Recently Yahoo! released a new beta messenger (code name Diablo) for Windows Vista. Initially I tried during the alpha days and did not had a chance to try it again; and I installed it today during the free time and surprised to see that it offers almost all the existing features of regular messenger with much more enhancements.
The good thing about the new Diablo is; it is completely re-written messenger on top of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for Vista to get the rich GUI look and feel. It has number of interesting features like zooming of contacts to the desired level, multiple color choice, searching of contacts, auto spell checker, phone support, call history etc. This is for sure much better than the currently existing one; and need to see what new features the team will add in the coming days especially towards the social networking of friends as part of YOS.
The only thing that I found missing is the archive of messages; that’s one of the feature that I use a lot by archiving all the messages; so that I can refer back to them at any time.
The screenshots of the messenger can be found from here:
[read more...]
Recently I noticed that my Macbook pro is getting over heated and on the other day I almost felt like it will cause a fire…but the good and old Windows Vista shutdown itself without any notice …I am guessing may be because of the heat or it could have done my Macbook heating sensors.
What is happening is; lately when I goto office, I immediately connect the Macbook Pro to external HP 24″ LCD monitor along with external mouse and keyboard and close the Macbook lid by booting to Windows Vista under direct Bootcamp.
Normally its gets hot and the fan spins like anything under Bootcamp. But otherday it was such that I couldn’t even touch the laptop at all…man ? what kind of air ventilations the laptop has when the lid is closed ? Looks like closing the lid is the actual cause. I only noticed this when my laptop suddenly shutdown itself without any notice (just power-off, not a regular clean shutdown) and powering on back, boots to Windows and then shuts down automatically. After keeping the lid open for 10-15 minutes and then restarting the Macbook seemed to work fine.
So, no more closing of the Macbook LID when connected to external monitor…Â
Today CNet blog posted an entry related to Windows virtual machine performance on the Mac and it is interesting article to read when VMWare(VMW) when to IPO. VMWare Fusion 1.0 seemed to out perform Parallels in all the scenarios except that the Fusion is not able to run Quake 4 where as Parallels was able to. Not sure if it is a legitimate test as Fusion was using more than one core in the tests along with 128MB RAM where as Parallels was restricted to single core(it does not yet support multi-crore) along with 64MB.
Using Bootcamp is the best choice as it runs the Windows natively and lately I only boot to Windows using Bootcamp instead of using any of the virtualization software as I always end up into some sort of problems (like OS and/or office activation and random crashes and white screen of death).
Last week I did a clone of my Mac OS X using Carbon Copy Cloner and then repartitioned the hard disk to have Bootcamp partition and then installed the Windows Vista using the complete restore mechanism as I had the complete system backup. Windows Vista Ultimate edition which supports the complete PC backup and restore mechanism built into the Operating System without the need of any third party tools along with incremental full backup (supported in Home Premium, Business and Ultimate editions).
And after the restore, actually I forgot to activate the Windows Vista; as I thought I had 30-days left. But after booted back with Parallels using Bootcamp and later on when I re-booted back to direct Bootcamp the Vista is not fully working and popped to activate with a message An unauthorized change was made to your license and when I try to activate, it always fails with an error Unrecognized error, error code 0×80080250. I tried all possible ways to activate, nothing went in my way. This may be because of my Parallel tools. But funny thing is the same Bootcamp OS works fine when ran through Parallels as it has its own activation.
I left again with another restore last night; and settled not to experiment much with any of the Mac virtual tools until I am done with my work.
Today I thought of uploading some of my photos to Google so that I can keep them a copy in Picasa web interface as my flickr account is going to expire in the next year.
So, first I tried to download and install the Picasa tool on my Windows Vista. The installer just starts and nothing happens. Looks like its not compatible with Windows Vista yet. So, I gave up the tool option, instead tried to do web based uploads using Active X control on IE7 and that control (uploader2.cab) starts the installer and nothing happens as that of the other PC based tool.
Looks like I can’t even use either of the Picasa uploader tools (on PC or web based) to upload photos on Windows Vista. Only option left is to use basic uploader mechanism where in you can upload 5 photos at a time.
Wondering why Google did not even bothered to have a support on Vista. Or is it just related my system ? I tried to install even after a reboot..same problem and on the other hand both the options works fine on Windows XP.
As we all know Windows Vista introduced a security feature called User Acount Contol (UAC) to strengthen the overall security level by enforcing the administrator authorization privilege.
This is indeed a good thing; similar to what root or sudo access does in case of Mac or Linux environment. But; even if the user is in administrator domain still Vista pops up a administrator dialog box for copy or delete operation to restrict the access. Which at times is annoy to me. If the user is not in admin group; then it makes sense; but even when user is under administrator domain; then there is no point to have this for every operation.
Indeed this becomes much more complicated when dealing with the system files copy or delete from command line. At times it is frustrating. For example; when you have a visual studio DLL project which generates a DLL which is automatically copied to system32 directory using custom build will fail without any useful errors as shown below:
Performing Custom Build Step
Access is denied.
0 file(s) copied.
Project : error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from "Performing Custom Build Step"
Nor from any regular command line:
c:\>type venu.txt
test file for copy
c:\>copy venu.txt c:\Windows\System32\
Access is denied.
0 file(s) copied.
So, to get rid of this; I have to completely disable the UAC from Start -> Control Panel -> User Accounts -> Turn User Account Control on or off and then uncheck the box ‘Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer‘; and after a restart I can copy and do all kind of operations as that of XP.
It will be nice if Microsoft would allow this by default if the user is already in administrator domain. Not susre if there is any alternative way.
Its been a while I played with Windows Movie Maker. Even though I did used it extensively on Windows XP last year when I created few DVD’s without any problems. But today I started using it on my Windows Vista, Ultimate edition and noticed that the application keeps crashing (in the sense it stops responding) for every possible operation that I perform. Even for a basic cursor movements, when trying to play any video, when I tried to click on a photo or when I tried to import some pictures, it stops responding. Only option for me is to kill the application and reload back.
This happened when I wanted to make a new DVD with few recent videos from the camcoder along with recent photos. But no luck so far to continue further even after playing it with for 2 hours. Good thing is, I could atleast able to import the video to AVI format from my camcoder without any problems. Looks like time for me to start using Windows XP version of this; which seemed to be much much better and I never noticed a crash or time to play with iMovie from Mac to see how it performs. I am still wondering why this happens to me, as Windows Movie Maker is one of the key feature and improvement in Vista. Also, it does not support the photo preview within the application.
Today Apple released the public beta 3 Safari browser for Windows. I downloaded and installed it on my Windows Vista and browser seemed to work fine without any problems. Most of the websites rendered without any issues. Even though I didn’t like the way the browser adjusts the data to fit to screen as it makes it uneasy to view when it moves the contents over the page for the proper layout (I noticed this even with Firefox at times, but only IE does it clean)
Only thing that I noticed is, Yahoo! beta mail gave a warning that the browser is not supported and upon continuing I was able to view the messaged. But when I tried to reply a mail; the compose editor becomes blank. So, looks like some work pending from mail team.
Another good thing is it gives an option to change the default search engine to either Google search or Yahoo! search. There is no stunning feature in Safari which can take the users away from IE as IE 7 also has all most all the features that Safari provides. Only people who hates Windows/IE has another source other than Firefox now. May be it will take some share away from Firefox on Windows.
As it only released now; only few default plugins are provided by Apple for time being. And there is no customization for browser in terms of placing the icons or changing the theme yet. Not sure apple will ever support that. Atleast Apple should change the page title bar font and its background.
I also noticed that the safari crashed 3 to 4 times when I hit the back button on my website as well from Apple website. Also; the back button seemed to take longer time than IE.
Recently Yahoo! released a new beta messenger (code name Diablo) for Windows Vista. Initially I tried during the alpha days and did not had a chance to try it again; and I installed it today during the free time and surprised to see that it offers almost all the existing features of regular messenger with much more enhancements. 
