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From: Simon Wistow Date: 12:18 on 09 Feb 2004 Subject: constantly refreshing web pages TBH I'm not sure if it's a problem with my old nemesis - the browsers or whether it's lame ass brain dead web monkeys but I hate constantly refreshing web pages. Not like "once every five minutes" but *constantly*. I suspect it's some crap Javascript wank doing something *incredibly* important like, say, scrolling "Welcome to $foo" along the status bar or some such shit but basically it means that my window flickers. All the time. And makes it impossible to say, select anything. Or click on form elements. Which kind of defeats the point fo travel sites which is wear, bizarrely I tend to find such code (recently Eurostar and KLM). On the theme of Travel Sites - give me a button that says "All London airports". Most of the time I couldn't a badger's nutsack which one I fly from you hateful fucks.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 10:28 on 03 Feb 2004 Subject: XIII A first, I think, on hates software - a games hate. To be honest I quite like the game - a conspiracy based FPS based on a Belgian comic with stylish cel shading done with much more flair than usual - lots of nice comic book touches. In general it's fun to play - nothing world shattering but not terrible by any strecth of the imagination. However it does have some HATEFUL things.And it is these that I shall expand on. For a start, you can't skip the cut scenes. This in and of itself is enough to condemn the makers to enternal hell being used as the jizz bucket of a thousand hairy backed pederasts. Especially since they're long. And voiced by David 'Monotone' Duchovny. The problem is compounded by the god awful save system. You can save but it only saves you back at the last checpoint. And it doesn't 'remember' when you finished a level - you have to tell it to. And the checkpoints are at stupid places like just before a cut scene so that everytime you die you have to go back and watch it again. And feel the urge to hurt yourself rising. And when you do die the first highlighted button int the menu is .... controls. Not retry. Controls. Like the designers thought that your first thought on getting slotted by a wandering SPAD soldier is to invert the look control or something. In fact who knows what the designers were thinking - they commit many of the cardinal sins of game design. You're encouraged to knock out people stealthily with chairs ... but only some chairs can be picked up. And if you pick up a chair and then realise you actually need to do something else first then you have to break the chair. Which means you may be left without a chair to do your stealthy dirty work with. Sometimes, to get further in a game, you have to activate a certain trigger. Which is fine if it just works but lousy if it doesn't. One bit of the game you have to listen at the door whilst a receptionists talks to a doctor. That, for some reason, triggers a security guard going into another, previously locked room which lets you kill him and then get a swipe card to get into another part. Why? fuck only knows. Oh, and if you die, you have to do it again - wait by the door listening to the conversation whilst he wends his way back to that room again. GAHHHH! Hate! Simon
From: Simon Wistow Date: 16:50 on 30 Jan 2004 Subject: libraries Without meanign to start any holy wars, I think I've been spoiled by CPAN. In general documentation for each module on thre follows the format NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION METHODS BUGS AUTHOR COPYRIGHT SEE ALSO In SYNOPSIS you get a shor texample of how to use the API of the module. This generally means that you can egta absic version up and working very quickly. Anything more complicated may involve rummaging around in the METHODS section but at least they're there. Java libraries, inspired by Sun's own Class library, are also generally like this. However C libraries - now they're a whole different kettle of fish. Currently I'm doing a lot of image processign stuff and attempting to use various libs to accomplish things. Take FFMpeg which has documentation online. If you're like me then what what you'll mostly be wanting to do is open up a quicktime for writing, write some frames and close it out. There fore what you need to know is how to set up the movie, how to add frames (and what format the images added should be in when you add them) and then what you need to clean up after. So let's go to http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC30 Do we find that? No. We get a phrase saying "# libavformat is the library containing the file formats handling (mux and demux code for several formats). See `ffplay.c' to use it in a player. See `output_example.c' to use it to generate audio or video streams." So let's look at output_example.c does *it* have that. Well yes. Sort of. It's creates something. But it never exaplisn why it's doing anywying, it just has comments saying "allocate the temp picture frame" which is perfactly fucking clear from the code which is tmp_picture = alloc_picture(PIX_FMT_YUV420P, c->width, c->height); TBH, it's not all bad - stuff like Imlib2 has good docs, very much in the Perl style. http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/enlightenment/e17/libs/imlib2/doc/index.html?rev=1.14&view=html But I hates the rest.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 14:21 on 13 Jan 2004 Subject: automake I cannot actually believe that somebody thought that automake and all its brethren were the best solution to the problem of installing things in C. I mean, it's not like it removes all external dependencies since you have to have the right version of automake installed (and slight differences in version can make a big difference), it's not easy to grok let alone write and requires lots of tweakignt o get it to run right on different platforms. I started this week actually looking forward to coming into work - I had stuff I really wanted to do. By this morning I was doing subconcious work avoidance. The reason - M4 macros. And a bit of XS but mostly M4 macros. From the dire documentation, crap syntax and just general square peg round hole nature of the whole thing automake is truly hateable software.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 17:33 on 15 Dec 2003 Subject: XPlayCd Just a little hate but ... I'm playing a CD in XPlayCd, it gets to the end, I dig out the app again and hit play ... and it plays the last track again rather than playing from the start. Wah? This is especially irritating when you have a data track because it starts to play that and then stops when it realises it can't. Grrr.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 11:23 on 06 Nov 2003 Subject: overloaded key combos This is partly due to the parlous state of *nix standardisation but Ihave one particiular hate which people are free to extrapolate. At $new work we standardise on WindowMaker as a window manager and, in general, it's ok. Like Enlightenemnt, only not as good. So I've attempted to customise bits of it to be more like Englightenment ncluding recycling muscle memory by remapping the "Move desktop (left|right)" keys to Alt+Shift+(L|R) Which is fine and works dandy. Except we also standardise on Nedit as an editor (or atleast, of the editors available I prefer that to Vi or Emacs). Switching onto a desktop containing an Nedit window that was previously in focus will, naturally, switch to that window. And Alt+Shift+(L|R) is interpreted as being the same as Shift+(L|R) which highlights the next character. Now the author of Nedit will claim it's the auhtor of WM's fault and vice versa but it's just plain fricking annoying that I'm shuttling between desktops and suddenly I'm hauled up short like rhino made of lint in a toffee gravel trap. Annoying is to weak a word actually. In fact, you could say I hate it.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 11:51 on 29 Sep 2003 Subject: media players I tried to limit this to maybe one media player, or maybe just one OS or something but no, I realised I hate them all. Streaming, static - it doesn't matter ... I'm an equal oppurtunities hater. I hate the fact that they all try and grab all the file types. I hate the fact that half the time a given file is an "unrecognised format", I hate Real Player for, well, lots of stuff actually but because it trys to open a file and then goes to "download software from Real.com" and then fails to do anything. I hate the fact that I can't drag a file into Quicktime. Windows seemed to be going somewhere with it's installed codecs thing - theoretically that should mean that, no matter what player I loaded up, it should all 'just work' [tm]. Does it? Does it bollocks. I hate mplayer - it spews loads of debug stuff out to STDOUT. In fact I don't know which is more irritating - the fact that it does that or the fact that so many enconders seem to produce junk. I hate the fact that some clips I discover it hangs on unless I forceably skip past the problem spot. I hate Xine for being so fricking difficult to compile and install. Media players are a simple concept. Files comes in, choose codec based on magic, play file through codec. IT'S REALLY NOT THAT DIFFICULT. *sigh*
From: Simon Wistow Date: 09:59 on 09 Sep 2003 Subject: Yahoo! Messenger On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 11:31:08PM +0100, Mark Fowler said: > To have smileys on is the default behaviour on ymessenger, or at least it > was a couple of months ago when I was using it on linux. Now the annoying > thing is that this software used to corrupt itself so often (it would get > it into it's head that you wanted a font so small it was only two pixels > high) that the only way to cope is to delete the ~/.ymessenger directory > almost every time you used it. I hate Yahoo! Messenger more than you do. Because I'm forced to use it. Y! Messenger was, I'm led to belive, developed internally, to cope with the fact that at any given point a member of the team I'm working with may, in fact, be nowhere near me. Where nowhere ranges from a few hundred meters horizontally and 50 vertically to, well, at least 10 time zones, if not more. Everyone uses here. Yet, strangely, it's practically not supported. Something broken? File a bug and wait or patch it yourself. We have a couple of skunk work internal versions - I'm running 0.99.22 which doesn't crash quite as much. Although conference messages still bring it to a resounding crash. I hate many little things about it. For a start I hate the fact that it exists because I hate talking on it. I hate the fact that, on Unix, I use multiple desktops and this makes using messenger difficult. Either I don't have it pop up when someone messages me or I miss the fact that they've done it. But if I do have a pop up, and two people are messaging me when I'm also working then they can inadvertently get a stream of bitter invective that wasn't meant for them or a paste full of code. And if a messenger is on one desktop then it will only pop up there again. Unless I close the window. Which means I lose all the history (unlike the latest Windows versions apparently) and also means that occasionally I close *just* as someone messages me. So I have to ask them again. Grrr. Speaking of copy and pasting. Well, that just doesn't work. Although occasionally it does. URLs are highlighted but to activate them I have to double click on them. Which then opens two browser windows. And it's easy to forget that you've set yyour status to away. And when people put URLs in *their* status messages ... well, I'm buggered because I can't copy it (not a selectable text area plus, well, copying doesn't work) and I can't click on it. And adding someone someone else in ... the 'group to add them to' part of the form is default highlighted. So if I've copied an ID from an email or somethingthen I have to deselect it, go back to the original desktop, copy it again and go back to messenger. *sigh*
From: Simon Wistow Date: 16:40 on 08 Sep 2003 Subject: mac schmack This will be another unfocused hate. More like a seething cloud of hate rather than a rock hard fireball. I had a long weekend in which I shouted a fair bit at my laptop. This is the result. The general recipient of this hate is my Mac. I'm goign to steer clear of the hardware in general but they're so intertwined, the hardware and the OS and all the software, that some bitterness may leak over. Now most hates that I've seen are about Mac OS X. And if there was a sister list, hates-hardware, then I imagine that there would be plenty of anti-iBook hates. Actually, know I don't. The number of people I know who've had horrific problems with their iBooks yet remain staunchly Apple apologist, is incredible. My Vaio didn't have this many problems and I treated that like shit. But I hate my Vaio too. But this is not hates-hardware. I digress. So, where were we? Oh yes. My Mac. I aquired it when a company I was working for went bust. It's an old G3 powerbook. A Lombard I think. It's fairly slow. It has problems running QT movies and won't run MacOS X. Still, I quite liked it. It has all the right ports and stuff. It looks nice. But it runs MacOS 9. Now, the interface to MacOS 9 is nice and I have to admit that I do like that fact that, in general, stuff just works. But I loathe the fact that it's not pre-emptively multitasking. And has no memory protection. I know that Apple did have a project to try and fix this (Copland?), and eventually went with the beast known as Mac OS X, but still. My fucking ST had pre-emptive multitasking back in 1990 or so. I've heard people say that they don't notice. Those people are either lying, stupid or kidding themselves. Networking seems to be particularly braindead. True the point and drool interface works aslong as it's working but when it doesn't fixing things seems to be a pray and reboot situation. And what's with not having a button to refresh or apply the current settings. It means that if I want to update my DHCP or experient with settings then I have to go into network setting, select another network interface, hit ok (which closes the dialogue) then go into the network setting again and turn it back to the interface that I want. Gah. And if I close the lid then it drops all my network connections. Instantaneously. Grrr. And takes a fricking age to wake up again when I open it again. If I then fire up Internet Explorer and try and go to a page then ineveitably my machine locks up. Hard. Dead. If I wait a bit before I do anything, or fire up another app (such as MacSSH) before I fire up IE then it seems to work. But if I forget then there's nothing I can do but reboot. Because there's no 'kill process'. Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh. And how do I reboot? Ctrl-Alt-Delete? Nah. Hit the pwoer button. Umm, no. Apple+power button. Sometimes. But generally I just have to pop the battery and pull out the power cord. Nice. Of course half the time the Mac then does the blinking question mark thing until I leave it for half an hour and try again. KILL! KILL! KILL! So I finally reboot. And I'm using IE and most stuff looks ok in it and network lookups aren't *too* slow as long as I'm not trying to do anything else at the same time of course. And suddenly I get a "Cannot load Flash plugin. Error 2 of 5. Out of Memory". On every page. Until I quit IE and load the whole thing again. RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE! So finally I manage to download say, a QT trailer. And I try and run it. And it runs like a pig. So I download the smaller, postage stamp sized one and drag that onto Quicktime. Which obediently does nothing. I try again. Nada. Zip. I have to open up the file browser and navigate to it. *Sigh*
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