Software sucks

Published on 15th of December, 2011 in Uncategorised. 2 Comments

WARNING: Pointless rant ahead.

I have spent much of the last few minutes being pissed off by software. Here is a collection of ways in which it sucks:

  • No, I do not want to update Flash. No, really.
  • Steam, just because a computer turned on and decided to log in, that does not mean you should log me out of the instance I was actually using and demand credentials, then send me an email complaining that you don’t know about the computer you were already logged in on.
  • Windows, I do not want you goddamn update in five minutes time.
  • Attempting to charge me six dollars for the privilege of downloading software I just paid for, even though it’s freely downloadable on your site, is merely abuse of those who aren’t paying attention
  • Offering me an upgrade and not telling me until after I pay that I’m not eligible for the upgrade is abusive and probably illegal.
  • Microsoft, your installers should actually check if the software I am installing is already installed before offering to upgrade it, then failing because there’s nothing to upgrade.
    • This goes double in the case of the Windows installer which makes Upgrade the big, default option that doesn’t actually work, and Advanced the little one that does.
    • A “Description” field should not duplicate the “Title” field. Especially if the title wasn’t enlightening in the first place.
  • Linden Lab: Expecting your users to enter an API key from an unrelated provider who is providing the key for the use of developers, simply because you are cheap and want to dodge the provider’s fee structure, is tacky.
  • Providing your data in a format that requires me to boot Windows, install MS SQL, import your file, and then export the data to something more reasonable (somehow) does not make me want to use your data.
  • If you are releasing an OS X software, it should not be trying to find my music in “C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Music”. I’m unsure if I’m more disturbed that it can actually find this directory.
    • As an addendum, it also shouldn’t always crash when you finally feed it some music to play
  • If entering my password in one place is supposed to unlock a data store in two places, it would be good if the second place was actually aware of this feature.
  • Yes, Apple, I do actually think that syncing my music to my music player is a good thing. Please stop turning this feature off.
  • Chrome, the internet is not fancy layouts completely devoid of text. Every other browser gets this right, including Safari.
    • Also, quit hanging all the time
  • When I click a link outside an application’s internal, tabbed web browser, I probably do not mean “replace the content of the current tab”. Try opening a new one instead.
  • Internet Explorer, when you are asked to search Google, it does not mean “Load some random webpage from which I could potentially search Google, but don’t bother even filling in the query I just typed.”

All of these came up in the last hour or two. rage.

Oh, and when I finished typing this iTunes decided it needed an update. NO MORE MODAL UPDATE DIALOGS. I DO NOT CARE IF YOU HAVE THE SHINIEST NEW VERSION EVER TO GRACE THE PLANET; IT DOES NOT NEED TO INTERRUPT WHAT I WAS PREVIOUSLY TRYING TO DO IN AN UNRELATED APPLICATION.

That said, the Mac App Store and iPhone App Store update systems also suck, by virtue of flat out not working.
Oh, and WordPress broke my list when I tried publishing this. Just to add to the collection of failures.
And there’s a missing image at the top of the admin bar where there was a little graph before the last random wordpress update that you must install or else your server will be compromised in ten minutes appeared.

megaprim.sl (and others) down

Published on 12th of August, 2011 in Uncategorised. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

Since I keep getting emails, blog comments and IMs about it: megaprim.sl is currently down due to circumstances beyond my control; I’m working with MIT’s IS&T to restore service. Some other sites run by myself are also down for the same reason.

In the meantime, you can use the Viewer 3 beta (and probably most TPVs, but I don’t care for them) to create prims of up to 64x64x64 on sims running the mesh beta channel (when this is rolled out across the grid, I will be removing all prims smaller than that anyway, which account for ~80% of use of megaprim.sl).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Server move

Published on 5th of February, 2011 in Server. 5 Comments

This website is now hosted on a new (free) server. If you can see this post, you have been directed to the right place. Else you have not.

Do let me know if anything’s broken.

Restructuring Emerald Viewer

Published on 23rd of August, 2010 in Uncategorised. 8 Comments

Emerald Viewer has, apparently, undergone some restructuring. They have indeed deposed, and apparently beheaded, Fractured Crystal.

They promise that, henceforth, there will be one fair, level playing field; this will, near as I can tell, be achieved by making Arabella, a nominally neutral party (accurate at least insofar as she’s unlikely to be making coding decisions, I suppose) have control of the servers.

A minor problem here: Emerald was already a level playing field. All developers have always had svn commit access. All developers have always had write access to the website. The servers were technically owned by Fractured, but Chalice, Discrete, Phox and Fractured all had full administrative access – and Phox and Chalice were the ones who actually did all the administrating (which one varied depending on which server you were referring to). Fractured was sufficiently incompetent that he couldn’t set up a cron job I needed, and I had to paste him the line. Ironically, this was the cron job that regenerated their login screen every five minutes. (I wrote the login screen; it didn’t have any ridiculous iframes at the time.)

Fractured, for all the “leader” status that he seems to have acquired, was never really the leader in any non-monetary sense. If people disagreed with him, they would ignore what he said – and he was less revert-war happy than many others, so ignoring him was frequently successful. By saying this, I do not wish to implicate the others in this latest event; I shall assume they simply didn’t notice that he did it. I was not party to that discussion, having already left by the time it happened.

The restructuring effort, effectively, boils down to “We don’t like the ModularSystems name, or the ongoing association with Onyx, or the IP logging, or…” – which was always an ongoing discussion; moreso since Modular Systems LLC was incorporated (or we were told it was; anyone found the registration records yet?).

Oh, and if it’s a level playing field, why are there only three people to contact? They can’t have lost all but two developers and their leader/PR. That’s about as level as before, then, from an external perspective; “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

As an addendum: I do trust Jessica to a reasonable extent, but she seems to be quite happily spinning this “restructuring” effort to be far more significant than it actually is. I’m surprised.

Emerald Shenanigans

Published on 21st of August, 2010 in Second Life. 1 Comment

So, Emerald has been up to things again. This time they’ve been “boasting” about their traffic (but not their spelling ability, clearly). By including 32 iframes to another website in their login screen. That means that every time someone launched Emerald, they made thirty-two requests to this website. This happens several times per second; that’s quite a lot of requests for an unsuspecting site. They hid this from the users inside a 1×1 pixel hidden div. They did this for some weeks until they were caught. This affected every version of Emerald.

The offending code has since been removed, but Google has it cached (update: Modular Systems got this cache removed); if you don’t feel like visiting this page (which will, incidentally, cause you to also load these pages), look at this screenshot instead.

Even if you accept Emerald’s “boasting” claim, in this claim they refer to the targeted site as malicious. Why in their right mind would they force all their users to load a malicious site without telling them? Thirty-two times, for that matter.

Emerald has a tendency to attract drama. Much of it is unwarranted. I feel that this, however, crosses the line.

Valentine’s Card

Published on 9th of February, 2010 in Life. 4 Comments Tags: , .

So this turned up in the post (along with three large boxes of stationary and six boxes for my dad – I wonder how long those have been hanging around for. Still waiting on some of my own stuff though; grr). It has one hit on Google, from two years ago tomorrow.

Featured this on the cover (well, minus an H):

Chemical structure of theobromine

And this inside:

We could model the compounds in chocolate,
Trace the genomes in any bouquet,
Or offer a market assessment
Of the future of Valentine’s day

We could fill both your ears with the music of spheres,
And we would, if it helped us to say
That we love MIT with a passion
And we hope that you’ll join us some day.

Congratulations and welcome to MIT!

Is this typical in the US? Seems kinda odd. I liked it though! I’ve never received any Valentine’s anythings, even if identical ones were sent to a couple thousand other people. It was signed though.

There will, of course, now be at least two hits for this on Google…

megaprim.sl

Published on 9th of January, 2010 in Development and megaprim.sl. 23 Comments

Hello there! This appears to be an actual post, for the first time since 2008. Amazing, no? Anyway…

I have spent the last day and a half or so working on a new website, http://megaprim.sl. It is a megaprim search engine – essentially, enter the required size and it’ll show you the best matches and send you one of your choice. It also does a couple of neat things like allowing greater/less than searches, skipping axes, and searching various permutations that might match better than those you actually entered. Additionally, for more for show than anything else, it renders previews of all the prims. Because it can.

Example search: Any prim with one side of 100m (when would that be useful? No idea!)

Hopefully someone will find this vaguely useful. Comments would be appreciated! :D

Twitterbot for Plurk

Published on 21st of September, 2008 in Uncategorised. 0 Comments

Twitterbot is the result of a night-and-half-a-day of hacking. It’s a Plurk bot that integrates your Twitter stream into your Plurk timeline, creating plurks for each tweet, and (attempting to) merge Twitter conversations into a single Plurk thread. It’ll also forward any response you make in these threads back to Twitter.

You can use Twitterbot by visiting its Plurk profile and adding it as a friend (not by being its fan). Within a couple of minutes it will request your Twitter name and password. Once these are provided, it will poll your Twitter account periodically for tweets to plurk.

You can shut it off by de-friending it, which will cause it to destroy all data it holds on you within a couple of minutes.

If you wish to use this, however, a few words of advice:

  • You will, for all intents and purposes, be following everyone you follow on Twitter on Plurk. If you have thousands (or even a few hundred) of people you follow, you may find it difficult/impossible to keep your Plurk timeline reasonable. Twitterbot is not very helpful in this case.
  • Capacity is limited. No idea how limited, but it’s limited, and further access will be forbidden once the limit is reached until it can be raised.
  • There is a delay of up to two minutes before it notices you sending a plurk or friend request, and up to five minutes between receiving new tweets from Twitter.
If you want to use this, have fun! If not, eh. :p

New server

Published on 15th of September, 2008 in Uncategorised. 2 Comments

This website has moved to a different server. If you can see this post, you’re using it. If you can’t, you aren’t, but you don’t know that yet anyway.

Two more Plurk userscripts

Published on 26th of August, 2008 in Plurk Userscripts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I have written two new Plurk userscripts: Be Productive and Force Qualifier Language.

Be productive adds a new entry to the top toolbar, which when clicked can block you from Plurk for any number of minutes. Any attempt to use it will result in a block screen until the time elapses. It also disables my Plurk notification script. The script’s a little ugly, by the way.

Force Qualifier Language forces all qualifiers to be in the same language as the rest of your profile, including those set to be something different for whatever reason (e.g. from someone who uses the Thai interface they’ll be in Thai, even if the message is not). Note that it has no effect on the pages for individual plurks, only on the timeline.

Both of these call on or alter various internal Plurk JavaScript functions (as do my other scripts). These scripts work with both GreaseKit and Greasemonkey