Robot.Floss

I love Google, and I am always excited by the products the release. However, I am never impressed with what they release. They create interesting tools and products, but the execution is always sub-par. And their product launches make it apparent that they’re a large collection of engineers with too few designers. But at times they miss the boat completely. For instance, the Google API presumes you will only turn your phone counter-clock wise and never clockwise. I am impressed with the Android platform. But there is no excuse for an idiotic oversight like this. This is an arbitrary restriction that hinders user experience.

If you turn the phone clockwise, Android’s native menus and text will appear upside down. I’ve seen a few applications that do a good decent job of letting you turn the phone clockwise, such as the game Bebbled (a good game by the way), but call up a menu in this position and you’ll see upside-down menus.

I am beta testing Super GNES application for the Android platform. Before I continue, let me say the developers are doing a great job with the project. Now on to the part where Google failed to have foresight. You can play Super GNES in portrait mode or landscape. On the G1 I prefer landscape as it puts the trackball under your right thumb, and your left hand is free to mash the keyboard. But every video game controller since the NES has put the direction pad under your left thumb.

A more natural setup for playing the emulator would be a rotating the phone in to landscape mode clockwise. It would put the trackball under the left thumb, place the volume buttons on the top side of the phone to become the left and right shoulder buttons easily accessible by the index finger of your right hand, and your right thumb could use the onscreen A,B,X,Y buttons.

I asked the SuperGNES dev team about exploring this orientation, and here is the teams:

“There doesn’t appear to be a good way to orient the screen landscape with the track ball on the left. I even took a tour through the android framework source code to see if I could hack something together but wasn’t able to find anything. I can manually orient the screen but stuff like the menu and settings have the wrong orientation which is frustrating to use.”

Popularity: 12% [?]

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is decent, but it presents too many security problems. If you love Firefox or Chrome, and you should, then eliminate the threat of IE to your system. Whether by the built in Windows firewall or from another vendor, block all of IEs access to the internet and don’t let up.

I’ve made this a standard practice for years. And when I must use to IE, I’ll tweak the firewall, take care of business, and then return everything back to its locked down state. A few months back I let the rule slide. Like clockwork, a few days later my girlfriend was surfing around on IE, hit a malicious website, and my computer went to shit. I then spent the rest of the weekend formatting and reinstalling.

Be smart. Stop IE.

Don’t chance it. Ban IE. I promise your life will be happier and your computer safer.

Popularity: 7% [?]

I have no need to post blogs from my phone, but the capability exists and I must explore it. This morning I downloaded wpToGo and PostBot from the Android market and ran a quick comparison. Screen shots of the two apps would be a great idea. But this is Saturday morning, and I’m not exerting myself to that degree yet.

Setup – Winner: wpToGo
Both programs are easy to setup and support multiple accounts. This is great because you can log in as different users (ex: admin vs your normal account) on the same blog or log in to different blogs completely. Excellent.

wpToGo has a cleaner user interface in general, and for that it wins the setup round. Although, I think the publisher could do well by removing the post options that are not related to setting up the blog. When you setup a blog you’ll be asked to choose how to place images, what size images should be, how they should be aligned, and what resolution they will be displayed. This should be removed from the setup screen and accessed elsewhere instead.

Posting – Winner: wpToGo
Once again the wpToGo UI dominates PostBot. Not only that, but when you first log in wpToGo pulls a list of the most recent posts. In my case it pulled every post back to the start of this blog. PostBot didn’t have this feature, so editing previous entries is out of the question on PostBot, which is a massive miss.

Both editors give you the options to add pictures, categories, and publish or save as a draft. wpToGo goes an extra step and gives buttons for bold, italics, links, block quotes, and tags. Both editors are pure HTML, so you can always manually add tags where needed. Once again wpToGo could do well by removing some of the options, such as adding a picture, from the main layout and moving them under a menu option instead, which is the route PostBot has taken.

Final Verdict: wpToGo wins by a long shot, but its editing screen can take some lessons from PostBot.

Popularity: 16% [?]

When I say I have nine D630s, I’m not trying to boast. Rather, I’m trying to gain some sympathy. I’ve worked in IT for years, and I’ve always had a great Dell experience. And I encourage people I know to purcahse Dells as well. Not because the machines are necessarily better than others, but because the tech support is incredible. They once sent a tech to rural Oklahoma on Christmas Eve for me.

The only problem with having nine identical laptops is if a manufacturer defect exists, your odds of being affected are massively increased. And the D630 has an almost 100% failure rate for its graphics card.

In fact, the issue was so bad that Dell went back to Nvidia and said “We need to replace these graphics cards due to a defect” and Nvidia said “Well, we don’t make them any more.” Dell must have wielded a bat in the form of a legal threat, because Nvidia quickly started the line back up. (This was relayed to me via a Dell rep with decent knowledge on the situation)

I can understand the situation from Dell’s perspective. But here is my problem – the replacement graphics cards are as bad as the originals. I’m having replacement cards getting replaced. Since the graphics card is tied to the motherboard, this means that both are being replaced. And the systems never behave correctly with the new motherboard, so you have to reinstall Windows. I don’t know about you, but I have better things to do then waiting for Dell techs to replace parts, then reinstall Windows (even if I’m doing it from an image, it still eats up time).

Of the nine D630s I have:

• Four have had the graphics card replaced.
• Three more of my machines are showing signs of the graphics cards going out.
• Of those three, one or two of them have had the card replaced before.
• Three I’ve had to order new batteries for (these die almost perfectly a month after their warranty)

And I’d like to point out that batteries are not covered by the 3 year extended service warranty you paid extra money for. But that is only listed in the small print. You don’t get to find this out until the batteries start dying and Dell makes you cough up $169 for a new one. Also, don’t get me started on how fragile the AC adapter is – barely kink that cord once and you’ll be buying a new AC adapter.

Basically:

• The graphics cards have a 100% failure rate (verified by a rep and a field rep)
• The replacement graphics cards have almost the same failure rate (from my experience)
• The batteries have a short life span, terrible reviews, and are expensive to replace
• The details of the battery warranty aren’t as apparent as they should be
• The power adapters die with ease

The bottom line:

If you need to purchase a D630, just purchase a cute puppy and shoot it in the head. It is about an equally worthwhile investment and is just as painstaking.

I’m tired of dealing with Dell and with this issue. As someone who makes a lot of purchases and has always been a major Dell supporter, I have to say that I’m quickly becoming burnt out with them. Hell, at this point I know more about the situation than the Dell reps. It reminds me of the capacitor fiasco with the GX270s, and it seems like Dell is just praying that no one gets organizes enough to bring up a class-action lawsuit.

And if you’d like to see what a failed graphics card looks like on the monitor, here are a few of the images from my sample library:

Popularity: 10% [?]

Since setting up OS-X on my PC, I’ve had little interest in using XP. And the binary fate that controls the digital universe decided to reinforce my OS-X use by smiting the power supply of my XP machine. I love OS-X, and as I get more comfortable with each aspect of the operating system, I’ve kept track of the things I like and dislike.

Dislike:

• The behavior of the Home and End keys is terrible on Macs if you’re used to Windows. In general though, I feel that the Home and End keys must take the user to the end of the current line. Command + Home/End should take a user to the top of bottom of a document. Even Linux follows this pattern.
• There is no real maximize button in OS-X. Yes, there is a green button that makes the window bigger, but programs never are truly maximized. There needs to be a nice blue button to the right of the green button that forces a program to use every last pixel of available screen real estate. There are times a user doesn’t want to see anything else.
• Application windows can only be resized from the bottom right hand corner. On more than one occasion I’ve used programs that had a height the went well beyond the bounds of the screen. Thankfully, Spaces allows you to effortlessly move application windows from any point to correct this, but it isn’t an intended behavior.
• When a file is selected, pressing the Enter button allows one to rename the file. This should open or launch the file. Poor behavior choice for the Enter key.
• Menu bars are supposed to be easy to access, but for some ill reason Apple has chosen to make the user press Ctrl + F2. They’ve made an affair of one button, in to an affair of two buttons, and there is no reasonable explanation.
• For keyboard shortcuts, the position of the Command button is better than Window’s use of the Control button. But it means when switching between the two operating systems, I’m constantly hitting the short cuts for the the other OS. There needs to be a key emulation option that switches this behavior.

Love:

• I’ve never had a problem with the Windows Taskbar (not counting Vista), but something about the OS-X dock makes me blissful. It is simple and well designed without being over the top.
• The ability to lock system settings. This is great, because if you’re logged in it means another person can’t edit your system preferences without knowing your password. No longer is your system subject to the whims and plots of co-workers, roommates, or housemates.
• The built in GUI utilities, such as ping, trace route, and disk utilities, make life much easier for tech support. Password recovery from the CD is great. And the disk utility is top notch – allowing you to image, partition, and even securely erase hard drives.
• The ability to boot from the CD, or the network, or a target drive, or a thousand other potential options is great. If there is a combination of hardware you want to boot from, OS-X supports it.
• The theme is well thought out. Microsoft had the correct idea with Vista, but then went too far. Vista is the Circus de Soleil, while Leopard is a gorgeous Monet.
• Spaces are great. Extra desktop space is great, and the fact that transitions between the spaces are seamless adds to the experience. Also, adding extra desktops has never been so easy. Click the add row or add column button, and viola.
• Dashboard’s beauty is that you never have to look at it you chose so, unlike Vista which forces everything to be in sight. While you’re waiting for the long installation to complete or process to finish compiling, you can spent your time watching Panda Cam, exploring Wikipedia, playing poker, and getting weather updates.
• Bringing a Windows machine in and out of sleep takes as long as shutting the system down and booting it up. But Apple has made sleep such an effortless action, that sleep is an option that is viable. I find it fun.
• Built in Spellcheck. Enough said.
• Installing programs is rarely more complicated than dragging and dropping an icon. And the process is much more uniform than the thousands of countless installers of Windows programs. A standard look, feel, and behavior for normal OS tasks is a must have.

Other Things:

• The way the mouse moves. At first I disliked the way the mouse moved. Now I love it, because it borders on giving the feeling of tactile feedback.
• The Mighty Mouse, though pretty, is a horrendous little mouse. The trackball is two small, and often staff I encounter who have a MM are unaware that it has both a left and a right click, due to the complete lack of visual clarification.
• Also, the Mighty Mouse is based on more of a lever than button design. Since the top edge of the mouse is curved, any excess cord that brushes the mouse will block clicking action.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Thanks to an article on Wired.com about great geek gifts, I came across the game Settlers of Catan. I’d never heard of the game or even tried it, but after asking a few friends about it, I discovered that a small group of friends play the game on most Fridays. I went. I played. And now I’m hooked.

The premise of the game is that each player is a settler of an island called Catan. The island is composed of hexes which can produce one of five types of resources: lumber, woold, brick, ore, and wheat. Because the hexes are laid out randomly each game, you’ll never encounter the same game board twice. The players build towns, cities, and roads between the hexes of the island in an attempt to gain 10 victory points before their opponents can.

The best part about the game is that it is elegantly simple, and it is the most well balanced and strategically diverse game I’ve yet to encounter. The only flaw is that the board game needs at least three players. Thankfully a version of Catan can be downloaded from XBLA for 800 credits.

AI Opponents
As with most games, the computer AI is the biggest frustration of the game. There are several AI opponents available to play against on either easy, medium, or hard difficulty settings. However, the difficulty seems to only influence how an AI opponent will trade resources with you. On easy, the opponents will make almost any trade, no matter how absurd (e.g. it most likely will give you 2 bricks and 2 lumber for one 1 wheat in return); on medium the trading is a bit more realistic; on hard the AI opponents will refuse to trade with you once you’re in the lead, but will freely trade with each other.

The oversight here is that the developers haven’t taken the time to make the computer opponents consider each other opponents. The hardest AI setting is equivalent to playing 3 on 1. It might work better if you could select the AI level of each individual opponent.

Game Achievements
There are a decent number of achievements to unlock, such as completing ten games with control of the Longest Road card or the Largest Army card. But clever achievements don’t exist, such as end ten games with control of the Longest Road card AND the Largest Army card, win 10 games against easy AI opponents, win 10 games against medium AI opponents, etc., Steal 15 resources in one game with the robber. Collect ten victory points without building additional towns (you may only upgrade to cities or build roads).

Online Play
You can play up to three opponents online in either casual or ranked games. None of the online aspects are amazing, but the experience is okay. The nicest part is that if an opponent drops from the game, he or she is replaced by an AI opponent. However, I’m not sure how this affects your ranking in matched games if you defeat an AI opponent that has replaced a dropped player though.

Problems
As with most games these days, no one has taken in to account that you might be playing on a non-HD tv. For instance, on my television it is almost impossible to tell what the dice roll is, because the numbers on the dice are approximately one pixel across. It is damn irritating, and there is no excuse for it. I’m presuming this only happens on non-HD tvs, but it might happen on HDs too.

Second, in each game you can keep track of different stats, such as number of dice rolled, resources collected, the distribution of the dice rolls, how various points have been collected or lost, etc… except the on-screen display offers no legend for the icons used to indicate each stat. You can figure it out on your own, but it isn’t something you should be asked to do. It would be great if you could see accumulated stats for all of the games you’ve played. Also, the columns on the displays don’t all line up and some labels over-lap on to each other.

Overall: A decent game, but if you’ve never played the board game, then you probably won’t enjoy the XBLA version.
Good: The game is true to every aspect of the board game, and I find myself playing at least once a day.
Bad: Poor AI, lack of quality/creative achievements, and programming negligence (lack of legends on certain screens)

Score: 3/5 (decent)

Popularity: 2% [?]

Contra is one of the most loved gaming series created, and Contra 4 continues the saga of the ultimate side
scrolling, left-to-right, shoot’em up action game. You’ll always be holding the trigger button down as you
spew bullets and testosterone in your onslaught against anything that moves, and there’ll be a few moments
of cursing as you fight through the moments of ball breaking frustration that eat up all your continues.

The game offers three levels of difficulty: easy, normal, and hard. These affect not only the number of lives and
continues you receive, but also the firing pattern of weapons, and some of the challenges in each level. For instance,
on easy the spread shot has a wider spread. And on easy there are no falling boulders in Stage 2′s vertical waterfall
section.

If the difficulty of the game had ramped up as the levels progressed, the game might feel more consistent. Instead
the levels, mini-bosses, and bosses tend to vary from almost jokingly easy to insanely frustrating. Nothing is
ever of medium difficulty it seemed. Then again, frustration and death are hallmark features of each Contra game,
and no one picks up a Contra game expecting to beat it on the first try, which brings us to game length. I think it is
perfect, but every other reviewer has already bitched about it being too short. On the other hand, if this game had been
3 levels longer, they’d all complain about being bored the last few levels.

There is a decent pace to the game and you’ve always got something to shoot, but I’d have liked a little more intensity
to the action. For example, in Contra III: Alien Wars, even the transitions between the levels are seamless and packed
with action. Whereas in Contra 4 the screen goes black and you are magically transported to the next stage, which
detracts from the pace of the game.

Boss fights in the game are solid and usually involve several phases of action. As usual, the fights revolve around
the “Owned or Screwed” scenario where you can easily beat the bosses in under 15 seconds with the correct weapons,
but you’ll be fighting forever if you’re stuck with the standard rifle. Unlockable bonus bosses would have helped.

One of the best additions to the game is the challenge stages. These are quick action levels that you try to beat
by various means such as not firing your weapon, obtaining 100% weapon accuracy, taking out a certain number of foes,
etc… And as you progress through the challenge stages you can unlock the original Contra and Super Contra. I was pumped
about unlocking the levels, but in actuality they’re not overly entertaining or worthwhile as they have terrible
graphics, which I’d hoped had been revamped a bit. Aside from that, I feel they missed out and should have included
Alien Wars as an unlockable.

Overall, the game is solid and I enjoyed it. But unless you’re a fan of the Contra series already, it probably won’t
appeal to you after you’ve played through it once or twice.

Popularity: 1% [?]

vLite is a great tool I recently found that lets you trim down the size of your Vista distributions by removing unwanted components. I’ve been messing around with it for a few days at home. It is easy to use, has a great interface, and is free. What else could you ask for?

There is no need for me to bore you with every feature available, because if you want to add/remove/configure it vLite has a way for it. To quote the vLite website:

“Main features are:

• hotfix, language pack and driver integration
• component removal
• unattended setup
• tweaks
• split/merge Vista installation CDs
• create ISO and burn bootable CD/DVD”

Popularity: 1% [?]

At Christmas I’d hoped to receive the game Contra 4, but due to an issue of phonetics and identical numbers, I received Call of Duty 4. When I loaded the game in to my DS, I didn’t know what to expect, but I feared I’d discover a great console series that had been butchered down to get quick sales on a hand-held system. I’m not a big fan of FPS games on the DS, for the simple reason that nothing beats the PC FPS experience. Besides, I find the genre a bit too worn and the DS presents a valuable creative outlet for developers willing to experiment. Either way, the developers at n-Space have done a solid job with COD4.

Graphics and Sound
I won’t dwell on this topic long. The graphics are good for the DS, but they aren’t mind blowing. If I had to use one phrase to sum up the graphics: think counter strike. They’re not mind blowing, but they’re good enough. The animation is smooth, the framerate didn’t seem to drop off during play, and I found the explosions satisfying. Of the games in my DS library, the sound quality of COD4 is the best I’ve experienced, and it lent a nice pace to the game.

Levels
The game starts with the stereotypical Call of Duty training level: grab a gun, practice shooting, throw a grenade through a window, etc. Then it transitioned straight in to the first level of real combat. The transitions between the checkpoints of each level are smooth and thought out. They reminded me of the transitions in the Contra series. The levels are fairly long, have plenty of checkpoints to save your progress, and present you with a pleasing variety of tasks: shoot everyone in sight, plant a bomb, get to a jeep, secure a nuclear missile, make a hasty get away while manning the turret on your way to victory.

AI
The enemy AI in the game is not impressive. You’ll die a few times, but you’ll never have a problem killing your intended target. Enemies don’t tend to move or reposition themselves, which makes them a bit too easy. They respond a bit like the Nazi’s in the original Wolfenstein, except on occasion they crouch behind cover instead of standing directly in your line of fire. The enemies did seem to excel in one area: catching my grenades and throwing them back with the accuracy of an all-star quarterback.

Controls
The controls are simple and well done. The top screen displays your main view. Turning and looking is controlled with the touch pad, which also displays a map of the level and indicates the position of nearby enemies. Forward movement and strafing is controlled with the direction pad. The shoulder buttons are used to fire your weapons. And the bottom screen also doubles as inventory management. (A good strategy seemed to be to ditch the standard-issue hand gun and replace it with an enemy AK-47 – you’ll collect plenty of ammo from your defeated enemies).

Overall: COD4 is well done. It has great sound, easy controls, an appropriate length, and enough variety to keep you from slamming your DS in to the nearest loved one.

Good: Solid FPS for DS. Great sound. Entertaining with a lot of easy action to jump in to.

Bad: Unresponsive AI.

Popularity: 1% [?]