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From: Matt McLeod Date: 00:56 on 27 Jan 2004 Subject: Tru64 "enhanced" security I am not at all sure what we gain by using this FPOS, but someone at some point decided that we must use it (presumably because the name implies some benefit to system security) so now we're stuck with it. It's particularly awful in that it gives no useful debugging information when it is unhappy, even when using the "-v" switch to the various related commands -- which is *supposed* to provide additional information, but doesn't. In theory, if one needs to rebuild the databases (e.g., if one of the provided tools hoses them) you can run "convuser -a" to recreate them. However, more often than not you will get really useful error messages like: PUTPRPWNAM: root: Function not implemented or: PUTPRPWNAM: root: File exists which, as you will notice, do not say *which* function is not implemented. Nor which file exists. The latter is particularly hateful as it pops up even when no possibly related file does exist -- if it did, you wouldn't be trying to rebuild the damned database. As a final bonus, there seems to be bugger-all by way of useful documentation. Sure, prpasswd(4) looks like it might be helpful until you really need it, but then it's pretty much useless. Grr. Matt
From: Mark Fowler Date: 14:46 on 23 Jan 2004 Subject: Website Passwords I can't remember my passwords for websites. I'm sorry, but it's just not worth my while remembering the password for your random site. Hell, I can hardly remember my password for my online banking - there's no way I'm going to memorise the details of my Bob's online bait house emporium account. Most web site designers have realised this. I like the fact that most sites can mail me passwords if I click on the 'ooops I'm a moron' button (or mail me a link that will let me reset my passwords, which is better as it never sends what might be a sensitive password over cleartext.) Other sites haven't. They expect me to email a real person. Real people are slow. And real people get pissed off if you mail them every couple of weeks. Hey, George, I've got an idea how we can save our company a mint! You know how Betty down in accounts spends half her day emailing clients with lost passwords? Maybe we could get that repetitive boring task done by one of these new fangled computer thingywosits! No Ernie, that'll never fly. bah.
From: Mark Fowler
Date: 15:59 on 19 Jan 2004
Subject: Spreadsheet cell notation
Today I am hating (actually, for the last week I have been hating)
spreadsheet cell notation. A2, F7, BA99, etc.
Basic problems:
a) I don't think in letters. 'M' doesn't automatically seem ten over
than 'C' where '13' does compared to '3';
b) They're indexed from one, not zero. I've been a programmer too long
and this is driving me nuts.
c) Using different units for going across rather than down is *nuts*.
It's impossible to reuse code that you've written for addition
in one dimension for going in the other
d) When the spreadsheet goes to three dimensions (i.e. it has multiple
'sheets' in the book) it goes truly insane. Now I have to write
this in Excel:
='Sheet 1'!A1 + 'Sheet2'!A1 + 'Sheet3'!A1
Yep that's right. I have to remember what my sheets are called.
Well *that's* reusable. And can I just use a =SUM(...). Nope, gotta
do each of the sheets individually.
Oh and Excel formulas have a maximum length of 1024 chars. So if you
have too many sheets you're screwed.
Who came up with this notation? What's wrong with a *comma* to delimit
across and down, and between sheets.
Programming spreadsheets is *hard*. Anyone who knows a way around this,
I'd be grateful if they could tell me. However, it's still hateful since
this would be easy with a multidimensional array.
Mark.
From: Leon Brocard Date: 14:21 on 19 Jan 2004 Subject: VNC VNC is a wonderful idea. Make anything a remote desktop. Anything can be a client. As always, it falls down in implementation. Software! OK, so I'm mostly talking about Mac OS X VNC clients and servers here. But wait, isn't this supposed to be a simple open protocol that anyone can implement? So why is it dog slow and why do I keep on finding VNC clients and servers that don't interoperate? It's just silly. But not as silly as the name "Chicken of the VNC" that is a popular OS X VNC client. Or it would be, I presume, if I could get it to talk to anything. Thus I blame everyone. It shouldn't be hard to write a client. Writing a server could be a little tricker, granted, but a client for a well-documented not-really-new-is-it protocol? Hey, maybe I'll do it myself 'cos everyone else appears to be failing completely. I hear rdesktop is better. But can it really be? I mean, it's software... Bah, Leon
From: Matt McLeod Date: 15:48 on 16 Jan 2004 Subject: OS X and network filesystems This has been getting on my nerves for a while now. So. We have an SMB network browser built in to the automounter. Great. Nice enough idea. But it doesn't work reliably. Sometimes machines will show up in /Network, sometimes they won't, and sometimes they'll show up but the automounter won't mount any of the shares even when it knows the password and could quite easily do so. And when that happens, you have to mount them manually, in which case they appear as /Volumes/share rather than /Network/host/share. Which is a real PITA if you're trying to script anything. It's bloody irritating, and in four major revisions of the OS they *still* haven't managed to get this right. Matt
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 03:38 on 16 Jan 2004 Subject: linux _still_ sucks Normally I like hardware (mostly) but my hard drives have been driving me insane. (Don't worry, I'll get to the software hate.) I'm preparing to pull a fourth drive from desktop; this one because it's making a high-pitched whining noise that's about to drive me insane. The point of this email, contrary to how it may appear, is not that BeOS is great: It's that linux really does just suck an amazingly large amount. This machine runs two operating systems: Linux and BeOS. In more detail, it's running the absolutely most up-to-date, Debian "unstable" version of Linux, and it's running a version of BeOS that hasn't been upgraded in, oh, 2 or 3 years. Now, there are some problems with BeOS. I can't use spatial keys (Control-Left, Control-Right) to switch workspaces, the terminal really just sucks, the network stack is a travesty, and missing plenty-o-features. But compared to linux.... I turn my stupid computer off and connect a bunch of drives so I can stage my data to them. I boot into linux thinking "i'll just repartition one of them and copy this data over first". Oh yeah, except that, well, linux can't see the damn things. Even though essentially every ide driver that exists is loaded in my kernel, and most definitely the autodetect driver is loaded. Even though at least one of these drives worked last week. Sure. So okay, I'll start with Be. I boot into Be (which takes about 15 seconds and involves almost no disk grinding), and hey! I can see all the drives. Quick partition. Ooooh, a _graphical_ partitioning tool. Simple, straightforward. Wow! I don't have to enter in the number of freaking cylinders I want?! It's almost like I've died and left the 1980s! Amazing! If Linux is innovative, what the hell is this? Cheating? So, I go into partitioning. I may have to boot off this drive. You know what that means? I have to throw away some space at the beginning. Because, you know, lilo might or might not be able to read past the 1024st cylinder. Oh yeah, of course, it's _possible_ to make lilo do it. Usually. In theory. So I partition it all up, and backup my OS. What does the backup consist of? I grap all of the folders and drag them onto the new drive. Wow, that was tough. I wait a bit (again, with graphical feedback, including a progress bar--wow, progress bars!), and it's all done. Oh, and just to reiterate my last hate: BeOS can (of course) power off my monitor even if it's connected via DVI, and it's mp3 player works just dandy, even though it hasn't been updated in 3 years. Oh yeah, open source is all about innovation, and it _naturally_ results in better software. The software's just better than it's competitors were 20 years ago, rather than right now. Thanks. So I'm reduced to trawling the fricking 'net looking for how to force devfs (you know, the thing that's supposed to autodetect all of my devices?) to autodetect (see, I have to force it to autodetect; got that?) my stupid IDE drive. Right. And then, once I get the stupid drive working, I'll have the pleasure of doing the following to make a bootable drive: run 'cd <fs>; sudo tar cf - . | (cd <newspot>; sudo tar xf -) for each of my stupid filesystems Change lilo so that it points to the new drive and installs the new stupid bootloader thing (yeah, BeOS has a simple, easy bootloader, but I decided, heck, I'll try lilo. And plus, BeOS has been deprecated; it didn't seem wise to requier it. Big-ass mistake, obviously, especially considering that Be has no freaking problem with 1024 or more cylinders. Change my stupid SCSI card so it boots off a different drive. Pray that it all freaking works. Reboot twenty times trying it. Yes friends, linux sucks a lot. It's not an atrocious server OS, but anyone who thingks this crap is acceptable is smoking crack. And not the good kind either. How's that for some software hate? And I'm not even done with the night yet. Luke
From: Earle Martin Date: 13:10 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: date Every time I have to set the date on a Linux box[0] I have to read the documentation for 'date', because I can never remember what format to specify. earle@batou:~$ date --help | grep MM or: date [-u|--utc|--universal] [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]] So that's month, day, hour, minute, and *then* [optional] century, year, and *then* seconds? What kind of crackhead came up with this? Would it have been too hard to have it understand ISO 8601? FFS. [0] Before getting it set up to get the time over the network.
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 06:37 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: Introductory linux hate Wow, maybe this list will be my saviour.... I've got so much software bile it's giving me an ulcer. So much... But this month it's linux. I hate most software, and especially operating systems, but I reserve a special place in my cankerous stomach for linux. I just want two simple things (in this case): Audio, and my LCD powered off after a timeout. Audio worked fine for a long time. I mean, XMMS sucks, but it works. But then something happened and I had to upgrade to ALSA (which becomes standard in 2.6) for some reason, and, well, nothing works now. Or at least, not often. About 1 in 3 times my stupid linux box hangs on startup trying to restore the ALSA mixer settings. Or, conveniently, it hangs at shutdown. About 1 in 2 times, XMMS decides to grind the disk until I restart it. Eventually, almost every time, XMMS just decides to take 100% of one of my cpus and I have to kill -9 it. Okay, maybe I'll use something else. How about rhythmbox and gstreamer? They're cool and new and support ALSA natively. I get the stupid ALSA thing started again, and, um, rhythmbox finally (on the fourth try) imports my 7000 songs. But after that I never once get it to successfully start. Oh, and this is really cool: there's a settings app for gstreamer (which rhythmbox requires) and if that settings app is open, rhythmbox will never start. Close the app, the stupid mp3 player starts. Yeah, and it apparently uses gnump3d or something, and gnump3d-index maybe, except I can't tell, although it did start the process, but it doesn't use the process's index, and instead builds an 80k XML file. This app sucks. Why is it that something that everyone else (except maybe windows I guess, but do they even count?) can do so stinking easily is so stinking hard on linux. Even fricking _Solaris_ can do audio trivially. Really. It's trivial. Works every time. Why the hell is this so difficult? "Oooh, I know, let's replace a simple crappy system with a really complex crappy system!" Oh yeah, that's the OSS innovation we all wanted. Thanks. And don't even get me started on the fact that I have two mac laptops and a linux box, and I need some way to synchronize their libraries on disk (which is easy) and in the stupid apps. But since everyone wants to maintain their own database of the files, and no one provides an external, automateable indexing function, no dice. Yeah, thanks. "Apple: We make the easy things easy and everything else impossible, and we insult you if you try them!" But really, that just makes me mad. What really pisses me off is that my stupid linux box refuses to power off my LCD if it's connected via the DVI port. Oh yeah, it's a bug. It's a bug that was fixed three years ago. It's a bug that's been patched. About ten times. By ten different people. For each linux distro. And Debian even ships with a patch. But it doesn't work. I recompiled xfree86. Four times. Still nothing. So, I take my expensive digital display and connect it to the stupid analog port. Except when I briefly (wonderfully) had two LCDs connected, the primary via DVI and the secondary via VGA. That was even better: The primary wouldn't power off and the secondary would not even blank. That was really cool. Xfree86 sucks, and I hope all those xfree86 core developers, sitting in their parents' basements with no pants, have to suffer through their own code for the rest of eternity and aren't allowed to use the newer, better code that I'm hoping will supplant this crap. Oooh, and the primary has a USB hub in it, so I (stupidly) connected my USB mouse to it, because hey, it's USB, that's cool. Except that it won't power itself off. So I have to. And when I power it back on, well, the mouse doesn't work anymore. I got about 10 very helpful messages that the mouse driver was already loaded, but, well, the stupid mouse never worked. Bouncy bouncy. I just discovered this list today, but you guys may be hearing a lot from me. I've got a lot of software hate. Luke Kanies
From: Simon Wistow Date: 14:21 on 13 Jan 2004 Subject: automake I cannot actually believe that somebody thought that automake and all its brethren were the best solution to the problem of installing things in C. I mean, it's not like it removes all external dependencies since you have to have the right version of automake installed (and slight differences in version can make a big difference), it's not easy to grok let alone write and requires lots of tweakignt o get it to run right on different platforms. I started this week actually looking forward to coming into work - I had stuff I really wanted to do. By this morning I was doing subconcious work avoidance. The reason - M4 macros. And a bit of XS but mostly M4 macros. From the dire documentation, crap syntax and just general square peg round hole nature of the whole thing automake is truly hateable software.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi