Planet Koalabs

On July 26th right before midnight, I went to my local EB Games store to get my copy of StarCraft 2: Wings Of Liberty. After waiting an hour to get it, I got back home and launched the installation right away. It took another hour to copy the 12GB required.

I was a bit anxious that the game wouldn’t run smoothly on my modest computer. But it was perfectly playable in high settings. The only slowdown I experienced was during a huge battle with many units on the screen. The game looks good. As usual Blizzard relies the skill of its artists and designers to make a beautiful game; unlike others that rely on fancy visual effects and raw processing power.

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StarCraft 2 takes a lot of time to load. Each level, and each cut scene loads for 10 seconds or more. It would be fine if this was just once in a while, but it happens quite often when playing the campaign. This spoils what would otherwise be a great single-player experience. The loading screen is not Alt-Tab friendly. Each time you switch from the game to another application it takes 10 seconds or more to switch to the other application. Switching back to StarCraft 2 is even longer. I don’t know if that’s because I don’t have enough memory or if it’s the game.

Update: Lowering the Textures detail or/and the Graphic settings decreased loading time a lot. The problem might be that I only have 2GB of memory. With textures at medium and graphic details at low the game loads very quickly, but it’s not pretty to look at.

I played 15 hours, and experienced 3 crashes. That’s a crash every 5 hours. This is disappointing; especially from Blizzard, which usually releases high-quality products. I think they could have spend more time polishing the code and getting the last bugs out instead of working on all those fancy cut-scenes during the campaign. Those crashes and bugs should be fixed by future patches, but it’s still annoying when you have to reload the game after a lengthy loading screen.

The campaign

I played the campaign with the normal level of difficulty. It was a bit too easy: I didn’t fail any mission. I’ll probably replay the campaign in hard soon.

Overall the campaign is much better than what was in the original StarCraft and WarCraft 3. Blizzard must have spent a lots of time and resources on it. The story is good, there are no “filler” mission, and the cut-scenes are gorgeous. Even if you don’t play online, the game is well worth it.

There are a few bonuses, like challenges that will help you improve game. The first set of challenges explains you which unit to use to counter other units. It’s a good way to get ready for the online game.

I have yet to play online. Blizzard now have a new system where players are divided into leagues. This way if you’re a beginner you are very unlikely to play against somebody much stronger than you.

Overall I am a bit mixed about StarCraft 2. That’s mostly because I had such high expectations for it. The game is great, but the glitches are hard to ignore.

I’ve never been a fan of the name MailNG so I’ve changed it, I hope you will not find it too ugly…

At the same time, I’ve just finished a new website, dedicated to Modoboa presentation. From now, project management and presentation are splitted.

Here are the new addresses :

• Official website
• Project page

Finally, I’ve renamed this google group, its new address is modoboa-users@googlegroups.com.

Last week I’ve left Image-Engine, the visual effect company where I’ve worked for almost 2 years. It was a great experience, I worked with the teams behind the aliens of District 9, the explosions and crashes of The Losers, and the werewolves of the upcoming Twilight Eclipse.

As much as I liked it, I wanted to be my own boss for a long time. After 3 years in Canada, I now have enough savings to start building something on my own. It’s exciting and scary, even if I have a strong technical knowledge, I have zero business and marketing experience. That’s a great occasion to learn.

My plans are still fuzzy. I’m hoping I’ll be able to find a viable idea for a bootstrapped company this summer and start working on it. Success would be good, but failure wouldn’t be dramatic: all I’d lose would be 3 years of savings, for 2 years of hand-on experience in the world of business. Given how much an MBA or an engineering school cost, I think I can hardly find a better deal.

Dear all,

I’m really happy to announce that the first RC for the next major version of MailNG is out!!

What’s new :
* Simple webmail extension,
* Online parameters handling,
* Graphical layout update,
* Many updates and code refactoring on the admin panel and existing extensions,
* SQL schema migrations handled using south.

This an RC version, certainly containing some bugs so please, don’t be too hard with me

You can find the tarball here.

Invalid character: A password should only contains vowels, odd numbers, and be at least 17 characters long.

I’m tired to see systems where I can’t enter the password “I love chocolate”, because spaces are not allowed. I am tired of systems which require me to use at least 1 uppercase letter, 1 lowercase letter, and 1 number but let you enter a 3 characters password. “my fancy password is very secret” is much more resistant to brute force attacks than “aA1”.

Instead of coming up with stupid rules that don’t really protect anything, use a password strength meter and let the user enters what the hell he wants! People are not stupid, they know that their bank password is more important than their Reddit’s password. If I want to have “123” as a password, that’s my reponsability.

Another article from the Economist talking about how TV influence real life. In the show “24”, the hero —Jack Bauer— tortures terrorists to extract information. Most people watching the show believe that torture is a efficient way of getting information. If it works for Jack Bauer, it must work in real life, right?

The medias affect our view of the world events as well as every day life. Romantic movies, series, and books make us expect to have a very agitated sentimental life, when in fact, our sentimental life is mostly boring. Kurt Vonnegut explained that beautifully in his talks:

“[...] Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

People want life to be like TV, and books. Fortunately real life is boring and predictable.

When you get a message from someone using a free email service like Hotmail or Yahoo mail, you might get irritating ads at the end of the message. Apparently gadget makers think this is a pretty neat idea. The so-called smart phones also have this “feature”. Here’s what I sometime get at the end of my Emails:

Sent from my BlackBerry

Sent from my iPhone

Sent from my iPad

Sent from my Nexus One

And worst of all:

Sent from my Verizon Wireless Blackberry

If I had one of those devices I would try to delete this junk right away. Nobody sane would write “Sent from my PC while eating Nachos” at the end of every single mails, right? Well no ... It turns out that some people are already doing this kind of thing. On hardware forums you will see signatures like this:

Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.2GHz, Sapphire HD5850 Toxic Edition, Intel X-25M 80GB SSD, ASUS P6TD Deluxe, Corsair TX850, Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1600 RAM, Corsair H50 Hydro Series

The fellas posting this kind of information on Internet aren’t trying to get help to make sure all their computer’s components are compatible. They are bragging about how great their computer is. I think this is the same with smart-phones, people don’t delete these signatures because it makes them feel good. What’s the point of owning a Ferrari if you can’t show it to the world? “Man, I have an iPhone 3G; aren’t you impressed?”

Side note: the headers User-Agent or X-Mailer are supposed to contain information about the Mail User Agent. It looks like the right place to put something like ‘Sent from my’, but none of those devices add these headers. Not visible enough I guess.

We are easily fooled by fiction. Even when we know something is fiction, we tend to think it also applies to real life. After reading this article from The Economist, I was reminded how much influence TV have on people’s world view.

The article is about the television drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”. People watching the show think they understand how forensic science works, when they don’t. CSI is partially based on “real science”, for example they use DNA to identify suspect. But the parallel with reality stops here. How those methods are depicted is complete fiction.

In 2005, I worked on an Automated Fingerprint Identification System. It is used by police forces around the world. It works very differently from what’s showed on television. Identifying people by their fingerprints is a slow and labour intensive process. Technology helps, but most of the work it still done by humans. It takes weeks to look for a matching suspect in the database, and that’s if the suspect is in the database. Most of the time he’s not.

In the excellent book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion there’s a paragraph explaining how an actor playing a doctor in the TV series appeared in a drug adverts. People knew he was an actor, and yet the viewers were fooled. They believed that he had some authority on the subject, like a real doctor. They associated the guy with his role.

You can’t really blame TV and the medias for that. They have to be entertaining. Waiting 2 weeks to get a result from the lab is not exactly fun. When things are fast, it’s fun, it’s engaging.

We’re fooled by fiction, and we know it. Our brain simply hasn’t made the link. Just by stepping back a little bit and think about things we could act much more rationally.

I increasingly rely on Lynx to surf the web. Lynx is a text web browser, no graphic, just text. I also uses Readability, a Firefox extension that removes all the useless junk around content. But I might stop using it soon. Lynx seems to be better in most cases.

Because Lynx is just text: I see the work I care about, the work of the writer. When I read an article, the only thing I care about is the article. Not the stupid logo, not the obnoxious ads, not the ridiculous “web-design” that gets in my way.

Because I use Lynx: I don’t have to endure the obnoxious design choice made by people who don’t have a clue. I don’t need to suffer debilitating typographical choices: The number 1 usability problem in 2005 was unreadable fonts. This is still true in 2010. And it will get worst, because HTML 5 allows morons to use custom fonts in their already ugly pages.

Because lynx just displays text, most of these problems are solved. No pictures, no tables, and no CSS. Lynx uses the terminal font, it’s always the font I’ve chosen. This isn’t perfect, monospaced fonts aren’t ideal to read prose. But at least I can read it.

Using Lynx has nice side effect: It’s harder to surf with it. With Firefox I tend to open pages in a new tab every time I see something that might be interesting. Because there's no tab with Lynx, I don’t do that. I stay focussed on the subject at hand.

I’ve just installed an automated script on koalabs that generates development tarballs of MailNG. It runs once a day and includes the content of the last changeset available at that time.

You can find tarballs here.