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I want to like Windows Vista. I really do! Not that I’m a Microsoft fanboy. In fact, I pride myself in the fact that after using personal computers since 1980 and email almost daily for about 20 years, this Monday when our IT staff migrates my corporate email account to Exchange, I will be using a Microsoft email client for the first time. The real reason I want to like the latest Windows release is that I’ve grown attached to too many small but extremely useful software programs that I can’t bear the thought of using a computer without them.

I’m not talking about big office-type applications, I’m talking about little programs like StrokeIt, SideSlide, Launchy, Total Commander, Sandboxie, CLCL and my favorite text editor or two. I understand that as you’re reading this you might find it hard to believe that these programs can be essential but the fact is, giving them up would be a big productivity hit for me and I won’t want to use a PC without them.

A few months back I did a fresh install of Microsoft Vista Ultimate on my primary home PC. I did experience some of the annoyances that made many hate this new Windows OS, but I’ve learned, mostly from searching the Web and reading PC Magazine, tricks to fix those annoyances and to a degree, I managed to make Vista not get in the way. However, for the past two weeks I kept getting random BSOD’s with a bad_pool_caller error and finally yesterday, Vista won’t boot. Using System Restore was no help. I kept going back from one point to an earlier one without success and when I finally restored to the earliest available point from 4 days earlier, the PC won’t start!

This really pisses me off especially considering the following:

• I have very few Windows applications installed as 90% of the software I use is portable. No Registry entries, no files in the Windows or System directories.
• I use a virtual machine to test software. Installing and uninstalling software on my PC is not something I do frequently.
• Windows Update, as well as a 3rd party firewall and AV software are installed and regularly updated.
• I am an IT professional. I know what I’m doing.

So on this Independence Day I sat watching the Yankees-Red Sox game and reinstalled Vista on my PC. Sad that I can’t get myself independence from Windows!

Not sure why but the software outliners category is really lacking especially if you have a taste for the freeware and portable variety. Every once in awhile I long for the days of Ecco Pro and I start a new search that always turns up no good freeware outliners.

I like to use software outliners because they help me think through new projects and get me started laying out things in detail. I try to use outlining in Microsoft Word but it just doesn’t do it for me. Excel works better as an outliner for me but I’m still left hoping that one day, I’ll come across an outliner that is as good as Ecco Pro was or I remember it being.

If you are in the hunt for an outliner, here’s something you can try to see if it works to your liking. With the following procedure you can use Notepad++, a portable freeware text editor as an outliner.

Notepad++ is a fantastic text editor with syntax highlighting, auto completion, file and ftp management, macros and code folding. It is the code folding feature when used with language set to Python that makes Notepad++ usable as a text outliner. (Indenting and un-indenting lines in Python start and end code blocks.)

To use Notepad++ as an outliner, start typing your hierarchical outline text using at least one space to indent lines, see screenshot. Then set Language to Python to activate code folding.

Don’t forget that Notepad++ is portable. Simply download the zipped version and extract to a location of your choice.

If you have a favorite text outliner, leave me a comment.

filament: Very thin metal wire, usually made of tungsten, emitting light rays when an electric current passes through it.

Picture books and pictorial dictionaries are handy for giving visual representations and dictionary definitions of words.  They are great for preschoolers and elementary school pupils to browse through them or to lookup definitions and illustrations of words.

For older kids and adults, these books are less useful.  Sometimes you know what an object or a part of an object is but you don’t know what it is called.  Merriam-Webster’s (m-w) Visual Dictionary Online can help.

When you visit the Merriam-Webster’s Visual Dictionary Online, you’ll see the familiar Search Box to enter your search word.  Don’t use it.  It is more fun to drill down through the provided visual paths to find exactly what you’re looking for.  These paths are hierarchically organized in over a dozen categories; m-w calls them themes.  Choose from themes like Astronomy, Human Being, Communications, Energy, Sports and Games.

Using my mouse, I clicked on illustrations and drilled down House – Electricity – Lighting - Incandescent Lamp to finally see the graphic above and learn that the illuminated thin metal wire in a bulb is called the filament.  Clicking on the speaker icons next to terms in the dictionary will let you hear their pronunciations.

Merriam-Webster claims 20,000 terms and 6,000 full-color images in the Visual Dictionary Online.  Chances are you’ll find what you’re looking for.

A very interesting article by Daniel Eran Dilger about Why Microsoft’s Zune is Still Failing over at RoughlyDrafted Magazine.  The one thing I find most interesting is the information regarding the Wall Street Journal’s Consumer Electronics poll (Note: voting is now closed) conducted earlier this month.  The poll asked consumers: Which of these items are you most likely to purchase as a gift?

When the poll started, the WSJ listed the Microsoft Zune Media Player and the Apple iPhone among the eight options on the poll.  Missing was the Apple iPod.  Later, after reader demands and write-ins, the WSJ changed iPhone to iPhone or iPod. 

The iPhone or iPod turned out to be the big winner of the poll grabbing 62% of the vote but the real story for me is that the voting for the Microsoft Zune, according to the Journal, surged from less than 1% for most of the polling to 28% at the end!

In Daniel’s blog entry he reports that with 123,000 votes in, the Microsoft Zune had registered 0% interest.  Inexplicably, a day later, 14,999 out of 16,481 new votes came in for the Zune!  Daniel attributes this to “Microsoft discovering the embarrassment”.

This sheds some new light on how mighty the Microsoft PR machine is and how swiftly it springs into action.  Sadly, it also makes me more skeptical of online poll results and unregistered public voting in general.

Click on the links above to visit Daniel’s entry and the WSJ story.

I don’t like bloated software. I understand why some developers go the route of adware but I don’t install or use advertisement-supported software because of the additional resources they consume and the distractions they create.

There are three pieces of software that you’ll find on many Windows PCs.  They are AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), QuickTime and RealPlayer . 

AIM is an ad-supported software client that’s been around for over 10 years and is by far the most popular program and protocol for instant messaging.

QuickTime is video playback software from Apple that plays many popular formats including the proprietary QuickTime Movie (.mov) format.  If you have an Apple iPod and use iTunes, you had no choice but to also install QuickTime.

RealPlayer is far less popular than AIM and QuickTime but is on many PCs nevertheless.  RealPlayer is also used for playback of many popular video formats and proprietary RealVideo and RealAudio with and without DRM.

I don’t like AIM because it pops ads on the screen and I don’t like QuickTime and RealPlayer because they run background processes on PC startup.

Recently I’ve come across three less known alternatives to abovementioned trio.  They eliminate some annoyances associated with using the originals.  They are:

1. AIM Ad Hack software is a hack of the official AIM client that removes advertising from it.  If you need to use the AOL Instant Messaging network, there are many 3rd party alternative clients you can use.  If, for whatever reason, you want to use AIM, this version at least removes the ads.

2. QuickTime Alternative, recently renamed QT-Lite but apparently still in existence with its original name gets its codecs from Apple’s QuickTime and is a workable substitute for it.

3. Real Alternative as the name implies replaces RealPlayer.  You no longer need to fill-out and send forms and like QuickTime Alternative, no background processes.

Editor’s Note: I am not clear on the legality of these three alternatives since they use parts of or based on hacks of the originals.

I like to use portable applications as much as possible. However, not every software application I need is portable. Virtualization software comes in handy for not only making your applications portable but also taking your heavily customized Windows Desktop and operation environment with you everywhere you go on a portable storage device instead of carrying a notebook PC.

MojoPac from RingCube Technologies is nice virtualization tool that is more portable than VMWare server and workstation. Both VMWare products are better fit for test and development environments giving you control over networking the virtualized desktop(s) and snapshot rollbacks. MojoPac turns your portable drive or USB key into a personal Windows desktop that does not require another Windows license and is much more compact.

RingCube Technologies recently announced the availability of MojoPac Freedom, a free version of MojoPac. Now users can carry their applications, Windows configuration settings and data files on a portable USB device that can be used from any PC.

I have recently put MojoPac Freedom to the test and was able to install several applications that ran flawlessly from different PCs. I did however have trouble installing the .net framework and applications that rely on it. Some users reported similar issues in the MojoPac Forums but I did not find a solution that worked for me. Nevertheless, MojoPac Freedom will probably remain on my portable drive for some time to come as it is a handy virtualization tool. Try it!

For some activities, it is hard to find a tool that will do the job and have all the features you need. This is not the case with To Do List managers. There are many good options for offline and online To Do list management.

My preference is to use one that automatically synchronizes items with my mobile device. This way I can view and organize my list while commuting to work on the train and prepare for my day.

Corporate email systems do a good job of To Do List management and synchronization with mobile devices. For Gmail users, there are label tricks and add-on scripts to use Gmail as a To Do List manager and Gmail can be accessed from your desktop as well as your mobile device.

But what if you need more out of your To Do List manager? What if you need something that is more robust but not as complex as Microsoft Project or other project management software? Fortunately, good options are available and free.

ToDoList is a Windows desktop application that gives you full control over your task management. You have all the basic options associated with a To Do item plus plain or rich text notes, item dependencies, linking items, resource assignment, time tracking, cost tracking, file attachments, custom fields such as Status and Version, multiple import and export options, view filtering, reporting and more….

Sounds complex? It really isn’t thanks to the wonderful user interface that uses multiple panes to display each To Do item’s properties. Everything is right there on the screen without the need to dig into menus and buttons to find the properties you need to set.

People who use Excel or other spreadsheets to maintain project plans are better served using ToDoList. ToDoList is easier to update and manage and it is easy to create reports or export projects to a variety of formats including text, CSV, HTML and more to share with others.

As a bonus, if you miss having a Text Outliner, I remember, quite fondly, years of using Ecco Pro as a Thought Manager / Mind Mapping software, ToDoList can do the trick:

1. Create a New Tasklist
2. Click View / Select Columns… and uncheck everything. (Make sure to click Affects active tasklist only)
3. Click View / Maximize Tasklists

ToDoList is a portable freeware application. You can take it and your lists on a USB drive.

So I’m just catching up on my RSS feeds in the new Bloglines Beta when I accidentally activate a Command Line or Shell interface as an overlay on the page.  It has the Bloglines logo in ASCII font with the tagline: Proudly Made on Earth!

To activate this, press the ` key. (left of the number 1)

It looks to be for experimental or debugging purposes as the HELP function reveals only three possible commands: echo, set and show.  Of course it is entirely possible that other commands do exist but aren’t documented in the HELP function.

A popup command line option in a news aggregator GUI is an interesting concept and can be useful for quickly adding feeds and folders or sending commands to change feed display settings.  I’d love to use something like this to set ad hoc filters.

If anyone knows what this is there for, I’d love to hear more about it.  If you’re hacking away at the shell and discover something cool, do share.

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The FileZilla free FTP client is available for all the major operating systems.  To make the latest Windows release portable, follow these steps:

1. Visit the FileZilla Client Download page and download the .zip package
2. Unzip the package to your desired location.  z:\filezilla for example
3. Copy z:\filezilla\docs\fzdefaults.xml.example to z:\filezilla\
4. Rename z:\filezilla\fzdefaults.xml.example to fzdefaults.xml
5. Edit z:\filezilla\fzdefaults.xml and change the following line under settings:

<Setting name=“Config Location”>$SOMEDIR/filezilla/</Setting>

Change to:

<Setting name=“Config Location”>.</Setting>

6. Save the file then launch FileZilla

If you were running an older 2.x version of the FileZilla client, you can import your FTP sites by selecting Edit/Import.

In a six month period, two of my all-time favorite print publications shut down. In March the news came out that InfoWorld will discontinue in print and today, Business 2.0 suffers the same fate.

OK, maybe they are not dead, but having them online-only or folded into another publication isn?t the same for me and many others I suspect. It was nice to have them in a portable magazine format to take along to the beach or on the train. In that format, they were two of a handful of magazines I read on regular basis. On the web, it?ll be hard for me to give them adequate attention or incorporate them into my regular must-read websites.

They will be missed!