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DirecTiVo, your return can not be too soon

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 in rant by Will

Our DirecTiVo was dying. Every now and again, frequently at times, it stopped, hung. Maybe it waiting on a bad block on disk. Maybe it was just the heat. But the only option offered by DirecTV was a replacement with their dreaded DVR.

My first impression was positive. The guide responded quickly. The on-screen display is unobtrusive.

But on closer inspection, this was designed by a committee of retarded monkeys with no sense for how the ability to control the television changes how we use it.

The remote is cluttered. Do I really need three power buttons?

Why are you starting from sleep at the Game Lobby? I have never willingly selected that, so don’t even bother showing it to me.

Speaking of sleep, what’s the deal with the screen saver? Trying to keep my cathode ray tube from burning in the Game Lobby?

But now that I have a chance to sit down and completely reprogram all of the shows I’ve chosen to record over the past eight years when there is absolutely no reason why I should have to do that, I wonder WHY THE FUCK DirecTV can’t make a searchable version of the TV guide so that I can find the shows I want to record you fucking incompetent pieces of shit.

How about making one that displays the show that’s actually playing on my TV?

This is why all efforts at interactive television have failed miserably.

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Comments Disabled Until the Internet Gets a Life

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 in rant by Will | Comments closed

O you spammers, may the fleas of a thousand camels nest in your pubic hair.

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Die, Spammer, Die!

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 in rant by Will | Comments closed

Dear Spammers:

I sincerely hope you all die a horrible death.

Have a good day.

Yours,

Like, but not totally unlike, Useful

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 in rant by Will | 1 comment

IBM has a way of making software that looks like it would be really helpful and of great utility — if it didn’t totally suck.

Stick to hardware, guys.

To Those of You Paging Out for On-Call Support

Thursday, March 19th, 2009 in Work, rant by Will | Comments closed

You’d better have a damn good reason for waking me up. Ask yourself this: “Is somebody dying?” No? Then it can wait until morning.

Against the Time Change

Friday, March 13th, 2009 in rant by Will | Comments closed

Really it’s not the shift in noon that I’m against — though there is a certain rightness to being able to look up at the sun and say, “ah, yes, it’s mid-day” — but that there’s a change at all. Just pick one and stick with it. This business of switching the clock around in order to alter behavior has been driving me nuts since 1971.

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The Impact of the Daylight Saving Time Change on Traffic Accidents

Friday, March 13th, 2009 in rant, transportation by Will | Comments closed

It seems to me that accidents would increase during the transitional period surrounding the switch between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time. And apparently others have asked this question, and looked at the data to see if what effect the transition has. The paper Daylight Savings Time and Traffic Accidents, with related discussion of the results, is, unfortunately, behind the New England Journal of Medicine’s paywall. Fortunately, Stanley Coren presented on the subject at INABIS 98, and so the work is available online at McMaster University.

Other studies argue that, overall, DST reduces traffic fatalities because more driving is done in daylight. No shit, Sherlock; the day is longer because of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, not because the clock changed. However, it just boggles the mind why the arguments proffered for DST are considered sufficient. Why not impose a curfew and forbid driving at night, then? Or remove headlamps from cars so that night driving becomes more hazardous and is thus avoided?

Worried about energy consumption and think it saves energy? Why not increase the price of candles, or kerosene, or whale oil, or electricity? Or, if you must compel the rest of us to do something, then forbid the use of electricity when it is dark. That will surely reduce consumption.

You want to use more of the daylight? Wake up when the sun rises, or leave the office earlier. Hell, work from home or live closer to your work location. But don’t move the clocks back and forth and pretend that you have more time. We may as well as call an inch a foot and pretend like penis enlargement pills work.

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Newlines

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 in Work, rant by Will | Comments closed

What do the text utilities on AIX have against following the manual and manipulating newlines properly? Is it just that AIX is from IBM, and IBM software is half-assed?

$ uname -a
AIX myhost 3 5 00C2D2804C00
$ echo " 1 2 3 4   5 2 1" | tr -s [:space:] '\n'
 1 2 3 4   5 2 1
$ echo " 1 2 3 4   5 2 1" | tr -s [:space:] '\012'
 1 2 3 4   5 2 1

$ echo " 1 2 3 4   5 2 1" | sed 's/ /\n/g'
n1n2n3n4nnn5n2n1

By properly, I of course mean “How GNU does it.”

$ uname -a
Linux myhost 2.6.9-55.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri Apr 20 17:03:35 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
$ echo " 1 2 3 4   5 2 1" | tr -s [:space:] '\n                                                                             '

1
2
3
4
5
2
1

$ echo " 1 2 3 4   5 2 1" | tr -s [:space:] '\012'

1
2
3
4
5
2
1
$ echo " 1 2 3 4   5 2 1" | sed 's/ /\n/g'

1
2
3
4

5
2
1

Turns out that tr(5) was not matching the class [:space:] or the class [:blank:], but would match and transform the single character ' ' (space). Still not sure WTF is up with sed(5). The simple solution to this problem, of course, is to avoid AIX.

Commenters

Friday, January 16th, 2009 in rant by Will | Comments closed

I tend to be very happy with reading websites through their syndicated feeds rather than directly. Recently, with all the political and economic ferment, I’ve become even happier. It’s a cesspool out there. If the original author of the piece is not an idiot, then at least 90% of the people who comment on the piece are. You see the same thing on USENET or IRC or any of the other older Internet media. But at least on IRC you can /kick them in the ass. There’s something about the level of discourse that makes you want to reach out and punch someone.

Maybe I should read things as fast as put them in the pile

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 in rant by Will | Comments closed

Either I accidentally clicked the close box instead of the minimize box, or Google Chrome crashed a whole set of tabs. I suspect the former. Kudos to the idiot who put those two functions next to each other: You’re a moron and then some.

Meanwhile, Google, to recover from this idiot’s complete failure to understand the effects of clicking, could you please add a “recently closed tabs and windows” feature, not unlike the one that Firefox has? Thanks.

Adobe, You Owe Me Money

Sunday, June 15th, 2008 in rant by Will | 1 comment

I was wondering why my laptop was not idle when I wasn’t using it, because when I picked it up I burned my hand.

Using the handy-dandy Task Manager, I saw that Mozilla Firefox was using 25% of this 1.8GHz Intel Centrino Duo. Why would it be doing that? I’m not browsing the web, nor did I leave one of my tabs open to a new-fangled Web 2.0 site that thinks I need it to update itself every 30 seconds. I was idle. And by idle I mean that I was outside trimming the shrubs, not sitting in front of my computer.

Well, turns it that some advertisement or other written in Adobe Flash was eating that CPU time. Since I didn’t identify the advertisement, and since Adobe either provides a means for the author to disable my ability to stop the movies from playing, or simply does not provide a means for me to stop the movies from playing, I figure that Adobe owes me the cost of the energy drained by 25% of two 1.8GHz processors over the course of the 12 hours between the time I installed the Flash player to watch some idiot video on YouTube, then enjoyed my Father’s Day offline, and the time when I disabled the Flash player because I had first degree burns on my thighs.

Oh, by the way, Google, now that you’ve bought DoubleClick, if wouldn’t mind simply discontinuing the use of Flash advertisements because they’re evil, we’d love you for it. Thanks.

Tired

Monday, June 9th, 2008 in Work, rant by Will | Comments closed

One of Rick Klau’s shared items in Google Reader suggested that journalists today will need to know Photoshop, HTML, and a bunch of other crap to get a job. That may be so, but remember that computers are just a tool, and any time the tool gets in the way of the Real Work, discard it.

I used to find working with computers and learning their ins-and-outs to be interesting. Now it’s just dull, boring, and a drain on my life.

Maybe if I worked reasonable hours, got enough sleep, and saw my family for more than a few minutes each day, I’d feel differently, but right now I just want to take my time machine back and murder the sons-of-bitches who invented the things.

So, no, I don’t want a job “working with computers.” I want something rewarding, preferably with Oz hours:

Get up at noon, and then to work at one / take an hour for lunch, and then at two we’re done.

You Made Your Bed, Now Lie in It

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 in economics, liberty, rant by Will | Comments closed

I read Joel Spolsky’s “Martian Headsets” post a while back, in which he discusses Microsoft’s about-face with regards to Internet Explorer 8 in terms of balancing backward-compatibility with standards compliance, as if they are necessarily incompatible. Mark Pilgrim followed up with this funny translation into colloquial English.

So I was reading Spolsky’s piece, and nodding, and sort of agreeing that his central premise was correct, and then I got to this part, the conclusion.

98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.” They don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.

Damn straight we want web browsers that work with actual web sites. But I must beg to differ about 98% of the world installing Internet Exploder 8 of their own volition. If they’re not using Firefox 3.0 because their friends told them it’s the bomb, they’re still using AOL, or Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000, or maybe Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP — but the only reason they switched to IE7 is because it just happened, and unless IE8 offers some compelling advantage, that is the only reason they will switch to IE8.

Oh, and the reason IE8 won’t work with some websites is not standards. Opera and Firefox and Safari do just fine. It’s Microsoft. Site developers have been kowtowing to Internet Explorer’s quirks for years, and have come up with tricks to make Internet Explorer display the site the way that they want the site to be displayed. Either they fork their content so that IE gets the “good stuff,” or they’re willingly putting in more effort to please those customers who just happen to be stuck with a browser older than my kids. (And, no, I don’t mean Netscape Communicator 4.0.) The way around that impasse is to quit being Internet Explorer. Quit asking for special treatment. Quit demanding a segregated web.

We want web browsers that just work with web sites. And we want them to just work whether we’ve chosen to use Microsoft Windows Vista, Apple iPhone, Nintendo Wii, or Ubuntu Linux.

Apple Makes Useless Design Decisions Too

Friday, March 21st, 2008 in rant by Will | Comments closed

Which jackass at Apple thought that it was more important for iCal to leave 50% of a day as white space and display ellipses than to display the entries that I’ve so painstakingly added to the calendar?

Lowering My Health Care Costs

Thursday, February 21st, 2008 in rant by Will | 2 comments

If Mrs. Clinton, or Messrs. McCain or Obama would like to lower health care costs, then perhaps they could encourage Congress to start by requiring that all insurance companies, doctors (and anybody else who conducts inter-state commerce) have a real live human being answer the [EXPLETIVES DELETED] PHONE ON THE FIRST [MORE EXPLETIVES] RING. Any company using a [EXPLETIVES FOLLOWED BY MORE EXPLETIVES] INTERACTIVE [EXPLETIVE] VOICE [EXPLETIVE] RESPONSE system should be fined their market capitalization, have their CEO ground into small little bits, their offices razed to the ground, and their fields sown with salt.

Computers should NEVER answer the phone.