From: Yoz Grahame Date: 07:18 on 18 Dec 2006 Subject: Firefucked 2.0 Oh go on, Firefox! Please freeze solid on me again! It's only been, what, four times today? I can't tell if it's your core code that's causing the problem or one of the extensions I've installed in an attempt to stave off other kinds of hatefulness. And I won't be able to tell unless I play the thrilling all-day game of systematically uninstalling them one by one. I love that game so much! Please, never implement anything remotely sensible like partitioned execution environments for Javascript! Because that would... wait, you *have* implemented that? But you haven't bothered using it for extensions? Genius! Thank you, Firefox! I love you, Firefox! ... Firefox?
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 19:09 on 26 Jan 2006 Subject: Yet another Mac hate Be warned: The next smug Mac owner I see who publicly makes the mistaken statement that lovely shiny OS X is a whole world more stable than that Blue Screening crock of shit XP is getting this fucking useless Mac Mini (currently beachballing its little heart out, yet again, while I type this on my XP-running laptop) shoved down their latte-scalded throat. One of the main causes of the problem is this Mac running with "only" 512MB of RAM (an amount that I've happily used on Windows for twice the amount of work). We've had a 1GB stick sitting in the office for two weeks, but can we get it installed? Can we bollocks. Reason: Can't get the fucking super-small white object of desire open. Bought a putty knife as recommended by the interblogs - putty knife not thin enough to get into submolecular-sized gap in casing. Putty knife will be finding new home in the behind of Jonathan Ive or the next member of his team that crosses my path. -- Yoz, author of the upcoming Apple-switch memoir, "A Day At The Race Conditions"
From: Yoz Grahame
Date: 17:42 on 24 Mar 2004
Subject: Visio redux
As my time with Visio has continued I've started finding nuggets of
consistency within Visio operation that have reduced the resulting
irritation to the point where I'm actually getting some semi-decent work
done with it in not too much time. Today I produced a bit of design
where I was actually able to sit back with a contented and probably smug
smile on my face and think to myself: "You know, that's actually quite a
nice bit of work. I like that."
And then I hit Save.
Visio popped up a little warning to the effect that my file "rule
gui.vsd" had become corrupted somehow, and that it couldn't be saved,
but that I might be able to salvage my work from "~rule gui.vsd" and
that I should also close Visio as soon as possible.
The question of how the file had become corrupt despite having loaded
fine at the start of the session and Visio being the only program to
have touched it was knocking at the side of my brain, but I was far too
busy worrying about rescuing the data to notice. Fortunately, after
making a copy of the ~ file ("Copy of ~rule gui.vsd", yes, okay, I just
used Explorer) and quitting Visio, the new file loaded up just fine with
all of my work.
And so I was going to just write this one off to random weirdness until
I tried deleting the old "rule gui.vsd" and renaming the new one back to
that.
Now, when I double click on "rule gui.vsd" to start Visio with the file,
I get:
"Visio cannot open the file because it's not a Visio file."
When I undo the renaming operation in Explorer and double-click the file
(now reverted to "Copy of ~rule gui.vsd") again, it loads up just fine.
And I really was starting to get on with Visio, too.
-- Yoz
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 16:59 on 16 Mar 2004 Subject: Visio I know I don't really need to say much more than "Visio", but we only got acquainted a couple of weeks back and I really did think that we were going to be, if not friends, then at least mutually agreeable to a beneficial and productive working arragement, and not that I would be playing BLOODY MOUSE-CLICK RUSSIAN ROULETTE EVERY TIME I TRY AND DO SOMETHING AS WILD AND DARING AS TRYING TO SELECT A SHAPE ON THE PAGE. You have a shape on the page, right, and it's sitting atop a bunch of other, larger shapes, and you just want to select it. That's all. You don't want to select any of the ones underneath, or any of the ones to the left, or whatever. Nor do you want to edit the text of the shape, because if you did YOU'D BE USING THE BLOODY TEXT TOOL NOT THE POINTER BECAUSE IT'S WHAT THE TEXT TOOL IS FOR AND SO IF YOU HIT SOMETHING WITH THE POINTER YOU DON'T EXPECT TO BE FUCKING EDITING TEXT, DO YOU? But the crux of the matter is that, if you do want to select that shape, it takes N clicks, with N being *a different value every single time*. So you just keep clicking and clicking and eventually you select it but you're into the rhythm of clicking and you do one too many and now you're selecting the wrong thing again. So you have to start over. Nnnnnnggggg. Plus, a whole load of other rants about the uselessness of the Windows UI template set (a couple of the widgets are ghostable, but only a couple, so if you want a whole set of widgets ghosted you're SOL because only a third of them can be), the thing never remembering what I want my text defaults to be, et bloody cetera. Is there a better way of mocking up Windows UI nice and fast without going slowly insane? Anyone? -- Yoz
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 11:46 on 09 Oct 2003 Subject: The flight of the upgrade path On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 10:57:48AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: > How else would they be able to convince you to part with more money? > > I hates software whenever it doesn't do what it should do, and its > vendor expects me to pay them to fix their own mistakes and shortcomings. This leads directly to one of the things that, speaking as a long-time Windows user, mystifies me most about OS X and its users: they make you buy a new OS every year! Now, admittedly there's a new Windows every two years or so (though it looks like the follow up to XP, which came out in '01, won't appear till '05 or so) but you don't *need* it. If you're running Win98 on, say, a P2-400 with 128MB of RAM, you can reasonably expect 95% of Win32 software to work on it, and the only stuff that doesn't will usually require an NT kernel, so it'll work on NT 4 instead. *Everything* runs on the four-year-old Win2K and that will continue to be the case until (and probably well beyond) Longhorn's appearance. Yet within three months of Jaguar coming out, every second bit of new OS X software I saw *demanded* it. I probably have a distinctly inaccurate impression of things here, but... (trails off waving hands, hoping for a Mac user to continue at this point) -- Yoz
From: Yoz Grahame Date: 17:51 on 16 Sep 2003 Subject: mutt How many bloody different exit keys does it need? And why aren't they remotely consistent? -- Yoz
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