Please wait...
I'm in a meeting that includes some people from Red Hat. One of them has
a big "Microsoft (heart) Linux" sticker on the back of his laptop. I can
only assume that I am in Elysium and am already dead.
Holy frejoles. It's amazing how much computing power is consumed by stupid
fluffy user interface crap. Microsoft is guilty of this but Apple and Google
probably are too.
As mentioned elsewhere, I'm playing around with moving towards using VDI as my daily-driver computing environment. For starters I'm just using an old Raspberry Pi as a thin client to my existing laptop.
It was unusably slow, because the Pi was constantly struggling to redraw all of the st00pid effects. Fade in, fade out, slide things around, stupid window and menu animations, all of the crap they've thrown in.
I found the system settings screen to disable all of that crap. I shut off every stupid hack except for antialiased fonts.
OMFG. It's actually usable now. Even on a crappy display server it's usable.
I'm actually happy that Moore's Law is no longer in effect, because I want computing power to flatline. I want developers to learn to optimize again. I want to see computing power getting used for computing instead of stupid display tricks.
The only other setting I had to change was to disable smooth scrolling in Firefox. That helped too.
Interestingly, the Pi can move its own windows around the screen smoothly, but on a remote display we have to deal with wireframes. This doesn't bother me, but it tells me that Remote Desktop doesn't have a BLT operation. That seems pretty stupid to me.
As mentioned elsewhere, I'm playing around with moving towards using VDI as my daily-driver computing environment. For starters I'm just using an old Raspberry Pi as a thin client to my existing laptop.
It was unusably slow, because the Pi was constantly struggling to redraw all of the st00pid effects. Fade in, fade out, slide things around, stupid window and menu animations, all of the crap they've thrown in.
I found the system settings screen to disable all of that crap. I shut off every stupid hack except for antialiased fonts.
OMFG. It's actually usable now. Even on a crappy display server it's usable.
I'm actually happy that Moore's Law is no longer in effect, because I want computing power to flatline. I want developers to learn to optimize again. I want to see computing power getting used for computing instead of stupid display tricks.
The only other setting I had to change was to disable smooth scrolling in Firefox. That helped too.
Interestingly, the Pi can move its own windows around the screen smoothly, but on a remote display we have to deal with wireframes. This doesn't bother me, but it tells me that Remote Desktop doesn't have a BLT operation. That seems pretty stupid to me.
I find I prefer to write software from a terminal. I don't use the bloated GUI IDEs as much as I did in the past.
You can get plugins for vim that can do an awful lot of cool, useful things for your code.
Eventually, you wind up putting together your own dev environment, with lots of quirkly shortcuts and whatnot, for relatively little bandwidth cost.
It only starts to kinda suck, though, when the network is especially bad, and that keystroke your made five minutes ago hasn't echoed back yet.
*checks room*
Yep, this is it.
Fucking hell, Microsoft.
Okay, it's nice you admitted to accidentally setting __cplusplus 199711L when someone sets the language to c++17. Dumb error, but nice that you owned it.
But your solution is to create another command line option to make it behave correctly rather than make it behave correctly and have a command line option to keep the old behavior.
WTF?
Okay, fine. Whatever. Maybe you're trying to be the kindler, gentler fuckup or something, I dunno.
But let's look at your fucking gmtime_s. The standard says gmtime_s( const time_t*, tm* );
But you say gmtime_s( tm*, const time_t* );
What's more, the standard says one should get gmtime_s when setting __STDC_WANT_LIB_EXT1__ to 1, but you're all 'fuck that noise' about it.
Then there's this assmunching STL4006 warning with your goddamn 'You can define _SILENCE_CXX17_FUCK_YOU_IN_THE_ASSHOLE to silence the lambs' bullshit.
All day, fucking around with Microsoft bullshit where g++ 8.2 just works without question or fucking up, and according to standards.
I just... I just want to write the code. You know... the stuff your wretched excuse for a compiler is actively preventing me from doing.
I find I prefer to write software from a terminal. I don't use the
bloated GUI IDEs as much as I did in the past.
Having started that way decades ago, I never graduated to IDEs (except for a semester in college where I was forced to use Turbo Pascal). It's a very lean way of working, and you have the added bonus of being able to do all of your development on a remote host if you want to.
I suppose if you're writing client-side code you have to work locally, but the terminal still works for that too.
Unfortunately, the main reason I found myself having to do development via the IDE involve writing a GUI.
Ironically, in Electron.
But, since I don't have a very handy Linux desktop, I had to do it in Windows.
OTOH, I can probably write it in Linux and use X11 remotely to get a GUI to work... but I noticed it's about as terribly slow as on Windows to do things that way... Electron over a remote X11 connection creates a sad panda.
X11 doesn't work well on a high latency connection. There are other remote
protocols that work better. You can use xrdp to do RDP remotely, which works
ok. VNC is much faster on Linux than it is on Windows, because it isn't screen
scraping.
Well, VNC over Windows works nicely, if you use TightVNC, as it doesn't do full screen-scraping to work (it's something closer to Microsoft's own RDP).
But, yeah...
I got my Electron app working in Windows, so I then started working on it in Linux (just for full testing), and discovered differences that made everything frustrating.
Amusingly, because my linux dev environment doesn't have a desktop, I'm sorta forced to use X11 via port-forwarding. It's neat you can do this, but it's very, very slow since the server is across the state, etc.
Still, eventually, I got everything to work, so at this point, I can take the packaged app and see if it works properly in a test environment where I have a proper linux desktop instead networking to desktop. Then, rebuild with my changes in Windows, test some more, and hopefully get this thing done.
I just wish I could do more of the Windows stuff from a tty, though. I never thought I'd get to a point in my career where a terminal interface over a full-featured IDE, but I guess I've arrived.
Did you ever think you'd see messages like this on web sites?
Internet Explorer is deadz0r, Edge is so much of a non-starter that they're basically giving up and embedding someone else's layout engine...
It took a long time, but the non-Microsoft side won the browser wars ... bigly.
Of course, this isn't as big a deal as we once thought it would be. Nowadays the Borg of Redmond just wants everyone shackled to their cloud, just like the Borg of Seattle do.
(Full disclosure: this message is actually just a test of copying an image onto my clipboard and pasting it into WebCit. I seem to be the last person to realize that the editor automatically translates it to a data: URI.)
Good thing you're back, because my computer got b0rked by an update and I
had to reinstall. If I had to nuke Seattle I'd hate it if you were there.
Do you have any irrational hatred of Arizona? Is where I am this week. In
a couple of weeks it'll be New Orleans. And then who the heck knows after
that.
Are you implying that my hatred of Seattle is irrational? I supplied three
irrefutable reasons to hate Seattle.
I'm ok with Arizona. I've heard it's a nice place. Except for the McCain family, of course.
I'm ok with Arizona. I've heard it's a nice place. Except for the McCain family, of course.
Meanwhile, on my Windoze machine...
I found an unexpected way to finally ditch Outlook. (Aside from using Web Outlook, of course, which is *just* broken enough under Firefox to make it unusable as a daily driver.)
I configured Windows Phone Mail and Windows Phone Calendar to point to my organization's Exchange server. Of course, they don't have "Phone" in their names, but let's face it, that's why these programs were built. Seems pretty good so far. They're far more lightweight than Outlook, and they don't have to be running to get alerts.
It's kind of funny that these programs have outlived the devices they were built for.
I found an unexpected way to finally ditch Outlook. (Aside from using Web Outlook, of course, which is *just* broken enough under Firefox to make it unusable as a daily driver.)
I configured Windows Phone Mail and Windows Phone Calendar to point to my organization's Exchange server. Of course, they don't have "Phone" in their names, but let's face it, that's why these programs were built. Seems pretty good so far. They're far more lightweight than Outlook, and they don't have to be running to get alerts.
It's kind of funny that these programs have outlived the devices they were built for.
Oh, this is great...
Microsoft is bringing Clippy back for the new version of PowerPoint.
He won't appear in his original Microsoft Bob cartoon form, of course, but the "Presenter Coach" will be there to tell you that your presentation sucks and needs to be fixed.
But here's the really Orwellian part. Clippy will now flag you for not using "inclusive language". Presumably this means that you get yelled at for "wrongthink".
It's likely that such wrongthink is being transmitted to Redmond as well.
[ https://tinyurl.com/xe-clippy ]
We have lost, The Simpson's have retired Apu because it was a stereotype, Hank Azaria has said he *always* hated the stereotypical character. Both Slash and Axle have said their songs are far too sexist.