Latest news from my world

Well, I'm running the Build 5219 bits of Windows Vista (Codenamed Longhorn), good stuff, a lot of really nice eye-candy that's been brought in over the older Beta 1 code branch. I think MS has the potential to do good things with this OS. But it's still a race against time, and Microsoft has a tendency to lose those.

Also of interest: I'm involved in starting up a videogame development club at the community college I'm attending, I'll post more information on that as it becomes available. If this continues, we will eventually have a website, so hopefully I'll be able to pass that information along somewhere down the road.
All work with this club is purely preliminary at this point, we're getting a members list together. Then we're going to figure out the best time for us all to get together. Once that has been decided we'll be meeting and arguing over intelligently discussing stuff like which engine we will use, what kind of game we're going to actually make, etc.
If it works out the way we envision it (haha) it will actually be a pretty cool deal. :-)

RAM Upgrade! Party!

As the title implies, I upgraded the RAM in my computer today... w00t w00t!

I bumped my Sony Vaio laptop up to 768MB over the 512MB I was running on. There's a noticeable speed increase, not huge, but definitely noticeable.

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In response to Tom Major's comment on my last post:

I agree that Vista is going to be pretty incredible, and it is definitely going to be groundbreaking in some areas, but I look at it this way:
Look at how much faster the development cycle for OS X has been, they have been able to implement features in half the time that MS was promising to deliver them. (The "instant" desktop search is my favorite example of this, but there are others.) Heck, Google beat Microsoft on that one.
Microsoft has just gotten too big. What makes them so powerful is going to be their undoing, they have the strength to crush all the competition, but by the time they've brought that strength to bear the enemy has moved.
Right now I feel that (minus the massive user base, of course) Mac OS X is pretty much on a level playing field with what Windows Vista will be when it's actually released. That means that Apple still has a year and some change to to keep innovating, to keep advancing, Mac OS X 10.5 (Or maybe even 10.6, depending on how this goes.) will probably be out around the same time as Vista. That's two major versions from now. That's huge.

I think MS has the potentional to kill all the competition, but at their current rate it feels like they're going to show up after the battle has already been decided.

Another thing about Longhorn/Vista:
I know it's currently just in Beta stages, but right now the install process seems hopelessly broken... it's unbelievable the hoops I have to go through at times to get an install up and running.
I'm about to try to install the x64 edition again, because I really want to be able to run it.

Granted, Office 12/Office Vista looks like it's going to be simply stunning, let's just hope they don't kill productivity with impressive graphics.

I guess I'll work on that install now!

I switched mail clients... (Plus a whole lot of other stuff)

OK, I’ve dumped Outlook. Yes, it’s a nice platform, but I’ve decided I don’t really like it. I’ve switched over to the open source (and, of course, free) companion email client to Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird!

I like Thunderbird because it is open source and free, and not only does that mean a good deal for me (can’t beat free ;-) ), but I like what I feel open source/free software does for the software market. Open source software encourages anyone and everyone to “jump in,” to add their voice (or their code, really) to any project, and I like that. If I decide I don’t like a feature Thunderbird, if it’s within my technical skill set to do so I can change or remove that feature in my copy of the program.

As an added bonus: Thunderbird is just plain fast. Yes, any of you Outlook junkies will say “but Outlook has so many more features, and this and that and the other thing” yeah, those are great, and I’ll admit that Outlook certainly has its place. But that place is not as my email client, at least not right now.

I’ve used Thunderbird in the past, but I drifted away from it when Mac OS X Tiger came out, because Mail.app was so well integrated into the OS and supported the new Spotlight feature so well, I instantly gravitated towards it. ( (Up until a few days ago I was using my Powerbook exclusively for email, for security reasons.)

This mention of Mail.app reminds me: Once again, Microsoft is ripping somebody off. I saw a video over on Channel 9 of an interview with the Outlook Express team. (They’re now re-formed as the “Windows Mail” team.) Ok, “Windows Mail” that alone is half rip-off, I mean, yeah, what else are you going to call it? But it still sounds all too familiar.
Also of interest is how much they’re trumpeting their new integrated search feature, it’s the same thing that Mac OS X Tiger already has… so when this comes out in late 2006 it will almost be a two-year old “innovation” and MSFT still thinks they’re being brilliant and original. It’s kind of pathetic, really.

I think Windows Vista (as this new OS is to be called) is really going to be the tipping point for Microsoft. If they can’t get their act together and put out a really good product, they’re going to have some serious customer defections. Especially if one considers the anticipated price tags on their various editions, I mean, from $99 (for what can barely pass as a completed OS.) to $999 (For everything, even the kitchen sink! <g>) (I think those were the numbers? I’d have to look it up…) to get a copy of a really useful OS you’re probably going to have to drop between 2-400 dollars, or you could just get Mac OS X for $130.

Wow, this has really turned into something of a ramble/rant, sorry about that. I guess I’ll go do something besides sit in front of a computer for a while. :-P

I (sorta) love technology

We pulled into the driveway at home just now and my computer automatically connected to our network and I was online. I (sorta) love technology. :-)
So I sat in the car and finished the email I was typing then sent it, and now I’m writing this brief blog post, again, technology is awesome. :-)

I’ve been working on an eCommerce site for my office this week, it’s going very well, and I’m enjoying doing “something else” for a change. (Writing a website as opposed to turning a screwdriver, repairing PCs.)

On another note, I’ve somehow lost my Blogger for Word plugin…. It’s showing up as installed, but it’s nowhere to be found in Word. A mystery, but what involving Microsoft isn’t? Ha.

EDIT: Apparently it's something to do with Outlook that is breaking the toolbar. I'm going to contact Blogger/Google about this... /EDIT
EDIT2: It's a known issue with the toolbar... rawr. When you use Word as the email editor for Outlook (Which I do.) it disables toolbars. This is why I (sorta) love technology. :-) /EDIT2

Google Blog Search

I signed in to briefly mention the new Google Blog Search and found that it had already invaded (in a good way, if that makes sense.) the Blogger back-end, very nice integration, Google! (Google owns the Blogger service, FYI)

Back from the library...

OK, I’m back from my library excursion. I picked up several books.

The afore-mentioned title: The Cuckoo’s Egg as well as Takedown and Masters of Deception, I was hoping that my library had some of Mitnick’s own work, but if any of you know anything about the library around here, you probably predicted my lack of luck with that goal!

I’ve read The Cuckoo’s Egg and Takedown before, Masters of Deception is new to me, and hopefully it’s good.
I’d like to find some newer “geek” titles, I know they’re out there, I just need to go look them up… plus pay for them, no thanks to our crummy library. (They have NO selection of any worth, and are extremely slow at pulling in new titles, if you want a book, you have to buy it for yourself and your own home library!)


OK, what I’ve been doing for my own furtherance lately:

I’ve been working on coding problems. These can be found in many places online and provide excellent practice in writing code and thinking in a programming language.

Most recently I wrote a C++ application to decipher a folded cipher, a solution to the problem presented here.

That was fun, it took me about two hours, and I learned stuff! :-)

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EDITED: for clarity on the library bit        

Nothing to do?

I actually have no assignments to work on right now.I'm taking 15 course hours at college and 11th grade. I have no assignments that require my immediate attention. This is unreal.

For those of you who noted poor grammar, etc. in the last post (speech-recognition): I know about it, I just left it up there as a testament to how good the application may or may not be, how far it has to come, etc.

I’m typing this, not speaking it, if that proves anything, speech recognition can be handy… but I type faster than I talk. Plus I talk fast anyways, and so that tends to trip speech-recognition systems up. (Sometimes even the most complex ones around, humans!)

So yeah, I prefer typing over speaking. I like speech for interface manipulation when it is advantageous to have a hands-free environment.

For instance if you could have a Bluetooth headset associated with your computer, wear the headset over your ear and from up to 30 feet away you could be issuing commands to the computer. (“iTunes volume up”, “go to the next track”, etc.)

Good stuff.

By the way, I’m writing this post in Word, and it will then be posted up to my blog using the Blogger for Word toolbar, it allows me to write my post in Word and then upload it directly to my blog, no intermediary copy/paste necessary, etc.

For those of you interested in such things, there’s a video up on Channel 9 with the developers of this add-in.


Back to education: (Sorry about the random jumping around here…)

These are the courses I’ve taken and I am taking at the local community college:

(Summer ’05, my first semester)
CIS-110 – Intro to Computer
CSC-139 – Visual BASIC Programming
CIS-172 – Intro to the Internet

(Fall ’05, current semester)
CIS-152 – Database Concepts and Applications
NET-110 – Data Communications/Networking
CIS-130 – Survey of Operating Systems
CIS-115 – Intro to Programming and Logic (Really basic C++ stuff, I’m currently attempting to challenge out of it.)
ENG-111 – Expository Writing (My only general college course, anyone care to guess my major? ;-) )

I’ve got A’s in all of them… but that’s not saying much, they’re all really basic.

I’m skipping out of here for a bit, going to the library, might as well do something besides sit at the keyboard all day.

I think I’ll pick up a copy of Clifford Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg while I’m there.