Crashety-bashety
Microsoft Windows is
badly in need of a
UI that's nice.

Some feature filed under
‘Accessibility’
makes it superb - but you
can't find it twice.

(Brought to you by several pints of Kopparberg and fanf praising the ‘mouse trails’ feature in Windows.)

Also at Dreamwidth. (
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Oh, good grief.

My missing prescription from Monday turned up in the post yesterday, after the surgery got their printers working again.

I took it to a pharmacy just now - who refused to fill it, because the doctor had (presumably due to the unusual circumstances) forgotten to sign it.

Also at Dreamwidth. (
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Two weeks ago I tried to make an appointment with my GP. Since it was tedious administrative routine (renewing my prescription for gluten-free pasta, which I still can't bring myself to believe is worth wasting a medical professional's time for in the first place), I didn't think it was worth booking an urgent same-day appointment, and instead ( Read more... )

When wielding a Stanley knife, I concentrate extremely hard on not cutting myself with the Stanley knife.

So hard, in fact, that I manage to completely overlook the possibility of cutting a finger on the thumbnail of my other hand. Sigh.

Also at Dreamwidth. (
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In a debate at work about development workflow, I somewhat whimsically responded to a suggestion by writing ‘Jira issues non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem’. (For those lucky enough not to have encountered it, ‘Jira’ is the name of a bug tracker.) I wondered briefly whether that would be too incomprehensible to post (but decided not, and ( Read more... )

Warrgh, that was unexpected. I picked up my toothpaste tube, squeezed it gently until toothpaste began to emerge from the nozzle … and there was a sudden pop, a fingertip-sized blob of toothpaste flew out of the tube and landed in the basin, and I was hit in the eye by a sharp puff of minty air.

There must have been a big bubble of air in the tube ( Read more... )

I've occasionally thought it would be nice to have a coffee mug with a built-in heater, so it keeps the coffee from getting completely cold. But this is an obviously impractical idea: heating costs serious energy, so you'd have to have a stand to supply the power, which is inconvenient; also there are probably some exciting failure modes.

This ( Read more... )

Ahem. In yesterday's post about iterating over a circularly linked list, I made a mistake. The construction I exhibited, because it completely skips any test at the start of the loop, will crash if the list is empty and hence its head pointer is NULL.

Fortunately, this is fixable by putting an additional test in the switch statement:

switch (( ( Read more... )

A while back I wanted to write some C code that looped over every element in a collection. But I wanted the code to be parametrisable in the face of different implementations of that collection, because it might have to link against several other pieces of code which might all store the things in question in a different format.

( iteration over a collection of elephants by C switch abuse )

Here's a question I've been pondering for a while, to which I don't have any good answer.

( could we make the Unix shell syntax not unmanageably complicated? )