Short cuts

Paul Stephens takes a sideways look at the world of IT

Published: 01/02/2009 | Last Revision: 07/07/2010

Worth waiting for?

It’s easy to make jokes about Windows Vista’s performance (Fred: “Hang on, I’m just loading Vista.” Joe: “OK, I’ll go and paint Vista Copy Dialogthe exterior of my house then.” See, piece of cake), but sometimes it does bring it on itself. For example, HardCopy correspondent Tim Anderson recently found his new Vista laptop estimating that it was going to take another 10,627 days (and 22 hours) to finish copying a CD image. That’s around 29 years, which is longer than it would take to print out a CD’s contents as hex digits, transport it by ship from San Francisco to Tokyo then convert it back to binary via OCR (as Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz would no doubt have pointed out if we hadn’t thought of it first). Tim knows his stuff so guessed that this might be a pessimistic figure, and as he reports in his blog (www.itwriting.com) it was, with the copy finishing a few minutes later. Less experienced users, however, might have taken it seriously and rushed out to Comet to buy an all-in-one inkjet capable of printing hex digits, with disastrous consequences for trees, the environment and world ink reserves. This is the kind of thing that gets an OS a bad name: let’s hope Windows 7 can do better.

PHP Class of the Month

This issue’s dip into the deep pool of productivity that is the PHP Class Library is a semi-random string generator, although we hasten to add that it’s subtly different from the Sloganizer semi-random string generator we featured back at the end of 2007. This one’s called Alternate Text and it’s by Alexander Amzin of the Russian Federation.

You feed it a string containing fixed text plus lists of values from which it picks at random to construct an output. If, for example, you fed it “Vista is (good|bad|ugly) and (cool|resource-hungry|dead in the water)” it would produce either “Vista is good and cool” or one of a number of alternatives. We’re not quite sure what you’d use it for apart from building “Vista is (good|bad|ugly)…” applications, or why it’s tagged ‘Moon’, placing it alongside a lunar phase calculator in the Class Library listings. It is easy to implement though, and as a bonus it works, although documentation is limited (and yes, that means there isn’t any). No applications were registered as using the class, which seems to happen a lot with our selections. However there is one now, at www.paulspages.co.uk/hardcopy.

Win 8 - sneak preview!

Windows 8 Alpha showing the new PunchBagBar feature – pick an app that’s really getting on your nerves, drag its icon to the Bar and give it a good wallop. Note the bar’s retained semi-transparent Aero-style interface.

With Windows 7 public betas flying out of Redmond and a likely release date somewhere in Q3 this year, it looks like poor Vista’s troubled life will soon be at a mercifully early end. Some cynics are saying, cruelly, that the reason the beta’s so stable is that Win 7 is really just Vista with some of the bloatware re-coded and a few gimmicky tweaks to the UI. We at Short Cuts don’t subscribe to such theories, and anyway Win 7’s already a bit passé to us because we’ve been given privileged alpha-release access to the product that’s scheduled to bring Win 7’s life to a mercifully early end in 2012, namely Windows 8. As well as improved performance, the new release will feature a range of interface enhancements. Here are some highlights: • Windows StartTaskInstallUninstallBar – an enhanced version of the Task Bar which contains applications that are running, haven’t been launched yet, haven’t been purchased yet and haven’t been developed by Microsoft yet although it’s rumoured that Google’s got something similar. Requires a 10240 x 7680 display and DirectX 14. • Windows Gadget Widget – a Widget which organises your Gadgets into collections using an open XML-based standard (key portions © Microsoft 2011). • Windows Widget Gadget – a Gadget for controlling the Windows Gadget Widget. • Windows Euro interface – replaces the Windows Aero interface and costs nearly twice as much as it did when you were on holiday in 2007. • Windows PunchBagBar – right-clicking turns the cursor into a boxing glove with which you can give the Bar a good hammering to relieve frustration at things like PhotoShop refusing to recognise your laptop’s graphics accelerator (still having trouble with that one, eh? – Ed) • Windows Stuff You Actually Want To Be Able To Find / Documents You Couldn’t Be Bothered To Save In A Proper Folder Bar (formerly known as the Desktop) auto-shrinks to a 30-pixel horizontal band when you select an unsupported graphics mode.

Phew!

President Obama: unlikely to appoint Steve Ballmer to his cabinet.

As regular Short Cuts readers will know, we spent an anxious 2008 wondering if John McCain, whom we’d unwisely referred to as ‘Insane’ McCain, would win the US Presidency and subsequently arrange a visit from some men in bulky suits – not to mention appointing Microsoft CEO Steve ‘Mad Dog’ Ballmer to his cabinet and having moose-hunting pit-bull Sarah Palin as his VP. It didn’t happen, of course, and that nice Senator Obama got in instead. Relief all round then, but we can’t help thinking that it might have been a fun (if potentially lethal) ride with Steve stalking the corridors of power, delivering hoarse, soaked-armpit lectures (“Americans, Americans, Americans, Americans!”) to the UN General Assembly, and so on. On balance though, perhaps it’s time that insanity went out of fashion on Capitol Hill.