KDE 4.3 sucks, too
September 6th, 2009
It’s been a while since I ranted that KDE 4.2 sucks, so I figured it was a time to give an update, just in case someone is still wondering whether 4.3 sucks, too.
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Posts Tagged ‘rant’
Facebook – first week
May 24th, 2009
Facebook warning
I have sinned. I joined Facebook on 2009-05-17. As of writing this, I have 80+ acquaintances on my friend list. I’ve tested out the Facebook Mobile as well. It seems to be surprisingly usable.
The issues that come to mind now:
- When adding new friends, Facebook keeps warning you after you’ve hit some kind of invisible daily limit. I hit the limit several times during the first few days, so it seems to be very low. But on the bright side, once you are done adding initial acquaintances, you probably won’t see it ever again.
- You seem to surrender all rights to privacy and having your data collected when you succumb to using applications.
- Image uploading java applet could use some improvement.
What I haven’t tested yet:
- Image tagging
- Applications (and don’t plan to at the moment)
Interesting things:
- Ability to tag images with names of the people on it. Not very revolutionary but works great on a social networking site.
- Good for casual “additional” socialization as a side dish for actually going out and meeting friends.
- Good way to stay up-to-date on lifes of your friends, while riding on a bus, train etc.
- Easy way to get in touch with old friends.
- Everyone else uses it. Wait, no, they don’t. A lot of people don’t. And great deal of them never will.
All in all, not as horrible as I imagined it would be. But you’ve sold your soul anyway.
KDE 4.2 sucks
April 26th, 2009
… and I’m going to use it as an example of free software projects being capable of marketing crap as a good product.
I’m almost wishing KDE 3.5 gets forked and developed in a sane manner. And I’ve even considered testing out Gnome.
The people who said KDE 4.2 rocks, meant “in comparison to 4.1 or 4.0.” If KDE 4.2 is good in comparison to those, I never want to find out how horrible the earlier versions were.
Now, normally you’d start making bug reports about issues you find, but if the overall quality is sour crud, it’d make more sense to report what works.
And the answer to that is “a lot less than in KDE 3.5.”
Freshmeat – “Releases pending approval” bug
April 20th, 2009
I earlied ranted about Freshmeat being slow on approving submissions, but based on the Freshmeat Support discussions, it seems the problem lies in their new software that makes some releases pending approval invisible to the admins. And the oddities don’t end there…
No idea whether just releases submitted within a given period are affected. In any case, I hope they patch it up.
Freshmeat slowing down on release approval?
March 26th, 2009
I just noticed that the ViewGit release announcement I submitted almost two weeks ago is still pending on Freshmeat. Maybe they are busy rounding the corners on the new site look? 
MSN / Live bot spamming with fake referrals
March 8th, 2009
Looks like Microsoft’s web spider is crawling sites repoting fake (spam) referrals coming from live.search.com. These referrals are completely bogus and if you look at the keywords, it’s quite obvious.
A short recap on the Seagate fiasco
January 24th, 2009
Timeline from my point of view:
- Stories start circulating that the 1 TB and 1.5 TB models have “freeze” issues that freeze the drive for 15-30 seconds. I decide to stall my decision to buy Seagate, at least until there is new firmware that fixes the issues.
- There were reports of Seagate 7200.11 models dying after power-down, not only the big ones, but smaller ones as well. They aren’t even shown by BIOS. Uh-huh.
- Slashdot covers the news on 2009-01-16: Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows
- Seagate releases new firmware, which makes 500 GB models unusable. Slashdot – Seagate Firmware Update Bricks 500GB Barracudas
- Yet another firmware release is done, this time several people report failing SMART values and other oddities.
From the Seagate knowledge base (emphasis mine):
A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.
Small number of drives? From what I can tell is that there is a really a lot more of affected drives than “a small number”. For a very long time Seagate also claimed this affected only disks manufactured “thru December 2008″ which was either outright lie, or a clever way to confuse people about the real scale of the issues. I bought my disk over nine months ago, and it is affected, too.
Based on the low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return data, Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is. However, as part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, Seagate is offering a free firmware upgrade.
In the unlikely event your drive is affected and you cannot access your data, the data still resides on the drive and there is no data loss associated with this issue.
Very assuring. Not. I didn’t need to ask around much until I found someone who recently had a Seagate drive fail on boot.
All in all, the way how Seagate reacted to this issue and downplayed it has made me firmly decided not to buy Seagate for a while. If this isn’t a PR disaster, I don’t know what is.
Distributed issue tracking – the next big thing
October 18th, 2008
For a few years distributed revision control systems have been picking up speed especially in free software projects, but increasingly so in companies and organisations as well. While the problem of “disconnected” working on code was solved by the distributed revision control model, what remained was the fact that issue tracking still couldn’t be done in a truly distributed manner.
Public IRC logging
September 17th, 2008
I recently noticed that one of the channels I had been chatting on was being logged, and made publicly available for search engines to index. There’s nothing new about public logging of IRC – in past I’ve run into channels that announce public logging in the topic, and sometimes chosen to refrain from contributing to the discussion. However, the way I discovered the logging this time was a much less comfortable – I ran into the logs when googling for something…
First project rejected from SourceForge
September 12th, 2008
I have to admit I wasn’t expecting to get my SourceForge project registration rejected this morning when I submitted it, but I guess it happens. They wouldn’t have an approval process in place otherwise, would they?
Ohloh
