Speak now or forever hold your piece

Just more internet clutter for Google to index

New Life for old vinyl

Finally gotten around to getting a USB turnable to breath some life into some of my old vinyl records..
So a couple of hours and some mucking about with Audacity later I have manage to rip:
Life’s Too Good – The Sugarcubes
Lovely – The Primitives
Saint Julian – Julian Cope
Excellent…. I need to dig out some old 12 inch mixes next, perhaps Heaven 17 Penthouse and Pavement


Ribbons and Bangles and Bows

…. or maybe Knots

An interesting little article on the up and coming ribbonification of the Win 8 Explorer

Windows 8 Explorer Ribbonification

Especially in comparison to the pending adoption of the HUD interface by Canonical

Ubuntu HUD (ooo look, a linux article on the beeb)

Interestingly these developments seem to fly in the face of the prevailing assumption that in the future we’ll all be pokeing our fondleslabs, as neither interface seems to be particularly touch friendly.

My own takes is that adding the ribbon to explorer seems a fairly pointless change, esp as it is going to be hidden most of the time. It takes up too much screen real estate on a desk top, yet too little for touch interfaces. And it doesn’t help explorer “power users” (if there is such a thing) much, as they are more likely to use the the CLI anyway….


This week I am mostly…

listening to…..

Punk & Poetry by The King Blues (punk, ska, love songs and agitprop)

reading….

The Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe (I finished reading American Gods recently and thought ‘God thats a lot like Soldiers in the Mist’ turns out Gaiman is Wolfes biggest fan)

Little known fact GW is one of the engineers who designed the Pringles making machine.

trying out…..

Protobufs
Hadoop
Different linux desktops (and despite self quite liking Gnome 3)

thinking about buying…..

a Raspberry Pi


A new spin on Microsoft FUD

I have been watching the fallout from the MS Windows 8 demo with some quiet amusement

Windows 8 HTML Javascript panic

With some fairly apocalyptic articles about Silverlight and even .Net being dropped.

Spreading FUD amongst your opponents is one thing, but amongst your supporters is going some.

It’s interesting to see the amount of distrust the Microsoft is held in, even by it’s developer community.

Mind you in the brave new post-Sun Java world, it’s probably something that us Java devs should get used to as well…..


Scala and the Guardian

Here is a very interesting article on migrating to Scala from Java, not only on the technical gotcha’s (readability, null handling and what parts of Scala functionality they avoided), but also in the route they took in getting general acceptance of the new language within the organisation.

InfoQ Guadian Scala

BTW I have read the Odersky book they mention, and it is very good.


DCU, Champions Online and CoX Redux

Just seen this video review and started giggling like a complete loon in the middle of the office… not cool.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2757-DC-Universe-Online

Not seen much of DCU, though by rep it seems to be more of a 3rd person shooter style (http://hill-kleerup.org/blog/heroes/2011/02/because-occasionally-i-feel-like-i-should-post-something-other-than-tweets.html)

What with Champions Online having to hit the “free-play” button to get players, it looks like CoX is going to be last superhero MMO standing.

Some of the new CoH stuff is also rather top notch, I just recently picked up Going Rogue, and haven’t played a Preatorian yet, but managed to get Shadow Hood through his first Morality Mission (v good mish, and he is now a Vigilante) and started the arc to open up Ramblin Syd’s Alpha Slot (which somewhat surprisingly does not involve trips to Old Compton Street, or cruising Hampstead Heath at 3am in the morning….go figure).

BTW the Alpha Slot is the post-50 uber-god-mode stuff added in I19.

Also as all the Fitness Pool is now inherent, respeccing your old toons becomes rather fun, and (although I haven’t tried it yet) will get over the 14-20 slog to get Stamina.