Well, I've survived through eight full days of my first Ramadan, and so far I've maintained the fast. So this is a quick status report.

First off: I'm freaking hungry! Please, oh please, someone send me some food!

Okay -- that's not exactly fair or accurate. Indeed, our home is chock-full of food right now. The problem right now is that we spend 14 hours not eating or drinking any of it, so most food items are lasting longer than they would otherwise. We have two meals a day -- dinner (which is now at about 1920), and "breakfast" (at around 0430, and really should be renamed from "breakfast" to "gobble-up-all-you-can-cause-the-fast-starts-...now!"). We snack almost constantly in the evening, but because of the fast (no energy during the day or evening (until the first food is mostly digested), and the need to get up early the next day), Gigi likes to go to bed early. So this snacking doesn't last all that long.

Most days I either feel like I'm seriously hungry, or like I'm going to be sick. One morning I felt I was close enough to tossing all my cookies that I stayed in the bathroom for at least half an hour until the urge subsided. And on the days that I don't feel sick, I feel like I'm unable to work on anything requiring any significant concentration (which has been a problem, as I'm supposed to have been working on two papers these past 10 days, one of which is only now 95% complete (and it was at least 85% complete before Ramadan even started), and the other of which I haven't even started. The teaching is working out fine (fortunately) -- in fact it's usually the two times during the daylight hours in the week that I feel my best (as my mind is sufficiently occupied I forget about how hungry or crappy I'm feeling).

Fortunately, my difficulties with Ramadan and the fast haven't affected Gigi and my relationship at all -- even though she's always telling me I should stop the fast, and that I don't have to do it, I know that she's glad we can do it together. Which is really the whole reason why I'm doing this in the first place.

Fortunately (and unfortunately) Gigi is going away to the mainland on a training source all next week. It's unfortunate because I'm going to miss her every moment she's away (and I know she will too), but it's fortunate because I can eat again. There really isn't a whole lot of reason for me to continue while she isn't here.

However, at this point I haven't quite decided wheter I should give up or not. I'm not the type of person to give up on hard things just because it's convenient to do so, and while Gigi tells me she knows I'm not that sort of person, I want her to see it for herself. Still, I need to get some serious work done toward finishing this Masters degree, and being able to take the quiet time when she's not here to concentrate at my fullest to finish off my survey paper (which is written, but I want to improve the conclusion and my use of references in the text), and writing up a new proposal paper (more on this in a future Journal entry) -- and being well fed is integral to thinking clearly and being able to concentrate on the task at hand. So at this point it boils down to whether my practical side or my stubborn side wins out.

Fortunately, for five of the days of the week nobody cares if I sleep in past noon. If Gigi didn't already know better, I'd have to invent some sort of fake Canadian festival/holiday where you're supposed to pull down your pants and slide on a frozen lake in the middle of winter, as a form of revenge ;).

Yaz.

As those of you who have followed my Journal probably already know, I'm an atheist, and Gigi is Muslim. Beyond the whole God issue, however, Gigi and I perceive the world in much the same way -- she isn't so much religious as she is spiritual. She doesn't pray five times a day (or even once a day) or anything -- she just feels that there is a Supreme Being, it initialized the Universe a long time ago, sent a prophet, sends bad people to hell after they die (and good people to heaven), but otherwise stays out of the affairs of humanity. Some sort of cosmic voyeur I suppose. We've agreed to disagree on the subject, and get along fantastic.

Yesterday was the beginning of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Islamic lunar calendar. Gigi's family back in Turkey has always observed Ramadan (just as my parents have always observed Christmas in a secular way), so she has a cultural attachment to it that I can honour and appreciate.

Now for those of you who don't know, one of the central practises of Ramadan is the fast. From dawn through to the end of dusk, you're not allowed to eat anything (unless you're too young, too old, or your health simply doesn't permit it), you're not allowed to have sexual contact, and you're not allowed to swear or have bad thoughts (at least in the manner in which Gigi and her family practise the holiday). As Gigi practises things, she can't even hug, kiss, or brush her teeth during these times. Of course, once the sun is down the feast begins, and we can stuff ourselves until the sun rises again.

"She" isn't exactly the right word -- what I really mean is "we". I didn't think it was particularly decent of me to be doing any of the things she can't (read: won't) do during the daylight hours: it wouldn't be particularly understanding of me to be eating in front of her 80% of the way through a long day of fasting. So I'm observing Ramadan as well.

We're just finished day one, and here's the basic schedule:

1. Wake up at 0400: Last chance to eat before the sun comes up. I was up earliest, so I made us a big breakfast. We had to be finished by 0448, and once we were (and after a quick tidy), it was time to...
2. Go back to bed at ~0500: we were tired. I pretty much didn't sleep at all the night leading up to breakfast, so it was my chance to get some sleep.
3. Avoid eating, drinking (even water), swearing (something I never do anyway), having sexual contact (difficult when our workplaces are ~10km apart anyhow :P), or having evil thoughts for about 14 hours, until:
4. Dinner at 1939: Let me tell you, after 14 hours of nothing to eat or drink (with at least a dozen instances of me walking to the 'fridge to pour a cool drink, only to remember I can't do that and head back to my laptop thirsty and dejected), I was ready to pig out. We had a pretty good sized meal (although just prior to working on this post I had to have a bowl of late night cereal because I'm hungry again), but if I'm going to fast all day every day for the next month, I'm going to need dessert of some sort. We didn't have the time (or too many ingredients) to make anything tonight. We are however trying a number of Turkish dishes I've never had before (Gigi found this brilliant website of traditional Turkish dishes, written by a fellow Canadian (and Turk) here, so we're giving them a go. Tonight was "Kadinbudu Kofte", but as we didn't have egg noodles, we did the very, very Canadian thing and substituted Kraft Dinner instead).

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now the good bit of news: fortunately, as it is September, the days are getting shorter. In fact, every day we start breakfast two minutes later, and dinner two minutes earlier. By the end, we'll be fasting for approximately two hours less than we had to on day one. Whew!

I know I'm a really lucky guy to have Gigi in my life -- she's the sweetest, gentlest, silliest, and most loving entity I've ever encountered, and I'm more than happy to support her during this special time. I know that participating with her means to world to her, so I'm going to keep it up, and refuse to let her down. Still, if I did believe in $SUPREME_DEITY, and if we were also doing the traditional prayers, I can imagine that by the third round of prayers, I'd be praying for $SUPREME_DEITY to send down a truckload of tacos, or maybe some cedar planked salmon or some-such.

So day one is finished. It's just after 0100 local time, Gigi is sleeping soundly, and I'm going to have yet another bite to eat before I join her. The next 28 days are basically going to be repeats of today, but I'll post up any interesting tidbits as we continue.

(And I haven't forgotten about my promised review of the Weird Al Yankovic concert we attended on Tuesday -- I'm still amazed and happy that we got to meet him, shake his hand, and thank him for the amazing show).

Yaz.

Gigi and I are going to see Weird Al tonight. I've been following Al's music and career pretty much since he started issuing albums in the early 80's, but I've never actually been to one of his concerts. Gigi found out about it earlier this summer, we bought tickets right away, but were still only about to get 9 rows from the front, right against one side. Oh well -- I'm still excited, and I still expect it to be a really good show. I was tempted to try to e-mail Al to offer him $5 and a bag of doughnuts if he'd only play Nature Trail to Hell, but figure the guy gets bugged by enough strange people as it is. But here's hoping...;).

Yaz.

My sister has been a Mac user since 1988. She uses her computer all the time and notably in her business (she's a self-employed graphic artist).

She's pretty knowledgeable when it comes to computers. She's installed RAM and hard disks herself (unlike me).

However she does have some quirks. She's not keen on software or OS upgrades. Enhancements really truly have to wow her to be worthwhile. She's had been typically 2 versions behind when it comes to Adobe Photoshop (and that was pre-OS X) and hasn't upgraded her Word Processing software (WordPerfect for Mac) in years (and WP for Mac doesn't even exist anymore).

She bought her most recent Mac in 2003. What was the first thing she did when she got it running? She reformatted the hard drive and installed OS 9.

She hates OS X. She says "it's too much like Windows".

I've tried to explain it's closer to Unix than Windows (from GUI to guts), but she didn't buy it.

Only in the past year or so has she started using OS X (and probably not the latest version), but only for "some applications"(she dual boots). I'm assuming she's using it with newer software that's only written for OS X.

But there's the catch - "some" applications". She's still using stuff that was written for System 8...

Do you feel this way about your OS and upgrades? Are you by choice 2 or more versions behind?

Are you a Mac OS X user who misses OS 9?

Inquiring minds want to know...

Just a quick note to let everyone know -- Gigi and I are getting married!

We were both surprised that, after two months of grumbling, her father gave us permission to wed two weekend ago. So we're starting to make plans. First up has been shopping for an engagement ring -- she's picked out a nice one, and we're just waiting for the diamond we're looking at to arrive (it's in a white gold version of the ring she likes, but if she wants it we'll have them set it in the same model, but in 18K yellow gold/platinum instead).

All of which means I need to get a move on and finish up my research work so I can graduate. We're flying to Istanbul this December for the official engagement ceremony (and I've already bought the airline tickets), and hope to be married July 2008.

So little time, so much to do. I really should be wasting less time here and spending more time writing the papers I've started, but between the engagement, teaching, and trying to get over a nasty summer head cold, and other projects I've been rather busy. But I can't complain -- I've had a lot more money than I do now, but I've never been happier. Isn't the adventure of it all grand sometimes?

Yaz.

Gigi and I decided to get out and see a movie tonight, and caught "Transformers" on its opening night here in Victoria.

I can't say that I've had a really good time at the movies for a while. It has just taken me 10 minutes to remember the last movie we saw (Pirates of the Caribbean 3), and I have no recollection of what we saw previous to that. Movies have just been so forgettable as of late.

But Transformers was fun. The special effects were top-notch. My main complaints (which don't really detract from the fun factor) are:

• It was sometimes hard to follow combat sequences due to the fast motion and really short camera sequences.
• Due to the fast motion, there seems to be motion blur involved with some of the Transformers. I'm not sure if this was intentional, or a side-affect of the cold I'm suffering affecting my visual acuity somehow, and
• The signals analysis/"hacking" scenes. Yeah, they Hollywooded-up the computer displays and the overall process in a manner only a really hard-core systems nerd would notice is just plain wrong

Something to watch for: the use of Macintosh computers and displays everywhere, and not hiding the fact (I'll note here that other series use a lot of Apple hardware -- the new Doctor Who series being a good example, but in many such cases the Apple logo, especially on laptops, is covered over with a circular sticker). I wonder what Apple paid for that product placement.

Overall, however, we had a lot of fun. It's probably the first movie in a long time that I'd actually be tempted to go and see again, if seeing a movie didn't cost a significant portion of my income (and as it is, Gigi has to see the new Harry Potter movie next week -- we've already bought our tickets for it). I don't buy a lot of movies, but I might be tempted to pick this one up on DVD when it is released.

Yaz.

For the past few days, Gigi and I have been completely unable to send e-mail from our Mac laptops at home. Mail.app will try to send messages, but by and large they don't go anywhere. I have been having a certain amount of luck using Gmail's SMTP server, but it's a minor pain to try to send a message from one of my University accounts (which I use for the third year OS course I'm teaching this term), or from my .Mac account (my mail personal account), only to get an error dialog a minute or two later asking me to select a different server. Gigi hasn't been so fortunate -- she can't send anything at all.

Tonight I decided to look into this, and as it turns out, without announcement or fanfare two or three days ago my ISP decided to block all access to external port 25 requests. Thus, I had to try and find alternate ports for my .Mac and University servers. .Mac supports SSL, so that wasn't too hard to find, but the University only lists port 25. After some experimentation trying some SSL and SSL alternate ports, I discovered by chance that they also accept SMTP connections on port 26 (which might be new to allow people around the local cable monopoly's port 25 blocking, in which case they ma not be advertising the new port yet).

In the end, everything is working again. The cable company claims it's being done to try to fight spam, but really it seems to me that if more providers do this, there will be organizations that instead of implementing SSL and authentication for SMTP simply do what the University has done and make the service available on port 26, simply shifting the problem to a different port. And even with SSL and authentication for SMTP, does anyone think its going to be difficult for botnet creators to simply query the necessary connection credentials from Windows users Outlook settings and just use them?

Thanks a smegging bunch-a-roonie, Shaw Cable. You've just caused problems for millions of customers for absolutely nothing.

My box is fixed. Gigi's box will have to wait until tomorrow so I can get her to authenticate so I can change her SMTP settings.

Yaz.

I just finished up a rather large project implementing a robotic blimp. We based the system on at Atmel AT90USB Key device, which is a really flexible little development board with a ton of connectivity. We wired in motors, sonars, a digital compass, and a 2.4Ghz radio. We started off with absolutely no software, so we wrote a Real-time Operating System, device drivers for all the hardware, a protocol stack for the wireless radios, an RS-232 driver, and even an ANSI/VT-100 driver. We built the blimp ourselves (a company donated a massive roll of mylar), and even made our own tool for sealing mylar sheets together.

As you might be able to imagine, this resulted in a lot of output. We wrote tons of documentation, tons of code, had reams of experimental output, and even had a set of digital videos showing various parts of the system in action throughout development (you can see web-friendly versions of them here).

So today, with my team and myself finishing up the last of the documentation, I decided to put it all on a DVD. I grabbed what's left of the spindle of single-sided DVDs, and took them to my G5 in my lab.

I recall my first CD burner -- a 4x4x16 Yamaha SCSI CD-RW drive (I still have it, installed and running in an old machine). Back when I got it in the mid-late 90's, it was just barely on the cusp of becoming a semi-common peripheral. A year or two after I got it, suddenly every computer manufacturer was tripping over themselves to include a CD writer.

These days, the vast majority of systems sold come with CD/DVD burners. They are everywhere. The media has good capacity, and is easily and cheaply available.

And yet today, as I burned the first DVD, I really couldn't remember the last time I had burned a disc. That spindle of DVDs I brought to the lab with me has been in my possession for at least a year and a half, and I'm still not all the way through them.

Thinking about it, I don't have much need for optical media anymore. There are only two cases where they come in useful: burning video DVDs (such as I did today, and burning the occasional MP3 CD for my car MP3 CD player. Both are very infrequent events. For everything else, I use either my laptop, a USB flash key, iPod, or network storage. For files that I need easy access to anywhere, I can put them onto my iDisk. For large capacity, I have a file server with 300GB of storage. Ten years ago I was so excited at being able to store 650MB on a single disc, but now I rarely even use optical media for much of anything (even though I have a dual layer DVD burner at my disposal, and hence can store 8.5GB of data on one disc).

So how about you? Do you burn as many optical discs as you once did, or are removable disc media a rarity in your life as well, supplanted by network storage, USB keys, and iPods?

Yaz.

I've been making a very conscious effort since I moved to BC back in 2005 to make my home more energy efficient. To start, I should note that I have things comparatively easy -- Gigi and I are living in a one bedroom apartment. However, as we're on the ground floor, with no balcony, and with a balcony directly above the living room window, with a ~3m cliff wall only about 4m away from and parallel to the windows, we get virtually no direct sunlight, thus artificial lighting is pretty much a must for rooms we're using for tasks that require light (which is pretty much anything short of watching the TV or sleeping).

Shortly after I moved in back in the late summer of 2005, I started my mission to replace every light in here with energy efficient lighting. The first to be replaced were the three frosted glass ceiling lamps -- one in the bedroom, and two in the hall, each taking two bulbs, for a total of 6 bulbs. They had primarily 60W bulbs in them, which I replaced with 13W CF bulbs. I also replaced the light in the range hood with the same 13W CF bulb. Two of these Noma branded bulbs also made their way into a desk lamp that also had a 60W bulb in it, and a table lamp of mine that was designed for a 150W tri-light bulb.

The bathroom required decorator globe lamps, so I bought 4 of these, replacing four 40W incandescents with four 9W vanity bulbs made by Globe.

The dining room has a single-bulb suspended ceiling lamp, which had a 100W globe bulb in it. It's on a dimmer, so I replaced it with a 26W CF bulb from GE. This bulb has since died (well within its 4 year guarantee), and I've replaced it with a really old-style fully enclosed CF bulb I've had for 15 years or so, which I don't know the wattage or manufacturer of (post-preview check: it's an 18W SL-18 lamp from Phillips).

The latest replacement was a 300W halogen torchiere floor lamp. Gigi and I got a great deal on a brand new 55W CF torchiere which, after sale pricing and an instant rebate from the electric utility, cost us $35 (CAN). As there is no built-in lighting in the living room, which is our main lamp -- if someone is home, it's probably on. Switching to CF is probably going to save us roughly $60 a year based on my rough usage calculations, so we're going to hopefully see a net savings from this acquisition pretty fast (and if we can sell the old one for $15, we'll have paid off the lamp in savings in about three months time).

The kitchens main lighting has always been via CF tube lighting. I'm guessing it has two 30W bulbs in it, however as I haven't taken apart the fixture to find out (and probably won't), I don't know for certain.

So, from a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, we've decreased our energy usage in these lighting fixtures from 1190W down to 234W.

We're not quite finished, however. There are still 5 incandescent bulbs in our apartment:

• A small 40W desk lamp, that takes a type S bulb,
• A second halogen floor lamp. This one is smaller, with a flexible head, and is rated for a 20W G4 connector bulb (I can't tell if this is the wattage of the bulb in there, mind you),
• The lights in the refridgerator and oven, which are standard 40W appliance bulbs, and
• The current heavyweight, a 250W infrared heat lamp in the bathroom. As the bathroom has no heater of any sort, this built-in ceiling lamp is the heating system. We virtually never use it.

I'd love to replace the 40W desk lamp bulb with an LED bulb, but I have yet to find anywhere where I can buy one with a type S connector. I'd also love to replace the 'fridge bulb, as it is a heat source, so not only does it use more energy than necessary, the bulk of that energy then needs to be used again by the refrigeration system to remove that heat again. But I haven't found a CF or LED appliance bulb anywhere either.

The over light is probably the hardest to replace, as I'd think the temperatures reached in there would be too excessive for most CF ballasts to handle, and would melt the plastic in LED lamps. Besides which, any heat lost is typically useful in this scenario (as rarely is the light ever turned on when the oven isn't in use anyhow).

The heat lamp is probably impossible to replace. The only way I can see any energy savings from it while still allowing it to do it's job would be to find something that emitted more IR light -- even though the bulb is marked "Infrared", it still emits a lot of visible white light (enough that you can use it as the only light in the room if you wanted to). We virtually never use it, so replacing it with something more efficient would mostly be "because we can", rather than for any actual energy savings.

It's been difficult to measure the savings, due to both the staggered deployment over the course of two years, and what with Gigi moving in back in January (someone is now typically home much more often than before, so the lighting is used more often, and the electricity usage has changed). I'm billed 6 times a year, and the last bill would have only included about two weeks of usage of the new torchiere lamp (our single biggest energy saving replacement to date), so the next bill should hopefully be more en-"lightening".

Next in the series: replacing the old mechanical thermostat with a digital setback thermostat (the apartment uses all electric heating). I'm hoping the next bill will show whether or not this has also made an appreciable difference or not to our energy footprint here in Chateau Yaz.

Yaz.

Gather around everyone, for I have a story to tell.

As regular visitors to my irregular /. journal probably recall, I spent last summer working very closely with a woman visiting from Germany (whom in the past I've identified as Rose (not her real name)), together with whom I spent all my social time with outside the office as well, and for whom I was very emotionally attached. You'll also remember the pain I was going through in September after she left.

Let's rewind a bit for a moment, and talk about when she first arrived. She came to Canada knowing nobody here early last March, and I was assigned to show her around. Around the same time, I started dating a woman I had met online, whom we'll call Gigi (not her real name, of course). Gigi and I went out three times, and things were really going well when, without warning, she told me she didn't want to see me anymore. I felt really down, in large part because I had gone through 13 years of first dates which were also last dates. Rose and I were becoming good friends, and she was there for me when I felt really low, with Gigi (apparently) losing interest with no explanation.

Fast forward to the beginning of last October. Feeling depressed having lost Rose, I suddenly get a message from Gigi, to tell me that I was the nicest man she'd ever known, and that she was interested in being friends. Hungry for some companionship (and always having had really liked her), I invited her over for a movie one night in early October.

I expected nothing, but by Thanksgiving weekend a week later (Canadian Thanksgiving, celebrated at the correct time in October :) ), we were officially an item.

Kismet is now making up for lost time. The last 4+ months have been the absolute best in my life. Gigi is an international student (studing for her Masters in a different faculty, so we never bumped into each other at the University at all), with a significantly different cultural background than my own (I'm Canadian, she's Turkish), and when we first got together late last March and hit it off so well, she got somewhat scared, and backed away. However, she had spent the entire summer daydreaming of our short time together. She had never been in a long-term relationship before, and was somewhat scared by the concept, but apparently it grew on her, and I was the guy who was on her mind.

She moved in at the beginning of January, after coming home to Toronto with me for the holidays. Every day since has been domestic bliss. My home is now so full of love and joy that it has completely transformed me. We are hoping to get married for the summer of 2008 (although there are a number of issues for us to deal with to make that happen -- she's not a Canadian citizen (but wants to become one), and she wants to get married in Turkey (so her parents can attend -- they don't have the resources to come to Canada, and don't speak any English)).

Every morning, I wake up, and see her beautiful, peaceful face, and wonder how I went from 13 years of rejection and loneliness to absolute bliss. She does so much for me (as I do for her). I made sure this Valentines Day I gave her all those things I had dreamed of being able to do for all those years (a lot of the cliché things, as she has never had anyone do anything for her for Valentines Day). Every day, I'm so excited to be able to go home.

Including today. I'm at a pretty dull conference right now (I'm here because some people in my research group at speaking here later today, and I'm speaking here tomorrow afternoon. Maybe then I can shake things up ;)), and can't wait to get home and cook her dinner (we don't subscribe to archaic gender roles when it comes to household chores -- I do the vast majority of the cooking, for example).

Every day, I wake up the luckiest man in the world.

Yaz.

Tonight I needed to get a new pair of pyjamas out, so I dug into the drawer to get a pair of bottoms and an old t-shirt out. Tonights selection is a very old t-shirt I have that was given to me in the early 90's with an image of a painting by Robt. Williams called "The Mystic Rabbitmaster".

I've owned this shirt for a long time, and due to its age it's relegated to pyjama-shirt status. Parts of the image and text are a bit faded, but otherwise it's clean, and the stitching is fine, and there are no holes of any sort, so it suffices for the task.

However, in the 15+ years I've owned it, I never really knew anything about the painting or the artist. It was given to me as an impromptu gift (someone gave it to the general manager of the company I was working for at the time, and he gave it to me). So tonight, putting it on, I decided to see if I could learn anything about the painting and the artist in question.

So I typed in "Mystic Rabbitmaster" into Google, and it spat out one result. There are no pictures online unfortunately (at least not anywhere I can find), and no other information about the painting other than the fact that it was included in a card collection called "Crimes Against the Eye". The artists name, painting title, Colloquial title, and Museum Catalog Title are all printed on the back of the shirt (as apparently they were printed on the backs of the cards).

I always find it interesting in this day and age when I type something into Google and find one (or no) results at all. It's rare, but it's always interesting to find those corners of the realm of data that aren't online.

Yaz.

Okay, so it took me a bit longer than I had expected, but I got home a bit early today, my SO isn't home (SO? WTF? Yeah -- I'm saving that for another journal entry one of these days. Sorry gang!), so I decided to sit down and get the Vista install rolling.

I popped in the DVD, and the first thing it prompted me to do is to check and see if my system is Vista compatible. So I started it up, only to discover than instead of starting the upgrade advisor as I had expected, it started Firefox instead so I could download the advisor. There are nearly 2GB of free space on the Vista Business Edition DVD -- why couldn't they put the program on the disc itself?

Anyhow, a minor PITA, but not worth complaining about too much. I'm more interested in the results. So after running for 10 minutes or so (WTF was it doing???), the results have popped up. I haven't read them yet (I figured I'd get this journal entry started), so I'm interested to see what it has to say.

System Requirements

• Before you upgrade to Windows Vista, there are some system issues you need to address on this computer (2).
• Some system issues might prevent you from using all of the features in this edition of Windows Vista (1).

Devices

We recommend you review your device issues (1).

Programs

We recommend you review your program issues

Hmmm. Sounds a bit ominous. Let's see what the issues are:

• CPU: The upgrade advisor recommends a minimum 800Mhz CPU.
• RAM: The upgrade advisor recommends a minimum 512MB of RAM
• Free hard disk space: I can't upgrade from XP, because the boot drive is only 9.1GB, with only 3.8GB free, and Vista requires 15GB (15GB!!!). It does say I can install to drive G:, mind you, which has 40GB of free space.
• Video Card: It won't run Aero. I wasn't expecting it would.

So, Vista Upgrade Advisor basically recommends I need a whole new system. Let's see what else it says:

• ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP 2x: Not supported.
• Jungo WinDriver: Not supported. I'm not sure what this is, but I think it was installed as part of the Iomega parallel Zip-100 drivers I installed, which...
• Iomega Legacy Parallel Port Drive ...is also not supported!
• Macronix-based Ethernet Adapter: Not supported.
• Sound Blaster 16: Not supported.

What on this system is supported?

• Intel Master IDE Controller
• Intel PCI to USB Universal Host Controller
• LSI Logic Device (my UW-SCSI adapter)

So, looking at all of this, my CPU, RAM, video card, ethernet adapter, audio card, and old Zip drive aren't supported. I don't care about the Zip drive (I hooked it up to see if it still works), but it's hard to run a system with no video card or ethernet card. On the bright side, if all I wanted to do was run SCSI and USB devices apparently I'm golden (with the problem of CPU and RAM being insufficient, mind you).

Okay, so this looks like a bust, and perhaps an end to the experiment. But let's look at the rest anyhow:
Programs:

• J2SE Runtime v1.5 may have minor compatibility problems after the upgrade,
• Windows Messenger may have minor compatibility problems after the upgrade (huh?)

So, there it is. The experiment might just die right here. I might try to see if I can image the XP drive somehow and try the installation anyways, but the advice from the Vista Upgrade Advisor certainly isn't all that rosy. Not that I was expecting great things to start with, but as this system does run XXP, I figured it should also run Vista with all of the extra video eye-candy turned off. This system runs XP and Ubuntu just fine (well, it installs and runs Ubuntu fine if I give up one of my drives -- the installer doesn't like the fact that I have both SCSI and IDE drives in it).

Fortunately, my computing life doesn't depend on Windows, and doesn't depend on this machine. So for now it will stay an XP machine for those times when I need to do Atmel microcontroller development, and I'll be happy doing the rest of my work on the shineyness Mac OS X Tiger (which has had those fancy video effects and GPU-offload features for more than 3 years now).

Yaz.

Well, my University's MSDN Academic Alliance finally put Vista available for download the other day, so I grabbed a license, downloaded the Business Edition DVD, and will be installing it later tonight. The catch? I'm a Mac guy, but do still have a few PC's laying around, one of which has been running Windows XP SP2 for the last few months. And that system is a P3-450 box from the late 90's.

Here's the hardware:

• Pentium-3, 450Mhz
• 384MB RAM
• 8MB ATI Rage Pro (AGP)
• Symbios-based UW-SCSI adapter
• 9.1GB UW-SCSI HDD
• 40GB IDE drive
• Sound Blaster 16 with WaveBlaster (ISA!)
• 2.88MB floppy, 1.44MB floppy, DVD-ROM, CD-RW, and parallel Zip-100 drives

Now back in the day, this was one rather impressive machine. Lots of drives, and a very fast primary hard drive. Today, however, it doesn't really have much going for it. My laptop is three years old, and has a 1.33Ghz processor and 1.25GB of RAM, and an 80GB hard drive.

A bit about the current software installation (as I'm intending to do an "upgrade" installation first): XP was installed for one reason only: to run some Atmel microprocessor development tools for their AT90USB device. As such, the system has the following installed on it (and nothing else):

• XP SP2 with all the latest updates
• IE7
• Microsoft Windows Defender
• Windows Media Player 11
• Firefox 2.0
• Open Office 2.0
• Atmel Studio and FLiP
• Grisoft AVG Free anti-virus
• TortiseSVN

That's it. Most of this software has never been used, and almost every other piece of junk XP installed has been removed (like Outlook). I've never run OpenOffice on the machine, nor have I ever run Windows Media Player. IE7 has only been used for Windows Update. I don't use the system to surf the web -- Firefox is just used to read some HTML-based documentation for the hardware I've been coding against.

As such, this is a pretty pristine Windows XP install. It was installed from a clean drive (previously the system was a Debian box, but Debian and Ubuntu both started to have serious issues with the UW-SCSI drive when I installed the 40GB IDE drive). This XP system is probably going to be a whole lot cleaner than 99% of the XP systems Vista would be installed over.

I'm not expecting Aero to run (of course), but I'm curious to see how it performs otherwise. I don't know if the Atmel tools will work on Vista, and I'm interested to see how other items react. Will the system thrash due to only 384MB of RAM? Will other, non-Aero effects run slowly due to the 450Mhz processor? Will this near pristine XP system upgrade cleanly?

I don't care to run Vista -- I think Microsoft's software design is terrible. I don't like anything they've produced since "Decathalon" for the original IBM PC. But I am curious to find out if things are going to be as bad for old PC owners as some people seem to think. I'm not going to complain if my old system won't support some of the more fancy aspects of Vista -- but will it continue to work as a workstation for my microcontroller programming projects, and some basic web browsing?

Stay tuned. I'm burning the DVD tonight, and will be installing it within the next few days (as time permits).

Yaz.

While everyone is excited and talking about the products Steve Jobs announced today (the iPhone -- and I'm excited about it myself), nobody seems to be talking much about what wasn't announced: a new iLife Suite for 2007. iLife has been announced at MacWorld each of the last 3 years, and most people felt this was a slam-dunk prediction.

Maybe they want to integrate new features into the 2007 edition that work specifically with Leopard, and that we'll hear about it when Leopard is launched in the new few months.

Yaz.

I've been running Firefox 2.0 beta 2 since its release (and beta 1 before that), and was just notified on my Apple PowerBook by Firefox's built-in Software Update facility that FireFox 2.0 RC 1 is now available for download. Huzzah!