A Man and his Penguin

This new r8187 driver is fucking nuts!

I finally got FED UP TO THE GILLS of the crappy wireless. I was going to
buy an Atheros-based card, but I decided to go down the cheapo route
instead and see if I could just build the latest rtl8187 driver.

So I followed the instructions here
(http://zenzike.blogspot.com/2008/11/wireless-woes.html) to build it and
apply the patch to get it running on the 2.6.27 kernels. It immediately
connected to an unsecured wireless network in the area that I had
assumed used MAC filtering, that I had never been able to connect to
before with this computer or with the Aspire One.

And I’m surfing on this network now! Not only that, but I’m getting
better signal strength reported on it than before, and I’m picking up
three other networks that I could previously only pick up on the Aspire
One! There’s even a network that I’ve never seen on the Aspire One!

There’s just one slight flaw: There’s no WPA support. I’d have to change
my own network to WEP in order to connect. But yeah, this is an
amazingly cool driver and I want to have its children. In fact, I want to move to Denmark because they probably permit marriage between humans and kernel modules.

What isn’t cool is Parcellite clipboard manager. I’m currently running XFCE, and for some reason Parcellite is running twice. So, I’m guessing, at least one of them should manage my clipboard? Think again. I copied a bunch of text from a Gedit window, closed the window, and tried to paste into Firefox. Nothing. I kept Gedit’s window open and it worked. I closed one of the Parcellites and tried the original test, and it didn’t work. I really must wonder why there are so many clipboard managers out there, as there are only very minor differences between them. Except that some of them work as your clipboard, and some only claim to.

I successfully put Ubuntu on my netbook. I don’t have a lot of time to write at the moment, but it’s gone well.

Startup speed isn’t too bad. Much slower than the Linpus, but it’s alright. The Netbook interface works really well. Unfortunately the machine chews through power when running Ubuntu; under Linpus I was getting 3 hours, under Ubuntu I supposedly get just over 2 hours.

I’ve disabled things like Scrollkeeper and updatedb, which cause a lot of CPU and disk IO whenever they kick in, and Tracker only works when I’m on AC power. I did some tweaks to prevent the SSD wearing out, but unfortunately I have to still have swap on the SSD because the machine only has 512mb of RAM (shared with the Intel graphics). As a result, it’s a little slow.

However, it all works alright. There’s a small thing you need to do to get the wireless working, but once that’s done it’s tremendously reliable and fast. There’s a free wifi spot (actually, an unprotected network!) near me that I’ve been using, and it’s very zippy!

There’s an annoying bug in Nautilus with the tabs. If you open a second tab, the first one will not have any scroll bars unless you refresh it. The Gnome devs appear to be quite laid-back about whether they’ll fix it or not; if you develop Nautilus and want to give us a status report, I’d much appreciate if you left a comment.

Another problem: The SD card slots don’t seem to work. And I haven’t tried the webcam yet. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that all the functions of the trackpad (including left/right scrolling!) and the hotkeys all worked perfectly out-of-the-box.

Hibernate doesn’t want to go, but that’s not a big concern. I haven’t tried suspending yet.

Anyway, I’m finally happy with my Acer Aspire One, and I’m looking forward to using it a bit more soon!

Last night I did some “wardriving”, observing the wireless networks in the area. I’m spinning out about how many networks there are these days! Every time I found an unsecured one, I stopped and tried to connect. With instant disconnection. I assumed that these networks had MAC filtering.

I went to Kingsway, because I had seen earlier online that there was a “Free public use” AP there at the caravan park. I couldn’t connect until I wound down the window (but it turns out you need to contact the office for a ticket number to actually do anything useful).

Today I had the idea that I’d need to not have a pane of glass in between me and those precious wifi signals, so after work I grabbed my netbook and drove in a different direction this time. I went up a road, stopped outside an empty block, and lo and behold there was an unencrypted network. With the router’s default name! I wound down the window and was able to connect.

The empty block had a couple of trees at the back, so I walked behind there and was able to surf to my heart’s content. It was fast. Very fast.

The only problem I’m having with my netbook is that I can’t install software. Nobody else seems to be having any trouble with it, but I always get dependency problems with anything I try to install. It’s the most infuriating thing. I think the machine had been turned on and updated before I recieved it - it never asked me to specify a username or password.

I can’t figure out the software problem and I can’t find any information about it online, so I’m just putting Ubuntu on it. Note: The “Create a USB startup disk” option in Ubuntu doesn’t work; it won’t boot the One. Instead I used Netbootin, and now Ubuntu is installing as I speak.

Now I know where there’s a fast unencrypted network in a place I’m not likely to be seen, I’ll be able to download lots of interesting things :-)  But I’ll try and use my own connection as much as I can, because it’s not fair for me to use someone else’s without their permission.

Oh, and I’m getting exactly 3 hours out of the battery on my Acer Aspire One, when running Linpus. No idea how much when running Ubuntu, but let’s hope it’s not much more. I want to try and get a 6 cell battery if possible, and a carry bag (the second guy at Officeworks told me confidently that it came with a bag, but it DID NOT - I don’t think I’ll buy from Officeworks again because that’s the second time they stuffed me around! Now I have to head out tomorrow morning before work to get a bag.).

I think it’s been a while since I last wrote to here, but Linux users are probably going to be very interested in what happened to me today.

I finally went out and bought a netbook. Over the last couple of weeks in particular I’ve been in situations where I’ve thought “Gee, I could really do with having a portable computer right about now”, so I decided to get one. Linux, of course (why on earth do people want to run a 7-year-old outdated, archaic operating system on a netbook, especially when they could be paying more than $100 for the OS?)

First, I was thinking of just getting the original 7 inch Eee. Arrow Computers have them for $299. But then I read that the 900 MHz processor is underclocked to just 600 and something MHz. And a 7 inch screen is pretty small.

So I decided to choose between an EeePC 900 or 901, and an Acer Aspire One. At first I was for the One because of its looks and the Atom processor (as opposed to the 900’s Celeron), and then I found that the 900 and 901 both have 20 gigabytes of SSD storage; perfect for long train rides! So I wanted an Eee.

I rang up MCG who had advertised the Eee 900. They didn’t have any. I called Kambo’s, Officeworks, and Good Guys. Officeworks said they had some Eees with Linux and an Atom processor, and that the price was $478. I was a little suspicious because that was the advertised price of the One, but I went there anyway.

As it turns out, the guy had quoted me on an Aspire One, and they didn’t have any Eees with Linux. Desperate dash around; Harvey’s only had the XP ones, Dick Smiths didn’t have any, Retra only had XP, and Arrow only had 7 inch. So I ended off going back to Officeworks and buying the Aspire One. I would have bought the One elsewhere as penalty for the misleading, but I’d like to think it was an honest mistake; and besides, they were the cheapest.

As further demonstration that Ubuntu isn’t driving my wireless card correctly, the One shows my wireless signal strength as being 92%. Ubuntu shows 13%.

I’ve enabled the XFCE menu by pressing Alt-F2 and typing “xfce4-setting-show” and then going to the window manager settings and enabling the right-click menu. There’s an unusual bevvy of stuff installed on the One. Compiz is installed, but won’t run. There are heaps of window manager themes for the person who delves into the XFCE settings, but few control themes apart from the XFCE defaults. The Session settings menu item is present, but the actual program doesn’t exist. Sudo is available, with no password - this makes it easy to set a root password and get access to the Pirut package manager.

There’s also a bunch of Acer bloatware, like some amateur games and an “XP Recovery” program that doesn’t run. There’s also some open-source games like Tux Puck, Supertux, and Frozen Bubble. Funnily enough, Acer also includes their own amateur rendition of Frozen Bubble that looks completely out of place compared to the slick, professional open-source equivilant.

Halfway through the first level of Supertux, some of the arrow keys stopped working, and then none of the keys worked. I had to reboot. I don’t fancy doing much gaming on this machine, of course.

Once I’ve got a bit more speed on my internet connection (I’ve gone over the 5 gig mark) or get into a free wifi zone (like just outside Linda’s house!) I’ll do the equivilant of apt-get update and start installing some packages on the One. And I’m also planning on doing some wardriving too!

I do want to get a bigger battery if I can find one. The one it comes with is ridiculously tiny, and out-of-the-box I’ve got something like 2 hours. Once I actually charge the battery I should get more.

I’m a little bit frustrated by the policies of the new place I’m working at.

The policy is: If a customer asks for a discount, give them 2.5% off.

2.5% not only sounds like a tiny discount, it *is* tiny. Customers are so used to getting bigger discounts from electrical stores, furniture stores, etc; that they’re very dissatisfied with it. They think I’m a miser, or that I’m greedy, when I don’t come up with a bigger discount; and they either walk out or decide to go to a different store next time.

The profit margins at the new place are over twice that of the electrical store I worked at before, if you assumed that everything was sold at the ticket price (doesn’t happen much in electrical!). So why be so miserly? Give the customer a 10% discount and everyone wins: You make a sale, the customer’s been given a good price for this type of goods and knows it, the customer is willing to come back, and you still make good GP.

The other thing I’m frustrated about is that I have to depend on one person to put through sales on the computer. If he’s busy or in the toilet, both the customer and I have to wait. Just teach me the system! Even if I’m not allowed to handle cash (which I understand the reasoning behind), at least let me put the data into the computer! There’s a whole “double-entering” and “Chinese whispers” system - I have to get the customer’s details and write it on a pad along with the things I need put into the computer. Then I hand it to the cashier who types the exact same information into the computer.

And I don’t get any credit for my sales until I get given a salesperson number. As a full-time staff member, I deserve to be given the credit. And as a full-time staff member, the management should be able to see that my performance is up to standard and that they are not just paying me for kicks. I’ll be blowed if I’m going to sell any warranties until I get a salesperson number; why should my commissions be given to some other staff member whose sole role in the sale was just to take the cash from the customer?

The last thing is, apparently we’ve all been told to pounce on customers as soon as they walk through the door. That’s not how to do things. People resent that as being pushy. Give them a minute to look, and then they’ll know what exactly they want help with. If you ask them straight away if they want any help, they will almost always say “Just looking”, or maybe ask “Where’s xyz?” before then saying “Thanks, I’ll just have a look”.

If you give them a minute to look first, and then introduce yourself not with “Can I help you?” but with a friendly comment relating to what they are looking at or doing (i.e. “If you want to lie down on the mattresses to try them out, please do”), then you’re much more likely to have the customer like and trust you. Then they are more likely to give you the answers to your questions, or volunteer information; and therefore more likely to get the sale.

If you can’t think of a folksy and friendly comment, the question “Was there something you were looking for particularly?” will more often yield information than “Can I help you?”.

I’m not grouching about the people I work with. I certainly landed on my feet there; they’re all good people. One lent me a book he had about selling skills, which I appreciate even though the tone of the book is a bit like one of those spam e-mails promising to give me advice to “get any girl you want”.

Yeah, I actually don’t mind my job, but I’d like a little more freedom in order to make more sales and maximise efficiency.

———-

My computer is running a bit warm lately. 40 degrees at idle? Not so impressive; I wonder if the stock thermal paste is breaking down? I did make a mistake when I first applied it; I took the heatsink off once and didn’t reapply the goop. It hits 60 degrees under load; you’d imagine that the cooler would run much faster to get the temperatures down? Under load, the fan only goes about 100RPM faster than at idle.

The extra fan I installed has had a marked effect on the temperature of my hard drives, fortunately. My 500 gigabyte HDD is 7 degrees cooler. My graphics card is running cooler than it did last summer, too.

Of course, I want to upgrade to Intel Core i7 once the prices go down! If AMD’s “Shanghai” microarch turns out well, I might cross-grade; who knows? I suspect I probably won’t, because I don’t believe AMD’s next lot of processors will be anywhere near as good as i7. But we can always hope that things will get better for the AMD.

Speaking of Shanghai, I read that Red Hat were trumpeting a victory in virtualisation; they said that they had migrated a VM between “three architectures”. No they frigging didn’t! They migrated it between three microarchitectures, which I didn’t think would be difficult at all. I mean, they all use the same instruction set, and the process of virtualisation is intended to abstract the exact hardware anyway. It’s not like they migrated a VM from a Playstation 2 to a Core 2 and then to a Macintosh G5! That would be a massive feat of engineering!

In other news, I want an EeePC again. They’re only $299 for the 7 inch Linux version with a Celeron processor. Arrow Computers. I’m finding excuses for thinking about it; like on the train yesterday I could have done… stuff with it. Watched Doctor Who on a 7 inch screen rather than a 1.7 inch screen
I won’t get one unless I really find a proper need for it.

I’ve also noticed that the pace of Ubuntu Intrepid development has slowed down. It’s been over 24 hours since the last update in the Proposed repository. So many bugs, so few fixes. No updates have fixed my wireless or suspend. Boo hoo.

I hope the Ubuntu devs put an earlier version of Banshee into the repositories, the current version is utter crap. There are now bugs that stop you from being able to rip multiple CDs at the same time, which is all I used it for really! You can’t add metadata to a CD before ripping it - useless, because then you have to manually rename files after applying the ID3 tags! All the options have been stripped out of it - making Rhythmbox look like Amarok by comparison. Terrible. But at least I’m getting better aquainted with Exaile.

I’ve written a post about “9 things that disappointed me in Ubuntu 8.10″ and recieved a heap of comments on it; quite surprising considering I didn’t submit it to FSDaily!

Now that I’ve used the system for longer, here are 11 things that I like about Ubuntu 8.10:

1. I appreciate the effort that’s been put into the new status switching menu in Ubuntu (Fast User Switch Applet). I don’t find it incredibly useful, but it’s a good start toward making the Gnome desktop more unified and more intuitive (god, how I hate that word!).

2. Ubuntu developers and people in the community are sharing workarounds for at least one of the problems I mentioned. I got Gnome sounds working again through a quick HOWTO on the Ubuntu Forums. I was less impressed that removing PulseAudio stopped me from being able to log into Gnome, but once I put it back everything started working again.

3. The new KDE 4 version of K9Copy looks good. I haven’t done any DVDs yet but I’m sure I’ll take advantage of the extra control it gives.

4. I haven’t suffered any catastrophic Firefox 3 crashes yet on Intrepid. On Hardy, Firefox used to go down and actually bring the entire system down with it. Funnily enough, it never happened with Flock.

5. 64-bit is truly here. To be honest, it’s my first time with a 64-bit operating system, but I’ve heard that it used to be rather difficult to set everything up. With Intrepid, so far installing programs has been just as easy as 32-bit, and I’d forgotten it was 64-bit until I saw Synaptic install the ia32 libs.

6. Updates are still flowing, and are safe to install. I used to never apply updates unless I believed they would fix my bugs, for fear of them mucking up something. This time around I’ve been installing them when they come out, with no ill effects, and with one noticable benefit (the icons beside the text in the Fast User Switch Applet - yay, now it looks right!). Not even the kernel updates, which are coming along very quickly, are ruining things. I don’t recall having to install a new linux-restricted-modules version either; looks like DKMS is handling things spendidly.

I don’t have the “proposed” repository enabled, but if I hear about any wireless fixes… I’ll add it like a shot!

7. And all the old kernels are gone, or at least are no longer on the GRUB menu. I remember reading that this was an Ubuntu feature now - it removes old kernels once you’ve had a successful bootup on the new kernel. It was still a pleasant surprise for me even though I never actually hit the GRUB menu.

8. The end of Xorg crashes? Even the Nvidia driver has been well-behaved so far. My system appears more stable except for the wireless. Xorg.conf is an almost useless file now, which I’m sure means we’ll all have to transition to a new way of doing things, but it really will be a transition to a better way of working with screens and input devices.

9. Am I the only one who sees the big potential with the “Create a USB Startup Disk” program? You can use it to trial a new Ubuntu version on your computer without having to repartition your hard disk, and without settling for the limitations of the Desktop CD. You could use your regular programs live from USB, via a flash drive, to check that everything works satisfactorarily. If I upgrade my workmate’s computer to Intrepid, it will only be after doing a full set of tests, with her programs, having the whole system running from flash drive.

I expect it would be especially useful for enterprise migrations, but it’s a pity they won’t actually be using it like this until the next LTS version.

10. Although the Printers setup program has completely changed (FOR THE SECOND TIME IN AS MANY VERSIONS! GRRR!) it is now more Gnome-like and less intimidating, and makes it a piece of piss to install a networked printer.

I mean, it wasn’t difficult to do in Hardy, but now it’s ridiculously easy. Even though the printer is connected directly to my father’s computer rather than to an Ethernet port in my router, the Printers program just immediately listed it as though it were a local printer. I was very impressed by this. I just had to click it, and then click “Next” a couple of times and the job was done. I have installed a similar printer, locally, on a friend’s computer running Windows, and it required me to run two programs and reboot before it would print. And that’s as a local printer!

11. Intrepid still agrees with me more than Windows or OS X, and I still like the way Ubuntu is maturing.

Now to answer some comments from my last post:

@Dave K: I’d like to keep the latest version of Ubuntu. I know I don’t have to have it, but the newer versions of all the programs are handy. I’ll consider a move back if the wireless issue gets too bad. I did have a reason to upgrade: I thought Intrepid was going to fix the Pulseaudio problems, and improve the reliability of my wireless card. Neither of those happened despite there being a lot of hoopla about those precise things.

When everything works perfectly, as it did during the Dapper and Feisty days, I skip an upgrade. (I never ran Edgy, and I didn’t run Gutsy on that computer either; I only ran Gutsy on this new computer).

If I sound like I was personally hurt, it’s just because I was a little dispairing.

@Jason: I usually give distros a month or two to settle down as well. I upgraded from Gutsy to Hardy on this computer after I had installed it on two other computers. I jumped in a bit early this time.

@Timinpx1: You’re right, there aren’t “lots of little bugs to get familiar with” introduced in new versions of open-source application software, at least none that I’ve seen. The little bugs have been with new Ubuntu versions. I never grew up in the Windows world, but I don’t remember these sort of problems with the classic Mac OS except for a general loss of stability and speed between Mac OS 7.5 - 7.6.1 (that’s five versions!) and 9.0-9.1 (three versions).

@6205: Extra 700 megabytes of RAM available, is the benefit for me. I still fill up all my cache anyway whenever I rip a DVD, regardless of whether I’ve got 2 gigs or 4 gigs installed
@Appsmanster: Ahh, looks like the Jockey issue is peculiar and not necessarily to do with the “Install Ubuntu” option. Thanks for the report. A Mac would not be an easier choice for me - it would drive me insane as surely as if I was using Windows. The Linux way of doing things is the way I prefer.

@Oli: You’re right, but I do only have fairly limited internet quota which prevents me from downloading too many prereleases. I share the connection with my father. I did download Hardy beta and submit bug reports, and I remember downloading an alpha of Feisty that simply wouldn’t log in, making it a complete waste of 700 megabytes of download quota! But yes, I should make more of an effort. I should also tell you that I’ve never had a bug that I’ve reported or contributed information towards, fixed. Except for the one I reported to Nvidia, but they didn’t really fix it; they just moved the problem to a different series of cards
Thanks all for reading and replying to the earlier post, and please keep reading and replying to my blog!

I bought a 160 gigabyte hard disk to store my / and swap, and use my 500 gig HDD for /home. I also bought another 2 gigabytes of RAM, and promptly tried installing it the wrong way :-)  The chips are on the other side compared to my existing RAM, lol.

Anyway, I installed Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit edition. And now I regret it.

1. There’s something seriously wrong with my wireless driver. Under Gutsy and Hardy, Network Manager shows 70% signal strength and the wireless works fine (drops out every couple of hours on average, but otherwise it’s okay). Under Intrepid, the signal strength shows as a ridiculous 14%, with signal quality just 12%! Downloads go to approximately 3 kilobytes per second every 3 megabytes, and stay there for up to 30 seconds before returning to normal speeds. The connection is more prone to completely dropping out. I’ve filed a bug report, but THESE SORTS OF REGRESSIONS SHOULDN’T HAPPEN IN THE FIRST PLACE.

2. PulseAudio is more broken than before! I can type my username and password at the login screen and press Enter before the login screen sound actually comes out of my speakers. I just tried launching “Which Way Is Up?” and having it segfault because PulseAudio was throwing an error. I killed Pulseaudio and changed my sound outputs back to ALSA and the game runs perfectly.

I’ve also lost my Gnome sound effects. I like the audial feedback I get from them. That’s gone now, and I’m sure PulseAudio is the problem.

3. The much-hyped Darkroom theme is unusable for me. The theme shows promise, but the orange highlights and white text fields just have too much contrast. Hurts my eyes. I changed the colours so that the scroll boxes and things were the same brown, and the input boxes were a dark orange, but it still didn’t look that great. I ended off installing White, which is a beaut white-and-orange theme, because the Dapper-era Human theme with the orange lights on the scrollboxes is gone, and replaced with a Clearlooks-based alternative.

4. Jockey has some regressions, like for instance, it doesn’t install my Nvidia driver anymore. I had to get it from the repository myself, which is mystifying. At least Jockey realises that I’ve manually installed it, but unfortunately the Appearance control panel likes to check with Jockey first before enabling Compiz, which means I get an annoying “Checking for drivers…” progress bar before it finally tries running Compiz.

The original problem with Jockey might have been because I used the straight “Install Ubuntu” option at the Desktop CD’s boot menu rather than boot into the live environment. On a non-wired connection, you wouldn’t get an internet connection, so the installer wouldn’t update the Apt listing, and when you tried using Jockey, Apt wouldn’t find the package it wants to install, and Jockey doesn’t recognise the error message provided by Apt and just thinks everything has gone swimmingly.

Considering that the “Install Ubuntu” option is an official part of Ubuntu, and that the problem didn’t let up even after I updated Apt, this is a bad bug.

5. I believe performance is down. Login on a fresh two-HDD install with almost no desktop items or services takes nearly as long as my old packed-to-the-brim Hardy install did. The disturbing thing was that my Hardy install was heavily fragmented, and the disk seeking was causing the login to go slowly. With Intrepid, the hard disk doesn’t seem to be actually doing much during login. Why is it going so slowly? Compiz doesn’t feel quite so smooth either.

6. Suspend is broken. In the last days of my Hardy install, I discovered that Suspend worked. The machine won’t suspend or hibernate with Intrepid, it just crashes.

7. Screens And Graphics is gone. No sooner did Ubuntu’s developers get that program working properly, than they remove it. Telling X to use the Nvidia driver I installed from the repositories requires a trip to the command-line again! It’s like a little slice of 2006!

8. Pidgin seems to have some new bugs. Every time I start up, it asks me if I want to authorise or deny my addition to somebody’s friends list. Then it tells me that there was an unknown error causing the user not to be added. The Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin is currently the only thing keeping me from using Meebo in Prism.

9. IPv6. Yes, IPv6 is STILL enabled by default, despite it being incompatible with most routers and ISPs. It has been causing slow and irresponsive web browsing on Ubuntu since 2004, the they STILL ENABLE IT BY DEFAULT. And it’s not obvious where to turn it off… the Networking control panel has vanished. I had some idea that gufw had an option to disable it, but no, there’s no option there for that. Once again, in order to use your Ubuntu system, you seem to require a trip to the command-line. I’m not averse to the command-line, but I couldn’t remember the location of the file I had to edit. I had to look online with faultering internet… which of course didn’t work. I had to use my Wii to look online for the location of the file I had to edit.

I upgraded because I thought it would probably stop my wireless from disconnecting every few hours. Boy was I wrong there. I thought it would fix the PulseAudio situation where Flash would monopolise the audio output. Well, I haven’t tried Flash yet, but this time around PulseAudio has fucked up the rest of the system.

My faith in open-source software has taken a severe hit. There are always little bugs that you have to get familiar with, but Intrepid is a clear case of regression, and it makes me wonder what the Ubuntu folks have been doing the last six months. I’ve now decided not to upgrade my father’s Mint system to the next version of Mint, and if the next release of Ubuntu isn’t better than Hardy I’m seriously going to be considering a change of distribution.

I was impressed with the Australians at the International Rules Football test match last night. Sure they lost the match and the series, but they did occasionally play the ball off the ground with their feet rather than always stoop down to pick it up.

I’m still in the process of uploading the first test. Megavideo flakes out too much, so I decided to try Blip.tv, which can also be accessed through Surf The Channel.  After using their web uploader for part 1 of the match, I discovered that you can also upload using FTP! Awesome! I am copying the last parts of that match over to the network share and I’m going to use my father’s computer (with his wired connection) to upload the rest of the video tonight while I sleep.

Also, out of curiosity, I decided to suspend my computer today. Bear in mind that I’m still running Hardy. It suspended and then came back up without any hassles, which is unusual because I remember it failing to come back up once before!

I downloaded Super Mario 64 for Wii Virtual Console because I keep getting told what a great game it is. I always had trouble playing it due to the controls and the camera angle.

Well, I’ve got 9 stars and I’ve attempted the Bowser level when you go through the “8 stars” door. But I always end off jumping into air. The camera and control system for Super Mario 64 might have been revolutionary for its time, but it is FRUSTRATING. You can never tell what line Mario is on, and you can never be totally sure what direction he’s going to travel in when you push the analogue stick. Yo Frankie is a 3D platformer too, and I don’t have any troubles with that because the camera always stays behind the main character, unless there is no room.

According to Wikipedia, by today’s standards the Super Mario 64 camera system would be considered “broken”. At least it’s not just me, although it’s a little disheartening to remember the video of the guy completing the game in 20 minutes.

I cant’ remember if I mentioned Helix. It’s like a dancing game that uses two Wii remotes, and has some good techno tracks that you dance to. It’s a great workout for your arms and really has you puffing and panting afterwards, if you play on Medium. It’s a 40mb download from Wiiware, costs 1,000 points I think, and is well worth it if you like techno and body movement.

I found a hilarious video today. It’s a Futurama parody of those anti-DVD-piracy ads. (Youtube: “Futurama anti-piracy”) I saw a different ad to that recently where it claimed that video piracy helps fund terrorism. Didn’t you hear, Osama uses K9Copy! I mean, come on, some people aren’t stupid enough to believe that.

Ever on the lookout for good new Gnome themes, I found a metacity theme called GBand-Metacity. It uses artwork ripped off from Apple’s Garageband, but it’s quite attractive with faux wood panels on each side of the window. I paired it up with the Unity GTK theme, changed one of the colours to a light brown, and now it looks brilliant.

Everyone knows about the Windows 7 taskbar screenshots… people are ooo’ing and ahhh’ing over the fact that it’s going to use icons rather than actual full taskbar entries. When it actually comes in and normal people try to use it, it’ll be about as popular as foot rot. The same goes for multi-touch. Great on a mobile device, terrible when you get sticky fingerprints all over your screen or worse, dead patches due to you accidentally prodding your finger through the monitor.

I do quite like the jump pad or quick list or whatever they’re calling it, where you can get a menu of functions and recent items when you hover your mouse over a taskbar entry. It makes sense for a music player (that was the demonstration screenshot), but I actually can’t think of many other contexts where it would be useful. I guess the programs that it would be useful for, already put icons into your system tray.

Microsoft has finally realised that you buy a computer and it comes with 20 tray icons from all the preinstalled crap… they obviously want to get rid of as many tray icons as possible, which is laudable. Whether application developers will respect that is another guess. My guess is no; from what I hear, many Windows application developers still don’t write their programs 64-bit clean, and they still fire up unnecessary UAC prompts from trying to write to system-wide places.

Microsoft has done a wonderful job with the marketing for Windows 7, getting people excited about new features. People are actually saying that Vista was terrible and that Windows 7 should be much better. You ask them what they didn’t like about Vista: “It uses too many resources; it’s incompatible with Legacyware Super OldSoftware and doesn’t have drivers for my 16mb Nvidia 1400GX graphics card; and it annoys me with the UAC prompts”. Windows 7 will not make these “problems” worse, but it won’t make them any better either. But people have forgotten that. Good on ‘ya, Microsoft.

Day after tomorrow, I start my new job, and I’m not looking forward to it. Furniture is out of my comfort zone. I’ll continue looking for a better job in the meanwhile and we’ll see if we can’t get into something more respectable.