Slashfail
Jun/090
Slashdot has always been a buggy piece of shit, but recently it’s exploded into a buggy metric fuckload of shit. No matter what I do, every Slashdot article looks like this:
(Click image for a closer view)
Seriously. Slashdot is supposed to be full of smart and technical people, and they can’t even get a goddamned website right? How is that image even being shown to me, the end-user? Have they ever heard of the concept of “staging servers?” It’s fucking disgraceful.
It’s not like I’m using the hated Internet Explorer browser, or some experimental web browser from beyond the stars, or that I’ve hacked the shit out of my system, it’s fucking stock Firefox with one fucking add-on.
Oh, and to make it all worse, I have Slashdot set to use the “classic” (read that as: “working”) comments system, not this new piece of shit they’ve been shitting out over the last year. Not that anybody at Slashdot gives a fuck for my preference, since I still get the new version on my user page, and half the templates.
Maintaining this site is somebody’s full-time job. In fact, there are several people who work for Slashdot and only for Slashdot… what the hell do they even do? Think up more creative ways to cram so much fail in such a small space?
Slashdot is the only website I’ve ever seen where the owners/administrators of the site simply don’t fucking care.
I got to stop posting about Slashdot, it’s kind of pathetic. Not a third as pathetic as Slashdot itself, though.
Two almost entirely unrelated things that teach a lesson about usability
Jun/092
Thing the first:
I’ve been playing Left4Dead recently. One of the zombie types is the “smoker”, which shoots out a long tongue that ensnares one of the survivors and drags them away from the group.
Take a look at this approximation of what happens, in cute Valentine’s Day form:
So when I was playing the other day, I was surprised to learn that you can actually save a survivor being dragged by using your melee attack. Somehow, in the magical zombie-infested world of Left4Dead, slapping someone upside the head with the butt of your automatic shotgun will unravel a mutated tongue wrapped around their neck. I’ve been playing the game for several weeks, and I’d never heard this before, but lo and behold it works.
And it makes no sense.
Thing the second:
The other day I signed up for an account at Mint.com. I put in my bank info, and it went and retrieved my balance sheet from Bank of America using magical Internet technology somehow. It worked pretty good, except for one thing: for some reason it categorized ATM withdrawals as mortgage payments.
So I dive in and try to fix the problem. For each transaction, Mint.com has a list of dozens of categories you can select from. But for some reason, I couldn’t find ATM Withdrawals anywhere on the list. I knew it existed, because a friend I was talking to told me as much, but where was it? Turns out, the category “ATM Withdrawals” is a sub-category of “Uncategorized.”
And that makes no sense, either.
Lesson learned:
Maybe I’m some kind of freak, but if I think that something’s not going to work, I don’t even try it.
For example, in Left4Dead, since whacking a fellow survivor with your melee attack is something to be generally avoided, and since there’s no possible way that could (in real life at least) uncoil a choking snakelike tongue, it never occurred to me to try it.
Similarly, when looking for a category named “ATM Withdrawal” it would never have occurred to me, in a million years, to check underneath the menu item called “Uncategorized.”
In short: things are easier to use when they make sense. Make sense.
Things Mint.com should do, but doesn’t
Jun/090
Mint.com is great, but there’s a lot of very obvious features it could use:
- An offline data uploader applet, so that I don’t have to store my username/passwords to the web. I don’t know about most people, but I have trust issues with stuff like that.
- Depreciate cars. Right now you just plop in the value of your car, and that’s it– since Mint.com doesn’t know the make/model/year of your car, it has no way of judging the value of it other than what you specifically type in.
- Recognize Bank of America ATM withdrawals by default. Not only is Bank of America one of the largest banks in the US, but ATM transactions specifically show up with the descriptive all-caps text: “BANK OF AMERICA ATM WITHDRAWAL” on them. Despite that, they showed up in my Mint account as “Mortgage Payments.”
- Similarly, a purchase from Steam Powered.com (i.e. Valve’s Steam game service) showed up as a coffee purchase. I’m pretty sure that Valve’s Steam is bigger than whatever podunk coffeeshop is also named “Steam Powered.”
- If I tell Mint I don’t have a credit card, it should remove the “Credit Cards” section from my homepage. The “add account” wizard seems to be smart enough to stop asking when I say I don’t have one, but the homepage isn’t similarly smart.
- Also, there’s a bug with their lightbox where sometimes it’ll get taller than the browser window and become impossible to close. Wasn’t just me on this one, a friend saw it also.
I gripe because I gripe a lot, but Mint.com really is a good service, and I think it’ll be very handy to me. Since I’m godawful with money, generally.
Nerd Tip of the Day: Firefox Not Saving Cookies?
May/090
I recently had this problem, and found the solution after a little Googling.
You might notice that sites that used to auto-log in, like your webmail provider, now require you to manually log in each time. Your login information is stored in cookies, and this likely means that Firefox’s cookie file is corrupted.
Navigate to the following folder (in Vista):
C:\Users\[Your User Profile Name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default
Put your Windows user name in the first blank. The actual folder has a randomly-generated name, something like “5gjbzh6p.default”, but you most likely only have one of them. You’ll need to have Explorer show hidden files and folders, as the “AppData” folder is hidden by default. (In Vista, the setting for this is in Organize->Folder and Search Options->View->Show hidden files and folders.)
Inside that folder is a file named “cookies.sqlite”. This is the corrupted file. Rename the file to something like “cookies.backup”. (So that we can restore the file, if it turns out that this wasn’t the problem after-all.)
Open up Firefox, log in to your favorite website to set your cookie. Now to test if cookies are saving correctly, close Firefox, re-open Firefox, and go to your favorite website again: you should be automatically logged in.
Mini Sci-Fi Movie Reviews: Star Trek
May/090
Ok, Star Trek pretty much rocked. I have to say this first, because the way my brain works, I always focus on the negatives first and forget about the positives. So here’s the negatives:
- The camera work was a little problematic at times. It’s like they used some special lens to emphasize lens flares in some attempt at “realism.” There are scenes with huge lens flare rectangles right above the actor’s faces. Also, there were a couple fight scenes where the cuts were so quick you couldn’t tell what was happening in the fight. Editors: we know quick cuts indicate action, but if you make to too quick nobody can tell what the hell is going on!
- While they did a pretty good job of following the Star Trek canon, I’m pretty sure that the Federation didn’t build the Enterprise in the middle of a corn field in Iowa. That was just weird. (Also, what were those super-tall Iowan buildings? Was that a future-city, or was it just the biggest grain elevator ever?) Oh and the Enterprise is at least twice the size of the old one… the original had room for maybe 2-3 shuttles in its landing bay, this new one has like 16. I guess this movie si a “reset’ so it’s not that big a deal. They also changed Star Trek’s warp drive to work more like Battlestar Galactica’s jump drive.
- That scene you saw in the preview where the classic car is racing along the Iowan freeway, then falls off a cliff while Kirk holds on for dear life? That actually has nothing to do with the plot. At all. Not even slightly. It is, believe it or not, part of a product placement for Nokia.
- Apparently all Federation ships now include vast engineering areas that resemble, more than anything, cheese processing plants. I’m actually ok with this, given the larger size of the Enterprise it almost makes sense– except for one small point: since there are no computers or really controls of any type (just pipes and tanks), Scotty’s engineering shots just consist of him running alongside pipes.
- Just say no to cute little comic relief sidekick alien characters. They suck. There’s one in this movie, accompanying Scotty. Just try to pretend it doesn’t exist.
That all said, the movie is vastly more entertaining than I expected it to be. Chris Pine did a great job of playing Kirk, without copying William Shatner’s un-copy-able Kirk. Zachary Quinto, as well, made an excellent Spock, and was much better than I expected. (I guess the crappiness of Heroes was firmly rooted in the script, not in the acting.)
All of the classic bridge characters are there, and all of them have their particular quirks/talents re-inforced: Chekov’s accent, Sulu’s fencing, that weird antenna thing in Uhuru’s ear, Scotty and McCoy’s classic lines. Captain Pike is there, playing the same role as Kirk’s mentor. Even the Kobayashi Maru test is present, and Kirk’s “cheating” is shown in a particularly comical way.
In fact, I was surprised at the amount of humor in the film. Even the villain is given a humorous line at one point, that made the whole theater laugh. It’s really at the level of, say, Star Trek IV, almost sliding into the comedy genre.
My recommendation: Watch it.