Slapstick programming

[nancylebov]

Is there any way to guarantee that a window is always on top?

Since there is no coordination among the various applications, you're basically stuck playing a game of walls and ladders, hoping that your ladder is taller than everybody else's wall. The customer has pretty much found the tallest ladder which the window manager provides. There is no "super topmost" flag.

Sure, you can try moving to another level of the system, like say creating a custom desktop, but all that does is give you a taller ladder. And then one of the other applications is going to say, "I need to display a store-wide page (manager to the deli please, manager to the deli), overriding all other messages, even if it's a limited-time in-store promotion." And they'll try something nastier, like enumerating all the windows in the system and calling ShowWindow(SW_HIDE).

And then another application will say, "I need to display an important store-wide security announcement (Will the owner of a white Honda Civic, license plate 037-MSN, please return to your vehicle), overriding all other messages, even if it's a store-wide page." And it'll try something nastier, like setting their program as the screen saver, disabling the mouse and keyboard devices, and then invoking the screen saver on the secure desktop.

Link thanks to andrewducker.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I do occasionally wonder why people think my surname has an r in it.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

By parallel to the dr in an(dr)ew(d_)ucker?

[andrewducker]

Also, Drucker is a surname people have heard of.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Corrected, and my apologies.

There are about 700,000 Ducker entries on google and about 24,000,000 Drucker entries. I think it's just tempting to drift toward the more common name.

[andrewducker]

You're not alone - Jamies Nicoll has done it to me a couple of times, and occasional post arrives in that name :->

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Because an evil wizard cast a spell on the planet forcing people to stick extraneous 'r's into names even when those names contain no 'r's whatsoever and when the owner of the name is spelling it out for them.

Guess how I know.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Guess how I know about drift towards more common versions...my last name is Lebovitz. L-E-B as in boy - O - V as in victor - I - T - Z.

There is one I, and it's in the third syllable. There is no W.

Mid-westerners are more likely to get my name right than people from the Bosh-Wash corridor. I don't know whether it's that mid-westerners are more polite and thus more likely to pay attention when they hear a name, or if they are less likely to have heard the more common variant.

Since I have a last name which is likely to be misheard and misspelled (you think you have problems? people get my name wrong even if it's both spelled for them and shown to thinm), I simplified it for the LJ. When someone referred to the lj as nancylebow, my heart sank.

The one good thing I've gotten from this is a suspicion that people (including me) are probably making huge numbers of mistakes about what they think is obvious sensory experience.