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From: Michael G Schwern Date: 22:08 on 20 May 2005 Subject: links Let me first start off with the obvious. "Is there a good command line web browser?" "Yeah, use links." "I've used lynx, it sucks." "Not lynx, L-I-N-K-S!" Google, when asked for "links", actually has the links home page as the first hit! Didn't expect that, lost a reason to hate links. Now back to our hate. How do I copy text from links? For some reason this is the only command line application that refuses to allow me to highlight and copy anything. GRAH! So even though links' rendering is superior I'm stuck using lynx.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 00:31 on 29 Apr 2005 Subject: Utilities vs Applications Apple wisely placed all applications into a simple, flat /Applications directory as opposed to scattering them all over the filesystem or creating some sort of hierarchy. This is good. Now I can find shit. So I get on a Mac and I look in Applications for X11... its not there. Terminal? Not there. Digital Color Meter? Not there. Grab? NetInfo? ColorSync? Console? Not bloody there! OOhhhhhhh, they're cleverly hidden in /Applications/Utilities. What's a utility? What's the difference between an application and a utility? How do I decide which is which? Why is a program to take a screenshot (Grab) a utility and one to decompress a file (Stuffit Expander) an application? iSync is an application but RsyncX is a utility. How is a user supposed to know the difference? Why even have this artificial split? About the only distinction I can see is Apple put things into Utilities it would rather its dumb users not stumble onto such as the Terminal or X11 or the Disk Utility lest they shoot themselves in the foot and generate money wasting support calls. Ok, maybe I can see that... but Grab? Just how much trouble can you get into making screenshots? Unix does this, too, with the whole bin vs sbin thing. traceroute and ifconfig being the two I'm always losing. As always... hate.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 10:31 on 12 Apr 2005 Subject: A new email anti-virus low The attached message sent to you did not meet the Bosch security policy. Sender: epgbc@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xxxxxxxxx.xx Recipients: schwern@xxxxx.xxx Subject: "hello" Time: Tue Apr 12 08:41:39 2005 File: body.scr The original, cleaned message has been attached to this notification. I didn't sent the email. It doesn't even LOOK LIKE I sent the email! So why is your anti-virus software telling me YOU sent me a virus? What can I do about it? Compounding this genius, after it had stripped off the virus it let the mangled result through. Not only is this unwise as false positives could make you look like an idiot ("Joe, why did you try to send me a virus?" "It was a zip of our latest brochure, I swear!"), the negatives aren't likely to contain a whole lot of useful data! As a matter of fact, it stripped every bit of content off the email but the subject line. At this point you'd think some rule would kick in "If no content left don't bother sending it!" What in the hell were the designers thinking? This is Trend Micro, they've been doing this stuff for years! The software starts at $800 and goes up to $43K for 2500 users! FOR A FREAKIN EMAIL VIRUS SCANNER?! What do they do with all that money? Not hire decent programmers, apparently. Hating while training SpamAssassin for this new flood.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 23:15 on 08 Apr 2005 Subject: Javascript: Time Traveller From the Year 1962! Gee, how original, hating Javascript. But this is a new hate. A fresh hate. A fundamental hate. I have to touch Javascript for this project. Sean Burke's written some mildly positive things about the state of Javascript in 2005 vs 1995 so I'm going to give it a chance. The project has existing HTML with the same JS functions copied into the header of each file. Ok, simple enough refactoring, I'll toss each function into its own .js file. Already things are looking up! A lot of pages use most of the functions, so rather than have a ton of <script src="..."> in each file I'll just write up all.js which does the moral equivalent of: include("this.js"); include("that.js"); ... Simple enough, right? Basic 1970s programming technology. Include a file. So I start looking for such a thing. And looking. And looking. And ask some friends. Finally I get back this: function include(jssrc) { document.write("<script type='text/javascript' src='"+jssrc+"'></script>"); } include("include2.js"); I have to write my own include function. This include function isn't even native to Javascript, it relies on the browser DOM. I have to cut & paste this code into every JS file which wants to include another. I have to cut & paste code so that I do not have to cut & paste code. I just double checked, Javascript came about in 1995. Its up to version 1.5. There's an ISO standard for it. At least three multinational corporations are actively involved in its development. AND IT HAS NO INCLUDE FUNCTION?! In related news... Lua. NO NAMESPACES! WHAT THE HELL PEOPLE?! The tables-as-namespaces makes Perl 5's OO system look clean and well thought out. Are the designers of these languages all TIME TRAVELLERS FROM 1962? The next big thing in language design: variable names with more than eight characters!
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 21:21 on 03 Mar 2005 Subject: Phone numbers and form fields To log into T-Mobile's web site you give them your phone number. Ok. 123.456.7890 "12345678: Your phone number should be 10 digits. For example: 1234567890" How hard is it to strip out non-digits from input, people?! I see this all the time. Phone numbers. Credit card numbers. Postal codes. I mean, christ. $input =~ s/\D+//g;
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 20:56 on 14 Dec 2004 Subject: Apple X11 copy Its simple. I highlight something in an X window. I hit Cmd-c to copy it. I go to a native Apple application. I hit Cmd-v to paste. Nothing. Or maybe its something I copied a few minutes ago. So I do it again. Copy. Paste. Nothing. Copy. Paste. Nothing. Copy Paste Nothing. Copy Paste Nothing. Copy Copy Copy Copy Copy Paste Nothing. Copy Copy Paste AHHH! It FINALLY FUCKING WORKED! Sometimes it seems to work if I first cut something in a native buffer, like there's some sort of corruption in the clipboard and it has to be cleared. The only thing that works consistently is pasting into XEmacs and using its explicit Edit->Copy menu command. Its CUT AND PASTE! How hard can it be, Apple?!
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 17:15 on 03 Jun 2004 Subject: iChat cutsie formatting. Dear iChat, [1] Hope you are well. I like your cute interface to AIM. It makes me forget that I'm sucking up to the devil's teat by using it. However, I have a question... Where's the fucking TURN SMILIES OFF button!? As astounding as this may seem, there are situations where one might not want :) translated into a cute little icon, like code. Also, I might suggest an option to STOP STRIPPING NEWLINES!! As much as I enjoy arbitrary formatting, just occassionally one wants the message they sent to remain unmodified, such as pasting a small diff. Finally, and this is not quite as hateful as the rest, a feature request. iChat gives the illusion of a private conversation between two individuals especially when they're sitting in the same office. However, its really an unsecured conversation spewed out across the Internet. Throw in wireless and you have people blithely transmitting their deepest secrets in the clear. What would be fantastic is some simple client-based encryption. iChat could advertise its willingness to encrypt in its client version string. Key negociation occurs between two crypt-enabled iChat clients as normal chat text supressed from the user's view. Then encrypted data is encoded base64 and sent as perfectly normal text which the client decrypts. All over the existing AIM protocol. Knowing far too many businesses that use AIM for internal communications it would be killer. [1] I know this is not the Apple iLife Team but I figure I'm yelling loud enough that they'll hear me no matter where I post this.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 10:26 on 27 Feb 2004 Subject: iTunes, follow the damned playlist iTunes, could you just fucking play the songs in the order they're in the playlist?! Don't try to resort them or do anything clever. For fuck's sake, xmms and Winamp have had this right for years.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 01:49 on 27 Jan 2004 Subject: Email viruses This one's a cheap shot, but I don't care. Once upon a time, viruses were something other people had to deal with. Some Windows' user's hard drive gets reformatted, "oh, hard luck pal" as you snicker quietly and turn back to your Mac and/or Unix machine. Now, through the wonder of executable email attachments, Visual Basic and the incredible gullibility of the bottom 10% of the Internet, any keyboard pounder can slop together an email virus with just enough social engineering to make someone drool in the vicinity of the left mouse button. "*GASP*! The FBI's Department of Illegal Internet Downloads has caught me!" After a few years of this sort of thing, you'd think people would learn. [1] Then it breeds like a rabbit hutch on trial size Viagra sending itself indiscriminately to any address it finds while ransacking the poor fool's computer. Now its MY problem because this infinite queue of email clicking monkeys managed to find activestate.com and installed Perl documentation with my email address in it. With this last outbreak I'm getting hundreds a day. And even if I filter them out, I still need to download and scan the bloody things at 30K a piece. And then, because some anti-virus companies are so astoundingly gullible that they trust the From line on an email, the bounce messages add to the fun. Must. Purge. Internet. [1] They don't. While home over Christmas I helped my neighbor set up their new WAP. They had so much crap installed on their machine that it would simply accumulate random popup ads if they left it on doing nothing to the point where rebooting it was faster than trying to get rid of them all. IE was encrusted with ads and scam search tabs. This was all sort of accepted as the price of using a computer.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 01:28 on 03 Jan 2004 Subject: OS X Finder In the OS 9 Finder one could quickly navigate to a folder in an open window by typing the first few letters of it and then correcting with the arrow keys. If you wanted to drill down into it, either cmd-o or cmd-downarrow, but this opened a new window. No problem, hold down shift to avoid this. cmd-uparrow to move up a folder. This made navigating a directory tree nearly as fast as a command line. Enter the OS X Finder. Everything works the same, but they changed the default. Now the default is to open a folder in the same window. Great! Except that they took away a hotkey to open in a seperate window. shift-cmd-downarrow still opens in the same window. shift-cmd-o opens in a different window but using this rediculously slow zoom animation that I can't figure how to turn off. cmd-doubleclick will do what I want, but that means I have to use the mouse. Three ways to open a folder, three different behaviors. Argh.
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