There’s a reason it was named after Eunuchs

Oct. 13th, 2007 12:18 pm

Call me a revolutionary, but I don’t see any reason why we should use an operating system that was intentionally designed to be user-unfriendly, and which was designed 40 years ago, back when 8-track tapes were the state of the art and the two-byte difference between “copy” and “cp” was really, really important.

I still marvel as my Linux weenie coworkers have to kill hours rebuilding their entire file system because they powered Unix down without going through the formal shutdown process. Oh yeah, and don’t forget that it allows users to create a file called “~”. Just don’t ever try deleting it, because the tilde is also a shorthand notation for your home directory! Now ain’t that intuitive? And don’t forget the Windows Find post I made last year at this time…

Unix is a fossil, and running Linux is like making your Twenty-First Century laptop backwards-compatible with rocks. I’m not saying Windows is especially great, but I am saying that Unix is not a serious platform for anyone who wants to actually get work done, as opposed to dicking around with obscure incantations.

That was what I was thinking when the following exchange occurred at work:

Orn: Why don’t my Windows keys work?
Jay: Install Linux
Orn: Yeah, like I want to type Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T-Backspace-U to login.

I think that kind of key combination is pretty typical of Unix. I just made up a completely random and undocumented sequence of keys on the spot to poke fun at Unix’s patently stupid fixation on arcane and unintuitive escape sequences. Jay thought it was funny and used that exchange as his instant messenger away message for a while.

Ironically, one of our senior technical architects noticed Jay’s away message. He runs Linux, and out of curiosity and sheer stupidity, actually typed it into his Linux box.

What did it do? It killed his X Windows. Brilliant! Gotta love a system that’ll let you type a random key combination and crash your whole windowing system.

You may now picture all the Unix weenies who read this post doing the same thing, just to see what happens…

There is only one Stupid Unix Trick, and that’s ever installing that shit.

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You eye goo rue

Oct. 13th, 2007 11:14 am

Venting about some UI annoyances.

Bad Drop-Downs

When a drop-down is active, typing a letter will take you to the first entry that begins with that letter. Pressing the letter repeatedly will go to the next entry in the list that begins with that letter.

For example, in a list of states, clicking on the drop-down and pressing ‘C’ will cause ‘CA’ to be selected. Subsequently if you press ‘C’, it will select ‘CO’ and ‘CT’ and then ‘CA’ again in a cycle.

Not breaking this behavior is basic usability.

But how many sites have you been to where they prepend a hyphen or a repeating word in front of every single value, making the letter shortcut worthless?

Much worse than that are the sites that use the javascript onChange event to take the user to another page. In that case, when I use the letter shortcut to get to ‘CT’, the first time I hit ‘C’ I’m immediately taken to the ‘CA’ page, in direct violation of the drop-down’s standard behavior and the user’s desire.

Double-click lookups

Being able to look up the definition of any word in an article is nice. However, overriding the default double-click behavior (highlight word) is not. I happen to use double-clicks to highlight words as a visual reminder of where I am in an article. Having to manually close all the popups this generates on the New York Times site is so frustrating that I refuse to use their site.

Meaningless progress bars

Have you ever watched a progress bar get to 100 percent complete, only to start all over from scratch?

Once upon a time, progress bars reflected how far you were through a process. Now they’re just animated gifs, with no correllation to how close you are to “done”. I’ve watched software installs where the progress bar got to “complete” a dozen times. What?

This practice has become so widespread that users are now trained to completely ignore progress bars, so even if you code yours properly, no one is going to believe you.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Remember me?

In lots of web-based apps, the login prompt also includes a checkbox labeled “remember me on this computer”. In theory, it sets a cookie so that the user won’t have to login—or at least not retype their username—the next time they visit the page.

The problem is that almost none of those sites actually remember anything. I have to type in my username and password every time I visit my work email, even though I click “remember me” every time, and that’s not an isolated incident.

Again, this is shit. What the hell are these people thinking? “Gee, that’s a great feature… Let’s pretend we have it!” Fuckwods.

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