Trent’s Blog

A couple things I would like to share. While I’m not having a change of heart I would like to say I’ve reevaluated my perspective towards Microsoft. Lately I’ve tried to reorganize my work flow to adapt to my “environment”. At my desk sites a Vista machine and an Ubuntu machine..

Since I’ve started doing all of my programming on Ubuntu lately I’ve been much more pleased with Vista. Before I had nothing but problems with various issues from dual monitors, ide issues, to blue screens. I believe most issues were due to intense usage which most user’s aren’t apt to do. The last couple months I’ve stuck with internet browsing, instant messaging, and itunes on Vista and couldn’t be happier as far as an everyday email checking computer. As far as heavy duty programming, database work, and never ending for loops its not quite up to par just yet.

Ubuntu Fiesty has been very pleasing as well too however, especially since most of my computing needs for programming are well suited for it, where as my leisure computing is well suited for Vista with iTunes and Office. The two together seem to balance each other out very nicely, Which brings up an interesting topic from a post I read a the other day that not following web standards may actually help…

IE has long been going their own direction while other web browsers are sticking to standards. Well I love standards as much as the next guy, especially while doing CSS and Javascript, but had it not been for someone breaking the ice much of the client side capabilities would not be available today. As bad as we all like to jump on a bandwagon you have to understand sometimes that someone being bold and different is how we have evolved through the web, as programmers, as designers, as companies, and as humans.

At the same time I can’t say I’m uninstalling Firefox from my computer, its still my browser of choice, but I would like to see more people come to an understanding that just because something is different doesn’t mean we have to hate it, we should respect it and keep our eye on it. It could be on to something! Believe it or not I do have a lot of respect for many Microsoft products, and some of them I would probably prefer over any other product(SQLServer anyone?) although due to the financial situation we are blessed to have the others among us.

Well I finally got vista and I have to say the Imaging design is very nice and pleasing to the eye. Everything so far seems to install pretty normally with no tricks except about 100 alert messages to run, download or change anything(I counted, it literally takes 6 alert messages to RENAME one text file, rather dissapointing).

Another serious problem I have encountered is that my mouse will disappear after I leave my computer idol for any length of time. Twice today I have rebooted because of this problem. Then after the second reboot I decided run my updates to see if there was a fix,.. well I’m not sure yet but my monitor did decide to turn off on me while I was using it(something my monitor has yet todo becuase I have it set to turn off after twenty minutes of inactivity and it never will). After a manual reboot my bottom menu bar happily decided it wanted to be placed on my secondary monitor.

I must note I have not made any system changes at all, only setting my screensaver and installing the usual aim, eclipse, ff, etc.. Not sure if there are some display settings I am missing but I would surely like to find it!