WordPerfect vs. Microsoft Word

I know that this battle is long over, but I was trying to do some fairly complex layouts with Microsoft Word a few days ago, and I remembered how much I loved WordPerfect. For good or bad, Word has become ubiquitous. Fortunately almost all of the document I create are simple paragraphs with maybe a few headers and some lists, anything more complex than that and Word seems to fall apart. The last big, important document I worked on was a few years ago: my masters thesis. Rather than try LaTeX, I decided to stick with tried and true WordPerfect. I had heard to many horror stories of people trying to use word, and getting something just a little messed up, with no way to correct it. They would have to take there thesis content and recreate it in a new Word document.

Obviously this wasn't something I wanted to do. So I brought out my trusty copy of WordPerfect and went to work. I will admit that there were a few struggles to get the layout just right, but nothing that required huge amounts of time, or starting over. Other than the fact that WordPerfect just seems more intuitive for doing tables, diagrams, and images; it has reveal codes. For anyone not familiar with WordPerfect reveal codes it kind of like looking at HTML. I know Word has something that lets you look at style information, but it doesn't give you nearly the same informtion or control as reveal codes.

I also realize that something like reveal codes is not for everyone. I am a software developer so raw document codes like reveal codes, or HTML or C# don't scare me. In WordPerfect I have the best of both worlds: A really good WYSIWYG editor where I can do most of my work and an equally good view of the underlying document codes that lets me fine tune, fix, and tweak my documents. If I get a stubborn image that won't stay where I want, I can look at the detailed properties in the reveal codes to see why it isn't behaving like the rest of my images. In Word my best bet would be to remove the image, and add it to the document again, and cross my fingers that it works.

Is Linux the operating system of the future?

I'm been using different variations of Linux for 10-15 years, and there seem like there have been some pretty dramatic improvements over that time. As a server operating system Linux is great, it has many advantages over Windows, but Windows has many advantages over Linux. Both operating systems can be good choices, depending on your needs and requirements.

I'm more interested in the desktop side of things. Linux still hasn't made many inroads on desktops. Many techies have dual boot installations with both Windows and Linux, and some ultra cheap computers come with Linux. Some companies and government institutions have converted wholesale to Linux. But most of these case are the exceptions to the rule. Windows is by far the most popular desktop operating system.

I think that the biggest reason for this is compatibility: all of the applications that people use work on windows, everyone else uses windows, everyone knows windows. Linux has a huge hurdle to overcome to be able to compete like Windows. Even if Linux may be a superior technology and run more efficiently, and even if it's GUI is comparable to the UI on Windows: it doesn't have the same value has Windows.

When you select windows as your operating system you don't have to worry about training, you don't have to worry as much about application incompatibilities, you don't have to worry if your employees will be able to interact with external parties. But with Linux many or all of these can be potential issues that will require time and money to overcome. I don't think that there are any significant flaws in Linux. It isn't perfect, but Windows isn't either. But even with all of the things that Linux has going for it, it doesn't have the momentum to really beat Windows. At least not yet...

Death to Internet Explorer 6

I personally think that Internet Explorer 6 should be outlawed. Web development can be difficult enough to make things look good and work right, that throwing Internet Explorer 6.0 into the mix just makes things that much harder. Even when I'm doing ASP .NET development, you would think that everything would work well with IE 6, but that is not the case.

I spend most of my time using Firefox to test my sites, then do some quick checks in either IE 7 or IE 8, depending on what is installed on the computer, and in most cases things look and work pretty well. Sometimes there may be a few tweaks necessary to get things just right. After that I have to spin up a virtual machine, or find an old computer with IE 6 on it. And that is where the fun begins.

Web page layouts never quite look right, IE 6 never really seems to do what you've told it to. It selectively ignores CSS and re-sizes things how it wants. The internet is abound with IE 6 CSS hacks. Functionality seems to have just as many problems. Basic JavaScript is hit or miss, it might work just fine, or it might decide to be your worst enemy. Anything more complex like AJAX is almost a lost cause. You might as well develop and maintain two separate websites: one for real web browsers and another for IE 6.

Maybe I'm being a little hard on the browser, but it really is a web developers worst nightmare. If there were only a few computers out there that still had IE 6, that would be one thing. But there is still a large portion of computers that run IE 6 as their primary browser. I defintely favor Firefox, but I don't mind if people want to use IE 7 or IE 8, just not IE 6. We should all wish it a fond farewell, and retire the old chap already.

Windows 7 - free upgrade to vista

About 6 months ago I built myself a computer, and I decided to install Vista on it. The primary reason for this choice (And not Windows XP) was that the computer had 8GB of memory so I 64bit OS was necessary, and in my mind 64bit XP is not a viable option. So I've been using Vista for a while (I went with Ultimate so I could get Remote Desktop, etc) and it seems to be OK. Nothing new and exciting about it, but at least it works (With a few little tweaks).

But now that Windows 7 is on the horizon, it seems to me that it should be a free upgrade (like a service pack) to Vista, not a brand new operating system. Why should I have to pay for the "fixed" version of the operating system that I already own. Doesn't seem to make much sense to me. But I guess microsoft has to make their money somewhere.

Vista Remote Desktop and monitor power saving

For some reason when you use remote desktop to access a Vista machine, it seems to turn off the power saving features. Normally my monitor shuts off after 10 minutes, but if I remote desktop into the machine, the monitor never seems to turn off, until I log in locally. Once I log back out, the monitor shuts off after the normal time. I've seen a few posts about this, but no one seems to have an answer or solution. Please chime in if someone knows how to fix this.

VMware and Avira

I was trying to get VMware Server running on my Windows Vista 64 machine, and every time I tried to power up a new VM, it would get stuck at 95%. I finally stumbled on a post that indicates that VMware may not play nice with Avira Antivirus. It says you have to uninstall Avira for it to work. I was hoping to get by with just turning off Avira and even shutting down the service, still no luck. It seems odd that this is still an issue, but I haven't seen any newer posts about this. I guess I may have to switch Antivirus software to get VMWare to work?

Changing Passwords for local windows accounts

At work today some of the IT guys were talking about needing to change the local Administrator accounts on a bunch of the computers. They were planning on updating each password manually by going to each computer and logging in. The computers are all part of a domain, but apparently Microsoft hasn't made an easy way to update local machine information like this.

I remembered seeing an article in Microsoft TechNet magazine about how to automate this. I thought it had been windows powershell script, but it wasn't. Once I found the article, it ended up being a visual basic script for Excel. All you need to do is provide a list of computer names, and give it a new password to set. It's not as simple or easy to use as a standalone application, but all of the apps I found didn't look very good, or cost more than they should. If someone knows of a good free application or even better an open source application (maybe C#), let me know.