Category: low quality (disfunction)

WordPress Gutenberg is getting worse

A lot of this blog are my entries to help myself with some task. I like to copy / paste commands that I don’t want to memorize. If those commands help someone else trying to do the same task, that’s wonderful.

Copy / past has been a bit of a chore on WordPress, however. I’ve tried three different plugins. The first one worked for a while, but then broke. It was based on WordPress shortcodes. I don’t recall if it was WordPress that upgraded and broke the plugin, or if it was the plugin that upgraded and broke. Whatever: the shortcode stopped working.

The second plugin worked at least once, but then broke after an update of some sort. It was supposed to work either by specifying a shortcode or text formatting. I’m pretty sure the text formatting was supposed to be for “inline code”. When the plugin saw that the text was marked up that way, it added the copy-to-clipboard function. It was pretty frustrating to go back and edit some old posts and less than a month later, those posts are trashed up without providing copy-to-clipboard access.

This third plugin, Copy Code To Clipboard works well, and it is based on the /preformatted text attribute.

I don’t recall if this is the way it always was, but: it appears that this only works with whole blocks now. You can have inline code or keyboard input within a paragraph, but you cannot have /preformatted within your paragraph.

But, the /preformatted block type is just implementing the HTML tags <pre> and </pre>

So, I can edit in HTML mode and insert it that way, right?

Where WordPress has made things worse, is that now, <pre> and </pre> implement a forced <br></br> immediately before <pre> and immediately following </pre>

And it doesn’t put those codes in the HTML. It just sneaks them in there and taunts me with the extra lines before and after every piece of text I want copy-to-clipboard for.

Thanks, WordPress developers: I hate it. You’ve made the world a worse place.

And another thing ….

This showed up many months ago, shortly after Gutenberg became official: Ctrl-K for creating an anchor (link) used to be great. On another web site I maintain, we have an old kludgy events calendar plugin, and it still works great there. That events calendar plugin does not use Gutenberg.

All I want for Ctrl-K is to highlight the text to form a link, hit Ctrl-K to start the anchor creation, hit Ctrl-V to paste in the URL, and hit <Enter> to finish the anchor.

Guess what no longer works in Gutenberg? Hitting <Enter> to finish the anchor.

I am always so very overjoyed when I have to finish an operation by grabbing my mouse and finding the stupid little button to click to indicate that I want to finish creating the anchor. I’m editing an anchor: there’s really not that much more that I can do here.

Like what the heck was the <Enter> key supposed to otherwise signal?

In the current Gutenberg, it is simply a no-op. Useless. A waste of a keystroke. Until I find the stupid mouse cursor and click on the stupid little submit button, the anchor is incomplete. All editing has come to a stop, until I do some freaking mouse work.

Thanks, WordPress developers: I hate it. You’ve made the world a worse place, again.

Nextcloud has far too many bugs

I like Nextcloud: it is probably my favorite piece of software that I run. But man it has a ton of bugs. Their support forums are full of people reporting problems, and there is no solution.

Sometimes, the support forums do report that “Yes, this bug is listed in the Github bug tracker.”

There are more than 2,300 open bugs.

It is ridiculous. I saw a changelog that said the update would fix a bug I was seeing. I installed the update. The bug was still there. Quality control in this project is deplorable. I have another bug that I experience daily that has been open for almost two years.

What is dismaying to me is that the main developers have a Microsoft mentality: let’s add new features! No, we’re not going to work on bug fixes: debugging is boring.

In a couple of years, after I retire, I may decide to learn PHP programming. I haven’t really been fond of PHP.

Way back when, I read (well, got through the first few chapters) of a programming book that pointed out that software can be written to be mathematically provably correct. For every memory allocation, the math can add to the sum of debt. Memory should be specifically de-allocated, which subtracts from the sum of debt. When at the end of your source code, the sum is zero, you’ve handled all cases of allocating and de-allocating.

Nothing about PHP makes me think this is true for that language. Maybe I just don’t know the language well enough.

But, PHP does run a ton of super successful projects. So there must be something there which is valuable.

But yeah, I’m not going to be competent at writing PHP for years. Hopefully, someone at Nextcloud will get tasked with fixing bugs before then.

Terrible experience at Kaweah Health hospital

My mom went to Urgent Care, and they put her into an ambulance and sent her to Kaweah Health hospital. My mom spent 25.5 hours in the emergency room waiting room before getting a room / bed.

This is disgraceful.

Mom showed up at KDDH1 at 2024-04-19 1400

The urgent care people had told the ambulance people to give her some saline because of severe dehydration (because of three days of vomiting and diarrhea). That was the last liquid she got until 2024-04-20 1700.

The doctor who saw her during the initial contact said they needed to do a CAT scan to find out what was the source of intense pain in her abdomen. She finally got that CAT scan at 2024-04-20 0540.

My mom was concerned that she would need emergency surgery for gall bladder removal because her mom had had to go through that. I should probably mention that my mom is 86 years old, and although her mind is clear with no signs of dementia, her body is getting frail, and in the dehydrated state, she is pretty wobbly. The idea of being 86 years old and having to go under the knife scares her.

The night shift doctor finally did get to interview her at 2024-04-20 0715; the CAT scan revealed that it was an inflamed colon – not gall bladder. Thank goodness. Apparently, an antibiotic my mom took a month ago also affected her biome in her colon, and something in there took hold and created an infection.

The doctor was a nice young man, but he did mention that he was at the end of his shift. He said they would admit her, but there weren’t any rooms available: it might be a couple of hours. My mom then sat in the emergency room waiting room for another seven hours. Eventually, my mom got worried that they had lost track of her (she was on the third shift of administrative and nursing staff in the waiting room), so she hobbled up to the front, and when the nurse asked her what was wrong, she burst into tears. She’d been there more than 24 hours, and she was afraid they’d lost track of her. That was shortly after 3:15 PM. The nurse did promptly get her a room.

When I visited her a little before 1700 (5 PM), she still hadn’t slept since the morning of the day before, but finally a nurse did cover her feet with a blanket. My mom has poor blood circulation, so her feet felt cold, and it stressed her out so she couldn’t sleep. The other problem is that the diarrhea continues, so every few hours she needs to get help to climb out of bed to get to the toilet.

I had shown up a little before midnight on the 19th, and relieved Frank from sitting with my mom. About 2 AM, it dawned on me that the CAT scan wasn’t going to happen until the morning shift showed up to work. I don’t know why the CAT scan wasn’t done between 2 PM and end-of-shift on the 19th.

I also don’t know why, when the overnight doctor went off shift, that the emergency room staff don’t seem to have a process for hand-off or review of who needs care. When my mom screwed up enough courage to ask the nurse at 3:15 PM, they immediately found her a room. The room was available. Why isn’t there a process for informing the emergency room when rooms become available? Instead, little old ladies have to tell the nurse that there’s a problem, and then they act. That’s the opposite of the way I would expect medical care to work.

I know that doctors hate it when their patients try to self-diagnose and then direct the doctor on how to provide care. Yet, here was a situation where a little old lady had to force the situation, twenty-five and a half hours after being delivered in an ambulance.

It’s just terrible.

  1. KDDH was the original name: Kaweah Delta District Hospital. Everyone around here still calls it that. They even had that coveted four character domain name: kddh.org – I will rant about the idiocy of changing the company name later ↩︎