Ladies and gentlemen, Microsoft is releasing a new version of their operating system. A follow up to Vista. It’ll slice, it’ll dice, it’ll…. okay, maybe not all that, but it will be called… Windows 7! That’s right, it’s called Windows 7. Not Windows XP Senior, not Windows Viva la Vista, not Windows 2012; simply Windows 7. Microsoft decided to drop the special names and date name scheme because they felt it just didn’t work anymore, and I agree. As noted in the article, the date naming didn’t match the release time, similar to Madden games being dated 1 year ahead, based on stats 1 year behind; bad EA. And they also said they didn’t want to come up with the “aspirational” name either. I agree with this move as well. It’s easier for people to deal with just a number associated to a software. It’s bad enough you have multiple versions of the OS that don’t really stand out that well at the end of the name like Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Home Ultimate, Vista Business, Vista yada yada. It’s just frustrating. A number tells the story better and in fewer words, “You need this version of better”.

The new OS will improve upon Vista, and will be available to devs in beta version soon. Honestly, I think Microsoft needs to slow down on all these releases. I’ve been using Vista for just about 18 months. These turn around cycles don’t allow for sufficient time to work out the kinks properly and to include the features that people want if you don’t allow for proper feedback. Vista has probably one of the worst releases of any Microsoft OS due to the number of issues with stability and support at launch time. Most of the issues have been resolved, but I still have some issues with my OS running a 64 bit platform. Stabilize the OS before you go off and work on something new, because if you haven’t fixed your current OS by the time you work on the new one, aren’t you carrying over the issues and bugs I’m experiencing?

I’m sure the motiviation for this is money, and to help push the transition to the new platform for all the businesses who said no to Vista. Look, if you get it working better, you will see the move.

Blah, I’m done on this topic. Time to go back to my command line interface on linux.

I noticed recently that my version of WinTabber, version 0.232 was no longer the current version. I decided to download the new version that was available, and what a surprise. Putty now comes with WinTabber.

This is great. I’m using putty and wintabber daily to work on and manage a number of linux machines. It makes organizing all these windows efficient, and I don’t have to spend the money on

Some other new features to note:

• Tab placement: allows you to position the tabs to either the Top, left side, right side or bottom.
• Tab appearances: give you the option to style your tabs, either as a flat look, visio style, excel style and more.
• Color coding the tabs for easy identification.
• Will read your old putty profiles for easier access.
• large icon support.

Download the newest version here.

When you run a website on a VPS, making any sort of improvements are helpful. This holds true for large servers as well. So another area you can improve is your web server. It’s really not that hard to tweak, if you know what to look for.

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I’m running this website, and others, on a VPS hosted at VPSLink. For those who don’t know, a VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a “fake” server that is partitioned off of a real server. For example, say you have this big beefy box with 16GB of RAM, over 1 Terabyte of disk space, Dual Processors with Dual Cores. Sounds pretty nice. Well you could if you wanted to, segment the server into small servers by creating these smaller servers virtually. Through the use of software like OpenVZ or XEN you can do exactly this. You can take a beefy server and make multiple servers out of it. It’s different from shared hosting where you share resources with other sites on a server. With a VPS, you get a dedicated portion of the resources, or a slice of the box. It works out great if you want to have a server with it’s own resources to get around the issues of shared hosting, but not spend the full cost of full server like with a dedicated server. So that’s a VPS, and back to my problem.

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I was noticing in the wordpress admin, that you can add a more link. This more link is very useful. Have you ever been to a website an noticed that each blog posting just runs on and on? Well some of the postings on my own site have been very long, and I don’t really like that. I want them to be more of an intro text on the homepage, with a link to read more. Here’s an example.

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I want you to look at this interview of a woman who talks about this new software from ImageMetrics, that makes computer generated graphics of characters look real. I’m serious check out the video. Remember, watch it twice.

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Here are some tips that are useful for those just starting out with firefox.

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