On balance I’m satisfied with Vista x64, but I’ve run into a few challenges and at least one casualty.
The casualty was my Palm Tungsten E2, which can’t connect to Vista64 with the USB cable. According to Palm, you can connect with Bluetooth, but I don’t have Bluetooth on the computer. Fortunately I don’t use the Palm much anymore and I synced mainly to back it up.
As for the challenges, it seems that some applications, notably OpenOffice.org 3, have to be installed using XP-SP2 compatibility mode. Also, some installation software doesn’t trigger privilege elevation which may be required to write to certain registry keys or system folders, so the “Run as Administrator” and “CMD prompt here as administrator” Elevation PowerToys are practically necessary. Sun’s Java RE (which I probably wouldn’t install except that it’s a dependency of OOo) has an annoying bug in it’s control panel such that you can’t change the settings, so you can’t disable automatic updating. The workaround is to run bin/javacpl.exe as administrator using the Elevation PowerToy. Using 32-bit Windows help files (.hlp) requires a special download (this affects all Vista versions) as Microsoft is no longer updating the older help program and so doesn’t distribute it with the OS. Only two of the four buttons on my Kensington Expert Trackball Mouse work, and Vista thinks it’s a regular mouse — but it wasn’t working fully under XP-SP3 either. Don’t bother to install the MouseWorks software, although some folks claim they’ve gotten it work (or at least the OS to use the driver). I would guess at this point Kensington isn’t going to release a Vista-compatible driver for the older devices.
I can live with two buttons.
As I continue my investigation of and attempt to implement a GenericSetup approach to customizations for my Plone site, I am seeing more clearly the need for this transition, even if the reasoning behind some of the design choices escapes me.
In TTW customization of Zope 2 there was no natural way to cleanly separate customizations from default functionality. Perhaps more significantly, the system did not really provide a canonical way of separating presentation from business logic. Zope Page Templates (and the older DTML methods) were, and are, too powerful for their own good. On the other side “Script (Python)” scripts are too limited in power (due to security restrictions) and scope to be able to handle general purpose business logic. This state of affairs leads almost unavoidably to “spaghetti code” strung across a mixture of page templates, DTML methods, “Script (Python)” scripts and “External Methods”.
The addition of “Controller Page Template”, “Controller Python Script”, and “Controller Validator” objects appears to have been an earlier attempt to address the problem of a lack of a clear MVC-style “controller”. While these objects provided some conveniences, at least for form processing, they didn’t eliminate the deeper problem. I’m still not sure that Plone 3/Zope 2/Five has really resolved the fundamental issue, but definite progress has been made.
I do regret the profusion in GenericSetup of XML configuration files (a la Java web apps) which IMO humans should not have to read, much less write. The use of XML-like “ZCML” for the main configuration files seems particularly strange. There must have been some initial reason for not using XML, but now it just seems arbitrary and bewildering. Personally, I would much prefer a pure Python implementation, but what do I know?
I woke up this morning thinking about tags … and buckets.
Probably because I had reorganized my Picasa albums last night. Actually I collapsed all my public photo albums into one and applied more tags to individual photos. For some reason — most likely habit — I had originally created several albums for different subject categories: Bugs, Animals & Birds, Buildings & Places, etc. It worked fine, since I could easily pick one “bucket” in which to put each photo. And then I could apply tags, too. I guess I thought of tagging as a secondary means of organization, an optional sort of extra goodness. But I encountered a situation where I wanted access to all my public photos using a mechanism that dealt only with individual albums. I was stuck. Then I realized that by using tags instead of separate albums to create subject categories I would have a more flexible structure, and not just for this one application.
Since I work in a library (although I am not a librarian by trade or training) I frequently deal with systems for organizing objects (principally books and other written materials) and metadata. Of course, prior to the existence of computer networks, the library was the premier information storage and retrieval system. And the techniques libraries use for managing metadata for effective and efficient retrieval of objects were largely developed to meet the needs of a physical collection. Without automated indexing and searching, information tends to be organized hierarchically. Having used this strategy with physical objects, it was natural to do the same with “virtual” or electronic objects. Hence we organized our email and documents by creating folders. The problem, of course, is always, “What folder did I put that thing in?” When I switched to Gmail I felt a bit insecure at first because there were no folders, just “labels”. I wasn’t accustomed to the paradigm, but I went with it. Gradually it has dawned on me that the impulse “to put each thing in its place” isn’t always necessary in the digital world, and it’s sometimes not the best organizational strategy.
