So, I’m on.. almost a week since my purchase of a new laptop (model to be disclosed later in a separate review) and it has Windows Vista Home Edition on it. I am contemplating upgrading to Windows Vista Business 64 bit to see if that works better (the CPU is 64 bit compatible).

So far my experience with Windows Vista, overall, has been positive, but there are glitches, obviously (nothing’s perfect). The visual, and the navigational presentation is more than superb, and it is much easier for me to navigate through compared to XP. At the same time, the basic elements, and where to find things etc. are on an extension from Windows XP so it’s not difficult at all to migrate through.

Here are the good things I have to say about it :

• The Start Menu Bar is simply superb compared to that of XP. Instead of the fly-out style menus that used to coer up the whole screen if you have a lot of apps (and I certainly do), it has an internal navigation system that opens the items under items in the shape of trees. Also, accompanied with that is a quick search bar - I know this is a rip-off from Mac OSX, and it’s a good thing to copy for sure!

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It seems that somebody at the Apple Headquarters got a whiff about my article on iFags vs. Mac Users and their tendencies, and they decided to launch a lawsuit against me. Their claims, according to the papers I was served, is as follows :

“Your incident on your blog has damaging consequences to the reputation and revenues of Mac users and Apple Inc. Apple and its subsidiaries find the article to be very disturbing in its derrogatory nature, its obscenity, and the falasity of the accusations against Apple Inc. We have assessed the collateral damages caused by your blog entry … to a total of $500,000 US Dollars, and this letter officially serves you the civil lawsuit, filed in the Cupertino Superior Court, which is part of the State of California judicial circuitl”

Well, I do not have money for a lawyer, and the lawsuit amount is for $500,000 US. They figured, judging by the number of people who come each day, and the number of backlinks to that post on the internet, that’s about how much business they lost. I’ll spare you the detailed calculations the corporate lawyers at Apple included.

The jurisdiction of this lawsuit falls under the USA, not my own country Canada, based on the following factors -

• Apple Inc. is an American company.
• My blog has more readers from the US than from Canada. Well, considering the US has 10 times the population, and they too have the internet, it’s a given. I wonder if I can dispute this? My web hosting server is in Vancouver, and so is Jeff Kee Consulting!
• The “incident”, as they refer to it in the legal documents, happened over the cyber space, so the jurisdiction must be set based on the audience, not the physical location of the writer (myself).

What a pain in the ass. I have to fly to California JUST for a settlement conference in the civil courts!!! And they’re not even paying for the tickets!
Apple, however, hinted in a later article that they are offering to settle this - basically, they want the article removed, and replaced with a positive review about their Macbook products. And they are requesting that I make a purchase of a Macbook Pro 15.4 inch or higher, out of my own pocket, so that I can write credible reviews of it in a positive tone only.

I suppose I should be thankful this did not spread to a human rights lawsuit - the term “iFag” could be offensive in nature towards homosexual people, but thankfully, I had the disclaimer on my entry, so I think I dodged that bullet.

Well, since I don’t have cash for a lawyer, nor the $500,000, I guess I have no choice. I guess I’ll have to return my new Windows Vista laptop and convert again to a Mac. Oh well, to avoid bankruptcy, it’s worth it.

I also just realized that you are a fool if you took this seriously up until this point - it’s April 1st.

So, I finally moved onto Windows Vista. Actually, the word “finally” does not really fit here - it’s still very fresh, and if I had it my way, I wouldn’t be on it yet. But, after trying a Macbook Pro and giving it up, and realizing my laptop screen on my Toshiba laptop with Windows XP was a lost cauase, I finally had to move on.

Overall, I’d like to note that I am satisfied with Vista!

Pros :

• Cool design. It looks sharper and nicer than XP, or Mac OSX.
• Enhanced security - altho it’s no Mac when it comes to defeating viruses, it has a strict permission system on by default that prevents sketchy programs from running without your permission. I turned it off because I know what I’m doing - but for the everyday user, this is a much more reliable security gate than SP2 that was patched for XP a long time ago!
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I will write more about this later, but I purchased a brand new HP Pavillion laptop today that had Windows Vista on it. And as I was checking out the features, I started looking for more Gadgets (the same thing as the widgets on a Mac, except Windows shows it on the right hand side of the desktop), and I ran across some interesting stuff.

Windows offers a developers section for everybody to learn how to create new gadgets for the Windows sidebar, and many other things. I was pleasantly surprised. If these things existed for the longest time, please excuse my ignorance, but Microsoft certainly did not market it so well over the last few years. Everybody knew Firefox could be extended by countless add-ons made by developers all over the world, and the same thing applied to the Mac OSX’s widgets. And even Wordpress is famous for its ability to handle plug-ins. However. The only SDK (Software Development Kit) I’ve ever handled from Microsoft was the Microsoft Live Local Maps SDK (which, by the way, kicked Google Map API SDK’s ASS! This SDK was so much easier to understand and experiment with!).

Here is the API/SDK guide to Microsoft Gadgets and much more. 

If you are a developer who enjoys developing your own add-ons and what not, this might be a good opportunity.

Now that I think of it, the MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) has been around for a while, but I just did not feel that it got enough light as other API guides and SDKs, only because Microsoft did not market them very well, as I already mentioned. The coolest addons I saw on Windows XP were the Windows XP Powertoys (which were quite handy, by the way) but addons, gadgets and what not were pretty much non-existent, and people were unaware of it.

The new Windows Vista, however, has caught up with Mac and Firefox when it comes to the extendability of software and functionalities. Of course there are those who criticize Microsoft for copying from Macs, but hey, if it’s good, you follow it. I say Microsoft did a fine job with Vista, and if they had tried to go their own way again and try to make it too different, it may have ended up in a product with lower quality than what it is.

I will write further about my new laptop, and Windows Vista.

Google pageranks are forecasted to be updated in April sometime - or at least that is the rumour.

If you don’t know what a pagerank is.. well. The word itself is self-explanatory. It’s a system that Google has that ranks the importance and relevancy of your site, and you get better search engine results. Also, the links that you give out to other sites have more relevancy too (unless attributed by the rel=”nofollow” thingy).

Even if you are already being indexed by Google, that does not mean that you have a pagerank, or if the pagerank is up-to-date. In my case, my site is rather new so I have no pagerank whatsoever. BUT.

There is a way to predict your pagerank. I’ll be brutally honest with you - I’m not sure how accurate this is, but I gave it a whirl for fun, and it predicted that my blog will hit a pagerank of 5 - which is pretty darn good.

http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction

Try that tool and see what your blog MIGHT end up being. I want to see the pagerank update, and check out how accurate this is. You should do the same. And let me know the results - we can all compare the prediction and the actual result in order to see how good this tool is!

” . . . if it works on FF, the chances of it working well on IE7 is very high. It’s a math’s game - it’s my method to reduce the amount of failed products.”

I reverted back to Internet Explorer 6 today after upgrading to 7 for a while. If I weren’t a web developer I wouldn’t have done this, but I am. And I need to make sure my projects will work in FF, IE6 and IE7. And here’s what I felt and found over the last few weeks of living with IE7.

If my stuff works well on FF, it generally works well in IE7. IE7 offers full PNG support, they corrected the faulty box/padding/margin module problems since the IE6 days, so overall, the failure rate on IE7 is less than 5% I’d say. There are some differences in the way it handles Javascript and what not (for example, when parsing through XML, textContent is the Mozilla standard, while text is the Microsoft standard, so that was a bit tricky.. especially when the nodeValues doesn’t work for some mysterious reason…), but that’s manageable.

But what I did find is that, the failure rate on IE6 after testing properly on FF, was around 30%. This is just a gut estimate so don’t try to quote me on these figures, but I’d rather make sure it works on FF and IE6, because if it works on FF, the chances of it working well on IE7 is very high. It’s a math’s game - it’s my method to reduce the amount of failed products.

I still haven’t figured out how to run both IE6 and IE7 without having to hack through the registry or run some sketchy script, so I’m not going to go there yet. I am debating, however, getting a cheap cheap computer from my dad (he has them lying around) so I can run IE 6 on that one as the testing unit and a storage unit perhaps.

And of course, today I realized that I still have the sidebar of my blog showing up way down below on IE6 (no wonder my ad click rates were so low) and I fixed it once and for all. Last time I was trying to fix it for a few days, I think I got distracted somehow and then installed IE7 so it slipped away from me.

“Of course, it’s kinda sketchy when a Microsoft spokesperson claims that Vista is better than their competitors.”

With the recent release of Windows Vista, the buzz is out there, and people are trying it out. I tried it out briefly for the first time last night on my friend’s computer. It was OK, but it had 2G of RAM. But I wonder how good it will be with 1G or so…

The greatest thing that peopel pay interest to is the security aspect of things. How secure is this OS? Do we need to get to Service Pack 2 to enjoy a secure environment? Microsoft claimed that Vista had fewer bugs than many of its competing OS’s, but here’s an interesting post that refutes that bold claim completely.

Microsoft Passes Its Own Vista Security Test, Too Early to Celebrate

I found this article on Techboggle.com, which is a very interesting site with great knowledge and insight into computers, technology and software.

Of course, it’s kinda sketchy when a Microsoft spokesperson claims that Vista is better than their competitors. Are they going to say “We have a huge security issue that could lead to major worms.”?? No way. When you get the criticism from the other side, that’s when you really get the whole picture of things. Fewer errors, but much more severe ones. It’s not a children’s counting game - 1 bug could be more fatal than 10 minor bugs. Grow up.

Also, as you can see, despite what some of the iFags thought about me giving up a Mac computer for a Windows XP pc, I do have a rational mind with constructive criticism to both sides. Take that, iFags.