La vida con Vista (part 3)

Life with Vista (part 3)

It’s been three months since my last “Vista” post [La vida con Vista (part 2)] and I can tell you things have not gotten much better. I thought products were supposed to get better with each new version, like when each new book from an author gets better because the author is more experienced, or how a winery produces better wine each year as the vines mature. So what happened to Windows?

Vista sucks. How’s that for a professional opinion? They can promote their “Mohave Experiment” all they like, but the fact is that after the shiny bobbles get old, we all need functionality and it just isn’t there. Is it just a coincidence that Bill handed the reigns to Steve at the same time Vista was being prepped for market? Is this the shape of the new Microsoft? I hope not.

I work all day with three systems at my finger tips. There is the laptop with Windows XP that I use for client work, the PC with Windows Vista Ultimate that I [try to] use for all my personal stuff, and the CentOS-5 server (RedHat Linux without the support) I do all my software development and testing on. Guess which one gives me the least grief? (hint: it didn’t come from Microsoft) As far as the Windows boxes go, I’ll take the XP one over Vista any day.

There are numerous reasons why I believe XP is better than Vista and this is speaking strictly from experience.

Occasionally I need to reboot my router and switch, bringing the network down temporarily. When it comes back up again, the Linux server is always the first to access it followed closely by the XP box, but the Vista PC can take up to 5 minutes to re-establish a connection. When it does finally establish a connection it always (always) resets my “private” network to “public” which disables file and printer sharing. Talk about frustrating.

Windows has always been able to save username and password credentials for commonly used applications, like mail or secure web sites. When I first installed Vista this worked, but after a “security update” that was apparently mandatory and installed itself without asking, it does not work any more. Not only did all of my saved credentials vaporize, I can’t re-save them again or add any new ones either. Even manually added credentials are completely useless.

Active-X add-ons have taken on a life of their own. In XP, removing a bad or damaged add-on program was as easy as opening the “Downloaded Programs” folder and clicking “DELETE”. Not with Vista. Now it’s next to impossible to remove one even if you are logged in as Administrator will all the security turned off.

And what’s the deal with changing perfectly good terminology? If I click on SAVE, I want the dialog questions to be YES or NO not SAVE or DON’T SAVE. Worse are the moronic questions when you try to copy over existing files. Was “are you sure you want to replace this file” such a bad question that it had to be replaced with three separate equally confusing questions like “ do you want to copy and save the original”?

I believe Vista has drawn its last refresh across my screen as my frustration has reached overload level. After trying to work with Vista (Ultimate) for three months, I’m packing it in and tossing it. If anyone is interested in $298 worth of slightly used Microsoft Operating System, let me know – it’s going cheap.

To PHP or not to PHP. Is that even a questions?

This is still a question, but not as big a one as it used to be. Five years ago I was building web sites with a combination of PERL, PHP, HTML, and JavaScript. Today they are almost entirely PHP. Over the last few years, the PHP language has developed into a powerful, flexible language that has shown strength in not just the web arena, but in mainstream application programming as well.

Recently I was asked to write a script to inject mail to a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) in order to send several thousand emails in a short period of time (no, this was not SPAM) and I had my choice of languages to write it in. My first choice was PERL because I have had great success with PERL when I need to search and strip text data and access databases quickly. However, this time I chose to test how far PHP has really come so I wrote the script in both PERL and PHP and ran them on the same job data.

To my surprise, the PHP script performed as well, if not better than the PERL script. Both were fed the same information and had to perform the same task and over 25000 iterations, the PHP script may have actually beat the PERL script, by a few nanoseconds – too close to call.

I am currently re-writing a couple of my older web applications and replacing all of the old PERL and JavaScript chunks with equivalent PHP and have been able to actually reduce the code size and increase functionality along the way.

The moral here is… if you are a programmer and have ignored PHP because it is “just for dynamic web pages” then take another look. You might be surprised.