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I got a great deal (thanks Nelson, thanks Adam!) on Office 2007, and the new version of Word comes with a handy feature to publish from Word to my blog. I’m not sure what advantages it has to over just logging into my blog’s admin panel (but I can think of some disadvantages, like not being able to approve comments (once again, thanks Erin for being my most consistent commenter).

This post is just to merely check the functionality of said function, but all in all I think Microsoft is slowly realizing that the feature set of their applications needs to be updated somewhat in order to truly be professional class.

I read this off Joey Devilla’s blog a while ago, quoted from here:

“One of my big bones with MS stuff is that it always makes me feel like I’m eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm. All of their software is designed to help busy executives plan their lives. Everyone I know uses it to try and write birthday cards and chat with their friends. When people use Microsoft Office they use it anywhere but in an office. Microsoft knows this – but it also knows that the money comes from their corporate clients, so there’s a limit to how much it can bend its software toward a wider customer base. Ultimately when you use MS software, you’re not the end user MS perceives at all: we’re just living off the scraps Microsoft leaves out after feeding its big customers.”

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Hey,

I liked this movie a lot. It’s pretty long but I think it’s totally awesome. Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton are two of the most unique looking people I’ve ever seen too.

The movie is kind of Forrest Gump-y but in a good way (I didn’t like Forrest Gump too much).

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I used to really like (Ximian) Novell Evolution, but now I’m realizing that it’s pretty dumb. You have to write filters to move mail into separate inboxes, which is fine but what if the recipient address isn’t in the ‘to’ field, but it’s instead been ‘bcc’ed?

Then your filter doesn’t work, that’s what.

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After I’ve been harsh on Microsoft in the past, I sat down for a limited time with Office 2007 because I’ve been redoing (and redoing) my resumé.

I’d actually rate the experience as being excellent (I only used Word and checked out Excel for a bit). I can say that the menu options are a lot more useful and intuitive than they were previously, and while Word still had some funny default ways of treating formatting, it was miles better than the version I’d used at work.

I saw this in light of Computer World’s report that Windows’ market share has dropped below 90% for the first time probably since the 80’s, when Apple’s marketshare was huge.

Internet Explorer’s marketshare is also down to under 70% according to this. Wowzers, the times they are a-changing.

I wonder how many people like me are out there who do their surfing in a Linux VM (Ubuntu with Firefox for me) but use Windows as a host OS.

So that’s that.

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Hey,

I had the McDonald’s angus burger for a late lunch today. It was pretty good. It comes on one of their new ciabatta (however you spell it) buns. I skipped the salad and got fries (booh!)

So I’ll be walking a lot this evening to make up for it.

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I just installed KDE 4 into my Ubuntu virtual machine and I must say, it’s just about the sexiest User Interface I’ve ever seen.

For one thing, Kicker doesn’t expand as you explore applications, instead the entire panel switches to the list view of all the categories, then when you select one the panel is filled with the related apps. You switch back to the parent menu by clicking on a nice arrow that points left. Very nice.

Installation was painless. I added the KDE 4 repository (deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main)to my /etc/apt/sources.list file, aptitude’d (Terminal: sudo aptitude update – then: sudo aptitude install kde4) the download and install, and logged out, selected a KDE session from the Options and that was that.

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Having just built my new PC, I wanted to install a Virtual Machine application on it. My main reason for doing this was for the ability to surf the Internet and check e-mail without having to worry that I’d get my Windows installation infected or compromised.

I have to say that both Virtualbox and Ubuntu are great. I do all my web surfing and emailing in Ubuntu and it’s fast and very feature-rich. I had no problems installing my favourite apps (MPlayer most notably, as well as some KDE stuff) with the really nice package manager they include by default. I love the fact I can surf and check my e-mail without worrying to much about viruses or exploits (knock on wood).

I’d say that Virtualbox is one of the greatest apps I’ve ever used. It’s extremely easy to use, feature-rich, almost bug-free as far as I can tell and it works exactly as advertised. Many, many props to the team for this. 10/10

Ubuntu is a good Linux distro, can’t really fault it for anything. Package management is a breeze, haven’t had any compatability issues with stuff I’ve tried. 8/10

Below are the instructions I used to install Virtualbox with Ubuntu 7.10:

I’m using:

WinXP Pro
Q6600 (Intel Core 2 Quad at 2.4Gghz)
2.75GB of accessible RAM (4GB, but 32-bit Windows only sees 2.75GB – not using the /3GB switch)

So, I looked into these free products:

VMWare Player
Microsoft Virtual PC
Virtualbox 1.5.2

Anyway, I settled on Virtualbox as VMWare Player has a maximum resolution of 1024×768 that apparently cannot be overridden and Virtual PC only promises to work with Microsoft operating systems.

I downloaded and installed Virtualbox from here: Virtualbox download

They have closed-source binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac. They have an open source licensed version but I didn’t even look into it.

Download and installation went smoothly, and upon loading the app I was given the opportunity to create a virtual machine.

For the sake of simplicity, I decided to go with Ubuntu Linux 7.10, which I believe is just about the most popular distro out there today. I used to use Redhat (up to 8 or 9, but the quality I think dropped off after 7.3) and Suse, for a bit.

I downloaded Ubuntu (CD .iso version) from here: Ubuntu download mirrors

I didn’t need to burn the CD, Virtualbox read the .iso package and installed the app using that. Meaning that installing Ubuntu Linux in Virtualbox on my Windows host was going to be faster than installing it as a standalone OS.

At this point I’d like to state that if Virtualbox ever improved its Mac OS X host support – this would probably be the most popular application ever.

Anyway, so the steps to install a new virtual machine are as follows:

1) Open up Virtualbox and click ‘New’.
2) Enter in the machine name and the version (kernel version for Linux) of the virtual machine operating system.
Supported types are:

• Windows 3.1 – Vista, including Server 2003
• OS/2 Warp 3 – 4.5
• Linux release kernels 2.2 – 2.6
• Netware, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris
• DOS, L4

3) Click ‘Next’ and pick out how much RAM to give your VM. I went with 768MB
4) I had to create a new hard disk image for the virtual machine, so I clicked ‘New’ on the Virtual Hard Disk screen.
5) The Virtual Hard Disk Wizard screen popped up.

***Note: Select ‘Dynamically Expanding image, or else you’ll get some specific errors when creating the file system (at least, I did)***

6) Create the virtual hard drive image.

7) After all that, we h ave to tell Virtualbox where to get the VM from. To do that, go up to ‘File’ and ‘Virtual Disk Manager’. Click CD/DVD image and select the .iso for the operating system you downloaded.

After that, click ‘Start’ and the installation wizard for your OS should start.

9) After installing the OS, go back to the ‘Virtual Disk Manager’. Click CD/DVD image and deselect the .iso for your operating system, as you don’t want to install it again.

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