Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Scrollbars a page at a time, not a huge jump at a time

I've been really annoyed by Rhythmbox scrollbar behavior of late: when I click in the "trough" of the scrollbar, instead of moving the view by about a page up or down, it moves a distance corresponding to the point in the trough clicked. This is pretty bad for large text areas, such as a large music library. I complained to the Rhythmbox folks and Jonathan Matthew replied that this is default gtk behavior. This struck me as odd since I haven't noticed it in other applications, however Jonathan was right.

Google led me to a Gentoo site where ebichu was having the same issue, and posted the solution. I can't thank him there since I don't have a gentoo.org password, but he or she deserves thanks. The fix is to add a line to /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini:

[Settings] 
gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = false

So they apparently call this slider warping. Very user-hostile.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Mindspring's 14 Deadly Sins

Worth keeping in mind and adapting for just about any business. From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindSpring and credited to Mike McQuarry:

THE 14 DEADLY SINS OF MINDSPRING (or ways that we can be just like everybody else)
  1. Give lousy service--busy signals, disconnects, downtime, and ring no answers.
  2. Rely on outside vendors who let us down.
  3. Make internal procedures easy on us, even if it means negatively affecting or inconveniencing the customer.
  4. Joke about how dumb the customers are.
  5. Finger point at how other departments are not doing their jobs.
  6. Customers can't get immediate "live" help from sales or support.
  7. Poor coordination across departments.
  8. Show up at a demo, sales call, trade show, or meeting unprepared.
  9. Ignore the competition; they are far inferior to us.
  10. Miss deadlines that we commit to internally and externally.
  11. Make recruiting, hiring, and training a lower priority because we are too busy doing other tasks.
  12. Look for the next job assignment, instead of focusing on the current one.
  13. Office gossip, rumors, and politics.
  14. Rely on dissatisfied customers to be your service monitors.
I took the liberty of correcting the grammar in two places: 'jobs' in 5 was singular, and 9 contained a comma splice. Also, Wikipedia used a hyphen rather than a dash in 1; since it's unclear if this was Wikipedia's error or Mindspring's, I did not correct the Wikipedia page.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Texas? New York?

Lewis Black nails it. Link [ Note: the YouTube video has been deleted multiple times, so try the Vimeo one just above.


Deceased YouTube link replaced with one directly to the Daily Show, 2014-07-08.