New Random Blog Post, Updates, etc.
Posted by Tyler Brown
Ok, I apologize for not keeping up with my promise last month. Summer started to drag on, I had a cold for the first week and a half of June, etc. etc. So anyway, its July 1st, new month, and I figured, time for a new blog post.
So in the past month I've probably used Ubuntu 10.04 95% of the time, and Windows Vista about 5% of the time. So, I'm definitely using Linux hell of a lot more than I have in the past, which is definitely a good thing! Yes, I have gotten used to the buttons being on the left side of the titlebar, and even Ubuntu's new Ambiance Theme (although I changed it to something else eventually anyway).
So, around a week and a half ago I decided to order a new 500GB HDD. I wasn't running dangerously low on space, but I figured I might as well order one just to have the extra space, have one nice really large drive, and for performance too (the 32MB of cache is pretty nice). The drive I ordered was a 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black. Absolutely amazing drive. Boots up into Ubuntu 10.04 much quicker than the 40GB I previous had Ubuntu on. And just to bring it, my previous drive configuration was 1x120GB for Vista, 1x80GB for Storage, and 1x40GB for Ubuntu 10.04. Now its 1x500GB for Ubuntu, 1x120GB for Vista, and 1x80GB for Storage. I'll include the unboxing video of the HDD below. I gave the 40GB SATA to my younger brother to use as an extra drive, which brings up the next topic.
My younger brother having had suffered 2 months on a A8N-SLI board (after trading motherboards with my other younger brother) which wouldn't work with his video card or Processor correctly (it detected his Socket 939 Athlon x2 as a Single Core), he finally got a new motherboard/CPU with 3GB of DDR2 RAM included. He's now finally able to use his 512MB 8600GT again, and his new CPU is an Athlon II x3 CPU at 2.7GHhz. Of course, because that boards only IDE channel would have been taken up by his Optical Drive, we had to order ANOTHER 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black drive. The pure fact that it was on sale AGAIN when we realized he needed another drive was some pretty good luck, otherwise we would have had to go with a 320GB or 250GB drive instead. But basically we set up a dual-boot on his system w/ XP and 7, plus a partition to store games. My youngest brother also got an upgrade out of this, including an upgrade to 2.5GB of RAM, Socket 939 Athlon x2 2.4GHz, and an extra 80GB IDE HDD.
Another thing I would like to mention is I have an extra Pentium D + a Board laying around I am actually considering doing something with. I just need to get a case, HDD, an optical drive for it (and maybe just a little bit more RAM). What I was thinking is I could possibly set that up to do videos on AND I will also probably use that as a machine to setup and do distribution testing and reviews on.
Anyway, I did mention I was getting used to Ubuntu's Ambiance Theme, well, thats when I decided to install the Elementary Theme Package, including The Elementary Modification of GNOME's File Manager Nautilus. I absolutely love this theme, and its actually going to be the Default theme of a Ubuntu-based distribution coming out called "Elementary OS". I think I might do a review on that in the future. That, along w/ Installing the AWN Dock, and using GNOME-DO, I can definitely say this UI is heck of a lot better than Window's UI.
So to continue on with my aimless rambling (is it really aimless?), while I kind of didn't go through with my blog every day in June, I definitely plan on doing more blog posts this month. I have been messing around with some pretty interesting software packages lately, mostly ones I found via Ubuntu's Software manager, that I would probably like to talk about, including an application I'm using to type this blog post in right now. So thats what I might focus my blog posts on in the next week, and I might even include videos. So, I would recommend keeping your eyes glued to this blog.
Anyway, thanks for reading this rambling blog post just updating a few things. Please subscribe to my Blog so you can keep on reading the next series of posts reviewing certain pieces of software, and I would definitely love some Constructive Feedback/Criticism in the comments section.
~ Tyler J. Brown
Back on Vista…. and using Opera
Posted by Tyler Brown
Yes, you heard it correctly. I am back on Vista. So what happened? I was on Windows 7 Ultimate for nearly a year (From the RC to the RTM).
Well, as some of you may have known, I had gotten an MSDN account through another staff member when I was a staff member at McInTEC. After I had decided to leave in January, I lost my MSDN account too. No big deal, right? I saved my keys. That was all fine and dandy until just within the past week or so all my Windows 7 Ultimate Keys that I had, about 3, ended up getting blacklisted from Microsoft for no reason.
So why didn't I fight Microsoft to get my keys back? Well, for a couple reasons. First off, I got the MSDN account for free through that other staff member at McInTEC. No point in trying to get back keys that I didn't even pay for in the first part, even if they were legit in the first place. Secondly, I will be going to college this fall, and as a college student, I will either be able to get a huge discount on Windows 7, or the school that I plan on going to will offer a copy of Windows 7 Pro to their students via an MSDNAA account.
So anyway, now that I'm back on Vista, this time Vista Ultimate x64 (Thanks to a couple good friends! 
), I might as well talk about my experience a tiny bit. I will say one thing for sure, it isn't until you go back to using Windows Vista, that you start really noticing the small things in Windows 7 that you got really used to. For example, on Windows 7, I had gotten quite used to the superbar, especially how it grouped applications together, and how I could close a window just by clicking the scroll-wheel on my mouse. I had also gotten used to using Aero Peek to check my widgets, primarily using the keyboard shortcut Win+Space. Yeah, I know on Windows Vista it also brings the gadgets to the front, but it doesn't put them back in the background either. Those were just probably a few of the things I've kinda gotten used to again.
So, as usual when it comes to an OS reload, it'll probably take a couple weeks to a month to remember to reinstall everything that I use every now and then, but from the looks of it, everything is running alright, I am having no issues, etc. Enough about Vista though, I'm going to talk about Opera.
So about early March is when Opera 10.50 came out to the public as a final release, in time for the EU Mandated Browser Ballot Box Microsoft had to include in Windows 7 to be released, which is the reasoning they used as to why the Linux and OS X releases hadn't been released. Then about later that month Opera 10.51 was release, which fixed a few bugs, improved performance, etc. Anyway, when I did the reinstall of Vista, I decided that instead of installing Chrome first, I would instead give Opera a chance and use that as my primary browser for a little while. So far its been a pretty interesting experiences, a few bumps here and there, but definitely I can say its a great browser.
To start off with, Opera 10.5x sports an amazing new UI, including support for Aero integration with Vista/7, as well as including integration into XP Luna, Zune, and Media Center themes, which is going above and beyond what Google has done for UI integration w/ Chrome on XP and what Mozilla has done with Firefox. Opera 10.5x also includes a new tab design, and has moved the entire menu bar over to one button on the top left corner, that sports a red background and a white Opera logo (you still do have the option to move the Menu bar back to normal).
Opera 10.51 UI for Vista/7
Enough about the UI, what about the speed, and its performance. Opera 10.5x is the first version of Opera that I've used that has had an amazingly fast JS rendering engine. Its about as fast as both Safari and Google Chrome's Javascript engines. Its loading of pages is also very very quick. Loading pages is also very very quick. In terms of resource usage, when using flash, it can be a bit of hog, but thats not very surprising. Flash by itself on browsers that take advantage of out of process flash is also very much a hog. Overall, performance for me has been very good, speed has been great, and most of my issues may have come from the websites themselves.
So despite the many great features I've found with Opera, it does have its own issues. Mostly with how certain websites act in it, including a few pages on Facebook, Google Reader, and including Geeks.pirillo.com. I'm not going to go more in-depth of other features, issues, etc. Because, its nearly 2 months after the original release of Opera 10.50, so theres probably already enough blog posts on it. Overall, I'm just going to say thats its been a great browser so far in the past few days, and I'm going to continue using it for a little while. Who knows, it may stay my default browser, or I might have to go back to Chrome. I'll update that for you all in a week.
Anyway, thanks for reading the first blog post in a couple months! Please subscribe to my blog by clicking the orange RSS icon if you want to see more content. I also appreciate comments, and CONSTRUCTIVE criticism on my writing.
- Tyler Brown
Has Microsoft lost focus?
Posted by Tyler Brown
I've been looking into it a bit recently, and I am thinking more and more that Microsoft has lost their focus with Windows, and is possibly even looking into the wrong direction.
So what is that wrong direction that Microsoft is looking towards? That direction is back towards the past. Microsoft has announced that with every copy of Windows 7 Business and Ultimate, there will also be a copy of Windows XP available to Install in Microsoft VPC2007.
I know there are a lot of people who will want XP around to use, but most people who will take the time to virtualize it, probably already have a license, and for the purposes they want to virtualize it for, they will probably just use VMWare or Virtualbox, especially if they choose to play a few old games on there, Virtualbox supports Graphics acceleration, while MSVPC2007 does not.
I also think they may have lost their focus on Windows, while they are trying to compete with every market out there. I know Microsoft is a large company, and they do have quite a few divisions, but I feel that when Microsoft does pay attention to their key product, Windows, they seem to be looking again, into a wrong direction, whether it be the past, or the wrong group of users. I feel that with Microsoft offering that copy of XP, instead of listening to the users who said "I don't like Vista, but Microsoft, with the next version, you could do this, and modify this a bit, you could also work on this a bit." enough, and they decided to pay more attention to the users who were like "OMG! VISTA SUXORZ! DON'T GET IT! VIVA LA XP! THEY CAN'T DO A THING TO SAVE IT!!!1!1!1!!!"
A couple of other things that Microsoft paid attention to, that again, they shouldn't have really even considered, were listening to users who didn't have adequate hardware to run Vista and still complained about it, those that only run Windows in virtual machines to run certain pieces of software they can't run on their native OS (thats directed to **NIX and OS X users,) and one new thing that popped up in the past few years that has gotten Microsoft even more involved with keeping XP, was the Netbook market.
Yes, I mentioned netbooks, which brings me to my next point, one of the major reasons Microsoft has lost focus on their key product, is they are trying to enter and compete in other markets as well, including competing with new Phone OS', Netbooks, web-search, advertising, mp3 players, and quite a few other markets.
I know Microsoft previous had a phone OS, so I will excuse them on that, and they don't even focus on that as well, but, Microsoft's irrational fear of Linux taking over due Linux having great success in the Netbook market, kind of really dragged MS into the netbook market, causing Microsoft to loose focus, again, on the future version of Windows because Vista was just way too large for netbooks, so focusing on the past, they extended XP support to go along with the netbook craze.
Then you've got Search and advertising, while I haven't seen much in advertising, I know Microsoft has been trying constantly in the past few years to compete Google - face it Microsoft, Google is king of the Search industry. When people want to search something, 95% of the time, you will hear Google. You're trying way too hard, and are lacking the simplicity that keeps bringing people back to Google.
Then you've got the mp3 market with the Zune, ah yes, the Zune. Ok, you had a bunch of people complement the Zune, ok, but, I do believe the Zune was almost as bad as Apple in the DRM department, if not worse with the Zune subscription service. I think after you quit the Zune subscription service, your songs just won't play after like a week, while if you quit iTunes, I believe you still have your songs (but, of course, they only play on one type of player, the iPod.)
Before I loose you in the midst of my rambling, I will sum it all up: Microsoft has lost focus and keeps looking into the wrong direction. I can even imagine an Apple commercial out of this - Where PC's neck is crooked starting at his own arse. Anyway, thanks for reading, please subscribe to this blog, pass it on, etc. etc.
~ Tyler Brown (condoulo)
Another Weekend Passes by
Posted by Tyler Brown
So, another weekend has come and gone for the most part. Seems like this has been an interesting weekend. I have finally gotten more work done on my website (http://www.condoulo.com), I have added a new gallery section to the site (http://www.condoulo.com/gallery), the software used is Gallery2, and I used a module for drupal to integrate it into the Drupal Install I have on the website. I think it was done very nicely. Though, there are still a few flaws here and there, the kinks will be worked out over time, so feel free to use it! Just please don't post anything questionable though.
Saturday Night was Thunder Over Louisville, its a shame that I didn't go in person, because the Camera Men for WHAS were starting to piss me off. At least for one part of the show they had a camera angle above the actual Fireworks, so those watching at home missed like 5 seconds of it.
I also gave Windows 7 Beta/RC another try Saturday, installing it from a flash drive, the installation was pretty quick. Though, here's my thought on it. Some things felt faster than on Vista, other things felt a bit slower than Vista. Of course, I haven't spent too much time truly optimizing it. Windows 7 has some performance enhancements, and some feature updates, but all in all, it feels more like a service pack than anything, and to spend $100 on an OEM copy upon release, at least if you are on Vista, isn't worth it. If you are on Windows XP still, I would say, go to Windows 7, because its a bit late in the game to get Vista and then be slammed in the face with a new version.
Anyway, if you liked what you have read, please subscribe. If you use a browser that supports RSS subscriptions (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE7+), there should be an orange or blue (Safari) RSS icon somewhere on the browser, and click on that to subscribe!
Anyway, thanks for reading!
~ Tyler J. Brown (Condoulo)