Save Will

There’s a condition that afflicts many innocent, hard-working people around the world every day. Its victims suffer from light sensitivity, disorientation, lethargy, sleep deprivation, and depression. There is no cure, but some drugs temporarily alleviate its symptoms. Many people manage to live somewhat normal lives through proper treatment. I’m referring, of course, to waking up before 9 a.m., which I had to do all this week and expect to continue doing until my body gives out. Please donate to my relief fund.

Posts tagged opinions

Jul 26

Smash the Ceiling

James Surowiecki:

The truth is that the United States doesn’t need, and shouldn’t have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one. There’s no debt limit in the Constitution. And, if Congress really wants to hold down government debt, it already has a way to do so that doesn’t risk economic chaos—namely, the annual budgeting process. The only reason we need to lift the debt ceiling, after all, is to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we’ll face an absurd scenario in which Congress will have ordered the President to execute two laws that are flatly at odds with each other. If he obeys the debt ceiling, he cannot spend the money that Congress has told him to spend, which is why most government functions will be shut down. Yet if he spends the money as Congress has authorized him to he’ll end up violating the debt ceiling.

Great insights into the debt ceiling. I totally agree. It’s worth reading the entire article.

Jul 16

Learning Ruby

I’ve been learning some Ruby the past week or so. Some thoughts:

Arrays seem to be lists.
Ranges are needed because of eager evaluation.
I like that anything defined can be changed later, even visibility or constants.
I haven’t found a good explanation of blocks yet, but they appear to be first-class functions with some kind of iterator functionality grafted on.
No homoiconic syntax.
Abbreviated keywords (def). Yuck.
No exposed class variables is a great idea. Methods only!
Attribute generators are great for saving time, but is this done through some kind of extensible macro system?
The + operator seems to do several things, depending on the operands’ types. Is this extensible, or baked in?

Jul 11

Uncharted 3 multiplayer beta

The problem is that too much stuff is thrown into the mix. Everyone has two weapons, a grenade, power ups, boosters, enhancements, experience points, dollars, and all this other random shit that results in a confusing maelstrom that you can only survive for a minute or two at a time. I don’t like dying so often. It’s a jarring experience. I make a plan, and before I can get a quarter way through it, I end up getting shot in the head through a wall by some guy twenty yards away. WTF. It’s just so frantic. I don’t like it. Give me the multiplayer of GoldenEye any day.

Jul 9

The Rise of "Worse is Better''

The Worse Is Better philosophy is simply iterative design: lay the foundation, erect some walls, and you’ll worry about putting on the roof later. Apple is notorious for doing this. See the iPhone.

The one thing I disagree with Richard about is the diamond-like jewel scenario: “To implement it to run fast is either impossible or beyond the capabilities of most implementors.” My intuition says that’s wrong; at least, it’s not right in some cases.

Jul 8

Evolution of a switch

The visual representation of the switch widget for iOS 1-4 was ambiguous because the width of the draggable knob was about half of the overall width of the widget. When you look at it, it isn’t immediately clear whether the blue part is meant to signify the knob.

(Picture credit to Ben Stiteler.)

Its new design in iOS 5 appears to have resolved this ambiguity by making the knob much narrower, and circular rather than rectangular. I really like it. Plus, the rounded corners better conform to the overall look and feel of iOS.

(Picture credit to Christian Zibreg.)

Jul 7

Password strength

They say you should use a strong password, one that is long, has uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, symbols, even spaces. You should have a unique password for everything in case the security for one of them is compromised.

Until recently, I had used two passwords, one for important things like computer accounts, e-mail, banking, and electronic payments, and the other for everything else, like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. They had uppercase and lowercase letters and digits only, and were about eight characters long.

I resolved to strengthen my passwords and have unique passwords for everything after the recent hack of the PlayStation Network, in which my financial information might have been compromised. After that, my passwords were about sixteen to twenty characters long and had symbols. Each password had the name of the corresponding service encoded in it. It took about ten seconds to type in a password, whereas before it had taken only a couple seconds. Not a bad trade off for peace of mind.

However, there was a major problem with using secure passwords: they were long, and lots of services imposed certain restrictions on what kinds of passwords I could use. Lots of places, for example, imposed a minimum and maximum password length. Since my passwords’ lengths were proportional to the length of the name of their corresponding service, passwords for services with long names often times wouldn’t satisfy their maximum password length restrictions. So for these cases, I had to revert to using one of my old, shorter, less secure passwords, which negated whatever security benefits my password system had.

Strong passwords are a nice thing to have, but until it’s common practice to allow arbitrary passwords, it’s not practical to expect people to use them. So everyone should just shut up about them already.

Jun 13

What kind of thing is that?

Have you ever wondered, “What kind of thing is that?” I use Wikipedia to answer that question all the time. You can even use Wikipedia to find similar things that share the same category. What kind of thing is a senate? Well, apparently it’s a legislature. Did you know that a tricameral legislature is also a kind of legislature, and that there was a Tricameral Parliament in South Africa until 1994? You could spend all day exploring the order of things.

Jun 11

Lion, iCloud, iOS 5, oh my!

Apple announced a lot of new things on Monday: their next Mac OS, their next iOS, and their new cloud service. I’m really excited about iOS and iCloud. The new feature I like the best is that iOS devices no longer need to synchronize with a computer. This necessitated a lot of additional functionality in the built-in apps and settings to make iOS self-sufficient. It really is the post-PC era! I can’t wait to get them all.

Jun 7

Recipe for Rebooting Tomb Raider

So what steps is Crystal Dynamics [the game maker] taking to reinvent Tomb Raider?

…

Sprinkle Some RPG Elements: Tomb Raider will use a base camp system as Lara’s home base or hub world. Here she can upgrade and build new gear, as well as purchase new survival skills (although I’m not yet sure what she’ll use for currency). From her base camp, she can revisit previous levels to look for items and reach areas previously inaccessible, much like Metroidvania games.

Why does this sound so familiar?

If you find yourself sprinkling RPG elements into your video game, you’ve run out of good ideas and tacitly admit the core game play isn’t compelling enough to carry the narrative as far as you want.

If you’re going to take the low road, at least don’t make it contrived. Buying upgrades when marooned on a small island with hostile natives? With what? From whom? It doesn’t matter, because I don’t (and won’t) buy it.

May 23

142 Plane Crash Victims Were Statistically More Likely To Have Died In A Car Crash

My thoughts exactly. Fear of a plane crash isn’t irrational; it’s fearing the lack of control, which you don’t have in a plane crash.

← Older posts Page 1 of 3