ctrl.altered.mind

If you have ever exchanged zipped up folders containing images or accessed directories over a shared connection, chances are you have come across numerous Thumbs.db files scattered all over. A Thumbs.db file is a system file generated and maintained by Windows, and is generally hidden from view on local directories. The file is used as a cache for image thumbnails, making it faster to preview image files in folders before opening them. They can however, quickly start polluting directories across networks and are of no real value, especially less so for users of other operating systems (Mac OS X has its own variant, in the form of the .DS_Store file).

It is fairly easy to prevent Windows from generating the Thumbs.db file - choose Folder Options from the Control Panel (or access this via the Tools menu in any open folder window). In the View tab, check the box next to ‘Do not cache thumbnails’. This should get rid of the pesky files from popping up everywhere. The only downside to this option is that folders with large amounts of image files will take slightly longer to load if the folder is set to Thumbnail view. This can be resolved by viewing folders in the more useful List or Detailed views (a matter of preference, after all).

On OS X, creation of hidden .DS_Store files can be curbed by a command line operation (via the Terminal):

com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

You can clean up remnant Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files from network shares by performing a simple search - deleting these from network shares have no adverse effects on the system or your computing experience.

A dear friend just emailed me an excellent (and very creative) slideshow, which chronicles some capers his fiance and he have shared in recent years. This presentation also doubles as an invitation - they are getting married by the end of this month (congratulations!!). Sadly, I won’t be able to make it to the wedding that will be taking place halfway around the planet (I’ll get my dinner treat later for sure!). I’d have loved to post this awesome presentation here online, but I’m pretty certain it comes to me accompanied by limited copyright.

Onto the technical part of this blog post (oh yeah, there is always one, isn’t there!)- the slideshow file that I received (in the PowerPoint Show, or .pps format) is not natively playable by StarOffice. While it is one of the better open source application suites available today, StarOffice does fall short in cases such as this one. Fortunately, Microsoft has been graceful enough to offer standalone viewer programs (on Windows) that can handle Microsoft Office formats - not only for PowerPoint (2007), but also for Word (2003) and Excel (2003). There is also a compatibility pack available, which enables MSO 2003 viewer programs to handle MSO 2007 file formats.

By the way, if you have not heard of (or recently taken a look at) Sun’s StarOffice or its parent, OpenOffice, please do. They are excellent substitutes for Microsoft’s commercial Office suite, and have equivalent programs that look and feel almost the same. They can also handle about ninety percent of the functions that the average user requires from their productivity applications suite. Of course, both come at the low, low price of $0.00. StarOffice is also offered via the Google Pack, a convenient package manager tool. For the Mac platform, there is a derivative of OpenOffice available in the form of NeoOffice (with a full Aqua interface).

Now, if only Microsoft gratuitously extended this service for Microsoft Project files, I’d be a happy camper (sigh).

I have been answering questions about Microsoft’s Windows Vista for some time now, mostly coming from friends and family. All the points that I have been trying to make are summarized below in a comment by Enderandrew, posted in response to a Slashdot article.

• UAC - annoying and not remotely secure. People will be trained to always click yes, or just disable it. Further more, it prevented me from installing legit software, and copying files in certain directories.
• Drivers - People say an OS is only as good as the software for it, and I’d argue an OS is only as good as the drivers. If you can’t support your hardware, then software isn’t even an issue. Now all drivers MUST be signed, yet many signed drivers don’t work very well, if at all. I think it would be a good idea to have all drivers in one central repository (like the Linux kernel) so you won’t have to worry about tracking down drivers for old hardware, but make sure the drivers work. And here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don’t let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense.
• Design for productivity, and not looks. Sexy is sexy, and we all like sexy things. In the long run however, I want my computer to enable me to work, not prevent me from doing so. Usability studies have shown that Vista’s UI slows people down performing the same tasks. Scrolling in the Start Menu? Again, the writing was on the wall here. Look at the UI changes in Windows Media Player, and you’ll see a program that has become less user friendly, while prettier. Why should we expect Vista to be different?
• Performance is piss-poor. Again, people like fast computers. Installing Vista is just a bad decision.
• Vista’s worst enemy is not OS X or Linux (as much as I love me some Linux). Vista’s worst enemy is XP, which post-SP1 has been a pretty decent OS. For the end user, Vista provides no real benefits or new features besides better looks, while slowing your PC down considerably. And with projects like the Vista Transformation Pack, you can make XP look like Vista. Why would someone want Vista?

The Slashdot article was about Microsoft’s next major OS release - codenamed Windows 7 - that is being rumored to have a release date of late 2009. Microsoft might be tempted to follow Apple’s strategy of frequently releasing updated versions of their OS X operating system (which has seen six iterations since late 2001), but they will need to start off with a much more polished operating system first. Attempting to fix the design flaws enumerated above, would be a good place to start.

What’s the definition of a good computing experience? Booting up your operating system and staring at it, with no ability to smoothly run applications or games, according to Dell. I know Vista has elicited a lukewarm experience, and my biggest gripe about Microsoft’s latest OS offering has been that a ton of resources have to be sacrificed to the machine running it if any productive experience is expected.

An operating system should, ideally, allow maximum availability of resources to the applications intended to run on it. Configurations that essentially were used for small servers until a few years ago, are required to power Vista on a ‘home computer’, forcing average users to invest in an insane amount of computing hardware and resources compared to the tasks they would want to achieve.

I found a link to Dell’s product description page via a reddit news article, and quickly grabbed this screenshot to prove my point. Check out what Dell has to say about the uses of a ‘good’ system with 512 MB of RAM that can, at best, provide basic Windows Vista experience (with no Aero, aka resource hogging eye-candy window display system on board) - “Great for… Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games.” Seriously? You’ve got to be kidding me. This screenshot has not been modified in any way! Although, the description is likely to change on Dell’s website once Microsoft’s marketing team gets across to them.

Due to primarily using a Macintosh at home, which is also the machine of choice to design and maintain my website, I have been taking the aesthetic advantages of using OS X for granted. Apart from testing for general structural integrity of my website in Windows-based browsers, I rarely examine the look and feel that Windows portrays for my site.

OS X uses a font rendering and screen smoothing mechanism that is unparalleled. My choice of images and fonts for the website was not accurately displayed across all platforms, as I recently found out. Certain images with lower resolutions seemed to have jagged edges (notably, the RSS feed button in the sidebar). A side-by-side comparison of ssaidoor.com, with Safari on Mac OS X and Internet Explorer (and Firefox) on Windows XP, evinced glaring differences in the font and image rendering, with the illustration being of generally inferior quality on Windows.

I’ve made some changes to mitigate these differences, such as adding a new higher-resolution image for the RSS feed button. I need to experiment with some new fonts for the website.

I snapped this picture at a local grocery store, where a kiosk’s sole function of displaying catchy ads for coupons and new products was marred by a familiar Windows error, although not quite as attention-grabbing this time as the other one I had blogged about.

(click for larger image)

Interestingly, the command line reveals that the kiosk runs Laplink Everywhere, commercial software that allows remote access to a PC from anywhere. I guess all the kiosks from the store (and across the country) connect to a central machine that selects the advertisements to be run by the store, and thus rely on 24/7 internet connectivity for their operation. Given that the kiosk is using a capable machine with a complete Windows XP installation, I would have guessed that a better design would be to run local custom software and just provide daily (or even hourly) updates via the internet connection - which is also the way most Windows spyware work.

Of course, capital costs could have been cut significantly if the kiosk ran cheaper x86 hardware with a basic Linux installation - although I wonder if that was even an option considered by the company that designed the kiosk.

The photographer insists this is an original, unedited picture, and I have no real reason to disagree. I believe Coca-Cola would have received some additional attention than what they bargained for. The picture was taken at Piccadilly Circus in London.

(1600×1063 version)

Picture shared by Rosso (afka siamonesti) under a Creative Commons license.

I snapped this picture at the local big-name retail computer store while casually browsing for computers. While I am not exactly in the market for a new computer running Windows Vista, this particular screen display did pull me towards the laptops section. This screen was running through the entire time I was in the store. It would help if the guys ambling around in blue shirts and khaki pants would take a peek at the displays every once in a while.

I just received a comment on my previous post about Apple’s unfair attitude - disallowing running OS X as a virtual machine, while happily supporting and encouraging the use of Windows on Macs through Parallels and Bootcamp (which might be a bundled feature for the next big OS X release, Leopard).

The prevention of virtualization of OS X has different reasons, in my opinion. The OS has been optimized to run on Apple hardware, which is a tiny subset of computer hardware that Windows has to be able to recognize. If OS X is opened for virtual machines, Apple will have to inadvertently provide support for hardware that they do not make. This is extra effort with no real benefit for them. In fact, it quite possibly would adversely effect Macintosh sales - this is not something Apple would appreciate, especially when they are trying to increase market share with their switcher campaign.

Supporting Windows on the Mac, on the other hand, is a big plus because a significant section of people cite one or more Windows-only applications as their reason to not consider a Mac. Providing this support takes away from that argument and makes the Mac an attractive option.

Apple is careful to project themselves as an experience provider (as opposed to a software vendor) while making the claim that OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system. The concept here is that with Apple, everything ‘just works’. That may not necessarily be true once you have a virtual system with a whole new hardware ecosystem. Microsoft has been battling that for years - hardware vendors’ lack of updated driver support for example, can fuel the angst toward Windows even when Microsoft is not the real culprit. By locking in to a known hardware configuration, Apple can manage to sell a premium computational device that concentrates on usability like no one else does.

The day has finally arrived, and Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to market its brand new offering.

Engadget is hosting their own welcome party with a generous heap of pictures in a Vista gallery. One of the screen grabs did catch my eye: look at the window shell in this particular screen capture. It surely indicates that we may have not seen the last of the classic Windows GUI that has been around since Windows 95. So much for interface redesign from the ground up.

Engadget: Vista Gallery