So it's been some time since my last post. And it's not because I didn't have stuff to talk about. I've just been busy with schoolwork. It's now a Friday afternoon. Classes are done for the week. And there's relatively little homework to do. So here I am.
First up! Windows 7 Wallpaper Rotation feature. A while back when I wrote up my first impressions on Win7, I said I was pleased with the integration of wallpaper rotation in the windows theme framework (framework?... w/e). I did not, however, complain at how absurdly difficult and finicky it is to select specific pictures from different places.
Issue #1: The GUI for adding pictures to the list of wallpapers is horrid. An interface NIGHTMARE. Allow me illustrate.
So the first issue I have is the selection scheme they have set up. Each thumbnail has a checkbox and a hover marquee/highlight. Now, if you check a checkbox and then check other multiple checkboxes, they will all stay selected. HOWEVER! And this is the dumb part. If you have multiple pictures checked off and you click on a thumbnail for a new picture (not its checkbox) ALL OF THE PREVIOUSLY CHECKED PICTURES ARE DESELECTED. How dumb is that? Checkboxes aren't supposed to clear until you uncheck them. What's the point of checkboxes if they get reset on an unrelated click event?
This issue makes it very frustrating because I have accidentally missed a checkbox and cleared my entire selection. This happened 2 times, since I have... a lot of pictures. And I was mad both times.
This caused me to research on how to do it manually. As in, edit the themes configuration file and manually put in image paths. This brings me to my second surprise! I don't know if these problems are just with my installation, or if this is how all Win7 versions are. (fyi mine is the RTM from MSDNAA).
So after some research, I found this link Creating and Installing Theme Files [MSDN]. Pleased with the simplicity of it, I decided to pursue this route of editing the themes file. And what I saw when I opened one up to edit..... surprised me. And not in a good way. In a WTF ARE YOU DOING WINDOWS!-way.
So if you didn't notice, there's TWO things HORRRRRRRRRIBLE about this. This is what was automatically generated by the system when I selected a bunch of pictures. (I chose about 900). The first should be quite blaringly apparent. WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE FILEPATHS!
First of all, these file paths may be at most... maybe 120 characters long.
"D:\Pictures\2008.08.02 - EuroTrip - W120\06 Wednesday - Triomphe, Louvre, Eiffel\a - Arc du Triomphe\DSC00571.JPG" being an example. Take a guess at how long one of those Item lines are in the themes file.
1600 characters. The longest one is ~2000 characters. I don't even understand how this is possible. Wait, let me rephrase that. I don't understand why anyone would even think of doing it like this. WHYYYYYY! Now I'm not exactly an expert on text encoding, but even a unicode scheme might use 64bits per character. If somehow represented in ASCII, that's still only 8 ASCII characters per character. 120*8 is still way less than 2000.
I must not be smart enough to understand the things that go in the minds of Microsoft programmers. Feel free to flame me if I'm making fun of something that makes sense at a higher level. Ok, so that's the first thing I was astonished at. The second thing was the length of these lists. It looks like they can only count to 30. Well, 0 through 29. It creates a new section every 30 images. Beats me as to why they do this too. But there may be a legitimate reason for this - like randomization or something. So I'm not going to be too critical on it.
There's some more things I want to complain about, but you don't need to hear it I'm sure. Next up! This subject might be a bit more touchy, but for some reason I feel the need to discuss it.
Last week on campus there were some ... speakers? picketers? petitioners? Something like that. We have a free speech area on campus, I guess you could call it. And I could hear the speaker on the loudspeaker as I neared the center of campus. At first I thought, wow this sounds like a religious speech. For some reason, there's a specific tone and rhythm to these speeches no? Sure enough, as they came into sight, I told myself: I need to take a picture of this. And so I snapped two shots off.
It's almost too easy to tear into these people. It's like, false logic out the butt.. or up the butt.. nvm. Well, all I could really make out from the speaker was that God hates homosexuals. Also something about homosexuals not being saved or something. I know it's bad that I don't completely have their side of the argument, but I'm going to go off on a limb and say that it was probably full of holes. This next picture being evidence of one of them.
I wish I had blogged about this a little earlier so that I may have had some quotes from the speaker. Oh well. Let me make this clear. I have nothing against religious people. But pushing your own agenda through religion is a nono. Discrimination is a nono. Unfortunately, there will always be the intolerant. Anyway, I was curious as to what Prov 8:13 was. Maybe God really did say that he hates homosexuals. That's news to me.
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All rights to free speech should be revoked from you people. I don't care, all people are not created equal. (Ok, let me clarify: I *do* believe in equal opportunity). That reference you have so prominently placed on your sign says NOTHING about homosexuality. The only thing remotely linked might be "perverse mouth" but we're not talking about blowjobs here. So that's rejected. Only unless you correlate homosexuality with evil does it mean God hates homosexuality. But you haven't addressed why homosexuality is evil. Lack of support -100points to you.
Anyway, enough of criticizing people. If you take away anything from this discussion, I want you to direct your attention towards their abbreviation of homosexuality to homo sex. Which could be re-translated to gay sex. I mean, I understand how you might think gay sex is unpleasant, but seriously, you don't have to picket about it.
Meh, I'm done. Have fun and keep an open mind! Til next time~
