Windows 7 thoughts

I’ve been playing around with the first beta for Windows 7 for a few weeks now, and I’ve got some thoughts on it.

A little background: I’m primarily a Mac user, and I haven’t used Vista much at all. I’ve been running W7 in a VMWare image (because that’s where Windows belongs and lately Windows has been stupid about running on my hardware). That’s that.

Running in a VM with 2GB of memory I have to say it runs brilliantly fast. IE8 is nice enough, though I find the menus incredibly difficult to navigate. Paint has been revamped with the new Ribbon interface (world asks “why?”), which although questionable, it still works pretty well. Paint has become a lot more feature rich lately — finally Microsoft seems to have realized it’s actually a pretty widely-used tool!

Haven’t tried any games on it.

Taskbar: Here’s where things get interesting. I’ll start with the Notification area, which has been revamped greatly. Instead of being clustered with a billion icons, it arranges itself perfectly and lets you configure what shows up and what doesn’t. And it works. It works well. It works like it always should have.

As for the rest of the bar, for starters you can finally re-arrange items in the taskbar (why this took so long is beyond me) but it works great. You items are now arranged by app, represented by a single app icon. This is also where your quick-launch items go. So allegedly it’s a lot like the Dock on Mac OS X. I’d say that’s a fair assumption. It works a bit differently, but they offer mostly the same functionality. The new taskbar will also show you window previews for each app, as you mouse over its icon. A nice touch.

So while I would say it’s borrowed things from the Dock, it’s not in a bad way. It’s all been implemented in a good Windows fashion and it doesn’t feel out of place. Very natural. I think it’s a great step forward in terms of usability. One thing they have to fix is the way running/nonrunning apps are shown. They all appear in the taskbar, with only a tiny, subtle indicator denoting a running app (a little outline, very faint). If they fix this, it will be mostly perfect.

So it’s generally a solid beta. No UAC bullcrap everywhere. It feels pretty refined. Good on them.

I have to say this looks mighty slick

Even though I’m generally not a fan of Windows laptops (especially from Dell), I must admit this is a very pretty one.

It looks like the screen might be pretty glossy, but generally that isn’t a problem for me. Not that I’m really in the market to get a new laptop (and certainly not a PC), but I just thought I’d point it out. Looks nice.

I think they are launching either H1 or H2 of this year (it’s a PC, there had to be something stupid about it).

OMG Bio left his room?

Well, I’m at MacWorld in San Fransisco. Have been for a few days now. I’m just playing around on the interweb so I thought I’d post here.

Right now I’m in an InDesign class about Keyboard Shortcuts. Cool.

Dear every app on every platform ever

STOP TAKING MY GODDAMN FOCUS.

EDIT:

Jumpstarted the conversation for you guys on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7hvip/dear_every_app_on_every_platform_please_stop/

This is the best bicycle ever made.

This is such a cool bike. Found around U of Ottawa.

The Best iPhone Game

In my experience, Jellycar is by far the best iPhone/iPod touch game on the platform. Full of great music, hilarious sound effects, and always a great challenge, Jellycar is a must have. Best part it’s free!

Jellycar’s main screen is a bunch of little thumbnails of the maps, that slide and bounce around as you tilt your device. Tapping an icon will first pop up a dialog with the best time, and asking you to confirm your choice for the level.

When you load a level, you start as a small car, with a continuously counting timer. In the top left hand corner there’s a progress bar of sorts. The controls are simple: tap and hold the right side to go right, tap and hold the left side to go back, tilt left and right to roll the car, pinch to zoom, tap with all three fingers to pause. But that’s not it! Tap the car to convert your car into a monster truck.

You only get a limited amount of time with this car (as shown by the progress bar), but it’s usually required at some point in each level for completion.

Why is it called Jellycar after all? Well you see, your car and the level is made of a pliable jelly-like material. You bounce, deform, and squish your way through the level, usually laughing the whole time at the silly sound effects.

If you think these levels are easy, think again. Each level is challenging in its own way, and until used to the controls and the dynamics of the game, it’s actually extremely difficult.

If you don’t have Jellycar, and you have an iPhone or iPod touch, I highly suggest you give it a try. It’s probably the only App I actually use from the App Store.

iPod touch as a gaming machine

I read this article earlier today, and I’ve heard the same thing said before, so I thought I’d comment on it, and see what your thoughts are as well.

Apple really seems to be throwing down at both Nintendo and Sony with regards to the iPod touch as a gaming platform. Why? And why not iPhone?

I believe they aren’t so much marketing iPhone as a gaming platform because of battery life. If you’re intended (as per the marketing) to play a bunch of games on your iPhone, you probably won’t have much juice left for calls. So right now it’s only iPod touch marketed for games.

Is this a possibility? I’m not very confident the iPod will ever entirely dethrone the DS — there are about 85 million DS consoles around the world right now. That’s a huge hurdle, and while the iPod touch will likely be incredibly successful, it’s hard to judge who buys it with games in mind and who doesn’t.

The other hurdle for iPod touch are the controls. There are no physical buttons which can be used for game controls on the device. Instead you have the touchscreen and the accelerometer. Using the device’s [arguably] flagship game as an example, Super Monkey Ball, it uses touch for menus, and the accelerometer for controlling your character. And it’s really, really difficult. Most other games which use the “tilt-to-move” paradigm are also pretty difficult to control. I think these issues will eventually be resolved as time goes by. Developers will learn the system better and develop more controllable games. But currently controls are a little difficult.

The absence of buttons is seen as a deficiency for a gaming device (as in “it sucks because you don’t have buttons and you can’t do X without buttons”), but I think it’s more of a paradigm thing, again. Given time, developers will come up with novel ways of controlling the games. This is a strength of iPod touch in the gaming sense. No, it’s not going to be the same as A, B, and a D-pad, but that’s getting pretty stale anyway. The device also has WiFi, a microphone, and is location aware. Those are three more new inputs to play around with. So I think it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing more novel games appear which will start to threaten Sony and Nintendo.

But here’s where Apple really has the advantage: the App Store. I honestly can’t believe neither Nintendo nor (especially) Sony hasn’t done something like this already. The App Store is where you get your iPod touch apps (or Games in this case). Apps typically cost between $0-$10 as opposed to $30 on the other consoles. But more importantly, there are no cartridges or discs to worry about. If you lose your game, you just download it again. One game can go on all of your iPods. They are backed up in iTunes. You can download them wherever you have internet access. Are you getting this Sony? Nintendo? This is where Apple has the potential to dominate.

It will be interesting to see where this goes in the coming years. As an aside, I fully believe Apple will eventually move all of their iPods to the iPhone OS (with touchscreen, accelerometer, etc). When they do this (nano touch, anyone?), they will really shine.

Getting System Information from Linux

Most of the information I gather for my Linux version of my uptime program comes from procfs.

/proc/sys/kernel/hostname

Provides me the one word hostname of this kernel. I’m planning on switching this and /proc/version to a uname() syscall (see man 3 uname) to provide better compatibility on systems without /proc.

/proc/uptime

Provides me the raw number of seconds (including factional) since the computer booted, as well as the total number of seconds this computer has been idle (the second bit I discard)

/proc/loadavg

Provides me with the three load averages

/proc/version

Provides me with a long kernel version, which is different than the one supplied by uname -a.

/proc/meminfo

I get all of my memory information from here, but I don’t use all of the information available to me. Most of it is pretty useless, but I do get:

• Total Memory
• Buffered Memory
• Cached Memory
• Free Memory
• Total Swap
• Free Swap

I get ‘memory used’ from the formula: “int memused = memtotal – cached – buffers – memfree;”

Please Make it Stop!

Why am I continually assulted with an election that gets more press coverage in Canada than Canada’s own election? People complain about Canadian Politics, but that’s because everybody’s so fixated on the wrong country.

Managing Computer Health in Multiple Places

I have a few computers under my control. Unfortunately, not all of them are in the same room. Actually, most are spread all around the country. I have essentially two computers under my direct control, with a few others that I tend to use.

It becomes very important when you start needing these computers to do tasks, such as serve up websites, provide SSH servers, or other such services. Unfortunately, power interruptions, and crashes do happen. A lot of times, if a server goes down, you need to wait until you can get somebody to physically press the button if it’s remote, or provide some details on network access (did just the network go down, or did the actual computer go down, or both). Collecting information about a server after it has gone down is a trivial task, just look through the logs. The big crunch here is, what about real-time outage information? Having a server “ping” a webpage every 5 minutes, uploading the latest load average, memory information, disk usage, uptime, and system log information should provide adequate information to provide a decent report on system health.

Over the weekend, I want to see if I can write some code and set up a little site where I can monitor all my computers, and maybe even try and send commands to them (security and authentication being somewhat of a problem here).

Update: I started work on this on the weekend, and I already have it working. Visit data.vectec.net/uptime for live uptime information for three of my Linux computers (Mac OSX coming soon I hope).