We got our Wii on Friday. This was a busy week-end!

First, some background. I have owned and played video games ever since I was twelve or so. My wife has played on the Nintendo first generation machine extensively as a kid too. I have two young boys who are still a bit too young for video games.

In the recent past, I have been a Sega Dreamcast owner. I bought it because my wife didn’t want me to play DOS-era strategy games alone on my laptop. (Some enjoy chess, I prefer turn-based strategy games.) This console offered very good gaming experience. It was underpowered for first-person shooters and had no strategy games. But we had lots of fun playing Resident Evil as a family. I played most of the titles all the way through.

Then, I upgraded to the PlayStation 2. It was a bit of a disappointment. The first-person shooters were ok. The action RPG games on the PS2 were pretty good. There were no strategy games. Resident Evil was still there, but it was no better than it had been on the Dreamcast. In the end, my wife never played much with the PS2, and I gave up on many of the titles.

The Wii is very different. First of all, my wife played way more than I did so far. She just love Wii Sports and she can probably beat me at most games by now. Even the lowly Wii Play got us to play together a bit. In fact, the main difference between the PS2 and the Wii is that I am now back at the “console as a family game machine.” I bought the classical Mario and Zelda for the Wii Virtual Console, and again, my wife enjoyed it quite a bit (nostalgia?).

I also bought Super Mario Paper. So far my experience with the game has been so-so, but I have never been a fan of Mario and I hear it gets more interesting later.

The Wii has good news and weather channels. I think I will actually make good use of those. One very important step I took was to enabled the Web browser on the Wii. It actually works very well. It is a great way to browse the Web as a family.

Technologically, the Wii might be underpowered though I doubt it. Yes, its processor only runs at 729 MHz and it only has 88 MiB of RAM, but the processor of the PS2 ran at 294 MHz and it only had 32 MiB of RAM. So, it has easily twice the power of a PS2 and the Wii does not need to support high definition, which is a good thing because drawing fewer pixels takes less time. My guess is that we will simply see less stunning visuals on the Wii, but I doubt it will matter to Wii owners. And since the Wii is outselling other consoles at least 2-to-1, expect the Wii to have great games soon. Isn’t it what matters?

(I should mention that I expect games to be cheaper-to-make on a Wii.)

The Wii remotes are a breakthrough. I will never be able to go back to standard controllers. In fact, now I am wonder why my mouse does not have the some sensors as the Wii remotes. While not as accurate as a mouse, it gives the impression that it is as accurate.

(Picture source)

Microsoft apparently once used this video to promote early versions of Windows. It is really funny.

Update: my wife does not think it is funny. Is there something wrong with me?

Smultron is, by far, the best text editor on MacOS. And it is free. Now, I just found out how to make it even better. One annoying problem with Smultron is that if the underlying file gets updated, Smultron often forgets to reload it. You can make this less likely. First close Smultron, then, in a shell, type:

defaults write org.smultron.Smultron TimeBetweenDocumentUpdateChecks 1

Explanation: by default, Smultron checks for file updates every 10 seconds.

What a good question! Why can’t I search my attachments from withing Gmail?

I think I have an answer, though people will not like it.

I once worked as a project architect for an e-Health project. This was circa 1999 and we were trying to automate exchange of data between laboratories using some kind of specialized email application. I had written a customized email client that would received the data in XML form and present it appropriately (now, you could do the same thing with XSLT in minutes).

I ended up quitting the project. One reason for it was the strong desire for users to send the medical data using Word documents. This is extremely annoying to someone who is working on data schemas to facilitate automated interchange. Basically, secretaries love Word (unstructured data entry), and they hate structured data. And they probably have good reasons too! The worst thing came down when people forking the money decided that we should really fully support Word documents. I really gave up at that point. Try as I may, I could not convince them that storing the data in Word documents was incompatible with a smart data interchange format.

So, why do I think that the GMail team finds that fully supporting attachments is not a priority?

Because they think that exchanging documents via email is inefficient and will probably go away, at least for serious tasks, in the near future. If you document has any kind of serious content, it should not be archived in your email system. Seriously. Post it on an intranet, on a Web site, using a collaborative editing tool, and so on. These solutions are not mature enough for you? It could be, but they soon will be.

Email is for 10 liners, no more. Email is not appropriate for sending large documents, publishing your essays, and so on. The only reason I use emails for other purposes is because there is no other way, but there soon will be.

I keep seeing the statement that machines can now beat human beings at chess.

To me, this is like saying that a car can move faster than a human being.

A naked, unassisted human being is pretty useless. Most of us, me included, would not last a month without tools, naked in the woods. I might not even last a day. But does it matter? Human beings do rule the Earth, last time I checked.

I can move faster, over longer distances than most animals. I can kill even the largest beast from 100 meters away. I can get images from the sky as accurate as what any bird can get. I can swim for hours without coming back to the surface.

I can do all these things because I use tools.

And I submit to you that the only way a machine can surpass human beings is by not being a tool anymore. A tool, no matter how great, cannot surpass the one who holds it. A drill does not make holes faster than a human being, a car does not move faster than a human being, and so on. They only surpass an unassisted (naked) human being.

So, when does a machine stop being a tool for human beings? Presumably when human beings no longer control it.