Windows 8.1 review

So, windows 8.1 was supposed to be this giant success because it brought back the start menu. But no, they brought back the start button, not menu. They added a stupid button to take us back to that useless start screen? It's a slap in the face to be treated like a mouth breather who saves all their crap to the desktop. Please.

Will 8.2 bring back the start menu, or is this just me being forced to Linux? I'm only waiting for all my software to be Linux and I'm gone.

Rating = 0/10

Update: Ended up reverting back to windows 8.0 due to weird mouse-input lag bugs. Apparently in making certain things work better for tablets, stuff was broken in the process for regular computers. I'd give 8.1 a -5/10 rating.

Dual-booting part two

So you know how I fought with my two crappy USB wireless devices for ever? I found that the Netgear was having crappy performance in windows (had trouble with the driver) so I plugged in the smaller cisco device which is probably newer since it's smaller.

Well, I accidentally booted into ubuntu while leaving the previously not working in ubuntu cisco device, and the wireless is magically working now. So I'm completely boggled.

But anyway, in the evenings all three non-overlapping channels (1, 6, 11) get saturated to the point that I get massive packet loss. So I'm thinking of just running a wire now, since those are better anyway.

Update: Ran a wire. Much happier person now.

My take on the usefulness of time zones

Slashdot had this discussion two years ago: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/08/27/1819203/ask-slashdot-could-we-deal-with-the-end-of-time-zones?sbsrc=thisday

Since I work at a company that is open 24 hours, and has international offices around the world, I may see this differently from some people. It seems that the most common argument for keeping time zones is that we still need to know when people's awake/sleep/available time are. At a company that is open all the time, with multiple locations, I find timezones only to be a hassle. I don't think there is much of a good reason to keep DST around except to complicate things, and for some people to opt-out of further, and for fun time-travel twice a year.

The only thing that really seems to be a true issue is that having the date change in the middle of the day kind of sucks. However, there are people on the graveyard shift where I work who start at approximately 10:00 p.m. and end at 6:00 a.m. the next day have to deal with it.

When working on my own local times, and thinking about what time people on the other side of the world work, I generally just memorize something like "Oh, Bob gets in at 5:00 and leaves at 1:00, and Mark works from 6:00 p.m. until whenever. I really don't care what time it is where Bob or Mark live, I just memorize a local time. It's a pain in the butt to memorize what days of the week people have off, and whether those days of the week are the same as mine, but in a 24/7 shop there will be someone else to work with those days anyway.

If we all used UTC or something, I would still memorize a number, but the number wouldn't arbitrarily change. And I wouldn't have to ask people what stupid time zone they are in. We could all just change our mail signatures or status messages to something like Bob - 13:00 - 21:00  Mark 3:00-11:00 and then people would know immediately when I'm working and contactable. It would be easy for someone to tell me when I can call them up, we wouldn't have to calculate off meaningless values that we can never remember anyway because of DST (but I don't think there's anyone who thinks DST is a good thing) which is extra confusion that doesn't help either method.

The complaint I have with using UTC is why should the folks in England get to use their current time? Seems a little unfair to me. I vote that whatever time zone I happen to be in right now (or ever) is the standard. I think to be fair, we need to pick a neutral place to be considered the "center of the world" or maybe use a completely new measurement system that doesn't favor any single location. How about epoch time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_time ? Can't get more arbitrary than that. Anyone know of a way of keeping time for the whole world at once (or, what about multiple worlds? What then?) that makes sense and doesn't play favorites to a single place? Maybe just make a 25 hour clock, since one of my professors one time said our bodies naturally fall into a 25 hour cycle, so everyone could take turns having noon be noon?

Update: Did some searches on "metric time". I decided it makes more sense to come up with arbitrary identifier names (which could easily be changed), but a day can stay the same.

1 day
10     ticks = 1 day (1 tick = 144 minutes )  (1 tick = 8640 sec)
100    Eep = 1 day   (1 eep = 14.4 minutes)   (1 eep = 864 sec)
1000   Creep = 1 day (1 creep = 1.44 minutes) (1 creep = 86.4 sec)
10000  Jig = 1 day   (1 jig = .144 minutes)   (1 jig = 8.64 sec)
100000 snap = 1 day  (1 snap = .0144 minutes) (1 snap = .864 sec)

Found this: http://www.metricclock.com/

Now to figure out how to divvy up a days. The restriction being ~365ish days is a year if we still care about revolutions around the sun, and the lunar cycle being approximately monthish.

Dual-booting Ubuntu and windows 8

So a couple weeks ago I snagged one of the extra drives out of my previous computer that my son mostly uses now (I had done a reinstall and didn't actually use the extra drive) and decided to dual boot into ubuntu on my new machine.

After figuring out that the old CD I had burned was a 32 bit version and I really wanted 64 bit ubuntu, I re-downloaded and reinstalled. Wireless support is always a challenge, and I just couldn't get Ubuntu to work with my (newish?) Cisco AE1000 (Ralink 3572). After a couple days of struggle I remembered I had another old device in my drawer - NetGear, Inc. WN111(v2) RangeMax Next Wireless (Atheros AR9170+AR9101). While the Ralink would almost pretend to work (it had actually worked on 32bit Ubuntu, and during the installation of 64bit, but after the "real" bootup it wouldn't fully initialize), Right when I plugged in the older Atheros, it immediately just "worked" out of the box.

So I eventually reboot into windows, and the Netgear/Atheros seems to have nonexistent support. Netgear has a driver on their website that seemed to almost work, and windows update teased me in that it found a driver, but wouldn't install. After a day or so of struggling I gave up and just decided to swap the USB devices depending on the OS I'm in, which is very annoying.

A couple weeks later, I'm so tired of it that I revisit the Atheros win7(8 actually) issue. I found the two same drivers as before, but also decided to look for a generic atheros driver from atheros. Well, it seems atheros got boughtout by Qualcomm who doesn't seem to care about the older stuff, but I found a random link that hopefully isn't malware. I guess I took a chance with it and just installed it, and my wireless works now! yay. I also uninstalled as many USB devices from device manager as I could as in the past having windows rediscover things does random fixes. Which makes me sad that my keyboards are all USB. My next purchase will definitely be ps2, since people finally realized it's the superior interface since if the hardware is right it can handle more than 6 keypresses at once.

Anyway here's that link: http://www.wireless-driver.com/atheros-usb-11n-wireless-win7-driver/ I might upload it to google drive too. I'll probably do that for now on, since searching for drivers after a reinstall is really annoying.

Tech support for kids

Today when I got home from work, my son came to me in distress letting me know that he can't attack in Guild Wars 2. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"When I push 1, I don't attack."

"Okay. Do any of the other keys work?"

"I don't know."

I press some keys, and they don't work.

"Did you unplug it and plug it back in?"

"no." (I unplug it and plug it back in, still doesn't work)

"Did you turn it off and on again?"

"no."

Of course, after that everything works.

My Perl moment

So I've been reading the Perl Black Book  10 pages per day. I've just read page 290, so that means It's been 30 days (I missed a day) since I started. I'm really happy with the results. I wish there was a 3rd edition that was more recent too, since the 2nd edition is from 2001.

Anyway, I was confused early on about scalars, arrays, and confused arrays with lists, and thought lists and arrays were different things.... but anyway.

$calar
@rray

That's all, now that I have memorized them by wrote, my mind made this connection. Was this the reason those signs stand for that type of variable? If anyone reads this and knows, please comment on other logical leaps/connection things that make sense that I might not know about additional hints/tricks that could help me remember things better.

I hate windows 8 and google

Okay, so I prefer Google. To the point that I really don't care about the other search providers.... I don't care that bing found a few people who prefer their search to google, the name just reminds me of Chandler Bing from friends. And I think his name was meant to be weird, obscure, boring, and sort of "huh"ish. No offense to any people out their with one of their names being Bing, it just wasn't meant to be the name of a search engine. Especially when Google is already a verb.

Moving on, I had to dump windoze 8 "metro" (I hear they wanted to call it something else, but whatever they tried to officially change it to, I'm sure is still dumb) for a Classic Shell so that I can have a usable experience. Not that I love windows, and as soon as Linux Steam gains enough steam, I'll dump windoze forever (hopefully). But for now, I'm using windoze 8 on my newest computer, because I could get it for $40 by upgrading one of my XP licenses, which I have a few, and $40 is less than I could have gotten windoze 7 for. And I can feel good about using a legal copy of windows.

I really hate the magic tiles they think I'll want, but I don't intrinsically hate the tiles. The real problem is I still can't do 90% of the things I want to do with the metro UI. It feels like instead of having an intelligent desktop that I can keep a bunch of things open at once and refer back and forth, I'm supposed to turn my computer into a smartphone and do one thing at a time.

When I want to do one thing at a time, I might do it on a mobile device. When I want to get serious, I get to the keyboard/mouse combo, and don't want to play smartphone.

So, the main reason I hate windows 8 is that it fails to be as good as previous user interfaces (7, XP) because certain central elements are gone, and the replacements are terrible.

Oh yeah, and now I'm to the whole reason that I came to this breaking point to write this: user agent.

 I had to copy the user agent from my windows 7 machine and put it into my firefox about:config so stupid google will stop asking me if I want to add google to my metro menu (which I'm not using, because it sucks). So every time I open a browser and go to my home page (google) I'm reminded that I hate windows 8 and metro. Because I'd much rather use something stock because periodically Classic Shell kind of stutters for a couple seconds. Not that I can really tell if it's a classic shell problem, or a windows 8 problem, or some weird configuration issue with my hardware, because I didn't buy windows 7 (as would have been the preferable experience, but as previously stated, costs more, legally).

 Anyway, to change this go into about:config and type "useragent" into the search bar, and there probably won't be this listed:

general.useragent.override

so add it as string, and this is the windows 7 string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0

The only difference is that windows 8 = NT 6.2 and windows 7 = NT 6.1 so this is how you can tell people, stop annoying me about the stupid metro UI because it sucks, and I should just use linux since I like it better anyway. That is all.