It lets you know when someone is preparing to send you a message, even if you weren’t having a conversation with them. My initial reaction was that it was pretty creepy, but at the same time, I could see some interesting possibilities.

First, if you see an incoming message that you’re not interested in answering, you can choose to make yourself scarce, thereby granting yourself the possibility of pleading ignorance. Certainly not something I condone, but I still found it intriguing.

Second, you can send a message to the person before they finish theirs. That way, you’re exploiting the creepy nature of the feature to creep someone else out.

Will these possibilities help your productivity? Probably not, but they certainly amused me for a few moments. Though, to be honest, not as much as the introduction of Trillian’s Rick Roll Detection feature:

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SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers. When you search over SSL, your search queries and search traffic are encrypted so they can’t be read by any intermediary party such as employers and internet service providers (ISPs).

Source: Google SSL Search Help

So, put simply, the announcement was great news for privacy and security enthusiasts everywhere. As one of these enthusiasts, I immediately switched to Google’s SSL search for all my web search needs. Sure, there were some drawbacks to switching – namely, a loss in performance – but in my mind, I rather wait a little longer, knowing I have increased security.  So, as a first step, I switched my homepage in Google Chrome. This was pretty straight forward, I simply had to press the Wrench icon, and then select Options.

The next step was to change the search provider – in Google Chrome, this is crucial – since it relies so heavily on one smart search/address bar. When I went to do that, I instinctively selected the existing search engine I was using: Google Canada, and attempted to edit it. Unfortunately, the URL field was grayed out, preventing me from making changes to the URL pattern.

I then figured out that some of these providers are built-in, and can’t be edited. You have to manually add a new search engine, which allows you to define all fields. Here’s what I entered for each field:

• Name: Google HTTPS
• Keyword: g
• URL: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s

Once I selected the new engine as my as the default, I was ready to go. Google’s SSL search was my homepage, and my default search engine. Yet, I still had some flexibility: I chose keywords that would allow me to easily switch between engines. For example, by typing:

gc wikipedia ducks

Chrome understands that I want to search using Google Canada:

This allowed me to have a secure search engine by default, all the while making it easy for me to use others on-the-fly.

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Despite these mouse-powered shortcuts, I’ve always felt that keyboard shortcuts were faster. With that in mind, I took my search to Google, and eventually and found what I was looking for:

CTRL + SHIFT + N

Great shortcut… after you press it, you can immediately start typing the folder name. No need to use the mouse in between creating the folder, and typing the name.  There’s just one unfortunate catch – the shortcut only works in Windows 7.  Seeing as I needed something that worked across Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, I returned to Google for an alternative. Here’s what I found:

ALT + FWF

Certainly an awkward looking shortcut, but it works just like CTRL + SHIFT + N. The only difference is that it uses accelerator keys, a  long-supported feature of Windows. Back in Windows Server 2003, accelerator keys were easy to recognize visually:

Notice that certain characters are underlined in the menus?

All you had to do was look for underlined letters in the menu options. As can be seen above, the File menu option has the F key associated. If you hold ALT, the key combination you press will be sent to the menu bar. This also works in Windows Vista, and Windows 7 – though, by default, the underlined letters and menu bar are hidden. So, for example, you can follow the ALT + FWF path. Holding ALT, first press F to select File, then W for New, and F for Folder. After that, just type the name of the new folder, and press ENTER.

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Lately, when I booted my machine, I saw this dialog appear:

Learn Jing Now? No thanks, I already know how to use Jing. So… what other options do I have?

• “Replay”
• “Sign Up Now”

That’s it. The usual Minimize-Maximize-Close buttons from Windows aren’t there, and I don’t see a Close button. Replay just starts the tutorial video again, and Sign Up Now sounds like I have to register for something . I already created a Screencast account – I remember doing that specifically to satisfy Jing. So, as far as I know, I don’t need to sign up. Yet, the text above the Sign Up Now button seems to suggest that I should click it… but I know I already signed up, why would I do it again?  Because of the resulting confusion, I see the dialog as having a poor user interface. While it is visually appealing, I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to click. I’ve also been trained to avoid registration forms – I only use them when I absolutely have to. After all, each time I register somewhere – it takes time, and the information I provide could be exposed in one more location.

If I decide I want to close the window, I have to get creative… I can either:

• Right-click the window in the taskbar, and select Close Window.
• Press ALT+F4.
• Open Task Manager, and kill the process from there.

It could have been easily averted with a Close button, or at least clearer instructions.  If I have to sign up again to use Jing, then tell me why. If I have to click that button to get to the login page, then that’s terrible – just put a Login button alongside Sign Up Now. Either way, make it clear.

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Back then, it took me up to 2 1/2 hours of travel time to get to school, and 2 1/2 hours to return home. I did this every day, and so I didn’t have much time to relax when I got home. Think about it, I left home – it was dark out. I get home, dark – the only sunlight I saw was during my breaks at school.  I’ll likely focus on my transport stories in another post – it’s a fascinating tale in itself; however, I mention it now because it meant my focus was largely on my core Computer Science classes. Knowing I was quite good in English, I decided I could put it on the back burner for the start of the semester, knowing that there was one big, valuable assignment at the end. As long as I did well on that, I knew my mark would be pretty good. I trusted my skill with the English language, I was sure I could pull this off.

Eventually, I approached the date where the big assignment had to be handed in. I was busy with other classes, and couldn’t devote time to the English assignment until the last three days before it was due. Though I was running out of time, I knew I would succeed – so I planned my last three days:

• Day 1: Finish reading the material, and take notes of areas I want to reference in my paper.
• Day 2: Complete rough draft.
• Day 3: Polish and refine until I have a final version.

It was a lot of work, but I knew I could pull it off – and I did, with one unfortunate detail.

Photo by Tim Riley

While finalizing my rough draft, I found I was missing a section of text that would allow two paragraphs to flow properly. Looking for ideas, I did something I never did before – I used Google to locate similar papers written by others. My intention was to see if anyone else focused on the same points as me, and if they did, how they structured their points. I eventually found what I was looking for – a crucial 3-4 sentences that would perfect the flow of my paper, most of which was taken up by a quote from the book. I copied this text into my rough draft, with the intention of removing it later, and instead writing my own text that covered a similar set of points. This was a fatal mistake – given how much work I had to do, I ended up being so absorbed in the paper that I forgot about the sentences from the external source. When I reached the end of the 3 days, I was pleased with what I managed to achieve – it was a lot of content to produce in three days. I handed my work in the next day, and waited for my marks.

A few days later, our English teacher published her schedule for giving us our papers back – she wanted to meet with each of us. When I went into the classroom, shutting the door behind me, I was expecting to hear mostly positive remarks, but instead, I was told I got 0%. ZERO. PERCENT. She told me it was due to plagiarism, and at first, I was completely stunned – I would never plagiarize… it’s completely against my moral code. Then, it hit me. The external text – I completely forgot to change it. Shocked, I explained the situation to the teacher, but she then replied asking me if that was true, why did I change the page numbers in the (accidentally) plagiarized portion?

Photo by James F Clay

I had a good answer to that, and it was related to the fact that I spent time with a particular individual while in English class. We’ll call him Fred. Fred was fun to hang around with, but it was pretty obvious he was a into the marijuana. I was never into that stuff, but I wasn’t one to alienate people because they had such habits. So, given all our other classes were together, I usually sat with him. Unfortunately for me, I’m convinced that factor played a huge part in my 0%. You see, Fred wasn’t the taking English very seriously, though he was aiming to finish his most valuable assignments, like me. He called me as I was working on my paper – and I provided him with some of my quotes. Just quotes from the book – that, unbeknown to me, had wrong page numbers, because I found some of them online. He later called me back to warn me about this, and so I proceeded to correct the page numbers, so that they were all valid according to my physical copy of the book. Since the forgotten text also had a quote, I corrected it along with the others – unknowingly making it seem like I was trying to cover something up. I later found out that Fred got 0% too, also for plagiarism. I didn’t know the details, but knew that I only gave him quotes from the book, nothing by another author. Regardless of his reason, it really looked bad next to me – considering I had shared with him some of my quotes.

Despite my attempts to explain this to the teacher, she didn’t believe me. It didn’t matter to her that only 3-4 sentences were accidentally plagiarized, even though it was a tiny percentage compared to the overall content I wrote. I remember clearly asking her – considering the ratio, why would I plagiarize? If I need 4 sentences, I’ll write them – that’s nothing compared to the size of the whole paper. It doesn’t make sense that anyone would plagiarize in that scenario. She still refused to budge from her mark of 0%, dismissing what I considered to be a rational, logical argument. Then again, I was really unlucky – the circumstances were aligned against me:

• I was friends with Fred, who really didn’t come off as mature, and who actually plagiarized in the end.
• I corrected the page numbers in the quotes, one of which just-so-happened to be in the accidentally plagiarized text.
• I didn’t do much work up until that point, so the teacher probably assumed I was slacker/irresponsible by nature.

Photo by Luigi Caterino

I tried taking it higher up within the college, but eventually decided to end the frustration. The higher ups told me the incident would be seen as a fluke if nothing else happened in my further education. I decided to leave it at that, but to this day I feel anger and frustration when I think about it. Nothing is worse than being accused of something you would never do. When you try to tell the truth, no one believes you – might as well have been trying to convince someone from a jail cell. I had to drop the English class at that point, as the assignment was too important – my chances of passing were almost impossible. Had I tried to pass English, I would have had to spend much more time on it – and to get what… a mere 60%. It didn’t see the point.

So, as you can imagine, this changed my views on a lot of things. The most obvious: now whenever I temporarily copy external text into a document, I make it bold, size 20, and red. That way, there’s no chance I can mistake it for my own content.  I’m also more cautious about who I associate with.

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Since Vista, Microsoft has decided to hide the bar, by default. In Windows 7, here’s what Windows Explorer looks like:

While the menu bar is no longer visible, it hasn’t been completely removed from the operating system. You can simply press ALT to make it appear. Once visible, it is designed to disappear whenever you left-click the Windows Explorer window. If you actually click the menu, you can execute one action, and then the bar will disappear again. In this manner, Windows ensures that the menu bar is never left to waste window space. Here’s a video illustrating this behavior:

I really like this approach, and actually found that other applications feature the same logic. For example, Internet Explorer 8, Windows Live Messenger, and Firefox 4 Beta 1 also show/hide the menu bar whenever ALT is pressed. I’m hoping it becomes a global standard for applications.

You also have the option of permanently showing menus… an option I don’t personally like. If you want to try that option, follow these steps:

1. Click Organize > Folder and search options in Windows Explorer.
2. In the Folder Options dialog, click the View tab.
3. In the Advanced Settings section, you’ll find an option titled Always show menus. Enable the checkbox.
4. Click OK.

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The video does a decent job at giving you a quick overview, but you really have to use the tools to fully understand. You can make stuff that looks like it was made in Photoshop, that’s how advanced the customization options are. Layers, transparency, gradients, masks, custom symbols, all of these modifications/effects are possible in the APB editors.

So, given the flexibility, I decided to make use of the customization tools to design a sleeveless shirt for my character. My goal was to make something close to the Awesome smiley. Here’s what I came up with:

My character is an Enforcer, essentially a cop. Imagine seeing that happy smiley running towards you.

While definitely not perfect, I found it was a decent homage to the smiley, seen below:

I got the image from this Wikipedia page.

I’ll likely work on a better version in the next couple days; however, after making such customizations – I realized something else. I could very easily use my in-game shirt to advertise for my website. APB already contains in-game advertisements, both visual and audio. I never had anything against this, given that they are trying to depict a modern urban environment, which does feature advertisements in real life. The idea of adding my own advertising intrigued me. As a quick test, I tried just stamping my domain on the back of my newly created shirt:

Pretty simple to make, and fairly easy to read – even when the player is running with low texture quality. Still, it brings up some interesting questions. First of all, did Realtime Worlds cover this possibility in the APB license agreement? Second, if my full name is visible in the game, should my behavior change?

To answer the first question, I checked the APB End User License Agreement, and I found what I was looking for. See the bold text below:

Rules of Conduct

9.4 You shall not (and you agree to not) generate any User Generated Content, or use the Game in a way, that:

9.4.1 infringes the rights of any other person or entity (including, without limitation, their Intellectual Property Rights) (and references to “any other person or entity” shall include RTW);

9.4.2 breaches any Applicable Laws;

9.4.3 in RTW’s absolute discretion, RTW considers:

(a) is defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libellous, harmful, abusive, harassing, hateful, invasive of another’s privacy, sexually explicit, or offensive (whether in relation to race, sex, religion or otherwise) or denigrating to anyone’s reputation or general standing (whether or not actionable);

(b) is seeking to promote or encourage illegal activity;

(c) is false or misleading to others;

(d) is seeking to access another person’s personal information or information relating to another APB Account;

(e) is seeking to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of the Game or any servers or networks connected to the Game or another’s computer; or

(f) amounts to unwanted or unauthorised advertising or solicitation.

(g) is stalking or harassing of another person.

The wording there offers a lot of flexibility for Realtime Worlds. Is my advertising unauthorized, or unwanted? I’m not advertising for a commercial company here, just a personal domain, with a blog. Sure, one day, there may be a commercial component associated to my domain, but that’s not currently the case. Either way, they specifically say it is at their absolute discretion… so it could very well be seen as both unauthorized and unwanted, since it is entirely up to them.

The argument gets more complicated when you consider that APB creations can be manufactured. Once you come up with a design, for example, my Awesome homage shirt, you can sell copies of the shirt for in-game credit, or even credit towards APB playtime. To play APB, you have to buy hours of play, or subscribe to a monthly pay-to-play plan. Selling customizations for playtime credit is therefore an attractive option for people that want to play the game long-term. Now, if you sell something you create, it is forever related to your in-game character name – the person who owns it will always be able to see who manufactured it. This makes it possible for people to behave as fashion designers in game. Yet, in real life, what do we typically see on clothes when they’re part of a particular line? Logos. A reference to the line of clothing you are wearing, the manufacturer. So, if you’re manufacturing clothes in APB, is it wrong to put your domain on there? I’m not sure it is, but, of course, I feel it must be respectfully placed, and very small to not grab too much attention. I’m sure some people would do the opposite, though – so the argument still stands… though Realtime Worlds would ultimately decide.

Advertising also comes with a cost on the privacy side; consider this: my character’s name is actually “MattRefghi”, and his shirt, as you’ve now seen, sports my domain in a very visible fashion. When playing, I feel like I have to be careful with what I do or say, because it is pretty obvious who I am in real life. I was never a guy who was negative with other players, but sometimes I did utilize strategies that weren’t particularly pleasant for my targets. I’ll probably visit some of these strategies in a future post.  In APB, like real-life, I must consider my actions before I execute them, because they’re ultimately bound to me. As scary as that might seem to some, I think this is a good thing… people would be forced to behave with a certain amount of class if their online interactions were always bound to their real life identity. In multi-player games, Griefers would likely be greatly reduced, and everyone should have a better time online.

A griefer is a player in a multiplayer video game that purposely irritates and harasses other players.

I may contact Realtime Worlds for more information – I think it would be interesting to see what they have to say on the matter. In the meantime, however, I’ll keep thinking of amusing customization ideas.

Update: A few days after posting this, here’s what Blizzard Entertainment announced:

The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it.

[...]

The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players — however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before. With this change, you’ll see blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.

I like it… but we’ll soon see whether the idea can float, or not.

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ID,NAME
1,KARA
2,GAIUS
3,SAUL

As you can see, the above CSV contents are completely valid. However, when I tried to open it in Excel 2000, I received this error message:

When I tried to press the OK button, Excel just gave up loading the CSV. While I didn’t know what they meant by “SYLK“, I assumed something was wrong with the CSV export. Maybe there was an invalid, invisible character in the file, preventing Excel from parsing it – perhaps making it think it was another format. To test this theory, I used one of my favorite features in Notepad++, one that allows me to see all characters, even those which are normally invisible.

Using the feature, I could tell that there were only carriage returns (CR) and line breaks/feeds (LF), which are perfectly valid for a CSV.

With that possibility ruled out, I decided to try the same CSV in a newer version of Excel – the 2007 edition. When I went to open it, I was unfortunately greeted with the same type of errors:

Despite these errors, through the selection of the appropriate dialog options – I was at least still able to view the CSV within Excel:

At this point, however, I was really intrigued – so I googled the original error message I received in Excel 2000. I found a Microsoft article explaining the behavior, while also offering a workaround. When reading the article, I could barely hold in my laughter:

SYMPTOMS

When you try to open a text file or a comma-separated variable (CSV) file, you may receive the following error message:

SYLK: File format is not valid

CAUSE

This problem occurs when you open a text file or CSV file and the first two characters of the file are the uppercase letters “I” and “D”. For example, the text file may contain the following text:

ID, STATUS

123, open

456, closed

Note This problem does not occur if the first two letters are lowercase “i” and “d”.

WORKAROUND

To open your file in Excel, open the file in a text editor, and then insert an apostrophe at the beginning of the first line of text.

How to Insert an Apostrophe

To add an apostrophe to the beginning of the first line of text in your file, follow these steps:

1.  Open the text file in a text editor, such as Notepad. Click before the first character in the first line of text. Press the APOSTROPHE key on your keyboard (‘).

2. On the File menu, click Save. Quit the text editor. You can now open the file in Excel.

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323626

I think you need to be a developer to truly appreciate how funny this is. I had to mention this bug to the client, because the likelihood of the ID being the first text in the file was pretty high. Even then, I mentioned they should read the Microsoft article only if they encountered the problem. No way am I going to explain the awkward workaround myself.

So, I confirmed that the bug was still present in Excel 2007. I just hope that Microsoft fired the developer that came up with the SYLK detection logic. Assuming that a file is a particular type based solely on the first two characters (“ID”) is a big risk, especially when those two characters are part of the alphabet, and are also common in IT.  I’m guessing there are complexities I don’t see… or at least, I hope so. Either way, their workaround is really unbelievable… they’re actually telling people to add an apostrophe as the first character of the file. I’m aware that Microsoft is a large complicated beast with many different teams  involved in releasing bug fixes, but this one is just so ridiculous.

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http://mattrefghi.com/wordpress/sitemap.xml

My browser doesn’t download the file, it merely displays it. This happens because browsers know how to display XML, and they figure it makes more sense to show you the content – rather than initiate a download. The behavior is different with “.zip” files, for example. Browsers usually initiate a download when they are pointed to a URL that ends in “.zip”. Downloading the physical XML is therefore slightly trickier. In Opera, I can just paste that exact URL into to the Quick Download box at the top of the Downloads page. When I press ENTER, it automatically downloads the physical XML file – rather than trying to display it.

I’ve used this countless times over the years. The same is possible in other browsers, but it usually isn’t as quick as Opera’s implementation. For example, in Google Chrome, I’d first have to view the page, click “Control The Current Page” button, and then “Save Page As”. I would then get a” File Save” dialog, which allows me to change the name, or simply press OK to save the file.

Certainly not as quick as Opera… and what if the XML file was massive? I’d have to wait for the browser to first display it, then I’d be able to download the physical file.

One more reason to keep Opera installed on my computer.

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In the beginning of April, I became aware that my blog was corrupt – no articles were visible, and the visuals weren’t right. I promptly contacted my web host pair Networks, and after an hour of trying different things – their agent (who was extremely helpful), told me it was likely a problem within WordPress. He tried repairing the database, but subsequent browser refreshes just corrupted the WordPress database further. With this knowledge, I thanked the agent for his help and prepared to restore my blog in a fresh copy of WordPress.

By the time April 10th came around, I had mostly everything working – the only problem left was the comments – a good 90% of them were not appearing in the articles. You see, I’ve always used IntenseDebate for my comments. It had a good feature set, and did exactly what I expected it to do. When I installed a fresh copy of WordPress, I naturally installed IntenseDebate very early on – and yet, it didn’t restore my comments properly… the vast majority were simply missing from their respective pages. Concerned, I contacted their support address, providing plenty of detail, and offering URLs to illustrate my point.



I decided to wait for a response before I restored my blog fully – comments were too important to me.

Two weeks passed, and I still hadn’t heard back… so I submitted a support ticket via their website, including the same information I sent via e-mail. Considering that e-mail (as a medium) isn’t flawless, I also asked whether they received my e-mail or not. I realized that it was even possible that Gmail’s spam blocker was eating their message. To cover that possibility, I started regularly checking and deleting my spam. But time passed, and my site remained down – all without the slightest word from IntenseDebate. I started to get annoyed… especially when I noticed that they were happily telling people to contact their support address on their Twitter page. Yet, no help available for me. So, as you can imagine, I logged into Twitter, and posted the following message:

As I’m writing this, they have not replied to me. They still continue to reply to people on their Twitter page, but they have not acknowledged me in the slightest.

On May 2nd, I decided to drop IntenseDebate. I had to manually make corrections in my WordPress database, but after waiting so long, it was an attractive option.

Could it simply be an isolated incident? Perhaps… but I still consider it difficult to forgive.

UPDATE: Soon after this was posted, they replied to me. See the update at the top of this post for details.

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