Mushroom photo

Here is a little photo of mushroom, growing on the remains of old tree.

Picasa

Here is a nice program, I am using for quickly viwing and editing pictures. It is really easy to use, and have plenty of features, like burning photos to CD with slideshow.



Download here

Cab driver knows stuff

This is interesting. One cab driver was mistakenly taken as an expert in IT field. The guy did a great job and answered all the questions like a pro :)

Windows Vista

Yesterday the Microsoft Estonia attended a seminar, about new windows Vista. I have been invited, through our company partnership. There were also many other guys from all around Estonia, that are also Microsoft partners. The interest was pretty high, mostly because the new OS thingie hasn't been around for a really long time. So it was about time.

The seminar tooke place at The Meriton Grand Hotel Tallinn. The organisation of the event was on a good level. Alex Holy the Microsoft EMEA Evangelist, presented the new Vista features. I really liked the way he made the presentation, and the quality of it. All the steps of presentation were logically linked, and explained simple enough, so it did made a good overall impression.

The main topics of presentation were:

1. New Windows Vista features (formerly code-named Longhorn)
2. Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code-named Avalon)
3. Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named Indigo)

There were plenty of things explained, from both user and programmers point of view. I especially liked the 2 part of the presentation, where he explained about new possibilities of WPF, and the power of .XAML. The language similar to xml, is really impressive. It is possible to create all kind of applications with it. For example he showed a small video of another Microsoft presentation in Las Vegas, where Vista allowed users to use webpages, to stream videos , search them, download , preview and so on. And with an easy to use interface, and with minimum amount of work required.

Anyway as a small present we were presented with a beta 2 version of Vista



Though I was already signed for a beta 2 testing participation :)

I know my PC is old, 4 years old 1.2 Ghz 256MB RAM and Radeon 9000 128 MB. So it is really way lower then minimum Vista requirements. Anyway I still decided to put it on. So I have 2 HDD the one 160GB is running current version of Windows XP and the other 20 GB resting on the shelf. I decided to use the 20 GB Fujitsu for the Vista, and remove the other 160 GB Maxtor in case anything bad may happen. But I didn't got anyway far as the DVD booted and froze on the loading screen. The screen was updating but nothing happened for a few minutes, I mean no DVD access and no HDD access. So I tried to boot it with the Maxtor 160 GB only, everything was OK, until I tried to click on Install Now button, this is what I got:



No surprise actually :). I knew it wouldn't be that easy to set it up with my hardware. But only the booting from DVD failed, the installation from within the Windows XP went smooth and flawless. The dual boot mode was also automatically applied, so I can switch between XP and Vista whenever I want. I installed Vista on my 20 GB Fujitsu. The bad thing is that this freezing I mentioned before is occurring all the time, the good part is that it is still possible to continue, but after waiting 5-10 minutes. I think it is some problem with HDD, because I had similar problems on some Linux distros, for example Ubuntu.

Still the XP was installed, and I started to test the features it has. The first really useful thing to use after installation is the Set Up devices option.

Usually after installing any other Windows, XP for example, the administrator needs to install the drivers and other stuff, this usually means putting CDs in drives, or downloading from the vendors sites. In Vista though at least for my sound card it was only needed to click on the button, and the updates were downloaded and installed automatically. Off course if additional features or programs needed the manual download is still the best option.
Another thing you notice right away is the Confirmation window popping all the time you want to change something in the system. So each time you have to click and confirm you want to use it. Personally I understand why Microsoft is doing this, I think they are really sick about the security problems with previous version of Windows. And mostly it is caused by the users themselves, who didn't give enough attention to security, or didn't know how. But I think it has become really annoying, and getting more and more annoying with each new version of windows. Can there at least be place where I can uncheck check box, so that these windows won't pup up anymore, I really hope there is going to be something like this later on. I don't want to do 3 action all the time in order to see the processes in the task bar.

The other feature of Vista is the great options for video and music playback. Vista has already the new Media Player installed, and WOW even Media Center. I haven't seen the media center before, so I was eager to check it out. Yes it looks good, and has so many great features, like Radio, TV , music and Video playback, DVD and CD, and even games . Don't know this is probably because it is in beta, but the only thing that did work is the CD playback. The DVD part may also work, but when I tried to use it the Media Center crashed really bad, it took him about 20 minutes to return to normal state after that.

The good part is that Vista has some new mode, that records the errors, and later it is possible to send these errors and get solution to those problems. I think it is a really great idea for problem solving. Another thing that I liked is the new help system. If compared to regular Windows XP help that is almost useless, the Vista system is really big step forward, not only it provides options for solving the solution, but gets a real feedback regarding about was the solution helpful or not, and if not what would be your solution!
After trying the media center I decided to try that DVD again with media player now, surprise but it didn't work.

It seems that decoder was required. If you read this solution closely you would notice that it doesn't help

The most famous part of the Vista is the GUI off course and the impressive Aero effect. Too bad I couldn't use it. Because as I know it is not enabled by default and I need to install special drivers for that. No problem then, but hey there are no drivers for my card, only starting from Radeon 9300. This means that no Aero effects and no OpenGL games for me.

The performance is really slow (FOR MY MACHINE - so don't think it is going to be slow for everyone), The memory usage is minimum 500 MB, with my 256MB RAM this means SLOW. Opening anything takes allot of time. So if you want to install Vista I recommend 1GB minimum, 512MB ram is not an option if you want to run more then one program at the same time. The best choice would be actually waiting for the initial release of Vista, so the hardware vendors could provide working drivers, and the compatibility problems would be fixed.

These are only a small portions of problems I experienced, but this doesn't mean that Vista is buggy, no it is normal process of the software development, and the bugs are expected behaviour. I just hope they are going to fix all of them before releasing the final version. Not like they did with Visual Studio 2005 . For me now Vista doesn't offer anything I am interesting in, it is like more of a toy, that eats lots of memory.