The dog days in bucolic New York, coming soon...

Believe it or not, New York is like a big small town in the summer where you can actually walk lonely and quiet streets and feel life passing you by as if you were an spectator of yesteryear, in the times of typewriters, perhaps quills... This year I don't even know when New York's PC Expo will take place or if it's going to happen altogether. I wanted to go back to Tech-Ed, this time in Orlando, but it wasn't to be. Perhaps I'll return to another bucolic town, Los Angeles, for Tech-Ed 2009. Time to have the most productive summer, ever. Seriously. (This view is from Long Island City at sunset, by the East river).

The modern Ada Lovelaces and Grace Hoppers

Just came accross some "news" about some "geek girls"
who do high-level engineering and some other "cool" stuff and obviously have a say on Windows Vista, actually they're full of praise. [Their site is not up-to-date, though]. These are the modern incarnations of those women who challenged society's machismo, very prevalent throughout history, like the mathematician and Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the British poet Lord Bryon, Augusta Ada Byron, after whom the programming language Ada was named, and the American wizard Grace Hopper, the first woman to get a PhD in Mathematics at Yale, and who was instrumental in the creation of the legendary COBOL programming language. Books seldom bother to highlight the fact that behind great science feats there were women. I'm just making this reflection on this "Father's day" weekend when I want to pay tribute to my late father, a winner against all odds...
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Want to see what's under the hood?

Then, try the "Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor" that provides tools for analyzing system performance. This monitor is one of the many features that make me love Windows Vista and give power users (all right, PC geeks) more power and control, although regular users will seldom have to use this Monitor. The Monitor consists of three great tools: 1) the Resource Overiew (which is the home page, by default, shown here), 2) the Performance Monitor, and 3) the Reliability Monitor. The latter offers a System Stability Report with detailed accounts of Software (Un)installs, Application Failures, Hardware Failures, Windows Failures, and Miscellaneous Failures. All of which will help you pinpoint whatever is not right with your system. How do you get there? Open a DOS prompt and type the command "perfmon", or better yet, press the Windows Key and the R (run) and type "perfmon", or if you definitely don't like to type commands, the old-fashioned way, go to Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Performance Information and Tools > Advanced Tools (on the left column) > Open Reliability and Performance Monitor. Enjoy! [This or a similar feature, under another name, I'm sure, I always saw and admired in Linux (which I used for the first time in the sumer of 2002) and MAC OS].

When it comes to software, nobody's perfect

This morning while working with one of my favorite tools (Dreamweaver) the program told me that "No error occurred" (?!), which inspired this post. I was trying to "Go to code" in the CSS panel. So don't blame it always on the Operating System, because bad programming can happen to the best of breed. DISCLAIMER: This post is not intended against Adobe and/or the former Macromedia software. On the contrary, I believe that they produce the finest and most efficient sofware both for Windows and Mac. This is not an issue, just a curiosity. Notice how I assigned this post to the "Trivia" category.

Another "expert" with no direct experience...

A pseudo journalist, apparently, who admittedly still uses Windows 2000, wants readers to believe, using word games, buzzwords, and some dubious statistics, that he is right about Windows Vista. The problem is that these "experts" abound and uninformed or plainly clueless consumers believe them.

"Slow adoption..." it has happened before

...because people (and businesses) are used to a "comfort zone" (hey! it's a human thing, I know), it takes a while to adopt change, especially when it comes to a paradigm shift. Digging out old news from 2000 (!) I came across this jewel: Many analysts now project continued slow Windows 2000 adoption through the first half of 2001, in part because of sluggish U.S. PC sales and larger economic conditions. Sound familiar? And to think that now people not only clinch to XP but also to Windows 2000 desktop and server, almost 9 years after release (!) That piece of news of 15 December 2000 declared upfront that a "Slow adoption of new Office, Windows hurts Microsoft". Did it actually?

Yes, you can run a lot of new (and old) software

In case you're wondering what I'm doing with VISTA (which, by the way, it's my primary tool as a consultant on a daily basis)... FYI I'm running all Office 2007 SP1 applications, except Visio, Office Visio 2003 Pro SP3, Visual Studio 2008 Pro and .NET Framework 3.5, IIS 7 (which I know is even greater than what I know of it so far), Adobe CS3 Web Premium suite (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, the fabulous Acrobat 8 Pro, etc), WS_FTP Pro 2007, CanonScan Toolbox 4.8 (for my scanner), Macromedia Freehand MX (2003), QuickTime player 7.4.5, Windows Media Player 11 and a bunch of "legacy" software. My favorite is the Random House Webster's English dictionary, version 1.0 (1992!). Also, one application I created in 2001 using VB 6.0 Pro (to make it run I just had to register a VB control). All of them without a hiccup and really fast for an "old" computer (2005) like mine. It's a computer designed for Windows XP (!)

...and I'm still using my 10-year old HP Deskjet 722C printer (for quick drafts), which Windows Vista took care of, drivers and all.

If you don't believe me of if you have any particular question, please write to me. Being there, done that.

Let the real day-to-day Vista users speak up!