Epnix.Com

I have found my nemisis when it comes to blogging, and it is the “delete” button, that includes it’s best friend “backspace”.  Why?  Becouse that’s pretty much what has happened the past few months to me posting a new blog entery.  That and I don’t sit here and hammer out blog posts untill they are done.  Though in some cases, one should consider themselves lucky that I’ve not posted some of the “walls of text” that I’ve written.

Side Note: funny thing is, when most people get started reading something, they finish it, no matter how bad it is.  I wonder why that is? Maybe a glimmer of hope that something intellengent would come out of the 10-20 minutes that they have just wasted prior to that?  Or I suppose it could be that everybody DOES love a train wreck and just has to poor though it all.  This way in the event they happen upon the unlucky sod that wrote it, they can let them know in detail what was wrong.  I don’t know, I suppose I could look into it more… what do you think?

Regardless I’ve had more then a couple of posts that have never made it out of draft as I didn’t like them for one reason or another, and instead of fixing them.  Delete!There were 2 in the que just a few mins ago, one was another verision of this very post, that just hit the magic delete function.  One reason is that I’ll get started writeing a post, then have to leave it for one reason or another.  Writing, interupted, well at least for me, is never a good thing as it takes hours for me to get back on track as to where I was going with something.  The problem is, when the writing got interupted, it may be days before I get back to it.  So anything I thought was a good idea or maybe somewhat humorius, is gone.  Also when I look over the post in question I start thing oh that wrong, and this don’t work, and….. bah, might as well start over.   After that the big problem is, I had so much to day about whatever it was I was about to write about. Plus I want to add on the latest “news” or thoughts to what is already a large post.  I end up with a wall of text that has a tempral, space / time issue.  I alude to future stuff while I write past stuff as if it was happeneing shortly before writeing it instead of days later.  Yep, and another post bites the dust.

Anyhow, so let me get this post off before it goes by the way side and gets deleted like so many others.

Have a good one

While talking to a friend of mine (yes, believe it or not I do have a few friends) he asked if I had seen the new Safari web browser.  I will admit, I don’t follow Apple stuff to much. I’m not a hater, or a die hard Microsoft user, I just no Apply fan boi.  So really I didn’t even know that Safari is up to version 4, or that it had a major release a few weeks ago.  I was informed that it was really cool, and looked great, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

It’s kind of funny though, to go to the Apple website you wouldn’t know that the software was recently released. As a matter of fact to look at the website as I type this, there is no mention what-so-ever about the release that happened in July 8th (today being the 17th so 9 days later).  After a little bit of searching I found the page (if your interested its apple.com/safari It can also be found by clicking the downloads link on the anywhere in the apple site), and took a look at the marketing spiel.  One thing I beginning to hate about companies and their use of the word Innovation.  They don’t seem to care if a technology or setup is out there or not.  As long as it wasn’t done “Their Way”, then they are providing innovation to the market.  The example here is:

With Top Sites, Safari keeps a running tally of the websites you visit and automatically creates a graphically rich page that displays up to 24 thumbnails of your  favorites.

This is not Innovation in itself as the Google browser, Chrome, has had this since release I do believe.  Now they didn’t have it on a stylish solid background, with the thumbnails looking like they curve around the screen. All that though is just display, displaying a users top sites is not a Apple Innovation.  The items below on the page are not even innovative, really they are nothing more then the normal progression of features.  HTML 5 is a up coming recommendation (though not fully set yet) the same with CSS3.  Really the only thing on the page that is possibly innovative is the WebKit project as it is a true derivative work of the KDE project’s KHTML software library.  Also, you would think that companies would word security statements a little bit better. A few months ago, at a “security conference” a Mac was hacked into in under 10 seconds via a Safari 3.2 library.  So reading that a software package has “be built From the ground up with security in mind” tends to make me nervous.  Let me mention again, that yes I’m tearing about the marketing speak on Safari page, but they are not the only ones guilty of this.  So I’m not being a hater, just it happens to be the site I’m talking about right now.

With the negative marketing speak out of the way, I’ve downloaded and installed the software on my laptop, and fired it up.  If anything can be said about the products Apple releases, they look great.  Safari is no exception to this.  Really, if Apple really wants’ to innovate the market, they should leave the feature creep to the other developers  and just show the world how to make those functions work and look good.  Safari’s version of top sites looks many times better then Chromes version, same with the history search that uses page thumbnails so you can see which page on a site your selecting.  Apple lists 150 features for the Safari browser on their website, some new, others not, but since this is my first run with safari, I guess they will be new to me. 

One feature that I need to check out a bit more is the Speculative Loading.  Basically Safari is going to try to guess which page or document your going to go to next and pre-load it ahead of time.  This probably ties in with Apples claim that Safari is faster then the competition.  It might not actually be faster in processing information, it might have just had a head start getting it.  Where as this has some obvious benefits in the rendering category, I have to wonder what it’s going to due to my cell phone bill.  You see many times when I’m on the web with my laptop, I tend to be in places that don’t have wi-fi access.  So instead of Wi-Fi, I’m tethered to my Blackberry under Verizon’s plan. I get 6GB a month of bandwidth, which, since I tend not to be on YouTube or Hulu when I’m tethered, has been more then enough (I will admit though, I really wish there was more bandwidth usage for my money so I can view more video.  But then who doesn’t wish they had more when there is a hard and set limit.)  My concern is though, say I’m on a news site with links to Video that I wouldn’t normally click on cause I’m using the tethered cell connection, that Safari may still be downloading all that information anyhow.  I’m going to have to remember to test that.

Well looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me to test out this browser.  Granted I’m sure if I do some surfing, someone else has already done the work for me, but what fun is that?!

Today I has going to write about how great of a job windows 7 does in handwriting recognition.  I was going to say what a great job its doing with both my print and cursive writing. But then I found out about a small, but very annoying issue.  See I’ve actually tried to write this twice now. But somehow the cursor moved, so when I went to insert the text it went to the void, never to be seen again.  this really sucks, because the handwriting recognition is really that good So this flaw that causes you to Completely lose your text is just that glaring. In some ways its kind of funny. Just about everywhere else in windows there are multiple levels of undo, yes/no boxes that get in the way and so on. But not in text conversion.  So the moral of that story will be to hit the insert button often, and make sure the insert cursor hasn’t moved.

As I play around with handwriting recognition, I do have to wonder though.  Is this a technology that missed it’s time?  You may have heard that type is soulless.  You can’t derive feelings from a typed page like you can with a written one.  There is a visual clue as to a persons feelings as you look at how ones handwriting flows and loops, or how much more messy or neater it is from what you are use to from that writer.  Even how much pressure somebody put on a pen could let one one if the writer was hurried, or excited.  There are those who made a career out of interpreting  this, However most people could pretty much figure it out from notes and letters from friends. If I were to type or write a line of pure sarcasm it would be easily understood in a written note, but usually confused in a typed one.

The problem is, for me at least, I can type faster then I can write. Even with the high rate of recognition, and the the speed at which I was writing, I still can typed twice as much in the time it took to write the first paragraph. I know that’s not true for everybody, for that matter, most people who Graduated High school up to the mid to late 90’s typing was more of a after thought.  I have pain stakenly watched many people hunt and peck there way though typing on the computer.  However this is becoming less of a case for those that are graduating now.  Were I was the odd one (for more reasons then this one admittedly) posting on forums back in the glory days of Bulletin Board Systems. Now there’s Blogging, and Facebook or Twitter micro-blogging, web based forums are a form of support, people are publishing there own web pages and so on.  My kids, as part of there Elementary school Academic requirements, are taking computer classes that evolve on how to type or use the mouse to answer questions.  It’s definitely come a long way from the Apple PC that was in the library, that you could use if you wanted to, but was in no way required.  So i think it’s safe to assume that the successive generations will be more efficient typists then they are writers. Of course… y can’t type english…lol.. haha..is another story..ROFLKOPTR!!!11!!!!! *sigh* there are some that make my “version” of bad English still look awesome.

Where then does that put us as far as a need to write, with ether “pen and paper” or digitally. Well for one, it’s still easier to transition from text to graphics and graphics in meetings or class.  Graphics could be flowcharts, org charts or other such “Knowledge diagrams”, maybe a sketch up of a scene for a film or photo storyboard and such. Though programs like microsoft word have things like smart art, you’re still stopping one task and calling up or inserting some other program.  One thing that is well noted as a reason for keyboard shortcuts is to avoid having to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse to do what ever needs to be clicked on.  so in this transitioning it’s more efficient to be using a pen or stylus/tablet then to be typing.  Medical disabilities could also limit the ability to be able to type properly making handwriting a more efficient tool.  Lets also not forget that a pen / pencil and a notebook of paper is lighter then most laptops, and can be used for days, weeks, months, after the laptop would run out of power, even though it’s limited to the amount of paper and ink that you have.  There’s still something to be said about not needing power.

Well I have to stop this mental exercise for now, maybe I’ll come back to it later, as it’s time for me to get going.  What do you think? How long will we as a collective whole be writing instead of typing?

Recently I decided that I needed to try a few things out on my laptop, cause, you know, I’m a glutton for punishment apparently.  Really though it was due to my install of Windows7 on my lap top when Release Candidate 1 (RC1) came out.  My laptop is a convertible tablet, so yes it works like a normal laptop, but the display can swing around and close, monitor side up and be a stylus or touch screen tablet.  The fact that it can be a tablet is the reason I bought it, instead of a fancy, shinny, and a few other pretty adjectives 17” multimedia wonder.  The problem was, when I did a upgrade install of windows 7 from Vista, when using the stylus the cursor would go spastic, jumping around where it was touching.  And as far as a touch screen, that wasn’t working at all.  At first, it was no big deal, as I was still able to use it as a normal laptop, but in the back of my mind it was bothering me.  Well the “pre-installed games” limited duration came up, and the anti-virus needed to be upgraded (Norton 360 version 2, didn’t work on Windows 7) so it seemed like a good time to torment myself.

With the reinstall I wanted to do 2 things;

1. See if a fresh install of windows worked better then my upgrade install.
2. See how well Linux worked on this laptop.

I should have listed them in the opposite order, as that’s how I did the installs.  Browsing over to Ubuntu I downloaded the ISO of the latest version of the distribution (9.04), backed up my laptop and installed away.  I could have done some form of “Nifty” Dual boot system, but I figured eh, why fight with it.  Since the goal here was to see how well it worked, I wanted to give it plenty of space for the best case scenario.  The “out of box” experience wasn’t to bad, most things worked, including the wireless network.  What didn’t work was the touch screen and stylus, I didn’t have any audio, and the buttons around the edge of the display didn’t do anything.  Still it wasn’t a bad start, considering that most laptops have a lot of proprietary hardware that require a bit of tweaking to get to work properly.  A quick trip to Google led me to quite  a few posts regarding my laptop and Ubuntu.  It didn’t take long for me to have sound working (just typed one command, one line of text, save and reboot, done) and a few more minutes later I could use the stylus for some text input.  For the most part I stopped there.  The fix that enabled the stylus was suppose to also enable touch capabilities, also the procedure for getting the display to rotate was going to take a bit. But I was pretty confident I saw what I was going see as far as how well the laptop would work.

Now before any of the Linux faithful decided to jump all over me, yes I know that I could with a little bit of effort and a day or 2 could probably get just about everything working, and be a “sort of” happy Linux user.  I’m not knocking Linux here, just looking at it strickly from my requirements for a OS right now on this laptop. In my investigating of the the issues I also looked up the software possibilities for touch and stylus.  And the selection is rather low, and is really still in development.  Going back to my original intent behind the laptop was usage as a tablet so really that’s what I was considering as I said I saw what I was going to see, I had cell writer, and Journal (I think that’s the one, I can’t remember now) and while it was good, and worked well, it just wasn’t developed enough yet.  For one thing, I was hoping the Journal software would convert the chicken-scratch that I wrote to text, like Microsoft One Note.  Beyond that, I really like Linux, it’s fast, Compiz-Fusion (best video I could find), is everything windows Aero wishes is would be when it grows up, the software carries the right price tag and all that.  Regardless it was time to move on.

Windows 7 Had been installed on this laptop once before, it was done as a upgrade, which took hours.  I was rather annoyed with it especially since I had a few things that didn’t work.  Granted these issues were quickly forgotten as Win7 worked in all other ways.  Due to that install I knew I had some driver incompatibilities.  There was a message to that fact as I was doing the install, and of course I wanted to get rid of all that “wonderful” additional software that HP graciously gave me with the laptop.  Of course half of this was already taken care of since I completely wiped out windows when I had installed Linux.  So it was easy enough to pop the Win7 disk in and start from scratch.  Instead of hours, it took less then a hour.  Come to think of it, I think I had Windows installed, patched, and was downloading the drivers for the display buttons (the only think that wasn’t working after the initial install) in less then a hour.  In about 30 minutes to a hour later I have Office and OneNote installed.  I was trucking along.  Yes, as soon as Windows came up from install, I had both stylus and touch screen input available working perfectly.  Of course it wasn’t perfect, As I mentioned, I still needed to download the drivers for the buttons around the display, particularly the one that let me rotate the display.  Also, the fingerprint reader won’t work with the default windows software.  It took me maybe 2 minutes to fix the first issue, haven’t looked into the 2nd one yet, just wasn’t important yet.  Yes, I’d like to not have to type out password all the time, (yes I’m one of those, who like to password protect my windows account even on my home PC’s.) especially when I’m in tablet mode. That Aside though, windows 7 passed as far as what I needed for usability.  Plus for the few things that didn’t work, it was going to take a lot less time to get them fixed that what I was looking at Ubuntu.  So Windows 7 it is on this laptop…. For now at least.

Along with the patching of Windows 7, there was a optional item for Microsoft Live.  Contained within that package is a program called Windows Live Writer, which is what I’m using to type the blog post up.  To be honest that’s really what got me to actually get a update in, but I’ll save that story for another day.

Mike