One of the devs points out in his blog that there’s a current hot issue over how the client provides information about which IM service you’re currently chatting over, or which service you would use if you were to message someone in your buddy list. After reading the discussion in the bug report and the comments on his blog post, I can only conclude that the Pidgin developers are only coding for themselves. They are presenting the stereotypical, snide, elitist attitude that many critics attribute to open source developers.

They have made it clear that no matter what anyone says, the logical “use cases” don’t justify reinstating a recently disappeared feature – one which I and other users took for granted as a part of how the app behaves, and have found very useful. To my way of thinking, if you create an app that users love and then hack pieces away without regard for user feedback, you’re shooting yourself in the foot (stabbing yourself in the eye, what have you.) You won’t be trusted as a good steward of open source going forward, and people will begin to abandon use of your product as soon as they can find a reasonably usable alternative. This is bad for everyone involved.

Listen to your users, and stop pretending you live in a perfect vacuum.

The PS/2 keyboard port decided it was done being useful when I powered on my desktop this morning. After being taken to the cleaners by Best Buy (misnomer, ha!) for a PS/2 -> USB adapter, I’m back up and working.

Should I worry about other failures following close on this one? I’m not budgeted to replace a system right now, but I’m reluctant to go for a motherboard swap just for this failure if it’s going to stop at the keyboard port. The motherboard in question is an Asus A8N-SLI Premium, and I’m using an IBM Model M keyboard (naturally.)

I don’t have automatic updates enabled, to prevent Microsoft pushing their pet projects like IE7 on me as “critical” updates. As a result, I missed KB931836, which appears to have just been published 02/07/2007 anyway. Way to support those of us who don’t drink your koolaid, M$.

The coolers use heatpipes to transfer heat from the GPU to a large radiator-like surface that covers the whole video card.

Yeah, we call that a <Dr . Evil finger quotes>heat sink</finger quotes> in tech geek lingo. Maybe you’re paid by word count. Whatever.

If you are looking for additional cooling performance or have very little airflow in your case you can install an additional Turbo Module that uses an active fan to improve cooling.

Whoa. When did the whole active fan thing become publicly available. I’d heard there were tests in secret labs, but never thought I’d see the day.

NB: This is not directed at people who appropriately use “away” messages to indicate temporary non-availability.

Is Firefox 2.0 a dud?

Is Firefox 2.0 a dud? Are users better avoiding it and waiting until a future build? Are too many of the new features buggy and incomplete and is the browser overall more unstable that previous versions? What about Firefox on Vista?

This is not news. This is not journalism. This is not “reportage.” This is FUD and rumormongering. While there may be an article in there somewhere, I’ll never read it because of the so-called style the writer chose to use. Thank you, drive thru please.

I am completely flummoxed that anyone who uses email on a daily basis has no idea what the common-sense conventions and practices of using email are, or just refuses to use them.

Here are some of my suggestions for business email. Ignore them and you may find yourself wondering why, at best, you don’t get replies to your urgent missives.

• Use an email client that understands and sends text. Not HTML, not RTF, not some wonderful format that allows you to WYSIWYG your way through decorating and emphasizing and cutesifying everything. Learn to use text.
• If you send me an HTML email, please don’t expect me to see your blue reply. As a non-member of the virus of the month club, I prefer not to indulge the world’s attempts to get me to electronically ingest any goodies that hit my inbox. HTML email is like a rat during the plague times. HTML email at work is like handing everyone you work with a rat and telling them they make great pets – during the plague times.
• If you top post, please don’t expect me to weed through the disorganized mess you’ve made of the sequence of conversation to try and divine the context of your reply, and therefore your meaning.
• Avoid emails that consist of “me too” or a single word reply while including the entire thread of conversation and your 15 line signature with the clever talking dog ASCII art. Go look up the concept of signal to noise ratio. When you send these emails, you’re the noise.
• Your email client has a quoting mechanism built into it that is likely to be able to save you from yourself, should you decide to let it. Typically the quote character is a single ‘>’ with multiples of these stacking up along the left side when quotes are nested. Don’t type in the middle of the quoted text. Seperate your reply text from the quoted text by putting a blank line or two between. If you really must reply inline, split the quotes up and again seperate your replies from the quoted text with blank lines.
• For the love of Pete, stop using Microsoft Outlook. Outlook and Outlook Express are the Dumb and Dumberer of email clients. If you insist on using Outlook, you’re opting in for the virus of the month club, as well as causing the rest of us untold headaches when your system becomes infected and spam the world with our return addresses.

The very act of someone messaging me when I’m clearly available and asking “u there?” sends me into vapor lock. Exactly the same kind of brain gridlock that occurs when I answer the phone and a voice at the other end immediately says “hold on a sec.” I can’t get past my incredulity in order for anger and frustration to fully take hold, so I just sit there in limbo and watch people slapping away the helpful tools they’re being given. Watching them lapse into the same old behaviors that have proven to waste the only thing we can never get back – our time.