Blog posts for 2007

What ever you do, do not submit your email to them. After several phone calls, they assured me that my email would be removed, but it never has.

They continue to send unwanted SPAM. Companies like this should be pelted with rocks.

I got married yesterday to Shannon. Hurray :)

Homer:

How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?

7 part interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates

I have multiple Macs and PCs. I like to use the Macs more, but I do most of my development in windows. I tried using parallels at first, but it turned out to be slow for several apps.

I've been using parallels with my MBP for a few months now. My MBP had 2GB of RAM and is a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Parallels always made OS X slow, and running applications like Visual Studio was painfully slow.

I decided to replace one of my 1GB sticks of RAM with a 2GB stick of RAM to reach the maximum available 3GB of RAM in my MBP. Apparently if you try to use two 2GB sticks of RAM, then there could be memory address overlap and problems can arrive.

What did I find? The performance difference after installing the extra 1GB of RAM is amazing. Windows runs extremely fast in parallels, and there are no delays at all. I have parallels configured to use 16MB video and 1500MB of RAM. It runs better than my best PC. Before I had parallels configured to use 1GB of RAM.

I even keep parallels open during my normal work day while in OS X just for convenience's sake. This is something I wouldn't dream of doing with my old configuration.

In conclusion, if you're going to buy a MBP and you are going to use parallels. Make sure you select the 3GB RAM maximum. It makes all the difference in the world.

In all operating systems that I've seen the file copy dialog sucks. Why is this simple dialog that is used by everyone everyday so hard to come up with a good design?

Mac is better than all versions of windows, but it still isn't ideal. Windows fails to give you a do not replace apply to all option.

It would be nice to see a list of some sort detailing all of the status' of each file that was copied. It would be even nicer to be able to select this list and copy it into the clipboard.

The main problem with windows is if a single file fails to copy, the entire copy operation is aborted.

I could go on with several more points, but it just comes down to the developers lack of caring for the operating systems they develop.

Apple not licensing its OS to other hardware vendors, gives Apple a big advantage overall.

Anytime there is any type of hardware upgrade, Apple gets the credit (and traffic/hits/sales). When a new processor gets released by Intel (for example today's 8-core release), Microsoft will not get any new traffic from it; However, Apple will get millions of unique hits (once they release it) because of the hardware release.

The other good part, is that Apple can guarantee that anyone that has an Apple, has a good reliable, fast, non-sluggish experience. With Microsoft, they can't guarantee this since Windows runs on any PC hardware which is not sold by Microsoft.

Every version of windows allowed each application to stop the computer from entering sleep mode.

This is an important function and is required by several applications (for example backup software). This ability was removed in Windows Vista. I.e. Windows Vista (without manual tweaking of a group policy) does not allow an application to veto sleep mode.

This is just another reason why Windows Vista sucks.

It took Microsoft 5 years to finally release version 7 of IE.

Internet Explorer 7 has no original ideas and it is largely just copying Firefox and Opera's features. It is an improvement from version 6.0, but I'm largely disappointed overall.

You would think that a company like Microsoft would have support for emerging standards like SVG. SVG is the acronym for Scalable Vector Graphics. I remember reading the SVG recommendation which was created by the W3C almost 6 years ago. I knew that although browsers didn't have built in support for SVG, that eventually they would.

Today I see firefox and others with built in support. Microsoft decided that this extremely important technology should not be included.

Had IE7 included SVG support, the internet would be a different, better place. Microsoft has ruined that, and as usual they have shown us just how little they care bout web standards.

Does your browser support SVG? If you can't see this than go get firefox here

Note that you can get SVG plug-ins from Corel Corporation and Adobe, but IE should have included built in support for it. Maybe adobe paid them off so that SVG wouldn't be a competitor to Flash and Microsoft's newer crappier similar product to flash.

The most important rule to writing great easy to understand emails, is simply that: Writing is not a linear process.

Read the email over, add to your email, spend time on your email, cut your email up into sections.

Replace words like "it" with the object that you are talking about. Your readers will probably have no clue what you're referring to in your email.

Reading is a linear process. Writing is not. It's really that simple.