Plan 9 From Outer Space

Just finished consuming Ed Wood, an entertaining picture about the infamous director, when I found that his magnum opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space, is available on Google Video for free. It’s an epic story, sincerely executed. And — if you overlook the parts that are batshit insane — it’s a telling cautionary tale about the dangers of raising the dead to combat weapons of mass destruction.

Beautiful Comments Form

More fun than blogging is redesigning my blog. So I’m working on that. I’ve decided this template is not representative. Early comments are positive…

I’m mentioning this because, once again, Mr. Powazek is super-inspirational. Take a look at the comments form from his photo site, Ephemera. The little thumbnail of the photo at the top is brilliant.

I love to gaze at good designs like this (and these) and wish I had teh hotx skills.

Testing Web Pages

I feel compelled to make a quick shoutout for JWebUnit, a unit testing framework for web pages. Basically, it’s an embedded Java HTTP client that allows you to programmatically access URLs, inspect pages, manipulate forms, and click links.

This is useful because it lets you write tests against web app behavior. So, if you change, say, Blogger, you can run tests to ensure that it’s still possible to post and comment, and that the access control works, and that posts show up right, etc.

I’ve — up until now — mostly scoffed at automated web testing. This is because it really doesn’t address design concerns, and doesn’t do heavy lifting on issues like cross-browser compatibility.

But, I’ve been working a bit on the Blogger comments form, and I have to admit I’m really quite pleased to have the confidence in my changes that passing the automated tests gives. If you’re curious about why this is necessary, play around with your comments settings and access the comments page in various states of logged in and not. Given all the possible combinations, it’s really necessary to ensure that each little permutation works the way it’s supposed to.

So, I’m pretty happy, but one major flaw in JWebUnit is that it doesn’t let you change hidden form fields. While this is authentic in that well-behaved user agents don’t let users change hidden form fields, but I’d much rather have tests to make sure that if a curious or malicious user did start playing around with those, the app would behave reasonably, or at least blow up without letting anyone do anything they shouldn’t.

Super-Mega Blogger Shiny!

I’m pumped that a widget I made just got released in the first volley of Google widgets for the Mac OS X Dashboard! You can use it to publish to your Blogger blogs. I posted a full introduction over at Blogger Buzz.

This was a lot of fun to do both programming-wise (something I posted about before) and design-wise. It gave me a chance to exercise my limited — but growing — Photoshop skills to make the window and buttons. Gradients are totally my friends now.

I like the Dashboard design philosophy of get in quickly, do something straightforward, and get out. The widget is paired down to the minimum settings (which blog, and whether to show the title field… “sorry” to those who like the link field) and minimum operations (save draft and publish). You can make things bold and italic with the obvious key commands, but there’s no toolbar. I even dumped resizing and a scrollbar for simple auto-expand (though this may be revisited).

I think this works well because the widget can leverage the full Blogger editor through the “Save as Draft” button. When you click that, the post gets saved, and a link pops up that can take you directly to editing that post in the Blogger app. So if you get part way through a post and realize you really want to add an image, you can do that easily by jumping over to Blogger.

So that’s that. I hope you find it stylish and useful. I’ll be keeping up with the Google widgets group to follow any bug reports or feature requests.

Becoming a New Kind of Geek

So, sometime about three weeks back I became a boardgamer. It started slowly, popping into Games of Berkeley when I was in the area, getting a Risk variant at Toys ’R’ Us, then… wham! A thread about 2 player board games on Metafilter led me to BoardGameGeek.com, and then it was all over.

“The Geek” is a comprehensive database of board games, complete with ratings, reviews, and forums as one might expect. Its coolest feature is GeekLists. Users can create lists of games, adding commentary, and others can add to the list or just comment on the individual entries. Some of my favorites: Couples Games, The Most Overproduced Games Ever, My Carcassonne Research, and All the Flavor, Half the Calories. Wicked addictive. Wanna see my profile?

As I recently wrote, there’s a game store down the street, though for true selection I go to Games of Berkeley. There are various online sites (Fun Again seems good, and sometimes necessary) but because of the shipping, it’s usually worth it to buy at a store unless you need to hit up Ebay for something out of print.

Here’s what Cait and I have been playing:

Lost Cities

Great two-player card game that’s quick-moving and has good opportunities for tempting fate, but also only requires half a brain. Good for playing during a conversation or when watching quality television programming.

Carcassonne: The City

This game is beautifully presented, with a nice wooden box, pretty art, and four colors of happy meeples. It sounds more complicated than it is (as we discovered teaching it to two different groups of people), but is well worth learning and playing. Cait’s gotten quite good at trying to steal my residential areas, which are often worth mega points. The City is a stand-alone game, but the original Carcassonne has a ton of expansions that I’m thinking of trying out to add some different flavors to the mix. (There are also other siblings: the two player Knizia designed The Castle (which The City borrows from), the prehistoric Hunters and Gatherers, and the latest (and U.S. exclusive to Fun Again), The Discovery.

San Juan

A slightly more involved game. I like that it has a fair amount going on and has the potential for multiple strategies. (“Do I build up my production to get cards, or can I get by without and build more monuments instead?”) It’s the card game cousin of the well-regarded Puerto Rico, which I haven’t played yet. Might give that a shot, too.

Risk: Godstorm

Nice re-imagining of Risk in mythologic times, based somewhat on the mechanics from Risk: 2210 A.D. Haven’t played the full version more than once, but we’ve used the board and pieces for regular Risk. Cait can kick my ass at Risk, since she’s good and I make stupid decisions. (The phrase “creamy center” has come up to describe some of my overextended, underdefended positions.)

Settlers of Catan

The original eurogame gateway game. We don’t actually own this, but play it with our friends Ian and Tiara. It’s good times, though I’m quite bad. Also, it proves the phrase that “randomness is lumpy.” Frickin’ 9 never came up! Looking for the card game version (which I think is being re-released) since it plays with two.

Kill Doctor Lucky

Haven’t actually played this yet, but it’s themed as the prequel to Clue. I.e.: people running around a mansion trying to kill someone. From the manifesto’d Cheapass Games. I’m planning on using my Pixar Monopoly pieces with this one, so it might end up being Kill Doctor Sulley.

So, wanna play a game? I’m all about it.