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Yes, a lot of the stuff here is no longer valid.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