Posts tagged Review
New Bloglines Beta
Aug 12th
Bloglines released a new “skin” on their Bloglines Beta this week. Having been tied to the speed, look, and feel of the live bloglines.com, I decided to give it another shot. Let me tell you, this one is head and shoulders better than the previous version. Here are a few notes.
First of all, the default skin is really nice. Unlike the last one, this one is a little more “Plastik” and a little less glass. I may be making this up – but since the entire experience is smoother, it feels lighter and more responsive. The slow “clicking” of posts is gone. Whereas before, if you scrolled down in Opera and other browsers it would slowly chunk down the page, it now scrolls smoothly and easily, without effort.
The fonts and basic layout are both familiar and attractive, and the javascript is very pleasant in its fading and other dynamic effects.
This is the first of the Bloglines betas that I could use everyday and the first I prefer to the live site. Way to go, Bloglines team.
Review: The Dark Knight
Jul 20th
WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS:
Do not read any further if you do not want critical plot points revealed
I saw The Dark Knight on Friday afternoon. Like many movies, I need a few days to truly digest the film. Sometimes, I like a film and later decide I didn’t like it as much as I thought (see: Spiderman 3, Die Hard 4). Sometimes, I like a film and decide later it was better than I thought (see: The Matrix, The Bourne Ultimatum).
In this case, I knew I liked the film. It was very true to Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins film in both storyline and dark overtones. But, like James Bond, I fear there are some real breaks with reality that I struggle to accept. Nothing in the Bourne movies I mentioned above requires major suspension of disbelief. But The Dark Knight pushes reality a little too much. Let’s examine some aspects of the film:
Cast and characters
Again, masterfully done. I enjoyed the acting quite a bit. Christian Bale, Michael Cain, Morgan Freeman, Aaron Eckhardt, Gary Oldman, Nestor Carbonall, all were fantastic. Heath Ledger – while I won’t call him Oscar-worthy, primary because I don’t really understand what makes one role Oscar worthy but not others) – was truly genius. I say this for several reasons: firstly, his facial expressions, voice tone, and eyes were masterful. Secondly, because I largely forgot it was him for most of the film. To me, this was the Joker, not an actor I’ve known for over a decade.
Storyline
Like the last film, pretty well executed. The entire thing felt a bit rushed – they crammed a lot of plot into a little time (note it still runs well over 2 hours), meaning some characters got a little short-changed, primarily Two-Face. The fall from do-gooder and justice-seeking Harvey Dent to the conscious-less Two-Face was a bit too harsh and dramatic. Such a cool character would have been a great long-term adversary.
Bruce Wayne was a bit brash, which I suppose was how they wanted to keep him, a trait established last film. Alfred Pennyworth and Lucious Fox were consistent. The Joker was perfectly executed in that we learned virtually nothing about him and his origin remains a mystery.
Where Things Went Wrong
Okay, I’m a stickler for plot bending. I don’t like when an otherwise semi-realistic film, requires me to entire dicard realism. So there are several key points here:
- Amazing Explosives!
- How did the Joker get the hospital wired so effectly and so quickly with no one noticing and no real team of goons to speak of? That were a LOT of very well placed explosives that would surely require a very skilled expert to help design that implosion, no?
- Sonar on your mobile?
- After months of work, presumably, Lucious Fox was able to design a prototype “sonar” using CDMA or GSM technology. He was able to rig a device to use it. He was able to make it work through existing mobile networks with neither the networks, nor the satelite owners, nor the military noticing it. We must presume, given these facts, and the limitationsof existing hardware, that the data was tranferred as internet data. Not much later, with no previous knowledge of the project or how it works, Bruce Wayne, never an engineer, was able to decipher, understand, and deploy this technology to millions of existing phones, most of which, I’d wager, do not have internet plans, a good portion of which is using half-decade old technology. We must also presume that the Wayne R&D department has the necessary bandwidth to receive the data from millions of phones and that their ISP and the phone carriers wouldn’t notice this incredble spike in traffic. Oh yeah, did I mention that they somehow were able to locate a particular crystal-clear voice amongst this overwhelming parade of sonar? Pshaw!
- Extra! Extra! Commissioner Dead!
- Explain how the Joker and/or his minions were able to get into the commissioners office, replace his booze with poison, and get him to drink it at the exact time?
- Mayor Assasination Attempt Thwarted by Gordon
- So, uh, the Joker anticipated the Batman locating a name that was NOT actually him and going there and breaking in? And conveniently, some cops who had recently been kidnapped were all there waiting? And the Mayor, while under fire, delivered a speech in a neighborhood with more Windows than a room of government computers without a protective shield or bulletproof glass? What the hell? Who runs Gotham security? Find him and smack the bitch upside his stupid head!
- A Boatoad of Trouble
- Lastly, why didn’t the boats explode at midnight? Did Batman somehow disarm it off camera? It was the BACKUP Joker was holding. That means the original device failed. But how? By the way, give me the remote while I’m on a ferry with my wife and kids. The scene would be like this: “Give me the remote!” BOOM!
All the foolishness aside, I still really liked it. I really hope there’s a third entry to this series.
Slashdot: Slowing Rotting from the Inside Out
Apr 28th
Sometime ago, say, 1999, Slashdot was the king of the online tech world. In fact, from a “hits” standpoint, they may still be, if not second to Digg. Slashdot has always been the first big blog-style tech site, long before the word “blog” meant anything to anyone, and somehow, Rob Malda and crew are still relevant in the scene.
Not too long ago, Slashdot started overhauling their incredibly horrendous HTML and rewriting in mostly compliant HTML. The goal of the rewrite, amongst many other things, such as incredible bandwidth savings, was to support stylesheets and graceful degrade. When all was ready, Slashdot held a contest to solicit new stylesheets and received tons of submissions, some really cool and others really ugly, and chose a very nice, very reserved, very modern-but-conservative one as their new default style.
Let’s back up a bit: Slashdot is written in Perl – ack! – and is built upon an open source system called, simply enough, “Slash.” Slash code is horrendously out-of-date and the last download is pathetically old. In fact, the only way to get Slash in any recent form is via CVS access. Slash requires mod_perl and tons of Apache and perl customization. Since Slash is tried-and-true, it’s not really “new” code. And it shows in many ways.
Not too long ago, the Slash folks started realizing that new technologies and new sites were introducing amazing interactive features. Perhaps they realized when a chunk of their userbase got fed up and left for sites like Digg, Techcrunch, Mixx, or some other aggregation type site. Nonetheless, the Slash team started hacking in features that emulated many of the Web 2.0 sites. First it was tagging. “Taggging” has been in beta for some time now. It allows users to arbitrarily tag a story with keywords. The FAQ says that once enough people use a tag, it shows up as a suggestion for others. But I always see weird tags suggested. Either way, it’s pointless, because I don’t know what good tagging does for me.
Then came the “firehose.” The Firehouse is essentially Slashdot’s answer to Digg. The diea is this: users submit stories, links, bookmarks, journal entries, etc, and other users vote on the stories. As the stories get “warmer,” or redder, the entries because available to the editors to convert into real news items. Neat, huh? The idea is cool, except the interface is nowhere near as dynamic or alive as Digg’s, and the content doesn’t rotate as fast. And the load time hurts. So I never use it.
In the last 6 months to a year, Slashdot began rolling out “D2,” their new dynamic discussion system. It is a replacement for the static comment system of days past. The problem is multi-fold, however. Firstly, the layout is a screaming nightmare. There is so much whitespace and what is there is totally overwhelming. Big garish buttons take the place of links or real buttons. Dynamically fetched text takes many seconds to load, even generic insertions like a comment form takes 5 seconds plus to appear. Slashdot has become flat out slow. And D2, which should have remedied a lot of that, has not lived up to its promise.
All the places where things got dynamic on the site feels like a new paradigm being smashed into old code. I wonder if Slashdot might be better off rewriting the entire engine as version 3.0. I know that sounds scary, but when OSNews was starting to feel the pain, we ditched the entire front end and rewrote it – every single line of PHP and HTML and CSS and JS. A combination of creative time-based caching, caching on request, and sleek, optimized queries resulted in a snappy and very responsive front end with smooth ajax integration, a super fast loading page (minus the ads, subscribe today!), and a zero lag experience. The differences between the v3 backend and v4? None. If you exclude new features we built in (news tags, extended user preferences, and conversations), the backend is exactly the same.
Slashdot’s database likely won’t have to be dumped or modified at all to rewrite all of their Perl and Javascript/Ajax. But it might result in a faster, smoother, nicer looking front end. It’s time to reel in the speed issues – the entire site takes forever to load (a 200K front page plus externals doesn’t help). It’s time to fix the ajaxian display weirdness. It’s time to get your JS working well in Opera. Fix those and then perhaps we can deal with the elitist userbase.
Vista SP1 First Impression
Mar 18th
Vista SP1 was over 435 megabytes for me, making it larger than any Microsoft Service Pack ever, larger than any Mac point release, larger than many OSes themselves. Installation took well over an hour in three stages, which is suspicious, as again, I’ve installed OSes in less time. But it went smoothly and did it all on its own, which was nice.
Click the link for a larger picture
Booting up, there’s nothing immediately different. I tried copying a 28MB file over the network to check on time. It copied the first half in light-speed, but then stopped. I called the guy whose machine I copied from: “Hey, did you just shut down?” His response, “Negative, I lost connection all of a sudden.” Uh-oh, I thought.
But alas, after he rebooted, I copied the latest ISO of gOS, which weighs in at 535MB, and it told me 60 seconds, and by jiminy, it took about 60 seconds.
Thus far – after 30 minutes use – I’ve only noticed one new feature, it appears Vista SP1 has some new “modes” of desktop wallpaper display, and can finally “stretch” wallpaper. Thanks God, because my larger secondary monitor always had stripes with Vista RTM.
Click the link for a larger picture
So, first impression? So far, so good. My biggest pet peeve – the abysmal network transfer speed – appears to have been quelled (potentially, we’ll need more data for a final conclusion). I’ve long since gotten used to the graphics and learned to enjoy the subtle fade-in/fade-out of apps. I still am warning people to stay clear of Vista for some time, and still have no plans to roll it out at work in the enterprise, but I certainly think that Vista is coming along. I think there’s a better shot that when Windows 7/IE8 come of age, people will be willing to rethink things on a larger scale.
The Pain of Vista
Feb 21st
Yesterday, I began building my new work laptop. It’s a Dell XPS M1530, a nice 15″ widescreen screamer with a dual core Centrino, 2GB RAM, a 256MB video card, embedded Bluetooth, 802.11n, and, for the first time in my company, Windows Vista.
It’s typical for me to buy/install new software for testing on my own machine. I can generally test most software and evaluate it pretty tough, so it seemed with the XP consumer drop-dead date fast approaching, I ought to have better than cursory familiarity with Vista. It’s also a good time to ensure that all of our critical tools run on what will, unfortunately, likely be a platform our IT guys run shortly. So I embarked on the Vista adventure.
The verdict? Well, let’s start at the beginning? You know how every review of Vista… like ever… has complained about UAC? Well, imagine that level of annoying times 10 and you can begin to understand UAC. The most pointless utility ever not only bugs you for virtually everything – including deleting shortcuts from the desktop – but also moves all over the screen so it’s impossible to predict where it will show up next. Also, sometimes it sits in the taskbar, perplexingly pausing application installs until you notice the subtle orange blinking and “activate” it. Also, UAC doesn’t require a password or anything, just a click. And best of all, it’s stupid. If I delete something that requires admin access, and then repeat the action, it sometimes asks for the permission twice in 10 seconds. UAC is the worst thought out decision a team that brilliant has ever produced, and it took me about 5 hours of use to de-activate it entirely.
Most applications, surprisingly, installed just fine. Even older tools I prefer – some from 2004 – work without any problem. However, many recent tools, mostly those from Microsoft itself, don’t. You cannot install the Windows 2000/2003 admin pack – essential tools for Windows network admins – onto Vista without a stream of commands not publically advertised by Microsoft. I built myself a big batch file to run it, and I will share that file on this site later. Eventually, I did get it to run. Turns out that it’s a “security risk” because it involves certain DLLs running at elevated privileges… or something. I don’t know. But it should be embarrassing for Microsoft that Windows Vista users can’t administer Windows networks. Embarrassing… or pathetic.
Every single window in Vista fades in and out. It’s a neat effect to be certain, but it’s overused. Sometimes dizzying.
You can’t use Windows Update anymore – you have to use a app built into the control panel.
The Start Menu is a disaster. Drilling into subfolders takes a good 2-3 seconds. And they are impossible to view as a whole. While it’s pretty, it makes me long for XP’s Luna Start Menu, which is odd, since I found that to be such an abomination that I always de-activated it immediately. It’s a nightmare.
The Control Panel is much more logically organized, except I used to know where everything was, and now I have no clue where to find it without scanning the whole damned thing.
Same goes for many folder options, locations on the hard drive (it’s now C:\Users, and profiles are in C:\Users\%username%\AppData), and some other configurations, which have mysteriously moved.
I changed the path of C:\Users\%username%\Documents to re-map to my H: drive on the network – as it’s ALWAYS been – and the .NET framework wouldn’t install. I had to un-map the drives to get it to work.
But the cherry on top – by far – was my adventure to get the Citrix admin tools installed. I kept getting an IMMEDIATE error on launch; I tried many versions of Citrix, same error every time. Eventually, I traced it back to the Windows Installer service, which wouldn’t run. At all – it wouldn’t start. I kept getting the same error: Windows installer service cant start Error 193:0xc1. I googled it and looked at all the results – Google it yourself. Here, I’ll even give you the link: “Windows installer service error 193:0xc1″. You’ll notice a lot of feedback, but lots of unanswered questions. I dug and dug and eventually started poking into the DCOM service, thinking this was the problem, since the Installer service depends on DCOM. But DCOM ran just fine. So I dug further. I tried everything I could: I rebooted, I tried everything as the local administrator, I removed all of my temp files, I unregistered some files. Eventually, I found an article on Microsoft’s K-Base that discussed some problems, but you’ll notice it only covers the ancient “Windows Installer Service 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0.” XP runs version 3, Vista runs version 4. Could these be relevant?
When I got to the registry search, the key it mentioned wasn’t there, but having been through the registry several times today, I decided to do a search for “msiserver” – which is the Microsoft Installer Service. I found the new key, and one of the sub-keys is called “ImagePath.” This key is present in almost all services and gives the location of the files it launches. In the case, the file was “C:\Windows\system32\msiexec /I /v” (those switches might be wrong). So, on a whim, I wondered if many the permissions on that file were wrong. I poked into the system32 directory and found msiexec, but it was a 0 KB file. Blank. Weird, huh? Then I realized that there was ALSO a “msiexec.exe” file. In short, the path was referring to the exe without an extension, and somehow, there was a blank file without an extension by the same name! Wha??
Simply renaming msiexec to msiexec.old and trying to restart the service did it. So that’s one possible fix for Error 193 – make sure the ImagePath references the proper path.
Anyway, re-building and migrating a laptop ought to take about 3-5 hours, depending on the volume of data to transfer, and setting up Vista took me the better part of 2 days. Will I recommend it for other users in our company? No way. Will I recommend it to other IT professionals? No way. Will I recommend it to anyone at all? Sorry, Microsoft, but no way. Vista is everything you’ve read. Pretty, but dumb.
I have high hopes for Service Pack 1, but I should think it’s fair to say “too little too late.” Vista is a disaster, even moreso when compared to Leopard, whose bugs are much less serious, many of which really merely annoyances (such as stacks and menu bar complaints). But Vista is the real deal: a sympton of a company too big to make sane choices. I will definitely be posting a SP1 follow-up, to be sure. Here’s hoping for a retraction.
Remembering Why I Mostly Hate Apple Users, Even Though I Am One
Feb 11th
This week, I had to make a trip to the Apple store. My iPhone began growing some “bubbles” under the screen, so they swapped one out. I had also brought back a flaky Airport Extreme, but since I only made an appt for my iPhone, they told me I’d have to make another appointment for my Airport with the “Mac” team. Frustrated, I spoke to the store manager and got in via “standby” appointment. They didn’t have an AE in house, so I had to order one and go back this weekend. The people at the Apple store were nice, but the entire thing was a cluster. The Apple Store is always so crowded and chaotic and it’s hard to find someone to help you. Luckily, it turned out ok, and I got a new iPhone and a new Airport. I wanted to post, but then I remembered what happened in the past when I posted about Apple.
I wrote a piece for OSNews some time ago called “A Month With a Mac.” If you read it, it’s not really very negative – in fact, it’s mostly positive – but I eventually decided to stick with PC, predicting, accurately, I’d add, that I’d be a Mac user by 2005, which I was.
But after a little Google’ing today, I found this thread at MacSlash. I read it today, and almost immediately, I hate Mac extremists.
In my house, in the last 2 years, we’ve owned an iBook, a Macbook Pro, a 20″ iMac, a Macbook, an iPhone, an Airport Extreme, and three iPods. We’ve purchased iLife 08, a Leopard family pack, and several Mac apps including my favorite, Transmit. We have no operational PC’s in-house. But I swear, reading this pathetic crap makes me want to burn my Mac.
What a bunch of pricks? They think I made facts up – like the error message I received. They think that the first thing you do with a review unit is break the seal. Although I mistakenly referred to 10.1 merely as “OS X,” they don’t beleive I got the discs. It’s really pretty amazing to see a decent review get such incredible responses. Genius comments like this one (where I’m apparently gay) and this one (where I’m paid by Microsoft) and this one (I don’t care what he says, he’s absolutely 100% wrong) ought to embarrass the Mac community. But instead, they stay on their own board masturbating each other and growing insanely angry about what, in essence, is a decent review. Truly, they make me hate my Mac right now and they make me hate the elitist community.
A Review of Online Photo Services
Oct 3rd
Some time ago, I switched to Google’s Picasa Web Albums online photo management software. Although it’s simple to use, Picasa Web has been missing too many features for too long, and after Google locked me out of their software for a few days due to a bug of some sort, and their iPhoto plug-in stopped working, I decided it was time to start checking out the alternatives. I have played with a few services, and judged them based on a number of criteria, including these 15 questions:
1. How easy is it to do batch uploads?
2. Are there decent Mac and Windows upload tools?
3. Does it work in all major browsers (Opera and Safari are both important)
4. Will the default display scale to upwards of 2500 photos?
5. How fast does each page load?
6. Is the image scaled down? If so, is the original available?
7. Is it a fly-by-night startup that I can count on to be around?
8. How much does it cost for a pro membership, if anything? What are the benefits?
9. What are my storage requirements?
10. What is my traffic/bandwidth limit, if any?
11. Are there integrated ads?
12. How easy is it for others to access my photos?
13. Is there any sort of privacy?
14. What type of tools exist for me to manage my photos once they are online?
15. Is there some sort of embed/slideshow for my webpages?
I’ve tested the following services: Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Zoto, Zooomr, SmugMug, Photobucket, Facebook, and MySpace. Read on for my initial results.
More >
IBM Releases Lotus Symphony Beta
Sep 19th
Imagine everyone’s surprise this morning when IBM not only announces that they are working on an office suite package, Lotus Symphony, but that it’s geared towards consumers, not businesses, and it’s based on OpenOffice.org, and… oh yeah… the beta is available immediately!
BetaNews caught my attention this morning, and it looked nice, so I downloaded it and took it for a spin.
Lo and behold, this suite is the best OpenOffice.org offshoot I’ve used thus far. StarOffice and Openoffice.org are both nice products, but the layout and graphical tweaking done on Lotus Symphony is just great.
First of all, the beautiful blue rounded tabs of each document make for a warm, modern, and welcome theme. The formatting controls on the right hand side are smartly available like Office 2007’s “ribbon”, Also, the buttons are attractive and easily decipherable and the best part is that I can actually find what I’m looking for. I’ve been using Office 2007 for a few months now, and my biggest pet peeve in Word is that I often highlight text as I read it and a floating formatting box pops up, often causing my to mistakenly format the text I’m reading. Symphony doesn’t have that problem.
Click thumbnail for a full screen
As far as compatibility goes, I tried opening several Word documents, some complex with embedded images, Word Art, formulas, tables, forms, protection, and more, and it handled all of them properly, often with only minor format tweaks if any at all. It would not read my Office 2007 .docx files. It did easily import some complex Excel files without flinching.
It imported all of my Open Document formatted documents perfectly, as expected.
As far as Powerpoint compatibility goes, it properly formatted a templated, fairly hairy presentation, but the tools to manipulate presentations were not immediately understandable, so the Presentation interface manipulation portion of Symphony needs some tinkering for certain.
The only weird choice, one I’m very confused about, is their decision to move *back* to a single window frame. StafOffice 6 used this “desktop” view to encapsulate all of its components, and that was done away with for OpenOffice.org 1.0. Oddly, now that tabbed-interfaces are all the rage, Symphony makes the single window usable again. I’m actually pretty jazzed to see this paradigm begin to work. It is much better executed now than it was with previous versions of Star Office.
Other than that, Lotus Symphony is a really beautiful start to a free office suite. I cannot imagine ever wanting to go back to OpenOffice.org after using this program as an alternative. That said, I hope they bring me my Mac version soon!
Go, Bloglines, Go!
Sep 13th
The other day, I griped about the new Bloglines beta. To my surprise and enjoyment, one of the Bloglines developers left a comment, and we exchanged a few short emails. Today, Bloglines releases beta 1.0.2, and guess what? My issues were specifically addressed! Let’s examine:
So what do we see? The font that made it impossible to distinguish bold from normal weight text? Gone. Now we have a beautiful font that makes it very clear which are read and which aren’t. How about the visual indicator of which item you are hovering over? It’s there!
My biggest gripe was that items were only marked read on hover and by a keystroke, just like Google Reader. But what do I see in the teaser for 1.0.3?
Hey-o! Score one for the Bloglines team! Way to utilize reader feedback! Nice work.
Bloglines Beta Ain’t Doin’ It For Me
Sep 6th
Bloglines has been pushing their new beta site, beta.bloglines.com, and are already reporting many satisfied users. The new site is very attractive and much more modern looking, but do not count me among the satisfied.
The new beta, as far as I’m concerned, is just a second rate Google Reader. In fact, everything about how Bloglines works has been changed to emulate Google Reader.
My primary gripe is this: in the normal Bloglines, you click on a feed and the items are marked read. In the new version, you must scroll past each item and/or click on each item. If I click on a feed with one or two short items, then I click a new feed, those items are not marked “read” and stay in my lefthand sidebar. I do not care to address each item individually, which is what the new system requires.
Also, even if I do scroll over each item, more often than not, the last item is not “marked read” and remains for me to address later.
There are a host of other single key shortcuts, and I do find these useful, but make no mistake about it, these single key shortcuts are “borrowed” directly from Google Reader again.
Most of my gripes with beta 1.0 were not addressed in today’s update. It was hard to click on a feed properly – the linked area was a bit flaky. Each element in the feed bar had a display of “block,” which I think lead the developers to think it would be easer to locate the right feed quickly with your mouse. However, the second part of my complaint was that without underlines in the feedbar on mouseover, there was no way to tell, except via the hand cursor, that you’re on the right link. The UI ought to indicate that you are on an active link via an underline. Since it does not, and still does not, you’re still floating above a huge link sea.
This is only compounded by the fact that the current version uses a simple Arial font, whereas the new uses what I suppose Bloglines thought was a more “Web 2.0″ font, which I think I’m properly id’ing as Trebuchet.
As a result, it’s harder to figure out what means what in the feedbar. Notice that in the example, on the current site, the bolder headlines mean unread items exist. There is a clear number right beside the feed telling you how many items are pending. But in the new Bloglines beta, the bolding is much less noticeable due to the font change and the number of unread items is right justified, which means you can’t easily tell how many are pending when you have a large number of feeds with unread items.
Overall, it’s a very nice start – it’s attractive, it’s got nice drag-n-drog javascript everywhere, it loads in a decent amount of time, and the new customizeable start screen is very cool. But if this is what rolled out as final, I’d probably just move to Google Reader, which is practically the same thing anyway. This is just too much like it and pretty much ditches all the concepts that I *liked* about Bloglines that made it different.