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From an email I wrote today, names changed to protect the innocent:

So today two important computer related things happened.

First, I think I may have mentioned that a Windows desktop that exists for the sole purpose of being able to let [my flatmate] and I access the corporate VPN and let us telework had died randomly after trying to update some weeks ago. Not sure what happened – it asked to reboot after installing updates … and never came back up. So I booted it up and discovered that there was a built in system recovery feature and allowed it to wipe the drive and start over. It took its sweet while, but it came back up – and the first thing that happened was that the setup wizard crashed. If I had no knowledge of computers, I wouldn’t have known what to do – there was a giant white screen with a frozen “HP” logo. As it happened, I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del, terminated the process and went on my merry way. Which brings me to item the second: crapware. It took eleven reboots, two hung Symantec uninstaller, a hung HP uninstaller, a failed Microsoft “Works” removal tool and 4 hours of my time to get the machine to a state I would consider usable. I’m currently (6 hours into my adventure) trying to install service packs. It turns out that unlike any other operating system in the world, which would allow you to skip installing intermediate service packs and go to the latest release, Windows requires you to download, in order, SP1 (434MB) and SP2 (380MB). I’m waiting for those downloads to complete. If this is anything like the last time I installed SP1, that will mean an hour of my time and two reboots; if this is anything like the last time I installed SP2, that will mean 45 minutes and a reboot (possibly two). After that, I will need to install software to make the computer usable (Office, Office updates, Virus Scanner, Virus Scanner updates, iTunes, Picasa…) All told, I’m looking at maybe another 3 hours or work.

Second, today [my flatmate] bought a MacBook – one of those $800 Microcenter ones. She asked me to set it up. I started at 10.11pm to do so: setup (worked perfectly, by the way) – about 5 minutes; no crapware to remove, and it finished downloading the latest version of Mac OS X, and all the updates in a single go, installed them, rebooted once – about 17 minutes. Office installation took the longest time, because again, to get from Office 12.0.0 (which is what shipped) to Office 12.2.3 (the latest version), it downloaded 12.1.0, 12.2.0, 12.2.1, 12.2.3; time wasted to install Office: about 50 minutes. So it took twice the time to install Office than setting up and updating the computer. And, of course, the whole Mac installation took less than 1.5 hours – versus, six hours and counting on the PC.

In short, if you’re still using Windows, it’s because you value your time at $0. There’s no other explanation for why on EARTH it should take so long to get a computer to a working state. Truly, unbelievable.

Ugh.

The short take away: avoid Windows. Unless your time is worthless.

I recently had a chance to do something that I’ve not really ever done before, and I came away pleasantly surprised. A few months ago, I helped setup a new Windows Vista desktop from HP. It’s got a dual-core 2.3GHz AMD processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive and Windows Vista Home Premium – a pretty typical machine that one could buy today for about $400 or so.

What intrigued me about this machine was the responsiveness. I have a larger Windows Vista laptop (soon to be sold) which is pretty close in spec to this Vista desktop I was using for the first time in a few months and using the laptop is like trying to swim in mud: occasional bouts of speed coupled with usually slow and uneven progress. This desktop, though seemed as snappy as the day I had set it up – and compared to the slow, unresponsive system I was running, it seemed like a miracle.

There’s a common perception – something which I certainly have experienced first hand – that Vista, like every other Microsoft OS has a tendency to slow down as time goes along. More gunk accumulates in the registry, more things stop working because of the DLL model, and so on. But this machine, which was running the usual complement of anti-virus (McAfee VirusScan Enterprise), firewall (Comodo), iTunes and such, worked reasonably well out of the box, and kept running well in the months since I used it.

So it just goes to show that perhaps some of my issues with Vista are my own doing – I install software left and right, for one. That’s still no excuse for Windows not having sufficient robustness to clean up after a user, but at least, Vista can be usable if you don’t mess with the steady state, and don’t download random junk from the internet to install. Then again, my next computer will be a Mac, in all likelihood.

I’ve not done too many “grab-bag” type posts here, since usually I have lots to say about any given topic (some say I can out-Dvorak Dvorak). I’ve now collected a few things that aren’t worth their own posts, so you get a bunch of odds and ends that don’t necessarily go together.

Windows Vista, yet again
It’s now been something like a year that I’ve been using Vista (or attempting to do so). However, for my new netbook, I decided to get a Bluetooth transceiver, so that I could use Skype, mice and other gadgets without needing cables. Suffice to say, the major discovery that I’ve made is that in 2008, Vista’s Bluetooth stack is worse than the one that my 2003-era Nokia dumbphone sported. Basic telephony requires third-party drivers (which of course, I do not have, seeing as Bluetooth has a few standard profiles and basic telephony is one of them). A Microsoft-made mouse is only partially supported. The third party software that comes with the transceiver – called Bluesoliel – seems to have been written by someone that: (a) never had to use it; and, (b) never read any UI guidelines for any OS ever. I wish you good luck to force it to search for something, since apparently, you’re expected to memorize the Bluetooth ID of every device you have in order to make it find new devices. If this is the very best that Microsoft – and its “valued OEM partners” – can come up with after a half-decade of programming Vista, the future is very bleak for end-users.

Resume
I decided to take the advice of several people both via comments and via email, and decided that I will redo my resume in Open Office; it’s only fair that I give it as much time and effort as I gave my resume in Microsoft Office. So thank you to those of you who suggested so. Now those of you so kind as to email me  get the pleasure of looking over and comparing the versions…

Fring for the iPhone
I love Fring. It’s the only application other than Skype that talks to Skype’s network natively (that I’m aware of). While I’m share the concerns that many people have with Skype – not least the fact that the Chinese are overhearing all the chit-chat about my work, school applications and other such important things – it’s a simple program that does one thing reasonably well. I like it, and my folks use it, so it’s become a standard around the family. After I ran into Bluetooth-ical difficulties while talking on Skype (see above), I switched to using my Fring for the iPhone for the rest of the conversation and it flowed much better. There is a slightly delay, but overall voice quality sounded good to me. Certainly, it makes clear that the iPhone is a good platform for Fring-like VoIP apps. I’m sure like almost all other iPhone OS 2.x first and third applications there are instabilities and I’ll discover them as I go on, but if you were on the fence about spending your $0.00, well… it’s worth it.

Windows monoculture = computer illiteracy
One of the best, most enlightening comments about the problem with the Windows monoculture is here. While there is a good argument to be made that computers are much more complicated beasts than washing machines, DVD players or any other tool, I would respond with the car analogy. A car is a tremendously complicated item, with thousands of parts that have to work flawlessly and hundreds of settings that need to be set perfectly in order to move efficiently and effectively. However, put someone who has only ever driven sedans into a van, and they will be able to operate it – and reasonably well. One becomes car-literate, not “Ford Taurus-literate”. Sadly, it seems more and more, people are becoming “Windows + Office literate” not “computer-literate”. (By the way – the same principle applies to food stocks and crops.)

Washington DC transport
WMATA’s continuing quest to screw up commutes reached a nadir last Friday for me. My train caught fire and had to travel back to the previous station. On that positive note, the Washington Post notes that you can expect your commute to get worse, since somehow in DC traffic planners’ heads, it makes sense that to make commutes easier, one should increase congestion. Yeah, not sure how that works… This is doubly aggravating when one realizes that for a relative pittance, one can travel the length of NYC at any time of the day or night, whilst no amount of money can do the same in DC. (Fun fact: were I to live in NYC roughly the same distance from Manhattan as I do from my house to my work place now, I’d pay a third of my DC commute costs – and I’d get there more reliably around the clock.)

Lifehacker, a favourite around these parts, has two articles up about why their readers switched to Linux. Some of the people switched for ideological reasons (Microsoft’s asinine “Genuine” program comes to mind), some because they wanted to use older machines, and others out of simple curiosity. I came because I was curious, and the more that Microsoft turned the screw on “pirates” the more I wanted out.

Unfortunately, there is one major stumbling block to my adopting Linux entirely: Office. While I’d like to say OpenOffice is great, it isn’t; frankly, OpenOffice is awful. I spent almost two weeks trying to get my resume to look the same in OpenOffice as I did in Office, and somehow, it just didn’t work out. I have a pretty crammed resume, to the point that every line and line space counts. Unless I shrunk, on average, every font by about two points, I was simply and utterly unable to get the same amount of content on my page. I’m not sure why this happens – particularly if I have exactly the same margins and kerning as in Office; I suspect there is something different in the underlying structure of OpenOffice’s renderer and it is this that causes me to stick to Office. Even documents produced natively in OpenOffice just don’t quite look right when printed. Again, I’m not sure why – but I find that often Google Documents looks more correct to me.

Being forced to use Office means: (a) Windows; (b) Mac OS; or, (c) years of my life configuring WINE to run properly. It’s not a happy choice, but I’d like to use Linux and other free alternatives more; where I can, I do. I run FreeNAS on my home server, I run Linux on an older laptop, I run OpenWRT on my WiFi access point. These are all incremental steps towards a free and open computing experience, but I hope for a better OpenOffice, so my main machine can also one day run Linux.

Windows Vista – just when you think it can’t get worse, it does:

Yes, that helpful dialog box is to try and connect to a network (which, thanks to a patch installed in the past few days, drops every few megabytes). Yes, Vista – making the Windows world more secure by preventing computers from connecting to any networks.

Over the past few days, ever since a hard drive came magically back to life, I’ve been attempting to consolidate all the data I have into a more coherent organizational system. Some of these are causing quite a lot of think and rethink, others are simply on the lines of merging all the folders called “software” together. In the process, I’ve stumbled upon a weird Vista Explorer copying glitch, which just makes me even less happy about the state that Vista is in, but… that’s another story for another day.

First, robocopy simply does not work. It worked just fine under XP, but for reasons which are unclear to me, it fails while trying to copy anything to anything. Not sure why. Even a basic copy of one large file with no options just dies. So I’ve been forced to resort to using the GUI to do basic file system stuff, which, as you can imagine, is quite a challenge for a keyboard guy.

Which brings me to the glitch: Explorer “forgets” that it has copied the first x dozen files and directories, and attempts to recopy them at the end of the copy. So for example if I have FolderA, FolderB, FolderC all being copied into Folder1 from Folder2, Vista will copy FolderA, FolderB, FolderC, and then doubles back to copy FolderA again. Then, obviously, it brings up the confusing “Merge” dialog box, even though the copy happened perfectly the first time. The problem is even more clear when moving multiple items – theoretically, Vista is supposed to read, copy, delete in that order; in reality, for the first x dozen files and directories, it reads and copies, and then doesn’t delete… and comes back to try to merge the folders again.

I’ve no idea why it happens, but in case anyone has any idea why Vista tries to recopy or double backs on certain files and folders, please let me know how to fix it. It’s driving me crazy to initiate a copy and come back to find that after a night, it’s still got 18GB left, because it stopped copying to ask me about a merge.

Also, it’s slow as molasses doing any file system transactions compared to XP. But I think we all know that.

Wow. I thought I’d seen it all.

I’ve not bought or helped set up a new Windows computer in a very long time. So I’m slightly behind the times on finding malware and crapware (and quite frankly, crapware is malware by another name, so I’m simply going to refer to it all as malware) that HP and other computer manufacturers try to “offer”. Here’s where I’ve seen malware hiding to ensure that it starts up:

• The Windows registry (this is a pretty obvious place).
• The Windows startup folder (also depressingly obvious).
• As a service (less obvious, but since Microsoft and legitimate services, like anti-virus programs provide a description, it’s pretty easy to spot).
• The Win.ini and System.ini files – from way back when (less obvious, but an old timer like me would know about it).
• As a login or startup script (quite clever, since it’s never clear what Windows is doing while it is “preparing your desktop”).

However, today I was introduced to a new place to store malware, and I must say, I’m both impressed with the ingenuity of it, and angry that it was done this way. Mainly the latter, some of the former.

HP decided to include “Internet Offers”. Of course, any sensibly designed program would notice that the computer was already connected to the internet and bugger off. HP, being HP, has no quality control, and is probably paid a commission for installing malware and for every signup that the malware brought in to the service provider.

So they decided to make it impossible to find. How do you do that on Vista? Well, pretty simple. You find the most difficult to understand, most worthless piece of crap program that comes with Vista, and put it there.

Yes, the Task Scheduler.

So after I spent hours scouring through the bowels of the registry, the services list and miscellaneous startup bits, I found myself trying to comprehend the New! Improved! Impossible to Understand! Task Scheduler. And sure enough, buried under layers of folders called “Microsoft”, I found… “HP Internet Offers”!

For that reason alone, I’ve ruled out buying a HP 2133 and changed my tune on buying HP. They may make decent computers – sorry, they used to make decent computers – but thanks to the Carla “screw our customers” Fiorina mentality that now pervades every HP department, I can’t recommend an HP to anyone in good conscience.

Screw you HP.

(And now, to install Ubuntu via Wubi…)

According to Download Squad, Trillian is eight years old today. Of which, approximately, four years have been spent on waiting for Trillian 4 to come out.

I kid.

Mostly.

Back in the day, I was an ardent Trillian fan. I remember using it on my parents’ old, slow Toshiba laptop, because it just worked and worked pretty fast, considering how far behind the curve that laptop was. I tried a couple of other programs too – ranging from GAIM (slow beyond belief, and ugly to boot) to the native clients (ads – talking ads!!!) and settled on Trillian. I don’t even remember how I first found it, but in the days of a 120 MHz Pentium with first 16MB and then 48MB of RAM, it was a godsend.

When I got my first personal laptop in 2002, I was eager to install Trillian – until I discovered to my chagrin that features which were earlier free were now pay. I stuck with the free version for a year, until Trillian Pro 2.0 came out in 2003, at which point, I paid up for a licence. For the next two years, I was an ardent Trillian fan – going so far as to buy friends Trillian Pro licences for their birthday gifts, because I believed in Trillian so much. When 2004 came around, I renewed my licence for Trillian 3.0 and bought another round for my friends.

And then… Trillian died.

In retrospect, I should have seen the warning signs. The developers would just disappear as a matter of routine. People would report major connectivity issues, and a reply, if any would be in the form of “we’re working on it, don’t worry” and two-three months later, an update to fix a connectivity issue. If your next thought is, “I bet it broke a week later again”, you are psychic. The grumblings on the forums increased. People publicly started decrying Cerulean Studios as frauds, and around that time, I left.

Two things happened.

First, Google happened. In February 2005, my school took its entire mail server system down for the second time in as many years. I should add there was precisely a one week warning (though that was better than the previous crash and burn, which was announced ex post facto) and it was during mid-term exams. Really, really smart. Having given up on a reliable communication there, I and a number of people encouraged people to move to Gmail, and route all emails there. There was no IM at the time, but using Google set me up for the second thing, which was that…

Second, in the middle of my winter exams in March 2005, my Toshiba laptop mysteriously died. It powered down fine, but when I came back the next day after a two hour nap, it refused to start. At all. An emergency trip to buy a computer resulted in my installing only what I needed to write my term papers and study for my exams; everything else was left till the summer of 2005. I got around to installing Trillian Pro again, but it never worked with any reliability. So in August 2005, just before I went back to school again, I was delighted to find Google Talk – a lean, clean client that not only just worked, it worked elegantly with the people I talked with most. Victory! So through my final year at school, Trillian, now the relative memory hog, stayed off.

A year or so after I left, I stumbled upon the new version of Trillian, codenamed Astra. Hoping that this would be the rebirth, I was in the first few batches of alpha testers. Astra is currently on Alpha build 81. I first used Astra, build 25 or so in February 2007. And it seemed like they had been working on it as far back as 2005. To put it in context, it’s taken three people working full-time three years to write an IM program; it took 2000 Microsoft programmers to build Windows Vista in that much time. Vista alpha testing took about a year; Astra is well into its second year of alpha testing. With luck, by 2010, we might see a beta.

In the meantime, I stopped using it. Not only did GAIM catch up in features, it bettered Trillian in resource usage. The last Trillian build I used ate nearly 45MB – without any accounts enabled. GAIM uses 31MB with nearly half a dozen accounts. Trillian never drops below 10% processor usage; GAIM rarely exceeds 10%. GAIM was cross-platform by design so I could use exactly the same way under Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, and its open nature led to some of the most interesting offshoots I’ve ever seen – Digsby. It was a direction others and I encouraged as far back as 2004 on Trillian’s forums. Pure IM is nearly dead – it’s almost all about social networks and building communication capability into social networks: witness MySpaceIM and Facebook Chat, in addition to the private messages both networks offered from the get-go. Digsby does this with aplomb, all while keeping IM as a key focus. It’s amazing. On the web, a client like Meebo does everything you could want an IM client to do – and it’s universally accessible from anything with a network connection, a screen and a JavaScript interpreter. I think belated recognition of these different modes of using IM forced a mad scramble at Cerulean Studios to build an online version as well.

So, looking back at the few happy years of Trillian usage, I am glad that there was a decent IM client when I needed it. Graduation also killed off IM usage – there’s only so many hours in a day one is home to use it, and collaboration rarely happens at the office over IM.

It’s time to say bye to Trillian. I know Astra may eventually be released, and there may even be a successor. But Trillian seems to be an idea whose time came and went. Unless there’s a drastic reinvention – not one of Cerulean’s trigger-happy “complete rewrites” – Trillian will be one of those amazing products that will be scarcely merit a footnote in the early history of IM.

Good luck Trillian and Cerulean Studios, but also, good bye.

One of the more interesting arguments I have back and forth with people is about Windows Vista. I’m most assuredly not a fan of Windows Vista, but I do have a slightly more fair perspective of Windows Vista than most.

For example, a friend of mine and I often have conversations that go something like this:

Friend: “Varun, Vista sucks.”
Me: “Now why?”
Friend: “Because it runs so slow. When I ran XP on it, it was so fast. But Vista is slow!”
Me: “So you’re telling me that an OS designed three Moore Cycles ago is slower than a contemporary OS? Why is this a surprise?”
Friend: “Because it’s so slow. I can’t stand this. I’m going back to XP.”

Fair enough. I have enough gripes and frustrations with Windows Vista that I’m considering buying a new laptop that comes with XP out of the box, instead of Vista. But I’m also realistic about it. When Microsoft was designing Windows Vista, the facts were: there was no EeePC on the horizon, little notice that Intel was switching away from the megahertz race to the performance per watt metric, and vast numbers of tiny, eco-friendly cores were distant gleams in chip designers’ eyes.

Anyway, this is a long way to get around to the point. My flatmate bought a new computer this weekend for less than $400. It’s one of those HP Slimline machines, kind of what I was considering, except it’s got a AMD Athlon 4400+ instead of an Intel Core 2 Duo. The only change she made was she doubled the RAM in the computer from 1GB to 2GB. It has Windows Vista Home Premium on it.

It is FAST. Even with the crapware that came with the computer (including – shudder – Norton Internet InSecurity) and no SP1, the computer ran surprisingly quickly. In fact, the new machine was significantly more responsive than XP on the predecessor machine. By way of comparison, this computer scores about 175% of the PCMarks that the old one did, so it’s not as if the new computer is several orders of magnitude faster than the old one.

Which just goes to show: Vista may require more resources than XP. And I, for one, do feel a lot of that wasted resource usage is useless crap – mainly of the DRM variety. But, when you give Vista a machine that was designed for Vista from the ground up, including a DirectX 9.0c card, enough RAM, a decent (not blazing processor) and a depressingly standard hard disk drive, it can scream and feel as responsive as XP.

One of the most interesting things I’ve discovered since I got my iPhone is how much more I use the internet now, than before, whilst on the go. To put this in perspective, during my entire N80 ownership period (October 2006 – March 2008), I used approximately 300 MiB of data on the phone, untethered. (If you include the tethered amount, that quintupled to about 1.5 GiB.)

By contrast, just in the past 30 days, I have used 380 MiB on my iPhone. Total usage since April? Approximately 1.2 GiB.

And there are two reasons for this (well, two and a half):

1. The browser. Unlike the S60 browser that takes months (and really, months) to startup – the iPhone’s Safari browser starts up immediately. The browser is hugely responsive. I never felt, like I did with my N80, that the browser was about to collapse. Going back to the N80, and trying out a friend’s E51, it hurts to see how sluggish a web experience S60 users have. I don’t disagree that the S60 browser has more features, but between features and speed, on a mobile device, I’d choose speed. And really, the S60 browser falls way behind Safari on the features that really matter to me – web standard compliance.
2. The RAM. Unlike my N80, which was perpetually starved for memory, the iPhone never seems to run out. Oh, it does, and sometimes, opening Terminal or Mail takes a few seconds longer than when the app is loaded in memory. However, it feels like a true multi-tasking OS. I was able to precisely once browse the internet and listen to music at the same time on my N80 – and that was when I was on a WAP site. Loading anything more complex than, say, Google’s homepage would instantly kill my music, or give me an “Out of memory!” error. I hear that Nokia is finally playing catchup and adding RAM, but the OS is still too slow and sluggish, feeling more like Mac OS 9 than Mac OS X. S60 was never designed as a multi-tasking OS, and all the hacks and improvements in the world will never change that. (Just see what happened when Windows was dragged screaming and kicking into the Windows 95 era to see how well OSes handle a fundamental structural change.) Perhaps Maemo will become the future platform of choice for Nokia, giving them a true multitasking OS, but speed and reliability will remain major issues.

The half-reason is the battery life. I tend to keep the WiFi running all the time, which probably doesn’t make for the best situation, but nonetheless, the iPhone runs about 36 hours before dying pretty consistently. In practice, this means that I can charge it every night, with a comfortable margin for excess usage during the day. By contrast, the N80, on a brand new battery would die within six hours if the WiFi network search was enabled. Note I said WiFi network search – not usage. Using WiFi would kill the battery dead in less than half that time. I left it off most of the time – using it briefly when I knew I was in range of my home network to use Fring, or some other bandwidth intensive application. I have no such compunctions about leaving the iPhone’s WiFi running 24×7. The battery keeps up.

Probably the most damning indictment of S60, though, is how the iPhone has changed my behaviour. Earlier, I would routinely sit with my N80, but if I had a quick question or something to lookup, I’d open up or start my laptop and do it there. Now, I grab my iPhone to do the same, often leaving my computer off. There have been weekends where I’ve not bothered to turn on my computer at all.

So I find myself agreeing with David Pogue (not one of my favourite writers – he specializes in something I affectionately call verbal diarrhea): we’re witnessing the birth of a fourth major platform – Windows, *nix, Mac OS, and now, iPhone. More and more, my iPhone is replacing my other machines to do everything. In time – not now, probably not with the iPhone 3G – I think that my iPhone will become my primary platform.

As someone who has been waiting for a good mobile platform – one that allows me to leave my computers behind for good – all I can say is “about bloody time”.