Sun Microsystems has added PHP support to their open-source Netbeans development IDE. I just tried the latest version (6.5) and I’m not impressed at all, at least with their OS X version: It’s slow and the Open File dialog takes a good 45 seconds (!) to load.
Posts Tagged: Rants
eBay Listing Removed for Search and Browse Manipulation
I just received this email for an auction I listed almost 24 hours ago:
The listing was removed because it violated the eBay Search and Browse Manipulation policy. The violation occurred when you included the following information in your listing:
Title…- LIKE NEW
Sellers are not permitted to include unrelated keywords in their listings in a manner that unfairly diverts attention to them. Using ‘new’ in a title to describe a pre-owned or used item is misleading information that confuses buyers when they are searcing for items that are actually new.
You’d think that eBay would be smart enough to make those checks BEFORE I publish my listing! I had over a dozen people already watching the item with several bids already in place and then eBay just spontaneously removes my listing. This is unacceptable!
Case Sensitivity in Mac OS X
Case sensitivity in Mac OS X does not exist.
The OS X command line is probably the most commonly used feature of my MacBook Pro. I love the fact that almost all the Linux commands I’m used to using on a Linux box work the same way in OS X. So, as you can imagine, I was shocked when I couldn’t rename a simple directory:
eris:~ raam$ mv Downloads/ downloads/
mv: cannot move `Downloads' to a subdirectory of itself, `downloads/Downloads'
That command should allow me to rename ‘Downloads’ to ‘downloads’, but apparently OS X thinks ‘Downloads’ and ‘downloads’ are the same thing! That’s absurd! In the Unix world, case matters!
So how did I eventually rename it?
eris:~ raam$ mv Downloads/ downloads2/
eris:~ raam$ mv downloads2/ downloads/
That’s just ridiculous.
I installed the Fluxbox window manager on my MacBook Pro a while back and decided to start it up to make sure I had access to a “real” command line. Sure enough, the command worked as expected within Fluxbox. Maybe I’ll start using Fluxbox a lot more often.
Check out this snippet from an article on InformIT:
Mac OS X, like the classic Mac OS before it, is not case sensitive; it doesn’t care whether you said File1.txt or file1.txt. Only one of them can exist in a folder at the same time, and there’s no ambiguity for either computers or humans in telling which file you meant. Even Unix commands like ls will work if you give them filenames to operate on that don’t match the capitalization of the actual files (try it: ls /library).
That’s really quite disappointing. I have suddenly lost so much respect for the OS X command line. Being derived from BSD in the Unix world, you would think Apple would keep something as fundamental as case sensitivity in OS X.
Apple’s home page not viewable in 1024×768
I do all my browsing with my web browser resized to 1024×768, mainly because I don’t need the window to take up the whole screen, but also because I like to see how compatible sites are with lower resolutions. As you can see from the screenshot above, Apple’s home page is not fully viewable in 1024×768.
According to Google Analytics, 30% of all the visitors to my blog are browsing with a screen resolution of 1024×768. I’m not alone: According to W3Schools 48% of their visitors are browsing their site with 1024×768.
Come on Apple, don’t lose sight of usability!
Syntax Highlighting Plugins
I’m getting sick of the iG:Syntax Hiliter bug that causes it to lose its configuration every time I do anything in the Plugins section. I also hate its proprietary syntax tags ( or ) because if someday the plugin author stops maintaining it and a newer version of WordPress breaks the plugin, I’m screwed (unless I wade through the code to fix it myself).
Here is what my code looks like whenever the plugin options are reset:
And here is what I want it to look like:
It makes so much more sense to use a plugin like Snippet Highlight which uses <pre> tags with CSS classes. The code for the plugin is dead simple, so maintaining it should be easy. Speaking of maintaining it, there’s a bug that causes Snippet Highlight to allow WordPress to parse HTML. I already notified the author, but if I have some free time this week I’m going to see if I can fix it.
