So, IE7 was released today. Aren’t you excited? Yeah, me neither. But, I decided to download it and see if it sucked less than IE6. There are already thousands of reviews of IE7 out there, so I figure one more wouldn’t hurt.

Even before I got to use the new browser, I was put off by the fact that it took about 10 minutes to install and also required the typical post-Microsoft-install reboot. And, I noticed that it disabled my virus scanner when it started installing — doesn’t that mean that any application can do that?

Anyhow, on to my first impressions…

A slimmed down, cleaner user interface. It’s not really a shock as other MS products have been going down this path for a number of years. However, I’m not convinced that this is a good thing.

Tabs. I didn’t like them when Opera introduced them, but over the years, I’ve grown to love them in Firefox. Now I find it irritating when my browser opens new windows unless I explicitly tell it to do so. IE7’s tabs blend too much into the UI, so it’s almost difficult to see them. I like how IE7 has a nice little tab that you can click on to open a tab.

RSS. I didn’t play with this, but it’s cool that it’s finally supported.

Anti-phishing security. Again, I didn’t play with it, but hopefully it’ll help the average Joe.

Login and form completion. IE7 must have remembered my preference to not ask to store passwords for IE6. However, I couldn’t figure out how to convince it to start asking again. The options were set correctly under the “AutoComplete Settings” dialog, they just weren’t working. Since I didn’t have any special settings configured already, I just used the new “Reset Internet Explorer settings” feature under the Advanced tab to get rid of any IE6 preferences that might have been lingering. That seemed to fix the problem for a few sites. Saving a login/password for some restricted access sites like SharePoint doesn’t appear to be an option.

View Page Source. Why is there still no keyboard command to do this? As a web developer, this is extremely frustrating.

Internet Options. Instead of trimming the browser UI, they should have cleaned this configuration section up. I’m a tech guy, and I hate trying to find how to change options in their options menu. I pretty much just leave things alone unless some reason or another forces me to find how to tweak an option. (See Login and Form completion above).

Crashes and shutdown delays. After 3 hours of moderate use, I’m happy to say that it hasn’t locked up yet. Although it has become unresponsive and/or slow, and has forced me to close the window. Sometimes clicking on the close window icon takes 15 seconds for IE7 to give up and die.

First-run start page. It asks you some configuration questions when you start, then sets the home page to MSN. Fine, but I changed it to a blank page because MSN takes too long to load. 2 hours later, it decided to change back to the First-run page again. How often is this going to happen?

Speed. I haven’t clocked anything, but page loads appear noticably slower than Firefox and IE6.

Page load icon. The rotating “e” has been replaced with a spinning circle on the tabs. It gives up waiting for pages that take a long time to load. You can only tell that the connection is still open by looking at the bottom status bar that says “Waiting for …”

Although I’m happy Microsoft has finally updated it’s antiquated IE6 browser, I guess I’m just underwhelmed with this latest version. This took how many months to deliver?

However, now that Microsoft is once again developing IE, I hope they continue to enhance it and get compliant with all of the existing web standards instead of waiting another 5 years for their next major overhaul. We can only hope.

As I mentioned in a previous article, I was anxious to get a new machine down here so I could once again have a serious development environment. I’m happy to say that I’ve now been up and running with Fedora Core 5 for close to two weeks. It wasn’t all fun and games.

First off, I had been using RedHat and Fedora Core versions of Linux for more than 5 years. I wanted to try something new, just to see what was out there. I heard wonderful things about Ubuntu, so I thought I would give that a shot. After verifying that the install would work with my hardware, by using the LiveDVD, I installed Ubuntu 6.0.6 and got to work. I am not sure exactly what I did wrong, but when I tried to install new applications using their package manager, I kept running into dependency mismatches that were not automatically resolved.

I honestly spent 2 days trying to get my system up and running with Eclipse, Postgres, IntelliJ, Apache ant, and the Sun JDK 1.5. It did not go smoothly, and things just constantly felt broken. Probably the biggest decision to bail was the fact that with a fresh install, Ubuntu did not recognize my dual core CPU. I wasn’t about to go down the path of recompiling the kernel for smp support. If I had more time, I would have attempted another install, in case I had selected a wrong option or something, but I had work that needed to be done.
So, I downloaded the FC5 DVD and got to work. After installing and applying all of the latest updates, I was ready to roll. The installer even recognized the 2 CPUs and installed a pre-compiled smp kernel. Nice!

Unfortunately, I soon discovered, that the brand new Shuttle I had custom built did not include the built-in internal 802.11g adapter. The nice folks at Shuttle offered to fix the problem for me after 7 days of phone tag. Their solution involved me sending the machine back so they could install the adapter. I explained that this was not an option as I am now living in Mexico, and shipping packages to/from the US was too much of a gamble. Well, at least they will refund my money… it’s been over 10 days and I still haven’t seen a credit, so I’ll be bugging them again this week.

Unfortunately, due to setup of our network, the router is located in our bedroom, and all our computer equipment is out in our living room. Therefore, I had a few options… 1) Run a long cable across the apartment to hook into the LAN connector (my wife would kill me), 2) Move my computer into bedroom (there’s not enough room, and my wife would kill me), 3) Buy a USB wireless adapter (can I find one in this part of Mexico?), or 4) Bridge my Windows XP machine so that I could access the network.

I decided option 3 was going to be the best, but I needed to find an adapter first. So, in the meantime, I was stuck with option 4. Suprisingly, Windows XP made the process quite simple, I’m quite pleased to say. Unfortunately, sharing a wifi connection bridged through another machine is probably a speed demons worst nightmare!

Eventually, a Belkin F5D7050 USB wireless adapter was located at the local Sam’s Club. Thanks NAFTA!

I had a bad feeling about Linux and USB and wireless cards playing nicely together. My fears soon became a reality. I spent the next 3 days trying to find a driver that would work with my adapter. The wireless chip on the card is supposedly a rt2500 (Ralink Tech 2500), although I can only access the card by using an unsupported legacy driver for the rt73. I was able to hobble along for a few days with using a tool called ndiswrapper to load the Windows driver… however, besides the fact that it didn’t work with wireless encryption, the stupid thing would cause a total system lockup after a few hours of use.

Luckily, I stumbled upon the Rt2×00 SerialMonkey website. These guys took over the maintenance of the Ralink proprietary driver when Ralink open sourced it. They are currently in the process of rewriting, from scratch, the drivers for all of the Ralink chips. Excellent. After I solved a few problems, namely compiling the driver on Fedora Core (it involves a manual patch), and finding the mislabeled firmware for my chip on Ralink’s site, I was up and running. It’s now been 2 days without a lockup.

Although I’m up and running with the SerialMonkey driver, I’m sad to report that any high volume network traffic (bittorrent) will cause the driver to freak out and unload. Luckily, I don’t need that to do my work.
I love the stability and reliability of Linux, the massive amount of open source and free software available; however, I am not shocked that more people haven’t made the switch just yet. Although things like the LiveDVD from Ubuntu will help some people get a feel for Linux, getting the system functional and easy to maintain still needs some work. I am positive that things will continue to get better. I look forward to it.