Focus, Daniel-san!

I absolutely fucking *HATE* applications that steal my focus. There is no reason for it, under any circumstances, ever.

Case in point: a new software push on my work laptop. I’m typing something, it steals my focus (wasted keystrokes) to ask me to click “Okay” or “Postpone”. If by some chance I’m typing a return key when this steals my focus, I’m headed down the “Okay” path, like it or not. But I sure don’t want to be interrupted again later, so I select “Okay”. Let’s get this over with. Switch back to the app I’m working in, start typing, have focus stolen by progress bar. WTF? Switch back to app, resume typing, have focus stolen by (same? another?) progress bar. Switch back to app, have focus stolen again before I even hit a single key. Forget it. I’m out of here.

There’s also the periodic pop-up notices that steal focus too… If I’m typing anything at all, these notices invariable disappear again before I can read what they said, and I pray my keystrokes didn’t just select some disastrous option for me. So far, they never have, but there will come a day I am sure. Not to mention the sheer worthlessness of a notice so self-important that it feels the need to steal my focus and thereby be unintentionally dismissed sans reading.

Maybe I just see this more at work because I’m doing more productive things at work than at home, but I’ve never gotten this upset on my Linux box, so I have to think that Microsoft is somehow at fault for this.

Schadenfreude

I just wish I could see your face when you see this for the first time.
(no, it’s not a Rickroll, I swear. Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you)

When 3.5 > 4.0

I love the KDE desktop for Linux. I’ve been using it ever since 3.5 came out. Maybe even 3.4. I don’t remember. So I was really, really looking forward to 4.0 and all the promised excellence it would contain. Then it came out, and was essentially one big shipment of fail. Developers were quick to point out that 4.0 wasn’t really a finished product. They wanted to get people using it so that they could get feedback. Unfortunately, in the rest of the computing world, 4.0 is a finished release. Sneaking a beta on to people’s desktops by not calling it a beta was a poor decision that put a lot of users off. In fact, I found it completely unusable, with little other than some pretty bling to recommend it (and a boatload of missing functionality to disrecommend it). But every so often I try again (a package updated… maybe everything’s better now?). So today I will enumerate the things I still dislike as of 4.0.3:

1. The desktop wallpaper. I can no longer have “centered maxpect” as an option. This means that all my pictures too small to reach the edges of my monitor stay too small unless I scale them (distorts the image aspect ratio) or “scale & crop” them (make them reach all 4 edges, and possibly some of the picture is off-screen). Highly annoying, but not a show stopper.
2. Rotating (slideshow) wallpaper has no option for how to display the image at all. If I want to change from centered to scaled, I have to display a single wallpaper picture, make the change I want, then go back to the slideshow. Again, an annoyance.
3. Advanced->Special Window Settings->Preferences allows you to choose active and inactive opacity levels. Sweet. Too bad it doesn’t work at all.
4. Under KDE3, my keyboard volume controls would visibly affect the sound level (a graphic would pop up center-screen showing the volume level). Gone. In fact, the volume controls don’t seem to affect the system sound anymore. They don’t work on Amarok. They do work on mplayer.
5. Most of the apps are still KDE3 apps.
6. Most of the plasma widgets are just plain lame (so far).
7. When I click on Logout, Restart, or Shutdown from the K menu, it pops up a window asking me if I want to Logout, Restart, or Shutdown. This is maddening. I just got done telling you what I wanted 0.1 seconds ago. Why are you asking me again?
8. The new default K menu blows. Hard. I want my old-style K menu back.
9. I can add the old-style K menu to the taskbar as a widget, but it appears on the right-hand side of the bar instead of the left. There is no way to change it.
10. Konqueror is in my “Favorites” on the menu, despite me never using it. Firefox is not, despite me using it all the damned time.

I think that’s it for now. It’s mostly minor annoyances (or major annoyances), but when the list of annoyances hits 10 within a half hour of use, and the number of things I like (1: ooh, pretty; 2: Kopete for KDE4) is equally minor, and tops out at 2 even after many days of use, the answer is clear. KDE 3.5 > KDE 4.

UPDATE: Now on 4.0.80 (4.1b1), all 10 of these issues are still present, and I see no new features worth mentioning.

Muppet sex (don’t say I didn’t warn you)

OK, bear with me here, because this is going to be surreal… But on Twitter today, somebody said:

Discussing muppet threesomes–could Miss Piggy have a threesome?

My immediate response was:

miss piggy is total dom and could easily have a threesome. Probably with Kermit and Gonzo

and a third person said:

Thanks. Now I have a mental image of Miss P. with a flogger, Kermit on a leash, and Gonzo with a ball gag in his mouth.

Person #4 chimed in:

Miss Piggy? Remember “Pigs In Space!” All those long space voyages…

Of course, I don’t tell you all this just to warn you away from Twitter forever, but because my warped mind went and elaborated on the theme. So, maybe you should stay away from Twitter and me…

Miss Piggy seems like a total domme, and she’s got Kermie wrapped around her stubby finger, so I say she can do whatever she wants. Gonzo is the logical choice for a threesome, because he’s submissive and adventurous. As opposed to Beaker, who is submissive and cowardly. If Miss Piggy approached Beaker about sex (much less a threesome), his head would asplode.

Now on the other hand, many socially assertive people are actually submissive in bed. I can totally see Animal giving it to Piggy hard and fast, with one or more of his band members joining in, in one fashion or another. She would never tell Kermit…

Thoughts?

Jet Jaguar?

The Ubuntu Developer Summit for Intrepid Ibis is in progress, and soon attention will turn to the name for Intrepid +1. Alphabetically, it should be the J’s, and so I humbly propose: Jet Jaguar.
For the sake of Godzilla fans everywhere, I implore you to support this name.

“some kind of acid trip”

Jono Bacon writes a short but sweet recap of Penguicon:

Not only did I have a photo taken with tron guy – he came looking for
me to deliver a parcel with a fake beard in it. While it was happening
I felt like I was in some kind of acid trip. We then had a serious and
detailed conversation about MOTU, while he was stood there in full tron
regalia. Just when I thought my world crazy, it got a little crazier…

Pet peeve

People who comment about something I say without taking the time to actually read what I’ve said. Double peeve points when I can’t reply to their post because of a 404 error. Jmoron thinks that I don’t understand UUID, but I think if he’d take a few minutes to actually read what he linked to, it would be obvious I have a genuine problem, and that UUID is most decidedly the culprit. Oh well. Thanks for linking to me anyway, J. UUID always has been and probably always will be an issue for anybody dual-booting two different UUID systems with a shared SWAP drive.

Last rites

When I gave my presentation on Ubuntu Bug Triage Basics at Penguicon (or whenever anybody asks what triage is), I likened bug triage to the TV show M*A*S*H in which the wounded come in, go through triage, and then are operated on according to their triaged status. While the analogy between software bug triage and human triage isn’t perfect, it’s fairly close.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot like Father Mulcahy. As the Army minister of the 4077th, he had the unenviable task of performing last rites on those who could not be saved. In much the same fashion, I’ve been invalidating bug reports that have sat around for several months in need of more information. If we don’t have enough information, we can’t operate. If we are unable to operate for too long, the bug report dies. It may not seem like the most useful triage function, but I like to do it for two reasons:

1. It’s quick and (usually) simple. I can crunch out a lot of these is a small amount of time.
2. It’s a good way to decrease the number of open bugs, of which there are way too many for our team of dedicated (mostly volunteer) developers to address them all.

In addition to those obvious reasons, though, there’s some other good that comes out of these “last rites”. Sometimes (in fact, twice in the past two days) the bug filer will get my invalidation notice, and suddenly wake up, see the questions that have been needing answers, and answer them! Kind of like that one episode of M*A*S*H… “This one’s not dead!”

And this, to answer a question from the Penguicon presentation, is another reason we don’t just script the process of invalidating old incomplete bugs.

Note to defense attorney:

Allowing your defendant to plead “I thought they’d get out of my way.” when she is charged with 2nd degree murder for running people down with her car just makes the both of you look stupid.

Guitar Hero Pi

I want this, just for the Coulton.