loge.hixie.ch

Hixie's Natural Log

2003-05-26 23:59 UTC Reloaded, finished, not started yet, unconvinced, and good luck

Today I saw Reloaded. Great movie. The fight choreography and special effects are simply amazing, and the plot hangs together surprisingly well given the subject matter. I'm used to science fiction films being totally unrealistic, and computed-related films making no sense at all, but the Matrix series falls into both categories and yet still works. Similarly, the "bullet time" effect has been done by lots of people, especially since the release of the first Matrix film, but as GwieF pointed out, only the Matrix films manage to do it in such a way that it adds to the story rather than distracting from it. (For an extreme example of this and similar effects being abused to the point of jerking the viewer out of suspension of disbelief, see Die Another Day.)

If you haven't seen it yet: Don't forget to stay through to the end of the credits, or you'll miss the Matrix: Revolutions trailer (don't worry, it is spoiler-free).

I also finished the set missions in Vice City today. Woo! Great game. One of my favourites. It even supports widescreen TVs. I wonder what I'll do with my PS2 now, though. I mean, I only bought it to play Vice City, so...

Actually, though, I'm still only at 59% completion. This game has so many sub-games it's just insane. I still have 51 hidden packages to find and a large number of minigames to complete. Playing time: 308 hours. That's not counting the times I failed a mission by dying or being caught and reloaded so I wouldn't lose my arsenal, of course. People wasted: 3177. People wasted by others: 1401. That makes me over twice as deadly as everyone else in Vice City put together!

Road Vehicles destroyed: 1106. Total number of wanted stars attained: 611. Evaded: 454. I assume it doesn't count the stars I evaded by (ahem) saving and immediately reloading... Daily police spending: $72,544. Holy mackrel. As I understand it, that's basically how much street damage I made while driving around like a maniac. Multiplied by the number of in-game days, that's $62,823,104. "Oops". Bullets fired: 973,333. Hit accuracy: 1%. Yes. Well. Moving on, I'm sad that the highest media attention I got was "National TV 4am" (aka 770). I even stole a tank and went on rampages around the city, how can it be so low? Or rather, how do you get it higher? My criminal rating is Fixer (4165).

Now, Kam has started working on the Pyoro client, so I may have to start working on the Pyoro server soon; and GwieF has started working on the Voidwars single-process server, so I may have to start working on a sample client implementation soon; and I've been getting ideas on Void, so I may have to start working on both the client and server parts of that. Plus there's all my CSSWG commitments, like the 2.1 test suite and other specs, and I'm trying to outline a plan for reorganising Bugzilla in line with the new direction Mozilla is taking (should be out around the same time we release 1.4), and I'm actually reading my bugmail these days so there's probably lots of bug INVALIDating to do.

I was most amused by recent comments on bug 25537. I now think I've had every possible argument put forward for showing alt attributes in tooltips: It helps authors and it hinders authors, it helps users and it hinders users, it gives too much control to the author and it gives not enough control to the author, it is presentation and it is semantic, it will encourage good behaviours and it will encourage bad behaviours, it is against the spec and it is not against the spec, it is standard behaviour and it is non-standard behaviour, we will never get any market share if this isn't fixed, we should display the alt attribute only, the title attribute only, the alt and the title attribute together, the alt and the title attribute at the same time but in separate bubbles, the alt attribute if the title attribute is missing, the title attribute if the alt attribute is missing, there should be a pref, there shouldn't be a pref, it should be the default, it shouldn't be the default, add-on packs make this bug irrelevant, add-on packs aren't enough and this bug is still relevant... All of which, of course, misses the whole point of why we WONTFIXed this bug in the first place: Authors should use title attributes if they want tooltips, and we don't want to encourage authors to use alt attributes instead, since those should contain alternate text, not additional text as given in tooltips.

In all fairness to the person primarily leading the most recent request for this bug to be reopened, though, he has been giving the most persuasive arguments so far.

Finally, good luck to anyone taking exams at the moment. I hope the results come back better than you hoped.