I feel a bit bad about picking on Google Doctype's HTML on launch day. Having launched products at Google I know there's nothing more obnoxious than some know-it-all harping on some tiny problem with the product you've worked for a year to launch. But the irony of the problem was too much to let pass. It's fixed now, a plain ol' HTML link. Yay! Since I picked on Google's newest product let me pick next on their oldest product now; web search. And the ugly URLs it produces.

The first problem is the search page URLs are too big. If you go to the plain ol' google.com home page and search for "RFC 1738" in Firefox 3 or MSIE 7 you end up at here:

More inside ...

Google was very lucky to hire Mark Pilgrim, web standards expert and cranky genius. Congratulations to him on for the launch of Google Doctype, a website that documents fancy HTML, CSS, and DOM tricks that we all use. The current practice of rich webapps is way beyond the official standards and it's good to see Google take some leadership in documenting how things should work.

So it's a bit mind-boggling to me to find this bit of HTML on the front page (URLs elded) that breaks the most basic element of the web; clicking on a link.

What's that? Well, it looks like a link to the actual important content; "Browse Google Doctype". But because someone put an onlick handler on it, it's not actually treated like a URL when you click on it. Instead, when you click on it the Javascript is executed to navigate you to the URL. Unfortunately, when you shift-click on it the Javascript also navigates you. Rather than doing what the user would expect, open the link in a new window.

I know, it's a little thing. But it's a horrible little thing, the kind of thing that so many "smart websites" do wrong and break the web standard UI. My understanding of Google Doctype is that it's a whole project about helping developers avoid this kind of mistake.

I've had 4 email addresses for my personal life: @reed.edu (1989-1994), @santafe.edu (1994-1996), @media.mit.edu (1996-1999), and @monkey.org (2000-present). I take some pride that all but the first address still works. But all the old addresses get is spam; 2600 in the last month. That's 2600 spam messages that got through my gauntlet of spam filters. Most are bounce messages for spam that was forged from my name.

I think it's time to stop maintaining those old addresses.

The biggest computer game of the year is out and is of course being attacked by various advocacy groups. With some reason; the game is violent and ugly and entertains us by letting us do violent and ugly things. But it's a game, and American society has long since accepted that ugly violence is entertainment.

MADD has joined the call against GTA because there is "a game module where players can drive drunk". I wonder if they actually tried out the drunk driving simulator?

Driving drunk in GTA IV is awful. I tried it once; the camera goes pitching around at random so I had almost no control over the car. The view is so swervy I became a bit motion sick. Then the cops saw me. I tried to speed away but I was so out of control I crashed into a wall and got busted.

Maybe, just maybe, GTA could teach people that drunk driving sucks?

My PC is 3.5 years now. It's been great but it's time to get an upgrade. What's holding me back is Windows Vista. The horror stories continue and now with the Windows 7 talk there's some evidence that Vista may be a dead end and XP -> 7 is the upgrade path.

Any advice? Comment here or email me. I actually like XP once you turn off the Aqua graphics nonsense. My PC spends 95% of its time running Firefox, Thunderbird, PuTTY, and games (mostly Warcraft). If it weren't for the games I wouldn't even bother upgrading. Arguments for Vista: DirectX 10, multimedia which requires DRM, and inevitability of the OS.

PS: if you tell me "buy a Mac" I will publically mock you. I don't want MacOS.

Grand Theft Auto IV is out, the reviews are fantastic, and the game is amazing. I've played with it two or three hours and am awestruck by the complexity and detail.

For example, there's Internet in GTA IV. Complete with dating sites, two newspapers, ads for home cremation, a "secure" police database.. And craplist.net

Craplist was started in San Fierro in 1995 by some basement dwelling sociopaths with the simple mission of creating a computer-based online forum where users can sell stolen bicycles and meet up at lunch time to give a stranger head. ... Capitalists don't understand us. Newspapers hate us. Stalkers love us. Craplist is here to stay. We are you.

That's one of about a thousand different parodies hidden away in the game. It's overwhelming and beautiful. (Sadly, none of the game URLs lead to web sites on the real Internet right now.)

Game software has come a long way for usability and new user education. I've been trying to play some old classics recently; the 1997 commercial success Heroes of Might and Magic 2 or indie old-school roguelike Decker. Each time I last about 10 minutes and give up in frustration because I can't figure the damn thing out.

Older games had a steep learning curve. You were expected to read the manual and be interested enough to spend several hours figuring out how the game works. But in the past few years games have gotten really good at the new user experience, making the game playable right from the start. Game manuals have mostly disappeared, replaced by colour text, art, or spoiler guides.

Complicated desktop appliations like Photoshop could learn a lot from how games educate new players on how to use them. Maybe complex web sites, too; part of why Flickr is successful is that it's complex but has an easy path into it. The key is to have a rewarding, simple experience at the beginning with a few core useful/fun features that don't require a lot of tutorial text. Let the application unfold slowly, a gentle learning curve as the user experiences the environment.

The first time I played World of Warcraft it took me many hours to finish the newbie zone and get to level 10. Now I can do it in just an hour or two but that initial experience is still fun gameplay. It's not so much a tutorial as it is a simplified version of the later game. Great design.

Portishead's new album Third is due to be released on April 29. It's highly anticipated; their 1994 and 1997 albums were amazing and then the band imploded, unable to produce. Fans have been waiting nervously. But if your ethics are flexible you haven't had to wait quite so long; a near-final edit of the album was leaked to the Internet on March 6. First to BitTorrent, then to Usenet, then to YouTube. And the album is great. I've preordered my copy of the real thing.

If you were politely waiting for the actual release, yesterday a full copy of the album showed up for streaming on last.fm. It looks legitimate, branded "last.fm exclusive." Except the streams sound identical to the March 6 release. Including the abrupt end of the end of the first track, Silence, a rough edit. And including the IM popup sound 2:14 into track 5, Plastic, sounding like an error on the initial pirate's computer. Why is last.fm distributing these glitched tracks?

I had the most annoying problem in Firefox 3; Google Reader stopped working. I'd click on a blog and no items would show up, even if I started Firefox in safe mode.

Turns out I'm not the only one with this problem, but it has an easy solution. Press Ctrl-0 while on the Google Reader page and all is fixed.

What happened is you accidentally changed the zoom level of the page (via Ctrl-Scrollwheel or Ctrl-Minus or the like) and some bug in Reader's HTML and/or Firefox's rendering causes all the content to disappear. There's a Firefox bug filed, but they're pointing the finger at Google.

PS: dear Google Groups team, it is unacceptable for new messages posted to a group to not show up when I post them. I don't care if the backend datastore takes a minute to commit the data, figure out some way to make it visible immediately.

On my way across the Bay Bridge today we hit some traffic. So I took out my phone, clicked the "show me a map of where I am now" button, and looked at the real-time traffic overlay. There was a bit of a delay getting on the bridge but things after were fine.