Windows 7 RC1 made available for download

I did not try all my chosen applications in Windows 7 beta and RC1 is available now.

I have to say I like better to wait some days for this RC1 to test it.

Windows 7 - II.

When Windows 7 are running on the virtual PC, I have to try some software to ensure it is worth to think about upgrading to Windows 7 and leave Windows Vista behind. To be honest, I have to mention that I didn't try Vistas because I don't have enough powerful PC.

I chose Google Chrome, CCleaner and AdAware for the first part of experiments.

Tags: Windows 7

Windows 7 - I.

I read many commendations about Windows 7 after Microsoft released first beta version and made it public. I became very curious and decided to install it for myself. I don't have spare computer for similar tasks (yes, I have some older PCs, but these cannot be used with newer versions of MS Windows than Windows 95 beta :-))) - or Linux, of course ;-) ), so I decided to use Microsoft Virtual PC on my notebook.
I assigned 512 MB of RAM to test machine (my notebook has "only" 1 GB of RAM installed) and hoped it will work.
The installation was successful as you can see on the screenshot below.


And the biggest surprise for me - it runs with only 512 MB of RAM (impossible to do the same with Windows Vista).

Danger of malware

It seems that current "viruses" - like below mentioned AutoRun malware - attack by abusing social habits of PC users. Most of them (us) are trustful and this is their (our) weak point in the battle with malware developers.
See this article Is there no end to the AutoRun madness?.

ZDNet News : Net bombarded by heaviest ever attacks this year

The more we all are online, the more we will be subjects of cyber attacks.
And I have to agree with this opinion Users = security holes in Talkback. Or we can reverse it - Biggest security holes are the users. Including me.

Intelligent mobile phone

As I wrote in my other blog (My shared thoughts), I am currently in the hospital. And here is no wireless internet connection. So I started to explore features of my intelligent mobile phone (Sony Ericsson P990i). I had no problem to connect to internet, so I can browse the web (I am writing this using my mobile phone). It is amazing.
I think that I could not use my mobile phone as pocket computer for serious work, but it is very good as reserve "computer".

Software I.

The main scope of my work is support of IS of one financial company. Of course I don't do it only by myself, I am a member and leader of small team, which is looking after company's IS and its users. Also we are developing small IS add-ons for better comfort of its users. We need to coordinate our activities and track their progress - as every team, I think. So I began looking for software which would support these tasks. (Of course open source software - see my blog)
First selected software was TUTOS, it is The Ultimate Team Organization Software by the words of author. And he is not lying. We have implemented this system, but we realised after short period of time that it is very software development oriented and its customization for our needs would not be simple. Complexity of the system and incompletion of module Requirements (although it is one of the few commercial modules) put us off of using it. I started to search again. But now I restricted searching to the issue tracking system.
At that time I acquainted myself with programming language Python and tools developed using it, so I focused on that area. I found out 3 interesting applications - Issue Tracker Product, zTracker and Trac. All applications are built in Python, first 2 use Zope application server, the last one is standalone web application. There are also others (e.g. Roundup), but I can't search and try indefinitely, it is not the scope of my work.
BTW: what attracted me the most on issue tracking systems built in Python were their lucidity and simplicity in comparison with PHP systems. Very interesting.
In the end I selected the Trac, mostly for very good integration of Wiki subsystem, other features are very similar in all preselected applications. Currently we are implementing this application.