Glims for Safari

Firefox was a clear winner this far... the sheer configurability and the usability edge it had over Safari. Being a Mac user , Safari was the natural choice though... the easy integration with OSX (Keychain et al) was indeed convenient. Easily faster and lighter than Firefox , Safari 4 would be the perfect browser what with its slowly but steadily growing list of plugins ...if only Apple could have done away with the usability issues that turn me off in v4.
However, what saved the day is Glims.(Get it here). Here is a quick and dirty list of things that I used to miss the most that make the Safari experience so much better now.

• Adding and managing search engines. Lets me add shortcuts and keywords like in FF.
• Undo Close Tab (Command-Z). Big convenience for the clumsy me.
• Autocomplete in forms
  
• Saving tabs from last session
• Better managed download folders - dated downloads
• Closes download window by default . Small detail but liked it.
• Suggested search previews in the search toolbar. Jazzier than FF if not better.
• Tab navigation using . and ,
  

None of these are things which make it better than FF but all of them definitely bring it at par with its interface.
Next on my list to improve my Safari window are SafariStand , FLVR (or VideoBox now) and TabExpose

First day with Windows 7

Finally found time to install and start running Win 7 on my Apple machine. A quick upgrade to Bootcamp made sure the installation went on pretty smoothly. At the end of it , the only problem I'm stuck with is the missing drivers (the trackpad refuses to work for one). Will get around to it sometime.

So the much hyped user interface is actually good. Though being a Mac user , I didn't find anything remarkable in any of the new razzmatazz. The OS is noticeably faster , cleaner, shinier. For anyone used to the old Windows interface, a few changes could take a day or so to get used to (have seen people fumble a little with the new Control Panel layout, similarly with the IIS management ), but all in all refreshing changes.

A funny thing happened ,though , when the Win7 machines were first plugged into the LAN, the PCs refused to connect. Suspecting a larger network issue , our sysadmin set out to unravel why. Turned out when the Win7 machines sent out a gratuitous ARP request, they actually received a response...each time! And not because of some IP conflict. Looked like the machine ended up responding to its own gratuitous ARP creating an appearance of another machine on the network with the same IP. A registry tweak finally resolved the issue but has to be done on each Win7 machine to let it log on to the network.

This is more a cute-funny mistake than a bug probably but for market leaders on desktop OSs , as a colleague puts it... "banta nahi Bhai"("It's not done, dude").

Making the move

It hadn't been long since I delved into the world of Java (like it can ever be too long) when as a result of an apparent project requirement, I had to move to a project entirely working in the .NET world.

Since it was my first time, I did not have too many expectations.And then I was continually told how it's all the same. How I wish...

To start with, it took me a whole day to get that first look of the code. But with all the visual studio/resharper/sqlserver installation and setup ,notwithstanding the time and money spent on obtaining licenses, I couldn't but help miss the good,old Eclipse. Lesson learnt : Please maintain the order of steps religiously when installing and uninstalling products and muster that extra bit of patience.And do not even try working on VS without ReSharper int he interest of your sanity.I might not be a VS power user yet but by far with all my project requirements , I haven't come across something spectacular that VS lets me do that most other IDEs do not...and without being as much of a hog. With 4GB RAM on the machine, it makes me cry every time I need more than two solutions open.

For someone from a Java world, working with .NET can be daunting.Especially when you do not have too much regard for things being made easy for you at the cost of bloating them. Is it just me or everything in the .NET world was just a tad bit complicated? From getting confused when protected didn't really mean protected but internal to looking for a class called A for a few seconds before realizing search for file might not help as both A and B in a file called B.cs , small things get on my nerves. And in a team where we do extensive code pairing , some of this irritation rubs off on my pair too.
[BTW this is quite a help.]

Being new to this, it's quite often that I run into trouble. And it is then that I realize that exception handling is as sorry as it was when they first came up with Windows. Newer products like Silverlight have the same affliction.Just the number of times you are faced with error messages which simply do not make sense.

Till date, I haven't come across anything significant which would make me crib any less about having to move.Really wondering why we put up with a bloated piece of monstrosity and pay for it too.