Living with Office 2007 Beta 2

Recently, Microsoft has released both Windows Vista Beta 2 and Microsoft Office Beta 2. Both are public, although Vista will not be made available until a few weeks from now but you can download the free Office 2007 Beta 2 now from Microsoft's web site.

I, being the nerd that I am (and proud of it!), downloaded both and I'm running them on my laptop as my only Operating System and Office Suite. The usability of Vista has certainly improved, but what I really want to point out is the new Office. If you haven't seen it yet, check out some of the screenshots that people are posting on the web!

My impression? I love the new Office! The interface is much more user friendly and Microsoft has made it much easier to find all the cool features available in the different programs like Word and Excel. I have been finishing up a research project this year at school and had to create a slide show presentation as well as write a thesis paper. I used PowerPoint 2007 and Word 2007 to accomplish the respective tasks and I was quite amazed at how many cool features I was able to figure out how to use. As a result, I made some pretty awesome stuff. I've been using the new Outlook as well, and my favorite feature of that is the integrated RSS feed reader.

On the negative end, I'd say stability is the biggest problem with this beta. I've had the programs crash on me quite frequently (especially Outlook and Word). Luckily, this is only a temporary problem as the quality will be much better once Microsoft is close to releasing the final product.

And if you're interested, there's quite a storm brewing about a feature that lets you save documents as PDF files. Basically, it is being rumored that Adobe wants to file suit against Microsoft for adding the free feature, even though many other applications support exporting to PDF. Some are upset that adobe is doing this, but then there is also the conspiracy theorists that claim Microsoft is misleading the public in an attempt to harm Adobe and further promote their own PDF rival, XPS (XML Paper Specification).

What's the deal with Windows Vista

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time playing with Microsoft's next operating system, Windows Vista. It's not due for release until sometime in 2007, but I managed to sign up for the CTP (Community Technical Preview) program, so I have access to the various beta versions of the OS. One of the reasons why I've been playing with Vista is because my Imagine Cup submission is built to take advantage of the Vista platform known as WinFX.

Vista was once the target of a lot of hype, but lately, it's been the target of sharp criticism by some well known Microsoft enthusiasts. It seems that a lot of bloggers out on the net are upset because of how Microsoft promised a lot with the new operating system, but has mostly gone back on most of those promises in addition to delaying its release several times.

My take? It's certainly dissappointing to see that Microsoft aimed so high and pretty much failed to hit the target with Vista, but I think there is a lot of significance to this next Windows release, even if a few cool features were cut. It also seems to me that people in the blogosphere are making way too big a deal out of these "disappointments". Honestly, how bothered are you, personally, about the progression of the OS? If your answer is, "Chris, I don't even know what you're talking about", then my point is proven :). I think the most important part of Vista (besides the really fancy UI and graphics) is the kernel-level changes, i.e. the stuff you can't see such as inherent security, that will be the platform for which the next versions of Windows will be based.

One thing I'll mention. After playing with various versions of the Windows Vista beta, I am extremely appreciative of how stable and awesome Windows XP is. I just didn't realize how much I loved it and how well it "just worked" until I tried to use a beta product that frequently crashed, couldn't run some of my favority programs, and was combersome to navigate.

Lastly, if you haven't seen screenshots yet, here are a few you might enjoy:

• http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_5365_gallery_01.asp
• http://officeblogs.net/UI/WordVista.png
• http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsvista/default.mspx

Tablet PC Capstone at the UW

I happened to be perusing the web for some interesting content when I happened to stumble upon the following Channel9 video:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=179753

This video was apparently recorded during one of my lectures last quarter when I was taking the Tablet PC Capstone (CSE 481B) at the University of Washington. Had I known that Robert Scoble was in the classroom doing the recording, I would have tried to bribe my way into that video!

It was actually very interesting to have an interactive classroom with tablet PCs. As Professor Anderson says in the video, it's very cool to have your answer to a question displayed for all to see after we've all done our submissions - unless he explained how wrong your answer was in front of everyone! It was all anonymous though, so it wasn't a big deal. I had a few days where I was providing awesome answers that showed up on the big screen. ;-)

Overall, this was a pretty sweet class. We had to come up with a cool application that would make use of the Tablet PC technology and give several presentations of the progress we were making as the weeks went by. Some of the projects included a digital sports playbook, the foundations of a real-time strategy game (like Warcraft) that relied on pen input, a program that transformed text into your own handwriting (that one was my favorite), and a few others. My group's project was actually a collaborative mapping application where users create shared annotations on a map in real time. This is also the project we are working on for the ImagineCup competition. Not only did our project make use of Tablet PC functionality, but it was also written to use WinFX, the new development platform for Windows Vista.

Speaking of ImagineCup, we just received word that our project has just qualified to be in the Final Round of the competition for our region! Wish us luck as we travel across the bridge to the Microsoft campus to compete against other teams from across the country.

Hardware Woes

Back in the days of my high school internship at Microsoft, one of my responsibilities was to help manage my team's servers in the lab. It was a fun job, especially because it was my first experience dealing with server hardware. These were old machines, however, and seemed to constantly have problems. I was the guy who had the largest number of help requests submitted to our lab manager (Joe was his name, I believe). He once told me that I must have magnets in my pockets, because he's never had so many hardware problems until I showed up!

Sadly, I wonder if this is true in some way. Recently, the Windows server that I set up in my previous post had a series of hard-drive failures. This was a nightmare, because I'm busy enough as it is, but now I have to figure out why this thing blue-screens on me when I try to boot it up. It turned out that the file-system had been corrupted (I blaim Windows Update and a forced reboot, but arguing won't get us anywhere). In the end, the hard-drive ended up needing to be replaced and I quickly learned the importance of backups. We almost lost a huge chunk of our ImagineCup project, but thankfully, I was able to get it to finally boot up long enough for me to back up the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server databases onto my 20GB iPod (who would have guessed, Apple saves the day)! We purchased a new hard-drive (laptop hard-drives are expensive, by the way!) and now the server is up and running again...this time, with scheduled backups running automatically.

That's not the end of the story though. My beloved laptop, my relatively new Inspiron 6000 which I love dearly, decided it didn't like it's hard-drive either. Lately, it's been hanging when starting up from hibernation and sleep and occassionally freezes completely while I'm doing work. Thankfully, Dell is awesome about quickly sending me replacement parts and I should get a new hard-drive soon. Again, the iPod is currently housing my important documents and I can't help wondering if I really do have magnets embedded in my skin! These events happened within about a week! I've never had hard-disk problems in my life! Luckily, my Dell desktop (the FreeBSD box), which I've had for all four college years now, is still plugging away like a champ and has there for me during these hard times.

If you don't already, I recommend anyone who reads this learn how to back up your important files. Consider how upset you would be if you lost your music collection, photo album, electronic journals, or whatever else you keep on your computer. I was lucky because my failures weren't total - meaning, my computers would occassionally start up and let me save my data somewhere else, but if you're like my old roommate, Nate, you might not be so lucky (he lost some pretty awesome photos he had taken over the years). Windows XP comes with one basic backup program called ntbackup (Start->Run->"ntbackup"). It works fine for me. If you want something that gives you a little more fine-grained control, a prettier user interface, and lots of other file synchronization features, check out the SyncToy PowerToy from Microsoft.

Windows Server Fun

Man, school work has been hammering me so far this quarter. I've never in my life been as busy with homework and studying as I have now - and that's partly my excuse for taking so long to make a new post :).

Sometime last quarter, I started work on a project for a competition called ImagineCup (check out the link for details). I'm working with 3 other UW CSE students and I recently had the chance to setup a Windows 2003 server to use for our project. I've done a little bit of server configuration during my MS internships, but after playing with FreeBSD for a while, you learn to appreciate what Microsoft provides to make an administrator's job easier. One of the things I had to do in order to get our special server software to work was to set up a domain controller - yeah, I didn't know what that was either. A quick google search showed us how to start the installation, but it was all very easy to set up after that, even though I had no idea what I was doing!

One thing, however, that I've learned from both this server setup task as well as my MS internships - avoid complicated Beta software like the plague (in this particular case, I'm being haunted by the Microsoft's Team Foundation Server for Visual Studio development)! You'll live a much simpler and more peaceable life this way :).

Short post, but I have networking homework that I need to do today...simulating reliable communication via the unreliable UDP communication protocol - good times.

My latest pet project: FreeBSD

So I've decided to take a plunge and explore a non-MS Windows operating system. My OS of choice happened to be FreeBSD (see new logo below):



Rationale
My reasoning for playing with a new OS is simply because there is a huge amount I can learn from it. FreeBSD derives from the original Unix BSD. It's known for it's high performance especially as a server OS. I decided to try FreeBSD instead of Linux because FreeBSD, although not as popular, is more like Unix, and unlike Linux, FreeBSD is an entire operating system (Linux is only a kernel that has a huge amount of different distributions, e.g. RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, etc). I also chose FreeBSD because it wasn't Linux (Linux zealots tend to hate anything that's related to Microsoft -- read the comments for the articles on slashdot.org if you don't believe me -- and that doesn't rub well with me :)).

Comparing FreeBSD to Linux
FreeBSD and Linux are similar in many regards. They have the same basic shell interfaces (although, FreeBSD defaults to tcsh while Linux defaults to bash). They also both run the X windowing system and thus both support desktop environments like Gnome, KDE, and (my favorite) XFCE. Additionally, FreeBSD can run nearly all Linux software natively (and it's been rumored that FreeBSD can run Linux software faster than Linux can)! I found a very good comparison article that you might find interesting here.

My Experience so far
My experience so far has been slow at first, but has been picking up rapidly as of the last few weeks. I installed FreeBSD 5.3 on the second drive of my PC last spring, and that was the first time I installed a non-windows OS ever (and there were definitely some bumps in that road). Things worked out okay, except I couldn't quite figure out how to get sound working properly. FreeBSD, by default, does not have any sound support installed in the kernel, so you have two options: 1) load the sound drivers manually (I was able to crash the OS several times doing this), or you can build a custom kernel (which I learned is the better, although more time consuming, choice).

The ugliest part of getting my system set up, however, was trying to install Java. For some reason, Java has these weird licensing restrictions which means I had to download a bunch of files manually before the FreeBSD installation process could actually install Java (some files required free registration). I then had to compile the Java source code which was a HUGE PAIN because it took FOREVER.

Summary of the good and the bad
In conclusion, let's go over some of the highs and lows of the FreeBSD experience:

Pros:

• FreeBSD is 100% free.
• It's not as mainstream (or sexy, as some say) but still compatible with Linux.
• Very easy to install software, simply type pkg_add -r as root (people rave about the ports system too).
• Solid base. BSD has been around for a long time and contains very solid code. It's also much more organized than Linux (in terms of supporters).
  

Cons:

• Less user friendly. Most Linux distros will set everything up for you automatically. FreeBSD gives you a basic system and you have to configure things like X yourself (this can be a good thing if you want the learning experience, though).
• Not as bleeding edge as Windows or Linux. Windows by far supports the most software, but FreeBSD lags behind even Linux when it comes to supported software. I believe the FreeBSD community takes longer to port software for stability reasons, but I'd still like to be able to install a non-beta version of Java 1.5...
• More of a server OS than a desktop OS. FreeBSD definitely makes a great desktop OS, but it's assumed that you're running a server when you first install it (e.g. no sound support by default and no automatic X installation).

There's a lot more I could say about FreeBSD, but I'll save it for later. I definitely encourage you to try it out if you're bold enough (and have the free time). I mentioned a few negatives, but the reality is that I love working with FreeBSD and hope to learn a lot more about it as time goes by. I recently set up Samba and Apache, so I'll probably talk about those soon. Feel free to comment on anything I've talked about if you find it interesting, wrong, or have more to add.

New Blog!

Not that I have readers or anything (yet), but welcome to my new blog! I was previously a member (sorta) of xanga.com, but decided that it was time to move on when my primary friends stopped posting and I stopped getting readership (blogger is way cooler anyways - maybe YOU should be blogging here).

This blog is open enough to contain anything, but will most likely contain nerdy tech stuff that I'm so fascinated by. You'll notice that you can comment on my posts (which I hope you'll do very frequently) as well as subscribe to my blog through what's called a feed. There are lots of free programs out there that let you do this. If you're using firefox, you can subscribe to my blog by clicking on the little icon on the right-hand side of your address bar to create what's called a "live bookmark".

Speaking of technology, I found this way-cool site today: www.writely.com. I read about it in a news article on C|Net that was talking about how all software is moving off the desktop and onto the internet. Writely.com is a site that allows you to write documents for free and in several different formats. What blew my mind about it was how it felt so much like a normal word processor like MS Word, but it was free, could upload and save in more formats, and ran inside my browser (firefox)! Definitely worth checking out if you have the time.