I noticed that Fry’s had a sale on the Zotac AD02, so I picked one up fairly cheaply, and have set it up. The AD02 is a small little thing, with tons of connectors on the back (USB 2.0 + USB 3.0, eSata, HDMI, DVI). It’s fairly quiet — it does have a fan but the fan is very hard to hear over standard ambient noise — although it has to be said that they have a circular green LED on the top of the box that is bright enough for passing UFOs to notice and use as a landing spot.

One thing to note is that the Zotac AD02 eSata interface does have a port multiplier (PMP). With Ubuntu 11.10 I was able to connect to a Mediastation ProBox with multiple drives and access all of them without any problems.

BIOS Settings

I found it almost impossible to get into the BIOS. You’d think this would be easy. The trick is this: the Zotac AD02 defaults to a) a one-second window for going into BIOS setup, and b) numlock on. So, as soon as the box beeps, you need to hit Numlock and then delete. The Numlock is key, because if you don’t hit that then the delete key won’t register. When you’re in setup for the first time, set the boot delay to a bit higher and turn off Numlock.

Why? When you’re selecting a boot drive, Numlock submits the current selection. So, you see the list of drives that you want to boot, decide you want to move down 2, so you hit Numlock and… the machine starts booting.

Ubuntu 11.10

Either Zotac or Ubuntu doesn’t appear to boot from the USB 3.0 adapters — so, if you have a USB drive and you want to boot from it, you have to use one of the other 3 USB slots.

Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit installed without problems, but I noticed after installing that the drive was constantly flashing. Using iotop and echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump to see what was going on; it revealed that that the jbd2 process (used by the ext4 journals) was constantly writing, which I eventually traced back to the lightdm greeter, which was spewing debugging messages into /var/log/x-0-greeter.log, of the form:

[+35196.63s] DEBUG: user-list.vala:1204: Drew 1 frames in 0.1 seconds
(9.932854 fps)

There’s a bug in Launchpad for this already, and it’s apparently been fixed recently. My incredibly hacky fix was to link that file to /dev/null, which was good enough for now.

sudo ln -s -f /dev/null /var/log/lightdm/x-0-greeter.log

For good measure I ended up putting a bunch of directories in tmpfs anyway. Ubuntu 11.10 has /var/run and /var/lock in tmpfs already, and I added a few others:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0 
tmpfs /var/log/apt tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0

Note that putting /var/log into tmpfs is not generally recommended.

VNC

I usually log into the box via SSH but occasionally it is handy to be able to get to the GUI. I used the example described in this article to set up Upstart to automatically kick off X11VNC. The advantage of this method is that it’s started early enough that even the login screen is controllable through VLC.

XBMC

Putting in XBMC was straightforward, but you want it to use the graphics hardware on the E-350 chipset. I just used the instructions here and it went off without a hitch.

Well, the video was straightforward. I went to audio settings, set up everything for HDMI sound, and… no sound. And then I spent three days of little five minute sessions trying to get the sound to work.

I did not get it to work perfectly — but eventually ended up putting the following into /etc/asound.conf:

pcm.!default {
  type plug
  slave {
    pcm "hw:0,3"
    rate 48000
  }
}

… and then setting audio in XBMC to plughw:0,3, I was able to get videos and music working (but no menu sounds). For something that’s only occasionally a XBMC server, this seemed good enough.

Anyway, I can play a video and the CPU is only running at about 20%, so there are pretty of cycles left to run a torrent or index my mail or whatever else.

Air Video

I also set up an Air Video server according to the instructions here, as there’s a PPA available that makes it incredibly easy to install. Unfortunately, both CPUs are almost completely pegged when streaming with Air Video, but it is good enough to stream the occasional show.

• Display is ridiculously nice
• It’s fast — subjectively, as fast as the iPad — and the extra CPU power really makes the web browsing much better.
• The bumper case is not that great — it prevents some headphones from being used (because the distance to the headphone jack is a bit longer) and also prevents you from using the 10,000 iPod USB adapters that you have lying around the house, because the slot in the case for the iPod adapter is just small enough that older adapters don’t work. As one of my friends said, “Get the Dremel!”
• I took the case off and tried to reproduce the reception problems that people had been talking about, but was unable to get it to happen.

The ominous thing was that the iPhone 4G suffered from the same wireless problems as the iPad, manifesting as a couple of symptoms: a) unable to connect unless I was really close to the router, b) and really low signal strength.

Wireless

I had been living with the wireless problems for a while, although they were extremely frustrating. Finally, a lucky break meant that I was able figure out the underlying cause (although to my chagrin I discovered later that other groups had identified this a long time ago). My iPhone 4G wouldn’t get onto the net, and even worse, every time I tried to get onto the net, it would kick my laptop off for a minute or two.

At that point, it became blindingly obvious — the phone was trying to use an expired lease, and as a result was conflicting with the laptop. Thirty seconds later I had set up static IPs for the iPad and iPhone 4G, and all my problems were solved. I could use the devices all over the house, there were no mysterious drops, signal strength was fine, and as a bonus, the mysterious wireless network failures that my laptop was having were solved.

Lessons Learned

Well, I really should have done my research — I could have found the answer to this much earlier.

Why did I think it had something to do with signal strength? I suspect that the 3.2/4.0 iOS somehow bases the signal strength indicator on DHCP status — where I was getting one bar before is now three. The alternate explanation is that I tended to use the devices in the more remote places at night, which happened to coincide with the DHCP conflict.

Man, netbooks have really come a long way. A quick run through:

Screen: 1366×768 vs. 1024×600 is almost twice as big, and makes a big difference. It’s glossy, which is kind of annoying, and I think the contrast is a little lower than on the 1000h, but nonetheless it’s really nice.

Keyboard: Full sized shift keys on the Acer! This far outweighs almost anything else. The smaller cursor control keys are kind of pain, but I’ll get used to them. Feedback is not as nice as the Asus but still pretty decent — I can type full speed on this keyboard.

Touchpad: Touchpad is good enough; at least there are two mouse buttons, which is one of the things I really wanted. It’s multitouch, but the drivers are a little choppy with the two finger scrolling — but I haven’t tried to fix it, either. The two finger to zoom in and out is surprisingly handy when browsing, to be honest, and I’m using it all the time.

Wireless: Wireless on my EEE 1000h was always a little glitchy at home (and would sometimes cause my router to reboot, for whatever reason), but was fine at work and at Starbucks. The wireless on the Acer 1410 works much better, and I haven’t had any problems.

Speaker: I frequently watch movies with the speakers on. The speakers seem to be just a touch softer than the EEE 1000h, but still pretty good. This tweaks thread has some tips on improving the volume of the speakers.

Processor: The new ULV chips are everything that Atom wanted to be. With the Acer I’ve been able to a) run Ubuntu under virtualbox, b) play full-screen 480p Hulu, and c) play full-screen Netflix, and it hasn’t stalled out on anything. Additionally, the 1000h would bog down when scrolling in Firefox (seriously), whereas this machine handles it fine.

I specifically looked for an Acer with the SU2300 (dual core) instead of the SU3500 (single core, slightly faster).

The machine only starts up the fan when doing flash video — fan noise is not too bad and significantly quieter than the EEE 1000h. The computer itself does not get very warm at all, which is nice.

VirtualBox was a must have, since I wanted to run Ubuntu but didn’t want to deal with the pain of partitioning and dealing with its peculiarities on a new machine. I had assumed that having the AMD/Intel virtualization mode was a big win, but it turns out that it really doesn’t help performance. Nonetheless, Virtualbox works fine. VT-x mode was originally turned forced off, and it was subsequently fixed in the BIOS; see this tweaks thread for tips on getting the new BIOS.

Battery Life: Hard to say, but looks like 5-7+ with this machine, whereas I was getting about 4 with the Asus 1000h.

Operating System: I run XP on most of my computers (and didn’t upgrade any to Vista), but the Acer came with Windows 7 Home Premium. It’s pretty and nice and performs well — I have no complaints.

What a difference a year makes. These new ULV chips are amazing.

I’ve been looking for a replacement for my unslung NSLU2 for a while. I have tons of USB drives all over the place, and wanted to a) consolidate them in one place, and b) have a low power, fanless, tiny machine that could do mail fetches, bittorrent downloads, mt-daapd, e-mail indexing, and other background tasks. The NSLU2 wasn’t bad at all — it was very close to ideal — but it was just a tad underpowered for what I wanted, both in memory and processor.

I eventually settled on an Alix.3D3 board for $132, and ordered it from mini-box.com (which turned around the order really fast, so kudos to them, and I had also heard good things about them when doing my research). It’s tiny, just a little smaller than your typical XBOX game (I keep mine in an old cigar box).

This particular version has a standard BIOS and VGA adapter, so it’s easier to debug; some versions only have serial adapters. (I’m sure I have bunches of serial cables, but at the moment I have no computers that have serial adapters!) It runs very quiet and cool.

So, in typical fashion, I allocated about two hours for everything: 30 minutes to install FreeNAS, 30 minutes to set up the drives, and an hour to gloat. Instead, this turned into a whole day thing. (It was not made easier by VirtualBox kind of breaking USB support in their latest release, but my curses are reserved for Parallels, who in the entire history of their program have never been able to get the USB working halfway decently).

On an Alix.3D3 board, here is the stuff that didn’t work, at least during my hurried first pass:

• FreeNAS 0.686.4 — does not boot, aborts with a trap 12
• FreeNAS 0.69RC2 — does not boot, hangs at “starting devd”
• OpenFiler — incredibly slow to install, results in a compact flash that did not boot
• iMedia Alix — there are bunches of versions of this. The iMedia Alix version (332M) kind of worked, the iMedia Minibox version (525M) did not.

Here is the stuff that did work:

• Voyage Linux — we have a winner! At first I didn’t think this would work on account of it not working in VirtualBox, but if build the disk in Linux using the instructions in the README, you end up with a nice small Debian installation with Alix support. It’s really a beautiful little distro.

Final performance? 2.67G of 5 large files in 314 seconds, which is okayish performance for a NAS, and at least 2x faster than my NSLU2. I have it running mt-daapd, rsync, and Samba, and will set it up with AFP soon.

So, if you’re looking for this, then it’s not a bad little board. But, on consideration, I think I’m so much a niche market that it’s not even funny. You can spend less money; the old VIA and new Atom boards have more power and have SATA connectors, which gives you the option of making a little NAS box with cheap hard drives instead of USB drives. You can spend about the same amount of money and get a NAS with pretty much the same functionality; for example, the new Buffalo 1TB NAS drives have media streaming and run about $170 with a terabyte of disk storage.

Bottom line: I’m happy with it, but not only is it not for everyone, it’s hardly for anyone.

Nonetheless, the Audiovox 5600 was, hands-down, the best phone that I had ever had: a good phone, a very decent PDA, and exactly the right form factor. I like the Treos, but the form factor is a bit large and the keyboard screams geek. I want to appease my inner geek while not giving out obvious geek signals, you see.

Anyway, Cingular now has the Cingular 2125 available, which is pretty much the successor to the Audiovox 5600. As of this writing (Jan 2006), with 2-year contract it’s $299; if you agree to buy a $19.99 unlimited data plan you can also get a $100 rebate.

Hardware: The Cingular 2125 has much the same form factor as the Audiovox 5600, with the addition of a “hump” on the top of the phone (you can see it in the pictures). The hump seems to throw off a lot of people, in phones as well as prospective mates, but it doesn’t bother me that much. The joystick is better than the Audiovox’s toggle-rocker-switch-thing. The screen is amazing — QVGA resolution, bright, easy to read, and you can hold an amazing amount of legible text by setting the font size to “smallest.” The power switch has been commented on in some reviews as incredibly hard to work, but at least on my phone it isn’t that bad: you just put your finger on it and kind of “squeeze” towards the screen, and it works easily.

Some have complained that their memory cards do not work correctly, but I had no problems transferring my Sandisk mini-SD card from the Audiovox to the Cingular.

There is significantly more memory available on the phone, so even though the processor is the same speed as on the Audiovox 5600, it seems faster (although, see below).

Battery Life: Always seems good at the beginning, and then after a year you end up having to charge the phone at lunch because it won’t hold out for a full 8 hours. That said, it seems about equivalent to the Audiovox when I first got it, which means that on average I have to charge every third day. I don’t talk a lot on the phone, obviously.

Software: Uses Windows Mobile 5.0 instead of 2003. A fair number of programs don’t work correctly with the new OS; many others will work but won’t use the entire QVGA screen. The phone seems faster, probably due to the extra memory, but there are long pauses every so often, substantially longer than with Windows 2003. Let’s not talk about the five-minute boot times I sometimes get on this phone, which is much slower than Windows Mobile 2003 ever was.

The other problem is that the UI in Windows Mobile is still enough to make your eyes bleed spontaneously.

The homescreens provided are awful — either too busy or too sparse. Head on over to MoDaCo to get some better ones (30% of them are scantily-clad females, if you want to get some Pavlovian association between scantily-clad females and your ringing phone), or use the old 2002 Microsoft Theme Generator, or just copy/edit the XML files yourself. I have a modified basic screen that I prefer — don’t get me ranting about the uselessness of the MRU list in the smartphone interface.

Last, but not least, download Nethack for your phone. You’ll never be bored in line again.

It took me a while to find the directions for this, so I’m putting it in the hopes that someone else will find it useful. To use your Cingular 2125 as a modem over a USB cable, you will need to:

1. Go to Accessories/Modem Link and activate the modem for a USB connection.
2. Plug the USB cable into the phone.
3. Windows will go through the hardware wizard. When asked for manufacturer’s disk, point to the \OEM\APPS\Drivers\USB Modem directory on your installation CD
4. This will install the HTC Modem driver. Go to Dial-up Networking and choose a new connection based on this modem. The number to be dialed is *99#, and you’ll want to define an additional initialization string of +CGDCONT=1,"IP","WAP.CINGULAR"

I mentioned in the review for WinPlosion that it had a number of bugs, and that I would try to reach technical support in order to get them fixed. I made two attempts to reach them and never got a response. Furthermore, I’ve never received any e-mails from them about any updates to the program — but any way, it looks like I would have to purchase the program again to get the latest version, and (still!) there isn’t a trial version available. So, given the number of bugs in WinPlosion and the lack of support, I’d have to say that it is not recommended.

WinGlance

Site URL: http://www.usablelabs.com/productWinGlance.html
Price: $8.99 (trial version available)
Installed size: 250K
Memory requirements: 2-4M
Processor load: negligible

User Interface. Installation for the trial version was no problem, and took up only about 250K on disk. Runtime memory requirements were equally sparse at about 3-5M. The following configurations options are available:

The only mode available in WinGlance is the “show all programs” mode. When you go to the overview, it tiles the windows in a matrix; since the screens are snapshot at the time that you go to the overview, there is a delay of a couple seconds or more, depending on how many windows you have open. The matrix is straightforward, there is no Expose-level cool swooping and intelligent swooping of Windows. Mac users, they get all the cool toys.

The default settings aren’t good for my pattern of usage. The thing is that in Windows the Alt-Tab key is used for two very different user operations:

1. Switching between two windows, and
2. Browsing windows trying to find the one that you want

The WinGlance default settings mean that user task #1, above, suddenly goes from a subliminal thing to a waiting-for-three-seconds thing, which in my humble opinion is too jarring. Given the limited utility or duplication of existing functionality of the other two keys — “Switch To Recent Window” just switches between the two most recent windows, and “Switch to Other Windows” just cycles through the window list, but without an icon overview and without the option of using the shift key to go backwards — I would just recommend assigning all but the first key to something that you’ll never hit, leaving Alt-Tab with its original functionality.

Hovering over a window brings up two small buttons that allow you to see some task information for the process, or a close box to close it. The close box (oddly, and irritatingly) prompts for a window close, but at least it is nice to be able to close the window from the browser view.

Compatibility. Handled Trillian, did not handle Stickies, did not work with multiple desktops. Handled floating palettes.

Bugs. A few minor ones. If you select a program that currently has a modal dialog up, focus is given to the main window instead of the modal. Also, if you have the options dialog for WinGlance up, it does not minimize when you go to overview mode, ironically enough. Binding Anything-ESC to the overview mode would just bring up the overview mode and then dismiss it, not a big deal. Had one crash but was never able to reproduce it.

Stress test. No problems found.

Windows XP PowerToy Task Switcher

Site URL: http://www.microsoft.com
Price: free (not supported)
Installed size: 100K
Memory requirements: 4M
Processor load: negligible

User Interface. As simple as you can get. Hitting Alt-Tab brings up a list of the windows, and a snapshot for the currently highlighted window is shown. It feels like looking through a blindfold.

Compatibility. Trillian and Stickies were not shown in the Alt-Tab list (although they usually don’t, either). Palletes are handled correctly, as were multiple desktops.

Bugs. One really annoying one: oftentimes, the snapshots aren’t done for windows, leaving only a title bar (see this screenshot for an example). It happened frequently enough that it almost wasn’t worth having the utility at all. Also, modal windows show up in the window list as separate windows (they don’t usually show up in Alt-Tab).

Stress test. No problems found.

Conclusion

Microsoft PowerToys isn’t worth it. WinGlance is close, even without all the modes, but not supporting multiple desktops is a killer for me. If you don’t use them, it’s worth a try. From the last review, I’ve given up on WinPlosion, given the lack of support. Windows Exposer and iEx do not appear to have had any updates. Still looking…

The movie is violent and bloody, almost pornographic in its gross intensity. I have never seen another movie that went to so much effort to show, lovingly and with ultimate technical expertise, torture. It’s the closest thing to a religious snuff film that you’ll ever see. For example, it shows how the hooks from a whip can grab into a man’s flesh and rip it apart, done in slow motion and realistically as possible. Or take note of the efforts that the movie makers have put into making the crucifixion look as realistic as possible, including a minute or two with closeups on the hand as the spike is driven into the cross.

The ultimate irony, of course, is this is about Jesus: and what is meant to be the loving and forgiving nature of his philosophy has been turned into a two-hour bloodfest. Church groups are going to this movie in droves, and it has turned out to have more preticket sales than the Lord of the Rings. This seems amazing to me. Instead of spending Sunday drinking the metaphorical blood of Christ at sacrament, this movie forces them to watch buckets of fake blood spew onto the stony ground.

The movie presumes that you know the bible already — if you were not familiar with it, then you could easily miss that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, or that the old men persecuting Jesus were Jewish. For that matter, if you went out for popcorn at the wrong time you could easily miss the Resurrection… it’s been relegated to a 10 second spot at the end of the movie, no doubt to leave room for a sequel.

It’s ironic, really, that the reviews of this movie seem to so closely aligned to the viewer’s religious faith: that is, I keep reading reviews about people that are “moved” and think that the movie is great, and they always seem to be fairly religious. Yet, I would think that this movie would inflame the faithful more: they would know his teachings, why would they choose for his lesson to be taught in this way? I didn’t come out of the movie feeling awe for the sacrifice of Jesus, but instead came out feeling sick. This movie does not seem like good testimony if it only appeals to the believers.

I hear that Mel Gibson has decided to make a movie about Abraham Lincoln. It will portray the south as cackling, evil brutes; Lincoln as a complete saint; it will cover his accomplishments in about five minutes, with one or two lines from the Gettysburg address and maybe a mention of the Emancipation Proclamation; and the rest of the 110 minutes of movie will cover just Lincoln in Ford’s Theater, with over an hour devoted to showing the bullet slowly passing through Lincoln’s brain, spewing bone and flesh and blood all along.

A review of three different programs that provide Expos� (or Expose) for Windows.

Exposé is cool. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth going down to the nearest CompUSA or Apple Store and playing around with the new systems, just to see it in action. It’s one of the first real new paradigms in window management to come about in a long time, and as soon as I saw it, I knew that I wanted something like it. Unfortunately, for better or worse, I’m wedded to Windows — as much as I lust after the new titanium Apple laptops cum lap heaters, I just can’t switch for a variety of reasons.

No matter. There are a lot of inventive programmers out there, and I was sure that something as cool and obviously useful as Exposé would immediately be implemented on the Windows side. So, with a backup of my registry and a snapshot of my drive, I decided to try all of them on my laptop (see end of article for specific configuration details).

Most of these programs just came out very recently. They come with sparse documentation and sometimes-questionable UI. All but one (XPoser) offer the same basic functionality:

• Tile all windows
• Tile all windows of a particular type (i.e., all Internet Explorer windows), based on the window with focus
• Hide all windows

It should be pointed out that the last one is not that useful, since Windows already has a way to minimize all windows and get to the desktop: Windows-D. At any rate, I tested all of them with the programs that I need day-to-day, both in an ordinary configuration (abut 10 windows open) and in a stress-testing configuration. The programs in my test set:

• VC 6.0
• Photoshop CS
• Epsilon
• Stickies
• Trillian
• Microsoft PowerToys Virtual Desktops

Note that since Windows XP doesn’t yet have Quartz, there are limitations that any of these programs are going to be laboring under. For one example, Exposé on the Apple is live — that is, even when the windows are shrunken, they are still updating. Alas, that is not to be for the Windows platform, or at least not for a while, so these programs rely on taking frequent snapshots and using the cached bitmaps when the Exposé overview mode is brought up. This means that all of them can potentially have out-of-date thumbnails, based on when the last snapshot was done.

So, with expectations in order, the programs…

WinPLOSION v1.32 (formerly WinExpose)

Site URL: http://www.winplosion.com
Price: $9.95 (no trial version available)
Installed size: 700K
Memory requirements: 30-40M when running
Processor load: about 4% (6-10% when “don’t freeze” option is off)

User Interface. Installation was easy, once you entered the 172-character registration code. I kid you not: they have a registration code with more bits than most wartime ciphers, and luckily my e-mail program didn’t truncate it. Compared to the other programs, this program is fairly zippy — I saw one thread on about how WinPLOSION takes too long to go to the overview, but I didn’t have any problems, and it seemed “fast enough,” faster than any of the other programs. Presumably, the 40M of memory that it takes up is helping there. There are not many options in overview mode; in fact, once you’re in the overview, you have to choose a window in order to get out of it. Nothing else will work, you can’t escape, and the task bar will not come up.

You have the option of animating the windows, which is kind of cool the first five times, but I ended up turning it off. WinPLOSION’s algorithm for sizing and placing the thumbnail images seems to be best of all the programs reviewed here, with a fairly natural placement.

The following configuration options are available:

The last screen is amusing, and I have to quote from the one paragraph (of the one page) of documentation:

Short System Freezing
On some computers WinPLOSION can cause a short freeze of the system when the user is scrolling through a long document. If this occurs on your machine right click the WinPLOSION icon in the system tray and select the “Don’t Freeze” Option.

Ah, yes, the “Don’t Freeze” option. I wish other programs had that.

Compatibility. Trillian and Stickies windows were properly tiled. It does manage to handle palettes — modeless windows are contained within the “snapshot” of the program (meaning that sometimes you get only half a palette in the thumbnail), but otherwise works correctly. Multiple desktops were handled, except that the desktop image was incorrect.

Bugs. Photoshop CS crashes without warning if a) you sit on a menu too long, or b) let a tooltip pop up in the File/Open dialog, or c) other nonreproducible cases. Sometimes, Photoshop doesn’t even have to have focus — it just closes in the background, silently and unbeknownst to the user. I searched the option screens for a “Don’t Close Photoshop” option, but to no avail. Handled MSVC 6.0 and all my other programs fine.

Stress testing. The windows came up instantly! This was so impressive and neat that I did it a couple more times, resulting in uncloseable exception dialog, requiring Windows XP to be rebooted. But it came up really fast the first two times. There is definitely a bug here, possibly related to the number of windows that are open at one time; it seemed that if I had more than 10 windows up, the chances were good that I’d get an unrecoverable crash in the next five minutes.

Update (March 9th). Sent mail to the company about some of the bugs I found, and didn’t get any response, not even an autoresponder. As of this time, I can’t recommend this product.

Windows Exposer v1.17

User Interface. What a horrible, horrible name, almost obscene, but at least a trial version is available. It installed easily, not counting the 25M of .NET downloads — if you don’t have .NET 1.1 installed, make sure you have a fat pipe to the Internet when you install. There are some nice features in the user interface: you can optionally zoom a window when you mouse over the thumbnails in overview mode; this is very nice if a bit slow, and the zoomed window may occlude other windows. You can also turn on an option to show the title of the window when you mouse over.

Although it probably isn’t obvious, the slider in the first screen controls the size of the hotspot. It has to be mentioned that at one snapshop/second this program is a processor hog.

Compatibility. The Trillian and Stickies windows were not tiled. Palettes were not shrunk down in overview mode. Multiple desktops were handled correctly.

Bugs. Sure. First time you go into overview mode, the program iterates through each window and does a snapshot — and you can see it iterating through each window in turn as it does it, about a second per window. Annoying, but since it only happens the first time, liveable. More unfortunately, it doesn’t handle windows designated as always on top, so, for example, so if you have the task manager up then the task manager will appear in every window snapshot that intersects (see the example screen shot, above, for an example). Along the same lines, the program does not handle palettes well; palettes appear in both the owning program’s screenshot and as as unshrunk windows in their own right that aren’t really “there” in the overview, so in Photoshop or MSVC, especially, you get a bunch of screen junk. Finally, when a window is selected and the desktop switches back to the standard mode, it flashes through a bunch of windows — fairly annoying visually and making me cry out for a DeferWindowPos.

Stress test. Handled without problems. The first switch took about 20 seconds, since it had to go through every window, but subsequent ones were about three seconds. The processor load would bug me, but you can just change the snapshot timer to reduce it as needed.

iEX

UI. No installer. To install the program, you must register, get the program, get a RAR extractor, extract the program, and then edit the .INI file; see this blog for details. It has a tray icon, but no context menu or options dialogs; you have to change the .INI file to even run the program and/or change keyboard assignments. (There is an addon program available that gives you a dialog for changing the .INI file, see the aqua-soft forums for details). When you hover over the program in overview mode, it expands and the title is overlayed — very nice touch. Takes a couple of seconds to go into overview mode.

Compatibility. Properly tiled Trillian, Stickies, worked properly with multiple desktops. Did not handle floating palettes.

Bugs. Doesn’t handle palettes or command consoles properly, leaves them out there in overview mode, obscuring the view. This is particularly annoying for me because I tend to have a lot of command consoles open. Snapshots of Photoshop and Firefox frequently were blank. Worst, it seems like the windows sizing/arrangement algorithm has problems when there are more than about 10 windows; it arbitrarily doesn’t present windows that you have open, meaning that even when you’re in overview mode you can’t see all your windows — and you don’t know that you can’t see all of them.

Stress test. Didn’t show all the windows. As mentioned above, seems to max out around 10 windows.

XPoser

UI. Spartan UI, and not really Expos�. There is only “show all programs.” The windows don’t animate, they are shrunk and the current desktop can be seen in the background. It does uses a translucent window, so you can see what is going on underneath, live. The program does not hook windows, so going into overview mode is slow: the programs are snapped and shown one by one (probably 10 when there are a lot of windows). There is not an option to allow a key to invoke the overview mode, you have to click the taskbar icon. There is no animation, and the algorithm to display all of the thumbnails is pretty basic: it divides the screen into n x n equal squares, and maps the thumbnails to that. Finally, there is no way to exit the program other than killing it in the Task Manager. But, hey, he gives you the source, so what the heck.

Compatibility. Handled Trillian and Stickies, although with many redraw issues. Worked with multiple desktops. Handled palettes with aplomb.

Bugs. Kept unmaximizing maximized windows. Also couldn’t seem to snapshot Firefox 0.8 correctly — so it always showed up as a black window.

Stress test. No problems.

Conclusion

None of these programs are really ready for prime time. WinPLOSION has the best UI and is probably the coolest to demo, but it as of yet too unstable for daily use. Windows Exposer needs to fix their bugs with floating windows and get rid of the annoying window flash — and, ideally, the requirement on .NET. iEx is temptingly close — if just a few bugs were fixed, it might actually be the preferable solution — it’s lightweight and performed decently. XPoser is just too slow bringing up the overview to be useable daily.

So, I’m keeping my eyes on WinPLOSION and iEX, with Windows Exposer being the long shot, and hoping that one or the other will soon pan out. In the meantime I’ll go down to the nearest Apple Store and lust over the Powerbooks again…

It seems a little extravagant, but nonetheless I needed one, especially with this project that I’ve been working on. A couple of weeks ago I had a brief fling with a Compaq notebook, but returned it two weeks later — it was just absolutely horrible, had many glitches and problems and swapped keys when you typed too fast.

So, I researched, with the problem being that a) I was researching something that I have strong opinions on, and b) there are many options out there, so I ended up using entirely too many cycles and head space in thinking about the laptop that I was going to get. Finally I settled on a relatively lesser-known brand, Fujitsu, and I got a teeny tiny little computer:

But, really, it’s hard to visualize this, so I compared it to a common referent point:

It’s a little bigger, but MUCH thinner. Weight wise is hard to tell, since I don’t have an accurate scale, but I have to give the nod to the Harry Potter book, it seems much lighter. But: the Harry Potter book has about 900 pages, with each page having about 2k worth of text; so, when you look at it, the Harry Potter book only has about 2M of storage, whereas my new computer has 60gb � much more.

On the other hand, the Harry Potter book is much more robust, and could easily be used if you needed to sit a little higher in your chair, or to level a table, whereas you wouldn’t do that with the computer because you’d probably damage it.

So, all in all, I’d have to say that they’re about even. But at least I’m happy with both purchases.