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From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 15:40 on 08 Sep 2003 Subject: Keyboard remapping ... or the lack thereof. The poor state of the art in keyboard remapping in most software, now that's a disgrace. In 1983, just about any terminal in the world had at least 8 programmable function keys that could store any string you wanted, and you could load them from an application or just let them use the default. I had wrappers around programs that loaded the keyboard mapping I wanted for that program (not 'what that program wanted', what *I* wanted), ran it, and set them back. In 2003, neither the Macintosh nor Windows, the supposedly friendliest operating systems you can get, give me anything like that functionality. When you can remap keys, it's through arcane registry hacks or obscure XML files, or through little applets that just do one thing, conflict with each other, and half the time expect you to pay $10.00 to get rid of a nag screen. It's the "ugly and hostile" X Window System that does the best job here. Ironic.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 18:38 on 04 Sep 2003 Subject: bastard standards http://peter.hates-software.com/2003/09/04/7af43925.html To be precise: --9XMFo0eNrVFj6oBf Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable [...] --9XMFo0eNrVFj6oBf Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQE/V3RlWaB7jFU39ScRApZvAKDIrqZiQ77jDQLSRP95uxU+OnWDzACgwDbW mOPNYEdOPtDTXnd+LjrOG84= =01u8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --9XMFo0eNrVFj6oBf-- WTF? It's not that it's PGP-singed, mind you, but that it's also encapsulated inside a bunch of MIME turds ... but not using the MIME-PGP stuff. So if you're doing MIME you get to share with the old-PGP stuff, and if you're not you still have to deal with the MIME turds... which are likely to break the old-PGP-stuff because it's encoded in quoted-unspeakable. Let's combine the worst of all worlds.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 17:50 on 04 Sep 2003 Subject: bastard software developers I hate bastard software developers. When someone sends me a patch for something they actually use, I'll either add it or I'll come up with a better way of doing things, or at worst suggest they try another approach in the patch. I can't understand why someone, after you've gone to the trouble of coming up with a patch for their software that doesn't break anything, is in the right format, doesn't duplicate functionality, and is generally a good patch... why someone will then turn around and say "I don't need that feature, so I won't consider putting it in". Not, "that will break a feature I use" or "it's too much work" or "I don't understand it" or "tell me more", but "I don't need it, so it's not going in, period". It's not just me either. I've gone hunting patches for other packages and had other people tell the same tale. I'm going to have to re-apply a patch someone did for an old version of Postfix later this week because RBL tagging apparently offended Weitse. And it's a straightforward patch, doesn't hardly change anything, and doesn't hurt anything. And he's not even one of the hard-to-get-along-with ones. We all know the poster-boy there...
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:57 on 03 Sep 2003 Subject: I hate MDI I hate MDI. But... it never occurred to me that Microsoft might screw up whatever little value MDI has... until now... > Don't get me started. Here's a nice example of Windows applications in > action: > http://www.jshift.com/services/design/horrors/taskbar_abuse.asp To me, each thing in the task bar is a *document*. I hate MDI. I hate the whole "single-instance" nature of Windows. Windows is so relentlessly 'there is a single instance of an application, a single instance of a user' that they had to invent a whole extra "session" layer that digs its filthy fingers deep into the OS to make each session act like a separate virtual machine to allow multiple user sessions. And then Jobs had to bloody well copy that on Mac OS X, when Mac OS X (being UNIX) already has a better way of dealing with multiple users. [remainder of subrant deleted to spare the Internet from my filthy language] I've seen that pseudo-MDI-ha-ha-fooled-you behaviour before. Acrobat Reader on UNIX does the same thing, without the courtesy of giving you a hint that closing the last window won't close the last window but turn it into an "empty MDI". I think that they're trying to emulate Apple's "close-isn't-exit" behaviour. But I had no idea how far Microsoft was willing to go in search of suck: Thank god I've never had to use access: "Unfortuntely, MS decided to treat each object as a document and give it its own slot in the taskbar." Jesus Harold Christ on a pogo stick. That picture has so much suckage I'm completely blown away. Whatever drugs those people were on when they created MULTIPLE taskbar slots for a single objects... Windows, Just Say No. But, anyway, MDI sucks. The only program I like using MDI in is Notes because I don't *care* about Notes: it's an obstacle, not a tool, so hiding it all off in a single window is great. Otherwise, MDI is just a way to make virtual desktops annoying so Microsoft has an excuse not to implement them. There's a useful subset to MDI: tabbed windows. That makes the "new window or new subwindow" choice mine, not the application's. http://www.jshift.com/services/design/honors/mdi_browsers.asp Oh god, I wish Opera did tabs rather than MDI.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 02:33 on 03 Sep 2003 Subject: I Hate Solomon IV We have this timecard system we use based on some kind of business process package called Solomon IV. I have never seen a program that did as bad a job of following the Windows GUI guidelines (which are, at least in principle, pretty good) as this one. Lotus Notes is better. It looks like they started by screen-scraping a 3270 program and assigned random Windows operations to virtual 3270 buttons, and never bothered changing anything once it was more or less working. First, the program is in two separate windows, One of these windows is nothing but a launcher for the other components, but all the menus are in this window. The other window has no menu, no toolbar, and if you close the first window it generally crashes. Then, none of the entry controls are standard. The first one you come across is the one for the date. It looks at first like a normal text entry. Oh no, that would be too easy. It's got the whole date hilighted in yellow, and if you enter anything in the wrong place it collapses the date to "//" and expects you to enter it again. I haven't quite figured out the rules by which it decides to advance to the next field, so I end up having to reenter the date fairly frequently. If you enter fields in the wrong order you can't go back and correct them, they get locked. You *have* to enter your employee ID (why? It knows who you are, you already logged on!) and then the date and so on. If you need to go back you have to quit and start over. The main entry area is is a fairly conventional looking grid. When you want to enter a job or department number, you don't right-click or double-click, you hit F3. If you double-click it brings up a more detailed view of the current line of the grid, and the only way to make THAT go away to edit another line is to double-click again. Sometimes. It seems there's right and wrong places to doubleclick. There's no indication of this, by the way... aborting is so normal I just aborted it until I happened to doubleclick right and had an epiphany. F3 brings up a new window, containing another grid. For some reason, this grid has scrollbars but you can't use most of the normal scrollbar operations on them: the thumb is a fixed minimum size and locked in the middle. You click above or below them, the grid scrolls, the thumb stays exactly where it is until you get to the top or bottom, when it suddenly jumps to the end. There's a normal pulldown box that shows the status of the card (in progress or complete). As soon as you select "complete" all the fields lock up, the only thing you can do is "save" or close the program and start over, losing all your changes. If you close the window it closes it. No warning. Throws away all your changes. I guess people got tired of having to say OK because aborting the session was such a normal thing to do.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 20:04 on 27 Aug 2003 Subject: Printing software All software sucks, but, damn, printing software manages to bring suck to whole new levels. Even setting aside Windows, where you have half a billion printer definition files (misnamed as "drivers") which make printers that are almost perfectly compatible from UNIX (because they all implement standard Postscript, so long as the generator doesn't try and get too agressive with corner cases) behave entirely and bizarrely differently. In UNIX, we have BSD printing with its hardcoded definitions for printers and printing technologies that haven't been used in 20 years except among retrocomputing enthusiasts who trade SMD hard drives for Varian paper rolls at swap meets. We have System V printing, which is a moderately nice generic queing system with a bunch of horrible shell-scripts duct-taped to the side to handle the actual printing bit. We have a handful of "improved" print systems that couldn't settle on a communication protocol to save their lives. We have commercial print systems from companies like Adobe that bring the Windows Horror into the UNIX world... It's a measure of the horrible state of printing that the creaky old BSD LPR/LPD system has probably the least suckage of the lot of them. By a whisker. And let's not forget Apple, which used to be all "everything's Postscript, we'll take care of it", but now according to the log files it's using CUPS and running a webserver as part of the scheme...
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 19:20 on 27 Aug 2003 Subject: More hating hates-software... This code has more bugs than the county pound in a heatwave. Latest fun... is it just me or is everone getting errors when you try and read followups?
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 15:36 on 25 Aug 2003 Subject: Emacs > Who needs shiny? OS X comes with a great newsreader. > $ emacs -nw -f gnus Emacs is pure evil, distilled and perfected. Combine in equal parts the bile of an angry developer, two thousand competing keymappings fighting it out in an arena of flaming napalm, unbounded arrogance, and an empty niche just waiting for the first program to come along. Let sit for two decades in universities and research labs, stir in mailing lists and newsgroups, add a dose of Linux, and stand back. Well back.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 11:48 on 25 Aug 2003 Subject: Stupid mailing list software I hate stupid mailing list software that blindly grabs some tagged and temporary address from a header instead of letting you pick the one you want to use. Like the software running this list.
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