Apparently there is a Notepad conspiracy where it hides certain text from the user. The problem is that it isn’t hiding it, it’s just guessing the character set incorrectly. Raymond explains things a lot more eloquently than I. It seems to be a similar problem in the gnome notepad (gedit) utility – when it can’t guess the character set it puts up a D’oh, I can’t interpret this file message.
someone(/thing) doesn’t understand menus
The msnbc website’s entertainment drop down is utterly insane… It can be disabled but on my screen those little teeny tiny targets are difficult. Fitts’ law anyone?
gerrymanderers are us…
It turns out that I’m registered to vote. Apparently the road I live on is split in two. Just a little on the scary side.
You have just received an html email…
Another stupid email. Just some text and a ‘click here’ link that simply directs you through doubleclick/edgesuite. Put some effing useful information in the email instead of trying to data mine at every possible occasion. And no, the message says you have received an html email, but the content… it’s all plain text.
Bleugh, for a message that claimed to be a piece of customer service information, the fact that it directs to a data mining site angries up the blood.
And another thing…
It’s the world’s most advanced operating system? I mean really, that’s an overstatement. Hello! that’s nothing more than a brag as there’s nothing to back up the statement. Advanced for what? File systems? zfs! observability? dtrace! pretties on the screen? XGL! The ability to perform more than one name service lookup at a time? [ok, that’s a cheap shot, I’m sure they fixed this]
Pants, complete pants I tell you!
I’m sorry, I just prefer a mouse with more than one button
It reeks of some form of elitism, and lets be honest using X for so long made a three button mouse mandatory, what with the middle button paste thing, which I love and try to recreate on the PC when using cygwin/X applications. Every time I look at a mac, I get this chill just thinking about the higher price tag along with the crippled bar of a mouse button. It’s effing stupid. We still have double click for the primary select, and if you want a context menu you need to use one of the extended keys (honestly, I can’t remember which) to get it to pop up. It’s a really fricking broken model when you have only one button.
Send in the pie menus, my friends, send in the pie menus.
bulls don’t have udders
I saw a trailer for some stupid animated farm movie. A male cow is a bull. Bulls do not have udders. All the cattle on the trailer – both male and female alike had udders. Could this be the first transexual animal movie for kids?
So I decided to play with c++ builder
Probably one of the handiest features of C++ is the ability to create an object on the stack, and have it destroyed once the class has gone out of scope. This is because of the design of the language.
When you create an object using the syntax ‘ObjectT foo’ the object is instantly initialized, and you refer to each of the items in the object as foo.<whatever>. When the function returns the ObjectT’s destructor is called to clean up the object. This happens for every class.
Borland have seen it fit to make their compiler barf when you use one of the Visual Class Library(VCL) classes to create an object. Personally, I find the fact that you have to then wrap the code in a __try__ __finally__ block to be a waste of my time. After all there is no rational reason for preventing me from using the variable on the stack, as stack memory is just as good as heap memory (I’m old skool me!).
All you’re going to have on the stack is a pointer to a VTBL and the data concerned with the object; nothing more. If you have to cast it to a lesser object, then cast it to a lesser object. If you are using this object in another object (for example adding it to a collection), then use the proper syntax (in this case the ObjectT *foo = new ObjectT()). As a programmer you should know these things.
I would argue that the compiler should not protect us from such annoyances, but the reality is that to make better code we need more assertive nannies. All my C code is compiled with -Wall -Werror, which catches a lot of stupid mistakes, but doesn’t catch a lot of normal problems. Sometimes I think I would be better in a garbage collected, reference managed, array overrun protected world… but where would be the fun in that? I like my assembly language, I’m more careful as I know every instruction counts. That and the fact that a review of assembly code takes significantly longer than the same review of C code makes me pray that the developers are paying more attention.
Would you people please write proper applications
I’m getting annoyed with the number of programs that I have to exclude from DEP. Practically all of the palm simulators fall into this category along with all the securom games I’ve used.
Grrrr.
don’t pass your shortcuts through the installer
God, this one really annoys me. I’ve installed an application and it puts the shortcuts into the root of all programs. I move it where I want it to be (There was no choice on install). Then I run said program. Up pops the windows installer and recreates the shortcuts in the root of the start menu.
You ignorant stupid rat b*****d wh***son of a b****h. What; do you think you own my computer? Away with you and your crappy force fix of my choices as a customer. This complaint brought to you by shite software and a harkening back to why is there no programmatic access to the Start menu pin list. Thank you for small mercies.