JulioBiason.Net

It seems I’m really unlucky when dealing with the Python-List.

As pointed before, when I signed it, I got in the middle of a battle between Lispers and Pythonistas. Although it was pretty ugly, a lot of good stuff appeared there; after all in the middle of it, some people pointed good points in both languages. And, as the list goes, it is a programming language list.

Then, when things settle down, someone decided that it would be good to post things about 9/11. Yeah, things from 2001 (some people seem to be trapped in the past and really like it). Several people complained and, for weeks, the posts keep appearing over and over again (each time, a different story, but always about 9/11). After three weeks, it seemed that the moderators decided to do nothing, so I did what I would did: I reported it back to SpamCop.

What I hoped was that the original poster would get listed, his/her ISP notified and, if everything fails, at least wake up the Python-List moderators.

The thing is, after some reports, my subscription turned into digest and I received one message from one of the moderators. It seems that, instead of getting the ISP from the spammer notified, I manage to get the hoster of Python-List notified and blacklisted. I explained my point of view, that I was reporting spam on the list and not the list itself and so on.

Then, the guy came with this:

Those messages were coming in through the USENET gateway.

The moderators have no control over the gateway.

We do have very aggressive anti-spam processes on the python.org mail servers — I’ve written a six-part article to be published on the LOPSA.org website on the current state of the art on fighting spam for mail server administrators, and I use what we’re doing on python.org as one of the key sets of examples that I keep coming back to.

That’s when I unsubscribe the list. Not only because it pretty hard to follow conversations in digest mode, but because such stupid nonsensical message. In one point, say that they are very agressive towards spam and, on another point, show that there is a way to bypass every “state of the art” measures they have against spam. It is like, “I have build this super-strong wall; nothing can breach it, you can drop a nuclear bomb on it and it won’t even scratch! But people say it is too dark inside, so I put this glass window”.

Really. How can someone say “we are very rigid against spam” and let an uncontrolled, unprotected way to send things directly to the list? That’s utterly stupid and braindead. The guy probably never heard that “a chain is as strong as its weakest link”. It doesn’t matter if they are using an advanced neural network, a bayesian filter or even a positronic brain to filter the messages if there is way to bypass everything.

Stupid. Some people should look around before praising their own work.

“Keep me in the CC ’cause I didn’t subscribe to this list”. I’ve read this many times, when people contact a user list/development list looking for help in some problem. Now that I’m using Mutt (again) and that it has a “reply to list”, trying to “reply to list and the people in the CC” is quite annoying.

Thinking in a way to solve this, I came with the following thought “oh, wait. This guy needs help, but he is not willing to help people reaching him. Anyone who has the solution will have to check to send the message to the list [to keep the archives] and to the guys, ’cause he was too lazy to subscribe.”

Really people, if you want help, start helping yourself.

When the summer time started here in Brazil, almost every channel kept their programming in the original time. There is just one exception: Sony Channel.

Why would Sony keep the same old times? My guess: they still have that stupid “Latin America” control. Not that Brazil isn’t part of the Latin America, but our culture is complete different from the other countries; we even have a different language!

But that’s not a problem. They could just come and say “due the brazilian summer time, our programming will now start one hour later.” but no, they have come with some stupid “time is a matter of quantum mechanic physics and our specialists will now free the country from this mess”. Oh, cut the crap. You have stupid time control and don’t care about the country. So cut the chase and say it so.

CSI is the only thing they have that is worth seeing, anyway…

There are two things I hate on some musics:

1) It takes about three seconds to play anything. When a music starts, it should point why its going to play; if it takes three seconds of pure silence, the song seems to never begin. Why it can’t just start and show what is going to say?

2) Minutes of claps and cheers and screams at the end of a live song. Man, that is boring. You take a song, say, “Depeche Mode - Never Let me Down Again”, played live in Paris (”One Night In Paris” album) and you have three minutes of claps and cheers after the song is over. Ok, I could just skip the rest of it, but what if there is something good at the end (like the hidden scenes some movies have after the credits)? Also, I like to let the song play completely, so my music player marks another play for it.

The good point of it is that very few songs on my playlist have those problems.

I’m starting to believe that Microsoft doesn’t like me. For real.

All we hear from them is “Our API is what make us great” (some MS manager, forgot his name and real quote) and Ballmer claiming “Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!”, but what I see is a very rough and stupid approach to developers.

I’ll skip all the stuff from MFC (Microsoft Foundation CRAP) and go to a little story about trying to fix some JS that worked flawlessly on Firefox but chocked when run under Internet Explorer. It all starts with the “oops, you got an error somewhere around the first line and the last line” error IE throws when it finds an error on a page. Nice, huh? But wait, Microsoft has a script debugger that should help developers finding what is wrong. Let’s try to use it right?

Google for it, find the right page on Microsoft, where I see I must use the Genuine Windows checker (or something like that) before installing the debugger. Here we go: download the checker, run it and… it fails, saying it can’t find the browser folder. Run around and around till I tried to check the site with IE. And guess what: it works. It seems Microsoft tried to support another browser and failed miserably. We couldn’t expect anything different, right?

But that’s not the end: after it checked my Windows, the site allowed me to download the script debugger: 653K. All that mess for 653kb. Even worst: this tool is now deprecated. So I’ve run into a lot of troubles to get a small tool that doesn’t have any support anymore. Yeah, let’s protect it.

Enough? No. With the Script Debugger installed, I found what was wrong in the JS: it has a line such as

obj = document.getElementById ("element_id");

Funny thing, there was a line almost exactly like this one just a few lines above and it haven’t a problem. The error? “The object doesn’t have such method” (or anything along this line). Without any ideas, I did the thing I thought it was the most useless: added a var just before the variable name. And guess what: problem solved. Yeah, just that: a var. Oh, and the line before that, which looked almost the same? No problems at all.

Too much stupidity for a single company. TOO MUCH!

Já foi um porre agüentar a Globo ontem: as únicas notícias do mundo eram as partidas da copa e a morte do Bussunda. Alias, pela forma apresentada pela Globo, parece que toda a população brasileira está de luto mas, para aqueles que prestaram a atenção, foram poucos os brasileiros que estáo na Alemanha que foram entrevistados sobre a morte do “humorista”: alguém viu o que Ronaldinho Gaúcho ou o Felipão disseram (ou mesmo se eles foram entrevistados)? Por que será, não é?

A gota d’água é ver o Baguete (que se descreve como “jornalismo empresarial digital”) e o Projeto Software Livre Brasil noticiarem a morte de tal pessoa. Até parece que o cara fez grande coisa. Ok, lá pelos idos da TV Pirata até que surgia alguma coisa engraçada, mas faziam mais de dois anos que eu não via o programa porque o n&iaicute;vel das piadas era estupidamente baixo e sem graça.

Mas vamos olhar pelo lado positivo, certo? A morte do Bussunda provavelmente vai significar o fim do Casseta e Planeta. Pelo menos ele serviu pra alguma coisa que preste.

… is to accept a table inside a table. That lead to the most ludicrous HTML designs EVER! And I mean it! Browsers should refuse to render such crap!

Really, I can’t see how people can do anything on Windows. It seems it tries really hard to get in the way to make even the simpler things hard.

My gripe still around the keyboard layout. Yes, I did manage to put the American layout and everything is nice. Except that, sometimes, I really need to type words with accented characters, so I need to keep an american layout with dead keys and another one with dead keys. That’s not hard, I do this everyday on my laptop: It starts without dead keys, and I can switch pressing both Shift keys at the same time; press them again and I’m back to normal layout. Simple. Oh, and I can opt to do that to the whole desktop, not to just one window/application. Of course, I do all that on Linux.

Now, on Windows: There is an option to “switch layout” on the keyboard layout settings, so I could easily switch them as I do on Linux. Except that Windows doesn’t think a list of keyboard layouts are circular: once you hit the last layout, you got stuck in the last layout. And there are just a few selections for “keys to switch layout” (and, unfortunately, both shift keys aren’t amongst them). The only way to not get stuck on “you need to use your mouse to switch layouts” (clicking on the option in the task bar) is to add keys to select a layout directly: I got Ctrl+Shift+1 to use the keyboard without dead keys and Ctrl+Shift+2 to use dead keys. Try to type it and see how hard it is.

I really can’t imagine that 90% of all people in this planet can say “I’m productive on Windows”. That’s a lie or a very sick joke.

Como vocês já devem estar sabendo, eu tenho que trabalhar com uma máquina Windows, o que permite que eu tenha, todo dia, excelentes motivos para achar mais e mais coisas que me incomodam no sistema da Microsoft.

A última veio por culpa da tradução: Eu estou estupidamente acostumado com o layout americando de teclados, e o teclado veio configurado para ABNT2, até porque é um ABNT2. Mas meu notebook veio com um teclado em espanhol e isso não me impede de trabalhar com o layout americando, de qualquer forma (é só cuidar para não usar o “ñ” e estranhar quando vir um “;” )

De qualquer forma, eu passei um bom tempo tentando achar qual seria a combinação de configurações de teclado de layout e língua para ter um teclado americando sem acentos. Logo que se escolhe a opção de layout “Americano” [”Inglês (Estados Unidos)” seria o correto, mas enfim), o layout que aparece é “BR”. É quase instintivo que esse não é o layout sem acentos, então fiquei revirando várias opções de línguas até cansar, sem sucesso. Eis que, aparentemente, “BR” é uma língua sem acentos, segundo a Microsoft. Agora, num Windows em inglês, não existe a opção “BR”, mas sim… “US”, que é exatamente o que se quer, não é? Um espertinho achou que seria interessante traduzir a sigla sem se importar o que diabos ela queria dizer.

Microsoft, por favor, aprendam a usar o gettext. Suas traduções são terríveis (e eu não vou citar o fato do Word brasileiro ser um dos poucos editores do mundo inteiro em que Ctrl+S não salva o texto).