Re-reading the old xkcd comics gives me a truly fuzzy feeling inside. Firstly, xkcd is the first (and only) web comic I can actually boast to have started viewing before it became popular (with the whole “sudo get me a sandwich” line. Though that one is pretty good.). And re-reading them is even better than reading them the first time.

For the ones of you that DON’T know xkcd (shame on you), I suggest you check it out. For the ones of you who do know xkcd… well, check out the old archives. Trust me, you won’t regret it

Now, I know some of you are subscribing to my various feeds–please update your links! They are now:

• Content feed
• Comments feed

According to Feedburner, I have 38 subscribers on my regular feed–w00t ^_^;

I don’t game much (anymore), but I still consider myself somewhat of an enthusiast: I monitor the release (and hype) of new games and technology, and I occassionally test new games when they’re released. And in all my years of monitoring new releases, I’m yet to find a website which:

• Doesn’t use Flash,
• Conforms to web standards,
• Hasn’t got annoying sounds playing, even when I don’t want them to.

As pretty as some flash websites might be, Flash is a huge hinder when it comes to a lot of aspects. Copy/pasting the contents of the website for instance, or linking to a specific part of the website. Instead, you have to go start at the very beginning, skip an annoying intro (if you can), navigate through hundreds of different pages to end up at a final page.

It’s the evil truth, and while I love most of their games, I’ve noticed that it’s particularly games distributed by Eidos Group^{[1] [2] [3]}.

Take a look at these websites. It’s quite easy to make just as pretty websites using nothing but HTML and CSS–Flash really isn’t needed. Flash, for instance, isn’t available on all exotic platforms^[4], and in this way, all Eidos is actually doing is prohibiting its customer base from viewing its products. Look at the Tomb Raider site for instance (provided you’re not using an exotic/BSD platform–as you then can’t. Hah.). Pretty much everything on that site (except the sounds on mouse-hovers and stuff, but that’s my actual point. They’re useless.) could be done with nothing but CSS, HTML and perhaps a bit of JavaScript. It’s easy. The only thing I can see as a problem, is the compass. And sure, you could stick a small square Flash applet in there, and it would be fine. Or do a UserAgent check, and decide if Flash isn’t installed, you’d instead view an animated gif, or just a static image.

It really gets to me, because people don’t visit websites because they’re visually orgasmic–they visit them because they want the content, and what Flash does (in a lot of cases I’ve seen), is to move the focus from the content to the design–are game developers smart, knowing their games aren’t really that interesting, or are they just ignorant? My bet is on the latter.

Ultimately. Well, not quite ultimately. However, after a trial period of approximately two weeks where I’ve been testing Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, and I’ve finally found true love.

I’ve been using Ubuntu on and off since November 2005, just after the release of Breezy, where my initial interest in Linux was erected, and I quickly became accustomed to the look and feel, the speed of the terminal and the friendliness of the community—but after a few months of having used just about nothing but Linux, XP was calling me. Well, not so much XP—more Photoshop.

I left Ubuntu behind and moved on (but installed it on my laptop in the Summer of ‘06) on the desktop-side, and didn’t really look back. Since then, I’ve used Dapper and Edgy on my laptop, but I only use those for school, not enjoyment.

Needless to say, I was excited about trying Feisty when it was released (Beryl, XGL and whatnot), so I grabbed the LiveCD, stuck in the disk and installed it on a 16GiB partition. I loved it from the very beginning–its ease of use, its user interface (Emerald is sooo pretty) and just the general improvements that had been added to the system over the past 3 releases. I kept stuffing new data on my drive—amaroK, Pidgin, Wine, essential applications for any Windows to Linux convertee—needless to say I’d filled that partition to the brim within 7 days, and thus, I turned to gparted. To my horror, gparted destroyed my entire NTFS file system, and I left it for dead. Until today. I reformatted and re-partitioned my disk completely, which means Vista now has 50GiB, and Ubuntu has 189GiB (it’s officially a 250GiB drive, meh).

What I noticed upon the second installation of Ubuntu, was that it was a breeze–I’d installed the base system, texlive, pidgin.im, compiled irssi 0.8.11 installed and setup amaroK, setup Thunderbird and copied my songs from my Frets on Fire backup I had on a DVD disk. And all this in less than an hour. Amazing.

And now that I’m on Linux (for the 3rd time), I don’t think I’ll be looking back anytime soon. With a small partition for whatever graphic design work I need, I’ll be doing everything else on Linux from now on.

Update: I’m still yet to boot into Vista. Hell, I haven’t even got Firefox installed yet @_@

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

To the MPAA: Cease-and-desist letters to lasse SPLATREMOVETHIS havelund DOTSPLATLOL org.

We will now return to our regularly scheduled programme….