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[ Page 29 of 76 ]
From: cdevers
Date: 04:00 on 13 Sep 2006
Subject: Oh please wait a minute Mister iTunesman
Please Mr iTunesman
( Stop )
Oh yes, wait a minute
Mister Tunesman
( Wait )
Wait Mister Tunesman
(*) Please Mister Tunesman look and see
( Oh yeah )
If there's some artwork in your store for me
( Please, Please, Mister Tunesman )
Why's it takin' such a long time
( Oh yeah )
For me to see about this artwork of mine
There must be
Some PNGs tonight
For my song files
To make them right
Please Mister Tunesman
Look and see
If there's some artwork
Some artwork for me
I've been standin' here
Watchin' Mister Tunesman
So confusedly
Take the soundtrack
For the movie "Rushmore"
It has "The Faces"
But others too
So why ya' usin' "Ooh La La"
For the cover?
Repeat (*)
So many soundtrackss
You passed them by
See the tears
Standin' in my eyes
You didn't stop
To see compilations
By leavin' them
The right illustrations
Repeat (*)
( Why don't you check it and see one more time
for me you gotta )
Wait a minute, wait a minute...
( Mister Tunesman )
Mister Tunesman look and see
( C'mon deliver the artwork, 'cause right now it don't work )
Mister Tunesman
*ahem*
Sorry, I'm on a Motown kick this week.
Really though, grabbing album artwork is clever and useful, but...
* ...using The Faces' "Ooh La La" for the "Rushmore" soundtrack?
* ...using James Brown's "Black Caesar" for "Lock, Stock, and Two
Smoking Barrels"?
* ...using James Brown's "20 All Time Greatest Hits!" for both the
"Rocky IV" soundtrack (for "Living in America", the only song I have
from that album) and Nancy Sinatra's version of "You Only Live
Twice" from the James Bond soundtrack of the same name (and again,
the only song I have from that album).
Would it be too hard to check if a track is flagged a compilation, and
if so, make sure that the retrieved artwork is from an compilation?
For that matter, making sure that the name of the album (and artist) is
the same on both sides would be a good start, no?
Still, quirks aside, and ObHate aside, it is a fun UI...
From: Simon Wistow Date: 02:32 on 13 Sep 2006 Subject: Lucene's Index opening modes I don't know about you, dear hates-software reader, but, in general, when wanting to write something like an index for a search engine I have two major uses cases. The first is - open the index and start using it. The second is - open the index, if it doesn't exists then create it, then use it. The number of times I want to open the index and nuke any existing comments is small. Even whilst developing a search engine. Still, I can imagine it being useful to, you know, someone. Lucene, the Java based search engine with the hateful documentation, seems to think that it is important. Very important. Because it doesn't have a "Create if it doesn't exist mode". I know not why. Sure it's emulatable in my own code. But so would throwing an error if it didn't exist. Or deleting all the documents if it did exist. When you've had 3 hours sleep these things can trip you up and suddenly all your indexed data is gone. All of it. I hate you Lucene. I'm giving you cancer with my thumbs.
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 09:48 on 11 Sep 2006 Subject: M$ Excel A document with the name 'TS_200609_NWC.xls' is already open You cannot open two documents with the same name, even if the documents are in different folders. To open the second document, either close the document that's currently open, or rename one of the documents. People *pay* money for this? Positive sums of money? Nicholas Clark
From: Joshua Rodman
Date: 01:02 on 11 Sep 2006
Subject: Debian and the GFDL and stupid packaging decisions
Debian has decided that documents under the GFDL with so-called
"invariant sections" are non-free. This means that these documents have
sections which are you not legally allowed to modify. In a sense this
practice enables users of GFDL documents to refuse to pass freedoms on
to sub-licensees. One could imagine a practical scenario where such
documents become successively hidebound and unusable. Ironically, it
seems to go against some of the GNU ideology of freedom.
I think the GNU folks have sort made a mockery of themselves with this,
but I don't care that much. However, Debian has a policy of shipping
only free as in freedom components, and has decided that they should
remove this non-free documentation from their distribution.
The result:
jrodman@Skonnos:~ >man gcc
man: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz is a dangling symlink
No manual entry for gcc
See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not
available.
This is pretty impressive. Not only do I not get the documentation, I
don't get any sort of reasonable result. I don't even get an error that
the manpage is missing. What I get is a _missing symlink_.
jrodman@Skonnos:~ >ls -l /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz
lrwxrwxrwx [...] /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz -> gcc-4.1.1.gz
jrodman@Skonnos:~ >ls /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-4.1.1.gz
ls: /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-4.1.1.gz: No such file or directory
You'd think this means I forgot to install something, but that would
rely on the people packaging this stuff not screwing up. So there's
some kind of pointer to the currently installed version of gcc which
gets set up. I guess it picked the best option, eh? I mean it's not
like the documentation for gcc is available in some other form:
jrodman@Skonnos:~ >ls /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-*
/usr/share/man/man1/gcc-3.3.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-4.0.1.gz
Oh, I guess I'm wrong: there's completely reasonable documentation
sitting right there. But hey, it's not like I'd want to read any of
those documents. What I really want is a glaring error, which makes it
seem like my system is misconfigured. And hey, I suppose it _is_
misconfigured, by Debian.
Just to be clear, Debian does manage to make things like Adobe Acrobat
and Macromedia (Adobe) Flash available via reasonable channels. They go
into a repository of packages called "non-free". I suppose completely
proprietary software systems with lock-in capability are more touchable
than slightly problematic licenses for the standard free software
compiler.
Great priorities!
(Yes I understand this situation may be temporary, but it's been this
way for a couple months now. Great way to leave your users completely
in the lurch! Oh that's right, if you're not running stable, you dont'
exist.)
From: sabrina downard
Date: 16:11 on 30 Aug 2006
Subject: Die, die, die.
I have a lot of things that I could hate on at the moment, but I think
I'm going to just pick on one particular thing. Which ironically is,
like, the *one* thing that's relatively working. (At least I can fix
it when I'm the problem.)
resizer_reiserfs: the new size value is wrong.
Really? Why is that? What have I done wrong? How could I fix it?
What would an example be of a not-wrong size value? Can I just tell
you how much I appreciate how helpful and specific that error is? I
mean, I was too stupid to figure out that it was "wrong" since IT
DIDN'T WORK and all.
Incidentally, the problem was that I had made a typo: I typed "GB"
instead of merely "G." So, owning up to the PEBKAC, that's still a
fucking stupid error message.
hatefully,
--s.
From: Phil!Gregory
Date: 22:08 on 25 Aug 2006
Subject: Delphi. Excessive type-bondage.
Allow me to quote from the Delphi help file:
For a variable parameter, the actual argument must be of the exact type
of the formal parameter.
procedure SwapBytes(var B1, B2: Byte);
var
Temp: Byte;
begin
Temp := B1; B1 := B2; B2 := Temp;
end;
var
C1, C2: 0..255; (*Similar to a byte, but NOT identical*)
begin
SwapBytes(C1,C2); (*<-- Error message here*)
end.
Arguments C1 and C2 are not acceptable to SwapBytes, *although they have
the exact memory representation and range that a Byte has*. [Emphasis
mine.]
Oh, and for the case where I specifically ran into this, typecasting won't
help. Apparently when you typecast a variable, the result looks like a
constant to the compiler so you can't pass it as a variable parameter
(pass by reference).
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 14:22 on 25 Aug 2006 Subject: Xquartz Something isn't honouring my profile... My profile sets HISTSIZE to something non-default so that more bash history gets saved. Login shells are happy. Children spawned from login shells are happy - they inherit the environment, as it should be. It turns out to be the OS X X server. Its default is to spawn an xterm. It's doing this from a clean environment (ie it's not run my profile) but it doesn't run the xterm with -ls to make it a login shell. So nothing is running my profile. Mmm. I don't have an .xsession here, I don't really feel like creating one just for this, so as it's "my" laptop I investigate what the system default is. It seems to be /private/etc/X11/xdm/Xsession And lo, that file has a bare unadorned "xterm". So I change it to "xterm -ls". Does this work? Hell no. The bastard X server isn't using that, and is (or at least as far as all the documentation and preferences goes) hard coded to start xterm. And fuck my shell history over. Hate. Nicholas Clark
From: mjinks Date: 01:08 on 23 Aug 2006 Subject: errno=104 Cool. Thanks, that's really helpful. Somewhere along this chain of client<=>middleware<=>server, somebody encountered some difficulty and killed my connection. Well thank goodness they threw an error! An "errno=104"! Now, I wonder who did the throwing? And in what .h file buried deep in whoever's bowels might I find out what an "errno 104" FUCKING MEANS? Sequel: as it happens, client and server in this case are both part of the same package, so it seemed like a reasonable guess to go pawing around in that package's headers. Yay, 53 of them define something as a "104", and of those 53 header files, none has a name with "err" anywhere in it. Lovely. This of course assumes that the numbers in the headers and the numbers reported at runtime are even in the same base, such that my naive text string search is even vaguely on the right track. I mean honestly, numeric error codes, why the hell bother? Why not just die and keep your trap firmly shut so I'll know right away that I'm going to be running two or three different processes inside debuggers, rather than pretending to try to be informative? Oh wait, I get it. Never mind. Loathe, -j
From: sabrina downard Date: 17:23 on 22 Aug 2006 Subject: You know what I hate more than I hate software? Software installers. Worse, operating systems installers. Especially ones that work just fine with your pointer until the first reboot, then decide they know not of this strange "mouse" of which you speak and force you to use the "obviously no one will ever have to navigate this by keyboard! hah! hah! And if they're trapped without a pointer *certainly* they won't need the 'expert options' dropdown to work!" interface instead. Of course after I rebooted after the install completed, the pointer worked fine again. Hate. --s.
From: Juerd Date: 13:57 on 22 Aug 2006 Subject: Hating it already The past hours I have been searching for software that: - runs on Linux - lets one easily administer addresses - prints labels (standard 4x8 sheets) - won't confuse my grandpa with terms like "ldif" and "merge" This seems like a reasonable thing to expect the world to have produced. Unfortunately, I still haven't come across anything that remotely looks like what I'm looking for. Everyone seems to suggest using OpenOffice and document merging, but that's ten times too complex. But if it exists, I'm hating it already. Juerd
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[ Page 29 of 76 ]
Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi