Technology

This year, I had the opportunity to attend an event in Toronto known as Tech Days 2010. I think it’s a yearly event and I don’t know which year they’re into now but all I know is that there was one last year and there’s probably another one next year. Tech Days is a learning conference where they tell you about technologies like Windows 7, Office 2010, and Windows Azure and so on. The presenters demo software like Windows Phone 7 (WP7) and showed us how easy it has become to develop for the new phone. Out off everything that was shown, I look forward to the WP7 the most.

Microsoft Tech Day 2010 was a two day event that covered things like the Windows 7 OS, to SQL to Microsoft Azure. The things that I was interested in were the development sessions. I attend a few sessions that were very interesting. I think a lot of them were interesting because I haven’t been doing much on the software development side in the longest time. The .NET tools have come a long way since I last played around with it. Microsoft has developed a lot of tools that were meant to help developers create software a lot quicker. One presenter, Colin Melia demoed Microsoft Express Blend and showed how he did little or no coding at all to achieve the same functionality. He used Visual Studio to write the code and Express Blend to create the user interface. Once he was done with that, he did it all in Express Blend and literally dragged and dropped things. I was very impress with how easy and quick it was to create something from scratch. And during the session after that, Mark Arteaga present some things on developing application for WP7 using Silverlight, Microsoft’s platform for developing interactive user experiences the web. He had a two part session which I attended. He gave some pointers on how to make sure your application passes certification when submitting it to Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. The things that were being shown by Colin and Mark made me really want to get back into developing.

In another session, Steve Syfuhs from Object Sharp gave a nice presentation on Windows Identity Foundation, which allows developers to externalize identity logic from their application. This made things a lot easier because it takes the workload of your application from having to authenticate a user’s identity. I’ve heard of OpenID but I wasn’t aware that Microsoft had a product that did something similar. When I developed a small application for my Internet Applications class, I had to do all the authentication part myself. And every page that required the user’s information, I had to call the same class and passed in the same parameters time after time. At least with WIF, you probably just authenticate and call a function to see if the user’s is who they say they are. Sounds pretty simple.

There were six different flavours with six sessions per day but I couldn’t attend them all. I tried to attend the ones that were relevant to me. The last session that I attend was regarding Internet Explorer 9 by Pete LePage. And from what he presented, it looks like IE 9 has come a long way towards being web standard, which is nice since you don’t have to worry about changing your code so much so that it looks the same on all browsers. I remember way back when I first started web developing, I gave up on trying to make my site look “OK” in IE6. So long as it looked right in Firefox, I didn’t care what it looked like in IE6.

It wasn’t all learning at the conference. I had a chance to test out the new Xbox Kinect. Playing the games without any controllers took a bit to get use to. You stand there in front of the TV screen and you start flailing your arms around. To the people nearby, you seem perfectly fine but to those who don’t see the TV screen, you look a little like an idiot. It was a bit weird not having any feedback from the game. When you have a controller, at least you can feel what’s in your hand. Most controllers these days have vibration built into them so that the controller rumbles when some sort of action is performed. With Kinect, you have nothing.

I played a game of volleyball with the demo guy (I won, of course). When he bumps the ball to me and I set it, I didn’t feel anything. So it’s like you’re standing there miming your actions. Kinect picks up that motion and your avatar hits the ball. It felt a little awkward having to perform the action but not hitting anything. I’ve played volleyball before and this was a whole new feeling. There wasn’t any feedback so it took a little getting used to. I’m not sure about you but I prefer to play the actual sport rather than staying indoors, standing in from of the telly and pretending to be a mime.

As the day wrapped up, I found myself exhausted from all the running around I did, as well as from all the information that was given during the session. Before the start of the last session, I sat around and watched the tweets on the projector. I wasn’t sure if it was live so I did a test and wrote my own tweet. Surprisingly, it showed up!

I am probably one of the last person to jump onto the smart phone bandwagon. Working in I.T. you would think that I would be one of the early adopters but that’s not the case. Years after the Blackberries and the iPhones came out, I finally get my hands on a smart phone. A Blackberry Bold 9000 to be exact. So far, I’m liking my new phone and it turns out that I’m using the apps more than using it as a phone.

There are plenty of advantages to owning a smart phones but I didn’t give into the hype. One of the reasons why I didn’t buy one right away was because of the cost. I needed a cell phone to make phone calls and my Motorola Razr did just that. I didn’t want to pay extra for a data plan when I had a computer at home that has internet access. Data plans from cellular providers in Canada is expensive compared to other countries.

The thing that I like about having a smart phone is that that you’re always connected. Information is readily available at your fingertips which is convenient at times. But a disadvantage is that I’m wasting a lot of time on it doing nothing in particular. I spent quite some time playing BrickBreaker.

I have to tell you thought that I didn’t buy the Bold. It’s a phone that was given to me by my company because I’m on call every now and then. The data plan that comes with the phone is just pointless. From what I can tell, I have a 10MB data plan. What am I supposed to do with 10MB? A few YouTube videos and I’m over my limit. The nice thing about this phone is that it has WiFi so I can easily connect to a hotspot to gain access to the internet. The loaner phone that I had before didn’t have WiFi so I didn’t anything other than send messages using Blackberry Messenger.

Now that I own a Blackberry, it a little hard to imagine life without it.

My car couldn’t have broken down at a worse time. I’m not sure why it decided to break down tonight but a lot happened tonight and it would have been nice if I had the car. Since I didn’t have to car, I had to walk to work… at 11:00 at night.

My brother gave me a ride home because it was already getting late and walking home would have taken a good hour. He was heading in my direction anyway so it was convenient. I was just about to settle in when my cell phone rang. It was one of the supervisors from work. One of this worker forget their password and wasn’t able to get into Windows. After asking a few questions, something caught me off guard.

The user had a desktop machine and it was asking for a BIOS password. The strange thing was that we don’t password protect the BIOS on desktop machine. We have a password set for the BIOS of laptops but not for desktops. After hearing that, I wasn’t sure what was going on.

At first, I thought it was the encryption for the hard drive but the name of the user didn’t ring a bell. I asked the supervisor a few more questions to confirm that it was a desktop that he was talking about.

The user had called the help desk to get the password reset but if it’s the BIOS password of a desktop, there was nothing the help desk could have done. Heck, there’s nothing I could have done because we don’t have any records of desktop BIOS passwords. However this password was set, the only person who knew it was the person who set it.

Windows wouldn’t boot up on this machine without that password and the worker that was on duty didn’t know what it was. He told me that they set the password on there so that no one would use the computer other than the people in his area. But he also told me that he gave the password out to a few people so one of those people must have changed the password on him earlier in the day.

They needed to ship out some stuff so they needed to get into Windows as soon as possible. They called my worker but there was no answer on his phone. I didn’t think they would be because he’s probably fast asleep since he gets into the office quite early in the morning. One of the other supervisor recommended that they call me.

I was going to try to assist from home but as soon as it was confirmed that it was a desktop machine that I was dealing with, there wasn’t anything that I could do from home. Since I didn’t have my car with me, I had to walk to work to fix the problem.

When I arrived at work, I tried to clear the BIOS password by taking out the battery but I guess that trick doesn’t work anymore because the prompt for the password was still there. I had no choice but to find another desktop machine and swap out the hard drive. That was the quickest and easiest thing to do and whatever else needed to be done, I could deal with in the morning.

I quickly changed the hard drive and got the user up and running. I wasn’t sure or not to set the password on this motherboard to prevent any further tampering in the morning. We decided not to set a password and left it at that.

My coworker was had just finished his shift stuck around for a bit to give me a ride home. After all this running around, I’m exhausted.

I’ve got my hands on another laptop to play around with. This time it’s a Tablet PC manufactured by Dell called the Latitude XT2. It’s a visually appealing laptop and fairly light to handle. Lately, I’ve been handling laptops that are quite heavy so the XT2 didn’t feel like anything.

The system that I’m testing is configured as follows:

12.1″ Premium WXGA LED Display
2GB DDR3 SDRAM
Intel Core2 Duo U9400 1.4GHz
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator
80GB Hard Drive 5400RPM
Dell Wireless 1397

Out of the box, the system came bundled with Windows Vista. I’m not sure why it didn’t come with Windows 7 installed but I assume that it was assembled before the release date of the operating system but for some reason they didn’t ship it out to us until last week. Unfortunately, nobody likes Windows Vista so it had to go.

My company uses Windows XP but we’re pilot testing Windows 7 so it’ll be a while before we start to use Windows 7 as the main operating system. That means that I’ll have to configure this laptop to use Windows XP before we can roll it out to the users. We ordered eight laptops so it’s not so bad. The plan is to configure one of them properly and then image it and throw the image onto the other machines. I have one tablet at work for that and the rest I get to play with.

I brought one of them home and installed Windows 7 Professional on it. Much like the other installs, Windows 7 found most of the hardware. The only thing that it didn’t manage to find was the fingerprint reader and some other hardware that I can’t remember. I had to download the drivers for those and manually install them.

So here’s the laptop. It’s pretty slick looking with the brush metal texture. It’s about 8.5″ wide, 11.5″ long and 1″ thick and weighs 3.62lbs. I have a Dell D400 laptop but the XT2 is a bit smaller and lighter than the D400. It has somewhat of a nicer feel to it too. And when you touch it, there aren’t any finger marks left all over the place like the other laptops that I’ve used, at least none that I can see at the moment.

The screen is nice and bright. There’s an ambient light sensor at the bottom of the display but I hardly use it because it’s a bit of a headache sometimes with all that dimming and brightening. The best resolution that I can get is 1280×800 which isn’t too bad. Running along the bottom are the power, the CTRL (CTRL-ALT-DEL), orientation button, ambient light senor and the biometric fingerprint reader.

Switching from laptop mode to tablet mode requires you to rotate the screen 180 degrees clockwise. It’s not bi-directional so you can’t turn it 180 degrees counter clockwise, not if you want to break it. Once it’s in tablet mode, Windows remembers that last orientation that you had it in and switches to that orientation. The orientations that you can switch from are landscape, portrait, flipped landscape and flipped portrait. As far as I know the orientation button only switches between three of those modes. I’m not sure why but it doesn’t want to switch to flipped landscape mode automatically. In order to get flipped landscape mode, you have to manually set that in the display settings.

Last but not least is the pen. I haven’t really used the pen much because of the touch open. Also, I found the pen to be a little finicky. Sometimes it thinks that I click on something when in reality I haven’t even touched the street. I think the proximately detector is slight off. Plus, there’s not too many uses for the pen because you can easily use your finger. But the thing that it can be used for is to wake up the computer from standby mode. You simply put the laptop to sleep and when you’re ready to use it again, you can either type a few keys or eject the pen from its hiding spot.

Switch between pen mode and touch mode was seamless. The multi-touch screen comes with software by N-Trig that allows you to switch between the two modes. It also adds some gesture features as well like pinching to zoom in and out, flicking to navigate and some handy two finger combination to do stuff.
I testing the dual mode in Windows XP and it’s very buggy. I couldn’t get it to work properly. When I switched between pen and touch mode, it was very slow. Going from touch to pen mode was easy but for some reason the touch doesn’t always register correctly. But the two modes in Windows 7 seems to be flawless and works without any issues.

All in all, this is a pretty impressive machine given that you have a good operating system to handle everything. Switching between all of the display modes was quick and easy. Once you rotate the screen, the screen blinks quickly and the new orientation takes over. The laptop is light weight and great for mobility. The fingerprint reader handles logging in without any issues. The display is night and bright. The keyboard is just the right size. Over all, I like this laptop very much. It’s probably one of the best laptops that I’ve used in a while. But on the down side is the $2700 price tag. I’m not sure why it’s so expensive but I’m assuming that it’s because of the tablet feature. The screen isn’t as solid though because when it’s in laptop mode and you go to press the button, the screen shakes a bit. And the one thing that I almost missed were a couple of buttons that are hidden underneath the display. They’re not visible until you switch to tablet mode. They’re used to scroll and navigate. It’s pretty handy when it’s used.

I have an account with Microsoft Developer’s Network through Mohawk College so I was able to get a license key for Windows 7. The official release date for Windows 7 was October 22, 2009 but I had a copy a few weeks early. Even though I’ve had access to Windows 7 all this time, I only installed it at the beginning of this week. So far, the test drive is pretty good.

The first thing most people will notice when their system boots up is that there’s no more progress bar. Windows XP and Vista has a progress bar that shows you that it’s loading. In Windows 7, they’ve changed it to the Windows logo and they made it pulsate. From an I.T. perspective, that’s much better because then people won’t know how long it actually takes to boot up. On the system that I tested Windows 7 on, it took anywhere from twenty to thirty seconds to load.

So here’s the machine that I’m working with. It’s an old Sun Microsystems machine with two single AMD Opteron processors clocking in at 2.6GHz each, 6GB of RAM, nVidia Quadro FX1100 128MB, two SCSI hard drive, one drive holds 70GB and the second holds 140GB. I got the system from work since they were going to toss it and it was still in working condition. All it cost me was the gas to get it home. It’s a fairly heavy machine because of the case. I think it’s made from steel or something.

I think the only thing wrong with this machine is the video card. Every now and then I would run into some issues where the display would be all messed up or things would be all yellow. I have the proper drivers installed so I think there’s something faulty about the hardware itself. It if wasn’t for that, I would have a higher Windows Experience Rating.

As you can see, you’ve got your standard Windows desktop with the taskbar, gadgets and icons. Like Vista, the Start menu placeholder is the orb that glows when you hover over it. The taskbar has been made a bit larger and the way things are organized is a bit better. The system bar is less cluttered this time. The gadgets are not restricted to just the right hand side of the display. You can move them around anywhere you want. The icons are a lot larger too. It’s almost as if you’ve set your resolution to 800×600.

The Start menu looks a lot nicer and is now even more useful than before. I found that the search actually responded fairly quickly no matter what you’re searching for. I think before, it would only search for software and system related stuff. Now, it pretty much searches the whole hard drive for anything.

Some software that is listed on the Start menu has the option of opening a sub menu. For example, for Paint, it would give you access to recently saved files but for Messenger, it allows you to change your status, check your email or even view your profile.

As I mentioned before, the taskbar has been given some organizational changes which helps makes it less cluttered. Any similar software that is running is grouped together and when you hover over it, you get a little preview of each individual window. This is very helpful when you have multiple Word documents opened and you want to see what in each of them without having to switch to them. When you hover over the preview, that window will be show and everything else will be transparent.

The icons on the taskbar as some interactivity to it as well. When you cover over an icon, there’s a little animation that takes place. There’s a little glow to each icon and they’re all difference. The colour of the glow depends on the colour that was used to create the icon. For example, the Firefox icon will have a red-orange-yellow glow to it while the Messenger icon will have a blue-white glow. It’s a nice little touch, I say.

They’ve also changed up the way you switch between windows as well. This is the feature that’s available in Vista where you hit the Windows key and Tab rather than Alt-Tab. This feature gives you a little preview of each window. It’s a nice feature but it doesn’t do much for me. I just like playing with it but the novelty fades after time.

In Windows XP, you would have to click on the “Show Desktop” shortcut to quickly minimize every window that was opened. In Windows 7, that shortcut has been replaced with a tab at the end of the taskbar. When you hover over that, everything turns to glass which in turn allows you to see what’s on your desktop. As soon as you move your mouse away from it, everything goes back to normal.

Overall, Windows 7 is a big change in the right direction for Microsoft. It’s not a resource hog like Vista and it’s a lot faster as well. Where Vista fail, Windows 7 has succeeded. If you’re lucky enough to be eligible for the free upgrade to Windows 7, I recommend that you upgrade. I don’t know the retail price of Windows 7 but it’s probably worth it to buy.

I’m currently typing this blog from a software that came with Windows Vista. It’s looks pretty handy since everything is available offline and the major parts that I need are available to me. There’s a good chance that I’ll be using this software instead of WordPress. I’ll still be using WordPress as the platform but I’ll be using Windows Live Writer to write my blog.

The cool thing about Windows Live Writer is that I no longer need to preview my post anymore because I’m basically typing this post in the blog itself so I see exactly what it’ll look like when I publish it. When you start up the software, it asks for your credentials and then downloads and bunch of stuff, the style sheet being one of them. For this site, it even posted a temporary post and then deleted it so it has done a nice job at integrating with the online platform.

A nice little feature is the plug-ins which you can download and add extra features to the software. For example, there’s a Polaroid Picture plug-in that turns your picture into a Polaroid. You can make minor adjusts to the picture like adding a caption and tilting the image ever so slightly. I find this a nice little feature because it saves me from having to resize the image in Photoshop.

There’s a bunch of other plug-ins available as well, about six pages worth as of now. The default things that you can do ranges from adding a hyperlink, images, tables, maps, tags or even videos. All of this stuff is available in WordPress but since the latest update to WordPress 2.7, I found it to be a little slow. Sometimes, it’s gotten so slow that every time I press a key, it would take about a second before it shows up.

Although it has some nice plug-ins, I’m not sure how compatible those plug-ins will be with WordPress. I’m hoping that it’ll do everything offline so that when this post gets publish, there won’t be a lot to do online. The Polaroid plug-in is simple enough since it’s just an image but from what I can see, I don’t think there’ll be a problem.

Last month, Royal Bank ran a promotion for a free Asus Eee PC (pronounced “E”) if any customers who upgrade to their Signature No Limit banking package. I was updated to that package automatically because the package that I was using before was no longer available. The difference between my current package and the qualifying package was a $3 charge. I saw that as a good reason to upgrade to get a small little laptop.

I called them up to ask if I was eligible for the promotion. The CSR said that I was and all that I had to do was pay for the addition monthly charges. After I signed on, he told me that I’d have to wait a few days and someone will call me to tell me what to do next. That didn’t sound too promising because whenever you have to rely on someone else, there’s a chance that there will be some delays. In this case, there was a delay and I had to call back to follow up.

I spoke with a lady who looked over my profile and told me that she had to get back to me about the promotion. As far as I know, there was no need to check for anything since the first representative already did all that. The lady called me back a couple of hours later and told me that I wasn’t qualified for the promotion because it was only opened to customers who upgraded from the Day-to-Day banking package. I didn’t fight with her because I was at work and didn’t have time to argue.

A few weeks later, I get a message on my cell phone from RBC saying that they’re still looking into the matter. I’m not sure why they’d still be looking into it if I wasn’t qualified so I just brushed it off and carried on with life.

The following week, I get a letter in the mail telling me that I was qualified for the laptop and all that I had to do was enter in the promotion code on the website and verify my information before they sent out the laptop. I was so excited at it that I called to my parent’s house and asked my little brother to enter the information for me, because I didn’t have internet at the time. He typed in what I told him to type but when he finished, there wasn’t any confirmation or anything. I had to double check to make sure he did it right so I waited until I found a stable wireless signal and re-entered my information. At the end of it, it confirmed my information and said that the laptop will be here within six to eight weeks. Since it has been confirmed, I was willing to be patient and wait.

I can’t believe that after making a few phone calls, it turns out that I am qualified to get a free Asus EEE PC from Royal Bank. The first person I spoke with said that I would be eligible if I upgraded but when I called back, they had to do an investigated to see if I was qualified. The person who called me back said that I didn’t qualify which made me a little disappointed.

Now that I have the laptop in my hands, I plan on doing a little review on it. Initially, I was supposed to get the 2gb version but when I opened the box, I noticed that it was the 8gb version so I lucked out. I have an upcoming “debate” with a colleague of Jenn regarding Mac and PC and I can probably test out the webcam on this little thing and at the same time use it to debate the guy about it. So we’ll see how that turns out. Asus Eee 701SD review, coming up!