Opera has what seems to be a peculiar bug in its treatment of HTML <img> elements that have align attributes. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to work around.

CVS might be considered an easy target for software hate, but that doesn’t stop it annoying the hell out of you. Here’s an instance I encountered today, trying to use cvs annotate.

Various things we do at work involve taking RSS feeds from elsewhere. Some incompetent people emit feeds that are broken in one way or another.

GNU Screen is an extremely useful piece of software, but one that requires an annoying amount of hackery to make it useful. Herewith a description of why you want to use it, and what you have to do to make it work better.

Suppose you have a MySQL database containing stored procedures (which were added in MySQL 5.0.3). Now you dump that database using mysqldump, take the dump, and load it into a different server.

Oops, the dump didn’t contain the stored-procedure definitions, so your code fails. So you read the mysqldump manual, and discover that you need to add a -R (--routines) unbreak-me option. You regenerate the dump with -R, and load it into your other server. That worked; phew. (Assuming the user you dumped as has read permissions on the mysql.proc table, anyway.)

Then you load the dump into a third server. But you weren’t thinking very clearly at this point, and this third server is running 5.0.2, or 4.1, or some other version N−k. What should happen now?

Here’s a MySQL query issued by some Perl code:

$db->do(q{
    CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE byline_age (
        byline_id int PRIMARY KEY,
        last_used int not null
    )
    SELECT byline_id, MAX(IfNull(published_at, ?)) AS last_used
    FROM article
    GROUP BY byline_id
}, undef, time());

Spot the bug? No, nor did I.

I have a ticket to the William Gibson event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. However, I can’t make it: I’m going to be at YAPC::Europe instead. So, I’m shopping the ticket round some friends. I’d like to point them to the URL of the event. So, I go to the festival website — hey, that’s nice, it’s the first Google hit for the term book festival. Click on What’s on. Select the date of the show. Search within page to find Gibson. Click on the More information link. Go to copy URL into clipbo— just a minute, the page URL shows absolutely nothing of value. The thing I clicked on must have been a POST form.

[Previously published here.]

Sometimes the small hates are the most consuming ones.

My desktop uses Gnome. I mostly like it; it’s certainly not hate-free, but it’s not the topic of today’s rant.

OpenOffice.org.o.OoOO.Oooo runs on my Gnome desktop. I don’t really like OpenOffice, but some idiot has sent me a picture as, of all things, a PowerPoint presentation, and I need to be able to look at the benighted thing. So. Now I can Alt+Tab between the thing I’m actually working on, and the stupid picture stuffed into the stupid PowerPoint document.

Here’s some astonishingly bad MySQL insanity. (I know I rant about MySQL lossage a lot, but that’s because there’s just so much of it to rant about.)