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In the 90's my friends and I wasted far too much of our young adulthood blowing each other up with 3D Realms' Duke Nukem 3D. It was a tremendous amount of fun, and no other networked game has really felt quite as good to play to me as it still does. Even now, every few years when the opportunity strikes we'll fire up the modern ports of the game and drop right back into the fray, cackling with laughter long into the night.

What really kicked off the marathon Duke sessions was the discovery of FTP sites that had user-authored. Some were designed for one-person playability but most were for death matches, which was perfect for us. After downloading and trying out over a hundred of these maps, we noticed that we gravitated toward a set of maps with the filename "BARTMAP1.MAP", "BARTMAP2.MAP", and so on up to "BARTMP11.MAP". Despite the name, I had nothing to do with their authorship.



Some of these maps represent places in my mind that are as real to me as any physical place I've ever been. In my mind's eye I can see the contours of some of them as clear or clearer than places I've lived. And they are special places in my memory. They are where my friends and I sparred for endless hours with RPG's, jetpacks, and freeze-rays. When I think of the rooms and tunnels and open spaces in these digital worlds, I hear real laughter; real joy and bonding over a cartoony competition to, essentially, die as few times as possible in the midst of non-stop explosions. The mere mention of "bartmap five" can start most of us giggling uncontrollably.



The maps weren't large or terribly complex, but they were carefully crafted and well-balanced to prevent any one player from gaining an unfair advantage. And the maps had a degree of variety and polish that many of the other maps didn't have. They weren't the only maps we played, but they were the majority.

A few years ago, after a night of walking down memory lane and blowing each other's heads off, I decided to see if I could find out anything else about the author of these maps. If nothing else, I just wanted to drop him a note to thank him for the great times and hope that he and his friends had enjoyed the maps as much as we had. Unfortunately, there isn't much out there about him. A few credits for Doom 2 and Heretic maps here and there, and a tribute page for his Duke3D maps (turn down your speakers before visiting, plays a MIDI rendition of "Music Box Dancer.) But no definitive contact information can be found, and his email address from that era (BARTMAN at ACEINFO.COM) appears to be a black hole.




So, I want to say publicly: Wherever you are, thank you, Jim Wiscarson.

Unacknowledged creativity happens every day, and sometimes the creators really put themselves into what they are bringing to life. These maps were the result of serious work, with carefully considered details that made them special to my friends and I. I'm not sure we would have had quite as much fun if they hadn't existed. Perhaps our lives would have been just a hair darker and slightly less filled with mirth. And for that they are indeed a special and precious gift.

And for anyone still enjoying Duke Nukem 3D, you can download all 13 BARTMAP's here (including a couple that are new to me!). ]]> Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:54:43 +0000 http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/bartmap/ http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/bartmap/ longer to undo something as it did to do it in the first place.

If all planning took this into account the world would be a better place.

Or at least the tech industry. ]]> Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:50:03 +0000 http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/ctrl-z/ http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/ctrl-z/
In the troubleshooting process I tried rebooting, resetting, and finally, a factory restore. The AppleTV UI obviously keys off of data downloaded from the iTunes store so that it can provide an up-to-date storefront. What I hadn't realized was that the core menu system was ALSO driven over the network from the iTunes store. Once the factory restore was complete I was staring at the original AppleTV UI (I had forgotten how much worse it was) and... the menu was still missing almost all the entries!

Worse still, now the couple hundred hours of TV that we had downloaded over the years was no longer on the device.

At this point it was apparent that the AppleTV was very tightly integrated with iTunes, to the point where if it was having trouble then my AppleTV would actually become useless. And now that I had reset the device I couldn't access media that I had rightfully purchased. This is, of course, the worse-case scenario for digital distribution and DRM.

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For years I've had my iPhone randomly duplicate the notes I've taken, presumably due to network synchronization issues and the system getting confused. It's a minor bug in an otherwise excellent phone, but it's still puzzling. Do they not know how revision control works? I can't imagine that they don't. Do they not know how to associate a single primary key (even if composite) with a hunk of data and keep track of its existence with that key? This is basic database stuff, here.

And now Apple has launched iCloud, which will keep all your data seamlessly synchronized in the cloud, or on your computer... but not both. And even if I did want to give up having my computer and my phone synchronized, I have to have a me.com address in order to back up notes in the cloud. This is the ONLY thing that requires a me.com account to sync. I'll never send these notes out, or be sharing them. WTF?

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And tonight this system failed me enough for me to sit down and write this rant.

The very basics of a system like iCloud would be to have a clear sense of "identity". And yet, the appleid.apple.com site is atrocious. There's bugs on a majority of the UI panels, it's divergent from the account management system in iTunes but still has some overlap, there's basic data collision issues within the database (ie. it let me add the primary email address for my MacOS App Store account to a new account AppleID account), and the UI sucks.

After verifying an additional email (which entails authenticating), how does one navigate back to the "main" homepage for a logged-in account?

(also, this page scrolls in a fully-expanded Safari window on my 13" Macbook)

You can't delete mailing addresses! In fact, I can't seem to add them, either. Same goes for phone numbers. Actually, it seems like of the 5 panels on this screen, the only that actually works is "Name, ID, and Email Addresses":


What in the hell, Apple? You're famous for "it just works", but getting this set up is like pulling teeth. And God save you if you want something more sophisticated like merging accounts! This stupid system can't keep my basic user details straight, much less any kind of real identity management.

And now it appears that after it erroneously allowing me to add the primary email of another account to this one, that secondary account is in a strange limbo. I can't reset its password, I can't log in/download with its credentials, and I can't even update apps because it can't authenticate.

I take back what I said before about worst-case scenario for digital distribution and DRM. This is much worse. You buy things from a vendor, downloaded them, and then somehow the vendor forgets who you are and now you're locked out. At least before I had a sense that it was a transient issue, but with this it's just irrevocably broken and I have little expectation that I'll be able to get it fixed.

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I just don't get the feeling that Apple gets what consumers are expecting with this kind of thing. They are not considering the bizarre corner cases that come up with systems like this, and they are definitely not prepared to be transparent enough to let users attempt to diagnose their own problems. In this kind of situation, the enormous confidence Apple has in itself turns into hubris. The real problem is that they've hitched virtually their entire product line to this concept now, but they're nowhere near ironing it out to the degree they need to.

The identity management aspect of iCloud is a total mess, and it needs to be a tightly designed product in its own right. And they need to figure out the solution for seamless multi-way revisioning and syncing (it's very hard, but it's not impossible). Until they do, users of Apple products and especially people relying on iCloud are in for a rough ride.

$(function(){ $('a.gallery').colorbox({opacity:0.8}); }); ]]> Sat, 15 Oct 2011 08:21:17 +0000 http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/icloud-is-going-to-break-apple/ http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/icloud-is-going-to-break-apple/
When he took over as "Interim CEO" in July of that year, it was trading around $3.60.

When he resigned his position as CEO today after 14 years in the role, the stock closed at $376.18, a hundredfold increase, and with a market capitalization greater than almost every other company on the planet.

Steve Jobs is almost a cartoon character at this point, but behind the black turtleneck and the keynotes and all the other things that people associate with the guy there is a businessman who turned around a very weak and struggling company and made it the most valuable company in the entire technology industry. How that happened, even if it was an unconventional approach, will be studied and emulated for generations simply because of the Cinderella story that it tells.

The leadership style, talent recognition and acquisition, operational structure, and market approach all play into Apple's resurrection story and I believe that hasn't really been told yet. If nothing else, Apple's massive success under Steve Jobs proves again that one route to building a great business is to start with an unrelenting focus on creating products people want.

It might seem unlikely that eventually there'll be business school lectures, textbook chapters, and Masters Theses dedicated to Apple's turnaround and success. But I'm sure that just as today we hear mythical tales of Henry Ford building the first modern assembly line, in 100 years I'm sure there'll be stories about the tech giants that we are witnessing and the ways that they are innovating business. ]]> Wed, 24 Aug 2011 22:27:48 +0000 http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/jobs-steps-down/ http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/jobs-steps-down/ similar form factor as the iPhone 3/iPhone 3GS, but instead of a plastic back it will be molded out of Liquidmetal. ]]> Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:20:41 +0000 http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/my-iphone5-rumor/ http://www.bartgrantham.com/blog/my-iphone5-rumor/