September 27th 2008
I’m not sure when this changed in KDE 4 but if you move your mouse to the upper-left corner and keep trying to “push” you’ll get the “exposé” effect without having to use the keyboard shortcut, and then click on the window you want. Handy alternative to Alt-Tab.
September 27th 2008
Why are you taking notes on the debate? I thought you already mailed in your vote.
This was a quote from my wife a few hours ago as the Presidential debate was getting started. She was right of course in that it wouldn’t affect my vote. I did jot notes down for the first hour or so just so I’d be able to remember the debate later should discussion ever come up. :-)
Anyways I expected better from Obama and worse from McCain. I still think Obama won but he at least at first seemed to have trouble collection his thoughts at times. I’m quite pissed at McCain trying to say that the only way for the deaths of American servicemembers in Iraq to have meaning is to “win” the war as it discounts the very real effort of many of those servicemembers. The Navy Times had an article the other day describing a Marine put up for a Medal of Honor because he died jumping on a grenade to save nearby Marines. He may not have won the war but you’d better believe what he did meant something to those Marines that he saved.
If there’s any single thing about this campaign that scares me though, it is Gov. Palin potentially becoming President if McCain wins the election. I’m impressed enough that he is doing as well as he is doing at 72 (?) years old but he has melanoma, suffered for years as a POW in Vietnam and, judging by the change in appearance of Presidents Clinton and Bush over their time in office, I’m really not convinced that Palin wouldn’t end up as President sooner rather than later. I feel that would be disastrous for the nation given her current practices for picking executive staff (i.e. nepotism instead of meritocracy). Being completely silent on the investigations going on in Alaska isn’t making me feel any better what with having just gone through Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez…
However, that’s neither here nor there and all I can do now is hope that the best candidates win the upcoming election. In more exciting news, a friend of mine coerced me into joining a fantasy football team (for points, not money, don’t worry). I didn’t really put a lot of effort into the picks and I missed the draft due to other committments so my team (”Graphitar”) is basically the best team the Yahoo! Random Number Generator could provide. Against all odds though, the team put up an incredible performance in Week 1 thanks to career days by Donovan McNabb and Michael Turner. It’s looking like the 171 points or so put up in that game may stay a season record at this rate. 6/8 teams get to the playoffs so I should at least be good for that.
On a completely unrelated topic I see the topic of Phonon and gstreamer has come up again. I documented many of the reasons why KDE needs Phonon in a letter to the LWN Editors more than 2 years ago. Suffice to say I don’t feel like going over the arguments again, but let’s just say that Phonon keep the doors open for gstreamer 0.12 to be supported in KDE when the time comes.
Finally on a more depressing note a submarine sailor was killed almost a week ago. The linked article is about all the specifics I have except that it is unlikely that the sailor was cleaning the rudder since last time I checked it had to be in the water (where the crew is not located) to work. It is likely that any cleaning he was doing was in the area of the hydraulics controlling the rudder but I don’t see how he would have been caught up in the mechanism. At least on my boat it has a shield surrounding the mechanism although Murphy’s law being what it is…
September 11th 2008
My wife bought me a PS3 as an early Christmas present (and so I could possibly bring it on the boat for the next underway).
So far though the experience has been underwhelming. The on screen keyboard is annoying to use, even accounting for the fact that it uses a controller. It at least uses the normal QWERTY layout instead of just putting the letters in order but you have to select that mode manually, otherwise it gives you 10 digits as if I was trying to send a text message to someone. What’s next, limiting games to 320×240 resolution because people have PSPs and DS? I don’t see why they intentionally limit the number of input buttons just because that’s what people have to deal with on a cell phone.
Eventually I got the internet access to work, at which time it needed an update. After about seriously 20 minutes of downloading over a cable modem it finally was able to start the 5 minute process of actually applying the update.
Finally I was able to play a game. Perhaps my wife shouldn’t have chosen Medal of Honor: Airborne though. :-/
It spent 10 minutes on its own installing stuff to the hard drive. I then got to go through a training mission where I was supposed to parachute out of an airplane near a green flare below. The on-screen instructions were basically useless. For example, “Press X to flare the parachute”. That explains nothing to me, and pressing the button made my legs kick and nothing else was apparent. It would probably have helped if my son wasn’t crying and therefore drowning out the spoken instructions but seriously, why put up on-screen instructions so undescriptive?
Also cool about the training mission was that I’m pretty sure my soldier broke his legs every landing. The game even made sure to put a message on-screen saying as much: “Botched Landing 10/50″ or something like that. For all 3 landings. This was even with me holding up on the stick trying to “Grease the Landing” or whatever that’s supposed to do. I never did figure out how to maneuver in mid-air. Trying the obvious thing (moving the control stick) merely makes you oscillate in the air before your untimely leg-breaking.
Luckily though no matter how much you suck the Army is willing to drop your ass over Sicily. I must have been on easy mode because I pretty much automatically landed near a green flare (botched landing, of course) and started the mission. It was basically me walking around and having to manually aim everywhere and getting shot 10 times and yet I still miraculously had half of my life bar. I figure that the health is so high because in-game testing revealed that the poor control they impose led to people getting out-gunned by the A.I. I wonder why they didn’t simply improve the control so that you aren’t useless but I guess innovations which were old hat when Goldeneye 007 was released in 1997 or so is old-fashioned now.
The buttons were at least easy enough to figure out for the most part, at least enough to point and open fire. Taking cover is easy, although the tendency of your computer-controlled teammates to immediately move in front of you when you try to shoot the enemy is not helpful.
I really wish that people would stop buying games which take such great pains to simulate events that real people don’t want to do. Hey look, I can spend $50 $60 on a game that allows me to take forever to line up a shot because that’s more “realistic” than the auto-aim present in Goldeneye 007, look how manly I am!! These developers have taken so many pains to make the game realistic that it’s no longer fun, it’s a chore. I turned off the PS3 1/3 of the way into the first level. If I really wanted to be a soldier I’d have enlisted in the Army. As it stands now I’d rather play Metroid Prime 3, which was designed for a system with probably one tenth of the power…
Also the graphics are not extraordinary although I assume that is because I don’t have the HDTV hookup. But it does make me feel better about what I get out of the Wii.
I’ll eventually try Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and the other supposed good PS3 games but what an awful way to start out the experience…
September 10th 2008
So the recent Hurricane Hanna that passed by forced our ship to get underway last week and I got to spend almost a week deployed. Yay. I’m back for now but we’ve been super-busy since then trying to make up for lost time.
I managed to find time to go ahead and move the asciiquarium screensaver into kdeartwork, which should be a part of KDE 4.2.
KDE trunk is looking better and better with each passing day which is nice. I’m tempted to run out and buy an ATI card at this point if only for the better hardware support in Linux. It seems that everytime I build a computer I inadvertently pick the worst-supported graphics card somehow. :-/
Anyways, I’m too tired to remember what else I was going to post so I’m just going to go to bed. :P