all those utterly crappy video games that get made and released. and presumably make no money. how does that happen? especially in the indie / small developer world? like, wouldn't you just be thinking "ok this game is not, in fact, fun, maybe i shouldn't puke it forth onto download sites after all?" (by which i certainly refer to anything crimsonland-esque.)

i guess not.

ok, today my favourite idea for something to ask the interviewer is, "how do you make sure you can refactor up until the last second?"

the concept of "search" is such a complete fuster cluck in eclipse. it drives me bonkers. like, uh, you can search for a whole word in a buffer, but not across files.

one of those things that is a neat idea but which in less than a minute of actual use reveals itself to be a painful crappy hateful doomed UI. i hate that kind of crap.

oh dear lord above, the hacks do beget the hacks, don't they? how many astronomical units cubed of purgatory should be dedicated to those who 'manage' software development? yeah, well, ship it already and make some money for once i hear you reply.

using fixnums is a premature optimization, really. heck, using bigints isn't even guaranteed enough (but at least then you can do some cheesy fixed-point hack version of floating-point values if desperate enough).

argh!

oh, right, the ultra comfort diapers. because the iron maiden ones just weren't selling, go figure.

ok maybe gta liberty city sucks less than other gtas.

well maybe i should give groovy another chance, what with support for delegation and all, but i wish there were more static typing going on. i wonder how all those examples would be done in Scala?

i want everybody to get involved in this art project: write "printed in china" or "made in china" or "hecho en china" on all your dollar bills.

the law of unintended consequences, example #487.

all software (apparently) has rough edges. magically, they all seems to congregate around me when i try to use things. i shoulda been a tester.

so the mac has a gui and a cli for doing file system stuff. in the gui you can double-click on a data file and it will be opened with the relevant application. how do you do that in the cli? if you can't, then that is kinda plain dumb. shove usability up your nose.

blogger rocks! i clicked on "new post" and before it took me to the composition page it said "conflicting edits". like, even though there were no edits. in that case. in fact.

do they have alzheimer's or something? i fully expect to get "shoes in the fridge!" error messages next.

wow. i really hate photobucket. like, it makes winkflash look good. it is that bad.

ok, as if i would either hire or want to work for a place that has a web site that doesn't even render well in firefox?

so, like, when is there going to be a LEGO space probe finally landed on Mars? seems like a perfectly natural thing to do these days, to build a probe outta legos.

i! hate! msdos-fat! sadly that is what my laptop came preconfigured to use, even though it is running win xp. i know i know i should reinstalled, but...

some day when i'm flush with cash i'll get a group together to make a really great laptop. it will have a curved ergo keyboard like the acer machines. and it will have a small mouse that pops out (like how the covers for pc card ports pop out of laptops) and then expands to be bigger. so you can close it up and pop it back in to the laptop chassis so it goes with you. and the mouse would be wireless.

hey, man, if you've got a commercial web site for your auto mechanic business, and it has the address and phone number and all that... how about, you know, putting up which days and hours yer open?

ok, i submitted a project to abolish corporate personhood in the USA, and the world.

regarding the horrible cashing-out that the wall street fat cats have managed to perform during the current financial scandal: in some ways, i have to say i don't blame them. i think it is a fairly safe bet that within the next decade the usa, if not the entire 1st world, will have become a facist place [1][2] with the top wealth holders safely covered, and everybody else pretty much screwed and repressed (cue monty python and the holy grail to try to lighten the mood). so if you have the chance to amass a lot of $ (and then presumably somehow convert it into something other than $ which are becoming increasingly rapidly devalued and meaningless) and then try to shore up yourself into that top 0.5%, hell, how could you not do that? you have a duty to your immediate family and everything.

of course, just because you are filthy rich doesn't mean you aren't going to be stripped of it all and thrown to the rest of the scummy dogs outside the citadel walls by those who are e.g. commanding the military.

i just do not grok companies. like, i would maybe buy a thrustmaster wireless gamepad if only their web site wasn't a piece of excrement, and instead actually helped me figure out which one i really want to get and where to get it. it is even as if all the data is available somewhere, just that they've paid somebody to go to lengths to make it really painful and unsimple to get the answers i need.

so maybe i'll go look for a different brand, if only out of principle.

[blogger: conflicting edits.

[the only saving grace about all the shyte in the world is that thew way things are going there won't be a 1st world left over, in about 3 months time.]

ok, dunno if we are into the world facist control, but it sure has happened in the united states of america.

oh hells yeah, been sad about that for a while.

learn something and get hungry all at the same time.

personally i kinda hate flash, but, in this day and age if you have a web site with e.g. gameplay movies of your game, and your movies aren't streaming flash videos (shoot, as least just put them up on you tube), then i think your company deserves a swift death.

ok, i want to produce a video game where you get to be involved with shooting down airliners. i mean, there are so many to choose from! there's KAL007, there's IA655, and maybe even more! i mean, heck, what about TWA800? i mean, really, wasn't that one shot down, nudge nudge wink wink?

and maybe at the start of the game you get to choose if you are going to play as the shooter pilot, the shootee pilot, or maybe even just a shootee passenger.

for sure, the best way to design a web page is to make the link which downloads the thing you care about as small as possible.

[lips moving out of sync with words]

ah hah! you did not realize i know the Monkey's Fist! and, that i am not left-handed.

ah, yeah, veritable leaders in product design... and they don't know not to block the screen.

wow, that guy was such a playa'!

'Linge (who was his valet) said Hitler once laughed at traces of Braun's lipstick on a napkin and to tease her, joked, "Soon we will have replacement lipstick made from dead bodies of soldiers".'

and, like, oh my gawrsh!

firefox 3 + gmail: seems like it is pretty much totally random if when i command-click (yes, i'm on a mac) on a link in email in gmail the new tab will be or not become the immediately focused one. so half the time i have to click back to the gmail tab, half the time i don't.

remember, you can't say "whatever" without saying "hate".

character sets can kill! news at 7.

marshalling sucks.

Ben - I just want to say one word to you - just one word -

Yes, sir.

Are you listening?

Yes I am.

(gravely) Transactions.

Exactly how do you mean?

There is a great future in transactions. Think about it. Will you think about it?

Yes, I will.

Okay. Enough said. That's a deal.

[blogger, oh the irony: conflicting edits]

in theory, escaping special characters in strings should be something which composes well. so, like, you could run the string through several escape rounds and then do the same number of unescape rounds and get back to where you started. and yet quite often that turns out to not really be the case; the abstractions are very leaky, and it kinda just sucks, overall.

the extra strong kick to the junk is when the escape codes are used to print things out, so when you are trying to do logging or inspection in the debugger it is easy to get really confused about what is right and what is wrong and precisely how many escapes there should be.

surely somebody has already done a nice mash-up of spam so that you get some sort of subject about some cute animals in sexual positions with celebrities who have really good stock tips from nigeria after taking herbal supplements. seems like a stand-up routine waiting to happen.

there's something to be said for having human reviewers vs. relying on Page Rank. take "ascii hex table" results for example; the top two hits are complete crap when it comes to usability - just try to select text to copy out a single entry in the table with the decimal, hex, ascii, etc. values.

[blogger: conflicting edits]

oh, yeah, i for sure want my kids to attend a polytechnical college that doesn't even grok internet maps. at all. or font sizes. my mind has exploded with incredulous hayte.

it never ceases to amaze me how there can be such a stunning disconnect between the customer and the company. what i don't then get is how such companies manage to be at all successful.

oh, yeah, what could possibly be wrong with that old plan? to wit: changing as much as possible, and at great cost!

hey, but at least we're not terrorists. er, or, uh, at least we pay reparations, rather than sweep it under the carpet of history. er, uh, hm, or something.

ok, ok, when they get around to making the Futurama MMO, i really might have to sign up.

seriously, if somebody could give me a really nice s-expr interface to Ada, i might love it since the Ada culture seems to be a lot more towards the correct-by-construction end of the spectrum.

skim gets the update thing somewhat mostly right, with a couple of painful exceptions: first, there is no "stop reminding me of the upgrade, dammit, for ever!" button (not even "for a week/month"). second, when it restarts it does not reopen the files you had open! (yeah, you can manually use the recent items menu entry, but that isn't the idea thing, imho.) furthermore, even if it did, it probably wouldn't be nuanced enough to open them scrolled to the same page you were looking at before the restart.

oh, right, you say C++, i say O'Caml. (or Scala, but i think nowadays i'd prefer O'Caml.)

i open a new window in firefox 3.0.2, then pick an entry from the History menu. nothing happens. so i pick it again. this time the new window goes there. happens every time.

yes, exceptions are still hard to get right.

the citizens of the world are, basically, bitches to the conglomerates. the problem is that while there are a lot more little people than there are corporations, the amount of money and coherence is vastly in favor of the corporations.

i want somebody to make a rip-off of The Family Guy, called The Ops Guy, taking the BOfH lines for source material.

when will (some) people learn to favor implementing auto-save+undo over just save?!

i wonder if once you trick somebody into paying for some software, if then they will be somebody who continues to pay for it (as long as it didn't totally suck), especially when they hear other people talking about having scored the free warez copy of something they actually paid for out of respect?

customizing things about one's blog in blogger is sort of a crappy user experience. especially on a dual monitor system.

the suckage of having a plug-in architecture, in particular eclipse: the thing presenting the error message doesn't know enough to do it well so you end up with the critical piece of information hidden inside some nested window pane all chopped off so you have to scroll around to actually find the text which explains wtf is wrong. this is a bad kind of finger-pointing blame-game crappy ui end result.

a new way to be all supercilious: when somebody names a tune by the movie soundtrack, rather than knowing who the actual original musician was, but you (well, in this case, i) know that it was e.g. brian eno.

[blogger: conflicting edits]

word: "I'd like to call the distinction: using threads for 'modeling' reasons, and using it for 'technical' reasons."

java sucks. scala is less suckful (in some serious ways, at least) than java. but scala is a jvm language, and interacts with java libraries. which means it is doomed to be a language with extreme suck that would not be necessary in a non-jvm language.

so basically i think the claim that running on the jvm and using java libraries is a good thing is kinda crap, because i'm really sick and tired of throwing out the quality just to get pragmatics.

clojure somehow side-steps the issue a little bit more?

so you can set up your web site to tell google about its structure so that when it appears in google results there are shortcut links in addition in those results. ok, so then i think anybody who does that but doesn't include a link for login and a link for customer support is an ass.

i'll say it (again?): i think it is stupid and lame that blogger doesn't seem to check that i have the cookie until after i click on sign in, making it take even longer for me to be able to start editing my blog.

respect!

oh, come on, Obama, surely you can get off your but and take pole position yet?

amen!

is there a window frame adjustment ui that doesn't suck ass? like, they are usually hard to grab, or you think you grabbed but then you move and nothing happens. or you were totally not intending to be doing anything about window frame adjustment but somehow the system decided you were so things move around. (all these are of course extremely exacerbated by a sluggish system.)

[blogger suck: "conflicting edits"]

also? the car talk web site kinda sucks to actually, you know, use.

for all my complaining about Eclipse, i have to say that when i entered a bug it got a response really fast!

hm, well, now i know where i sit in the grand scheme of things.

i honestly do appreciate that making non-suckful UI is really hard. but that doesn't stop me from pretty much haytering anything in the Apple iFoo family of applications. like, in iTunes i just want to rip a CD and it is kind of a big hunt to figure out how to make that happen. as if ripping isn't some fundamental thing that people would want to do.

uh, so eclipse doesn't let me change the text cursor to e.g. be a big block cursor? what? suck.

from experience i'll just say that if you let people run off and do things without oversight and actual planning and review you will sorta reap what you sow. not fun. full speed ahead will come back and bite you on the ass. or, in other words, APIs matter.

uh, maybe the Eclipse people could stand to get some actual information architects and usability types working on their bloody painful web sites?

hat trick!

has scala jumped the shark?

always nice to be reminded how i do not know haskell, really.

usability suck: word wrapping. i'm trying to type in a word and it gets wrapped, but then i see i mistyped it so i delete some letters which unwraps it and then i try to type in the new letters to fix it which eventually wraps it but since i didn't follow all the un/wrapping it still has a mistake, repeat.

so far as i can tell, the reddit text search 'feature' kinda sucks. like, it doesn't seem to support quoted exact match strings.

sometimes, reddit actually has really rather important links, or even two, for the aspiring nerd.

daily, i relearn that usability is as uncommon as hydrogen/stupidity are not. if you catch my drift.

i tried upgrading to eclipse ganymede. it kinda sucked; it would utterly freak out on xml files. also, for some windows it completely did not make them the correct size compared the older version of eclipse. so i'm reverting and staying old school.

of course everything sucks! i try the "inverse video" mode in Mac OS X because i'm having a bad eye day, and it works... with the exception of the I-beam text cursor in eclipse text editor windows, which simply no longer exists. dogged. who to blame?

(i upgraded to the latest eclipse and it did not fix it.)

so, like, why does anybody support apple? all those folks who bitch about MSFT's licensing who bought iphones aren't seeing themselves as lame?

"Allen writes, after reading Dostoevsky and Weight Watchers magazine on the same plane trip: 'I am fat. I am disgustingly fat ... My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat.'"

i feel fat.

it isn't so much that you should write one and plan to throw it away. more like you should write N and plan to throw them away. and you let yourself do that by having some good set of regression / automated tests. and, the more you can have things be componentized (having cohesion but not coupling), the more you can get away with only throwing out some subset of the overall system at any given time (vs. yanking on one small sweater thread, but leading to the unraveling of everything).

just thinking: that as you write code, it becomes exponentially frustrating because old assumptions made will inevitably intertwine and screw you come the guaranteed gonna happen time you need to refactor.

languages that don't help you do has-a (e.g. java has too much manually managed boilerplate required to do has-a) screw you in so many ways. for example, it means it is a lot harder to take an already existing thing and wrap it up in something bigger, to add functionality -- you know, that thing which you inevitably have to do one week before shipping because some new feature is required. 'cause you'd have to write all those wrappers. talk about st000pid!

the freaking kicker is that it can lead people to horribly violate the Very Strong Suggestion of Demeter, which will only further prevent you from being able to easily rework and extend things later. hayte!

small teams focused with lots of customer interaction. otherwise? suck!

so, like, uh, when will people actually grok the meme "oh maybe we should talk to some users before launch?" i mean has nobody read about Portal?

the google map for trying to find businesses near you e.g. a local instance of a chain drugstore, kinda sucks.

yeah, go go blogger! "Blogger Sign In. We found the following errors: Your browser's cookie functionality is disabled. Please enable JavaScript and cookies in order to use Blogger."

except for how that isn't the problem at all since i'm in gmail and i reloaded blogger and it worked.

AND TRYING TO POST THIS GIVES THE CONFLICTING ERROR PAGE.

so exactly how much did google pay for blogger?!

i hereby reserve the superhero name "Effing Expletive" for my self. hands off!

i do think there is something to be said for firing out better data structures and for thinking about data vs. code (i do think the mental gap between the static code and the dynamic runtime behaviours is bad).

a small suggestion to the supposedly usability-minded apple folks: put the <EXPLETIVE> software update process on a very low priority thread, so it doesn't <EXPLETIVE>ly make all my user apps freeze up and become horribly unresponsive and juddery.

ARGH!

wow, LtU rocketh, verily!

java: death by, well, death. for example, TimeUnit doesn't have MINUTES, or anything bigger.

dammit. newspeak can't arrive soon enough for me. (well, at least the version with a good optional static type inference + checker system.)

sure, it is the big things which kill me when it comes to usability, but it is also the little things. take gmail for example: the "delete" button at the bottom of a message might in fact be after a bunch of whitespace after the message, so much whitespace that the button is off the bottom of the screen and you have to manually scroll down to find it.

why?

so they have enough room for all the text ads on the right hand site.

hayte.

somebody tell me: is Codd rolling - nay, spinning, in his grave?

usability is hard. it is also hard to convey to somebody who doesn't yet grok it. so, like, i can make a usability suggestion and fail to get the point across so that the change which is made falls afoul of the original problems i wanted to fix, only in a rearranged format. blah. communication is hard.

i'm using neo office to look at an excel spreadsheet. i want to find the cells that have negative values in them. so i us the find command and look for "-". that totally doesn't work. for one thing, it is matching any use of the minus sign in formula inside the cells, not just matching the leading negative sign on the final computed value of cells.

another take on distribution and failure, care of the Oz folks.

i kinda wish java null was an actual object. so, like, toString() would be implemented.

from my experience, such as it is, all logging systems (libraries + tools) kinda freaking suck when you stop a day-dream about what a way cool penultimate logging system would really be like.

see, if your language only gives you single inheritance with interfaces, and then also doesn't help you avoid mutation, i think you end up having to do either a lot of fingertyping to come up with something good, or you end up with runtime checks, which kinda undermines what i'd really like. must! switch! to! o'caml! (or something.)

there are days when, probably because i'm using a brain-dead language like Java/C#, i can start to appreciate the dark side of untyped languages. as in i just want to hack this thing up and get going already! which in my mind isn't really the best way to go, but sometimes tempting allrighty.

all i'm sayin' is, quite often the google maps ui just freaking kills me.

i love city web sites, like for the library, where i type "renew" into the search box and get zero results. and then notice the "renew" link at the top of the page that is an image, not text, and is really too bloody small.

awwww, yeaaahhh!

yeah, the web emperor has no clothes, fer shiggle.

cool, nerd up, and out!

you have nothing to fear, citizen. we are all in it together. the economies are sound. your rights have not had "bout à bout violée" happen on their sad asses. and there's too many fish in the sea.

reddit, so i have heard, has been through several complete re-writes of their software. and yet. and yet. and yet when you page along you see some entries appearing on more than one page. as if it is really difficult to filter out what has already been seen on previous pages per user, or something. pretty freaking lame, even if it is all free and all.

you gotta wonder, how much does CRC really cost?

oh, hells yeah! gotta try anything with enki bilal involved. oh, wait, maybe not.

also? please don't suck, please don't suck, please don't suck.

it pisses me off that i believe i've heard functional programming described as having no state. bindings can be added and forgotten (gc), but an already existing binding cannot be changed. so it isn't some koan.

[conflicting edits]

did i mention infocom's bureaucracy recently? oh, yes! turns out the cell phone # i'm trying to move over to the new provider has area code XYZ and my newest billing address is not in the XYZ area code any more for land lines. apparently this has screwed up the cell phone system such that it won't let things go through, but it also doesn't flag it in a way where any of the customer support people understand or see that right away. only a process of me talking it over with them and offering up new info they didn't ever ask for or look for, it is all in the data they already have on me, only doing that started to get us on the right track. oy veh. i mean, it is great that the systems they use apparently are not designed to cover this use case. as if i'm the first person in the history of the cell phone business to be trying to do this?

at any rate, the one ray of sunshine is the customer support person at T-Mobile's 'wholesale' (prepaid) division actually kicks ass and is really a true customer support person - she's actually thinking ahead as much as possible and not giving up and doing all the leg work, including talking to the Net10 people herself rather than forcing me to go through the ping-pong telephone game alone. somebody give her a raise. (i'll make sure to talk to a supervisor afterwards to commend her.)

a parallel: software which was slow which is now faster reminds you that speed of ui is actually important. good customer support where people speak english really well and are careful about what they are doing, and explain things -- the difference is like night and day.

a new way to rock the vote, baby.

word. up.

ah. yes. well. moving phones to a pre-paid company that goes through other providers in the background kinda sucks ass! talk about shades of infocom's bureaucracy!

i am trying to switch cell phone providers for several reasons. one of them is that my old provider doesn't carry nokia phones and i do not want to have to learn a whole new UI from some other handset maker. so i switch and get a new nokia phone... that has a completely different UI than every single other nokia phone i've ever had (which i think is like 3 over the last 7 or so years). ha ha dogged.

the net10 customer support was supposedly revamped. so far it seems "ok". although they are funny in that they say thanks for calling tracphone, not net10. there ya go. the oligopoly. also, their support folks are ok but apparently have to read scripts or something because they say the same key phrases ever over. that gets to be a little disturbing because one isn't sure if they are doing that 'cause they are told to, or if they are futurological congress type human robots, or if they don't speak english so well.

(god, lem was such a good author. freaking genius imho.)

all i'm sayin' is: look, even the programmers don't really know how to program.

i think an important approach to getting less-suckful code is to write it in really small chunks and to interact / test those chunks heavily before during and after writing and wiring them together. a language which supports a really good repl (so, like, not Erlang) is nice. or perhaps one with magic hot code swapping (Erlang) might be a viable alternative. add in some form of quick check as well as your own automated tests.

not that this should be news to anyone. and yet...

p.s. and, also, it is important that the components remain separable over time, rather than get twisted and coupled and ossified.

ponder.

i still cannot fathom why emacs doesn't "page" over large files. it seems to want to try to read the whole thing into an in-memory buffer rather than chunking it and re-seeking to the disk when necessary.

blah.

yeah, i know, i should download the source and figure it out and contribute a patch.

i think IVR is a new swear word. i guess i will start actually just paying my bills with plain old paper checks and stamps and the us mail service.

you gotta love a web site that puts a Thawte logo hidden at the bottom of their page, which right now when i'm looking at the site says "invalid certificate". guess i'll be buying elsewhere.

the alibris web site is from hell, in terms of being able to actually see the information or link i want amidst the overdesigned and overstuffed pages.

oh the fun we have with technology. i have a laptop with a 2nd external monitor attached. firefox is on the laptop monitor which is below the 2nd monitor. i click to "print" a recipe from saveur.com and it opens a new window on the laptop screen that is the printable version. but the window is frozen. i can't scroll it at all, even though the scroll bar shows that there is more stuff below. and the status bar says it is still transferring data from the server. finally i figure out that what is actually going on is that the print dialog box has opened at the top of the other monitor, which i am completely not looking at, and so don't see it and the dialog box is modal. the kicker is that if i cancel the print dialog to try to be able to scroll the page, the new page window closes. so somehow the combination of saveur's code and firefox and mac os x all blends together to make my experience completely freaking suck. i mean, why on earth would we want to let the user have any actual control over things? obviously what we need to do is to continue to force the user conform to the machine.

i think that a language which does not have (1) good support for delegation and (b) 'local' functions-within-functions, is basically really bad. it forces you to either write giant functions (bad), or if you break it down into little ones you cannot guarantee new code will start calling those functions and screw up the assumptions about how it is all used (bad), or you have to start breaking things out into small components (good) but then you are forced into lots of boilerplate (bad). so you are basically screwed at any turn.

whimper.

boy i sure do love the experience i guess we all still have with current applications and operating systems where e.g. firefox has a new version and asks me if i want to install and restart it, and the restarting puts up all sorts of dialog boxes which take focus away from the window i'd switched to while it was restarting, and so various keystrokes i'm typing get sucked up by those dialog boxes and heaven only knows WTF will happen.

because we as a culture and industry could in no way ever possibly come up with some solutions to this kind of blatant suckage, empirically?

lo, verily i continueth to hayteth everything.

if you use a non-threaded approach to concurrency, what do you do about not having stack traces when trying to debug things? how on earth do you know what led up to where you are in the debugger?

another problem with mixing together things, like interfaces in java, is that the naming of things in the interfaces can collide, because the interfaces obviously don't have to know about one another. so that's pretty great of course.

the first step in the program is to actually see bad code when it is in front of you. the second step is to admit that you have and probably do and probably will write bad code. the third step is to actively think about what could be done so the code wouldn't be bad. the fourth step is to try things and iterate and improve. the fifth step is ???. the sixth step is PROFIT!

my problem is that i've gotten up to the end of step 3 and desperately need lots of money so i can start a company which will then continue with steps 4 and beyond. :-}

also? types. types types types types types. so you can actually enforce things. which means the language has to be really gracious and easy when it comes to making and using types. which doesn't really mean Java :-P

as a maintenance programmer, i think that a lot of issues are due to not programming at a high enough abstraction level in the first place. in other words, the apis are too anemic and people end up hard coding things in all sorts of bad ways.

(i'm guilty of entirely too much copy-and-paste action, myself.)

it really is important to develop good interfaces, and that includes refactoring. duh!

maybe it is like jacob's ladder, only i'm in hell. i mean all the slings and arrows of using computers (which my day job requires me to do) sure makes me wonder "and we have done this on purpose to ourselves?!"

including the fact that when i tried to post this post, i got the as far as i know completely and utterly bogus bullcrap "conflicting edits" error from blogger.

super fast and far-reaching space travel would be fine if i could use it. but if the majority of humanity could use it? ix-nay on at-they. i personally don't really think that having Coke show up on Rigel 7 is a great wonderful achievement for human kind.

here's my theory: when you combine the fact that people don't know any better (everything has for the most part always been done in stupid ways) with the fact that people think spending more time and energy on meetings and talking and stuff makes them important or lends some validity or meaning to their i guess otherwise vapid lives, you end up with your average business as we know it today.

i still haaaaaaaaayyyyyyyttttttteeeeeeeeee gmail.

i guess i need an hdtv, now. :-}

ok, ok, making a programming language that really hangs together well is actually not easy. i get that. but it still kills me that we use such crummy languges for the most part. i guess i should just really learn haskell + learn everything oleg has done. ha ha. ack.

i wish compilers (e.g. javac, eclipse) would spit out a warning when people cast something they don't need to. e.g. a method takes a float, but somebody calls it with a parameter like (int)(1.0f). ok, maybe they meant to do that because they wanted the truncation, but since the method takes floats it could be an error. it would be nice if one had to supply some explicit language marker so future readers would know if it was on purpose, or a mistake.

a new meme: "I found my elevator pitch on Reddit." my current favourite being "it's like Twitter, but for cats".

the related work links on the left hand side are great food for thought. still, it is frustrating that so many things did not get to commercial quality, and that i think the majority of developers are still using shared mutable state concurrency. hey, i bet that's why the ETs haven't talked to us yet - there is a requirement that we get beyond usig SMSC before they'll deign to talk to us. yeah, that's it.

it is good and bad to see the basics explained ever over again. like, it really fundamentally depresses me. and yet i feel gratitude that some folks are still trying to get the messages out.

on the one hand, i already know and expect it, so in some ways i can only laugh. on the other hand, where's my ammo? to wit: i find the approach to putting up signs on american highways and byways to be, shall we say... lacking. extremely lacking what might be called an expletive clue.

ok! i would not make a good politician! although i think actually knowing things is one of the least relevant abilities in US politics. i would also not make a good politician because i could never stand the duplicity and wheeling-and-dealing.

i'll say it again: the history ui in firefox 3 is killing me on a daily basis. it is too short! most every time i use it i cannot find what i need until i open up the full history window, which is a pain in the butt.

so, seabreeze looked interesting enough for me to try to download smalltalk and seaside and all that jazz. what happens? yeah, you can maybe guess? what happens is everything sucks and the docs are lame and the cincom web sites are broken and i end up just hating everybody.

so that's really turned me on to smalltalk, yessiriebob.

you gotta love the utter (at best) self-deception and duplicity of all concerned; i can't afford an xbox 360 and really think i should vote with my dollars if i ever can, and get a wii (even though the name is still something which really grates, to me).

(either that, or get a xbox 360 + sufficient cooling tricks.)

in my dictatorship, anybody who made a site that said it had "book chapters" and then had a ui from hell, so bad that it had to have a link (buried, mind you) called How do I read this book?, yeah, well, anybody who did that would be quickly disappeared.

mmmemoriessss.

it does constantly blow my mind that so many successful programming languages are such horrible hacks. i guess scratching an itch is worth its weight in gold. (mind you, i didn't use perl until it was v5.)

yeah, me also, not so happy with the mutability thing.

yeah, it has always bugged the crap out of me that strategy game uis are so poor and undernourished. like, wait, i'm sitting at a computer and i can't even program the thing to do the overall strategy for me? no? i have to keep doing ridiculous amounts of clicking for ever? yeah, bite me. hence, i don't play RTS style games.

all i'm sayin' is the entire process of installing plug-ins in firefox 3 is a freaking nightmare of gross usability cluster suckage.

i cannot fathom how or why there are so many web sites for downloading software. download.com, tucows, and then a hundred zillion other random sites i've never heard of or used and totally don't trust, turning up in google results.

i really do not like the apple ixyz program user interfaces. having said that, i'm willing to bet $10 that the overall experience of burning a DVD or S-VCD on a mac is better than trying to do that on a PC.

so. anybody have any recommendations for PC warez to take crappy videos from my old Canon digicam, and turn them into denoised and exposure corrected S-VCDs and DVDs? free would be nice, too.

(i'll tell ya right now that avidemux on the PC does not in any way strike me really as not sucking.)

apparently, from the apps i've seen, i detest GTK+.

i think cygwin is something of a bit, fat lie. but it is better than not having unix-y stuff on windows at all. that's for sure. just don't expect it to resolve and absolve all forward vs. backward slash issues and sins. oh, no, sir!

guis suck. try to find one which will nicely let you copy and rename-and-paste in one operation.

i turn on my old pc that has been dormant for months. i do ms update. well, i try to do ms update, but of course the bloody start menu disappears out from under me just as i'm about to click on that. because xp is such a usability advancement over previous versions of windows. so i eventually get ms update going, and it tells me to do sp3. which takes a while to download. and then it looks like the whole bloody thing has locked up because it has 3 little bars in the overall progress bar of doing the installation after it has downloaded, and those 3 little bars are the only thing there for like 30+ minutes.

then, eventually, i notice another thing in the task bar; turns out there is a new dialog box for actually doing the sp3 install that is completely hidden underneath the ie browser window + modal progress dialog box.

aaaaaaaaargh!

i tried jahshanka on my windows xp laptop. the whole experience sucked, from the completely non-standard open file dialog (er, "load" file, in their parlance), to the immediate crash when i finally tried to load the movie.

i also tried virtual dub. it isn't sexy, but it worked. i used the time smoothing filter to do some very basic cleaning up of some low-fi movies from my low-fi old canon digital camera. and then found the MPEG-4 compression feature. nice, all in all.

something i've learned from my own code + others' also: apis on collection objects matter. like, either the thing needs to have add+remove support, or it should only have add but easily be copied+modified and then used to replace the old reference. and, any language without a good default bijection collection rather than only having just the boring old map, sucks.

pretty much, mostly, if you want to do some software really right, you cannot use java. it is just so wrong and broken when it comes to trying to be even vaguely sane or concise. it kinda kills me. (ditto C#.)

ok, what happens if you hook up your sql on a chip with your java on a chip? profit! of course.

the next time you run some code and you get an error, compare your mindset before you ran it to what you feel now. then consider if that should give you pause for thought in the future. (it surprises me how lame human nature apparently really is.)

gosh! who would have thought! semantics actually matter when developing decent software?!

i assume that assignment of a reference in java is atomic. i looked through the spec and stuff but didn't find confirmation one way or the other. (like, aren't we all using 64-bit machines now? so wouldn't references be sorta like doubles and longs or long longs or something big that the spec says are not guaranteed atomic?)

the java language spec: a fun source of humorous and, in light of the route they chose to go for concurrency, perhaps rather sad, sad bits of wisdom.

is it a sad day for me when i finally find database tools interesting? oh and, by the way, i mildly suggest that if you are looking to get a db, you should not look at performance above all other metrics.

name and shame: people who are without numbers need a good slapping upside the head.

yeah, i love how there are all those jvms and yet nobody seems to bother to publish any benchmarks. does that mean they don't even know themselves how they are doing relative to others?!

hey, here's my new genius usability idea! have a benchmark results search, and then make sure there isn't a way to directly pick competitors to compare. have they never seen the shoot out ui?!

i dunno. you'd think a print newspaper would appreciate the value of using a good, adjusted, kerned, etc. font for their bloody title text?

software is hard; languages are hard; constructors are hard. Java << Scala << ??? (...profit!)

Teh Suck is not additive. it is multiplicative. or exponential. or ackermanical. or something. it bugs me when people don't seem to grok that.

64-bit is a lie. (lots of apps are available in 64-bit versions.)

everything (ok, not really, but) you need to know about java generics in a few compact lines:


public static<T> void copy(Box<? extends T> from, Box<? super T> to)
{
    to.put(from.get());
}


pretty much daily i am reminded that something like subtext cannot come soon enough.

oh crap i gotta stop sleeping.

you gotta love craigslist. "i am selling my dell laptop. the laptop is not wireless but i am giving a 25' internet cord with it."

i love how restarting a mac is sometimes really hard manual labor, because the various running apps might prevent the restart from happening. seems like a good UI problem for a masters student project.

maybe we would be worse off w/out microsoft around, but the fact that every time i try to get anything off of the microsoft web site they put up the "TRY SILVERLIGHT!!!!!" message -- sometimes more than once in a session -- in my face makes me wish the company would die off over night.

also? i pretty much hate about.com, i think.

words will never quite do justice in conveying how much i hate windows xp. (i refuse to 'upgrade' to vista, mind you.) and, no, linux/*bsd is not stunningly better at all.

p.s. yeah, eff-u-2, blogger.

huh, i heard a rumour that after all the Indiana Jones and Batman lego games and movies, there's enough money and interest in that field to try applying that filter to some older classics; i think they said there's going to be a an FPS lego version of Sophie's Choice.

i always wanted something like that, yup. if only it weren't wed to a less-than-easily-comfy-open-source world.

software is hard. cross-platform is even harder, of course. especially when it comes to UI. take the cross-product of that and the fact that any UI at all is (apparently, empirically) hard to do well, and you end up with something which could be pretty frustrating to some folks.

if i type a key that does something all at once, and then i don't like it, and i hit undo, the thing had damned well better just go back to the way it was. not some bloody intermediary state such that i have to hit undo again (some number of times) to really actually get it back to the beginning state. certain IDEs make this shootin' offense type mistake.

yes, i am still doing the "i hate zimbra web client" dance.

anybody who makes an electronic item which takes an odd number of batteries > 1 is a completely and utter jerk. obviously in cahoots with the battery cartel.

oh my gawrsh. where do i start the bitch slapping? some fancy pants makes some entirely too freaking large flash presentation, doesn't make it streaming, and also apparently makes sure there is no pause button in the crappy player in the download, and yet claims to be somebody with a clue? hayte.

it doesn't help that (as far as i got into it anyway) everything has already been said, and so i think the whole blankety-blank presentation could be reduced to ten bullet points in a small blog posting.

but noooo, we have to and spend lots of time and energy abusing flash and effective graphic design and basic human dignity in the process!

i think in C# and Java, i pretty much utterly loathe and detest the foreach / enhanced-for loop because overall the idea is pretty bankrupt and only serves to hilight that these languages are trying to look like they are doing something new and useful with their syntax but turn out to be completely effing stupid, especially when compared to similar features of functional languages.

that version of 'for' is mostly useless to me when i'm debugging because it hides too much state. and it often needs to be re-written into a regular for loop eventually, because e.g. i need to remove items, or do something else that isn't supported that way. if it were more of a functional thing like fold or map then i could see it being more useful, but it isn't, so it just pisses me off that it has some claim to being oh so useful, but once you get done enumerating all the ways in which it actually isn't and you have to do something else, you aren't left with a whole lot. like, uh, maybe it is useful for debug printing/logging of lists?

basically, in the end, i think i just have a strong dislike for C# and Java. too bad they are the main game in town for some of the things i must or want to do.

it seems pretty sad that just removing things from collections is not blindingly stupid silly obviously simple in some programming languages so you end up having to iterate over things to find the item, then get out of the iterator, and then remove it. that kind of thing.

"It will take a year to work out just the major bugs. In the first year of the Media Lab building at MIT, the elevator caught fire, the revolving door broke weekly, all the doorknobs in the building failed and had to be replaced, the automatic door closers were stronger than people and had to be adjusted, and an untraceable stench of something horribly dead filled the public lecture hall for months. This is normal."

A network cable is unplugged.

yeah, wonderful, whoever was responsible for that UI wisdom fu sure was worth their money. might as well say something as useful as I fart in your general direction.

to paraphrase How Buildings Learn: "All programs are predictions. All predictions are wrong." by which we mean change is inevitable, and you cannot even know what kind of change it will all be.

i'd like to make a really popular small game, like a tetris or a solitaire, that has a Boss Mode which turns itself into a spreadsheet or whatever. but then on like the 100th time you do that it would instead put up FMV hard core. ha ha.

or, no, blogger has decided the boss mode would instead put up some error message about conflicting edits. that's the real wtf!

"To me, simplicity is having as few different concepts interacting as little as possible to get the job done."