Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Windows 8

So I tried Windows 8 today at work. The operating system is pretty zippy even though I'm running it on a virtual machine on Oracle's Virtual Box. That is about the extent of the nice aspects of Windows 8 for me. Once I got to the DESKTOP (This is a DESKTOP OS right?) it all went down hill from there.

The DESKTOP starts out as a bunch of tiles on a single colored background. The tiles are bright and cheery and there are no menus to use such as the old faithful Start menu. Installing applications just adds a new tile to the pile of tiles on your desktop and you have to page through things when there are more tiles then the screen can hold. (Swipe if you were on a tablet or phone.)

Using non-Metro applications causes Windows 8 to go in to a stripped down Windows 7 desktop interface. This interface has no Start menu and is just a very basic version of the Windows 7 desktop. This whole experience reminded me of OS/2 and how fun that was going between OS/2 applications and Windows 3 applications. Talk about RETRO for a modern operating system.

Finding standard Windows things took a bit with me. I shudder to think how my own mother would handle Windows 8 on her DESKTOP computer. She has a hard enough time finding things in Windows 7 and when she switched to that from Windows XP and the changes there confused her for months.

I hope Microsoft stops dorking around and actually puts out a useable DESKTOP operating system and not some stupid phone or tablet interface bastard child. Right now I consider Microsoft in the same light as Ubuntu Unity and Gnome 3 when it comes to DESKTOP interfaces to avoid. The only thing that makes Microsoft's offering worse then Ubuntu's or Gnome's is they want you to actually pay for the rotten thing.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

When fan made is really damn good.

For being fan made this video is really damn good.


I downloaded the whole video from the site they said it was at and it's 2 gigs of awesomeness.

In other news I'm digging back in to my Java programming roots from college as well as my first job. I'm diving in to Liferay portlet technology for projects. Once I got over the initial brain fart hurdles it's actually quite nice working with Eclipse and Git. Mixing that with some PL/SQL programming is turning out to be even more fun.

As for pointless fun, I built a castle in Minecraft. Even has a working iron gate.





I like keeping the inside of my castle walls practical yet somewhat decorative.




Full blown village, garden, smithy, apartments, animal pens, and I even made a central market area with nice colorful stands. The melon patch where the melons and pumpkins grow is hooked up to a piston system that knocks them all off the vines at the flick of a switch making for easy harvests.