One key point is the ease of editing wiki pages. Few of us can remember all the wiki markup tags correctly. Atlassian has addressed this problem by introducing the office connector. With the help from this connector, you could use your native Office editor to edit wiki pages. To make things even better, Confluence provides Office connector support on multiple OSes, including Windows, Linux, and Mac, which talks to Microsoft Office, Open Office, and/or NeoOffice.

Sounds exciting? Yes, except the default WebDav Launcher plug-in from Confluence does not work under Firefox 3.5 (I am using 3.5.7 as of this writing). Luckily, there is a fix for it. You can download the latest Firefox add-on from here.

Another issue for Mac users. Apparently only NeoOffice is support in Mac OS X. Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 does not work. I tried to change the doc handler to Office for Mac in the WebDav Launcher, but Word always open an empty page. Could this mean WEBDAV is not directly supported in Office for Mac?

Since I got my first Macbook Pro one week ago, the overall experience has been pretty positive. One of most impressive feature I like is quick switch from/to sleep mode. In Windows (and Linux) it usually takes more than 10 seconds but it takes than 1 second on Mac OS. When I touch the touchpad, the computer wakes up from sleep and becomes up-and-running almost instantly.

Apple computers are great. But sometimes you just could not find your favorite app on a Mac, MS Visio being one of them. When you do not want to switch to a different machine, you have options – visualization. There are several different products on the market – VMWare Fusion 2 and VirtualBox 3 being the most popular.

Both of them have some nice feature sets. I like “Unity” mode in Fusion (the counterpart in VirtualBox is called “seamless mode”). VMWare has more interesting integrations, such as mirroring Mac home directory, iSight under Windows, to name a few. VirtualBox, on the other hand, is more configurable via the command line.

However, VMWare Fusion does not support Windows 7 yet, at least officially. The official Fusion blog suggested to use “Windows Server 2008″ as the profile when installing Windows 7 beta and RC. As a result, the above nice features are not available – home directory mirroring and iSight under Windows. In this case, Dropbox will be helpful if you want to share documents between these OSes.

Performance-wise, VirtualBox seems to be the winner. Windows applications in VirtualBox (MS Office 2007 and Visio) are more responsive and the host OS is not slowed down by any means. Windows apps in Fusion feel a little bit sluggish, given the same configuration (1G of physical mem). Please note, these are not really scientific performance analysis – they are totally my subjective feeling of “responsiveness”.

In summary, Fusion 2 and VirtualBox 3 are both great products. I am hoping when Windows 7 is officially released, VMWare Fusion will have more integration with it. Oh BTW, Fusion costs $70 and Virtualbox is free for personal use.

Here is a list of reasons why I need an Apple:

• It is UNIX based OS (like Linux)
• I want to work with iPhone SDK (only Mac OS X is supported)
• I want to use Flex 3 Builder (only Mac OS X and Windows are supported)
• Ruby on Rails support on Windows is lame
• Microsoft Office is not officially supported in Linux (and you know why)

A mac, hopefully combines the advantages of both Linux (stable) and Windows (GUI and application base). Though I will still be running my Linux and Windows boxes side by side.

This time I did a fresh install instead of upgrading from Vista. The system was pretty stable until I got numerous BSOD yesterday. On the BSOD, it said tdx.sys is the one to blame. I installed windbg to figure out what went wrong in the memory dump file but for some reason windbg could not run in Windows 7. Finally I did another fresh install. This time, I got BSOD from nwifi.sys and kl1.sys. nwifi.sys BSOD went away after I replaced the Windows 7 wifi driver with the one from Dell website. kl1.sys BSOD went away after I replaced Kaspersky with AVG.

Hope that helps.

Nevertheless, I jumped the boat. DVD ISO download from MSDN subscription is close to 3G, a little bit smaller than Windows Vista . The Guinea pig is my Dell Latitude E6400.

The upgrade process is rather painless. After popping the DVD into the Latitude, I was prompted about a couple of different options – update or clean install. As planned, I chose to upgrade from Vista. It took about 30 minutes to complete the whole process.

The startup screen is a little bit fancier than Vista’s. Performance wise, I feel it is getting better (very subjective though). I like the new taskbar, which feels like Mac OS X. You can “pin” an application and its instances on the taskbar, which eliminated the need for lauch bar from Vista/XP. However, I was disappointed at the desktop composition feature (the new name for Aero). When I enabled it, my screen display literally went corrupted. I am not sure whether it is with my video card (Intel GMA 4500) or not.  Other than that, everything seems to be fine.

What’s your experience?