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[ Page 59 of 76 ]
From: Earle Martin Date: 12:23 on 30 Mar 2004 Subject: Aqua Aqua. The GUI for Mac OS X. Where do I start? Words really do fail to convey precisely how I feel about Aqua, but I'll try. I hate the dialog boxes. I hate the grey stripes and translucent effects. I hate the shiny blue buttons and the sickening way they pulsate. I hate "brushed metal". I hate the "cute" effects like dialog boxes that slip down from the top of windows and then back up again, or windows doing that perspective zoomy thing. I hate the colourful pinwheel cursor. I hate the menus with their acres of pointless whitespace and I hate the new Apple font that they use. I hate the new wastebasket icon. I hate the Dock. I hate the way that windows and I especially hate the way that even menus and submenus have FUCKING DROP SHADOWS ON ALL SIDES. I hate the "traffic light" buttons and the way their functions appear when you hover the mouse over them. I need no justification for my hate. It's all fucking ugly, and I fucking hate it. The day I pay Apple for garbage like Aqua is the day I slit my own throat. Love, Earle.
From: Juerd
Date: 18:26 on 27 Mar 2004
Subject: CPANPLUS
"According to the cache, Apache::Request failed to install before in
this session.. returning!"
Then TRY AGAIN.
That's why I typed "s force 1" to enable forcing ('force' being a global
setting is another discussion of hate).
Rule number one when caching: never cache errors.
Rule number two: drop the cache when relevant variables change.
Alternatively, don't cache at all. I think a module installer can do
without caching of results.
Juerd
From: Tannie Date: 13:12 on 27 Mar 2004 Subject: I hate iPhoto I very much hate iPhoto. It has this neat feature where you can set the title of the photo to a certain text or the film role name followed by a number.(see http://www.macstuff.net/hate/rename.jpg for a screenshot) Very handy one might think. Think again. iPhoto does: photo1 photo2 photo3 etc etc photo10 photo11 photo12 So when you sort all the photos by title you get: photo1 photo10 photo11 photo12 photo2 photo3 As you may have expected. (see http://www.macstuff.net/hate/sorting.jpg for the wonderful sorting sample) Well, it's not what I want nor expected! I just want *normal* sorting. Why on earth would iPhoto use a 1-2-3...10 type of renaming if it can't sort it properly.Even I can build in a check to see if something ends with one number and therefore should be treated a bit special for sorting. How come apples developers can't?Oh wait! Finder can! And that's all hate apart from the fact it keeps on crashing me even though it is supposed to be able to handle the 2000+ photos I have. grrrr hate iPhoto grrr! -- Tannie
From: Simon Wistow Date: 18:08 on 24 Mar 2004 Subject: terminals and urls and copying Terminals seem to be another of those things that you'd think would be really simple (display text and, err, that's about it) but are actually a bottomless pit of hate situated in the Mountains of Loathing, deep within the steamy Destest Jungle on the Island of F&*CKINGPIECEOFSHIT!!@$% This has been documented elsewhere. There is much hate to be mined from that pit. It would be greedy, nay foolish to mine it all at once. I shall instead hack off a sliver of purest hate and cray it back from the pit, over the mountains, through the jungle and row away from the island merely to deliver it to you, my fellows Haters. This Hate, and a succulent morsel it is too, is concerned with urls in terminals. Some terminals highlight a URL that scrolls past and allow you to double click on it and it will be loade din a browser. They ones that do that have, in my experience, many other, often unrelated hates which preclude's their use. But thi is fine since I can just highlight the URL like so and switch to my other window and paste it into my browser's URL bar. No great hardship. But wait! What's this? I have pasted blank *cough* I go back. I look again. Oh, I see, it was in an IRC window and somebody has said something so the line I highlighted has moved up. CLEARLY THIS MEANT THAT YOU SHOULD CLEAR THE CLIPBOARD. YOU PIECE OF SHIT. There may be technical reasons why it does this. I care not. I just want to be able to copy something out of scrolling window (tailing a log, output of a make, etc etc) without having to do some insane dance. *sigh*
From: Yoz Grahame
Date: 17:42 on 24 Mar 2004
Subject: Visio redux
As my time with Visio has continued I've started finding nuggets of
consistency within Visio operation that have reduced the resulting
irritation to the point where I'm actually getting some semi-decent work
done with it in not too much time. Today I produced a bit of design
where I was actually able to sit back with a contented and probably smug
smile on my face and think to myself: "You know, that's actually quite a
nice bit of work. I like that."
And then I hit Save.
Visio popped up a little warning to the effect that my file "rule
gui.vsd" had become corrupted somehow, and that it couldn't be saved,
but that I might be able to salvage my work from "~rule gui.vsd" and
that I should also close Visio as soon as possible.
The question of how the file had become corrupt despite having loaded
fine at the start of the session and Visio being the only program to
have touched it was knocking at the side of my brain, but I was far too
busy worrying about rescuing the data to notice. Fortunately, after
making a copy of the ~ file ("Copy of ~rule gui.vsd", yes, okay, I just
used Explorer) and quitting Visio, the new file loaded up just fine with
all of my work.
And so I was going to just write this one off to random weirdness until
I tried deleting the old "rule gui.vsd" and renaming the new one back to
that.
Now, when I double click on "rule gui.vsd" to start Visio with the file,
I get:
"Visio cannot open the file because it's not a Visio file."
When I undo the renaming operation in Explorer and double-click the file
(now reverted to "Copy of ~rule gui.vsd") again, it loads up just fine.
And I really was starting to get on with Visio, too.
-- Yoz
From: Mark Fowler Date: 11:46 on 24 Mar 2004 Subject: terminals again. Somehow I've managed to configure my terminal so that when I ssh to another box and user vi or emacs (but, not when I use bash) the cursor keys don't work. How is this even possible?
From: Mark Fowler
Date: 00:00 on 23 Mar 2004
Subject: Software you have to register.
I'm pissed off with software that you have to register or remember a key
for. It's not that you have to pay for the software or it stops working I
mind - I'm quite happy to pay for the small amount of software I use -
it's that I have to enter the code.
Entering the code isn't the problem when I buy the software and first
install it. It's three months on when I install the software on my new
computer and now have No Idea (tm) where the code is.
For example, I like synergy, a little app that monitors iTunes allowing me
to pause it from the menu bar/with a keyboard short cut and will pop up a
little dialog telling me the name of the track when the track changes.
This costs 15usd for five licences. So all my macs are theoretically
licenced, but can I find the code in my email? No. I supose I can email
them, but it's too much hassle.
I have the same problem with UltraEdit. I have a licence for this, but on
the odd occasion I need to use a Windows machine and install it, I don't
have the code to hand. When I come back to use the machine a month later
the trial version will have expired and I'm well and truely stuffed.
Maybe this is why free (as in beer) software does so well. It's not that
people mind paying for the software so much, it's that they mind having to
a) Go though the process of actually paying for it (which takes five
minutes out of their life that could be more productivly spent
sorting the recycling, hovering the front room, or eating pie)
b) Spend four hours finding the code that was sent to them from some
totally bizare email payment system (that bears no resemlemence to
the product bought) every single time they need to reinstall the
software.
Mark.
From: Mark Fowler
Date: 23:58 on 22 Mar 2004
Subject: SQL
I've written this email several times, trying to find a way of expressing
exactly what is wrong with SQL. I find I am not up to the task. It sucks
in so many ways I could write an entire article on it.
So, in summary:
SQL SUCKS SO BADLY THAT FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS NASA HAVE
BEEN MISTAKENLY INVESTIGATING IT AS A BLACK HOLE
I thank you.
Mark.
From: Phil!Gregory Date: 21:37 on 22 Mar 2004 Subject: Hey, more BDE hate! So thoroughly fed up with Delphi and the BDE at the moment. Possibly also Client Access--I'm not sure where the hate truly belongs. Programming in Delphi 5, using the BDE, accessing tables via the ODBC driver in Client Access to get to an AS/400. A little while back, the DBA created a ten digit numeric field to use as a key on several tables. The most significant digit of the field indicates the source of the number (1 if site a generated it, 2 if site b did, and so on). It worked when only two locations were generating values. (See where this is going?) When we added a third site, everything broke. 3E9 is larger than 2^31. I'd been using signed integers in Delphi to hold the value of the field. I switched to using Int64s. Everything broke again, but in different, more subtle ways. TTable.FindKey doesn't work if you hand it an Int64 value. It's not a type it looks for, so it causes an error. TDataSet.Locate (and other, similar methods) doesn't work, because Int64 is the *only* type that cannot be put into a Variant. Using SQL to find a record worked some of the time, but sometimes spun the program off into a series of access violations deep in the bowels of the BDE code. I tried telling the program that the field was really a String, not an Integer. Didn't work. Base field type is provided by the underlying database driver. Client Access said it was numeric, so it was numeric. I tried Googling for information to see if this was a known problem, to see if maybe it worked better in newer released of Delphi. No information. As far as I can tell, no one has run into this problem before (which is pretty unlikely). The solution was to alter all of the tables that had the offending field, fix the values of those fields to be 9 digits, change the Delphi program back, recompile all of the programs on the AS/400 that used the affected tables, and erase all thought of ever again using an Int64 for database access in Delphi. Simple, no?
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 16:59 on 16 Mar 2004 Subject: Visio I know I don't really need to say much more than "Visio", but we only got acquainted a couple of weeks back and I really did think that we were going to be, if not friends, then at least mutually agreeable to a beneficial and productive working arragement, and not that I would be playing BLOODY MOUSE-CLICK RUSSIAN ROULETTE EVERY TIME I TRY AND DO SOMETHING AS WILD AND DARING AS TRYING TO SELECT A SHAPE ON THE PAGE. You have a shape on the page, right, and it's sitting atop a bunch of other, larger shapes, and you just want to select it. That's all. You don't want to select any of the ones underneath, or any of the ones to the left, or whatever. Nor do you want to edit the text of the shape, because if you did YOU'D BE USING THE BLOODY TEXT TOOL NOT THE POINTER BECAUSE IT'S WHAT THE TEXT TOOL IS FOR AND SO IF YOU HIT SOMETHING WITH THE POINTER YOU DON'T EXPECT TO BE FUCKING EDITING TEXT, DO YOU? But the crux of the matter is that, if you do want to select that shape, it takes N clicks, with N being *a different value every single time*. So you just keep clicking and clicking and eventually you select it but you're into the rhythm of clicking and you do one too many and now you're selecting the wrong thing again. So you have to start over. Nnnnnnggggg. Plus, a whole load of other rants about the uselessness of the Windows UI template set (a couple of the widgets are ghostable, but only a couple, so if you want a whole set of widgets ghosted you're SOL because only a third of them can be), the thing never remembering what I want my text defaults to be, et bloody cetera. Is there a better way of mocking up Windows UI nice and fast without going slowly insane? Anyone? -- Yoz
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[ Page 59 of 76 ]
Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi