A couple of techie followups

Research, including asking y'all earlier, has led me to believe that if there is a way to have MSIE 6 and 7 running independently on a single Windows machine, it's almost certainly not worth the tremendous effort involved. Nor is it worth the questionable level of stability that this level of DLL and registry contortion would no doubt leave the machine in.

I will instead take mr_choronzon's advice and carve out a second, file-based VMWare machine on my Mac, expressly for running 7. This is a sad sacrifice of hard disk space for running a single test-target application, but I really see no other reasonable way.

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Had a comment thread a while ago about maintainability versus size in client-code that has to be sent over the wire (most commonly, JavaScript in web pages). Since then I've encountered a happy medium that many perfectly clueful entities employ.

It's apparently SOP for organizations that deal with tremendous amounts of traffic to code in a nice clean fashion with as much whitespace and as many long variable names as you please, but before going into active duty each such piece of code is pseudo-compiled (really, obfuscated) down to an ultra-compact size, making it as small as possible without any loss of meaning. These files are then treated like compiled binaries, even though they're still interpreted scripts: the developers never touch them directly, instead making further changes by editing the long-form scripts and then re-compressing them.

Harry Potter and the Palette of Beige

I look at screenshots for the upcoing Harry Potter Wii game and think: Wha? Why is it so washed-out and yucky-looking? Why do the grounds around Hogwarts look like they were sculpted out of soggy oatmeal? Were the other games in the series like this?

The Wiimote-as-wand system sounds cool, as does mission-based play, but the game's world just looks bland and depressing and I'm not sure I'd like to spend much time there.