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From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 00:04 on 05 Jan 2004 Subject: Panther. Again. AUGH. They replaced the perfectly good "nvi" in Jaguar with one of those inadequate and incomplete clones (to be precise, "vim"). This is intolerable. (no, I'm not going to try and quantify exactly why vim sucks, suffice it to say that I've been using "vi" longer than the Macintosh has existed, and vim breaks my finger macros)
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 00:23 on 09 Oct 2003 Subject: Hard coded $FOO I hate: hardcoded key bindings, hardcoded file names, fixed array sizes, hardcoded menus, hardcoded program names, hardcoded mail headers, hardcoded anything. If I want to make BOTH Backspace and Delete do "erase char", why the hell can't I? 4.1BSD had "Alternate erase" in 1980, for god's sake. And I still have to alternately type "stty erase ^H" and "stty erase ^?" when I find some keyboard that's got one or the other mapping (DEC-I-mean-Compaq-I-mean- HP, usually) because you can't "stty erase ^H erase ^?". And, no, I don't care if GNU Readline ksh tcsh foosh can do that for me, because not every program can, damnit. This belongs in termio. This should be a bloody matrix that lets me map all functions to all characters... Same with the keyboard. In UNIX at least I can map anything to anything easily. In NT it involves hacking the registry and calculating bitmaps by hand. In MacOS you have to create a custom keyboard definitions file and convert it to a resource fork and hide it deep in the system... And speaking of MacOS, it's got a great preferences system... and even if you don't want to create a prefs pane for every damn variable in your program, at least wrap it in something like this: NSString textFont = [ [NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] stringForKey:@"textFont" ]; if(!textFont) textFont = @"LucidaGrande"; And even if you never create an "advanced prefs", someone else will strings your app and write it up on ResExcellence or something and you'll get free advertising. In Windows, I'm sure you can do the same thing with registry keys. In UNIX, if you've got any kind of config file just keep adding options to it. God knows why people can't do this. It should be a reflex.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 15:25 on 05 Oct 2003 Subject: Mac Paint Can you hate software that doesn't exist? OK, I want to edit a bitmap to go in a TIFF file in a Resource folder, so I go digging through Mac OS X to find a bitmap editor. Near as I can tell, there isn't one. Not in the system, or the developer kit, and there doesn't appear to be a functional one (freeware, shareware, or commercial) for less than a couple of hundred bucks. Well, there's Gimp. Which seems a bit of overkill. They expect all developers to fork out $200+ for a copy of a graphic arts tool so they can build icons? Bah, I think I'll convert it to an ASCII XBM and edit it in "vi".
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 18:19 on 29 Sep 2003 Subject: Software that thinks "_" is legal in DNS. While trying to retrieve the URL: http://phil_g.hates-software.com/2003/09/29/746dcaa6.html The following error was encountered: * Invalid URL Some aspect of the requested URL is incorrect. Possible problems: * Missing or incorrect access protocol (should be `http://'' or similar) * Missing hostname * Illegal double-escape in the URL-Path * Illegal character in hostname; underscores are not allowed Your cache administrator is webmaster@$VBC
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 20:37 on 23 Sep 2003 Subject: Acrobat Apart from the general stupidity of trying to take a layout language designed for a fixed-sized-fixed-aspect-ratio medium and force it to play nice on the screen (I'm talking about PDF here, in case anyone hasn't yet encountered the myriad stupidities involved with PDF)... Acrobat REALLY LIKES MDI, to the point where it implements MDI on UNIX. I hate it for liking MDI. I hate it for implementing it badly. Acrobat is schizophrenic in the extreme about fonts. I've had it barf and show Windows-fnords (you know,when Microsoft's Magic Quotes show up as A-acute and the like) on *Windows*. Presumably it's trying to convert everything to Adobe's proprietary Postscript font mapping internally. Or maybe it's just stupid. But beyond all that, Acrobot is a bloody stalker. "Oh" it says, "you're running something that looks like one of the browsers I'm fixated on. I will install myself as a Plugin. I don't care that you have disabled plugins and removed x-pdf and all its relatives from the helpers list, I AM ACROBAT and I'm more important than your petty preferences. You meant to download that? Tough, I'm going to take over... and I'm going to run so bloody slowly OpenSSL will hit 1.0 before I'm finished showing you that first page. "Oh, yeh, and I'm going to lobotomise your browser so you can't even do anything to fix that while I sit there and try and fetch the file through a really slow proxy. "Yeh, look at this, I totall 0WNZ0R your browser, buddy. I'm so L33T!" AUGH.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 14:50 on 18 Sep 2003 Subject: Javascript abuse iCab: "GET / HTTP/1.1 ..." Router: "Go away you smelly peon, you don't support Javascript." iCab: (puts on IE5 Mask) "GET / HTTP/1.1 ..." Router: "Ah, your majesty, what can I do for you?" Javascript is actually a nice little scripting language, on its own merits. But, dang, 90% of the time it's used it's not needed, and servers that assume you can't do Javascript because they don't recognise you. Rotten smelly bastids. All of them.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 13:04 on 16 Sep 2003 Subject: Mailman It might actually be a pretty nice bit of software, in the right hands. But every month on "Mailman Day" I hate it more and more.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 15:36 on 11 Sep 2003 Subject: Perl > Yup. Of course, this is because those "two lines" use several thousand lines > of Perl modules, but that's by the by. I guess that it's on topic for the list to mention that I hate Perl. I hate the absurd syntax. Unless this do that if not something else. And the precedence rules make C's already tottery tower look simple. I hate the absurd claims that the absurd syntax is a good thing. There's more than one way to do it, but if you don't think like Larry Wall none of those ways match the way you're looking for. I hate the absurd quoting rules. Give me a reflective language and I can create the quoting rules I need, I don't need ten different variants on qw(er/ty/). Not to mention that a reflective language does a MUCH better job of giving you "more than one way to do it". I hate the absurd dependency maze I end up in every time I delve into CPAN, which usually ends up with my having to upgrade CPAN before I can build anything. I hate the way it encourages idiots who shouldn't be allowed within ten meters of anything sharper than Cobol to write things like Majordodo. And to release things in public I'd be embarassed to admit I'd written. Not that I'm suggesting that present company includes any such idiots, but damn, I hate Perl. And I'll take a couple of hundred lines of rules, much as I'd prefer to trim them down to a couple (and now I know there's an RFC to follow I don't hate this list software nearly as much as I did), over several thousand lines of such line noise.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 16:05 on 10 Sep 2003 Subject: Mailing list software I hate spamware! Not because I use it, but because other people do, and it put random subjects like "Yahoo! Messenger" in the subject line and software like Mariaaaaaaaaaachi or whatever this thing is using can't be configured to present it as "[HATE] Yahoo! Messenger" so I can tell that this one is a worthwhile message and not spam. So I can't automatically reply and get my comment about "why didn't the scurvy beggars just use Zephyr" included in the Yahoo! Messenger thread.
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