Seb's weblog » Rants

Floating point not allowed

Sebastien Tanguy — Sun, 02 May 2010 11:00:35 +0000

This is the error that pops up when editing the (obviously) floating point value of the character or line spacing in the Mac OS Terminal.app preferences.

safari 4 and…

Sebastien Tanguy — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:27:40 +0000

I preferred when Safari was chewing up tons of memory. At least then it didn’t crash every 10 minutes on random web sites.

Sure, the usual culprit is most of time the flash plugin. Ok, that’s an external thing, that could be an excuse. But my guess is more on the thread management (which was already the subject of my previous post). Sometimes it would freeze loading a page when moving the mouse around. (I would bet on some kind of race condition between the cookies handling and the javascript interpreter).
If somebody wanted to bad mouth apple, one could say that they send out buggy software, crashing, being slow as molasses (I’m looking at you, iTunes), but mostly on older operating system releases, to push people to the upgrade way.
Bleh!

dear php, about array declaration

Sebastien Tanguy — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:41:33 +0000

So, the following is legal:

$foo = array(
  "bar" => 2*2
);
var_dump($foo);

But this is not:

class Foo {
  public static $foo = array(
    "bar" => 2*2
  );
}
var_dump(Foo::$foo);

I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation for this behavior, but I’m not sure I really want to hear about it.

safari 4 and threads

Sebastien Tanguy — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:10:49 +0000

Dear Lazyweb, why does Safari 4 takes up to 500 threads after a few days running? Not that I mind much the 5.6GB of virtual memory it takes or the almost 700 MB of real memory, but I’m just curious.

Dear google reader developers…

Sebastien Tanguy — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:25:11 +0000

Automatic translation is nice, but please, allow it on a per-post basis instead of per-feed. kthxbye.

I mean, when following on a multiple-writer feed (for example, any planet type installation), I may sometimes encounter a post written in, say, chinese or japanese, but I may not need everything translated (especially when I’m at fault, using the local google instance instead of the .com thing, and I find posts in english that I could understand translated into gibberish french that I don’t always understand).

journalists and up-to-date data

Sebastien Tanguy — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:44:04 +0000

People, if Chinese Democracy was already reported to have cost $13M in 2001, maybe giving such a number now would be misleading since most of the tracks were recorded a few more times since then.

bad taste

Sebastien Tanguy — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:44:07 +0000

Replacing Brian May’s nice and clean job with some butchered (probably fretless) thing.

Remember kids, Piracy is bad for your health.

google reader tags.. err… folders?

Sebastien Tanguy — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:05:21 +0000

So they renamed their tags as folders. But they still act as tags. Don’t people get confused by the “change folders” behavior?

gmail mac notifier wtf?!

Sebastien Tanguy — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:55:48 +0000

Downloading gmail mac notifier brings a dmg file (ok) which only contains a shell script (wt?) which opens another URL to download the notifier (W-T-F-F?!). What’s wrong with you, people, seriously?

nin’s website

Sebastien Tanguy — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 10:57:01 +0000

Dear Trent,

Your website sucks. Deeply. Oh, not as much as, say, voyage-sncf (which is the high level standard for suckage), but it sucks in its own way. It sometimes looks (and works) like a weblog or even a photoblog, but there’s no history. And when you’re posting 5-6 photos in a row, only crackheads doing a reload every minute can have a chance to pick all of them.

Your website sucks. And to compensate the high suckage level of your website, people built their own website posting everything you post there. But like I said, if they don’t have enough crack incoming, they might miss a post every now and then.

There are different solutions. You could probably enable full content in the corresponding feed, this way we will at least be able to see the content and you won’t have to change the visual aspect of your site, if that’s the problem. And this way, we don’t have to think about the thousands of fan comments (“I love you, Trent”, “come play to my house”, “alessandro is so sexy”, etc…). And I know you can post this content to the full-content feed, because you just do it for the “real” news. Another solution would be to post those pictures on flickr. It’s not like it would be difficult, again, since you’re already doing it for a selection of photos. Having pixelised phone camera pictures in the middle of dark blurry in-concert (not even large) pictures wouldn’t be such a drama.

Thanks for listening, Trent. Think of the ki^H^Hwebsite.

PS: don’t forget to free Robin in time for the VMA. Let him rehearse a bit, I’m sure Josh can help him too.