Very Big Grins

by Posted on

Just once in my life­time I would like to see a piece of open-source soft­ware with doc­u­men­ta­tion that bears even slight resem­blance to the soft­ware it pur­ports to doc­u­ment. JUST ONCE.

In par­tic­u­lar I’ve wast­ed a day and a half on a MySQL instal­la­tion. The docs say that the default instal­la­tion has no pass­word for the root user, and yet I run up against “ERROR 1045: Access denied for user: ‘root@localhost’ (Using pass­word: NO)”. Of course there’s all sorts of love­ly infor­ma­tion about how to reset the root pass­word and of course none of it even pre­tends to work.

I’m about to go on a killing ram­page here.

Ignore me. I just need­ed to vent. My boss says no killing sprees.

Published by splicer

6 Replies to “Very Big Grins”

  3. Some­times you real­ly do get
    Some­times you real­ly do get what you pay for.
    I under­stand the feel­ing, though, although I nev­er got the urge to go on a ram­page in my own office. Some­times I think about track­ing the authors down and per­form­ing unspeak­able atroc­i­ties to their bod­ies, but feel no need to take it out on my co-workers. 

    But there is so much crap­py soft­ware out there! Why would you expect the doc­u­men­ta­tion to be any better?

    My cur­rent pet peeve: soft­ware and web­sites that don’t both­er to put the focus (hence the cur­sor) in the box that is await­ing your entry. Exam­ple, the OED comes up to a basic screen that does­n’t do any­thing. You have to click “Search” first. What in blazes else do I want to do when I’m look­ing some­thing up in a dic­tio­nary??? And after you click “Search” it puts a find box up but does­n’t put the cur­sor there. Where in blazes else would I want it??? Aaaaarrrrrgggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!!

    Maybe I will go on a ram­page here after all. Like father, like son.…

    Dad

  4. I just noticed that
    I just noticed that Live­Jour­nal strips out all my Very Big Grins (VBG enclosed in greater-thans and less­er-thans.) I usu­al­ly add those to imply humor, but you’ll have to fig­ure out where they belong for yourself.

    I’ll use smi­leys in the future.
    Dad

  5. Don’t wor­ry about it too
    Don’t wor­ry about it too much. The VBGs show up when I get the noti­fi­ca­tion emails, which is where I usu­al­ly read replies any­how. So I see ’em.

    Also, I think that the “Don’t auto-for­mat” check­box leaves angle brack­ets intact, but I’m not sure, and if that’s right it’s a coun­ter­in­tu­itive­ly-named fea­ture. But this is a good place to test it out.

    Is there a VBG imme­di­ate­ly above this paragraph?

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