I can’t think of any nice way to put this, so I’m just gonna say it: I really hate your website. Looking at it makes my eyeballs bleed. The pain and suffering that it inflicts upon the world has caused me to question my belief in a benevolent God. I just finished writing a letter to the Hague requesting that the creation of your website be prosecuted as a war crime.

Among its many grievous crimes:

I thought we had a good thing going; I thought we could trust each other. I wouldn’t play with her heart, and she wouldn’t let me down. We seemed to be in a stable, long-term relationship. Then she just stopped trying and completely locked me out. I couldn’t figure out why her behavior just changed overnight, and I didn’t know what else to do. So I had someone follow her, to find out what was really going on.

So here is a problem we’ve run up against several times: displaying live, streaming video in real-time. Doesn’t sound that hard, but you’d be amazed. We are generally dealing with RTSP streams, which both QuickTime and RealPlayer handle just fine - for pre-recorded content. But I’ll tell you what, no matter how many preferences you enable with names like “Instant-On”, “PlayNow”, and “TrueLive”, these players will continue to suck for real-time video.

Apple has a (well-earned) reputation for creating products that are simply a pleasure to use. The iPhone springs to mind as a crowning achievement in this regard. But man, do I ever hate Xcode.

Nothing is where I expect it to be. I can’t seem to close a window I don’t want without closing the whole project. When I try to debug an application, I can’t get the present value of variables in all levels of the stack trace.

Here at Lextech, we have internal training events a couple times a month. We take occasional surveys to find out what technologies people are interested in learning about, then figure out who among us knows it or might be interested in picking it up. These teachers are then cajoled into giving a class with the promise of free food. The classes take the form of either a brief overview during lunch, or a more in-depth look during the evening.