ohkine

FYI, i have used Aurora/DevEdition almost exclusively (outside of testing) on at least a dozen different Windows and OS X machines ever since the Aurora channel was created and i have never once had a serious problem. Occasionally i find little visual glitches or whatever, but it rarely ever crashes and i never get data loss or anything severe like that.

I am not a scientist but i don't think hydrogen occupies every single point in space everywhere in the universe

Anyway, if 5 in 1000 (as your own link states, these numbers are inherently difficult to quantify — but i'll go along with it) is not enough to qualify as everywhere, what is? What's your exact limit on everywhere? 1 in 500? 1 in 100? 1 in 10?

The suicide rate in the US is ~12 in 100'000, but you didn't seem to think mentioning it hurt OP's credibility (or, by association, the credibility of people who've committed suicide).

'Radical' is synonymous with fundamental

That is not at all what 'radical' means in the context of 'radical sub-culture'. The definition you're looking for is one of:

2. thoroughgoing or extreme, especially as regards change from accepted or traditional forms: a radical change in the policy of a company.

3. favoring drastic political, economic, or social reforms: radical ideas; radical and anarchistic ideologues.

I guess you could argue that trans people fall under definition # 2 from the perspective of many (most?) people, but i also think that 'radical sub-culture' generally implies some kind of conscious action — i don't think that simply existing as a member of a minority makes you inherently 'radical'.

How are you going to cite a study disproving the inherently subjective and hyperbolic definition of 'everywhere'? There is literally nothing in the universe that is 'everywhere'. Can you link an academic paper establishing a quantitative definition of when something can be referred to as being 'everywhere'?

Being trans is not a 'radical subculture'

I agree with you. I work in software development and have followed Mozilla's bug tracker for over 5 years, and i STILL don't really understand how to use Bugzilla.

On the dozen or two occasions that i've filed a ticket, probably 1/3 of them ended up being duplicates (which i always search for, but never find, because i don't get how to use Bugzilla's search function), and another 1/3 end up going un-acknowledged. The remaining 1/3 get acknowledged, but i've yet to see one actually get fixed (which i understand is a function of resources and blah blah, i'm not bitter about it or anything).

On one occasion, i was able to locate the source of the bug i had, and, even though i had absolutely zero experience with 'lower-level' languages like C++ at the time, i decided i would fix it. I pulled trunk and managed to build it, which was an enormous affair, let me tell you, and in the end i had a fix. I submitted the patch, but was told that i would need to put it through their testing system. I was given a link to a wiki, but this entire process was just absolutely beyond me at the time and i bailed on it. I just wanted to help them fix a bug. The bug is still there to this day.

To Mozilla's credit, they did (do?) have a user-feedback extension with the beta/Aurora builds that allows regular users to report bugs in a simple manner directly from the browser. You'd pick 'Firefox made me sad' and then just type what the problem was and click submit. However, i have no idea where these bugs go, how closely they're looked at, or how successful they've been in reducing bugs.

I was really really into the GameShark during the PSX days. The original one was nice, but the best thing was the GameShark Pro, which allowed you to (amongst other things) generate your own codes via a rudimentary hex editor/comparison tool that could be invoked by pressing a button on the device. (You could also connect it to a Windows PC via a parallel port on the back, which was tedious, but the accompanying software was easier to work with.)

So to create (e.g.) an infinite-ammo code, you would reload so that you had a full magazine of 30 rounds, and press the button. Then you'd have the GameShark search for addresses with a value of 30. Usually it'd return a huge amount of mostly garbage, so then you'd return to the game, shoot once or twice to change the number of rounds, and go back and tell it to narrow the results down by showing only the addresses that had changed to 29 or whatever.

After doing that two or three times, you'd have a working code that you could save to the device or share with people.

Sometimes it wasn't obvious what the value of a variable was, so you'd have to do a 'not equals' search. So to get weapon values, you would equip a knife, do a search, change to a hand gun, do a 'not equals' search, usually repeat that many times (because there are always going to be things changing) until you finally end up with an address that specifies the weapon (and sometimes one or two accompanying addresses).

Firstly, by watching the value of these addresses (you could always return to the results screen and see what the new value was), you would find out which values correspond to which guns. The knife might be 01, the hand gun 02, the rocket launcher 0A, and so on. That would allow you to take the address and create many codes for different weapons by adjusting the values.

More humorously: In some games, like Resident Evil, the address for the weapon function would be accompanied by another address for the weapon ammo. You could adjust the two values so that they differed from each other — for example, set the function to 01 and the ammo to 0A — and then you would end up with a knife that shoots rockets.

The codes that were the most challenging to create, and also probably the most fun, were what i used to call 'abusive codes'. Abusive codes were usually more humorous than practical — instead of giving you useful things like infinite ammo or lives, abusive codes would screw with the game's display or physics.

One of my favourite abusive codes was roller-skate mode for Silent Hill. Silent Hill is an extremely frightening and morbid horror game (i still can't play it alone), and enabling roller-skate mode completely changed the dynamic. First of all, during game-play, Harry's legs wouldn't move — he would just scoot around like he was sliding on ice. What was funnier, though, was that the sliding would persist into the game's cut scenes (which usually involved the discovery of something gruesome). So for example Harry would come across some mutilated corpse, the music would get all shrieky and he would exclaim how terrible it was, and all the while he would be scooting all over the screen. It turned the game from something frightening into something hilarious.

Most of the other abusive codes that i and my friends experimented with had similar effects on the physics. For example, in Resident Evil 2, we created a code where, if you pressed a certain button on the controller, the characters legs would shoot around like a helicopter and, if you held it long enough, they would gradually 'fly' up through the ceiling and off the screen.

Other games would allow you to alter aspects of the display. You could make the characters into giants, or make specific body parts extremely large or small, or make all of the doors turn into different objects. This was 'after my time', so to speak, but one of the Resident Evil games for GameCube allowed you to adjust the main character's breast size. If you cranked the value high enough, you could make her boobs fill the entire screen.

I have always felt that this is an issue, as i have personally had many problems when interpreting road signage.

For example, i once pissed off some builders by following a truck into their work zone (they were working on a highway lane). The truck had a huge sign on the back that said 'do not follow into work zone', but how can i possibly know if i'm following a truck into a work zone without some indication of where the work zone is? There were no other signs or lights or orange barrels or anything.

Another example is the way exit ramp signage is written where i live. Highway signs don't include units of measure when they refer to distance, so the first few times i saw the sign 'ABC ROAD — 2' i had no idea that it was telling me that the exit for Abc Road was in 2 MILES, not that i was meant to take Exit 2, which happened to be the very next exit after the sign.

The 11foot8 Web site linked elsewhere in the thread mentions that the rail bridge has a flashing sign that says 'OVERHEIGHT WHEN FLASHING'. The site calls this 'pretty good' signage. It makes sense sitting at my computer reading about it, but i can almost guarantee that if i was seeing that sign for the first time on the road i would have absolutely no fucking idea what it was talking about until after i had already crashed into the bridge.

etc.

> I only used the software once, a few years ago. I never logged into anything, it never required internet access, it never frequently updated and it never required a reboot.

They changed the software package literally less than a week after i bought the DeathAdder. Previously there was a specific 'DeathAdder' utility which, as you said, didn't require any online junk. But they completely removed it from existence once their port of the Windows software left beta or whatever.

I did try installing a copy of it that i had saved from before, but it seems that the act of installing the new software somehow broke the ability to use the old one, and i didn't want to spend hours fucking with some mouse driver.

> You realise you don't need the software right? You can use the mouse perfectly without it.

No, you can't. Or i can't, anyway. The default tracking is unusable to me (i like it much slower and smoother-scaling than most people seem to), and OS X's tracking slider didn't help. The only way to make it even tolerable was to use the software. Additionally, the buttons would be recognised incorrectly unless you told the software what you wanted them to behave as.

> I have never experienced this problem. I don't know what you're talking about.

Obviously i was being facetious, i'm sure it was actually one line per 'click' or whatever. Each click had far too much travel for that to be usable. Especially in comparison to the Magic Mouse and Mighty Mouse, with which you can near-instantaneously flick to the bottom of a long Web page.

If you didn't experience that, i guess i don't know what to tell you.

I have a DeathAdder. The mouse itself (the hardware) is great. However, the software (the thing that really makes the mouse functional and configurable, which is what i thought i was paying for) is one of the most absurd and infuriating things i have ever had to deal with.

The configuration tool was designed in the vein of Steam — it requires an Internet connection to use it. At all. So before you can change the mouse settings, before the mouse will even LOAD its settings, you must create a Razer account and sign in to their online service through the tool. Only then will you be able to do anything with the mouse.

Also like Steam, there is an option to 'go offline', but it (perhaps unintentionally) doesn't seem to persist across sessions. So if you lose your connection and then you reboot the computer or the tool crashes (which is semi-frequent), you're back to where you started — a log-in prompt.

In addition to that, just from a usability perspective, the software is a disaster. It is a mass of grey-on-grey text, modal panes, near-full-screen sliders, and unexplained icons that i dread even thinking about using. In addition, the tool adds an ugly menu-bar icon that you can't get rid of, and once you install the software you can never close it — if you try to kill the tool or any of its background services, the entire thing will respawn. And just to give you that extra punch in the face, every time the tool starts (at boot or because one of its background services crashed) the giant black-and-green blob pops up on top of everything else. HEY, HEY, LOG IN TO YOUR MOUSE NOW

The scroll wheel is also apparently non-configurable on OS X, which is incredible because the default behaviour is some pre-Windows-95 we've-just-invented-scroll-wheels one-pixel-per-rotation insanity.

Lastly, every single update to the software requires that you reboot the entire machine.

I am not exaggerating when i say that i loathe using this god-damn mouse.

If you had simply decried the site's 'sexism' i would not have taken issue with your post. What you'd said was that it was an 'insane double standard'.

The definition of a double-standard is 'the application of different sets of principles for similar situations, or two different people in the same situation'.

Your use of the term 'insane double standard' (not to mention the other comments here using similar language) therefore suggests that the existence of one single Web site dedicated to women objectifying men is a 'similar situation' to living every single day in a culture where only the OPPOSITE is actually a real problem.

And as much as i can identify with the distaste over this Web site, i find that that implication is laughable and the emotional outrage over it is therefore severely misplaced.

Try being a woman on the Internet — anywhere on the Internet, not this one idiot site — and then talk about insane double-standards.

When every other online interaction involves at least a few men commenting on your fuckability or how much of a 'bitch' you are, or going digging through all of your previous posts or even tracking down your Facebook account so that they can publicly share your body with all of the other men reading, and you have no recourse lest you be labelled an 'angry feminist', you will find that one single Web site where women treat men in a similar fashion does not inspire the same level of passion that it is doing here.

It is a terrible Web site, obviously, but i am envious of the social position that leads to such a complete lack of irony and self-reflection as seen in these comments.

You don't think it's offensive that sexual acts traditionally associated with women are considered inherently derogatory?

In ~/.ssh/config there is a directive called LocalCommand that you can use to do an rsync (or anything else you want) just prior to making the connection. This way you can have it automatically update remote hosts with your shell scripts each time you connect.

Late to this, but...

> these is no way to remap system wide either, you need to do it on a per app basis

That isn't true. OS X actually has a very powerful and easy-to-use (but NOT easy-to-discover) method of controlling key bindings, and it applies instantly to ALL Cocoa applications (which, now that Finder and iTunes are Cocoa, means every common GUI application except Firefox).

This isn't my link, but here is an excellent site that describes the Cocoa text system:

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....

And, if you're interested, here is the DefaultKeyBindings file that i've use on every OS X-based Mac i've ever had to fix Apple's default Home/End/PgUp/PgDn implementation:

https://github.com/ohkine/configs/blob/master/KeyBindings/De...

> Mac OS X has oddly small targets for many of the Window management things.

I actually like this about OS X. When i heard that Lion added resize-from-any-side, i was annoyed, because i feared it would be Windows 7-esque (in that on W7 there is this 20- or 30-pixel dead zone around the edges of every window where you can't get anything done except resize). I found the final implementation on OS X to be surprisingly good.

> Naturally when you click it in iTunes you expect the iTunes window to.... shrink down to a compact size. I know the purpose of it is to 'change the window size to fit the content' - a nice concept but doesn't seem intuitive or easy to grasp for everyone.

iTunes and Finder are outliers when it comes to what the zoom button does. To Apple's credit, a few versions ago they did try to make iTunes more consistent by making the zoom button work as described. However, there was an ENORMOUS backlash from people who liked the former behaviour and found the keyboard shortcut (OpenApple+M i think — it's in the menu somewhere, but i never use the mini-player because it's stupid) too excruciating to use instead, so they switched it back around for the next version.

This looks fairly promising, but it's not there yet. For example, try drawing a capital sigma ( Σ ); if you don't get your top and bottom bars perfectly parallel there's a strong chance you'll get gibberish back. Or try pi ( π or Π ); a 1° change in the angle of your bars might make the difference between a handful of relevant results and a full page of nonsensical Devanagari and Gurmukhi characters. Or do a double dagger ( ‡ ); if your middle bar isn't perfectly straight up and down it might think you're doing cent ( ¢ ) or integral ( ∫ ). It seems like it's extremely difficult to get the same results for the same 'search' — every time you get wildly different answers because the slightest little difference in how you draw it changes how it reads it.

So i think the recognition algorithm needs a little work. I know you mentioned font limitations, so i suspect adding more of those would be a good start.

Also, i don't see Japanese support, which is unfortunate. If you could get that working i would be an instant fan. (I deal with transcription of Japanese a lot, and although i'm proficient in kana, my kanji skills are pretty poor and probably always will be. What i've always wanted is a tool that can return kanji characters based on a drawing WITHOUT requiring strict adherence to stroke order. That last requirement rules out every single tool i've found...)

Anyway good luck!

> After stepping down from CEO six months ago, my mind started to wander. The reason I left Blogger/Google when I did is that I felt it had reached a place where it was on solid ground and in capable hands (at the time, Jason Goldman’s as product manager). Though still an independent company, I realized Twitter may be at a similar point today.

Do people really mean it when they say this, or is it just a thing to say, the same way disgraced politicians claim that they're retiring to 'spend time with their family'?

I mean, i'm not suggesting that there's anything untoward going on, it's just that with a few rare exceptions i find it hard to believe when people (politicians, CEOs, message-board founders, or anyone else) claim that they've left because they looked around and, like the Old Testament God, saw that 'it was good', and decided that their job was done there. I have not ever been a CEO or anything obviously, but the concept seems unlikely to me. 'I'm tired of my responsibilities', 'the culture has changed too much', 'i don't like my co-workers', 'i've got a more lucrative opportunity lined up elsewhere', 'i want to raise my new child', whatever, i'd easily believe those. But that it's so charitable and grandiose as deciding 'it's done' seems foreign to me.

Brilliant. Good luck :)

I noted that the article mentions that there is a lot that is 'coming soon', so maybe this is all in the works and i'm being redundant but:

I have to say that i'm not super impressed with how the profiles are set up. I really like Last.fm's profile pages because they provide a huge amount of information at a glance, and they do Like.fm's stated job of being 'a place to find songs that you like' very well by giving you compatibility ratings and showing top artists, top tracks, &c.

Meanwhile, the profiles on Like.fm are barely a step up from a text log of songs you've played. There's no information at all aside from that, just song a, song b, song c. I am not sure how this is meant to help me discover music i like -- there's no context or anything.

On another note, i find the design/layout of the site somewhat lacking as well. There's a lot of unnecessary white space and the design doesn't seem to have any coherent branding or theme (Last.fm has a relatively attractive and memorable red-and-white thing going on, for instance) -- it's just very dreary.

I hope that wasn't too harsh, it was meant to be constructive. I should add that i did sign up, in anticipation of improvements -- i am very interested in moving off of Last.fm, it's just that so far there's not much to tempt me.

Unrelated to anything but: Your terminal colours seem a bit brighter than the standard ones in Snow Leopard. Are Terminal's colour capabilities improved in Lion, or are you using that SIMBL plug-in, or...?

> OS X version of VLC is unmaintained, because the mac community doesn't care about it...

Do you mean the Mac development community, or the Mac user community? Because based on my admittedly anecdotal research, i would say that the latter almost certainly do care. Why none of the developers have stepped forward, i don't know -- maybe they feel like their talents would be wasted given the past administration of the Mac client? Maybe they think it's a hopeless cause? Have the VLC team made it clear what sort of developer they're after? Do they want someone to just expose their functionality changes to the OS X version, or do they want someone to take charge of the OS X version, in the same way that Transmission's Mac UI team take charge of their OS X version?

> Editing a NIB and not making it open source, is near useless for the community...

Of course it is. But why do you think people do that? If they felt that the work they were doing anyway could influence the design direction of the official VLC project, wouldn't they jump at the idea? Almost certainly they would. They don't because they feel like no-one at VLC cares about their work. (And given that the OS X version is unmaintained, i guess that's true.) They don't know that they have the opportunity to use their talents to make more meaningful contributions to VLC.

> Not to mention that the developers don't have to court those people, it should be the other way around... They should propose their design. This goes for everyone, developers, translators, technical writors... Why would designers be different?

There is a well-known path for developers to submit their contributions. Everybody knows it, it's understood, it's easily accessible for people who do their sort of work. A designer is less familiar with these processes.

Not only that, but a designer can't implement their changes on their own. Any random developer can look up a bug on a tracker and write a self-contained patch that gets merged with the trunk and then boom it's fixed. That's not how interface design works. A random designer can submit mock-ups or image files to a bug tracker, but they require another person -- a developer -- to actually put their ideas into action. This is a much larger barrier to entry.

> Finally, about the transcode part, this is not a designing issue, but a usability issue...

It is not an aesthetic issue, no. But the work flow -- the steps you need to take to complete an action -- is another aspect of interface design.

First of all i don't think Apple has done that bad with backwards-compatibility. The jump from OS 9 to OS X was extremely easy thanks to Classic and Carbon support, and then the jump from PPC to Intel was easy because of Rosetta. But admittedly this is not on the same level as being able to run 16-bit Windows 3.1 applications on Windows 7.

That said:

Microsoft's backwards-compatibility policies are great for businesses, who naturally have many special considerations when it comes to legacy applications.

Apple's policies, on the other hand, seem to be more geared towards improving the experience for the user. They deprecate libraries and functions of the OS that are no longer relevant to how computing gets done (or how they want it to get done) on the Mac. This helps to ensure that applications keep up with the times.

Microsoft don't have this philosophy at all, and so Windows 7 often feels like an arbitrary mash-up of the last 25 years of PC operating systems. There are many many applications in W7, for example, where buttons and interface elements still have a Windows 95-ish feel to them, because they haven't been updated to the new system themes. A famous example in Vista (corrected now in W7) was the 'Add Font' dialogue, which had been exactly the same since Windows 3.1. Another example is mIRC, where (if i remember right) some decades-old Unicode work-around forces the application to use non-Aero title bars.

At the risk of sounding like a snob, the whole experience -- to a consumer who appreciates good user interfaces -- just feels kind of amateur-ish, really.

My problems with VLC go beyond the interface, but its hideous UI is a major reason why i don't use it (i'm on OS X). I have seen many many people online try to work around this problem, at least aesthetically, by skinning or editing NIBs or whatever -- have any VLC developers attempted to court those people? Have you considered just asking them if they'd be willing to help? Or if they would be OK with having their NIBs incorporated into the official project?

edit: Another problem that i didn't think of when i wrote the above is that, since VLC is a multi-platform application, any SERIOUS interface changes -- changes to work flow, arrangement of options and menus and the like -- need to be copied over to the other platforms.

For instance, VLC's transcoding function, whilst very featureful, is incredibly irritating to use, interface-wise. Suppose i had the solution to this, and i provided it to VLC. That's step one, but in order to get that actually put into the product, not only do i need to have done my part, but then you need presumably multiple programmers to actually get it implemented in the Mac, Windows, and Linux versions.

I guess the first thing to do is to actually care about it to begin with. I have tried submitting suggestions for improving UIs (and even more trivial bug reports like some element is not centred properly or a text box is 1 px too tall) and it seems like many developers simply don't want to hear about it. They don't have an eye for it, they don't think about how other people might approach the interface, so it just doesn't bother them. They consider your criticisms and suggestions to be nit-picking or pedantry and they either get defensive or they just dismiss them outright. Even if they don't resent them, they often consider them to be so low-priority that they're not worth putting much effort into.

The second thing would probably be, like others have said, just to ask -- and part of asking for help is making sure that you are able to actually receive the help. Perhaps partially because of the above, and also because i am not really a programmer (yet!), i have come to be hesitant to even try submitting anything. The process is too complex. I feel very uncomfortable with patches and pull requests and test cases, so please don't make me deal with them. Offer a 'dumbed down' way of submitting our contributions, or, perhaps, make somebody a liaison between people like me and people like your developers.

Large open-source projects in particular -- Firefox, GNOME, KDE -- are ones that i have the most interest in contributing to, but they have extremely high barriers of entry for people like me. (To a relative outsider it kind of seems like the design direction of these types of applications/suites is strictly controlled by some high-up cabal of developers, though, so perhaps that is intentional.)

edit: wording

I don't understand the appeal. Every single LaTeX-based CV looks exactly the same. The same mediocre serif fonts, the same structure, the same basic layout in every way. I guess there is something to be said for the 'classic' way of doing things -- i'm not saying it's bad per se -- but i certainly don't find it novel or particularly 'gorgeous'.

As far as the ease of use and the typography functions, i find Pages (from the iWork suite) to be more than adequate. The layout that he did would have taken me only moments to re-create in Pages, and although LaTeX has some advanced typography features that Pages and OS X don't, the latter seems sufficient to me for just about anyone's CV.

The hiding functionality doesn't interest me, this feature has been available for ages and ages in GreaseMonkey scripts and the like. But sending the information to Google, with the hope that they will eventually use it for something, interests me greatly.

Unfortunately, i don't and can't use Chrome. If all this does though is send a URL request when a site is blocked, it should be extremely trivial (for someone who is smarter and has more free time than me, probably) to re-implement this in a Firefox-compatible form, right?