10 Sep 2006
I just tried Wine again for the first time in about twelve months (last attempt was with eTax, useless IE-dependent thing that it is, last year. After a bit of configging it worked but couldn’t submit because of that dependency… it saved a data file I could submit with Windows, though) and am astounded.
After zero-config, installers work magically, 3d engines function, and everything is generally incredible. I read this on someone’s blog earlier today: “with that I was able to install the latest Wine (0.9.18 at the time of this writing). This comes with better support for HL2 and WoW.” and consequently was afraid the version in non-backports Ubuntu would be ancient, etcetera, and generally useless.
No, the author is correct in saying “better support” — there is intrinsically fantastic support for pretty much everything. It’s incredible. Now I’ve just got to get some time in which to play various games. Linux, apparently, is no longer a barrier to entry, and Loki Games (R.I.P.) would face an ever-diminishing challenge as compatability layers keep growing in their sheer brilliance.
I’ve yet to try productivity applications, but am content with having tentatively embraced the gamer side of geek for one weekend. I’d love to give Dreamweaver a whirl, but am unlikely to be doing enough development work to justify it for the next couple of months. MS Office would be a pleasant addition to the repertoire, though OpenOffice is excellent for most applications. I’d never go back to using Word for preparing real documents, but perhaps for things requiring collaboration/versioning it’s the best choice. I’d probably get MS Office for creating Powerpoint templates/editing other people’s work before I had any real need for it myself, so these things are still pretty unnecessary. It’s just fantastic to think that it is, all of a sudden, a possibility.
The irony of all this is that I’m waxing lyrical about closed-source apps when the actual intent of this post is to extoll the brilliance of F/OSS’s progress. Purists would argue otherwise… but they’re wrong :-)
08 Sep 2006
Good food and even better steak knives. The knives are spectacular. Some fun was had stabbing lambs but we shortly desisted upon realising how much noise we were making as the knives sailed through the flesh and loudly collided with the plate beneath. Scared yet? ;-) I like knives :-)
05 Sep 2006
Continuing in the spirit of procrastination, I know, but I couldn’t help noticing all the awesome things ABC (that is, Australian taxpayer-funded TV/media network… nothing to do with American network of same name) are doing with their various brands. The most stand-out example in this sense, of course, is their tech-saavied’up youth/new-fandangle-embracing market service, Triple J. But they’re doing funky podcast stuff with the rest of their network, too. Anyway, JTV is exciting and cool. ABC’s lawyers must be the kindest, most understanding souls on the planet. And/or Triple J’s ‘casters are universally sensitive to copyrighted materials and all quite sedate and non-rebellious in a corporately rebellious sense. One of the two groups must be great team players, at any rate. Alternatively, we’ve got some awesome loophole in our copyright law/acts relevant to a national broadcaster absolving them of all fiscal responsibilities. But then there’s the question of why there’s no production music in live segments… and I don’t accept lack of quality on-air/production talent as an excuse, because that’s just not true. Certainly the talent is quite different from that on the commercial nets, but that just means the presenters are allowed to have an opinion and a brain much of the time. Maybe proximity-to-Inner-West has been affecting my tastes somewhat, but the dial (or, in this case, Rhythmbox’s stream) is getting stuck here more often of late.
Maybe we’re finally getting citizen media saavy enough to appreciate what they’ve been doing for the last however many years as finally ‘cool’. Which kinda ties into the idea of positive freedom in a Renaissance sense. But that has nothing (or little) to do with adolescent emotional development, even if it’s relevant for another pres due next Tuesday. So I’ll stress about that later on =)
