Back to Vista

I am writing this post on my newly installed 64-bit Windows Vista RC1. Another round of partitioning and some experimentation completely erased my Ubuntu (Edgy) Linux and has left me just with this particular OS. Surprisingly, I am comfortable with this. Maybe I'll use windows for some time now.

The only trouble is that Vista has not detected any of my sound cards (yeah, I've two of 'em). But I believe I should be able to fix that soon; after all Microsoft products don't usually give problems like this, and if they do, they are easy to fix.

This 64-bit edition is actually 32-bit compatible and I haven't had any compatibility problems so far. Interestingly I am getting a strange warning while opening the Yahoo! home page:

I know this is not very readable, the error message says "This website wants to run the following add-on: 'TODO: ' from 'TODO: (unverified publisher)'. If you trust this website and the add-on and want to allow it to run, click here..."

Windows Vista definetely has a lot of eye candy with it's translucent windows, fabulous backgrounds and colors. The designers at Microsoft are awesome. The user experience on the desktop with Microsoft's products is something which is hard to emulate in the immeadiate future on the Linux desktop. Meanwhile on Linux, an entirely new breed of UI technologies are coming up. XGL is striving to put advanced effects on the Linux desktop using the advanced OpenGL platform. You can click and drag your desktop and switch to another workspace while doing a cube rotation effect. Now that's what I call the WOW factor!

Googlemail alias for Gmail

Found something new about GMail today. It seems that everybody who has a gmail account also gets an alias account with the googlemail domain automatically.

For example my email address is shalinmangar [at] gmail [dot] com
So I also have an alias shalinmangar [at] googlemail [dot] com

Try it out!