autocratic for the people.

Axis of Warcraft.

You've seen this, right?

posted by avixe @ 10:45 PM 3 comments

They Grew Up In Minivans.

My Dad sends this along: the Beloit College Mindset Lists, which enumerate the state of the world as seen through the annual high school graduating class. Examples for 2006:

• Weather reports have always been available 24 hours a day on television.
  
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has always been available to doctors.
  

Neat idea.

posted by avixe @ 7:41 PM 0 comments

I Was Web 2.0 in 2001.

Stumbled across this today: Bill Monk. It's a spare, yet somehow overdone 2.0-ish site that affords per-person tracking of monetary debts and, confusingly, borrowed items. I recommend you take the tour, and see if your eyes glaze over too. It seems like a hideously busy interface for what is, really, a very simple idea.

I'm not (just) talking trash here; I naively implemented this sort of system five years ago for my roommates and I to use. It was basically one screen:



Great art it ain't, but it gets the point across just as well with a lot less clicking.

posted by avixe @ 5:56 PM 1 comments

TI-force.

It's a common lament that computers seem to speed up at about the same rate that software slows down. This complaint is most commonly applied to Windows, where it seems to take more power every year to do the same thing (have you seen the new Solitaire?), but in actuality it happens with many popular programs. The efficiency losses are usually due to either higher-overhead programming languages or, perhaps more often, a bad case of featuritis.

This makes it all the more uplifting, then, to see a case of extreme economy and efficiency. And the platform in this case is, of all things, a graphing calculator.

Some guy wrote a Zelda game for the TI-83. Really. Here's a video. It's written entirely in Z80 assembly and, according to the linked interview, currently runs about 25,000 lines. It's a testament to the real power of cheap computing devices when you take the time to actually make them sing. Too bad we don't get a whole lot of that anymore.

posted by avixe @ 8:39 PM 0 comments

George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People.

Last week the eagerly-awaited Dead Rising was released for the 360. I bought it last Friday and, along with a crew of experienced zombie-hunters, plunged in. A complete review is not my intent here; rather, I want to address an issue that quickly cropped up for us (and others), prevented us from playing the game, and has so far been dismissed by both the developer (directly) and Microsoft (tacitly).

The issue is pretty straightforward: some of the game's on-screen text is tiny. Really, really tiny. Tiny to the point that it's completely unreadable on normal, non-HD televisions. Now, normally some unreadable text isn't that big a deal; you can usually ignore it and just muddle through. In this case, though, the unreadable text provides the most critical game information possible: it describes the tasks you're supposed to complete.

Part of the problem is that Dead Rising is a sandbox-style, as opposed to a linear-style, game. In a linear-style game, you're presented with a series of challenges to perform, one after another, with each new challenge presented after the previous one is completed. An example of a linear-style game would be Super Mario Bros.: upon completion of a level, you proceed to the next. The other style, sandbox, which has become much more popular lately, instead presents a number of challenges simultaneously, and lets you decide which ones you want to complete, and in what order. Since Dead Rising is a sandbox-style game, the text describing the tasks to complete is absolutely critical. The game can't be played without it.

I mentioned above that we played on a "normal", non-HD, TV. This is important. The legibility problems apparently disappear on HDTVs, as their higher-quality displays make the text much more sharp. This illustrates the real problem here: nobody ever tested this game with a normal television.

It may surprise you to learn that this is not a new problem, and in fact, it's not even a new problem for the 360. Last fall, one of the 360's launch titles was also problematic when played on a normal TV. And that problem was never fixed. It's funny; the last time a number of games exhibited problems for a number of customers, the console manufacturer stepped up and implemented an official approval system in order to make it clear to customers that there was, in fact, a quality control process applied to games that bear the approval seal. It pretty well solved the problem, and it restored faith in software for the system in question.

Of course, Microsoft has an approval process for the 360, too .. and both Dead Rising and King Kong were approved. So apparently Microsoft doesn't consider playability on a normal television to be a criteria for certification. That's interesting. Last year, the Executive Producer for XBox went out of his way to state that the 360 "will look great on both high-def and standard-def televisions because we built in enough graphics horsepower that Xbox 360 in real time can scale down high-def images to standard def." That's pretty explicit; hell, that's calling out playability on normal televisions as a feature.

In any event, it'd be easy to distribute a fix for this problem. Since Microsoft has managed to introduce the wonderful world of software updates to console gaming, the developer of Dead Rising could issue an upgrade automatically via XBox Live. So far, though, they've issued only a statement. This statement is mostly notable for its failure to provide a solution, or even to promise that one's coming. To be clear, though, they do already have our money.

What can we conclude? Only this: Nintendo's new system won't have this problem, as it doesn't support HD. It's amazing to think that that might actually be a selling point.

posted by avixe @ 11:25 PM 2 comments

Treating the Symptoms.

"A terrorist group will almost certainly try to blow up a plane with a bomb assembled on board unless security measures improve fundamentally. (...) 'In mid-flight you could go into the toilet, attach the mobile phone to the explosives and, as the plane makes a final approach over a densely populated urban area, you detonate it.'" - CNN.com

The above article goes on to relate (with face-clawing hysteria) that the new threat to airline passengers are individually harmless electronics and liquids, combined in an aircraft lavatory in order to create a weapon. "Bomb experts" are quoted as suggesting that "mobile phones, computers, wrist watches or anything else with a battery should be prohibited from flights." Even if we ignore the knee-jerk move to ban liquids from carryon luggage as just a temporary delusion, the recent past suggests a very real possibility that shrieking idiots will ban even more arbitrary items from airlines in the interests of safety.

These people, I think, are treating the symptom instead of the disease. If the problem is that innocuous materials can be combined to create a weapon mid-flight, wouldn't it make much more sense to limit access to the private areas? "No weird stuff in the lavatories." Done. Let's move on.

posted by avixe @ 1:53 PM 0 comments

No one yelled Bingo!, apparently.

A fair amount of ground was covered today at the WWDC06 keynote, but poking around the Apple site now I see a lot of rather important advances that haven't yet been reported.

• Automatic garbage collection in Obj-C 2.0, as predicted. (See the sidebar.)
  
• The 30-inch Cinema Display is $1999 ! The 23-incher dropped in price, too.
  
• iCal Server.
  

It'll be interesting to see what else oozed out.

posted by avixe @ 2:10 PM 0 comments

Popularity Contest.

Another day, another bit of Office 2007 idiocy (courtesy of Jensen Harris). Today the new look of the "options" dialog box was revealed, the most obvious change being a new categories index. This is not in itself a bad idea, although it's also nothing new: existing versions of Word already sport a similar categorization system, but the existing systems use tabs, not buttons, so, uh, there you go. In any event, the categories have been reworked, and I invite you to take a look at the first category in the new dialog.

"Popular."

What the hell? How is Popular a useful category label? If I open the options intending to change, say, my language settings, how am I supposed to know whether or not it's under Popular? I'll have to read through the whole category, clearly, in order to know. I'll have to read through the whole category for every option I look for, in order to determine whether or not it's Popular! It's a completely useless category! Actually, it's worse than useless: it's a hindrance to navigation, since it slows down the process of finding an option. It's a hindrance to learnability, too, because you can imagine the Popular settings will change in every subsequent service pack, or as new features are added. Right now, according to that screenshot , "Show Developer tab in the Ribbon" is a Popular option. After a year or two, do you think it'll still be there? Probably not. It'll be replaced by "Underline things that might be book titles" or some shit. So in this way, the Popular category not only destroys navigation now, but it also lays the foundation for re-destroying navigation in the future as well. How efficient. What a great idea.

And, speaking of efficiency, the same blog post mentions the term "ScreenTips." What's a ScreenTip? Have you ever heard of that? .. As it turns out, no one else has either. Explains Harris, "Yes, tooltips are called ScreenTips in Office for some reason. Don't ask."

..

Now remember, the main feature of Office 2007 is the new UI. Aren't you glad no one asked?

posted by avixe @ 12:46 PM 0 comments

Finitely reducible.

How to open a Master lock in ten minutes. A great example of what can go wrong when theory is reduced to practice, and another indication that the Internet eliminates security by obscurity.

posted by avixe @ 3:13 PM 0 comments

Series Armageddon.

The new face of faded glory. (I count 64 playable fighters. Jesus, 64?!)

posted by avixe @ 6:37 AM 0 comments