Dear Santa/Fairy Godmother...
There's a number of new graphics applications that I've been searching all over for. They may or may not have been invented yet. So I'm posting this little list, to the purpose of either...
#1 - An Isometric Image Editor
We're close already. Gimp has an isometric grid and snap-to-grid feature in the GFig plug-in, and it's also possible to render isometric perspective with POVRay and Blender. But what I'm actually after is a drag-n-drop block editor. The closest thing to what I have in mind is a Windows program named "AnkerCAD", uncovered over at Rea Maor's. I tried it out, but it behaves funky.
#2 - A combined POVRay/Flash Editor
As anybody who's followed my Flash explorations knows, I've frequently used pre-rendered ray-traced graphics in building Flash animations. My favorite POVRay front-end is KPOVModeler, which sadly looks like it's going to be abandoned in favor of the new K3D. But anyway, if we had something like KPOVModeler with a plug-in to automatically integrate a build-script for swfc, defining frames of movie-clips... I don't even know exactly how this would work, but with better integration between POVRay and SwfTools, it could save the step where you have to write your own custom-hacked Bash script to run the two together every time.
#3 - A MakeHuman Fork For Animals And Cartoons
MakeHuman, previously raved about here, here, and here, continues to be a source of delight for me. Now, if only we had it so easy to make animals, and make lower-polygon human models that could easily be converted into manga/anime Ω style models.
#4 - A Sims Clone
The whole family has gotten back into Maxis' "The Sims" games (on the only Windows box), except, as before, we don't care a whit about the actual game play. The fun of the game comes from subverting it, making and using custom-hacked objects, and letting your imagination run wild in making up whatever kind of game you want. A whole subculture of object modding has grown up around the Sims franchise. Now, really, it's time we had a whole open-source system which also - duh! - ran on Linux. One that breaks out of the narrow, confining game play of the Maxis game and just lets you have a complete open sandbox. True, we have Second Life, but it's too tied in with online play, and also it's commercialized to the hilt. Maybe a fork off of OpenSim for a small, casual desktop toy.
#5 - An ANSI-to-Unicode Converter and Unicode Graphics Editor
I'm talking, of course, of ANSI-character graphics like you used to see on Bulletin Board Systems. I've almost got a system worked out myself for converting ANSI graphics to Unicode - once you have a handle on DOS code page 437 and Unicode box-drawing and block elements, it would be simple to translate between them. Now get the colors right - ah! You'd have to come up with the closest match between how they displayed in a terminal and HTML hex color codes today. The main stumbling point is that I have no idea how to protect against server-scripting attacks if I put up a PHP program to do this with uploaded ANSI graphic files.
And that's what's going on in my dream-world!
Ω I've gotten quite into manga myself. I never used to be, but my gateway drug finally came along: Deathnote! God, I loved every issue, and devoured the series in a week-long marathon. What an idea, what characters, what story! And then since then I've been searching for another manga with the same flavor, and so far haven't found anything close. My manga tastes run to the exact opposite of Shonen, so DragonBall-Z and Bleach are out. Fullmetal Alchemist so far looks interesting.
What if manga swam back across the pond and culturally combined with independent underground comix?
I hear you inquire, "Wherefore, prithee proud blogger, doth thou make such claim?" Well, see Klein bottles are these mathematical objects that are really hard to grasp and explain. They make sense but don't seem like they do. Kind of like a Möbius strip, which is cool to write because it has a Heavy-Metal umlaut in it.
The economy is on my mind this week, for some screwy reason. The fact that Wall Street this week is melting away like Belloq's face after Indy told him not to look in the Ark is just a passing coincidence. It is also entirely incidental that house values in the USA are currently so low that burglars will break into your house just to leave you their house. And it's a mere whiff of a happenstance that the dollar is getting so weak that it doesn't even make a good snot-rag anymore. No, I go around randomly thinking about the economy all the time.
And thinking about the economy, I chanced upon the assertion that Linux is, in fact, developed by corporations. This time it's being said by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who has been a really nice guy lately so I'll link him the credit. So to which corporations do we owe our gratitude for Linux development? McDonalds and WalMart. No, no, wait, I misread that. To Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Intel, the Linux Foundation (which is a group comprised of a charter involving many companies, itself), Consultant, SGI, MIPS Technologies, Oracle, MontaVista, Google, and Linutronix, to name every corporation with more than a 1% share of the code.
In fact, just a little under 75% of Linux kernel development is corporate-sponsored. Somebody actually makes a paycheck off of it. In what appears to be complete defiance of the laws of capitalist economics, because then they turn around and just give the crazy thing away for free.
Most companies who pay to develop the Linux kernel don't even bother to reap the secondary rewards of good publicity. You don't see the Google homepage advertising this fact, every Intel commercial I've seen doesn't even mention Linux, and every HP ad I've seen shows Windows in the screenshot.
It's almost as if they were participating in a community project to benefit the world at large. At this point, somebody usually interjects, "That's communism! From each according to their ability to each according to their need.", and then does a little Marxist salute and smirks because they're so damn clever.
Yeah, it'd be tempting to say that. After all, communist models which falter in the real world tend to do very well in the virtual electronic world where a good may be reproduced indefinitely without ever running out. Electronic goods tend to be infinitely abundant. The Internet itself is kind of a warping of the ideas of economics, too. Where's the law of supply and demand when it comes to blog posts?
But still, why should these corporations to the grunt work? Because they get something from it. Their motives are, in fact, ruthlessly capitalistic. They reap a benefit that makes the investment a good return. Of course, Red Hat, Novell, and Oracle sell Linux distros and support themselves, so that's obvious from there. IBM sells Linux support, and so do several other companies on the list.
Then you get to Google. They actually run their services on Linux. So in a way, they're reaping direct rewards as well. Several of the other companies which develop Linux also depend on Linux either for their own systems, or as a platform upon which to market products and services. As IBM's senior vice president said, they're recouped their investment in software and system sales. The returns on investment take dozens of other, even more arcane, forms. For instance, one way to be sure your driver works on Linux is to write the dang module yourself.
What else, in classic economic teaching, could express such a model? Um... water utility? Your local water department operates as an allowed monopoly, by consensus of the fact that having seven sets of pipes coming out of each house would really ruin the curb appeal. But that's not a good model. Your neighborhood watch program is a volunteer effort to make your neighborhood safer, but that actually amounts to citizens forming their own anarchic system for self-protection in the face of perceived lack of police coverage. How about public libraries? Taxpayers are perhaps willing to pay for libraries because a better-educated public benefits us all?
That's the closest thing I've thought of to the free software model, but the truth really is that there is no perfect economic model for this. Most of what you'd read in an economics textbook was written before the Information Age. The closest model before that was writing and speech. Talk is cheap.
Code is cheap. But even in writing and speech, there is definitely a producer and a consumer. Those are the two sides of every known business model.
But Klein bottles and Motörhe - ah - Möbius strips only have one side. And that's what Linux, and other Free and Open Source Software products, are. We, the consumers are we, the producers. And we all own it, and we all make it, and we all use it, whether we know it or not.
Yep, more 1600x1200 wallpapers. Get 'em here.
I miss the days when I could just mindlessly slap something together. These days, every project I do has to be this boundary-pushing exploration into new territory, whether it's blogging, graphics, or Flash. It's the kind of period where I'm just determined that it's better to do nothing at all than to do something I've done before.
So this batch of wallpapers shows lots of experimentation. There's cellular automata...
Typography...
And this sketch-looking one...
This last (full-size here) was rendered with POVRay making 3D objects with black-and-white striped textures and some reflection, then running Gimp filters on it of the sort you would use to turn a photo into a sketch, including some warping so the lines aren't so straight. I don't know what kind of wallpaper it makes, but it is definitely my most successful attempt at creating 3D art with the effect of a hand-drawn sketch.
As always, CC-licensed, share 'em, trade 'em, collect the set. Scott Carpenter, fellow geek blogger, has recently had a little career boost when the phone company used one of his CC-licensed images on the cover of the new phone book. Maybe there will be hope for me yet, if and when I develop my own work further.
There's room for a movie with that title. "We ride for Hackalot!" Cue epic journey across hill and dale, following many a wizened oracle squatting by a campfire tantalizing us with half-made-up legends. It exists! I've seen it! The Holy Programming Language! It's right over that mountain, past the Valley of Dead Platforms, through the Forest of Disgruntled Bloggers, into the Maw of the Proprietary Swamps, and out across the Bridge of Design Paradigms.
Hold on, wait a minute. Are we sure it's even out there?
There is no programming language that is without detractors. Take, for instance, PHP. Here's yet another in a long history of musings as to what should be done about it. It is true, PHP sucks.
Python sucks, Ruby sucks, C sucks, Bash sucks. HTML and Javascript and ActionScript and Java suck. Visual Anything sucks, as does Lisp and Haskell and COBOL. We'll never run out of it. Your favorite language sucks too - especially yours! Really, it seems that flaming about languages is an essential part of working in the field. It helps coders' blood pressure or something. If you take a break from coding for a while, you get some distance about it. When you dive back into a project, though, suddenly it hits you just how badly the particular language you're forced to use is lacking. You say, "They all suck, but this one I happen to be working in this week is particularly bad!" Then the project is finished and you get back to being the balanced Zen master again.
You never saw an industry where so many of its practitioners hate so many of their tools. And all the while, there's this nagging voice in the back, asking "Will it ever get better?"
You know what I'm thinking? It won't get better. Everything we've achieved in programming right now is all that will ever stand out in history, and all we have left to do is keep making smaller, faster gadgets. Because programming languages are made up. There is no perfect programming language any more than there is the perfect novel.
Here we are, free to create anything at all. It's easy to make something up. The challenge is to make up something that's really good. You'd think, with over 50 years of research and academic debate, that if it were that simple, we'd have done it by now.
At the end of the day, my philosophy is "Use what's available, get the job done, and then forget about it." Obviously, even if we had the Perfect Programming Language, it would have to make it past a standards committee, dodge a gauntlet of patent claimants, see simultaneous widespread adoption the world over, and survive all attempts to water it down with derivatives. So it would arrive in our hands sullied before the fact.
Even though we make them, when I look around at what everybody else is currently using, I have to conclude that the sum total of chaotic forces that shape programming standards produces an effect very much like haphazard evolution. Just like with living nature, we end up dealing with things as they come up, exactly as if nobody designed them and they just grew up in a field.
Ahoy there, my mateys! 'Tis the time to plunder baubles of randomness from the searchbag, which be the list o' terms o' searchin' that are charted by me bloggin' software. Here, I be lookin' fer the telltale signs of explorers who docked at my port o' call lookin' fer booty which wasn't stocked here, though the search engines marked the 'X' over my reef. And o' course, speakin' in the dialect o' sea dogs in observance o' th' day.
geek insult - 'Tis not me custom to be postin' salty remarks against landlubbers. However, me matey Rea Maor has collected a catalog o' terms which the elite regularly hurl at the salt o' th' Earth, guaranteed to arm yer cannons aginst the bilge-suckin' rats who plague ye.
is ubuntu bad for linux? - Aaaargh, no, ye stalwart seeker o' wisdom, yer got th' wrong idear. Ubuntu is a beckoning trade route for young salts expectin' to hoist sail for th' exotic ports o' Linux. It just isn't the rum o' choice for experienced old salts o' Linux, if ye ken my meanin'.
sudo code for mowing the lawn - Landlubber pursuits don't interest us buccaneers, and they don't draw the spyglass o' computer captains too often, neither. Ye probably got th' idea from the XKCD comic o' the mate who inspires his lass t' fix 'im some grub, but thar be no equivalent. Try hidin' his bottle o' rum in th' weeds, and when they grow too tall he'll have to trim 'em back to find it!
CAN WE HACK INTO WINDOWS MACHINE WITH LINUX OS - In the first place, ye scallywag, yellin' yer queries to Google don't make it troll the seas at any faster knots. She cares not what case ye phrase yer speech. And in the main point, Linux indeed be a shipshape man-o-war to plunder th' seas with, and Windows be an especially weak schooner prone to sink to Davy Jones' Locker wit' a mere shot across her bow. But if yer reduced to askin' such daft things of Internet oracles, might I suggest that the pirate life not be fer ye? Ye needs able-bodied seamen on yer crew afore ye take to settin' sail. Sure as ye try yer first pillage, ye'll be arrested and hung from a yardarm by th' first light o' dawn!
attractive geek girl scifi convention - Sure 'n' blimey, ye may find a fair bonny lass or two at a meetin' o' fans fer fantastic tales, but by what trickery do ye propose to catch their eye? They'll be in costume so ye can't reckon them from the mates, unless they be obvious lasses and then she'll be stowin' with a sailor already. Ye'll have smoother sailin' scoutin' fer wenches at th' tavern.
ascii banner kevin sucks - Ye be havin' a quarrel with a mate named 'Kevin', eh? Perhaps the captain o' Digg.com? Aye, that port is not favorable to anchor me own galleon, either. Here be an elegant parchment scroll upon which to express yer disfavor with the scurvy dog...
______________________________________________________ /\ \ \_| _ __ _ _ | | | |/ / (_) | | | | | ' / _____ ___ _ __ ___ _ _ ___| | _____ | | | < / _ \ \ / / | '_ \ / __| | | |/ __| |/ / __| | | | . \ __/\ V /| | | | | \__ \ |_| | (__| <\__ \ | | |_|\_\___| \_/ |_|_| |_| |___/\__,_|\___|_|\_\___/ | | | | | | _________________________________________________|_ \_/___________________________________________________/
Take note, 'tis not my quarrel, however.
'Til next time, me mateys, keep yer sails filled!
Ah, it's another post about UI Aesthetics! Quick, let's everybody get in line to kiss up to Apple and Microsoft for giving us shiny shiny pretty. And then we'll find a couple of stray dogs and name them "Linux" and "BSD" and then we can kick them until they cower, for not having as much shiny shiny pretty.
Yeah, sure, I like pretty UI as much as anybody else. Right here at my desktop guide, I show each desktop interface dolled up to its most charming. I even got some good looks out of TWM, for the luvva Mike! I draw a whole gallery of wallpapers, just because I like pretty, too. Also, because I don't know how to do more important things. Yet.
But in the whole UI-debate, there's a point many people are missing out on.
All computers have a finite amount of resources. All of them.
Got that? This applies to every digital device from your watch to the LHC at CERN and IBM's Blue Gene. All computers have an upper limit to how much processing per time unit they can do. If this limit did not exist, encryption would not work because you could brute-force any algorithm instantly. So, we're all on the same page regarding how computers are science and not magic, right?
So: Given finite cycles, you can either have those cycles devoted to drawing pretty pictures on the screen, or have every last cycle devoted to mofo almighty-god power.
The "ugly" programs (and the Linux command line) are for power users. Windows, Mac, and the pretty Linux desktops of Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, and Compiz are for pretty users. You want a slick UI that makes you feel like you're in a science fiction movie? Have at it.
But I am never happy with how fast my computer can compute. If my program compiles in five seconds with a shiny desktop, then I want it to compile in three seconds with an ugly desktop. If my ray-traced scene renders in five hours with a shiny desktop, then I want it to render in four hours with an ugly desktop. By the way, that ray-tracing is not facetious; the scenes that win the IRTC take *two months* to finish, according to the artist. For a freaking picture!
How about your browsing experience? This page probably loaded in a second or two for you on DSL, and I don't even want to think about dial-up. For DSL, that's two seconds wasted, incrementally added together for every page you visit. It should also be reading itself out loud to blind users, translating itself automatically into every written language for everyone who looks at it in any locale, converting its dimensions automatically for every device anyone might view it on from a PDA to a movie theater screen, and rendering exactly the same in every single browser. It should also be 100% secure, forever.
We don't have that. We're so far away from that, that's it's practically a miracle that you're just able to read this right now.
Same thing from the design perspective. I want programmer hours to go towards making the program rock-solid and powerful, then they can worry about the coat of paint. Ugly programs that run fast and correctly get a B grade from me. Beautiful programs that run fast and correctly get an A. Beautiful programs that run like shit get an F.
Think of all the frontiers that computers have yet to conquer.
Come to think of it... The hell with pretty user interfaces! We shouldn't be wasting our time! Save it for the Jetsons Age; right now we're still in the Stone Age. This week only marks the 50th birthday of the integrated circuit - the foundation for what we know as computers today - counting from the first demonstrated working model on September 12, 1958. Figuring 6000 years of recorded history, the integrated circuit has been with us for 0.0083 of it. We're still banging rocks together, and instead of getting with it and inventing the hammer, we're arguing about what color to paint the rocks.
Computers could be solving 100 times the problems they solve right now, if only they were more powerful. We could be saving millions of lives with more powerful computers.
But we can't do that. We all have to waste time making everything pretty, or people bitch.
I while ago when I was talking about the San Francisco rogue admin story, I mentioned that IT workers and upper management are often at odds in their world-view and that this seemed to be coloring the accuser's attitudes towards their former employee in that case. Now comes a Slashdot story asking about that same Tech vs Business front.
Briefly, managers and techies just don't seem to see eye to eye very much in the business world. Note those first two comments on the Slashdot thread, where they say it for me:
"I've found this to be true in almost every company that I've worked for. tech workers are looked down upon, because people only ever come to us when things go badly..."
...and...
"I've often considered tech to be like plumbing. The users of both have no idea how it works, basic knowledge of how to use it, and only care when it stops working. Users expect it to work like magic all the time..."
And of course, the issue begs comparison to the famous Dilbert comic strip. It's the same old story over and over again: The tale of the clueless pointy-haired boss who nevertheless inexplicably manages to maintain his position as head of a technology-based company, and the smart, savvy engineers who laugh up their sleeves at his incompetence. Things just go on that way.
One thing to point out, is that I don't entirely blame the manager. Geeks, too, are short-sighted in several ways. This is why I freelance. I'm great at the technical stuff. But the thought of filling out paperwork for incorporating a business looks like mindless tedium to me, I'd hate to be in a position to hire and fire employees, and discussions of marketing makes my eyelids heavy. I'd rather be at my desk coding up some wonderful engineering solution, where I can then hand it off to the boss who magically turns the technology into money and pays me a share.
So you see, it's the same problem on both sides of the fence; business is magic to an IT worker, computers are magic to a business manager. Engineers speak of MBA degrees in sneering tones and disdain wearing a suit and tie and having a power lunch. But that stuff is science to the business manager. We're all muggles to some kind of wizard.
For my part, I make every effort to explain technology clearly to those who didn't understand it before. That's the biggest motivation for me to maintain this site; explaining Free and Open Source Software to the masses and helping beginners get more savvy with tech, at the same time helping slightly more advanced techies learn a bit more.
It's taking longer than I thought it would.
One person at a time. That's our only choice. Since I quit working in cubicle land and started working online, I've found it immensely easier to explain technical issues to clients. Face-to-face, all you can do is talk. Over a network, you can slap together a whole presentation, with diagrams and images and links to citations online. Frequently, I've had to pause a job and do just that for clients. The clients appreciate it immensely, because I can patiently explain anything as long as I know where the other person's starting point is. It helps to have writing skills and broad general knowledge, so you can talk about a subject without sounding like a Harvard professor and you also know a few subjects outside your field so you can pull up a handy analogy.
When geeks get exasperated and run out of patience, it isn't with the user. It may seem that way, but it's actually the fact that for so many people out there, the only place to start is square one.
Technology education sucks. Horribly!
Look at how other disciplines are handled in school: you're not expected to be a chef, but at least you get a home-ec class where you learn how to bake a sheet of brownies without burning the house down. You're not expected to be a race-car driver, but everybody gets enough drivers-ed to pass a license test. To get back to business, school is chock full of business education. You get story problems about lemonade stands, you learn how to compile statistics into a graph in math, a life skills course teaches you the basics of handling credit cards and checking accounts, and you're taught how to write a business letter in English class.
Cooking, driving, and holding down a job. Basic skills that you need in order to function as an adult in society. Yet here we have the Information Age upon us, where every person will be expected to deal with computers at some level or another all their lives. Where's the comp-ed courses at the high school level?
That's where you hear all the abuse hurled on "newbs" comes from. Computer professionals get sick and tired of having to fill in for all those comp-ed courses that the educational system didn't provide. When they come off all superior and condescending, well, that's them being human.
It's slowly getting better. I review my own kid's school activities, and I must say I'm impressed with how technology is at least brought into the classroom to teach other subjects. The students might play an educational game or have a class lecture delivered with notebook computer on every desk to aid in presenting the lesson. There is even the occasional dip into how computers work, along the way to illustrating a point about logic or science. The next generation of students might accidentally pick up a few computer skills by sheer osmosis, at least.
So there is hope for the next generation. But even if we get this situation fixed, it says dark things about our culture that it took so long to fix it.
.-"""-.
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I have to conclude that the best way to make an idiot of yourself in public, besides actually getting naked and setting yourself on fire, is to become a tech blogger. The world of computing technology news is 90% made-up, with everything being rumors, vaporware, over-reactions, over-corrections to over-reactions, FUD, speculation, and completely blind guessing. And of course, as a blogger masochistically bent on self-humiliation, you will have endless opportunity to post first and think later.
Witness the train wreck that is the reporting of the release of Blogger Chrome. Now, when I saw the news, I checked it out, downloaded the Windows version and tried to run it on Wine (failed), then investigated for the Linux version (fail). Then I shrugged and figured I'd wait until I actually had something to say about it before blogging about it. For those of you wondering why I don't post more often, this is why. For every day that I don't post, there's a time when I could have said something stupid but kept my mouth shut instead.
But here comes fun...
"Note: There is no working Chromium-based browser on Linux. Although many Chromium submodules build under Linux and a few unit tests pass, all that runs is a command-line 'all tests pass' executable."
Sweet. There's a source code release for Linux, but it's busted. So you can't run it native on Linux, but you also can't complain that there's no Linux version. And the point of this would be? By the way, Google apologetically displays a message if you go to get the Linux version of Chrome, with an offer to submit an email address so you'll get notified immediately as soon as a Linux port is produced. You know, in case the entire Internet goes black and 38,000 tech bloggers suddenly don't report the news for them.
One of many sites chewing Google out for not making the Linux version yet.
"If Google likes open source so much, it could at least let the most important open source operating system (which the open source crowd pretty much likes, right?) have a beta version to test on their preferred platform…"
See, I could go along with that if you were talking about Google Sketch-Up. The market for 3D/CAD graphics tools on Linux is thin. But how many web browsers does Linux have? Like ten million, that's how many. How many Linux users would actually switch from Firefox, were a Google Chrome for Linux be made available today? None. We would download it, blog-review it, and delete it in three days. On the Windows platform, Internet Exploder still has the majority, and that's the important thing is to kill IE. I'll settle for no Linux version if it meant that Chrome replaces IE 100%. In fact, speaking as a website maintainer, I'd part with a couple of minor organs if anything replaced IE 100%.
Did everybody have fun panicking about the EULA before Google retracted it?
"Google owns everything you publish and create while using Chrome. Ah-whaaa?"
Of course, the EULA OF Death got retracted hours later. How ADHD do you have to be to think (a) this wasn't a mistake, and (b) this was enforceable? By definition, every piece of copyrighted content that any webmaster uploads anywhere would become Google property. Duh, they copy-pasted the EULA from something relating to their search indexing, where it makes a lot more sense because webmasters are always trying to sue them for showing thumbnails of their precious Photoslop disasters in search results pages.
"Yet, for today at least, this is still vaporware with zero users."
Written back on the first of September (Labor day). Because it just simply would not do to wait like a whole day to get your hands on it. Oh, and while we're there, how do you "accidentally leak" a 38-page comic book online? Do you just fall out of bed with a pen in your hand and whoops, you drew a comic book, then feed it into the FAX machine with the number punched in to the office, while thinking it's a shredder? Because nobody draws a comic book with the intention of showing it to anyone. Oh, and you have to guess the pages are "30-plus-page" because you just couldn't bother to find out it was 38 pages? That's the investigative reporting we've come to expect from the crack team of experts on the web.
Oh, where is all this pollution in the tech blogosphere coming from? Let me follow the trail of sewage upstream, until I discover...
"Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer"
I should have known. Michael Arrington, the Pied Piper of Stupid. Whenever somebody around you says something that's incredibly brain-damaged, just assume they're copying TechCrunch - or "SpecHunch" as I like to call them. Yes, go read it yourself, M.A. actually has web browsers confused with operating systems. He's going to deny it later, he's going to backpedal like a sunnuvagun and go 'no I really mean something else', but there's the words: "While it seems that Chrome is aimed at IE and Firefox, the target is really Windows." When even my AOL-using mother-in-law says, "What the heck is he smoking?", you know he's just said something infinitely dumb. And SpecHunch is where news agencies like Reuters get their info. Cthulhu help us all.
"I will demonstrate that Chrome [based on what we are allowed to know] puts strain on the Designer and Developer communities, is not innovative (save for one feature), and copies ideas liberally from Google's worst enemy."
tied with
"My greatest problem with the cartoon strip is that while it's supposed to explain how Chrome works, it really explains how all major browsers work, implying that these features were invented for Chrome alone."
It's pretty tough to pick out the single stupidest thing on this page. It's like trying to decide which politician is the most corrupt. OSNews' post is sneaky - it sounds intelligent at first, then starts making bizarre claims, then wanders into increasingly stupider statements. You're just about to wonder at what point the LSD tabs kicked in when, boom, the author starts evangelizing for Internet Explorer 8. Oh, that explains it. Shill.
Actually, I have to conclude that most tech bloggers just don't care a thin damn. They're in it for the paycheck alone; they put their brains on auto-pilot and never take their eyes off the clock until their fingers quit moving on the keyboard, which signifies that it's time to hit the bar. After all, it's not like anybody out there actually reads this crap anyway, right? The boss said "write something about Chrome so we get search hits for it." and lo, much was written.
See you next Goomor.
PS For somebody who actually had intelligent things to say about Chrome, check out Eric's Binary-World review. There, Chrome has been reviewed.
DrawDemon, down there in the sidebar to your right. As if yesterday's demo weren't pointless enough, I took the same idea and ran with it to produce the next step. This time, in addition to mousing over the black square to draw and clicking to clear it, you hit "L" (on the keyboard... keep up with me) to turn Lines on and off, "C" for Circles, and "S" for Squares.
Thanks again to SWFTools. It's going to save the world.
It makes pictures. Like 
There's no way to save images directly. Your screenshot program is your friend.
Get the source code here, GPL licensed. Turn it loose!
I have no idea what I'm doing, but it's making things that keep me occupied. This is KBilly's Super Sounds of the Seventies Weekend.
I'm sorry to break this to you, but your website sucks. You know why? Because you don't have Penguin Pete writing for you!
Don't let your copy succumb to stale cliches, exhausted metaphors, contrived alliteration, awkward similes, and a hash of managerial buzzwords. From a few posts of linkbait to a full 50,000-word eBook, an injection of verbiage from my keyboard will breathe new life into your online business and bring the web audience running. Post a private auction for me on Rent-A-Coder , and mention that you followed here from my site so I know to give you special consideration. No SEO-keyword cranks or spamblogs, please!
NOTE: I am also open to volunteer work for FOSS and projects related to computing freedom, as time and motivation permits. For work of this nature, contact me through:
