matt-helps

Windows 7 became available for pre-order today. There are positive reviews around the place though I think it is a shame that they’re not offering it free to Vista customers considering how bad Vista was. Still, Microsoft have to keep the money coming in to support their massive infrastructure. The timing is good too, designed I guess to take the focus from Google’s new OS that they are going to release.

Google’s OS will be won or lost based on 2 factors – its office suite (likely to be a shiny version of Google Docs), and whether they can get mainstream games publishers to use the linux platform that Chrome OS is based upon. I can’t see how they will swing the 2nd point without investing heavily themselves in a linux version of DirectX/3d. Much as I dislike Microsoft one thing they got right (eventually) was DirectX and that got the game publishers on board. I’m an ex-games programmer (Gremlin Interactive, Infogrames entertainment) and it helped no end having almost identical XBox & PC versions of whatever game we were working on, not to mention not having to do things totally differently depending on what graphics, sound or input device a user had. DirectX unified the lot and people (and teenagers in their garages) started spitting out games much more quickly. Google will need their DirectX – they must take games seriously if they want to capture the home/Desktop market.

Anyway, if you’re interested in pre-ordering Windows 7 see the links below for US/UK via Amazon. Amazon (UK at least) has a set number of Windows 7 for pre-order each hour and it seems to be sold out for that hour by 5 minutes past the hour (does that make sense?) – so check it on the hour whilst we’re in early days!). Note also that the UK does not have upgrade options, but must purchase the full package:

US: Amazon.com
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade

UK: Amazon.co.uk
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium E (PC)
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional E (PC)
Windows 7 Ultimate E (PC DVD)

I bought this Sony Bravia TV on a Tuesday, it was delivered by Friday and I have to say I am so happy with it (Amazon UK link on the right, Amazon US link is at the bottom of the page).

It is an absolutely brilliant TV, futureproofed (full HD, accepts 24p, and 1080p input through any of its 4 HDMI inputs). Will show pictures from a USB stick, or watch other movie files when running as your laptop’s 2nd monitor. I also have it hooked up to the network (the TV has an ethernet port) so we can stream family pictures over the network to show our extended family pictures of the little ones – the quality on this TV is MUCH better than a standard TFT computer monitor.

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The programmers behind gnome-terminal seem to have changed something to do with the way ctrl-c works. Now if you want to cancel a program that has the focus of the terminal and you hit ctrl-c then nothing will happen. That’s because the gnome terminal is trying to copy text to the clipboard – perhaps your gnome-terminal’s “copy to clipboard” command is set to ctrl-shift-c in which case you won’t notice this problem!
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Well I’m not sure what facebook are doing with this but if you follow the following commands you get a lens flare (a visual effect) on the screen:

1. Log into facebook
2. Click on the background (the white bit)
3. Press: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right
4. Press: b, a, enter
5. Click on the screen

Thanks facebook – I guess their code monkeys have got time to kill !?

I have used Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) for my dedicated hosting needs for nearly 6 months now. They’ve just released a new “bulk-buy” service that enables you to buy 1 or 3 years’ of as many instances as you want in advance. I’ve just bought 3 years of the smallest instance at $500 plus $0.03 per hour – saving just over half of my server costs over the course of the 3 years: $500 + (24*365.25*3*0.03) = $1288.94 for 3 years, verses the current cost of $0.1 per hour which is 24*365.25*3*0.1 = $2629.80 for 3 years. Both prices are ex-vat and don’t include bandwidth costs or storage costs, obviously, though those costs are themselves VERY competitive ($0.17/GB outgoing and $0.10/GB incoming). But as you can see it is a good deal for me to bulk buy in advance.

So how do you bulk buy? Amazon’s new service is called reserved instance and you bulk buy simply by typing in a command in your terminal or dos cmd prompt (ec2-purchase-reserved-instance-offering) and hey presto you’ve just bulk bought in advance. For me that was $500, but it is possible to buy the biggest instance they have for $4000! All just by issuing a single call from the commandline. That is such a scary prospect I went into my history and deleted it so that I wouldn’t accidentally call the command again by accident. Actually there was no need to delete it from my history as in order to buy a reservation you need to ask Amazon to “offer” you one (ec2-describe-reserved-instance-offering) and then use the offering id that they specify for the instance type & region you need. Once that offering id has been used it can’t be used again – but I wasn’t about to test that their code worked…
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