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Windows 7 (Home Premium) first impressions

October 24, 2009 By 2 Comments

First Install

windows7-150

I am usually not big on Microsoft releases, but since Vista was a disappointment and XP was getting so… old …I decided I would do something I’ve never done before.  I actually purchased a version of Windows.  Now don’t get me wrong, I have technically purchased older versions, but they were all pre-installed or re-installed through restore CDs and the like.  Basically I was good and paid the “Microsoft Tax”.

Since there are quite a few workstations in my home, I chose to buy the Family Pack, which gives 3 licenses, and installed first on my dad’s computer (No, I don’t live at home)…  Figured if Dad was ok with it, then it’ll probably be ok for the rest of the family.

His machine is an older HP a1430n purchased from the local Office Depot,  it only had 1GB of RAM, AMD 64 3800 processor, integrated nVidia video, 250GB SATA drive, a printer, Microsoft fingerprint reader, and a few other misc peripherals.   Since he was running XP on it, I was required to do a “Clean install” instead of upgrading it, which was expected.  It did put everything from XP into the C:Windows.old folder and did a nice, fast install of Windows 7.  No problems and it was noticeably faster installing than even the 2009 RC1.

Got him booted in and went to manually copy a thumbdrive backup of his My Documents into the new Documents folder.  Nicely, Windows was smart enough to realized what I was doing and proceeded to place the My Pictures, My Videos, etc. from the old My Documents into the correct locations that Windows 7 puts them.   Nice!

Fired up IE 8, nothing new there, basically the same as IE 8 on XP.  Downloaded Firefox and Chrome and setup his Google Apps icons for email, docs and so on.

For a 60 year old, Dad is pretty savvy on the PC primarily just from using them casually over the years, so I plan to let him install his software and misc printer drivers and so forth.

The only thing that really won’t work on his setup is his Microsoft Finger Print reader for logging in.  Microsoft did not seem to write a driver for it and I didn’t try using the XP one.

I did also yank some RAM from an old machine and upped him to 3GB RAM and he’s good to go.  No complaints so far.

Second Install

Second install, it was my turn.   I have a Gateway Quad Proc AMD Phenom, 8GB RAM, nVidia 9800GT w/ 500 watt PSU, Blueray ROM drive along with a normal CD/DVD RW.  running Windows Vista Home Premium 64 that came with it.  Fired up the install and it was for the most part non-eventful although it did end up taking around 4 hours since I upgraded instead of clean installing.  It gathers all settings and files from the old OS and “moves” them into the new.  That takes forever and at times it seems like it is “locked” up or frozen at certain percentages of the process.  I just let it go, it rebooted a few times and came up.

Once in, I was sure to check for updated versions of all my utility software and Open Source things I run to ensure maximum compatibility.

A few minor annoying things I’ve noticed, in no particular order:

  • Windows got sluggish a few times, which I believe was my Tortoise SVN process updating the working copy of my Repo.  Once done, I upgraded it to the latest 64 bit version and it has been fine.
  • My USB ports on the front of my machine cut out a few times, not sure what the cause was, but everything seems to be ok now.
  • My Multimedia card reader doesn’t seem to be working.  Windows 7 used a generic driver for them, so it may just need to be updated.
  • When plugging in a USB card reader, Windows recognized it, but it could NOT read a FAT32 formatted Sony Memory Stick and it insisted on me to format it.  Luckily I did NOT, put it on my Mac and it worked fine.  Pictures SAVED!  Yay!
  • External hard drives (I got 4 of them) are working OK.  One of them has been dropping out occasionally (my bittorrent drop) and Vuze gets angry.

Most of these annoyances don’t bother me too much.  Overall, World of Warcraft (WOW) seems to be noticeably faster loading and exiting, program loading is fast and I have no other complaints.

Next Install, the wife’s machine.  More to come.

Filed Under: General, Microsoft, Review, Software, Technical, Technology, Windows 7 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cherokee Web Server

April 23, 2009 By 2 Comments

indiankidI ran across a webserver called Cherokee a week or so ago while looking around for “light” alternatives to Apache on VPSes.  It looked pretty nice, so I downloaded it and compiled the latest version 0.99.9 and started it up.

The nicest thing, I think, about this server is the simple Web configuration UI (cherokee-admin).  When you start it, it generates a one time hashlike password that you then use to log into the web config.  From there, you can configure virtually (no pun intended) all aspects of the web server, including virtual hosts and many other settings.

The reason primarily for my use is serving up my static HTML sites and light PHP ones as well, light meaning minimal DB calls for things like contact form entry, single simple “SELECT * from where whatever = whatever” type querys with small recordsets and so on.  I moved about 20 of my customer sites to it and so far so good.  That is the level of confidence I had in Cherokee.  100% stable so far.

Compiling it from source may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it really isn’t that difficult.

Here’s how I did it from a new VPS.

apt-get install nano htop build-essential mysql-server php5 php5-cgi php5-mcrypt php5-mysql gettext

This installs nano (a simple text editor), htop (top on steroids), build-essential which is a meta package containing necessary packages to compile crap, mysql, PHP, a few extensions and gettext which the ./configure told me it needed and I’m surprised it wasn’t part of the build-essential.

If this is a fresh ubuntu build, you’ll probably get a locales error… Use this to correct.

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
sudo /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Download the latest cherokee source.

Untar it and enter the folder.

Now run these commands, modify the paths to your liking.  This runs the pre-compile config, makes then installs it, it then copies the init script to that folder and changes the permissions to allow it to execute.

./configure –localstatedir=/var –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –with-wwwroot=/var/www
make
make install
cp contrib/cherokee /etc/init.d/
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/cherokee

to Autostart the init script on boot… Run this…

update-rc.d -f cherokee defaults

That’s about it, read the documentation for specific information on features and have fun.  It is a VERY fast and light webserver that is very well suited for basic websites running on minimal memory VPSes.

Filed Under: Cloud Computing, General, Linux, Review, Software, Technical, Technology, Ubuntu, Web Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

New Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 – IE 8 Acid3 Test

March 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8.0  is just downright pitiful…  To the extreme.  After spending so much time “improving” IE8 to make it more standards compliant, it failed miserably.

Screenshot (in native IE 8 mode)

acid3ie8native

So I figured I’d try the IE 8 compatibility mode to see if it would fair any better…

acid3ie8compat

Actually, quite a bit worse…

On the other hand, Safari 4 did perfect.  Granted, it is a beta, but a very functional one.  Firefox (3.0.7), Opera (9.64) and Chrome got up into the 70′s and 80′s, but still did not get it.  At least they’re trying.  Here are the screen shots for the 4 other aforementioned browsers.

safari4acid3acid3chrome10154acid3firefox307opera964

Filed Under: Microsoft, Review, Software, Technical, Technology, Web Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Mosso (Rackspace) acquires Slicehost

October 22, 2008 By 2 Comments

I posted a lot of posts earlier this summer about my debacle at Mosso which caused me to jump ship and switch my sites over to Slicehost…  

Lo and behold, Mosso buys my new provider… *sigh*…  Can’t get away! :-)

From talking to a few Slicehost guys in their chat, they stated that everything will stay pretty much the same or get better, which I hope it will, but I’m hoping the pricing stays the same or gets lower.

I guess I’ll just be crossing my fingers over the next few months as Slicehost merges into the larger company.  I’m hoping a lot of the features that have been requested by the users can come to fruition soon.

Here is my “wishlist”… (in no particular order)

  1. Ability to backup Slices (cloud nodes) into the Mosso “cloud files” storage, which will allow better backup space utilization and ability to backup the slices offsite.
     
  2. True “pay as you go” for the traditional Mosso shared hosting (Cloud sites)… Instead of $100/mo, do a $5/mo base + compute cycle charge or something along those lines.  I still have a few sites on the old Mosso that I wouldn’t mind keeping there (so I can have ASP/PHP hybrid hosting) as long as it’s reasonable.  
     

  3. Windows 2003/8 Server Slices at the same price point and simplicity of management as the Linux slices.  This MAY be hard to do at an equivalent price due to Microsoft Licensing… But a 1GB+ 60gb+ for under $100 including snapshot backups would be sweet.
     
  4. Keep the same “small company” feel for the people who have become accustomed to Slicehost the way it is today.
     
  5. More diverse data center options to help with latency problems for people in Europe or Asia, ability to choose which datacenter you want a specific slice to reside and the ability to migrate between datacenters. (Rackspace/Mosso) has datacenters in San Antonio and Dallas, TX, Herndon, VA, three in England, and one in Hong Kong.  Both of Slicehost’s datacenters are in St. Louis, MO.
  6. Backbone/Redundancy increases as Slices get “jacked” into the new data centers. 
  7. A la carte access to features that are offered by Mosso and Rackspace such as cloud files and traditional Mosso ASP/PHP shared hosting.

These are all I can think of at the moment and I hope the best for the Slicehost crew.  IF things go bad, I’ll probably have to switch AGAIN to someplace like Linode, but for the time being, I’m still a loyal Slicehoster.

Filed Under: Cloud Computing, General, Linux, Microsoft, Software, Technical, Web

PC vs. Mac vs. Linux

September 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Co-worker showed me this… Funny stuff…

YouTube Preview Image
Filed Under: Apple, Cool Stuff, Humor, Linux, Technical, Technology, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Google’s new Chrome Browser Released!

September 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Google released their new Chrome web browser shortly before the end of a video announcement about it at 11am PST.  I had the download page ready at the beginning of the video (http://www.google.com/chrome) and was only getting a “404 – not found” error.  At around 11:45a I hit refresh on it and there it was.  

The install was amazingly fast and simple.  Didn’t even require a file that needed downloaded to my HDD and run from there.  The install launched directly out of my Firefox and was done in less than 1 minute. 

It is very heavily based on Apple’s Safari Webkit engine.  Here is the HTTP_USER_AGENT from a test PHP page I made:

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″

Overall, I’ve always sort of liked Safari, but always had issues with minor glitches and random lagginess.  I’ve not encountered any issues at all with Chrome so far.  Google has probably done massive internal testing to insure that there are no obvious glitches and/or bugs.  The GUI is very simple and seems fully functional and the memory usage is EXCELLENT compared to Firefox.  

I’ve had Firefox take up to 400-500mb RAM without much even going on.  Even just after starting Firefox is the Google homepage, it takes up 62mb RAM.  On my system, Chrome only consumed around 25mb.  

The only thing I’ve run into when it comes to rendering is my company’s Intranet.  It is only optimized for IE and Firefox and looks pretty bad with Chrome/Safari but is still usable.

All other sites I frequent are just fine, loading faster than ever.

UPDATE 5pm EST:

After running some memory tests, I opened up 4 tabs in Firefox, IE8, Chrome, Safari and Opera, which included logging into 2 of the sites and just displaying two others.

Tab 1: My company’s ticketing system
Tab 2: My personal GMail (Google Apps for Domains)
Tab 3: This blog’s admin section login page only
Tab 4: MSN Money Stock quotes with 6 stocks on it

Firefox 3.0.1: 124.5mb RAM (1 thread)
Firefox loaded everything pretty well, was a bit sluggish on GMail tab.

IE8 (version 8.0.6001.17184): 95.5mb RAM (2 threads)
IE8 loaded everything that it loaded pretty quick too, but completely failed to load GMail, getting stuck on the loading <Email adress> progress meter…  Rendering on the front page of my company’s site was screwed up, but was fine in all other browsers tested.

Chrome: 112.5mb RAM (6 threads)
Perfect loading of all tabs, very fast, no issues.

Safari 3.1.2 (Windows): 98mb RAM (1 thread)
Loaded all sites, a bit sluggish, but not as bad as Firefox. 

Opera 9.52: 75.5mb RAM (1 thread)
Loaded all sites, little slow on GMail, but it came up. All other sites where just as fast as Chrome.

In conclusion, I like the feel of Chrome the best.  Very simple and easy to use, I really like the multiple thread/tab paradigm.  Safari has that nice “Appley” interface I like.  Opera is Ok, but does have more rendering problems, on sites not tested above, than the others.  IE8… Bleh… no comment…  

And as for Firefox, and I thought I’d never say it, it falling behind on both memory usage and speed.  I’ve also encountered quite a few Firefox crashes when shutting down the browser.  This is happening occasionally on all my machines on all operating systems I use, Mac, Linux and Windows.

Filed Under: Apple, Cool Stuff, Review, Software, Technical, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

New Google Chrome Browser

September 2, 2008 By 1 Comment

Google Chrome Browser

Later today Google is expected to release a new web browser based on Webkit (what Safari uses) and Firefox.   I feel that it will be a welcome addition to the browser wars.

I used Firefox, but have notice a lot more browser crashes with 3.x than previous versions and it feels quite laggy sometimes even on a Quad processor machine with 3gb RAM.  It gets to the point sometimes where I just load up Safari or Opera to surf sometimes.

IE just sucks.  I ONLY use IE for site testing during web development and for the “best” experience accessing my day job’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) for email.  Other than that, IE is not a part of my day to day browser use.

If this Google takes the best of Webkit and Firefox and makes it “better, faster, stronger”, then I will use it.  Of course I will be frank on my review of it and will do my best not to be biased since I use Google almost exclusive for my search needs, Email (Google Apps for Domains), Analytics for stats, etc.

I will post up a review once I get my hands on it and can put it through it’s paces.

I think Google will have more downloads of this browser in the first 24 hours than Firefox did on it’s 3.0 launch day if it posts up something on the front page of Google.  This could be huge.

Filed Under: Apple, Cool Stuff, General, Review, Software, Technical, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

iPhone Class Action Suit?

August 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

What a complainer… Sure, there are going to be bugs, lots of them sometimes in the case of a new product of this type… People should almost expect them.

We all knew it was coming, it was just a matter of time. A lawsuit has been filed against Apple over what the plaintiff is referring to as the “Defective iPhone 3G,” which she hopes will become a class-action complaint. Alabama resident Jessica Alena Smith filed the complaint yesterday against the iPhone maker, alleging that the new iPhone’s 3G performance and reliability has been subpar, despite the claims made by Apple’s aggressive marketing campaign. Considering that a true fix has yet to be issued for users’ 3G problems, this could just be the tip of the iPhone lawsuit iceberg. More >>

But now, this woman wants to file a class action lawsuit against Apple due to 3G not living up to her expectations.  Even though the Infineon 3G chipset may be a bit flawed, it’s still not completely Apple’s fault.  AT&T is the provider and that can cause the dropcalls, coverage (or lack of) issues and so on.

I live in Kentucky and don’t even have 3G where I live, so I cannot really vouche for the quality, but I did get a chance to travel to Lexington KY this past week and had NO problems whatsoever… Actually my 3G was much faster on my phone that one of my friend’s tethered BlackBerry.  I brought up pages much faster on my phone than he did on his laptop.

Some people just don’t have anything better to do… Just ask for a refund and get a different phone… geesh.

Filed Under: Asinine, Cell Phones, Gadgets, iPhone, Review, Technical Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Multi-Domain Linux Mail Server

August 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Over the last few weeks, I’ve done a lot of blogging on my new provider, Slicehost, and the steps I’m taking to move away from Windows Server hosting to the Linux platform, at least for my personal sites and client development.  I still have to use some Microsoft technologies at my day job, but I am even in the queue to switch to Linux on my workstation at work too as new machines get ordered.  I plan on running XP in a VM for necessary things on the new workstation.

Well, so far with Slicehost, I’m now up to 3 Slices.  The 512mb one for the websites, a 256mb for development which will turn into another webserver once the 512 is “full”, and now a new 256mb one as a mail server.  I found a good tutorial on how to setup Postfix, Courier, MySQL & Squirrelmail with Spam Assassin and ClamAV in a multi-domain virtualized setup. (LINK)

This took a few hours to get working as intended, there were a few minor details missing, but I was able to track them down and get it working.  Most of it was just copying and pasting commands and changing a few details to my configuration.

The only part I really changed during this installation is NOT to use Spam Assassin and ClamAV, at least for the near term.  Both of these programs take up large amounts of RAM even with the base setup.  With the 256mb Slice, it was going into the swap memory as soon as I booted up and accessed anything.  Without these programs and with a bit of Apache tweaking, I got the memory down to around 116mb while idle.

Also, instead of SquirrelMail, which is “ugly” compared to modern web interfaces, I chose Roundcube, which has really gotten better over the last year.  It is still simplistic, but is very nice and functional.  With my setup, any email user just logs into the Roundcube interface with their email address and password.

Since all the usernames/passwords for this mail server are stored in the database, I was able to quickly write up a little PHP web interface to add/remove/modify email accounts and domains.  Once it is more stable to functional, I will release it here on this blog for others who have a similar setup.

As a test, I’ve been forwarding all my email on my primary account to a test account on this new server and every email has been received properly.  No problems whatsoever.

I plan on moving a few of my friends and family onto this to see how it works for them, if good, then all my customers will be migrated.

Filed Under: Linux, Software, Technical Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Moving away from Windows & IIS (ASP) to Linux @ SliceHost

July 24, 2008 By 4 Comments

I have, for years, been developing web apps and so on using ASP (Classic) on IIS.  It’s a “fine” platform, but I have, over time, become weary of the Microsoft bloat that accompanies running a Windows Server… Especially in a colo/dedicated/VPS environment.

Over the last few months, since my major GoDaddy Windows Dedicated servers got hit by a worm or something, I’ve seriously started learning PHP with MySQL.  I used MySQL quite a bit with ASP and am quite familiar with it, but PHP experience was rather limited.  In the last few weeks, I’ve written a few things and ported a customer’s website over from an ASP CMS I wrote to PHP (still need to finish the CMS in PHP).  The site runs so much faster and I am now able to host it on my new Slice VPS that I setup earlier this month.  In 15 minutes or so, I can have an entire new Slice setup with Apache or Lighttpd and PHP/MySQL and, with a little tweaking and securing, have a server up and serving sites.   Can’t do that with Windows that quickly.

Slice is still running strong and I’m going to do my best to get ALL my ASP sites “ported” over to PHP over the next few months.  I’ve been using ASP/PHP cross reference sites like Design 215 and a few others and have been able to do things very quickly.  The database part was the only part I really needed to find good samples  for, but they aren’t even too hard once you use them a few times.

SliceHost has inspired me to really learn Linux and abandon the Microsoft OS, but there is still one caveat to Linux that I am very disappointed with.  There is not a single (that I’ve found), reasonably priced, multi-domain, domain level administratable email server with a nice webmail interface for users and administrative functions.

I know there are a ton of “pieces” that I can put together to get something like that, like Postfix, EXIM4, Dovecat, etc., but I just simply don’t have the time to wade through the massive pile of config files to get all those pieces working together in a nice secure and highly reliable fashion.

So, I am going to continue moving all my websites over to Linux/Apache/Lighttpd/PHP/MySQL and keep a small (30gb, 768mb RAM) Windows Virtual Dedicated server running with SmarterMail 5.x mail server on it. SmarterMail is probably one of the BEST email servers for a web hosting environment.  It is a snap to setup, backup and move to a new server if needed (Trust me, I know!). I already own an Enterprise license and am just waiting for one last very important domain to move off a temporary dedicated server before I move it to a new Windows VPS to serve the remainder of my customer’s email needs.  SliceHost isn’t a fully “managed” solution, but with the Slice Backup capability, you can have daily and weekly images made and restore to them quickly at anytime in case anything happens…

Mosso is good and is finally rectifying the Compute Cycle issue I mentioned previously,  I may keep them if I can break even with the few sites I still host on there, but their servers aren’t nearly as responsive as a VPS or Dedicated server probably due to the massively clustered setup they run.  I don’t really need individual site scalability… If a site has high requirements, I’ll just stick them on a new slice and charge the customer accordingly.  Most of my sites that would need to scale are WordPress Blogs and could easily handle being Digg’ed etc, by installing WP-Supercache.

Ultimately I plan on hosting all websites and blogs on Ubuntu 8.04 @ SliceHost and email on a Windows VPS @ GoDaddy (for now) until I find a Windows VPS provider as excellent as SliceHost is (hint hint to SliceHost)…

That’s all for now…

If anyone knows of any turn-key type mail servers that are free/inexpensive (< $500) for Linux please leave a comment.

Filed Under: General, Software, Technical, Technology, Ubuntu Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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