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[ Page 42 of 76 ]
From: Phil!Gregory
Date: 17:37 on 12 Aug 2005
Subject: Delphi's Type-Bondage
Hey, here's an idea. Let's make a language that forces the program to
adhere to extremely rigid variable typing rules. That way, we can force
the programmer to never shoot himself in the foot. Oh, but the whole
bondage and discipline approach to typing won't make him hate us enough.
Let's also introduce just enough type interchangeability to break anything
where he might try to use the type strictness to his benefit.
Well, it works. I hate them.
I have to read a series of database fields into a series of variables.
Except for the types of the variables, the process is the same for all of
the fields. I'd love to have just one function to call on all of them; it
would make things very simple. Delphi thinks differently. There's no way
to to hand a function a variable of an arbitrary type and have it do the
right thing; the compiler won't allow it. The best I can do is to keep
track of the data types myself and pass an extra value into the function
to tell it what the type of the destination variable is.
"But wait!" you cry (maybe). "You can use overloaded functions and
inheritance and stuff!" Or, at least, that's what I though to myself.
But, while Delphi is ever-so-strict about keeping different types
separate[0], if one type is defined in terms of another (TDateTime is
really a Double, for instance), overloaded functions _cannot tell the
difference between them_.
Go, Delphi, giving me the worst of all possible worlds.
[0] To the point where this is illegal code:
var
arr1 : array[1..10] of Integer;
arr2 : array[1..10] of Integer;
begin
arr1 := arr2
because the compiler considers arr1 and arr2 to be of different
types.
From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Date: 20:19 on 07 Aug 2005
Subject: Applescript
How the hell do I add a file to iTunes using Applescript.
I'm obviously holding my face wrong.
Every example and the documentation says I do something like this:
tell application "Finder"
set theSelection to selection
end tell
tell application "iTunes"
set thePlaylist to make new user playlist
repeat with theFile in theSelection
set theTrack to add theFile to thePlaylist
end repeat
my ps_play_next_ref(thePlaylist)
delete thePlaylist
end tell
And it comes back with
Can't make <<class cUsP>> id 42775 of <<class cSrc>> id 56 of
application "iTunes" into the expected type.
Or sometimes, it tells me Finder doesn't know how to add an alias to (the
same kind of spew).
Well, DUH, I didn't say "tell application "Finder"".
And, by the way, things like "item 1 of blah" are something Grace
Hopper would have come up with. Or maybe it's Larry Wall's idea of
what COBOL should be like. I haven't used COBOL in years, and I
still remember how tired I got of "perform monkey-balls through
smelly-swamp".
How about an Objective C scripting language, Apple? Something like:
tell (application "Finder") {
theSelection := [selection];
}
tell (application "iTunes") {
thePlaylist := [Playlist new];
while (theFile := [theSelection next]) {
theTrack := [thePlaylist add: theFile];
}
ps_play_next_ref thePlaylist;
thePlaylist delete;
}
Then I wouldn't have to fucking guess how to convince it to use
the right version of "add". God damn, get the basic syntax right,
or at least internally consistent, and worry about frills later.
All I want is that when I'm playing a song, I can cue a newly
downloaded file in iTunes without it changing the playlist to the
library and forgetting that I'm in Party Shuffle, or doing it all
manually.
From: Jonathan Trites Date: 09:21 on 06 Aug 2005 Subject: make uninstall Here's something I hate. Programs that after you do the ./configure, make, make install, you realize for one reason or another that you did something wrong or you no longer want the program. So, after it shits all over /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/lib, or whateverthefuck other directories it uses that have a bajillion and a half other files already in them, so you can't manually delete the program, you try 'make uninstall'. And what the fuck do you get: make: *** No rule to make target `uninstall'. Stop. Well, FUCK YOU TOO. I haven't done any other ./configure's or changed anything, so you should be able to fucking uninstall. I just don't want you on my system anymore. So, GET THE FUCK OFF. But nooooooooo, I can't do that because it put files all over the fucking place and I have no way of ever being able to get it fully off of my system. Just fucking great.
From: Jonathan Trites Date: 08:54 on 06 Aug 2005 Subject: Mozilla tabs and url's OK, so I like firefox. It's way better than IE, duh. I haven't tried opera in a few years, but firefox has been good to me, except in this one regard. So, I'm at a page where I'm going to open up a bunch of links (> 10) to read in separate tabs. I can do this with my wheel button or holding down control and clicking normally. Either way works for me. However, sometimes, for whatever reason, the internet doesn't work. Most commonly, this is when the phone rings and makes my wireless die as we have a 2.4 GHz phone, but other things have caused this problem as well. So, after a while, firefox decides it's going to timeout all of the tabs that I have opened that were in the loading state. "Fine," I say, "I'll just wait til the internet is back and then reload the pages." So, the internet comes back, and I go to reload the page, and guess what. The fucking tabs only hold onto url's after the page has loaded. The url's not in the address bar until after the page loads. Well, fuck me in the goat ass. Whose fucking brilliant idea was that? And after TEN SEPARATE TIMEOUT POPUPS, now I have 10 tabs open and no url's in any of them. Half the time, I've moved on or closed the original tab. Just fucking great. Now I have to dig through my damn history, reopen the original document, scroll up and down the fucking page looking for what I had open, and do a rain dance and sacrifice whothefuckknows how many cows hoping it will work this time. Just put the damn url in the tab you peice of shit. Fuck. --=20 And then there was the lawyer that stepped in cow manure and thought he was melting... Want a gmail account? I've got invites galore.
From: Earle Martin Date: 00:24 on 03 Aug 2005 Subject: Movable Type Having just installed Movable Type, the experience of actually writing weblog entries has been a fairly enjoyable one. On the other hand, there is the administration interface for configuring your weblog, which appears to have been designed by a howler monkey that has been given a copy of "Learn JavaScript in 24 Hours".
From: Abigail Date: 00:27 on 30 Jul 2005 Subject: Fedora installer --jh06fhy6YTawvwPV Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline So, I have this new HP box, and for some reason, I decide to install Fedora on it. The installer asks a few preliminary questions, and then whether I want to do a custom install. I do. So, it lets me partition the disk. Being an old fashioned person, I don't create one large partition, no, I slice and dice myself a /, /opt, /tmp, /var, etc. Fine. Then it asks me which packages I want to install. I select everything - disks are large enough and I can't be bothered wading through the list of packages. A few more questions, and off it goes. It starts creating the file systems. Only after it created them it figures out it doesn't have enough space, claiming it needs slightly more space in / than the partition I created for it. Ok, I think. Nice to tell me now. Why don't you let me select the packages first, then tell me how much space I need so I can partition with the space requirements in mind? Alas, I decide, I now know how much space is needed, and this installer has nice back buttons, so I go back to the partitioning screen and repartition. No way buddy. I can go back a long way, but it stop just before the screen with the partition options. "I already partition the disks, and I'm not letting you do it again, nananana! If you want to partition differently, reboot and start all over again, you sucker!" So I do. Now giving / lots more space, much more than it claimed it needed. Select all packages again. Answer the other questions again. And off it goes. Creating file systems again. And again finding out / isn't large enough. Despite it being much larger than it claimed it needed the first time around. So, did I try a third time? No. Before I could, the disk decided that it hard worked for an hour or so and that it was time to start developing read and write errors. Abigail --jh06fhy6YTawvwPV Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFC6rtqBOh7Ggo6rasRApg3AKCPX9yub8tHlhBS6L+5IHrboxykgwCdEIR8 NJO30pcu9yiZOYa9Y7lzQcQ= =/eZj -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --jh06fhy6YTawvwPV--
From: Artur Bergman Date: 20:37 on 29 Jul 2005 Subject: MacOS X and subversion Hateful operating system, unix eh? Stability eh? FOR FUCKS SAKE! So, not only is it easy to bring down the entire networking on the machine and cause a hung process, just do svn ls svn:// ip.that.will.timeout/ then hit ctrl-c a couple of times and in a different shell execute ifconfig BAM, your network will start to decompose... But then when it reboots, your entire filesystem, (I mean, sorry filestore) is fucked up, svk has lost it's config, mail.app has lot it's config and I have mysterious directories in /Users/ machtching my /username \d+/ crap crap crap, how can it crash? and how can it loose my data!!!!
From: Simon Wistow Date: 12:20 on 05 Jul 2005 Subject: PHP gallery Apart from having a stupid name (almost as brain dead as calling something .NET or COM) I actually really liked PHP Gallery. It was easy to set up and it did everything I wanted. Then one of my users created a sub album. Two actually. And I couldn't work out how to delete it. Unlike the main album there didn't seem to be a handy dandy button to say delete. Since it seemed to be directory based rather than DB base I did something slightly stupid. I just deleted the directory of the second album. (Which was in the root albums diretcory, not a subdirectory of the directory of its parent album). Without making a backup first. DOH! This actually appeared to do nothing. Apparently, I found out after trawling through the various web sites out there, what I should have done is scrolled through all 400 photos looking for the virtual photo representing the sub album. Anfd then hit 'album actions -> delete'. This worked fine for the first album but threw an error syaing that the second album didn't exist. So I grep for the name (album02) and find it in photos.dat of the parent album (still with me) which appears to be a serialised data structure. I make a backup and edit photos.dat by hand. Which causes all the photos in the parent album to disapear. DOH! Restore. Chew finger nails. Create two new sub albums. Sure enough these are given the name album01 and album02. Delete the orphan album02. It works! Huzzah! Delete the new album01. It works! Delete the new album02. Failure! Chew finger nails again. Repeat steps again but this time back up new album02 dir, delete orphan album02, delete new album01, restore album02 dir, delete orphan album02. SUCCESS! PIMMS ALL ROUND! Of course now I'm worried that other data is in an inconsistent state but it *looks* ok. What a fucking palaver.
From: Leon Brocard Date: 12:34 on 14 Jun 2005 Subject: Spotlight Muahaha, http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/ says: "Spotlight for Mac OS X Tiger lets you blaze through all of your files and applications and see results as soon as you type the very first letter" Does it now? Only if you type at about 1 second per letter on my non-Intel Powerbook! Let's pretend I'm trying to find an application. I Command-Space and type in the application name, watch it find all sorts of crap, and then only three seconds later show the actual application I was searching for. [Sidenote: command is the key with the apple and bit of string on. Option is the one labelled "Alt" and the frying pan] Three seconds to find something which you should know is already there, because I typed it in not so long ago and I search for a few times a day? Hateful! Even "locate" is faster. Back to Quicksilver we go, Leon
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[ Page 42 of 76 ]
Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi