Norm The Machine

My Experience With Windows 7 RC1 – Part 2: Installing Software And Configuration

2009-05-08T22:06:00.001-07:00

If you read part one, you might remember that I formatted my HD and started from scratch. What I didn’t say is how I set built it in the first place. The main HD (the OS drive) is a Western Digital 150GB Raptor. I also have a Seagate 1TB that holds everything else from music to program files. This made the transition so incredibly easy. Here is the best example: Steam. I downloaded the steam installer and ran it. After I changed the install path to where it was previously, I clicked close … and it disappeared.

Well actually, it did flash the install screen for a second, but just for a second. Steam recognized that all of my files were still there! I didn’t have to re-download and install a single Steam game! That’s not due to Windows 7, but still cool. Take this as a lesson: Always separate your OS install from as many of your files as possible via separate hard drives or at least partitions.

On the other hand we have Stardock. This company is awesome in that they develop games for gamers and don’t hamper our ability to play them with DRM. Three cheers for Stardock! They have Impulse, which is analogous to Steam. Impulse installed fine, but completely fails to run. It just dies with an appcrash report. I checked around and it seems that they just don’t support it yet, but are “looking into it”. I don’t know how up-to-date that is, but the newest version doesn’t work. Oh well, I’ll have to wait a while for Demigod.

The control panel got a couple of additions/upgrades. One new one is HomeGroup which seems to be a rebranding of workgroups, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet. I will when I install Win7 on my laptop. There are a couple others, but I didn’t really bother to look too deeply into them. The “Network and Sharing Center” got a face lift which I like. It will even display a graphical “network map” which is kind of cool.

One important thing I have to point out is the ease of connecting and disconnecting to different networks. Along with an important addition to VPN connections. You now have the ability to specify a totally different set of network settings for when you are connected to VPNs! This helps immensely with more advanced networks like where I work. Thanks M$!

There is a new item into the system tray, oops sorry … “Notification Area” (That is the name of the control panel that modifies the tray). Its called the Action Center. Its just annoying. It was annoying at the start because it kept telling me to update! update! and Anti-Virus! Anti-Virus! In retrospect, once you calm it down, its nice to have system messages grouped into one place. The Action Center is divided into two sections: Security and Maintenance. Security contains updates, firewall, spyware, and anti-virus messages while Maintenence has backup, troubleshooting, and updates again.

There is not much more detail to go into other than give you a list of software that installed without any problems whatsoever:7-Zip,AC3 Filter, BitTorrent, Foobar2000, Magic Disk, Office 2007, SQL Server 2008 (needed an immediate service pack), and nVidia drivers. There is probably more, but you get the idea.

Overall, my experience has been beyond my expectations. I would recommend anyone who is knowledgeable enough to deal with pre-release software to try it out.

My Experience With Windows 7 RC1 – Part 1: UI

2009-05-08T04:47:00.000-07:00

I have been without my desktop for a while due to a bad graphics card and my laziness in getting it RMA’d (thanks EVGA). So I got the card today, and decided to just go for it and install Win7 RC1. So after I meticulously put my machine back together I booted up, but only to make sure the card worked. On to the Win7 setup.

The install process was very similar to that of vista. In fact, it looks like they just slapped some new graphics onto the vista install process. I have no problem with that, Vista never gave me any problems installing. When I got to the point to specify the hard drive to install too, I made a snap decision. I formatted the drive. Poof … gone. I just hoped that didn’t bite me in the ass.

The total install time took a little longer than I remember with Vista. (Totally subjective and from memory.) It only restarted once, before I got a desktop. Awesome. The Aero interface looks as cool as ever. Now to try different things out. The following is in not particular order, except for the first.

The first and foremost thing everyone will notice is the taskbar. It has been totally revamped, and heavily borrowed from the Mac OS Dock. The bar now has icons that will both launch applications and serve as the task icon that we are used too. Adding (pinning) applications is a simple drag-and-drop. Also, the window preview that we first saw in Vista has matured. Hovering over an icon will show you the preview like normal, but if you have more than one window open in that application, it will show you all of them. Here’s a cool one, It even shows all the tabs that you have open in IE! When you pause the mouse over one of the previews long enough, all other windows are temporarily minimized to show you that window alone. Awesome. Love it.

The system tray is still around, which seems superfluous. The taskbar now does most of the functions that tray icons do. I think that the only reason that its still there is for backwards compatibility. Oh well. It has one addition: A much easier interface to configure the tray icons’ visibility and notification. It actually has its own control panel now. Alright whatever.

Next on the list is “Libraries”. Windows has always had a list of special folders that would show up by default in most file dialogs. “Documents And Settings”, “My Music”, “My Pictures”, etc. Win7 renames these special folders Libraries. The cool bit is that you can define your own libraries at will! Call it whatever you want, and assign it to the directory of your choice. You can also set which Libraries show up in the navigation pane of explorer. Although, they conspicuously are missing the option to specify your own icon. The second icon from the left in the image above opens explorer up to the list of libraries, so they are the starting point of your filing system. Nice.

Some other small things. Themes are sill around. Desktop backgrounds now cycle through a list of pictures automatically. (You don’t need the power toy to do it like XP and Vista) “Show Desktop” is now just a region to the right of the clock, and it can be activated temporarily by a simple mouse-over. (This would be cool if desktop gadgets weren’t such a joke.)

Overall, I think that its a huge improvement over both Vista and XP. The Win7 interface is what Vista’s should have been.

A Good Time To Get Something Done

2008-06-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

.. is in the midle of the night. Where I work I get inturrupted all day long. Pesky customers call wondering why some thing isn't working or want something done for a quarter the price they think it is. (I am NOT a good salesman) The Boss asks me some question about something or other every hour. Coworkers do the same thing. Meetings. Damn emails. True I do procrastinate a lot, but still!

After I realized I wasn't going to be able to sleep at about 1 o'clock this morning, I went to work. I have so far been able to 2 major items off my task list and worked 2 others halfway. (Need other people to continue those.) It's so nice to just put on some music, get shit load of soda, and just GO. In the past 6 hours I have gotten ~2 normal days worth of work done. Woot!

XKCD And YouTube Comments FTW

2008-06-21T22:12:00.001-07:00

Alright so I cam across one of the funniest things I have seen in a while. The punchline of this commedic journey is a YouTube Comment. You are not going to get it if you are not an xkcd fan, but I'll take you through it. For those who actually know these references I apologize for spelling it out.

It started when I decided to make a TF2 spray out of this XKCD comic. So I Googled "xkcd River Tam", who is an awesome character in FireFly and Serenity played by Summer Glau, in order to find it. The second result was this YouTube video created by someone as a tribute to the comic. This xkcd comic about Summer Glau (in a way) sets the basis for the hilarious comment on the YouTube video (Make sure you mouse over the comic to see the alt text which is important). Scroll down for the comment itself.

LeClerc15 (3 months ago)

Cameron ('terminator girl) hands down. cameron can't die unless she's crushed in a hydraulic press, thrown into a pit of lava, pinned down by another terminator and her cpu removed, or has a bomb shoved into her mouth.

joehardflec (2 months ago)
I find your comment to be lacking in any notable content, and factually wrong on many levels, examples as shown below... -Summer Glau

P.S. I can kill you with my brain

lolololololololololololololololololololololololololol

Generaly Bored And Rambling

2008-06-19T18:58:00.000-07:00

Ah yes, I have a blog. Forgot about that.

Life doesn't change and neither do I. Well, I resist it with a force that would rival Mordor's. Maybe that is a little over-dramatic, but you get the point. The problem is that there are so many things I need to change that I don't know where to start. The easy way out is doing nothing. Yea for nothing! I think that I am repeating a previous post.

Here is a link to a post on Hack-A-Day. Usually they post hardware hacks, but this one is about something entirely different. Don't Talk To The Police! Note: The videos in this link are long but very interesting.

I will try to post more often.

Posted via FireFox 3.0

Battles 5 Days A Week

2008-04-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

There is a constant internal struggle that I engage in at work everyday. Actually, it is more like a war, with battles scheduled 5 days a week. On days off, the weariness of battle from the previous week and gearing up for the battles of next drowns the relaxation that is sorely needed. The stakes are high, and the axis of the war is in the lead. Losing is not an option, but still a possibility and would result in a lack of income, a bleak prospect of future income, and the detriment of my general well-being.

The army of hard work, concentration, and being an altogether valuable employee is not well armed. Generally they decide that there are plenty of other things to do while merely pretending to fight. It is only when presented with the weaponry of new and interesting tasks at work that this army fights with all of its might. It is at these times that great works happen. The sky opens and flows with such inspiration and concentration that the work that is done stands high above a normal day.

However, the opposition is much more powerful. Their weapons consist of menial tasks, interruptions, the draw of the massiveness that is the Internet that is at my fingertips. On days that I lose the battle, much of the time is spent browsing the net. With the absence of a driving force to invigorate the allies into action, this army readily wins the battle. At the end of the day, I lay broken, tired, and depressed by my loss. Sometimes it seems that the axis always wins.

The root cause that the battle is constantly so one-sided is mostly boredom. For years, all that it takes for me to work hard at anything that I do is to arouse my interest. (or do nothing for so long that I must get up and DO something, but that takes days) If I am learning something new, I am all in earnest. But at work, that is so rare that the day-to-day stuff becomes almost painful. Why must I reply to all of my email with answers to stupid questions or deal with the fires the must be put out. Problems just seem to constantly happen which is an early drain on any sort of initiative to complete work items throughout the rest of the day.

So how do I motivate myself, and therefore the good army, to resist the charges and assaults that come from both myself and my environment? I would hope that it is not completely up to me and that work itself is failing in someway so that I could absolve myself, but obviously this is not the case. I do not wish to find a different line of work because I generally like the area I'm in, just not the current situation. No, I think that on most days, the battle is won or lost before I ever get to work. A conscious and truthful (no tricking myself) decision to work hard the moment that the battle starts is the solution. The hardest part is that first initial skirmish in the morning. If that is won, the days battle starts heavily favoring a good outcome.

The last thing to note about this war in general is that it never ends, well, not in the near future anyway. I must build up my army every day until the opposition is weak and overpowered on even the bad days. When that happens, I will consider myself successful no matter how much money I make.

Journey To An Understanding

2008-04-07T19:29:00.000-07:00

I came across an interesting article via Slashdot today that sparked a flurry of web browsing ending at Wikipedia (which happens alot). The article was by a writer at a Mac centered news site, but had nothing to do with Macs. Instant Messaging for Introverts was a very interesting read on a subject that I've always noticed about myself. I hate instant messaging. While the article is an interesting read, its merely the starting point of a journey to understanding.

This article made me think about a personality test that I took a while back. The test was based on a popular set of personailty types called Myers-Briggs. There are a total of 16 personality types according o their model. The result of the test came back as INTP, which is described as Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving. I took multiple tests for error-checking and they returned the same result. The tests themselves gave a short description and suitable careers, but Wikipedia gave a much more thorough description. Oddly enough, wikipedia says that INTPs only make up about 3.3% of the population, now I know why I don't identify with people.(Incidentally the career list included computer programmer, which was a nice reassurance). While the description mostly suited me, I kept browsing.

There is another closely related theory of personality types called Socionics which was much more interesting. Each Myers-Briggs type has an associated Socionics type. INTP maps to an ILI Socionics type, which stands for Intuitive Logical Introvert. The description of which was much more detailed and hit home personally. Reading the article instantly gave me a better understanding of myself and other people. It was like I was reading a biography of myself.

Here are a bunch of quotes from the article on Intuitive Logical Introverts:

"ILIs have very well-developed imaginative abilities, and may spend a great deal of time by simply thinking. ILIs are able to create a complex and intricate inner world."
"... prefer to observe and gather an understanding of a situation rather than actively participate."
"Most ILIs are largely indifferent to the organization of their living areas."
"ILIs analyze situations and make decisions in a very logical and scientific manner."
"ILIs tend to be unconfident and often nervous about interacting with other people"
" If left to their own devices, they often simply do nothing at all rather than interact with the outside world."
"To many an ILI, nothing is worse than routine, menial, household tasks."
"ILIs long for stable personal relationships with other individuals based on mutual trust and understanding, where deeper and private feelings and experiences can be easily shared. However, they lack the initiative to establish such relationships and usually expect others to make gestures in that area, admiring those who do so."
"ILIs naturally possess a strong command of logical systems such as formal logic and mathematics."

There is a lot more to Socionics then just 16 types. I am still reading and gaining perspective. As I continue to learn more, I realize that this is an answer to my last post. Well, not an answer, its a start. I would encourage anyone who wants to find out more about themselves and their relations with other people to find and take a Myers-Briggs test, translate it to the associaed Socionics type, and read about themselves.

Social Ineptitude

2008-03-31T19:05:00.000-07:00

I've never been able to understand some of the finer points of social interactions, some of the bigger ones even. The combination of a plethora of different personalities and an infinite number of situations for those personalities to be put in results in such a complex web of results that the physical universe pales in comparison. The multi-dimensional space of emotions, thoughts, and fate itself is impossible to concieve. How am I supposed to know what is happening with the people around me? How can I know or calculate the right thing to do? The odd thing is that I calculate with a mix of some sort of fuzzy logic that I can't define and intuition. My calculations are often wrong.

When confronted with something I don't understand, my first reaction is to ignore it. Without understanding, how can you begin to calculate a result? To know something is not the same as understanding it. My second reaction, if it can't be avoided, is to learn it. This is not hard for something I can learn from reading a book. But how can you understand the social part of the human condition from a book? Therefore, I have always tended to ignore those social intricacies that mystified me. While this worked fine for a while, it tends to slowly lose friends without gaining more.

Changing from this pattern is a must. I cannot just dismiss social interaction because I am woefully bad at deciphering both the actions of others, and their reactions to mine. This means I must make mistakes and learn from them; Try, fail, and try again; Lose in order to win. Win at life, because life itself is not a game that you can lose and try again.

Twadget Gadget for Vista

2008-03-21T16:25:00.000-07:00

At about the same time that I started this blog, I started twittering. (See that "Twitter Updates" on the right?) Its a neat idea and I am actually keeping up with it. I work on a Vista machine at work so I wanted to find a gadget that would twitter for me. I found Twadget and loved it. But there was one thing that annoyed me: If you started a twitter post in Twadget, but decided not to, there was no way to get the post form to go away unless you removed and readded the gadget! So, I fixed it.

Download

Let me know what you think in the comments here.

Going nowhere and doing nothing while I'm there

2008-03-20T21:32:00.000-07:00

Yes I know it's my fault, but trying involves just that. Why try when I can continue as I am without effort. No effort goes into my daily life. The current in the whirlpool of my existence overrides my willpower. I cannot get out. Well, I don't think I can get out. Such is the catch-22 of not doing anything that I think will involve to much effort.

I don't mean any sort of physical exertion, rather, doing things that I have not done before. Getting outside my "comfort zone" (which is a cliche, but originality escapes me) takes a certain adventurous spirit that I only have when I am the worse for drink. (I thank Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for that phrase) I favor inaction in any uncomfortable situation. The power that holds me is not so much my inaction, but the pervasive anxiety of the unknown.

Taking the metaphor of life as a path through the forest, I have found a clearing and set up camp. It has all the basic necessities of life (wow, I now have an urge to watch Jungle Book), with very little threat to my existence. However, there is nothing here. I took a wrong turn and ended up in the Doldrums.

It's time to break camp.

Hello World!

2008-03-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to start a blog for some time now. Actually, I have created and deleted 2 because I never kept them updated. They were never read because nobody ever knew about them. This time I will succeed. (hopefully)

For the first post I didn't know what to write, so I just spot my thoughts at the moment. Well, filtered because my fingers can't keep up with my head. I was thinking of doing a full bio, but I hate describing myself. What do I say? What would people think about what I say? The second question would be obsessed about for a long time after this post so I refuse. Besides, anybody reading this will most likely already know me better than I could say in any bio, no matter how long or thorough it may be.

First Post!