Darren New wrote:

> Stefan Viljoen wrote:
>> I quickly get irritated whenever I have to do something in XP
> 
> I just had to replace my monitor today. I got a nice new widescreen
> thingie
> to work with, etc.  And I discovered something interesting.
> 
> I'm annoyed by bad design, not by the difficulty of accomplishing a task.
> 
> It annoyed me that the connector for the old monitor took 3 minutes to get
> disconnected because it was screwed down and the designer of the connector
> put an unmovable flange a quarter inch over the screw.
> 
> It didn't annoy me at all that the new connector wouldn't fit thru the
> hole in the desk I'd drilled and it took me half an hour of work with a
> file to enlarge it the 2mm it took to slide the connector through.
> 
> It doesn't bother me that it takes an hour to back up the laptop. It
> bothers me that opening "my computer" takes 30 seconds because all the
> drives for the developers are shared over the same internet connection
> they're streaming sample video over to hundreds of testers.
> 
> I knew I got pissed easily at pretty trivially annoying stuff, but I never
> realized it was trivial *needlessly* annoying stuff that did it.
 
I feel much the same. "My" equivalent irritation with Linux that I can admit 
to though is - erm... I don't have a name for the phenomenon. 

Whenever I'm at work, and for some reason the internet connection goes down, 
for no reason I can fathom, MySQL control center starts taking a minute 
(literally - 60 seconds, I've timed it!) to open any MySQL table on the 
machine. Conversely, emacs takes up to two minutes to start.

I've done /sbin/ifconfigs as a test once, and I can't see that -anything- 
passes over the ethernet connection that is relevant. I've not etherealed 
yet, probably need to.

However, the moment connectivity is back (I can ping something, anything on 
the internet) my MySQL control center starts working at "instant" speed 
again, and emacs starts instantly as well.

I've searched the hell out this, but nobody I've so far been able to find 
that responded to posts, or nobody else I could google about, have ever 
experienced this phenomenon.

I only use direct IP's no symbol resolution is required by either emacs or 
MySQL control center. MySQL control center is setup to connect to the local 
127.0.0.1 port, emacs is only used to edit files in the local home folder 
(so no network pauses or anything seem to be involved.)

Obviously it MUST have something to do with DNS then? But I can find no 
literature or mention of -WHY- this happens with my desktop.

It irritates the hell out of me, but apparently -only- my machine, with my 
kernel (2.6.18.1) experiences this.

If it IS, in fact, DNS, I've not been able to find how to turn that kind of 
timeout delay (which I think it must be) off somehow, without my system 
refusing to do DNS queries entirely.

Mostly Linux has chosen to be friendly with me (the old "UNIX is picky whom 
it makes friends with") but this is one thing that clouds the waters of our 
relationship.
-- 
Stefan Viljoen

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