Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog
Archive for September, 2007
Monday, September 24th, 2007
Technical writing should be understood as a subset of technical communication, which is the art and science of organizing linguistic symbols to communicate technical concepts and procedures to an audience we cannot assume has previous knowledge of the task.
The technical writer, like an instructor in a classroom (another type of technical communicator), attempts to preserve knowledge by recording it in steps and explanations that can apply in almost any context. Technical writers distinguish themselves by being able to remove themselves from a specific knowledge context, understanding what an archetypal user will not know, and then communicating it to them in an organized flow of knowledge that creates the correct hierarchy of concepts in their minds so they can learn it.
 An archetypal user, not an “average” user, is an abstraction composed of all the instances of a user trying to understand what the writer has written. This user can be a PhD or a moron, but in both cases, they benefit from having assumptions about their knowledge managed, and as a result, having technical concepts introduced in such a manner that the cumulative knowledge required is built from fundamental principles outward. This enables them to both follow a numbered instruction list, and learn from it.
From those basic definitions, we can assemble a laundry list of technical writing qualifications:
Technical writing is the art and science of passing on information about technology. From that very basic definition of technical writing, we can understand more. Technical writing is also the ability to produce manuals, release notes, user guides, online help, query response strings, error codes, and user interface design.
Technical writing combines the art of writing, or using language efficiently and interestingly to communicate clear meaning, with an understanding of the psychology of humans, including our users. We are more like elementary school teachers than copywriters, but we have the skills of both, as well as skills in technology, page layout, and interface design (now ponderously called “interaction design”).
We are often more like editors than writers, in that we take the words of others, cut out the unnecessary, re-arrange so they can be understood by a newcomer to the process, and then pitch them out the door again. There are similarities to literature in that we, unlike people who are paid to sell products, attempt to describe a process without making it boring.
Technical writing is understanding how users apply technology and how to explain it to them, but technical writing is also going back to those making the technology and explaining how to make it easier to use for the intended audience. We look at the tasks from a user perspective, which is often called user-centric design or user advocacy. We are the only group throughout the whole of the production process that consistently thinks of how the user sees the product.
Technical writing combines the skills of a reporter in finding data with the patience of a teacher in dividing up the information into a sequence of bite-sized chunks for people to understand. Technical writing is also a simple skill of page layout and understanding how documents fit together. Although it is often seen as the last refuge of the unemployed English major, technical writing is a pleasant fusion of the liberal arts world and technology.
From the liberal arts, we take ideas about how to understand other people and communicate with them, and from technology, technical writers take the discipline they use to make every detail of their descriptions accurate. Technical writing is many things related to that skill of explaining technical writing to a wide (not necessarily stupid, not necessarily uninformed, or inexperienced) audience. It is audience compassion and passing along knowledge, which is what teachers, shamans, writers, bards and parents have done for aeons.
Technical writing is passing along knowledge. Technical writing is sharing. Your experience of technical writing may be a vague or uninformative, overwritten manual, but else, technical writing can be opening up a new world for someone.
And when done correctly, it can be not just useful but fun for the writer and readers alike.
Posted in Technical Communications | No Comments »
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
* OWEN PLANT/RYANHOOD TOUR! *
The crown jewel as always is Club Passim so get them caravans
organized and converge on that historic club like it was Woodstock
Sept 21!
SEPT 13 – NORTHAMPTON, MA – SMITH COLLEGE – The Goldstein Lounge -
9:00P
SEPT 14 – MIDDLEBURY, VT – CAROL’S HUNGRY MIND CAFE – 7:00P
SEPT 15 – NEW YORK, NY – THE UNDERGROUND COFFEE HOUSE – 8:00P
(the new location is 20 Murray Street(2nd Floor)
between Church and Broadway in Tribeca)
SEPT 16 – PORTLAND, ME – NORTH STAR CAFE- 1:00P
SEPT 17 – BRIDGEWATER, MA – BRIDGEWATER STATE COLLEGE – 8:00P
(CLOSED TO PUBLIC)
SEPT 20 – WASHINGTON D.C. – EBENEZERS – 8:00P
SEPT 21- CAMBRIDGE, MA – CLUB PASSIM -7:00P and 10:00P
Tickets for 7pm:
http://www.clubpassim.org/passimcalendar/viewEvent2.php?evt=1178847285
Tickets for 10pm:
http://www.clubpassim.org/passimcalendar/viewEvent2.php?evt=1178847306
The Club Passim shows generally sellout when these lads play
together, so be sure to buy advance tickets!
THIS SHOW WILL BE A CD RELEASE FOR OWEN.
His new compilation/best of CD “We All” will be for sale for people
to get multiple copies for holiday gifts, birthdays etc. It’s all
done up fancy with plastic and everything!
OWEN CONTINUES TOURING WITHOUT RYANHOOD :(
SEPT 23 -Allston Village Fair – Allston, MA
SEPT 27 -Tupelo Music Hall – Londonberry, NH
SEPT 28 – Lincoln Street Coffee – Newton Highlands, MA
SEPT 30 – Fundraiser for Owen’s Outreach Program – Thompson, CT
THEN BACK TO CALIFORNIA FOR MANY OTHER MUSICAL SHENANIGANS!
*SOME SHOWS FROM THE ORIGINAL TOUR WERE CANCELLED SO TAKE NOTE IN
CASE YOU’D PLANNED TO GO!*
* CHECK OUT DETAILS ABOUT THE TOUR AT THESE SITES:
WWW.OWENPLANT.COM ( http://www.owenplant.com/ )
www.myspace.com/oplant
( http://www.owenplant.com/ )WWW.RYANHOODMUSIC.COM (
http://www.owenplant.com/ )
THE SUNSHINE BROTHERS ( http://www.myspace.com/sunshinebros) are in the
studio while I’m back east putting the final touches
on an album that will be really, really awesome!!
Posted in People | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
As software proliferated, it grew to accomodate not only specialized function but classes of function. For example, some software was designed to military specifications, and had its own set of requirements. Other software needed to be used exclusively in a business-corporate environment. That type of software, called “corporate” for lack of a better term, is designed around the concerns of groups of people working together. It attempts to verify who is doing any action, keeps logs and accounting, and blocks any actions that could circumvent the corporate objectives.
In contrast to corporate software, consumer software is designed to be easier to use, and to make common tasks into functions, so that Mom and Dad can perform a combination picture edit, upload to web site and send IMs to friends notifying them of the new images. It might be tempting to write it off as junk software except that so many of our innovations come from the consumer world, because people using software for play and not work (hint, humanity) find the more interesting applications which are not directly related to task control.
In The 8 Most Dangerous Computer Technologies, corporate IT is shown its future: consumer ware leads the pack as far as new features, and corporates will have to adapt to keep up. In the article, the writer(s) detail several of the new challenges, including the potential security horror of USB drives, the ubiquity of web mail, cell phones, chat and voice over IP. The solution they edge toward is one corporate America might not like at first.
Instead of banning the consumer software, they began an assimilation program. It was okay to bring in a USB drive, long the bane and fear of administrators, if you used their encryption software on it so that if you lost it, you wouldn’t also give data to the world at large. I think this is a step in the right direction, and I’d take it even further, taking advantage of something I’ve learned from Google. If you offer people free breakfast, free dinner, and a chance to socialize, they’ll hang out around the office. I think Google will find that this is effective only for the first three years of an employee’s time at the company, but it’s equally relevant to an inverse scenario.
That inverse is what most of us face, which is being in an office when we need to be out doing the things we need to do to keep our households in order. I’ll bet most of you have ducked out at lunch to pay a bill, researched a purchase online, or called to make a doctor’s appointment from work. Unlike Google, where they want to keep people at work longer, we are at work longer and want to be doing what we need to do after work but don’t have time. For these two problems, a variation on the same solution exists.
Instead of viewing employees as having a value by the hour, I think businesses should view them as community members with a yearly cost that should balance their direct contribution to business income. For some employees, like receptionists, this is difficult to measure directly but it’s evident that it exists, since a business without a receptionist would have no clients. In those cases, you should measure the amount of their job they do correctly and assign it an arbitrary percentage of the income production. This tells you what the employee returns to the community that is the business.
If you view your employees as community members, it is no longer important to you to see them working every hour of the day. You hire them to get a job done, and you don’t care how long it takes, unless it’s obvious that more people are needed. You might even tolerate people going home early. One thing that you will tolerate in this new view is their use of business resources for personal use. They are members of your community, and in a community, everyone’s Job One is survival, but they recognize that without the community that’s not possible, so it’s a very close second.
With the business as community outlook, it becomes obvious what to do with consumer software. Embrace it. You can relax and stop ranting about people using Gmail, a giant security hole, or USB drivers, or AIM. Plan these into your IT strategy because you are no longer responsible for dividing business needs from employee needs. You’re a community and the business-critical tasks you do are what determines your survival. Even indirect aid to those is important, so keeping employees happily having normal lives is important, which means allowing AIM and MSN on your network is important.
From this mindset, we can see a need for a new strategy and technologies in IT security. Instead of banning products, look at traffic. Who’s sending large files out, and can we determine they’re not MP3s? Is someone’s machine connecting to a lot of other machines briefly and then moving on? Traffic analysis, deep packet sniffing, and behavior profiling are the tools of this new environment. It is one based on community, so it accepts that a wider range of tools will be used, and then tries to limit their use to non-destructive means.
Over the past months, I have seen too many people worry themselves gray about hours accounting and IT security when their real problems are elsewhere. I can’t make people stop screwing off on the internet, and I definitely am not going to be able to intercept thumb drives and AIM. I can do something ultra-draconian like shutting down USB ports and heavily filtering traffic, but that will damage as many legitimate uses as illegitimate ones. Instead a change in strategy is called for.
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
Over the last few days, I’ve been evaluating different software and hosting environments for a client, and I’ve found an interesting paradox about the net audience and its darlings. To put it bluntly, they over-rate anything they like and over-state any negative feedback, so that you feel all “excluded middles” have been eliminated. I can’t find any correlations to gender, age, political outlook, sexual orientation, intelligence or personality type, so I’m going to chalk it up to the medium.
In the blogosphere, or the internet, or even in a large group of people, you have to shout to be heard. Since volume of voice doesn’t count for much anymore, what matters then is how “interesting” what you’re saying appears to be. It has to be either freaky, or extremely righteous. We’ll all eavesdrop on a conversation about that threesome gone wrong, or the time you really showed a tailgater how much of a screwup he was! Freaky or forceful. It reminds me of the speeches of politicians and CEOs at that hideous barbecue every company seems to have to kick off its new initiative.
The internet audience is a victim of this shouting. They can’t make themselves louder, so they make themselves more extreme, and then others compete with this, to the point that you might as well not bother rating something 2 out of 5 stars, because the people rating it 0 or 6 are going to command the audience.
I have plenty of examples of this. For example, Firefox the much-loved browser, is bloatware that has made itself distinguished to me for its frequent crashes, mostly but not completely standards-compliant rendering of code, and hogging of memory. It is not very reliable software. In fact, Internet Explorer is more reliable, but it has a fatal flaw in its ActiveX-supporting security model. Luckily there is a alternative to both that is smaller, faster, and a balance between standards-compliance and coding practices from 1996-2006.
On the other hand, throughout most of the internet you will find Microsoft demonized, to the point that people will not admit that for almost all daily tasks Internet Explorer is a better browser, or that for almost all daily office tasks Microsoft Office is the superior choice, or that for the average user who isn’t fascinated by the guts of their computer, Windows XP is the best desktop operating system choice. Microsoft makes its share of failures, but even Honda does that, so I’m inclined to chalk it up to being a large corporation more than any inherent “evil” (unless you think wanting to make money by dominating others is evil, but that seems to be designed into our economic system).
It is emotionally gratifying to become a fanboi or hater. It gives you the feeling of power, since you have made a strong choice and slammed home that point by not giving the product a 2 out of 5 but a 0 because it’s awful or a 6 because you believe in the company. From now on, this blog is going to avoid the tendency to over-state or over-rate, because it is counterproductive to informing users about technology.
Posted in Information Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
Everybody knows hackers are the biggest threat to computer networks, except that it ain’t necessarily so.
Yes, hackers are still out there, and not just teenagers: malicious insiders, political activists, mobsters and even government agents all routinely test public and private computer networks and occasionally disrupt services. But experts say that some of the most serious, even potentially devastating, problems with networks arise from sources with no malevolent component.
Whether it’s the Los Angeles customs fiasco or the unpredictable network cascade that brought the global Skype telephone service down for two days in August, problems arising from flawed systems, increasingly complex networks and even technology headaches from corporate mergers can make computer systems less reliable. Meanwhile, society as a whole is growing ever more dependent on computers and computer networks, as automated controls become the norm for air traffic, pipelines, dams, the electrical grid and more. ^
Our computer systems mirror our minds in that they have a lot of power, but are disorganized and undisciplined, and as a result they fail frequently at the worst times. It’s easy to rant against Microsoft and assume Linux is better, or claim that you prefer Apple hardware to HP, but these are really degrees of the same great fat incompetent. There are a few people out there who will do things correctly, but they are rarely recognized because few people recognize how dysfunctional our technology is until it blows up and strands people for 17 hours in an airport.
Posted in Computer Security | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
You’ve put on your virtual reality helmet and gloves, picked up your Wiimote, dropped a tab of dex and hit the mainline, pure crystalline geometries unfolding in your mind… this is cyberspace, the final frontier. From a distance it appears as a glowing cube but as you approach you find that like the consciousness of language, each point of light can expand to infinite folds of parallel spaces. As you reach an apex of complexity, a culmination of connection, suddenly you find: a microwave.
That is how I would summarize William Gibson’s “Spook Country,” the novel of his which owes an obvious complete tribute to Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49.” Like Pynchon’s work, it starts with vast potential and ends up being the same old thing, buying into some failed philosophies from the past that my generation and I reject. At the beginning, it is mystical; at the end, it is as much an off the shelf offering as the latest microwaves from Samsung and GE. It fails because it cannot constrain all of its initial complexity to make a complex point, and so we end up with a simple dichotomy: good people versus bad people, good ideas versus bad ideas. That would be well and good, except that we’re in a book that argues against such dichotomies. Oh well.
Gibson trots out the usual brilliant, in-depth Googling of consumer culture and writes with a Burroughsian depth of abstract metaphor. He also in Pynchon/DeLillo style has brought to the table a number of paired divided abstractions, the best of which is characters describing themselves as “agnostic” regarding data. Do they fully believe, or are they sceptical? Hence agnosticism, which is a hilarious and eerily accurate. It mirrors the main point of the book, which is a semi-amorphous plot about Homeland Security Republicans versus the New World Order Multi-National hipster. Could it get more boring or obvious, or more product-oriented, since we know (gnostically) that there’s a paying audience for such views?
As usual, Gibson is at his best when writing female leads, and in this case, Hollis Henry is as real as Oedipa Maas and then some, which is odd for someone who says little about what she believes. Some of the devices are trite, like the dead former friend, the dubious past, the hip single city kid trying to live a life away from the system without admitting they hate society. A lot of the other observations Hollis offers us are more mature, a Nietzschean fusion of aesthetics and ideology coming out in a simple preference which like most Gibson characters she emphasizes with her feet, dramatically attempting quiet exits from any number of failed situations.
His male characters are tempting as belief-objects but hollow in that they show up like Hollywood actors making cameos (think of the hamfest that was the final half hour of Ocean’s Twelve) and are too aware of how slick they are and how much they can over-gesticulate their emotions. Like most books founded on an aesthetic premise, this one starts out promisingly mysterious (even gnostic in its mystical depth) but after the halfway point, falls to pieces as it tries to tidy all of its complex observations into a simple dichotomy. The promisingly neurotic characters who are from the bad side turn into dumb thugs like Hollywood Russians, and the promisingly neurotic characters from the good side turn into… neurotic Wonder Women and Clark Kents.
In this tendency, the book is most like Pynchon’s longer works, from Gravity’s Rainbow to Mason & Dixon. After the middle crease, it’s a more coherent narrative that is incoherent compared to the sense of ambiguous space previously created, and a boiling down of complexity into a handful of divided concepts. What made The Crying of Lot 49 different was what Pynchon left out, which was an attempt to make sense of his world of observations, which made the book truly like a cyberspace in which we could read anything into it, at first, but that would lead us through a series of logic gates to test our own faith against the observations of the incredible, quite credible observer in Oedipa Maas.
Maas was a sort of Marlowe on a raft of confusion drifting past the ruins of colonial Africa as she tours California in search of an unknown protagonist or manipulative force, finding nothing except different groups who have dropped away from the dystopia and constructed their own realities which in some cases are sustainable. There was more of that vision in Pattern Recognition, which I’m already going to say is what we’ll remember Gibson for outside of Neuromancer. We get none of that sense of survey in Spook Country, because where it reaches its apex it backs away from the depth it has discovered in order to present us some tidy, gift-wrapped conclusions that don’t change our outlook at all.
Parts of this book are as embarrassing as the now-dated 3MB of RAM in Case’s Hosaka from Neuromancer, in a time when wristwatches have more than that amount. The unpaid iPod commercials throughout the first one hundred pages are embarrassing. Some of the praise of 60s garage rock seems slick until, like the really neat guy who seemed to have all the answers you met at the record shop, you look through the references and see it’s little more than a namedrop. The real sadness is the last one hundred pages, when all of that crystalline interconnectivity of geometric parallels that Gibson built us up to expect folds down into a story as divided between hollow ikons of good and evil as the Gore-Bush debates. I still believe in Gibson, but not this book. Eschew this disconnected pile for the greater clarity of Neuromancer or Pattern Recognition.
Posted in Literature | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
A Polish crime writer has been jailed for 25 years after authorities found he had committed a murder that had been described in one of his thrillers, officials said Wednesday. ^
I can sympathize with him. Commit a murder, get away with it, and pleased with your own creativity, think maybe you can write a book about it. That turns out well, so you write more… but are there more murders?
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
I resisted the blog for many years. I think all things in life get branded by how they appear to most people who aren’t totally brain-dead. These appearances define their archetype. These archetypes get manipulated by your favorite TV shows and comedians as well, but some things just appear right. One of those is that the blog is for those who want to bemoan their problems, decide not to solve those problems, and make you suffer through reading a steady stream of self-pity. It was this cause that made me deny the blog, but I gave in, finally. Information might be the last vital commodity on earth, and when I encounter something that is truly informative, I think it belongs here.
On another topic, I figured I’d mention that we host with the much maligned Dreamhost. They’ve grown a lot over the last two years, and run into some problems, but they fix them rapidly and transparently, which means they tell you what’s going on and how much they know it’s going to take to fix it. I’ve had a number of webhosts over the years, and like this one the best.
For professional clients, depending on traffic, I either get them hosting with a smaller ISP or rent rackspace and install a quality operating system and web server. If your traffic is enough to warrant this, it can be a great way to host!
Posted in Web development | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
I feel like a heel for mentioning it in passing in previous posts, and not elucidating. You probably hear a lot about Windows Vista, after all, and most of it is negative in that familiar “David versus Goliath” style of logic that many people seem to adore. After all, Microsoft is a big corporation and we’re little guys, so we should hate them. Never mind that the same socio-political system that sustains us created them. This blogpost attemps to clear the air.
 Before we even talk about Vista we should mention a truism of technology. It is unwise to be an earlier adopter of any new hardware or software. The first year a car is on the market, it will have problems. The early versions of a new DVD player are going to need firmware upgrades and possibly hardware swaps. Any version of software ending in “.0″ will be followed by a .1,.2 and .3 which might actually work for everyday tasks without crashing. It’s nearly impossible to predict all of the situations a complex piece of technology will encounter, so expect early adopters to crash test it and some months later to have something you can use (I say nearly impossible, because it is possible to get very close, and I’ve done it, and intend to do it again because the gratitude of your users is priceless).
For this reason, I’m not even going to think about installing Vista for 2 years, and will probably only do so when I have a need to upgrade hardware. I like keeping the mound of landfill generated by my life low, and so I’m not prone to buying things I don’t need. A well-built desktop computer will last ten years, although you’ll want to replace hard drives every four years. At the ten year point, it might still be running, but it will be so hard to find parts it is wisest to move on. I anticipate that at some point two years from now, I’ll pop out the motherboard on one of my clones and put in a new one, possibly used equipment. It’s why I like PC clones: you can fix parts instead of buying an overpriced, decorated, physically unreliable piece of technology. Before you consider pre-fab, realize that the best green computing you’ll get is something that doesn’t require you to buy a whole ensemble every three years.
Two years from now Vista will have undergone some changes. First they’ll fix the bugs. Then they’re going to try to eliminate all the duplicate code they can, and trim down its estimated 50 million lines of code. You do this by finding parallels in function between bits of code, and inserting abstraction layers so they can be shared. Do too much of this, and all of your processing power goes to unhelpful abstractions. Do just enough and the system balances faster execution with less variance, so is far more stable. One reason UNIX is so stable is that it has grown organically from very few functions and so is heavy on the sharing of building blocks, which can then be made stable over two-year cycles.
At that point, you will be able to see what Vista really offers. As with many things, to understand what it does well you must understand what it is not doing, and to do that, it helps to have a refresher on operating systems. Because they’re software, operating systems are dependent on hardware, and the evolution of hardware has driven the development of new operating systems. A computer that saves data to punchcards, has 2K of RAM and runs at .5 mhz does not need an operating system other than the ability to send data to its cardpuncher. A computer running at 20mhz with 2MB of RAM can take advantage of multi-tasking, protected spaces, optimized disk use and so on. We’re a few stages past that now.
The operating systems currently on the market are based on the hardware of the 1970s and 1980s. This hardware is a relatively fast processor, a bunch of cards thrown in for interfacing to peripherals, and a CRT monitor. There is little collaboration between coprocessors, and no consideration of multi-tasking. The graphics cards are primitive devices that receive instructions about where to place pixels and then keep track of those pixels. The disk drive was often treated as a random-access punchcard with large capacity.
Since that time, computer hardware has improved in every way, but no one has quite managed to stitch it all together with a new theory of how it works. Oddly, this will probably happen after Vista becomes commonplace and drives the next round of upgrades. In my experience, history oscillates between concepts (shades of Hegel, without the illusion of forward motion) in order to advance itself like a ladder toward higher degrees of complexity. Thinking back to the days of mainframe computing and its descendents on the desktop, including the Amiga and NeXT, I think the future is going to be a time where the main processor spends its time managing resources as much as computing. It will be aided by coprocessors for graphics, I/O and specialty calculations, and will with the rise of the hyperthreaded processor become more like the “cell” computing paradigm.
In cell computing, each computer is made of up many processors, each of which is like a complete networked computer. The advantage is that complex tasks can be tackled in parallel. For simple uses, there is no advantage. This bypasses the older model, in which a single powerful processor was king and was surrounded by subservient but brick-stupid helpers who handled the rote chores of graphics, I/O, sound and so on. Vista addresses that need as well.
Speaking of history, there’s a second need Vista addresses, which is backward compatibility. PCs at this point can run just about any program written since 1983. This is an awesome advantage when retrieving old data from proprietary formats, or playing retro video games, but it is also a liability. There are thousands of obsolete instruction pathways the operating system must support, and it must limit itself to older paradigms. My guess is that Vista will include a virtualization engine so that when you need to run 1983-2008 software, it will do so in a “virtual PC” running a small version of Windows XP. That way everything old will work flawlessly, but so will the new.
Now that you’ve got all of that crammed into your head, you can look at the advantages of Windows Vista:
Threading. It takes advantage of the new processors’ ability to tear a task into parallel silos, run through them at high speed, and generate a result. It’s not the same as multitasking, but it’s like multitasking by dividing a program into six parallel functions that run at the same time. As you might guess, a big requirement is that the parallel pieces can communicate in real-time without getting hacked or lost. Vista’s threading model makes a number of positive changes. For more information, read Inside the Vista Kernel.
Graphics. In the old days, you stored data in pixel form, like you’d draw it on the screen. Now that screens come in a variety of sizes and shapes, and our graphics cards contain processors nearly as powerful as the computer itself, we don’t need that literal model. Vista uses an abstraction layer to store graphics as vectors, or abstract shapes, and then translates into pixels at the hardware level. For more information, read Vista is a hardware beast.
Interface, functional. Vista acknowledges that the old operating system was file-based as a way to manage that newfangled thing called a “hard disk.” People now want a file system to be an information manager that actively keeps track of their contacts, junk, links, files, IMs, and so forth. Vista is based around the idea of indexing and searching data. For more information, read Vista Beta 1 versus Tiger.
Interface, visual. Windows XP was a visual update to the same basic interface we’ve been using since Windows 95. It’s time for a change, especially one that takes advantage of the on-card effects offered by newer video cards.
Programming interface. Years of compatibility, work-arounds for hardware and software, and shortcuts have gone into the Windows 32 Application Programming Interface (API), which is how programmers make their programs cooperate with the operating system. They put in some new stuff, and for a change, the names are consistent to make them easy to remember. For more information, read Changes to the API in Windows Vista.
Meta data. Filenames and file extensions don’t tell the whole story. If it’s an MP3, who is the composer? If it’s a drawing, what is needed to view it, and is it vector or bitmap? Meta-data is how search engines will sort files in the future as well, and is one of the great promises of XML as a data categorization and storage mechanism. For more information, read Windows Vista Beta1 Vs OS X Tiger.
Speed improvements. Better caching, better prioritization of multitasking, and a brand new driver setup to improve performance, eventually. This won’t hit for awhile as there’s still too much code in Windows Vista for it to be fast. Expect improvements from MS on this front over the next 18 months. For more information, read Bit-Tech MS Vista Review and Windows Vista Speed Tweaks.
GUI improvements. There’s a “Welcome Center” that groups common functions, and makes much more sense than the procession of icons previously used, and a NeXT-style sidebar, and an improved desktop and more readable fonts. Of these, the improved Welcome Center is what will benefit users the most. For more information, read What Windows Vista Does for Me.
Better built-in applications. Long ago, computer makers tried to throw as much software at the new user as possible, so the user had an expectation of having a working machine when they got it home. By working I mean “can do something real-world useful with it.” Then we got into the mentality of shipping white boxes with an OS, and hope the users know someone down the block who can burn them some CDs. New DVD, CD, video and audio authoring software come with Vista and it’s a good thing for the end users like Mom and Dad who just want to make some vacation videos. For more information, read What Vista Gets Right.
Increasing reliability. It has nowhere to go but up, although I think the problems with Vista are overstated while problems with other operating systems are understated, simply because the public loves an underdog. 50 million lines of code means at least 500,000 bugfixes. For more information, read Vista Developers Blog.
Important Note
Today’s conventional wisdom, based on more than a year’s worth of relentless negative publicity, says Vista is hopelessly broken. In fact, my experience says the exact opposite is true. I proved the point in the first installment of this series, where I restored a sluggish $2500 Sony Vaio notebook to peak performance in a few hours. And I think anyone with a modicum of PC smarts can do the same. ^
There are other details, but these are the major reasons Windows Vista is important (check the Windows Vista Team Blog). I’m not going to delve into the Linux-vs-Microsoft-vs-Macintosh thing here except to say that when Vista is stable, it will be a more advanced model than either one (Windows NT, as a descendent of DEC’s VMS, was already more advanced in theory than Linux, but it was hard to see past all the bloatware).
I’m not really pro-Microsoft or anti-Microsoft. They hire some brilliant people and they make their mistakes like any large corporation does, and corporations are the basis of modern capitalism, so Microsoft hatin’ is really another topic. I give them credit for doing what the market wasn’t able to do before them, which was produce a unified standard for which programmers can write software with the expectation that just about anyone can use it, and for making Windows XP an operating system that runs on almost any hardware and is very stable. Beyond that, I’ve got no investment in this issue.
I do think that, as much as corporations unleash Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) against each other’s products, the computer industry has a lot of bitter people who will unleash FUD against any product from a company that’s making it, or making it more than they are. This was particularly bad after the dot-com bust, when people refused to use Google or other success stories because of their own lack of success. Vista is here, and like everything in life, it’s a mixed bag, but I wanted to tell the side of the story that shows some things to look forward to, regardless of what FUD from any “side” of the story tells you to think.
Posted in Information Technology, Web development | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
We all got the message over the last two years: stop using Internet Explorer, because its ActiveX control friendliness is prone to security errors.
Most people then switched to Mozilla Firefox.
What’s amusing is that these browsers both descend from early-1990s engines. IE is a grandchild of Spyglass, and Firefox is the great-grandchild of NCSA Mosaic and the grandchild of Netscape Navigator.
There is one browser authored anew, with new standards, and the explicit goal of being small and fast and solid.
http://cybernetnews.com/2007/09/03/cybernotes-exclusive-opera-95-features-video/
Check out the new Opera 9.5. I’ve been using Opera since 8-series and have been impressed to the point where it is my preferred browser. Its userbase also does not have the fanatical, ugly, supercillious chip on its shoulder that Firefox users often do.
Impressive features:
Search every site you’ve visited
Faster page rendering than any other browser
Full standards support
Restore closed windows
Synchronize bookmarks remotely
Quite impressive! You can download it here:
http://snapshot.opera.com/
The browser wars that raged first in the 1990s, until Internet Explorer won, and were revived when its security problems drove people to Mozilla (in the same way Microsoft’s continued inability to secure older installations of Windows XP, and the slow process of perfecting Windows Vista) are now in turn revived, because Opera has upped the ante. For the first time since 1997, the browser is substantially changing in function and becoming closer to the general information peruser and manager many of us have always thought it would be.
Posted in Web development | No Comments »
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