Well, I have had a handful of bad experiences with Microsoft lately. I just recieved a new (pretty darn cool!) motherboard for Christmas; I plan on installing OSX with it, but first I decided to install some flavour of Windows first so I can do some hard drive operations to prepare for OSX. So the first thing I did was try to install Windows XP. No go, it doesn’t recognize the new hardware I have (no EIDE support). Well, I don’t have any floppy disks to install the drivers with, so I figured I’d just go to Vista now and try it out. After I finally found a working torrent, I installed it expecting Microsoft’s new operating system to behave a bit more like OSX and not worry about drivers.

Boy was I wrong!

I booted up and many things didn’t work. I was stuck at 800×600, I had no Aero Glass, I had no sound, and it was painfully slow! Way to go Vista! Looks like we’ll have to wait for the next release of Windows to see pain-free installation. So I started to fish around for drivers, using IE7 which came with Vista. I kept using the built in search feature to look around for a video driver, I couldn’t find a single page about NVidia Vista drivers. I was getting worried, but then I realized, I’M USING WINDOWS LIVE. So I searched Google instead and the 3RD RESULT was exactly what I was looking for. Way to go again, Microsoft. So after I finally fished around for my video card drivers and mysteriously enabled Aero Glass, then downloaded the (beta) sound drivers, I had a working system… kinda. I think it’s my RAM, I’m not sure, but Vista still seems sluggish. I mean, the glass effects are running fine (although making me a bit nauseous after a while), it’s just sluggish. So I thought while I’m waiting for OSX86 to finish, I’ll try to install Steam. It installed alright, and I got all of my games in a jiffy, started up HL2 Episode 1 to play around. It took FIVE MINUTES just to get to the “New Game, Load Game” screen. I was pulling my hair out by now, noticing that obviously something is wrong. After another ten minutes or so, I was finally in the game, except it was lagging horribly, unplayable. There were graphic artifacts all over the place, glitches every frame.

Bah! Well, I’m sure I’ll fix it eventually, but it really irks me that the newest version of Windows (RTM, mind you) still can’t compete with the simplicity and “just works” feeling of Mac OS X, and I’m left with so many more problems.

I am starting a beta test for a blog that I programmed from the ground up in PHP and MySQL! It’s called “BuzzBlog”, it’s a very simple, non-bloat weblog for regular people. I made a setup installer script too!

Go to http://buzzert.zanneth.com/buzzblog to give it a test drive.

Let me know what you think, comment here, or on the BuzzBlog!

Liquid Plasma

Posted 12/2/06
By Buzzert

I was inspired by the PS3’s new background. I was also inspired by Chemistry book I’ve seen around school. It’s not as “watery” as I had hoped but it still looks neat! Let me know what you think in the comments.

Welcome to the new buzzert.zanneth.com v3.0.

Version 3.0 is a major update. buzzert.zanneth.com v1.0 is about two years old, and my web design skills have changed and improved greatly since then. Quite honestly, I was just a n00b when I began designing v1.0; however, my Photoshop skills were already quite developed. This is why the website looked okay, but the code was a complete mess. A few months ago, I released v2.0, which wasn’t quite different, it was just a face-lift before I began designing 3.0. So should this be called 2.0 and should 2.0 be called 1.5? I think so, but to save confusion, I’m just going to call it 3.0. Here’s why I needed to do a major overhaul:

• It was too hard to make new site blog entries, and it looked pretty awful.
» v3.0 features a blog powered by WordPress, which I can easily update.
• There were a lot of mistakes that were hard to fix, so I didn’t.
» A complete overhaul of the website guarantees the scrubbing of legacy html files for mistakes, including typo.
• The code was a mess.
» I coded my own, neat CSS file now. v1.0 and v2.0 did not have CSS.
• There were huge images, making the page load slowly.
» v3.0 includes images mostly in jpg format, not png, and the buttons are no longer image files, but good ol’ CSS beauty, as well as the rest of the page.
• DIV LAYERS STINK
» Version 1 and 2 had DIV layers, which are the lazy man’s web designing tools. DIV layers essentially allow you to put things wherever you want, without the worry of knowing how to code it. v3.0 is written from the ground up excluding those nasty DIV layers and just plain, beautiful CSS.
• Media and Wallpaper
» The Media and Wallpaper sections are now much cleaner, and easier to navigate, as well as the ability to comment on them. The latest image is now on the top of the page, rather than the bottom.

This website is coded (except for the blogging software) and designed from the ground up by me, it took me a total of three days to complete, and it looks dang good in my opinion, very “Web 2.0“. Leave a comment here (couldn’t do that before!) telling me what you think of the new design.

And I kept the shoutbox, so you can still do shout-outs.

Ciao!