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From: Peter da Silva Date: 04:22 on 13 Jun 2006 Subject: Windows Update This is an old dry hate, with just a hint of bitters, but by god do not enjoy spending an evening running Windows Update when Windows failed to detect the second core in my new Athlon X2 and the ONLY way to get it to really truly retry is to reinstall from scratch... It was easier to install Jaguar on my unsupported dual-CPU Mac clone using XPostFacto. And I'm really not enthused by Mac OS X's install procedure either. But Windows sets such a low bar...
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 16:22 on 25 Jan 2006 Subject: Would you like to save... "You just opened a new document, you haven't made any changes, you closed the window, DO YOU WANT TO SAVE YOUR CHANGES?" What the hell? Why would any application anywhere behave this way? I don't know, and for Office i can imagine some stupid macro doing something that looks like a change, but I've gotten this from Lotus Notes, SAP, Apple Mail, on and on and on... whiskey tango foxtrot?
From: Peter da Silva Date: 00:51 on 06 Nov 2005 Subject: iTunes and Podcasts Hmmm... this podcast mostly sucks, but this one's good. Lemme save that one for later listening, and delete the podcast because it's cluttering up iTunes. (PS: Mail.app... why don't you think "podcast" is a word?) Drag and drop to finder. No dice. OK, "Show File", copy, paste". Delete podcast. Bring the file back. Podcast is back! Change the "album" name, change the genre from "Podcast", copy out, delete podcast, file's gone, quit iTunes... Bring the file back. Podcast is back! Except now it's named "George Bush - Humor". Grovel through the ID3 tags. Change the file name. Nothing helps. Apple's labelled this file as a podcast and nothing will change that.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 19:59 on 17 Oct 2005 Subject: Re: Significant whitespace (was Re: Blogging sucks) > It was unclear whether you were calling the inclusion of extra > characters idiotic, or the invention of incompatible charsets in > order to express them. Both. > The former is, but before Unicode, inventing new 8-bit charsets > that were ASCII + a bunch of whatever characters were considered > necessary was something everyone did. No, it wasn't something everyone did. It was something idiots did. The right thing to do is to use © or \(co or equivalent internally and in transmission and storage formats, and deal with the mechanism for displaying either of those as a copyright symbol to the presentation level. So the file contains \''quoted text\" or &lquo;quoted text&rquo; and the user sees his curly quotes if his display and software is capable of presenting it that way. And (as I already noted) it can do the same thing with straight quotes when it believes it's appropriate. Yes, it may be mistaken. But. Since it's already doing it when it isn't appropriate and burning those mistakes in the file itself, that's definitely a lesser evil.
From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Date: 20:19 on 07 Aug 2005
Subject: Applescript
How the hell do I add a file to iTunes using Applescript.
I'm obviously holding my face wrong.
Every example and the documentation says I do something like this:
tell application "Finder"
set theSelection to selection
end tell
tell application "iTunes"
set thePlaylist to make new user playlist
repeat with theFile in theSelection
set theTrack to add theFile to thePlaylist
end repeat
my ps_play_next_ref(thePlaylist)
delete thePlaylist
end tell
And it comes back with
Can't make <<class cUsP>> id 42775 of <<class cSrc>> id 56 of
application "iTunes" into the expected type.
Or sometimes, it tells me Finder doesn't know how to add an alias to (the
same kind of spew).
Well, DUH, I didn't say "tell application "Finder"".
And, by the way, things like "item 1 of blah" are something Grace
Hopper would have come up with. Or maybe it's Larry Wall's idea of
what COBOL should be like. I haven't used COBOL in years, and I
still remember how tired I got of "perform monkey-balls through
smelly-swamp".
How about an Objective C scripting language, Apple? Something like:
tell (application "Finder") {
theSelection := [selection];
}
tell (application "iTunes") {
thePlaylist := [Playlist new];
while (theFile := [theSelection next]) {
theTrack := [thePlaylist add: theFile];
}
ps_play_next_ref thePlaylist;
thePlaylist delete;
}
Then I wouldn't have to fucking guess how to convince it to use
the right version of "add". God damn, get the basic syntax right,
or at least internally consistent, and worry about frills later.
All I want is that when I'm playing a song, I can cue a newly
downloaded file in iTunes without it changing the playlist to the
library and forgetting that I'm in Party Shuffle, or doing it all
manually.
From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Date: 21:34 on 25 Apr 2005
Subject: HPUX tcp/ip utilities
% route add net 192.168.127.0 192.168.81.1
add net 192.168.127.0: gateway 192.168.81.1: Network is unreachable
% ifconfig lan5
lan5: flags=843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>
inet 192.168.81.12 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.81.255
% ping 192.168.81.1
ping 192.168.81.1
PING 192.168.81.1: 64 byte packets
64 bytes from 192.168.81.1: icmp_seq=0. time=0. ms
...
% # netstat -rn
Routing tables
Destination Gateway Flags Refs Interface Pmtu
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 UH 0 lo0 4136
...
192.168.126.0 192.168.81.1 UG 0 lan5 0
% route add net 192.168.127.0 192.168.81.1
add net 192.168.127.0: gateway 192.168.81.1: Network is unreachable
% ...
To make a long story short, HPUX "route" command things this is still 1987
and goes
"Hmmm, no metric, let's pull 0 out of my ass"
"Hmmm, what's the gateway? How many hops away is that?"
"Hey, he said metric 0, and that's one hop!"
"This mother needs a confusing error message, telling me that 1 hop gateway
is 0 hops away like that"
I just LOVE dealing with a computer that's using early-80's versions of
network utilities. Makes me nostalgic for Xenix 286 it does. NOT.
Hey, HP, it's 2005, you haven't updated this software in 20 years, isn't it
about effing time you did? Wouldn't it have been a REALLY GOOD IDEA to take
advantage of the fact that Tru64 is based on 4.3-Reno (AKA 4.4 beta) instead
of 4.2 or 4.1D or whatever prehistoric discarded backup tape you used to spawn
HPUX from, and use it instead of this ... AUGH
HATE
From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Date: 12:41 on 20 Aug 2004
Subject: GCC
Condemned from their own mouths:
5.7 Conditionals with Omitted Operands
The middle operand in a conditional expression may be omitted.
Then if the first operand is nonzero, its value is the value of
the conditional expression.
Therefore, the expression
x ? : y
has the value of x if that is nonzero; otherwise, the value of y.
This example is perfectly equivalent to
x ? x : y
In this simple case, the ability to omit the middle operand is not
especially useful. When it becomes useful is when the first operand
does, or may (if it is a macro argument), contain a side effect.
Then repeating the operand in the middle would perform the side
effect twice. Omitting the middle operand uses the value already
computed without the undesirable effects of recomputing it.
Yes, it's useful. It is NOT, however, C. This kind of thing should require
compilation with "--butthead-extensions" and several embarassing "#pragma"
lines to make sure that it's NEVER used by anyone who isn't completely
aware they're being a wanker.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 13:29 on 10 Jun 2004 Subject: Optimizing System Performance Optimizing System Performance. Optimization 25% completed. Time Remaining: less than a minute. LIKE HELL You know, they already have code in there that goes "install X% complete, taken Y minutes so far, must be (100-X)/Y*100 minutes remaining". If they just reset X and Y when they hit "Optimizing System Performance" so it didn't sit there on "less than a minute" for ten minutes...
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 22:34 on 29 Apr 2004 Subject: mariaaaaaaachi http://tom+hate.hates-software.com/2004/04/21/1bc70490.html ^--- since when has this been a legal character in a domain name? Hey, mariaaaaaaaaachi! If you're going to grab the local part from email addresses and shove them willy-nilly into URLs, clean them up first! You can put a lot more stuff on the left hand of an @ sign than you're allowed to stick on the right side, or in the hostname part of an URL.
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