Recently in Complaints Category

It seems to be disabled when downloading files for a random lenght of time. Generally I have to click outside of and then back into the download window to get it to save the file.
Why? cough security? Get real if that's the case.
I think my stint on the mac has made me nasty to bad UIs

It doesn't charge over the mini USB connection. I mean WTF? I consider an omission like that simply criminal.

The hard drive in the big laptop gave up the ghost two days ago. I'm running spinrite on it to recover as much data as I can before kicking the drive onto the kerb. It seems to have been a perfect storm of badness happening to me this last week. On the plus side, at the pool party last night I found a tenner in the corner pocket of the table I was playing on, so it wasn't a complete wash.

This is about the worst of all worlds. You need a certificate to get the applications to the damned device even when you're a developer - I would have thought that the 2gb download of the SDK would have taken care of that for casual end users.
The 'right to develop' is $99. It's open to a limited number of companies and individuals in the US only. This is probably due to needing to verify the developers to issue them a cert.
Apparently Steve loves the code signing requirements of the Nokia S series phones. What he misses is that this can be switched off from the UI of the phone.
So at the moment, we can develop test applications that can be used in the simulator. Just like the palm... oh, no hang on, they allow applications to be installed without any code signing requirements and they allow you to develop for the platform without any cost to the end user. Granted this took several years while the only development tools were on the Mac (CodeWarrior), but the end result has been a zero cost of entry development environment which was geared to the small developer.
Sir Steve - get your head out of your ass on this one.

This time it's about mobile phones.
I have had recent occasion to use a Nokia N95. On paper it has all the bells and whistles. In reality it is a cumbersome lumbering beast (please refer to my earlier entry about the Motorola Razr).
Physically, there is nothing terribly wrong with the form factor of the phone. It has a vast arrray of features, all of which seem good... on paper.
The front end has been customized by vodafone, but that's all candy. The usability is terrible.
It doesn't know what country I live in, so therefore it does not match non-country coded numbers with the entry in the address book. A problem so simple that my helper monkey could accomplish it. As a result when friends ring and I've explicitly stated 'only my friends group can call me', I get nothing because the phone can't match the number to the entry in the address book. kind of like. Dear f**king christ, it's not that hard to drop the leading zero and match with any numbers that match the country code you're in. This is not f**king rocket science.
On the front panel we have a 4-way bar surrounding a button, and 8 other items surrounding it. There is the ubiquitous 'green' button, which only works when you're expecting a call; otherwise it it about as useful at a tit on a bull. there's the red 'get me the f**k out of here' button, which is about as useful as a granny with epilepsy (as you hit it more often than the buttons surrounding it due to the poor response. There's a 'clear' button, which is supposed to delete characters. It's so small that my stubby fingers press the red button more often than this one. There's a 'pen' button. I have no clue what it does. Apparently it did something at some time. What it did and what it's function are are lost on me as it seems to be completely useless. There are two blue 'multi-function' buttons. This means that they do what the two items at the bottom of the screen say. Then there is the 'shortcuts' button, which pops up some form of paged navigation thing (poorly implemented), and the menu button which pops up the 'menu of doom' when pressed lightly, but when held displays a popup of all the running applications.
The menu of doom is this crazy rube goldberg style navigation system where you only know where things are based on your previous knowledge. And what knowledge will you need to have. There is a vast disordered mess of settings and applications the location of which needs to be discerned by experimentation and memorization. Even then, there is little chance you will be able to remember what it is that you're looking for so you will need to pop it up to the standby screen. Where in other phones the reason for placing something on the quick access menu was due to it being slow to access, in this case it's because you will never be able to find it again.
On to using the phone. Receiving calls is simple. Press green and you're in. Whoopee f**king doo, Nokia have remembered that it's a phone after all. Unfortunately, they've obviously left the usability engineers locked in a cave for the last 10 years. Nothing has improved. It's like they're stuck in the ice age with regards to functionality.
We wander through the entries in the address book. I get a list of names. You have to open the contact, choose the number, click the left button to get the options for this item and then choose to make a voice call (it may do a voice call on the center button, but as there's no way to know based on the complete lack of UI on what happens when you press the center button, you're kind of shooting in the dark on that one).
Text entry is a crap-shoot. Some of the fields take predictive text, some do not. Most of the times you expect it to be predictive text it isn't and vice versa.
Call logs only tell you that you called a number. All the entries are mobile phone icons, so you don't know if you called the house, the mobile or some other number. There is no uncomplicated way of calling one of the alternate numbers for a contact from a call entry in the log. There's no way of knowing if the dialled call was received or not (dear god this it first year usability here). There's no record of how long the call was.
While this is a fully featured phone, it provides them in such a manner as to be practically unusable. Informing the user that they need to learn how to use a phone like this is counter-productive. a phone like this should provide all the needed features in an easy and intuitive manner. The poorly oriented, badly designed button arrangement on the frond end is anything but that.
I would not recommend this phone to anyone except the most hardened masochist. I will return to a more sensible phone as soon as possible.
What a piece of crap. Really, and they expect people to use this shite?

People please stop writing your own damned programs to deal with dates and times, or at least make them use standard mechanisms to determine if you've got a valid date of the month.
There are 29 days in the month of February in a leap year. Leap years happen every 4 years, but specifically don't happen on years that are divisible by 100, but not by 400. So 1900 wasn't a leap year. 2000 was, 2004 was and 2008 is.
If you need to check if a date is valid you need the day of the month, the month and the full year (i.e. 1900, 1999, 2000, 2004). Using a 2 digit year is tantamount to the Y2k problem.

Leopard's wireless access is a bit of a problem. This morning it decided to connect to the one base station in the office that is transmitting it's ssid (down stairs, in the lab). There are two other base stations in the office, each of which does not transmit their ssid (one about 5 feet from me) but does it pick up the base station that's the closest? nooo, it picks the one that transmits it's ssid.
There's no way to force Leopard to bind to a particular base station is there? I think I can do this with windows, and I know I can do it with the N95. The options for the Mac are quite limited. I feel like I'm trapped in a particularly well implemented Gnome environment :)

Do not, under penalty of me beating you three ways from sunday even think of wasting and I mean wasting your money on this crap.
it doesn't understand resolution, apparently I decided that I could only display the screen at the lowest definition of the attached screens, even though it managed to identify the fact that I was plugged into multiple monitors (hint to developers - when multiple monitors are present, assume that they each are capable of independent resolution choices).
Then there's the audio... or lack thereof. Once the pre-rendered scenes complete, I hear nothing. Best guess is that it redirects audio to /dev/null, although it's most likely that it's going to one of the ~25 audio sinks of vista.
whine, pants, realistically, I have played a sum total of 5 seconds of this game, and I feel cheated.

I was booking the flight to visit my sister in the UK in the next few weeks when I encountered some of the fun changes to the way this airline works. Every check-in bag must be paid for, which I vaguely remember some stuff on a consumer affairs program on the radio over the last few weeks. I need to fly into Heathrow as it's the easiest airport to deal with for visiting the sister, so I'm pretty much stuck with the fungus. I did check out bmi, but they're a euro more expensive when tax is included. I should have booked earlier :)
Well, the long and the short of it is that they have a check-box at the bottom of the booking page that tells you that you need to check the box to 'opt-out' of having your inbox spammed. I thought that the EU had rules stating that you needed to opt-in to have marketing sent to you. It's two bloody sentences long and I had to read it twice to make sure that I was not going to get spammed by checking on the box.

Ok, who's bright idea was it to create the delete[] operator. I know that deep down, you may possibly, perhaps, in a million damned years, want a separate destructor for array as opposed to individual items, but bear in mind this isn't the damned slab allocator you're dealing with once that happens.
Oh, you say, but it knows that because this is an array of objects it will invoke the destructor for each object. So what, I have 4 bytes here that says you should not make me be concerned for that.
Once we've passed from the bounds of single-threaded, linear applications, it becomes difficult to maintain such fineries as reference counts and guarantees that we actually are damned certain that we're the last owner of an object.
Hey, C++, I'm looking at you passing references around like chocolate. Yes; I'm damned aware of all the ways that allow you to keep the reference alive - smart references and all that.
COM - i(f*king)unknown. Oh yeah, that works all right. And if you believe that, here's a memory manager I've got to sell you.
Messages. That's pretty much it. Everything goes through the message (including the object). That keeps things simple. If you need to pass something back it has the object as well.
Incidentally, this rant was brought to you by the letters A, K and Z and the number 14. After all, it's not prime.

Well, the mac doesn't get BSODs it gets a slightly differently colored grey screen of death. Thankfully I had saved before yanking out the plug for the external monitor. It greyscreened on me with the multi-lingual press the power button for a few seconds message on-screen.
I mean really guys, this is grade-A simple stuff, people should be expected to plug these things in and out on a regular basis so it shouldn't be a kernel panic level issue when something goes wrong in that case.
At least you get a 'graceful' video driver restart when things go horribly messy on that platform (unlike XP where you just have a brick).

Ok, I ponied up a wodge of cash for a ps3 and a few games (and paid the tax for a few movies too). I got Uncharted:Drake's Fortune and Assassins Creed (grammar note: this is a creed that covers all Assassins, so I think the apostrophe should come after the s).
Well, Uncharted is just fun. I'm still a newbie to controller based gaming, but over all, I am impressed. The puzzles and combat just seem to work well; mind you I'd be hard pressed to find that many mercs on any one island. You would need to pay them a hell of a lot of money to stay once they start getting killed with any degree of regularity. Reality aside, it just works as a game. The visuals are great and the game play is well paced and just combines to give us a good experience
Not so Assassins Creed. Booooring is probably the best expression for it. Boring in the same way that performing the same, repetitive missions time and time again gets really damned boring. You get to the city, save the person in distress and then sneak in in the company of a bunch of monks. That's the only way in. Then once you get in you have to perform a minimal set of a handful of styles of missions in order to get to the real mission.
You can go everywhere.... so bloody what, it doesn't help in the complete absence of variety in the missions.
The visuals are great... No, they're good, put a few more pixels on Outcast and it would probably beat Assassins Creed hands down.
For a company like Ubisoft who have produced an excellent run of 3D games in the Prince of Persia series (which got boring, but made up for it in the puzzles) I am stunned that they could produce such a band title. I'm left wondering if they were just scared to produce something that had a bit of excitement in it due to the fact that they set it in a contentious time period (which even then is a huge cop-out, god how I have another rant stored about that).
Oh for another Beyond Good And Evil, Damn, that game is a milestone that needs to be shown to people as an example of how to make a game that reaches out to the player.

I'm just wondering when Apple will be shipping the SDK for the ipod touch/iphone. Just being nosey really. I've veered away from jailbreaking it simply because I don't want to end up with an expensive brick next firmware update.
They say February, but of course remembering that the Leopard launch being the end of the month it could be anywhere up to the 29th.
Another thing I'd like to see is the UI guidelines. I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to reading design guidelines, simply because there are a lot of good points in them. Mind yo, you should not be slavishly obeying them, as, after all, they are only guidelines, and not commandments.
On guidelines, I'm get miffed with applications that require the use of the mouse to accomplish things. Vista's keyboard usable everywhere is a charm to use, even while it's gobbling up all those cpu and disk resources with the indexer.

I've heard of large asset caches, but two fricking DVDs worth of game? that's just ridiculous. I had to do some serious housekeeping on the machine to get that amount of space back. I really need to do something about my serious lack of space on the box at the moment.
Internets help me!

Back in the land of the perpetual beep again. Forgot to blacklist the pcspkr driver again. It beeps something horribly when ever there's an error condition. I should make someone else suffer from this.

Setting up network-manager (0.6.5-0ubuntu16.7.10.0) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf ...
Auto interfaces found: lo eth1 eth2 ath0 wlan0
iface to disable = eth1
iface to disable = eth2
iface to disable = ath0
iface to disable = wlan0
Disabling interface: eth1 ... done.
Disabling interface: eth2 ... done.
Disabling interface: ath0 ... done.
Disabling interface: wlan0 ... done.
 * Reloading system message bus config...
   ...done.
 * Restarting network connection manager NetworkManager

And that's all it wrote. I do not like NetworkManager - it is a piece of crap

My old hosting provider downgraded me to an older operating system and facility so I've just made the leap to another provider.
I will not be recommending the old hosting provider any more.
hosting has been changed to fix the willing