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[ Page 33 of 76 ]
From: sabrina downard Date: 17:16 on 20 Jun 2006 Subject: and on the topic of firefox biting shiny metal asses failing to block pop-unders *that play sounds at me*. at least if they're silent i won't be bothered by them until all my memory's used up and firefox is using 70% of my cpu! freshly off of "where the hell is that *noise* coming from because i'm pretty sure i don't recall there being any 'Beavis and Butt-head' dialogue in this song," --s.
From: Bill Page Date: 09:58 on 20 Jun 2006 Subject: oops i just quit can someone please send steve a memo that having apple + q so close to apple +w makes it far too easy to quit something you didn't mean to? even just making close window apple + e would make it less easy to kill a browserful of tabs or an adiumful of conversations.
From: Jeremy Stephens Date: 21:58 on 19 Jun 2006 Subject: tabs in source code I hate tabs in source code. If you must use them, expand them into spaces please if you think anyone will ever want to read it. Hatefully yours, Jeremy
From: Joshua Rodman
Date: 21:26 on 18 Jun 2006
Subject: More info hate.
Trying to use expr, the argument 5.0 is not recognized as numeric, so I
wonder what is supposed to work. The man page doesn't say, the --help
doesn't say (nor -? nor -h).
so:
info expr
[...]
SEE ALSO
The full documentation for expr is maintained as a Texinfo manual.
If the info and expr programs are properly installed at your site,
the command
info expr
should give you access to the complete manual.
I suppose this text is technically correct.
The second part of this hate is unfortunately too tangled for me to
deduce. The short form is that Debian is hateful, and either the
package installation method, or the texinfo scripts, or the dpkg
install-info program or well, maybe something else is broken. And has
been so since before the year 2001.
Extra joy comes from the developers involved being so tired of the
situation that they don't bother to consitently comment/modify/clarify
bugs filed against the relevant packages, so a significant portion of
the hints in the bug tracking system are wrong.. Maybe it will work
correctly in another decade or so.
-josh
From: Yossi Kreinin
Date: 11:26 on 17 Jun 2006
Subject: C++: a bigger pile of shite
I'm working on this fairly large embedded system. Recently we decided
that maybe it's even too large, and how about making it smaller.
So people cleaned things up, and everyone was happy. The other day we
built it, and the image is 800K larger compared to the size that made
us happy.
I wrote a script to tell us how much code was compiled from each
directory in the source tree. It looks for `bof..' and `eof..'
symbols kindly generated by our compiler at the beginning and the end
of each translation unit. The source filename is mangled so that
slashes become `.2F' and so on. Elegant and portable, pretty much
like the rest of C/C++.
So we run it on the two binaries and it turns out that iostream used
to take only 400K, but now it's grown to 1.2M. That's not too much
for a state of the art formatting library: after all, Embedded Linux
takes 2M. And it was easy to get these 800K back: all you need to do
is comment out the instantiations of basic_{i,o}stream with wchar_t
and unsigned short in the library source (BTW, wchar_t is unicode,
but what the fuck is unsigned short?!). Of course it would give us
>200K in the old version, which is also notable.
But I was still puzzled why it changed without anyone touching it
(can you imagine someone touching THIS shit?). So I look deeper into
the object files, which have names like ostream__sti0_97abf70.o.
I list the symbols and fire an editor. A function named _Iput or
something catches my eye: it takes, say, 14K. Must be very useful,
thinks I to myself. Let's look how many instantiations of that we've
got.
I search for `_Iput' - and the screen doesn't move. Try again and
again - nothing. Did this piece of shit workstation hang again? Wait,
something is flickering at the bottom of the screen. That's the line
number! WHAT?! I see the same screen 10 times around _Iput? DO YOU
MEAN THAT ALL OF THIS _(&^$*@_(1) BULLSHIT IS REPLICATED 10 TIMES
IN MY IMAGE?? And I was looking for DIFFERENT instantiations - how
NAIVE!
This is actually even better than that. First, the replicas DON'T
LIST in the symbol table: they show up as unnamed gaps BETWEEN
symbols. Second, we've already spent quite some time trying to
convince the compiler to keep ONE copy of every function: we've
found FLAGS for that (by default, it keeps multiple copies of
templates, and then has the NERVE to COMPLAIN about having them,
so you have to tell the linker to IGNORE MULTIPLE DEFINITIONS).
Now I see how the flags work: it keeps replicating, but without
the whining.
And that doesn't even count the INLINED code! When you compare
a std::string with a character literal, you get to see assembly
code the size of a human head listed near that source line.
And no, that's not all - it calls about 3 functions to help it.
Do the fuckers who promote STL realize that CODE TAKES FUCKING
SPACE? Maybe they are idealist philosophers and assume that code
lives in a separate realm of ideas and notions. And how is it
possible to implement a compiler so lousy it just HAS to keep
10 copies of each instantiation, unless you do it on purpose?
C++: kind of like C, but much bigger.
(1) People with C++ experience know that these characters are not
necessarily a censored profanity - they may as well be a perfectly
legal mangled symbol name.
From: Pete Hunt Date: 19:21 on 16 Jun 2006 Subject: Mimesweeper Dear Mimesweeper, If you don't have a parser for a particular email attachment(1), can I suggest that you remove the option to grep the binary for things that might even remotely look like "naughty" words and then block the the attachment based upon whatever random fucking text strings you happen to find? (2) (1) MS Publisher file, so it's not _that_ obscure. (2) Yes, this is a user-configurable option. No, I have no control over the filter. Yes, I want to kill the filter admin (3). (3) "But how did you find the text strings in the binary?" Hatefully Pete
From: Peter da Silva Date: 04:22 on 13 Jun 2006 Subject: Windows Update This is an old dry hate, with just a hint of bitters, but by god do not enjoy spending an evening running Windows Update when Windows failed to detect the second core in my new Athlon X2 and the ONLY way to get it to really truly retry is to reinstall from scratch... It was easier to install Jaguar on my unsupported dual-CPU Mac clone using XPostFacto. And I'm really not enthused by Mac OS X's install procedure either. But Windows sets such a low bar...
From: Earle Martin Date: 12:13 on 05 Jun 2006 Subject: apt-get and some crypto thing root@pulsar:~$ apt-get update [ some output nusked for brevity ] Fetched 38.5kB in 4s (8510B/s) Reading package lists... Done W: GPG error: http://ftp.uk.debian.org unstable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems Hmmh. Okay. man apt-get. search for 'gpg': "Pattern not found (press RETURN)". Search for "signature": "Pattern not found (press RETURN)". Search for "key": "Pattern not found (press RETURN)". Same results for "man apt". YOUR PROGRAMMER DIES NOW
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 22:30 on 01 Jun 2006 Subject: Brain-dead trouble ticket mailer code Dear trouble ticket system programmers, the In-Reply-To header is there for a reason. (So what if your system can accept comments via venues other than email? If an incoming email causes you to eventually generate an outgoing email, then here's my Message-Id for you to keep track of. I don't care what happens inbetween. Figure it out.) Annoyedly yours,
< mari
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi