Adding insult to injury

Stupid Expat/PyExpat/PyExpat SAX2 driver throws fatalerrors and won't go on after a mismatched tag. Ain't this great: first they won't use sexps and instead go for format which requires balanced start/end tags, then the software totally gives up when the tags aren't balanced. So much for trying to help the user.

Argh.

[update]

And PyXML makes it pretty "challenging" trying to figure out what is wrong when a SAX driver won't work. libxmlop, pyxml 0.7.1, python 2.1. Somewhere it's trying to call __init__ with a wrong number of arguments. Clues welcome.

Desktop silliness

Browsing the Gnome mailing lists, over at nautilus-list archives I came across this little gem: Unifying ~/Desktop. Ye gods. I was hoping the desktop folks would be, at some point, getting rid of the desktop directory silliness. I have yet to understand what's the point of having a separate home directory and a desktop directory. $HOME is for me to work in, right? So what was the point of having a ~/Desktop, ~/.gnome-desktop, whatever, again? To have a desktop that has nothing to with reality and the stuff I'm working on, I guess.

I'd love to know have the two options, of having a separate desktop and having a $HOME desktop, been tested on users? I don't think it was in the Sun report, I don't know about things Eazel did. Not to mention other environments besides Gnome.

[update]

Oh well, reading a bit further, I found Jeff Waugh testing $HOME as desktop on users. I know the problems he listed (I still haven't managed to convince Gnus to put News and Mail directories somewhere besides $HOME, and ~/evolution is just as stupid), but still, I don't think that's an argument against $HOME as desktop, but against stupid software which clutters your home directory with non-dot directories not meant for the user to use.