David Holmes' Journal

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Comment on usability
When a program has some action that causes data loss or some other major irreversible effect, its designers need to take into account ways that it could be performed by accident, and come up with some manner of naturally discouraging it from happening by accident. That might mean a dialog box asking "Are you sure?" but sometimes there are better and less obtrusive solutions.

Also, when different actions naturally map to each other, the interface should present those mappings in a way that is naturally obvious to the human mind, such that the interface itself makes it clear what is mapped to what.

The Playstation emulator pSX (which is an outstanding program overall; easily the most painless of the free Playstation emulators) manages to screw both of these up in a way that causes each to make the other worse. It has five "quick save" slots, which are loaded with the keys F1-F5, and saved with the keys F6-F10. This means that if you are saving your games primarily with slot one (hitting F6), if you fat-finger the keystroke and hit both F5 and F6 at once, and F5 is hit first, it will load whatever you have in slot 5, and then use it to overwrite whatever you had in slot six, causing you to both lose your current progress and lose your save (your safeguard against losing your current progress) in an instant.

This is particularly annoying, because look at the function keys on your keyboard. They're grouped F1-F4 and F5-F8. It would be completely natural and intuitive to simply have four quick-save slots, read with F1-F4 and saved with F5-F8, and it would be immediately clear which save key corresponds to which load key, and there's a physical gap between the sets preventing the accident described above. You'd lose a quicksave slot, but it's not like you really need to juggle four quicksaves simultaneously; there are also non-quicksave save states if you want a larger record of historical data.

An even better idea would be to simply not overwrite old saves, and make copies of them instead. Since a Playstation only has 2MB of RAM, and even with other aspects of the system state the total file size is only 3.8MB, you can keep thousands of these things before space becomes an issue, and they likely compress well, especially in sequence with each other. If I was designing it, I might forego multiple slots entirely, and have one quick-save button and one quick-load button, with the option of selecting past quick-saves from a menu.

(this rant inspired by losing half an hour of playing time to said fat-fingering issue)

Fallout 3
...was a well-spent 65 hours of my life. It neither succeeds nor attempts at being the continuation of Fallout 1 & 2, but it is definitely of high enough caliber to be a worthy entry to the Fallout series, and perhaps more worthy than several other games in the series. It is also definitely Bethesda's best game, and improves on almost every shortcoming in Oblivion.

If you were worried about Fallout 3 because you reject everything The Elder Scrolls stands for and wanted a game just like Fallout 1 & 2, you should not play Fallout 3. If you were worried about Fallout 3 because you had extreme frustrations with Oblivion's broken leveling dynamics, generic and repetitive game world, uninspired characters and story, and all-around lack of soul, then you will probably find Fallout 3 to be a vast improvement in almost every way.

Which is not to say that it's perfect, but it's good enough that I came home from work every day wanting to play it and I never stopped out of boredom of frustration. It was pretty much consistently entertaining.

Some people won't accept it, but Bethesda's vision for the series is the future of Fallout, and it's here to stay. Considering that five years ago, virtually everybody acknowledged that the series had no future at all, I have no complaints, and am eagerly awaiting Fallout 4.

Overall score: A-

Spore DRM
So it seems EA decided to raise the number of installs allowed for Spore from 3 to 5. While one could consider it good that EA is in some capacity listening to customers, it seems pretty clear to me that they're just throwing a bone.

The issue wasn't never seriously that "I want to install the game five times, not three!" The issue was that they've transitioned from a model where everybody has the right to play a game they paid for, anywhere, forever, regardless of whether or not the company operating the activation servers is still supporting them or the customers have convenient internet access, to a model where you can only play the game you rented at the will of the company that made it. It is a privilege which they reserve the right to revoke at any time.

There is precident to believe that they WILL revoke that privilege as soon as it becomes unprofitable to support whatever they're selling it. Microsoft did it, after all, and I trust EA even less than I trust Microsoft.

I've heard a lot of EA-defenders arguing that "no paying customer has actually had any problems." This completely misses the point, because the problem doesn't arise until EA decides they no longer need to support the game. A few months ago, I installed SimCity, for DOS, of of a copy of the original install media. It worked, almost 20 years after the game came out. Will Spore still run off the original install media in 20 years? I think at this point the answer is "obviously not". At best they'll expect me to pay for it a second time, on the 2028 equivalent of Steam, which only proves that I was only renting it the first time.

And when EA claims that the vast majority of customers only install games once, they're immediately ruling out any chance that the game will be a timeless classic. I only install most games once, but I've probably installed a handful of games like Starcraft 20-30 times. If Starcraft had to phone home to Blizzard every time it was installed, I can't imagine that anybody would still play it ten years after it came out.

</rant>

Suikoden Tierkreis
Dammit, now I have to buy a DS.

Explanation?
So most of us have probably heard about the new method of electrolysis just announced by MIT. What I can't figure out is that every single reference to it is implying it's all about solar. It seems to me that it has much larger ramifications for both wind and hydrogen-powered vehicles than for solar. Yet the MIT site itself is talking about a "solar revolution", and the media seems to be regurgitating it mostly verbatim. The only reason I can think of is that the project was funded by a grant that was to research solar power.

Am I missing something here?

Infuriating
After replacing a hard drive with another hard drive with the same data on it:

Every time I wonder why I tolerate this shit.

Rant
So for the past couple weeks, I've been tossing around the idea that somebody (maybe me, if I had more time) should start a site based on the discussion of environmentalism based on science, economics, and engineering. The rationale behind this is that while I consider environmental issues to be extremely important, there are a huge number of people in the green community who have some severely distorted ideas about, well, pretty much everything. I see a lot of opinions out there that are just plain unworkable, almost to the exclusion of environmental strategies that might actually help us save this planet.

But today I got more worked up than I've been in a very long time, by a series of posts on TreeHugger, one of the bigger green blogs, about a car that "runs on water":

Fill Her Up... With Water?
Genepax Water Car: Too Good to be True? Yeah
Survey: Can a Car Run on Water?

When the first post was made, it was embarrassing. The car described in that article is obvious lunacy, and for TreeHugger to have a writer who couldn't recognize that reflects more than a little poorly on them, but when they ran the second post acknowledging it was a hoax it seemed like it was behind them.

But then WEEKS after their correction, they ran the "survey" asking what their readers thought of the car, and it made me sick to my stomach. The "survey" isn't really a survey; it's a quiz, with one correct answer and three incorrect answers. There is no opinion involved in this question.

Only 42% of respondents answered the question correctly.

This blew my mind, because I always figured environmentalists in general and TreeHugger readers in particular were educated and relatively well-grounded in science. You don't have to be a scientist to understand this; even a high school education in chemistry and physics should be sufficient. This is the audience that's supposed to understand this stuff.

Considering these results, it seems clear that TreeHugger needs to work much harder at educating their readers, and also at factual reporting in the first place. The first article should never have been posted, the second should have come down much harder on the issue, and the fact that the "survey" backpedals far enough to even insinuate that this car could possibly work just blows my mind.

Having a basic understanding of physics, chemistry and biology is necessary to have an informed opinion about the environment. The combination of energy and climate change is the greatest crisis humanity faces going into the 21st century, and it's clear that the obstacles to solving these issues are colossal if most of us don't have even a basic understanding of what energy is and how it works. Just the stuff they teach in high school would be more than enough, but apparently even that is asking too much.

Now I'm in the embarrassing and uncomfortable situation of having to count myself part of a movement of which the majority apparently doesn't have a clue what's going on. Calling a site "TreeHugger" was supposed to be reclaiming the word, asserting that environmentalists aren't a bunch of nutjobs out of touch with reality. It seems we are after all.

Rant
When a biker is riding in the street, treat him exactly as you would treat any other vehicle in the street.

If you arrive first at a 4-way stop, you have right of way. The fact that he's on a bike doesn't change anything. Do not be "nice" and let the biker go first.

If a biker has a stop sign and you don't, don't ever stop and wait for him. He's not a pedestrian.

Thank you for your time.

Earthquake in China
Am I the only one thinking this is an embarrassment for the United States? Not the earthquake itself, but how the Chinese government has handled it, compared to our own government's handling of Hurricane Katrina?

I am no fan whatsoever of the Chinese government; in fact I think they're generally deplorable. But it seems to me they've been remarkably on the ball with this one, especially considering their not-so-great track record.

As far as I can tell, they've been almost completely transparent about the whole thing. Of course, the photo ops in the state-run media don't exactly impress me, but it's not as though President Bush didn't do exactly the same in Katrina. And while the Bush administration totally dropped the ball after Katrina, the Chinese government has been both graceful in requesting and accepting aid, and swift in mobilizing all the resources at their disposal, from the army to the industry.

Of course, having an autocratic government function well makes it harder for those of us who value democratic government to argue against them. All the same, we can only wish the best for the Chinese people.

Support High Gas Prices!
...or more specifically, support market-determined gas prices.

When gas prices first started to soar, I found it to be an amusement. When Senators Clinton and McCain embraced this idiotic gas-tax holiday idea, I figured "oh well, just another reason to vote for Obama". But now it seems like half of the Congress thinks something "should be done", and I'm pulling my hair out just listening to these guys.

I'm not an economist, but I have studied a small amount of economics, and pretty much anybody who's taken so much as Econ 101 should understand that when price elasticity of demand is inelastic (which is close to the case with gasoline in the short term), there is no incentive for producers to lower prices just because they could make a profit selling for less. Selling at the current prices will still make a larger profit, no matter how little tax is included in that price. Therefore, lowering the gas tax will have a minimal effect on gas prices; it will simply result in larger profits for oil companies, which will be passed on in turn to OPEC. We'd be taking (almost) all the money we currently use to build roads and sending it as a gift to other countries instead.

And even if there was a way for government action to lower gas prices, it would still be an awful idea, because oil is a scarce resource. By subsidizing our dependence on oil we encourage consumers to make long term decisions which will only screw over our children further down the road by giving them less time to prepare for the inevitability of us running out of oil. Every penny we save now, they'll have to pay twice over.

In fact, I think the government should raise the gas tax. I'm wary of saying they should use the revenue to subsidize alternatives to fossil fuel dependence, since that was the train of thought that brought about the current insanity of corn ethanol, but in general, anything to slowly but firmly ease us into the reality that the age of oil is over is a good thing.

Grand Theft Auto IV
Are you guys with PS3s/360s all playing GTA4?

I'm tempted to buy a PS3 in the near future, though I'll probably wait until I think I have enough spare time to play it.

Samsung YP-U3
Last year, I decided I wanted a music player I could take to places like the gym, work, etc. I wanted something disposable, cheap enough that it would be no great loss if it was lost/stolen/broken. I also wanted it to be light and durable. This pretty much implied the 1-2 GB flash player range.

I was aware at this point that some of the non-Apple options in this particular market subset are actually very competitive, so with a small amount of research I picked out the Samsung YP-U3, which is sort of like the original iPod Shuffle, only cheaper and with a screen and more features. In fact it seemed to pretty much blow the Shuffle out of the water. It even supports Ogg Vorbis.

I've been pretty happy with it, for the most part. There are a few slight issues, like some slight usability defects and an extremely dubious track shuffling algorithm which seems to generate very not-random sequences, and on some files there is audible static in the background, but it mostly met my expectations... except for one problem:

There is no way to effectively sync a random, shuffled playlist onto the thing. There just doesn't seem to be any software that can do this. I particularly want to be able to sync random tracks from an "Auto Playlist" in WMP11 onto it, a task which is extremely easy in iTunes. Apparently this isn't possible.

Since it only holds a couple hundred songs, its variety can get pretty old if you listen to it all day. I don't have time to actually sit down and pick out what music to put on it for the next day; I want to just plug it in and have it done for me. Since this is the entire point of the iPod Shuffle, I figured WMP11 would probably be able to do it to, but no. To be honest, this sort of device is actually pretty worthless without it.

This seems pretty telling to me as to why Apple dominates this market so completely. Everybody else tries to compete by having as many features as possible for as cheap as possible, while Apple sits down and thinks about how people actually want to use the thing. They understand the limitations of this size and price point, figure out who would buy it anyways, and design the product of greatest value to them. Everybody else just packs on as many features as they can, without a thought to what the user actually wants to do, and how to best accomplish that.

It's peculiar. The iPod Shuffle is overpriced, has basically no features at all, and doesn't even have a screen or menus. When I was picking it out I figured the screen and menus were the killer feature that made the YP-U3 unambiguously better than the Shuffle. In reality I almost never use them. Instead I spend almost all my time skipping to the next random song, which I'm sick of since I've heard it twenty times since I filled the player with songs.

Of course, this isn't something Samsung could solve even if they wanted to. It's iTunes that makes all the difference, not the specific device. The only music player to sync with it that comes even close to iTunes is Windows Media Player 11, which is actually a decent program that has overcome pretty much all of the horrible aspects of its predecessors, but it's still not nearly as useful for the day-to-day things people use iTunes for. Anything MP3 player manufacturers tried to invent on their own would surely turn out awful. It's all in Microsoft's hands.

Denno Coil
Over the past five years I've all but stopped watching anime. I have enjoyed anime greatly in the past, but in truth it's just not a hobby that a busy college student has time for. That, and a lot of it is just juvenile and stupid. I think a lot of American teenagers are attracted to anime because a lot of it is aimed at an older audience than American cartoons - they perceive it as being animation for adults rather than children - but in reality most of it is still aimed towards young teenage boys, even in Japan. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but I just have no interest in a contrived plotline that jumps through hoops to make sure almost all its main characters are 15-year-olds, no matter how out of place they are, and then bores me with their idiotic teen drama and insecurities. I just don't see how people can stand to watch something like Gundam Seed. I eventually just sort of lost interest in wading through all that.

But I do occasionally give it a chance, and that really paid off for one show this year: Denno Coil, the most creative and intelligent show I've seen in a long time. I even managed to overlook the fact that the characters are all children, because it even makes sense in this context (for the most part). Check it out while it's still unlicensed; and buy it when it's licensed. I highly recommend it.

Life
Yesterday my grade was posted for Math 4242 Applied Linear Algebra, the only class I took this fall. It was an A-, mostly thanks to a generous curve (86%-89% was the A- range), but still a pleasant surprise. With that, I'm officially done with school.

I have some anxiety about this - school is pretty much all I've known for the past 18 years of my life. I was just finally starting to get used to it when it ended. The three and a half years I spent at the University of Minnesota have been far and away the happiest years of my life, and I feel I've grown greatly from my experience there. But it's time to move on.

In a few weeks I'll be starting work at Compellent, a provider of cutting-edge enterprise storage solutions here in the Twin Cities. I'm really excited about this job; from my interviews it seems like a great company with great people, two of whom I know from school.

Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
I've had this game sitting on the shelf ever since it came out. When I first tried it I couldn't really get into it.

Over the past week I finally played the game all the way through, and I quite enjoyed it. The story is cute and funny (albeit short), some of the music has rather grown on me, and the gameplay is above-average for a tactical RPG. Levelling is more compelling than in most other RPGs, which is good, since the game is basically all about levelling your characters/items to ridiculous heights.

Unfortunately most adults don't really have time for that sort of thing. This is just a very gameplay-intensive game, and while I enjoyed the story while it lasted, after playing for 40 hours and watching the "good" ending I don't really feel compelled to spend the next 50 hours levelling Laharl to L9999 and beating whatever optional content there might be or getting any of the other endings. I have other games to play (including Disgaea 2 & 3, La Pucelle, Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom? Did I miss any? Good grief.)

A good game regardless, and a must-have for fans of the tactical RPG genre.

Overall score: B+

Music I don't understand
I listen to a vast and varied assortment of music, and I make a conscious effort to diversify my tastes and try new things. One thing I just can't seem to get into is what Wikipedia tells me is called the death growl, in this case in Children of Bodom in particular.

I'm making an effort to listen to Children of Bodom, and I absolutely love everything about the band--except this. I just can't get over this death growl thing. It seems to me the music would be so much better if he just wouldn't sing. It totally ruins it for me. I mean why? What's it supposed to accomplish?

I-35W Bridge Collapse
Since it seems to be front-page news even internationally, I'm just posting to let everybody know I'm fine. Thanks all for your concern.

MS 150 Bike Tour
On a slightly more uplifting note, a month ago I participated in the Larkin Hoffman MS 150 Bike Tour, a 150-mile bike ride from Proctor, MN (near Duluth) to Blaine, MN (near the Twin Cities). This is something I'd wanted to do for a long time, but never quite had the guts or motivation to do. The furthest I'd done in one day before the ride was 44 miles, which was pretty grueling by itself, and after 75 miles on the first day I was feeling pretty beat. Fortunately the wind wasn't as bad the second day and I made it the entire way.

The ride was a great experience and a lot of fun. I was very impressed by how well organized the entire thing was, with regular rest stops with free food and water and Gatorade, and everyone was very friendly and helpful. I wouldn't have realized it without doing it, but this ride really is something that anybody could do, and I highly recommend it (though I also recommend training beforehand; as I didn't do enough of).

Since then, I've been biking a lot more and am just starting to get more serious about it as a hobby. I've always enjoyed casual biking, but I've never really been all that athletic and it feels great to finally be more so.

Music recommendations
I want recommendations! Any era, any genre is fine!