wibni

More WIBNIs

Gregory Golberg holding forth , ,

 

P.S. And on the lighter side…

GMail WIBNIs

Gregory Golberg holding forth ,

So I noticed that when I got an e-mail about an appointment, GMail helpfully (no, I mean it!) included a conspicuous link for entering
this appointment into my Google calendar. Which leads me to a couple of WIBNIs:

  1. When I get a bounce, I should get a similar link allowing me to remove this address from my contact list. (Parse the email, come on, I know you already do, so it’s not that big an invasion of my non-existent privacy to see that this email came from a MAILER-DAEMON or something)…

  2. More or less ditto for locations mentioned in emails.

  3. When I do “Report Spam”, I don’t really give a flying spaghetti monster what the underlying algorithm is, but is it too much to expect never to see a message from that particular address in my inbox?

  4. In general, perhaps there’s a way to allow people to create solutions for similar WIBNIs, immediately adding this functionality to their own account and also contributing them to some central repository of solutions, thus enhancing Google’s hegemony further, if that’s even possible.

  5. I’ll be having more to say…

P.S. A couple of days after discussing with BOBHYTAPb the silliness of Google’s attitude toward “mail sent to yourself will not appear in your inbox as you expect because it’s a feature and you’re gonna like it and we don’t give a shit that that’s what you expect<'cause your expectations are due to bad upbringing", I noticed that this changed.

WIBNI…

Gregory Golberg holding forth , , , , ,

 

    1. A “Debugging Eliza” idea from BOBHYTAPb

      Here is a bomb of an idea: A Debugging Eliza.

      After a long and fruitless session of debugging a programmer reaches a certain dead end, where he has already glossed over the problem, has not found it, but noted subconsciously that that venue has been checked – or simply didn’t think about it. At this point he needs to talk to someone about this problem – a sort of a psychiatrist, which doesn’t even have to be human – it could be a slightly tweaked version of Eliza.

      “What are you doing?”

      “I am debugging Blah-Blah Industrial Application.”

      “What was the last thing you tried?”

      “I checked that the configuration file corresponds to the Blah-Blah…”

      “And how is the Blah-Blah?”

      “It’s perfectly fine.”

      “And how does that make you feel?”

      “It means the problem is somewhere else.”

      “Where else could it be?”

      etc.

      Obviously, this is where a lot of problems are found — when you are asking someone for help, and in the process of explaining the problem realize your error.

  • Eclipse, for all its cool pluggable architecture, lacks a basic thing — macros, which should be easy given the above. That is, a way to record (or write by hand, fine) a series of steps to instruct the Eclipse workbench to do something, and then play it back. Where’s AppleScript  when you need it?

    For example, instead of creating a walkthrough. Yes, part of the pain in this particular case can be solved by, for example, checking in dot-files into the source control, and then telling everyone to “Import existing projects into a workspace” after checking out the tree. But I can’t do that — there are dot-files of a “competing” approach checked into the repository, which suit some of us fine, but lack the things others want. but that’s in this particular example, and I cannot come up with another case right now, but trust me, they exist.

     

 

RSS WIBNI

Gregory Golberg holding forth ,

So, I broke down and got a paid account just so I could
syndicate (oh, and ).
Does this even work? We’ll see…

So, while I am at it, here’s an RSS WIBNI: a weighted RSS. So that,
for example, occassional entries from stay
on top, rather than being beaten by frequent spewage from something
like /. (I won’t even link to that den of iniquity, but I read
it for the articles…)