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.

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.

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.

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.

The sites closing are the following:

• TSL Profiles
• TSL Blogs
• TSL Emporium (which was defunct anyway)

Also, the SSL certificate should be valid now. Woo!

I’ll update the svn when I can be bothered to boot Windows, which has the code on it.

[insert much prodding of assorted services]

So we’re back, after server load crashed and completely obliterated MySQL, requiring restoration of the database from backups. Fortunately, those backups were all of ten minutes old (excluding times where data couldn’t be collected), so it’s not too horrible.

I think everything’s back up. Except cron. Now to restart AjaxLife again. *waits impatiently on new server*

Depending on how things turn out, I may not be around for a while

Two hours later, things turned out okay, at least until Monday. And I can’t be any more specific for fear of wrath of various people.