So I've been having some trouble with my eyesight lately. My right eye does not work as well as it "should" and I've been contemplating going to see my optometrist for a few months. I don't know why I've put it off so long, maybe I was being lazy or maybe I was scared of what he might say...

In any case, I took the plunge last Tuesday, and I'm kind of glad I did. He took a photo and noticed that there was a white discolouration on the retina which wasn't there the last time I had my check-up (about a year ago). He wasn't sure what it was, so he sent me to the specialist. The specialist did some more tests and told me I had a scar on my retina. He said you normally don't see those except on patients who are over 60 or so... hmm...

He also told me that it's mostly curable (my eyesight won't return 100% but at least it'll be 95% or so) with a bit of surgery. I've had surgery before, and it's not fun. Eye surgery is surgery is surely worse because of the additional risks involved. I've got an appointment with the surgeon on Thursday week, so here's hoping it all goes well!

P.S. it's not because of all the XBOX I've been playing, regardless of what my wife tells me ;D (it started long before I got my XBOX)

It seems there has been some small developments in the quest for an R18+ rating for video games in Australia.

The first bit of "news" is that the new game "FEAR 2: Project Origin" has been refused classification. FEAR is an action-horror type of game, clearly aimed at adults. Of course it's not appropriate for people under 18!

Secondly, a study, conducted by Bond University and Neilson, found that 91% of respondents (gamers and non-gamers) were in favour of an R18+ rating (a summary of the report is here). Also mentioned in that study is the fact that the average gamer is now 30 years old. That means if you were born in the 80's, you're younger than most gamers in Australia!

However, Michael Atkinson (whom I've mentioned before), was interviewed by ABC's Good Game and basically said the research was "totally bogus". His reasoning? It was funded by the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia.

Um, so? Research has to be funded by someone. Why don't you do some actual research yourself, Mr Atkinson, instead of just assuming that everybody agrees with you? And get a reputable company like Neilson to do the work and a reputable institution like Bond to perform the analysis! Oh wait, you don't need to do that, because it's already been done for you.

It's generally a bad idea to reinvent the UI controls in your application just for the sake of it. It's not particularly hard per-se, it's just very "fiddly" and it's indeed tricky to get every little detail "just so."

Office is an example of an application that has a completely custom UI, but they actually do a pretty decent job of hiding it. You really only notice it if you go around with Spy++ and try to look at the details of the controls - it doesn't work!

But I noticed this little rendering bug in Outlook today which kinds of demonstrates my point above that it's hard to get 100% of the details right:

For a normal Windows application, if the title of the window is too long, it cuts it off before the minimize button. But they obviously made a mistake here and it just continues to the edge of the window. Obviously, this isn't a huge problem, it's not even a small problem ("trivial" is the word that comes to mind), but it just goes to show that even a team as big as the office team can't get it 100% right.

Internet Explorer is another app which draws its own control (at least, when rendered on a page - the actual dialog boxes are all just standard dialog boxes). IE actually gets a lot more wrong than Office does. Off the top of my head, the rendering errors in IE are:

• Hot-tracking of buttons doesn't work in Vista. It just flashes between the un-tracked (grey) and tracked (blue) state. The problem Vista buttons fade between un-tracked and tracked. The same is true of checkboxes and radio buttons (which is just special kinds of buttons, actually)
• Hot-racking of scrollbars doesn't work. In Vista, when you hover over a scrollbar, the up/down arrows pop up and the bar fades to blue. This doesn't happen at all in IE. When you click a button or the thumbtab, it turns blue, but nothing happens when you just over over it.
• In versions of IE prior to IE7, buttons did not scale proprly. Before, when a button is drawn larger, once it got over a certain size, the button was "zoomed" rather than drawn larger. This meant that the border around the button got bigger and it look out of place on the page. I understand the reason was that they internal "button" control couldn't tell the difference between just being rendered "big" and being rendered in "high resolution" (e.g. printed) and so when the button went over a certain size, it just assumed it was being printed and so entered the "zoomed" mode. This was "fixed" in IE7 by simply removing the "zoomed" mode and so when you print out a web page, the buttons look funny because the lines are all 1 pixel wide - on a 96DPI screen, it's right, but on a 600DPI printer, it's invisible!

As I mentioned, none of these problems are huge, but they just reenforce the idea that you shouldn't try to render your own controls. Because if even Microsoft can't get it right, what chance do you have?

There is some debate in Australia about the introduction of an R18+ rating for video games. Currently, the highest allowed rating for video games is MA15+ which has meant that many games were either banned completely from sale, or modified from the original to fit the criteria for MA15+.

In recent memory, for example, Fallout 3, GTA III, GTA: San Adreas, GTA IV, Reservior Dogs, Soldier of Fortune: Payback, and bizarely, Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure (a game about graffiti) were all either banned or modified versions are sold. Technically, they not "banned" just "refused classification", which amounts to the same thing (though it doesn't stop people buying the game overseas and brining it back to Australia)

What annoys me most about this is that every other entertainment medium has an R18+ rating - music, movies, etc - only video games. Maybe I could understand if there were no video game players over the age of 18 anyway, but the average age of gamers in Australia is 33 years old. It's ridiculous to believe that a 33 year old gamer should only be allowed to buy video games designed for children under 15.

The Standing Committee of Attorneys-General is currently working on a paper for public review that will allow the public to "vote" on whether an R18+ rating should be introduced for video games. I think this is great news, and frankly, about time. However, South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson believes that paper is somehow "biased" and withdrew his support. This meant that the SCAG had to go back and rewrite the paper to be "less biased".

Um, what? Of course it's biased. Complaining that a paper stating we need an R18+ rating is biased is like saying the statement "the sky is blue" is biased. I cannot think of any reasonable argument against it.

In any case, I'm looking forward to the release of this paper so that I can submit my comments. Does "about bloody time" count as an opinion?

Man, I've been spending too much time playing XBOX in the last two days since it arrived :-)

To celebrate all my XBOX-time, I've added my gamertag to the blog... to advertise my whopping score of 30. Yay! Expect to see that number increase over time...