Sign of The Coming Apocalypse #152

Heard late one night...

Me: 5
Her: 1
Me: 7
Her: 3
Me: 8
Her: 2
Me: ... DAMNIT!
...
Me: 53916DAMNIT2

Yes, it's Lauren and Glen playing verbal naughts and crosses without a board, followed by Glen playing against himself and still managing to lose to a surprise attack.

This was then followed by a game of battleships on 8x8 grids held only in our heads, during which time SOMEONE MAYBE NAMED LAUREN managed to fit a 3-length ship into B3-5 without getting hit by a shell landing on B4.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you leave your Nintendo at the wrong house.

Wii Second Guessing

One thing I noticed about playing Rayman Ravin' Rabbids (I got it last night) on the Wii is that I can't forget that I'm holding a bunch of accelerometers - I spend a lot of time wondering if the way the game tells you do things is actually the best way. For example, when the game tells you to move the nunchuck up and down rapidly, I wonder if moving it on two axes would result in a higher amount of measured movement (the combined delta on two axes may be greater).

Similarly, in the "throw the cow" game*, where you have to use the controller like a lasso, I wonder if they are measuring rate of change (in which case rolling the controller in your hand might produce the best result) or total force (where swinging the remote above your head on the end of the nunchuck cord might work the best).

Wii Boxing is a great example of all this - once you figure out how to actually trigger the different punches and movements, you get much better accuracy/power at the expense of any form of realistic punching motion.

* P.S. I threw the cow 129.92 meters, how'd you do?

Melbourne Photos

Lauren and I recently returned to Melbourne for a week to attend a graduation and an engagement party. I started the week thinking "this'll be great - aside from those two events, I have nothing planned - I'll call all my friends!".

Next thing I know, I'm on the plane going in the other direction, and most of my friends remained blissfully unaware that I had even been in the country. DOH.

The photos are up, anyway. Other thoughts coming soon.

Quick Wii Observations

• As the sensor bar is just two LEDs, any game that relies on measuring the distance from the Wii Remote to the screen can be foiled by moving the Remote to the sides (so to the Remote's camera, the sensor's LEDs are closer, making it appear further away). It's a shame that Nintendo didn't add a third off-plane LED allowing the Remote to do proper 3D positioning through its camera.
• Games that rely on multiple players with pointers (e.g. Super Monkeyball) often require the players to calibrate their controls at the start of each round, since each player may be at different angles from the television.
• The Remote seems to be aware of absolute up/down - flipping the sensor bar and/or covering the camera then rotating the wiimote in a haphazard fashion (so as to induce gyro/accelerometer error) and uncovering the camera while the remote is upside down still results in the remote being perfectly aware of which way is up.
• Further, if you hold the remote steady and move the sensor bar around in front of it, it will track properly - if you then rotate the sensor bar, it will work up to about 45 degrees, at which point the Remote cuts out (as what it's seeing and what its internals tell it are out of whack).
• Wii Sports Tennis and Baseball don't really care about how you hold the Remote, as long as you produce movement - you can play both games by just rolling the remote along any axis, and don't have to mimic the on-screen actions (e.g. you can serve, forehand and backhand in Tennis by eating ice-cream with your Remote).
• In games like Boxing and Golf, there are frequently better ways to control things than what the manual says - in Boxing, glove position is determined solely by rotation, not position, and you can also punch by flicking at the wrist, rather than punching outwards, likewise, in Golf you get more power/control by flicking at the wrist, rather than putting from the elbow).
• General impressions are that the pointer is very accurate, the motion controls less so - I am wondering if a proper one-to-one sword combat game is even possible. I extra-want someone to figure out how to pair the remote with a PC (and write whatever drivers are needed), just so I can see how good/bad the raw sensor data is.
• Super Monkeyball demonstrated that first person shooters could be very good on the Wii. Though after playing Gears of War on the 360 then Zelda on the Wii, I cry for the Wii's lack of processing power.
• I can see this console getting a lot more use than my 360. I haven't seen anyone who didn't like it.

Successful camping out for the Wii

And by 'camping out' I mean 'sleeping next to my computer with the sound turned way up':

// ==UserScript==
// @name           WiiNotifier
// @namespace      http://www.amazon.com/
// @description    Make some noise if the Wii 
//                 appears to be available
// @include        http://www.amazon.com/Nintendo-Wii/dp/B0009VXBAQ
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
  if (document.body.innerHTML
      .indexOf("This item is currently not available.") 
      == -1) {
    unsafeWindow.location.href =
      "file:///G:/Music/Ministry%20Of%20Sound%20-"
      + "%20The%20Annual%202007/CD1/09%20-%20Benassi"
      + "%20Bros%20-%20Feel%20Alive.mp3";
  } else {
    unsafeWindow.setTimeout("window.location.reload()",
                            6000 + Math.random()*8000);
  }
})();

The only issue was that after it woke me up, I couldn't immediately get to the Amazon page because the script kept detecting that the Wii was available and so kept redirecting to the MP3. My brain was still booting at the time, so it took a few precious seconds to figure out how to disable the script ('precious seconds' is right - the page now says that they sold out in less than a minute).

After both BestBuy and RadioShack cancelled my preorders for the Wii and PS3, I was a bit skeptical of any store selling them, so I ordered from a few, and now it looks like I have two Wiis on the way. Oh DARN!

Bally Hell! I Never Realised that it Had a Name

It turns out that the way Melbournian ravers dance is somewhat unique. The Melbourne Shuffle, Wikipedia Article ("this minimised people getting Kung fu'ed whilst dancing"), Youtube Video and Documentary DVD.

I wonder if they have a name for the dance I 'performed' at raves .. probably 'Melbourne Corpse Rolling Down a Hill' or 'Melbourne Skewered Animal Rolls Around in Agony'.

(Hat-tip to Shaun)

Boot Camp USB Device Issues

Apple's Boot Camp is great - I'm using it to turn my otherwise useless Mac Mini into a dedicated machine for running all my arty stuff. One issue I found though, is that for some reason Windows likes to reject the Boot Camp USB drivers consistently, in some instances getting rid of the keyboard and mouse drivers, making the system unusable (even in safe mode), and making it so that you can't use the keyboard or mouse to download the drivers.

However, if you can eject the Boot Camp drivers CD (you might need to boot back into OSX to do it), you can then reinsert it after Windows has started and it will autoinstall all the drivers again. You'll probably have to put up with incessant "found new hardware" messages forever, but at least you'll have a usable system.

This brought to you by the "if Google search doesn't find the answer, post your solution when you find it" idea.

University High School Melbourne

While wondering if we were going to have a 10-year reunion next year, I stumbled upon a pretty comprehensive Wikipedia entry for my former high school. I'm not sure what's more surprising - the fact that it exists, or the fact that I was surprised by its existence (brain melt now).

The Little Things

One thing that's neat about working in America is that people are far more likely to spell my name correctly, even in very informal communication. In Australia, people I'd known for years would still get it wrong. }:|

(This minor note of appreciation prompted by looking at my referrer logs and seeing just how many people come here by searching for the wrong thing).

Noo Yoick

The photos are up.

New York According To The Internets

Over the labour day weekend, Lauren and I popped over to New York - we'd always wanted to go, and now that we live relatively close, we figured we might as well.

The trip was largely internet-guided - with Yelp Mobile launching a week before, much of the trouble of finding a place to eat (which is terribly hard when one of you is a vegetarian who doesn't like standard vegetarian food, and the other is a voracious meat-lover who likes eating any old crap that isn't vegetables) disappeared - we would often just decide we wanted 'pizza', do a search for it in our area, then go to the closest one with the highest rating. You can read my reviews in my Yelp profile (you'll have to dig around if you're reading from the mysterious future).

However, the best and worst recommendations came from outside Yelp - Aaron guided us to Veniero's, which was DEVINE. But then Kottke recommended a trip to Philly Slim's, probably the worst advice I've ever been given.

The only things not on there are the Dunkin Donuts Coffee, which Ojan recommended (as coffee snobs, Lauren and I are never listening to Ojan ever again). And the Nathan's 'famous' hotdogs, which were similarly awful (the rather poor meat and bun was made into a total disaster by the further application of Cheese Whiz).

In all, it was an excellent holiday, with our trip to the Guggenheim being the non-food highpoint. The low-point was having a slow shuttle back to the airport, a slow line to check in, and no information telling us that check-in had a hard cut-off of 30 minutes, so when we checked in with 25 minutes to go, we were told that we couldn't, and would instead have to wait overnight or more for a possible standby flight back via multiple connecting flights. We ended up having to pay an extra $800 for tickets home, which was slightly upsetting at the time.

The photos are going up soon.

Steamtastic Delivery

Valve's Steam was derided by many upon release for being buggy and slow, but underneath that was a delicious digital software delivery platform that I love and adore.

Previously, hating swapping CDs all the time, I made CD or DVD images of all the software I bought, store the keys somewhere secure, dumped the physical media in the bin and used daemon-tools to mount the images in a virtual drive whenever I needed them. This was frequently fraught with difficulty, as the content-owners regarded the media as the token of ownership, so copy-protection schemes hated it, but it was just so incredibly convenient (and fast) that I just stopped buying software that didn't support this mode of use.

Digital delivery of titles was a decent promise, but services like direct2drive foul it up by limiting use to one machine at a time, which is less freedom than being able to install media-based software on your multiple computers. Steam, however, is digital software delivery done right - you download the tiny Steam client and after logging in, you see all the software you've purchased - you can then pick and choose which to install on the machine, and you're done. No accusations of piracy, quick purchase, fast downloads, and you're free from machine-dependence. It's so quick and easy that despite its (incredibly) limited library, buying software any other way just seems insulting.

If it did savegame syncronisation across your multiple machines, I'd probably die.

Picnicing

Work's been busyfun as heck, but that didn't mean we couldn't take time out to have a picnic, where fun was had by all (especially the guy in the picture above).

Melbourne Today

Showing the scenes I used to see every day, Melbourne Today makes me just a little homesick (the photo above was taken in the park next to my old apartment). (update: image fixed)

In the background, baby

We pushed out a new version of Google Browser Sync today. Everyone will be very very happy to know that we got rid of the 'Syncing...' dialog, so you can start using your browser straight away, without having to wait for us to syncronise all of your delicious pornography and knitting bookmarks.

If you already have it installed, you should see the changes shortly.

Okfineblisket

Okfine Arv, here's the JavaScript version.

Holy Crap, something new on Bodytag

Blisk.

brrzooooommm

I'm not a car fanatic by any stretch of the imagination, but after a day being driven around in this fantastic orange beast, I think I understand the buzz.

Your Existence

A few weeks ago, stencil graffiti started appearing over the streets of the Mission district in San Francisco, showing twee messages like "Your existence gives me hope" and "Your sweet voice breaks my heart".

A few days later, amusingly snappy counter-graffiti started showing up:

(Thankfully, these days "take a photo" means "someone else on the internet has already taken the photo I want so I'm just going to use that")

Google Browser Sync

I've been spending the last little while fixing bugs and creating even more bugs for Google Browser Sync, which launched today. Super-hooray for the other team-members, Aaron, Marria, Kristina and Brian.

The two things I love most about it are that bookmarks are actually useful again, and thanks to the history syncing, when I swap computers, all my visited-links are coloured correctly. Less duplicate visits = super goodness.

Now it's time for bee-ah. And a haircut.

Nodebox

Nodebox seems very much like Processing, but using Python rather than Java, and is only available on Mac. I gave up on my Mac (too damn slow), so I haven't tried it out yet.

Bodytag Busted

Bleh, multiple pages on Bodytag are currently busted (and have been for probably a month now) - the XSLT processor got mucked up at some point, and I can't even remember how to fix it. IE users shouldn't have a problem, however.

Update: And now it's working fine. "zend.ze1_compatibility_mode=Off" in php.ini fixed it.

Singularity Summit Writeups

• ZDNet
• Responsible Nanotechnology
• Down the avenue

All found using Blogger Web Comments. Hooray, something I wrote was useful!

Google Booth FAQ

Q: So what's it really like working at Google?
A: It's like there's a party in my mouth, and the 'mouth' is really the office and the 'party' is a metaphor for 'crazy awesomeness'. Also, there's no 'like' - it exactly is.

Booth Babe

They may not be allowing booth babes to do much of their thing at E3 anymore, but there'll be nothing stopping me when I wield my awesome powers at the Google booth tomorrow morning at The Ajax Experience, so stop by and say hello.

If you're a late riser, you'll get to see Erik strut his "ooh look at me I'm from Sweden and made from ice-cream" stuff at the same booth in the afternoon.

3DVisor Price Drop

eMagin have dropped US$250 off the price of their apparently-decent 3dvisor, bringing it to US$549.

I'm severely tempted, but I'm not sure I have time to do anything interesting with it, and the gaming side doesn't hold any appeal - after playing LockOn at 1920x1200 with my TrackIR4:Pro (sorry, FreeLook users, I totally gave in), going back to 800x600 would be painful.

Rainbow's End

After being on pre-order for a ridiculous amount of time, I finally have the new Vernor Vinge book, Rainbow's End, and so far, it is total post-cyberpunk hotness (which is mildly amusing, as Vinge's True Names was pre-cyberpunk hotness, with no 'just-cyberpunk' hotness). As is the case with his previous works, the book seems to follow and tie together multiple storylines, where each is so enjoyable that when a switch between them occurs, it is both disappointing and exhilarating crap and rad.

Most of all, I find it inspiring, and that automatically means it wins.

Sci-fi haters need not apply.

On Americas Great Cellular Infrastructure

A quick comparison of the reactions of people from around the world when they answer their mobile phone and hear nothing:

Rest of World: "Hello? ... ... oh, must've been a wrong number"

America: "Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... hm, reception here or there probably sucks .. Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... Hello? ... ... Hello? .. Hello? .. Hello?"

For the record, I get useless reception in my apartment, and I'm only 500m from a Sprint store.

More Goats

So, I've been using my Mac at home full time, and all day today at work. Some points that stand out:

• Coming from years of Cleartype on Windows, I just don't like Quartz Extreme's subpixel hinting - the fonts look much blurrier, even on the 'light' setting. I realise that this is partially due to choice of fonts, and I can definitely see why some people prefer Quartz' version.
• The single menu bar at the top of the screen might've been a good idea 10 years ago, and might still be a good idea for laptops, but now that we have massive hi-res desktop screens, it just doesn't work. I generally have a browser, texteditor and file browser all visible at the same time, horizontally and vertically separated - it makes no sense for an browser to be on the bottom right and have to access my bookmarks at the top left, crossing over several other apps in the process. Fitt's law works against OSX, here, and I think we can assume that most users are now very very used to clicking on small horizontal bars of text.
• So the single menu bar, app's giant amounts of chrome, and the need to click to focus an app before using it (on Windows, you can still interact with unfocused windows), really does continue MacOS' 'app-focused' feel - you have a core set of apps that you do stuff with and generally only using a few at a time, Windows tends to blur the lines between apps and services, and likes to run with four million systray 'service' apps etc.
• Performance is much better now that I have 2GB of RAM in this thing. Still much much slower than Windows, but livable. Lauren also mentioned that she found this machine slow (she has a G4 Powerbook), Spotlight indexing might have played a part in this, but it's still pretty bad. I find it bearable mostly because of something Evan said about Mac Zen.
• I'd be back on Windows already if it wasn't for Quicksilver, MouseFix, DoubleCommand, Witch, Pathfinder and Textmate. I love those things. Dasher is also nice.
• I miss being able to resize a window from any edge or corner. This is a large annoyance when dealing with multiple windows from multiple apps, something that, as described above, MacOS doesn't really encourage. I'll get used to it I suppose.
• Native X11 support is great, though VPN definitely wasn't as easy as Windows.
• No window position/edge-snapping utility? Heavens!
• I'm considering a MacBook Pro, but I detest touchpads, and the single button-ness? Yuk. I'm a trackpoint lover to the core (they're so much faster!), and this could be a huge blocking factor. We'll see.
• As the mousing is painful, I'm learning lots and lots of keyboard shortcuts. This consequently makes me feel a lot more productive.

Really though, I'm quite liking it, and when I remember how much default WindowsXP sucks without spending hours recustomizing it and downloading a billion helper apps, OSX stacks up pretty well. I just wish the transition to x86 had resulted in the speed boost I'd always hoped for.

Cheesiest .. post .. ever.

Handypants

So I work in the Firefox group at Google, and since every one of my co-workers who has seen me open the search dialog with the keyboard has asked "how did you do that", I figure it's safe to assume that it's not common knowledge: to open or focus the search dialog (that thing in the top-left corner with the Google logo), press Ctrl-K. Ctrl-K is your friend. None of this F6 Tab, or Ctrl-L Tab business. It even works when you've removed the search box from your browser chrome.

I love working at a place where people will stop mid-sentence to ask how to do something they just saw you do out of the corner of their eye, rather than just dismissing it as magic.

Kernel Quartz

I've been a daily, nightly DOS/Windows user for about 20 years. When OSX 10.0 came out, I was excited (having been forced to use OS9 at work).. until I realised how slow the UI was. When I bought an eMac with 10.3 last year, I was excited, until again, I realised how slow the UI was. This weekend, having decided that I've become too set in my ways, and tempted by the "ooh they're so much faster" lies, I bought an Intel Mac Mini (the fastest one they had), eagerly set it up, and .. it's still soooo sllooooow.

This is mostly because I am overly fussy when it comes to responsiveness. Thanks to my Quake background, moving my mouse cursor around, and typing text in OSX sets off this uneasy "YOU ARE GOING TO GET FRAGGED" feeling that comes from having controls that don't work quite right. I even get more satisfactory results on my Windows machine when it's running as a Synergy client, with the keyboard and mouse plugged into the Mac and everything being sent over the network.

That said, at least the Mac is consistently slow - Windows, in all its blazing 2D-blitting glory, runs crazy fast 98% of the time, and then produces freezing, blank-white-Explorer-windows of frustration the other 2% of the time. I'm also terrified of what might happen with Aero in Vista, whose latest betas run with the same thundering "wait mortal, I am rendering fancy effects" slowness that OSX does. At least you'll have the option of turning Aero off, however.

Still, as Aaron pointed out, I am doing this whole thing because I want differences, and so I should enjoy them.. More detailed discussion on pros (unixness, reliability, ease of use, spotlight, happiness) and cons (single menu bar when multitasking, quartz' font rendering) to come. Maybe.

An ExplorerCanvas Demo

Running much much faster than I thought it ever could, Rafael Robayna's Canvas Painter now uses ExplorerCanvas to allow it to work in IE. Crackers!

ExplorerCanvas

A slightly paraphrased account of the creation of a 20% project at Google, and an illustration of why I love working there:

Dan: I want you to write a wrapper for VML, SVG and Canvas
Glen: Let me handle this, 99
Dan: Sorry, Max
Glen: As I was saying, I want to write a wrapper for VML and Canvas
Erik: Good thinking, Max
...
Glen: How about *this*?
Erik: Just make it emulate the Canvas API in IE - all the other browsers support it anyway.
...
Glen: How about *this messy hodgepodge that sort of works*?
Erik: You young whippersnapper! I'll show you how it's done!
...
Erik: How about *this*?
Glen: Ooooohh!
...
Glen: Now I made it do images, hooray for me!
Erik: Except they don't work
Glen: Berrrrrrr
...
Emil: Hey world, look what I've been working on! Canvas for IE!
Erik and Glen: !! Join our secret project !!
Emil: Tally ho!
...
Erik: Look, I made it better!
Emil: Look, I made it even better!
Erik: Look, I made it even more better!
Emil: Look, I made it even more super better!
Glen: ... I broke it
...
Glen: Dearest engineering director Linus, look, we made bright shiny things!
Linus: K-Rad, doodz. Tell DiBona
Glen: Chris, look, we made bright shiny things!
DiBona: Open source!
...
Erik, Emil, Glen: Hello World, please enjoy ExplorerCanvas, we hope you find extra tasty uses for a what is now a cross-browser (Firefox, Safari, Opera 9, IE) drawing API.

To start you off, bodytag is hosting one of the included demos.

[Updated because I forgot about Dan]

Ranting On Statements

37signals has an interesting post on art statements, things that once caused me much grief and anguish, as the 'art' I produce is never pre-planned or thought about until its done. In the art shows I've done, I've usually been asked to write a statement, and once I've gotten over the fact that I have to write something when there's nothing to write about, the agony disappears and I begin to view the statement as a piece in itself; it is not a description, but rather a few short words to encapsulate the state of mind I'm in when I'm looking at the work. A poem, if you will.

It's still awfully corny, and can be even more painful when you're told to write an artist's statement - something about you and your work as a whole. The statement is often displayed next to those from arty artists, whose 'art language'-filled paragraphs make as much sense to me as the papers my girlfriend writes, so it is at once intimidating and preposterous.

I have currently settled on the still-pretty-corny "I like to computationally connect wonder and reality"; it is a fancy way of saying "Glen tries to make things that instill a sense of wonder". I miss the feeling that came with being a child and discovering new things, and so I spend all my time trying to find it again. I believe this is what drives me - for the most part, I do not start projects thinking 'oh, this is going to be art' or 'this is going to be a nerdy VR thing' - they all begin with 'I wonder what it would be like if ...'.

This is why I find it amusing (although sometimes flattering) when I am called an 'artist' or a 'programmer', it is why I find it terrifying when I am asked "what does it mean" at art shows, why I only care about 'getting it done' and not process or technique - I'm really just making things because I am fascinated by "what isn't, but could be".

P.S. Some people have been asking if, since going to Google, I have abandoned the art world in favour of nerdism. I haven't, of course; I've just been terrifically busy. Besides, it's all the same, right?

SXSW Panel

I'm on the 'how to make the most of maps' panel at SXSW on Sunday. I'm there because of MeHere.

Useful Offshoots

Oh rad, it looks like open-sourcing Sproutliner resulted in something mo'better - iOutliner. It seems to add the two most requested features - user logins and project groups (the third, in case you were wondering, was a 'textarea' field type).

Apologies to the iOutliner guys for the pain they must've suffered in having to deal with the must-finish-it-in-a-day-bah-who-cares-about-correctness Sproutliner code.

Sproutliner Firefox 1.5 update

I updated the now-quite-outdated SproutLiner to work in Firefox 1.5. Woopie! Zzzzz.

Multitouch

I've mentioned Jeff Han previously, but his new work has me dribbling. I'm interested because I loved the 'feel' of the multi-touch technology used in the now-bought-by-an-unknown-company-and-killed touchstream keyboard, and Apple has a patent on a multitouch tablet - consumer level multi-touch screens could lead to some corker applications, as Jeff has shown.

Bring on the hotness!

MMO DDR

Massively Multiplayer Online Dance Dance Revolution? Yes PLEASE!

(via Waxy)