Category: Technology

Tonight, the Mars Science Laboratory rover is landing on the surface of the red planet at about 1:31 EDT. The mission is a huge undertaking, and will be nothing short of a modern miracle if they can pull it off.

This seemed as good of an occasion as any to share one of my favorite Bowie tracks today, the appropriately titled ‘Life On Mars?‘.

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‘Life On Mars?’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

The song has a funny little history, originating as a Bowie-penned lyrical re-working of a french song ‘Comme d’habitude’ that never came to be anything. When Frank Sinatra did the same thing, it became his mega-hit ‘My Way’. In response, Bowie wrote and recorded ‘Life On Mars?’ for Hunky Dory.

It’s truly epic in its composition, and the lyrics weave in and out of comprehension. You can’t help but belt the chorus though. Give it a spin, and when you’re through go ahead and tune in to watch the amazing team at NASA do their stuff later on tonight:

So this is just a quick little blip about the recent updates to the iOS software on Apple devices that was pushed a few weeks ago.

I don’t know that I ever cut loose about it on this site, but to anybody who’s ever let me “get into it” about smartphones or iPhones or digital media players or anything like that, this is probably something they’ve heard before.

In March of 2010 I got an iPhone to replace the aging messaging phone I’d had previously. At first, I was hesitant to the entire idea. The notion of a single device absorbing all the functions of my menagerie of gadgets seemed nonsensical. Why would you want one device to perform many functions at an average level when you could have a handful of specialized ones that performed exceptionally? As a lover of gadgets, I was hesitant to consolidate.

But, needless to say, I took the plunge. My skepticism was validated by the lack of functionality afforded by the old ‘iPod’ app native to iOS. One of the main reasons I like iTunes (in spite of the fact that in the old days it was a tremendous resource hog, and more recently due to the shameless plugging of services like ‘Genius’ and ‘Ping’) is that you can utilize a wealth of metadata to customize the way your music collection was organized.

Me? I like my records alphabetized by artist, and subsorted by year of release. As I type this I realize there’s a whole can of worms to be opened on the merits of various schema, but we should save that for another day. The takeaway here is that I’m very particular about how my music is organized. In particular, I like collections of songs from various artists (mix tapes, etc.) and other media (soundtracks) to be sorted separately from ‘regular’ albums.

iTunes will happily oblige such a configuration (Sort: Albums By Artist/Year, ‘Compilations’ set to ‘On’), and as of the introduction of video functionality, the iPod could manage well enough too. I was irked, to say the least, when the iPod App supported next to none of these features.

Browsing on the iPhone via artists took you to a giant list of every artist in your collection, roughly half of which had only a single song to their name. This drove me mad!!! A huge selling point of the iPhone is that it plays music, but nobody every bothers to mention that it does a terrible job organizing a library.

I’m not naïve; I know that audiophile music junkies such as myself are not the target audience of this functionality. It’s for people who listen to the same 6-7 albums while they walk to school or work out at the gym. But still, in the three years this software has been developed, it’s weird to me this was never addressed.

With the iOS 5 update, the iPod App was replaced by the Music App, and with it, a tiny little additional setting to “Group By Album Artist.” And just like that, my artists list is clean and tidy, and all the other miscellany reside in the compilations list. So for the moment, I’m placated. Still can’t sort by year of release within a given artist, but whatever.

Cleaning up the artists list solved a big usability issue of mine, and I’m grateful for that much. I’m also happy the newer models finally upped the storage capacity to 64 GB, because I’m just now starting to hit the ceiling on 32 GB. That said, I’m done hoping that they’ll open this thing up to be fully customizable.

However, in the unlikely event that the Music App was given some real love, I’d be mad appreciative.

I’ll be attending this year’s WordCamp Boston! I’m really excited to go and see what a WordCamp convention is like. I’ve never been before, and it will be fun to see what other people are doing with the platform.

Anything interesting will undoubtedly be reported back here, so stay tuned!

Not really. I just needed a title.
And let’s not lie to ourselves, that’s not nearly as good of an ad campaign as Kylie’s ‘Happy Words/Happy Pictures’… and who could forget, the legendary “Bill Gates?!” and Jerry Seinfeld ad:

But really, lets zero in on the point here: I got Windows 7 installed a little less than a month ago (October 30). After building up to my teary, tragicomic goodbye to Windows XP, Vista, petty and tepid bitch that she is, refused to install. So, XP and I sauntered on a little longer. Nonetheless, when Windows 7 showed up on my doorstep (literally, I had it mailed to me), I seized the moment and got to work right away. I’d already had several false-starts with installing Windows Vista, so I was already ready to begin the over-write of my old data (important stuff safely cached away on my external drive).

One thing I’ve had sitting up in my browser forever, was Paul Thurrott’s article which addresses a lot of fairly technical concerns I had about the upgrade process. While it is silly that Microsoft continues to be deficient in answering the questions that Thurrott thankfully covers on his page, I’m more willing to look past it now that I’ve seen how great Windows 7 actually is.

For the curious, the specs of my system,discussed previously, are fairly robust:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, 2.88 GHz
MOBO: Asus P5QPL-VM EPU, 1333 MHz FSB
Memory: 4 GB OCZ DDR2 800
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT w/ 512 MB DDR2 memory onboard
HDD: Maxtor 100 GB SATA

It’s not the best machine money can buy, but it’d pretty damned fast, and it runs 7 without skipping a beat. While I do miss the less-than-30-second startup the above hardware could manage with XP, but 7 manages it in just over a minute, which is still pretty awesome. And really, it doesn’t take much to beat the pants off of staring at this for around 3 minutes:

(Those Were The Days)

As I’m typing this, I just realized it’s the first blog post on the new machine! My life got pretty hectic post 7-install, and this is the first chance I’ve had to really reflect on the experience. Maybe that was for the best, because I’ve really had some time to play with it, fiddle with it, and form an educated opinion.

Under the Hood
So here’s as good of place as any for the caveat: I have logged a grand total of about 2 hours on Vista. My PC Desktop ran XP until recently, as does every University machine, so a lot of this is new to me. Explorer has been completely redesigned, which is nice. ‘Recent Places’ doesn’t cause the OS to grind to a halt, which is nice… not that I’ll ever use it: seven years of avoiding the damn thing, and paying the price for any discretion have taught me to live without it. The new feature I really like though is the idea of ‘Libraries’.

Certainly, there is utility in keeping all your music in one place, at least in terms of access. For storage and organization though, sometimes you’re constrained or would prefer to keep stuff in different places. Now, you can easily explain to Windows where all those places are, and it will rout them all into a central location for your browsing convenience!

I also like that the control panel is back to making sense again. I never got over that I could only get to ‘Add/Remove Programs’ from the category view in XP. That drove me nuts. The new configuration makes a lot more sense, and it was nice that they centralized a lot of features which used to be scattered around anywhere (I even found under Administrative Tools > System Configuration > Startup Tab, the old startup list that was the entire purpose I had for downloading Tweak UI, which is now no longer available…).

And the Start Menu! Sadly, this is a misnomer I suppose, but I think it’ll always be the Start Menu in our hearts. It’s grown up now, though. An unobtrusive little Windows Orb sitting in the task bar, you pop it open, and so many useful things spring forth! I pin my word processor other daily-use items at the top, and just let the bottom do whatever it wants. I’ve yet to have this “guess what you use often” think work that well. I actually was pleasantly surprised to find the menu totally customizable, allowing you to choose what appears, where, and how. For me, I trimmed a lot of the fat out in terms of file-access. Use Explorer when I want to find data, and I use the Start Menu for applications and customization settings.

Finally, the search feature! Whether you access it through the Win+F shortcut I’ve been relying on since Windows 98 to just search, or you use the super-snappy live-search in the Start Menu, finding stuff is about 1,000 times easier than it used to be. Whatever indexing Windows does behind the scenes does its job with flying colors, and gone are the days of waiting for the OS to drudge through countless gigantic system files on a fruitless search for whatever you wanted. This is one of those no-brainers that simply having it work saves so much time and frustration that I almost start to think the damn thing is worth the price tag.

User Experience
Microsoft really stepped up their game here, because 7 looks slick as hell. I’ve been doing the full Aero Thing, glass effects and so forth, and I’ve really enjoyed it. The transparency is a nice effect (though not the Earth-shattering ordeal it was built up to be in Vista) and the overall interface looks really polished, particularly the gadgets that are available for the desktop. Which might be why there are so few. I found the gadgets library to be clunky and hard to navigate, but the handful of gadgets I did decide on were really well put together (though, as a whole, the functionality pales in comparison to that of the Firefox add-on community).

My favorite added feature, exclusive to 7, is Snap. This allows you to quickly and conveniently resize and arrange windows in a really intuitive fashion. Drag a window to the top of the screen and release it there, it maximizes. Doing this at either corner auto-fits the window to occupy 50% of the screen. As soon as you ‘break’ it from this place, it returns to the size it was before. Additionally, this can all be accomplished from the keyboard with Win + Left/Right (Corners) or Up (Maximize). Beyond that, the new Win + Tab feature is gorgeous, and useful if you’re working with a lot of easily distinguished windows.

Not Annoying Me
The one thing that I’ve found insufferable about 7 is that the screen blanks (as in the monitor has no signal) momentarily before I’m polled for one of the now-infamous security override questions. Thankfully, the update to the Security Center means this happens far less frequently, but it’s still annoying. That said, the security issues are far less obnoxious, and as a whole, 7 is pleasant to use. A huge component of this is how damn fast it is. I know that part of this is my hardware, but another big component is that the folks at Microsoft didn’t up the system specs from what Vista asked for. So they’re able to deliver a vastly superior user experience with the same resources they had three or four years ago.

I for one, am grateful. Yes, it was stupid that Vista had to be endured for the intervening years after XP, but 7 really delivers on the promise of a next-gen operating system that takes full advantage of current hardware while still ensuring smooth and seamless functionality. Thus far, I’ve had no system hangs, blue screens, or other catastrophic breakdowns as far as the OS is concerned.

I’m pleased as can be with Windows 7. For once, it actually paid off to be on the ground floor of a Windows OS launch!

This post ends with a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Wow. That is not at all indicative of where this entry is going, though. Apologies in advance for the misdirection. I just recently got a new computer. In this case, it is worth noting that ‘got’ actually means ‘built’, which is why this entry is something of note. With some money saved from my Boston excursion, I decided to sink some serious cash (a few hundred dollars) into some new hardware. Included in this purchase was a a new case, video card, motherboard, processor, and memory. Joining the new components were a few hold-overs from my then-current machine: DVD burner, SATA hard drive, and power supply. These, in addition to a new 24″ display, would become my new machine!

For those interested in raw specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, 2.88 GHz
MOBO: Asus P5QPL-VM EPU, 1333 MHz FSB
Memory: 4 GB OCZ DDR2 800
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT w/ 512 MB DDR2 memory onboard
HDD: Maxtor 100 GB SATA

All of which has been crammed into a SilverStone microATX form-factor case which looks like a tiny microwave. Getting this thing to work was a bit of an ordeal, though! Since I’m using my old hard drive, I wanted to keep my data on there if possible, and avoid wiping it clean. Problem is, when it was all connected together, the machine refused to boot Windows XP! This really should have come as no surprise, as I’d changed every single major component of the machine; some confusion on its part is to be expected. The way I got around this was through a really fancy trick I stumbled upon that allows you to rebuild your installation of Windows XP. That article saved me!

So I now have my old install of XP running on an all-new hardware set! It moves noticably faster, especially in loading applications and browsing graphics-heavy websites (I am glaring at your, GMail, WordPress) that would normally cause the old machine to falter and occasionally fail! Now it’s no problem. Except I will probably go blind staring at the tiny letters on this humongous screen.

Sitting on my desk in front of me is a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium that I picked up with the promise that they would mail me a free copy of Windows 7 when the release date happens on 22 October! So right now, my machine is running XP; in a day or so I’ll switch over to Vista, bitch about it for a few months, and finally settle on Windows 7. This really gets at an important point that maybe only I am getting too bent out of shape over: Saying ‘good-bye’ to Windows XP is not going to be easy.

My XP Desktop In Its Final Days

Sure, XP and I had our sore spots: We didn’t meet until 2006, when XP was well over 5 years old, and already being pushed off the stage by the flashy-but-faulty Windows Vista. Until then, I’d been using a workhouse of a machine that ran Windows 98. That’s right, friends: I ran Windows 98 through 2005, and I liked it. XP was unfamiliar, with its reorganized control panel items and strange-and-slow search feature with that stupid dog that I hated. When I finally made the switch when I built my machine that was supposed to get me through college during my senior year of high school, I was irked with the damn thing. Glitzy menus and weird color schemes that I didn’t trust, and utilities I was unfamiliar with…

Somehow though, in the intervening 3+ years, while I wasn’t paying attention, I came to love the blasted thing. I made it my own, throwing the taskbar up to the top of the screen (an aesthetic decision I still catch flack for) and using the silver theme (suck on that, Apple-ites with your faux-brushed aluminum: it ALL looks fake, even in 32-bits of color). I know the network setup all too intimately, with Truman’s complex secure wireless login procedure. My beloved Firefox (then, version 1.5!) and I first met during my introductory phase to XP, signaling a whirlwind romance that continues to this day. I logged what must have amounted to hundreds of hours on IM clients, built the BrakBlog.com and Schrödinger’s Blog websites using tools in XP, and even typed my college application essays in Office XP.

And to forsake such a history for what?! To submit myself to maneuver about the bloated feature-creep ridden copy of Vista that sits before me? I’m glad that our engagement will be a short one. Vista never really wowed me. The few positive things one can say about it are outweighed by the cost at which they come. I do look forward to 7 in all its 64-bit glory, however. It’s the first time in my memory that they’ve redesigned the OS with the express intention to run faster than its predecessor, while still using the same hardware; even if it doesn’t totally succeed, having its heart in the right place goes a long way in my book.

What I’m getting at is similar to my point about cellphones: I’m continually amazed how casually people are willing to toss away something that has borne witness to many critical decisions and important discoveries. Sure, maybe I am getting a little carried away with it; it is just an OS after all. But I will miss it. Like someone you used to love, I will soon forget how easily we used to get along, recalling only that we were once privy to each other’s most intimate secrets, but not what they were. Resigned now to uncomfortably negotiate one another in public libraries and professional office settings… Our encounters an awkward imitation of what was once an elegant step performed by knowledgeable partners.

Windows XP, it was a good run;

“Goodnight, sweet prince! And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”