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From: Mark Fowler Date: 00:16 on 19 Feb 2004 Subject: iTunes, and remembering it where it was Dear iTunes. Yes, I've heard this bit of this track before. Remember last time when I was half way though this audiobook and it was just getting to the really exciting bit and I had to get off the train and do a load of work and I quit iTunes? No? Oh, you want to go back to where I was when I did this a couple of days ago instead and forget all about this time? I'll guess I'll re-listen to the last ten minutes shall I. Not that that ruins the whole experience. Oh no. Thanks for the excellent seek interface too. I like the only way I can fast forward or rewind in a track is by dragging the slider onscreen. This works really really well when your track is five hours long, and the fact that each pixel maps to a minute and a half when I make the window as large as it can be (as we all know music players should always be run in full screen) isn't a problem whatsoever. Mark.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 14:08 on 14 Feb 2004 Subject: Mac OS X and Force Quit Okay, why doesn't force quit force quit? Camnio stops responding (okay, that's what I get for using beta versions, so sue me.) It sits there showing the Spinning DoohDah Of Paiiiin. Click and hold on icon on dock. "Force Quit". Camino doesn't immediately die. Huh? SIGKILL it! Or is this some kild of wussy Force Quit? The "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." kind of force quit? Sod that. Give me back xkill any day. Click. ZAP! GONE. HAHAHAHAHA. What I don't expect, and I really mean this, is the Dock then to start the Spinning DoohDah Of Paiiiin. And Lightswitch X to do the same. And when I finally give up and alt-funny-looking-flower-key-esc to bring up, um, task manager, or whatever it's called, to kill Camino it to unceremoniously log me out back to the login window. Oi! I was using that. For gawds sake, IT'S AN APP. IT DIED. DEAL. Isn't this the whole point in having an operating system, to police the apps on the system? DON'T DIE SHEP! Damn operating systems.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 12:18 on 09 Feb 2004 Subject: constantly refreshing web pages TBH I'm not sure if it's a problem with my old nemesis - the browsers or whether it's lame ass brain dead web monkeys but I hate constantly refreshing web pages. Not like "once every five minutes" but *constantly*. I suspect it's some crap Javascript wank doing something *incredibly* important like, say, scrolling "Welcome to $foo" along the status bar or some such shit but basically it means that my window flickers. All the time. And makes it impossible to say, select anything. Or click on form elements. Which kind of defeats the point fo travel sites which is wear, bizarrely I tend to find such code (recently Eurostar and KLM). On the theme of Travel Sites - give me a button that says "All London airports". Most of the time I couldn't a badger's nutsack which one I fly from you hateful fucks.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 10:28 on 03 Feb 2004 Subject: XIII A first, I think, on hates software - a games hate. To be honest I quite like the game - a conspiracy based FPS based on a Belgian comic with stylish cel shading done with much more flair than usual - lots of nice comic book touches. In general it's fun to play - nothing world shattering but not terrible by any strecth of the imagination. However it does have some HATEFUL things.And it is these that I shall expand on. For a start, you can't skip the cut scenes. This in and of itself is enough to condemn the makers to enternal hell being used as the jizz bucket of a thousand hairy backed pederasts. Especially since they're long. And voiced by David 'Monotone' Duchovny. The problem is compounded by the god awful save system. You can save but it only saves you back at the last checpoint. And it doesn't 'remember' when you finished a level - you have to tell it to. And the checkpoints are at stupid places like just before a cut scene so that everytime you die you have to go back and watch it again. And feel the urge to hurt yourself rising. And when you do die the first highlighted button int the menu is .... controls. Not retry. Controls. Like the designers thought that your first thought on getting slotted by a wandering SPAD soldier is to invert the look control or something. In fact who knows what the designers were thinking - they commit many of the cardinal sins of game design. You're encouraged to knock out people stealthily with chairs ... but only some chairs can be picked up. And if you pick up a chair and then realise you actually need to do something else first then you have to break the chair. Which means you may be left without a chair to do your stealthy dirty work with. Sometimes, to get further in a game, you have to activate a certain trigger. Which is fine if it just works but lousy if it doesn't. One bit of the game you have to listen at the door whilst a receptionists talks to a doctor. That, for some reason, triggers a security guard going into another, previously locked room which lets you kill him and then get a swipe card to get into another part. Why? fuck only knows. Oh, and if you die, you have to do it again - wait by the door listening to the conversation whilst he wends his way back to that room again. GAHHHH! Hate! Simon
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 21:20 on 02 Feb 2004 Subject: Actuate Report Server... Actuate Report Server is a 3rd Party App which tags onto Siebel. It requires a Windows 2000 server but can actually produce decent reports so you can collect stats on a call ceneter. From what I've seen of it, the language is a bit better than oh, Crystal Reports. The downside is it requires your Siebel App server be a Windows box; it won't pull data from a Unix-based Siebel app server. Actuate has its own console client app which runs on your workstation. You can tell it which report server to connect to. We have multiple report servers, as we have one for production, development and test. You get the idea. The console app looks like an explorer window. You can scroll through different directories (as administrator) and see reports, see what reports are running, and view results. As a regular joe user you have limited access (you can only see your output directory and the reports you're running.) As an administrator you import new reports through the menues or through dragging-and-dropping. It's faster to import multiple reports by highlighting on many of them and dragging them into the app. As a security precaution, when reports are added to Actuate they have NO permissions, so no-one can run them, read them, write to them or delete them. As an administrator one of the first tasks you have to do is set the permissions on the reports. The permissions can be set for all or for specific users and groups. It has a nice amount of granularity and is "secure by default" -- You don't want joe random report user running reports on groups or people he doesn't manage because you imported a report and he got access to it before you could lock it down. The one MAJOR shortcoming is in the UI. You can only set permissions on one report at a time. When you import, oh, 37 reports at once, you have to manually set the permissions on each of the 37 reports. This is tedious, slow, and annoying. You can't simply highlight multiple reports, right-click and go to properties and change the permissions for multiple files at once. It just won't work. -Jon -- Jonathan Katz, J. Random Guy.
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 01:13 on 31 Jan 2004 Subject: Lotus Goats After three and a half years of using whatever mail client I wanted that accepted IMAP v4 I'm now at a new gig where the corporate mail standard is Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes Blows Goats, get it? First and foremost, in the day and age of GUI mail clients one would expect that when you drag-and-drop a file into a message-compose window it would attach that file. No, not in Lotus Notes. It EMBEDS the file if it is a Word or HTML file or some such, making a message nearly unreadable or un-editable if you're sending a large document. Then, if you drag-and-drop a document into Notes, it embeds and becomes slow. Windows XP surprisingly and correctly reports "Not Responding." Although Window's Task Manager does not have the beauty of 'kill(1)' I can easily close out Notes. That's fine, except there is a ntlhplr.exe (or similar) program running in the background which does directory lookups for Notes. That's all fine and dandy, but upon restarting Notes it will fail to start, claiming that there is a lock-file in use and that the only way to fire-up Notes is to log-out or reboot. Using my magic powers gleaned by Google I found the advice I needed to find the ntlhlpr.exe process (or whatever it's called) and was able to kill that and successfully restart Notes without having to logout, quit what I was working on, or lose my ssh sessions to many hosts actually doing stuff. Wait until I start commenting about Siebel.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 16:50 on 30 Jan 2004 Subject: libraries Without meanign to start any holy wars, I think I've been spoiled by CPAN. In general documentation for each module on thre follows the format NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION METHODS BUGS AUTHOR COPYRIGHT SEE ALSO In SYNOPSIS you get a shor texample of how to use the API of the module. This generally means that you can egta absic version up and working very quickly. Anything more complicated may involve rummaging around in the METHODS section but at least they're there. Java libraries, inspired by Sun's own Class library, are also generally like this. However C libraries - now they're a whole different kettle of fish. Currently I'm doing a lot of image processign stuff and attempting to use various libs to accomplish things. Take FFMpeg which has documentation online. If you're like me then what what you'll mostly be wanting to do is open up a quicktime for writing, write some frames and close it out. There fore what you need to know is how to set up the movie, how to add frames (and what format the images added should be in when you add them) and then what you need to clean up after. So let's go to http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC30 Do we find that? No. We get a phrase saying "# libavformat is the library containing the file formats handling (mux and demux code for several formats). See `ffplay.c' to use it in a player. See `output_example.c' to use it to generate audio or video streams." So let's look at output_example.c does *it* have that. Well yes. Sort of. It's creates something. But it never exaplisn why it's doing anywying, it just has comments saying "allocate the temp picture frame" which is perfactly fucking clear from the code which is tmp_picture = alloc_picture(PIX_FMT_YUV420P, c->width, c->height); TBH, it's not all bad - stuff like Imlib2 has good docs, very much in the Perl style. http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/enlightenment/e17/libs/imlib2/doc/index.html?rev=1.14&view=html But I hates the rest.
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 06:33 on 30 Jan 2004 Subject: Stoopid LILO Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I got my stoopid linux box working. Yeah, what was the problem? Well, see, apparently when BeOS makes a filesystem, it doesn't bother to put it on cylinder boundaries or something. What is LILO's response to this? Hmm, well, we could just give a warning. Or, you know, we could refuse to do anything. But no! LILO, mature veteran that it is, decides instead that it should die with a fatal error and leave a totally busted loader in place. Becaues, you know, the user will figure it out, right? And I normally read error messages and stuff. Really I do. But LILO is _always_ excluding about half of my listed disks for one reason or another, so I figured "oh, an error, that just means this disk got excluded". But no! Instead we just destroy the MBR! I guess I will take the time to learn Grub after all. Yuck. Luke
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 01:49 on 27 Jan 2004 Subject: Email viruses This one's a cheap shot, but I don't care. Once upon a time, viruses were something other people had to deal with. Some Windows' user's hard drive gets reformatted, "oh, hard luck pal" as you snicker quietly and turn back to your Mac and/or Unix machine. Now, through the wonder of executable email attachments, Visual Basic and the incredible gullibility of the bottom 10% of the Internet, any keyboard pounder can slop together an email virus with just enough social engineering to make someone drool in the vicinity of the left mouse button. "*GASP*! The FBI's Department of Illegal Internet Downloads has caught me!" After a few years of this sort of thing, you'd think people would learn. [1] Then it breeds like a rabbit hutch on trial size Viagra sending itself indiscriminately to any address it finds while ransacking the poor fool's computer. Now its MY problem because this infinite queue of email clicking monkeys managed to find activestate.com and installed Perl documentation with my email address in it. With this last outbreak I'm getting hundreds a day. And even if I filter them out, I still need to download and scan the bloody things at 30K a piece. And then, because some anti-virus companies are so astoundingly gullible that they trust the From line on an email, the bounce messages add to the fun. Must. Purge. Internet. [1] They don't. While home over Christmas I helped my neighbor set up their new WAP. They had so much crap installed on their machine that it would simply accumulate random popup ads if they left it on doing nothing to the point where rebooting it was faster than trying to get rid of them all. IE was encrusted with ads and scam search tabs. This was all sort of accepted as the price of using a computer.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi