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Joe's Post-Graduate LifeBibliophile, technophile, systemsphile
August 28 Test posttest Your PC, mobile phone, and online services work together like never before. See how Windows® fits your life February 17 Goodbye "Sponsored theme B en-US"For about a year now my space has held a unique distinction - it's the only production space that has ever had the theme "Sponsored theme B en-US" on it. Back in 2007 we built a sponsored theme system that let a company build a unique theme that tied in to its properties (like the awesome Halo 3 themes). These themes were slightly different from normal themes in that they prevent the end user from using the advanced menu to make adjustments to the theme like setting their own colors and changing the background image, a feature we developed to provide our sponsored theme providers with consistency in their themes.
As we were building and testing this feature in our test environment we built three test sponsored themes, appropriately titled Sponsored theme A, Sponsored theme B, and Sponsored theme C. These themes were pretty lame, as they were just existing themes with some identifying text in the background image and the theme customization "locking" I mentioned before. These themes weren't supposed to be released to production - they were just for testing purposes. But as we were rolling out the release to our Blue Ridge data center I noticed that they were available in the theme picker and that they could be applied to a space:
I applied Sponsored theme B to my space so we had an example that we could use to track down the problem. Pretty quickly we found the issue and fixed the appropriate config files to prevent this theme from being accessed by anyone else. Since there were only a few dozen spaces (belonging to MS folks helping us out with dogfooding) in the Blue Ridge cluster at the time and since the rollout had only made it to Blue Ridge by the time we caught the problem no "real" customers ever saw this abberation or applied one of our test themes.
But I still had Sponsored theme B on my space. And being the only person in the world to have this theme had a certain appeal to me. Which is why I've kept this theme for over a year now. But it's time to say goodbye - Sponsored theme B has gotten old, and it's always been ugly  . . . . But I'm writing this blog entry to commemorate the passing of my old, personal friend. Goodbye Sponsored theme B en-US - I'll miss you.December 19 IE8 gets me hotIf you're interested in the future of the web and of a geeky persuasion you should go check out this post on the IE Blog:
Standards compliance is an incredibly important "feature" for the web 2.0+ world and it looks like IE8 is going to nail it. I'm super excited about this because it feels like a fulfillment of the "promise" of IE7 - that MS cares about the web, wants to move it forward, and cares about doing so in an extensible, interoperable, inclusive way. I've been on the IE bandwagon ever since I was an intern back in 2005, when I got to dogfood an early internal beta of IE7. I think the team is doing incredibly important work, and I think this data shows the incredible progress they've made.
I've known about the ACID test results, as well as some other cool stuff that IE8 is going to include, for a while now, but I'm really psyched to be able to talk about some of this publicly and to see the reaction of the people outside MS to this info. August 24 Testing is importantTesting is important. Outright bugs suck, but product design should be tested too - bad UX can be even more frustrating than bugs.
Yesterday my housemate Jon downloaded the new Texas Holdem game for the Xbox Live Arcade, which turns out to be hilariously bad. There are lots of terrible UI choices and a poor control scheme. Examples include:
The computer opponents are disappointingly poor and there are some pretty glaring feature omissions, like:
The matchmaking and network code is scary awful - it took me three attempts to get matched up - the first attempt I was told the match attempt failed (no reason given), the second time I was matched to a tournament I was not allowed to play in (my bankroll was too small), and the third time it created a new table for me which it took 10 minutes to fill. The highlight of our night, however, were the two glaring bugs we encountered playing in just three tournaments. First, it appears that when a player is in the small blind with less than half of the chips needed to call the big blind (after playing the small), they will hold on to their extra chips and be treated as all in, instead of making a partial call of the big blind. this was minor but annoying, but the bug we found in online play was genuinely frustrating. About 10 hands into the tournament I got all in with two pair that rivered a full house against a short stacked opponent with a high ace and a busted flush draw. There was about 1,000 chips in the pot when I won the showdown, but when my busted opponent left the table the chips that were in the pot disappeared with him, leaving the table (and more importantly me!) with about 1/4 less chips than we should have had.
These bugs were somewhat frustrating, but a poor UI choice was what really ruined the game for us. Whenever a pot is won or lost, whenever someone goes broke, and whenever someone leaves the table you are presented with a notification dialog that you have to press A to acknowledge (this dialog pops up quite frequently at other times in the game, but we will focus on just these three cases). This is an OK design choice for single player scenarios for this game, since the target audience is probably not very poker savvy and will probably want a chance to review their hand and the play before continuing the game. But it is a terrible scenario for online multiplayer games. At the end of each hand all eight players must acknowledge that the hand is over before the next hand is dealt, which creates a 30+ second delay between the laggy network code and the inevitably slow opponents. When a player gets knocked out, though, the experience is even worse, since everyone must first acknowledge that the hand is over, then everyone must acknowledge that the player has gone broke, and then everyone must acknowledge that the player has left that table, all while waiting between steps for everyone to finish acknowledging the previous step. Between code defects and poor design choices what should have been a fun fast paced game turned into an unbearably slow mess that was far away from fun.
Design is important. Testing is important. Usability is important.
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