You motherfu….

Some days, I hate to call myself a programmer. Why? Because it lumps me in with a lot of really fucking stupid people. This weeks Rant is brought to you courtousey of Matrox Corporation.

I have a sweet setup at work. I have a Matrox 400 DualHead MAX, with a 21″ monitor in the center, and a 17″ monitor to the left. This is AWESOME because I can set the 21″ for 1280 x 1024, and the 17″ for 1024 x 768, and slide documents back and forth, and no matter where I look the text size is the same. I use this for programming A LOT because I’ll keep my notes on one monitor while I code. Then when I’m actually running the program, I’ll slide the code over to the notes window, and can debug while it’s running and figure out what’s going on. Really nice. In fact, my ‘ultimate’ setup would be two dual head Matrox 550’s with a 17″ or 19″ LCD in the center, and three 15″ flatscreens (which have gotten cheap these days) setting left, right, and above it.

It didn’t used to be that you could do independant resolutions on different displays on the Matrox 400’s – after a driver update, they finally changed that. Well, I’ve been having performance problems with Trajectory, and decided it was probably time to upgrade the drivers. Guess what? You can’t do independant resolutions anymore. Which means the text on one monitor (the 21″) is too large, and the text on the other is just right.

WHY? Why in the hell would the remove the feature again? I could have lived with performance problems if they would have at least TOLD me that this was gonna happen when I upgraded. Instead, now I have to put up BS display problems (my task bar now streaches across both monitors too, putting the system tray 38 inches from the start button – I keep utils in the systray for a reason. *SIGH*)

It’s crap like this that makes me unhappy to be a programmer. Mainly because I get a ‘Shoot All Programmers’ attitude when I think about the stupid shit they pull on end users (even when the end users are Programmers!) Then throw in stuff like stupid End User Licenses (I mention this because I’m also updating to Direct X 8.1 to check things out on the most recent version) and all that horse shit, and it really pisses me off to see the state of programming and software development in this day and age!

It could always be worse, of course. But DAMN! Some things really have to change in this industry!