91–100 of 311 posts
“Comfort food”. That’s so funny. I still use motif window manager with steelblue4 desktop and wheat xterm background since aix into Linux. That was my first default in 1989 college and nothing has improved since. (Gnome, kde and the like make me want to upchuck).
> Also, I tend to stick with default configurations because it makes bug filing easier. I've learned to use default configurations pretty much everywhere. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations, so it's easiest to just not care. The exception is my ~50 lines of VS Code settings I have sync'd in a mysterious file somewhere that I've never seen, presumably on github's servers, but not anywhere I can s…
Agreed. I had a professor once who would say “The defaults were put there by people who probably know more about the software than you”. As long as you understand what the defaults are doing sometimes it’s more hassle messing with every option under the sun.
Offtopic I really liked the auto-refreshing "Windows Spotlight" wallpaper on logon screen. I even wrote a script to sync it as my desktop wallpaper. But on my Win10 it stopped working idk why, so I wrote a script to download Bing Image of the Day instead: https://blog.est.im/2025/stdout-03
There's an official Bing Wallpaper App ( https://www.bing.com/apps/wallpaper ) for this, but it has all kinds of nuisances / dark patterns to switch your default browser to Edge and other nefarious things.
On my Windows 10 work machine, solid color backgrounds sometimes get reset to black after connecting to it via RDP. I "fixed" it by creating a solid color .png and using it as a background picture ...
Seeing how that complicated if-then logic is just too stiff a challenge to your average developer, we should probably just dispense with it.
Offtopic I really liked the auto-refreshing "Windows Spotlight" wallpaper on logon screen. I even wrote a script to sync it as my desktop wallpaper. But on my Win10 it stopped working idk why, so I wrote a script to download Bing Image of the Day instead: https://blog.est.im/2025/stdout-03
To me, this falls in the category of bugs I think of as "systemic bugs" or "type bugs". If login components were passed a token, then you could make the token's destructor automatically flag that the process is done. Then this bug would be more-or-less impossible to write. Because they made it a runtime thing - "components just have to remember to do this", the code structure itself affords this bug. There was a simi…
It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time. Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me…
The most annoying one is that Windows machines have lost the ability for deep sleep. Laptops that slept perfectly 5 years ago are now left as 24/7 zombies, with the CPU, fans and hard disks running non stop. I'm certain that some idiotic change just like the ones suggested in the article destroyed this perfectly working feature, and nobody is bothered to fix it because it would impact the latest harebrained scheme to…
The code in question reminds me a lot of my favorite Kubernetes bug: if (request.authenticationData) { ok := validate(etc); if (!ok) { return authenticationFailure; } } Turns out the same meme spans decades.
void doFoo(PermissionToDoFoo permission, ...){...}
from request import getAuth, respond
\\ Maybe getAuth(Request request)
\\ void respond(String response)
from permissions import askForPermissionToDoFoo
\\ Maybe askForPermissionToDoFoo(AuthenticationData auth)
response =
try
auth Earlier quoted context omitted.
> showing the user environment before the software was fully started. and it has migrated to web apps today - where doing something causes the UI to show a loading/progress wheel, but it takes forever in actuality (or on start up of the webpage, you get a blank screen with placeholder bars/blurred color images etc). And this is the so-called responsive design...
What would you suggest? Is it better to wait until the whole app is loaded to show anything? Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place?
It's the right thing to do to load resources asynchronously in parallel, but you shouldn't load the interface piecemeal. Even on web browsers.
I'd much rather wait for an interface to be reliable than have it interactive immediately but having to make a guess about its state.