taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Usability: So, I’ve just found out about a useless feature of my microwave oven the hard way. The microwave’s manual notes:

Demo Mode

The Demo Mode is ideal for learning how to use the microwave oven. When set, functions can be entered without actually turning on the magnetron. The microwave oven light will come on, the fan will run and, if on, the turntable will rotate.

To Turn On/Off: The microwave oven and Timer must be off. Touch and hold TIMER SET.OFF for 5 seconds until 2 tones sound and ‘d’ appears on the display. Repeat to turn off and remove ‘d’ from the display.

Great! How useful! What a friendly UI! A tiny ‘d’ that indicates that, although your microwave looks like it’s cooking away, it’s actually doing nothing.

If you ever want to prank a friend with a Whirlpool oven, I’d recommend this one ;)

Tags: demo, display, feature, light, magnetron, microwave, mode, oven, timer, usability, way

ah, Donncha reminisces about the Commodore 64 demo scene.

I was involved too, around 1987, coding demos as ‘Mantis’ for XS — a pretty little known group. I wrote 2 really great demos, Rhaphanadosis, and another name I can’t quite remember ;), but they don’t seemed to have survived, which is a shame…

Tags: commodore, demo, donncha, group, mantis, name, rhaphanadosis, scene, shame

Nathan Cochrane meets the Aussie Privacy Commissioner:

We’re talking about a serious privacy vs piracy debate. On the piracy debate we’re talking about management of Intellectual Property (IP). I am a person with Personal Information (PI) and if that is taken away, it is an invasion of my privacy. I would like to hear these people (IP owners) making such a lot of noise about piracy of IP talk about the protections of PI — then they would have some credibilty. There’s a pretty ugly asymmetry in the debate. Both sides need to grow up a bit and be a bit more respective of both sides of the argument.

(Nathan:) For my part, I chipped in that I think it hypocritical that IP owners will kick in my door if they suspect I am stealing their IP, but to steal my PI is just a ‘business case’.

I like the ‘PI’ concept. Perfect timing, given this report on the new ATTBI/Comcast ‘Transition Wizard’. Check out this insanity:

Any Comcast user that actually installed the Transition Wizard has given Comcast permission to do the following;

• 1) arbitrarily open and read your email without your knowledge and/or consent

• 2) perform a credit check on you and then share that info with whomever they choose

• 3) Perform firmware upgrades to your cable modem at their discretion, regardless of who owns it.

  You also agreed not to participate in any future class action suits that may be brought against Comcast for whatever reason. You agreed to this and more when you clicked on the ‘I Agree’ button during the initial installation phase.

Mind you, the actual text isn’t posted, so take it with a grain of salt.

Code: Danny’s notes on the FIT testing OSCon talk — that’s running a test suite as a Wiki. Interesting, but I have to think about how practical it is in general. Demo here, more complex demo here.

Tags: bit, comcast, debate, demo, piracy, privacy, talk, the, transition, wizard

The Reclaim The Streets demo last Sunday went off well, sounds like. I would have gone but I hadn’t heard (or had forgotten) about it :(

The fact that it went well is a relief, because the last one became a bloodbath when some of the Gardai got a little over-excited, removed their identification, and started swinging clubs and “arresting” attendees indiscriminately. Very nasty, or so I hear. (I wasn’t back in Dublin by that point.)

Along with some reports of massive corruption in the Donegal police force, this event turned out to be a watershed in how Irish folks are viewing their police. That kind of thing wasn’t really a problem over here in the last few years — but now it seems to have all changed. Old news for people in the UK, US, Northern Ireland and Australia — but quite new to us here.

Tags: bloodbath, demo, fact, gardai, identification, point, police, reclaim, relief, sunday

http://www.uncontrol.com/ — a flash applet which provides a good collection of nature-imitating mathematical eye candy. Number 16 is beautiful.

I used to write graphics demos on the C-64, which used a lot of this kind of stuff (although a hell of a lot simpler for obvious reasons). It occurs to me that Flash makes writing demos a lot easier; it provides a decent language (scripting as opposed to 6502 assembly), it gives you a good set of drawing tools (anti-aliasing, alpha blending, and 24-bit colour), the hardware no longer limits what you can do in 2-D graphics, and you can even buy software which takes care of the text effects like zooms, scrolling, bouncing etc. In other words, all the cool tricks are done for you ;)

I wonder what demo writers are doing nowadays, as a result? One side seems to be what these guys have done — actually go for really interesting, good-looking effects, rather than just the “how did they do that” factor. I would imagine the other side of the demo “bleeding edge” is doing a hell of a lot of 3-D stuff. (By hand. In assembler. ;)

Tags: applet, candy, collection, demo, eye, flash, hell, lot, side, stuff