The computing stuff rant thread

[FifeingEejit]

Yesterday was brilliant.
Yes I know that shouldn't be how a rant thread starts but bear with me.
I love ranting, in fact give me an excuse to slag off anyone and everyone and as some may have already twigged ill take it with both hands and run with it, yes I know we're playing football but hey if Mardaonna can use 1 hand...

Thursday evening
weird data state was raised by BA doing UAT 2 days before were supposed to be wrapping up for release week after next.
(rant about that)

Why's this showing w+x when it should be w+y.
Checks data view in source system, um the  supplier produced the data view and it doesn't show y, are you sure this is a valid state.
Out of office recieved in response, BA is off on holiday for a week, in the week before go live umm...

Friday
Got data state confirmed as normal...
Looks deeper oh fuckity fuck f--- OK you get the picture

Interlude, 45 minute "stand-up" while we try to figure out what in the shambles of unmanaged JIRA ticket for the project (been ranting about since about day 10 back in April... Yes this was a 2 week project...)

When previous management put this source data system in, they defined all of the data concepts they needed in terms of the system it was replacing (previous rant repeated, jist obvious)

So of course in old system data concept im looking at has similar name and appearance to a concept in new system.
But the actual data concept in the old system is covered by 2 data concepts in the new one.
So of course what we asked for from the supplier resulted in bullshit (yes previous rant)

Which feeds 5 other subsystems that have been in place for 5 years.
Including a screen, that's meant to show the concept of concern, no ones reported it being blatantly wrong (fucking users shrugging and ignoring issues, previous rant)

And that got through fucking UAT at the time too, ffs.

Then of course there's the fact that at the time of the migration we were offered training so we would understand (funny we'd forget be cause we don't do it all the time) the source systems database and be able to leech data from it as we wished management denied.
(another previous rant)

So here's me working out how to summarise 8 different sub-concepts in a massive data table where rather than summarising at row level (first and last) I'd need to do each one indivodually , without crippling both systems (almost impossible, another little rant)

So far this investigation and consideration has now taken from about 10 to 1500, rant with bosses, we suddenly realize hud on who knows the DB well, the guys that write reports day in day out.

Hullo um, have you got a query that will tell us y directly .
Phone rings around the back of 4 "oh hello yes we do, it's all in there, points me at a standard table representation of the mumps database "
"ta"

At this point it's worth nothing that instead of having a field in a table called "admission"."specialty" it has a table with a name like PA_ADM, and specialty needs to be derived from a row number held in a column called something like CT_LOC_ID, which is related to a table called CT_LOC which is just a KVS of lots of stuff, chances of finding on a casual Un trained look, nearly nill.

30 mins later I'm now staring at a much simpler quey than I feared i needed to write for y, but there's still about half of it needing figured out namely w, what next.. .

Hm but isn't that other half only used for thay  there screen? ... And didn't I see another late UAT issue raised saying "why the fuck are you showing w that we asked for instead of y" (shite spec, poor quality BAs, we found them in the failed developers bin.., part time working and mostly on holiday too)

Checks screen that shows w instead of y, it now shows x.

At this point the cleaner appears and in her normal manner asks me "can you turn off the lights when you leave" which translates as "can you fuck off now please I want to lock up and go home"

---

So yesterday I got to rant about absolutely everyone.
It was great.

Unfortunately when ever I mention to other devs or management that the way we've been working is a crock of shit, it's written off as me having a rant.
Though to be fair the new SDM knew this ages ago and was part of his pitch for the job anyway and he's finally got movement on the shit.
Even got a manager to take the role of scrummaster who has been sorting out how to convert us from this shambolic shitstorm.
But the other devs particularly the one that was meant to be lead on this seems to be oblivious to how fucked it all is, or have given up caring (while working on escape plan)
It's not like all this shit wasn't noticed 5 years ago, a plan out in place and never implemented.
Slightly annoyingly my escape plan fucked up when I missed an interview due to losing access to an old email address that I'd told the recruiter not to use... No rant about that today for obvious reasons.

---

Anyway the point of this overall rant is, what the fuck am I going to do when the scrummaster is battering everyone for trying to boycott process, the SDM is throwing the shite specs back at the BAs and there's nothing for me to rant about?





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[TheLurker]

... points me at a standard table representation of the MUMPS database ...

FTFY. 

I take it the source DB is Cache (insert your own diacritic) rather than POM and you have some horrid mapping from globals (or whatever Cache uses) to SQL(alike) tables?  I remember having all sorts of *fun* back in the early 90s with that sort of thing.

Anyway the point of this overall rant is, what the fuck am I going to do...

Shrug your shoulders, do the minimum* necessary to keep you and your team-mates sane and let the bean-counters & management sort out their own fuck-ups and come knocking-off time, go home.


*I grant you that for path. & patient admin systems this might be quite a lot of effort 'cos the treatment and health people is not something that admits of a jobsworth** attitude.
**I strongly suspect management, they having no conscience whatsoever, rely on us grunts having one.

[FifeingEejit]

Yeah it's Cachè exposed through sql views.

The final question is more a case of what am I going to do when the new management* have ironed out the stuff I have to rant about and work is back to plain old boring getting stuff done.
The obvuous answer to that's is ill be enjoying getting stuff done, like I was in the last hour of the day figuring out where the data was and bashing out the new base query.

* it really is new management, at the top there's a new director who's shaken quite a lot up, most positive the place has been since the previous director arrived with her slash and burn cost cutting exercises.

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[Pingu]

...Which feeds 5 other subsystems that have been in place for 5 years.
Including a screen, that's meant to show the concept of concern, no ones reported it being blatantly wrong (fucking users shrugging and ignoring issues, previous rant)...

Me: <looking at process built a decade or more ago>That doesn't look right.
User: It's always been like that.
Me: <sigh> So what do you do?
User: Well, we do this then that then export to Excel and use a pivot table... It takes ages.
Me: It should only take a few seconds, I'll have a look at it.

Half an hour later...
Me: OK, I've fixed it, there was a typo on one line in a subroutine that...
User: <eyes glaze over> OK, whatever.

A couple of months later...
Me: Why are you still doing this then that then exporting to Excel and using a pivot table which takes ages when I fixed it to take a few seconds?
User: Er, we've always done it that way.

 

[Mr Larrington]

Ah, the joys of Luddism

Mr Larrington:	Generating this list of tapes wot can be re-used takes a ridiculously long time using the built-in function in The Vendor-Supplied Product.  There has to be a better way of doing it…
	Time passes.  Mr Larrington learns about DATATRIEVE and, peripherally, wombats.
Mr Larrington:	OK, youse BOsFH, would you care to try this New! IMPROVED!!1! SCIENCE wot I haz writted?
BOFH #1:	Wowsa!  A list of tapes wot can be re-used in fifteen seconds instead of eighty minutes!!1!
BOFH #2:	And the output is identical to that generated by the built-in function in The Vendor-Supplied Product, so The Boss, [“Bad Swear” – The Invigilator] tho' he undoubtedly be, cannot complain!
BOFH Chorus:	Hurrah!  Hurrah for Mr Larrington and his wombat SCIENCE!  Let us take him to Thee Pubbe, and buy him much BEER!!1!
Mr Larrington:	This Unit hereby endorses this product, service or sentiment!
	FX: Thunderbolts, lightning, smoke, flame, loud roaring noise
The Boss:	'oo tole you ter do that?  Make it go away!  Fifty house points from the Operations Assurance Froup!
Omnes:	WANKER!!1!

As a punishment Git Boss made me produce drawings of the data centre's floor plan, during which I discovered that the building was Not Straight, and then gave me another bollocking for using a primitive CAD program that had been bundled with my home PC.  At which point I started updating my CV.

[Kim]

As a punishment Git Boss made me produce drawings of the data centre's floor plan, during which I discovered that the building was Not Straight, and then gave me another bollocking for using a primitive CAD program that had been bundled with my home PC.

Should have used Excel.

[Chris S]

Oi, CentOS - "Sorry, something went wrong" is not an error message.

[Mrs Pingu]

Fecking Harmony Hub refuses to connect to the Wifi all of a sudden. Arsebisquits.

[FifeingEejit]

...Which feeds 5 other subsystems that have been in place for 5 years.
Including a screen, that's meant to show the concept of concern, no ones reported it being blatantly wrong (fucking users shrugging and ignoring issues, previous rant)...

Me: <looking at process built a decade or more ago>That doesn't look right.
User: It's always been like that.
Me: <sigh> So what do you do?
User: Well, we do this then that then export to Excel and use a pivot table... It takes ages.
Me: It should only take a few seconds, I'll have a look at it.

Half an hour later...
Me: OK, I've fixed it, there was a typo on one line in a subroutine that...
User: <eyes glaze over> OK, whatever.

A couple of months later...
Me: Why are you still doing this then that then exporting to Excel and using a pivot table which takes ages when I fixed it to take a few seconds?
User: Er, we've always done it that way.

 

Ooh thst lines up another rant about our operations team, but it's quite a bit older.

But I could be here all... Oh OK...


Rant 1.
Decision made that dev don't need to know live server details, (reasonable enough, we're not allowed on them anyway without Caldicot or in fact near any real data).
Deva ignore they ever knew live server details.
First release after this (and ever since)
Ops: what server is thst to go on?

Rant 2: (not really a rant)
Ops: report problem with query they run regularly
Devs: what's thst to do with us... Also that system was decommissioned last week.
Ops: who dod that no one told us
Devs: we sat in a meeting with you for 2 hours about it 2 weeks ago and you turned it off
Ops: did we???

Rant 3:
Me (paraphrased to what I'm thinking)
Why the fuck are you still working like its 1989?
Ops: oh is there a better way to do this?
Me: yes just use UNC to access the fucking file on your desktop instead of going through 3 layers of tty terminals to use a Shitty text editor on Solaris that makes VI look like a bleeding edge wysiwyg
Ops: oh didn't know you could access Solaris files on windows
Me: how in fuck do you think we get the files onto Solaris in the first place from out windows desktoos
Ops: oh do you not work in solaris


Rant 4
Me: windows release
Ops: nothing to do with us, data centres job
Datacentre: WTF we only deliver a VM with OS and run away why are you asking us
Me: cos ops...
Datacentre: ah OK we'll do it
(politics between the two facepalms removed for brevity)

Rant 5:
Me: system meets spec, the spec says this <copies and pastes spec point>, this is kot a big
BA: you could read it either way
Me thinks: no you fucking cant, you say nothing of this clause you want added
Me actually: <fobs off>, adds to postit for retrospective

This one is more recent, like Friday, I've now got a big pile of Stop posits and some Starts but they're really reworded stops,
The summary is "stop this bullshit shambles of unstructured project, BA taking the piss interaction and dev/test process and start doing what we've just employed someone to get us doing.



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[TheLurker]

Rant 1.
Decision made ....

Rant 5:
... meets spec, the spec says this <copies and pastes spec point>, this is not a bug...

Every IT project, regardless of size, that I ever undertaken.  Here, have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. 

[Mr Larrington]

Please please please let it be now-fixed minor typos causing shit to crash and not the bloody Volvos that took all day yesterday to assemble 

[rogerzilla]

Have finally kicked Firefox into touch, after struggling for a few months with the disastrous new version.  Too many sites just don't work.  Bye Mozilla...it was a mostly good 22 years.

[nicknack]

Not so much a rant, more of a long drawn out sigh.

I'm typing this on our usual living room computer - a HP small thing running Ubuntu. Up until a few days ago it was running 18.04 which has been fine except for the last few months when it's sometimes taken a couple of goes to boot up. Those few days ago it took most of the morning to get it going so I thought I'll upgrade to 20.04 and see if it makes a difference. Well, as you might expect, it's worse.

It won't boot at all by the usual method, ie. just switching it on. Ok, so reinstall from a usb stick. Nope. Won't install anything from a usb stick - not Ubuntu, not Mint, not nuffink. I did did get it to run Mint from a stick but it utterly refused to let me do anything useful like grub repair. It just crashed.
However, I do have Ubuntu 14.04 on a partition of an old separate hard drive and the bloody thing manages to boot from this. If it's ok with this I can't imagine why it's not ok with a usb stick.

Weirdly, I can get the computer to start up 20.04 if I work my way through the boot menu on the old hard drive on a "recovery mode" option, but again, if I try to carry out any repairs it crashes. Apart from that it mostly works. Well, actually the sounds are a bit odd too. If I run the speaker test in Settings then it's fine but none of the apps that play music produce any sound.

Might be time for a new one.

[citoyen]

Have finally kicked Firefox into touch, after struggling for a few months with the disastrous new version.  Too many sites just don't work.  Bye Mozilla...it was a mostly good 22 years.

Gosh. I haven’t used Firefox for such a long time, I’d pretty much forgotten about it.

I’m currently trying to wean myself off Chrome and onto Safari. Getting fed up with various sites I use regularly not working properly on Chrome. Annoying.

[ian]

Wanders off to look at our browser usages stats... Yeah, FF is essentially dead (Chrome is about 80% of what hits our systems).

I've moved from Chrome to Safari (other than a couple of systems and sites that insist on Chrome). Safari is fast and sleek and doesn't seem to eat through resources like the hungry Pac-Man that every Chrome tab is.

[Afasoas]

I’m currently trying to wean myself off Chrome and onto Safari. Getting fed up with various sites I use regularly not working properly on Chrome. Annoying.

Well that's odd because IIRC, Chrome and Safari are fairly closely related.

I'm happily still using Firefox (on PC) as Chrome/Chromium (or rather the dominance of the Blink browser engine) sends chills through my bones. I have Chromium installed as second browser, and I'm struggling to recall the last time I opened a site in Chromium because it didn't work in Firefox, outside of web-based Video conferencing - which does generally work in Firefox, I just don't like sharing cookies and I'll periodically restart Firefox (t'is configured not to save any data).

[citoyen]

Well that's odd because IIRC, Chrome and Safari are fairly closely related.

This may well be true in general but there are one or two specific differences in the way they behave that cause me problems, eg webp images, which are a pain in the arse.

[pcolbeck]

Not so much a rant, more of a long drawn out sigh.

I'm typing this on our usual living room computer - a HP small thing running Ubuntu. Up until a few days ago it was running 18.04 which has been fine except for the last few months when it's sometimes taken a couple of goes to boot up. Those few days ago it took most of the morning to get it going so I thought I'll upgrade to 20.04 and see if it makes a difference. Well, as you might expect, it's worse.

It won't boot at all by the usual method, ie. just switching it on. Ok, so reinstall from a usb stick. Nope. Won't install anything from a usb stick - not Ubuntu, not Mint, not nuffink. I did did get it to run Mint from a stick but it utterly refused to let me do anything useful like grub repair. It just crashed.
However, I do have Ubuntu 14.04 on a partition of an old separate hard drive and the bloody thing manages to boot from this. If it's ok with this I can't imagine why it's not ok with a usb stick.

Weirdly, I can get the computer to start up 20.04 if I work my way through the boot menu on the old hard drive on a "recovery mode" option, but again, if I try to carry out any repairs it crashes. Apart from that it mostly works. Well, actually the sounds are a bit odd too. If I run the speaker test in Settings then it's fine but none of the apps that play music produce any sound.

Might be time for a new one.

I'm running 20.04 and its fine. Why should it be worse than 18.04? Ir an 18.04 for two years then went to 20.04 after it had been out for a couple of months. Did you do an upgrade or a clean install? I never trust the in-place upgrade of Ubuntu I always backup my data and re install its much cleaner.

[pcolbeck]

So we have been working on a major datacentre upgrade for a large corporate client for two years. Gradually getting all the pre requisite work done and network hardware upgraded and ready. Yesterday was the day one of a two week blitz to get the new compute and virtualisation platform stood up. Teams calls setup for all day, everyone who could working remotely due to Covid and we are off. Everything going as planned.
Then someone in BAU decides it's a good day to take down the remote access systems for maintenance. Boom everyone cut off.

[nicknack]

Not so much a rant, more of a long drawn out sigh.

I'm typing this on our usual living room computer - a HP small thing running Ubuntu. Up until a few days ago it was running 18.04 which has been fine except for the last few months when it's sometimes taken a couple of goes to boot up. Those few days ago it took most of the morning to get it going so I thought I'll upgrade to 20.04 and see if it makes a difference. Well, as you might expect, it's worse.

It won't boot at all by the usual method, ie. just switching it on. Ok, so reinstall from a usb stick. Nope. Won't install anything from a usb stick - not Ubuntu, not Mint, not nuffink. I did did get it to run Mint from a stick but it utterly refused to let me do anything useful like grub repair. It just crashed.
However, I do have Ubuntu 14.04 on a partition of an old separate hard drive and the bloody thing manages to boot from this. If it's ok with this I can't imagine why it's not ok with a usb stick.

Weirdly, I can get the computer to start up 20.04 if I work my way through the boot menu on the old hard drive on a "recovery mode" option, but again, if I try to carry out any repairs it crashes. Apart from that it mostly works. Well, actually the sounds are a bit odd too. If I run the speaker test in Settings then it's fine but none of the apps that play music produce any sound.

Might be time for a new one.

I'm running 20.04 and its fine. Why should it be worse than 18.04? Ir an 18.04 for two years then went to 20.04 after it had been out for a couple of months. Did you do an upgrade or a clean install? I never trust the in-place upgrade of Ubuntu I always backup my data and re install its much cleaner.

Reading around, it appears there might be a compatibility issue with HP and Linux. It's worked fine for the last 4 years though. It was an upgrade. I've tried to do a clean install but since the thing won't boot off a usb stick then it's a bit difficult. The option I haven't tried involves gparted and taking off and nuking from orbit.

[Afasoas]

Frickin WSUS.

[Mrs Pingu]

This week's fun things to do for IT, is moving all our outlook archives to the online archive. It's taking forever cos I've got three of the things.
Not only that but the instructions they sent us mean that for each archive you have to transfer every subfolder over individually.
WTF? I've been at this since Friday.
Eventually I got fed up and Googled for an alternative method. Hopefully that will work ok.

While this takes place Outlook doesn't work and so you have to use the online version. Which is horrible.

[ian]

I use the web version of Outlook, it seems curiously fine.

[Mrs Pingu]

You've been using it for years tho.

[ian]

I did try the desktop app, I'm not sure what it offered me over the online version, but my needs are limited to sending random emails to other subdecks and ignoring their responses, and finding out I'm CCed on absolutely everything.