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From: Mark Fowler Date: 13:13 on 12 Oct 2003 Subject: Autodetecting Web Sites It's not that I mind that websites detect what browsers I'm using, and change what they show me. It's that most sites don't seem to let me override it. Who came up with this stupid idea? Look, trust me, my browser _can_ cope with the website. It's considerably less useless than your detection software. Oh, and today, the classic. Trying to download the Java runtime for a windows PC, and I'm using my mac. The webserver detects that I've using a Mac, and offers me the mac version, but _won't_ let me manually chose the windows version! Damn, I'll guess I'll have to go find a Windows PC to do this download this on. GAH.
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 11:46 on 09 Oct 2003 Subject: The flight of the upgrade path On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 10:57:48AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: > How else would they be able to convince you to part with more money? > > I hates software whenever it doesn't do what it should do, and its > vendor expects me to pay them to fix their own mistakes and shortcomings. This leads directly to one of the things that, speaking as a long-time Windows user, mystifies me most about OS X and its users: they make you buy a new OS every year! Now, admittedly there's a new Windows every two years or so (though it looks like the follow up to XP, which came out in '01, won't appear till '05 or so) but you don't *need* it. If you're running Win98 on, say, a P2-400 with 128MB of RAM, you can reasonably expect 95% of Win32 software to work on it, and the only stuff that doesn't will usually require an NT kernel, so it'll work on NT 4 instead. *Everything* runs on the four-year-old Win2K and that will continue to be the case until (and probably well beyond) Longhorn's appearance. Yet within three months of Jaguar coming out, every second bit of new OS X software I saw *demanded* it. I probably have a distinctly inaccurate impression of things here, but... (trails off waving hands, hoping for a Mac user to continue at this point) -- Yoz
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 00:23 on 09 Oct 2003 Subject: Hard coded $FOO I hate: hardcoded key bindings, hardcoded file names, fixed array sizes, hardcoded menus, hardcoded program names, hardcoded mail headers, hardcoded anything. If I want to make BOTH Backspace and Delete do "erase char", why the hell can't I? 4.1BSD had "Alternate erase" in 1980, for god's sake. And I still have to alternately type "stty erase ^H" and "stty erase ^?" when I find some keyboard that's got one or the other mapping (DEC-I-mean-Compaq-I-mean- HP, usually) because you can't "stty erase ^H erase ^?". And, no, I don't care if GNU Readline ksh tcsh foosh can do that for me, because not every program can, damnit. This belongs in termio. This should be a bloody matrix that lets me map all functions to all characters... Same with the keyboard. In UNIX at least I can map anything to anything easily. In NT it involves hacking the registry and calculating bitmaps by hand. In MacOS you have to create a custom keyboard definitions file and convert it to a resource fork and hide it deep in the system... And speaking of MacOS, it's got a great preferences system... and even if you don't want to create a prefs pane for every damn variable in your program, at least wrap it in something like this: NSString textFont = [ [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] stringForKey:@"textFont" ]; if(!textFont) textFont = @"LucidaGrande"; And even if you never create an "advanced prefs", someone else will strings your app and write it up on ResExcellence or something and you'll get free advertising. In Windows, I'm sure you can do the same thing with registry keys. In UNIX, if you've got any kind of config file just keep adding options to it. God knows why people can't do this. It should be a reflex.
From: Arthur Bergman Date: 13:22 on 06 Oct 2003 Subject: Cron again! So, After struggling with cron for an hour or not, the bloody shit NEVER executed what I wanted, and it never freaking put anything in the log. It just was silent all the time. Oh yes it did execute the hourly thing and so on, but never my crontab! So it turns out I had MAILTO=abergman@xxxxxxx.xxx and of course, cron doesn't handly remote users in MAILTO is it silently died after that. fucking piece of shit sky
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 15:25 on 05 Oct 2003 Subject: Mac Paint Can you hate software that doesn't exist? OK, I want to edit a bitmap to go in a TIFF file in a Resource folder, so I go digging through Mac OS X to find a bitmap editor. Near as I can tell, there isn't one. Not in the system, or the developer kit, and there doesn't appear to be a functional one (freeware, shareware, or commercial) for less than a couple of hundred bucks. Well, there's Gimp. Which seems a bit of overkill. They expect all developers to fork out $200+ for a copy of a graphic arts tool so they can build icons? Bah, I think I'll convert it to an ASCII XBM and edit it in "vi".
From: Arthur Bergman Date: 14:25 on 02 Oct 2003 Subject: Cron Hi, I hate cron. Reason I hate cron is because it has a very awful non friendly specification system. Why cannot we move into the 21th century with some nice specification for cron like things. Oh I know it exists, but it is never installed everywhere. HATE Arthur
From: mjinks Date: 20:58 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: does this count? I'm skipping a meeting right now, which some of my colleagues were roped into, because I cannot bear to sit through another 1.5 hour tour of a vendor's web-based application. I know how to use a web browser. I even, believe it or not, know how to fill out forms in a web browser and hit "submit". And I'm bothered by the apparent contradiction between "Oh, we'll make it Easy and Intuitive! We'll put it on the Web!" vis-a-vis "Please come to yet another meeting in which one of our salesdroids will show you PowerPoint [HATE] slides of screenshots of our intuitive, easy-to-use web application so you, idiot, will be able to use the damn thing." And the vendor? Sun Microsystems! Sun "why should Unix provide any usability tools at all?" Microsystems! Sun "we'd really like it if everybody had to pass through US$10,000 worth of LCD training classes before laying a finger on any of our products" Microsystems! Sun "all our employees run our main competitor's OS on their laptops because our own OS is just too damn tough to get any real use out of" Microsystems! Sun "we clearly have no idea how anybody manages to make their way around one of our machines without our help" Microsystems! And the application? An abomination which (Sun thinks) is going to sit on all our machines and send them constant updates on their status, like which particular DSIMM is going to go tits up and cause their half-million-dollar sooper-dooper fault-tolerant megabox to do a hard reset next Saturday night. Automagic! Easy to use! Huge time saver! Huge reliability increaser! Yeah. I'd rather spend my time venting at the hates-software list, thanks anyway. I hates software, and I hates the spawning grounds in which it breeds. Colleague, now on his way in to the meeting I'm boycotting: "They must know better by now."
From: mjinks Date: 20:31 on 30 Sep 2003 Subject: eudora I hate Eudora so much. So very much. And I don't even use it. I hate it because I hate all things that foster and encourage stupidity in computer users, and Eudora does this with a vengeance. Please, Eudora programmers: they are called "mail headers". The whole world calls them "headers". People who don't know what a header is will not bother to make use of a menu option which refers to headers, or they'll try it out to see what it does and they won't be harmed. They do not now, nor did they ever, need an option called, "Blah blah blah". Seriously. "Blah blah blah"? What the fuck good is that going to do anybody? Eudora users can't tell one flavor of "Blah blah blah" from another so why not call them HEADERS? Do you know how stupid it sounds when a tech support person tells somebody to "turn on your 'Blah blah blah' option"? The obvious and inevitable first response is "Huh?" And do you know how stupid I feel when I ask any member of our user community to please send me a copy of a particular e-mail with the headers attached, when I know that chances are pretty good that they're a Eudora user and can't tell a header from a hole in the ground from their Blah blah blah? But I dare not say to them, by the way, if you're a Eudora user, please activate your Blah blah blah option, because that would make me sound like some sort of patronizing idiot.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 18:19 on 29 Sep 2003 Subject: Software that thinks "_" is legal in DNS. While trying to retrieve the URL: http://phil_g.hates-software.com/2003/09/29/746dcaa6.html The following error was encountered: * Invalid URL Some aspect of the requested URL is incorrect. Possible problems: * Missing or incorrect access protocol (should be `http://'' or similar) * Missing hostname * Illegal double-escape in the URL-Path * Illegal character in hostname; underscores are not allowed Your cache administrator is webmaster@$VBC
From: Phil!Gregory Date: 17:09 on 29 Sep 2003 Subject: Fonts and X Fonts have been around for quite some time. Even TrueType fonts have been an everyday part of people's lives for a great many years now. Why is it, exactly, that I can't get my programs to use all of the fonts on my computer? Well, X is broken. X likes to deal with strict bitmap fonts. None of that scalable, TrueType, stuff. No, that's too newfangled for X. People used to work around this by making font servers that took scalable fonts, prescaled them for common sizes, and pretended to the X server that they were bitmaps. Which worked, more or less, though you still had to deal with X's wonderful font naming scheme. Then came XFree86 4.<mumble>. "Oh," said they, "It supports scalable fonts natively now. No need for those nasty font servers." Well, that's a lie hidden inside a truth. They wrote an extension for X that supports scalable and other sorts of fonts. Who uses this extension? Well, GTK 2.2. And maybe KDE. And approximately no one else in the universe. Probably because it's only in XFree86. (But "will hopefully be included by [other X11 implementations] in the future.") My needs are simple. I want TrueType fonts in Mozilla. Mozilla says it supports TrueType fonts. Surely that means it's brave and daring and uses the new Xft extension, right? No, of course not. The wise Mozilla developers decided that it would be better to build TrueType support *right into Mozilla*, so you have to go out of your way and make sure Mozilla knows where your TrueType fonts are. It can't figure this out on its own; it has to be told. Why can't there be one solution that works well and everyone uses so end users don't have to worry about stuff like this. Font support should be something that just works. Yeah, it's probably more likely that everyone will magically decide to standardize on a single widget toolkit.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi