My World of Warcraft account is now more secure than my bank account. It is harder to steal 5,000 fake Warcraft gold from me than $5,000 real US dollars. Why? Because unlike my bank, my computer game supports two factor authentication.

About six months ago Blizzard started selling the Blizzard Authenticator to its US customers for the nominal price of $6.50. It’s a little keychain fob that generates random number codes that change frequently. Logging in to WoW requires both a password and the current code.

Why bother protecting a computer game account? Because WoW accounts are valuable and are frequently stolen. The typical serious WoW player has between $50 and $200 worth of gold in their account, possibly more. There’s a variety of Trojans floating around the Internet custom designed to steal WoW passwords and funnel them to a crook who will log in and strip the account. In my old guild of a hundred people I know at least five people who had their accounts stolen this way.

Two factor authentication is nothing new, but in the US it’s unusual for it to be available in such a common consumer product. A lot of my friends who play the game have gotten authenticators for themselves after seeing people lose their accounts. Sure wish I could easily get the same protection at my bank.

If you haven’t seen your nerdier friends recently it’s because they’re all too busy playing World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. It’s a good expansion, certain to keep the 10 million+ players hooked for another year. And for game designers WotLK brings a really interesting new technology to multiplayer online games: phasing.

The basic idea of phasing is that two people standing in the same place in the world can see different things. I’m in a beautiful meadow while my friend has drunk the magic potion and is seeing and interacting with a demon-torn battlefield. Or maybe I just learned how to talk to spirits and I can see an NPC that no one else can.

What’s exciting is phasing allows the world to actually change. The problem with MMOs is that the world is static. My heroic group kills the big evil bad guy and saves the city, but 10 minutes later the bad guy respawns and everything is back the way it was. It has to be that way because otherwise no one else of the 20,000 people playing on my server would be able to kill the bad guys themselves. MMO players accept that the world never changes without comment, but it’s unsatisfying.

With phasing the world can change. So far I’ve seen it used to great effect in Dragonblight, one of the new zones. The 100+ quests tell a long story about a fight between the good forces of the Alliance and the Horde against the evil Scourge. And towards the end of the story you see the actual battle, and when it’s over you see the aftermath, destroyed buildings and screaming wounded soldiers. And it’s permanent: those NPCs are now dead forever. It’s very effective storytelling.

Phasing also solves some game design problems. It allows the developers to give players private experiences without going entirely out of the world into a private instance. Being able to smoothly give players semi-private experiences in public places is quite innovative and I’m excited to see what else Blizzard can do with this tool.

Ken and I have been really enjoying watching True Blood, Alan Ball’s new vampire serial on HBO. It’s fantastic: ridiculous, over the top, and excitingly garish. Everything a vampire show should be. The premise is that vampires have come out of the coffin and walk among us. Good vampires mainstream and drink synthetic blood, but there’s bad evil vampires who hang out in Shreveport nightclubs and feed off of human groupie fangbangers. Our hero is human but telepathic and she makes friends with the misunderstood vampire who comes to their little town. She’s a great character, very girly and innocent but also strong and smart.

A big part of the pleasure in the show is the small swamp town Louisiana setting. A town just big enough to have a fascinating ensemble cast but still be seriously backwards kay-zhawn. I particularly like the assortment of accents the voice coaches assembled: young Southern belle, aging Southern belle, New Orleans sophisticate, Atlanta sophisticate, gutter swamp Cajun, proud young black woman, crazy black mama, queeny-but-tough black gay guy, dumb redneck white hick. All living in the same town, and that’s not counting the gentleman Civil War vampire, the creepy Boris Karloffs, and whatever weird-ass verbal tic sheriff J.F. Sebastian has. The characters and setting are great for someone like me who grew up with the mythology of the South.

Alan Ball also wrote a lot of Six Feet Under. But where that show was sympathetic and mature and subtle, True Blood is outrageous caricature and silly vampire genre stuff. With some Civil War nostalgia and commentary on civil rights thrown in the mix. All done incredibly well and very fun to watch. Recommended.

Have you bought a light bulb recently? My local Walgreen’s has a whole aisle full of bulbs. Little appliance bulbs, compact fluorescents that don’t work with dimmers, floods, halogens. What’s hard to find is an ordinary, everyday, $0.50 light bulb.

I finally found them, down low by the floor. Only they weren’t normal 75 watt light bulbs. They were “energy saving” 71 watt light bulbs. Rated at 1075 lumens, compared to 1190 lumens of a real “energy wasting” 75 watt light bulb.

What dumb ass thought this idea up? Yes, let’s save energy by making our lights dimmer! There’s a whole range of anemic wattages from GE now: 95W, 71W, 57W, 38W. Awesome.

Tuesday is election day in the US. Please go vote, it’s important. I don’t care who you intend to vote for, what’s important is to participate. Google can help you find your polling place.

I didn’t quite have time to chew thoroughly but I very much enjoyed playing through Fable 2. It’s a good RPG, well told story and fun gameplay. Just like Fable in most ways but much better done. It’s full of interesting and ambitious game design ideas that actually work this time.

As with most games these days it’s the side missions and extra colour that are most interesting part. The NPCs inhabiting the world are fantastic. Particularly the AI: every one of the hundreds of townspeople has their own wants and desires, their own opinion and relationship with you. Like Bully, but even better. I found getting married really compelling, particularly as my spouse got woven into the main story.

The NPC AI gives room for emergent gameplay, too. I committed my only evil act in the game after a harlot wormed her way into my house with my husband and tricked me into going to bed with her. Dan was upset at my infidelity so I had to deal with her. I tried leading her away to a private place to commit murder unobserved but my husband heard of my evil deed and he was always a bit scared of me ever after.

Fable 2 also gives you a faithful dog, a cute and useful little fella with whom you have a much simpler relationship. I was surprised at the end of the game to find I was quite attached to him; that attachment plays a role in the narrative, too. There’s also a real estate game where you buy homes and stores. Towns prosper or fail depending on your heroic actions, affecting your income, so there’s a link between the economy and your questing.

As for the main story, Fable 2 works quite well. It embraces the classic Hero / Chosen One narrative rather than trying to alter it in some crazy postmodern way. The free play and main story alternate a bit clumsily, it’s a little too episodic. But the main story episodes are great. And in two different circumstances the game makes a strong break from the traditional gameplay, taking you out of your usual milieu. Normally I hate that kind of thing but it’s quite powerful in the context of Fable 2. Can’t say much more without spoiling it, unfortunately.

One caveat: the game is buggy. Lots of little bugs you can mostly ignore, also some huge terrible game stopping bugs like quests that fail and prevent you from continuing your only saved game. No doubt the worst will get patched, but it’s shameful to see an A-list title released with souch bad quality control. My own heroic story end was ruined by the disappearing spouse bug. I’m supposed to return home to the rest I earned, but my husband had disappeared about halfway through the game not to be found. Hope I didn’t miss anything.

I can’t say enough good things about my Sonos music system. If you want to play MP3s in your house off a file server and you have more than one room, take a look.

Sonos just got a little better today thanks to the new iPhone controller app. Free app from Sonos lets you control the music queues in all your zones. Works great. Sonos’ wireless controller is a big selling point for the system, I’m surprised they developed an iPhone app as an alternative.

Setup was easy as with all Sonos network configuration. The only real caveat is your iPhone has to be on Wifi on the same local network as the Sonos system. It doesn’t work via Edge, 3G, or Internet.

The problem with A-list games now is that they’re too good. Too many gameplay options, too much art, too much story, normal people can’t possibly complete them.

I’ve finally finished Grand Theft Auto IV. It’s a real tour de force of a game, sophisticated and beautiful and a lot of fun. It’s also overwhelming. I only managed to finish GTA now, six months later, by knuckling down and grinding through the story missions. I finished with 42 hours of gameplay logged, which seems like an awful lot.

But I only enjoyed half of what the game has to offer: no side missions, no races, no pigeons or stunt jump completions. I barely even got to see New Jersey Alderney since I kept taking cabs everywhere.

I don’t feel cheated, 42 hours is plenty. I just wish the game rewarded casual exploration more. I agree with Rob: there’s a lot more room for content in the exquisitely modelled virtual city. But the game has no way to track and encourage casual exploration and wandering aimlessly gets old after awhile.

My favourite technical feature of the game is the dynamic lighting. Bright sunny days, cool grey dawn, colourful beach sunsets, dismal rain. Liberty City keeps changing how it looks depending on the time of day and the weather and the various moods are quite beautiful.

GTA IV is a lot to absorb and while I appreciate the gluttonous satiation of the game I get bored of the flavours before I can finish the meal. I’m hopeful that we’ll see more beautiful, small games like Braid that can be fully enjoyed without making a huge time commitment.

I got my first electric bill for my new house and suddenly I’m on a power-saving kick. I broke out my trusty Kill-A-Watt and measured how much power the various bits of my new audiovisual rack use.

Idle, my rack consumes an astonishing 80 watts. That’s like leaving a lightbulb on all the time, and at my punitive rate of $0.35 / kilowatt-hour it’s costing me $20 / month just to own this rack. What’s it doing?

38W Tivo (Standby mode saves 2W)

35W Five Sonos players

4W Network switch

2W Superfluous power conditioner lights

Of course, it takes more power to actually use the gear.

32W Listening to music upstairs (1¢/hr)

Running three amplified Sonos zone players

85W Main amplifiers (3¢/hr)

Just turning on the amplifier and the subwoofer amp, not actually using it.

4W Watching TV

The Tivo consumes so much power when idle that actually watching it doesn’t add much. Of course, I need the amplifiers on too.

25W Watching Blu-Ray (1¢/hr)

The disc player is hungry. It seems to use this much power even when sitting idle at a disc menu.

184W Playing GTA4 on an Xbox 360 (6¢/hr)

What an inefficient beast. It generates so much heat I have to leave the door open, too. Saves about 30W when sitting idle on the dashboard.

I don’t begrudge the operating costs when actually doing stuff, even the Xbox. But 80 watts when idle is terrible. The Tivo is never truly idle, I can understand what it’s doing with the power. But why do the amplified Sonos players consume 7W each when doing nothing? At least I can turn off the stupid power conditioner lights.

Lots of randomness in my life lately with the move. Here are some good things I’ve been enjoying.

Eating breakfast or lunch at Toast. Like American diner food only high quality and carefully prepared. The new place at 24th and Sanchez is just as good as the original at 29th and Church, only with twice the seating.

Typing on a Humanscale 5G keyboard tray. Stable, slim, easy to install and adjust.

Watching Planet Earth in HD on my Samsung A650 TV. Clear bright colours, beautiful subtlety in the mid-tones. My new home is my first time having an HDTV and every time I see the flock of tiny white birds all crisp on a dark blue background my jaw drops. Even better is the beautifully rich brown tones of the African plains.

Cleaning up contractor mistakes with Goof Off and Goo Gone. For all I know Goof Off is just paint thinner in a can, but it’s great at removing stray bits of paint. And Goo Gone is the master at removing sticky residues from hard surfaces: tape gunk, grease, etc. The web site says it’s “a combination of Citrus Power and scientific technology,” which is nearly meaningless, but it smells like oranges and works great.

Playing Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise. It’s the game Spore should have been, a cute and engaging garden simulation game. You entice colourful animals to live in your garden with good husbandry. It’s dressed up in kid’s game clothes but has a lot of depth to it.

For a decade now people have been babbling about “digital convergence”. The typical vision involves some proprietary set-top box from your company name here and the grandiose plan to be unify radio, TV, and Internet in one market-dominating service. That hasn’t happened, but it turns out digital convergence is already here in our living rooms and no one has quite noticed yet. The driving factor isn’t the consumer electronics manufacturers or the cable companies. It’s Internet services like Amazon Unbox, Netflix, iTunes, and Youtube. Youtube is now a full-fledged content provider on both Tivo and AppleTV. I can watch Youtube on my TV just like I watch Comcast. There’s plenty of random things to browse and search as well as actual edited programming with YouTube’s Featured Videos. YouTube on Tivo is great for bored channel surfing, particularly since you can quickly bounce around related videos. The video quality is atrocious, of course, but it starts playing fast and it feels like watching TV, not browsing the web.

YouTube isn’t the only Internet service I can watch on my TV. Amazon’s Unbox is also on Tivo with online rentals available for download right next to recording off the cable. Netflix is about to stream to the Xbox 360 if you haven’t gotten around to spending $100 on a Roku player yet. Of course iTunes delivers TV and movies to AppleTV.

Internet companies are now making the end-run around cable and satellite distribution that’s been predicted for years. If you have fast Internet in your home you can get something to watch Internet video for very cheap. The big sticking point is quality; streaming HD is still generally unavailable. The same A/V setups that can stream low-res content from the Internet are mostly being bought by people to play HD content, and watching a crappy 80 kbytes/sec YouTube video blown up to 1920p is a bad experience. Internet HD is doable; decent quality 720p AVI files are about 200kbytes/sec, within reach of home broadband. But it’s a significant expense to provide that bandwidth to hundreds of thousands of customers. Also, I imagine content owners are loathe to license HD copies of their video for streaming. So traditional cable and satellite video distribution isn’t doomed quite yet.

The M-Audio StudioPro 3 Desktop Audio Monitors are good computer speakers. I’m no audiophile expert, I’m just looking for decent speakers for listening to MP3s and the occasional Youtube video. These fit the bill for about $85.

The main thing that sets these apart from your usual cheap computers speakers is the enclosure. Instead of a cheap hollow plastic box they’re MDF, a wood composite. They sound pretty good to me, particularly crisp in the mid to high range. Without a subwoofer cluttering your desk the bass is limited (they spec at 100Hz-20kHz ±3dB), but there’s a decent bass port on the back and a booster circuit if that’s your thing.

The design is functional; decent shielding, an extra aux-in jack on the front, and nice little wedge stands for pointing the speakers up from the table to your head. They’re not particularly attractive but they don’t look stupid either.

M-Audio makes a variety of small amplified speakers for various price ranges. I sure wish someone would just make a candybar sized small amp so I could power ordinary speakers from my computer.

Windows networking confuses the hell out of me. I can tell you why every single bit is present in the average TCP packet header, I’ve surveyed hundreds of thousands of time servers on the Internet, I’ve actually modified the source code for BSD lpd. But I couldn’t begin to explain to you how Windows filesharing is supposed to work.

I want to print to Ken’s USB printer plugged into his WinXP system. Since removing our wireless ethernet bridge I can see his printer via Windows filesharing. But I doubleclick to install it and Vista demands a printer driver. It claims to have no drivers to choose from. Of course, HP doesn’t have a manually installable Vista64 compatible driver for this old printer. I’m screwed.

Turns out there’s a solution. Basically you manually set up a new local printer where Vista will let you manually choose from the hundreds of pre-installed printer drivers. Then you fake it out by giving a network name as the port. In detail (from the linked post)

1. Add Printer from the Control panel
2. Add a local printer with a new port of type “Local Port”
3. For the port name, type the SMB share name. Ie: “\\KENSCOMPUTER\Printer”.
4. Browse the tree to choose which driver you need.

I think what you’re using is Vista’s support for legacy parallel port computers where the only way to identify a printer is manually. Why Vista doesn’t let you manually pick drivers for other types of printers is beyond me.

I try really hard to keep my privacy at home. In particular, I hate phone calls from strangers. I keep my number unlisted, I require caller ID to call me, I’m on the Do Not Call registry. And yet, even so I get junk phone calls about four times a week to my home line.

This time around on the new number it’s a promotion for Dish Network TV. No doubt it’s not Dish themselves but some marketing affiliate. I don’t care; they call me with a fake Caller ID once a day and I can’t make it stop.

Even worse are the junk calls to my cell phone, almost always one of the car warranty scams. And then there’s political calls. As near as I can tell all of these marketing calls are entirely illegal. Also, as near as I can tell there’s no way to stop them.

In the past year I’ve bought more housewares than in the past ten. I found two stores I particularly like shopping at.

For furniture I like Room and Board. Very clean and simple furniture and furnishings. It’s a bit like Crate and Barrel only fresher style, higher quality goods, and without all the crockery. Lots of good furniture if you want something well made and relatively simple. They have a beautiful print catalog with a great use of small multiples to quickly show you all of the furniture options they offer. Their San Francisco store is a delight, open and spacious, friendly staff, and parking. My only regret is they trend more contemporary than our home so we ended up not ordering as much from them as I’d hoped. But I got some great desks; simple cherry planks with aluminum legs. Also a nice old leather reclining chair and a sofa bed.

For matching our house’s 1930s details I’m totally in love with Rejuvenation Hardware. It’s an amazing source of period light fixtures, door hardware, and other house furnishings. Need a crystal doorknob to replace the 1890s knob that somehow got lost? They’ve got it. Or maybe an art deco coat hook or an Edwardian outdoor light fixture. If you’ve got a pre-WWII house and want to replace / upgrade something, they’ve got matching parts newly manufactured. Mail-order hardware makes me nervous but they ship quickly and have a generous return policy. So far everything we’ve gotten from them has been great.

Since December 2007 the Xbox 360 has been capable of playing Xvid files. But it’s ridiculously complex to set up.

First of all: do not use Windows Media Center. Do not use the “Media Center” option in the Xbox. Do not set up anything called an “Extender”. Windows Media Center is interesting and has a fancy UI, but for some baffling reason it does not support DivX/XviD.

Instead you need to do something simpler; just let the Xbox find the AVI file and play it. The easiest way to do this is via an external USB drive; just plug it into the Xbox 360 (it has USB ports!), go to Media/Video, press X to change source, and browse the files on the drive. It’s really that easy. But copying files to a drive is a drag, what you want is to serve them over the network. And for that you need a UPnP server, a simple file sharing protocol.

There’s a slew of UPnP servers out there for Linux and near as I can tell none of them work. Windows has a UPnP server built into recent versions of Windows Media Player. Launch WMP, click the obscure little arrow below the word “Library”, and choose “Media Sharing”. If your Xbox 360 is turned on you should see it as a device option. Allow sharing to it and you’re done. You’ll probably want to also do “Add to Library” to pick the folder where all your videos are. Then on the Xbox go to Media / Videos, press X to change source, and you should see your new UPnP server. Now you can browse and play.

This sharing process is all ridiculously complicated and obscure. Poor Microsoft; they really want to sell media devices, competing with iPod and iTunes and Apple TV. But it’s clear their media stuff is designed by a giant committee: they lack the single person with good taste and the authority to say “make this work simply”.

The problem with virtual stuff is there’s no way to show it off to your friends.

One reason we buy things is to display ownership. Intellectuals fill their bookshelves with demonstrations of their knowledge. Hipsters show off CD collections of cool obscure music. Fashionistas parade their designer clothes and handbags. The objects themselves have value and purpose: we do read the books and listen to the music. But the display of the object is part of our culture of conspicuous consumption. People are bower birds.

It took eight days to pack and unpack my house on my recent move. I’m still not done; somewhere I have an unopened sixty pound, 1.5 cubic foot box labelled “PC Games”. I also have about four cubic feet of CDs. I’m hoping to never open those boxes; the games are installed, the CDs are ripped. I’d rather get rid of the objects entirely, but then I’ll lose the pleasure of looking at and showing off my collections.

There’s no good way to display the virtual objects we own. There’s no online equivalent of looking at a bookshelf full of cool CDs. It’s not just vanity, it’s hard to casually browse virtual objects, to enjoy any serendipity at finding some long-lost things. It’s also easy to forget we own stuff. I just bought Spore online and was surprised to learn from the downloader that I also owned Battlefield 2142: I’d bought it online a year ago. I appreciate that EA kept my bookshelf of games for me, but I wish it were more visible. And unified: I own stuff at Microsoft and Valve, too.

We need virtual bookshelves of some sort, a display of all the digital stuff we possess. There are some precedents. Library Thing is all about showing off your books. Habbo is a whole virtual social world constructed around buying virtual things and displaying them to your friends. And Lord of the Rings Online lets your kinship buy a collective house to display the trophies they’ve collected. But these virtual collections are so specific, highly mediated, and abstract as to not satisfy the same way as an old pine bookshelf full of paperbacks from your salad days.

If you’re doing a local move in San Francisco, Marin, or around there I can highly recommend the moving company Country Moves in Novato, CA. They don’t have a website I can find, their number is 707-522-1377.

Moving house is always stressful, but Country Moves really helped make it easy. Their crew was incredibly careful and thoughtful. They totally know their craft; the truck was packed neatly, pictures and such were wrapped beautifully in blankets, and everything came out organized. It helps a lot they sent four folks, the owner of the business and three strong guys. Steve, the owner, is easy going and clearly in control, it was great having him managing things.

Their pricing for the move was quite reasonable. We appreciated the extra service: they dropped off some boxes a few days before and then only charged us for what we used. They also took care of getting the street parking permit when we had didn’t have time to do it.

They do a lot of deliveries of designer furniture so they know how to handle delicate and expensive things. They’re happy to do house moves in San Francisco, too, and I can recommend them without reservations.

I’ve only recently appreciated how much Twitter is a part of my life. A lot of folks I explain Twitter to say “huh? that seems frivolous”. That was my reaction, too. But now that Twitter is a daily part of my life I really like it. Here’s some ways Twitter has enhanced my life recently:

1. My old friend Richard was in SF recently. I didn’t know until he twittered that he was at his dentist, so I twittered him back “you’re a mile away from me. come for a glass of wine”. Great casual reunion.
2. I needed to get rid of some old computer gear. I twittered a request for suggestions and my friend Ned responded wtih good advice.
3. Twitter search was a great way to keep up with chatter at the Start08 conference.
4. I use Twitter frequently as a replacement for SMS. Much easier to remember usernames than phone numbers.
5. Twitter in the background on my computer gives me a casual way to stay connected with friends.

One thing that surprises me about my use of Twitter is that it’s almost exclusively a way for me to stay in contact with people I already know. I don’t really have new Twitter friends. I do have one friend who meets new people via Twitter. The key thing there is the iPhone app Twinkle shows him tweets from other people near him; he’s trying to meet people in a new country so English tweets near him get his attention.

Also I almost never use Twitter as a mobile app. It’s all computer desktop for me (with Twhirl). I do get SMS notification for direct tweets but I quickly found it irritating to see all my friends’ updates on my phone. OTOH I frequently load my Twitter home page on my iPhone’s web browser.

My favourite thing about Twitter is it’s low obligation. Small updates free me from the need to be eloquent, and the ephemeral nature of tweets means missing some is no big thing. It enhances my social life without being complex.

So Comcast finally went public with a bandwidth cap: 250 gigabytes / month. That’s about 50 DVDs or 100 hours of high def XviD per month. It’s no accident that Comcast, a cable company with government-granted monopolies on video distribution, is taking actions that limit the use of the Internet for distributing video.

Back in 1995 when I was an impoverished college student I bought myself a Koh-I-Noor Rapidomatic 5635. It was fantastically expensive for a pencil, about $10. A crazy impulse purchase for someone who literally ate other student’s garbage to save money. I used that pencil all through college, wrote up 3+ years of math papers in impossibly tiny, precise handwriting. I’d use one page per assignment when most students used five or more. And ever thrifty, always on the back of some discarded printout. They’re beautiful old papers. I was so terribly focussed studying homographies, complex analysis, and the axioms of logic.

I still have the pencil. It works great.

Every network port on your computer has a MAC address, a unique 48 bit identifier. It’s a bit like an IP address but lower level; your wireless or ethernet delivers Internet packets to you by knowing your MAC address.

It’s very important that every computer on a network has a unique MAC address. So important, that all network hardware has a unique ID burned into its firmware (one of only two sources of standard unique bits on a typical PC). However, it’s common for routers to support “MAC address cloning”, where your router impersonates your computer when talking to your ISP. That feature was placed there to work around inflexible ISP networks and network policies, and it’s mostly useful.

But MAC address cloning can be quite harmful, as I learned today. See, I cloned my laptop’s MAC address to my router. Then two years ltaer I cloned my laptop’s MAC address to my new router, too, in my new house three miles away. Miraculously this worked fine for a year, until this morning. When my network connection would go down at random intervals. I’m guessing the layer 2 stuff wasn’t broken by the duplicate MAC address but rather it confused some DHCP housekeeping in my ISP’s network management back office.

Three cheers to my wonderful ISP, sonic.net, for helping me figure out this bizarre problem. I love that when I call them I get a tech who will happily discuss DHCP leases, MAC addresses, and non-standard router firmware wtih me. They were as mystified as I was at first, but talking it over at the phone we figured out something was going bad with address assignment. No way either of us could have figured this out without working together.

1. A mechanism for delivering Internet service to a home.
2. A medium for human speech wherein sounds are encoded electrically and carried via wires. archaic

The indie / intelligent game world is very excited about Braid, Jonathan Blow’s new platform puzzle game for Xbox 360 (and soon, PC). Some of the conversation is getting a little overblown, so let me explain simply why Braid is such a fantastic game.

Half the reason Braid is brilliant is the gameplay. It starts off looking like another boring Mario clone. But then you find the ability to rewind time to let you undo mistakes, then you find the bits of the world that are immune to time rewind so you can run causality backwards for everything but the crucial bit to solve the puzzle. Then you keep playing and find more and more complex puzzles requiring time manipulation. It’s a fresh game mechanic and the puzzles are very satisfying to solve. I’m usually impatient with games and bust out the walkthrough pretty quick, but the reward vs. difficulty of this game was tuned so well I only used a walkthrough hint for the last piece (and then felt like I cheated myself).

The other half the reason Braid is brilliant is the art. The basic look of the game is watercolour paintings, restful and beautiful. The music is great. The story is compelling and adult, full of ambiguity (beware spoilers) and subtlety. And it’s refreshing that the story is told obliquely; as much as I liked Bioshock it’s about as subtle as a Hollywood action flick. Braid is more of a David Lynch movie.

The third half of why Braid is brilliant is that the gameplay and the art work together. The time manipulations of the gameplay are direct echoes of the story. The story echoes the gameplay, too, and in fact both story and gameplay are woven together in a complex braid of emotion and ambiguity. There’s not many games that have pulled that off, my hat is off to Jonathan Blow.

There’s a bit of superstitious lore amongst old Unix hands. When shutting down a computer you run sync twice, to make sure all bits are flushed to disk. Why twice? When I learned this bit of lore at Bill’s knee in 1990, he shrugged and say “I dunno”. Then Kent chimed in to suggest that the first sync exited before the kernel had truly flushed the bits to disk, but the second sync invocation would block until the write was finished. Being 18 and in awe of my Unix gods I took that at face value.

Of course syncing twice is ludicrous; halt itself syncs the disks. And modern filesystems deal pretty well with abrupt shutoffs, say during power failures, so the risk of completely destroying a filesystem is pretty low. But I still run sync twice when I’m concerned about my disks. Silly, but harmless.

I was reminded of this when sitting next to Merlin at the Start conference. He was having trouble with the Wifi and when I looked over he had a full screen console up running fsck. He said this was his superstitious way to fix insolvable computer problems. It’s like we belong to opposing factions in the same cargo cult.

Now that we’re about to move we’re fixing up the little things in our old house. You know, the little things that take 30 minutes each but make life more pleasant. Like replacing the awkward deadbolt to the garage door with a convenient lockset with a real doorknob, so you can shut the door without a key and keep the cat out of the garage.

I’m totally kicking myself for being so lazy over the past five years and not doing this stuff before. It all seemed so complicated; how do you find a locksmith? What lockset? Now we’re rushing to do about twenty little things like this so the house sells well. At least the new owners will enjoy the work, even if we don’t.

The big thing we didn’t do when we moved in was repaint the house. The hideous, amateur paint job. (Seriously: painting is a professional craft. You can’t do it yourself. Don’t do a sponge decorative finish because you read an article in Sunset; it will look like measles. And don’t be lazy about surface prep; that flat latex you painted directly on old oil paint will chip off in weeks and those hinges are now forevermore half-painted.) We’ve been apologizing to guests for the ugly walls in this house for years. We’re finally fixing it, right after we leave the house forever.

Synchronized diving
For when regular diving isn’t homoerotic enough

A bunch of friends keep asking me, so here’s the scoop. No, I haven’t moved to my new house in Noe Valley yet. Yes, we bought in a long time ago, and it sure is about time to move isn’t it? It’s close to done now, I hope to be moving in about a month.

Everyone says remodelling costs more and takes longer than you’d think. And yup, it does. In our case I’d say about half the time we’ve spent remodelling could have been avoided with better project management. We lost a month having to do a second round of contractor bids, another month or so not making up our minds on what we were going to do, another month in disorganization towards the end of the project, etc. #1 rule if I ever do a house project of this size again: I’m going to hire a project manager. A boring, nerdy GANTT chart and spreadsheet guy or gal.

The good news is the house is coming together and looks great. Particularly the tile work. We’ll be moving in before it’s entirely done; a few light fixtures on order, missing furniture, etc. At some point you just have to say it’s done.

It’s been 24 hours since the Olympics opening ceremony. NBC started the broadcast early and I missed the fancy drums. So I went online to watch the part I missed. You know, go to Youtube and watch a crappy FLV version of the opening ceremony, broken up into easily sharable, easily linkable three minute segments.

Nope! Near as I can tell, there’s no legitimate way to share a video experience of the Olympics online. Google’s got Youtube locked down quite tightly, even if you fiddle your cookies. The NBC and Olympics sites seem to not have the video, although the sites are so awful I could have just not found it. I even checked Hulu, which apparently thinks Jimmy Carter’s boycott in 1980 is the most relevant result for a search on “Olympics”.

Of course there are torrents available; 5 gigs for a 720p copy, probably blissfully free of the American announcer stupidly bleating colour commentary. But that’s a lot of effort to watch three minutes of video. And it’s not really sharable with your friends.

So great job, Olympics copyright holders! You’ve made your production irrelevant to the Internet.

I was at the fantastic Start Conference yesterday. I noticed something; for the first time, as many people were using iPhones when ignoring talks as were using laptops.

At tech conferences the geeks have their laptops open and are paying more attention to web surfing than to the speakers. At Start08, half those geeks (me included) were looking at their iPhones instead. In part that’s because the Wifi didn’t work very well. But also the iPhone is capable and more convenient than a big ol’ computer.

One of the best uses of a laptop at a conference is participating in the IRC backchannel chat. iPhones don’t do IRC (or do they now?) but we have an alternative: Twitter. Specifically, a Twitter search for a conference specific tag. I really enjoyed refreshing that page on my phone during a talk and seeing the commentary. It’s also nice that the Twitter backchannel is persistent, non-anonymous, and archived.

I’ve always hated how many people at conferences (or in meetings) ignore the speaker and focus on their computers. Isn’t the whole point to be together in person, to communicate face to face? But I get bored during talks too. The iPhone is a nice compromise; small enough to be discreet, limited enough capability to capture a bit of partial attention without drawing you in entirely.

I totally believed the perception that Windows Vista was a failure. Everyone I talked to hated it, no one was buying it, I even have half a blog post written about how Microsoft is doomed because Vista failed. But then I needed a new computer and asked for advice and it turns out most people who actually use Vista like it.

Now I’m one of them. After a month of using Vista I like it just fine. It’s not so much better than XP that I’d upgrade an existing computer, and there are rough edges with old applications. But in general it’s a fine Windows OS.

The main improvement I appreciate is the UI. Aero, the fancy 3d/translucent thing, is a bit fluffy. But it’s kind of grown on me. The font rendering is good and the new screen-optimized fonts are very readable. The best UI improvement is all the system dialogs, configuration panels, etc have been redesigned to be very understandable. I find it much easier to do some unanticipated task in the Control Panel than ever before because the UI is in readable English. Some of this UI is too clever for itself. For instance if Vista thinks you have a folder full of pictures it doesn’t show standard file modified dates but tries to use EXIF tags instead, even if they don’t exist. But you can disable most of the new cleverness if it is a problem and I’ve found I don’t have to do that much.

There are a few new features I use regularly. My favourite is the new Search capability via the Windows menu. Press the Windows button, type the name of a program or document, and it launches. Just like Quicksilver or a zillion other app launchers, but this one works by default. It’s tied into some search indexing system in Windows that seems to actually work too; a first for Microsoft.

The other new feature I like is User Access Control, Vista’s compromise between running as Administrator and having some security. Most people hate UAC because it pops up a disruptive security dialog whenever you try to change a Control Panel setting or install some software. Me, I like the prompting, because it means there’s a chance I can catch some malware before it gets installed. And it doesn’t really come up in day to day work.

Where UAC causes problems is with older applications. Since Windows 2000 proper applications are supposed to use APPDATA and not write user data into the Program Files directories, but even now eight years later some apps break that rule. Those apps don’t work well with UAC, and it is a practical problem for me. The worst offender was World of Warcraft; I finally gave up and installed it in some non-protected directory. The other workarounds are to run the offending app as Administrator, or turn UAC off entirely. I haven’t had to do that with anything else, although the occasional auto-updater causes me some grief.

One final thing: not only did I install Vista, I installed Vista 64. I’ve not noticed any issues at all with the 64 bit OS except one: Explorer shell extensions have to be special 64 bit builds. Some of the apps I used to use don’t have those. But I don’t really like shell extensions anyway, so I haven’t really missed it. Beyond that Vista 64 should use my 4 gigs of RAM a little better than a 32 bit OS, but not much better. And it has some funky address rewriting system that makes the OS a bit more secure to buffer overflow attacks.

So after a month with Vista, I like it just fine. Like I said, I wouldn’t bother upgrading an old system. But if you’re getting a new computer and aren’t doing anything exotic with old applications, Vista should be just fine.

PS: Microsoft is doing some marketing campaign for Vista right now that seems to involve stupid “viral” deceptive crap. This blog post is entirely independent.

I bought a copy of Crysis the other day. I haven’t played games on my old PC in quite awhile, it’s been all Xbox. But the new PC is fast and I wanted to see the eye candy.

I’m totally like a kid at Christmas with a new game. I rush home from the store ripping open the package while stopped at red lights. My heart quickens and I drop the CD into the tray. So excited! So what was my first experience of Crysis? Thunk, thunk, thunk in the DVD drive. For 30 seconds. Crap, a bad pressing. I was so frustrated I walked away from the computer. When I came back a few minutes later I found the DVD is working just fine.

Well, sort of fine. Actually the DVD is out of spec with some bad blocks on it in a special pattern for the SecuROM copy protection. And unlike some other copy protected discs, this one’s bad enough to give my DVD drive fits. 30 second delay on boot. 30 second delay the first time I open “Computer” on my machine. Thunk thunk thunk. All to wait for some stupid copy protection scheme that stopped people from stealing the game for about 24 hours. And the disk always has to be in the drive to play the game. It’s the paradox of PC gaming; a stolen copy gives a better experience than a purchased one.

On top of the badly mastered disc I also have the pleasure of knowing SecuROM has gotten its hooks into my machine somehow, running extra services in the background. And I have to keep the manual and its precious serial code forever more because there’s a second form of copy protection, too. And I had to spend half an hour tweaking graphics settings to make it run reasonably well on my machine.

Console gaming has none of these problems. Pop the disc in the console, play. No wonder I haven’t played PC games in so long.

My house remodelling is almost done. And I’m repeatedly impressed by the expertise of the craftsman. All these details that have to be done correctly, both for engineering and æsthetics.

One reason we chose this house is it has beautiful 30s woodwork; oak floors, mahogany moldings and baseboards. We’ve installed new floors in a couple of rooms that didn’t have them. And I learned a new thing; when you add a floor to an existing room, you have a problem as to how the floor joins the wall. Walls aren’t straight and you can’t cut wood perfectly, so you end up with a small gap between the floor and the wall.

Traditionally, the baseboards are installed after the floor and cover this gap. But when you have existing baseboards you have three choices. You can remove the baseboards, install the floor to the wall, and reinstall the baseboards. That’s the right way but it’s difficult and can damage the baseboard. So you can try to undercut the baseboards; cut a thin sliver from the bottom of the baseboards and slide your floor underneath. One floor company tried that and it was a mess, now the gap is in the wall, not the floor.

The final solution is a “shoe”. You lay the floor as close as you can to the wall, then cover the gap with a little bit of trim. (The picture above is misleading; it shows the floor under the baseboard so there’s no need for a shoe). The common fix is 3/4″ quarter round for a shoe which looks completely ugly. For just a bit more work you can have a nicely shaped bit of trim. Stain it to match and it looks like an extra baseboard detail, not a patch.

This wall vs. floor problem is one of hundreds of problems that come up during remodelling. Good craftsman solve these kinds of problems every day. It’s a lot like software engineering, only a heck of a lot harder because you can’t just recompile to fix your bugs.

As I write this post my mouth is coated in the sour, unpleasant aftertaste of a sourdough English muffin. It’s breakfast: a little butter, a little Italian honey, and a crunchy muffin. Why is my muffin sour?

It’s sour because in the US, particularly in San Francisco, it’s hard to buy good bread. About 75% of the decent bread in my grocery store, both fresh baked and industrial, is sourdough. Consumers think sourdough is shorthand for quality. It’s not. In fact, sourdough is seldom the appropriate bread for a meal. It makes lousy sandwiches, lousy breakfast, it clashes with cheese. It’s good with creamy soups, and it’s good plain with butter. But the premium bakeries all push sourdough, and so sourdough becomes synonymous with “good”, when it’s not.

The flipside of sourdough is hideous American industrial bread made out of sugar. Sugar has no place in bread. OK, maybe a pinch to proof the yeast. But bread should not be sweet. Pretty much every industrial bread in my grocery store is sugary; particularly second-rate breads like hot dog buns. Yuck.

Photoshop CS2 is the most expensive piece of software I own. I wanted to migrate my license to Vista and it wasn’t as simple as I’d like. The main challenge is CS2 is an old version and Adobe claims it does not work on Vista. Here’s how to make it work anyway. I’m assuming you have a legal copy: do not steal software.

1. Get install media. If you have CDs you’re in business. Otherwise write to Adobe support and tell them you need to download a CS2 installer. Do not mention Vista; they’ll tell you that you have to spend $200 on an upgrade to CS3. They sent me an FTP link with a password for Photoshop_CS2_9.0_WIN_ACT.zip.
2. Unzip the install media. Don’t just double click the installer and run from the virtual folder; the Adobe installer will break with the meaningless errors .\AutoPlay\main.ini MAIN_FILE_VERSION PRODUCT_REGISTRY_PARENT PRODUCT_REGISTRY_KEY. Extract files and run from the new folder.
3. Run the installer. Grant it permissions via the usual Vista UAC popup.
4. Run Photoshop. Activate it.
5. Allow Photoshop to update itself. Grant the Updater permissions via UAC.
6. Reboot. (Screw you, Adobe).
7. On reboot, you’ll get an error that Vista blocked programs at startup because they asked for permissions. Run the Vista tool recommended in the error box and disable all of Adobe’s startup tasks (gamma control, updater). The error will go away and your computer will boot faster, too.
8. Enjoy Photoshop!

I’m sure there’s some lurking Photoshop / Vista compatibility problems. But I was able to edit a raw photo from my camera, that’s all I really care about. I didn’t test color management and printing, I could see potential problems there.

A few weeks ago I asked for advice on Vista or XP for a new computer. Responses were mixed, but most of the people I talked to who actually use Vista are fine with it. So I got a new Vista 64 box and after 24 hours it seems to be working great. Sure is nice having fast new hardware.

I’m long past the point where new computers are fun; it’s just a chore to set one up. But I spend all day in front of a computer, so fast hardware is nice. And the software experience is like a home to me, my environment. So I care a fair amount about the details. Here they are.

Choosing PC hardware is ridiculously complex. I found the Ars Technica guide the most useful resource. I went medium-end with a bias towards power efficient components: Intel Core Duo E8400 (45nm), NVidia 9800 GTX graphics card, 4 gigs of RAM, a 7200 RPM hard drive, and an Antec P182 case with a Seasonic power supply. You can definitely build a faster machine or one with more upgradability, but this seemed a good compromise.

I planned to order from EndPCNoise, I really like the last machine they built for me. But they were too expensive so on the advice of a friend I ordered from AVA Direct. Great website, they clearly understand PC hardware. Pre-sales service wasn’t so great and my order got delayed for a week for no good reason, but their tech support has been fine. Then again, they made a couple of mistakes building the box. So that’s a mixed recommendation.

Setting up a new computer is always a pain, particularly with the dog’s breakfast of hardware that is the typical PC. My new computer had one major problem: the ethernet didn’t work reliably. I had to grub around for a driver update and now the thing only will speak 10Mbps ethernet. My router’s fault? My driver? Who knows. Also one minor problem, the expensive quiet CPU fan was always roaring at full speed. The solution was the magic BIOS setting for “fan control: voltage or PWM”. Who the $#*$ knows what that means? One final hardware problem: the bluetooth mouse lagged about 3 seconds. The solution for that was to move the bluetooth dongle from behind the metal case. Thank you, radio waves.

Software has been a lot smoother than hardware. Vista itself is fine, I even appreciate the UAC security feature that drives most people nuts. I’m still not sure if the 64 bit OS was a mistake. I’ve got no problems with hardware drivers but the requirement for 64 bit shell extensions and signed drivers leaves some third party software hacks I like out in the cold. But mostly Vista looks and acts a lot like my XP box only with better UI for system configuration.

The big geegaw in Vista is Aero, the fancy 3d translucent UI. It’s pretty silly, particularly the blurry privacy glass feature of window titlebars. And the details are ugly, like the high contrast sheen on the black taskbar whose colours you can’t change. Aero looks like Microsoft was jealous of Apple’s beautiful design and tried to mimic it but hired the same designers who build the $99 boomboxes with shiny black plastic, fake chrome trim, and giant useless VU meters. I’ll probably end up turning all the nonsense off, but for now the novelty is amusing.

So overall the new computer is a success. A few hours of swearing on Twitter from frustrations, now it’s good. Next step: migrate all my old software over. Adobe’s advice on Photoshop was “buy another copy!”. Um, no.

PS: I promised to mock all the people who said “get a Mac” in response to my request for Windows advice. But the first comment was such a great parody of Apple advocacy I don’t need to do more than quote it. “You’re intelligent enough that you should have gotten a Mac by now.” Dear computer enthusiasts: when someone asks you for directions to a nearby synagogue you don’t direct them to your evangelical Christian megachurch.

Bad news on the Google Browser Sync / Firefox 3 front; Google has discontinued Google Browser Sync. At least, that’s what a Google support person told a user; no official information on Google’s product page or FAQ. It’s not unexpected. This is the downside of Google Labs; a 20% project from a smart engineer can get released quickly but truly supporting a quality product takes a real team.

There are some alternatives. If all you want is bookmarks, there’s lots of options. If you want cookies and passwords too the best bet seems to be Mozilla Weave. But it’s an “experimental prototype,” requires registration to install, and reports are that it’s unstable.

I’m surprised how slow Google has been to support Firefox 3; there’s not even a Toolbar version yet. Firefox is very valuable software to Google. There’s no public data about how much money Google makes from Firefox, but there is information on what Google is paying for the privilege of being in the Firefox ecosystem. Google paid Mozilla over $50M for search ad traffic in 2006. And Google pays at least $1 / install for Firefox + Google Toolbar. They’re not just giving that money away to be nice, they’re paying to own the default search box. Nothing wrong with that, I just hope it translates into good support for the development of Firefox products.

It’s time to retire RSS. Atom is superior, better defined, mature, and a proper standard. RSS is hurting blog readers’ user experience.

The problem is that the major blog platforms that support Atom are publishing multiple feeds in the autodiscovery section of the blog. So when a user goes to subscribe to the blog the browser presents a completely confusing choice of multiple feeds to subscribe to. That choice is meaningless to blog readers and just causes unnecessary anxiety. Publishing platforms should simply advertise the Atom feed and be done with it. Yeah, sure, keep the RSS link working for backward compatibility if you need to. Just stop advertising the link to the RSS.

Here’s the advertisements for major publishing platforms

• Blogger: 3 choices. Atom, RSS, Atom comments.
• Typepad: 5 choices. Atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom comments, RSS 2.0 comments.
• Wordpress: 1 choice. RSS 2.0. Atom is supported but not advertised by default.
• Tumblr: 1 choice. RSS 2.0.

Ironically, many of the RSS links are published through Feedburner which has some automatic feed rewriting that ends up serving Atom anyway.

Congrats to Wordpress and Tumblr for not presenting a confusing choice, but you’re offering the wrong feed type. Blogger and Typepad, your user experience is awful. I sympathize with the blog vs. comment problem, but at least get it down to two choices.

PS: no criticism intended to the history of RSS. The original Netscape work was revolutionary and kudos to Winer and other early blog pioneers who saw the value of a standard syndication format and promoted it. Atom represents the industry maturity of the syndication vision of RSS; it’s time for the progenitor to retire.

You have to give AT&T and Apple marketing credit; they’ve managed to palm off a price increase as a discount. The headline is “$199 iPhone, half the old price”. Then buried in the details is that the data contract now costs $10/month more, so over the two year lifespan of the phone it ends up being $40 more.

I know, I know, the new phone is more capable and the 3G network will be faster. Yeah, I want one too. But you have to admire the simple old carny marketing trick.

What I find most odd about the new price plan is it seems to bring the iPhone closer to AT&T lockin. I’d been hoping Apple would move away from a single carrier. I sure hope Android or something else provides some viable competition to the current market.

I just had a lovely little two day outing to Murphys, CA, about three hours drive east of SF between Stockton and Yosemite. If you’re looking for a weekend getaway and want a mix of gold country, Sierras, wine, and good restaurants then Murphys is a good option. I love going up to the Sierra foothills, it’s relaxed and beautiful and the gold history gives some architectural interest. On my full day in Murphys I visited Mercer Caverns, a fine vertical limestone cave that’s a bit worse for wear after 120 years of tourism. I also headed up to the incomparably beautiful Big Trees state park, home to a couple of groves of giant redwoods and a fine looking swimming hole on the Stanislaus river.

There’s a zillion pleasant towns in the Sierra foothills. Murphys is distinguished by its concentration of good restaurants and wine tasting. Calaveras County is a relatively young wine area, but the local winemakers got the bright idea to put all their tasting rooms in one town. You can easily spend a pleasant afternoon having lunch and wandering around the friendly tasting rooms. And Murphys has several fine restaurants. I had a delicious roasted pork shoulder with beautifully seasoned beans at Grounds. Next night was even better, with spicy corn chowder and perfect lamb chops at Alchemy. Both meals were way better than you could expect in a town of 2000 people and Alchemy could easily compete with any of my favourite places in San Francisco.

I’m always a bit uneasy with being in a tourist town, but places like Murphys justify it. The area is beautiful enough to be worth visiting and the tourists bring in money to support good services. The whole gold country region is really growing with tourism. Even sad little Plymouth, a town I visit solely to take pictures of a rusted gas pump, is now home to a fine restaurant, a gourmet deli, and soon an Indian casino.

Cottonelle toilet paper
Like wiping your ass with a playful puppy

One of my favourite little Google tools is Google Browser Sync. It synchronizes all your Firefox state between multiple computers; cookies, passwords, bookmarks, etc. Very handy when switching computers.

Sadly the addon doesn’t work with Firefox 3. And worryingly, there’s been no update to the project since August 2006. It’s a Labs project (ie: less supported than the usual) and there’s been no hopeful response in this Google Groups thread. It may be time for an old-fashioned lobbying campaign, see also this blog post.

The online game industry has a problem: World of Warcraft so dominates the industry that it’s hard to imagine any serious competition. There’s room for niche players like Eve Online; it takes about 100,000 subscribers to break even. But everyone’s angling to have the next million+ blockbuster, and it’s not happening.

The latest competitor in the mix is Age of Conan. On the surface it seems a lot like WoW; high fantasy, RPG, quests and levelling and all that. They’re trying to distinguish the gameplay by adding realtime combat elements and a serious PvP endgame.

But what really sets AoC apart is the intellectual property. The Conan franchise is a great starting point full of big dumb exciting heroes. And Funcom has embraced it whole heartedly with lots of gore, fast combat, and “mature themes”. The first quest in AoC (pictured above) makes it clear this isn’t WoW; you turn the corner and see a beautiful slave girl in chains, begging for your help. When you rescue her she tells you she’s a “pleasure girl” and that while she can’t pay you for helping, if you visit her at the brothel you’ll “come to some arrangement”. Hubba hubba. Oh yeah, the female models have nipples, too.

I don’t think gore and boobies will be enough to make AoC a success. It might even backfire; a big part of WoW’s growth is its appeal to people who aren’t hardcore fantasy gamers. But it’s nice to see something different and it’s good campy fun.

What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

I’m not going to pretend it’s a good movie. Speed Racer is a summer film with no redeeming narrative or characters. But it’s absolutely beautiful and if the visuals interest you at all go see it very soon. Because there’s no point in watching this film other than the sensory experience in a real theater, and it’s unlikely to be in theaters for long. The pleasure of the movie is entirely in the incredible visual language. The Wachowskis aren’t shy at all in their formalism and the film is a triumph of oversaturated plastic colours, insane cartoon collage, and overwhelming motion sequences. Visually the whole film is kind of like the monolith sequences in 2001. Only instead of LSD infused cosmic transcendance it’s MDMA fueled heart pumping sensory overload. It’s absolutely exhausting, ridiculous, and beautifully conceived and rendered. Either you’ll find it interesting or you’ll hate it.

I feel a bit bad about picking on Google Doctype’s HTML on launch day. Having launched products at Google I know there’s nothing more obnoxious than some know-it-all harping on some tiny problem with the product you’ve worked for a year to launch. But the irony of the problem was too much to let pass. It’s fixed now, a plain ol’ HTML link. Yay! Since I picked on Google’s newest product let me pick next on their oldest product now; web search. And the ugly URLs it produces.

The first problem is the search page URLs are too big. If you go to the plain ol’ google.com home page and search for “RFC 1738” in Firefox 3 or MSIE 7 you end up at here:

The q parameter is our search term, a lovely thing that belongs there. But what’s the other stuff? hl specifies the language Google itself is in. Google already knows I speak English, why does it have to be in the URL? And the btnG is entirely superfluous. Why not just send me here? So much simpler. Easier to email to other folks, cleaner to bookmark, cleaner to link to.

It gets worse. Here’s the URL for the first search result:

Follow all that? Three completely mysterious parameters, an escaped version of the actual URL, and then three opaque blobs. What’s all this garbage for? Why not just have a link to Because of all the URL mucking I can’t really use the URL on the Google results page. I can’t simply copy the link destination or bookmark it; I have to click and go to the page itself. And whatever they’re doing means I don’t even go to the site when I click the link; I have to make an extra HTTP connection to google to get a redirect (250ms in the test I just ran).

The destination URLs only get rewritten in this way if I’m logged into my Google Account; with no google.com cookies you get clean URLs. I imagine there’s some sort of clickthrough tracking or web search history maintenance or some other vaguely privacy-invading feature I’ve long since forgotten about. There’s ways to do clickthrough tracking without redirecting URLs; why mess with links?

I realize writing this I’m dangerously close to self-parody by dissecting URL structures. Very few people will care, stuff still works when you click on it. But Google set a real standard for parsimony and speed in its web applications. It also has a unique understanding of the value of a simple HTML link. So it bugs me when they break stuff like that.

PS: to my friends at Google, no need to send me mail explaining why all this stuff is necessary. I still vaguely remember the explanations for most of it. My point is that from the outside, as a user who cares about simple HTML, all this extra stuff looks like harmful overhead.

Google was very lucky to hire Mark Pilgrim, web standards expert and cranky genius. Congratulations to him on for the launch of Google Doctype, a website that documents fancy HTML, CSS, and DOM tricks that we all use. The current practice of rich webapps is way beyond the official standards and it’s good to see Google take some leadership in documenting how things should work.

So it’s a bit mind-boggling to me to find this bit of HTML on the front page (URLs elded) that breaks the most basic element of the web; clicking on a link.

What’s that? Well, it looks like a link to the actual important content; “Browse Google Doctype”. But because someone put an onlick handler on it, it’s not actually treated like a URL when you click on it. Instead, when you click on it the Javascript is executed to navigate you to the URL. Unfortunately, when you shift-click on it the Javascript also navigates you. Rather than doing what the user would expect, open the link in a new window.

I know, it’s a little thing. But it’s a horrible little thing, the kind of thing that so many “smart websites” do wrong and break the web standard UI. My understanding of Google Doctype is that it’s a whole project about helping developers avoid this kind of mistake.

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!

In the five and a half years I’ve been a Netflix subscriber I’ve rented 104 movies. That’s an average price of $11 a rental. I’m apparently one of their best customers.

The Firefox 3 beta has a nice new UI for remembering passwords. The first time you type a password into a form and click “submit” the browser does the submit and then puts a thin window at the top of the next page asking whether you want to remember the password. In Firefox 2 the option to remember was a modal dialog you had to choose before the submit happened, so there was no way to know whether you were remembering the correct password. By deferring the decision until after the result page loads, you can avoid committing bad passwords.

Firefox 3 is a significant improvement in lots of ways. It’s much more responsive on Windows and the new Location bar autocomplete thing is cool. Beta 4 has one terrible bug with scrolling textareas, and the lack of 3.0 compatible addons is a nuisance. But FF3 is generally a big upgrade and stable for use now.

Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind
And you’re hampered by not having any
The simplest way to solve the dilemma you’ll find
Is simply by flipping a penny

No, not so that chance shall decide the affair
As you’re passively standing there moping
But as soon as the penny is up in the air
You’ll suddenly know what you’re hoping

--Piet Hein

I’ve been writing this blog for over six years always to satisfy an audience of one: myself. But I’m vain and am curious what parts of my blog others like. Thanks to Google Analytics I now know my most-linked posts:

Why SOAP Sucks

Four years of web API development frustration boiled down to 500 words.

Google search history and privacy

Alarm at a new Google feature. I’m not as concerned about it as I was when I wrote this post.

Goodbye, Google SOAP search API

Learning Google turning off my once-loved search API. My comments about “discipline” were considered news to Google watchers.

Games imitating war imitating games

Call of Duty 4 remixes Iraq. Waxy gave it link love, but a lot of the links are search engine gaming. One of the spam pages has a funny picture, though.

Hostile movie theaters

A guest post from friend Marc, a fine cranky rant I’m in total agreement with.

Helping spiders find your new home

Deeply nerdy post about migrating a website to a new domain. Glad this is well linked, it should be useful.

Why Bloggers aren’t journalists

My attempt at being controversial calling Techcrunch out for sloppy reporting.

Another gamer emoticon

The usage of <3 to express affection. BoingBoing liked it. Breaking emoticon news: <8 is the opposite of <3, presumably as rhyming slang.

My most linked posts are pretty varied, but generally technical. When I talk to people in person the posts they remember most are the ones about Paris; no one seems to link to those though.

Do you want to enable Expires: headers on your Debian web-server? It takes three steps:

1. Get mod_expires loaded into apache by symlinking expires.load in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled.
2. Enable expires header in your specific site by adding the directive ExpiresActive On in 000-default or wherever you configure Apache.
3. Enable a default expiration policy by adding the directive ExpiresDefault "now plus 2 days".

The expires header makes me a bit nervous. Pages render faster because the browser doesn’t even do a HEAD request if it’s in the period. But if the file actually changed, the browser will never know about it. Sort of the same problem with DNS cache times. It makes a lot of sense for static assets like images you never change.

All this is motivated by Yahoo’s guide for speeding up websites. Along with the YSlow tool webmasters have no excuse for not knowing why their site renders slowly. Some of their suggestions are a bit complicated for a small site (no content distribution network for my blog, sorry). But any serious web company should take a long hard look at its reports.

We’ve been having our new house remodelled. One thing that really surprised me is how impermanent the walls are. I’ve always thought of the walls of a house as fixed objects, invariant constraints you work around. But all it takes is a crowbar to open them up. Then you can run wires through them, put in plumbing, ventilation. We even moved a wall a couple of inches to steal space from a closet and make the kitchen larger. No big deal, assuming you have a good drywall guy to finish the job.

20+ years later the Unix shell is still the fastest way to get work done on a bunch of files. I’m still regularly combining grep, awk, sort, uniq, etc to do analysis on data.

One common task is doing work for every line of a file.

for f in `cat list`; do
  ls -l "$f"
done

There are a lot of reasons this idiom is broken. The worst problem is that it doesn’t work if the lines in the file list have spaces in them and no amount of quoting will fix it. Also if list is large (32k?) it fails because everything’s expanded in the limited command line buffer.

The idiom works often enough that I use it all the time. And when I do I have a problem, I’m always left scratching my head to remember the right way. Well, here it is (in bash):

cat list | while read f; do
  ls -l "$f"
done

The read command in bash is a magic builtin. It reads a line from stdin and assigns its contents to shell variables. It also has a return code when EOF is reached, allowing a clean exit from a loop.

read has a lot of options for how it handles the file input. I’m a bit confused that the above sample works, actually, because the bash docs suggest that each line is parsed via IFS and only the first word assigned to the variable f. But in practice that only seems to happen if you have more than one variable. See the docs for options for line delimiters, assigning to an array, backslash handling, etc.

Looking for something intelligent to watch? Can’t wait for Season 2 of Mad Men? Do yourself a favour and rent The Apartment, the 1960 film from which Mad Men borrows half its period setting. It’s a great movie thanks to the fantastic performance from Jack Lemmon. He’s a total sap, a bit of a nerd, and yet despite everyone walking all over him he remains charming and self-posessed. He’s also got enough backbone to get the girl in the end. Shirley MacLaine is good as the girl too, and while the movie falls a bit too much into dopey romance comedy it always has a bitter New York edge that keeps it tasty.

Back when Google filed to go public in 2004, a bunch of investment banks came sniffing around Google looking to “help” all the newly minted millionaires. Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS, all the top tier brand names. And thanks to Eliot Spitzer (with some help from Jonathan Rosenberg), I didn’t fall for their pitch.

Before he was governor, Spitzer was the attorney general for the state of New York. And he made it his business to ferret out corruption and double dealing in Wall Street investment banks. Thanks to Spitzer we learned in 2002 that the top investment banks were selling their retail clients securities that they knew were garbage but needed to sell from their investment arm. Nice bit of double dealing. And we learned in 2003 about “market timing”, a coy word for the simple fraud of letting privileged customers buy securities at below market prices. He also uncovered the scandal around Dick Grasso; the guy in charge of regulating the NYSE who was getting paid the outrageous sum of $140 million dollars by the people he was supposed to be regulating. The same Grasso who’d failed in oversight on double dealing and market timing.

A lot of people hate Spitzer. Wall Street is glad to see him go, for obvious reasons. And from what I’ve read he wasn’t particularly popular with anyone, you hear words like “abusive” and “arrogant”. He’s a fucking idiot for hiring prostitutes and the fact he’s throwing around $80,000 or more on hookers raises troubling ethics questions.

But I’m still thankful to Spitzer for the work he did as attorney general. I found a way to handle my own investments that doesn’t involve getting advice from crooked investment banks and am much better off for it.

Can a great game be ruined by bad controls? I think so and Geometry Wars: Galaxies is my example, on both Wii and NDS. The lack of two joysticks destroys the game.

The Geometry Wars games are a series of great retro twin-stick shooters, a sort of Robotron spiced up with high-def graphics. Galaxies adds a lot of depth to the previous incarnations and I was greatly looking forward to playing all the different game modes.

Sadly, my attempts to play on the Nintendo DS quickly ended in hand cramping. The default controls are left hand holding the NDS up and working the D-Pad, right hand using the stylus to aim your shots. It works OK but holding the NDS up is fatiguing. The Wii is even more disappointing. The controls have you moving with one joystick and controlling where you shoot by pointing the remote at the screen. But the pointing is too imprecise to work. And it’s awkward in that one hand is doing something abstract (moving a joystick) while the other is doing something fairly literal (pointing at screen).

I gave the game to three friends for Christmas. Not a big success with anyone. My eleven year old nephew liked it ok on the NDS and didn’t mind the controls, but I think he got bored of it quickly. My friend Marc didn’t play the game on his Wii very long; it’s a more demanding hardcore game than they prefer to play and the controls didn’t help anything. My other friend Mike is more of a gamer nerd and wasn’t turned off by the hardcoreness, but also agreed the controls were awkward. He went so far as to buy the dual stick controller for the Wii, but that doesn’t quite work either because the physical hardware design forces the joystick into the eight compass directions rather than allowing smooth 360 degree motion.

I still think Galaxies is a very good game, it’s too bad it’s hamstrung by being a twin stick shooter released on Nintendo platforms that don’t have two joysticks. Particularly since Nintendo has made a name for themselves in having games with innovative controls.

The Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000 is good hardware. It’s a full-size Bluetooth mouse that works pretty well and is fairly inexpensive at $50.

The main feature that matters in a wireless mouse is power management, and the Microsoft mouse is great at it. It goes into sleep mode automatically, so the battery lasts a week. (Something Logitech mice didn’t do, last I checked.) I also like the smooth scroll wheel, with no click-like resistance. And it’s standard Bluetooth, not some silly proprietary wireless protocol.

It’s not a perfect mouse. In theory clicking the scroll wheel is a middle button, but you usually end up triggering the useless side-to-side scrolling instead. But there’s enough extra buttons that you can have another act like button 3. I prefer a right handed mouse to Microsoft’s ambidextrous design. The charging connection isn’t tight so you have to carefully place the mouse and verify it’s charging. I’ve had the tracking go wonky a couple of times; rebooting the mouse fixed it. And randomly at night my computer is waking up from the screen saver; not positive it’s the mouse, but that’s my best guess.

That’s a long list of problems, but they’re all pretty minor. The convenience of a wireless mouse with long battery life outweighs the small issues. Recommended.

PS: Apple LOL.

MediaMonkey is good software. It’s an MP3 cataloguer / player that works well. Something like iTunes, only without all the creeping awfulness and with lots of useful features.

The main feature I use is the autotagger. It uses the filename and existing ID3 tags to look an album up on Amazon, then tags your MP3 files with cleaner names and cover art. There’s an addon to get lyrics, too. The UI for this is great, with a clear view of and control over exactly what tags you modify. Solved my problem.

My only complaint is that MediaMonkey is not very good at actually playing MP3 files. It takes awhile to launch if it’s not running already, the available skins are ugly, and it doesn’t buffer enough off my NAS. But it’s good enough though and you can always just use it to clean up your collection and play music via a more lightweight player.

A few months into our relationship and I still love my iPhone. Mostly because it’s a cell phone with a decent UI. Having mobile email and Web is nice too, although EDGE is awfully bad in SF. But like any relationship, after a few months some things bug you...

The “Recents” UI makes me constantly call people by accident. You get this nice list of recent calls, so you click on one of the names to find out when they called you, see their number, maybe text them a message. Only clicking the name in that list immediately calls them back. Oops! You have to click the little right arrow on the side for all the other actions. That’s backwards from how the contact list works and causes mistakes daily.

I love the hands free headset on the iPhone. Great sound, good mic, fits in the pocket. But the microphone has a terrible flaw; sharp corners. See the edges in the picture above? The microphone is just at the height of my shirt collar, so it’s constantly catching when I walk. It’s a small thing, but Apple often gets the small things right and their hardware design is why you pay the premium.

ReGet Pro is good software. It’s a download manager for getting large (10MB+) files with some management instead of straight in your web browser. Integrates into Firefox via the FlashGot addon.

I’d always thought download managers were stupid. Their primary advertised feature is downloading several chunks of a file in parallel “for faster downloads”. Because of how TCP/IP works this idea is almost always terrible for large files. It only works because you’re circumventing the server’s bandwidth throttle; that’s anti-social.

But ReGet Pro can be configured in a more useful way, to limit bandwidth. I’ve got mine set up to download only one thread at a time with a max bandwidth of 180kBps, comfortably under my 240kBps connection. That way I can download big files in the background while doing other things on the net. It also turns out that ReGet’s suspend and resume function is surprisingly useful; Firefox is suprisingly unstable to be using for 3+ hour downloads.

A few years back I blogged about an AC-130 gunship video. You can watch it on Youtube now, it’s a creepy but fascinating live view of soldiers in a gunship killing people on the ground in Afghanistan. At the time, it struck me how much this real war video was like a video game. Now we’ve come full circle; that war video has been made into a video game level in Call of Duty 4. Same visuals, same basic setup of bombing people on the ground but avoiding a church, even some of the same color dialog. The game’s a little harder; you have to avoid hitting your own people as well as the church. But the effect is quite similar. And creepy.

My ongoing rants about iTunes may be getting old, but I continue them because Apple has a reputation for well designed software. The truth is a lot of their software does not work particularly well, particularly on Windows.

Today’s fiasco was when I plugged my iPhone in to charge the battery. Only it didn’t charge. Why? I was in a hurry, so I didn’t wait for 30 seconds for iTunes to start up and didn’t notice that it wanted an upgrade. Which left the phone mid-sync and some stupid feature in the iPhone means it didn’t actually charge the battery while waiting for me to click a button on the computer at the other end of the charging cable. Nice engineering, guys.

I approved the update. 65 megs of download without a functioning progress bar and the upload process stole keyboard focus from my other apps three times. My desktop reloaded several times too, and along the way iTunes once again stole my .mp3 association and littered my desktop and launch bar with QuickTime advertisements. Then it demanded a reboot, which I refused. The iPhone upgrade failed with an “error -50”, whatever that might mean. It worked the second time, although the phone was deactivated for about a minute with no useful warning.

The iPhone has a terrible user experience on the Windows desktop. It’s embarassing. And because the iPhone is a closed environment, I don’t have any alternative. Apple’s linkage between products is the sort of thing that got Microsoft in trouble.

If I start sounding like a Tory, you’ll know why. I’ve started getting most of my news from reading The Economist.

“Conservative” is a relative thing. The Economist is a specifically European form of conservatism, one where the Texas death penalty gets special attention, Barack Obama has already won the nomination, and industry abuses in California are called out.

I particularly appreciate the international viewpoint. So much better coverage of world affairs than American news outlets. I feel like I understand something about what’s going on in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Japan, Brazil, and more generally internationally. And the outsider view of US politics is interesting too, from election coverage to a sort of direct assessment of American wiretapping politics. It also helps that it’s a weekly magazine rather than a daily, the stories are a bit more thoughtful.

I read the New York Times for years. It’s an excellent paper but after the Iraq war runup disaster I lost faith in their editorial board. The recently bungled McCain story doesn’t help anything. I still read the local paper, but it’s become a joke. I’m finding I don’t quite finish one copy of The Economist before the next shows up, and that’s just about enough weekly news for me.

Perpetually hopeless candidate Ralph Nader is entering the presidential election. All the Democrats still smarting from having the Florida vote stolen from them in 2000 are pissed. With some reason.

But the presidential election is months away; we still have a primary to finish. And I’m thinking Nader’s threat may help Obama. If Clinton gets the nomination, a lot of hard-core liberals are going to be tempted to vote for Nader. By contrast, I think Obama is progressive enough that left-leaning Democrats will not be tempted by Nader.

The threat of a Nader spoiler becomes particularly strong if Clinton wins the nomination via backroom politicking and dirty tricks. Maybe the threat of a split liberal vote will be enough to keep the Clinton people from doing something awful like getting Michigan and Florida’s improper elections to count.

During the primary a couple of weeks ago Robot Hillary Clinton called me at home twice to ask me to vote for her. I go through a fair amount of trouble and expense to avoid unsolicited calls at home and so Robot Hillary Clinton was not very persuasive.

The Do Not Call registry does not stop calls for political campaigns. But in California robotic calls are illegal.

A “live” person must come on the line before the recording to identify the nature of the call and the organization behind it. The recipient of the call must consent to allowing the recording to be played.

I wasn’t angry enough at Robot Hillary Clinton to do anything about her illegal calls. But today the evil fucks behind ProtectMarriage.com illegally robo-called me. From a fake caller ID of “800 Services” 800-851-4642.

Not only did they disturb my peace at home, they did so asking me to support their twisted religion-branded hatred of me and my family. So now I’m looking to see how I can help the law be enforced. I’ve already filed my PUC complaint, but angrily pressing the “Submit Form” button doesn’t seem like enough. Any ideas?

I got a new toy today, a Sonos music system. It’s a music player like my beloved Squeezebox, an audio component that turns network into music by playing MP3s off a server somewhere. But unlike the Squeezebox, the Sonos is designed for multi-zone audio and the components are amplified.

The user experience so far is beautiful, as clean to use as an iPhone. The centerpiece of the Sonos system is the controller, a large remote control with a bright LCD screen and a few simple control buttons. You use the controller to choose which music you want to play in which zone. The UI is good; intuitive and nice features like album cover art. You can try a Flash demo; look for the “Click Here to Launch” box on the left.

The controller tells the Zone Players to play music. The players have no significant UI of their own, they’re just boxes that take power and ethernet or wifi in and deliver audio out. Output options are line-out, digital, and amplified. The integrated amp is the killer feature for me in the Sonos and what sets it apart from the Squeezebox.

Behind the scenes everything’s working over wireless network. Music is pulled off of a NAS; I’m using Samba on a Linux box. There’s also a good browser for Internet radio stations and various music services like Napster and Rhapsody. Not iTunes, tellingly.

I just got the Sonos today so there’s lots to tinker with still. But out of the box things were working in 15 minutes. Great unboxing experience, simple setup, the only wrinkle was getting my stupid Samba server to cooperate.

My only caveat so far is the price; the starter bundle is $1000 for a two zone system. That’s a lot, but it’s a fair price for an amplified multizone system with a great UI. But if your needs are simpler then a Squeezebox or iPhone dock may make more sense.

Ken and I were talking about the origin of the word discombobulated yesterday. “dis” and “com” are combining forms in English, but there’s certainly no root verb bobulate or combobulate.

Random House, American Heritage, and Webster all have it as an American coinage with dates varying from 1825 to 1916. Supposedly a fanciful play on the word “discomfort” or “discompose”. Other variants show up, too: discombobricate, discombobberate, or a recent variant discomboobulate.

But there’s a wholely different theory which I first found on a MySpace profile, that discombobulate is connected to the Italian word scombussolare. That Italian verb has roughly the same meaning as discombobulate and is derived from the word bussola, compass, as in “lose one’s compass bearing”. Supposedly scombussolare is a 17th centuary Italian word, but alas I don’t have any more authoritative reference than a forum thread. And how do we get to discombobulate with the extra negative prefix?

There’s something sinful about pretending to do this kind of research solely on the Internet, when all the relevant sources are over a hundred years old.

Netflix announced today that they’re going to stop stocking HD-DVD and will exclusively stock Blu-ray. That’s it, the stupid format war is over.

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing the racing / car crashing game Burnout: Paradise. Well tuned racing, amazing car crash simulations, and a rich open city to drive around in. A city with lots and lots of advertising. Ads permeate Paradise City. There are billboards everywhere with CompUSA, Vizio, and Slingbox logos clear enough to be perceived even as you whiz pass at 100mph. Vans drive around the city plastered with ads for Gilette Fusion razors. Diesel is everywhere: billboards, vans, even a storefront. There are also game codes for drivable cars from Walmart, Best Buy, and others.

What’s amazing is the ads work. They’re not offensive, they decorate the city appropriately. There’s enough variety and turnover that the ads seem fresh. Amusing fake ads for “Good Kid Jellybeans” and “Rayfield Hotels” liven things up and fill the unsold inventory. And the ads are an interactive, integrated part of the world; you crash into a lot of Diesel cars on your way to smashing into billboards (albeit unbranded ones). The only ads that look sad are the drivable cars; you can spot the douche in the online game because he’s the one that shows up in the Walmart-branded Formula One car.

I’d love to know more about the economics of in-game ads. Burnout’s ads come from IGA Worldwide; other online ad players are Microsoft (via aquiring Massive) and Google (via aquiring Adscape Media). So far all the game ads I’ve seen are branding, not lead generation. But what a brand platform! Captive users interacting with the ads, online updates both to monitor brand penetration and to sell new ads over time, lots of creative potential. The big wrinkle is that only some small fraction of games can accomodate brand ads. I’d hate to see game publishers stop developing fantasy RPGs because they can’t work in Burger King advertising.

I hate the coverage of the Super Tuesday results. We get stupid orange/purple maps showing who won the majority, completely obscuring the size of the majority, the number of delegates, or the number of people who voted. Inspired by Robert Venderbei’s red/blue maps I tried to do a better choropleth map. Above is my work-in-progress. The more red the state, the more of the vote Obama got. You can view a live map, also a map of percent of delegates. According to NPR, Obama got fewer delegates than votes.

This visualization is not very useful, honestly, I don’t like the constraints of the map drawing tool I’m using. Can anyone suggest better simple software for drawing coloured US states? Then again geography may not be the right foil; delegates or popular vote is more important than location.

I didn’t triple-check that the data is accurate. Sources:

• NPR election results
• Example XML result data.
• Snapshot CSV of Super Tuesday results; will be outdated as soon as this is posted.

If Yahoo agrees to the deal with Microsoft, it will be a shotgun marriage, but it will be Google holding the shotgun. —BBC

Astonishing offer from Microsoft for Yahoo today. Just revel in the number for a moment: $44.6 billion half cash, 62% premium. That’s a lot of cash.

The Yahoo offer has to be considered in the context of Microsoft’s offer to aquire Fast Search. Who is Fast? At one time there were just a few real search engines: Inktomi, Altavista, Fast, and Google. Yahoo bought Inktomi and Altavista, digested a couple of years, and narrowed the search market to Yahoo vs. Google. Fast was still around with good technology and brilliant employees but not much mindshare.

At the same time Yahoo was consolidating Microsoft started developing their own search engine. With mixed results; decent technology, no users. Microsoft buying Fast in January was both an admission of their technology limitations and a very shrewd way to pick up a lot of search engine engineers. Now if they buy Yahoo they get the users they need to make their search engine a success, not to mention another group of search engineers, a sophisticated online ad system, and lots of paying advertisers.

If Microsoft succeeds in buying Yahoo it will turn the game from Yahoo vs. Google to Microsoft vs. Google. Will they succeed? I don’t know, but it’s the kind of bold move they have to try. Vista is failing, Office is getting serious online app competition, Microsoft understands their shrinkwrap business is slowly fading. Ray Ozzie is there to lead the company to online apps and search is the Start button for the Web. Buying Yahoo would be a very smart move for Microsoft at almost any price.

If you care about games as an artform, you definitely need to play Rez sometime. That pleasure is now easier; Rez was just remastered and released for $10 on Xbox Live Arcade. Well worth the expense.

The conversion is good. The HD graphics look beautiful and the widescreen aspect works nicely. There’s surround sound. A bit of online play in the form of leaderboards and downloadable replays. And yes, there’s even trance vibrator (NSFW) support. And if you want to see how poorly we lived six years ago, you can play the original game too. Really, a perfect conversion.

To be honest Rez doesn’t have the best gameplay. It’s a basic rail shooter with occasional frustrating dodging and the boss fights are tedious. What makes this game so important is the pure æsthetic joy of it, the fusion of music and trippy graphics and sensory overload.

Video games have mostly become like movies, complex animations and sets and stories and intricate gameplay. Which is good when done well. Rez stripped all that cinematographic stuff away and focussed on a music and visual experience. And is deservedly well loved for that.

At the time Rez felt unique and retro, but happily now we have lots of other good options for hypnagogic gameplay: Space Giraffe, Geometry Wars, Lumines. The look of these games is unique to gamer culture, not an emulation of movies. I cherish that.

I recently switched my IM client from Trillian Pro to Pidgin, née GAIM. Trillian hasn’t had an update in years, the Jabber support is bad, and it was acting wonky. Time to switch to an open source alternative.

Be careful what you wish for. Pidgin is amazing in a lot of ways; it supports a lot of protocols, has simple plugins, a solid communications library, etc. But it also has the breathtaking hostility to usability of so many open source apps. A lot of the GUI details aren’t quite right and the docs are downright arrogant.

To be fair, Pidgin mostly works fine out of the box. Except the font is too small. No big deal, every app lets you configure the font, right? Ha! Just try the documented solution. Apparently I’m supposed to learn about GTK, and themes, and figure out where GTK places config files in Windows, then edit them with a text editor and insert 500 bytes of configuration directives for “imhtml-fix”.

There’s a proposal to add font controls in Pidgin, but the answer from the developer is “I think more people should know how to modify their system configuration settings”. Because you know, chatting with your friends without squinting should require you spend hours researching some GUI toolkit no other app on your system uses.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
I’m a big fan of post-apocalyptic novels so it was a nice surprise that America’s favourite postmodern western novelist would tackle the genre. Or that it’d be an Oprah Book Club pick. It’s a fantastic novel, grim and depressing and horribly compelling.

King Corn by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis
A documentary from the Michael Moore school of social justice, only without the smug obnoxious presence of Michael Moore. Really quite sweet and understated, two filmmakers spend a year growing and sell an acre of corn and document the process and the people. Lots of insight into the economics and consequences of modern agribusiness, well told without being preachy.

Burnout: Paradise by Criterion Games
The Burnout games have been light racing / crashing fun for a long time. Paradise is a real improvement, though, with a free roaming design. It’s like Grand Theft Auto only the driving is actually fun and you can’t sleep with hookers. The fans had a minor revolution when the demo was released because it was different and honestly not very good. The full game is much better than the demo. Best innovation is the elimination of long event load times.

Today I thought I’d update my iPhone to 1.1.3 firmware. Here’s the hell I encountered.

1. Run iTunes, try to update firmware and am told I need to update iTunes.
2. Update iTunes. Wait 15 minutes for downloads, accept the Klingon license agreement. Ignore the demand to reboot.
3. iTunes works, but decides to “update my library” which for some reason involves uploading many megabytes of data to something on the Internet.
4. Try to update iPhone. Get “error 1602”.
5. Research online, get no conclusive results. Try rebooting to see if it fixes it.
6. Start iTunes after reboot. Get error “iTunes cannot run because it has detected a problem with your audio configuration”.
7. Research online, uninstall Quicktime and iTunes entirely and reinstall.
8. Wait 20 minutes for downloads and installs. Miraculously, no reboot required! Also no way to prevent Quicktime from stealing the .mov file association.
9. iTunes works! iPhone update starts! Hooray!
10. 5 minutes later, iPhone update continues. Realize the progress bar has no measured finish time; just a little blue light scanning endlessly.
11. Update finally finishes, iPhone reboots, iTunes recognizes it again.
12. Unplug phone in a hurry because I’m 10 minutes late. Phone seems to work.
13. Phone crashes when I’m in my car. Reboot the phone and find it’s no longer activated with the cell provider and is now useless.

I spent 90 minutes downloading updates, rebooting, reinstalling. And in the end what did I get? A broken iPhone. Wasn’t Apple the computer for the rest of us?

(Yes, the phone is working again; plugging it into iTunes and waiting a few minutes seems to have now fixed it.)

Readers of my blog know I dislike everything about iTunes. But I’m kind of charmed by the license agreement on my most recent update. Yes, the iTunes license in Klingon. Properly speaking it’s just in a Klingon font; I don’t read Klingon but I’m guessing the glyphs are just transliterated from English.

Apple should get a third party to build their Windows apps.

I used to be an academic, a grad student 1996-1999 doing the workshop and conference tours. Write a small paper, propose it, take a trip to present it. It was kind of fun because the MIT Media Lab was stupidly overfunded, letting me do interesting if not productive things like wangle a trip to Budapest.

The downside is that now, eight years later, I’m still getting spam about once a week inviting me to go to third-rate workshops. Like the “Conference on Knowledge Generation, Communication, and Management”. Sounds hideous. I’m not in the business anymore, but a conference you’ve never heard of whose papers are published in a journal you’ve never heard of isn’t a good sign. Neither is filling your conference up with papers from people you spam because ten years ago they were doing something vaguely related. And the program has the stench of the Semantic Web, which as everyone knows is a total academic rathole.

This conference is at least in the US, albeit organized by someone in Venezuela. A lot of the spam I get is for conferences in small countries with no academic influence. Dear US grad students: a paper published in a workshop in Macedonia is not going to help you get a job at a top American university.

I understand that my email address is on giant lists for Viagra spam. But what list am I on that I keep getting academic conference spam? At least the Viagra spam has amusing pictures.

Once a year I’m reminded of the good people of Quitman, Mineola, and all the folks in God’s East Texas. Because once I year I write property tax checks for them on my vast oil empire.

“Vast” is a bit of an overstatement. I have no idea how much property I actually own since it’s so split up. The taxes on a 0.0006741 royalty interest in 95 acres comes to about $0.05 a year. The taxes on 1/2 of 1/3 of 2/3 of 2/3 mineral interest in 473.8 acres would be more, but no one’s drilling oil on that land right now. All told the yearly tax bill is about the cost of a steak in San Francisco. The royalties I earn would pay for a couple of steak dinners a year though, particularly with oil at $100 a barrel.

The US is unusual in that the minerals under a piece of land can be owned separately from the surface rights to farm or develop that land. Texans took good advantage of that option in the early 1900s after oil was discovered and it’s common for mineral rights to be owned and divided separately from the surface rights. My great-grandfather apparently took mineral interests in lieu of cash payments for some lawyering he did. And now we have an odd little family legacy.

The administration of that legacy is a huge pain. It took me several years to transfer the mineral rights to my mother’s heirs upon her death and the cost of filing all the papers outweighed a year’s royalties. People offer to buy the royalties from time to time, but we keep them in the family because they’re sort of fun and the offers are never very good. That, and I cherish the yearly ritual of getting a handwritten tax receipt from Mount Pleasant, TX (elevation 404 feet) for my payment of $3.66. They have good handwriting in east Texas.

I love services that passively record things I do. So I was excited to find Audioscrobbler from last.fm. It silently watches my Winamp and Squeezebox traffic and tells a server what I’m listening to. Simple, well executed.

What last.fm is missing is doing anything useful with that data. The site has some complex dashboard social network thing that is impenetrable to me. And it has a music recommendation function which is pretty good, but too junked up by crappy quality free music to be enjoyable.

So hooray for third party graphs! lastgraph is a simple web site that plots your music listening history from last.fm. The tool is a bit awkward, but the resulting graphs are beautiful and readable.

I hope last.fm has already made the appropriate overture to provide these graphs themselves. Simplify the creation tool a bit, publish a PNG, and fix poor Édith’s name and you’ve got a fine product feature.