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From: Leon Brocard Date: 15:41 on 11 Sep 2003 Subject: Progress bars There is so much I hate about progress bars that I don't quite know where to begin. First off, let's make the assumption that progress bars (or some sort of progress display) might be useful. If something is going to take a while, it might be useful to inform the user. Even better, you could inform the user the expected time the whole process will take. Or the expected time to the end, and where in the process you are. It just makes sense. Programs like rsync which lack such progress indicators should be shot[1]. A progress bar should have a bar. The bar should start at the left, increase during the process, and get to the right. When it's got to the right, the operation is complete. Some sort of ETA might be nice. If this is an installer, the installer should quit. If there are things to do after the progress bar, the programmer is stupid and they should be included into the progress bar. And about ETAs: let's not be too accurate, because you know some foolish programmer will have an ETA that jumps from 2:01 to 2:13 and back again as it is overly accurate. This is silly. Mac OS X has vague ETAs, like "Under five minutes", "Under a minute". This is nice and friendly. I was installing a driver and utility disk for a digital camera the other day. The primary installer really installed lots of little installers which installed other things, most of which had a couple of progress bars. Multiple progress bars are stupid. Roll them into one. This installation process showed me 28 progress bars. 28! All I wanted to know was if it was almost over and how long it would take, not the details of every file of every package it was trying to install. Bad programmer, no cookie! Leon [1] So rsync has a progress bar for a file. So what? I'm transferring 200k small files, and it fails to do anything useful for that
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 15:36 on 11 Sep 2003 Subject: Perl > Yup. Of course, this is because those "two lines" use several thousand lines > of Perl modules, but that's by the by. I guess that it's on topic for the list to mention that I hate Perl. I hate the absurd syntax. Unless this do that if not something else. And the precedence rules make C's already tottery tower look simple. I hate the absurd claims that the absurd syntax is a good thing. There's more than one way to do it, but if you don't think like Larry Wall none of those ways match the way you're looking for. I hate the absurd quoting rules. Give me a reflective language and I can create the quoting rules I need, I don't need ten different variants on qw(er/ty/). Not to mention that a reflective language does a MUCH better job of giving you "more than one way to do it". I hate the absurd dependency maze I end up in every time I delve into CPAN, which usually ends up with my having to upgrade CPAN before I can build anything. I hate the way it encourages idiots who shouldn't be allowed within ten meters of anything sharper than Cobol to write things like Majordodo. And to release things in public I'd be embarassed to admit I'd written. Not that I'm suggesting that present company includes any such idiots, but damn, I hate Perl. And I'll take a couple of hundred lines of rules, much as I'd prefer to trim them down to a couple (and now I know there's an RFC to follow I don't hate this list software nearly as much as I did), over several thousand lines of such line noise.
From: Earle Martin Date: 22:49 on 10 Sep 2003 Subject: Software that expires when it doesn't have to I hate and loathe software that suddenly, when you run it one day, says "This version has expired! Download a newer version!" and promptly quits. No, you stupid turd of a programmer, I *know* it's out-of-date - what you've failed to realise is that _I don't care_. In fact, I'm using an out-of-date operating system right now, on out-of-date hardware. In this particular case, for a Mac Jabber client called TVJab, both of them were made before your cruddy little program even existed. So don't go telling me that your program is TOO OLD TO RUN, because compared to everything else I use happily it's still a mewling whelp, wriggling and shitting in its diapers. Please hold still whilst I jam this screwdriver into your eye socket. Thanks.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 16:05 on 10 Sep 2003 Subject: Mailing list software I hate spamware! Not because I use it, but because other people do, and it put random subjects like "Yahoo! Messenger" in the subject line and software like Mariaaaaaaaaaachi or whatever this thing is using can't be configured to present it as "[HATE] Yahoo! Messenger" so I can tell that this one is a worthwhile message and not spam. So I can't automatically reply and get my comment about "why didn't the scurvy beggars just use Zephyr" included in the Yahoo! Messenger thread.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 15:33 on 10 Sep 2003 Subject: GNU utils, and lack there of I hate systems that don't have a nice handy collections of GNU utils installed. Quite frankly why anyone would want to ship inferior alternatives is completely beyond me. Look, I'm not asking for world peace, cold fusion, or a working Perl 6 compiler, I just want to get a listing of my files in colour. It's not rocket science! Yes Damnit! I want my directory listings in colour. I want to be able to get a tree of my processes by typing 'ps -faux'. I want to get a tree of my filesystem by typing, 'tree'. How hard can this be? FreeBSD! You suck! You ship with crap versions of these utilities. Apple! You suck more for copying them! Yes, I know I shouldn't be using non-portable options. Bite me. I don't care, I just want it to work. Yes know I can install GNU versions on most systems with one command. But they're not installed by default are they? I'm lazy, and yes, I maintain that this is a virtue. Besides, it's my hate and I'll rant if I want to. GAH!
From: Simon Wistow Date: 09:59 on 09 Sep 2003 Subject: Yahoo! Messenger On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 11:31:08PM +0100, Mark Fowler said: > To have smileys on is the default behaviour on ymessenger, or at least it > was a couple of months ago when I was using it on linux. Now the annoying > thing is that this software used to corrupt itself so often (it would get > it into it's head that you wanted a font so small it was only two pixels > high) that the only way to cope is to delete the ~/.ymessenger directory > almost every time you used it. I hate Yahoo! Messenger more than you do. Because I'm forced to use it. Y! Messenger was, I'm led to belive, developed internally, to cope with the fact that at any given point a member of the team I'm working with may, in fact, be nowhere near me. Where nowhere ranges from a few hundred meters horizontally and 50 vertically to, well, at least 10 time zones, if not more. Everyone uses here. Yet, strangely, it's practically not supported. Something broken? File a bug and wait or patch it yourself. We have a couple of skunk work internal versions - I'm running 0.99.22 which doesn't crash quite as much. Although conference messages still bring it to a resounding crash. I hate many little things about it. For a start I hate the fact that it exists because I hate talking on it. I hate the fact that, on Unix, I use multiple desktops and this makes using messenger difficult. Either I don't have it pop up when someone messages me or I miss the fact that they've done it. But if I do have a pop up, and two people are messaging me when I'm also working then they can inadvertently get a stream of bitter invective that wasn't meant for them or a paste full of code. And if a messenger is on one desktop then it will only pop up there again. Unless I close the window. Which means I lose all the history (unlike the latest Windows versions apparently) and also means that occasionally I close *just* as someone messages me. So I have to ask them again. Grrr. Speaking of copy and pasting. Well, that just doesn't work. Although occasionally it does. URLs are highlighted but to activate them I have to double click on them. Which then opens two browser windows. And it's easy to forget that you've set yyour status to away. And when people put URLs in *their* status messages ... well, I'm buggered because I can't copy it (not a selectable text area plus, well, copying doesn't work) and I can't click on it. And adding someone someone else in ... the 'group to add them to' part of the form is default highlighted. So if I've copied an ID from an email or somethingthen I have to deselect it, go back to the original desktop, copy it again and go back to messenger. *sigh*
From: Chris Nandor Date: 17:13 on 08 Sep 2003 Subject: Smileys Programs that automatically convert your text into smiley graphics are pretty silly, I think we can all agree. But if you can turn them off, then at least they are not especially hate-worthy. But in iChat, you CANNOT TURN THEM OFF. Now, there's a hack that supposedly removes them, but that's not the point. Smileys not only look stupid to many people, they actually get in the way when I am typing normal text, like: It has three colors (RGB) That becomes: It has three colors (RG<smiley face with glasses> And there is no way to turn it off. I can think of only one reason to not turn it off: because the person you're communicating with might have them on, so you should see what they see. But if that's the case, then I should see a smiley BEFORE I hit return. And anyway, couldn't it send some magic over the AIM link saying "Don't use smileys here"?
From: Simon Wistow Date: 16:40 on 08 Sep 2003 Subject: mac schmack This will be another unfocused hate. More like a seething cloud of hate rather than a rock hard fireball. I had a long weekend in which I shouted a fair bit at my laptop. This is the result. The general recipient of this hate is my Mac. I'm goign to steer clear of the hardware in general but they're so intertwined, the hardware and the OS and all the software, that some bitterness may leak over. Now most hates that I've seen are about Mac OS X. And if there was a sister list, hates-hardware, then I imagine that there would be plenty of anti-iBook hates. Actually, know I don't. The number of people I know who've had horrific problems with their iBooks yet remain staunchly Apple apologist, is incredible. My Vaio didn't have this many problems and I treated that like shit. But I hate my Vaio too. But this is not hates-hardware. I digress. So, where were we? Oh yes. My Mac. I aquired it when a company I was working for went bust. It's an old G3 powerbook. A Lombard I think. It's fairly slow. It has problems running QT movies and won't run MacOS X. Still, I quite liked it. It has all the right ports and stuff. It looks nice. But it runs MacOS 9. Now, the interface to MacOS 9 is nice and I have to admit that I do like that fact that, in general, stuff just works. But I loathe the fact that it's not pre-emptively multitasking. And has no memory protection. I know that Apple did have a project to try and fix this (Copland?), and eventually went with the beast known as Mac OS X, but still. My fucking ST had pre-emptive multitasking back in 1990 or so. I've heard people say that they don't notice. Those people are either lying, stupid or kidding themselves. Networking seems to be particularly braindead. True the point and drool interface works aslong as it's working but when it doesn't fixing things seems to be a pray and reboot situation. And what's with not having a button to refresh or apply the current settings. It means that if I want to update my DHCP or experient with settings then I have to go into network setting, select another network interface, hit ok (which closes the dialogue) then go into the network setting again and turn it back to the interface that I want. Gah. And if I close the lid then it drops all my network connections. Instantaneously. Grrr. And takes a fricking age to wake up again when I open it again. If I then fire up Internet Explorer and try and go to a page then ineveitably my machine locks up. Hard. Dead. If I wait a bit before I do anything, or fire up another app (such as MacSSH) before I fire up IE then it seems to work. But if I forget then there's nothing I can do but reboot. Because there's no 'kill process'. Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh. And how do I reboot? Ctrl-Alt-Delete? Nah. Hit the pwoer button. Umm, no. Apple+power button. Sometimes. But generally I just have to pop the battery and pull out the power cord. Nice. Of course half the time the Mac then does the blinking question mark thing until I leave it for half an hour and try again. KILL! KILL! KILL! So I finally reboot. And I'm using IE and most stuff looks ok in it and network lookups aren't *too* slow as long as I'm not trying to do anything else at the same time of course. And suddenly I get a "Cannot load Flash plugin. Error 2 of 5. Out of Memory". On every page. Until I quit IE and load the whole thing again. RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE! So finally I manage to download say, a QT trailer. And I try and run it. And it runs like a pig. So I download the smaller, postage stamp sized one and drag that onto Quicktime. Which obediently does nothing. I try again. Nada. Zip. I have to open up the file browser and navigate to it. *Sigh*
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 15:40 on 08 Sep 2003 Subject: Keyboard remapping ... or the lack thereof. The poor state of the art in keyboard remapping in most software, now that's a disgrace. In 1983, just about any terminal in the world had at least 8 programmable function keys that could store any string you wanted, and you could load them from an application or just let them use the default. I had wrappers around programs that loaded the keyboard mapping I wanted for that program (not 'what that program wanted', what *I* wanted), ran it, and set them back. In 2003, neither the Macintosh nor Windows, the supposedly friendliest operating systems you can get, give me anything like that functionality. When you can remap keys, it's through arcane registry hacks or obscure XML files, or through little applets that just do one thing, conflict with each other, and half the time expect you to pay $10.00 to get rid of a nag screen. It's the "ugly and hostile" X Window System that does the best job here. Ironic.
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi