Software are not people. They’re stupider than people. Here’s a list of stupid software I’ve encountered (and got very frustrated with) in the past week:

4. EViews 6
   I know I’ve given Eviews 6 quite a thumbs up. But that was on a small scale of data (about 5000 observations - like all my econometrics assignment have). But when I tried to load millions of observations (4.45 million, specifically), it kept crashing. Over and over again. And it’s not due to the lack of RAM. It just crashes. I mean, it does data processing fine, but after a while of messing around with the data, it crashes. That’s it, folks, when you use the Quick Estimate Equation function, with 4.45 million observations, and leave it for a while, it bloody crashes!!
3. Excel
   Microsoft Excel 2007. Argh. Guess what it did? Here are the pictures:
   
   Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you’re reading it right. EXCEL.EXE is taking 1018076KB of my RAM. That’s 1 gigabyte of RAM. Surely it must use that amount of RAM for good reason? The answer is NO. Microsoft Excel was trying to open a csv (comma separated value) file. Guess the size of the file? 540 kilobytes. Yes, its a 540 KB file, and Excel used 1GB trying to open it.

   Also, “,” is a comma, and “;” is a semi-colon. CSV = comma separated values, not semi-color separated values. PHPMyAdmin and Microsoft should take note, so please stop exporting all my CSVs with some weird delimiter by default that I have to manually set them when I want to open them. Thank you.

2. Firefox
   Oh, since we’re on the topic of memory hogs… look at Opera and Firefox’s usage. Take a guess which one had more tabs open? Yes, you guessed it right, Opera. Opera had 11 tabs open, most of them dynamic, AJAXified webpages. Firefox had 7 tabs open, 5 of them are pointed to PHPMyAdmin on localhost (static pages). Firefox is a bloody memory hog.

   Firefox isn’t a very good browser, because obviously Opera is so much better. Firefox is just marketing. And also, Firefox causes another problem - the one below -

1. Google
   This has been on my nerve all week. I knew I shouldn’t have taken part in the Annual Day Without Google on April 1st. Now Google hates me
   
   If you can’t see what’s happening, let me explain: When I search for something on Google, and then refine my search on the result page, Google keeps redirecting me to search pages from within Australia. And the reason why? Google tweaked its button for a stupid browser called, oh FIREFUCKINGFOX. This is the URL generated with Firefox (=&meta=cr%3DcountryAU is the culprit for the constant redirects to search within Australia only:
   http://www.google.com.au/search?q=python+statslib&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official &client=firefox-a#hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&hs=oms&q=python+statlib&btnG=Search &meta=&meta=cr%3DcountryAU&nochrome=1
   By comparison, here’s the URL with Opera:
   http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=statlib+python&btnG=Search&meta=

Also, minor grouse: If Python is free, and Eclipse is free, why isn’t PyDev free? Oh well.

Cool? DiggDel.icio.usTechnoratiFeedsterFurl
RSS feed for comments on this post  |  TrackBack URI for this post