Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I bought a Toshiba 13″ laptop at BestBuy yesterday for $750, just to have a lightweight laptop with included DVD drive to take to Africa. The machine has more or less everything once should need: 1 GB of RAM, 160 GB hard drive, DVD burner, Webcam, FireWire and USB ports, etc. It also came with Windows Vista preinstalled.

I tried doing some basic things with Vista, such as changing the workground from “WORKGROUP” to “MSHOME”. This involved trips into the Help system and finding help descriptions that didn’t match up to the dialog boxes. It was possible from some of the network dialog boxes to pick a collection of checkboxes that would, when Apply was clicked, result in a 1960s mainframe-style error of “incompatible parameters”.

Vista can’t connect to my Infrant NAS disk array, even after I upgraded the firmware on the Infrant. The XP machines have no trouble with this. The worst thing about Vista is that it doesn’t like to say no. When connecting to a network server that it has discovered, it puts up a “working” thermometer and will keep incrementing it for about five minutes. It never does work, but Vista never seems to give up. Dead Windows File Explorer programs litter the desktop and need to be killed with the red X in the upper right.

During a lot of system administration tasks, bizarre dialog boxes pop up demanding extra administrator rights, even though the machine only has one user, which was configured without a password.

The system tends to be sluggish, even with 1 GB of RAM and a modern dual-core CPU. Although Vista is supposed to be virus-proof, the system shipped with McAfee firewall and virus protection software (which I uninstalled, along with everything else that seemed superfluous, in an attempt to boost the machine’s responsiveness).

Summary: So far inferior in every way to Windows XP.

[Update:  I copied a bunch of Canon RAW files from an EOS 5D, which has been out for two years, onto the Vista machine.  Unlike my patched XP machine, which has a Microsoft extension to be able to show thumbnails from RAW photos, the Vista machine treats these as an unknown file type and cannot show thumbnails in the Windows Explorer.  Yet another disappointment…]

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Linear Air accepted their first Eclipse Jet, which arrived yesterday at Hanscom, creating quite a crowd despite its location on the East Ramp inside the Air Force Base.

The pilots reported achieving a 700 n.m. range at high-speed cruise with a standard IFR reserve and a clearance to 27,000′. They described the interior noise level as extremely quiet (measurements to follow; I have lent one of them a sound level meter).  As far as I could tell, there are no provisions for noise-canceling headsets.  The plane has only the standard headset jacks, not a LEMO connector for Bose nor, as far as I could tell from skimming the documentation, tip-power for a Sennheiser.

Linear Air was kind enough to let me sit in the aircraft. The front seat is very comfortable for me (6′ tall), with pretty good visibility. The one really off note in the front seats is a backup attitude indicator that has been stuck on top of the pilot’s side glare shield, partly blocking the view.  Supposedly, this will be removed as the avionics suite gets additional certifications.

There are four seats in the back, plus a small baggage area behind the last two rooms. With one back seat moved all the way forward and the far back seat moved all the way back, I was able to sit in the far back seat with my knees brushing the magazine holder of the seat in front. If I owned the airplane, I would remove two of the seats and say “Here is my four-seat 700 n.m. very quiet very capable airplane”.

Fit and finish is excellent throughout.

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Folks:

I have drafted “A photographer’s guide to Botswana” and would appreciate corrections, suggestions, etc.  (I know that the article isn’t comprehensive, of course, but one purpose of putting an intro on a site such as photo.net is that it gives true experts a place to park their knowledge via the comment link at the bottom.)

Thanks,

Philip

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I would be interested in comments on http://philip.greenspun.com/research/solar-magnitude-forum

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Folks:

I’ve drafted a new article: “Africa Photo Safari Guide”.  Comments would be appreciated, ranging from typos to “you should be writing about xxx”.

Thanks in advance!

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I walked by the house of a Macarthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient the other day.  The idea of the fellowship is that by giving $500,000 to a creative person, the person will do additional creative things.  This particular recipient hadn’t, as far as I knew, changed anything that he was doing or planned to do.  In the ten years since his Macarthur award, he had upgraded his housing situation, however.  The current house, in a comfortable West Cambridge neighborhood, is probably worth at least $3 million and the MacArthur’s $500,000 is about what his neighbors are spending on a kitchen/bathroom renovation.

It occurred to me that the foundation might be making a mistake in giving any awards to people who live in Boston, New York, or California.  A person who lives in an area where a comfortable house may be obtained for minimal $$ is likely to spend a $500,000 windfall on something interesting.  A person who lives in an area where a house that would be considered “nice” by Midwestern standards starts at $2+ million is going to turn the money into real estate.  As noted in “where to live for early retirees”, home ownership makes people boring and, probably, owning a fancier house with a $500,000 kitchen/bathroom renovation makes an already boring homeowner even more boring.

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Richard’s 74-year-old mother came over for an iced tea today.  She was kind enough to let me play with her iPhone.  Here are some impressions…

This might be a better iPod than an iPod.  Unlike the iPod, the iPhone has a dedicated volume control on the left.  Unlike the iPod, you can’t get stuck in a mode where you have no control over the volume.

The contacts list syncs street addresses as well as phone numbers, vaulting the iPhone over 95+ percent of phones sold in the U.S.

Downloading Web pages via the AT&T data connection is excruciatingly slow.  It took about 2 minutes to bring in http://philip.greenspun.com with both photos.  Turning on WiFi solves this problem, but it is not easy to turn WiFi on (for relief from AT&T’s sluggish network) or off (so you don’t drain the battery).  You’d expect there to be another switch on the side or a shortcut, but there isn’t.  You wade down into some menus and look at a list of available networks.  It is at least as complex as turning on WiFi on a standard Windows XP machine, but you’re using your thumbs instead of mouse.

According to a Web forum, the iPhone will not work with the Gmail mobile Java client.  Either you need to use the Web browser or access Gmail via POP in the standard iPhone email client (taking us back to the 1960s, before conversations were grouped).

Typing did not work very well for me.

The owner thought that the speakerphone quality was so bad that she was intending to return the phone and try another.  She was satisfied with the sound/voice quality when holding the phone to her ear.

Typing on the touch screen wasn’t quite as difficult as I thought it would be, but it was still much more difficult than using a thumb keyboard as on a Treo or Blackberry.  You cannot touch type, but must look at the screen constantly to see what letters the iPhone is guessing your fat thumbs are over.

Verdict:  A nice device and maybe better than the Windows-based phones, but probably not as functional as the original Treo 180 (flip phone introduced early in 2002; thumb keyboard; PalmOS).

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I’ve revised http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/bikes in preparation to buy some more bicycles: some more compact folding bikes to fit in the back of the Cirrus; maybe a high-end recumbent; and possibly a comfort/city bike.  I would appreciate suggestions from more experienced cyclists, especially if made at the bottom of the page in question.  Thanks!

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People are getting fatter.  The human race has expanded its numbers as well as its waistlines, up to more than 6.6 billion according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  Humans are literally covering a larger percentage of the Earth and absorbing more sunlight, thus contributing to global warming in the most direct manner possible.  What if we were to dress everyone from head to toe in bright white clothing?  Imagine if everyone dressed like the owners of Saudi Arabia, in flowing white robes.  More of the sun’s light would be reflected back into space.  It wouldn’t be enough to cool the Earth, but it would help stop the acceleration of global warming.

Speaking of obesity… it is becoming ever-more difficult to get an accurate appraisal of one’s health and size from a medical doctor.  If you’re not diabetic and morbidly obese, you’re above average, so the doctor probably won’t come down too hard on you for carrying 10 or 20 superfluous pounds.  To whom can we turn for an accurate appraisal of our bodies?  Veterinarians.  The average Labrador Retriever loves to exercise and is in great shape.  A vet who sees fit Labs and Goldens all day is likely to be much more critical of human body weight than an American medical doctor.

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