equivocal ramblings

Dear Windows Live,

Windows Live Messenger took 1 hour and 30 minutes to install thanks your installer deciding my offline package (downloaded just this afternoon) was too old. Apparently there was a minute version mismatch with the latest one in your repository.

Installing software on Windows in general is an already slow process, but you seem to think that it’d be awesome to slow me down further. Please bear in mind that not everyone has a T3 connection.

Please fix. Kthnxbai.

Sincerely, Kevin.

The installation process for openSUSE 11 is quite impressive. LVM, package selection, desktop selection etc. were all top-notch without any hiccups (unlike my past experiences with Fedora). Post-installation set up was quite smooth as well, except for the part where I wanted a static IP — took 15 minutes to figure the GUI for that out. Seems more geared towards network administrators than end users.

I can’t say I expected the green to be pleasant, but I can’t complain — looks very nice. Overall, solid stuff.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu’s new release — Hardy Heron (8.04) and I am impressed. From start till end it seems so much more polished than anything else I’ve tried (including Windows Vista).

From the new File Operations dialogue to the weather applet/clock/calendar integration it all just fits together so well. One thing in particular which I really like is this:

All this while it’s required the use of apt-spy or trial and error testing of repository speeds (Australia’s awesome on Streamyx^WSlowmyx) it’s nice to have automated tests against 200 mirrors. I can actually use the GUI tools rather than falling back to the CLI all the time…

Of course I’m sure there are niggling issues, especially for the laptop users among us. Thankfully I don’t have to deal with that pain yet :P

Much like jhall’s problems with the office 2007 trial, I downloaded the Office Standard edition 2007 Trial. Now, on the website it has this to say:

Trial programs contain the same functionality that you get when you buy the perpetual versions — but only for a limited time.

Well, something is seriously wrong with their activation process because even after activation, and getting an expiry date (sometime in July), I couldn’t do anything but view files, email etc.

How can they get something like this wrong? This is a really bad experience for anyone evaluating Office 2007 for their company (like I am).

Update: Well, it works now. Uninstalling it and reinstalling fixes the problem. Same thing on another machine. This is most odd. I quite like it so far though…

If you use a high resolution display, like me you might find your eyes starting to water as you read all these trendwhore websites that use tiny tiny body fonts, like Verdana at 10 pixels. I’ve always solved this by Ctrl + Mousewheel up or down, but doing that for each and every site is a tad bit tedious.

Enter No Squint. I’ve fallen in love with it. No Squint allows you to select a default zoom level (I chose 110%, a slight bump up) and also remembers if you changed the zoom level while browsing a website. So now pages with ridiculously large fonts, or ridiculously small fonts are tolerable.

The best part? I’ve not noticed it at work except that my eyes are less tired now.

Thank you Jason Tackaberry. You did a good job on this one — so much so that I had to add a new category to this journal to post this in: Brilliance.

As taken from the CodeIgniter website:

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks

I must say that after looking through the documentation, watching the introductory screencasts and then experimenting with it myself, it really does live up to it’s claim of real-world thoughtfulness. CodeIgniter flexible and clear when it comes to the MVC pattern, and all through the tutorials I never once felt that I didn’t quite understand what was going on. Even reading the documentation, it’s all amazingly well explained.

I’ve so far not felt mystified by something in the framework, and haven’t yet had to ask any questions on the forums of IRC channels — something I’ve had to do numerous times with CakePHP, a similar open-source project. This of course isn’t to say that Cake is bad, but good documentation is king when it comes to programming.

Overall, the first impression you get when you run CodeIgniter is that of confidence. This is of course the benefit of having a commercial entity backing a project — little things like the documentation that typically don’t get done with a non-commercial project get taken care of.

Best of all? CodeIgniter comes with a license that qualifies as ‘Open Source’.

Lookout CakePHP, you may have the major portion of mindshare right now, but CodeIgniter is a serious contender.

RHB has disappointed me once again with yet another facet of their services. Their wonderful online portal (shockingly similar in layout to MayBank) isn’t quite up to snuff when it comes to interbank transfers it seems.

On Thursday I transferred some funds from my RHB account to my MayBank account, and I still don’t have it. It is Saturday morning. Talk about poor service. Idiots. Now I’m going to have to worry about where my money went through the weekend and call them and give them an earful on Monday. I’m sure I’ll get my money on Monday or (god forbid) Tuesday, but the problem really is that I wanted to use it today.

This is such a contrast to Maybanks wonderfully consistent service — instant, or near instant transfer. You click OK, and within a few minutes your money is available, even with interbank transfers. Then again, RHB is the bank that took 5 working days to clear a cheque of mine once, so I’m wondering if I should even be surprised?

As most of the Linux world already knows, Ubuntu “Feisty Fawn” v7.04 was released a couple of days ago. So being the good early-adopter that I am, here’s what I did to upgrade:

1. apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade to update my Edgy Eft
2. vim /etc/apt/sources.list, a dash of VIM magic, :s%:edgy:feisty to make APT look at the new stuff
3. apt-get dist-upgrade
4. Whimper at the message — 997MB of packages to be downloaded
5. Go to sleep and pray it’s done in the morning

None of that GUI nonsense. I’ll use my command line damnit!

Was it worth the upgrade? Well, there aren’t any blindingly obvious new features on the KDE side of things, unlike the GNOME folks who are at this very moment raving about drop shadows and compositing I’d imagine. It certainly feels more evolutionary than revolutionary, which is how I like it.

I have noticed a few new versions of things, like Amarok — got a few new buttons to play with, some fancier TreeViews with album art in it etc. I’m sure more stuff will show up in the next few days as I actually use the system.

So far only two things have gone bad:

1. The file manager (Konqueror) suddenly decided it didn’t need half it’s menu items, and that toolbars were useless. A quick quit/restart fixed this. So no biggie.
2. OpenOffice.org. What were they thinking? It looked ugly before with it’s non-native toolkit, but these new icons are just horrid. They’re a cross between Windows 3.11 and the Lila theme. It’s like they want us to hate OpenOffice.

I’ve been testing Vista out for a few days now, and I have to say, it’s not too bad really.

• You definitely need 1GB of RAM to operate it as comfortably as Windows XP. 2GB definitely recommended. Office work is fine on the 512MB I have, but … more than that and you’re pushing the limits of what the human mind can withstand when it comes to waiting for applications to catch up.
• UAC, or User Account Control is annoying, much more so than Ubuntu’s way of handling Linux’s restrictive environment.
• Aero Basic isn’t bad at all. Quite a bit better than XP to be honest.
• Windows Calendar, Contacts and Mail are nice enough for normal office use.
• Explorer has a lot more ‘rich’ views — contacts, etc. Also, it’s blazingly fast when loading up system views like Control Panel
• All my stuff works, except for … well all of it works. I had an interesting experience with drivers — I installed an XP audio driver and it failed, but then Vista was like Would you like to install that with recommended settings? and it worked afterwards. Nice.

Yeah, I caved and got myself a 1GB flash based MP3 player:

(Mine’s black)

Sound Quality

As usual for a Sony product, excellent. It comes with AVLS — Sony’s fancy acronym for what basically artificially limits the volume to levels below that which would render you deaf by 30. Custom and preset equalizers, some form of normalization (not sure how it works, but it seems to) and of course, a decent pair of headphones. Not much more to say really.

Aesthetics

To say it looks good is an understatement. From the semi-transparent skin, to the flush screen, it’s all good. The front panel itself is actually a transparent plastic piece, with all wording and logos printed beneath it. Below the panel is then the actual layer that gives it colour. Quite a nice, subtle effect.

The flush screen is just awesome. It looks like they somehow managed to integrate the screen into the actual surface of the player — you can’t see the usual screen boundaries even if you try. The only hint you get that it’s just an effect is in the dark when you can see the backlight glowing around the square plate.

It comes in a really handy form factor too. It’s somewhat larger than the average thumbdrive, which makes it really easy to just slip into your pocket and forget about.

Interface

With a screen that small, I expected something of a headache when it came to navigating the various menus. Surprisingly though, most of the time it works well. I’ve not had to resort to reading the manual at all. The one irritating thing about the player was that it defaulted to beeping with each action (Next, Previous, Stop, Open menu etc.) but that was easy enough to turn off — Options -> Advanced -> Beep | Off.

The Software

SonicStage, the application used to manage the player quite frankly not going to win any awards. It’s alright for it’s stated job, but you won’t see me using it to play music regularly. Thankfully, there are various third party applications that work fine at managing the files on the player, and quite a few of them are Java based, which makes this player Linux compatible. Shocking eh?

Verdict

Overall, a good buy. Sony needs a kick where it hurts for the disaster of SonicStage, but since there are many applications that do a good job of music management, it’s not so bad.