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….

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

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…..

InfoQ Guadian Scala

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

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.

The best being Plan R