Windows Vista: what’s there?

So I just saw this post over at the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog. To wit, ”
Monad will not be included in the final version of Windows Vista”. So this leaves me wondering, what is left in the famous “Longhorn” release?

It seems like the bulk of the new Windows operating system is a bunch of under the covers and catch-up technologies. Let’s take count:

Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) — Catching up with Apple’s Quartz and Interface Builder. “Look our UI can be as candy laden as OS-X!”

Least-privileged User Account — Catching up with just about every other OS out there. The UI here is eerily similar to Apple’s.

Data Recovery and Application Restart — This might be different enough from the Unix style init.d to be considered a feature. On the other hand, an Application Framework that made it easier to write bug-free software would obviate the need for this entirely.

I/O Cancellation Support — Welcome to the 90’s… Is there an OS that doesn’t do this today? (well besides Windows).

Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo) — This sounds really cool. I can’t tell if there’s a lot here, or if it’s just Microsoft’s implementation of existing protocols (Bonjour, WSDL, SAML, Kerberos, etc) that are already available on the Unix platforms.

Search — See Apple’s Tiger OS release

Windows Installer / One-Click — catch up with Apple, and it still looks like it’s worse.

Sync Services — iSync anyone?

XML Paper Specification — Oddly enough this seems to be a combination of XML / PDF / RDF/ Quicktime. It could be interesting, but it’s not clear what the advantage to anyone besides Microsoft is. As a developer this means that when Microsoft decides to compete with you, you’ve done the work of converting your file format for them.

What’s up?

Ok, so if I complete a two year old project for a class I took an incomplete in, I can stay in school. Yeah! The bad news is that I’ve not really feeling well right now (you really don’t want to know), and making progress is hard.

I’ve also got the main bathroom in the house gutted, and I’m not really up to finishing the remodel.

Not to mention the $1000 the City of College Park is suing me for (I failed to inform them that I no longer needed a Rental Occupancy Permit).

Sigh…

This week’s personal goal: at least one photo in the photoblog.

Life changes

The spring semester is over, and with it I’ve hit a milestone in my graduate career, or at least I’m supposed to have. This was to be my last semester of classes (and I’m 3 overdue for the end as it is), but I missed completing my requirements by getting 1 ‘B’. Officially, I’m overdue and might be kicked out of graduate school, but I’m also working on cleaning up an old, incomplete class. If I can still pull an ‘A’ out of that class, I move on to the second phase of my graduate study (exclusively research oriented); otherwise it’s the boot for me. In either case, I’m done taking courses! (Unless I choose to get a M.A. in journalism ;-))

Leaky roof

So the roof of my house has been leaking for the last couple of months; luckily, it’s only bad if it rains pretty hard. Anyway, I’ve had two contractors out to look at it. The first pointed out that that flashing and about 30% of my roof was installed improperly, and quoted me $700-$1750 to replace varying amounts of my roof. Based on the half-assed job the previous owner did on various other projects in the house, I’m not surprised to hear that the roof is shoddy work. The second contractor wanted $170 to re-seal the chimney flashing, and didn’t comment at all about the rest of the roof installation.

Normally I want a job done once, and done right, but on the other hand I’m a “poor graduate student”. I went with the $170 quick fix, it might fail really soon, but I’m just not in the mood to drop $1000+ on redoing a large part of my roof. Hopefully, I won’t be shelling out to have the rest of the roof fixed for at least a couple of years.

Barbecue

I went over to Geek Haus for memorial day, and made pulled pork as my contribution to the gluttony of the event. For those in the know real barbecue is always cooked very slowly over low heat; in this case, I spent 20 hours smoking a pork shoulder (boston butt) using hickory wood for smoke. Those from certain parts of the country will recognize this as the correct way to barbecue, and the rest of you are just plain wrong 🙂

I used a flower-pot smoker à la Alton Brown, and served it with my (not so) famous mustard sauce. Good Eats indeed!

(updated with link to recipe).

Under a car

I was just under a car.

I should elaborate. I just spent the last 4 hours (willingly?) under one of my cars.

For reasons that don’t bear explaining, I currently have 3 cars. I’ve been trying to get rid of at least one of them for the last 4 years, but it keeps having mechanical troubles, and I fix them slower than the new ones show up. It’s not really been an issue since I have a reliable daily car (2001 VW Passat), and my other hobby car (1995 VW Corrado) doesn’t really leave the garage much (ever).

But this week a friend was in an accident, and I’m loaning him a car while his is repaired. To keep his life simple, I’m loaning him the reliable Passat, and I’ll drive my “fun” car. Unfortunately, the problem car is blocking the driveway, so I need to move it to be able to get the Corrado out of the garage. To move the problem car, I had to connect the battery (disconnect to prevent draining it), and start it up for the first time in 4 months.

Problem 1. The hood cable broke the last time I moved it (hence the reason it’s been blocking the driveway). I had left the hood popped so that I could get in easily, but someone (roommate? neighbor?) must have seen it, and shut it, “as a favor”. So I jacked up the car, and cracked out the tools to try and pop the hood manually.

Problem 2. My floor jack died. It’s apparently an $80 piece of junk. I am told I was supposed to buy a “real” jack for > $200. Sigh. I just used the little portable jack that came with the car…

Problem 3. I still couldn’t pop the hood (even with instructions from the net). Off to borrow/buy tools. It took 3 trips to get the tools I needed. 18 hours, $40, and 1 headache later, the hood is popped, and I’ve left a screwdriver in the bracket to prevent it from being shut again.

Problem 4. I ended up getting the hood open because the headlight housing is broken. I hadn’t noticed this before, and it’s another thing I need to fix…

Problem 5. The engine is now tapping. ARGH!!! I hope this is just a simple problem, and not time for an engine rebuild….

Add to this the existing problems (thermostat, heater core, sunroof, general interior nastiness), and I’ll never get this thing sold.

Update: The tapping worked itself out during a test drive around the block. Yeah!

Setting up a small darkroom

Justin Ouellette from Chromogenic.net has very cool directions for setting up a minimal darkroom (negatives only) in your bathroom. I did this for a while in my old apartment, and it was a great way to save on black and white developing, as well as being a good segue into a full darkroom. I would add a couple of things to his article though.

First, a changing bag means that an absolutely dark room isn’t as important. The room should be dark, but I’ve loaded negatives in a normal room at night and not had problems when using a changing bag. They’re a bit of a hassle, but if your bathroom has a window, this is a good alternative.

Next, I like liquid concentrate developer since it lasts longer between uses. The problem with most dry chemicals is that you have to use them pretty soon after mixing (a month or two). Liquid concentrate developers tend to be more stable and they can sit for 6-18 months between uses. Right now I use, Edwal FG7 Developer, but it can be hard to measure for small amounts of use.

I would also argue that there is one meaningful difference between steel and plastic reels. If you need to do two or more batches in a row, steel reels are much easier to load while wet. I used plastic for years, and until I was told this, I never understood why I’d sometimes have problems with the plastic reels. Sure enough, when my (Paterson) plastic reels were wet, they were really hard to load. I switched to steel (also my steel tanks leak less, but thats not so important), and I can reliably load them wet or dry.

Judging books by their cover

In one of the comments on the previous post Seva notes that many books of the like Getting Things Done suck. I won’t argue that point, and I have to admit that while shopping for my copy I was appalled to find myself in the business management section of the bookstore. Since I view myself as an engineer, there has been little of interest to me in the self-help and business management sections of the store, and I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my mind — or at least my way.

But let’s face, the old adage about not judging a book by it’s cover (or it’s classification in the bookstore) is true, and while 99% of the books with “morons smiling on the cover”” might suck, I don’t think Getting Things Done is one of them. While reflecting on that comment, I was reminded of another good book that has another person smiling from the cover, the Wealthy Barber.

At college graduation several years ago, a physics professor recommended the the Wealthy Barber to many of us as good guide to learning about managing the money we would all soon start earning. Since I had always felt that I didn’t have the first clue about investing or managing money. I dutifully went to the store and picked up a copy. In the intervening decade, the insights in the Wealthy Barber have helped me: begin saving to retirement, buy a house, and make crucial decisions about things like cars and life insurance.

These are not sexy topics, but they’re all important, and many people could really use the help. the Wealthy Barber explains personal finance in plain language and an approachable format; I highly recommend it!

starting Getting Things Done

Recently I’ve seen a lot of posts about “Getting Things Done”, by David Allen. Designed as a program for increasing productivity (mostly for business professionals), that many geeks seem to be turning on to. I’ve been feeling stretched increasingly thin with commitments at home, grad school, and with friends and colleagues, so anything that makes it easier to get things acoomplished would be wonderful. After seeing four or five different technical people mention the book (at Slashdot and O’Reilley among other places), and since I’ve felt like my commitments were getting out of control, I decided it would be worth a read.

So far I’ve only read a couple of chapters, but I decided to start implementing some of the techniques mentioned so far. The net result is that I’m feeling more relaxed, and that my commitments are being better tracked. Only time will tell if I get more from the book and I become more productive as a result. The tactics in the book seem to be well thought out, and pretty simple to put into use, but I’ve only really started using the project/next-action lists so far.

I’ve decided to use OmniOutliner3 for tracking my “projects”, multi-step tasks that I need to finish, since I’ve always found outliners to be a good way for me to work, and I only had to upgrade an existing license that came with my computer. If people are interested, drop me a comment, and I’ll elaborate on how I’m using OmniOutliner within the structure of “Getting Things Done”, since it differs somewhat from what other people seem to be doing.