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From: Leon Brocard Date: 19:31 on 15 Sep 2007 Subject: Network connectivity may fail I have recently been playing with a Vista laptop. Yes, I know. Anyway, Skype doesn't work on it in my sister's flat. It does work in my flat. It's taken me days to figure out why: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934430 "Network connectivity may fail when you try to use Windows Vista behind a firewall device" Well it's a good thing that nobody uses firewalls or routers then, eh? The fix is to run the following as root^Wadministrator: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal Now Microsoft is blaming my router's TCP implementation. That's strange, because Linux copes fine with it. And Mac OS X. And Windows XP. And the Wii. See, my thinking is that the TCP stack should be ultra flexible in order to make things work. It shouldn't break. It should work. It shouldn't automatically tune itself for speed and have a failure mode of broken. Tune yourself if you want but failure mode should be working but slow. IT SHOULDN'T BREAK. Grrr hate, Leon
From: Leon Brocard Date: 14:47 on 30 May 2007 Subject: Web applications suck Google Docs & Spreadsheets has a really stupid import "dialog": http://www.astray.com/static/gdas.png Guess who clicked on "Cancel" and wondered where the data was? Leon
From: Leon Brocard Date: 17:27 on 20 Feb 2007 Subject: Windows and wireless I apologise for not writing in a while. Software has been very hateful, and I should get it off my chest. I recently visited my girlfriend's parents in Germany and installed a wireless network in their house. Their house is nice and full of wooden beams and not really a faraday cage at all. I provide a wireless router thingy and buy a generic A/B/G wifi PCMCIA card from, I think, Linksys. This is where the fun begins. The first instruction on the PCMCIA card is to disable Windows wireless networking. This is slightly worrying, but as I see later on, the wireless card provider is really giving us a treat. Instead of a simple, workable wifi selector, what you instead get is a brain dead UI with flashing red status updates telling you it's failed to connect to a router in channel 1. Channel? Why would I care what channel it is failing to connect to, as long as it connects to the perfectly working wifi? Eventually I beat it into submisssion, getting it to connect to the access point whenever Windows boots up. I check this. I check this again. I check it a third time, knowing full well that I won't be there to fix it after that weekend. I return to London. The wifi works swimmingly. The wifi skype phone works great. Everyone is happy. The sun is shining. Until a month afterwards, when the stupid non-windows wifi selector decides to no longer connect to the frickin' access point which is 30cm away from it. This is annoying to debug over the phone, and we just give up. The software is all hateful. Windows is hateful. The access point is still there, but the laptop can't talk to it. Ninjas, please strike out at all network card manufacturers that provide their own custom software. HATE. Leon ps on the plus side, I'll get some nice wurst for fixing it
From: Leon Brocard Date: 12:34 on 14 Jun 2005 Subject: Spotlight Muahaha, http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/ says: "Spotlight for Mac OS X Tiger lets you blaze through all of your files and applications and see results as soon as you type the very first letter" Does it now? Only if you type at about 1 second per letter on my non-Intel Powerbook! Let's pretend I'm trying to find an application. I Command-Space and type in the application name, watch it find all sorts of crap, and then only three seconds later show the actual application I was searching for. [Sidenote: command is the key with the apple and bit of string on. Option is the one labelled "Alt" and the frying pan] Three seconds to find something which you should know is already there, because I typed it in not so long ago and I search for a few times a day? Hateful! Even "locate" is faster. Back to Quicksilver we go, Leon
From: Leon Brocard Date: 19:52 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Weather Dashboard Widget Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (wow, I need to start thinking up longer relase names) has Dashboard and widgets. It's a pain to develop these (whoa, there's another hate), but more importantly for this hate it ships with a weather widget: http://images.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/images/indexweather20050412.jpg So I type "London" into the back of it (because Apple has gone UI crazy and the back of widgets is how you configure them) and am pleasantly suprised at the massively hot weather that it'll be in rainy old London. Very surprised. For the next few days, until I figure out that it is stupid software and showing me the weather for London, West Virginia. You see, Dashboard widgets have a completely different UI to everything else. What I wanted to do was enter "London" and hit return. Even though there's no button, no form that I can see. Then it'll give me a list of cities and I can choose "London, United Kingdom". Would it be too much to ask to understand that people might mean "London, UK" a little more than they mean "London, WV"? This is supposed to be the future, dammit. Stupid software causing me hate because I have to work around it and guess what it is actually doing. Gah! Weather update: 15degC, overcast
From: Leon Brocard Date: 09:51 on 27 Apr 2005 Subject: Enlightenment Nono, it's not that I'm against transformation into greater wisdom. I'm against the Enlightenment Window Manager and all its libraries. This simple picture should explain all: http://www.enlightenment.org/data/images/upload/efl.png I hate the bad naming. I hate the billions of lines between these software libraries and all their bugs. Oh fine, I mostly hate the ones in Imlib2. It's an image library, it shouldn't have line- or polygon- drawing bugs. This is the future, dammit, we know how to fill polygons. Also this IRC exchange, although this might be more hates-people material: 09:32 <@acme> enlightenment-- # reinventing every wheel and still not releasing 09:33 <@muttley> acme: oh, they release 09:33 <@muttley> you just have to get it from CVS HATE, Leon
From: Leon Brocard Date: 14:48 on 03 Feb 2005 Subject: SourceForge's download links I think SourceForge is the only site that manages to get the simple idea of letting people download files horribly wrong. If I'm in a download section, and I click on a filename, it should let me download the file. Not a very tricky concept to grasp, you might think. Fairly simple UI design. See file. Click file. Get file. But no, if I click on a file on SourceForget, I get a page saying "You are requesting file: /foobar/quux-1.2.0.tar.gz. Please select a mirror". Errr, hello? No, I just want the file. I don't care if you have mirrors, we have computers which can reasonably guess about mirrors which might work for me. So I hate it a bit, and then I click on a mirror. What does it do? Of course I don't get the file, no, I get another page telling me what I clicked on (errr, I know). And I have to wait 5 seconds for META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="5; URL=http://... to do its thing. Of course, I almost never want to download to the computer my browser is running on, so I abort that, copy the link and use wget. Having to use SourceForge is hate enough, but two extra links for no reason. HATE. Leon ps I did mean it about the previous hate, but I'm slowly recovering
From: Leon Brocard Date: 12:04 on 22 Nov 2004 Subject: All of it This rant is pretty simple: I hate all software. I've just had it. I don't understand why people write or use software. I don't understand why companies use software or employ people to use software. I'm too frustrated. People keep on writing the same shoddy software which does the same thing as all the other wheels only still crashes and corrupts data and is 100k lines big and is hard to install and sucks up stupid amounts of memory and doesn't actually do what you want and just basically all sucks. I used to like software. It did useful things for me. However, what was really happening was that my frustration threshold was set too high because I was a fool. My threshold is now much much lower. And with any luck I won't interact with much software while I'm diving (which is mostly what I'll be doing now that I've quit my software job), other than my dive computer, which has a sucky interface but at least it tells me how deep I am and how long I should stay there. If a piece of software crashes, we should execute the entire software development and management team. This will lead to less software, and hopefully some of it might actually not crash. And don't get me started about hardware... Leon
From: Leon Brocard Date: 17:34 on 19 Jul 2004 Subject: My files! I hate software lock-in. So I have a computer. This computer has my files on. I'm happy with my files for they are on a file system where multiple programs can act upon them. That way if I change a file, say, or delete it, then it's deleted. That's it. VOOM. etc. So I try Eclipse [which is an IDE apparently], and lo and behold it "import files" somewhere else and wants to be the only program in charge of holding a copy of them somewhere. Why oh why? I mean, I know some iApps do this but this is a source file which I might want to edit / move / run in something other than Eclipse dammit. They're my files. Don't steal them! Leon
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