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From: David Cantrell Date: 15:44 on 08 Mar 2004 Subject: YaBB YaBB - Yet Another Bulletin Board - is a free webby forums thing, and as such is hateful. Clued people know that instead of using such horrors they should use mailing lists or Usenet, or at least if Usenet is inappropriate use Usenettish software on your private network, like what the BBC does for web chat. At work, I was asked to come up with proposals for some way for our sales and marketing people to share information easily. Obvious, innit, either a mailing list or a newsgroup. That way, they get discussion threading for free, we get easy replication of data to our NZian office, users get their own local copies of the data to refer to when they're out and about, but most importantly we get to use concepts and software which have been extensively tested, fixed, and where there is copious documentation for me to refer to. But no. We can't use mailing lists because we're a Doze shop and Lookout can't do threading. Newsgroups are vetoed by the IT department because "it's too complicated" and "it needs desktop software installed". Neither of which is true, as once I'd shown my IT-illiterate boss how to start Lookout Express (which was already installed) and how to configure it to look at the news server I had running on a dev box, he found that it Just Worked. So I had to do something webby for them. I'm not reinventing that particular wheel thankyouverymuch, and after looking at several variations on the theme, I settled on YaBB. And it was mostly good - tweak the config files and the HTML "template" (actually embedded in the code, but please let's not go there) and it Just Worked. I have happy users. Oh, but it can't do proper threading, just like Lookout, but that seems to not be an issue now. Grrr. Now, users want more features. For various good reasons, they want particular discussion forums to only be accessible to particular users. This we achieve by making all users log in first, by assigning users to groups, and then saying "forum thus-and-so is only accessible to group such-and-such". And now, a user wants access to two different sets of forums. I *can* do this, as the software already supports having forums accessible by multiple groups, but I can see a huge explosion of groups, most with just one user, and an administrative nightmare in my immediate future. I *need* to be able to put a user into multiple groups. There is a patch already available to do this, but it sucks. To start with, it has a hard-coded number of groups someone can be a member of. So I need to patch the app to do this properly. And so I start grovelling in the source, and it is hateful. Sins such as rewriting their own versions of standard functionality abound. The amount of wheel-reinvention is *amazing*. It has code to open a user's profile repeated in 11 different files. It often appears several times in a file: In one file we find these, each accompanied by code to parse the file: fopen(MEMBERFILEREAD,"$memberdir/$name.dat"); fopen(MEMBERFILEREAD,"$memberdir/$memberfile.dat"); fopen(MEMBERFILEREAD,"$memberdir/$membername.dat"); And in another, we find these: fopen(FILE, "$memberdir/$currentmem.dat"); fopen(FILE, "$memberdir/$curmem.dat"); Grrr.
From: Jonathan Stowe Date: 13:09 on 04 Mar 2004 Subject: Gnu findutils So how long has samba been around, how long has Windows had long filenames and encourage people to create files with spaces in (yeah, yeah I know but that is a totally different piece of hate.) It's not entirely impossible to create filenames with spaces under Unix (why you should want to is another matter). Then why do the stupid poxy findutils not make any allowance for this and not give me: [jonathan@orpheus Documentation]$ find . -type d | xargs chmod go+rx chmod: failed to get attributes of `./Database': No such file or directory chmod: failed to get attributes of `Schema': No such file or directory chmod: failed to get attributes of `./Document': No such file or directory chmod: failed to get attributes of `System': No such file or directory chmod: failed to get attributes of `./ID': No such file or directory chmod: failed to get attributes of `generation': No such file or directory chmod: failed to get attributes of `./SCP': No such file or directory chmod: failed to get attributes of `SDK': No such file or directory and so forth. Oh yes I know there are ways to get around this. But 'find' knows it has a filename there which has a space in it and 'xargs' is designed to work with 'find' so why can't they just sort themselves out and deal with these as filenames rather than a bunch of space delimited tokens. I despair. /J\
From: Simon Wistow Date: 15:02 on 03 Mar 2004 Subject: Tivo, oh how I wish you were smarter I love my Tivo in many, many ways. Some of them not even legal in Louisiana. But sometimes it is very, very, very dumb. I tend to only watch the "10pm" programs - usually an hour long and placed just after the watershed for a reason. Examples of these are Nip/Tuck, ER, Spooks, The Agency, The Handler. Mostly drama. Mostly on at the same or around the same time. Not always on the same channel. Recently the new series of the Agency started up. And for whatever reason the channel is doing an episode every night. At 10pm. Which means I lose the series arc because other stuff is being recorded at the same time. Except ... do I? Most of the other programs are on channels like Sky One or E4 and those tend to repeat stuff ad nauseam at least twice a week at prime time and once during the dead hours. Sure enough stuff that clashes with my 10pm showings of the Agency has repeat showings at 2am on a Sunday. Which is cool because, you know, it's a fucking Tivo and I don't care when it's recorded. But the Tivo just says that it will record the first showings of those other ones and not the second showings because, hell, I dunno. However, with a stroke of insight, and good guess at how its internal scheduling software was likely to work, I merely upped the priority of The Agency and suddeny it's all dandy and the second showings are being recorded and I can get everything that i want. Although I need to be careful because if I'm not then I'll end up with an HD full of Agencies and miss out on the rest of the stuff I want. And dman Nip/Tuck is good. But it's HATEFUL that I have to do this my self. I mean, it's not like it can be an uncommon thing SO WHY ISN'T THERE SOME SORT OF AUTO RESOLVE SCREEN? THINK! THINK ABOUT WHAT YOUR USERS MIGHT DO! WHAT COMMON SCENARIOS MIGHT BE! YOU FUCKING FUCKS. .... and breathe
From: Nicholas Clark
Date: 11:21 on 03 Mar 2004
Subject: mail.app and zip file attachments
So I've been forwarded a message, and it contains a zip file attachment.
However, said zipfile has been made by hateful software, which has used
backslashes instead of forward slashes as directory separators in the internal
filenames. Strictly there is nothing wrong - the legal zip file contains
files at the top level named
foo\bar
foo\baz
etc, but the intent was clearly
foo/
bar
baz
Now, I know that Infozip's unzip program is not hateful, and is smart enough
to allow compensation for this hatefulness.
However, can I get mail.app to save the attachment as a zip file? No way!
Whatever I try, it insists on "helpfully" unzipping it for me. And it
(correctly, but unhelpfully) takes a literal view on those backslashes. So
I get crappy filenames with 3 levels of directory trees flattenened
Oi! No. Stop trying to be clever, and let me detach the attachment still as
a zip file.
The only way the collective brains round here could outsmart the hateware
was by saving the message in raw form (OK. at least it lets us do that,
but hatefully it did put [] in the filename it made from the subject line)
and I used a REAL mail program (ie mutt) to save the zip attachment.
At which point unzip can do its magic:
$ unzip Localization-10-30-2003-6.22.57.PM.zip
Archive: Localization-10-30-2003-6.22.57.PM.zip
warning: Localization-10-30-2003-6.22.57.PM.zip appears to use backslashes as path separators
Wah. I think I have a solution. I could just mail Apple 42.zip as an
attachment:
$ unzip -l 42.zip
Archive: 42.zip
Length Date Time Name
------ ---- ---- ----
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 3.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 1.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 2.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 0.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 4.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 5.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 6.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 7.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 8.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib 9.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib a.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib b.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib c.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib d.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib e.zip
34902 03-28-00 21:40 lib f.zip
------ -------
558432 16 files
(etc, etc, etc)
That'll teach them not to trust zip files.
Nicholas Clark
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 21:45 on 02 Mar 2004 Subject: Mozilla/Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix/blah Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful that these exist. I'd still be using Netscape 4 on my Sun boxes if they weren't here, but... They're pretty annoying plenty of the time. Right now I'm pissed that keyboard shortcuts don't work from text boxes. I'd understand if emacs or vi editing modes worked in them, thus stealing our control characters, but they don't. So why the hell can't I hit ^W to close a tab or a window while in a text box? And why doesn't ^Q quit the app? Why? But it's not like that's my only complaint. Of course, using linux is often painful for me because I think it makes more sense to use the Alt/Apple key as the main keyboard shortcut modifier, and this makes that much more sense on Linux because this key is used for absolutely nothing else, whereas Control is used freaking everywhere. I know this isn't really the fault of Moz et al, but it sure bites me the most in that app. And don't get me started on the stupid preference directories... Who ever though that I need to have my preferences stored in some randomized directory name? I understand that maybe someone someday would want multiple profiles stored in the same home directory (although I would think such a person would be smart enough to hack it themselves), although I think it's _stupid_ that all of the preferences are set up to allow this by default. But once we get past that, what's up with the extra gibberish directory? And why the hell isn't it trivial to do things like run/import Diffs of bookmarks? Instead of bookmarks becoming more important, which is what should happen, they've become less important because they're such a PITA to manage across my many, many platforms. It's not like I can check them into CVS, you know, because I get a different random directory on every damn host. Yes, I do use soft links to get around that, but that's also a PITA. And lastly, why is it that Moz et al are the only damn applications in the whole world that can't just run a binary? Why do I need a shell script that launches a shell script to launch a shell script to launch the binary? Huh? What's so special about you? And what's even stupider is you can't soft link those shell scripts to another directory; you have to specify the real, full path every time or the stupid things don't work. Hello? What's your excuse? Yuck! And this is one of the most important apps on the 'net these days? Embarassing. Luke
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 21:56 on 28 Feb 2004 Subject: More linux hate Okay, now that it all actually works, I can let go. Ugh. All I wanted to do was switch from SCSI to IDE, because I don't have any viable SCSI drives left (I've still got some functional ones, but they're too loud for my workstation). That's all. On BeOS it's trivial. On MacOS it's trivial (basically). On linux, it's darn near impossible. Oh sure, in retrospect it was easy: Just modify /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf so that the ROOT variable points to the new volume and rerun 'mkinitrd'. Very easy. Except that it took me about 20 hours to figure that out. Because of course, errors like: modprobe: can't locate module block-major-3 aren't very informative. Oh, I finally figured out that it wasn't probing the driver for my IDE drive, and then about 6 hours later figured out exactly how to make it do that the right way (hint: no, specifying it in /etc/mkinitrd/modules, which lists the modules to probe, isn't enough). But really. Just moving from SCSI to IDE. What makes this whole damn thing even more insulting is the Knoppix CD. This is a bootable CD which literally boots faster than my Debian distribution while giving better feedback (and in color), and at the same time autodetects every single piece of hardware I have. Sure, it runs my monitor at 16bit instead of 24, that's no big deal. But it boots up a fully functional, completely detected system. Oh, and it's based on Debian, the distro I'm using. So, I ask, WTF can't Debian do this? "Oh, but see, there's this guy who wants to specify everything." Well, fuck that guy. He can go to hell. Let him specify everything. I just want the whole damn thing to work, and I don't want to think about it. Linux is not long for this house, at least not on a workstation. Luke
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 10:26 on 27 Feb 2004 Subject: iTunes, follow the damned playlist iTunes, could you just fucking play the songs in the order they're in the playlist?! Don't try to resort them or do anything clever. For fuck's sake, xmms and Winamp have had this right for years.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 10:26 on 26 Feb 2004 Subject: Copying music with iTunes You can't. STEVE JOBS YOU SUCK DONKEY WANG. I have three macs and an iPod that I want all my music on. iTunes on one of my computers can see all the music on all of them, but it can't copy it to the local drive to keep everything synced. I have to drop to Finder, or in the case of the iPod, the shell. Fucking closed source software. Maybe that loon wearing a computer disk on his head was onto something after all. That is all. Thanks. Mark.
From: Ann Barcomb Date: 08:20 on 25 Feb 2004 Subject: My cellphone's SMS software Lately I started sending SMSs again, and after several messages which failed to send, a distant part of my memory was revived and I remembered similar problems I had a few years ago. Specifically, any message which contains an unclosed right paran will fail to send. So 'hey there :)' gives the unhelpful error 'Message failed in sending'. Not only does the error message suck, the only explanations I can come up with for why it might fail are, frankly, rather scary. - Ann
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi