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August 17, 2008
This Week in Review
Browsing and the Web
In what I thought was an uneventful week tech wise, I gave the Zone Alarm Force Field 1 year lifetime freebie a try. Not often am I impulsed to install an unresearched product on my production desktop PC. It sort of worked - Firefox and IE responded with toolbars to denote virtualisation of browser activity - but I eventually found the virtualisation slowed down web page rendering to a crawl and uninstalled the thing.
Firefox 3 on my machines has been giving me a hard time - slowdowns, freezes after 5 seconds, not persisting last use state. It's due to probably corrupted user profiles caused by overuse of Firefox Extensions or something but it could be something else - either Firefox itself has some problems or some global extension (McAffee SiteAdvisor, Evernote) etc... On one machine, I am reverted to the scared Opera Portable. Opera is quite a pleasure to use, problem is, it does not have enough market share and is significantly different in programming Object Model / behaviour to break several favourite Google facilities. The magnified text and fit-to-width when browsing is still superb.
My favourite bookmarking facility - deli.cio.us is now delicious.com with a re-designed presentation. Retrieval and reviews of your recent bookmarks is now a lot nicer. I do have some regular bookmarks that I keep locally in the browser but delicious gives me browser independent, machine independent bookmarks - that's my number one in-the-cloud facility.
Microsoft Office 2007 - are you moving on?
It's now past mid-year 2008. Office 2007 has been out for a long time. CAE's courses are now predominantly Office 2007 and some corporates are rolling out Office 2007. Some migration are very abrupt - one day, you're out of office, the next day you're out of Office 2003. Leaves users staring at the Office 2007 Button and the massive Ribbon. Other corporate IT approaches are more kind and have engaged a migration plan. In this day and age, some IT departments are still living in confinement - Microsoft has gone the extra mile to provide the Enterprise Learning Framework except that no one appears to have heard about it - don't worry, it's not ITIL. It's just a web wizard. Microsoft knows how to make user assistance Wizards. Well, they do, they just took a few detours from time to time, Bob's manager being, I think, Melinda Gates notwithstanding. Anyway, ELF is a an interview wizard that filters the list of Microsoft Technet articles based on your responses as IT guru and then downloads a Word file with hyperlinks and one liner descriptions - for staff to read on their journey to Office 2007 and Vista.
For the third time, I think, I'm moving my Microsoft Office resource notes to a new blog - I try to add my own slant to things.
Photography wise
We saw aussieboykie recommend the Epson V700 in the forum. By reputation and word-of-mouth, that is one fine film scanner and it is speedy since it does things in bulk.
Life was easier in the analogue world - you just walked around with Pantone swatches or something. Nowadays, people talk about mysterious things like Colour Gamut - guess you need the Gamut Vision. After which you wish you had the budget to acquire a Dell 2408WFP which features 104% of AdobeRGB Colour Gamut because it's an S-PVA panel. Or consider whether a Samsung 2493HM cheaper T/N panel would do.
Terry's been giving advice on the Fine Art of Pointing and Shooting and I've been pondering what drives "normal" guys nuts in internet forums.
New Hardware Goodies
Walking round the shops I see a few Acer Aspire Ones - compared to the early ASUS EEE PCs, the Acer for once, looks more chic, more glossy. The Intel Atom seems quite a good, low power chip, fairly responsive - of course compared to a dual core, you wouldn't like to multi-task too much. Maybe I'll get over my aversion to that brand.
The Centrino 2 brand stickers are out. You can see them on some attractive Toshiba notebooks (again nice glossy lids, really nice keycaps which look like the print will take wear) as well as HP Pavilions. HP I think, reached a peak with their high gloss, wear resistant palm rests last year. This year, they've gone over the top - the palm rests look shinier than a stainless steel fridge and the keycaps don't match the finish or look wear resistant
Posted by Anandasim at August 17, 2008 01:45 PM
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