Of course, then came the mind-numbing exercise of clicking the PuTTY icon, and having to double-click the “cygwin” profile I made (for scrollback, colored terminal, etc). A quick Google search later, and I had my answer.

1. Create a shortcut on your desktop for PuTTYtel.exe (right-button drag and drop the executable works great, select “Create Shortcuts here”)
2. Right-click the shortcut icon and select Properties
3. Under the “General” tab, give it a meaningful name
4. Under the “Shortcut” tab, where it lists your target as “C:\whateverpath\puttytel.exe” change it to include a parameter of -load (single dash) and then a string (quoted if it contains spaces, etc) of which profile name you want to autoload. Since mine was called “—-cygwin” (so it would appear at the top of my stored session list), my new Target line became this:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\putty\puttytel.exe" -load "----cygwin"
5. Click OK to save, then right-click on the shortcut again and select “pin to taskbar”
6. Now you can simply click that icon, and it will immediately load that PuTTY saved session for you.

In a nutshell, create a folder in the root level of any drive, and call it “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” (without the quotes).

I decided the Nokia E71x is a great little smartphone if you use IMAP for your Email, and general overall support for the phone is decent. Unfortunately, the “Mail for Exchange” client didn’t work well for me, and I wonder if there’s something funky with the Exchange server at work because I had trouble using two separate apps to sync my work mail on the Nokia, and also had issues with work Email on the Blackjack II which prompted me to ‘upgrade’ to the Nokia.

So I went to an AT&T store, and asked them to exchange the phone. Oops, sorry, been more than 30 days, you’ll have to pay full retail price for a new phone because you’re not eligible for extending your two-year contract for another 21 months. Oh, and we’re out of stock for the iPhone you asked for. The rest of the conversation went something like:

Assistant Manager: You could try another AT&T store, see if they have any in stock.
Me: I don’t really know the area, can you check for me?
AM: (sighs) Yeah.
(searches and types enough on his keyboard to make me wonder if he was writing a blog article about the guy who went past his 30-day exchange period etc)
AM: The Beverly store has lots in stock.
Me: Okay, where’s that?
AM: On Beverly. Do you need the address?
Me: Considering I don’t know where on “Beverly”, yes, I need the address.

I get to the Beverly store, and took me 10 minutes to realize there’s a “sign in here” sign that isn’t close enough to the door for me to realize there’s a waiting list of about 8 people in front of me that are tying up sales reps.

An hour later, I got Brett (very friendly guy, super service) to find a 32GB iPhone 3GS for me, bought a neat dark red “luxe” shell from iFrogz, upsell me on the upgraded warranty, and sell me an overpriced car charger.

Oh, the best part. I didn’t have to pay full retail price after all. Turns out there’s a nifty little loophole in AT&T’s terms.

For $9.99, I can “add” a new line on my existing account. After telling him my wife was complaining about me adding a new line which would require her to memorize a new phone number when I’ve had this old number for like 7 years, he switched my old number to the new phone, and put some random 310-area code number on the Nokia. New data plan (business class, unlimited data plan, (hooyay for expense reports). New year 2-year contract with the iPhone saved me $400 on the retail price.

So now I can just cancel my Nokia line, which will charge me the $175 cancellation fee, which means I’m still ahead $225 on the retail cost of the iPhone.

And I’ve spent about $20 on apps and a few catchy tunes (like Natasha Beddingfield’s Pocketful of Sunshine).

The drag, I’ve come to realize after a little bit of Google searching, is that I can’t develop any apps for my iPhone without having Mac hardware. Bleh. Apple needs to release some Windows/Linux tools to develop iPhone apps on other platforms. Restricting it to Apple-only hardware seems ridiculous. Anyone got a used Mac Mini for sale?

Aion closed beta was fun. I got a Scout/Ranger to level 11, a Priest to level 6 and a Warrior to level 5. I think I enjoy the pure warrior class, to be honest. Usually I’m a ranged-DPS kind of guy, but the Ranger class seems overly complex. Found a bug in the game, dutifully reported it to NCSoft, and put the game away. Too bad the open beta doesn’t start up for a while.

I still have to move a bunch of sites from my old hosting provider. That’ll probably happen this weekend so I don’t get charged another $114/month. Although part of me wants to hold in until October which means my one year lease-to-own contract will be up, and I can go pick up the computer from them and cancel my plan… Decisions.

The answer is ‘no’, of course. As much as I’ve been enjoying the performance of Win7, even on my old laptop (P4 2.66GHz, 512MB of RAM, old Trident video, 802.11 a/b only doing WEP, etc), I have to say that MS has really outdone themselves at sending out a DVD install of the ‘Windows 7 Ultimate’ release package that works so well on older hardware as well as higher end hardware.

My rig at home is running the 64-bit version, and haven’t had a single hiccup yet, other than needing Vista drivers for my Asys mobo, LAN and separate Nvidia graphics. Windows Update *claims* to have new Nvidia drivers for Win7, but I get a steady 60fps in World of Warcraft whenever I play, so I don’t want to risk screwing anything up by going to beta video drivers.

I was a little disappointed to read this morning that the actual Release Candidate (RC) of Win7 will require a full wipe and reinstall, but I do understand their reasoning — they want people to test real-world upgrade/install scenarios, and upgrading from a beta version to a beta version isn’t really a “real world” scenario.

Windows 7 has a lot of nice features, now including native NFS support, both as a server and client. Of course, I was digging way down inside Control Panel and Windows features to enable/disable (like web services and the like) to find it. My buddy Jorge had this to say about NFS support over IM:

(11:50:40 AM) ian douglas: oh, and win7 has built in nfs now
(11:50:48 AM) jorge: it’s about time
(11:50:53 AM) ian douglas: found it last night in a setting, it’ll act as an nfs server and mount nfs stuff natively
(11:51:02 AM) jorge: when are they going to add unix tools to the shell, lol
(11:51:07 AM) ian douglas: no kidding
(11:51:10 AM) jorge: wow, slick
(11:51:21 AM) jorge: can you mount it from linux?
(11:51:24 AM) jorge: using nfs?
(11:51:25 AM) ian douglas: yeah
(11:51:29 AM) jorge: wow
(11:51:29 AM) ian douglas: and vice versa
(11:51:40 AM) ian douglas: mount linux in windows via nfs so we can finally kill samba
(11:51:48 AM) jorge: yeah
(11:51:53 AM) jorge: samba kinda sucks
(11:51:57 AM) ian douglas: yeah, i was pretty impressed, though it’s buried in the settings of windows features to turn on/off like web server, etc.
(11:52:05 AM) jorge: sure
(11:52:43 AM) jorge: typical M$ (let’s hide that feature so people don’t discover it too easily and start to figure out our stuff is crap)

But Jorge does bring up an excellent point, which I’ve made clear to other Linux geeks out there — I won’t be switching my desktop full-time away from some flavor of Linux (current is Ubutnu 8.10 64-bit) until Windows starts natively supporting Perl and a full bash shell without having to install an add-on like cygwin.

I will, however, happily dual-boot my system with Windows 7.

The Mac fanboys out there will of course cry foul, that Mac OS is essentially a really pretty OS with all of the *nix support you could want, which is true. But for what I’d pay for a Mac (OS license and hardware) to get comparable hardware to what I currently run, I could at least double the horsepower/RAM of my rig right now.

So when pigs fly and hell freezes over, and Mac lowers their prices or Windows supports Unix shell, I’ll consider switching. Until then, keep my name on the “linux fanboy” list. Right at the top.

The biggest complaint people have when switching to Linux is that the software they’ve gotten used to using on Windows is no longer available to them because so many software vendors aren’t producing Linux-capable software. I’d switch my parents’ computers to Linux in a heartbeat if I could be sure that all of their necessary Windows applications would still work.

Thankfully, some companies like CodeWeavers and Cedega are working very hard on cross-over application support so you can run native Windows applications, like Office, within Linux. Of course, there’s the Windows emulator, called ‘wine’, that natively runs a *lot* of Windows-based software, but more complex software bundles like Office won’t work in ‘wine’ alone. But then you don’t need Norton or McAfee any more either.

I can’t envision a day where I don’t need Linux any more. A GUI is a GUI, it’s the underlying technology that changes things and makes a difference for me, and I have way too much flexibility in Linux that I feel very constrained in Windows, like “I want to _____, oh, wait, I can’t, I’m in Windows…” I’ve added lots of add-on software to mimic a Linux shell (cygwin) and have similar development tools available within Windows (ActivePerl), but like the author of that article said, the more you add to Windows, the slower things get.

I’m guessing the lady who wrote the article had XP preinstalled, which has some definite performance issues. Then again, Linux can have performance issues too if you misconfigure it. In her case, it was all of the add-ons that caused her laptop to boot so slowly.

I have a beta version of Windows 7 running on my laptop, and frankly it is SO much faster than XP (even running the 32bit OS on the 64bit cpu). I’m actually considering taking XP off my system at home and putting Win7 on there. Of course, the only reason I even boot into Windows any more is to play World of Warcraft. I *could* play WoW within Linux using Cedega, but frankly my video hardware is better supported in Windows, so I don’t mind dual-booting. I’m a firm believer in using the right tool for the job, so might as well keep Windows around just to play a game ’cause that’s all I need it for anymore.