As I was using Thunderbird today, I was unpleasantly reminded of areasonably common UI idiom that I absolutely hate: having the way youpage through a single 'item' (in Thunderbird, using spacebar to gothrough an email message) also be the way that you advance from one itemto the next. The net effect is that you are paging through a message andthen suddenly, surprise, you're reading the next email.

This is wrong. In the case of Thunderbird, I can explain succinctlyexactly

In general, there are two sorts of Referer spam that I see here on WanderingThoughts . The firstsort is what I'll call 'plain referer spam', HTTP requests that have Referer URLs that are various spam websites. Many of these are easilyrecognizable because they are of the form 'https://web.site', with notrailing slash on the end; this is a legal URL, but it is not one thatregular browsers ever send. Usually the domain names or the rest of the

For those of you who haven't heard, OpenSolaris is dead; see theleaked internal memo for details (via here , here , here ,or even Slashdot ).In a way, I can't say that I'm too surprised, but I am rather unhappy.

We don't run OpenSolaris in production so in one sense we aren'tdirectly affected. But there are at least two areas where this islikely to hurt us, possibly quite badly. The big one is what is

A commentator on my recent entry on how programs should make it easyto change the font size asked me toexplain why I'd do this and said that they didn't even change the fontsize in Firefox, which boggles me quite a lot. When I boil it downenough, there are two reasons.

The first reason is the reason that I keep changing font sizesin Firefox: because (web) designers are crazily in love with not merely small font sizes, but absurdlysmall font sizes. I

What the world needs is a good caching nameserver. What brought this onis that I am currently flirting with yet another caching nameserver,which is something that I do from time to time because every cachingnameserver I've ever found sucks in its own way. This is actuallysomewhat surprising to me, because at one level the job is not allthat difficult so you'd think that someone would have written a saneimplementation by now.

(Possibly the DNS system actually is sufficiently difficult that itdrives every implementer

There is an old aphorism in Computer Science that any problem canbe solved by another level of indirection (Wikipedia credits it to David Wheeler ). TodayI have an illustration of this.

I mentioned that I was having problemswith USB serial ports on my just upgraded to Fedora 13 machine.Specifically, starting up PPP on such a port would hang the pppd process (and then any other process that touched the serial port).Since my DSL link is still down, this is a problem.It turns out

Here is a thesis: any GUI program that deals with a substantial amountof text should have a browser-like set of menu options for 'increasetext size', 'decrease text size', and 'reset text size'. Naturally, thisshould really use the same key bindings as browsers do. Browsers haveshown everyone the way, so it is now well past the day that we shouldhave to go into preferences and configurations in order to temporarilychange the text size in our editors, our mail clients

Dear application programmers: I understand that you like to providea history of recent documents, for whatever reason. But in today'senvironment, if you store any sort of history like this you should andin fact really must provide some way of purging that history. Ideallyyou would also provide a way to turn off keeping this history, too.

This does not have to be a prominent feature or element of your UI;Firefox puts their version of this in a preferences pane and a menuentry, and I

I've just gotten through with upgrading my office workstationfrom Fedora 11 to Fedora 13 with my first yum upgrade , and I have to say thatthe experience was reasonably pleasant. Reasonably pleasant here meansthat nothing exploded and I could use my machine throughout the process,which is what I wanted out of the whole exercise.

I did have to do some cleanup work in order to get the upgradeto start by removing various packages that caused yum to choke,all ultimately due to the RPM multi-architecture