James's Weblog

Some people might think that I’m crazy for complaining about free services, but squeaky wheels get grease, and I truly believe that these wheels need greasing.

Most free Wi-Fi hotspots require accepting a EULA before they can be used, and they usually accomplish this by intercepting a user’s first attempt to view a web page and by showing a web page with their EULA form instead. This isn’t so unreasonable, but pretty much every EULA page that I’ve seen sucks.

• EULA requirements disrupt service. While most Internet traffic involves the web, there are still other protocols that aren’t uncommon. Some Wi-Fi hotspots block all traffic until the EULA is accepted, but this means that things such as email and instant messaging applications can fail without providing any explanation why. Admittedly, I don’t think that this is fully the fault of the hotspots themselves since they can’t control the error messages (or the lack of them) in the individual applications. Perhaps some standardization effort is warranted here.
• Most EULA pages are not designed for mobile devices with small screens. Free Wi-Fi hotspots might have been predominantly used by laptops not so long ago, but smartphones with Wi-Fi are becoming increasingly prevalent. At least on my Palm Pre, I almost always have to zoom in and to do a lot of scrolling to find the checkbox or button to accept the EULA, and then I have to zoom in some more so that it’s big enough to tap on.
• Most EULA pages don’t automatically redirect to the original destination. If I go through the effort to type out a web page address on my tiny keyboard only to be redirected to a EULA page, at least redirect me to my original destination after I accept the EULA. Don’t make me type out the address again.

In some cases, free Wi-Fi hotspots actually do me more harm than good. Since I have an unlimited data service through Sprint, if my phone suddenly decides to use a free Wi-Fi hotspot instead of my cellular data service, I suddenly have to deal with all of the EULA nonsense (or, as mentioned before, things just start mysteriously failing).

Unfortunately, there aren’t strong economic incentives to fix issues with free things. Alas.

In recent years, Adobe Flash has been a prime target for malicious hackers in which to find security exploits. (Don’t even get me started on the security vulnerability of the week in Adobe Reader.) Additionally, in the era of the zombie PC apocalypse, compromised computers hurt everybody.

It’s therefore crucial that users update Flash on their systems to patch known exploits, yet Adobe strangely makes it harder than necessary to update Flash.

Upon booting my computer, an automatic Flash update tool notices that my installed version is out-of-date. (It’s no longer a good time to check for updates on boot; many people reboot very seldomly these days.)

Clicking the “Install” button then shows:

This is even worse on Vista or Windows 7 since they will require an additional UAC prompt. There are three prompts asking the user the same thing. When you ask someone a question, then ask again, “Are you sure?”, and yet again, “Are you really sure?”, some people are liable to change their minds.

I admit it’s unfair for me to complain about the UAC prompt since that’s outside of Adobe’s control, but their own, second installation prompt is simply goofy. Moreover, all the EULA nonsense gets in the way too. They should avoid introducing reasons for people to change their mind.

Thankfully, it does seem that Adobe again lets people download the Flash installer manually without using their silly Adobe Download Manager browser plug-in.

The “James” part is old, but somehow I didn’t make an ambigram of “Lin” before (although it also looks like “417”).

May 28, 2018 update:
I made an updated version that tries to make “Lin” look less like “Liin” and gave it a black background.

Yesterday everyone in VMware R&D was invited to a company holiday party. The invitation read: “If you are attending the party, you will be allowed to leave work at 3:00 in order to get to the party on time.” A lot of us were slightly insulted by the wording. (The company’s privileged to have us working there, right?)

I finally got around to watching the Watchmen movie. (Yeah, I know I’m late to the party. I meant to watch it in theaters, but my plans fell through, and by then everyone else had seen it already.) I have to agree with Ben’s remarks: I liked it, but I didn’t love it.

Even in the director’s cut, a lot of things from the comics were omitted, but that’s to be expected. I was a bit disappointed that some things were left out (mostly involving Rorschach’s origin). I was skeptical that Watchmen would work as a film—a lot of what makes Watchmen great is how it takes advantage of the comics medium. The movie adapts it as well as probably can be expected; it does an admirable job, but by itself I think it falls a bit flat. It’s too late to be groundbreaking, and I think familiarity with the comics is necessary to appreciate the movie.

(Spoilers below.)

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So I finally bought an Xbox 360, pretty much just to see if Limbo is as good as I’ve been hearing. (My verdict is that is that it is a really good physics-based puzzle game, but it’s not mind-bending like Braid, which I like much better. And anyone who hasn’t played Braid yet must do so.)

Getting the Xbox 360 set up was surprisingly difficult. When I went to set up my new Xbox 360, I had the choice between creating a new “Gamertag” (a.k.a. a unique user name for their online Xbox Live service) or signing in using an existing one. I chose to create a new one, having completely forgotten that I had bought a Windows game last year that already associated a Gamertag with my existing Windows Live/MSDN account.

The Gamertag creation screen on the Xbox 360 asked me for an email address and a password so it could log-in to (or create) a Windows Live account. Entering the credentials to my Windows Live account showed an error message saying that my account already had a Gamertag associated with it, but it neither switched to it automatically nor told me what my existing Gamertag was. It instead suggested that I use a different Windows Live account. (Really? I need to use a different email address?)

Signing in with an existing Gamertag (which kind of confusingly is under “Recover Gamertag”) requires that I know my Gamertag first.

I went to a PC to log in to my Windows Live account to see if I could determine my Gamertag there. None of the account settings or information pages listed it. Eventually I stumbled onto the Xbox Live website itself, which (because I was still signed in to Windows Live) prominently showed my Gamertag.

• Gamertag creation and Gamertag “recovery” should be merged into a single sign-in flow. It should ask for a Gamertag or an email address, each along with a password. It then should sign-in to an existing account or should create a new account if one doesn’t already exist. (The Xbox Live website already lets people sign in with an email address and a password; why doesn’t the console?) This also would avoid the misleading “Gamertag recovery” name.
• Windows Live should make it easier to see Microsoft services associated with the account, and in this case, it should clearly indicate the account’s Gamertag in the account information screen.

At least it’s only a one-time pain, and admittedly most users wouldn’t run into that.

One of things I lamented when I replaced my Treo with a Pre was that since the Pre uses a capacitive touchscreen, it doesn’t use a stylus, so I no longer had my Treo’s combination stylus/ballpoint pen wherever I went. There have been numerous times where the pen came in handy, and after I switched to the Pre, there have been numerous times where I’ve found myself not having a pen when I needed one. I’ve been looking for a good wallet pen as a substitute but haven’t found anything appealing:

• The Wallet Pen—the one recommended by Oprah—is $50 (a 3-pack costs a staggering $125). I think Oprah must be one of the few people who thinks it’s affordable. If I put that in my wallet, it’d be the most valuable thing in it.
• The Derringer Pen is much cheaper at $8 (a 5-pack costs $32), although that still seems expensive to my inner miser.
• The FoldzFlat pen is a cheap plastic pen for $2 (or $25 for a stainless version) that folds into the form factor of a thick credit card. This is the right price, but my wallet has enough credit card-sized things in it already.

Last week the obvious occurred to me: I could carry the stylus/pen from my Treo in my wallet. Duh. It’s thin, it has a sturdy metal barrel, and it even has a cap. It doesn’t have a clip, but I think that’s okay since a clip would add to the bulk. I think it’s thinner than either the Wallet Pen or the Derringer pen. It fits easily but snugly into the bill compartment of my wallet.

The price is reasonable: it’s effectively free for me since I bought a 3-pack of them years ago, but normally a 3-pack costs around $10–15. It’s a third-party accessory, and there are various companies that produce and sell different versions for different PDAs, so it’s possible to shop around too.

I saw Avatar in 3-D on New Year’s Eve with a bunch of my cousins. Impressions (spoilers ahead):

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