Joe Ganley [http://ganley.org/]

Writing code since 1979

I have been a professional software engineer for over 10 years. I have written many kinds of software, but my particular strengths are interactive graphics applications, compilers and interpreters, and algorithms.

I also enjoy writing, woodworking, and home improvement. Also this.

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Friday, January 26, 2001

After reading an excellent history of Infocom, I started wondering if/how you could still get those great old games. A bit of web searching, and here's what I found out:

The first three Zorks and one I never heard of appear to be available as freeware. That, and much more, is available at the ostensible Infocom homepage.
I saw mentions of Java versions of some of the games, but haven't chased those down yet.
You can currently buy Zork collection, an Infocom Adventure collection, and an Infocom Mystery collection. The Zork collection contains Zork I, II and III, Enchanter, Sorceror, Spellbreaker, Wishbringer, Beyond Zork, and Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz. I haven't figured out what the other two contain, but one can take a pretty good guess from the names.
The best bet would seem to be The Lost Treasures of Infocom, their 20 best games in one set. Unfortunately, this isn't made any more, though you can still find it sometimes on eBay.

I'm going to have to pick up some of these; those games were the coolest, not to mention wonderfully nostalgic.

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Tuesday, January 23, 2001

A while back I tried to sell my 1994 World-Wide Web Conference t-shirt. It didn't sell, but at least now I can give it a (virtual) home.

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Cathy and I rented Frequency the other night. Good movie, but not great; it only realized maybe 75% of the potential of its main idea. It did, however, rely heavily on one of my favorite themes: that one's life is the sum, or perhaps the product, of a lot of little decisions and coincidences, many of which seem totally insignificant. For example, my favorite illustration from my own life: If a particular guy at the phone company, who I didn't even know but whose desk was right next to a friend (and, at the time, crush) of mine, hadn't quit his job right when he did, allowing me to move into that desk, the entire rest of my life would have been changed beyond recognition. In particular, I might never have met Cathy, whom I met via that friend.

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Pretty funny: According to a Post article, a bunch of outgoing White House staffers made off with the W key from their computer keyboards. This got me thinking: Has any other celebrity ever owned a letter of the alphabet as part of their personal brand the way George does the W? Malcolm X is the closest I can think of, and as far as I know, he was never really known as just "X".

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Thursday, January 18, 2001

I'm driving a rental car this week, and it's brand spankin' new, with about 200 miles on it. And the smell inside this car is killing me. I mean, it's really noxious, so it's killing me in the sense that I can't stand to be in the car with the windows closed, but I also fear that it is literally killing me, because it smells so damned toxic. What is that smell, anyway? Some kind of deadly petrochemical waste, I'm sure. Remember when "new car smell" was a good smell?

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Tuesday, January 16, 2001

Caricatures of Cathy and me:

Amazing how like us, or at least not unlike us, these crude caricatures are. Cathy's is especially good. Make your own!

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Monday, January 15, 2001

In case you're wondering about my talkativeness today, (a) I'm traveling, and (b) I'm suffering some very long compile times.

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Last week, in the midst of an extremely grouchy day, I composed a short list of things that annoy me:

Radio traffic reporters with cutesy traffic-related names like Diamond Lane, Ingrid Lock, and Lane Closure.

Web sites that don't work without the "www." on the front.

Dumb vanity license plates, especially those that just repeat the model of car, like "MY 300SL." Like, duh, that's already on the back of your car; you didn't have to pay extra to repeat it.

Bills that say "Payable Upon Receipt" instead of giving me a due date.

Forms that don't give you enough room for the information they specify; for example, they give you about a 1-inch space for your address.

Commercials featuring talking animals. Two exceptions: The Taco Bell chihuahua and the Pets.com sock puppet.
Left-turn lanes so short that backed-up straight traffic prevents you from getting in them, so you just sit helplessly and watch the green left-turn arrow cycle by.
"Enter your five-digit zip code, and then press 'pound'."

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I just finished The Cobweb by Stephen Bury. I enjoyed it, but probably would have enjoyed it more if I weren't comparing it to the more recent works by the author, for whom Stephen Bury is a pseudonym. I won't say who that is, in case you'd like not to suffer the same taint; follow the link to find out. This actually reminded me of one of my favorite books, Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas, and Electric, only more down-to-earth and, well, not as good.

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My four-year-old just pointed out the other day that the whitespace between the E and the x in the FedEx logo forms an arrow. My wife and I felt like dopes because, while this was doubtless quite deliberate on the part of the logo designers, neither of us had noticed it before.

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An interesting illustration of how different people view usability: We just got a new phone. It is a two-line phone, and has a feature that I love: there is no hold button. Instead, if you're talking on line 1, and answer an incoming call on line 2, it automatically puts line 1 on hold. This seemed totally natural to me, and it took me no time at all to get used to. My wife, who evidently has more deeply ingrained experience with hold buttons, finds this totally confusing: she can't shake the feeling that she should have to do something to put line 1 on hold before answering line 2, so when this occurs, she has to consciously puzzle out what needs to be done to answer the other call. A perfect example of how usability doesn't exist in a vacuum, but is instead tremendously affected by the user's own habits and preconceptions.

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Saturday, January 13, 2001

Just because it seems to be the trendy thing to do, I added a link over on the left to my Amazon.com wish list. I love Amazon.com as an information resource, although I seldom buy anything from them. The wish list is useful because I can look it up from the library when I don't have my Palm with me. Anyway, I often browse around Amazon.com by following the "people who bought this also bought..." links; I find it interesting that usually two or three clicks in any direction will bring me to something else I have already liked. Proof that people's likes are internally and externally consistent, or just the six-degrees-of-separation principle in action? My only complaint about Amazon.com is that I wish I could tell them when I've already read something, so (for example) it can stop recommending Signal to Noise to me.

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Thursday, January 11, 2001

So eBay tells me that a credit card charge they attempted was declined, and when I call my credit-card company, they tell me that they have frozen everyone who does a lot of internet transactions from doing any more until they call and give their okay. Apparently this is a reaction to the Egghead security breach, in which a lot of credit card numbers were stolen. Kudos for their diligence, although I would think they would have the records to know that I've never bought anything from Egghead on that card. Update: Actually, on further reflection, I think I might have bought my hub from Egghead...

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Wednesday, January 10, 2001

It would be really cool if someone could come up with a way to make candy that looks like chrome. Oh, and in related candy news, I just discovered the new tiny chewy sweet tarts. I've always loved those things, but the giant version is a little unwieldy; the tiny ones are awesome. (Shame on me, rifling my daughter's goody-bag from her best friend's birthday party!)

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Monday, January 08, 2001

Since a large part of my job at Cadence was designing physical design software for analog designers, I found it interesting to see the art of analog chip design the subject of a Merc article.

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Saturday, January 06, 2001

I just love the way electronics are always getting cheaper. I've always wanted a clock that automatically sets itself to the radio signal from the NIST Atomic Clock. Years ago, these were ludicrously expensive units that only rich people could buy. As recently as a year or so ago, they were $200 gadgets that you got from places like Sharper Image. Last night I saw an ad for the Emerson SmartSet, a clock/radio that sets itself (time and date), that retails for just $39, and that will probably be available in any local department store. What a wonderful world we live in. Update 1/8: I just saw a digital wall-clock like this at CostCo for $20, though I'm going to hold off for the Emerson or some other bedside clock. Also, I love how the manufacturers call all of these clocks "atomic;" it reminds me of the 70's, when everything remotely high-tech had the adjective "space-age" attached to it.

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Friday, January 05, 2001

I just noticed that the navigation on washingtonpost.com sucks. Go there and try to find the Fairfax Weekly section. It took me at least five minutes, and I was looking on the day when that section appears in print! Two different search mechanisms, both confusing -- One for the last two weeks, which are free, and one for the archives, where you have to pay to see the whole article. And many features aren't archived, and thus something that was in the paper a month ago cannot be found at all. Ugh.

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The new U.S. postal rates go into effect this weekend. I have no problem with the rate increase -- I've always thought the US Mail would be a bargain at twice the price -- but I wish they increase the rates by a larger delta and do it less often; having to deal with one-cent stamps is a pain. Of course, it occurs to me that the change itself is probably a windfall for the USPS; I wonder how much they make in overpostage after a rate change because people use (for example) two thirty-three cent stamps because they don't have any one-cent stamps.

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Wednesday, January 03, 2001

Until the latest redesign I had on this site a list of D.C.-area software development companies. I just got mail from a guy asking what happened to it, so if anyone else missed it, here it is. Note that it's way out of date; most of the list was compiled during a job sear - megan iopfOJAimacroirromecq['2wq R#.swejw0e9i32493oir3lekdld.,doeq2001j ganley;mnb - excuse me, my daughter came up and wanted to "do what I was doing." Where was I? Oh yeah, most of the list was compiled during a job search I did in Spring of 1996.

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