Category Archives: Computers

Posts on computer science and the web, rants about OS:es, Window Managers, and the like.

Computers, Humor

Who’s really, really, really homebrewing?

As a former Linux user I’m getting really, really, really burnt by homebrew.

My big fallacy is that I was used to have the package manager handle everything for me.

Brew doesn’t do that. Oh my, it certainly do not!

First crack: Brew cask

I don’t know if brew cask is bad or if it’s just getting the short end of the stick, but several months ago the brew developers decided to move the “Caskroom” to /usr/local/Caskroom

Or in fact, they decided I should move it.

Which I tried and failed at.

I seriously doubt there are any linux package manager that would ever, ever do that.

If something needs to be done… IT. DOES. IT. FOR. YOU.™

So that was a very new and original concept.

Then a little later the “non-casked” brew stopped working with the perpetual “Already up-to-date.”-message.

This was months ago!

Now I’m a person that likes to have stuff upgraded. I feel that being upgraded and having virus protection are the two first things you do to protect yourself.

Guess how many times I was planning to kill brew forever?

It turns out, some one had crapped in the blue cupboard and broken the whole brew repository (every programmer has to start somewhere – especially open source programmers…), so you had to paste some hard core git commands to get things up and running again.

This solution appeared about a month ago (20th august).

My brew has been broken for at least 4 months.

By Jürgen Schoner - Originally uploaded on the German Wikipedia as "Weinbergschnecke 01.jpg". Own work of Jürgen Schoner., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=201455
By Jürgen Schoner – Originally uploaded on the German Wikipedia as “Weinbergschnecke 01.jpg”. Own work of Jürgen Schoner., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=201455

Blazing speed….

The big problem with brew is the reliance on git… or how that reliance is apparently badly implemented.

On the other hand, git wasn’t exactly implemented to solve this kind of problem. (No git is not a package manager or a CM-tool, it is a versioning system – I don’t care if you have 30 km of reasons why it can solve everything from Rubik’s Cube to world hunger to software configuration and installation!)

Now that I know OS X better I’ve come to understand that brew cask should never have been implemented in the first place. It replaces functionality that performs magnitudes better than brew and it does this drop dead simply.

Remember the old days when hard drives boasted a whopping 10 mb of memory and there were floppy disks?

No?

Congrats!

1200px-floppy_disk_2009_g1
By George Chernilevsky – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6963942

I remember my excitement when we switched from 360 kB floppy disks to 1.44 mb hard floppies! Heck I remember my even bigger excitement when we switched from cassettes to floppy disks before that.

The Windows, Linux etc approach to program installs – that you spread the program all over the place and only place a single version of a file on the computer once in a shared space – it is an archeological artifact from these times. When disk space was expensive and you had to be frugal.

What OS X does with its program’s files is, it places them all, “DLL:s”, executables and every other resource, in one folder per program, called the program’s application-folder. (Because it’s a folder in the folder named “Applications”).

If someone else happens to use the same binaries/resources/whatchamacallit, they package it in their app-folder (no filthy, disgusting, pathogen transmitting sharing!) No dependencies outside the folder, no DLL-hell, version mess, suicidal-programmer’s-excuse-to-kick-the-bucket!

And most importantly of all… it doesn’t matter that it takes an extra megabyte or even a hundred, no one cares because we all have 500 gigabyte, even terabyte disks!

SIZE. DOES. NOT. MATTER. ANYMORE.

So, no. brew cask was a total bust and a waste and a complete STD I can’t get off my mac now. (yeah yeah yeah you went there too when I talked about size, animal!)

The other brew? (The non cask one?)

Well I have like three console apps I’d like to have around… joe, markdown, um and what was it… unrar? Naaah… well it was something anyway. Ah yes, python! (Hey doesn’t OS X have a native version of python? perhaps not… whatever!)

Anyway, I guess it does fill some purpose…

I wonder if I can remove the shit and just install the three things I want installed like that and keep things really, really, really minimalistic over there….

By Simon Q - Flickr: Lightning Strikes, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19688303
By Simon Q – Flickr: Lightning Strikes, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19688303

Because you know… yesterday’s weather!

Don’t know what “yesterday’s weather” means?

It means, if you were to guess tomorrow’s weather, a good guess would be that it would be about the same as yesterday’s weather.

Ergo, brew will break again, and I will sit there like a UFO with no online resources that can help me. (It also seems the brew people are really, really, really bad att SEO… you can’t find shit when searching for brew related info…)

witches_add_ingredients_to_a_cauldronNah, I’ve come to the conclusion that brew might be less about beer and more about witches…

All I need to do now is to stay as un-macbethish as I possibly can!

Computers, Humor

Macaroni package over VPN

Aside

My VPN makes Google serve pages in german. The other day I realized the macaroni package in my cupboard had german writing… for half a second I wanted to cuss my VPN…

(Time to leave the house and take a walk IRL… Oh, and yes, I think that’s in fact dutch…)

Computers, Humor, Science and Society

Levels of system maturity

The following is a list of system maturity levels:

  1. Pre-conceptual – no idea, no system, not even an idea that a system is needed.
  2. Conceptual – an idea that a system is needed, nothing developed.
    • Customer: We need a system that does X.
    • Management: What they really say they need is a system that does Y.
    • Developer: What is most technically feasible is a system that does Z.
  3. Not working – a system that doesn’t work, at all.
    • Customer/management: We have no system.
    • Developer: We’re working on a system!
  4. Almost not working – a system that works, kind of.
    • Management: We have a system!!!
    • Customer: We wish we had a system…
    • Developer: Hey! We’re not done yet!
    • Support: Take the system out back and shot it, for the sake of pity and mercy!
  5. Almost working – a system that works, in principle.
    • Management: Didn’t we finish this system months ago?
    • Customer: We have a system! On sunny days…
    • Developer: Just let us…
    • Support: Oh no! Not another update!
  6. Working – a system that works.
    • Management: That was long before my time…
    • Customer: Oh, yeah, I remember that system… didn’t it use to do Z back in the days?
    • Developer: Done!
    • Support: Hands off our legacy system… or seas will turn red with blood and dogs will sleep with cats (or is it lions with lambs… whatever!) Hands off our system!
Computers, Humor

Dear Microsoft

Hello,

This is an open letter to you people at Microsoft.

I really doubt you would ever get back to me, but if you against all odds would care to raise your eyes from … whatever you’re mindlessly droning over right now… why don’t you comment with an e-mail address I can use to contact you?

Yep! I said it. E-mail address!

Bugga-wugga-BOOO!

Now, please relax! Take a pill (Not E! I need your focus a few more seconds!) I will not send you any viruses or bad porn or atom bombs or zip bombs or any form of bomb….

…I’m sure you’re already having a blast anyway…

It’s just… I am not born in the 90ies or later and I am having a hard time tweeting or facebooking or instagramming or whatever with you support people.

I want to send you an e-mail where I can tell you about my problem.

You see, I am a paying customer! No torrent download, no serialz. A paying customer!

And I’m paying for your software.

And I can’t use it.

I come from the Linux world where not paying meant you had to suffer through support forums with dubious half answers. And most of the time you never got things to work anyway or if you got it to work it still broke down a little while later.

That’s why I switched away from Linux.

And, I bought an Office 365 subscription.

It works on my main computer… kind of… you see it’s a Mac…

Yep! I said it, a Mac!

So nothing “Office” really works anyway… or well it kinda works and it crashes impressively… that means that most of the times it will save the file and you can continue as if almost nothing had happened… so… it works well enough.

However. I was so happy to see there was also Office for iPad…

You won’t see LibreOffice, or OpenOffice or much of anything usable for iPad. Pages for iPad don’t work with Dropbox… Only iCloud…

Lalalalala! Vendor lock-in! Vendor lock-in! Vendor lock-in!

…But Microsoft Office exists on the iPad…

…Kind of…

Well, I am sure someone can use it on the iPad.

Hey! Excel works. Haven’t tested PowerPoint… Haven’t been able to install Word.

Apple hates me by now, so they won’t help me anymore.

After all, I only bought the hardware from them. Twice the price, half the performance…. Veeeery cool (I guess?) design…

But, I can at least be disrespected by them via e-mail!

Maybe I’d get to mail you if I told you I had Tourettes and would yell at you to **** your ******* **** if I had to suffer through a phone call?

Okay, I don’t have Tourettes. I shouldn’t be joking about this. It’s serious stuff… but apparently Microsoft doesn’t have any customers with Tourettes, right?

Otherwise you wouldn’t have the contact-by-phone-only policy, would you?

Anyway, if you read this, know there’s a customer out there and he’s unable to use your fine products.

And he is looking for alternatives.

And in a contrary to any other search for alternative software I’ve ever performed I will now only consider products with e-mail support.

/Erk

Update: Woohaaa! I just cracked this nut!!!

One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399

I can mail my support request to you (that is mail as in send a letter)! WOW! AMAZING!