Saucemaster

“Aghhh No, Please No, Don’t, Please I beg of you” screams your hamburger as you masticate its soft buttercup bun and all beef patty. “Ohhhhh” squeals your chicken McNuggets as you dip its tasty bottoms into BBQ sauce. This might not be you usual McDonalds fare but didn’t you know… your food has feelings too!

I’m talking about chicken (i use the term very loosely) McNuggets with little eyes a cheeky smile and a hilarious personality. Little edible humans that you can play a round of golf with or shoot some hoops. The best thing about your new friends… if you get hungry, just eat them.

Nuggets.wmv

I’ve spent much of my working week trying to get Microsoft Word to do the simplest things. All I wanted was to have a style on each of my headings so that I can create a table of contents. Sounds easy right? We’ll I’ve been fucked over and over again trying to get the useless terd to do what I want. I’ll have all the headings on the right style and the table of contents is good, but when I add a new heading or open the document the next day, the fucking office assistant has seemingly changed all headings on all 50 pages back to ‘normal’……arhhhhhhhhh!

Searching in Google this morning for ‘Microsoft Word styles hell’ came up with this nice little rant, it helped me feel a whole lot better.

[Warning: Extreme language follows.]

For reasons which are completely beyond my control, I’ve spent half a week writing a document in Word 98.

I have never in my life seen, heard of, or even imagined a more malodorous piece of steaming shit than this little slice of Microsoft. Words fail me, and all that follows is the faintest Platonist shadow-on- a-wall of what is, in my heart, the Ideal Peeve, perfect in its sincerity, bottomless in its depth, and unassailable in its accuracy.

This bloated, pestilent gigabyte-swamping piece of ordure takes up enough computational resources to accurately model the world’s weather for the next billion years, and what do you get for it? Something that will format and display text? Don’t make me fucking laugh. What you do get is a profusion of bells and whistles thrown in a careless heap, each bauble lovingly designed to make the straight path crooked, the intuitive arcane, the simple impossible.

Take the “Help” for example. It’s not just help, it’s a new friend!

I don’t want a new friend, you shit-slurping choad-munching bunch of retards; I’ve all too many as it is. What I want is something simple where I can find a technical detail with a minimum of fuss and interruption. I don’t want animation. I don’t want natural-language interpretation. I don’t want to be led by the fucking nose. Give me a fucking index and get the hell out of my damn face. If I dismiss a window, I want it gone. I don’t want it to wave goodbye, or hesitate, or sneeze. I want it gone.

The document I was working on was very simple. No images, no tables, no nothing. One font, one style, that’s it. It would be perfectly simple in other system, even earlier versions of Word, but, oh no, not in this latest magnum opus of the word processing world.

This helpless, hapless, hopeless, buggy piece of offal insisted on changing my fonts every couple of minutes for no reason. Random chunks of text, at random times. And bullet points, don’t talk to me about fucking bullet points. It’s a little known fact that in the bullet-point mode of Word 98 every single button on every single toolbar is the “Fuck Me Over Now” button. I’ve got bullet points going left, I’ve got ‘em going right, and down and up, I’ve got ‘em changing indentation, and style, you name it.

You’d think in 20 or so megabytes of RAM there’d be room for one scenario in which it doesn’t actively do anything wrong, but for that you’ll have to wait for Word 2023, which will have a user interface like a retarded version of “I have no mouth, and I must scream.”

And don’t try telling me that one need only configure the options to avoid these problems; I’m not a fucking moron. I quickly configured the preferences so as to minimize all this bullshit, at which point Word promptly changed them back. Lather, rinse, repeat. If you don’t want fast saves, then fuck off, you’re gunna have ‘em. Don’t want your grammar constantly corrected by some shitty little subprogram that doesn’t know the first goddamn thing about grammar? Tough shit. Empty your wallet and move off to the side.

How did this come about? It can’t be incompetence, at least not the usual mundane sort one is constantly immersed in simply by having to share a planet with a bunch of fucking primates. This is either some transcendent type of incompetence, or active malevolence.

My money’s on malevolence. This software was obviously created by a company who’s motto is `We’re Microsoft, and you, the customer, aren’t worth fuck to us.’ It matters not one iota what their official motto is, watch the hands, not the mouth. Well, Microsoft, your time will come. It may not be Linux that does you in, it may not be the DoJ, it may not be this decade, but you’re going to go the way of the dodo, and I for one will cavort naked on your grave, pissing effusively on your memory, and screaming, `Animate this, you bastards!’ to the sky.

But in the here-and-now, I shall finish this document with the quiet dignity with which I have always comported myself, and then I shall un-install Word, and swear a terrible oath that I would rather daub dung on paper with a stick than write a document using a Microsoft product.

_source

As I’m sure most of you are aware, you can use your mouse to point at stuff, click on stuff, and drag stuff around - this is your basic mousing technique. You point at something, click it to select it, and drag it to move it somewhere else.

Let’s add another button to your mouse. Now you can point at stuff, left-click on stuff, right-click on stuff, left-drag stuff and right-drag stuff. Yep, with Windows 95, Microsoft introduced the concept of a right-drag. But can you guess what it does?

Did you guess that it combines left-dragging and right-clicking into one gesture, letting you right-click and drag a file around as normal except when you release the button to drop the file a context menu pops up. It even seems to make sense in a twisted, hate-your-users, kind of way.

But has anyone ever fucking deliberately used a right-drag, or even actually knew it was possible? I seriously doubt it. Go try it out for yourself.

When you right-drag a file to a folder, you’ll be presented with a context menu with the following options: Copy Here, Move Here, Create Shortcuts Here, and Cancel.

So we can rule out the “Create Shortcuts Here” option - I doubt anyone has ever deliberately chosen that option since that fateful day in August 1995 when Windows 95 was released. There are better, more visible, and easier ways of creating shortcuts. You can even hold down ALT while left-dragging, and it will create a shortcut without an annoying pop-up menu. More importantly though, most users don’t even know what shortcuts are. So it’s a complete waste of pixels, a total non-option. It doesn’t even know I was dragging one lonesome file. So Windows, just how many “shortcuts” do you want to create for this one file?

So that leaves move, copy or cancel. Moving a file is what happens when you left-drag it (unless you left-drag it to a network share or mounted drive, in which case it copies it without telling you, but forget I mentioned that.) I wonder if that’s why the “Move Here” option is bold, because it is the default option. Of course it isn’t actually the default option, you still need to choose it from the context menu if you want to move your file. Anyway, my point is that we already have one way to move files by dragging. It’s left-drag, the true drag heir.

The same goes for cancel. The only reason that it’s even in the menu is because most users don’t realise they can dismiss a context menu by ignoring it and clicking on something else instead. Worse, when nobody knows that right-drag is different from left-drag, and then they get a goddamn stupid pop up menu out of nowhere they panic and want to cancel it before it does something wierd or nasty like deleting the file.

That leaves the “Copy Here” option, the only one worth choosing if you deliberately right-dragged a file. Of course there are easier ways to accomplish this too. And yes, you can even hold down CTRL while left-dragging a file and that will copy the file instead of moving it.

Now just for fun, try right-dragging a selection area around a group of files and releasing the button. How does Windows handle this scenario? It (possibly randomly) chooses the context menu for one of the files and displays that, whether it is appropriate for all of the files or not. In the screenshot below, I right-dragged and selected the shortcuts on my desktop, and got the context menu for Internet Explorer. What the fuck?

And now for the bad news. When Microsoft implemented right dragging, they did so at a terrible loss. In order to only show the context menu once the user has finished dragging, because this is very important as you wouldn’t want to get the pop-up menu when you start a drag because it would make absolutely no sense to “copy here” before you’ve actually dragged the file, Microsoft chose to only show context menus on the release of the right mouse button, not when it is first clicked. And I don’t mean just the context menus for right-dragging, I mean every single context menu. Way to go, Microsoft.

Take a moment and consider that every other (important) Windows interface element responds to the click of a mouse button, not the release of a mouse button. Normal menus let you click on the menu heading and drag the mouse to the desired option and release, all in one go. It’s fast, very fast, to use menus in this fashion. But not context menus. You need at least two clicks, no, actually one release of the right button to pop up the menu, and one release of either the left or right buttons to select an option.

Am I the only one who thinks this is fucked? Right dragging provides no new features, it complicates the interface, and it’s a trap for novices. The way Microsoft implemented right dragging throws consistency out the window (pardon the pun), with some interface elements now responding to button clicks and others to button release. Why didn’t they just make left-drag move files and right-drag copy files? Or better, make left-drag and right-drag behave the same way, and only move files, as God intended dragging to do.

Right-dragging is a feature that should have been aborted sometime in 1994. If only abortion was legal in Redmond…

Cupertino, CA - Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller announced that the next update to its operating system “Tiger” would come with a blue screen of death widget. He said that this is being released in response to users that need to blend in with their corporate standard operating environments.

“Many users prefer to use a Mac at work but fear the persecution from the IT support staff for not complying with the corporate standard,” said Schiller.

Now Mac users can install the BSOD widget and when they see the IT manager approaching simply press “F12.” Their screen instantly becomes filled with an image of the blue screen of death. Not only does this fool the IT manager into believing the user is adhering to the corporate standard, it also sends him scurrying back to his office as quickly as possible to avoid fixing the problem.

Schiller suggested that this continues the trend of making Mac OS X more “enterprise friendly.”

“What started with Windows file-sharing compatibility that only partly works is further improved with the BSOD widget. We at Apple understand that we need to increase our perception of unreliability if we are to compete with Windows in the workplace. The BSOD widget is big step in that direction.”

Sourced from BBspot.

The Christian (AccTV) Channel on Pay TV packs a load of interesting programming that everyone can enjoy. Perhaps not for the original intended purpose, but because they are more entertaining than other crap Australian shows (yes, All Saints and Neighbours rank highly as the most soul decaying terds ever to be screened). One of my favourites is Colby’s Clubhouse. I didn’t write what follows, but it’s so funny that I couldn’t resist regurgitating it here:

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Aside from life lessons, children also enjoy Bible learnin’. Nobody seems to notice that a living computer is sort of weird.

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What’s even dumber is that nobody seems to mind that a mysterious, vaguely dangerous-looking computer with rollerskates, a fruity green cap and chillingly lifeless eyes is luring innocent kids to his secluded wooden shack and forcing them to dance for him, often in a variety of kinky costumes. In one episode, Colby is invited to a theme park with the kids. Colby is concerned about his appearance, possibly because he’s finally realised that he’s a fucking computer on rollerksates. However, one of the kids tells him that, “You look fine just like that, Colby!” So, not only are these kids Christians, but they’re fucking idiots as well. He doesn’t look fine. He looks like he should be knocking over Tokyo with gamma rays whilst singing rad Christian pop songs such as “Psalm 1:23 Rap”. (Note: I regret to inform you that this song does actually exist.)

Colby solves all manner of problems. All the tickets to the latest Crystal Lewis (everyone’s absolute favourite Christian singer!) concert sold out? Just invite Crystal Lewis round to your clubhouse to perform “Shine, Jesus, Shine”!

Is a friend of yours in a coma? Just perform at the local Talent Quest, and you’ll forget all about him and his sickly, atrophied, comatose body!

Do you dress like a hobo? Do the local girls make fun of the vagrant garments? Just make your friends feel guilty so that they buy some hot new threads for you!

Did a friend of yours win a horse in a contest you had desperately entered, thus shattering all your dreams of owning and operating a horse? No problem! Just discover near the end that she helps retarded kids on the horses, thus making it all better! (Note: chillingly, the horse-winning girl reveals that the retarded kids “…have to be balanced right or they fall off!” This indicates that not only did the girl go through several pratice retards before she figured out the magic secret, but that the makers of Colby’s Clubhouse do not grasp the concept of objects needing to be balanced before they fall over, including such obscure and hard-to-balance objects like retards, refrigerators and even buildings!)

_original source

This is the first release (0.0.1) of an open source Java sparklines library called JSparkline.

Sparklines are small, word-sized data graphs, inspired by Edward Tufte’s Sparklines.

Some example sparklines are (if you’re viewing this in Internet Explorer, get a better browser like Firefox, or Safari, so you can enjoy PNG images with true transparency):

Example Sparklines

Area
Line
Pie
Whisker

The source and binaries are available for download as a java archive file: JSparkline-0.0.1.jar

The javadoc documentation can be downloaded or viewed online.

Well known musicians Saucemaster and Brewen have fallen out over Brewen’s breach of internet cultural protocol this week.

Sources report that Brewen, shadow man behind the infamous group The Spastiks, reportedly posted an inappropriate addition to the Saucemaster’s blog.

“I didn’t know it would be offensive”, claimed Brewen, “I thought he would find it humorous and immediately delete it!”.

The Saucemaster has reportedly posted comments claiming Brewen once enjoyed the teenage serial “Heartbreak High” in the late 1990’s.

“These allegations are simply not true”, he commented.

The tension between the two artists has put into question the possibility of a Spastiks reunion and rumoured world tour of capalaba.

Spastiks porn star, Dirty Dirk, refused to comment.

we all knew saucemaster was a lover of dogs when we saw him kiss a dog on the bottom, but many of you may find it even more interesting that he now laments the loss of lassie-like rex.
check out this post on the hotline.

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Amina were magical. Particularly the use of a saw as a musical instrument, which was like Delicatessen come to life on stage. The thing that really struck me was how much they clearly enjoyed playing music live: although their performance was a mixture of digital and live instruments, the way that they interacted showed how much they really got a kick out of playing their instruments together, feeding off each other’s performance.

Sigur Rós were fascinating on stage, with jónsi sawing away at his guitar with a cello bow and goggi whacking his bass with a drumstick on one track. Haunting soundscapes are their specialty, and with the backing of a string quartet and some great use of lighting effects and video, it made for a superb evening.

It is probably fair to say that Sigur Rós are the wankiest band in the world, with their album { } in Hopelandic and their $70 ticket price at the Tivoli … not to mention their collaboration with Radiohead on composing a ballet. However, they are an inspiration to me. They are more than drums, bass, vocals and guitars: they deliberately experiment with unusual and interesting ways of creating music. The use of starálfur on the soundtrack of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (in the scene with the “jaguar shark”) was a great introduction to their music, and has given me a slightly whimsical attitude to the rest of their work.