Taking the Plunge – Installing Windows Vista

Well, I did it. I’ve installed Windows Vista. The install went pretty smooth. I had to locate drivers for my NIC and my Video Card. Both came on the Motherboard DVD, so I didn’t have any troubles there.

Windows Updates gave me a bit of a fit. I think I was trying to install too many things at once. Once I settled down on only installing updates, then installing Office 2007, and then installing my other apps, it worked fine.

Speaking of Office 2007, I’m posting the article from within Word 2007. More of a test run to see if I like it. So far, it works ok… I won’t know until I’ve had a chance to post some articles with pictures and such.

But, back to the Vista stuff. I like the theme colors. But I’m still scrambling trying to find some of the settings that I like to tweak. One item that I really like is the new search functionality. Hit the Windows key, and start typing. It may even cause me to give up SlickRun… we’ll see…

That’s all for now. I have a birthday party to go to. I’ll try and post more thoughts on Vista later.

Shameless Self Promotion – I’m going to be a published author!

lego-mindstorms-one-kit-wonders-small

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT One-Kit Wonders

Kinda hard to read the list of authors in the image on the left, but I’m one of them.  So.. YEAH ME!

This book has 10 robots you can build from a single LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT kit.  Expected ship date is late November 2008.

You can read more about it at Brick Labs – LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT One-Kit Wonders.  Or, go pre-order the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT One-Kit Wonders from Amazon!

BAND – Bangor Area .NET Developer

The next BAND meeting is scheduled for October 2nd.  That’s a Thursday.  Usually our meetings are the last Tuesday of the month, but sometimes they get moved.

This time, it’s for good reason. Chris Bowen is coming back.  And he’s talking about the XNA Game Development.

Free pizza, games development, and a bunch of geeks.  What more do you want?

Oh yeah.. if you are coming, be sure to register, so we can make sure we have enough pizza.  No need to stage any Death Matches to determine who gets the last piece of pepperoni!

Chrome and silent updates

I was wondering how Chrome handled it’s updates.  Turns out, Google pushes them down silently.  You get no notifications that your browser has been updated, it just happens.

Normally, I’d say this is a good thing.  I mean, from a user interface viewpoint, I shouldn’t need to control the updates, nor should I need to be notified.  The software should "just work", which includes seamless updates.  Google claims they will provide release notes at some point, so those of use who want to see what was changed can do so.  That’s assuming that Google doesn’t hide those updates. :)

There is some controversy over the latest security updates though.  Google pushed down an update, but won’t say what they updated, and they’ve sorta hidden the changes in the open-source code too.

For more on the "security fixes" issue, I suggest you read the full article at CNet.

There is a topic on the Joel on Software board (in the Business of Software) about Chrome.  Actually, there are several, but I’ve only linked one here.  It’s got some neat reviews, and some insights too.  Worth reading.  Thoughts on Chrome.

Learn something new every day! GMail

Color me silly, but I just notice this in GMail.

  1. Open GMail in your favorite browser.
  2. Click the Settings link (Top right)
  3. Click the Labs link (far right in the orange bar)
  4. These are "beta" type features you can enable if you want.  Some are kinda neat (random signature lines, customer keyboards shortcuts) and some are silly (play Snakes in GMail).
  5. Enable or Disable any you want, and your done!

I often use the Better GMail 2 plug-in, but since I’ve been using Chrome, I don’t have any plug-ins.  But I don’t really miss  Better GMail 2 right now.  Guess I didn’t rely on it much. :)

Chrome – As good as it seems?

Well, I’ve now spent a full day using Chrome, the new browser from Google.

There are many things I miss.  AdBlock.  Better GMail 2.  A download manager (I like DownThemAll for Firefox.) The status bar (ok, so I like to hover over a link and see where it’s going to open).  Update: DOH! You can hover over links.  It gives you a popup status bar, which goes away after moving off the link.

There are many things I like.  Chrome is fast.  It’s wicked easy to move tabs into a new window, and back to the original window.  Firefox will let you do it, but it reloads the page.  Chrome simple moves the existing process into a new window.  Or back into a tab.

The Google Chrome EULA is a bit scary.  Supposedly, it’s going to be modified.  But we’ll have to wait and see if it truly is.  UPDATE: Here is a more "authoritative" post from Matt Cutts on the Chrome EULA question.

And they did change the EULA:

Update, Sept. 3rd 2008: Earlier today, Google changed section 11 of the EULA to read as follows:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

I’m looking forward to new features as time goes on.  Google is usually pretty good at adding new features based on user response, so I’m sure we’ll see new stuff soon.

I haven’t done any web development yet with Chrome, so I haven’t missed my developer tools in Firefox.  But I’m sure I will.  Of course, any decent developer uses several different browsers to ensure compatibility anyhow. :)

Chrome is here!

I just downloaded Chrome.  The new web browser from Google.  My first impression is… this thing is FAST!  I mean very fast.  Pages that took a half second to load are now instant.  GMail (which uses a lot of JavaScript) is noticeable faster.

I haven’t put Chrome through it paces yet.  I’ve only tried it with about 5 of the normal sites I use.  I’ll post more as I have more to say.  I’ll also try to get up some screen shots, and talk about their user interface.

When asked "Why build a new browser"? Google Said:

Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

So today we’re releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome.

You can read more about Chrome from the Chrome website on Google.  There are screen shots and a full digital book (comic book format) that explains the guts of Chrome and why it’s supposed to be better.  Oh yeah… it’s Open Source too… so that should make some folks happy.

Need to ScreenCast? Try Jing!

jing-logo I recently found Jing (this morning as a matter of fact).  It’s a great tool (from what I’ve used so far) for recording images (screen captures) and screen casting (videos of your computer screen).

It’s free.  And you can use it to share your images and captures with friends, via ScreenCast.com, FTP or on your network.

There are a few limitations (the following is a direct quote from Take 5: The Video Time Limit – via the Jing Blog):

  1. We think Jing is for quick and simple sharing. Record, send. No scripts, no editing, few retakes. Anything over 5 minutes starts to become a tutorial and we thought things like that are better suited for Camtasia Studio and the like.
  2. File size. Depending on what you’re recording, the file size can start to get massive. Once I recorded live video from a web cam and I was up to 55 meg in under a minute. This sort of relates to quick sharing in that we wanted to be friendly to viewers on less-than-ideal connections.
  3. Our video format is SWF. One good thing about SWF is that the quality is lossless (no degradation between what you record and what viewers see). Learn more about SWF near the bottom of this post.

They have some great tutorials, and Jing works on the PC or Mac. So, go download Jing now and see for yourself.

UPDATE: A friend asked me “Why is this better than ALT+PrintScreen (or even regular PrintScreen).  There are a few reasons.

  1. Jing will do a screencast.  It will do a live recording (with audio) of your computer screen.  PrintScreen can’t do that.
  2. Jing offers a “hint” when you hover your mouse over a window.  It darkens the other windows, so you can easily see what you are taking a screenshot of.  PrintScreen can’t do that.
  3. Jing lets you choose the entire screen, a single application, a single window, or you can draw your own custom sized box. PrintScreen can’t do that.

So there you have it.  Three reasons why Jing is better than the regular PrintScreen.

A Book List

This book list is courtesy of The Monkey Exhibit.

  • Look at the list and bold those you have read.
  • Italicize those you intend to read.
  • Mark in red the books you LOVE.
  • Reprint this list in your blog

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (in progress)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (sorry… ain’t happenin)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (yes, I’ve read it, and I intend to reread more every day).
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – Not sure if I’ve read some or just excerpts
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (a favorite)
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (sorry… ain’t happenin)
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Not sure if I’ve read or just read parts.
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

 

I think that gives me 25 read.  1 in the process. Some, I just won’t read… period.

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