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[ Page 8 of 76 ]
From: Jonathan Katz Date: 15:51 on 10 Dec 2007 Subject: HR/Employment Software HATE I'm currently looking for work :( I've submitted my resume to many places. Many of them use brassring.com or taleo.com which have their own ideas on how to handle your resumes. Other places, like EDS have their own software for parsing resumes. Even the State of Indiana uses some bastardized module in Peoplesoft that they have yet to properly configure, as I'm able to request my salary in any of the 199 available currency denominations. First, some of the sites have a 100k limit on the resume you can upload. I'm a relatively senior guy with a loaded 2-page resume which comes out to 120+k in Word or OpenOffice. I got around this by converting it to PDF and having a 98k resume. Then there is the parsing. I keep my resume simple. No real boxes or funky formatting. Just dates, companies, and descriptions. No funky "skills listing" or multiple-paragraph objective shit. Their auto- parsers will skip entire sections, replace dates as the names of former companies and other such nonsense. If I wasn't seriously needing a paycheck I'd leave the resumes that butchered as an example of how horrid their systems are. Instead I wind up having to delete anything that they auto-parsed and commit several cut-n-paste exercises to convey the important parts of my resume to these employers. Likely I won't wind up with any callbacks because some HR dweeb with an IQ of 2 won't realize that a CISSP isn't a job function but a separate certification that is listed under the certification section of the resume. -Jon
From: Mike Beattie Date: 20:14 on 05 Dec 2007 Subject: Windows, .NET, and god knows what else So, I have to do some coding in VB.NET at work, updating an in-house management tool for Exchange accounts - we're upgrading to 2007 over the next 4-6 months, and it uses PowerShell (POWER! SHELL!), not CDO. So, anyway, I have a nice little VM environment set up under Parallels on my MacBook. Three Server 2003 systems, AD, Ex2k3, Ex2k7, and an XP client with Visual Studio and all the trimmings. Things were going swimmingly, until yesterday when I installed the latest .NET 2.0 service pack. OH GOD THE PAIN. Now each bloody system that has anything even vaguely related to .NET installed has slowed to a crawl. That's the AD server (cos it has SQL server 2005 (don't ask), with it's VS-like management interface), and the XP client. Finally worked out that it's bloody .NET with it's optimisation service (what?!?), so stopped that, and eventually the AD server calmed down, but for the effing life of me I can't get the XP client to chill the fsck out and actually run with any degree of stability. Simply running tasklist in a cmd.exe window will slow to a crawl. HATE. Did I mention that I need to have 99% of this work completed by CoB tomorrow? and that I'm only about 50% done? HATE HATE HATE
From: sabrina downard Date: 14:03 on 04 Dec 2007 Subject: Banking web sites The entire fucking Internet had just better be grateful I'm practical enough to not limit myself to doing business only with people who can design functional web user interfaces, because I'd be shit out of luck finding one. Dear Citibank: You can stuff your criminally obtuse payment-account-addition interface in your ears. And top it off with your ridiculous "feedback can only be 20 lines (of unspecified length, natch)" comments form. I'll tell you what, I'll keep my feedback to 20 lines or less if you make the explanatory text on your dialogues not LIE about required formatting. Dear Chase: And as for you people, you can just take that ridiculous "You're logging on from a new computer! OMG!" authorization code transfer nonsense and shove it where the sun don't shine. I am in fact NOT signing on from a new computer, I'm signing on from one of the two computers I always use, on its same IP it always uses, and your goddamn inability to handle cookies is not my problem. God, imagine the pain if I had multiple machines changing NAT addresses all the time behind my firewall at home. It's amazing it ever works for anyone at all. I want goddamn SecurID tokens for my banks just to eliminate this bullshit. I hear tell other people get them, and I'm bitterly, bitterly jealous. hatefully, --s.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 22:22 on 28 Nov 2007 Subject: Why does one bad drive block the whole operating system? My DVD drive is dying, this much is clear. Put a DVD in and it's like Homer Simpson in a hospital bed. Disk spins up, disk spins down. Disk spins up, disk spins down. After a few dozen cycles of this it will either be spat out or finally mount. Mechanical parts, they wear out. What are you gonna do? The trouble comes when an already mounted DVD spins down to save power, and then tries to spin up again. The up/down/up/down cycle can go on for ten minutes with the OS refusing to stop or eject the disk. That's hateful in and of itself, but like I said, the DVD drive is dying and I can accept that. What I can't accept is that it brings the whole operating system down with it. One by one, each application freezes with the dreaded OS X beachball spinning. Spinning into oblivion. Applications that have no business with the DVD drive. Firefox, Thunderbird... even the Terminal! Everything goes unresponsive while the computer plays Homer with the DVD drive. And this isn't limited to OS X or even DVD drives. I remember a poorly connected NFS mount would bring Unixen to a screeching halt. Or a troubled hard drive would freeze any shell which touched it, locked and unable to be killed even by root. Why, in 2007, is the most unreliable part of my computer cross wired with the most critical part?
From: Earle Martin Date: 19:20 on 20 Nov 2007 Subject: Those damn uppity computers! http://www.slowwave.com/index.php?date=07-11-17
From: Michael G Schwern
Date: 22:37 on 19 Nov 2007
Subject: Hate saves the day! (was: Don't fancify my man pages!)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: nroff does not honor TYPESETTER
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:40:13 +0100 (CET)
From: Werner LEMBERG <wl@xxx.xxx>
To: schwern@xxxxx.xxx
CC: bug-groff@xxx.xxx
References: <4740ECC9.9030800@xxxxx.xxx>
> nroff does not honor the TYPESETTER environment variable documented
> in the "Troff User's Manual" page 31.
`TYPESETTER' is implementation specific. The corresponding
environment variable for groff is `GROFF_TYPESETTER'.
> SUGGESTED FIX [optional]:
> If the TYPESETTER environment variable is set, use it rather than
> guess based on the locale.
I implemented that for GROFF_TYPESETTER. Please test the CVS.
> Additionally, I wouldn't be upset if groff stopped mapping ASCII
> input characters into Unicode.
This has been already discussed, and I'll fix that somehow for man
pages (but not in general).
Thanks
Werner
From: David King Date: 21:34 on 19 Nov 2007 Subject: How NOT to write a shared library On-topic from <http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=612606>: I'm interested in audio, so I'm looking over the (frankly horrible) documentation for this new "Pulse Audio" thing, and I see this function in its shared lib: pa_xmalloc() Allocates the specified number of bytes, just like malloc() does. However, in case of OOM, terminate. First of all, why are so many programmers who write a Linux shared library offering a simple wrapper function around malloc? Is it too hard for an app to just call malloc? Is anyone so completely absent- minded that he can't remember malloc is used to allocate memory, so he needs an equivalent wrapper in every shared lib he uses? Second of all, in the case of "out of memory", it just terminates your app right then and there??? Oh great, The enduser spends an hour working on something, does some operation, and BANG! -- all his hard work goes down the drain because some shared library decides it wants to terminate the app. Absolutely ridiculous. And I see that other pulse audio functions call this pa_xmalloc too, so good luck getting around it. I can just see it now. Every programmer who uses pulse audio will need to add a feature to his app called "Auto-save before every Pulse Audio call because this may be your last chance to preserve your work". Yeah, that should really yield "low latency". Sorry, but anyone who puts a call to exit() in a shared library should simply be shot dead. That's really, really crummy, amateurish programming. In a shared lib, if something fails, the professional thing to do is return some error code/signal to the app, indicating that the function failed. Let the app decide what it wants to do. You don't terminate the app on your own. And anyone who makes such a shared library a part of his operating system should be shot dead, and then stabbed through the heart with a stake just to make sure he's really dead. God help us if this pulse audio thing is ever chosen to replace ALSA in the kernel. This will make Linux stability and reliability go to hell if you have operating system calls terminating apps at will.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 01:16 on 19 Nov 2007 Subject: Don't fancify my man pages! Lately I've been noticing that less has been subtly choking on perldoc pages. Lines might appear and disappear as I scrolled up and down. I figured it was a bug in less, but no. It is far more evil. Today I pasted some example code from "perldoc Attribute::Handlers" into a text file to write up a test based on it. The test was failing in mysterious ways. I finally figured out why. nroff (or rather groff) replaced all the ASCII single quotes in the file with fancy Unicode x2019 quotes. What?! Who thought this was a good idea?! Even if my CTYPE is set to UTF-8, NO! "Smart quote" stupidity should not leak into roff, the final bastion of the most Unixy of all Unix formatting tools! Ok, maybe this is some sort of OS X brain rot. Maybe the curvy corner, pointy-clicky heads somehow infected groff. But no! There it is, right in the pristine GNU roff source. $ grep 2019 groff-1.19.2/font/devutf8/R.proto ' 24 0 0x2019 WHY, GNU, WHY!?! To add insult to injury, the nroff TYPESETTER environment variable which can be used to override this madness isn't implemented in groff's nroff wrapper. Smart quotes in man pages. What's next? Turn ... into HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS? Turn all my math functions into DIVISION SLASH? Will the next version of groff include a clippy helper or maybe a little dog to help me? How about putting google ads at the bottom of my man pages, wouldn't that be nice.
From: H.Merijn Brand Date: 08:33 on 13 Nov 2007 Subject: libtool The header says it all If that is not enough, combine that with building open source projects that already gone wrong in choosing libtool to make *their* lives more easy and now try to build on AIX (a subject of a lot of hate on itself) in a mixed 32bit / 64bit environment and you're fucked completely. I hope libtool dies soon. Very soon. At least I understand why there is so little up-to-date open source software available for AIX. People give up. It takes away the fun.
From: Timothy Knox Date: 07:43 on 13 Nov 2007 Subject: Firefox updater hate Dear Firefox updater, Thank you so much for keeping my copy of Firefox, and my Firefox extensions, up to date. I really appreciate that, truly I do. But let me clue you in on how GUIs work in the 21st century. Nowadays, when an application highlights a button as a default, hitting return is normally interpreted as though the user had pressed that button. I can understand your confusion, after all, it's only been standard behaviour for at least the last twenty years or so, so maybe you haven't quite caught up yet. So consider this just a little FYI: When I hit the triply-accursed enter key, and you have a fscking button highlighted, I want you to act as though I had personally moved the mouse over the d*mned button and mother-fscking clicked it! AAAAAARRRGGH! You filth-encrusted slimy turd! May you suffer a terminal case of licky-end, or something even more horrific!
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi