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Case Study 5 - Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous Open Source software. Hopefully anything in here means that it is really reliable but more likely I have just not used it enough yet ;)

Part of the Open Source case study.


In general, Apache seems to be able to do no wrong. But here, it seems to be having an identity crisis:

If you click in the following edit box in the Nick Completion settings pane, all of the edit box contents shunt up a pixel:

This leads to interesting effects. (Nick Completion is a ShadowIRC plugin by the way.)

X-Chat mysteriously allows you to open an indefinite number of instances of the same plugin, in this case the system tray plugin. Only one copy is actually doing anything, and one of them has no icon at all. Attempting to unload them all just makes X-Chat fall over.

The latest stable Audacity (1.2.6) has a bizarre bug where it pretends to offer to let you import raw audio as formats that then denies it understands:

Audacity itself should be a showcase for the wxWidgets cross-platform toolkit, but the quality of the interface of Audacity 1.2 and 1.3 beta scares me that were I to make the effort to learn wxWidgets and C++, I’d only still up with a program with an interface even more horrible and broken than what REALbasic offers.