Month: August 2008

Vista: almost done

I’m nearly done moving all my stuff over to the Vista install on my desktop machine. I de-authorized iTunes under XP, so I can use it under Vista. I moved my OneNote files over. Almost all of my key programs are installed and working now.

I’m installing Visual Studio 2008 right now. I haven’t used VS 2008 before, so hopefully I can spend some time playing around with it now. I don’t think I’m going to bother installing any older versions of VS. I don’t really have any independent projects in .Net 1.1 or 2.0 that I need to worry about supporting.

I have Delphi 4 on my XP drive, and I have one fairly important program written in it: the database program that I use to manage my comic book collection. This is a program that I first wrote in BASIC on the Commodore 64, and have ported (or rewritten) several times. It’s probably time to rewrite it again, this time as a Windows Forms app in C#, maybe. I’ll have to see if I can even get the existing Delphi program running under Vista. I never really made an installer for it, and I think I may have used a weird library or two.

I think rewriting an old Delphi app in C# is particularly apropos, since I’ll basically be following Anders Hejlsberg from Borland to Microsoft. I considered upgrading the project from Delphi 4 to the newest version of Delphi, but I don’t see much point in spending time on that right now, since Delphi programming doesn’t seem to be a marketable skill anymore. And the new version of Delphi costs a minimum of $400, whereas I got a free copy of VS 2008 from Microsoft when I went to the launch event a few months back.

Vista: point of no return

I think I’ve hit the point of no return on my desktop Vista install now. I’ve moved over my Quicken data file. It’s working OK, so I guess I’m going to start moving over other key stuff, like my Outlook data file, and my OneNote files.

I’m experimenting right now with mapping a drive to my MobileMe iDisk, and backing up my Quicken files to it. It works, but it’s pretty slow. Under XP, I’d been backing up Quicken to a Zip disk, which just seems so out of date now. There’s really nothing wrong with doing that, but I’m probably the last guy on earth still using Zip disks. Given how slow the iDisk backup is, though, maybe I’ll stick with the Zip disks for a while.

Vista progress

As I mentioned about a week back, one of the two drives in my home desktop machine died recently. Luckily, it wasn’t my main drive. I have now removed the dead drive, added a new 500 GB SATA drive, and installed Vista on it. So, now I have my old XP install on my old 250 GB drive, and the new Vista install on the 500 GB drive. I’m gradually migrating my apps and data over to the Vista install. When I’m done, I plan to wipe out the XP install and use the 250 GB drive for backups.

So far, it’s working well. I’ve got a fair number of key apps installed and working. Vista actually seems to be snappier than XP at this point. That may just be because I haven’t installed a few key apps that are probably going to bog the system down a bit. Well, hopefully, it’ll remain usable, regardless.

eMusic price increase

I’ve been using eMusic for quite a while. Since the beginning, I’ve been on a download plan that allows 40 songs per month for $9.99. They discontinued that plan a while back, maybe in 2006, but grandfathered existing members, so I kept that rate. My credit card bill this month shows an $11.99 charge, though, so I logged in to my account to see what was up. Apparently, eMusic has raised prices. There’s a thread about it on the message board. The announcement is dated June 17, but there’s no indication that they ever sent out an email on this to let anyone know. There’s another thread on the board, started by a confused customer who didn’t see the announcement either.

I can’t get too mad about this, since those of us on the $9.99/40 track plan are now apparently on an $11.99/50 track plan, which is still pretty good, and still better than what a new user can get. (The new user $11.99 plan only includes 30 tracks per month.) I really think they should have sent out an e-mail blast on this though.

Interestingly, this is all coming up at the same time as Apple is rumored to be getting ready to roll out iTunes subscriptions, possibly for $129/year. I’d still rather have MP3’s from eMusic, assuming any iTunes subscription model would include only DRM’d music that self-destructs if you discontinue your subscription.

new machine

At work, I generally get a new desktop machine every two years. We lease computers from Dell, so it doesn’t really cost anything to return my machine at the end of each two-year lease and trade it in for a new one. My lease is up at the end of this month, so I just got a new machine in. Usually, when I get a new machine, there are a few big differences from the last one. This time, not so much. I’ve got more hard drive space, but that’s really the only major difference. The processor is about the same speed. I’ve got twice the RAM (from 2GB to 4GB), but I don’t think the difference there will be especially noticeable. And I’m sticking with Windows XP, so there’s no OS update to worry about and/or enjoy. When I configured this machine at Dell’s site, Windows XP was still the default OS choice in the drop-down. The machine does ship with Vista Business on a DVD in the box, but it’s got XP installed. I’m not sticking with XP purely out of laziness or anything like that. We’re using a number of applications that aren’t supported under Vista. And I just can’t see any real advantage to moving over to Vista yet.

On another front, I tried installing Lotus Notes 8 on the new machine. It worked, but it was pretty slow. It’s got a few interesting new features, and I’d really love to be able to move everyone from Notes 7 to 8, but if I can’t get it running well on a machine with 4 GB of RAM, it’s going to be intolerable on some of our lower-end machines. I uninstalled it and went back to Notes 7.

The point of this story is basically that I’m somewhat disappointed with the progress we’ve made in the computer industry over the last couple of years. Major new software releases, such as Vista, Notes 8, Office 2007, and so on, are interesting but not compelling. And they’re usually bloated and slow on even high-end hardware. And the hardware itself doesn’t seem to have progressed much, expect in a few areas. Processor technology in particular doesn’t seem to have changed much over the last two years.

Well, that’s my two cents. I’m still glad I’m getting a new machine!

backpack

I’ve been fussing around with Backpack some more lately, trying to decide if I want to switch from a free account to a paid one. I think I could get some utility out of having more than 5 available pages to play with. I’m thinking about taking some notes that I have on my old Palm, plus some stuff that I have in OneNote on my PC and/or DevonThink on my Mac, and copying it all up into Backpack. The fact that there’s still no obvious way to sync these notes to my iPod Touch is probably the only thing keeping me from doing that. I can think of some workarounds, but they’re not perfect.

I started playing with the journal feature in Backpack last night. It’s pretty cool, but as I discovered by digging through the forums, there’s a 100 item limit on what you can store in the journal. Past that, stuff just falls off into oblivion. This limit doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere. I wouldn’t have known about this if I didn’t go looking for it. That’s one of the things that’s frustrating about some of the 37 Signals stuff. They often seem to impose weird limits on things, then fail to document them. I’ve also noticed, for instance, that stuff in the journal doesn’t show up in search results, if you use the search box on the main page.

This stuff makes the Journal a good bit less useful than it could be. I was thinking about using the Journal as a kind of log for some key activities that I might want to come back to later, and see when I started them, when I completed them, or when I last did a certain thing. With the 100-item limit, I’m really not going to be able to use the Journal that way, except for short-term stuff. I had been thinking it might be cool to create a Journal entry every time I had work done on the car, for instance. Then, I could get a full service history on my car by just searching on “car” in the Journal. I can still do that, of course, but the history won’t go back that far, depending on how much other stuff I use the Journal for. I guess I could copy and paste old stuff from the Journal into a regular Backpack page once in a while, but that seems like a kludge.

dead drive

I’ve got two hard drives in my main desktop computer: a 250 GB drive that I’ve got all my stuff on, and an old 100 GB drive that I occasionally use for backups, or experimenting with Linux, or what have you. I turned the computer on last night, and heard an ominous clicking sound coming from one of the drives. Luckily, it was the 100 GB drive, which didn’t currently contain anything important. I could really just throw that drive away and be done with it, but I decided that this was a good opportunity to do some upgrading. I just bought a new 500 GB drive from Newegg for $70. I’m going to use that as my main drive, move the 250 GB drive over to secondary use, and toss the bad 100 GB drive.

I think I’ll probably use this opportunity to do a fresh Vista install on the new drive, and just reinstall all my apps. I’m still running XP on the machine, largely because I’ve been afraid to try an in-place upgrade to Vista, and there was no obvious quick and safe way to do a clean install without having another big drive handy.

I’m still a little worried about putting Vista on this machine. The Vista upgrade advisor indicates that it’ll be OK, and I actually did a test install of Vista on the 100 GB drive a while back, and it did work. My motherboard and video card predate Vista, though, and there were a couple of slightly questionable things that came up when I did that test install. I really don’t want to go out and buy a new mobo and processor right now, if I can avoid it. I might upgrade the RAM in the machine from 2GB to 3GB, though. And a newer video card wouldn’t be out of the question, though I’m not sure that would help much.

E2-E4

I was going to go into NYC on Friday to see Manuel Gottsching perform E2-E4 at Lincoln Center, but I got stuck dealing with some stuff at work, and it was raining on and off, so I kind of lost my enthusiasm for going to an outdoor concert. I probably should have gone anyway, even though I would have got there late. I found some nice pictures from the concert on Flickr. Looks like it was probably cool.

iPhone note-taking apps

There are a couple of new note-taking apps for the iPhone that came out just recently. MagicPad’s key feature is cut and paste, which, sadly isn’t built into the iPhone system software. iNote is fairly straightforward and simple. One interesting feature is the ability to switch to landscape mode, which isn’t present in the built-in notepad app. Sadly, neither of these apps has the capability to sync to the desktop or to the web in any way.