Brad Wardell's Blog

My brain is trying to escape

Published on Wednesday, November 5, 2003 By Brad Wardell In Blogging

I'm so far behind on so many things. I also have a bunch of topics to cover. I have a fun article about Hydrogen fuel cells and the problems they have. Short answer: We're not going to have hydrogen fuel cells any time soon. Sorry.

The Matrix Revolutions was spectacularly crappy. Shockingly bad.

I have two huge projects in front of me to get working on that is on top of all our existing projects. One on the business unit and the other for the games unit.

I need to find us a bigger building and soon. It's becoming quite problematic.

We also need to hire more animators (ones who know 3D Studio) and software developers who already know DirectX decently.

I'm annoyed with our elementary school. They don't have a nurse on staff. Unbelievable. My little elementary school had a nurse and I grew up in a place that didn't have anywhere near the resources Canton Michigan has (land of $7500 per year property taxes).

Bullet proof glass? Put some nail polish remover on it and it becomes brittle enough to shatter with minimal effort.

So tired from so much stuff going on. Gotta get Object Desktop 2004 out the door and DesktopX 2 Pro and work on the Political Machine and WindowBlinds 4.2 is coming and GalCiv Expansion pack is coming and tons of other goodies. It's enough to make ones head spin.

Most of all, I need some chocolate. Right now.

Matrix Revolutions = Crap

Published on Wednesday, November 5, 2003 By Brad Wardell In Movies & TV & Books

If The Matrix was a 9 or 10 and Reloaded was maybe a 7. Then Matrix Revolutions is a 3 or 4.

Worst movie I've paid to see at a theatre in a long time. But I say that with a big caveat. No set of movies had built up expectations like The Matrix. Movies like "The One" that came out a year or two ago weren't any better than this. But the Matrix, and the story behind it, had been hyped up beyond belief.

A lot of the problem appears to me to be one of editing. A few extra scenes, a few scenes cut, and epilogues could have made a big difference. Instead, we're left with something that isn't really a conclusion but more like the end of a chapter in a larger story that I no longer care to know more about.

Picasa 1.6

Published on Tuesday, November 4, 2003 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

Picasa automatically finds and organizes all of your pictures including: jpeg, tiff, bmp, psd, and standard camera movie files. Sending pictures with e-mail used to mean five steps just to get it right. Picasa lets you pick the size and then automatically attaches your pictures. Browse through all your pictures and view slideshows of your albums with the click of a button. Enhance, fix red-eye, and even crop without losing data or permanently changing your original picture.

New in 1.6:
Cropping, Support for more grpahics formats, Movie support, network drive support, more thumbnail sizing options.

Download: Download

News source: Betanews.com

Lying Liars and their Lies

Published on Tuesday, November 4, 2003 By Brad Wardell In Politics

What is it with left-wing zealots and the word "lie". It really gets under my skin. For liberals, it seems, conservatives never make mistakes. Oh no. Conservatives aren't, you know, actually human. And so whenever a conservative makes a statement that turns out to be wrong, it isn't that he was mistaken, it is that he lied.

Al Franken has made this into a mini-career with books like "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". Sure, other zealots on the left like him will eat that stuff up. But is it convincing? To me, it just makes ugly stereotypes of the left ring that much more true. The left certainly has no monopoly on hypocrisy. The right is full of nuts and zealots on its own. Many charactertures of the right are actually true. I have actually met rich Republicans who pretty much believe that the poor should be liquidated (and I had this conversation in a hot tub in Grand Cayman with people who have never had to struggle or work hard for anything mind you).

But to me, the left's hypocrisy is more disturbing. And I'll tell you why: The left is the one that believes that the government is the solution to all of life's problems. Name a social problem and the left's solution is to have the government solve it. And why not? Because they would love to run the government because they are, after all, more civilized. Where the right generally wants the government to leave them the hell alone, the left wants the government to be all encompassing. A benevolent parental figure. And that's the problem.

The left's view of itself is that liberalism is simply the more civilized way to approach life. Combine that with a healthy dose of righteousness and the power of the government and you have a recipe for authoritarianism. Anyone who's been a student at a major university in the past decade knows what I'm talking about. It is on universities that we get a taste of what would happen if the liberals ran the world. You see, because liberals are more civilized, or more to the point, because conservatives are a bunch of evil, selfish bastards, they feel the need to play referee in the game of life. But they're not an impartial one because they don't recognize that other ideas may deserve equal time with theirs.

The net result is that all conservative actions are viewed by liberals under the most cynical of lenses. Conservatives who don't support affirmative action on campus are against it not because they believe it is morally wrong to favor people based on their skin pigment but because they're a bunch of racists. Conservatives who favor military action in Iraq are not in favor because they understand what is a stake and concluded this is the right course of action, they favor it because they're war mongers or at best, duped by "The Bush Clan". And when a conservative statement turns out to be wrong, it's a lie.

Let me give you some examples:

When Clinton bombed a civilian Aspirin factory in Sudan during the height of the Monica Lewinski nonsense, his claim that it was a chemical weapons lab wasn't a lie. It was a simple mistake based on faulty intelligence. Even though the timing of the whole thing was incredibly suspect and the target odious, that was pretty much the end of that.

However...

When Bush follows the same intelligence that Clinton did and assumes Iraq has WMD and calls for military force to remove Saddam for failing to comply with UN resolutions and said WMD are not instantly found (despite Iraq being a huge country) the result is loud cries that Bush "lied" about the WMD. Clinton was in error about WMD when he attacked Iraq in 1998 but Bush lied. Huh?

It is a symptom of a broader problem. Clinton must have simply made a mistake because he's a liberal and liberals are civilized people. Bush couldn't have made a mistake because he's a conservative barbarian and is only capable of lying.

Like I said, conservatives can be zealots too full of nasty habits. But there's a big difference -- conservatives aren't the ones hoping that the government gets to be a huge, all encompassing thing with the power to civilize society by force. Conservatives don't view the government as "Mom". Hence, the liberal's tendency for selective tolerance should be a warning to those who believe that in an ideal world, the government would be the one solving life's problems rather than individuals solving them for themselves, their families and their communities.

Visual Style quality over time

Published on Tuesday, November 4, 2003 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize Talk

Skinning really got going in the late 90s. The software was relatively primitive back then in terms of features and reliability. And there were a lot fewer skinners in those days.

But what about quality?

Here's a skin from the 1999 time frame:

user posted image

I mentioned in a post recently that the number of new skins (visual styles) being created has steadily increased over time. This, despite the increasing difficulty in creating a fully featured visual style (due to each new version of Windows and WindowBlinds adding more features that need to be skinned).

Some have argued, persuasively, that the *quality* of visual styles has steadily dropped as complexity has grown. That as the amount of time required to create a visual style has increased, the quality has decreased.

One theory for that would be that those talented enough to create really outstanding graphics simply don't have the free time available to put in to creating a visual style.

Or more to the point, the amount of time *available* to skin a thing has remained constant and as the complexity has increased, the time spent hasn't increased and the net result is lower quality.

One result has been the coming of premium skins. This works on a basic premise: Spending X time on something is fun. Spending X + Y time on something moves it out of fun and into being real work. Therefore, I'll still do X amount of it for fun but need to be paid for that Y amount. Net result, premium visual styles.

But back to the main piont -- what do you think? Do you think that the overall quality of skinning has declined? Or perhaps that the quality has remained the same but that because so many more visual styles are created these days that there's just more junk to sift through.

Love my T40

Published on Tuesday, November 4, 2003 By Brad Wardell In Blogging

Little discussed feature about the IBM Thinkpad T40. The Fn-space bar combo will instantly switch the resolution to a the next lower one. this is great when you are browsing the web and want the text nice and big. Just one of the many handy features that makes the Thinkpads rule.

Converting Msstyles to WindowBlinds visual styles

Published on Monday, November 3, 2003 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize Talk

This was asked recently so here's a quickie guide on how to do it.

(1) Download SkinStudio 4 beta from http://www.skinstudio.net

(2)Choose Convert MSStyles

user posted image

(3) Choose the one you want. I'm using StefanKa's cool "6 pack" visual style.

user posted image

(4) Now you're in Universal Skin Format mode. You can now edit the visual style in whatever way you'd like. I.e. change color, move buttons around, tweak it a bit here and there.

user posted image

(5) Then File-Save As... Choose WindowBlinds UIS1 or UIS2 (UIS1 = faster UIS2 = more features -- either will work with an msstyle).

(6) Final result.
user posted image

Note: DO NOT distribute visual styles you've converted without asking for the original author's express written permission. The original author retains all copyright rights to the visual style regardless of what format/language it is in.

MacOS Panther vs. Windows XP: A response

Published on Sunday, November 2, 2003 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

ActiveWin.com has an article that compares Windows XP vs. MacOS X panther (10.3). A lot of good points are made but we also think it is not doing a (pardon the pun) apples and apples comparison.

The article focuses on what comes with the base OS rather than what is available on a platform. For example, is it really that big of a deal that Outlook Express doesn't include spam fighting features when for free you can download something like SpamPal? Especially when a Mac carries with it a $600 to $1000 premium?

Here's another point of view on the matter at JoeUser.com

MacOS Panther vs. Windows XP: A response

Published on Sunday, November 2, 2003 By Brad Wardell In Personal Computing

ActiveWin has an article that compares MacOS X to Windows XP. There are a lot of good points in the article and a lot of his findings are based on pretty solid and reasonable analysis.

But I take issue with an underlying "ground rule" with a lot of these comparisons -- he is comparing what comes with Windows XP with what comes with MacOS X. Considering that a Mac machine costs a great deal more than a comparable Windows machine, I think a more fair comparison is to look at what you can get for both as a platform. Especially since any OEM can always bundle whatever they want to with the machine.

Below are the points he considers to be in favor of the Mac. Most of these I agree with but I'll comment below in red.

Dialogue boxes: In windows you get things like Yes, No and Cancel - on a Mac you get Don’t Save, Cancel and Save – logical text information that is an improvement over Windows. This is just one really plain example, I could literally list loads. Open Recent dialogues easier to read than Windows

Absolutely agree here. One of the first things I noticed about MacOS X vs. Windows was the bits of polish like this that make is a better experience.

Drag and Drop: Far, far better in OS X over Windows. Things like dragging files to a Printer Icon to print, dragging images from the web to the desktop, drag folders to e-mail, drag a picture or photo to you desktop picture control panel sets it up as the desktop background, dragging pictures to your login icon sets that as your login picture. You can also drag reorder items in any Window toolbar or sidebar.

This isn't really a fair comparison. First, drag and drop on Windows XP is pretty thorough. But more to the point, Windows, because it is based on a 2 button mouse, does a lot more with right click menus. I'd still give the edge to the Mac though.

Exposé – Nothing more needs to be said

Agreed.

Navigating the file system: A Mac does in 3 views what Microsoft does in 5.

Yes and no. For one thing, you can't just type in a path into some URL-like field in Finder. I find that very annoying and limiting. Not having the ability to simply type into finder where you want to go is a major restriction IMO.

Colour labelling: excellent way of creating user defined groupings of items.
Icons: Nothing Windows has right now can touch the specs of 128x128 pixels and 8-bit transparency. You can also change icons really easily in OS X compared to Windows.

Wrong wrong wrong. First off, for the price of a Mac I think one can safely say you can pick up Object Desktop. Object Desktop has been giving Windows (and OS/2 before that) features long before they showed up on the Mac. First with Zooming icons on mouse over? Object Desktop. First with Alpha blended shadows under windows? Object Desktop.

And I can replace everything on my system with 128x128 icons/objects right now. First, most modern icon packages come with 128x128 icons and have for a long while. And secondly, ObjectDock and yZ Dock have helped popularize 128x128 (and larger) PNG files that you can download and use on programs like DesktopX, ObjectDock, or IconPackager. All of which is either part of Object Desktop or in the case of ObjectDock, freeware.

The price difference between the mid range Mac and a high range PC is about $600 in favor of the PC and the PC includes a lot more software (such as Office, DVD authoring tools, etc.) that aren't being considered. But on top of that, $600 can buy you a lot more after market software too. Object Desktop is $50 for the whole thing and it addresses a good chunk of the issues Byron speaks of.

Fonts: Better quality and quantity of fonts, various ways of previewing fonts, including the excellent and new Font Book. Overall a better Font Management now that Windows too. Better Anti-Aliasing of fonts.

Agreed.

Find and Search: Massively better in OS X than Windows. As soon as you start to type OS X starts searching. Sherlock is there to let you search the internet for Pictures, Stock and more.

Agreed.

Keyboard: Makes better use of Keyboard shortcuts, navigating the file system by the keyboard, application and document switching via the keyboard (Exposé), shutting down via a keyboard and more.

Once again, because a Windows system is less expensive, inexpensive extensions should be part of this comparison. Object Desktop, once again eliminates this advantage and then some. Keyboard LaunchPad not only allows you to assign hot keys to any program or website but can even be assigned to control parts of individual programs and apply saved clipboards automatically.

Installing Applications: You may think this is a strange one, but in my view, dragging a Mac OS X Package (applications behave like folders) to the applications folder is a much easier install than Microsoft offers us in Windows. Multiple versions of the same program can be kept on the computer this way, uninstall is simply a case of dragging the folder to the trash. Neither Windows nor OS X is perfect.

I don't think this is that clear cut. Most Windows programs behave as he describes. They just simply include a "install wizard" to walk the user through the process.

Video editing: iMovie ships with OS X and works very well with improved editors, filters, audio editing, and transitions

And for the amount of money difference in cost, you can purchase some pretty impressive video editing packages on Windows. And as a Mac user myself, I can tell you that you need pretty good hardware for iMovie to be useful. For one thing, in 10.2 (I haven't tried this with 10.3) some actions with video files had to be done as the foreground app. iMovie would pause the action when it wasn't the active program which makes having a high end (read: expensive) machine key.

DVD Playback: OS X comes with a DVD player that plays the video without having to have a third parties software installed to run it, unlike Windows.

So?? What is this? Bundle wars?

Let's recap: In my view, the minimum spec'd Mac I'd purchase today is the 1.8 Ghz PowerMac G5 with 512MB of RAM (which I'd bump to 1 gig). Add a 17 inch flat panel and your price is $3,348.00. This right from the Mac store.

Then I go to the Dell store. Without even really working much to cut prices, a 3Ghz Dell machine with a gig of RAM and 21 inch flat panel display with a ton of software bundles is $2,700 (like Office for example which I'd have to add on to the price to the Mac).

My ThinkPad T40 comes with WinDVD. Does Byron think that the Mac's DVD player remotely compares to WinDVD in features?

DVD creation: iDVD is bundled with all Macs that ship with Super Drives. Windows Movie Maker requires additional software if you want to burn DVD’s

See above.

E-mail: Mail is a much better free mail program than Outlook Express, especially for Junk Mail.

Agreed except my $2700 Dell with Office 2003 comes with full Outlook which is as good at junk blocking. But that's irrelevant anyway because I can use free programs like SpamPal for junk mail.

Calendar: iCal comes free with OS X and can be synced with Palm or iPod devices. Windows has no free Calendar program.

How can you call iCal "free"? It's figured into the price of the Mac. Outlook 2003 comes with a similar scheduling program.

Free developer tools: Apple offers a more complete set of free developer tools than Microsoft does for Windows XP.

Is he suggesting there aren't free developer tools for Windows? I'll concede that developer tools should come with the OS though.

Photos: iPhoto is far better at managing photos you have on your computer than Windows.

Again, this is bundle wars.

Voice recognition: This has been around on the Mac since OS 7 and is built into the OS – if you want it in Windows, you need to buy Works or Office.

Voice recognition is not something that is very practical yet on either Mac or PC. And voice recognition on the PC - Dragon Speak Easy, IBM ViaVoice are both excellent if you need it.

Speech Synthesis – OS X supports system wide voice synthesis and has various voices to choose from. OS X also has Talking Dialogues.

See above.

Screen capture: 6 different types of screen grab shortcuts are available.

Print screen! In fact, I can't believe that he mentions this because when trying to take screenshots on the Mac I found this infuriatingly annoying. On Windows, I can hit Ctrl-Printscreen to take a screenshot of a Windows or just Print Screen for the whole desktop and paste right into Front Page, Word, etc. Maybe there's a trick I don't know of on the Mac but I find it much more cumbersome to get a screenshot on the Mac. And I take a lot of screenshots, people like me are the target market for that bullet point.

Scripting: Improved in OS X for workflow automation.

I'm not experienced enough here to comment.

CD-R: Advanced options are far better in OS X. Add icons to CD’s you burn.
Sticky Notes: Free and built into the OS

Bundling Bundling Bundling. For a $600 premium it should come with more stuff out of the box.

Password Management: System wide password management through Keychain

I haven't used this enough to comment.

Spell-check: Excellent system wide spell checking – While posting in a forum on the Internet, I can have it check my spellings on the fly.

Agreed.

Crashes: So far I haven’t had one crash or needed a reboot (other than updates) with OS X – something that can’t be said of Windows XP.

Oh come now. Crashing on either is a non-issue. Windows XP is just as solid as MacOS. I've had forced reboots with both on occasion but it's not statistically significant.

No Viruses: This is a bitter point for a lot of Windows users, who usually then say it is because OS X has fewer users. Fact is – it is far more secure.

No, it's not a "fact", it's a matter of virus writers focusing on the market with 25 times more users. This could just as easily be said about OS/2. Is OS/2 more "secure"? It doesn't even have security for it. But I've never seen a OS/2 virus or Worm and yet REXX on OS/2 allows the potential to create worms the likes no one has ever imagined. But none have happened?

My magic rock here prevents earth quakes from occurring in Michigan. As proof I can show that there have been no earth quakes here. Would you like to buy my rock? $3348.

As soon as I get a chance, I'd like to do a video demo of both. Does anyone know of a freeware screen video capture program along the lines of CamStudio for Windows but for the Mac?

Anyway, I don't want it to sound like I'm bashing the Mac. I consider myself a realist on OS wars these days having been an OS warrior during the OS/2 era. But I don't like strawman arguments. And comparing what comes bundled with the OS is just that. Not only that, but it only encourages business practices that, in the long term, harm consumers. If OS vendors are to be judged purely on what they happen to bundle with the OS, you're going to get more and more bloated OSes with fewer and fewer healthy third parties to write software. And it's third parties that help drive innovation in technology.

WinCustomize: 2 MILLION USERS

Published on Sunday, November 2, 2003 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

In October, WinCustomize crossed the 2 MILLION unique user mark. That is, 2 million different people visited the site in the month of October.

Here are some interesting statistics about WinCustomize from last month:
60% of users visited via bookmarks or typed in the URL manually or from a program that brings them here.

About 25% of users came from Stardock.

Penny-Arcade had an article about ObjectDock that mentioned WinCustomize which brought in over 4,000 new people.

Other high referring sites includes:

Deskmod
deviantART
TweakXP
Neowin.net
JoeUser.com

90% of WinCustomize visitors use Windows XP or Windows 2000

85% of visitors are running 1024x768 or higher

245,000 of the people who visited WinCustomize last month visit the site several times each day.