Zac Garrett

While growing up I only used Microsoft products as I had no need to use anything else. When Windows XP first came out I purchased it within a week of its release date. At that point you could have even called me a Microsoft Fanboy as anything Microsoft did was absolutely correct there was no other way. I felt like Apple was the root of all evil and Linux was some thing used on servers.

My first glimpse of how Microsoft really operates came with all of the security problems that happened with XP. Instead of staying on top of the security issues they stalled until the bug got into the wild. Even then they would not patch something unless they saw a finical benefit in it. I really started to see this, especially when it came to their browser, Internet Explorer.

After using XP in its default state I became tired of adware that was constantly being installed without my knowledge. This is when I first became aware of open source, or more specificly Mozilla Phoenix, now called Mozilla Firefox. All that I was looking to do was stop the bad software from being installed, what I found was much more. This project was very new at the time, but it was already far easier to use than IE.

I soon started realizing that the anti-virus industry was based on the security flaws from Microsoft. If they did a decent job at creating its products or even just fixed the problems when they got reported I would not have a problem with that as everyone makes mistakes. My real issue was the fact that they just forgot about their users, no major updates, nothing.

At this point I started looking for alternatives, not because I wanted to leave Windows, but because I was disappointed by the support from Microsoft. I soon found Linux and just the sheer number of people willing to help was amazing. Also the various options offered that can be daunting to some I found to be wonderful.

Today I use Linux, but still follow Microsoft because that is what the average person uses. For me to convert back to Windows it will take Microsoft about two years of staying on top of updates and having a secure operating system. Right now I want to believe in Microsoft, but their history speaks for them. It is hard to believe that they have changed until its proven with the test of time.

I’ve previously posted about XFCE with Beryl and the fact that its fairly easy to get working in xubuntu. In my second post I stated that I did not like Beryl for various reasons. With all of the talk as of late about Beryl being installed by default in various distros I decided to give it another go.

From my last post and this beryl had somehow became corrupt. When I would login to the beryl session the xfce window manager would start and it would not allow me to start beryl’s. I decided that it would be easiest just to uninstall all of the components and start fresh. Reinstalling was fairly simple with synaptic, I did not have any problems here. After a the install a quick ctrl+alt+backspace to restart X and I was in XCFE and Beryl once again.

The first thing I noticed was the fact that Beryl had been updated and a few things have changed. I thought that some of my previous problems may have been fixed, sadly I was wrong. If you use keyboard shortcuts for almost everything like me you will quickly find out that Beryl takes over most keyboard shortcuts by default. One of my favorite shortcuts is the F6 key in firefox. This normally moves the cursor to the address bar so you can type something in. I press this key when running Beryl and all of the sudden all of the windows hide and I see my desktop. I for one do not have any items on my desktop and have absolutely no need to have this shortcut. I went into the horrible beryl manager to try to find the place to unset this. It probably took half an hour to find the right setting.

I have to say I like the whole cube aspect of the 4 desktops. It provides a quick and easy way to remember go through all of the screens. It was fun to hit ctrl+alt+left or right arrow and just hold them down. It would make me dizzy and it surprisingly didn’t kill the processor. The issue I had was the fact that only the left control and alt would toggle the movement of the screen. Normally either of the controls and alts will work to do this. This might just be a setting, but I didn’t have time to look into this as the last time I tired to fix something it took 30 minutes.

The water effects are neat at first, but quickly become tiresome when you are trying to get real work done. It is just an unnecessary feature than wastes valuable time when you are trying to do things very quickly. You can live with it, but it just wastes time more than it adds to the experience.

What finally made me switch back to the xfce window manager was when I was typing my post on Vista last night and X kept “crashing” for no reason. I would be typing and all of the sudden X would restart. It seemed to always restart when I would get to one part about Vista blue screening, of all topics. After a little investigating I found out that beryl has kindly bound the shift and backspace together to restart Xserver. I would be trying BSOD (for Blue Screen Of Death) and would type it as BSDO and have to hit the backspace key. By habit I still had my finger on the shift key — X restarts. It took me about 4 times doing this to figure out exactly what it was.

I can see no logical reason to bind shift and backspace to restart X, you’ve already got control+alt+backspace to do this. There does not need to be a simpler command for it. This just aggravated me and I immediately switched away from beryl and do not currently have any desire to switch back. Some people may enjoy the fuzzy GUIs like beryl, Vista, and OS X, but I am not one of those people. If it does not improve productivity or at least give a laugh I do not see the reason for it being on the computer.

But hey, thats why I run xfce in the first place. I don’t like all of the extra stuff added by gnome and kde. I might just be one of the select few who feel this way though, I can see how most people enjoy all of the extra “features”.

I have now been running Vista as my primary OS at work since my previous post. In that post I mainly pointed out the negative in Vista, although my stance on Vista has not changed much I have found it to not be as bad as originally reported. It is still a pain to manage, but it is doable.

One of the first things I originally noticed about Vista was the fact that all menus are hidden. I still do not understand why Microsoft did this, the menus make common tasks so much easier, such as copying and pasting. If you do not know the keyboard shortcuts to do these common tasks it takes quite a few clicks to complete the tasks. It seems like they have dumbed down everything to make it not as scary to the new user. The problem is that they completely forgot about all of the average computer users who know how to use a computer already.

I have no problem navigating through Vista as I already know the keyboard shortcuts that thankfully did not change. I have had quite a few problems locating common features in the operating system. I have yet to find a feature that is no longer in the OS, it is just in a completely different place. Quite often the reason for not finding a feature is that they have moved it to a more logical place. (Wow, MS doing something logical?) We are all so used to things being illogical in Windows that it is hard to get used to a little bit of logic.

One of my biggest problems with Vista at the moment is the drivers. I know this has nothing to do with Mircosoft, but it is still an issue. The actual problem in the business world is the lack of good printer drivers, especially 64bit ones. At work we have Xerox printers that worked great out of the box, no problems what so ever. My personal printer is a HP and I have yet to get it working, directly connected or via a Win 2k network shared printer. HP acts like it wants to work, but it seems that the 64bit version of Vista is still not supported. Another printer of ours is a Kodak thermal printer, it just plain does not work. Windows rejects the drivers from the start, no false positives here.

I know that this current period of time is for letting the hardware manufacturers produce drivers for Vista. I am waiting for some good drivers to come out, but have yet to see anything updated for Vista 64bit support. I am also waiting for these same companies to put out drivers for Linux, but thats another box of crackerjacks.

A few days ago I was bored at lunch and opened up minesweeper. Holy… it was updated! All of the sudden I was in a much prettier version of the game, no more windows 98 style of game! It’s its like going from a 1998 web site to a web 2.0 style, simply amazing — graphics wise. The game play is still exactly the same, but that was to be expected. After a few games I had to see the other games that came with it. Solitaire has been completely redone, it was actually fun to play solitaire again. It is one of those things that you just have to play it to really see the differences. They’ve also added a few other games which are fun to blow time, if you happen to have time to blow.

Microsoft has said that blue screens do not exist in Vista, or at least they have made them prettier. I found out this was not the case today. I was surfing amazon.com and a few other sites trying to look for some funky X-acto blades and all of the sudden the computer froze for a few seconds, then *POOF* blue screen! It was exactly like the old Windows 98 blue screens with the core dumps and all. There was nothing pretty about this, it was a normal ol’ blue screen that we have all seen and love.

From a security standpoint Vista has made some remarkable upgrades from XP. To now install any software you need to give it permission. This is going to make it much, much harder to install software in the background, such as virii and other badware. I have to commend Microsoft for doing something right here.

A problem that I have had with Vista is its brand new TCP/IP Stack. Microsoft has tried to clean up its problems in the past with buffer overflows and such by creating a new Stack, but like anything new in the security world its going to have problems. The problem I have had is that it just stops working after two or three days use. The stack will not come back now matter what I do, restarting the network connections, resetting them, nothing. The only solution I have found is to restart the system. I am sure that the crackers (or hackers as the media calls them) have already found holes in this new system to exploit. There is going to be holes, there is no getting around it. The only real question is if Microsoft is going to be quick at fixing them or if they are going to close their eyes and imagine that they are not there.

If you are a Windows user you will eventually use Vista. Personally I do not recommend switching to Vista any time soon, it needs quite a bit of work still. It will probably be ready for stable use after service pack one or sp2 like XP. If you don’t wait for Vista itself to be ready, then you should wait for the drivers to at least be ready. This might happen by January when it is released to the public.

I started this site using WordPress as it was the easiest tool to start with that I knew of. Yesterday I found a new script Serendipity that is about 100% better than WP and came from the recommendation of the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf who uses it on his toys page. After about an hour of playing with the program I was convinced that I had to use it.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours or so working with Serendipity, s9y for
short and I am always finding new features that amaze me. One of the
neatest features is how its plug-in database works, its online. Unlike
many plug-in and template systems this allows you to single click
download and install items. This is so simple it is just neat.

The template system is built on Smarty
which allows for very simple templates that can do advanced stuff. I
was able to take the default layout and turn it into this one in just a
little bit of time. It is the neatest and easiest template systems I have seen to date, especially in an open source project.

Like many systems of this sort it has plug-ins that allow to further
customize the site. They have a decent size database full of scripts
and also have decent documentation for creating your own ones. I have
yet to sit down a write my own plug-in, but I have looked at the code
in many of them and it is very clean and easy to read. I will be
writing my own plug-ins in the future and will probably write more
about this in the future.

The conversion from WP to S7Y was fairly simple. The only issue I had
was that the user you use to do the conversion needs to have
permissions on both of the databases. After giving the user full access
to both databases the conversion was very simple. There is also an
issue with images just linking from their old positions rather than
importing into the new script. I really did not expect this to be
automated though. I am still working on getting all of the images going
in this new version.

I am currently very happy with Serendipity and I believe that I will be
using it for a long time. If any of the developers read this I would
like to say thank you and keep up the great work.