Marketing fail
Posted by Johnnie
Lazy programmers
Posted by Johnnie
I use Moviestorm on a daily basis, but I have to switch fairly regularly between Moviestorm version 1.0.4 (our current public release) and the cutting-edge (read: broken) development version, which is only accessible by compiling and running our current source code. If I’m running a demonstration, or answering posts on the Moviestorm forums, I’ll boot up 1.0.4. I’m also currently writing a whole bucket load of documentation, though, and that’s being written against the latest development version.
The problem with the dev build is that it changes daily. In fact, often it changes hourly. And, every so often, you’ll find a little bit of functionality that hasn’t quite been raised to the usual high standards of absolute perfection that we’ve come to expect from Moviestorm. Little bits like this genuine example from the current dev build:
Will we ever kill Office?
Posted by Johnnie
Microsoft Office. God, I hate it. But it’s held an overwhelming market share for many, many years. As far as I can tell, this is for three main reasons:
- Everyone else has Office, so everyone else can read the .doc that you email them
- Non-technical users feel comfortable with Office. They know how to use it, and don’t have the time or the inclination to learn a new interface.
- The management bods responsible for I.T. purchasing at big companies don’t realise that there’s an alternative. Often, Microsoft offers them a very cheap bundle deal for a bunch of Office licences. If you’ve already got ‘em, you’d be stupid not to use ‘em, right?
However, with the latest iteration of the Office behemoth (Office 2007), Microsoft have really shot themselves in the foot. They’ve discarded two of these three killer factors.
- First of all, they changed the format of all their documents, so that Word (for instance) now saves in .docx rather than .doc as it previously did. This means that you can no longer be sure that the person you email your document to can read it. If they’re running Office 2000, for instance, they won’t be able to open the file you saved from Office 2007.
- They also changed the interface. Gone are the familiar menus and buttons, to be replaced by a totally new paradigm: the Ribbon. It’s now much harder to transition from Word 2003 to Word 2007 than it is to go from Word 2003 to Open Office Writer.
Here’s the strange thing: it doesn’t seem to matter. People still use Office, doggedly persisting even though their daily routine is now nothing more than a series of increasing frustrations and blockages.
The reason for this can’t just be down to ignorance. I know there’s still a general perception that Office is the only show in town, but Open Office and the like have had a much more visible presence recently. So why? I don’t have an answer. If you still use Office, either by choice or necessity, do you fancy telling me why? I’m genuinely curious.
Update: It looks like OpenOffice.org version 3 will feature a mail app and a calendaring app, which would make it a serious threat to Microsoft Office.
Update 2: foobar has blogged a pretty in-depth dissection of the average Microsoft fan-boy, which is well worth reading.
Update 3: Red Hat Magazine has a short but excellent dissection of the shortcomings of Microsoft’s OOXML specification.
Update 4: The updates just keep coming – the imminent adoption of rejection of Microsoft’s OpenXML format as an ISO standard seems to have sparked a lot of discussion. If you can’t wait for OOo v3 for an Outlook-killer, you might want to try Spicebird, a fork of Thunderbird that adds in Calendar support (via the Sunbird codebase), RSS support, and more.
Programs that pat themselves on the back
Posted by Johnnie
Much as love Linux – and god knows I do love ‘er, fickle and high-maintenance mistress that she is – there are a few things that irritate and annoy me. Some of them are big things and some of them are small things. The thing that annoys me most of all, though, more than anything else in the Free & Open Source software world, is the noise that K3B plays when it’s finished burning a disk. It’s a little fanfare of smugness. It’s a sound that all but demands a round of applause and a short speech to commemorate the fact that K3B has managed to accomplish the sole task for which it was designed, without – for example – setting my house on fire or pissing on my cat. It’s as bad as using Windows, where if I don’t want to sit through the ten-minute masturbation session that is the Windows XP New Features Tour, the operating system gets mildly indignant and goes off into the system tray for a sulk.
I know it’s open source, so I can just hack it myself and solve my own problem, but it shouldn’t be there in the first place. It’s stupid, and most un-FOSS-like.
Why you should never date a geek
Posted by Johnnie
Actually, if you and I ever do hook up, you’ll be able to tell when our relationship has moved on to a very special level – it’s the day I give you my root password. Which, by the way, I will never do. What if we split up?
My life at the moment is basically a series of XKCD strips, loosely strung together by sleep and beer.
Celebrities do not exist
Posted by Johnnie
As a pretty proficient Photoshop user, I’m often called on to touch up or alter an image, sometimes in a minor way and sometimes in a major way (for one of the shots in BloodSpell I had to animate a character’s mouth movement frame by frame, because we forgot to puppeteer it when we took the shot).
I know that image manipulations tools such as Photoshop can have a profound effect on a final image, and I also know just how much work has been done to the images that grace the covers of fashion and celebrity magazines. I sometimes find it difficult to get this across to people, though – if you don’t have years of regular Photoshop use under your belt it’s difficult to comprehend just how much influence you can bring to bear on an image. Finally, I’ve found a perfect example. iWANEX Studio have put several example images online (Flash-based site. Click Portfolio to see the images). Mouse-over the final image and you can see the original shot. Pay attention: this is what celebrities really look like. Greasy, fat and spotty; rather like you and me. The reason Kylie Minogue’s butt is so impossibly pert is because it is, quite literally, impossible. Those buttock cheeks do not exist. They’re no more real than Lara Croft’s funbags.
"I think we need to read the decision before we make any decisions."
Posted by Johnnie
It was very satisfying, in a twisted way, to be ranting about Microsoft again the other day. It’s been too long. It was even more satisfying, though, to discover that we won. Stick that in your proprietary codec and smoke it.
The title of the post, by the way, comes from the Q&A session with Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith.
A thin client so thin that it's invisible when viewed from the side
Posted by Johnnie
I’m writing this from one of the public-access terminals at my local library. It’s a thin client system, which needless-to-say runs Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. Gah!
Every two minutes, the system tray pops up a balloon to helpfully tell me that A Java update is available. Apparently I also have unused icons on my desktop – click here to clean them up. Every three minutes, that one.
Finally, the most annoying Helpful Windows Prompt™ of all time, Your computer needs to be restarted in order for the new updates to take effect. Restart now? No, Windows! Don’t restart now, thank you very much! In fact, don’t restart at all. As I’m not logged on as an administrator, I don’t have the privileges to restart anyway, so if I clicked the restart button, you’d just tell me I couldn’t. You know it, and I know it, so stop bugging me! Goddam it! Every five accursed minutes!
God, this site looks fugly on IE, doesn’t it? Sorry about that, those who are forced by circumstance to use The Cancer Of The Internet. Those who do so by choice have earned my eternal hatred. I’m not going to fix it – I spend far too much of my life making websites work under IE.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. The restrictions on this computer are crazy. I just tried to open up a second IE window to grab some urls for this post. Apparantly This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Are you kidding me? Two browser windows is too much anarchy for you? Give me a break.
Ah-ha! I’ve just remembered – I’ve got Portable Firefox on a USB stick in my bag. Happy browsing here we come … nope. Can’t use external storage either.
Bollocks to it. I’m going home. There’s a *nix box with my name on it.
ActiveScaffold - the best thing since dynamically self-slicing bread
Posted by Johnnie
How have I missed this? Why did nobody tell me about Active Scaffold before now?
Most of my Rails apps site on a CRUD backend, which I usually generate using Rails built-in scaffold, just to get things going. Inevitably, I’ll rewrite 9/10 of the code, because the default scaffold is clunky and decidedly non-scaleable.
ActiveScaffold scales like vectored gold. What’s more, it reads your Models and dynamically generates an AJAX-powered CRUD interface for them, including their relationships. So, if your Farmer model has_many :cows, and your Cow model belongs_to :farmer, you’ll find the ability to create a new Cow, or add an existing one, has been baked in to the interface for creating a new Farmer. Awesome.