rangerBlog

01:39 am

My laptop was stolen on Friday. I was pissed.

With no sign that it's coming back, I purchased a new one on Monday. Another HP Pavillion, one or two model numbers above my old one.

One hitch: It runs Vista.

*cries*

I've spent 6 hours gutting awful interface changes, restoring the instinctive up-a-level button, etc. Hate, hate HATE.

I cannot figure out how to search for a file in Vista. The new search interface is-- awful. A mess of nonpersistant settings, dumb-as-rocks default windows, out-of-date indexes that don't reflect changes to the file system and searches for files that simply stubbornly won't show up.

A search leading me to Microsoft's Vista Blog reveals the startling truth- not only is the Search now stuck in broken-mode-- they've also thrown out the entire search paradigm used by every search function-- ever-- in favor of a nifty new proprietary search format that uses bizarre encapsulated braces and finicky control-terms! Yay! All the headache of Regular expressions (to perform a BASIC search instead of this enhanced garbage!) and none of the power!

You know what- I like Google Desktop too! It's incredibly nice and useful to be able to find things quickly, and to have text cache and mid-document searching, it's a great and powerful application!
Google Desktop is also completely unusable for many things. I have multiple external hard drives. They get indexed willy-nilly- so if an external drive mounts as E: once and H: another time the files show up both places. And clicking on the E: response in Google Desktop Search results in an error message- the file does not exist even if that file IS there on H:!
It's a great, wonderful search paradigm... that is absolutely useless for many basic system tasks. Which is why GDS was a great tool to use hand-in-hand with a basic search- the right tool for the right job!

But Microsoft has replaced basic search with another Desktop search- and no real ability to run a basic search-a t all. Now instead of tools that work hand-in-hand I've got two left hands and I can't jerk off because I can't find my porn anymore.

Does Google have a 'Basic Fucking Search that Works' program I can use as my other hand now? Seriously- anything? I'm tearing my hair out trying to perform the most basis searches, and it makes me want to cry.

Microsoft, as a corporate culture, seems to have 'redesign it, even if it doesn't need it' deeply ingrained into themselves. I'm going to use the new folder icons as an example.

We all know the basic folder visual paradigm- a manila folder icon.

Vista has cleverly made the fodler icon fresh and exciting by turning it on its side!



Ignoring (for the moment) that the visual metaphor breaks down because turning a manila folder that way would cause its contents to spill out, I have a more fundamental problem with the icon redesign.

Let's look at the footprint of standard icons from time immemorial!

file

folder

program

Hey, look! The 3 basic kinds of icons, files, folders, and programs, have different footprints! Files are tall and thin, programs are blocks, and folders are square! There is no technical reason for this, they all use the same icon format, but this is the convention that's built up over 25 years! The result is- even if a program/folder/file uses a custom icon, we can tell at-a-glance whether it's a file, folder, or program because it's footprint is part of the visual metaphor we uses to interact with the operating system!

Now let's look at Vista's icons!

file

folder

program

Well, they seem to have fucked it up, haven't they? It's not a big deal when viewing folders full-size... but when viewing using small (16x16) icons folders no longer read like folders, they look like files.

I'm sure I'll eventually get used to this- and pick out the Vista folder icon despite it begin visually coded as a file instead of a folder... but it's nicely symbolic of Microsoft's place in the marketplace. They did not create the icon footprint paradigm, that came out of Redmond, Microsoft just stole it without understanding why it worked. As a reuslt- for 25 years Microsoft ripped off these footprint from someone who knew what they were doing, their icon footprint paradigm made sense despite an absence of intention or awareness of its existence on Microsoft's part. But they change it- and because Micrsoft dosn't even realize it's supposed to be doing something, they make it a total fucking mess.

I think what irks me is that- this kind of shit is not a trade secret. Apple publishes it's Human Interface Guidelines freely for all to read- explaining how they things things should work in MacOS, and their operative logic why! (I read them cover to cover circa System 7.) Microsoft doesn't have to be bound by Apple's solutions to those human interface problems... but they should at least acknowledge they exist

In summary:

Vista's search function is a lot like talking to a Disney tour guide. It gives you whichever canned-response answer best correlates to your question-- regardless whether that actually answers the question you were asking.
Microsoft employees employ much the same tactics when people ask how to restore the old search function. "You can access our new advanced search capabilities by..."

09:06 am - On Personal Religions (and Tetris)

I am not a great believer in the Personal Religion, the sort of made-up 1-person-follower theologies that seem to proliferate on the edges of the New Age set. Someone searches their entire life, sampling this religion or that religion on the menu- none of which quite fit, so they take their theology buffet-style and build a system that suits them better.

This is about 1 step removed from the 'charismatic villain' in a summer blockbuster who spouts off about his hard-learned personal philosiphy of life. Key indicator: those guru-villains always have a moment right before they die wherein their philosiphy crumbles like a stale cookie in the face of their victim's selflessness and is revealed to be nothing but a way of absolve themselves for turning into a No Good Shit when life shat on them.

I can crock people having their own interpretation of an existing religion-- I was raised catholic, but I tend to filter my religion through a historical context. i.e. The New Testament goes out of it's way to absolve Pontius Pilate (a swell guy!) in Jesus's death- he was forced by Jewish authorities! Problem: Pontius Pilate was an asshole. He was such an asshole that Roman records exist gossiping about him which have survived 2000 years. And the books of the New Testament were written while nascent Christianity was trying to get the Roman government to recognize their right to exist instead of feeding them to carnivores. "Heck no, the Romans didn't do it! We love the Romans! Quick, someone add a line where Jesus tells everyone to pay their taxes on time!" That's an interpretation.

Randomly deciding that Global Warming is actually atmospheric phlogiston being agitated by angels shaking their fists at all the gays and abortionists in California? That's crazy. Sure, there's are religions who believe stupider stuff, but they're at least doing it in large groups, which makes it look less stupid.
The leap from "Hey, I have an idea, what if...?" to "yes, it is decidedly so!" with no stop in-between for critical self-analysis bothers me. Not that people do it- I know people are crazy and stupid- but they seem aware of what they're doing. "Aliens are coming to take us away on their comet!" is not a pre-existent true state of things, it is (in theological terms) a New Covenant. "Yeah, we know this isn't how things worked up until now, but I just thought of something better and that's how it's gonna work from now on- castrations for everybody!" There's amsll but terrifying group that believe in The Matrix too- not he philosophies underlying the film-- the film itself.

This is a sort of cosmological version of Rule 34, like if you can think of it it not only becomes your religion, it becomes a valid religion, bare assertion = true.

I am a religiously open-minded man, to the poin that I get irritated with evangelical atheists of the Sagan or Dawkins set. Hardboiled skeptics like to hold up things like The Secret's, which proposes a 'Law of Attraction' whereby you wish for material goods and they appear in a flash of light (or something) as it represents all religion. I have 2 issues with this;

That's a strawman, holding up a weak argument, demolishing it and symbolically claiming you've demolished a, analogous stronger argument.

The Secret is a re-dressing of a form of Magical Thinking that's twined up with Crowley. It's had god substitutes for angels, had all theology stripped out, has New Age or occidental skins laid o top of it and (in this incarnation) crossbred with the Davinci Code's pseudohistory. Crowley based some of his shit on John Dee-- which gives this fringy quasi-religious philosiphy a 500 pedigree. None of this makes it any more valid..., but it's not like the Secret's producers sat down and wrote this in a drunken weekend-- they mined an established and long-existing body of nutter-thought.

It is in full knowledge of the stupidity of personal religions, but with a healthy skepticism of unhealthy skepticism that I find I must nonetheless declaim the following;

Long centuries of rhetorical use, and an inability to eliminate it through the scientific method, have caused René Descartes' Decieving Demon to spring into existence via a sort of cosmological rule 34.

By its very nature as an infinitely wise and consistent deceiver, a universe with the Deceiving Demon must appear functionally identical to a universe without it. However since the Demon's existence represents a fork in Knowability proof, it must represent a change in our experience of the world (rendering it unknowable) while still seemingly perfectly emulating a consistent and truthful universe for our perceptions.

It follows therefore that since changes to the world resulting from the Deceiving Demon's existence must exist, those changes must also be hard to see occurring too small or too large for our senses, or within blind spots we are structurally or psychologically ill-equipped to notice. Small perturbations can create large divergences, like small leaks eventually sink a ship. It is essentially impossible for us to say which leaks (which occur naturally to null-effect all the time) are adding up to macro-scale changes- we can not trace the thread of every pebble into the future in search of an avalanche.

However- others can. Rats flee sinking ships, distinguishing the intention within the leak that will flood against the hundreds of others that merely drip. If the Deceiving Demon's micro changes directed at effecting macro changes undetected fall below human perception... they must nonetheless ripple up the scale of things from small to large, hidden in the chaos. But all events create knock-on changes, and just as rats detect the one critical leak which humans cannot and then respond on a level which humans can perceive, there exist other 'ripples' on the surface of human perception which betray the presence of a vast creature moving just below.

Listen well, for I speak the unassailable proof! Among those ripples most easily divined by human senses is the electronic random number generator; it samples incredibly small datum and uses them as the basis for mid-scale effects, easily seen by humans, there is no chain of dozens or hundreds of knock-on events leading to this manifestation, it cuts out the middle-man for easy detection.

Lo this Sunday early did I Witness; as my Testris game did begin with a line, continue with a line, persist with a line, which itself begat a line that was followed by a line until not-four-nor-six-but five lines did there manifest themselves upon the tetris grid.

Much can we learn from this; five being the number of mischief, the line being the icon of order, and the disruption at the outset which creates unmanaged chaos. There is fear in so doughty a succession of lines, a fear against using them lest- in coming to rely on them- great vertical chasm are created, crippling the board. And so a harbinger or order and resolution is transformed into a mocking thing of chaos. Presented with its mighty power there is no choice but the leave it unused and lay it sideways like a fallow field. While lack is acutely felt, surplus can do greater damage undetected.

So this, I say, is how you shall know the Deceiving Demon; by the playing of Tetris. And when the alleged 'randomness' of the pieces is replaced by a surplus of destructive order, you will know it passes, and watch then for what lie it will present for you, and be not deceived.

All hail Tetris. Ex Tetris, veritas

07:56 pm

At right is a christmas gift I'm working on for my mother- an embossed picture of her kissing her grandchild. I ende dup doign some embossing at school this year and, well... I'm at art school. (Even if I am getting a business degree from it.) I feel vaguely obligated to gift something arty on occasion.

The method I came up with however, after reading a bunch of stuff and consolidating ideas... is kinda process-intensive.

To create one 5"x7" embossing, this is my workspace:

It's supposed to seat 8. All that crap? Mine.

The first of (pictured above) took almost 6 hours. The second one (about 20% more complicated) looks to be on track to be completed in 3 hours. This is a result of workflow streamlining, and about $5 in supplies I picked up to enable that. Hopefully I can finish #3 (the last) tonight as well, leaving me just to pick up the frames at target or something. Black should look nice against white paper. (The paper I'm using isn't quite snow-white enough to pull off a white frame.)

Unstained light brown wood might look nice too.