Fugato

Microsoft has posted a splash screen spec for the Orcas version of Visual Studio, asking for our impressions.

And here I was determined to start taking a more positive tack in my tech blog. Dear me.

My impressions are as follows:

The triviality

They wrote a nine-page specification complete with “Microsoft Corporation Technical Documentation License Agreement (Standard)” and stamp of approval from Microsoft Law And Corporate Affairs and table of contents and overview and context and definitions and appeal-to-stereotype Elvis arguments …

… for a drop-shadow and rounded corners and no other changes?

And thought it would be a good idea to post it publicly?

The specious claims

“[the splash screen] is no less critical than any other part of the Visual Studio User Experience.”

They lost me right there on the front page. Let me rephrase this statement while retaining the precise meaning:

“There is no part of the Visual Studio User Experience that is more critical than the splash screen.”

Gee, I could have sworn there were a couple.

We don’t even interact with this thing. It’s not a User Experience, it’s a Viewer Experience. And that’s if we even bother to View it, instead of fetching a cup of coffee while Visual Studio loads, or starting it with /nosplash.

How could it possibly be as critical as any other part of the User Experience?

This is the kind of text that comes out when you are thinking “what would sound impressive here?” instead of “what’s the plain and useful truth here?”

“The Splash Screen typifies some of the worst aspects of the Visual Studio User Experience.”

No no no. The worst aspects of said User Experience are, unsurprisingly, things we Use. Such as:

• tiny fixed-size dialog boxes around huge tabular data.
• A source control client that blocks the entire IDE while waiting for the server, and hangs on Cancel.
• A source control system that takes 38 blocking seconds to rename a file.
• A GUI designer that chokes on buggy nested controls with cryptic error messages.

It’s OK to exaggerate the importance of your work in order to motivate yourself. But don’t go overboard.

The singularly clueless marketing stereotype banter

When Elvis first heard about Visual Studio Orcas being released, he wasn’t convinced that it was worth upgrading to, especially since he felt as though he had just purchased a copy of Visual Studio 2005.

So, like any frugal developer, Elvis went and downloaded a trial copy of Orcas to test drive.

Elvis could see that Visual Studio Orcas was new and different from the moment he started the application. The changes in the Splash Screen suggested to him immediately that this release was, indeed, different.

Well, wasn’t that a nice story.

Really, this Mort-and-Elvis stuff has to go. It pains me to see dinky little stories of these contrived stereotypes masquerading as product marketing wisdom.

The inattention

Chapter 6, “Feature Decisions / Q&A” is not just blank; it consists entirely of the placeholder text from the document template: “Include a quick description [...] describe decisions and rationale here [...] We will do so and so”

This is the document equivalent of:

/// <summary>
/// Insert summary description here
/// </summary>
public class Class1
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Construct a new Class1 instance.
    /// </summary>
    public Class1()
    {
        // Add initialization code here
    }
}

Do we post this kind of code for public review? For private review? Do we even check it in?

The implied background

One can’t help wondering whether this spec gives a glimpse of some contorted in-house dynamic, where people have to participate in a ritual Product Marketing dance by writing a Mort or Elvis “scenario” for every feature spec, and inflating the importance of their work with baseless hyperbole.

It sounds like the FeatureSpec.dot document template contained the placeholder text “Insert scenario involving Mort and Elvis here,” as a hoop for each feature spec writer to jump through.

It may not really be that way, but we’re talking impressions here.

Summary

Why did nobody’s nonsense detector go wild and prevent this embarrassment from publication? The splash screen improvements themselves are nice and understated, and should have been put in place without a word.

Did the wow then stop right away?

[Via Seth Godin]

This:

is called Tupper’s self-referential formula. If you graph it over particular values of x and y, it makes a picture of itself, and that is quite neat. Follow the link for details.

And this is a property of the unit impulse:

But that’s not really the point. The point is the mathematical notation; you can integrate mathematical notation in your WordPress blog very easily, using Steve Mayer’s LatexRender plugin.

And the point here is that you can install that plugin even more easily and correct a nasty bug in the offset beta functionality, using my LatexRender installation script (or the BSD version).

Go to the wp-content/plugins subdirectory of your WordPress installation, and then either:

wget http://fugato.net/wp-content/install-latexrender.bash
bash install-latexrender.bash

or, if your webserver is running BSD (or anything with the same kooky version of sed as my hosting provider’s BSD installation):

wget http://fugato.net/wp-content/install-latexrender.bsd.bash
bash install-latexrender.bsd.bash

and with any luck, the script will set everything up right. Then you’ll just need to activate the plugin LatexRender in your WordPress admin panel, and try it out by putting something like [tex]e^{i\pi}=-1[/tex] in a blog entry. That should render the classic .

This is tested working fine in WordPress versions 2.0 through 2.5.1 (the current stable version, which this blog is running).

The script assumes that your blog is located at the root of your website. If it isn’t, then you must provide the base path as an argument to the script. E.g. if your blog is at http://o.com/all/ye/faithful/, then you must run the script like this:

bash install-latexrender.bash /all/ye/faithful

and it should work right.

Some formulas may be slightly misaligned with the text baseline. You can work around this by manually surrounding them with stuff like <span style="vertical-align: -0.5px;"> ... </span> on a case-by-case basis (assuming you edit your blog entries in straight HTML, not the rich text editor).

I was in Side, Turkey, for the total solar eclipse last March. Despite a recent interest in photography, I did not even pick up my camera during the eclipse. Why?

1. I had never seen totality before and I wanted to experience it without distraction.
2. My longest lens was 85mm, so my photo would show the eclipse as a really small fuzzy black spot.
3. I knew that there would be people making pictures like this:

so I might as well not bother.

This is by one Nick King; I found it at the Solar Eclipse Gallery. Click it for a really big version. There are plenty more good ones there.

This makes me happy:

http://www.asciimaps.com/

Dried-out coffee stains are darkest at the edges and lighter in the middle. I always wondered why that was. It made sense that they should be strongest in the middle and fade out from there.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see that the question has been answered in the University of Iceland Science Web (here in English, here in Icelandic).

I was even more pleasantly surprised to find that I was the one who submitted that question. Life is full of surprises; that is the upside of having no long-term memory to speak of.

This answer came up on the web years ago, but it popped up in my head a few days ago when I took the photo pictured here.

Cool to see that snow/ice does this. The explanation is probably completely different from that of the coffee effect. Probably has something to do with how the weight of a foot/paw packs the snow into ice that is dense enough to resist melting for longer than regular snow, so an icy footprint remains when the surrounding snow melts. And then a later snowfall accumulates more easily on the edges of the footprint than in the middle, probably due to, uh, the hermeneutics of quantum gravity.

Reading this in your RSS reader? It probably will not display this effect. Open in a browser to see it.

Click here to turn the 3d effect on/off.

Well, it does trick the mind with a 3d stereo effect, with no need for nerdy plastic red-blue glasses or staring intently into infinity through a bunch of random dots.

Shame about the motion sickness though.

Kudos to Jim Gasperini for the idea.

This is the view from Arnarhóll in central Reykjavík, shortly before sunset (about 10:45pm) on the summer solstice a few days ago. Click for a larger version.

[For the uninitiated: yes, that thing on the left edge really is a 20-foot-tall wall mural depicting a sheep. No, I do not know why it is there.]

The sky looked nice. The mountains looked nice. Most of the city center looked nice.

But that big beige-and-turquoise industrial facility in the middle doesn’t look too nice.

Good thing Faxaskáli is being replaced by a stonking big music hall and conference building, supposedly ready three-and-a-half years from now (I’ll bet you a six-pack of Staropramen that it’ll be five years and a budget overrun of, say, 60%). It is government-sponsored, of course, and the inaugural concert will probably feature the wails and moans and tut-tuts of Iceland’s fiscal conservatives as accompaniment.

Assuming the architects know their stuff, the view from Arnarhóll will certainly be nicer afterwards. But the new building will presumably be taller than Faxaskáli, so I’ll have to walk another three minutes and look at the sunset from the other side of the music hall. Life keeps getting harder on me.

Then again, I can always enjoy the sky from my bedroom balcony. Below is that view, captured at approximate geographical midnight (1:35am) on the summer solstice. Click for a larger version. And excuse the overexposure. :)