Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Anticipating Windows 7

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So, you all know my opinions of Windows 6.0 (Vista). It’s terrible, at least on any hardware that originally shipped with Windows 5.1 (XP) or right around the release of 6.0 (Vista). It’s acceptable on new hardware, and even downright decent on new hardware since Service Pack 1 came out. Decent, however, is still quite a lot behind contemporary Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, and even Windows 5.1 (XP) installations. As such, most businesses and attentive consumers have stuck with XP in hopes what Windows 7 will be better than Vista, or have begun switching to Windows alternatives.

But Windows users now have what looks like a light at the end of the tunnel. I expressed cautious optimism in October that Windows 7 would be a move in the right direction based on some screenshots and positive early reviews, and that cautious optimism has been reinforced throughout the development of Windows 7 so far. Most people who have had the opportunity to play with the new operating system from Microsoft have found it to be speedy, reliable, user-friendly, and—quite frankly—what Vista should have been all along. Best of all, unlike Vista, Windows 7 has a logical name (its version number; imagine that), has proceeded through its development process largely on-schedule, and hasn’t promised more that it can deliver.

Indeed, it does look like Microsoft is getting it. Windows 7 at this early stage looks like it’ll actually be on-par with its Mac OS and Linux competition.

In the coming week, Microsoft will be releasing the first ‘Release Candidate’ of Windows 7. While Microsoft has only committed to a final release in 2010, many pundits and observers see the Redmond company releasing the final product to manufacturers and retailers as early as this summer. It is heartening to find that Microsoft can, indeed, develop a quality product in a reasonable length of time. It is also heartening to know that even a behemoth like Microsoft gets a little shell-shocked when it makes a major blunder like Vista, and takes some drastic action to right itself.

Why am I happy? After all, I gave up on Windows a long time ago and use Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux almost exclusively now for my personal computing. Well, competition is a good thing. If Windows gets really great, it’ll drive Apple and the many thousands of Linux developers to up their game a little more. It was Apple’s resurgence that drove the industry forward to where it is today, and a resurgent Microsoft will help drive the entire industry even further forward. Microsoft’s improvements to their once-wayward operating system ultimately has benefits across-the-board, even if you shy away from trusting Redmond with your computing needs.

Website 21 Planning

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I’ve started doing some preliminary work and prototyping for the next major update to my web site, Website 21. It’s been over a year now since I launched Website 20 on the WordPress blogging and content management platform, which makes it one of the longest-lived designs in the history of Off on a Tangent. It’s been through two minor revisions and I still really like it, which is also pretty abnormal. Usually I start getting annoyed with my site after six months or so and start furiously experimenting with redesigns. In this case, I got a bit annoyed with the color palette and darkened it in the 20.2 revision but that’s been about it.

All-in-all, I’m mostly doing a redesign because it’s time to do a redesign. It’s been over a year, and—perhaps most importantly—I’m no longer supporting Internet Explorer 6 so I can start doing some more advanced, clean, simplified coding without all the hacks and insanity. Internet Explorer 6 has held back the Internet long enough. Don’t expect a really ground-breaking change from a visual perspective. Website 21 will likely be an evolutionary design change, not a revolutionary one. Having said that, I do intend to spend a lot of time reworking all the code on the back end. I’m basically going to code the template from scratch with clean, compliant, modern code. IE6 users beware; the site will not work properly in your browser. Upgrade!

Lastly, I’m always open to suggestions. If there’s something about the design or function of Off on a Tangent that you love or hate, please let me know. I will seriously consider your input as I go through the process of developing concepts and building the next version of this site.

Bad Economy? Depends on Perspective

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I keep trying to tell people that whether this economy is ‘bad’ depends on perspective. Those of us who work hard, save money, live within our means, and mind our credit ratings actually have some great opportunities available to us right now. Sure, there is some uncertainty, but depressed home prices and low interest rates make this a great buyers’ market for people looking at real estate.

In our case, we live in a very expensive area. A few years ago, mediocre townhouses in our area sold for $500,000 or more and home ownership seemed to be completely out of our reach. We were content to live in apartments for the immediate future.

Today though, even decent brand-new townhouses can be had in our area for significantly less. The going interest rate is nice and low (in the 4-5 percent range), and—despite all the media blather about a ‘credit freeze’—credit is widely available for people who have minded their credit scores and don’t present significant risk to lenders.

And I’m not just spouting off either; Melissa and I are very seriously considering buying a home when our lease expires in October—an opportunity that we would not have except for a well-timed economic downturn. We had an initial meeting with a Realtor yesterday and have already started identifying nice townhouses in our price range ($300,000 or less). Even better, as of today we have been pre-approved for a mortgage up to $400,000 (!!). Credit freeze? What credit freeze?

I’m sure I’ll have more on this subject in the coming months ;-).

Sun and Software Uncertainty

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Most of us computer folks have, at some point, been burned by a technology merger or buyout. Maybe you really, really loved Netscape Navigator and watched America OnLine (AOL) destroy it. Maybe you were a BeOS user left in the cold when Be Inc. was bought-out by Palm and the operating system was discontinued. Maybe you really liked Adobe GoLive (though I can’t imagine why) and, after the Macromedia merger, were forced to switch to DreamWeaver or a competing product. This happens all the time—companies go out of business, or are purchased, or merge with other companies, and every so often a piece of software you really love gets the axe.

This isn’t usually the end of the world, since there are always competing products that you can live with or even learn to love. It becomes a bit more tricky though when you have tons of files in a particular format and the original product disappears. If you wrote hundreds of documents in WordStar for DOS, those documents might open in Word or OpenOffice.org or WordPerfect . . . or they might not. Your access to your own data relies on whether other companies thought it was worth the effort to reverse engineer the formats you used at all, let alone whether they devoted enough resources to do it well.

Having been burned by this in the past—both because of mergers and bankruptcies and, at times, by my own decisions to switch to competing products—I now make an effort to store all of my documents in ‘open’ formats. The OpenDocument format, for example, is the format in which all my office documents are saved. These files can be opened with virtually no data loss in OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office (with plugins), IBM Lotus Symphony, Sun StarOffice, Corel WordPerfect Office, Google Docs, and other products. They can be opened on Macs, Windows PCs, and Linux PCs—and probably other, more obscure platforms too.

Read more . . .

‘Still on the Cross’?

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CrucifixOne of the canards some Protestants repeat about Catholicism is that the Catholic Church ‘keeps Jesus Christ on the cross’ by using Crucifixes instead of bare crosses (our family Crucifix is pictured as an example to the right). Most/all Protestant Christian communities use a cross without the Corpus (body) still present.

First and foremost, the cross—with or without Christ on it—is a perfectly valid Christian symbol. While Melissa and I have become Catholic, we are not getting rid of the crosses we had before. Maybe they take a less prominent role now, but they are certainly not invalid. Both forms of the cross remind us of the brutal Roman method of execution that was used to put Jesus to death about 2,000 years ago.

Many Protestants would say that their crosses, with Jesus no longer present, remind them that the Lord is risen . . . and indeed, he is risen. But Catholics would point out that it is the moment of Christ’s death that Jesus brought about atonement for the sins of the world. It is his death on the cross that ultimately brings us life. It is his death on the cross that brought about the New Covenant with man and made possible the entire Christian movement.

For me, personally, the Crucifix presents a constant reminder that Jesus Christ—the human incarnation of God—paid the ultimate sacrifice for me. He accepted pain and suffering unlike anything I can imagine, and he did so for my sake. In doing so, Jesus conquered death and sin. An empty cross, as valid as it is as a Christian symbol, does not serve so powerful a reminder of what God has done for us.

After all, St. Paul did not preach Christ resurrected . . . he preached Christ crucified.

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”—1 Corinthians 1:22-24 (NAB), emphasis added.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.