Trevin Chow

Windows 7 is now available on Microsoft Store for pre-order!  

As mentioned earlier today, we have both Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade and Windows 7 Professional Upgrade heavily discounted at $49 and $99 respectively.  This discounted pre-order is available in limited quantities and for a limited time. 

Other information

• When placing you’re pre-order on Microsoft Store, you’ll have 3 options for getting the product on October 22, 2009:

1. Download – the quickest and easiest way.  We even store your product key so you don’t have to keep those pesky software boxes in your closet or silly stickers taped to your monitors.
2. Download + Backup Disc – for those that want convenience of downloading, but also a physical disc to use later.
3. Ship the package product – we’ll ship you the fully packaged product on or about October 22, 2009.   Arrival time will vary depending on actual shipping time.

• All editions of Windows 7 available on Microsoft Store include both 32-bit and 64-bit editions.  If you choose to buy Windows 7 for download, you will get access to both downloads.
• Discounted pre-orders are available starting June 26, 2009 and will continue while supplies last, or until July 11, 2009 whichever comes first.

Today, we announced the Windows 7 Upgrade Option and Windows 7 pricing. Microsoft Store is also participating in this program and offering a free* copy of Windows 7 to qualifying purchases on Microsoft Store of Windows Vista from starting June 26th, 2009.

The Windows 7 team blog summarizes this program as it relates to buying a new PC with Windows Vista:

…you don’t have to wait until GA to get a new Windows PC. In fact, we know many people need that new PC sooner – for back to school specifically. And we have the answer for people who need a new PC now but still want to get Windows 7 and that’s the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program, which kicks off tomorrow, June 26th! Anyone who buys a PC from a participating OEM or retailer with Windows Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate on it will all receive an upgrade to the corresponding version of Windows 7 at little or no cost to customers.

On Microsoft Store, we are offering the Windows 7 Upgrade Option for any purchases of Windows Vista Home Premium, Business and Ultimate starting on June 26, 2009.  On or about October 22, 2009, we will send qualifying customers an email with a promotion code and instructions to get your free copy of Windows 7.  You will have the option to download it for free, or choose to have a packaged copy shipped to you.

If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments or on Twitter.

*Shipping charges and any applicable taxes may apply

While trying to upgrade a few WordPress plugins, I got this error message:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 7680 bytes)  

After struggling with trying to fix this, I found a really easy solution – increase the WordPress memory allocation size from 32 MB to 64 MB.  To do this, edit your wp-settings.php and change line 13 from:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '32M');

to

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Simple, easy and delicious. No more memory issues for any plugin upgrades!

After a rocking the Yaletown wordpress theme for a few years, I’ve decided to try out something different.  I wanted something a little simpler looking, and since I’m blogging mostly about photos these days, I wanted it to be based on a white background.

After digging around for awhile, I stumbled upon the Celeny theme which jumped out at me because it was 2 columns, ad-sense ready and supported widgets.

After installing it and mucking around with customizing it for my liking, I’ve got it in a state I’m reasonably happy with. The theme author didn’t do that great of a job allowing you to customize it through the WordPress UI. Instead, I had to dive into the PHP code and make changes directly which I always hate doing since future upgrades of the theme will cause me to lose all my customizations.

There are some layout problems on the sidebar currently that I still need to fix, but I figure before I invest time in doing that, I’ll rock the theme for a few weeks to see how my loyal blog readers like it, and also how adsense performs with the theme.  I’ve reduced the overall ads on the site to a single 250×250 adblock in the sidebar, so it will be interesting to see if fewer ads that are less intrusive will outperform my previous attempt.

Let me know what you think!

I’m still in the process of authoring a blog post on what it was like to move to an iPhone 3G after nearly 6 years of using Windows Mobile devices.  My most recent phone was a Motorola Q9H which was running Windows Mobile 6.0.

However, in the meantime, I’m getting super frustrated over the crazy bugs and problems I’ve been having with the iPhone so I wanted to spend a bit of time venting.  While Windows Mobile is not perfect by any means, the iPhone is definitely getting a lot of undue accolades in my opinion.  There are features and scnearios that work fantastically such as GPS integration into Google Maps, Yelp, etc, and not to mention the obviously superior web browsing experience.  However, the things that don’t work well, are absolutely horrible.

This writeup is in no way trying to compare Windows Mobile to the iPhone.  Instead, this is isolated feedback on the iPhone 3G.

In no particular order, here are my gripes:

• The UI and Application performance is horrible. There is unacceptable lag in so many scenarios, but the most glaring one is with the Contacts application.  Even after updating to the new 2.0.1 firmware, it can take up to 4 seconds for the Contacts application to load.
• Why does it have to “backup” my iPhone everytime I dock and sync with iTunes?  Even better, why isn’t this configurable?  This is made worse because these “backups” can take as long as an hour for me.
• When the first generation iPhone launched last year, Steve Jobs stated:

“…iPhone’s battery life is longer than any other ‘Smartphone’ and even longer than most MP3 players… We’ve also upgraded iPhone’s entire top surface from plastic to optical-quality glass for superior scratch resistance and clarity. There has never been a phone like iPhone, and we can’t wait to get this truly magical product into the hands of customers starting just 11 days from today.”

When the iPhone 3G launched this year, he said:

“If we compare this to WiFi, we’ll see 3G approaches WiFi speeds. We’re also really proud that we’re doing this with great battery life — standby time is 300 hours.  2G talk time is up from 8 hours to 10 hours. 3G talk time… other phones have 3 – 3.5 hours, we’ve managed 5 hours of 3G talk time, which is an industry-leading amount of time.”

I have no idea how the Apple Engineers have their phones configured, but there is not way I’m getting this type of battery life.  With 3G, push email, bluetooth and Wifi turned on, I can barely get through half the work day with a single charge.  I’ve had to resort to either 15 min email sync’ing on the “fetch” setting, bluetooth off and wifi selectively turned on.  I can now last a full day now, but as a contingency plan, I bought an iPhone 3G dock for my office.  Goodbye $40.

• I get continued errors about applications not being able to install or update, and when that happens I get obscenely useless errors messages. Here’s the latest gem I get from iTunes:

• iTunes still has horrible performance after all these years.  It doesn’t like the fact my music was on a network share, so much so, that there would be a noticeable lag between keystrokes in the search box.  Did I mention I have a gigabit ethernet network at home?
• I get random crashing from applications.  At first I thought this was the fault of the 3rd party application developers, but the biggest offender is Safari.  If Apple can’t even get it right, then how can 3rd party developers?  Something is amiss either in Apple’s hiring competency for developers or the iPhone OS is pure crap.  Either way, the end-user loses.
• Apple gets continually praised for making things “easy to use”, but the iPhone is an counter-example, and a big one at that.  There are weird UI inconsistency exist all over the place, one example is between SMS and Email.  For SMS, why is there no way to delete a message when you’re viewing it like there is with email?  You can only “clear” the message thread, but this leaves an entry in the SMS inbox.  To delete it you have to do it from the inbox.

This is all I can think of off the top of my head.  Stay tuned for a later post on specifically commenting on an enterprise user like myself going from a Windows Mobile device to an iPhone.  That’s where it will get interesting.