'Til All Are One

Microsoft claim that their UAC secur­ity prompts in Vista are designed to annoy you. I’m try­ing hard to take them ser­i­ously and to not laugh them off… but did they really think it’d work? OEMs and users have been dis­abling it in droves. Other users have prob­ably taught their muscle memory to auto­mat­ic­ally click the Continue/​Allow but­ton without the slight­est acknow­ledge­ment or thought. I think Microsoft need to get their act together when it comes to UIs. Some of their recent efforts have been frus­trat­ingly incon­sist­ent.

A major reason given by Microsoft in their UAC scan­dal was to encour­age developers to avoid priv­ilege elev­a­tions as much as pos­sible. A noble cause, espe­cially in the security-​​inexperienced world of Win­dows devel­op­ment, albeit poorly executed. It reminds me of Apple’s per­petual oppos­i­tion to the multi-​​button mouse. One stated reason is to enforce more ‘sane’, ‘usable’ and con­sist­ent UI design, and over­all I think they’ve done well. They don’t ban multi-​​button mice (‘XY-​​PIDSes’?), but given the simple one-​​button default there’s less need for them. I might prefer using a con­ven­tional 3-​​button scroll mouse, or even Apple’s own Mighty Mouse (a cleverly-​​disguised multi-​​button mouse), but I don’t lose any func­tion­al­ity by not using them.

It goes to show how much the graph­ical inter­face can be influ­enced by its phys­ical input, some­thing a lot of us don’t acknow­ledge in today’s world of >100-​​key QWERTY key­boards, multi-​​button mice and multi-​​finger touch­pads. The real innov­a­tion in that space seems to be hap­pen­ing in the mobile and embed­ded sec­tor, the iPhone being a good example. Play­ers of games on both desktop com­puters and games con­soles might notice the dif­fer­ence in ‘look and feel’ between games designed for keyboard/​mouse versus con­trol pad. Par­tic­u­larly for action and strategy games, ports from desktop to con­sole (or vice versa) often aren’t suc­cess­ful. The soft­ware was designed with the assump­tion of par­tic­u­lar input devices, and any­thing that devi­ates from this will also alter the feel of the game.

LotD: Your Win­dows licence fees paid to make this

I saw X-​​Men 2 a few weeks ago. I’ve always been a fan of the com­ics, so I am rather sens­it­ive to any ‘changes’ that are made just for the movie. How­ever, I do real­ise that it is near-​​impossible to squeeze the entire X-​​Men uni­verse into a 2-​​hour movie. I must con­clude that they did an excel­lent job here. As in the first movie, the ‘changes’ were done very well.

There were a few little easter eggs hid­den in there as well. In the first movie, you get a quick glimpse of Jubilee (the comic book char­ac­ter whom Rogue replaced in the movie), and just like in Spider Man (another fant­astic movie) there is a short cameo by Stan Lee (This man is a GOD! If you don’t know who he is, stop read­ing right now for you have offen­ded me.). In the second movie you hear Jubilee being called by name (by Storm), and on a tele­vi­sion set you see a man with the cap­tion “Dr Henry McCoy” beneath his face. The man appears as a nor­mal (non-​​mutant) human being, but this man later becomes Beast. I think there were a few other easter eggs, but I don’t remem­ber them.

Speak­ing of The X-​​Men, I found a great fan-​​comic, The Uncanny X-​​Sprites. Quite funny. I also stumbled across Wolverine’s real name. It’s not Logan, it’s James How­lett. It’s all explained in Marvel’s Ori­gin series, which was released last year. There was also a Para­dise X series which con­tra­dicts some of the fun­da­mental aspects of Ori­gin, but I wouldn’t take it ser­i­ously. Both of these (among oth­ers) are explained in vivid detail (beau­ti­fully illus­trated, too!) at the Lost Soul Wol­ver­ine site. I spent hours read­ing all the stuff there; I was so riveted.

Last Sunday I saw The Mat­rix Reloaded. I am not going to com­pare it to X-​​Men 2, but I will say that this is another excel­lent film. The CGI was amaz­ing. There were a few little flaws, but with all the action going on they were easy to over­look. I love Hong Kong mar­tial arts movies (Jackie Chan and Jet Li are DEITIES!), and this movie sat­isifed my desire for some well-​​choreographed fight scenes. On the neg­at­ive side, there is less con­tinu­ity between the plot and the fights when com­pared to the ori­ginal movie. Also, some parts were slow and unne­ces­sary. I don’t want to see a bunch of Zion­ists (I assume that’s what the inhab­it­ants of Zion call them­selves?) dan­cing, and I don’t want to see Neo mak­ing love to Trin­ity. There’s enough pr0n on the Inter­net, thank-​​you-​​very-​​much.

Like the first movie (and the third, which arrives in Novem­ber), The Mat­rix Reloaded was mostly filmed in my home town of Sydney. It’s weird to watch scenes from a movie and think, “hey, I was at that place only yes­ter­day!” It also makes me won­der if I really am in the Mat­rix. Kooky.

The abso­lute coolest thing, how­ever, was Trinity’s crack­ing of the elec­tri­city grid. She uses Nmap to scan for open ports and finds that port 22 is open. Port 22 is typ­ic­ally used by SSH, and sure enough Trin­ity uses a known SSH v. 1 exploit to gain access to the server! As her root pass­word, she uses Z1ON1010. Not only does this make her 1337, it is also another easter egg — 1010 is the num­ber 5 in bin­ary (or so I’m told), and if you’ve seen the movie (spoiler alert) you know that Zion in the movie is in its fifth incarn­a­tion. More on this at The Register and Slash­dot, and there’s a nice screen­shot at Insec​ure​.org, the home of Nmap.

Of course, what’s a movie these days without mer­chand­ising? Sam­sung has a ‘lim­ited edi­tion’ ver­sion of one of the phones used in the movie. To me it looks like a for­got­ten prop from Star Trek: The Ori­ginal Series. It looks hideous, the ergo­nom­ics are all wrong, and the screen is too small to do any­thing use­ful. That won’t stop Sam­sung from char­ging a premium for it, or people from buy­ing it. I feel sorry for those people. They obvi­ously have some sort of psy­cho­lo­gical prob­lem that has them con­vinced that they will only have friends if they have the latest mobile tele­phone. If it’s movie-​​themed and a ‘lim­ited edi­tion’, even bet­ter. They may even pur­chase a black trench­coat to go with it. That will alle­vi­ate the symp­tioms of their inferi­or­ity com­plex for a little while, after which they will feel com­pelled to jump onto the next fad. Over-​​consumerism should be treated as a men­tal illness.