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

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).

July of 2005, I wrote a brief post about IBM OS/2, and the news back then was IBM had announced it will be ending support for the operating system. In its time, OS/2 had potential, and was supposed to have been a strong alternative to MS Windows, which was just starting to gain ground.

An old friend of mine, Michael Balcos, had just emailed me recently to tell me he’s now blogging. Mike was my batchmate and classmate back at elementary in Claret and at the Ateneo High School. He was the one who introduced me to Bulletin Board Systems, and I can pretty much credit him for helping start my fascination with all things online. You see, it was Mike who inspired me to set up my own BBS back in 1995, when email and the Web were still not widely and commercially available here in the Philippines. He ran the Student Union BBS, and I ran the Cyber County BBS. We were members of our respective BBS networks (he was part of Fidonet, and I was part of smaller, loca-based networks).

Balky was such an OS/2 enthusiast. And while he has decided to move on to other things (particularly Slackware), he still has fond memories of being “warped” (reference to OS/2 Warp, of course).

That friend of mine showed me a little of OS/2 Warp 3’s capabilities. He formatted a diskette, executed several recursive “dir” commands in different OS/2 command shell windows, played an audio file, opened Windows 3.1(yes, it can run that!), and did a host of other things. The OS did all of that smoothly at the same time! When I got my own copy of OS/2 Warp 3, I crossed my fingers that it could give what I wanted in an OS. During that time, I wanted my OS to smoothly multitask between my BBS, word processor(MS Word 6 for Windows 3.1), DTP software (Aldus PageMaker 5 for Windows 3.1) and other applications. And it did so with flying colors!

IBM has ended support for OS/2 effective end of 2006, and apparently there are no plans to open-source the code. Balky thinks there might still be hope for OS/2, if IBM were to open-source the OS. I believe a lot of financial institutions and banks still use OS/2 to date, because of the security and perhaps because of the cost of migrating to a different system. Time to move on to other things, too, I guess.

When you close your laptop lid, you’d expect your computer to go to sleep, and perhaps after a few minutes of inactivity go to hibernate mode. This is a default with Apple notebooks—the sleep functionality is so efficient that the computer goes into suspended state in a couple of seconds and wakes up as quickly.

I can’t say the same about Windows, though. Sleep takes about 5 to 10 seconds on my machine. Waking up takes about twice as long. And hibernate? Depending on how large your system RAM is and the speed of your hard drive, you could be looking at a 30 second wait for hibernation and a couple of minutes for waking up.

I’ve assigned the power button on my Presario to be the shortcut for hibernate. I rarely shut down since I prefer to have all my work still open when I turn on the computer—opening up everything after a fresh restart seems too tedious. I only shut down completely when I really have to reboot the system (i.e., after installing applications).

But a few days ago, my laptop almost got burned because of crappy hibernation sequences. So as it was approaching noon—the time I’m supposed to pick up my wife and daughter from work and school, respectively—I hit the power button, closed the lid and stuffed the laptop into my backpack, thinking it had already started with the hibernate sequence.

This time, it did not.

It turns out that there was a glitch with the wireless connection and Windows displayed a prompt that the computer could not go into hibernate mode at that time. Stupid as Windows was, the prompt stayed on, and somehow managed to prevent the computer from sleeping or hibernating. By default, the laptop was supposed to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity and hibernate after 10 more minutes, if on battery mode.

So as we had a quick lunch, the laptop was still running inside the backpack, which I left inside the car. As I was carrying the bag on my back upon arriving home, I kept wondering whether the heat was coming from inside the backpack or just the noontime sun. Boy was I surprised when I opened the bag. I almost panicked because the computer had been so hot I could smell something almost burning inside (the same smell when you’re using soldering lead).

It’s good the laptop survived without problems. I think that incident might have accelerated the laptop’s aging by a few months, though.

And this is one of the reasons I’m not too happy with Windows. If I had brought the PoewrBook, none of this would have happened. Thing is, the work I was currently doing was on the Windows machine, and among the two, it’s the smaller and lighter one, so it’s easier to carry around in quick trips.