All Quiet On The Western Front

I'm working on a post about the upcoming Presidential elections, and it's far from being done, so I really don't have anything to fill up space with, and it seems to be a fairly quiet Saturday night. The horrid day of really bad April fools jokes will be over soon, and it couldn't come soon enough for me. The worst offender by far is Slashdot. Those people have no concept of a great gag, and never will. The "Bill Gates buys Linux" thing is done every single year, and it's not freaking funny you idiots. You have to be shocked, but also taken in by something that is at least a little plausible. You guys can't even sniff plausible, so stop trying.

As long as I'm in a bitchy mood, I might as well complain about the program I use as an offline composer for this weblog. The program, w.bloggar, is actually pretty slick. It's just enough of an HTML editor to have everything you want, without being a bloated HTML editor. It's also just enough word processor in the same respect. Just enough of both, not too much of either. But it's also sadly written in C#, which is a joke of a language. It's so slow on a 2.4ghz machine that it's just laughable. The dictionary component is pathetic, it only has around 30-40,000 words when it should have 300-400,000. And even at that tiny size, it still takes several seconds to load the first time you try to spell check. And for being an application designed just for this purpose, the spell check is very stupid (as in logic.) You can't even spell check highlighted areas of the document, only the full text. And when it does run as you'd like it to, it hardly ever suggests the right word. The accuracy is just terrible.

Similarly, the American Heritage Dictionary I have has one incredibly annoying problem. When the application starts, it searches the clipboard and uses what it finds as the default search. So if I put the word "bogus" in the clipboard, then launch it, it'll given me results for "bogus". Cool, right? Sure, if you have a brain and understand how the clipboard actually works. You see, the clipboard can store more than text, and if it does, the AHD program chokes hard core when it first starts trying to make sense of whats in there, like it's doing right now. It's probably been about three minutes since I tried to launch it, and it's still not running. That's the second part of the problem, when this happens, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. The process does not show up in Task Manager, and doesn't even show up in sysinternal's process explorer (that actually surprised me.) Since the process isn't visible, you can't kill it. You have wait. And Wait. And wait.

I'm inclined to give the AHD a free pass because it looks like it was written in 1995, but still, that's just sloppy design.

Note: While spell checking the document down to this point, it took 5 full seconds to load the dictionary (w.bloggar is now sucking up 32mb of memory), and lacked all these words: Saturday, April, Linux, and "w.bloggar". The fact that it doesn't contain it's own name is kind of stupid but not fatal, what bugs me is that it doesn't understand the word "w.", and not "w.bloggar".

Anyway, that's a pretty good sized rant for a guy who had nothing to talk about, and I just realized I haven't been to cardsquad.com in like a week or more. Crap. Here's a rant that's much better than mine is, I just wish cardsquad had trackback so I could leech hits off of them. Damn them.

I love poker, you know, and this just really makes me want to go play. I think I will. Peace out.

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