Worthy Pdf readers in Linix Mint/Ubuntu

There are plenty of questions on the Internet asking whether there are any PDF Readers (free of course) for Linux that have more capability than the one that is packaged with Ubuntu/Mint, the Evince, that allow the users to annotate and highlight the materials.

Adobe Reader 9 can do this provided that the document contains a policy allowing the users to comment and annotate. In the absence of such a policy, this reader defaults to denying such capability.

There does not appear to be any native Linux PDF readers that can do this. Some such as Okular can do highlighting etc but they are stored in their private format that only the viewer that created it could display them. Hence their annotations are not shown in say Adobe Reader. Therefore this class of viewers are considered not supporting the annotation and highlighting requirements.

As a last resort, I am using 2 Windows PDF viewers running in WINE in Mint/Ubuntu. They are PDF XChange Viewer and FoxIt Reader.

At the time of writing, I have uninstalled "PDF XChange Viewer" because in Mint-64 bit, it consistently crashed the reader when I was switching documents in the tabbed view of the reader. My experience is also supported by reported behaviour in the WineHQ. It is ashamed that it misbehaves in this manner. The other problem with this is with the display when scrolling the document. However, one can alter the display settings to prevent this.

While FoxIt Reader also has a native Linux version, it is a very basic reader similar to Evince that does not do annotation and highlighting. Consequently, this is not used. Instead FoxIt Reader version 6.1.2.1224 is installed with the support of WINE.

So far, it behaves well with the only exception that it fails to account for the height of the task bar in Mint when one maximizes the FoxIt window. As result, the navigation bar is partially covered.

The other issue which may unsettle some is the automatic installation and activation of the FoxIt cloud plug-in and the Reader does not have an easy way to uninstall this plug-in.

To disable this plug-in, close the FoxIt Reader and use the following steps in Mint/Ubuntu:
1) Bring up the File explorer, Nemo or Nautilus
2) Press Ctrl-H to view hidden file
3) Locate the Windows system tools in WINE installed directory which is by default located here:
~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32
4) Then use the "Wine Windows program loader" to load Control.exe, the Windows control panel program and you should see a window like this:

5) Double click on "Add/Remove Programs" to start the program.
6) Locate the item called "Foxit Cloud" and uninstall that program item.

Next time you start FoxIt Reader, you will not see the "FoxIt Cloud" menu item. I only wish FoxIt would offer a more user-friendly way to disable it and also seek user's consent before activating the plug-in and FoxIt cloud.

Caveat to customise Ubuntu locale for Ubuntu Thunderbird

Further to my post on how to customise the locale in Ubuntu and my suggestion to use the following format:
     xx_YY.CHARSET@extra

as a way to provide customised locale settings without replacing the system's.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu Thunderbird (ver 17.0.6) cannot handle the above mentioned convention even though Ubuntu can comfortably handling this.

By way of experimentation, I have discovered that it appears that Thunderbird picks up the local specifier in the LC_* environment variables and drops the part from @ onward and then using that as the locale specifier to load the locale settings.

So for example if you customise say English (Hong Kong) and name the customisation where you change the time/date format as en_HK@test and then you select this in your Regional Formats. When Thunderbird loads up, it will pick up the specifier en_HK.utf-8@test but it will only use en_HK.utf8 to load up the appropriate locale settings thus ignoring your customisation.

Hence if you want to correct the locale for Thunderbird, the only way is to replace the system file.

Way to customise Ubuntu locale settings

What started me on the journey to examine how to modify or customise the locale settings in Ubuntu began with a very trivial matter. I moved my Windows Thunderbird to Ubuntu Thunderbird.

Although the regional settings for my Ubuntu is already set to English (Australia), en_AU for those familiar with locale language, the time is still showing in 24 hours format. In Windows, the default is in 12 hours format and it is customarily in Australia to use the 12 hours format. I don't know how Ubuntu has got that wrong!

Hence the quest to correct this which turns out to be a major exercise diving into the bowel of Linux's way of dealing with locale wasting me several days for something we could do in seconds in Windows. At this point, I fully sympathise with Miguel De Icaza of his reason to move over to Mac OS.

There are no shortage of rants on the Internet about how primitive Linux/Ubuntu in catering for this not unusual customisation with some GUI support. Even if none, at least it should be better documented so that user can follow the steps. Unfortunately, the Internet is also fully of advices which range from working in some situations, or brute force work around, to some simply does not work any more.

This post is not to add more rant to an already heapful but to outline the steps one needs to go through to customise and here are the steps:

Step 1 - Identify the locale definition file you want to modify

If you are unfamiliar with way Ubuntu specifies locale information, you can visit this page.

In Ubuntu and other Linux, the locale formatting specification is based on the C-Library's strptime() specification. The same list of format specifiers can be found in the man page of date.

The specification for the locale is then stored in text format as locale definition file and one for each locale. They can be found in /usr/share/i18n/locales and the binary version is then recorded in an archive somewhere else.

So the first step to do that is locate the locale definition file in this directory. It is also a good practice to store your customised version here too.

Step 2 - Customise the setting(s)

Before you modify the settings, you can use the following command to view the format of items, for say the time/date display, of your locale:

      locale -ck LC_TIME

You can also use the same command without any parameter to view the current locale settings. We will come back to how they are specified in which file.

I assume that you are familiar with the syntax in the locale definition file. If not, you can study the precise definition here.

Identify the items you want to customise and as a good house keeping task make sure you change the file's:

• Title to reflect that you have changed something
• Change the version number, say from 1.0 to 1.05
• Change the date.

This helps later on, particularly if you want to replace the existing locale definition with your customised version. More on this.

Step 2.1 - Decide how to use your change

Before you save the changes into the file, you need to decide what you want to do:

1. Replace the existing locale with your customised version - this will impact on the system as well as per-user. Simply use the same file name.
2. Keep your customised locale separate from the one you based on and you can then choose to apply this system-wide or on per-user basis. You need to save the changes to a different file name.

If you decide to use strategy No. 2, you need to understand the locale file name convention which is of the form:

    xx_YY@extra

where xx is the ISO-639 language code and YY is the ISO-3166 country code. The @extra is the bit that allows you to identify your customisation. Normally @extra is not used.  When you compile the locale definition file, that is the next step, you then specify the character set used in definition in the following convention:

   xx_YY.CHARSET@extra

where the CHARSET can be UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 or ASCII.

In my case all I want to do is to display time in 12 hours format and hence I modified the t_fmt and d_t_fmt as follows:

%
% Change "%T" to "%r"
t_fmt       "<U0025><U0072>"
%

% Change "%T" to "%r"
d_t_fmt     "<U0025><U0061><U0020><U0025><U0064><U0020><U0025><U0062><U0020><U0025><U0059><U0020><U0025><U0072><U0020><U0025><U005A>"

I also want to retain the system deployed setting and introduce my customisation as such. Hence I name my file as en_AU@mod.

Step 3 - Compile the locale definition file into the locale archive

This can be accomplished with the localedef command with super user privilege and the locale archive by default is located in /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive. This is a binary file but whose contents can be listed by using the following command:

     locale -av

To compile my customisation and to install it into the locale archive, I use the following command (assuming your current directory is in /usr/share/i18n/locales, the directory containing your modified definition file):

   sudo localedef -c -v -f UTF-8 -i en_AU@mod en_AU.UTF-8@mod

If you are replacing the system deployed file with your customised version, use the following variation:

   sudo localedef -c -v -f UTF-8 --replace -i en_AU en_AU.UTF-8

To verify your changes have been successfully installed into the locale archive, you can use the above mentioned locale command. This is where it will save you time if you have followed the above mentioned house keeping recommendations as your modified title/version/date are become evident.

If you are replacing the system deployed file with your customised version, all you have to do is to log out of your session and log back in.

You can use locale -ck LC_TIME (or whatever setting you have changed) to see if your customisation are compiled correctly.

Step 4 - Introduce your change on per user basis

You can select your customised locale definition by using the Ubuntu's Regional Formats in the Language Support applet or fondly known as gnome-language-selector. If you have named your customised definition file appropriately, it will show up in the list like this:

All you then have to do is to select that (as circled in red). Close the dialog and log out and log in to bring that into use.

What actually happens behind the scene is that it modifies or creates the ~/.pam_environment file that records the locale settings meeting your selection. This file is not there unless you have change the Regional Formats. In my case the LC_TIME becomes:
    LC_TIME=en_AU.UTF-8@mod

If you want to apply your change to the system, you simply modified the /etc/default/locale file.

XmlSerializer - Difference in runtime behaviour between MS .Net and Mono runtime

There are several ways to define a class in C# with read-only properties.

You could define it like this:

    [ Serializable ]
    public class PersonReadOnly
    {
        String m_Name;
        Int32 m_Age;
        public String Name {
            get{ return m_Name; }
        }
        public Int32 Age { 
            get{ return m_Age; }
        }

        public PersonReadOnly()
        {
        }

        public PersonReadOnly (String name, Int32 age)
        {
            this.m_Name = name;
            this.m_Age = age;
        }
    }

This is the good old way of doing it. When this class is serialized using Xml Serialization, the values of the properties are not serialized.

Alternately, you can declare one with a private setter or using the auto-generated property syntax with private setter, like this:

    [ Serializable ]
    public class WithAutoPropertyReadOnly
    {
        public String Name { get; private set; }
        public Int32 Age { get; private set; }

        public WithAutoPropertyReadOnly() { }

        public WithAutoPropertyReadOnly( string name, Int32 age )
        {
            this.Name = name;
            this.Age = age;
        }
    }

The end result of this class WithAutoPropertyReadOnly is to produce private setters for properties Name and Age.

While WithAutoPropertiesReadOnly and PersonReadOnly classes are functionally the same, the runtime treatments in CLR (MS .Net) and Mono runtime are very different.

CLR and Mono differences
The Mono runtime used in this experiment is version 2.10.8.1 hosted in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS).

When one tries to construct an XmlSerializer object for the class WithAutoPropertiesReadOnly class, like this:

       XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer( typeof(WithAutoPropertiesReadOnly) ); 

CLR runtime throws an exception of type InvalidOperationException while Mono blissfully serializes and deserializes with XmlSerializer in defiant of the specification.

This is dangerous as it introduces runtime differences that can affect cross-platform compatibility. Irrespective if the above piece of code is run in CLR or Mono, the same runtime behaviour should result.

This anomaly between CLR (runtime 2.0 & 4.0) and Mono only manifested by the presence of non-public property setter. In fact, the exception thrown in CLR is due to the runtime exception thrown by sgen.exe when the runtime tries to generate the temporary serialization DLL.

There is no disagreement when trying to serialize the class PersonReadOnly; both CLR and Mono yield the same result that the values for the properties are not serialized in Xml Serialization.

Cavaet in using KGpg in Ubuntu

After I have discovered KGpg as a suitable replacement of GPA, I ran into some rather strange now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don't-see-it situation.

I have also discovered many posts complaining that KGpg does not appear to run. KGpg is a KDE application and it turns out that after the first execution, the default behaviour in any subsequent invocation is to minimise to system tray.

System Tray in Ubuntu is different from that in KUbuntu and its subsequent default start up mode gives the illusion that the program fails to run. It is running OK except that it has been minimised to system tray.

Hence after configuring your KGpg for the first time, you will not see it any more in Ubuntu. Not even if you reinstall it.

This is because KGpg writes the settings to this file:

~/.kde/share/config/kgpgrc

and uninstallation does not remove this file.

If you invoke KGpg in Ubuntu and does not see its window showing up, do this:

1) Use System Monitor to terminate the KGpg process, if it is running.

2) In the Terminal, type:
gedit  ~/.kde/share/config/kgpgrc

to edit the configuration file

3) In the [User Interface] section add the following line:
systray_icon=false

4) Save the file and restart Kgpg.

During the first installation of KGpg, you can change the default not to use system tray icon in Settings > Config KGpg > Misc > Applet & Menus. If you have forgotten to do it in that phrase, you then need to edit the configuration settings manually as shown above.

Using a second disk drive in Ubuntu and auto-mounting it

Recently, I added a second disk (virtual) to my Ubuntu 12.04 and now I want to make that disk auto-mount when I log on.

When you create additional disk drive using the "Disk Utility" tool, it adds that volume name to Nautilus. Depending on how one prepares that disk drive or partition, you may have trouble making it auto-mount; you can open Nautilus and click onto that drive to mount it. But it will not auto-mount.

There are several ways to make that partition auto-mount. However, most of these only works when the drive has a partition.

It turns out that in Linux, when you prepare a disk drive, it is not necessary to have a partition of sort. You can simply have a volume formatted with the right type and you can use it.

If you do not have a partition on that drive like this one:

Program such as Pysdm will not be able to configure it.

You can use udisks to mount the device on per-users basis by defining it in the "Start up Applications", like this:

/usr/bin/udisks --mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/4746946c-1cb1-404a-a74b-4a59cb248df2

This is the technique that I have chosen as I am happy to auto-mount it on per-users basis.

If you have a need to auto-mount a disk drive on a system-wide basis, make sure when you prepare that disk to:

1. Create a partition
2. Format that partition and assigned a Volume name to it
3. When you use Pysdm, it will report that this device has not been configured and proceed to configure it.
4. The name for this partition is actually the mount point name and make sure you use the Volume name otherwise it will create two entries in the /media directory when this device is mounted. This can be confusing.

Once Pysdm has configured this device, you can choose to auto-mount it and it will be mounted with the start of the system.

In search of GPA replacement in Ubuntu continues ...

Since Ubuntu 11.10 onwards have declared GPA not supported, I have been in search of ways to use GPA and have found several schemes:

1. Running old GPA at with root access and 
2. Emacs with its plug-in 

Now, I believe I have found a third one which provides a very convenient GUI facility to encrypt and decrypt clipboard data as well as files and is also supported in Ubuntu 12.04.

Testings with KGpg, one of the front ends listed in GnuPG that is available for installation via Ubuntu Software Centre, indicate that it lives up to the expectations and does not required to use any tricks, such as root access or via an editor.

It is just a front end to the GnuPG installation standard to Ubuntu. Hence you can use "Passwords and Keys" to manage the keys or to use KGpg's user-interface. They share the same private and public key stores.

So far I am very happy with this front end and hopefully it will be supported in future version of Ubuntu.

Using Gpg in Ubuntu 12.04 - replacement of GPA

Ever since I migrated from Ubuntu 11.04 upwards, I have lost the use of GPA and can only use it with super user privilege.

While that works very nicely it creates the ~/.gnupg directory with root ownership preventing other gnupg program, such as Seahorse, from accessing the keys. Seahorse does not even report access problem. It simply does not work well leaving the user oblivious of the underlying problem.

In the past, one can rely on the Encryption plugin for gedit to perform the encryption and decryption operation. But that is not supported in Ubuntu 12.04.

In search for some graphical means to encrypt and decrypt data on clipboard, I believe I have managed to connect all the dots to form a feasible solution. Here are the ingredients:

1. Instead Seahorse (I used Synaptic Package Manager)
2. Once installed, use Seahorse to import your private and your friends' keys.
3. Make sure gnupg2 and gnupg-agent are installed.
4. Install Emacs - either from the Ubuntu Software Centre
5. Use Synaptic Package Manager to install easypg, an Emacs plug-in or from here.

Before one uses easypg, one needs to be aware that there is reported potential vulnerability. The combination of easypg and gnupg also throw up some curly configuration arrangement on caching the passphrase.

If you are decrypting material for the first time, the program will prompt for the passphrase and on its graphical dialog box, you can use Details link to open up the dialog box to reveal treatments of the passphrase allowing you to specify how long the passphrase can be discarded. Unfortunately there is no option to discard once used.

Now you are ready to perform the GnuPG operations using Emacs.

For those new to Emacs, here is a brief introduction materials on how best to use Emacs for encryption and decryption of materials via the clipboard:

1. Open Emacs
2. Use Buffers | *scratch* to switch into the scratch buffer so that what you type or paste into does not get saved into a file. In Emacs even if you do not explicitly save a file, the content is written to a form of temporary file whose name formed from the given file name. Something you want to avoid.
3. Type your plain text or paste the cipher text into the buffer.
4. Select the entire text block. (Use Edit | Select all).
5. Then use Tools | Encryption/Decryption to bring up the sub-menu.
6. Select Encrypt Region or Decrypt Region depending on your need at this time.
7. If it is to encrypt the region, it will open up a split window on the bottom showing you brief instructions and a list of keys managed by Seahorse.
8. Use Tab key to navigate to the key list, then press m to select and u to deselect the key.
9. Once the keys are selected, click OK to perform the encryption and follow the prompt.
10. If it is to decryption, it will prompt you for your passphrase and then it will cache it.

Driven to Linux by Microsoft

I could rephrase this to "Driven away from Windows by Microsoft". No matter which way one words that, Microsoft has driven me away to Linux. As a staunch and long term Microsoft developer since DOS1, a few years back I would not have believed that today I am writing code in Ubuntu using MonoDevelop/Mono.

What causes me to wander away from Microsoft? Several.

1) The advent of machine with Hardware Virtualization Support and Microsoft's draconian unfriendly licensing requirements, including the consumer unfriendly activation scheme is largely the impetus for me to desert Windows. Virtualization (I use VMPlayer but I could easily use VirtualBox) allows developers and ordinary users to have a number of 'dedicated' machines or 'machines' that one can restore very quickly. But if the VM uses Windows, it becomes very expensive. You literally requiring one license per VM. Not only Windows but Office etc.

With more and more multi-core 64-bit machines being released, they are ripe for running VM but Microsoft's not making that easier and economically. Don't try to defend this with XP Mode as it requires XP Professional while other virtual machine software runs happily in lower edition of Windows and offering wider guest OS support.

In fact, Microsoft went out of their way to frighten their customers.

2) Running up a Windows VM and UBuntu VM is like watching a race between a Tortoise and a Hare. Even the size of the VM is a stark contrast. MonoDevelop is also lightningly fast compared VS2010. This shows how inefficient Windows has grown to.

3) It is also my "Pay Microsoft minimum amount" policy. UBuntu has MonoDevelop and OpenOffice and are all free. Who needs to buy Office? I could continue to use my Office 2000 in say XP VM or Win2K VM (no activation).

4) UBuntu brings back the feeling of the carefree days of early Windows experience - no activation to worry and no worry of installing another copy. So carefree and joy to use. Not anymore with Windows. The unknown of UBuntu/Linux is like unchartered water to this newbie with new things awaiting me to discover. Just like the days with Windows in the '80.

5) Mono, not a product from Microsoft, offers me cross-platform cross-language development without using Java that Microsoft has steadfastly refused to embrace. Sorry, you have lost my vote. There are so many good and solid tools that are running fine in both Windows and Linux.

So it takes a lot for this staunch Windows supporter to look for greener pasture but the step is well worth it. I urge all Windows users to give this a try. It is free and nothing to lose! Send a message to Microsoft. It is a joy to live in the Ubuntu VM!

Microsoft's UAC & Sudo

Mackenzie recently blogged about the history of Sudo and the similarity to Vista's UAC

What makes this whole thing funny, though, is something I saw a couple days ago. Head over to Builder-AU and listen to Peter Watson from Microsoft. He says, User Account Control is a great idea and strategically a direction that sort of all operating systems and all technology should be heading down Excuse me

My brief encounter with Ubuntu and the chanced encounter of the dialog box seeking my root password stunned me of the close resemblance to ME II's UAC.

A long journey to meet the Penguin

Since I have lost interested in Windows ME II, alias Vista, and totally disgusted with their activation scheme and DRM turning the OS literally into a Police outpost, I have decided to turn my attention to something differently. I have decided to re-acquaint with my long lost friend that I began my computing career in.

I have heard so much about Linux and how little resource it demands to run; it is free (that is what OS should be) and that it has a much stronger security system (a fact that has been questioned); Linux is a strong contender to ME II. So I have decided to check out UBuntu, a distribution or variant of Linux.

Below is my experience of meeting and installing UBuntu:

I happen to have an old discarded Laptop, a Toshiba Satellite 1800 Series with a Celeron 800 and 256M of RAM lying around with Windows XP Pro installed into it that I can use to check out Linux, since UBuntu supports multi-boot option.

Well, it is an old machine but I have been told that Linux does not require much to run. So it sounds like a perfect machine to test Ubuntu out. I am sure ME II will choke on this specification.

The first attempt used a downloaded CD image of the desktop version 7.04. I popped the CD into the machine on Wednesday evening and naively believing that I could use it to config an ADSL modem. How wrong was I.

The Ubuntu Live CD fired up reasonable quick, not without drama, allowing me to experiment with the OS. When it was booting up the graphical environment, an error message box popped up complaining GNOME Settings applet could not start, etc. All I could do was to close it. Some how it did not hold back the starting process.

It looks very nice and the graphical interface was definitely not in the Unix I cut my teeth in in learning C programming back in the '70. It's a nice addition.

Running totally from the CD was really painfully slow and you can hear the poor drive going crazy. So I decided to bite the bullet and to install this onto my hard drive, which still had 6-7G spare. This was the beginning of the fun bit revealing the not so polished side of Ubuntu.

I opened the Install applet on the desktop. For a period that felt like eternity and was indeed eternity in computer time, the CD Rom drive went berserk zipping back and forth lights blinking and all the screen was showing was a frame with the title "Install." After more than a hour or so, a list of locales beginning to appear in a combo box but more were to come.

Not knowing what lied ahead and I was not totally comfortable of risking the machine at that moment, I aborted the installation, an action I regretted. The installation process did not have any instruction on aborting it and shutting down. So I simply powered down the machine forcefully. For some reasons, I did not see the red button on the top right corner of the screen that was designed used to power down.

From that moment on, I could not recover that list of locales. It's strange that running the installation from a CD Rom should guarantee that no previous installation state was recorded but somehow, there were variations between each attempt, indicating something was recorded but in where? In some attempts, I left it ran for hours and all I saw was a frame with nothing in it. It's not a freeze by any definition because the CD was still being read on and off. One had to wonder what it was doing. Some progress message would be greatly appreciated. It couldn't be just reading that hundred or so locale names. Some attempts encountered error with the message complaining about failure to load the paned "OAFIID: GNome_MixedApplet".

After so many failed attempts, I suspected the image might be faulty or the machine could not tolerate version 7.04. So I tried the version 6.06 (alternate).

This ISO image produced even far worse outcomes. It froze my machine trying to populate the list of locales consistently. It might be doing some memory scanning or something but definitely no CD drive activities and no hard disk activity. I had even left it "ran" for hours just for curiosity.

After several attempts, I gave up on this and was even considering trying XUbuntu as it's for lower spec machines. Before doing that, I decided to give 7.04 one final attempt using the "alternate" ISO image. I had no idea what "alternate" meant and I also selected the download for machines with less than 256M, which sounded more suitable for my machine.

This ISO image differed from the other in that it did not start Live CD. It jumped straight into installation mode - in text mode. The best parts were that it was fast and informative comparing to the graphical installation.

I was a bit apprehensive when it guided me through in resizing the NTFS partition and in creating the new one. The on screen message was not clear enough. What the heck? It's a late Friday night and soon into Saturday. So I went ahead.

It finally completed the installation and after removing the CD from the drive, I pressed the button to reboot. Instead of coming up with the familiar graphical screen, after displaying some messages that quickly vanished, I was staring at the black screen with no disk activity and no progress message.

I thought that was frozen, so I forcefully shut it down. When it restarted, it went through some recovery process akin to NTFS' Chkdsk /F . When that was completed, the same black screen came back. Once again I powered it down. On the next reboot, I decided to play with it and ran the memtest. This went through some lengthy tests and after completed one full cycle, I decided to reboot.

Not knowing what would come next, I went to do something else. When I returned to the Toshiba, the Ubuntu log in screen awaited me. Finally success and the Penguin was there to welcome me!

One of my first missions was to check out the command prompt, being a keen command line practitioner, and it's now called the Terminal. The next was to determine what kind of privilege I was given. The installation screen should advise me that I have been give root access rights. I only discovered this on the Ubuntu web page.

While I was exploring this, I stumbled onto some panel that required elevated privilege and I was challenged. This is very similar to the ME II's UAC . The only difference was that I was required to supply the password in Ubuntu, even when I have root access rights but in UAC I would only be required to select the accept button on the consent box.

I began to feel confident and tried my luck in pinging the Internet. No such luck. It turned out that Ubuntu did not recognise my old PCMCIA network card, a Xircom RealPort2 card. So now, I have the most secured Ubuntu in the world and I was happy of progress so far.

Many of my failed attempts might be the result of lack of communication from the installer. Definitely the installation program was not as slick as that from Microsoft. There is room for improvement. But I can put up with that since it's free and it did not treat me as a thief by constantly asking effectively "prove to me that you bought it", the most offensive customer treatment that Microsoft has ever invented.

What I saw impresses me and it's now time to explore - a spirit I have lost, for the first time, on any Microsoft OS, particularly the ME II.