Re: Giving an application a window icon in a sensible way
You seemed to have taken my post as an attack on you. That was not the
intention.
"Twisted" <twisted0n3@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1164153494.942122.204840@f16g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Oliver Wong wrote:
It doesn't happen to everyone who posts here, but it does seem to
happen
to a lot of your posts, so maybe there's something about the style of
your
writing that attracts these responses.
Well, let's see ... what do I do differently?
Oh yeah, of course. When I ask a question I'm asking a question rather
than engaging in some kind of social ritual. What I expect is an answer
rather than a question or riddle of some kind. Also, when challenged by
the alpha male I tell them to go shove it or simply ignore them rather
than bow down in submission and make all of the right noises, because
as I said, I didn't come here to engage in some kind of social ritual.
Maybe one of the things you do differently is consider certain posts to
be a challenge from an alpha male, which causes you to react in a certain
way, which attracts those posts you don't seem to enjoy receiving.
I'm not actually challenging you for dominance; I consider dominance in
whatever little hierarchy you have here to be completely irrelevant to
my goals, and you're welcome to keep it as long as you don't insist on
involving me in submission rituals of some kind or another just to keep
your ego well-fed.
Maybe one of the things you do differently is to believe that there's a
dominance hierarchy here, among the posters.
I am simply looking for the answer to a question.
And oh, yes, that means that when what I get is not in the form of an
answer, I pointedly remind people that this is not Jeopardy! and you
most emphatically do not have to phrase your response in the form of a
question.
Maybe one of the things you do differently is to believe that someone
asks you a question, they are not trying to help you.
Any questions? :)
No. I'm trying to offer you an alternative perspective to help you
escape this problem of the perception that everyone's ganging up on you, or
something like that. If you don't want help (perhaps because you don't think
you have this problem), then feel free to ignore my posts.
For example, in one of your posts,
you wrote "I may have discovered another bug in the 1.6.0 release
candidate
library implementation." which sounded a bit on the arrogant side to me.
"I have discovered a bug" might be; "I may have" certainly is not, and
shouldn't be considered even to be particularly contentious considering
that it *is* beta software we're talking about.
You may defend the logic of your choice of words all you want, but this
does not change their emotional impact. Saying you found a bug is generally
considered a bad idea, unless you're very confident that there is, in fact,
a bug involved.
http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#id273206
<quote>
When you are having problems with a piece of software, don't claim you have
found a bug unless you are very, very sure of your ground. Hint: unless you
can provide a source-code patch that fixes the problem, or a regression test
against a previous version that demonstrates incorrect behavior, you are
probably not sure enough.
[...]
When asking your question, it is best to write as though you assume you are
doing something wrong, even if you are privately pretty sure you have found
an actual bug. If there really is a bug, you will hear about it in the
answer. Play it so the maintainers will want to apologize to you if the bug
is real, rather than so that you will owe them an apology if you have messed
up.
</quote>
Usually when people follow this advice (particularly in the lower
paragraph), they tend to get the answers they want. Consider the "infinite
loop with http requests" post at
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/2a0e0a602c02320c
The poster shows his/her source code, explains why it doesn't make sense
that the program should loop forever (How can "" not be equal to ""?), and
then rather than ending with "Is this a bug in the JVM?" ends it with "Any
insights would be appreciated - thanks!". And they got an answer: use
..equals() for string comparsion, rather than ==.
You also seem to think this newsgroup is a lot more social than I
think
it is.
Curious -- it's you people that want me, the newbie, to bow down
submissively and act all meek and awed around your alpha males and
never, ever, question them, and generally to answer any question put to
me while you reserve the right to ignore mine; I'm the one treating
this as a medium of information exchange rather than yet another venue
in which to vie for the Testosterone Junkie of the Month Award(tm).
I think you may be thinking in terms of "us (or me) versus them" where
it's not appropriate. As hinted at above, when someone asks you a question,
it is usually because that information is helpful in solving your problem.
You've told two stories about how your browser has misbehaved
Misbehavior triggered by encountering a Java applet, while researching
a Java-related issue. Hardly offtopic. Far less so than, say, personal
criticisms directed against particular posters in this newsgroup would
be, hm?
Sorry to be blunt but IMHO, your stories are distracting and largely
uninteresting. In one example, we were discussing 64 bit and 32 bit CPUs and
OS and their compatibilities with each other, and you interrupted your
question with an explanation of how your browser had messed up because of
google mail or something like that. And your explanation was *long*. I was
sighing, wondering why I had to read all of this stuff just to actually get
to your question. I considered myself to be doing you a favor to actually
read through all that to find the question, so that I could actually answer
it, rather than just give up and abandon the thread. I'm not asking for your
gratitude or appreciation or anything like that: It was *MY* decision to
actually read through all that, so you don't owe me anything. I'm just
giving you an alternative perspective on the conversation -- one you may not
have been aware of.
because maybe you're right and I'm wrong (about the socialness of this
group).
Someone is actually man enough to admit that they may be wrong? Wow.
Maybe I misjudged ... some of you.
Yes, I think you may have misjudged a lot of the posters here. This
group is very reasonable as far as newsgroups go. There's a very low ratio
of trolls (I think I saw PofN post here though, and (s)he's a troll, so
ignore him/her), and I don't think every single time a regular said
something factually incorrect, they admitted it.
I mention it now to advise you to not takes things too personally.
Suggestions that implicitly question my competence notwithstanding, I
presume?
Yes, exactly. If you feel someone has insulted you, just ignore that
aspect of the post, but don't nescessarily ignore the post altogether. It
may still contain advice for your problem, and if it contains questions, try
to answer them.
Seriously, ignore insults is very effective in getting things done.
People are posting answers here, not only for you, but for future readers
who, perhaps months from now, will have the same problem you're having,
and
will search the google archives for an answer and find this post. It's
great
that you got an answer that works for you, but the people here want to
make
sure that the future readers will understand that there's a conventional,
"standard" solution for this problem, and that it's better than your
solution for certain situations.
Another surprise -- you said "for certain situations"! OK, you
definitely scored some points on that one.
Again, I don't think anyone here would claim that one solution is better
than another solution for all situations. In fact, I was going to suggest
the solution you undertook: to hardcode the image directly in the class
file, if you were really having problems with using the classloader. I.e. I
would advise you to try the classloader solution first, and if that really
didn't work, as a last resort, go with hardcoding the file. Except you
figured this out on your own, so I didn't bother to make the post.
OTOH, I'm still awaiting
some details regarding this "standard" solution, in the form either of
the details themselves or a (safe) URL (preferably a *.sun.com URL,
which obviously would carry extra credibility).
You might want to make it more explicit that you're awaiting the
standard solution. From my reading of this thread, my impression is that you
would not accept the standard solution, even if provided with it.
Anyway, here it is: http://www.devx.com/tips/Tip/5697
It's not a *.sun.com URL, but from fairly quick inspection of the
provided source code (17 lines including import statements and empty lines),
I think it's obvious that this program won't reformat your harddrive or
anything, so you can just try running it to see if it really does what it
claims to do.
Of course, these people, being human, have some emotional attachment
to
their solutions.
As, I suppose, might I -- having found something and even fixed a bug
in it myself is definitely more of an accomplishment than having
followed a rote, canned routine...
They downplay the reasons why your solution might be better
than theirs. IMHO, if you're happy with your solution, stick with it. If
later on, you start having problems with your solution, come back and
re-read this thread, and see if the alternatives proposed here address
some
of those problems.
I'm aware of its limitations -- both in scaling, and in cases where
there are direct advantages to separating a resource from the core
binaries. Those limitations might apply to some stuff in the future, at
which time I might as well move the icon (which would be easy) to the
same place as this hypothetical other stuff. Until then, YAGNI appears
to apply. Also, of course, I'm still missing the information that
people seem to assume I either have or could easily find. Information I
might add that they apparently assumed I could easily find once before,
an assumption that proved to be wrong once before. I've no guarantee
that plugging in "getResource" and following the first plausible
instructions I see won't *also* result in disapproval stemming from
further decision branches. Researching it myself led to a disapproved
result once, so obviously it's plausible that it may do so again.
Maybe you should just not care about disapproval so much.
[Snip remaining paragraph, which seems to slide a bit and suggest,
without coming out and stating, a possible insult.]
That last part was directed to "everyone else", rather than to you. I
was basically commenting on my being perplexed at people pushing a solution
to you that you obviously don't want. I re-read it to see where you might
have inferred an insult, and I see I used the word "stupid". I didn't mean
to say your idea is actually stupid. I'm saying that their thinking your
idea is stupid is not a rational reason for pushing their solution: Because
people should be free to make stupid decisions if they want. So if they
wanted rationally to push their solution to you, they needed a better reason
for doing so.
- Oliver