Archive for November, 2008

Two UI “Features” I Just Don’t Understand

Friday, November 28th, 2008

One on the Mac, and one on the PC. First, the Mac. When you’re selecting items in a list by holding down shift and using the arrow keys, pressing the arrow in the opposite direction expands the selection the other way, rather than reducing the selection. Let me illustrate: Here’s a finder window where I […]

Playstation Home

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

I got invited to the PS3 Home beta / stress test this evening, so I logged in to have a look around and take some pictures. Here’s me waiting for some content to download. Home can download new world locations and other stuff in the background, so while the download was going on I was […]

Parallels 4 and VMWare Fusion 2 vs The Sims 2

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

The Mac version of the Sims 2 has a control problem that drives me nuts. I don’t know if it happens for everyone but most people don’t notice or care, or if it’s somehow unique to the two Mac’s I’ve tried it on, but for me, the pie menus don’t work right. I thought I’d […]

Outsourcing Commenting

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

There’s a service called Disqus that provides hosted commenting for your blog or website. My Ottawa Events site was recently hit by a deluge of spam – so much so that I had to disable commenting completely. I discovered Discus through Dave Winer’s blog, and it seems like it’s worth a shot, so I’ve enabled […]

ExtremeHeadline

Monday, November 10th, 2008

The headline: “Windows 7 Next-Gen Graphics”. The teaser: “Windows 7 will usher in a host of changes all over the OS, including a major overhaul of the graphics architecture. Here’s what you can expect.”. From the article: The changes to the graphics landscape you can expect in 7 are not sea changes, but these relatively […]

I Want an Xbox 360 on my Desk

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

No, not at work. At home. This is how I played games before I got into console gaming. On computers. The Vic-20, Commodore 64, Amiga, DOS-era PCs, and the PCs are all systems I used for gaming. They all sat on my desk, hooked up to a monitor. They all had a keyboard, and most […]

Finished Fable 2

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Fable 2 was a short game. I enjoyed it, but sometimes in spite of itself. The menu system sucked, the spell system sucked, and the controls for moving around sucked. It took me until I was about 80% done before I figured out how spells work. And once I did figure it out, they still […]

Spammers hit Ottawa Events

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

My Ottawa Events website has become a target for spammers. I cleared out all the comments yesterday because of the amount of spam that had crept in, and now this morning there are another 927 pieces of spam. Bummer. I’ve been running this site for years now, and this is the first time it’s become […]

Developer Conference Videos

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

Apple has made the videos from their latest WWDC available for purchase on iTunes, the way Microsoft did for the PDC videos. Except that Microsoft doesn’t charge you $999 to watch them. Crappy move, Apple.