Two different people invited me to google+, so I figured what the heck. It’s a little annoying the way it keeps putting up a red box on my gmail tab saying “1″ notification, but when I click on it, it isn’t showing me anything that hasn’t already been viewed/responded to.
Usually, when I find a bug in windows iTunes, it’s a screaming at the PC frustrating bug that makes me want to conduct a long term campaign of harassment of the offending developer (ok, not seriously). Today’s bug is much less annoying, more just puzzling over how it could have occurred. If you click-drag on the bare metal of the iTunes app, when maximized, the application switches into non-maximized mode.
I can’t find any other windows application that reacts the same way, and now I’m curious what maximized iTunes does on my iMac at home. Is it an intentionally inherited ‘feature’, or a true-bug like the focus-stealing during import?
Something odd going on in the interaction between STAF and sudo on an HP-UX 11.31 ia64 system. When I sudo from the command line as userx, who as a member of the wheel group, and the sudoers configured to allow no-password commands, I still get prompted for a password, or an error about no tty allocated to ask for a password from (for a while, I somehow managed to attach a random root telnet session such that it was acting as the tty for said messages). After further experimenting, determined that with sudo 1.6.9p11 everything works OK, but with sudo 1.7.4p6, I get uid/eid problems that generate spurious authentication requirements. Investigation continues.
My druid character doesn’t have a hearthstone at the moment. I’m sure whatever I needed that one inventory slot for was totally worth it. It’s not like he can’t teleport to moonglade and take a quick bat to Orgrimmar. Today I go to do that, but notice that instead of the path it used to use, it now wants to send you through 5 different flight points in the new Mount Hyjal area, for a total cost of 5 gold. Or you can manually tell it to fly you via Winterspring to Bilgewater Harbor, for 14 silver, and then a second bat on to Orgimmar from there, for only 6 silver more. I suspect the manual route is significantly shorter too. I’ll have to time it and see.
Oftentimes, how something fails can tell you a lot about how it was put together. This holds especially true in software. Legion are the security holes that were found because an innocuous error provided attackers with valuable information about the design.
Sometimes the information exposed is just interesting, but without practical value. In the World of Warcraft, I’ve run into more than a few of these types of errors. The most recent one left me in a sort of limbo state. As part of the new expansion, you take part in an epic battle that includes several ‘phased’ zones that are only enter-able via automation, during cut-scenes. One of these zones is the epic final battle between the Naga and the lord of the water realm they seek to take over. You get zoned into the area after a cut-scene boat-ride, and have a couple of minutes where you can control your character as you follow the automated NPCs around a major battle scene. Hundreds, if not thousands of NPC’s can be seen fighting around you. Eventually another cut-scene starts up, the Naga kill their man and swim into his realm. It looks really nifty. Somehow I ended up stuck in the zone after I should have phased out to the next segment, which is where things got interesting.
All around me, the battle is still raging in the distance, eventually circling around to the point in the timeline where the player gets phased in, but since I wasn’t standing in the magic spot it placed me in, I could control the camera and move around, even during parts that I thought were pre-rendered. What I think this means is that somewhere in the Blizzard datacenter, there are machines (Ok, probably virtual slices of machines) that do nothing but fight this one battle over and over, 24×7, 365 days a year, regardless of if anyone is in them. From a little experimenting with the hostile NPCs, it looks like a practically fully functional zone; the NPCs are unkillable, but suffer and give damage that looks to be properly tracked, up to the 0-point at which some special rule probably kicks in and doesn’t ‘kill’ the mob even when it would hit 0 HP. If I ever get stuck in the zone again (you can get out, FYI, by letting one of those mobs kill you. when you swim back to your body, you get zoned into the post-final-battle version of the zone), I’m going to try attacking one of the talking mobs during what would be a cut-scene for anyone else. Ideally, I’ll do this with a second box running through the zone in normal mode. If only I had an infinite supply of 80′s ready to run through the zone.
During the post-launch rush, I’m sure the zone gets lots of usage, but I have to wonder how well they planned out utilization vs processing-cost a year from now, when visitors could be days or weeks apart. Will they still be spending the same amount of processing power putting on a play to an empty house, or does the zone have enough smarts built in to suspend itself once empty? It makes me wonder how much ‘effort’ is wasted on zones that are practically dead now, like the two racial starting zones from Burning Crusade….
You gotta love when a small company gets taken over by a big faceless giant, and you start getting left-hand/right-hand problems where, for example, one group in a company will add a nifty feature to the product that reduces the pain of working with said company tremendously, only to have someone else in the same company make a change that sabotages all the work of the first group.
Someone at Yahoo added a feature to the Flickr Uploader that lets it automatically determine image rotation.
Someone else at Yahoo added a feature to the website that lets it automatically determine image rotation.
No one at Yahoo bothered to see if the two systems work together, so you have situation where the auto-rotation-magic of the Flickr Uploader is wiped out by the auto-rotation-magic of the website’s back end processes.
Morons.
open firefox on a machine with two monitors.
place the firefox window so that most of the window is on monitor 1, but the search box is on monitor 2.
start entering search terms.
when the auto-suggest feature kicks in, it’s displaying it’s dropdown on monitor 1, far away from the actual text-field on monitor 2.
Is it google, or firefox?
You can accidentally drag one folder into another under appdata\local, and it just does it. It ctrl-Z to undo your mistake, and NOW you get prompted by UAC to approve the re-creation of the file folder. Nevermind that the delete was probably the more damaging action. WTF-eh?