Windows 7

I played with Windows7 beta a whlie ago and really liked it. But I picked up a new laptop since then, and didn't want to put the beta OS on my new laptop. Now that the RTM is out, I just upgraded my laptop, so I thouhgt I'd blog about my experience for anyone who cares.

First the geek details: I'm running an HP quad core with 6-gig ram and a 4650 ATI graphics card. It came pre-installed with Window's Vista Home Premium 64-bit. I'm upgrading to Windows7 Ultimate 64bit

Next, the install was long(ish). Let's face it, my laptop is a whapper. But it still me a couple hours.

The results: stellar. I've been playing with computers for 100 years or so. I've installed Linux more times than I can remember. I've put ever major version of windows on except "Bob". I've never, ever, EV-Er had an upgrade go as well. I did the "upgrade" rather than the clean install. It picked up my graphics card, my network, and amazingly all my settings, down to my log in password and desktop wallpaper.

I gotta say, this part blew me away -- *it even kept my installed programs*! I rebooted to 7, my virus checker was running, Google Chrome had all its bookmakrs, everything is just "there".

It did a pre-check before installing to identify which programs it would have issues with and it found one that it didnt know what to do with (an HP-specific keyboard filter, that I really don't care about), and 3 or 4 that i'll need to re-install. It saved the report, so I can go back and look at it in case I dont' remember.

Now... Windows... 7.... ROCKS.

It's *much* faster than Vista, doesn't crash as much and has a bunch of bells and whistles that are actually usefull -- like the ability to run a virtual XP instance built in.

I've only upgraded today, so I may have a different opinion in a few days, but so far, i'm very impressed.

MS got it right, this time.

a quickie Unix thing

For those who don't know, I've worked with Unix/Linux/Posix for .. like... longer than I'll admit. And I keep getting into Posix style projects.

This is a really quick thing, but by far the most useful thing about Posix to me is the way you can chain commands. Probably the most coolest command chain that I regularly use, or at least the one I use most often is:

find ./ -name "*.something" -exec egrep -il "somepattern" {} \;

Yeah, for those non-"ix"-ers that syntax is ugly. Ok, for those of us who have been there, it's ugly too.
But what it will do is look through every file named *.something for the pattern "somepattern", ignoring case, and provide a list of all the files that have a pattern match in them (that's what the -l is for).

I use it constantly. Of course there are lots of variations, but the ability to look through a complex directory tree of php files for anything with a certain pattern, when one is totally unfamiliar with the code, is wildly useful.

it's not difficult, but I've run into a few poeple who don't know how to do this and stumble over it using pipes and the like.

Hope it helps someone.