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[ Page 46 of 76 ]
From: Dave Vandervies Date: 18:38 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Re: Subversion (was: Re: Upgrading without central packaging) Somebody claiming to be Robin Stephenson wrote: > Can anyone name a single piece of software that doesn't suck? There must > be some small, perfectly formed jewel out there that does something > useful, right? Right? The system I'm sending this from has a /bin/true that comes close to fitting that description. Not like the one on the other end of the SSH connection. (Linus Torvalds's comment about version and copyright notices comes to mind.)
From: Xtina Date: 16:51 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: Windows labels and such. Here's a nice nifty hate. I select Open With for some file or another. I mouse over the various selections, and the little yellow label comes up. I [esc] out of the selection box, and the label... remains. My friend explained this to me: "Popups are actually just windows without the window stuff at the top and the frame, but are set top always on top so you can see them. They are controlled by hover and mouse out actions over an icon or menu, or whatever. "Sometimes, though, the mouse out code that would remove it automatically doesn't run and it isn't removed. Alt-F4 as you know is the default keys to close any window. "Why it doesn't run is has to do with the mouse out being interrupted before you leave that object and then the mouse being out of that object at the mouse out event that closes that window never being executed." ... Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds this to be filled with the rotten tofu of hate. I key things in quickly enough to where this happens to me at least once a fortnight, and it drives me *bonkers*.=20 Yknow, I don't need to see the labels that badly, Bob! -x
From: Tanja Date: 10:37 on 26 Apr 2005 Subject: beachball Today I witnessed, many times, that cute colourful beachball that my Mac OS X displays when it basically hangs. Instead of using the valuable resources to actually make sure Safari doesn't hang (as my activity monitor kindly displays in bright red) Apple decided to make a cute spinning beachball. I don't like it *I hate it* What do they think? I go 'oh cute, I don't mind the wait lalala'??? I want to do my work! I don't want some stupid happy thingy on my screen, making it impossible for me to actually do anything but wait! And what do I wait for? I have no clue! It spins on *ALL* my apps most of the time! Do I want it? No! Can I turn it off? NO! Does it drive me crazy? Fuck yeah! -- Tanja ... Be a rebel. Accept your body.
From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Date: 21:34 on 25 Apr 2005
Subject: HPUX tcp/ip utilities
% route add net 192.168.127.0 192.168.81.1
add net 192.168.127.0: gateway 192.168.81.1: Network is unreachable
% ifconfig lan5
lan5: flags=843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>
inet 192.168.81.12 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.81.255
% ping 192.168.81.1
ping 192.168.81.1
PING 192.168.81.1: 64 byte packets
64 bytes from 192.168.81.1: icmp_seq=0. time=0. ms
...
% # netstat -rn
Routing tables
Destination Gateway Flags Refs Interface Pmtu
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 UH 0 lo0 4136
...
192.168.126.0 192.168.81.1 UG 0 lan5 0
% route add net 192.168.127.0 192.168.81.1
add net 192.168.127.0: gateway 192.168.81.1: Network is unreachable
% ...
To make a long story short, HPUX "route" command things this is still 1987
and goes
"Hmmm, no metric, let's pull 0 out of my ass"
"Hmmm, what's the gateway? How many hops away is that?"
"Hey, he said metric 0, and that's one hop!"
"This mother needs a confusing error message, telling me that 1 hop gateway
is 0 hops away like that"
I just LOVE dealing with a computer that's using early-80's versions of
network utilities. Makes me nostalgic for Xenix 286 it does. NOT.
Hey, HP, it's 2005, you haven't updated this software in 20 years, isn't it
about effing time you did? Wouldn't it have been a REALLY GOOD IDEA to take
advantage of the fact that Tru64 is based on 4.3-Reno (AKA 4.4 beta) instead
of 4.2 or 4.1D or whatever prehistoric discarded backup tape you used to spawn
HPUX from, and use it instead of this ... AUGH
HATE
From: Juerd Date: 14:40 on 24 Apr 2005 Subject: Bad Terminal! After mis-doubleclicking: 15:41 < Juerd> WHY THE HELL DOES DRAGGING COPY AND PASTE 15:41 < Juerd> THAT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WITHIN THE SAME TERMINAL WINDOW Juerd
From: Smylers Date: 17:09 on 23 Apr 2005 Subject: ps2pdf ps2pdf, I'm fully aware that the default paper size on this system is USA letter[*0], and I can understand that size being used when creating a brand new document -- but why on earth would you think I want to use it when converting a document's rendering language from PostScript to PDF, in preference to the paper size _used by that particular document_? The PostScript document was on A4, and -- guess what? -- it was formatted to fit nicely on A4; maybe it's just me, but I didn't get the urge to chop off bits off each page just because I was converting it to PDF! Hate! [*0] Though that's a separate hate -- that I haven't spotted where to change that on this Fedora system. On Debian /etc/papersize exists and has a manpage, and even has the program paperconfig for manipulating it; Fedora has none of these things. Quite possibly Fedora has some other easy way of configuring this -- and if Debian has warped my mind into expecting things to be in odd places, it's hardly fair to hate Fedora for not targeting their OS at Debian converts. So currently I've got the unsatisfying feeling of having some unresolved hate there and not knowing where to direct it. Smylers
From: Juerd
Date: 13:21 on 23 Apr 2005
Subject: Upgrading without central packaging
So I've had a Mac for a month now. And there's a new version of Firefox
that has some bug and security fixes, so I thought it'd be wise to
upgrade.
Under Debian, I'd also upgrade the rest of my system, just because it's
just as easy and doesn't take a lot more time. I would type two simple
commands and it would get me new versions of everything, probably
including Firefox:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
But - with my shiny new Mac Mini, I have to upgrade Firefox the same way
I installed it, and I recall not liking that. Again, with Debian, it'd
have been just one simple command:
apt-get install firefox
Which downloads and installs all without my intervention. Instead, I
have to:
1. start a browser (in this case Firefox)
2. enter a URL (getfirefox.com)
3. click a link (download)
4. wait for the download to finish
5. double click an icon (dmg)
6. drag another icon to the Applications folder
7. confirm that I want to replace the old one
8. close the Finder window again
9. select two icons (dmg and mounted volume)
10. drag them to Trash
And after all that hard labour, all that's upgraded is just one program!
There's not even something that can tell me what updates are available
for the many programs I have installed the past month, so I have to
check that manually too.
As far as I am concerned, Apple's Mac OS X and Microsoft's Windows XP
are not yet ready for the Desktop. This is too much hard and confusing
work to confront newbies with. I'm lucky to be a geek and understand the
entire 10 step procedure!
Juerd
From: Michael Leuchtenburg Date: 02:46 on 22 Apr 2005 Subject: firefox's file selector Sadly, Firefox does not break with the long tradition of poorly design file selection dialogs. No, instead it has a *new* way to be broken. When I click on the file that's at the bottom of the list of files in the current directory, it scrolls that list up a notch, thus moving the file I was aiming for out from under my cursor. Of course, if I was double-clicking - since you need to double-click to select a file or enter a directory, of course - the second click is aimed at the wrong file. Of course, it still recognizes it as a double click. It would make too much sense to reset such things when changing the widgets being displayed. No, it recognizes it as a double click and selects that file instead of the one I was intending to select.
From: Luke Kanies Date: 18:11 on 21 Apr 2005 Subject: MP3 players? Linux? I'm not sure, but I know there's hate I don't know why MP3 players and audio are so hard; I really don't. Getting MP3s to work on Gentoo was hours and hours of work, and it only got worse when I wanted to use my external USB headphone amp. But I'm doing something theoretically simple here: I want to play music on my computer, in the least obtrusive and most efficient manner, I want hotkeys to control the playing, and I want simple mechanisms to manage what music I'm playing. So, I've been using XMMS for years, even though its usability is about, oh, 1992. But recently its complete uselessness when it comes to playlists became too much for me. So, I tried rhythmbox again, for about the ninth time. It only lasted about 2 weeks (it just periodically stopped playing with some kind of weird error, it has about 1/10 the prefs it needs, it does absolutely rediculous things with refresh while it's loading the MP3 library, and it finally just played static constantly), but it highlighted another annoying-ass aspect of using mp3 players: I always set up hotkeys for forward, reverse, and pause, because I do them often and I hate having to switch around finding the stupid mp3 player. Well, obviously, I have to switch the hotkeys when I switch mp3 players. So, today, I finally wrote an abstraction for the two players in question, so I can just modify the script (basically just switching default players) and the hotkeys will automatically work, because they're just pointing to my script. Yes, I could have just had the script search through the process table to see which one was running, but I didn't feel like it. This just seems bloody stupid, but I'm not sure who's to blame. Me, for demanding too much? (Nope.) The mp3 players for sucking so much? Metacity, for having such absolutely retarded mechanisms for setting hotkeys (2 years and it _still_ requires me to set the key and command separately, within GConf)? Gnome, for not having a good, integrated mp3 player, or even better, a good mechanism for integrating any mp3 player, or any app? Linux, for not having an even lower-level good mechanism for integrating mp3 players, or any other apps? All OSes, because they basically all lack this feature? I mean, come on; classes of applications (like mp3 players) are members of a class because they share similar features. In some cases those features are not exposed externally (e.g., one might not generally refer to an internal feature of both Gimp and Photoshop in the same way, although it seems like it'd be great to be able to call a filter in either one through an external interface), but in many cases each member of the class has similar features that you want to call from outside the app, say, through hotkeys. Why the hell don't OSes recognize this and make it simple to register applications as members of a class, with the same interface? Then allow the user to pick which member to use, and then send most/all actions through that interface, and the stupid interface is responsible for finding the correct command on the correct app? Why do the damn operating systems expect me to know how everything works? I want music played through my computer, and I want hotkeys that allow me to quickly pause or fast-forward, and I want some mechanism for managing my music. I frankly don't care how this is done, but I categorically don't want to spend 5 hours a month just making sure it all fucking works. Stupid computers.
From: Phil!Gregory Date: 16:23 on 21 Apr 2005 Subject: More BDE Hate I would love to stop using the BDE. If only we didn't have so much legacy code that relies on it. The BDE sometimes needs to create temporary tables for intermediate data (often as a result of SQL queries) it does this in what it calls a private directory. (You need to set the private directory because if you don't the BDE will use the same directory that your executable is in, and that's bad, because it makes the lock files too large. I don't know why; it just does. But that's an old hate now.) When you initialize your BDE session, the session puts an exclusive lock on the directory. So you can't have multiple instances of your program using the same directory. Fine, I can deal with that. Oh, and if the program exits unexpectedly and doesn't unload the BDE, that directory stays locked. "Okay," I think, "since I only have one instance of my program running, I'll just have it delete any old lock files when it starts, since they won't be valid." What I learned is that the BDE DLL[0] remembers the locks, so as long as any other program has the DLL loaded, I can't just restart my program. Needless to say, this makes developing and debugging the program somewhat painful. Program crashes, I have to go exit all other BDE-using programs on my system, then restart them, because I need to use them. Repeat every time the program dies while I'm working on it. Hate, hate, hate. [0] The BDE DLL is actually named idapi.dll. Go figure.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi