The computing stuff rant thread

[Morat]

A user complained to me today that she couldn't send our new brand guidelines by email to our suppliers and it was taking her too long to make them small enough to send (I limit emails to 20Mb each on BOFH principle). These brand guidelines are a huge stack of 50Mb .tif files. I hate designers. and branding. especially re-branding.
GRrrrr.

I told her to send a load of USB sticks by snail mail instead. Honestly, she's got dropbox but insists that she cant use it because "The suppliers might not have dropbox so they'd have to register". I mean, WTF???

edit:
forgot to say that I did actually host some of these files on an FTP after we had the "No you don't need dropbox to receive dropbox files" discussion (the outcome of which was that I was disbelieved and told to come up with another solution) and then she had the gall to complain that it took too long to download the files.

[Feanor]

I work for a software house, and on more than one occasion I have had to transfer large files to/from customers using my home FTP server on the end of an ADSL link.

[pcolbeck]

Back in the late 90s we had a customer who wanted to backup a large (for the time) amount of data between the UK and the US every couple of days. It wasn't static data either there was a lot of churn in it.
After doing the calculations and the costs on the required bandwidth of a suitable cross Atlantic comms link we advised him to get some large removable hard drives and get them flown backwards and forwards on Concord as that would be orders of magnitude cheaper.

[Kim]

Ob-Tanenbaum: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Ob-xkcd:


The rise of NAT has made transferring files surprisingly awkward.

[Jaded]

Why would branding guidelines not be predominantly full of vector images and therefore small in size?

[mrcharly-YHT]

Why would branding guidelines not be predominantly full of vector images and therefore small in size?

I bet they are full of EPS files containing badly exported bitmap images.

[David Martin]

Why would branding guidelines not be predominantly full of vector images and therefore small in size?

I bet they are full of EPS files containing badly exported bitmap images.

And you aren't joking either...

[mrcharly-YHT]

Why would branding guidelines not be predominantly full of vector images and therefore small in size?

I bet they are full of EPS files containing badly exported bitmap images.

And you aren't joking either...

I speaks from experience.

"can we have a copy of the new logo, please"

Illustrator file arrives in email.

Um, we need to use it in Word documents and on the Web and we don't have Illustrator, can you give us files suitable for HTML and Word?

EPS file arrives, huge in size. It contains bitmaps.

On the third asking, a PNG is sent. It is badly exported from Illustrator. The export process has translated the colours, so that the 3 colour logo is no longer in the 'company branded colours', but an interpreted version. The curves in the bitmap are jagged.

We give up, draw our own version as an SVG.

Yup, our 'creative services' department. They actually had at least one person with a degree in graphic design. Still couldn't produce a simple drawing.

[Phil W]

Back in the late 90s we had a customer who wanted to backup a large (for the time) amount of data between the UK and the US every couple of days. It wasn't static data either there was a lot of churn in it.
After doing the calculations and the costs on the required bandwidth of a suitable cross Atlantic comms link we advised him to get some large removable hard drives and get them flown backwards and forwards on Concord as that would be orders of magnitude cheaper.

And probably quicker as well.

[Mr Larrington]

Vague recollection of a test run in Australia comparing file transfer by network, car and carrier pigeon.  ISTR the pigeon went on strike about 50 miles from its destination and the network connection died and could not be revived before the sender got bored and went to the pub.

[ian]

At the risk of dating myself, my first job in publishing involved pressing a button on a computer each evening to start our branch office database synchronization with the head office. Over bundled ISDN. Sometime it would finish by the following morning. Sometimes we'd have plenty of time that following morning for photocopying. Photocopying was a thing we did back then, an early form of human vs. machine combat that taught us that the machines will always win.

Anyway, I just checked the current mothership's branding guide and it's 63 MB. I confess I've managed presentations with animation and video that run into the GBs. To be honest, a lot of bloat is introduced by the software rather than human activities, any Adobe application can, at any random save point, chose to bloat your simple file with the entire corpus of human knowledge. I'm looking at you, Illustrator and Photoshop EPS. It is worth remember that a lot of vector stuff that flattened and rasterized (I've long since given up expanding to people that setting the rasterization DPI to something ludicrous like 1200 dpi is unnecessary).

I'm not sure about the latest version of Office, but they've generally found vectors indigestible and don't handle colour. For colour, of course, you need to define the output – I get persistently annoyed seeing our stuff online in obvious CMYK. If you need a print version, fine, use the correct profiles and conversions, but unless you need superfinickity colour control in your workflow (while you probably don't want to give the famous extensively airbrushed model on your glossy glamour cover a martian tinge, the average corporate image is going to be fine), use RGB.

[TheLurker]

Wow. Just wow.  I think I've gone past ranting into an island of stability.

I found out today, the hard way,  that one of our products uses a case sensitive string comparison for a configuration setting. "Meh" you say, knowing full well that idiot programmers have been doing that since Babbage was a lad.   Ahh, but they didn't then put in code that, if it couldn't match this case sensitive string, would decide that it was one of the three possible values it ought to be and try to start the application in a mode for which the remaining configuration parameters were complete nonsense thereby leading to all sorts of msleading error messages about failed DB logins.

For pity's sake why not throw an ArgumentOutOfRange exception if it doesn't match or, now this is radical I know, try a case-insensitive comparison?

[T42]

^^^BTDT. With comic dialogue to follow:

- and did you note down the very first error message?
- no, I just clicked through it.
- oh well, can you fax me the error log?
- what's it called?
- error.log
- oh, that.  I always delete that because it just gets longer and longer. (Alternative: I deleted that to see if it would work without it.)

[T42]

Oh aye, I came in to bellyache about the bear-garden laserjet-cartridge market, and how the best prices for dependable-looking cartridges always turn out to be on items that aren't available.

[PeteB99]

Facebook again

I've got a profile which I haven't logged onto for about 18 months. It was only set up to keep in touch with ex work colleagues but it's just too needy - like having a 2 year old child.
Last couple of days I've had emails from FB saying that a couple of women (scantily clad from the profile pics in the Emails) want to be friends with me. So the question is have I pulled? or are they just after me for my money?

[Mr Larrington]

Microsith, why can none of your stupid command-line copy operations actually do as they're told?

[dave r]

Facebook again

I've got a profile which I haven't logged onto for about 18 months. It was only set up to keep in touch with ex work colleagues but it's just too needy - like having a 2 year old child.
Last couple of days I've had emails from FB saying that a couple of women (scantily clad from the profile pics in the Emails) want to be friends with me. So the question is have I pulled? or are they just after me for my money?

I get these occasionally, I'm a 65 year old grandfather, and they are usually late teens early twenties and easy on the eye. I just decline the friend invite.

[Mr Larrington]

Mr Larrington wants to copy six and a half thousand .mp3 files onto a fresh shiny new USB stick, while retaining the folder structure, because reasons.  I cannot just copy the entire source directory tree directly and then delete the files I do not want, because the fresh shiny new USB stick has insufficient bigliness.

Me:	OK, PC, copy these folders and files from the larger directory tree on that device over there to this fresh shiny new USB stick!
COPY:	Can't, because the folder you want to copy to does not yet exist*. Soz.
XCOPY:	I can do that! Oh, wait! Some of the folder and file names have funny characters in them! Do you really expect me to understand "é", "ñ" or that Canadian lot** whose name looks like "HRSTA" but isn't?
Me:	MP3TAG manages it OK...
ROBOCOPY:	Stand aside, XCOPY! This is a job for me! Half copy, half something else, all-powerful, bulletproof and psych...ERROR 87
Me:	WTAF does THAT mean?
Teh Internetz:	We don't know LOL. Try another device? Also, ROFL! Would you like to see some pictures of kittens?
Me:	I don't have another device, clot. And fck off with ur kittens. Now, ROBOCOPY, copy the entire original directory tree from HERE to THERE where, unlike the USB stick, there is room for the whole thing. Can you do that?
ROBOCOPY:	Yes. Yes, I can do that. (Does that)
	Four hours later...
Me:	Right. DEL, pray delete all the files I don't want.
DEL:	I'll do a lot of 'em, guv, but remember what XCOPY said about shifty FOREIGN characters?
Me:	$DEITY help me, a racist operating system! POWERSHELL, terminate these files with extreme prejudice!
POWERSHELL:	I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. Because you used that UKIPpy dinosaur DIR to generate the list of files to delete, and that big city on the Rhine is called "Köln". Not "K“ln". But I, POWERSHELL, can both get the list you want AND delete the files. Aren't I $theCleverOne!!1!
Me:	Yes. Yes, you are. Though why you find it necessary to pad out all the file paths with up to $LOTS of trailing spaces is a mystery worthy of Hercule Marple her own good self.
POWERSHELL:	You do know I can be told to trim those those lines, right? Just type '$file = "F:\Foo\x.txt"' and then 'Get-Content $file | Foreach {$_.TrimEnd()} | Set-Content "F:\Foo\y.txt"'
Me:	Gee, thanks, POWERSHELL! That's really intuitive!
POWERSHELL:	It worked though, didn't it?
Me:	Finally! FINALLY I haz just the files I want to copy to the USB stick, all fuelled and ready for take-off. ROBOCOPY, can you...
ROBOCOPY:	ERROR 87!
Me:	Windows! If I do <CONTROL-A> here, and then <CONTROL-V> there, will you copy the files?
Windows:	Yes. Yes I will. Except for the source files which aren't there any more.
Me:	What do you mean, "they're not there"? Do you think I deleted them while I was asleep? Try again, why don't you?
Windows:	Oh, silly me! They were there all the time! Forget me own head next!
Me:	I notice you only cough up these errors when I'm not actually supervising you, Windows. Have you considered therapy?  Because I have...

What should have taken a couple of hours has taken about twenty-four and counting. There has to be an easier way than this. Doesn't there?

* actually ROBOBOPY's "/NOCOPY" qualifier will create the folders while not copying the files, but I didn't know that at the time
** HṚṢṬA

[Kim]

Barakta: "Get a bigger USB stick."

[Mr Larrington]

Me: If a USB stick biglier that 128 GB exists at all then PC World don't sell them and I needed one NOW

Edit: The following files have different names:

File1
File2
[...]
File1372

Actually they don't.  It's just POWERSHELL truncating the output

[David Martin]

Git-Bash and use a proper shell.

[Mr Larrington]

Life, or at least time between now and leaving Larrington Towers for FOREIGN climes, is too short to be installing any new stuff.

[mcshroom]

Eurosport nonplayer - if you are having problems with people logging in after you've upgraded something then a) sort it out and ii) put a note on your log in page, not just on your email autoreply. Then perhaps you won't have customers resetting their passwords multiple times (DAMHIKT)

Also giving yourselves "72 working hours" simply to respond email is ridiculous. I want to watch the vuelta on the service I've paid you for.

[ian]

So, I finally abandoned Windows some time ago, but I keep the Dell around as a paperweight and because one day I may find that I squirreled away some vital file (ok, or one that I can't be bothered recreating). Which was this morning.

Will the big pile of shit even let me log in? Type username and password, not recognised. Now I know the it's password for our domain because I'm logged in elsewhere, like I do every day. It's not even checking, the response is instant.

We are, as ever, united in mutual loathing. Pile of shit can't even be bothered to check.

[Feanor]

If the machine has been off the network for a long time, it's machine credentials with the domain will have expired.
(The PC itself basically has it's own secret password which you don't get to see, and it gets expired and renewed in the background without you knowing.)
This is used to set up a secure channel for things like checking your password for logons.

So it can't check the domain for your current password, because the domain controller has locked it out and has told it to "Clear orf, you're not on the list".

However, it will still have a cached copy of what your password was the last time you successfully logged onto that machine!
It will let you log in with that.
Try that, if you can remember what is was.

To fix it properly, a domain admin needs to remove the machine from the domain and re-join it.
That will re-set the machine account credentials.
That will almost certainly require a visit to the office, and a physical Ethernet cable into the corporate network, because with the machine having fallen off the domain, all the remote stuffs will be broken.