Delve Into Lunacy

Well, since I started posting again I would say my posts have been fairly tame in comparison to my old ones. Of course, everything up to now has been geared toward the migration of hosts, getting the site up and running, etc. It seems technical posts just don’t allow for quite the same level of rancor that other topics do.

However, I’m at the point now where I just have to get some things off my chest. Due to there being so many things that get my panties in a bunch on a regular basis, I’ve decided to start a series of posts simply called Things That Piss Me Off (TTPMO for short).

My beef tonight is with open source projects. I fully understand the spirit and what not behind open source projects and there have been many apps created with the model that are absolutely wonderful in what they do or in what they provide to others at no cost. My complaint isn’t with those, but more with some aspects of the model itself.

The first is the complete lack of control over what appears out there. It seems like 99.9% of all projects started fall into one of the following categories: went no further than picking a name for the project, died halfway through development never to be touched again, or those that are coded so horribly that you would be better off hitting yourself in the head with a hammer rather than download them.

I realize that this problem is endemic to other things besides open source, but it’s easy to go back from something like a dead page on Geo-Cities or skip over a dead profile on a friend/dating site for example. With applications however you are investing more time and effort into getting them downloaded, installed, etc often to just realize you have wasted a few hours of your life that you’ll never get back. Is there a solution? Probably, but I don’t need to come up with one to justify my ranting.

The second thing that chaps my ass is the developers themselves. I know there are some great people out there working on open source projects, but unfortunately they never seem to be the ones I run across. It seems to be a model that really attracts the biggest, self-important jackass developers that exist. Then they all seem to end up working on things I get interested in.

For an example, go to a forum site for a project and enter something in the area that they set up so that people can provide suggestions. It doesn’t matter what your suggestion is, how well thought out your posting was, etc. You can just pretty much expect to get flamed by the developers, or one of their sycophantic followers, as either being: retarded, a n00b, or a dumbass for posting something that they already thought of but just haven’t documented anywhere.

Since I’m a helping type of guy and just in case you do decide to post on a forum somewhere, I’ve kindly provided a template that you can use to at least help lower the chances of being flamed.

[quickcode:noclick]Dear developers,

You are gods among men and I wish I had a womb so I could bear your children. There are no programmers that have ever had the skill, wisdom and imagination that you show in every line of code that springs forth from your Cheetos and nicotine stained fingers. This is by far the best application ever created and henceforth I shall use nothing but this app even though it only does one particular thing.

Now keep in mind that I’m borderline-retarded, know absolutely nothing about anything and am already well aware that I don’t deserve to be in the same general cyber-vicinity as you, but I have a [question / suggestion].

[Enter question or suggestion here.]

Forever indebted to you,
[Enter your first name.] - aka Stupid Moron

P.S. - If you ever need a kidney, lung, chunk of liver or an eye you can have mine…even if I don’t match as a donor.[/quickcode]

Now in case the “Stupid Moron” moniker fits you, make sure you replace the things in brackets and don’t just copy-paste-submit. Moving on.

There is plenty of other stuff about open source that pisses me off but the final thing I’ll bitch about today is documentation. Jesus Christ on ice skates…how fucking difficult is it to: a) put comments in your code and b) write some basic documentation that is at least slightly helpful?

Standard documentation typically seems to consist of a readme file that just has the following things in it: the name of the app, the names of the developers and the name of the joker that wrote the readme file. If you’re lucky, you might also get a line making note of the current version of the app. If you’re incredibly lucky, you might get some half-assed installation instructions that will still require you randomly renaming files, moving things around, etc before you can get it working.

As for in-code comments, if there are any at all, then they typically consist of things like "Bad stuff happens" or "This does the work". What exactly possesses a person to even bother if they are just going to write crap like that?

Well, now that I’ve written a book on this topic I should wrap it up. Stay tuned for the next issue of TTPMO where I will most likely be bitching about over-hyped sites.