Procrastiblog

February 13, 2007

Developers Can Be Dicks (It’s True!)

Filed under: Tech — Chris @ 9:50 pm

Take, for example, this bug that I mentioned a few days ago: the Mac OS version of the Thunderbird mail client doesn’t integrate with the Mac Address Book. Many people find this annoying and a good many cite it as the One Single Reason They Don’t Use Thunderbird On Their Mac.

In a past life, when my Mac was my main computer and Mail.app was getting on my nerves, I voted for this bug in Bugzilla. As a consequence, I am CC’d on any changes to the bug, which I find fairly annoying. Apparently, the maintainer find it un-bjørne-ably annoying:

Peter Van der Beken 2007-02-13 13:37:12 PST

is someone working on this with the intent of AddressBook integration happening sometime ‘soon’ (hint: not another 4 years, please …)?

Yeah, I was. But comments like yours have finally made me decide that I’d rather not read more bugmail from this bug.

And, with that, he took his name off the bug and marked it UNASSIGNED.

A little history… This bug was first reported in April 2003. The first patch was committed in June 2003. Since then, there have been about 80 comments attached—a rate of less than 2 per month—and the patch has been modified more than a dozen times to fix bugs or keep it up-to-date with the trunk code. Over 400 people have voted this an important bug, making it the #5 most voted for open bug in the entire Mozilla project database. Despite all of that, there has been never an inkling that the bug fix will be incorporated into a release.

What gives, Mozilla? Has all maintainence been outsourced to unhinged maniacs?

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Panser Anti-Bjørne

Filed under: Not Tech, Waste of Time, YouTube — Chris @ 9:03 pm

This documentary is now at the top of my Netflix queue. I suspect—just this once—H won’t mind.

The quick summary: man is attacked by bear, man spends years building anti-bear armor, man seeks out Grizzly for a re-match, and then… ? I’ll just have to wait and find out!

(Via Dave-of-the-Long-Box)

A Series of… Pipes?

Filed under: Tech, Waste of Time — Chris @ 7:51 pm

Yahoo Pipes is pretty cool, though not, I suspect, as easy-to-use as advertised. The idea is that you can take RSS feeds and other “Web 2.0” content, process them in non-trivial ways, and end up with your own filtered, re-mixed, or mashed-up data stream. Things like: personalized Ebay price watches or Flickr photos inspired by New York Times headlines.

I’ve concocted my own, decidedly less ambitious Pipes: Overheard in New York w/o the Wednesday One-Liners (there’s too many!) and Tapped blog posts by Mark Schmitt or Ezra Klein (all those other earnest liberals get boring). Here’s another one, just for kicks: Grace’s posts on design*sponge and BizBox in one feed.

If anybody can figure out how to make a Pipe that attaches headlines to headline-less RSS feeds, that would be sweet.

P.S.: I should probably give a “via” credit to TWiT—as if they need it—since I was inspired by their idle yapping to check this out.

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