09.23.08
Posted in pondering at 10:41 by swong
Ugh, I’ve been reading too many of Will’s posts, and it’s affected my critical reasoning capacities.
Like, for example, I was able to pick out some flaws in this guest post over at BoingBoing. See if you can see what I picked out. Three years ago, I would have been sitting at my chair, nodding. Now I’m shaking my head.
Like, doesn’t inflation also encourage spending/investing over saving?
Like, doesn’t lending stimulate growth?
Like, hasn’t the growth of the merchant class improved equality? The thing about the old aristocrats is that there weren’t that many of them. The thing about the nouveaux riche is that the ways they became rich broke up the old, stagnant social structures and helped everyone else along the way.
I’m not exactly a champion of upper class privilege, but come on.
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09.12.08
Posted in gaming at 16:45 by swong
Been playing Spore a bit lately.
There are plenty of reviews and comment threads floating around the web. I’ll keep this quick.
Not bad, but it doesn’t approach the hype. Games rarely do.
It really, really, really needs a patch. I got my first species up to the Space stage a few nights ago. I’ve got a maximum of about 180 seconds (I timed it) between alien attacks. Usually less. If the Space stage is supposed to be a sandbox, they built it below the tide line.
DRM controversy aside, I’ve come to expect this kind of thing from Electronic Arts. Every so often, I test the waters to see if they’ve improved their act. Battlefield 2 was a big disappointment – lots of firewall tweaking to get it to work online, perpetual balance issues, and ridiculous load times. Crysis had a pretty great single player campaign, but the multiplayer was non-functional, and by most accounts will never be fixed. Simcity 4? Great game, but some of the gameplay elements never worked, and needed 3rd party mods to implement properly.
And now there’s Spore, which I bought on day 0. Like an idiot.
Edit:
Maybe not totally idiotic. After coming very, very close to quitting a couple of times, I decided to tough it out and punch through the beginning of the space stage. Many corpse rushes later, I was able to unlock a few new items and shove the invaders’ borders back a few parsecs. This cut the frequency of attacks by a lot.
Imagine you’re hiking around a lake on a paved trail. Imagine you come to a section where a landslide has destroyed a section of trail, and you have to pick your way across boulders and fallen trees to get to the other side. That’s what the beginning of the space stage is like.
Past that, it’s pretty fun. The disasters are still annoyingly frequent, but it isn’t the whack-a-mole game that hours 2-6 of the space section represent.
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Posted in development at 16:33 by swong
I’ve been working on a little IE bug that came up in a site I’ve been working on. Short tech explanation: I’ve got some boxes full of links on a page with little grey borders all around them, and in IE the bottom borders get cut off.
Wonky tech explanation: Unordered list, links are inline LIs (not floated). IE is ignoring the bottom margin on the UL.
I tried lots of things to fix the problem. When I commented out one of my non-working solutions, I hit on something that did work. After a little experimentation, I found a fix:
Put a comment in the HTML right before the box.
A comment in code is a little note to anyone reading the code. Whatever machine is reading the code is supposed to say “oh, this is a comment, I’ll just ignore this bit” and go on executing things after the comment ends.
In layman’s terms, imagine your car’s engine is making a funny thumping noise while it’s idling. Imagine if you discovered that you could fix the problem by drawing a happy face on a sticky note and putting that sticky note on the rear seat.
What’s up with the watermelon? I’ll tell you later.
So now I have a comment in my code that says:
<!– Magic comment. Do not remove. –>
And people wonder why web developers hate IE.
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