Time after time i hear so much talk about how nice Ubuntu looks nowadays, that i decide to give it a go again. Unfortunately i also get disapointed time after time, by seeing just how much really basic stuff just sucks. Seriously, so many talented people are working on this, and it even has commercial funding by Canonical. Can someone explain me then why the GUI and the general graphic presentation of Ubuntu just looks like a cheap dodgy shareware program?

As an example, i took not just a random screenshot, but the very first screen you are presented with when you install Ubuntu. As everyone knows, first impressions last, so this should be a pretty crucial part:

(Drag mouse over to see my edited version)

For everyone with just a tiny sense of layout and margins, this is just a nightmare. Everything is squeezed together, and it just looks messy and amateurish. In general the background, the colors and everything has a really nice look, so i am guessing that some kind of graphic artist must be involved, that knows what he is doing. The question is then, is it just a bunch of long haired hippie open source programmers that is messing everything up afterward? (let the flamewars begin!)

This is an issue not only in the above installation screen, but throughout the entire distribution.

Note: I am not a graphic artist, but i took the liberty of correcting (quite a few) things on the above screenshot. Everything is probably not perfect, but i think most people will agree that i has a much more straight look. It took me ~15mins to make the corrections, why haven´t anyone done this before? Come on, it´s version 10.04? (yes yes, i know, open source, i should do it myself)

It’s exam time here at DTU right now, and therefore i have tons of sparetime for coding cool stuff for my consoles (someone might disagree on that statement)

Last night while waiting for some old QIC-80 tapes to restore on my 486, i coded this classic shadebobs demo effect for my Nintendo DS.

(Screenshots are from the DeSmuME emulator, but of course i tested it on the real thing as well)

I have custom firmware on my DS, and using some custom drivers for my wireless network card on the PC, i can upload the code to the DS directly from visual studio

It’s nothing you have’nt seen before, but if anyone should want it, here it is:

Shadebobs DS source

Shadebobs DS Binary

For those of you who use the WLA DX macro assembler, i have compiled some windows binaries from the latest source v9.5a. (Only the source code is available on the original download site) I have included the original documentation plus two examples.

WLA DX v9.5a windows binaries

For those who have no clue what i’m talking about, WLA-DX is a cool assembler which handles 6502 / 6510 / Z80 / etc. processors, and have a lot of special Gameboy, SNES and SMS features. Go check it out at www.villehelin.com/wla.html