My computer is quite screwed up. Currently, it “runs” windows. By which I mean, I can get it to boot without bad-sector-ridden boot floppies. It now hates the internet.
And I thought Windows XP Professional was more networking friendly than the “home” variant. I thought wrong.
The mail client renders its own gui wrong half the time, but fails to read mail off servers properly all the time [Update: For those curious, this is apparently window’s idea of someone checking e-mail]. Visual studio grinds to a halt each time I mistakenly hit “properties” on a source file, and that source file happens to be in fortran. McAfee prevents clean shut downs and causes an infinite “hang” state. McAfee also conflicts with DLA and the “windows installer” preventing me from removing or installing any software. McAfee also prevents itself from being disabled anywhere. I guess if you don’t have any software, you can’t really have a virus? Intel things like to install themselves in “My Pictures” no matter where I ask them to go. I have no codecs and can see/hear very little of my media. Windows attempts to update drivers for all devices on my machine by itself, but doesn’t know how to do it, so it complains. It then complains when I disable “auto-go-ahead-and-screw-everything-up-myself” mode.
Of course, since it wiped out my MBR and I lost my boot floppy to bad clusters, I’m burning a distribution install disc to see if it is smart enough to get me out of this hell hole and to a place where I can work.
And play.
Deviating to some informatively non-negative news. Though delineate‘s interface looks rather simple, the backend data holding and classifying scheme is quite capable, and complicated. I am currently figuring out how to unleash these features on to the page without cluttering it. What am I talking about you ask?
For instance. Hmm.. if you’ve seen the permanent links for the current images, they look like so: domain/shoebox/picture-title/. Now I picked “shoebox” specifically to give it an unclassified feel. I mean, you randomly dump old photos in a shoebox right?
But that’s not the only way of accessing images on delineate. Consider for instance, domain/genus/flowers. Sweet huh? (Yeah, it renders funnily on IE, but will be fixed before the official release of such things.) Internally, images hold some meta information related to their content, so such nifty look ups are easy. There are a bunch of other things like this which will be fun (and probably necessary) once the number of images grow.
I’ll leak said features a lil’ bit at a time.