'Tis The Season
- Welcome to another time of gift-crazed Christmas-shopping drivers! Seems like not long ago that we were celebrating our first Christmas in a new house, and here we are again, doing the exact same thing once again, but in a different new house. The tree is up and illuminated, as is our house. I managed to put up some new LED lights around the front of the house, though somehow half of one string of lights is completely dark. Figures they worked before they went up on the eavestrough.
- By next Christmas, we'll have a new addition to our family, so there will be four Chungs! We're very excited to be expecting a little one somewhere near May 9th, 2007.
- I recently bought a new laptop to replace my T42, which I sold; a new Lenovo (was IBM) X60. It's a great little laptop, weighing in at somewhere around 3.5lbs with a Core Duo CPU, 2 gigs of RAM, and a 100 gig hard drive. Initially I was skeptical of the move from a 15" 1400x1050 panel to a 12.1" 1024x768 panel, but I'm finding now that I'll gladly give up the extra screen resolution and bigger screen for the portability and battery life of the X60. The new X60 tablet has an option for a 12.1" 1400x1050 panel, though I'm thinking that that might be a wee-bit small and hard on the eyes. Too bad there aren't anymore of those IBM stores where you could go touch and feel IBM personal computing gear!
- With the launch of Windows Vista around the corner, I decided to give it a whirl. I can't say I'm all that impressed with it. I managed to install it, then started to install a whole slew of the applicaitons I use on a regular basis under XP, rebooted, and witnessed my very own Vista blue screen! The eye candy is nice, with Flip3D and the new Aero interface, though I find that the window frames are gigantic. I found a Vista Expose clone called MyExpose which is actually very cool -- not only does it scale the windows down, but they're all fully live, so if you're watching a DVD or movie clip, and you hit F9, the media player window gets scaled down, but continues to play in realtime. On top of that, the original windows at the original sizes are still visible in the background, but made very transparent so you end up seeing the original cluttered desktop (albeit faded and not very visible) and the newly scaled and spaced out live windows. Amazing how it's taken an entirely new version of Windows to be able to deliver the same functionality Mac OS X has had for quite some time now.
- Since eye candy and expose seems to be the rage these days, I also tested out the LiveCD/DVD for Sabayon Linux, a derivative of Gentoo. It includes AIXGL and the beryl window manager which leverages OpenGL hardware acceleration to deliver some stunning visual effects. Four virtual desktops appear as the faces of a cube, which can be rotated (while still displaying all windows contents in realtime) and flattened so they are all visible at the same time. Expose-like functionality is also there. It's quite amazing, and quite a step forward for Linux as a desktop OS.