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[ Page 56 of 76 ]
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 14:53 on 17 May 2004 Subject: OS X X server $ xterm Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server Xlib: No protocol specified xterm Xt error: Can't open display: :0.0 W.T.F? You have lost the authorisation to create new X sessions on the local server. Hateful thing. Bad Apple - clearly no (valid magic) cookie. Nicholas Clark
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 11:15 on 14 May 2004 Subject: keyboard or mouse - place bets now! Systems should put keyboard events and mouse events into the same queue. Anything else is a race condition, and thus hateful. Nicholas Clark
From: Earle Martin Date: 10:19 on 14 May 2004 Subject: Copy and paste, and "undo" An exercise for you to perform: 1) Type some text in your text editor. 2) Select it and copy it (NB, in the "Edit -> Copy" sense, rather than the "X11 highlighted text copy buffer" sense). 3) Choose "undo". 4) Paste. What comes out? If it's the text you just copied, that makes no sense, because you just told your editor to undo the last action - which ought to mean to the editor that you never copied it in the first place. Yet in every text editor I try this in, this isn't the case, and so undoing a copy will not un-clobber your clipboard. Hate.
From: aglet Date: 15:28 on 13 May 2004 Subject: M Sexchange So I inherited this NT 4/Exchange 5.5 server and (surprise!) it's hateful. What with it soon being both hateful and unsupported I'm looking at "upgrading" to more recent software. From the Exchange 2003 FAQ: Q: What are the minimum hardware requirements for Exchange 2003? A: The minimum practical hardware requirements in our experience are 1.25 times the disk space one would allocate under Exchange 2000, 1GB RAM (4GB minimum if the Exchange server also serves any other function) and the fastest processor(s) you can afford. Q: Am I better off with one really fast processor or two somewhat slower processors? A: You're better off with two really fast processors. There's more, oh, so much more, and I haven't even started the migration yet. Still, look on the bright side, at least it isn't Notes or GroupWise.
From: Phil!Gregory Date: 21:42 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Charset Abuse Okay, getting everyone on a single, encompassing character set/encoding is pretty much a pipe dream. But why can't tools at least communicate what charset they're using? I'm used to getting web paged that misreport their charsets. When I read things like "I m sure it s ok", I can generally tell w3m, "Ignore what you were told; this page is in CP1254." This doesn't work if the content was written in CP1254 but the publishing tool turned those 0x92 apostrophes into ’ HTML entities, which is just wrong. This isn't really a rant directed at any one thing in particular. I just wish all this stuff with character sets happened transparently and that I wouldn't have to have learned what little I do know about the whole process. Like so many things, it should just _work_.
From: Earle Martin Date: 16:10 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours After reading people talking about colors they were comfortable reading on their screen on London.pm today[0], I decided I wanted the default background color of web pages in my browser to be some very light shade of grey (like #f3f3f3 or some such), that's almost white but not quite, just to take the edge off a little bit. So I took at look at Mozilla Firebird's "Fonts and Colors" preferences dialog, and what do I get to choose from? A seven-by-ten grid of inoffensive colors, none of which is a light enough shade of grey. No color picker of any fucking kind at all, because I guess they didn't think that maybe their USERS might like to PICK THEIR OWN COLORS. Gah. (1 minute later) OK, I was motivated enough this time to get a Bugzilla account. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242840 [0] thread starting at http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20040510/026196.html
From: Phil!Gregory
Date: 22:28 on 10 May 2004
Subject: Modifying Constants
A minor thing, really, but I've just wasted several hours on this bug:
I've been working on convincing a Delphi program to call procedures in a
DLL. This is new to me, so I figure I'll do things wrong. Thus, when
things go wrong, I blame myself, sometimes, as I found, needlessly:
procedure SimLibLogon(pszDBName: PChar) external "EKDWS.DLL";
procedure DoStuff;
var
System : String;
begin
System := 'VADER';
SimLibLogon(PChar(System));
end;
and I get an access violation. The problem? Delphi is stricter about
types than C. So, with the prototype I wrote for the procedure, Delphi
decides that the string is a constant, and just calls it with a pointer to
wherever the program stores its string constants.
The DLL was written in C. It gets a character pointer which, logically,
ought to be constant, but isn't strictly so. It tries to modify it.
(Consensus here is that it's probably trying to upper-case the string.)
The string is in non-modifiable memory, so I get an error. I blame
myself, try to fix it, and run in circles for a couple of hours.
Solution?
System := Format('VADER', []);
Compiler has been fooled, and the string is now in modifiable memory.
Sigh.
From: Daniel Pittman
Date: 02:57 on 06 May 2004
Subject: Address Books...
Having ranted on half of the groupware hate that I feel at the moment,
let me rant on the other half - address books.
I know a bunch of people, some online, some offline, and some both.
I want to store a bunch of information on them, and have relevant
subsets accessible from:
* my mobile phone
* my mail client
* my web based "I can't get at my own PC" mail client
* my PDA, when I get one again
* my partners mail client
* my partners PDA
Now, I would have thought that somewhere along the way *someone* else
might have found this beneficial, but apparently not.
Several days of looking show me that there is *NOTHING* out there that
copes with any sort of shared address book in an even vaguely useful
fashion.
LDAP looks close - at least, in theory it can share the address book
between the machines that are on the local network, and export to other
devices like the phone...
...but no. LDAP is a read-goddamn-only address book system. Nothing,
it seems, actually supports writing back to an LDAP directory, except
for dedicated client software.
Oh, and possibly Outlook, but I can't say for sure because even that
isn't really documented!
The worst part is, of course, that even if I do find the magic to make
Mozilla, Gnus and LDAP all play nice, it still isn't going to do what I
want.
At that point I have an address book system that makes me hate it,
because it is full of insanely stupid data management decisions like
"a home phone number is a property of an individual person"
Bah. No it isn't. I don't want to have to go and update two, three or
even four records because the phone number at a house changed.
I want to see that person X lives at house Y, and I can call house Y on
phone number Z. Then I can update the record for the house, and have it
all work.
I want an address book system that understands the concept of "old"
contact details, so I can keep a historic record of things like, say,
"foobar173256@xxxxxxx.xxx" is actually my friend Joe, but that I can't
reach Joe there today.
I want an address book where I can track the relationship between
people, so that I can jump from someone to their partner, or their
housemate, or both - and know what the link is.
It also bothers me that writing this really makes me think that what I
am after is "Orkut in a can", because that just seems somehow wrong...
Daniel
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 22:35 on 03 May 2004 Subject: Evolution is a step backwards Holy cow. This is now the third time, so I'm really upset, and it was even worse this time. I have a linux box and a Mac. I sometimes have appointments. The Mac is almost always asleep (as it's a laptop) but I can bring it everywhere with me. Therefore, I'd like the ability to make appointments on either machine and be warned whether I'm at my computer or not. The Mac can email me, and thus can email my phone, which means I can get notified no matter where I am, but like I said, the Mac is almost always asleep. This is annoying, but is not the Mac's fault. Because my linux box is never asleep (I've got a dual proc box, so I couldn't even put it to sleep if I wanted to -- hate), it'd be especially nice if I could have something email me from my linux box, even if I annoyingly can't use the calendar on either machine and somehow sync the calendars. So, of course, I'm experimenting with Ximian's Evolution. I need the ability to check my IMAP email with a GUI client sometimes so I can look at pictures and such (which pine is not much good at), but I especially need its calendaring abilities (or apparent lack thereof). In both of these areas, Evolution fails quite miserably, and sometimes spectacularly. This is Evo 1.4.6 on Debian. Calendaring just plain falls down on functionality. Apparently. The two features I need are some kind calendar syncronizing capability and the ability to email meeting notices so I can send them to my phone. There is a calander syncronizing protocol (ical) but Evolution only supports it via email, not via an automated mechanism like WebDAV (like Apple's stupidly named iCal), so I can't easily synchronize between my Mac and my linux box. That part sucks. But Evolution also can't email notices. Or can it? It's there as an option, but it's greyed out. Why? I've no idea; why add it but not make it available? I can't figure it out, but apparently it's fixed in 1.5, which (of course) debian doesn't have. So apparently I could do what I want, except I can't for some reason. Even better, though, is how email functionality falls on its face. Actually, it might not; I don't know. Every time I try to send an email, I type something into the "To:" header box, and it pops up with a list of potential matches. I have found nothing other than 'pkill -9 evolution' that can get rid of that box. I select the email I want and hit return, or double click, or triple click, or dance, or whatever the hell I want, and nothing at all happens. Even better, this is (somehow) a globally modal dialig (you know, like Mozilla always does that pisses you off so much?), which means that until it goes away I can't focus on any other windows. Which means that my X session is effectively dead unless I can get in some other way. So, I have to SSH in with my Mac and 'pkill -9 evolution'. This has now happened 3 out of 3 times I've tried to use the most recent version of Evolution. Even worse, when I killed the instance the latest time, it somehow managed to move all of my windows down by about 10 pixels, on both of my monitors, which means around 40 windows. I'm very excited. Oh yes, very excited. Anyone got any linux calendaring recommendations? Luke
From: Aaron J. Grier
Date: 19:31 on 03 May 2004
Subject: outlook (not so good)
there's plenty to hate about outlook: its virus propensity; its complete
bloated being; its bugs that microsoft admits exists but won't fix
"until the next version".
but what's really pissing me off today is its piss poor SMTP client
implementation.
once a month marketing sends out a newsletter to a hundred or so
recipients [1]. eventually I'll set up a mailman list [2], but until
then they're sent with via Bccs. this would be fine if the client were
sane. but it's outlook, so it's not.
if there's a bad address in the list [4] postfix dutifully returns a 501
error, which outlook doesn't deal well with. it aborts sending the
email, flashes a vague message to the user, and leaves the message in
its outbox, only to fail the next time around... in the same way.
which means I end up having to look through my logs to find the failing
address and tell the user about it. the user then gets to search
through their address book, since outlook shows names and not addresses
in the Bcc field.
even eudora handles this correctly by allowing the bad address to fail,
keeping the message on its outbound queue, but marking the rest of the
recipients as delivered, allowing you to fix the failed address [5].
I'd love to move this user from outlook. but until I discover a way to
migrate outlook's large address book to another less-hateful client,
they're stuck with it. which leaves providing another (internal-only)
mail server which blindly accepts all recipients as the only feasable
solution.
bah. hate. not seething, just a slow smoldering burn of hate...
[1] completely opt-in, mind you.
[2] dependent on getting machines renumbered and our ISP changed [3]
[3] yeah, I'm working on it. however, there's still a problem with
integrating the recipients from the user's outlook address book
with a mailman list. hate hate hate.
[4] non-RFC 821 characters, basically.
[5] even eudora has its hateful side. but that's another rant.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi