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From: David Cantrell Date: 13:57 on 26 Oct 2003 Subject: Hateful websites Web sites are software, right? Why do all car manufacturers' web sites SUCK so hard? Is there some law of nature that they have to be designed by crack-head donkey-botherers? All I want, please Mr. Volkswagen/Peugeot/Mercedes/whoever, is to find where my local dealer is. I don't want your flash intro, or your quirky tune, i'm not interested in diplomatic sales or your racing team or your apprenticeship scheme or wireframe drawings of your engines. I want to type my postcode and for your website to say "thankyou your marvellousness, please go to FOO, their address is BAR, the nearest station is BAZ, the number QUUX bus stops outside, and here's a map showing where the dealer is and your postcode". A map, with all the streets on, with their names, like what I can get at streetmap.co.uk, not just the main roads, no fancy 3d buildings drawn on it. Just a map. Which I can use to find the fucking place and spend vast quantities of money.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 03:05 on 24 Oct 2003 Subject: OS X fighting itself over aliases Aliases or symlinks, the war continues. MacOS introduced the concept of aliases. Infinately better than Windows shortcuts. They posess most of the positive qualities of both hard and soft links. You can move the original file and the alias will still work. It will work across mounted drives. Brilliant! Nearly transparent aliasing! Except a Unix shells has no idea what to make of these things. To the shell its nothing but some crazy empty file. Fortunately the Finder understands symlinks. So if you want to be compatible with both halves of OS X's personality, you have to make a leap backwards and use symlinks. All part of the Unix half of OS X not groking resource forks. :(
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 00:35 on 24 Oct 2003 Subject: Symmetrical connectors Its not software but damnit if I can never figure out which way my USB cable is supposed to go in! If you're going to design a connector that has to go in a certain way, make sure its damn obvious which way it should go! USB, Serial, ADB, IDE, most SCSI, polarized US power cords (thank god those disappeared right quick) all require they go in a certain way yet they're symmetrical across one or more axis. ADB was the worst offender being nearly round with nothing but a notch to orient on. Many a time I played the little twisty game trying to get an ADB connector to slide into an unseen jack. OTOH, firewire, phone and ethernet jacks, three prong US power and to a limited extent, VGA and mini-VGA seem to have gotten it right.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 12:25 on 21 Oct 2003 Subject: Galeon Right, I've suffered long enough. Time to hate. I hate the Galeon that's in debian unstable. No idea if this is true of all Galeons. No idea if it's just my machine or not. Though oddly, Camino stable (0.7) does exactly the same thing on my mac. Make of that what you will. This doesn't make me hate it any less. Quite simply, it doesn't work. Every so often it just won't submit forms. It won't work on IMDB. It won't work on pasty. It won't work on RT. I just get the same page back. As if I haven't submitted anything. Blech helped me work out that it's doing something odd with content lengths. (I initially blamed his code on pasty, but it's not that.) Understanding this doesn't make me hate it any less either. It's been like this for a month. And it doesn't seem to be getting any better. And annoyingly it's _just_ shy of being so bad I need to switch browsers. So I use it, forget about it, and then all of a sudden I find another site that's not working and I have to go find a computer with a working browser. I don't even think this is anyone's fault. GAH.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 13:17 on 20 Oct 2003 Subject: Fink, subversion I'd like a working SSL subversion client for my mac please. Of course, this is way too much to ask for. Especially if you're trying to install it from Fink. I hate the fact that if you want an unstable package then you have to start compiling software. Do you have any idea what kind of bizarre and crazy extra dependencies this gives me? Debian doesn't do this. Since the developers had to compile the software, and the package manager had to know what files it just installed, well, all the information is there. There's no reason on earth not to ship a binary version. It's like one extra command. Now I know that 'unstable' means that the packages are just for developers. But some packages are just never going to become stable. That's the way of things. Some of them just move too quickly. Take subversion for example. It releases new versions every few weeks or so. And the fink package maintainers (god bless their cotten socks) keep updating the packages to track. But this means, as far as I can tell, that the package will *never* make it into stable. In Debian this would be fine, I'd just pin it to unstable and take the rough with the smooth. Or grab one unstable binary version and stick with it, and tell Debian to hold that package. You can't do that with Fink. Fink insists on building from source for unstable releases. Which quite frankly takes ages. It requires a whole lot of other software to be installed. And it normally fails since the software packages have changed something in their build process slightly since the fink developers wrapped it. Oh! And the only way I can figure out to get a unstable source is to CVS update my tree. That's right, I can't actually rely on an apt-get update alone. And to make matters worse, this is using sourceforge's CVS system that has been know to be.... how do I put this? About as reliable as using marmalade to cement your house together. No, I've never got this to work. I have to manually download each extra dependancy using the web interface and place it in the right place on my hard drive. So here I am. I want a SSL subversion client. The worst think of all of this is I, like many software projects, have no idea what to do about it. I can't waltz in and tell all the people who are doing such a thankless task that they're doing it all wrong. I can't force them to change, and it'd be wrong of me to even try. But on the other hand, the way to install subversion on my mac (according to the subversion website) is to use Fink. Any ideas on how to get around this, offlist please. GAH.
From: Anders =?iso-8859-1?Q?Hellstr=F6m?= Date: 21:41 on 17 Oct 2003 Subject: Internet Explorer Sometimes I ask myself... "Does Microsoft's developers even glance at the= standards before trying to implement them?" But then I come to my senses and say to myself "Don't ask stupid questions,= of course they don't." It would seem that Internet Explorer for Windows doesn't support "position:= fixed;" at all. Internet Explorer for Mac however does support it to some= extent, but has broken support for "right:" and "bottom:" thus making it= mostly useless for me. Now let us all sit down together and wait for "Internet Explorer 7 with new= and improved bugs(tm)". Maybe they can break PNG support a bit more? *hopes= *
From: David Cantrell Date: 19:28 on 17 Oct 2003 Subject: Mapping Hate One of the most important applications for me on my Palm is Tomtom Citymaps. For pretty much any town of any consequence in the whole of western Europe, it helps me find pubs and other important places. It works really well and I don't have any complaints about the current version at all. But I do have a big complaint about the next version. You see, the current version doesn't work on Palm OS 5 devices, like the shiny shiny Tungstens which magpie-me so desperately wants. Palm no longer sell Palm OS 4 devices. Tomtom have no plans to release an updated version of their software, and so I hate them. I've looked around for an alternative map application. There are none. Garmin have released a combined Palm and GPS device, which looks very nice indeed. And they have European maps! Hooray! Oh, but what's this red text on their webshite? Maps of Europe are only for sale in the US. So let me get this straight. They'll sell me maps of irrelevant places thousands of miles away, but won't sell me maps of London or Paris. So I hate them too. Suggestions for less hateful suppliers off-list please.
From: aglet
Date: 11:28 on 17 Oct 2003
Subject: bind9 documentation
we hates unreadable docbook documentation
[...]
>Section 8</I
></SPAN
> contains troubleshooting help. The
main body of the document is followed by several
<SPAN
CLASS="emphasis"
><I
CLASS="emphasis"
>Appendices</I
></SPAN
> which contain useful reference
information, such as a <SPAN
CLASS="emphasis"
><I
CLASS="emphasis"
[...]
From: Earle Martin Date: 11:04 on 14 Oct 2003 Subject: xemacs, again That fucking open dialog. If you tab-complete the path to the thing you're trying to open, and then decide that you do actually want to use the file listing doodad and double-click a directory listed in it, it appends the name of the directory you click to the path you've tab-completed. So you can be in ~/foo and tab-complete to ~/foo/bar, but then open bar by clicking it and you get ~/foo/bar/bar. Gah! Also, the default configuration that comes in the Debian package for xemacs21 is broken. Whenever I open an HTML document with it it switches to HTML-mode; unfortunately in HTML-mode every time I hit "tab" to indent a line it hijacks one of my panes to tell me this: (1) (error/warning) Error in 'post-command-hook' (setting hook to nil): (wrong-type-argument arrayp nil) What the hell does that mean? I shouldn't have to read a manual about LISP to fix the fucking thing BEFORE I CAN EVEN USE IT. Someone gave me a workaround, which is M-x customize-font RET font-lock-keyword-face RET [pick a font, save it] but that's just not good enough. Did the people who put this package together not test it? Oh. Look. This problem had a fix diagnosed for it TWO YEARS AGO! http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs-beta/200102/msg00467.html So the problem is with "PSGML", whatever that is. I don't care. I only care that there's a problem that hasn't been fixed and it's impeding my efficiency. For fuck's sake.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi