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From: Simon Wistow Date: 17:07 on 04 Sep 2003 Subject: browsing is a world of hurt At work we use a heavily customised version of BSD and our own packagement system. Don't ask. There are good reasons or so I've been told. During the course of my work I have to do a lot of stuff in a web browser. Some, nay, most of this is in areas where I have to be authenticated using our single-signon doodad. Just now, my browser crashed. Again. This must be the thirtieth time today. As I was firing up the various windws I had open before and typing in my username and password a squillion times it occured to me that WHY SHOULD I PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT? I've tried a variety of browsers - mozilla, firebird, galeon. Galeon used to work fine but for some reason, one day, somebody suddenly flicked the "look like ass" switch and all the fonts came out weird. Firebird and Mozilla looked fine. They all had the same font settings. Go figure. So I start using Firebird. It starts off fine, then starts crashing once a day. Then practically constantly. So I switch to Mozilla. Which is slow, And has some really annoying features (like switching immediately to a tab I've just opened). But it worked. Except now it crashes all the time as well. Muttering something about shmmap being out of space or something. Fuck knows what that's all about. I'm guessing I may have to reboot. Sometimes it mutters about illegal space access or something. And crashes. Nice. Oooh. It's just crashed again. Fan-fucking-tastic. And I'm putting up with this. I accept that this is a normal thing. Well, obviosuly not at the moment because I'm ranting to you but tomorrow I'm going to go back to accepting it. Because I have to. Because I have no other choice other than Netscape which seems stable and appears to be faster but which no fucker is supporting because "only 5% of people have it" and because it doesn't let them do their fancy fucking dotted line boxes round the meaningless, empty, hollow, self congratualtory wank that they spew all over the place. "We only design for IE, it's the market leader". NOT SO FUCKING FUNNY NOW IS IT YOU FUCKS! IE is abandoned, maybe to become part of the OS again (wasn't that decalred illegal?) but at the moment it's like some crippled half browser comapred to other ones. So mostly Netscape is unusable. So I have to keep using Sir-Crash-A-Lot. What I don't understand is - why are browsers so fucking complicated? Why do people seem incapable of writing a decent one (although I hear that under the stable monocultured homogenity of MacOS X things are fine). I mean - they're not that big a deal. It's a document viewer. With a network retrieval layer. Yet they seem to have evolved into the most fricking difficult programs to write ever. They shouldn't crash. In fact - no software should really crash. Especially not from segfaulting. Memory corrupting is so 30 years ago. ... And again. Fuck this. I'm going to go and get drunk.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 11:28 on 03 Sep 2003 Subject: gimp by name, gimp by nature It's not just the Gimp actually, I hate most imaging software but I suspect that's because I don't know how to drive it. My be-smocked designer friends seem to be able to whizz around Photoshop doing anything they want using a combination of esoteric keyboard chords that would make a Vi addict blanche and an Emacs apologist startbegging for text pad. But I digrees. I'm hear to complain about the Gimp. Spencer Gimball's program seemed to mature rapidly. I had high hopes. Ok, so the usability seems to be a bit of an issue but these things often are and all they need to do is basically copy Photoshop. Photoshop may not be the ideal interface but it's the one people are used to. Right? Right? So I'm using (umm, CHECKS) Gimp 1.3.3. I ahve a picture. I wnat to put some text on it. Actually what I want to do is have an image with a white layer on top and then use the text as a mask to stamp through the white layer to show the image underneath. But we'll get onto that. So I hit the text tool. And a floating selection of text appears the text being 'Gimp'. So I look around about how to change that. Can I find it? Can I bollocks. Yes, I can read the manual. But should I need to? I'm sure it shouldn't be this hard. I'm sure it wasn't before. Actually, reading the manual it says that "The Text Tool dialog box will open and display a list of the installed fonts. Type in the text you want in the text box in the bottom of the dialog." Ok, so text Dialog opens. Check. Is there a text entry box? No. I presume the manual is out of date. *sigh* Whilst I'm ranting why is it spewing out copious amounts of debug stuff to my terminal? Do I care? No! Surely that should only be printed out if I start with gimp --verbose or something. I honestly don't need to know that logical rect: 234 x 116 @ 0, 0 ink rect: 229 x 94 @ 0, 19 logical rect: 234 x 116 @ 0, 0 ink rect: 229 x 94 @ 0, 19 logical rect: 234 x 116 @ 0, 0 subsample_region: (500 x 374) -> (256 x 191) subsample_region: (500 x 374) -> (256 x 191) subsample_region: (500 x 374) -> (256 x 191) subsample_region: (500 x 374) -> (256 x 191) subsample_region: (500 x 374) -> (256 x 191) subsample_region: (500 x 374) -> (256 x 191) subsample_region: (500 x 374) -> (256 x 191) subsample_region: (500 x 374) -> (256 x 191) gimp_container_remove_handler: id = 2012 gimp_container_remove_handler: id = 2013 gimp_container_remove_handler: id = 2014 (gimp:77692): Gimp-GUI-CRITICAL **: file colormap-dialog.c: line 301 (gimp_colormap_dialog_set_image): assertion `GIMP_IS_COLORMAP_DIALOG (ipal)' failed gimp_display_disconnect: gimage->ref_count before unrefing: 2 Galeon seems to do this as well. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! If it's really, really important that I see it then print it out but I don't need to to know the internal ID of the container you're removing. *sigh*
From: Simon Wistow Date: 10:59 on 28 Aug 2003 Subject: software with surprising depths of superficiality I'm actually talking about a particular bit of code that I've inherited but I've seen this phenonomem elsewhere so I'll paraphrase. I'm not sure if there's a neat buzzword for this particular species - neither lasagne nor spaghetti code seems to work. Perhaps 'spirelli' code. Anyway, lurching back to the point. I've inherited this code. The task seems simple enough - indeed I have a suspicion that if I was to reimplement it from scratch it would take a week or two. Instead, on and off, I've been poking at it for nigh on six months now. Now to be honest this is a week here and a week there but still. Six months. You could rewrite Emacs in Perl in that space of time. Or Mailman :) Why is this code so bad? Well, its lineage for a start - I can practically see its evolutionary tree. Currently it is a rag tag collection of shell and Perl scripts. Some of the Perl scripts obviously used to be shell scripts to the extent that they actually SHELL OUT TO OTHER PERL SCRIPTS. Not for forking reasons, oh no. Just because, well, the original author had partaken of the crack pipe and not drunk deeply from the cup of refactoring. I have to concede that they did move some of their 'require'-d code into modules but the design of those, plus the fact that they lurk in various lower case namespaces or, and I'm not sure if this is better or worse, in the Test:: namespace, means that this is not enough to let them off the hook. Even as I write this I'm struggling to explain why this has caused me so many problems. On paper, and I know this because I had to write it down yesterday, it all seems perfectly easy. But, obviously there is, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this. My two, no wait, three major issues with this stuff are these : 1. The code is *incredibly* brittle This to the point that if I leave it for a week and then run it again I can practically guarantee that it will not work, often failing silently, and I will spend a full day poking around trying to diagnose the problem. Often there will seem to be no reason for this. 2. It's amazingly hard to follow. There are several reasons for this - my particular favourite being the lack of indenting, the terse variable names, the overuse of hash references (which are normally fine but become incredibly difficult to follow when nested 8 deep and passed between required files to functions with 10 arguments with no consitent naming scheme or ordering), the fact that there are many "actions at a distance" not least the use of Environment Variables as some sort of perverse global variable system, like the author went "well, I'm told globals are bad so if I put then in ENV then nobody will know". Truly, the list goes on and on. I haven't even mentioned the lack of comments and the long, undocumented regexes with unprintable characters in. On and the fact that various libraries are in various people's home directories. Testing is also a problem because a trial run takes 4 hours and requires a full days worth of data meaning that a fix checked in on Monday won't be checkable until after lunch Wednesday. 3. I'm not allowed to refactor. Apparently the main reason I'm not allowed to is that then it won't be 'trust worthy'. I've mentioned Unit tests but these have been roundly ignored. Also, the code has been internationalised from the original which is also being developed (don't ask why there are mutliple branches). So I can't refactor unless I want my life to be a manual patch applying hell. Hell, I can't even use Perl Tidy (I tried - waaaaaay too many spurious deltas) Actually, there's a fourth. 4. It makes me feel shit I know I'm not a bad programmer[0] (stop sniggering Richard). I've written far more compilcated programs than this. Yet it has single handedly been the most disasterous project I've ever worked on. I seem to find it impossible to give, let alone keep, a deadline. It saps my confidence and I have huge problems forcing myself to work on it which in turn makes me feel worse. Et cetera, ad nauseaum, ad infinitum. Right, that's enough moping.
From: Simon Wistow
Date: 16:08 on 14 Aug 2003
Subject: auto-highlighting dialogue boxes in X
This may just be in GTK or maybe just a particular piece of suckage
on behalf of Yahoo Messenger for *nix but
...
HIGHLIGHTING THE GROUPS BOX AUTOMATICALLY WHEN OPENING A 'NEW USER'
WINDOW IS RETARDED, MMMMKAY
Imagine this scenario - I obtain someone's user id, maybe in an email.
It matters not. Because I'm in XWindows I highlight it, move to my
messenger client, click on New User ... and now I have to go deselect
the 'group' entry field, go back, re-highlight the user id and then go
back and paste it in.
I mean, what use is highlighting that dialogue? In case I want copy the
group name back somewhere when I'm done for some reason but am
pathologically lazy and so can't do it myself?
And whilst I'm ranting about Yahoo Messenger ... people stick
interesting URLs in their status messages. Can I somehow click on those
urls or maybe even get to somewhere where I can copy them? No. Because
that would make too much sense.
From: Simon Wistow
Date: 15:57 on 14 Aug 2003
Subject: Mozilla save file dialogues
To be honest, I think this may have been fixed in the later versions of
Mozilla but here goes anyway.
So, you click to save something. Your save file dialogue comes up but
you realise that it's in the wrong directory. So you change it, either
by double clicking on another one in the pane or by typing a new path in
...
And the fr*&king filename disapears.
Because OBVIOUSLY I wanted that nuked. Merely by changing the directory
I was intending to also completely change the name as well.
GAH!
From: Simon Wistow Date: 13:58 on 12 Aug 2003 Subject: iMovie This stems from a while back when I was doing some freelance video editing for $games_magazine. I decided to use iMovie on a Titanium Powerbook. Don't ask. Now there are many reasons to hate iMovie but I worked with ti and appreciated some of the features. I let it lull me in to a false sense of security - even ignoring the fact that I had to jump through incredible hoops to convert NTSC to PAL. More fool me. Most non-linear video editing software has the concept of a shelf. You stick your movie clips on there and then construct stuff in the time line, cropping, editing and adding filters where necessary. Then you bake the movie and it works it all out for you. iMovie has a similar concept. Except it actually cuts up the movie clips and either has them in the shelf or the timeline. I can see why they did this. I don't have to like it but at least I can understand it. Except one time was moving everything off the time line and back into the shelf. I had saved the movie in advance of doing this. I thought I was ok. Except iMovie crashed. It had done this before. Lots. So I wasn't unduly worried. Except that it wiped all the assets being moved from the timeline to the shelf. So all the stuff I wanted then. I can only presume that it had some odd special move function to preserve space or something - I honestly don't know. 3 days work down the drain and a deadline looming. Laugh. I almost did. In a cackling, maniacally, verge of a nervous breakdown kind of way. My name is Simon Wistow and I hate iMovie.
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