Google believes I am a robot

Google believes I am a robot

Every once in a while I get this:

Yes, I do run FF with NoScript, Adblock Edge and CookieMonster addons to prevent attacks, reduce traffic and avoid tracking. No, I do not want to be offered ads of same stuff on all web sites I visit, and will not disable my cookie and JS protection.

So the $*10^6 question is: why do you, Google, care, while YOU ARE A ROBOT! You creep all over the Internet, you suck information out of web sites, even engaging in hacks and security circumvention to steal copyrighted content and re-publish it w/o owner's permission, and you are worried if some potentially allegedly robot accesses you??? How does this make sense, can anyone tell me?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 04:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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What billions of dollars cannot buy you: user friendliness.

What billions of dollars cannot buy you: user friendliness.

Considering how totally destructive many TFS commands are, and how difficult recovering from inadvertently falling into their trap can be, Microsoft should have thought about introducing a stage mode. Allowing the user to run a command without permanently committing the results, just to see if the idea would work, should have crossed their minds.

But no, with all those hundreds of billions that they are sitting on, no one bothered to care about the user and they keep releasing bits of information about how to recover from virtually irreversible loss of assets, as in this blog post dispensed on us by the geniuses in Redmond.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 01:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Quantity over quality is the new motto of "open source everything"

Quantity over quality is the new motto of "open source everything"

Folks, this is not getting ridiculous anymore - this is ludicrous. Your users do not need or want a new major version of the OS every year which you are pumping out. The users need quality and stability over all.

Once in your lifetime, stop and look at Microsoft. They are anything but stupid. Microsoft releases a new major version of their OS once every 3-5 years and drops support after about 5-7 years at least. It matters not how smug you think of Microsoft - they are protecting the clients investments into IT, while you are NOT.

All mainstream Linux distributors pump out 1-2 major versions a year. We are on 25th Fedora over the past 10-12 years or so. We are on Ubuntu 16. FreeBSD accelerated their releases and pumping out more than 1 major release a year. Even ZeroShell router OS published a few quick half-baked versions between 3.0 and 3.7 at the speed of light while the users kept reporting complete show-stopper problems with each release which never got addressed. The speed at which you drop support due to "end of life" is horrifying! Most of the time this means a complete freeze on the updates and even removal of them from the update servers, as if extra few GB cost is of paramount importance these days.

"Open source" has become the opposite of its intended and pronounced goal: to develop quality alternative to the paid software products. Quality is simply not there anymore.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 01:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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KDE God knows which version follows Gnome 3 down the toilet

KDE God knows which version follows Gnome 3 down the toilet

They are no longer even showing the version of KDE running from the Help menu of the KDE programs such as Kwrite... And that is fine! What's the point, after the "development team" or "KDE community", whatever those twits call themselves, butchered KDE beyond belief?

Why am I ranting again? Well, here's why: after installing Fedora 25 "the latest and greatest" glorious most recent version I realized that everything I was afraid of for the last few years finally came to pass. My readers remember me being frustrated with Gnome 2 turning into a smartphone-like Gnome 3 and thus becoming summarily useless POS. The same thing just happened to KDE.

more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux cannot print

Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux cannot print

Today I tried to print a shipping label. It was created by the post office web site in a landscape orientation, but Linux Adobe Reader insisted on printing it in portrait.

I turned on "Auto Rotate and Fit" in the print dialog options, but it wasted another corrupt portrait page.

I switched orientation from Portrait to Landscape, keeping the auto-rotate option. It wasted another corrupt page.

Finally getting fed up I saved the PDF to a Windows machine, logged into Windows and opened the file in Windows Adobe Reader. It printed the correctly oriented landscape page right away even though on Windows the print dialog did not have orientation option at all.

Adobe, before you release - test 456!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 04:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Oracle continues its tradition of sabotaging the users

Oracle continues its tradition of sabotaging the users

Below I blogged about Fedora 25 and its bugs.

As a part of that test I installed the latest VirtualBox 5.1.10.

You probably already know where this is going: of course, it did not work. Entirely. Completely. Totally.

Well, not entirely - the VB itself starts up and even allows you to create a VM. But that VM does not start. It complains about "some error code that occurred" and recommends running a command

sudo /sbin/vboxsetup

But when you run this command, it only throws several more errors, complaining of how this system is not set up for compiling the kernel modules and recommends, in turn, to run several Yum commands to install kernel_core_devel packages.

Well, guess what, those packages do not exist in the Fedora 25 repositories. A multi-billion corporation should have done due diligence and verified its setup before releasing a specifically Fedora 25 package of VirtualBox, instead of writing God knows what in a script and releasing it, hoping that it would work.

If they ever did their due diligence, they would have probably learned, that Fedora, starting with version 20, uses DMF instead of Yum for package management. What a bunch of irresponsible yahoos!

There are bug reports to Oracle for this, which they are in no rush to resolve, but you can fix the things very easily. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Experimenting with Fedora 25 just for fun

Experimenting with Fedora 25 just for fun

Same old, same old - another bugged, untested release

For a long time I have an issue with the releases of Fedora from 14 till 19. They just do not work gracefully with AMD platform's sleep modes. Once Fedora goes to sleep, it either does not want to wake up at all, or wakes up everything but the monitor.

Once I realized that switching from XOrg console to a text console wakes up the monitor, but switching back puts it back into energy saving mode, I found a workaround to the later issue on Fedora 19: pulling out and re-inserting DVI cable wakes up the monitor in XOrg as well.

Just out of curiosity I decided to test and see if this bug has been fixed in the latest releases. Yes, this bug no longer exists. Hurray! But there exists another.

The freshly installed vanilla Fedora 25 never booted into the KDE desktop. It froze in the black (huh?) screen with the KDE logo and the spinning circle underneath. It just sat there after entering the login credentials. I decided to give it a little whack over the head and used the console switching trick. And then the desktop loaded!

This freeze apparently was not specific to KDE spash screen - the panel, desktop and application launcher menu froze upon clicking them until console was switched to text and back.

For a week now I have been faithfully installing every update that became available, but this bug still exists. According to a quick Google search Fedora 25 freezes all the time and for just about everyone. Another piece of turd released by the inept and reluctant "Open source developers" who do not give about their users. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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How do you pwn all your users at once? You suggest they upgrade, then laugh at them!

How do you pwn all your users at once? You suggest they upgrade, then laugh at them!

So suppose you are running some virtual machines in Oracle's VirtualBox. And suppose you are on version 4.3.x. And one day comes when VirtualBox pops up a dialog that niggardly informs you that a new version is available and you should upgrade.

And you do!

And once you do, you are no longer able to start any machines. None at all. They all just display a highly technical message box that says nothing more than something like "Error code 1, unable to start VM".

And only after trying just about anything in universe and downgrading all the way back to the old version, you realize that it works. Get it? New version does not work, old version works. So where would any reasonable person go in this predicament? To the manufacturer's web site, of course! www.virtualbox.org

And over there, deep in the forum threads about the countless bugs that users created, you will find a mention of "hardening". What is that and why did it whack you over the head? more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Open Office's Terminal Stupidity

Open Office's Terminal Stupidity

I am afraid to state that (for fear of it getting worse) but can anything be worse than this: Open Office is programmed to format anything as dates and it is impossible to get away from that. Paste text containing "5/8 in" into a cell. Edit out or replace " in" with an empty string. It becomes 12/30/99. Edit the cell and add an equal sign in front of "5/8". Still the date! Even if the cell is formatted as a Number. Why and what for? But if you enter brand new "=5/8" into another cell, it is 0.625... Did they even test before releasing? Do they have unit tests? Rhetoric question, of course they did not test and do not have any formal testing. Isn't open source world grand, where you do not need to bother about testing?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 08:04 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another linux lie: "we can switch users in XOrg"

Another linux lie: "we can switch users in XOrg"

On paper KDE has user switching, where other users should be able to start their own graphic desktops while the 1st user who logged into the system is still connected.

This is supposed to work like this: while screen of the 1st user is locked, another user presses "Switch User" button under the password prompt of the screensaver and is presented with a dialogue allowing them to start a new session. Then the users can switch between the sessions using Ctrl-Alt-F12345...

Well, that works for one user only. Once that one user started a new session, did their work and even logged off completely, that original button "Switch Users" in the 1st user's locked screen does NOTHING any more.

Devised to help multiple users use the same machine's graphical desktop, this functionality is single-use throw-away. To get it to work again, the 1st user has to appear at the keyboard and unlock the screen. Then it will work only once again (including not proceeding with starting a new session - if the new user simply opens the "Switch User" dialogue, but changes their mind and cancels, the button will still not work again until screen is unlocked by the 1st user).

Should that untested functionality be embarrassing for anyone in KDE project? You judge!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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LibreOffice - another piece of rotting meat, II

LibreOffice - another piece of rotting meat, II

Saga continues...

Was doing personal finances today and had to calculate a running total of my credit card statement. For that I copied and pasted a table from the CC company web site into Calc.

The table contained 3 columns: date (dd/mm/yyyy), vendor and amount ($#,###.##). I pasted the info into Calc, selected the cell under the amount, entered =sum(, selected the column and pressed Enter. The total was 0.

What the... said I, and looked at the numbers. They were left aligned, which meant Calc treated them as strings.

I search/replaced the $ symbols out of the numbers. Nothing changed - still 0 total, left-aligned values. Looked closer - all numbers had a blank space at the end. Search/replaced spaces with nothing. The total was still 0.

Even though the numbers in the cells were now perfectly formatted, stupid POS that Calc is considered them strings.

The developers of LibreOffice are either high on mind-altering substances, or terminally stupid, or they all work for Microsoft. Releasing untested piece of crap into the world and calling it an office suite is audacious.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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LibreOffice - another piece of rotting meat

LibreOffice - another piece of rotting meat

Had to create a mail merge tonight - cost me some grey hair, again. How typical of an open source POS.

Begins with the address block editor dialogue... It ignores user input (leading tabs) and presents the preview as if they are not entered. Its own Left/Top/Right/Bottom buttons insert spaces/CRLF in order to move the field around. Huh? When trying to type in front of the field, entire field is selected and erased. Takes using the above buttons to move it to the right (inserts spaces before) and only then it is possible to position the cursor to the left of the address field. WTF?

Next tab... It inserts the fields inside the text boxes. Well, hmm, Okay... But positions the box absolutely randomly and with no respect to the top/left offset I am specifying. Out of whack.

Next tab... Saving the merged document... You would think that once you saved it to a file, then the new window Writer just opened for it would retain the file name you just saved, as well as the path where it was saved? Wishful thinking! It still thinks it is an Unititled1 in your home directory (I am on Linux).

The merged document is completely butchered. The boxes containing the fields are not where I put them, also something is so screwed that my document that originally fit on 2 pages with quite some slack is now wrapping onto the 3d page. WTF?

Well, after lots of bad blood and screaming at the monitor, I finally figured out the sequence of actions that can provide a quality merged document:

1. Start mail merge wizard. Edit your address block etc. Insert tabs in front of the fields as needed by first using buttons to shift the fields right.
2. Press Edit Document button and move the boxes where you want them to be.
3. Do the merge.
4. Press Customize document.
5. Fix the position of the boxes.
6. Save the merged document.

Now you are really done. Do not skip customization, even if your document looked fine while being merged - the address etc. would be butchered and move up and to the right in the merged document if you skipped that step.

Hoping that helps anyone to avoid going bonkers over non-cooperating POS that LibreOffice has become. I never had such issues while it was Oracle's StarOffice.

Did you think horrors were over? I thought so, but when I finally tried to print the merged document from Linux, the printer wanted to use manual tray. Nothing in LibreOffice printer settings or in CUPS allowed me to choose paper source, so I ended up saving the document to a network drive. Then I went to a Windows machine and opened the document in the same LibreOffice there.

Other than the fact that the text box has shifted again on the very 1st page, everything seemed to be fine, as printer properties on Windows have paper source and it was set to Automatic, which always prints from Tray1. So I sent document to the printer. Some 300 pages later I turned over the printouts and... cursed everything in universe: the To address textbox merged into the document was not there. I had 300 useless letters with no To address on them. LibreOffice managed to spit me into the face after all once again.

I do not give up easily so I exported the document into PDF/A and guess what - the To box exported just fine.

LibreOffice developers, when you read this, know: you are the worst fucking dicks in universe, shit headed monkeys with bat guano for brains. I had enough of your stupidity. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Why on Earth is Linux using CUPS for printing???

Why on Earth is Linux using CUPS for printing???

I don't know when and why the enlightened ivory tower dwellers, who package Linux distros, decided to use CUPS across the board, but the end result is that every time a Linux system is booted prior to turning a printer on, which is in like 99% cases, CUPS in its wisdom pauses the printer considering the situation some kind of disaster.

So I have to explain to 1057th user how to go into CUPS web interface and use Administration tab to resume the printer.

If you ever had this problem, you probably know that there are suggestions on the internet to change error policy in CUPS config file /etc/cups/cups.conf from 'Pause Printer' to 'Retry Job'. Well, that does not work! The next time you reboot, the setting will revert back to 'Pause Printer'. Who and why overwrites your changes is a mystery, but someone went out of their way to ensure that you cannot print.

And you know what is most hilarious? It is that while your policy is still 'Retry Job', it does not actually do that. If you had a misfortune of sending a job to a turned off printer, the job will be permanently paused and you will have to do what? Right, go into CUPS administrative web interface, again, and resume that job. CUPS is hell bent on NOT printing.

You probably also came across the scripts that supposedly re-enable any paused printer by querying 'lpstat' and using 'cupsenable' command. Well, those do not work too! They simply print an error

cupsenable: Operation failed: client-error-not-found

I guess that's how Steve Jobs is laughing at all of us from the grave.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Microsoft developers have gone mad. Again.

Microsoft developers have gone mad. Again.

Try to open two files with the same name from the different directories in Excel. You cannot, as it will give you an error message to that effect. Nice!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 11:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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TexMaker is dead

TexMaker is dead

Open-source community shows its true face once again. Previously a fabulous product - TexMaker - became essentially useless due to huge number of small, but annoying bugs creeping in. When contacted with the bug reports, its author Pascal Broshet reacted in a surprising (for a stranger to Open Sorce) but typical for me manner: he deleted the incidents from his bug tracker, replied in an annoyed and rude tone and then spread lies on tex.stackexchange.com QA site.

Pascal is really sounding deranged in his posts, that he makes under 'user27168' alias on tex.SE. He accused TexStudio users of "creating false bug reports" as if there was a global conspiracy against him. But how would he know that a bug report was false, if he did not even triage it, never even got our feedback and simply deleted the incidents?

To substantiate my claim of bugs I will mention the following:

1. Various glitches in search, such as not searching upon the first press of Enter, but on the 2nd only; search box recalling a wrong search term from the drop down list.
2. Weird behaviour in undo/redo, when sometimes undo works action at a time, other times character at a time in very similar context.
3. Painful glitches with inserting environments: \begin{} \end{} auto-completion positions caret somewhere in the middle of the inserted lines and selecting \end{} in order to move it to the bottom of the text block it is supposed to close takes quite a few keystrokes. And another horrible bug related to the same function: using auto-complete of environment replaces the the word immediately following the caret.
4. Bookmarks are not staying on the line where they are set if previous line breaks are inserted or deleted. Bookmarks moving around is a royal pain when editing documents.
5. UI freezing and non-working Stop button make it impossible to abort compilation.
6. Switching between insert and overtype mode, all by itself... Realizing that you just overwrote a good chunk of text is priceless... And then it is priceless undoing it one letter at a time (see above).
7. By some twisted logic, pressing Ctrl-T (to comment out a line) inserts % sign at the caret, not at the beginning of the line. As if Pascal believes, that instead of pressing Shift-5 for % we prefer Ctrl-T.

Could these have passed QA if there was one? It is sounding like Pascal is not even bothering with unit-testing!

There are more, but I simply do not have time or will to keep them in mind as I have to work on the documents and produce the drafts in limited time. Pascal is not making it any easier and this is a last straw that finally makes me abandon Linux TexMaker that I previously loved for Windows TexStudio.

Why Windows, you might ask? Ha-ha! Because Linux TexStudio requires me to install a full-blown instance of texlive from the repository, even though it is already installed from a DVD. Of course there is no such requirement on Windows. Linux... a royal PITA these days.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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New Era

New Era

We are entering a new era - the era of counter-intuitive user interfaces.

Did you notice that every UI designer believes into wasting as much space on your monitor as technically possible? The panels that cannot be hidden or completely collapsed (Microsoft Office)? The toolbars that can no longer be docked where user wants or turned off (Adobe Acrobat Reader) etc.

What is the last 20 or so years of progress in software and hardware for then? I could dock Adobe Reader toolbar to the left side of the window in order to be able to view 2 pages side by side at 100% zoom in the versions up to 9. Starting with version X the toolbar is fixed. The effort to change the UI to fix the toolbar was apparently deliberate (20+ years of development experience tell me that). Just as deliberate were the efforts to introduce non-collapsible Appointments and People side-bars in MS Outlook.

The only question I have is when is KDE going to follow? They already screwed up the Plasma widgets such as panel settings and widget palette (with its horizontal scrolling design). Time will tell.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 08:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Apparently Linux can no longer print

Apparently Linux can no longer print

Sent a couple of PDFs to my 2 laser printers: HP and Brother. Neither printed correctly right away:

• Brother flat out refused to print, displaying "Bad letter paper" error. The same file printed on the same printer from under Windows without issues the moment I sent the job.
• HP displayed "Load cardstock paper" even though I never ever used cardstock in my life. Same story - printed fine from the Windows machine.

It used to be the other way around about 10-15 years ago. Linux truly has become a sad caricature of itself.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Can multi-billion corporations be embarassed?

Can multi-billion corporations be embarassed?

Oracle just released NetBeans 8 which has a re-occurrence of a complete show-stopper bug: cannot debug GNU C++ code.

There was the same bug back in 2011 that was supposedly fixed in 2012. Now it's back.

Another embarrassing bug in NB 8 is runaway processes. Stopping debugging session does not actually kill the process being debugged. How they could possibly miss that in test is beyond me. The only reasonable explanation would be that they did not test at all.

In version 8 they finally managed to completely break breakpoints. In a sense that there are glitches with setting and removing them: clicking left margin may not have any visible effect, but set the breakpoint anyway. Or the other way around: clicking a breakpoint in the margin will not have any visual effect, but breakpoint would be removed. And any combination of that, when you no longer have any idea what breakpoints exist in your code.

Top that with broken code completion where completion hotkeys have to be pressed twice to bring up code completion drop down box, not one! Wasting users' time must be their goal.

When initially started, NB 8 does not allow you to run your project right away. You can edit your source, but the run/debug butons are disabled until you click inside the project tree. Could they miss that in test? No possibility - they did not test at all.

Recently I came to realization that with NetBeans 7.3.1, 7.4 and 8 I was spending ever greater portion of my working hours on fighting the IDE bugs and its developers @ Oracle. This cannot continue as I have to make money for my business before I get paid. The Oracle developers, judging by the sheer amount of bugs in rudimentary simple functionality, that must be easy to spot if only they bothered with testing, must be getting paid regardless of quality of code that they deliver. I do not have this luxury and am jumping off the train wreck called NetBeans.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:12 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Oracle further embarasses itself with NetBeans 8

Oracle further embarasses itself with NetBeans 8

It's unfathomable how they can call this a release while this is not even an Alpha. Try refactoring... You'll be in a world of pain like I was, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Get it? Left Ctrl-R works different than right Ctrl-R. Even with the left Ctrl-R that seems to work more often, you sometimes get inline refactoring, othertimes you get a popup window. I could not figure out the rule, as the variables I was refactoring were simple a, b, c of the same data type, declared on one line!

Replacing the 3 last characters of the variable name with their uppercase twins was not saved when I hit Enter in the pop-up rename window. But inline refactoring worked... The only emotion I have after all that is Huh???

This is from a multi-billion dollar corporation. Imagine the horrific bugs we should expect from someone sans billion $$$! But wait, aren't GNU products working fine?..

Posted by: LinuxLies at 03:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Fedora packagers are now officially out of their mind

Fedora packagers are now officially out of their mind

Try installing MySQL Workbench (GUI client for MySQL). You'll end up getting mariadb (a full blown MySQL server) too.

Get it? You want a DB client, but you have to get DB server too. Even if you do not need it. Even if you do not have disk space for it. Screw you, Fedora user! Sucks to be you.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another Linux myth: 'We have voice communication!..'

Another Linux myth: 'We have voice communication!..'

There is much noise about voice in the open source world.

People use this and that application for voice and video calls with varying success. Truth is, most of the time this is not working as advertised.

Let's look at the XMPP clients advertized as supporting voice and video.

Gajim

Gajim is a Python application using 3d party library for voice/video suppot. That 3d party library is available only under Linux. Does Gajim voice work under Linux then? No, it does not inter-operate with the other XMPP clients. Perhaps one Gajim works with another Gajim, but then we are not talking about voice over XMPP - we are talking about Gajim working with Gajim, which is no longer 'voice over XMPP' - it is voice from Gajim to Gajim. I do not know if it works actually, as I don't have anyone else out there who are using Gajim to test.

Jitsi

Jitsi is a one trick pony. First of all, it requires lots of real estate to work. Jitsi is a Java 1.6 application which uses 3d party native libraries for virtually everything. If these native libraries crash your system, you are responsible, not Jitsi team, even if no other similar software (Skype? Real Audio? Adobe Premiere? Virtual Dub? SIP softphones?) ever crashed it. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 11:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Jive Software at igniterealtime.org are a bunch of loonies or scoundrels

Jive Software at igniterealtime.org are a bunch of loonies or scoundrels

Jive Software are makers of Openfire jabber server which works kind of Okay (if we forget that their latest version does not allow Miranda, Pidgin and other clients to log in existing JIDs, only create new ones). But their own client Spark, advertized as supporting voice and video all over the interwebs, simply is not what they say. Bait and switch.

Spark voice calls simply do not work. It is so bugged, that calling that a 'stable release' is simply unethical. Calls don't go through, developers nowhere to be found and there is not a bit of documentation on what the hell this program requires to work. In other words this is usual and customary "compile, release and forget" POS from 'open source community'.

Worst part is that they make it look like it works and have users waste countless hours downloading, installing, configuring, registering in their forum and posting questions that never going to be answered by anyone who would know. Same old.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 10:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Fish rots from the head

Fish rots from the head

Every day 'Open source community' goes out of its way to provide more evidence of its total moral corruption or growing incompetence - whichever you prefer.

Here's a reply from none other than Alan Cox to a bug report of a complete showstopper bug where files cannot be copied from Linux to Windows machines while hanging entire Linux O/S in the process: rtl8111d: network transfers fail/corrupted

In short, he proposes that the bug reporter installs all kernels from 2.6 to 3.11 in a Fedora 14 box (knowing full well that 3 series kernels do not work in F14) and then walks away. FY, Linux user!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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A common thing about the open source projects

A common thing about the open source projects

Someone writes something, convinces everyone (who are not really listening) that this is fabulous stuff, then turns around and walks away to a real job (why not? with 'enhanced resume' now...)

Here's the proof: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2516 - a bug in Android TabHost that remains unfixed since 2009, for over 4 years.

In the best traditions of open source projects the bugged code is now 'deprecated'. Strictly, not yet. But Google does not recommend using TabHost anymore. Now it's clear why. Instead of fixing, they 'deprecate' which means no fixes and no new development going in.

GFYS, users of the existing applications with TabHos layouts. You are on your own.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 05:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Why we all should buggier and worse quality software going forward

Why we all should anticipate buggier and worse quality software going forward

The developers can write quality code if they have an opportunity to use a debugger to fix the issues with it. This is called de-bugging for a reason. Human brain has limited ability to analyze computer code. Even the best developers introduce bugs unintentionally and even the best of the best need debugger to visualize the call stack, variable values and follow execution flow.

The trend of the day in software development is to use XML to define program structures - be it composition and layout of GUI or representation of database tables. Everyone is happy - XML is plain text, it can be generated automatically and it is self-describing. They are forgetting of only one important thing: XML cannot be debugged. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 12:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Upgrading to Fedora 19

Upgrading to Fedora 19

Some pleasant surprises and not so pleasant too. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 12:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Oracle goes full Microsoft

Oracle goes full Microsoft

Open source claims another victim

Previously there was significant difference in the way Oracle (Sun) and Microsoft treated their developers.

Microsoft strived to keep developers junior at all times. Every couple years they changed the API and tools and pushed seasoned developers into learning mode and lower pay bracket again.

Oracle used to be different. One can make a career doing Java against Oracle DB server. Not anymore. As soon as Java went open source with JavaFX, it was over. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 03:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another fascist invades your system

Another fascist invades your system

Oracle must be very proud of their Virtual Box - a multiplatform virtualization system that runs anything from DOS to latest Windows servers...

Well, it's only nice and cute as long as you are following Oracle's ideal configuration, i.e. your /opt directory is NOT a symlink. If your /opt is a symlink, you are royally screwed due to two choices Oracle developers made FOR YOU: they do not allow changing target installation path and without telling you (read - without checking on install) they do not support running VMs out of symlinked paths. Listen carefully: they will install into a symlinked /opt, but will not run the VMs. Lame? It is.

If your Linux system is not configured exactly Oracle wants, no VirtualBox for you. Of course there is no such issue on Windows as no one uses symlinks there (and no one is concerned with 'security' that Oracle insists it has to enforce on your behalf whether you want it or not). VirtualBox does not concern itself with file/directory permissions on Windows and simply runs from whatever target folder you installed into. FY, Linux users, from Oracle with despise!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This is what $240,000,000,000 cannot buy you!

This is what $240,000,000,000 cannot buy you!

1. Undo/redo
2. CUA clipboard control (Ctrl-Ins/Shift-Ins) copy/paste
3. Mouse wheel scrolling
4. Type-ahead picking

You are probably puzzled of what the hell I am talking about? Well, welcome to Business Intelligent Studio's expression editor. Microsoft with its total market value to date of $240B is infuriating developers around the world by dropping support of the items above.

Typed 200-300 characters into your precious expression and made a mistake? No undo for you! Type it all over, slave! Apparently coding a keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Z for Undo was too expensive for MS. They saved how much... $10? more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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JSP has become a bastard child of NetBeans (or Oracle?)

JSP has become a bastard child of NetBeans (or Oracle?)

As of NetBeans 7.3+ JSP projects no longer deploy into Glassfish. Bug reports to that effect go unnoticed/not worked on. Evidently Oracle does not want any more JSP development, as they are choosing to ignore these complete show stoppers.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Strange hostility from another open source developer

Strange hostility from another open source developer

After creating a bug report I received the following email:

1) The changes about the shortcut key was requested by YOU!
https://code.google.com/p/texmaker/issues/detail?id=1047

2) It's clear that you don't have any kind of respect for developers, that you're not a real Texmaker user and that you're a liar (with a fake google account like all anonymous cowards)

It is sounding like an email from a very disturbed individual. He is not differentiating between his bug reporters as evident from 1) and considers his development activity some kind of quest of challenges by the bug reporters as evident from 2)

Bottom line is, he deleted the bug reports and flatly refused to address them. This is probabaly how 'Open source community' is advertising its prowess.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Linux further embarassing itself with non-working preupgrade

Linux further embarassing itself with non-working preupgrade

You know what's most horrible about Open Source community? It is that they come up with those great ideas, have little patience coding and even less testing and they say 'Screw it, we are moving on'.

preupgrade is trumped up as the proper way to upgrade to the next version of Fedora. But does it work? Google 'preupgrade root not found' or 'preupgrade intermediate version' and you will realize that preupgrade does not work for too many users. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Linux RSS readers - OMG!

Linux RSS readers - OMG!

Listen, folks, this is bordering on insane!

When you sit down to code an RSS reader, you probably want to create something user friendly, otherwise why coding?

What you have achieved so far with Akgregator and Liferea was the opposite, like 180 degrees from user friendly.

Listen up: RSS is about being informed of the updates to a web site, like ads or posts etc. But when you code a list view of the titles and insert new updates at the bottom and randomly in the middle and every new update at the bottom repositions the list to the very top, you are just demonstrating your IQ below 60.

"Open source community" as you like calling yourself should just quit writing software altogether - it is too embarassing, don't you realize?

Posted by: LinuxLies at 11:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Linux Flash saga continued

Linux Flash saga continued

This is 2012 and Firefox version is 13 or higher but still FF cannot play all flash content out there. How IE manages to play any flash that exists, or how FF under Windows does the same, but not under Linux is beyond me.

Epiphany crashes while playing many flash videos. It just disappears from screen w/o any diagnostics. I knew a programmer who loved to terminate application inside his catch blocks. He must be coding Epiphany now.

Can't get Konqueror not even to play - to display flash object.

No flash content for you, Linux user! GTFO in other words.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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LibreOffice packages install new version instead of updating

LibreOffice packages install new version instead of updating

I am not interested in "figuring it out" as the nerds in forum always suggest. Problem is I am an admin of a huge IT infrastructure and have to figure out thousands of important things, thus, alas, don't have time to figure out these issues.

For the life of me I cannot figure why first StarOffice, then OpenOffice and finally LibreOffice cannot package their releases so that they would update themselves on Linux machines. Instead they install a new version every time, and I have to go into yum and uninstall the old one.

All other software I deal with - hundreds of packages - clean up after themselves and update, but not whateverOffice.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 03:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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LyX - pseudo-WYSYWYG editor for LaTeX

LyX - pseudo-WYSYWYG editor for LaTeX

Open source community strikes again. Encountered another piece of software with defensive and arrogant development team.

LyX is devised as a WYSYWYG editor for LaTeX, but it does not support properly formatted LaTeX files for import and export.

The developers are clearly annoyed by the bug report and recommend changing the LaTeX documents to accommodate their bugs.

Chemists beware! Your LaTeX works employing fabulous Martin Hensel's mhchem package will lose some formatting characters if imported into LyX. I am aware of problems with gas ^ character and equation direction characters >>. There may be more issues I am not aware of! more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 12:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Gigabyte decided to follow Asus suit...

...and switched to making crap

The last two motherboards that I bought are neither GB nor ASUS.

The previous 2 were Gigabyte. One of them has issues suspending and waking up in Linux, as well as a network adapter problem - it may disappear from the system after reboot from Windows into Linux or after Linux wakeup from suspend. Another one was defective to a degree where applications were closing with errors and system went into BSOD every so often, increasingly often.

GB had audacity to send me a completely dead, non-working motherboard for an RMA replacement, similarly to what Asus had done - they returned me the defective motherboard without doing any repairs. The defect is still there - if Windows startup was interrupted, it will not boot again until DVI connector of the on-board graphics was disconnected and system rebooted and allowed to complete the POST w/o anything connected to DVI.

Thus no more Asus or Gigabyte products for me - enough!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:59 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Entire world has gone mad

Entire world has gone mad

Over the last few years I have been trying to contact the developers of the so-called 'open source' projects with the bug reports and important feature requests.

If you have been following this blog, you should have known that response have been non-existing or abusive, perhaps because the bug reports have exposed utter lack of testing and common sense in the developers.

The last drop is the sorting in Open Office that is driving me mad: even if the column's cells contain nothing but digits and formatting is set to Number, OO still sorts as text, i.e. 100, 1000, 110, 1500, 200...

Are the OO developers for real? I would have been fired after 2-3 bugs like that made it into a formal QA. Apparently 'open source community' does not care. No wonder, they have no formal policies as to quality and there is no one overseeing their 'work' to weed out horrible developers. This is hopeless.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Fedora 16 is out... and further out

F16 follows F15 to the trashcan

for the same reason as in the earlier post on Gnome 3.

Taking Gnome 2 and making an Iphone out of it was unbelievably stupid idea. I just can't believe my eyes.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 01:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Stupid is as stupid does - no config.gz in Fedora kernels

Stupid is as stupid does - no config.gz in Fedora kernels

Everyone noticed that there is an option in the 2.x kernels to publish kernel configuration via config.gz. But the 'open source developers' are not using this feature, making compilation of a custom kernel a nightmare.

Even if one needs a custom kernel just so that it is optimized for the platform, there have to be many changes made to configuration compared to .config shipped with kernel sources to arrive at the functionality of pre-compiled kernels shipped from the repositories. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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