ObfusCo > The List > misc

Miscellaneous Blog

Yes, most of this has to do with computers. I need to get outside more. Some of them are things where I wonder, "did the creator ever actually use this thing? Because it is really clear to me, given the way I use the thing, that it's crap!" Some of the other items are just me thinking out loud.

Yes, a lot of the stuff here is no longer valid. It was at the time, though, so there.

• Here's the Mac stuff (e.g. if you came from AppleBlunders.com).
• 1295) How can you be on version 7.16.4 of a program and have the man page say "curl [options] [URL...]" but have the program only actually understand "curl [URL...] [options]" and otherwise give cryptic unhelpful error messages? How? I guess by being a freaking genius. Does nobody else notice this kind of thing? Am I the only one? (Like, why was it behaving that busted way on the B&W G3 (hacked to be a G4) running 10.4, but just now it worked as documented on this G3 iBook? Are aliens making my life random heck?)
• 1294) Yes, I do hate all those sites where there's a menu bar, and the bar automatically pops-down the menus whenever the mouse crosses over it. This isn't just blatently hateful on any machine, it is also really insulting on lower-end machines which struggle with the events and redrawing etc.
• 1293) All I'm saying is that if I ever get to make the user interface for burning CDs/DVDs, it isn't going to completely suck like all UIs for that task I have ever seen - be it Nero, WinXP or OS X. Give. Me. Strength.
• 1292) It figures that the advent of pop-up blockers in web browsers could do one of two things, and the more pathetic of the two is what happens. To wit: web sites could either not have things open in new windows - because generally that is a lame idea in the first place (not always, but I think quite often); or they could start blaming the user and put messages on their pages telling you to disable your pop-up blocker. Nice.
• 1291) I love how OS zealots don't know how to take a picture.
• 1290) A couple of things I'm really enjoying about all those computer-related web sites: One, the ones with forums where you apparently can't easily format the source code you are posting. Two, the ones that completely lack an "about" or "getting started" link on their front page. Yeah, baby.
• 1289) Dunno whose silly fault this is: I do a search on Google using a query like "foo OR bar" which I think is how to do logical or's. Then when I go to a particular page that is a hit, it shows not only "foo" and "bar" hilighted (you know, some sites do that when they are referred to from a Google result), it also hilights "or" everywhere.
• 1288) You know, I'd really like it if these lists didn't appear in browsers as illegible crap, because there is insufficient whitespace between entries. I guess in theory I could try to use some kind of hateful CSS to do the trick but it would probably be another dainty jaunt through "standards" hell, and I am too exhausted with everything technological to try. I did spend 5 minutes googling around to see if there was a simple - hah! - way to have whitespace between the entries (not between lines in a given entry) but didn't find anything great. I mean, do I really want to have to learn all of this, with all of the inevitable browser incompatibilities and suck of using fixed units? Uh, no, not really. (If this were a commercial site making some money, then sure. I'm too cheap otherwise.)
• 1287) I love how in various web browsers (it just happened in Camino) I'll be clicking on something in a slow, half-loaded web page to try to skip loading the whole thing, and the browser ignores my click and keeps slowly loading the stupid page I don't actually care about any more... and I press the Esc key and it still keeps loading... rather than actually listening to me and, you know, doing what I'm telling it to do. That's usability, baby!
• 1286) People who use really bright blue LEDs, presumably just because they can, are jerks. As if I really want the new electronic item I got to be blinding me all the time? Shove usability...
• 1285) I love it when Google says did you mean? ... and then clicking on that gives zero results [as of 20070225]. Guess all them thar PhD's can't figure out how to check the results of that ahead of time?
• 1284) Fundamentally, pretty much all desktop GUIs are horribly broken because although everybody claims multitasking is a key advantage of modern systems, the GUIs invariably penalize you if you actually try to multitask: windows will appear on top of things you are trying to do, or already-existing ones will steal focus (always good for a laugh when you are trying to enter sensitive data like passwords), or will place dialog boxes such that you don't see them and can't discover them, or applications will simply lock up resources so other things you are trying to do only result in cryptic error messages... all in all it is clearly a pile of festering feces, this oh-so-supposedly-productive environment people have marketed.
• 1283) Some people claim that Linux is making great strides, what with things like the Synaptic package manager. These people are dumb-asses and you should not believe them. To wit: If you are tring to add a repository, and Alt-Tab to another application (say, your web browser so you can copy the text for the new repository definition to then use in Synaptic) and then Alt-Tab back, the dialog box where you were to enter the string is gone and Synaptic is completely locked up. Note that this bug has existed in several releases of Ubuntu already. Obviously the Linux world has taken to heard our sub-motto here at Obfusco.
• 1282) I have seen the modern web, and it apparently consists of fixed width regions that don't work for me because I do not have my browser maximized. This is the cutting-edge of web design and usability?!
• 1281) How many software tools freak out if you ^C them in the middle or running? Subversion comes to mind, among others. So lame!
• 1280) On my iBook, the "fn" stuff works fine under OS X. However, under Ubuntu the top row of keys with pairings like {f1, lcd dimmer}, {f2, lcd brigher} etc. is backwards; I have to hold down the "fn" modifier in exactly the opposite fashion to get the same results. I dunno what on earth is going on there.
• 1279) I just wish everybody could agree on a package system. I hate Cygwin's. It would be much better if they used RPM.
• 1278) TortoiseSVN is medicore. It has some annoyances. Overall, I find it just kinda hateful. I mean, you should only right-click on something when you are going to directly work on it. Being forced to use the riht-click to get into the TortoiseCVS options is just insane.
• 1277) A mish-mash of SVN stupidity: If you do rename, you have to check it in right away. You can't make changes to that file and check them in at the same time. This means 90% of the time you are forced to make a revision that will break the build. Also, if you try to undo a rename with revert, it leaves the "new" file still around, just not under revision control. That is a nice way to screw up your local build and confuse the heck outta you. Also, the fact that you have to update after commit to see your own changes in the logs still completely kills me. Oh, and the whole .svn directory thing is incredibly fragile and just a brain-dead design. These things are as if they SVN developers were actively trying to prevent people from getting work done.
• 1276) Here's an idea. If your site requires javascript then how about telling the user that? You know, rather than having them edit a page only to find out the "save" button doesn't bloody work?
• 1275) Freaking genius: Sourceforge has mirrors to lighten the load, but it would appear they all go through some central DNS or something because none of them are responding to me right now - and I can see other sites just fine. Yay!
• 1274) To paraphrase the Dead Milkmen: If your system's string compare doesn't support regexps, then your system's string compare could use some fixin'. (Take 'make', for example.)
• 1273) All I'm saying is, how much time is lost in dealing with incompatible technologies? Even something as simple as a slightly out-of-date utility can screw you pretty hard.
• 1272) It is a law of the technology world that all build systems suck (even the ones that somebody claims don't). But I see some 1271) SVN is killing me, as usual. I want to tell it to not check out a certain sub-directory. It appears that one would use the svn:ignore property to accomplish that, but it also appears that the property will be committed to the repository! That screws me because I really only want the ignore to be a local thing. Gah.
• 1270) A real problem with technology is lock-in. Consider trying to move a large project that uses 'make' towards using just about any other build system (ant, scons, rake, whatever).
• 1269) Maybe it is just a Windows thing, but it kills me how often some hateful tool-tip appears on the screen and won't go away until some hatefully long timeout happens, or something. Did I mention the hate?
• 1268) I've probably said this before (too lazy to find out), but you'd think by now we'd have file systems with pluggable architecture or services that would let things like 'make' run faster by knowing exactly what has changed without having to scan the world every time. (Of course, it would also require that 'make' try to make compiled versions of the makefiles themselves - I hazard to guess that is also what is slow about using make for big projects.)
• 1267) Some things about Subversion that make me think its developers haven't actually ever used it, at least on a fast-moving project: First, I think "svn update" should not update me beyond the revision I currently am sync'd with; getting updated to tip-of-tree should require either a flag, or a different commant. Second, I think it should all be set up pretty automatically to let me have a local repository so I can make local micro-checkins (alternatives are to use OpenVMS with automatic file revisions, or svk, I guess).
• 1266) Yet another clear indictment of technology and so-called progress: watch developers when something doesn't work, going through the machinations of "Is it an environment variable? Is it a missing library? Is it version incompatibility? Is it just bad hair day?"
• 1265) In some parallel universe, an example of how the user rules is that you can tell your browser where you want the web site-supplied search field to appear on the page so that every site you go to has the field in the same place so you aren't hunting for it.
• 1264) The rub of all the dual-core machines is that the disk can't handle all the stuff making demands of it.
• 1263) I still pretty much hate all wikis; they are all shining examples of usability turds. A nice example from moinmoin: it says to enter the same password twice "Only when changing passwords", but right now I'm trying to create myself an account, so I only entered the password once. Of course it gave me an error saying the two passwords didn't match. So I entered the same password twice and, sure enough, it said "User account created!" (I also love the way people feel the need to make things so exciting with exclamation marks. Maybe they are themselves surprised that it actually worked?)
• 1262) Those who do not learn from normalization are doomed to repeat it after much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
• 1261) A horribly dry subject in many ways, to me, but here are some possibly useful notes on data modelling nevertheless.
• 1260) I probably have to agree, having used MySQL at work.
• 1259) My own story along these lines is that I once wrote a comment "be nice to handle hex", by which I meant, using lingua pittsburgh, that "it would be nice if this code could handle hex as well as decimal." Sufficeth to say, the other folks who came to read the comment didn't know WTF it meant.
• 1258) I don't grok it yet, but jmockit sounds like it might be useful. Some day.
• 1257) Some dharma transmission from Test Driven Development.
• 1256) An argument in favour of refactoring better than designing.
• 1255) Here's another example of why I hate people. I want to read the main text body, right? I don't want my mouse cursor in the way, right? I can put it on the left side of the page and use the mouse wheel to scroll, right? Wrong, because they use frames in a hateful hateful hateful fashion. Did I mention the hate? (Still, there actually is interesting content - of a geek nature - on the site.)
• 1254) All I'm saying is, word.
• 1253) Some research on exactly what factors kill software projects.
• 1252) Wow, did CORBA suck, or what?
• 1251) Might as well know how your soon-to-be government mandated implant works.
• 1250) When I was a kid, we walked uphill - both ways! - through snow for school, and 'realtime' actually meant something.
• 1249) Food for thought on phishing, and how to design systems to curtail it.
• 1248) "There was no isolation and, as a result, no clear ownership... strict service orientation is an excellent technique to achieve isolation."
• 1247) Nice to see the HCI community doing their damndest to sell out!
• 1246) Here I am in mid 2006 and I thought that Linux had gotten to the point where setting up a machine was a no-brainer. Well, turns out I know more about setting up a machine than your average user. "Should I set up a boot-loader password?" "What network settings should I choose?" "Do I want KDE or Gnome?" Etc. Linux desktop distros are fundamentally a huge nightmare of hateful configuration suckage. I mean, I am sure they could have just tried DHCP by default first and only if that failed gone on to ask the user networking questions, but, no. Screw usability! We're Linux! You'd think we've never heard of OS X!
• 1245) Maybe I'm just a caveman, but all this tagging pseudo-science babble sounds like somebody is just saying, "Allow more than one category per item. Oh, and let folks create categories." Doesn't seem like super rocket-science, so I'm not sure sure why so many words and pictures need to be dedicated to the issue. Having said that, sometimes the best ideas are the most simple, and/or get a new breath of life via new a new medium.
• 1244) It is all about usability, stupid.
• 1243) In typical Sun fashion, they have lots of useful information but in a relatively useless and certainly archaic form. This kind of knowledge should all be built into software and hardware that helps you set things up, rather than hidden among a bazillion web pages. (Seems typical of Sun's desire to give system administrators lots of job security.)
• 1242) Maybe I missed it, but it drives me nuts that the way I want to see the data is not supported. To wit: I want to see things by the status category, not by the manufacturer. Duh!
• 1241) MS Horoscope: Tuesday, serial numbers 0x900 to 0xA00 - Bad day for text processing.
• 1241) A peek at logic and business (oxymoronic?).
• 1240) Virtualization of computers is nice and all, but some companies just don't get it when it comes to usability. I know, it might actually be something of a hard problem to do magically such that the user wouldn't have to suffer through this configuration crap, but it seems obvious that asking a user to deal with this kind of thing is clearly advertising what is wrong with virtualization, rather than enabling people to really make use of it all.
• 1239) Once again, Firefox impresses me with uttery broken UI: note the size of the vertical scroll bar, etc. Making the window smaller horizontally causes the scroll bar to completely disappear!
• 1238) More evidence that your average person doesn't know usability at all, and in fact apparently thinks that neat features are great, even when it is immediately obvious to anybody else watching the user that they have painted themselves into usability hell: any kind of menu, like the Mac OS X Dock or the Windows XP Task Bar, which the user has configured to "auto hide".
• 1237) I guess it is close enough for government work: note the first article on the right side of the page.
• 1236) Having been cracked/hacked a few times myself: don't forget that all your security stuff is itself buggy code.
• 1235) Some more fun things about Gmail: I "select all unread" then "mark as read" and nothing really seems to change. Turns out they get unbolded, but I pay more attention to the background color and the yellow hilight didn't go away, so to me it looked like there was no real feedback. (I was expecting the checkboxes to get cleared and to see the backgrounds that were previously white, now yellow, go to being light blue.) Often it says "Inbox (1)" and yet there is nothing shown as new in my Inbox; I have to manually refresh to see the new item. (Also? I still hate the Archive stupidness.)
• 1234) Gosh, if you are going to write about rootkits [pdf], how about not glossing over the fact that by using the compiler on your machine you could be getting a resulting binary that has a trojan in it?
• 1233) What are the Right Abstractions when it comes to technology?
• 1232) I'm impressed that Ubuntu tells me I have to update linux-image, but when I tell Ubuntu to go ahead and update it I get "404 not found" from the update server!
• 1231) I hate all wikis because they make me learn a new markup language, and they all differ. Why can't I just bloody well use regular HTML? That's what it was bloody invented for, ya know?! Anyway, if you are going to invent a new markup language, how about you take a second to actually come up with something useful? A particular example: wikispaces uses something like [[url|text]] when I think it makes a lot more sense from the perspective of usability to have it be [[text|url]], since the idea is encoded by the text, not the URL. (Of course, [[url|text]] is more like HTML, so there is this nasty bitchy wiki syntax dichotomy where it wants to free itself from HTML, yet still bows to it.)
• 1230) Learn the inside scoop on eBay selling.
• 1229) It kills me when somebody forces text width. It also kills me that browsers don't give me an easy way to turn off whatever width restrictions the page has. So I end up being able to make the font larger, but since the margins are fixed it means I get fewer words on each line. Blah.
• 1228) Some intersting memoirs of Dijkstra. Lots of nice quotes, including, "In those years we learned that the most effective way of avoiding unmastered complexity is not to introduce that complexity in the first place. And when we focussed on that laudable goal we learned to exploit and appreciate the power of well-designed calculi."
• 1227) How to make really fault tolerant systems.
• 1226) From the company that supposedly knows how to do search, we get Gmail where I get no hits when I search for 'blue' even though there's email in my archive containing a url where the domain name starts with 'blue'. That's usability for ya!
• 1225) It seems obvious to me, but obviously it is not obvious to the people making the stupid things: digital speedometers all suck, from what I've seen. The basic problem, the problem that kicks me in the head every time I look at these things, the problem that you'd think would be obvious to anybody, is that their update rate sucks poo. They sample and update way too slowly so when you are speeding up or slowing down, you get a jarring series of stop-frame animation sequences of numbers counting, and counting a series of numbers that makes no human sense - you don't see 25 20 15 10 5, you see 26 23 21 19 14 7 3 or whatever, and the next time you slow down you will see a different set of values. The benefit of old-school dials is that you can quite cearly see the acceleration happening. With digital readouts that aspect of usability and relaying of information to the observer is utterly lost. It drives me bonkers.
• 1224) Things have been so bad for so long that I no longer know if I'm in the "it is painful" or "it is funny" state that eternally loop between one another. When somebody thinks this is an "even prettier report" and seriously means it, I'm liable to wish I could snap my fingers and make all technology disappear. I mean right down to making sure nobody can paint anything on cave walls.
• 1223) Sun hardware is supposed to be the bee's knees when it comes to reliability and stuff. Well, I'm here to say that my limited experience with trying to install Solaris on a V240 makes me say that I'd much, much, much rather have been trying to install something on a PC clone. We have Sun hard drives in the machine, but we are getting the dreadded and seemingly un-resolved "Trap 3e" message whenever we power it on. Good luck finding any concise, accurate, and working explanation of what the problem is or how to fix it. No docs I've come across can even agree on what the "single user" flag is for booting off of the cdrom. OpenBoot might have all sorts of features, but it is inscrutible and undocumented. Also, the machine apparently failed to see the VGA card at all, whatever. If I had some "crappy" (and probably a lot less expensive) Dell, I would have been able to just hit the bloody Del key and get something on the VGA monitor no problem.
• 1222) Here's another reason I hate Amazon: pretty much whatever you search for via Google, an ad comes up saying, "XYZ Blowout Sale. Up to 50% off XYZ! Free Shipping." Now, when XYZ happens to be Tatung sparc hardware, I suspect they don't have jack in stock, in reality. Just freaking lame buckshot hateful advertising spam bull crap. Blah!
• 1221) It is to laugh. Or, it is to cry. Or, more likely, it is to give me a heart attack. We sent Sybase lots of money so we could use their software. They give you access to a web site, and that is where you can download the relevant programs. The first thing that struck me as suckful about the site is that when you get to the log-in page there is a checkbox labelled "Remember my password until I logout". First, that should be "log out" or "log-out", as far as I'm concerned. Second, that sentence makes like no sense to me. It could mean just about anything. (I suspect it has to do with how the web sucks buttocks when it comes to "logging in" to web apps.) After I get through that, I find that I have to software available to download. So I send them email - and hear nothing back for a day. So I call them, and the person on the other end of the line says (paraphrased), "I see your entitlements have been deleted. I cannot tell how or why. I will request that you get re-entitled." He doesn't apologize for the inconvenience. He doesn't tell me how long it will take to be, or how I will know if I did or did not get, "re-entitled". Bloody typical, and enough to make me go shooting.
• 1220) It still blows my mind that people can't make decent e-commerce sites. Here's a clue: let me click on the bloody images, not only the text! (The kicker is that they do support that on other pages of their site.)
• 1219) "Programming is all about abstraction, and the abstraction here is the remote procedure call. I want to be able to write some kind of simple function call, and get some information and maybe produce some kind of side effect on the remote computer. If the underlying mechanism happens to ship data back and forth using XML, or uses an XML-RPC, SOAP, or JSON setup to make the call, that's fine -- but I'm solving a real problem here and I don't want to have to spend my time figuring that stuff out, or even needing to think about it." Right on, brother!
• 1218) It is funny that we still don't know how to do version control. It is also interesting to note that it is good to think about the theory underlying whatever you are trying to make.
• 1217) The font is awful, but the ideas behind Responsibility-Driven Design are interesting. Supposedly, there's even some beer behind it. Just don't drink too much of the Kool-Aid.
• 1216) Personally, I think it is pretty clear that the entire computer industry is insane, and out to make sure things break as easily as possible. The only evidence I need is the fact that only the VMS file system would automatically keep backups of files.
• 1215) I like Tufte, but I'm willing to believe that just because you are good at one thing, you aren't automatically great at another. Still, there's time for him to iterate.
• 1214) Hey, I have an idea! How about we make a web site where the home page has a "Home" link on it that just keeps taking you right back to the same content (although the URL sorta changes), and since this is about a physical event at a physical place, let us make sure to not have any map or anything readily available on the site to let people know where the heck it all is! Yeah! (Oh, be sure to do some graphic design work.)
• 1213) When you pick a company name, factor into the decision making process how easy or hard it will be for people to enter it into their cell phones with the crappy UI we all get for entering text.
• 1212) It kills me that people still use Mailman - it is such a complete and utter turd! This is the best the OSS/GNU world has to offer? The docs suck. The UI sucks. Everything sucks. What especially sucks is that the folks who wrote it have no idea it sucks: "Note though, that Mailman's web interface is much more sophisticated because you can do nearly all the list configuration through the web." Uh, in a word, no. They have obviously no freaking clue about usability testing. I mean, even the basic layout of the UI is complete crap, let alone the actual functionality, which also happens to suck. A concrete example of the system being suckful is that one of our lists is all <expletive>'d up and we don't know how or why, but it is bad news. Mailman structure and UI makes it all pretty opaque what actually will happen with even simple things like the reply-to header. They're taking the simple and the complicated things and making sure that they all end up being complicated. So, anyway, I was going to make a new test list with which to experiment and make sure it is working exactly how we want, and then move the subscriber list from the old broken list to the new one. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a way in the UI to export the list of all the folks on the list. Do I have to use some arcane command line program to dump whatever arcane database format Mailman uses? Why should I have to even learn about any of this? Shouldn't the UI have appropriate features so I wouldn't have to drop to the command line? Oh, and shouldn't the documentation on Mailman perhaps not actually suck? Like, where's the bloody man page to get me started? There's a bunch of disparate, bloated, documentation (with no indecies) to wade through to try to figure out how to get Mailman to stop sucking, and it is all just a horrible user experience to me. The docs don't appear to talk about how to use the command line program, so if the operation you need doesn't exist at the Web UI level I guess you (in this case that means "me") are just plain screwed? (Ah, turns out you have to read the "Site Admin" docs for that stuff.) I mean, even the stupid naming of the documentation is inconsistent; in one place, one of the docs is call the "User" doc, but when you actually get to it, it is titled the "List Member" doc. Or, you click on the link to the "List Manager" docs, and in fact you enter a whole new world that is an entire set of "Mailman" documentation which presents to you the options you were just wading through of "User" vs. "List Manager" vs. "List Server" docs. Oh, and there's a note that it is only for 2.0 and is missing some of the commands and features that are in 2.1. Then there are other docs which purport to also tell you about being a "List Admin" but I have no idea how that compares to the other "List Manager" docs (note the naming problems again), and it says these other docs are "not yet complete" even though they are two years old. Also? They seem to like to like to end their sentences with prepositions. Documentation is the Vietnam of software products (but please note that the Vietnamese don't call it the Vietnam War, they call it the American war).
• 1211) Unix supposedly lets you automate things, and also slap components together to make a larger system. That is nice and all, but the actual implementation is a freaking nightmare. Example: cron doesn't have an undo if you do "crontab -r" by mistake. Example: maybe your script sends email to some account for status, or perhaps even to signal state to another process. If I then go to check on that email manually and end up having "Saved 1 message in mbox" happen because I read one of the status emails, I have no idea what the ramifications of that are for the automated bits. Example: The indirection that people end up causing with cron entries that call Makefiles that call Perl scripts is just hell. You end up having to resort to "sudo find / -type f" piped to "xargs grep UpdateStuff.pl" type action to find out what the heck is actually going on.
• 1210) Could cron be any more the poo of unusability? So lame!
• 1209) From a usability perspective, it bugs me to see confusing acronyms: confusing in that the acronym differs by a single letter out of three, whereas the expanded form differs by two words out of three. That just strikes me as anti-mnemonic.
• 1208) More Araxis suckage: when you have long file names, it shows you the front of the strings when personally I would rather it show the ends of them. Blah! Blah, I say!
• 1207) Araxis is making me sad. The little widgets for copying text blocks between the two files are in the wrong place. They should all be in the middle gutter when you have two files being compared, but they currently have the right-hand widgets misplaced as far as my usability is concerned: I only recently noticed the ones off to the side so for quite a while I was frustrated that Araxis was apparently only going to let me merge from the left-hand file to the right one!
• 1206) All computer-related technology sucks. Especially software. JRun is a nice example of overkill - the documentation is from hell because it talks about all the different fancy-pants things you can do, and completely lacks simple, small, straight-forward recipies to get basic stuff working. Fortunately, Google's cache turned up this useful, succinct, documentation. (Possibly useful Macromedia docs: Admin Intro and Packaging Web Apps, because they describe (a little) the directory and file structure.)
• 1205) Big geek fun to be had at the Charles Babbage Institute.
• 1204) I'm using Araxis Merge v6.5 to do some directory comparisons. One thing that is killing me about their UI: say you have A/foo.xml and B/foo.xml, but then also B/bar/foo.xml. The user interface doesn't let you manually select A/foo.xml and B/bar/foo.xml to compare - it always wants to compare "parallel" files. The kicker is that if B/foo.xml doesn't exist, then it will merrily let you manually pick B/bar/foo.xml. Barf!
• 1203) I love how pretty much everything sucks when it comes to the web. Take, for example, the Berkeley Performing Arts site. First off, if you don't have JavaScript turned on it will redirect you to a page that doesn't exist. So that's impressive. Then, if you turn on JavaScript and go to the site you might have a hard time figuring out what to click on to just find a bloody calendar. I mean, what would be higher priority than the bloody calendar of bloody events? I'm looking for Manu Chao's upcoming concert. There's crappy arbitrary categorization of things on the left, with stuff like "music before 1850" with then some other random music sub-categories, none of which seem to me to be relevant for what I seek. I try the search and of course that doesn't work. At the top of the page it says "dance music theater" (on the page it looks like 3 different categories) so I try clicking on the music part, but it turns out that those aren't individual links, they are simply part of the masthead which takes me back to the hateful front page. I've heard the concert will be next month, so on the calendar I click the "Next Month" link, and am presented with... a month of no events! None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Thanks, folks, really, it's been real. Real hate.
• 1202) Fitts's law (it would be nice if other people could figure out how to get the possessive form correct) goes out the window when you have multiple monitors - the scroll bars at the edge of the screen used to be easy to hit, but now you find your mouse pointer flying way past them, and your blood presure goes way up as you try to target them.
• 1201) How's this for genius in user interface: I'm trying to use 7zip to open an LZH file, so I'm using the 7zip file explorer. Unfortunately, it keeps refreshing the screen, which means the scroll position & any selection I might have & even the path in the text field get reset like every second - because Firefox is still downloading stuff to that folder, so the file system contents is changing, so 7zip decides to keep polling every second and completley screw usability. I can't actually get enough time between refreshes to pick a bloody file!
• 1200) More Google rocket science when it comes to usability and bugs: I'm using Google Maps to look at downtown San Francisco. I'm on my laptop using WiFi. The map doesn't load so well, and I get chunks of the city that say "We are sorry, but we don't have maps at this zoom level for this region. Try zooming out for a broader look." Note that I'm not looking at the satellite view, I'm looking at the graphical map view. I think it would be pretty surprising if Google really truly did not have map data for downtown SF. So I reload the page and - here comes the multiple kicker - the parts which had that message get refreshed with actual map images, OK, but then parts of the map which were OK the first time around start to go away as the page is refreshing. In fact, I end up with more missing parts after the refresh! Complete insanity. (Massively distributed systems that don't give you the same answer twice - good luck really debugging that stuff, buddy!)
• 1199) I love how five minutes before a deadline I try to print an important PDF file from Acrobat on XP, and it comes out as complete gibberish. My co-worker prints it from his Mac, and it comes out just fine. Whatever.
• 1198) Some researchy thoughts [pdf] on software reuse through components.
• 1197) Just when I think there is nothing new under the sun, I start to see liquid paper products (you know, "white-out") which have a foam applicator tip, rather than the old bristly brush stuff. Freaking genius!
• 1196) It warms my heart that Gmail still provides prolific examples of really crappy frustrating UI that doesn't even remotely do what I want. Example: I want to delete a single piece of email that is part of a thread - oh, excuse me, "conversation" - (e.g. a bounce message) so I click on the Delete button, and I'm told that the entire conversation has been moved to the trash. Great. Thanks. Terrific.
• 1195) Remember: security, of any sort, is hard.
• 1194) Wow. You'd think that the world of Linux distros would be trying to avoid trouble with incompatible software over time. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be the case. Even remotely. I mean, even things like libstdc++ change drastically, leading to headaches when trying to build or install warez, man. If Microsoft did this you'd be hearing about it every day on /., but no so with Linux, hmm...
• 1193) It kills me that the Roku Soundbridge can't rewind or fast-forward music. So I'm looking at Slim Devices. A friend got one, and apparently it can do rewind and fast-forward, however it does it like a DVD player. I hate that UI. I just want it to ffwd at a constant rate while I am holding down the ffwd button, and to revert to playing as soon as I let go.
• 1192) I know that the answer a true geek will give you is, "well, you should just be using del.icio.us" but nevertheless, it would seem to me that all web browsers have utterly crappy hateful evil (if any) UI for managing bookmarks. Even just doing a simple sort is an utterly hateful experience in Firefox, and apparently can't be done at all in Safari?
• 1191) I hereby put this idea into the public domain on Tuesday June 6th 2006: Patent the business process of using spam email. Then, sue the daylights out of all spammers for infringing. Drive this towards two very nice results. First, one might collect a lot of money in damages from the spammers. Second, one might be able to shut down the entire spam industry.
• 1190) Here we are in the next millenium, and un*x software is still a complete and utter cluster <expletive> when it comes to just installing the bloody stuff.
• 1189) Nice how Google Video supposedly buffers, but invariably gets it wrong and I end up having to either watch judder-vision video (actually, the worst part is the choppy horrible audio), or I have to manually pause it and let the buffer fill up. Yeah, all those PhDs sure did a good job on the math to figure that one out! The kicker is that this part of Google is not even marked as beta, oy veh.
• 1188) Could Firefox suck more ass? I love how I'm watching a video and it puts up a fat dialog box over everything saying it has downloaded an update, and do I want to restart Firefox right this second? Gee, how about you guess the bloody answer?
• 1187) Ubuntu might be cool, but if your intent is to put out a new version every six months then I should think the upgrade process should be top on the list of features that need to "just work". Of course, things are never that happy. Really.
• 1186) Math may be, in fact, hard, but it is interesting nevertheless.
• 1185) The LOCKSS project looks neat in attempting to meet some lofty goals regarding information longevity.
• 1184) On design process patterns.
• 1183) It is kind of recursively funny to think about having to model bad math with math itself. Basically, handling all errors in a systematic and sane fashion is actually quite difficult.
• 1182) What you want in a software architecture plan. And, duh, how to actually plan before writing a vapid plan document.
• 1181) Every time I try to go and read about Java and object persistence, I feel immediately ill.
• 1180) Nice how I've mostly never seen the Source menu in Eclipse actually have any entries that I can use; they are always disabled. Sounds like some great usability all 'round. The kicker is that there are 4 entries in that menu, two of which also appear if I select code and right-click - and in that case they actually do work, even though the exact same commands are still disabled in the Source menu. "Ship it!"
• 1179) I go to run a Python program under Eclipse with Pydev. It runs, but I don't get any output. Instead, Eclipse says "Console: A console is not available." Uhm, great. So what the bloody heck do I do now? (Besides "switch back to Emacs!")
• 1178) I love how the Eclipse people spend all this time making some insane plug-in architecture with UI from hell, and then forget to show whitespace e.g. for Python folks, and then say things like, "I think it would clutter the UI" as if the UI isn't already utterly insane?
• 1177) I have the Midas Touch when it comes to software, so it is no surprise that Eclipse hates me and I really hate it. Just trying to get it to update itself is proving to be a pain in the ass. I'm trying to be a good citizen by using mirrors, but they all seem to freeze and fail. Great. I particularly enjoy how the update dialog doesn't say much, and if you then try to see more details, it just laughs a little recursive laugh of unhelpfulness. Don't even get me started on the process of trying to add a plug-in. After wading through all the UI crap, of course I end up with a dialog box that says "the update failed" and doesn't tell me why or how or what I can do about it. Now that's quality software!
• 1176) Ha ha! XP vs. CMM, fight!
• 1175) To paraphrase that oracle of wisdom, Barbie: software is hard. Thus it is worth reading the words of Demming to learn some humble pie.
• 1174) While the site looks horrible, Don Lancaster always has interesting things to say.
• 1173) More evidence of trac sucking: It commits the age-old crime of having areas around some text (see the figure) which look like they are clickable because of the color change, but in fact are not: the location of that cursor is actually in the un-clickable area. If you move it up a tad to be in horizontal alignment with font text, then you can click. Freaking genius.
• 1172) While I like the idea of trying to have legal protection for people, the every-day reality of it is just insane.
• 1171) Gosh, could the webroot Spy Sweeper UI suck any harder? These days it is freaking out, putting up its dialog box and for a split second showing something apparently urgent, but then redrawing itself to show nothing happened. Does that mean it protected my computer somehow, or does it mean that something has hacked Spy Sweeper already? It certainly looks like the latter. The kicker is that it doesn't seem to have a log or history of events that I can find easily. Nice! (Even if it didn't suck in such high-level regards, just the basic layout and design and functionality of the dialog box is pathetic.)
• 1170) SVN still kills me. It just doesn't work the way I think it should - a matter of the model it uses being something designed by freaks from Uranus. A particular example: I want to find out what changes have been made under a given path, so I use "svn log" expecting there to be some way to get it show me a reverse-chronological history of all changes under there. That way I can find out what files have most recently been altered. However, it seems to only show changes for the directory itself, not for the files within or below.
• 1169) Clearly, technology sucks. Take the installation of Java on an Ubuntu system, for example. I love the line that says, "Note: in the above example, i386 might have to be i586." I mean, the average person had no idea what the frig is going on here - and, in a half-way decent world, they wouldn't have to. Oh well. (The part below about "selecting the default Java version" is even worse, yay.)
• 1168) Amazingly enough, people are still making apps in Smalltalk (well, OK, Squeak).
• 1167) Saying that things are complex and people are subjective (and dumb!) wins you a Nobel Prize.
• 1166) I have a passting interest in visualization, so this anti-UML note with its guidelines caught my eye.
• 1165) Boy, do I hate weasels. It is very sad that there are so many of them, and/or they exert such influence in the world. I guess it all boils down to money, which then all boils down to power. Which just means, "people suck".
• 1164) While browsing around for jobs, I came across a company which professes to be making weblications. So already they are using annoying dumb-ass marketing speak, a big negative mark. The kicker is that their site eschews regular scrollbars for their own version of a scrollbar - a horribly stupid, broken, hateful, and almost utterly useless thing. These people think they're going to take the world by storm?
• 1163) It still bugs the crap outta me that most programs with network download in them do not support bandwidth control. Only wget does, everything else sucks, sucks, sucks! Total pathetic usability insanity! Gah.
• 1162) I just can't win. Somebody goes and writes an interesting article, then makes their comments section unreadable. The kicker is that I tried telling Firefox to not use the page's colors and fonts, and I still ended up with italics. Could this be any further away from the original idea behind HTML? Behind all device independent formats? Could humanity be any more blatently pathetic? (I left a comment complaining about it, but it got edited away by somebody, with no fix to the horrible presentation of the site. Nice!)
• 1161) Gosh, you'd think they'd never heard of anchors; In my browser the page displays with just about zero indication that you can download anything, because all that was off the bottom of the screen, with a healthy dose of whitespace at the end of it. Finally I noticed that I could scroll down to see more stuff. Ha ha. Ha.
• 1160) Why does everything technological have to suck? I'm looking at a file via trac and the file contains some long lines of text. Interestingly, trac (under Firefox) somehow manages to prevent horizontal scrollbars from appearing. Nice! (The trick then is to click and drag to select out into the rest of the text.)
• 1159) No, really, I just love how Google keeps launching new entire windows when I click on things in Gmail like Help and Google Account info.
• 1158) If you are a large company that can afford to pay lawyers to figure stuff out, that's one thing. If you are not in that boat, which right now I am not, then I can easily see why open source rules. That's just the tip of the iceberg of crap I've been dealing with just to be able to buy some bloody software. It is utterly insane. All these companies really deserve to die a Darwinian economic death.
• 1157) Always remember that the customer is often wrong. Or wrong. Or wrong.
• 1156) One thing you should know if you want to be a vaguely serious photographer (a label for which I don't even remotely yet qualify): you must get the shot as soon as you can. I can't count the number of shots I've thought about and said, "I'll get to it later" only to have the opportunity vanish. It can be for any number of unexpected reasons including, most recently, Stanford getting around to finally doing some gardening. D'oh!
• 1155) It is funny how somebody claims to offer directions for making ssh more secure in five minutes, but then the discussion goes on and on and on and on. Why the frig haven't distros already incorporated these suggestions for better security?
• 1154) I love sites that require JavaScript and other offences, and then the text is unreadable crap (that blurry crappiness is precisely how the page looked, it isn't some artifact of PNG or anything). Because, you know, having legible text is like the last thing a bloody design company should care about.
• 1153) English as a video game because the demo has things constantly moving under your cursor to make it difficult to, you know, actually be able to bloody click on things. Genius.
• 1152) I tend to find actually using databases boring, annoying, dry, and just plain lame. However, I enjoy reading about various topics in the field.
• 1151) A crackpot but, still, sometimes an interesting crackpot.
• 1150) On taking software design patterns and formalizing them [pdf]. (The same folks have nothing nice to say about UML - they're pushing LePUS [pdf]).
• 1149) A crash course in software development with contracts (in the "specification" sense, not the "$150/hr" sense). "So by writing twice as much code, we may achieve 10 times the reliability."
• 1148) Gosh, I really kinda detest websites that have a link to the home page on their home page. Duh!
• 1147) The important questions are five in number.
• 1146) Working effectively with legacy code [pdf] is a little version of the larger book.
• 1145) It bugs the crap out of me that the bloody Berkeley School of Information doesn't put the bloody name of the bloody day with the bloody event! (I've sent them email so maybe they will get around to adding them.)
• 1144) Nice how a design firm has kinda crappy HTML: Hyphens vs. dashes and no word-wrapping.
• 1143) I haven't yet figured out if this is really cool, or some crack-induced bull crap.
• 1142) Ah, so is this what happend to Netscape?
• 1141) I love it when nobody knows the true answer.
• 1140) I'm sure nobody would ever use the idea in the parenthasized clause to create a sham company for a while to gather data they can later "buy out": "CLIENT DATA STORAGE: You retain all rights to your data. We will never sell or share your client data with any third-parties (unless, of course, the product or our company is sold), or use your data for our own business advantage. We respect the privacy of our subscribers, and the privacy of their client data."
• 1139) Apache might be free, but as far as I can tell it was designed to keep certain people in business, rather than to make it possible for everybody to run their own webserver. Every time I try to get mod_rewrite working on a new machine, it is a nightmare of clueless trial-and-error. The official docs are nigh useless (they only barely even talk about what Directory options you'll need), and searching for help on the web only ends up showing that there are at least two different ways of specifying most things - I see people saying "" and others saying "", and I see some folks saying "FollowSymLinks" and others saying "+FollowSymLinks". What! Ever! (It also bugs the crap out of me that you can't just re-use e.g. 'DocumentRoot', but instead you have to have the same path string repeated in the conf file.)
• 1138) Wow, a neat site of CS videos! E.g. a SuperGlue video.
• 1137) Another shining example of a terrific error message comes from org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: "The content of element type X must match Y, Z." But, of course, they don't show you the string it was parsing that didn't fit into that rule. Since there is also no report of what file was being read (which I can understand, they probably only see it as a stream), it kinda sucks dirty buttocks.
• 1136) Tomcat's error logs are, sometimes, next to useless. I get "SEVERE: Parse Error at line 43 column 15" and yet no mention of which bloody file it was trying to parse.
• 1135) Well, so far: MySQL has been a dismal failure via Blastwave and Sun's packaging; it had to be installed from source in the end. Tomcat was a cluster fudge via Sun, but the Blastwave installation was less broken. I guess Sun is desperatly hoping that open source folks will slave to turn OpenSolaris into something that doesn't actively suck?
• 1134) Maybe I'm just a caveman, but I've never understood how companies that provide server hosting can say, "if you go over your bandwidth allotment, we'll charge you extra money." As if there aren't ways to enforce the bandwidth limit so you never go over that? Maybe I would prefer to have asymptotically decreasing throughput to make sure I don't go over my monthly budget? And I certainly don't want to try to support all the requests of being slashdotted, so just don't let things go there. How hard could it be? It just sounds like providers are lazy, money-grubbing weasels.
• 1133) I love how people still make really unusable web sites. There's no bloody search! Any real site (present company excepted, of course) should have a search entry field at the top of all pages.
1132) The fact that Tomcat has a startup.sh and a shutdown.sh, but no restart.sh script is just doofy.
• 1131) Another reason to stay away from Sun: they lock documentation that might actually help you get the system running. Great. Worth every penny. Basically, we are having zero luck with the packages we've tried (MySQL, Tomcat) and we end up downloading source and building them ourselves. But, some of the packages we couldn't get to work are still around because there are other sun tools that require them, and we don't know the full ramifications of getting rid of them all. So in the end the entire point of a packaging system, namely to keep a neat and tidy single view of the world, is utterly undermined. I cannot begin to fathom how anybdoy can consider this to be worth paying for in the new millenium. Short Sun stock. Stay away. Use Linux / *BSD for everybody's sake.
• 1130) If, like me, you find yourself having trouble just trying to log in to MySQL, you might check out these possibly helpful notes. What worked for me was to use the --no-defaults command line option with mysqladmin.
• 1129) While not very useful for seeing precisely what time it is, this format is interesting in the way it shows the passage of time in a Qix-esque fashion.
• 1128) The guy needs fashion help, and his diagrams are too much on the asian mysical fuzzy-wuzzy side, but he still has some interesting things to say.
• 1127) Humanity is clearly in desperate need of replacing itself with some other, more advanced, life-form.
• 1126) ASCII math is neat (demo requires JavaScript).
• 1125) An interesting CS blog, if you don't consider that an oxymoron.
• 1124) How to paper [pdf], from a real Haskell guru.
• 1123) It kills me how Sun is apparently really trying to make their systems more usable, yet they really still just doesn't understand anybody other than psycho low-level system administrators. The claim that "Impact: 0 services are not running." is reasonable English or "plain language" is just so utterly transparently inhuman. And, oh, right, everybody knows where the log files for the NIS server lives.
• 1122) Yet another utterly annoying UI-ism, this time from Adobe's PDF plug-in for Firefox (although the same thing happens in regular Reader, I'd wager): hyperlinks in PDFs can be clicked on to take you to that resource, but there is no clear and strong indication that a link is live, as opposted to just static text - no underling or color difference like you'd see in an HTML page. The cursor barely changes at all, from a grabbing hand to a hand with the index finger pointing, to differentiate. The sum total of all this is that I often-enough-to-realy-hate-Adobe try to use the hand to grab and scroll the page, only to have the page go away and be replaced with whatever the hyperlink that I just unwittingly clicked upon was pointing to, if you catch my drift.
• 1121) It is sad that Sun has theoretically nice systems with Solaris 10 and all that jazz, and yet they seem hell-bent on making their systems as hatefully un-featured as possible in so many ways. I really kind of hope they die and blow away.
• 1120) It drives me totally banana when there's a system that has apparently had all sorts of effort put into it, and yet it is still glaringly missing basic features I would want. In particular, I want to read all of comp.lang.* in reverse chronological order, not just a single group. (Ideally, the feature should let one slap together any feeds at all, of course.) Blah, humbug!
• 1119) Database vs. XML: fight!
• 1118) It drives me nuts that most people refer to the various versions of Ubuntu by the cute names "breezy" or "hoary" etc. The problem is, I have yet to find anything on my installation that would report such a string. Using uname doesn't, System / About Ubuntu doesn't, etc. Hopeless usability, here, folks.
• 1117) A terrific article relating just how insanely opaque technology has become. In other words, time for everybody to learn and use and love DTrace.
• 1116) What if our systems knew how to extract bogus patterns from their own behaviour?
• 1115) What if our systems had built-in performance monitors?
• 1114) It really is true that higher levels of abstraction and proof can make life better. (Of course, we'll all be dead due to global climate change much sooner.)
• 1113) The advance of technology is not without its problems.
• 1112) A nice little ditty on GET vs. POST and idempotency.
• 1111) Much like what Moravec has to say, the old failures of AI are quite likely to be turned around as we bring on exponentially more powerful computing resources. "This kind of machine learning has had little success in academic trials, Hoelzle said, because they didn't have enough data. 'If you have enough data, you get reasonably good answers out of it.'"
• 1110) The L4Linux personality on L4 is pretty darned neat since it sounds like it is pretty up-to-date.
• 1109) It makes me really mad that in today's work of digital media, an educational group that claims to want to "share" and "enhance... the community" fails to have any results on-line. No papers, no videos, no summaries, no abstracts, nothing. (Also? Their web site plain sucks.)
• 1108) GUIs always seem like they should be easy and fun to put together, but one quickly hits a reality of twisted and confusing stuff. Supposedly there is a real UI Avalon [pdf] and it might even be within commuting distance.
• 1107) Hallelujah and Amen! "The neat curves and crisp laws of supply and demand, elasticity, and rational behavior that everyone learns in microeconomics class don't work in the real world."
• 1106) Because, you know, business is war, and cannot possibly be anything else.
• 1105) A little missive on how UML sucks.
• 1104) As of early 2006, as far as I can tell Wine is the biggest freakin' joke in the Linux world, certainly when it comes to accurate and helpful documentation, let alone when it comes to actually working.
• 1103) Thank goodness! A tutorial on SQL joins which actually explains things visually.
• 1102) While this note about SQL's 'distinct' is somewhat informative, I still can't figure out how to get Sybase to do what I want. I kind of completely freaking hate SQL from top to bottom. (Update: Ah, I think it had to do with trying to write "select distinct(*)" rather than just "select distinct *". Of course, the error messages I was getting were utterly unhelpful. I still completely freaking hate Sybase from top to bottom.)
• 1101) It is funny how ssh takes "-p" but scp takes "-P". The kicker is that scp doesn't have any "-p" option at all, so I don't see why they had to use the upper case letter.
• 1100) It is interesting to see how the current state-of-the-art is a bunch of bull-hooey, under some lights.
• 1099) Yes!
• 1098) It is always a pleasure to read about human stupidity being jacked up with technology.
• 1097) The claim by Mac and Linux folks that stats prove their systems are more secure are, in my opinion, plain dumb. Now, the frequency of hacking those systems might be less because there are fewer of them in the world vs. Windows machines, but that's a separate issue.
• 1096) Adobe Reader is killing me! It only has one actual window open on my Windows computer, but it has put two icons in the Alt-Tab list, which completely screws up any motor-memory style action. Selecting either one brings up the exact same window! Hate!
• 1095) If there's a competition for poster child representing GUI-over-CLI, rsync is in top running.
• 1094) P2 sounds neat because it focuses on a declarative approach to network-building. The OCALA stuff sounds neat, too.
• 1093) The computing industry is clearly a bunch of big jerks. Not only is it impossible to get the right memory for your computer at the lowest price - that's the producers making life suck - but review web sites do not offer basic review functionality where you could find out what the recommended motherboard of the moment is - that's the consumer side of things doing a pathetic job. Strange. Maybe it is all funded in the background by Dell so people give up trying to make their own machine from parts? (I like the Sharky Extreme guides, but they tend to only be updated like every three, rather than all, months.)
• 1092) I guess the moral of the story is that every single one of us is a low-down dirty backpeddling weasel, in the end.
• 1091) Some people smoke the crack. A lot. Obviously.
• 1090) It is nice that people try to document things for linux, but then you see that they haven't the foggiest idea of how to make the documentation even vaguely useful.
• 1089) I love how Google's little search results excerpts for a given hit can include profanity, even with the "Safe Search" thing on?! (I noticed it while searching for big4rents.)
• 1088) Even with the onslaught of SATA and stuff, SCSI drives could still hold their own for a while yet in terms of speed. Unfortunately, trying to figure out which SCSI anybody is talking about, or anything supports, is a complete freaking nightmare.
• 1087) Remind me to do a project in Ruby on Rails!
• 1086) Note to self: lots of neat sysadmin tricks to try out.
• 1085) I'm glad to see OpenBSD continuing to impress.
• 1084) On some level, I think stupid things should not be illegal because only stupid people would get suckered in. Now, given the state of education and media in the US of A, there's plenty of argument that says we are all pretty stupid.
• 1083) When your OS doesn't out-of-the-box calculate memory usage, I say your OS is just plain pathetic.
• 1082) Everybody loves the RIAA/MPAA, right?
• 1081) Having been a user of Zephyr, AFS, X, etc., I found Dan Walsh's reminiscences to be a golly good (sad) read. It contains a hidden nugget of wisdom: even the most hard-core folks will go for usability over features, in the end. It is also lesson in how freaking hard security really is because it will seem to waste more of your time denying things that shouldn't be than actually helping protect you.
• 1080) Perhaps there is something to be learned from OSS on occasion after all?
• 1079) Free software apparently is worth every penny you pay when it comes to the documentation, too: 'mailterables' should be a hyperlink.
• 1078) All I'm saying is, if you can avoid doing business with Sun (like, ordering hardware), then do so! Go anywhere else at all! The crack dealer on the corner with the Sun box to sell you is a safer bet!
• 1077) It drives me nuts that software does all sorts of optimizations which only serve to make life hell. Gah!
• 1076) Ericsson's Erlang programming language might be the bees' knees, but they sure don't seem to understand security (or care?) worth a darn.
• 1075) It amazes me how humans manage to build systems of eternal suck, and think nothing of it, or are unwilling to invest in making the 'real' fix (namely, avoiding the use of bare strings - the data must be associated with spec and interpretation that takes care of all the bogosity).
• 1074) People complain about configuration hell; everybody should go read about the convention over configuration - combined with reflection - approach of Ruby on Rails.
• 1073) Graphic design is nice and all, but I always find it sad to see the corporate stuff trying to be modern or hip - it just ends up looking like their printer was broken and printed everything all misaligned an 'at.
• 1072) Excel is a munition, in the wrong hands.
• 1071) There are many rehashes of Ed Tufte, some intersting. And then there's smoking crack.
• 1070) A collection of proper British advice on where to stick your multimedia.
• 1069) Mmm, tasty Venn diagrams.
• 1068) If it's a fact I'll believe it.
• 1067) One person's Linux scaling scars, so you don't have to repeat.
• 1066) "The underlying root problem is too much complexity." And apparently nobody is thinking about reducing the source of the problem, instead they are working on rerospective tools. Seems a little sad.
• 1065) I tried to write an article for My Desktop OS, but it turns out I pretty much hate all Desktop OSs, so my article submission wasn't exactly relevant. I wish I could think of a Desktop OS where I could really say positive things, but I just keep thinking about all the blatant and obvious suck each and every one has. So sad.
• 1064) More evidence that Google kinda sucks: the results for this search aren't close enough to the this one. Hasn't anybody ever heard of stemming?
• 1063) Possibly good advice on how to design your site's URLs.
• 1062) Chalk up another cute blatant usability and relevance gaffe: going from this Wired article, which is cutting-edge today, to another one under the "See Also" heading; only the other one is from what might as well be pre-historic times, technologically speaking. Pathetic!
• 1061) Yet another ostensibly open-source component architecture, this time from ex-Be folks, I guess.
• 1060) For a moment there I thought maybe the Deepnet or Maxthon web browsers would be neat to try... then I read their License agreements and didn't install and deleted the files. Thank goodness for Firefox (as much as it sucks)!
• 1059) Amen, brother!
• 1058) Given some of humanity's efforts one might be surprised that we ever left the oceans at all.
• 1057) And some people seriously think Linux is ready for prime-time desktop usage?!
• 1056) It blows my mind that anybody thinks any project can get away without managers. Human nature is pretty clearly dead-set against having things work out without oversight.
• 1055) I tell Zone Alarm to allow or deny something, and tell it to remember. Most of the time I guess it remembers, but for some things it doesn't and I have to tell it every bloody time I reboot. Nice.
• 1054) A cute little ditty on what it means to be anthropormorphized.
• 1053) A nice way to say, "screw EJB".
• 1052) Sybase's technical help really sucks ass and they should either go bankrupt, or clean up their web image by putting only actually useful data out there.
• 1051) It kind of drives me crazy that people claim to be fans of evil corporations (or at least, really stupid corporations). Or, well, just about any corporation at all.
• 1050) The Web-based "content management system" thing is possibly neat. Check out WebCT, OSPI and KEEP.
• 1049) More fuel for hating VMware: The free server version is slower than the free player version, and they won't let me have both installed at the same time. Great. In addition, just about everything in the free server version is tremendously painfully slower than via the Player. In the end, I have up on the free (beta) VMware Server and removed it in favour of the Player! Oh well.
• 1048) Any commercial, professional web site (such a definition apparently excludes our own web site) which does not have a "report broken page" link on every page is just plain lame. Now, if you have a giant battery of testing systems running every supported browser and OS combination all the time and taking action based on reports from said giant battery, you are off the hook. The rest of you just suck.
• 1047) Have I mentioned recently how much I hate Linux?
• 1046) "If a physician told a patient to eat less fat, that will do nothing," Dr. Chlebowski said. "If you send someone to a dietitian one time, that will do next to nothing." Good thing the American public educational system teaches kids good eating habits. Not that nobody has problems, but at least they try to fight back.
• 1045) Boy, I sure do hate Gmail. They give you buttons to trash or keep an entire discussion, not parts of it, as far as I can tell - and the point is, this shouldn't be something that I even have to try to figure out at all. It is just utterly <expletive>ed.
• 1044) Anbody who claims that our current computing systems can be secure is either clueless, or lying. I believe the corporations, e.g. Microsoft, Sun, etc. have a vested interest in not fixing things from the ground up from a software perspective so they can shove things like Trusted Computing into the public's orifices.
• 1043) Come on, you know you love Linux! "OPTIONS: When no flags are given, -acdgkmnru is assumed."
• 1042) Here's my free idea (thought up on 2/2/2006): small companies should form a co-op to pool together for the purposes of patent idemnification and lawsuit battles: share all the patents and use them as a war chest.
• 1041) Another fun example from personal experience of how everything sucks, especially thigns made by people, and especially computer stuff: I was trying to copy a bunch of files to a remote machine and it all worked fine up until the last few files, at which point i'd get a seg fault from zmodem, and a network error from scp. Turns out the remote machine was running out of disk space. Good thing the errors told me that instead of trying to mislead me...
• 1040) I love open source, but I really wish they would learn about the basics of graphic design (let alone actual usability), like, you know, anti-aliasing and just generally not looking like crap! You might also think they could spend the little effort required to replace "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" in the official documentation with their own product name? (Looks like it is a copyright / distribution restriction from RedHat, which sorta makes sense.)
• 1039) I'm trying the free version of VMware Server. While it seems like the folks at VMware are trying to do a decent job in terms of functionality and user interface, they just don't seem to actually "get it" at all. Trying to actually use their stuff, either their web site or their virtualizaiton products, has always led me to just be very frustrated with how difficult it is to find information or actually accomplish anything. Case in point: the VM is telling me that I should update the version of VMware Tools but it dosen't offer any help whatsoever in downloading the file. So then I try to search on their web site for the relevant files, and that returns all sorts of results that all look to be for different VMware products. I really don't want to keep wasting my time like this, so I'm investigating OpenVZ and hoping that it will suck a little less?
• 1038) Maybe somebody will make a Firefox extension, but why don't our download tools automatically calculate the md5sum incrementally so that I don't have to waste more time after the download finishes?
• 1037) Personally, I think that anybody using JSP or EJB technology only gets what they so richly deserve, no matter what app server product they choose.
• 1036) Sometimes, the alarmists are right.
• 1035) Yes, kids, computers are hard.
• 1034) Unix isn't really all that robust [pdf].
• 1033) The CygWin installer is still one of the most polished examples of utter crap I've ever come across. It doesn't have a good way of telling you what dependencies are going to drag in what extra files, so it always looks like it is just randomly bringing in tons of extra stuff. Great. Genius. Nice! I mean, why does it install Apache when all I asked for was sshd? Also, the progress bars are the crap kind.
• 1032) If good government is akin to good computer design then giving the quality of the computing resources we have on this planet, we really are doomed.
1031) Another simple indictment of JSP: since spaces in HTML can lead to differences in rendering, you cannot format your "source" code however you want, so the source files end up being unmaintainable crap.
• 1030) This fancy laptop, new at the tail end of 2005, has both wired ethernet and wireless. However, it doesn't seem to be smart enough to virtualize those; if I unplug the wire then many connections I had open die. I think in a less un-ideal world, they would simply move over to the wireless connection (even if it just means everything gets slower).
• 1029) People are stupid and geeks are no exception. Hello? Ever hear of an MMU?! We're in the new millenium here folks!
• 1028) Remind me to never buy another Canon product, ever. Trouble is, they make such bloody good cameras. (Well, that and the fact that all companies are weasel mo-fos who pull this kind of stuff.)
• 1027) Capitalism becomes oppressive just because. And the governments of the USA fall for / in line with it.
• 1026) It amazes me how all the computer seller web sites I go to apparently do their best to prevent me from making a purchase by hiding the path to buying things I want. Gateway does it (the word 'laptop' doesn't appear and 'notebook' only appears under "Technology Archives," whatever in the heck that would be all about), so I'm once again reaffirming my choice to never buy anything from them ever. Dell does it so I'm avoiding them. HP didn't suck outright like Gateway and Dell, and they have some systems that got decent reviews so I'm currently aiming in that direction. I sincerely hope that Gateway and Dell die soon due to their pathetic un-usability. That's the sad thing about capitalism: the only thing that matters is price, and most people will put up with actual road blocks to get it.
• 1025) Here's a rule of thumb for language designers: if Emacs doesn't have a mode that will gracefully handle it, then your syntax is plain stupid. Living proof is found in JSP.
• 1024) The United States of America is run by weasel bastards.
• 1023) It is interesting to me that a website dedicated to free software has such a stupid evil user-hating interface: I clicked "Search" from their "Main Menu" and it ends up saying that I have to become a registered user before I can use it! Not only is that patently obnoxious, it indicates the web site creators are trying to live in some bizarre pre-Google fantasy. If there were a Capitalist God, he'd smite this kind of bull crap.
• 1022) If you ever wanted to run BeOS.
• 1021) I really hate software patents.
• 1020) I wish I didn't find mathematics so hard.
• 1019) Yes, the government of the United States of America exists only to channel money to the in-crowd [pdf]. All hail the weasel king: Money. (As an aside, the whistle-blower's web site sure does kinda suck from a graphical-web-ui design perspective.)
• 1018) Nice to see a manager who desperately needs training and doesn't know it. Hey, maybe I could sell him some ancient wisdom or other!
• 1017) My problem is I do this all the frickin' time and everybody just thinks I'm a freaking n'er-do-well nut job. Great.
• 1016) A plethora of interesting 'agile' articles. I sorta liked the pithyness of The Schedule Trap.
• 1015) A cute riff on technical paper rejection notices.
• 1014) Apparently, the 5ESS communications switch (that's the 5th version of the ESS, I guess) is super robust, so presumably there is something to learn from it [acm]. Read about some classic reliability modeling [pdf] from Bell.
• 1013) At work there is a crosswalk. The institution is too cheap to put in actual lights, so they have some minimum wage person who stands in the crosswalk to stop traffic when pedestrians actually want to use it. Nice. Well, OK, actually they splurged and did put in lights, only they aren't a set of regular traffic lights. No, they are a stupid half-assed set of lights sorta like cats' eyes. Pedestrians press a button to cross which causes the lights on the ground to flash, hopefully drawing drivers' attention to the fact that somebody is trying to cross. The kicker, however, is that the lights flash in a really stupid fashion. They are yellow and not very bright so they are hard to see during the daytime. In addition, to make the system even more completely useless, the duty cycle for the blinking is all wrong: the lights flash, which gets your attention, so you look at the ground where the flash happened wondering what is going on there, and yet you don't see any further flashing; since you are driving, you have to then look away to pay attention to other things to make sure you don't have an accident, at which point the duty cycle fires and the lights flash again. This all just ends up making the driver really unsettled. If the pause between flashes were half what it is, the system would work. Perhaps they worry about inducing seizure in some drivers? All in all, a horribly ineffective waste of money. People are stupid and couldn't usability test their way out of a paper bag.
• 1012) Finally, somebody has a clue about customizing software.
• 1011) VMWare and the Player are close enough to make you think that everything will be OK. Then you start to see how things are broken: The clock doesn't keep proper time, even with the utilities. The keyboard and mouse inputs sometimes are very slow or missed entirely, and other times the system completely missed the "key up" event and you get things repepating ad infinitum, which is particularly evil hateful annoying - like, when I get a zillion blank lines in my emacs buffer, etc.
• 1010) Excel pisses me off because it causes so much chart junk; all the stupid lines around all the cells. And then people draw new things into it with ever more lines, more bold lines, more crap that makes it harder to see the actual data.
• 1009) Clusty, while kind of a gross name, has some nice features over other search engines. There's the clustering, of course, but there's also UI to let you easily choose between opening the link in a new window or not... unfortunatley, all that has been sorta surpassed by the whole tabbed browsing thing and they don't have a link that will do that for you. D'oh!
• 1008) I'm sure some day the semantic web will be cool. Some day.
• 1007) Is it funny or sad (or neat?) that even basic mathematical and philosophical definitions are not nailed down?
• 1006) How to think about the cache [pdf] when looking at algorithms.
• 1005) Here's how Gmail's usability is broken for me: they think that instead of deleting, I should archive. So their search doesn't search the trash. But I want to delete things so that my list of mail is relatively clean should I ever want to browse it all. Thus, deleting should be the norm, nor archiving, and the search should - obviously - include searching what is in the trash.
• 1004) I'm still waiting for /bin/psh (think: pr0n).
• 1003) An example of suck heaped upon suck: I'm running Ubuntu under VMWare Player on a Windows XP machine. In there, I'm running Firefox 1.0.7. Sometimes when I'm using the mouse wheel to scroll, things seem to lock up for a bit. Now, it could either be VMWare being burpy, or it could be Firefox's broken UI where if you have the mouse over a text area, even if that text area doesn't have a scrollbar, Firefox decides to send the wheel movement to that text area rather than to the containing page. My point being that as technology progresses, you get layers of things, and then the final user of it all has to deal with trying to suss out what the root cause of any given problem is, and it just all kinda really sucks ass. (Of course, it might be said that it isn't how well the dog plays chess that matters, it is simply that it can play at all.)
• 1002) Synaptic sucks: if it can't download a file, it doesn't offer any suggestions about what might ahve caused that. In particular, it doesn't tell you that a newer version is availble (e.g. due to security fixes) and that you should refresh the package metadata archive.
• 1001) The history of "About" boxes in software leads me to expect it to tell me the version of the software in question. So it is really nice (not) that Ubuntu's about shows nothing but annoying marketing drivel - no mention of what release of Ubuntu this is (hoary, breezy, whatever). Apparently, I have to know enough about linux to open a shell and use uname or dmesg? Oh, those don't tell me the answer, either! Yeah, that is really linux with usability for the masses.
• 1000) Naming is important. The Debian/Ubuntu package folks apparently don't realize that; they have a package called apache2-utils which even the apache 1.3 package needs. I think they should either have apache-utils be an alias for apache2-utils, or they should call it something without the '2' in the name, duh.
• 999) It really bugs me when Google offers a suggested "fix" to your search query but then if you follow that suggestion you get... zero results!
• 998) The people who make the Linux Synaptic package manager are sorta clueless. For example, the search doesn't let you search for "whole word"s. Come to think of it, that seems to be a common OSS failure.
• 997) Eclipse has much better support for Emacs key bindings than what I've previously seen from any MS Visual Studio incarnation. However, the bottom line is that if you aren't using Emacs you simply aren't using Emacs and no amount of emulation will get you there. For example, in Emacs the use of C-l will run 'recenter' which vertically centers the cursor's line in the buffer. That kind of feature simply doesn't exist at all in Eclipse, so there's nothing you can bind C-l to at all. Blah.
• 996) People who invent things like restructured text and wiki markup suck buttocks, in my opinion. It kills me that apparently other people don't get it, and jump on those bandwagons never the less. Humanity, plain and simple, is crap. And it isn't the power of wiki text vs. HTML that I find frustrating, it is simply reinventing the wheel. I guess I'm just not a visionary.
• 995) Anybody who thinks the Google Desktop is set to storm the world has either never used it, or has no expletive clue about user interface and usability.
• 994) Yes, the cygwin installer is utter 1960's style UI crap! Crap, I say, crap! Worth every penny you paid for it! (Also, any distribution that has neither jove nor mg can rot in hell.)
• 993) It bugs me that people say they have tried to get a database-like file system going and have failed because they tried to make the file system fit inside a relational database. It seems to me that the obvious hack would be to leave the file system alone as a place for storing files, and only put the metadata in the database. Wrap all that up so that it looks like regular file system APIs with extra metadata interfaces. How hard could that possibly be?
• 992) The tech industry wears no clothes.
• 991) I love how Symantec AntiVirus says that it is checking in-memory processes, and yet shows a little animated hard disk platter spinning...
• 990) Some interesting miscellaneous software development related articles.
• 989) I hate it when people talk about math and then confusingly use an exclamation mark. Dumb ass dummies.
• 988) I really don't get it; it is still horrible stinky Windows poo under the covers.
• 987) Business lessons from Apple: if you are going to do an about-face, you better have something super attractive with which to make people forget actual history.
• 986) Have I ever mentioned how much Subversion sucks? Seems like every time I use it, it doesn't want to work for me, like it was explicitly designed with some utterly alien, non-earth-man approach to source control. Blah!
• 985) Why is it that every editor under the sun has decided on some completely hateful source code formatting convention? E.g.: I cannot get Eclipse to do what I want with for statements, or with whitespace everywhere. Great. While I hate Emacs for being incomprehensible, I love it for the fact that eventually it can do what you want. The other thing that pisses me off is that nobody has made the right UI for setting formatting, which would simply be to have a sample chunk of code that the user edits once to look the way they want, and the program then derives specification from that. I mean, duh! (Eclipse fails to even try to make the wrong way work at least a little less hatefully: they don't give you any indication of what changed, so if you don't see it as you try to toggle choices, you have to keep doing it until you spot it. A horrible trial-and-error nightmare that should obviously be complete crap to anybody who actually tested it for more than a split second.) Update: OK, after mucking with it for a long time, I finally found the option that gets the for-loop bodies to stop sucking... but the whitespace is still crap.
• 984) I love things like Eclipse, where the bloody built-in Tutorial is broken: it keeps talking about a "Click to Perform" button that doesn't exist anywhere that I've seen!
• 983) In this day and age, any hardware vendor who requires you to open up your computer to look at stuff printed on their printed circuit board (SIIG, ASUS, etc.) deserves to die a horrible capitalist death. Here's a bloody blue, folks: design your products so that you can give us a utility program that will query the hardware and tell us the answer instead. Kee-ripes!
• 982) Why I hate the Windows version of BitTorrent (mind you, I got it from Xandros) : when you minimize the window, it doesn't go to the Task Bar, it goes to the Tray. So that utterly confused me because I thought the program had died. Once I figured that out, I had to double click on the BT icon in the Tray - single click did nothing. So then it brought up the BT window, but also removed that icon from the Tray, which is not how any other Tray item works, and the system took the 2nd click to mean a click on whatever icon ended up replacing the BT icon in the Tray, so every time I get both the BT window and my Wireless settings window. Raw bloody usability genius!
• 981) No matter how much they clean up Java, it still all just looks like a big argument in favor of Ruby on Rails. (To give some benefit of the doubt, presumably there actually is a point at which J2EE starts to be actually useful, rather than simply overkill?)
• 980) It doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux or Mac OS, systems are falling apart under their own weight of unfortunately chosen architecture and implementation. So far, the only thing that seems to offer a future vision are capability-based systems.
• 979) Read about complex event processing, it is sorta neat. Maybe the AIs will come from that realm of development, ha ha.
• 978) Here's a tip: if your program is quitting because the parameters to it were wrong, do not spit out the usage, especially if your usage text is long, because it hides the specific error message (your program does spit out a very specific error message to the user, of course, right?). Instead, tell them -h (or whatever) will get them the full usage text. Or, don't say anything, and they can go Read The Freaking Man Page.
• 977) I love unix tools that don't support reading from stdin. Like, apparently, xml_grep. Also, if you are going to name your program like one that already exists, you might want to consider supporting the features people have come to expect, given that name. In the case of xml_grep, it does not appear to have anything like grep's "-v" option.
• 976) More evidence that Gmail is complete crap: I search for the singular of a word, and get no hits. I then search for the plural, which differs only in that it has an 's' appended, and I get results.
• 975) I guess it depends entirely upon the target audience, but I would have dropped the fancy terms and just called it what it is: a Model-View-Controller architecture.
• 974) For the most part, SecureCRT doesn't completely suck. However, even after many updated releases of the product, even after I mentioned this to them long ago, they still don't deal with pasting extended ASCII well. I want a "Paste as ASCII" command that translates apostrophes to ASCII single quotes, that translates em- and en-dashes to ASCII hyphens, etc. (Additionally, their overall configuration UI is still kinda evil.)
• 973) Both Firefox and IE commit this stupid, dumb, evil, wrong, hateful user interface gaffe: they let you have a selection in the body of the page, and a selection in the adddress field. (Firefox could have further screwed the pooch by having the search text be another selectable thing, but it actually makes sure that only either the address text or the search text is hilighted.) So, you don't actually know which text the copy command will grab! Festering idiocy!
• 972) Probability is a dangerous wench. One-in-a-billion events happen in the process of life as we know it. Now what do you think of short checksums?
• 971) An interview with the somewhat appropriately named James Reason about human error. It includes a nice bit of blaming the media for being jerks.
• 970) More evidence that machines suck, because the humans that make them suck (and because the Right Answer is hard to find): now that we have the mouse wheel for scrolling, you might find yourself in a situation where you have to click on the browser window to get focus there before you can scroll. How often have you done that intending only to get focus, and then having the browser think you were clicking on a hyperlink (advertisement, whatever) instead? Isn't that really bloody annoying?
• 969) My one online shopping experience at KBtoys didn't suck. Now I get spam email from them that is all HTML; I use an old-school ASCII reader. I can see that they have "Click here if you can't view this e-mail" in the HTML letter, which is patently freaking stupid, see?
• 968) I want to slap people who say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less."
• 967) Blah, I hate Amazon.com. "Review the information above, then click 'Place your order.'" Gee, what if the information is wrong, and I want to change things? Where's the bloody 'Cancel the order' button? Gah!
• 966) The Airlink101 AR315W does, in fact, suck. After trying the various firmwares and everything, I ended up exchanging it for the only slightly more expensive Netgear WGR614 v6, which by comparison pretty much totally kicks ass. (It is therefore particularly sad that their web site for registering the product sucks so hard, and that the serial number is so bloody difficult to read.) Anyway, now I'm happily flooding my house with ionizing electromagnetic radiation so I can use the Roku. So much for having kids.
• 965) Here's another free clue for the world to use: If you publish a long review of something, and then have a summary at the beginning that has "pros" and "cons" listed, then how about hyperlinking to the detailed part of the review that talks about those individual pros and cons, so I can find out what you mean? I know, you want to sell ad impressions, but I'm not going to click on any ad you put up anyway, so just let me get the details. Jerks.
• 964) I asked for a digital music player for Xmas, the Roku SoundBridge 500 (since it is available refurbished, which means a little cheaper than anything else that doesn't totally get suckful reviews). First, let me say that I finally got it working (it was the wireless access hardware that was sucking, not the Roku) and it is pretty cool! On the other hand, it could be better... The UI is sorta frustrating on the unit, but that is to be expected, right? The current kicker is that I'm trying to read their online forums for help, and it is requiring that I sign up before I can read threads! That's just completely evil and wrong! For that alone I kinda think I should tell everybody else to stay the heck away. Also, their forums set the font size of the page to be really small for no good reason! Butt munchers! (The issue I was trying to research, by the way, is that I told it up install the available update and it froze with the progress bar at around like 98%. Nice! Anyway, I let it sit for several minutes, afraid to touch it, and it finally gave up and let me re-try, at which point it worked. Coulda had a little better UI/feedback, there, folks, especially since I see this issue coming up several times in the forums,from what little I'm allowed to see w/out an account.) Also? The remote kinda sucks. Most times, remotes suck, but this one not only sucks in terms of the layout, but it also sucks in that the main up/down/left/right buttons are really mushy and chunky feeling - they don't give good interaction at all. Blah, I say! Oh, and I just found out you can't fast-forward or rewind in a song. You can only skip forward and back entire songs. D'oh.
• 963) Ever more evidence that Linux and Gnome and everything are flying pieces of excrement that deserve to die, die, die, at least when it comes to having a usable 'desktop': /usr/lib is full of many directories, and when I use the Gnome 'Open File' dialog box, it ends up not listing them all, and it doesn't give an error! It just truncates when it is full and gives you no notification that it happened. That's oh-so useful! Gah! Die!
• 962) If somebody says "It's too complicated to be affordable," don't just assume they are right.
• 961) People who try to sell radically new keyboard designs deserve the utter obscurity they get.
• 960) I'm obviously too old to understand these new-fangled things like del.icio.us (let alone appreciate their naming): I thought the whole point was to store booksmarks, so why doesn't it have a way to import the bookmarks I already have?! This is insane.
• 959) The FCC is a bunch of corporate whores, and they don't seem to make no bones about it. Maybe I should be in South Korea, or some other tech-forward-thinking country? Sure ain't so in the U.S.A.
• 958) Maybe these will help make less suckful websites? 9 pillars, the Elements of User Experience [pdf], and a simplified version [pdf].
• 957) Cygwin, while almost useful, mostly just pisses me off. The installer is complete shyte. And my installation didn't even end up with scp available. What the futz?!
• 956) The problem is that your piece of crap software (e.g. Spy Sweeper) is one several pieces of crap running on my machine. If each of those programs has some stupid crap about how it works, then my rule is that the total psychological damage done to the user is not the sum, rather the product of all the crap. Computers suck because humans suck. Seethe.
• 955) I can dig a rant against JSP (and likewise ASP, etc.). Some alternatives: Enhydra XMLC, Cold Fusion MX, Java Server Faces, and Tapestry.
• 954) Somebody was trying to apply the following quote to computer systems and software architecture [pdf]. They seemingly fail to realize that there are many good reasons why pure hierarchies often simply do not work for systems, and you end up with all sorts of holes punched through. So I think the thing is to figure out why that is (often, it is for efficiency, either human or machine) and come up with a better architecture template than stupid hierarchy. "As Simon notes, the nesting of subsystems helps bring about a sparseness of knowledge between subsystems. Each subsystem operates (nearly) independently of the detailed processes going on within other subsystems; components within each level communicate much more frequently than they do across levels. For example, my liver and my kidney in some sense know about each other; they use chemical signals to communicate with one another. Similarly, you and I may know about each other, using verbal signals to communicate and collaborate with one another. On the other hand we would be quite surprised to see my liver talk to your kidneys."
• 953) It seems clear to me that current approaches to security in pretty much all OSs are lame hacks [pdf] that only serve to underscore the complete failure of and abdication by OS and App providers to get security right. The user should not have to decide what cryptic events to let pass or not, which is how most current systems work. It simply ends up with the user allowing everything. Instead, the authors of the systems should be responsible enough to take on the task of being the experts who narrowly define what the systems are allowed to do, and no more. I'm not sure any band-aid (sorry, "adhesive bandage") will really make things as secure as they could and should be.
• 952) Making a robust on-line world is hard.
• 951) So much for cross-platform-ness: "The majority of Chickenfoot is written in JavaScript, which is single-threaded. This is a problem because sometimes Chickenfoot needs to suspend its activity (such as when find() is called on a page before it is done loading). On Microsoft Windows, other threads in the browser continue to run while Chickenfoot is suspended; however, on Mac and Linux, suspending Chickenfoot apparently suspends all threads in the browser. We are exploring workarounds to make Chickenfoot cross-platform."
• 950) So far, every experience I've had with Chef's has been bad. Their website UI is annoying in many ways. Their customer service is sorta clueless. They pretty much completely screwed the pooch with a gift certificate; we almost lost $50 into the ether, etc. Their web site claimed my order was complete, then my browser crashed, then I emailed and asked them if it was complete because I didn't get the expected confirmation email, then they said it was not complete, so I re-ordered, then days later I got two confirmation emails, then I called to cancel one order, then they said the other order had a problem with my credit card, even though their web site never reported an error with it, etc. ad nauseum. The latest part of the saga is that the telephone customer support person says, oh yeah, those gift cards never work. Great! So it is a complete bloody scam they are trying to pull! Here comes my note to the BBB and epinions. Shop anywhere else! May they fester and die!
• 949) Funny how the deal with line-endings across different system types is still a complete train wreck here in the New Millenium. Or source control having to know what is a binary file. Or any of a million other gotchyas to do with software. Whatever, man, whatever. If this is what leads to the singularity...
• 948) This brand-new Dell Latitude D810 running Windows XP Pro has some weirdness about it:
  1. The UI for dealing with multiple monitors is kind of a nightmare. Basically, it never does anything even remotely right the first time, and you have to fiddle with things a lot before it is vaguely how you want it. And during that process things can happen, like having the Displays dialog box lost on some virtual screen that doesn't actually exist - so you literally cannot see the dialog box or get a mouse cursor to it. And since dialog boxes tend not to show up in the Task Bar, or sometimes not even in the Alt-Tab list, it is all just clearly crap.
  2. Similarly, trying to use display mirroring with e.g. an external video projector sucks buttocks.
  3. When I re-dock it, my Task Bar has gone from 2 rows back down to 1. Every time. That sucks.
  4. I have the keyboard repeat rate maxed out, and it is still pretty slow! What's up with that?
  5. There's a blank writable CD in the drive. But Windows says there's no CD in the drive when I go to write files via the File Explorer. The really crappy CD recording software that came with the machine sees the CD and works just fine, however. Terrrrrrific!
  6. The little icons in the task bar tray thing can have mouse-over tips. However, the machine has gotten itself into a state where those are being drawn behind the task bar. Which means you can only see a little bit of them for the very top row of things in the tray, and nothing for any others. That's pretty nifty. Not.
• 947) Debugability should be a main goal of all systems.
• 946) Funny how all the noise about URNs and PURLs has been mostly sturm und drang with no results. (Things like tinyurl and redirx have more cache mojo, even though they are only vaguely related to this issue.)
• 945) I always wanted a system that would take regular programs and magically turn them into web verisons thereof; this paper is running with the whole "web continutaions" bandwagon, but they try to get around the usual suckage related to the back button, and session timeouts. However, it has pros and cons, like everything else.
• 944) I saw an Outlook 12 Beta demo. I actually think the new UI is freaking cool - all those pathetic OSS UI developers should get some screenshots and use them as suppositories.
• 943) Funny how most of the social networking sites I've used have had user interfaces that made the actual effort of establishing the network non-zero, and a real pain in the ass. By all rights they should all die a painful Darwinin death. Please. I've now seen 3 different UIs (linkedin, last.fm and ringo) and none of them have had a networking UI that didn't obviously and completely suck ass. What planet are these freaks on?
• 942) I've been looking for an apt / dpkg guide, so that's nice to find.
• 941) For ease of setup, I'd give the nod to Virtual PC. However, if you compare successful installations, I think VMWare is a way better experience; everything about running Ubuntu Linux is faster and better than when I tried it under Virtual PC.
• 940) Gnome is still shows its roots as a festering turd of un-usability: the mouse wheel scrolls different amounts under different Gnome applications, and I haven't found a configuration to make them all work the way I want. So that's great, having gnome-terminal scroll like 9x what I'd like. Now how much would you pay?!
• 939) Impressive how linux can't handle spaces in the names of directories (fakeroot blows up), and cute how Firefox makes sure to push people towards having a space in their downloads folder ("My Downloads") on all OSs.
• 938) Here's at least one way in which all virtualization schemes fall down: you still end up having to fight over disk space among all the VMs. I think the fix is to have the 'hypervisor' supply a low-level FS that all the VMs use, so the guest OSs think they have a whole hard drive somehow. OK, so that might not really work since all OSs want to format their entire partition, and they might get really confused if disk space just started to magically disappear out from under them without it being via calls to their individual kernel...
• 937) It is killing me how so far none of the virtualization applications hand-hold me through getting networking set up. I want the linux VM to use whatever the host Windows network settings are, but I've yet to find a relevant explanation for how to do (anything remotely like) that (via the regular UI, or via Google, anyway - I didn't go into the so-called 'Help' because it more often than not just ends up really pissing me off with how lame it is). But wait! Maybe I found a succinct overview for VPC. Guess we'll see if the Ubuntu install falls for it...
• 936) Well, within about 30 mins each of using VMWare and Virtual PC 2005, I'm definitely going for the latter. VMWare's documentation might be plentiful but it is not very usable. (And, it is a really bad sign that most of VMWare's "tip of the day" were about how to work around problems with their system, rather than how to do something really advanced.) I looked briefly at Parallel, but it is too new and untested for my tastes. Maybe in six months it would be worth revisiting.
• 935) Google sucks: I search for "C--" and all I get are "C++" hits.
• 934) I hate systems that force a particular sorting order. Like seemingly many things from MS - Outlook Express, for example, forces the folders to be listed in alphabetical order. Stupid!
• 933) OSS has got to learn how to support upgrades successfully. Heck, is there any OS family anywhere that does upgrades well? Blah.
• 932) I just got a new Dell monitor at work. It came with some documentation and an install CD. Nowhere did it give me the driver for the display, so I ended up with just standard "plub and play" monitor driver. I had to do some laborious trial and error searching at the Dell website before I could find it. So that's a nice setup experience. Then, I go to try and calibrate the thing and it turns out the the "+" button (a physical button on the display, not a button in a GUI) moves the cursor up, when it should move down, since the list starts at the top. Whatever, man, whatever.
• 931) I've seen it happen too many times, and yet nobody seems to take it to heart: most of the time things don't go wrong and so having things fall off the end of the log isn't a problem. But, that one time you "rm -rf *" you are going to want lots of backups and logs and safety and stuff. And if you don't have it, you will waste lots of time in the best case and in the worse case you might not be able to really ever fully recover. I dunno, it just seems like the systems we are given "out of the box" should magically be doing all sorts of things to completely ameliorate such situations. The other thing is that even if you have the tools set up, you actually have to know how to use them. And they have to not suck. So if you've never really tried your emergency systems, then you might find that you only wasted lots of extra money!
• 930) Even if we didn't have the virtualization, why haven't we had things like 'nice' for non-CPU bound things? Why can't we easily dynamically dial the network bandwidth that a given process is allowed to go for?
• 929) The whole virtualization thing (Xen, VirtualPC, Solaris Containers and Zones) is so late, it is frustrating. How many things would have been better had we had that from the get-go? (Seems like the kind of thing IBM or Tandem probably had working on a cool mainframe decades ago, ha ha.) I can understand that everybody just wanted to sell more hardware, so there wasn't a whole lot of commercial reason to develop it for sub-mainframe class machines. And, there was probably never the smarts or raw horsepower to make it possibly work. I recall back in the late 90s playing with something funny like a Sun workstation that was emulating a PowerPC Mac that was then running a 68000 binary. It worked, but not impressively. Maybe Moore's Law has made it all that much more plausible? Heck, projecting out, I guess it means by next month we'll have had the Singularity.
• 928) When I think about exception handling, I think I come to the conclusion (as other's have said for a long time) that a really good programmer probably knows more about error cases than about solving the core task the software set out to solve. That's kind of scary.
• 927) Ah! Software is like gardens, not city streets.
• 926) It is debatable if this is the crowd you really want to emulate, nevertheless it is worth reading how successful JSRs happened; food for any project leader's thought.
• 925) Anything even remotely complicated will blow chunks all over the place.
• 924) It bugs me that Gmail has an "Archive" button, but no category of mail actually called "Archive". No, it is called "All mail" which just seems like a stupid thing to do in the UI; they should have the same name.
• 923) It strikes me as a really sad comment on humanity when making icons is considered a huge contribution to Open Source.
• 922) This is a lovely example of how people do something and only do it half-assed: I want to be able to order the sites on the page for my custom view, of course! Note how they spent time working on letting you have color themes before they worked on the basic functionality that should actually matter. Ha ha. Ha.
• 921) Computer systems should be doing their best to help us. Unfortunately, getting the helping part right is hard (for many disjoint reasons) and so we end up with things that could do what you want if only you knew how to do it. "Out of the box" they don't help you keep things organized. A geeky example: in a place with several unix machines, there is nothing set up to easily enforce that the username and uid and gid for a given human is the same across all systems, which is something administrators would often like to guarantee.
• 920) Yup, I can get on this train of thought: Yahoo was the Dark Ages of human scribes, and was successful via brute force. Google intends (and already is) to be successful through automated intelligence. (Note, however, that even Google has to rely on human decision making via Page Rank!) Having said all that, I think there are clearly gaping holes in the belief that Gmail works well for everybody. What is sad to me is that all of this was clear to the smart folks; it makes me frustrated that things have taken so long to change and improve. The underlying message is that ideas are great, but execution is the other 99%. (And, the other other message is that you cannot predict what will take off and what won't; it is an incredibly multi variate problem, with most of the variables embedded in psychology.)
• 919) No matter how good your technology is, if nobody groks its potential then it will die off like DHTML. Then, years later if you are lucky, and never if you are unlucky, you might get Ajax presented as if it were something new.
• 918) Anecode from a DVR user: they were given a remote that has a "power all" button. So they use that to turn everything off. But then the DVR secretly turns itself completely on when a recording time comes along. Then the user goes to turn on the system (including TV and stereo) by pressing the button - and so they end up seeing a dialog box saying something like "Are you sure you want to turn the system off? That will cancel your recording!" And that is pretty confusing to them since all they thought they were doing was turning everything on. Genius!
• 917) I'm impressed how the Stanford University online library catalog search system is such a festering piece of unusable poo. Like, just trying to search for books by ISBN is utterly obfuscated. This is a premire university?
• 916) A fun list of organization mini-patterns, interesting to think about for your project management goals. NASA generated 100 rules for project managers. The SEI has moved from CMM to the CMMI [pdf].
• 915) A couple of articles on software testing; Unit Test Patterns for .NET and Martin Fowler on the nuances of test coupling.
• 914) It is sad how things are designed these days. I can barely see the buttons on this Sony DVD player, and my elderly parents sure can't.
• 913) I think everybody should sell their Corel stock, if they have any. I just tried to register to download their 30 day trial products and a) the web form was a nightmare of usability suck and b) the registration system returned web server errors so I couldn't get any products. That so totally makes me trust that they know what they are doing, yessir. See ya, I'm off to buy Photoshop!
• 912) Audiophiles are funny (as in, "completely nuts").
• 911) I'm not a big fan of Python, but maybe Django would make it all worthwhile?
• 910) I think exokernels are, at least, an idea worth masticating. (Too bad the page was last updated in 1998; the stench of a dead project.)
• 909) People are stupid, ergo technology is stupid. Add in terrorists, and you have our modern world.
• 908) Neat, Java and Quicktime in harmony.
• 907) People are dumb. People make things. Those things are dumb. An example: 99.9% of the web advertisements I do not want. I steadfastly ignore them. However, say that there's that 0.1% that - frighteningly enough - I find myself intersted in. Well, first, it is usually some baiting ("get a free Xbox!") which is, of course, utter claptrap ("read the small print"). But say that the baiting works (bastards), here is where the kicker comes in: most ad spaces are under some kind of rotation scheme. So if I leave the page before checking out the advertisement, the only one that actually succeeded in catching my eye, then I'll probably never see that ad ever again! When I come back to the page something else is shown in that spot. So then entire system has completely failed - it fails 99.9% of the time, because I find advertising annoying as all hell, and then the 0.1% of the time when I might actually be interested against my better judgement, there are design issues that risk utterly losing that tenuous interest. Which means: no deal.
• 906) Here's another thing I utterly hate: 'blogs' that have comments on the same page because that way, the scroll bar no longer tells you how long the core article is. Genius.
• 905) Holy crow, Unicode from hell!
• 904) It makes me angry that the only way to get nicely tiled application windows in most systems (MS Windows, Java Swing, etc.) appears to be the Multiple Document Interface, which is made of Pure Evil (like in Time Bandits).
• 903) It kills me to see people making their own atomic types [pdf] (in the taxonomy / programming language sense) and not having Boolean in there. Did nobody learn from the mistakes of SQL?
• 902) Well, duh! (But important to have said.)
• 901) Jotspot sounds possibly cool.
• 900) I like the idea of screencasting, but only if people stick to non-proprietary video encodings. I'm sick of being on my linux box and only having a .wmv to download.
• 899) Any sufficiently complicated system will have many parameters to tune. Most times, that means you have a completely impenetrable, unprovable, black magic, arbitrary, random, frustrating and simply evil situation at hand because you simply cannot know the correct best way to set the parameters. So I think the systems have to be self-adjusting. But, then somebody has to write the self-adjusting part and, you know, test it and/or prove it is correct, ha ha!
• 898) While I use Gmail, I pretty much utterly loathe it. My most recent complaint is that the UI is inconsistent - in some views, the way to trash something is via a pop-up/drop-down menu, but in other views there is no entry in the menu, rather a first class button in the UI. Whatever, man, whatever.
• 897) Read "The Best Software Writing" via the web, care of Google.
• 896) It is funny that the Silicon Valley Computer Human Interaction's web site has a horrible usability blunder. To wit: I saw a talk last night and I want to find information on it. Their calendar automatically only shows future events. There is a link for past events, but it is apparently only for all past events, and clicking on the link results in a long wait for the server! All this for a program that happened less than 24 hours ago - it just isn't commensurate.
• 895) I always wondered what happened to Autonomy.
• 894) Learn a little about MySQL query optimization.
• 893) I think the whole "in anger" terminology thing is just ugly and, well, dumb.
• 892) Many things require that you estimate risk, so maybe these references will learn you up a thing or two.
• 891) Since you have many machines sitting around in your garage gathering dust, why not cluster them and compute PI? Or something.
• 890) At the time of writing, when I vote I get to use a horrible electronic system. It doesn't give any paper trail. It uses ALL UPPER CASE to display things. It doesn't list things in a standard numerical order. These are all things which, to a suspicious type like myself, would make it seem like the people designing the system were trying to make it as easy as possible to alter the results of the election and have things to blame it on other than their own outrightly unethical behaviour.
• 889) It makes me angry that the whole world, myself included, has taken to putting .tla extensions on all file names.
• 888) Apparently, there is no standard bug reporting format in e.g.: XML. Wouldn't that be nice and possibly useful?
• 887) Crackpot, or cool: Fight! Funny how it was written by somebody supposedly concerned with education, and yet pretty much totally failed to explain things in a way I could understand. This helps make it a little more clear. To boot, this thesis [pdf] is apparently a good read. (This other one [pdf] I have yet to read.)
• 886) People simply do not grasp what automation and technolyzation should really be all about. For example, at work we have a very simple, very crappy web-based calendar for scheduling a conference room. However, it in no way has any smarts, it is nothing more than a bulletin board. So if conflicts arise, it does nothing to draw your attention to them (e.g.: a meeting which is scheduled to happen every week conflicts with a special meeting schedule to happen in the same room three months in the future). People apparently think that by using this software they have a technical solution to the scheduling problem, but it clearly doesn't do what it really ought to do. It is a half-assed solution. Oh well! I guess that is what you get when people are technically unsavvy cheap-asses...
• 885) Here's another example showing that people are, generally speaking, utterly stupid: an ecommerce site that claims, "Please note: Mozilla FireFox Version 1.0.7 can not display this Web Shop properly. Please use Internet Explorer or a different FireFox version." Right, because you want to make sure that people can't buy your bloody products. Good luck to ya, Jerry.
• 884) When it comes to technology, speed matters.
• 883) Why UI sucks: we can't even get the scroll bar right. There are things which move when the scroll bar is there or when it isn't, and so while you are clicking on the same spot, since things have changed for some reason, your click causes entirely different behaviour. That sucks.
• 882) XML sucks. Getting software set up to parse and validate XML sucks. But, if you ever do get it working, I think it is pretty neat to have DTD validation checking. It suits my anal side, as it were.
• 881) I love how people say "don't use tables, use CSS!" and then there isn't a single tutorial I can find via Google that tells me how to do that. There are lots about how to have columns and stuff, but none have managed to explain how to convert any arbitrary table. In particular, it has been killing me that when I use divs, they all start on a new line. I finally came across an article that explicitly mentions that gotchya: "We use div (division) containers for our table-replacement containers. These are called block level elements in CSS mark-up, meant for largish blocks of mark-up and effectively force a line break before and after content. We use the span tag for smaller bits of content as it is an inline element, which means it won't disrupt layout." Finally! Somebody tells me something I actually need to know, namely that I should have been using span all along, instead of div. God, hell. The kicker is that They use divs with various parameters to make them not have the line breaks. And spans can easily be made to do breaks, so there really isn't a solid rhyme or reason that you can quickly glean from all the supposedly helpful examples on the web. Yay. I think it all derives from the fact that CSS is overly complex.
• 880) It sure is nice how many of the links on the official W3 Learning CSS page are bloody well broken. Has the W3 never even heard of link checking software?
• 879) Re-stating the very, very obvious: the design of the whole modern World Wide Web is fundamentally broken. It could only work in a world where all browsers are perfect (yet every browser has at least one serious CSS bug - both IE6 and Firefox screw up the Webmonkey CSS examples) , and software of any size is never perfect. To which we add the kicker that old browser versions stick around for a long time. Face it, they couldn't even agree on how to render basic HTML, and you think JavaScript and CSS are good ideas? Even if DENG exists, not everybody is going to be using it.
• 878) Why is it so hard to answer the question: "how much of a given computer's resources does program X eat up?" Seems like our OS tools are pretty lame if we can't even do that.
• 877) What I'd like to see: a site that reviews the code of open source projects, so I can find out how much of a piece of poo it all is before wasting time trying to hack into it all on my lonesome.
• 876) A great example of technology desperately in search of actual talent.
• 875) Yes, Victoria, natural languages are hard.
• 874) Uh, this guy has completely failed to understand Darwin, I guess?
• 873) I think these instructions are well drawn; the duo-tone approach is great!
• 872) I love how Gmail says "Inbox (1)" but there is no unread email and in other parts of the UI it just says "Inbox".
• 871) For the love of unix, do not have --quiet make more messages appear, and only --Quiet make things silent. God hell, Batman!
• 870) I love how Perl has only 3 types and yet so often the docs for something (like HTML::Template) do not tell you anything about the types. Does output() return a scalar or an array? Bah, humbug.
• 869) 'dselect' is an obviously bloody stupid name because it is too close to 'deselect'.
• 868) Some fun things with my iBook ubuntu linux setup:
  1. The cd player skips when playing any CD. It will play like 5 seconds of music, then stop for a second, then play 5 more seconds of music, then stops...
  2. So I tried to rip the CD so I could listen to it via some low bit-rate format, but I wasn't hooked up to the internet and the ripper stuck looking for album data, with no apparent way to tell it to skip that.
  3. Then, after the ripper gave up on the internet many minutes later, I told it to rip the CD and it put up a progress bar and everything, yet the CD never even spun up! I could manually eject the bloody thing and yet the ripper still claimed to be ripping!
  4. Mute doesn't mute things like sounds from the keyboard prefs dialog. Great. Or shutdown sounds. Or startup sounds.
  5. Going to the full volume prefs shows a very wide dialog box (like 500 pixels wide) with a tiny strip of UI controls down the middle (like 100 pixels wide).
  6. Mute doesn't mute the headphones.
  7. Mute doesn't mute ^g in rxvt.
  8. rxvt doesn't have a way to turn off the audio bell that I could find.
  9. rxvt's +vb doesn't stop making beeps.
  10. The Synaptic repository update progress bar is complete and utter crap! It goes full then empty then progresses spastically like four or five times during the process of downloading the files. It is basically utterly useless and the person who put it there should be taken out and shot.
• 867) Some things that drive me crazy at conferences or presentations:
  1. Stupid gradients for slide backgrounds, in stupid colors.
  2. Blue foreground (text, icons, whatever) on a blue background.
  3. Or, blue on black.
  4. Or, red on blue.
  5. I hate it when people move the computer mouse pointer around on the slide, for any reason. Get a laser pointer for the projection screen.
  6. Some idiot had the top 1/3rd of the slide fading down to like 10% opacity and revealing part 'b' of the slide by fading that bottom 2/3rd up. Since nobody could read the 10% part, get rid of it and make them two distinct slides.
  7. I hate that (Windows?) font with the large lower lip on the 'e'.
  8. Somebody's G4 laptop said ' has unexpectedly quit', interrupting the slideshow. It wasn't PowerPoint that had failed, no, but it still had to put up the dialog box over the person's full-screen slide, ruining the presentation.
  9. If you say it, but it doesn't appear on the slides, then you didn't say it as far as the audience is concerned.
• 866) Why are there things in XML (like DOCTYPE) that do not have a closing slash?
• 865) When I go into high contrast white-on-black in Acrobat reader, instead of black-on-white, the images fail to get converted and basically disappear. Somehow that doesn't strike me as being very accessible.
• 864) Another genius moment in graphic design: so, like, where is question 23?
• 863) I want to try Araix Merge because I hear it is good. They send me a trial serial number in email which I have to copy and paste into their web form to get the product download. When I try to double click on the serial number in Outlook Express, it doesn't select the whole thing because of funky characters (punctuation) used in the serial number. Tiple-clicking selects the whole bloody document. Nice one, Araxis.
• 862) I don't understand why Xen uses rings instead of just calling them layers. Are they just trying to sound cool? I think it only serves to make really stupid diagrams that would be a hell of a lot more clear if they were simply flat layers.
• 861) Shooting offence: using the word "bold" in anything, especially marketing bumph. You know, like "bold new taste." Shyeah, I've got your bold new taste right here, buddy!
• 860) Supposedly, filesystems have creation and modification date information per file. Of course, if you then go and move the file around via FTP or something, you lose that information. Sweet.
• 859) Here's an example of how not to format text [pdf] (page 63). The font face is hard to read, the fonts are the wrong size, the inter-line spacing is wrong, and the fancy curvy graphic design only serves to make it harder to read things because the curve is too 'loud'. When the curve is on the left (page 60), then it is even harder to read the body paragraphs. Score!
• 858) I would like for my web browsers to hide the mouse cursor whenever I use the scroll wheel, or after a few moments of mouse idleness.
• 857) I'm the kind of person who hates the fact that everybody is now calling them 'podcasts' instead of just 'recordings'. How on Earth does somebody get away with claiming that a podcast is anything new?!
• 856) I am not even sure if the idea is any good, but certainly the execution leaves a hell of a lot to be desired.
• 855) Some people, when faced with a problem, say, "I know! I'll use cygwin!" Now they have two problems.
• 854) Another reason to hate 'progress': People have their laptop hooked up to a projector to give a PowerPoint presentation and you get to see the cursor they are moving around, like to click on an animation clip to get it playing. It completely breaks any aesthetic quality of the presentation. A proper presentation would let the audience not have to know about the 'man behind the curtain' but our technology doesn't support that. The kicker is that 4 out of 5 people will leave the expletive cursor lying in the middle of the animation after they've clicked on it, so it is sitting in the way of the animation! Hate!
• 853) Trying to install some Perl modules in a Debian system sucks ass! The utility dh-make-perl worked on some, but on others it fails with various error messages that are utterly not documented. Yay! This is lots of fun! A great use of my time! Face it: unless everything is under One True Pacakge System, you are just going to end up facing this kind of utter crap: having to try to get multiple package systems to live together. This is why I stopped using OS X, because there were like at least 3 different ways to install stuff, and none of them seemed to know about the other. Yay! We're so advanced! Not!
• 852) Hey, if you have a restaurant, and you have a web site, how about putting the hours of operation on there? Duh!
• 851) I love going to a video game review site and clicking to have the reviews sorted by score, and having the result be that I get to see the lowest scores first. Because, yeah, that's precisely why I wanted to sort! So I could go buy utter shyte games!
• 850) Nice that the Open Usability site has some basic problems with their UI!
• 849) Some recommendations for people sending in resumes to job openings (these are obviously my own personal bias):
  1. Whatever file you submit, make sure the file name isn't something generic like "resume.txt" because there will be lots of those, and it is a pain in the ass to have to rename them all. Make it something like "YourLastName-JobKeyWord.txt" instead.
  2. Keep it short! Get to the bloody point! Tailor your resume to the job description! If somebody is asking for Oracle, then at least put that first thing in the file.
  3. Make sure to have a phone number listed, and an email adress that you check often. Personally, I just want to use email at first, but other folks might want to call you instead. Whatever, make it possible for them to get in touch however they want, duh!
  4. Education should come after work experience. Otherwise, it looks like you just graduated and are looking for your first job.
  5. Send it in plain ASCII. I kinda hate HTML. I kinda hate Word. I kinda hate PDF. For heaven's sake, don't send in some bizzare thing like MS Outlook 2003 .vcf files! (Also? put your bleedin' name on the thing, and not with some stupid Word header/footer thing that I can't easily copy and paste w/out having to go into some stupid bloody Word mode.)
  6. If you send a Word document, make sure that it doesn't cause my Word to show red or green squiggly lines everywhere.
  7. Similarly, if I run a basic spelling checker over the resume it should only have problems with domain-specific terms; there should not be any blatant spelling mistakes or typos.
  8. Watch your language! "My collateral is attached for your perusal." Ahem.
  9. Here's another take care of craigslist.
• 848) I heartily concurr: linux sucks when it comes to setup and configuration.
• 847) Funny how OSS folks tend to freak out about lock-in and the WinTel hegemony, and yet they tend to assume that everybody is running on some x86 compatible chip. So if you are running on something else (e.g.: an old Mac) quite often you are SOL because nobody supports it, and even if they do they don't keep everything clearly distinguished and labelled.
• 846) I think my virus checking software is to blame, since it scans everything. When I double click to start a software installer, my machine goes into molasses mode for a good minute or two! There's nothing indicating that the installer is running, unless you bring up the process list and look at what is hogging the CPU. Most ordinary folks wouldn't know how to do that. So the machine has seemingly become broken, but actually the installer is furiously doing something, maybe unpacking data files, or God knows what. Eventually the installer dialog box appears. Anyway, all I know is, this is crap! From a usability perspective, this is completely and utter crap! The virus checker thing should make it more obvious it is interfering like that.
• 845) I recently got my first MP3 player, because it was $20 at a surplus store. It works OK, and for $20 nothing about it can really bug me all that much. However, this thing probably cost $100 when it was first released on the market, so its foibles would have really bugged the crap out of me if I had spent that much on it. The most annoying thing is that even though I put files on it named "01 - Chumbawumba - Salt Fare", "02 - Chumbawumba - Jacob's Ladder", etc., it nevertheless is playing them in some completely other order. This isn't an iPod Mini where it is supposed to like always be playing in random order, so it just seems like completely horrible usability! Especially because I have no idea what I would have to do in terms of renaming the files to get the stupid think to play them in the order they were on the album. Why does everything always have to suck?
• 844) Color considered harmful, or 2 bits are better than 24, or progress is nothing of the sort: When designing a UI, there comes a time when you want to add something but not have it stand out too much. For example, you want to leave items in the drop-down menus, but you want them to indicate that they are not available in the current mode. Traditionally, that is done by "graying out" (or "greying out"?) the relevant text. The original Macintosh and Lisa display only had 2 bits for screen depth, so they ended up stippling the black and white pixels together. In modern day, we have more bits so we can actually use the color gray. Here's the problem: different displays have drastically different characteristics when it comes to showing colors; The Excel spreadsheet we have has a light pink background which turns into rusty dark red via the digital projector. So if I design something which tries to use subtle colors, I run the risk of having them either wash our entirely on your display, or having them turn into annoyingly bold items. I just can't win. So, in the end, I actually think stippling is the better implementation, in many ways!
• 843) If you wondered about the web continuation vs. REST stuff, this is an educational read (if a bit on the programming theory geeky side).
• 842) This MS wireless mouse will start to blink the LED when it figures there has been no motion, rather than leaving the LED on steady which expends more battery power. What if instead it had a simple binary motion sensor? That way it could totally turn off the LED and even instantly get back into sampling when you moved the mouse again. I'm guessing that by now, all wireless optical mice do that?
• 841) I! Hate! #ifdefs! Well, at least when used to force one file to support multiple targets, because then it is all to easy to end up in a situation where you don't know if you are looking at code which actually gets compiled in or not. Also, anybody who releases code with #if 0 must die.
• 840) While abstractions can help to make software more easily ported, you have to consider which way the abstraction is done: is it done 'on top', or 'underneath'? Example: Haskell's search path for modules has syntax like ".:{Home}/lib/hugs/packages/*:/usr/local/lib/hugs/packages/* which doesn't look like Windows or Unix (although it is clearly closer to the latter). What the hell does the syntax "{Home}" really mean? Is that just $HOME or %HOME% or what? I'm guessing that no matter what system type you run on, the path synatx is like that. So there is some abstraction going on for the Hugs implementors, and users, once they grok it. Well, and the probably really important thing is probably that the source files can use that syntax. So that is the 'on top' abstraction. But it is very frustrating for a user new to the system who is just trying to get it to work on their host OS. In that case, it would be better if the abstraction were something that let the paths be done in the native OS syntax, and have Hugs know how to handle that on whatever system it finds itself. That way, the knowledge the installing person has about the OS can transfer over to getting Hugs to work. That would be the 'underneath' abstraction, sort of like how Java attempts to handle any native file system path separator. (Then there's the whole naming convention for modules. Java package names translate directly into directories, so I'm guessing that when Hugs says "Can't find Hugs.Prelude" it is looking for Hugs/Prelude.hs, but maybe not! This all segues into my hate of all documentation, especially when there is almost none. It all absolutely falls under the rubric of Woody Allen's opening joke in Annie Hall. (Turns out I was right, and there is a doc that Google finally found that says that's how the '.' works.) In particular, I like how Googling for what appear to be very standard Hugs error messages results in only hits on source code. Ha ha! Ha! Ha.
• 839) So very cute an introduction to Normal Form you've never before seen.
• 838) Somtimes I am amazed at just how much of a UI genius I really am (OK, that's mostly tongue-in-cheek). To wit: When I use the back button in a web browser to get a pop-up list of the short recent history, so I can perhaps go skipping back over a few pages, I find it hard to figure out where I want to go. Usually it is back to my Google query, but that can be hard to see because the title for the Google page has Google at the end. Well, even if they had it at the front, there would be other situations where I'd have to do a lot of parsing to figure out exactly which I want to pick - I mean, I know what I want, the hard part is mapping that onto the data presented. So! My suggestion is to make that particular UI suck less by showing a better history. This is a mock-up of a rough idea, and would have to go through real UI development before it could be considered solid, but hopefully you get the gist. It works by connecting those things which were connected by you clicking on links in pages. A break happens when you type in a new address. Also, an indentation is made when by following a hyperlink you get to a different domain (for some smart definition of the word domain).
• 837) I love how linux has logs, yet when I use 'dmesg' to view a log there are no timestamps for the log entries. Great. Did that event happen last millenium? Or two minutes ago? What is the bloody point of a log without timestamps?
• 836) Oh. My. God. Opera doesn't yet implement scrolling lists of bookmarks in the bookmarks menu. No, they use a list that has a sub-list, etc. ad nauseum. This completely fails when you have lots of bookmarks, e.g.: if you import a long list from Firefox. This will prevent people, like me, from switching to Opera.
• 835) I boycott Amazon because of their software patent practices. It kills me, however, that all other e-commerce sites have completely broken, stupid, hateful, evil, spiteful and just plain retarded check out systems.
• 834) trac sucks because in the listings, if you click on whitespace it actually takes you to the file whose name is on the same line as the whitespace. I hate that.
• 833) All I'm saying is, if you use ASCII graphics and you don't keep them under 80 columns, you are a bloody idiot who deserves whatever comes your way. (In fact, if you do anything in text, then keep it under 80 columns, you bastards!)
• 832) I really hate it when people get their navigation all wrong. For left-to-right languages, Next should come after Previous!
• 831) Look, I don't care how large or small a project you are running. If your email lists / forums do not have text search, then you simply suck. You suck a lot. Your project utterly deserves to wither and die.
• 830) Opera has got to have the most utterly crack-smokin' stupid dumb weird UI of any browser. It is as if they are purposefully trying to prevent people from wanting to use their software! To wit: when you do a print preview in IE or Firefox under Windows, they bring up a new window for the contents. Opera, on the other hand, turns your current view into the print preview view. So when you instinctively close the window, hoping to get back to the original page - you now have no page.
• 829) Maybe you can simulate it with mini personal branches, but I think that a gaping hole in revision control systems is that they don't let you check in code that is broken. Bear with me: ther are times when you want to checkpoint what you've done, because you might go off on an investigatory tangent, even though what you currently have to check in isn't entirly working. So I think you should be able to check in so you have a place to restore from, but you should mark your checkin as explicitly something that other people shouldn't get. A personal brach. Of course, then the system must also have tools to help make merging of changes other people commit into your personal branch.
• 828) Wikis seem to often put up an icon when a link is external. But they fail to show an icon for when the link is internal, but has no content. Like, you click hoping to learn something and instead you get a page saying you have to start it! Bastard!
• 827) If web browsers are such hot poop, then how come they don't give me a view of file systems (either via file://, or ftp://, or http://, or whatever) like MS File Explorer, or any other hierarchical viewer, where I could see more than on directory's contents at a time?
• 826) "MJD: I'm still upset about Amazon's ridiculous 'one-click' patent, and I'm still boycotting them. Software patents like Amazon's threaten the livelihoods of all programmers, including mine, and I don't want to give my support to a company that means me ill. They dropped their suit against Barnes & Noble, but the terms of the settlement were never disclosed, so we don't know what happened, and Amazon could turn around at any moment and sue anyone for violating their patent. So the issue is unresolved. I'd like people to buy my book from anyone but Amazon. My web site has an affiliate link to either to Barnes and Noble or to Powell's Books, depending on who isn't out of stock at the moment. I get a small kickback from this, but I really don't feel strongly about it. I do feel strongly about not supporting Amazon. There are a lot of places to get books online; it's not hard to buy books from a company with less abusive business practices than Amazon."
• 825) Directories are the lamest thing in the universe, especially when it comes to dealing with installing software. It should all be in a magic database that handles versions and aliases and bidirectional pointers. The other (I think less optimal) option would be to have as many virtual file systems as you want, all with the same overlapping directory strucutre, and then tools for mapping things into and out of them per application.
• 824) A sign of how sad software is: pretty much anything you download and build yourself lacks a "test" rule; "make test" does nothing.
• 823) When writing documentation for computer wares, if directories are involved at all then you should give examples of how the source and destination directories are going to be interpreted. A bad example is the CVS man page, a good example (although I'm still always getting it wrong) is the rsync man page. Right up front, the rsync documentation gives examples of how the source will get to the destination - will it create a subdirectory, or what? (In addition, all such software should have the equivalent of make's -n, so you can try it out and see what happens without actually risking creating bits in the wrong place.) It should be common courtesy, common usability here, folks.
• 822) Sourceforge sucks buttocks. Some misc examples, culled from entirely too many to mention:
  1. "HTML tags will appear in your post as text." should be simply "Do not use HTML tags." or "HTML tags not supported." or something along those lines. This is basic usability.
  2. The new user registration process says "Opt-in lists" and then shows you two mailing lists where the checkboxes are already checked, which clearly means they are opt-out, you jerks.
  3. I post a message with the term "autogen.sh" in it. I then use the SF forum search to look for "autogen" and it finds... nothing. I search for "autogen.sh" and it does find it. So, basically, given that SF is all about source code and computer terms, this search is about 97% useless. Holy hell on a pogo stick.
• 821) Just a friendly little warning: While Ubuntu works pretty well for a simple desktop ppc machine (in other words, and old Macintosh), you are not going to have any fun trying to do development on it; nobody really supports it. Sure, they might claim they support it, but then when you try to actually build mono it fails miserably, and there's no helpful answers to be found. Ditto things like O'Caml which just completely failed to work, even though it was installed from packages. The only thing I've vaguely had any success with is the Java supplied by IBM (evil scary license agreement involved, there). Yay. So I'll be skipping F#, apparently, and sticking with Scala (or Haskell?!). (From what I can tell, if you even use something like AMD64 you are going to be sad. The hegemony really is 32 bit i686.)
• 820) Linux versioning kills me, because it tends to only be in the name of files, not embedded as metadata. Mix in the whacky naming that distros like ubuntu use, and the lack of decent error messages from configure scripts (it says glib-2.0 isn't version >= 1.3.11, but it doesn't tell me what file it looked and and what version it thinks that file is), and you could well be hating linux life. I know I am.
• 819) A word of warning: there are apparently no good GUI diff tools for linux. xxdiff forces you to give it file names from the command line, so I'm not sure how anybody could claim that it is a GUI. meld is slow and evil and horrible and plain broken (e.g.: it has what looks to be a history of files you've opened before, but it never gets populated). kdiff3 uses KDE, and I! Hate! KDE! etc. WinMerge on the PC would be better than any of these even though it has its failings, and, of course, Araxi$ would be better than any of anything anywhere. Even when I e.g.: get xxdiff going, the UI is more akin to something a just flushed down the toilet this morning than to usable software. Holy heck. I don't understand how anybody can actually use linux to get any real work done - life after Araxis, without Araxis, is hell.
• 818) Maybe it is Solaris 10, maybe it is just our sys admin, but why don't we have GUIs for doing things like dealing with restarting services?
• 817) Mark another success for Windows and the Web! (I'm not sure if it is Windows failing, or browsers in general - it doesn't work in either Firefox or IE. Or Opera.) To wit: text with a colored background (like what you get when you use Google to search for terms) doesn't have the background color in Print Preview, nor do the colors get copied e.g.: to MS Word. I don't really want to try printing it out and waste precious earthly resources since it already is utterly failing to appear to work. Nice one, humanity, Nice!
• 816) It make me mad, or just sad, that revision control systems are apparently too complicated for your average non-geek to use, for anything other than critical situations (judging by the responses of coworkers). I think one solution is to give up on revision control (the main thing I care about is history of who touched the file and diffs, having reasonable comments is gravy). I think a better solution is to have our file systems stop sucking so much and get with the program! Bloody hell, the VMS file system at least had automatic versioning, if nothing else.
• 815) For software to drastically improve, I currently think that we need to be more formal. For example, we need to find out how things will perform e.g.: what their big-Oh is for, say, space requirements. Sure, I learned all that in college, but how much do I ever have to use it day-to-day? Given how many people take up programming with no formal background, how much can you expect them to grok it? So I think either we need to only hire people who know and do the math, or we need our systems to do much more of the math for us. To some degree, that is what libraries are for; somebody takes the time to supposedly make sure the library doesn't suck. But then you get into wiring up all those libraries, and you are back in the situation where you really ought to be proving things to make sure the system doesn't simply outright suck...
• 814) More proof that everything sucks, because fundamentally people suck (democracy being where we get what we deserve, capitalism being the worst system except all others, etc.): Databases don't have boolean types, and they also don't give you performant arbitrary-length text fields.
• 813) "This morning I declined to write a popular article about the question 'Can machines think?' I told the editor I thought the question as ill-posed and uninteresting as the question 'Can submarines swim?' But the editor, being a social scientist, was unmoved: he thought the latter a very interesting question too." -Dijkstra.
• 812) Can you believe that Windows still makes it a nightmare to move all your software to a new machine? And for this they rule the world? RPM can still lead to hell. So can apt-get or yum, etc. The Mac almost gets it right with the applications as self-contained worlds, but then what about moving preferences over? What about when you have to install something from Fink or DarwinPorts? Software installation and maintenance is such a complete and utter dirty failure of the computing world.
• 811) O'Caml-based language of the moment: Acute, for distributed programming.
• 810) If your user interface has tabs that are generated by the user, e.g.: in a web browser or in a spreadsheet, then bloody well support the ability to re-arrange them.
• 809) On the one hand, it is impressive that there is so much Linux stuff available for PowerPC machines (at least i.e.: New World Macs). On the other hand, it is impressive how little there is: JOGL, UML, Xen, etc. all only currently work on x86. (Note, however, that I got JOGL working and submitted a description of how to make it go to the JOGL forums.)
• 808) All source control systems that I have seen one, and most suck in two ways: First, they don't let you copy history from one file to another (in the case where you forget to use the control system's version of 'mv'). Second, they don't let you append comments to checkin comments after the fact. (Maybe svn lets you do the latter via the whacky properties?)
• 807) Somebody claimed that you can replace any HTML tags with DIVs and appropriate CSS. I don't know CSS that well, but I was unaware that it included variables one could increment, so I don't see how <ol> could be done. And, personally, I really want a reverse-order list!
• 806) Instead of running the password cracker on all the passwords after the fact, use it to prevent folks from entering bad passwords. Yeah, well, systems do that and then you realize that it is really, really annoying. Passwords, or even passphrases, are just fundamentally evil. We need something better.
• 805) Counting is hard, especially when it comes to invervals. There's the issue of being open or (partially) closed. Then you have the choice of starting at zero (like some programming languages) or one (a more 'common sense', if mathematically flawed, choice). Choosing 0 means math tends to works out more easily; lengths are (end-start). If you choose 1, then your intra-segment length is (end-start+1), yet your iter-segment length is (start-end). Whacky, fun, stuff. It isn't actually hard when you think about it, yet the fact is there are plenty of off-by-one errors in people's software!
• 804) It blows my mind that people make charts like this. How horribly redundant and ugly! Not to mention, color-blind unfriendly!
• 803) The UI 'feature' of re-arranging things as I use them pisses me off. MS Windows does it, Firefox does it for bookmarks, etc. Here's my idea, at least for bookmarks: Stop messing with my data! Instead, make a new, parallel, bookmark folder and update that automatically. I can go use it if I want, but I'm not forced to feel the hate anywhere along the way. Unlike the current implementations.
• 802) Seems like no matter what one does, one comes across crappy UI (the story is in the comments). Is that because UI is hard, or because people suck? Both, I'd wager, but I think the former is greatly enhanced by the latter!
• 801) Here's a nice example of why usability is really quite nuanced. Although, it annoys me to hear of a usability goof that makes me think nobody at Apple has ever even used an iPod! Also, you should read just about anything by John Allen Paulos.
• 800) Nope, I don't use blogging software. They seem to all really suck; here's my blogspot. I guess WordPress is the least crappy one I've seen, maybe I'll wend my way over there some day. Although, I suspect in the end the only person who might care would be moi.
• 799) An interesting keyboard layout (e.g.: for soft keyboards). The vowel arrangement seems particularly nice.
• 798) Things that beep suck. I think other people, other generations, don't find that annoying, so I'm sad. One thing that I find doubly hellacious is when somebody is nice enough to turn off their cell phone entirely... but the thing plays a tune while turning off. Holy heck in a handbasket.
• 797) "It turned out that during the server reboot, the Windows 2000 operating system had just fallen a bit behind in recognizing the "missing" drive, and when it was time to mount the database, Windows told Oracle the drive "wasn't there." Of course, by the time I performed a shutdown and restart, Windows had finished making the disk drive available, and voila! everything was once again copasetic. Our team eventually found the root cause of the BSOD with some help from Microsoft. We traced it down to a Windows driver conflict between the OS and SNMP-based software that is supposed to monitor the server for hardware failures, including (ironically) disk drive failures." From DatabaseJournal.
• 796) Our servlet web server was freaking out every now and then. I would never have figured it out, but apparently the problem was that the behaviour of the thread pools and their timeouts interacted with the firewall network connection timeout in such a way as to end up with zombie threads. Zoikes. Computer systems are just plain evil.
• 795) The other thing I hate about wikis is that their default formatting sucks. Take a look at the tables on this page and note that the borders are way too strong. Oh, and that they are using a table at all is sort of obnoxious. They should really be using CSS and div, duh! (Here's a quick & dirty example possible fix, which still uses evil tables.)
• 794) All I'm saying is, the Apache project could stand to have an explanation of how all the sub-projects relate. There's Apache HTTPD, there's Tomcat, there's Cocoon, there's Turbine... and there's a who bunch more web related things! Very confusing.
• 793) As a friend said, "We're lucky to even have ASCII." Really puts it all in perspective, doesn't it? I'd follow it up with "and XML" although Unicode is a pretty scary beast.
• 792) Wikis have some nice ideas in them (the formatting syntax not being one of them), but they run into the problem of having the same system serve two masters; there's the content that people have added, and then there's the metaspace of working on the content. It sucks when you click on a link and get to a page that is actually an empty page because quite often the Wiki format doesn't make that obvious enough. The user's brain is looking to suck in information, and starts to do that, then falters because the information doesn't make sense, then has to stop and pull back and understand that they've gone off the edge of the world into meta-Wiki-space. It is not a well designed experience, yuck! The kicker, to me, is that the Wiki system should be able to know ahead of time not to have the hyperlink to the blank page. Instead, it should have a little icon next to the source text to let you create the page. Having the link is misleading.
• 791) Gnome seemingly really doesn't want you to see dot files. That's totally and utterly retarded and wrong and I hate everybody.
• 790) I think linux apps, things like Gnome apps, are maybe starting to try to use file name extensions to determine what a file is, rather than examining the magic number or doing further heuristsics. If that's the case, like how Apple is using file extensions, then we might as well just dust off and nuke the place from orbit.
• 789) I figured I'd give SmartSVN a try. I mean, it does have "Smart" in the name so how bad could is possibly be? Yeah, you can guess the answer to that, can't you? So I get it to check out a repository and it dies part of the way through with a dialog box saying that Java has run out of memory. It tells me to manually go edit the .cfg to increase the memory for the Java heap. Yeah, already we're seeing the machinery behind the thin curtain. So I do that, and then I re-launch the program and tell it to continue the check out... and it cannot, because svn has locked the directory. The dialog box is just a report of the svn error, so-called SmartSVN doesn't actually know diddly, so it doesn't offer me a way to get out of this predicament (svn itself is saying I should try using 'svn cleanup'). Yay! So with the very first operations, this software has already proven itself nigh utterly useless! Sweet! (Oh, yeah, and the Help menu doesn't actually even contain any help. At all.) So the (next) kicker is that it runs out of memory again, but gives me the same errors message which shows the old memory values. In summary, yes I am damned sure I want to remove the application from my computer.
• 788) Apparently, the computer world doesn't even know how to do basic math, so we've got huge legacies of horribly wrong code!
• 787) I tried gaim on Windows, and boy does it suck! The irony is that it isn't surprising; this is exactly the kind of thing I have literally come to expect from pretty much all open source software - completely broken, stupid, wrong, evil user interface and usability.
  1. When you run it for the first time, it brings up three different little windows. That's insane. Especially because one of them is the Login window, and yet I haven't se up any accounts yet. Of course, the other windows are for accounts. But if you close the Login window then all the windows go away.
  2. Its pop-up menu interaction is totally different from regular Windows. Nice.
  3. I tried connecting to Yahoo! and it got an error. It put the error in a dialog box that was on the screen for maybe three seconds. How am I supposed to debug the connection problem?
• 786) You gotta love Sybase.
  1. So this whole Sybase installation and configuration thing is once again hilighting something horribly lacking from systems: built-in knowledge about what depends on what. So if I didn't e.g.: set up a backup DB, and later need to add one, the name of it is apparently crucial. How am I supposed to know or find all the dependencies and get things right? What if it were some more complicated configuration issue? The system should know all about it, and be able to help me through the task.
  2. No, really, I find Sybase to be worth every damned penny. Here's an example from the 'Troubleshooting and Error Messages Guide': "Can't open a connection to site `%S_SRVID'. See the error log file in the SQL Server boot directory. Explanation: Refer to the writeup for this error."
  3. Computers suck because humans suck: Sybase makes you create "devices" which can basically just be files on whatever disks you have. But then when you use those devices, sybase says it is doing something "on disk ". Argh! (Also, they are very, very inconsistent in their use of reboot, shutdown, restart, etc. in the docs.)
  4. Another $ybase documentation gem (emphasis mine): "sp_helpdevice may report erroneous negative numbers for device numbers greater than 126." Now how much would you pay? I also like how they say "the server need not be rebooted" which I saw as "oh no I have to reboot the server" because that is what I have come to expect from machines. Upcase the 'not', folks.
  5. Don't you love how pretty much all ASCII based SQL database interaction sucks in anything with less than like 200 columns of text?
  6. I know I love it when documentation says something like "check the next available vdevno by running sp_helpdevice" and then when you do that there is no entry in the output that is called "vdevno". I'm guessing the closes match is "device_number" but heck, who knows, you know?
  7. If your software costs more than $1000 and is in the 'mission critical' or 'central services' category, like a database, then you should provide a means of easily migrating dbs, including the setting up verbatim copies of installations elsewhere. Sybase?
  8. And then, once somebody has some computer system that works, they've invested so much and they've been hurt so much that they are pretty unlikely to go back and fix any rough edges, because that might end up breaking things in new and horrible ways. It is understandable, but it is ultimately an indictment of the entire computer thing.
  9. Computers suck because people suck: Don't even get me started on the whole K vs. k thing.
  10. Here's a free clue for all those dumb jerks who hilight search terms in result pages: give the user a means of toggling it! Grn. The fact that obvious stuff like that hasn't been done is further proof of the moral bankruptcy of humanity. Or something.
  11. We're installing various software at work. (I should say that we are attempting to get it installed, apparently against the wishes of the companies from which we bought it.) I thought that open source stuff was undocumented dog feces, but actually the stuff we are having the most trouble with is the proprietary stuff which costs thousands of dollars! So far: The installers don't work. They are corrupt (JRun) or they don't show any error messages (Sybase). And the -console mode for the installer still requires X11. (It also says things like "click the XYZ button" ha ha!) And say informative things like "Sever shut down" when they've in fact apparently succeeded (Macrovision)! Then, if you can figure out how to get around those issues, the licensing system doesn't work (Sybase) and you go to look for info on the product web site and the only hit from the search is actually locked so you can't read it unless you are one of the 2 official technical contacts. This whole world is utter shyte and I really do hope that they all go the way of the dodo as MySQL and Postgres and Tomcat and Cocoon grow. I swear, if I'm ever in the role of buying stuff I'm going to do my bloody damndest to stay the hell away from anything this is 'closed'.
  12. Don't you love how... the documentation for something you paid lots of $ for is hard to find on the vendor web site because their site navigation sucks, and all their terms sound the same anywya, and then when you do find the docs they are impossibly over your head and scary, so you end up Googling and finding something that doesn't actually suck and gives you a chance in heck of getting the install finished? Blah.
  13. It keeps telling me the size of things in either 2K or 8K page sizes. How about just bloody well telling me values in regular 1K units? Argh! The kicker is that their documentation's example output format is different from what I'm seeing. They haven't make their docs match the various versions of Sybase, thus heaping on more angst. And the other kicker is that their output is totally confusing because it has a value-in-units then a value-in-1K then a message that the units are 2K pages, but that juxtapositioning is obviously bad! The other other kicker is that when you do sp_configure "max memory" it ends up changing a value that was never printed by sp_helpconfig "max memory"!
• 785) I hate Google. How do I search for error code -15? The minus means to not find 15, and when I try to put it in quotes it just looks for 15 without the dash. Yay! Genius! Ship it!
• 784) Another reason that computers suck because people suck is that people cannot write documentation to save their lives. After looking through umpteen Google hits, and the docs for SecureCRT itself, I finally found something which successfully explains how to get X11 tunneling over SHH. Now if I can figure out how to get it to continue working when I su. The note I saw didn't work for me on solaris.
• 783) Computer systems continue to amaze me with how utterly broken they can be. At work, some folks say that using Pine and IMAP, when they write email and send it, it doesn't get saved in their 'Sent' folder. This is the kind of thing that, were computers not crap, should just never ever even remotely go wrong (or hard to figure out if it does).
• 782) I'm amazed that un*x systems are still in the bloody dark ages when it comes to administration. Here's a quote from the Sun 'useradd' man page - this isn't even like a technical note, it is up front in the docs. "The login (login) and role (role) fields accept a string of no more than eight bytes consisting of characters from the set of alphabetic characters, numeric characters, period (.), underscore (_), and hyphen (-). The first character should be alphabetic and the field should contain at least one lower case alphabetic character. A warning message will be written if these restrictions are not met. A future Solaris release may refuse to accept login and role fields that do not meet these requirements." Because having a GUI would make me a candy-ass? Yes, there is 'admintool'. But even the regular 'useradd' command-line utility could stand to be made a little less painful. Eh, I guess they figure you are either 100% lame and use a GUI or 100% hard-core and want a non-interactive scary CLI tool, and nothing in-between, dammit!
• 781) Paul Graham has one of the best graphics ever.
• 780) Another little example of why using Cygwin is just completely <expletive>ly half-assed and doomed to failure: when I type "exit" in my Cygwin shell window, half of the time it just logs me right out and closes the window, and the other half of the time it asks me "Terminate Batch Job (Y/N)?".
• 779) Sure, I'm using X through VNC, but I'm still impressed that copy and paste doesn't work correctly, and that xterm doesn't get the size right for less, so using less has strings scroll off the top. More works. Whatever.
• 778) Now that hyperlinks are everywhere, it is quite often the case that the only really interesting things on a page are said links. When that is the case, it bugs me to have prose with links instead of just a bullet list of links.
• 777) A neat shell would let you define everything that started with 'z' that didn't start with 'z' by default to be something which gets zcat in front of it, so you could write zsed, or whatever.
• 776) Computers suck because humans suck. So humans go and write something to suck less, and it just ends up sucking anyway.
• 775) I love it when (I do this all the time, but you still want to hire me, right?) I spend the whole day trying to figure out why 2 data sets are different, only to realize that the grep regexp filter I started out with was the simple cause of it all.
• 774) Note to future self: avoid buying hardware that uses special cables/adapters, because if you lose them you are screwed!
• 773) I love how open source software makes mose of the same egregious mistakes as the software it is possibly trying to replace. To wit, the lack of good documentation and advanced (in the sense of it e.g.: knowing about synonyms, not just in the sense of giving you more fields to fill out) search thereof.
• 772) My PC at home won't recognize the USB keyboard for booting, sometimes. It won't even recognize it when I use a USB-to-PS2 converter. I apparently have to use an entirely non-USB keyboard to get it to boot. Isn't that special? Is it worth me spending the time to figure out why it is such a piece of (expensive and top-of-the-line when I bought it) crap? Should I not have bought a Macintosh instead? It all sucks because upgrading whatever I might have to upgrad to fix the problem will suck. For example, if it turns out to be a motherboard firmware issue I'll have to physically open the machine to see what revision the board is, because there isn't a way to tell via software. Etc. (Well, the first thing to try, apparently, is the BIOS setting for "legacy usb support.") The same machine has 2 built-in ethernet ports which have over time failed working under WinXP so I ended up installing another ethernet port via PCI card. Yay.
• 771) The Daily WTF.
• 770) Don't you love it when people completely break an obvious and standard UI? (Back/First/Newest/Next should be First/Back/Next/Newest, duh!)
• 769) I'm really glad to be able to use open source things like Firefox and Thunderbird. The whole closed software and restrictive license agreement thing is crap and evil (although I totally am willing to listen to folks who say GPL vs. BSD is a restrictive license). Having said all that, I sure wish they had picked better icons for their software. The circular nature doesn't reduce well, so the icon for Thunderbird that appears in my WinXP Quick Launch area just looks like en envelope wearing a bad blue toupee!
• 768) Reading a PDF in Acrobat inside Firefox sucks because either Firefox or Acrobat does something every once in a while that takes focus away. So I click in the PDF document so I can use page up and page down, and then a minute later it stops working, and I have to re-click. Insanity. (Also, the cursor doesn't get hidden when I scroll the page, which is super lame.)
• 767) Simple things can combine to be quite powerful: Tabbed web browsing along with the right-click menu item to web search the selected text is actually pretty invigorating to one's use of the web. It lowers the barriers to opening up several paths of interest, so you will do it more often. Cool.
• 766)
• 765) Augh! Google's so-called Advanced Search doesn't let you set the File Format to HTML only!? At best, you can exclude one file type e.g.: PDF, and hope that it will get you back mostly HTML results.
• 764) Neat how Adobe Reader has 2 icons in the Alt-Tab list on my WinXP box, even though there is only one application window.
• 763) A common error when working with revision control systems is to forget to commit a new file, thus breaking the build for others. It seems stupendously lame to me that the revision systems don't therefore tell you which un-commited files have been created since the last time you checked in. Subversion will tell you but it doesn't hilight the new files, it just lists all files that have never been checked in. Apparently, if you use the arcane 'ignore' property religiously you can approximate this functionality, which should have been built-in from the get-go. (I guess you still have to deal with the fact that every time you build, the output files will be newer, so for those directories it would make sense to still use svn ignore.)
• 762) Don't you love it when usability experts draw bad charts [pdf]? In this particular example, there is no reason to connect the dots horizontally.
• 761) Here I thought rsync was the bees' (bee's?) knees. But then, of course, the suck found me.
• 760) It is great how when I adjust the volume in Ubuntu, I get lots of scratchy noisy pops and stuff while dragging the slider. I guess sound is hard, even in the new millenium.
• 759) Awww, suck: SConstruct leaves '.sconsign' turds everywhere! I hate that, like I hate how subversion has to have (way worse) .svn directories everywhere. Eh, guess I'll get used to it.
• 758) I'm trying to figure out how to get SConstruct to use a specific compiler, so I set the CPP value but it doesn't seem to have worked. Thus, I am googling for "scons verbose" because I want the equivalent of Ant's -v flag. The irony is that the first hit is entitled, "Making the SCons Output Less Verbose." Obviously, the cards have been stacked against me. (Turns out reading the man page quickly led me to figure out that the configuration variable I want is not CPP, which doesn't really exist, but CXX.)
• 757) More examples of human and computers suckage: when something goes wrong, where do you look for the error messages? Did a dilog box appear that went away because you were typing somewhere else and it stole and interpreted your keystrokes to make it go away? Do you get anything on stdout? Do you look for some secret log file? Which one? Some supposedly standard system log file? Some program-specific one? Is it in your home directory? Somewhere else? Is there a command that will tell you the last 100 files that were modified in your system, to help you figure out where the error file is? Do you take the machine out and kick it repeatedly and curse the so-called civilization that led to this world? Could computers suck more? (Yeah, well, yes, of course they could, but it seems like we do a pretty good job already.)
• 756) For any given software domain (DBs, version control, whatever) I've heard horror stories about any given product (MySQL, Postgres, Subversion, VSS, whatever). And, I've had personal experience with horrible situations so I tend to believe that, yes, nothing is perfect and, yes, one day something bad will happen and you'll suffer for it. That means, of course, number one that you need to keep backups. But it also is suggesting to me that, were it possible and were their tools to make it super easy, one might expend the energy to use multiple tools in parallel to make sure things don't screw you so badly. Have your persistence layer write out to both a MySQL and a Postgres instance, then constantly check that they are showing you the same view of data. That kind of thing - very NASA with the multiple computers voting on the 'right' answer.
• 755) When you have a list of things that people are going to scan to find what they want, do not center all the text because it makes it harder to read. Instead, it should be justified to one edge.
• 754) I suggested this maybe a year or so ago to a NASA person: put the stupid foam inside the stupid tank, so it can't fall off and hit anything. I mean, duh!
• 753) I'm sick and tired of cables and plugs that have to go in a particular way "up". I should think that some bright EE somewhere could think up a way to have a system for being able to plug something in no matter what way it was rotated?! Trying to get the bloody USB cable plugged into the back of the computer that is half buried in books etc. sucks ass, and I don't see why such un-usability should be perpetuated.
• 752) I'm looking at a large PDF (couple hundred pages). I want to print it out. I don't want to waste resources, so I'd like to select the chapters that I want to print (i.e.: exclude the TOC, the glossary, etc.). Can I do that? No, not by saying what chapters, I can't. Apparently I have to go manually figure out the page numbers for the range of chapters and enter those values into the 'Print...' dialog. Yeah, great. Terrific UI, wonderful boon to civilization there, folks. As if HP didn't pay Adobe to not implement that kind of feature.
• 751) Make sucks, Ant sucks, BJam is confusing as hell... maybe I will become a convert to SCons. Or, maybe not.
• 750) Here's a clue for all you completely dumb ass web sites out there - design your URLs that you send out in email to be less than 80 characters wide. Actually, in fact, they should probably be less than like 50 characters wide. Given that other sites have been doing it for thousands of URLs for years, it shouldn't actually be that hard!
• 749) I came across a fairly useful laundry list of Ubuntu information, which looks to have some info I've been trying to find, so maybe you'd find it useful, too.
• 748) Apparently, in 2005, formatting hard drives under Liux is still mystical rocket science. The programs suck, the man pages suck, the HOWTOs suck, and they all talk about completely different versions of fdisk. Mac OS X's graphical disk utility also sucks (the UI is just plain weird), especially in that it doesn't want to let me format the 2nd partition of an external drive as MS-DOS. Also, I don't see that it lets me tell it to do MBR stuff so I can use said external drive on MS-OS machines. In the end, I used the command line tool dikutil to partition and format the drive, and that worked. Zoikes.
• 747) I love how the Apache config file format (even the oh-so-modern Apache2) is not HTML, nor is XML, even though it uses <foo></foo> all over the place. Duh!
• 746) Is it kind of silly (or downright insulting) that Gnome puts Emacs under "Applications / Accessories?" I mean, instead of something like "Applications / Godlike-who-needs-anything-else?"
• 745) Here's what I had to go through to get JOGL 3D sorta working on my linux ppc / powerpc / power-pc / g3 / g4 / b&w machine.
• 744) Why don't search engines let me enter a block of text into their search field, rather than a line? Surely they could do something that would be better than me having to search for various fragments manually myself?!
• 743) I love open source: "There are also some old installation instructions, which are mostly obsolete but still contain some information which has not yet been merged into the main part of this manual." This is for GCC, nothing important.
• 742) Another thought about all the evidence that computers suck, because people suck: the deal with unix options where you can have ones that use "-", ones that use "--" and ones that don't use any dash at all.
• 741) So, like, what do you do in Google if you need to search for something called 'OR'? Putting it in double-quotes didn't seem to work.
• 740) Isn't it part of the HTTP standard headers that you get informed when the resource was created and last edited? Why doesn't that show up in search engine results? Blah!
• 739) My complaint about how nobody writes the full date on things seems to be exemplified to a new amazing degree by anybody giving a set of classes; quite often they don't say what date the classes start and what date they end (and if you can join in the middle of things, and if it is pro-rated, etc. etc.). Genius!
• 738) If I were the ruler of the world, and I needed to drastically reduce the population to save the Earth, my plan would be to round up all the folks who think getopt doesn't suck, and export them to the moon. Or Pluto. Or something.
• 737) Ant sucks! But seriously folks: I would like it to let me make some targets in the build file to be private. That way I can have some utility targets which nobody has to know about, thus avoiding confusing them. So Ant should let me mark targets as private, and only let other targets call them, and then it should have a mode where if you type "ant --help" or something it dumps out all of the public targets, and any associated documentation that's in the build file for them.
• 736) Computers are from hell. I'm running Emacs on another machine, under a Mac OS X Terminal window. The Terminal window lets me customize its colors. Emacs also apparently lets me customize its colors, like I guess it thinks it is in some ANSI terminal that supports a limited range of colors. I end up with Emacs having set the color to something I don't like, and I just want to tell Emacs to not color anything so that Terminal can do it, so I can get the exact colors I want. But there is no option in the list of colors from Emacs that is like "none" so I can't do that. So I'm stuck with the colors (until I change my .emacs and then restart, which I can't do right now because I have an important process running under Emacs). Yay!
• 735) When I search in Yahoo! Groups for a group that has a name I know to exist, like "various", it doesn't show me that as the first hit. Instead there's things like "various_artists" and many other things that start with various. What! Ever!
• 734) Ever more proof that computers are designed to make life hell for humans: in MySQL you cannot have commas (in the US, periods in Europe) in numbers to denote thousands. So it is not easy to differentiate between 1000 and 10000, which is bloody genius. I mean, we might as well just dust-off and nuke the whole place from orbit!
• 733) LabVIEW is neat, even if their capitalization choice is pretty lame. But it does have some rather stupid UI conventions. First, breakpoints end up having flashing borders around things which is horribly evil. For that alone they should all be hung, drawn, and quartered. The other thing that is lame is they don't have tool-tips when you mouse over a VI, instead there is text at the top of the palette which changes. The fact that it is at the top is a huge problem because it looks like that text is the title for the entire palette, when it is only for the one you are moused over. Obviously, that kind of contextual help text should go at the bottom, like what browsers do when you mouse-over a hyperlink. I say, dip them in hot oil!
• 732) I think subversion deleted a file of mine without asking. I'd copied a file 'foo' that was in conflict to 'foo.mine' and then did 'svn update foo' and now 'foo.mine' doesn't exist. Nice!
• 731) License agreements have gotten whacky. Would you really sign that one? Hell no. "2. Rights In Data: You assign to IBM all right, title, and interest (including ownership of copyright) in any data, suggestions, and written materials that 1) is related to Your use of the Program and 2) You provide to IBM."
• 730) Either he is an idiot, or WordPress sucks ass, because the titles of the pages in the blog are just always his name, rather than the title of the post. So that looks really good in my bookmarks list! (Actually, since he chose that software, he is an idiot.)
• 729) Some other notes about how stupid the World of Linux still is
• 728) I'm glad it has been kind of a pain in the ass to just find the package for Ubuntu that installs the bloody X11 header files, so I can actually compile some code. Hate.
• 727) If you make an XML helper library that prsumably is supposed to help make it easer to write XML, then how about being smart enough to realize that you shouldn't require the element string again when closing the element? It was already specified in the matching open call! So much for saving me some typing. (Yes, I realize that it would have to keep around potentially lots of state in that case.)
• 726) Could the pipermail UI be any more annoying? Well, OK, it isn't completely broken, it is more that it has rough edges, and I'm sorta the ultimate not-liker-of-rough-edges. To wit: when you look at an archive of a list, you can view it in Date order... yet there are no dates listed per post!
• 725) You know you've clicked away dialog boxes that you wished you had read. So why isn't there a global log of all the dialog boxes for people to review? Computers suck!
• 724) Ant sucks major ass. The trouble shooting info says that you should ideally have an empty CLASSPATH. Hah! Hah, I say!

  	  
  	  foo@bar:~/Src/JOGL/jogl/make$ ~/Src/Ant/apache-ant-1.6.5/bin/ant linux -v --execdebug
  	  exec "/usr/bin/java" -classpath
  	  "/home/foo/Src/Ant/apache-ant-1.6.5/lib/ant-launcher.jar"
  	  -Dant.home="/home/foo/Src/Ant/apache-ant-1.6.5"
  	  -Dant.library.dir="/home/foo/Src/Ant/apache-ant-1.6.5/lib"
  	  org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher -cp "" "linux" "-v"
  	  Apache Ant version 1.6.5 compiled on June 2 2005
  	  Buildfile: build.xml
  	  Detected Java version: 1.4 in: /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.4.2-gcj-4.0-1.4.2.0/jre
  	  Detected OS: Linux
  	  parsing buildfile /home/foo/Src/JOGL/jogl/make/build.xml with URI =
  	  file:///home/foo/Src/JOGL/jogl/make/build.xml
  	  Project base dir set to: /home/foo/Src/JOGL/jogl/make
  	  
  	  BUILD FAILED
  	  Target `all' does not exist in this project.
  	  at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.tsort(java.lang.String,
  	  java.util.Hashtable, java.util.Hashtable, java.util.Stack,
  	  java.util.Vector) (Unknown Source)
  	  at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.topoSort(java.lang.String[],
  	  java.util.Hashtable, boolean) (Unknown Source)
  	  at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.topoSort(java.lang.String,
  	  java.util.Hashtable, boolean) (Unknown Source)
  	  at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTarget(java.lang.String)
  	  (Unknown Source)
  	  at
  	  org.apache.tools.ant.helper.DefaultExecutor.executeTargets(org.apache.tools.ant.Project,
  	  java.lang.String[]) (Unknown Source)
  	  at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTargets(java.util.Vector)
  	  (Unknown Source)
  	  at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.runBuild(java.lang.ClassLoader) (Unknown
  	  Source)   at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.startAnt(java.lang.String[],
  	  java.util.Properties, java.lang.ClassLoader) (Unknown Source)
  	  at org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher.run(java.lang.String[])
  	  (Unknown Source)
  at org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher.main(java.lang.String[])
  (Unknown Source)
  at gnu.java.lang.MainThread.call_main() (/usr/lib/libgcj.so.6.0.0)
  at gnu.java.lang.MainThread.run() (/usr/lib/libgcj.so.6.0.0)
  
  Total time: 1 second
  foo@bar:~/Src/JOGL/jogl/make$ echo $CLASSPATH
  
  foo@bar:~/Src/JOGL/jogl/make$ export CLASSPATH=/home/foo/Src
  foo@bar:~/Src/JOGL/jogl/make$ ~/Src/Ant/apache-ant-1.6.5/bin/ant linux
  -v --execdebug
  exec "/usr/bin/java" -classpath
  "/home/foo/Src/Ant/apache-ant-1.6.5/lib/ant-launcher.jar"
  -Dant.home="/home/foo/Src/Ant/apache-ant-1.6.5"
  -Dant.library.dir="/home/foo/Src/Ant/apache-ant-1.6.5/lib"
  org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher -cp "/home/foo/Src" "linux" "-v"
  Apache Ant version 1.6.5 compiled on June 2 2005
  Buildfile: build.xml
  Detected Java version: 1.4 in: /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.4.2-gcj-4.0-1.4.2.0/jre
  Detected OS: Linux
  parsing buildfile /home/foo/Src/JOGL/jogl/make/build.xml with URI =
  file:///home/foo/Src/JOGL/jogl/make/build.xml
  Project base dir set to: /home/foo/Src/JOGL/jogl/make
  Build sequence for target(s) `linux' is [linux]
  Complete build sequence is [linux, ]
  
  linux:
  [echo] pong
  
  BUILD SUCCESSFUL
  Total time: 1 second
  
  

• 723) Oh, yeah, I'd heard that the Hibernate developers are kinda unhelpful.
• 722) Bugzilla must suck ass: this bug that I'm interested in doesn't say when the bug was fixed (as in, what release? there is a 'version' field which says 1.6.0 but is that where the bug existed or where it was fixed?) or how it was fixed (as in, show me the cvs log and code edits). Those are like totally basic requirements from a bug tracking system.
• 721) I find it a clear and solid indication of how stupid humanity is, that so many computer applications by default use fonts which fail to give sufficient differentiation between zero and capital 'o'.
• 720) The Synaptic Package Manager (which uses Gnome on my Ubuntu box) has some pretty lame things about how it works, UI-wise:
  1. Would you believe that "page down" doesn't work correctly in Linux? It is either Gnome's fault, or Synaptic's fault, I dunno which (the evidence points to Synaptic because e.g.: Nautilus doesn't have this problem), but it is pretty <expletive>ing stupid that somebody added the "page down" functionality and never noticed that it was utterly wrong! What it does is skip entire pages; it is as if you pressed "page down" twice.
  2. The entire UI is locked up while it downloads changes. I could understand if it locked up while it was applying changes. I could understand if it didn't let me make more changes, but at least let me browse the old state. But this sucks.
  3. If you select a few different packages to download and install, it will download them all first and then install them, rather than starting the separable individual package installs as soon as they are downloaded, in parallel with downloading the remaining packages.
  4. You can search through the package index for keywords. You can choose to have the search include 'description'. Now, note that in actual fact you can't choose it in the sense of choosing it with anything like, like where everything would have a checkbox next to it and you could pick what you like. No, instead they have predefined sets of fields that you can search through. So that already is really retarded, like some UI from before people had brains. And it is "name and description" which almost makes it sound like the term has to be in both fields for it to get a hit.
  5. And, even though the search includes descriptions, it turns out that there are 2 types of descriptions. There are the descriptions you see in the 'list view' of things, which are like a single sentence fragment. In there I saw something saying it was an "emacs-mode" which made me want to search for all "emacs-mode"s. Well, I searched for "emacs-mode" and the entry I had just seen didn't turn up! This seems to be because the search is searching the long description field, which appears in the area below the list view when you select a single entry from the list view, rather than the short one, which appears in the list view itself. Where, oh where, do I start the punishing?
  6. Another lameness, which I suspect is a Gnome thing rather than a Synaptic thing, is that the list view has columns, and you can resize the columns, but you apparently cannot manually resize any given column to be narrower than its title width. That sorta sucks, expecially because when I first got the list, it had already been automatically set up where one of the column's was narrower. So the ability clearly exists, it just isn't allowed for actual users, which shows how people are stupid and seem to think that users shouldn't be the ones actually in control?! (There's plenty of other lameness; it doesn't save any package selections; it doesn't remember your desire to show the details of installation; etc.)
  7. The UI for repositories is just utterly whacked. I think the root cause of the problem is that they are trying to make the UI closely represent the format of stuff in /etc/apt/sources.list. Well, for a regular Joe, that's just stupid because it is a confusing organization of the relevant information.
  8. When it is about to download, it tells you how much it has to download. It doesn't tell you how much space is left on the disk, either before or after downloading or applying the changes. Great.
• 719) Learn from others' mistakes: If you upgrade a computer yourself, then if anything ever goes wrong with the upgraded components you will most likely have a hard time getting a refund or anything because they supplier can always blame some other part of your system (and sometimes they will even be correct) - to paraphrase the goats, "plausible denial, no trial is a beauty!" There are so many variables that you will never be able to pin the blame on one particular thing. Instead, if you buy a whole new machine, a whole new enchilada, you get the assurance that it is covered in its entirety. So screw "reduce, reuse, recycle!" (All this hints at many facets of how both humans and (therefore) computers suck.)
• 718) Maybe it is just me, but it seems like cygwin always needs to redownload everything, when all I really wanted was one new app. Like, it doesn't seem to know what I've already got installed? Who knows.
• 717) If you have stuff, and that stuff has any documentation or anything like that, then bloody well make sure that is readily available through the major search-engines, right?
• 716) Would it really be that much rocket science - is it really that novel of an idea - to have text searches deal with typos? Why can't the bloody computer find foobar when I type foobra? At least optionally? Jef Raskin was, of course, always right.
• 715) Yes, Virginia, keep thinking that math is hard.
• 714) Finally, a standard for Unix file system layout. Now if only the entire unix-verse would actually follow it.
• 713) Nice how the Amazon zshops search doesn't find anything for "72" but it does for "72pin". Also nice how it doesn't appear to let me search within results (refinement).
• 712) When a computer system doesn't support the users, there is only one thing to do: viciously beat the users for being there. (Never mind the conspiracy to commit fraud.)
• 711) I've always hated the rule for written English that says to put punctuation inside quotes, even when the punctuation is not part of the quoted "text."
• 710) Why is it that people still don't know how to design web pages to have even the most basic, obvious, functionality?
• 709) SecureCRT has had this for years, so I don't understand why browsers don't: If there is a URL that isn't hyperlinked, I want to be able to right-click on it and have a menu option that will take me to that URL.
• 708) I looked at some more 3D modellers: gmax - too restrictive a license for my tastes; Milkshape 3D - the first thing it did when I ran it was to put up a poorly worded, confusing, and simply rude dialog box that screamed (with sentences ending in multiple exclamation marks) something weird about "date manipulation" so I immediately uninstalled it for being evil crap; Anim8or which didn't apparently have a way to have multiple viewports open at once, and even if eventually I would have found it, in the meantime I tried using their mouse-drag rotation control and it was just comlete and utter confusing crap.
• 707) I downloaded a 3D modeller. As you might have guessed, I found something utterly broken about it within literally 10 seconds of launching it so I am kind of already writing it off. (I can't take a screenshot of it because my Apple usb keyboard doesn't have the print screen key on it.) The problem with AoI is that it has tooltips, but they are drawn at the wrong z-level and get chopped off by the neighbouring view ports, which means there might as well not even be tooltips. Nice! (Also, it doesn't have any right-click contextual menus.)
• 706) Why does BitTorrent allow me to limit the upload rate, but not the download one? My only option is apparently to pause the entire download. (Or get around to installing and grokking some packet gateway thingamajig, yikes.)
• 705) I'm glad to discover that I'm not the only person who is concerned with ssh fingerprints. I'd wondered about fuzzy fingerprints myself, but not that rigorously, and it has always bugged me that people are so blase about checking fingerprints in the first place.
And ever more examples of people ready to subvert ssh security as soon as they see a fingerprint mis-match. Oh, well. (The kicker in all of this is that the user experience for figuring out what the keys and fingerprint values are, and if they match, is a complete cluster <expletive>.)
• 704) I'm dying. All these important sites (Budget, Dell, Sun, etc.) are apparently constantly changing their URLs for resources that I've linked to in these various blogs. So I guess they want to break everybody's bookmarks? What is the purpose of the gratuitous link breakage? Couldn't they at least have decent redirections, if not a policy of keeping URLs alive?
• 703) What kills me is when somebody who supposedly works on HCI or usability, or some such, sends out a notice for some upcoming meeting and has the date like "July 20th, 2005" with nary a mention of what bloody day of the week that is.
• 702) One good thing about emacs: you can pretty much find an editing mode for anything. So I'm doing ASN.1 format and I can get an ASN.1 mode really easily. That's probably not generally the case with any other editor you care to mention. (vim?)
• 701) More fun with gnuemacs. My PC got upgraded and (yes, I am also be annoyed with the service person who did this to me!) now the main disk is the E: drive, not the C: drive. Emacs explodes because it tries to write to C:\.emacs.d which it can't. The thing is, I have yet to find any explanation of what I can do in elisp to change its path to .emacs.d. Most of the hits use '~' which I can't then use in my query because Google sucks ass.
• 700) I love how GNU's own documentation about for Win32 has a nicely broken link. Have they never heard of link checkers? I know, I know, they don't care diddly-squat re: Windows.
• 699) Is it only MySQL that doesn't show you exactly what was updated? I mean, how are you supposed to check that your update didn't break other things, other than by writing out the entire database before and after and comparing them? What kind of utter insanity is this? Bah!
• 698) The whole "selecting implicitly copies" UI in X windows is clearly evil and the inventers will burn in heck for eternity.
• 697) Emacs's dired mode sucks because you have to refresh it manually, and it doesn't even give you any asynchronous warnings that things have changed.
• 696) Security isn't just the responsibility of one program. I mean, how many times have you thought one application or text area had focus, and typed your password, only to then look up at the screen and see it was actually going into some clear-text area for any and all to see?
• 695) The security in SSH is presented with the absolute worst usability in mind, it would appear. I tend to end up using password authentication across the secure channel. All I want to do is know what the key is for a given host, but it shows it to be in some hex format with ':' characters the first time I connect, and then it keeps it in the known_hosts file in a different, non-colon format. So if I wanted to go to a new machine and use ssh from there, how would I compare the :'d key it shows there with my known good key value? Not to mention the fact that I don't see anybody making their keys well-known, so when ssh asks me if the key is valid to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, I have no way of verifying the bloody value! Update: here's a nice document which actually talks about just that.
• 694) Why doesn't SQL (at least MySQL) use SQL for accessing the metadata? I want to be able to find all the columns in a database that are nullable varchars, and then perform a test on the contents of those columns everywhere. I should be able to just write SQL to do that.
• 693) I find it patently offensive that SQL doesn't have a means of doing an 'update' without actually causing any changes, like 'make -n' you know?
• 692) I find it patently offensive that subversion doesn't have a means of doing a command without actually causing any changes, like 'make -n' you know? Ah hah! It looks like "--dry-run" should, hopefully, do the tric!? Subcommand 'import' doesn't accept option '--dry-run'. Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhhh! Start the killing.
• 691) Any text editing widget that does not support the equivalent of Microsoft's Alt-mouse-select-region to define an arbitrary rectangular region, is crap. (What, have they got a patent on it or something?)
• 690) Subversion's logging seems to be utterly broken - or at least, the command line UI for it is just wrong. I'm in a directory and do 'svn log | head' and see something from 5 days ago, even though I know I checked in stuff 3 days ago. Looking via ViewCVS does, indeed, show the log from 3 days ago! So what the hell is the command line 'svn log' doing?! (Update: apparently, even though I'm the one who checked in the changes, I would have to run 'svn update' before my local directory would reflect those changes. I'd appreciate it if somebody would let me know which svn developer I should cane first.)
• 689) In this new millenium where we have browsers that do tabs, it would be nice if either web page designers would not force the creation of new windows via java-script, or if the browsers would do magic parsing to get around that super suckfulness, and let me right-click to open the link in a new tab.
• 688) I love it when things like Yahoo! say "did you mean to search for bar" and then I click on that to see the results for bar... and there are zero results. Yes!
• 687) If you think computers are easy, try to get some non-geek to use CVS and do things like get previous revisions out of the repository. The whole shebang is just a nightmare, trying to explain it all. It is fundamenally flawed from the ground up. Computers shouldn't be that hard, and I can visualize ways in which they wouldn't be, but nobody has made anything like it. Hm. (On the other hand, it is a difficult problem because it is the old issue of how to represent multiple dimensions of data in a human usable fashion.)
• 686) Wasn't USB supposed to save us all from the multiverse of different connectors? Looks like that claim didn't pan out.
• 685) Pretty neat how the sourceforge mailing list UI doesn't default to the threaded view. I just don't get that approach.
• 684) OpenBSD 3.7 does not install bash, but sets you up with ksh instead. What is really cool about ksh is that it apparently doesn't understand ! for history substitution... unlike regular old bash which understands that just fine. Did they purposefully pick an utterly broken, stupid, evil and just plain wrong shell? It would seem that yes, yes they did. The kicker is that the man page for packages assumes you are running some C-shell derivative (it uses "setenv" rather than "export")!
• 683) OpenBSD uses the .tgz filename extension for its packages, but the man page says that "they should always be added using pkg_add(1), as there might be some extra information that only pkg_add(1) knows how to handle. Tip: you can distinguish between packages and .tgz bundles using pkg_info(1)." Also, "Note: System distribution files, e.g., base28.tgz, comp28.tgz, are not packages and may not be installed using pkg_add." The obviously begged question is, why the bloody heck do they use .tgz then?! It just means everything is confusing and can easily lead to configuration errors. Give it a new extension, how hard is that? Or am I speaking some kind of rocket science the *BSD cave people cannot understand?
• 682) I like to use ergonomic keyboards. Currently at work I've got what is apparently an Acer Ergo61. One funny thing about it is the End key is directly above the Home key. I mean, duh! Somebody had to have done that on purpose which is just utterly nuts! At least Page Up is above Page Down.
• 681) Is it me, or do no web browsers give you a means of seeing and copying the "a name=" tags (i mean, besides doing it manually from "View Source")? Wouldn't that be useful? Yes, it would.
• 680) Software that sprinkles output all over your file system must die. Versant JDO writes all these jdo* files into the directory over time, never cleaning up, so you have to do that manually. Subversion puts .svn directories all over the place, wrecking havoc with your ordinary file name completion. Etc.
• 679) IBM has ICU4J which has CaseInsensitiveString which they explicitly say is for use in Hashtables... but then if you try to use it as as value you will get a ClassCastException because they don't implement Comparable! How utterly dumb and lame!
• 678) Interesting how Google comes up with a good idea and then completely screws it up.
• 677) How about a picture of this dialog box I get first thing from a software installer. Like, what kind of crack are these people smoking? What in the hell is it all about? Am I really supposed to find a ruler and measure these things? Holy dumb backwards loozer idiots, Batman! Shove usability up your ass!
• 676) I love how I can't get IE or Firefox to just open certain files as text in themselves. They are just dying to helpfully download the file or launch some external program when all I want is to see it as a simple bloody ASCII representation. Why isn't there a command for that? Hell. So check out my little fetcher.
• 675) I don't know who is wrong (although I know what I think is better overall), but Firefox and MS Word implement the "Ctrl + mouse wheel = zoom" in the opposite fashion. When one would be making the text larger, the exact same input to the other application makes the text smaller! Yes! Now that's the kind of quality and usability I'm looking for in my computing world!
• 674) The craigslist search really sucks! Specifically, you have to enter at least one term that matches - you cannot enter all "negative" terms. Which is what I want to do, and is the best way to pear things down to get the results I want. (Because people posting things don't use a controlled vocabulary, I can't enter all the things that I want to match, but I can easily enter things I don't want to match by looking at the results so far.) Gah, dumb jerks, all.
• 673) I find the Gnome "Open File" dialog to be the most blatent piece of excrement ever. It doesn't have ".." in the list of directories. It doesn't have a text field for editing the path directly. Etc.
• 672) Apparently, the CD/DVD Creator application in Ubuntu only supports drag-and-drop to get files into it. That! Is! Completely! Insane! Drag-and-drop sucks, people! What the hell is wrong with a normal "Open" or "Add" menu item?! God, hell.
• 671) It drives me nuts that whenever I try to get help for some Gnome application, it has to load all of the help text, not just the stuff for the particular application I'm running. Since I'm on a low-powered machine that means I have to wait for it to load and parse all the extraneous stuff before it gets to what I actually care about. Rather annoying.
• 670) What is really impressive about the Gnome help is that... there's no bloody index! And the search doesn't give you an indexed list of results to browse, no, it is an incremental search on the current page only. That is an interaction model that is so utterly stupid and wrong and useless it is hard to comprehend how anybody could have ever said, "ship it!"
• 669) Open source is so great. I mean, I love not having any documentation that explains how this particular thing wants me to supply command line arguments to it (not even what the names of the switches are!). I love having to use a debugger on it just to figure that out. Yessir! (I also love the fact that they didn't just use GnuOpt and wrote their own utter crap parsing code.)
• 668) I don't know who needs killed, but I love the fact that when I try to copy from Windows and then paste into emacs running on a remote unix host via VNC, it doesn't paste what I copied from Windows. At all. Since I have problems doing the same between Java and xterm both under X, I suspect it is the age-old issue of X windows sucking extreme ass.
• 667) Subversion sucks, as if somebody saw Perforce and decided to make a free thing that is like Perforce, only really really stupid and hateful! For example, in Perforce I think you have to explicitly say which files are going in to the checkin, which helps to avoid accidentally committing things that should be left out. SVN on the other hand commits them even if you delete the file name entries while editing the checkin comment.
• 666) Map sites should let you enter addresses more easily as free text. Of course, Google started doing that a while back so it is even more lame that map-only sites still have really doofy restrictive annoying suckful ui that makes the user bend to the computer when it should be the other way 'round. Go Google.
• 665) It really gets me steamed that open source wares have yet to cotton onto the idea of not having an Exit command in the File menu for multiple-document applications. Close is fine, to close the current file, but it is dangerous and annoying to have Exit happen and nuke everything at once. IE doesn't even do that any more.
• 664) OpenOffice can lick my ass. I've got two 'sheets' of data and I'm trying to merge them into sheet 3. I copy and pasted from sheet 1 to sheet 3 OK, but then when I try to copy and paste sheet 2 onto the end of sheet 3 I get a dialog box telling me there isn't enough room left in the sheet. It doesn't give me an error code, and searching for the error message in Google turned up nothing useful. The error doesn't tell me anything that would help me figure out how to work around the problem. The kicker is that I'm not pasting in that much information!
• 663) OpenOffice is failing to update the Recent Files menu. Whatever!
• 662) ViewCVS is kind of a tub of poo, from what I have seen of it to date. It aparently doesn't let me see a list of revisions by a given author, nor let me see a list of revisions for a given path. Etc. Anybody who has had the luck to use a well-developed web interface to a repository (I was apparently spoiled at my last job) will find ViewCVS retchid. I dare say, even if you were not so spoiled, you'd still realize that ViewCVS was written by people who apparently have neither any idea what developers would want to get out of the UI, nor any idea of how to implement that in an even remotely sane fashion.
• 661) trac isn't much better than ViewCVS. Sure, they have fancier presentation, but they still suck hairy buttocks when it comes to actual usability. Example: I deleted a file in a changeset. I want to see that file's history. The entry in the changeset doesn't link to the file's history, it isn't a link at all. Sure, the file was deleted but don't you think somebody might still want to be able to drill down into that file's metadata? Argh! Has nobody even used trac or ViewCVS? Seems like if they had, they could have figured out the suck pretty quickly. Here's an information browsing UI rule of thumb: never leave people stuck at a dead-end! Give them links from wherever they are to something so they can keep going, rather than having to totally backtrack and fight with the UI to find some other way of getting the information they want. Sheesh!
• 660) Some Linux distros seem to have mostly gotten cut/copy & paste working so that's pretty nice. Maybe in this decade we'll have oh-so-modern things like working USB devices, ha ha!
• 659) It is amazing what a complete piece of crap the Ubuntu/Debian "Software Updates" utility is. The two main glaring usability issues: One, it goes out to lunch while figuring out what packages need to be updated and there is no wait cursor or progress bar, so you cannot tell if the things has just totally locked up or what. Two, the list of packages to install fails to tell you what repository they come from! So if you have all repositories enabled, including multiverse etc., or even some random person's (like the Marillat stuff), you could be getting a spoofed package like a linux kernel and not be able to tell! (Once it starts downloading, you can see the URL in the 'details'.) Like the Spanish Inquisition, I'll add Third, you cannot set the updater to trickle-load files like, say, with wget.
• 658) At least one of Gnome's themes has a progress bar that is animated sort of like a barber shop pole. It is vaugely in the vein of the OS X progress bar animation. The difference is that the Gnome one is slow and painful, whereas I think the OS X one is done simply with color palette cycling and is fast and smooth. I'd rather not have my poor old machine animating the barber shop effect, but I dunno enough about themes to hack it away. What extra sucks is that the Gnome Theme Preferences interface doesn't show you what the progress bar looks like in the preview picture. Didn't they ever look at the (pre-X) Mac OS appearance manager? (In the end, through a process of activating all the themes in turn, I switched to another one that was similar to the one I liked, but didn't have the animated progress bar.)
• 657) It totally sucks that Ubuntu's font chooser dialog box doesn't show you, let alone give you the ability to sort by, those fonts that are fixed width vs. proportional. (Let alone bitmapped vs. outline.)
• 656) When synaptic is downloading the repository content files, it has a progress bar that goes from 0 to 100 about three or four times before it actually is done downloading things. WTF?
• 655) It cracks me up that Google's cache of a page has some header text from their servers telling you e.g.: how to get a text-only version of the cache etc., and that they say "Click here to xyz". Not only is "click here" stupid, but "here" is not hyperlinked, the "xyz" is.
• 654) It seems like people who develop web browsers do not ever actually use them to browse the web. Or at least, the real web. I want the Ctrl-Wheel text zoom to only affect the current page, not all of them, so I can override only those pages that suck. I mean, duh!
• 653) All wikis have evil formatting/syntax ideas and must die die die.
• 652) Sure, code editors show you the matching opening bracket when you type the closing one, but they don't often seem to be able to show you the matching closing one when you are on the opening one.
• 651) When I close the hinge on my iBook running Ubuntu, and then later open it, apparently waking it up from 'sleep', the X session comes back and everything but the color palette is screwed up. Mostly it is right, but enough colors have been horked that now the text has pixels dropped out (maybe from anti-aliasing colors being lost?), so everything has the look of that original Macintosh "stippling to make grayed out text" effect. Terrific!
• 650) A fundamental rule of mine for computer user interfaces: If there is text displayed to me by a computer application, then the bloody thing had better allow me to select that bloody text, somehow. That is sometimes very hard to do, because the widget system you are using (Win32, Mac whatever, Linux suck, Swing hell, etc.) probably doesn't support it everywhere. Suck!
• 649) More Gmail suck: It displays a person's name (well, user ID) at the top of mail they have sent you. There is a blue "star" symbol next to it. You can click on the star to do something. Somtimes the name has the email address of the sender in <angled@brackets.com> next to it. But, you cannot select that text with the mouse! When you are reading a thread, clicking on that text will instead expand/collapse the body of that email. Someone finally explained to me that, even though the text I want is staring me right in the face, I have use the "More options" link to get to another version of the email address text that I can copy. What! Ever!
• 648) Ever more Gmail suckage: Say you are named Fred and there is a mailing list you are on that is called "Fred & Dave". Now, say you haven't read that list for a while and you want to find out who has been mentioning you. So you search for "Fred" and... you get every piece of mail from the list, because "Fred" appears in all the headers, and you apparently cannot tell Gmail to not search the bloody headers.
• 647) Blatently, obviously, stupidly bad UI: the Mozart download page make it look like version 1.3.1 has not been released yet, when what is really going on is that the links are for verison 1.3.1. The same site makes the shooting offence of forcing the docs, like their tutorial, to use a font apparently chosen to be as annoying to read as possible?
• 646) Even further proof: Getopt and the like.
• 645) Further proof (as if anybody needed it) that humans and computers are devoid of quality: the "top posting" issue should be a non-issue because the messages should be in a format that allows the final client to order things in any fashion the user desired.
• 644) Subversion sucks because I renamed a directory, then decided not to commit that and revert it... but reverting was a pain in the ass because I had to use the -R option and then I also had to revert both the new and old directories.
• 643) Subversion sucks because it puts an svn directory in any directory that is under revision control. Which means any time you are e.g.: doing a search for a string in files, you end up with all these extra hits in the '.svn' directories that 99% of the time you really don't care about. It is just noise that gets in the way of the signal. Also, it means that path completion e.g.: in emacs doesn't work as nicely: now there are two directories in cases where there was only one, so emacs doesn't keep auto-completing, and you have to do more work to get it moving along the obvious path.
• 642) An example of chart junk from the ASUS web site: their version is too busy and hard to read. A better version is basically the same, only modified so all HTML table borders are off. Which do you think is more readable?
• 641) More rough edges at Google. When I do an image search e.g.: for a dell laptop, there are links at the top right of the page saying "Show: All sizes - Large - Medium - Small" but the irony is that I clicked on the 'Large' link and got no images. So why the bloody hell did it bother to put that link on the first page at all?
• 640) Google maps sucks. Yahoo! maps is better. The former failed to find me my street quickly and easily, the latter showed me the hit on the first try.
• 639) Safari puts the "Close Tab" button on the tab. Firefox puts it outside the tab, off to the side. The former is better in that you know exactly what you are going to be closing; Firefox's placement means you aren't sure just looking at the screen what will happen when you click. On the other hand, one could guess that Firefox's design leads to fewer accidental closing of tabs. But, on the whole, I prefer the Safari layout and wish Firefox gave me the option to have things that way.
• 638) Everything has tabs now, so it quickly gets easy to be completely <expletive>ly lost when trying to find a window you want. One step forward, a zillion steps back?
• 637) After downloading the metacity source and perusing it, and then reading a HowTo on making themes, I've come to the conclusion that there is no way to insert any space between buttons in window title bars. So the desire to make the 'close' button be apart from other ones for usability safety reasons is impossible to achieve in any way I'd find not-entirely stupid or ugly.
• 636) So not only does gnome not have easily found or correct docs, now I'm looking for docs on metacity and the supposed homepage for it is just an FTP download site of tgz type files, no docs in sight. It is particularly nice that the Gnome Help installed on my machine doesn't have an index, just a really really pathetic glossary. Whatever!
• 635) Computers suck in so many ways. The current shining example is the "caps lock vs. ctrl key" issue, where no system on earth comes with a simple and working means of configuring that. Instead, one has to waste hours googling around reading about arcane linux incantations, or sketchy warez to download, and even if after all that you have the keys changed, most likely the caps lock light will still be toggling even though you made it a ctrl key. And if you think that kind of thing isn't a problem, how about Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q, or backspace vs. delete?
• 634) As far as I can tell, 'paste' doesn't work in the Ubunto (Gnome?) Network Settings control panel. Heck, there isn't even an Edit menu. (Let alone 'copy', either, for that matter.) Are they trying to one-up Windows in terms of retarded wrong bad usability? They certainly seem to be succeeding.
• 633) I was fiddling with the Gnome Keyboard Preferences (note that when you are looking at the keyboard layout graphic, you can resize the window from the corners, which you most likely will want to do since the image is small to start out with, but there is no 'maximize' widget in the title bar, which is what I really wanted) and something crashed, and I got a dialog box asking me if I wanted to "Inform Developers" which I figured I should do. But then "Bug Buddy" said it needed to update itself, so I told it to do that, and then after all of that... it asked me what program I wanted to report the bug for! That is so completely useless and stupid and error prone, I cannot begin to fathom who would think such a system was worthwhile, when Windows and OS X have bug reporting systems that don't ever have to ask the user which program died. It all just speaks of geeks working on some pretty front-end glitzy gui tactics without ever thinking about the very basic, fundamental usability strategy.
• 632) I'm trying to use the Gnome Keyboard Preferences to make the "caps lock" key on my iBook be another "ctrl" key. I've set the option, but the consequent change is not what I wanted: emacs now thinks that the "caps lock" key does nothing at all, rather than it being a proper "ctrl" key. Also, I seriously doubt that this Keyboard Preferences thing is going to be smart enough to disable the keyboard's "caps lock" key light. (Update: it looks like iBook keyboards are pathalogically unable to get it right, based on these two links: [1] [2])
• 631) Does it strike anybody else as funny (but only in a sad, sad way) that the gnome home page does not include a link for documentation at the top? It has "About GNOME · Download · Users · Art & Themes · Developers · Foundation · Contact" but nothing to tell you how to use the bloody system. The kicker is that I actually did not find any documentation on the site at all! I ended up using Google to try and find docs, and it pointed me at the gnome documentation project which itself buried the link to the actual docs, the bloody thing they are trying to produce and release, the entire purpose of their project, they buried the damned link at the bottom of the page! I just do not comprehend this kind of thing. (Oh, and that just turns out to be developer docs. I'm still looking for the basic user docs! Still looking! Even the "about gnome" dialog box on my machine doesn't have a link to help text!) I try reading up on the Keyboard Preferences in the local Help, but it appears to be text that has little, if anything, to do with the version of Keyboard Preferences on my machine - so apparently this installation defaulted to having incompatible docs vs. software. Nice!
• 630) I'm using Ubuntu linux on my iBook, and it doesn't totally suck. However, it has most of the same-old-same-old problems as all other distro's I've seen; check out Mr. Doubting Thomas' comments (and subsequent discussion) of this 'Hedgehog' release.
• 629) I understand the arguments for having a system be case-insensitive on read, and case-sensitive on write. If you do that, but you show things in the written format (that is, preserving case) then you should allow people to rename things where the case is the only change. The cygwin tools on NTFS don't realize that so if you say "rename foo.bar Foo.Bar" it won't let you. The super kicker is that the DOS command window does let you do it!
• 628) The logo for StuffIt is cute and all, but when you stop and think about it, it totally doesn't make sense. The clamp is used to hold things, not compress them.
• 627) The dirty little secret of ubuntu and debian linux is that support for ppcs sucks ass. There's all sorts of helpful information on getting things like mpeg set up, and when you follow the instructions you inevitably are told that the repositories don't have pcc in their manifest. Yes!
• 626) When you select * from a table that has strings in it, at least in MySQL, it doesn't show you trailing whitespace in the strings. That's genius.
• 625) I hate menus on modern consumer electronics items, as opposed to having at least the basic functionality work through simple knobs. I want the contrast and brightness on my monitor to be knobs, I want the station tuning of my stereo to be a knob, I want volume on all things to be a knob, etc. Having to work ones way through menus with little buttons is crap! Crap, I say!
• 624) Another reason I hate Gmail: when I have it in a background tab in Safari, it will often force itself to the front all of a sudden, totally interrupting what I was doing! Piece of excrement!
• 623) Humans suck, and capitalism is one of the most perfect engines for proving that suck. To wit: when I call my cell phone company, or my credit card company, or pretty much any company, they have me enter my account number and last four digits of my SSN before talking to a human... whose first questions are "what is your account number?" and "what are the last four digits of your SSN?" and "what is your mailing address?". So that is a pain in the ass. Oh, and then they say "our department doesn't handle that, let me transfer you" and then the new person at the other department asks me the same bloody questions. The super kicker to it all is that SSN and mailing address have absolutely zero security value! They aren't doing anything other than pissing me off, and making some ignorant people think they are more secure. I wonder if groups like JD Powers or Consumer Reports tell you about the service of the company. Like, how long you are going to be on hold, and if they ask stupid questions. See, the thing is that I think (at least American) humans suck and will go for whatever company has the shiny phone or the seemingly cheap rates, rather than the place that doesn't just suck when it comes to actual service.
• 622) People invent new ways of doing things with computers, and they fail to build debugging environments for them. So you end up with utterly insane stuff. God, hell. Or how about this? Just give up and write Fortran on your 8086.
• 621) I am trying to install Gentoo on my little original iBook 300, and 'emerge -sync' is downloading an alpha iso?! This is totally insane! I am about to set masking to '~ppc' but the scary thing is the comment in /etc/make.conf that I shouldn't do that until after the first bootstrap and emerge, which I think is where I am. This sucks. It sucks ass. [Update: looks like you should not set the RSYNC mirror in '/etc/make.conf'. It is nice that the docs in 'make.conf' conflict with what is said in the Gentoo Handbook. In there, they tell you to use mirrorselect for the regular and rsync mirrors. However, when I tried it, it wrote "" as the mirror to my make.conf file, so then I figured I had to go and manually enter URLs. Whatever! And also there's the thing where the Handbook says "don't upgrade your portage until later" but then portage is dying before it even gets done downloading the file list, and the solutions I see on the web are all "upgrade portage first" of course.]
• 620) I love how the shell window under cygwin doesn't notice Ctrl-Z. I love how bash under Emacs on Windows doesn't get my Ctrl-C (yes I typed Ctrl-C twice, I even tried Ctrl-Q Ctrl-C). Grn. So anybody who says that PCs can easily have a unix environment on them can totally bite me.
• 619) Sites that don't deal with http requests to foobar.com, but can only handle requests to www.foobar.com are worthy of completely and utter business failure.
• 618) The New York Times web site has a feature for sending a link to an interesting story to other folks. The link gets sent via email. The kicker is that the sent link is longer than 80 characters, so for some not-insignificant portion of the email reading universe, the url is too long to easily copy and paste into a web browser. Stupid!
• 617) If there is one thing the Web is good at documenting, it is computer technology. So it really irks me that Google doesn't support searching for something like "struct [1]" to find talk about structs in C that have arbitrary length arrays at their end.
• 616) I love those automatic voice menu systems that claim to understand people talking to them. I love getting through 2/3rd of the steps to pay something only to have the system decide that when I said "yes" to "did i get your credit card number right?" i must have instead said "no" and then it asks me to enter the number again ad infinitum. (It is what the Danes call, "Quality Service", yessir!)
• 615) Stupid bloody web sites. Yahoo! is great for looking up the movies and everything, but I wish they'd give me an option of only showing films playing after e.g.: 10pm since it is already late. I keep getting my hopes up over some movie only to then look and see that the last showing was at like 7pm.
• 614) A9 can die and go to hell. I'm sticking with Google's interface; A9 got stuck in some mode where it was only looking in its yellow pages, and nowhere else. The UI was pretty confusing and useless and, well, I'm used to Google and it works and screw A9. (Yes, I understand that it is all about the buttons on the right of the page, but it still grosses me out. The UI is just wrong. Maybe I could make my own, non-suckful, front-end to their stuff? Hm...)
• 613) This new Dell PC I have does something weird and annoying: whenever things are drawing to the screen (like if you are scrolling the contents of a window) there is some high-pitched hum that happens. When you stop scrolling, the hum goes away. It is really really really weird, and it is really really really annoying.
• 612) Tools for ripping and playing back music need to let me set the relative volume per track. Some mix albums have too great a range in the subjective volume of the tracks, so I keep having to manually adjust the volume when listening. Seems like I should only have to do that once, ya know?! Grn. (I know, I know: find an open source player and contribute the feature.)
• 611) Using XML tends to lead to large files. So I find it pretty pathetic that XML Spy can't handle large files. Basically, it appears to be trying to read everything into memory at once, rather than doing some dynamic, chunked loading of the data. So, it is currently useless to me because I have a large data file. Great. Maybe binary formats aren't that bad after all?
• 610) Any web browser (Firefox, Safari) that does not let you resize frames all the time (in other words, gives the final user control over the content, rather than bowing to the author's HTML/CSS) is a flying piece of facist excremement, and must die a horrible horrible horrible death. What's that you say? Firefox is open source and I should just fix it myself? Yeah, great...
• 609) Safari web browser from Apple sucks. so i'm trying "camino" which is based on mozilla. it is version 0.8.1 so i can't expect too much i guess. there are some gross web related usability problems (maybe planned to be fixed in future releases) but then there are some i expect they aren't smart enough to even realize are problems - e.g.: you can choose to have icons and/or text for the "back" "forward" "home" "stop" "reload" navigation type buttons at the top of the window. if you have both icons & text (which for whatever reason is what i gravitate towards) the problem is that clicking on the text doesn't do anything! the text isn't active, only the icon is. oh the hate.
• 608) The Gmail user interface is complete crap. No threading. Yet "Sent items" folds conversations, hiding sent items. Etc.
• 607) Sites with really cute 404 pages deserve to die. To die and go to hell, because it takes me a second or two to parse that it even is a 404 page. It is jarring and confusing and a waste of my energy. Just put up a bloody traditional 404 you jerks. (IE's internal "nice" 404 or whatever page is a nightmare that way, too.)
• 606) It might be for security, it might be because of the web proxy involved, it might be that the browser sucks, it might be that I've changed the browser's settings, but all I know is that if I do an Amazon search and get results and click on one and then try to go back, that page of results has been lost. So that's nice.
• 605) Web sites suck. Pretty much all of them. It has gotten pretty bad when it comes to trying to figure out "does this link open a new window?" Sites will have links which are javascript, sometimes to open a new window, sometimes to run a query and replace the contents of the current one. In both cases, opening the link in a new window (under IE at lest) fails to obtain the new contents. In the former case, if you want the new window then you can click on the link directly. However, in the latter case your only choice is to click on the link and then use the back button which, depending on the task at hand, can suck a lot. This is especially true when the system doesn't remember the scroll position correctly when you do go back, and you must then try to figure out where you were in the first page. This is the kind of thing that makes me figure extra terrestrials would give up on us right away.
• 604) I hope there is a Circle of Hell for people who make progress bars that are really just time wasters e.g.: they get to the end and then start all over again. And again etc. until the thing is really done. What a horrible bastardization. Use a wait cursor or something like that, bozos.
• 603) I find it annoying that the nvidia drivers are not "windows installer certified". I mean, you'd think nvidia could afford to get this done? Seems like they don't give a damn and don't want me to feel safe installing their warez. They don't even give md5sum values on their download pages. Hello! The other, not mututally exclusive, possibility of course is that MS is a bunch of gangsters and the whole certification thing is used to squeeze people for money.
• 602) This is, to me, a pretty cool site map implementation.
• 601) Trying to find the "current deals" on Apple PowerBooks or iBooks quickly hilights how much Low End Mac's hyperlink architecture, and naming thereof, sucks. Ack! Barf!
• 600) Acrobat Reader has little Plus and Minus icons on the toolbar that let you change the zoom level. Inbetween those two is a drop-down menu thing that lets you manually pick a specific zoom level. What is interesting is that the while the three widgets are all in their own little sub-area of the toolbar, they are not very well tied together. To wit, you can use the +/- controls to get to zoom levels that do not appear in the drop-down list (300%, for example). What! Ever!
• 599) If Acrobat is such hot poop, why does it fail to render some things correctly? Presumably it is lacking the relevant font. But since it is Acrobat, I can't change the font to something I do have, so I'm force to read some fuzzy, really badly-stretched and pixellated crap! Yeah, that is soooo advanced, baby! (Hm, it seems to often be papers from academics, so maybe it is some translation-from-LaTeX thing? Whatever, it sucks, it is yet another straw on the camel's back.) The kicker is that while going through the "Preferences..." dialog box to see if I could kick the piece of crap upside the head, I looked at the "Web Buy" thing. Clicking on it make the whole app freeze up for ten seconds before showing me a means of purchasing the item. Yeah, that's how to sell something to somebody: just before they are about to buy it, make sure to vividly demonstrate that it sucks! [Addendum: more fiddling with the Preferences shows me that the entire body text is not rendered using fonts at all. Instead, it is One! Giant! Image! Okay, maybe the blame lies squarely at the feet of the complete retards who exported this PDF to begin with! Not that it makes me love Acrobat any more, don't get me wrong.]
• 598) Here's a clue: if you are making a web site that isn't some "you mistyped the domain name, and I'm squatting, and here's a ton of stupid ads" thing, then you should try to make it not look like that kind of thing! Ah, turns out the ".org" should be ".net" in there. Good thing that the official class catalog we got has ".org" everywhere and no single instance of the ".net" version that I've seen. Don't even get me started about how utterly literally retarded the 'official' web site is. Like, you find a class and then there is no link for doing online registration. Instead, you have to find a link to the root of the online registration system and then go find you class all over again. Yeah, this all really makes Mountain View / Los Altos look like the leading heart and edge of Silicon Valley!
• 597) Normally I claim that Web search engines are good at finding computer information, because the Web was build using computers. But if there were a search engine that supported searching for punctuation, it would instantly win my heart away from Google. Ever try searching for programming notation like || or && or the more esoteric stuff from functional languages, like >>=? Google explicitly doesn't handle those at all! As if the Web itself wasn't a product of programming languges? Whatever. There are almost opposite ways in which one gets utterly screwed: try searching for an index to documentation, and you will probably find a zillion "index.html" results.
• 596) I thought that GTK (or is it GDK?) couldn't be that bad to deal with. Well, turns out I was about as wrong as I could be. Of course, I am trying to get things working under MS Windows so there is obviously bad karma there already. But the whole shebang is such complete and utter <expletive>! It is soooooo far beyond the average "Hm, what are the dependencies here? Where is that .h that it can't find? Maybe I have to download it somewhere?" kind of thing that you must always wade through to get things building, it really does boggle the mind. In the end I think it will be better for me to try and fix the O'Caml labltk problems with KeyPress events than for me to keep trying to get G?K working on this machine. Like, even if I have to break out a bloody disassembler or in-circuit-emulator or quantum microscope, it will have much greater chances of working some time before the bloody heat death of the bloody universe! I'm not sure I believe it would be any better under Linux, but maybe there are RPMs that make it all magically work. Shyeah, and then if I ever wanted to port my stuff to Windows I'd have to go through all this crap again anyway... I just can't understand how people live with this! As if I'm going to start developing stuff using G?K after this living hell? The people who do such development probably think they are really kul for figuring it all out or something. Yeah, that's really liberating, that's really leveraging Open Source to make everybody more productive and able to contribute. (Not!) This all makes Java and Swing and classpaths look like some kind of sexual favours by comparison!
• 595) If Opera is the best web browser... yuck! For example, when I'm searching for text on page it gives me no feedback when I've found the last instance of the item. You have to notice that it wrapped around. And if there is only one instance, it then gives you literally no feedback once you've found it; you can keep pressing the "Find next" button and nothing happens. Well, the button might indicate that it was pressed, but that's it. And if you did everything using keyboard shortcuts, the button doesn't even change its look. So literally nothing is happening.
• 594) With the myriad socket designs that AMD is coming out with these days, I'm surprised they haven't announced the socket 666 form factor. Ha. Ha.
• 593) I hate any car that doesn't have separate turn signal and head-and-brake lights. Further, the signal lights must be orange and the head-and-brake lights must be red. Anything else is an offense to proper design and usability ideals. So when I saw some Mazda that had a red cicular light that was split down the middle, with one half being for head-and-brake lights, and the other for the turn signal, boy did that make me ill. The kicker is that the flashing rate of the turn signal is not fast enough to distinguish it from the head-and-brake light segment.
• 592) Cutting somebody off on the highway, without signalling, going quite a bit more slowly, and then trying to acellerate to make up for it is a lot like being really obsequious to somebody the next time you meet them because you realize you did something the last time that you wish you hadn't.
• 591) I love being in a world (to wit: cygwin type stuff running on windows, in a bash shell) where typing ^c or ESC to get the hell out of some annoying program or command line utility you mistakenly started doesn't just kill the bloody thing, it instead kills the thing (sometimes, sometimes it only pretends to have killed it and you have to go manually kill it in the Task Manager later) and then brings up like literally five different dialog boxes all about how you just killed the thing, and did you know that, and did you really want to do that, and did you want to try and attach a debugger to the thing, and with which particular debugger thing-a-ma-jig did you want to attach, and oh did you also want send the crash report to Microsoft? All this for me just wanting to stop doing the thing but now I have ten seconds of annoying crap to wade through. Yeah, that is clearly the kind of usability we deserve to have in the bloody new millenium. Yeah! Baby!
• 590) Zone Alarm cont'd: when the Privacy Blocker blocks something, it also puts up a little dialog box. Which steals focus. So now there's a dialog box covering part of what I wanted to read on the web page, and my scroll wheel doesn't work to scroll the web page. Thus, they've rendered a possibly useful set of features more annoying, so nobody will use them. (Oh, and I bet that if you ever want to see something that is blocked, it will become a pain in the ass nightmare to figure out which program is doing the blocking - is it your security settings in IE? Is it Zone Alarm? Is it Pop-up Stopper? You'll have to comb through them all to figure it out. Nice!
• 589) Nice. Zone Alarm has completely forgotten all my settings. Yeah, that's what the Danes call quality. Oh, so then the kicker is that now of course it is putting up all these dialog boxes asking me if I want to let some program access the net - it is putting these up while I'm holding down the "d" key in my email program to delete a bunch of spam. So while I'm merrily auto-key-repeating away, the ZA dialog boxes appear and instantly take one of the "d" key inputs and then disappear; so now I have no idea what they were for, or what it just thought I told it to do.
• 588) Personally, I think that in this day and age of computer mice, anybody who makes a keyboard with a numeric keypad is a complete and utter jerk.
• 587) Is it me? Or maybe I just have an old verison of Lynx... but after filling out a web form, I don't see any way to save the form with the data I entered. I can "print" the page, but all that does is save the source version, without my data. Suck!
• 586) Why does all software have to suck? Nero Xpress on my machine running Windows XP has a hard time adding a directory to the image to be burned - if there are lots of files in the directory tree. I mean, it is butt slow. Blah. What is even extra bonus cooler about it is that the File Explorer from which I dragged the folder locks up modally while the 'add' operation is going on in Nero. All in all, a wonderful user experience!
• 585) PDF and, to a large extent these days, the Web have gone the way of evil by forcing their font choices upon me. I try to read some downloaded PDF paper in Acrobat Reader, and I can't change the font to something legible for my environment. That was one of the most liberating and humanitarian aspects of HTML and the Web, and has been corrupted by just about everybody. Pretty much an indictment of the entire human race, if you ask me.
• 584) Nice how the wavy pattern is distracting and makes things like reading on a sea-wracked boat. Genius page design, folks, genius!
• 583) Opera 7.23 is missing a couple of pretty important features that can be found in IE: scaling of fonts, and ignoring page font sizes/colors/etc. Opera has a zoom ability, but it zooms everything including images, so your fonts are legible but the entire page is now bigger than your entire monitor. Whatever! I guess they never visited sites like AnandTech, which forces the fonts to be eensy-teeny-weeny suckful things. (The kicker is that if you browse that site using IE, if you have ActiveX turned off then you get that bloody dialog box alert on every page.)
• 582) I'll never order anything from New Egg again as long as I live. I went through the laborious process of getting my shopping cart all set up, and entered all my shipping info and credit card info... and only at the very last step did they then put up a page telling me their site was down. Nice. So I called them to ask if I could place it over the phone - "no," because all their machines were down, even though I could still do the same steps over their public web site?! - and to suggest that they put up a page in the beginning rather than at the very end when things are dead - to which the guy said he didn't have the clout to suggest that to anybody. So much for the best customer support!
• 581) Further proof that we have entered The End Times. Any web page that tries to force the font size, and then has buttons on it to try and let you change the font size, rather than leaving the font size issue up to you and your own browser, is clearly Satan Spawn.
• 580) HP must be nuked from orbit for this abomination.
• 579) Opera 7.23, if you are on page A, then click a link to go to page B, then hilight the adress text that is page B (like you are going to copy & paste it to email it to somebody) and then, with that address text still selected, you press the back button... you will get to page A, but the address will still be page B. Yeah, that's genius.
• 578) Under the "do they even use it themselves?" Department: Google's Image Search results should tell you how big the thumbnail is compared to the original image, percent.
• 577) Word!
• 576) Fountain Pen Hospital had very good customer service.
• 575) Wake me up when Linux doesn't suck, and maybe I'll consider giving up my Mac. Oh, wait, I don't have a Mac yet, all I have are evil Linux, OpenBSD and Windows machines. Shoot me, or give me the dosh to get a Macintosh life, please!
• 574) Operating Systems and File Systems that we currently have are pathetic: if you double click on an XML file, they can only go to one program. You can't have it look inside the XML file at the DTD or schema and launch the relevant editor based on that. So that sucks a lot.
• 573) People claim that Wikis are the best thing since sliced bread, yet any time one gets real use I see embedded in the discussion many complaints about how the UI is for shyte (see e.g.: About Latent Typing.)
• 572) Why typewriters are better for getting into The Flow than a computer is: today my machine decided that every key press was accompanied by the Ctrl key, even when it wasn't. So typing 'o' would bring up the Open File dialog rather than just typing the letter 'o'. Of course it started doing this just as I was getting into actually accomplishing something. So I had to quit all programs, log out, and log back in (which took probabl a total of three minutes). Yeah, that really didn't get me off track or anything... So basically computers are like eating shards of yummy salted glass when it comes to productivity, or something.
• 571) Another complete indictment of the current state of software: Opera somehow got into a very strange rendering state after I had flailed a little on the keyboard by mistake. It took me quite a while to figure out what bloody state it was now in (Authoring) and how to get it out. That sucks. That really sucks. There's nothing to help you, no visible log that says "you just went into Authoring mode." There's no way to use Undo to get out of it, etc. Just. Plain. Suck. The kickers are that it doesn't let you e.g.: click on anything, apparently (or maybe this is a different hellacious mode in Opera, who knows? It all just sucks ass, that's what I know). So I'm entering some text into a text field and then somehow get into this mode, and now I can't click to get the focus or text cursor in the text field any more. So then I'm fiddling around trying to get out of Author Mode, I guess, and... the whole application dies. Dies, and takes all the text with it because I couldn't have copied it out before it crashed, because of the mode it was in. I'm pretty sure the complete hatefulnessof these kinds of so-called "features" should have been figured out within thirty seconds of any user testing, leading to them being removed. But, nooooo....
• 570) Acrobat Reader sucks because, as far as I've been able to tell so far, you can only have one window per document. You can't right-click on a reference and "open in new window" or anything useful like that. Sure, you could run 2 instances of Reader, but they don't communicate in any way so that is super lame.
• 569) Why *nix sucks my stinky hairy buttocks: adduser or useradd? 'Nuff said.
• 568) I've got to say, the UI for ZoneAlarm kinda sucks ass. It has a very strange, crappy implementation of tabs, for example. It uses left and right click totally incorrectly, also. Left-click should only be for selections, right-click should bring up a context sensitive menu; instead, both bring up menus, which is just plain wrong. Whatever.
• 567) Just try to find a decent list of all the James Bond movies at imdb. The search is atrocious. All I want is a reverse-chronological listing of Bond flicks, but noooo, we wouldn't want to give you the search tools for that, now would we? That might make the search actually useful and then we couldn't sell as many ad impressions, or something. Hate.
• 566) Computer technology remains clearly removed from the world of regular humans as long as we need %20 in our URLs.
• 565) I don't care if it is the browser's fault, or the site's fault, all I know is it bloody well sucks my butt when I do a search, look at a result, then click back... and get a message telling me that page has expired. Where. Do. I. Start. The. Killing?
• 564) Ever more empirical proof that User Interfaces are all crap: If you have 2 windows maximized in Windows (X, MacOS, whatever), and you click on the jolly candy-like button to close the top window, and then you have a slight twitch of the hand and finger, causing another click in the same area... Yup, you guessed it, you just killed the other thing as well. And Ctrl-Z isn't going to get it back. Bastard!
• 563) One of the more pathetic web sites, although a favorite because of the subject matter, is Chocosphere. The thing is, the whole site is pretty first-generation web site cheesy in terms of design (I mean, they are using centered text for chrissakes, nudge nudge wink wink) and then when you get through to ordering... I pity the fool. They put so much text in there disclaiming this or underscoring that, that just for ordering the bloody chocolate is a nightmare. Pear it down, guys, pear it down.
• 562) It constantly amazes me how people can be so utterly retarded. Gamesdomain used to be little old in the tooth, but the UI at least didn't completely fall down (well, only as long as you had JavaScript enabled). Now that it has moved to Yahoo!, they have made it all nice and pretty, but have utterly killed any usability it ever had. They fail to have a single link that gets you to the reviews. Or previews. Instead, you just get the mish-mash "Features" list. St00pid! Even if you drill into a specific platform (which is retarded because people can own more than one system, duh) it still doesn't give you a list of reviews. You have to pick by name or genre, you can't see things in reverse chronological order, or even by score apparently. In other words, the site has become completely and utterly useless. I only pray that the great gods of capitalism utterly smite them up the ass.
• 561) The problem with the Web, and Internet text in general (usenet, email) is you get to read things that are not spell checked, and over time that can erode your own holographic sense of spelling. Things no longer come out automatically correct because you've seen enough missepllings (ha ha) to slightly warp the stored procedures for word structures. I want a web browser that is smart enough to fix English spelling on the pages I'm reading. Maybe I'll make a proxy that does just that (some day).
• 560) Okay! I will never buy an Acer notebook since they web site doesn't help me figure out what the bloody real differences are among their models. As if I'm supposed to do a manual breadth-first search of their entire web site? Whatever!
• 559) Yes, in my perfect-world-parallel-universe, any web site which required flash would result in the immediate financial and cultural death of the owners.
• 558) I'm so glad I can't get any search engines to search for the exact string "is-a". They all seem to turn it into "is a". Whatever.
• 557) Slashdot's search is a festering piece of, well, crap. For example, it apparently doesn't match on titles; I can search for "theatre" and the article whose title contains "Theatre" doesn't appear in the results. I have to search for "home" because that appears in the summary/body. (Guess it doesn't pay to spell the British way.)
• 556) Is it me, or is the discussion navigation of slashdot completely and utter crap? If I'm looking at a reply, how do I find the parent?
• 555) I try to limit the cookies (only accept ones from the original server etc.) in Opera, and then I can't log onto any web sites. If I do what seem to be similar restrictions in IE, the web sites work fine. Which means Opera is useless to me.
• 554) Opera is kind of a piece of crap. There are web sites that I'll try to go to which kick Opera into downloading the web site for ever. Nothing is ever drawn, and the status bar indicates that the size in MB gets ever larger, the progress bars zip and zoom, etc. But nothing ever gets drawn. Yeah, that's what I want my browser to do, sure! I bet IE doesn't explode like this. (Yes, I understand that some sites have bad HTML or whatever, and it is their fault, not Opera's, but the poopy truth is that nobody is going to cut Opera any slack if the site renders okay in IE.)
• 553) All I'm saying is, the Opera people should look into making it so people can download their software using Lynx. This Simtel bullcrap of requiring Javascript to get the download is plain evil, stupid, self-defeating and wrong.
• 552) When I open a new window or page in Opera, it shows up utterly blank. I think it should show up with my home page. I mean, that's why I set a home page. That's the whole bloody point of a home page. Argh!
• 551) I'm stunned how, like, every browser has blatant usability and security problems. I've tried IE (which seems to render the fastest, but has huge security holes), I've tried Mozilla (which renders the second fastest, but loads and draws thing horribly badly, making it kind of nasty to use), and Opera (which is the slowest loader & renderer by far, but at least doesn't utterly freak out on already visited pages, which Mozilla does). And they all, pretty much, suck ass in at least three different really obvious ways, ways that I discover within the first few hours - if not minutes - of using them.
• 550) I love Tom's Hardware Guide but the really need to learn the most basic ideas when it comes to drawing graphs. There are so many things wrong, here, but the two most blatant are:
  1. It doesn't tell you why some bars are red and others blue.
  2. It is missing the succinct statement "longer bars are better."
• 549) All web browsers should automatically fix mistyped TLDs. But they don't.
• 548) I've decided that people who run restaurants are destined for the same circle of hell as anybody who ever designed a web page at e.g.: Wired. They all require bloody Flash or some custom Active X 3D viewer just to see a bloody picture of the bloody dining room. Hate!
• 547) Citysearch is lacking some obvious usability tweaks:
  1. From the "Obviously Overlooked by Dumb Idiot Designers" office: Citysearch doesn't let you choose a city using a map. No, you have to know the names of the cities ahead of time, and look them up alphabetically. That's not very useful when you are just going on a road trip. Gah!
  2. When I change to another city, even though I've been only searching for restaurants for a couple hours now, it doesn't default me to only restaurants in the new place.
  I set it to a new city. I enter the name of a restaurant. Since it didn't put me back into only restaurants when I changed cities, it gives me hits of anything that matches the name. So I click on the Restaurants tab at the top... and it gives me the default top-level page for restaurants, it doesn't even take my search and narrow it to, duh, restaurants.
  3. Maybe it is because I'm going through a web proxy, but its list of "Recent Locations" that I've searched through really just doesn't work at all.
  4. You can search restaurants by Ambiance, but they don't have Romantic listed as one. Even though, when you actually read a review, the fist thing it lists are booleans like "Kid Friendly" and "Romantic". Whatever.
• 546) I'm so glad that every bastard with a mail-order web site now has "write your own review" on their pages. It really makes it easy for me to find real, educated reviews of stuff.
• 545) Nothing proves the moral bankruptcy of computer interfaces more succinctly than the confusion the general populace has over knowing when to single vs. double click to activate an item.
• 544) We all know that using Cut & Paste for text can be dangerous, especially when using it to create source code for software. (For those of you who haven't run into the problem, it is that you paste text and then think you've edited it sufficiently only to later discover a bug where you failed to e.g.: update an old variable name to the new one.) On the face of it, the risk (at least for commercial software development) outweighs the benefit, and the conclusion is that you should never cut & paste code. However, programmers these days tend to use IDEs, much as novelists tend to use word processors. Any such application, were it actually concerned with helping you, would (as an aside) get rid of the standard annoying hateful "hover with mouse" tool tips that get in the way more often than not, and replace it with code to: draw the background of pasted text in some hilight color (but obviously not the one used when selecting text), and then restore the regular background color as you edit letters. That way, the parts you have failed to update will remain quite visible at all times, and you should more easily avoid the mistake of leaving the iOldVariable rather than properly updating it to iNewThing. Sort of like revision markup you find in some document editors.
• 543) Yahoo! bastards. I use their yellow pages to look for "Foos Data Pacific" and it gives me a hit but when I look closer (the wrong area code tipped me off) it turns out they've only returned 1 hit that is actually "Foo Digital Pacific" which is close but clearly not the same company at all. Yet there is nothing in the list of results warning you that no exact match was found. Whatever.
• 542) I'm not sure I've ever seen a web site that commits more pathetic, retarded offenses against usability than that of ICT. It uses graphics for text, so you can't copy and paste, you can't have a machine read it out to you, and you can't change the miniscule font to something actually legible. So if you are using Lynx or any text-based web browser, you won't be able to get the phone number or address. Genius! It also hides the menu options behind images so you have to play hunt-the-UI-weasel when you want to get information, and pretty much every time you want information - one doen't tend to remember where the stuff is from visit to visit. The only thing missing is use of Flash, I guess.
• 541) Gah! It is considered good form to put your name and email etc. info on web sites you create because it indicates that you are taking responsibility for the maintenance and contents. I feel it is an absolute requirement if you are making a political / social justice / civil rights / etc. activism site. Lack of names of real people makes everything appear to be possibly quacky or shady.
• 540) Linux has a long way to go, I gotta say. I've tried installing various and sundry distributions on my various and sundry Macintosh boxes, only to be met with sturm und drang. The stories I've heard of other people's suffering don't make me really want to figure out how to fix these crappy broken distributions all on my own, even though that is what you are supposed to do with Open Source stuff, I guess.
• 539) I am so sick (and tired) of people naming their software projects after mountains. Every software company in the entire history of Earth has probably had a Denali at some time.
• 538) It kills me when computer applications just go utterly out to lunch. Like, you get a wait cursor for the mouse and it stays there for a couple of minutes and you have no idea why, or how to prevent it from happening in the future. Great. Maybe if everything had some logging you could try to suss it out. Whatever.
• 537) MapQuest is stupid.
  1. It says to enter an address or intersection. So I enter "123 Elm St at Jasper Rd", and then a city and state. It ends up giving me just a general address for the city and completely fails to parse the intersection. Impressive!
  2. I enter a location, it gives me a map. Then, I want to get directions to there. They have a "Driving Directions" area where you can enter another address. There's a set of radio buttons with the options "to this location" or "from this location" and then space to enter an address. Now, from my perspective, "this location" should mean the place I mapped first. Turns out they mean the other way 'round. You'd think they would have figured out by now that it could be confusing to people (I'm sure a cursory glance at the page-to-page server stats would show people redoing their directions mapping a lot) and would have disambiguated the wording.
• 536) I'm reading the email archives from the Clean list and it says that "Re: foo" and "RE: foo" are two different threads. Whimper.
• 535) Things I will never buy or use because of their goddamned pop-up ads: Alienware computers. Heald College.
• 534) Good luck finding what original article this is commenting on. Could the UI for finding the source item suck more? It is all in the wrong place.
• 533) Whoever runs the Apple Store is a financial retard. Yeah, let's force people to not be able to give us money! Genius!
• 532) What is the point of a help system when it takes seemingly a year for the stupid thing to finally fire up? This happens both in Mac OS X and in Windows. The kicker in OS X is that I swear the help is always utterly useless. At least the stuff in Windows is overkill rather than simply impotent.
• 531) Netflix is nice and all, GreenCine is great... yet nobody has a search engine and queue UI worth a damn. How about fuzzy matching to allow for speling mistakes and typos? How about letting me categorize my queue entries so I can make sure to interleave things for me any my significant other? Yadda yadda yadda. I dream of the day when people really do compete on user interface quality.
• 530) No, really, where can I start the killing? Hm, lemme think... I know! Yes, I should start the killing at Audioreview. Wonder why?
  1. I added a review for the Sherwood Newcastle RVD-9090R audio component. Now... how can I edit it if I've forgotten something or found a typo? Hm, no links for it on the page of reviews. No link for it from my profile page. Apparently, no link for doing that anywhere at all. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, WTF?!?!?!!!!! Was it too hard for them to figure out the SQL to do the update or something?
  2. They aren't so much a review site as a blow hot air up your ass, so you will go out and spend money site. See how their front page is all about selling you stuff? See how reviews only let you sort them by "Best Rating"? There's no way to see the shyte first. Kinda like how eBay, the commie bastards, try to make it difficult to find negative feedback on anybody. What is the point of having any of this if you can't get at it? I'll tell you what the point is, the point is to give you a false sense of security, a false sense of these folks being honestly helpful folks, rather than weasels out to make quick bucks. Gimme an honest site for a change, that isn't sucking the teats of our capitalist masters. Gimme something with a bloody spine, you scum sucking vermin.
  3. My friend Eric would appreciate the fact that they can't get their name consistent. In some places it is "AudioREVIEW.com" (nice shouting there), in some places it is "audio/review.com". Whatever.
• 529) DevFS is utterly killing me. I've got 2 machines with it, and neither can see its own bloody hard-drive. One is an I-Opener with Jailbait Linux, the other is a Mac B&W New World G3 with the Gentoo live CD. When I look through the results of dmesg, I see no reference to hd anything. Augh!
• 528) Contrary to what this person is implying, Open Source Sucks because it is a confluence of "somebody else's problem" fields. So in the end, i can't get X windows to work on my OBSD computer (the mouse doesn't work) or on my G3 running Gentoo (the auto setup script *ucks up the video plane layout) without learning all about configuration options. Have not had similar problems with Windows in years!
• 527) Another reason why Open Source sucks: XFree86 on OpenBSD 3.3 doesn't magically know how to get my mouse working. My mouse doesn't work, and I don't know what magic crap I have to change to make it work. Do I have this problem with Windows? Well, technically, yes, I did just have a machine give me trouble, but I just switched from the PS/2 to the USB port and rebooted, and Windows works. I'm not sure I have that excape with OBSD?
• 526) Yahoo!'s calendar is nice and all, but it quickly reveals the missing nuances. Quicken showed the way with nuanced UI, nobody else has really bothered to take it to heart?
  1. It doesn't remember the last event you entered, to use e.g.: the event classification as the default for the next item saved. I'd like that to at least be an option.
  2. I'd rather have the day names in the day blocks in the month view than the numbers. I'd like more customization ability in general.
  3. It doesn't color already past days differently.
  4. I want to have everything besides the events be slightly faded so that the events stand out. Chart junk!
  5. You can't set an event to be urgent and to therefore show up in some bright color.
  6. You can only set the duration of an event, and I'd like to be able to just set the end time, sometimes.
  7. Making an event that goes for a long time, e.g.: "Parent Visiting" seems to be a pain.
• 525) Open Source continues to suck: XDarwin presents me with a dialog box that has 2 buttons: "Full Screen" and "Rootless". Here's a clue, people: not everybody is going to know what those mean or what the difference is. Hell, I've been using X11 since 1988 (which is before some readers were born, I'll wager :-) and I still don't know off the top of my head what the hell the difference is. Dumb bastards. There is a little bit of help text, but it is buried at the end of a long paragraph of text - the other rule, besides "make buttons that make sense", is "people don't read long text." These are UI rules that we've known about probably since the 60s, people. Augh!
• 524) The United States Postal Service has physical Post Offices you can go to (in case you didn't know that). They suck. For many reasons, they suck, but one of the most glaring ones to me is that I have never seen clear concise explanations of the different service levels they offer for sending something. What is the difference between Global Priority, or Fist Class, or Express, or XYZ? Which can have insurance? Which give me a tracking number? Which offer a physical delivery receipt? Then, even if you do know all that, just try figuring out what forms you have to fill out. It is all such an utterly insane complete piece of broken crap bureocratic situtation straight from government hell! Hate!
• 523) The Happy Hacking Keyboards piss me off because they are so close to being nice, but then they go and have something above the delete key. What complete incometence! (Hey, and why aren't there any good small ergonomic keyboards?)
• 522) People who need to die and go to heck: Those who make their web page have hyperlink text that changes font style when you roll-over it. E.g.: it gets bold. Which then forces the entire page layout to change. Which gives the whole page an epileptic look. To quote Weird Al's movie UFO, "Stooooopid!"
• 521) Ikea is kinda from hell.
  1. We went to get some bathroom and kitchen furniture at the Emeryville, CA store. Both were 'custom' items, which means we couldn't just pick it up ourselves in the big warehouse area. Instead, we had to go to the furniture special order / delivery area, which is located beyond the cash registers (you pay then go pick up that 'custom' stuff).
  2. They told us the bathroom stuff was in stock, but the kitchen stuff wasn't so we elected to take the bathroom stuff that day, and have the kitchen stuff delivered to our home later. So, we filled out all the forms for the orders and the delivery in the main kitchen showroom area. Theoretically, we were good to go as far as documents were concerned, all we had to do was pick up the bathroom stuff on our way out. We were told the earliest we could get the kitchen furniture was a week hence.
  3. The pickup area is hell. They have not designed it well, so there are zillions of people with their shopping carts full of all the stuff they just bought (the area is after the check-out tellers) so you end up with a Fire Marshal's worst nightmare of jumbled chaos. It doubles as the delivery document setup area as well, but that isn't super well labeled, to add to the mayhem. One guy in front of me in line said, "Last time I was here, I waited for an hour only to discover they had the item the whole time waiting for me behind the counter, they just didn't realize it was there!" and, "See those folks over there? They've already been waiting for an hour and a half today for their pickup."
  4. The first Ikea person we talked to in the pickup area told us that we had to fill out the forms we'd already filled out, again, because that's the way things are done. He didn't try to look up our info in the computer, and we didn't know enough to demand he do that. Oh no.
  5. Eventually, the bathroom stuff did come out for us to pick up. However, we were left waiting in line to try and get the delivery stuff finalized - even though we thought we'd already done that back in the kitchen showroom.
  6. I finally get to talk to somebody and they, along with some managers they try to get help from, go through:
     1. "How does delivery tomorrow morning sound?" even though the original kitchen folks said the items wouldn't be in stock until a week later.
     2. "You haven't paid for delivery." So why does the receipt I'm holding say $60 for delivery? "Oh, gee, I guess you've paid for delivery."
     3. "Okay, you're all set to go... for in-store pickup!" So my receipt says I just paid $60 for the privilege of driving all the way back here next weekend "Oh, you want home delivery?"
  7. Anyway, in the end we leave there thinking things are set up. We've got various and sundry print-outs which claim we do have a delivery order.
  8. Come the day of the supposed delivery, and nobody shows up with our stuff. We try to call Ikea - to discover that literally about 80% of the time their phone number is busy. You can't even get in a hold queue. Eventually we get lucky and get through, to be told that they don't have the stuff in stock yet even, and that they don't know about us having paid for home delivery. Then I seem to get cut off - the line is dead quiet - so I give up and hang up (we were running out the door at the time anyway).
  9. (Turns out they tend not to have any hold music or voice-over, only dead silence, so you are kinda left wondering if they even know you are there, ever.)
  10. Sufficeth to say, days of trying to get through on the phone, days of being told they'll call me back and yet with no returned calls, end up with me finally figuring out that our "Booking Number" for our original order is in no way lined in their computer system with our "Delivery Number". And the Booking order says that we're doing in-store pickup. But the Delivery order, no duh, says we're expecting and have paid for home delivery.
  11. As of this writing I'm waiting to hear back from them again, to see if they can successfully set up a delivery for this coming weekend... Ah, they never called back! Yes! So now I am calling them, and am on hold...
  12. Turns out the docks in Los Angeles said they sent it up here, and that it was supposed to arrive at the Emeryville store on Monday. That's already a day after our original home delivery date. Pretty good organization, there. But the kicker is that nobody here knows about ever having received it. So they have to reorder it from LA.
  13. In the end, I told them to just cancel the whole damned order.
• 520) Google will try to suggest alternate spellings of your search query. But it does that even when the alternate spelling results in fewer hits than how I spelled it (e.g.: "stand alone" (mine) vs "standalone" (theirs)). That seems really stupid.
• 519) I am dying trying to use Wings. It completely doesn't know how big my screen is, or something, and it uses its own insane version of the Multiple Document Interface like what MS used to use. It was a bad idea then, and it is a bad idea now, especially when implemented in a completely broken way. Whatever. Maybe it would all work better if I were running under Linux instead of XP?
• 518) Google's image search doesn't offer spelling corrections, like their regular search does. Oh vell.
• 517) I appreciate that some people like to have cryptographically signed downloads. But then there's ordinary folks like me who really are fine with just an MD5 sum. So, please, put both on your page, okay? Unlike the SDL download page. Blah!
• 516) Free software is great and all, but I'm the kind of person that gets driven up the wall by the little things - because the little things should have been completely solved by now, and anybody who doesn't grok them just pisses me off no end. Take the free and excellent 3d modeler Wings 3d. It is great, and all, but:
  1. It can't even get the bloody UI for the pull-down menus right! If you click on 'File' and then click on 'File' again to close the menu... nothing happens. Doesn't matter how long you wait to click on it, it refuses to go away. That is just plainly and simply wrong.
  2. Also, it does the absolutely inexcusable Windows thing where if you drag the mouse pointer down past the end of a menu, the last item in the menu remains hilighted, even though you aren't pointing to it. So you aren't sure if that command will happen when you click outside of the menu or not. I think, like Windows, it doesn't, but it shouldn't ever happen that the user has to live in fear. Bah, humbug!
  3. Unlike every other WIMP GUI in the Universe (almost), hierarchical menus do not have a little right-arrow next to them. Instead of reading something like "Hier Entry >" it reads ".Hier Entry." Must be some kind of serious crack smoking going on there!
• 515) I'm just doomed to never be able to set aside my pickiness long enough to learn 3d Studio Max or gMax.
  1. It just so completely kills me that when I'm trying to rotate something left and right, around a vertical axis, I apparently have to move the mouse pointer up and down, rather than left and right. I'm just doing their tutorial, and that's what I have to do. This is considered cutting-edge usability? God help us all.
  2. It uses + and - for the roll-outs, which is bad because it is a toggle button and you don't know what the 'icon' means - what it will do, or what it already is.
  3. Using the mouse scroll wheel in the Modifier List roll-out leads to super zany redrawing of the list. Yeah, just what I'd want it to do.
• 514) I hate NewsForge because they apparently do not give unique titles to their web pages. So trying to navigate through the page history is pretty much rendered unusable. Yeah, great, gee thanks guys.
• 513) When they keyboard cable comes a little loose, what I type gets turned into similar but slightly different input. It would be a much better failure mode to do nothing at all, because that way it would be a lot more clear what's going on!
• 512) Viking Memory incorrectly advertised their product on the Amazon.com web site, so I got stuff that didn't work in my Mac. I talked with one customer service rep who said they wouldn't pay for my returning the stuff, even though they advertised it incorrectly. She pretty much told me to go talk to Amazon. So I did, and Amazon laughed and said that first person was lying weasel scum. So, I called Viking back and got somebody else who was like "sure, here's our UPS account number, send it on back for free." So that was a very nice ending to the story (well, the story to date, at any rate)!
• 511) I'm using WinZip 8.1, and they still have modal sub-dialog boxes. Utterly retarded. So if you are trying to extract, and then you're like "hm, I wonder if the archive already has a root directory in the path of the files, or if I should create a new directory myself" you cannot find out just by looking back at the main window because your Extract dialog has taken over. So you have to exit that, scroll over to look at the paths, then do Extract again - and re-navigate to where you want to extract to, where you were a minute ago. Utter suck!
• 510) Don't you love how companies try to vary their "press X to talk to a human" number X so that you can't guess until you've heard the entire stupid message? (Apparently, for Working Assets it is '9' right now.)
• 509) I went to Ikea. Oh boy. That place is a zoo, even on quiet days. Things are usually mostly okay there in terms of getting your stuff, because it is all self-service. But this time I wanted to get some things that required talking to Ikea employees, oh, and then also required picking stuff up after we'd checked out. Oh, and also trying to do home delivery. Sufficeth to say, it was a huge SNAFU. A teeny weeny example of their stunning competence: their printer ran out of paper, and there wasn't any paper to refill it. Anywhere. Don't get me started on the whole bureaucratic cluter fudge that included things like "you haven't paid this" "then what's the $60 on the receipt that says 'delivery' for?" "wait a second... gee, I guess you paid for this" and "no, you aren't set for home delivery, you are set to come back and pick it up yourself when the shipment arrives" "so I paid $60 for the privilege?" "wait a second... gee, I guess you paid for home delivery." Et-cetera, et-cetera, et-cetera.
• 508) Sonic.net is nice and all (they probably can't be any worse than Speakeasy, whom I hate) but they seem kinda dorky nevertheless!
  1. Their Web Mail UI is just utter feces. A chimp could do a better job with its head wedged up its ass. Apparently, it is Squirrel Mail, which I guess must plain suck rocks?
  2. When I click to log out of their web site, it asks me to enter my password three times before it really logs me out! What kind of crack are these weasel-monkeys smoking? The kicker is that they respond to my email about it and admit that it is broken but then go on to be apologists about it and rationalize that "well, gee, if you just do (completely non-intuitive) X then everything works fine." Severe denial, there, very sad. WWJD?
  3. Their Web Mail uses a different namespace than their web site for userids. So I'm Fred to log into the self-help tools of the web site (the aforementioned completely broken one wrt logging out - and more), but Fred was taken for email so I end up being something completely different. Seems like somebody should have thought "gee, from the user's perspective these should all just be the same damned namespace since they are just going to the exact same web site in each case." But nooooooo...
  4. Sure, I can ask for a block of IPs but then the list doesn't show up anywhere that I can find in my user stats page. Either that, or the block wasn't reall allocated to me. Or their notation is the [IP/bit mask] notation but they don't really explain that and not many regular mortals know about that. Whatever!
• 507) Boy, do I hate Nokia's cell phone UI. Oh, and why did the Backgammon game give itself literally 6 double's (3-3, 6-6, that kind of thing) in the space of like 10 rolls? I know things like that can happen statisically, but it just reeks of cheating.
• 506) Does it piss off anybody else that when you call e.g.: your credit card company, the recorded voice asks you to enter your account number... and then, when you finally get through to talking to a human, they ask you for it again? Why can't their fancy-pants phone system just show the stupid number I just entered scant moments ago (modulo waiting in the hold queue for the human) to the service person? Whatever!
• 505) Have I mentioned recently how much I utterly loathe Speakeasy? I ask them to terminate my DSL account at the end of the month - that's two weeks in the future - and suddenly my shell account is killed, and I can't log into the web site either. That's customer service, baby! Not a day goes by without thinking of them hatefully.
• 504) Konqueror sucks. I mean, what is the point of having a "home" URL if it doesn't go there when you start up the program? So every time, I have to click on the home icon. Whatever!
• 503) I'm glad to see that Speakeasy's web site is still utterly incomprehensible. It looks like there should be lots of useful information, but actually deciphering all the stuff which ends up sounding very similar, actually being able to find anything is nigh impossible. Ugh. Oh, and it tends to be really slow. So that's a nice bonus.
• 502) Sites like IGN which have intersitial ads between every page are utterly stupid. I'm not going to ever visit them, I'm never going to pay for some subscription to get rid of the ads. Rather, I'm going to let them rot in hell.
• 501) I was maybe going to get DSL from PacBell / SBC but then this is what I get when I ask their web site to check what services they can provide to my residence / phone number. I'm definitely not going to bother with them ever again. Guess I'll just be going straight to Comcast (as much as that pains me ethically).
• 500) It has been a couple of years since I last tried to use DSL Reports and unfortunately they apparently have not really improved at all.
  1. They don't give their web pages unique titles, totally preventing one from navigating back using the page history. Nice!
  2. In lists of providers, some links will take you to reviews, others to the providers web site. There is nothing to distinguish the types of links ahead of time. Further, some apparenly take you to a pretty unrelated list of providers by state?!
  3. Oh, okay, I think I figured out their page design, so now I could tell you ahead of time what the link will do. But it takes some noodling around before anybody will figure it out. Pah, utterly pathetic infoviz here!
  4. My experience with ISPs vs. how the same ISPs are rated on DSL Reports makes me feel like most of the time they are giving you the opposite of reality. E.g.: everybody loved Speakeasy, which ended up sucking severe buttocks. E.g.: everybody whined about Telocity, but when I got DirecDSL it was pure bliss, at lest in comparison with every other ISP I've ever had. (So, of course, DirecDSL had to die, so sad). E.g.: everybody said Sonic.net was great... and in some ways they actually are good (so far, anybody I talk to on the phone there is very nice, very helpful, very competent, and doesn't have some psycho geek socializing like all the people in any line of support at Speakeasy), but then in other ways they are utterly insane; their web site is just clearly wrong and stupid and broken and from Mars when it comes to usability.
• 499) I tried to take BART from the airport. What a nightmare!
  1. There are, like, no signs on the tracks that tell you clearly which track to be on for the next train, or where they are going. The signs they have tell you things like "if you get raped on BART don't blame us" (really reassuring to see that as the first thing at the track!) and "the other track is for <other stuff>... but we're not going to tell you what this track is for, oh no!" Oh, and the few signs are only in English. You know, because this is the station built to service the San Francisco International Airport, and everybody on Earth must speak (and read!) English, I guess.
  2. The user interfaces for the ticket machines absolutely kill me. For example, when you buy a ticket, you insert money, say, ten bucks. The UI gives you two options for setting the price of the ticket: subtract one dollar, or subtract five cents. You know, because even though there is a numeric keypad on the bloody machine, I guess it would just make waaaaaay too much sense to let the user directly type in the price. No, instead, they have to be doing math on the fly to get what they want. Nice!
  3. They spend all this money on extending the track and building new buildings, and then they go and install ticket vending systems from hell! There are all sorts of hidden assumptions that the ticket machines have that are not explained anywhere. E.g.: how to pay for parking; you are supposed to add $2 onto your ticket when you buy it and then you go find a completely different machine which then deducts your parking fee from your ticket. They don't tell you this when you are buying your ticket in the first place, so you really are just going to end up with a ticket that is $2 short of what you need to ride the train. Ha ha. (Oh, and you are supposed to have remembered the stall number you parked in during all this hectic bull-crap, otherwise you are screwed. And the parking ticket machine is inside the ticket barriers, so it isn't like you can easily walk back out to your car...) So then you try to use the Add Fare machine to put back on the $2 you need, but it turns out the Add Fare machine is the exact same one as the parking ticket machine, and it adamantly refuses to let you do anything remotely like "add fare". It only gives you the chance to pay for your parking again ha ha. In the end, it turns out that you can apparently only do Add Fare at the exit station (so it knows how much extra you need to pay, since different trip lengths cost different amounts). But nowhere is any of this explained!
  4. Once you are on the train, again, there are no signs to tell you where you are, or where you are going. Instead, you have to rely on the conductor's announcements. Now, maybe they actually only hire Shakespearean actors to ensure proper diction, but even if that really were the case, I'm pretty sure the intercom system would deftly mangle their words to guarantee visitors from other countries won't know what the hell is going on.
• 498) I just don't get it. Gateway sells computers over the web, right? So you'd think they'd have big pictures of the things I'm considering buying, right? Well, they don't. At least, none of the laptops so far have. That's really nice, great, terrific, and now I'll be never buying anything from Gateway again as long as I live. Toshiba was just as bad; they wanted you to have some web browser plugins or something. What. Is. So. Hard. About. Having. Some. BIG. GIFs?
• 497) I got a new Nokia phone. It apparently no longer shows you the menu number sequence to get to your current menu position like my old phone, e.g.: 4-5-1 (on the new phone) gets you to the Wallpaper display setting, but it doesn't show you those breadcrumbs. So I'll never learn them I guess.
• 496) I stayed at the W business hotel in Chicago. It was a classic example of style over substance. The room was designed to be impossible to use; light switches were hidden, lamps were unplugged, doors opened into one another, the clock radio was from hell, etc. etc. There wasn't even a full-length mirror anywhere, just the little one in the super cramped bathroom. Don Norman would have loved the place, I'm sure.
• 495) Why is it that in the future (in video games, in Robocop), the soldiers have helmets that cover everything except their mouths? As if getting a bullet there would feel particularly good?
• 494) It kills me that things like web browsers, or the Windows File Explorer still have "Back" and "Forward" buttons. Those are so clearly horrible bad confusing stupid evil names. At the very least, "Previous" and "Next" would probably cause less cognitive dissonance.
• 493) When you turn on a PlayStation 2 without any CD in it, but with a memory cartridge, the UI that comes up has the memory unit selected. If you then put in a CD, the selection doesn't switch to the CD(/DVD). It stays on the memory cartridge. So, if you want to use your PS2 as a CD player without having to have the TV on, you need to have this complicated mental map of what the hell is going on in the UI. They should have made it default to just being a super straight forward CD player; when you put in a CD it should just start playing it.
• 492) Comcast really pisses me off because their logo doesn't have a capital 'C', yet when they write the name in plain text it does. Make up your bloody mind!
• 491) It blows my mind that I cannot completely turn off key-repeat on various and sundry computers (well, at least, Win2K Server). You'd think that would be an available option in the control panel, at least for the sake of accessibility.
• 490) A classic proof of the complete and utter suckfulness of computers: I'm playing an on-line multiplayer game, I'm dogfighting another airplane... and suddenly my game goes away and I'm on the XP desktop, and my virus checking software has a dialog box up saying "there are updates, do you want me to get them?" Note that this is like ten minutes after I've booted the machine, not one. So by the time I get back to the game, of course I'm dead... and now the sound is utterly broken and I have to quit and restart the entire game. Who is to blame? The OS? The virus software? Who knows?! That's part of the proof of the suckfulness; you won't even know exactly what screwed you!
• 489) I have and like a SmartBoard ergonomic keyboard. One thing I seriously dislike about it, however, is the stupid arrangement of the function keys. They are split F1-F6 and F7-F12, which is obviously wrong. They should have done what every other keyboard does: F1-F5, F6-F10 and then two at the end for F11 and F12.
• 488) Sure, I like artbomb and everything, but I wish they would fix their bloody comic-reading UI. You get to the end and yet it still shows you a little "next" arrow that you can click on... just to go nowhere for ever. Idiots.
• 487) Is it just me, or does SourceForge have the most useless sorting / searching mechanism ever? I can't yet find a way to sort within results or to combine requirements e.g.: by a license and a project type. What. Ever! Oh, and then I tried to submit the comment... their submission form is utterly stupid as well. Very impressive, folks, very impressive! As if Sun, Microsoft, Apple have anything to fear from OSS. Anyway, after screwing around with it for a while myself, it turns out you can click on the "Filter" links to build up filters. I wish they would just have a regular search interface like a normal search engine. E.g.: like Hotbot or Google. Whatever!
• 486) Epicurious has a really stupid UI for their recipe search results in that it tells you "46-60 of 94 [results]" and has "Previous" and "Next" links... instead it should just tell you how many pages of results there are. What, I'm supposed to do the math every time to figure out how many bloody pages there are in the result set? There isn't even an option to set how many results you get per page!
• 485) Wow. I really want to hurt the software developers at ATI (the video card company). I installed a couple of ATI cards in my PC and then noticed that the refresh rate of the monitor was low and everything was flickery. So I went into the Display control panel and changed the display rate to a decent high rating. It made no difference at all. This puzzled me for many many weeks, and then eventually I got curious and looked through the extra tabs in that control panel for ATI special features. Turns out there is another place in there which defines the monitor and the refresh rate as well... and apparently that is the one which wins. Since that was still set to 60Hz everything sucked. Setting it to 85 made life better. But I'm still utterly disgusted that they totally broke the control panel. Pathetic, insulting, infuriating. I hope their stock completely tanks.
• 484) I want all my applications to give me a good history mechanism so I can see exactly what happened. E.g.: in my mail program I just noticed that this one folder has been pretty much emptied of all its contents. I don't recall ever doing that myself, so I think the server is to blame, but I don't have any history to see if I spaced out and somehow managed to kill all the messages myself, or what.
• 483) Have I mentioned how much I hate speakeasy? Hate hate hate hate. Like, they apparently don't (at the time of writing) even support SSH2 for their shell accounts.
• 482) Point-and-clicking over lists of text can be hard. I end up clicking on the wrong thing sometimes. I wish that there were more feedback about what the mouse is really over so I'd know ahead of clicking what the target is. Just a very mild background fill would help show me which item I'm going to click on (since the idea of resizing what you are over to be big has been proven to suck buttocks by Apple's OS X Dock).
• 481) It kills me that browsers are this lame still: I copy two lines of text, and then try to paste them into the search text field in Google. I only get one of the original lines of text. Why not just bloody well take out the bloody newlines?
• 480) I'm trading email with someone in Japan. They are pretty much a day ahead of me (you know, the old International Date Line trick). My email reader (mhe) fails to sort things properly because of that; mail I wrote in response is sorted before the mail I was responding to! I guess it completely fails to look at the GMT offset in the bloody header?!
• 479) Oh my Lord in Heaven. On the Kinkos web site, they have a banner across the top that includes a large Kinkos logo. If you click on that logo from say some page deep in the web site, what would you expect it to do? Return you to the home page, perhaps? That's what I'd expect, at any rate. Guess what: It. Does. Nothing. The kicker is that their stupid catch phrase "tap into the network" is under the logo and is linked, but then it also doesn't take you to the home page but some other stupid thing. Whatever.
• 478) I think I would be hard-pressed to make a search system that is less functional that that of Netflix.
• 477) Okay, as much as I detest eBay, I have to say that the times I've been forced to call a seller/buyer and talk to them in person about something, I've ended up realizing how much most people are freaks and basically suck, and it gives me new-found appreciation for the distance eBay can put between me and them. Thank you!
• 476) Icons invariably suck. So let's stop wasting time making new obfuscated stupid images for them and instead just start using simplified Chinese characters, okay? We'd get pictographic things for our icons, and we'd be learning to read an important language (or three or four) at the same time!
• 475) You know how in some applications you can use the mouse wheel scrolly thing to change the magnification? Well, I wish there were a way I could do that to my graphics card / monitor resolution as well! Yeah!
• 474) Any BIOS that lacks an explicit "Quit without saving changes" is just plain stupid and asking for trouble, no? I've seen Dell laptops with just such a BIOS UI.
• 473) Why are the Yes and No buttons so close to each other in all dialog boxes? You'd think you'd want to have the Cancel button as far away from the Accept button as possible! Especially since they tend to not be tall enough vertically to ensure safe separation.
• 472) One thing that sucks about optical mice is that you tend to have to pick them up higher off the desk than opto-mechanical ones when you wanna (there's gotta be a sniglet for this) keep scrolling the mouse pointer but you've reached the end of the desk.
• 471) Optical trackballs are nice in that they have fewer moving parts to get gunked up. However, they are still very susceptible to dirt - if you get a loose cat hair in there, for example, your mouse pointer really freaks out! Seems like the obvious solution, which I wish somebody would bloody well implement, is to have 2 or 3 opto-readers rather than just one. That way you could do some error filtering. Oh, wait, maybe Logitech already did it?
• 470) I'm trying CesarFTP and the UI is pretty much insane. I mean, its own bloody help text makes it completely self-evident that it is brain-dead.
• 469) Here's something I think sucks: Google's advanced search doesn't let you enter a set of "nice to have, but note required" words. See, I'd like to do a search for a bunch of terms where some are higher priority than others (because the lower priority ones are getting far too many hits, drowning out the ones i really care more about). Blah, humblug.
• 468) This shouldn't surprise me, what with the Oracle fiasco, but I tried to make an appointment with the DMV of a certain state... I got through a gazillion levels of crappy interactive phone menus ("To make an appointment, press 1" followed by "Choose an office" soon followed by "To make an appointment at the chosen office, press 1" - uh, didn't I already tell you that was what I wanted to do?), taking roughly five minutes, only to hear at the very end something like "Please wait a moment while we access the reservation system..." and then "Our reservation system is currently unavailable." Grrreat.
• 467) I really tried to give Visual Assist a chance, but in the end I realized that it is actually just a huge piece of crap and absolutely not worth the trouble. Maybe twenty revisions from now it will be usable, but I ain't holding my breath. It is a classic example of something that is supposed to make your life easier, and really just gets in the way and breaks things way more often than it successfully subtly helps you. Hate hate hate hate hate.
• 466) The Netflix rating UI sucks my buttocks. I rate stuff and then go to the home page... and at the top it is asking me to rate movies I literally just rated. Whatever!
• 465) If OpenBSD is so anal about security, then why haven't I been able to find MD5 sums of the installation files?!
• 464) Why is it that the connection by my previous DSL provider to my abode didn't suck, and now that I've switched to Speakeasy (because DirecTV DSL went outta business), everything bites dog poo? Like, the connection drops all the bloody time? Hate.
• 463) Wow. There's this TV (made by Semp, whoever the hell they are) that has the most amazingly brain-dead 'feature': when you change the volume, not only does the on-screen display show you a volume bar, but there is also a beep heard over the speakers every time the volume bar moves a notch. The beep is pretty loud.
• 462) I'm sure I've ranted about it before, but the MadOnion Online Results Browser interface is really pretty utterly horrible. It isn't even worth going into the details, sufficeth to say the search interface for comparing your benchmarks against others is a real let-down.
• 461) I just got a fancy new Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard. It is pretty nice. There are some silly things about it, however. First, rather than having the old regular POST screen at boot-up, it shows a big graphic. You have to hit F2 to see the POST information. I don't like that, I want to always see the POST information so hitting F2 every time is going to suck. Maybe I can turn off the image in the BIOS, dunno. I wish they had just had the nice graphic, but still incorporated the POST data. The second thing which is sorta silly is that rather than having beep codes for things that go wrong during boot, it has pre-recorded phrases that it will play over the speakers. That is actually terrific because decoding the beeps is generally utter voodoo... however, it turns out that the voice recordings are really bad. Like, super low bitrate or something, so it is really bloody hard to figure out what the damned thing is saying! Genius!
• 460) A little critique of some HTML: "Consult our releases page to download the source and the latest version of Mozilla for your platform." This doesn't work for me when it is embedded in more text (as it is on the source page) because what I'm looking for is the download page. I mean, that is why I'm on the page that is specifically for version 1.3. So I think the releases link is dumb because it is too indirect. Just make "download" a hyperlink to the download!
• 459) The thing that cracks me up about Linux/BSD/OSS, and people claiming that it will take over the desktop: not only do applications have a hard time enabling cut and paste between them under Xwindows (e.g.: I can't get it to work between Opera and Xterm), but even when that works it is made useless by the fact that when you select any text, the copy buffer is overwritten with that text. So if you copy an URL from email, and then go to clear the address field in your web browser (e.g.: Konqueror) by selecting it in toto and clearing it, then when you next go to paste in your desired URL instead you get the same one you just cleared out. So the entire system is completely cocked up from the get go!
• 458) All the PC Case cooling FAQs I've read point out that having expansion cards in your machine blocks nice air flow. Makes sense, so what I want to know is: Why is the AGP slot right there as close to the CPU as possible, because it blocks the air that way? Sorta suckful.
• 457) Okay, this is as close to search-engine nirvana as I've been able to find in the crappy World Wide Web. It is amazing how many search engines are just plain broken (Price Watch's search has been utterly broken for months for me now) or just don't have the search features I need.
• 456) I'm so glad that both the cnet and zdnet shopping price guides let you enter search terms, and then when they give you results the search field has been made blank. So to refine your search you have to re-enter your previous search terms. (Oddly enough, the zdnet one will keep the search terms if it gets zero results.) Whatever.
• 455) If you ever want to see a user interface for searching / browsing that clearly shows you what not to do, you can thank the kind dorkuses at freshmeat for providing such a stellar example.
• 454) Do yourself a favor and never buy RAM make by Legacy Electronics since their warranty is... nothing. So after the 90 days Fry's warranty expires and your RAM dies on like the 95th day, as mine did, you are left with a stick of crap. Moral: always get memory with a lifetime warranty!
• 453) Does anybody else find this funny and yet oh so sad (I mean, apart from the green artifacting from BMP conversion)? The image is from before any redirecting happened, so what you are seeing is the original URL I entered, and then the site telling me it is apparently not the correct URL and that it will redirect me to... the exact same URL?!
• 452) Please don't buy TurboTax or any Quicken things ever again, eh?
• 451) It sucks when some sites have a text field e.g.: for search, and then they also have javascript to put the cursor in that text field, and then their page loads really slowly, because by the time the javascript fires, I'm already trying to type into that field (or, if it is a username and password login page, I might already be typing into the 2nd field), and the javascript suddenly rips the text entry cursor out of my control and puts it at the very start of the first field, screwing me pretty well. I don't know what the solution is; can you force javascript to run earlier? Can you have a much simplified page, so it doesn't take for ever to load? Could HTML forms have been originally defined to include a tag for "this text field gets focus first" so we wouldn't even be in this mess? Such is life in the modern Internet age: user interfaces from hell.
• 450) Why does this kind of thing happen all the time? Their map sucks ass (bad colors, bad and actually incorrect labeling), and they are supposed to be a design company. Then, they send email that looks like utter hell, and they claim to be "humanizing technology"? Hello, Thank you for your interest in career opportunities here at Cooper. Currently, we have no positions open. We wish you well in all your future endeavors.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> The Cooper Staffing Team | humanizing technology. With what, a 2x4 they shove up people's butts?
• 449) I'm sorry, but I still think Speakeasy has complete and utter dog-poop interfaces for their web site. Sure, there is lots of information there, it is just organized by someone from the Andromeda galaxy, not by or for regular humans. I really don't understand why they are taking over DSL everywhere, or why they get good reviews. Bloody DirecTV DSL was the pinnacle of my DSL experiences (those being Speakeasy and DirecTV DSL, so not a wide range of experience, I grant you, but everybody said Speakeasy was the best), not a day goes by that I shed a tear they folded. Furthermore, the UI itself, in terms of the layout and graphics etc., is awful, and then to top it all off the site is really rather s l o w.
• 448) PDF is nice and all, but having to download something really breaks the flow of looking for information on the Web. I've seen lots of colleges / universities put their course catalog on line, but only in PDF. It really sucks a lot, especially because then there is no powerful search engine available to find what you really want. Suck!
• 447) A wacky UI idea: consider Windows application menus. Like, you type Alt-F to get the File menu open. Then you are supposed to use the keyboard shortcuts or the arrow keys to select the command you want. Another way this could have been done, which might be vaguely more intuitive would be to let people start typing the name of the command "sav..." and selecting the entry based on that. Like if you are choosing files in an Open dialog box, you can do that. The point being that typing e.g.: "pag" to get to "page setup" makes more sense than typing "u".
• 446) More about Linux for the common user. Not!
• 445) I'm so glad evite is a another steaming pile of crap. Like, how it tells me I need to turn on cookies, then how it has pop-up windows, then how it adamantly refuses to let me see the event I've got the URL for, let alone any kind of obvious search engine for finding events if I don't have the URL handy.
• 444) Opera is still a huge piece of stinky poo. Why can I copy and paste from an xterm into Konqueror, but not into Opera 6.11? Whatever!
• 443) It pisses me off no end that these days the Ctrl key is pretty much always in the wrong place on computer keyboards for us real geeks who use Emacs. It then pisses me right off the end when it turns out to be so bloody difficult to find a utility for keyboard remapping that doesn't completely suck.
• 442) C++ Smart Pointers are no such thing. Get a life and go use a real language (Java, C#, OCAML, Squeak, whatever...)
• 441) How many times have you done something by mistake in a software program and had no idea how it happened? Which then means you have no idea how to undo it, if it isn't the kind of thing that ^Z will fix. So, I'm thinking it would be useful if all applications had a history window you could bring up that would tell you all the actions you have done (or at least the last 100) and how they were done - what keystrokes did it, and also how to undo it or links to help text about that subject in general.
• 440) I realize that getting a useful UI into something as stunted as a cell phone is hard, however, there are still some things that I think the Nokia people got completely wrong. For example: on some phones, you can Add Text to a phone number entry. One of the options is to add text that is the Address of the person. However, in that mode there is no option to Insert Number so you are screwed into having to press each button a zillion times (especially the 1 button which has seriously like 7 symbols before you get to the actual bloody number '1') to enter the numerical address. If they'd had a mode of text entry (you can cycle through versions of predictive and non-predictive text) that was just for numbers, that would have made things a lot easier.
• 439) Opera is on version 6.11 and they still don't know how to make an Application UI. The File menu has "Quick Preferences", under which are lots of things with check boxes next to them. Only, some are radio button groupings. But you have no good visual marking to distinguish things. Great. Yeah. This is the height of Linux software, I guess? Oh, yeah, and double clicking doesn't select the word, it selects the entire line (e.g.: for my search terms in Google). Oh, and Ctrl-arrow moves a whole word, but Ctrl-backspace doesn't delete a whole word, no, instead it... I think it is taking me to my home page. Uh, yeah. Riigghhtt... Where's Jamie Zawinski to write a (another) screed for me? I also love how the Bookmarks menu starts with "Manage bookmarks" rather than "Add bookmark here..." since I guess the Opera developers think I'm going to be managing my bookmarks a lot more than I'm going to be adding to them?
• 438) Buy.com: We put the "f**k you" in "customer service".
• 437) Web sites that try to turn off right-click suck my hairy buttocks.
• 436) Okay, riddle me this: How come I haven't heard of an IDE that has visual diff tools built in, where you can select any two parts of code and run vdiff on them? That would be helpful in double-checking code that you copy & pasted and updated, ya know? Whatever.
• 435) I'm playing around with mIRC on my WinXP PC. If I didn't know any better, I'd think it was originally written for Linux because it doesn't have copy and paste. What bloody planet are these people from?
• 434) I hate Nokia and everything. My PC sees my phone through the IR port, but when I try to run the Nokia connection software, it utterly fails to find the phone. And half the time it locks up. I hate hate hate hate hate this crap. What bloody millennium are we in, already? And people want to make nanites? Well, don't expletive let Nokia do it, please! (Turns out that for my particular phone, the related software doesn't work under WinXP. Nice. Great. Terrific. Way to go.)
• 433) I love how IMDB tells you that you must be logged in to vote after you've chosen a vote, not before you get there. So you've wasted your time. Maybe they are theorizing that it will make people want to get their vote heard more since they were so close, and thus users will be more likely to sign up. Shyeah, except for people like me who think they are just a bunch of UI jerks.
• 432) Bay Soft Games is a con game. They never shipped my stuff yet they charged my credit card. Further, they do not respond to email. Even further, their phone numbers lead only to busy signals or answering machines which take a 1 second recording and then hang up on you. Please, don't ever buy anything from them at all.
• 431) I'm trying to research LCD monitors with DVI connections. As far as I can tell, neither CNet nor ZDNet searches allow me to specify that I require DVI. What complete tubs of poo!
• 430) EB Games is killing me. I order something from them. The order confirmation is right. Then a few days later I get a shipping notice in email. It lists the stuff I ordered, plus a ton of other stuff I didn't. I go to their web site to check on the order and sure enough there's a few hundred dollars extra crap listed. I call them. They say "oh, yeah, we know about that problem with our web site. Actually we charged you $X." But $X is like forty bucks more than what the original order was for. So they go figure out that, yes, they've overcharged me by $39.99 and they have already hit my credit card with that... so they go and (so they said, anyway) start a refund for the difference. All in all, not an impressive situation. The only saving grace is that there was somebody on the other end to straighten it all out. Gah.
• 429) Game Spot pisses me off because when it has a picture of a game (happens anywhere on the site game's main page, or from the "Best of 2002" article), that picture's link is not to the full review of the game but to a list of prices. The largest click target doesn't take me to the review which I require before deciding to buy the game. Blah. Hate.
• 428) I've said it before and I'll say it again: anybody who claims linux has a valid desktop environment is smoking dope. Three words: "copy and paste."
• 427) Web browsers suck. Well, at least IE since that is the only one I've tried with this: There's a table on a web page that I'd like to search through for a particular repeated row. I select the row and copy it and then do Find and paste in what I copied and then try to search. Well, nothing matches because the thing has converted from the HTML format of the table down to text for the copy and paste, and then it can't match across multiple cells in a row of the table when I'm searching. So basically there appears to be no way to search this huge table for what I want. Great. It is so nice to be living in the new millennium and have this kind of utter crap still be dogging us.
• 426) Do yourself a favor and don't ever by anything from Axion. I got something, it didn't work, I got an RMA, I sent it back... and now the RMA isn't in their database, so I spent weeks getting the run around while they tried to find it, then some guy said they found it and had tested it and were sending it out and now I called back 'cause I haven't gotten it and some other guy is pretty much admitting that the first guy lied because they still haven't sent it back out yet, let alone apparently tested it or anything. Nice. Then, they finally got it tested and all, and they are supposed to ship it back to me, and say they will... and never do, so I call them for the zillionth time to find out now what the heck is going on and their database has the wrong status on the item, they tell me. These guys couldn't RMA their way out of a paper bag. Please, somebody "accidentally" carpet bomb them already!
• 425) I'm trying to get and install a SRPM from rpmfind.net. I get it and run md5sum on it. The checksum doesn't match the Signature they have listed on their page. So I'm trying to look in their help to see if there is anything I'm doing wrong (e.g.: maybe I'm supposed to checksum things in the .rpm rather than the entire .rpm itself?). Well, their help page looks extensive, but then it turns out the one thing it completely fails to address is what the Signature is and how it is generated and how I should be using it. You know, the one thing that is used for validation and security? Nice.
• 424) I have a little Sony TV. It has a remote. On the remote is a button labeled "Display" which is used to control the overlaying on-screen display. It goes through three modes, one of which is to have the on-screen display turned off. What is rather pathetic is that when you switch to the "display off" mode, it puts up, using the display, the string "DISPLAY OFF" (yes, all in capital letters) for a second or two before... having the display actually be off. Utter insanity.
• 423) Pretty impressive when the Computer History Museum has a completely broken web site. I'm trying to use the "forgot my password" form and I enter the email address I used to sign up and it says it can't find any such entry. I call them and talk to a person who verifies that is the email address they have in their database. For almost a month now. Yes! I guess they really are keeping an accurate history of the web.
• 422) I'm trying to use the MadOnion ORB service to collect benchmark results of my PCs. Could their UIs be more crappy? I mean, both the web site and the test utility. The web site is killing me; I just want to see a side-by-side comparison of my collected benchmark results. I mean, wouldn't that be a common thing people would want to do with their benchmarks as they upgrade their hardware? There are supposedly ways to do comparisons, but I have yet to see how to just compare any of my own results. Instead it wants me to do some psycho search through every recorded benchmark. Whatever. (Solution: use the psycho full-featured search and enter your own login / userid / email and pick from those.)
• 421) Riddle me this: I upgrade from a P3-700 to an Athlon 2000+ XP but some of the graphics benchmark results decrease. I should note that the benchmark software itself has changed, although I assume (making an ass...) that the results are comparable; they never said they were not. Anyway, most things improve, as expected, but all of the following got better ranking with the old CPU (with percent that the old one is better):
  1. Single pass Fill Rate (61%)
  2. Multiple pass Fill Rate (15%)
  3. Point Sprite Speed (61%)
  4. DOT3 Bump Mapping (57%)
  5. Environment Bump Mapping (9%)
  6. Pixel Shader (2%)
• 420) Both Mac OS X and Windows XP do this: you have files on your hard drive that you want to burn to a CD. So you drag them over onto the CD. Then, the OS decides it needs to copy all the files to some staging area. Which is just another place on the same hard drive. So now you are taking up twice the space you need to, and you have to wait for the staging copy to finish which can take a long time. I'm sure there are important technical reasons for doing all this, but from a user's perspective it sucks ass.
• 419) Well this is a fine how-do-you-do: I got a motherboard that has 4 slots for RAM. they are numbered, not surprisingly, 1 through 4. So I put the one stick of RAM I have into slot 1. When I turn on the machine, the POST/BIOS/whatever tells me that I have to put the memory starting with slot 4, down to slot 1...
• 418) If you have an ecommerce site, for the love of Pete, let me see the shipping + tax = total cost before you try to make me create an account. I'm likely to tell you to bite me otherwise, and take my business elsewhere.
• 417) Epinions has such a highly advanced user interface: "You've written 1 reviews." Then, is it just me, or does my Account Summary page have no link that will let me write another review? Where the hell do I go to be able to write another review? Hell! Okay, now I really am going to start the killing - I get to the FAQ and it tells me how to write a review by going to such-and-such page to then get to such-and-such link... rather than just giving me the link right there in the answer. I guess it is because they force you to find the thing before being able to review it. So if nobody has reviewed it yet, you can't kick it off. It just all seems very ass-backward; at the very least the FAQ answer could have had a link to the search engine, and explain that you have to find the product to add the review, you know? Of course, there is no way to review Epinions itself, as far as I can see.
• 416) Is it just me, or is the AMD web site an outright insult? I mean, it seems to purposefully hide any information on their chips. I completely hate it. Makes me decide to go buy an Intel chip, seriously!
• 415) I think reviewing things with numbers is generally kinda lame. Something like 1-5 stars/mice/whatevers is especially stupid. Instead, use things which have actual meaning to people: "Excellent", "Very Good", "Good", "Above Average", "Average", "Below Average", "Poor", "Very Poor", "Suck Tastic", etc.
• 414) If you have a site which has reviews of things with ordinal values assigned (1 through 5 stars, or A+ through F-, whatever) then you should bloody well let me see an index of the reviews listed by rating. I mean, that's the whole point of having the reviews and ratings, right? It blows my mind how many - even big name commercial sites - don't let you get at the information that way. Gah!
• 413) Ever more hate. I have a certain credit card. I go to their web site, which is a sub-URL of their main site. It says Server Error blah blah blah, doesn't give me any names or phone numbers to contact. I'm like, okay, maybe they are fixing it. This goes on for a month. I use their main web site's search to see if I have the right URL, and indeed it shows the one I was typing in. So I end up calling them to find out what the hell is going on and they tell me that they've got a new web address and that the old one is kaput. I tell them that their search is crap and still gives the old URL. They don't seem to really care. So basically they are complete and utter dumb poop heads who apparently don't even know that META REFRESH exists. For this I pay them some obscene interest rate? I. Hate. Everyone. Oh, and the kicker? Their new web site still has links to the old one that on longer exists! Yes!
• 412) I'm entering a lot of phone numbers from an old cell phone into Outlook, from whence I can sync to my new cell phone. I sure wish they all showed me MD5 for each phone number so I could be sure I haven't typed them in wrong. Blah.
• 411) Yup, I'm never buying anything from CD Now ever again, because their sign-up process was broken, stupid, and annoying. Rot in hell.
• 410) Why is it that it is still a huge pain in the ass to rename a bunch of files in just about any OS that I use? What bloody millennium are we in, anyway?
• 409) Should I find it ominous that the California State web site doesn't seem to have any readily available information on voter registration? Blah.
• 408) Dammit! I just unplugged the wrong thing. Why aren't electrical cords all in different colors by now so it would be less hard to figure out what plug goes to what electrical item? Gah! Bah! Fume!
• 407) Opera is killing me. I pasted in an URL which turns out to be not working because the remote server is down, or something. Anyway, the URL that I pasted in goes away, and the address reverts back to what was in it before. Which is really bloody annoying for a couple reasons:
  1. Now there is an error page showing, yet the URL in the address field is not the one I was going to. So the page display and the URL are out of sync. Potentially confusing to users, if not at least annoying.
  Now I have to paste in the URL again if I wanna try modifications to it while trying to reach a server that is up. If the URL had been just left alone, I could do that directly. More annoyance.
• 406) I guess whoever made the M'n'M candy web site have never heard of image maps? Whatever.
• 405) I wonder if part of the reason the Dreamcast didn't sell so well was the nasty loud scratchy GDROM unit in the thing. Doesn't really give one a strong sense of security about the long term robustness of the machine.
• 404) Why I hate Perl: I have a module that is implementing on object. The file name is FooDB. I call it from something else and I get the dreaded 'Can't locate object method "new" via package "FooDB" (perhaps you forgot to load "FooDB"?)' message. Well, it turns out that the error was inside FooDB.pm I'd typed "package FooBB". Since all this has to hang together, you'd think that maybe Perl could check that for us?
• 403) I used to think that keyboards with Caps Locks lights in the key itself were cooler than the ones with the Caps Lock light at the top of the keyboard. But I now realize that you can't see the light if it is in the key because your hand is covering it. So that sucks. So the light should definitely be at the top of the keyboard, so you can see it in your peripheral vision, without having to move your hand away.
• 402) EBGames.com's telephone support is sorta impressing me. Their web site is crappy, however: I ordered something that had free 2 day shipping. You had to enter a coupon code to get it. I tried the code and it never worked. They told me to place the order and call after it was placed and they would fix it. It took a couple of calls by me (first time was to get the shipping charges knocked off, the second time was to get them to make it the 2 day shipping that was the special offer, rather than the ground shipping I'd ordered with 'cause it was cheapest) to get everything fixed, but the amazing thing is that I was like almost never on hold. And the folks weren't surely. What's up with that? So, even though their web site kinda bites, and the telephone support needed some coaxing, at least they were actually there when I called! Update: you knew it had to happen. After all that, they did ship it ground. Bwa ha ha ha ha. Well, at least I didn't pay for shipping.
• 401) I know it is free software and everything, but the process of ordering OpenBSD software couldn't be much worse. Sheezuz. A dead rabid run over road kill monkey on crack could have done a cleaner and more usable job.
• 400) I've got some computer speakers. The volume knob is also the on/off switch, with some resistance at the transition from off to on-volume. The knob has four little ridges on it around it to give some grip. Well, basically, it isn't enough and the stupid thing becomes impossible to turn on or off if your hands aren't like perfectly cleaned and dusted with that powder the olympic uneven bars / pummel horse competitors use. Blah.
• 399) I hate RealAudio. Like the guy who bought Remington; I hate them so much I uninstalled the program. It kept blinking its tray icon at me telling me there were updates I should download. Bite me! Bite me and go to heck!
• 398) I downloaded the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo. Of course, my machine can't really handle it and get decent frame rates. So I'm experimenting with the settings. Turns out their UI for that sucks a lot of hairy buttocks because:
  1. There are multiple things you can change; various texture detail levels, various effects, various polygon detail levels etc. Some use pop-up menus. They mostly start off showing "Normal". I changed one of them, and the pop-up showed a list like Normal / High / Highest. So I didn't change it because I was looking to reduce detail to get higher frame rates, and I couldn't set it any lower than Normal. Well, all the other pop-ups were showing "Normal" as well so for a while I figured that I couldn't actually set the detail levels any lower. Eventually, though, curiosity got the best of me and I did check the other menus... and it turns out that they have completely different choices! Like, Lowest / Low / Normal / High. So all this time there were other things I could have tried tweaking but, given the experience I'd had, I thought there was nothing. So that all just seems like a huge stupid thing and they should have somehow normalized their menus.
  2. When you change one detail level thing via a pop-up menu, the whole system freezes up while it is doing whatever it needs to do to e.g.: change the texture resolutions. There is no progress bar, either. It all sucks a lot when you are trying to play around with settings and you want to maybe change more than one at a time. They should instead let you make all your changes and then once you are done apply them. This is especially true since those settings in the pop-ups have no significant visual impact on the menus you are looking at. So there is no need for "instant" (ha ha) feedback. An Apply button would work just fine. Dorks.
• 397) When I'm typing and somebody interrupts me, I can lose my train of thought. It might be neat to have my editor show me what I was previously typing - without having to use Undo/Redo.
• 396) The California DMV now has a way to make appointments via their web site. It kinda sucks because it:
  1. Requires JavaScript, even though from what I could see, it could all have been accomplished without JavaScript.
  2. Failed to work in Opera even though I explicitly turned JavaScript on. (Is that Opera's fault, or the fault of how munged and incompatible versions of JavaScript have become?)
  3. Doesn't give you a (e.g.: calendar) view of what future appointments are open. Instead, you have to query with a day and time, and it will tell you what the next available open appointment is on that same day. So you have to manually query today, tomorrow, etc. etc. etc. which is pretty lame.
  4. When you get to the end and have your confirmation page, it says something really pretty sad/funny: "Note: If you are using Netscape Navigator or Netscape Communicator, you may not be able to print the confirmation page."
• 395) Perforce pisses me off. It says "sd diff -f" should do the diff no matter what, but it keeps on saying that the file isn't on the client and so won't diff. But I can look at the file, it is there. So I sync -f and that fixes it. Argh. Hate.
• 394) Then there's Yahoo's wallet. I'm trying to buy something from Global Exchange, and I try to use the Yahoo! Express Checkout. It asks me to log in (id, password, then security code) and then... just takes me right back to the same login screen. It apparently took my password and security code okay because when I try to enter different values it tells me they aren't right. I'm, not going through a proxy. I've got cookies completely turned on. This is insanity. Don't they want to take my money? I don't understand what is so hard about this stuff. I. Just. Don't. Understand.
• 393) So then I try Global Exchange again from a different machine and get further with the Yahoo! stuff. Well, up to the point where I'm actually wanting to place the order. It then screams in big red letters that apparently it doesn't know my shipping address, even though it is showing on the same page as part of the Yahoo! Wallet. So I'm guessing integration of web apps is not a strong suit of Global Exchange? Sheesh. Welcome to the new millennium, folks!
• 392) Frames suck. Iframes suck. The fact that a frame can still be loading and neither the mouse cursor nor the spinning icon are showing any activity sucks. Argh!
• 391) So I'm trying to use jigdo and I have to say the instructions suck ass. Basically all they would need to add is "When asked for a URL/file to download, give the first jigdo file e.g.: foo-bar-1.jigdo, and the remaining file names will be determined automatically thereafter." I guess it doesn't matter much because in the end it doesn't work. It just hangs my entire (Windows) machine... of course, only after it has wasted my time by downloading all sorts of crap. As if it was leading me up to the sucker punch: "I'm a utility that will look all business like while I'm downloading stuff to lull you into a false sense of productivity." Yeah, that's pretty darned useful, if you ask me!!
• 390) I'm using Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4 to backup a bunch of stuff. When I drag-and-drop the files I wanna put on the CD, it doesn't show any of the icons being dragged. And then it sits there, locked up for a while. Then it eventually comes back to life with the files dropped. Look, folks, drag-and-drop without any active visual feedback is just plain wrong.
• 389) This is total genius (and I'm not being sarcastic). You know how most web sites say "don't press the credit card submit button again while we are verifying otherwise we will be charging you twice!"? Well, the smart folks at dotster had a bright idea: when you press the submit button, just immediately take the person to an interstitial page where they can't do any more damage, and then on from there once the processing is done. (The only problem is that right now that interstitial page is doing nothing. I'm sitting here with no further feedback wondering when I should give up on having it refresh me with results. So, in the end, everything still sucks.) (Update: I had security set to the max, which turns off meta redirects.)
• 388) Any editor without a dired mode like EMACS is not a real editor.
• 387) Bathroom doors should always open to the outside. When you've washed your hands and you are leaving, you should be able to push on the door with your elbow or something instead of having to use a filthy handle.
• 386) Anybody who thinks they can have Unix running on any sort of DOS/Windows machine is smoking crack when bash crashes just when I do a 'cp'. Not to mention that the whole forward vs. back slash thing is never going to be completely transparent. All 'round, it just sucks. And don't get me started on the whole naming of files:

       $ ./configure
       creating cache ./config.cache
       checking for ocamlc... /cygdrive/d/Apps/Objective Caml/bin/ocamlc
       checking for ocaml... /cygdrive/d/Apps/Objective Caml/bin/ocaml
       checking for camlp4... /cygdrive/d/Apps/Objective Caml/bin/camlp4
       dirname: too many arguments
       Try `dirname --help' for more information.
       /cygdrive/d/Apps/Objective: not found
       /cygdrive/d/Apps/Objective: not found
       configure: error: OCaml version  found ; version 3.04 or greater is needed
       

• 385) Maybe I just don't grok it yet, but the fact that type constructors in Haskell use the keyword "data" rather than "typedef" or something with the word type in it really pisses me off.
• 384) GUI buttons tend to be wider than they are tall (in English, etc., anyway). So it bugs me that we put "OK" right above "Cancel" because that means there is less area effectively distinguishing the two. You only have to move up or down a little bit to hit the wrong one. If they were horizontally next to each other there would be a lot more safety buffer, you know?
• 383) Why don't IDEs have "Find text in comments" or "Exclude comments from search results" you know? I mean, we're already into the next millennium, for crying out loud. Blah.
• 382) So my cell phone is sorta beat up. I'm looking on the Nokia web site to read up on repairs. They have a little search tool to help you find offices in your locality that can do the work. Well, it turns out that all the ones near me are rated level 2, which means they can't do actual hardware repairs, apparently. I keep expanding the distance search radius, and I only ever see places rated 2 (I need a place with a 3 rating, as far as I can tell). It would be nice to be able to ask "where is the closest repair place rated 3", you know?
• 381) It bugs the crap out of me when sites with lots of data don't give it to you the way I'd expect it. Like, if you have zillions of game reviews, wouldn't it be pretty clear that, first, I'd want to see them ranked by review score, with the "best" ones first? So why does everybody insist on showing them alphabetically? Whatever.
• 380) Okay, google is run by a bunch of stupid poop heads. I enter search keywords, then I click on Groups - before running the search on the Web. The page goes to the Groups search, and my search terms are lost. So I have to type them in again. Brilliant UI there, folks! Update: if you have JavaScript enabled, it works. I'll let you all in on a little secret: you don't need to use JavaScript to have such a feature implemented.
• 379) It pisses me off that in most debuggers for software I can only have breakpoints based on source line numbers. So if I want to debug code that is like if(foo){bar;} I have to split it so the bar; is on its own line. Right?
• 378) I hate people. I'd like to try ZBrush but the key they send to activate the demo doesn't work; the program says it is invalid. I even went to their web site to request another key, and it turned out to send me the same, invalid, one. This is supposed to make me want to buy their software? No, it makes me want them to crash and burn and go out of business and contract leprosy.
• 377) Is it IE? Is it the web server? Pages with dynamic content and/or frames are shown as being fully loaded by IE but they are blank... and then eventually the data for them comes in. I so completely hate the Web as User Interface. It is like three bazillion trillion steps backward from where we were before everybody went for Web Apps. God, hell.
• 376) The Quick Launch area of the Windows Task Bar proves that icons have their limit; if you put too many things in there (I have 20) it can become hard mental work to figure out which one you want. If they were a list of names, it would probably be easier at times!
• 375) I'm still waiting for the laptop computer with the ergo keyboard.
• 374) So I downloaded a demo of Spiderman the Movie game for the PC. The installer sits there telling me how much time is left, as the progress bars move... and the time left is increasing. Yes!
• 373) Sure, conceptually 'make' is cool. But it sure leaves a lot to be desired in terms of the actual implementation. For example, if you have a target and the rules to make it, you can't always have comments in the rules e.g.: if you have "for name in foo; do xyz; done;" a la bash, you can't put any lines in there that are makefile comments because make sends everything, including the hashed-out comment, to bash. Why the hell make doesn't pre-process out all the comments and then parse the makefile, I do not know. What a crock of excrement.
• 372) Riddle me this: Why don't web browsers have a Find that looks for hyperlinks? Like, I'm on some huge discussion page at slashdot and I remember a link I was interested in before, but it is buried down somewhere. I'd like to be able to jump from link to link until I find it. [SF writes: Opera has some functionality here: hit Ctrl+J and up pops a list. By entering text at the top it will pull up the link.]
• 371) I'm pretty sure I've never seen a more completely pathetic web user interface than that of Pictage. Like, I want to change my password so I look in the help section and it has a textual explanation of how I have to go to some section of the web site to do that... and yet there is no hyperlink to get me there. What. The. Hell. Are. These. People. Smoking? Don't even get me started on their UI for browsing/choosing photos... which is really the entire purpose of the site, and is a huge piece of crap.
• 370) I'm trying to find info on 802.11b and g products. I go to the Linksys web site and type "802.11g" into their search and get no hits. So then I just try "802.11" and... get no hits. "802.11b" does turn up hits, but I think it is pretty pathetic that "802.11" doesn't match squat.
• 369) Okay, here's my question: why does every visual merge program suck? Araxis merge, Windiff, Differ, yadda yadda yadda. You'd think this would be a solved problem by now, for crying out loud.
• 368) All I want is for visual diff software to give me the option of e.g.: not showing what is similar, or only showing what is in both files yet differs, ya know?
• 367) Want to know what I really hate? I hate that now CD drives on PCs take bloody for ever to open (presumably they are waiting for the disc to spin down). I hate hate hate that. Complete disregard for the user's experience.
• 366) I'm trying out Araxis Merge and it is okay. But it still has some silly-isms in the user interface, even though this is version six. Like when you compare folders, it always starts out showing you the comparison with subfolders opened. I want them to start out collapsed. Or, like how when you are picking the folders to compare, the directory picker doesn't let you double click on the folder you want. Instead, you have to select it and then hit the OK button. Oh, and the kicker is that when you click on the application close button, it always says "you have comparison windows open, are you sure you want to quit?" That's really bloody annoying. Et-cetera, et-cetera, et-cetera.
• 365) This about sums up my opinion of computer systems in general: I try to print some big image out from IE to an HP printer, telling it to force the thing to scale down and fit on a single page. So then I go to the printer and see... one page, with the image at regular size, which means only like one eighth has been printed because the original image is so large. Whatever.
• 364) I think 'customized' cell phone rings, and the fact that people use them, represent everything that is wrong with human beings and their existence on this planet.
• 363) I've seen web sites with searches that respond "We are having trouble finding a match for your query" which sounds like their server might be broken, rather than just saying "No matches found." Whatever. Dorks.
• 362) A famous Information Architect, Richard Saul Wurman, and 12 other maybe not-quite-as-famous Information Architects spend $1 million and create a web site that... doesn't tell you it requires Flash. Like, it doesn't even say, "Hey, sorry, you need Flash, buddy! Because we hate everybody using Lynx and Links." Maybe if they had two million they could have made a web site that wasn't just plain dumb like this?
• 361) I've encountered apps which prevent you from max/minimizing them while they are doing some long operation. That is really bloody annoying because I want to get them out of the way while they are doing that long operation!
• 360) My Linksys KVM switch sucks because: I have a Trackball Explorer from MS. I actually don't completely hate it. It is probably the best mouse-type input device I've ever used. However, it all falls down when it comes to actually using it under certain circumstances. Specifically, if I try to use it as a PS/2 device rather than a USB one, with a KVM box ("well, there's your problem!"), I get into a world of hurt. The IntelliPoint driver tends to not recognize the trackball as such (it defaults to some generic MS mouse), and I have to tell it explicitly that's what it is. But even when I do that, it can only see the first two buttons. Sure, it will let me map the others, but when I click them nothing actually ever happens. So I'm reduced to using the first two of four. Pretty pathetic, really. For sure the KVM is complicit in all this - plugging the trackball directly into the machine's PS/2 port works!
• 359) Could PC hardware be more of a steaming tub of excrement? Like, just consider PS/2 vs. USB input devices. My. God.
• 358) I hate computers so much. Well, especially PCs. The Dell I'm using says "F2 = Setup" when it is booting, so I press F2 a couple of times and it instead of going into setup it just says "keyboard error" and keeps on booting... Yay!
• 357) Don't you just love contacting customer support and having them say, "well, it doesn't do that on my machine!"
• 356) Why is there so much evil in world? Why doesn't Macrovision burn in hell, deservedly ? There is no God.
• 355) Accubyte does, truly, bite. I enter MSI as a search term and get back crap. The kicker is that if you click on any of those radio buttons and "go" you get the same page back. Again. For ever. No matter what... Nice!
• 354) I have some Adaptec software for burning CDs. It has a picture / icon of a CD that it uses as a progress meter. It is like a pie chart or a clock: the progress increases like the hands of a clock move around. Which is funny because that is completely not how a CD is written - it is written from the center of the CD outward.
• 353) This is precious. I get a notice from the CA DMV that I have to renew a registration. It says that I can go online and do it. So, like a sucker I give it a shot. It takes me through a couple of steps of clicking on things and entering numbers and crap, and then ends up saying "Department of Motor Vehicles - Vehicle Registration Internet Renewal: System Unavailable. The Vehicle Registration System is currently unavailable. Please try again in a few minutes. If the problem persists, please contact your local field office for assistance." Is that genius, or what?
• 352) GUIs suck. Like, I want to copy file foo from directory a/ to directory b/, which already has a foo in it. When I paste it, my only option is to cancel the procedure or overwrite the file. There is no option of editing the pasted name, which is what I want.
• 351) Perl is fine and all, but it really does suck in a lot of ways. I've suddenly gained a lot of respect for Mr. Wall, however, since he himself is willing to note that things suck. That's character.
• 350) Yay! Cloanto and Digital River are wonderful because they really do keep track of your purchases so you can re-download them in the future. That is totally how things should work, but I've bought stuff before and downloaded it and then the company which sold it to me doesn't give me any way to re-download in the future. It is very refreshing to see someone doing things right! (Oh, wait, now I'm ordering something else and they are saying that service will cost $5 from now on. Dogged!)
• 349) I went to Italy.
  1. I was using an ATM and it asked me what language I wanted it to use. Yay! So I picked English. It was pretty sad because it didn't change the "Enter" and "Cancel" on-screen button labels from their Italian! Instead, the instructions on the screen said "When you are done, press <Italian word>". Bloody genius. Another one listed amounts you could withdraw, and then it had a button for letting you type in an arbitrary amount. So I did that, because I wanted more than the max fixed listed amount. I typed in what I wanted, and it told me that it was an invalid amount and that I should enter a smaller number. It didn't tell me what the max amount I could enter was! Yay.
  2. The showers there have some cord in them you can pull. In all the showers, it was completely unmarked. It was just this... cord. It looked like it should control a light, or a fan, or something. But then it was in every shower in every hotel, not just the first one. Weird. I later heard that it was maybe for emergencies, e.g.: so when you fall down you can pull it and have someone come rescue you. Seems to me, then, it would make sense to put some kind of label on it that looks like some emergency thing, rather than leaving it completely bare, for clueless tourists like myself to yank on repeatedly to see if they can turn on a fan or light.
  3. The train system is nice and all, but not perfect. The signs in train stations don't tell you what stops the train is making, only the final destination. Great. Also, the trains seemed to pretty much never have anybody announce what the upcoming stop was! And, the kicker is that the train stations have like maybe one or two name signs. So it seems like it would be really easy to miss your stop. Pretty lame.
  4. In Milan, you have to save your 1 euro coins for the late night Metro because there are no change machines, and the ticket machines only take 1 euro, 50 cent or 10 cent coins. Yes, we learned that the hard way.
  5. I hate the fact that the Euro coins can be worth real money. There's the 1 and the 2 euro coin, which are like $1 and $2 respectively. That is just too much value to have in a coin, in my opinion, because it psychologically makes them seem worth less and easier to spend (maybe it is all on purpose, to keep the economy moving?). Plus, if I'm looking for change, I really want to just get coins that are worth less than 1 euro; that's the whole bloody point of change.
• 348) I was at a fancy, expensive, hotel. The phone connection to the front desk, all of five hundred yards away from my room, over a custom phone system, and the fidelity is crap. Nice. And their TV/menu/interactive stuff where you can automatically check out gets me all the way to the final screen (and it is slow and just a pathetic implementation) and then it says that, oh, sorry, I can't actually check out that way so I have to go to the front desk. So I open the door to leave the room and there's the newspaper I explicitly asked them not to deliver, so I take it with me to check out because I should get my fifty cents back, and they never deduct it from the bill. Did I forget to mention that they didn't print the operating hours of their restaurants? That they don't provide bathrobes? That their folder with the documentation on what was available at the hotel had coffee stains all over some pages? This is high class?
• 347) The Opera web browser often prevents me from being able to use the Back button while a page is loading. It grays the button out. That is really really really dumb and annoying and stupid.
• 346) Oh, yeah, and in Opera I can't tab the selection to a pop-up menu and then type a letter to pick the entry. Like on sites that have you enter your state, in Netscape or IE I can tab over and hit e.g.: 'N' to get to NY, but in Opera nothing happens.
• 345) How many companies have divisions that are all about user interface, and then you look at their internal (and sometimes even external, for sure) web sites and they are just total poop?
• 344) Having a C subroutine which returns an int as an error code always bugs me because in other C contexts, zero would mean false, which I would associate with failure (rather than with no errors). Well, whatever.
• 343) I ordered Yellow Dog Linux for my old Power Mac. The instruction booklet warned me that if you did any twiddling with the partitions, the install would crash. Basically, you aren't allowed to change your mind, you have to know exactly what you want and set it up once. I read that note at least twice. When it came time to set up my partitions I of course wanted to screw around with their setup, and so the install crashed. I mean, it is just hardwired into us to screw around with the partitioning. There is no way anybody could reasonably expect me not to. It's like telling me not to breathe or blink or something. So that all meant my machine no longer booted at all! It was toast! Completely hosed! I hate everybody! I finally managed to reinstall OS7.5.something, but the kicker is that YDL ships with the installer in a compressed format, with no decompression utility on the disc, even though it comes on a CD-ROM. This completely blows my mind. So until I can transfer a decompresser onto the machine, it is a door stop. Man, I hate crappy installs.
• 342) When you are trying to page down through a document (rather than scroll a line at a time or whatever) using a scrollbar, it gets to be a pain at the bottom because there is so little space in which to click. Depending on how large the document is vs. how tall the scrollbar is things can kinda suck.
• 341) We have very fancy phones at work, with lots of buttons on them. Things like Messages, Program, Display, Auto Dial, Forward, Conference, Make Busy, Speed Call, etc. However, there doesn't appear to be anything that is just a plain old Redial button. Which I consider to be pretty much completely funny stupid, because I think the Redial button was like the first extra button ever added to telephones, you know?
• 340) I guess some people are still having trouble with HTML (or maybe, gosh, they really wanted to keep things narrow and utterly incorrectly justified / line-broken?).
• 339) Does it strike anybody else as really pathetic that all these fancy-pants commercial web sites warn you not to hit the submit button more than once when placing a credit card order? I mean, couldn't they come up with a way of making sure that if you do press it more than once within like a ten minute interval it warns you or double checks or something? Are they just trolling for extra money? Lame!
• 338) Wow. The Pottery Barn web site is absolutely killing me. First, when I'm ordering something from a gift registry, it has a field for how many of a given item I want to order, and then in addition to that it has a check box saying "select item". As if when I enter the number of items I want and press the update shopping cart button I really don't want to buy the things? Maybe if you are some power wedding registry shopper it works better for you. Maybe it is supposed to be like some kind of lay-away thing. I don't know. All I know is, it is stupid. Secondly, when you go to check out, it lets you add some optional message that will get sent with the order. However, rather than giving you a single text area in which to type with some upper bound on the number of characters (which is, admittedly, always a frustrating interface), it gives you six lines of 30 characters each. So I'm trying to type my message and I just hit a brick wall. It is really annoying to have every line suddenly stop accepting input; then I have to delete the word that I was just halfway done typing and move to the next line and start again, only to soon hit the end of that line invariably in the middle of another word. Hate. Not to mention that then there's the whole thing about how on web pages if you hit Return that is like Submit, so you really have to hit Tab to get to the next line. Which means people are constantly submitting when all they mean to do is go to the next line, because in every other application on earth when you are typing a whole bunch of text you can just use the Return key to get to the next line. Oh, the humanity! Whatever. I guess HTML just isn't up to the task. The third thing is that when you hit Return the next button which submits is actually to edit the order so I'm back at the start. That's just great. So I go forward (amazingly enough the system remembered my billing info etc. so at least I didn't have to enter that again, which most times I do on most sites) and get to the page where I'm entering the nice message again, and it has what I was entering before thankfully... however, it is ALL IN UPPER CASE for no good reason. I. Hate. Everybody.
• 337) I was on the treadmill the other day and I was trying to adjust the speed. Every time I pressed the up or down buttons, no matter how fast I pressed them, they would beep. But that wasn't how many increments of change were applied to the speed of the treadmill. Like, the treadmill, in reality, responded more slowly (of course) and would ignore extra button presses until it had sped up / slowed down to the next increment. It just bugs the crap outta me that the people who made the thing let it beep every time I press the button, even when the button press is completely going to be ignored and do nothing! In that case, the button obviously shouldn't bloody beep, so I can figure out how many more times I really have to press it to get the treadmill to the speed I really want. Whatever. Chalk it up to lazy people.
• 336) It is a long story, but I'm trying out StuffIt on my PC. I have a .hqx file on a CDR that I want to uncompress onto a floppy, but when I use StuffIt it says "internal error" and craps out. A little while later I realize that I didn't have the floppy actually inserted into the drive. And for that I get an "internal error" that blows chunks? Come on, guys.
• 335) Apparently, Honda doesn't want me to buy any of their cars because they've put a lot of effort into making sure their web site prevents me from getting any info. It asks me to register before I can find out about the Hybrid, and then the registration doesn't work at all. Or, I try to look at other info and I get VBScript errors instead of real information. Yay. Impressive. Sure hope they don't make and test their cars the way they do with their web site...
• 334) It still blows my mind that I have to end Perl modules with "1;".
• 333) This completely cracks me up: I click on a search button and get an index instead. So I guess that's 'search' as in 'search it yourself, buddy.' Which is really showing off the power available to us in this Information Technology Age!
• 332) It blows my mind that software would get rid of undo information when you save a document. The real problem is that we ever have to save anything at all. Go go Alan Cooper.
• 331) I have a new hard drive in a linux machine. So how the holy heck do I get devfs to bloody well recognize it? It shows up in dmesg, but then I can't figure out what I have to do to make devfs acknowledge it and let me fdisk it, for crying out loud. One step forward, two steps back.
• 330) It is pretty funny how functional programming languages tend to fall on their faces (in terms of efficiency vs. maintaining functional style) when it comes to simple arrays.
• 329) Is it me? When I do "zip -help" on my linux box, it doesn't list any option that will just dump the names of the files in an archive, like tar t. Seems sorta dorky?
• 328) It figures. I was trying to buy something at Sears and everything was going just fine... And then I tried to register (name, phone number, billing address, the usual). I type in all my stuff and then I hit submit and boom I get some server error. Specifically, it claims that the page doesn't exist. That's nice. Of course, when I go back in my browser, the form has cleared itself out so I'd have to retype everything - assuming that it was just a spurious error, which I'm not going to bother to find out. Basically, I will never buy anything from Sears ever again, if I can avoid it.
• 327) I'm trying to learn some Haskell and there are some sillyisms to it:
  1. When you make a new type you use the keyword 'data' which sounds more like a variable declaration to me. So then 'type' is used as a type alias. Why couldn't we have used 'type' instead of 'data', and 'typealias' instead of 'type'? Or something like that, at any rate.
• 326) I love how nobody wants to sell me anything over the web. I mean, why else would they require JavaScript and/or persistent cookies? Go to hell, everybody.
• 325) I've probably mentioned it before, but I feel I need to mention it again: if you are ever looking for an example of how not to run a search engine, just go look at the Stanford web site. Here's a world renowned university that spun off Sun, Yahoo! and even an honest to goodness search engine, Google, and it can't even find me the "campus book store". (Oh, not to mention the fact that their web server only responds to www.stanford.edu and not just stanford.edu. Why does everybody have to suck so much? Why isn't Stanford just completely embarrassed to have this crap?
• 324) Wow. This is impressive. I'm not sure if I should hate them and completely boycott them for ever, or if I should like the fact that their search engine is so good that it showed me they are weasels. Anyway, I went to look at Apple iBooks at Mac Connection. I found the ones I'm interested in, and then compared them. There were several that were exactly the same, yet were priced differently. The only difference I could see was that some of them came with "Free" things like CDRs or a carrying case or whatever. But those were five bucks more. So I don't see how they can be considered to be free.
• 323) Another thing I friggin' hate about the Opera web browser is that when you type something into the address field, it shows you a completion for it - and if you hit Enter it takes that completion. Rather than taking what you have typed in so far. You should have to hit Tab or something to take the completion. For example, I typed in foo.eduy by mistake and hit Enter, then tried to stop it and fix the typo by deleting 'uy' and typing 'u'. However, the stupid thing then autocompleted that to 'eduy' again. Hate hate hate hate hate.
• 322) I love going to st-patricks-day.com and it never saying when it is.
• 321) I have a pair of AIWA folding noise-cancelling headphones. They're okay, I guess. One thing that really sucks a lot about them, however, is that if you pull them too wide apart while you are trying to put them on or take them off, a really scary nasty plastic cracking sound is heard. Like, isn't putting the headphones on and taking them off one of those things that headphones should be bloody well designed to handle without exploding into a plastic fragmentation grenade? I guess it is all to be chalked up to planned obsolecense and base stupidity. Boy, do I dislike people.
• 320) TURN OFF YOUR DAMNED CELL PHONE / WATCH / PALM PILOT ALREADY, YOU SCUM, YOU VERMIN. (Et jamais n'ecrire pas IN ALL CAPS. C'est tres gauche.)
• 319) If you've ever used speaker phones, if you've ever done conference calling, you have probably experienced how much those systems suck. Another fine example is radio talk shows where people call in. What they all have in common is a lack of volume equalization. You can hear the people in the studio fine, but when folks call in you can't hear 'em well at all, etc. You'd think that in the two thousand years since Christ we'd have come up with a decent fix for this, and that it would have been so successful as to banish such lame ass problems. But, no, humans are stupid bastards, and we still have stupid crap like this all the time all over the place.
• 318) And what about feedback? Why hasn't that just been completely eliminated already? What the heck? Come on, Science!
• 317) If you run a mass media site, how about maybe checking that your parenthases match? (Hell, just load the crap into LISP and see what happens.
• 316) This continues to piss me off like crazy: When you go to a Yahoo! Regional section, you cannot do a free-text search there. I mean, this is insane.
• 315) Even the great folks can miss things. When you search the web using Google there is a text entry field at the top and bottom of the results pages. However, if you search by the Google Directory the results page doesn't have the text entry field at the bottom.
• 314) I'm obviously going to have to start a page just dedicated to things I come across on my Linux box. Like how Mozilla (installed from rpm) just segfaults as soon as it tries to put up a window. Or how the Gnome Panel is such a flying piece of dog poop. I got an icon in there for launching Opera but it has the wrong icon. So I right-click on the icon and choose Properties... and there is a place for me to click and pick the icon I want for it. Only the dialog for choosing the icon magically appears underneath the Properties dialog. And none of the dialogs have title bars or anything for moving them around. This is just incredible.
• 313) I'm trying to look up info on Doc Martens shoes. Their site requires javascript for a stupid pulldown menu form. Then, when I click on shoes I get an error: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Servererror '80040e14' Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'ORDER'. /FootwearHome.asp, line 12. Remember, I clicked on this so I could buy their products and they are telling me "No, actually, we don't want to let you give us money. Really, we just want to go out of business." Can I please slap all commercial web site admins everywhere?
• 312) Have I mentioned recently how much I hate Opera (the browser, not the art, silly)? Well, even if I have I'm still going to put this down now, for catharsis:
  1. Having the progress bar be the same as the address bar is completely stupid. The main suckful thing is that then I can't type into the address bar while something is loading. Instead, I have to first hit Stop. IE and Netscape let you just type stuff in, especially while something is taking a long time to load.
  2. Whenever I come across a pop-up ad in Opera, the stupid piece of excrement first makes the original window I was in / page I was looking at shrink down to some small size, and shows the secondary window that is the pop-up ad. IE doesn't do this. Konqueror doesn't do this. So I don't think there is any javascript resizing the window. I think it is just that Opera sucks hairy buttocks. Sure, there's the option to tell it to put them in the background etc. (Preferences / General / Windows / Document Windows / Popup Windows), but by default it seems to do the most annoying thing possible!
  3. Since it is all running in X Windows, cut/copy/paste is of course a huge piece of excrement, as well. Whatever. That's sort of endemic to anything using X I guess.
• 311) Oh, and Konqueror? Also a stupid piece of junk. It doesn't change the mouse pointer when you are over a link. You know, the way every other browser on earth does.
• 310) So I'm looking for hotel reviews, and I come across one for a hotel I'm interested in on Epinions.com. I click on the link to get "Side by Side Comparison... with highly rated similar items" and it gives me 3 hotels in completely different cities than the one I'm looking at. Oh, right, that's useful. Oh, and then they have a link to HotWire which is supposed to find deals on hotels, only it turns out it is restricted to the USA, and of course the hotel I started with is in another country, in Europe, so why the hell would I even care about this HotWire crap? Okay, so I end up navigating through Epinions into: Home, Hotels and Travel, Hotels and Resorts, Country-I-Want Hotels. I would like to see the most highly rated hotels, of course. I mean that is the whole point of Epinions, isn't it? So why doesn't it list all the hotels ranked by rating? Instead, it lists all the hotels grouped in subcategories that are the Chain (e.g.: Best Western, Hilton, whatever) that owns the hotel. So I'd have to manually go through 33 subcategories? This is useful?
• 309) I'm checking out Sheraton hotels. I enter the location and dates I'm interested in. Then, I "drill down" to get into specific hotels. When I'm in a specific hotel and then want to check room rates, it asks me to enter the dates I'm interested in. Again. See? Blah. Lame!
• 308) I'm trying to browse through refurbished Dell notebook computers and it is scary because there are all these links to look at machines and stuff but it doesn't keep any sort of banner that lets me know I'm still looking at refurbished machines. Like, for all I know they've taken me off to look at real machines. Sort of annoying.
• 307) Yay! Linux rules! Okay, really, it sucks. I'm trying to upgrade package P which depends (at least) on package Q so I'm trying to install package Q which is gnome-libs-devel, so I go to the gnome web site only to be told to go to the Ximian web site. So I try to download the manual installer and run it, only to be told that it only works with X Windows. But I'm not at home, so running X Windows is going to be really slow and is going to really suck. Yay! The real kicker in all of this is that the original package P isn't even one I ever use with any GUI. I always just use it from a regular old text terminal. Kill me. The double-kicker is that I go through the hour long install of Ximian only to find that gnome-libs-devel still apparently hasn't been installed because when I go and try to install package P, it still tells me I'm missing that. So now I'm trying to use red-carpet to get it, and as it starts up it tells me that it is loading the RedHat 7.2 Channel. Uh, but, as dmesg says, I'm running RedHat 7.1 you commie bastards! I'm giving it a shot anyway. So another funny thing about this Ximian crap is that you can tell Red Carpet to use a mirror, like a good citizen. But the mirrors I try apparently don't have the files I want to install. So I end up using the default, non-mirror server. So what is the point in having mirrors if they don't have the bloody files?
• 306) I have this headset thingy for my phone at work. What totally sucks about it is adjusting the volume, both for what I hear and what I transmit; there's no feedback to tell me what effect I'm having on it, or when I've set it to what I'd like. If it had some LED volume meter that would help a lot.
• 305) Konqueror is lame because if a form submit button is a graphic image, you can't Tab over to it and hit enter or the space bar like you could in MSIE.
• 304) It annoys me that it seems like most video game review sites are too chicken to post a list of their reviews in order. Instead you have to look up the review of each game individually. It would at least be nice if they had a decent way to do a bulk review search so I could see the top rated RPGs for the PS2 etc. but noooooo.
• 303) If Epinions.com is such hot poop, then why don't the let people post reviews of the site itself on their site?
• 302) It seems like there's a trend for web sites to let people enter text for things like reviews or personalized web sites. The sites I've used which have that ability tend to completely screw the user by doing strange stuff to the text they enter. I guess they are trying to limit the amount of HTML someone has to know, but it absolutely kills someone like me who really does know it. Like, they will give you some crappy HTML form with a text entry area, and if you have stuff in there with carriage returns they will explicitly but a <br> in for you. So your formatting ends up sucking completely. Normal HTML wouldn't care about the line breaks, you jerks. At least give me the option of having it parse things as regular HTML, you know? I mean, the principle here should be that the tools try to go out of their way to help me, rather than me being the one who has to bend over backward to make anything work. Hell
• 301) "Caution: Do not operate this cutter without this warning in place." Okay... and if it is missing I'm supposed to be able to see that notice? Genius.
• 300) It is killing me how many web sites require cookies to work, yet never say anything about it, and never try to detect if you don't have them enabled and warn you, you know? So instead it just looks like their site is completely broken and a huge piece of excrement. Which it really is, I guess.
• 299) Wow. I've just completely had my mind blown. The ABIT computer company web site has javascript driven menus, right? Each entry in the menu is a rectangular region with text in it. On most sites that I've seen like this, when you are trying to pick one of the menu entries you have to click on the word itself. Like, things will look like a button that you should be able to click on anywhere but in reality it is just background color and you have to click exactly on the (usually really small) text. So that is always stupid and completely suckful, right? Well, these folks have gone and done one better: they've made it so you must not click on the word. So I'm trying to pick the things by putting my mouse cursor over the word, and nothing is happening... Lord in heaven give me strength.
• 298) Does this strike anybody else as kinda silly? The SiSoft site says "BTW, don't search for the name Sandra on a WWW search engine. You'll get at least half a million hits and none will reference this page. Search for SiSoftware Sandra." But if were searching for the page, I wouldn't have been able to read that sentence, you know?
• 297) So there's the iTools web site which is supposed to make it easy to "create, share and communicate." So, like, you can put your digital camera pictures up on it in photo albums. What kills me about it is that the photo albums apparently pretty much require javascript, and that you cannot easily just get a link for a single picture to send to someone. So if I want to point someone at a specific photo, I can't just right-click on it and copy its URL (or shortcut or whatever you wanna call it). Uh, yeah, all that really adds up to make it easy to share my stuff with other people. Right...
• 296) It strikes me that people still don't grok multiple monitors. Like, having two displays with neither one in the middle strikes me as really ergonomically annoying. I have two displays on my machine at work and keep one centered. Further proof that people don't put any time or effort into the usability issues is that it (Win2K in this particular case) is missing a hot key to swap the two displays. See, I have applications of lesser importance on the secondary display. But when I use one of them, my head is turned to use that display, which isn't good in the long run. I'd rather be able to keep those in my peripheral vision, off to the side, for when I only need to look at their output, and then be able to switch them to the middle monitor when I need to do input. There, that wasn't so hard to figure out, now was it? So why the heck hasn't anybody tried to do something actually useful like that, rather than just this stupid idea of slapping two LCDs next to one another? Whatever. (Yeah, I'm sure there are some utilities I could download from somewhere to do something similar, but like I trust those not to completely lock up my machine? Anything messing with display hardware is already scary enough; God knows enough apps lock up my machine just because they apparently can't handle my two monitors. I want the functionality to be in the OS and superduper tested by the maker.)
• 295) When I buy a fountain pen, why does it always come with a cartridge of blue ink? I hate blue ink! Why don't they all come with black ink? Sheesh!
• 294) My PC at work has a CD player in it. That's nice. When I press the eject button on it, there is nothing to tell me that it noticed. No blinking lights, no sound, no anything. If there's a CD in it that I've been using then it pretty often takes a while before the tray opens (maybe it is spinning down the disc or something). Anyway, it just completely sucks that there is no feedback. Like, I could press the button, not get a reaction, press it again, then have the drawer open due to the first press and then pretty much immediately close due to the second press. Or something equally vile.
• 293) This old purple iMac has the purple iKeyboard which, get this, has a 'home' key but does not have an 'end' key. Whatever.
• 292) English language readers will read from top-left to bottom-right. Thus, I think this graph could stand to have the color key reversed; when I look at the graph, the first color I'm interested in is the cream, not the baby-blue.
• 291) Konqueror is killing me. The problem is that sometimes the space bar works to scroll the frame or whatever, and at other times it just willy-nilly decides to interpret the space bar as a click. So I'll be looking through stuff, click on a link to go forward, read some stuff, click on the back button, and then hit the space bar so the original screen will scroll, and instead suddenly the browser goes forward to some URL again. I've looked in the key mappings and there doesn't appear to be anything bound to the space bar at all - like, there isn't even the scroll command listed there with the space bar. Whatever.
• 290) Opera can't handle the AT&T site I'm trying to log in to. Either that, or they specifically made the site not work with Opera. Or something. Whatever. At least with IE I'd know that it was because of some setting I'd done, rather than having this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that the browser I'm using just simply sucks too much ass.
• 289) Opera brings up xedit when I tell it I want to "View Source". The funny thing is, the really funny thing is, xedit doesn't have a horizontal scroll bar, that I can see, even though the source goes way off the right edge of the window. Uh, yeah. And you want to replace Windows with this kind of crap?
• 288) Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4.05 seems to want to eject the CD it just finished burning. That's annoying as all hell, and stuff.
• 287) Okay, this is just bizarre, if one is thinking about web browsers for the vision impaired: There's a web site with images where the ALT tag says "Call for Photo."
• 286) I'm sick of idiots that sell computers, and have web sites, and yet do not have on-line inventory or prices or ordering.
• 285) Now, this is funny: I have software for my PC that emulates an original PlayStation. I'm trying to play a real PlayStation game I bought (Fear Effect 2) with the emulator. Things are mostly okay... and then after like ten minutes of playing the game, suddenly the audio goes into high pitched computer squeals of death that make me rip the headphones off of me, and leave me with long term hearing damage. I think that's what the Danes call quality.
• 284) I <heart> the web. Okay, what I'm really saying is that I completely hate everybody. I hear you ask, "why?" I'll tell you why: because of all the web sites that apparently are designed from the ground up not to help me but to screw me royally and make my life suck, all because I don't have cookies enabled, or javascript turned on (or I have it turned on, but their code is crappy and buggy and puts up debug error dialogs in my web browser), or active x going full steam. I. Just. Hate. Everyone.
  1. Radisson requires cookies. All I want to do is look up what hotels are in my local area; why should that require cookies?!
  2. Gateway's site required cookies and/or javascript. Whatever. I guess that they don't want to let me browse, because that might let me learn enough to want to buy something from them, at which point I'd be willing to turn on cookies etc???
  3. Gamespot had an advertisement as their front page for a while. Like, you had to wait for the ad to finish playing before you were let into the actual site. More recently, it looks like they've maybe stopped doing that. The fact that someone authorized doing it in the first place makes me (said like Ren) puke!
  4. The irony is, of course, that as I was writing that about Ren, I wanted to make it a hyperlink. So I went to the Spumco web site, only to get "Forbidden: You don't have permission to access / on this server." Yay!
  5. Gamasutra used to be cool and mostly free, but then they started requiring registration. Then, they went and changed their server so my password got blown out. So I go to log in and they say they are sending me a random password. Why the couldn't just migrate my original password over I don't know... well, actually, it was apparently so they could force me to enter personal info again; when I use the assigned random password, I'm told to fill out personal information as well as updating my password to whatever I want. When I try to submit the form, the site freaks out and tells me that I apparently need to log in before I can submit the info, which is stupid because I already just did log in to get to the form, and now neither password works worth squat.
• 283) I'm talking to someone on the phone. They say they are going to transfer me to someone else. Then, I hear the tones of the numbers they are dialing really bloody loudly in my ear. It hurts. I'm hating. Lo, hate!
• 282) I go to sfbay.yahoo.com and then I enter "Mountain View" to get to a local town and it ends up putting me in... MV Hawaii. Genius.
• 281) I'm using Opera. I was looking at an URL that was something like http://foo.com/Foo/bar. Then, I wanted to look at http://foo.com/foo/bar. The only difference is that Foo became lower case foo. When I'm trying to enter the new URL into the Opera address field, the URL completion keeps kicking in and screwing me because it is case insensitive. So I start to type the foo of the second URL, and Opera suddenly replaces it with capital Foo. I can't get it to let me enter my URL! (In the end I had to just hilight the single letter F and type f.)
• 280) The Gnome Terminal lets you right-click on an URL and open it in a browser. But then you'd have to, like, configure it to know which browser you prefer (it opens Netscape and I want it to use Opera). So it would be nice if the right-click menu also contained the ability to just copy the URL to the clipboard so I could then paste it into Opera, but noooooo.
• 279) I hate unix. I hate linux. "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdd5, or too many mounted file systems." Okay, which error is it, really? You jerks.
• 278) I think I've learned that WinZip sucks a lot of ass. All I want to do is extract a file ("notes") from an Archive but save it out with a new file name. There doesn't seem to be a way to do that. I tried editing the text in the "Extract To:" field to be the full path with the new file name ("notes-old") but then the file doesn't appear on disk. Even more strange, when I look at the directory I tried to extract it to in WinZip again, it shows a new subdirectory with the new file name, and the file is in there with the old file name. Argh! UI of doom! The real kicker is that neither the application nor the web site say anything about how to report bugs. Feel the hate.
• 277) From Nielsen & Tahir's Homepage Usability: "Of the homepages in our sample, 60% used the traditional standard for link colors: blue. This is a fairly small majority, but still large enough that we continue to recommend blue as the color for unvisited links. If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story." Okay, that's just messed up. 40% of people in the world are jerks who decide they know what colors you should be forced to use. Hey, wait a minute, I do that all the time on my pages, too! Damn!
• 276) I'm trying to browse the internet and I get an error saying "No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept." Now, someone tell me if that means the destination server, the proxy server I 'm through, or the machine I'm running the browser on. Sheesh. How hard would it be to make the error that comes back from the proxy server actually say it is from the proxy server?
• 275) I think debuggers like the one in VC++ should let you write scripts that you can plug in to do things like show variable values in certain ways. E.g.: if I have a variable that represents the time, I'd like the debugger to show me it as a human readable time, rather than raw seconds-since-1970.
• 274) "Backward compatibility" can really just mean "keeping around stupid stuff so the new folks are completely confused and screwed." Just shoot all the old users, already, okay? Or give them another mode. Or something.
• 273) I don't like it when there's more than one class per source file. Maybe if they are little helper classes, okay, but if they are major things then no sir, I don't like it.
• 272) I really dislike it when people do something like if( (foo = GetFoo()) ).
• 271) It blows my mind, but there are software tools I use on a daily basis that have arbitrary limits on how long a line can be. Of course we have some really long lines in some of our files, so it becomes a huge pain in the ass.
• 270) In bash, if I do cp First/* ../../data00/ it gives me an error saying "cp: when copying multiple files, last argument must be a directory". In fact, data00 is a directory. If I remove the trailing slash from data00 in the command, it works. I so completely hate software it is crazy.
• 269) If you ever get the chance to play around with the HBO Spawn 3 DVD, check out how the main menu stuff works. It is the kind of thing that makes me wanna be a vigilante.
• 268) Is it me, or does the Bookmark UI in Opera really suck ass? Like, how do you tell it to put the new bookmark in a particular folder?
• 267) Ha ha, I'm using Linux with a "desktop." Ha ha ha. Oh, boy, this sure is a funny one!
  1. The menus in the Panel don't lock when you click on an entry that is the start of a hierarchical menu. I hate that.
  2. I've got the Gnome Panel running. I want to add Opera to it as a launch button. I bring up the "Panel Manual" which brings up the Gnome Help Browser. Which is, itself, a piece of utter crap. For example, I can't select text to copy, apparently.
  3. The dialog which comes up for adding an application to the Panel asks you for a command to run when you click on the new button. It doesn't have a find file dialog. You apparently have to know the path (or have the program in the path of the shell that the Panel started from).
  4. The dialog box doesn't have a title bar so I can't move it.
  5. The dialog box lets you pick an icon for the new item. You click on a button and it brings up another dialog, from which you can choose an icon. For some bizarre reason, the new dialog appears under the one where you enter the command. And, of course, the new dialog box also doesn't have a title bar. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
  6. Oh, wait. It gets even more insane. Once you have the item in the Panel, if you right-click on it and bring up the Properties, what you get is the first dialog box, the one where you can enter the command. Well, if you then click on the button which brings up the icon selection dialog, now that appears on top.
• 266) Look, if you are ever an architect, make sure to put strong extractor fans in the bathrooms.
• 265) Opera is sort of okay. Although:
  1. I can't figure out how to make it not check a file each time I come back to it in the history. Like, I told it to never recheck, but it seems to be re-downloading it anyway.
  2. It kills me that the address bar goes away when a page is downloading, so you have to explicitly hit Stop before you can type in a new address.
  3. The Back button is unavailable while downloading some pages. So you have to wait until it is done before you can hit back. (Or go hit Stop first or something equally dumb.) Kind of stupid. Kind of annoying.
  4. The Find dialog has a button on it labeled "Cancel" rather than "Close". I hate that. It is so dumb.
• 264) A miscellaneous picture of some obviously quality software, namely swish.
• 263) I'm still trying to use GameSpy Arcade, with the same problems. I'm guessing that it cannot talk to the GameSpy servers because of a firewall. What I don't understand is why it isn't just using bloody HTTP.
• 262) I'm trying to use GameSpy Arcade. I go through the registration wizard and yet at the end of it all, I don't have any profiles to choose from. And if I fire up the wizard again it tells me that my email address doesn't have an account associated with it yet. Is this normal behaviour? I certainly didn't get any error messages about some server being down, if that is what is causing the problem. Whatever, all I know is, this thing is apparently a big piece of crap. Just like everything else. And while I'm on the topic of GameSpy, why don't they let you log in to their site with you account so you can maybe customize it? Seems like they are missing a whole potential revenue stream there. Dorks.
• 261) So I was going to use Orbitz but they suck ass. Like, of course they don't give me the error that prevents me from doing anything until after I've entered in a ton of data. Like, of course, they don't even give me a good reason for the error, they just say "Error. Try again later." So I pretty much completely hate them right about now.
• 260) People spend all sorts of time and energy working on getting their OS GUI colors set up, and then applications (especially games) go and not use them. So if you had your settings working with the contrast and brightness of your monitor, then crappy applications come up like apparently totally black or something. If they had bothered to actually get the UI values from the OS, then things would be fine, but nooooo, we can't do that!
• 259) Whoever made the Farallon web site screwed the pooch by using both plugins and frames. Like, you click on the page and try to scroll with the mouse wheel and nothing happens because you clicked in the left frame, not the right one, and you can't see the separator. Genius!
• 258) The bathrooms at work are pretty dumb. The locks on the stall doors don't show anything so you don't know if someone is in one. And then the locks don't really turn very far (like twenty degrees or something) so it is apparently easy for them not to really be so securely locked. I mean, for how many decades has Mankind been building these things? Why on earth are there any that are stupid at all?
• 257) Seems pretty obvious to me... if you have a search toolbar that goes in the web browser, it should have a quick way to take whatever text you have selected as the input to a search engine. Rather than having to manually copy-and-paste it into some text field. Oy veh.
• 256) In case I haven't mentioned it recently, Speakeasy sucks ass. So does DSL Reports because I tried to enter my Speakeasy review in there and it screwed up after I entered everything, and lost it all. Totally sweet. I pretty much hate everybody having anything to do with DSL these days.
• 255) Amazon still has some... issues with their checkout process. Like, when you are picking the shipping address there aren't apparently any ways to delete old addresses. So I've got like 12 different addresses on the screen that I have to choose from or edit. I can't delete all the ones that are old apartments that I will never ship to ever again. What a pain in the ass! Oh, and they are presented in some apparently completely arbitrary order; it isn't as if they show you the most recently used ones first. Because, I guess, that would just make too much sense! Also, if you edit one of the addresses, it doesn't make that the first one in the list - you know, if someone is editing the address I think it is probably a safe heuristic to think that maybe it is the one they are going to actually want to use? Argh. Whatever.
• 254) There is a program called Electric Eyes for Linux. It is sort of another XV (image viewer). It kinda sucks a lot of ass. Like, say you have an image and you resize the window it is in to be bigger than the image. You end up with a grey border taking up the non-image room. The only menu that exists in the program is one you get to via right-clicking - the same bullshit GIMP thing I guess which I completely hate - but the kicker is that if you try to right-click on the grey border, nothing happens! You apparently have to be right-clicking in the image. Such utter competence! God, hell, if anybody really