SteveX Compiled

So our local transit company, OC Transpo, is on strike. We also had something like 19 centimeters of snow last night with a lovely freezing rain glaze, so getting around today is a nightmare.

I gather one of the main reasons for the strike is a proposed change to the booking system that drivers use. They currently get to book their own schedules, and this introduces some inefficiency, to the tune of about 100 drivers worth of wasted time every year. Or so the auditor general has said.

It's a tough call whether to agree with the drivers or the city on this one. Someone I know works for an organization whose status quo is what the city is proposing, and they've formed a union whose goal it is to change to something like what the city is trying to remove in Ottawa. I'll admit I don't really understand why block booking is so much more efficient than letting employees book their own time, but I know asking workers to work split shifts, or alternating them between working a night shift and a day shift seemingly randomly makes life a lot more difficult than it needs to be.

I wouldn't expect this to get resolved quickly. Looks like there are some decent carpooling resources filling in some of the gap.

I've put enough electronics through the wash that I think this is a great idea: a Washer/Dryer Safe USB Drive.

I put my Audiovox Windows Mobile phone (SMT5600) through the wash a couple years ago, and I was amazed that it came out unscathed. So maybe these things are mostly washer safe, I don't know. Prefer to buy one that says it is, than find out the hard way.

Looks tiny too. My current USB drive is pocket-safe, thanks to its ability to retract the USB connector... I don't know how well this one would fare but I'm guessing probably pretty good.

Google Desktop is available for the Mac. There's even a demo video.

But what they don't mention anywhere is why I'd want to use Google Desktop when Spotlight already does such a great job on the Mac.

I get that it searches your Gmail. That's actually a nice feature. I have Mail downloading my Gmail through to my local system so Spotlight can see it, but having it index the mail right there in Gmail would be nice.

But I'm not willing to have two content indexes of all the stuff on my computer.

If Google Desktop uses the Spotlight database for the local system, then I'll use it. But Google's expertise is search, so I'm guessing they wouldn't use the platform's built-in search. Anyone know for sure?

I'm in Canada, and every Christmas, we make at least one trip to the US to do some shopping. We don't necessarily buy a lot there, but it's just interesting going and seeing some of the Black Friday madness and occasionally picking up a deal or two.

This year we didn't go on Friday, we went on the following Monday. It was a Monday evening, so maybe that's a light time to be shopping, but still, it's December, and a lot of stores still had sales on.

Two observations:

1. Traffic was light. The stores were empty. Maybe everyone was just shopped out.

2. Prices in the US are currently not worth crossing the border for.

10 or 15 years ago, there was a good reason to shop in the US: A lot of stuff came out in the US before it did in Canada, or just wasn't available in Canada. These days, Canada gets treated like a real market, and the big box stores have taken over here the way they have in the States, so we're pretty close to parity on product availability now.

Then last year there was a different good reason to shop in the US: Things were cheaper. A lot cheaper, because the Canadian dollar was doing so well. Six months ago, people were crossing the border in significant numbers to buy expensive items like cars in the US and saving thousands of dollars doing so, even after all the costs associated with bringing the car over the border.

Today, things are different.
Many products have been repriced to reflect a dollar at parity. A Mac Pro at the Apple Store in the US is $2799, and the same computer in the Canadian store is $2899, less than a 4% difference. The Xbox 360 is priced identically in Canada and the US.

But while retailers were adjusting for the dollar at parity, the economy played another trick on them. The Canadian dollar is now back down to 79 cents US, meaning that that Xbox 360 for $299 in the US is about $360 Canadian. Why would I shop in the US?

This is a temporary state. Products in stores today in Canada were purchased and shipped to Canada months ago, when the dollar was at parity. Once these products are off the shelves, prices will go back up.

In summary: Now is a good time to buy stuff in Canada.

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 want to select a few files. I start with the first file:

I hit the down arrow a few times to select some more files:

Now still holding down shift, I hit the up arrow.

What I expect to happen is one of the items I expanded the selection onto using the down arrow will be deselected and the selection will shrink. What actually happens is the selection grows at the other end.

This is different from how shift-cursor works everywhere else. In an editor, for example, if you hold down the shift key and move the cursor, the selection extends from the anchor (where you started) to the cursor (where you are now).

So why do some lists in the Mac work this way? I don't think it's a bug, so someone thinks this is how it should work, but I can't come up with a good reason for it. I often shift-cursor-down to select a bunch of files and then realize I went to far and need to back up; I have never hit shift-cursor down and then realized I started at the wrong place.

So that's my Mac beef. Here's the Windows one.

When you click the thumb in a scroll bar on Windows and move the mouse, there's a horizontal range within which you have to stay, or the scroll position snaps back to where you started.

This gets in my way because I click the thumb and start moving the mouse to scroll to read something, and because I'm not watching the cursor, it strays outside the green rectangle. And the scroll position snaps back to the top of the document.

Is this a feature to anyone? Old versions of Windows didn't do this, so again it seems intentional, but I don't understand the rationale.

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 exploring my waterfront studio apartment. It comes with some nice Ikea style furniture that you can sit on and move around.

Here's me on the balcony.

For the default apartment I certainly can't complain about the view.

That's me looking out at my yacht. At least, I think it's my yacht.

Still waiting for that download. Yay it's done! Time to dance with some strangers.

The ghostly strangers are strangers whose bodies haven't downloaded yet. You see them walking around like that until they eventually pop in.

I think these ghostly people are laughing at me. That's not very nice.

I'll just have to dance on my own.

Or watch this great video.

It actually looks very good - far better than these pictures would suggest, since these are just photographs of my TV.

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 blogged about this but now I can't find it. The gist of it is that on Windows, you can use pie menus as intended: click-move-click. The move-click isn't processed until the pie menu is visible.

On the Mac, click-move-click doesn't work. You have to click-wait-move-click. Not a big deal, but after playing so much Sims on Windows, it's just frustrating. I tried contacting Aspyr (the guys who do the Mac port) but they couldn't see the problem, so I doubt any fix is coming.

So I want to play the Windows version of the Sims on my Mac.

I can do that through Boot Camp, but I don't want to essentially turn off my Mac to play the Sims. VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop to the rescue, right?

Almost, but not quite. The game installs and runs fine, the frame rate is good, but on both VMWare Fusion 2 and Parallels 4, the walls are red. Solid red. Here's a screenshot:

I'm a little surprised that both Parallels and VMWare mess up the same detail; there must be something unusual in how the Sims does the texturing or lighting for the walls.

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 it on the Ottawa Events site.

I like the idea that I can sign up for an account with Disqus and that account works on any blog or site that uses them for commenting. These sorts of sites that provide hosted services to webmasters tend to get bought up by someone if they do a good job (as happened to FeedBurner, for example) so I'm not too worried about my comments disappearing, although that is a risk I take by letting someone else host them. Ottawa Events content is time sensitive, and the comments aren't valuable anymore once the event has passed, so if Disqus did disappear, I wouldn't lose a lot of valuable content.

There are two services that Disqus could be providing. One is simply managing commenting, which they're doing, but the other is filtering spam. I don't know how they do at that job, but if Disqus just becomes another spam target, their value disappears. Hopefully they're well aware of that.

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 minor upgrades should provide welcome features and may have a significant impact on consumers.

Now that's more in line with what I've been hearing. Vista was an architectural release, changing many things in the core of the OS, and that's why it's compatibility, especially regarding drivers, was terrible.

The focus of Windows 7 has been on polish and usability rather than features. Windows 7 is building on the foundation work that was done in Vista, so there will be less upheaval when it arrives.
Apple is doing the same thing with Snow Leopard - taking a break from features to work on improving what's already there.

I'm glad that both companies are doing this, and especially that they're both doing it at the same time.

(Mark Russinovich's Inside Windows 7 video is a good watch if you're into kernel stuff).

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 of them had a mouse (even the Commodore 64).

Gaming consoles assume you're going to play with a controller. Controllers have gone from a single 8 direction joystick and 1 button to the multitude of inputs that the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers have (including two proportional joysticks, 2 triggers, 8 buttons, etc). But for some classes of games, this just isn't the right input metaphor.

Real time strategy games, for example, benefit hugely from being able to get around the screen quickly. Aiming in first person shooters and RPGs is better with a keyboard and mouse. And in-game communication with a keyboard is preferable to me most of the time to using a headset to chat.

But PC gaming is slowly dying.

People still want to play these kinds of games, so they're coming out for the consoles, but the experience just isn't as good as it is with a keyboard and mouse combo.

So here's what I want: Keyboard and mouse support in Xbox 360 games.

There are two obstacles to this happening:

The big one is, I think, that Microsoft doesn't want it to. It doesn't fit their vision of the 360 as the couch experience - I'm sure they think of the question from the perspective of making a good keyboard/mouse controller that you can use on the couch. But that's not what I want. Plus they still make a few bucks selling Windows.

And the other one is the extra UI design and testing that would go into supporting two input methods.

But in my opinion, the payoff for that extra work would be worth it. For example, even though I love RTS games, I didn't buy Command and Conquer on the 360 because I don't like the control scheme. That's lost dollars for EA.

The PS3 technically supports keyboard/mouse play, but I don't think most games do. For example, their headline shooter series, Resistence: Fall of Man, does not.

I think the way to change this is to let the publishers know why we're not buying their games. If EA sees lost sales, they'll pressure Microsoft to allow keyboard/mouse. And with Peter Moore at EA now, maybe he'll still have some pull with MS.

(Okay, a console one on my desk at work would be cool, too).