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Archive for November, 2006

SLOTD 9th November 2006

Silliness:

Well, this made me chuckle anyway – seasoned shot for hunting game with.

Space invaders rendered entirely in ASCII? Bizarre.

The ultimate kitchen question, Will it Blend?

Geekiness:

Whoa, (did I just say "whoa"? oh dear.) what can be done with Photoshop is amazing, to such an extent that I don’t really believe this tutorial is real.

Is this the worst program ever made?

Quite possibly.

Ok, so SpectateSwamp has been annoying me with his trolling on Channel9 – and his ludicrous search app – so when he finally challenged the Windows Desktop Search team to a comparison I had to do it. (Note, I’m nothing at all to do with the WDS team, I though it’d be funny.)

Installation experience:

SpectateSwampSuperCrappySearch (SSSCS):

Actually, this is pretty simple, in the same way that "installing" a text file might be simple. It’s a single EXE so put it somewhere and run it.

WDS:

Fairly standard installation process, nothing good nor bad to say really. It did require being restarted when I moved the index files, but that’s just me.

User experience:

SSSCS:

Three little letters – WTF? No, seriously how the hell does it work. Here’s a screenshot of the horrendous thing in action:

Does anyone know how this works? Anyone???

ANYONE?

Ok, no problem it says HELP, so I’m guessing I can type HELP and get some help.

Right…

Well, you can type HELP and you get something – I don’t know what it is, but it’s something.  

Does anyone know what it is?

Right, so I try a few "commands" out – can’t get it to do anything, I do get it to open a text file. Notepad can do that though.

 

WDS:

Simple case (which I failed dismally to achieve on Spectate Search) let’s find a document, any document. Here’s how it’s done in WDS – you see that little box on the taskbar – type something.

And this is what you get:

The immediate differences from SSSCS should be obvious, firstly you have some results. These results contain the words you were looking for.

I’m not even going to go into the advanced search syntax stuff – I’ll leave that to someone who knows something. The second difference is that this program wasn’t written by a loony on acid. Look, it has useful labels on stuff so you know what it does, and you don’t have to type in P to get to a list of god-knows-what (I think it was a list of stuff I typed in, at least some of it looked familiar.)

Conclusion:

Well, SSSCS gets +1 on the installation over WDS, then it promptly loses about a million points for being utterly unusable and clearly written using squirrels.

WDS on the other hand is quite nice, useful and simple to understand.

Well, that was fun – let’s delete the thing now after having awarded it "worst program I have ever seen including the one I wrote which was supposed to print a message but restarted the PC." At least that program was consistent and could have been used for something. 

SLOTD 8th November 2006

Silliness:

fnar, the origins of blogging.

Fascinating things, perception and vision. Check out the hybrid images which appear different from far away.

SLOTD 7th November 2006

Thoughtfulness:

A simulator for the war on terror.

Silliness:

A simple game of guess the logo. Do you recognise these common logos? (Warming: fiendish)

Genius, genius, genius! When animations get sick of being pushed around.

Geekiness:

Did I mention Line Rider? Well here’s a video of the beta version’s possibilities.

Happy Birthday to me!

Happy birthday to me!

Happy birthday dear Meeeeeee!

Happy birthday to me!

Having survived what was just a rubbish day yesterday (picked up just before going to bed.) I’ve now reached the grand old age of 26 years! I just hope there a few more cards for me when I get home, as two is a bit pathetic.

SLOTD 6th November 2006

Silliness:

I’m a Democrat (first and foremost), Anarcho-Socialist Green apparantly. What are you?

A stack of badly done subtitles exposed for the foolishness they are.

So, how many five year olds do you think you could take on?

There are a whole stack of things like this on the t’Internet at the moment, but this is one of my favourites so far.

Awesomeness:

Two high-school girls are proposing to produce Biofuels efficiently from Algae.

Geekiness:

A huge stack of tutorials for photo-editing programs.

SLOTD 3rd November 2006

Geekiness:

Ah, the problems of working in an industry where no-one understands what you do.

Silliness:

Well, there was only one link – thank heavens for Scott Adams.

SLOTD 2nd November 2006

Silliness:

The next logical step?

A thing of beauty is a toy forever.

"You can’t drink that, it’s the law!" Scary stuff.

Well, that’s one way to escape prison, post yourself to freedom.

I like this, short animation on Human development as viewed by rocks.

SLOTD 1st November 2006

Silliness:

Ingenious, did you ever need to know how much of a chart resembled Pac-Mac, well, now you do.

I was amused by this article on "acceptable" forms of swearing.

A witty response to all the annoying "get a mac" adverts.

Holy sweet cakes batman! (Don’t ask me what sweet cakes are.) The worst URLs in history!

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