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Tagged: frustration

These blog posts have all been tagged with frustration. These tags appear to be related:

04 Feb
2016 My name in the modern world My last name is a technical hurdle. At least, for many people. In this high-tech, modern, globalized society, one would expect that a simple accented character shouldn't be an issue. After all, even a small child can write Stüvel correctly with a stick in the mud. So why is it such an issue in the world of computers?

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20 Jan
2014 Comments via Disqus

My blog has been targeted by spammers for years. The last months spam has been on the rise, so I finally got fed up with it and replaced my home-grown comment system with Disqus. Old comments are still there, new ones will be using Disqus instead.

29 Jul
2011 My experience with Wicket

Today I found out that I'm not a Java programmer. The more I look at programming languages in general, the more I find Java to be clumsy and short-sighted. For a project at my work I tried Wicket.

A lot of web frameworks in Java have the "I'm scared by the web"-syndrome, in which they try to get rid of CSS and mostly JavaScript, and replace it all with Java. Wicket is no different in that respect. In my opinion, if you're scared of the web, don't build a web interface.

A colleague pointed me to the Play framework. It appears to be very much like Django, but then for Java and Scala. I've given it a go, and it looks very nice!

Read on for some of my reasons for disliking Wicket.

14 Sep
2009 Why doesn't Windows have a package manager?

After I uninstalled Visual Studio 2005 Pro I got this very long message (I've included it at the bottom of this blog post) telling me to manuall uninstall twenty other programs, in the correct order.

They are capable to install all of this with one single button. Why on earth are they incapable of removing this? Why do I have to remove those programs myself? I'm also fairly sure that I can't even keep the window open so that I have a reference, because it is an installer and thus locks some DLLs that need to be uninstalled too.

Yes, replacing in-use files. It's a thing that systems all over the world have been capable of doing for years. Microsoft is still unable to do this nifty little trick that's oh so useful.

You may wonder why I want to remove Visual Studio in the first place. Well, an update of Internet Explorer broke some programs, so now I'm trying to repair my installation of Visual Studio. The built-in "Repair" function didn't work, without telling me why. So now I'm back to manually having to remove and reinstall every little part.

Please, Microsoft, join the new millennium and start using a package manager like all those Linux distributions have been doing for years. They don't use a package manager to tease you. They use a package manager because it's bloody useful.

Update: after hours of waiting while my computer uninstalled and reinstalled everything, it still didn't solve my problem. Snif.


30 Jun
2009 Refusing to continue

I've seen this so many times, and thought about writing about it. Today I found some code that is too good an example to let it go. I'm talking about the refusal some people have to using the continue statement. Here is an example in some pseudo-code:

It looks like fine code, but personally I'd rather use:

Read more about my coding philosophy after the break

28 Dec
2008 I can only get health insurance by breaking the law My last name is Stüvel. Apparently, this is very difficult for many programmers and testers to understand. Here are a few of the ways that my name is displayed by various applications:

Names with accents are really common here in The Netherlands, and even more so in the entire continent of Europe. Many people from all over the world immigrate to The Netherlands, so every application in our country that requires a person to fill in their name should be equipped to handle at least European names.

Nowadays it gets so bad that I'm having trouble applying for health insurance! When applying, I have to fill in my name and other personal information on the insurer's website. There is much money (and fraud) involved in health insurance, so they stress that you are obliged by law to correctly fill in your personal information. This is something I cannot do. When I give them "Stüvel", they ask me to confirm that my name is "St&#252;vel", which I cannot do by law. Then again, I am not allowed to give any other name than my real name, so "Stuvel" is out of the question - it is forbidden by law. In other words: I can only get health insurance by breaking the law.

Pretty please with sugar on top, accept that we live in a world that is made up of more than A-Z and design your systems for it. Unicode has been a published standard since 1991. Perhaps it's a good idea to start using it.
