A Man and his Penguin

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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 6:55 am and is filed under Backstory, Other computers/OS'es, Proprietry software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.