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From: Earle Martin Date: 10:19 on 14 May 2004 Subject: Copy and paste, and "undo" An exercise for you to perform: 1) Type some text in your text editor. 2) Select it and copy it (NB, in the "Edit -> Copy" sense, rather than the "X11 highlighted text copy buffer" sense). 3) Choose "undo". 4) Paste. What comes out? If it's the text you just copied, that makes no sense, because you just told your editor to undo the last action - which ought to mean to the editor that you never copied it in the first place. Yet in every text editor I try this in, this isn't the case, and so undoing a copy will not un-clobber your clipboard. Hate.
From: Earle Martin Date: 16:10 on 11 May 2004 Subject: Mozilla Firebird and user-specified page colours After reading people talking about colors they were comfortable reading on their screen on London.pm today[0], I decided I wanted the default background color of web pages in my browser to be some very light shade of grey (like #f3f3f3 or some such), that's almost white but not quite, just to take the edge off a little bit. So I took at look at Mozilla Firebird's "Fonts and Colors" preferences dialog, and what do I get to choose from? A seven-by-ten grid of inoffensive colors, none of which is a light enough shade of grey. No color picker of any fucking kind at all, because I guess they didn't think that maybe their USERS might like to PICK THEIR OWN COLORS. Gah. (1 minute later) OK, I was motivated enough this time to get a Bugzilla account. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242840 [0] thread starting at http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20040510/026196.html
From: Earle Martin Date: 12:01 on 03 May 2004 Subject: Cash register software ...To be specific, cash register software that prints my complete debit card details, including my name, card number, expiry date etc. on the receipt, thus forcing me to keep it so I can securely destroy it later. And no, I'm not paranoid. Within the last couple of months I've had someone clone my card and steal almost a thousand pounds from my bank account, and some (else?) try to register a credit card in my name, so I don't consider this paranoid at all.
From: Earle Martin Date: 01:52 on 16 Apr 2004 Subject: Guest rant from ESR This may be old news to some of you, but I thought it seemed apropos. "CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System... [is] a system which despite its superficial pseudo-friendliness is so undiscoverable that it might as well have been written in ancient Sanskrit." http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
From: Earle Martin Date: 12:23 on 30 Mar 2004 Subject: Aqua Aqua. The GUI for Mac OS X. Where do I start? Words really do fail to convey precisely how I feel about Aqua, but I'll try. I hate the dialog boxes. I hate the grey stripes and translucent effects. I hate the shiny blue buttons and the sickening way they pulsate. I hate "brushed metal". I hate the "cute" effects like dialog boxes that slip down from the top of windows and then back up again, or windows doing that perspective zoomy thing. I hate the colourful pinwheel cursor. I hate the menus with their acres of pointless whitespace and I hate the new Apple font that they use. I hate the new wastebasket icon. I hate the Dock. I hate the way that windows and I especially hate the way that even menus and submenus have FUCKING DROP SHADOWS ON ALL SIDES. I hate the "traffic light" buttons and the way their functions appear when you hover the mouse over them. I need no justification for my hate. It's all fucking ugly, and I fucking hate it. The day I pay Apple for garbage like Aqua is the day I slit my own throat. Love, Earle.
From: Earle Martin Date: 13:10 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: date Every time I have to set the date on a Linux box[0] I have to read the documentation for 'date', because I can never remember what format to specify. earle@batou:~$ date --help | grep MM or: date [-u|--utc|--universal] [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]] So that's month, day, hour, minute, and *then* [optional] century, year, and *then* seconds? What kind of crackhead came up with this? Would it have been too hard to have it understand ISO 8601? FFS. [0] Before getting it set up to get the time over the network.
From: Earle Martin Date: 10:24 on 22 Dec 2003 Subject: Browser detection Did we do this one already? Who cares, let's go: I just visited powergen.co.uk. I got this message: ---- We have detected that you are running a browser not supported by this website. We currently support Microsoft Internet Explorer (Version 5.0 or above) and Netscape Navigator (Version 7.02 or above). Whilst not officially supported the site can also be used with Opera (Version 7.20 or above) and Konqueror (Version 3.1.1 or above). Your Current Browser: Netscape Your Current Version: 1.89 It is recommended that you upgrade your browser to one of the below. ---- Uh... Netscape 1.89? Let's have a look at that version string. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1 StumbleUpon/1.89 Oh look. It's taken the beginning and the end of the string - the end happening to be the version number of StumbleUpon (that SU appended without asking me, and I hate it for doing so, as an aside). What fucking shitwit wrote this browser detection script? Having a website that does that at all should be a hanging offense, even *if* it works, which half of the time it doesn't.
From: Earle Martin Date: 23:03 on 30 Oct 2003 Subject: Idiotic mail filtering An easy target: really stupid software that "filters" mail (read: blocks it for idiotic reasons). I just got a call from my dad asking me if I knew why a mail he sent to someone had been returned as blocked. I got him to forward me the error message. Here it is: -------- From: postmaster@xxxx.xxx.xx To: [ my dad ]@yahoo.com Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 11:50:06 +0160 (BST) Subject: From: [ my dad ]@yahoo.com Your Message has not been delivered because of LVSC's content policy. Details: - Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 03:50:04 -0800 (PST) Subject: Sender: [ my dad ]@yahoo.com Recipient(s): [ someone ]@lvsc.org.uk Scenario: Scenarios/Incoming/Block Profanity: The operation completed successfully. Text Analysis Results This report describes the search expressions found in this message. Scenarios/Incoming/Block Profanity found the following search expressions in '0.0.0': * The phrase 'britney spears' was found at the location(s): 4. -------- I would be amused that the software has reclassified the Pop Princess as being obscene, were it not for the fact that it's resulted in my dad's mail being rejected. The thing he didn't understand was that he didn't actually mention her in the original mail, which he sent to me too. It took one glance at it to work out why. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/ That's right - Yahoo! Mail's software inserted Britney into my dad's mail as an advert at the bottom, and imbecilic software at the other end rejected it because of that. Fucking dimwits. Yes, lvsc.org.uk, I'm looking at you!
From: Earle Martin Date: 11:04 on 14 Oct 2003 Subject: xemacs, again That fucking open dialog. If you tab-complete the path to the thing you're trying to open, and then decide that you do actually want to use the file listing doodad and double-click a directory listed in it, it appends the name of the directory you click to the path you've tab-completed. So you can be in ~/foo and tab-complete to ~/foo/bar, but then open bar by clicking it and you get ~/foo/bar/bar. Gah! Also, the default configuration that comes in the Debian package for xemacs21 is broken. Whenever I open an HTML document with it it switches to HTML-mode; unfortunately in HTML-mode every time I hit "tab" to indent a line it hijacks one of my panes to tell me this: (1) (error/warning) Error in 'post-command-hook' (setting hook to nil): (wrong-type-argument arrayp nil) What the hell does that mean? I shouldn't have to read a manual about LISP to fix the fucking thing BEFORE I CAN EVEN USE IT. Someone gave me a workaround, which is M-x customize-font RET font-lock-keyword-face RET [pick a font, save it] but that's just not good enough. Did the people who put this package together not test it? Oh. Look. This problem had a fix diagnosed for it TWO YEARS AGO! http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs-beta/200102/msg00467.html So the problem is with "PSGML", whatever that is. I don't care. I only care that there's a problem that hasn't been fixed and it's impeding my efficiency. For fuck's sake.
From: Earle Martin Date: 23:46 on 27 Sep 2003 Subject: BitchX A paste of something that just happened says all: 23:16 -!- UnderMine [~UnderMine@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xxxxxxx.xxx.xx.xx] has quit [Quit: User pushed the X - because it's Xtra, baby] 23:17 <@hex> isn't there a --not-retard flag you can give to BX to turn off those stupid fucking messages? 23:19 <@hex> That and another couple of dozen stupid /quit messages 23:20 <@hex> they're almost funny the first time, but not then the next $inf times when more than one person is producing them 23:21 * DrHyde considers BitchX authors to be only a small step up from those anti-virus scum 23:23 <@Kake> You could just configure it. 23:23 <@Kake> But I keep saying this, and nobody ever does. This post has been brought to you by the low-effort hate department.
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