Sorry in ad­vance, but right now I have the feel­ing that if I don’t rant a lit­tle bit I’m gonna burst. “Tech­nol­ogy sucks”, some­times.

First of all there is the “it was fine be­fore but you just _had_ to ‘im­prove’ it, didn’t you?” kind of suck­age (nev­er­mind, I just made that word up). That’s when cer­tain peo­ple just can’t ac­cept that some soft­ware works per­fectly fine the way it is (and only needs minor bug­fixes, if at all). Like ion3 being re­moved from the Gen­too tree. Now, I don’t know the back­grounds, all I’ve heard is that the au­thor of ion is a big-time ass­hole, but here is this: I don’t give a crap! ion3 has worked (and will work) fine for me, thank you. If no new ver­sions are being re­leased at least keep the last one in the tree. I tried using xmonad and it sucked (big time). I mean the whole con­cept of “we can write a win­dow man­ager with < = 500 LOC” is fine, but that does not count if you have to in­stall shit­loads of de­pen­den­cies and ghc. And the no­tion of “let the win­dow man­ager tile the win­dows for you” is all fun and games until I want to say “split here, please”. But then you’d have a “sta­tic” win­dow lay­out like with ion3. Hello? When I start my In­stant Mes­sen­ger it _al­ways_ has the same con­tact list, and I _al­ways_ have it run­ning, so isn’t it safe to as­sume that _maybe_ (just maybe) I _al­ways_ want it on the same work­space, with the same di­men­sions and so on? Well, that would be sta­tic… Like hav­ing con­fig-files would be so un-cool. C’mon, you didn’t re­ally think that you could get your win­dow-man­ager, bi­nary-pack­age or what­ever, and then just mod­ify your con­fig once in a while. Nooo sir, please keep the whole haskell-tool­chain around until your brain is rot­ten enough that you ac­tu­ally start using darcs (like that will ever hap­pen) in­stead of some­thing peo­ple ac­tu­ally use, like git.

The sec­ond point is about my re­cent switch from “I’m feel­ing lucky”-shaky-WiFi-In­ter­net to “I’ve had so much fun on your crappy WiFi”-ADSL. One day in and I’m al­ready count­ing the days until the 1-year-con­tract ex­pires. I don’t even have a prob­lem shar­ing 1/3 of my band­width with strangers. I do how­ever have a prob­lem with peo­ple who can only think in the most basic usage pat­terns. If I have an ac­cess point, which also acts as my in­ter­net gate­way, might it not be pos­si­ble that I some­times want to ac­cess a com­puter from an­other one, that are both hooked up to the de­vice (one by LAN and an­other one by WLAN for ex­am­ple). Might it not be pos­si­ble that I would want to con­fig­ure loads of stuff on my router (like for ex­am­ple set­ting up Dyn­DNS). It would not be un­com­mon at a uni­ver­sity were CS is a major study area. And since there is some­thing called DD-WRT (or va­ri­eties) it would not even be this much work. But in­stead we pre­sent the user with a chaotic and some­times bro­ken Web-In­ter­face and the cool hint how to log on to the router via ssh as root. Now, you might think “let’s just flash a de­cent ver­sion of some WRT onto this WRT54G”, but then you would be deny­ing other peo­ple the wire­less ac­cess, break­ing the con­tract and would have to pay a fine. Never mind that the air in the 2.4Ghz band around here is pol­luted enough that you don’t have to turn on the mi­crowave to cook a chicken. Then there is this brain­dead thing called vpnc and some ter­rific (read: baaad) la­tency, but I am not even gonna start with this. Oh, and in case you might be won­der­ing which “ISP” not to sign up with: It’s uni-dsl. The only thing left to say is:

Fin­ster der Tun­nel, die Band­bre­ite knapp,

wie schön war die Back­plane im eige­nen Hub.

Am Ende des Tun­nels: Das Päckchen ist weg,

ver­nichtet vom Cyclic Re­dun­dancy Check.