So I finally managed to get Vista installed last week, and have been using it a bit since then.
Now I know this might not be what you'd expect me to say.. but I think I prefer it over XP already. It's definitely an improvement in some ways!

The Start Menu has been hidden away, and replaced with some icons for commonly used items, plus a box to type in which will "do what you mean", a-la Sherlock and Quicksilver on the Mac, Tracker on GNOME(Linux) and Launchy on XP. FFS, finally! So that's a big win, IMO.

Next up, the user vs administrator separation. Sure, it does seem annoying that you have to stop and Authorise actions, but you know what? What is a good thing. I *like* knowing that run-away apps or naughty programs can't just sneak around modifying firewall rules or any old system files without my permission. You only need to do this authorisation stuff when you're installing new programs or modifying lower-level settings, so after your initial period of setup it doesn't get in the way. I'm not sure why there was such a fuss made about this. (Or maybe I'm just used to having to do it occasionally, having used *NIX and Macs before?)

I heard a lot of complaints about performance, but it doesn't seem too bad. Startup time is comparable to XP, possibly even slightly faster! General use, clicking menus, loading programs, etc seems fine too. Copying files, which I've heard gripes about, seemed to take longer to start copying than reasonable (ie. more than milliseconds) but wasn't what I would call delayed. The new File Explorer windows take some getting used to as they've changed the behaviour to be more like the Mac and Gnome UI, but still keeping aspects of the old way. I haven't made my mind up about whether it's easier or harder to use, yet.

So far I've only tested the in-game performance of Crysis.. at highest detail level, yeah, it ran a bit slow, ~15-20 fps with some hiccups.. but then, in highest detail, under XP, it also runs like a dog.. I think i lost about 5fps going to Vista, but keep in mind that under Vista it runs in "Ultra-high" detail, vs "High" in XP, and thus it's looking nicer in Vista in return for those FPS I lost. I'll need to test some other less stupidly-poorly-performing games too.
And probably buy some more RAM now I have an OS that can play games AND handle 4GB. :P
(Windows XP famously won't deal with more than 3GB of RAM)
But the complaint that Vista runs games at literally half the speed of XP doesn't seem justified.

Driver support: Well, my nVidia 8800GT and the Creative X-Fi were supported by 64bit vista drivers available from the manufacturers website, and nothing has crashed, so that seems alright. I'm afraid I don't have any exotic hardware in the gaming machine, so haven't got anything else to test! The various features provided by the motherboard (usb, network, etc) were all supported out of the box by Vista fine, and I wasn't surprised that my common USB devices also were supported.
I have a $3.00 USB MIDI adaptor winging it's way to me from the distant lands of China, via eBay, and that'll probably be more of a test :)

Software like DaemonTools worked just fine.

I haven't encountered any of the DRM that is meant to be under the surface, yet. But then, that would only apply if I used the machine for media (music, video, etc), rather than just gaming and surfing the web. (I still boot into Linux or Leopard for anything else!) However it does worry me that it's there.

Some gripes:
* Modal dialog windows are STILL not resizeable. Come on! Why not? What's wrong with making the "Save As" dialog box bigger than a postage stamp? On modern monitors, it's getting stupid.
* The default 'Off' button in the menu is actually Standby. You have to get into a little side-menu to get to the "Restart" and "Actually turn off damnit" options.
* Erm, it DID take me 5 attempts and a new hard drive to get it installed, although it was easy when it finally went on.
* I did note that Ableton Live (6.0.10) worked fine with DirectX input/output, but when I tried to use ASIO i/o everything went silent. I have no idea if that's Creative or Ableton's fault, but Live 6 is fairly old, and I had forgotten to switch the soundcard to 'Music production' mode. (The X-Fi is unique in having modes for Gaming, Music and Music production.)
* Windows still doesn't automatically pick up nearby printers. OSX and Gnome have been doing this for ages.

A note: All of this was tested on a recent copy of Vista (64 bit edition) with SP1 streamlined, and the latest drivers for my sound and video, on a high-end machine (Hitachi 500 GB SATA HDD, Core 2 Duo 2.88 GHz, 2 GB DDR800 RAM, 1GB ReadyBoost). I suspect this helps matters - I've heard from friends that SP1 made Vista usable, and that driver support was terrible initially, but decent now.. and I am running it on a moderately-well-specced machine.

Conclusion: I'm still going to continue to use Linux and MacOSX more than Vista, but all-in-all, I don't think Vista is as slow and unusable as its reputation. I don't see myself going back to XP.
On the other hand, it's interesting to see that the noticeable improvements have been blatantly nicked from its competitors, and nothing particularly interesting has been added beyond that.. and in return it's bloated out to using a huge amount of RAM and disk space.

The naming of cats^H^H^H^HPerl modules is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you tail -n 3 `shuffle /usr/share/dict/names`

Oh, just remembered - would anyone like to buy a 512 Mbyte DDR400 PC3200 CL2.5 DIMM?
I had a stick that failed, which I returned to Corsair, who sent me a new one. Catch is, it didn't match the existing memory (which needs to be paired in my machine) so I bought another one. So, would anyone like this one? £20? Tests fine in memtest86.

Is anyone using gShrooms?
It looks pretty neat - essentially, it allows you to auto-share your music, including with your instant-messenger contacts.
It'll also auto-detect other music sources on your network via standard means, so I *think* it might Just Work with the Apple gear that does that too. I'll install it later and see.
The guy doesn't look like he's updated it since 2005 though, so I'm not sure what the state of play is today.

Edit: See also mt-DAAPd and the recent versions of Rhythmbox that support DAAP. (Erm, and iTunes.)
I'm sharing my entire load of music at home via mt-DAAPd now; anyone on the VPN should be able to see it. (However, I can't at work, although I can reach the admin interface. Maybe something isn't right..)

Windows XP is amusing, kind of.
There's an icon in the system tray, which you normally use to unmount (disconnect) removeable media, like external harddrives, USB memory keys, etc.
But for some reason, ever since I reinstalled Windows, that icon tells me I can use it to "Safely remove ST3200822AS (Drives C, D)". Umm.. Drive C is the one Windows is installed on. And it's a fixed, internal harddrive.

How is it possible to safely remove the drive the operating system is running on??

I've bought a new video card (Nvidia 7900GTO). Is anyone interested in buying my ATI X800? It still is one of the fastest AGP-based videocards around, so for people with older PCs (ie. not made in 2006), it's the best option.

(Edit: the IM-to-LJ bot doesn't handle nested square brackets in the topic!)

So... tonight! What! Shall! We! Do!?
(I may have been drinking too much espresso...)

In other news tonight.. I have Dojo-ified one of my apps, and now it is pretty and oh-so-web2.0-baby. It also takes about 20x longer to display the page. Ahem. Such is the price of progress, etc.
Why can't these toolkit developers ever write bloody docs though? I don't know javascript, I'm crap at HTML, and I'm annoyed I had to learn it, and JSON RPC, in order to read the source code in order to figure out how the hell the thing is supposed to fit together! Luckily, it's not a very complicated language.

I'm posting this from inside XGL.. and I have to say, it blows me away that it actually works, and it's so amazingly SHINY!
It makes MacOSX's "Aqua" look dated, in terms of blatant use of technology for pretty effects and stuff.
The fact that it appears to work fine with general X apps (eg. I'm watching a doctor who episode in mplayer, and browsing in firefox) is what really surprises me.

For a couple of screenshots, look below the cut tag. They demonstrate the rather cute cube that virtual desktops are mapped onto, a working Gnome setup, and a semi-transparent mplayer window playing over gimp and firefox. The rest of the "feel" and effects aren't really captureable in a static shot.. The way windows distort and wobble as you move and resize them, or menus spring and fade in and out. I'm quite happy admit that most of this is pointless novelty, but hey.. It's nice to be able to say that Linux got there first, before OSX or MS Vista.
( two screenshots )
Yes, I know this makes me an unrepentant geek..

So, what have I been up to lately?
on Monday, headed to Painshill Park. Very nice. Very cool. Mid-18th century landscape designed to create scenes. I took my Nikon film body along; but would like to go back another time with the full D70 kit (inc infrared).
From the top of the "gothic tower", I could just about make out some features of London with the aid of my binoculars. (Canary Wharf, Telecom tower, Wembley stadium, and also Hampton court castle.)

I caved and ordered a PSP, which arrived today. It really is terribly shiny. It's just a pity it doesn't have a touch-screen.
Setting up the GNU/Linux PSP development toolchain and sdk was surprisingly easy.. just download and run a perl script some guy wrote, and it downloads, patches, and configures everything you need. Sorting out ffmpeg to recode videos to the correct format for the PSP was a bit harder, but eventually google hit on the right mantra.
I did buy an actual genuine game too; GTA, because it has the exploit that lets you run homebrew stuff. Plus it's fun.

Still busy. Still seem to have too little time in the days.

Oh. I signed up to Skype - I am, predictably, "Wintrmute".

Watch the clocks.. It'll be "01:23 04/05/06" in half an hour.

I had a day off work today. Not entirely coincidentally, Oblivion was due to arrive today.

It's good. And I've lost a lot of today to it. It's going to be hard not to lose the rest of the weekend, too.

Last night I went to another leaving do for some people at work... and the company asked that someone secretly record who went along, because they were putting some money behind the bar, and needed to know who went, so they could tell the tax people. Lovely. Four more days until I've left too..

Full Mooners at the Comedy Store last night was great.. an absolutely hilarious end to this run of the night. I was feeling decidedly ill (as I have been all week), but was laughing my arse off anyway. (It was much funnier than last week's).

The only thing more boring than performing this, would be *watching it*.. and they're planning on doing it for eight hours?

The performance A la recherche du temps perdu takes the code literally. We are reading the machine-code version of Marcel Proust's novel. During the eight hours of a working day the human performers are playing computer. From the analog to the digital and back again: The sequence of events of the performance is described in this manual. Starting from the ASCII-Version of Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu it is then re-coded into its underlying zeros and ones and then read by two performers alternately (one is reading the zeros, the other one the ones). The third person is CPU (the Central Processing Unit): She interprets the zeros and ones with the aid of an ASCII allocation table, cuts out the corresponding letter from the prepared sheets and turns it over to Display, who sticks it onto the wall panel. After eight hours of performance about 250 characters can be processed. During the act of reading, interpreting and presenting the work of art emerges, posing questions about the nature of the digital and the analogue, of work and art, time and beauty.
players:
False (Zero): James Smith
True (One): Valie Djordjevic
CPU: Karl Heinz Jeron
Display: Elvina Flower

http://khjeron.de/index.php?cSID=&cat_id=1826

Does anyone know what the current status of Lego robotics and interfacing with Linux is like?
Let me explain..

My house has suffered a few power or gas failures recently. They have been entirely our fault, due to the pre-pay meter running out.
burritob suggested we should hook a webcam up and keep track of the credit that way. Hell, we might even be able to do OCR on it. As I have spare linux-compatible webcams, this would be fine, except that one of the meters needs you to press a button in order to display remaining credit.

So, I'm wondering what state Lego Robotics stuff is like these days. It all came along too late after my childhood for me to have played with it, but any excuse to get some out again is good.

Does anyone know if you can directly control stuff though? Eg. I want to write a program, that will run on Linux, that can give the Lego commands to turn motors and stuff, so I could put the webcam on a sliding rail that moves between the two meters, and has another motor that extends a rod to push the "display credit" button.
Is that sort of thing possible? I think I've seen Mindstorms demos that looked like it was all standalone - eg. you program it once, but then it just runs off and executes the program, rather than continues to receive input from the PC. I would need to have interaction with the PC though, in order to take the webcam shot at the correct time.

Any suggestions on other technology to use?

Copied over from xterminal: TES: Oblivion has gone gold, and should be shipped 20th of March!

Went to upgrade the Linux server and DSL gateway at home. This should take about 20-30 minutes; I expected it to take about an hour, since things always go wrong..
Then I discovered that the new motherboard doesn't even support the AGP videocard that was in there. Joy..

I am then left with the prospect of either using my gaming PC's video card (a radeon X800 XT PE.. a card that needs a secondary power plug, just to work), or trying to get the Linux server to boot up fine without a videocard. This took substantially longer than I had planned.. but got there in the end.

Turned out that it would have worked straight away if it wasn't for a couple of things:
* Older versions of grub just plain don't work without a video card.
* Loading a graphical splash screen on boot is a bad idea too.
* It's really hard working blind; esp when it's commodity hardware that doesn't have serial console support for the BIOS, and you need the video card in the other PC in order to be able to attempt to network connect.

It's working now though, but I'll keep an eye out for a PCI video card I think..

In other news - the laptop works with the spare USB ADSL modem (that I havne't used before) fine.

Some of you might have noticed that the BBC is running a distributed-computing thing for Climate change predictions.

You might be interested to know that they are using the open-source BOINC project to handle it, so you can run this stuff on loads of operating systems. Gentoo has BOINC in Portage as sci-misc/boinc. The UNIX versions have a headless server mode with remote GUI support, which is nice.

More RMS updates:
* Autocomplete tags (may need you to Shift-Reload once on the site to get the new CSS if you've visited recently)
* Add thumbnails to lists
* Minor cosmetic adjustments (sort tags, list several per line)

It's been a while since I've hacked on Rate My Sanity!!1!, but I've added a small feature now, which was a right PITA to implement.
The site now has Flickr-style tags implemented in AJAX. Totally pointless, but off you go.. tag away! Watch the input boxes fade in and out..

For example, I am tagged as "male" and "geek".
You can browse by tags at http://sanity.dryft.net/tags

Have fun. Does this make it Web 2.0 now? :)

I've put up another update to Rate My Sanity.
* Ratings only displayed after you've voted.
* Thumbnail of previous profile displayed in a little box.
* Randomness removed - When you vote, you just get the next profile in sequence. Clicking the 'Random' link at the top still gives you random profiles though.
* Layout adjusted slightly
[Edit: plus these:]
* Fixed bug in statistics (min/max were swapped)
* Added count of total votes to your stats page.
* Leaderboard

If you get wierd layout results when you visit the site next, try hitting shift-reload, as your browser may have cached the old stylesheet.

I've updated Rate My Sanity!!1! to v0.03.
When everyone hit the site at once yesterday, a concurrency bug showed up and probably caused a few of you to get long loading times, blank pages, and missing pictures.
That should be fixed now.

The randomness of the Random function still sucks though.

[Edit@17:50: Randomness improved.]