Microsoft, innovative? Nah, really!

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A new version of Windows Mobile, is supposed to have a Honeycomb like start menu.

But hey wait a minute, I remember a X window manger that has something like that. After a bit of a hunt, I found it: Unix Desktop Environment (UDE) born back in 2004 [Wiki] [home] [screen].

It’s been on my todo list for a couple years now, to try out UDE; but then again, writing my own window manager for fun, and splelunking blackbox have also been on my todo list for a few years lol. I’m sure no one working on Windows Mobile 6.5 has ever heard of UDE, but it is nice to see someone at Microsoft is willing to try something DIFFERENT, if not totally new….

So far, the most innovative thing I’ve seen come out of Microsoft is some of the new window operations/shortcuts I’ve heard about in Windows 7; my response to it being: Have you jackasses really taken over a decade to figure out how to do that, or did you finally realize that window mangement has evolved since 1987 ???

What a small world!

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Made it to level 10 in HR, then stopped to deal with my IM’s. After that, I took to reading the Doom Wiki to re-learn about the power ups (manily the spheres). Then I found out… the plasma gun and shotgun were based on toys.

And guess what? I owned both as a kid :

http://content.kapowwe.com/images5/1-1-465_13.jpg

http://web.archive.org/web/20041031174054/http://www.strombecker.ca/products/viewproduct.asp?ID=317

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Caught Grumpy Old Men on TV, and laughed my ass off solidly ^_^. Most Rest and Relaxiation I’ve had in ages…. Also saw a film I’ve never seen before, The Prisoner of Second Aveune with Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft. Now that was a good movie!!! He gets fired and has a wonderful nervous breakdown, they get robbed, everything goes to heck, and he eventually learns the hardway that you can’t stand out on the terrace cussing a blue streak at the neighbores ^_^. She’s forced to take a job, and put up with his breakdown; until she finally edges on a nervous breakdown lol. The ending though is wonderful, when he realizes that the mugger he chased down and recovered his wallet from, wasn’t a mugger at all… the quarrals with the couple one floor up, and the ending — it is just priceless xD (and I’m not gonna spoil it :-P).

And The China Syndrome is starting 🙂

My laugh of the day….

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Early Unix hackers struggled with this in many ways. In the languages of 1970 function calls were expensive, either because call semantics were complicated (PL/1. Algol) or because the compiler was optimizing for other things like fast inner loops at the expense of call time. Thus, code tended to be written in big lumps. Ken and several of the other early Unix developers knew modularity was a good idea, but they remembered PL/1 and were reluctant to write small functions lest performance go to hell.

Dennis Ritchie encouraged modularity by telling all and sundry that function calls were really, really cheap in C. Everybody started writing small functions and modularizing. Years later we found out that function calls were still expensive on the PDP-11, and VAX code was often spending 50% of its time in the CALLS instruction. Dennis had lied to us! But it was too late; we were all hooked…
— Steve Johnson

Hmm, I’ve always wondered why some really old programms written in C look so odd, as if the person had never heard of a function call (or macro) before. I’ve never been able to figure out if it was because many function calls were more expensive on the hardware back then, because the programmer was used to assembly, or loyality to some “style of the day”.

I guess that clears that up a bit more; if so, thank GOD he lied!

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Doom2-hr is a heck of a run, just pasted the map shaped like a spider; I can just imagine that thing on UV mode !!! I really wish I could dig up a copy of DooM II, the graphics in FreeDooM are quite a bit different then the ones I remember as a kid, but it gets the job done.

Some of the critters might look a bit off (especially the demon & imp), but hey… this is DooM, don’t gotta care what the heck it is, just shove a few rockets up it’s wazoo lol. The occasional revenant, and incresingly common Mancubuses are easily enough to deal with via my faovorite weapon: the super shotgun. But when an Arch Vile popped up….. Ok, a BFG9000 would have been prety handy! Rockets hwoever, have been very plentiful and there is no lack whatso ever of shotgun shells.

Somehow, I think the shotgun must be every gamers best friend, since the release of DooM. Ahh the good old days, but I at least some modern games plots have improved since the classic, hehe.

Day dreams

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hmmm, [a job posting]
is that real !?
I wonder, lol
it coulb be… interesting for the least
some of the job postings are interesting on thedailywtf, but I’ll never get that lucky lol
why ? 🙂
you never know what awaits you
let me put it this way, if only 1 in every 1000 people got shit on by a pidgin, I’d probably be shit on 2ce lol

Sometimes I just crack myself up xD

I don’t know if the job listed I was looking at would fit me, or vice versa. But man, it would actually be nice to get hired on merit. Very few places that I’ve seen, will even give you the time of day without a stack of prerequisite (and expensive) papers :.

Sigh.

Writer’s Block: Year of the Ox

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Happy Chinese New Year! The Year of the Ox starts today. What is your Chinese zodiac animal? Do you think you fit the description of the sign?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

http://www.chinesezodiac.com/dragon.php

Hmm, an earth dragon. I don’t believe in Astrology, but I must admit it is generally intriguing to parse.

Stress Buster

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Well, with nothing to do, no inclination left to me for sleep… and quite far from in the mood to get any more work done (Dang it!) for the night, I figured I’d play a little bit of DooM. After sorting a little issue of loading the right IWAD, I noticed something interesting in ports: the Hell Revealed MegaWad for Doom II 🙂

So I installed the doom-freedoom Free Software IWAD for DooM II, and the doom-hr ports on my laptop. I haven’t tried UV, but from the soun do it, I wonder if after all these years, if I’d even get past the first room on UV, lol. I’ve played the shareware version of DooM from Id some time ago, and wished that I had a copy of the full version handy afterwards (very fun game). The thing that surprised me about revisiting classic DooM, was not only were the levels much like I remembered them, there was still a good “Oh !@#$, it’s a trap!” factor keeping you on ya toes for hosing down some baddies — applying [SAS] movement and room clearing techniques actually helped clear it, haha! Playing through HR, might be agood time paser for awhile :. It’s a very well known megawad, but it’s still my first encounter ;-).

DooM is like _t_h_e_ classic FPS shooter. I was never into it very much as a child, and usually just watched my brother play the various console ports. But in later years, I’ve come to regard it as a great way to relieve stress — switch brain off, and let the shells fly.

cvs / git cooperation

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http://issaris.blogspot.com/2005/11/cvs-to-git-and-back.html

hmm, might be useful.

Somethings I’d like to work on, are using git, cvs, or svn. My own system here runs CVS, since that’s what OpenBSD comes with, but I’m more used to workign with Subversion. Git and Bazaar-ng are two programs I really should evaluate, since git is likely a program I would love using, and bzr is one I may find more useful in the wider world.

It also pays to know svn/cvs, hehe.