Vertical Tabs

There were a few key reasons for my wanting to move from Firefox to Google Chrome but the ONLY, I repeat ONLY, reason I finally gave up on Firefox and moved to Google Chrome was because there was at least some form of vertical tab sidebar option in Chrome, albeit crippled compared to tree-style-tabs.

That is... until now.

Chrome updated and now there is no possibility for this tab sidebar.  And I for the life of me cannot understand why they are so fucking against having vertical sidebar tabs.

WHAT is the logical argument for it? WHAT?!  If you sill live in the 90s and only keep one or a couple tabs open at all times and just love going forward and back and reloading pages, then yes, having a few tabs at the top is more efficient.  But if you have a lot of tabs open it SAVES space to have a vertical tab bar.  Why? because tabs are wider than high, so you can fit more tabs in the space and have them be readable before you need to resort to scrolling.  On the top, you have to shorten the tabs to fit more in and have to use the scroll buttons sooner.  To top that off, most screens these days are wide-screen so it's just a better use of screen real-estate; most web-pages are NOT wide screen so there is unused space unless you love to zoom or have gigantic fonts.

I think that because tabs started out on top and are therefore the norm, they are just being lazy pricks and don't want to rock the boat or put in the extra effort on behalf of the mass of us that use a lot of tabs and therefore NEED this vertical tabs on the side.

Maybe they think that we shouldn't have many tabs open ever.  Or rather that we should go back to going forwards and backward ad nauseum.  There are many useful and valid reasons to have a lot of tabs open.  I'm not even talking 35 tabs of memory and resource gobbing youtube videos, I'm talking about normal use and even  for work.  Example.  I often have to look up python modules and it is helpful for me to have a bunch of the ones I'm using open in their own tabs and at my fingertips and NOT have to constantly go forward and backward and search and research and load and reload.  And when I'm doing a normal search I like to tab-open the links so I can compare pages and not have to back-button to the list of pages.

Come on!! WTF, man?

More reboot nonsense

So yeh, I'm to blame for continuing to use the free Adobe Acrobat PDF viewer when there are so many other, probably better, certainly less bloated PDF viewers around.  But it was convenient, been using it for over a decade, many sites that generate PDFs helpfully suggest you get it, and they're the creators of the format giving an extra false feeling of competence.

Anyways, it just gave me another notification that an update was ready so I let it update.  After installing, it told me I have to reboot my computer for the changes to take effect.  I'm sure it's got something to do with that accursed windows registry or something similar because for the life of me I can't think of a good solid reason for a PDF viewer to need a system restart.  I know they're not the only software that requires a nonsensical system reboot.  Why after how many versions of Windows do we still need to reboot when non-system/kernel/hardware changes are made?

Reboot-itis

I almost popped a vein the other day with Windows 7 again.  It drives me NUTS that it will auto-reboot (post-update) without your permission and no matter what you have running.  In fact, I find that policy downright unprofessional.  I know they think it's to "protect" the users and perhaps for the vast majority of them maybe there is some benefit; benefit as much to Microsoft as to the user.  You see, if they step in as if they were you're IT department forcing you to do it their way for you're own good without choice and in the process manage to actually cut down on exploits and infections, then in the public eye Windows looks good even if they do it in a big brother fashion. 

But at least have the decency to let us turn that bloody "feature" off with a simple option click.  And I don't mean "Turn off auto-updates" because then you'll just be nagged.  And I don't mean scour Google for registry hacks and third party software that sometimes does the trick but sometimes not.  I mean an honest to goodness checkbox that says "don't reboot automatically until I say so".  Not only do some of us not need it, but it actually interferes with us.  My sis sometimes needs to work remotely from her main home machine when she's away and she's completely fucked if her machine decides to reboot and she's not around to turn it back on and run the proper software.  Poor thing has had to call relatives to break into her home to turn it back on.  And the answer should not be "oh she should install x, y, z, buy u, v, w and edit o, p, q to have l, m, n started upon boot and ...".  She's not an IT professional.  The simple answer is "Don't shutdown without my permission!", nag me about it later if you must.

While I'm at it... 20 years later and you still need to reboot for what feels like every little freaking thing.  A driver here, a service there, registry setup change over yonder.  What is it about the system that makes it impossible to just stop-service start-service restart-service and once identified to FIX IT? 

(Granted, it's gotten a lot better and it's not always their fault)

No vertical screen split for J00

I got quite happy when I learned there was a version of Gnu Screen that let you do vertical splits.  I always have 2 screens side by side (emacs and shell) both distinct ssh sessions with distinct instances of screen.  Had this worked it would have saved me some minor inconvenience since I'd only need to log in once and not have to select between the two detached screen sessions.

I said "had it worked".  Actually it did work, but there is a side effect that is a deal breaker and it makes me really sad.  The fatal flaw is that I mouse select for cut/paste a LOT and the selection does not respect the border between the vertical split.  Yes, there is the keyboard option for cut/paste but that's insufficient.

I keep wanting to hate Python

Just something I feel I have to say once in a while.

Dell XPS m1330, a most beautiful piece of shit

I remember being quite excited upon receiving my m1330.  It was a beautiful laptop.  Very sleek and original.  Relatively thin.  Powerful enough to run my WoW (at the time) by sporting an NVidia card.  I loved it.  I stopped using my Alienware desktop monstrosity almost entirely.  It was a bit pricey though, something like $1600 in '07/'08.  Perhaps the only complaint I had was that it came with Vista.

It's sad though, the innards of that thing ended up being junk.  I had to have it serviced every year.  It overheated, the video would give out, the motherboard would break. I even forked out dough for the extended warranty just to get it fixed (2nd time it died was shortly after the previous warranty expired but they let me buy the extended).  It was my main machine at the time, in particular since I had just moved and purged much of my wares, so I kept it serviced.  And a part of me wanted it to be a nice working machine because I really did like it cosmetically and feel-wise.

But at last, it just wasn't cutting it.  I'm not sure if it was the game upgrades or the vidcard or what, but WoW and other similar games became completely unplayable.  It ran a bit clunky.  It still had Vista on it just to run the games but when that stop it basically became a linux box.  So a year ago, upon getting the Alienware m11x, a machine I also love (though I still think I prefer the m11x look and feel-wise), I gave it to my sister.  Not much long after that, it started exhibiting more problems and basically quit on her.  I took it back, loaded it up with linux to find that it kept crashing.  I had good indication it was the hard drive so I bought another one.  Installed it, spent more time putting Ubuntu on it, had it just about set up the way I liked and wouldn't you know.... it completely gives up the ghost.  Won't power on or anything.  Pisses me off that I had just spent more money on it again only to have it bricked.

I've read about bad experiences with Dell and their machines.  It wasn't my experience for the most part, until now.  My previous laptop was also a Dell and although it ended up with some issues here and there, it worked for a looong time, on the order of 8 years or so.  And (having a warranty) I had fair service.  But now I'm very disappointed, doubly so because they put together a machine that I really wanted to like and they ruined it with shoddy parts and internal design and a hefty price tag.  Such is the life with gadgets I suppose.  I did try and look up how much it would cost me to fix it and I decided that I'd rather spend the money on a new netbook than sink it into an aging machine.  I did consider it though.  If I could have found a new mobo for, say, $50-70 I would have justified it as a geek hobby.

As to whether or not I'll ever trust Dell again to buy from them... Well, I probably will.  I mean, I already have with this Alienware but I'm HOPING that that subdivision of the company (acquired) has a higher standard and from what I read they mostly are.  I did have to have it serviced but it was only a fan that stopped working causing overheat and shutdown.  I'm getting good use out of it though and that's the important bit.  Also, sometimes the price is hard to ignore, I have the discount deals through my company and I have a work-issued Dell as well that is a clunky beast but is still kicking with nary a problem (other than a dead battery) in 3.5 years.

I just wish it wasn't the m1330 that ended up being the lemon.

Autostart annoyance

I find it ironic that Windows too often goes through this extra "security" step of asking you if you really want to do something even though you just tried to do it, but has no checks on programs that love to put themselves in the startup.  The most annoying offender of all is the MS Live IM client by the way, but there are other programs that slow up my boot time by automatically installing in in the startup with no option to tell it not to do that.

CD access

I thought computer CD drives were ancient news, a solved problem, a triviality.  I can't believe I downloaded (a rather cool) program that can't access my CD drive like everything else I have can.  That program is foobar2000.  I did a beyond token amount of web searches trying to get it to work, stopping short of downloading some other program (Nero) to help it do it's job.  I just wanted to rip some songs to FLAC and was dumbfounded that the CD wouldn't access.  I may try again.

Do shell writers not care where they are?

Bash has dirname and basename and there is the ever present $PWD; but has no built-in mechanism for determining what the absolute path name of a file or directory.  I find this infuriating.  Did someone think that people would never need to know?  Did someone impose their view that absolute or full pathnames are evil and should never be used within a script?

Ok, I'm overstating the problem.  There is the workaround of using "readlink -f" command but it was not obvious and I was only lucky to stumble across it recently.  I had to have a separate script otherwise.

Fear of the upgrade

There was a time when I would constantly upgrade to the latest version of software. I was a junky for new useless features. There was sometimes a secondary reason, like keeping certain file types up to date (due to the unfortunately still present but thankfully diminishing days of proprietary file formats). That changed as the years passed. I now find myself skeptical of upgrades. Oddly, the inevitable increase in bloat (both in size increase and speed decrease) is less the reason than the problems that invariably get introduced. It seems that these days an upgrade signifies an introduced incompatibility, instability, or worse.

Off the top of my head the first program that I purposefully abandoned upgrading (versus just didn't need to use anymore) was PaintShopPro, from back in the early 90s. It was freeware or shareware then. It was small, fast, and useful. Then at some point the upgrade was no longer free to get. It became around $30 and later $100. I kept the old free version around for many years and refused many upgrades. Eventually I abandoned it for other things, but I still remember liking it a lot. A copy may be lying around on a disk somewhere.

Another example is MusicMatch. It was one of the first decent mp3 ripper-players around. I was fond of it not as much because of its real quality (it was good but kind of clumsy in some ways), but rather because the owners did something absolutely right: free lifetime upgrades. Now that policy deserved my money. I despise being forced to buy essentially the same software over and over again every year or two. For every software purchase, there should be at least 2 free major upgrades or like 4 years of upgrades included. But lifetime? that was awesome. Then Yahoo bought it, but I remained pleased because at least they still honored the lifetime upgrade. I saw an end to that coming when they changed the name to Yahoo Jukebox. Eventually it was unrecognizable as MusicMatch. And eventually, I stopped installing it and even stopped using the old version. Why? because I upgraded once too often and it kept pestering me to upgrade, and then gave me a stern warning that my version's days were numbered due to an interface change (basically a forced connection with Yahoo Music that I didn't want). Oh well.

Apple software gets my goat because I'm convinced they purposely break something just to keep things more proprietary. e.g. every new version of iPod firmware seems to be designed to break other peoples attempts at using their product not in the "vision" of Apple. iTunes is similar, only every major update seems to cause my iTunes to stop working properly. My new rule is to wait two updates minimum before updating.

These are kind of trite examples. The major one is Windows. Now there's an important piece of software that they force you to re-buy every couple years whether you like it or not. My latest excursion, I got a laptop last year that had ONLY Vista as an option. Of course a month after I got it the backlash forced Dell to offer an XP version. I stuck with Vista though because I didn't want to buy another copy of XP and also I'm lazy. I admit that it has some added niceties, mostly trivial in my opinion, but DEAR LORD IS IT ANNOYING. It has never stopped pestering me for something or other whenever I boot. I'm always getting these damned bubbles popping up in the corner, especially annoying when I'm playing WoW. Every major piece of software wants to put crap in my taskbar and wants to poll for updates and yadda yadda. Windows of course is the second worse offender (first being McAfee), especially with its constant "are you sure", "do you want to allow this", etc. It drives me nuts. The real issue here though is stuff just doesn't work cleanly in it that worked fine on my XP box. Even stuff that's certified for Vista in some way encounters problems.

As if that wasn't bad enough, along comes SP1. After some pestering, I allowed the update. And wouldn't you know, iTunes won't run. I was getting a "iTunes has stopped working" message before even the window popped up. Dangit, I wanted to swap in some stuff onto my nano NOW. I spend a couple hours scouring the interwebs for some solution and even tried the ol' uninstall and reinstall. The searches were kind of scary with all the notes on how iTunes and Vista were problematic from the get-go; I felt lucky that I got it to work at all. It took me a while to get the right incantation of the Google search to get me to this link which at least one solid and tangible solution to try. I downloaded the noted patches but turns out I didn't need them. For the benefit of the search engines: the trick that worked was Control_Panel -> Programs_and_Features -> Quicktime -> Repair. It runs now and thankfully even though I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, my library info remained intact. A miracle I know. Sigh, I really wish I didn't HAVE to use iTunes... but it's the only iPod compatible program I'm aware of that supports the "resume playback where you left off" (or "save played position") feature that I need for audiobooks and podcasts. That's the critical deal-breaking feature.

Backing up to the upgrade subject, I do not sport this upgrade fear on Linux. Maybe it's because nearly everything I use on Linux is below version 3 with a non-trivial chunk of it below version 1. This basically means that most of it can still be a bit unpolished and upgrades are welcome. But there's also this sense that when it comes to open-source software, it really feels like the upgrades are needed somehow. Most updates really are bug fixes and often times optimizations. When new features are added, it's as if by committee it was decided that the new feature really was a good idea. Another related reason might be the tendency that when some piece of software gets old -- like versioning past 3 to 4 but often much sooner -- that by then something else similar but cooler comes out and people move to that even when it's in alpha. Yes, upgrading and changing and tweaking seem natural in the Linux world, but it works because you don't have to pay for each update and it's often not even required. Sigh... it always feels like I'm just on the cusp of going completely Linux, but for the durned expectation that everyone uses Windows and may only make drivers and software compatible with Linux as an afterthought, maybe.

And the next letter will be...?

I've witnessed the trends where a slew of companies, names, and products would nearly simultaneously begin with "x", "e", "@", and now "i". I can't say which is the worst offender though "i" is currently taking the cake because unlike "e" (email, ebusiness, ebay) it not only keeps its lowercase lettering but the letter after it is always capitalized (iPod, iTunes, iMac, iFinder, iHome, iBoom, iMotion... check out the name of this product). A close second would be "@" which isn't even a letter but at least it was short lived.

So what will be the next letter/symbol du jour?

While I'm at it, I think that "www" should be eliminated from any and all web addresses. It is a truly unfortunate those words that it stands for begin with the only English letter that is 3 syllables and therefore cumbersome to say, much less 3 times in a row. I think only the German speakers don't mind this since their pronunciation of "w" is "vay" (though they did compensate with "upsilon" for "y"). All basic atomic letters should be one syllable. I'd say numbers should be too but I there are good arguments for having them all be two syllables, but definitely not mixed (e.g. se ven, ze ro). But we can't do anything about the letters and numbers pronunciations that we've inherited. This "www" thing is though. And with the ubiquity of the web, it means nothing anymore.