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Yes, a lot of the stuff here is no longer valid.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