I work with computers. They regularly frustrate the hell out of me. This is where I will vent, and where possible outline solutions as I find them.

comments:

Google shits me --DonovanBaarda?, Sun, 14 Jan 2007 12:42:04 +0000 reply
I know it's not really Google's fault, but once apon a time I used to be able to cut and past an error message into the Google search dialog and find the solution. Now I find thousands of half-arsed posts asking for help for something similar with no solution at all, or at best some clueless newbies half-arsed busted suggestion that solved his not-related-at-all problem.

Galeon shits me --DonovanBaarda?, Sun, 14 Jan 2007 13:00:03 +0000 reply
Was just half-way through writing a rant on gnome-cups-manager, tried a print preview and it opened it in a tab and turned off all my toolbars. I couldn't find any way to turn them back on. In attempting to restore them by dragging tabs into a new window that had the toolbars, it froze my whole X session so I had to kill it, loosing all my rant typing.

gnome-cups-manager shits me --DonovanBaarda?, Sun, 14 Jan 2007 13:04:46 +0000 reply
Setting up an epson USB printer under Debian using gnome-cups-manager. All went well until printing the Test Page, at which point the job just stalls with "Stopped: job-stopped". Using the cups web interface at http://localhost:631/ the test page prints fine, it's only screwed for gnome-cups-manager. It appears that printing from other apps works OK, but there are some margin issues that need fixing... I've updated the bug report at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=383785

Unity Shits me --DonovanBaarda?, Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:33:07 -0400 reply
The new Unity UI for Ubuntu annoys the hell out of me... back to the Gnome classic interface for me. I've never been a big fan of apple's global menu idea, but can understand why it might make sense, but the main thing I hate is the lack of hierarchical menus. They seem to have decided hierarchies are too hard, lets just show a flat list of popular icons and make the rest searchable. The problem with this is it's not discoverable. I can't just browse around a logical hierarchy and find what I want or find out it's not there. The flat icons are only a fraction of what's possible, and the search dialog is so open ended I never know if I just didn't find the right search terms. I worry about a whole new generation of computer users who don't understand hierarchies as a way of organizing data.

Gnome Classic Flashback Mate Cinamon/WTF! --DonovanBaarda?, Wed, 22 Oct 2014 14:18:16 +1100 reply
The year of the Linux desktop was so close and is receding into a fragmented mess. We still have all the not-gnome-desktops, but now Gnome forks are trying to outnumber them. Clearly Gnome3 was a mistake, because we now have not 1 but 4 different re-implementations of the old Gnome2 interface. Mate I can understand a little bit as Gnome2 lives on, and Cinamon as lets do Gome3 right. But why do we need two more gnome2-done-with-gnome3 "Classic" and "Flashback"? I've tried most of the new gnomes and within a day I'm finding that they are mostly OK and very similar, but each have some brokenness that is a regression on what I had with Gnome2.