Older blog entries for auspex (starting at number 32)

The Sick F**ks!

I thought it was another stupid spamscam - the endless incoming drivel for the "Iraqi Most Wanted" cards.

But, oh dear God, no!

The sick . . . no. Evil. Sick you can't blame them for. The evil cretins in the US government have actually distributed playing cards with the faces of Iraqis to be captured.

Please! I want to OD on soma* now!

(The one from Brave New World, not the real one. Yes, there really is a drug with that name.)

*sigh*

Window swallowing was removed from GNOME because it can't be reliable without window manager or client support.

X forked

From A Discussion with Keith Packard:

One obvious first step is for X developers to start using modern applications; many key X developers wear the badge of 'twm' or 'fvwm' with pride. I switched to a mixture of KDE and Gnome desktops several years ago so that problems with those environments would be immediately evident as I changed code underneath them.

I don't think this is a problem for X alone.

My motto of late has been: "Not only does the universe not owe you anything, but it wouldn't pay up if it did."

The ones that got away

Two people replied to my diary entries, but they've slipped off the recentlog and advogato isn't searchable. Looks like I'll have to wait for google, luck, maybe an email, or . . .

To the person working on gnome-games: I'll try to file those UI bugs soon. (Filing each separately is a pain.)

To the other person: Damn it. I forgot what the other thing was.

Psyche

Mr. Crawford, I'm very much impressed by the article you're writing. I suffer from "major depression, recurrent type with panic attacks," and I've lost yet another semester as a physics major to it. I withdrew, again, a few days ago. The bad part for me has been that it cripples me mathematically; if not for that I think I could at least work through it. Generally neither my chess game nor what little programming I do are affected. The odd thing about my current episode is that I'm getting headaches and nausea frequently.

Early this year I had unfortunate cause to learn more about bipolar disorder. I didn't appreciate the severity of it before. Here comes a headache. There's so much to write at once, and it's probably better to not write it in a public diary.

First annoyance of the day

I should never have tried to find out what was wrong with the gnome status dock.

First amusement of the day

I have the TV on and The Adventures of Lois and Clark (Superman) was on a while ago. Supes is told to state his name when sworn in to the witness stand. "Kal-El of Krypton, Son of Jor-El, Son of . . . " "Superman will suffice." LOL!

Does everything have to go wrong at once?

I'm ready to take a hammer to my computer. I wish I hadn't taken a course in computational physics some years ago and rekindled my interest in these devices. I have wasted so many hours in front of this damn machine that I think smashing it to sand may be the best therapy. I'm more than ready to blame it for having wasted the last few years of my life. I hate this thing.

Maybe if I could play some mp3's I have, it would be better to keep it. But I haven't been able to do that in at least a year. Only recently do the sound modules consitently load, but I don't hear a thing. Every step getting to this point has introduced some new frustration - wrong compiler, wrong kernel, wrong version, wrong this that and the other. In desperation I send a message to the alsa-user mailing list. But it's a moderated list; I'd have to take the time to subscribe, set up filters, send most messages to /dev/null, unsubscribe later, etc. My message supposedly sits in the queue. It's been a few days now. Reading other threads via the archives, it doesn't seem likely that I'll get a helpful response even if my message does appear.

Maybe if I could play a nice game, it would be better to keep it. Of course, without sound my choices are limited. So I try gnome freecell. The cards aren't dragable - fine, I can deal with that. Oops! I misclicked. Bang! Error alert! Have to dismiss that, select the card again, replay. Was it really necessary to copy the stupidest UI error from Microsoft's freecell? Wait a second! This game was never really ported to GNOME 2! You can tell because there's a Settings menu with only one item on it. I select it out of curiosity. OH MY GOD! There's an checkbox to unbreak the interface . . . . Almost, because the -um- dialog (?) that appears is also broken. Besides being ugly for lack of spacing, it contains one other checkbox and an OK button. WRONG! It's only one kind of alert that should have just an OK button, otherwise there should be the pair of OK and Cancel. But look. What is the other option? It's to move cards one at a time. There's no good reason to turn that on. This "dialog," the menu item, and the menu containing that item can all be removed. Tick tock. I guess this is really abandonware; surely someone would have fixed this by now. So I try Aisleriot. But wait! First I quit freecell and lo and behold I get a confirmation alert. "Are you sure you want to quit Freecell? [[ Cancel ]] [ Quit ]" The question "Are you sure?" should have long ago been struck from all interfaces. The correct answer to it is either "Yes" or "No." That GNOME's HIG does not allow buttons for the correct answer to that question should not be taken as a sign of a problem in GNOME's HIG, it should be A BIG FRICKIN' SIGN THAT YOUR INTERFACE IS WRONG! Alas. Oh, and Cancel should never be the default button.

So now to Aisleriot. A splash screen? No comment. That Settings menu again. Sigh. The dialog it shows? HA! A notebook with one page. A frame . . . for what reason? Center aligned labels? "beige.png" instead of "Beige"? "Suit Font (small)"??? WHERE THE HELL IS THE OPTION TO MAKE THE CARDS SMALLER SO THEY FIT ON THE SCREEN!!!!!!!!! And the buttons at the bottom are backwards.

I'd play Go, but I'm losing the patience to wait for the computer to make a move.

I'm pretty sick of typing now too.

spam

My spam filter has been a few domains in my .procmailrc. I end up scanning too many subject lines. Sometimes I bother to look at the "message." The quantity and stupidity of the spam has led me to conclude that there is no possible way for a person to be so deceived as to believe that he is successfully marketing anything except his service as a spammer. Furthermore, no one using such a service could be so deceived. Therefor spammers and those funding them cannot believe they have a legitimate goal. These people are, to paraphrase Larson, "just plain evil."

For some reason, the festering of spammers reminds me of the prelude to Crusades 2003.

Stupid Humans

How much of a wit does it take to understand a lever? I have all too often seen gangs of brawny men struggling to move some object and gaining injuries in the process. Yet I, far less brawny, move the same objects with ease of leverage. Guess I'm not a team player.

"Emacs component"

What a bad idea! Making emacs (or vi) into a component is the computer science equivalent of forming a cargo cult. (Well, maybe a satanic cult for vi.) The important aspect of emacs is that it is programmable; that is what needs to be replicated in a modern UI. (It surely has been, somewhere.)

Go

I really suck at Go. The amazing thing is that I can see character flaws in my gaming flaws. I let conflicts escalate; not unlike some world leaders. In a recent game I let one of my groups which was one stone away from atari run across the board. I was able to save the group, but I lost much territory and so the game. Another flaw is my willingness to secure a position of strength without influence. I'm too content sitting on my island to be an imperialist.

"GNOME/KDE is not a window manager"

This was repeated so often some years ago. I wonder whether anybody asked, "Why not?"

If you're going to use one of these environments, why not have panel/dock/taskbar provided by the WM? When you do there's little need for chatty WM protocols, and showing and hiding the thing (e.g., for fullscreen modes) is simpler. So why are these separate processes? (Or should that be "applications"?) Next, why is the file manager separate? (Maybe remote use?) These three things - WM, dock, FM - are basic for any desktop environment today.

Reliability? I doubt it. Should any one of these crash, the typical user will most probably be lost. Rather than having him flit about waiting for some magical restoration (by the session manager - yet another process), it may be better for the whole system to come down. That Windows is restored by cycling power is good for its users; they do not want to deal with fixing someone else's mistakes. Neither do I.

That other canned ham

One of these days I need to figure out which mailing list habit annoys me the most. Which is it:

1. quoting nothing so no context is available, or
2. quoting everything before so one wonders if there's anything new, or
3. quoting everything after so one wonders why waste space, or
4. quoting everything with a one-line reply in the middle so it's invisble?

Then, when I have done this, I will be able to say for the other cases, "At least he didn't . . . "

No, sir.

When the purpose of the library is to render text on the screen so that it is pleasantly readable, and aesthetic problem is a MAJOR problem.

If it were acceptable, or just a minor problem, for text to be ugly, then the library would not exist.

Why don't you try NOT applying any extra patches? Maybe, just maybe, the upstream maintainer knows what he is doing.

"She never told me she was a MIME."

jdub, unfortunately the mime-support package is quite obscure. It doesn't look like something all distros and desktops are likely to standardize on.

I get the distinct impression that no one - at least no one in a position to do anything about it - is looking at OPENSTEP or MacOSX. One thing that would help would be support for bundles (or even just AppDirs) in Nautilus, but Nautilus still treats all directories as directories. It could treat some as folders and others as documents (an aspect of bundles), and that would probably go a long way towards making the system more usable. Yet it seems that Windows also fails in this regard. Opening a VB project folder in IE, I get a list of files instead of VB. Then I have to take some time to figure out which is the one I must open to get my work done. (I hate BASIC, but it's what the control and data acquisition code is written in. *grumble*)

Feeling Odd

I'm part of a very small statistical grouping. For the first half (or so) of my life, I mostly interacted with people of a slightly larger group - of which mine may be seen as a subgroup. Not until college did I notice the differences between the larger group and society at large. (I mostly assumed that larger group was the norm. Oops.) I know two other people in my subgroup. It took a long time for me to appreciate the differences among these groups. In the last five years, I've seen hints of even more radical differences between my subgroup and the most similar larger group. I feel like the rope in a tug-of-war.

Not being well enough aware of larger group-norm differences, I didn't correct for them until very late. I'm only now starting to wonder about the subgroup-norm differences, and I fear for what it may take to correct for them. The funny thing is that I'm more keen to the similarities - almost as if I take the differences for granted.

I'm leaving this vague though I think it's obvious what I'm talking about. It's not a subject I like to discuss, especially because so many people in that larger group abuse their knowledge of it or draw erroneous conclusions from it. But sometimes I think about it, and painfully. I might easily surmise that considering it is a psychological shield - and surely it is to some extent - but still there is something there not complete; somthing I have to figure out. Rarity makes this a hard subject for scientific study, and it seems no one is interested in taking any study as far as I need one to go. I'm not even trained for that kind of work , so it would take me some years to be ready to do it - years that might better be spent seeking answers to personal satisfaction.