Windows 7 beta Review

I have been running win 7 build 7.0 beta for the past month and I think I’m ready to offer my opinion about this widely praised OS.

 

Pre Installing 

As at the time I was thinking of trying win 7, I was in need of a laptop because our old laptop was giving up on me. It was too slow and I couldn’t do pretty much anything with it. So I decide to retire our old laptop and migrate it into either the Fedora or Ubuntun world. Haven’t decided yet. With that decision made, I set out to buy a new laptop. I kept going between windows pc or Mac pc. Why? , well, I’m not an apple fun boy but I was interested in developing for the IPhone which meant having a Mac. But I could bring myself to justify the amount I would pay for a Mac in relation to how much time I will actually spend using it (which will only be during development for the Mac environment). Then there was the thought of running windows on the Mac using VMware fusion. I had heard some good stories about fusion.

After a couple of discussions with a few friends, I made the discussion to go for a 64bit windows laptop. I discarded the taught of buy a Mac and running windows virtually because, I mainly live in windows. Emulation seems to take away the optimum performance of any OS and I do push my laptops really hard. I could have gone for a dual booth on a Mac but by then, I had already fallen in love with Sony’s Vaio FW. It was perfect in every way. So in the end, I ended up with a 64bit Sony Vaio FW . See the specs below.

 

 

 

Installation Experience

Installation was smooth as a baby’s ass. Wow, that different from what I have experienced so far. In any case, I think MS did a good job with installation improvements. My installation path was an upgrade from vista home to win 7 ultimate so I hope others with different upgrade or new installation path will go as smooth as mine. I can only hope since this is a beta.

 

UAC configuration

This is a lot easier since you can now choose your own configuration and not be bothered by unnecessary pop up’s. One up for the MS guys.

Device Discovery

This is by far my favorite since it looks like a lot of work has been done here. I was able to discover my Xbox, router, cellphone (through Bluetooth), wireless printer and more in just a few seconds. Win 7 really made it easy for me and I hope the  final version will even be better.

 

 

Software Installation

I didn’t have any issues except for IE 7 and Microsoft Expression suite. IE 8 64bit works just fine and works really really fast. IE 7 will start but doesn’t allow any interaction with it. I don’t know if its because I did an upgrade from Vista home to window 7 Ultimate. The expression suite also installed with no issue but will error out when running blend or designer. Personally, I don’t care for designer since I do all my vector work in illustrator and export to xaml when I need to. I just needed Blend for the composition of my application. I will have to resort to my desktop for now till I have a solution around this.

 

UI Features

I was really hoping for some ground breaking but ….its better than it was before. The peek feature is my favorite were you can peek a window and go back to the one you were working on without switching between windows. The grouping of apps at the bottom also makes sense and works very well for me. A bit of style would make these features look great but style is what Microsoft lacks, not like Apple. With that said, the UI is functional and lets you do your work and that’s all one can really ask for.

 

Overall, I will switch to win 7 in a heart beat as its proven to be a lot better than my vista desktop. I think MS got it right this time and if they keep this up, they will have customers like me on their side. That doesn’t mean I giving up on Mac. I like the work of the Mac boys. The look to design first for inspiration. They look to groundbreaking but unfortunately, they are not business worthy at the moment. Not because you cannot run a business with a Mac, but finding all the different software you need to run a business can be more challenging in Mac world than in the windows world. Plus their pride in the “no-virus” selling point  scares the hell out of me because no OS is bullet proof and I have more confidence in the support and speed of the MS security team (since they have been dealing with this shit for a long time) than the 2-5 man security team at Apple.

Note: I really don’t the size of the security team hiding at the Cupertino-based company’s basement. I was mealy making a point.

 

Wish List

1. Spellchecker feature built into the OS or as an add-on so all content applications can make use of it instead of rolling out their own
2. Map feature should be build into or be an add-on to the OS for allow mapping needs to be met by any application that needs it
3. Location based feature build into the OS
4. An OS that knows its environment, that can adjust the light, sound(noise cancellation etc) properties depending on the surrounding.

These are the things I consider moving forward. Up until now, I still cannot believe that laptops and pc don’t come with prebuilt radio receives in them but they are present in the tiny mp3 players we buy.

What do you say dear reader. What are your thoughts.

Filed under: Personal, Platforms

Reducing Online Ad Noise

 

THE ROUTING

I have my ritual every morning from the minute I get to work. I get my coffee; next; ask my colleague (he’s an early to rise kind of guy) if there are any issues that needs my attention ASAP. If none; I put my desk in order; spend the next 15 minutes checking emails and catching up with my favorite blogs etc; then to work.  I’m content with all this except for the last 15 min within which I have to check my emails.

 

THE DISLIKE

Because I have come to dislike internet Ad’s with a passion; both at yahoo and hotmail. They just take up space which otherwise can be used by the application. I have read a lot of complain in relation to yahoo and hotmail to get ride of the Ad’s and more but I know this won’t happen. Below is an image from hotmail but mind you, this applies to yahoo and other email client providers as well. Google does a better job at this by making the ad’s section very small and very smart by relating the ad’s to the content of your inbox. 

 

THE BECAUSE

Ad’s are not going to go away any time soon.It wont because the advertising business is a cash making machine. USATODAY reported online ad revenue over $21Billion in 2007 and the interesting part is that internet ad’s account for less than 10% of all Ad’s. Meaning there are lots of room for improvement and money to be made by online solutions like yahoo (with yahoo mail, search , …) , Google (mail, search, apps etc), Facebook and more. I can understand why Ad’s are important to these companies because, after all, we don’t pay for the service they provide. We search and check our emails for free for the most part. Unless you have a premium account or something of that sort.  That’s how they make their profit.

 

THE SOLUTION

Gladly, I stumbled on a great Firefox extension called stylish and have to admit, its one of the best extensions around. It allows you to customize the look and feel for any site by saving your modifying style in stylish and it does the rest. The best part of stylish is that it has a huge support and contributing community which makes it easier to find styles for many sites. I wasn’t able to find a one for the new hotmail and live sites so I created one and contributed it to the stylish online community repository. Below is a screen shot after applying stylish. You can apply stylish to any site, any web email client. Now, I can enjoy my routing freely. Take stylish for a spine and you wont regret it.

Filed under: .NET, CSS, Design, Personal, UX

Get it Done, NOW !! {DIFN}

It’s been hard trying to find time to blog. I have so much respect for people like Jeff Atwood, Matt Berseth, Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman. These guys have lots of responsibilities at work and at home and they some how manage to find time to blog. So I began to wonder what it takes to blog and blog "successfully.  From what I have come to learn, they are two types of developers. There are those who create “noise” by chatting , blogging, writing articles  etc and then, there are the “quiet” ones, those who are knowledgeable but either has no motivation to blog about it or just to see the need to. Belonging to any of these categories doesn’t make you better than the other. The only difference I have come to realized is  motivation.

Motivation is  what makes people like those I mentioned above, make time to blog amongst the million others things they do in their day to day activity. They feel some sense of responsibility to tell the world about their findings, their thoughts and their lives experiences. Jeff Atwood and his team at stackoverflow have even take the extra step to tap the hidden knowledge inside the “quiet” ones amongst us. I have tried to encourage my team at work to blog (including myself as you can tell I’m not too happy with my blogging habits) but most of them don’t think blogging makes any difference in anyone’s life.

So you must be wondering why I’m so unhappy with my blogging habits or why I’m not a successful blogger like the mentioned above if I have all this motivation. Well, because I’m lacking the DIFN. The “DO IT F**KING NOW” plan. Yes, that’s what I’m missing and that’s what most early bloggers lack. We procrastinate. We are not committed to “doing”. We don’t have a blogging plan for success.

I recently read a post by Joel Spolsky talking about DIFN in the form of  Fire and Motion. 

Once you get into flow it’s not too hard to keep going. Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before getting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I’ve got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again that I really have to get started (9) launch the damn editor and (10) write code nonstop until I don’t realize that it’s already 7:30 pm.

Somewhere between step 8 and step 9 there seems to be a bug, because I can’t always make it across that chasm. For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest.

I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn’t matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side. Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?

 

Jeff Atwood also has a similar post from a different angle, titled  “How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step”. In his post, Jeff asserts that continues jabbing and regularly throwing haymakers is what makes it happen.

 

But success takes time– a lot of time. I’d say a year at minimum. That’s the element that weeds out so many impatient people. I wrote this blog for a year in utter obscurity, but I kept at it because I enjoyed it. I made a commitment to myself, under the banner of personal development, and I planned to meet that goal. My schedule was six posts per week, and I kept jabbing, kept shipping, kept firing. Not every post was that great, but I invested a reasonable effort in each one. Every time I wrote, I got a little better at writing. Every time I wrote, I learned a little more about the topic, how to research topics effectively, where the best sources of information were. Every time I wrote, I was slightly more plugged in to the rich software development community all around me. Every time I wrote, I’d get a morsel of feedback or comments that I kept rolling up into future posts. Every time I wrote, I tried to write something just the tiniest bit better than I did last time.

 

In all these different perspective lies DIFN as their foundation. The power to get your ass off the couch after work and spend an hour to blog about a great piece of code you wrote at work, or about some efficiency process you implemented and so on. Anything worth the world will add to the knowledge we all feed on. If you are one to think blogging is a hustle and worthless, I only have this to say to you. Try ignoring all blogs and articles in your result set for your web searches and let me know how you do. That’s when you will come to understand the importance of blogs (with useful content).

From this moment, I intend to keep jabbing everyday with good content and most of all, uphold DIFN.

I will be glad to hear what you think of DIFN.

Filed under: Personal

Part 1: Reporting for duty after 2 months of AWOL

 

I will like to start by thanking Jeff Ottum and Alan Kneel for their emails in relation to my wedding. Thanks guys. I appreciate it. Its been 2 months since I made my last post and 4 months since I made a post on this blog  so I will try to elaborate on what I have been up to so far. I might have to split this post into two as I might not be able to finish due to time constraint.

Table of Content

• -What I have been up to
•   – Go-live at work
•   – Family Time
•   – House maintenance
•   – Programming
•       - Google Android
•       – ASP.NET MVC
•       – F#
•       – Silverlight

 

What I have been up to

I lot has happen the past few months after my wedding. It’s been crazy here and I haven’t had time to catch my breath. I will not be able to elaborate on every aspect of it so not to bore you out of your mind. After all, you are not here to read my memoir.

Go-live

We just went live with our 2nd major version of our management software at work, streamlining processes from customer enrollment to management to renewal or termination. Since go-live, my team has been very busy supporting issues in relation to management. Our end-to-end management software includes our client and customer portals in which I own. That’s to say I have the largest surface area exposure in relation to issues, hence, very busy. I have learnt a lot through out this project and we already have plans for our next release with some exciting new features. 

Family Time

Jennifer and I have been spending a lot of time together as we didn’t have vacation days to go on a honeymoon. Some of my co-workers are not happy with that and insist I take off from work for my honeymoon. Well, we do have it planned, it’s just not time to execute it. We just had our wedding (took days off for that) and we also took a couple of days off during the years to take care of some other family business. Go-live at work needs support and a lot more. Due to all these reasons, we decided to push it off to next year but make it a point to spend time together after work. That has translated into less time on my computer and …you know the rest.   My mom was also here visiting this past few weeks and that was great. I got to have some good home made meals …mmmmm…. I’m missing it already. We also finally got our wedding pictures. I must say, I’m not big on pictures but I really like these. I will put up a couple later.

House Maintenance

Whoever said owning a house doesn’t come with responsibilities. Huh. I have had to set time aside to get the house ready for the coming winter. We had a leakage in the guest bedroom and that had to be taken care of. We also had other problems that need to be resolved but all in all, I’m feeling more like an owner now and I can’t complain. At least I don’t have to do the lawn and snow blowing.

 

I will like to end this post here as I will need more time for the programming section than I have now. I will have some code samples and others in my next post. 

Filed under: Personal

IT’S OFFICIAL

This past few weeks and months have been very busy as my fiancee, Jennie and I have been working hard on planning our wedding since we came back from Hawaii in January. Well, its a been very busy since January and I haven’t been able to blog more than I will have liked to. This past June 1st was our special day and it was great. Everything leading up to it was a challenge I must say.

It started of with the “Let have our wedding this June” banner after Hawaii and we only had 4 months to plan so you can just imagine how busy we were.Tasks included choosing the location, finding vendors, bargaining for the best prices ( you better be good at this if you want the best for less, hahaha). Developed our wedding site and more but it was all worth it.

Everything worked out just great and the date didn’t slide. Not only did we have our wedding this past June 1st, but it was also a family union and reunion between the two cultures and families. I had my parents, siblings, cousins and friends fly in for it. I must say, I’m blessed because the wedding was on Sunday (due to space vacancy) and we worried that most people will not be able to make it. But despite all the worries, they did. I will like to say a big Thank you to my family and friends for the great support. I also got to see some of my nephews and nieces for the first time. That was exciting.

Unfortunately, I had a go-live for our biggest major project at work so I had to be back at work after the wedding. I’m still decompressing and looking forward to getting back into the development and blogging game.

Filed under: Personal

What’s in your Blog List, Part 1

Its always interesting to notice the blogs my fellow developers read. I have come to realize that depending on your area of interest, developer or architect’s blog’s turn to be packaged based on their desire. Basically, you can tell a developer specific interest by looking at their blog list. Then there are those developers that are all over the place. Interested in every single thing. Not a lot of those but they still exist. Here are a list of my top must read blog’s for me.

Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/
Dan Wahlin’s WebLog by Dan Wahlin, http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/default.aspx Manuel Abadia’s ASP.NET stuff by Abadia, http://www.manuelabadia.com/blog/
ScottGu’s Blog by the all mighty Scott Guthrie, http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/default.aspx
Scott Hanselman’s by Scott Hanselman, another ASP.NET guru, http://www.hanselman.com/blog/
nikhilk by Nik, creator of script#, http://www.nikhilk.net/Default.aspx
Omar AL Zabir blog, one of the founders of pageflakes.com, http://msmvps.com/blogs/omar/default.aspx

more to come, What’s in your blog list

Filed under: Personal