John’s Random Review

John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

Joel Spolsky recommends not disabling menu items in context where they can’t be used:

Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there’s some reason you can’t complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

…
Spolsky’s suggestion is also predicated on the assumption that the user is stupid. Better is to assume that the user is clever and curious and will be able to figure out for themself why a certain command is currently disabled.

I don’t normally post “work related” things here, but daring fireball doesn’t have comments or anything that i can find, so i can’t comment there to disagree, so i’ll do it here! I generally agree with the things John posts, but in this case, i think he’s wrong, at least for some kinds of applications. I’d break the apps into a few categories, one based on frequency of use, and one on complexity.

High frequency+low complexity: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, or any other web browser. You probably use it every day. If the back button is disabled, you know why. if the stop button is disabled, you know why. Fine, let them be disabled like Gruber wants.

On the opposite corner of the frequency+complexity graph are the products I work on. They are used for analysis and visualization of gene expression data (Rosetta Resolver), mass spectrometry based proteomics data (Rosetta Elucidator), or genetics data (Rosetta Syllego). They are used by people to analyze billions of datapoints which were generated by multi-million dollar instruments that ran continuously for weeks, after weeks of design, planning, biology and chemistry. (Yeah, all of our products have Rosetta at the beginning, and they also have longer names, like “The Rosetta Resover System for Gene Expression Analysis”, in the same way that Excel isn’t “Excel”, it is “Microsoft Excel”, but i digress…)

Some people use use our products every day, making them high complexity+high frequency. Their job might be to use our products and other statistics tools to analyze data, and that’s all they do. For those people, would be fine if some of the buttons or menu items are disabled when they don’t apply, because they know intimate details of how the system works.

But a lot more of out users are low frequency users: they might use one of the apps for a couple weeks to analyze data they have spent months gathering, get their results, write their paper, and then not use the app again for several months while they start planning and generate data for the next big thing they are doing. During that time, there might have even been a major upgrade to a new version of the application. When they want to perform a task, and the menu item is disabled, they don’t have time to be “clever” and try to “discover” why that the button that does their complicated thing isn’t enabled. They are too busy trying to cure cancer or some other thing to spend time trying to solve the mystery of why their menu item is non-obviously disabled. It is better to pop up a dialog telling them that some of 11,000 things they are looking for are still loading, and let them choose if they should be excluded from what they are trying to do or if they want to wait until later.

The alternative is a disabled button and a call to customer service, where a brilliant PhD user tries to explain to a support analyst that they can’t get their favorite tool to turn on.

Back when i wrote the post about building a pantry, i said that i thought i had used every tool i owned for that project…well… for this project, i used every major tool i own except one: my miter saw. I would have used the miter saw if it had a sharper/newer blade. And if i had a better place to use it than on the floor. And if I had a better one. For the closet doors project, I even bought some new tools that i didn’t have before!

Before:	After:

For more details and more pictures, follow the jump! (more…)

For Valentine’s day (weekend), Laura and I had dinner at The Herbfarm restaurant. It definitely gets into the “Top 3″ of meals I’ve ever eaten, but does not get the top spots. It was the most elegant, well prepared, fanciest, and most gourmet meal we’ve ever had, though. For reference, #1 is Steak for lunch in a tiny little family restaurant in Porvoo, Finland, #2 was J P’s in Cannon Beach, OR, the dinner the night before we got engaged. Interestingly, the herbfarm is #1 of the “non-steak” dinners. Quick Summary: 9 courses, 5 wines, and 4 hours well spent. for more details and the pics (if you haven’t already seen them) are in this set at flickr! The pictures do better service than i can here with words. It was an awesome place and awesome meal!

I had started this post the week after valentine’s day, but i totally forgot about it in its “Draft” status, so i clicked “publish” today

I think most of Laura’s 20% came from actually knowing the answer to the Firefly question: she remembered going to the movie! Attagirl!

So i bought some fancy electronic ear protection from cabela’s to use at the range. I had searched some places and this “Impact” model fit my real requirements: has to muffle sounds, have to fit into the range bag. They also met my optional requirements: electronic ones that boost normal range sounds, so you can still hear people talking while you’re wearing them. Howard Leight Impact™ Sport Earmuff @ Cabela’s I got them for shooting, but i’ve now used them for a whole host of purposes: shooting, lawn-mowing, weed-eating, table-sawing, routing, and as my wife calls it, “Rototillering”. I’ve also used them for something i never expected: sleeping while someone snores loud enough to wake the dead .

The electronic part works pretty good at the range, its very easy to hear what the people around you are talking about. Its pretty interesting, because when you have a room full of people wearing ear protection, they assume that only the people in a 3 foot radius can hear them. So i’ve overheard some hilarious discussions at the various local indoor shooting ranges. When using power tools, like the router or the table saw, it doesn’t work very well, though. I think the tool noises are in the ranges that overlap with the other sounds you’d want to hear, whereas a gunshot is a pretty intense and identifiable noise that would be easier to filter out. These also have an aux-in so that you can pipe in sound from an ipod or some other thing with a standard headphone plug, but i haven’t used that yet, although i’ve thought about it. I just don’t really want a cord going from my head to something else while i’m working. It can only get in the way of something! (which you don’t really want when shooting OR playing with power tools!)

An open letter to my computer controlled squad-mates in Call of Duty 4.

Dear highly trained SAS/USMC squad mates,

Thank you for providing covering fire from behind that pallet of stuff and those barrels, you’re doing a great job. But you should at least try to shoot that guy standing 3 feet in front of you. Its cool that you’ll duck out and throw the grenades back at them, but that guy right there, yeah, that guy in the ski mask, he’s a bad guy. Shoot in his general vicinity. With the amount of bullets you are spraying, i think you might even hit him by accident.

Never mind, i got him for you. Lets move up!

Oh, alright, you guys can stay back there behind those barrels. Its probably safer that way. You keep directing fire towards where that guy is hiding behind that car, so i can see he’s over there. I agree, i’d think that sporadic rifle and light machine gun fire would go right through the aluminum and plastic body work, but apparently these Russian cars are much sturdier than you’d think.

Yes sir, I’ll go out and place C4 on that tank with the heavy machine gun firing at us. You guys keep that tank pinned down from behind those boxes. Ok, i’ve singlehandedly blown up this tank…. oh, there’s another one over there? Ok, i’ll get right on that.

Hey, have you guys realized that every time we hear some voices speaking in Russian, that some guys come from this door? Maybe you should premptively shoot over there. And if you hear anyone say any words that even remotely sound like the word “grenade”, or “grenata” or anything like that, you should probably hide behind something instead of just standing there.

Your friend,
John

Just finished the main storyline of Call of Duty 4 on veteran. I finished it on normal a while back and have been playing multiplayer almost every night, but since Jeff, gamertag:”Still Breastfed” finished the game on Veteran last week, i at least had to try to get through it. After finishing on normal i’d started again on veteran and got stuck in the TV station. What a pain. Most of the game was pretty awesome, even on veteran. I’d guess that a single playthrough on “hardened” would be about the best experience. Not too hard, but hard enough to not breeze through it. Not the best or most original storyline (hey, lets prevent some nukes from ’sploding!) but diverse enough environments and missions that it stayed interesting the whole way through. Its interesting how they kill off some people in this one, and the ending sequence is a believable movie ending that you’re in control of. CoD4 has by far the best animation and modelling of any video game i’ve ever played. The way the characters run, climb things, switch weapons, and perform other tasks is almost spot on. Some of it looks like its pre-rendered, but it isn’t, its all happening in engine in game. Pretty awesome. They could make an AC130 gunship game and we’d all buy it without question (hey, infinity ward, make an arcade game out of that!) The multiplayer is the most fun i’ve had on any multi-player FPS on a console ever. I only wish that when you got killed in the single player you’d get the killcam view you get when you get killed in multiplayer. But i bet that I’d just be enraged when i see that the guy who killed me was behind a wall and can’t possibly see me…

Now if i could just get through the airplane mission on veteran…. I’m so close!

So in the last 3 days we’ve had 6″ of snow, rain, then hail, then snow-hail (”snail”) and then it even thundered and lightninged while snailing! hence, my newly coined weather-phenomenon “thundersnail”:

For the first time in a long time (portal is a close second: portal better ending, mass effect better story), this game actually made me want to to watch cut scenes. It felt kindof like a movie, kindof like a “choose your own adventure”. Being able to choose the direction things were going was cool, while the game was “on rails”, at least there were some switches along the way to push the story in a direction. The voice acting was great, and included some big names, which was really cool. I saw probably 100 people in the “other voices” section alone. The little interactions between the crew when out moving around, or overhearing conversations as you walk through a bar was very immersive. The main story line was really good, with a few twists now and then to keep it interesting. A couple of the little details in the story really made it feel plausible. All of the main characters had backstories and somewhat interesting conversations. It would have been nice if the side missions that you do would affect the story more. I spent time doing some of them because i hoped they might.

My only real complaint was that there was no “ship to ship” space combat. The codex had information about it, like how the shields and guns worked (interestingly, it seemed to be pretty plausible!), so maybe that was something that got cut from the console version and will make it into the PC version? There’s been one downloadable content thing so far, so maybe that would be an addition? Some of the missions got a little repetitive, but in a game this long, it will happen eventually. Some people complained about load times and/or elevator rides, and i somewhat agree, but it wasn’t the worst waiting i’ve done in a game. I swear loading a track in PGR4 or Forza can take longer than that, and thats for a 3 minute drive in a loop…

My mini-2 year review of my Marvel Precision .22LR 1911 conversion. This is a continuation of my adventures with it, continued from the original post, and my 1 year followup! I’ve been keeping religious track of range time in a Numbers spreadsheet for about 9 months now, so I can give exact numbers and ammo used and everything. in the last 9 months i’ve fired: CCI Mini-mags: 300 CCI Stingers: 133 Total: 433 Follow the jump for the rest of the details and some pics.

(more…)

I’d heard of TripIt from people at work, but hadn’t used it. We’re going to AZ for Spring Training, and i needed to be able to print out all the itineraries and confirmation numbers and all that, but can’t from work because gmail is blocked. So i was going to just forward all the emails to work, but instead decided to forward them to plans@TripIt.com instead and see how well it worked.

They link everything together, parse it all and put it into a slick itinerary combined with weather, maps, directions and other cool stuff. Its a lot cooler than i expected it to be. And by looking at it all in one place, i realized that i had booked the rental car for the wrong days! (We land at almost midnight, i accidentally put in 11:30pm for the next day!). Seeing it in the wrong place on the list made it trivial to find and correct. I’d had the emails and printouts from the rental car place on my desk for a week and never noticed i had the wrong days! Fixing this kind of thing at the airport at midnight would have been a GIANT nightmare!

Update 3/25/08: TripIt saved us twice this trip, actually. The itinerary printout also had directions from PHX to the Hotel. Our GPS tried to take us to a completely different place (you know something is wrong when it takes 30 seconds to plan a route and it tries to go around 800 miles instead of 31) and then died altogether. It got into this mode where it had a buggy route stored in memory somewhere, then crashed hard. when it restarted we had to go through the full setup again, but it remembered where we wanted to go, so it tried to recalculate the route and crashed again. If we popped out the map card, it went to a full reset, but after putting the map card back in, it would still randomly crash when we used it. I think we need a new map memory card?