Author Topic: The computing stuff rant thread  (Read 396506 times)

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #25 on: 03 March, 2014, 08:53:45 pm »
15 isn't legal in the UK IIRC.

13 is legal in the UK, but isn't in the US, which means routers tend not to default to it, thereby making it a good one to use.  Except when buggy laptops (running UK versions of the drivers which claim to use Ch 13 just fine) decide to do that.  We discovered this in a broadly similar way.

Now I'm home I checked and it would have been 13. So my rant is still valid?

Very much so.

T42

  • Apprentice geezer
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #26 on: 05 March, 2014, 08:41:34 am »
For years my favourite routing site used both Google & Cloudmade routing engines. Google didn't include cycling but Cloudmade did, you had the choice, it was great. The Cloudmade engine was fast, too.

Then Cloudmade disappeared and they only offered Google routing for cars and walkers, so you could either take your bike up the motorway/autostrada/autobahn/whatever or that scenic hiking route straight up Lover's Leap.

So I decided to set up my own site & base it on Cloudmade.  I set up an account, acquired a key, dived into the docs and started beavering. It was much clearer than Google's API, a real delight to program. For about 3 months my spare time was spent chortling with beaverish glee.

Several months ago the API wiki disappeared from Cloudmade's site. Uh-oh.

This morning the axe fell: "Cloudmade are moving to new business model": $25 per million map tiles.  On 1st May support for existing free services will be withdrawn.

So now I have the choice of watching my beautiful routing prog die, or rehashing > 15,000 lines of code for Google, Mapquest or some other.

Yetch.
I've dusted off all those old bottles and set them up straight

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #27 on: 05 March, 2014, 12:53:54 pm »
Twas ever thus.

Building something using free services (or even relatively new paid for services) is always risky.

Unless you get to a point where there's a contract and terms of service then the rug can always be pulled out from under your feet.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

Phil W

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #28 on: 05 March, 2014, 01:00:08 pm »
Or you can pay $25 for Cloudmade which is cheaper than your time to rehash

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #29 on: 05 March, 2014, 01:07:30 pm »
BT you gits. You raised my hopes by having the Infiniti checker say it would be available here by end of Feb and when I checked today it now simply says "not available in your area"
After an online chat with them it seems they now estimate it will be sometime next month but I wont hold my breath.
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

T42

  • Apprentice geezer
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #30 on: 05 March, 2014, 01:44:10 pm »
Or you can pay $25 for Cloudmade which is cheaper than your time to rehash

$25 per million tiles.  I've no idea how many tiles it takes to plan a 1000k trip.
I've dusted off all those old bottles and set them up straight

Afasoas

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #31 on: 05 March, 2014, 07:40:33 pm »
Microsoft
 - Visual Studio 12*
    Removal of the Deployment Wizard
    Forcing the use of InstallShield.

Windows Installer XML, if its still around....

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #32 on: 06 March, 2014, 09:43:02 am »
BT you gits. You raised my hopes by having the Infiniti checker say it would be available here by end of Feb and when I checked today it now simply says "not available in your area"
After an online chat with them it seems they now estimate it will be sometime next month but I wont hold my breath.

Ha. They've been doing that dance with me for over 18 months.

Every time it got to within 2 weeks of the end of the window it got shunted 3 months further on.

Then when the ASA stomped all over BT for giving false promises they shunted the date way out (until "by March 2014"). [1]

That's getting dangerously close so they may, like you, just roll it over into a "We have no date".

It's annoying as the cabinet down the road (but not serving my home) was converted to FTTC over a year ago.

1. *checks again* "Fibre optic broadband is estimated to be in your area by the end of March 2014. Please note that these dates have been provided by our supplier and are estimates. Dates may be subject to change due to factors outside our control such as; delays agreeing cabinet locations with your local council or unforeseen issues encountered during the construction of your street cabinet."
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

ian

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #33 on: 06 March, 2014, 11:01:17 am »
They can't even tell me. The exchange is accepting orders, cabinets elsewhere are tauntingly emblazoned with 'BT Infiniti here'  but our cabinet isn't upgraded. They can't tell me why. It's all like super-mysterious. They. Just. Won't. Say.

TimC

  • Old blerk sometimes onabike.
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #34 on: 06 March, 2014, 11:08:32 am »
BT are fucking useless. I've just - yet again - spent an hour on the phone to their Delhi call centre trying to diagnose - yet again - why I have little or no bandwidth despite a HomeHub insisting it's connected (at a download speed of 448kbs - whoopee!) yet I cannot connect to anything with any device using any operating system, wired or wireless, for more than an hour before the connection drops out following a box reset. BT insist it must be a problem with whichever device I'm using. However, surprise, a discussion with other householders in my little hamlet reveals that they are all having exactly the same problem, and are getting the same fob-off from BT. I have recently been at least successful in persuading them to get an Openreach engineer to visit, but he was given only the history of the most recent complaint not the full several-years' worth. Nor was he aware that other households locally were suffering the same crap service, or that some of them had also had engineers' visits without any appreciable progress. No-one within BT, it seems, talks to anyone else.

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #35 on: 06 March, 2014, 03:55:00 pm »
They can't even tell me. The exchange is accepting orders, cabinets elsewhere are tauntingly emblazoned with 'BT Infiniti here'  but our cabinet isn't upgraded. They can't tell me why. It's all like super-mysterious. They. Just. Won't. Say.

Check the planning part of your local council website. Most of the time it's because there's a dispute about where your new (bigger) cabinet is going to be placed.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

ian

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #36 on: 06 March, 2014, 04:22:57 pm »
They can't even tell me. The exchange is accepting orders, cabinets elsewhere are tauntingly emblazoned with 'BT Infiniti here'  but our cabinet isn't upgraded. They can't tell me why. It's all like super-mysterious. They. Just. Won't. Say.

Check the planning part of your local council website. Most of the time it's because there's a dispute about where your new (bigger) cabinet is going to be placed.

I didn't see anything when I checked. We have a standard cabinet opposite us, and there's another at the bottom of the street. Next to that is a larger, considerably more vintage looking cabinet (which I assume is telecoms related). Probably someone is looking at the cost of replacing a cabinet. Infiniti seems to have reached the rest of the exchange's coverage, other than our bit. The infrastructure seems fine, we're getting 13-15 Mb/s, though that's from the cabinet across the road. I wouldn't mind if they'd just say, it's just the mystery. I'm fortunate the the ADSL is actually pretty good, we have no issues with Lovefilm etc., and I'm not trying to torrent an entire internet's worth of p0rn. The only pain point is slow uploads, I work from home and often need to push stuff up to the mothership, and that's pretty slow. I should probably steal an alien spaceship and go deliver it personally. I think that has precedent.

tonycollinet

  • No Longer a western province of NĂºmenor
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #37 on: 06 March, 2014, 08:38:55 pm »
Check out your county council plans for the BDUK rollout. My cabinet was left out of the BT commercial roll out (uneconomic) but has been included in Cheshire east BDUK project. In fact the empty cabinet has just been installed - due to go live "from summer on"

ian

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #38 on: 06 March, 2014, 08:53:50 pm »
Check out your county council plans for the BDUK rollout. My cabinet was left out of the BT commercial roll out (uneconomic) but has been included in Cheshire east BDUK project. In fact the empty cabinet has just been installed - due to go live "from summer on"

Hmm, according to that by the end of 2014 apparently (which I take to mean we might get around to it before the funding runs out). I assume that means our upgrade was deemed uneconomic. Not sure why, whilst not the most affluent part of Surrey, it's far from poor and there's no alternative cable option (or likely to be).

tonycollinet

  • No Longer a western province of NĂºmenor
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #39 on: 06 March, 2014, 09:21:10 pm »
No idea why mine was uneconomic either. One possibility is that the FTTC cabinet is located about 15m from the phone cabinet - so the extra cabling costs might be part of it. It also partly covers an industrial estate so perhaps fewer residential lines.

But who knows.

tiermat

  • According to Jane, I'm a Unisex SpaceAdmin
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #40 on: 07 March, 2014, 08:02:00 am »
ORACLE!

In particular Oracle E-Business Suite.

We have a number of Applications servers* here, all of which started, for some reason, acting up at 18:00 on Sunday evening.

One by one they started behaving themselves, all bar one.

I come into work this morning, having spent all week trying to diagnose the problem, to find the last one fixed itself overnight!

Fuckers!

*Luckily they are DEV/TEST servers, so no great impact on the operation of the business...
I feel like Captain Kirk, on a brand new planet every day, a little like King Kong on top of the Empire State

hellymedic

  • Just do it!
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #41 on: 07 March, 2014, 04:27:23 pm »
BT you gits. You raised my hopes by having the Infiniti checker say it would be available here by end of Feb and when I checked today it now simply says "not available in your area"
After an online chat with them it seems they now estimate it will be sometime next month but I wont hold my breath.

No, don't.
We finally got Infinity 10 months after the date BT said it would be available.

simonp

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #42 on: 07 March, 2014, 04:47:53 pm »
Merge conflicts.

David Martin

  • Thats Dr Oi You thankyouverymuch
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #43 on: 08 March, 2014, 08:39:57 am »
Better than miscellaneous bugs after a successful automerge.
"By creating we think. By living we learn" - Patrick Geddes

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #44 on: 08 March, 2014, 08:52:21 am »
So, what kind of braindead autoresponder ignores the Reply-To and sends its out-of-office notifications somewhere else entirely?
Quote from: tiermat
that's not science, it's semantics.

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #45 on: 08 March, 2014, 08:58:21 am »
Better than miscellaneous bugs after a successful automerge.

Or silently overwriting previously checked in and released changes with the version from the branch, causing recent new features to disappear without warning. On the positive side, it did teach the devs to include a unit test for every new feature.  ;)
Quote from: tiermat
that's not science, it's semantics.

simonp

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #46 on: 08 March, 2014, 10:35:19 am »
Better than miscellaneous bugs after a successful automerge.

I made one mistake in the most recent manual merge which caused a test failure that took ages to track down. It doesn't help that this project is still using CVS.

My main problem is I've been brought into this project to help out as they slipped. So I don't know the code. And they keep changing sections of code I'm working in so nearly every time I update I have conflicts. Still, I expect I'll have his feature checked in this weekend and I have only one more to implement then I can go back to my usual work. Which I have also been doing while waiting for tests to run and I've rewritten an important part of our traffic code halting its size and making it much faster.

Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #47 on: 10 March, 2014, 11:34:23 am »
BT you gits. You raised my hopes by having the Infiniti checker say it would be available here by end of Feb and when I checked today it now simply says "not available in your area"
After an online chat with them it seems they now estimate it will be sometime next month but I wont hold my breath.

Availability checker now says end of March. We will see.
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

CommuteTooFar

  • Inadequate Randonneur
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #48 on: 10 March, 2014, 01:32:13 pm »
Damn you Microsoft. My home computer uses Windows XP in a months time there will be no more security updates and I will need to buy a more modern OS [Seven not eight].

Dibdib

  • Fat'n'slow
Re: The computing stuff rant thread
« Reply #49 on: 10 March, 2014, 02:29:22 pm »
Damn you Microsoft.

In their defence, XP is twelve years old now - how long did you expect them to support it for?

In comparison, Debian supports previous releases for a year after a new release and even Ubuntu's LTS releases only get security patches for five years.