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Windows XP will get a service pack upgrade in late Summer or Fall, which is much later than I would have expected it, but it is not my call. One thing the upgrade will offer is Freestyle an upgraded graphical user interface that makes use of pictures, video, and sound. Freestyle sounds like a DVD interface for the PC.

Web Page Design for Designers offers a browser size test that lets us choose the pixel size of the browser, Mac or PC, and IE or Netscape to view our pages. This tool is a great one for our tool belt. [hat tip xblog]

Okay, O'Reilly Net has been offering a lot of good resources of late and I am a little behind in catching up.

Those of us that need a light weight database for a small project and are using Microsoft Windows often turn to Access to perform the task. Steven Roman offers his tips in how to set up an Access database. The best tip is right up front:

Don't touch your PC until you have taken the time to rough out a design of your database.

The tips keep coming and many of them apply to any other database development. Once I learned to think of information and metadata in a relational database format (which also helps with setting up XML documents) application development became easier. Understanding a little database design will also help ask the right questions when setting up an application, database, and/or project.

This article also helps define the limitations of Access databases. Each database will have its own limitations or peculiarities. Knowing these differences will help think about the application, information, and how they can and will be used is helpful.

David Coursey has been trying an iMac as a change from his devoted PC life and writing about the experience. Coursey has been enjoying his iMac after one week and hints he may not go back.

I have been looking for a solid e-mail client for quite some time. I seem to have found one that I really like, MS Entouragge for Mac OS X. Entourage is much farther ahead of Outlook in that you can not only flag an e-mail, but set a reminder in your calendar to come back to that e-mail at a later time. The ability to set categories in addition to rules and other elements is a great help. I find it easy to use and work with.

The competition has left me cold to some degree. Netscape 6(plus) is light years ahead of version 4 (did not allow pulling from multiple e-mail sources), begins to really choke with a couple thousand e-mails in a folder (the downside of being on some wonderful listserves that are full of great information). Outlook Express does not permit archiving. Outlook on Windows has a muddled interface that works well with Exchange and that is not completely a plus.

In all I am very impressed with MS Office on Mac OS X. That is my "productivity tool" of choice. It loads faster and the application does not get in the way of doing what you want it to do, although "Clippy's" cousin is alive and still annoying.

The Fool compares Apples and Windows and their networking strategies. This question of how Apple with work with .Net has been on my mind for a while. Since .Net is XML based it seemed to be no big deal. I have been finding that OS X handles all my networking needs and more, which I definitely can not say about Windows XP.

In the attempt to get photos out of my Olympus D-490 I have been having fits. The camera is fantastic and takes great pictures. Getting photos out has been a pain of late. The serial port is horribly slow to say the least. I bought a Microtech Zio USB card reader about six months ago, which has been a great asset. I switched to Windows XP on my main PC and Apple for my laptop.

The XP would not read the Zio and locks up if the reader is in the USB when starting up the PC. Worse is if you plug the reader in while the machine is running, it kills the machine dead by shutting it down instantly. I upgraded the drivers, but no luck after the recent security upgrades from Microsoft.

The Apple would acknowledge the card in OS 9, but required an initialization. OS X would not ackknoledge the card. Today, I started the laptop in OS 9 and found that I could read the cards and pull the images on to the hard drive. This was a great day. I can get access to that drive point from OS X and view them. I am now happy again. And once again Apple has provided an option that works where Microsoft fell short, Apple 5 and MS 0.

Apple explains Myths to Windows Users. This has been one of my favorite bits of the week. I have been finding much of this to be true as I have been switching from Windows to Apple (at least for laptop). Apple is proving to be a much better operating system for interacting with other operating systems. Windows XP Home is a pathetic computer to network and that is being more than generous (the Pro version is a much better OS to network and even much better suited for home networking).

I really would like XP Home to have Samba (SMB) as the Apple documentation on using SMB to network machines and share drives is very solid. XP Home does not have SMB capability. If anybody knows a way to build it in plese e-mail me (comments being turned on this month or next month).

SMB is an open source networking tool that is supported on most operating systems. Windows 2000 and XP Professional support SMB. I should have learned my lesson and never by consumer grade software or hardware as I am always wanting to do more.

This MacSlash posts tries to answer networking OS X and Windows XP boxes, this will be a task I will soon try and tackle. My only issue is I was a sucker and only bought the XP for Home, which seems to lack the ability to build a home network with anything but a Windows machine (even this is fussy). I must only know the aberrant households, but most of the people I know with home networks are connecting Mac, Linux, and Windows machines (mostly Mac and Windows). Microsoft seems to have a different understanding of home than the people I know, but then again they are not average families as they don't have 2.3 children, they have children in whole numbers.

I have been anxiously waiting for my TiBook to finally arrive, but it seems there are hardware issues and it could be a week or two more before it actually ships. You ask why Apple? I have been in need of a laptop as mine have always been tied to a job and being able to build applictions on the road (along with have e-mail and Web access), let alone hang out with my wife while she enjoys her movies in the family room, were nice options. The Apple OSX was the kicker. I have heard nothing but raves about the TiBook, but OSX has been getting better reviews from non-traditional-Apple folks than XP. I have had more than enough issues with XP (Home edition) of late with all the networking and development functionality it can not do.

In short, I can have my Windows applications running on a laptop that has UNIX stability, provides a great development environment, and carry it with me. Apple keeps beating my expectations by leaps and bounds, and Microsoft keeps letting me down. XP is light years better than ME ever could dream of being (perhaps MS' worst operating system ever released), but I need to run IIS or even PWS so to test some ASP code (not an option on XP for Home), nor is networking easy with non-XP machines as is our home office.

I have been spending more time at Mark Newhouse's site and using his good collection of links, which include Apple links. I have found the Mr Barrett site to be quite helpful.

I was having some problems with my Real Player 8 and MS IE not allowing me to "view source" on my Windows XP box. It turns out both of these problems are attributable to a full Internet Temp directory. By deleting the files in this temp directory both sets of functionality return. Who knew I would fill 1GB of temp space in two or three weeks.

I am continually running in to graphic display problems with Quicktime on Windows XP and with an ATI 7200 Radon graphics card. I lose the picture in movies and the skin on the player. If I go back and reload the drivers and the Direct X drivers it all works wonderfully. XP has been solid but there are a lot of little annoying bugs running all throughout. There are loads of interface and interaction anomalies also. In all I am happier with it than I was prior, but they still don't get things right.

If you have taken the Windows XP leap you should really grab the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP. The best element is turning off the Windows automatic focus for newly opening apps, like AIM or YIM. That for me was well worth the download.

The great Microsoft and Linux debate is on... Slashdot discusses MS inside memo on Linux threat. The Slashdot folks are by-in-large technically inclined, if to hard core techies and are also leaning Linux. It is good to see technical understandings when comparing Windows server solutions to Linux, both running on Intel.

The sales approach for Microsoft is ahead of the Linux folks. MS is giving the hard sell to the boardroom inhabitants and Linux is winning the technical folks who are in the trenches. This is a great view of the dicotomy of corporate environment and the disconnects between business and technology (not directly in this example but in the stories underlying the example). Microsoft has always sold the future and what is coming, while the UNIX and Linux people solve your problems today. MS is just delivering on their promisses of years ago, but they are still selling the future and are still behind the xNIX platform. Heck, Apple even got religion for their stable and fast new OS.