Every time I read my Apache logs I get a very strong urge to block anything claiming to be Mozilla that is not actually Mozilla. Then I go make some tea and chill out.

(Years ago this was sheer eccentricity. But for the love of God, software that didn’t even exist in 2005 is still doing it.)

When this headline on Pandagon pops up in your feedreader, you get the sort of feeling a parent might have when the principal calls. I wrote a long and typo-ridden comment. (I gotta stop linking back to that same entry.)

Come to think of it, that’s kind of the same feeling I have every time Andrew Suffield sends something to a mailing list that users and/or the general public read...

  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib.py", line 787, in __init__
    self.read = self.fp.read
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'read'

Sigh. I believe this is how Joe feels all the time, only much less so.

Ugh. What in the world were these people thinking? Got this from Amaya, who made a GIF of it if you don't want to waste time downloading that.

Gah.

Not that this is that much better.

Brown paper bag bugs cause you to scramble to get a fixed version out as soon as possible, which causes more bugs and that causes more grief, which causes you to screw up the upload. I suck. Maybe we should discourage being your own upstream.

I have a line in my ~/devel/TODO under aewm that says “UPDATE THE FUCKING VERSION NUMBER IN aewm.h YOU DOLT”. Will I remember to read it? Who knows?

I just installed Bitlbee and added 14 lines to said file for that, but the one line for ghosd has priority.

<decklin> but that will actually be FUN unlike hacking gaim which is AWFUL

Yeah, that’s why, mainly. I think I just need to be more professional.

Buffer overflows, man. I'm fixing fucking buffer overflows. Gag me with a spoon.

Raise your hand if you have ever said, “I wish I could use C-s and C-q in Firefox.”

Occasionally I see an absurd discussion like this one continue to drag itself out and I feel sort of guilty for writing one of the big “minimalist” things. The point of writing less code is not to conserve memory or cycles or soothe some “first thing we’ll do, let’s purge all the libraries” fetish. The point is to only write what you want to express. If a feature would require that to get lost in a bunch of dreary nonsense, then it’s not worth it. If there’s a library you can call that lets you say the what and not the how, then it is.

More importantly if there’s a standard program that you can call that’s the same standard program that everyone has agreed on for decades and that saves you from implementing a protocol which you are obviously not smart enough to implement on your own, then you just shut up and fucking call it. And if that causes you to realize that your program is pointless, don’t write it.

Not writing it is the least amount of code you can produce. And that is the best possible thing you can do. That’s what this unix thing is all about. Those who do not understand it are condemned to reimplement it, poorly.

I truly, truly hate email. First you have the __getitem__ and __setitem__ that work nothing like a dict (no KeyError ever, just returns None, despite there being a get, silently fails to overwrite an existing value, no update). But of course they're just as stupid as a dict if you change the content, instead of associating the type with that object. And then. decode_header. Does this:

[('Foo', 'utf-8'), ('Bar', None)]

Hint: ('Bar', None) is not a valid list of arguments for creating a unicode object. I don’t even want to create it myself. I just want the thing decoded. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Everything that possibly could have sucked here has sucked. Lots.

One of the reasons I decided to use Maildir is because it takes two lines of code to turn it into a structured list of objects. Except of course both of the standard modules that make that possible are horribly designed. I really don’t want to reimplement this shit. I really don’t want to go to a “real” database backend where suddenly you can't use any standard unix tools to do anything and you have to write them all from scratch.

All software sucks. Down, not across.

I just wrote, in a mail to mb-users, “that would have been the correct place for the OP to not post this.” I think I need to start using this phrase more often. Particularly when someone acts surprised that the world is not their personal help forum, but in fact contains other people who might want to address, well, each other.

We’re still losing the culture wars.

What happened to being a nice loser? I’m not sure. I think it’s because someone mailed me (rather persistently) asking for a non-free font. Hint: this is a faux pas.