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RedOctane attempts to dictate own warranty laws

Warranty is a really touchy subject for me. I have incredibly poor luck with purchases and I don't think I would be exaggerating to say that 50% of computer and A/V products I purchase have faults when I get them, or develop them later. So I've spent a lot reading about warranties and getting an understanding for what my rights are (in Australia).

For example, most people don't realise that if something goes wrong with a product within the warranty period that you entitled to a refund instead of a replacement if you wish. There is a catch with this though, as if you have had significant use of the product then you may only be entitled to partial refund. How much of a refund you get is negotiable. So whilst it's illegal for a business to state that they don't offer refunds, it's not illegal for them to only offer you $1 and tell you to shove it if you don't like (at which point you would take the replacement).

So, now I'm having issues with my Guitar Hero World Tour guitar strumming erratically by itself. I've been informed this is due to issues with the touch strip and you can work around it by disabling it. Regardless, I don't think it's too much to expect a purchased product to work without fault, so I went to the RedOctane warranty site to investigate their warranty claim process and noted this statement.

Warranty can be claimed only within 90 days from purchase date.

*cough* Bullshit! RedOctane can say what they like, but Australian law would protect any claims you wish to make within 12 months. So I find it most arrogant and offensive that if you submit a purchase date greater than 90 days ago on the Red Octane site it states quite boldly that your item is not longer under warranty. What's worse is that no contact information is provided to argue this point.

So I post this to point out that a business can say what ever it likes, but it doesn't override the law. If you have an issue with your Guitar Hero equipment 364 days after you purchased it, you will not only be entitled to a replacement, you will also be entitled to a partial refund.

NetBeans 6.5 for PHP development

Sun has released version 6.5 of its IDE, NetBeans--the first stable version of NetBeans to include support for PHP coding.

NetBeans is the first IDE I've used and I've been using the development versions for PHP coding for a number of months now. Prior to NetBeans I had only used DreamWeaver and Notepad++.

Like I said, I had never used an IDE, I don't know how it compares to Eclipse, but the extense of code-hinting and completion, compared with DreamWeaver, was a true surprise to me considering its a free program. It provides code hinting and completion on all PHP5 methods, as well as functions, classes and methods you define yourself. It also tracks all your variables, even across include files. These sorts of features mean a lot fewer mistakes and really speed up my coding.

NetBeans goes even further than code completion by highlighting errors in your code, such as mismatched braces, missing function parameters, and warnings such as defining a variable in an if statement when you may have intended to do a comparison. It doesn't highlight all errors that would cause your code to fail, but it certainly stops you making those annoying mistakes that you don't spot as you code.

You can even use NetBeans to debug a website if you have XDebug module installed on PHP. It works just like debugging a normally desktop application where you can set break points in your code, watch variables and jump in out of functions. Unfortunately this doesn't work so well with my main project which has a rather unique Apache/PHP configuration as it stops on the same include file multiple times as the page loads. But for most other people it works brilliantly.

In my new employment we use Subversion which, makes NetBeans even more valuable since it has native support for Subversion and other version control systems. NetBeans will highlight new, changed and deleted lines of code and you can quickly view and restore these changes. It's great to be able to identify what I've changed in a file the next day when I may have otherwise forgotten.

If you do any PHP coding at all I highly recommend you install NetBeans--it makes coding so much easier.

In Rainbows

I bought Radiohead's In Rainbows album at the beginning of the year.  I didn't buy it online for 5c because I wanted a CD quality version.

But for whatever reason, today is the first day I've properly listened to this album and I love it!  Prior listenings obviously weren't in the right environment to properly appreciate it (i.e. car).  It's certainly not as punchy Hail to the Thief (which is perhaps my most favourite Radiohead album) but this album reminds me why I love music so much.

For the geeks, check out the House of Cards Google Code used for the music video.

Seat Girls dance to Gods gonna cut you down

I don't post much fun stuff here--mostly I just bitch and whine.

So here's something fun: A black and white, slo-mo video of volleyball cheerleader put to Johnny Cash's version of God's Gonna Cut You Down folk song.

Going back to XP

I have just about decided to give up using Windows Vista 64 after 6 months of use, and go back to the tried and true Windows XP.

It's not that I have a problem with Vista itself.  There's a few things I'll miss if I downgrade.  I am a sucker the for Aero Glass windows effect.  I'm going to hate going back to "My this" and "My that" in XP.  I may later miss not being able to upgrade from 2GB of RAM to a full 4GB.

However, I've been suffering continuous driver issues with my nVidia hardware.  I've wasted more than a few weekends doing everything I can think of to get F.E.A.R and Mass Effect to run without crashing the PC.  Only the Halflife 2 series of games were able to be played from start to finish without a crash.  BioShock and Call Of Duty 4 both occasionally crashed.  But F.E.A.R and Mass Effect would both crash within a minute of the game starting.  I can't continue to buy games and cross my fingers and hope they'll run.

I've found that I can't play audio CDs.  All other CD and DVD formats play, but not audio CDs.  My searches for a solution suggest it's related to the combination of my DVD drive being SATA and the nVidia nForce drivers.

Opera 9.5 crashes when I submit a form if I have the PC Tablet Service running for my Wacom tablet.  Not being able to browser the web and draw at the same time means I'm not drawing at all.  BioShock also won't run if the same service is running.

It's got to a point where owning a PC is not a pleasure.  I spend my evenings and weekends, trawling the Internet, posting on countless forums and constantly fiddling with settings in hopes of narrowing the behavior to something specific.  It's insane really.

I could dual boot my PC between Vista and XP, but if everything works under XP what would be the point of going back to Vista?  The only time I would boot into Vista would be to test if the new nVidia drivers fixed my issues.

I'll miss Vista, but I'll enjoy the amount of time not using Vista will free up for me.

More IE web developer resources

It's yet another blog about Microsofts dreaded Internet Explorer.

This time I wanted to direct my readers to a great article on the Opera Developer Community, Supporting IE with conditional comments.

I've know about using conditional comments to target IE for some time, but this article not only gives good practical examples, it's floushing with links to valueable sites that discuss the issues in more detail.

One such site was On having layout which explains in details many of IE's uglier quirks, what triggers them and how to get around them.

The article also contained a link to the Multiple IE installer.  I had found a standalone version of IE6 previously which didn't work and I ended up folding and going with Microsofts recommendation which is to download a 445MB, time-limited, Windows XP virtual PC.  That's right, if you want to test your site in a previous version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft recommends you download an entire operating system to do so.  The multiple IE installer is a life saver, and contains versions of IE all the way back to IE3.

Microsoft research - high-density cursor

Currently I'm struggling with single monitors at my new employers.  Web programming is simply a frustrating task when you have to alt+tab been your IDE and your web browser to test changes.

Alt+tab is made far easier with TaskSwitchXP and my AutoHotkey script that allows me to Alt+Tab with my mouse.  You'd be surprised how much different using the mouse to alt+tab makes because you can scroll back and forth between items in the alt+tab list.

Since I don't have dual-screens yet I was looking for a way to better use the 22" widescreen I currently have.  I remembered from long ago about a program that let's you divide your screen into a grid so you can maximise windows into specific areas.  I was hoping it might allow me to maximise an application into a two-third area on the left and another application into a two third area on the right (overlapping each other in the middle third area), giving me a partial view of each screen at any time.  But in my searches I only found Acer VistaGrid which divides your screen into a grid, but with no overlapping it's really only useful if you're using programs that require very little screen space.

But in my searches I found the Microsoft research article, Two Screens Are Better Than One.  It's the first article I've seen that refers to research proving you can work more efficiently with multiple monitors and that it's not just a luxury.

It also suggested that Microsoft is researching how to better use multiple monitors which I found both surprising and confusing.  I've ranted previously that Vista's support for multiple monitors is no different to what 95 had--perhaps with the exception of being able to adjust the relative position of each monitor which was introduced sometime between now and then.

So I was surprised that after 13 years of no changes, Microsoft does actually have people looking at better support.  But confused because one of the research areas is how to maximise a single window across more than one monitor.  UltraMon has given us this ability, at least, since Windows 2000 was the latest and greatest but Microsoft has yet to crack the puzzle themselves.  I really hope these researches aren't being paid too much.

Now, if you've read this far, here's the reason I'm posting.  One of the research areas is how to better display the mouse cursors movement so it isn't as easily lost between screens.  The solution is called High-density Cursor .  It involves drawing additional frames between the cursor frames that appear as a result of your monitors refresh rate.  So it sounds like mouse trails but works much better.  They've created a number of variable that effects how it works, such as scaling the mouse cursor to make it larger as you move it.

It looks to work extremely well in the video, but unfortunately you can't use it yet.  You can, however, test the effect in a flash demo.  It doesn't seem like a complicated system so I'm really hoping Microsoft releases this soon.

The problems with Cuil search

I just took a look at the new kid on the search engine block, Cuil (pronounced "cool").  I hadn't heard of it, but apparently it has been hyped by mainstream media as the next Google.  Of course, it's not and I doubt it ever will be.

But it's not that I don't believe that a new search engine can't compete with Google.  It's just that Cuil can't in it's current form.

Cuil has been criticised for poor search results so far, but I can accept that relevance will grow with use.  So I'm not surprised that Googles results are noticeably more relevant than Cuil.

I think Cuil will fail purely because of design.

First of all, the opening page is black.  Black is intimidating and uninviting.  It's the colour most used by geek sites and WoW guilds.  Metal-heads wear black shirts.  Wealthy people drive black cars.  I use black on my site, but I'm not trying to appeal to everyone. 

The next issue is that search results are sorted into columns.  Now this could be a usability boon, but it won't feel like it after years and years of using Google.  So, again, it's going to alienate.  We are conditioned to know that the top item in google is the most relevant, but when your results are arranged into a grid and I'm not really sure where to look.

The creators of Cuil suggest that columns are better and that's why newspapers and the Bible uses it, but you don't have to scroll the content of a newspaper or the bible into view.  And we are yet to see any Harry Potter books printed in columns.  So why do newspapers and the Bible get away with it?  It's because they both use very short sentences.  In fact most paragraphs in newspapers consist of just one or two sentences--no more.  The abstracts displayed in Cuil search results are much longer than what you'll see in a single sentence or paragraph in a newspaper, so it does benefit from columns the same way newspapers do.

The page has a footer at the bottom of your browser window that does not scroll and overlaps the search results.  Again, it might seem like a good idea, but as your eyes follow the content down, rather than getting the usual visual cue that you need to scroll to see more, instead your concentration is interrupted by links to the next page.  It encourages you to go to the next page rather than view the rest of the results on the current page.

The header also does not scroll with the page and only serves to reduce the number of results we can see on the screen at any one time.  And together with the footer, at first glance you may not realise you can scroll because the scroll bar is absent from the top and bottom of the page.  Again, it just serves to alienate Google users.

The other problem is that if you're telling anyone about Cuil, you have to spell it to them if they are ever going to find it.  And whilst it's easy to remember the sound, it won't be so easy to remember how to spell it.

These arguments might seem like nit-picking, but Cuil should realise that it's the combination of little things that will prevent people from abandoning a search engine they are familiar and comfortable with.

I don't want to suggest that a competing search engines needs to be the same as Google, I actually wish Google would update their interface, just a bit.  But Google's format has worked for a long time and the mass audience doesn't like change.  I would like to see Cuil succeed, but I think it's too different to appeal to everyone.

Test your regular expressions

It's hard to believe that anyone out there can write a complicated regular expression flawlessly on the first attempt.  I know it has taken myself a long time to get as good with them as I am now and that's still not very good.

My need to use a regular expression is irregular and everytime I go online to find something that can help me test the expression before using it in code.  I've finally found the perfect one with RegExr.

It uses flash and shows the result of your expression as you type.  You can also download it as a desktop application using AIR package.

Internet Explorer Buglist

After spending half a morning trying to figure out why Internet Explorer (and only Internet Explorer) would not create a cookie I was setting, I thought it was time to familiarise myself with the known issues of IE7.  So here's my reference - EnhanceIE - Internet Explorer Bugs.

The problem was that I was running the site from my own desktop where I created a virtual host that contained an underscore.  Obviously you would never give an Internet domain name an underscore--you couldn't if your tried--but I never gave it a thought when defining a dummy host name for testing.

IE7 won't allow a cookie from a domain that contains an underscore because underscores are prohibited by DNS rules.  So it's "by design".  I think this is a bollocks choice though.  If you're going to allow underscores in your server names, and allow you to use those name in a browser address, then create the cookies like Opera and Firefox do and stop confusing developers.