First, I should point out that I was getting most of these problems before I got my new machine, and I assumed that when I got my spanky new machine and fresh OS I would be mercifully free of them. Unfortunately this assumption was wrong. I don’t know what I have done to deserve this and I don’t care. Perhaps it’s something I installed [I run a fairly lean system], but I maintain it should not be so easy to pollute a clean install!

Top 5 gripes:

1. Unwanted & Unnecessary Icon Rebuilding - XP keeps rebuilding icons on my desktop for no apparent reason, as well as taking forever to display the proper icons in file dialogs. The hard disk thrashes, and for 2-5 seconds my desktop/file folder looks like absolute shite filled with generic icons while frikkin XP rebuilds its icon cache for what seems like the ten millionth time.
2. Horrible Evil Selective Find-in-Files Capability - I think I ranted about this recently, but considering how little documentation there is about this, I think it’s worth mentioning again. XP does not let you find text inside all file types! There is more info about this problem [and its miserably tedious fix] here. Some cases where I have been totally screwed by this great new feature:
   1. Searching through html files (ie this site) looking for pages which use a certain link. Weirdly, nothing shows up because links are not part of the human readable body text of html documents [they are stored in attributes within tags], and XP therefore doesn’t see why I would want to find them!
   2. Searching for symbolic constants in RC files, to try and sort out project merging clashes. XP also can’t think why I would ever need to do this, and so it screws me .
3. Utterly Vindictive Toolbars Which Keep Reverting to Defaults That I Don’t Like - Here is what I want my folder windows to look like. I consider it a compact and functional arrangement:
   
   and here is what my folder windows keep reverting to, sometimes after a day or two, and sometimes instantaneously:
   
   I hate hate hate not having an address bar, and XP clearly hates me, because it keeps discarding my choices for no obvious reason.
4. Trivial File Deletion Can Take About Ten Thousand Times Too Long - I think this might be specific to NTFS under XP, but I frequently find myself staring at the Deleting File dialog box for more than ten seconds, even when I’m only deleting a shortcut from my desktop. Do you know how big a shortcut is? It’s frikkin miniscule, and deleting one shouldn’t even require a progress dialog, let alone one that hangs around long enough for me to start wondering why the hell it’s taking so long to delete just one pissy little file.
5. Using XP Makes Me Look Like a Dick Next to Mac OSX Users - because OSX looks beautiful, handles redraw properly, and doesn’t continually make icons disappear and reset themselves for no good reason. The UI designers of OSX appear to understand what the term "seamless" actually means, and correctly assume that the average user does not want to witness their OS publicly stumbling, sneezing, farting and wiping its arse.

One reason why I don’t provide reader comments here is to avoid surreal public conversations such as this one over at Joel on Software. It appears that someone pointed out a very trivial bug on his web site, which provoked a bemused jokey insult from Joel, which in turn led to hurt feelings and much discussion about the bounds of pedantry and the social skills of programmers.

That’s not to say that I don’t find comments entertaining, what with all the unexpected twists and turns. Here you can read what happens when one nerd gets envious of another nerd who got invited to a nerd convention that only uber-nerds are supposed to attend. [The argument is between Rory and Roy, and for what it’s worth, I’m glad that I shall never meet Roy in person, because he seems like one of those annoying people who is always "just saying" things, but then sidestepping responsibility for any actual offence caused.]

Another problem with comments is that there are some really messed up/ desparate/ lonely people in the world, and there are a lot of other people who enjoy pretending to be messed up [trolls], and when you post a seemingly harmless mention of Bill Gates’ philanthropy you might get some rather startling responses. Reading the misguided pleas for financial help, I’ve never felt such sympathy for the Richest Man in the World, because I’ve no doubt that the correspondence addressed to him on a daily basis must be 1000 times worse.

Anyway, speaking of nerds, why not check out the automated , which really is surprisingly similar to the real thing…

Whiz Kids [circa 1983] was about a bunch of kids who solved crimes with the help of their home-brew computer [which I think was assembled from discarded government hardware?] Whiz Kids was probably the nearest thing to a TV equivalent of the movie War Games [except for the Global Thermonuclear War stuff of course].

I wanted very very badly to be one of those kids, on that show, playing with that hardware. I think sometimes Richie’s dad would bring home a shit-hot new piece of government technology for him to try, like a voice modulator or image scanner, and I would be just so… jealous… or something. Also I probably had the hots for the older girl in the back [who has clearly been hypnotized for this publicity shot].

Just one of the great plotlines [for the episode, FATAL ERROR ]:

Richie learns that the computer game he has been play testing has a very different application for the convict who invented it, and who has $12,000 hidden away on the outside

Now that’s a show!

Of course, I was only 12 when it aired, and it’s very possible [or even probable] that it sucked, but reading the plotlines I really think I’d like to see an episode again. I cannot say the same for The Powers of Matthew Star…

…according to this quiz, which doesn’t actually tell you the correct answers at the end, just gives you a ranking. Still, a quiz is a quiz. [via Ned Batchelder]

Interestingly, the same site hosts a bunch of other quizzes, and the highest rated ones appear to be entirely about vampires…??? It seems that the site has become the unlikely host to a bunch of interactive vampire fan fiction. This feels like a perfect illustration of the subversive something-or-other nature of the internet blah blah blah… zzzzzz…

Well OK, it’s not really, but any illusions I had of the compatibility of JujuScript with C++ have been shattered as I attempt to convert from former to latter.

I had been assuming that a lot of the code would copy across fairly easily, but now I realize how much I rely on generics and ECMA style with blocks, so the code is really quite different. Realizing this I think that for future JujuScript development I will worry less about maintaining the C style conventions, because it’s already different enough that cut-n-pasting code doesn’t work.

The reason I have to convert it is because JujuScript has not got much 3D math support, and more importantly it isn’t fast enough to cope with intensive tasks like AI. If I don’t convert then Drivey is stalled until JujuScript gets some serious optimization, which is not really on the cards right now.

In other news, my friend Richard has started a , which I welcome, so long as he doesn’t use it to harrass me too much ;)

… this is the kind of stuff I would be working on:

Unfortunately I am neither rich nor retired, but for short periods of time I can at least pretend that I am. That’s the nice thing about programming as a hobby: apart from having to shell out for a new machine every few years, there are very few expenses. Much unlike scuba-diving and drag-racing.

With Google’s ranking system you never know how a page will be indexed. To my utter surprise a routine search [at time of writing] on my - just my surname mind you - now returns in the #1 slot a semiotics essay I wrote in 2000 as an undergraduate. Not anything in my blog, not anything I might actually want my name linked to, but an essay I posted on a whim while clearing out some old documents.

There are only two links to this essay: one is buried somewhere within these archives, and the other is from this page. The amazing thing is, my name doesn’t even appear in the essay! It seems that since that second external link contains my name in the link text, Google is happy to consider it the most worthy result.

I’m thinking of taking it down now, or at least posting a disclaimer with it… If someone I’ve met googles my name I’d prefer them to arrive here rather than at a short mediocre essay I wrote several years ago.

Somewhere along the line, PkWare has dropped the ball, and what was once the zip app of choice has [d]evolved into software that is so bloated and annoying, it made me want to scream.

–> Documented below in screen captured form is the remarkable 22 step experience of installing PKZIP for windows and unzipping a single file. See if you can guess at what point I nearly lost my temper. Not included is the initial stage of obtaining the evaluation package, where PkWare requires an email address to send a link to (the email tells you that by clicking the download link you are opting in to future mailings). For such annoyances, I highly recommend www.mailinator.com . [Also not included in the 22 steps is the uninstall of this utterly crap-tacular software, which I did immediately after using it, hopefully for the last time in my life.] The reason I needed PkZip at all this is because a single package I downloaded from www.pointing.com would not open using integrated ZIP support in WindowsXP, and since they point out on their download page that they used PkZip to compress, I figured I should try it out. It did work, but it is worth noting that after uncompressing it I tried recompressing using WinXP zip functionality, and got a substantially smaller file. Our journey begins…

I wouldn’t be using it at all if there was an equivalent to OpenGL for sound, and an integrated WinAPI for getting analog controller input. I’m really sick of cut-n-pasting boilerplate code for restoring buffers and enumerating capabilities. I am pleased that DX9 seems to have stabilized somewhat, whereas a few years back it seemed like the API was constantly changing. I still have unpleasant memories of the first big change in D3D (DX3->DX5 I think) where MS basically deprecated a whole methodology, because it stank [’Execute Buffers’ I think it was called].

There was a bit of an anti-climax last week when it turned out this entry on BoingBoing was not a reference to me [I wrote about aerogel in January] Ah well, musn’t grumble. Anyhow, I don’t know what I would do if I was linked from such a major site… [I’d probably put my underpants on my head and go ‘wibble’]