Jerrah

After the disappointment I received when Vista completely bombed on my aged but still functional Dell Inspiron 4100 (Pentium IIIm 1Ghz) I thought it had been pushed to the corner and I was only using it for testing new Linux distributions. Even that has recently become a chore as Gnome has become slick and fancy.

I am lending my old Dell to a computerless friend who is currently in need, and Linux was a bit daunting for them. I thought I’d try Windows 7 32bit as it seems to run just fine on my Intel Atom machine.

To be brief I’m stunned with the performance. A near flawless install (except for a XP networking driver I pulled from the Dell site). Sure it’s not the full aero experience but none-the-less a hugely impressive performance for a machine that is around 8 years old!

Whilst browsing through the Direct2Dell blog I saw that Microsoft has announced the release date for Windows 7.

This has been confirmed as a tweet from the Microsoft team and on their blog.

At work I seem to be getting a reputation of being a ‘Mac guy’ because I have decent OsX knowledge but in reality I like to have a go at all the current operating systems and I certainly like to explore technology.

I have had the Windows 7 RC1 running on a home machine for a while now and I am considering installing it on a netbook as I’ve heard it works quite well with the Atom processor.

Windows 7 already seems fairly polished with only the occasional driver issue presenting itself. Microsoft have managed to get 7 in better shape than Vista in a fairly short timeframe and I think this will be a successful launch for them despite the economic conditions.

If you haven’t already tried Windows 7 I recommend downloading it and giving it a chance.

The BBC today revealed that the companion for the forthcoming series of Doctor Who will be Karen Gillan.

Twenty-one-year-old Gillan will star alongside new Time Lord, Matt Smith, when the smash hit drama returns to BBC One in spring 2010.

With filming due to begin this summer, Gillan beat off dozens of hopefuls to land one of television’s most coveted roles.

Gillan said: “I am absolutely over the moon at being chosen to play the Doctor’s new companion. The show is such a massive phenomenon that I can’t quite believe I am going to be a part of it.

“Matt Smith is an incredible actor and it is going to be so much fun to act alongside him – I just can’t wait to get started!”

Lead writer and Executive Producer, Steven Moffat, added: “We saw some amazing actresses for this part, but when Karen came through the door the game was up. Funny, and clever, and gorgeous, and sexy. Or Scottish, which is the quick way of saying it. A generation of little girls will want to be her. And a generation of little boys will want them to be her too.”

Executive Producer and Head of Drama BBC Wales, Piers Wenger, said: “We knew Karen was perfect for the role the moment we saw her. She brought an energy and excitement to the part that was just fantastic. And when she auditioned alongside Matt we knew we had something special. It is a partnership that is ready to take on the universe!”

The new series of Doctor Who comes to BBC One, Spring 2010.

Source: BBC Press release

Shawn Blanc has reviewed MarsEdit and suggests that it has outlasted much of the competition to survive in the blogging world of today.

I was browsing through wikipedia tonight looking at the T800 series Terminators in response to the fourth Terminator movie Terminator Salvation was to be released soon.

I was surprised to read that the tv series has been cancelled after leaving the second season on a cliffhanger.

Series writer and executive producer Josh Friedman has issued the following personal statement:

By now most of you have heard the news that T:SCC is cancelled. I received a call earlier today from Peter Roth at Warner Bros. and I appreciate both his personal and professional support throughout this show’s life. I know a lot of you are angry about the cancellation and want to find a place to direct your anger and to that I say do yourself a favor and find a way to move past it. Every network wants a big fat hit, especially one with a brand name behind it, and Fox was/is no different. They supported the show, they supported my vision of the show, and they gave it plenty of time to find an audience.

And what an audience we found: passionate, intelligent, kind of nuts in a good way. My only complaint about the T:SCC fans is that there aren’t ten million of them. But I prefer to be happy for the ones we had instead of lamenting the ones we didn’t.

Good shows are cancelled every year; smart shows, worthy shows, shows which move their viewers to write blogs and have viewing parties and create action figures and bury executives’ email accounts under thousands of messages. I miss Deadwood and The Wire and Arrested Development but thank God that I still have Rescue Me and The Office and a recently renewed Party Down written by ex-T:SCC writer John Enbom.

Bad shows are cancelled, too. And certainly there are those who did not like what we did and had their own vision for what a Terminator TV show should be. It’s easy to look at low ratings or cancellation as “failure” and for those who believe we’ve gone about this all wrong I’m sure today’s news will only serve to confirm a world view that I would never try to change. We’ve written the show as best we can, executed it to the best of our abilities, and sent it out in the world knowing that we worked out asses off to do something that wouldn’t be a waste of anybody’s forty-three minutes.

Thanks to a brave and talented cast, a feature crew working on a TV schedule, and everyone else who I could list but won’t because they know who they are. Mostly I’d like to thank those of you who’ve supported us and fought for us and given up hours of your life to watch our show. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. The watching.

Hope we do it again soon.

I’ve been trialling Windows 7 RC1 over the last week.

As part of the installation it suggested that I install the Microsoft LIVE suite of free apps which appears to be designed to compete (in an incomplete way) with the iLife suite from Apple.

I’m using this opportunity to update my blog using Windows Live Writer which is a handy desktop application that allows you to publish directly WYSIWYG into Wordpress.

Many years ago I would eagerly await the weekend to go for a dirtbike ride in the State forests around Coffs Harbour with my brother and friends. Thinking back we would often discuss the future and what we would be riding when petrol became scarce and new technologies had become available.

We had decided that electric motorcycles would be the future but thought it would be odd being propelled through the forest on a quietly humming steed.

That was going on ten years ago now, I haven’t had my TT600R for going on eight years now and I don’t even live in Coffs Harbour anymore. I happened across a youtube video of an Electric motorcross bike in use (ignore the hooliganism) and looking carefully at the video I saw a website address across the bike Quantya.com. Apparently our dream of the future is a reality and you can buy electric motorcross (and road registerable) motorbikes across the world - just not in Australia.

It seems like such an excellent idea to me and I can’t wait to see what electric vehicles the world has to offer in the near future.

I’ll finish up with a promotional video for the Quantya.

Apple insider has published an article that describes a computer market that is in massive decline. This is attributed to the current economic situation and the rise in popularity of Netbook computers running Windows XP. The author highlights that Apple has somehow managed to buck this trend with an extremely profitable period. Unfortunately for the industry Apple computers are still a minor player in terms of total units sold.

This photo was taken on Sunday on the way home from the History of Computer games at the Queensland State Library.