"Do we have free will?"

An article linked from slashdot claims, or seems to claim, that in at least some cases, we have no free will.
Horse manure.
Free will is the ability to chose. Simply having a tendency to do something doesn't mean you had to do it. A child cannot be help responsible because it can't really make a choice - it doesn't have the required mental facilities yet. Neither can someone with an IQ of below 40, or someone insane.
But for all the rest of us, we are what we make of ourselves. So I'm lazy by nature, tough shit. Should society pay me an allowance to sit on my butt all day and play WoW?!

The ideas that people come up with... sheesh...

WoW, Life and Everything

The View From the Top is an article from a former WoW player who quit WoW because of the negative impact it had on his life. The comments on that blog, and on the follow-up articles - The View From the Top: Redux and Warcraft: Another Point of View could fill a small book and are interesting in their own right. I won't talk about the article, except to say I found both the original and the "Another Point of View" insightful.

One thing I found interesting, were some comments that talk about what people do in WoW as if it "has no meaning", that the rewards are just "pixels on a screen" and therefore a waste of time. For me, those people just don't get it. They know the answer is 42, but they don't get the question :)

Life isn't always about tangible things. Examples are too numerous to list, think up of some yourselves :) WoW is just another intangible - perhaps once removed compared to some of the examples you could think of, but no less intangible for it, if you follow me.

Certainly, it's hard to compare the friends I've made on WoW with my RL friends, but while different, they are no less real and certainly no less friends. As for the items from the game, the satisfaction I get from them is no less real then the satisfaction I get from buying a new music CD - and the "utility" is about the same.

For different people, life has different meanings. WoW is about pure fun (or should be). So if you think something that has little tangible benefits is not for you, doesn't fit your view of what life is about, then playing WoW makes little sense to you. But don't make the mistake of thinking your view of life holds for all of us. I know, this wasn't what the original article was about (it was about taking things to excess), but I'm just talking about a few of the comments.

Keep having fun :)
Solid

Guild Enchanter

So yesterday my GM offered me the job of Guild Enchanter, and I said yes. Should be interesting :)

DC Issues - stop saying it's our fault!

Posted on http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=23022342&sid=1


Dear Blizzard,
Hundreds of players have posted on your forums, regarding the issue of frequent disconnects ("DC") during raiding (or Battlegrounds), especially in BWL, that have started since the hardware upgrades. Probably thousands have experienced the problems but have not bothered to complain on the forums.

Your only replies, when you have bothered to reply, is to say that the DC are our fault - our network cards, our Internet connections, our drivers. Please stop it. Seriously, what is more likely - that thousands of separate people have suddenly and without reason all started to develop problems, or that the problem is with you?

How does a BWL raid look for my guild these days? And from what I hear, both on the game and in these forums, for other guilds? As people join the raid and enter the BWL staging area, they will start getting DC. The DC hits random people, happens a lot (on average once per 5 min) and at any given time, out of about 40 people, there will be about 5-10 people DC at any given time. Obviously, this makes the raid impossible. People have complained and posted screenshots on other threads, so don't claim this is not a wide-spread problem!

Unlike lag or some other problems, none of the reasons given by you on this thread:
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=16591863&sid=1
Have any bearing on such a severe problem. No, 40 people have not all suddenly started sharing their accounts, loading their networks with file-sharing programs, working wireless or using Sky DSL. Nor is this a problem with the character itself, as other raid instances seem to be okay (we tried AQ40) with exactly the same character. So Blizzard, please stop insulting us, your customers. Please stop saying it's our fault and make us jump through hoops to provide you with useless technical information that has no bearing on the subject.

Here is a quote from a NY-Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/technology/05wow.html):
“Ultimately, what I’d like is for the user to feel like they are having a very polished entertainment experience,” said Mike Morhaime, 38, Blizzard’s president (and a gamer since he first encountered Pong in 1976). “We’d like players to associate our name with quality, so if they see a box on the shelf and it says Blizzard Entertainment, they don’t need to know anything more than that.”

Is this a "polished entertainment experience" Is this quality? No, it is not! Nor is this any way to treat your customers. Just because your main markets are Asia and the US does not mean we, your European customers, should get second-hand treatment! We are paying customers! Acknowledge you have a problem, deal with is, and keep us updated on the progress. But stop blaming us, our computers, our connections, for this problem!

Review of online word processors

Linux.com has a very nice hands-on review of online word processors, including Writely. Finally, a review that doesn't gush mindlessly over how great these apps are just because they're "web2.0". The review is honest, in-depth and pretty much shreds all of the reviewed apps into little pieces :)

My favourite sentence:

these products sometimes seem like an online regression to typewriters, a technology that few of us who suffered through it would care to see revived.

Priceless :)

EQdkp and WoWRoster added to guild website

Yesterday our guild leader added EQdkp and WoWRoster to our guild website. All I can say is way cool :)

Really, now that I've seen them, I think these are must have tools for any guild. If you're playing WoW in a guild and your site doesn't yet use these, bug your GM till he agrees to install them - he'll thank you in the end ;)

Tried out Writely... not impressed

Following my last post, I registered to and tried out Writely. Well, what can I say. I am not impressed.
Yes, Writely does basic word processing. Very basic...
Oh sure, the ability to export to a variety of formats is nice and I suppose the ability to collaborate is cool. But before you export something or collaborate on something, you need content - and the current feature set of Writely takes me back to Word, circa Windows 3.11. Heck, IIRC even that version of Word had more features then the current Writely does.

• Want to change the spacing of letters? No can do.
• Want to create and use your own text/paragraph styles? Nope.
• Want to insert formulas? Can't.
• Selection of fonts or special symbols - sadly lacking.
• Built-in library of images - none.

I really have to wonder about the sanity of the many online pundits forecasting the emergence of a web office suite to rival Microsoft Office, based on Writely. I seriously doubt any of them has actually tried Writely. Or maybe they have, and simply don't have many demands :)

If Writely were a one-man project by a student or single developer, I'd be impressed by it's current state - but I'd still think it needs more work.

As it is, while I have no idea how much Google paid for Writely, I have to wonder at their reasoning. As a very simple and basic text editing Widget, Writely is fantastic, and if all Google want to do is use it to enhance Gmail and Blogger - more power to them. But if they really think they can get people to work on this instead of a real word processing application, they are in for a rude awakening...

Google Text Entry Interfaces

So currently I use Gmail and now Blogger, both of them Google services. I've also heard of writely, which is another company that Google has bought, I guess not long ago.

Now here's the odd thing - you'd think that a company such as Google, renowned for it's web-savvy and AJAX know-how, would standardise the text entry widget across its services, taking the best features from all of them, and keeping only specific features needed by one service and not another. But no...
Instead, we have a mess of features, badly-working and feature-incomplete widgets. Google, have your wits left you?!

The Blogger interface:
As you can see, the blogger interface is pretty basic. Although you can directly edit the HTML (which means you can do anything HTML let's you), for the basic user, the options are limited. In addition, at least on Firefox, the buttons act a bit quirky - if you double click a word and hit the button for bold, the button will remain "pressed" as you continue writing other text, although the other text is not bold!
The URL linking mechanism is incredibly simplistic, allowing you only to type an address and hit either OK or Cancel - that's it.
The picture insertion feature works okay but for some reason the pictures appear at the top of the document, instead of where the cursor currently is, and have to be drag-n-dropped (or cut-n-pasted) manually into position. And you can forget about inserting anything else, such as you can in a Word document.
At least the spell-checker works as expected, no complaints there.
I haven't tested any other features.

• Update - as a new user (I guess), I'm already using the new "beta" interface. I read that in the old interface even the spell-checker was lousy to use. Poor old-Blogger users... :)
  

The Gmail interface:

The Gmail text entry widget actually has 2 modes, "Plain text" and the one you can see above which is the "Rich text" editor. Now that's a rich joke :)
The duel-mode operation makes a lot of sense for emails and I have no quarrel with it - on the contrary, I would not use Gmail if it only let me send HTML emails!
But if you think the Gmail "Rich text" editor looks a lot like the blogger one, you'd be right. For some reason the problems I saw with the Blogger buttons don't happen on the Gmail interface, but that's about the only positive thing I can say for the Gmail interface - it's as feature-lacking as the Blogger one. Worse, it doesn't even give you the option of directly editing the HTML, leaving the power-user stuck without any options...
The Gmail spell-checker allows you to chooser a language to check, the Blogger one does not.
The Gmail icon for "Remove Formatting" is an underlined "T" with a red "x" at the bottom, the Blogger one is a small eraser. Go figure...
There are a few other differences (text color/font handling, picture insertion), I won't list them all here. The point is, for two interfaces which share almost the same function, these differences are annoying and puzzling. Plus, the general lack of advanced editing features in both makes them less usable, at least in my eyes.

The Writely interface:
I haven't signed-up for Writely, so all I'm writing here is based on this screenshot which is available on the writely.com front page, and from the "Tour" you can take, also from the front-page.
Writely bills itself as the "Web Word Processor", so I would expect it to be more feature-rich then the basic interfaces Gmail and Blogger offer. Based on the screenshot, it's obvious this is true. After going through the "Tour", I was also impressed that Writely offers many if not all of the commonly used "Word Processing" options that I use when writing a "rich document" (as opposed to a "text document").
In addition to all of its bells and whistles, Writely also seems to have the ability to publish directly to a blog, so I guess you could just stop using the Blogger interface and write all your blog posts from there. I think I'll do just that :)

But if Writely is so great, why force the user to go to another site and register yet again, simply to use functionality that should have been available in the first place? Why not standardise on the Writely interface for all the sites? Sure, some options would remain unique to one service and not the other - for an email, you attach files and send the email. For a blog, you may want to preview your work before publishing it. But there's no excuse* for the many differences which currently exist between the three interfaces, differences which have no reason, as the interfaces belong to products of the same company and which have many similar or even identical goals!

As always, your comments are welcome. Especially of any Google employees :)

* Well there is the excuse, the products are free, and I guess you get what you pay for. But that is a poor excuse at best... (pun intended :))

First Post

I don't know what is a customary way to open a blog. So I'll just start and hope for the best :)

I'll start with the title and URL.
I play World of Warcraft, and my main character there is a Human mage called SolidState. The blogspot URL "solidstate" was already taken, so I chose solid-state as a compromise. This also explains the title.

Now a little more about me - I'm a 33 years old Israeli, work as a CAD/Physical Design engineer, am married and will soon be a dad :)

Why this blog?
I'm not sure, to be honest. I've heard about blogs since they pretty much started but was never drawn to write one. Between my work, family, playing WoW (well when blogging started it was anther game :)) and writing the occasional Perl script (I'm a Perl buff, yeah :)) I don't have a lot of spare time.
But recently I heard about the new Blogger look and this got me thinking about the subject again. Sure, what I write may only be of interest to me, but at least I'll be able to write down the occasional fleeting thought, and revisit it in some future date. Who knows, maybe my random ramblings will even interest some other people...

So what will this blog be about?
Anything I find of interest - WoW, Perl, computers, interesting websites, math, physics, movies, etc. I'm not going to limit myself :)

If you've read this far, leave me a note, share an idea or thought - I promise to read, even if I don't respond.