Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on windows http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic windows Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Longhorn... what a yawn... Thu, 05 May 2005 09:50:36 +0100 <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/">Longhorn</a> looks <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1789345,00.asp">incredibly</a> <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/0,2394,l=150617&pg=0&s=26945&a=150625,00.asp">dull</a>. How long have they been hacking at this thing? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002546.html Sound schemes apparently a rare species Tue, 10 May 2005 12:47:46 +0100 This is really odd. Try as I might I cannot find any sound schemes for Windows XP. I'm getting really fed up with the strident default scheme but I do like sound notifications for various events. I had assumed there would be thousands of them (desktop themes seem to spawn like rabbits) but I couldn't find a single one. Has no-one created any nice, unobtrusive, sound schemes for WinXP? I don't want a lot of movie clips and loud explosions but something that subliminally enhances my computing experience. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002563.html On the psychology of .NET programming Tue, 01 Nov 2005 12:05:42 +0000 Here's as good a reason for avoiding .NET (if you can) as I've ever heard:<blockquote>API Proliferation Twenty years ago, in November 1985, Windows 1.0 debuted with approximately 400 documented function calls.5 Ten years later, Windows 95 had well over a thousand.6 Today we are ready for the official release of the .NET Framework 2.0. Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System, we have over 5,000 public classes that include over 45,000 public methods and 15,000 public properties, not counting those methods and properties that are inherited and not overridden. A book that simply listed the names, return values, and arguments of these methods and properties, one per line, would be about a thousand pages long. If you wrote each of those 60,000 properties and methods on a 3-by-5 index card with a little description of what it did, youd have a stack that totaled 40 feet.7 These 60,000 cards, laid out end to end the five inch end, not the three inch end can encircle Central Park (almost), and I hear this will actually be a public art project next summer. Can any one programmer master 60,000 methods and properties? I think not. One solution, of course, is specialization. I myself have specialized. This evening I hope no one will ask me questions about web forms or ASP .NET or SQL Server because those arent my specialty. I do Windows Forms, and my language is C#. [ <a href="http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html">Charles Petzold - Does Visual Studio.NET rot the mind?</a> ]</blockquote>And this is only counting the core!! Is .NET 112 times better than Windows 1.0? Well, maybe it is, but I'm not sure it's 45 times better than Windows 95! Petzolds ruminations on the way Microsoft tools shape the developers philosophy are interesting. As someone who programmed for dos and then Windows 1.0 upwards (i even wrote a few Windows applications in assembly language, now there was a trip!) I can honestly say I preferred the old days. I remember around the time MFC took off realising that the beast had grown too big. The beast never looked back. These days I program in Ruby (and am learning some Haskell) and I've never been a happier coder. Rails is still pretty grokkable and the core team are doing their best to keep the core, core. Over time everything gets crufty and rots inside out, you just have to hope you can deliver a lot of useful stuff before that happens. It might be too late for .NET already. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003072.html My 7 month Mac report Thu, 19 Jan 2006 18:19:06 +0000 I just read <a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/01/19.html#sixMonthMacReport">Dave Winers 6 month Mac Report</a>. It occurs to me it is just over 6 months since I got my first Mac, so heres my report. I bought the 12" PowerBook at the end of June 2005. I choose the 12" model because I wanted portablity over power. After 3 years of lugging a Dell around I was looking forward to something that wouldn't leave creases in my shoulder. For reference my Dell was a 15" Inspiron 4150 with a 1.6GHz P4, 1GB of RAM, ATI Radeon 7500 with 32MB VRAM, and a 40GB 5400 RPM HDD and boy was it heavy. Performance: The PowerBook seems faster than the Dell but not heaps faster. I guess you'd expect that given the relative parity of CPU speed and the poor bus architecture of the PowerBook. Certainly with 1.25GB of RAM the PowerBook is plenty fast enough for everything I do (including development work, I don't play games on it though). Where the PowerBook really scores over the Dell is how it performs under load, it stays very responsive even when the CPU is running on overdrive. That really does make it more usable. I've not suffered from the kind of typing lags that Dave seemed to have with his iBook. Usability: MacOSX is streets ahead of Windows XP in my book; they're not even in the same city really. The UI is generally well done, pleasant to use, and doesn't have too many surprises. I was able to switch in no time with only two things catching me out for a while: 1) In most Windows apps Alt-W gives you the window list, in MacOSX Cmd-W closes the current window. It took me a few weeks to learn to stop doing that. 2) Maximize doesn't. But I quickly adapted to whatever it is that it does do. In short I was more or less immediately productive with MacOSX. When you add that I can drop to Unix whenever I need, that QuickSilver is an incredible productivity tool, and access to a wide range of excellent applications like Omni Outliner Pro, OmniGraffle Pro, KeyNote, TextMate, and XyleScope. The only application I really miss is Trillian Pro although maybe Proteus is a replacement. Stability: MacOSX just doesn't crash. As I reported the other day I have had continuous uptime of over a month. I restarted at that point to install 10.4.4, who knows how much longer it might have run for. This is a compputer I am working out every day. That's a pretty good definition of robust to me. So, what don't I like? <ul> <li>Battery life isn't great. It's not a problem the way I work, but I imagine it would be disappointing if I were away from a power socket more often and for longer.</li> <li>Screen brightness isn't great. I didn't notice it before but now I have a 20" Dell panel next door you can see it. And if you want to get 4+ hrs from the battery you need to turn the brightness down.</li> <li>Safari still crashes or behaves unpredictably. Not enough for me to switch to Firefox but, after 3 point releases of Safari 2.0 it's pretty much unforgivable that it still crashes.</li> <li>Mail.App is bleh</li> <li>Firefox looks awful and Camino has few pluses over Safari.</li> <li>Some UI glitches as reported earlier.</li> <li>Umm... that's about it</li> </ul> Summary: Nicest computer I ever owned. I love it. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003258.html