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From: Sean Conner Date: 20:30 on 25 Jan 2007 Subject: Okay Firefox, that's ... interesting. Now cut it out! I'm working remotely today, and I need to log into the trouble ticket system (a web-based interface). Since I am remote, I don't have the trouble ticket system bookmarked or in the history of the Firefox instance I'm using, so I type it in by hand and get a site that I don't expect (a domain squatter). Obviously I didn't remember the URL correctly, but that's not that much of a problem. The system I'm currently using is Linux with X. My computer at work is Linux that runs X. Easy enough, just ssh to my workstation with X forwarding and run firefox. Sure, it might be a bit sluggish, but I can get the URL I need. ssh -X myworkstation.at.work.net blah blah blah GeneralUnixPrompt> firefox And sure enough, Firefox comes up. But ... it doesn't look right. The history shows the site I *tried* going to, and the bookmarks aren't quite right either. And why did the Unix prompt on my workstation come back? It should still be running Firefox. Some testing, and yes, I try to run firefox on my workstation, and somehow the instance running locally is notified to pop open a new window. No, I don't *want* that behavior. I truely do want to run Firefox on my workstation! Don't make me close my local Firefox ... Sigh. I'll close my local Firefox. Only *then* did I get the Firefox I wanted. I specifically use Linux *because* it has a history of not being user friendly and doing *exactly* what you tell it to. This business of being *clever* is disconcerting. I wish it would stop when I wanted it to stop. -spc (I suppose there's some command line option to get the behavior I want, but I certainly didn't see it when I ran "firefox -h")
From: Andy Armstrong Date: 13:07 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: Excessively grandiose product names Sensible operating systems have had powerful shells for decades. They have names like 'sh', 'bash', 'tcsh'. Modest names. So why, when Windows finally does a bit of catching up, does the shell have to be called 'PowerShell'? They were going to call it Monad. Not a bad name that. A bit enigmatic and interesting sounding. Obviously that wasn't sexy enough though so now it's <voice class="hollywood">PowerShell</voice>. Hear it roar! Of course if you can work out what the fuck the cygwin installer (which should probably be the topic of another post) is trying to do you can just install bash instead.
From: Hakim Cassimally Date: 11:07 on 24 Jan 2007 Subject: (Virtual Dimensions) Re: Possibly PuTTY, possibly something else. It's still hate. On 24/01/07, Andrew Black - lists <andrew-lists@xxxx.xxxxxx.xxx.xx> wrote: > DO I get the feeling that virtual dimensions is worth avoiding. As per muttley's conundrum, I'm not sure whether to hate Virtual Dimensions or XP. Allegedly XP now supports virtual desktops. Yay! we all cry. Windows could now have something that Linux has usably had for years, without having to go through the hackery that made the various widgets that emulated it (buggily) on WinNT. I tried EvilDesk (nice, but ultimately annoying) and a couple of other alternative windows managers which all sucked in various ways. Finally I installed Virtual Dimensions, on the basis that it more or less leaves the default Windows desktop the same, and therefore should break less. It more or less works. Changing from desktop to desktop is a bit slow: the task bar entries don't immediately switch but sit stupidly there for a bit before realising that they have to replace themselves. This doesn't really sit comfortably with the idea that the desktops are supported natively. Some apps, notably Firefox will occasionally decide that they want to make a break for freedom and sit on all desktops. Other apps, notably Thunderbird, will decide not to register their presence in the taskbar anymore (until you Alt-Tab to them). Simon's PuTTY hate could well be VD related too, as the data points in the thread suggest. VD adds items to the window menu -> move to another desktop, set transparency, or "always on top." Transparency works ok, (though without being settable by slider it's frankly unusable to me, I don't like transparency except to enable it quickly to peek behind a window). "Always on top" (basic functionality in Gnome anyway) doesn't work at all. I wasn't sure whether to really hate VD (it has some functionality), but as it would be off topic if I didn't, I will. It is a hateful buggy piece of shite that doesn't even provide the basic functionality that would bring this part of the WinXP experience to the basic level of usability that Linux desktop has (and believe me that's not a fantastic or unattainable level to aspire to). Hate, osfameron
From: Simon Wistow Date: 18:51 on 23 Jan 2007 Subject: Possibly PuTTY, possibly something else. It's still hate. Given that PuTTY is generally pretty damn nifty I'm willing to possibly lay the blame on something else (for example, XP itself. Or a a peice of Virtual Desktop software I'm running called Virtual Dimension) hwoever the hate still stands with ... with SOMETHING DAMMIT. And it smells like this. The only way you can close a Putty session is by exiting the shell or by killing the process in the Task Manager. This is retarded. If I lose my network connection then when I regain it to close all the inactive windows I have to go to each of them, restart the session then type exit. GRAAAGAGGAGAGAGH. This is especially irritating when I've still got my connections open to other machines on the same LAN or the Xen instance I'm running on my machine because my shortcut of firing up the Task Manager and hitting kill process is nigh on impossible because the process name doesn't have the host I'm connected to in it. KILL! MURDER! DEATH!
From: David Mackintosh
Date: 15:39 on 23 Jan 2007
Subject: There is a thing as too much flexibility
--bajzpZikUji1w+G9
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So I get called to this user's desk at a new company I'm doing some
work for. It seems that for the last two weeks, he's been firing up
his Evolution and wondering why no email is visible, even though when
he goes to OWA he can see and manipulate his email (as normally as
you can when using Firefox with OWA, but that's another story).
So after ten minutes of messing around with this, I turn the preview
pane off -- and presto, he got his list of email back!
Seems that with Evolution, you can grab the preview pane and pull it
up to the top of the window, completely covering the list of emails
in your mailbox.
Aaaand when you first fire up Evolution, it does not select an email
to display for you -- meaning that you get a blank frame.
After I'd stopped beating my head against a wall, I went and tried
the same trick with Outlook. Microsoft gets many, many things wrong
-- but you cannot cover up the top three lines of the email list with
the preview pane.
I'll just repeat that the user had been sitting there for TWO WEEKS
wondering why he had no email.
Kill. Me.
--=20
/\oo/\
/ /()\ \ David Mackintosh |=20
dave@xxxxxx.xxx | http://www.xdroop.com
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From: David Cantrell Date: 13:51 on 22 Jan 2007 Subject: C compliers Seen in someone's sig on the mailing list for some software I maintain: > -pete "The C complier is only $4,000 ...." Considering the quality of a lot of free software, what an appropriate typo that is!
From: Jon Nangle Date: 13:40 on 18 Jan 2007 Subject: Stupid packages $ sudo /sbin/iscsi-ls ***************************************************************************** SFNet iSCSI Driver Version .../sbin/iscsi-ls: line 220: iscsid: command not found ***************************************************************************** TARGET NAME : iqn.1991-05.com.microsoft:iscsistor-000000-target TARGET ALIAS : iscsitest01 HOST ID : 0 BUS ID : 0 TARGET ID : 0 TARGET ADDRESS : 192.168.16.70:3260,1 SESSION STATUS : ESTABLISHED AT Thu Jan 11 14:22:09 GMT 2007 SESSION ID : ISID 00023d000001 TSIH 1 ***************************************************************************** Package maintainers: top tip coming up. If you're going to put shell scripts in /sbin, at least make sure that they know where to find their shit. You know, all the stuff that's in the very same package that you just created, you goon. No, I don't have /sbin in my path. Bite me.
From: Timothy Knox Date: 21:03 on 16 Jan 2007 Subject: CUPS My cup of hatred for CUPS runneth over, but let's focus on just one hate: Due to really bad weather today, I wanted to work from home. No problem, as I have a high speed network connection. I wanted to print some documents from my Linux workstation at the office to my printer at home. No problem, sez I, cuz I have CUPS. Oho, I can hear you experienced folks chortle, you're asking for it now. And I was. I set up the printer: hostname, queue name, usw... Tell CUPS to print a test page. No joy. Walk over to the console of my print server at home. Print a test page to the same print queue. Ka-chunk! Out comes the page. Back to my Linux box at work. Look in the cups error log. It tells me the print failed, and I should try setting the LogLevel to debug for more information. No problem, sez I, cuz CUPS has this amazing web-based UI for configuration and set up (which I had in fact already used to add the printer). Some of you have already guessed what comes next, but for the rest, I'll tell you: There is no way I could find anywhere in the wonderful web-based UI to set the LogLevel to debug. Why not, CUPS? Why not, you chuckle-headed steaming pile of electronic offal, WHY NOT? Is this not a reasonable request, especially when a user is trying to, f'rinstance, ADD A NEW PRINTER? If you are the new face of Unix-based printing, no wonder adoption of Unix on the desktop still ain't happening! CUPS, I hate your electronic guts with a passion unmatched, save for my hatred of all your software brethren!
From: jrodman
Date: 17:09 on 16 Jan 2007
Subject: BSD "Slices" on x86 (and amd64)
I know we have some BSD coots out in the audience, so in advance, I'm
going to say that I don't want to hear any defenses for this complete
and utter crap, because that's what it is. Of course I welcome parallel
hate for comparable things.
The various forks of the BSD operating system all use their own
partition scheme, but to enable "compatability" they stuff their
partition scheme inside one of the partitions in the PC MS-DOS partition
scheme.
Now, the MS-DOS, CP/M partition schcme sure is lousy. Four partitions
isn't enough, and extended/logical terminology is clunky, and the
linked-list-on-disk business is a ball of hair. But it's the partition
scheme which is used on x86 systems. If the box will only ever run one
operating system, fine, you can opt to lay the disk out any way you
please, but if you're going to bother to make it possible from different
systems to understand the disk, you should implement the same format!
The BSD "slice" are not cute, and they are in every way inferior to the
awful MS-DOS partitioning. They are more limited in number, they are
not comprehensible by other toools, and they introduce a needless second
level of hiararchy in order to access partitions that confers no
benefits and incurs complexity. Moreover, each of these systems has its
own slightly different, slightly incompatable variation of "slice", so
that they cannot be shared (here again you see the lack of comprehension
of interoperability), and to boot they insist on using names to refer to
things defined by the platform which are inconsistent with the platform
(cf. slice vs partition vs slice).
The least one could do is the bare minimum of allowing these "slices" to
be stored in "dos logical drives" or "logical partitions" in more modern
x86 parlance, and still be bootable. NetBSD has managed this amazing
feat of engineering. FreeBSD and OpenBSD have apaprently yet to figure
it out. DragonFly BSD can do it, but yet the installer still refuses
to let you set things up this way. Great.
The upshot of all this stupidity is that I do not believe I can actually
install the various flavors of Unix I had intended to test with on this
new machine at the same time. The common solutions to this problem I
see are:
1 - Use VMWare and friends - which is basically another way of saying
*don't* install them. Especialy if you wanted to get real-world
performance data
2 - Buy more hard disks
3 - Use one of these "nifty" bootloaders that actually changes the
partition table on the fly during boot to give you more fake
partitions
The very existence of 3 is something I had not imagined possible until I
started looking into this, but yet it seems to be a common
recommendation on certain mailing lists. What a horrific concept.
I guess I was misled when I was told that the FreeBSD port was mature!
Interoperability. You'd think UNIX developers would have heard about
it.
-josh
From: Yossi Kreinin
Date: 12:56 on 16 Jan 2007
Subject: Invisio
I need to draw a block diagram. I've worked on it for quite some time in Visio,
having an urge to act in ways incompatible with civilization about once in a
minute, which is not bad for this type of program. Now I want to export the
thing in PNG, detaching it from the universe of Microsoft file formats.
PNG export doesn't export bullets (the dots are invisible in the output). Not to
mention changing the width of parts of some of the arrows and the like.
BMP export does the same thing with the extra benefit of generating bitmaps xv
won't open (presumably the bonus points go to xv here). There must be an
abstract canvas class somewhere down the guts - three cheers for object-oriented
programming. Too bad they didn't merge it with the other abstract class used for
rendering. Or did they use HDC directly?
HTML export produces something Firefox displays as a black screen. Inside, it
looks like a constant bulk of script referring to a binary .emz file. Apparently
this doesn't cross the boundary of Microsoft file formats, so it might at least
render correctly in Explorer, but I couldn't check, since it refused to access
the files from the local network.
Print preview doesn't have a full screen mode, so it took me two screen shots
and hand-patching them to "export" the diagram. A true application of polymorphism.
I did the patching in gimp. Using intuitive commands like "Layer to imagesize".
And it has a "parasite editor" extension ("xtn", more precisely). Maybe I can
edit the authors of Visio with this thing so they learn to save what they redner.
Writing the message without using the word "fuck" was a tough excersize.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi