January 17th, 2009
This is perhaps the best way I’ve seen frustration with a software installer expressed in a long while:
I forsee Friends of Ed creating a book series, “Foundation Adobe CS3 Installation”, Amazon cross selling people who buy the software with something like “Customers who purchased Adobe CS3, also bought 100 capsule bottles of Excedrin, Pepsid AC, and a book titled “How to find a job when you’ve been fired for missing a deadline because you were installing Adobe CS3″.
— Dave Gillem on Crucial Limit
P.S.: Yes I like long titles :)
Posted in Asides, Design, Morons, Reviews, Software | No Comments »
January 14th, 2009
If you’re having problems connecting, try forwarding port 1863 (TCP/UDP). Worked like a charm for me. No idea why this fails to work, but the OS and the IM client are both in beta, so …
Posted in Asides, Internet, Software | 1 Comment »
January 14th, 2009
After having used Vista for 2 years since I got my Dell, I’ve to say that it’s the slowest, buggiest version of Windows by far, even beating Windows ME for the title. Random lockups, sluggish UI, more random lockups, skipping audio, inability to delete/copy/move files in any reasonable amount of time (”Calculating remaining time” anyone?) to name a few of the problems that plagued Vista.
Windows 7 seem to have fixed all that. It just works (so far). None of the earlier problems are prevalent in 7. Speedy UI, effortless file operations, and no more skipping audio.
Let’s just hope it stays this way. Sad that I keep applying the (so far) qualifier to anything I have to say about Windows 7 — Microsoft has let me down too many times before.
Posted in Brilliance, Design, Reviews, Software | 3 Comments »
January 13th, 2009
So I installed Windows 7. I guess most of you have watched the videos (and if you haven’t go do so) by now, and so I’ll just confirm what we all saw: The new taskbar kinda rocks. The system is fast (really fast), and most of my stuff just works out of the box.
More updates as I actually use it properly.
Posted in Brilliance, Design, Reviews, Software | No Comments »
January 12th, 2009
My favourite moment came when I pointed out that journalists should be on the side of those who suffer. If we were reporting the 18th-century slave trade, I said, we wouldn’t give equal time to the slave ship captain in our dispatches. If we were reporting the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, we wouldn’t give equal time to the SS spokesman. At which point a journalist from the Jewish Telegraph in Prague responded that “the IDF are not Hitler”. Of course not. But who said they were?
— Wherever I go, I hear the same tired Middle East comparisons by Robert Fisk
Posted in Asides, Life, Morons | No Comments »
January 11th, 2009
“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
— Omar Khayyam [via Projectionist]
Posted in Asides, Life | No Comments »
December 19th, 2008
I’ve been using Amarok on my GNOME desktop for years now, and loving it all the way. Recently I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora 10, and there’s no Amarok 1.4.x package — just the 2.x.
2.x is still nascent in terms of functionality, and every other Gtk based player I’ve tried (Banshee, Rhythmbox, Quod Libet, Exaile, BMPx, Listen etc.) don’t do it for me.
Long live Amarok 1.4.x. Whilst not quite what the authors of Amarok dream of — they want to turn it into a rich media platform, which is a nice idea — it was (and still is) amazingly good at what it was meant to do. Play and manage music.
P.S.: So good in fact, that I installed the dependencies and compiled the source for 1.4.10
Posted in Brilliance, Design, Reviews, Software | 1 Comment »
December 3rd, 2008
I’ve been running Fedora 10 since the Preview they released a while back and I must say that I’m incredibly impressed. After switching away from FC 3 to NoNameYet (which became Ubuntu) I’ve never looked back, being thoroughly impressed with it. Fedora has managed to make me reconsider, flaws and all.
First Impressions
It all starts when you boot the computer, and the extremely impressive start-up screen comes on. Not is it just animated, it’s of a blue sun with solar flares. I rebooted 2 or 3 times to just look at it. The show is all too soon over though, since Fedora 10 boots quite fast, almost matching Vista.
Freedom at a (really low) price
Now, Fedora is of course geared towards Freedom in the somewhat narrower than usual definition of software freedom — Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Now this comes at a bit of a price for the typical user — you’ll have to spend quite a few minutes installing bits and pieces of proprietary, or otherwise un-free software like Nvidia drivers, MP3 playback, Java and so on. This isn’t particularly difficult thanks to RPMFusion.
Shiny new stuff
Fedora certainly does deliver on its promise of an up-to-date, easy to use desktop. The latest GNOME, and all the latest GNOME/Gtk/Mono applications are included in repositories, and are merely a click and some automated downloading away.
The bad
One complaint I do have about Fedora though is yum and PackageKit, the package management duo of choice. Compared to apt it is downright sluggish. All the waiting required makes me pre-plan(!) my package management.
Thoughts
I find that Fedora makes for an able desktop, wonderful development environment, and presents a good chance to contribute to the free software community. I haven’t even been trying and I’ve filed bugs and spent a couple of hours with the SELinux people discussing minor problems in the Preview. For some reason it seems to encourage me to give back shrug.
Maybe it’ll even convince me to start contributing code again…
Posted in Brilliance, Reviews, Software | 1 Comment »
October 26th, 2008
Dell mailed me my Vista SP1 disc a couple of weeks ago and I decided to take the opportunity to install fresh and see how I liked Vista. Overall it’s been much better than the initial release of Vista. Things don’t randomly freeze up (as much) and file operations don’t randomly take hours to complete for no reason (as much).
Vista is a lot more compatible with my hardware (webcam works, USB drives work faster in general etc.) than Linux is, and this has been nice. Having full syncing with my Sony Ericsson K850i is also nice.
Still, I don’t feel comfortable using Vista. Whenever I boot into Ubuntu and log in to my GNOME desktop I almost feel a sense of relief. It’s that same feeling you get when you return home after a vacation. Granted, the vacation might’ve been just what you needed, it was nice etc. but you still love that you’re home and that you’ll be sleeping in your own bed again. That’s the feeling I get when booting back into GNOME from Vista.
Posted in Reviews, Software | No Comments »
October 5th, 2008
I just bought my first pair of ‘noise-isolating’ earbuds today — SonicGear’s EarPump. I paid RM 39.90, so I wasn’t expecting much from them.
I was wrong. The fit is excellent — with three different sizes of rubber in-ear seals to choose from, and a spare set of the medium seals there’s something for most ear sizes. In my case, the mediums fit perfectly and comfortably, sealing out most outside noise.
Overall I’m quite happy with sound reproduction. Treble comes through loud and clear, with bass being a little too far on the restrained side for me. The mid-range is somewhat strong, but that doesn’t bother me too much. Overall I’m quite happy with sound reproduction though I wish the bass was a little more defined.
Apart from the headphones and extra seals, the package comes with a carry case which has spare room for a small MP3 player; something along the lines of a Creative Zen Stone would fit perfectly in there with the phones.
A serious problem that has emerged after my testing is that the majority of MP3s in my library aren’t ripped well enough and have a constant background noise to them. My commercially purchased tracks, as well as higher bit-rate rips sound excellent however.
P.S.: I think EarPump sounds like something you’d rather not have happen to yourself :(
Posted in Design, Entertainment, Hardware, Reviews | No Comments »
