Vista Beta: Clean Install

It's much better. I still had to disable User Access Control to keep it from popping up a confirmation dialog every 10 seconds. I turned off search indexing on the hard drive: it slowed down copying files from my external drive to a crawl (expecially when they're text files, which should be lightning fast), and it's a waste of resources, since my data is pretty well organized, and there are programs for indexing specific content, such as pictures and music that do a way better job than a generic always-on search indexer. Vista is set by default to index all external drives for searching: this is a stupid default, and I can't figure out how to change it universally. Vista is still a bit slow and clunky, but that's what I get for running it on 4-year-old hardware. The new Start menu is annoying: I reset it to "classic" style and disabled the "feature" that hides icons you don't use very often.

Vista Beta: Impressions

It sucks. To be fair, I installed it on my laptop, which has integrated graphics, and so the "glass" UI that's supposed to be all the rage isn't available to me. In stead, the windows are colored gray and gray, with shades of gray. It seems also that in order to show off the translucent effects that I can't enjoy, the margins on all the windows was thickened. I think it's annoying. I'm sure it looks pretty with a fancy expensive graphics card. There are other things that annoy me that have nothing to do with cosmetics. Drivers are an issue. My display was stuck at 16 colors, which made the buttons on the title bars invisible, and therefore useless. I was able to reset it to fix that, but there is no driver for my ethernet controller. My photo printer won't work in Vista, ever, since it's a model that HP has stopped supporting. The most annoying thing by far is the interruptions. Vista seems to think that giving it attention is more important that whatever I'm trying to actually do. The whole screen dims, and a single window pops up that asks you condescending questions, t and gives you options that don't cover all possibilities. The configuration settings are also re-arranged from XP, but that's to be expected. What wasn't expected was that the "My Documents" folder has disappeared, supposedly this has been replaced by indexed searching features. The folder is still there, but it's a jumbled mess of hidden and system files. Perhaps it's not as bad on a clean intall. I have my XP installation backed up, at least in theory. I'm not sure if I'll try a clean install of Vista. It may be better to wait until I get my next laptop. Vista is a bit ckunky on this 2GHz P4 with 512MB RAM. If I get a Mac, a free Vista lisence might come in handy. Macs tend to have beefy graphics cards and nice specs, but then again the cost of a Mac laptop will get you a pretty nice Windows laptop. Anyway, my current computing needs seem to be met, as long as I don't install unnecessarily bloated software.

Vista Beta

Got my Vista kit in the mail today. I'll let y'all know how it goes. I'm planning on upgrading the XP install on my laptop. I want to do a clean install eventually, so maybe I'll do that at some point.

Free DNS

It's worth every penny.

Until today, I was using the subdomain athena.gentoolinux.be through freedns.agraid.org for athena's DNS. I have a neat little script that keeps track of what my IP address is, and then if it changes, it automatically updates the DNS listing for my box, and the world can keep on accessing all the wonderful pictures and such that I host there. This is all fine and dandy, but it so happens that the owner of gentoolinux.be is a bit temperamental, and so this morning athena was nowhere to be found. Oh, the IP address hadn't changed, ports 22 and 80 are still forwarded there from the router, and apache and sshd were chugging along just fine, but the DNS listing had disappeared.

I had no idea what was wrong. And I was counting on tar-ing up and transferring a Harry Potter sound track MP3 folder today. Bummer. My first thought was to interrogate RFH: he was doing something with athena after 12:30 last night, but it turns out all he did was watch an episode of "Jack and Bobby," so that was a dead end.

I didn't think to try just using the IP address until I got home and discovered everything was working just fine.

So anyway, I switched the domain from gentoolinux.be to gentoo-server.be, so now athena can be accessed via athena.gentoo-server.be. This domain is "public" at freedns.afraid.org, so hopefully there won't be another similar incident. I sent off a message to the owner of gentoolinux.be to ask him to restore my ability to use it. There are a grand total of 3 domains available for use with "gentoo" in them. It's not essential to have that in the name, but I like it there.

I updated the links on my blog template (actually, I changed it so that it only needs to be updated in one place at the top in a JavaScript variable that gets referenced several times throughout the page).

I didn't go through and update all the links in my blog entries, although I did do the Rattlesnake Ledge photos one. I discovered that you can't put JavaScript inside the blog entries themselves. If I get athena.gentoolinux.be back, then I'll leave things as they are, but if I don't then I'll have to go back through and update each link.

If someone wants to look at photos that have a dead link, all they need to do is click on the "athena" link on the top or bottom of the page and browse to ~tim/photos/.

I Promise This Isn't A Mac Blog

New MacBooks today.

Okay, not that color isn't important, but slapping on an extra hundred and fifty bucks just to get the case in black? The price difference is $200 and you can upgrade the hard drive on the white model for $50. They are otherwise identical.

I suppose it'll make it easier to spot the suckers cool people.

Oh, wait. These people bought Macs. Silly me. (Interpret that how you want.)

In all seriousness, the mid-range white model isn't a terrible deal. If you don't mind integrated graphics and low resolution, and you don't mind (or prefer) a small laptop screen, this might just be for you.

At the moment, I'm convinced that if I bought one of these, I would end up loading Vista (beta in June) and/or Gentoo on it. Is there a right/middle-click driver for the touchpad available for Linux? I might have to write one. Not that I would ever get it done. I still haven't found time in my busy life to get MythTV up and running on athena.