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From: Mark Fowler Date: 13:13 on 30 Oct 2003 Subject: Panther Hate Don't get me wrong. I quite like a lot of Panther, but I hate a lot of the new stuff too. And I've only been using if for an hour or so. First up, the installer is stupid. It keeps displaying random bars with random text. Installing foo. Processing foo. I'm not entirely sure what installing does if it's not processing the files (and vice versa,) but apparently it's a seperate thing. And the times are widly wrong. And you think you're done and it just switches to another random installation stage. I hate (I mean, really, really dispise) that Apple want to put my whole name "Mark Fowler" on the menubar for fast user switching. That's the most valuable screen real estate in the world, and they want my whole name there. Dumb. DUMB. DUMB! I just set up a new account for guest users to use my system, and I wanted to change thier default browser to be Camino. I spent ten minutes looking in every single tab in System Preferences until I finally remembered that they'd moved it inside Safari. So I have to load up Safari to tell it not to load Safari, but load something else instead. Huh? What kind of logic is this? Don't get me started on the weird expose bug where it would trigger every time I switched applications. Odd. I hate the new finder. I had nice icons set up there so I could drag things onto things onto the toolbar and things like opening a shell window or loading the file in emacs or setting the directory as the default location would happen. Now the space where the toolbar was is a large fake metal section and all my icons are down the side of the page taking up stupid amounts of space. I'm sure I can replace these with Folder Actions or something, but damnit, my old solution worked. Oh, and would it really have killed Apple to compile in X11 support for emacs? No, I don't think so.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 12:25 on 21 Oct 2003 Subject: Galeon Right, I've suffered long enough. Time to hate. I hate the Galeon that's in debian unstable. No idea if this is true of all Galeons. No idea if it's just my machine or not. Though oddly, Camino stable (0.7) does exactly the same thing on my mac. Make of that what you will. This doesn't make me hate it any less. Quite simply, it doesn't work. Every so often it just won't submit forms. It won't work on IMDB. It won't work on pasty. It won't work on RT. I just get the same page back. As if I haven't submitted anything. Blech helped me work out that it's doing something odd with content lengths. (I initially blamed his code on pasty, but it's not that.) Understanding this doesn't make me hate it any less either. It's been like this for a month. And it doesn't seem to be getting any better. And annoyingly it's _just_ shy of being so bad I need to switch browsers. So I use it, forget about it, and then all of a sudden I find another site that's not working and I have to go find a computer with a working browser. I don't even think this is anyone's fault. GAH.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 13:17 on 20 Oct 2003 Subject: Fink, subversion I'd like a working SSL subversion client for my mac please. Of course, this is way too much to ask for. Especially if you're trying to install it from Fink. I hate the fact that if you want an unstable package then you have to start compiling software. Do you have any idea what kind of bizarre and crazy extra dependencies this gives me? Debian doesn't do this. Since the developers had to compile the software, and the package manager had to know what files it just installed, well, all the information is there. There's no reason on earth not to ship a binary version. It's like one extra command. Now I know that 'unstable' means that the packages are just for developers. But some packages are just never going to become stable. That's the way of things. Some of them just move too quickly. Take subversion for example. It releases new versions every few weeks or so. And the fink package maintainers (god bless their cotten socks) keep updating the packages to track. But this means, as far as I can tell, that the package will *never* make it into stable. In Debian this would be fine, I'd just pin it to unstable and take the rough with the smooth. Or grab one unstable binary version and stick with it, and tell Debian to hold that package. You can't do that with Fink. Fink insists on building from source for unstable releases. Which quite frankly takes ages. It requires a whole lot of other software to be installed. And it normally fails since the software packages have changed something in their build process slightly since the fink developers wrapped it. Oh! And the only way I can figure out to get a unstable source is to CVS update my tree. That's right, I can't actually rely on an apt-get update alone. And to make matters worse, this is using sourceforge's CVS system that has been know to be.... how do I put this? About as reliable as using marmalade to cement your house together. No, I've never got this to work. I have to manually download each extra dependancy using the web interface and place it in the right place on my hard drive. So here I am. I want a SSL subversion client. The worst think of all of this is I, like many software projects, have no idea what to do about it. I can't waltz in and tell all the people who are doing such a thankless task that they're doing it all wrong. I can't force them to change, and it'd be wrong of me to even try. But on the other hand, the way to install subversion on my mac (according to the subversion website) is to use Fink. Any ideas on how to get around this, offlist please. GAH.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 13:13 on 12 Oct 2003 Subject: Autodetecting Web Sites It's not that I mind that websites detect what browsers I'm using, and change what they show me. It's that most sites don't seem to let me override it. Who came up with this stupid idea? Look, trust me, my browser _can_ cope with the website. It's considerably less useless than your detection software. Oh, and today, the classic. Trying to download the Java runtime for a windows PC, and I'm using my mac. The webserver detects that I've using a Mac, and offers me the mac version, but _won't_ let me manually chose the windows version! Damn, I'll guess I'll have to go find a Windows PC to do this download this on. GAH.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 11:36 on 29 Sep 2003 Subject: Loathing Samba Let's try mounting our work directory (which worked on friday) bash-2.05b$ sudo mount /mnt/projects 1988: session setup failed: ERRSRV - 2242 SMB connection failed bash-2.05b$ Oh, error 2242. I know that one. It's like 2241, right, but with a slightly higher number. GAH! Mark.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 11:11 on 12 Sep 2003 Subject: Reply-To Okay, this is the 21st Centuary right? Why don't email clients have the ability to send and parse more meta-data about who the correct _people_ to reply to are? I'm not talking about the Reply-To header in my email, which as we all know can only say which email address the person should reply to if they want to send info to the entitiy that sent the original mail. I'm talking about setting a reply to for whole sets of people. Typical example. Someone sends out a list to a whole bunch of people saying "Drinks at my place, mail me if you're coming". Why can't they set some headers that mean that if someone hits reply on thier mail client then it automatically replies to them and just them? (rather than forcing the decision of reply to sender or reply to all on the person that recieves the mail) Same situation, but on getting my invite I notice that they've forgotten to put the date of the meeting. Currently I have to email everyone in the group to say "Oi, mate, what date?" so the original sender can reply with "Oh deary me, I am *so* sorry, I meant the third wednesday of the month." What would be nice is that I can reply to the original sender and set the default reply to send to everyone in the group. I mean, the other members of the group don't need to know she's forgotten the date - they only need to see the reply with the correction. You get the idea. But no, our software is dumb. And so my inbox is full of crud. GAH.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 15:33 on 10 Sep 2003 Subject: GNU utils, and lack there of I hate systems that don't have a nice handy collections of GNU utils installed. Quite frankly why anyone would want to ship inferior alternatives is completely beyond me. Look, I'm not asking for world peace, cold fusion, or a working Perl 6 compiler, I just want to get a listing of my files in colour. It's not rocket science! Yes Damnit! I want my directory listings in colour. I want to be able to get a tree of my processes by typing 'ps -faux'. I want to get a tree of my filesystem by typing, 'tree'. How hard can this be? FreeBSD! You suck! You ship with crap versions of these utilities. Apple! You suck more for copying them! Yes, I know I shouldn't be using non-portable options. Bite me. I don't care, I just want it to work. Yes know I can install GNU versions on most systems with one command. But they're not installed by default are they? I'm lazy, and yes, I maintain that this is a virtue. Besides, it's my hate and I'll rant if I want to. GAH!
From: Mark Fowler Date: 16:31 on 02 Sep 2003 Subject: Save Dialogs Which idiot came up with the idea of save dialogs? I mean, I have a finder window open here (Explorer, I can see you from here, wipe that grin off your face - you do this too.) It *is* the representation of that directory on the file system. It should be to me one and the same thing. Right, now I want to save this file from this application into that directory. Right, File -> Save As. Okay, now all I have to do is tell the program to save it into this window and all will be fine. What's that, my little application? You want me to navigate to the same place again using the world's smallest dialog? You can't be serious! I've got the window open here! Look, just save it there damnit! No, little application, I have no idea where that finder window is located on the hard drive. You see, I loaded it up from a alias. I think it's in my home directory somewhere? Does that help? This of course, is pure insanity of the worst kind. Whoever came up with the idea of reinventing a whole secondary Finder/Explorer system in order to save a file, rather than using the perfectly good one the user has already, needs a good kicking. Of course, ten years ago, before Windows 95 was all the rage, in this country we had RISC OS computers (that's Acorn to you crazy foreign people.) RISC OS was simple. It popped open a box containing a icon of the file when you wanted to save and you just dragged it to where you wanted to save it to (yes, directly onto the equivalent of the Finder/Explorer window) and it saved it there. It was that easy. Of course, it was more powerful than that. You could drag documents to other applications and it would 'save' them into the application directly. But that's just crazy talk. Next thing people will be having shells that can pipe output from one program to the next. Mark.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 11:13 on 02 Sep 2003 Subject: Mac OS X Finder and changing extensions. Okay, this thing is driving me insane. I want to change my foo.html file to foo.tt2. I want to put some template code in it. Will the finder let me do this? Nope! I click and change it's extension and it just changes it. Keeps the nice HTML icon. Hey, nice I think. Everything runs, but ten minutes later my script can't find the file. Why? Because it's been renamed to foo.tt2.html. Argh! Apparently, if the extension isn't known to the OS then the policy is to just hide the actual extension and show the name that you've changed the file to. This is nice for Ma and Pop when they're using the computer, but I'M TRYING TO GET SOME WORK DONE, OKAY? I really need the file to be called what I renamed it to. So I try renaming the file foo.txt and sure enough it prompts me, saying 'Are you sure you want to change the extension...'. So I click 'use .txt' and the file is renamed to foo.txt (which I check in an xterm, and it really is called that) Then I change it from foo.txt to foo.tt2. And it gives me foo.tt2 in the finder, but the file is now foo.tt2.txt. No closer! So I give up on this. I use 'mv foo.tt2.txt foo.tt2'. Huzzah! The file is called what it needs to be called. Except now the finder displays it as 'foo'. No extension. What is going on? How do I get this thing to stop! Not even Windows Explorer is this braindead.
From: Mark Fowler Date: 16:50 on 13 Aug 2003 Subject: Volume controls on laptops Often I'm in a place where I want my laptop to suddenly not make quiet as much noise as it's annoying someone else (for example when someone thought it might be classy to stick a midi on a webpage I've stumbled across at work - nice one guys.) So, when I realise I'm making too much noise first action is to whap the the 'turn off speaker' button. I then say I'm sorry to whoever I've disturbed. I then press the 'turn volume down button' which causes the laptop to turn the sound back on again at a slightly lower volume and me to get the Glare Of Death from everyone around me. Which idiot decided that the 'make less noise' button should turn the sound back on? Both my Apple iBook and my Thinkpad do the same thing, so it's not just one braindead manufacturer. Apple win the stupidity award though - when sound is turned off I can't even adjust the volume with the graphical menulet thingy - it's disabled until I turn the sound back on again. Gah.
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