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From: Nicholas Clark
Date: 13:04 on 29 Feb 2008
Subject: Photo Booth
Good idea: Mirroring the live webcam feed, so that one doesn't get confused
about left and right
Bad idea: Saving the photos out to disk still mirrored
Makes it somewhat less than useful as a quick way to take pictures of things.
Oh. I found an option to flip photo...
And to auto flip all new photos...
Which turned my existing photo blank, gave me the pizza of death, and now
I have a little dialogue "The application Photo Booth quit unexpectedly"
How sweet.
Nicholas Clark
PS And where's the preferences option to turn this off? Where's the preferences
setting full stop? Doesn't that break Apple's own guidelines?
From: Nicholas Clark
Date: 09:59 on 09 Feb 2008
Subject: autocrap error messages
configure.ac:6: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_PROG_LIBTOOL
If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
See the Autoconf documentation.
make: *** [all] Error 1
Yeah right. How helpful. What would it take to actually be helpful and say
"you don't seem to have libtool installed"?
Nicholas Clark
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 22:57 on 04 Feb 2008 Subject: Post Office Cash Machines There are various things that can be hateful about the software running cash machines. But tonight the cash machine at the Post Office (run by Bank of Ireland, so maybe they are to blame, and not the ants that boogie*) Firstly - why use 3 of the 8 buttons to give me the options cash/balance/something-I-forget, and then add a whole extra bloody screen of "would you like a receipt?". Just make that 4 options up front - cash with/cash without Maybe they got their programmers from McDonald's - and it was only QA that stopped it saying "would you like fries with your cash?" Secondly, and far less cluefully, why present me with a screen with various pre-selected amounts including FIFTY POUNDS, and then when I press that one immediately present me with a dialogue asking me to enter an amount in multiples of TWENTY. If the 10 pound cash reel is empty (or jammed) just don't bloody show the amounts you can't dispense. It's not like other (better) cash machine software doesn't get this right - I know I've seen machines with the amounts in their usual places, only in place of "£30" or "£50" it says "Sorry, no £10 notes available". Maybe the software was written by muppets, and it needs to have extra screens to delay the user if there are a lot of notes to count. You'd be there half the night for £200. "Tventy. Ha ha ha" "Forty. Ha ha ha" ... Nicholas Clark * The UK Post Office was advertising everything with various anthromorphised ants which graced everything in sight, particularly the advertising screen each branch's queue was aimed at. So many ants that some months ago this very Post Office* had coloured card stars hand written with "features" of the credit card they were promoting, one of which was something like "doesn't have any ants" ** The big one near Trafalgar Square
From: Nicholas Clark
Date: 11:39 on 28 Jan 2008
Subject: pdftotext
SYNOPSIS
pdftotext [options] [PDF-file [text-file]]
...
Pdftotext reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a text file, text-
file. If text-file is not specified, pdftotext converts file.pdf to
file.txt. If text-file is '-', the text is sent to stdout.
No. Dammit. You're a Unix filter command. You should ALWAYS be writing to
stdout. Anything else would be hateful and broken and counterintuitive.
Nicholas Clark
From: Nicholas Clark
Date: 11:42 on 13 Dec 2007
Subject: emerge
Right. So I have "emerge"d something that I realise doesn't do what I want.
So I want to undo that.
Easy? No.
There is no simple option to do it. By simple, I mean simple for the user
--unmerge (-C)
WARNING: This action can remove important packages! Removes all
matching packages. This does no checking of dependencies, so it
may remove packages necessary for the proper operation of your
system. Its arguments can be atoms or ebuilds. For a dependency
aware version of --unmerge, use --depclean or --prune.
nope. Having warnings that big doesn't qualify as simple.
--prune (-P)
WARNING: This action can remove important packages! Removes all
but the highest installed version of a package from your system.
This action doesn't verify the possible binary compatibility
between versions and can thus remove essential dependencies from
your system. Use --prune together with --verbose to show reverse
dependencies or with --nodeps to ignore all dependencies.
nope. Again warnings that big *and* it isn't going to remove all versions of
something I don't need
--depclean
Cleans the system by removing packages that are not associated
with explicitly merged packages. Depclean works by creating the
full dependency tree from the system list and the world file,
then comparing it to installed packages. Packages installed, but
not associated with an explicit merge are listed as candidates
for unmerging. Inexperienced users are advised to use --pretend
nope. Removes everything, not just the one thing I'm interested in.
Why is this so hard? It is a simple task, that I can't have been the first
person needing to do it. It's almost as if the Gentoo developers don't
actually use Gentoo themselves.
Nicholas Clark
From: Nicholas Clark
Date: 15:57 on 01 Aug 2007
Subject: xargs
$ echo | xargs uname
vs
$ echo | xargs uname
Linux
I'm not sure whether to hate the open group:
The utility will be executed one or more times until the end-of-file is
reached.
( http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/xargs.html )
for having lame behaviour and no flag to give me the useful 'zero or more'
Or FreeBSD for lulling me into an assumption that its xargs is standards
conformant:
STANDARDS
The xargs utility is expected to be IEEE Std 1003.2 (``POSIX.2'') compli-
ant. The -J, -o, -P and -R options are non-standard FreeBSD extensions
which may not be available on other operating systems.
FreeBSD 6.2 August 2, 2004 FreeBSD 6.2
Nicholas Clark
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 10:44 on 24 Jul 2007 Subject: yum $ sudo yum install solve-halting-problem Loading "installonlyn" plugin Setting up Install Process Setting up repositories Reading repository metadata in from local files Parsing package install arguments Nothing to do Bullshit. Nicholas Clark PS as to why - well, yum is documented as firstly trying to install the package, and if that is not recognised, treat it as a globbing pattern. I infer that if the glob matches nothing, yum treats it as a zero length list, rather than an error condition. Hateful.
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 10:23 on 26 Jun 2007 Subject: VMware Server Console Dear hateful VMware Server Console: I have drool follows pointer. So why can't you accept typing from me, unless I click in the window? Oh. and of course, once I click in the window, you grab the mouse too. So then I have to remember to press keys to unlock the mouse before I can go back to drooling in another window. Hateful thing. You're making me have to think. Oh, and the way you change the height of your lower window bound depending on whether the mouse is grabbed is hatefully irritating too. Crap. Nicholas Clark
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 19:37 on 06 Jun 2007 Subject: Apple Mai^Hl As seen on a list not a million miles from here: ----- Original, trimmed ----- User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Subject: [ANNOUNCE] [REMINDER] Social Meet at The Antelope - Tomorrow, 7th of June And remember to come grab me if it's your first time and I'll buy you a drink. Cos I'm nice like that. ----- End ----- ----- Reply with quoted text inline, trimmed ----- Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] [REMINDER] Social Meet at The Antelope - Tomorrow, 7th of June X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3) On 6 Jun 2007, at 6 Jun 17:55, Simon Wistow wrote: >And remember to come grab me if it's your first time and I'll buy >you a >drink. > >Cos I'm nice like that. ----- End ----- No, no, no, Apple Mal. Simon didn't write *that*. You've fucked it about, and are now slandering his mailer. mutt didn't hard wrap after "buy". Apple [fucking] Mal - *you* put that hard wrap in. And *then* you put in '>' marks to quote it, as if you're quoting something verbatim. WHICH YOU ARE NOT. And there's no cop out about "a format fucked compatible mailer can unfuck it" Because there's now that sodding '>' in front. *You* fucked it, and you're trying to frame mutt. Shame on you. FOAD. HAND. HTH. Nicholas Clark
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 11:40 on 01 Jun 2007 Subject: Firefox DOM Inspector When I have a line selected in the DOM inspector, and I *drag* the scrollbar, what do you think I want to do? a: Scroll? b: Initiate a drag-and-drop? And teasing me by giving me 'a' for half a second then swapping to 'b' isn't endearing you to me. Nicholas Clark
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