Survival Mode vs. Creative Mode

Worldwide CAD users: about 44 million. Of those, 40 million are using Minecraft, and about 4 million are using everything else.

It could be because Minecraft is the only CAD system that includes a sword as a standard tool. It could be that at €20 (or free on a Raspberry Pi) Minecraft is very affordable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Dimensioned drawings, FEA, subtractive geometry, meshes, tolerances. A whole lot of really complicated stuff that grown-up CAD systems need to do that Minecraft can't do.

Can't do right now, that is. But who has the user base? People are doing real CAD with Minecraft right now. So it's not a question of if Minecraft will disrupt the CAD market, it's a question of whether Minecraft will disrupt CAD enough to be a dominant player there.

Minecraft has a Python interpreter. Not some ratty ad-hoc scripting language, a full-on programming language. Not easy to get at on all platforms, but it's there, with a 200-page textbook. And a sword.

And Minecraft has collaboration tools built in. And mobile. And monsters, of course, but you can turn the monsters off. Which would you rather have: (i) a collaboration tool 40 million people know how to use that actually works across the internet but lacks some key features, or (ii) a metastatic drafting tool with no collaboration features built in, and a totally separate collaboration tool you'll never use because you'll never get everyone you collaborate with to have it, and even if you did, it would cost a fortune and require a whole IS team to manage?

The war is over. The games won. The sword is mightier than the ribbon.

(Image: Stonehenge from the Minecraft Map of Britain by Ordnance Survey.)

We launched a new cloud service

My company Insilicos has formed a joint venture with the University of Washington to further develop and commercialize the Rosetta molecular modeling software developed in David Baker's lab. The product is Rosetta@cloud, a cloud-based service for protein modeling and similar services.

We've been working on getting this project going for most of a year. It's nice to see some real customer activity!

I hated Flash before it was cool to hate Flash

Several years ago, I wrote:

"Don't use Flash. Especially, not for the home page. Waiting for a flash site to load is like standing in line to watch TV. Even after loading, Flash sites are slower. If you are going to have an HTML option, you will have to develop two web sites. If you require Flash, you will lose visitors. In any case, you will lose visitors who won't wait around for slow Flash to load. What do you hope to gain with Flash?"

I wrote this long before Steve Jobs started tearing into Flash, so I'm hardly shilling for Apple. (And approximately zero people look to me as a tech pundit anyway.) So is Steve following my lead? Not exactly.

I generally agree with Jobs' criticisms of Flash: it's a pig, it crashes a lot, it doesn't play nice with the native OS or user experience. But my main problem isn't even with Flash per se. That's why, a year or two ago, I changed "Don't use Flash" above to "Don't use gratuitous Flash." Sure, Flash is a pig, but it also encourages piggy web sites. Even if you don't use Flash, you can still make your web site suck if you try hard enough. The point is to provide the user with an excellent and supple user experience with as little delay as possible. Any site that feels compelled to put up a link that says "skip intro" is based on the fantasy that there are people out there who are giddy with excitement at the prospect of sitting through a bunch of pretty mood-setting pictures before they get to the reason they visited the site in the first place.

So go ahead and dump Flash. I'll cheer. But for all the people who will use HTML 5 to make sites that need "skip intro" links, sorry about all the traffic you didn't get.

Comcast: Delivering the Internet even when it isn't really there

Comcast's roll out of Domain Helper (also know as "DNS Helper") hit us at work this morning. This fascinating typosquatting tool would be illegal if it were done by anybody but an ISP. (And might actually be illegal under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. If it isn't illegal, it should be.) As designed, Domain Helper is a supremely irritating form of network damage that makes complete hash out of DNS. What it's supposed to do is return a paid search page for any URL that doesn't exist. What Comcast is effectively doing here, is giving themselves a free domain name registration for all domains that have yet to be registered. To me, that's stealing. (Comcast isn't alone either, apparently Verizon and Virgin also engage in this nefarious practice.)

That's when Domain Helper works correctly, which it doesn't always. Sometimes, it keeps you from getting to web sites that actually exist. So, possibly because of design errors that Comcast may have little incentive to fix, Comcast users will now occasionally get a search page instead of the legitimate web site they asked for.

To top it off, Comcast doesn't follow their own published rules for Domain Helper. Comcast says they'll only intercept pages that begin with "www." This is important, because it makes it less likely that Comcast will sweep up an obvious typo. But today at our shop, "wwww.google.com" is intercepted by Domain Helper.

Even Comcast wouldn't do something this evil without an opt-out. Except the opt-out is broken, at least for us. The following conversation would be funny if it weren't sad. Apparently, Comcast replaced an earlier opt-out system that didn't work well, with a whizzy new opt-out system that doesn't work well. When people ask what ISP we have at work, I answer, "we don't have internet service at work; we have Comcast."

[Edit: Comcast can't figure out why their opt-out won't work for us, but they did give us URLs for DNS servers that provide the correct DNS service. Since we're geeks, we can hardwire our DNS at the router instead of getting it via DHCP. It's not super-hard to do, but it's pretty ridiculous.]


Help Chat room text follows:

user Brian_ has entered room

Brian(Tue Sep 8 16:37:14 PDT 2009)>
wish to disable Domain Helper, but primary login does not display that option below the "Device 1" info. Oddly although I am logged in [...] says "hello, *".

analyst Mark has entered room

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:38:35 PDT 2009)>
Hello Brian_, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Mark. Please give me one moment to review your information.

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:38:53 PDT 2009)>
No problem. I can help you with your account.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:39:02 PDT 2009)>
great, thx

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:40:27 PDT 2009)>
What is Domain Helper?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:40:37 PDT 2009)>
it's that whacked out DNS hijacker

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:41:42 PDT 2009)>
Is it a toolbar on your browser or a web site?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:41:39 PDT 2009)>
http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?Guid=f134ed32-3ad4-49c6-9864-1dd00689d950

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:41:59 PDT 2009)>
its your web site

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:44:05 PDT 2009)>
Ok. That looks like a feature of the browser..

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:44:32 PDT 2009)>
NO. It's your routers intercepting DNS errors and substituting a search page instead. Bad juju.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:45:11 PDT 2009)>
Let's go ahead and kick this upstairs to somebody who understands the product offerings, shall we?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:49:45 PDT 2009)>
hello?

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:51:52 PDT 2009)>
This actually can't be 'switched off' because it is on all our servers for resolving domain names and helps get you to a valid page.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:53:01 PDT 2009)>
Do I need to dig up your own FAQ for you on that as well? Search on "Domain Helper Opt-Out" while you're transferring me to your manager.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:53:49 PDT 2009)>
http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?Guid=e02580db-8813-43a3-9642-b66d8cfceb1a

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:56:50 PDT 2009)>
That's the FAQ for turnging it off, except of course it doesn't work. The promised opt-out link isn't where it's meant to be. I'm thinking it has something to do with the weirdness in my primary account where [...] it calls me "*".

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:57:15 PDT 2009)>
But really, please just boost me to somebody more senior. This is getting silly.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:58:37 PDT 2009)>
Also you might enjoy https://dns-opt-out.comcast.net/help-index.php

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:58:50 PDT 2009)>
sheesh

Mark(Tue Sep 8 17:00:13 PDT 2009)>
You may need to clear the browser temporary files and cookies and set the security levels to the defaults.

Make sure you have the following:

- the latest version of adobe flash and shockwave installed from http://www.adobe.com
- the latest updates installed from Windows Update.

analyst Mark has been temporarily disconnected. Please wait while the analyst attempts to reconnect.

Analyst has left the room. Your problem is being escalated to another analyst

analyst Amber has entered room

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:07:52 PDT 2009)>
I can certainly relate to your needs and to have you in this chat is as good as fulfilling my own. I am committed in wanting to provide you with the best customer service experience. You can surely take your worries out. Let me prove my expertise.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:08:42 PDT 2009)>
OK! Per that last suggestion: Two fully up to date PCs, three different browesers (IE, Firefox, Chrome), same effect. No opt-out link in the CustomerCentral page, and that weird "hello, *" thing.

analyst Amber has been temporarily disconnected. Please wait while the analyst attempts to reconnect.

analyst Amber has entered room

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:10:57 PDT 2009)>
hello again

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:11:05 PDT 2009)>
Is Domain helper installed on your computer?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:11:40 PDT 2009)>
is this the right chat room? Please read the FAQs I've already posted in this chat.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:12:12 PDT 2009)>
Or can you see the previous exchanges?

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:13:04 PDT 2009)>
Brian, is this a business account?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:13:07 PDT 2009)>
Yes.

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:14:41 PDT 2009)>
I apologize Brian, as much as I wanted to assist you with your concern however for Business Accounts, you need to call our Business Accounts Department. I will provide you with their telephone number.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:14:54 PDT 2009)>
sure, great, whatever

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:15:20 PDT 2009)>
Phone number is 800-316-1619

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:15:48 PDT 2009)>
It was my pleasure assisting you today. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:17:26 PDT 2009)>
I sincerely doubt it.