Joost - Slick and Definitely Worth a Look

After poking away at the page for about 20 minutes (apparently their servers are quite finicky handling the new load of the expanded beta) I got into the Joost beta today. off of the provider mentioned on Gizmodo. I wished someone had helped me out with an invite earlier though--if you happen uppon this page and would like an invite, leave your e-mail in the comments. (and I'd encourage you to add me to the feeds that you read if you like what i write about!)

Some notes:
After downloading and installing Joost, it asks you for your e-mail address that received the invite, and for you to select a username and password. I did, and then it said that it was checking my username for about a minute. Then it bounced me back to to the page to provide username, e-mail and password . Although it doesn't say anything right now, apparently if you don't receive a dramatic error message, odds are your username has been successfully registered (there's no "success" message).

Once I got through the hassle of the signup, the Joost software seems to work like a charm. Within seconds after selecting a show, the p2p system gets the show to the screen. Quality is a little pixelated for the first few seconds, but as more content gets to your machine it rapidly improves. So far the content is fairly limited, but there are some episodes of Transformers, Punkd, and Starsky and Hutch with more to come as they make deals with content providers. There are quite a few music videos as well

I dont' think I'll be using it too heavily until there's more to watch, but for now Joost is certainly a great way to get quick access to some quality videos. Again, if you'd like an invite, leave a comment!

Office 2007 -- Engineering and Math Finally Get Some Respect

Office 2007 has been right alongside Vista in receiving all manner of poor reviews and complaints, primarily revolving around the new file formats (such as .docx) and the replacement of the old toolbars with the ribbon. After spending a fair amount of time working on a huge engineering paper the past few days, I feel I can safely say that Office 2007 is the best thing to happen to writing as an engineer.

As someone who has muddled with the old "Microsoft Equation Editor" that has remained almost completely unchanged for years, Office 2007's equation editor is one of those "Why didn't they do this years ago???" sort of things. Press the arrow under equations and get instant access to a list of built-in equations.

If you click on the equations button, an entire chunk of ribbon opens up with every amount of functionality from the old equation editor had, and then some, all instantly accessable directly from within Word without having to deal with another window to insert the equation components.



All of this is perfect for writing entire equations out with great ease. However in engineering writing I frequently need to put in a single greek letter to reference a value. In older versions of word that meant either using a character map, the symbols font, or inserting a single letter through the equation editor. Now, just to the right of the equations button is the Symbol button. Initially it contains a few basic symbols, but as you choose from the attached character map, Office will automatically save the symbols you use. When you need the symbol again, you just click the symbol button on the ribbon, and select the symbol from the nice drop down list.

Just these two tiny additions to Office have made a big difference to how I use it on a regular basis, and I couldn't be happier.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Just got the release of Feisty Fawn installed and running in a dual boot setup with Vista on my Thinkpad. Initial opinion--very very slick.

Things that stick out from just my first hour:

1. Easy codec access--When you try to play an mp3 or another file that requires one of the restricted codecs you once had to manually install, Ubuntu informs you that you need to get a codec and after a couple dialog boxes and an admin password all the codecs are ready to go.
2. Beryl in 1 step-- Beryl is now included in the default repositories, and the video drivers (at least the ones for my T43p's ATI card) are up to snuff enough to run Beryl out of the box. sudo apt-get install beryl and I was all set. A basic version of Compiz that does the virtual dekstop cube and wobbly windows is included in Feisty, but I personally prefer the customizability of Beryl for now until the projects re-merge.
   
3. Networking--On my laptop, wireless access and managing it can be a pain. Luckily, Feisty has a nice new set of wireless controls easily accessible through the tray. It even picks up networks around my apartment that I could never see in Windows!
   
4. It's fast. Booting up seems much faster than 6.10 ever did, and within the OS it feels like I'm using a much faster computer than I am -- even running all the Beryl GUI enhancements.
   

Complaints:

• Thunderbird 2 (which I've made the switch to in Windows) isn't in the repositories yet so I had to put it on here manually. It sucks when I'm spoiled by Synaptic

Running Vista on my Thinkpad T43p - Initial Thoughts and Tweaks

Despite all the bad press Vista has gotten, I went ahead and put Vista Ultimate on my Thinkpad T43p. I was fairly optimistic since I ran the Release Candidates late last year and they functioned smoothly with no major driver issues.

Vista booted up smoothly, albeit very slowly on the 2GHz Celeron 1gig RAM, 5400rpm/80gig system. As I started getting myself up and running on the new OS, the first thing I did was disable UAC. It's too much of a pain in the ass when you have to click through 3 dialog boxes simply to install Firefox. I understand the point of UAC, but honestly, I know what I'm doing and I don't feel that it's a necessity for me.

The next thing I did was to modify the indexing (Orb-->Indexing Options). By default, Vista wants to keep an index of all the files in my Start Menu, as well as everything in my Users folder. While I do like the idea of keeping an index of my files for easy access, I modified the settings so that only my Start Menu and Desktop are indexed. This knocked my index size down from several thousand to ~500. Why do this? Well, the simple fact is that my hard drive is just too slow to maintain an index of my constantly changing User's folder. Full-fledged indexing works great on my friend's T60 with a 7200rpm drive, but it's too much of a drag on my system.

I've disabled a few more non-essential processes, but the indexing has made the biggest difference to the overall system performance on this slower system. Overall, Vista seems to be running well on here, especially since I took the plunge and upgraded my system to 2 gigs of RAM last week :)

More on Vista stuff later