Excel 2007 definitely got the short end of the stick in the 2007 revamp*. About the best thing is the new features: fancy conditional formatting is now super-easy and provides impressive visualisation. The rest of it is just as quirky and unfriendly as before. Take this dialog, which has about 8 things wrong with it. This file was created using Excel 2k4 on the Mac. The message says there is a “REMOTE POSSIBILITY” that this “later version” of Excel has properties that 2k7 will destroy.

Wow. What hyperbole. And the message is completely wrong. Although Mac Office is a different product with possible incompatibilities, *I’m* not supposed to know that. And guess what? 2007 is newer than 2004. So maybe Excel 2007 should check for actual 2004->2007 incompatibilities instead of trying to minimise the probable non-problem with hyperbole. Second, as you can see underneath the message box, I am in fact using *2007*-specific conditional formatting. That’s what it should be warning me about.

This is besides the classic mistakes of super-long lines of text, uncopyable dialog text, an application-modal dialog, uninformative button names with ‘press 1 for preserve, 2 for continue’ that should just be “Save Copy” “Cancel” “Continue", followed by “Continue saving?” in an attempt to patch it up.

I guess I can’t knock Excel as a useful statistical visualisation tool, but it sure is annoying to use. Maybe Apple’s Numbers is better…
Well, I can’t get it for free, so who cares?

EDIT: I should make it clear that I like what Excel does for me a lot, and for a certain class of people Excel is very usable. I’m not really the target audience. I should also point out that if you’re viewing this post on a small screen, you’ll have to guess the total size of the dialogue because you can’t see it all. If you can see the OK button, figure that as *half* the width of the dialogue. I guess Excel decided that since I have a Wiiiide screen that it should take advantage of it.

*I have never used Access 2k7, so maybe it’s just as unimpressive.

I only use b2evolution because that’s what comes with my hosting. I run into problems regularly because of its HTML linguistic prescriptivism: it wants you to write its idea of perfect HTML; maybe this is XHTML, maybe not. I don’t know, because its PHP-infested error messages are so bad. Furthermore, it is obviously using incapable, incomplete regular expressions to do its HTML checking, because I’m pretty sure that tags like br and img allow an optional space between the tag name and the slash, and that in normal HTML, that slash isn’t even required.

I just had five minutes of trouble trying to post an img because it turns out the order has to be precisely: <img src="whatever"/> with no spaces between the “, the / and the >. I don’t think this is required by the HTML standard, but by whatever holey regular expressions the prescriptivists at b2evolution slapped together in PHP.

I don’t know how many of my readers are WoW addicts, or recovering WoW addicts, but either way you might find it funny to know that some researchers at IU spend their time analysing chat in WoW. Here’s the abstract from a talk they’re giving this Friday. (The researchers are Susan Herring and John Paolillo if you want to learn more)

While multiplayer online games (MOGs) such as World of Warcraft have attracted much scholarly attention in recent years, and while such games often allow for text chat during play, the uses and characteristics of MOG chat remain largely unexplored. How actively do users chat, with whom, about what, and how coherently, when they are shooting enemies and dodging blows in a fast-paced virtual gaming environment? In this talk, we report on a study in progress of public chat conversations in BZFlag, an open source capture-the-flag type game in which user avatars are tanks. We discuss how we arrived at decisions about data capture, sampling, and methods of analysis, and present preliminary results regarding BZFlag as a conversational environment and the coherence of conversations that occur there. MOG chat is a type of convergent media CMC, that is, computer-mediated communication bundled into a media product in which user-to-user communication is a secondary goal. As such, the findings from this study contribute to a larger ongoing project aimed at exploring trends toward media convergence and their effects on online communication.

Notice a couple of things. First, the odd abbreviation MOG. I thought these things were called MMOs. Second, IIRC, in capture-the-flag games only *bots* use text chat. Everybody else just yells good old-fashioned insults*. At least that’s what I remember from the LAN party this year…

*And as I recall from my years at C of O, this is true even if the opponent is not in the room.

—my handwrists hurt already

iTunes has some real Klunkers sometimes. I don’t actually buy music there since I like having an automatic backup copy of my music on a stupid plastic disc, but I was listening to some Pink Floyd I’m thinking of buying. At one point I found a link to this:

The Electronic Tribute To Pink Floyd, Vol 2

The tracks are all different styles of ‘electronic’:

1. Moby/BjØrk
2. some kinda ambient robot
3. crappy Euro MOD
4. bad trance
5. more ambient
6. um, normal, except with funky synth pads in the background? The ORIGINAL was more electronic than this!
7. oh joy MORE crappy MOD. I can get this stuff for free from, like, scene.org or something. Seriously, Geroge Bush sucks.
8. I guess progressive? this was OK until a BjØrk wannabe started singing. But I haven’t heard the original, either.
9. Ambient again … booooorring
10. Indie-tronic. Version. Of. ‘Young Lust’.

Full disclosure: I own and paid for the reggae cover “Dub Side of the Moon” and kind of like it. The two albums are worlds apart.

I just got back from the Annual November LAN, put on by the St Louis graduates of the C of O CS program. This year, Andrew Reiter (Butch) hosted for the third time, and did a great job once again.

For us, a LAN party is strong escapism. Most of the players use it as an opportunity to let off steam in a way that’s not allowed socially except with people that are very close, a sort of geek Fight Club. For me, I don’t have the same pressures* in daily life, but I treat the LAN party as a chance to forget that I have dedicated some years to a tiresome quest of questionable value, the kind that makes you feel guilty about playing games after thirty minutes. For all of us, we make a conscious effort to forget our day-to-day way of thinking.

The LAN party is also a great chance to catch up with old friends annually. It’s amazing how little we have changed, at the core. In this environment, you can see that we’re basically the same people as in college. Thomack still has an acerbic wit, Rose is still pretty klutzy, I’m still the oddball, and Jeremy still sleeps all the time. The married ones don’t appear to have changed much either, at least for the weekend, even the ones with kids. The camaradarie of old friends makes it easier to forget the changes of the last few years and go back to our days together in college.

*In academia, there are a lot fewer stupid people you have to deal with, although the number of annoying ones is about the same. Plus you’re allowed to argue quite vociferously as long as it’s about academic stuff.