I’ve been designing a new desk and I want to have a smoky glass top. Here is an even better idea – a surface that responds in a super funky way to touch – MAKE: Blog: Multitouch table experiment

Windows Vista: I’m Breaking up with You ~ Chris Pirillo says Vista is “late beta, at best”.

I couldn’t agree more. I am using Vista oem pre-installed on two machines now. I’ve already discussed the first, my rating for Vista was “ehh”.

My second has caused me to downgrade the rating to “blech”. Specific issues:

* Blue screen in the firewire driver when copying files over from a firewire drive * can’t install a printer driver for an hp laserjet which is shared over the network from an xp machine. xp is 32bit, vista is 64. when i try to connect to the printer, i get a vista popup telling me it doesn’t have the right drivers. when i try to install the drivers locally on vista, it asks me what printer i want to connect to, and when i pick it, vista tells me it doesn’t have the right drivers – no shit sherlock. * oh and once i’ve done this, windows explorer hangs and restarts everytime i look at the printers folder * installed plasma pong from the best indie games – way cool looking until it hung and vista killed it. even cooler looking the 2nd time until it hung and caused a spontaneous reboot

I wish i had gotten these machines shipped with XP. I am stunned at how crappy Vista is.

UPDATE: great, now OWA doesn’t work right in IE either. the rich editing component won’t load in message forms. no explanation why. I’ve put our OWA site in the trusted sites list. doesn’t help, oh and now i see why – MSFT KB article - you have to patch your exchange server to support vista clients. Great tradeoff, create another really hard adoption hurdle for Vista users.. I sure hope the vista team is cranking hard on SP1.

I got a velocity micro box from Bestbuy.com with Vista preinstalled. Some early impressions:

* Bestbuy.com did a nice job on availability and shipping. they had what they said they had, it shipped on time and got here fast. no complaints there. * The machine arrived nearly stillborn. Random reboots every hour. Velocity Micro support was nonexistent – unresponsive to email requests, long hold times. And their website self help options are awful. I suspected a bios issue, they don’t document their motherboard model number in the provided doc and their website doesn’t tell you what they use, and in fact doesn’t even link to nvidia as a supplier. but visual inspection told me what nvidia part it was, and a bios download definitely made things happer. This machine was obviously never burnt in at velocity micro, and their support sucks. Beware. * Vista – ehh. Random moving around of commands just to make things feel new – finding how to add a printer took me forever (a plug for network magic, it was the easiest way to connect to a printer), finding the log viewer applet is even harder (and when your machine is rebooting every fricking hour you want to look at logs). iTunes doesn’t work right. All that work on search and it doesn’t even index it’s own help files???? You have to separately search help for “add a printer”, if you type this into the prominent search box it doesn’t give you anything useful??? Oh and the security popups are so frequent you basically just learn to OK them all, apparently no one learned any lessons from ActiveX. A net yawn for me. And some anger that iTunes is screwed up, and anger that a not insignificant oem and retail partner could ship a machine with an incompatible BIOS – how can this be happening in 2007???

* Monster Guts – some nice things in here, i need to look at the iogeek product a little more * Battery operated candles – these seem a little pricey, i suspect you could buy some of the flicker led products out there and embed them in your own candles for less money. * Amazon deep discount links – nice, i bet there is some good stuff in the 90% off section that might be good for halloween

Cool – Marginal Revolution: The Beauty Function – algorithms to automatically beautify people.

It is one thing to see these developed someday as processing software tools. That will be nice. But I want this code jammed right into my camera, I want this to happen realtime – I want all my pictures to look great. Or imagine stuffed into a mirror – man retailers would love this, everyone would look awesome in the store when trying on clothes. Or even into your eyeglasses – it would be a much happier world if we all thought everyone was more attractive.

Very helpful compendium of semiconductor info and links

* Wikipedia of course * Nice RPI presentation pointed to by wikipedia * HEMT history

Looking at some of these – want a 1-2 week program:

* NC State. We’ve been to, it was pretty good, albeit a mite warm and sticky in the summer. * Arizona. * Michigan State * Colorado * Berkeley * Purdue * Illinois * Boston U

A somewhat stale master list of engineering summer programs is up here

MAKE: Blog: Declutter your desk – use the underside of the desk to mount various parts. Seems liks a maintenance hassle tho.

Dave found an awesome site on tesla coils – Tesla_Downunder – the laser stuff on this sight is awesome as well

Man this is pissing me off. I would avoid Vista, even on OEM machines, until Apple and MSFT get this fixed.

I’m pissed off at Microsoft. They jammed all this new media playing goo into Vista, and have all this ambition around Zune, but they haven’t made sure that the most important, most used music playing experience works well with Vista. They let their ambition and ego get ahead of their customers.

I’m pissed off at Apple. Vista has been in beta for like forever, and Apple couldn’t figure out how to get iTunes upgraded in time for consumer release? Everyone was too freaking busy on the iphone or what? Again they let ego and ambition get in the way of supporting customers.

It is really bad. We are constantly rebooting our Vista machine with iTunes.

Jerks.

For homework in my class this term

* NSM Archive - Gallium Nitride (GaN) * Ditto for AlN, BN, and InN * Office of Naval Research pages on GaN, BN, AlN, InN

Kurt pointed this out to me – EFX-TEK :: Prop-2 Controller – new version, more outputs, BS2 syntax. Looking good.

relevant to the course I am taking right now –

Theory aims to describe fundamental properties of materials from PhysOrg.com
Gold is shiny, diamonds are transparent, and iron is magnetic. Why is that? The answer lies with a material ’s electronic structure, which determines its electrical, optical, and magnetic properties.

[…]

Plasma Light: Way Cool Tesla Device for a Lamp – these could be useful in a halloween mad scientist setup