Category Archives: Reviews

Windows 8 and all that.

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The first time I was upset about an operating-system upgrade was in 1984. PRIMOS had a minor version upgrade to 19.2 and whilst I had retrospectively complained about the change from 18 to 19, that didn’t actually affect me. This change from 19.0 to 19.2 was a disaster because things I had written and hacks I had come up with no longer worked properly. I was cross and in my head I was right and they were wrong. I was also a 16 year old boy at a technical college in Accrington and I doubt very much that PRIME cared about what I thought.

A few years later, this time at University, I was upset about the major VMS 5 release. I hated it. Everything changed, old things didn’t work – What were they doing! Didn’t they listen to their users at all? Didn’t they care what I thought? Apparently no. Digital cared little for the thoughts of a 20 year lad at a redbrick university in Leeds.

By 2002 I was somewhat more (self?)important. I was one of the most influential people in the VMS World of the European user-group DECUS  and also closely involved with the RSX/PDP-11 group. Digital would finally listen to what I said!  In my dreams… Course they wouldn’t. Not only did nothing we ever say to them influence anything they did they also sent my company that sold legacy PDP11-73s bust by releasing the 11-83 with zero warning to the people who should have known first.

And now Microsoft. I started with Windows 1 and every upgrade seemed much better until the day that Windows 3.11 changed to Windows 95 which in my mind was the biggest disaster Microsoft ever made – I was wrong of course because eventually out of that came NT4 and then Vista, the pinnacle of Windows Operating Systems (listen, I am right on this one, and you are wrong, ok?). The latest OS Windows 8 has been released to an apparent barrage of hatred and revulsion from the unwashed masses. But why?

One thing I have learned in the last 30 years is that stopping progress is pretty pointless, however much my ego may say I am right I have to admit that in the long term I rarely am. PRIMOS turned into a pretty good operating system without my help. VMS, surprisingly, went from strength to strength and retired happy and well respected and I have tried using Windows 3.11 and Netscape 1.2 recently but frankly, I have to admit that they are a bit shit compared to what they turned into. Nostalgia is fun and all that, but progress can be pretty cool too.

With all that in mind I was wondering about the backlash about Windows 8. There is no point reading articles by journalists because they know bugger-all – The Doctor Dobbs types of the 70s and 80s have long gone and the modern IT journalist graduated writing-school and makes a living writing about things they know very little about and have no experience of at all. I have been paid to work with Windows since 1986, I have deployed and built literally millions of Windows based systems and I’d like to think I know a little bit more about it than they do.

Is Windows 8 evil? It’s not very intuitive to us old mouse and keyboard users – The start menu button is missing but then again, when they moved from 3.11 to 95 they removed the start-group. This put me off for a while and I refused to change from 7 to 8 until I was forced to by hardware issues – Now I am actually starting to quite like it. If you actually use Windows 8 as an oldy-timey Keyboard user for a while, you will discover that typing things like “programs a…” into the vile new menu pops up “Programs and Features” much faster than the old start-menu ever did. People who are installing start-menu tools like Start8 are actually crippling their Windows 8 and then complaining about it being crap. They are not even giving it a chance.  There are a whole raft of keyboard shortcuts to make things really quick for keyboard users and if you can be bothered to spend 20 minutes learning them they make life pretty good. The changes in 8.1 allow us luddites (and people without touch screens) to switch back to a desktop interface semi-permanently which is a nice thing.

The journalists are telling us that nobody wants this new interface and why should MS force people to change their work habits to suit a new OS – Well maybe they don’t want it this year, but when people want it next year or the year after then where would MS be unless they got us used to it in the first place? They are meant to be an innovation company not a legacy company. Sales are bad, that’s obvious from the figures but are sales really just bad because the manufacturers are listening to the endless drivel on the Internet from people who just complain about everything anyway and journalists who realise that there is no story in saying “Actually… Windows 8 aint that bad”.

Well – Actually… Windows 8 aint that bad.

Doctor Steaming Pile of Turd

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It has finally happened. The gnomes on the Internet and I agree on something; namely that the last two Doctor Who episodes (The Pandorica Opens and Big Bang) were one of the biggest pile of steaming turdburgers ever created for television. Despite having legions of Pepperpot-Daleks, Cybermen, limp-wristed Romulans, Rhino Creatures, Flying Cubes, Stonehenge, Magical Time Travelling Bracelets, an exploding Tardis and probably hundreds more things that I missed; Steven Moffat, once one of British children’s TV’s best writers back in his more drunken days, managed to create something that was ludicrous, pointless, confusing and utterly boring in more or less equal measures. Come on Steven. You wrote Press Gang and Coupling. Even Chalk had a few good moments. What’s happened?

The Death of Doctor Who

Now the Internet Gnomes are mostly teenagers who have very little concept of what Doctor Who used to be so I can forgive them for expecting low standards. They’ll acknowledge that there was a show before the 2005 pantomime remake but they probably haven’t actually watched any episoses. I mean hell it’s been going nearly 50 years now, that’s a lot to watch and fuck man! Some of them are in Black and White; didn’t people know how to encode AVIs properly in those days? Having said that, even the most die-hard fans of the new drivel will have trouble justifying a reason to look forward to the Christmas episode except maybe in the vague hope that the Doctor will finally die. We have hope yet! Remember Lynda Day? That’s all I have to say!

It’s not even that I don’t like Matt Smith as The Doctor; I do. I would go as far as saying that he’s pretty similar to Tom Baker in many ways and I’d class that as a compliment. With some good writing, he’d be great. For one single moment in Big Bang I had hope. He said something like “Do you really think the life of one girl is more important than the future of everything?” – Hell no! That’s the Doctor we know and love! Welcome back Hartnell and Troughton. Halleluiah! Finally us humans are back to being nothing much better than shaved apes. Unfortunately, it seems he was only joking; a brief moment of teasing taunting fantasy for those of us who remember a proper Doctor. Obviously the life of one human girl is more important than the whole of … Well whatever the fuck was going on.

It’s a terrible ending to a terrible show. Russell T. “If you can’t write it Camp, it’s not worth writing” Davies started it by dragging in his old mate David Tennant. Now Tennant isn’t a bad actor as such but he’s no Doctor Who. The whole thing is akin to getting Daniel “Harry Potter” Radcliffe to play James Bond. Talking of Harry Potter, what’s with all the new gadgets? Time travelling wristbands, notepads that show magical identity badges, every flavour jelly-beans, telephones that cross time and space and a Sonic Screwdriver that doubles as a magic wand when it is waved and the spell “deus ex machina” is muttered. One of the major plot-devices about Doctor Who was that a lot was unexplained but the pantomime version seems obsessive about explaining everything. There was an amusing part in the Matt Smith series when one of the ever-present C-List British TV celebrities they roll in said “Oh you are that Doctor”. Yep, he is indeed just that Doctor.

Back in the olden days of Doctor Who the format was pretty solid. Each story was 4 or 5 parts, with a cliff-hanger between the middle episodes and with the exception of John Pertwee’s exile years, they were very rarely set on Earth. It’s tempting to use this entry to have a dig at Americans and say that the new one hour neatly wrapped shows are made for export to the US where attention spans are shorter but this doesn’t really fly. American television is getting a lot more sophisticated than this these days and it seems to be the British who are falling well behind by adopting this somewhat tedious format. As for the writing – Well yea, all I can say is that even the old Tannith Lee episodes were better than any since Tennant became The Doctor. There were a few good Eccleston episodes but then we had false hopes once, for a short time.

Another thing I am curious about is why, when there is the whole of time and space to zip around in; does The Doctor insist on coming back to Earth. More specifically, Britain – In fact more specifically again, London or Wales in the early 21st Century. It’s not like the BBC is short of money for this series; each episode must cost more to make than than one of the older whole seasons. The whole thing seems kind of akin to Star Trek or Blakes 7 spending their entire time travelling back in time to 20th Century Earth.  And what’s with his obsession with Human assistants? I don’t want weedy and somewhat useless British girls, I want half naked primitive girls, in skimpy leather loincloths who carry big knives and gut the baddies when nobody is watching. I’d say I want metal dogs with guns in their nose too; but I don’t. I can live without that. The show has two spinoffs; Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures – Let them deal with Earth in the 20th Century since that’s where they are set. It’s boring… Ok! I want Robots of Death, I want Yetis in space, I want Daleks on Sarko, I want The Doctor shagging green aliens. On second thoughts no; I have seen Casanova, I am not sure I want to see any more Russell T Davis sex-scenes.

I WANT SPACEMEN – IN SPACE AND IN THE FUTURE – DAMMIT!

(Oh, and I want Lynda Day back please.)

The Curious Case of Canadian Marmite.

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As many of you may know, I am something of a Marmite addict. If you don’t know what Marmite is there are plenty of references on the Internet and if you are an Antipodean who is already looking for the comment box so you can tell me that Vegemite is better than Marmite then don’t, I am not talking about Australian Marmite which is completely different than British Marmite so the chances are high that you have never actually tasted proper Marmite otherwise you wouldn’t be talking such nonsense.

Anyway, all that aside, I had been convinced that the Marmite you can buy in Canada, although it is made by the same company and in the same packaging is watered down. It’s the wrong colour for a start. Canadian Marmite looks like diarrhoea and doesn’t have the translucent inner glow of British Marmite. I thought I was going mad, why would there be a difference? Tonight, I came across some old packages of British Marmite I had nicked from a hotel in Norwich in 2003 so I finally had a comparison.

Firstly… Hotel packets of British Marmite:

marmite0

(Yes, I know the sell-by date is 2005, we will ignore that. It’s not like Marmite changes over time).

Now Canadian Marmite:

marmite1

(You can tell it’s Canadian, it has English and French labels, so no cheating here).

Now some anaemic toast:

marmite2

(Yeach, do people really eat toast this colour?)

And now, the Marmite on a knife:

marmite3

I may as well have stopped here really – It’s obvious that they are completely different. In the interests of Science, however…

The Marmite on toast:

marmite4

I have no idea WHY Canadian Marmite is so completely different. It costs pretty much the same in Canada as it does in Britain. It doesn’t taste bad, it’s just a little weaker and you have to spread a lot more; plus there is that whole bodily fluid thing going on with it. People who may claim that the 2003 Marmite is blacker because it is old, well you will just have to trust me. I could have used the British Champagne Marmite which is just as black but that wouldn’t have been like-for-like.

There is no conclusion to this. I just figured that rather than waste a posting ranting about Google I may as well expose this curious Marmite Conspiracy.

Let’s Face it…

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I was going to be nice to Google today. Really, I was – I started out thinking “Wow, for the first time ever, I will have to write a weblog entry and be 100% nice about Google” – As the 5 people who read my weblog will know, this isn’t normal. I don’t like Google, I make no secret of it generally but sometimes, there is the rare good thing.

So let’s pretend for a moment that Google isn’t a great encompassing blob of an alien life form and it is in fact different organisations some of which I can be nice about and let’s ponder Picasa.

I have been using Picasa from the start – I don’t know why, it’s not very popular to use Picasa, especially for somebody who doesn’t like Google. I should probably be using Flickr or Deviantart like all the cool kids do but I like Picasa desktop and I like the way it talks to Picasa Web Albums and I like the way Picasa Web Albums are nice and easy to use. But there is more.

Firstly, my Picasa crashed a few weeks ago. I was not happy, I use my Picasa a lot on my laptop for trying to keep tabs on what photos I have on here that I haven’t moved to the Desktop and the huge photo archive I have. Every time I loaded it, it crashed and told me to send a crash report – As long as I didn’t hit “OK” it would carry on working so that was good but I submitted a crash report anyway.  I wasn’t expecting anything, I submit Microsoft crash reports on a weekly basis and have never had any feedback at all but apparently the Picasa team actually read theirs. and a nice chap called Fernando Corrado asked me to test a new version which promptly crashed too. Eventually after 2 days of trying new versions and tweaking things the Picasa people discovered I had a screwed up installation of Quicktime that was causing some previews to die and created a fix. My Picasa now works properly again and it is nice to see such a quick response for what is really, free software.

Anyway, armed with a working Picasa and being generally impressed so far with the new face recognition, I decided to let Picasa run riot over my desktop.  I started it about 48 hours ago now and it claims to be 14% of the way through recognising faces (which is odd because 4 hours ago I restarted it and it claimed to be 21% of the way through).

It is sloooowly indexing 3 terabytes of disk on a 3.5ghz Pentium and has found just under 5,100 folders full of photos. It has found over 1,500 photos of me now ranging over 25 years, some of which have me wearing glasses, funny hats and in one, a Pippi Longstocking wig and a diamond fairy tiara (Hey I get bored in Wal*Mart sometimes). Every time I look at it, it has dug up more and more obscure photos of people with terrifying accuracy and it is still going strong. It also seems quite good at sharing the facial information (via my Gmail account I assume) between my laptop and the Desktop. I am deliberately avoiding asking what Google will do with the huge amount of data I am giving it but I am pretty sure now Google could track me pretty well with its hidden spy cameras since it even recognised me in my tinfoil helmet. Damn.

We are no longer safe!
(Why wouldn’t Picasa let me link that from my Picasa album? Weird)

I can’t find much wrong with it – There are some pretty useless filters in it (why would I want to find all purple photos, or all orange photos?) and some seemingly useful filters missing. One really useful thing would be for it to be able to detect naked photos  (ok, let’s call it a porn filter). There are very few good tools for detecting porn by flesh percentage and *ah hem* “body features” on Windows – Hyperdyne’s Snitch and Media Detective are the only two I can think of and they cost more than I paid for my copy of Vista. It is a feature many people need and want so go on Google, add it please?I suspect all the tools are in there, although please… It will freak me out if you start being able to identify people without faces, that is going a little too far ok?

And now for the downside. Don’t worry Picasa, this isn’t about you, I have nothing but praise for you today and this weblog entry would have stopped here if I hadn’t needed to register a Gizmo5 account for Jess today.

I merrily browsed to http://gizmo5.com only to be redirected to http://www.google.com/gizmo5/ and told:

Gizmo5 Has Been Acquired by Google
New user signup has been suspended and will return when we re-launch.
To receive information about the re-launch please enter your email address.

This is not useful… I needed a Gizmo5 account today and now Google own it I assume that the useful “Forward to Skype” feature will end up broken since Skype are in the business of selling Skypein numbers and won’t want Google Voice numbers supplying this for free. I assume it will also create a mess because Google Voice is only available in the US and Gizmo was available everywhere. Plus of course, it’s a pain since I wanted an account today dammit! Grrrrr.

On the plus side, this means I didn’t have to write a Weblog entry that was full of praise for The Evil Empire.  Got to take some good out of everything I guess.

(I also wonder why WordPress wouldn’t allow me to have that last line in a paragraph by itself… This thing has a mind of its own I swear)

Hail to the TV.

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I watched Battlestar Galactica a few days ago and that is another 40 minutes of my life that I want back please. Nothing happened, well except Starbuck dying but no doubt they will force her back on us as a Cylon or something so we won’t get rid of constant whiney misery PMT girl in the near future. She started off cute, quirky and amusing, but then so did most people in that show.

When it came out, I remember saying it was the best thing to come out of the US for years. And it really was. It was well made, well plotted, well acted, well shot and an improvement on the original. The problem is when they ran out of the original 80’s story to mirror it just stopped and died. Now it is utter boring dross. Just you wait, we will end up with robot dogs, kids with the most annoying American accent in the universe and the invisible Battlestar and fleet hovering above earth for a whole finally fated season one day.
Prison Break has really improved again, it had a lull at the start of season 2 but that seems to have mostly gone away; though I can’t really see how it can carry on for much longer with all the amusing side characters dead now.

Heroes seems to have stayed good, but then it’s still only on its first season so that’s to be hoped really. Mind you, in 3 seasons I may stop finding Hiro charmingly amusing and switch to annoying as fuck.

LOST (interest) goes on and on and on and unfortunately most of them seem to be immortal. I wonder if the actual actors will die of old age before the series ends.

Boston Legal is consistently brilliant, superb and wonderful. It just gets better and better. I want Shatner and Spader as my weird old gay uncles that nobody else in the family talks to.

Gilmore Girls is… Well the same as ever, nothing has really happened at all in 7 years and I like it that way. One small problem is that every time I see Lorelei I keep thinking of her yelling “FUCK ME SANTA!” whilst being shagged in a car by Billy Bob but then, that makes makes me giggle so it’s all good. Kirk is my hero and I fancy Paris still; so Gilmore Girls is ok by me still.

Veronica Mars is good mind and eye candy and she’s still cuter than most of the others. Eat your heart out Buffy. I used to like it a lot more but it does seem to have gotten a little boring, but mostly still fun.

NCIS is NCIS – I like it, they seem to keep trying to introduce long term plots but failing miserably but that doesn’t hurt it. It’s fine as a whole load of mostly standalone episodes to me. Mind you, I am biased, I think Bellasario is generally wonderful anyway, unless of course he still has anything to do with the new Battlestar Galactica in which case he should be shot.

Dexter was great, but it didn’t last very long. I am told it’s coming back but I bet they will find some way to spoil it.

House is consistently good, though getting a bit convoluted. I am glad that stuff with the police guy is over though, yawn!

Stargate SG1 is just ridiculous, but it’s about to die anyway and so it’s allowed. Stargate Atlantis is better than SG1 but still, ditto. It’s not quite completely lost the plot yet like SG1 has but I am sure it will. It’s kind of a shame they killed off the Scottish guy just to have an impact; given that he was one of the only good actors in it.

Ugly Betty, apart from not having a single ugly person in it, is still amusing me. Unfortunately most of that show’s entertainment comes from the gay nephew. Him, Paris, Abby and Kirk need to get a show of their own. Maybe something based on Charlie’s Angels.

Finally, My Name is Earl somehow has managed to stay original despite having played the same story about 40 times now. I don’t know how it does it but I like it anyway.

That is Michael’s summary of American Telly at the moment. I know you don’t care less anyway but it’s my weblog and I will post what I want.

Tesco Finest Moussaka

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I am starting to agree with Robin (the chappie who reduces food at my local Sainsburys) that the major difference between Tesco and Sainsburys normal foods and their Finest, or Taste The Difference ones is that the more expensive ones simply have less salt in them.

With half a tonne of salt added to it, Tesco Finest Moussaka may well start to taste of something – Unfortunately without it, it doesn’t. It’s as simple as that really. It’s a shame though; I was looking forward to it. Grumble.