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May 04, 2003
intellectual fallacies
oh crap. i spent a few hours playing with squeak. it felt like a few minutes, but i checked the time. hours. shit. Squeak is a time waster all right. i think i just found one of the great intellectual timesucks of this and the last century. the interface...just running it is moderately insane. you load it's VM and then an "image" file. the download doesn't include those instructions. after you do figure this out, the next time you fire up the VM it prompts you for the image--unless you use another vm, see, there are a bunch of them floating around. once you get an image running, your in a squeak world, a world with an opaque, ugly interface. a world with balloon help that was stolen from MS Bob. a world that resembles the ugly pixelated 16 color world of the IBM PC circa 1984. meet the future. small unreadable monospaced type in unreadable fonts in unreadable menus. no visible scroll bars, window controls split across the title bars,a dn the window close/quit button is right next to the window menu button. jaggies everywhere. mouse click on the wrong spot, and the whole window or palette moves. not all windows even have window controls. mac users beware, this app needs a multi button mouse--and it behaves weird. and despite it's size, the programs help files are all online. the image they give you to start with is over 9 megs, add a 2 meg vm to that. it's like X-windows in the late 80's, but worse. and the tools! a paint program that makes the one MS includes in windows look like a full featured image processor. and it crashes a lot. not what you'd expect from a program that has been in development for over 25 years. it does have some plusses. it starts and quits quickly, and seems to allow for rapid completely insecure collaboration between multiple parties (something i plan on trying out next time the east pilsen floating wifi LAN party and iBook collectors society meets). 2 hours wasted playing with a joke. the sad part is i'm probably going to go back and play with it some more, to see if my hero is really not wearing any clothes. not recommended to anyone except those interested in UI, human computer interaction and history of computing.
highly recommended is the web page of blasser. he's a circuit bender, synth maker and player. his music sounds like me on a good day. claims to be playing with Buchla's and Serge's sons. weird
Posted by parody at May 4, 2003 01:17 PM
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this is test post
Posted by: ffej at May 10, 2003 08:46 PM