Why can MMOs leave you with the worst experience of any gaming genre? The "MM" part. Massively multiplayer games leave plenty of room for you to play with total douchebags. The guys that find it fun to ruin experience of folks new to the game. A game could be the funnest game ever created, but if a level 60 is running around the level 3 area, killing all the monsters before the level 3s can, what's the fun? At your level, killing those level 3 rats is all there is in the game for you. If they're all dead, you get frustrated and quit playing.

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I first saw a post about iArmory a few weeks ago and was blow away by the idea. Elad at Omen of Clarity has developed and is still developing a front end for Blizzard's WoW Armory for iPhones and iPod Touches. It runs great, is very easy to use... I'd love to post some screen shots of it, but it's designed for MobileSafari, and breaks apart some in FireFox. Keep an eyeball on Elad's blog for the first public release. Being able to very quickly reference your +shadow damage while driving to the grocery store may seem like a silly idea. But I've used iArmory a lot already. The full armory site just about breaks my laptop when I load a profile, so my iPhone is really unhappy about the the bulk site.

While browsing the blogosphere, I found a few other folks talking about code commenting. I'm always told by the person in charge, "Comment your code! It's the number one most important thing to do in a project!!!" In college, in a C++ class, my teacher said to comment EVERY line of code. "If you're going to set a variable, say what the variable is, why you're setting it, and how you got the value you're setting it to." He was a fan of one letter variable names, maybe to support his super commenting. He'd like this... I'm glad he was fired...

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Last week, I found that Robert Hoekman, Jr has a new book coming out, Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concept in Action. I told my manager and he immediately got me a copy. I loved Hoekman's first book, Designing the Obvious, so much, I had my manager get a copy for everyone in the group. Hoekman ranks way up there with in the field of usability experts, with Steve Krug, Alan Cooper, Jakob Nielson.... I've found Hoekman's writing style so easy to read and follow. He remains generic enough that his books won't easily become outdated, but is specific enough that you can immediately apply his points. If you're interested in some usability tips, I'd very much recommend picking up his books.

A few days ago I migrated from CF7 to CF8 and from MSSQL 2000 to MSSQL 2005. By my own goof up, I brought the blog down for a few days and now that's it's back up, looks like it re-spammed the coldfusionbloggers aggregation. Before I figured out exactly what was killing my blog, I loaded up the newest version of blogCFC, forgetting about all the changes I made to it. So if you get errors, sorry. I'll have things fixed in a bit.

This is why I love the internet so much. I searched Wikipedia for two revolutionary developments and compared the amount of content each was given.

The Printing Press

2,407 words summarizes the printing press

"In contrast, the impact of Gutenberg's printing press in Europe was comparable to the development of writing, the invention of the alphabet or the Internet, as far as its effects on society."

American Idol, seasons 1-7

27,109 words, over 100 pages with graphical charts showing contestant progress.

It was just brought to my attention that Google Maps was recently updated with more street-view locations and the ability to edit markers. I moved the marker for my house. And now there's a street-view panoramic picture taken right in front of my house! It's eerie to do a search for my house and actually see it. But this made me finally realize the value of street-view pictures. If there's a picture of where you're going, you'll know what you should be looking for in advance. I know that was help lessen how much time I'll spend leaning forward, with the radio turned down, looking for a sign or address.

High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders

I got this book in the mail the other day. I never ordered it, so figured it was a birthday gift from O'Reilly. But I still felt obligated to flip through it and write this little review... not much of a "review", maybe "comment"...

After 11 months of Flex development, the concepts of how to streamline your frontend are starting to fade from my mind. The object for me now is to decrease my SWF's file size, make sure there aren't memory leaks, and make fewer database hits. High Performance Web Sites boils down to the list of concepts on the back cover of the book. Things like "Make few HTTP requests" and "Make JavaScript and CSS external". The studies done on popular websites is interesting, to see just why the site is slow. But maybe I like it because my two most hated sites scored terribly. MSN got an F and MySpace got a D.

To test out and grade your own site, first get Firebug, then YSlow from http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

As an Adobe user group manager, I get 10-20 emails a day from the manager list, folks just chatting. Lately I haven't gotten any. So I checked and they're all in my spam folder.

I was getting so much spam to my google address (really to another address that I have forwarded to google) and one night I was being blasted, 10 spam emails a minute every 7 minutes getting through the spam filters. I checked my inbox to see 147 new messages and 3k spam emails. I must have selected a single email from the manager list while selecting the spam and black listed the address. But I had to shut off mail to the other address. I want to know what the purpose of all this spam is. Is someone really making money off this, or is it done purely to annoy people and stress mail servers?

I'm so evil.

I was talking to my mom last night, telling her how I went to some dive bar the other night. She was being a mom, telling me how dangerous dive bars are. Meanwhile she was getting upset that she couldn't find her usual wireless network. My mom lives in an apartment with lots of unsecured wireless networks floating around. Why pay for internet when someone else is? She couldn't get online, so couldn't pay the bills she wanted to last night. So after the dive bar chiding, I chided her about logging into her banking site on an unsecured, foreign network. I told her they could easily log all the traffic back and forth and get all her passwords and other information. She said, "If they're too stupid to not turn on their network security, they're too stupid to do all that." I told her that's what they want you to think so you'll use their network while they gather login information, credit cards, and other private goodies. She thanked me that she'd be worrying about that all night now.

But thinking about that made me realize how little I know about network security. If the information was sent as clear text over an unsecured, http connection, I'm sure a router could be programmed such that it could scoop out your information. But will an https secured connection prevent that? I don't know. I should know that...