Aeroglass. Yes, Aeroglass is pretty much a rip-off/re-interpretation of Mac interfaces – but that’s ok. Microsoft learned a lesson that interfaces are important, and that wow-factor and flow is key to the experience of using (and selling) the operating system. Apple has this in spades. Why do you think they can charge 2x for equipment that’s about 1/2 as technologically capable than other things out there?

That’s just one thing Linux zealots don’t yet get. Yes you’re technically, and arguably, morally superior. But it isn’t sexy, and in case you didn’t learn this in high-school – you are a lot more popular with sexiness than actually being morally, intellectually, or technically superior (though Apple does get these departments mostly right too – they’re just not bleeding edge). Sexiness also sell more software. Microsoft gets my seal of approval for not going the WindowsBlinds route that just polishes the turd one more time. Instead, they made the conceptual leap in 100% the right direction by rendering windows contents to textures then manipulating the underlying 3D geometry it’s pasted to in order to achieve cool blending, fading, and bending effects. This allows them to utilize the power of modern graphics hardware and finally opening our desktops to the amazing voodoo that shaders do so well.

For desktop themes, you get to pick a little colored, shinny, square gems with harmonic colors already baked in. Too bad that flowing feel of working with the windowing system gets a brick thrown through its aeroglass each time you get one of the unending security warnings (more on that later). Still, I’ve been using the windows interface and media center app for a month and I’m very impressed with its look and feel. After a few days, I knew I wouldn’t re-install XP. Microsoft’s Media Player, on the other hand, is still the stupidest and most UN-intuitive way to manage and find your music and videos but at least it has gotten a face-lift. It’s technically solid, but I’m always left saying: Geez, kill that thing or build something that actually has a decent, usable interface where I can actually find the songs I want fast and play them easily.

Program compatibility knowledge:
You will get dialogs about ‘known issues’ when running some older programs. This was a good idea – to notify you when things might go wrong and give you a link to an online knowledge base to help resolve them. I haven’t played with it much, but it seems as if the articles are getting updated all the time. Every week I find some new info on a compatibility page. Now, if they could hook it up to a real user-modifiable forum style knowledge-base, that would be excellent. People can post what they’ve tried, what works, partially works, etc. Then Microsoft could come along and certify the ‘best’ answer if it comes along. Hmmm, listening yet Microsoft? Anyway, they do have compatibility running modes that support running things as old as 95. If stuff didn’t just work anyway (which most stuff did), you could set the compatibility mode and I got all my apps to run. The only one I couldn’t get running was Quake 4 (not that that’s any big loss); but I did just hear a new patch that came out will work. Overall, I found compatibility to not be any issue and a touch better than the previous compatibility mode execution.

Sleep/Hibernate/etc:
A real bane to existence is waking up computers from sleep and hibernation modes. Simple a concept as it is, Windows-based PC’s do not reliably sleep/hibernate. Everybody I know at some time has had some issue with waking from a sleep/hibernate mode – especially with notebooks. Sometimes it never comes back from sleeping, sometimes devices acted weird/don’t function afterwards, etc. I’m happy to say this has vastly improved. I ran my desktop computer for 2 weeks waking and sleeping at least once or twice a day without reboot and had no stability issues. I also did it on a vista compatible laptop I was evaluating and it felt a lot more stable than XP in the one week I tried it.

Gaming:
I can play all my favorite games on Vista without a single hitch – mainly Half-Life 2/Counter-strike source. Performance and frame rates were at least the same, if not a touch better, on Vista. Surround sound in Half-life 2 works flawlessly. It certainly seemed a bit more stable by subtle responses I got. I think gaming will be very compelling, if you don’t have one of the above compatibility problems.

That’s it for THE GOOD so far. Tomorrow: The BAD

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu

May 19, 2006 admin Comments 0 Comment

Yes, that’s the name of a real place!

After Wellington, I arrived the the university town of Palmerston North. It is a smaller, but very university-like town. Think a rural Kansas town gets a big university dropped in it. The city square was covered with little shops that nostalgically reminded me of Ben Franklin’s and other dime stores you run into in mid-century rural America. Yet the city was clearly trying to embrace a nouveau bourgeois bohemian style of the local university. An old 50’s theater had been turned into a art play house. It was an interesting blend. Overall a nice place, but nothing of tremendous note – other than it had the biggest town square I’d ever seen. Almost 2x-4x the size of a normal city block. I stopped in the university library and picked up a few computer science journals to see what the Kiwi’s were up to. Ahhhh, analysis of different dynamic memory allocation strategies – fun.

In the morning, I started my drive early to get out to a place I’d longed to go – the location of the worlds longest place name: Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu. Yes, it’s a real place name, and yes, it beats Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch in North Wales. It was about a 3 hour drive east all the way to the coast. There was little along the way and the road turned quite windy and narrow for at least an hour. Surprisingly, it is well marked and easy to find. The place is a hill named by the indigenous Maori people. The name means:“The place where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid, climbed and swallowed mountains, known as ‘landeater,’ played his flute to his beloved one.” It refers to Tamatea, a famous Maori explorer, had to fight his way past a hostile tribe in his journeys. At the battle, his brother died, and Tamatea climbed the mountain each morning and played his flute for his lost brother each morning. I got a couple pictures in front of the monstrous sign and the hill, and then headed back north. I stopped and talked with some other farmers on the way, as the directions in my guide book pointed out there was another sign somewhere else. I found a farmer who said the old sign had been torn down and the one I saw erected instead since the old sign was on private land (and I’m guessing the farmer got tired of everyone trespassing).

On my way back to Palmerston North, I passed through a range of very high hills. At the top was a wind farm. I stopped by and watched two workers working on one of the 50-75 foot towers. While I was watching and enjoying the spectacular view, two really cranky old farmers came by. They were super friendly; but just think of the two guys on the movie Grumpy Old Men. They were real cordial, but cussed like sailors. I helped them move their cows, which was fun, and by that time the two wind farm guys climbed down and came over to chat. They were really friendly and they talked about the control shack just down the road. I drove a few kilometers to the wind farm control shack and there was an even friendlier guy there. It seemed these guys didn’t get too many visitors (it took 20 minutes up a really treacherous road to get there) and were happy to talk with you – or anyone. He took me into the tiny control room and he showed me the whole operation. How fast the mills were running, how much power each mill generated (one I watched was putting out a steady 400-500kW [instantaneous output] (500kW = the max) ), how the computer was controlling the pitch of each fans blades to maximize output, etc. I was amazed he took this total stranger from another country right into the primary control room, all alone, with the one little rack-mount machine that ran it all. I was wondering how completely unlikely that was to ever happened in the states considering how gun-shy we’ve gotten. I was kind of laughing to myself at one point that one or two well-placed kicks might just take down 5% of the New Zealand power grid. It was cool that New Zealand, being an island, really is an isolated power grid. They generate 5% of the countries total power from that one station of about 40 mills. It was one of the best wind farms in the world, and the wind was so good and so constant that they were slated to install mills 3 times the size of the ones they had starting next year.

It was getting late and my host bid me safe travels. I thanked him for the tour, excellent info, and the sights. I also got a good appreciation of how small New Zealand really was. I was standing on a 500m peak or so, but could almost see both east and west coasts. Mind boggling.

Onward north I drove until I hit the town of Ohakune late at night. I wandered into town and noticed a pub full of locals. I strolled in and they were watching a big national rivalry rugby tournament. It was cool because it was a bar but there were a number of 10-15 year old boys there watching with there dads and grandfathers. I just loved the homey feel and the fact the society could be so safe as to do that and not worry about drunken stupidity. It was a great game to watch, even though I didn’t understand all the rules. Still, a good game is a good game – and good people are wonderful to chat with anywhere.

Wellington

May 18, 2006 admin Comments 0 Comment

My British co-travelers headed north this morning to catch some skydiving. Well, I shouldn’t say early. They sleep in till 10am while I was up and out the door before 8 most mornings. Daylight is getting short (8am-5pm) since it’s getting later and later in fall. I just couldn’t let daylight waste.

My first stop was a park on the hills south of Wellington where they filmed one of the first shots for LOTR. Yes, the first few shots were done in a normal city park. Wellington is surrounded by hills which have forests and parks in them – much like Portland. I went up and followed the instructions in my film guide book. A short walk later I found the spot where the hobbits hide under an overhanging tree from the Nazgul while fleeing from the Shire.

It’s fun to find the exact spot where something happened and sit in the very spot the actors and characters did.

After that, I headed down the bay to Miramax. That city name sound familiar? Yup, the Miramax film studio is named after the sleepy little town it’s from. Miramax the city is not big at all, about the size of Lincoln city or larger beach community. It was a beautiful drive along the beach – sunny, warm and clear skies.

After soaking in the beautiful rays, I turned back inland to stop at the New Zealand Film Archives. They had an amazing library of movies, films, commercials, etc. You could browse through them all. The film archive was an amazing concept. Just like libraries of books, this was a library of video. I saw terrible coke commercials from the 70’s, old auto commercials (hilarious), nuclear test films, any movie that was filmed in New Zealand, sporting events, etc. You name it – if it was on film then they had it. They’d converted a lot of it to DVD, which made it even better. There were also tons of books that had all the press and public clippings surrounding each event and film. It got my mind thinking that this really was something missing in America. So much of our media is video. Is it really being collected or saved – or is it just literally fading from the negatives into nothingness on each companies’ storage shelves?

From Wellington, I drove north along the west coast and turned inland to Palmerson North. The coast was beautiful and full of lots of little places you could escape into. Beautiful forests and the like abounded. This whole area was pretty well developed as a refuge for people wanting to escape Wellington for some beach fun. I could easily have spent a few days exploring; but time was ticking…