Windows 7 - First opinions

Well, I've been using Windows 7 for a while now - since the beta came out, in fact, and I think that I have been using it for long enough to be qualified to give my two-pence-sterling about this early release.

The first thing to bear in mind with this version of Windows is that it is meant as a preview. I have heard good things from other people about the completeness of this release, although I can't say that I've had the same experience.

First of all, the 64 bit version of Windows 7 does not have good compatibility with some of my favourite applications, the most notable being the browser Google Chrome, which didn't work at all for me. Historically, 64 bit versions of Windows have also had notable driver issues, although, impressively, all of the drivers for my NForce chipset and Nvidia Geforce graphics card worked "out of the box" - the same goes for the 32 bit release, and I think that this is something that Microsoft should have included in Vista. It's the sort of functionality that Linux has been able to provide for years. Still very nice that it's finally happened though.

So, having discovered that the 64 bit version was a bit unpleasant, I stuck with 32 bit Windows 7. This meant that it could only address 3.3 gig of my 4 gig of memory, which would be a problem for me in Vista, but not in Windows 7. My Vista installation is rediculously cluttered and tends to use at least 1.3 gig straight after boot. This is only using 800mb as I type this article.

The experience of using Windows 7 is mixed. On one hand, the new "library" system is great - being able to pull lists of files together from multiple locations is a real blessing. The search and indexing features are much the same as in Vista, although there is a slight annoyance in that the first time I searched my library it did not detect that the index was incomplete and resort to a manual search. The new "superbar" teeters between genius and down-right-irritating. In my installation, (but not in my friend's, mind) there was around a second delay between placing my mouse over a symbol and the window previews appearing - this is one of the top features of Windows 7 touted by Microsoft, and although the previews could be brought up instantly by clicking, it made the experience a bit less nice and a bit more clunky. I managed to reduce the delay by editing a registry value, though, as per a tip on a site I found.

With applications that were designed for Windows 7, the jumplist and preview features are great. It's possible to easily navigate your windows, tabs, IMs etc. The rub for me is that it doesn't work that well with anything else. The main problem is that applications have been providing tab features that duplicate the functionality of the "superbar" by grouping instances of an app into a single Window for a long time, and you find yourself, with such applications, first moving over the icon, then viewing the previews of the windows for that application before focusing on a window and clicking on a tab. It's a problem that I think is likely to go away, though.

There are other issues with older applications and the superbar though, for example, applications that minimise to the tasktray when closed appear as closed on the superbar. This isn't so bad unless you've got them pinned, in which case it's rather tempting to open new instances of the application by clicking on its icon. The other thing I found was that Google Chrome's application shortcuts also do not pin well to the task bar. Not so much a bug in Windows 7 but something not yet included in Chrome.

Whether or not the superbar works well is a moot point in my opinion. I feel that the biggest barrier to it lies in the fact that it's different. Sufficiently so to confuse a large number of users. The ribbon interface in Office 2007 is absolutely brilliant, but most users reject it at first because it's different and forces them to use better working habits when using their applications. If Microsoft go ahead with this superbar, they're going to have to market it and market it and turn it into some kind of demi-god if they want people to use it - and even then they'll only get the nerds interested.

Other than that, I have a couple of slight annoyances with Windows 7. The nvidia drivers that come bundled won't talk to my TV in dualview mode, for one, and when VLC is streaming the output seems pixelated where it was smooth before. It also had quite a lot of trouble getting permission from my document storage on my other hard drive to read and write, although it didn't have any trouble with Nat's. In the end I had to boot vista and set the permissions from there before it would work. That sort of bug is also likely to disappear before the final release. I can't get my front headphone jack to work in Windows 7. The sound card supports audio-jack detection, but my case is not wired for it, and the built in drivers in Windows 7 don't offer any way to turn it off.

I'm also slightly miffed that I seem to be using Internet Explorer more than even before. That's not because its good, though (it even fails to render blogger quite right), but because it supports the tabs-in-preview thing.

There are other things about Windows 7 that I like. The wordpad with Openoffice compatiblity (not personally tested) is nice, and the themes thing is great. Pinning applications is great fun, though somewhat hedonistic if you're like me and never un-pin things. A lot of people praised the way the gadgets have been moved from the side bar, and yes, I think that works well - especially with the new "Desktop peek" feature, and they feel more like a part of the OS than a 3rd party application now.

Overall, I give Windows 7 two thirds of a Stone Henge out of 0.981.

Google Application Engine

As it stands, google runs my favourite search engine, my favourite web browser, this blog, my email and even my calendar. They also help me get from A to B, watch videos that I'm interested in and find the cheapest price for things that I want to be.

Since I do all of this whilst logged in to my google account - it stands to reason that google owns a worrying amount of information about me. Sometimes I worry about it, but then I stop worrying, because, after all, I can stop using google's services any time I like, and, to be fair,  my habits as an individual probably aren't that interesting to a large, multinational organisation like google.

Google application engine, on the other hand, completely changes the name of the game. 

GAE (the application engine) is a service provided by google that allows online web applications to be built using Python and then hosted - completely free - on google's servers. They promise that the engine is extremely scaleable - that means that an application created using GAE could be used by 4 people, or by 4 million people. The service could be used to create almost ANY type of data processing system, provided that it is web oriented. 

That sounds wonderful, but it raises the question of ethics. Google operates in hundreds of different legal climates, although it is in itself an American organisation. What happens when the application engine is used, for example, to store information about the mis-treatment of prisoners in one country, or measures taken to drive out dissidence in another. On a less ethical note, is it really a good idea to trust the innermost aspects of the workings of your organisation to another company? No less one that is incredibly good at indexing and data mining.

In fact, I believe that the British Data Protection Act makes it illegal for any company to pass your data to another organisation without seeking permission from you for it first. If google ran servers in countries that DON'T have similar data protection laws, you would need to ensure that none of your customer's information lands on those servers - that's another requirement of the Data Protection Act.

Nevertheless, Google's application engine is a very useful and interesting peice of technology. It is easy to work with, includes a set of tools that are fairly standard for web applicatioons in Python, and encourages best practises for scaleability by providing an excellent set of standard tools. It includes a powerful data storage system (with its own problems, mind you - I might discuss those in another post), and it can run easily in both development and production environments.

Using google's servers can be extremely useful if you run a small to medium sized site and you don't mind passing your data to google. In fact, you can run the engine on a server of your choosing, as long as it supports a django environment. That was your information is NOT all passed to google - useful when you start storing information that matters.

All in all, I believe that GAE is a fun bit of technology. It could be used in a fairly large number of situations to make life easier and simpler for the amateur web application developer. Should it be used for larger organisations? Probably not - or at least, I believe it shouldn't.

Bye for now!

Esperanto

Esperanto is a spoken and written language that was constructed some time ago by an academic type that thought it would be lovely if the whole world was able to speak some universal second language. The idea does sound grand at first doesn't it? International politicions would be able to talk to each other honestly and directly - without any translation needed. They would be able to avoid the bias of using a language that belongs to a particular nation! That would be great.

Probably the most important thing about esperanto is that it is constructed - it doesn't originate from any nation, and it doesn't give anyone an unfair advantage because they come from a country that already speaks it. I think that's important - the british people are particularly bad at getting on with the rest of the world, and I think that partly it's because we're so rubbish at learning other languages - we simply expect other people to speak our own!* That's an attitude that we often extend to culture and tradition - sometimes without even realising it.

Of course, another major advantage of Esperanto can be demonstrated by looking at the story of The Tower Of Babylon - as described in The Bible (by God). In The Bible, when civilisation first grew all of the nations of the world spoke one language and acted under one banner. One day, they decided to build a fucking huge tower so that they could become closer to the heavens. God didn't like that, so he went super-saiyan and smashed the tower with a kamayamaya wave before spreading humanity all over the world. To make sure that the tower would never be built again, he gave them all different languages. For this reason, I believe Esperanto would help to anger God.

Good eh?

Esperanto is taught in a few different places. Notably, in the UK, Manchester university helps 4 primary schools teach it - the schools believe it will help the children to learn the basic skills needed to acquire further languages. There are 2500 books in Esperanto, and 2 films. There are between 100,000 and 2 million speakers world wide. This is an abysmal figure when you consider that it's been around for well over a century. Looks like that pesky tower isn't going to get built, after all! :(

The problem, as I see it, is that Esperanto is a novelty. It's spoken by few - you could go out and learn it, but the only people you could speak to are the sort of people who speak Esperanto; I'll bet that would be dull. Of course, the language itself also has some flaws - for example, words are intoned according to a general rule - it is not permitted to use intonation of words to convey meaning. Words spoken without intonation would sound extremely un-natural and artificial to any human being. The language is also nowhere near as neutral as it should be. It uses european pronunciations and european letters. It also derives many of its word roots from european words. Speakers that haven't grown up learning some European language find it difficult to pick up Esperanto.

All in all, I give this language 6 out of 16. Nice concept - but poorly implemented.

Yummy biscuits

Today I made a batch of my favourite type of biscuit - shortbread. As you can see in the picture to the right, they went down well enough for all but three of them to have been eaten by the time I could take the photo!

This is a big achievement for me, as a person who can't cook. Finally, I have the independance to cook sugary buttery treats whenever I want to!! However, I can't really take credit as the recipe did, in fact, come from Andy's mum's brilliant website about baking, Cake Frills. The site is regularly updated, includes loads of great seasonal recipes and has the added advantage that I can pester the person who runs it if I ever get stuck! You should definitely check it out.

On an unrelated note, I miss my guitar :(

Google Chrome

It's official - google are trying to take over the internets!

Clearly, the next stage in their evil plan is controlling how you ACCESS it. Yesterday, on the 2nd of September, google released their innovative new web browser, Google Chrome. 

Web browsers

Before I launch into a rant about this new release from the masters of the internet, I will first explain what a "Web Browser" IS. 

When you want to use the web on your computer, for example, to look on wikipedia or facebook, you will probably either be clicking on an icon called "Internet explorer" or "Firefox" on your desktop. This will then launch a program that will probably take you to your home page. You can then type addresses or navigate to where you want to be, and get the information you want to see. That program, that you are now using, is a web browser.

So what's Chrome?

Google chrome is an example of a browser. A few years ago, when firefox was released, it hailed a revolution in the usability and the safeness of the internet. It was more reliable than internet explorer - more universally intuitive than Safari or Opera, or even its ancester, Netscape. However, firefox does have its weaknesses - simple design issues that arise from the fact that it is such a mature project that still recieves a very large number of new features.

One of the "Problems" that Chrome deals with is the complexity of the Javascript stack.

Javascript

When a website changes its content without loading a new page, it is using a special programming language called javascript. Javascript has been around for a long time - it gave us those menus that appear when you hold your mouse over something,  and disappear when you move it away. More recently, it has been used in web pages to grab or send information back to the website without the page being reloaded - you no longer have to wait for everything you change on a web page to have an effect for the next thing to happen. This can be seen on Facebook - where you can type your new status in and save it straight away, or start searching for something and recieve suggestions back immediately. The technique itself is referred to around the internet as AJAX.

The problem is that it only works because it relies on technologies that were very old. When the first lines of code for Firefox were put together, Javascript was something altogether different from what it is now. This means that despite all modification, Firefox is still not running such websites as fast as it should be.

That's where Chrome comes in. It features a whole new Javascript that is as fast as they come.

Concurrency

When you are using the internet, you often browse many web pages at once. These web pages all behave as parts of one program - they can communicate to each other to a limited degree, and if one crashes, they all crash. That's a problem when it comes to security and reliability, in an increasingly dangerous internet. Google solves this problem using an unusual approach - each website you view with Google chrome runs as if it is a seperate program. It all appears within the same Window, with tabs, such as can be seen with Firefox or Internet Explorer 7, but each website is actually seperated - it can not interfere with the others.

First impressions

My first impressions of Chrome are warm. It's not a finished product yet, which is why I don't think it's a Firefox killer in its current state. The colours leave a little to be desired, though the rest of the user interface is rather nice, with space maximised by a simple, intuitive layout - something that's important for a web browser. The lack of any sort of extension at the moment is disappointing, though I don't know if there are any plans to implement this. I have also lately been using something called "Ubiquity", which is a clever little technology that at the moment only works with firefox, so I would miss that.

Alcohol and the Olympics

Yesterday, I discovered a few new things about myself. The first is an utterly practical realisation:

I cannot drink 1 x Bitter, 4 x Lager, 1 x Spirits and 1 x Wine + eat half of a Mushroom & Ham pizza and a plate of chips without throwing up. This information would be more useful, however, If I knew whether it was the alcohol or the food that caused such a tempestuous, vile outpour from the deepest depths of my stomach. It was probably the drink, But this is irrelevant - I simply cannot forego my end-of-night takeaway, so the two are pretty much joined together.

Secondly, I care a lot more about the Beijing Olympics than I thought. I am already an individual that has resolutely decided never to go to China - many of their policies on censorship and "freedom" are uncomfortably close to fascism(this is the natural viewpoint of a naive male that has grown up in Britain in the decedant 90s). China's viewpoints are founded on poverty and overcrowding, so it's natural that they would entertain a different political stance to us - however, the same could be said of pre-war Germany - poverty that was "Inflicted" by the non-germanic races was the founding influence of the Reich - or so I hear. The viewpoints within Germany quickly became a problem under a warlike leader. Luckily, the Chinese government only seems interested in internal rather than external compliance - so the current solution to the problem is to simply not go there.

This is not so easy you are holding a major sporting event there. However, up until recently I trusted that China would recognise that the Olympics were little more than an excellent tourism opportunity and an exciting sporting event. The way of the Olympics have always been to rise above international politics - rivalries between countries should be demonstrated by winning (cheating) in the sports field rather than in the streets or in the battlefield. I am beginning to have my doubts, however, as the Chinese authorities have announced a sort of "Cleansing" of Beijing of minority groups. They are taking the appearance of Beijing during the Olympics very seriously indeed - enforcing the "Correct" image through decidedly immoral means. Migrant workers are being forced to leave their jobs. People who have STDs are banned from the events. Spies are being employed to pretend to be Olympic goers and punish "Trouble makers". Moreover, China is also persecuting against those that "Are likely to cause trouble". This could be political dissidents, government members of freedom loving countries, or even members of any ethnic groups that Chinese culture doesn't approve of. This sporting event is now being used by China's government as an excuse for a free reign of fascism - and this worries me greatly.

I sense a disturbance in the force.

Happy birthday. to me!

Today is my 18th Birthday. This essentially means that if you were born after the 11th of July, 1990 (A wonderful year), then you are younger than me. If you were born BEFORE that date, you are older. If you were born ON that date, Happy Birthday! You should probably get yourself a cup of tea to celebrate.

I have, happily, received several wonderful gifts for my birthday. The warm congratulations of a portion of my gratuitously oversized but loving family, some bubble wrap with eighteen one pound coins on it, a cake, some money to spend on clothes, and, of course, an ASUS EeePC.

Unlike my extended family, the EeePC does NOT have mammoth proportions. It is, in fact, about 11 inches from the top left corner to the top right corner. That's VERY small, and it means that carrying it around (in the snazzy sleeve that it comes with) is very easy. It's also light, because of its minuscule size, and it's a bit less easy for me to break, as it has fewer mechanical components than a traditional laptop.

I'm actually sat in bed, keeping my toes warm whilst typing this post. The wonders of technology - it's all very novel to me right now, as up until today I've only ever owned full sized desktop PCs with old fashioned cathoid ray tube monitors.

Well, I'm off to eat some cake! Good bye!