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From: Abigail Date: 22:14 on 26 May 2005 Subject: Peppercorn --5I6of5zJg18YgZEa Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I do a lot of development for a small box, which doesn't have its own keyboard or monitor.=20 So I use a "management card" (whose vendor I shall not mention, because I already did so in the Subject line) - which allows you to control the box remotely. Using a web based interface, you can turn the box on and off, reset it, and, using a Java applet, it gives you a remote console as well. It gives you what's on the console, and allows you to use the keyboard (and in theory the mouse as well). Nice principle. But, it being software, there's hate. I hated the old card because the applet allowed you to type all characters, except the '-' and the '_'. To type a dash or an underscore, you had to pull down a menu and select a "soft keyboard" in some submenu. This popped up a small window consisting of a keyboard with tiny keys. In this window, you could select the dash. Hate. But now a days, I use a newer card. It doesn't have the problem I mentioned above. It has its own hate. The box I work on, I reboot a lot. And the bloody applet thinks "Hey, the box is booting, let's grab the focus". But don't think that grabbing the focus back is the end of it, oh no. Three seconds in the boot process, it grabs the focus again. And a few seconds later, it grabs it a third time. Three times. For each reboot. Which I can easily do 30 times a day. Hate. Hate. Hate. Abigail --5I6of5zJg18YgZEa Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFCljwcBOh7Ggo6rasRAv/8AJ9y1bXfyFo0+gDSq7vZ8j5e/EVNkACgsFYV a3pfc9jhjzlkyoPpQabgSI4= =qpga -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --5I6of5zJg18YgZEa--
From: Philip Newton Date: 11:16 on 26 May 2005 Subject: Don't install a different version than you promised! I wanted to install dbish, the DBI shell, on a Windows machine. One `ppm install DBI-Shell` later and I had a dbish. Yay! It also downloaded and installed some prerequisites, such as Test::Simple and Text::Reform v1.11. Or so I thought. The next time I started ppm, ten minutes later, it bombed with: "break_at" is not exported by the Text::Reform module Can't continue after import errors at C:/Programme/ActivePerl/site/lib/Text/Reform.pm line 43 BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at C:/Programme/ActivePerl/site/lib/Text/Autoformat.pm line 9. Compilation failed in require at C:\Programme\ActivePerl\bin\ppm3-bin line = 12. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at C:\Programme\ActivePerl\bin\ppm3-bin line 12. Looking in Text/Reform.pm, it appears that this is version 1.10 -- not 1.11! Even though ppm thinks it's version 1.11. And downloading Reform.pm v1.11 shows that it's a week older than the v1.10 that was installed by ppm. WTF? Hateful. --=20 Philip Newton <philip.newton@xxxxx.xxx>
From: Paul Orrock Date: 11:38 on 25 May 2005 Subject: Windows Install My day started well upacking the nice shiny boxes we've bought with 3ware RAID cards. These servers are going into a rack where they will work until they die so we thought we'd be clever and buy them without CD-ROM or floppy and instead buy a USB CD-ROM drive and just plug it in on the odd occasion we need to use it. I install Debian, everything fine, RAID hardware detected, everything groovy. I install Windows 2003 (for a client I hasten to add) and my troubles start. So it took ten minutes to load everything it needed from the CD just to say it was ready to start installing. (I'd like to point out Debian was up and downloading packages over the net at this point). Windows says we found no hard drives. No what you mean is that due to all the other crap you have on the CD the engineers (I use the term loosely) didn't see fit to put any standard RAID drivers on the CD. So I reboot a few times trying to watch the screen for the 2 nanosecond chance you get to say "Add third party raid drivers". I then wait ten minutes for windows to load all its crap and ask me where the third party raid drivers are. There the fun begins. Can I put a CD in with them on ? No Can I grab them via FTP on a DHCP network card ? No Can I stick them on a USB flash stick ? No I have to have them on a floppy. I mean for heaven's sake, in this day and age when we have so many other ways I have to use a technology that went out with the ark. Of course I have no floppy with them on. I'm not even sure I have a floppy disk in the office. So now I have to take the lid off my new box and plug in a floppy drive I cannibalised from an old 386 I dug out from my attic. Just to install the drivers so a commercial and up to date operating system can see the disks that are on a mainstream RAID card. I mean how is this sane ? *sigh*
From: Simon Wistow Date: 11:17 on 25 May 2005 Subject: SQLite and friends I know that at least one other member of our carthartic little bile cabal has come across this problem http://use.perl.org/~hex/journal/24191 but some combination of Class::DBI, DBI, DBD::SQLite and sqlite is fucking up my cabbage patch. I'm using SQLite for rapid prototyping and I want to stick a version into a DB. A version is a string because, well, apparently just having incrementing numbers is too difficult for people or something. Either way, this shouldn't be a problem. Right? Right? Just set the column type to VARCHAR. Or TEXT. Or BLOB. Or CLOB. Any of those? No. SQLite trys to promote whatever goes in to be a number. Despite claiming that it won't "If the datatype of the column contains any of the strings "CHAR", "CLOB", or "TEXT" then that column has TEXT affinity. Notice that the type VARCHAR contains the string "CHAR" and is thus assigned TEXT affinity. If the datatype for a column contains the string "BLOB" or if no datatype is specified then the column has affinity NONE." http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html MY SCHEME DOES DEFINE IT AS ONE OF THOSE! YOU SYPHILLITIC PILE OF GYM SOCKS! In fact I've tried everyone of those and also the trick of manually and explicitly setting the data type to be BLOB. But no. Apparently the simple taks of sticking exactly what I want into the database is too difficult. I apparently misunderstood the point of a database - here I was thinking that it was store data and, in fact, it's intended purpose is TO MAKE MY LIFE A MISERY. *sigh*
From: Simon Wistow Date: 14:54 on 23 May 2005 Subject: windowmaker's backgrounds Changing one's background is one of the fundamental writes of a GUI user. It allows you to express your individuality in much the same way that sticking amusing posters up on your cubical walls do. In 99.9999% of all desktop systems out there it is a trivially easy operation. Windowmaker has, however, fully embraced the Linux Retardo[tm] mindset. Is it part of the configuration menu - NO! That would be entirely too easy! You have to use the wmsetbg command line tool. Because, you know, when you're configuring the look and feel of a GRAPHICAL environment you want to be using the fucking COMMAND LINE. But, I figure it should be quire easy - simply wmsetbg <path>. But oh no, whilst that does change my background it only does it on this desktop. And sometimes only temporarily. Sometimes permanently. How special. To set my background on all desktops I need to do for f in `seq 0 10`; do wmsetbg -u -w $f <path>; done Hurrah! I suppose the point is that I could have different backgrounds on every desktop should I show wish which is clearly a far more common usecase than, say, wanting to browse thumbnails. Or put the image down anywhere other than center.
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 19:20 on 21 May 2005 Subject: AIX patch Patching file ./cv.h using Plan A... patch: 3016-007 Cannot open file ./cv.h Hunk #1 ignored at 12. 1 out of 1 hunks ignored--saving rejects to ./av.h.rej errr? yes? Why did you put it in av.h.rej? Hateful thing. Can't cope with unified diffs either. Get New Utilities. Nicholas Clark
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 22:08 on 20 May 2005 Subject: links Let me first start off with the obvious. "Is there a good command line web browser?" "Yeah, use links." "I've used lynx, it sucks." "Not lynx, L-I-N-K-S!" Google, when asked for "links", actually has the links home page as the first hit! Didn't expect that, lost a reason to hate links. Now back to our hate. How do I copy text from links? For some reason this is the only command line application that refuses to allow me to highlight and copy anything. GRAH! So even though links' rendering is superior I'm stuck using lynx.
From: Leon Brocard Date: 19:52 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Weather Dashboard Widget Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (wow, I need to start thinking up longer relase names) has Dashboard and widgets. It's a pain to develop these (whoa, there's another hate), but more importantly for this hate it ships with a weather widget: http://images.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/images/indexweather20050412.jpg So I type "London" into the back of it (because Apple has gone UI crazy and the back of widgets is how you configure them) and am pleasantly suprised at the massively hot weather that it'll be in rainy old London. Very surprised. For the next few days, until I figure out that it is stupid software and showing me the weather for London, West Virginia. You see, Dashboard widgets have a completely different UI to everything else. What I wanted to do was enter "London" and hit return. Even though there's no button, no form that I can see. Then it'll give me a list of cities and I can choose "London, United Kingdom". Would it be too much to ask to understand that people might mean "London, UK" a little more than they mean "London, WV"? This is supposed to be the future, dammit. Stupid software causing me hate because I have to work around it and guess what it is actually doing. Gah! Weather update: 15degC, overcast
From: Patrick Carr Date: 17:36 on 18 May 2005 Subject: power archiver Power Archiver, you stupid hack of a utility, you're a lot like my mother. Since you unzip all the files BEFORE checking for existing files of the same name, your question is less, "Do you want to replace these files?" and more: "I've already spent a few minutes unzipping these several-gig files, do you want to replace what's already there? Because it's okay if you do. I mean, it's no big deal. If you don't want them, I can just throw them away. You could rename them if you want; do you want to do that? Then all this CPU time and memory won't have been wasted. No? They're duplicates? Well, fine. But maybe you should look more closely next time before I go through all this trouble. No, no, sorry, it's fine. Don't worry about me." Not to mention the explanationless "Run-Time Error" every time I try to quit you. I'd say we should start seeing other windows unzip utilities, but I'm afraid you would start stalking me. Pat Carr
From: Simon Wistow Date: 14:59 on 18 May 2005 Subject: oyster cards One could argue that this is a stretch to call this software but if you don't like it then you should feel free to bite the ass of a convenient llama. One that was syphillitic, amourous and deranged would be best. Oyster cards, for Americans and other aliens, are the handy dandy smart cards for gaining access to The Underground. They work in two modes - Mode the First: You buy a travel pass to travel about for a period of time in a specified number of zones. For the record I buy monthly Zone 1-2 passes. Mode the Second: You put some pre-pay on the card. Every time you swipe through some is deducted. As of earlier this year it actually works out what the best fare was for you retrospectively and adjust accordingly. Which is nice. Now, I tend to put about a tenner of pre-pay on my card because occasionally I nip to zone 3 and it's useful. So far, so hateless. The hate starts now. A minor quibble first - when you swipe through and your travel card is about to expire the gate flashes up a message "soon expir" (sic). Bceaus elcearly, even though it only has one thing to say and one thing only, they though that somehow putting enough space for the final letter wasn't worth it. And people wonder why our children grow up with the reading age of a toddler. And now the major hate - you only get the warning for 2 or 3 days before your card runs out. Which means that if have a weekend and then take a bus or walk on the third day you miss it. If you have no pre-pay then your normal rhythm of swiping and walking through the gate is disruptwed and people crash into you. MEbarssing but liveable. If, however, you have pre-pay they charge you for the journey. At which point it's too late to back out and get a travel card. Even if you get to the other end and immediately renew your monthly pass then you still get charged full whack. Fucking peice of shit.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi
