Since I'm always in some sort of tmux/screen terminal, I find myself cycling through some combination of Ctrl+a q,Cntrl+q to make sure I didn't turn on flow-control (Ctrl+s).
arg flow control is the worst when trying to diagnose a frozen session. idk how many tines I've reset my network connection etc etc before realizing its gnu screen being silly (or really myself being silly)
I think we just have something against C keys. I do this to a calculator as well. It makes more sense with copying since there's absolutely no feedback that the copy was successful, but with a calculator there's no reason for it.
Ctrl+C interrupts the currently running program in a UNIX terminal, usually resulting in the program dying. That's probably what the commenter was referring to.
except usually the interrupt has visible feedback, namely returning user back to prompt or a notice that the program has caught the intercept, or if the terminal/program is hanging, ^c
I thought they were referring to copy and pasting. There's been many times in the past I've gone to paste something and it wasn't the thing I though I just copied half a second ago. It has resulted in me abusing control + c.
Quite a few very entertaining responses. Unfortunately the clicks aren't "random" as indicated in the question; therefore this is not an easily tapped source of entropy.
When I do this it's because I'm irritated that it's hanging and I hope that my clicks will queue up and punish the insolent program. Kind of like sentencing it to 2,000,000,000 cycles of hard labor.
Not applications, but I will refresh unruly/bad ui web pages with a timed auto-refresh (like every 5-10 seconds so I'm not overdoing it) with a 404 url that leaves a log messages related to whatever the annoyance is (in hopes the developer/sys admin will perhaps see it). If it's a really angry message, I will sometimes give an apology message a while later when I'm not so annoyed :)
You mean you force a 404 error, then add a URL param like /404.html?message=you_need_to_fix_feature_x, then refresh it a bunch so it'll hopefully gain a developer's attention?
Heh. Though speaking just for myself, I disable 404 notifications if there's no referrer, so I'd only see it if I happened to be trawling through the log with extreme care (i.e. never). If other developers are like me, you might want to use curl (or whatever) so that the referrer is actually set. In fact...I may start doing this.
Didn't think about it being filtered on no referrer, but that would make sense after thinking about it and why. I end up doing it hoping it has a better chance of reaching someone with the power to fix stuff in some of the larger companies. Going through the PR front end sometimes feels like a lesson in futility so might as well try to make it fun and hope someone listens while defusing web rage :)
Same for me. In terms of real life, something upsets you, you go punch a punching bag or beat up a pillow. In the computer world, I simply click as fast as possible until my frustration level lowers.
Actually this makes a little bit of sense these days on linux (or maybe it's gnome-specific?) An application that's unresponsive will just hang there, but if you try to interact with it and it doesn't respond you'll get the "do you want to kill it" dialog. Of course that's important only in case you really want to kill it - it won't fix anything.
Hidden modals is the kind of fun people miss in KDE.
But when I use Windows, I'm not bold enough to just click enter on whatever I'm not seeing to get the program back. I'll kill it on control panel before that.
I use KDE and there are two situations where I get "hidden" modals.
One is when FF decides I need to enter my master password more than once - eg a restart that opens more than one page that requires authorisation.
The other is when an app crashes, if there are multiple crashes then the crash reporter hides subsequent error dialogs.
What's most frustrating is when the ordering gets broken, probably due to my interactions, and one can't click the topmost dialog as it's blocked by a later dialog.
Generally the dialogs aren't hidden because you see them on the application bar but with grouping on (the default) they get hidden within the group. It might be worse with things like sloppy focus or focus stealing prevention set differently.
If I can't see a dialog on MS Windows I'll try Alt-Tab then hit escape, then Alt-F4, then try and bring up task manager ...
An analogy that comes to mind - physical exercise. When you are stopped doing exercise (e.g. running at a traffic light), people often will jog in place. Obvious reasons - keep heart rate from large deltas, muscles warm/responding well, etc.
If you watch competitive PC gaming, you will notice that even professional gamers will often 'spam' their hotkeys in low activity periods, typically the beginning of games. Some people claim that it is simply for actions-per-minute stats, but I could see it as some kind of setting of mental/physical cadence.
I don't think that the analogy holds. Jogging in place is to maintain movement and keeping the body warm so that it's easier to continue running when you can run.
Spamming before a round starts is done in order to fire off an action before your opponent or just as soon as possible.
Neither scenario is analogous to a non-responsive software application because everything is in fact responsive. If the stop light is red, then that's temporary, it is in fact the whole purpose of the signal. Only if the light hangs for an abnormally long amount of time do people get nervous. In the game scenario, there's usually a countdown to the round starting, so again nothing is frozen.
No, not before a round starts. For a concrete example, in starcraft all you normally do in the first minute is build up your worker supply and make 1-2 buildings, maybe send a scout. But you'll see players hitting hotkeys to view their base, no view over here, no view the base, now use the mouse to select all the workers, now do it again 7 times, now give this one ten move orders to the same spot as fast as you can click... They're not trying to get an action done faster, they're not even hitting keys that do anything, they're just constantly spamming input.
In as much as it has any real purpose, I would say spamming hot keys is more about making sure your hands/controllers are properly positioned. And then making sure of it again. And again.
Also, given the above, spamming hot keys is just about the only physical action you can take using your hands to expend nervous/bored energy.
Back in programming class, we had people read some stuff from /dev/random (or was it urandom? I don't remember). Some built infinite loops, which drained the entropy pool of the kernel and caused the program to hang.
It was just glorious. They were confused. "Look, this print should be triggered all the time and spam like hell, but nothing is happening! Where could it hang!" they wondered. And you just sauntered over, looked at the program, pondered for a second... and poked the mouse to one side. 5 more lines appeared. Eyes flashed bright with confused understanding.
In my experience, I simply do this as a way of polling the app to see whether it's still working. A working app will often have the main gui loop running so you'll be able to see the GUI respond to clicks, focus changes etc. If the app doesn't do that, it's a sign that it's blocked waiting for something (network or file access, for instance). Experience then informs me whether it's normal for a certain app to behave in this way, and whether I should wait longer to let it finish or just kill it off.
So for instance, a long time ago I was an Opera user on Linux. In certain cases some bug would cause it to go on a memory eating rampage which would slow the machine to a crawl of swapping if I didn't react quickly enough to kill the process. I developed a very good sense at "smelling" when this was about to happen, so I could react quickly enough to kill the process before just switching over to the terminal would take something like a minute.
Same here. In addition, I usually attempt to perform an action that will result in a visible response, like scrolling or selecting text, so that if/when the app does start responding again, I'll see.
I also sometimes move the window or switch to another window to see if it's the app or a bigger problem.
I usually switch to another window or program as well, in the hopes that the other window/program will distract me long enough to give the slow app an opportunity to recover. If other windows/programs are slow as well, then I start killing processes.
Agreed, same here. If the app responds, good. If the app doesn't respond, check to see if it ate the computer (i.e., allocated all of swap and is now thrashing). So clicking/other movements are sort of a basic manual health check.
Sometimes, there appears to be a loop that presents a limited-duration period/window of responsiveness but does not process prior input. I'll make repeated input in an attempt to catch that window.
This is another type of behavior that one tends to "develop a feel" for.
I remember that whenever a printer crashed at my university, its queue would fill up as people kept queuing additional copies of whatever document they were trying to print.
Thankfully the permissions on the print queue were loose enough that we lay users could purge the impatient people's documents from the queue rather than waiting for the printer to churn through their duplicate requests.
Sure does. Did you know that you can still entirely lock up windows simply by having a bunch of programs access the hard drive too much at once?
(And last time I made linux thrash it wasn't any better. Why is it so easy to keep the system responsive when a program or two hogs the CPU, but so hard when they hog disk I/O.)
I haven't actually looked into this question, but I suspect the problem isn't so much that the system isn't responsive when I/O is hogged, but rather that individual programs are not responsive.
On my computer, I occasionally get into a congested hard drive issue, and almost all programs I am running are incredibly non-responsive. However, my window manager (awesome), and virtual terminals stay snappy during this period. This is in contrast to when my CPU starts getting thrashed, when even those begin to get unusable.
In my experience the core UI systems usually lock up. I can't use even the simplest already-active non-memory-allocating programs. And can you explain caps lock not responding for 8 seconds without 'total system lockup'?
Misclicks are common, and it's normal to click two or three times to get something right - how many times have you mousedowned on a button, but had the pointer move off the button before mouseup?
Also, very occasionally, an application will respond to a click where it previously wasn't, and faint hope is better than no hope.
I've been using computers for over 20 years and believe me, every one of these actions has worked at some point.
Clicking might get the application into another state, or at least get the operating system involved in killing it of. Pressing return might answer hidden input fields (wrong focus, broken modal dialogs). Pressing escape might help exit one of these. Pressing ctrl-alt-del gets the OS involved... etc. etc.
What UI experts ignore, is the fact that a crashed/freezing application is no longer in a well-defined state. Therefore the apps logic no longer applies.
Sometimes I do it to try and get the program to crash instead of just hang. Software is pretty stable these days, so sometimes it feels good to see a complete crash to the desktop.
I used to do this in the OS 9 days, but these days of no swapping (lots of RAM and SSD) and OS X where the window manager never hangs and we have the pinwheel cursor for apps that stopped responding to UI events, I've stopped doing it (at most I'll move the cursor around in circles frantically to ensure there's no hardware/disk freeze, or scroll up/down to see if there's one of the frequent Safari WebProcess freezes).
Do any other OS X users do this, or is it limited to Windows/Linux? Is it due to poor feedback?
i click and highlight and such out of boredom, similar to how i tap my fingers when waiting or thinking. if i click while a program is 'hanging,' it isn't out of frustration or expectation of a response. people actually do that for those reasons?
Mildly related, and mildly humorous: After the last update to my phone I've started randomly experiencing dips in responsiveness. It might be doing GC or some other heavy tasks, but it remains in low (not zero) responsiveness for several seconds.
Whenever I experience it, I start tapping the back-button furiously, in a quick steady rythm, causing a pileup of tap-events. These will be dispatched in batches, each tap causing a small buzz in the vibrator engine. When the buzzes start happening at an even pace, I am back to having a responsive phone.
The purpose of this behaviour is to know when my phone is usable again, but it kind of evolved from me just wanting to see if I could provoke it or whatever. People are curious things.
I suspect many people do this for the same reasons that we yell at other drivers from within the sealed environment of our own car. There's very little chance that the other driver will hear us, but it provides an outlet for frustration.
My 17 month old plays with several numbers and letters apps on my Surface. If the app hangs even slightly, she taps over and over until the app reacts again. I find it interesting that even she does the rapid fire tapping as well.
I have a similar aged lad who uses his pad just like all the other much older kids do. Just want to say what an amazing thing it is to see kids so young so easily and comprehensively using these touch screen devices.
As an example, he can search YouTube for The Number Song, which has already taught him to count to 100. Alphabet 90% reliably correct too, not to mention shapes and colours. He has been using pads since he was about 15-16 months, something like that, he is now 2 years 3 months, and I still find it incredible. Way ahead of my other kids.
In an ideal world, I would love for every child to get one of these, plus an internet connection, free from what ever education department, when the hit, say, 18 months. Yeah, I know.....
What I don't know though is whether its a good thing or a bad thing? To this 40yo Dad, something seems sad about seeing him there, on the sofa, with his face lit up by his "Samsung". But equally, it seems like a modern miracle. Even though he still like books,, actual toys, running about in the garden, pulling the cat's tail, giving his food to the scrounging dogs, it still feels like he is being robbed of something. I suppose thats my age or generation, or something stupid.
As for the pad hanging, he now has patience, and simply waits. He used to tap away, then hold the pad out for one of us to fix it, but now he just waits. If he gets no response after a while, he restarts the pad.
People want to feel they have some level of control over a negative situation. This is why people will take a way home that is 15 minutes longer to avoid a 5 or 10 minute delay caused by a traffic jam. It's also the reason people are sometimes afraid to fly but not afraid to drive, even though it's generally far more risky.
Perhaps clicking repeatedly is an outlet for trying to control an application that has developed its own agenda.
73 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 95.2 ms ] thread"ctrl+c ctrl+c ctrl+c, just to make sure :)"
That's hilarious.
Thanks.
1. Click on chrome to see if the window responds
2. Click on enter to make sure any hidden modals are accepted
3. Alt+F4, die bastard die
4. Ctrl+Alt+Delete, kill it with fire
But when I use Windows, I'm not bold enough to just click enter on whatever I'm not seeing to get the program back. I'll kill it on control panel before that.
One is when FF decides I need to enter my master password more than once - eg a restart that opens more than one page that requires authorisation.
The other is when an app crashes, if there are multiple crashes then the crash reporter hides subsequent error dialogs.
What's most frustrating is when the ordering gets broken, probably due to my interactions, and one can't click the topmost dialog as it's blocked by a later dialog.
Generally the dialogs aren't hidden because you see them on the application bar but with grouping on (the default) they get hidden within the group. It might be worse with things like sloppy focus or focus stealing prevention set differently.
If I can't see a dialog on MS Windows I'll try Alt-Tab then hit escape, then Alt-F4, then try and bring up task manager ...
If you watch competitive PC gaming, you will notice that even professional gamers will often 'spam' their hotkeys in low activity periods, typically the beginning of games. Some people claim that it is simply for actions-per-minute stats, but I could see it as some kind of setting of mental/physical cadence.
Spamming before a round starts is done in order to fire off an action before your opponent or just as soon as possible.
Neither scenario is analogous to a non-responsive software application because everything is in fact responsive. If the stop light is red, then that's temporary, it is in fact the whole purpose of the signal. Only if the light hangs for an abnormally long amount of time do people get nervous. In the game scenario, there's usually a countdown to the round starting, so again nothing is frozen.
Also, given the above, spamming hot keys is just about the only physical action you can take using your hands to expend nervous/bored energy.
eg.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702
It was just glorious. They were confused. "Look, this print should be triggered all the time and spam like hell, but nothing is happening! Where could it hang!" they wondered. And you just sauntered over, looked at the program, pondered for a second... and poked the mouse to one side. 5 more lines appeared. Eyes flashed bright with confused understanding.
So for instance, a long time ago I was an Opera user on Linux. In certain cases some bug would cause it to go on a memory eating rampage which would slow the machine to a crawl of swapping if I didn't react quickly enough to kill the process. I developed a very good sense at "smelling" when this was about to happen, so I could react quickly enough to kill the process before just switching over to the terminal would take something like a minute.
I also sometimes move the window or switch to another window to see if it's the app or a bigger problem.
This is another type of behavior that one tends to "develop a feel" for.
Thankfully the permissions on the print queue were loose enough that we lay users could purge the impatient people's documents from the queue rather than waiting for the printer to churn through their duplicate requests.
(And last time I made linux thrash it wasn't any better. Why is it so easy to keep the system responsive when a program or two hogs the CPU, but so hard when they hog disk I/O.)
Also, very occasionally, an application will respond to a click where it previously wasn't, and faint hope is better than no hope.
Clicking might get the application into another state, or at least get the operating system involved in killing it of. Pressing return might answer hidden input fields (wrong focus, broken modal dialogs). Pressing escape might help exit one of these. Pressing ctrl-alt-del gets the OS involved... etc. etc.
What UI experts ignore, is the fact that a crashed/freezing application is no longer in a well-defined state. Therefore the apps logic no longer applies.
Do any other OS X users do this, or is it limited to Windows/Linux? Is it due to poor feedback?
Method to detect an application has hung
- by when a user repeatedly clicks randomly in a short time period of time
Whenever I experience it, I start tapping the back-button furiously, in a quick steady rythm, causing a pileup of tap-events. These will be dispatched in batches, each tap causing a small buzz in the vibrator engine. When the buzzes start happening at an even pace, I am back to having a responsive phone.
The purpose of this behaviour is to know when my phone is usable again, but it kind of evolved from me just wanting to see if I could provoke it or whatever. People are curious things.
As an example, he can search YouTube for The Number Song, which has already taught him to count to 100. Alphabet 90% reliably correct too, not to mention shapes and colours. He has been using pads since he was about 15-16 months, something like that, he is now 2 years 3 months, and I still find it incredible. Way ahead of my other kids.
In an ideal world, I would love for every child to get one of these, plus an internet connection, free from what ever education department, when the hit, say, 18 months. Yeah, I know.....
What I don't know though is whether its a good thing or a bad thing? To this 40yo Dad, something seems sad about seeing him there, on the sofa, with his face lit up by his "Samsung". But equally, it seems like a modern miracle. Even though he still like books,, actual toys, running about in the garden, pulling the cat's tail, giving his food to the scrounging dogs, it still feels like he is being robbed of something. I suppose thats my age or generation, or something stupid.
As for the pad hanging, he now has patience, and simply waits. He used to tap away, then hold the pad out for one of us to fix it, but now he just waits. If he gets no response after a while, he restarts the pad.
Mine is a little older (3 years 4 months) and has graduated to spelling and skip-counting, mostly on the "havefunteaching" youtube channel.
He's also learned which apps seem to respond well to extra taps. There are a few that do, and a few that just require patience.
http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/P/plokta.html
Perhaps clicking repeatedly is an outlet for trying to control an application that has developed its own agenda.