Gacka Eco-Action 18.7.2009

 

Majerovo vrilo

Yesterday, our diving club KPA Adria from Kraljevica attended an “action” (in Croatia: where group of people do something for public for free) which consisted of cleaning the riverbed under some bridges near river Gacka’s bridges. So we were 9 divers and some other support staff (friends and family) which was divided in 4 teams. Another friend and fellow diver and me cleaned the riverbed below the bridge which you can see on the photo below. The link to the actual map is here.

General map of the location

Majerovo vrilo was our base point and a great place to dive by the way (huge cavern system, and the biggest of the three exit points of the Gacka river). The place is shown on the first photo. Each team was assigned couple of helpful local people to get the trash out of the water. Our dive lasted around and hour. The water was somewhat clear and not too fast, but the temperature was only 10.8 degrees centigrade. That wouldn’t be a problem if I brought my dry suit but I didn’t (its summer after all;) but still that wasn’t a problem to be honest. The most important thing on a wet suit is to seal properly. Around 5 or 6 large sacks later (around 1h) we were finished with our bridge. My dive buddy found an unexploded mortar shell among other trash which we reported to the authorities immediately. After the dive we meet up at Majerovo vrilo again and we had a great with the rest of the team. Overall, our team took out quite a chunk of discarded trash so I do look forward for the cleaning at the generally the same place in some future time.

Take a look at the photo gallery.

 

Fireworks Rijeka 30/6/2009

I was at the opening of the Summer Nights at Rijeka (“otvorenje ljetnih noći”) the previous Tuesday. I was there only because of the announced fireworks. The opening show was to last 50 minutes with fireworks which were “never seen before”.

And I wasn’t disappointed. The fireworks were great. The music in the background was great too. The explosions were colossal, the range was mind boggling. There was even a moment when they launched some into the sea and from the sea there were flying fireworks. Absolutely fantastic. But the fireworks that fascinated me the most was some which burst in yellow glowing dust which slowly descended over a large area with a great sense of 3d space. It seemed like some cgi trick in some fairy movies.

Well, I’m not here going to melt like an ice cream but here are some of the pictures from the event.

You can see the full gallery here.

  

Canon LBP-5000 “out of paper” problem solved

Today the mentioned laser printer refused to print because of “out of paper” error. Naturally, the paper tray was full of paper. Printer reset, toner removal didn’t help. After examining the the underside of the printer (the part above the tray) I haven’t seen anything that was malfunctioning either. No mention of this problem on the web too. Then I realized that I could try to print the pages by using manual paper feed (seems obvious now;) and it worked. But still the notification light for missing paper was still on. But luckily, after few printer papers from the manual feed slot the notification went away and everything was fine.

One interesting thing about this printer and the other canon printer I have (cp520) is that they are some strange models canon doesn’t want to display any information. What I mean is that the latter printer I can’t even find on their web page (even in discontinued printers), and the former doesn’t even have 64bit drivers.

Canon selphy cp520: completely erased existence on canon web pages, those print kits (“cassettes” and paper packages) just went up in price by substantial amount

Canon i-sensys LBP-5000: completely discontinued drivers, no 64bit version. Expensive toners (4x500kn when the printer price with new toners is 1500kn)

One could say that I could switch manufacturers but I bet they are even worse. The canon inkjet printer I had before this laser was expensive but was good actually. Died only couple of months ago (had it for around 6 years). The printer before was a HP deskjet 690c. That printer was ok for couple of months but then it mysteriously couldn’t pull the papers in so you had to supply it sheet by sheet. The scanner I bought for my dad 2 years ago was somewhat expensive hp one. I can only say to you this. It takes like 4 minutes to start scanning the first page and the drivers are around 400MB! Unbelievable I know. And they have one of the worst UIs I have ever seen. So I won’t buy any of that HP crap ever again and I advise you do the same.

Accidents do happen

A car went down from the road straight into a sea in the middle of last night. Interestingly enough, the driver wasn’t hurt at all.

 

 

Caska, island of Pag, Croatia archeological excavation 2009

I know that I haven’t updated in a while so I’ll try to make up somewhat with this post.

I’ve been to archeological underwater excavation/survey at the small town called Caska (latin: Cissa) which is located on the beautiful island of Pag in Croatia. I’ve been as a part of Croatian-lead, French, Italian and Macedonian team of archeologists who were excavating an ancient wooden ship which was found last year. My job there was to photograph both underwater and above water as my knowledge of archeology can be summed up in two words: below basic. Lets first talk about the place itself. Ancient Cissa was a large estate (many villas and probably ships) of some famous roman senator which name escapes me. I did read it, but of course I forgot it. The place now is very interesting. The whole bay is very shallow (few meters at most) and somewhat well protected from wind (except from the Jugo – south wind which can produce big waves). All along the beaches (which are very narrow, only a couple of meters) there are still preserved huge ancient walls, walls of the houses (the other 3 walls collapsed in the sea with time or because of some other reason: earthquake(?) or maybe some plundering), walls from the water reservoirs etc. The reason why the beaches are narrow is that because the soil comes almost to the sea line so the big waves erode it revealing the stone base.

Our ship was around 15m from the beach at the depth of around 1.8m. The good news is that the whole bay has a thick layer of mud and sand (and a stony basis) so the ship was lying on the rock base and was covered in mud/sand. Mud doesn’t let oxygen in so the ship’s wooden construction is well preserved. Well, it is not as well preserved as the one at Pakoštane, but well preserved enough. This one is smaller and the west half (probably starboard) side is not well preserved. The general idea about the ship is that it about 2000 years old and was used by the population called Liburni(ans) which was then under Roman administration.

The ship is roughly facing north-south orientation and only 5 (2x2m) squares were excavated in the two week time the expedition was there. And that is a somewhat unusual thing for someone who is not familiar with archeology. The actually digging (usually removing the sand/mud from the wooden construction) is the fastest part and only lasts for a few days. Afterwards comes the slower part which takes many more days where they put numbers on every excavated bit and piece, take measurements, draw drafts of the ships layout, take exact measurements of the ship frames, take out some of the parts which are not connected to the ship itself and some loose parts, very fine cleaning etc. As our chief archeologist said, and if I remember correctly, the diving part is only 1/10th of the job – documentation in the office is another. Continuing with the ship, the frames and the planks are well preserved. But there is a very interesting finding though. The planks were sawn together to insure the water tightness which is a very rare finding.

So not to bother you more with the text – on to the photos.

You can see much more of them in my gallery at http://gallery.me.com/dfrka/100288.

Disclaimer: All the history part in the text can be complete BS, I’m no historian, I wrote from memory from the things I heard.

Find Me If You Can

The picture below is showing a list of files which are various (and unfortunately necessary) drivers for Lenovo N200 laptop which passed through my hands.

Can you identify any of the files by its name? Can you tell me which file will get me wireless drivers?

No, because some moron(s) at Lenovo decided that file names should be completely meaningless to users.

 

And btw – a short one sentence review, the laptop itself is a piece of crap. In no particular order: cheap plastics, horrible huge size, vacuum cleaner is more silent than this laptop, comes preloaded with crappy and useless Lenovo software, the hinges are just covered with plastic but painted to look like aluminium, the touchpad is coarse and even if your finger slides ok on it, there is just a right amount of friction to heat up your fingertip (I never thought it was possible), the power brick gets very hot, and did I mentioned that it arrived with the battery which refused to charge? So much for the famed Lenovo quality.

Watchmen movie suggestion

Watched that movie yesterday.

If I can give write a one sentence about this move it would be this.

In no particular order: Much too long, completely inappropriate music, plenty of clichés, you have story for the first few minutes, then a pause of totally irrelevant 2h:30m and the rest is back to the story (which is weak btw), acting is horrible most of the time, the movie went overboard with flashbacks  so you lose track where in time you are, cheap and clichéd sex scenes (which are of course irrelevant), unimpressive CGI (which everyone is craving mistakenly), abundant pseudophilosophy, and pseudointelectualism.

I mean, the movie is not unwatchable or very bad, but it just wanted to be too many things at the same time, without a good story as a backbone. They wanted to cram in so many film elements so they created a mess. Keyser Söze effect is one of them.

Why is The Usual Suspects a great film? When I was watching it I was almost bored. Confusing start, almost poor acting, story which doesn’t make too much sense etc. But the last few minutes of the movie totally redeem the movie, and actually make you watch the movie again in a complete different light. That movie makes you talk to others about it, praise its completely unexpected twist etc. The Watchmen has many similar things to the the Usual Suspects in a way. But the difference is that it doesn’t make you want to watch it again. TUS was made just for that KS twist. Watchmen has KS effect too,  but it is just made very poorly as with every other element in the movie. As they say, jack of all trades, master of none.

You have probably already guessed my suggestion about this movie concerning the question whether to watch it or not.

Don’t, that is 2h:45min of a greatly overrated movie you will never get back.

Windows 7 beta build 7068 x64 impressions

I won’t bother you or myself with detailed descriptions of this build (which you can get on other sites anyway) but I am going to share things I did notice.

1. Team Fortress 2 runs like Usain Bolt, that means fast and smooth! Even faster than my Windows XP. I kid you not. On xp when I enabled Multicore Rendering even though I did not get bigger slowdowns, there was a constant choppiness, the game wasn’t smooth at all. But with this build the difference is very tangible and welcomed. (Just for your information I play at 1920x1200). Another problem which vista x64 and previous build had was hl2.exe crash when exiting the game. That was solved by Valve in some recent patch, it wasn’t microsoft’s fault.

2. That file permission bug I was talking about is still present! That bug really showed up much sooner than expected and that means yesterday (same as install day) all the files in my documents folder were locked (at least there is a nice little icon with a lock so you know they are locked) so I couldn’t view or edit them. But I did manage to fix the problem, more precisely, the symptoms, rather then the cause. But as I can treat the symptoms now, I’m not that much worried because I certainly can’t fix the cause (only microsoft can). So enough with the medical claptrap and onto the solution itself.

Solution to the file permissions problem in windows 7 beta 7068 x64:

1. Download the takeownership.zip from blogsdna.com article. The file included two .reg files and one of them adds Take Ownership to the right mouse click as seen below. You can download those two files individually here and here. You need this reg hack because without it you have to take permission for file after file manually which is extremely inconvenient.

2. Select the folder where you have the locked files and Take Ownership.

3. Go into “Advanced Security Setting for $yourfolder” [1]. Add yourself and administrators. Be very careful to absolutely click on the “Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object”. I didn’t click on that checkbox the first few times so it didn’t work for the files in the folder.

4. There is no step 4.

[1] To get there you have to go to folder properties->security->advanced->change permissions.

As you can see, I’m not complaining about anything else at this time, so stay tuned because something will probably come up.

If you need any help with the file permissions or anything else, be free to leave a comment.

 

What’s going on these times? Gmail mobile app, Drupal, Windows 7 changes…

Gmail mobile app

The gmail mobile app on my nokia 6500c is great (too bad iphone doesn’t have similar version), but it lacked full screen support for my mobile. The problem was that google didn’t have special version for that mobile too so I always had to download generic app which doesn’t run in fullscreen. Another problem was that I always downloaded finnish or swedish language version so that didn’t work too. The idea that I had was that I had to trick google in giving me a version for nokia 5320 xpress music which has pretty much the same electronic hardware. Or even identical. So that part in guessing the address took me some time, but I finally managed to guess it. The language problem I didn’t solve completely (I wanted english version), but the trick is to set your phone to your own language (croatian in my case) and then it will download that version. The link will probably work with 2.0.7 or whatever other version.

The link is this:

http://www.gmail.com/app/gmail.jad?make=Nokia&model=5310&ver=v2.0.6

Drupal

Wasted two days to install it on my windows xp desktop. Couldn’t manage do the same on my macbook even though the installation is supposed to be simpler. I wanted to write a guide how to do it (the official one is out-of-date), but after a few days I forgot what was os special about my installation. Sorry. It is a CMP (Content Management Platform), so I guess that means it is a superset of CMS. Everyone is talking about it nowadays so I gave it a go. In any way, I didn’t use it that much because in one way it seems too simplistic, and on the other too complex. Adding some “blog posts” is easy enough, but it just seems that I’m doing something wrongly, probably I don’t even know what Drupal is all about. In any way, I’m going to explore it a bit more and report back.

Windows 7 beta build 7068 x64

After a very unpleasant experience concerning file permissions with build 7000 I decided to skip a few builds and go for some newer. This build was released yesterday and I’m just testing it at the moment. The problem with the file permissions bug is that it doesn’t manifest from the start, it can take days or weeks for problems to emerge.

It seems that some Microsoft employee has maybe seen my improved picture from my previous blog about build 6801, as demonstrated here:

My suggestion for this window (build 6801).

 

New Win+P window (build 7068). I like my solution more though,

same functionality but better looks.

 

More impressions and talk about performance soon to come as I test this build more closely. Update: see my post after this one.

Eventual disk problems

My Seagate Barracuda 300GB SATA hard disk (not a primary disk) started to sound strangely. When I start Norton Ghost it just starts to produce some metallic sound and windows really slow down. The end is near I think. What is strange is that the disk is only few months old because it was swapped under warranty because the old barracuda died as I said in my rant post about lack of quality in modern electronics.

iDeneb 1.4 on msi wind u100

As you are probably interested in OSX hackint0sh installations as I am, you might have heard about new gen of those distros. iDeneb brings OSX to version 10.5.6 and supports point upgrades.

Still, speedstep isn’t supported very well, because the battery lasts for exactly 1h:30min when almost fully idle (some web pages open, wifi on, display on) versus 2h:40min which Windows 7 beta 7000 managed.

Another problem is that resolution loves to revert to some unstandard and broken one when you restart computer manually.

So to keep things short, even though this “distro” is still unsuitable for a msi wind, I do think that it would be completely okay for desktop use.

 

Microsoft Sidewinder X6 Gaming Keyboard Review [Updated]

Bought myself this keyboard. I won’t bother you much with the facts you probably obtained easily in other reviews as I prefer writing my reviews just with the information other reviews missed. So lets get started.

The main reason I bought this keyboard is because of the removable keypad. I just prefer somewhat narrower keyboards (ie numpadless) because I hate having keyboard off-center to the monitor if I want mouse not too far to my body. In reverse case if I want the keyboard centered then I have to move the mouse further to the right so it gets very uncomfortable to do anything serious. The solution is a keyboard without numeric pad because I can have centered keyboard with regards to the monitor and mouse close at hand. The solution this keyboard uses is in my opinion great and should be used on other keyboards as well.

The keyboard itself is sturdy build and not that heavy (as other reviews imply) but heavy and unmoveable enough. It isn’t built as bomb proof as razer’s tarantula (for 2x the price here), but it is not worse either. It has good build and nothing less, you don’t have to worry about it.

Keys have similar feel to the razer’s tarantula which is good, that means that they are softer than microsoft natural multimedia keys and logitech’s diNovo. Good thing is that they have a threshold for tactile feedback so the typing doesn’t feel like typing on a sponge or worse, on pack of wet towels.

One of the main “problems” I read about in the reviews/forums about this keyboard is the famous “ghosting”. This is just a wrong word to describe a problem when you press multiple keys at once. Bad keyboards register just a couple of key presses at once,  good ones register more then couple. There is much talk that pressing ctrl+w+r doesn’t work (reloading while moving forwards crouched). I can confirm this. This combination doesn’t work. I got nifty program called KeyScan which can tell which keys are registered when pressed. Using this program I have determined that only ctrl has only a problem with R+something. Every other ctrl+key+key+key+key works. If you’re like me and don’t rely on ctrl that much every other key combination works without problems. So for example if you use shift for crouch (I dunno why would anyone use ctrl to be honest) the keyboard will register this shift+w+e+r+a+s+x or any other similar combination. So if you are really heroin-like dependant on ctrl maybe you can buy some other keyboard. Just as a little sidenote, my msi wind’s keyboard registers up to 12 (yes you read it correctly – 12) key presses at once. Quite remarkable and totally unexpected. I used the same program to determine this fact.

 

This is the infamous CTRL+R+W which doesn’t register. But ctrl+r+alt+printscrn works though;)

This works easily, even without alt because I was pressing print screen at the same time so you can press q and a or whatever at the same time. If you have three hands this can be very useful.

So my conclusion regarding ghosting is this: this keyboard will put up with pretty much any key combination except ctrl+r+something(1).

There is much talk about placement of the space bar and escape key. I can confirm that the escape key is placed a bit to the left but in this few days time I have completely adjusted, it isn’t a big deal at all. What will take a bit more to adjust is the placement of the alt gr (right alt) key. The space bar is actually very long (14cm vs 11,2cm of a normal logitech keyboard) especially on the right side. There is couple of mentions of smaller ctrl/win/alt keys on the left side but that is not the case or a problem, but the right side is. Alt gr is placed too much to the left. That is a problem when you use (especially in croatia) alt+v (@) or alt-f/g ([]) or alt-q (\). I used to press alt gr with my right thumb, but cannot anymore. I have to use my right pinky which feels awkward and will need a lot of adjustment because I don’t use those keys that much.

Function keys (F1 etc) are quite narrow and somewhat long, and this is not bad at all because the more shorter they are (height doesn’t matter much) it is quite more harder to find exactly the one you need without looking at them.

All keys have tapered(?) edges so they don’t feel sharp and they don’t look rounded. This is always commendable because I hate keyboards with keys with sharp edges. Those kind of keyboards always want to chop off your fingers.

There are multimedia and macro keys which are easy to press and have medium travel. Contrast this to razer tarantula which have too short travel and are too hard to press (and tarantula doesn’t have pause button, wtf). Multimedia keys work from any program so you can be in say firefox and control your playlist in itunes without problems.

There are two large knobs on the right part to the top of the keyboard and one is brightness of the led backlighting and the other one is the volume. Both take 270 degrees from 0-100%, and both turn smoothly. Volume knob can be turned endlessly. Background lightning doesn’t flicker (contrary to razer tarantula on which every led flickered horribly)

Macro buttons are simple to use and configure (as a contrast to tarantula’s which are frankly useless). You don’t even have to use the supplied drivers/software to configure macros. You do have to have that software installed though, but it is lightweight, powerful and easy to use. You can program any key combination, key sequence (including large strings, for example bpush the cart!enter) etc. Memory banks are easily selected with a key etc. There are more on other reviews but I just want to stress that macros work flawlessly and they are very easy to configure and use.

There are some words on the reviews/forums about strong magnets on the sides, and they are somewhat strong but they don’t seem to influence my mouse at all. If they did in the future I’m not reluctant to remove them or isolate them somehow, but I don’t think there will a problem with them at all. Moreover, you can use them as paperclip holders.

There are no audio or usb ports. Razer’s keyboards have usb ports but those ports are ver1.1 which means they are completely unusable (yes, even for usb flash drives). Well someone will miss those ports but I don’t them so much.

Handrest is not “huge”, nor it is uncomfortable or made of cheap plastic. It gets the job done, of course, it isn’t removable but it doesn’t get in the way. Moreover, it is lower than the key so you don’t have problems pressing the keys. I don’t really know what the fuss is all about. One more good thing about the handrest and the keyboard itself is that the back of the keyboard is very clean and as the keyboard is raised couple of millimeters from the desk you can put A4 papers below it (short side first). This is very handy when you have to have paper between your hands while typing on the keyboard.

Just as a curious sidenote: the keyboard does really style well with logitech’s g9 (which is a good thing). They look like they are designed by the same guy. They use same font colour, same visual cues and curves (or lack of them).

To sum up: I have this keyboard for a few days now, but I’ve been using it full time. Aside from the alt key which migrated eastwards.

If you have any questions, suggestions or anything else, please leave a comment below. I will reply as soon as possible (probably the same day).

Here are other images of Sidewinder X6 gaming keyboard. On this site [mobileme gallery] you can find all of this plus more.

 

 

   

btw, Windows Live Writer is great.

(1) just to clarify, ctrl+r works without problems.

By popular demand, ctrl combinations (all w/ print screen):

So just to make this one very clear: All usual ctrl+key+key+… key combinations work. There is only one problem and that is with ctrl+r+any_other_key_on_the_left_side. That means that ctrl+r works, ctrl+c+whatever+whatever works (as shown in the screenshots) etc. The only case this keyboard isn’t suitable is with ctrl+r+some_other_key. For any other key combination it works perfectly.

[Another update] The bottom of the keyboard

 

[14/6/2009 Update]

I had some problem with the keys numbered 9 and later 8 and 0. They were easy to press (as usual) but didn’t register all the time. For a few days there was only the problem with the key 9 then the problem spread on the previous mentioned keys. The keys are easily removed and I noticed that the rubber layer somehow moved a little in the direction of the handrest. The only way to repair that was to disassemble the keyboard and move the rubber layer. The keyboard is easily opened but be very careful to remove three (3) screws which are underneath the two stickers. I just readjusted the rubber layer and the problem went away. I’m not really sure why the problem occurred anyway.

But to this day, I’m very content with the keyboard aside from this little problem. I would lie though, there is another problem, but not with the keyboard, probably with software (drivers probably). The problem is that the media keys (play, pause, next etc) don’t work from another application in windows 7 RC1 x64. I’m hoping that will change in the near future.

Windows 7 beta build 7000 – updated impressions and file permissions bug

As you may know, I had bought additional 2GB of RAM for my desktop computer so I decided to give a Windows 7 beta x64 a spin.

It all went very smoothly, and I had no problems at all. To my great surprise Team Fortress 2 did run acceptably good, which means it was better than vista/vista x64. So all was well and good for the next 4 days.

So I wouldn’t be writing this if all was well isn’t it?

You are right of course because yesterday I was stunned when I discovered that iTunes wouldn’t play songs. This was very fishy so I immediately copied my 70GB of iTunes managed songs on another backup drive. I cannot recall the exact sequence anymore because I was really upset yesterday so I’m just going to tell you what were the problems yesterday and what I did to solve them.

Problem 1: iTunes couldn’t play music from iTunes folder (70ish GB of music and podcasts)

Solution: Immediately copied the folder to another drive.

Later problem 1a: I couldn’t access iTunes folder at all (after xp reinstall)! Couldn’t unlock the folder (with Unlocker), couldn’t delete it, nothing.

Solution: formatted the partition of the hard disk with the itunes folder. Copied the folder from the backup disk.

Problem 2: Couldn’t read any document from My Documents. I could add new documents in the folder.

Solution/description: File/folder permissions were set up ok. Nor did I change something before so the problem manifested just now. Strange thing was that when I copied some file on to another folder I could read it without problems. I managed to copy some of the more recent documents to another folder for backup but this isn’t really a solution. This isn’t really a small problem, it is a huge one, and I was constantly afraid that the “iTunes problem” wouldn’t happen to My Documents folder as well. So I didn’t want to leave anything to bugs of some programmers, so I reinstalled Windows xp from ghosted image 5 days ago. In xp my documents seems to be intact, which means everything is ok with it. But iTunes folder afterwards was completely unreadable. So I reformatted the partition as described in the previous solution.

But this could be all forgotten as a showstopper beta bug, and I was thinking that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. The following morning (today) the very similar thing happened on my msi wind which is running windows 7 beta 7000 too (but 32bit version). Problem with my documents folder on the Wind I solved quite more easily with taking ownership, and giving myself permissions (didn’t work on my desktop computer as there everything was (re)configured correctly). I thought that was the end of the problem (as I really didn’t want to reinstall xp, as Windows 7 was working pretty much flawlessly (until today). But I realized that the My Documents problem was only a part of the a larger problem. I went to this site’s blogger dashboard and there I was greeted with the note that I need to set my browser to accept cookies (because the site failed to write one to my hard drive). As I never, ever disabled cookies on this computer I immediately figured that this was the same problem with file permissions as the problems I mentioned previously. As I have no intention to hunt down and try to get back permissions on random occasions, I decided to reinstall xp on wind.

This really is a showstopper bug because I’m always ready to accept some rough edges and beta bugs, but when you are actually afraid for the existence your own files/folders, I had no doubt in my mind to reinstall windows xp (which is saying a lot, so to be short yes, I do think that Windows 7 will be a replacement to windows xp worth installing and using). There is even some irony in this too, because I always considered msi wind for experimentation with other operating systems, but I just cannot pass over the security of my own files on my own hard drive(s).

Until they fix this problem, I’m not going back to windows 7 beta.

Finally, I have provided a file and a web page which is generated by the extremely cool Problem Steps Recorder program which is included in Win7 (I’m hoping in all versions). The mht file (compressed as zip) opens only in Internet Explorer and Word but I’ve saved the web page opened in IE as a normal html page so you can see it by following this link. Be warned though that the IE version (mht file) looks much nicer, but if you avoid IE at all costs you can see the (poorly) saved html page. The linked page/mht file is going to demonstrate you in detail one instance of the larger problem with write permissions. 

PS: There is ongoing (?) discussion on two forums concerning the problems I mentioned in this post. Seems too me that they are just instances of the large problem, even though on the forums they treat it as separate issues, and some even say it is the problem only with x64 version of Win7 which is not a truth at all.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t720870.html

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=720922&st=0&gopid=590406834&#entry590406834

Microsoft Windows Live Writer quick review [Updated]

Ok, I’m writing an extremely short review of Windows Live Writer, Microsoft’s new blog post writer/editor. This is to my surprise a windows client (program) so it isn’t like blogger’s web editor. So you can write a post in the (relative) comfort of your Windows (which means greater screen space, easier formatting and object manipulation, and other offline extras) and publish directly to say, your blogger blog. Yeah, you’ve read it right, it works with Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Share Point blog and other blog providers. This is, to be quite honest excellent.

Lets start with the good sides of this application.

Firstly, it lets you format text easier and that feature is more bug free than blogger editor (I’m only familiar with that one, others I know only very superficially). Inserting pictures is very ms word-like. That means you can of course add pictures from files (which can be saved to your blog host or some other site via ftp, all automatically) but you can add pictures (and other objects) from clipboard as well. Besides images, you can easily and directly add tables (which you can easily edit), photo albums (needs Live ID though), MS Virtual Earth maps (as demonstrated below), movies (offline, online, youtube [1])and tags or other objects by downloading plug-ins. Every object which you add is very customizable which is a nice surprise. So you can add shadow effects to your pictures, change sizes, add watermarks, crop, tilt, add standard post processing effects etc.

Blog management is good too. You can have multiple blog accounts and Live Writer (or is it just Writer?) can manage them all very easily and efficiently. That means you have full control about your blog accounts, your blog posts are easy and fast to edit etc. There are other small details which only make your life much more easier. You can always preview your full blog (including the post you were currently editing) so you can always see how it all fits together even before the current post is finished. Of course, you can see the html source too. Too bad you can’t split the window to Edit and Source (like in Dreamweaver) but very few people will won’t sleep because of this.

So what are the the downsides of this program?

To be honest there aren’t many, which may come as a surprise to some. First what you notice when using this program is there seems to be a delay when you hold down your backspace key so you sometimes delete more text than you intended to. I hope this problem will be solved in the future though. It is not that annoying but you can used to it very fast. Next problem what you notice is the interface. Well, it is not bad at all, but I somehow expected a bit more, especially after the Office 2007 interface (which was a step in right direction). This time some of the commands are transplanted to the right part of the screen (which is a good thing in theory anyway, because it uses wide screen monitors more efficiently), but there are left large gaps in the top tool bar as you can see from one of the images below. Moreover, wouldn’t be great if the right sidebar has the same graphical style as Office 2007 ribbon? Then you have some other waste of screen real estate in the lower part of the screen as demonstrated on the screenshot. Finally, there is no quick way of changing fonts like you have in say MS Word. You don’t have a drop down list (even though there is plenty of space in the interface to add it), but you have to click an icon to open a font browser. Hey, 1995 called and they want their font browser back. And yes, publishing mini window could be better integrated in the existing interface too.

This are almost minor criticisms, and the application is very easy to use but not dumbed down and cut in useful features just for the sake of simplicity (I’m looking at you Apple!). This application proves that you can have simple to use program and have somewhat powerful features in it as well. This cannot be said for many os x applications sadly. Obviously there are many different teams in microsoft corporation. Some of them write crap products (or usually parts of the products) like the team which made Windows Network and Sharing Center for Vista/Win7 (or stone age carvers who made Paint.net, but don’t get me started) and then you have some other teams which write programs which are well build, almost perfectly polished, easy to use, tweakable, and most important of all, usable from day to day. This part of Microsoft I have no problem in admitting that I prefer and like.

Update: The program has a nasty habit of reverting the font typeface to Trebuchet even if you set for example Verdana for your post. This is easily corrected when you write the post and ctrl+a – format – font – verdana. It would be even better if font menu has a keyboard shortcut (preferably the same as ms word). Another thing which should be great is saving drafts to the blog site by default. Default is saving a local copy which is admittedly faster but less convenient. And yes, UI should have been done more logically.

 

[1] You can even upload movies to youtube directly.

Short status update 14/1/2009

Last month or so was really boring to be honest. Very little happened so I haven't have much to write about.

I installed Windows 7 beta (build 7000) on both my Wind and my desktop pc. Deinstalled beta from desktop probably because the performance wasn't there and couldn't use shared printer on the network. Installed vista 64, deinstalled because of somewhat poor performance in Team Fortess 2. Installed vista x86 (another way to say it is 32bit) slightly better than x64 but still somewhat poor framerate. I did notice something more though. TF2 (or any other game) have a difficult to describe micro stutters when moving mouse. It just isn't silky smooth as in windows xp. Moreover, when I scroll with the mouse wheel in firefox under windows xp, the text and images scroll very, very smoothly, but not so in vista, which isn't smooth like that. This is difficult for me to capture but maybe one day I'll do it for the sake of it. So now I'm on windows xp again. But even windows xp isn't really rock stable (as it was) anymore (vista is though). When surfing on my Wind and I'm connected to desktop's wifi (which is configured to act as an Access Point through driver), desktop will go bsod ("driver irql less then or equal"). This never happened in vista even though the driver is exactly the same. Btw, I can't use ad-hoc networks because they are completely crippled in vista/windows 7 so I can't have a reliable connection with my Wind (who is running windows 7 beta).

To sum up the problems I have with windows releases:

• Windows xp: everything is blazingly fast, but bluescreens when I surf the web on my msi wind. And the old age is really starting to show up in these days.
  
• Windows Vista x86 (32bit): bloated, considerable drop in performance in games, doesn't scroll in firefox right, but has no blue screens, has media center (much better software than absolute crap of software I got with my tv tuner)
• Windows Vista x64 (64bit): even poorer performance as 32bit version, but not much so though. Supports 3.5GB+ of RAM. Not many programs are written directly for 64bit so they run in 32bit mode with is slightly slower than a native 64bit mode. That means slower games (more noticeably, TF2 is 32bit only) and slower programs (eg. firefox is 32bit only too but you don't notice the difference).
  
• Windows 7 beta x86 (32bit): slightly less bloated than vista, wifi management is better, but it is still in beta, cannot use a printer shared on my other networked computer, homegroup doesn't work for me, network sharing is a mess. Game performance is about as same as Vista, that means not very good.
• Windows 7 beta x64: didn't try it yet.

So there you have it. Probably I can't have it all though. There was much of the discussion on slashdot on windows 7 performance which I was very interested in because I tested Windows 7 extensively on my Wind (have it installed since the first pre-beta) and desktop (had it for a few days, but it is the same as on my wind so the problems are the same). I did conclude that the performance isn't there because I actually tested the performance in games. Performance in windows is a bit better than in vista though, but this is very slight performance gain though. But what I'm specially amused about are this "facts":

Ars technica was always very "in-depth" (especially when testing processors and graphics cards), but this "in-depth tour" has the same depth as a dried up lake - no depth at all. There is not a word of mention that you can revert the new, completely unusable, counterintuitive taskbar to (improved) classic one in three mouse clicks, not a word on a new mini windows for selecting wireless networks etc. They tackled the windows 7 performance only by linking to the zdnet's comparison which is rubbish(1) (ie: first test - boot time). So hardly in-depth. I did intentionally mention that zdnet's comparison because those slashdot microsoft fanboys were wetting themselves over that the zdnet's test ultimately shows that windows 7 is faster than xp (which frankly it isn't) and completely disregarding the most obvious rubbish that the vista is even faster than xp.

Lets take a look at some of the comments from the slashdot discussion (even slashdot is going down the drain I'm afraid)

Slashdot continues to moan because the average commenter has neither ran the beta or used Vista for longer than 5 minutes. Its more fun to bitch about Microsoft than to actually use the product.

Its also fun to sit and read some of the bitch comments and see how many Slashdotters overlooked the "beta" part, bitch about missing features, and apparently thought they were downloading the final RTM code.

I've never had a lick of trouble running Vista. Nor have I had a lick of trouble in the two weeks I've been running this beta. But then I made sure to put it on a modern PC built with Vista in mind, not my grandfather's Packard-Bell 486 with 4 meg of ram.

(Score:5, Insightful)

Then we have a reply:

Yes that's nice. It's clear MS didn't finish the OS. Because of things like this [imageshack.us]. They didn't even bother making the Aero UI that they hyped up for so long mesh with the rest of the OS. They took the Desktop Properties window (right click->Properties) in Windows XP, and just separated the tabs and provided a link to each one. Boy that's an improvement.

Or how about having to click 3x more than XP just to get to the network connection status or, Bill Gates forbid, make changes to the TCP/IP settings. Jeez it feels like 15 clicks. I have to STOP doing what I'm doing and concentrating on, and figure out which of the 5 buttons to click, and do that for about 5 more windows that come up before I get there. With WinXP I just double click the little computer on the taskbar and it opens it for me. Or I right click it and can get to the TCP/IP settings with one more click.

(Score:2, Insightful)

Strange he didn't get a troll mod. Now read this:

My experience doesn't match their assessment. I'm running Windows 7 on my Dell Mini and it runs faster than Windows XP Home ran on this exact same machine.

(Score:4, Informative)

And this from another poster:

Likewise I'm finding that Windows 7 feels subjectively more responsive than XP on the same hardware. So far I'm really liking the beta, but as a microsoftie friend of mine pointed out, "the vista betas worked really well too...."

(Score:3, Informative)

This is really getting out of hand. No, Windows 7 doesn't feel any faster than xp, if it actually does, you have spam/virus infested windows xp installation (can hapen to 7 easily too) or you are too stupid to configure windows xp. And no, Vista beta never felt fast, on the contrary it was always slow. Slow in the beta, slow in the RC, slow in RTM. I know, I tested them all.

Then you have a typical fanboy who is talking out of his ass, clearly confused with the ars technica's preview and zdnet's comparison:

TFA has six pages, almost all of which were praise for Windows 7, and yet the "summary" picks out three choice sentences that were negative.

Nevermind the new features (both under the hood and with the UI), nevermind all the annoyances of Vista that this undoes, nevermind the ZDNet tests that show 7 to be faster than XP and Vista.

No, let's scan the entire article and post the most damning phrases we can find and call that a summary.

And no I'm not new here.

(Score:5, Insightful)

He is only a confused kid, maybe not a new, but clearly confused. (very few vista's annoyances were resolved, only some with wifi, and a thing here and there, but nothing serious to be honest).


Then the saga continues with this fanboyism:

Let me start off by saying that Windows Vista is no longer the piece of shit that it once was. Ever since SP1, the many problems that Vista used to have have been gone. I was using Vista Ultimate since July and had absolutely no issues with anything, and it actually runs faster (gasp!) than XP on my machine. (Let me point out that my machine has a Q6600, 4GB of RAM, and an 8800GT)

(Score:3, Interesting)

Yeah, right. And I have even faster computer (and even slower 2) and nothing runs fast as windows xp. Nothing. Period.

Then you have this gem which pretty much sums up my point about windows 7.

1. I was able to work with Excel without a problem. It opened up and ran as fast as a dual core machine running XP. So that's fine.

2. Installation speeds were completely in line with what I'm used to. I installed Firefox, Flash, Adobe Reader and Office 2007. I didn't run into any problems.

3. The OS' installation was seemless. I didn't try to upgrade and just let it go from scratch. Once I finished the basic setup I just let it sit for about an hour and it did it itself. Once it finally booted up I didn't need to install new drivers. I really liked this to be honest given how painful driver installations and downloads can be.

(Score:2, Informative)

There you have it. Even a 10 year old computer will run office 2007, excel or whaterver fine. Vista runs every non gaming app fine. Windows 7 runs every non gaming app fine. But only Windows xp runs all of that + games fine. That is my whole point. Those fanboy tards look at those two mentioned articles and say, wow, windows 7 surely is fast! It runs firefox very fast! The new task bar is surely cool! That means windows 7 is great for gaming! lol

Anyways, doesn't seem to you as well as it seems to me, dear reader, that this the most obvious problem microsoft is facing: if windows ever goes bad in games/gaming (as vista is, whatever the horde of kids says otherwise) and more gamers go to consoles, and lets imagine that very few gamers even play on windows, what would happen really? All those kids who used pc for gaming used it for writing documents, surfing the web etc. But when you remove games, what is actually left in windows which binds a gamer to it? Nothing really. Doesn't it seem to you that when games become more popular on consoles (as they already are as a matter of fact) those kids won't bother with windows at all? Then those kids will push alternative operating systems to their relatives (as they/we did with windows) because those alternatives are as good for writing documents and surfing the web as windows. Food for thought.


Lastly, I'm presenting you a stupid picture I did in a couple of hours of photoshop and night diving.






(1) Why zdnet's comparison is rubbish and has no real world weight? Because it uses Passmark, PCMark vantage, Cinebench r10 which are nothing but rubbish tests. Why, firstly they are sythetic so they are not real-world (it is better to test copy speed of huge directories, launching huge programs, images, run games with this and that graphic settings, mark low/high fps, does windows management feel fast or slow etc) and secondly, when a test like that puts vista ahead of xp then I know that the test is complete and utter bullshit.

Apple OS X 10.5.4 on MSI Wind [Updated]

As the title (almost) says I managed to install OS X 10.5.4 on my wind. How was this possible? Intel based computers (which includes the wind) has somewhat similar hardware as an apple macbook so people from the hackint0sh community have been working hard to manage to install os x on them. Installing os x on wind was possible some time ago (months really) but it demanded couple of things which weren't that easy to pass over. Firstly you needed a broadcom based wireless card (which you could order from ebay, but for me unfortunately that was out of the question) and an external dvd drive. You needed the wifi card because the default realtek didn't have any drivers for os x so just didn't work, and that was a great roadblock for many wind owners. But few days ago, MSI quite unexpectedly (for me at least) drivers for the integrated wifi card. So I then realized it was time to give os x on wind a go.

I already found two tutorials how to install it.

First is from a guy named Paul at modaco forums. This installation is a bit out of date (but not by much) because I found the second more up-to-date tutorial (25 September 2008) from a guy named Jose Perez at PlanetX64. (btw, you don't need to have dual layer dvd, single layer works too)

His tutorial suggests using a slipstreamed Kalyway "distribution" and he is right about it. The installation is much simpler than Paul's so I recommend it.

But the next problem I had was getting an external dvd drive because my somewhat local shops had some but were dvd readers/writers and not quite cheap as I imagined. So after looking around I realized that I could put my internal dvd drive from my desktop computer into an external enclosing for 3.5in disk (which I already had) and connect it over usb. That worked perfectly. So installing os x was just a matter of installation.

Software installation itself went very easily and smoothly. Additional software installed without problems whatsoever. One problem though are software updates. Well, everything updates without problems, but "point upgrades" ie 10.5.4 to 10.5.5 doesn't work. There are some workarounds to update anyway but I wasted a whole day reinstalling the OS because I didn't manage to get it to work. But those updates are actually pretty minor so I'm not bothered about it very much. In any case some easier methods to update will probably be released.



What works:

webcam
native resolution and color depth
sound
wifi (with realtek drivers)
suspend
fn-hotkeys
touchpad (even better than in windows, you can accelerate it much more)
normal updates
battery indicator is precise

What doesn't work:
speedstep isn't working which is a problem on this subnotebook because the processsor is working at full power all the time so it wastes the battery faster.
point uprades
ethernet? (not really sure about this, didn't work when I was connecting to my router, needs more testing)
some (very rare) windows are clipped at the bottom because of the lack of resolution. Fortunately, this is very rare and all System Preferences can be adjusted without problem.


Haven't tested audio inputs/outputs yet so I'll report later.

[Update]: Deinstalled, couldn't get over the lack of processor throttling (speedstep). I tried some programs kexts (kernel extensions) which amazingly I managed to install, but it seems to me they didn't work. So I'll wait for some other distribution in the future, even though the one I tried (slipstreamed kalyway) isn't bad at all.

Windows 7 pre-beta build 6801

I tried it on my MSI Wind couple of weeks ago. I wanted to publish this post much more sooner but better now then never. I had tested Vista /w sp1 on the same computer but generally uninstalled it the same day. I just couldn't live with all that bloat and 30+ windows in networking.

Windows 7 (build 6801) is completely another animal. I'll concede right away its not windows xp. But it is no worse either.

Firstly, most of the bloat is gone. Networking has at least half of the windows cut down and selecting a wireless network is much more simpler now (almost like os x). Still there are problems which are carried over from vista (not xp, evidence that 7 is based on vista). For example: 60sec lag spike when using wireless connection is still present which makes web browsing less pleasant than on the xp and online gaming impossible which isn't a small deal. I just cannot fathom why still they haven't fixed it. The problem was present at least from Vista RC1 (which I tested too back then), and today it thrives in windows 7 too. There are other issues too (including major ones, like random disconnects from ad-hoc networks etc) but its late and I want to write about other stuff.

Windows explorer has some new features which is nothing but bloat unfortunately. Almost all the new gains in UI are offset with this. Why on earth there is Favorites, Libraries and Homegroup in the folder list (left part of explorer)? They cannot be removed and all of them are placed above (My) Computer and your local disks which are used the most. And every time you open explorer, Libraries are open by default. This is completely unacceptable. And I don't really get what Libraries are all about. It seems that those are links (like favourites) and at the same time they are indexed. The same can be set for favourites folder too so I'm confused. As the guy at windowsteamblog.com writes, Libraries and Homegroup are made to facilitate file sharing between computers (on the same network). I can understand that and I'm a great supporter of better file/folder integration in networks but this solution reeks of infamous microsoft way of doing things. Take a simple idea (better file/folder integration) and combine it with heavily bloated, poorely customizable and impossible to turn off designs and you get Libraries and Homegroup. Normal user will be either completely confused by this or will completely ignore both favourites and librarires. I can predict it will be the latter rather than former. I have trouble explaining to a normal windows user anything in windows which cannot be said in couple of sentences. If you've seen the article I've posted in the link above you'll understand how complicated (even if that blogger says otherwise, he is wrong) this "feature" is. And this tells you exactly how many users will experience this addition in a positive way. Add the fact that the libraries/homework work only with windows 7 (so all your computer have to have winows 7, to fully utilize the concept) and yes, you guessed, very few people will use this feature at all. And oh, did I mentioned that they've changed yet again the name of the default folders? Windows xp->My documents Vista->Documents Windows 7->Personal Documents. Great consistency boys!

Task bar is new and by default it is two rows high and only shows icons. It is a bad decision to have this by default. You can switch to normal windows information display (icon + app title text) and then it looks and handles nicely. Hats off to the guy who designed that cool mouse tracking effect on the taskbar. There are minor aesthetical issues with other taskbar features but this is not a place to expand on it. Yeah, they still haven't come to terms with flip 3d which is a garbage and a blatant feature copy of mac's expose. I wouldn't have anything against that but they copied it badly. It is nice to show off to a friend the first time, but has no practical value whatsoever. They added "aero snap" (or some buzzword like this) and that is one of those little features which are good and forward thinking. This way you can easily have firefox centered (because it a is complete waste of screen space to have it maximized) on your 1920x1200 desktop, which is the picture below showing (on win xp though, just to illustrate my point). This is the a feature you can put on rather small list titled: "Windows does it better than OS X". I just hate all the windows micromanagement when you are using a mac. Add to that a pretty slow and high friction touchpad on my mac and you'll know what I'm talking about.

They added some new features like character editor, keyboard shortcut to connect a projector or an external display (pretty slick and useful actually, win-p), new calculator (I like xp power toy one better though), power shell (finally) etc. Still I find mac os x more feature complete though.

Other than that, stability is great in the days I have tested it. Haven't had one single problem. All hardware devices were recognized and drivers automatically installed once you connected to the internet (which can be a tricky one on a msi wind;). Battery lasts at least as long on the xp, maybe even more because the indicator says that at full charge battery will last for 2:20 (vs 2:00 with xp). And yes, power management was streamlined, but that could be done even further though. And finally, yes, it runs very well on Wind, just as xp. Contrary to Vista which feels very slow most of the time, and extremely slow some of the time.

Just to conclude the post. Win 7 is windows on the right track (if you give a blind eye to libraries/homegroup). Vista definitely was like Me, but 7 is not to Vista as xp was to 98. It is something in between. It is not bad at all (even this early, but as a sidenote, I don't think they will change much after this pre-beta), but it is not game changing like xp was to 98. At the same time one could say that 7 will be a good replacement for aged xp. It will be what vista should have been from day one. But I still long for a real desktop mac, more customizable os x, and lower prices in europe at least...

Underwater statue

First of all, sorry for not posting in a while, I was very busy in the last days so no updates. Anyways, last weekend we've installed a statue of Saint Nicholas on 15m of depth near our diving club. The statue is 70cm tall and made of bronze. The same statue but 4m tall is in front of our church in the town center. This saturday I'm going to have a proper dive there so to see how the statue is faring concerning the sea weed and take some proper photos with 12-24mm lens. I hope this time the current will be much more weaker. Last time the current was around 2mph which is was a hell for taking photos.


You can see the photos here:

http://photo.adriasub.com

the movies are there too but you can watch them on youtube too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4Rfe53a1NA

Apple headphones suck build quality wise - part 2, final conclusions

Note: This is a followup to my previous post about the low quality of the apple iphone and/or ipod headphones.

Just look at those awful headphones (why yes, I know that photo suck, but you can thank nokia for crappy ccds). These are iphone's and they are almost 1 year old. They completely disintegrated few days ago. Trouble started when the rubber rings around the the earpieces fell apart. Then around two months later, the rubber around male connector fell apart too because the iphone's female connector is a hair smaller than the headphone's male piece. At the same time the wire at the connector was chipped. I had to fix it with carefully applied electrical tape, but that worked only for a short while - right earbud stopped working. The wire snapped inside the microphone piece.

So with this day, I threw away two apple earphones, which were around 1 year old. The third pair lost the rubber around the earpieces months ago even though it was in the drawer all the time and never used! I have to stress that the headphones were always handled appropriately so the last one to blame about the quality of the earphones is me.

Croatian National Geographic Magazine's special edition book

Today I got a book in my inbox and boy was it a surprise. It is a book made and released to mark first five years of Croatian edition of National Geographic Magazine. In it you can find 12 best croatian stories that were published in NGM over this 5 years (so it is a selection of 11*5=55 stories). The special reason to be content is that in the story about Lastovo island there are my photos as well. In other words, the story that was published in NGM more than a year ago was featured now again this special edition book, and that includes my photos. Dad has even greater satisfaction to be content because his photos are in Lastovo story, and in island of Vis story too.

I'll try to get a scan of those photos and upload it here for you to see what I'm rambling about.

Shorter posts, more frequent updates

I'm not really satisfied with rare updates I'm doing on this blog so this is going to change. Twitter's tweets are way too short to even update someone about something, let alone to give a short comment to supplement it.