always interested in learning about facets of the elephant, heaven knows i'm still mostly a cargo-cult pattern-matching clueless-n00b when it comes to haskell.

i kinda feel like, if you can't understand your classes well enough to write equals() for them, then maybe you don't understand them well enough to really be using them? from a quality standpoint. (how much Other People's Code (including stuff your previous selves wrote) have you come across where things are so muddled and gross that if you suddenly have a desire to compare two instances you are kinda in for a hunk of sadness?) but, of course, implementing equals() for non-value items is hard. mutability sucks. so if there's any merit to this line of thinking, doesn't it pretty much lead one to ditch e.g. current standard OO languages in favor of more pure + functional ones?

why, oh why, is tail call optimization seen as such a horrid thing, apparently, by the owners of java and .net? there had better be a circle of heck reserved for them!

we want results, not activity.

yeah, computer science is kinda politics more than science, often.

as with software, you especially don't want to use version 1.0 of things that blow up.

another fun metric: retro-wtf-taboo per pica.

ok. on the whole, i think function signature overloading so you can pass different sets of parameters is evil. named optional parameters (perhaps cheesy example is perl's use of hashmaps) seems a lot better in the long run to me, in terms of flexibility and maintainability. (in other words: yet another thing that i think i don't really like in the end about java/c#/etc.)

saved (and killed?) by charts.

no, nothing to see here, move along. whimper. i need a new life. so sad. so much angry. "building the solution to the wrong problem is normal" aaaaaaaaargh so true! as another person said once: "debugging into existence".

all i'm saying is: naming is hard. and really important.

really.

word, on basic <expletive> usability of something every bloody computer user uses every bloody day.

i'm sorry, zaphod, i just don't believe a word of it. maybe if there were a graph of the history of bugs, and their severity, then i could start to believe the hype, but as it stands i'm finding it hard to believe. (don't get me wrong, i sincerely believe there are probably ways to make small good things vs. the big bloated route that most people go, so i would like it if my gut reaction were wrong in this case.)

oh eclipse, you are so funny: you don't actually let me find/replace within a selection at all, because you expand that selection to the full line of any partially selected line. how... fun.

while the physical thing requires a real money subscription, apparently it is all available for free as pdfs: misc rotman (business) magazines.

apparently, in the USA you just should not be Black. good thing Civilization has progressed so dramatically and we're in this wonderful new millennium.

here's the thing: if your code isn't great, and your tools have issues, and your process isn't up to snuff, then i think you end up dragging down any individual's productivity, which then might lead you to think "i know! we need to add more people to the team/project! because obviously the people already there don't have resources to spare." whereas if you kept things ship shape and then some from day one, i think you'd be surprised at how quickly the two future histories diverge, and how much more you can get done.

in real life, i'd like to be a lot more tidy and organized and cleaned up. but physical reality is hard because there is a limited amount of space. i'm a different person in code because i have access to pretty much unlimited space when it comes time to rearrange things; i'm always happy to take time to clean things up as i go along, which isn't how i feel irl. i don't enjoy tripping over things at home, or in code.

so, like, where should i shelter my money?

i love calling tech support (at least this time the person was not a complete robot, and also had a nicely accented slightly sultry voice) and having them use phrases like "i'll note your problem" rather than, you know, acting as a representative of a company that is willing to admit they are broken (voice mail not set up for my account yet still) and say "our problem".

grrrrrr.

being tracked everywhere by browser cookies suck. firefox 3 cookie ui control sucks. google + blogger suck. everything sucks!

that is all.

[blogger: conflicting edits.]

i think it is going to become some kind of badge / chip on my shoulder: i will not like tower defense, no matter how many dimensions it gets rendered in.

[blogger: conflicting edits.]

somebody hurry up and get some gray goo that eats most, but not all CO2 going!

pretty much, i believe it. but obviously i ain't no economist (which might, in fact, make me better qualified to pontificate ;-)

just to be evil: how about dashed lines of color, where the dashes don't overlap, so you can follow lines even when they intersect for a while. there'd have to be an algorithm making the right choices for sizes and spacing of dashes e.g. depending on how many lines are overlapping.

a couple of devices that suck:

1) "oh, hey, i woke up with amnesia!"

2) oh look, the audio-video feed is breaking up, how scary!

newsflash: animated people still suck.

am i bad if i found that funny?

there are some companies for whom i'd like to suggest slogans. like, "sure, we sorta claim we do cross-platform, but in fact we don't know how to make a cross-platform anything, so lick our poo and die." but i guess that wouldn't really sell?

man, if i were single, i'd have the best pick-up line right now!

"i'm employed."

or print up a nice t-shirt:

"i have a job"

oh, ha ha, so much for the what, not the how.

when somebody says "a mind is a terrible thing to waste", it is interesting to try to imagine just how many cpu cycles it adds up to.

(i mean, think about people stuck in stupid boring pointless-to-many-attendees meetings.)

is it funny or sad or on purpose that the free adobe online pdf2html conversion service does such a piss-poor job? "oh gosh, look, it didn't turn out to be good html... guess i'll just go back to doing everything in pdf, as god wanted me to."

jerks.

heh. "manuel".

i love how prius brake lights at night are like 50 <expletive> times brighter than they really need to be. it isn't as if the night-running lights are anywhere near as bright, so it was obviously a conscious choice on the part of the freaking toyota jerks to make them so blindingly painfully bright to all those cars that are right behind the priuses at stop lights.

[blogger: conflicting edits.]

me: your web site change password thing is broken, it has said "temporarily unavailable" for a day shy of a week now.

them: oh, huh.

me: let me try again. man, the requirements for the password really suck.

them: yeah, when i did mine i had to sit there for a long time trying to figure something out.

me: ok i'm doing a longer password, maybe that was the problem. ... hey it worked.

them: good.

me: so apparently the issue was that the wrong error message was being shown to me all that time! how about you tell the web site people about that so they can fix it?

them: oh well i don't see anybody else reporting that, so never mind.

me: [fuming but not bothering to get into it]. ok, thanks, goodbye.

oh the hayte.

i love how searching in google maps for "banh-mi" gives different results than "banh mi", ditto "dim-sum" vs. "dim sum".

so. who is for shorting msft?

sad that the search functionality on penny arcade is so painfully bad. that and the -- as far as i can tell -- complete lack of the concept of permalinks for their text blog posts. i mean, wtf?!

here's the thing: many -- many -- people who are better than i am at software development have already been laid off.

kanban is the stick you use to move all the other bad things onto the bonfire, and then, at the end, you also want to throw the stick on, too. apparently.

we need agencies (federal, private) that name and shame any medical groups that don't follow the rules of safety.

ugh. i'm trying to install g++ via cygwin, and it hangs at 99% in update-info-dir.sh for ever. i've searched around a little bit and have not found a solution, only other people complaining about this with other installs, with the occasional "oh hey the new cygwin installer fixed it" written in '07, and i already downloaded the latest installer yesterday when i first encountered this problem. gooooo cygwin! gooooo windows!

wow, are there really actually sane people out there? how come i never get a chance to vote for them for President? (ok, (a) well i actually did vote for Nader before, and (b) because we probably need to work from the bottom-up, not top-down.)

as each generation benefits from the genius of Boynton, i have to say it will suck when she's dead.

i love how different instances of "view blog" in blogger have different results: some cause the current page to be replaced, some open a new page/tab. genius.

i swear, i'll operate on myself before trusting modern hospitals.

ah hah, the magic fairy pixie dust is a lie! (at least the current flavour.)

and don't even get me started on the whole "no broken windows" thing, especially when there are several different configurations of systems alive at the same time.

[blogger: conflicting edits.]

in my experience, if you don't keep your code not just clean, but one step even more clean, then it will come back to haunt you pretty quickly, and life will suck, and you'll have twice the stuff to deal with then, rather than having used an amortized payout. and when i say clean, i also (especially) mean design and architecture. basically, as soon as you see any reason to refactor, you should. (although you have to know that you aren't just going down a blind alley of coding because you didn't stop for a little bit to think it through on paper first.) and wanting to be able to refactor quickly and easily and safely leads to all sorts of other interesting things you must do.

it can be the opposite of the one string you pull that unravels the sweater: if you have the correct bits in and working together, you get a leveraging/multiplying effect where the total is greater than the sum of the parts.

or so i think. it isn't like i've had the luxury of being in a situation where i really get to do that (not a belief people seem to have at work, and i have like zero free time for personal coding projects). have to think about how i can make a (drastic) change towards it.

hey, in case you were under the impression that i liked java or anything like that: so there's this thing where some people are starting to use "final" everywhere because it is supposed to help lead to better code.

there is so much wrong with that that it makes me want to cry. not that there is anything wrong with the desire to make better code, no, but that (a) anybody thinks "final" is enough and (b) that now you have even more ascii crap taking up space in your source code.

i mean, don't they get it? it all clearly indicates that the language has totally the wrong defaults. use Scala instead, or something. at least.

(irony: of course, i'm trying to use final more in my day job java code.)

something that kills me about google's approach to ui for reading netnews is that there are areas of the screen which are click-sensitive but which don't look any different than regular whitespace. to wit, if you click on the vast whitespace of the line that has the author's name, it collapses/expands that post. but i'm just trying to click so i can get the keyboard focus in firefox such that i can use the page down key to scroll. if google at least made the background color of that whole line different, that would suck a lot less.

firefox's download ui sometimes really kills me.

it is funny how you can think you understand something in Haskell, and in fact you even might be understanding some facet or fraction of it, but then you do something and run it through the compiler and it quickly makes a mockery of your pathetic minimal incomplete too touchy-feely gut so-called understanding.

i think that's the difference about the learning curve: in other languages you could just get by with what you already know, even though you don't totally know what is going on. whereas with Haskell it is a lot harder to just wing it, n'est-ce pas?

wow. i love open source. in the README, the first file i open to read to get a clue about how the undocumented system might work, "TODO: This file is outdated quite a bit."

i. detest. the sourceforge. ui.

i think i still have the email thread where i had that idea ten years ago. and did nothing with it.

i think they forgot just taking the damned paycheck. i mean, can you really call that loyalty, in a really great helpful useful sense?

old enough to have to trim ear hairs.

:-(

cia fbi nsa terrorists al qaeda middle east crypto export free speech civil rights rule of law torture top 1% owns everything electronic voting paper trail federal bailout 9/11 twa 800 jfk secret service wiretaps echelon democracy joke big brother newspeak privacy guilty until proven innocent facebook linkedin number of the beast.

i think the ending of the iron giant is bad melodrama, given that he can be a "gun" that could easily have done the dirty job from a distance. i mean, a plot hole you can drive a death star through.

(otherwise, i liked the movie. i even have it in my laserdisc collection.)

personally, i really rather despise this type of fantasy video game art. i mean, get a freaking artistic life. (yeah, in fact it is all just a matter of subjective taste, i'm sure the stuff i like would be seen as jejune by plenty of others.)

yay, the art of video games. truly.

cia fbi nsa terrorists al qaeda middle east crypto export free speech civil rights rule of law torture top 1% owns everything electronic voting paper trail federal bailout 9/11 twa 800 jfk secret service wiretaps echelon democracy joke big brother newspeak privacy guilty until proven innocent facebook linkedin number of the beast.

i wish i didn't suck at math. "I have an idea that the power of mathematics comes principally from the places where it succeeds in understanding two different things as aspects of the same thing. For example, why is group theory so useful? Because it understands transformations of objects (say, rotations of a polyhedron) and algebraic operations as essentially the same thing. If you have a hard problem about one, you can often make it into an easier problem about the other one. Similarly analytic geometry transforms numerical problems into geometric problems and back again. Most often the geometry is harder than the numerical problem, and you use it in that direction, but often you go in the other direction instead."

(and, related, calculus for dummies.)

reason #666 to hate Java. yup. see, also, equals() and toString().

a blog comment feature i think i now require is the ability to track the thread via automatically send email updates. ahem.

in the long run, i think caching and just-in-time (vs. haskellian lazy) approaches are actually quite ossifying and thus dangerous paths to go down. i mean, unless they are done really well.

i'm going to go out on a limb and say that sometimes, people go overboard.

ok, i still wrestle with the question of: in a language that supports unsigned number types, should they be used? my personal knee jerk reaction is "of course, because ideally they provide static rather than runtime error checking" but then other people will say "actually, you are doomed to screw yourself because it is all just bit patterns, and somebody is going to send you -1 and you are going to confuse that with MAX_UINT" (e.g. in C/++).

so the question is: how to get correct static checking and prevention of bad negative values? the question should of course be generalized to: how to get correct static checking and prevention of bad out-of-any-particular-range values?

is it all down to a good dependent type system?

i need this book.

gmail ui sucks. they tend to put up modal dialog boxes when they could instead have just put an error notice in the page itself, thereby reducing the number of clicks required to get back to accomplishing things.

while Hewitt has gotten some shit for what happened with Wikipedia, nevertheless he's contributed a lot of interesting food for thought, n'est-ce pas?

ooh, look, a train wreck!

oh, great, another recruiter who wants to talk to me about a Java job they have. ha ha ha ha, whimper.

every time i think about Java's @Override implementation vs. the way C# does it, i get really mad about how stupid Java is all over again.

drag-and-drop in Google Reader is sort of an Epic Usability Fail, as far as i can see. haytering!

oh, speaking of bad: does it come in waves or something?

hey, it's true.

so. dogged.

bring out The Statistics.

ui sucks / is hard to get right. the big hierarchical right-click menus in Eclipse on this MacBook Pro go away if you click on a non-entry e.g. whitespace, or a grayed-out entry. that sucks a lot because it can actually take a long time to get to the place in the menu that you want, and if you click off by some small # of pixels then it dismisses w/out doing what you wanted. in that case i'd rather nothing happen -- the menu not go away.

but then, there's the other case where you are a newbie and somehow you've ended up with some god-awful horrible evil large menu system suddenly up and in your face, and you don't want it, and you want to be able to click somewhere to safely get rid of it.

i mean, i assume things suck they way they do because somebody was optimizing for the latter? otherwise, if they had no good reasoning, whoever did this is just a jerk.

worst: not even seeing the errors as errors.

less worst: seeing the errors.

less less worst: talking about what to do to prevent that particular (class of) error(s) in the future; maybe actually implementing the ideas.

even less worst: establishing things ahead of time to constrain the chances of errors in the first place.

all i'm saying is, don't do things when key people are on vacation, if you do not already have a process which has been vetted to make sure you can do things when key people are on vacation, without having things all effed up in the end.

talk about fessing up and being a mensch. right on.

all i'm saying is, i do not think it will get any better short of massive voting, because there is too much money and too much stupidity / turning a blind eye involved. money grubbing humanity is creating the torture prison system with such glee.

to actually make money in the real world, you have to cut a few corners now and then. unfortunately generating a never-ending feed of lots of nice stuff for comp.risks.

pretty much all video games, especially causal ones, have horrible ui for just getting into the gameplay itself. it completely blows my mind that even great folks (e.g. nitrome) perpetuate that crap.

ah, no wonder i kinda hate python. and, apparently, javascript.

adp (401k) sucks. not so much automatic data processing as automatic screwing the customer with horrible usability both on the web, and via phone.

ha ha, well, in these tough economic times, at least craigslist says they're hiring.

i think anybody who changes the look and feel of a login page is asking for trouble, because in this day and age of one person having lots of online accounts it is often only by visual memory cues that i can recall what my password is. so if the page changes i lose that recall.

for example: the linkedin front page doesn't have a quick way to log in. you have to click once to get to the login page. so that sucks for returning customers. although i assume they are making a carefully considered decision to try to make it as convenient and simple and unconfusing as possible for new people to sign up: they don't want to risk having a 2nd set of text fields be confusing and thus risk losing a potential sucker.

i coulda been a contender.

hello? can you say, "facebook"? (and linkedin, and etc.)

is it funny that the place that does various kinds of testing, including some usability in the mix, has bad usability with its accoutrements?

personally, i find it in some sense hysterically funny that people still do the bad things which have previously been clearly documented as bad things to avoid, including sending millions of dollars down the toiler.

my current hayte-of-the-moment is blogs that have some template that makes the text be something other than just black-on-white. i see lots of blogs with light gray on white. really fun to read, that.

step right up! ass hats a plenty!

it seems to me that most any web site is living proof of the old adage that "The Best is the Enemy of The Basically Crappy but Ship it Anyway". freaking linkedin's ui sucks. freaking facebook's ui sucks. for me, at any rate.

so, like, what was so wrong with Erlang? or, now, Clojure? (or Haskell's light-weight threads, etc.)

this is the kind of thing that is an indictment of every single person involved in technology: i'm subscribed to various yahoo groups via my gmail address, and often the messages come through with really fubar'd text wrapping, making reading things something of a serious headache. and heaven only knows why this is, or how to fix it.

fanning the flames of hayte!

wow, does gmail suck. i'm scrolled down to the bottom of the page of subjects, and click the checkmark of a message and then delete it. and then the scroll position jumps all the way back to the top of the page. yeah. thanks.

my lcd monitor at home sucks a lot when it comes to trying to connect video cables to it. so i ended up leaning it face down on something while wrestling with the hateful industrial design back there.

which means i now have an apparently permanent gray smudgy streak about an inch and a half long on the top middle of the monitor.

<expletive>!!

i simply cannot fathom how firefox 3.0.5 could do such a completely broken horrible wrong evil bad stupid job of dealing with the history. invariably the thing i want is nowhere to be found until i laboriously open up the full history and look through that.

all i'm saying is, any url where the main part of the domain name is "cmubuggy" is perhaps asking for too much trouble with typos.

maybe it does, but i think eclipse doesn't: i can do (on a mac) cmd-O and it shows me a list of methods in the current class. i can then use wildcards to type in an interactive search query string. but it is only for the name, and doesn't seem to give me a way to see things where the signature involves a query string. since some code bases which will remain nameless have inconsistent naming e.g. some getter methods don't start with "get", searching by method name isn't really always that useful.

maybe if you can't Fight the Power, at least you can help Monitor it?

i wonder if we shouldn't develop and mandate hydroponics.

an exercise i like to do sometimes to depress myself, and if i'm lucky then leverage that into learning to not be such a wasteful jerk: take some time some day to really fix in one's mind the here-and-now of it all. the feeling and sense that Right Now is really real, and the future doesn't yet exist and even next week seems so far off. then, later, in the future which comes to be the now, try to think back to that feeling and realize how utterly fleeting and easily lost Now really is, and how time just flows through our fingers and we cannot do anything to alter that. then, try to think about spending more time with family and friends. we're all dust soon enough.

as an aside, i used to find time to be moving more slowly. i think it was because (a) i was younger and (b) my schedule was very loose and (c) at the time i was practicing tai chi chuan (very poorly, i'm not making some i'm a cool tao person kind of claim) and on occasion it really did have a good meditative affect and i was in no mental rush. i do think the more one feels rushed and in a hurry, the more subjectively time rushes past. being able to stop and smell the roses does prolong the Now a bit.

in other words: modern 1st world life sucks, when it comes to appreciating time?

spaulding gray, rip, iirc once said he wanted to make a 30 second tv advertisement where it was, like, him on a chair in a blank white room, and all he says is, over the full 30 seconds, "take. ... your. ... time."

opera sorta sucks: if you only have the transfers window open, it doesn't have a home button on it. so you have to laboriously open another tab and then close the transfers one.

i wish there were something that was better than gmail.

so i'm reading a thread in gmail. i reply to one of the messages in the middle. when i'm done sending, now gmail scrolls me to the bottom of the thread, showing my message. i have to then manually go back to figure out where i was in the thread.

hayte.

oh well. it turn out that my experiences with burger king (not that i eat much in the way of fast food, really) have never been all that good. i think mcdonald's does a good job of having cleaner nicer stores, and actually overall better food. of course, i'd mostly rather go to in+out.

"What Cook and Jobs have in common is a passion for making Apple products the best, the ability to set high standards and an incredible level of attention to details."

i. am. still. throwing. up. in. my. mouth.

i mean, sure, their stuff is for the most part way better than the alternatives, but relative improvement doesn't mean they've hit some absolute measure of best. especially when there are glaringly bad things which they don't fix (although there could be the excuse that since the errors have been in there for ever, they aren't going to change it now for fear of freaking out users).

band name! very scary precedent.

dammit. i wish people would stop stealing my ideas.

the other day / i saw a bear / up in the woods

er, no, wait

the other day i was driving to work and there was a car that had some contraption mounted on its roof, something that looked like it was probably one of those getups for doing the amazon / google street view thing.

so, of course, the person driving it was driving like an asshole, veering across lanes of traffic at the last second to get out of an exit i guess they didn't want to be in, and fun stuff like that. awesome.

maybe They need to incorporate multiple passes combined based off of LADAR information.

yeah, at least prohibition hasn't hit the lambda calculus. yet.

wow. finally, somebody making a relational database, go figure!

hm, so there's another benefit of lisp (for some value of lisp). i wonder how much that benefit is available in other languages which purport to have some OOPyness to them?

now you know: CLOS == The Invisibles.

mmm, tablizer would be proud.

(is it funny or sad that since the term "misintegration" was used early on, i expected the author was an Objectivist? which, per Ms. Anderson, in fact they turned out to be.)

yeah, i had that happen to me once in academia. here's a word of advice to managers: when it comes to any kind of reward, be it money or vacation or whatever, don't say it unless you follow through. always under-promise and over-deliver in that regard.

i'm sure there's a reason for the stupid-at-first-blush api, and i wish the docs said what it was.

i want a version of the states of USA.

i can only hope that life on mars has the same political impact as The Watchmen.

a firefox plug-in i think somebody should create (although in reality it needs to be something for IE, given the audience demographics): it automatically checks what you are reading and notices if you are reading something which has been debunked so that you don't end up (as a co-worker, not me -- really! -- has done) talking about how interesting it is that everything is derived from the Romans' horses' asses. (did i get the punctuation right there?)

pardon my french, but: holy crap! somebody official with a clue?! i am going to have to forward this to my senators.

i think mac os sucks stinky dirty buttocks when it comes to backwards compatibility. like, how often do you see some new app out there that doesn't work with the slightly older version of the os you have? <expletive>. even windows isn't as bad, i feel.

oh wow. what with Sneak King and now Whopper Sacrifice, i think i need to buy stock in, and eat more, BK.

i like this overview of Kanban etc.

i pretty much only restart the macbook pro i use at work when it locks up (which seems to be at least once a week). so it is nice that eclipse is a steaming pile of poo that doesn't save my preferences (things like turning "wrap" on in text searches; what files i have open) saved. so i have to spend time getting it back to the state it was in for days before the machine had to be hard-power-cycled.

i don't particularly want to buy myself a cryogenic burial, but sometimes i think it would be great to have a service where i could donate $10 towards other people getting the cryogenic lottery ticket, for the long-term good of society.

wow, ok, it explains a good bit of what i find hateful in most video games.

oh, right, i'm so sure that not everything that gets awards around CES time is directly applied to porn.

"This is proved by a straightforward application of Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games."

i almost laughed out loud.

is there a truly relational database engine anywhere? that doesn't suck? that has real support? that is a real product? with a real future?

of course, on the other hand, apparently SQL can form queries that the real relational approach cannot, so don't go completely dissing SQL just yet?

from the instances i've seen of the use of the term "calculus", i find it hard to know what it means. like, the "relational calculus" doesn't have anything to do with infinitesimals or limits, does it?

ah hah, i guess there is infinitesimal calculus, there is a logical calculus. i think i would like to further the cause by inventing and proselytizing (wow i couldn't spell that to save my life) some yet further calculus. maybe it would be a calculus of pudding, or some such.

rough stab, please comment. assuming some # of applications which could be made up of some # of components, some important things to think about in making decisions about trade-offs:

• shared (library, branched, web service, whatever) vs. independent (duplicated, unrelated, whatever) code.



• implementing a new feature (forward looking, in some sense).



• fixing a bug (looking backward, sorta).



• number of apps which need the change (does the bug affect all apps which use the component? does the feature have to go into all apps?).



• time to go through QA and out to production.



• quality of your software development process (planning, management, quality, speed).



• deadlines.



• ability to throw money at the problem.

could we please do away with all these earth-bound rape-gaia limited-lifespan approaches to energy? and just get the solar power satellite systems up and running? i mean, <expletive>.

seriously, now: if behaviour and subtyping/classing is evil then which OO language doesn't suck?

it is kind of funny how mutability is so bad from certain perspectives, and yet we've been la la la blase about it all for so long, from the imperative perspective.

ok, getting something out the door so you can get customers is presumably the most important thing. but the coupling that seems to inevitably come along with that is so evil. being able to keep cohesion and non-coupling as high priorities offers a huge ROI in the long run, i strongly feel.

yeah, take that, you Agile bastards.

i really don't understand how spandex comics are still all the rage.

google reader has two things in its ui that have the label "All Items". and yet they are very different widgets. it is pretty darned annoying.

oh crap. really, i have no idea what they are talking about. cough. splutter.

i'm ocd anal freakish enough that i think when you write inequality tests in source code you should always write it with the 'smaller' value on the left. like, (foo >= bar) just doesn't read well to me and is kinda confusing -- i have to explicitly think about it every time i look at it, whereas (bar <= foo) just reads really easily. [maybe it is due to too much Haskell and Lispy things that have an overabundance of funky operators like => --> etc.]

i think i know why the ETs aren't contacting us -- what they are waiting for. i think first we have to make anything which has a headphone jack include a system for making sure you don't suddenly blow out your ears due to some shitty volume control user interface. like, you know, on any laptop ever made.

[oh and they tried to contact us via blogger, but it told them they had: conflicting edits. more than once.]

the lactose intolerant: persona non-gratin.

i really detest those soft switches on laptops that inevitably don't work right when you want them to, because the OS is freaking out doing something else, and then 45 seconds later all your inputs suddenly get processed.

this is usability?

this is progress?

maybe it is competitors sending the spam (or just random phishers), but there are lots of things in my gmail spam folder where if i'd actually seen them i would boycott the relevant companies as much as possible! e.g. getting spam about "ihop pancakes for life" tells me i effing hate ihop. ya know?

programming language syntax is funny. when the compiler doesn't give good helpful errors you can more easily excuse things like being required to put ";" at the end of lines. but when the compiler and figure out that you probably just forgot that, and tells you that, maybe you begin to wonder, "well, now, if it knows enough to know what i meant, then why the hell do i have to actually go through that hoop all the damned time? why not get rid of the ';'s i have to enter all the time?" and then maybe you end up with haskell, python, etc. indentation-sensitive syntax, which in some ways is neat and in other ways sucks (copy and paste, in particular).

'Ten seconds into the pitch, she had grabbed our attention and told us exactly what she wanted to write about. The second line of her pitch was her thesis, and we all understood it immediately. Sarah continued, "I am a female high-functioning alcoholic, which is an underrepresented class of alcoholics. We are harder to identify because our external successes mask an underlying demon. I was able to drink alcoholically for 12 year and still managed to graduate with honors from college, get my master's degree and then to excel professionally as a therapist."'

wow, i wish i had been drinking whatever she was, when i was in school.

[blogger: conflicting edits.]

oh, goody, some quizzes i can fail.

even if i were a speed reader, there wouldn't be enough time.

it kinda bugs me that high-profile digital calendars like the google calendar are so ignorant of the world around us. like, it doesn't seem to put in standard holidays, and it certainly doesn't put in phases of the moon. technology is a chance to reconnect, but often we just end up disconnecting while thinking that we're improving ourselves.

i got a copy of universal principles of design for xmas and it is really neat! one thing that bugs me, however, is that i think they say "iterative" when they mean "incremental" development.

ah, yes, the infamous five horsemen of the parallel programming apocalypse! w00ty.

yes, your code probably sucks, too.

"The examples in this paper are based on Haskell, though any lazy functional language incorporating the Hindley/Milner type system would work as well."

you know. because there are so many of them.

if i were filthy rich, i think it would be fun to make modern high-performance versions of cool classic boatscars.

product idea i'd (maybe) pursue if i had any disposable income -- if you do it, please send me a free copy? so i have a laptop and i'd like to play fun games on it, but i don't have a nice controller setup and playing robotron-esque games with they keyboard is just pathetic. now, this here laptop has a "card bus" or whatever the hell that slot is for laptop peripherals and i don't have any whatever-slot-it-is peripherals, so how about a slim sleek dual analog and wireless (bluetooth i guess?) game controller that would fit into that slot, thus being something stupendously convenient for moi?

wow. and now he's all about things like dependent types an 'at?! quite the journey.

i guess impact munitions could make a good band name.

" For example, subjects in a test were prone to give an obviously incorrect answer if all the other subjects (actors, in this case) gave the wrong answer. Having a lone dissenter seemed to break the power of this kind of sway, even if the dissenter gave a different wrong answer or was portrayed as incompetent.

The Brafmans cite the example of “The Devil’s Advocate,” giving the origin of the phrase as arising from the selection of each new pope, where one cardinal is appointed to argue against the nomination, simply to ensure that a countering viewpoint is heard when all others might be in favour of the nomination. This type of dissenting voice, even if not convincing, is enough to break the power of sway and draw out any dissenting viewpoints which might otherwise go unspoken."

chrome is supposed to be this awesome, robust browser, right? and it is from google, right? i'm using iron, which is based off of chrome, right? so i'd expect it to sorta work with google properties, like blogger, right? and to not just freak out on some javascript, apparently, from blogger's ui, right?

to quote kids in the hall: there's so much evil in the world!

ok so maybe processing for java is better than anything else that is around for java? but i have to say that overall, while it is apparently certainly Good Enough and Better Than The Other Options, it makes me sad that it isn't all it could be. i wonder how much of it is due to the nature of Java -- i think things like Pan and Fran and all those Haskellian takes on image handling are more interesting, although of course they aren't in any form that could get the foothold that processing does, so there ya go. in particular, it bugs me that things in processing are so hard-wired, like the filters on an image, rather than having a nice higher-order approach to things so i could simply and easily plug in my own little filters or whatever. some day, if i have the resources, i'd very much like to get some folks together to make a more Dream version of pan/fran+processing+etc.

the more i think about it, the more angry i get with everything other than Mac OS X's Spotlight. Windows XP's search sucks ass, often missing things, and is slow. And my experience with SUSE-Gnome recently (i'm guessing it is Beagle?) was stunningly bad! like, there's an app that shows up in the list of apps, but when i searchf or that name i don't get the app in the results, i only see docs about the app being found. i haven't tried the Google Desktop Search stuff a whole lot for Windows, and i don't know that it is available for Linux. but holy heck, batman, why do people even bother to put in these so-called "features" that suck mighty phallus so much? it is to weep!

argh! i got the processing o'reilly book for xmas. for the most part it is well worth reading, to get an idea of what neat visualization stuff one can do with processing. having said all that, and not to denigrate processing (that's a whole 'nother story...), i'd like to point out that the book has some really painful bad issues. the first example is showing zip codes, and the choice for rendering things is awful: the matching codes are drawn in white on a black background, with the non-matching codes being drawn as well! in yellow! so they look almost identical! there are a zillion things one could do that would be less stupid bad unusable than that. a subsequent example is showing how to plot some data over an image of the usa, and uses circles of various sizes to show magnitudes. that's a no-no, since the human brain processes area (and worse, volume) of circles in a way that makes it hard for us to really understand the differences between two circles, and one of the main things to get out from visualization is an insight into "compared to what?" so that is a great way to lead people down the garden path. even later, there is an example of doing a line chart, and various ways of drawing it are explored. none of which, i dare say, are how i would ever have chosen to draw it. the most interesting ones are the ones with the area-under-the-curve filled in, but the choice of color and contrast is way too heavy imho.

it all just sums up to making me wonder if Ben Fry really has a clue about visualization at all. ok, ok, it's all just me being a Tufte-Fan-Boy-Brainwashed-Weenie-Looser, i guess.

wildtangent sucked ass. unity looks a bit better, but they still have some seriously pathetic usability issues. maybe it is just too hard a nut to crack, having something be really portable. like, on this macbook pro running the unity browser plug-in, it fails to capture the mouse pointer so as i'm trying to look around in a 3d world and click e.g. to shoot, it can end up just clicking on another application's window, and then i'm no longer in the game at all. so that's quite impressive.

another thing that kills me about Java is the painful mish-mash of expressions and statements, so that in places where i'd like to be able to use the succinct ternary ?, i instead have to write a huge if-else (i refuse to write them without {}'s, and given how bad the Java debugger is (vs. say the C# one) things really do need to be on their own lines).

java == teh suck.

yes, sometimes you really do need something like printf debugging / logging. it would be neat if i could mark a method as to-be-logged, and then at runtime when that method was executing the system would dump out the lines of source as they are evaluating along with the values of the variables there. in some configurable way (e.g. to deal with not getting stuck logging some variable that is the root of some huge network of references).

[blogger: conflicting edits, don'tchyaknow?]

i know i should really appreciate experimental games, but it bugs the piss outta me when their usability is finnicky.

oh, crap, i might have to get that.

ok, ok, it isn't that i hate java, which i do, it is that i don't think i'm allowed to try to make use of things which make java suck less. i guess i should see if i can go fight that fight?

...after going to look around at the available libs, i think my conclusion is that the free ones are all kinda lame (either pre-1.0 or apparently not-very-maintained), and that the real answer is to use Scala.

poop. back to just simply, "i hate java".

since i kind of hate dealing with stupid OS portability issues while developing things (as in: different devs working on the same project losing time due to using different OSes), i do wonder if having e.g. an OS written in Java would be possibly useful, because then everything could be really portable and consistent.

ha ha.

ha!

whoo, i crack myself up.

why do all 'granola' bars taste so freaking bad? cliff bars are like concrete; this luna chocolate bar tastes like fish; etc.

how? hard? can? it? really? be? to make something that doesn't suck, here, folks?

ha ha. this macbook pro has a back-lit keyboard. there are control keys on the keyboard to change the brightness. however, if it is dim enough, then you can't see which key is the one for brightening the back-lighting. of course.

my personal preference would be to find a way to keep it generic by throwing money at the problem, as it were. so instead of hiring somebody who can e.g. manually optimize their source code's internal data reference network, i'd rather try to use an in-memory database for that and hire folks who can optimize that db engine. maybe it is too much of a dope-smoking dream rather than anything realistic.

it kills me when web sites that take phone numbers force you to supply them in some hard-coded format. like i enter 123 555 1212 and it barfs because i didn't enter 123-555-1212.

die already.

[blogger: conflicting edits]

Iron (and presumably Chrome/ium) doesn't handle Gmail well at all, ironically. like, right-clicking on links in email messages doesn't bring up the correct menu, that would let you open the link in a new tab. instead you get a menu that is all about the iframe. suck!

smoke. more. dope.

ok, creepy!

i <heart> brian eno.

"some of them quite disturbing."

suck!

blogger sucks.

i really think that if you are creating software that will change over time then you do yourself a big favour to expend energy on using something other than hard references and collections in your code to deal with the relationships among data. that's because the definition of the right relationships are likely to change, and in the best situation your code would be flexible and not coupled to the previous idea of the right relationships.

so, like, do you run an in-memory relational database? do you avoid OO and use FP instead? hm...

[blogger: failed to post for some stupid reason. here's a bunch of information about the failure. no, we do not apparently automatically register the failure and instead tell you to jump through stupid <expletive>ing hoops to get the error reported. because, i guess, we suck. "bX-2hcpgd"]

[update: the kicker is that the posts are eventually going through but i'm still getting the error as a result of posting.]

oh, just dandy. not only is the economy sucking, but if this gets out i really will have to find a new line of work.

[blogger: conflicting edits.]

(although it does give me ideas for a better ARG :-)

testing is dope. but it is good to think about getting it just right.

time to lean? time to read. (no, i don't have such time.)

i've said it before and i'll say it again: i'm pretty sure your logging system sucks. (ok, ok, i haven't really researched it that much, but i haven't heard of anything that has the basic things i think are required to avoid ending up with a logging system that is a pain in the ass to really use e.g. for debugging printfs.)

oh, sure, blame the user. but i think that Gmail's user interface somehow leads me to often Reply To All when i really didn't want to. doesn't happen as much with other mail ui's i've used. i think.

some days, i wonder if nobody has really ever gotten it through their heads: "coupling? BAD!!!! cohesion? GOOD!"

all i'm saying is: every team is a fragile thing in the beginning that needs to be nurtured, and you can't just e.g. assume that because previous teams with some of those people worked well that the new team will also work well. no, in fact, there's plenty of evidence that it can all actually go to hell.

(i think this factors in to the old adage that adding people to a team e.g. to get through crunch deadlines is at best a risky proposition.)

following the pyramid analogy from Mistakes Were Made, i am definitely on the base side that says people who use Snap are complete and utter asshats! ahem. in a nice way. (can we kiss and make up?)

given that i like Agile, i think going back to the Kanban roots is an interesting path of study. e.g. you got your kanban in my scrum.

(the study should include the fact that it is spelled Kanban, not Kaban, ha ha, ahem. :-)

in other words, "anybody going faster than me is crazy, and anybody going slower than me is an idiot. yay me!" (actually, for the most part i agree with the post.)

man, do i hate Yahoo!

nice how there isn't any "get security updates right bloody now!" button in the software update utility in suse-gnome, only ui for setting what periodicity the update checking will follow.

suse linux 11.1 running gnome whatever-version-comes-with-suse (2.24.1, apparently) is not what i would call a wonderful experience with respect to usability. sad. there are some very basic errors, and there are more esoteric badnesses. for example, the equivalent of the windows start menu in gnome uses buttons where it should use tabs, as far as i can tell. for another example, the software installation utility says brasero is installed, but when i use the desktop search feature to look for that keyword, it doesn't find the application, it only finds the docs. there's more lameness like that; it really doesn't feel like a system that would make any sense to a clueless newbie. i mean, i've been using computers, building computers (not in the woz apple 2 sense, of course), installing and maintaining my own home linux servers, etc. for decades now, and this whole suse-gnome thing is just kinda confusing to me. i guess some folks would say "use KDE!" but i've used it in the past and really got offended at their usability mistakes, so i'm a little loathe to try them again. devil you know (i've used ubuntu gnome a fair bit) and all that.

maybe i will start a new blog, entitled No Shit?!

it isn't so much the technology that i hate. it is all the people involved in making it so, i think.

wow. every time i have to do any sort of manipulation of Java Collections, i feel this rise in my blood pressure because they apparently just don't have a freaking clue that having only a mutable approach really sucks. a fun kicker is that clone() isn't supported by Collection (so much for programming to a nice generic interface: Java really screws that whole pooch, and how).

(not to mention how Collection doesn't generically support things like removeAll, retainAll, etc. not to mention the whole badness that is the optional operations in the interfaces, so you might end up with UnsupportedOperationException runtime exceptions.)

code sucks. code that has the suck hidden behind language-required boilerplate and obfuscation sucks even more. yay java.

man, i hate batteries. nobody wants to fix the problem, i would guess. so they can sell more batteries.

sure wish i had time to take advantage of somebody kindly offering to save me some time. of course, with my touch, it wouldn't work, anyway.

oh, hey, screw you, ah hah. ha. ahem.

i love how, as far as i can tell, VTA does not have transfer tickets. that is bullshit.

wow. DVDStyler managed to create a disc that was more wrong than what i got from DVD Flick. truly impressive work, there!

oh. of course. it is all so self-evident and usable. not. (but maybe, just maybe, it will at least actually 'work' in the end in the sense of getting a dvd burned i can send to grandparents that will actually work in their regular dvd player. unlike what i got from the DVD Flick program.)

there's some lesson about humanity to be found in the study of windows application installers. the way they all are sorta similar, yet different enough so that the overall experience in sum total over the years is mostly just one of annoyance rather than comfortable ease of use. (of course, i guess one could be an apologist by saying, "yeah, well, at least it isn't rpm".)

oh and don't forget the web sites that have a possibly interesting dvd app, but their site is designed to make it hard to actually find the <expletive>amned download link.

i was hopeful with Video DVD Maker Free... until i got the Microsoft Visual C++ Debug Library "Debug Assertion Failed!" overly detailed dialog box telling me that, in fact, the software sucks ass.

i love how nobody knows how to do user interface. like, DVDStyler has to go and make its own version of file opening UI that just plain sucks ass. why do people think they need to "innovate" in these areas, as opposed to, you know, maybe just expending their energy on making something that doesn't suck? i do not grok the thinking here.

it is days like this that make me kinda wish Apple was the dictatorship, and none of us ever had to deal with crappy windows. as much as i detest the "iApp" stuff, i have to believe that iDVD would actually be able to make an <expletive> dvd that actually freaking works in a regular dvd player, with a regular dvd menu, and 'at. because the <expletive>ing stuff i've been trying out on my winxp machine (DVD Flick, NTI CD & DVD Maker) only serve to prove that the windows ecosystem couldn't creatively make its way out of a freaking paper bag for less than $250.

it is the kind of thing that is so insulting it kinda drives me into a blind rage.

and how it commits the fun ui sin of having some horrible error dialog (not enough space on drive C to generate the ISO) box that doesn't explain what options you have within the program. so only an hour later after dicking around outside the program (uninstalling things, deleting misc files) do i notice the other part of the ui that lets me fix it the way i wanted to (write the bloody ISO to bloody drive D).

and how it seems that it verifies at the same rate it burned, rather than going faster for the verify stage. genius. fun.

also, like, uh, how the disc doesn't play in my apex dvd player. oh the fun is just beginning, i can tell!

like, uh, how DVD Flick doesn't explain that if you click the options to eject the disc when done and to verify, it will eject after burning, before verifying, and so the verify won't run that night, but be stupidly waiting until you get up in the morning to find it just sitting there.

augh. i'm trying to use DVD Flick to author a dvd. it kinda bites. like, the ui is just sorta not smooth. i get what i pay for. any ideas for other good free apps to try here?

computers hate me, i hate computers. now whenever i try to do something with my baby movies (trying to burn a dvd to send to grandparents), the dvd apps open slowly, and when i try to open a video in them they are super slow. the hard disk isn't spinning much at all. wtf?

dubman for virtualdub needs help: when adding jobs, it doesn't give you a way to easily use a job you already defined to initialize the new one. so that's a lot of lameness. yes, it is open source so yes, i should go find the time to fix it. but it still seems odd to me that whoever wrote it never realized that would be, like, a majorly missing feature.

(i ended up making a couple of jobs in there, saving the file, examining it in emacs, ripping out a template segment, using bash/seq/for/sed to generate instances from the template, and pasted those back on to the end of the job file. way easier than hacking the java sources to dumb, er, dubman. so while the virtualdub world is a little on the cheesy side when it comes to UI, i have to say it certainly seems to get the job done. there are a lot of supposedly great free video tools i've tried in the past that just utterly failed to work at all, so i'm overall happy now.)

the hl2 mod "coastline to atmosphere" kinda sucks. even more so when it crashes.

does she hesitate to call IceCube the Top Gun?

don't fret: help is available.

"Yakuza 2 (Sega, PS2) The underrated and overlooked gem of Sega's current development efforts returns with another compellingly adult and sophisticated tale -- with visceral punchy-kicky and unmatched verisimilitude, particularly for a PS2 title."

hey, if you want verisimilitude, i can come around to your place and punch you in the gut for twenty bucks, buddy.

argh. so i upgraded the version of subclipse, and while it does seem faster and more robust (yay, thanks!!) on the other hand it seems to have taken some steps backward with respect to usability. to wit, certain things which used to Just Work now put up a Pretty Scary Dialog Box instead. i pretty much just click the OK button and get what i want, but the fact that they added that horrible evil thing in the process is not, imho, good.

i need to figure out where to send a dollar, or two.

you gotta love them internetz: "It wasn’t pretty, but I did end up choking a guy and hitting him in the kidney a few times."

word: "The problem with excessive navel-gazing is that many men never move beyond the pondering period to actually taking action. Life interrupts their thoughts, and they get distracted by other things. Then, 6 months later they realize they haven’t changed and go into another navel-gazing funk about the reasons why. Quit over-analyzing and get to work."

let him know that you'd buy a copy, too.

skateboarding CO₂ is a crime.

i love how corporations seem to inevitably design software that uses my personal information when i don't want it to, and doesn't use my personal information when i do want it to. for example, i'm logged in to gmail and do a search for starbucks in google maps, and then want to send a particular hit to some folks via email -- but when i use the 'send the map point' feature it does not have the email address auto-complete-from-my-address-book enabled. so that sucks butt mightily.

also? Iron (and presumably Chrome) doesn't have a button to clear download history the way Firefox does. also? Iron (and presumably Chrome) doesn't have a way to throttle download speeds. also? yadda yadda yadda software sucks.

here i am in 2009 (today ha ha) and the suse 11.1 net installer doesn't bloody well know how to retry a failed download connection?! so i have to manually go in to my office and check up on it and click retry every hour or something since my DSL is flaky? i mean, aren't computers supposed to help reduce manual labor?!

i kinda hate all game reviewers. like, i try to find a good hl2 mod and i read that Das Roboss is oh so great. uh... not. thanks for telling me to waste all that time getting it downloaded and installed and even a little bit played. hayte.

i guess i am too ocd or something, but Iron (and presumably therefore Chrome, too?) doesn't stop loading a page when i hit the Esc key -- at least for some pages, like planetphillip. so the bloody circular loading animation in the tab title is going and going and going and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!! make it STOP!

"The Suffering - Sponsored by the US Air Force." (it's a video game.)