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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.

One of the cats ran away on Sunday morning or thereabouts. It’s possible that he ran off earlier or later, but certainly, by 2.00pm on Sunday we couldn’t find him. Given that he has a habit of briefly running away and then coming back, we weren’t too concerned. However, most of yesterday and today have been spent putting up posters and searching for him, when we were not at work. As luck would have it, I found him munching a stray cat’s dinner behind a trashcan and we caught him.

While I’m tempted to light him up like a candle in honour of Diwali (that’s today), I’ll just share this one picture with you for now, and thank you all for your well wishes. It was a pretty scary while there, and I’m glad we’re back up to two cats, even though Sliwka can drive you nuts.

As an update to my previous post, I finally shutdown my home server (FreeNAS) owing to a problem with our router (and that is pronounced “root-er” not “RAU-ter”, capisce? A rout is what happens to ill-fated armies.) That brings the total uptime to 193 days, 3 hours, 7 minutes and 4 seconds, give or take a minute between the time I hit shutdown and the time the machine switched off. Once everything cools off, I’m going to make some small upgrades and changes to the setup, including putting a RAID card in and moving some drives currently connected via eSATA to internal SATA. I’m kind of enjoying this sort of once in a way mucking about; not having to worry about the machine for extended periods of time really makes it a more likeable machine.

As a side note, I picked up a D-Link DIR-615 for $40 and find that it beats the pants off the $100 Linksys WRT54G we were running earlier. I should also note that this is the third Linksys WRT54G that has died on me in the past two years. By contrast, the little Netgear WGR614 I had lasted through college without so much as a hiccup (and my folks have been using it since). I bought it for $45 during the Thanksgiving sale in 2003 and it’s reliably lasted since then. That’s pretty impressive.

Speaking of Windows crashes, let me also observe that iPhone OS 2.x is significantly less stable than its predecessor. While I had the occasional crash with 1.x, mainly with the jailbroken apps, I can’t go more than a few minutes of browsing without Safari crashing. This, of course, is insult upon injury, given how just about no app in the store was tested before it was released and is hence crash-prone.

Despite having spent some money for apps, I’m seriously entertaining the idea of going back to 1.1.4, just for the stability and reliability improvements. Anyone else considering the same?

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.)

One of the running jokes my friends and I had back in University was that we really  needed four more hours in a day in order to get everything done. After I graduated, that was less the case – partly better organization, but mainly less stuff going on. Anyway, today I looked at my RTM list and actually counted the number of things I have listed as urgent.

87 things.

It’s interesting – I don’t think that in college my list of urgent things ever went over 40 or so. Despite trying to become more efficient – for example, doing stuff I need to do while waiting on the Metro – the number of things is catching up to the better organization. My personal list ranges from the mundane (renew driver’s licence – and that has dependencies on getting letters from the State Department and HR) to the middling (install iPhone OS 2.1 and then unlock, jailbreak and restore it) to the interesting (work on the router so we can get stable connections at home). My work list… I’m not even going to look at it on a weekend.

In the meantime, I need two more hours in the day already. And that’s going up again soon, I’m sure.