Alderaan in SWTOR

Sweet, sweet, StarWars goodness, from @swtor

Announcing Alderaan, the next playable planet in STAR WARS: The Old Republic! http://tinyurl.com/yk9wx6o

Did Episodes 1-3 visit Alderaan? Or is this carte blanche for SWTOR?

Cold fries kill coder…

Bought a big and tasty with fries and ice coffee last night, mostly for the coffee… When I mentioned it was for to-go the server calmly transferred my food from the nice, thick brown paper bag to a flimsy plastic one. So by the time I got it home it was cold.

It turns out that cold McFries are… stabby. Especially if you eat them too quickly, trying to get it over with…

After a couple of minutes I started to feel bloated and that quickly became a sharp, piercing sensation I first thought was indigestion.

Some advice on expelling sharp food items from your esophagus: don’t wait until your dearest wish is to lie face down in the tub and vomit up your feet; alternate between gulping air and swallowing lukewarm water to avoid additional bleeding (if you’ve already waited too long, like a dumbass)

Steering wheel laptop desk … huge seller

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/20/steering_wheel_desk/

Follow thru to Amazon page after reading for full effect

Droid

(Which reminds me, where the hell is my new StarWars MMO, already, Nicolai?)

Yes, I got a Droid phone.

I’m not a gadget geek, really; I lost interest in cell phones at least 15 years ago. But my Samsung SGH-A717 was an annoying PoC. I knew nothing about Android, I’ve only seen one iPhone. I was cussing out my old phone and a Droid ad was on the TV – the only one I’ve seen – and I just thought “Ok, I’m getting one of those”.

OMG, it’s wet!

I hoped that Baby and the kittens would take to a multi-cat, self-filtering, water fountain. Frosty took to it. Zip, splash. This was my first attempt at filming anything with my Droid, I’ll try and capture some of Frosty’s more amusing antics (she loves to ambush Sooty with a spray of water as he trots past)

This thread is dead, Fred.

I love Open Source software, but sometimes I hate Open Source software people…

Not all of them, but that guy.

There’s at least one for every project.

He’s the guy who has attached himself to the project in some official capacity and will respond negatively to any question posted in the forum that is the least technical or sane.

You can ask “what length is a piece of string” and he won’t bother you, you can ask “Is the pope catholic” and he won’t interject.

But ask “If I pass 7 as the item count, I get a crash, but only if I pass 7″ he will reply “don’t pass 7 then”…

If you don’t yet know this is that guy and explain why you might pass 7, he will respond with “have you considered using that thing instead?” – where that thing’s only commonality with what you were trying to achieve is some singular keyword such as “code” or “C”.

I’ve been trying to do some non-WWII related odds and ends to get my coding zen/fu spinning again, but I just keep on running into that guy and my “I’ll do it myself” level is almost in danger of surpassing my “reinventing the wheel is bad” threshold.

Of course, closed source is no guarantee there won’t be one, but usually the people standing to lose money from him will spot him and shut him down.

The real difference is that with Open Source he is usually the death of the project: seeing that every thread asking a question similar to theirs got the same stupid, dumb-ass responses from that guy and the actual project developers treat those threads as dealt with, next guy goes off and writes their own end-to-end solution, generously pinching as much of the source project as they need. And voila, another dead open source project…

Kitten update

I had to take the kittens’ mother to the local animal shelter :( She and Baby were not making any progress, and having her continually meowing 24/7 (even between mouthfuls of food) and efforts to mask baby’s scent with her own (by peeing everywhre) was just too much. Shame – she’s a really, really nice cat, otherwise :(

Thank you, Sms :)

From the very bottom of my bottle (hic), and hish 19 liddle friends…

(See this post)

Touchy feely (10gui)

http://10gui.com/

10 gui is an attempt to rethink the GUI, particularly mouse operation, based on a touch-based input device. Instead of touch screens, they use a separate touch-pad (like an artist’s tablet).

Their GUI makes me squirm a little: it’s not what I’m used to, but I can just about see it. The Amiga user in me wishes they used vertical panning instead of horizontal…

I just don’t think it goes far enough. The paradigm shift we need is a two-way, touch-based input device. “Touch” is a two way interaction. It is both an application and a sensing.

What the tablet needs is tactile output: the ability to raise pixels on its surface — like a Haptic Reader.

Microsoft hate

When they released Vista, I thought it was sucky and advised people not to buy it. Clearly the only possibility is that I hate Microsoft. Anything Microsoft does I’m going to spout bile about – and then probably pirate it anyway. It’s not like you’ll find me loving the free Win7 releases so much that I pre-ordered the release 3 months ago.

Doh!

My biggest hopes for Windows 7 are that (a) I’m not going to have to reinstall everything over my RC1 :), (b) it drives down the cost of touch screens… :) And that short list is brought to you by RC1 meeting my needs and expectations and making me one very happy customer.

(Note: That is my own, personal, pre-ordered copy of Win7 arrived today from Amazon)