Vista for a day

Strangely enough, right after I wrote the previous entry about the lack of a up folder button in Windows Vista I came across Mavis Up Button. I wasn't even looking for it, since I gave up looking for a solution long ago. It was a completely random thing.

So I re-installed Vista on my ThinkPad on a spare 320 GB hard drive.

My ThinkPad actually came with Vista Business pre-installed, but I downgraded to XP when I first bought it because of the missing up folder button, and also because it was slow at the time due to lack of RAM. (The ThinkPad came with 512 MB installed, which I immediately upgrade to 2 GB. Now it has 4 GB installed, although only 3 GB can be used due to chipset limitation.)

The installation from the Vista restore discs followed by Service Pack 1 followed by driver updates took nearly three hours. After installation was complete I disabled all the useless animations and reconfigured the desktop the way I like it, and immediately ran into a new annoyance: Vista insisted on remembering each folder's view settings even when the option is disabled. Hmm, I remember hearing about this problem but I never paid much attention since I wasn't using Vista, but a quick web search turned out the problem most people were having was Vista refusing to remember each folder's view setting, and I was having the exact opposite problem!

After some tinkering I figured out the relatively simple solution: folders in Vista have default view setting which Vista will use even when the "remember each folder's view settings" option is disabled. So after disabling the option, I also had to apply the view setting to all folders.

After that I installed the trial version of Mavis Up Button and started using Vista, and like I said in the previous entry, I do like Vista a lot, and it runs very fast on my notebook.

But then I ran into a yet another new annoyance: there doesn't appear to be any way to disable smooth scrolling in Windows Explorer when the view setting is set to List. I came across this Neowin forum post that suggests that there is no solution. Smooth scrolling is fine for typical users or if there are very few files in a folder, but I have folders with thousands of files, and scrolling smoothly across thousands of files takes a long time.

Bah. Back to XP for me.

Why I don't use Vista

Reading about the Microsoft Mojave Experiment made me write this. I actually like Windows Vista a lot. But the only reason I don't use it is because it lacks the "up folder" button in Explorer. The up folder button is not like the back button, and the new breadcrumbs bar can not replace the simple up folder button.

The breadcrumbs bar is much harder to use than the simple up folder button is because the breadcrumbs bar changes in length depending on the length of the current path. If you're many folder levels deep, the breadcrumbs bar could take up the entire width of the Explorer window, so to go up one folder, you need to mouse over to the right side of the window. But if you're only one or two levels deep and the path is short, you need to mouse over to the left side of the window. This gets worse if you have a large Explorer window, since the breadcrumbs bar would be random in length.

The location of the up folder button never changes.

This is very important because I don't want to have to look at the folder names and move the pointer to the right place just to go up one folder level. What if I'm going up more like one level? Some people argue that the breadcrumbs bar is faster if you're moving up more than one folder level because you can click to that folder directly. But in reality, I would then need to look at the breadcrumbs bar to see exactly where I should click to go up that many folders, instead of just moving the pointer to the up folder button and click click click.

It's strange that Vista actually introduced a new shortcut key to replace the missing button: Alt-Up arrow. Alt-Up arrow is exactly the same as the up folder button, but why take away the button, and add a keyboard shortcut?

One reason I can think of why Vista doesn't have the up folder button is because users can't tell the difference between up and back. I look at my users and none of them ever uses the up folder button because they usually navigate into a folder from the previous folder, and going back is the same as going up. This is probably a lot like those windows animations and sounds. My users need them to see where they've clicked and what actions last took place, but they just slow me down. The animations can be disabled for advanced users, and I imagine the Alt-Up arrow shortcut was added for advanced users, but why was the up folder button taken away?

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 released

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 has just been released. Maybe it's really time to buy a good professional LCD monitor instead of doing everything on my notebook all the time.

Happy SysAdminDay!

Last Friday (July 25) was System Administrator Appreciation Day (SysAdminDay). No one showed up to give me any presents or called me up to thank me, and it completely slipped my mind too until early this morning.

Let me see, last Friday some user's computer got infected by a virus that could not be cleaned unless the hard drive is connected to a clean computer and scanned from that computer. Another user's monitor was having problems and sent in a request for a new monitor which we didn't have on hand. The company's inkjet printers are using way too much ink and I had to figure out a plan to reduce ink usage. A programmer's Visual Basic suddenly failed and I helped him fix it. The CCTV system crashed and I had to fix that. The 1.5 Terabyte Buffalo TeraStation used for backups ran out of disk space because the backup software keeps crashing so it keeps doing full backups instead of incremental backups. The SOX consultants requested a complete list of all programs developed by our programmers. Boss wanted to burn some CD's but can't remember which program to use. Someone called me up to do a telephone survey about our network infrastructure and I had to spell out Google and Cisco for her. Right after that the local Kerio Winroute Firewall dealer called me up to remind me that my subscription is expiring. A friend dropped her notebook by accident and the screen cracked and wanted my advice about buying a new notebook. (We made an appointment and went out to buy it on Sunday.) Another friend wanted to have a website redone and I went to check out the website and turned out it was infected by an iframe virus. Another friend was starting a web business and wanted to know about link exchange and SEO. Yet another friend was having problems with her company's Internet link and I had to talk to their service provider about it. Still another friend was installing Windows XP on his Acer notebook and was having problems with the display driver. The driver turned out to be corrupted on many Acer sites and I managed to find an uncorrupted copy on the Chinese Acer site. My domain controller had been having an issue where every single day after 5 PM and before 8 AM the server's dual port LAN card would stop working as a team and then the server would complain about duplicate IP on the LAN. Since the problem only happens after 5, I worked late trying to fix it. (It's still unfixed.)

In other words, a completely typical day.

Flying GPS

Last week I took a whole week off and went on a much needed R&R trip to China. I've always wondered if GPS devices could work in a commercial flight, and this was the perfect opportunity to find out for myself.

My GPS is a Garmin Forerunner 205 which actually a sports GPS, but it could be used as a general purpose GPS for tracking, but not for navigation.

The flight was between Bangkok and Beijing. The distance from take off to landing was 3,511 km and the total flight time was 4.5 hours. Max airspeed was 905 km/h. The yellow line in the image is the actual flight path taken from the Garmin software.

Router boards

So, just buying home routers and flashing them with third-party open source firmware wasn't enough, I started looking at "router boards". Router boards are low-cost power efficient computers usually with multiple network interfaces suitable for being used as firewalls or routers.

After some research, I decided to buy some alix2c0 boards directly from PC Engines. The alix2c0 is a basic router board model with two onboard network interfaces and two empty mini PCI slots suitable for wireless network cards. Other models of the ALIX boards have different combinations of network interfaces, onboard USB ports, and even form factors.

I also bought bright red cases designed just for the alix2c0, as well as wireless cards and CF cards. The red box at the left of the picture shows a fully assembled alix2c0 with one wireless LAN card (it's internal) and one external antenna connector (with no antenna attached). The board at the right of the picture is the plain alix2c0 board with nothing attached.

My OS of choice for the alix is m0n0wall. m0n0wall turns the ALIX box into a full feature firewall suitable for small businesses. One other thing that I use m0n0wall for is the hotspot voucher support, which turns an ALIX box into a standalone hotspot for use in Internet cafés or hotels. m0n0wall's internal hotspot support is still too primitive to support long term usage such as in an apartment complex, where the users may want to buy a ticket and use it for days or even weeks, and the hotspot would need to keep track of the usage.