Argonaut Design

I was looking at the blog here and noticed that there was some old stories that I needed to follow up on.  Please read on the see my answers and conclusions to some burning questions.

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For those that don’t know Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a micro-blogging web service that allows users to leave short messages, limited to 140 characters, online for anyone to read.  Each user can follow the “Tweets” of other people and have any user follow them as well.  Many people have asked me what Twitter is all about and I’ve never had a good answer for anyone.  That is until last week.

On Friday, July 3rd I was sitting at my desk at my day job working on some website changes when one of my coworkers called me to say that the credit card payment website was not working.  We use Authorize.net to take credit card payments from our customers and sure enough after thorough troubleshooting I determined that the site was definitely offline.  We tried calling technical support but couldn’t get through.  We searched the web and couldn’t find anything.  The last place I thought to look was Twitter, and what I found was incredible.

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The iPhone 3.0 software update is now available for download in iTunes and as I type this I’m installing it on my iPhone.  Looking forward to the great new features like copy/paste, MMS (eventually, thanks AT&T), and shake to shuffle music.  I’ll follow up when the update is done.

We had a technician from AT&T here this morning to apparently plug in a wire outside the apartment to turn on the new DSL.  We are still setting up some of the equipment and it should be business as usual in a few days.

Don’t forget about the Windows 7 Release Candidate coming out tomorrow to the public.  First big download test for the new DSL line here.

We’re going to be offline for a few days while we move all the office equipment to a new location and get the new 6Mb internet service ramped up. All of our websites will function as normal. We will still have email and telephone access during the move. As soon as we are settled at the new place we’ll let everyone know. See you soon!

Paul Thurrott has a great post on his SuperSite for Windows blog about a newly revealed virtual Windows XP mode found in Windows 7.

Have a read here.

The very popular Linux operating system called Ubuntu is now available in version 9.04 nicknamed “Jaunty Jackalope”.  According to the parent company, Canonical, this release is even faster than the previous version and has many great improvements to the user interface.  As always Ubuntu is free to download.  More information can be found at http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-9.04-desktop.

I tried to download this from one of the many servers and it was very busy.  If you know how to work with torrents, this is a much better option at release time.  Here is a link for the torrent I’m downloading right now . . . Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Torrent

Lets get things back in gear here at Argonaut Design.  Back in January I mentioned that I downloaded the beta version of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system.  At that time I installed it in a virtual machine just to test the waters.  Well, I liked it so much that I took the plunge and installed it on my main computer.  I have to say that Microsoft really has something good here.  Actually all they have done is tweaked Vista a little bit and give the look and feel a good once-over.  File and folder navigation is much improved over Vista, one thing I never really got comfortable with.  There is a big update to the task bar that might take some getting used to, but I’ll explain that in a later post.  For now what I can say is I like Windows 7, and I’ll be purchasing it when it is released later this year.

One thing to watch for is the RC, or release candidate, version set to be available for download on May 5th.  I’ll report more after that.

Hey, if Oprah can do it then so can Argonaut Design.  You can follow us on Twitter at . . .

http://www.twitter.com/argodesign

After working with the new Windows 7 Beta for a few hours I started thinking about which of the big three online “Cloud” computing companies have the best products for me.  I currently use a little bit each including Google’s Gmail email system, Yahoo’s Flickr photo storage, and Microsoft’s Live Mesh folder syncing product.  I’ve been very happy with each of these but would I be happier using just one Company and having everything connected under one “roof”.

Over the next few weeks I plan on trying all the products that each has to offer and reporting back to you, my readers and customers, what I think.

First week . . . Microsoft.  I will report my findings next weekend.