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From: Simon Wistow Date: 11:51 on 29 Sep 2003 Subject: media players I tried to limit this to maybe one media player, or maybe just one OS or something but no, I realised I hate them all. Streaming, static - it doesn't matter ... I'm an equal oppurtunities hater. I hate the fact that they all try and grab all the file types. I hate the fact that half the time a given file is an "unrecognised format", I hate Real Player for, well, lots of stuff actually but because it trys to open a file and then goes to "download software from Real.com" and then fails to do anything. I hate the fact that I can't drag a file into Quicktime. Windows seemed to be going somewhere with it's installed codecs thing - theoretically that should mean that, no matter what player I loaded up, it should all 'just work' [tm]. Does it? Does it bollocks. I hate mplayer - it spews loads of debug stuff out to STDOUT. In fact I don't know which is more irritating - the fact that it does that or the fact that so many enconders seem to produce junk. I hate the fact that some clips I discover it hangs on unless I forceably skip past the problem spot. I hate Xine for being so fricking difficult to compile and install. Media players are a simple concept. Files comes in, choose codec based on magic, play file through codec. IT'S REALLY NOT THAT DIFFICULT. *sigh*
From: Mark Fowler Date: 11:36 on 29 Sep 2003 Subject: Loathing Samba Let's try mounting our work directory (which worked on friday) bash-2.05b$ sudo mount /mnt/projects 1988: session setup failed: ERRSRV - 2242 SMB connection failed bash-2.05b$ Oh, error 2242. I know that one. It's like 2241, right, but with a slightly higher number. GAH! Mark.
From: Earle Martin Date: 23:46 on 27 Sep 2003 Subject: BitchX A paste of something that just happened says all: 23:16 -!- UnderMine [~UnderMine@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xxxxxxx.xxx.xx.xx] has quit [Quit: User pushed the X - because it's Xtra, baby] 23:17 <@hex> isn't there a --not-retard flag you can give to BX to turn off those stupid fucking messages? 23:19 <@hex> That and another couple of dozen stupid /quit messages 23:20 <@hex> they're almost funny the first time, but not then the next $inf times when more than one person is producing them 23:21 * DrHyde considers BitchX authors to be only a small step up from those anti-virus scum 23:23 <@Kake> You could just configure it. 23:23 <@Kake> But I keep saying this, and nobody ever does. This post has been brought to you by the low-effort hate department.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 20:37 on 23 Sep 2003 Subject: Acrobat Apart from the general stupidity of trying to take a layout language designed for a fixed-sized-fixed-aspect-ratio medium and force it to play nice on the screen (I'm talking about PDF here, in case anyone hasn't yet encountered the myriad stupidities involved with PDF)... Acrobat REALLY LIKES MDI, to the point where it implements MDI on UNIX. I hate it for liking MDI. I hate it for implementing it badly. Acrobat is schizophrenic in the extreme about fonts. I've had it barf and show Windows-fnords (you know,when Microsoft's Magic Quotes show up as A-acute and the like) on *Windows*. Presumably it's trying to convert everything to Adobe's proprietary Postscript font mapping internally. Or maybe it's just stupid. But beyond all that, Acrobot is a bloody stalker. "Oh" it says, "you're running something that looks like one of the browsers I'm fixated on. I will install myself as a Plugin. I don't care that you have disabled plugins and removed x-pdf and all its relatives from the helpers list, I AM ACROBAT and I'm more important than your petty preferences. You meant to download that? Tough, I'm going to take over... and I'm going to run so bloody slowly OpenSSL will hit 1.0 before I'm finished showing you that first page. "Oh, yeh, and I'm going to lobotomise your browser so you can't even do anything to fix that while I sit there and try and fetch the file through a really slow proxy. "Yeh, look at this, I totall 0WNZ0R your browser, buddy. I'm so L33T!" AUGH.
From: Chris Ball
Date: 19:26 on 18 Sep 2003
Subject: GNU tar(1).
Please allow me to introduce you all to GNU tar.
GNU tar does wonderful new things, none of which have been done in a
mostly unchanging fashion for several decades. Since the code is in
such constant flux, sometimes it's inevitable that occasional bugs
slip through the net of the keen and watchful GNU developers.
Like, say, this one:
I create an archive of /usr under Solaris, with `tar cvf usr.tar /usr`.
I copy it to a Linux machine. I unpack it with `tar xvf usr.tar`.
But wait. We have errors. They look like this:
tar: usr/bin/uncompress: Cannot hard link to `/usr/bin/compress':
No such file or directory
tar: usr/bin/zcat: Cannot hard link to `/usr/bin/compress':
No such file or directory
tar: usr/bin/zipinfo: Cannot hard link to `/usr/bin/unzip':
No such file or directory
That doesn't seem right. Actually, the Solaris fetish for hard links
doesn't seem right -- but of more importance to me right now, neither
does the error; usr/bin/unzip *does* exist in the archive. Maybe an
strace -elink will help:
link("/usr/bin/compress", "usr/bin/uncompress") = -1 ENOENT (No such
file or directory)
link("/usr/bin/compress", "usr/bin/zcat") = -1 ENOENT (No such file
or directory)
link("/usr/bin/unzip", "usr/bin/zipinfo") = -1 ENOENT (No such file
or directory)
# ^ note leading slash
So, while GNU tar's happy to remove leading slashes from archive paths
while unpacking, it'd rather spew links straight through to the machine
the archive's being unpacked on than to the archive it's just made for
itself. CHRIS SMASH NOW. AXE FIRE PLASTIC. DEATH. BURN.
(In case you're thinking that this'll be fixed by now, well, it's in the
latest Debian stable tar (1.13.25). It's been reported to bug-gnu-utils
on many occasions, including this one from _2001_:
<http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2001-05/msg00217.html>;.)
- Chris.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 14:50 on 18 Sep 2003 Subject: Javascript abuse iCab: "GET / HTTP/1.1 ..." Router: "Go away you smelly peon, you don't support Javascript." iCab: (puts on IE5 Mask) "GET / HTTP/1.1 ..." Router: "Ah, your majesty, what can I do for you?" Javascript is actually a nice little scripting language, on its own merits. But, dang, 90% of the time it's used it's not needed, and servers that assume you can't do Javascript because they don't recognise you. Rotten smelly bastids. All of them.
From: dagbrown (Dave Brown) Date: 22:21 on 16 Sep 2003 Subject: Scripting languages again Class, can I have your attention? Hands up, everyone who knows how to find the length of a string in Perl. Yes, Jimmy? You're right, the answer is "length()". How about C++'s string class? You're right, Elizabeth, it is "length()"! Anyone want to venture how you get the length of a string in Ruby? Oh, hello, Simon! Yes, the answer is "the length() method!". Very good! Yes, thank you, Simon, I know that you can also use "size()". That's enough. THANK YOU. Alright. Can anyone in the class explain why Python chose to have "return the length of a string" be a standalone function called "len()" forcing the would-be Python programmer to reach for the manual? Nobody? Ah, young Guido, yes. "Because that would be too much like Perl, which is unreadable by definition." That's certainly an interesting theory you have there. I'll be sure to share it with the rest of the teachers after class. Feh. --Dave
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 17:51 on 16 Sep 2003 Subject: mutt How many bloody different exit keys does it need? And why aren't they remotely consistent? -- Yoz
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 13:04 on 16 Sep 2003 Subject: Mailman It might actually be a pretty nice bit of software, in the right hands. But every month on "Mailman Day" I hate it more and more.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 11:11 on 12 Sep 2003 Subject: Reply-To Okay, this is the 21st Centuary right? Why don't email clients have the ability to send and parse more meta-data about who the correct _people_ to reply to are? I'm not talking about the Reply-To header in my email, which as we all know can only say which email address the person should reply to if they want to send info to the entitiy that sent the original mail. I'm talking about setting a reply to for whole sets of people. Typical example. Someone sends out a list to a whole bunch of people saying "Drinks at my place, mail me if you're coming". Why can't they set some headers that mean that if someone hits reply on thier mail client then it automatically replies to them and just them? (rather than forcing the decision of reply to sender or reply to all on the person that recieves the mail) Same situation, but on getting my invite I notice that they've forgotten to put the date of the meeting. Currently I have to email everyone in the group to say "Oi, mate, what date?" so the original sender can reply with "Oh deary me, I am *so* sorry, I meant the third wednesday of the month." What would be nice is that I can reply to the original sender and set the default reply to send to everyone in the group. I mean, the other members of the group don't need to know she's forgotten the date - they only need to see the reply with the correction. You get the idea. But no, our software is dumb. And so my inbox is full of crud. GAH.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi