Ed The Dev .com

Today’s XKCD is absolutely spot on. I’m happy to say that the Illinois homepage is much improved on this score. My colleagues did a usability study a year ago and learned and addressed the exact information XKCD is teasing about. If you visit the Illinois homepage, notice that everything XKCD put in the right circle is available within 2 clicks. Maybe one of our team is feeding XKCD’s author ideas. In any case, we’re laughing pretty hard at today’s comic.

There’s a bug in the iPhone version of Simcity; it’s simple but very annoying.

The problem is that the ‘Citizens demand a stadium’ news item is much more frequent than the ‘Here’s a stadium for you to accept’ petition.

What’s the difference you may ask? Well, without finding the ‘petition’ version, you can never build a stadium.

Normally that’s not a problem, because for most special buildings, the news item is either attached to the related ‘petition’ or alternates with the petition often enough that you’ll come across the ‘petition’ version in the news ticker eventually. But for some reason the ‘build a stadium petition’ never appears in your news feed.

So if you are tired of your citizens endlessly requesting an impossible stadium, follow these instructios:

1. Click the ‘…’ button on your map, then select the ‘advisors’ button (it has a speech bubble); on the ‘advisors’ page, click the ‘petitioners’ button (it has a clipboard). You should now be on the ‘Petitioners’ page.

2. Now scroll through your many open petitions until you find one with the word ‘stadium*’ in it. On the petition itself click the ‘Accept (thumbs up)’ button.

3. Now go to your city buildings menu and select ‘Gifts (wrapped present)’ and then scroll back and forth until you see a huge $75,000 stadium.

Now you can finally shut those stupid citizens up satisfy those voters with their stadium!

*If someone will comment with the exact wording of the petition title, I will gladly update this article.

Here’s a one line list comprehension that stops processing the list as soon as it finds a true member, and returns false if all members are false. Keep in mind that you could also use a lamba function to check for a more complex circumstance in the list.

mustBlock = next((True for rule in rules if rule.block == True), False)