• Just upgraded to WordPress 2.8.5. Reminder: All WordPress upgrades include security updates. UPGRADE NOW!
• Does the thought of upgrading #WordPress scare the bejesus out of you? Then install WordPress Automatic Updater: http://bit.ly/4cWIZV

Not a lot to add to these two tweets. If you use software that accesses the Internet, and there is an upgrade or update, the chances are extremely high it includes one or more security fixes or enhancements. Don’t hesitate to upgrade.

I’ve mentioned WPAU a couple times before. While the built-in updater is fine for a lot of people, I find it more confusing than helpful. WPAU presents a very logical, very easy step-by-step process that has been fail-safe for me. The key is to carefully read the minimal instructions. Can’t get any easier!

• Finding it hard to see a difference between new #Mac Magic Mouse and a touchpad. And, it’s fugly. D/N seem ergonomic at all.

I admit it: I’m a mouse geek. I have a Logitech MX Revolution for non-gaming, and a Razer Naga for WoW. Both have LOTS of buttons. I have also used a trackpad, and I really like the idea of Apple’s new buttonless trackpad on its newest laptops to be a great idea. But combining a trackpad with a mouse (as it seems the Magic Mouse does)? Hmm…not so much.

• 10 months into 2009, the most overused and uninformative noun in tech this year is "netbook." Have yet to see one with netting of any kind.

What, exactly, does "netbook" mean? In Twitter, we’re restricted to 140 characters. In "Real Life" we have no such restriction. How about "small form-factor notebook computer"? And if you don’t like that verbiage (go ahead, click the link!), explain to me why my 14.5" MacBook Pro isn’t a "netbook." And I swear, if I see "green netbook" I’m going to puke.

• Media bias? The # of Win7 stories I’m seeing today is way less than SnowLeopard stories 24 hrs before its release last month. I’m just sayin

It strikes me that 24 hours before the release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in September, there was a flood of stories about the new Mac OS. Today, Lifehacker has a few, but most other tech blogs/sites (that aren’t Windows/Microsoft-specific, of course) have very, very few. This strikes me as odd, to say the least, given that Win7 is Amazon UK’s biggest preordered item ever.

• After tomorrow, I will brook no bitching about Vista. Instead, I will say "buy a Mac, b/c you’re not smart enough to upgrade to Win7."

Seriously. Win7 fixes just about every single valid complaint I’ve ever hear or read about Windows Vista, and does so elegantly. Here is a very telling reply I received to this tweet, which just about says it all: @runycatWhat’s hilarious is that Windows 7 really feels like OSX when it first came out. In other words, I like it. 

I’ve upgraded PCs (desktop and laptop) with the Win7 release candidate, and I’ve installed it in a virtual machine under OS X. Piece of cake. Flawless. The new OS looks and feels great. It’s as big a step as the move from Windows 2.x to 3.1 or from 3.1 to WinXP. The best part? The hardware required to effectively run Win7 is almost the same as for WinXP. In other words, you don’t need the huge hardware upgrades you needed to get from XP to Vista!

So if you can’t bring yourself to like Win7, get a Mac. 

• WAY TOO MUCH crap on "Which version of Win7 is best for you?" For 99.9 percent of you, it’s Home Premium. Empahsis on HOME.
  

I can’t count the number of new or re-released articles I’ve seen, with all their confusing or "simplified" charts, on "Which version of Windows 7 is right for you?" While I contend there are still too many versions of Win7 available (gotta love Apple’s single flavor of OS X: It may be vanilla, but it’s rich vanilla!), for home users, gamers, and anyone not in a corporate environment, Windows 7 Home Premium is what you need.

Even if you’re a geek, the chances are Professional or Ultimate offer no additional features you’ll use, because you probably don’t have a server-based network, and BitLocker is overkill, not to mention the fact that you don’t need 128¹ language versions. In addition, most of us don’t have more than 16GB of RAM. Small business? Then yes, Pro or Ultimate may be a better solution. But folks, it’s called "Home Premium" for a reason!

Do you have a 64-bit CPU? Then install the 64-bit version. Just do it! I can also give you 80 or 100 more reasons to stick with Home Premium. They’re called "dollars."

So those are my thoughts today, the day after Apple announces major new lineup changes, the day WordPress announces an upgrade, and the day before Windows 7 takes over the (PC) world. What are your thoughts? Am I a clueless n00b or a tech savant? Or somewhere in between? Let me know in the comments!

What I’m Tweeting: Win7 and Other Topics is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

 

While doing a web search for something completely unrelated, I came across an article at Webworker Daily, entitled "3 Efficiency Tips for Using Dual Monitors."  The first of these discussed having Firefox open on one monitor, to take advantage of its installed addons (for example, in my situation, using Firebug to analyze website coding), while having web apps (e.g., Google Documents) open in Chrome tabs, to take advantage of Chrome’s design to prevent a single tab crash from crashing the entire browser (one of my very serious criticisms of Firefox). This sounded pretty reasonable to me, and a way to play around with and monitor Chrome’s development, without an all-out commitment to the browser.

It was at this point I hit the brick wall that is Chrome for Mac development: There is no beta version of Chrome for OS X! Since I haven’t really been paying a lot of attention to Chrome, I wasn’t aware of this fact. However, I’m nothing if not persistent: I kept seeing references to "the latest build" of Chrome for Mac. A few more links clicked and I was at the Developer Release page for Chrome (OS X) (there’s also one for Linux, I believe). The download was quick, installation was (as usual for Mac software) a drag-and-drop.

I launched the browser, and it asked if I wanted to import my bookmarks. There was a dropdown list of bookmark sources, with Safari being the default. I elected instead to import from Firefox. This, my friends, is why it’s called a "developer version." A nice little window popped up (and unfortunately I closed it before I could get a screen shot of it) to inform me that a whole bunch of stuff was being imported. Only it wasn’t, really. That window stayed up until I did close it (thinking I would see it again when I restarted Chrome). That’s a one-time good deal, though: Apparently in the innards of Chrome, a flag is set saying I’ve done the import, so I can’t do it again (at least, not easily). Of course, not a thing was imported. Not a huge setback, but rather disappointing that the FIRST thing that happens is the import flag is set to True, even if nothing actually happens after that.

So I reopened Chrome, set a few preferences for home pages (GMail, Google Reader, and the Aerie). One thing I will echo from reviews of Chrome for Windows: It is fast. I realize Chrome is not feature-complete by any means, so a lot of code isn’t there yet. On the other hand, a lot of debugging and developer code is still there. And pages still opened a lot faster than they do in Firefox. No, I haven’t measured how fast, but a full page rendering of the Aerie, the first time it was loaded, was a LOT faster than opening a cached copy in Firefox.

I should mention, as far as I can tell, the Aerie renders exactly the same in Chrome as it does in Firefox. This is, of course, a Good Thing: It means, at a minimum, both Chrome and Firefox are adhering to the same XHTML standards.

One thing missing from Chrome (at least in the Mac version) is the "status bar." That’s the information bar at the bottom of the browser (in Firefox and IE8, at least) that tells you when a page is done loading and also contains information from plugins. For example, here’s my Firefox status bar (usually wider than this, but I narrowed the window to cut out a lot of empty real estate):

 In Firefox and IE, displaying the status bar is optional, but in Chrome, the option doesn’t exist. Yet. I expect it will show up at some point in development.

One visual element I really do like (and I know other people are put off by it) is the appearance of Chrome’s tabs. They really are tabs, as you’d see in a set of file folders:

For me, this is simply a more visually appealing, even intuitive, design. However, if you look at the shot above, you might think that typing in the address bar will open the new site in the current tab. In fact, that’s exactly what happens, and is a major gripe I have with Chrome. After all, the whole reason for tabbed browsing is to…use tabs! In order to open a new site in a new tab in Chrome, I need to click the New Tab button, click the address bar, then type the new address. Firefox cuts out that first step: If you type in the address bar, your new site opens in a new tab. What a concept!

Eventually, this page will populate with thumbnails of the sites you visit most often. Okay…so? If I visit a site so often that I’d want to click a thumbnail of it, I would… (wait for it) …bookmark it! So while the "gee whiz" factor is present, the usefulness escapes me. (Feel free to enlighten me in the comments!)

Will I keep Chrome installed? Yes, I will. I can definitely see the utility in having pages I’m working in open in a browser that won’t crash if that page crashes. This is especially true if I have multiple web apps open, which is often the case when I’m actually "doing work" in my browser. And, what I see of Chrome, and can use in Chrome, I like a lot (for the most part). And of course on the Mac, it’s simply not robust enough yet to replace Firefox (or Safari, for that matter).²

There are still a lot of things I can do in Firefox that I can’t do in Chrome, even on the PC side. But I do have faith that the Google team will get there. Some day. (After all, how many years was GMail in beta?)

Have you used Chrome? What do you like, or dislike, about the browser? Have you made it your primary or default browser yet? Is anyone else playing with the Mac developer release?

Google Chrome for Mac is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie

 

At this time yesterday (Wednesday) I had no intention of writing this article. In fact, today’s post was going to be “Meanwhile, Back In WoW.” Guess that’ll have to wait till tomorrow or next week.

For quite some time, I’ve been having “issues” with my PC. In World of Warcraft, for example, I’ve done two complete reinstalls since installing WotLK. Still, I regularly got kicked from the game due to an error reading a file. And of course, the way the WoW client is built, you can’t simply reinstall a single, relatively tiny map or texture file. A couple times a week, I was having to run the Blizzard repair utility, which often told me my installation was “severely corrupted and would have to be restored to an earlier state.” At that point, I could usually cancel the repair, and restart the game just fine…until the next time.

Also of late (since about mid-April, I think), the PC was not booting promptly in the mornings. I have it set, in the BIOS, to boot at 7:30 each morning. That way, by the time I’m up, dressed, and have my coffee, my daily virus scan and other tasks are complete.

What was happening, though, was the computer would POST,¹ flash the “Starting Windows” screen, then reboot. The only way to boot successfully was to allow it to sit for 30 minutes or so after the “Loading Windows files…” screen in the repair utility came up. Then, I could power off the machine, power it back on, and it would boot normally.

I suspected a motherboard problem, but yesterday morning, I decided to troubleshoot everything I could (since I’d crashed out of WoW during a raid the night before, and I was pretty sick and tired of WoW crashes). I removed power, opened the case, and checked everything.

I reseated all four RAM modules; I reseated the video card. I removed a Creative Sound Card I wasn’t using. I did find that the front panel fan wasn’t connected, so I hooked that up to power as well as the SYSFAN2 connector on the motherboard.

At that point, the computer wouldn’t power on at all! So I disconnected both the power and motherboard connectors for that fan and hit the power switch. Yay! We have power. “Okay, seems like that motherboard fan connector is fubared,” I said to myself. Whereupon I reconnected the fan power connector (the 4-pin thingy that connects to the power supply).

Before I go any further, you should know that I have been playing around with PCs since before there were PCs: My first computer was an Atari 800 with cassette drive. I have built my own PCs for at least the last 15 years; I know my way around a motherboard and case.

So I have no explanation or excuse for the completely stupid act of reconnecting a power connector while power was on! A word to the unwise: Don’t. There was a bright flash and a very loud *SNAP*. I didn’t even get the thing fully connected. After that, the computer would power on, but wouldn’t POST. It would spontaneously restart after a few seconds, over and over.

Congratulations: You have successfully fried, at a bare minimum, your motherboard. There is a high probability that your Duo-Core CPU as well as 6GB of pretty damn good RAM are also useless metal, plastic and silicon.

At that point, I confess the air got a tad blue, and not from the smoking remains of my very-high-end PC. I went and told my wife my sad tale of woe: She didn’t have a ton of sympathy, but did say, “Well, you keep talking about getting a Mac…”

The irony is, I had just come to the conclusion, in the past couple days, that while I dearly love my MacBook Pro, and while iMacs and Mac Pros are pretty to look at and all that, in the final analysis, there really wasn’t that much wrong with my PC: 99.9 percent of the time, it operated flawlessly, and with Windows 7, even more powerfully than ever.

How quickly things change. The mishap occurred around 11 AM; shortly after 1 PM I was enroute to our local authorized Apple reseller (since Best Buy had none in stock), picking up a 24-inch, 3.06GHz iMac with 4GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive and the upgraded Radeon graphics card (since they didn’t have one in stock with the nVidia card). I also picked up a Mini-DisplayPort to DVI adapter, so I could hook up my Dell 24-inch monitor as a second monitor.

Setup was as easy as any Mac is: Plug it in and turn it on. However, I also connected my Microsoft Sidewinder X6 keyboard, my Logitech MX Revolution mouse, my external DVD writer, and my external 2.1 speakers.

First happy discovery: Upon booting up for the first time, the iMac asked if I had a backup from another computer I’d like to restore. As a matter of fact, I’ve been using an external 1TB drive with Time Machine to back up the MacBook Pro. So I said, sure, restore from there. And voilà! My iMac was configured exactly the same as my MBP! Of course, the very cool thing about that was, I didn’t have to reinstall, from scratch, World of Warcraft! /happydance

Before raid time, I was able to get into the game, see that my add-ons were in pretty good shape (a lot of updates to be done, but no show-stoppers), set up Ventrilo, and discover I could configure my mouse to act just as it had under Windows.

Once the raid started, I found the Skype and Ventrilo clients for the Mac are not the same as their Windows brethren: Skype would disconnect every 16-17 minutes for no apparent reason, and I couldn’t individually change volume settings for specific players (we have a couple who are very, very loud).

On a very positive note, I didn’t crash once. My latency was about one-third what it was on the PC (lousy network card on the PC?) and my framerates in Dalaran were two to three times what I’d been seeing on the PC. I don’t know if it’s due to the iMac’s glossy screen (the Dell monitor has a non-glare LCD screen), but everything seemed much brighter and easier to read on the Mac, as well. All in all, a significant improvement to the WoW play experience.

After the raid, I decided to install VM Fusion and a Windows 7 virtual machine, as I had recently done on the MBP, so I could use Skype and Vent under Windows. But wait! They were already installed, due to my restored backup from the MBP. How cool is that?? And that’s why I am able to write this article in Windows Live Writer, on the iMac, in a Windows 7 VM.

So while, physically, “I’m a Mac,” virtually, “I’m still a PC.” And a very happy camper, to boot.²

For Better or For Worse…I’m a Mac is a post from: Kestrel's Aerie