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From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 20:15 on 26 Apr 2007 Subject: Trashcan hate I use Xfce as a desktop. It's one of the few desktops that actually follows the Freedesktop.org trashcan spec [1]. Basically, trashed files are moved into ~/.local/.Trash/files, and some metadata about the file is saved into ~/.local/.Trash/info. Gnome doesn't follow this. Instead, files are moved into ~/.Trash. Since I run various Gnome applications from within Xfce, when I delete a file from within those applications, they go into Gnome's trashcan, which Xfce's trashcan cannot see. Even better: when I view removable media using Thunar (Xfce's file manager), it's running Gnome's volume manager inside of it. So if I delete files, they go into Gnome's transhcan, not Xfce's, even though I'm using an Xfce app. Lovely! [1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications_2ftrash_2dspec
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 15:33 on 25 Apr 2007 Subject: Feisty or Bash hate I'm not entirely sure which one of these to hate, so I think I'll spread it evenly and hate both of them. In Bash 3.2, the syntax of regular expressions were changed. So if [[ $string =~ 'foo(.*)' ]] then ... should become if [[ $string =~ foo(.*) ]] then ... You can imagine how many scripts that breaks. Well, maybe there's a justification. Oh by the way, Ubuntu Feisty, included an upgrade to Bash 3.2. No warning about that in the Release Notes at http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/704 Oops.
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 16:11 on 20 Apr 2007 Subject: Ubuntu Feisty hate I was a clone and decided to upgrade Ubuntu from Egregious Eft to Festering Fawn. Sh'loads of hate.... Like what that the upgrade manager does when it sees that I've changed a default configuration file and wants to know if it should overwrite, etc... it never makes a backup. The most obvious f***ing thing, it never makes a backup. Oh, and they removed Attaxx. My favourite game. I suck at it, but it's still my favourite. They didn't bother leaving it there, unsupported. No, since it was removed from that version of Ubuntu, they removed it from my computer. I also added menu entries for applications that never showed up in the menu, or in the categories I wanted. (All this involved was adding .desktop files.) All of those minor tweaks lost, without warning. (Or maybe there was a warning buried deep somewhere.) Why? What harm was there to be done? And all sorts of useless fonts I removed were re-installed. So I will be always be able to view documents in exotic languages that I cannot read and have no intention of reading. Does it *really* need to download and reinstall an upgrade to utilities like gzip? All that time to download lots of files that basically had a different version number? Grrr. Rob
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 16:36 on 17 Apr 2007 Subject: Thoughtful operating system It's so nice to know how thoughtful OS/X is. Often when I am doing something trivial like scrolling down to read the rest of a document or opening a folder in Finder that it stops to think deep thoughts for a moment or two. I know that when the mouse pointer transforms into a spinning psychedelic mandala that the computer has been struck by a wave of nirvana which a mere unenlightened novice like myself cannot ever hope to understand. I only wish that I had the patience not to try to do anything else with the computer, but surrender to the void and stare at the pretty swirly little disk while OS/X contemplates the deeper things in life.... ... like if the machine weren't so damn expensive, I'd smash it into tiny little bits while screaming like a maniac.
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 22:38 on 15 Apr 2007 Subject: LaTeX hate So I write a paper with the following: \begin{table}\label{table:foo} \caption{Foo data} ... \end{table} and a little later... \begin{table}\label{table:bar} \caption{Bar data} ... \end{table} We examined foo (see Table \ref{table:foo}), then we examined bar (see Table \ref{table:bar})... but what does the generated text say? We examined foo (see Table 1), then we examined bar (see Table 1)... What?!? It turns out that in LaTeX, the table counter is incremented by the caption command, not the start of a table environment! I had to change it to \begin{table} \caption{Bar data}\label{table:bar} so that the text would reference the correct table!
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 15:12 on 20 Feb 2007 Subject: unzip hate Take the following zip file $ unzip -l foo Archive: foo.zip Length Date Time Name -------- ---- ---- ---- 0 02-20-07 15:05 foo/ 0 02-20-07 15:05 foo/file1 0 02-20-07 15:05 foo/bar/ 0 02-20-07 15:05 foo/bar/file2 -------- ------- 0 4 files Now try this: $ unzip -l foo foo/* Archive: foo.zip Length Date Time Name -------- ---- ---- ---- 0 02-20-07 15:05 foo/file1 -------- ------- 0 1 file Oh, but what if I also want to list all files below foo? There's no equivalent -r option for recursive. So I cannot list or extract files in foo/bar without specifying them manually. Rob
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 16:20 on 01 Feb 2007 Subject: Bash file completion, symbolic links and pwd confusion Note the following session: me@nix:~$ mkdir foo me@nix:~$ mkdir foo/bar me@nix:~$ mkdir foo/feh me@nix:~$ mkdir baz me@nix:~$ mkdir baz/bo me@nix:~$ cd baz me@nix:~/baz$ ln -s ../foo/bar me@nix:~/baz$ cd bar me@nix:~/baz/bar$ ls ../bo Bash file completion works as one expects. I'm in "baz/bar". That's even what pwd says: me@nix:~/baz/bar$ pwd /home/me/baz/bar So ".." should refer to "baz". But when I run that ls command ls: ../bo: No such file or directory Because ls knows it's really in "foo/bar", not "baz/bar" me@nix:~/baz/bar$ ls .. bar feh I understand that there are good reasons for this behaviour on the part of commands like ls. But why can't bash's file completion behave consistently with everything else?
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 14:43 on 06 Jan 2007 Subject: Gimp Hate I want to choose the colour for an alpha channel by clicking on something of that colour in the image. I get a "Colour to Alpha Clour Picker" but there's no way to select anything from my image. I have to use the colour picker Tool to get the RGB information, and then manually enter it into the Colour Picker dialog.
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 11:51 on 22 Dec 2006 Subject: More Evince hatred I have several PDF files to read, and re-read. Every time I open them with Evince, it remembers the page I last viewed, and the magnification (nice). But it seems to believe I have a 40" monitor. Well, no, but the window's bottom and right edges extend way off screen. So I need to use keyboard controls to resize the window to something usable. Every time. Disclaimer: No programming languages were harmed during the writing of this message.
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 20:01 on 14 Dec 2006 Subject: Gnome's Character Map I'm using a mere UK or US keyboard to type in exotic Roman characters used for non-English languages. Fine, there's Gnome's Character Map, which makes the process of finding an accented character difficult by never remembering the last Script or Font one used (or allowing one to set a preferred font). So I have to scroll down the list a couple of pages of a few dozen character sets that I will rarely if ever use (such as Armenian or Khmer) until I get to the Latin script. Every f***ing time I run the program. It's probably a safe assumption for most users that if the system is configured for a certain language (such as English) that it should prefer the character set for that language. How hard is it to remember the last script used, or add an option to put the most used choices on top? I could use the search function and look for "L with Stroke" (if I remember what the particular accent is called) but after typing all of that in, I may as well search for it manually. I tried Gnome Character Palette, but it just doesn't work. I don't know if Gnome or Xfce supports typing in the unicode number like Windows does, but that's no help if I don't remember the code. Grr. Rob
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