Computers & Technical

Since I make my living as a computer programmer, this category has to be in here somewhere. This could be information about Macs versus PCs, or it could be software reviews. Or it could just be some oddball rant about a printer or a cellphone.

Windows 7 First Look

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Microsoft newest salvo in the operating system wars is out in beta, and if it is any indication of what will come with the final shipping product, then they are aiming for victory. Microsoft Windows 7, note there is no year or name or code letters, is what Windows Vista should have been. It is clean, fast, and stable. It contains all of the visual upgrades that were shoved into Vista, but with stability and speed that is at least as good as XP, if not better.

When Microsoft published the beta of Windows 7 they obviously underestimated how interested people were in their next move. windows7Within hours the servers hosting the files and generating the license keys were overloaded and went off-line. Many pundits thought this was a first sign of bad things to come. But within a day the servers were back on line and offering up the files and keys without problem.

The disk image to install the OS is approximately 2.4 gig – much smaller that the equivalent Vista image. The first thing you notice as you go through the install is how quickly it moves. There are none of the long pauses between questions that seem to make up so much of the time of previous installations. And in fact, there are far fewer of those questions. The Windows 7 installation intelligently inquires of the hardware and makes assumptions so that the user doesn’t have to answer a litany of prompts about hardware and location. These setting can be fully configured once the system is up and running, but the bar to getting to that running state is much lower. Whether on older hardware or virtual machines, the entire installation seems fairly consistent at about 30 minutes in length, and not once did the installation fail.

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Tools for Twitter – Part 1

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Twitter is great. I love it. It is fun, it is informative, and it can get out of control fast. If you are using this great social media party-line, then sooner or later you will start to wonder how to gain control of what is going on there. While there are lots of excellent applications for actually using Twitter from your desktop, such Twhirl and TweetDeek which are Adobe Air cross-platform applications, what I am looking at here are three web-based tools that will help you actually manage your friends and followers.

Twit Who?The first tool we come to is actually called “Friend of Follow”. This site will show you a simple but visually appealing tabbed overview of those people who you are following but who are not following you back, those who are following you but that you don’t follow, and those that are both followed and following. While the display is nice, and by mousing over each user you can get some basic information, Friend or Follow doesn’t really provide enough information for my to find it to useful for most uses. What I do find useful sometimes is that I can put the people listed in order by location or number of followers. This is perfect for when I want to know if there are people local to my area I’m not following.

Next up is “MyCleener”. Ever wondering which of your friends are deadbeats? Or which of your friends just isn’t keeping up? MyCleener will pull the list of people you are following and then put then in order by the last time they tweeted. I was actually surprised to find out that one of the people I was following hadn’t tweeted in over a year. While technically there is nothing wrong with following someone who doesn’t tweet often, it does inflate your following to followers ratio. And many people, myself included, use that ration as a kind of rule of thumb to your legitimacy.

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