Keeping Tabby Safe - and Indoors

I apologize for veering off-topic for this week’s column, but I feel I need to offer an unofficial public service announcement about cats. On Friday October 20th, I let our cat Maxi out for the night; this is when she insists on her nature visits. If we don’t let her out at night, she howls and protests and keeps us awake, so we always felt there was no other choice but to let her out. Unfortunately, last Friday was the last time we saw her.

On Sunday, we went to WAG to see if our kitty had been reported or turned in, but alas, she is still missing. The folks at WAG, after letting us vent about our unfortunate loss, gave us some insight about how to look after cats in Whistler. We haven’t entirely given up hope, but it seems that many people in Whistler are missing their cats right now, and the cause is pretty much certain – coyotes are the culprit. The two women who greeted us at the WAG reception desk, Wendy Wahl and Joanne Russell, were incredibly sympathetic to our plight, and they gave us some very good information that we wish we had known before our cat went missing. I have decided to repeat some of their pearls of wisdom in this column so that others may avoid losing a beloved furry family member.

The first and most important lesson we learned is that Whistler cats should be trained to be indoor cats only. Until Sunday, I had always been fervently opposed to the idea of keeping cats inside, partly because all the cats I have ever owned have been allowed to go outside. I always felt that it was part of their nature to go out and explore and play in the great outdoors. Of course, there was also the rather selfish expectation that letting a cat out was a way to reduce the chore of maintaining the cat litter box.

Wendy and Joanne patiently explained to us that cats, by their nature, need to chase things. It may seem obvious that cats like to chase things, but by spending a little time playing with your cat and offering it some toys to chase, the outdoor chasing instinct can be supplanted with a little human play time. So if you are thinking of adopting a feline, you should expect to spend some time programming it to chase things that are inside your house. It was surprising to learn that a great deal of research has been done about modifying cat behavior, and training a cat to be an indoor cat takes about 2 weeks. There may be some cat-protesting that goes on during that two weeks, but if don’t want your kitty to become a wild animal’s next meal, take the time to program your cat to stay inside.

I don’t know much about coyotes, but apparently they are extremely cunning animals and they are very adept at hunting in numbers. They work as a team and they gang up on their prey. No matter how athletic or nimble your cat may be, it is no match for a pack of intelligent, hungry carnivores. Our neighbor told us that she witnessed her border collie get “rolled” by a coyote in broad daylight just the other day. Fortunately her dog got away unscathed, but be aware that dogs are targets too.

I really want to thank the folks at WAG, particularly Wendy and Joanne, for their empathy and insightful information last Sunday. If your cat has gone missing, fire up your computer and print some posters of your cat and distribute them around town; apparently there is a 40% chance you might get it back again. Not great odds, but enough to give us all a little hope. And if you don’t get your cat back, train your next cat to stay indoors so that it may live a long and healthy life.

Please let me know if our petite gray tabby shows up on your doorstep. She is/was an Emerald resident.

Windows Vista Conclusions

This concludes my Windows Vista Experiment. Last week I took the plunge and upgraded my computer with more RAM (1 Gbyte), and suddenly Vista burst into life. With 1 Gbyte RAM, Vista zips along very nicely – even with the Aero interface enabled. My graphics card is quite basic and shares system RAM, which is why my system bogged down with the Aero interface enabled. Systems with high-end graphics cards, like the kinds used by gaming enthusiasts, will probably run OK with only 512Mb of system RAM. However, my graphics card worked fine once the RAM was upgraded. I was wrong to say Vista is slow – it isn’t. Just remember one word – RAM.

One of the really great new features of Vista is the search tool. A few years ago, Apple Computer introduced their Tiger OS, which had a search tool named Spotlight - a search far superior to that of Windows XP. Microsoft has responded with Vista’s new Desktop Search. The search window is now the very first item above the Start button, and when you begin typing the search term, the results appear instantaneously as you type. The new tool not only searches for file names, but also content within files, email subject lines, and email content; all of this at speeds that will astonish. Add to this the ability to do Boolean searches, (the use of “and” and “or” to link search words) and this new search tool really shines; now you can find the item that you need in a fraction of a second. It’s one of those things that you didn’t think you needed until you try it, then find that you cannot live without it.

Vista has upgraded Internet Explorer, an upgrade which is long overdue. Mozilla’s Firefox browser has taken a fairly large market share away from Explorer, mainly because it’s a safer browser and resists spyware infections much more effectively than Explorer 6.0; add to this a few extras that Explorer hasn’t offered in the past, the most obvious of which is the tabbed browsing feature. The new Explorer, version 7, is reported to be much more robust in terms of security features, and also includes tabbed browsing (see a pattern here? Microsoft is not so much an innovator as it is an imitator; when other software companies innovate, Microsoft simply copies the concept. Microsoft has been doing this since MS-DOS, which itself was based on QDOS, and Microsoft bought it from a university student).

Vista includes a new thing called a Sidebar, and in the sidebar are things called Gadgets. With the Sidebar, your favourite Gadgets are readily available as an integrated part of your Windows Desktop. Vista offers eleven Gadgets to start, and more are available from Microsoft’s website. I’m sure that other software vendors will offer many more. The Gadgets I chose are Weather, a Calendar, a CPU and Memory meter, an RSS news feed, a Google Search box, an analog clock, and a Currency Converter.

Speech recognition has been around for many years now, usually as an add-on, but in my experience, very few people actually use it. Anyhow, Windows Vista has it.

In conclusion, I’d say that Vista will be a worthy successor to Windows XP, which is growing old and is ready for retirement. If you are thinking of buying a new computer in 2007, it will most likely have Windows Vista; if you want to upgrade your existing computer, just make sure that it is no older than a year or two, or you’ll likely be disappointed with performance. Vista is nice, but it’s a bit piggy.

Windows Vista Experimentation Continued

Windows Vista is still not ready for primetime. It is however, an interesting new Windows, and it does have some interesting features of merit. In my last column, I gave a few first impressions of the Operating System, the most aggravating of which was its slowness; however, I suspected that the new Aero interface, which relies heavily on advanced graphics capabilities of the higher end video graphics cards, was in fact the culprit in making my system seem slow. The Aero interface is really just a bit of flashiness, making windows appear translucent over the background picture. With just a basic graphics adapter, however, it just sucks the life out of the processor, and every task becomes an agonizing chore. Fortunately, it is easy to turn off, and once I switched to the “Windows Classic” theme, the OS became much faster. With more RAM, which is planned, I am sure the speed will become quite respectable.

When Vista is officially launched, it will be offered in five different flavors; Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and Vista Ultimate. The pre-release beta version offered by Microsoft is the Vista Ultimate, which has all features of each of the others wrapped up into one, including Windows Media Centre. Microsoft has changed the way it sells its various versions; for example if you start with Windows Home Basic, and then decide that you want to upgrade to Vista Business, you can use your credit card and download the upgrade from the web. This really makes a lot of sense, and allows users to continually upgrade until they have the feature set they want, without losing their original investment.

The computer with which I am experimenting with has an AMD Athlon 64 processor, which is a 64 bit CPU, and Windows Vista is the first 64 bit operating system I have experienced. I was hoping for increased speed and stability, but I was disappointed. I guess it’s a matter of waiting for some 64 bit applications to come to market. I was impressed by the speed of MS Office XP, which was slow to install and crashed the system on the first install attempt– a crash so severe that I got the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death); there is no recovering from this type of crash without turning off the computer completely and starting again. Once I got Office successfully installed, it runs noticeably faster than it does on Windows XP, despite the fact that this version of Office is only a 32 bit application.

Probably the most exciting feature, from my own personal standpoint, is a new bundled program called Windows Photo Gallery. This is so superior to the previous Windows Explorer photo feature-set, the old system seems almost annoying by comparison. I have been using Google’s Picasa photo organizing software, and it looks like Microsoft has been paying attention. Photo Gallery looks like a copy of Picasa, but with more and better features. Now you can tag all your photos with categories you devise for yourself; for example, you could have your photos organized by labels such as Friends, Mountain Scenes, Parties, Holidays, Children, Pets etc. You can also tag all your photos with a one-to-five star rating system. Then it’s a simple matter to look up your photos by whichever category you choose, saving much time if you have a lot of photos.

One thing I was very glad to see was the inclusion of Remote Desktop in Vista Ultimate, though it wasn’t a real surprise. Remote Desktop is still the fastest, best remote control method I have ever used, and it works great with Vista.

The next step for me is to load Simply Accounting and begin using Vista as my daily workspace. Stay tuned for more discoveries as I learn more about this exciting new OS.

Windows has gained some weight

Windows Vista RC1 is the official Pre-release version of the next major update of Microsoft Windows, due out in January of next year. Without too much effort, anybody can apply to become a Beta tester of Vista, and I decided to take the plunge; after all, as a Windows expert, I decided it was probably not a bad idea to get a head start, because soon the whole world will be using Vista.

The first step, after signing up to become a beta tester, was to download the DVD image and create the Vista installation disc. The image is 3.9Gbytes, and the download took about six hours on my ADSL account. After the image had finished downloading, the next step was to burn the image to a DVD (CD’s are rapidly becoming obsolete as DVD-RW’s have become the norm). I had decided to use my home desktop computer, which I recently acquired from Futureshop for $450, for the upgrade, and not my laptop; I depend on my laptop as my daily computer and I didn’t want to risk messing it up. I did, however, use the DVD burner in my laptop to create the install disc, and this provided me with my first challenge in the process… The new install disc booted as expected, but then told me that I needed a special driver for my DVD drive. This was a surprise, as windows has not required any special drivers for CD or DVD drives for many years, they are automatically recognized. After some reading on the Microsoft Vista forums, I decided to try reburning the image using my other DVD burner, the one on the actual machine being upgraded; lo and behold, this solved the problem.

Before installing Vista, I used Partition Magic to create a new 20 Gbyte partition in which to install Vista, and make my PC dual-bootable, maintaining my old Windows XP configuration in case the new Windows experiment failed; I would advise other experimenters to do the same. After that, installation of Vista took about an hour, which is a bit longer than it would take Windows XP. The installation wizard was easy, the only questions asked are the desired name of the computer, and what username and password to use. Strangely, after taking so much flak for its security flaws, Microsoft still does not force the use of a password – a real no-no. This is one of the major differences between Windows and Linux; you cannot create an account in Linux without a password, one of the reasons Linux is still more secure than anything Microsoft has to offer.

The first boot after installation was painfully slow, it took about another half hour for Vista to configure itself for first use. This came as no real surprise, I remember Windows XP did the same way back when, and Windows 2000 before that… the best explanation for this is that current low-cost hardware is fine for XP, but not really enough for Vista, and the next generation of processors and other hardware will run it just fine. Also, my machine has a paltry 512Mb of RAM, which is listed by Microsoft as the minimum for Vista.

After Vista finally settled down and presented itself to me for the first time, the first thing I really noticed was the speed, or lack of – that is to say, with only 512Mb of RAM, Vista is sloooww. Again, my first impression of Windows XP was the same 6 years ago, but as the hardware caught up, Windows XP started to seem snappy – I’m sure the same will be true for Vista. Next week, I’ll give you the low-down on the features of Vista and whether they really are worth all the fuss.