racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

For almost a decade now, I’ve been a loyal AVG user. I liked how AVG was lightweight, free (for personal use), and had daily updates. It wasn’t bloatware like McAffee or Norton, and it was a decent enough antivirus software.

Through the years, though, one would notice that as software becomes more sophisticated, it becomes more bloated, too. Perhaps it’s because of the big size of the virus definitions (or the heuristics engine). Or maybe because it’s due to the popularity of low-powered netbooks.

Thus, as I reformatted and reinstalled Windows 7 on my old-school Asus EeePC (the 8.9-inch 900), I tried to look for alternatives to AVG. I read that Microsoft’s own Security Essentials, which comes free with any genuine installation (however you may define that). Then another good option was Panda’s Cloud Antivirus.

Panda calls it collective security. And because all (or most?) of the processes occur in the cloud–either on Panda’s servers, or shared across the network of users–it also has a smaller resource footprint.

Wanting to try this out, I’ve uninstalled AVG on all of my Windows computers, including netbooks and laptops, just to see how it fares. At this point, I’m mostly online, and most of the computers I use are always online, save for the netbook, which I take almost everywhere I go (which means there may not necessarily be a wireless connection).

As I see it, a cloud-based antivirus program has a few pros and cons.

Pros:

• Light resource use: Panda Cloud Antivirus uses about 15MB of system memory during idle state, and about 60MB during active scanning. Also, being on the cloud, scanning essentially happens offsite, so your computer doesn’t have to contribute precious processing cycles just to see if your files have some badwar.e
• It’s on the cloud, so you don’t need to download virus definitions frequently.

However, there are a few cons to a cloud-based setup like this. I can think of a few.

• What if you’re not connected? Granted, viruses usually come in emails and links. However, what if someone plugs in a USB flash drive onto your computer, and it’s offline? Panda does have basic on-site scanning, but you might need to be connected to be assured newer virus will get caught.
• Is this an intrusion of your privacy? You’re essentially sending bits and pieces of the files you access while Panda is active. To the security-conscious, this might constitute a breach of privacy.

Still, the biggest come-ons of Panda Cloud Antivirus are its small size, quick scanning, and the concept of sharing the load. I’ll give it a try for a few weeks, and I’ll report what I find out.

photo credit: Mendhak

When I bought my Compaq B1200 about two years ago, I got an OEM copy of Windows Vista Home Premium with it. I knew Vista had bad reviews, especially with its huge system requirements and bloat. But my notebook could handle it, I thought. On my netbooks, I ran Windows XP (I even got a free downgrade from a Vista Business to XP Home from HP).

When Windows 7 had a free beta release, I didn’t bother to try it out. I thought I would only be troubling myself with having to install and reinstall, and un-install the software when the beta expired. Looking back, I think I should have taken my chances. I could only imagine how much productivity I lost due to a clunky XP or slow Vista interface.

Now I’ve upgraded all of my Windows-based computers to Windows 7, including my main workhorse (the B1200), an Asus EeePC 900 and my four-year-old Compaq V2617 I’m really beginning to appreciate Windows 7. It’s quick. It’s lightweight. It’s easy to install. It also has a markedly improved interface.

Still, being able to compare Vista with 7 makes one better appreciate the improvements, especially with the performance. The new way the taskbar shows applications can save time and clicks. Also, I particularly like how you can tweak application settings for compatibility with older Windows versions. This can be useful if your computer doesn’t have Windows 7-specific drivers, but you have drivers for XP or Vista.

Most comparisons and reviews would agree that Windows 7 performs better than Vista and XP in most instances. It’s what Windows 7 should have been, they say. Suddenly, I feel silly for having purchased Vista. MS should’ve had offered a free or cheaper upgrade program for Vista users.

At any rate, if you’re buying a new computer sometime soon, go for Windows 7. If you have an older computer (with at least 1 GB RAM and 8 GB of hard drive space) then it’s probably worth the upgrade.

I’ve stuck it out with Bloglines even when there were other RSS readers touted to be more cool (okay, I also used Vienna when I used my Powerbook as my main work machine). Even though the interface was a bit dull, I found beauty in the simplicity (and the lack of snazzy AJAXy effects).

Now, Bloglines has redesigned and has released its new features and interface as a beta.

Why I like it:

* Drag and drop reorganization of feeds
* Feeds are marked as read when they are actually shown in the window, not when the whole page is loaded (meaning you might have missed those posts at the bottom of the page)
* Quick switch to quick and full views
* Less page refreshes
* Seems spiffier, overall. Not like Google reader which takes forever to load.

Bloglines plasn to release this new version in full before the year ends. You can try the beta yourself by logging in to beta.bloglines.com — use your existing Bloglines login!

[via 901am]

This is a lazy post, by the way. Lots of work to do, so here are some highlights.

* I installed Ubuntu Linux Feisty Fawn (version 7.04) yesterday. Finally got to archive some old files (via DVD) to get a big enough space on my hard drive to re-partition. The entire process took about 8 hours (most of which was spent working while waiting for the ISO to download via BitTorrent, Acronis to resize my partitions, and Ubuntu to actually install).
* Ubuntu detected all my hardware, and activation, setup and operation was seamless. Even Windows couldn’t detect my newly installed Intel Pro 2200BG wireless card. And that was an Intel chip supposed to come built-in with laptops of this vintage.
* Just faced some problems with sleep and wake-from-sleep while running on battery mode. The wireless network won’t work after waking up. Solution: I added ipw2200 to the MODULES line under /etc/default/acpi-support (be sure to edit this using superuser). Working fine so far, except for some instances when the laptop won’t sleep when lid is closed.
* Enabled NTFS write access, so I can still work on my files in the Windows NTFS partition.
* Imported my entire Firefox profile (which just involved copying over the profile from the NTFS partition to the Linux one.
* Installing apps was a breeze, wit the application manager. Just check the ones you want, and Ubuntu will download and install these for you.
* Installed Beryl. Wow! This was one of the main reasons why I was dead serious with installing Ubuntu on my V2000. It’s as good as OS X Expose. And it even has the 3D cube (which I believe OS X Leopard will feature as “spaces”.).

I’m not exactly a newbie to Linux, as I’ve been using Mandriva as my main work machine back in 2005. But I’m not exactly much of a Linux power user either. But still, I’m not alien to the command line (having started using computers when DOS was still in fashion), and there’s always Google for easy reference. So I’m not totally lost.

One stark observation: It’s easier to start using Linux coming from the OS X camp. Both being Unix-derived, a Mac user won’t get lost navigating through Linux, especially if one is used to tweaking Darwin using the OS X Terminal. If you’re primarily a Windows user, though, you might need some time to adjust.

And of course, the Beryl desktop manager makes all this even better.

Best thing is that even if my machine wasn’t too spiffy (it’s a Dothan class Celeron-M running at 1.5 GHz, with 512M of DDR1 RAM), it can still support all this eye candy without breaking a sweat. I don’t think Windows Vista or even XP can do that. I tried installing some 3D cube type desktop managers on XP and I wasn’t so impressed.

Ubuntu passes the J. Angelo Racoma test. It’s easy enough to install, and it works well enough without the usual headaches you would usually imagine having when doing a fresh OS install on your machine. But more importantly, it gets my seal of approval because I got through with installing Ubuntu even with my very short attention span. My previous attempts at installing Linux distros by myself (Red Hat, Slackware, Mandrake/Mandriva) were all in vain. I gave up too easily.

I think Ubuntu Linux will do well as a free OS for home-based computing, and as an alternative to Windows

More testament to Ubuntu Linux’s coolness over at Max Limpag’s site.

Safari has been my preferred browser of late. One of my only gripes is that it’s not like open source Firefox or Camino, which usually have updates every few weeks or so. Still, Safari seems to be a fast, solid, no-frills browser.

One thing I like about it is that its rendering engine seems to catch mis-coded XHTML quite nicely–meaning, it displays badly coded stuff badly! Another one is the clean RSS view I just access a site using feed:// (url here) and I get a no-frills content-only view of that blog or site (now some would argue against this, but I prefer this when I want to quickly check sites for updates).

Just recently, Apple announced that the public beta of Safari 3 is now available for download. And what do you know–it now runs on Windows!

It’s still on beta, though and I know there are a lot of bugs to be found (and fixed!). I even spot a few UI inconsistencies here and there (like saying OPTION-something as a shortcut, even though Windows keyboards don’t have an OPT key). But I’m pretty optimistic about it, though.

I’ve installed it on my Windows machine, and I can say Safari is pretty spiffy. It’s like software from a different world installed on a Windows-powered computer (much like how Windows users might initially find iTunes). I’ll be installing the beta on my Mac in a while. Hopefully that will resolve some small gripes I have with Safari 2.xx (like the inability to run Google Docs).