incompl

The Rules of the Meme:
Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with your picture.

For more on my previous topic, you can watch this.

Politically, I am pretty far into liberal territory.  One thing I’ve noticed among liberals is a common notion that conservatives hold their beliefs because they have been tricked or misinformed.  Worse, some suggest they are simply stupid.  This is nonsense.  Most conservatives don’t believe what they believe for these reasons.

Of course, this goes both ways.  Living in Boston I don’t meet a lot of conservatives but I have gotten a gist of a similar feeling on their end.  Liberals are amoral crazies who follow inspiring leaders like sheep.   This, too, is nonsense.  Most liberals don’t believe what they do for these reasons.

How did this happen?  How did we get so many people on both sides of the political landscape that simply do not understand the other side at all?

I don’t know.  But I do know why both liberals and conservatives think the way they do.  Fundamentally, both groups support a different model for social order.  A super liberal society focuses only on fairness and preventing people from hurting each other.  A super conservative society, in addition to doing those two things, also promotes loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity.  These are also powerful ways of maintaining social order and keeping people from harming one another, but require compromise in the virtues that liberals hold most important.  Both models are imperfect, but both are functional.

This article goes into more detail.  Read it.  Go on.

So, let’s stop thinking that the the other 50% of the country is simply stupid or misinformed.  Let’s talk about issues, and let’s talk about what kind of society we want the government to promote, and why.

Infinite Undiscovery (a recent video game) has shocked me by its ineffectual use of tutorials.  Here is an event where a tutorial was used:

• A carrier pidgeon arrives.
• A character explains that group X communicates via carrier pigeon.
• You read the message.
• A tutorial explains that sometimes carrier pigeons will provide messages from group X.
• I slap my forehead.  They just explained something completely trivial after fully demonstrating it.

Meanwhile, their shop interface was too confusing for me to figure out the first couple times I used it.  No tutorial there.

It says at the bottom “Fol gold 3257, Total gold 0″

Sometimes RPGs have “followers” so I assumed it meant that.  Oh… my followers have gold, but I don’t?  How do I get it from them?  When I go to what I want to buy and hit accept, it just beeps at me.  I guess because my total gold is 0.

In reality, you hit left and right to choose the amount, the total gold value goes up to show you how much you’re going to spend, and the mystical “fol” refers to the amount of gold I have.  Nice.

The purpose of the interface seems to be to be able to choose all my purchases and see the total before committing.  I still don’t know what “fol” is.

Moral of the story: They probably designed the tutorials earlier in development with no user feedback or usability testing.  Documentation (even integrated into the app) is not part of the functional spec: figure it out later in the process when the features have settled (they’ll probably change, you know) and it is clear what needs explanation.

Update: Turns out “fol” is the currency of the game world.

We all know there are system programmers and higher-level application programmers.  At the extreme ends of each category: a dude writing C to work on the Linux kernal, and a dude writing Java to create a text editor.  These two fellows deal with very different tasks.  Generally, the former can write stuff that runs faster, and the latter can write stuff more easily.

I’m starting to think that the web is going to get a similar disjunction.   JavaScript may become the C of the web.  I’m not referring to how some new JavaScript engines are approaching the speed of C (not there yet, but certainly getting there).  I’m talking about how JavaScript is becoming the systems language of the web platform.  You write JavaScript to create either really fast webapps, or use libraries implemented in JavaScript to more easily write slower webapps.

Look at some jQuery code for a second:

$("#dog").show()

.addClass("barking")

.load("dogdata.html")

It starts to look more like a domain-specific language for DOM manipulation than actual JavaScript.

Since that may be a stretch for some people, here is a better example, further into the disjunction I’m talking about.  Cappuccino.

What are we looking at here?  A library that is much more powerful than typical web app libraries.  It uses its own programming language (Objective-J).  And if the demos are to be trusted, the resulting software is much slower than stuff written in plain JavaScript.

Imagine years down the line if we had web app developers that knew Objective-J, but not JavaScript.  Us JavaScript guys would be useful for maintaining these libraries, and for doing the jobs that need to be blazing fast.  Sound like a C developer of the desktop world?

Obviously this trend could be derailed depending on how browsers develop.  I found it an interesting pattern nonetheless.

I love it.

Crashed plugin:

Crashed tab:

Sure beats the whole browser crashing.

Normally I don’t believe in making a dead simple tool virtually unusable for the stake of style.  But damn, that watch is hot.

Some links to good stock texture sites.  High resolution textures can really spice up your site if used right.

Listen up: these guys have shown you how to make an online store.  That is how it’s done.

I recommend reading the entirety of The Pragmatic Programmer, but if you don’t have the time, at least read the list of tips.

The last.fm people do quality control right.

Here is how you market your tequila.

Some JavaScript graphing and charting tools.  As with many things, there are innumerable options, but only a handful of truly good ones.

The (potentially nsfw nudity) works of Jasper Goodall.  Does your boss hate art, I wonder…?  Seriously though, this stuff is solid.

shinywhitebox seems to be the best (reasonably priced, starting at $20 USD) Mac screen capture program I can find.  Here is something I made with the demo version: shinywhitebox test.

And now the goofy (and possibly stale) stuff, like the Adventures of Wassup Holmes, information on how babby formed, and finding out the hard way that she has a boyfriend.

Lastly, a reminder not to give in to regret.

I want to do a proper design for this site, so I’ve been thinking through ideas in the back of my mind.  I’m a big fan of colourlovers and they post a ton of photos for color inspiration.  Here are two that are driving my ideas for the redesign:

Yep, mold.  But these colors are awesome.

Red kermesite crystals.  Similar colors to above but a very different setting.

The trick will be getting a good pair of colors for the text / text background that are readable, but that work with this theme.