SolitaryGeek

I received a mail from Microsoft today morning about Windows 7 expiration. Here is the essence of the mail:

It’s time to upgrade from the Windows 7 Release Candidate

While most people who tested Windows 7 have now moved to the final version, some are still running the Release Candidate. If you haven’t moved yet, it’s time to replace the RC.

Starting on March 1, 2010 your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Your work will not be saved during the shutdown.

The Windows 7 RC will fully expire on June 1, 2010. Your PC running the Windows 7 RC will continue shutting down every two hours and your files won’t be saved during shutdown. In addition, your wallpaper will change to a solid black background with a persistent message on your desktop. You’ll also get periodic notifications that Windows isn’t genuine. That means your PC may no longer be able to obtain optional updates or downloads requiring genuine Windows validation.

To avoid interruption, please reinstall a prior version of Windows or move to Windows 7. In either case, you’ll need to do a custom (clean) install to replace the RC. As with any clean installation, you’ll need to back up your data then reinstall your applications and restore the data. For more details about replacing the RC, see the Knowledge Base article KB 971767. For more information, visit the Window 7 Forum.

Thanks again for helping us test Windows 7.

The Windows 7 Team

This sounds very unprofessional and disappointing. Why shutdown the operating system every 2 hours? Why change the wall paper to “a solid black background with a persistent message on your desktop”?. Why display “periodic notifications that Windows isn’t genuine”?. Did we cheat Microsoft by running Windows 7 RC? Why not just expire gracefully with some friendly reminders.

What do you think about this?

You can get more information about Windows 7 RC expiration from Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Recently I read the article “Free UML tools” which explains about the various free UML tools available. That article made me think “What UML tool do people actually use?”. Over the years, I have used tools like Microsoft Visio, ArgoUML, NetBeans UML, StarUML and finally settled with JUDE. How about you? What UML tools do you use? Some of you might use more than one tool (at work, at home etc), so feel free to choose all the options applicable.

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I recently came across a nice little tool called “goosh” or “The unofficial Google Shell”. It resembles a linux shell (or terminal) and provides a “command line interface” on the web for many google services. This means that you can just open and read your mails very fast by typing just 2 commands: “login” and then “gmail”. That’s it, your mails are loaded damn fast and this is what you might want if you are in a hurry!

And goosh provides some cool facilities like searching wikipedia, news, rss feeds, blogs etc etc with simple to use (and remember) commands. Let’s see some of goosh’s firepower in action.

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Yesterday I asked my wife to chat with her mother using my new Ubuntu 8.10 and she happily accepted it. She quickly picked up pidgin and started chatting. But then she asked me, ” I want to speak to my mother, how can I go about?”. I told her that with pidgin you can only do text chat and voice chat facilities are not supported in pidgin. When she asked me, “Why don’t you just install Google Talk?”, I replied her, “Google Talk is not yet available for Linux”. She just went to her Windows XP notebook. Looks like I missed a major oppurtunity to convert my wife to Ubuntu.

I too love Google Talk and I miss it whenever I use Ubuntu. Most of my friends have google talk account but I was able to only chat with them by sending text messages from either Pidgin or Gmail. Though many Google products like Google Earth, Picasa are now available in Linux, Google Talk is not yet there and many Linux users like me need it very badly.

So I was looking around for some solution and I came to know about a great product called “Empathy“. I quickly opened my Synaptic Package Manager and searched for “empathy”. Luckily the required packages were available in my Synaptic Package Manager and I selected the package “empathy” and marked it for installation. The other required packages were automatically selected and the download/installation went smoothly as it use to be in Ubuntu.

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