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From: Ricardo SIGNES Date: 02:00 on 12 Jan 2008 Subject: Mail.app smtp server OS X ships with a postfix install. It's very easy to set it up to relay to a trusted SMTP server over SASL. This is great for sending mail when offline; it just flushes when you're online. Mail.app will never allow you to use localhost for SMTP. It will not allow 127.x.y.z, localhost, or any name for the local box. It *will* allow it for your IMAP server. What. The. Hell?
From: Earle Martin Date: 17:57 on 11 Jan 2008 Subject: Mail.app address autocompletion Start typing in the compose field: web<space> - Web Support Actions <websupportactions@...> - Web Systems <websys@...> Keep typing: web s - Web Systems <websys@...> Hello? Where the fuck did the other one go to? I WANTED THAT ONE, YOU WORTHLESS POOL OF PREMATURELY SQUIRTED BYTES.
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi Date: 19:56 on 10 Jan 2008 Subject: my(sql) setup agony Why is installing mysql the fun equivalent of picking a zit in your back? It shouldn't be there, you need to do it because it hurts like a damn, but you can't quite reach it, and you fail in mysterious ways, and shouldn't science have progressed far enough by now to now to have to do it? I installed MediaWiki to my Mac last night since I want to try writing something that quite well fits the wiki hyperlinkage model, and I sure as hell don't want to write raw HTML this day and age... I found this: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_Mac_OS_X Notice the roughly 27 easy steps of installing mysql. I don't think it's that mysql in OS X in particular, from my past (unfortunately forgotten by now) experience in other UNIXes it was equally painful. Why do I *always* have to disable remote and local (myql) root access and setup passwords? Storing the access rights of a database *IN THE DATABASE*? Please, just shoot me.
From: Peter da Silva Date: 04:34 on 08 Jan 2008 Subject: Apple Mail *name* rewriting... When I get mail to an address that APple Mail thinks it knows, it CHANGES what it shows me to match the address it thinks I should be seeing. I just realized that this is what it was doing, despite the fact that I have the option that *looks* like it turns this hateful user snottiness on disabled, after a frustrating attempt to find a message that I'd deliberately sent to myself with a different name so it would stand out. This is pissing me off. Most of the Apple Collective crap I can ride out and move on with, but this is hiding information I need to know. That's purely hateful.
From: Jeremy Stephens
Date: 22:49 on 07 Jan 2008
Subject: .NET and Visual Studio
Per Peter's request =)
I really hate how Visual Studio forces me to use a certain style when
coding in C#. I like functions to look like this:
void Foo(int blah) {
/* insert code here */
}
But apparently Microsoft thinks that you should do this instead:
void Foo(int blah)
{
/* insert code here */
}
because it tries pretty hard to force you to do it. Maybe there's a
way to change that behavior, but I try to use VS.NET as little as
possible and looking for a way to change its formatting would prolong
my usage.
Also, I'm a Ruby programmer. Ruby is nice and neat and orderly
(IMHO). I program in .NET because I have to. Maybe I'm spoiled by
using Ruby on Rails, but there are countless things that I could
easily do in RoR, or even PHP or Perl for that matter, that are
stupidly hard to do in .NET.
For example, if I want an HTML element with some custom attribute
(like onchange), I have to do this:
someElement.Attributes.Add("onchange", "alert('Are you sure?')");
It's also extremely hard to put the focus on a particular control when
a page loads. There's a control method called 'Focus' in the
documentation, but for whatever reason it didn't work for me. I
found myself writing this little gem to make it work:
p.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(p.GetType(), "do_blur_" +
stupid, "setTimeout(\'document.getElementById(\"" + stupid
+ "\").blur()\', 100);\n", true);
I also dislike capitalized function/attribute names.
Like I said, I'm not a .NET programmer, so some of my problems might
not be as bad if I actually gave a damn enough to learn it properly.
Also, the code I'm maintaining is very poorly written. But the
clunkyness of the whole .NET package doesn't inspire me in the least
to learn it better, especially since I work in a Linux shop
(supposedly).
</bitch>
From: Jeremy Stephens Date: 19:49 on 07 Jan 2008 Subject: SQL syntax Why is the UPDATE syntax so different from INSERT? If I'm constructing a SQL statement to insert or update based on the existence of a row in some code, I have to have two completely different cases to handle it. What were the SQL creators thinking? What's strange is that I've been working with SQL for years and I've never considered the syntax difference annoying. Avast!
From: Smylers
Date: 18:30 on 04 Jan 2008
Subject: Debian Bash Command-Not-Found Extension
Debian/Ubuntu supply Bash with an extension that lets you define a
function to be run whenever a command in an interactive shell hasn't
been found. As shipped it does things like this, which can be handy:
$ echo znetnerg gungpure | rot13
The program 'rot13' is currently not installed. You can install it by
typing: sudo apt-get install bsdgames
bash: rot13: command not found
This feature's documentation in its entirety, is an item in the 'Shell
Variables' list in bash(1):
command_not_found_handle
The name of a shell function to be called if a command cannot be
found. The return value of this function should be 0, if the
command is available after execution of the function, otherwise 127
(EX_NOTFOUND). Enabled only in interactive, non POSIX mode shells.
This is a Debian extension.
Points of hate:
* The docs suggest that you set $command_not_found_handle to the name of
the function you want to run. I couldn't get this to work.
The shipped function is called command_not_found_handle (and
$command_not_found_handle doesn't appear to be set anywhere); so far
as I can tell you simply define your function with that name for it to
work, and the documented variable simply doesn't exist.
* Because the API only provides for a single function, not an array of
them, it's needlessly hard to set up a series of fallbacks -- for
example to try the shipped 'uninstalled package' thing first and then
something else.
To get this your function has to duplicate the default behaviour
before adding in its own check. This obviously doesn't scale, and
makes assumptions about what the default behaviour is.
* The default function in its entirety is this:
command_not_found_handle ()
{
/usr/bin/python /usr/lib/command-not-found -- $1;
return $?
}
It only has two lines, and the second is entirely redundant! And the
underlying Python program that determines whether the command is a
program in an uninstalled package has the generic name
command-not-found rather than something which indicates what this
particular not-found handler does.
* Whether that program knows about the command (and successfully tells
you which package to install) or it can't help at all, the spec says
it has to return 127 (because in neither case has the command been
installed, for next time). This makes using it in a chain of
fallbacks more work than necessary, because you have to capture its
output to see if it's worked.
(Then save its exit code, check if there was any output, and if so
echo the output and exit with the exit code.)
How hard would it'd've been to come up with different exit codes to
distinguish these situations? Perhaps this 'uninstalled package'
scenario isn't one the authors of the feature considered -- except
that this is a Debian extension that appears to have been written
especially to provide this behaviour!
Grrr!
Smylers
From: Smylers Date: 17:31 on 04 Jan 2008 Subject: Bashing Bash Hashing I just spotted this in the README.Debian that Debian supply with Bash: bash does not check $PATH if hash fails bash hashes the location of recently executed commands. When a command is moved to a new location in the PATH, the command is still in the PATH but the hash table still records the old location. For performance reasons bash does not remove the command from the hash and relook it up in PATH. "For performance reasons"?!? The only way I can parse that is as claiming it's better to complain 'No such file or directory' than it is to run the command that the user asked for (and is in the path) because the former is faster. Really, do you expect me to buy that? Is that actually going to be useful to anybody? Use 'hash -r' manually or set a bash option: 'shopt -s checkhash'. Options make sense when different users genuinely have different preferences, not to make up for stupidities in your default behaviour. Smylers
From: Smylers Date: 10:59 on 03 Jan 2008 Subject: Firefox Update "Click Finish to continue starting Firefox." I'm not entirely sure how I'd've phrased that, but surely, _surely_, when you want to indicate starting something there must be a better verb to use than 'finish'? Smylers
From: Aristotle Pagaltzis Date: 10:32 on 02 Jan 2008 Subject: Subversion and credentials If you stopped reading after the first word in the subject, you took a pretty sensible decision. Anyway, so: Subversion only stores auth credentials you supply on the command line if it used them successfully. If the server refused a request for some reason, it won't store the credentials. If the server doesn't *ask* for credentials, Subversion won't use them to begin with, and you cannot make it. This means you cannot deposit credentials ahead of time if you only need them for some actions -- say, because the repository you're working with only requires credentials at commit but not for checkout. Notably absent is any form of credentials management. You can specifically ask it not to use any cached credentials when it otherwise would, but the only supported form of managing stored credentials is to delete files inside the ~/.subversion/auth/ subdirectories. Which is reasonably doable without the aid of tools, because you can easily inspect these files: Subversion stores *everything*, and that includes the passwords, in pure, untarnished clear text. A marvel. That anyone ever thought this fuming pile of manure is great. Regards,
< mari
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi