I've had 4 email addresses for my personal life: @reed.edu (1989-1994), @santafe.edu (1994-1996), @media.mit.edu (1996-1999), and @monkey.org (2000-present). I take some pride that all but the first address still works. But all the old addresses get is spam; 2600 in the last month. That's 2600 spam messages that got through my gauntlet of spam filters. Most are bounce messages for spam that was forged from my name.

I think it's time to stop maintaining those old addresses.

The biggest computer game of the year is out and is of course being attacked by various advocacy groups. With some reason; the game is violent and ugly and entertains us by letting us do violent and ugly things. But it's a game, and American society has long since accepted that ugly violence is entertainment.

MADD has joined the call against GTA because there is "a game module where players can drive drunk". I wonder if they actually tried out the drunk driving simulator?

Driving drunk in GTA IV is awful. I tried it once; the camera goes pitching around at random so I had almost no control over the car. The view is so swervy I became a bit motion sick. Then the cops saw me. I tried to speed away but I was so out of control I crashed into a wall and got busted.

Maybe, just maybe, GTA could teach people that drunk driving sucks?

My PC is 3.5 years now. It's been great but it's time to get an upgrade. What's holding me back is Windows Vista. The horror stories continue and now with the Windows 7 talk there's some evidence that Vista may be a dead end and XP -> 7 is the upgrade path.

Any advice? Comment here or email me. I actually like XP once you turn off the Aqua graphics nonsense. My PC spends 95% of its time running Firefox, Thunderbird, PuTTY, and games (mostly Warcraft). If it weren't for the games I wouldn't even bother upgrading. Arguments for Vista: DirectX 10, multimedia which requires DRM, and inevitability of the OS.

PS: if you tell me "buy a Mac" I will publically mock you. I don't want MacOS.

Grand Theft Auto IV is out, the reviews are fantastic, and the game is amazing. I've played with it two or three hours and am awestruck by the complexity and detail.

For example, there's Internet in GTA IV. Complete with dating sites, two newspapers, ads for home cremation, a "secure" police database.. And craplist.net

Craplist was started in San Fierro in 1995 by some basement dwelling sociopaths with the simple mission of creating a computer-based online forum where users can sell stolen bicycles and meet up at lunch time to give a stranger head. ... Capitalists don't understand us. Newspapers hate us. Stalkers love us. Craplist is here to stay. We are you.

That's one of about a thousand different parodies hidden away in the game. It's overwhelming and beautiful. (Sadly, none of the game URLs lead to web sites on the real Internet right now.)

Game software has come a long way for usability and new user education. I've been trying to play some old classics recently; the 1997 commercial success Heroes of Might and Magic 2 or indie old-school roguelike Decker. Each time I last about 10 minutes and give up in frustration because I can't figure the damn thing out.

Older games had a steep learning curve. You were expected to read the manual and be interested enough to spend several hours figuring out how the game works. But in the past few years games have gotten really good at the new user experience, making the game playable right from the start. Game manuals have mostly disappeared, replaced by colour text, art, or spoiler guides.

Complicated desktop appliations like Photoshop could learn a lot from how games educate new players on how to use them. Maybe complex web sites, too; part of why Flickr is successful is that it's complex but has an easy path into it. The key is to have a rewarding, simple experience at the beginning with a few core useful/fun features that don't require a lot of tutorial text. Let the application unfold slowly, a gentle learning curve as the user experiences the environment.

The first time I played World of Warcraft it took me many hours to finish the newbie zone and get to level 10. Now I can do it in just an hour or two but that initial experience is still fun gameplay. It's not so much a tutorial as it is a simplified version of the later game. Great design.

Portishead's new album Third is due to be released on April 29. It's highly anticipated; their 1994 and 1997 albums were amazing and then the band imploded, unable to produce. Fans have been waiting nervously. But if your ethics are flexible you haven't had to wait quite so long; a near-final edit of the album was leaked to the Internet on March 6. First to BitTorrent, then to Usenet, then to YouTube. And the album is great. I've preordered my copy of the real thing.

If you were politely waiting for the actual release, yesterday a full copy of the album showed up for streaming on last.fm. It looks legitimate, branded "last.fm exclusive." Except the streams sound identical to the March 6 release. Including the abrupt end of the end of the first track, Silence, a rough edit. And including the IM popup sound 2:14 into track 5, Plastic, sounding like an error on the initial pirate's computer. Why is last.fm distributing these glitched tracks?

I had the most annoying problem in Firefox 3; Google Reader stopped working. I'd click on a blog and no items would show up, even if I started Firefox in safe mode.

Turns out I'm not the only one with this problem, but it has an easy solution. Press Ctrl-0 while on the Google Reader page and all is fixed.

What happened is you accidentally changed the zoom level of the page (via Ctrl-Scrollwheel or Ctrl-Minus or the like) and some bug in Reader's HTML and/or Firefox's rendering causes all the content to disappear. There's a Firefox bug filed, but they're pointing the finger at Google.

PS: dear Google Groups team, it is unacceptable for new messages posted to a group to not show up when I post them. I don't care if the backend datastore takes a minute to commit the data, figure out some way to make it visible immediately.

On my way across the Bay Bridge today we hit some traffic. So I took out my phone, clicked the "show me a map of where I am now" button, and looked at the real-time traffic overlay. There was a bit of a delay getting on the bridge but things after were fine.

RSS 2.0 is a bad format. I just helped Andy debug a problem with his linkblog's feed. Google Reader was sending folks to his own domain rather than directly to the link destination. Why? Because RSS 2.0 is stupid.

The problem is the guid element in the feed was being used instead of the link element you'd expect. Why? Well, read the spec:

There are no rules for the syntax of a guid. Aggregators must view them as a string.
If the guid element has an attribute named "isPermaLink" with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser.
isPermaLink is optional, its default value is true

Follow all that? guid is defined to be any ol' string. Only later we learn that by default, it's assumed to be a URL that feed readers may use to override the other URL in the entry. In other words, the default behaviour of guid is broken and every RSS 2.0 feed should probably be setting isPermaLink to false on every single entry.

Most people have probably never seen this bug because on a typical feed the link and guid both point to the same URL.

Wow, the Google app engine is impressive. It took me 30 minutes to go from zero knowledge to a deployed app with persistent storage. Try it out, or see my source code.

There's a lot to digest. Put simply, Google App Engine lets you write webapps that use Google's scalable datastore, Google's bandwidth, and Google's CPU and provisioning. The appserver environment is the real thing; fully functional Python with some very mature looking APIs. App frameworks like Django even run on it, although integration with Google's datastore will take some doing. There's a lot of capability to work with.

The getting started experience is quite good, at least on Linux. Download 2.5 megs of SDK for a local replica of the hosted environment. Write your webapp just like you'd write a CGI, then deploy it locally and test. When you're satsified you just run a simple command to upload it live and you're done. Very clean.

Congratulations to Ryan and the rest of the team for getting this launched. They've worked hard a long time on this vision. They were just getting started when I left Google, and this project was the one thing so interesting that I was strongly tempted me to stick around. It's very exciting to see it live!