Terminally Incoherent

Dear History Channel,

I wanted to start this letter by politely saying: WHAT THE FUCK? As you may or may not know the name of your network (”The History Channel” in case you forgot) sort of implies that your programming should at least relate to history. Don’t you agree? I may be completely off base here, but I would think that when TV viewers hear this name they have certain expectations, and preconceptions as to what your programming is going to be.

For example, majority of normal people (may they rot in hell for all eternity) will avoid your network like a plague because they are generally allergic to knowledge and anything remotely educational fills them with fear and doubt. On the other hand people whose IQ is not a single digit number (and sadly it seems that we are a dying breed) actually seek your channel out for precisely the kind of programing which scares off the mainstream sheeple. I really think that well made documentaries, be it about ancient civilizations, weapons, world war 2 or more contemporary stuff are much more interesting than the Reality TV bullshit that many of my coworkers enjoy so much.

Only recently, there has been preciously little of actual History on my History Channel! In the past I had your channel running in the background most of the day, and whenever I looked at TV there was something interesting on. And even if it was not interesting, it did not provoke nausea in me. These days I usually end up flipping channels in disgust because I just can’t stand the crap you are airing in the evening sometimes.

Let me ask you a question: what do shows like Ice Truckers, Axemen, It’s Tougher in Alaska, and Monster Quest have to do with History? Absolutely nothing! Why are they on your network then? What is the purpose? In case you have failed to notice, these are pretty much reality shows. Reality shows without promiscuous sex, relationship drama and attractive women in bikinis. Reality shows about grizzled, overweight truckers, lumberjacks and Bigfoot enthusiasts. I’m sorry but even big fans of reality tv genre are probably turned off by this shit.

Here is a newsflash: reality shows suck ass. People who watch reality shows and enjoy them are a fucking IDIOTS. Idiots do not watch History Channel because knowledge is like Kryptonite to them. It is that simple. Who are you pandering to by making new seasons of these titles? Do I need to remind you who your core audience is? It’s predominantly white collar intellectuals, people from the academia, college students and history buffs. My guess is that 98% of these people have no interest in watching a reality show about dim-witted blue collar physical laborers who can barely string together a coherent sentence. Can you see why this is a bad idea?

Why can’t you stick to what everyone expects you to do - and that is documentaries. The reality TV is going to scare away your core viewers, and it won’t attract new ones because dumb people don’t watch your network - and this is the only kind of viewers you could possibly catch watching this crap.

And while you are at it, can you please ditch the supernormal shit? How many shows can you make about NOT catching Bigfoot, or NOT proving or disproving the existence of ghosts, monsters or UFO’s? This shit was awesome when I watched it on Discovery Channel when I was 14. But then Discovery decided that they want to spent most of their time airing shows about bikers, grease monkeys, and home improvement shows. So I stopped watching it. Now you are doing the same fucking thing.

I prefer to use specialized tools that were designed to perform a specific job, rather than universal tools that claim they can be adapted to perform a multitude of tasks. While in many cases they are perfectly serviceable, I usually find that dedicated tools are simply better at what they do. There are exceptions of course, but in most cases a jack of all trades is a master of none. And the biggest, baddest universal software tool that claims to do everything is of course Microsoft Office.

The full MS Office suite is a package of tools for just about anything you can think of - from writing letters and memos, publishing, creating spreadsheets, presentations to databases. It was designed to cover all your bases, and let you do all sorts of things without needing to go look for the right tools elsewhere.

Sadly, all the tools in the suite are of sub-par quality. Everyone knows Access sucks. It is a single-user toy database that should not be used for anything other than small personal projects - such as cataloging your book collection perhaps. But people use it for all kinds of projects because it’s there in the office suite.

Word is a decent WYSIWYG editor but as all WYSIWYG tools it is deeply flawed. Not only does it hide and abstract vital information from the user. It also doesn’t guarantee in any way that the document you created on your computer will look the same on another one. The layout of a .doc file is largely dependent on the MS Office version, the availability of the fonts, and the default printer on a given machine and it’s settings. It is an ok tool to write a short letter, and maybe interoffice memo. But people use it to write research papers, books, and design promotional materials which in my opinion is insane.

Word also pretends it is able to save documents as HTML pages, which is a blatant lie. It doesn’t create HTML pages but rather vomits up non compliant MSHTML specific markup garbage with little regard for human readability. But some people use it for designing web pages.

Excel is a very nice spreadsheet application for quickly tabulating data, or creating simple charts. It is also hopelessly limited with arbitrary limits on number of rows per sheet, and invisible, counter-intuitive limits on the way worksheets can be formated. That issue was resolved in the OpenXML version but the binary xls format is still the de-facto standard in the corporate world. It was never designed to be used for storing and processing massive amounts of information but that’s what people use it for these days. And that’s despite the fact that storing data as comma separated or tab separated list is more efficient and much easier to parse by a variety of other tools.

They are all useful tools that are appropriate for certain problems. But since they are all bundled together, and marketed as the “be all, end all” office productivity solution people learn to rely on it. MS Office file formats are the standard formats for corporate information exchange these days. And since these formats are standards, hardly anyone, save for few geeks like you and me, considers using anything else. Office is the swiss army knife for office clerks, financial analysts, secretaries, CEO’s, technical writers, philosophers, sociologists, fiction writers, poets and just about anyone else. They use Office for anything and everything because:

1. they don’t know how to use anything else
2. they don’t know that anything else exists
3. and therefore they don’t feel that they need to learn anything else but Office

Sadly, when the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. And if it does not look like a nail, you change the definition of the word “nail” until it fits your problem.

Time and time again I get approached by people who have an issue that Office was not designed to handle, and ask me if I could design VBA macros to solve it. Instead of asking whether or not there exists a tool that does X, they instead insist that we figure out a way to coerce Word or Excel to do it instead.

Apologists and Office addicts will of course say that learning new tools is difficult, unnecessary and counterproductive. Why for example would one need to learn LaTex if Word is perfectly serviceable, and easy to use substitute. Unfortunately easy to use does not mean best for a given domain of problems. In fact, quite to the contrary it usually means: simplistic, limited, and inflexible. While learning something new may slow you down at first, it is usually a wise investment of time and effort which will benefit you greatly at a later date. If nothing else it will help you grow as a person. I mean hell, you even had to learn how to use Office at one point, didn’t you?

You’re not going to tell me you write lengthy papers in Word without figuring out how to automatically enumerate figures, create bibliographies, tables of contents, and how to deal with page/section break and paragraph formatting oddities not to mention using features such as mail merge. Oh, wait… I forget that our regular office addicts don’t do that either. They rely on intuitive understanding of the tool and often for example do things like manually numbering their pages, or manually double spacing their text by hitting enter between lines.

The thing is that intuitive understanding of a tool is not enough. Everyone knows how to use a hammer for example. But nailing things together without damaging the wood, wasting nails, or hitting your thumbs is not trivial and takes some practice. Same goes with software but on a much higher level of complexity.

I’m not saying you should be experimenting with new software when under strict deadlines. I’m just suggesting that perhaps sometimes the right question to ask is not “how do I transform this data so that I can dump it into Excel” but rather “what tool should I use to efficiently analyze this data and get the answers I’m looking for”.

A while ago Shamus posted a list of his WoW Nitpicks. Since I agree with most of them I’m not going to repeat them here. I just wanted to add few little nitpicks of my own. I still like the game, and I still enjoy playing it and I’m currently hoarding money so that I can afford my first mount as soon as I hit lvl 30 which makes it exciting. Having that mount will make the game play experience so much better and I’ll tell you why.

For the most part WoW is a running game. You run to a location, you kill bunch of things, you run back to the town, and then you run right back. Here is a very common multi-stage quest scheme that you encounter over, over and over again:

1. Go to the location 10 minutes of running away from the closest town accessible by flight path and kill 10 Creatures and get back to me
2. Great! Now that you killed 10 of the creatures I want you to go back and collect Greater Creature Claws. These are only dropped by 1 in 20 Greater Creatures which spawn in the same area you just came back from. Oh, and I know that when you were there you killed like 600 of them, but they never dropped the claws. That’s because I didn’t give you this quest yet.
3. Excellent! Now that you exterminated that spawning point 6 times over we are well on our way of eliminating the creature threat altogether. I just need you to run back to that spawn point once again and this time destroy 20 Creature Eggs for me.
4. Splendid! The last thing I want you to do is to run back to that location kill the Big Creature Boss. I know you killed him 5 times already but it didn’t count yet. This time it will though.

Can you see the pattern here? The game loves to send you to a distant area, have you come back to a town to turn in the quest, only to be told to get right back where you came from. Sometimes you can take these quests in parallel but that’s usually more of an exception to the rule rather than the norm. There are multiple quests like that in the Barrens, in Stonetalon and in Thousand Needles - essentially all over the place in the 15-30 level zones.

A bit repetitive, isn’t it? If the creatures in question are beasts that can be skinned I actually don’t mind grinding the same spot over and over because then I’m actually turning profit. However most of the time these missions make you kill some sort of humanoid creatures that drops 20-40 copper and stupid gray items. Ok, sometimes they drop linen which I can sell with profit to low level alts of high level players. Still, not the best use of my day.

My second nitpick which is directly related to the first one is the fact that 98% of low level missions are variations on the same old theme known in the MMO circles as “kill 10 rats”. Only that rats become increasingly powerful mobs which force you to come up with new strategies. But you are still just killing assigned number of specific creature in just about every mission. There is just little variety. Sometimes you will get an escort quest where you have to defend someone and deliver them securely to some location. Sometimes you just get simple courier quests where you just need to deliver a package to a location, and collect quests where you have to find certain items and deliver them to someone. These are rare though. Most of the time you are just slaughtering your way through horde after horde of enemies.

The repetitive kill 10 rats style quests are a staple of MMO’s of course so WoW can’t be really faulted for it. And perhaps some of the higher level content, the instances and the Burning Crusade/Lich King stuff will be much more varied.

Anyway, these are the two aspects of the game that have been slightly annoying to me lately, on top of what Shamus already covered. The add-ins are there to help alleviate some of these annoyances - for example the Quest Helper like tools do a great job eliminating the frustration with vague quest directions. But the two things I mentioned above can’t really be fixed by a plugin - they are essentially core game mechanic that is a bit repetitive at least at the stage I’m at. I’m hopeful for the future though.

I have a nice little binary clock from ThinkGeek standing on my desk. It is a silly gadget, but as any geek I lust for this sort of things. Awesome little toys which remain incomprehensible and mysterious to mere mortals. It is sort of a symbol - normal people look at the damn thing dumbfounded. Fellow geeks, smile with approval when they see it - they know they found a kindred soul. Then there are those people who don’t actually believe that this toy shows time, or that you can reliably read it - so they challenge you.

Tell me what time does it say it is, right now! Quick!

The problem with these clocks is that unless you are standing next to it, in a well lit room they are incredibly hard to read. Reading one from across the room - especially when it’s dark, and the unlit lights cannot be seen, is not easy. For example, imagine you wake up in the middle of the night in a dark room and you glance on your binary clock. What time is it?

At the first glance I would say it’s either 11:15 or 11:19 depending on whether the highest dot is in the 4 or 9 position. It is hard to tell without any frame of reference. And that is the point here. All we see are dots suspended in black void. If you would approach the clock and look more carefully, you would see a different picture:

Oops. It’s actually 1:11 and 50 seconds. Because you had no frame of reference and you didn’t see the “zero” columns the whole image shifted slightly in your mind. Of course if you wait a second or two you will notice the last row changes way to quickly to be considered “minutes” and another row will appear as the seconds pass. This will let you guess it is actually 1 instead of 11. Similarly, you can distinguish a 4 from an 8 by observing the seconds column and comparing relative distances. But it is in no way intuitive, or quick. Unfortunately this is the design of every single binary clock gadget I have seen on the market.

The problem is that the unlit LED’s are as important as the lit ones when you try to read this sort of a time piece. A slight change in design to actually illuminate the LED’s in OFF position would make these devices much more readable. How do you illuminate them in a way that would make sense? You can do it in the way I shown on the picture - simply show an outline, or a filled dot. This could be done using some sort of a shutter or a film to cover the OFF LED’s and fully expose the ON ones. Alternatively you could use different colors or intensities. For example you could use a contrasting scheme with dim red lights for OFF and bright green/blue LED’s for ON.

How does that look? How would it look on the other end of a dark room? Personally I think such design would be much more functional. A binary clock we could actually read from far away, and in poor light conditions. Imagine that! What do you think? Are you happy with the current design? What is your suggestion to make these things easier to read while retaining the charm and geek factor of a binary clock?

I previously ranted about strange password restrictions that disallow usage of special characters such as spaces or alphanumerics. This time I want to complain about another boneheaded security feature out there - word length restrictions on your “secret” password recovery question. I was recently creating a Microsoft Live Passport account to register Visual Studio Express 2008 copy. Yeah, laugh all you want but PerfMonG is written in C# and it won’t maintain itself no matter how hard I try to ignore it. At some point during registration I saw this:

click on the image to embiggen

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for keeping things more secure, but restricting the secret answer to strings of more than 5 characters is a bit silly. For starters, let’s consider pet names. I don’t know about you, but I find that most of them are relatively short. For example I did a quick google search of most popular dog names and I stumbled upon this ranking:

It turns out that half of the top 10 most popular dog names are shorter than 5 characters. If you look down that list, this trend continues. So roughly half the people won’t be able to use their pet name as their secret question, or will have to figure out a way to make it longer (for example by adding their last name) by simply adding confusion. Same goes for the childhood friend option. You may remember that your best buddy from the playground was named Bob, but will you always remember his last name was Szczebrzeszyński? Will you remember how you spell it? Hell, if on top of all this the place of your birth is Ido, Japan then you are totally fucked.

Now you are forced to make up answers - ones that you won’t remember 3 years from now when you need to recover your password making them absolutely useless. This minimum length limit is silly, because these hints are not really designed to be secure. Anyone can find out the name of my first pet, or the birthplace of my mother. It’s really not a secret, and it can easily come up in a casual conversation. The whole point of them is to provide another layer of protection for your account so that the attacker has to have both the secret answer, and access to the email account you used to open the service. Brute forcing the secret answer should not be a concern, because they’d be incredibly vulnerable to dictionary attacks anyway.

So why won’t you let us to use answers that are as short, or as long as we like or stop using them altogether. Otherwise it is just counter productive as people won’t be able to remember what they typed in to pad their answers to meet your arbitrary minimum length limit.