Post by: David Martin on 24 February, 2014, 08:10:41 pm
I can't do a f^&*$( thing with it because every time ti tries to read my home directory it claims it can't find files that are hiding in plain sight.
can't find Blah Blah Blah enu/support/thingy
Well don't install it under enu/Support/thingy then.
Rename folder.
Still can't find it
Is it really such a bloated piece of &*( or is it my sysadmins screwing up roaming profile mounting?
Post by: Woofage on 24 February, 2014, 09:35:32 pm
I feel your pain.
Post by: David Martin on 24 February, 2014, 10:17:21 pm
It may get filed next to 'Visual Basic' in the box of technologies I am not allowed to use in polite company.
Post by: Kim on 24 February, 2014, 10:27:48 pm
(Yes, I know the WizNet 5100 has been around for ages. It's still a bit stupid though.)
Post by: pcolbeck on 25 February, 2014, 07:53:56 am
Arduino Ethernet modules that don't speak IPv6. Who thought that was a good idea?
(Yes, I know the WizNet 5100 has been around for ages. It's still a bit stupid though.)
Surely that's just a software issue as IP is not Ethernet it's L3 (media Independence being one of the points of IP). And yes I know some devices offload L3 processing into hardware for better performance but unless its an L3 switch that shouldn't be an issue.
Post by: Kim on 25 February, 2014, 01:31:56 pm
Arduino Ethernet modules that don't speak IPv6. Who thought that was a good idea?
(Yes, I know the WizNet 5100 has been around for ages. It's still a bit stupid though.)
Surely that's just a software issue as IP is not Ethernet it's L3 (media Independence being one of the points of IP). And yes I know some devices offload L3 processing into hardware for better performance but unless its an L3 switch that shouldn't be an issue.
Yes, but the WizNet 5100 (around which most Arduino Ethernet shields are based) is a system-onna-chip that takes Ethernet on one end and gives you serial on another. The entire stack, from physical layer to TCP socket is effectively untouchable, other than basic configuration.
You can use a less integrated chipset and do the TCP/IP stuff on the Arduino, but that can be a resource hog. Or roll your own hardware (either with something more capable, or a dedicated micro).
Post by: barakta on 25 February, 2014, 02:12:37 pm
The irony of the fucking outlook/network combo hanging and going into "I'm going to have a meltdown" mode as I tried to reply with HURRAH \o/ to my boss was not lost on me. Had to kill everything using the network and start again.
Post by: Kim on 25 February, 2014, 02:17:56 pm
Lovely boss sends an email saying boss3 has finally got a date of end of March for upgrade of our building's 10Mbit network to be upgraded (building of 50ish ppl, many of us working on stuff on servers elsecampus)...
Men in hi-vis sighted peering into a manhole at the end of your road a couple of hours ago. Anything's possible...
Post by: ian on 25 February, 2014, 08:16:03 pm
On the print out, after the preamble it says click here for instructions.
Post by: barakta on 26 February, 2014, 01:34:16 am
Lovely boss sends an email saying boss3 has finally got a date of end of March for upgrade of our building's 10Mbit network to be upgraded (building of 50ish ppl, many of us working on stuff on servers elsecampus)...
Men in hi-vis sighted peering into a manhole at the end of your road a couple of hours ago. Anything's possible...
Yeah we saw them, we were in the meeting room they walked past as they walked past the window behind me and Dawn kindly clued me and Patrick upto what everyone was rubbernecking at. Your SMS came in during our meeting.
The plan is to cable us to the building where you were! Last we'd heard it was "being quoted for" 7 weeks after boss3 promised my boss1 that he would push it cos there was nothing else short of $SpecialistDatabaseWeNeedTM that he could do to make our jobs more doable... 4 months is quite fast for the university *eyerolls*
It may also be helping I am putting tickets into helldesk about three times a week, every time the fucking shitpile of a website (which is not our local network, it's just SHIT) is shit I helldesk it with screenshots and data. Every time the network is especially crappy and nothing works. I helldesk that with screenshots and data... I have been encouraging colleagues to write polite, friendly, detailed trouble reports little and often to helldesk with Dear Helpdesk and Many thanks and pleases and thank yous and stuff in them. I figure if our error reporting rate spikes someone will care enough to pass it up the chain :D Don't get mad, get reporting! I know IT say half the actual errors we get are from software not handling the network contention gracefully :D
Post by: TheLurker on 01 March, 2014, 09:14:01 pm
- Visual Studio 12*
Removal of the Deployment Wizard
Forcing the use of InstallShield.
InstallShield was crap 15 years ago. It's _still_ crap and the Limited Edition? Dear Christ! That's not limited that's crippled. Just get a _fucking_ grip you _stupid_ bastards and reinstate the DW.
And while we're about it. A _manual_ conversion from MVC2 to MVC3? How absolutely fucking brilliant!
*Which deserves a 10 page rant all of its very own if only because of the appallingly unusable "monochrome" skin.
Post by: David Martin on 01 March, 2014, 09:18:46 pm
Post by: Kim on 01 March, 2014, 09:39:03 pm
Repartitioned, paying more attention to things I don't want to care about like sector boundaries, reformatted, checked on a couple of boxen that they report the right size. Have plugged it back into the server and re-started the backups script. That'll be an overnight job, then.
Post by: Chris S on 01 March, 2014, 09:55:01 pm
Microsoft
- Visual Studio 12*
Removal of the Deployment Wizard
Forcing the use of InstallShield.
InstallShield was crap 15 years ago. It's _still_ crap and the Limited Edition? Dear Christ! That's not limited that's crippled. Just get a _fucking_ grip you _stupid_ bastards and reinstate the DW.
And while we're about it. A _manual_ conversion from MVC2 to MVC3? How absolutely fucking brilliant!
*Which deserves a 10 page rant all of its very own if only because of the appallingly unusable "monochrome" skin.
May I suggest you investigate WiX? It's pretty feature rich - and once you get your head around its xml schema, it's not so bad to use either. Visual Studio template support too.
I too was initially alarmed at the lack of VS-based deployment in VS-2012- but I managed to dodge the Installshite bullet with WiX. Give it a shot!
ETA: A link to save you Googling and finding the Web-host company, which is not what you're looking for. http://wixtoolset.org/
Post by: TheLurker on 01 March, 2014, 10:01:48 pm
May I suggest you investigate WiX? It's pretty feature rich - and once you get your head around its xml schema, it's not so bad to use either. Visual Studio template support too.Thanks for the thought. I suggested that we move to wix when I found out VS12 had been downgraded and was told that we'd be using InstallShield. It may be that wix doesn't play nicely with TFS automatic builds, but that's just a guess on my part.
Post by: Chris S on 01 March, 2014, 10:04:27 pm
May I suggest you investigate WiX? It's pretty feature rich - and once you get your head around its xml schema, it's not so bad to use either. Visual Studio template support too.Thanks for the thought. I suggested that we move to wix when I found out VS12 had been downgraded and was told that we'd be using InstallShield. It may be that wix doesn't play nicely with TFS automatic builds, but that's just a guess on my part.
Maybe, though the documentation boasts "good" integration with command-line builds, and the builds I look after are all command-line driven (though not automated through TFS which is a whole other dimension of psychosis I've managed to avoid so far!).
Post by: Greenbank on 03 March, 2014, 09:34:17 am
Luckily I haven't had to touch it in a good few years (and last time I had to monkeypatch an MSI I didn't have InstallShield so I had to do it with Orca. Ugh.)
In the few places where we have to use MSI we use WiX now.
Post by: tiermat on 03 March, 2014, 10:07:39 am
Let the battle begin :(
Post by: simonp on 03 March, 2014, 02:28:43 pm
https://twitter.com/TrueValhalla/status/438665765265240064/photo/1
Post by: Zipperhead on 03 March, 2014, 03:53:06 pm
I have spent weeks trying to work out why sometimes the laptop works faultlessly, but at other times my wiffy networks are completely invisible to it - but it can see all of the neighbours.
I tried all sorts of things, deleting the wiffy adaptor and letting it re-install it. Installing the latest one, every fucking thing I could think of and some weeks it just wouldn't see *my* networks. I had very nearly got to the point of taking it to an upper floor window and reprogramming it with the aid of voodoo and gravity when in desperation I tried a little bit of google-fu and found that some Acer laptops don't like the high channels. So if my router was restarted and picked channel 15 or similar because it was nice and quiet up there - then as far as the laptop was concerned it didn't exist.
Post by: ian on 03 March, 2014, 05:37:07 pm
Firstly, I miss Paperclip Guy. He would have written this for me. If I were ever to become friends with a paperclip, he'd be the one I'd choose. Of course, I'm not actually considering friendship with any kind of office sundry at present. That's no reflection on Paperclip Guy, I mean he was great, but I have a big red stapler that I suppose I like a bit more. But no, I'm just not into office supply friends. Not like that.
I also liked the cat that did the searching. He was a good cat. Not very good at searching, but then when you've misplaced your house keys, would you ask a cat for help? It best you don't, they're no good at it.
What I don't like is when Word crashes because I – oh I don't know – pressed the enter key funny. How was I to know that was going to cause terminal offence? Once upon a time, Paperclip Guy or search cat might have stepped in to avert disaster. But not now, it's just gone. I know you're sorry. I'm sorry. We're all sorry. It's a big festival of sorry. We should build a marquee, get catering, hire some portaloos and a rock band. That's how sorry we all are. Would I like to report it to Microsoft? Of course, but I think Paperclip Guy would have done it better. It looks like you're writing an angry letter to Microsoft. Sure am, Paperclip Guy, over to you.
Would I like to restart Word and recover my file? Sounds like a plan. Hold on, that's the file I opened this morning? I'm sure I did some work today. I'm sure Paperclip Guy used to autosave my work. He was good like that, always looking out for me. Ah, you did autosave my work, just in a file four layers down in a hidden library folder. Even search cat wouldn't have found that. Well, he never actually found anything, but then he did insist on looking under a carpet. No one ever lost a computer file under a virtual carpet. I once dropped a floppy disk down the toilet though.
So, Microsoft, I think (a) Word shouldn't crash when I press 'enter' and (b) you probably should recover the file you autosaved most recently not the one I saved yesterday.
thanks Microsoft!
your best pal, ian.
Post by: TimC on 03 March, 2014, 05:43:36 pm
Post by: Kim on 03 March, 2014, 05:48:53 pm
So if my router was restarted and picked channel 15 or similar because it was nice and quiet up there - then as far as the laptop was concerned it didn't exist.
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.
Post by: frankly frankie on 03 March, 2014, 06:28:41 pm
Post by: Zipperhead on 03 March, 2014, 08:46:09 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?
Post by: Kim 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.
Post by: T42 on 05 March, 2014, 08:41:34 am
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.
Post by: Greenbank on 05 March, 2014, 12:53:54 pm
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.
Post by: Phil W on 05 March, 2014, 01:00:08 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 05 March, 2014, 01:07:30 pm
After an online chat with them it seems they now estimate it will be sometime next month but I wont hold my breath.
Post by: T42 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.
Post by: Afasoas 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....
Post by: Greenbank 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."
Post by: ian on 06 March, 2014, 11:01:17 am
Post by: TimC on 06 March, 2014, 11:08:32 am
Post by: Greenbank 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.
Post by: ian 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.
Post by: tonycollinet on 06 March, 2014, 08:38:55 pm
Post by: ian 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).
Post by: tonycollinet on 06 March, 2014, 09:21:10 pm
But who knows.
Post by: tiermat on 07 March, 2014, 08:02:00 am
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...
Post by: hellymedic 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.
Post by: simonp on 07 March, 2014, 04:47:53 pm
Post by: David Martin on 08 March, 2014, 08:39:57 am
Post by: Pickled Onion on 08 March, 2014, 08:52:21 am
Post by: Pickled Onion 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. ;)
Post by: simonp 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.
Post by: pcolbeck 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.
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 10 March, 2014, 01:32:13 pm
Post by: Dibdib 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.
Post by: Kim on 10 March, 2014, 02:32:08 pm
Damn you Microsoft.
In their defence, XP is twelve years old now - how long did you expect them to support it for?
About twelve years. Then they apply the lucrative binary exponential algorithm to the extended support contract costs.
Post by: barakta on 10 March, 2014, 02:36:57 pm
Assistive software, has an awful lot in common with 'educational' *spit* software. Still beats colleagues trying to spend £££ on software packages I can find for FREE! The cheap/free stuff is all much more limited than the professional stuff, but you gets what you pays for and when yu don't pay you have to fart about a bit.
Post by: hellymedic on 10 March, 2014, 02:37:30 pm
Waiting for my records to come up on their computer screen
Waiting for a computer system crash to be sorted by IT
Waiting for David's records to come up.
How much NHS personnel time is wasted on Windows?
Post by: rafletcher on 10 March, 2014, 03:16:18 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.
Availability checker now says end of March. We will see.
Hooray! We've been upgraded from "NC" when I last looked a couple of months ago, to "CS" - end of June 2014.
I should think so too - after all Openreach dug up the whole length of our lane not 6 months ago to install data connection - to the new factory at the end of the lane! Pity we couldn't tap into that as it passed.
Post by: David Martin on 17 March, 2014, 04:35:41 pm
Post by: David Martin on 17 March, 2014, 05:28:13 pm
Post by: Wombat on 17 March, 2014, 09:35:30 pm
I think CAD software is designed to be non-intuitive!
(edited, so it wasn't utter gibberish)
Post by: Wombat on 17 March, 2014, 10:03:23 pm
Printer setups, and printing dialog(ue) boxes. I do not use American paper sizes, I never have, and never will, so don't bloody well flood the print size selections with 43 different paper sizes only used in one country! How about, when setting up the printer initially, asking you what family of paper sizes you want to use? I only want A sizes, so don't want to plough through thousands of obscure sizes only available in Japan, or the US of bleeding A, or the independent Republic of Bechuanaland upon Severn.
And Microsoft print dialogs specifically - when I want to set up a page to print on A3, or maybe even A1, why the fuck do I have to have the A1 size printer connected and switched on, for you to allow me to access that page size? Maybe I haven't even got an A1 printer*, maybe I'm creating a document for a client who has. Fuckwits!
* I have, actually ;D
Post by: David Martin on 18 March, 2014, 10:39:12 pm
Post by: Wombat on 19 March, 2014, 08:57:39 am
Post by: David Martin on 20 March, 2014, 09:22:21 am
Apparently life scientists think differently to the mechanical engineers. It was the first time the tech had seen anyone use different layers to determine a cut order on their laser cutter. Shame it slowly loses calibration as it runs.. But it runs and that is the main thing.
Post by: David Martin on 20 March, 2014, 09:25:42 am
But the most annoying was the magic smoke escaping from an arduino pro mini mounted on header pins to the board. Oh joy - trying to desolder that lot was an exercise in futility. And start over, with stripboad deciding to lose grip on the strips. But I now have a PSU unit that works (albeit with no smoothing caps because they seem to keep giving me grief) and a new board on flying leads. More tomorrow when I can summon up the courage to wield the soldering iron near that dogs dinner of leads again.
Post by: Ham on 20 March, 2014, 09:48:00 am
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].
Alternatively, stop visiting those sites and clicking on those special offers.
Security updates, while clearly significant, are of limited value on their own and in a domestic as opposed to corporate environment not especially significant. More annoying will be the gradual degradation of functionality as software updates increasingly expect a modern o/s.
Post by: Biggsy on 21 March, 2014, 07:33:26 pm
I'll roll back to an earlier version.
Post by: TheLurker on 21 March, 2014, 07:58:10 pm
What the frack have they done with Firefox? >:( Removed the add-on bar and Firefox button and pissed it up. >:( If I want Chrome I would use Chrome. ::-) Making it look like Chrome won't get back users who switched to Chrome. Arseholes. >:(Umm. I'm still sticking with v17 after your rant about v18 (or it may have been v19) last year. Security fixes? I don't need no steenkin' security fixes. :)
I'll roll back to an earlier version.
It's getting a bit like M$ Word isn't it? The, "The last _good_ version was n.n* after that they just fucked it up." syndrome.
*As suits product being criticised.
Post by: Biggsy on 21 March, 2014, 08:10:27 pm
I do like security fixes - which I suppose I won't get any more if I stick to v28. :(
Post by: Biggsy on 25 March, 2014, 06:07:20 pm
"Contrary to what Mozilla has done with their redesign of the user interface, Pale Moon will continue to provide a familiar set of controls and visual feedback similar to previous versions"
Post by: Canardly on 25 March, 2014, 07:48:06 pm
Post by: Kim on 25 March, 2014, 08:21:25 pm
There is a new cafe nearby on a chilli farm. The staff are great, the food is ok, prices are reasonable and it is bike friendly, but they will insist on using digital pads for the ordering of tea, coffee and food and then again at check out. This slows the whole process down to a painfully slow level. Pen and paper and a few spikes would speed things up tremendously.
I first encountered that in some pub or other. I can see why it seems like a good idea (effectively moving the till to your table for ordering), but the implementation was similarly dubious. Too much menu-navigation to find related items, and the staff didn't seem to know their way around it. Weatherspoons seem to manage it with their tills, so there's no reason why it has to be slow.
I expect there are real advantages of an electronic system over paper and spikes when it comes to adding everything up at the end of the day, but the customer never sees that.
Post by: TheLurker on 25 March, 2014, 08:30:13 pm
Lo, LEO is reborn. :)There is a new cafe nearby on a chilli farm. The staff are great, the food is ok, prices are reasonable and it is bike friendly, but they will insist on using digital pads for the ordering of tea, coffee and food and then again at check out. This slows the whole process down to a painfully slow level. Pen and paper and a few spikes would speed things up tremendously.
I first encountered that in some pub or other. I can see why it seems like a good idea (effectively moving the till to your table for ordering), but the implementation was similarly dubious. Too much menu-navigation to find related items, and the staff didn't seem to know their way around it. Weatherspoons seem to manage it with their tills, so there's no reason why it has to be slow.
I expect there are real advantages of an electronic system over paper and spikes when it comes to adding everything up at the end of the day, but the customer never sees that.
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 26 March, 2014, 01:03:30 pm
Post by: Pingu on 26 March, 2014, 01:23:23 pm
...a few spikes would speed things up tremendously.
I've seen service like that :demon:
Post by: Biggsy on 28 March, 2014, 03:09:37 pm
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/ goes some way to get back the old look after you've updated to v29. You'll still need to manually shuffle things around as well, especially if you had any icons on the Status Bar. Not sure I can be bothered when Pale Moon has done a better job (to begin with at least).
v29 is just a beta at the moment, but you'll be getting the full version soon if you haven't turned off auto updating. I've tested it early so you don't have to. :) Actually, to be fair, you might not mind it if you haven't heavily customised your browser. Someone must even like it.
Post by: PaulF on 28 March, 2014, 04:05:39 pm
That is all
Post by: Afasoas on 29 March, 2014, 02:22:37 pm
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bj3SJULCcAAWf0R.jpg)
And this.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bj5piZ3CEAAmaOJ.jpg)
Not to mention frequent instances when the display resets itself.
I'm running fairly vanilla Win8 PRo x64 with NVidia GTX 660 graphics on the latest drivers (v335.23). Latest version of Photoshop CC.
The crash seems to occur as a result of the clean install of new drivers, and last night was happening fairly consistently when I cropped/straighted/ran an action which duplicated a layer and added a curves layer for outlining. I installed the drivers whilst trying to fix the problem with quick masking at anything over 50% zoom.
I can fix the quick mask problem by switching to normal graphics over advanced graphics, but this slows things down. Not desirable.
I may just start saving for a new Graphics card but it couldn't come at a worse time.
Post by: Wombat on 29 March, 2014, 02:58:17 pm
Post by: Biggsy on 30 March, 2014, 12:46:54 am
https://8pecxstudios.com/Forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=330
Post by: perpetual dan on 30 March, 2014, 09:08:45 am
Post by: Afasoas on 01 April, 2014, 01:20:41 pm
It's helpfully installed as 32-bit into a 64-bit environment.
It can't cope with an SMTP server that requires authentication - doesn't ask for authentication details when you configure it.
For some reason, in a Windows environment where IIS is natively supported, it installs it's own Apache server.
In it's present condition, it doesn't write to the Windows Event Logs. Instead it writes to event log files.
It doesn't work, despite a re-install.
I'm currently jumping through hoops to get tech. support.
So despite reading a good dozen positive reviews beforehand, this is one software choice I'm really regretting.
Post by: hellymedic on 03 April, 2014, 11:12:40 pm
I sent him an email tonight which he has not received.
We are not getting failure messages.
We seem to get emails from everybody else.
WHAT THE FUCK IS UP?
Post by: tiermat on 07 April, 2014, 08:08:49 pm
Why go to completely paid system?
Post by: Kim on 07 April, 2014, 08:26:12 pm
Why go to a completely paid system?
Post by: tiermat on 07 April, 2014, 08:39:44 pm
Post by: Kim on 07 April, 2014, 08:44:01 pm
Post by: tiermat on 07 April, 2014, 08:46:49 pm
Since they blocked clients i have meant to change provider, intending, eventually, to cut out the middleman. The last bit, though, involves trying to deal with a difficult to deal with dns hosting company.
ETA Technicolour routers are a pita if you already have a dyndns supplier setup...
Post by: Chris S on 08 April, 2014, 12:24:17 pm
What's missing from this? : sudo usermod -G somegroup, someothergroup, chris chris
Yes, that's right you missed out "sudoers" from the group list didn't you Chris, and we know what that means don't we Chris? Yes, that means you're removed from the group because you didn't include -a in the options. As yours is the only account in the sudoers group, and this server's root account is disabled, you're a bit f00ked now, aren't you Chris?
Fuckwit.
Recover Mode toooo the rescue!
Post by: Woofage on 08 April, 2014, 12:55:19 pm
Ah, Chris. It's as well you're a professional, isn't it.
What's missing from this? : sudo usermod -G somegroup, someothergroup, chris chris
Yes, that's right you missed out "sudoers" from the group list didn't you Chris, and we know what that means don't we Chris? Yes, that means you're removed from the group because you didn't include -a in the options. As yours is the only account in the sudoers group, and this server's root account is disabled, you're a bit f00ked now, aren't you Chris?
Fuckwit.
Recover Mode toooo the rescue!
F*ck it. Just go for a bike ride 8)
Post by: tiermat on 08 April, 2014, 01:39:46 pm
I have managed to lock myself out of my firewall due to this.
Logged on, found shorewall not running so started it.
Due to your messing around, changing eth0 to em1sp0, shorewall starts but blocks all interfaces other than eth0 and eth1...
Spot the problem...
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 08 April, 2014, 01:46:05 pm
Fedora, stop fucking around with network interface names.Serial cable connection onto router?
I have managed to lock myself out of my firewall due to this.
Logged on, found shorewall not running so started it.
Due to your messing around, changing eth0 to em1sp0, shorewall starts but blocks all interfaces other than eth0 and eth1...
Spot the problem...
Post by: tiermat on 08 April, 2014, 01:48:54 pm
I HATE COMPUTERS
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 08 April, 2014, 02:05:41 pm
Good idea MrC, shall look into it, but, right at this moment, I am 60 miles away from it..."Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
I HATE COMPUTERS
Try remotely supporting students who are trying to configure and install embedded Linux . . .
Post by: David Martin on 08 April, 2014, 02:25:20 pm
Post by: barakta on 08 April, 2014, 02:59:27 pm
We're a week into April and the notwork is more fucking useless than ever with added Win7 upgrades which fucked the luddite refuseniks' settings
Boss has chased, apparently central admin were told we'd been upgraded. We haven't been. Don't need a speedtest to tell that with ALL our server side stuff timing out and crashing on us.
Post by: barakta on 21 April, 2014, 03:18:30 pm
However that does not justify Plusnet deciding instead of her name mailbox they'll just set her up on the account mailbox to "fix" the problem. It doesn't, it loses ALL her proper email and everything. Oh and effectively changed her email address which they didn't tell her.
Thankfully she emailed me her password in plaintext and gave me enough garble that I was able to phone her up, get more sense, log in myself working out what passwords now applied and changed the mailbox passwords myself and RE-set her up on her proper user mailbox where she has a number of emails arriving from the last few days.
I hate having to run my mum's email account live but I think that's the only sane way to do it so if she has issues she can phone me and I can help work out if it's her shitty iPhone, shitty cellular, shitty wireless or some other issue causing issues. Every time she phones Tesco (cellular provider) or Plusnet they break shit...
And Apple's stupid fucking piece of shit mailclient had better not still have that fucking bug where email just stops working and needs reconfigged from scratch cos Lightmail was a pain and I don't want to have to pay for something Apple should make work...
I really need to see mum and her netbook, laptop, iPhone etc in person and do the techie fixes but due to $complicated that's not possible right now... Technology... Parents...
At least my dad just collects and categorises spam as a hobby...
Post by: Kim on 21 April, 2014, 09:28:32 pm
Raspberry Pi: Known for being annoyingly surrounded by sockets on all sides. Mounted inside an enclosure in such a way that a short HDMI male to HDMI panel mount female cable is needed to bring the HDMI socket out externally in a sensible and non-right-angular manner, with all the cutouts on a single panel.
Which would be fine, if the extension cable was just that. But no, it's doing something (I can't face the continuity probing to work out what) that means all I get is an awake monitor with a black screen. FFS!
Post by: David Martin on 21 April, 2014, 10:45:38 pm
You probably have a passive repeater built in and the cable is pointing the wrong way. DAHIKT
Post by: Kim on 21 April, 2014, 10:50:42 pm
Price would suggest that it's economising on ground wires or something, but anything's possible...
Post by: David Martin on 21 April, 2014, 10:52:15 pm
Post by: Kim on 21 April, 2014, 11:06:33 pm
Wrongendian cables would fit right into that philosophy...
Post by: David Martin on 21 April, 2014, 11:21:52 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 22 April, 2014, 08:41:19 am
And Apple's stupid fucking piece of shit mailclient had better not still have that fucking bug where email just stops working and needs reconfigged from scratch cos Lightmail was a pain and I don't want to have to pay for something Apple should make work...
It's unbelievable isn't it? How does something as basic as an email client have so many bugs in it? Having switched to the mac way for most things, they integrate brilliantly, but Mail is driving me mad. Some of the most irritating bugs have clearly been reported and left unfixed for some time.
I don't mind paying for something that actually works, any suggestions?
Post by: TimC on 22 April, 2014, 09:23:44 am
Post by: Pickled Onion on 22 April, 2014, 10:04:38 am
Post by: Woofage on 22 April, 2014, 10:36:10 am
I don't mind paying for something that actually works, any suggestions?
Thunderbird (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/?icn=tabz). Not perfect but I've used it since version nought point something and it's never let me down.
In the fruit-sphere1 you may be wary of something that you don't have to pay for. No need to panic, it's free software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software) but contributions to the developers are welcome :).
[1] Other non-free proprietary computer systems are available.
Post by: Biggsy on 22 April, 2014, 12:16:17 pm
Post by: ian on 22 April, 2014, 01:45:17 pm
I couldn't be bothered paying for a mail client, but Sparrow seems to be well regarded in Mac circles.
Post by: TimC on 22 April, 2014, 01:50:48 pm
Post by: Kim on 22 April, 2014, 01:52:44 pm
It's the iThings where the Mail bug is a real PITA. Especially someone else's iThing.
Post by: ian on 25 April, 2014, 10:21:19 am
Firstly, the pile of arse-coded shit won't save the full URL as a favourite, clipping off the bit that navigates our SSO, which needs to be there otherwise I end up at the login page and we don't have separate logins. Ah, it's alright, it'll be in the history. Ctrl-H gives me a history of every file opened, not just web pages. What kind of braindead chucklefucker thought that was a good idea? I'm using a browser and you're telling me about Word documents. It doesn't even appear to let me go back more than a week. Maybe there's some cryptic settings. Bejeebus, I just want to see what web pages I accessed last week.
Now I have to wade through my inbox to find the bloody access link to click.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 25 April, 2014, 11:30:19 am
My (big corp) current client has given up fighting with IE as the corporate standard, even the help desk stock response is now "just use chrome instead, it will work".
Post by: ian on 25 April, 2014, 12:07:49 pm
Post by: Kim on 25 April, 2014, 06:00:34 pm
Please don't ask how I know this.
Post by: PaulF on 28 April, 2014, 02:14:28 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 01 May, 2014, 02:10:05 pm
For some reason the (new to me) netbook was refusing to mount NFS shares. It was working! I figured my NAS box might have blocked it's IP address, which was non-reserved DHCP and I'd meant to give it a reservation consistent with my IP number scheme anyway.
Created a DHCP reservation on DD-WRT router for it. End result: Hosed router. No idea how something so routine resulted in a non-functioning router.
Reset router and restored an old configuration.
After the reboot, webserver was not dishing up any content. Rebooted web server (running on a different netbook) and found it wouldn't start mysqld. I noticed the init.d/mysql file was trying to run safe_mysqld instead of mysqld_safe. No idea how that's happened and why it's gone unnoticed.
Also notice apache2 was excluded from the init.rc
So back to those pesky NFS shares. I looked again at the configuration on the NFS server (NAS box) and I've no idea how it ever worked. Authorised network segments were incorrectly configured. Fixed configuration and shares now mounted.
So now the good bit. I've managed to set-up printing via CUPS. And then create a new invoice in LibreOffice (based on an excel template), print it, PDF it and mail it.
:thumbsup:
Post by: David Martin on 02 May, 2014, 11:42:05 pm
How it can give a result of zero for =COUNTIF(S4:S155, S155) is beyond me. So far beyond me that after 15 minutes of trying I did Save As >Tab delimited, booted up RStudio and got done what I needed in about 15 seconds.
I will generate an R script that will package that analysis for next year.
Post by: TimC on 04 May, 2014, 08:23:22 am
Post by: JStone on 04 May, 2014, 10:27:02 am
Bloody Devolo dLan wifi. The plug works, I can get Internet via a wired connection, but nothing - Mac, PC, iPad, phone - will connect to the wifi. They can all see it, they all have the correct code, but nothing will bloody connect. Bum.
Have you got MAC access control set? (Configuration > WLAN Configuration > WLAN Filters). I've got 3 x Devolo dLAN 500 & it generally Just Works ™ unless someone turns off the wrong socket :facepalm:
Post by: pcolbeck on 04 May, 2014, 10:36:42 am
Post by: TimC on 04 May, 2014, 06:14:57 pm
Bloody Devolo dLan wifi. The plug works, I can get Internet via a wired connection, but nothing - Mac, PC, iPad, phone - will connect to the wifi. They can all see it, they all have the correct code, but nothing will bloody connect. Bum.Have you got MAC access control set? (Configuration > WLAN Configuration > WLAN Filters). I've got 3 x Devolo dLAN 500 & it generally Just Works ™ unless someone turns off the wrong socket :facepalm:
It was working fine. I have two of these plugs to extend the network in my house. They've been fine for a couple of years, but now this one's decided it doesn't want to work any more. All devices can detect it, but it won't let anything connect. I've 'restored' it to factory settings (it never had them changed anyway), but it just won't accept an connections. I guess some of the wigglyamps have gone on strike and it's preparing for a natural death, but I'd have preferred it if it had waited a few years longer!
Post by: Afasoas on 04 May, 2014, 06:19:38 pm
Tried changing the channel? Or using an application like inSSIDer on a laptop to see if there's a plethora of wi fi access points using the same channel?
Post by: TimC on 04 May, 2014, 06:26:21 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 04 May, 2014, 10:56:30 pm
Try changing the SSID?
I've occasionally resolved issues like this by ditching any existing profiles for a wireless network and creating a new one. I think both Andr0id and iOS have options to "forget this network" as you scroll through your list of known networks. On Windows, I think it's under "My Wireless Networks" or some such.
Also, what security standard are you using? And which encryption algorithm? TKIP or AES? Are all of your devices compatible with it? I think most clients will automatically choose security standard (WPA, WPA2) and encryption algorithm based on the information communicated by the wireless network, so if that has changed any old profile won't work.
Post by: TimC on 05 May, 2014, 05:20:07 am
Post by: Ham on 06 May, 2014, 09:54:44 pm
Excel. Almost enough said.
How it can give a result of zero for =COUNTIF(S4:S155, S155) is beyond me. So far beyond me that after 15 minutes of trying I did Save As >Tab delimited, booted up RStudio and got done what I needed in about 15 seconds.
I will generate an R script that will package that analysis for next year.
If that is your real example that's your problem: your criteria is is the range you are counting. Put it outside, t155 for example and all will be well.
Post by: Wombat on 06 May, 2014, 09:55:59 pm
And why does it copy to the laptop's SSD at around twice the speed anything will copy to or from the desktop's OCZ Revodrive PCI-E hybrid drive which claims a transfer speed twice that of the SATA SSD? In both cases they are reading to or from the same USB3 stick. that Revodrive is kack, its going in the bin. I'd ditch it now, but I've blown a lot of money on the laptop. Now, it did have a warranty, even though it was refurbished. Can I just send it back as failing to meet the specs? It seems to be acting like it doesn't have an SSD strapped to the back of the hard disk.
Post by: Biggsy on 06 May, 2014, 10:53:53 pm
And why does it copy to the laptop's SSD at around twice the speed anything will copy to or from the desktop's OCZ Revodrive PCI-E hybrid drive which claims a transfer speed twice that of the SATA SSD? In both cases they are reading to or from the same USB3 stick. that Revodrive is kack, its going in the bin. I'd ditch it now, but I've blown a lot of money on the laptop. Now, it did have a warranty, even though it was refurbished. Can I just send it back as failing to meet the specs? It seems to be acting like it doesn't have an SSD strapped to the back of the hard disk.
The motherboard could be crippling it, even if it's supposed to be compatible. For a start, something like "PCIe x4" should appear during boot up. My Revodrive in an Asus P7P55D-E only gets x1 on a cold boot, or x2 after resuming from standby. I have to reset the PC to get the full four lanes.
And it's limited to 2.5GT/s, halving the top speed. Still, it's a First World problem to complain about 735 MB/s. :smug: (Mine's a full SSD version rather than hybrid).
Post by: Wombat on 07 May, 2014, 01:33:56 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 May, 2014, 12:33:28 am
iPad? iCrap, more like >:(
Post by: pcolbeck on 12 May, 2014, 03:32:31 pm
The iPAD is many things, locked into to teh Apple Ecosystem, and overpriced for example but crap it isn't.
You need to learn the gestures rather than looking for arrow keys. Swipe up and down to scroll and three finger pinch to background an app.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 May, 2014, 03:47:51 pm
It would help if it were supplied with something a little more comprehensive than a wossname the size of a playing card, which only tells you how to turn it on. Even the online TFM leaves something to be desired, like the pommel of a broadsword applied vigorously to the head of its author.
Three finger pinch? I thought that was something perfected by Mr Spock...
Post by: TimC on 12 May, 2014, 04:08:15 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 12 May, 2014, 05:12:17 pm
Post by: CrinklyLion on 12 May, 2014, 06:28:00 pm
Post by: nicknack on 12 May, 2014, 07:33:05 pm
Why the fuck is working with audio such a pain in Linux?
Fucking useless jack.
A few days ago, after a month or two of actually working, jack decides,"Enough is enough, I'm not doing it anymore." This is on the PC running Mint. Ok, I thinks, I'll use this one that's on Ubuntu, it's always been fine. But not now. "Sorry", says jack, "I'm not playing on this one either".
Back to fucking Windows and Cubase.
Post by: Kim on 12 May, 2014, 10:48:54 pm
On the other hand...
Why the fuck is working with audio such a pain in Linux?
Fucking useless jack.
Because every couple of years someone (presumably with clever reasons that make sense at the time) decides to reinvent the whole stack from scratch. So it's never quite finished, and application support is a mess.
Post by: Vince on 22 May, 2014, 11:44:09 am
Quote
Sample.xml is not valid.
Element <Delivery> is not allowed under element <Report>.
Reason: The following elements are expected at this location (see below)
<Success>
<Delivery>
<Error>
Error location: Report / Delivery
I have a suspicion this namespace related, but it would be nice if you told me!
Post by: Pickled Onion on 22 May, 2014, 12:13:41 pm
Post by: Vince on 23 May, 2014, 09:33:08 am
XML Spy - Thank you for the really useless error message related to validating XML against a schema:Turns out to be a bug in the XML validator. Even though a default namespace is added to the root. it has to be explicitly put infront of the root tag. This is only an issue where a second schema is imported that uses a different target namespace.QuoteSample.xml is not valid.
Element <Delivery> is not allowed under element <Report>.
Reason: The following elements are expected at this location (see below)
<Success>
<Delivery>
<Error>
Error location: Report / Delivery
I have a suspicion this namespace related, but it would be nice if you told me!
Post by: Biggsy on 25 May, 2014, 02:50:05 pm
Using nuts and bolts instead would need access to the motherboard underside, but us punters don't seem to be trusted to not overtighten them anyway.
Post by: Kim on 25 May, 2014, 02:51:37 pm
Plastic tool-free push fittings on CPU coolers. Is it just me, or are these things shit - fiddly and prone to failing after three or four uses?
It's not just you, but the vast majority of CPU coolers are fitted once.
Post by: perpetual dan on 04 June, 2014, 02:35:04 pm
Got my new Matrox box for smearing my laptop video out across multiple proper screens.
Except it doesn't. I just get one screen working and another blank. Swap the ports over and the other screen works, but that wasn't really the idea. The box can see two screens but is declining to use both at once. And technical support seems to be in another time zone.
Post by: Biggsy on 04 June, 2014, 03:19:40 pm
Post by: tiermat on 04 June, 2014, 03:22:19 pm
Why do you insist on scanning ALL the music in my collection each time you start up?
I think I might just swap to Media Monkey.
Post by: Jaded on 04 June, 2014, 03:33:54 pm
Yes, I know I could buy Win 7. Thing is, I've got a proper, full price eye-gouging copy of Win 8. I just want a lean, basic install of windows to do lean basic things. I'm not paying for that, I've already paid for it.
With their two biggest rivals giving OSs away, M$ must be leaching non-corporate users at an alarming rate.
Post by: barakta on 04 June, 2014, 08:36:25 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 June, 2014, 12:16:47 pm
And not slyly to reinstate Iain Banks as a co-author when my back is turned.
And the same goes for the translators of FOREIGN books.
>:(
Edit: I think I have sussed this. Is it obvious how to do it?
No. No, it isn't. Bah!
Post by: Afasoas on 15 June, 2014, 06:30:39 pm
With some manufactures (I'm looking at your right now Acer) you provide a model serial number and yet still they give you a choice of four possible drivers for a number of devices.
Why can't you record the exact specification for a given machine and spew out the exact driver instead of Realtek, Aetheros, Broadcom and a.n. other alternatives?
And whilst we're on the subject, how about one single package with all the drivers in? Saves instigating multiple small downloads and awaiting for available sockets before they can all begin.
Eh thank you.
Post by: Kim on 15 June, 2014, 08:47:10 pm
And whilst we're on the subject, how about one single package with all the drivers in? Saves instigating multiple small downloads and awaiting for available sockets before they can all begin.
They used to do this. It was called a "driver CD".
Post by: Biggsy on 15 June, 2014, 09:37:41 pm
And whilst we're on the subject, how about one single package with all the drivers in? Saves instigating multiple small downloads and awaiting for available sockets before they can all begin.
Hear hear and here here. You're also supposed to reset the machine after each individual driver install as well. (I don't).
Post by: Afasoas on 15 June, 2014, 10:45:11 pm
Post by: Kim on 15 June, 2014, 11:17:06 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 June, 2014, 11:00:00 pm
That is all.
Post by: Feanor on 19 June, 2014, 11:07:02 pm
Yeahbut if Windows had it's way, you'd have to reboot for the updated mouse cursor position to take effect.
One of the selling points of Win Server 2000 over NT4 was the fact that you didn't need to re-boot the server for every minor network change.
It was said ( only half-jokingly ) that moving your mouse pointer within 10 pixels of the network control panel icon in NT4 required a reboot....
Post by: David Martin on 20 June, 2014, 02:15:36 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 26 June, 2014, 10:33:56 pm
Not just a fraction slower than the previous version. An order of magnitude slower.
That's on an i7, 16GB memory, GTx 660 video card which now also sports a rather fast SSD.
Very frustrated, I'm going to have to switch it back to the previous version.
Post by: Wombat on 27 June, 2014, 08:06:48 am
I can't bring myself to write it again, see my post in "fettled any computer stuff"
I would have been in the worlds most appalling ranting mood, but I received a lovely message from a friend this morning which rather dissolved it...
Post by: Woofage on 27 June, 2014, 09:33:35 am
(https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5153/14518197335_d6f98e2edb_o.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/o7Vyga)
system_monitor.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/o7Vyga) by pencyclist (https://www.flickr.com/people//), on Flickr
See the change between 20-30s? That's when FF shut down.
Post by: Vince on 27 June, 2014, 03:10:28 pm
So someone occidentally used a group mailing list with a lot of people on it.
Phase 1. Everybody replies to all, saying "Please exclude me from this mail"
Phase 2 (currently) everybody replies to all saying "Stop replying to all"
Phase 3 will be complete shut down of mail :hand:
ETA: Even better, people have put read receipts on them! :hand: :hand:
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 June, 2014, 03:30:14 pm
Top-posted, natch...
Post by: Woofage on 27 June, 2014, 03:37:24 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 June, 2014, 03:55:20 pm
Seven million of them.
They did it over the weekend, but it kept legitimate users from using e-mail until Wednesday. The Mgt told them in no uncertain terms that legs would break if they ever did it again.
Guess what they did two weeks later?
IIRC someone was sacked for that one :thumbsup:
Post by: TheLurker on 28 June, 2014, 09:25:30 am
Now see here. I know XML can be both unwieldy and verbose, but when you want to send me (semi) structured data which contains both embedded crlf _and_ commas and for which I have to write _reliable_, _maintainable_ and _robust_ import code what, in the name of sweet wibbling baby jebus, makes you think that CSV is a good choice of export format?
All aboard for the day trip to the regex mines... which are neither reliable nor robust and are most especially _not_ maintainable.
Gits!
Post by: TheLurker on 28 June, 2014, 09:35:11 am
Look, you pissweasels, I don't want to know that a file was modified "last week". I want the date and time.Hie thee to the Command window (as administrator for preference).
That is all.
C:> dir /TW <--- Last written
While we're about it Win7's file search is horrid especially for a simple name search. These days if I want to find a file my first resort is the command line.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 28 June, 2014, 11:09:30 am
Dear "Partner" Organisation,
Now see here. I know XML can be both unwieldy and verbose, but when you want to send me (semi) structured data which contains both embedded crlf _and_ commas and for which I have to write _reliable_, _maintainable_ and _robust_ import code what, in the name of sweet wibbling baby jebus, makes you think that CSV is a good choice of export format?
All aboard for the day trip to the regex mines... which are neither reliable nor robust and are most especially _not_ maintainable.
Gits!
We deal with millions of the things (though a good proportion of the so-called csv are actually |-delimited). Write or otherwise get hold of a robust csv parser and put it in your personal toolbox. Don't expect to do it in a single regex, then it will be both reliable and robust, and won't need maintaining, csv is not going to change any time soon.
XML is good for structured data. But it can take up to 500ms to serialise/deserialise even a fairly small file. If your data is simply a table of values, and you have a lot of data, then csv is a good choice (providing your parser is reliable and robust).
Post by: TheLurker on 28 June, 2014, 11:39:42 am
...and won't need maintaining, csv is not going to change any time soon.Unfortunately the CSV extract is generated mandraulically so is _very_ vulnerable to unannounced change.
...XML is good for structured data. But it can take up to 500ms to serialise/deserialise even a fairlyTime / performance is not a major constraint for this and it would be nice to have (the illusion of?) stability. At least with XML it would be very easy to pick up on changes in the supplied extract and reject files that don't conform to an expected schema.
small file.
....If your data is simply a table of values and you have a lot of data...Oh how I wish it were. As for volume; a few tens, v. low hundreds at the outside, of "rows". _If_ it were large and _if_ it were XML I'd go for a forward-only reader rather than try and deserialise the whole lot to a DOM.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 June, 2014, 11:09:45 am
Look, you pissweasels, I don't want to know that a file was modified "last week". I want the date and time.Hie thee to the Command window (as administrator for preference).
That is all.
C:> dir /TW <--- Last written
Would that I could, but I was thinking specifically of the files that The Book Crawler app backs up to Dropbox. I'm sure there are numerous other examples, thobut.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 30 June, 2014, 08:04:29 am
Now it won't allow cancel to skip past, or rather it does, but as soon as it connects to iplayer it goes back round the cycle. So basically it's now useless for any internet content.
Post by: woollypigs on 07 July, 2014, 04:25:05 pm
While I was streaming the last 1700m of TdF and had just clicked "Go" to my weekly backup. It just beeped went to black screen reporting - Panic occurred, switching back to text console!
Post by: Feanor on 07 July, 2014, 04:50:25 pm
BD player claims to need an update, but every time it goes to install it claims there's no network available. Of course there's network available, that's how it worked out there was an update!
Now it won't allow cancel to skip past, or rather it does, but as soon as it connects to iplayer it goes back round the cycle. So basically it's now useless for any internet content.
I have a BD player ( Can't remember make ) who's IP stack is just broken.
If it picks up an IP address from my DHCP (it even has a reservation! ) then it can connect to some internet locations but not others.
Further research found that it was down to my non-std subnet mask. ( 255.255.255.192 ).
It simply doesn't work properly.
If I force the wrong netmask onto it, ( 255.255.255.0 ) then it basically works-ish.
( but obviously has the wrong netmask, and thinks that the entire 81.2.123.x subnet is local, so there's a range of non-local 81.2.123.x addresses it can't get to, but I just have to live with that.)
Looks like they only tested it with a 'normal' netmask of 255.255.255.0
Post by: perpetual dan on 07 July, 2014, 10:05:17 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 July, 2014, 10:34:28 pm
And no, the link briefly changing colour doesn't count.
Post by: perpetual dan on 12 July, 2014, 11:55:47 am
PostgreSQL, Java and clever intermediate gubbins - time to talk to each other. I'm sure MySQL never gave me this hassle and without this level of mucking about in config files.
I cut out the clever intermediate stuff. Now they talk.
Taking enough to say that the code which used to work on MySQL doesn't work on Postgresql ... in two ways!
First to tell me that I have the wrong sort of results for selecting the first row. (There will be at most one row, why would selecting the first require going backwards?)
Second, to tell me that I've got a duplicate key. Whether this merits an exception is debatable. What it does merit is an exception whose error code is not "query worked just fine, well done" - you're raising an exception, how can it possibly be OK?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 July, 2014, 03:26:22 pm
From a helicopter.
And I don't care if hiring said helicopter will max out my credit card - that colour scheme is an affront to humanity. Gits.
Post by: TheLurker on 12 July, 2014, 07:48:22 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 July, 2014, 09:43:45 am
This version of Chrome doesn't have one at all. Make of that what you wil.
Post by: Afasoas on 15 July, 2014, 11:42:50 pm
Do you really have to overwrite my boot partition every few weeks???
You are not my preferred OS anymore. Get over it.
Post by: barakta on 18 July, 2014, 12:07:07 pm
8am to 10am are BUSINESS fucking hours for us. No warning for *scheduled* maintenance on email with risk of downtime is a fucking joke. You *REALLY* shouldn't be taking our email down at those times without at least the courtesy of an email round you nobbers. For context, I sent 83 emails yesterday.
Two or three people I know couldn't log into our calendars this morning to find out where our meeting was, nor could we access our prep materials, all in fucking Outlook. IF WE HAD BEEN WARNED we could have done this yesterday.
Also, you totally didn't put that status update at 8:17 cos I was trying servicedesk till about 9:35 and nothing showed, lying twats. And no at 10:35 it is not all fixed, I still can't get into outlook web access and nor can our team for our team mailbox... I am awaiting documents and studes will be emailing our inbox and expecting a reply.
So I have fucking well issued a ticket request with a request for a response when web access is back and an explanation for the lack of warning for *SCHEDULED* maintenance.
And that's on top of my other "open" ticket which is sitting there languishing away well out of SLA where you're not responding, so I'm adding updates and still no response, so the latest update was a "Respond with update even if not resolution within 5 days or I shall dob you into Boss3 for failing to even have the courtesy to respond...". Especially as it's the second ticket on the issue cos the ITperson didn't do customer service and transfer me, he told me I had to submit a whole new ticket for the solution...
IT used to be quite good and have reasonable SLAs. However we're having a LOT of network issues and no one seems to communicate or give a fuck.
Right, maybe Java has finally updated, had a little dance, shat all over my system and whatever else so I can go and fight with the shitty central database to find out my prospective student's offer info which I need before I can handle an urgent query.
And yes I am in a foul fucking mood after pointless meeting of pointlessness, too fucking hot and too much fuckwittery affecting my students which I have to magically resolve.
Post by: Chris S on 18 July, 2014, 03:08:01 pm
Look, I know it's hot and I know you're busy, but could you wind down the fans just a wee bit?
<checks internal temps on iLO4>
Oh. No. I guess not. :-\
Post by: perpetual dan on 22 July, 2014, 04:02:26 pm
To set the password: You can type a password containing letters, numbers and symbols. They silently strip out the symbols and accept your input.
To login: You can type the password as before. It fails the comparison and doesn't log you in. So presumably they're not stripping out the symbols this time!
How do I know this? Of course they'll email you the password in plain text.
(OK, that last bit doesn't qualify as creative.)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 July, 2014, 06:33:13 pm
Post by: woollypigs on 26 July, 2014, 08:14:49 pm
Visit www.farcebook.com with chrome on android tablet, can't view flash movies. Change the www. to m.and it's playing happy, go figure.
Post by: TQ on 28 July, 2014, 03:24:37 pm
Not a rant, more a go figure and why?
Visit www.farcebook.com with chrome on android tablet, can't view flash movies. Change the www. to m.and it's playing happy, go figure.
I'd imagine the mobile version uses HTML5 videos not Flash movies.
Post by: simonp on 30 July, 2014, 05:13:47 pm
First of all, the way you handle renames (you guess a file of the same name might be your ancestor, and if not have to perform a search for a similar-ish file) is asinine.
Second, you don't have a way to find the ancestors of a bunch of renamed files and keep these. So if I have a subfolder foo containing a file bar.c and I want to maintain its history across renames I have to
This repository contains 75000+ commits. I have it down to 65000 yet the history of my interesting folder is only several thousands of commits. So there are about 65000 commits of irrelevant deleted or moved files to find and prune.
Sigh.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 July, 2014, 06:31:18 pm
Post by: David Martin on 30 July, 2014, 06:38:24 pm
Post by: ian on 30 July, 2014, 08:18:53 pm
This is Finestre's revenge because I was too tight to buy them a Mac. It's going to be a long night. It might be easier to tell them to bin it and buy them an iPad. I'm going to make some popcorn.
Post by: barakta on 30 July, 2014, 08:33:00 pm
She's not too bad for spyware clickfest thankfully. I did find out the very spammy narrowboat crap in her email (which I keep an eye on for her) was actually a thing she signed up for and not actual spam. I've attempted an unsubscribe cos even she feels 2x emails a day is a bit much.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 July, 2014, 08:33:31 pm
Post by: red marley on 30 July, 2014, 09:51:57 pm
So the laptop I bought my parents a year or so back is teetering on the edge of infinity popup oblivion. I just took control with Teamviewer. Oh my god, did they ever meet a piece of malware they didn't like? It's a foul menagerie of adware, spyware, and viruses. Is there a link they didn't click? Even Finestre, the demon of such things, would stand a ways back and poke the computer with a stick. They somehow managed to de-activate every security option I set up.
This is Finestre's revenge because I was too tight to buy them a Mac. It's going to be a long night. It might be easier to tell them to bin it and buy them an iPad. I'm going to make some popcorn.
To help you through the night...
http://youtu.be/2Pn1YrBTbA8
Post by: tonycollinet on 30 July, 2014, 10:48:50 pm
So the laptop I bought my parents a year or so back is teetering on the edge of infinity popup oblivion. I just took control with Teamviewer. Oh my god, did they ever meet a piece of malware they didn't like? It's a foul menagerie of adware, spyware, and viruses. Is there a link they didn't click? Even Finestre, the demon of such things, would stand a ways back and poke the computer with a stick. They somehow managed to de-activate every security option I set up.
This is Finestre's revenge because I was too tight to buy them a Mac. It's going to be a long night. It might be easier to tell them to bin it and buy them an iPad. I'm going to make some popcorn.
To help you though the night...
http://youtu.be/2Pn1YrBTbA8
Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
(seriously - that sounds like a candidate for a clean windows install)
EDIT: On reflection - perhaps even an Ubuntu installation. Would be more resistant to click happy 'rents
Post by: simonp on 31 July, 2014, 09:29:27 am
Both
Correct.
Post by: Tim Hall on 31 July, 2014, 04:35:31 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 July, 2014, 05:15:32 pm
Post by: ian on 31 July, 2014, 07:44:32 pm
So the laptop I bought my parents a year or so back is teetering on the edge of infinity popup oblivion. I just took control with Teamviewer. Oh my god, did they ever meet a piece of malware they didn't like? It's a foul menagerie of adware, spyware, and viruses. Is there a link they didn't click? Even Finestre, the demon of such things, would stand a ways back and poke the computer with a stick. They somehow managed to de-activate every security option I set up.
This is Finestre's revenge because I was too tight to buy them a Mac. It's going to be a long night. It might be easier to tell them to bin it and buy them an iPad. I'm going to make some popcorn.
To help you though the night...
http://youtu.be/2Pn1YrBTbA8
Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
(seriously - that sounds like a candidate for a clean windows install)
EDIT: On reflection - perhaps even an Ubuntu installation. Would be more resistant to click happy 'rents
Well, I would nuke it from orbit, but I'm saving the codes for a special occasion. Truth is, I know bugger all about Windows these days, and to say it's riddled with malware is an understatement of epic proportions. There's a malware equivalent of UKIP in there claiming that other malware keeps arriving and taking their jobs. Despite removing dozens I still can't even get into my father's account, there's something blocking Teamviewer and any kind of remote access. As far as I can tell something has inserted its own proxy and hacked the hosts files (hey, if they still have them). No traffic is going where it should.
I was hoping I wouldn't have to do this in person, hence the remote approach, but after three hours I threw in the towel. I'll have one more brief try but I think the machine is irretrievably compromised.
It doesn't help that my parents don't speak computer, so lots of conversations like this
"There's something on the screen."
"What's a something?"
"Java something?"
"A dialogue box?"
"?"
"A square box. It should have some text about Java and some buttons."
"Yes, it says Java."
"But what does it say?"
"Something about Java and some numbers."
"Could you just read what it says to me?"
"I just clicked the OK button."
ArrrrrggggggghHHHHHHHHH. This after I'd specifically told them to stop clicking OK and Next on everything that pops up.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 August, 2014, 01:16:45 am
kthxbai
Post by: Gattopardo on 02 August, 2014, 11:59:32 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 August, 2014, 04:27:10 am
Post by: Pickled Onion on 03 August, 2014, 06:57:20 am
Album cocking artwork on iTunes is driving me stark staring mad >:(Truly a pain in the arse. Every other application can just find the artwork, it's right there with the songs, but iTunes has to be shown where it is. For every single album.
Post by: ian on 03 August, 2014, 12:17:14 pm
Album cocking artwork on iTunes is driving me stark staring mad >:(Truly a pain in the arse. Every other application can just find the artwork, it's right there with the songs, but iTunes has to be shown where it is. For every single album.
Weird. It's always found artwork fine throughout my library — the majority self-ripped.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 August, 2014, 12:19:55 pm
And breathe.
Post by: ian on 05 August, 2014, 10:59:27 am
I did clear the browsing history because there's some things I don't want to know and I'm pretty sure there's only one place you can get that much malware delivered direct to your desktop. Sadly, I neglected to clear the bookmark bar on the basis he might have had something useful saved there. Now, I can't delete the cache in my head. Dad, really, at your age. Still, it was age-appropriate 'mature p0rn'.
Post by: barakta on 05 August, 2014, 11:26:00 am
Post by: hulver on 05 August, 2014, 11:57:08 am
I was expecting a bit of culture shock. I know it's going to be different from Windows 7. I expected that.
So, shiney new tablet running Windows 8.1.
First experience, setting up a user when you first turn the thing on. Nice screens guiding you through the process. You MUST create a microsoft account to create a new user. Grrr.
Put nice secure (PITA to type in) password onto account, as it's accessible online.
Wake machine up. Need to enter password. GRRRR! Everytime! WTSF!
Look online for way to turn off "Enter password on unlock" option. Can't find one. Only online solution that looks like it might work involves the command line (Come on MS, are you taking the piss now). I run the command, which shows a standard windows user management screen, which pops up a dialog box "This tool doesn't work in Windows 8.1, please use the user configuration screen in PC settings", which I looked at first and doesn't give anyway to turn off the requirement to enter a password on unlock.
Finally create another user account, and creating it this way allows me to do it without joining it to a MS online account, so I can unlock the thing without a password. Of course, most of the widgets on the "Start screen" require an MS account to work...
Still, a minor annoyance I think, just part of the setting up process and getting used to a whole new system.
Start using the thing. Nice screen. Install chrome on it, works well. Start typing something on a web site. On screen keyboard is shockingly bad. I'm so used to swype on Android, that a Keyboard so basic it doesn't even auto-capitilise the first letter of a new sentence seems so primitive. Absolutely no auto-correct at all.
See somewhere online that suggests Windows 8.1 does auto-suggest correct spelling. Can't find anywhere to change keyboard settings.
Manage to shutdown the thing by accident somehow, as a screen popped up saying "are you sure you want to shutdown? Swipe to continue". I swipe the opposite way to the way the arrow is pointing and the thing shuts down.
Start it up again and try and look for keyboard settings. Find the control panel (swipe in from the right hand side of the screen, of course!) but the only entries I can find are for the standard Windows keyboard controls (how long you press a key before it repeats) which requires a physical keyboard, or the accessability controls, which are nothing to do with the touch screen keyboard.
Try and look for anything, can't find it.
Very, very frustrating experience. Stuff isn't easy to find. Even googling and following screenshots often doesn't work, as stuff seems to move around and not be where it should be.
Having something so frustrating in such an easily lobable format is very dangerous.
I've used everything from Dos version 3 (different config.sys & autoexec.bat files for different programs to make the most of the available memory) through windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, 7. Linux versions from Slackware floppy sets, through redhat, debian, ubuntu, that one you compile from source that I can't remember the name of, many different versions. I found setting up a mixture of debian packages and compiled from source applications less frustrating than trying to use Windows 8.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 August, 2014, 12:07:47 pm
Post by: Zipperhead on 05 August, 2014, 02:00:33 pm
I did clear the browsing history because there's some things I don't want to know and I'm pretty sure there's only one place you can get that much malware delivered direct to your desktop. Sadly, I neglected to clear the bookmark bar on the basis he might have had something useful saved there. Now, I can't delete the cache in my head. Dad, really, at your age. Still, it was age-appropriate 'mature p0rn'.
http://amateurgilfs.com ?
Post by: David Martin on 06 August, 2014, 11:00:05 pm
Then I can gat a stabel connection rather than one which drops and times out.
Post by: David Martin on 07 August, 2014, 09:29:12 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 August, 2014, 09:39:03 am
Here is what you are supposed to do when I click "Hibernate": go sleepy-byes.
Here is what you are not supposed to do when I click "Hibernate": start playing Back In Black.
I can only assume that Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, is a closet AC/DC fan.
Now, would you kindly restart?
kthxbai
Post by: tonycollinet on 07 August, 2014, 11:02:09 pm
It doesn't help that my parents don't speak computer, so lots of conversations like this
"There's something on the screen."
"What's a something?"
"Java something?"
"A dialogue box?"
"?"
"A square box. It should have some text about Java and some buttons."
"Yes, it says Java."
"But what does it say?"
"Something about Java and some numbers."
"Could you just read what it says to me?"
"I just clicked the OK button."
ArrrrrggggggghHHHHHHHHH. This after I'd specifically told them to stop clicking OK and Next on everything that pops up.
Bin there, done that, bought the t-shirt....in triplicate....complete with the artfully torn jeans, white loafers, linen jacket and bowler hat.
Few activities put my phone and TV in such danger of mutual destruction.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 August, 2014, 01:45:21 pm
The install fails. I try again.
The install fails. I reboot and try again.
The install fails. As suggested by the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia's wossname, I download the update and attempt to run manually.
Nothing happens at all. It seems that the next option is to nuke the whole fucking installation from orbit and start from scratch. This is utter bollocks. If it wasn't a Saturday I'd be charging you for my time. Arsewipes.
Edit: so I nuke the old installation as per the instructions buried somewhere deep in the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia's support fora. Then download the setup program and run it. Somewhat to my surprise, the install actually works, but just in case, I uncheck the "Check for updates automagically" wossname. I would not like the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia to start getting complacent and thinking that I trust it to Do The Right Thing or anything.
Out of interest, I clicky "Help...Check for Updates", whereupon I am informed that "This version of iTunes (11.3.1) is the current version."
The only reason I will not be killing Steve-o utterly to DETH when I'm next in California is because he's already dead. I will have further to research whether it is possible to arrange for the BEAR to have Steve-o's remains for his tea.
Post by: Asterix, the former Gaul. on 09 August, 2014, 02:32:19 pm
Windows 8.1. Oh dear.
I was expecting a bit of culture shock. I know it's going to be different from Windows 7. I expected that.
So, shiney new tablet running Windows 8.1.
First experience, setting up a user when you first turn the thing on. Nice screens guiding you through the process. You MUST create a microsoft account to create a new user. Grrr.
Put nice secure (PITA to type in) password onto account, as it's accessible online.
Wake machine up. Need to enter password. GRRRR! Everytime! WTSF!
Look online for way to turn off "Enter password on unlock" option. Can't find one. Only online solution that looks like it might work involves the command line (Come on MS, are you taking the piss now). I run the command, which shows a standard windows user management screen, which pops up a dialog box "This tool doesn't work in Windows 8.1, please use the user configuration screen in PC settings", which I looked at first and doesn't give anyway to turn off the requirement to enter a password on unlock.
Finally create another user account, and creating it this way allows me to do it without joining it to a MS online account, so I can unlock the thing without a password. Of course, most of the widgets on the "Start screen" require an MS account to work...
Still, a minor annoyance I think, just part of the setting up process and getting used to a whole new system.
Start using the thing. Nice screen. Install chrome on it, works well. Start typing something on a web site. On screen keyboard is shockingly bad. I'm so used to swype on Android, that a Keyboard so basic it doesn't even auto-capitilise the first letter of a new sentence seems so primitive. Absolutely no auto-correct at all.
See somewhere online that suggests Windows 8.1 does auto-suggest correct spelling. Can't find anywhere to change keyboard settings.
Manage to shutdown the thing by accident somehow, as a screen popped up saying "are you sure you want to shutdown? Swipe to continue". I swipe the opposite way to the way the arrow is pointing and the thing shuts down.
Start it up again and try and look for keyboard settings. Find the control panel (swipe in from the right hand side of the screen, of course!) but the only entries I can find are for the standard Windows keyboard controls (how long you press a key before it repeats) which requires a physical keyboard, or the accessability controls, which are nothing to do with the touch screen keyboard.
Try and look for anything, can't find it.
Very, very frustrating experience. Stuff isn't easy to find. Even googling and following screenshots often doesn't work, as stuff seems to move around and not be where it should be.
Having something so frustrating in such an easily lobable format is very dangerous.
I've used everything from Dos version 3 (different config.sys & autoexec.bat files for different programs to make the most of the available memory) through windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, 7. Linux versions from Slackware floppy sets, through redhat, debian, ubuntu, that one you compile from source that I can't remember the name of, many different versions. I found setting up a mixture of debian packages and compiled from source applications less frustrating than trying to use Windows 8.
The worst aspect would be finding that there are many 12 year olds, or maybe younger, who think Windows 8.1 is a doddle. And for whom it was probably designed.
Post by: Andrij on 09 August, 2014, 08:45:44 pm
The worst aspect would be finding that there are many 12 year olds, or maybe younger, who think Windows 8.1 is a doddle. Andforby whom it was probably designed.
;)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 August, 2014, 05:12:14 pm
For the same track ???
Which I had just removed from both, then re-imported.
The SCIENCE works quite happily for the other 9604 tracks which should be present in both locations, so I can only assume that the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia's own SCIENCE doesn't like the song title being ~. It doesn't mind any other odd characters, such as might be found in the titles of Sigur Ròs tunes, so this is making me Cross.
Post by: Aidan on 12 August, 2014, 07:48:04 pm
Windows 8.1. Oh dear.
I was expecting a bit of culture shock. I know it's going to be different from Windows 7. I expected that.
So, shiney new tablet running Windows 8.1.
First experience, setting up a user when you first turn the thing on. Nice screens guiding you through the process. You MUST create a microsoft account to create a new user. Grrr.
Put nice secure (PITA to type in) password onto account, as it's accessible online.
Wake machine up. Need to enter password. GRRRR! Everytime! WTSF!
Look online for way to turn off "Enter password on unlock" option. Can't find one. Only online solution that looks like it might work involves the command line (Come on MS, are you taking the piss now). I run the command, which shows a standard windows user management screen, which pops up a dialog box "This tool doesn't work in Windows 8.1, please use the user configuration screen in PC settings", which I looked at first and doesn't give anyway to turn off the requirement to enter a password on unlock.
Finally create another user account, and creating it this way allows me to do it without joining it to a MS online account, so I can unlock the thing without a password. Of course, most of the widgets on the "Start screen" require an MS account to work...
Still, a minor annoyance I think, just part of the setting up process and getting used to a whole new system.
Start using the thing. Nice screen. Install chrome on it, works well. Start typing something on a web site. On screen keyboard is shockingly bad. I'm so used to swype on Android, that a Keyboard so basic it doesn't even auto-capitilise the first letter of a new sentence seems so primitive. Absolutely no auto-correct at all.
See somewhere online that suggests Windows 8.1 does auto-suggest correct spelling. Can't find anywhere to change keyboard settings.
Manage to shutdown the thing by accident somehow, as a screen popped up saying "are you sure you want to shutdown? Swipe to continue". I swipe the opposite way to the way the arrow is pointing and the thing shuts down.
Start it up again and try and look for keyboard settings. Find the control panel (swipe in from the right hand side of the screen, of course!) but the only entries I can find are for the standard Windows keyboard controls (how long you press a key before it repeats) which requires a physical keyboard, or the accessability controls, which are nothing to do with the touch screen keyboard.
Try and look for anything, can't find it.
Very, very frustrating experience. Stuff isn't easy to find. Even googling and following screenshots often doesn't work, as stuff seems to move around and not be where it should be.
Having something so frustrating in such an easily lobable format is very dangerous.
I've used everything from Dos version 3 (different config.sys & autoexec.bat files for different programs to make the most of the available memory) through windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, 7. Linux versions from Slackware floppy sets, through redhat, debian, ubuntu, that one you compile from source that I can't remember the name of, many different versions. I found setting up a mixture of debian packages and compiled from source applications less frustrating than trying to use Windows 8.
I hate windows 8 almost as much as I hate Dell...
My Dell has an in built thing which only allows it to charge from a Dell ( read expensive) lead and charger. Of course now the thing has gone faulty , which from an Google is a very very common occurrence. So it doesnt charge or recognise the proper charger so has to work only while plugged in. Great for a laptop.
Even worse it has now developed a fault where it intermittently just turns itself off.
So now I am left with a choice of buying a new laptop which is either Windows 8 ( which I hate with a passion) or going Apple and paying over the odds for a shiny that will need extra software to run my favourite programs Aaaarrrrggggghhhhhhh
Post by: Afasoas on 12 August, 2014, 08:12:18 pm
Turning them off, taking the batteries out for a good while and then reinserting the battery/re-attching the charger solved it. Worth a shot?
Do you NEED windows or OS X?
There are some nice Chromebooks about. And there's always Linux as an option.
Post by: Kim on 12 August, 2014, 08:14:00 pm
(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/universal_converter_box.png) (http://xkcd.com/1406/)
"What, no RS232?"
Post by: tiermat on 12 August, 2014, 08:47:50 pm
Another thing, token ring and ethernet are not connectors, they are protocols. Ditto fibre, multiple different ways of connecting it.
No SATA, either.
Post by: Aidan on 12 August, 2014, 10:10:47 pm
I've had laptops/netbooks do that before.
Turning them off, taking the batteries out for a good while and then reinserting the battery/re-attching the charger solved it. Worth a shot?
Do you NEED windows or OS X?
There are some nice Chromebooks about. And there's always Linux as an option.
Thanks , but have tried that mad lots of other things. I want windows, so will probably by a new laptop and a copy of windows 7 , or I may go Apple and get parallels
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 August, 2014, 10:55:13 pm
Post by: simonp on 13 August, 2014, 12:29:58 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 August, 2014, 09:33:20 am
Bluetooth dongle now ordered. Thanks, Kim :thumbsup:
Post by: rafletcher on 13 August, 2014, 10:46:07 am
So now I am left with a choice of buying a new laptop which is either Windows 8 ( which I hate with a passion) or going Apple and paying over the odds for a shiny that will need extra software to run my favourite programs Aaaarrrrggggghhhhhhh
No, ypu can buy "professional" laptops (certainly from Dell) with Windows 7 Pro on them as standard, or with a "downgrade" licence from 8 to 7.
FWIW we use Dell at work - a large multinational - and have relatively few hardware problems. The E6440 i7 with SSD I have is fast and quiet.
Post by: Chris S on 13 August, 2014, 10:49:58 am
They sent a backup for me to diagnose. FFS you n00bs, you could at least have truncated the log before sending it - 268Gb!! :o
Post by: ian on 13 August, 2014, 10:50:17 am
Apple with Parallels for running the odd legacy app.
Virtualbox works fine these days and is free.
Though, to be honest, unless it's very specialised, you can probably find the same software or something similar that runs natively on a Mac. I only fire up a Win7 VM out of morbid curiosity and because it's an easier way of satisfying Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, than sacrificing small mammals.
For some reason, the mothership decided to shave a few pennies off its budget by giving us laptops without Bluetooth. It took me ages to find out via the labyrinth of windows settings (seriously Microsoft, how deep do you have to get in the system before it fesses up and says I've not got a Bluetooth chip, rather than merely hint there might be a hidden variable several clicks into the future that will turn it on). Shitmonkeys, it's 2014, just put a chip in by default and develop a UI for it that doesn't feel like you've sustained a significant head injury.
Post by: Ham on 13 August, 2014, 05:16:25 pm
Post by: Aidan on 14 August, 2014, 06:18:50 am
So now I am left with a choice of buying a new laptop which is either Windows 8 ( which I hate with a passion) or going Apple and paying over the odds for a shiny that will need extra software to run my favourite programs Aaaarrrrggggghhhhhhh
No, ypu can buy "professional" laptops (certainly from Dell) with Windows 7 Pro on them as standard, or with a "downgrade" licence from 8 to 7.
FWIW we use Dell at work - a large multinational - and have relatively few hardware problems. The E6440 i7 with SSD I have is fast and quiet.
Nope, no chance I'll ever buy another Dell. If it wasn't for their fuckwit "you've got to use a genuine charger" thingy I wouldn't need a new laptop in the first place! . A google says this is a common occurrence.
Post by: rafletcher on 14 August, 2014, 10:08:20 am
So now I am left with a choice of buying a new laptop which is either Windows 8 ( which I hate with a passion) or going Apple and paying over the odds for a shiny that will need extra software to run my favourite programs Aaaarrrrggggghhhhhhh
No, ypu can buy "professional" laptops (certainly from Dell) with Windows 7 Pro on them as standard, or with a "downgrade" licence from 8 to 7.
FWIW we use Dell at work - a large multinational - and have relatively few hardware problems. The E6440 i7 with SSD I have is fast and quiet.
Nope, no chance I'll ever buy another Dell. If it wasn't for their fuckwit "you've got to use a genuine charger" thingy I wouldn't need a new laptop in the first place! . A google says this is a common occurrence.
Common for people writing on t'internet - a self selecting sample. My Dell at home has the same charger (though on it's second battery) after 8 years. At work there isn't a prevalence of failed chargers either. YMMV of course.
Post by: ian on 14 August, 2014, 10:53:25 am
I've been using mothership Dells since the Jurassic, never had a charger fail, nor anyone I've worked with.
One of my Dell's self-immolated though (battery fire). Which was fun.
I have an E6430. Not bad, but not nearly as nice as my Macbook.
Post by: TimC on 14 August, 2014, 11:29:15 am
Post by: Biff on 14 August, 2014, 05:11:01 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 August, 2014, 09:32:52 am
Plus the cursor appears to be affected by gravity ???
Post by: Gattopardo on 16 August, 2014, 03:30:00 am
so cheap as possible 2.5 thin hard drives.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 16 August, 2014, 07:29:26 pm
If I want that level of nannying I'll go to the Mega-Global Walled Garden Corporation of Menlo Park, USAnia, not Wikipedia oops what a giveaway.
Post by: Afasoas on 16 August, 2014, 09:48:28 pm
Thanks again for bestowing your latest cacophony of updates upon me .. I'm honoured that you'd think such a wretched soul is worthy.
But do you think, pretty please, that you could refrain from once again overwriting my boot partition?
Ta Very Mooch.
Post by: tiermat on 29 August, 2014, 02:11:28 pm
You are shit, that is all.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 29 August, 2014, 06:09:33 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 29 August, 2014, 08:05:09 pm
*Write once read never. Ick.
Post by: Feanor on 29 August, 2014, 10:10:07 pm
Does no-one code to the native win32 api according to Petzold anymore?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 August, 2014, 01:21:39 am
Post by: tiermat on 30 August, 2014, 07:54:44 am
Despite being taken on as a Linux/Java server support person, the majority of my time is spent either fixing bugs in the aforementioned pile of shit, or designing forms is Adobe LifeCycle.
Additional rant. Windows update for Win7. We don't use media centre, we have no intention of using, or any interest inusing it. So why the merry hell do the latest batch of updates 1) force an update of said media centre and 2) that update stops media centre from starting properly, which prevents the wireless connection from getting an internet connection(sounds implausible, but disabling the service fixes the issue!). Useless bunch of wankers.
Post by: TheLurker on 30 August, 2014, 08:09:31 pm
Additional rant. Windows update for Win7. We don't use media centre, we have no intention of using, or any interest inusing it. So why the merry hell do the latest batch of updates 1) force an update of said media centre and 2) that update stops media centre from starting properly, which prevents the wireless connection from getting an internet connection(sounds implausible, but disabling the service fixes the issue!). Useless bunch of wankers.M$ have had some serious issues with patch quality over the last year to two years. I don't think there have been six months together over that period when they haven't had to pull a cripplingly bad patch for one or other or their OSs. You won't be surprised to hear that I wait at least a week (often longer) before applying patches after a Patch Tuesday; having kept a close eye on The Register in the interim in case there's a bad one in the batch.
Post by: tiermat on 30 August, 2014, 09:03:46 pm
Additional rant. Windows update for Win7. We don't use media centre, we have no intention of using, or any interest inusing it. So why the merry hell do the latest batch of updates 1) force an update of said media centre and 2) that update stops media centre from starting properly, which prevents the wireless connection from getting an internet connection(sounds implausible, but disabling the service fixes the issue!). Useless bunch of wankers.M$ have had some serious issues with patch quality over the last year to two years. I don't think there have been six months together over that period when they haven't had to pull a cripplingly bad patch for one or other or their OSs. You won't be surprised to hear that I wait at least a week (often longer) before applying patches after a Patch Tuesday; having kept a close eye on The Register in the interim in case there's a bad one in the batch.
Not like one of our customers, then, who have their public facing web server set to automatic download AND install for patches...
Post by: Afasoas on 02 September, 2014, 11:40:48 am
I have a feint recollection of doing exactly that in the last couple of weeks.
Post by: TheLurker on 12 September, 2014, 08:51:06 pm
And they've done it (yet) again. If you can be arsed; google KB 2918614. Does unhelpful and weird things to some Win7 and Win8 installations.Additional rant. Windows update for Win7. We don't use media centre, we have no intention of using, or any interest inusing it. So why the merry hell do the latest batch of updates 1) force an update of said media centre and 2) that update stops media centre from starting properly, which prevents the wireless connection from getting an internet connection(sounds implausible, but disabling the service fixes the issue!). Useless bunch of wankers.M$ have had some serious issues with patch quality over the last year to two years. I don't think there have been six months together over that period when they haven't had to pull a cripplingly bad patch for one or other or their OSs. You won't be surprised to hear that I wait at least a week (often longer) before applying patches after a Patch Tuesday; having kept a close eye on The Register in the interim in case there's a bad one in the batch.
ETA.
TFS API. What a badly documented appalling unintuitive mess. Sorry; too late in the day so not enough energy to rant _properly_. Please assume that your correspondent is both beetroot complexioned and incoherent with rage and likewise foaming at the mouth.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 September, 2014, 04:24:57 pm
Please do not pollute my iTunes library with that sanctimonious twat Bonio without so much as a by your leave.
kthxbai
Disgruntled of E17
Post by: Dibdib on 24 September, 2014, 12:24:39 pm
Dear Mega-Global Fruit Corporation Of Cupertino, USAnia,
Please do not pollute my iTunes library with that sanctimonious twat Bonio without so much as a by your leave.
kthxbai
Disgruntled of E17
Don't upgrade your fruitpad to iOS8 then. I just opened the Maps app and all the streets have no names.
(Mine's the black Craghoppers softshell, ta)
Post by: Vince on 24 September, 2014, 01:55:43 pm
Me: Can you tell me how to get e replacement mouse?
HD: You have a mail problem?
Me: No, I need a new mouse
HD: a problem with outlook?
Me: No, my mouse has gone missing
HD: please hold
HD: You have an email problem?
Me: No. I have no mouse, pointing device, hardware for switching between windows.
HD: I'm not getting you
I hung up in frustration amid laughter from co-workers
Post by: David Martin on 24 September, 2014, 10:51:29 pm
Post by: Vince on 25 September, 2014, 09:37:30 am
Post by: barakta on 26 September, 2014, 04:37:35 pm
No. You have a "download here to try A or B or C or D or E" and it all looks free cos you've hidden the pricing underneath your blingorama website of shite! NOT helpful! I don't know if C and D features are helpful unless I pay for them and I won't be able to pay for them so we probably won't be able to recommend it for a student. So you can't find out C and D aren't free until you download and it refuses to work.
Oh and asking for upper, lower case, numbers AND fucking punctuation in the password is extremely annoying as the error for creating account doesn't actually say this, it just flashes "nope" at you and it's only when you hover over the password text entry field it deigns to outline its demands (not made clear it's not just a suggestion). And NO I'm not logging in with fucking farcebook!
And everything is online subscribe by month model these days which makes running a tech loan pool for students REALLY hard fucking work.
Post by: woollypigs on 26 September, 2014, 07:25:36 pm
Post by: Diver300 on 27 September, 2014, 08:13:58 pm
I had to boot up the XP box that was recently retired, only to find that the window of the reflashing software is now on a non-existent screen, and it doesn't respond to Alt-space etc. I then had to recommission the DVI card to give it a screen off to the right, just so I could drag it back to the main screen. And it runs slower on the XP machine than it ran on Windows 7.
Grrrrr.
Post by: Kim on 28 September, 2014, 10:39:49 pm
I had to boot up the XP box that was recently retired, only to find that the window of the reflashing software is now on a non-existent screen, and it doesn't respond to Alt-space etc. I then had to recommission the DVI card to give it a screen off to the right, just so I could drag it back to the main screen.
That happened to me once. On Windows 98. About 16 years ago. When monitors were a lot heavier and harder to come by.
Post by: Feanor on 29 September, 2014, 08:39:59 pm
I much prefer a 'proper' COM port.
This is due to some nasty USB serial port devices I bought some years back, just about the time 'real' COM ports were disappearing from lapdogs.
I had many needs to get a console onto many devices: Cisco WAPs and the like.
The shitty USB-COM drivers would grab a new COM port number every time they were plugged in!
They would see a registry entry from last time they were there as COM5, and so become COM6, and so on.
This required me to change the COM port number on the Terminal Emulator each time.
And then when it got to COM256, it just asploded, requiring registry hackery to make it forget about the old COM ports.
Yuck and double-yuck.
Post by: Kim on 29 September, 2014, 09:46:15 pm
I have a ( probably un-necessary ) dislike of USB to serial adapters.
I much prefer a 'proper' COM port.
No, that's perfectly rational. Most of them don't work properly for anything that's bit-bashing the handshake lines, and then there's all the usual fun and games with Windows enumerating USB devices described above. Linux is marginally better in that you can at least beat them into submission with udev rules.
A Mac presumably asks "What's a serial port?" ;D
Post by: David Martin on 29 September, 2014, 09:55:51 pm
Post by: Biggsy on 29 September, 2014, 10:27:09 pm
Post by: aidan.f on 29 September, 2014, 10:28:20 pm
Quote
Ignore Hardware Serial Number Registry Editor Utility
This is a free utility that is used for editing the registry to ensure the serial number descriptor of each FTDI device is ignored during driver installation. This feature ensures any FTDI device connected to a USB port is given the same COM port number.
Post by: Diver300 on 30 September, 2014, 06:00:01 pm
However.....
as USB can't interrupt the processor, it has to wait for the processor to ask it if it has any data, USB to serial adaptors have to have reasonable sizes of buffers, so if data is arriving really fast, they can work better / load up the processor less as the data arrives in big chunks, not stupid 8 byte chunks that take so much more processing per byte.
Post by: Feanor on 30 September, 2014, 07:35:24 pm
Trying to select a block of text to copy/paste is un-necessarily hard.
Windows is forever trying to second-guess what I want to select.
"Oh, he's selected most of this word! He must want all the word! And the space beyond! And probably the whole sentence, or paragraph! Oh, woah, hold on... he's going back! Let's de-select everything I auto-selected, and everything he selected too! Let's start selecting in the reverse direction from some random point in the incorrect selection!"
And so on and so forth.
WTF can't it just butt out with it's useless auto-selection algorithm, and let *me* decide what I want to select.
Also, sometimes I want to just copy/paste the text, not the attributes / formatting.
That can be difficult too, because the paste option may or may not contain options to paste text only.
So I have resort to nonsense like paste into notepad to strip out the crap, then re-copy/paste into the final destination.
Bah.
Post by: Biggsy on 30 September, 2014, 08:26:06 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 30 September, 2014, 08:57:11 pm
ctrl+shift+v will paste text without formatting in some applications.
I think ctrl+shift+v in Chrome might even copy text without formatting, but don't quote me on that. As Biggsy said, there's probably a plug-in.
Post by: tiermat on 30 September, 2014, 08:58:20 pm
Post by: Feanor on 30 September, 2014, 09:41:17 pm
Just general windows apps.
Oh, I use notepad++ on all my machines.
But it shouldn't be necessary to use any text editor as a go-between to cut-n-paste!
Will experiment with the Ctrl-Shift-V, thanks for the suggestion.
Still doesn't help with the auto-selection nonsense tho.
Not sure if that's app-specific behaviour, or if it's inherited from Windows itself.
Post by: David Martin on 30 September, 2014, 11:41:17 pm
Post by: barakta on 01 October, 2014, 12:07:54 am
Post by: David Martin on 01 October, 2014, 10:51:37 pm
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 02 October, 2014, 01:16:22 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 October, 2014, 01:43:21 pm
Post by: Pingu on 02 October, 2014, 07:12:33 pm
Still doesn't help with the auto-selection nonsense tho.
Not sure if that's app-specific behaviour, or if it's inherited from Windows itself.
Had this in an app today. Ended up typing what I wanted :demon:
Post by: barakta on 02 October, 2014, 08:08:29 pm
We have Canvas, no one else seems to use it, it's less bad than WebCT apparently, but that's not saying much cos WebCT had got quite out of date...
Post by: David Martin on 02 October, 2014, 10:56:48 pm
..d
Post by: barakta on 03 October, 2014, 02:42:40 pm
Post by: ian on 09 October, 2014, 10:17:13 am
I'd mind less, but people assume that just because I know a soupçon of stuff about the damn machines they can ask me (anything is preferable to visiting the IT folks in the Basement of Perpetual Scowls where the conversation is limited to 'submit a ticket'), and that's only because I hang out with Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, who frequently snarls 'why you don't you turn it off and back on.' You should hear that in Enochian. It can break windows.
Ah, step 34, 'if email is not received, turn your device off and then on.'
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 October, 2014, 10:51:57 pm
I know that this fondleslab has no SIM installed. It has never had a SIM installed. So there is no need to tell me, on what appears to be an hourly basis, that there is no SIM installed.
Now fuck off.
Post by: Pingu on 10 October, 2014, 03:18:16 pm
Post by: T42 on 10 October, 2014, 03:26:30 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 October, 2014, 03:31:47 pm
You obviously need to know or it wouldn't tell you.
Helpful advices from the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia for others who have this issue have included "follow the instructions in this article which apply to Jesus Phones which do have a SIM card installed", "switch off the 'cellular data' wossname1", "tap something in the Babbage-Post message we've just sent you what do you mean you've submitted this from a Windows PC because you're fed up with your fondleslab guffing out ridiculous messages five times in the time it takes you to enter a 140 character description of the problem" and "have you tried switching it off and on again?"
The Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia clearly think that testing upgrades is for Other People.
- Wossname not available for fondleslabs without a SIM installed
Post by: jsabine on 10 October, 2014, 04:22:25 pm
The Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia clearly think that testing upgrades is for Other People.
You should feel proud to have been invited to become part of this illustrious grouping.
Post by: simonp on 11 October, 2014, 03:24:39 am
At this point I realised it did it so fast I'd actually missed it happening (automatic reopening of apps adding to the confusion). Face => Palm.
This is caused by rebooting the work laptop taking more than 5 minutes only to discover the replavement battery was DOA. Dell and Microsoft have really lowered my expectations over the years.
Post by: Zipperhead on 11 October, 2014, 11:03:54 am
Why, just why is it that having replaced my router any yet in spite of the new one putting out the same network name and using the same password would some devices not connect to it?
Most just connected and got on with whatever it is they all do, but not the Chromecast and one of the squeezebox controllers (the battery is knackered in the other one so I don't know about that)? They would both see the network but not connect to it (the squeezebox controller would only see that network, it wouldn't see any of the others).
In both cases the only way to get them to connect was to perform a full factory reset.
Post by: Afasoas on 11 October, 2014, 06:20:59 pm
I can't remember if I've had a rant about this yet, if I have then I apologize - but I need a little ratette.
Why, just why is it that having replaced my router any yet in spite of the new one putting out the same network name and using the same password would some devices not connect to it?
The hardware concerned must recognise the new wireless access point as being different from the old one - I think this is due to differing MAC addresses. I've no idea why your squeezebox and Chromecast would need resetting tho but./
Post by: Pickled Onion on 12 October, 2014, 06:13:16 pm
Now I've only got messages that decided to send themselves via gmail or icloud. Email is the primary source of "what actually happened". History has been wiped clean. Bugger.
Post by: Afasoas on 14 October, 2014, 01:12:44 pm
Dropped an external hard disk drive on which I'd backed-up a users personal pictures before re-installing an OS on her machine.
I managed to drop said hard disk off my desk following a chair-arm/cable interface. D'oh!.
Disk is now totalled. Again, D'oh.
I really do wish manufacturers of external hard disks would ensure they'd survive a three foot drop onto carpet. T'wasn't even a clean fall as I half caught it and dropped it again. Grrr.
Post by: ian on 17 October, 2014, 09:10:46 am
In the meantime, I'm downloading Yosemite. The OS, not the National Park (I wouldn't have anywhere to put that). I don't like the new OSX names, they should have done mustelids after cats.
Post by: Vince on 17 October, 2014, 09:40:50 am
The easy option would be to type in the two digits, but no you don't do that. Instead you have a drop down list of every dialling code in the world. Listed by country? Nooo, you list it be the national flags. Took several minutes to realise and hunt through for the Dutch flag.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 17 October, 2014, 01:07:07 pm
Post by: Kim on 17 October, 2014, 01:17:02 pm
Not quite so bizarre, just irritating, but why do drop-down boxes for date of birth always seem to go to 2014, even for products only available to over 16's?
It's marginally more sensible than 1901 or whatever they bottom out at.
Post by: Pingu on 18 October, 2014, 11:41:45 am
Not quite so bizarre, just irritating, but why do drop-down boxes for date of birth always seem to go to 2014, even for products only available to over 16's?
Code: [Select]
Select * from dateOr somesuch.
Post by: perpetual dan on 18 October, 2014, 05:11:44 pm
What does the panel think of Chromebooks? I think it is time to get something simple and not windows for homework and slugterra / friv / train your dragon etc. and phase out windows from our lives.
Post by: TheLurker on 18 October, 2014, 08:27:53 pm
I dunno, isn't at least one person is known to have lived to 120 ish? French woman? Sold paint to Van Gogh as youngster? Or is my aged memory conflating two people? Whatever. Given the increasing number of centenarians and those into living into a twelfth decade (I think Harry Patch was about 110 when he died) then 1901 probably isn't that daft as a lower limit.Not quite so bizarre, just irritating, but why do drop-down boxes for date of birth always seem to go to 2014, even for products only available to over 16's?
It's marginally more sensible than 1901 or whatever they bottom out at.
Post by: Kim on 18 October, 2014, 09:37:00 pm
I dunno, isn't at least one person is known to have lived to 120 ish? French woman? Sold paint to Van Gogh as youngster? Or is my aged memory conflating two people? Whatever. Given the increasing number of centenarians and those into living into a twelfth decade (I think Harry Patch was about 110 when he died) then 1901 probably isn't that daft as a lower limit.Not quite so bizarre, just irritating, but why do drop-down boxes for date of birth always seem to go to 2014, even for products only available to over 16's?
It's marginally more sensible than 1901 or whatever they bottom out at.
But everyone knows that the universe was created on the 1st of January 1970. :)
(And yes, not objecting to a generously low lower limit, just that once you've got one, it makes a lot more sense for a drop-down to start at the current year than the earliest available.)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 October, 2014, 12:04:15 am
But everyone knows that the universe was created on the 1st of January 1970. :)
ITYM the 17th of November 1858 :demon:
Post by: Snakehips on 19 October, 2014, 08:50:10 am
What does the panel think of Chromebooks?
Due to a set of extremely adverse personal circumstances I recently found myself in possession of a brand new Asus Chromebook. Fortunately it was taken out of my hands and returned to the shop before I could do what I wanted to do to it.
Post by: TheLurker on 19 October, 2014, 09:53:53 am
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Any fule kno it was the 31st of December 1840.But everyone knows that the universe was created on the 1st of January 1970. :)
ITYM the 17th of November 1858 :demon:
Post by: Andrij on 19 October, 2014, 02:41:09 pm
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Any fule kno it was the 31st of December 1840.But everyone knows that the universe was created on the 1st of January 1970. :)
ITYM the 17th of November 1858 :demon:
The opening of Hebden Bridge railway station (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebden_Bridge_railway_station#History)? ???
Post by: Dibdib on 30 October, 2014, 01:20:30 pm
Post by: TimC on 30 October, 2014, 06:02:16 pm
Fruitphone!!! What's the point of telling me that there is 3.67gb of "other" clogging up my phone if you're incapable of telling me what it is, why it's there or how I can get rid of it so I can use that space for something I actually want to use it for. :facepalm:
Amen, brother! My iPad showed that I had 18Gb (of 57 available) free. I asked iTunes to remove some music videos so I could install a full set of Sufferfest vids to use while away. At some point in that process it decided that I had 15Gb of 'other' and I couldn't transfer the vids. Can I find out what that newly-appeared 15Gb is? Can I fuck. I've added up all the app memory usage stats (deep in settings), which agree with the 39Gb used implied by the original information of 18Gb free. So what to do? Looks like a complete system reset!!!
Post by: ian on 30 October, 2014, 09:58:17 pm
So the laptop I bought my parents a year or so back is teetering on the edge of infinity popup oblivion. I just took control with Teamviewer. Oh my god, did they ever meet a piece of malware they didn't like? It's a foul menagerie of adware, spyware, and viruses. Is there a link they didn't click? Even Finestre, the demon of such things, would stand a ways back and poke the computer with a stick. They somehow managed to de-activate every security option I set up.
This is Finestre revenge because I was too tight to buy them a Mac. It's going to be a long night. It might be easier to tell them to bin it and buy them an iPad. I'm going to make some popcorn.
Oh Hell to Finestre, he's gone and done it again. Seriously, I put enough anti-whatever in that machine to fight a real (ok pretend, but you know what I mean) horse full of heavily armed and annoyed Trojans (you be annoyed if spent all evening cooped up in a pretend horse with a bunch of flatulent soldiers). Now 'it never goes to Amazon any more.' If you stuck to Amazon rather than mature ladies this wouldn't happen.
This is Finestre really rubbing it in for not buying them a Mac. I'll tackle it when I have appropriate protective gear and factor 100 smutscreen.
Post by: Afasoas on 31 October, 2014, 09:38:07 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 October, 2014, 10:13:14 am
The heavily-armed and annoyed types inside the giant wooden
Post by: Kim on 31 October, 2014, 12:08:32 pm
Post by: barakta on 31 October, 2014, 01:59:09 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 November, 2014, 10:52:11 am
Again.
iTunes 12.0.1.26! Firstly the version number scrolls off the top of the "Help...About" wossname if you blink, but that's a minor annoyance. No, picture the following scenario. I have ripped a CD. Teh Intarwebs has no idea what it is, which is no great surprise since it is a compilation of largely unknown bands from Captain Cook's Mistake, released in 1995. Ergo I have to enter the details manually.
I am entering the name of a band. We shall call them "The Powder Monkeys", because that is/was their name. Clicky on the "Artist" box under "Get Info" (why the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia cannot call this "Properties" like everyone else is a yart1) and start typing. Get as far as "The ". Then you decide that this track is by The Adverts and helpfully complete the box for me. Because the first artiste in the iTunes Library whose name begins "The" something is The Adverts. Geddit?
This was clearly the idea of a massive plank who wants badly to be introduced to Mr Shovel before being made to rip compilation CDs comprised of alternating tracks by "The ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha", "The Advertorials" and "The Brian Jonestown Massacre2" until they want to go to the toilet. A lobotomised rat displays more BRANES than this.
Also, fondleslab! When I'm trying to position the cursor to edit some text inna Big Box like for e.g. the "Reply" box on a well-known
- yet another rantworthy topic
- they exist. And they're a Rubbish
Post by: David Martin on 03 November, 2014, 11:47:48 pm
A chance to select the 'Broken/smoking hardware' option on our IT support form..
Post by: barakta on 03 November, 2014, 11:51:19 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 November, 2014, 08:46:12 am
I am in a Mac-infested house ATM and for academic reasons needed to use Miss von Brandenburg's machine. I eventually had to use Google to find the "On" switch.
Also it has a single-button mouse :(
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 04 November, 2014, 12:36:19 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 04 November, 2014, 12:40:25 pm
If someone tells you a character/string column is unique, check whether their definition of unique is case sensitive/insensitive.
Post by: ian on 04 November, 2014, 01:04:34 pm
Macs! Bah!
I am in a Mac-infested house ATM and for academic reasons needed to use Miss von Brandenburg's machine. I eventually had to use Google to find the "On" switch.
Also it has a single-button mouse :(
Cool, a Jurassic Mac. Did you travel back in time, or did the past catch up?
On other matters, last night's purge of malware from the familial computer took no fewer than four bloody hours. A browser took about a week to open because it was trying open six additional windows all helpfully offering updates to Java, Flash, etc. Every page was decorated with so many ads for vouchers and scams that it was pretty hard to see any content, every search was diverted somewhere strange that looked like Google, but every result link was scamtastic. I was, to be honest, impressed by the level of ingenuity. A steaming cauldron of self-referential malware. Have malware? Come on, collect the set.
Anyway, 564 items removed. The usual suspects, PC tune-ups, video 'conversion' utilities and downloaders (really father, at your age). For the four hundredth time, stop clicking every download link that a web page tells you to.
Not knowing much about the Windows world, is there a good anti-malware app for people with no internet sense at all? I ran Malwarebytes in free mode to clean things up, but there needs to something that lassoes the enthusiastic gullibility of my father before he can download and install something else. There's evidently no link he's not going to click if he thinks it takes him closer to naked mature ladies. And if the web thinks his PC needs a tune-up? Oh yes please.
Post by: Woofage on 04 November, 2014, 01:26:02 pm
Not knowing much about the Windows world, is there a good anti-malware app for people with no internet sense at all?
I don't know much about the windows world either, but we have 3 win boxes in the house and none has succumbed to any kind of malware. Your parents obviously have some special knack. I'm pretty sure win can be locked down so nothing can be installed. I once had a work 'pooter like that during a period of IT Gestapo management.
My other suggestions would be Linux Mint, ChromeOS or (cough) Hackintosh :).
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 November, 2014, 01:56:57 pm
Macs! Bah!
I am in a Mac-infested house ATM and for academic reasons needed to use Miss von Brandenburg's machine. I eventually had to use Google to find the "On" switch.
Also it has a single-button mouse :(
Cool, a Jurassic Mac. Did you travel back in time, or did the past catch up?
At first it felt like travelling back to 1989, when I last used a Mac for longer than ten seconds, but this one has Useful Features like a colour display, a hard disk and the ability to multitask without resorting to Horribles like Switcher.
Intensive use of Google suggests that it is a post-August 2007 Intel Alumin(i)um iMac. I don't know whether it's the later model which ditched FireWire for another USB port. The mouse may be a relic from Another Time. Anyway, she says it's Old and Slow and will probably be replaced soon. In the past she has mentioned replacing it with a Windows box on financial grounds but a short period of exposure to Win 8 seems to have cured that idea. She only upgraded to OS X Lion a couple of weeks ago coz the latest version of Vectorworks won't play under Snow Leopard.
Mr Sunshine's Mac is a big fuck-off deskside Thing with a Dell monitor and a two-button mouse with no markings except a label reading "Made in China". And you can see the power switch without a dentist's mirror.
And I still don't have any biscuits.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 November, 2014, 04:56:08 pm
The time spent dispassionately viewing a spinny thing is somewhat wearing. Especially when the "smallest size" version of the file is still eighteen fucking megabytes big >:(
Post by: hellymedic on 05 November, 2014, 06:57:05 pm
Quote
The time spent dispassionately viewing a spinny thing is somewhat wearing.
This, in spades.
Seem to have had it lots when just browsing the interwebs since Yosemite 'upgrade'.
Tonight partner couldn't get our network printer to work.
Until I enabled printer sharing on my laptop.
Seems Yosemite 'upgrade' disabled our network printer sharing by default buggrit!
Post by: David Martin on 05 November, 2014, 10:44:07 pm
Hope IT replace the mac soon. Do you use macs in biosciences at your uni?Yes. Both Mac and PC are supported managed desktops.
PSU on order..
Post by: Ham on 06 November, 2014, 11:34:43 am
Macs! Bah!
I am in a Mac-infested house ATM and for academic reasons needed to use Miss von Brandenburg's machine. I eventually had to use Google to find the "On" switch.
Also it has a single-button mouse :(
Cool, a Jurassic Mac. Did you travel back in time, or did the past catch up?
On other matters, last night's purge of malware from the familial computer took no fewer than four bloody hours. A browser took about a week to open because it was trying open six additional windows all helpfully offering updates to Java, Flash, etc. Every page was decorated with so many ads for vouchers and scams that it was pretty hard to see any content, every search was diverted somewhere strange that looked like Google, but every result link was scamtastic. I was, to be honest, impressed by the level of ingenuity. A steaming cauldron of self-referential malware. Have malware? Come on, collect the set.
Anyway, 564 items removed. The usual suspects, PC tune-ups, video 'conversion' utilities and downloaders (really father, at your age). For the four hundredth time, stop clicking every download link that a web page tells you to.
Not knowing much about the Windows world, is there a good anti-malware app for people with no internet sense at all? I ran Malwarebytes in free mode to clean things up, but there needs to something that lassoes the enthusiastic gullibility of my father before he can download and install something else. There's evidently no link he's not going to click if he thinks it takes him closer to naked mature ladies. And if the web thinks his PC needs a tune-up? Oh yes please.
This might sound too complicated (and it may be) but the thing to do is use a virtual machine image which is scraped clean every time it is started. it is actually easier than it sounds, I could send you a Virtualbox clone image that would give you 90% of what is needed.
Post by: ian on 06 November, 2014, 04:41:52 pm
This might sound too complicated (and it may be) but the thing to do is use a virtual machine image which is scraped clean every time it is started. it is actually easier than it sounds, I could send you a Virtualbox clone image that would give you 90% of what is needed.
I was trying to keep my liabilities to a minimum on a IT support front. They do like their dodgy bookmarks and downloads, I'd hate him to have the restart the not-exactly-Indiana-Jones-like quest for the land of the milf afresh each time.
I'm thinking of getting them a tablet, that seemed to work with the inlaws, and minimises their exposure.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 06 November, 2014, 04:46:20 pm
Cool, a Jurassic Mac. Did you travel back in time, or did the past catch up?
On other matters, last night's purge of malware from the familial computer took no fewer than four bloody hours. A browser took about a week to open because it was trying open six additional windows all helpfully offering updates to Java, Flash, etc. Every page was decorated with so many ads for vouchers and scams that it was pretty hard to see any content, every search was diverted somewhere strange that looked like Google, but every result link was scamtastic. I was, to be honest, impressed by the level of ingenuity. A steaming cauldron of self-referential malware. Have malware? Come on, collect the set.
Anyway, 564 items removed. The usual suspects, PC tune-ups, video 'conversion' utilities and downloaders (really father, at your age). For the four hundredth time, stop clicking every download link that a web page tells you to.
Not knowing much about the Windows world, is there a good anti-malware app for people with no internet sense at all? I ran Malwarebytes in free mode to clean things up, but there needs to something that lassoes the enthusiastic gullibility of my father before he can download and install something else. There's evidently no link he's not going to click if he thinks it takes him closer to naked mature ladies. And if the web thinks his PC needs a tune-up? Oh yes please.
Ding! Had the same thing with my son's laptop two weeks ago. Two weeks ago.
Last night he told me it is back to the same state again. Um, well I gave him the lecture but seems nothing went in. FFS.
A VM that's rewiped every startup would probably be a good idea for him. I wonder if this malware adware shite runs on linux?
Post by: ian on 06 November, 2014, 04:54:20 pm
There's no one in my office. I'm alone. The only person who would see my passwords is a ghost. Ghosts are not an IT security threat. I don't want to have to guess whether ********************** is my correctly spelled 18 letter password with two numbers, a capital letter, an alphanumeric character, that bears no resemblance to any password I've used in the last ten years. I'll type it in a text editor. Oh whoopee, you've disabled copy and paste.
And don't get me going on personal security questions. Also *******ed so you don't fucking know if you've typed it right, and no I don't know who my third grade teacher was because we don't do third grade, you culturally insensitive dickmonkeys. I've got a personal question for you.
Anyway, you've made me write the damn password in very big letters on a post-it note and stuck it somewhere obvious. Because like I'm sure some hacker wants to submit my fucking expenses.
Hear me, I'm working on those earwigs, you IT fucks.
Post by: Kim on 06 November, 2014, 07:25:33 pm
Post by: perpetual dan on 06 November, 2014, 09:12:16 pm
And if it can detect xxx1, xxx2 I do wonder how securely the data is kept on the server.
Post by: Afasoas on 06 November, 2014, 10:41:07 pm
Post by: Feanor on 06 November, 2014, 11:02:09 pm
On my home 2k8r2 domain, the passwords are set to 'never expire'.
And have been since the domain was a little NT4 toddler, sucking on it's NetBIOS dummy.
Post by: Jaded on 06 November, 2014, 11:22:44 pm
Oh and ranty. Passwords.
Anyway, you've made me write the damn password in very big letters on a post-it note and stuck it somewhere obvious. Because like I'm sure some hacker wants to submit my fucking expenses.
Yes, but someone with your expenses password can bring down the whole mothership, can't they.
Every secure MF knows that.
ILOVEYOU
Post by: Dibdib on 06 November, 2014, 11:44:47 pm
Post by: Polar Bear on 07 November, 2014, 06:21:12 am
Ironically, Microshaft who make these rules available through their group policy now advise that system administrators don't force users to change their passwords too frequently because it leads to use of weaker passwords.
Not only that but people cannot remember them all so write them down and leave them even more vulnerable.
My password policy for teh interweb is quite interesting - nobody would approve it. I've only needed to change my default password once and only then because ebay was hacked.
It's all in the mind MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Post by: woollypigs on 07 November, 2014, 12:39:25 pm
Dropbox have often been the easiest option to move files from computer to computer.
Where as with Windows, 99% of the time, was just right click, share and you were up and running.
I'm now at wars with crunchbang to get it to share with crunchbang, arrgghh! Happily remote desktop, ssh but for the life of me can I get to see a folder on the other laptop in the file browser, can I heck!
ok using gadmin-samba got it to play ball, but what an over complicated program to use to get a simple share to run.
Post by: Bledlow on 07 November, 2014, 12:50:02 pm
Ironically, Microshaft who make these rules available through their group policy now advise that system administrators don't force users to change their passwords too frequently because it leads to use of weaker passwords.You mean . . . they've finally seen sense! :o
Post by: Afasoas on 07 November, 2014, 01:10:48 pm
Never got on with network share on linux, samba with gui on ubuntu sometime worked, but I have always had to hack/kick/scream about to get it somewhat working.
Dropbox have often been the easiest option to move files from computer to computer.
Where as with Windows, 99% of the time, was just right click, share and you were up and running.
I'm now at wars with crunchbang to get it to share with crunchbang, arrgghh! Happily remote desktop, ssh but for the life of me can I get to see a folder on the other laptop in the file browser, can I heck!
ok using gadmin-samba got it to play ball, but what an over complicated program to use to get a simple share to run.
You don't need samba for sharing linux to linux. Use NFS?
Post by: woollypigs on 07 November, 2014, 01:15:17 pm
You don't need samba for sharing linux to linux. Use NFS?A bit over my head and I have never really got it to work that way. The simple GUI that was on Ubuntu where you point to a folder and say share, is something I like :)
Post by: tiermat on 07 November, 2014, 01:22:33 pm
Never got on with network share on linux, samba with gui on ubuntu sometime worked, but I have always had to hack/kick/scream about to get it somewhat working.
Dropbox have often been the easiest option to move files from computer to computer.
Where as with Windows, 99% of the time, was just right click, share and you were up and running.
I'm now at wars with crunchbang to get it to share with crunchbang, arrgghh! Happily remote desktop, ssh but for the life of me can I get to see a folder on the other laptop in the file browser, can I heck!
ok using gadmin-samba got it to play ball, but what an over complicated program to use to get a simple share to run.
You don't need samba for sharing linux to linux. Use NFS?
After years of supporting a multitude of systems, my first response, when asked how to shae files between servers, is "DO NOT use NFS!" It's shit, it's flaky, it falls over and causes all sorts of issues and it's shit.
As daft as it sounds, SAMBA is possibly the most reliable options for sharing files, even in a single OS environment (and the only real choice in a mixed OS one)
Post by: Kim on 07 November, 2014, 01:37:01 pm
Samba makes assumptions about file ownership which can be suboptimal. It's the only sane option when Windows is involved. It's slightly less simple to set up, and tends to Just Work until something (usually authentication or name resolution related) goes wrong at the Windows end.
SFTP doesn't require any setting up, and Just Works over the internet as well as it does on the LAN. Throughput is a bit iffy, and it's not transparent. No use with Windows as the server.
SSHFS is a thing of beauty and a joy forever (at least for laptops offsite). Requires FUSE and a bit of manual intervention, and again, windows doesn't have a server by default.
Dropbox is quick and easy for sharing files over the internet without having to worry too hard about authentication. You have to pay attention to how synchronised the local files are, and obviously file size becomes an issue. The Android client is a piece of shit, and I expect the IOS client likewise.
Dropping things in a webserver directory is often a winning strategy for sharing files with randoms.
Sneakernet still has its uses.
Basically, 30 years of mainstream computer networking, and nobody's come up with a way to share files easily. How did that happen?
(My real bugbear is the way the Gnome GUI tools pretend to mount network shares transparently, which works fine for the file manager and a handful of Gnome apps, but leaves the user scratching their head when some other standard non-Gnome application can't see the 'mount' that the file it was launched by double clicking on exists in. If you're not doing it in fstab, it's going to confuse you at some point.)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 November, 2014, 01:55:52 pm
Dropbox is quick and easy for sharing files over the internet without having to worry too hard about authentication. You have to pay attention to how synchronised the local files are, and obviously file size becomes an issue. The Android client is a piece of shit, and I expect the IOS client likewise.
The IOS Dropbox app works but has some "features" which are massively annoying when viewing large PDFs.
Post by: Kim on 07 November, 2014, 02:00:32 pm
That's "less annoying" in the sense of "no more annoying than anything else you do on that platform", of course.
Post by: Zipperhead on 07 November, 2014, 02:23:31 pm
At work we use Skype. We use skype for communicating with customers as well. It's not perfect, but in general it does what's needed in an easy to use manner. As long as there's a phone or internet connection I can use skype on whatever device I have with me.
But one customer insists that we use Microsoft "Lync. If you've never had to install it, I can't begin to describe to you what a great big pile of shit it is. The slurry tank on the farm, feed by 200 cows, contains less liquid shit than one single Lync client installation.
Once I had got through the installation and all of the configuration options it then required me to reboot my machine (for a messaging client installation?) and guess what? Oh, because I've just installed Lync, my machine now needs to install 35, yes thirty fucking five, new updates. With a reboot afterwards. Several hours wasted on unproductive crap.
And, and, and, and and, I'm one of the lucky ones because I don't have ms office on my machine. If I did, there are then all sorts of version incompatibilities to deal with.
This is just for the "basic" version, no doubt the "enterprise" version is even more of a bastard.
And (sorry, bad grammar again I know) do you know what? For days at a time the client hasn't been able to log into the server and even when it has the client has never used it to communicate with us.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 07 November, 2014, 02:42:15 pm
http://www.tecmint.com/scp-commands-examples/ (http://www.tecmint.com/scp-commands-examples/)
Post by: woollypigs on 07 November, 2014, 02:55:30 pm
Post by: Kim on 07 November, 2014, 03:16:12 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 07 November, 2014, 05:26:42 pm
I'm subscribing to the opinion that if you are doing anything that is even remotely out of the ordinary, the command line wins. It also seems to impress the folk who I live with :thumbsup:
I experimented with Zentyal on my Linux Server - it does seem fairly robust. Once it is set-up, configuring a Linux server is much easier from someone coming from a Windows background. Unfortunately I ditched it because it doesn't work with ZFS.
But one customer insists that we use Microsoft "Lync. If you've never had to install it, I can't begin to describe to you what a great big pile of shit it is. The slurry tank on the farm, feed by 200 cows, contains less liquid shit than one single Lync client installation.
It's not the first time I've read this rant. Wailing and gnashing of teeth seems to be a key part of the Lync installation ritual.
Post by: Chris S on 07 November, 2014, 05:33:14 pm
FWIW I find SAMBA more than up to streaming 1080p movies from a RaspPi (Samsung 1Tb USB drive) "file server" to a RaspPi "media server" (RaspBMC).
Post by: davelodwig on 07 November, 2014, 10:44:07 pm
I experimented with Zentyal on my Linux Server - it does seem fairly robust. Once it is set-up, configuring a Linux server is much easier from someone coming from a Windows background. Unfortunately I ditched it because it doesn't work with ZFS.
Nothing works with ZFS, not even the OS it's designed to come with, using ZFS to do replication across the wire to an offsite data centre for redundancy purposes worked, in theory but the ability of it to decide it didn't like it's own disks was outstanding.
There are days in my past that make me glad I've moved full time into development and the day my boss proudly told us the major part of our infrastructure was running ZFS was one of them.
Post by: Afasoas on 07 November, 2014, 11:27:48 pm
FWIW I find SAMBA more than up to streaming 1080p movies from a RaspPi (Samsung 1Tb USB drive) "file server" to a RaspPi "media server" (RaspBMC).
I've streamed to RaspBMC on openElec from a Synology NAS using NFS and CIFS. SD and 720p were fine, but 1080p using CIFS resulted in less than smooth playback and occasional buffering.
That said, NFS didn't always work and I didn't persevere long enough to find out why. Perhaps there was something wrong with my network at the time.
Nothing works with ZFS, not even the OS it's designed to come with, using ZFS to do replication across the wire to an offsite data centre for redundancy purposes worked, in theory but the ability of it to decide it didn't like it's own disks was outstanding.
Although there are one or two gotchas, it's been easy to set-up and plays quite nicely with Ubuntu server. The native file system is ext4, I'm only using ZFS for data disks. I haven't done any benchmarking yet, but file transfers run up to the limit of my gigabit network, versus a real world 60 mbyte/second using the Syno NAS. That said, using in a production environment (as oppose to a home server) could be another kettle of fish.
Post by: David Martin on 08 November, 2014, 06:17:06 pm
I tried very hard to get on with NFS, but I could never quite get auto-mounts to work correctly. Then of course there's the whole user mapping thing between machines.
the proper answer this is that you don't do user mapping, you use a directory service and network mounted drives for home directories.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 November, 2014, 11:58:52 am
Stupid FOREIGN SCIENCE!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 November, 2014, 01:42:19 pm
Bah! SCIENCE cannot cope with certain characters in path >:(
SCIENCE is updating tags on .mp3 files. Path includes band and album names. iThings library contains much Sigur Rós and Motörhead. This could be a long afternoon.
Post by: ian on 18 November, 2014, 07:05:59 pm
You are shit.
I buy music elsewhere. It downloads. Amazon even put it into my iTunes library for me. Just like that. They'd bake me a cake if I let them. Probably.
From you, I get a big poo sandwich. There was a problem downloading these items. Your network connection has reset.
Oh no it hasn't you dairylea-brained bonobo botherers. You have just one job, iTunes store, and that's letting me purchase the damn album.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 November, 2014, 10:16:11 pm
No, we'll hide it "in iCloud" and make you hunt around for the thing you've just spent seven quid on.
But we'll whack U-fucking-2 on your machine because we're too cool to have a checkbox for you to say "no, I do not wish to give free publicity to a sanctimonious tax-dodging git".
Grrrr!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 November, 2014, 07:03:06 pm
Oh, it's just finished and wants a reboot. Bah!
Edit: 33 minutes from clicking restart clicky thing to desktop reappearing. Gates onna stick!
Post by: ian on 19 November, 2014, 07:59:35 pm
Strangely, when Apple decide to let Bono lay a turd on my hard drive, there's none of this your network connection has been reset business.
Post by: Afasoas on 20 November, 2014, 10:14:07 am
UAC needs to be temporarily disabled prior to installation - which means forcing users to reboot and leaving one of Windows prime safety features disabled for an undetermined length of time.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 November, 2014, 01:25:05 pm
And I've deleted it.
Permanently.
Tw@ >:(
Post by: Zipperhead on 20 November, 2014, 02:00:54 pm
Downloading it song by song worked for some reason.
Strangely, when Apple decide to let Bono lay a turd on my hard drive, there's none of this your network connection has been reset business.
Karma has been to help you. Uniting the themes that are cycling, yacf's favourite (alright, most quoted) newspaper, and the cnut that is Bonio - bonio falls off bike in new york and has surgery (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/19/bono-surgery-bike-fall-new-york-u2)
As the comment underneath says "and people say there's no good news in the papers"
Post by: Bledlow on 20 November, 2014, 02:19:08 pm
Post by: Ham on 21 November, 2014, 09:49:47 am
But.
For some unknown reason one of the major features you are trumpeting about in the upgrade are the changes to the Lock Screen. How you can have notifications appear and use them to go directly to the feature. How you can swipe one way and get the phone, another way to get the camera and a third way to unlock. WOULD YOU PLEASE LOOK UP THE WORD "LOCK" ON GOOGLE? All I want from a lock screen is to LOCK THE FLAMING THING. Not hard is it? If I wanted more ways to UNLOCK the phone, I wouldn't ask for a LOCK screen I'd ask for a LAUNCH screen. Let me see if there are messages,emails waiting for me if I UNLOCK, great. Maybe even if I've missed a call, but if I lock the screen I really dont want to end up dialing someone with my arse, texting them with my keys or changing the setting beyond recognition, all things that can happen to an unprotected phone. I WANT SAFE PHONES. Trumpet that you useless bunch.
(and before you say you can replace the lock screen, no lock screen I have found is a is simple and as functional as the previous KitKat and before lock screens, any suggestions welcome)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 November, 2014, 11:46:08 am
(Flees the Wrath of Ham)
Post by: woollypigs on 21 November, 2014, 01:07:00 pm
Post by: ian on 21 November, 2014, 02:22:02 pm
Except it turns out that 'Cisco Jabber Video' isn't 'Cisco Jabber Video for Telepresence' (obviously). The latter I have no credentials for but I can request them. Which takes 72 hours of Indian call centre shuffling. Super.
Post by: mcshroom on 25 November, 2014, 11:38:00 am
While watching an incredibly boring
AtoS* have been rolling a new system out for over a year - could they have tried finishing the changes before migrating everyone instead of offering a half finished product?
*need I say more
Post by: rr on 25 November, 2014, 12:45:56 pm
We are going through a complete computer system replacementbecause the current one came out of the ark and MS will no longer support itto "improve our employee IT working environment".
While watching an incredibly boringPowerpointe-learning module, I've just been told that they are migrating us from Lotus Notes to MS Outlook - but haven't worked out how to do some of the important things in outlook so we are keeping notes as well, and will have to do extra steps for common tasks, like booking meetings into people's calendars (book participants in Outlook, room in Notes).
AtoS* have been rolling a new system out for over a year - could they have tried finishing the changes before migrating everyone instead of offering a half finished product?
*need I say more
Ditto steria
Break the network every week and spend three days fixing it.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 25 November, 2014, 12:59:36 pm
but haven't worked out how to do some of the important things in outlook so we are keeping notes as well, and will have to do extra steps for common tasks, like booking meetings into people's calendars (book participants in Outlook, room in Notes).Are they truly thick?
This is really easy to to in Outlook.
Oh, sorry, I missed the bit where you said it was ATOS. Yeah, truly thick.
Post by: ian on 25 November, 2014, 01:06:42 pm
Post by: Kim on 25 November, 2014, 01:30:38 pm
Student appointments are booked in Outlook calendars, which seems to work. When the student arrives for the appointment, reception staff change the text in the appointment to add a prefix, indicating this.
Which means barakta and her colleagues all have to manually poll the outlook calendar for changes whenever they're expecting a student, rather than get on with some useful work. Obviously students arriving early will wait in reception until such a time as the relevant member of staff thinks to poll the calendar, even if it would otherwise be convenient to see the student early.
This saves the overworked reception staff time, apparently. Not sure what it's supposed to achieve for the overworked disability and learning support staff.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 25 November, 2014, 03:32:15 pm
If you alter an Outlook 'meeting', normally Outlook sends an updated meeting request to all participants. This arrives as a new email, pinging up on your desktop. That's standard Outlook behaviour.
Post by: barakta on 25 November, 2014, 04:04:57 pm
And we can't just invite 'reception' cos they end up switching between their personal logins and some central counselling legacy login cos no one can set up mailboxes and calendars properly on Exchange cos they're fucking morons. They also wouldn't want about 20 invites x9 for us a week...
I have worked a hack to the manual polling requirement (which doesn't give any notification). Stick a mailto hyperlink with custom To: Subject: Body: content for each colleague which is pasted by us in the body of calendar items when we create the item.
Reception can now either add the prefix and/or Click the Nice Linky which should generate an email from their outlook and click sendy.. This will at least create an alert at our end and we can config our ends to be more annoying if we wish to (aka I can do this for about 9 members of staff)...
Boss is going to take it to admin boss tomorrow - I've created test examples in my calendar for her to demonstrate with. See if admin boss comes back with something better than "Am I bovvered" although that's a rant for a whole other fucking rant thread.
Post by: ian on 28 November, 2014, 02:50:47 pm
Anyway, Salesforce, or SFDC as the Americans insist on redundantly saying. We have to use it. It doesn't matter if kittens cry at the thought. That's not even my rant. I've come to terms with having to use not one but two (O the humanity!) versions of the damn thing. It's the accretion of security. Not sufficient were passwords. Not even the insistence on passwords like A1x&||78*eF£@$ (see rants passim) is secure enough. Oh no, then we needed machine tokens. Download them. Jump through more hoops. Secure. Oh no. Now it can only be accessed via the VPN with a token and a cryptically unrememberable password that changes everything 15 seconds.
Or it would, except using the VPN pipes our internet traffic through the mothership proxy. Can we guess which website it blocks?
Post by: woollypigs on 28 November, 2014, 06:21:27 pm
Post by: ian on 28 November, 2014, 11:08:19 pm
Oh, and thanks for just putting some playlists on my iPhone. I appreciate your judgement is better than mine but when I'm on the train and I pull out my phone and seek my lovingly curated collection of tunes, I might expect said playlist to be there and not still languishing on my computer.
Just the one job, Apple. That's all I ask.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 November, 2014, 11:44:17 am
Post by: Chris S on 29 November, 2014, 08:03:06 pm
A recent upgrade to lubuntu on my laptop rather destabilised things - with daily kernel panics and random lock-ups.
Now the damn thing won't start at all. I got into a bash prompt and was able to run the backup scripts so nowt will be lost (Linux rsync/rsnapshot backups FTW), but it's still a PITA. ::-)
Post by: Chris S on 29 November, 2014, 11:43:14 pm
Time for a new SSD I think...
Post by: Jaded on 30 November, 2014, 12:06:47 am
Give my printer back, you SFB.
Post by: ian on 30 November, 2014, 11:28:15 am
I learned at my mother's knee that if you want to manage tracks, playlists and so forth on an iThing it is much less of a headache in the long term to do it manually.
Well, it's fine when it works. Which it mostly does. One placelist has decided not to transfer for no reason that iTunes would like to disclose. Not even a cryptic error 'err -4895467845 error' message nor even the über-'unknown error'. It just doesn't. It seems the people behind iTunes have decided that rather fix the errors they'll just remove the messages. What problem? I don't see no steenkin' problem. Just to double-weird me, the playlist is on my iPad fine. It claims it's on the iPhone too, but it's not actually there when I press playlist.
Also, despite transferring 933 items of cover art, it didn't transfer the art for the new albums I put on the damn iPad. But it did for the iPhone.
It's like the Mighty Huh?
If you first sync doesn't work try again. Then tryn some more.
Post by: Diver300 on 09 December, 2014, 10:27:04 pm
[some lower case letters]@[domain that you are hosting]
that you have previously used as the address to send me emails?
I have even tried using a domain that ends .co.uk rather than the slightly more obscure but still been around for 10 years .me.uk and still got told it was invalid.
It does not make using their website easy.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 December, 2014, 10:14:59 am
plz to not be disappearing my USB hard drive like that
also why need to "install necessary files on my system" for something that was working fine when I hibernated the Babbage-Engine last night?
kthxbai
Post by: Pickled Onion on 10 December, 2014, 12:43:24 pm
Why is this a rant? Because the "From:" address is not necessarily the same as the "Reply-To:" address, so when I phone up it's no good telling me you've sent me an email if you've sent it somewhere else entirely!
Post by: Kim on 10 December, 2014, 12:52:46 pm
Same goes for the copy&paste behaviour described above, of course, but I reckon the absence of threading is slightly less irritating than actively incorrect threading.
Post by: Basil on 10 December, 2014, 09:23:36 pm
Bollix.
Post by: Feanor on 10 December, 2014, 10:21:51 pm
and got a terrible pain in all the LEDs down it's right side.
But it continues to compute correctly.
The smell is that of Electrolytic Capacitors that have let the smoke out, but it turned out not.
Strip-down and I find that an I/O PCB which has several USB ports and the LAN port, and a tiny connector for the 'Tron' decorative LED strips has failed.
Specifically, the 'Tron' LED connector and the cable coming from it has burned and melted.
The melted remains of the connector on the PCB still contains the connector part of the destroyed cable.
Faulty connector or cable, I'd guess.
I can source a new PCB, with a week's lead time, but the cable is more difficult.
I've just de-soldered the melted SMD connector from the board and cleaned the board up.
I'm hoping the board is otherwise undamaged, and can be pressed back into service in the meantime.
I can't leave the whole board out, as the main CPU fan connector is also on it.
Re-assembly tomorrow night and hopefully we can be back up, but without decorative LEDs.
Post by: Kim on 10 December, 2014, 11:52:45 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 December, 2014, 01:30:13 am
You're supposed only to be backing up the files wot have changed since the last full backup. This could conceivably be as many as 120 files, assuming iThings updating the play count is considered a change. And I don't think it is.
Why, then, in the name of Beelzebub's bollocks are you apparently backing up the whole directory tree? Tw@.
Post by: Feanor on 11 December, 2014, 10:21:25 pm
The entire machine is re-assembled.
All is well.
I have to say, the machine is very well engineered.
There's a massive amount of 3-d engineering gone on to fit all that into the case.
Everything is serviceable and modular and removable very easily.
Well impressed.
Post by: fuaran on 11 December, 2014, 10:51:39 pm
But for some reason the system restore broke Firefox, so I had to reinstall that.
Post by: Ham on 11 December, 2014, 11:36:13 pm
Post by: Oaky on 12 December, 2014, 08:15:06 am
Another update b0rked Virtualbox in an amusingly comprehensive manner - nothing gets anywhere near starting - and the only way to fix is to reverse the update.
Is that 4.3.20? I wa going to update mine today (currently 4.3.12) but might hold off in that case.
Post by: Ham on 12 December, 2014, 10:00:46 am
Another update b0rked Virtualbox in an amusingly comprehensive manner - nothing gets anywhere near starting - and the only way to fix is to reverse the update.
Is that 4.3.20? I wa going to update mine today (currently 4.3.12) but might hold off in that case.
4.3.2 is sound, the problem is with KB3004394 (which has other issues, too https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_update/windows-update-kb3004394-issues/ace25277-7f65-4486-bc44-c1b106907a18) which was in the last batch of Win7 upgrades (I'm running VB on a W7 host). Solution is straightforward -uninstall update.
Post by: Oaky on 12 December, 2014, 10:28:36 am
Post by: Zipperhead on 12 December, 2014, 02:32:09 pm
But one customer insists that we use Microsoft "Lync. If you've never had to install it, I can't begin to describe to you what a great big pile of shit it is. The slurry tank on the farm, feed by 200 cows, contains less liquid shit than one single Lync client installation.
It's not the first time I've read this rant. Wailing and gnashing of teeth seems to be a key part of the Lync installation ritual.
It's an even bigger pile of shit than I could possibly imagine. I've seen farm slurry tanks that are smaller piles of shit - and at least they're useful.
Yesterday evening there was an issue at a customers. A number of us were working on it, and I had extracted some information that might (or might not) have been pertinent. The person opposite me was communicating with the customer using Lync (the whole reason why we installed it), so I thought that I would us it to send him the information.
This information comprised 11 lines of ascii characters (all 7 bit), 672 bytes in total. So I pasted it into link, pressed return and got the message "message too large" or similar.
672 bytes too large?
What possible use is this piece of overcomplicated crap? As far as I can see the only benefit it offers over skype is ldap integration, apart from that it's all downhill using ships anchors for assitance.
Post by: TheLurker on 12 December, 2014, 04:39:44 pm
Google. Yes, OK Eclipse _is_ a bit of a peat-fired Swiss Army chainsaw, but if you are going to push your shiny new Android Studio as its replacement then at least allow those of us wise enough to wait for version 2 to do just that rather than forcing everyone to use version 1. I mean any fule kno that the first cut of a product is always buggy rubbish which should be left to enthusiastic idiots^h^h^h^h^h early adopters. Chiz, chiz.
And I bet it won't work with the SVN plug-ins I've got installed. *sigh*
P.S. Lync? S'OK. Its screen sharing is miles simpler (ergo better) than Skype's.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 December, 2014, 05:23:59 pm
Did I tell you to change the location of the iTunes media folder from Z:\iTunes to somewhere on D:?
Why, no. No, I did not.
So why did you decide to change it anyway? It's not as if Z: has magickally Ceased To Be as you appear perfectly capable of finding the Stuffs already on it. You utter twat.
Post by: Zipperhead on 21 December, 2014, 10:54:43 am
I've just got a new machine with 8.1 on it. I had already decided that if I couldn't stand it then it wouldn't be much effort to put 7 onto it.
Microsoft have broken a perfectly good and well evolved UI so that everybody can treat it as a tablet? Classicshell fixed most of that in a few minutes (thank goodness) but the thing that it can't fix is how patronising this version of windows is.
Microsoft, I'm not going to set up a microsoft account just so that I can log into this machine!
For the moment it's staying, but I've put Windows 7 into a vm on it - just in case.
Post by: redshift on 21 December, 2014, 12:01:04 pm
Now I know why people have ranted about Windows 8.So glad it's not just me.
I've just got a new machine with 8.1 on it. I had already decided that if I couldn't stand it then it wouldn't be much effort to put 7 onto it.
Microsoft have broken a perfectly good and well evolved UI so that everybody can treat it as a tablet? Classicshell fixed most of that in a few minutes (thank goodness) but the thing that it can't fix is how patronising this version of windows is.
Microsoft, I'm not going to set up a microsoft account just so that I can log into this machine!
For the moment it's staying, but I've put Windows 7 into a vm on it - just in case.
I constructed a baby Intel Nuc box a few weeks ago to finally replace my 8-year-old XP/Linux dual-boot machine. I used the Nuc kit that takes a real HDD not just an SSD. I was going to use Win8.1 Hyper-V to host the Linux VM which would be a dupe of the dev box at work, but having installed it and set it up, I rapidly became so disenchanted with it that I simply carved the HDD in half and put Linux on the second partition. Sadly, I know I'll need to boot into Win at some point to write some stuff in Visual Studio, but until then forget it.
How is it possible to break something so badly? I remember the legal 'Look-and-feel' battles through the 90's, and all that stuff about how developers should always respect the menu and naming conventions (especially for Apple) so that the interface would always work in an expected fashion for the user. Clearly they weren't even preaching to the choir...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 December, 2014, 01:21:40 pm
Why, no! No, they do not.
Some Swiss outfit offer an add-on which they claim to do the biz, which is free for private users, but although I've downloaded it I haven't installed it yet.
I somehow managed to start the Camera "app" yesterday and couldn't figure out how to exit it again. Task Manager to the rescue. Can the "apps" be uninstalled?
Post by: tiermat on 21 December, 2014, 05:22:52 pm
Oi! Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia! No!
Did I tell you to change the location of the iTunes media folder from Z:\iTunes to somewhere on D:?
Why, no. No, I did not.
So why did you decide to change it anyway? It's not as if Z: has magickally Ceased To Be as you appear perfectly capable of finding the Stuffs already on it. You utter twat.
As I discovered, recently, you should cut out the middleman and just use UNCs for the library location, it not only means you don't need to mount the drive, but it performs better (as anything that bypasses windows drive mounts always will)
Post by: Feanor on 21 December, 2014, 10:49:04 pm
We sell high-end petrophysical software.
I am one of the final-level support people who get the actual petrophysics issues, rather than the software issues.
I have a Dude who has loaded a bunch of data into our program.
It does some simple regressions and gives some gradients.
He says Excel gives different regression results.
It's all down to rounding.
Once the data is loaded in out program, it's *displayed* to X decimal places in the grid.
But the data remains stored in full-precision.
The regression is done using the full-precision values.
If he tries a regression in Excel by manually typing the rounded values visible in the grid, it *will* be different ( but not by much )
This seems a reasonable explanation, and is in fact stated in the documentation.
But no, I have to waste several hours demonstrating the issue in Excel using the displayed values and the true values.
Post by: David Martin on 21 December, 2014, 11:06:07 pm
Post by: David Martin on 21 December, 2014, 11:10:16 pm
I know the customer is always right, but informing them that you don't sell 12' bargepoles and even if you did you wouldn't touch Excel for numerical modelling with one..
R does nice regression modelling - and has a verifiable level of accuracy as it is open sauce.
Post by: redshift on 22 December, 2014, 01:31:31 pm
Hmm.. Excel for numeric work? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167947308001618 for a start.
I know the customer is always right, but informing them that you don't sell 12' bargepoles and even if you did you wouldn't touch Excel for numerical modelling with one..
R does nice regression modelling - and has a verifiable level of accuracy as it is open sauce.
Excel for numerical work may be considered a step up from excel as a "database", which is what I've been fighting for the last six months. I have some 15,000+ assets to wrangle in differently ordered and differently structured spreadsheets, with different naming conventions, written by people who couldn't spell. Oh, and up to 46 assets in any one cell.
I'm starting to think that excel for anything other than adding 2+2 (for limited degrees of precision) is a bad thing. It might have been quicker to hire somebody to go round and re-tag all the assets from scratch.
Post by: barakta on 22 December, 2014, 04:33:18 pm
And yes the spelling/formatting differently is maddening too. I haven't been allowed consistent admin support in recording our equipment loan pool items as they go out so every admin does it SLIGHTLY differently enough that I can't sort the data. I spend as long going in and sanitising the data as I would doing the fucking data entry myself except I can't actually do data entry cos it seems to be a style of typing which sets off my RSI pronto... And despite 3 requests for them NOT to, they are STILL using dots in dates which in excel doesn't work properly without fudging...
Admin staff who can't even use Excel to a basic standard "cos they're only support staff" who aren't seen as worthy of CPD and training by their useless twunt of a manager. If I was their manager training in basic office packages every year would be MANDATORY and they'd have to do refreshers and use the skills properly cos we waste hours with crap data entry and stuff.
Post by: David Martin on 22 December, 2014, 09:54:21 pm
Post by: Wombat on 23 December, 2014, 08:15:52 am
Now I know why people have ranted about Windows 8.
I've just got a new machine with 8.1 on it. I had already decided that if I couldn't stand it then it wouldn't be much effort to put 7 onto it.
Microsoft have broken a perfectly good and well evolved UI so that everybody can treat it as a tablet? Classicshell fixed most of that in a few minutes (thank goodness) but the thing that it can't fix is how patronising this version of windows is.
Microsoft, I'm not going to set up a microsoft account just so that I can log into this machine!
For the moment it's staying, but I've put Windows 7 into a vm on it - just in case.
You don't need to have a Microsoft account, whatever they tell you. Mine has no startup password, and there is no MS account on it. I too got duped into thinknig you had to, but you don't, but they make it as un-obvious as possible to find this. On the (very) rare occasions I use Skype, its a separate "desktop" version, not the bloody "app" and I share Mr L's desire to get rid of all the useless apps and use "proper program(me)s" When a stupid app pops up, Mr L, just do it the old fashioned way, alt-F4 gets rid of it! Alt-F4 is also my default method of closing down Win 8.1, rather than farting about with their silly shut down structure. Alt-f4, enter, is all thats needed.
Post by: Jaded on 23 December, 2014, 09:12:05 am
Post by: Afasoas on 23 December, 2014, 10:53:35 am
I tend to remove all the silly apps from the metro start window and then add my most used short cuts to real applications.
The simplest method of shutting down is pressing the power button. Or Alt+F4 as Wombat says. I must admit 8.1 is slightly better with the power button on the Metro Start window.
Post by: Feanor on 23 December, 2014, 11:45:14 am
At work, I sometimes have to write VBS scripts which run from the Task Scheduler to synchronise stuffs from one set of databases to another.
In VBS, I do this using something called ADO.
This abstracts all the various database types into a single 'Connection' object, which you deal with.
There are various drivers ( 'Providers' ) which ADO can call depending on what kind of data source you are connecting to.
So there are providers for SQL server, Oracle, Access .MDB files etc etc.
You simply specify which provider to use in the 'Connection String' you pass to the Connection object.
Interestingly, I see that the Access .mdb provider (Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0) can actually open much more than .mbd databases.
It can open .xls and other files too ( though I've never tried it myself ).
This would give you the ability to interact with the .xls using a SQL-like syntax.
You could, for example, write scripts to pull out various things from the spreadsheet, and put them into proper tables in a real DB.
Post by: David Martin on 23 December, 2014, 11:49:21 am
Post by: Zipperhead on 23 December, 2014, 02:03:30 pm
Microsoft, I'm not going to set up a microsoft account just so that I can log into this machine!
You don't need to have a Microsoft account, whatever they tell you. Mine has no startup password, and there is no MS account on it. I too got duped into thinknig you had to, but you don't, but they make it as un-obvious as possible to find this. On the (very) rare occasions I use Skype, its a separate "desktop" version, not the bloody "app" and I share Mr L's desire to get rid of all the useless apps and use "proper program(me)s" When a stupid app pops up, Mr L, just do it the old fashioned way, alt-F4 gets rid of it! Alt-F4 is also my default method of closing down Win 8.1, rather than farting about with their silly shut down structure. Alt-f4, enter, is all thats needed.
[/quote]
I managed to set it up without one, but to add to the rant.....
Microchuffingsoftinthebrain. When on my windows 8.1 machine I go to add a new user account, and I tell you "no thanks, I do not wish to connect this account with a microsoft online account", please don't fucking patronise me and tell me why I should. I have been dealing with this shit for long enough to know better. Why don't you just have a check box that asks "do you have a clue?", obviously no help should be provided on that.
And whilst on the subject.... this machine is so vastly overpowered in every respect that it's certainly smarter than me, it's capable of disk throughput that would have had the NSA and GCHQ wetting their drawers about not too many years ago, but when I had got past the patronising attitude and tablet interface and windows started to add the user account, why did it take getting on for 15 minutes? 15 minutes of being shown "useful" messages and pretty screens? 15 seconds is more than it required.
And another rant at microsoft windows.... I can think of about 8 major versions of windows ove r the last 20+ years, in that time the hardware has grown such that an original PC compatible probably wouldn't have sufficient power to run a modern USB port, but still windows is welded to the paradigm of drive letters. But worse than that. Much worse, it still wants all user accounts to live with all their files in drive C.
After such ranting, I must add an anti-rant. Something I've found that Windows 8 does do - you can right click on an iso image and mount it as a drive. *rant* about bloody time!
Post by: David Martin on 23 December, 2014, 02:44:02 pm
After such ranting, I must add an anti-rant. Something I've found that Windows 8 does do - you can right click on an iso image and mount it as a drive. *rant* about bloody time!
You've been able to do that for some time. Since XP at least, though it may have required thrid party helpers. And there was a sort of mount option for splicing drives into paths unix-lite style in DOS from way back. But it was always behind the curve.
Post by: tiermat on 31 December, 2014, 10:31:05 am
Why the fuck was I so stupid as to set up TLD's tablet, the first time, with my G+ details?
It didn't really affect me until I did a full wipe/restore on my tablet, which is now downloading and installing all sorts of crap suitable for a 10 yr old.
Thing is, I'm not a 10 yr old!
Post by: mcshroom on 31 December, 2014, 11:03:32 am
Post by: Valiant on 03 January, 2015, 12:35:12 pm
Post by: ian on 03 January, 2015, 07:40:47 pm
Whereas I'm not allowed to talk about the afterlife, I think I'm safe revealing that lawyers only take the down escalator when life finally manages to shrug them off and let's just say their eternity of torments runs to a lot more than 37 pages. And they televise it. It's the probably the most popular programme in Hell after their own version of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
Post by: Feanor on 03 January, 2015, 07:46:31 pm
After such ranting, I must add an anti-rant. Something I've found that Windows 8 does do - you can right click on an iso image and mount it as a drive. *rant* about bloody time!
You've been able to do that for some time. Since XP at least, though it may have required thrid party helpers. And there was a sort of mount option for splicing drives into paths unix-lite style in DOS from way back. But it was always behind the curve.
Native ISO mounting has not been available in any previous version of Windows.
It has required a 3-rd party utility like Virtual Clone Drive to do it.
I don't have win8 here, but if it's anything like their support for zip files in explorer, you will still want the 3-rd party tools!
Mount Points for volumes has been around since XP, IIRC, and I've used on occasion, but I've not seen it used In Real Life.
Post by: David Martin on 03 January, 2015, 11:38:35 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 January, 2015, 02:35:03 pm
<Brick Top>
Now fuck off!
</Brick Top>
Post by: Wombat on 04 January, 2015, 03:58:31 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 January, 2015, 06:56:17 pm
And another thing: how come teh Stupiz old XP laptop doesn't recognise the USB disk drive? It knows it's there but it dun't show up in Explorer.
Bah!
Post by: Biggsy on 04 January, 2015, 07:01:24 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 January, 2015, 11:14:28 pm
Post by: Biggsy on 05 January, 2015, 02:22:12 pm
GPT no good with XP 32-bit, for egg sample.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 January, 2015, 09:01:39 pm
But sometimes Windows removes drive letters for no apparent reason - at least it does on my Babbage Engines - then the drive will be invisible in Explorer. Or it's corrupted or an incompatible partition type or size. Try Disk Management in any case.
This appears to be happening with the old external drive; it drops off the radar for no resdily apparent reason save old age midway theough copying Stuffs to it. Which is annoying.
GPT no good with XP 32-bit, for egg sample.
Ah. All becomes clear(er).
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 January, 2015, 11:23:46 pm
Honestly, sometimes you make $BIG_BROTHER_CONTESTANT look like Brian Cox and his big helichopter.
Post by: Kim on 06 January, 2015, 12:12:17 am
Post by: pcolbeck on 06 January, 2015, 08:46:36 am
Printers. And cloud computing. Nothing good can come of it, I say...
Yeh, bloody tromboning isn’t it. I spend half my life trying to design networks so you don't get tromboning then they go and build it in as a feature ...
Post by: Woofage on 06 January, 2015, 11:28:24 am
Shutting down Windows 8? Oh, how we laughed.
Still having trouble, Jaded? (https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=75454.msg1552828#msg1552828)
I don't use win 8 myself, but my son frequently leaves his machine on and since I pay for the leccy I find the desktop icon that looks like an on/off button quite handy ;).
Post by: Woofage on 06 January, 2015, 11:31:40 am
Post by: jellied on 07 January, 2015, 10:55:39 pm
I've barely got to grips with the chuffing ribbon fellow and now this. why is everything in CAPS. the painful licence code, where has everything gone? don't tell me it's easier than it was before -the tame teenagers in the household are struggling to do anything with it.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 08 January, 2015, 09:55:52 am
It took ages to work out that the text entered on the Set Password page is (silently) truncated to eight characters, but when entering the same into the Log In page it's used in its entirety! Grrr.
Post by: Afasoas on 08 January, 2015, 10:48:54 am
It took ages to work out that the text entered on the Set Password page is (silently) truncated to eight characters
8 characters? It's not secure. Bin it :P
Post by: Pickled Onion on 08 January, 2015, 12:35:53 pm
It took ages to work out that the text entered on the Set Password page is (silently) truncated to eight characters
8 characters? It's not secure. Bin it :P
that's eight chars for the web interface log in - after you've got on to the network via WPA2 or ssh with RSA-only log in allowed from outside.
Post by: aidan.f on 08 January, 2015, 04:08:47 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 08 January, 2015, 04:35:08 pm
Post by: Feanor on 10 January, 2015, 09:52:39 pm
I make some modest network changes, and then I have everyone complaining that the Internet is broken.
<clickety-click> Hmm, I still have sync with the exchange, but no PPP session with AAISP.
<IRC on 'phone's 3G connction>... 'Yes, it's broken.'
Family don't believe it's not my fault, because I've been frobbing with the network!
All back up now.
Post by: Kim on 10 January, 2015, 10:37:08 pm
(No, I don't believe that'll actually work.)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 January, 2015, 07:12:48 pm
Bah!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 January, 2015, 02:49:16 pm
Post by: Biggsy on 14 January, 2015, 07:00:20 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 15 January, 2015, 09:10:47 am
Post by: woollypigs on 15 January, 2015, 09:21:55 am
I really do hope that we never get the urge to get a telly again - Hi I'm Bob, (everyone "Hello Bob") its been about seven years now without a telly. A few years ago I had a looksee in PCcurryWorld at the telly boxes and I honestly didn't know what I was looking at/for. And now you tell me that you need an account to be able to use it, that is just yet another layer of extra choice/option I really don't need/want to be able to watch a rerun.
Post by: pcolbeck on 15 January, 2015, 09:26:42 am
I hate watching TV shows on films on a tiny laptop screen and wont even bother on a tablet or mobile phone. I like my big (well not so big these days but it will do for me) 40 inch screen for that. Also three people round a laptop screen just isn't fun.
Post by: Afasoas on 16 January, 2015, 08:52:30 am
Post by: pcolbeck on 16 January, 2015, 09:30:40 am
Can you try a factory reset of the TV and create a new account?
First thing I tried and its still knows its registered ....
Sony tech support have escalated it to the second level of support. So we wait and see what happens.
Post by: TheLurker on 16 January, 2015, 05:31:30 pm
Two days pissed up against a wall trying and failing to fix a cross-thread locking problem. I _loathe_ multi-threaded applications (but it's the way of the future! chimes the chorus) and if WPF is involved well... why don't you just take me out and shoot me? It would be significantly less painful.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 16 January, 2015, 06:03:27 pm
*sigh*I *love* multi-threaded stuff and have done since [mumble mumble - you don't look That Old!]
Two days pissed up against a wall trying and failing to fix a cross-thread locking problem. I _loathe_ multi-threaded applications (but it's the way of the future! chimes the chorus)
Quote
and if WPF is involved well... why don't you just take me out and shoot me? It would be significantly less painful.I feel your pain. Can't you get your client/employer to use a proper computer?
Post by: Afasoas on 16 January, 2015, 09:25:34 pm
IGMP transmissions saturating a firewalls LAN ports. Very slow transmissions to the WDS clients.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 January, 2015, 12:02:11 am
Post by: matthew on 19 January, 2015, 01:43:33 pm
I shall now find out if Lync is as bad as implied by others.
Post by: TheLurker on 19 January, 2015, 06:50:51 pm
I shall now find out if Lync is as bad as implied by others.Unless they've (M$ natch) truly ballsed it up in the last 12 months then it's not too bad to _use_. I prefer it to Skype and other IM products I've used for reasons gone into previously.
Post by: pcolbeck on 20 January, 2015, 05:44:36 am
WDS Multicast Transmission Fail.
IGMP transmissions saturating a firewalls LAN ports. Very slow transmissions to the WDS clients.
Inefficient multicast is a bit of a known issue with some wireless solutions.
Post by: Afasoas on 20 January, 2015, 11:58:36 am
It's not a wi-fi issue. More of a CARP one. I figure a couple of ports on the switch are configured to be promiscuous in order for the master/slave firewalls to share a virtual IP address. Will need to try implementing some rules on the switch which block multicast traffic from the ports used with the firewalls before trying this again.WDS Multicast Transmission Fail.
IGMP transmissions saturating a firewalls LAN ports. Very slow transmissions to the WDS clients.
Inefficient multicast is a bit of a known issue with some wireless solutions.
Post by: pcolbeck on 20 January, 2015, 01:40:30 pm
Post by: frankly frankie on 20 January, 2015, 11:45:38 pm
Two days pissed up against a wall trying and failing to fix a cross-thread locking problem.
I know. I was putting a pannier carrier on an old alu frame and had the same trouble, totally stripped out, what a bummer.
Stupid media server ... just tried to play "Blonde On Blonde" in, like, totally the wrong order.
Well that sounds like a plus to me, being as how the most iconic song comes last in the track order.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 January, 2015, 02:48:27 am
Most likely you'll go your way...
Post by: David Martin on 26 January, 2015, 10:28:55 pm
Post by: Kim on 26 January, 2015, 10:56:58 pm
The network at work is a notwork. Cue lots of panicking students about deadlines, and staff getting annoyed.
At least there's electricity. This afternoon barakta was bemoaning what appeared to be the loss of a phase in their building, with severe implications for not just computing, but the viabiity of the TEA supply, provision of lunch, and the sense of impending doom that somewhere nearby a transformer was slowly overheating...
Post by: barakta on 26 January, 2015, 11:59:24 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 January, 2015, 06:48:20 pm
Click.
(Scrolls a bit)
Click
(Scrolls a bit more)
Click
(Scrolls at 100 mph halfway down the library, which is Big)
Idiots.
Post by: Chris S on 29 January, 2015, 12:20:08 pm
* does that *
Ah. But now I can't recompile said custom bootstrapper app in Visual Studio 2010 without being in Administrator mode, and I can't just run it elevated because it then gets a different environment to the current logged in user.
BAH!!! I HATE you Microsoft. >:(
Post by: barakta on 29 January, 2015, 03:34:49 pm
Well not a single person, even the usually-positive people have anything nice to say about it... Apparently it crashes, hogs system resources, doesn't work in Chrome, doesn't work intuitively and is taking everyone who suckered themselves into the testing (they weren't supposed to have so many of us) about 3x longer than promised...
And it doesn't look keyboard navigable at this point... Monday's meeting between me and project manager and my boss will be fun. Hoping to escape conference webPHONEcall of doom cos it's all just PAIN at this point.
Oh and our fucking network is behaving erratically. Documents going AWOL between computer and printer. Scanner deciding it will only scan part of a document (thus inconveniencing an already complex to deal with student); the student files and our database both denied the existence of a student I had in my office at the time and then 10 mins later spotted them as if they'd always been there (making me look silly); and my local printer ignored 4x print requests till I turned it and the application off and on again... Fucking gremlins, fuck off.
I am seriously thinking of a "piss off at 4pm" day cos I've had no fucking lunch and my hands hurt and I want to go to sleep!
Post by: Kim on 29 January, 2015, 03:59:51 pm
I am seriously thinking of a "piss off at 4pm" day cos I've had no fucking lunch and my hands hurt and I want to go to sleep!
Also, the pavements haven't actually frozen yet...
Post by: jsabine on 29 January, 2015, 05:56:18 pm
New software "user testing"... [...]
And it doesn't look keyboard navigable at this point...
That's basic not-fit-for-purpose stuff, surely?
Post by: David Martin on 29 January, 2015, 09:51:27 pm
Post by: barakta on 30 January, 2015, 12:52:52 am
David - I think I will be refusing to do more than 45 mins which is my known tolerance; insisting on clear chairing and if I die hideously as I expect I'm walking home 3 hours early and not returning the hours to work on principle. I am however hoping I can extricate myself from the call entirely cos I won't be able to "think" properly and don't want to be held to anything I say while using every braincell I have to parse babblenoise - all male speakers of course which is harder for me.
This has all reminded me why I don't use the phone for anyone except very close family and on my terms. And indeed why I don't use TextRelay with voice carry over mode (speak for self, listen to person and have captioning) cos it broke my brain. I can read and write, or listen and hear but crossing the modalities is very odd as my brain will throw the audio away and read and then I end up with a sort of "you said words?" packet loss situ. Possibly something to do with how my brain does deafie-language processing but makes me look stupid, weird or lying to people who don't know...
Post by: jsabine on 30 January, 2015, 02:20:19 am
apparently keyboard navigability is impossible.
*Please* tell me that at least one of your colleagues who has been roped into participation is unable to use a mouse.
Quote
Problem is that that shows I have some IT knowledge and they'll assume that means I can then tell their programmers how to do it which I can't.
I've always maintained that I've got just enough IT knowledge to convince a project manager that I understand what they're talking about. It does, I think, promote some degree of honesty on their part. (The other way of looking at it is that I've got enough IT knowledge to spot when a PM is lying to me. Yeah, yeah, his lips are moving ...)
Quote
I can read and write, or listen and hear but crossing the modalities is very odd as my brain will throw the audio away and read and then I end up with a sort of "you said words?" packet loss situ. Possibly something to do with how my brain does deafie-language processing but makes me look stupid, weird or lying to people who don't know...
It's that sort of statement that jolts me into realising I have even less understanding of other people's situations than I normally kid myself I've got. It is *so* easy to think that everyone's English, so they'll all be fine with language; we know we need to offer adjustments, so let's book a palantypist because hey, everyone'll get on just fine reading it. Memo to self: assumption=bad. Delusions of understanding=bad. Listening and accepting=better.
Post by: barakta on 30 January, 2015, 02:58:01 pm
The issue is as much expecting me to educate them on how to meet my access needs (not my job) as it is shite project management. Neither project manager is techie and as you say the IT bods can flummox them with bullshit. They think the law is on their side; I know it isn't, but I know ONLY a disabled person directly affected (me for example) would be able to enforce it and that's hugely risky as well as exhausting.
I will sue them if I have to. But I have to "play the game" up to that point. Increasingly tempted to draft a freedom of information request on what specialist IT consultancy they have had on this and other projects in the uni... That'll freak them the fuck out.
As for the deaf literacy/hearing stuff, it's not widely known so don't beat yourself up over it. It's not even well researched in non signers. Being willing to listen and recognise "there's stuff you don't know" is the important thing. I'm still working things out for myself cos "I seem to function well" much of the time but only by working hard to do so and I have massive gaps in weird places...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 February, 2015, 05:42:30 pm
USB HDD+XP: Fifteen seconds.
NAS+Win 8: Twenty minutes
:o
Post by: Kim on 04 February, 2015, 05:56:26 pm
Twelve hundred files spread across seventy folders wanted deleting.
USB HDD+XP: Fifteen seconds.
NAS+Win 8: Twenty minutes
That sort of thing is all about the filesystem.
Post by: pcolbeck on 04 February, 2015, 05:59:42 pm
Twelve hundred files spread across seventy folders wanted deleting.
USB HDD+XP: Fifteen seconds.
NAS+Win 8: Twenty minutes
That sort of thing is all about the filesystem.
And the efficiency of the protocol used to access the NAS. If this was CIFS then it is indeed a bit rubbish. ISCSI would have been faster or FCoE.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 February, 2015, 06:03:17 pm
Post by: Kim on 04 February, 2015, 06:11:18 pm
Same sort of thing can go on at the filesystem level.
And different filesystems are good at different things. I used to use XFS for recordings on the MythTV[1] machine[2], because XFS can delete a single multi-gigabyte file in the blink of an eye, while ext3 (as it was then) had to go away and have a long hard think about it, locking up the user interface while it did so.
[1] A kind of electronic monk.
[2] A twisty maze of old, slow hard drives, all different.
Post by: pcolbeck on 05 February, 2015, 09:25:58 am
Now you muppets where's the keyboard layout changer gone, I am not in the USA and for that matter nor are most of your developers so there must be one somewhere .....
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 February, 2015, 10:03:21 am
Basically a case of whether the computer is telling the NAS "Delete this file...OK. Delete this file...OK. Delete this file....OK. Delete this directory...OK" or "Delete this directory and everything under it............OK."
I think Win 8 does the former so it can display its spiffy progress graph. Very fond of its spiffy progress graphs is Microsith, but I'd prefer one that disappeared too quickly to read, thank you
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 February, 2015, 02:13:40 pm
That's two hours of anbarism I'll never get back :(
Post by: Biggsy on 05 February, 2015, 04:29:27 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 05 February, 2015, 05:31:03 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 February, 2015, 10:19:54 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 February, 2015, 01:34:38 pm
Solitaire.
It's something you play on your own.
So why in the name of the Seven Unholy Lemmings of New South Intercourse do you keep blathering on about your inability to log into my "Xbox Live" account? I do not have an "Xbox Live" account. Nor do I have an Xbox. I may have an ex-Box before long if you keep this shit up >:(
Post by: Zipperhead on 08 February, 2015, 01:40:09 pm
Google Chrome appstore (runs in regular chrome as well) has a variety of solitaire implementations.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 February, 2015, 03:30:56 pm
Thank you for changing my Babbage-Post settings over the weekend and not fucking telling me about it or anything. No thanks to you shower of dunces I have finally persuaded Thunderbird to receive Babbage-Post to that address but no amount of faffage has yet persuaded it to send even a one-word message to my Mega!-Global! Exclamation! Mark! Corporation! of! Sunnyvale!, USAnia! address. It's not as if that address gets used for anything very important, except for buying shit from the Mega-Global Sounds Like A Big River Corporation of Seattle, USAnia, and the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia store, and divers other things involving Money.
Sort it out u muppets!
Post by: ian on 10 February, 2015, 09:56:20 am
And there you go, despite whatever productive task my computer might have been engaged in, you've just turned the entire fucking thing off and gone into a long update cycle. The Amish build barns quicker.
Yeah, yeah, there's probably a setting, but I'm sure the mothership has creatively erected a large policy tent over it.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 February, 2015, 10:06:56 am
Post by: mcshroom on 10 February, 2015, 10:52:23 am
I suppose I should go looking for scheduled updates (or turn the computer off in the evening rather than leaving it to hibernate)
Post by: davelodwig on 10 February, 2015, 02:16:45 pm
Hey, hey, happy Windows, I'm real glad you've installed an update. It's sure must be swell. Thanks for telling that you are so happy with your new update that you are going to spontaneously restart. Just for me. In 2 mins and 9, 8, 7, 6, 5... seconds. The countdown is very James Bond. It's doubly nice that the postpone button is greyed out and there's no red wire to cut. Even better you hid this message under a tiny little flashing systray icon that I just happened to notice.
And there you go, despite whatever productive task my computer might have been engaged in, you've just turned the entire fucking thing off and gone into a long update cycle. The Amish build barns quicker.
Yeah, yeah, there's probably a setting, but I'm sure the mothership has creatively erected a large policy tent over it.
Yep that's a thing you can turn on on the network, we used to have to do it otherwise the developers would never install patches and then take down the network when their laptop got exploited.
I think you can set it so it only forces you after you've ignored a number of suggestions.
D.
Post by: ian on 10 February, 2015, 02:30:30 pm
Hey, hey, happy Windows, I'm real glad you've installed an update. It's sure must be swell. Thanks for telling that you are so happy with your new update that you are going to spontaneously restart. Just for me. In 2 mins and 9, 8, 7, 6, 5... seconds. The countdown is very James Bond. It's doubly nice that the postpone button is greyed out and there's no red wire to cut. Even better you hid this message under a tiny little flashing systray icon that I just happened to notice.
And there you go, despite whatever productive task my computer might have been engaged in, you've just turned the entire fucking thing off and gone into a long update cycle. The Amish build barns quicker.
Yeah, yeah, there's probably a setting, but I'm sure the mothership has creatively erected a large policy tent over it.
Yep that's a thing you can turn on on the network, we used to have to do it otherwise the developers would never install patches and then take down the network when their laptop got exploited.
I think you can set it so it only forces you after you've ignored a number of suggestions.
D.
Sadly all greyed out. That'll be the Group Policy, as dictated by the little Stalin on the IT deck (oh momma, we've outsourced to IBM). They also make my machine lock-screen every fifteen minutes. Drives me crazy but Cannot Be Changed even though I work in an empty house where the only security threats are cats and ghosts.
Post by: Jaded on 10 February, 2015, 03:10:37 pm
It's the bears.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 February, 2015, 03:22:39 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 February, 2015, 02:08:04 pm
Not page fucking one >:(
Post by: mcshroom on 11 February, 2015, 02:25:13 pm
Oh, and as a side show, if I log on to our company website using this company PC it tells me my browser is outdated and needs to be upgraded :facepalm:
Post by: Wombat on 12 February, 2015, 07:51:46 am
Post by: ian on 12 February, 2015, 03:12:55 pm
Why, in the name of Finestre, does it do that? Was it too busy in advance of the meeting? You're the bloody calendar, you're not supposed to forget. That's evidently my job. Hi, I'm Outlook, you should have been in a meeting but it's finished now, soz. Bring back the animated cat. Office went downhill the day that disappeared. I trusted the cat.
Post by: Clare on 12 February, 2015, 03:54:41 pm
Post by: barakta on 13 February, 2015, 01:33:10 pm
ALL I wanted was remote-STTR (realtime captioning communications support) without HASSLE! I didn't get it even on a tested setup.
MiFi Dongle thing? Why do you need the password again? You've not asked for it since I set it up but suddenly want the password as if you never had it. Fucker.
Citrix - why did you decide to load the fileshare once and then NOT load it when I got virtualisation confusion and saved the file with said password in it that I wanted to *FuckKnows* so I couldn't get the MiFi dongle password? Seriously unamused. 4 browswers. 2 reboots... Two different working wifi networks.
Then back at the office, Citrix works as if nothing was ever wrong over wifi 2? Could the fucking bastard IT bastards have taken Citrix shit down intermittently this morning? Could the browsers have actually given error messages with meaningful info rather than *loady loady* *vanish!* and I suspect at least one browser is eating the plugin...
As for fucking sound, the less said the better. Digital fm system radio aid receiver was cutting out at a mere 15m from transmitter which isn't fucking good enough. Also the sound setup I had working PERFECTLY last week on my desk Would Not Fucking Work so I had to dredge out backup analogue fm radio aid that I hurled into bag on way out (late) and use TWO sound systems when ONE should have been able to work...
Technology is clearly laughing at today's day and date...
Post by: Martin109 on 13 February, 2015, 02:16:22 pm
Post by: DaveJ on 15 February, 2015, 10:35:01 pm
Post by: Ham on 15 February, 2015, 10:55:15 pm
VirtualBox 4.3.22 breaks my computer. After installing it neither the network card or the USB2 controller work properly. It does it repeatably too, as I found out after restoring the machine to a working state and trying it again (isn't that one definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and expecting different results?).
I was wondering whether to upgrade, what's your config? Windows or Linux host?
Post by: DaveJ on 15 February, 2015, 11:13:43 pm
Post by: Pingu on 15 February, 2015, 11:43:06 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 February, 2015, 11:46:56 am
Thanks Google :-\
Post by: Pingu on 20 February, 2015, 09:42:42 pm
BBC have borked iPlayer so that Squeezebox disnae play 6Music :demon: Jist gonnae no :hand:
Yay, it's back :thumbsup:
Post by: David Martin on 21 February, 2015, 09:07:41 am
Post by: Afasoas on 21 February, 2015, 10:07:49 am
And still, the American Telco's seem to get away with CarrierIQ
Post by: tiermat on 21 February, 2015, 10:12:35 am
Maybe surprisingly, after this, they still are. Why? Well I wouldn't be (and never have, with any laptop) running the stock build. The windows partition would be blown away and either replaced with a vanilla windows build or the machine just built with Linux.
I am not surprised about this, nor should anyone else who has worked with computers for a while, all manufacturers install tonnes of shit, some just more malicious than others.
Post by: pcolbeck on 21 February, 2015, 10:16:29 am
I have a lovely eight core i7 Lenovo Thinkpad laptop next to me right now. I blew away the Windows 8.1 it came with and installed Linux instead. Windows now runs from a clean install inside VMware Workstation on it for when I need to access to Windows only programs.
Post by: barakta on 21 February, 2015, 08:38:02 pm
Lenovo's reputation deserves to go to shit for this and the other manufacturers will hopefully learn from their competitor's experience and be less evil and sloppy.
Post by: ian on 21 February, 2015, 09:33:30 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 February, 2015, 09:37:11 pm
Post by: David Martin on 22 February, 2015, 03:12:37 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 February, 2015, 05:20:37 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 22 February, 2015, 05:50:30 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 February, 2015, 01:15:57 am
Post by: Afasoas on 23 February, 2015, 02:32:22 pm
Yes it's all well and good migrating configuration data from ye olde version to ye neue hippier version when an upgrade is initiated from within the tool. But that's not really very practical in a corporate desktop environment. Why not have a proper MSI installer that handles the migration of configuration data? I mean, you author pretty spendy software ergo I'm sure producing an MSI that plays nice with Windows isn't beyond comprehension.
Post by: tiermat on 23 February, 2015, 08:32:58 pm
Argh! Group Policy. Deployment. & Software houses that choose to install their software their own way.
Yes it's all well and good migrating configuration data from ye olde version to ye neue hippier version when an upgrade is initiated from within the tool. But that's not really very practical in a corporate desktop environment. Why not have a proper MSI installer that handles the migration of configuration data? I mean, you author pretty spendy software ergo I'm sure producing an MSI that plays nice with Windows isn't beyond comprehension.
That, my son, is why software packagers get paid silly money on projects where everything MUST be deployed as a package.
Post by: Afasoas on 24 February, 2015, 11:45:42 am
Son's laptop is now suitably suprfish free - pretty easy job to sort but should not have been necessary.
Superfish was implementing a Komdia library that introduced this SSL vulnerability. Looks like the Komodia library is used in other products, including Lavasoft's anti-virus.
Allegedly worse still is Privdog adware that ships with Software from Comodo.
The words iceberg and tip spring to mind.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=17991
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 February, 2015, 01:38:50 pm
Microsith! How hard can it be for Word to treat a file called "junk.txt" as plain fucking text? >:( >:(
I gave up. Opened it in Excel.
Post by: Wombat on 24 February, 2015, 09:04:42 pm
Post by: woollypigs on 24 February, 2015, 09:07:40 pm
EDIT: and good luck tomorrow
Post by: Wombat on 25 February, 2015, 08:17:56 am
Need to get back to revising now, on the bits I'm a bit weak on. Its going to be an awkward interview, I know all three interviewers, and they know I never wear the suit I'll be wearing today, but the other interviewees will be wearing one, so I must. The PC screwing up was not needed, yesterday of all days, then Virgin compounding it by failing really put the tin hat on it. I've got monday and tuesday off, so I think a software rebuild of the PC on the new SSD is in order. Not found time to do it due to decorating, but now the issue is forced.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 February, 2015, 02:36:41 am
Why, no! No, there was not!
Did your update ask me if I wanted an iTunes shortcut on the desktop?
Why, no! No, it did not!
Now I like to keep my desktop free from clutter, the better to see the wallpaper and remind myself of holibobs. To cover bits of it up without even asking is the height of bad manners and therefore I should be much obliged if you were to cease, desist and fuck the fuck off.
Post by: David Martin on 26 February, 2015, 11:47:46 pm
So it is a piece of shiny that I can't get photos/videos/files onto without some extra hardware or software. What is the point?
Post by: Gattopardo on 27 February, 2015, 01:37:40 am
Post by: ian on 27 February, 2015, 08:10:19 am
Fruity fondleslabs. Are they deliberately setup to be bloody useless for normal folk? I have a movie file I want to place on the flat thingy of a colleague. No cable, her machine so I don't have any passwords except the pin to get in. It won't save files locally. It will play off the web. Clicking 'download' doesn't.
So it is a piece of shiny that I can't get photos/videos/files onto without some extra hardware or software. What is the point?
Let me introduce you to iTunes, the software lovechild of Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, and Proteus IV.
Post by: tiermat on 27 February, 2015, 10:13:14 am
Installing win 7 on an acer d255, and wireless does not work.....argh
Rule of thumb, unless using the recovery CDs, ALWAYS have another way of accessing the internet to download drivers(and a USB sneakernet in place), you'll need it.
Post by: Gattopardo on 27 February, 2015, 11:24:16 am
Installing win 7 on an acer d255, and wireless does not work.....argh
Rule of thumb, unless using the recovery CDs, ALWAYS have another way of accessing the internet to download drivers(and a USB sneakernet in place), you'll need it.
Oh I thought of that, planned the upgrade from xp to windows7 and it is still being a pain. Seems fine with win8/8.1 and flavours of linux just not 7. Seem to see the wireless network and then not see any.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 February, 2015, 07:09:34 pm
I need some new trousers and after encountering that fucking shambles I doubt I will be buying them from you.
Edit: I take back some of the above. It looks like you didn't test it on a proper Babbage-Engine either. Slower than a 2CV chained to a block of concrete and a page for entering address details that defies belief in its sheer awfulness. You say the State or Region field is mandatory even though you already know I'm in BRITAIN. You blank out half my street address after I've entered it. You get confused by "London" as a post town. If I didn't like your kecks so much...
Post by: T42 on 02 March, 2015, 11:12:28 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 March, 2015, 09:04:27 pm
(https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8607/16659135336_7440c5882d_o.jpg) (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_larrington/16659135336/)
Would it therefore being asking too much of you to open IE the way it was when it was closed? You know, like Firefox and Chrome do?
Post by: Gattopardo on 03 March, 2015, 03:40:33 am
Installing win 7 on an acer d255, and wireless does not work.....argh
Rule of thumb, unless using the recovery CDs, ALWAYS have another way of accessing the internet to download drivers(and a USB sneakernet in place), you'll need it.
Oh I thought of that, planned the upgrade from xp to windows7 and it is still being a pain. Seems fine with win8/8.1 and flavours of linux just not 7. Seem to see the wireless network and then not see any.
Decided to update the lappy with a cable from the router. So how many updates and how many days does it take?
And it still hasn't got wifi working. Maybe it could be the wifi channel.
Post by: Afasoas on 03 March, 2015, 08:58:44 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 March, 2015, 01:12:18 pm
Post by: David Martin on 03 March, 2015, 03:55:44 pm
Whover though this was a useful tool has a very limited idea of useful.
Post by: Gattopardo on 03 March, 2015, 06:25:47 pm
Have you installed the drivers for your wireless chipset as supplied by the laptop's manufacturer?
Ah yes, and you would think that it would work, but you (and I) would be wrong. You have to download the built in network card drivers and the wireless card drivers then, using a cable downloading all the updates and restarts to win 7 then and only then the wireless works. As if by magic...
Suspect, after reading many pages on the internet, there is something in an update that helps it work. AS without the updates the wireless card seems to want to stay connect or even powered on as the computer is no longer able to see anywireless networks.
Post by: Gattopardo on 04 March, 2015, 08:52:59 pm
Post by: Chris S on 05 March, 2015, 08:33:39 pm
Look, you useless sack of crap. You're linux fer christ's sake - you're supposed to WORK!
I've given every fucker in the entire known universe permissions to this directory, so "operation not permitted" is a bit fucking precious. Just do what you're fucking told. Look - Windows 8.1 over there -------------> was happy about it, so should you be.
Now. Wake. The. Fuck. Up.
Post by: tiermat on 05 March, 2015, 08:38:26 pm
Oh FFS.
Look, you useless sack of crap. You're linux fer christ's sake - you're supposed to WORK!
I've given every fucker in the entire known universe permissions to this directory, so "operation not permitted" is a bit fucking precious. Just do what you're fucking told. Look - Windows 8.1 over there -------------> was happy about it, so should you be.
Now. Wake. The. Fuck. Up.
NTFS partition mount? Then the mount options are wrong.
Otherwise I'd look at SELinux.
Post by: David Martin on 05 March, 2015, 11:06:31 pm
Oh well, at least there is some progress.
Post by: Gattopardo on 06 March, 2015, 12:36:21 am
Post by: Gattopardo on 06 March, 2015, 09:40:19 pm
Tomorrow will go back to fixing the acer aspire one d255...wish me luck
Now the wifi works for a bit, then stops working.
Post by: Zipperhead on 07 March, 2015, 11:38:03 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 March, 2015, 04:25:47 pm
Given sufficient money I could
Post by: Gattopardo on 07 March, 2015, 08:38:39 pm
What channel is your wifi on? I've got an aspire and found that sometimes the wireless would work and other times it wouldn't, it turned out that the aspire won't see all the channels (it was the very high numbered ones, might have been 14)
Have tried that, it was on 6 as that was the quietest channel. Think it is something else, such as a setting in the bios power setting, as restting the adaptor doesn't seem to bring the car back to life.
Post by: Zipperhead on 08 March, 2015, 12:26:13 am
Given sufficient money I couldbuildhave built a Bugatti Type 35 from all-new parts (the stable lad did this last summer) and that went out of production around 1930.
He probably imported the parts from Argentina
Post by: Diver300 on 08 March, 2015, 08:42:08 am
That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.
The work-around is to save as a .pdf and to print that, but printing as a .pdf just gets a .pdf with blank equations like the paper version. Saving as a .pdf would be easier to find if you didn't restrict the pull-down list of file types to view about 4 entries, so careful scrolling is needed. This is the 21st century, we use monitors that are bigger than 640x480, and we don't have to be restricted to menus the size of a toolbar icon if there are 20+ choices.
I can't be the only person who wants to print equations onto paper, or even as a .pdf to send to someone whose computer isn't infested with the execrable lump of bloatware that is Word, so why haven't they sorted it out?
Post by: Feanor on 08 March, 2015, 10:29:39 am
Microsoft Word.
That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.
The work-around is to save as a .pdf and to print that, but printing as a .pdf just gets a .pdf with blank equations like the paper version. Saving as a .pdf would be easier to find if you didn't restrict the pull-down list of file types to view about 4 entries, so careful scrolling is needed. This is the 21st century, we use monitors that are bigger than 640x480, and we don't have to be restricted to menus the size of a toolbar icon if there are 20+ choices.
I can't be the only person who wants to print equations onto paper, or even as a .pdf to send to someone whose computer isn't infested with the execrable lump of bloatware that is Word, so why haven't they sorted it out?
Have you tried this...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960985
I think it applies to office 2010 too.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 08 March, 2015, 03:31:22 pm
Microsoft Word.
That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.
They're probably embarrassed at how horrible their equations look when printed, they're bad enough on the screen!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 March, 2015, 01:15:53 am
"Very", is the answer. Lots of mucking about with file permissions. Does your webshite help in any way comprehensible to someone who has always had Advanced God access to everything? Why, no! No, it does not!
Anyway, TipBand.dll has been renamed to TitWank.dll and it's only taken 75 minutes. And why would installing a different mouse cause the ball-achingly annoying thing to appear in the first place?
Holibob plans to visit Pacific northwest now amended to include the words "Redmond", "screaming" and "spears sticking out of their backs".
Post by: pcolbeck on 09 March, 2015, 09:16:04 am
Microsoft Word.
That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.
The work-around is to save as a .pdf and to print that, but printing as a .pdf just gets a .pdf with blank equations like the paper version. Saving as a .pdf would be easier to find if you didn't restrict the pull-down list of file types to view about 4 entries, so careful scrolling is needed. This is the 21st century, we use monitors that are bigger than 640x480, and we don't have to be restricted to menus the size of a toolbar icon if there are 20+ choices.
I can't be the only person who wants to print equations onto paper, or even as a .pdf to send to someone whose computer isn't infested with the execrable lump of bloatware that is Word, so why haven't they sorted it out?
Try LyX. Its free and uses LaTeX as its backend but hides it from you (unless you want to get your hands dirty and tweak it). Produces lovely PDFs with equations rendered properly and will embed the fonts in the PDF so anyone can view them.
http://www.lyx.org/
and here is an example PDF with equations both in line with the text and on their own. Its from 2001 which shows how long LyX has been around.
http://minnie.tuhs.org/Seminars/Bond/LyX_Thesis/seminar.pdf
Post by: ian on 09 March, 2015, 10:04:58 am
What's that, dear simian lifeforms on IT subdeck P8954-X? We need new certificates on 8th March? Have Mssrs Goldblum and Smith been testing our defences again (the LA thing was so embarrassing)? And your communication plan for this? Oh, I see, you didn't bother telling anyone direct, you put a small 40 pixel icon on our intranet homepage. Could this be why our global support desk is receiving an unprecedented volume of calls at the present time. I could request a new certificate online, couldn't I? If the request page didn't require a VPN connection to access.
Oh and after three hours, when I get the certificate I have to go to a Symantec PKI website that doesn't work with new versions of any browser.
Every fucking time they mess this up. Corporate IT monkey, you have just the one job and that's to enable the rest of us do ours.
Edit: as a bonus level, they send the certificate retrieval PIN and link via to our corporate email address which is – you guessed – only accessible via VPN.
Post by: Diver300 on 09 March, 2015, 12:21:08 pm
Microsoft Word.
That's probably said enough, but why the hell can't you print equations? Blank spaces on the paper above and below the lines just don't convey the needed information.
The work-around is to save as a .pdf and to print that, but printing as a .pdf just gets a .pdf with blank equations like the paper version. Saving as a .pdf would be easier to find if you didn't restrict the pull-down list of file types to view about 4 entries, so careful scrolling is needed. This is the 21st century, we use monitors that are bigger than 640x480, and we don't have to be restricted to menus the size of a toolbar icon if there are 20+ choices.
I can't be the only person who wants to print equations onto paper, or even as a .pdf to send to someone whose computer isn't infested with the execrable lump of bloatware that is Word, so why haven't they sorted it out?
Try LyX. Its free and uses LaTeX as its backend but hides it from you (unless you want to get your hands dirty and tweak it). Produces lovely PDFs with equations rendered properly and will embed the fonts in the PDF so anyone can view them.
http://www.lyx.org/
and here is an example PDF with equations both in line with the text and on their own. Its from 2001 which shows how long LyX has been around.
http://minnie.tuhs.org/Seminars/Bond/LyX_Thesis/seminar.pdf
Getting some free software installed on the locked-down work machines is a form of torture. MS Word is the approved software.
Post by: Kim on 09 March, 2015, 12:33:38 pm
Post by: tiermat on 09 March, 2015, 02:02:06 pm
I had a dream about LyX the other night. I wonder if it's got good in the 12 years or so since I last used it?
Along similar lines, listening to the radio this morning one guy mentioned he had written his book in MathType* as there was 11 pages of equations and it was easier to do the layout for the rest of the book in that than try and sort the equations in Word**.
*I believe he said MAthType, it may have been another one
** May be cross posting with other computer threads :)
Post by: hubner on 09 March, 2015, 02:08:10 pm
Post by: tiermat on 09 March, 2015, 02:15:55 pm
It seems each newer version of Android gets less and less usable. Eg, no mass storage, cannot export contacts to SD card.
Mass storage, as in can't use it as a mass storage device? that has been gone a long time.
Why would you want to export contacts to an SD card? by backing them up to Google's servers they are always there, makes transferring to a new phone much less painful.
This might help, if the contacts are synced to the cloud:
http://support.fullcontact.com/knowledgebase/articles/155374-how-can-i-export-my-google-contacts-prior-to-using
Post by: Afasoas on 10 March, 2015, 08:36:53 am
It seems each newer version of Android gets less and less usable. Eg, no mass storage, cannot export contacts to SD card.
Mass storage, as in can't use it as a mass storage device? that has been gone a long time.
Why would you want to export contacts to an SD card? by backing them up to Google's servers they are always there, makes transferring to a new phone much less painful.
This might help, if the contacts are synced to the cloud:
http://support.fullcontact.com/knowledgebase/articles/155374-how-can-i-export-my-google-contacts-prior-to-using
Yes that's fine if you are still happy sharing your life with Google.
Post by: Afasoas on 10 March, 2015, 08:45:31 am
I can has IKE/IPSEC if I don't mind Shrewsoft bu$$ering up my network configuration.
I could has IKE/IPSEC without Shrewsoft if only I could figure out how to configure the Strongswan NetworkManager plugin.
I can has OpenVPN using NetworkManager but it completely fails to update name server and domain details in resolv.conf
I figure I'll have to hack my own solution together then.
Post by: tiermat on 10 March, 2015, 10:34:05 am
It seems each newer version of Android gets less and less usable. Eg, no mass storage, cannot export contacts to SD card.
Mass storage, as in can't use it as a mass storage device? that has been gone a long time.
Why would you want to export contacts to an SD card? by backing them up to Google's servers they are always there, makes transferring to a new phone much less painful.
This might help, if the contacts are synced to the cloud:
http://support.fullcontact.com/knowledgebase/articles/155374-how-can-i-export-my-google-contacts-prior-to-using
Yes that's fine if you are still happy sharing your life with Google.
TBH, if you are not, don't bother buying an Android phone. Replace Google with Apple and don't bother buying a iPhone, rplace it with Microsoft and don't bother buying a Windows phone.
In short, if you actually want to use a smart phone as a smart phone, you have to compromise. If you don't, then be my guest and buy a dumb phone.
Post by: fuaran on 10 March, 2015, 11:56:23 am
It seems each newer version of Android gets less and less usable. Eg, no mass storage, cannot export contacts to SD card.All of the Android versions I have used do have some way of importing/exporting contacts to a VCF or CSV file. Though the option is quite well hidden on some of them.
Then its easy enough to copy this file from the one phone to the other. You don't need to sync everything with Google.
Post by: Gattopardo on 10 March, 2015, 05:13:00 pm
What channel is your wifi on? I've got an aspire and found that sometimes the wireless would work and other times it wouldn't, it turned out that the aspire won't see all the channels (it was the very high numbered ones, might have been 14)
Have tried that, it was on 6 as that was the quietest channel. Think it is something else, such as a setting in the bios power setting, as restting the adaptor doesn't seem to bring the car back to life.
An update - Still not working. The wireless card works on Linux mint, So it is somethingelse in windoze. The driver from the atheros website is v10 over v9 that is on the acer website.
Post by: TheLurker on 10 March, 2015, 07:56:44 pm
When stringA.GetType() reports "String" and stringB.GetType() reports "String" and both appear to contain the string "Fred" (or "Jim" or "Sheila" according to taste and inclination) how in the name of Hopper can ...
if stringA.Equals(stringB, CultureInvariantIgnoreCase)
evaluate false!?
Because ... and you'll love this ...
Dim stringA = Ctype(aStringBoxedInAnObject, String)
Dim stringB As String = SomeFunction()
So stringA isn't _really_ a string at all whatever ::GetType() might say.. cos...
if stringA.ToString().Equals(stringB, CultureInvariantIgnoreCase)
evaluates true.
Leaving aside the fact that I don't much like working in VB and that I _really_ wish that M$ had killed it off when .Net was introduced what provokes my ire about this is the _hateful_ legacy code (dating back to when VB.Net was just VB) incorporated in the projects that has to have compile time checks "relaxed" thereby squelching all manner of really _useful_ warnings and errors that would catch stuff that otherwise isn't picked up until runtime.
Oh and while I'm here. Colleagues. It is C21. REDIM in _new_ code!? For pity's sake use a generic List<> or any other of the dozen collection types that are available in the Framework and have been since .Net was in Beta 15 odd years ago! Sheesh!
Post by: Feanor on 10 March, 2015, 08:09:25 pm
We do a lot of floating-point math.
*never* attempt to use 'equal' with floating-point numbers.
It will *almost never* evaluate to true, even when it seems like it should.
There will always be a single-bit difference down in the LSB or somesuch.
I've seen someone try to use a floating point value as a loop index.
( A depth value, where the depth increments were 0.25 feet. )
It ended in tears.
Post by: simonp on 10 March, 2015, 11:50:48 pm
It’s taken me about an hour just to get a firmware update onto the device (failed using Windows using various methods - the MapInstall app just hung after downloading the update). WebUpdater complained the update was corrupted. Switched to Mac. Same message. All sorts of googling suggested I needed to reformat the device. Eventually I tried connecting it in USB mass storage mode and hey presto, the update was installed fine.
Why so painful, Garmin?
Post by: Afasoas on 11 March, 2015, 08:37:16 am
TBH, if you are not, don't bother buying an Android phone. Replace Google with Apple and don't bother buying a iPhone, rplace it with Microsoft and don't bother buying a Windows phone.
In short, if you actually want to use a smart phone as a smart phone, you have to compromise. If you don't, then be my guest and buy a dumb phone.
It is possible to use an Android phone without Google's services. Cyanogenmod FTW.
Post by: tiermat on 11 March, 2015, 08:42:24 am
TBH, if you are not, don't bother buying an Android phone. Replace Google with Apple and don't bother buying a iPhone, rplace it with Microsoft and don't bother buying a Windows phone.
In short, if you actually want to use a smart phone as a smart phone, you have to compromise. If you don't, then be my guest and buy a dumb phone.
It is possible to use an Android phone without Google's services. Cyanogenmod FTW.
WRONG!
Cyanogenmod still, quite heavily, uses Google Apps. Without them you loses a LOT of functionality, such as the Google Play, Maps and Gmail. It is possible to use an Android phone without using Google services, but why anyone would want to is beyond me, it's like buying an Aston Martin and fitting crossply tyres.
Post by: ian on 11 March, 2015, 09:52:48 am
Post by: SteveC on 11 March, 2015, 10:00:46 am
I had a colleague who tried to use an FP variable for a time. So a quarter past nine was stored as 9.15. That did not end well either
I've seen someone try to use a floating point value as a loop index.
( A depth value, where the depth increments were 0.25 feet. )
It ended in tears.
Post by: Afasoas on 11 March, 2015, 10:35:31 am
Shrewsoft grumble NetworkManager grumble Strongswan grumble.
I can has IKE/IPSEC if I don't mind Shrewsoft bu$$ering up my network configuration.
I could has IKE/IPSEC without Shrewsoft if only I could figure out how to configure the Strongswan NetworkManager plugin.
I can has OpenVPN using NetworkManager but it completely fails to update name server and domain details in resolv.conf
I figure I'll have to hack my own solution together then.
Actually, surprisingly, OpenVPN + Network Manager does now work. I can resolve hosts on the local network and the VPN connected network. Hoorah!
Post by: Afasoas on 11 March, 2015, 10:45:44 am
TBH, if you are not, don't bother buying an Android phone. Replace Google with Apple and don't bother buying a iPhone, rplace it with Microsoft and don't bother buying a Windows phone.
In short, if you actually want to use a smart phone as a smart phone, you have to compromise. If you don't, then be my guest and buy a dumb phone.
It is possible to use an Android phone without Google's services. Cyanogenmod FTW.
WRONG!
Cyanogenmod still, quite heavily, uses Google Apps. Without them you loses a LOT of functionality, such as the Google Play, Maps and Gmail. It is possible to use an Android phone without using Google services, but why anyone would want to is beyond me, it's like buying an Aston Martin and fitting crossply tyres.
Cyanogenmod doesn't include those Google apps in the ROM. You have to flash them onto the device afterwards. The missing functionality can be replaced with some quite good alternatives, which I'm not advocating anyone do unless already having a pre-disposition to these things.
As to why anyone would want to, I think that's a topic for POBI. Personally, I'm making a big step away from using Google's products and services. Again I'm not advocating that everyone else should.
I'm really not sure why you're responding so vehemently about my original remark, the inference being that there are alternatives if people wish to consider them and take the time to implement them.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 March, 2015, 10:53:09 am
Cyanogenmod still, quite heavily, uses Google Apps. Without them you loses a LOT of functionality, such as the Google Play, Maps and Gmail. It is possible to use an Android phone without using Google services, but why anyone would want to is beyond me, it's like buying an Aston Martin and fitting crossply tyres.
I once read of an impoverished enthusiast who used to run his DB6 on the cross-plies intended for a Commer PB van...
Post by: tiermat on 11 March, 2015, 10:56:06 am
Cyanogenmod et al still require a certain amount of interaction with Google, whether you like it or not. Replacing Google Apps with a third party's still makes you reliant on that third party's services.
Cyanogenmod is not a panacea, which is how your reply to my post read, to me anyway.
My point still stands, if you don't want to be reliant on a third party's web services, DON'T BUY A SMART PHONE. Clear enough?
Post by: Kim on 11 March, 2015, 12:10:34 pm
Sure, there's functionality that you won't have (google calendars, for example), and there's obviously an amount of hoop-jumping required to actually install apps without access to the Play store, but we're talking about people who've rooted and re-flashed their phone already.
[1] Well, maybe not email. But you could host it yourself, or pay an ISP to host it for you, or use an account provided by an employer, rather than sell your soul to a marketing company for it.
Post by: Afasoas on 11 March, 2015, 12:11:32 pm
Google Apps are not the be all and end of the connection between Android and Google (as far as services go), is my point.
Cyanogenmod et al still require a certain amount of interaction with Google, whether you like it or not. Replacing Google Apps with a third party's still makes you reliant on that third party's services.
Cyanogenmod is not a panacea, which is how your reply to my post read, to me anyway.
My point still stands, if you don't want to be reliant on a third party's web services, DON'T BUY A SMART PHONE. Clear enough?
I'm sorry your point is simply not valid. It is possible to use a smart phone without sharing your personal data with third parties. Android is architected to sandbox applications so data is not shared unless given express permission by the end user. Applications can use the Android Data Backup Service to backup and synchronise data across devices, but the app has to be configured to do so. In most apps, that is not explicit so some care is needed.
Although Android is developed by Google, it is released as open source so it's possible to review the code and ascertain exactly what interaction Android has with Google servers. There are a few versions of Android which have been re-written for highly secure scenarios where data cannot be transmitted to third parties.
I'm happy to concede that using a smart phone without sharing personal data is not a walk in the park and thus not an option for most end users, however there is still a choice between using a smart phone without reliance on third party services and using a dumb phone.
When I next re-flash my phone I will be using an Android ROM without additional Google services/applications. With a careful choice of applications that means I'm in control of where my data is stored and how it is shared.
Sorry for cross-posting with Kim
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 March, 2015, 12:56:25 pm
Now fuck off.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 11 March, 2015, 07:33:43 pm
I had a colleague who tried to use an FP variable for a time. So a quarter past nine was stored as 9.15. That did not end well either
I've seen someone try to use a floating point value as a loop index.
( A depth value, where the depth increments were 0.25 feet. )
It ended in tears.
;D
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 March, 2015, 07:37:37 pm
Ah. Equal things being un-equal.
We do a lot of floating-point math.
*never* attempt to use 'equal' with floating-point numbers.
It will *almost never* evaluate to true, even when it seems like it should.
There will always be a single-bit difference down in the LSB or somesuch.
I've seen someone try to use a floating point value as a loop index.
( A depth value, where the depth increments were 0.25 feet. )
It ended in tears.
Using a Pentium, eh :demon:
Post by: Pingu on 11 March, 2015, 10:37:13 pm
BBC have borked iPlayer so that Squeezebox disnae play 6Music :demon: Jist gonnae no :hand:
Yay, it's back :thumbsup:
Not working again :demon:
And it's 'NOT AVAILABLE' on the XBOX :demon: :demon:
Post by: Feanor on 11 March, 2015, 10:39:42 pm
And it's 'NOT AVAILABLE' on the XBOX :demon: :demon:
You have an XBOX? ??? ???
Post by: Pingu on 11 March, 2015, 10:59:25 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 12 March, 2015, 08:47:51 am
Post by: TheLurker on 13 March, 2015, 04:29:55 pm
So it'd be a really good idea if your source control software could, reliably, give you the latest version of a file when you ask for it and not sit there gurning like the village idiot and swearing, 'pon me oath guv'nor, that all files are up to date even when they're not. Don't you think?
Well if that's your opinion, nay requirement, then don't buy fucking TFS from Microsoft. This shitty apology for a source control system has for, about fourth or fifth time in the last year or two, managed to let someone check in a stale version of a file after that developer explicitly requested the latest version. No merge warnings, _nothing_.
It took me the best part of 5 hours to reinstate the changes I'd made to a particularly tricksy and business critical section of code even with the help of diff. Worse. The poor sod in the test team will now have to repeat over a week's worth of testing because the stuff he thought he was testing wasn't in the code to be tested and, to improve the situation no end, we have a release deadline hard upon us.
So to sum up. TFS is a degenerate, pox-ridden heap of malware masquerading as a useful tool. If you have a choice don't ever, _ever_ use the untrustworthy heap of bit-rotten shite.
Post by: Zipperhead on 13 March, 2015, 11:21:54 pm
How about, if you don't like the way that microsoft think your workflow should be, you can get it to show you a nice diagram of the workflow but if you actually want to change it then you get dumped into an editor with tens of thousands of lines of xml.
My previous employers insisted on it as the corporate standard, which is probably why we also ran servers for svn & jira which supported more users than tfs so that people could get work done.
Post by: Chris S on 14 March, 2015, 09:23:19 am
I, and the company I work for on the basis of my recommendation, avoid TFS like the proverbial.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 14 March, 2015, 11:51:06 am
Post by: TimC on 15 March, 2015, 01:24:57 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 March, 2015, 03:15:03 pm
Reboot router while making cup of pre-Rugby Brown Drink. All now fine.
Throughout all above arsery (except router reboot, obv.), fondleslab able to speak to yacf, audaxclubhackney, dropbox, Google ect. ect.
???
Post by: Biggsy on 17 March, 2015, 04:20:37 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 March, 2015, 04:42:20 pm
Post by: Jurek on 17 March, 2015, 07:36:24 pm
My dear frend H.
I am flattered that you want to invite me to the private view of your art show, with a Shamanic experience (whatever the f*ck that is) thrown in, in trendiest Hoxtonia, later this month.
What possessed you to make my email address visible when you CC'd 37 of your other invitees is making me :facepalm: and is making my mind boggle.
I emailed you and was probably a little curt (no, that's not a spelling mistake).
I emailed you again, to apologise for my curtness, and offer some explanation, suggesting how you could do this in future using the BCC field, in a nice way, ending in 'lots of love, J, xx'.
On a normal day, my personal email receives spam emails numbering somewhere between 0 and 1.
This evening, on my return home, I open my email to find 137 spamtastic emails.
Thanks for that, H.
I had a similar thing from one of the organisers of the tw€€d run a year or two ago.
My email addy CC'd to a number of addresses which ran well into three figures.
They had the unmitigated audacity to have a pop at me when I attempted to point out the error of their ways.
The curt. (that is a spelling mistake)
Post by: Feanor on 17 March, 2015, 09:40:25 pm
Our training manuals are all created in InDesign; it's what print-houses like to use.
You'd think that it's option to output a quick n dirty PDF ( an adobe format ) would *just work*?
You are in a steep-sided canyon. The Frigid river runs North-South, to the Falls of Flatulence, just visible to the South.
Canyon>Inventory
You have an Adobe InDesign document, a printer, and a short length of 4x2.
It is pitch dark, you are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
Canyon>Print document as PDF
A hollow laugh echoes round the canyon walls. Your magic does not work here.
Canyon>_
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 March, 2015, 09:42:16 pm
Post by: ian on 17 March, 2015, 09:58:18 pm
Adobe InDesign.
Our training manuals are all created in InDesign; it's what print-houses like to use.
You'd think that it's option to output a quick n dirty PDF ( an adobe format ) would *just work*?
You are in a steep-sided canyon. The Frigid river runs North-South, to the Falls of Flatulence, just visible to the South.
Canyon>Inventory
You have an Adobe InDesign document, a printer, and a short length of 4x2.
It is pitch dark, you are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
Canyon>Print document as PDF
A hollow laugh echoes round the canyon walls. Your magic does not work here.
Canyon>_
Oh, lift up those petticoats and run, fair lady. InDesign is a gentle beast, suitable for petting zoos. Some of us remember Framemaker+SGML. Software that had to be kept in the cage to protect the unwary. Even Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, tiptoed around it whilst keeping one of her darker incantations in mind. There were commands, she hinted, buried deep in the labyrinthine submenus, in the darker corners of a UI that consisted entirely of dark corners, that could raise The Ones From Before.
Then we upgraded to 3B2 and a million kittens wailed as a great disturbance in the Force was felt. If only Jedis had kittens, things would have been a lot easier for them. 3B2 was best described as user hostile. The UI was practically Islamic State. You looked at it too long and it took your eyes hostage and made them beg.
Post by: Feanor on 17 March, 2015, 10:13:19 pm
There were commands... buried deep in the labyrinthine submenus, in the darker corners of a UI that consisted entirely of dark corners...
Ah, you are familiar with our software product then?
It's a highly sophisticated and very specialised product, which has no 'general public' audience.
It's very expensive ( but much less so than our competition! )
The user interface is "Windows 98".
Seriously.
The only thing it's missing (usually) is the hundreds of cascading "DLL version error" dialogs with the accompanying *Dung Dung Dung* sounds.
Post by: Kim on 17 March, 2015, 10:16:41 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 March, 2015, 10:28:54 pm
kthxbai
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 March, 2015, 02:37:02 am
Post by: perpetual dan on 21 March, 2015, 07:16:20 pm
Both times I did it by removing a file so that the other version of said file could be found. ::-)
How come that bloody file reappeared?
Post by: Pickled Onion on 22 March, 2015, 09:36:21 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 March, 2015, 01:36:03 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 23 March, 2015, 01:51:47 pm
I've just made headless firefox work for the second time this afternoon.
Both times I did it by removing a file so that the other version of said file could be found. ::-)
How come that bloody file reappeared?
selenium testing?
Post by: Pickled Onion on 23 March, 2015, 02:47:08 pm
Curiosity now tickled as CD reissues of pre-1988 recordings on label X average about 6x when ripping bust post-1988 ones on label Y did 18-20. Does BGO Records oops what a giveaway use the optical equivalent of cheese when getting its CDs made or something?
I'd never have taken you for a Shirley Bassey & Andy Williams fan.
Post by: Jaded on 23 March, 2015, 02:50:24 pm
Phoned Microsoft because I can't get my exam transcript off the MCP site. Follow the instructions given and get a blank page, so I ask if that's because I'm using Safari. The guy tells me to close Safari and open the page in Internet Explorer - err, I'm using Safari, therefore I'm using a Mac, and internet explorer hasn't been supported on OSX since 2003! And what happened to IE supposedly now being "standards compliant"?
There is a Safari for Widows.
The last laugh will fall on the 'use Internet Exploder' morons in a few months. When it is eol'ed and replaced by a new one that I think is called "Shit".
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 March, 2015, 03:04:11 pm
Curiosity now tickled as CD reissues of pre-1988 recordings on label X average about 6x when ripping bust post-1988 ones on label Y did 18-20. Does BGO Records oops what a giveaway use the optical equivalent of cheese when getting its CDs made or something?
I'd never have taken you for a Shirley Bassey & Andy Williams fan.
GIT!!1!
'tis the earlier albums of USAnian guitar maestro Leo Kottke...
Post by: Pickled Onion on 23 March, 2015, 03:07:45 pm
I've just made headless firefox work for the second time this afternoon.
Both times I did it by removing a file so that the other version of said file could be found. ::-)
How come that bloody file reappeared?
selenium testing?
PhantomJS?
Talking of which... If you're the first new high st bank in 100 years or whatever you claim to be, then try one of the above for your website. Using an HTML5 input type that's currently not supported by ANY major browser other than Chrome, and not programming any fallback, is quite frankly: shit.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 March, 2015, 03:39:56 pm
Why, no! No, I would not.
Is there an add-on called "Disable fatuous messages from Microsith"?
Post by: hellymedic on 23 March, 2015, 03:44:47 pm
WTF does your new website have so much blank white space and require so much flippin scrolling?
Post by: ian on 23 March, 2015, 04:05:06 pm
Phoned Microsoft because I can't get my exam transcript off the MCP site. Follow the instructions given and get a blank page, so I ask if that's because I'm using Safari. The guy tells me to close Safari and open the page in Internet Explorer - err, I'm using Safari, therefore I'm using a Mac, and internet explorer hasn't been supported on OSX since 2003! And what happened to IE supposedly now being "standards compliant"?
There is a Safari for Widows.
The last laugh will fall on the 'use Internet Exploder' morons in a few months. When it is eol'ed and replaced by a new one that I think is called "Shit".
Nah, they're naming everything after Halo characters because that's like how the kids work. Showing the magnificent corporate brain in action, endless layers of management synaptically forwarding email messages. Either that or they'll spend USD1,000,000 on marketing and focus groups to call it 'Net Discoverer' or something.
Apple killed Safari for Windows back in 2012 on the grounds that it was generally as shit as IE for Mac.
Post by: Mike J on 23 March, 2015, 07:15:02 pm
Microsith! If I wanted to disable add-ons to improve browser performance would I have installed them in the first place?
Why, no! No, I would not.
Is there an add-on called "Disable fatuous messages from Microsith"?
At least they don't have the annoying paper clip anymore.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 March, 2015, 07:48:14 pm
(http://invisiblebike.wikispaces.com/file/view/clippy-suicide.gif/127346833/clippy-suicide.gif)
Post by: tiermat on 24 March, 2015, 10:33:38 am
1) The new style synaptics pad where the buttons are built into the pad, it just doesn't work, it takes me three goes to recognise a left click, possibly longer, if at all, to recognise a right click!
2) Lets take a fantastic graphics card (Geforce 480M) and make it the SECONDARY graphics card, so that you use the crappy Intel one day to day then have to do some voodoo to be able to watch a mkv file in anything like a normal frame rate.
Bloody idiots!
Post by: Jaded on 24 March, 2015, 10:38:16 am
Phoned Microsoft because I can't get my exam transcript off the MCP site. Follow the instructions given and get a blank page, so I ask if that's because I'm using Safari. The guy tells me to close Safari and open the page in Internet Explorer - err, I'm using Safari, therefore I'm using a Mac, and internet explorer hasn't been supported on OSX since 2003! And what happened to IE supposedly now being "standards compliant"?
There is a Safari for Widows.
The last laugh will fall on the 'use Internet Exploder' morons in a few months. When it is eol'ed and replaced by a new one that I think is called "Shit".
Nah, they're naming everything after Halo characters because that's like how the kids work. Showing the magnificent corporate brain in action, endless layers of management synaptically forwarding email messages. Either that or they'll spend USD1,000,000 on marketing and focus groups to call it 'Net Discoverer' or something.
Apple killed Safari for Windows back in 2012 on the grounds that it was generally as shit as IE for Mac.
Ah, didn't know that about Safari Mac.
And you have conformed, the new Micro$ith Browser will be called "Grunt".
Post by: Mike J on 24 March, 2015, 10:46:34 pm
Don't tell me you don't miss Clippy :o
(http://invisiblebike.wikispaces.com/file/view/clippy-suicide.gif/127346833/clippy-suicide.gif)
I prefer this one
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BEcp0jICUAAZGyX.jpg)
Post by: Chris S on 25 March, 2015, 08:26:09 pm
Linux? Ah Linux....
Is it an Audio Device? Is it an Audio Sink? (WTF???). Do I need to pair it or not? I assume so, but it makes no difference...
Nope. Bluetooth on recent Linux Desktops is still non-functional.
C'mon linux developer dudes - get with it.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 March, 2015, 11:02:29 pm
Like, DIY, dude ;)
</Linux spod>
Post by: henshaw11 on 25 March, 2015, 11:47:44 pm
I have phones, a tablet, and some mp3 player I got in a Christmas cracker, that'll all connect to my bluetooth speakers, almost without me looking.
Linux? Ah Linux....
Is it an Audio Device? Is it an Audio Sink? (WTF???). Do I need to pair it or not? I assume so, but it makes no difference...
Nope. Bluetooth on recent Linux Desktops is still non-functional.
C'mon linux developer dudes - get with it.
From a cursory search - Bluez installed ?
What flavour of linux ?
( bluetooth works on android , I'm wondering how they differ..)
Post by: Kim on 26 March, 2015, 12:05:50 am
I'm sure the basic design spec was "come up with something that makes USB look simple".
Audio on Linux, though? That makes bluetooth look simple.
Post by: Arellcat on 26 March, 2015, 12:52:53 am
At least they don't have the annoying paper clip anymore.
Don't tell me you don't miss Clippy :o
:( I was rather fond of Scribble the origami cat.
I also liked watching Links the cat scratching the side of my screen, tearing up bits of paper, or curling up and going to sleep on the toolbar. I didn't really use the Microsoft Assistant for actual assistance, mind you.
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_z_BPo98TPjs/RrFfcI_oPXI/AAAAAAAAAUU/XKnfQJ30KI4/s400/cat1.JPG)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 March, 2015, 06:54:06 am
Sort it out u muppets!
Post by: ian on 26 March, 2015, 09:50:44 am
At least they don't have the annoying paper clip anymore.Don't tell me you don't miss Clippy :o
:( I was rather fond of Scribble the origami cat.
I also liked watching Links the cat scratching the side of my screen, tearing up bits of paper, or curling up and going to sleep on the toolbar. I didn't really use the Microsoft Assistant for actual assistance, mind you.
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_z_BPo98TPjs/RrFfcI_oPXI/AAAAAAAAAUU/XKnfQJ30KI4/s400/cat1.JPG)
It's not just me. The search cat was ace.
Post by: perpetual dan on 29 March, 2015, 10:34:28 am
Apple Mail is the turd in Apple's pristine lawn of user-friendliness. Basically, it's shit.
Not sure whether it is Apple Mail or Exchange, but mail plays an almost daily game of pretending to work, but not actually talking to the server. The only indication is a suspicious lack of people bothering me. Remedy is force stop. Which means anything I've filed or deleted comes back. Yawn.
Post by: Afasoas on 08 April, 2015, 12:25:21 pm
If the output from:
Code: [Select]
$myAssociativeArray = @()
for ([int]$i=1; $i -lt 4; $i++)
{
for ([int]$j=11; $j -lt 32; $j=$j+10)
{
$myAssociativeArray += ,@($i, $j, [int](($i +1) * $j))
}
}
foreach ($row in $myAssociativeArray)
{
write-host "$($row[0]) green frogs, $($row[1]) horny toads & $($row[2]) bottles of beer"
}looks something like:
1 green frogs, 11 horny toads & 22 bottles of beer
1 green frogs, 21 horny toads & 42 bottles of beer
1 green frogs, 31 horny toads & 62 bottles of beer
2 green frogs, 11 horny toads & 33 bottles of beer
2 green frogs, 21 horny toads & 63 bottles of beer
2 green frogs, 31 horny toads & 93 bottles of beer
3 green frogs, 11 horny toads & 44 bottles of beer
3 green frogs, 21 horny toads & 84 bottles of beer
3 green frogs, 31 horny toads & 124 bottles of beer
what would you expect from..
Code: [Select]
foreach ($row in ($myAssociativeArray | where-object { $_[2] -eq 124 }))
{
write-host "$($row[0]) green frogs, $($row[1]) horny toads & $($row[2]) bottles of beer"
}
?
Post by: Pickled Onion on 08 April, 2015, 12:51:21 pm
Powershell.
?
It would not surprise me in the slightest if it opened the CD tray or remapped the keyboard to Uzbek.
Post by: TheLurker on 08 April, 2015, 08:18:11 pm
Powershell.
:
:
3 green frogs, 21 horny toads & 84 bottles of beer
3 green frogs, 31 horny toads & 124 bottles of beer
what would you expect from..
foreach ($row in ($myAssociativeArray | where-object { $_[2] -eq 124 }))
{
write-host "$($row[0]) green frogs, $($row[1]) horny toads & $($row[2]) bottles of beer"
}
?
Hmmm, I'd hope to see only those rows where the element at index 2 was 124. So mebbe the last row?
This suggests that you are either seeing:
a) All rows or
b) Sweet Fanny Adams
*Flips coin* Probably the latter. What was the fix?
Post by: Afasoas on 09 April, 2015, 08:37:23 am
3 green frogs, horny toads & bottles of beer
31 green frogs, horny toads & bottles of beer
124 green frogs, horny toads & bottles of beer
So for now I'm using:
foreach ($row in ($myAssociativeArray | where-object { $_[2] -eq 124 }))
{
if($row[2] -ne 124)
{
continue
}
write-host "$($row[0]) green frogs, $($row[1]) horny toads & $($row[2]) bottles of beer"
}
It's actually a Powershell script that reboots all the developer workstations, once over a two week period. Machines are selected from active directory, their host names are hashed and they are then sorted via the hashed key. Machines are then selected for reboot from the list based on the day and week number in the two week cycle. The script ensures more machines are rebooted mid-week and fewer machines are rebooted on a Monday or Friday. Sounds a bit OTT, but I tend to make any changes in Group Policy (e.g. software updates, configuration changes) towards the end of the week so it means a fairly controlled roll out.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 09 April, 2015, 09:53:23 am
You have a 2 dimensional array (don't call it myAssociativeArray, that's as confusing as $myInteger = 3.1415) which looks something like:
((1,11,22),(1,21,42)...)
You can think of this as an array of arrays.
You've clearly heard of the "comma trick" as it's in your code - if there's no comma, it's not an array. So (1,2) is an array and (,1) is an array with one element, but (1) is not an array it's a scalar value. Why am I telling you this? Well, your where-object cmdlet, for this data, returns ((3,31,124)) - that's a single array out of your array of arrays. Powershell then treats the foreach as iterating over this as a 1-dimensional array, NOT over the outer array containing a single element that's an array. So $row is no longer a row, it's an integer.
You can see this in action if you change the comparison from "-eq" to "-ne", the results will be all the lines as in your first example bar the last one. In other words it works as expected. Only when there's a single result selected by the filter is there a problem.
The way to fix this is to force powershell to treat the output from where-object as an array even when it thinks it can be flattened:
Code: [Select]
foreach ($row in @($myAssociativeArray | where-object { $_[2] -eq 124 }))By the way, I sincerely hope this isn't related to your comment in the other thread about "learning a proper language". Powershell is a steaming pile of dogshit and should only ever be used if you're being forced to.
Post by: Afasoas on 09 April, 2015, 12:35:34 pm
My confusion about associative arrays arises from the "@" symbol, but now I see the difference between:
Code: [Select]
$myArray1 = "blah", "foo", "bar"
$myArray2 = @("blah", "foo", "bar")
which I presume are effectively the same andCode: [Select]
$myHashTable = @{ foo="bar"}And I realise associative array is a synonym for hash table. Correct me if I'm wrong.
By the way, I sincerely hope this isn't related to your comment in the other thread about "learning a proper language". Powershell is a steaming pile of dogshit and should only ever be used if you're being forced to.
I'm learning C .. albeit slowly. And I've done some rudimentary bits in Ruby but I'm not sure as to whether or not you would call that a proper language :)
I used to despise Powershell but it's actually pretty handy/powerful for domain admin type stuffs. Certainly preferable to VBScript.
Post by: woollypigs on 09 April, 2015, 01:02:17 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 April, 2015, 02:44:18 pm
Post by: Biggsy on 10 April, 2015, 02:47:03 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 April, 2015, 02:59:39 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 April, 2015, 02:30:54 pm
Please do not tell me that an upgrade to iOS 8.3 is available and then tell me the install "failed" scarcely had it even begun, thereby causing me to fear that my Fondleslab had turned into an expensive paperweight. Furthermore, please do not present no information as to why this has happened.
Or I'll set fire to your black roll-neck jumpers with you inside them.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 April, 2015, 02:01:46 pm
Post by: DaveJ on 13 April, 2015, 03:51:02 pm
Post by: Kim on 13 April, 2015, 08:19:11 pm
Oi! Mega!-Global! Exclamation! Mark! Corporation! of! Sunnyvale!, USAnia! Why! is! flickr! so! shit! on! a! Fondleslab!?
To provide UI consistency with flickr on all other platforms, of course.
While we're ranting about UI, it turns out that there's a devious security feature in Android that stops you from being able to click on the SuperSU "grant root privileges to this app" button when sounds-like-a-sparkly-vampire has dimmed the screen to a soothing nocturnal tint. While I'm all for avoiding privilege escalation attacks (especially those perpetrated by manipulative sparkly vampires - see endless teen fiction passim) the correct thing to do from a UI perspective at that point is, as any fule knows, to pop up a little animated GIF of Dennis Nedry saying "Ah-ah-ah!". Silently inhibiting the button press and allowing the dialog to time out to its default "deny" state will merely convince the user that their touchscreen is broken, and/or there's a mysterious bug in SuperSU that only allows root access during hours of daylight.
Post by: David Martin on 13 April, 2015, 08:27:07 pm
Maybe it is a seekrit conspiracy to persuade me to upgrade to Yosemite.
Post by: Ham on 13 April, 2015, 09:23:52 pm
Quote
I am an occasional user of TV Anywhere, I haven't used it for about 7 months, maybe more. I'm used to Virgin's unbelievably poor web implementations, but really, this is shocking.
The service used to work fine for me, no problems, now does it? Does it heck. After finding the service - for which anyone deserves a Top Sleuth medal - come on, Virgin, how difficult would it be to put a link on the top of some useful or intuitive page? No, why do that, put a link to a load of useless blurb and hide the live link at the bottom - signing in multiple times as ever with Virgin - Chrome appears to be broken completely,
OK let's try Firefox. Oh, look! Having registered in Chrome, Firefox thinks this computer is another device. I wouldn't swear to it (because that would actually mean Virgin implemented something useful) but I'm fairly certain it used to be by device rather than by browser. Not sure I want to have two registrations on the same machine. So...
Let's try Android. I have a Nexus 5 running Lollipop,I'm up for trying it. On the "help" (mwah hah hah) page it tells me the Nexus 5 is fully supported. OK, lets find it on Google Play. For whatever reason, can't be found on the phone, OK, use the desktop. Oh, look. "This application is not compatible with your device" That's another fine mess you've made, Virgin.
I assume that is because I am now running 5.1, which has been about for a while, but it is a pretty poor show.
Program I wanted to watch is finished now.
Virgin, you took what was a passably good service and have buried it.
(program was Paris Roubaix - I assume they have deliberately broken Chrome because of Chromecast - what I wanted to use to watch)
Post by: Feanor on 15 April, 2015, 09:38:29 pm
You work in the IT industry.
You should understand about this kind of stuff.
When I need you to send me 500MB files, I don't expect you to struggle to find a way to do it.
I don't expect you to try to e-mail it.
We have a shared network drive on a local server, on a gigabit LAN for exactly this purpose.
So WTF do you all insist on skyping them to me, thereby tromboning the file all the way out to Skype's server-in-the-sky, and all the way back, over our mediocre interpipes?
Post by: Kim on 16 April, 2015, 12:51:55 am
Barakta tried to send me some files using DropBox the other week. It's supposed to spot clients on the same LAN and transfer the files locally, but it clearly wasn't. Sneakernet would have ultimately been much less painful, as would my original suggestion of putting them in a directory on the file server and chmodding it. Won't be making that mistake again.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 16 April, 2015, 12:15:25 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 April, 2015, 01:12:52 pm
Post by: Biggsy on 17 April, 2015, 07:50:22 pm
Post by: woollypigs on 17 April, 2015, 11:30:58 pm
Wireless charging it is not, when you need to wire up the object that your item needs to be millimetres from to be able to charge. It is only wireless when you can walk on the moors miles away from a power point and have a full charge. OK I will accept it if it is within your house.
Post by: Kim on 18 April, 2015, 12:30:13 am
Wireless charging it is not, when you need to wire up the object that your item needs to be millimetres from to be able to charge. It is only wireless when you can walk on the moors miles away from a power point and have a full charge. OK I will accept it if it is within your house.
It's charging without a direct electrical connection. That's wireless enough for me, by any reasonable definition (eg. that it's relying on magic, rather than electricity). The effect works over long distances, if you drop the frequency low enough and make the antenna correspondingly longer - but that's more useful for injecting annoying buzzing noises into people's hearing aids or painstakingly instructing submarines to nuke Moscow, rather than topping up your iPhone.
Besides, if your device could be an arbitrary distance from the power source and have a full charge, you wouldn't need a battery, would you?
Presumably "magnetoquasistatic charging" was considered to be a bit of a mouthful... ;D
Post by: woollypigs on 18 April, 2015, 06:33:44 am
Post by: Polar Bear on 18 April, 2015, 07:57:44 am
When I disable apps that means that I don't want updates, clearly.
Why don't you understand that?
Please stop behaving like you know what's best for me. You are not my doctor.
That is all.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 April, 2015, 08:32:14 am
Well that was what Mr Nikola Telsa was working some nearly hundred years ago.
While he was no odder, say, than a monkey in a bucket of custard or some members of this forum, by most rational standards he was a bit of a fruitbat, thobut : demon:
Post by: Canardly on 18 April, 2015, 10:19:09 am
Post by: Kim on 18 April, 2015, 01:04:30 pm
Well that was what Mr Nikola Telsa was working some nearly hundred years ago.
While he was no odder, say, than a monkey in a bucket of custard or some members of this forum, by most rational standards he was a bit of a fruitbat, thobut : demon:
Tesla's resonant inductive coupling experiments were valid enough, the fruitbattery was expecting to be able to use what is fundamentally a nearfield effect over long distances (for that you really need a microwave beam, or something). He probably didn't know that at the time, though. He also didn't have to worry about the FCC sending the lads round.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 April, 2015, 11:51:37 pm
| Machine | Login screen | Desktop background |
| Lapdancer | Small-block Chevy | Monument Valley |
| Desktop | Lister-Jaguar | Bonneville Salt Flats |
Is that so difficult to accomplish, you useless gonk?
Post by: ian on 20 April, 2015, 07:20:54 pm
So what did the blessed of Cupertino do? They ported the same cryptic UI over to Photos. Dump the entire paradigm of 'events' which made nice containers for your photos, so you can nicely label things (admittedly no one knew the difference between an event and an album, but iPhoto always presented you with an event). Now, OK, I'd really like to go back and put several thousand photographs back into albums. Actually I wouldn't. Perhaps I could live with all that, but seriously, you've removed many of the metadata options, including the ability to add a location to a picture unless it's taken with a device that has GPS. So instead I just have a big list of photos and dates. Very fucking useful.
Edit: none of this should be taken to mean that iPhoto is good. iPhoto is still a big enough turd to give a straining brontosaurus cross-eyes.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 April, 2015, 01:17:27 am
I know nothing of this iPhoto of which Sir speaks but then I can't be arsed with metadatastasing photos anyway, and the "upgrade" to iOS on the fondleslab last September - with its constant blathering about the lack of a SIM card - was way more annoying than anything iTunes has ever done to me.
* "Spectre At The Feast" by the very splendid Hellset Orchestra
Post by: ian on 21 April, 2015, 09:42:07 am
And that they lose random features. Not all cameras have GPS and it's useful to know where a picture was taken. In ten years time I probably won't know where I was on 17 April 2015. In about five months time, I won't remember. I shouldn't have to play of a game isn't that the building in... Before you could select a pile of pictures, click 'get info' and add a place. Job done. It doesn't seem exactly an edge use case. It's information that it automatically retains for photos with the location added by the camera, though again not editable. Same for 'faces' which now clunks. Again, I'd like to be able to tag pictures and pull up, say, all the pictures I've taken in Hong Kong, or those that feature the delightful Cohort of Ms Frangipani.
The quest for reducing functionality to match that on a tablet continues. I blame Finestre, the Demon of Such Things. She had to trump skeuomorphism, which while inspired, hah had its day. She really does outdo herself. I think her performance review must be coming up.
Post by: davelodwig on 21 April, 2015, 10:32:22 am
If I just wanted to browse all my photos in a list I'd just dump them in a folder.
D.
Post by: ian on 21 April, 2015, 11:45:14 am
If I just wanted to browse all my photos in a list I'd just dump them in a folder.
Yes, but with Photos you get a smear of unusable teeny thumbnails like someone has pinned an entire year's worth of photos to a fence at the far end of a large car park and left you to squint at it with a pair of cheap binoculars.
I must be getting old. I don't really care about sharing all my photos. I just want to catalogue my pictures in a useable way that let's me easily find the photo I want. Anyway, without geotagging it's useless, so I'll need to find something else to satisfy what I thought were my undemanding needs.
Post by: Jaded on 21 April, 2015, 12:27:04 pm
I want Aperture. Not iPhotos
At some time in the future, when Aperture stops working I shall have to find a new Photo management and manipulation app. Which makes me >:( >:( >:(
Post by: ian on 21 April, 2015, 12:34:09 pm
Aperture.
I want Aperture. Not iPhotos
At some time in the future, when Aperture stops working I shall have to find a new Photo management and manipulation app. Which makes me >:( >:( >:(
I had iPhoto and Photoshop Elements. Worked fine. I don't see a third party editor option any more. That might be the inscrutable UI but I suspect that's another feature lost to progress. I love my iPad but I really don't see why my full computer has to be limited to the same feature set as the tablet and smartphone versions. One of the great things about the Apple-verse was that it pretty much included everything I need without having to install third party apps to do basic tasks like manage photos or send an email.
Post by: woollypigs on 21 April, 2015, 01:08:09 pm
Then when you think you have found one that works, they either stop supporting it, not compatible with OS upgrade, new update that just changed the UI into an un-usable mess or features you used/liked just go walkies.
So now I dump my photos into folder sorted by date, event type and title. If they need more fiddling I bring out the Gimp.
Post by: David Martin on 21 April, 2015, 10:43:55 pm
Post by: Asterix, the former Gaul. on 22 April, 2015, 07:38:47 am
Quote
When ctrl + alt + delete doesn't work, just shoot the darn thing.Read more at http://gazette.com/man-shoots-computer-in-colorado-springs-alley-gets-revenge-he-wanted-and-a-citation/article/1550042#z3IgkiAFzPobHEfb.99
He got tired of fighting with his computer for the last several months," Lt. Jeff Strossner said. "He was having technology problems, so he took it out in the back alley and shot it.
(http://cdn.csgazette.biz/cache/r960-17fce9f233d2bc29c7ce7df7c533e89a.jpg)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 April, 2015, 06:14:42 pm
Why, no! No, I cannot. "Page not found". Your ball, Microsith.
Curiously, it installed fine on the desktop box ???
Post by: davelodwig on 23 April, 2015, 12:37:40 pm
I have given up trying to find a photo organising program. They all either don't do what I want: as in not doing what I want/need or try to do stuff by themselves that I do no need/want - rotation, commenting, sorting all by themselves and didn't ask for.
Then when you think you have found one that works, they either stop supporting it, not compatible with OS upgrade, new update that just changed the UI into an un-usable mess or features you used/liked just go walkies.
So now I dump my photos into folder sorted by date, event type and title. If they need more fiddling I bring out the Gimp.
This is the direction I'm thinking of going, on the basis of cloud sync of folders of files works a lot better than bespoke library files with odd versioning. Might be an excuse to expand my dropbox storage.
D.
Post by: woollypigs on 23 April, 2015, 05:48:21 pm
Here is a tinfoil hat for you dropboxers - Miss C Rice, yes the lass from the Bush gang, is now the security adviser for Dropbox hmmm....
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 April, 2015, 06:27:13 pm
Is confused.
Post by: T42 on 25 April, 2015, 08:58:40 am
Post by: Wombat on 26 April, 2015, 11:59:55 am
Microsith, you are a pack of splattercrap-covered poomonkeys! $UPDATE fails to install. Repeatedly. And judging from the Microsith Community Forum, I am not alone in this. Aha! says a Microsith droid. You need to have installed $OTHER_UPDATE and $OTHER_OTHER_UPDATE first. The former cannot be found in the update history. Perhaps I can install this manually?
Why, no! No, I cannot. "Page not found". Your ball, Microsith.
Curiously, it installed fine on the desktop box ???
I too, and having a "you bunch of fuckers" moment at Microsoft, only I'm not feeling as eloquent as you, and can't think of any words which are not obscene. Why, when I have told you to tell me before updating everything, do you insist on doing updates regardless, and then fail with fatal errors, ;eAVING ME WITH a totally fucked PC? I am typing this on the laptop, pending committing murder....
Have just done a "refresh, ans that seemed to be the only option which might get it working, and I see the desktop has returned, but minus all my desktop shortcuts. I wonder if its totally buggered...
Post by: Wombat on 26 April, 2015, 12:09:35 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 April, 2015, 01:04:28 pm
- Uninstall KB3045999
- Do not reboot
- Install KB3022345
- Reboot
- Install KB3045999 again
- Reboot again
* as in "Care In The"
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 April, 2015, 04:23:56 pm
Google Maps is not Using My Location, because it isn't running. So why the twatty banner at the top of the screen taking up the space normally used for navigating to the top of the page, which now doesn't work?
I do not know whether this is the fault of the Chocolate Factory or the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, nor do I care. I just want it to go away.
Edit: it has gone away. Now I have to find something else to get cross about >:(
Post by: Wombat on 26 April, 2015, 05:24:03 pm
If yours was the same update issue, someone on the Microsith Community*Forum advised:Worked for me.
- Uninstall KB3045999
- Do not reboot
- Install KB3022345
- Reboot
- Install KB3045999 again
- Reboot again
* as in "Care In The"
Couldn't uninstall the failed update, as it wouldn't boot, whatever I did. Does it not occur to them to test their updates? My PC is modern, and fairly high spec, and quite "normal", so should not present any compatability issues. Microbloodysoft, get yer bleedin' act together! That's another several days wasted, just reinstalling software, AGAIN.
Post by: TheLurker on 26 April, 2015, 05:37:06 pm
Work machines are SEP.
Post by: Polar Bear on 26 April, 2015, 05:48:42 pm
It is prompting me to do updates again... :-\
Post by: davelodwig on 27 April, 2015, 12:44:41 pm
You might think your pc / laptop is a common configuration in reality it's probably not. This is where apple wins in some respect they make the hardware and therefore know what combinations are out there.
Microsoft are not alone in this regard, however the enterprise software (Solaris, etc, etc) just restrict the hardware there software will run on. Imagine doing that to a desktop OS people would be hand wringing and moaning, it'd be like the old days all over again.
D.
Post by: Wombat on 27 April, 2015, 01:07:26 pm
I'd liken it to me taking the car to the garage, and they tell me it needs a software update (it did, when it was serviced) and when I go to collect it, they tell me that there was a problem with the update, but its OK, they've sorted the update, but in the process they've removed the seats and the wheels, and I'll have to pay to get them refitted, and also find where they have hidden them.
Yes, it a complex business, but if you can't do it competently, don't claim you can, and charge money for it.
By the way, the car software update went just fine. Luckily it wasn't for the "infotainment" system, which runs Windows CE :sick: :sick:
Post by: tiermat on 27 April, 2015, 01:25:24 pm
By the way, the car software update went just fine. Luckily it wasn't for the "infotainment" system, which runs Windows CE :sick: :sick:
That got me wondering, just what the one in mine runs on.
Oh no! I wish I hadn't looked!
Currently CE, but the next generation will use QNX...
Explains everything..
Post by: Biggsy on 27 April, 2015, 02:32:31 pm
Well if they haven't tested it on an Asus Z87 motherboard, with an Intel i7 4770k and a Samsung 1TB SSD, then they really haven't tried very hard, have they?
You've got to be joking. The number of combinations of chipsets, CPUs and SSDs in use is into the millions. Even taking the twenty most common ones of each, that'd be 8000 combinations, and possibly yours wouldn't be included.
Post by: rafletcher on 27 April, 2015, 02:44:03 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 April, 2015, 03:33:20 pm
Post by: Deano on 29 April, 2015, 04:11:31 pm
I'm especially looking at you, Lotus Notes. I went to do something else while you were having a think about things, and now you've finally decided to respond with some "look-at-me, pay-attention-to-me" jumping-back-to-the-front antics. Just fuck off until I have to use you again.
Post by: rafletcher on 30 April, 2015, 08:20:24 am
Grr, programs that keep popping up from the background.
I'm especially looking at you, Lotus Notes. I went to do something else while you were having a think about things, and now you've finally decided to respond with some "look-at-me, pay-attention-to-me" jumping-back-to-the-front antics. Just fuck off until I have to use you again.
Ah, and Sametime (part of the Notes suite that we have). However at least you can see you're b eing talked to. We're moving to Outlook shortly, so have "Jabber" chat/phone programme. Just lights up a small icon in the tool tray when u get "chatted" to. but pops a big blob up if you're phoned.
Post by: davelodwig on 30 April, 2015, 01:34:36 pm
Well if they haven't tested it on an Asus Z87 motherboard, with an Intel i7 4770k and a Samsung 1TB SSD, then they really haven't tried very hard, have they?
You've got to be joking. The number of combinations of chipsets, CPUs and SSDs in use is into the millions. Even taking the twenty most common ones of each, that'd be 8000 combinations, and possibly yours wouldn't be included.
I quite imagine testing is done along the basis of what complete machines the big hardware vendors are pushing lots of units of. So Dell, HP, etc, because they will be sold as certified. As an example HP will send machines to work for us to certify that our software runs on them, we get to keep the machines at the end of it.
If your machine is that mission critical that any downtime will cost you money then why don't you have a duplicate for testing updates, new software before rolling out to production? It's what we do here, nothing much gets into production before rolling though test because the possible millions and millions of combinations pushed out by the silicone mills in China.
Like I said you might think your hardware is common, but it's probably not.
Post by: Biggsy on 30 April, 2015, 02:17:16 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 01 May, 2015, 06:24:04 pm
No, but seriously. Another in the intermittent, "TFS is a pox-ridden pile of shite" series of posts.
We've got this intranet site and we wanted to display some data from TFS all pretty like on it. A few hours and not very much swearing later it's all hunky-dory on my machine. Click hyperlink get pretty TFS "report". Sooo publish to server and we're done yeah? Ha ha, bloody ha. No. The site crashes and burns. Won't even load the home page.
To summarise:
1 - The TFS foundation DLLs are so heavily interdependent upon one another you have to install _all_ of them, not just the ones directly referenced by your project(s) on the web server.
2 - Microsoft screwed up an update a year or so ago so that instead of copying the updated DLLs to both the GAC and the directory holding the reference assemblies the updated DLLs only made it into the GAC. No I don't know how or why they did that. Now this means that even if you twig point 1 dumping what you think are a kosher set of DLLs on the server is no earthly use whatsoever. You just get missing method exceptions when you try to walk collections of some TFS types.
And best of all...
3 - The TFS DLLs force your site to be run from a 32bit application pool. If you don't configure it thusly your 64bit IIS running the intranet site won't even load the home page. It'll just blow up at start when it tries to load the 32 bit TFS DLLs.
God but I _hate_ TFS and I'm still a bit narked that we're faffing around with a 32/64 bit mix.
Post by: simonp on 01 May, 2015, 08:34:00 pm
Post by: hellymedic on 01 May, 2015, 11:24:13 pm
This is a new level of mischief which I DO NOT LIKE!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 May, 2015, 01:14:33 pm
Post by: tiermat on 05 May, 2015, 01:50:21 pm
When you need to reboot a VM, that is at the other end of a TS link, DO NOT REBOOT THE TS Server....
You would think I had learnt that one by now, wouldn't you?
Post by: woollypigs on 05 May, 2015, 03:01:11 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 05 May, 2015, 03:50:04 pm
Hmm backup ran over night just fine, but some how is about 100Gb bigger than the host. Fine for main backup drive but not for secondary backup drive. For the life of me where are the extra files ... ?
100Gb?
*how* much porn?
Post by: woollypigs on 05 May, 2015, 05:04:22 pm
Somehow folders has been duplicate within other folders. Wierdly there isn't any pattern and it is rather random so it could not be a slip of the old muse or Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v.
Post by: pcolbeck on 05 May, 2015, 05:13:01 pm
:)
Somehow folders has been duplicate within other folders. Wierdly there isn't any pattern and it is rather random so it could not be a slip of the old muse or Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v.
Some type of symbolic link that the backup software is following ?
Post by: Gattopardo on 06 May, 2015, 10:46:18 pm
So I create a one account on the new win10 install machine to share the photos off the phone, guess what phone can't access the sccount as it does not exist. All the operating systems can see the android phone and the apple thing.
Search comes up with little.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 May, 2015, 08:50:29 am
If yours was the same update issue, someone on the Microsith Community*Forum advised:Worked for me.
- Uninstall KB3045999
- Do not reboot
- Install KB3022345
- Reboot
- Install KB3045999 again
- Reboot again
* as in "Care In The"
Couldn't uninstall the failed update, as it wouldn't boot, whatever I did. Does it not occur to them to test their updates? My PC is modern, and fairly high spec, and quite "normal", so should not present any compatability issues. Microbloodysoft, get yer bleedin' act together! That's another several days wasted, just reinstalling software, AGAIN.
You may want to be on the lookout for the New! IMPROVED!! release of KB3022345, then, as in order to install this you first need to remove the previous version of said update (iffen you managed to get the bloody thing to install in the first place). With all the restarting and similar twattery that this requires. Someone at Microsith wants badly to have their cobblers deep-fried over this one, the massive wankhammers.
Also, Windows has turned the "View Installed Updates" wossname into a listing such as one might have for music files. Unsurprisingly, it does not tell you the album title, genre or contributing artists for Windows updates ::-)
Post by: TheLurker on 07 May, 2015, 09:03:19 pm
Post by: tiermat on 08 May, 2015, 10:12:53 am
Oh wow. TFS. Again. _Another_ overwritten/lost change. One is almost bereft of words. What a terrifyingly unreliable bucket of foetid pus it is.
I might just point my current client in your direction (you are, IIRC, not that far from us)
First they got MS in to organise a POC with TFS and Dynamics.
MS said "for a POC, use Azure"
We said "OK"
MS said "Hang on, Dynamics doesn't play nicely with Azure"
We said "OK, lets stick it on out vSphere"
"OK" said MS "Here is our document on what we will provide etc"
That gave us all a great laugh, especially the wide spread use of "Envisioning"
Post by: Afasoas on 08 May, 2015, 02:00:09 pm
Pile of Cr*p?
I believe back here TFS was phased in and very quickly phased out again, before my tenure.
Post by: tiermat on 08 May, 2015, 02:12:07 pm
POC?
Pile of Cr*p?
I believe back here TFS was phased in and very quickly phased out again, before my tenure.
Sorry, too long doing the consultant bit (and so chock full of TLAs), POC = Proof of Concept
Post by: Gattopardo on 08 May, 2015, 04:46:12 pm
Post by: perpetual dan on 10 May, 2015, 09:54:53 am
So, today I try and install something new (spark-cli) and it needs XCode to install. I get error messages that lead me to "Xcode licence problems, try opening it and accepting the licence". I try and open Xcode (not a tool I use normally, its just there). You've upgraded it for me. Why, than you. To a version that doesn't work on my OS version! Numbskulls!
Luckily I've already got a developer account of some sort (can't for the life of me remember why) and now I'm downloading 2 and a bit GB of old version software. I suppose I could upgrade the OS, but now I'm feeling belligerent.
Post by: woollypigs on 10 May, 2015, 10:47:51 am
:)
Somehow folders has been duplicate within other folders. Wierdly there isn't any pattern and it is rather random so it could not be a slip of the old muse or Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v.
Some type of symbolic link that the backup software is following ?
I think it is a slip of fingers and a random / that caused it and I have forgotten or not spotted it when I ran backup before. Still haven't got my head around linux paths - random/folder/path or random/folder/path/ . Some GUI programs and other terminal path tend to use the / differently, or is it me who don't get it :)
Post by: Feanor on 10 May, 2015, 04:08:38 pm
random/folder/path/ is unambiguously a directory.
This can give rise to unexpected results, unless you know what's going on.
For example:
mv myfile /archive/mystuff
what does that do?
It can do one of 2 things.
It can move 'myfile' into the 'mystuff' subdirectory ( **if it exists** ).
What if it doesn't exist? You mis-remembered the directory name, and it was actually 'MyStuff'. What happens then?
It sees there is no directory called 'mystuff', so it assumes you want to move 'myfile' into the '/archive' directory, and **re-name it as 'mystuff' along the way**.
Now you go looking for your archive of 'myfile', and it's not there!
Wail! The computer ate you file!
It's best to avoid the ambiguity by explicitly specifying the destination is a directory:
mv myfile /archive/mystuff/
That can only mean 1 thing.
And if the 'mystuff' directory does not exist, you will get an error.
It will not interpret it as a name-change of the file.
As an aside, your examples are 'relative path names', in that they don't start from root (/ ), they start from where you are right now, the Present Working Directory.
'/etc/hosts' for example, is an absolute pathname, because it gives the full path starting from root.
Again, you can use relative pathnames for simplicity, but absolute pathnames to avoid possible ambiguities.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 May, 2015, 05:24:18 pm
Post by: tiermat on 11 May, 2015, 12:49:40 pm
They used to provide a service that was audio only, the audio was hosted on their servers, and was very good.
Now all they provide is an algorithm that serves up YouTube videos, with the (to me) obvious drop in sound quality**. Also the algorithm is decidedly worse than it used to be, repeating artists (and even songs) within minutes, whereas it used to take a couple of hours at least before you heard the same artist again.
I don't want bloody videos, I just want music, ok?
*Yes, it has been a long time since I used the service.
**Yes, I know, internet radio and sound quality do not mix, but I hope you get where I am coming from.
Post by: tiermat on 12 May, 2015, 09:40:54 am
Now I wondered just why my data usage was going through the roof.
Turns out that the settings I had in Play Store had been ignored (only update over Wifi). Google, in their infinite wisdom decided that, actually, I wanted to auto update anywhere, anytime!
Thanks a fucking lot, you muppets! At least I noticed before I got stung for extra data charges.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 12 May, 2015, 12:26:06 pm
Post by: tiermat on 12 May, 2015, 12:49:54 pm
Just got an email purporting to be from 123-reg.co.uk. IT has a .doc attached, claiming to be a bill.
I "own" 3 domains (sorry bobb, one of them is a "theXXXXXX.org.uk" address).
I thought to myself "is it for real?" then had to think hard to realise that 1) none of my domains are due for renewal (August and November are the dates) 2) I use 1&1, not 123-reg and, finally, 3) the bills arrive as PDFs and a suggestion that I go to the admin panel to check everything is ok.
A quick squint at the message headers show the email originating from a .tc adsl address...
Post by: barakta on 12 May, 2015, 01:01:17 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 May, 2015, 01:10:35 pm
Post by: tiermat on 12 May, 2015, 01:12:58 pm
Received: from 65-255-51-142-static.dsl.tciway.tc ([65.255.51.142]) by
mx.kundenserver.de (mxeue001) with ESMTP (Nemesis) id
0LeDb3-1ZYbp93Yon-00qBiu for <XXXX-Tiermat's-RL-Email>; Tue, 12 May 2015
13:43:06 +0200
Post by: Afasoas on 12 May, 2015, 02:11:01 pm
Post by: Kim on 12 May, 2015, 02:13:57 pm
Ah, I have one of those, hadn't got as far as verifying it for authenticity and checking with Kim/real Pc when my domains were due for renewal.
Your domains are registered under my account, for ease of DNS-jibbling, so if you're getting emails they're spam.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 12 May, 2015, 02:16:39 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 May, 2015, 02:19:25 pm
Have you all got 123-reg domains? Sounds like a possible data breach ...
Mine's done through Heart Internet but Dog knows whether they're just an intermediary in the process or not. But Babbage-Post concerning that goes to a different address from the one which received the dodgy message ???
Post by: Woofage on 12 May, 2015, 02:55:16 pm
Spammers, stop getting sneaky.
Just got an email purporting to be from 123-reg.co.uk. IT has a .doc attached, claiming to be a bill.
I've had plenty of those today. .doc rather than PDF? Run a mile, so to speak.
Post by: bikesdontfloat on 13 May, 2015, 12:18:46 am
Though looking thinking about it there must be folk out there like Kim who have muliple sites registered - though you would hope that these would be the least likely sort of people to fall for something like this.
Post by: Kim on 13 May, 2015, 12:22:17 am
Correction: I have, but spamassassin caught it.
Post by: barakta on 13 May, 2015, 11:56:46 am
Ah, I have one of those, hadn't got as far as verifying it for authenticity and checking with Kim/real Pc when my domains were due for renewal.
Your domains are registered under my account, for ease of DNS-jibbling, so if you're getting emails they're spam.
I had sort of assumed that but I was reading emails while waiting for Helldesk to sort our remote access to $Database so had merely filed as "ask Kim later" cos I couldn't remember whether you had my domain or not... Then your comment reminded me that it's cos I trust you not to hijack my domains if we ever split up.
Post by: David Martin on 13 May, 2015, 12:13:50 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 13 May, 2015, 02:44:13 pm
Why don't the spammers rein themselves in a little? When you have 5 or 6 emails at a time, all purporting to come from 123-reg, it looks well dodgy from the off. You would have thought that dialing it back a little would be more convincing. We must have had 30 or so today just between 2 email addresses at work today.
Though looking thinking about it there must be folk out there like Kim who have muliple sites registered - though you would hope that these would be the least likely sort of people to fall for something like this.
I suspect multiple spammers are using the technique, probably running bots on compromised hosts which have no/minimal command and control.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 May, 2015, 01:53:25 pm
- Your new interface looks shit. I can live with that, but it's still shit.
- It crashes Chrome on the fondleslab if looked at askance.
- It looks shit. All that whitespace round the sides wastes electrons, and looks shit.
- There is no way to select bbcode from under the "Share" wossname. I can't press <CONTROL-C> on this thing, you thick fucks! And "Select all" selects something almost, but not quite, entirely unrelated to the thing I actually want to copy. By all accounts it doesn't work on Android devices either.
- Did I mention that it looks shit? Well, it does.
- Your auto-tagging SCIENCE is also shit. And I can't find a way of turning it off.
- It looks shit.
- I don't want to change my password either. This is a generic failing of the Mega!-Global! Exclamation! Mark! Corporation! of! Sunnyvale!, USAnia! but I thought I'd mention it.
- I just looked again but no, it still looks shit.
Point 4 is the biggie. A major fucking issue. A cockup that renders flickr Not Fit For Purpose. And there is a major drawback with the workaround suggested by one of your gnomes, which is this: IT DOESN'T TWATTING WORK >:(
Schlimbesserung doesn't even begin to cover it; there'd have to be some scheiße thrown in for starters. And you put the link to the help pages right at the bottom so after having waited for a fortnight to get there, the page starts loading more thumbnails and the link flies south like a coconutless swallow. I suspect this is deliberate, to stop people like me from complaining about it in public.
Tw@s.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 May, 2015, 04:12:47 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 14 May, 2015, 07:55:20 pm
Congratulations! are! due! to! the! Mega!-Global! Exclamation! Mark! Corporation! of! Sunnyvale!, USAnia! You really have fucking excelled yourselves this time. You have fucked flickr so badly that ["simile removed on the advice of our lawyers" - Ed.]
- I don't want to change my password either. This is a generic failing of the Mega!-Global! Exclamation! Mark! Corporation! of! Sunnyvale!, USAnia! but I thought I'd mention it.
I have found the following works for Oohay! anbaric post.
- Create bookmark/favourite to login page.
- Switch off javascript. I normally work this way anyway.
- Go to login page via bookmark. Enter user name and pwd.
- When irritating shroud-waving, "Change your pwd" page is displayed click on login bookmark again.
- When irritating shroud-waving, "Oh noes javascript is disabled" page is displayed click on the [continue] link.
And lo! You will be able to send and receive anbaric post. Whether or not this will work for Flickr is another matter, but it might be worth a try.
A useful side effect of switching off javascript is that you aren't constantly tripped up by Oohay!'s constant tinkering with the anbaric post UI as the version sans scripting is left well alone. This may not be the case with Flickr, but there's nothing to lose by trying. As far as the anbaric post goes you do have to switch scripting back on to attach files these days, but as it's a rare day when I send files to anyone it doesn't inconvenience me overmuch.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 May, 2015, 12:16:36 am
Post by: Chris S on 15 May, 2015, 10:54:19 am
Sigh...
XUbuntu worked great on my laptop, but I was tempted into straying from the path of righteousness by the promise of Eye Candy from KUbuntu.
What a shocking heap of turd that is. Sure - looks great - doesn't fucking work. Chrome browser - tab and menu fonts are fucking HUGE, and bear no resemblance to the fonts in the rest of the system. Come on Linux Distro folks - how can you STILL be having font issues after all these years, and all those chances to just Get It Right?
Also - hear that? That's the system fan running flat out. That never happened on XUbuntu. You're just sitting there with an empty desktop and the machine is being thrashed? I can see my battery lasting about 20 minutes.
Also - turns out, KUbuntu doesn't ship build-essentials by default. What. The. Fuck? This is LINUX FFS - no build-essentials? Would you ship a car without an engine?
Fine. I'll do it myself.
> sudo apt-get install build-essentials
"Please insert /media/cdrom0"
Oh come on! You retarded fuck - this machine doesn't HAVE a cdrom, nor a dvd drive - you were installed from a USB stick.
* Gives up *
It's enough to make you run Windows.
Post by: woollypigs on 15 May, 2015, 11:16:46 am
Every distro I have tried the design, lay out, name of setting/option/etc are all just different and look a bit dated. Windows and iOS looks good and is consistent throughout.
Why Ubuntu and all its flavours can't put their heads together and come up with some guidelines, I do not know. Yes I know it is all open source, GNU and all that jazz but to help the development and expansion of linux it would be great if there was some similarity and guides.
Linux is still a tinkers OS, which I do like to do with my computers. Ubuntu and Debian is getting close to the install - give it a name, user name and enter WiFi details - and forget. I was very surprised how fast and easy it was to install win 8.1 (if you ignore all the junk that the hardware vendors like to add and all the nag screens) when I tried about a year ago.
Post by: Woofage on 15 May, 2015, 11:41:03 am
That is one thing I miss about windows, even after years not using it I can find stuff. And no matter what program I have used on windows I have had no issues with the font or GUI (might be ugly but it works).
That was certainly true until win8 :sick:
Linux is still a tinkers OS
It allows you to if you want, but it's not necessary. That's one of its strengths.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 May, 2015, 11:57:28 am
That is one thing I miss about windows, even after years not using it I can find stuff. And no matter what program I have used on windows I have had no issues with the font or GUI (might be ugly but it works).
That was certainly true until win8 :sick:
While it is true that the Fisher-Price "Start Screen" nonsense is an hateful thing, it is mostly easily fixed. Microsith still insist on hiding some Stuffs where Control Panel can't find it, though, the bowl of dicks.
Linux is still a tinkers OS
It allows you to if you want, but it's not necessary. That's one of its strengths.
ITYM tinkerers' OS, unless it really does appeal to itinerant kettle-fettlers ;D
Post by: woollypigs on 15 May, 2015, 11:58:36 am
Oh yes I'm knocking it, I like it a lot.That is one thing I miss about windows, even after years not using it I can find stuff. And no matter what program I have used on windows I have had no issues with the font or GUI (might be ugly but it works).
That was certainly true until win8 :sick:Linux is still a tinkers OS
It allows you to if you want, but it's not necessary. That's one of its strengths.
Post by: pcolbeck on 15 May, 2015, 12:01:28 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 15 May, 2015, 06:36:20 pm
- Switch off javascript. I normally work this way anyway.
Srsly? Does anything work on the the internet nowadays without javascript?
And:
(b) why?
Post by: ian on 18 May, 2015, 04:52:59 pm
I suggest you might want to sue Southern Trains as they seem to have stolen your concept of the 'long minute.'
Post by: mcshroom on 27 May, 2015, 10:08:37 am
Please stop sending links to your favourite drive letter which bears no resemblance to anything I or most of the rest of us have. I've shown you what the full address looks like and how to quote it so everyone can access it in one go, but you're too lazy or stupid* to change.
*Actually with this cow orker, probably both
Post by: Afasoas on 27 May, 2015, 11:36:26 am
- Switch off javascript. I normally work this way anyway.
Srsly? Does anything work on the the internet nowadays without javascript?
And:
(b) why?
Add exceptions for the websites you trust.
Lots of browser based exploits require javascript.
I also have my browsers configured to disable plugins until they are explicitly allowed. It's easy to enable them with a couple of clicks.
I also have third party cookies disabled, for privacy.
Post by: barakta on 27 May, 2015, 12:54:23 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 27 May, 2015, 01:23:02 pm
Add exceptions for the websites you trust.
Lots of browser based exploits require javascript.
All these vulnerabilities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Security_and_vulnerabilities)?
Quote
I also have my browsers configured to disable plugins until they are explicitly allowed. It's easy to enable them with a couple of clicks.
I also have third party cookies disabled, for privacy.
That's fair enough, but JavaScript hasn't been a problem for many, many years. It was never much of a problem in the first place. Java, on the other hand...
Post by: Afasoas on 27 May, 2015, 01:57:44 pm
My major concern is being logged into a website that is vulnerable to a cross site scripting attack whilst I then have the miss-fortune to visit a malicious website.
I also to be in control of the information I'll make available to a website and it's developers/administrators. Keeping my browser locked down helps in some way towards this.
There's only a handful of sites I visit on a regular basis and I find white listing them is not a huge inconvenience. It takes two clicks.
Overall it improves the browsing experience on my underpowered but nicely portable laptop and I seldom see any rogue warnings that my version of Flash Player/Java etc. are out of date.
Post by: mcshroom on 28 May, 2015, 11:22:21 am
McShroom I have this debate with my colleagues all the time "The drive letter is just made up on your computer" "It ostensibly set us all up the same but..." "Here gimme the mouse..."...Oh yes. Especially when they decide to be helpful and attach a shortcut to the file on thier mapped drive rather than a text link that can at least be immediately edited.
Post by: Feanor on 28 May, 2015, 09:07:05 pm
Post by: tiermat on 08 June, 2015, 03:22:27 pm
Doing so will ensure that, when you issue a "shutdown -h now" the VM will shutdown, not your bloody laptop!
Post by: woollypigs on 08 June, 2015, 04:42:06 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 08 June, 2015, 07:15:45 pm
- Can someone please press the power button on ASDFSA123123?
- Where is it?
- Err, we don't know
- Sorry, neither do we!
Post by: tiermat on 08 June, 2015, 07:18:38 pm
That's not so bad. Compare to -h instead of -r on the build server. Quick call to the help desk:
- Can someone please press the power button on ASDFSA123123?
- Where is it?
- Err, we don't know
- Sorry, neither do we!
Done that one, too, at a job where the server could be a) in the server room next to the IT dept OR b) in the backup DC, 100's of Km away or c) on an oil rig, somewhere in the North Sea.
Fortunately, that time, the answer, once I found the floor plan and rack layout diagram, was a) !!!
Post by: Kevina9 on 09 June, 2015, 12:22:59 am
Robocopy, with this semaphore timeout expired nonsense you are annoying us! It's not as if that machine is being thrashed >:(
A tad late this reply, nor been keeping up with this board, but here goes anyway...
Robocopy never generates any error codes of its own, it only ever reports the errors returned to it by Windows. This particular error usually bubbles up from somewhere deep in the depths of the TCPIP network stack, and usually means that a timeout occurred waiting for a response to some network IO. In other words, it is usually caused by network problems. You may need to sniff your network and do some troubleshooting to find the root cause of the network timeouts.
HTH, Cheers,
Kev (original author of Robocopy...)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 June, 2015, 12:54:42 pm
Post by: Vince on 10 June, 2015, 10:44:23 am
Post by: tiermat on 10 June, 2015, 11:59:33 am
That means I only have about 200M to last me the rest of the month! Bugger!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 June, 2015, 05:57:17 pm
Cockwombles.
Post by: TPMB12 on 22 June, 2015, 08:52:39 am
Can I just say I now have 43 updates to install and only 24 are up to date!!! I feel a cull of apps that keep asking for updates. What is the best android browser as chrome is getting on my **** asking for an update every week.
Also, why did google split one play app into a load of other ones such as music, newsstand, etc.? Each one now needs updating.
Do you know what, I feel windows phone might be worth considering come update time in october. Is windows phone better or worse for updates?
Post by: Afasoas on 22 June, 2015, 09:38:51 am
You can configure Google Play so that apps are automatically updated on a WiFi connection.
I'd rather apps were updated little and often - it's good development practice as it means lots of small changes, thus big bang changes that are more likely to break things are much rarer. It also means that when bugs are introduced, fast feedback loops ensure they are quickly identified and resolved instead of app users having to live with them for extended periods of time.
Post by: fuaran on 22 June, 2015, 11:18:48 am
That's what I do, then I only choose to update the apps I care about - preferably after checking what is actually changed.
Also, if its apps you never use, then uninstall or disable them. eg I have disabled Google Play Newsstand, because I never use it, so it won't be listed in the apps with updates available.
Post by: Morat on 25 June, 2015, 05:14:32 pm
Mapped network drives. You know what, we have loads of them here, and everyone's mapped them to different letters (and sometimes mapped letters to subfolders of the server).
Please stop sending links to your favourite drive letter which bears no resemblance to anything I or most of the rest of us have. I've shown you what the full address looks like and how to quote it so everyone can access it in one go, but you're too lazy or stupid* to change.
*Actually with this cow orker, probably both
Windows domain? You should have a look at this https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj127250.aspx
it's actually pretty easy to set up for a domain admin.
Post by: ian on 26 June, 2015, 09:00:56 am
Post by: mcshroom on 26 June, 2015, 10:22:14 am
Mapped network drives. You know what, we have loads of them here, and everyone's mapped them to different letters (and sometimes mapped letters to subfolders of the server).
Please stop sending links to your favourite drive letter which bears no resemblance to anything I or most of the rest of us have. I've shown you what the full address looks like and how to quote it so everyone can access it in one go, but you're too lazy or stupid* to change.
*Actually with this cow orker, probably both
Windows domain? You should have a look at this https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj127250.aspx
it's actually pretty easy to set up for a domain admin.
It would be, except for the complexity of a server system set up to cover 12,000 users and, more importantly, the fact that our IT support is subcontracted to ATOS.
Post by: Afasoas on 26 June, 2015, 10:33:13 am
Anyway, Microsh4ft - why make it next to impossible to programatically remove the default icons you pin to the task bar in Windows 8.1 / Server 2012 r2? I want to display them just the taskbar items they are only ever likely to use as they've got not interest in Server Manager or PowerShell.
Post by: Morat on 26 June, 2015, 01:37:13 pm
Mapped network drives. You know what, we have loads of them here, and everyone's mapped them to different letters (and sometimes mapped letters to subfolders of the server).
Please stop sending links to your favourite drive letter which bears no resemblance to anything I or most of the rest of us have. I've shown you what the full address looks like and how to quote it so everyone can access it in one go, but you're too lazy or stupid* to change.
*Actually with this cow orker, probably both
Windows domain? You should have a look at this https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj127250.aspx
it's actually pretty easy to set up for a domain admin.
It would be, except for the complexity of a server system set up to cover 12,000 users and, more importantly, the fact that our IT support is subcontracted to ATOS.
EWw, sounds like ATOS are sleeping on their contract if you need/allow mapped drives to help users find their data. Best of luck!
Post by: ian on 26 June, 2015, 07:17:06 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 29 June, 2015, 03:00:42 pm
Code: [Select]
$windowsOSVersion=([string][System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version).Substring(0,3)
Switch ($windowsOSVersion) {
"6.0" {return "2008"}
"6.3" {return "2012r2"}
}
Returns OS version 6.2.92 on a clean unpatched install of Win Server 2k12 r2. Which everyone knows is 6.3x.
I'm tired of dealing with your shaftware that does work but not quite. Please get your shiz together.
PS. Workaround, use WMI:
Code: [Select]
$windowsOSVersion=((Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem).Version).Substring(0,3)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 July, 2015, 12:27:31 pm
It is 2015 and yet not only can I not renew my membership online, I cannot even check my membership status on your crappy goes-round-in-circles webshite.
Get with the program, cavemen!
Post by: Wombat on 02 July, 2015, 08:07:41 am
I've never actually renewed with them due to this problem, so I've never actually tested if it works....
Not a lot of help, I know.
It can't be as hopeless as ATMB (the French motorway toll folk) are with their online systems. I subscribed, had an illegal French transactino within seconds, the bank stopped my card, I told them their website was insecure,and I'd had to get a new card, and I'd give themthe details as soons I got it. They tried totake payment while I had no card, and applied a "penalty charge" for non-payment, and told me this several weeks later, by real old fashioned paper letter (in French contractual language). I wrote back and told them that the only reason the payment was not made was that their website was insecure, and that I had now changed my card details and had an email form them acknowledging that fact. I then got another letter saying I had to pay a penalty charge, completely ignoring the contents of the previous letter.
I then got my French mate Pascal to phone them up and have a French contractual argument with them in French, the upshot of which is that he had to send them a cheque for the subscription as their system is totally incapable of making a second attempt at taking the payment froma different card number.... So I still don't know if the toll barriers will open for us next Friday afternoon... (and no, we're not going via Calais!) Oh, and anyone else fancying getting an electronic tag, don't be fooled by their apparently English speaking website. As soon as you get to making a payment, it reverts to French! I can manage food, drink and accomodation in France, but contractual stuff is way beyond me.
Post by: ian on 03 July, 2015, 09:42:08 am
If we have a ongoing problem with the VPN, why not fucking put up an announcement on, you know, the system you have for such announcements?
Oh yes, you're IBM.
Fuckchucklers.
Post by: Ham on 03 July, 2015, 12:39:10 pm
Dear Mothership IT subdecks
If we have a ongoing problem with the VPN, why not fucking put up an announcement on, you know, the system you have for such announcements?
Oh yes, you're IBM.
Fuckchucklers.
Chances are that under the covers that's AT&T - they're just like IBM but without the smooth and speedy processes.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 July, 2015, 06:08:34 pm
Post by: Feanor on 03 July, 2015, 06:41:52 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 July, 2015, 07:21:30 pm
Post by: Ham on 03 July, 2015, 10:33:53 pm
(IBM have a bot on their chat system that expands acronyms, this was actually one of the options given for IBM, at some stage over recent years that has been removed)
Post by: Eccentrica Gallumbits on 06 July, 2015, 12:40:53 pm
Post by: ian on 08 July, 2015, 08:38:13 am
That's helpful, Cisco.
Post by: pcolbeck on 08 July, 2015, 08:45:24 am
Posture Assessment Failed: Hostscan CSD prelogin verification failed.
That's helpful, Cisco.
Posture Assesssment Failed means that something on your PC didn't comply with the standards set by your IT department for secure access to the mothership.
Possibly out of date anti virus or firewall off or missing etc. It can even tell what patch levels you are running dependant on how they set it up. Basically it scans your PC to make sure it meets a set of standards before letting you logon.
They should have documented your companies re-mediation system for when this happens. Usually you have to either get connected to a sandpit area that lets you get updated or take your laptop in and get them to manually update it.
Post by: ian on 08 July, 2015, 09:03:36 am
Anyway, it's not a helpful error message for an end user. It's 2015, perhaps they could encode some wisdom in such message. Like 'it's fucked, probably will be for a week and then we'll say we've fixed it, but we won't have.'
Post by: pcolbeck on 08 July, 2015, 09:16:02 am
Post by: Deano on 08 July, 2015, 08:02:57 pm
Emails to the helldesk ensured, and after some investigation, the reply was that backups aren't available for June.
Workmate whinged to TL, who said "well, it's a learning experience, isn't it". Further whinging emails elicited the following reply:
"We know that backups are 100% full proof".
I'm not sure if it was the uselessness of the reply which annoyed him most, or the illiteracy.
(Remind me to back up my emails tomorrow).
Post by: Kim on 08 July, 2015, 09:55:04 pm
"We know that backups are 100% full proof".
I'm not sure if it was the uselessness of the reply which annoyed him most, or the illiteracy.
It's not illiteracy. It means the backups are being made to /dev/null (a well-known technique for making them run faster).
Post by: Deano on 08 July, 2015, 10:34:07 pm
There's no accounting for someone deleting everything, really. And I'm not that surprised, since this is the same lot that had to scour ebay for replacement parts for their antique servers. One of the senior IT bods was cooing over the bits in the basement, which took him right back to his 70s youth.
Post by: Afasoas on 09 July, 2015, 08:43:49 am
You running a mainframe? :o
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 July, 2015, 11:20:47 am
Posture Assessment Failed: Hostscan CSD prelogin verification failed.
That's helpful, Cisco.
Translation: Sit up straight, man!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 July, 2015, 12:22:37 pm
Select a bunch of cells all in the same column. I just want to sort them into alphabetical order but because there is data in a cell in the same postcode the Babbage-Engine emits a vulgar noise and asks me whether I want to expand the current selection (the default) or continue with what I've got. If I had wanted to include column A in the sort of Stuffs in column B I would have selected column A as well, but if there's an option to "Turn off sort-based nagging for non-terminally-feebleminded users" I can't find it.
Still, because I want to apply the same sort to bits of column D I can use <CONTROL-Y> to repeat the process, right?
Can I fuck!
It's bad enough that current Microsith software has a look and feel borrowed from the Early Learning Centre but when they start throwing away keyboard shortcuts which have been engrained in my memory-branes for a quarter of a century it's time to send the BEAR round for lunch. I shall be passing through Sea-Tac in September and may have to initiate some ursine ultra-violence.
Post by: woollypigs on 23 July, 2015, 11:03:33 am
Not a big problem but I got used to the old numbers for the connected items. Time to change the DHCP setting...
Post by: Kim on 23 July, 2015, 04:32:27 pm
Not a big problem but I got used to the old numbers for the connected items.
This is what DNS is for.
Post by: woollypigs on 23 July, 2015, 04:34:33 pm
Yeah I know, but I'm lazy and it kept the IP's happy since I plugged it in the first time until now :)Not a big problem but I got used to the old numbers for the connected items.
This is what DNS is for.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 August, 2015, 11:59:49 am
Your "The Official DVSA Guide To Hazard Perception" is this: shit.
- You cannot maximise the window in which it runs, meaning that the video clips are not only piss-poor in quality but also too fucking small. You can't tell whether a white blur is a sign warning of Impending Doom or just estate agency propaganda until you're on top of it.
- The "Click the screen when you spot a developing hazard" exercises are very hit and miss. Mostly miss. "You did not spot the bus indicating right" it bleats. Yes I fucking did, you electronic sillybollocks. "See there," I said to myself, sotto voce, "that bus is indicating right and therefore constitutes a developing hazard. I will click the screen to indicate that I have spotted it". There is no right of appeal, and it doesn't listen to what you may be saying anyway.
- It won't accept the existence of a mounted ISO image so I have to cart the physical DVD around Larrington Towers if I want to use it on another machine. And then forget where I left it.
1: I originally mistyped this as "DVDA", which you should probably not Google if others are present, however appropriate the typo was.
Post by: Kim on 08 August, 2015, 02:47:58 pm
The practice test was a VHS tape, so the level of feedback was broadly similar to the current arrangement.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 August, 2015, 08:01:13 pm
Post by: Kim on 09 August, 2015, 02:42:51 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 August, 2015, 05:50:03 pm
(Click...click...click...swear...I did spot the wall full of fucking teenagers spitting needlessly >:()
Post by: Pickled Onion on 10 August, 2015, 01:34:09 pm
I aten't so worried about the Theory Test but the Hazard Perception one is another wossname of fishies.
(Click...click...click...swear...I did spot the wall full of fucking teenagers spitting needlessly >:()
I've not done it myself (having passed the test when knowing all the hand signals was necessary) but the standard advice appears to be "click on absolutely everything, as quickly as possible, it's been put there for a reason".
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 August, 2015, 06:53:51 pm
Post by: David Martin on 10 August, 2015, 09:17:01 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 August, 2015, 06:22:24 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 August, 2015, 12:39:35 am
Why in the name of the Second Five Year Plan are you trying to install updates for Outlook and Powerpoint and various other components of Office which aren't even installed on the fucking machine ???
Post by: Feanor on 13 August, 2015, 09:00:42 am
Damn and blast Microsith, said Mr Larrington, the words coming easily through force of habit.
Why in the name of the Second Five Year Plan are you trying to install updates for Outlook and Powerpoint and various other components of Office which aren't even installed on the fucking machine ???
I think it's because all of the office components *are* actually still there on the machine, even if you only elected to install a sub-set of them.
They are just hiding behind the sofa.
This is so that you can go into Add/Remove programs, and in the Office add/remover you have the option to change what components are installed ( eg add Outlook ) without having to go find the Office install disks.
(I think if you look, it will list your Outlook as 'Not Available', rather than 'Not Installed'.)
The previously not-
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 August, 2015, 10:35:57 am
Some spod at Microsith has claimed that the "Excel hangs when you look at it" issue can be cured by
Removing and reinstalling Office did the trick and Excel was happy. And then Microsith installed 52 updates, and Excel broke again, and the conclusion we draw from this, which coincidentally is one of the fundamental principles of IngSoc, is that Microsith Spod speak with forked tongue.
Uninstalling all add-ins, and the 3rd-party "Print to PDF" application, and Office, and then reinstalling them, and allowing Microsith to apply its updates (four of which it decided "weren't needed"), and I can once more embolden the contents of a cell, and that's about four hours of my time I'd rather have wasted doing something useful, like getting to the bottom of why the in-game music player in ETS2 doesn't like ZZ Top.
Post by: Andrij on 13 August, 2015, 12:29:28 pm
Post by: tiermat on 13 August, 2015, 12:31:02 pm
Do you really need to use M$Orifice? There are suitable substitutes available for the princely sum of zero of the BRITON'S Pounds.
Indeed, the Chinese invader* is my favourite, it doesn't have the sluggishness of OOO and none of the irritations of MS Office.
*Kingsoft Office
Post by: Kim on 13 August, 2015, 12:49:16 pm
Word, not so much. There are plenty of equally incompetent word processors available for the princely sum of zero BRITONS pounds. Or if it's a proper document, LaTeX.
If you need Powerpoint then you're basically doomed anyway.
Post by: Bledlow on 13 August, 2015, 12:57:29 pm
When I did it the babbage-engines were at least somebody else's problem, and the test was easily passed by guessing the frequency of clicks that would constitute cheating, and making sure that you stayed somewhat under it, while not being completely oblivious to the road scene being presented. TBH, anyone who's been successfully using the roads for a while ought to be able to pass it easily, either through a rudimentary ability to anticipate hazards, or a sufficiently high level of luck.This. IIRC if you click too soon & it doesn't register (counted as a random click), & repeating the click too quickly gets it counted as continuously clicking in the hope a hazard will turn up. Took me a few tries with the CD to get it right.
The Highway Code test was piss-easy, though.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 August, 2015, 03:18:37 pm
Do you really need to use M$Orifice? There are suitable substitutes available for the princely sum of zero of the BRITON'S Pounds.
Good God, man, you don't think I actually paid for Office, do you? :P That is what (former) employers are for.
Having said that, Microsith wants to install another 38 updates and a pound says Excel will be stiffed afterwards.
Post by: TheLurker on 13 August, 2015, 07:12:32 pm
I successfully avoid M$ patch crappery at home by _not_ applying their patches, but when I fire up at 0530 (don't ask) expecting to find a dev. server with our dev. DBs all present and correct and but find instead an e-mail sent at 2230 last night from the poor overworked sod who herds our servers telling me that M$ have supplied a patch that renders the server un-bootable* (is that a word? it is now) and it will be the thick end of a day before that particular server is back in service I reserve the right to call M$ lots and _lots_ of unprintable names. Deadlines? Nah, we don't have deadlines. Not so you'd notice.
I also happen to know that our server-herd started work at just gone 8 yesterday morning and lives about an hour's drive from the office so the poor bugger will have had a stupidly long day simply because M$ can't patch their own bloody OS on vanilla hardware properly. Fuckwits.
*Well it did reboot, the problem was it did nothing but effing reboot.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 August, 2015, 07:27:20 pm
Post by: perpetual dan on 13 August, 2015, 07:59:22 pm
TBH, I think if you're having to use Excel then you're already having a bad day, and trying to do so with a pale imitation of the real thing is only going to make matters worse.
Word, not so much. There are plenty of equally incompetent word processors available for the princely sum of zero BRITONS pounds. Or if it's a proper document, LaTeX.
If you need Powerpoint then you're basically doomed anyway.
Beamer ftw :)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 August, 2015, 05:55:44 pm
In an unprecedented case of actually doing what it says on the tin, the aforementioned updates did not kill Excel utterly to DETH, though as it's taken about forty-eight hours to achieve this state of stability I remain unconvinced that this is the end of the matter.
Oh look! It's b0rked again.
Post by: Morat on 14 August, 2015, 09:26:52 pm
Power cuts, generator failures, iSCSI array failures, Devs on holiday with outstanding major bugs, and a user who wont shut up about his sodding headset. I'm tempted to replace it with a man-trap and shut it on his head.
Post by: TheLurker on 14 August, 2015, 09:28:04 pm
Give up. Buy pencils, lots of paper, a sharpener and a rubber*. You'll waste far less time working it out by hand than trying to get M$ patches to work. Ask my colleague the server-herd (see prev. post) the poor bastard had another midnight touch yesterday trying to get the server back up and running was still working on it today and fully expecting to spending time on it tomorrow just cos of a shite M$ patch.In an unprecedented case of actually doing what it says on the tin, the aforementioned updates did not kill Excel utterly to DETH, though as it's taken about forty-eight hours to achieve this state of stability I remain unconvinced that this is the end of the matter.
Oh look! It's b0rked again.
*For USANIAN visitors: Eraser.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 August, 2015, 11:55:38 pm
Post by: Karla on 17 August, 2015, 04:26:48 pm
Post by: ian on 24 August, 2015, 10:22:54 am
You can guess the rest.
'can you please take me off this email string'n
You'd think after the first couple, they would have noticed than in complaining about one email they're generating many more.
I'm astounded that some people even manage the level of intellectual activity behind remembering to breath.
Post by: ian on 24 August, 2015, 11:31:47 am
Were people this stupid before I want on holiday or was there a comet or strange meteor display while I was away?
Post by: mcshroom on 24 August, 2015, 11:55:32 am
Yes people are that stupid.
Post by: ian on 24 August, 2015, 03:12:03 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 August, 2015, 03:30:11 pm
Post by: ian on 24 August, 2015, 03:59:33 pm
Even my own boss joined in. They're still coming in now, the next tier seems to be people asking for an explanation à la 'I don't understand, could you explain what I need to do...'
Stop fucking well pressing REPLY ALL would be a start.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 August, 2015, 05:31:32 pm
Stop fucking well pressing REPLY ALL would be a start.
Soon there will be an Official Missive from The Mgt telling everyone not to use REPLY/ALL and you can guess the rest.
Have them all executed. It's the only way to ensure the survival of the human race.
Post by: Kim on 24 August, 2015, 05:33:07 pm
It's the mail server version of a runaway nuclear chain reaction. Surprised it didn't reach criticality and blow the server up.
Yes people are that stupid.
I reckon the influx of stupid people neatly compensates for Moore's Law allowing mail systems to handle more messages before choking.
I remember this happening at Brizzle, after some genius created a list-of-lists that encompassed all the undergraduates and a fair number of staff. Eventually most of the student mailboxes went over their pitiful quota and it started backing up in the outgoing spool, causing all deliveries to grind to a halt. Only the more savvy members of the engineering faculty had working email, on account of having moved their account to a dedicated server with much higher quotas (though IIRC we still couldn't send to the outside world), and got to watch the whole clusterfuck in slow motion. I'm not sure how it was eventually resolved, but I expect it went something like this:
(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/regular_expressions.png) (http://xkcd.com/208/)
Post by: ian on 24 August, 2015, 06:06:22 pm
So, I come back from holiday and my keypad security gadget doesn't work (I blame the stupidity inducing cosmic rays that happened over Britain while I was wrestling my way up the Parisian league of surly waiters). I need to pay the builder. Ah, it's OK, there's a password option. Erm, what's my password? It's evidently not any of the half dozen secret questions, memorable phrases, or the telephone banking PIN number (which I don't have either having never telephone banked).
OK, I'll request a new keypad. Please enter your password, says the machine. Le sigh.
I call the bank. Please enter your telephone banking PIN, says the machine.
Do not pass go. I suppose it's secure if even I can't access my account.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 August, 2015, 06:16:43 pm
- they're all the same, and
- you can walk into a branch and get one over the counter, and
- Barclays Bank are a bunch of useless lying twats
Post by: Polar Bear on 24 August, 2015, 06:29:23 pm
Post by: Kim on 24 August, 2015, 09:59:13 pm
Ah, the illusion of security.
Not really. The algorithms on the Taschenrechner (as it has come to be known in this house) aren't supposed to be secret are they? It's just an interface to the chip on your card.
Which isn't to say the whole PIN-verification process isn't security theatre...
Post by: mcshroom on 24 August, 2015, 10:19:50 pm
Post by: Kim on 24 August, 2015, 10:24:05 pm
Santander seem to be able to run a fully operational internet banking system without having a keypad to lose. Why are they needed?
As an extra layer of obfuscation to prevent you from doing anything out of the ordinary without a card and PIN. Typically invoked when you set up a BACS payment to someone new, or similar (which makes a certain degree of sense). Regular stuff like logging in and transferring money between your accounts doesn't need it.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 August, 2015, 10:36:54 pm
Santander seem to be able to run a fully operational internet banking system without having a keypad to lose. Why are they needed?
As an extra layer of obfuscation to prevent you from doing anything out of the ordinary without a card and PIN. Typically invoked when you set up a BACS payment to someone new, or similar (which makes a certain degree of sense). Regular stuff like logging in and transferring money between your accounts doesn't need it.
Lloyds don't use them either, but Barclays require them just to log in, never mind juggling with actual money. I only came to need one after Barclays borged ING Direct.
Post by: mcshroom on 24 August, 2015, 10:40:18 pm
Santander seem to be able to run a fully operational internet banking system without having a keypad to lose. Why are they needed?
As an extra layer of obfuscation to prevent you from doing anything out of the ordinary without a card and PIN. Typically invoked when you set up a BACS payment to someone new, or similar (which makes a certain degree of sense). Regular stuff like logging in and transferring money between your accounts doesn't need it.
Ah. The Spanish bank's version of this involves codes by SMS.
Post by: Kim on 24 August, 2015, 10:42:40 pm
Barclays require them just to log in, never mind juggling with actual money.
Wheras NatPest explicitly state that they'll never ask you to use one to log in, lest a phisher create an elaborate mock-up of the login page as a proxy to access your chip+PIN.
Being a bank, they make up for this suspicious application of common sense by sending you regular spammy emails.
Post by: Bledlow on 24 August, 2015, 11:49:19 pm
Brilliant, about 150 emails later the originator pleads for people to stop. The response: dozens of reply-all 'thanks' and 'OK'sI wouldn't like to try to remember how many cases of that sort of idiocy I've suffered from. Delete, delete, delete!
Were people this stupid before I want on holiday or was there a comet or strange meteor display while I was away?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 August, 2015, 12:13:51 am
I think the balance in my Santander current account is about £6.99.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 25 August, 2015, 07:57:05 am
Brilliant, about 150 emails later the originator pleads for people to stop. The response: dozens of reply-all 'thanks' and 'OK'sI wouldn't like to try to remember how many cases of that sort of idiocy I've suffered from. Delete, delete, delete!
Were people this stupid before I want on holiday or was there a comet or strange meteor display while I was away?
Monday morning normally involves: right click email(s) -> create new rule -> apply rule to inbox now. Then watch the deleted items box fill up. Job done.
Post by: ian on 25 August, 2015, 09:24:58 am
Brilliant, about 150 emails later the originator pleads for people to stop. The response: dozens of reply-all 'thanks' and 'OK'sI wouldn't like to try to remember how many cases of that sort of idiocy I've suffered from. Delete, delete, delete!
Were people this stupid before I want on holiday or was there a comet or strange meteor display while I was away?
What gets me is that they don't stop. They're still arriving. The first email was stupid, but hey we all make mistakes. The first reply-all, well, it's a forgivable sin, you are yet to see what you wrought. But after that people must surely note that their inbox is now filling. Do they genuinely not see the connection?
Even better, they're now quoting, so each
'please remove me'
now quotes the previous dozen pleas below.
please
please
please
make
it
stop
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 August, 2015, 10:26:22 am
Even better, they're now quoting, so each
'please remove me'
now quotes the previous dozen pleas below.
please
please
please
make
it
stop
Post by: ian on 25 August, 2015, 11:14:56 am
Ah, the illusion of security.
Not really. The algorithms on the Taschenrechner (as it has come to be known in this house) aren't supposed to be secret are they? It's just an interface to the chip on your card.
Which isn't to say the whole PIN-verification process isn't security theatre...
It's certainly theatre. What's my 'grandfather's first name?' Which one? I don't remember. And was it Alf or Alfred. Where's my favourite holiday destination? I don't know. The only way I'd remember all this shit is to write it down. Make a mistake and you have reset the lot. Which you can only do with the secure key.
The HSBC secure key isn't a card chip based system, you type a PIN and it gives a six digit number. I presume all this proves is that you have the physical device (I assume there's some embedded key in the circuits) and its PIN (which algorithmically generates the six digit code from the embedded key) rather than anything more sophisticated. So, two factor authentication. I'm not clear why it's necessary to see my account, other than to annoy me. Still, given all that drug money squirreled away in HSBC accounts they probably figure their customers need that extra tier of discretion.
Apparently I needed to set up my password, but hey I can do, I just need to input...
A new one is in the post. Because that's secure.
Post by: David Martin on 25 August, 2015, 12:33:59 pm
Some systems are starting to catch on.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 August, 2015, 12:43:57 pm
Post by: Zipperhead on 25 August, 2015, 02:07:33 pm
I get plenty of luncheon meat from Santander in spite of not having to use an Infernal Machine to connect to their online banking. The next time the fuckers offer me a credit card I'm apt to take it and max it out oncocaine and hookersdonations to charity.
I think the balance in my Santander current account is about £6.99.
I think that might be enough to get you a BJ from Toothless Meg, and a couple of paracetamol for afterwards.
Post by: ian on 26 August, 2015, 02:37:15 pm
Edit: I'm not entirely sure whether to be subtly pleased with the sheer deviousness of the responses to all that say 'stop replying to all.'
There's 33,000 names in the group email used...
Post by: Afasoas on 26 August, 2015, 04:17:46 pm
Oh for fuck's sake, they're doing the fucking email thing again. Stop hitting REPLY ALL, you starspangled fuckstains.
Edit: I'm not entirely sure whether to be subtly pleased with the sheer deviousness of the responses to all that say 'stop replying to all.'
There's 33,000 names in the group email used...
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3igw3e/someone_just_sent_an_email_to_33000_employees/
Post by: ian on 26 August, 2015, 05:48:38 pm
I created a rule to dump everything with the subject line, then people started changing the subject line to PLEASE STOP REPLYING TO ALL or WHAT IS THIS?????????
You know, for most of the time I can convince myself that I don't live in a world filled with people so dumb, and then they go spoil the illusion. To think that these people vote and breed and drive large cars and occupy positions of responsibility. It explains so much about the world.
Guess who just replied to all, wayhey, it's everyone favour three letter computer business coming aboard. I should get pretzels.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 August, 2015, 06:30:22 pm
I've just picked up a fault in the AE33000 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
Post by: Dibdib on 26 August, 2015, 06:43:16 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 August, 2015, 11:03:58 pm
Post by: contango on 03 September, 2015, 05:10:11 am
Trying to connect to the online system to file a sales tax return here in Americaland.
Needless to say the site doesn't work at all using Firefox. Or Chrome. Or Android's vaguely named "Internet". For good measure the security certificates are all wrong. So reluctantly I load up Internet Explorer and visit the site, only to find I get an "Access Denied" message with the helpful hint "you may need to log in". Yes, that's what I was trying to do. But apparently I can't see the login screen until I log in.
So that's going to be another half an hour listening to hold music tomorrow then...
Post by: Afasoas on 03 September, 2015, 05:55:51 am
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/02/ico_looking_into_london_clinics_spaffing_of_780_patients_hiv_status/
Post by: Kim on 03 September, 2015, 01:16:27 pm
The worst kind of f*ck up involving large email groups:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/02/ico_looking_into_london_clinics_spaffing_of_780_patients_hiv_status/
Someone suggested to me that email clients should really pop up a warning when sending messages to large numbers of recipients without BCC. That seems like an excellent idea, but I don't for a minute expect that these incidents would be avoided, because people would just click 'OK' when confronted with an unfamiliar dialog.
Post by: andrew_s on 03 September, 2015, 03:12:44 pm
Post by: Ben T on 04 September, 2015, 10:30:06 am
"unobtrusive"
keeps coming out as
unobstruvie
unosbsturve
unobstrive
etc
the best i can get wihtout literally looking at each letter in turn is
unobstrusive
but the "s" always creeps in
??? >:( >:( >:(
Post by: clarion on 07 September, 2015, 04:42:30 pm
My phone app logged me out, and is now demanding proof of ID to let me back in, which sounds dodgy, but is just the sort of thing they would do. A friend contacted me because apparently I seem to have disabled my account.
Will have to look into the matter when I log on this evening. Hmm... >:(
Post by: clarion on 07 September, 2015, 09:15:04 pm
Post by: Polar Bear on 07 September, 2015, 09:40:06 pm
Post by: clarion on 08 September, 2015, 11:02:54 am
Aaaaanyway, Facebook have decided I am not under age (though I understand how my careful daily skincare regime may have fooled them), and allowed me back through the hallowed portal.
Post by: Polar Bear on 08 September, 2015, 11:09:55 am
I have rediscovered texting and emailing for such purposes.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 09 September, 2015, 01:10:28 pm
The worst kind of f*ck up involving large email groups:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/02/ico_looking_into_london_clinics_spaffing_of_780_patients_hiv_status/
Someone suggested to me that email clients should really pop up a warning when sending messages to large numbers of recipients without BCC. That seems like an excellent idea, but I don't for a minute expect that these incidents would be avoided, because people would just click 'OK' when confronted with an unfamiliar dialog.
You know more about this than I do, but wouldn't it be possible to reject outgoing emails at the server if they had more than one To: or Cc:? Given the particularly sensitive nature of the data being held at this place, why rely on humans not making an error?
Post by: Kim on 09 September, 2015, 01:18:22 pm
You know more about this than I do, but wouldn't it be possible to reject outgoing emails at the server if they had more than one To: or Cc:? Given the particularly sensitive nature of the data being held at this place, why rely on humans not making an error?
Now *that's* not a bad idea.
I know exim allows you to limit the number of recipients (unfortunately this includes BCC, but it's a start). Presumably with a bit of scripting-fu you could count the number of To:s and CC:s and reject on that basis.
Wouldn't stop someone who knows what they're doing from sending large numbers of messages, but it might reduce the frequency of these accidents.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 September, 2015, 01:59:47 am
Ah, I see.
I have rediscovered texting and emailing for such purposes.
Pffft! Last night I had so little intertubes that I could receive e-mail but not send it, and could not get the web at all. Also no phone signal. Bah!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 September, 2015, 04:44:05 am
DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_BAD_CONFIG
actually mean? Apart from my not being able to upload any photos to Flickr, obv.
Post by: Vince on 18 September, 2015, 01:18:32 pm
So when I thought I had ripped two films and the first two series of Breaking Bad, I hadn't.
There has to be a better way than spending 16 hours ripping a film.
Post by: ian on 18 September, 2015, 01:22:07 pm
Mind you, my 2009-vintage Mac Mini manages to rip an average two hour movie to .mp4 in just over an hour (with Handbrake)...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 September, 2015, 02:37:45 am
Post by: Gattopardo on 21 September, 2015, 11:33:06 pm
Post by: Biggsy on 22 September, 2015, 06:14:33 pm
Post by: Gattopardo on 23 September, 2015, 03:50:02 pm
Post by: Gattopardo on 28 September, 2015, 06:04:43 pm
Then the thing decideds that windows is not authentic...re enter the number again a few times till it finally accepts it.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 29 September, 2015, 04:18:54 pm
New laptop for daughter, turned on for first time. set up users, etc '00s of updates, reboot. 167 more updates. Over an hour installing them, then it fails - starts rolling back the updates. It isn't going to be finished when I want to go home. I don't want to leave it out on a desk, we've had breakins. Effing windows.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 September, 2015, 04:28:08 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 30 September, 2015, 11:32:59 am
I'm guessing that's why the laptop was a 'refurb'; if someone who wasn't persistent had got it, it would have looked like junk. Was crashing to bios settings every time it was put to sleep.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 September, 2015, 07:03:00 pm
Don't. Somewhere between Enfield and Larrington Towers is a new 8.1 box...
Updates went pretty quickly.
Updates to MS Orifice and other bits'n'bobs, OTOH, is a different wossname of kippers. 171 updates and the thick end of 4 gig chiz :(
ETA: Reboot. 44 more updates. 1.7 GB. Poo.
Post by: ian on 30 September, 2015, 08:43:03 pm
I'll make a cuppa then. Odds on it gets to 6.07 GB and runs headlong into a chunky error message.
Post by: ian on 01 October, 2015, 12:14:55 pm
Microsoft Office, it took you five years to debut the optimistically named Office 2016 for Mac. One that might actually work with a modern Mac (I reserve judgement). Hold on, £120 for one computer? It's forever 1995 in Microsoftland.
Or I can subscribe. I don't want to subscribe to software.
Bugger off then, I'll stick with 2011 and liberal usage of foul language.
Post by: Pingu on 11 October, 2015, 12:30:05 pm
Post by: StuAff on 11 October, 2015, 12:39:00 pm
Six hours. I slept through it.2011 still works just fine (OK, no worse than previously) with El Cap.
Microsoft Office, it took you five years to debut the optimistically named Office 2016 for Mac. One that might actually work with a modern Mac (I reserve judgement). Hold on, £120 for one computer? It's forever 1995 in Microsoftland.
Or I can subscribe. I don't want to subscribe to software.
Bugger off then, I'll stick with 2011 and liberal usage of foul language.
+1 on the price and the subscription model. I just want to buy software as and when, and at a reasonable price. Adobe lost my business when they switched Photoshop to subscriptions, when I'd bought multiple upgrades over the years.
Post by: Vince on 11 October, 2015, 02:20:42 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 October, 2015, 02:40:36 pm
- Reads metadata from music files
- Organises library according to what it finds
- Reads metadata from music files
- Organises music library according to what it finds
- Looks on Internets because it can
- Decides that a 1993 album called "Oscar" is really a 2003 album called "Luxor", because they've both got five letters and end with an "r"; adds tracks from former to latter
- Doesn't ask your permission to do this either
- Or even tell you that it's done it
- And makes it almost totally fucking impossible to correct
(Gives up)
Post by: Feanor on 11 October, 2015, 06:04:13 pm
Complaint from Mrs. F that she's had no e-mail for 2 days.
So I send her a test mail.
Nothing.
I send myself a test mail.
Nothing.
Hmm.
Log onto mail server, and find it's bogged down with a delivery queue of 6000 messages.
Shut down the mail service, clear queue, and look at logs.
I've got logging turned down to 1, so I can only see that I've been accepting mail from spammy address to random address ( ie open relaying ).
Only I'm not open relaying, I require SMTP auth.
So I think one of the client PCs is compromised and the mail is coming in via an authenticated connection.
I've turned on SMTP logging so I can catch which login is compromised.
It's not a dictionary attack, since I have an IP auto-ban for incorrect logins.
Server re-started, and nothing untoward coming in yet.
Will be keeping a close eye on this one.
Post by: Feanor on 14 October, 2015, 09:45:43 pm
Oh, dear. I seem to be a spam-spewing zombie.
Complaint from Mrs. F that she's had no e-mail for 2 days.
So I send her a test mail.
Nothing.
I send myself a test mail.
Nothing.
Hmm.
Log onto mail server, and find it's bogged down with a delivery queue of 6000 messages.
Shut down the mail service, clear queue, and look at logs.
I've got logging turned down to 1, so I can only see that I've been accepting mail from spammy address to random address ( ie open relaying ).
Only I'm not open relaying, I require SMTP auth.
So I think one of the client PCs is compromised and the mail is coming in via an authenticated connection.
I've turned on SMTP logging so I can catch which login is compromised.
It's not a dictionary attack, since I have an IP auto-ban for incorrect logins.
Server re-started, and nothing untoward coming in yet.
Will be keeping a close eye on this one.
Aha! Caught!
After 2 quiet days on the mailserver, I am alerted to a sudden spike in mail traffic.
Remote onto the mailserver, and I see spam from: and to: addresses being relayed.
Shuts down mail server service, and peruses the more comprehensive logs.
Ah, so there we are: logging in with a legit account, and getting authenticated.
So who's account is it? One of the kids, no doubt.
But it's base64-obfuscated in the logs, so I need to decode it... <tapity-tap>
Ah.
Not the kids.
It's my primary account. How embarrassing.
I have a strong password, don't I? Err.. no...
I forgot that back at Xmas time, when I got the new fondleslab, in my haste to set up stuff, I could not remember my e-mail account password.
So I just remoted into the mailserver and 'temporarily' reset it to 'username123', intending to fix it later.
Later never came, and I just adjusted my password on my other devices.
So I've been running with this silly PW for 10 months.
It's been reset to a strong PW again, and I've temporarily firewalled out the IP that was hitting me.
I'll remove the IP block after a week or so, once they have given up.
Dearie me. What an idiot.
Post by: davelodwig on 15 October, 2015, 01:14:14 am
Oh what fun to find none of the sites work because of virtual host incompatibilities such as files needing .conf adding to the end.
4 hours of my life I'm not getting back.
Post by: Feanor on 15 October, 2015, 10:41:01 pm
The fun of running your own mailserver.
After shutting down a vulnerability of my own causing, I'm now dealing with the fallout.
The mail server logs are full of failing attempts to do SMTP auth.
Previously, I had default settings for auto-ban, where 3 incorrect logins over a few minutes got your IP a 1-hour ban or somesuch.
That's not realistic in my setup.
There are less than 10 users, and they all have their credentials set up and stored on their devices.
There's *no* reason for incorrect logins.
So now 1 incorrect login gets a 2 week IP ban.
I'm assuming a compromised Consumer PC on an dynamic IP.
I may extend this to months.
No real MX machines will be affected, they don't attempt to auth.
Connections on the LAN are exempt from this.
I've noticed that dictionary-attacks seem to have become auto-ban aware, and back off their connection attempts accordingly.
Sneaky buggers.
Post by: Zipperhead on 16 October, 2015, 03:04:42 pm
Git, it's name even rhymes with shit.
Trying to do such relatively simple things has annoyed me so much that I find myself agreeing with Adolf* (on this at least)
"oh it's so fast" say the developers. Well it's not if you have to waste 30 minutes cloning the repository because there''s no way back. Oh yes, it's fine if you want to ponce around with your macbook.
So fucking arcane and illogical is it that to do something trivial I've now resorted to cloning a fresh dev VM, cloning the git repository on it and then making 4 clones of that VM, which I'll throw away later.
* https://goo.gl/WvCVPs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDeG4S-mJts&feature=youtu.be)
Post by: Maverick on 21 October, 2015, 08:28:49 am
Post by: mcshroom on 21 October, 2015, 12:06:55 pm
I have 320,000 rows of imported CSV data to try and turn into something inteligable in excel* and all I've been doing for the last half hour is trying to fix the switches from USAnian dates to UK ones which is messing up my attempts to do any sorting and processing.
*That I have to us Excel and not Access for something that Access would be far better at is another rant for another time
Post by: Pingu on 22 October, 2015, 10:30:02 am
Post by: Phil W on 22 October, 2015, 04:06:02 pm
Memory Map and Windows! MM - why do you refuse to develop a OSX desktop app forcing me to use Windows. This has been a no-windows zone for 5 years so it was necessary to dig out a copy and install it on a VM on my iMac. Consequently it took 5 hours of my life to split a copy of the 50k GB 2015 Hd maps in to small enough chunks to load onto iPhone/iPad, most of it playing 'hunt the network' and 'where is the USB port'. That should be a 10min job!! >:(
You know you really want Anquet which has OSX and iOS versions...
Post by: TheLurker on 22 October, 2015, 07:29:02 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 October, 2015, 02:03:28 pm
Therefore I should be obliged if you should treat all five files in the same way i.e. as if they were tracks wot I had for e.g. ripped from a CD. Or something. Rather than leaving poor Iggy out in the cold under "Podcasts".
I have now managed to get Mr Pop alongside Ms Church and Messrs Townshend, Bragg and Eno but only by frobbing the file until it screamed. Just stop it. You are the Louise Woodward of nanny-state-ism >:(
Post by: David Martin on 25 October, 2015, 03:19:06 pm
Dates in Excel - hours of fun ::-)
Dates in any package are painful. My weapon of choice for such shenannigans is either R or Python.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 October, 2015, 11:34:21 am
My fondleslab wants to upgrade to iOS 9.1. Now or later, it asks. Later, I say, fo I am using it to
I do not what made it not update but the first thing it asks this morning is whether I want to update to iOS 9.1. Look, FruitCo, If you're going to offer this service then make it fucking work, and if it doesn't find conditions to its liking then at least give me a fucking error message. Cretins.
In contrast it decided to do the last update unilaterally. While I was on holibobs. In a hotel with shite wifi. Which caused it to conk out and turn the fondleslab into a paperweight.
"Lobotomised shitlarks" is not too strong a description of the people responsible.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 October, 2015, 11:59:42 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 October, 2015, 01:16:49 pm
Post by: Wombat on 30 October, 2015, 10:37:22 am
You are slow, useless and obstructive. Several hundred times more obstructive than Norton ever was, preventing me from accessing anything on my blu-ray drive at all, and then taking 20 minutes to fail to scan the remote DVD drive, and locking up the PC in the process. Its a seriously powerful PC, with lots of resources, so why should scanning an optical drive take over the whole machine? Its set to auto-update, yet every time I fire up the PC it squeals that its out of date, and what am I going to do about it.
Well, what I am going to do about it is simple, get rid of you, you useless heap of crap -today, in fact in the next ten minutes, regardless of having a couple of months subscription left...
So shall I rely on Windows (10) own products, or go back to Norton, which at least when I asked it not to scan a certain thing, did at least obey, instead of blithely scanning it regardless and then locking up?
I just want something that works, and does not require lots of interaction from me.
Post by: Afasoas on 30 October, 2015, 12:33:29 pm
It's not uncommon for leading AntiVirusCos to provide new signatures several times of day. Is it possible to quiet the out-of-date warnings?
I'd be surprised if there wasn't an option to exclude the blue ray drive from scans. Which is fine if your using trusted read only media.
Post by: Wombat on 30 October, 2015, 02:39:36 pm
The "out of date" warnings only annoy me because its meant to deal with the issue itself, but it doesn't, I have to manually update it. I also takes up to half an hour to do that update, whereas Norton never took anything like that long. I have told it to ignore the blu-ray drive on numerous occasions, and on recent occasions I've told it to stop scanning anything at all, yet it still scans it. Basically, it just refuses to do as its told.
Gone now, and PC working better, which is a relief since one of today's tasks is going through a load of old discs I wrote ages ago, to see if they still have a purpose other than as bird-scarers.
I was amused that when removing it, it detected I was doing so, and asked why. The final question was "what OS are you using?" and a list of OSs, which did not include Windows 10, so my comment in the last box was that this summed it up, that they are hopelessly out of date, and seemed totally unprepared for Windows 10.
Things were not helped by an issue which Win 10 seems to have with recognising optical drives. Mine was recognised, but for some types of media, it didn't seem to want to read it, meaning I resorted to my external DVD drive. Drive firmware now updated and all seems to be well (fingers firmly crossed).
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 November, 2015, 01:10:21 am
Post by: ian on 04 November, 2015, 09:25:34 pm
El Capitan doesn't like the apostrophe. He's the anti-grocer.
Seriously, in 2015 and computers still choke on shit like that. Grammar pedants recoil.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 05 November, 2015, 09:27:11 am
Seriously, in 2015 and computers still choke on shit like that. Grammar pedants recoil.So they should. What the hell was wrong with 8.3?
You want apostrophe's in drive letters, filenames, directories but you think companies letting SQL injection via their websites are being lax? Are you taking the Bear Grylls rehydration technique?
Post by: ian on 05 November, 2015, 10:23:39 am
Seriously, in 2015 and computers still choke on shit like that. Grammar pedants recoil.So they should. What the hell was wrong with 8.3?
You want apostrophe's in drive letters, filenames, directories but you think companies letting SQL injection via their websites are being lax? Are you taking the Bear Grylls rehydration technique?
Ordinary humans use computers, not programmers. Attempting security by screwing usability is a common and epic fail.
Post by: Asterix, the former Gaul. on 05 November, 2015, 10:31:40 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 November, 2015, 02:22:42 pm
After much puzzling about why my Time Machine backup ground to a halt (on the last machine it claimed to be read only, on this one it sledged disk first into a lake of time-retardant jam) I finally removed the apostrophe from an external drive name and the jam was gone.
El Capitan doesn't like the apostrophe. He's the anti-grocer.
Seriously, in 2015 and computers still choke on shit like that. Grammar pedants recoil.
You think you've got problems? I have two NASen. The older one very properly displays its name as "El Gordo" but no matter how I try to jibble things the newer refuses to be anything other than "FATBOY", which offend my delicate sensibilities.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 November, 2015, 07:10:07 pm
No. No, I did not. Now put it back before I come round to your
Post by: Jaded on 06 November, 2015, 09:12:35 am
Seriously, in 2015 and computers still choke on shit like that. Grammar pedants recoil.So they should. What the hell was wrong with 8.3?
You want apostrophe's in drive letters, filenames, directories but you think companies letting SQL injection via their websites are being lax? Are you taking the Bear Grylls rehydration technique?
apostrophe's what? ;D
Post by: ian on 06 November, 2015, 09:26:54 am
Post by: David Martin on 07 November, 2015, 10:48:53 pm
..d
[1]Unix
Post by: Kim on 07 November, 2015, 10:54:19 pm
Post by: David Martin on 07 November, 2015, 10:58:39 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 November, 2015, 03:20:38 am
Post by: Afasoas on 08 November, 2015, 04:45:19 am
I'm finally sending my first ZFS snapshot from brox (home server) to mundo (backup server).
I couldn't work out why I was getting such poor transfer speeds. ~150 Megabit/second. CPUs/IO no where near maxed out.
Then I checked the event log on mundo. It's getting spammed choc full of these:
Code: [Select]
Nov 8 04:20:09 mundo kernel: [14143.334095] net_ratelimit: 131 callbacks suppressed
Nov 8 04:20:09 mundo kernel: [14143.400836] sky2 0000:05:00.0 eth0: rx error, status 0x7ffc0001 length 1020
Nov 8 04:20:09 mundo kernel: [14143.450895] sky2 0000:05:00.0: error interrupt status=0x40000008
Oh yes. I've reduce the MTU and the problem still persists. It looks like dodgy hardware is to blame: Marvel 88E8056 It's some sort of timing issue - the t'interwebs are full of geeks gnashing teeth with the same problem and no resolution.
On the bright side, the command line looks impressive.
Code: [Select]
zfs send -R biz@2015-11-08T02:52:10 | pigz -4 | ssh -i /root/.ssh/id_rsa_zfsbackup_biz_mundo.bikeshed.internal zfsbackup@mundo.bikeshed.internal "unpigz | sudo /sbin/zfs receive -Fduv biz"
If this works, I'll try using trickle to shape the bandwidth down somewhere south of 100 Megabits/second and just be very patient.
Now I really must get some ZZzzzz
Post by: Afasoas on 08 November, 2015, 12:11:11 pm
I though I was being clever, writing a script to regenerate a series of single use SSH keys:
Code: [Select]
#!/bin/bash
keyPath=~/keys_for_brox
keyDesc=( var-log-archive-rsync-backup \
dba-mysql-rsync-backup \
www-rsync-backup \
etc-rsync-backup \
vmail-rsync-backup \
dpkg-selections-rsync-backup \
)
command=( "rsync --server --sender -ltrze.iLs . /var/log/archive/*" \
"rsync --server --sender -ltrze.iLs . /var/backups/mysql/*" \
"rsync --server --sender -vltrze.iLs . /var/backups/www/" \
"rsync --server --sender -vltrze.iLs . /var/backups/etc/" \
"rsync --server --sender -vltrze.iLs . /var/backups/vmail/" \
"rsync --server --sender -vltrze.iLs . /var/backups/dpkg/" \
)
rm -rf ${keyPath}/*
for ((i=0;i<${#keyDesc[*]};i++)) ; do
ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 3072 \
-f ${keyPath}/id_rsa_${keyDesc[$i]}_bourbon.biscuit.ninja \
-N "" \
-C ${keyDesc[$i]}
sed -i "1s|^|command=\"${command[$i]}\,no-agent-forwarding,no-port-forwarding,no-x11-forwarding,no-user-rc |" ${keyPath}/id_rsa_${keyDesc[$i]}_bourbon.biscuit.ninja
done
This is a step towards reconfiguring automated backups from a few VPS boxen following loss of the boot disk in my home server. The only thing is, I copied and pasted the script from a text editor to vi, forgetting to pop it into insert mode first. I then ran the script.
I wound up running "rm -rf ${keyPath}/*" without keyPath properly defined.
The net result was running "rm -rf /*".
* faceplants desk *. FFS. I'm an idiot. I've hosed my entire home folder and goodness knows that else.
Moral of the story - don't use "rm -rf". Don't run potentially lethal scripts without properly eyeballing them.
Oh, and my previous rant? 3/4 through backing up, the snapshot transfer broke.
Post by: Afasoas on 08 November, 2015, 01:01:48 pm
It looks like only my home folder was affected.
Fortunately my kerberos keys had expired so I didn't delete anything off my network shares. And I managed to save out a copy of my krb5.keytab too so I don't have to worry about re-exporting keys. Accessing my password database might have been tricky without them. My other home compobulators haven't been setup with new keys yet since rebuilding the server following its boot disk failure.
That might not mean much to some, but it just brings home the importance of backing up data.
Hopefully in a few days time I'll have the backup regime sorted and I can put this mess behind me.
Post by: Kim on 08 November, 2015, 01:04:47 pm
Then I checked the event log on mundo. It's getting spammed choc full of these:Code: [Select]Nov 8 04:20:09 mundo kernel: [14143.334095] net_ratelimit: 131 callbacks suppressed
Nov 8 04:20:09 mundo kernel: [14143.400836] sky2 0000:05:00.0 eth0: rx error, status 0x7ffc0001 length 1020
Nov 8 04:20:09 mundo kernel: [14143.450895] sky2 0000:05:00.0: error interrupt status=0x40000008
Oh yes. I've reduce the MTU and the problem still persists. It looks like dodgy hardware is to blame: Marvel 88E8056 It's some sort of timing issue - the t'interwebs are full of geeks gnashing teeth with the same problem and no resolution.
"Is it an Intel? No? Then it goes in the bin."
Life's too short for crappy network chipsets.
Post by: Afasoas on 08 November, 2015, 01:10:58 pm
Ugh. I should pony up and buy some better hardware for the backup server.
Post by: Ben T on 09 November, 2015, 05:07:42 pm
Epson recommend replacing the cartridges which are from cartridgesave with genuine epson ones.
which are 26.99
I could get a whole new printer for 21.99
::-) ::-)
Post by: simonp on 09 November, 2015, 06:06:49 pm
Apparently people actually fail the theory test. Since it consists of about 5% obscure but easily revised facts (stopping distances, uncommon roadsigns, species of pedestrian crossing), 20% common sense and 75% "D) Slow down and proceed with caution.", you really have to worry.
I didn't revise in any meaningful way for my motorcycle theory test, and got 2 wrong. Didn't practice at all for the hazard test, that was harder, but I still passed.
I find it slightly hard to comprehend how people can fail this, but many people struggle with stuff that is much easier, so I shouldn't be that surprised.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 November, 2015, 06:36:36 pm
Post by: Oaky on 09 November, 2015, 09:09:21 pm
How did you manage to write a quite of programs (Office 13 in its Office365 guise) that share a common looking print dialog, but manage to make it so that one of them (Powerpoint) will silently >:( fail to print via said dialog whilst other programs in the suite succeed?
Powerpoint 2010 however, RUNNING ON THE SELF SAME LAPTOP, can print the same file fine. ???
Fuckwits!
Post by: David Martin on 11 November, 2015, 03:31:32 pm
Post by: barakta on 11 November, 2015, 03:46:34 pm
Post by: perpetual dan on 12 November, 2015, 10:33:05 pm
Post by: ian on 13 November, 2015, 08:54:34 am
It would all be easily (if tediously) fixable if Powerpoint wasn't such a hideous pile of shit. Seriously, nothing works. You have no idea how much this process makes me swear as I frantically try to select something. Click. Click. CLICK! Oh you fucking shit pile of fucking selection fucking tool, you donkey felching mother of a fucking bonobo etc. I probably shouldn't do this in the open plan office.
I'm would seriously build a Terminator and send it to kill everyone involved in the Powerpoint for Mac 2011 project (OK, the entire Office for Mac team) before they could squeeze out the steaming pile of software turds.
Post by: ian on 13 November, 2015, 08:59:14 am
Post by: billplumtree on 13 November, 2015, 09:16:27 am
http://www.davidgaffney.org/destroy-powerpoint.html
Quote
Destroy PowerPoint is a set of ultra-short stories about PowerPoint presentations, using PowerPoint technology to tell the tales. Through his unique, funny and profound stories of a complex corporate world, David demonstrates how PowerPoint dominates, destroys and pollutes workplace communication...
Post by: Tim Hall on 13 November, 2015, 09:18:52 am
(kb3097877 refers)
Post by: ian on 13 November, 2015, 09:25:39 am
ian, maybe you could book David Gaffney, master of miniature short stories, for a presentation?
http://www.davidgaffney.org/destroy-powerpoint.htmlQuoteDestroy PowerPoint is a set of ultra-short stories about PowerPoint presentations, using PowerPoint technology to tell the tales. Through his unique, funny and profound stories of a complex corporate world, David demonstrates how PowerPoint dominates, destroys and pollutes workplace communication...
Ironically my most
Post by: Afasoas on 13 November, 2015, 09:54:05 am
So off I went and automated my backups. They've failed two nights running now with target host unavailable. Seems that Wake on RTC cannot be trusted.
I could use a Raspberry Pi with a relay to turn it on but I figure this is the last straw given that I can't boot it from USB and the network stack falls flat on it's face at anything over 100 MBit/s. Time to be hunting for another mother-freaking-board.
*Real Time Clock
Post by: mcshroom on 13 November, 2015, 03:42:27 pm
Usable data? I'm sure our CE&I guys have heard of it once.
Post by: Asterix, the former Gaul. on 13 November, 2015, 04:15:12 pm
They want me to do a survey, a good opportunity to tell them I think they are rubbish so I do. At the end I have to choose between free gifts
weight loss product
e cigarette
skin cream
I don't want any of them but there is no way to complete the survey without choosing one so I do. Then they want £4.99 p&p. I decline and my survey doesn't count.
Next thing I know the CEO is on the telly saying their surveys indicate customer satisfaction!
Post by: Pickled Onion on 13 November, 2015, 06:18:05 pm
TalkTalk
They want me to do a survey, a good opportunity to tell them I think they are rubbish so I do. At the end I have to choose between free gifts
weight loss product
e cigarette
skin cream
I don't want any of them but there is no way to complete the survey without choosing one so I do. Then they want £4.99 p&p. I decline and my survey doesn't count.
Next thing I know the CEO is on the telly saying their surveys indicate customer satisfaction!
err - are you 100% sure the survey came from Talk Talk? ;)
Post by: Pickled Onion on 13 November, 2015, 06:21:48 pm
The wonders of mixing CSV files and decimal commas :facepalm:
Usable data? I'm sure our CE&I guys have heard of it once.
Nothing wrong with that if it's done correctly. CSV can cope with commas in data, quotes and even line breaks within a field. Though it would have been far easier if the standard separator wasn't a comma, for eg. a character not in use other than computer keyboards.
Post by: CrinklyLion on 14 November, 2015, 01:03:53 pm
TalkTalk
They want me to do a survey, a good opportunity to tell them I think they are rubbish so I do. At the end I have to choose between free gifts
weight loss product
e cigarette
skin cream
I don't want any of them but there is no way to complete the survey without choosing one so I do. Then they want £4.99 p&p. I decline and my survey doesn't count.
Next thing I know the CEO is on the telly saying their surveys indicate customer satisfaction!
err - are you 100% sure the survey came from Talk Talk? ;)
http://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Unlimited-Broadband/Online-survey/td-p/1604904 (http://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Unlimited-Broadband/Online-survey/td-p/1604904)
Post by: Kim on 14 November, 2015, 01:18:07 pm
(I'm surprised they're averaging 3 stars, tbh. I suppose some people only care about price.)
Post by: David Martin on 16 November, 2015, 09:08:55 pm
The perfectly usable email client has been replaced with something designed by eric, half brother of stan. It tells me I have new mail, but won't update the message list, telling me I have new mail but it will only show me mail until abut 6 hours ago.
And switching between email accounts doesn't. I presume some halfwit rewrote the sync code to resync the entire mailbox rather than just 'changes since X' and as my inboxes are of the order of tens of thousands of messages, it just freezes. Easier to just quit the app and reopen it to get it to sync properly.
Very frustrating. A n d v e r y <insert tumbleweed> s l o w
Post by: mcshroom on 16 November, 2015, 10:30:06 pm
It worked fine as it was, why did they have to 'fix' it?
Post by: Asterix, the former Gaul. on 17 November, 2015, 07:55:17 am
TalkTalk
They want me to do a survey, a good opportunity to tell them I think they are rubbish so I do. At the end I have to choose between free gifts
weight loss product
e cigarette
skin cream
I don't want any of them but there is no way to complete the survey without choosing one so I do. Then they want £4.99 p&p. I decline and my survey doesn't count.
Next thing I know the CEO is on the telly saying their surveys indicate customer satisfaction!
err - are you 100% sure the survey came from Talk Talk? ;)
I see where you are coming from. I thought I saw where the survey was coming from but now you mention it..
Post by: tiermat on 19 November, 2015, 06:59:27 pm
Combine the above with getting no help, whatever, from those that have experience of do the install of same to suit the organisation you have the recipe for 4 days of frustration followed by half a day of uninstall and reinstall from scorched earth.
I have had zero fun at work this week!
Post by: Feanor on 25 November, 2015, 10:13:04 pm
My job is to translate high-level Customer Requirements and Support into language that our developers ( who have no knowledge of the actual technical stuff our code does ) can understand.
I'm a Petrophysics <-> C# Translator.
We had a bug.
It crashed our software under certain conditions.
We fixed the bug.
It no longer crashes.
BUT... Projects that had been previously hit by the bug still failed even with the fixed version.
That's because the bug failed to write out critical stuff to the project, leaving the project corrupted.
Wail: "Can you fix that?, patchup the buggered projects?"
Me: "Soz, no. There's nothing to recover in the project file The critical data is simply not there. Re-load from source data and start again!"
No matter how many times and in how many ways, the answer does not change.
SORRY. The affected well must be removed from the project, and re-loaded.
I do appreciate it's a bit of an inconvenience, but I don't have a magic wand.
That's the problem with bugs; they are an embuggerance.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 26 November, 2015, 06:42:09 pm
Very poor show, and not something one expects from Apple. Jobs wouldn't have allowed this...
I have fixed it now, but not after assuming my old DVD rewriter was cream crackered. Expect to see it on the Free to a Good Home sometime soon :facepalm:
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 November, 2015, 09:38:23 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 December, 2015, 07:55:42 am
"Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)" O RLY?
"Unknown USB device (Configuration Descriptor Request Failed)" If you don't know which one it is how do you expect me to find it, eh? EH??
But let's see: USB 3.0 hub and attached devices are working. iPod plugged into USB 2.0 port round the back is working. Bluetooth dongle plugged into USB 2.0 port on the front is working. I therefore conclude that you are full of shit and should keep your worthless op!ons to yourself.
Post by: Zipperhead on 02 December, 2015, 03:04:55 pm
I know you can press some other magic key and another key (by guesswork since they don't seem to be marked with their other function) - but why press two keys to perform a simple operation - just so the machine looks pretty.
Post by: Feanor on 02 December, 2015, 03:30:42 pm
Post by: ian on 02 December, 2015, 03:33:30 pm
Post by: DDCyclist on 02 December, 2015, 03:34:52 pm
Press two entire keys! Together! Oh my. Poor thing.Looks more like a First World Problem than a Computing Stuff Rant.
Post by: Zipperhead on 02 December, 2015, 03:41:46 pm
Post by: ian on 02 December, 2015, 04:15:06 pm
Where the hell is my skinny flat white?
I resent the Hoxton accusation. I work in Clerkenwell.
Post by: DDCyclist on 02 December, 2015, 04:42:37 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 02 December, 2015, 07:57:11 pm
Post by: ian on 02 December, 2015, 08:08:05 pm
I have a nice Olivetti typewriter somewhere which I think may be more suitable.
Post by: Afasoas on 02 December, 2015, 08:37:03 pm
I suspect you people make corrections to documents by crossing out words on screen with a marker pen.
No, don't be silly.
I print the documents first.
In all seriousness, as a photographer and a system administrator, :/
Post by: simonp on 03 December, 2015, 01:38:01 am
In desperation, try the older unsupported 11.whatever version of Citrix Receiver. Yep.
::-)
* helpdesk operator is a contractor. DGAF most likely.
Post by: Jaded on 04 December, 2015, 09:08:32 am
What the chuffing heck are you doing? Why do you think I want to watch the next video news item automatically after I watch the one I want to watch?
Why do you keep turing the setting back to AutoPlay = On ?
Up Next? Up yours!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 December, 2015, 09:22:08 am
Post by: davelodwig on 06 December, 2015, 02:53:40 pm
I'm now left working on just one 27" screen, I'm not sure how I will cope.
TBH the second screen was a 21" NEC professional from the days when LCD screens came 2 inches thick and with many ports for connecting stuffs.
The replacement will at least be cheaper.
D.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 December, 2015, 11:44:18 pm
On Saturday.
Sixty hours ago.
There appears to be no easy way to grink you via e-mail and I'm not surprised. Fools.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 December, 2015, 10:26:19 am
WHICH FILE, YOU FUCKNUCKLES?
No, I don't want to trawl the fucking Internet to find out what's wrong. That's your job. You doctor, me patient. You Tarzan1, me Cheeta. You High Priest of Rational Thought, me
I suppose this will mean another tedious round of tinkering under the bonnet ::-)
1: No, Alicia, not that Tarzan
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 December, 2015, 03:53:12 pm
Bastards.
Post by: Afasoas on 16 December, 2015, 10:54:04 am
My VPS providers /23 has been listed because one IP is "hosting Russian dating botnet spammers" and other IPs in the range have form.
Thankfully they are responsive and advice they're working on getting de-listed.
Blocking IP ranges seems nonsensical.
Post by: ian on 17 December, 2015, 12:30:31 pm
bigshiny:~ ian$ install microsoft office
[bigshiny] sure thing, shall we sing a song in the meantime?
bigshiny:~ ian$ let's not
[bigshiny] you're no fun, we can do Taylor Swift
bigshiny:~ ian$ later
[bigshiny] Microsoft Office 1888 for Mac Installed. I feel dirty
bigshiny:~ ian$ me too
bigshiny:~ ian$ go ahead and run it
[bigshiny] it says it needs a 68 character product key
bigshiny:~ ian$ sigh. i'm typing it in.
[bigshiny] it says the code is wrong
bigshiny:~ ian$ fucknuts. here we go again. and again.
[bigshiny] apparently you haven't got an internet connection
bigshiny:~ ian$ really?
[bigshiny] not really, no
bigshiny:~ ian$ try again
[bigshiny] oh now it says you've used up all your activations
bigshiny:~ ian$ ok, maybe. how about we deactivate the one on the old machine
[bigshiny] what a great plan. hold on
[bigshiny] erm, there's no way to do this. It says you can call an office on Mars and speak to someone whose eighth language is related to English
bigshiny:~ ian$ but i have a stinky cold and no wish to hang about on the telephone
[bigshiny] i believe the technical term is 'fuck off then'
and thusly, this is why I'll never fucking buy another piece of product code protected or subscription-based crud again.
Post by: Feanor on 17 December, 2015, 12:40:26 pm
It will ask some questions a bit like the I-94 form.
Moral Turpitude, Nazi sympathiser, and have you downloaded it from a Wares site.
Answer these sensibly.
Then you get to key in a long number.
Then the robot answers with an activation code which you write down.
Post by: ian on 17 December, 2015, 12:51:16 pm
I'm still very glad I did that big stinky poo in their office toilets.
Post by: Afasoas on 17 December, 2015, 12:52:21 pm
and thusly, this is why I'll never fucking buy another piece of product code protected or subscription-based crud again.
glwt :)
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 17 December, 2015, 01:17:27 pm
MS has always had an issue with the idea that people might need to replace a hard disk, or replace their computer. I've used my activations on my work copy with one PC replacement and one installation on laptop at home (since I work from home some of the time).
Post by: ian on 17 December, 2015, 02:41:56 pm
So I enter a 54 digit number. Yes, 54. Because that's a not thermonuclear usability fuck up at all.
Twice.
And no, it won't let you copy and paste. That would be too easy.
Quote
Unfortunately, we cannot complete this transaction. Microsoft does not recognize this as a legitimate product. Please verify you are using a genuine product key when attempting to activate your product. You may be able to return the software to your reseller for a new product.
Thank you for contacting Microsoft, and fuck off.
Now I presume that's because I have installed it three times, so I'm back where I was before, with no way to revoke a licence that I don't want. I only want the three I legitimately paid for.
I hope they all die in a freak turd storm.
Post by: Feanor on 17 December, 2015, 06:30:51 pm
It's barfing because it can't identify the product you are trying to activate.
It divines this from the Product Key ( the number on the sticker ).
Are you mis-reading one or more of the characters?
Put your specs on :-)
The stupid long number is the 'Installation ID' which is basically a hardware fingerprint of the PC to tie the activation to.
Post by: ian on 17 December, 2015, 07:01:32 pm
It ought to be rule number 1. Do not ask humans to type 16 digit sequences of characters. Do they really need 1016 combinations and 53 bits of entropy?
Put seriously, 54 digits is laughable (that's about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations and I may have missed a few zeros, they probably got tired of lining up and wandered off for a pint or three). Really, they can't create a unique hardware key with a few fewer digits?
Mind you, Microsoft may have simply opted to disown Office 2011 for the Mac. I think it was only invented to give Steve Jobs indigestion.
I've met Bill and Melinda Gates. They never mentioned this.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 18 December, 2015, 08:30:21 am
Hmm, it's not barfing because you've used too many activations ( you just tell the robot it's installed on 1 machine when it asks ).That doesn't work with office 2013 upwards. There is no option to tell it the installation is on one machine, the check is made when connecting to MS to activate the product.
Post by: ian on 18 December, 2015, 09:06:48 am
Remember, this is to activate software I've legally purchased and am using within the licensing terms. Seriously, considering Microsoft's business model is based around regular computer upgrades, they never contemplated that Office customers might, you know, upgrade their computer? There's no option at any point that says 'I've got a new computer.'
All the Mac stuff just, you know, works. I don't have to type ludicrous strings of characters and digits. This is giving me flashbacks about The Quark Dongle. Shiver.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 18 December, 2015, 09:11:08 am
All the Mac stuff just, you know, works. I don't have to type ludicrous strings of characters and digits. This is giving me flashbacks about The Quark Dongle. Shiver.effing iCloud doesn't 'just work'.
Post by: ian on 18 December, 2015, 09:37:54 am
Anyway, I set up an iMac from scratch in not very much time (they've even paired the mouse and keyboard, ahhhh), other than transferring umpteen dozen GBs of media, the only bloody issue is Office 2011. My point is that it shouldn't be difficult. Having to type a 54 digit number is utterly ludicrous. More so when it's destined not to work. Microsoft really didn't get beyond 1995 did they?
I only use Office because it's still 99% compatible with files from my mothership Dell. I'd frankly dump it otherwise. I'm not moving to the latest version because it's subscription-based.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 December, 2015, 09:47:11 am
Post by: Pickled Onion on 18 December, 2015, 10:29:32 am
Put seriously, 54 digits is laughable (that's about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations and I may have missed a few zeros, they probably got tired of lining up and wandered off for a pint or three). Really, they can't create a unique hardware key with a few fewer digits?
It was supposedly1 Gates who once said the world will never need more than five or six computers. He doesn't want to be caught out again.
Alternatively MS really are expecting to sell more copies of Win10 than there are atoms in the universe.
[1] it wasn't, it was the president of IBM, but it's regularly attributed to Gates.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 December, 2015, 10:49:02 am
Post by: Kim on 18 December, 2015, 01:18:49 pm
It was supposedly1 Gates who once said the world will never need more than five or six computers.
[1] it wasn't, it was the president of IBM, but it's regularly attributed to Gates.
Nahh, Gates was the 640kB of RAM thing. And it think that was more of a short-sighted design decision rather than a future prediction.
Post by: DDCyclist on 18 December, 2015, 01:38:34 pm
The 'five or six computers' thing was attributed to Professor Douglas Hartree who, in 1951, is thought to have said all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built—one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, "would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them."
Others,of course, have said similar things which turned out to be equally naive and short-sighted.
Post by: Jaded on 18 December, 2015, 01:47:55 pm
Apparently
Post by: Kim on 18 December, 2015, 01:48:54 pm
I truly believe that one day, there will be a telephone in every town in America. Alexander Graham Bell
That one was right, thobut.
Post by: TheLurker on 18 December, 2015, 05:29:15 pm
As prescience goes that was right up there with Ken Olson's "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home".Umm. He was right. No one really _wants_ one. We've just got to have the bloody things because all the sodding companies and the agencies of HMG have decide it's cheaper to use shonky web sites than people answering telephones to fob people off. Hell; I'm paid to write bloody software and I certainly don't _want_ a computer.
Post by: Kim on 18 December, 2015, 05:40:18 pm
As prescience goes that was right up there with Ken Olson's "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home".Umm. He was right. No one really _wants_ one. We've just got to have the bloody things because all the sodding companies and the agencies of HMG have decide it's cheaper to use shonky web sites than people answering telephones to fob people off.
Respectfully disagree. At least in the days before shonky websites, computers were new and exciting and everybody under the age of about 30 wanted one. Since then they've evolved into (primarily) communications tools, which are sometimes frustrating to use on account of shonky websites, but have opened up all kinds of opportunities that simply wouldn't have existed without them[1], and they remain an empowering alternative to having to deal with idiots by telephone.
Quote
Hell; I'm paid to write bloody software and I certainly don't _want_ a computer.
That'll be why, then. :)
[1] She says, on an online forum for niche cycling.
Post by: Asterix, the former Gaul. on 18 December, 2015, 08:07:13 pm
As prescience goes that was right up there with Ken Olson's "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home".
It's understable tho' when you consider that early on a home computer for most people was an Acorn Electron or whatever that you could use to program the lyrics of 'Ten Green Bottles' in BBC Basic.
We've only really got computers now because we wanted to know what the Germans were saying to each other in WW2.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 December, 2015, 09:43:45 am
1: National Defense Research Committee head honcho Vannevar Bush. Though he did also "predict" Wikinaccurate, or something.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 December, 2015, 09:29:36 am
Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, you have raised twattery to new levels.
My fondleslab wants to upgrade to iOS 9.1. Now or later, it asks. Later, I say, fo I am using it tolookmake up random "facts" about Croydon. Between 2 and 4 tomorrow, then, it says, provided it's plugged in and has wi-fi rays. I plug it in and bung it on the coffee table, two metres as the well-aimed half-brick flies to the wifi router. Mr Jobs' SCIENCE will do its stuff and I can come down in the morning for tea, toast and iOS 9.1.
I do not what made it not update but the first thing it asks this morning is whether I want to update to iOS 9.1. Look, FruitCo, If you're going to offer this service then make it fucking work, and if it doesn't find conditions to its liking then at least give me a fucking error message. Cretins.
In contrast it decided to do the last update unilaterally. While I was on holibobs. In a hotel with shite wifi. Which caused it to conk out and turn the fondleslab into a paperweight.
"Lobotomised shitlarks" is not too strong a description of the people responsible.
Oh look! iOS 9.2 and exactly the same thing happened. Once is a glitch in the matrix, twice is further proof that as far as the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia is concerned, only Little People do testing. Just works? My arse.
Post by: RichL on 22 December, 2015, 05:35:25 pm
I know only 0.000001% of the population are interested in this, but I had to let it out...
Post by: TimC on 22 December, 2015, 05:47:57 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 22 December, 2015, 06:15:29 pm
My colleague just upgraded the compiler to 'fix' an error in his code, despite his code quite obviously containing the error reported.
::-) Poor lad. He'll learn eventually.
Quote
I know only 0.000001% of the population are interested in this, but I had to let it out...
YACF - where you can find 0.0000001 % of the population interested in just about anything.
Post by: perpetual dan on 26 December, 2015, 11:04:59 am
And now, one of the email addresses is on an ISP that blocks me after about 2 wrong password attempts. I think my laptop mail reader gets through those before prompting me to try another password. Sigh.
Post by: Jaded on 27 December, 2015, 04:52:27 pm
My iMac has started suffering from graphics gremlins. The picture disappears then sometimes reappears either misplaced on the screen (and unresponsive) or with some colours missing. Sounds like the graphics card is breaking down. I had thought it was an El Capitan issue, but it's now happening in Windows too. As a late-2010 model, it's not covered by the free replacement graphic card programme that Apple offered to affected 2011-12 iMac owners, chiz. A replacement card seems to be around £300+. Bugger.
Quote
Macs with bad video cards (and there are many iMacs and MacBook Pros among them) can often be rescued by keeping the GPU temps lower than the point at which the chips malfunction and either cause video artifacts, blank the screen, or even crash the Mac. I use 124F as the max but YMMV and, of course, different machine configurations have different fans (and number of fans). It will not fix -all- of them but it will for many.
Read that and thought of your post here. Worth a try.
Post by: TimC on 27 December, 2015, 05:44:16 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 December, 2015, 01:02:13 pm
Eventual answer: because in this room it was plugged into an individually on/off-beswitched 4-gang and the actual socket was off. When really running on mains power the message doesn't appear >:(
Post by: HTFB on 29 December, 2015, 09:44:13 pm
Also, why do Apple hide perfectly sensible controls and configuration switches---to, say, choose between photo libraries---behind scarcely-documented magic buttons that you have to hold down as the application launches? Who knows, if frustrated users were able to click through a dialogue to a control that said "Repair Library Index", or something, then the option hidden behind a different magic start-up button might actually work and, say, look in the directory to see what was in there: in this case, 12000 more photos than iPhoto knew it had.
I know it is supposed to be user-friendly, suitable for the least savvy of users, but if you have attracted users who scarcely dare press a button for terror that they will somehow irreversably destroy the machine and everything on it, it is no help at all to confirm their fears by (a) screwing up (b) stopping marginally more savvy users---like, say, your customer service agents---being able to set things right.
What with making backups onto an external drive, and creating the new library there before copying back onto the local disk, the whole process meant copying 240GB to and fro. With a bit of forethought I could probably have saved a quarter of this, admittedly. And we've lost a bit of user-entered metadata along the way: they'll have to turn all the photos the right way up again. Still, the Apple Genius Bar couldn't do it at all.
Possibly the longer-term solution is to send the whole lot to PhotoBox. At under 3p a picture1 it won't be all that much above a thousand quid, and nobody ever had the screaming abdabs in fear that tapping the wrong place on a box of 6"x4" colour prints would delete the lot.
(240GB takes a long time to copy. For example, it's 5 million 48k tapes, and as everybody knows 48k tapes take 5 minutes 2.95 seconds to load, that's exactly 48 years of faffing about. Buuuh Bip. Buuuh biddly biddly biddly schwaahahahaha biddly schwaaa.)
1. Buy one, get two free.
Post by: ian on 31 December, 2015, 04:27:23 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 December, 2015, 05:50:45 pm
But that magic button toggles everything in the Mac world (and I doubt non-savvy users change the default). Anyway, just right-click and select Open Package to get at the contents and the Originals folder without command line incantations.
I only discovered that iTunes (on Windows) can use multiple libraries by accident and yes, the Magic Button is used to select which one you want.
Post by: HTFB on 31 December, 2015, 09:52:51 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 January, 2016, 12:06:56 am
Post by: ian on 01 January, 2016, 04:58:04 pm
Post by: HTFB on 01 January, 2016, 05:55:56 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 January, 2016, 06:01:40 pm
It's a laptop with a clicky touchpad. No doubt -- if right-button mice are now standard -- there is some elegantly unmarked area that counts as "right" when you press it, if only you know it's there...
The touchpad on my (Windows) laptop is like that; the only clue is a line on part of it which you can't feel. Useful. Miss von B's current desktop Mac was new last year, and the one before dated from "post 2007" but she's still a legacy mouse user.
Post by: ian on 01 January, 2016, 06:14:17 pm
Post by: perpetual dan on 02 January, 2016, 09:52:22 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 03 January, 2016, 12:26:00 pm
They keep listing the /23 in which my mail server resides, on the back of 2% of IPs within the range having at some point being used for propagating spam.
That's 510 IP addresses listed for the sake 8 which have at one time or another been used for nefarious purposes.
Needless to say, I'm on the hunt for hosting with a VPS provider that takes a more stringent attitude towards preventing spam and reacts more proactively to Spamhaus listings. Or an affordable mail relay (..bye bye privacy)
I've just found an instance where Spamhaus blocked a /16 which included most of the Swedish Authorities.
I'm sure it's just part of a conspiracy designed to make it hard for smaller ISPs to run their own mail servers etc.. It's in the same vein as Microsoft almost insisting on obtaining ReturnPath certification at exorbitant cost in order to ensure delivery of email to hotmail/live/office 356 email accounts.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 January, 2016, 04:58:51 pm
Post by: Karla on 06 January, 2016, 12:21:01 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 January, 2016, 08:36:12 am
Fondleslab, how the fuck is it taking four hours and counting to install that Dropbox update?
It's still "installing". Someone is at home to Mr Fuckup with this.
Post by: Feanor on 17 January, 2016, 09:01:38 pm
If you are going to do that shit, make 2 progress bars: 1 for the current operation, and 1 for overall progress.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 January, 2016, 11:43:51 pm
What's that you say? I do have to do it like that?
Bloody hell, how crap!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 January, 2016, 06:36:13 pm
No. No, it isn't. You keep adding OneDrive back. Stop it, and fuck off.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 January, 2016, 06:39:46 pm
Post by: barakta on 28 January, 2016, 07:43:03 pm
Post by: Karla on 28 January, 2016, 08:18:23 pm
What twisted mind came up with this thing?
Okay, I know the answer: it's open source, so it wasn't the product of just one twisted mind, it emerged from the interaction of a thousand twisted minds, just to torture me.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 January, 2016, 08:32:52 am
Post by: Vince on 01 February, 2016, 07:12:58 pm
I'm using the latest version of Firefox you div!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 February, 2016, 09:01:03 pm
Post by: David Martin on 01 February, 2016, 11:24:45 pm
Post by: Morat on 03 February, 2016, 02:15:08 pm
Noone wants to do anything with a VPN once it has been set up.
Post by: mcshroom on 04 February, 2016, 10:25:33 am
Seems so, the IT department (who I gave the request to) had no idea I needed the HDMI in, despite it being on their own form :facepalm:
Post by: Dibdib on 04 February, 2016, 10:26:23 am
Quote
Chris - Intel Windows 8 Tablet - Now Just ??
This nonsense is standard form for them. What's the point of cluttering up my inbox with your latest offers if you're not even going to tell me how cheap it is?
Now where did I leave that frying pan...
Post by: ian on 04 February, 2016, 10:42:06 am
So have I or haven't I? I'm resigned to having something disconnected. I dunno, you'd think they'd put some thought into these things, maybe try them out first. I sense the dread hand of Finestre, the Demon of Such Things.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 February, 2016, 10:52:17 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 February, 2016, 01:52:44 pm
A complete fucking upgrade from Windows 10 to, er, Windows 10, that's what >:( Trashing half my settings and eating another 15 Gb of disk space in the process. Technology is out to get me this week, with one of the Seagate NASen requiring a reset after it gave up on a firmware upgrade, Acronis backup being twat-like and an update to Plex server on same being, er, the same.
Just stop it. Go back to behaving yourselves and let me install my new monitor, you terrible ["Uncle Monty" - Ed.]
Post by: Biggsy on 04 February, 2016, 03:24:37 pm
Is there a browser available for iOS that isn't shit?
Dolphin (http://dolphin.com/features/), if it's as good as the Android version (?).
Post by: TheLurker on 04 February, 2016, 06:55:15 pm
You'd think the BCS would know better wouldn't you? Sending out invitations to vote in the AGM in e-mail over the totally secure and totally (neologism alert) un-snoopable public internets, aye right, containing the following...
"To vote via internet you will need to enter the following two-part security code:
Security Code part one: {a six digit number}
Security Code part two: Please enter your date of birth in the format DDMM"
Wow. Using one of the most public and most easily obtained pieces of information about someone as the second part of the security code.
OK the BCS AGM isn't actually _important_ and it's the Electoral Reform Soc. doing the donkey work rather than the BCS itself, but... ohhh words fail me.
Post by: perpetual dan on 04 February, 2016, 08:54:06 pm
Post by: ian on 04 February, 2016, 09:53:52 pm
Now assuming that youthful brains can be turned by such sites, you think they might not figure out the birth date security mechanism. I mean, it's devious, but I'm willing to bet that those fine young minds will find a way to circumvent it.
Plus, the fuckers are making me feel old, I means seriously, how many years do I have to scroll back to get to my DoB.
Post by: Feanor on 04 February, 2016, 11:56:26 pm
I was *trying* to go to bed.
But Junior tells me he can't print his homework.
Hmm, he can't contact any of the network printers.
For that matter, neither can I.
Nor anything else.
DNS is down.
In fact, 80% of the network services are down.
I can't remote into the Domain Controller which hosts all these functions.
Rummage under desk, connect local monitor and kbd. All seems fine on local login.
Dunno. Reboot the thing. All comes up normally.
Shrug.
10 mins later, all the phones go down in an unrelated sympathy walk-out by the Asterisk box.
More head-banging under the desk to get a local console.
Nothing obviously wrong, so a shutdown -r 0 restores sanity.
Is there an IT fairy in a bad mood tonight?
Post by: Pickled Onion on 05 February, 2016, 07:57:51 am
Plus, the fuckers are making me feel old, I means seriously, how many years do I have to scroll back to get to my DoB.
Not really even as much as a whinge, but why do those scroll lists for your dob start from today??
On the rare occasions I've been on a site like that, I put in the earliest possible just to see if there are any sanity checks: "you're 186 next birthday? LIAR!"
Post by: Jaded on 05 February, 2016, 08:06:46 am
This is one of the reasons I've started tweaking the truth about my birthdate for people that demand a date but don't seem to have a good reason to know it. Of course that creates the problem of remembering which date I gave out :)
Apparently on some sites about a quarter of users were born on New Year's Day. I get quite a few happy birthday messages on NYD. It's the year I have to remember, but that's what 1Password is for.
Post by: T42 on 05 February, 2016, 08:45:51 am
"To vote via internet you will need to enter the following two-part security code:
Security Code part one: {a six digit number}
Security Code part two: Please enter your date of birth in the format DDMM"
I liked the one that went "choose a password that is difficult to remember and do not write it down". Forget what site it was for but it was something trivial.
Post by: ian on 05 February, 2016, 09:16:41 am
Post by: ian on 05 February, 2016, 10:11:37 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 February, 2016, 11:55:28 am
Is there a browser available for iOS that isn't shit?
Dolphin (http://dolphin.com/features/), if it's as good as the Android version (?).
Cheers, Biggsy. First signs are encouraging though it doesn't appear to offer "Open image in new tab" when you tap and hold a picture.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 February, 2016, 12:07:47 pm
I am currently backing up approximately 1TB from Bruiser McHuge to one of these over a gigabit network. It's been going since 15:00 yesterday and still reckons 12 hours to go. Backing up the same system to its 4TB sibling reckons on about five hours.
Can I give it back to to the vendors with a strongly-worded demand for something that works properly and/or my money back?
Post by: CrinklyLion on 05 February, 2016, 06:40:08 pm
It looks like the upgrage to Wordpress 4.xx has b0rked summat with the two themes that I have to deal with, removing the nice point and clicky WYSIWYG colour customisation options (no, I WILL NOT call them color customization ones) that we used to have. I don't want to have to learn how to deal with custom css. I iz not a website designer or developer, I just got lumbered with 8 of the bastard things to build/maintain/support in my vast amounts of free time, despite my abject lack of skill, talent or knowledge. Bah.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 February, 2016, 10:52:34 am
- just as shit to the 4TB NAS, and
- equally shit using Acronis True Image 2016 and Macrium Reflect
Post by: Bledlow on 07 February, 2016, 01:18:40 pm
Apparently on some sites about a quarter of users were born on New Year's Dayand are 116 years old.
Post by: Andrew on 07 February, 2016, 04:55:38 pm
.Net will not install on my Windows 7 system (Installation failed with error code: (0x80070643)) so I'm looking at the support forums. There are people there going around and around in circles looking for an answer and all those so-called experts can do is keep referring to same knowledge base articles that don't help. Strikes me that nobody really knows what goes on under the hood of this devil's spawn.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 February, 2016, 09:22:23 pm
The downside is that it appears to have eaten half the programs from the start menu. The programs are still there, just the shortcuts missing ???
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 February, 2016, 07:59:43 pm
Post by: Morat on 08 February, 2016, 08:27:31 pm
OK, so it was my fault for backing shit up to the wrong directory but really, Acronis, why do you claim it'll take five hours to move the backup file to the right directory on the same fucking disc >:(. I could pack up the NAS and drive it to Newcastle in that time.
It takes a lot longer to make a copy of files on the same disk than it does to move them between disks. If you're just _moving_ them it's usually much much faster. I suspect Acronis may be being pedantic and making a copy because it's the sort of thing backup software does.
Post by: Feanor on 08 February, 2016, 09:00:12 pm
Moving files within the same filesystem should just be an exercise in changing the directory entries.
There should be no need to shuffle the actual data.
Post by: TheLurker on 08 February, 2016, 09:52:31 pm
F*** me, I hate MS windows. Do any of the supposed MS support experts actually know any f-ing thing about the subject?!Ummm, I had summat similar a month or three back. Couldn't install VS 2015. Kept choking on installing 4.6 framework. Had to get the machine rebuilt from an O.S. reinstall. Not sure why, but others in the team were similarly affected.
.Net will not install on my Windows 7 system (Installation failed with error code: (0x80070643)) so I'm looking at the support forums. There are people there going around and around in circles looking for an answer and all those so-called experts can do is keep referring to same knowledge base articles that don't help. Strikes me that nobody really knows what goes on under the hood of this devil's spawn.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 February, 2016, 11:36:52 am
It really shouldn't.
Moving files within the same filesystem should just be an exercise in changing the directory entries.
There should be no need to shuffle the actual data.
Exactly. If I'd done <Control-X> <Control-V> from File Exploder it would have been pretty much instantaneous no matter what size the file.
Post by: Biggsy on 09 February, 2016, 12:36:32 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 February, 2016, 07:16:40 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 February, 2016, 07:01:11 pm
Right-click system tray icon, click "Status". Result: nothing.
Start application from Start Menu. Result: nothing.
See that bike? The one that's just spent a decade at the bottom of Tottenham Lock? That's you, that is!
Post by: Wombat on 11 February, 2016, 08:14:35 am
Basically it all starts with "hello Acronis, I'd like to back up" "would that be to the virgin USB3 3TB disk you have attached?" "Yes, please, that's the one" "Ok, lets go".
A week later, plug disk in, start Acronis, "Can't find backup location" "excuse me, you are showing it there, waddyamean you can't find it" I ended up having to create a new location, which it couldn't fimnd the next week, so I eventuially managed to persuade it to go to the original one. One one occasions it utterly refused, so I had to delete the backup, and say "Look, here's an empty disk, pick your own spot" again, which it did. I look forward with trepidation to this weekend's episode.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 February, 2016, 12:15:18 pm
Post by: Andrew on 11 February, 2016, 12:33:20 pm
.Net will not install on my Windows 7 system
Ok. You win. I've give up. >:(
I didn't need .Net anyway. I can control my Sonos system without the .Net needing Sonos Windows application anyway.
Post by: barakta on 11 February, 2016, 01:37:12 pm
But after I have said "FUCK OFF" for the 4 hour max allowed I don't appreciate the horrid little rebooter shit thinger to reappear 10 mins later and try to kill my state. I am fucking busy. I don't need state lost and rebootage to happen. FUCK OFF till 5pm!
Post by: SoreTween on 20 February, 2016, 11:39:26 am
FFS.
Uninstalled. Adobe going on. Oh goody, more Adobe software to update at 5 minute intervals.
[ETA]
I couldn't do it. As soon a I got to the download page, 'Offer: would you like to install this useless shit as well?' I just couldn't do it. So I installed Sumatra PDF instead. Small, fast to start, great. Print the first doc duplex 2on1 and I get... a blank piece of paper. Print the same doc 1on1 fine. Try again 2on1 - blank paper. Uninstalled.
F##k it, I'll use firefox, that has a (poor) built in reader. Click doc, 'Would you like to save or open this document?', Open please. <new tab opens with nothing in it>. 'Would you like to save or open this document?', Open please. <new tab opens with nothing in it>. 'Would you like to save or open this document?', Open please. <new tab opens with nothing in it>. Move file to desktop instead of opening from network drive. 'Would you like to save or open this document?', Open please. <new tab opens with nothing in it>. ARGHHHH!
[ETA again]
With a heavy sense of foreboding I installed Adobe Reader DC - DC? Document Cloud - Uh oh. Sure enough it now wants me to create a cloud account, log in here, see all your documents on any device, upload all you personal data to f##k knows where so that f##k knows who can see them too when Adobe drop the security ball. Uninstalled.
http://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/enterprise/
Reader 11 installed.
I would be so happy to pay for the full Acrobat again if I could have version 8 with security fixes. That version did everything I needed, in particular the document compare was excellent. It still is excellent so I still use it in a non persistent XP VM. Document compare in 9 onwards is close to useless. Unfortunately I can't let 8 near my network safely.
Post by: woollypigs on 20 February, 2016, 12:38:16 pm
I try when it is possible to read .pdf in Gmail/Google Docs, but my browser and laptop struggles often.
Post by: SoreTween on 20 February, 2016, 12:47:00 pm
Post by: Biggsy on 20 February, 2016, 12:58:36 pm
www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 February, 2016, 02:23:21 pm
Adobe keeps trying to sneak onto various machines around the place and has to be ruthlessly LARTed back into its hole.
Post by: SoreTween on 20 February, 2016, 02:41:53 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 February, 2016, 03:07:38 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 20 February, 2016, 03:30:09 pm
So I downloaded the portable version and tried again - duplex = fine, 2on1 simplex or duplex = blank page.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 February, 2016, 06:45:46 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 20 February, 2016, 07:29:26 pm
Those interfering cockshafts at Microsith have changed my default programs under Win10, such that PDFs are associated with Microsith Edge ???Explanation here
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/29.27.html#subj4
"Woody Leonhard, InfoWorld, 16 Feb 2016
The cumulative update not only knocks out PCs' default settings, it prevents users from resetting them
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3032751/microsoft-windows/windows-10-forced-update-kb-3135173-changes-browser-and-other-defaults.html"
Post by: barakta on 20 February, 2016, 09:15:52 pm
Post by: mcshroom on 20 February, 2016, 10:10:09 pm
Post by: TimC on 20 February, 2016, 10:11:52 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 February, 2016, 03:08:12 am
But it hasn't "forgotten" that I changed the image editor to paint.net ???
The other three Win10 boxes are all OK though Spencer The Halfwit hasn't been switched on this year so dog knows what they'll do to him once he is.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 February, 2016, 06:55:52 pm
I bet Charlie Babbage never had to put up with this kind of bollocks >:(
Post by: Ham on 22 February, 2016, 10:53:41 am
No, Microsith, just because that cell has the "/" character in it does not mean it's a date. It's text. I told you it was text. I selected the entire fucking sheet and did "Format Cells...Text". So when I do a replace all from "nn/62" to "nn/68" I do not want to see it turning into for e.g. "Apr-68". Just do as you're fucking told.
Sorry, that's user error. Format text does odd things and you RARELY want to use it. Use a leading quote ' to ensure you get what you want appearing visually. You can also set Excel's over excited auto formatting, but that's probably not what you want mostly.
Quote
Also, stop opening local .htm(l) files with Edge. It's not big, it's not clever and IT'S NOT THE DEFAULT BROWSER!!1!
I bet Charlie Babbage never had to put up with this kind of bollocks >:(
In W10, type "File Type" into the start menu and you should get "Choose default app for file type". Scroll down to htm/html and robert is your mother's brother.
Post by: Wombat on 22 February, 2016, 01:11:45 pm
In my view, the number formatting dialogue should have a bit saying allow leading zeroes, yes/no.
Post by: barakta on 22 February, 2016, 01:20:47 pm
And I haven't even looked at the shitty fire alerter I need to RTFM on for Wednesday's test. Might RT that M now.
Post by: Biggsy on 22 February, 2016, 01:21:14 pm
And the suggestion on Inforword that it might only happen with W10 installed with Express defaults is incorrect. I did a Custom install.
Post by: Ham on 22 February, 2016, 01:30:49 pm
I disagree. I am NOT going to type a leading quote into every sodding cell, just to allow it to display the leading zeros on an entire column of phone numbers. I have to format the column as text. What is so effing difficult for MS to allow Excel to show leading zeroes? My spreadsheets are often garnered from assorted sources of data, so I cannot control how it arrives. On this note, why does Excel sometimes decide, when copying data from one text formatted cell to another text formatted cell, to reset the formatting to number?
In my view, the number formatting dialogue should have a bit saying allow leading zeroes, yes/no.
They do?
Format-> Custom -> 0000 (or as many zeros as you want)
Post by: Jaded on 22 February, 2016, 04:35:14 pm
Post by: Jaded on 22 February, 2016, 04:36:27 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 February, 2016, 04:59:50 pm
Of course, even though you've specified "text" when importing, and Excel deigns to treat the imported data as text at first, when you actually look under the bonnet you find the entire sheet is considered to be "general" and when you change it to "text" it blah and you know the rest. It took about nine hours to mung the file into a form that could be fed back into MP3tag to put disc and track numbers back in order.
The whole thing reminds me of the conversation in "Good Omens" where the two demons have been working away for years on individuals and Crowley ties up the whole of London's phone system for 45 minutes. I'm sure Ian otp can name Excel's resident evil in no seconds flat.
Windows 10 file associations are a whole other madman with a bucket of shit, and the same goes for automatically appending ".txt" to files saved as plain text. No, Microsith, if I call that file "dg16k_750.sii.txt" it won't fucking work >:( Save it as "dg16k_750.sii" like I told you.
Post by: Ham on 22 February, 2016, 11:01:26 pm
Rather than opening a .csv, import it using the Data->Get External Data dialogue.
First screen will be the delimiter style, mostly that will be delimited
Next delimiter type, that should normally be a comma or whatever it is - can specify multiple delimiters but that doesn't normally end well. At this stage you start to see your data as it will appear
Next you get to specify the format for each column, including option to skip columns
Finish, and it all appears as if by magic
If you want to search and replace and autocorrect is interpreting date like things as date, use the quote to force text, single quote. The old style " for right align text and ^for central text no longer work in the base config.
The old file options are still available to alter, in File Explorer, you can change whether extensions are shown etc in the View Options dialog, stop hiding extensions for registered files and things start behaving better. Use Textpad (http://textpad.com/) instead of Notepad for editing text files and things get better still, because Notepad is pants. Actually you might prefer Notepad++ (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/) unless regular expression search gets you excited.
Formatting cells as text is NOT the same as using TEXT() formula and should be avoided pretty much every time for sanity.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 February, 2016, 11:56:53 pm
I get the exact same dialogue as wot Ham describes when doing "File...Open..." on the saved .csv file and already tell it, yes, every bloody column is text. I use | as a field separator. I suppose I could pre-jibble it with a text editor first and replace | with |' and then watch it get saved as iThings.csv.txt >:(
Post by: Wombat on 23 February, 2016, 08:26:28 am
I disagree. I am NOT going to type a leading quote into every sodding cell, just to allow it to display the leading zeros on an entire column of phone numbers. I have to format the column as text. What is so effing difficult for MS to allow Excel to show leading zeroes? My spreadsheets are often garnered from assorted sources of data, so I cannot control how it arrives. On this note, why does Excel sometimes decide, when copying data from one text formatted cell to another text formatted cell, to reset the formatting to number?
In my view, the number formatting dialogue should have a bit saying allow leading zeroes, yes/no.
They do?
Format-> Custom -> 0000 (or as many zeros as you want)
But doesn't that stick the relevant number of zeroes in front of everything? All I want it to do is leave my bloody zeroes alone, i.e. if I type one in, or one is there in data pasted in from elsewhere, just leave it as it is, don't mess about with it.
My spreadsheets are usually garnered from a raft of sources, sometimes extracts from our own housing system, which vomits out .csv files, sometimes Govt data which is usually .xls, and after they have been initially compiled, additional data is gathered from elsewhere, and either pasted in, or manually typed in. Quite often they may be project lists, of addresses, and when more people come on board, we add their details, and put their phone number in the relevant column which is already formatted as text, to stop the leading zero suppression, and sometimes, but not always, Excel goes "oh look, that looks like a number you are putting in there, I'll re-format it as one, and wipe off the leading zero." Just fucking stoppit, excel!
I'll explore the "get external data" dialogue, but often its a case of having a little snippet of data from somewhere, possibly even an email, and dropping it in, and that isn't really appropriate.
Next rant isn't aimed at Excel, its the idiots that wrote our housing system, whoever thought that stick the house number and street all in one cell was clever? How the fuck am I supposed to sort that? Cue much jibbling with adding spaces by replacing single ones with triple ones, then doing a text to columns, then removing the spaces. the space jibbling is because I have to have fixed delimiters because I can't use spaces as delimiters because it would separate "high" and "Street" inot separate cells, and of course house numbers can be from a single digit up to 4 digits, including an a or b on the end. Ah, of course its a pointless rant, because the system is by Crapita....
Post by: Jaded on 23 February, 2016, 08:52:41 am
Converting 'number (with or without letter after it) space' into 'number (with or without letter after it) tab'
Copy the column into a txt editor, do the reg exp thing, insert one or more columns in the spreadsheet then paste the text back in.
Obviously it isn't quite as simple as that...
Post by: tiermat on 23 February, 2016, 07:18:03 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 23 February, 2016, 09:11:26 pm
Post by: Kim on 23 February, 2016, 09:23:40 pm
The sooner someone (other than Doro, who had a go and then gave up) makes a proper SIP phone that goes to 11 the better. Preferably before PCI slots become obsolete.
Post by: David Martin on 24 February, 2016, 09:36:55 am
You need a Regular Expression find/replace in a text editor. Worked on the column with the number / name combo.Notepad++ is a very good and free windows text editor that Does. The. Right. Things. (tm)
Converting 'number (with or without letter after it) space' into 'number (with or without letter after it) tab'
Copy the column into a txt editor, do the reg exp thing, insert one or more columns in the spreadsheet then paste the text back in.
Obviously it isn't quite as simple as that...
Excel is an abomination. You can make excuses for poor user interfaces and blame it on user error, but then you start to sound just like some whiny unix fanboy who is just about to suggest using sed and awk as a more efficient way of doing it.
Post by: Andrij on 10 March, 2016, 08:10:26 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 March, 2016, 07:48:05 pm
Post by: Kim on 11 March, 2016, 08:11:13 pm
Also, Unicode consortium! You've seen fit to supply us with several flavours of slightly different asterisk, turds, snowmen, countless useful mathematical symbols and god knows what else, but at no point did anyone sit down and think that it might be a good idea to have a little Asterix, for ironic use around people who can't spell? Standards organisations - no sense of humour.
Post by: Pingu on 11 March, 2016, 11:39:08 pm
...Microsoft Word deciding it's going to piss all over your quotation marks...
Yes, WTF is going on with those (nae jist Windaes)?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 March, 2016, 01:25:49 am
...Microsoft Word deciding it's going to piss all over your quotation marks...
Yes, WTF is going on with those (nae jist Windaes)?
Fucking "smart" quotes, I expect. See also "standalone acute accent substituting for apostrophe's" and other Crimes Against Typography >:(
Also, Windows, if a scheduled task is set to run at time X, doesn't run because the Babbage-Engine is switched off and is set to run at startup if missed that means ALL scheduled jobs thus set, not just the odd one you think is important enough.
Post by: SoreTween on 14 March, 2016, 07:57:04 pm
a) stop replacing the start menu shortcuts for terd and exhell in the patches you issue. The old executable is in exactly the same place and has exactley the same file name as the new one so the is no fucking reason at all to replace the shortcut. Why do I care? Keyboard shortcuts. You give us the useful facility to set a shortcut key then when we are good and used to using it you drop your trousers and shit on it.
b) stop breathing.
Post by: HTFB on 15 March, 2016, 11:55:42 am
Also, Unicode consortium! You've seen fit to supply us with several flavours of slightly different asterisk, turds, snowmen, countless useful mathematical symbols and god knows what else, but at no point did anyone sit down and think that it might be a good idea to have a little Asterix, for ironic use around people who can't spell? Standards organisations - no sense of humour.Rem acu tetigisti. I think that must be it: emoji are mildly horrible because they're ultimately joyless. And the more there are of them, the less they do a useful job. They cease to be a punctuation mark conveying how the plain written text would be varied in more expressive speech, and become a mere method for typesetting pictures inline with text. Ultimately either the choice of pictograph is too restrictive, established by the joyless standards committee in arbitrary ways and freezing temporarily popular images into communications for all time; or it is too general, and finding the picture you want among all the 232 (ok, currently only a thousand-odd, but still) randomly added elements of the standard becomes impossible; while no font designer could possibly hope to produce new images for every character, so the pictograph as typeset will be selected from some generic font and fit the text as badly as a cut-and-pasted picture would. Or both.
In the end we will certainly abandon the idea, and this forum would be a great place to start. We should ban them all.
(click to show/hide)
Post by: iddu on 15 March, 2016, 02:32:16 pm
Also, Unicode consortium! You've seen fit to supply us with several flavours of slightly different asterisk, turds, snowmen, countless useful mathematical symbols and god knows what else, but at no point did anyone sit down and think that it might be a good idea to have a little Asterix, for ironic use around people who can't spell? Standards organisations - no sense of humour.Rem acu tetigisti. I think that must be it: emoji are mildly horrible because they're ultimately joyless. And the more there are of them, the less they do a useful job. They cease to be a punctuation mark conveying how the plain written text would be varied in more expressive speech, and become a mere method for typesetting pictures inline with text. Ultimately either the choice of pictograph is too restrictive, established by the joyless standards committee in arbitrary ways and freezing temporarily popular images into communications for all time; or it is too general, and finding the picture you want among all the 232 (ok, currently only a thousand-odd, but still) randomly added elements of the standard becomes impossible; while no font designer could possibly hope to produce new images for every character, so the pictograph as typeset will be selected from some generic font and fit the text as badly as a cut-and-pasted picture would. Or both.
In the end we will certainly abandon the idea, and this forum would be a great place to start. We should ban them all.(click to show/hide)
New KB please, this one's full of tea!
Post by: barakta on 22 March, 2016, 08:25:08 pm
Today's fucknuttery was ALL my shortcuts to anywhere/anything on the network drive just vanished off my local desktop entirely. I had to recreate them ALL with a network which kept hanging when I tried to rename them for my usual keyboard navigable filenames etc.
As requested I provided IT with "time specific data" on incidents and asked "why have all my networked shortcuts vanished?". I have copied the shortcuts to my userspace in the hope I can restore them again easily if they go AWOL but FFS, time, stress and annoyance I did not need as I kept discovering new ones I hadn't remembered to fix, and had to fix em...
Fucking useless piece of shit notwork.
Post by: Wombat on 27 March, 2016, 11:07:26 am
I buy a new 1TB SSD on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, you decide you are going to back up my entire system to it, thus neatly filling it up totally. Bearing in mind you do not have ANY scheduled backups, but rely on me doing them when I'm available (and therefore when the PC is actually switched on), quite how did you manage this piece of fuckwittery? So, you see a new drive appear and think, "well, he doesn't want me doing scheduled backups toe the 3TB drive which I normally, use, so I'll do a ninja backup to the new drive he thinks he's going to use for data, instead, that'll teach him to mess with my settings"...
I couldn't work out why Windows was telling me the new drive was dangerously full, and was beginning to think there was something amiss with it. Bearing in mind it contains best part of a week's work of photo processing for a British Library endangered archives project, I am NOT amused.
I've told it to delete the backup, and now its just sat there, with a little circle thing going, doing absolutely stuff all, and refusing to close down either. I was trying to do some work today!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 March, 2016, 11:33:39 am
Post by: Kim on 27 March, 2016, 01:18:01 pm
F'ing Acronis True Image, WTF do you think you are playing at?
I buy a new 1TB SSD on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, you decide you are going to back up my entire system to it, thus neatly filling it up totally. Bearing in mind you do not have ANY scheduled backups, but rely on me doing them when I'm available (and therefore when the PC is actually switched on), quite how did you manage this piece of fuckwittery? So, you see a new drive appear and think, "well, he doesn't want me doing scheduled backups toe the 3TB drive which I normally, use, so I'll do a ninja backup to the new drive he thinks he's going to use for data, instead, that'll teach him to mess with my settings"...
Maybe a disk enumeration problem? It might be the OS's fault rather than Acronis.
Post by: Biggsy on 27 March, 2016, 04:14:11 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 06 April, 2016, 08:46:35 am
TalkTalk are making me do lots of swears. They seem adamant there's no issue with the network. I beg to differ.
The bright red bars are packet loss. In the top graph, each bar is averaged out per minute. In the second graph, each bar is averaged out over five minutes. They ran some tests against the line last night at which point the fault was not occuring. Lo and behold, as soon as their tests were complete, the fault manifested again. At 04:30am the fault either manifests or disappears. When the fault is occurring, factory resetting the ADSL router and disconnecting the firewall makes no difference. Neither does using the master socket.
Virgin Media vDSL install is scheduled for later in the month and we're all set for high availability (Dual ISP internet). I thought it was OTT but as of right now, I'm unable to reliably provide out of hours support to my employer.
Post by: Kim on 06 April, 2016, 01:25:57 pm
(http://i.imgur.com/gKvb5S9.png)
TalkTalk are making me do lots of swears. They seem adamant there's no issue with the network. I beg to differ.
That change in latency at 4am looks like a DSL line re-syncing with different parameters (speed, margins, interleaving, etc). Can you log sync data from your modem to compare?
Post by: Afasoas on 07 April, 2016, 12:08:25 pm
What follows is a bit of a acronym-laden ramble, so feel free to ignore it.
I've got ADSL line speed, attentuation, SNR margin, Errored Seconds, Severely Errored Seconds, Unailable Seconds, Forward Error Correction and Cyclic Redundancy Check.
It looks like the line sync speed has been reduced, as it's now lower than what I've achieved in download tests prior to this knavery.
SNR margin looks reasonable - would be nice to see the actual SNR
Downstream attenuation is twice that of upstream - should they not at least be similar? (~44 dB down and ~26 dB up)
There are numbers for ES, SES UAS, FEC* and CRC on downstream
There are numbers for UAS upstream.
From what I've read, the UAS count should only be incremented as a result of ten consecutive SES occurances. On the basis of which these figures don't make much sense as the UAS count is greater than all the numbers put together. And it's the same value up and downstream.
An engineer visit is booked in for Tuesday.
*Interleaving is currently switched off
Post by: Pickled Onion on 09 April, 2016, 03:57:53 pm
Unless you really believe the LSO is a covers band, or that people really file their albums under conductor??
MAX was incapable of doing what it was told, so I tried to rip Mahler's 9th using iTunes. Half the symphony went under "Compilations", as Ovation something or other1, because there was a Wagner piece to pad out the first CD. The other half ended up under "Georg Solti". Seriously. It would be nice to play the whole symphony, and to find it under M for "Mahler".
[1] "Ovation" is the name given to a series of recordings by Decca, and has nothing to do with the music. ::-)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 April, 2016, 07:03:59 pm
Post by: CrinklyLion on 13 April, 2016, 11:06:13 pm
That was a challenging morning in the not-office...
Post by: Kim on 13 April, 2016, 11:38:10 pm
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 16 April, 2016, 07:32:26 pm
Everything I use it, it freezes Firefox and then the entire laptop.
Anyone got an Internet bank that is less shitty? (Actually I have several already but I suppose it's time I found another new one)
Post by: Feanor on 16 April, 2016, 10:49:11 pm
Frikkin Santander and their sodding crappy Internet banking!
Everything I use it, it freezes Firefox and then the entire laptop.
Anyone got an Internet bank that is less shitty? (Actually I have several already but I suppose it's time I found another new one)
RBS digital banking works fine here.
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 16 April, 2016, 10:59:58 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 April, 2016, 04:30:22 am
Post by: Biggsy on 17 April, 2016, 11:27:34 am
Post by: mcshroom on 17 April, 2016, 12:44:14 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 19 April, 2016, 10:55:17 am
I don't keep any history between sessions and cookies are destroyed when closing all the tabs associated with them.
It's probably got something to do with the metric shed load of javascript used for tracking user journeys, collating stats and advertising :/
Post by: Karla on 21 April, 2016, 12:46:57 am
Ubuntu has had problems with bluetooth for years. FFS, why isn't this sorted by now?
Post by: Wombat on 21 April, 2016, 08:10:47 am
Frikkin Santander and their sodding crappy Internet banking!
Everything I use it, it freezes Firefox and then the entire laptop.
Anyone got an Internet bank that is less shitty? (Actually I have several already but I suppose it's time I found another new one)
Strangely, apart from the first few months when Santander banking didn't like Opera, we've had no trouble with it at all. I think Mrs W uses it with Firefox, but on an Android tablet. I use it on the PC through various iterations of Windows, with various iterations of Opera, and on my Android phone.
I tried Firefox,. but found it had grown big and bloaty.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 May, 2016, 01:37:46 pm
Post by: Kim on 04 May, 2016, 01:41:49 pm
I'd replaced it and done a motherboard swap before barakta suggested checking that the kettle lead actually worked. :facepalm:
That's an hour of our lives we won't get back.
Post by: barakta on 04 May, 2016, 02:13:40 pm
Post by: Jaded on 06 May, 2016, 08:12:55 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 11 May, 2016, 11:25:23 am
Post by: Andrew on 11 May, 2016, 11:40:23 am
But I shall leave it. As much as I'm not a fan of Windows, it is 'useful' having it around. Justin Case.
I sense a job for VirtualBox though. That should be some fun for me. I've set up a Windows virtual platform under Linux but not the other way around.
Post by: Kim on 11 May, 2016, 01:10:26 pm
My wife ranted her frustration at the Windows 7 box last night. "Can I have Linux back?" she finally said. My work here is done :)
I do keep wondering when Windows will be ready for the desktop... ;D
Quote
But I shall leave it. As much as I'm not a fan of Windows, it is 'useful' having it around. Justin Case.
Sadly true, though much less so than it once was.
Post by: simonp on 11 May, 2016, 05:09:07 pm
Post by: Woofage on 12 May, 2016, 05:11:36 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 May, 2016, 10:29:08 pm
Fortunately I still had a copy of the original installer lying around so was able to restore functionality.
Post by: dave r on 23 May, 2016, 10:27:51 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 24 May, 2016, 08:22:15 am
Post by: dave r on 24 May, 2016, 12:02:30 pm
Is your phone just connecting for charging? Have you checked on your phone to see if it has an explicit option to switch to 'disk' mode?
The choice is MTP or camera, I've been connecting to upload pictures for about two years and its always worked faultlessly, why it should stop is puzzling, I suspect a fault or a settings changed on the phone.
Post by: Kim on 24 May, 2016, 12:38:32 pm
Post by: dave r on 24 May, 2016, 12:42:47 pm
Try another cable. They do go dodgy.
Changing the cable was the first thing I did
Post by: Wombat on 24 May, 2016, 12:56:49 pm
Post by: dave r on 24 May, 2016, 03:53:34 pm
Um, surely if you want to transfer media, then media transfer protocol that its offering you, is what you need?
Thats the one, but even in that it doesn't connect. I shall be asking for my PAC number at the end of the week and going phone shopping at the weekend, I've had the phone, a galaxy fame, two years now and my contract is up at the end of the month.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 25 May, 2016, 07:51:05 am
They do go dodgy.
My phone cable went dodgy on my last trip to the ABROADS. It started by telling me it wasn't a genuine cable (it is) so expect it to misbehave. Then it stopped charging altogether. I blame the state of the roads. Having 50% of my mapping on the phone without paper backup was perhaps not the brightest thing in the world :facepalm:
Try another cable.Finding an Apple Lightning cable in Кам'янець-Подільський is not exactly straightforward. When I did, it was in a locked display cabinet, priced at a whole €2. I asked if it was a good one, the guy cheerfully said "about 50:50".
Post by: Kim on 25 May, 2016, 11:29:57 am
Post by: Pickled Onion on 25 May, 2016, 12:33:33 pm
Post by: Kim on 25 May, 2016, 12:44:48 pm
Some of the blame lies with the shallow surface-mount sockets you tend to get in things like phones. There's no way that's not going to put the solder/PCB under loads of stress. But the connectors seem to do a good line in bending and no longer holding the cable securely, too.
Post by: Bledlow on 26 May, 2016, 10:16:13 pm
Finding an Apple Lightning cable in Кам'янець-Подільський is not exactly straightforward. When I did, it was in a locked display cabinet, priced at a whole €2. I asked if it was a good one, the guy cheerfully said "about 50:50".Have you visited the castle? i'm told it's very good, & that the surviving parts of the old city are also fine.
Post by: Oaky on 27 May, 2016, 10:26:36 am
On a related note, is it just me, or are micro-USB connectors a lot less effective in their sacrificial-bit-at-the-cable-end than the specification would imply?
Some of the blame lies with the shallow surface-mount sockets you tend to get in things like phones. There's no way that's not going to put the solder/PCB under loads of stress. But the connectors seem to do a good line in bending and no longer holding the cable securely, too.
Acorn#1's hudl socket has gone that way (Although not through normal wear/tear... she was using it plugged in and didn't realist she'd bent the micro-USB plug through almost 45 degrees :facepalm:. The socket has deformed so the cable is very loose and nowadays if you want it to charge, you need to apply lateral pressure to the cable (popping an appropriate thickness of book under the plug so that the weight of the hudl does this seems to work OK).
Post by: woollypigs on 27 May, 2016, 10:30:57 am
Post by: Kim on 27 May, 2016, 12:14:11 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 27 May, 2016, 01:35:17 pm
Finding an Apple Lightning cable in Кам'янець-Подільський is not exactly straightforward. When I did, it was in a locked display cabinet, priced at a whole €2. I asked if it was a good one, the guy cheerfully said "about 50:50".Have you visited the castle? i'm told it's very good, & that the surviving parts of the old city are also fine.
Indeed (https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=96535.msg2030505#msg2030505), couldn't miss it. Rather more impressive on the outside than the inside though.
Post by: Afasoas on 27 May, 2016, 10:07:25 pm
I've had periodic problems with the current dual WAN set-up - which I think relate to some incompatibility between pfSense and the Virgin Media SuperHub in Modem only mode. The link is effectively up and down like a Yo-Yo. The logs show ARPRESOLVE bleating repeatedly so I kind of suspect some ARP funkiness. A packet capture revealed nothing odd, save for lots of ICMP TTL Exceeded packets coming back in response to a packet trace (MTR) - and I guess that's hinting at a network loop somewhere. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, the TalkTalk modem isn't even managing an ADSL connection.
There are interludes of happiness where VM just works, but they don't seem to last long. What are the odds of two WAN connections failing in completely different modes on the same day?
Post by: Ham on 28 May, 2016, 07:14:33 am
There are interludes of happiness where VM just works, but they don't seem to last long. What are the odds of two WAN connections failing in completely different modes on the same day?
The last time I had to sort anything like that out (some 15 years ago) it turned out that the installing engineer had plugged the resilient routers, not to the dual power supplies available in the cabinet, but into the same wall socket - one that served the floor, too. And someone had plugged in a duff kettle.
HTH
(as I recall that was with a 2Mb circuit serving a building with c 500 users)
Post by: Afasoas on 28 May, 2016, 09:47:50 am
It turns out the VM Superhub doesn't negotiate the link speed properly with the Firewall. Forcing it to 1000BaseT-FullDuplex means that when the Superhub restarts, connectivity is restored soon afterwards. The Superhub is still restarting every 40 ish minutes.
TalkTalk fixed itself as soon as I restarted the modem the morning.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 May, 2016, 08:36:44 am
Bah!
Post by: Kim on 29 May, 2016, 12:53:23 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 May, 2016, 05:33:49 pm
Post by: T42 on 01 June, 2016, 07:53:33 am
Correct behaviour would be to utter a polite cough, as befits an underling, then to wait at parade rest at a discreet remove until told to carry on, whereupon it should carry out its duty quietly and with as little fuss as possible, rather than hauling one off by the scruff to observe as it cleans out the commode in Lady Margery's second dressing-room.
It's so hard to get properly-trained staff these days.
Post by: David Martin on 01 June, 2016, 11:20:05 am
Post by: Afasoas on 01 June, 2016, 12:40:34 pm
Both providers are keen to blame my setup. Cue hours of testing with laptops directly connected to ScupperedHubs and sure enough, the results absolutely entirely consistent with the firewall's view of the world.
???
Post by: JStone on 01 June, 2016, 04:57:31 pm
"Oh sorry", says the developer, "I reloaded the data and that's deleted all the previous tests. Forgot to include you in the email before doing it"
>:(
Post by: David Martin on 01 June, 2016, 05:30:26 pm
Post by: JStone on 02 June, 2016, 09:27:11 am
Version control?
Oh yes, all can be recovered. It's the lack of communication that's endemic & triggered the rant.
Post by: Biggsy on 06 June, 2016, 03:55:11 pm
(Yes funky third-party app managers are available, but still the official one is needed to actually do anything (without root permission)).
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 08 June, 2016, 09:57:42 am
So what does MS do? Install and configure effing OneDrive on my Work machine, without asking. I told IT support bod as soon as I noticed. He swore a lot too. Removing it seems to be difficult.
Post by: barakta on 08 June, 2016, 10:11:29 am
I'd hate to sysadmin windows, constantly trying to work out what evil has done what to systems.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 June, 2016, 12:14:19 pm
Post by: hulver on 08 June, 2016, 04:44:33 pm
For really important reasons (Intellectual Property, everything in caps), file sharing and cloud apps such as dropbox are verboten where I work. Absolutely verboten. Even USB memory sticks are very very frowned on. If you want to work from home, vpn in to a work machine.
So what does MS do? Install and configure effing OneDrive on my Work machine, without asking. I told IT support bod as soon as I noticed. He swore a lot too. Removing it seems to be difficult.
OneDrive is built into Windows 10. There is no way to uninstall it. I think it can be disabled through group policy, but It's one of those things MS desperately wants you to use so pushes you to use it all the time.
Post by: L CC on 08 June, 2016, 08:56:35 pm
Unless I look at its web page, of course, then it's ready.
If, however, I actually want to print something, that's not possible.
[I don't actually *want* to print it, but apparently I need to take pieces of paper with notes on to meetings. It's what you do if you're a boss-type-person in a factory. Apparently]
Fucking computers.
Post by: Afasoas on 08 June, 2016, 10:47:15 pm
Wireless printers are the work of Stan. ** shudder **
I had a problem with One Drive and a certain popular anti-virus product that caused one of the laptops in the fleet I'm responsible for to become IO bound. I think we resolved the issue by disabling One Drive, which didn't impress that end user very much.
Post by: Jaded on 09 June, 2016, 08:26:32 am
Post by: Afasoas on 09 June, 2016, 04:12:39 pm
My two wireless printers have been working perfectly with AirPrint for 8 months so far. From computers and devices.
Ah well I stand corrected. Proven technology.
:facepalm:
Post by: Afasoas on 09 June, 2016, 04:14:50 pm
For some reason my laptop thinks that printer upstairs is offline.
Unless I look at its web page, of course, then it's ready.
If, however, I actually want to print something, that's not possible.
[I don't actually *want* to print it, but apparently I need to take pieces of paper with notes on to meetings. It's what you do if you're a boss-type-person in a factory. Apparently]
Fucking computers.
In all seriousness, have you managed to resolve this? If not, HTH.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 June, 2016, 04:48:41 pm
My two wireless printers have been working perfectly with AirPrint for 8 months so far. From computers and devices.
Ah well I stand corrected. Proven technology.
:facepalm:
The wireless part of those I've owned has worked flawlessly. It's just the rest of it which goes wrong >:(
Post by: L CC on 09 June, 2016, 06:32:13 pm
My working system went like this:For some reason my laptop thinks that printer upstairs is offline.
Unless I look at its web page, of course, then it's ready.
If, however, I actually want to print something, that's not possible.
[I don't actually *want* to print it, but apparently I need to take pieces of paper with notes on to meetings. It's what you do if you're a boss-type-person in a factory. Apparently]
Fucking computers.
In all seriousness, have you managed to resolve this? If not, HTH.
Using work laptop, VPN to pick up email. Can't print from work laptop, because work laptop is only allowed to join work network. Email document to home laptop. Edit document. Fail to print. Email document to Mr Smith, a foot away on the sofa, who is allowed to print to the printer.
I really wish this was a lie.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 June, 2016, 04:13:01 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 15 June, 2016, 05:30:35 pm
Google, what is it with the newly-appeared finger-width strip of whitespace above the keyboard when typing in Chrome onna fondleslab? The space you type in is small enough as it is, without you dicks taking a chunk of it away to do ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NOTHING >:(Thanks for the warning. Knowing this I shall continue to dismiss the, "We've made Chrome even more marvellous! Upgrade now!" hectoring message that appears at irregular intervals with a cheery, "Fuck off!" and a touch of the [X] "button". Until, of course, The Chocolate Factory takes a leaf out of the M$ GWX dirty tricks book.
Post by: Kim on 15 June, 2016, 05:37:13 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 June, 2016, 07:22:35 pm
Post by: T42 on 20 June, 2016, 10:38:06 am
Post by: Chris S on 20 June, 2016, 02:32:58 pm
In case you weren't listening:
(click to show/hide)
If I press "Cancel", do NOT EVER open another window. Ever. Cancel means: Fuck. Right. Off. Right. Now, and never interrupt me again.
Time to uninstall Avast. Like so many of its predecessors, it has gone to the great Adware Heaven in the sky.
Post by: David Martin on 20 June, 2016, 09:08:58 pm
Do you wish to cancel?
It has two options: OK, and Cancel
YHOOJ...
Post by: Kim on 20 June, 2016, 09:53:33 pm
It has two options: OK, and Cancel
...both of which install Windows 10.
Post by: Kim on 22 June, 2016, 12:23:11 am
Post by: David Martin on 22 June, 2016, 04:42:02 pm
Post by: Kim on 22 June, 2016, 04:53:05 pm
You have signed ints, surely a signed byte is just a rather short signed int.
Indeed. Which is fine until you need to exchange data with the rest of the world, where bytes are traditionally used in the unsigned flavour. Cue lots of fucking about subtracting 128 or using ints and bitwise ORing with 0xFF or whatever every time you interact with some sort of byte stream.
The logic is supposedly that all number formats being signed is consistent and therefore simpler. :facepalm:
Post by: Feanor on 22 June, 2016, 08:48:13 pm
Byte to me means an 8-bit quantity, without any interpretation being put on it.
Int, Long Int, Short Int etc apply interpretation to the bits; they say things like "This is in twos compliment. Interpret the MSB as a Sign bit."
If you want to use an 8-bit quantity with a sign bit, call it something like a 'Very Short Int'.
Post by: Kim on 22 June, 2016, 08:51:56 pm
I don't like the sound of a type called Signed Byte.
They just call it 'byte'. It's signed, like all the other types in Java. :facepalm:
Quote
If you want to use an 8-bit quantity with a sign bit, call it something like a 'Very Short Int'.
Quite.
Post by: Wombat on 28 June, 2016, 08:53:05 am
So Adobe, far from what I was considering, i.e. subscribing to CC, I think purchasing Capture One Pro is now in order, especially as its cheaper for Sony users.
Gits!
Post by: ian on 28 June, 2016, 09:37:25 am
This is a lesson I learned yesterday. It's somewhere in an impenetrable and unsearchable Bermuda Triangle of temporary files. Possibly. It proved easier to redo the work that persuade Windows to cough it back up.
Post by: billplumtree on 28 June, 2016, 12:27:08 pm
Adobe, WTF have you done to Lightroom with your bloody "update". I know that those of us who bought it outright, didn't get the whole thing, which is a scummy enough trick, but now entire civilisations can develop, flourish, last for millennia, and then die out before you finish doing anything!
I feel your pain. The two most helpful suggestions seem to be (i) turn off GPU acceleration and (ii) increase the cache size.
Post by: ian on 28 June, 2016, 02:12:27 pm
Post by: Wombat on 28 June, 2016, 06:47:13 pm
Adobe, WTF have you done to Lightroom with your bloody "update". I know that those of us who bought it outright, didn't get the whole thing, which is a scummy enough trick, but now entire civilisations can develop, flourish, last for millennia, and then die out before you finish doing anything!
I feel your pain. The two most helpful suggestions seem to be (i) turn off GPU acceleration and (ii) increase the cache size.
'tis done, so lets see how we get on. As it was, the cache size was 1GB, so I upped it to 3GB, but I can't actually see why it can't be a lot bigger than that. I'm wondering if buying a serious graphics card to replace the (perfectly adequate) onboard graphics card which will do 4K video OK, would help? It would have to be a fairly silent one, as I've got a real downer on noisy PCs!
Already it seems slightly better, (I've done about 20 photos since I did it) but we shall see.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 04 July, 2016, 11:09:45 am
I'm working with over complex crap.
Either it is 'very powerful open source' (ie it can do anything as long as you can code it yourself) or proprietary editors/tools for working with the OP crap. On friday I hit weird issues. After much effing and blinding I have a workaround - the bloody expensive proprietary tools can't parse a relative address properly. So the document maps have to be in the root of the tree. FFS.
Post by: Kim on 04 July, 2016, 12:10:53 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 04 July, 2016, 07:33:35 pm
As of 11 this morning I still haven't got an updated VS-15. Now I haven't even got a usable VS-15 install.
I also find that restore points weren't re-enabled the last time Support restored my machine after a (surprise, surprise) screwed up VS-15 install so I can't even roll back to a usable installation.
Roll on death.
Post by: Afasoas on 05 July, 2016, 10:41:22 am
At least we work in a way where by the developers machines are reimaged on a regular basis so this type of thing isn't in fact very painful at all.
Post by: T42 on 13 July, 2016, 11:15:55 am
Post by: T42 on 14 July, 2016, 07:32:59 am
Post by: ian on 26 July, 2016, 07:43:10 am
There's a lot of them.
Every closedown and start is now imperilled with the 'do not switch off your machine' as a couple of hundred download and install every bloody day.
Post by: T42 on 26 July, 2016, 08:01:40 am
Post by: TheLurker on 26 July, 2016, 11:01:08 am
If you're still running Win7 or earlier you do, of course, have Windoze Update set to, "I'll bloody well tell you when I want updates now piss off and stop bothering me!" Don't you?
The other thing you can do is head to Control Panel / Services and set the Windows Update Service to manual start rather than automatic (at boot)*. Then, when it's _convenient for you_ , go to the Windows Update front end (I usually just type Windows Update in the start menu) and click the "Check for Updates" button / link and it'll toddle off and do its stuff, starting the update service as it does so.
After it's done this it will leave the service running but you can (if it's installed anything you will _have_ to) restart the machine and it will be switched off again. Or you can go to Control Panel / Services and switch it off manually**
*Control Panel / Services
Find Windows Update in the long, long, _long_ list, right click, properties, and set the startup type to manual.
**Control Panel / Services
Find Windows Update, right click, select "Stop".
Ian, sorry chum you're on yer own. If it's a work machine I expect it's locked down tight to stop such unauthorized shenanegins. Then again if it isn't.... :D
Post by: ian on 26 July, 2016, 08:14:31 pm
I'd drop the bloody thing off the balcony if I didn't fear it'd make a hole in the driveway as we can get Macs now (waiting for my three year replacement cycle to come up).
Post by: Afasoas on 27 July, 2016, 10:16:49 pm
Post by: ian on 28 July, 2016, 09:13:15 am
Now the Windows updates are starting to undo themselves in a parade of attempted post-shutdown restarts. Delights!
Post by: Afasoas on 28 July, 2016, 11:14:01 am
You can pop the MacOS installer on a bootable USB.
You need a fruityThing to download the installer and create a bootable USB.
I did find a reputable looking download of ElCapitan which I ISO'd up using dmg2iso and then dd'd onto a USB stick but the MacBook's boot manager thing (Opt +R) didn't recognise it, even though Linux recognised the disk as having a HFS partition. I suspect this is the result of a Hackingtosh arm's race.
Fortunately I've arranged access to another FruityThing.
Post by: T42 on 01 August, 2016, 09:54:28 am
Post by: SoreTween on 01 August, 2016, 09:04:26 pm
He has unfortunately (in this scenario) switched off config over wifi and I don't have a lan cable with me. No I can't ask him to sort it, they're never here.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 August, 2016, 09:53:39 pm
- me, or
- a l33t h@xx0r
Post by: Kim on 05 August, 2016, 04:00:04 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 05 August, 2016, 04:26:49 pm
That's a bit frustrating, at times.
Post by: Kim on 05 August, 2016, 04:41:39 pm
Android is designed for touchscreen input.
Well yes. It's playing catch-up with Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Apple) in this regard, as larger fondleslabs with sensible keyboard options are becoming more common. A surprising number of apps have no ability to run in portrait mode, either.
But not being able to open the notifications window does seem like the sort of thing that *somebody* might have picked up in testing.
I note that it finally seems to have got the hang not dropping characters and sensible handling of mice, at least. Not that a mouse is a practical way to open the notifications window, either, but it's good to have for fiddly websites (like this one) and not getting grubby pawmarks on the screen.
Post by: Afasoas on 16 August, 2016, 11:05:12 pm
Why have I got two 14.04.5 LTS Servers on different kernels? Both are bank up to date with no packages held back, yet the backup server running a subset of packages relative to the main server is on the 3.19 kernel backported from 15.04?
Why does Samba always need restarting before any clients can connect to it, although no errors are logged when it is started first time around?
And why did bind throw its toys out the pram and refuse to load half the lookup zones? (Answer.. journal files on dynamic zones which somehow a restart makes stale)
As for mount.nfs inexplicably hanging on some machines and not others and sending one on a wild goose chase to diagnose ..
All sorted for now, aside from the kernel delta. I'm contemplating rebuilding both on Debian.
Post by: ian on 17 August, 2016, 06:33:15 pm
Every bloody shutdown and startup. Ye ghads!
I can't be arsed fixing it or the thought of handing it back to the mothership. Oh god. Please not the global service desk. Just die so I can get a Macbook.
Post by: TheLurker on 17 August, 2016, 06:45:03 pm
Sixty five update on. Sixty five updates off.Six five special right on tiiiimmme! :)
Now to my grumble...
I.T. slave trader. Where on my CV does it say, "COBOL", Microfocus" or even, "I speak fluent Spanish"? Trust me, I've looked; just to make sure that in my accelerating decrepitude that I'd hadn't forgotten I had these skills. Just looked again. Nope still not there. Sooooo, why in the name of the wee man are you inviting me to apply for a job in Madrid that requires a _minimum_ of 5 to 7 years experience of COBOL? Go on tell me, I'd really like to know what you were thinking. Or even if you were thinking at all.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 August, 2016, 06:48:44 pm
- other Dell models, or
- other laptop brands, or
- other BigCos
Post by: woollypigs on 19 August, 2016, 06:19:47 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 August, 2016, 04:38:52 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 23 August, 2016, 05:57:59 pm
Oh well fucking done, Microsith! Your so-called "update" has broken many of the scheduled tasks on this machine. Trivial stuff like AV scans, backups, that sort of thing. Nice one.It's only going to get better* when they introduce dungball** updates in October for Win7 & Win8.x
* For certain values of better,
**As of Oct. patches will no longer be individually selectable. It'll be all or nothing so they can stuff any old shite on your machine and there'll be precious little you can do about it if it borks*** your machine or installs unwanted telem and other crap. Well you might be able to roll it back for a few nanoseconds after installation but that'll be yer lot.
***M$ patches borking things? Nah, never going to happen. *cough*
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 August, 2016, 06:04:26 pm
Post by: Feanor on 23 August, 2016, 08:31:12 pm
New HDD and clean windows install on Junior's PC.
Old HDD in a slot-mount thing on my PC, to recover what I can from it.
All user files seem to be readable.
Network mount the old drive from my pc to the newly installed Junior PC to copy the user content.
Steam installation is over 200GB!
And all in stupid small files, which really slows down the transfer rates.
On big files, the transfer rate goes well up, but when it's thrashing through thousands of small files, this is what I'm getting ( wired gigabit ):
(https://c2.staticflickr.com/9/8519/28565636753_417866ca9d.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/KwfmAv)
slow_file_transfer (https://flic.kr/p/KwfmAv) by Ron Lowe (https://www.flickr.com/photos/62966413@N04/), on Flickr
<edit>
And now we're onto some bigger files, and the speed has picked up.
Here's task manager right now:
(https://c2.staticflickr.com/9/8165/28566891273_545caacbe1_z.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/KwmMwa)
slow_fast (https://flic.kr/p/KwmMwa) by Ron Lowe (https://www.flickr.com/photos/62966413@N04/), on Flickr
Post by: Feanor on 24 August, 2016, 10:15:17 pm
(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/estimation.png)
I have the Steam installation transferred.
It seems this directory structure mostly contains the games in their as-downloaded state.
The games do appear in the clean Steam install, but when you run them, they go through their first-run stuff which involves installing half a dozen run-time libraries.
This is ok enough.
But exiting the game, I notice that about 50% of the games in the steam folder have turned blue, which indicates that they are updating.
It seems that all the game updates which have been downloaded over the years have been lost.
So the games seem to have reverted to as-downloaded state, and all now want updating.
Why the fsck does restoring the games as per steams instructions not restore the games to their updated state?
So now, my intertubes are saturated by fscking steam.
Again.
Post by: David Martin on 25 August, 2016, 03:35:13 pm
maybe its time for an upgrade - looking for an android with OTG for a sensible price.
Post by: pcolbeck on 25 August, 2016, 04:02:22 pm
And all in stupid small files, which really slows down the transfer rates.
On big files, the transfer rate goes well up, but when it's thrashing through thousands of small files, this is what I'm getting ( wired gigabit ):
This is due to TCP sliding windows which if your file sizes are small never really opens up properly.
Post by: David Martin on 25 August, 2016, 04:22:05 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 August, 2016, 04:38:17 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 25 August, 2016, 04:56:25 pm
Is that where good old fashioned tar cf - * | ssh -c user@remote (cd dir; tar xf -) works fine as it is one big file..?
Yes.
With TCP the receiving node has to send an ack back for every X packets sent where X starts out at a low number then open up as packets are sent without loss and provided the receiver has a big enough buffer to receive them.
Think of it as send send wait to get an ack to see if they got there OK, now try send send send send wait for an ack and so on.
You also get a load of file system o overhead with small files that slows things down.
Post by: Wombat on 25 August, 2016, 09:51:18 pm
Sony, the idea of having a smart phone that you can install apps on is so you can choose the apps you want to install. Not fill it up with pointless crap, updates to pointless crap and yet more versions of useless rubbish so that there is no space for users own apps. 8Gb storage, of which I am using less than 500MB and you are baking in loads of rubbish I don't want, don't need and stopping me using the phone as a useful tool.
maybe its time for an upgrade - looking for an android with OTG for a sensible price.
My Sony is quite nice about not installing too much crap, and it even allowed me to delete Facebook, which amazed me. I think mine's got more storage than that, as well as a 64Gb SD card, so there's a fair old bit of space. Soon won't be if I make a habit of doing 4K videos n it, though! However yesterday it did earnestly tell me there was a firmware update for my (sony) camera I really need to update, so after fighting Sony's crap website for half an hour, I realised I'd already installed that update over a month ago. If its going to be clever, and hold conversations with my camera, at least get it right.... I do find it disconcerting that the damn phone wants to talk to everything, including the PC, the telly, the Sonos, my amp... mind yer own business, phone! Phone's a Z5, BTW, and OTG seems to work OK.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 August, 2016, 08:00:47 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 August, 2016, 04:24:57 pm
And then some bastards made of piss had bagsied all the seats by the emergency exit >:(
Post by: Wombat on 28 August, 2016, 11:59:01 am
The dreadful "playmemories home" website thingy, which is what they use to disseminate the "apps" that my clever Sony camera can make use of, has not worked since last week. Last week I signed into it about 15 times, just to get a simple app but it refused to cough with it, this week, I can't even sign in... All I want is the clever little app which enables me to wave my hand in front of the viewfinder to trigger the shutter, cos its a nice easy way to fire it when on a tripod. Well, it would be, if I could actually get it... I like the idea of having such a dedicated website, where it knows who I am and what cameras I have, and offers relevant content, but its much improved if the effing thing actually works!
Post by: woollypigs on 10 September, 2016, 03:45:00 pm
Checking a 160Gb NTFS USB drive on Win8.1 ... 5 sec, 30sec, 45sec, 55sec, 15sec remaining ... 39 DAYS!!! remaining ... before I even get to mutter YOUFLIPPINGWHATNOW ... tadaaaa finished.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 10 September, 2016, 10:51:23 pm
I got an email "we have sent you a secure email*, please go to blah, blah, etc". So I log in to the site, navigate to messages, click on "click here to see your messages". There's a list of envelope symbols, so click on one of those. Do I see the message? No, up pops a modal dialog box "click on the attachment". What attachment? Oh there's a number, hover, ah it's a link. Click. Do I see the message? No, it downloads something. Go to downloads folder, find the file, guess what? It's an HTML file, so I open it, back in the flipping browser. Why? Why couldn't you just link to the HTML file in the first place?
* That's fair enough, email is not secure so they don't want to send confidential details. This is the complete text of the secure email:
(click to show/hide)
Post by: woollypigs on 11 September, 2016, 11:46:43 am
Post by: Greenbank on 12 September, 2016, 08:29:52 pm
Why the feck is call centre queue music so horrid.
To make you hang up.
Post by: David Martin on 16 September, 2016, 12:08:29 am
Post by: TheLurker on 16 September, 2016, 05:14:49 am
VBA.Points and larfs out loud. :)
My grumble. Visual Studio 15's bloody razr / javascript intellisense-parser thing. Sort your fucking act out. I remember all too well what it was like working remotely over a 300 baud modem I do _not_ need to revisit the experience on a high powered modern computer when editing a small cshtml file in _memory_.
Anywhere between 5 and 20s to echo keystrokes? Locking up the IDE for 30s to a minute while you take your socks off to count up to 12? Piece of shit. Thank $deity$ for Notepad++.
Post by: Afasoas on 16 September, 2016, 01:42:00 pm
Post by: Andrew on 16 September, 2016, 02:05:58 pm
For reasons I really don't understand, I could not get a decent screen resolution using the recommended legacy driver (it's an Nvidia 930 graphics card). All I could get gave the desktop a very 'my first computer' look. With the generic (?) nouveau driver, I could get a decent resolution but the display was slightly (and annoyingly) off-centre. I tried a number of things to get it to work but to no avail and I could only assume that the Debian/Bunsen/Nvidia combo meant the monitor's EDID was not being correctly read... if at all in the case of the legacy driver. I hate having to give up. >:(
That said, Xubuntu 'just works', picks up the supported resolutions, and now I can get on with pissing about with the stuff I like pissing about with ;D
Post by: TheLurker on 16 September, 2016, 05:15:55 pm
Out of interest, are you using VS 2015 Update 3?Not on the offending box. Every time I've tried to install U3 the damned work firewall/proxy has banjaxed it by killing the download part way through. The offending piece of crap is slated for replacement this month; or so I've been told. We'll see.
My other dev machine, yes I have two, does have U3 but of course I can't use that one for the stream of work* I'm doing on the POS.
*Don't ask. Too involved for a sane explanation. BigCoBureaucracy is probably the simplest answer.
Post by: woollypigs on 16 September, 2016, 10:33:24 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 September, 2016, 02:22:08 am
Particularly when there wasn't a peep out of you when it first connected to the intertubes from USAnia >:(
Post by: SoreTween on 21 September, 2016, 08:52:42 pm
TVM.
Post by: mcshroom on 21 September, 2016, 09:28:16 pm
First you start with the 'not approved adaptor' errors again, and now your down button is b0rked. Is this because I decided to make you go in the bag and travel to Devon instead of getting your usual place in the front room? Sort yourself out!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 September, 2016, 12:23:57 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 22 September, 2016, 08:15:48 pm
So please you motherfucking shitbiscuits STOP TURNING THE SERVICE BACK ON.I have a suspicion that Media Player switches WU on when you start it. Like you I run my machines with WU stabbed in the heart with a dirty great stake, but every now and again I find it has risen from the dead unbidden. It may be coincidence, I really _cannot_ be fussed with investigating further as life's too short, but it always seems to be shortly after I've used MP to play something. You won't be surprised to hear I normally use VLC instead of MP.
Post by: SoreTween on 22 September, 2016, 10:26:28 pm
I agree about life being too short. I don't waste time investigating microsoft annoyances any more, I use the time progressing my goal to get my company migrated off Microsoft.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 September, 2016, 04:13:47 am
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 23 September, 2016, 08:54:59 am
Oh, fucking well done, Microsith >:( During your fucked-up attempt to "update" my laptop last night you have deleted the entire directory tree containing all my e-mail settings, spam filters, passworms and EVERY FUCKING MESSAGE I'VE SENT OR RECEIVED IN THE PAST FOUR WEEKS. Nice one.That seems surprising.
I've never seen an MS update do this or anything similar.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 September, 2016, 12:47:52 pm
- Microsith
- l33t h@xx0rs
- a sleepwalking Mr Larrington drilling down umpteen layers to C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles and deleting the folder in question
- 2D Thomas (https://flic.kr/p/LVqfcu)
Post by: Kim on 23 September, 2016, 12:51:36 pm
Thunderbird was behaving as expected
Intermittently maxing out the CPU and using an improbable amount of RAM, while still being marginally less irritating than all the other GUI mail clients, and infinitely better than the current situation, then.
Post by: Zipperhead on 25 September, 2016, 04:12:16 pm
I had the Windows 10 Anniversary update last week, which announced itself, so I left it to restart overnight - but the next night was another update which restarted without warning me. In fact it woke up the computer to restart it.
One or the other of those updates has really screwed up the displays. I know that Windows 7/8/10 can cope with multiple displays it just doesn't seem to like them being different sizes. Since the update mine behave differently when they wake up from the screensaver. But that's not the really annoying thing. The really annoying thing that means that Redmond should be a glowing pile of radioactive dust is that now when it comes out of screensaver mode, every single fucking time, it resets the monitor profiles. The option to reload the profiles is greyed out. I've ended up finding a utility that will reload the profiles for me, manually.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 September, 2016, 06:19:02 pm
Post by: Bledlow on 26 September, 2016, 04:05:20 pm
Post by: ian on 26 September, 2016, 05:09:17 pm
I'd do the same in Cupertino if Apple would invite me. Probably unlikely if they're reading this.
Post by: Greenbank on 26 September, 2016, 08:29:35 pm
Removed the micro-SD card, stuck it in a card reader and attached it to one of the other pis, mounted the root filesystem and fiddled the entry in /etc/shadow and I'm back in.
I guess I'll have a couple of days of that nagging feeling about not knowing what it had been set to.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 September, 2016, 04:19:22 pm
Post by: Kim on 28 September, 2016, 09:37:26 pm
Will whatever it is that's nomming all my internets bandwidth either make itself known or fuck the fuck off >:( This is as bad as the Battle Mountain Super 8, FFS
All downloads take 3 minutes 20 seconds?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 September, 2016, 09:41:54 pm
Will whatever it is that's nomming all my internets bandwidth either make itself known or fuck the fuck off >:( This is as bad as the Battle Mountain Super 8, FFS
All downloads take 3 minutes 20 seconds?
All downloads grind along at 3 kb/s for a while and then fall over, more like >:(
Post by: hulver on 29 September, 2016, 12:51:16 pm
Will whatever it is that's nomming all my internets bandwidth either make itself known or fuck the fuck off >:( This is as bad as the Battle Mountain Super 8, FFSWe had that problem at work. 5 different downloads of Windows 10 Anniversary update did bog down our (fairly poor at the best of times) connection a bit.
Post by: Kim on 29 September, 2016, 02:33:17 pm
We had that problem at work. 5 different downloads of Windows 10 Anniversary update did bog down our (fairly poor at the best of times) connection a bit.
Around the turn of the century, this sort of thing could be mitigated by cunning application of squid[1] on the local network.
Sadly, the rise of indiscriminate use of https (which has its advantages) and streaming means that less and less web content is cacheable. These days I'm seeing a byte hit rate of about 10% (mostly static images and packages downloaded by apt). I think it'll still work for Windows Update (hard to tell when you don't have multiple boxen running the same version of Windows), but needs careful tweaking to optimise performance.
[1] Other caching proxies are available.
Post by: Feanor on 29 September, 2016, 02:57:12 pm
I think this makes windows update work a bit like a peer-to-peer filesharing network.
Never tried it.
First google hit on the topic:
http://www.howtogeek.com/224981/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-uploading-updates-to-other-pcs-over-the-internet/
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 September, 2016, 03:54:53 pm
And breathe...
Post by: Afasoas on 29 September, 2016, 05:10:14 pm
Will whatever it is that's nomming all my internets bandwidth either make itself known or fuck the fuck off >:( This is as bad as the Battle Mountain Super 8, FFSWe had that problem at work. 5 different downloads of Windows 10 Anniversary update did bog down our (fairly poor at the best of times) connection a bit.
Running WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) would download the updates from Microsoft (during the night) and then cache them on your local network so this sort of thing doesn't happen.
But you need an Active Directory domain and stuff which is probably OTT for 4/5 PCs
Post by: pcolbeck on 30 September, 2016, 04:30:58 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 September, 2016, 04:37:50 pm
I suppose I should switch on the last remaining not-upgraded machine in Larrington Towers and see whether planet Earth runs out of electricity before Spencer the Halfwit can finish updating.
Post by: barakta on 01 October, 2016, 07:19:29 pm
Apple's mail app is buggy as fuck with Plusnet emails.
The app I sorted has just suddenly emailed to say "Oh Hai, we can't afford to be a free app anymore" which is fair enough, but what isn't fair is the 4 days notice they gave for turning off the product which I can't find clearly stated anywhere (could be my bad parse of English but even so) and doesn't give me time to find alternatives which is probably their intent, but I think is shitty and sneaky. I was in the middle of time critical complicated life shit this week so simply could not support it.
I would say "just pay, $50 a year isn't much" but actually I won't reward shitty sneaky behaviour like that so I've said sign up for trial to reboot email and I'll kill it all when I see her in ~11 days... See if the Apple app is any less shite, or boot her over to Gmail once and for all...
Hate parental tech support. Hate iOS even more.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 October, 2016, 10:01:57 pm
Post by: Eccentrica Gallumbits on 02 October, 2016, 11:38:08 am
Post by: Kim on 02 October, 2016, 03:17:35 pm
TBH, and this probably marks me as old, I feel vaguely silly plugging my over-the-ear headphones into anything smaller than a smartphone, even though my Sansa Clip is actually better at the job.
Post by: Afasoas on 06 October, 2016, 01:41:45 am
It's not on any lists (IP and domains)
SPF/DKIM/DMARC are all set-up and verified (except for Microsoft because something caching whotsit their mail implementation seems to be permanently broken)
It's using opportunistic TLS with correctly set-up certificates (intermediates/root) from an actual CA
I think I've exhausted all options now.
I swear it's just a ploy to make you pay monies for EvilCorp mail hosting.
Post by: Greenbank on 06 October, 2016, 10:57:18 am
I found that the IP address for one server we were renting had been previously used for dodgy stuff, so the reputation was awful.
No way to fix it except for paying monies to EvilCorp so we ended up using mailchimp (our volume was low enough that we were in the free tier).
I'm weighing up a similar problem for my own stuff. Do I continue to pay for my web/email hosting (but no ssh access) or do I use that money to get a small VPS and run my own stuff (postfix/dovecot/nginx/etc)? The danger is I get an IP that's got a bad history and I end up having to spend more money to get my outgoing mail sent.
Post by: Chris S on 06 October, 2016, 11:42:16 am
In fact, write it out 100 times - you've got time after all - while all these VMs are fucking updating :facepalm:.
Post by: Kim on 06 October, 2016, 03:22:47 pm
For my own email, I just forward to my ISP's relay and let them deal with reputation problems as they come up.
Post by: Chris S on 06 October, 2016, 03:28:51 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 October, 2016, 03:55:39 pm
There is, however, one fundamental problem with this conjecture, viz. it is 100% Pure Unadulterated Lie. Surely, Microsith, this is not beyond your ken to sort out? Or is it that you're too busy trying to make us Do Stuffs the Redmond Way actually to make your software work as advertised?
Post by: pcolbeck on 16 October, 2016, 12:49:11 pm
Perfectly good route redistribution into OSPF with route tagging for connected routes setup on old IOS based switches but will it work on the new NX-OS Nexus switches, will it hell. Spent two hours last night in a datacentre at Mediacity trying every incantation I could think of before I happened on the right one to make it work. You missed a vital bit of information out of all the examples and documents you have published!
Good job the customer was understanding and flexible with extending the allocated downtime and pleased that the new Nexus switches made his Citrix and VMware farms run like shit of a shovel.
Post by: Afasoas on 19 October, 2016, 10:05:27 am
I found that the IP address for one server we were renting had been previously used for dodgy stuff, so the reputation was awful.
<snip>
I'm weighing up a similar problem for my own stuff. Do I continue to pay for my web/email hosting (but no ssh access) or do I use that money to get a small VPS and run my own stuff (postfix/dovecot/nginx/etc)? The danger is I get an IP that's got a bad history and I end up having to spend more money to get my outgoing mail sent.
I created an account with ReturnPath only to find that my mail servers sender reputation is neutral as there's insufficient data collated for it's IP address.
On Edit: Email sent using Evolution get spammed. Email sent using Roundcube (which is hosted on the mail server) do not. I need to re-test and ensure this is a consistent scenario and then investigate it further. There's no obvious difference in the headers.
On Further Edit: Emails sent via IPv6 are getting spammed, IPv4 is fine. Both v6 and v4 IP addresses have PTR records, included in SPF and have the same repulation/not black listed etc. T'is a curious thing thobut.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 October, 2016, 03:58:27 pm
Except that all the unwanted "apps" were back. Note to Microsith: I do not own an Xbox. Just fuck off, and when you've finished doing that, fuck off some more.
Post by: barakta on 24 October, 2016, 12:14:35 pm
Last week updates trashed GRUB (bootloader) and UEFI (bios jibbler) and the Windows install and took the entire system down with it. Had to disconnect the Linux disk and have time wasted by M$'s diagnostics failing to deal with the issue. Safemode seemed to work and reverted the update. Kim then spent ages fixing UEFI and GRUB for me so my Linux could load properly.
Today I am trying to do something time critical, it won't work in Linux so have to try Windows.
"Your system will reboot in 15 mins, you can't stop me nah nah nah"
The only way to disable this bullshit is to muck around in registry risking killing things or apply this update then dis-able updates entirely which is my next plan.
Having just rebooted it to get on with my task, I've now spent the last 45 minutes waiting for it to jibble those updates... A total waste of my time and it didn't even have the courtesy to say "Oh yeah, we'll take your PC offline for nearly an hour". It had several reboots which needed babysitting to get it back into Windows cos thankfully it has not killed GRUB this time and Linux autoloads.
NOW I am going to disable updates so the system cannot do this to me again. I shall also have to turn off the anti-privacy settings which have reverted despite my OFFing them several times!
FUCK YOU MICRO$HIT
Post by: barakta on 24 October, 2016, 12:20:52 pm
"Hi" . o O ( Don't you hi me you piece of shit )
"We've updated your PC" . o O ( Don't I fucking know it, you timewasting piece of shit )
"Preparing updates" . o O ( Now I have to twiddle my thumbs some more, fuck you! )
"Let's start!" . o O ( Start what? A fight? )
System appears to be visually different, it's reverted back to evil start menu and ignored all my settings. There does not seem to be any way to disable automatic updates. Google time, and if needed I will do a registry hack as this cannot be trusted.
Post by: Kim on 24 October, 2016, 01:55:52 pm
Last week updates trashed GRUB (bootloader) and UEFI (bios jibbler) and the Windows install and took the entire system down with it. Had to disconnect the Linux disk and have time wasted by M$'s diagnostics failing to deal with the issue. Safemode seemed to work and reverted the update. Kim then spent ages fixing UEFI and GRUB for me so my Linux could load properly.
Point of order: Something corrupted the BIOS, which automagically restored itself from backup and reverted to default settings. The default settings allowed Windows to start, but on seeing it had lost its EFI magic, it then run amok on the bootloaders and rendered Linux unbootable, before discovering that some updates thing had b0rked the system so it would only start in safe mode.
Unless handled with tranquillity, dual-booting with Windows can result in considerable stress, ulcers and even death. Fortunately, I was wise to this one from last time, and managed to sort it out quickly without re-installing anything.
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/ is handy for jump-starting OSes with broken bootloaders.
Post by: ian on 26 October, 2016, 09:42:38 am
Any clues on the Adobe site? Nope. I just want the one with Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. Is it too much to ask? Evidently.
Grumble. (OK, I can probably guess the first, but a nice comparison site without having to dig through a PDF would have been nice.) Now to do battle with the mothership's IT ordering system. Bah, I want my mum.
Post by: TigaSefi on 27 October, 2016, 09:48:52 am
Post by: Feanor on 28 October, 2016, 06:26:31 pm
Now she's off-line, and I can't VNC in to fix things.
There's no way on earth I can talk her through the router config, so I'm going to have to drive over there tomorrow.
Post by: barakta on 28 October, 2016, 06:52:31 pm
Hope you get motherly tea and caek as your reward (in my case she makes me proper soup as only Mum can make!)
Post by: TheLurker on 06 November, 2016, 11:00:10 am
Still here? OK. Read on.
For pity's sake. How can it be impossible to install one of _your_ products on one of _your_ pitiful operating systems? Not only that, but _how_ the in the name of all that's holy can it take over two hours to install, correction, _fail_ to install, your application?
A new squeaky clean machine with Win 7 64 bit Enterprise. Visual Studio 15 U3. I mean how effing difficult can it be? I remember installing Win NT from (31) floppy disks and that only took about an hour - for a complete bloody O.S.
I've had to install/reinstall VS15 4 or 5 times on various machines. Or is it 6? I don't know, you lose count; that and the will to live after a while. And of the numerous attempts how many do you think worked first time? Go on, Guess. That's right; exactly 0 (zero, nought, null) times now. In one case I had to hand the machine back to our tame hardware herder to have it flattened to clean OS.
Shoot me. Now.
Post by: TimC on 06 November, 2016, 11:20:26 am
So, I've replaced my MacBook Air with a new (but not the latest) MacBook Pro. I've transferred the contents of the MBA to the MBP, no problems (apart from the Bootcamp partition, but that can wait). However, I wanted then to restore the MBA to a bare OS (Sierra) so that it can be sold or passed on to one of the kids, or whatever.
Followed the procedure laid out on the Apple Support website. To the letter. Ended up with a borked MBA, no OS available and unable to boot from an external DVD with a (never used) genuine OSX DVD. Around 10 attempts to get it to do an internet reinstall of OSX (it will only accept Mountain Lion) failed, mainly due to the fact it refused the router WPA2 password. Thought I'd finally got it to start the recovery, went to bed. Came down this morning and no progress. Whatsoever.
Reformatted the SSD (again), another three tries during which it either plain refused to work, referred me to Apple Support, or alleged that there simply was no wifi. Aargh!! But the fourth attempt (possibly number 20 overall) seems to be working and it's now downloading Mountain Lion. If that works, I then have to update to El Capitan before finally getting back to Sierra - and then updating that (and all its apps) to the latest build.
Y'know, sometimes Windows ain't so bad.
Post by: Kim on 06 November, 2016, 03:34:35 pm
Which just proves that nothing good can come of relying on The Devil's Radio for this sort of thing.
Post by: TimC on 06 November, 2016, 07:02:34 pm
Post by: Kim on 06 November, 2016, 09:17:32 pm
So that's about 36 hours to do a format and reinstall. Nice.
I think that's actually slower than in the dialup days, when I discovered all my original Win95 CDs were in French...
Post by: TimC on 07 November, 2016, 09:40:12 am
Post by: Phil W on 10 November, 2016, 06:21:56 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 11 November, 2016, 07:32:13 am
That's mad. Actually I think its probably something to do with control plane policing rather than the flash itself but still ...
Post by: Afasoas on 11 November, 2016, 06:37:11 pm
M$. At this point regular readers may skip to the next post. There is, depressingly, nothing new here.
Still here? OK. Read on.
For pity's sake. How can it be impossible to install one of _your_ products on one of _your_ pitiful operating systems? Not only that, but _how_ the in the name of all that's holy can it take over two hours to install, correction, _fail_ to install, your application?
A new squeaky clean machine with Win 7 64 bit Enterprise. Visual Studio 15 U3. I mean how effing difficult can it be? I remember installing Win NT from (31) floppy disks and that only took about an hour - for a complete bloody O.S.
I've had to install/reinstall VS15 4 or 5 times on various machines. Or is it 6? I don't know, you lose count; that and the will to live after a while. And of the numerous attempts how many do you think worked first time? Go on, Guess. That's right; exactly 0 (zero, nought, null) times now. In one case I had to hand the machine back to our tame hardware herder to have it flattened to clean OS.
Shoot me. Now.
You can nobble the installation so it's much faster (not re-downloading the from t'web). It involves copying the content of the media to a share and creating an admin install file. If interested I can send you some details via PM/email.
Post by: mattc on 16 November, 2016, 09:45:09 am
How on EARTH did they make it so random??? I can accept that it won't be as pretty/quick/useful as Google, but it would be nice if it actually found a file, in a folder with 40 files, given a part of the actual file-name to search on.
Post by: TheLurker on 16 November, 2016, 07:19:25 pm
Windows (7) Explorer search:I gave up on explorer search within days of getting a Win7 machine. I generally drop into command line and use ...
How on EARTH did they make it so random??? I can accept that it won't be as pretty/quick/useful as Google, but it would be nice if it actually found a file, in a folder with 40 files, given a part of the actual file-name to search on.
dir /s *file-name-part* > op.txt
Not fast, but reliable.
Post by: Kim on 16 November, 2016, 07:49:34 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 16 November, 2016, 10:46:45 pm
dir /s *file-name-part* > op.txtI disagree. 10 minutes into a windows search of a network lcation that I just know is going to turn up sod all I'll kick off a dir and it usually finishes first.
Not fast, but reliable.
Windows search can be made marginally less useless by installing the pdf ifilter as that's the most common file type you'd like to search inside. other file type ifilters may be available but I've never heard of 'em.
Windows search can be made much less useless by using XP in a VM and the pdf ifilter.
DOS search can be made even more productive by using 4dos or grep.
Post by: ian on 18 November, 2016, 05:47:20 pm
If you're going to send me a new mothership mobile how about you set the fucking thing up first so I don't have to spend umpteen hours trying to figure out how to enroll my device via Airwatch (or watching the app crash, it seems). Le sigh, it must be nearly beer o'clock.
*they are actually baboons, we genetically engineered them to work computers, an experiment that evidently wasn't entirely successful.
Post by: ian on 21 November, 2016, 08:52:56 pm
Except, for some reason that will likely never be disclosed, it hadn't been busily autosaving. It just hadn't bothered but also hadn't bothered to tell me it hadn't been bothering. That's precisely 59 minutes of my life I won't have back. Is that laughter I hear from the underworld. Chortle it up, demons.
Lest not complacency maketh your bed, as someone once said in a cod-olde Englishe manner. And a hearty fucking shitbuckets macuntybollocks.
Post by: ian on 21 November, 2016, 09:08:52 pm
Post by: mattc on 25 November, 2016, 01:50:42 pm
Windows (7) Explorer search:I gave up on explorer search within days of getting a Win7 machine. I generally drop into command line and use ...
How on EARTH did they make it so random??? I can accept that it won't be as pretty/quick/useful as Google, but it would be nice if it actually found a file, in a folder with 40 files, given a part of the actual file-name to search on.
dir /s *file-name-part* > op.txt
Not fast, but reliable.
Plenty fast enough for me! Even searching a whole project directory tree at a time (a few hundred docs) it's virtually instant. This has saved me a ton of grief in the last week :thumbsup:
(I did used to know a bit of this sort of thing, but my command prompt usage has been minimal - after using Unix shells in my first IT job, using DOS was always a cringe-worthy experience. So I tend to forget the few useful things it is good for!)
Is there a command to make my predecessors put things in the right folder? (I have a flux-capacitor ready to go.)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 November, 2016, 05:06:51 pm
Post by: Kim on 25 November, 2016, 05:14:45 pm
Those who don't follow barakta on twitter should count themselves fortunate.
Post by: barakta on 26 November, 2016, 09:57:55 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 November, 2016, 05:17:59 pm
Post by: Feanor on 27 November, 2016, 07:15:23 pm
Bloody Kindle has decided not to do wi-fi again >:(
When we first got a Kindle, it couldn't connect to our European WiFi, because my WiFi was on European channel 13.
Older kindles could only do USAsian channels 1-11.
I cant remember if a kindle updeat fixed it, or if I forced the WiFi to channel6 or somesuch.
But there is/was an issue with kindles being too USEsian in their WiFi appetites.
Is it possible that your WiFi has auto-wombled off to channel 13 or somesuch?
Post by: Kim on 27 November, 2016, 07:43:20 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 November, 2016, 11:02:13 pm
Bloody Kindle has decided not to do wi-fi again >:(
When we first got a Kindle, it couldn't connect to our European WiFi, because my WiFi was on European channel 13.
Older kindles could only do USAsian channels 1-11.
I cant remember if a kindle updeat fixed it, or if I forced the WiFi to channel6 or somesuch.
But there is/was an issue with kindles being too USEsian in their WiFi appetites.
Is it possible that your WiFi has auto-wombled off to channel 13 or somesuch?
Hmmmm. It did this the last time it was at Fort Larrington too, so I wonder whether that's a factor, but it declined to start speaking wi-fi again when I took it home. I've had it for a couple of years and it's behaved OK up until last month. Full reset sorted it that time, at the cost of spending an entire afternoon repopulating it.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 November, 2016, 12:01:54 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 November, 2016, 03:07:49 pm
Post by: ian on 29 November, 2016, 07:10:05 pm
Secondly, Apple, delete is not decline. I'd rather not let the mutant spungmuffins know I exist by kindly declining their offers (unless that decline arrives surfing atop a tsunami of hot, rancid donkey splooge). See, the clue you avocado-addled sunbaked fuckwits, is the fact you have both options on the menu. If I wanted to decline I'd select decline rather than delete, wouldn't I?
Thirdly, oh yeah, sure I'll go to iCloud and nuke the bloody option to receive this crapola. But wait, what's that Apple, my three random word, dIzZiLy CaPiTalISeD, and numerically unbalanced password isn't strong enough? It's already the fucking He-Man of passwords. What the shitting else can I do? Transliterate into Linear B and mix it up with Norse runes? Randomise it every 50 milliseconds? Make me sing it soprano at Siri every time I try to log in? What else do you want from me? Pig felching fucknuckling knobchuckling barneygobyeads the lot of you.
Post by: SoreTween on 29 November, 2016, 08:13:17 pm
Post by: simonp on 02 December, 2016, 12:03:11 am
I rewrote the loop to use only integer shifts, adds, subtracts and comparisons. Probably at least 10x faster, maybe much more. Also - it now works. ::-)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 December, 2016, 02:06:22 pm
Post by: Diver300 on 04 December, 2016, 09:56:22 pm
I should not be seeing things like this in my address bar:-
It's allegedly an insecure page using the https protocol, and it's certainly not at bigbank.com, like it should be. And as you load that page in a frame, my browser doesn't even tell me why it refuses to load.
I'm supposed to be buying stuff online, not having to decide whether arcot.com is actually secure and is someone I should trust, and I certainly shouldn't be having to play silly games with extra tabs and agreeing to this and that, just to get to enter my card details.
Post by: Ruthie on 04 December, 2016, 10:49:30 pm
Post by: ian on 05 December, 2016, 09:05:38 am
Credit / Debit card issuers, sort your effing authentication.
I should not be seeing things like this in my address bar:-https://secure5.arcot.com
It's allegedly an insecure page using the https protocol, and it's certainly not at bigbank.com, like it should be. And as you load that page in a frame, my browser doesn't even tell me why it refuses to load.
I'm supposed to be buying stuff online, not having to decide whether arcot.com is actually secure and is someone I should trust, and I certainly shouldn't be having to play silly games with extra tabs and agreeing to this and that, just to get to enter my card details.
The Eurostar site does something along these lines (as far as I can tell, there's something on the payment page that Chrome thinks isn't https when it pulls up the 3D secure crap, ironically I don't even have it on my card), which means Chrome refuses to load the page. But it doesn't tell you this, nor does Eurostar. A happy half hour before I gave up and used Firefox which didn't seem to care so much.
Post by: Dibdib on 11 December, 2016, 03:39:30 pm
Look, fondleslab, if I tap the "Open in Safari" wossname on a Facething post then kindly do as you're fucking told and open the damn page IN SAFARI >:( Not in the Grauniad's app.
To be fair to the fondleslab (and to Facething), in my experience it's because Safari has been told to open it and has instead decided to palm it off to the native app instead. Does it to me on YouToob links all the time.
Post by: Dibdib on 12 December, 2016, 07:12:40 pm
HP don't do an OS X driver for a LaserJet 1018.
Neither do Apple.
Apple do offer a bundle of drivers including one for a 1022, which apparently will work.
Said bundle is a HALF A FLAMING GIGABYTE download.
:facepalm:
Post by: TheLurker on 12 December, 2016, 07:16:50 pm
A colleague: Hmm do you know how to run an transform over an XML file in .Net?
TheLurker: Why certainly, here's the source for something I put together a few years ago... uses the .Net XmlCompiledTransform class; jolly easy to use.
FX: Hollywood OS: e-mail flummery
A colleague: Ta.
Today, also somewhere in Britain in an anonymous office building...
A colleague: I can't get this damned transform to work, keeps throwing this exception, "{the usual gobbledegook}".
TheLurker: Hmm, that's odd. Let's have a dekko....
*peers at stack trace*
Check XSLT, hmm version 2, nothing odd in there...
*goggle's exception*
*read a stack overflow response*
*instant apoplexy*
M$! Sweet Suffering Baby Jebus! XSLT version 2 has been around since 2007 and yet the *very latest* version your bloody library still only supports XSLT 1!? Even sodding Java can deal with XSLT 2. Listen, you scabrous bunch of malingering bollock scratchers, XSLT 3 is only just around the corner so effing well get your damned libraries brought up to date PDQ. Pillocks.
For those that are interested downgrading the XSLT to V1 syntax is, of course, a complete non-starter.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 December, 2016, 07:34:59 pm
1: OK, maybe I made that one up...
Post by: ian on 12 December, 2016, 07:48:10 pm
I know it's an old, cheap printer but fruitytech is supposed to Just Work, isn't it?
HP don't do an OS X driver for a LaserJet 1018.
Neither do Apple.
Apple do offer a bundle of drivers including one for a 1022, which apparently will work.
Said bundle is a HALF A FLAMING GIGABYTE download.
:facepalm:
To be fair, Apple don't write the drivers, that's down to HP, they just bundle and ship them. Along with Siri's core AI and associated routines in preparation for our dystopian future as playthings of ever more capricious AIs. Or possibly that's already happened.
In other news: Winsock. Ha, there's still people using Windows for Workgroups 3.1.
Post by: TheLurker on 12 December, 2016, 07:53:49 pm
In other news: Winsock. Ha, there's still people using Windows for Workgroups 3.1.Lucky bastards.
Post by: Feanor on 12 December, 2016, 07:56:52 pm
I know it's an old, cheap printer but fruitytech is supposed to Just Work, isn't it?
HP don't do an OS X driver for a LaserJet 1018.
Neither do Apple.
Apple do offer a bundle of drivers including one for a 1022, which apparently will work.
Said bundle is a HALF A FLAMING GIGABYTE download.
:facepalm:
To be fair, Apple don't write the drivers, that's down to HP, they just bundle and ship them. Along with Siri's core AI and associated routines in preparation for our dystopian future as playthings of ever more capricious AIs. Or possibly that's already happened.
In other news: Winsock. Ha, there's still people using Windows for Workgroups 3.1.
Ha, I remember using Trumpet Winsock before MS believed in TCP/IP.
And then later in win95 having to Add Protocol... Have Disk... MSTCPIP32.SYS <grind, grind goes the floppy drive>
Post by: Dibdib on 12 December, 2016, 07:57:28 pm
To be fair, Apple don't write the drivers, that's down to HP, they just bundle and ship them.
That's really my issue - rather than letting me download one driver, I have to download and install ALL the drivers for every HP printer and scanner they support. The mind boggles.
Post by: ian on 12 December, 2016, 07:59:22 pm
To be fair, Apple don't write the drivers, that's down to HP, they just bundle and ship them.
That's really my issue - rather than letting me download one driver, I have to download and install ALL the drivers for every HP printer and scanner they support. The mind boggles.
You don't, you can (if HP deign to provide one) download a single driver from the HP site. Such as this (http://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/HP-LaserJet-1000-Printer-series/439424/model/439431).
Post by: Chris S on 15 December, 2016, 10:40:05 am
I have a "lab" I use for testing - it's a set of VMs on a Windows domain - there's a DC with DHCP/DNS - pffft, standard stuff. I have robot scripts that reset the VM states prior to automated testing, driven by Jenkins jobs from another server; and all is good.
Except... when the VMs get a new DHCP lease after a reset back to baseline, they randomly "untrust" the network; so the "Domain Network" suddenly becomes "Public (Untrusted) Network" and the VM drops off the Domain resources - it no longer appears in DNS, and so on. The only way to fix this at this point is to leave/re-join the VM to the domain. Which means I the have to take a new baseline snapshot of the VM. It's all VERY tedious.
A solution would be to have all the lab VMs with static addresses. FFS ::-).
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 December, 2016, 07:53:08 pm
I have three machines running 64-bit Windows 10. All of them have iThings on them. How hard would it be, when updates come around, for you to offer an option just to download the update? Then I could:
- put it on a network disk and so only have to download it once, and
- install it at a time that suits me because you always want a fucking reboot after installing it
1: i.e. tomorrow
Post by: SoreTween on 17 December, 2016, 12:34:59 pm
:thumbsup:In other news: Winsock. Ha, there's still people using Windows for Workgroups 3.1.Lucky bastards.
Post by: SoreTween on 17 December, 2016, 12:51:46 pm
Windows. :facepalm:How long do the VMs run after each reset? I had the same issue on a job a few years ago and in the end kept the VM snapshot in an unjoined state. It's not just that the VMs stop trusting the Domain, the DC will stop trusting the VM if.... jeepers it was a while ago now ... I think there is a trust certificate that gets refreshed periodically between DC & client and basically after a reset the VM goes back to using an old copy of the certificate that the DC no longer trusts.
I have a "lab" I use for testing - it's a set of VMs on a Windows domain - there's a DC with DHCP/DNS - pffft, standard stuff. I have robot scripts that reset the VM states prior to automated testing, driven by Jenkins jobs from another server; and all is good.
Except... when the VMs get a new DHCP lease after a reset back to baseline, they randomly "untrust" the network; so the "Domain Network" suddenly becomes "Public (Untrusted) Network" and the VM drops off the Domain resources - it no longer appears in DNS, and so on. The only way to fix this at this point is to leave/re-join the VM to the domain. Which means I the have to take a new baseline snapshot of the VM. It's all VERY tedious.
A solution would be to have all the lab VMs with static addresses. FFS ::-).
My environment wasn't automated and VM resets could be after anything from a few hours to a fortnight. Around a week runtime was the point at which I'd not know if I'd be in for an unjoin/join. Mine was a Win7 & server 2008R2 setup
Post by: Phil W on 17 December, 2016, 01:17:35 pm
netdom resetpwd /Server:DC /UserD:Administrator /PasswordD:mysuperpassword
Post by: Afasoas on 18 December, 2016, 08:55:13 pm
Windows. :facepalm:
I have a "lab" I use for testing - it's a set of VMs on a Windows domain - there's a DC with DHCP/DNS - pffft, standard stuff. I have robot scripts that reset the VM states prior to automated testing, driven by Jenkins jobs from another server; and all is good.
Except... when the VMs get a new DHCP lease after a reset back to baseline, they randomly "untrust" the network; so the "Domain Network" suddenly becomes "Public (Untrusted) Network" and the VM drops off the Domain resources - it no longer appears in DNS, and so on. The only way to fix this at this point is to leave/re-join the VM to the domain. Which means I the have to take a new baseline snapshot of the VM. It's all VERY tedious.
A solution would be to have all the lab VMs with static addresses. FFS ::-).
What does reset back to baseline mean? Are you restoring a snapshot?
I don't think this is necessarily a DHCP issue, although it's worth checking the DHCP scope is within an Active Directory Site and that site is associated to the correct domain.
The machines are dropping off the domain and switching to a non-domain network profile because the machine itself is out of sync with it's Active Directory account. There's something inherently wrong with your setup and without further information about what you are doing, it's going to be hard to diagnose.
It might be worth checking NTP is setup correctly, and that you haven't got time sync issues between the hypervisor and guest OSes.
Post by: Feanor on 18 December, 2016, 09:50:31 pm
AD domains use Kerberos tickets to set up their secure channels.
Amongst other things, they are very sensitive to time-skew between the clients and the DC.
This is to avoid 'replay attacks', where a Man-in -the Middle can replay historical security transactions and authenticate himself.
This is why DCs are usually SNTP servers ( getting time from the Internet ), and the clients take their time from them.
If you start messing about and re-winding time, then I'd not be surprised if the clients drop off the domain because their secure channel is broken.
All the machines will have probably picked up current time, and all the Kerberos tickets are stale.
Also, just like Users, Machines also have 'passwords' onto the domain, which you don't see.
These automatically renew in the background normally.
But if the machine has been off the domain in excess of a certain time, the machine credentials will have expired, and you need to remove it and re-join it to the domain.
So again, if you start messing about with re-winding time, you're going to break this.
This is all by-design, to prevent network replay attacks.
TBH, I'm surprised it even works at all.
The only way I think you could re-wind time would be if all the VMs ( DCs and Clients ) re-set to a common Historical Time, and could all remain synced to the Historical Time somehow.
Post by: Chris S on 19 December, 2016, 09:49:04 am
There was an automated build over the weekend (someone else must have made some source changes - wasn't me O:-)), and all the VMs reset several times (different test scenarios) and all was good - lots of green on the dashboard this morning :thumbsup:.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 December, 2016, 09:36:28 pm
Post by: David Martin on 26 December, 2016, 06:53:40 pm
A complete pain in the backside.
Post by: SoreTween on 01 January, 2017, 04:53:53 pm
I like the command line, I love it in fact. A keyboard is so much faster than a wimp. But I should not have to search umpteen sites for instruction to install a simple package (Java), it should by now be click to install or select from the package manager. There's a zillion different things in the Mint package manager when you search for Java and none of them IS FUCKING JAVA. Then I need drivers, here we go round the sudo merry-go-round again. Yet more opportunities to correct mistakes in the commands I'm issuing umpty umm times because Case FUCKING Sensitive and tab auto complete only works once in a blue FUCKING moon.
And at the end of all that.... It. Doesn't. Fucking. Work.
Post by: Bledlow on 01 January, 2017, 06:01:19 pm
Being newer, of course Win 10 must be better, mustn't it? Like hell. I've been fighting this for ages. I look at Help. I look at Microsoft support. I look on the internet. I follow the instructions I find there. What do I end up with? A stupid bloody little tag in the bar at the bottom of the screen which as far as I can see has absolutely no fucking effect on anything!
Windows 10 - why, oh why?
Post by: SoreTween on 01 January, 2017, 06:06:43 pm
OneWireViewer - installed
Thermochons & Hygrochrons - brain dumped & reset.
On Windows. Sigh :-(
Post by: Canardly on 01 January, 2017, 08:41:03 pm
Post by: ian on 03 January, 2017, 09:09:43 am
Giant steaming turd mountain.
Post by: SoreTween on 06 January, 2017, 12:00:57 pm
4 years ago I bought 12 thermochrons and 3 hygrochrons and have had them logging around the place ever since. Very interesting to see the effect of the considerable volume of insulation I've put in the loft, a new hard floor this time with insulation under and a sanely located thermostat among other small changes. They were a quite wallet wilting £277 but I could justify getting them on my company as I had a sniff of a contract vaguely 1-wireish. 1 thermo got lost a good while ago and now one hygro has gone senile, presumably the battery failing and so the rest will surely follow. A replacement set will be £519 :o I don't think I can bring myself to spend that even if it is company money.
Poo.
Post by: Wombat on 06 January, 2017, 03:13:03 pm
I habitually use Omega USB dataloggers that record temp and humidity, and used to cost about £50 a throw. I've had 3 of them for about 3 years, with no trouble at all.
Ah, they seem to have gone down in price. http://www.omega.co.uk/pptst/OM-EL-USB-1.html
Post by: SoreTween on 06 January, 2017, 04:08:20 pm
Not 100% sure what you mean by thermochrons and hygrochrons, but do you mean dataloggers?Yes, formerly Dallas but now Maxim iButton devices. Very tiny beasts:
(http://www.homechip.com/media/catalog/category/06_05_2007_086.jpg)
http://www.homechip.com/ibuttons.html
I habitually use Omega USB dataloggers that record temp and humidity, and used to cost about £50 a throw. I've had 3 of them for about 3 years, with no trouble at all.Thanks, these look a good alternative :thumbsup: Much deeper memory means less frequent downloading. I run the 'chrons at 20 minute intervals which means I download every four weeks (the hygro could go to 8 but if I'm emptying the thermo anyway...). These I could go to 31 weeks but I would probably empty at 20 or 24. I can certainly switch two of the hygros to those instead, outside and Mrs Tweens studio (the senile one). The third hygro in the house would be a tad conspicuous unless I can think of a better hiding place. The thermo in the loft can switch too, that gets all the long walk & awkward access ones on a usefully long cycle time making the 4 week job much easier.
Ah, they seem to have gone down in price. http://www.omega.co.uk/pptst/OM-EL-USB-1.htmlScroll down, £35 is temp only. T&H are £50 or £63 which still beats a hygrochron at £88
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 January, 2017, 11:35:59 am
"Access denied" says the Photos directory on the NAS, followed by some guff about failing to enumerate objects in container. Internets no help because whatever they suggest doesn't work.
"Error 112" says the Mail directory. Not enough disk space. Wait, what? You are telling me I can't copy a 5,000 byte file onto a disk with five times as much free space as the TOTAL size of the HDD in the laptop? Get tae fuck! Internets no help because whatever they suggest doesn't work.
Solution: rename target directories, create new ones, zip source directories, copy to NAS, unzip, delete old ones with glee. This, as you can imagine, takes a Very Long Time.
Dear Microsith, plz to be not doing this sort of thing.
Post by: woollypigs on 31 January, 2017, 05:06:37 pm
Fecking thing used tones of paper and ink just to print out one page and then moan there isn't any ink left.
When can we get to the point where printing is not needed anymore. They said back when PCs etc kicked off that we would safe so much paper and therefore the forests of the world! Have anyone ever tried to feed a printer successfully with paper that have gone through it once before, I think not!
As much as I hate .pdf can we just get to a point where at least we could send that to and fro as an accepted documents.
Post by: Kim on 03 February, 2017, 02:39:14 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 03 February, 2017, 03:28:44 pm
{snip}Yeah, ooooooh ages* ago. The old DEC LN03 laser printers would happily print on the unused side of previously used paper without jamming. This was back before double-sided printing was a thing on small printers and when printer / photocopier paper was expensive enough to warrant doing this. It was a right bugger if you put the paper the wrong way up in the tray.
Have anyone ever tried to feed a printer successfully with paper that have gone through it once before, I think not!
*30 years.
Post by: Kim on 03 February, 2017, 03:53:50 pm
When can we get to the point where printing is not needed anymore. They said back when PCs etc kicked off that we would safe so much paper and therefore the forests of the world!
Your industry may vary, but I think we have in fact achieved much of that, cancelled out by a general increase in what paperwork remains as computers enable more people do ever more (arguably pointless) clerical work.
I can't remember the last time I wrote someone a letter on paper, or wrote something down in order to store information. I will occasionally resort to paper for sketching diagrams or equations as I work on something.
Paper is of course alive and well for labelling things, making information portable or disposable[1], and communicating with large bureaucratic organisations that don't believe in email. Our printer mostly gets used for leaflets, posters and address labels.
Fax has almost died out completely (except in Japan and the NHS, it seems). Filing cabinets aren't quite on the endangered species list, but are much less prolific than they once were.
Original (paper) documents are often required for legal purposes, even if they just get scanned into a document management system.
Forms seem to be a sticking point in a lot of places. Too many people are creating paper-only forms for things because they don't know how to do it electroncially, even if they're distributing the blanks as PDF.
Quote
Have anyone ever tried to feed a printer successfully with paper that have gone through it once before, I think not!
Assuming the paper isn't bent or creased, I've found it works okayish on inkjets with an uncomplicated paper path, and I never met an impact dot-matrix (that didn't rely on tractor feed) that cared. Lasers not so much, as the fuser tends to give the paper a curl, and they tend to have paper paths that will jam if you so much as look at them wrongly. Even the venerable Laserjet 4000 series is a bit dodgy at duplexing.
[1] For fairly obvious reasons, while I'm happy to refer to PDFs of datasheets on a tablet or computer while doing electronics, I'll print out the instructions for servicing a suspension fork...
Post by: ian on 03 February, 2017, 06:11:44 pm
Post by: Kim on 03 February, 2017, 06:22:34 pm
I manually duplex paper in my HP Laserjet without issue.
Yeah, it's the auto-duplexer that's a bit dodgy. Every couple of years I take it apart and bend a critical pingfuckit slightly, which improves the jam-rate.
Quote
That said the toner cartridge ran out about two years ago so I've mostly gone paperless by default. I've yet to raise the courage to order a replacement.
Ah, thanks for the reminder...
Post by: caerau on 03 February, 2017, 06:28:22 pm
Fortunately I have a private office now, but I still hate my printer. But at least no-one can leave it empty of paper or toner and just think it is someone else's job to sort out.
Or not bother to get more paper from the stores...
... or print a 10000 page document remotely when I've just put some acetates in there to do a talk (that's an old petty hate incident clearly - acetates? Me--> Dinosaur)
or just randomly jam etc...
... Grr blood boiling just thinking about it!
Post by: Feanor on 03 February, 2017, 07:05:06 pm
<USAnian visitor, with documents set to Yankedoodle Letter size>
"Say, bud, my document didn't print! It's asking to load Letter! Don't you guys have regular paper over here?"
Printer is stalled, waiting for
Meanwhile, over in Sales, someone is doing this:
<Print>.
Hmm, nothing came out. Perhaps it didn't 'take'. I'll try again.
<Print>.
<Print>.
<Print><Print><Print><Print><Print>.
I cancel the blocking Letter job on the printer, and Woosh. 20 copies of a dozen peoples print jobs.
Post by: Kim on 03 February, 2017, 09:12:46 pm
Post by: Jaded on 03 February, 2017, 10:06:56 pm
Phone rings from London. "We've got several copies of this document printed out, did one of your staff print it?!"
Post by: Bledlow on 03 February, 2017, 10:33:49 pm
I use the reverse of printed-one-side paper all the time for semi-scrap uses in a very old HP Laserjet 2018, so feeding paper back into a laser for another run doesn't necessarily cause any problems.QuoteHave anyone ever tried to feed a printer successfully with paper that have gone through it once before, I think not!
Assuming the paper isn't bent or creased, I've found it works okayish on inkjets with an uncomplicated paper path, and I never met an impact dot-matrix (that didn't rely on tractor feed) that cared. Lasers not so much, as the fuser tends to give the paper a curl, and they tend to have paper paths that will jam if you so much as look at them wrongly. Even the venerable Laserjet 4000 series is a bit dodgy at duplexing.
Post by: Feanor on 03 February, 2017, 10:53:34 pm
Ha! Network printers FTW
Phone rings from London. "We've got several copies of this document printed out, did one of your staff print it?!"
"It seems to be quite confidential. It seems to contain the pay grades of all the staff. Should I post it on the notice board?"
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 February, 2017, 01:31:02 pm
There's a painful slice in my scrollwheel finger after being bitten by a fan during yesterday's UPS fettle (https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=71021.msg2130998#msg2130998). Hoping the fan wasn't radioactive, lest this end in a crap superhero origin story.
Chortle!
Post by: Kim on 04 February, 2017, 01:43:16 pm
Post by: CrinklyLion on 04 February, 2017, 02:20:30 pm
Post by: David Martin on 04 February, 2017, 03:47:50 pm
{snip}Yeah, ooooooh ages* ago. The old DEC LN03 laser printers would happily print on the unused side of previously used paper without jamming. This was back before double-sided printing was a thing on small printers and when printer / photocopier paper was expensive enough to warrant doing this. It was a right bugger if you put the paper the wrong way up in the tray.
Have anyone ever tried to feed a printer successfully with paper that have gone through it once before, I think not!
*30 years.
Yes, yesterday. With 200gsm paper. Not a hitch. Needed to print front and backs for some playing cards.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 February, 2017, 05:57:18 pm
Bah!
Post by: Chris S on 09 February, 2017, 10:25:23 am
Fast forward a decade, and guess what? Yes, I'm writing a webapp - this time with AngularJS and Bootstrap. I (rather naively) assumed it would now be a cinch to create a SPA which would dynamically occupy 100% of the browser space. Oh how wrong I was...
Random scroll bars? Yes! Main content shifted down by exactly the height of the banner row? YES! Content randomly disappearing when browser resized? HELL YES!
FFS! Well done, The Internet - progress in the last 10 years - zero.
Post by: Kim on 09 February, 2017, 11:52:28 am
FFS! Well done, The Internet - progress in the last 10 years - zero.
I don't think that's entirely fair. I'm sure the modern browser's using far more CPU and RAM to fail to achieve the same thing.
Post by: Greenbank on 09 February, 2017, 01:20:28 pm
Ha! Network printers FTW
Phone rings from London. "We've got several copies of this document printed out, did one of your staff print it?!"
We now have cloud printing in the office. No matter where you are you print to a single generic 'cloud' printer and nothing happens until you walk up to a printer (any printer anywhere in the company in however many different countries) and prod your ID badge against the reader, then your stuff prints.
Of course, this progress brings a whole new range of things that can go wrong.
Post by: woollypigs on 09 February, 2017, 01:39:55 pm
Of course, this progress brings a whole new range of things that can go wrong.Yeah, you can't come back from a liquid lunch and blame the return delay on a paper jam anymore :)
Post by: David Martin on 09 February, 2017, 08:21:42 pm
Ha! Network printers FTW
Phone rings from London. "We've got several copies of this document printed out, did one of your staff print it?!"
We now have cloud printing in the office. No matter where you are you print to a single generic 'cloud' printer and nothing happens until you walk up to a printer (any printer anywhere in the company in however many different countries) and prod your ID badge against the reader, then your stuff prints.
Of course, this progress brings a whole new range of things that can go wrong.
And anything that takes more than a few minutes to print?
Post by: SoreTween on 09 February, 2017, 09:32:56 pm
Of course, this progress brings a whole new range of things that can go wrong.
We have a not quite so advanced version of that system. You still select a particular printer but the job doesn't emerge until you slap your badge on the doohickey. Or rather the job doesn't emerge until you slap your badge, wait, slap again, wait. Then wake up the screen which you know damn well has nothing to do with printing but you do it anyway. Wait some more and slap again. Get a cup of tea or go recycle the previous one. Slap again. Blaspheme. Go back to desk & print again (I must have not hit the final 'yes get TF on with it button', silly me). Return to printer, slap one more time and collect two copies.
Post by: TheLurker on 10 February, 2017, 06:25:47 am
We have a not quite so advanced version of that system. You still select a particular printer but the job doesn't emerge until you slap your badge on the doohickey...Ohh, we've got that system as well. If it works it's good. If...
Post by: Pingu on 10 February, 2017, 09:50:19 am
Post by: woollypigs on 10 February, 2017, 10:33:19 am
My access card refused to work so I was given a password for cloud printing. So when I forget my card I cannot access the toilets, but I can print stuff ::-)Well at least that is a handy thing to be able to do ...
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 10 February, 2017, 08:03:32 pm
My access card refused to work so I was given a password for cloud printing. So when I forget my card I cannot access the toilets, but I can print stuff ::-)
Just piss on the printer, that'll get you a new card.
Post by: ian on 16 February, 2017, 08:03:31 pm
I like the way my Mac does things. The dictionary slinks along the background, the thesaurus roars, all at a little three finger tap of the touchpad. I double-click the top of an open window and the application quickly folds itself into the application icon on the toolbar. I press the full screen button and it muscles everything out of the way and makes it's own space. I can swoosh between desktops like that bloke in Minority Report. It's all rather spiffy. Autocorrect and user dictionaries follow me through every application.
But the bit that snarks, it's you, Microsoft and Adobe. Because you know better. Except you don't. You've got to have your own conventions, your own dictionaries, your own shortcut keys, your own UI paradigms, all just to make me say buggeryfuckingsnodlands sixteen times an hour when things don't do like they're supposed.
Fucking cheeseknuckles.
Post by: SoreTween on 18 February, 2017, 09:12:59 am
Post by: TheLurker on 18 February, 2017, 10:08:47 am
Now if you'll excuse me there are a couple of pleisosaurs in the pond that I really must deal with. They're worse than herons for taking the goldfish...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 February, 2017, 05:19:43 pm
Microsoft can't even get their own UI conventions consistently applied in their own office suite on their own OS, you've no hope on a mac. Adobe couldn't find their own arse with both hands and a map, noone has a chance anywhere ever.
The Mac versions of both Word and Excel predate Windows though.
Post by: Jaded on 18 February, 2017, 05:26:45 pm
And MicroSloth have removed one of the best bits of the Excel interface. I may have ranted before about it but it deserves another one. You used to be able to put a '=' in a cell then click on whatever cells you wanted and it would put them in the formula with a '+'
Now it behaves in the Windows way and doesn't do that any more :sick: :sick:
Post by: Kim on 18 February, 2017, 05:30:38 pm
And MicroSloth have removed one of the best bits of the Excel interface. I may have ranted before about it but it deserves another one. You used to be able to put a '=' in a cell then click on whatever cells you wanted and it would put them in the formula with a '+'
I thought you were supposed to start every formula with =SUM() ;D
Post by: Jaded on 18 February, 2017, 06:19:54 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 February, 2017, 08:35:41 pm
Thank you for updating the software that Does Things with my sound card. However, I had the default sound device set to the optical output on said sound card for a reason, viz. that is the hole out of which the sound travels on its way to the amplifier. So there's no need to change it to something which ISN't connected to anything other than thin air, is there? Just stop it.
Post by: barakta on 26 February, 2017, 03:52:41 pm
Fucking keychain doesn't know when to STFU and fuck the fuck off. Mum changed her mac password, keychain (which I thought I had told to go away on config) shat errors everywhere which wouldn't cancel and she didn't seem to know right password for them. She ended up with eleventy windows ninging all over her screen. I managed to change the keychain password, poke the windows in enough persistence to make them ALL fuck off and sort it. But user interface fail.
Mother managed to sign herself up for Amazon Prime. She claims she thought it was like magic first class post so when it offered free next day delivery on an order she clicked on it. She says it didn't show her any info saying she would be charged £79 or what it was but just took money off her card... She moaned at her CC company who v kindly explained what Prime was and told her to moan at Amazon which she duly did, so it is cancelled... Parents should not be allowed on the internet *headdesk*...
The scanner driver is shit, it keeps timing out so I have to reboot to get it to give me a 'scan' option again. Need to RTFM better options. Also can I have two fucking trackpad buttons which aren't the same surface as the trackpad itself, I hate this no 2nd mouse click option without keyboard contortions. Oh and the keyboard itself is giving me visual stress >:(
Post by: Feanor on 26 February, 2017, 04:07:30 pm
Dear Creative,
Thank you for updating the software that Does Things with my sound card. However, I had the default sound device set to the optical output on said sound card for a reason, viz. that is the hole out of which the sound travels on its way to the amplifier. So there's no need to change it to something which ISN't connected to anything other than thin air, is there? Just stop it.
Hmph.
Every time I get a New! Shiny! video driver for my Pictures Card, it re-sets the sound to go out the HDMI pipe to the tinny little speakers on the monitor.
Update the driver if you like, but please to be Leaving The Fuck Alone my choice of sound output device!
Post by: barakta on 26 February, 2017, 04:10:33 pm
I nearly copied the imap folders onto our server before I stopped co-reading her emails (at Mum's request cos family stuff) but decided not to bother. I might have some locally on my windows box, but I don't know if I can access them if Pusnet has buggered around.
We're paying for this shit service!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 February, 2017, 05:08:08 pm
Post by: StuAff on 26 February, 2017, 08:51:44 pm
Saturday: update to existing OS. Dear me it was painful. Lengthy download, with no indication of progress (real or imagined). Eventually downloaded it, ran the updater...which then failed to work so I had to start from scratch. Second update did work, very, very, very slowly. OK, it was to an HD rather than SSD, but shouldn't be that slow. Multiple reboots, some of them hung which was very helpful, followed by more extraordinary slow 'progress'. Less than 1% per minute...on a 3.33 hex core Xeon! And then I was prompted for a password and it wouldn't accept it even though I knew it was right, eventually it took....this normally speedy machine remains doggedly slow on this OS, god knows how anyone stands using it all day. Admittedly the OS hadn't even been booted in months, so many updates needed, but......updating took all day and it wasn't a new OS let alone a clean install!!
Sunday: New version of OS. Already had installer (without updates) on USB stick. Install to SSD took about half an hour. One password needed, accepted without question, zero faffage. Machine rebooted perfectly first time. Ran update to latest version- 1.8 Gb download, then another half hour. Runs very nicely, no further software updates needed- Wi-fi connection not recognised (a known issue with this machine config & OS version, I'll need a new Wi-fi adaptor)…then seamlessly cloned the SSD's new OS install to the main HD.
Saturday was (you'll never guess…) the Windows 10 Anniversary update.
Sunday (you'll never guess…): MacOS Sierra 10.12 (and hence to 10.12.3) from El Capitan.
It's still better to think different......
Post by: Dibdib on 27 February, 2017, 08:39:52 am
Fucking Plusnet have deleted all the folders in my mum's email account. I'm stuck in a queue for their online support as there is no offline way I can deal with them. If they cannot/willnot restore data I will be calling the ICO on them. I searched online and found others had had similar and they weren't over the storage amount and did not receive warning. I have been waiting 7 mins and counting. I'm now 4th in the queue. The system doesn't really tell you what is going on for ages. User interface of fail. I'm hassling them on twitter in case that's faster...
Probably not useful for this, Barakta, but Plusnet support on their internal newsgroups is actually half-decent (at least when I used to read them). Obviously not real-time, but some of the old-timer PN staff with a more full allocation of Clue were active in there and willing to hassle the appropriate departments.
Post by: ian on 27 February, 2017, 09:51:19 am
A tale of updating two operating systems.
Saturday: update to existing OS. Dear me it was painful. Lengthy download, with no indication of progress (real or imagined). Eventually downloaded it, ran the updater...which then failed to work so I had to start from scratch. Second update did work, very, very, very slowly. OK, it was to an HD rather than SSD, but shouldn't be that slow. Multiple reboots, some of them hung which was very helpful, followed by more extraordinary slow 'progress'. Less than 1% per minute...on a 3.33 hex core Xeon! And then I was prompted for a password and it wouldn't accept it even though I knew it was right, eventually it took....this normally speedy machine remains doggedly slow on this OS, god knows how anyone stands using it all day. Admittedly the OS hadn't even been booted in months, so many updates needed, but......updating took all day and it wasn't a new OS let alone a clean install!!
Sunday: New version of OS. Already had installer (without updates) on USB stick. Install to SSD took about half an hour. One password needed, accepted without question, zero faffage. Machine rebooted perfectly first time. Ran update to latest version- 1.8 Gb download, then another half hour. Runs very nicely, no further software updates needed- Wi-fi connection not recognised (a known issue with this machine config & OS version, I'll need a new Wi-fi adaptor)…then seamlessly cloned the SSD's new OS install to the main HD.
Saturday was (you'll never guess…) the Windows 10 Anniversary update.
Sunday (you'll never guess…): MacOS Sierra 10.12 (and hence to 10.12.3) from El Capitan.
It's still better to think different......
I think I mentioned the unbearable contortions of connecting Outlook 2011 (don't ask, it's what the mothership give us Mac users) to the Exchange server compared with providing email address and password to link Apple Mail and Calendar with Exchange. Three pages of instructions, endless settings, and it didn't work. That's linking two Microsoft products.
I've just spent 30 minutes of my day trying to put some title text in a box in Word (some old document that needs updated branding). I thought actually that I'd just draw a black box, remove any word wrap and put it behind the white title text which seemed an elementary 2 minute job.
Oh fuck.
And there's a logo graphic in the footer.
Post by: TimC on 27 February, 2017, 10:21:18 am
Moved into new gaff ni August. Prior to moving, talked to BT who said, "Lucky you - you can haz FTTP and mega BB speeds an all, innit" (because they talk like that at BT). "What's more, the work will be done before you move in", they lied, jauntily.
Of course, it wasn't. "No matter", quoth they," we'll put you on a promotional BB rate for copper BB in the interim. Won't be very quick, but it'll only be for a month or so". They lied again.
7 months later, I am finally enjoying FTTP and reasonable speeds. Not the 78mbs promised, but 50+ which is ok. Trouble is, BT carried on charging me both the normal rate AND the promotional rate, then charged me £31 for disconnecting the promotional rate PLUS £48.10 for 'prematurely ending the previous contract' and £50 for connecting the FTTP!
"Not on your nelly", said I, and promptly wrote to BT complaints, and copied the letter to Gav. This was Friday afternoon. Call from Gav's office this morning - have £240 back overcharged, plus £60 for your trouble, and your FTTP is now £12 a month instead of £20-something.
Result.
Post by: Phil W on 27 February, 2017, 11:26:16 am
Mutter mumble for a website that I generally only need to get involved in once a year when I ask the committee to refund me the hosting costs....
Post by: Canardly on 27 February, 2017, 11:46:49 am
Post by: TimC on 27 February, 2017, 01:24:16 pm
Gav?
Gavin Patterson, CEO of BT.
Post by: ian on 28 February, 2017, 10:17:34 am
So I copy and paste my six tenets of corporate ennui into the boxes and think, you know, before I start to scream at the same cryptic error message (I'm going to hunt down the software developers who think it's 'this page can't be restored' is a useful error message and make trained weasels eat their eyeballs), I'll refresh my coffee and review (the art of performance management is wording your goals in such a way as they ask as little as possible, so exceeding is guaranteed by simply continuing to breathe). So I turn around for a second and...
WINDOWS IS RESTARTING YOUR COMPUTER.
Fucking update.
Then I input it all over and you guessed it. Someone tells me to clear my cache again and I'm going to clear theirs. Permanently.
Post by: TheLurker on 28 February, 2017, 07:41:11 pm
...I'm going to hunt down the software developers who think it's 'this page can't be restored' is a useful error message...
Y'see that's what comes of expecting software developers to understand and be articulate in two languages at the same time; whatever it is they're writing the code in, ohh I dunno Forthal MCMLXVII with the Pastran extensions and a natural language like English. It just doesn't work. I see this all the time. You get some bloke (statistically it's a bloke) who, when down the pub or in the cafe, has a vocabulary and way with language that would put Shakespeare to shame, but ask that same bloke to write coherent, understandable natural language error messages after a long day writing code in a language with very much less room for expression and you get statements and reports that are utterly correct but totally uninformative.
Being slightly serious about it; it is _very_ difficult to find a short sentence that can convey enough information that will allow a user to correct the problem, if possible, or, if not, let him or her know that it's time to hand the problem on to someone else. A large part of the problem is that you have no idea how well the user understands the language the error message is written in nor how well they understand the business model / process that the program is dealing with.
The situation is then made worse because the developer is under the cosh to get the code out of the door some time last week and spending more than a few seconds working out an error message costs time that can't be spared. I have, and I jest not, seen me sit for 15 or 20 minutes trying to find a sensible and brief form of words for an error message in one or two complicated cases. I think it's time well spent, if only because a decent message can mean the difference between having an unending stream of unnecessary support calls for a common situation or not. The PHB looking at my timesheet would probably disagree.
Having said all that, "the page cannot be restored" is a candidate for worst error message in a very long time and should never have got past even the most cursory code review or testing.
ETA.
Setting "Goals"? 100% right behind you on that one. Complete waste of time and _everybody_ knows it.
Post by: ian on 28 February, 2017, 08:28:10 pm
If Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, has anything to do it, Hell will be eternity of cryptic 'Your file cannot be saved [OK]' insoluble error messages. Heaven℠ won't be much better, not given St Kevin of the Sparkles' low budget SAP implementation. Place has never been the same since it became part of JesusCorp. We're fucked whichever escalator we take. Melissa, the last living girl in Forest Hill, probably has it right. Smash the machines! Since The Breakdown and the entire Hillary thing, it's the only way to be sure.
Oh yeah, the Six Tenets of Corporate Ennui. Indeed, everyone hates them. They're like a rash that won't go away. They're easily gamed and at best exist as a tool of extreme demotivation. I think the only people who like them have those motivation posters on the wall.
Post by: TheLurker on 01 March, 2017, 06:50:21 pm
I'm asked for sort code and account No. which I duly give.
A long pause...."I'm sorry we can't find that account."
Really!? What kind of {insert long string of derogatory and obscene adjectives here} _BANK_ IT system can't find an account that I've held for over 36 years? An account that they've just sent me a new card for? I think I begin to see why they've failed to make any profits for the last 10 years.
Only took an hour and a half to resolve.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 01 March, 2017, 09:34:06 pm
Really!? What kind of {insert long string of derogatory and obscene adjectives here} _BANK_ IT system can't ...
You say that like you think _BANK_ IT systems might be expected to be something special.
RBS's software was written to run on these:
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/DM_IBM_S360.jpg/1920px-DM_IBM_S360.jpg)
They've updated the hardware, but the software lives on under a million patches. You're lucky it was an hour and a half - it's not so long ago they lost half a million transactions and it took three days to find them. They are not alone - apparently 82 of the top 100 retail banks worldwide run core systems written in COBOL in the 1960s.
Post by: TheLurker on 02 March, 2017, 07:04:12 pm
Given that a (the?) core element of their business requires keeping track of customer accounts then a bank system that can't do something as basic as that is +seriously+ fucked.Really!? What kind of {insert long string of derogatory and obscene adjectives here} _BANK_ IT system can't ...You say that like you think _BANK_ IT systems might be expected to be something special.
{snip}
Post by: Kim on 08 March, 2017, 12:31:10 am
This isn't the 1990s any more. People don't just use one mail client. Server-side filtering is the sanest option. Are they all using gmail or something?
Post by: barakta on 08 March, 2017, 02:26:49 pm
Dear Mother,
You pay attention to your laptop for about 10 minutes every fortnight and then SCREECH about how it didn't magically know what you wanted to do and give you a button for it RIGHT THERE on startup. Slow down, pay attention, READ or look at things carefully and surprisingly you're capable of working things out... Or you can SCREECH at me down a phone, where I can't SEE what you're doing as you click wildly at things.
There's no point TEACHING you things cos you won't retain the info cos you'll get interrupted, wander off, ignore the computer for at least another fortnight and usually only try to use it when you're tired and stressed.
"Where's my blank piece of paper programme?" (She wants the template document icon I made her in 1993 which had a Winnie the Pooh on it).
"There's no dock here" (necessitating a description of how to find it, look at what's on it at which point she raced ahead and started clicking things I couldn't see).
"It's not opening a new document" (Give it a minute, it isn't instantaneous).
"There's nothing which says how to put a table in this. I DO think they should have a thing" (requiring me to ask her what menus she could see, directing her to the right one, out of the wrong one I accidentally got her to click on and so on).
"WAAAAAH I've selected what I want (inset table dialogue in Libre Office) but the options INSERT CANCEL HELP aren't what I want!"
And that's before we had Thunderbollocks refusing to see a new email account folder that I made for her despite turning it off and on again. Pusnet thrashes here and Mum's husband likes AOL even though the latency spikes at random for no apparent reason. So fuck knows what that issue was. Mum seems to want 4889354577 folders with about 3 files in each.
When asked why she keeps forwarding emails from her inbox to herself again (she's done this THREE times on one email in 4 days) she claimed it was cos on her phone it was deleted and she couldn't undelete but could send (which is bollocks).
"I DON'T LIKE IT the new emails are at the bottom not the top" (Cue patient explanation of clicking on the date bar to resort... She has been told about these ELEVENTY times).
"WAAAH I can't see the email from $Foo" (I eventually got her to find email from $Bar and then look at the one above it) "It's NOT obvious" (it was totes fucking obvious, she just wanted to screech rather than READ).
I think her stupid forwarding habit means she's looking for $FOO as sender and not seeing it, cos SHE'S the fucking sender... But won't admit that cos she knows I might actually lose patience and be scathing at her. She WANTS the computer to know it's $FOO email even though SHE resent it.
I'm still pissed off nearly 24 hours after that fun phonecall. There's no good solutions to it cos she needs to sit down, calm down, pay more attention and rather than waiting till she's HACKED OFF that she can't do MAGIC-THING she needs to ask for help sooner which I'd happily give (if she isn't screechy and annoying).
Should take her technology away!
Post by: Kim on 08 March, 2017, 02:31:58 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 08 March, 2017, 02:38:37 pm
I still think Pine would be a good solution. Nice clear button-pressing based interface that you can write meaningful cheat-notes for. And since it's text-only, she wouldn't spew as many blurry grandchildren photos with it, which would help towards the data bloat problem.
Elm would be even more old school text based and I think is even still supported.
Post by: TimC on 08 March, 2017, 05:38:35 pm
I told him that computers and their resident programs are generally logical and (at least the ones I installed for him) simple. I told him to do a computer course on his next cruise. And I made it possible to remotely access his computer from my home. Lastly, I left him in no doubt that I wouldn't tolerate his tantrums. If he could fly a bloody fighter, he can drive a bloody computer.
Or not; his choice.
Post by: SteveC on 08 March, 2017, 06:28:46 pm
And I made it possible to remotely access his computer from my home.This. I use TeamViewer, probably as recommended by someone here. Free (with the occasional nag) for home use.
Doesn't help when Mother's kittens have run across the keyboard and turned the wifi off, but we're used to that one now.
Post by: barakta on 08 March, 2017, 06:50:25 pm
Fortunately I don't drive so visiting is not immediately easy and i know even if I planned a visit, she'd be running around doing eleventy million other 'important' things and never actually sit down and do computer stuff. That's what happens EVERY visit.
Post by: ian on 08 March, 2017, 09:41:26 pm
It'll start with 'so, what's your password?' to which the answer will be 'oh, I don't know that' and continue from there. On the plus side, if they can't log in, it reduces the rate at which the usual sludge of viruses accrete. That said, I'm sure it'll have picked up a few via osmosis.
Post by: David Martin on 08 March, 2017, 10:42:22 pm
So, today I find that I cannot access my RStudioServer install (needed because of Linux specific software on the back end.
An impromptu teaching segment on SSH tunnelling ensued with a subsequent delay of 20% of the teaching time. We will make that up tomorrow.
Post by: Kim on 08 March, 2017, 10:56:19 pm
An impromptu teaching segment on SSH tunnelling ensued with a subsequent delay of 20% of the teaching time.
Always time well spent, thobut.
Post by: simonp on 08 March, 2017, 11:39:15 pm
Here's why: I haven't created any documents on my laptop in months.
I write code on the Linux system and I create all my documents in the cloud. There's nothing to back up.
Post by: simonp on 09 March, 2017, 11:23:31 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 10 March, 2017, 05:59:31 am
And in other news TalkTalk will be blocking TeamViewer as an anti-fraudster measure. May only be temporary. More info. here. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/09/talktalk_blocks_teamviewer/)And I made it possible to remotely access his computer from my home.This. I use TeamViewer, probably as recommended by someone here. Free (with the occasional nag) for home use.
Doesn't help when Mother's kittens have run across the keyboard and turned the wifi off, but we're used to that one now.
Post by: Biggsy on 11 March, 2017, 04:39:19 pm
You may think no-one would want to use your app at home if it's primarily designed for travelling, for example, but even that is not always true. Anyway, phone users sometimes prefer landscape mode, too.
I would also complain about lack of special alternatives to touch screen control, but that can mean a lot more extra work so it can be forgiven. We mostly have enough control with a remote touchpad, fortunately. Landscape support is not so hard.
Other rant: Bloody Dolphin browser keeps auto-filling form fields against my will and incorrectly - to explain why you might have seen my name in place of the subject title on my posts (before I realise and edit). I'm not that much into self promotion!
Post by: Kim on 11 March, 2017, 04:55:57 pm
Dear Android app developers, please remember that your app may not just be used on phones and tablets, it could be used on television boxes as well, where we need landscape mode. Too many apps work in portrait only. It's doing my neck in.
Seconded. Plus, as soon as you add a keyboard case to a tablet landscape mode is needed.
Quote
You may think no-one would want to use your app at home if it's primarily designed for travelling, for example, but even that is not always true.
As the device is more likely to have a keyboard attached when away from home, that means travel-related apps need to support landscape properly, too. I'm glaring at you, Met Office. And you, Strava.
Quote
I would also complain about lack of special alternatives to touch screen control, but that can mean a lot more extra work so it can be forgiven. We mostly have enough control with a remote touchpad, fortunately. Landscape support is not so hard.
No, I'm going to complain about this too: All we want is a keybinding to open the notifications drop-down, FFS.
I'll be a bit more charitable about the piss-poor mouse control of text selection, that's a bit more niche. But with a bit of practice you can make the open-the-notifications gesture with a mouse, so it's not a complete waste of time.
Post by: citoyen on 21 March, 2017, 04:04:33 pm
Trying to print out a 52-page booklet from Adobe Acrobat, using the clever 'booklet' preset to organise the pages in the right order and double-sided. Neat, efficient and less wasteful of expensive paper...
Four attempts later, I finally get it right, but only by printing the front side of each spread first, then manually reversing the order of the printouts, putting the pages back in the printer the right way round, then printing the back sides.
After some googling, I eventually worked out that the reason it was printing the back sides upside down was because printing two A5 pages on an A4 sheet it treats the long edge of the paper as the binding side. And there is no option to set the binding to the short side. And no option to turn binding off because that's part of the booklets preset.
I managed to resist the temptation to put a boot through the printer. Just.
Post by: TheLurker on 09 April, 2017, 10:23:07 am
I'm going to hunt down the software developers who think it's 'this page can't be restored' is a useful error message and make trained weasels eat their eyeballs.
{Well reasoned and extremely articulate disquisition on the failings of lower order life forms removed for the sake of brevity.}
Then I input it all over and you guessed it. Someone tells me to clear my cache again and I'm going to clear theirs. Permanently.
On past form, see above, I think our resident Shiny Haired (Is it varnished? A world desperate for answers is yearning to know.) Thought Leader is most likely to appreciate this, but the rest of us followers (Oh _definitely_ lower case 'followers'; we know our place and only Leaders deserve capital letters.) might enjoy it as well.... read on. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/07/customer_satisfaction_is_our_highest_priority_ok_maybe_secondhighest_or_third/)
Post by: ian on 10 April, 2017, 09:38:53 am
A special shout-out to my Samsung Blu-Ray smartbox thing which every now and again gives up with English and blasts something in Korean at me. Followed by 'OK'? I've no idea if it's OK. I keep meaning to take a picture of the screen and ask a friendly Korean.
Post by: woollypigs on 13 April, 2017, 09:48:19 pm
Continued stamping on their fingers is too good for them.
Post by: Chris S on 18 April, 2017, 11:59:29 am
A side effect of the upgrade appears to be to un-register the PC with the domain controller. WTF? ???
Post by: ian on 21 April, 2017, 04:26:51 pm
I think not. Finestre, the Demon of Such Things – if she could die (and she can't, obvs) – would have it on her gravestone. Of course, being a demon, she'll put it on your gravestone and make sure it features highly in your eternal torment.
Of course, I could actually be experiencing my eternal torment.
Which would explain a lot.
Post by: Afasoas on 21 April, 2017, 04:50:03 pm
We've had an infuriating issue for a while now where the Linux boxen would occasionally bleat about losing connectivity to the UPS. A colleague firmware upgraded the UPS yesterday in an effort to resolve the issue. And of course that's backfired and made the problem much worse.
I've done some digging into APCUPSD. It is reliant up on receiving UDP broadcast MASTATUS packets from the UPS at ~25 second intervals. After every 3rd packet, the UPS waits ~19 seconds and emits an MACONFIG packet, which APCUPSD silently ignores. ~25 seconds later the cycle starts again with the broadcast of another MASTATUS packet.
Occasionally (five times this morning, just once this afternoon) the UPS emits two consecutive MACONFIG packets. That means APCUPSD goes ~69 seconds without seeing an MASTATUS packet. The longest it will wait for an MASTATUS packet is 60 seconds (equal to 25 * 2 + "a bit"). Thus the regularly reported commfail event.
I suppose I can try contacting APC but I don't think I'll get too far without a support contact. :/
Post by: Kim on 21 April, 2017, 04:57:05 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 21 April, 2017, 05:36:47 pm
Time to switch to NUT?
I'll investigate that option Monday morning. Thanks Kim.
Post by: Afasoas on 27 April, 2017, 02:17:47 pm
A business/self-employed individual shouldn't rely on 'free' email. It's not so much that it looks more professional, it's more that the email address is portable so if you have problems with the underlying email hosting, you can still switch to a different mail provider. Relying on free email just doesn't cut it.
One of the most important qualities in any self-respecting computer nerd is to not spread miss-information to non-technical people, and not to act based on such assumptions. Basically don't bulls**t people and don't mess with their things unless you know what you're doing. Especially if those people are self-employed/running businesses.
Regards
Grumpy IT Person.
Post by: Pingu on 28 April, 2017, 11:13:34 am
Post by: T42 on 28 April, 2017, 11:15:33 am
Dear People,
A business/self-employed individual shouldn't rely on 'free' email. It's not so much that it looks more professional, it's more that the email address is portable so if you have problems with the underlying email hosting, you can still switch to a different mail provider. Relying on free email just doesn't cut it.
One of the most important qualities in any self-respecting computer nerd is to not spread miss-information to non-technical people, and not to act based on such assumptions. Basically don't bulls**t people and don't mess with their things unless you know what you're doing. Especially if those people are self-employed/running businesses.
Regards
Grumpy IT Person.
A touch of the LART required?
Post by: SteveC on 28 April, 2017, 07:34:57 pm
BBC bork get_iplayer: https://squarepenguin.co.uk/forums/announcement-23.htmlI hit that last night. >:( >:(
Part of me can understand and it's a bit of a surprise get_iplayer has lasted this long, but it's still a pain.
Post by: Maverick on 29 April, 2017, 09:10:50 am
BBC bork get_iplayer: https://squarepenguin.co.uk/forums/announcement-23.html
Ah, a possible explanation as to why the iPlayer app on my Plex server wouldn't work last night.
Post by: hellymedic on 03 May, 2017, 01:57:35 pm
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?
SINCE WHEN?
SHEEEEIT!
Post by: ian on 03 May, 2017, 03:15:02 pm
Post by: hellymedic on 03 May, 2017, 05:00:17 pm
I'll attempt to rename the file and see what happens. I downloaded a Will Norman's answers to the London Assembly tried to open the download and got Pages does not support rtf formats.
GGRRR!
Post by: hellymedic on 03 May, 2017, 05:10:09 pm
Unimpressed that download from official body had been incompetently loaded though.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 May, 2017, 07:12:44 pm
Post by: T42 on 10 May, 2017, 01:33:17 pm
Post by: ian on 10 May, 2017, 02:29:56 pm
Photoshop is a bit bloaty and slow. Despite having the full CS package, I mostly default to Affinity unless there's a specific feature I need in Photoshop (or I haven't figured out to do it in Affinity). It's a lot more nimble and behaves proper and the UI is lot more intuitive.
Still, nothing quite annoys me as much as the frame/content drag behaviour in InDesign.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 May, 2017, 08:10:51 pm
Still, nothing quite annoys me as much as the frame/content drag behaviour in InDesign.
The behaviour of the <CONTROL> key in Excel 2013 is possibly the most annoying thing since Jive Bunny. Today I are mainly copying and pasting between Notepad++, World and Excel and every time I try to use <CONTROL>-<SHIFT>-<ARROW> to select a bunch of cells it coughs up some stupid context menu which I don't want and can't find out how to turn off.
Bah!
Post by: ian on 10 May, 2017, 09:02:05 pm
Simples.
But Adobe then hired a nice young lady. She had great references. OK, she had a tail and horns, but it's the fucking modern times and hey, you know, design hipsters. They're all body modding these days. Don't judge. She'd say perky things like 'why don't you move your software to subscription model, everyone would love that!' and 'I'm punching you in the soul, you just won't feel it until you're dead, which incidentally won't be long from now, maybe, oh I don't know, 5.03pm!' Everyone loved Finestre, of course. Mostly because they wanted their children to just have the one non-swivelling head.
So, yeah, Finestre decided to make the teeniest change. The littlest of little things. But she knew, being The Demon of Such Things, that it would slip a splinter under the fingernails of the unwary. The words would be darkly uttered. Children would cry. Mummy, daddy said that word AGAIN. Because now it's all down to timing. You have to press cmd before dragging. There's no point hitting it any other time, if it ain't down when you drag, then it's mummy-daddy-said-that-word again.
Post by: Feanor on 14 May, 2017, 07:52:16 pm
Power outage in the night, and one of my Linux boxes failed to come back on-line.
Was able to re-boot to a root login, but within minutes I was getting disk I/O errors flooding the console.
Reboot and forcing an fsck (it's never a good day when you are in fsck ), and I get a stream of I/O errors.
Subsequent re-boots either don't see the disk at all ( even at BIOS level ), or rapidly fail.
Dead HDD.
Bah.
It was not backed-up.
Well, it was not an important server, only roundcube webmail and *cough* kms.
Webmail will remain offline till I re-build the box, but all the users are on IMAP anyway.
Kms is on an alternate box and DNS updated accordingly.
Post by: Feanor on 17 May, 2017, 08:26:33 pm
Server mostly re-built now.
CentOS7, apache, mariaDB, php all installed and working.
I'll leave the Roundcube install for another day.
ETA:
After a reboot, the machine was no longer on the network. WTF?
Log in to console...
The Ethernet interface has no IP addresses bound to it, although it is physically up!
ifdown/ifup the thing and all is working!
Inspect the interface config file, and it has an ONBOOT=NO entry in it!
Probably due to me not having a network cable plugged in during the initial install.
(Well, I did, but into the wrong 'ole. It was plugged into the Out-of-Band managenment iLO interface! )
Idiot Boy.
Fix this up and try another reboot, and all is IPv4 and IPv6 goodness!
Post by: Feanor on 18 May, 2017, 08:54:36 pm
I had to read up on it a bit, but it was a slow day at work.
I needed to tweek the security contexts of a couple of the www sub-directories to allow httpd to write out logs and temp files.
I also needed to tweek some SELinux Booleans to allow httpd to open sockets to connect out to the imap server.
But webmail sanity is restored.
Post by: Kim on 18 May, 2017, 08:58:43 pm
webmail sanity
Oxymoron.
Post by: Feanor on 18 May, 2017, 09:07:19 pm
webmail sanity
Oxymoron.
Well yes. But I have moany end users to support.
And they all have perfectly good IMAP clients on their mobile devices and PCs.
But I get the "Mump Moan, I was at some random place and I didn't have wifi on my device so I needed to use some random PC. I can't configure it for our IMAP. I NEED webmail! Waah Waah!"
So a Roundcube box here at Feanor Towers has been the answer.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 19 May, 2017, 11:26:17 am
Just discovered that the font mapping mechanism (which is arcane, designed to accommodate multiple languages) was deprecated. Not in the release notes because it wasn't a 'change'. They just turned it off. FFS.
I can bodge round it, but that would be rather like adding hard-coded local variables. Waiting to find out what the new 'industry best practise' is now that the old 'best practise' was erased.
Post by: Afasoas on 20 May, 2017, 11:18:49 pm
It's so disconcerting just how much Facebook knows about me* considering:
a) In my previous Facebook existence, I hadn't be-friended any of these people
b) I've used a new unique email address for Facebook
c) I've always accessed it via VPN
d) I've not used the Facebook app
e) I've used Facebook in a separate browser**
I'm sure some of it's speculative on Facebook's part, but it makes me very uncomfortable.
*judging by the accuracy of friend suggestions, especially given my name isn't uncommon
**Facebook may have discerned my real IP address using WebRTC. I've just disabled it.
Post by: perpetual dan on 21 May, 2017, 09:18:53 am
Post by: Biggsy on 21 May, 2017, 04:17:32 pm
It's so disconcerting just how much Facebook knows about me
Which reminds me to get round to watching What Facebook Knows About You (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08qgbc3)
Post by: Kim on 24 May, 2017, 04:01:44 pm
Last night, a great many months late to the party, my Galaxy Tab S2 fondleslab finally received the OTA update to Android 7 'Nougat'. And there was much rejoicing.
At least until I looked at the notifications wossname. In a work of genius reminiscent of an unrestrained Jony Ive, the notifications are now a retina-searing (and with an AMOLED display, flattery-deflating) black-text-on-white-background, and the quick settings frobs (for turning wifi etc on and off) now fail to indicate state by changing from thin grey lines to thin blue lines (https://community.verizonwireless.com/thread/928824), a difference only perceptible when the brightness is turned up to 11. On some devices there's a themes system that apparently allows you to change that. But not the Tab S2.
Am I really going to have to root the device and learn[1] more than I ever cared to about the inner workings of Android purely in order to change this critical piece of UI to sensible colours? Really?
Fucksake.
[1] This inevitably means hanging out with the kiddies on mobile phone forums. Urgh!
Post by: Zipperhead on 24 May, 2017, 04:41:58 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 24 May, 2017, 06:54:46 pm
Last night, a great many months late to the party, my Galaxy Tab S2 fondleslab finally received the OTA update to Android 7 'Nougat'. And there was much rejoicing.This is the sort of thing that makes me click the [Fuck Off and Don't Bother Me] button whenever any of the software, including the O.S., on my fondleslab says, "Yay! FABBY new wossnames are available! Your life isn't complete without them! Download NOW!" I just _know_ that for every useful new thing there'll be a metric shedload of pointless and infuriating yoof/marketroid driven changes and as you have so pithily pointed out they will not be configurable (i.e switched OFF PERMANENTLY) without advanced voodoo.
At least until I looked at the notifications wossname. ....
Post by: Biggsy on 24 May, 2017, 07:54:48 pm
Kim, if you can bear to have a sticky notification row (or two), have a go with the Power Toggles app. It can hold up to eight settings or app shortcuts of your choice per row, with customisable colours for the on and off states.
Fortunately for me, Sony have been sensible with the quick settings colours so I don't need to duplicate them, I just use Power Toggles for extra stuff.
Post by: Kim on 24 May, 2017, 08:12:50 pm
Whereas I'm keen to update. I find more to like than hate with each new version.
It's certainly performing slightly faster under Nougat, which is nice.
And it's getting tantalisingly closer to being able to open the notifications menu from the physical keyboard. Where before there simply wasn't a hotkey to do it, now we have a hotkey that requires a <meta> key I haven't got. Maybe Samsung have a space cadet keyboard case option that I haven't noticed? :facepalm:
Quote
Kim, if you can bear to have a sticky notification row (or two), have a go with the Power Toggles app. It can hold up to eight settings or app shortcuts of your choice per row, with customisable colours for the on and off states.
Good workaround. I'm using that on my phone[1], largely because it gives a battery percentage display and easy access to the screen rotation.
[1] Moto G running 5.0.2 because later versions break[2] the WiFi on that model.
[2] Endless repeated re-connections, possibly related to the presence of IPv6 RAs on the LAN.
Post by: Biggsy on 24 May, 2017, 08:47:32 pm
Post by: Kim on 24 May, 2017, 09:08:46 pm
I use Buttons Remapper to open the notifications panel from a physical keyboard.
That looks like it would work, if it supported opening the notifications panel. ???
Post by: Biggsy on 25 May, 2017, 02:59:56 pm
1. Install and activate All in one gestures and enable one of its services (Swipe/Status bar/Hard keys) even if you're not using it or have it set to do anything.
2. From Buttons Remapper, for the Action, select: Other - Shortcut - All in one gestures - Status bar - Notification panel.
Alternatively, there may be some other app that opens notifications that could be called from Buttons Remapper. But AIOG is also good for toggling immersive mode, and even with the keyboard always enabled (after granting permissions via ADB if not rooted).
I use all this on my TV box with wireless keyboard/touchpad. Also handy is External Keyboard Helper (even the free demo version to quite some extent). I anglicise my keyboard with that.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 25 May, 2017, 09:04:39 pm
I finally found it.
Code: [Select]
#ifdef <not running in new environment>
// I don't know why you would need to do this, the default is 15 seconds
else
{
<section that increases the timeout>
}
#endifGrrr. I think someone owes me a pint next time I'm in the Prague office. And thanks to
Code: [Select]
git blame it didn't take long to find out who that someone is. A very experienced developer who should know better.
Post by: Kim on 26 May, 2017, 12:51:32 am
Oh sorry, I didn't check properly how I did it. It needs an app called All in One Gestures as well - using a bonus feature, not actually a gesture. Root not required.
1. Install and activate All in one gestures and enable one of its services (Swipe/Status bar/Hard keys) even if you're not using it or have it set to do anything.
2. From Buttons Remapper, for the Action, select: Other - Shortcut - All in one gestures - Status bar - Notification panel.
Cool, that's working.
Thanks!
Post by: Ben T on 27 May, 2017, 03:10:27 pm
They invariably don't do any better a job of downloading it than browsers do, most browsers now resume if network temporarily cuts out IME.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 May, 2017, 05:28:33 pm
1: PC hung while backup running; "backup_running" file on NAS locked and needs to be deleted before backup can be re-run. Alternative is waiting for unspecified long time for file to unlock itself.
Post by: Gattopardo on 05 June, 2017, 06:38:46 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 05 June, 2017, 06:51:34 pm
After several times of being unplugged and or dropped and thrown. Now it no longer works. All that happens is the flashing amber light.For most computer hardware I'd say that's probably for the best. :)
Post by: Chris S on 06 June, 2017, 04:33:43 pm
Arrrrghhhhhh!!! >:(
Post by: Kim on 06 June, 2017, 05:06:35 pm
Timezones.
Arrrrghhhhhh!!! >:(
I feel your pain. Anyone who hasn't can play along at home by watching this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 06 June, 2017, 05:36:22 pm
Anyway, why would you want to know how many seconds ago a historical event happened?
Post by: Kim on 06 June, 2017, 06:01:26 pm
Anyway, why would you want to know how many seconds ago a historical event happened?
Starter for ten: Sorting a list.
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 06 June, 2017, 06:15:49 pm
Post by: Diver300 on 06 June, 2017, 06:19:37 pm
I had written some code to work out if text message A was sent before or after text message B. Now text messages are timestamped according to the local time, plus a marker to say how many quarter hours that time is before or after GMT. Even sticking to UK based idiots, when the clocks changed to summer time, some of the computers involved in timestamping the text messages had their clocks moved forward without being told that they were no longer on GMT. The result was that text messages sent though that box were timestamped effectively 1 hour in the future, so in order to send a text from another box that was seen as later, we had to wait an hour.
Of course it was a waste of time contacting the owners of said box. As far as they were concerned, texts were sent and that was all that mattered.
The coding was tedious as well. The offset from GMT could take a text over midnight, either way, and therefore over a month end either way, and a year end either way. The variable month length had to be allowed for. A lot of coding went into working all that out, even with leap years being ignored. It was all in assembly code on a PIC.
Post by: Chris S on 06 June, 2017, 06:22:05 pm
Managed to wrestle the beast into submission eventually. Well, until the first defect report, anyway.
Post by: Diver300 on 06 June, 2017, 06:24:30 pm
gmmktime is supposed to produce a Unix timestamp from a GMT time and date. Only it works from local time and converts back to GMT. I found that gmmktime was an hour out for a couple of hours after the clocks changed.
Post by: Kim on 06 June, 2017, 06:58:44 pm
If the events in the list are affected by the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, as he mentioned, then it's rather unlikely they could be dated to the second.
You'd be surprised how often that sort of thing crops up in astronomy, where they like to express things in heliocentric Julian time in order to - I kid you not - make the maths easier.
(Astronomers, in particular, shouldn't be allowed to write date conversion code. The results can be a shining example of how you can write Fortran in any language.)
Post by: SteveC on 06 June, 2017, 07:14:45 pm
Post by: Kim on 06 June, 2017, 07:17:12 pm
Post by: Greenbank on 06 June, 2017, 07:38:23 pm
gmmktime is supposed to produce a Unix timestamp from a GMT time and date. Only it works from local time and converts back to GMT. I found that gmmktime was an hour out for a couple of hours after the clocks changed.
Without an indication of the timezone there's an hour when the clocks go back where a specific time could be either before the clocks changed or after the clocks changed, e.g.
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:00
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:01
...
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:59:58
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:59:59
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:00
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:01
...
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:59:58
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:59:59
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 02:00:00
With a time of "Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:00" there's no way to know whether it is the first one or the second one.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 June, 2017, 04:51:44 am
So I killed him, and then had an ice cream.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 07 June, 2017, 08:35:38 am
Since a complete reboot took multiple hours of work, this was no small enterprise.
Amazingly, there was not a reboot book. It was all in the operator's heads. Which jobs to bring up and which order. FFS. Sometimes someone would forget to start something at the right time and there would be much stress as it would be restarted.
Post by: T42 on 07 June, 2017, 09:20:00 am
Post by: Gattopardo on 08 June, 2017, 06:26:52 pm
After several times of being unplugged and or dropped and thrown. Now it no longer works. All that happens is the flashing amber light.For most computer hardware I'd say that's probably for the best. :)
Some peoplehave temper tantrums and take it out on the hard ware.
Post by: ian on 09 June, 2017, 04:07:45 pm
On a fucking Mac. Morons. Why not provide a fucking Win 3.1 executable why you are it? I hope everyone responsible endures an utterly terrible freak high pressure hot raspberry jam anal sphincter-related incident.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 June, 2017, 05:43:32 pm
Post by: ian on 09 June, 2017, 05:54:23 pm
Amazon Music ate my Taylor Swift playlist. Bah! That was carefully curated and took me an entire 5 minutes to recreate thus delaying our special Friday music hour.
Post by: Gattopardo on 14 June, 2017, 02:11:36 pm
So along with flat cmos batteries I am now resoldering power jacks to two different computers. Tempted to desolder the connectors from old laptops...but that maybe a problem. Why do I get myself in to these situations?
Post by: freeflow on 14 June, 2017, 02:23:16 pm
Helpfully, if you set a default namespace Word will quite happily add prefixes to *some* of your tags but demand that you prefix all tags with the prefix before you can access them.
Post by: Biggsy on 14 June, 2017, 03:54:17 pm
Ah power jacks...what would cause a power jack to overheat?
Excessive charging current or the jack not being rated for the power. Both seem unlikely to me. A short circuit could cause meltdown, but the power supply should trip before that.
The failed laptop power sockets I've seen, I've just put down to mechanical weakness or abuse, although I have noticed power plugs being rather warm in use.
Post by: Kim on 14 June, 2017, 06:09:05 pm
Ah power jacks...what would cause a power jack to overheat?
Excessive charging current or the jack not being rated for the power. Both seem unlikely to me. A short circuit could cause meltdown, but the power supply should trip before that.
Crappy contact somewhere increasing the resistance and therefore power dissipated as heat. May be the contacts themselves, the solder joints the the board or a fraying wire. I'm guessing the solder joints.
Post by: Gattopardo on 22 June, 2017, 10:40:19 pm
Ordered the cmos battery from RS. Called RS as central stores didn't have any in stock but searching Crawley had stock. So central stores said Crawley could send it to me, but I had to complete the on line order. Once the order was received I have to contact online central stores to change the supplier to crawley. Did that but somehow that didn't happen. So had to call crawley and sort out the problem. But it arrived now to do the soldering.
Post by: Gattopardo on 23 June, 2017, 04:59:25 pm
Post by: Gattopardo on 29 June, 2017, 01:20:58 am
How the brian christ can I take something that worked, replace the cmos battery and now it doesn't work anymore? Then my favourite, change a memory dimm and the computer no longer works. Changed the dimm back and the same....Arggggghhhhhhh
Post by: SoreTween on 29 June, 2017, 09:10:00 pm
Bollocks 2: The monitor on the mail server died on Monday. Small pop & then off. Lights up again and off. Lights up again and off. Repeat.
I wonder what bollocks 3 is going to be.
Replacing these things individually is no biggie but it means that all the hardware in my office is now of that age. Poo.
Every time I look at PC hardware these days I realise I have absolutely no interest whatever in spending my time pratting about with that shit any more. Nor do I ever find what I'm looking for when I do noodle about searching for a few minutes. For example I've been trying to replace the laptop I'm typing on for 5 years or more. Nobody but nobody makes what I'd call a 'work' laptop any more. Laptops today all fall into one of these categories:
a) pant wettingly gorgeous but as upgradable as a rock & repairable as a shattered windscreen.
b) video players. 16 fucking 9 is for watching videos and SHIT for anything else. Even editing video on 16 fucking 9 is painful.
c) all round cheap tat.
Bah >:(
Post by: Afasoas on 30 June, 2017, 02:08:42 pm
It's probably a good idea to change fans periodically anyway.
Post by: Gattopardo on 04 July, 2017, 12:44:01 am
Some times the toshiba laptop works and sometimes the flashing lights of doom.
How the brian christ can I take something that worked, replace the cmos battery and now it doesn't work anymore? Then my favourite, change a memory dimm and the computer no longer works. Changed the dimm back and the same....Arggggghhhhhhh
So randomly tried a memory chip that causes the machine it came out of to crash.....now works in this machine.
Post by: SoreTween on 08 July, 2017, 07:16:45 pm
Nor do I ever find what I'm looking for when I do noodle about searching for a few minutes.I may have just had a little accident
https://www.shop.bt.com/products/acer-xr382cqkbmijphuzx-37-5--3840x1600-hdmi-dp-usb-gaming-monitor-um-tx2ee-005-CPBY.html?refs=4294935805
Just look at the vertical resolution on that lovely :o
VPS not gonna happen. VM maybe but my stuff stays where I can see it.
Post by: David Martin on 29 July, 2017, 03:45:27 pm
And now my lapdancer does not suddenly decide to drop it's network connection and really annoy me at the most inconvenient times. Yippee.
It was this far > < from defenestration.
Post by: Morat on 02 August, 2017, 11:36:56 pm
FFS.
I was informed it was hard to predict a fix that would expose a bug. Maybe it is, but it was stupendously easy to TEST, surely?
GAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 03 August, 2017, 09:49:44 am
Today our EPOS system decided it wouldn't sell any weighed goods and failed utterly to read barcodes from the scales. Turns out it was only working due to a bug, which was fixed in the latest update.
FFS.
I was informed it was hard to predict a fix that would expose a bug. Maybe it is, but it was stupendously easy to TEST, surely?
GAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
yebbut testing costs money. Often testing means paying people to do testing.
Post by: TheLurker on 03 August, 2017, 06:00:39 pm
Testing? Isn't that what customers are for? :)Today our EPOS system decided it wouldn't sell any weighed goods and failed utterly to read barcodes from the scales. Turns out it was only working due to a bug, which was fixed in the latest update.
FFS.
I was informed it was hard to predict a fix that would expose a bug. Maybe it is, but it was stupendously easy to TEST, surely?
GAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
yebbut testing costs money. Often testing means paying people to do testing.
Post by: Morat on 03 August, 2017, 06:13:44 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 03 August, 2017, 08:49:18 pm
Yeah, pretty much. :(I had the misfortune to work for a company some 11 or 12 years ago where it was official policy to farm the testing out to the customers. I'm not sure the customers knew this. I didn't stay there very long.
Post by: Wombat on 04 August, 2017, 05:37:30 pm
Yes, the maps are lovely, but trying to get the mobile version to actually download the maps onto my phone instead of it downloading them "as and when necessary" was basically impossible, as the help kept referring to menu items that do not exist, and for some reason the map refused to display one map square, and seasoned YACF'ers will immediately understand which map square this was, yes, the one in which my new home is... Much googling which led me to help pages which MM's help would not lead me to, suggested all sorts of things, none of which worked, as all the help was for previous versions of MM, eventually led me to a very odd comment which suggested I opened a file explorer on the phone, after copying the maps off my PC into a random folder (it couldn't make its mind up which one) to find the map files, and click on it, which would open Memory maps, which of course it wouldn't as it was already running, hence much shuffling later, it actually understands to look in its own files for the maps, not trying to access them from a possibly non-existent internet connection. As I have forcefully said on these pages before, Wales is characterized by bugger all internet availability over much of its geography...
One day I'll actually live in Wales, when the solicitors actually condescend to do a day's work and complete the conveyancing for my new home. It does not take 8 weeks, you can do it in a week! They sent me an environmental report, and wanted me to confirm that I had consulted a qualified surveyor and wished to proceed with the purchase. How many times have I told you I'm a surveyor, you numpties!? A once in 200 yrs flood risk 250 metres away is not a real flood risk at my home 10 metres higher, and a supposed radon risk is not real, in a house at the top of a slope, on ground with no granite, with a solid concrete floor.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 05 August, 2017, 07:27:51 pm
They sent me an environmental report, and wanted me to confirm that I had consulted a qualified surveyor and wished to proceed with the purchase. How many times have I told you I'm a surveyor, you numpties!? A once in 200 yrs flood risk 250 metres away is not a real flood risk at my home 10 metres higher, and a supposed radon risk is not real, in a house at the top of a slope, on ground with no granite, with a solid concrete floor.
Lol. You know better than most people, but the environmental reports only consider the flat distance. Then mortgage companies/insurers get their knickers in a twist. We had to sign a disclaimer acknowledging the risks when the report came back that we were in the 250m "flood zone". Yes, the house is less than 250 m from the water meadows, but it's at least 30 m higher, up a bloody great hill, along with the rest of the town. Which is presumably the reason they built the town here 1000 years ago rather than in the wet field at the bottom, and it has stood here ever since. If the river ever rises to the level of my house I think there will be more to worry about than whether the carpets are wet!
Post by: Gattopardo on 06 August, 2017, 12:51:24 pm
Post by: Morat on 06 August, 2017, 02:20:17 pm
Why do harddrives die at the worst possible time?
Because any time is the worst time :(
Post by: Kim on 06 August, 2017, 05:17:11 pm
Why do harddrives die at the worst possible time?
Because they tend to be bought together.
Post by: Diver300 on 06 August, 2017, 08:19:50 pm
In a 64 bit message, numbered 0 - 63, the first bit transmitted is bit 7 and the last is bit 56.
1 CAN - Controller Area Network, a way that electronic messages are transmitted in motor vehicles, and on occasion, in bicycles.
Post by: Pingu on 06 August, 2017, 09:29:09 pm
Why do harddrives die at the worst possible time?
Just because.
Post by: Afasoas on 07 August, 2017, 04:48:39 pm
Ergo using the SMF TapaTalk plugin with a PostgreSQL database is not advisable.
I've got it to work by hacking the plugin - removing an ORDER BY clause in a statement that was just counting rows returned. I mean, when you want the total number of rows, what does the order in which they are returned matter?
It works now, but the boards show with the wrong descriptions and errors are still logged. Meh.
Post by: SoreTween on 09 August, 2017, 05:36:23 pm
Sigh
Post by: pcolbeck on 10 August, 2017, 10:22:54 am
Now Mrs P Colbeck will have to have a new contract with a new number even though its with the same carrier.
Post by: rr on 10 August, 2017, 01:25:05 pm
Mobile phone companies, when someone's contract expires and they ring to check on an upgrade why the hell can't you match the offers you give to new customers ?Get another network PAYG sim, port number to that and then to the new SIM.
Now Mrs P Colbeck will have to have a new contract with a new number even though its with the same carrier.
Sent from my XT1562 using Tapatalk
Post by: pcolbeck on 10 August, 2017, 01:38:28 pm
Post by: Morat on 10 August, 2017, 08:23:51 pm
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.
Post by: Feanor on 10 August, 2017, 08:27:27 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 11 August, 2017, 06:24:31 am
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.
Post by: Kim on 11 August, 2017, 12:02:12 pm
Ob-xkcd:
(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/file_transfer.png) (https://xkcd.com/949/)
The rise of NAT has made transferring files surprisingly awkward.
Post by: Jaded on 11 August, 2017, 12:54:17 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 11 August, 2017, 01:14:04 pm
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.
Post by: David Martin on 11 August, 2017, 01:15:50 pm
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...
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 11 August, 2017, 02:05:34 pm
I speaks from experience.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...
"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.
Post by: Phil W on 11 August, 2017, 08:53:12 pm
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.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 August, 2017, 01:49:26 pm
Post by: ian on 15 August, 2017, 11:49:16 am
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.
Post by: TheLurker on 24 August, 2017, 07:47:21 pm
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?
Post by: T42 on 25 August, 2017, 08:08:20 am
- 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.)
Post by: T42 on 25 August, 2017, 08:10:24 am
Post by: PeteB99 on 25 August, 2017, 10:49:25 am
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?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 August, 2017, 06:48:24 pm
Post by: dave r on 26 August, 2017, 09:26:00 am
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.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 August, 2017, 09:55:28 pm
| 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
Post by: Kim on 26 August, 2017, 10:01:22 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 August, 2017, 10:56:51 pm
Edit: The following files have different names:
File1
File2
[...]
File1372
Actually they don't. It's just POWERSHELL truncating the output >:(
Post by: David Martin on 27 August, 2017, 02:26:33 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 August, 2017, 03:53:37 pm
Post by: mcshroom on 27 August, 2017, 05:34:30 pm
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.
Post by: ian on 30 August, 2017, 03:16:10 pm
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.
Post by: Feanor on 30 August, 2017, 05:48:40 pm
(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.
Post by: ian on 30 August, 2017, 06:02:32 pm
So deal with IBM support or throw it out of the Window?
I found the file in a Time Machine back-up, which was fab, and some kind of idiot should have remembered to look in there first rather than spending twenty minutes staring at a Windows log-in screen and playing guess the *********. Is it **** ***? I think it is, Windows, I really do. Don't be shy, no need for the asterisks, we're all grown-ups.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 August, 2017, 05:47:33 am
Repent, wretched machine, or in the skip ye goeth (minus SDD, obv).
Anyone know how laptop prices in USAnia compare with back home >:(
Post by: ian on 31 August, 2017, 08:44:08 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 September, 2017, 12:25:10 am
At the current USD-GBP rate, not well. My 401(k) is in danger of being worth something.
I didn't think so. Natch threats of violence seem to have fixed the problem, at least until the next time I close the lid.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 September, 2017, 02:38:49 pm
I spent a while bunging points into you so-called "Maps" product and then, because I am perverse and would like to use THIS road instead of those, dragged the blue line around until satisfaction was achieved. Ad then clicked "Download to phone". In between leaving my lapdancer and arriving on my portable telephone, you reset the fucking route back to YOUR preferences, completely ignoring all my line-manipulation. This make your "Download to phone" option a useless thing, but then your entire fucking so-called "Maps" product is a useless thing anyway as there's no obvious way to clear the entire map history and you smell of wee and I hate you.
Post by: Kim on 08 September, 2017, 02:54:24 pm
Dear Mr Google
I spent a while bunging points into you so-called "Maps" product and then, because I am perverse and would like to use THIS road instead of those, dragged the blue line around until satisfaction was achieved. Ad then clicked "Download to phone". In between leaving my lapdancer and arriving on my portable telephone, you reset the fucking route back to YOUR preferences, completely ignoring all my line-manipulation. This make your "Download to phone" option a useless thing, but then your entire fucking so-called "Maps" product is a useless thing anyway as there's no obvious way to clear the entire map history and you smell of wee and I hate you.
Stands to reason that if it were that simple all the audaxers would be doing it...
Post by: Afasoas on 09 September, 2017, 12:35:58 am
perl is a great scripting language and if this script had been my first exposure to it, that would not be my opinion.
The script needed a few minor changes, but merely glancing at it was enough to break it.
- global variables everywhere
- arrays with dynamic variable names because the author couldn't use hashes - horrendous to debug
- case, for, if statements nested ten levels deep
- any why use perl libraries built for parsing arguments when you can write 300 hundred lines (practically repeated over and over) to parse the arguments yourself?
Needless to say now the script doesn't need comments as the logic is transparent and it's only 1/3rd the number of lines it was. The dynamic variables are gone. The arrays have been replaced with hashes. Arguments, results and perfdata are all handled by perl libraries bundled with the monitoring software. With the refactoring complete, it took minutes to make and test the changes rather than hours.
And then home to fighting with CSS and twig templates on a website theme yet another dodgy developer has produced. According to the twig template, false is false and null is true. That explains why using "icons: true" doesn't work.
And why change the formatting of elements globally instead of using appropriate .css selectors? It's not unreasonable for me to want bullet points on the actual content people type into the CMS so why not use relevant classes for menu items, testimonials etc.? ... I've cloned the original template and after two weeks of fixing all the minor issues with it, it's becoming hard to tell that the new template actually had anything to do with the original!
Honestly people, stop doing things the easy way when it just causes pain for the people daft enough to pick up and use your stuff.
Post by: ian on 29 September, 2017, 09:15:40 am
Which they didn't. But they did generate no fewer than 8 emails, of which 7 were automated responses, and 1 of which told me to talk to another help team for which they didn't include any method of contact.
Now my case has been marked as 'resolved', I've no doubt I'll get one of those 'how did we do?' survey, six reminders about it, and a note or three from IT telling my Dell hasn't been migrated.
This wouldn't happen if we were still using fax.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 September, 2017, 05:31:30 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 03 October, 2017, 07:49:50 pm
I head home, intending to do much much at home. Attempt to connect. No VPN. No, of course there isn't. Domain has been killed, hasn't it.
Offs, I should have anticipated this, stuck the work on a (strictly forbidden) USB stick.
Post by: Feanor on 03 October, 2017, 09:20:28 pm
They were in different physical locations, and had separate networks.
Now we have co-located to a shiny new office, but the IT is still split.
They have not managed to sort out the forest of domains.
So there's a segregation of work areas, with different network ports on different VLANS.
"Working Together", only not.
Now, rather than having the printers / photocopiers accessible from both VLANS, they have had to install two of these behemoths at each 'resource hub'; one for each network!
I did, however, manage to snaffle the managed switches from the old office :-)
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 03 October, 2017, 10:59:07 pm
Post by: Tim Hall on 06 October, 2017, 06:40:46 pm
He informs me he's got a new email addy, as his other one has been compromised. So far so good. Except he's cut and pasted his whole address book into the "to" box.
And now the responses start, saying yes, I'll do that.
Sigh.
Post by: T42 on 15 October, 2017, 02:40:34 pm
All my passwords have gone up the spout, shit and damnation.
Your car doesn't accelerate too well - let's throw out all the seats, glass, spare tyre and all your bloody luggage. There, that's better.
Beware of arseholes when they bring gifts, say I.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 17 October, 2017, 08:28:03 am
Damn thing decided to download an update for itself, and another for the phone, over 3G. Used up my entire hotspot allowance for the month. Thank you VERY much >:(
Post by: StuAff on 21 October, 2017, 06:56:09 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 October, 2017, 07:49:00 am
- Ach, Billy, I expect it will be like all the others.
- Whatever do you mean, Daddy?
- It will most likely replace your screen saver with something banal, uninstall the Classic Menus for Office app that at least partly does away with the Fisher-Price interface, install some Xbox-related crap, reënable Cortina and, yet again, "update" the driver software for your Logitech steering wheel so it doesn't fucking work, Billy. It might also slow saving stuff to a network disk to a scream-inducing crawl. That is what I mean.
(Later)
- Gosh, yes, Daddy, I see what you're saying! Why do Microsith always do this?
- Because they're a bunch of megalomaniacal bastards, Billy. Now, come and have your tea.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 23 October, 2017, 03:29:24 pm
Common sense would suggest replicating user access.
Nope, they've blocked my access to half my bloody work. fishguts!
Post by: DaveReading on 23 October, 2017, 06:35:26 pm
It might also slow saving stuff to a network disk to a scream-inducing crawl.
My W10 laptop has suffered that from the start, I thought it was just progress. :)
What's the fix, if any ?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 October, 2017, 06:59:24 pm
Post by: simonp on 24 October, 2017, 11:42:56 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 October, 2017, 07:05:17 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 October, 2017, 12:34:01 pm
Post by: Chris S on 26 October, 2017, 04:35:46 pm
I swear, Avast Antivirus is so spammy these days, it's worse than having a virus. Fuck off.
* uninstalls *
Post by: Tim Hall on 30 October, 2017, 08:17:58 pm
Post by: Diver300 on 06 November, 2017, 09:17:41 am
I'm using my personal mobile.
Post by: SoreTween on 07 November, 2017, 04:31:03 pm
'There are no logon servers available to service the logon request'
Is not a helpful message when hurtling at 100+ mph north on a beardy train towards a site demo in the morning.
Post by: Feanor on 07 November, 2017, 06:00:16 pm
If you have previously logged on to that laptop when it *was* connected to the domain, then the laptop should have cached a copy of your credentials so that you can logon when you are offline from the domain.
But the first time a user logs onto a machine, it needs to be connected to the domain, usually by wired Ethernet.
Subsequent logins can be off-line from the domain.
Post by: CarlF on 07 November, 2017, 06:47:56 pm
So it might be neither Microsoft nor your IT department, but beardy train man's WiFi breaking the rules that's causing the problem
Post by: ian on 07 November, 2017, 07:34:24 pm
Owing to the wonders of our outsourced IT I'm two weeks into not being able to access anything because they failed to 'migrate my domain' (top tip IT people, this means nothing to non-IT people). I'm not clear what they want me to do about it. I don't really much care, it's only SAP and Salesforce that need the VPN, and oh well, I'm heartbroken I can't get to those. Long may the incompetence continue. It's going to be a very long time if they're expecting me to fix it.
Post by: SoreTween on 07 November, 2017, 10:08:02 pm
After 50 minutes in my hotel waiting in the queue just for my call to IT to be answered I gave up.
A year or so ago I had some wierd shit going on with my old desktop, when talking the IT team through how they might diagnose it (I didn't have admin rights then) I suggested checking event viewer. 'We don't have that on our PCs was the answer.
They also do not understand the difference between connecting with whatever viewer they use to take over the mouse and keyboard of my session vs making a connection with their own admin credentials. Proved that when I couldn't do something so I called IT and they connected via viewer to do it....
Useless.
Post by: Si S on 09 November, 2017, 12:23:54 pm
rebooted on the lan numerous times. Several reboots off the lan
IRTA
Quote
rebooted on the ian numerous times. Several reboots off the ian
And thought 'have you not read his post above'
Grow a brain Si.
Post by: TheLurker on 09 November, 2017, 07:02:52 pm
For reasons that _totally_ escape me it decided in its infinite wisdom that when returning JSON from a WebMethod on an ASPX page (don't ask; you _really_ don't want to know) that instead of its built in converter handing out POJ it wraps it so instead of the client getting what you think you've sent, say, an object something like fred : [{jim}, {sheila}, ...] you get d : { fred : [...]} What the blazes!? Returning JSON from a controller action in MVC the client gets what you sent. Baffled and ticked off.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 11 November, 2017, 07:37:37 am
Microsoft, p'raps I've said enough already? No? OK.
For reasons that _totally_ escape me it decided in its infinite wisdom that when returning JSON from a WebMethod on an ASPX page (don't ask; you _really_ don't want to know) that instead of its built in converter handing out POJ it wraps it so instead of the client getting what you think you've sent, say, an object something like fred : [{jim}, {sheila}, ...] you get d : { fred : [...]} What the blazes!? Returning JSON from a controller action in MVC the client gets what you sent. Baffled and ticked off.
It's to prevent a particular cross-site scripting attack: https://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/20/anatomy-of-a-subtle-json-vulnerability.aspx/
Post by: Mr Larrington on 16 November, 2017, 12:33:01 am
I see you. I see you trying to sneak the fucking Avast virus onto my PC when updating CCleaner.
Just stop it, you mangy fuckweasels. I fucking see you >:(
Post by: fimm on 16 November, 2017, 10:58:48 am
(Yes, it is probably the rubbish system too, but I swear he really does name his files like that...)
Post by: Chris S on 16 November, 2017, 11:06:45 am
Dear colleague, if you didn't name all your files \MyProject\MyProjectPart1\Part1SectionA\PartOneSectionADocuments\<stupidlongcompanyIDthing>Document_About_Part_One_Section_A_Reviewed_By_Fred_And_Jim.doc then you might not get complaints about the length of your file name.
(Yes, it is probably the rubbish system too, but I swear he really does name his files like that...)
When did naming things become an essay-writing exercise? I once had to undertake major surgery on a Database/API because apparently 255 characters wasn't enough to name things - users wanted 2000 characters :facepalm:.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 16 November, 2017, 02:15:23 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 November, 2017, 11:43:35 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 December, 2017, 10:13:24 pm
Today, differential backup fails with "XML Validation error" >:( Look, Product, you wrote the fucking XML file in the first place, so what's gone wrong with it in the last 24 hours? Not me, that's for sure, because I was mucking about on another machine all night.
Just stop it.
Post by: menthel on 07 December, 2017, 12:27:36 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 December, 2017, 07:48:58 pm
Post by: David Martin on 07 December, 2017, 08:12:16 pm
Post by: Feanor on 07 December, 2017, 09:29:36 pm
Our online exams system isn't. That means no marking for the exams that are in the system, and frantically generating paper copies for tomorrow morning whilst the pixies in IT attempt to generate new magic smoke and get it back where it belongs.
Ah, fond memories of my former work where we used QuestionMark :-)
Post by: barakta on 07 December, 2017, 10:25:50 pm
ePEN as used by Edexcel is still so bad a friend who has to use it curses every marking year and her sysadmin husband makes her run it in a quarantined VM cos otherwise he won't allow it on his network... Shite educational software...
Post by: David Martin on 07 December, 2017, 10:48:01 pm
Questionmark on the other hand .. We were invited to a session to introduce us to Questionmark on Demand. We cancelled the second session on behalf of our colleagues (to save them the grief) and said basically 'Why are we beta testing this $#!%. Call us when it is ready for production' and told the Learning Technologists that they would be doing all the question editing for us if they implemented it like that because we sure as *** weren't going to use it.
And then one of the techs decided to send a merry email about the pending upgrade to this being rolled out by next semester at which point we went ballistic and the boss had a full and frank face to face conversation with the senior management over it. Tech now has a sore wrist...
So many process fails - like a graduate student has been let loose with a webkit and hasn't actually done any thinking about usability or workflow and sure as anything hasn't tested it for real.
Post by: David Martin on 08 December, 2017, 12:10:22 pm
Post by: barakta on 08 December, 2017, 06:11:46 pm
Booo to the wrong kind of IT support at 9am, plonkers!
My exwork are waiting out the 5 years of ShitSoftwareTM so they can legitimately get Something Anything Else cos it's terrible and everyone hates it. The arrogant twat who headed procurement has actually climbed off his high horse enough to apologise... Only took 1 legal action (mine) and 100+ people complaining with evidence over 2.5 years to get that then.. TWAT.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 December, 2017, 07:18:20 pm
Just works? My arse.
Post by: barakta on 18 December, 2017, 08:12:13 pm
Audiologist turned OFF all the clever shite... So why are you AGCing on my music and flattening sound every time there is something you think is background noise? Sounds fucking appalling... I keep thinking the battery is flat! And the streamer is giving me neck ache with its shitty neck wire, so I need DAI in the aid!
Dear person at Oticon,
Answer my fucking email! You didn't understand relay which is why you gave me your email address but that seems to have gone into a black fucking hole.
I have now prodded Oticon on Twitter to see if that gets me anything and if nothing else I'll harangue them by relay tomorrow.
If no dice from Oticon, then these are going back and Audiology can bloody well find a bone conduction hearing aid which isn't full of meddling shite. I'm not taking no for an answer. Really not! I'm sick of thinking my battery is flat.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 December, 2017, 01:51:06 am
Post by: Vince on 22 December, 2017, 08:28:38 pm
Currently suspicion is on iTunes as that was recently installed on a laptop to enable Mrs Wunja to download music to her phone.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 December, 2017, 10:03:00 am
Post by: Kim on 23 December, 2017, 12:27:11 pm
Post by: Polar Bear on 23 December, 2017, 09:49:58 pm
It's about a decade old so I shouldn't resent it but I do.
Fuck.
Post by: David Martin on 23 December, 2017, 11:16:22 pm
Post by: dave r on 01 January, 2018, 10:57:59 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 January, 2018, 12:31:16 pm
1: Bluetooth
2: Un*x
Post by: dave r on 01 January, 2018, 12:41:17 pm
When you mix a work of one one of the Imps of Stan1 with one of his Master's biggies2 only Bad Things will happen.
1: Bluetooth
2: Un*x
;D ;D ;D
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 January, 2018, 01:19:51 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 01 January, 2018, 04:14:39 pm
Meanwhile I am swearing at the grown-up version of the Devil's Radio, viz. wi-fi. I am at the rural annexe of Larrington College, Oxfod. Even the internal walls are about two feet thick, thus requiring three separate wi-fi access points. There's no mobile signal either ::-)
Chateau Oignons was built in stages, so some of the internal walls used to be external walls and are a metre thick1 of solid Northants. stone2. The poor little wifi beams don't stand a chance. We also have three access points and still need to trail wires about the place for any chance of Netflix without the stuttering.
[1] the plumber was not too happy when he hammered his longest drill the last few cm expecting it to pop out the other side, and it, err, didn't.
[2] Based on the cost of a little matching reclaimed stone for the garden last year, I reckon the house would be worth twice the market value if I knocked it down and put the stone on ebay.
Post by: Wombat on 03 January, 2018, 03:35:33 pm
Post by: Kim on 03 January, 2018, 04:25:18 pm
The place we are staying is a bit that way. We took the wifi password off the back of the access point in our bedroom, but when we moved bedrooms to the one which backs onto the previous one, Dave said we'd need to sign onto the one in his office, which is the other side of it. I said that surely as its only about 3 metres away it wouldn't be an issue, but then I realised that the 3 metres in question was the world's biggest chimney stack which goes up through the middle of this 16th century wing of the house. Hopefully in the future Wombat burrow, as its a 1985 vintage bungalow, there will be no such problems, and I'll be wondering if the wifi will make it across the front garden to the workshop. We will have no choice but BT, as Vodafone insist there is no possible service, SSE can't access BT's network as it isn't installed yet according to their system, and only BT admit that Openretch have stuck a green box thing on the pole nearby, which will apparently give us up to 300Mb FTTP.
Contrary to what some less scrupulous ISPs might like you to believe, WiFi performance is a function of your equipment, not your service provider, and there's no reason (other than laziness) to limit yourself to their supplied hardware.
Decent coverage of such buildings is eminently achievable, and without need to arse about with separate authentication details, given an appropriately installed and configured system of multiple access points. Yes, it requires money and effort, but that's the price you pay for living in a mansion / ancient stone monument / foil-lined identikit new-build (delete as applicable).
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 January, 2018, 07:03:14 pm
Post by: woollypigs on 09 January, 2018, 07:59:07 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 January, 2018, 01:10:07 pm
Post by: woollypigs on 09 January, 2018, 02:17:34 pm
Post by: ian on 10 January, 2018, 01:00:07 pm
Probably means it's time to go for a swim. After lunch, once I've calmed down, I'll authorize a pre-emptive nuclear strike on a certain Seattle suburb.
Post by: Feanor on 10 January, 2018, 02:20:51 pm
Ctrl-A, then Ctrl-C to copy the entire contents onto the clipboard;
Close Word down, shit-canning the corrupted document;
Opening a shiny new empty and un-fucked-up document and pasting the content back in?
Post by: ian on 10 January, 2018, 02:47:40 pm
OneDrive is apparently the 'ideal collaboration solution.'
Oh no it isn't says the panto voice from the back.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 January, 2018, 02:59:56 pm
"Why, the most recent one, of course?"
"Er, apart from that one..."
Fortunately the PC that does most Excelling has seemingly been cured of its annoying habit of random hanging and Excel hasn't done that for weeks now.
Post by: ian on 10 January, 2018, 03:30:17 pm
Then Word cogitates for a while. Then Word then shuts down.
I presume it's something to do with it being on the OneDrive server (which seems like the attic-bound stepchild of SharePoint) and someone else editing it. It would seemingly reconcile those edits by summarily deleting one set of changes.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 11 January, 2018, 09:45:51 am
Our IT services in this country are outsourced. We had the 'Consultant' onsite the other day, pouring scorn on our old (2010) Ororfice. We should be on the new version he says. Why is that I ask? We are a company where use of any offsite storage, any systems that back up or anything cloudy is a sin punishable by DA-Eth?
Why on earth would we want to pay extra to move to a system that has cloudiness built into its very bones, turning that off is a fecking pain (if not a near impossibility)?
He muttered something about the email being easier to manage then shutup.
Post by: fimm on 12 January, 2018, 10:58:13 am
"There will be a new server. It will need testing. Please ask X what testing he would like." is not a sufficiently informative email.
What will be on the server? Product A? Web site B? Tomb Raider 4?
(To be fair to X, when I sent him a somewhat politer version of the above, he came and talked to me and explained what was going on.)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 January, 2018, 11:56:05 am
Post by: Kim on 15 January, 2018, 10:34:17 pm
Anyway, having jumped through some nasty Windowsy hoops to flash the recovery on my Galaxy Tab S2, I've hit a wall by discovering - about 3 iterations of mkfs.ext4 too late - that there are in fact two different (and innacurately labelled) flavours of LTE 9.7" Galaxy Tab S2, and that SM-T819 (AKA gts210ltexx) is not the same thing as SM-T815 (AKA gts210velte). Bastards.
I've managed to un-brick it and gain root access, but unless either a) LineageOS starts supporting the newer model or b) I miraculously find myself arsed to do all the work myself, it looks like I'm stuck with the invisible Samsung quick settings GUI for a while longer.
Even when this stuff goes right, it's unsatisfying in exactly the way that ball bearings aren't.
Post by: Beardy on 16 January, 2018, 08:24:55 am
Am I the only one to find this pleasing?
Post by: SoreTween on 21 January, 2018, 08:55:24 pm
God I miss MSN messenger
Post by: freeflow on 23 January, 2018, 05:31:52 pm
If it weren't for your ability to remap the outline level in Word to allow a different hierarchy for the bookmark toc I'd have dumped you years ago.
Post by: T42 on 26 January, 2018, 04:32:11 pm
(http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/gaah.gif)
Post by: SoreTween on 27 January, 2018, 06:53:13 pm
Laptop in hovercraft mode and frozen on the landing page if I use IE 11, cannot access anything.
In firefox I can get past the home page but I cannot book anything because the to/from date fields are locked on dd/mm/yy and cannot be altered.
Never mind why do such programmers get paid, why are they allowed access to oxygen?
Post by: TheLurker on 27 January, 2018, 09:45:36 pm
Never mind why do such programmers get paid, why are they allowed access to oxygen?Because the bean-counters think cheap == good and instead of hiring someone who knows how to write production quality code, but costs GBPM they will instead hire some fresh-faced youngster who should still have stabilisers on his or her code but only costs GBPN where N << M. Bean-counters can't see past next week's wages bill and haven't got a fucking clue how much bad software _really_ costs to fix.
Post by: ian on 28 January, 2018, 05:39:55 pm
(OK, I know it's possible, I did use a cool one that actually made the form look like the card itself, and you just filled the numbers in the correct spaces as they are on your card, which is the way it should be done.)
Post by: Chris S on 29 January, 2018, 08:28:36 am
> nslookup <someserver>
Server: ns.yourdomain.foo
Address: 192.168.1.2
Name: <someserver>
Address: 192.168.1.14
> ping <someserver>
Ping request could not find host <someserver>.
FUCK OFF!
Post by: Feanor on 29 January, 2018, 10:22:33 am
Could it be that the local machines DNS cache is being hit but is stale and so its not querying the server?
Try flushing the local DNS cache.
Post by: Chris S on 29 January, 2018, 11:13:40 am
Post by: Morat on 29 January, 2018, 07:17:48 pm
AAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Post by: ian on 29 January, 2018, 07:33:43 pm
Mind you, if you want to see updates lining up in their implausible multitudes, try an infrequently used Lubuntu virtual machine.
Post by: Greenbank on 29 January, 2018, 07:39:57 pm
https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html
https://java.com/en/download/faq/release_dates.xml
(I'm, sadly, on the receiving end of these at work [not Oracle] as I have to bundle the new JRE into our product after each update.)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 February, 2018, 01:20:30 am
1: "_" instead of "." in a Windows batch file.
Post by: Greenbank on 01 February, 2018, 01:14:21 pm
(There was a typo in an IP address in the network plan that was taped to the desk which was the root cause of this problem.)
Post by: Chris S on 02 February, 2018, 05:53:35 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 04 February, 2018, 12:26:01 pm
- remap the drives to my NAS (just about fair enough, it has changed IP address at some point)
- delete and reinstall my printer
- sacrifice goats to get the mapped drives to my laptop working again
Post by: woollypigs on 04 February, 2018, 12:56:05 pm
Post by: Beardy on 08 February, 2018, 03:57:09 pm
I actually use a paper notebook to track what I've got to do because it's the only think I can rely on to note bork at an inopportune moment, and can take inputs form any system or person without interface problems1
1. That's actually a lie, because if I'm not wearing my hearing aids, I don't here what the boss says very clearly at all ;D
Post by: TheLurker on 08 February, 2018, 08:51:22 pm
Look just fucking well serialize the data, do NOT sodding well monkey around with the capitalization of property names. If we want to use Pascal case rather than camel case or even some horrific combination of the two that's OUR fucking decision. You are just a poxy transport mechanism so sod off out of it and stop pissing about with data content.
Post by: freeflow on 15 February, 2018, 05:31:59 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 February, 2018, 10:25:01 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 25 February, 2018, 12:51:51 pm
Two Kingston 32Gb cards hit exactly 10 MB/s so the replacements will be Kingston and will not be coming from Amazon.
Post by: TheLurker on 25 February, 2018, 04:34:46 pm
Microsith! Take your wanky "Smart" quotes and stick them up yer chuffer >:(This. Thank $deity$ for the Visual Notepad formatting stripper. :)
Post by: Beardy on 26 February, 2018, 08:07:56 am
Dunno if it is Amazon shysters or SanDisk marketing to blame but I have three 64Gb SanDisk C10 XC I MicroSD cards that achieve a sustained data write rate of 2.x MB/s. C10 is supposed to mean 10MB/s minimum so not particularly close to meeting their claim >:( Missed the returns window on Amazon too >:( >:(If they don't meet the stated standard the returns window is irrelevant surely.
Two Kingston 32Gb cards hit exactly 10 MB/s so the replacements will be Kingston and will not be coming from Amazon.
Post by: SoreTween on 01 March, 2018, 07:44:44 pm
Sigh.
[ETA]
Oh good grief, what has it done with my conditional formatting? Shattered it into 10,000 non functioning fragments, that's what.
Double sigh
[/ETA]
[FETA]
Actually, the shattering into 10,000 fragments was probably done by Excel versions > 2003. They were functioning, if not terribly manageable, fragments though :-\
[/FETA]
Post by: TheLurker on 01 March, 2018, 08:26:29 pm
Picture this.
[MVC web app]--references-->
[business model layer] --references-->
[repo. access layer] --references-->
[3rd party API DLLs for repo.]
All .net core 2
Build, run it up in VS - IIS express, call end point on one of the controllers in the MVC layer. Which results in call to [repo. access layer] which results in a "file not found" exception "can't find {third party DLL}". WTF!?
Fourteen developer hours later - yes two whole days worth of effort, 7 hours X 2 bodies ; stripping out the dependency injection then putting it back in, checking file versions, building cut-down solutions and so many other variations that my branes hav forgotten them the "solution" is found. It seems that as well as being referenced in the [repo access layer] that, for some utterly unfathomable and never before encountered reason, the [3rd party DLLs] have also got to be referenced in the MVC layer? Not only that but *copies* of them have to exist in the MVC layer project. It is not enough to reference the 3rd party DLLs in the repo layer directory. I suspect some namespace weirdness, because I have never, _ever_ seen this behaviour before. In fact I'm still having trouble believing it really happened
And then when we get it working... the sodding VPN is so overloaded because the world and his dog are "working" from home that queries against the servers with the repo data time out. In short the whole day is a washout.
Post by: TheLurker on 08 March, 2018, 07:49:40 pm
Because Windows File Exploder is pants a common trick to make sure you've got commonly used directories right at the start of the list is to use an "@" symbol or "$" at the start of the dir. name. F'rinstance I use @scratch amongst others and have done for mumble
Today I create a new scratch project in @scratch to test out an API for a 3rd party bit of kit I then try to use nuget to install a library, newtonsoft.json if you want to know. Can I? Hah! Can't read project configuration. Two and half hours later having tried all sorts of things I find a throwaway comment on SO, "I had a $ in my project path renamed it and all worked" and a follow up "me too, but it was....". Well you know damn fine what it was, "@".
So let's be clear on this. A valid character in a directory name causes the M$ VS implementation of package management / project configuration to choke? How fucking stupid is that!?
I should have guessed earlier. I got bitten this way by TFS 3 or 4 years ago. The API for version control treats $ as a reserved character (is that documented? is it cocoa) so all the files in the support patch library that used $ for various "process" reasons couldn't be checked in by the code I'd written to manage* the files.
*A number of support bods needed a dead simple, no need to think, interface to TFS. Pick file, check it in.
Post by: Beardy on 09 March, 2018, 11:10:49 am
Another starring turn from Microsoft or... Left Hand I'd like you to meet Right Hand.A classic case of How many M$ engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None, M$ just redefine darkness as the standard!
Because Windows File Exploder is pants ...
<snnnnip>
Post by: SoreTween on 09 March, 2018, 06:51:30 pm
Post by: Kim on 02 April, 2018, 04:22:54 pm
My phone just auto-updated to the latest nightly (read: weekly) build of LineageOS. And acquired a popup warning, in talk-like-a-pirate-day-ese, that it was vulnerable to malicious software. This lead me to the release notes, which mostly pertained to an announcement about the new LineageOS cryptocurrency, but contained a reference to a certification tool that wasn't mentioned in the wiki and had a name that was impossible to google for.
This annoyed me enough to dig deeper, and being an old fart, I was reading source code before it occurred to me to check the LineagoOS subreddit. Where it transpired that both the certification tool and the cryptocurrency were elaborate April fool's jokes.
Fine, whatever, put a comedy announcement on your website. But for fuck's sake. It's April 2nd and I've just had to use the android debugger to disable a persistent scary-looking popup warning that my phone was a land-lubber heading for davy jones's locker.
And quite frankly, it's 2017. Satire is dead. You can't go around announcing ridiculous cryptocurrencies and expect people to realise it's a joke.
Fuckwits.
Post by: Kim on 02 April, 2018, 04:30:13 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 02 April, 2018, 04:37:36 pm
Minor correction. Otherwise entirely correct rant too restrictive in scope. Could have been worse, but not much. Could have been written in JavaScipt using a library developed by an 11 year old.I hate mobile phones, or more specifically, the fact that theAll softwarefor mobile phonesiseitherdeveloped by a) under-resourced engineers working for The Man or b) open-source developers with the maturity and literacy of the average 13 year old, presumably because when they grow up they all migrate to projects that involve real computers.
Post by: Kim on 02 April, 2018, 04:41:23 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 02 April, 2018, 05:10:18 pm
There an extra special level of illiteracy... illiterate dudebros posting cargo-cult solutions.Unfortunately cargo cult / voodoo programming is also true of .Net/M$ and JavaScript development. Trundle over to SO and you will see insanely stupid or utterly out of date "solutions" with large numbers of "up" votes and the only proper/reasonable solution kicked into the long grass with either no votes at all or "down" voted.
Too many programmers. Not enough, functioning, brain cells. *sigh*
Post by: tiermat on 16 April, 2018, 03:29:12 pm
Forced update, this morning (work laptop). Reboot, runs like a tortoise on Mogodon.
Reboot
No better.
Reboot again. Ah! Now runs almost acceptably.
2 hours into a 4.5 hour meeting, it decides to BSOD.
Reboot, try to login, no login servers available.
Wankbadgers!
Post by: David Martin on 23 April, 2018, 04:05:24 pm
Post by: barakta on 23 April, 2018, 04:31:02 pm
Educational software relies on people being ignorant and unis buying into it and not caring how shit the interface is. GRRR to it being so shit it doesn't save as it goes, that's like basic software dev surely!
Post by: David Martin on 23 April, 2018, 04:42:42 pm
Post by: barakta on 23 April, 2018, 05:59:08 pm
#AllSoftwareSucks
Post by: Kim on 07 May, 2018, 01:18:49 pm
General inconvenience of widescreen aside, they've found an exciting new way to fuck this one up: Monitor controls are supposed to be irritating (it's a tradition, an old charter or something), but instead of the usual approach of a row of buttons with descriptions moulded into the bezel so you can't see them against the brightness of the screen, this one has a reasonably clear menu system, accessed by a row of what appear to be capacitive touch sensor buttons that you frob with your thumb. For extra lols, the power button is implemented in the same way. Guess whose fingers they don't detect?
Post by: SoreTween on 09 May, 2018, 10:31:04 pm
I've been having a problem on my work laptop with Acrobat Professional where when I rotate a page EMET kicks in and kills the task with a DEP error. Clearly a false positive but annoying. Usually I could get around it by rotating right 270 degrees instead of left 90, doing a 180 + 90, doing one page at a time or some such. (side rant 1, bloody people who won't correct their own scans, die you shitweasels). Eventually I hit a file I just could not correct so I decided to fix the problem. I was on version 11.00.00 and the latest patch updater was 11.00.23 (side rant 2, when IT was in house stuff got patched, now we are outsourced to IBM only Windows gets patches). I'm not allowed to install anything myself but knowing how shit IBM support are I took the precaution of getting admin rights on my laptop before I went to site. So I downloaded the updater and ran it only to be foiled at 90% progress, it needs to access the original install media, I don't know the path. With a heavy heart I submitted a support request.
I'll skip the detail of the next part in which the droid doesn't read the question, doesn't listen when the required actions are spelled out and eventually is foiled at exactly the same point because they've refused to piss off and find the damn install media path like I said they'd need to.
So now I'm back at the mothership the IBM droid contacts me for another go. He still doesn't have the install media path but insists on having a go anyway. Unsurprisingly it fails at 90%. So what does our cretinous halfwit do next? He opens the EMET configuration and disables every single 'monitor' option for Acrobat Professional and Acrobat Reader.
My last words to him were 'So we'll just keep our fingers crossed a genuinely malicious PDF doesn't get on our network shall we?'.
'Oh that shouldn't happen', he says.
It's not like everything that comes out of Adobe is a piss poor perfectly pervious virus spreading mechanism hugely popular with black hats since time immemorial due to it virtually nil ability to keep it's shit in order with record breaking numbers of CVEs published per executable per month. Oh, wait....
With luck in my inbox tomorrow will be a link to a service satisfaction survey.
Post by: Tim Hall on 15 May, 2018, 12:57:07 pm
In the red corner the shiny! new! router. In the blue corner and in another room my trusty long in the tooth Buffalo Ethernet Wireless thingy. Plug it into the a computer and look up how to configure it. Select the network, fill in the passworm, click save. "The SSID field is now populated" says the manual. No it isn't. Try again. No. Find reset button. Try again. Try again. Find advanced option on webby interface and reset it from there. Try again. Still no worky. Arse. Give up. Go to bed.
Post by: TheLurker on 16 May, 2018, 07:52:17 pm
Eclipse/adb/emulator. Why the merry hell have you stopped loading apks? The AVDs are all set up correctly and what bloody use is an error message that reads in its entirety, "(null)". Really? Why did you bother reporting anything at all?
Sub grumble.
Android Studio. If you can't run an emulator at all on the machine why don't you just bugger off? (It has been uninstalled as being NBG at all.)
Complaint:
Colleague.
1 - Don't you think that a class running to 4,000 lines of source code is probably a tiny bit on the large side?
2 - If you are going to write validation methods that build a string and you are going to check for a non zero length string on return from the function to see whether or not validation failed don't you think it'd be a good idea to return the string you so lovingly created rather than having the statement, ' return "" ' at the end of the function?
3 - If you want to check for a null/empty string try using !string.IsNullOrWhitespace(yourString) the test if (yourString is null) doesn't do what you think it does.
4....
No I'll stop there. It's swamp code. In the stuff written by any of my other colleagues the modification I was asked to make would have taken me a couple of hours at the most, because they usually (999/1000 times) write modular well thought through code. Four hours in and I was still correcting out and out bugs never mind taking a parang to some truly fragile constructions and I hadn't even made a start on the required changes.
Four thousand lines? For a single file? In 2018? Sheesh.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 May, 2018, 07:02:46 pm
An hour or so of fannying around to sort that one out, you berks. Cut it out.
Post by: Chris S on 17 May, 2018, 07:28:10 pm
Bloody Windows.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 17 May, 2018, 09:04:52 pm
Grumble:
No I'll stop there. It's swamp code. In the stuff written by any of my other colleagues the modification I was asked to make would have taken me a couple of hours at the most, because they usually (999/1000 times) write modular well thought through code. Four hours in and I was still correcting out and out bugs never mind taking a parang to some truly fragile constructions and I hadn't even made a start on the required changes.
Four thousand lines? For a single file? In 2018? Sheesh.
Who reviewed it? And who approved the merge to master?
Post by: woollypigs on 17 May, 2018, 09:27:40 pm
It would appear we now have two laptops in the household that refuse to install the Windows 10 "Creators Update" (FFS, really?) and keep whining about updating every few hours, only for it to fail once again if you (finally) capitulate to the nagging.Darn, I just had my Virtualbox win10 struggle with and update to 1803 after many attempt I found a way to poke it enough to get it up update. Sadly for the life of me I can't remember which stick I used, no it was not the stick with 3lbs steel lump at one end. If my brain kicks in I will return.
Bloody Windows.
Post by: Chris S on 17 May, 2018, 09:32:17 pm
Four thousand lines? For a single file? In 2018? Sheesh.
Haha!
A previous colleague of mine, "Waddya mean? Dean" (he was famous for being Teflon coated when it came to assigning bugs) once committed a 35Mb include file that was, apart from about twenty lines of declares, all whitespace.
His explanation was - during a late-night coding session, he'd fallen asleep on his keyboard and committed a file consisting nearly entirely of spaces entered by his forehead on the spacebar.
Post by: Chris S on 17 May, 2018, 09:34:58 pm
It would appear we now have two laptops in the household that refuse to install the Windows 10 "Creators Update" (FFS, really?) and keep whining about updating every few hours, only for it to fail once again if you (finally) capitulate to the nagging.Darn, I just had my Virtualbox win10 struggle with and update to 1803 after many attempt I found a way to poke it enough to get it up update. Sadly for the life of me I can't remember which stick I used, no it was not the stick with 3lbs steel lump at one end. If my brain kicks in I will return.
Bloody Windows.
Ah yes, Virtualbox. There's a fix for that - you need to change the Virtualisation options. Not so applicable to actual hardware though :).
Post by: TheLurker on 18 May, 2018, 08:01:40 am
This "developer" has a habit of going dark and not adding review invitations to his pull requests. This habit has been remarked upon repeatedly but he won't cooperate. Nuff sed?Grumble:
No I'll stop there. It's swamp code. ...snip...
Four thousand lines? For a single file? In 2018? Sheesh.
Who reviewed it? And who approved the merge to master?
This morning's extra special treat was three lines of code to change a file's extension using substring. Now this bloke has been using .Net for at least 14 years that I know of and he still hasn't heard of Path.ChangeExtension which has been there since .Net was in nappies.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 May, 2018, 12:43:11 pm
It would appear we now have two laptops in the household that refuse to install the Windows 10 "Creators Update" (FFS, really?) and keep whining about updating every few hours, only for it to fail once again if you (finally) capitulate to the nagging.
Bloody Windows.
Mine dun this. Switched off the Windows Update service and blew away the \Windows\Software Distribution sub-directory, switched updates back on, swore profusely and eventually downloaded the Windows Update Assistant from Microsith, which did the trick. It bypassed the failed install of 1709 (which I thought had installed successfully before Christmas!) and went straight to 1803.
Post by: TheLurker on 18 May, 2018, 06:21:19 pm
Two and half days on this so far. Of which half a day was making my changes and writing covering unit tests for those changes. The rest has been "refactoring" the rest of it by which I mean removing lines that...
Code: [Select]
// ... do nothing or
if (counter = 1 || (int)counter/50 == (double)counter/50) showProgress()
// ... apply tests for validity after the variable has already been used
if (!File.Exists(filePath)) someFunction(filePath); // filePath cannot be null/empty
if (string.IsNullOrWhitespace(filePath) {
logError("some random waffle");
continue = false
}
As well as extracting large lumps from the 4,000 line behemoth to other classes to try and get a degree of modularity and single responsibility established and just straightforward fixing of bugs that were obvious by inspection never mind
Hands up those .Net developers who don't know that Directory.CreateDirectory(someArbitraryPath) will create the full path all the way to the leaf directory and if someArbitraryPath already exists it will say "Fair enough chum" and leave well alone and there is absolutely no need to have three or four lines that create File/DirInfo vars to test for the existence before creating the directory? No-one? Thought so. Can I swap you for my colleague?
Oh and "falling rocks*" is bad enough, but turning it from a staircase/ladder into a pachinko machine must be a world's first
* "falling rocks"
Code: [Select]
bool continue = fnA();
continue = continue && fnB();
continue = continue && fnC();
:
continue = continue && fnZ();
return continue;
Ok there are times when you have to use this, but maybe, just maybe, throwing an exception might be a better alternative or even a simple early return?
Post by: David Martin on 19 May, 2018, 12:12:31 am
Post by: TheLurker on 19 May, 2018, 06:48:25 am
It is definitely poor undergraduate.I wish it was that good.
Post by: TheLurker on 08 June, 2018, 08:18:49 pm
Hands up any "professional" (i.e. paid for it) programmers here that don't know about the various string formatting specifiers available in the .Net Framework? None? Thought so. Today we had some VB6/VB.Net Framework 1.1 code in Framework 4.6 (might be Core 2) C# written in the last 3 months.
Code: [Select]
displayNumber = myNumber.ToString().PadLeft("0", 3);
When we could have had...
Code: [Select]
displayNumber = $@"{myNumber:D3}";
// Or even olde style
displayNumber = string.Format("{0:D3}", myNumber);
There were other code constructions off the Ark as well, but my morale is destroyed and I cannot face recounting them here.
Roll on death. His or mine, don't much care which.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 17 June, 2018, 03:23:47 pm
[1] Ignoring the compilation error, which I guess is not in the original, but only further demonstrates why having to remember random function arguments is vastly inferior to doing it the *right* way
Post by: TheLurker on 27 June, 2018, 08:06:36 pm
Ignore syntax errors in what follows, it's merely to give you another taste of what can happen in silo development with absolutely no peer review of code written by someone who resolutely refuses to try to stay within touching distance of modern coding techniques.
We'll start with a couple of very rough diagrams:
For object modelling types
+---------+
v |
[fred]<>----+
For data modelling types
+----------+
^ |
[fred]------+
The child in the relationship has an attribute Parent pointing to, yes well you can guess.
Code: [Select]
int level = -1;
if (this.Parent == null) {level =1;}
if (level < 0 && this.Parent.Parent == null) {level = 2;}
// Code elided to protect delicate sensibilities
if (level < 0 && this.Parent.Parent.Parent.Parent.Parent == null) {level = 5;}
if (level < 0) {throw new Exception("Possible circular reference.")}
I actually laughed out loud when I saw that. It doesn't even need recursion to do it properly, simple iteration can be used. Something like the very rough and untested fragment below.
Code: [Select]
int level = 0;
var parent = Parent;
while (parent != null) {
level++;
if (level > circularRefLimit) {throw new Exception("yada yada yada")}
parent = parent.Parent;
}
No I don't know what's supposed to happen if your starting instance has a null parent. Right now I really don't care.This piece of code has occupied nearly four weeks of my time and at least a week of my colleague's time plus the two or three months it took to "write" in the first place. $Deity help us.
Post by: Chris S on 27 June, 2018, 08:24:31 pm
Reminds me of the classic variable name:
var yourRealParentsAre = obj.Parent;
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 June, 2018, 04:32:42 am
SO WHY THE ACTUAL FUCK DID YOU WASTE MY BANDWIDTH AND TIME DOWNLOADING AND ATTEMPTING TO INSTALL AN UPDATE THAT WAS NEVER GOING TO FUCKING WORK, YOU IMBECILIC SPUNKFLUTES >:(
Post by: hellymedic on 11 July, 2018, 04:28:40 pm
Thank Glod I have some dishwashing to do!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 16 August, 2018, 07:23:18 pm
HOW long to install a Software Update?
Thank Glod I have some dishwashing to do!
Quite a long time, if it's my steam-powered laptop. It's been off for three months. Updates required for Windows, Open Office, Ccleaner, Notepad++, doPDF, Macrium Reflect, various FruitCo things and CoreTemp. Which all have to be given the once-over by the Windows Anti-Malware wossname. Which is quite capable of nomming 70% of the CPU without even asking permish.
The box is actually not that slow if you disable the Windows Update service.
Post by: Feanor on 16 August, 2018, 08:10:46 pm
It wanted a major version update which took overnight and failed at the first attempt, because it came out-of-the box with Pending Updates lurking in it, which required about 3 re-boot cycles to clear before another overnight session got the version update installed.
Then, I un-installed the preview version of Office 365 which wants a subscription, and installed full offline Office 2016.
Only, the un-install if 365 hadn't worked properly and the remenants were insisting on logging in and activating etc, even though the installed office was fully activated.
I had to use one of the MS fix-it tools to rip all of office out by the roots, then re-boot, then re-install Office 2016 which then worked fine.
Pet moan: why the hell do the un-installers not actually work properly?
It's fucking McAfee all over again.
Post by: Chris S on 16 August, 2018, 09:22:57 pm
Pet moan: why the hell do the un-installers not actually work properly?
If you've ever written code for Windows Installer, you'll know why - like many other Windows APIs, it's a bugger's muddle.
Office, like Visual Studio, uses a fully custom "Installation Experience" (over the top of the Windows Installer API) and IME, that's where it gets dirty - as soon as you stray off the prescribed path.
Sometimes installers do things that can't be undone, so the uninstaller doesn't do a perfectly symmetrical job.
Post by: Feanor on 16 August, 2018, 09:53:54 pm
But MS themselves seem to recognise the problem, and provide a fix-it tool to resolve the issue.
The same KB article tells you how to do it manually ( delete 10 million registry entries, and hidden files ).
So why can't the un-installer do the same thing?
It could if they chose it to do.
I think there's an assumption that you might want to subsequently want to re-install Office 365, and they retain a bunch of stuff to help with that.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 August, 2018, 11:11:42 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 August, 2018, 01:33:08 am
Who the actual fuck thought this was a good idea?
Post by: Pickled Onion on 29 August, 2018, 05:15:50 pm
Post by: ian on 29 August, 2018, 05:56:02 pm
I’m in Armenia searching hotels in Georgia. So YOYOY is Google maps showing prices in Hungarian Forints?
Because your internet is being delivered from Hungary, probably (or in some way they're using an IP range that is being recognised by the machines as being in the Magyar Republic). Our new mothership internet is evidently based in the Netherlands, it's clog central when it comes to adverts.
In other news, I get home, sit in front of computer for the first time in a week or so to peruse the internets. Everything powered up and peachy. Then *BANG* from behind the shiny iMac and a little swirl of smokes signs what looks like an expensive death warrant. Le grand sigh.
Went and flipped the circuit breaker and it turns out it wasn't the computer, it was the old Belkin router-as-an-access-point that sits behind it. Probably about fifteen years old and it certainly went out with a rather awesome bang. Hmm, now I can try to figure out how to make an old BT hub act as an access point. I figure I just start out with swearing at it. It'll be quicker.
Post by: Ham on 29 August, 2018, 05:56:43 pm
Post by: ian on 29 August, 2018, 06:02:42 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 29 August, 2018, 06:30:05 pm
I’m sure you’re right but Hungary’s flipping miles away on a different continentI’m in Armenia searching hotels in Georgia. So YOYOY is Google maps showing prices in Hungarian Forints?
Because your internet is being delivered from Hungary, probably (or in some way they're using an IP range that is being recognised by the machines as being in the Magyar Republic). Our new mothership internet is evidently based in the Netherlands, it's clog central when it comes to adverts.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 29 August, 2018, 06:43:39 pm
Where are you headed ? my info is seven years out of date, but when I looked most of the places I stayed in were on Airbnb
Tbilisi then the upper svaneti. The thing is I don’t know how far I’ll get each day on account of the mountains and state of the roads. So Airbnb is no use, there’s no mobile data here and in Georgia it’s about £300 a MB. I just need some idea if an area has a few guest houses on the route or if it’s a post-soviet industrial wasteland.
Post by: Ham on 29 August, 2018, 07:30:59 pm
You haven't mentioned how you are travelling, if you're cycling, good luck. There's a travel advisory against going into south Osetia which might be a route you take to upper svaneti, I would suggest heading west before north. If you have the opportunity, it is worth visiting David Garegi, and I preferred Shatili to the Svaneti. Both are glorious, but the Svaneti was being developed for tourism.
Anyhow, I would use Airbnb to get an address in a town, if they don't have a bed, they will take you to their cousin or some such.
ETA - realised you're cycling, scrap David Garegi, it's the other end of a desert with nothing much in it, beyond the hulk of a command economy village built where nobody wants to live (except for cows, they poke their heads out the ground floor windows and haven't quite worked out how to get upstairs to the hay. Shatili is also more remote and isolated than Svaneti, so probably not worth the bike detour.
Post by: Vince on 31 August, 2018, 11:59:08 am
Until last week.
I know you now need to get my permission to put cookies on my computer, but do you need to do it on every page of your site every time I visit?
Makes it almost completely unusable.
Post by: Jaded on 31 August, 2018, 05:50:30 pm
Several sites I go to ask me to state what cookies I’ll allow. I say none, and the next time I visit I have to tell them again. Surely they aren’t so stupid that they don’t keep a record of what users want?
Oh, and BBC,
CAN YOU STOP RESETTING PREFERENCES FOR AUTOPLAY ON YOUR CHUFFING VIDEO SECTIONS. IF I WANTED AUTOPLAY I WOULDN”T HAVE TURNED IT OFF, WOULD I!!!
Post by: Vince on 31 August, 2018, 06:42:59 pm
Chuffing cookies!
Several sites I go to ask me to state what cookies I’ll allow. I say none, and the next time I visit I have to tell them again. Surely they aren’t so stupid that they don’t keep a record of what users want?
They do store it... in a cookie... which you've denied them from using.
Post by: dave r on 02 September, 2018, 10:04:22 am
Chuffing cookies!
Several sites I go to ask me to state what cookies I’ll allow. I say none, and the next time I visit I have to tell them again. Surely they aren’t so stupid that they don’t keep a record of what users want?
Oh, and BBC,
CAN YOU STOP RESETTING PREFERENCES FOR AUTOPLAY ON YOUR CHUFFING VIDEO SECTIONS. IF I WANTED AUTOPLAY I WOULDN”T HAVE TURNED IT OFF, WOULD I!!!
I don't keep cookies I have the same problem, its annoying to keep being asked.
Post by: Jaded on 02 September, 2018, 10:07:58 am
Chuffing cookies!
Several sites I go to ask me to state what cookies I’ll allow. I say none, and the next time I visit I have to tell them again. Surely they aren’t so stupid that they don’t keep a record of what users want?
They do store it... in a cookie... which you've denied them from using.
I thought that might be the reason. If it is the case, they need to make one cookie to rule them all!
Post by: Jaded on 02 September, 2018, 10:08:55 am
Chuffing cookies!
Several sites I go to ask me to state what cookies I’ll allow. I say none, and the next time I visit I have to tell them again. Surely they aren’t so stupid that they don’t keep a record of what users want?
Oh, and BBC,
CAN YOU STOP RESETTING PREFERENCES FOR AUTOPLAY ON YOUR CHUFFING VIDEO SECTIONS. IF I WANTED AUTOPLAY I WOULDN”T HAVE TURNED IT OFF, WOULD I!!!
I don't keep cookies I have the same problem, its annoying to keep being asked.
The bbc is one of the sites I do allow cookies from, which makes it doubly annoying!
Post by: Afasoas on 02 September, 2018, 11:51:49 am
I know you like to cache lots of data because it makes your applications nice and responsive, but please spare a thought when blindly parallel.foreaching over the queries you use to load said data. DOSing the data tier isn't quite the way to go. Maybe instead you could use the native asynchronicity of the datastore driver and only invoke subsequent reads when the first spate of mutli-threaded reads is finished? After all, the responses to your applications are backing up in the data tier as your application can't process the responses as fast as the data tier is returning them. Ergo, this optimisation won't hurt.
Thanks
Grumpy Sysadmin
Post by: Tim Hall on 03 September, 2018, 10:17:47 pm
Post by: Pingu on 04 September, 2018, 05:36:31 pm
And the other day it dropped its wifi connection and not amount of bad language could persuade it to reconnect. Reboot; connection restored. Not long after, it did it again. After another reboot, the Internets told me that this was probably because some genius at Microsith had, during an update, enabled the option for Windholes to switch off the wifi adapter "to save power". Even when the fucking thing is plugged into the mains.
Who the actual fuck thought this was a good idea?
Ah - that may explain what happened to this lapdancer a couple of times.
Post by: Morat on 04 September, 2018, 11:11:30 pm
Reboot
Damnit, it tripped Bitlocker.
Now where's the password to the database of bitlocker keys?
Ahah, on my super safe USB key of useful stuff.
Which I had to empty onto my C drive in a hurry so I could copy some CCTV evidence last week
oh.. carp...
Post by: SoreTween on 05 September, 2018, 02:22:55 pm
Post by: ian on 05 September, 2018, 02:52:27 pm
Yes. Microsoft, I know I need to install the plug in. I've installed it multiple times. It's running there in my dock now.
The rather genius irony is that it's the Skype Meeting App that's asking me to install the Skype Meeting App. WTAF?
Post by: Jaded on 05 September, 2018, 05:08:54 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 September, 2018, 05:33:52 am
So how is it that I found, within five seconds of entering the details into a FWSE, a Win10 64-bit driver with a version number of 10.something dated April 2018?
Clicky, download, clicky, install, clicky, reconnect, cross fingers.
Post by: ScumOfTheRoad on 06 September, 2018, 06:49:55 am
Ahah, on my super safe USB key of useful stuff.
Which I had to empty onto my C drive in a hurry so I could copy some CCTV evidence last week
oh.. carp...
Do NOT do anything more. Do NOT pass go.
We might be able to rescue this. I am assuming you ave access to another system. There are recovery utilities available which will find deleted files.
The first tutility I would try is Sysrescue CD http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/
To be honest I dont know if there is a lost files utility on there, but I do know you can use it to scan for deleted partitions.
So take a fresh USB stick, burn the sysrescue CD to the USB stick and boot up your PC with the USB.
This is the utility for recovering deleted partitions
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Actually - I make an assumption here. You did NOT reformat the USB stick or did you?
In the case of not reformatting the file may well be recoverable.
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13706/recover-deleted-files-on-an-ntfs-hard-drive-from-a-ubuntu-live-cd/
This uses the utility ntfsundelete with Ubuntu. I woul imagine sysrescuecd has the same utility.
Post by: Jaded on 06 September, 2018, 07:04:58 am
Chuffing cookies!
Several sites I go to ask me to state what cookies I’ll allow. I say none, and the next time I visit I have to tell them again. Surely they aren’t so stupid that they don’t keep a record of what users want?
Oh, and BBC,
CAN YOU STOP RESETTING PREFERENCES FOR AUTOPLAY ON YOUR CHUFFING VIDEO SECTIONS. IF I WANTED AUTOPLAY I WOULDN”T HAVE TURNED IT OFF, WOULD I!!!
I don't keep cookies I have the same problem, its annoying to keep being asked.
The bbc is one of the sites I do allow cookies from, which makes it doubly annoying!
It must be how they have set up the process, because when I go to these sites that re-ask me for my cookie choices, they have kept me logged in with my identity for that site...
Post by: Kim on 08 September, 2018, 10:59:29 am
Post by: woollypigs on 08 September, 2018, 11:01:53 am
Post by: Kim on 08 September, 2018, 11:06:06 am
Post by: hulver on 11 September, 2018, 09:35:23 am
So go to
www.example.com
and the address bar will show.
example.com
Go to
www.m.www.m.www.m.example.com
and the address bar will show.
example.com
Great.
Post by: Feanor on 11 September, 2018, 10:19:07 am
When I type "192.168.1.1" I don't want to search the internet for that term!
I need to type explicitly: "http://192.168.1.1" which irritates me.
Post by: Kim on 11 September, 2018, 12:36:42 pm
On the other hand, it's been readily apparent since the 90s that people in general don't understand URLs. They barely grok the difference between the browser chrome[1] and the web page, so intelligent interpretation of DNS names isn't going to happen. Brower authors have tried to solve this by making a search engine text box and the address bar interchangeable, which does at least mean that when they type a URL into a search box, they don't get thwarted when whatever search engine has colonised the start page hasn't indexed the thing they want to go to.
Google know that people don't understand URLs and basically just search for things (I'm guilty of that myself - I barely even use bookmarks any more), so it makes sense for them to try to eliminate the address bar from the browsing experience. No good can come of it.
[1] Not to be confused with the browser, Chrome. Thanks Google. Clear as mud.
Post by: TheLurker on 12 September, 2018, 07:54:31 pm
All you sad-sacks condemned like me to work in the M$ salt mines may wish to make all your value type properties on types used in controller methods nullable. Why? Because if your incoming JSON containing "fred" : null and your type's Fred property is not nullable the binding shrugs its shoulders as above. Yes, yes you may get null exceptions in your code, but at least you'll know WTF is going and where it's going wrong.
Very nearly a whole morning (approx 0.002% of my remaining life span*) pissed up against a wall working out that one.
*Based on generally accepted actuarial values for a man of my generation.
Post by: Ham on 13 September, 2018, 07:53:28 am
Microsoft. Stop being so effing clever, clever. If the incoming JSON can't be mapped [FromBody] into the designated type then throw a sodding exception don't just shrug your bloody shoulders and hand on a null instance of the type. That's no bloody use at all. Pillocks.
All you sad-sacks condemned like me to work in the M$ salt mines may wish to make all your value type properties on types used in controller methods nullable. Why? Because if your incoming JSON containing "fred" : null and your type's Fred property is not nullable the binding shrugs its shoulders as above. Yes, yes you may get null exceptions in your code, but at least you'll know WTF is going and where it's going wrong.
Very nearly a whole morning (approx 0.002% of my remaining life span*) pissed up against a wall working out that one.
*Based on generally accepted actuarial values for a man of my generation.
I don't suppose Microsoft are any better with their decimal placing either, Methuselah
Post by: jsabine on 13 September, 2018, 10:12:50 am
Very nearly a whole morning (approx 0.002% of my remaining life span*) pissed up against a wall working out that one.
*Based on generally accepted actuarial values for a man of my generation.
I don't suppose Microsoft are any better with their decimal placing either, Methuselah
Even assuming 6 hours for the lost morning, that still gives something over 34 years of lurking to come. That doesn't seem excessive to me.
Post by: Ham on 13 September, 2018, 05:11:37 pm
Very nearly a whole morning (approx 0.002% of my remaining life span*) pissed up against a wall working out that one.
*Based on generally accepted actuarial values for a man of my generation.
I don't suppose Microsoft are any better with their decimal placing either, Methuselah
Even assuming 6 hours for the lost morning, that still gives something over 34 years of lurking to come. That doesn't seem excessive to me.
Yes, but you've left out the effect of forgetting to divide by 24. :-[
Post by: TheLurker on 13 September, 2018, 07:21:49 pm
Post by: jsabine on 14 September, 2018, 01:03:50 am
Yes, but you've left out the effect of forgetting to divide by 24. :-[
Yes, that would do it ...
Post by: ian on 14 September, 2018, 09:48:56 pm
Now BA have my credit card details. And probably the all blessed hackers of Mother Russia. Who are using it to buy 23-inch dildos and novichok on the DarkNet. That's going to be the credit card statement.
And in addition to not working: the cryptic 'we're sorry, this hasn't worked, why don't you try again later' which is about the most useless error message ever. I tried drinking an entire beer (a Moose Springsteen!) and it still didn't work.
And sites that make you type in all sixteen digits of your credit card number without a break. There's a fucking reason they split the number into blocks of four you numbskulls of online form design.
Post by: Sergeant Pluck on 14 September, 2018, 09:53:07 pm
Quote
Please click on the 'I don't have a username' link below, if you'd like to register for online banking but are already registered for our mobile app or telephone banking.
If you would like to register for online banking but are not registered for our mobile app or telephone banking, please register for online banking here.
Post by: Genosse Brymbo on 16 September, 2018, 12:34:47 pm
::-)
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 18 September, 2018, 11:41:28 am
Post by: Gattopardo on 19 September, 2018, 07:58:53 am
Spent ages looking in to this and now it just works again ???
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 September, 2018, 09:32:23 am
Post by: ian on 28 September, 2018, 12:24:24 pm
Except it didn't, because they're still in Office, but not available elsewhere.
Some noodling and the fonts are part of the application package but not in the system fonts. Uh? Because no one would ever, ever want to use a bloody font outside of Office. Just put them with the other fucking fonts, you font fucking fuck ducks. Installed them manually.
Sheesh.
Post by: pcolbeck on 01 October, 2018, 09:03:53 pm
Post by: dave r on 10 October, 2018, 11:37:24 am
Post by: Gattopardo on 11 October, 2018, 08:55:46 pm
Now that doesn't want to work any more just green light and nothing.
So my repairing skills aren't long lasting...bugger.
Post by: ian on 31 October, 2018, 10:24:55 am
Sorry, I can't do that, would you like me to read the timetable so you can play guess whether or not the train is running?
OK, Alexa arm my outside security cameras so I can be safe from bears and clowns and stuff attacking my house.
Sorry...
I'm pushing back Judgement Day a few months.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 November, 2018, 08:48:55 am
Clicky clicky install install and all goes swimmingly until iTunes. iTunes tells me it cannot access C:\Program File\iTunes, because privileges. It has a point, because I can't access it either, and I'm an Admin. I cancel the install, which takes ages, and check again. Nope, still can't access it. Do system restore. Oh, look! The security settings on C:\Program Files\iTunes are back to what they should be!
Try update again, one piece at a time, keeping a weather eye on the security settings. Shortly after beginning the iTunes update, the folder becomes inaccessible. Yes, FruitCo's update thing is FUBARing the security settings ON THE FOLDER IT'S TRYING TO INSTALL TO!
System restore. Uninstall iTunes. Update other FruitCo products. Install iTunes. Security settings remain untrammelled.
Perform updates on PC in Great Hall. It all works.
Stop it, FruitCo! Just fucking stop it and sort yourselves out!
Post by: woollypigs on 01 November, 2018, 09:44:27 am
That said phone updated it supply of cookies to Oreo's. But decided that a few of the apps I had, I did not need anymore. So I went into play store to install it again to be told that it is installed, yet clicking open the app - nada happens. Looking in the list of apps on system, it ain't there. Uninstall app and reinstall app was the only way to get in
Post by: ian on 01 November, 2018, 10:47:30 am
Post by: Kim on 01 November, 2018, 12:29:04 pm
Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, I am losing patience. "Update me!" say various iProducts so, rather than download 400 GB three times – once on each PC running iProducts – I select "Download Only". Then I can, and do, copy the stuff to a network drive and it will appear in the right place on the other boxes as is by legerdemain.
Used to be that non-sensitive things got downloaded over unencrypted http from a static URL, and the tame cephalopod in the cupboard could take care of making sure you only had to download big updates once, and make image-laden web pages load blindingly quickly, even over our-favourite-telco's wet string.
While I'm sympathetic to the principle of encrypting everything on the wire to make things difficult for The Man, it does seem like a retrograde step at times.
Quote
Clicky clicky install install and all goes swimmingly until iTunes. iTunes tells me it cannot access C:\Program File\iTunes, because privileges.
iTunes on Windows is surely one of the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation's most effective methods of persuading people to buy a Mac...
Post by: woollypigs on 01 November, 2018, 01:13:24 pm
iTunes on Windows is surely one of the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation's most effective methods of persuading people to buy a Mac...In my experience with iTunes, I clearly do not want to get a iThing.
Post by: ian on 01 November, 2018, 01:19:06 pm
The store is still painfully slow and glitchy to download a purchase though. If I were more paranoid, I'd assume it's a purposeful nudge from purchase-and-download towards Apple Music...
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 01 November, 2018, 03:21:45 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 November, 2018, 10:52:51 am
Post by: SoreTween on 07 November, 2018, 12:36:18 pm
Currently trying to get Mrs Tweens Windows 10 laptop to join the whiffy on the new router. What a loathesome experience. After fighting through the toytown UI running at glacial speed I told it to forget the network (new router has same SSID but different password) and provided the new credentials. Naturally, this being windows that didn't work so I tried again. Twice. What worked was to forget the whiffy, reboot and then providing the new credentials. What a steaming turd pile.
Still, the good thing about these rare excursions into Win10 is they always reinforce my resolve to complete my own transition out of M$ land by the Jan 14 2020. A mission that is proceeding well.
* A relation - he's an idiot and he lives in a village
Post by: ian on 07 November, 2018, 01:19:13 pm
This said, I'd prefer it's minimalism not to be so minimal that it doesn't bother to tell me that the backup drive has shuffled off its mortal coil and thus has not been unduly bothered about collecting any bytes subsequently jiggled post-November 1.
Post by: Kim on 07 November, 2018, 01:32:02 pm
Post by: ian on 07 November, 2018, 07:00:36 pm
Other than that, the occasional roll-back to a previous version is a handy feature of TM. Important stuff floats atop the cloud thing.
But still, some kind of warning that there's no longer a TM disk available and thusly no backups being made would be useful. Invalid record count, apparently. Off to disk heaven you go, chunky old Maxtor.
Post by: grams on 07 November, 2018, 07:15:15 pm
(I used to use this as a reminder to rotate between a pair of backup drives, when I used to keep one of them at work)
Post by: ian on 07 November, 2018, 07:22:46 pm
I'd still have liked a reminder before a week, mind you.
Post by: SoreTween on 12 November, 2018, 09:14:26 am
Sigh.
Post by: ian on 12 November, 2018, 09:25:26 am
You know, I never knew it was doing that – but yes, it evidently is still keeping snapshots. Obviously not super-useful if your HD dies, though it seems rare for SSDs to go the ways of spinning rust.
I'd still have liked a reminder before a week, mind you.
Ten days apparently.
As I am replacing the disk with more svelte Toshiba replacement. (Well, to make life complicated, swapping the contents of the previous external disk with the new one, and then using the older, smaller disk for TM – a process that is still slowly drawing a progress bar across the Disk Utility window, oh well at least one of us working this Monday morning, the other needs coffee first).
Post by: ian on 12 November, 2018, 11:55:06 am
The dead drive is apparently alive. I think the issue is that it, for some reason, doesn't correctly unmount when the machine sleeps and if it's halfway through a backup, then it corrupts (always restarts with a 'disk didn't correctly...'). Inexplicably (to me), the other USB drive (and now TM drive) always unmounted properly when the machine goes to sleep. It wouldn't seem to much to ask, given one of the more convenient features of a Mac is the instant sleep and wake (did they ever figure that out for Windows?)
Not sure what I need another half terabyte of storage for. To the understairs cupboard of IT shame and spaghetti-esque wiring it goes.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 November, 2018, 01:11:59 pm
Edit: fixed after much jibbling in the registry. Say after me, Microsith, "C:\Program Files (x86)" and "C:\Program Files" are not the same thing.
Post by: Pingu on 23 November, 2018, 12:28:32 pm
Post by: ian on 23 November, 2018, 12:53:10 pm
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Microsoft for switching the keys (on a Mac) for creating an array formula from cmd+enter to ctrl+shift+enter which, as the former is engraved into my brain, means I always press the wrong ones and then have to go and fucking well reselect everything.
Post by: Jaded on 24 November, 2018, 12:07:52 am
Post by: ian on 28 November, 2018, 08:08:10 pm
Post by: woollypigs on 29 November, 2018, 01:50:50 pm
I open it up, tray moved out and I took the ink out. Left it on and lid open. Went to the shop to get new ink. When I returned the little fecker had moved the tray into its naughty corner.
AND NOW THE BLEEPING THING DO NOT WANT TO COME OUT AGAIN !
All the little fecker says there ain't any ink to be found, please open lid to put some in !
Post by: ian on 21 December, 2018, 03:30:19 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 21 December, 2018, 08:29:00 pm
Another special festive shoutout to Cisco and the team behind the abominable AnyConnect VPN client and anyone responsible on foisting this second-rate piece of shit on the denizens of any corporate mothership. I hope you all fucking get run over by a runaway sleigh this holiday. And that the reindeer have rabies and come back and bite you in the face.Oh fuck. They're swapping us over to that from a.n.other VPN in the next fortnight or so.
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 26 December, 2018, 02:35:26 pm
Touchscreen - NO
tried it on 2 other computers, exactly the same.
Bought another one in case it was the monitor. No touchscreen.
Buy a different brand - works perfectly out of the box.
Conclusion: Magelok is a load of C**p
Post by: Kim on 31 December, 2018, 12:40:11 am
This is the only guaranteed way to prevent your parents from accumulating endless gigabytes of misleadingly catalogued[1] blurry smartphone photos of random children. And emails with blurry photos of random children attached. And emails with attached word documents of embedded wrong-aspect-ratio bitmaps of blurry photos of random children. And scans of inkjet printouts of blurry photos of random children. And folders where random selections of blurry photos of random children have been uploaded to a photo-printing service so they can be made into booklets to be given to elderly relatives. Some of it's video. And so on, all the way down. With the occasional important legal document buried n layers deep where nobody will ever find it except by accident.
And it's all precious and irreplaceable, which means it's your job to protect it from the disk fairy. The only sane approach is to channel said parent's money to the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia in the hope that iCloud will maintain a secure copy of the whole sorry mess.
I fear for the archaeologists of the future.
[1] The trick of prepending filenames with increasing numbers of 'A' characters to denote importance is as close as it gets to a system. The EXIF data with a creation date two years later than the last modified date (neither of which were 1970-01-01) was a particular work of art, I thought.
Post by: Karla on 31 December, 2018, 01:14:48 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 January, 2019, 11:14:42 am
Jolly decent of you to provide a free viewer to open .mcd files. Two things:
- Telling me the files I file to inspect are "too old1" is Not Helpful
- How the bastard fuck do you uninstall it when it appears neither in the Programs & Features list in Control Panel nor the equivalent in CCleaner?
1. I mean, they're only twenty years old, FFS (and created on a Macintrash)
Post by: TheLurker on 08 January, 2019, 07:20:52 pm
Great. Years* of trouble free use of the previous VPN client. Third day with NayConnect and it fucks up. Tells me I'm connected, but can I see any of the network? Can I cocoa. And to rub salt into the wound IT support have contrived it so that calls disconnect when you press the button to wait for someone instead of, "Using the intranet to log your problem." You know, the intranet I cannot effing well connect to. Words fail me.Another special festive shoutout to Cisco and the team behind the abominable AnyConnect VPN client and anyone responsible on foisting this second-rate piece of shit on the denizens of any corporate mothership. I hope you all fucking get run over by a runaway sleigh this holiday. And that the reindeer have rabies and come back and bite you in the face.Oh fuck. They're swapping us over to that from a.n.other VPN in the next fortnight or so.
*At least 2 since the last glitch and that was caused by large network outage so not the VPN client's fault.
Post by: Feanor on 09 January, 2019, 10:56:20 am
Mail server, webmail server, FTP server all timing out.
Line still in sync and PPP is up. (AAISP control pages )
Can ping both WAN and LAN sides of the firewall, but nothing beyond.
Looks like core switch failure from here.
Will need to wait till I get home to investigate.
Post by: fuaran on 10 January, 2019, 12:19:22 am
Is there any decent PDF software with proper forms support? Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader are both full of bloatware, adverts, and bundled crap in the installer.
Post by: Kim on 10 January, 2019, 01:38:52 pm
PDF forms. What is the point in them? Why can't you just use a webform, or a Word doc if needs to be a file.
Is there any decent PDF software with proper forms support? Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader are both full of bloatware, adverts, and bundled crap in the installer.
This might be a barakta question. AIUI PDF forms are usually an opportunity for organisations to cock up accessibility in exciting new ways, but done properly they avoid the dog's breakfast that Word tends to produce when people try to use it for, well, editing documents.
"Why can't you just use a webform?" is presumably because J Random Office Worker is more likely to have access to Acrobat than a suitable CMS or whatever, rather than any offline idealism.
Post by: ian on 10 January, 2019, 02:40:36 pm
Post by: spesh on 10 January, 2019, 02:48:21 pm
Honestly, the clusterfuckup that Adobe made ofboth forms and annotations in PDF has been a mystery for a long time. Initially, it was a quest to keepeverythingproprietary until they realised that no, people weren't going to buy Acrobat to fill in a form. The result: a useless mess.
;)
Post by: Kim on 10 January, 2019, 03:39:34 pm
Honestly, the clusterfuckup that Adobe made ofboth forms and annotations in PDF has been a mystery for a long time. Initially, it was a quest to keepeverythingproprietary until they realised that no, people weren't going to buy Acrobat to fill in a form. The result: a useless mess.
;)
Their Type 1 fonts were okay...
Post by: ian on 10 January, 2019, 04:08:02 pm
Post by: vorsprung on 10 January, 2019, 04:35:15 pm
Adobe do seem fairly intent on their own long-term self-destruction. Few companies have planned their own demise with such forethought and diligence.
TBF this is a strongly contented category so they have to try very hard
Post by: Kim on 10 January, 2019, 05:14:28 pm
Adobe do seem fairly intent on their own long-term self-destruction. Few companies have planned their own demise with such forethought and diligence.
TBF this is a strongly contented category so they have to try very hard
Borging Macromedia was a stroke of genius in this respect. They were suddenly responsible for everything that was annoying on the web.
Post by: hellymedic on 13 January, 2019, 05:05:14 pm
Searching seems to suggest this is due to modern lead-free solder failure.
APPLE
JUST
WORKS
Post by: Kim on 13 January, 2019, 05:24:49 pm
To be fair, it's not like the alternatives aren't afflicted with lead-free solder too - the only way to avoid that stuff is to build it from scratch using juicy lead-based solder as a hobbyist or to buy kit that's rated for military/space/life-critical applications, none of which apply to iMacs. This is what warranties are for.
At least when it ends up in a Chinese landfill, it won't leach lead into the groundwater...
(TBH, Apple's Just Working credentials are a software thing. They certainly don't apply to power cables, anyway.)
Post by: ian on 13 January, 2019, 05:47:39 pm
The benefit of Apple in my experience is that you can wander into their shop and look suitably pained.
Post by: Kim on 13 January, 2019, 06:08:00 pm
I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect any computer to never fail.
It's approximately doable[1], but it'll be a very expensive computer with all the performance you'd expect of a machine from the 1990s, and will likely run VxWorks or something as an OS.
The compromises we accept for a desktop PC are very different from those for a flight computer on a trip to Pluto. Performance, reliability, cost and presence of various substances are all part of that.
If you really need an iMac not to fail, your best bet is to buy two iMacs, put one on the shelf, and keep some money aside to buy/repair iMacs in future. This will cost a lot more than a single iMac, but should be good enough for most purposes.
[1] At least for small values of 'never'
Post by: ian on 13 January, 2019, 06:19:19 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 13 January, 2019, 07:44:13 pm
One day someone brought in a Sony. "Do you know why you've never seen one of those in here before?" the boss said. "No, why?" I said. 90% of what we fixed were Ferguson T10 or rebadged clones. "Pick it up." It weighed at least twice as much as any other telly in the shop. "That's the weight of the extra solder they use. You never see a dry joint on one of those." Of course Sony have since had to follow everyone else in building down to a price.
Post by: Kim on 13 January, 2019, 08:03:36 pm
It's not even a lead-free solder thing. Solder joints have always been the commonest source of complex electronics failing.
With a possible drop to second place during the capacitor plague years.
Post by: hellymedic on 13 January, 2019, 10:12:55 pm
I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect any computer to never fail.
It's approximately doable[1], but it'll be a very expensive computer with all the performance you'd expect of a machine from the 1990s, and will likely run VxWorks or something as an OS.
The compromises we accept for a desktop PC are very different from those for a flight computer on a trip to Pluto. Performance, reliability, cost and presence of various substances are all part of that.
If you really need an iMac not to fail, your best bet is to buy two iMacs, put one on the shelf, and keep some money aside to buy/repair iMacs in future. This will cost a lot more than a single iMac, but should be good enough for most purposes.
[1] At least for small values of 'never'
Suspect if you did that you'd be thwarted by OS updates and unsupported/supportable software.
David tried continuing to work on his presentation on his old MacBook. Couldn't open Keynote presentation as OS is too old to support it. He is currently using my MacBook and I am on his. I don't know all my log-ins and its Notes on the Cloud seem not to have updated. I really don't want to disturb David so I'm not on Twitter or email...
Post by: Kim on 13 January, 2019, 10:18:53 pm
I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect any computer to never fail.
It's approximately doable[1], but it'll be a very expensive computer with all the performance you'd expect of a machine from the 1990s, and will likely run VxWorks or something as an OS.
The compromises we accept for a desktop PC are very different from those for a flight computer on a trip to Pluto. Performance, reliability, cost and presence of various substances are all part of that.
If you really need an iMac not to fail, your best bet is to buy two iMacs, put one on the shelf, and keep some money aside to buy/repair iMacs in future. This will cost a lot more than a single iMac, but should be good enough for most purposes.
[1] At least for small values of 'never'
Suspect if you did that you'd be thwarted by OS updates and unsupported/supportable software.
Agreed. TBH, the spare-one-on-the-shelf approach only makes sense if you really can't tolerate downtime. Moore's Law dictates that otherwise you're generally better off waiting until it breaks before buying a new one, on the basis that by the time the first one breaks, the new one will be cheaper or better.
Murphy's law dictates that this will imply a forklift upgrade of whatever is involved, with exciting new incompatibilities dumped on you at the least convenient moment.
Post by: hellymedic on 14 January, 2019, 12:09:02 am
We'll get David's iMac fixed and he's now used my MacBook to export a Keynote 09 version of his presentation to his kit.
Looks like we'll have major purchases ahead - probably at least a new iMac; he might not need a new laptop because he has a recent iPad.
All fairly spendy.
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 14 January, 2019, 01:53:06 am
Post by: hellymedic on 14 January, 2019, 02:02:30 am
Post by: ian on 14 January, 2019, 09:29:40 am
Post by: Kim on 14 January, 2019, 12:16:30 pm
Post by: ian on 14 January, 2019, 12:47:54 pm
Post by: Jaded on 14 January, 2019, 01:34:11 pm
How old is it? You get fair mileage from the Apple store from quoting sale of goods regulations even on out-of-warranty computers, or they may offer a replacement refurb at reasonable rates.
Definitely know your consumer law. They tend not to, and in the past I felt they were being guided by US law, not EU/UK.
Post by: hellymedic on 14 January, 2019, 01:37:22 pm
It's gone of to Digbeth for repair.
Courier came at midday for collection.
David spent the night shuttling between his 2009 Macbook, my 2012 Macbook and his 2017 iPad, hitting the hay at 0745.
He managed to get a creditable presentation together despite the technology, which seems to conspire against those using older versions of software.
Post by: Diver300 on 14 January, 2019, 10:48:15 pm
Sent again with a few word in the subject and the body, and it was fine.
More frustratingly, when I go back and look now, the attachment is there to be found in the subjectless email.
Post by: Feanor on 14 January, 2019, 11:03:10 pm
ionos webmail refused to let me see or download an email attachment when there was no subject or text in the mail. There was a paper clip icon in the list of emails, but no such icon when I selected the email to collect the attachement.
Sent again with a few word in the subject and the body, and it was fine.
More frustratingly, when I go back and look now, the attachment is there to be found in the subjectless email.
Might just have been slowness between the actual mail server and the Webmail host.
The Webmail host may have been struggling to download the attachment in a timely enough manner to offer it up to the web client.
I sometimes see this on my self-hosted IMAP/Webmail because the IMAP is hosted on a rather slow machine, and the Webmail server can get a bit bored waiting for it to keep up.
Post by: pcolbeck on 18 January, 2019, 04:06:18 pm
Post by: Pingu on 27 January, 2019, 10:46:16 pm
Post by: Pingu on 28 January, 2019, 12:26:01 am
Post by: ian on 30 January, 2019, 05:23:38 pm
Who at Microsoft thought it was reasonable for Outlook to download a copy of every single email received or sent ever? That's over a fucking decade and umpteen GBs. And there appears to be no setting to select a time period to synchronize. I don't want a local copy of every email ever.
Swears profusely, goes back to Mail.
Post by: Kim on 30 January, 2019, 05:58:35 pm
WTF on the Grauniad website is using so much processor time and melting my lapdog, hmm ??? :demon:
It has a network bandwidth habit too. On several occasions I've peered suspiciously at my traffic graphs, wondered if something has been pwned and is now part of a botnet, only to discover that barakta has left some forgotten Grauniad tab open in her browser.
Post by: ian on 30 January, 2019, 07:32:31 pm
Post by: Feanor on 30 January, 2019, 07:41:13 pm
For reasons I thought I'd finally move over from Mail to Outlook on my mothership Macbook.
Who at Microsoft thought it was reasonable for Outlook to download a copy of every single email received or sent ever? That's over a fucking decade and umpteen GBs. And there appears to be no setting to select a time period to synchronize. I don't want a local copy of every email ever.
Swears profusely, goes back to Mail.
My expectations from an e-mail client are quite different between a Proper Computer and a mobile device.
As a traditional PC user, with a background in POP3, I expect all my mail to locally available on a proper PC.
That makes searching for old stuff much easier.
On a mobile device, with limited storage space, I can see why you would only want the last 50 or so e-mails, and that works well for that form factor device.
Now I'm using IMAP for everything, I like that Thunderbird on my PC has local copies of everything back to the year dot, but my mobile devices have only the recent past.
Different devices, different usage scenarios, different storage capacities.
Post by: ian on 30 January, 2019, 07:52:59 pm
Maybe I should cmd-A and hit [delete]. It's not like I'm going to answer them.
Post by: Kim on 30 January, 2019, 08:00:10 pm
For reasons I thought I'd finally move over from Mail to Outlook on my mothership Macbook.
Who at Microsoft thought it was reasonable for Outlook to download a copy of every single email received or sent ever? That's over a fucking decade and umpteen GBs. And there appears to be no setting to select a time period to synchronize. I don't want a local copy of every email ever.
Swears profusely, goes back to Mail.
My expectations from an e-mail client are quite different between a Proper Computer and a mobile device.
As a traditional PC user, with a background in POP3, I expect all my mail to locally available on a proper PC.
That makes searching for old stuff much easier.
My compromise is to have the IMAP server on the LAN with the proper PC. So searching the archive is acceptably fast without allowing thunderbollocks to run amok on the local SSD. The mobile devices can suck the last 50 messages up the ADSL as needed when away from home.
The real question is why Outlook doesn't allow you to choose which behaviour you would like.
Post by: ian on 30 January, 2019, 08:15:48 pm
Post by: woollypigs on 02 February, 2019, 06:47:16 pm
Oh now win10 says it have found the printer, after a reboot, and needs to download a driver. I have had this printer for 5 years and you have been connected to this system for 2 years. So how the feck can you just forget the drivers.
man I hate printers
Post by: barakta on 02 February, 2019, 11:21:27 pm
This hearing aid is SHIT. It doesn't understand "switch programme" and it takes over 1-2 seconds to register at best so I'm having to press the shitty button, wait wait wait, then press again, all while someone (usually Kim) is trying to speak to me.
At least Kim understands me signing one handed insults at the fucking thing (at my head) cos she knows it is shit. At work I have to verbalise "Hang on a minute, trying to change my hearing aid programme, it's a bit slow, no that didn't work, hang on, trying again, no, third time lucky"... 10 seconds later...
*sets fire to modern shitty hearing aids*
Post by: ian on 03 February, 2019, 06:16:43 pm
I presume there's some voltage threshold and below that the phone shuts down regardless of whether there's any charge lingering in the battery.
Post by: Kim on 03 February, 2019, 06:21:33 pm
Chromium: Refusing to start because you can't find an AAC codec library? Really? WTF?
Seriously, if I wanted updates that randomly broke things, I'd run Windows.
Post by: ian on 04 February, 2019, 02:00:10 pm
Post by: grams on 04 February, 2019, 05:09:38 pm
I presume there's some voltage threshold and below that the phone shuts down regardless of whether there's any charge lingering in the battery.
Phone battery power use is very spikey, so a knackered battery may sit at a reasonable voltage while idle, but as soon as the CPU kicks in to do anything and draws big watts the voltage plummets enough to kill the phone.
(some iPhones limit CPU speed (https://ifixit.org/blog/11208/batterygate-timeline/) when they detect a duff battery to try to prevent this, although that wasn't popular with users either)
Post by: ian on 04 February, 2019, 05:37:06 pm
I presume there's some voltage threshold and below that the phone shuts down regardless of whether there's any charge lingering in the battery.
Phone battery power use is very spikey, so a knackered battery may sit at a reasonable voltage while idle, but as soon as the CPU kicks in to do anything and draws big watts the voltage plummets enough to kill the phone.
(some iPhones limit CPU speed (https://ifixit.org/blog/11208/batterygate-timeline/) when they detect a duff battery to try to prevent this, although that wasn't popular with users either)
It was straining to hold onto a very weak 3G signal.
Anyway, battery health says 'service' which isn't a surprise, it's an old iPhone 6 that's been used continuously since late 2014 – that's a hefty number of charge cycles.
Unless I read the internet wrong, it seems Apple replace the battery for £45, which is less than I'd imagined.
'Performance management' is what Apple call the throttling these days – you can override it in the settings.
Post by: Jaded on 04 February, 2019, 06:00:52 pm
Mine, which has a new battery about 14 months ago as the previous one had a recall) was at 50% on Saturday, then *boof* all the magic telltale things in the software say the battery is healthy. It cannot cope with a low signal and GPS stuff at the same time. Pah!
Post by: Kim on 04 February, 2019, 06:05:25 pm
I presume there's some voltage threshold and below that the phone shuts down regardless of whether there's any charge lingering in the battery.
Phone battery power use is very spikey, so a knackered battery may sit at a reasonable voltage while idle, but as soon as the CPU kicks in to do anything and draws big watts the voltage plummets enough to kill the phone.
(some iPhones limit CPU speed (https://ifixit.org/blog/11208/batterygate-timeline/) when they detect a duff battery to try to prevent this, although that wasn't popular with users either)
It was straining to hold onto a very weak 3G signal.
There you go then. The cellular radio is even more spiky in its current draw than the CPU is likely to be.
Post by: Jaded on 04 February, 2019, 06:10:46 pm
https://eustore.ifixit.com/en/Parts/iPhone-Parts/iPhone-6s-Plus/iPhone-6s-Plus-Replacement-Battery-Fix-Kit-oxid-1.html?cur=1&lang=1
Post by: ian on 04 February, 2019, 06:34:28 pm
Replacing the battery is surely a job for grown-ups (admittedly ones with little fingers, though not that chap, it's bad enough for everyone that he's got his own phone, he's not having mine).
Post by: rafletcher on 05 February, 2019, 10:22:28 am
Unless I read the internet wrong, it seems Apple replace the battery for £45, which is less than I'd imagined.
You didn't, they do.
Post by: ian on 05 February, 2019, 03:31:14 pm
Though I might make sad eyes and see if they'll give me a discount on a new phone. That said, I'm happy with an iPhone 6 and I won't have the palaver of moving everything to a new phone (plus I still get completely free data and internet, and EE might finally notice...)
I'm surprised the battery has lasted this long tbh, like any thoroughly modern boy I wander around in the fug of electromagnetic radiation it's expected to constantly pump out.
Post by: rafletcher on 05 February, 2019, 09:27:19 pm
Post by: ian on 11 February, 2019, 10:30:30 am
Moving to a new phone takes about 15 minutes now using the Cloud backup/restore. And if it’s the same SIM EE will be none the wiser. That said the 6 is still a good phone.
That almost worked, unfortunately it bleated 'wrong version of iOS' because there's just been an update. There'd be more swearing but it was a simple case of setting up the phone as a new one, downloading the update, than then restoring. That said, it would have been even simpler if it had simply offered to download the update initially. Still, worked well and even remembered which browser tabs I had open.
Yeah, the evil minions of the shiny store got their claws into me, and I wandered out with two new iPhone XRs rather than re-batteried iPhone 6s. They offered a decent trade-in for our current phones, so...
Post by: TheLurker on 11 February, 2019, 09:12:32 pm
Quote from: ian
... it was a simple case of ...This is a new definition of "simple" of which I was unaware. Not only that but it also sounds like a dodgy bit of plot exposition from a particularly cheap and nasty science fiction "epic". That or a late 1970s episode of Doctor Who.
Post by: ian on 11 February, 2019, 09:38:14 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 13 February, 2019, 10:28:40 am
Who at Microsoft thought it was reasonable for Outlook to download a copy of every single email received or sent ever?Someone who needs a pay rise IMO. Having recently been issued a new laptop at work I'm going through the nauseating process yet again of finding someone in IBM support with a) sufficient clue to understands the concept 'internet not always available' and b) sufficient clue to set up Outlook 363 to download a copy of everything.
My expectations from an e-mail client are quite different between a Proper Computer and a mobile device.I agree with things varying but I have the reverse expectation.
As a traditional PC user, with a background in POP3, I expect all my mail to locally available on a proper PC.
That makes searching for old stuff much easier.
On a mobile device, with limited storage space, I can see why you would only want the last 50 or so e-mails, and that works well for that form factor device.
A desktop just sits there attached to the power and network.
A laptop goes with me to meetings at client offices (fill in this form and wait two weeks for guest access, repeat for each building you visit). A laptop goes with me on flights. A laptop goes with me to places the power isn't even on yet and likely never will have internet access nor phone coverage.
The real question is why Outlook doesn't allow you to choose which behaviour you would like.This.
Post by: ian on 13 February, 2019, 05:51:04 pm
Computers, the 21st century labour-saving invention, freeing us up to the do the more important things.
Post by: Kim on 19 February, 2019, 05:08:55 pm
Post by: JonBuoy on 19 February, 2019, 08:04:13 pm
I see the Met Office website has been redesigned to maximise the amount of scrolling (particularly horizontal scrolling) you have to do. I bet they've had some polo-necked conslutant with an iPad tell them it's a good idea.
Forget the scrolling - who writes this crap ?
Quote
Gusts will be strong enough to make small trees sway by the evening, but it shouldn't blow you over.
Quote
Noticeably gusty, umbrellas may become hard to use.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 February, 2019, 12:43:47 pm
Post by: FifeingEejit on 20 February, 2019, 01:19:22 pm
I see the Met Office website has been redesigned to maximise the amount of scrolling (particularly horizontal scrolling) you have to do. I bet they've had some polo-necked conslutant with an iPad tell them it's a good idea.
Forget the scrolling - who writes this crap ?QuoteGusts will be strong enough to make small trees sway by the evening, but it shouldn't blow you over.QuoteNoticeably gusty, umbrellas may become hard to use.
That sounds like Geoff Monk of MWIS trying to convert his forecasting style for a more general audience.
Post by: TheLurker on 08 March, 2019, 04:48:56 pm
Colleagues. The .Net framework has many ways of partitioning chunks of code by responsibility, classes and namespaces spring instantly to mind, so why did you think it was such a brilliant idea to drop all of those methods, there were 15, I counted them, in a "general" area and name them using the (anti-)pattern {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName01}, {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName02}, ... {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName15}?
Pitiful.
Post by: Genosse Brymbo on 08 March, 2019, 07:31:07 pm
... name them using the (anti-)pattern {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName01}, {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName02}, ... {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName15}?I do hope the naming convention placed appropriately small lengths on the BusinessProcess and MethodNameNN. One wouldn't want to exceed the assembler's limits for identifiers.
Post by: TheLurker on 09 March, 2019, 08:30:03 pm
I do hope the naming convention...Don't get me started on that.
"Thou shalt use Hungarian warts on thy variables and the wart shall say unto the world the type and scope of the variable."
Thus it was brought to pass in the land of Bedlam in the valley of the shadow of despair that there did appear declarations that were like unto the ravings of an lunatic whereat a class scope boolean would be named unto the world a method scope string and the proliferation of inanities of that ilk was without number. Truly was the sorrow and woe without measure or gauge.
I ask you.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 10 March, 2019, 08:59:29 am
This is not possible. TheLurker's colleagues are working in .Net so identifiers will be changed to ensure they don't clash before they even reach the CLR. There is no limit on the length of an identifier in C# apart from available memory at compilation. There is a limit in VB.NET of 1023 characters, but it will fail at compilation. As dysfunctional as TheLurker's team appear to be, method, class and namespace names all of hundreds of characters would be hard to achieve, even for them.... name them using the (anti-)pattern {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName01}, {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName02}, ... {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName15}?I do hope the naming convention placed appropriately small lengths on the BusinessProcess and MethodNameNN. One wouldn't want to exceed the assembler's limits for identifiers.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 10 March, 2019, 09:11:21 am
I do hope the naming convention...Don't get me started on that.
"Thou shalt use Hungarian warts on thy variables and the wart shall say unto the world the type and scope of the variable."
Thus it was brought to pass in the land of Bedlam in the valley of the shadow of despair that there did appear declarations that were like unto the ravings of an lunatic whereat a class scope boolean would be named unto the world a method scope string and the proliferation of inanities of that ilk was without number. Truly was the sorrow and woe without measure or gauge.
I ask you.
I can heartily recommend SonarQube as part of your build process. I was getting thoroughly bored of repeatedly telling team members that their code was non-compliant (or just a mess) on what they saw as minor things. Just because that was standard practice when you were at college learning language X, does not mean you have to keep doing it 10+ years later with modern languages and tooling. Now the PR can just be blocked until Sonar issues are resolved, and I don't get viewed as the team pedant.
Post by: Ham on 10 March, 2019, 08:55:25 pm
I'm off to Mexico this week, and have booked a guide for Friday through Viator. Went through Paypal, got confirmation from the guide, all seems good.
Went to log back into Viator. Sorry, wrong password. Now I know it wasn't. Oh well, reset password and I'm in. No sign of a booking. OK, lets try the Chat helldesk. 30 minutes later chat droid gives up and tells me I have to contact the PCI compliance (!!1!) Helldesk in USA. OK, I was using skype, but really!
It turns out viator.com and tourguides.viator.com are completely separate. Account on one =/= account on other. Tourguide systems can't even be seen by Viator........
Post by: Genosse Brymbo on 11 March, 2019, 01:42:52 pm
'twas a joke. A suggestion that the Lurker's esteemed colleagues' naming convention might belong to the world of 1970's assembly languages.This is not possible...... name them using the (anti-)pattern {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName01}, {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName02}, ... {BusinessProcess}_{MethodName15}?I do hope the naming convention placed appropriately small lengths on the BusinessProcess and MethodNameNN. One wouldn't want to exceed the assembler's limits for identifiers.
Post by: TheLurker on 11 March, 2019, 09:15:34 pm
'twas a joke. A suggestion that the Lurker's esteemed colleagues' naming convention might belong to the world of 1970's assembly languages.I got it. It made me smile. It wasn't just assembly languages. Many happy years in DSM-11 (MUMPS) wrangling an 8 character variable name limit and given that there was only one data type (character) Hungarian warts could be helpful even if they did mean you lost one or 2 of your 8 characters. However that was when dinosaurs roamed the
Post by: Gattopardo on 12 March, 2019, 06:17:59 pm
Post by: Gattopardo on 13 March, 2019, 03:33:57 pm
Post by: David Martin on 21 March, 2019, 11:33:08 pm
Mandrake 7 I think it was. Last updated in the Pleistocene (or 2007, which ever is earlier).
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 March, 2019, 04:51:40 pm
Today: Big PC will not so much as stir a little bit from its torpor. Grovel under desk, poke this, prod that and unscrew the other. Faint glimmer of blinkenlight from video card on power-up. Sometimes. Replace video card with old one I had lying around. Now typing this this from Big PC. Suspect this means someone is about to charge me a lot of money for a new turbo nutter bastard video card >:(
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 March, 2019, 09:37:10 pm
Bah!
Post by: Kim on 31 March, 2019, 11:55:59 pm
Post by: ian on 01 April, 2019, 09:56:10 am
Post by: Feanor on 01 April, 2019, 11:32:02 am
It seems to remember different docking stations, and when I plug it in, it seems to remember the monitor configuration from last time I used that one.
My main grumble is that if I crank it up as a standalone laptop, all the desktop icons get jumbled around to fit on the little laptop screen.
That's fair enough, but it doesn't restore them to their proper place when I go back to a docked configuration with a pair of large monitors.
It remains just a jumble.
Post by: Kim on 01 April, 2019, 01:47:00 pm
As ever with *nix, it's a case of once you do finally persuade it to work, it tends to stay that way.
My early experiment with dual monitors on Windows 98 was a right laugh, though: I had a spare old graphics card, and had borrowed a monitor for a weekend, and found that - while primitive - the extra space was a wonderful thing. So wonderful, in fact, that after removing the second graphics card, many windows forever[1] insisted on opening in the non-existent space somewhere off to the right of the desktop. :facepalm:
I think that got sorted in the Windows 2000 era. These days it's just random icon-shuffling, and occasional weird hot-plugging glitches that get solved by a reboot.
Never seen dual monitors do anything other than Just Work on a OSX Mac, though I'm sure there are projectors that can manage to fuck it up. Projectors are like printers from a higher, less important circle of hell, and connecting anything to an Apple laptop runs the risk of the electrons getting stuck in the compulsory adaptor dongle.
[1] Well, until the next fdisk and OS reinstall, which is the Windows version of forever.
Post by: ian on 01 April, 2019, 01:55:45 pm
Windows and projectors always seem to involve some random poking around display settings in the hope of stumbling on something that makes the screen appear at the correct aspect ratio.
Post by: Kim on 01 April, 2019, 02:12:30 pm
Windows and projectors always seem to involve some random poking around display settings in the hope of stumbling on something that makes the screen appear at the correct aspect ratio.
IME it usually involves sitting there watching a distractingly squished, cropped or aliased presentation *wishing* that someone would randomly poke around in the display settings and stumble on the correct aspect ratio.
Post by: ian on 01 April, 2019, 02:21:09 pm
Post by: Feanor on 01 April, 2019, 02:33:32 pm
I quite often need to use a perfectly good projector, but where the only cable available is a cheap shonky 30 foot long VGA cable which induces ghosting artefacts, and the projector will only do 640x480 over VGA and similar nonsense.
Post by: ian on 01 April, 2019, 02:53:50 pm
I still remember the time the projector bulb blew during a presentation at our Broadway, NYC office. I had to follow the correct IT procedure to have it replaced, which involved the usual submitting of a ticket, its roundtrip to the subcontinent, 56 random emails from each and every one of the many teams involved in requisitioning said bulb, and 12 how-did-we-do? surveys.
Two weeks later, a replacement bulb arrived. In London.
Post by: Kim on 01 April, 2019, 04:07:08 pm
Indeed, the number of presentations (and the obligatory fifteen-minute how-do-I-make-this-work intros) I've sat through where I've wanted to stomp to the front and just bloody sort it out properly.
Never do this, especially not with "I work in IT" confidence. The presence of an audience guarantees that the problem will be unresolvable with the tools at hand, likely in a way that isn't obvious.
Post by: ian on 01 April, 2019, 05:29:52 pm
It's been a while since I used Windows anyway, so I know less what I'm doing. Macs make you lazy.
Post by: TheLurker on 02 April, 2019, 05:50:56 am
IME it usually involves sitting there watching a distractingly squished, cropped or aliased presentation *wishing* that someone would randomly poke around in the display settings and stumble on the correct aspect ratio.
I don't get that far. I just sit there wishing they'd pull their bloody fingers out and get on with the sodding presentation, complete with its meaningless, pointless and utterly inappropriate effing PPT slides, so I can get on with some real work.
Having some moron waste 10 or more minutes of what's left of my life trying to sort that stuff out when the material isn't fit to be shown in the first place really, really pisses me off. In summary; the slides are shit and we don't care so just get on with it.
Post by: SoreTween on 02 April, 2019, 09:41:49 am
Funny, it was 2 days ago and several years prior to that. I can even see the genuine install media on the shelf just over there ->.
I can absofuckinglutely guarantee it will not be running Windows, genuine or otherwise, if this turns out to be one of those issues only a format c: can fix.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 April, 2019, 11:56:09 am
Dual monitors is one of those things where the Linux world had an early lead and squandered it by arsing about in a dozen different directions. The pain level seems to have dropped off considerably since we stopped having to use proprietary nvidia drivers, which is good as it means you don't have to google for things with a "-ubuntu" flag as much. I think the last problem I encountered was trying to rotate one monitor 90 degrees turnwise, when the stupid GUI tool only wanted to do it widdershins, easily fixed with the correct command-line invocation.
As ever with *nix, it's a case of once you do finally persuade it to work, it tends to stay that way.
My early experiment with dual monitors on Windows 98 was a right laugh, though: I had a spare old graphics card, and had borrowed a monitor for a weekend, and found that - while primitive - the extra space was a wonderful thing. So wonderful, in fact, that after removing the second graphics card, many windows forever[1] insisted on opening in the non-existent space somewhere off to the right of the desktop. :facepalm:
I think that got sorted in the Windows 2000 era. These days it's just random icon-shuffling, and occasional weird hot-plugging glitches that get solved by a reboot.
Never seen dual monitors do anything other than Just Work on a OSX Mac, though I'm sure there are projectors that can manage to fuck it up. Projectors are like printers from a higher, less important circle of hell, and connecting anything to an Apple laptop runs the risk of the electrons getting stuck in the compulsory adaptor dongle.
[1] Well, until the next fdisk and OS reinstall, which is the Windows version of forever.
I don't want to use the Nvidia "turn it all into one giant display" thing because it makes the desktop look shit. There is a Thing called SoftTH, which is a .dll you bung in the same directory as the executable you want to use with dual monitors (usually a game) which can take into account the width of the screens' bezels, if you can understand the maths involved in setting it up. And then you need to muck about with the game's special multi-monitor config file to tell it where to put the main options screen and other things and it gave me a headache. So I'm back on one for now, but even though the second one is switched off Windows will happily let the mouse pointer wander off into hyperspace because it's stupid.
Post by: Kim on 06 April, 2019, 12:33:12 pm
Post by: Gattopardo on 08 April, 2019, 03:44:20 pm
Fuckity bollocks
Post by: ian on 08 April, 2019, 04:15:39 pm
Except when it doesn't do this because (a) weirdly designed web-forms and (b) anything that isn't a webform, like say the password box for email accounts, icloud, and the myriad other places infected with a need for savant-like input of passwords. You'd think Apple at least would have figured this out. Why I'm even typing passwords like it's still 1975 I don't know. I have fucking phone that does facial recognition. Once, of course, you've periodically input your password to confirm it.
Oh, and rejected passwords because, well, they're not telling you. You have to guess the combination of letters, capital and lower case, numbers, and random non-alphanumeric characters that might meet their security requirements.
Post by: SoreTween on 08 April, 2019, 06:02:15 pm
Quote
The volume group name used to automatically partition using LVM is already in use. Lowering the priority for the configuration questions will allow you to specify an alternative name.It almost makes sense but for 2 small points.
1) I had selected the 'wipe the disk and start from scratch' option. It really shouldn't matter a fig what is currently on the disk if you're just going to nuke it.
2) On clicking OK to continue no relevant options at all are presented for me to furtle with. I can either:
i) go into the full geek mode and manually partition the drive. That option does not include LVM which I want in order to be able to use snapshots so that I don't get nagged to set up bloody snapshots every time there's an update to be done.
or
ii) Select an LVM install which leads straight back to the lovely error above.
Sub rant
It'd be quite nice if the registration autobot on the Linux Mint forums actually worked. I've tried twice & the confirmation email never turns up.
Conclusion: Next year still hasn't arrived.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 April, 2019, 12:59:53 pm
Bah.
Post by: DaveJ on 15 April, 2019, 02:36:04 pm
Post by: DuncanM on 15 April, 2019, 03:17:30 pm
My early experiment with dual monitors on Windows 98 was a right laugh, though: I had a spare old graphics card, and had borrowed a monitor for a weekend, and found that - while primitive - the extra space was a wonderful thing. So wonderful, in fact, that after removing the second graphics card, many windows forever[1] insisted on opening in the non-existent space somewhere off to the right of the desktop. :facepalm:My work laptop gets very confused by being plugged into a dock which has 2 extra monitors attached. Every so often, when running without them attached it will decide to open an application on one of the non-existent screens. You can see it minimise and maximise off to the screen that doesn't exist! The only solution I have found to this is to reboot the machine. Windows 10. A half decent operating system, with flaws copied from 20 years ago!
[1] Well, until the next fdisk and OS reinstall, which is the Windows version of forever.
Post by: Feanor on 16 April, 2019, 12:17:11 am
My work laptop gets very confused by being plugged into a dock which has 2 extra monitors attached. Every so often, when running without them attached it will decide to open an application on one of the non-existent screens. You can see it minimise and maximise off to the screen that doesn't exist! The only solution I have found to this is to reboot the machine. Windows 10. A half decent operating system, with flaws copied from 20 years ago!
Alt-Tab till the off-screen window is the active one and has (invisible) focus;
Alt-Spacebar to bring up the secret old windows 3.x 'minus' menu which is still hiding at the top left of every window;
M to select the 'Move' menu item;
Hit any one of the Up/Down/Left/Right arrow keys once ( this attaches the window to the mouse pointer );
Now wiggle the mouse to bring the window on-screen.
Post by: ian on 23 April, 2019, 09:41:06 pm
A couple of things would make this process easier. Like, for instance, not sending a nine-digit activation code when your app asks for eight. Or timing me out in the time it takes for the first activation code to arrive (nine digit, not eight for the one that arrives by email). This means logging in again with a 12ish character user ID, remembering the answer to secret questions, and the second, sixth and final letter of a password that I've not had cause to use since I penned the best bits of the Bible (you'll need the uncensored version to read those, of course). Then you time me out as I rerequest the second activation code (eight digits, not nine, delivered by text). It's like a diabolical modern update of snakes and ladders.
I'm sure I've ranted about this before, but if so I evidently I failed and gave up last time and logged in the old fashioned way.
That said, I think I've been trying to summon up the will (and a spare evening or two) to figure out how to get into one of my Santander accounts for about three years now.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 April, 2019, 01:18:47 pm
I do have an account. Possibly more than one. I know this because they send me e-mails about it/them. But accessing them fails at the first hurdle. "Enter username". I don't have one. You changed the login system and didn't send me one. "Forgotten ur username? Clicky this link and we'll e-mail it to you!"
This. Is. A. Lie.
It. Does. Nothing.
Sooner or later I shall have to bite the bullet and phone the buggers, because I need the money to spend on important things like this month's credit card bill.
Post by: Maverick on 25 April, 2019, 08:48:18 am
You changed the login system and didn't send me one. "Forgotten ur username? Clicky this link and we'll e-mail it to you!"
This. Is. A. Lie.
It. Does. Nothing.
Sooner or later I shall have to bite the bullet and phone the buggers, because I need the money to spend on important things like this month's credit card bill.
If you never had a username, you have to re-register via the "I don't have any login details" button. BTDT
Post by: ian on 25 April, 2019, 09:14:15 am
It's another one of those MLIR moments, when did it become even vaguely reasonable to end up having to deal with several financial institutions.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 April, 2019, 01:12:28 pm
You changed the login system and didn't send me one. "Forgotten ur username? Clicky this link and we'll e-mail it to you!"
This. Is. A. Lie.
It. Does. Nothing.
Sooner or later I shall have to bite the bullet and phone the buggers, because I need the money to spend on important things like this month's credit card bill.
If you never had a username, you have to re-register via the "I don't have any login details" button. BTDT
Yes, that's what I've been doing, to zero effect.
Post by: Tim Hall on 03 May, 2019, 02:37:27 pm
It shows as an almost white page with white boxes. I, with my getting on for normal vision had trouble seeing the boxes, so couldn't work out where to click for text input. How someone visually impaired will cope I don't know. "Not well" is my guess.
Some boxes are shown with an asterisk, which I assume means mandatory. I fill these in and hit submit. Nothing happens. Rinse and repeat.
I finally notice that some boxes have been highlighted in red. Boxes not shown as mandatory. Home phone, work phone. As I work from home via a mobile, I don't have these. I type in xxxx. The other highlighted box is County. County FFS. Why. They have my street, town and post code. They down need the County. I fill it in. Success.
I think, once my transaction has been completed, that I will grink them.
Post by: barakta on 03 May, 2019, 07:57:21 pm
Post by: Feanor on 09 May, 2019, 09:07:03 am
Who knew excel has 2 different time/date systems 'bases'?
I've just inherited the club Vets spreadsheets, and have added some lookup tables for DoB etc.
Now here's a thing...
If you subtract one time from another ( eg a Race Time from a Vets Standard Time ), it doesn't work if the result is negative!
All you get is "######".
This is not just a display formatting issue; you just can't do it!
To fix it, there's an advanced option called 'Use 1904 date system'.
Then, it calculates negative times OK.
BUT....
It it changes the 'base' date of how it stores dates as underlying numbers, and so all the DoB lookups from a spreadsheet which is *not* 1904-based break!
They offset by several years.
So you need to convert the DoB lookup sheet to 1904-based too, so they are both using the same base date.
But you can't just tick that option.
Oh, no.
If you do that, the stored numbers remain unchanged, and the displayed dates change to the wrong ones.
I need the correct displayed text to remain unchanged, but the underlying numbers to be re-calculated.
You need to save out the correct *displayed text* from the DoB column into Notepad. ( Not simply copy the column, because that copies the underlying number which will be wrong under the new system ).
Then change the Date System.
Then copy the text back in from Notepad, to have excel re-generate the underlying numbers in the new system.
And finally it's all working.
Post by: Jaded on 09 May, 2019, 09:11:37 am
Yes, I knew about the two systems. I think it used to be Mac vs PC so I was always careful when using cross platform files. Haven’t had to be careful for years now.
Post by: Feanor on 09 May, 2019, 09:59:20 am
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/214330/differences-between-the-1900-and-the-1904-date-system-in-excel
It's not clear to me why changing the base date by 1462 days should make a difference to the ability to calculate negative times, but it does.
Post by: ian on 09 May, 2019, 11:17:27 am
Post by: ian on 09 May, 2019, 12:41:34 pm
Because I've had to design a series of dashboards in Excel, I've been especially sweary of late.
They'd still not fixed the issue with broken fonts in PDFs generated from Excel (and possibly other components). This means you have to open the PDF in a suitable editing application and reset the tracking and occasionally manually respace. Apparently, it's a known issue. Fonts contain all the information needed to maintain spacing, there's no need or benefit to poorly re-engineer this in a way that is effectively broken.
Charts that randomly change size a bit. I have regular components of a defined size. I've put this size into the format fields. Please don't convert 9cm to 8.68cm when I'm not looking.
And the one that got me the other day. I'd set up a complicated formula, but the cell was wrong. I scratched my head. Pressed the calculate button etc. Still wrong. Then I nudged the mouse and cause the screen to scroll. Well, Excel had calculated the field correctly, it just evidently hadn't told the screen. Sigh.
It'll all get ported to Tableau Server and Angular shortly. I'm sure that'll give me something new to rant about.
Post by: ian on 13 May, 2019, 02:59:52 pm
Sigh.
Post by: barakta on 13 May, 2019, 08:42:40 pm
Post by: ian on 13 May, 2019, 08:50:10 pm
You can now guess what happens if you opt to keep both versions of Office.
Post by: Feanor on 13 May, 2019, 09:02:26 pm
There will be four fonts.
One With Serifs;
One Without;
One mono-spaced;
and Comic Sans, just because it will annoy you.
Jeezus, that will just fix all of this nonsense right away.
GIRUY.
Post by: ian on 14 May, 2019, 12:14:35 pm
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 14 May, 2019, 03:55:23 pm
I'm a font nerd
No your not. If you were you would be able know that the product of a typesetting foundry is a 'fount'. In English a font is a bowl found in church to christen babies.
Post by: Genosse Brymbo on 14 May, 2019, 05:36:36 pm
A bit of a grammar/vocabulary pot/kettle there :demon:I'm a font nerd
No your not. If you were you would be able know that the product of a typesetting foundry is a 'fount'. In English a font is a bowl found in church to christen babies.
Post by: ian on 14 May, 2019, 05:52:00 pm
I'm a font nerd
No your not. If you were you would be able know that the product of a typesetting foundry is a 'fount'. In English a font is a bowl found in church to christen babies.
No one has called a font a ‘fount’ since about 1928. It’s a bit of an affectation these days.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 May, 2019, 12:28:07 pm
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 15 May, 2019, 01:13:45 pm
I'm a font nerd
No your not. If you were you would be able know that the product of a typesetting foundry is a 'fount'. In English a font is a bowl found in church to christen babies.
No one has called a font a ‘fount’ since about 1928. It’s a bit of an affectation these days.
I worked at an electronic typesetter in the early 80's. Monotype and Linotype UK used the British spelling. The U-less font only arrived with the semi-professional american products such as PageMaker and Apple LaserWriter and office productivity programs. Note that Americans omit the U from many words such as colour.
Post by: Kim on 15 May, 2019, 01:25:25 pm
(I know the correct spelling is 'typeface'. ;))
Post by: ian on 15 May, 2019, 01:32:11 pm
I grew up with Pagemaker and Quark Xpress. While I know 'fount' is a thing, in my entire working career I've never seen it used in preference to font. Lucretia My Reflexion, and all that.
Post by: pcolbeck on 17 May, 2019, 04:57:24 pm
Post by: Kim on 17 May, 2019, 05:33:18 pm
(It's not so much the architectural headache that this represents - anything else would compromise the security - but the complete lack of advanced warning.)
Post by: barakta on 17 May, 2019, 08:10:44 pm
I am PEED off, cos IT services told me when I phoned (yes, phoned, fucking telephones) that the laptop would work fine. Neither Kim or I believed them!
I work remotely 50 miles away and 2 hours travel time away... I am not due in the office until Wednesday. I have reports due in today/Monday which I cannot access before presumably Wednesday. I can do 1 piece of work which came in via email IF I download it to my non encrypted Windows install which I am allowed to do IF my laptop is unavailable but...
Post by: Jaded on 17 May, 2019, 11:28:09 pm
And for those of us who had DTP of some kind around since shortly after the point we graduated from writing with pencils, 'font' is a de-facto computer word, and therefore American spelling is preferred for sanity reasons. I'd not come across the 'fount' spelling before, but if encountering it out of context I'd assume that was what Brits baptise babies in.
(I know the correct spelling is 'typeface'. ;))
Is it a bit like programme vs program?
Post by: Kim on 03 June, 2019, 12:39:05 pm
I thought I'd failed to save yesterday's 10 minute race (I had to jump off the bike, save the track[1] then leg it to the timing hut in order to wrangle CrossMgr), but on a hunch I rebooted the eTrex a couple of times this morning, and there it is!
[1] Which is fiddly at the best of times, even when you're not shaking and your glasses are covered in grit.
Post by: Feanor on 03 June, 2019, 01:52:28 pm
Examining the filesystem with utilities showed that the file was there, but marked as deleted.
A quick un-delete and and was well.
Post by: Kim on 03 June, 2019, 02:40:15 pm
This is karmic retribution for the Garmin, isn't it?
Post by: Kim on 03 June, 2019, 11:44:17 pm
My phone is stuck in a "Moto App Launcher keeps stopping" loop. I think I'm going to have to factory reset from recovery, as you only get a fraction of a second to interract with it in the time it takes between tapping "close app" and the error message popping up again. >:(
This is karmic retribution for the Garmin, isn't it?
Factory reset the bastard, which seems to have solved the problem (touch wood). Followed by the obligatory wasted couple of hours re-configuring all your stuff again. Came up against some weird problem with K9 whereby it wouldn't connect to the IMAP server from the pile-of-poo IPv4-only VLAN for buggy androids, but worked fine on the normal WiFi network, and over 4G. Eventually realised that it had somehow got fail2banned, because the pile-of-poo subnet wasn't in the whitelist.
I think I'm just bad at computers.
Post by: Jaded on 04 June, 2019, 12:34:44 am
Most other people would look at it, say “It’s Donald” and buy a new one, whilst accepting the loss of everything (photos, calendars, addresses, emails etc.) as acceptable collateral damage.
Post by: ian on 04 June, 2019, 11:25:35 am
(Ironically, I know what the error is, which Excel created when I copied a worksheet with defined dynamic ranges in it – you end up with one named range but two definitions, one refers to the original, the second to the new workshop you copied. For giggles there's no way to actually reconcile this without recreating two ranges and then fixing everything that uses them, or alternatively ignore the error and it seems to curiously continue to work as anticipated.)
Post by: ian on 07 June, 2019, 11:13:04 am
Well, that's cleared things up.
It's certainly encouraged me to start reading through the pile of data analyst CVs.
Post by: Afasoas on 08 June, 2019, 05:00:41 pm
I should clarify that logging in requires a colleague or IT with appropriate access to the encrypted user group settings and possibly FROM the wired network...
I am PEED off, cos IT services told me when I phoned (yes, phoned, fucking telephones) that the laptop would work fine. Neither Kim or I believed them!
I work remotely 50 miles away and 2 hours travel time away... I am not due in the office until Wednesday. I have reports due in today/Monday which I cannot access before presumably Wednesday. I can do 1 piece of work which came in via email IF I download it to my non encrypted Windows install which I am allowed to do IF my laptop is unavailable but...
This is why we don't (a) let people use full fat desktop softwares which in turn means that we don't have to (b) encrypt laptops.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 09 June, 2019, 08:24:12 am
This is why we don't (a) let people use full fat desktop softwares which in turn means that we don't have to (b) encrypt laptops.
Neither do we, so when I had the same problem last week - can't log in via RDP from laptop - it was fixed in ten minutes. The only reason it took so long was (a) can't raise a ticket from the phone app; followed by (ii) helldesk claiming they can't reach me by phone. That's right, my desk phone which doesn't forward to my mobile until I'm logged in :facepalm:
Post by: Pickled Onion on 09 June, 2019, 08:25:14 am
This is why we don't (a) let people use full fat desktop softwares which in turn means that we don't have to (b) encrypt laptops.
Neither do we, so when I had the same problem last week - can't log in via RDP from laptop due to bungled desktop win10 upgrade - it was fixed in ten minutes. The only reason it took so long was (a) can't raise a ticket from the phone app; followed by (ii) helldesk claiming they can't reach me by phone. That's right, my desk phone which doesn't forward to my mobile until I'm logged in :facepalm:
Post by: TheLurker on 09 June, 2019, 10:31:41 am
Quote from: Pickled Onion
...(a) can't raise a ticket from the phone app; followed by (ii) helldesk claiming they can't reach me by phone. That's right, my desk phone which doesn't forward to my mobile until I'm logged inYes. We don't have "proper" telephones anymore either. Headsets and Skype. All lovely* while it works, but, especially, when things go wrong absolutely no bloody use to man nor beast.
Lurk.
*May contain traces of Lie**. The call quality is invariably like listening to a congregation of pissed Daleks inside a corrugated tin shed in a hailstorm.
**All rights reserved. Mr. Larrington.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 June, 2019, 11:51:51 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 June, 2019, 12:38:10 pm
Post by: rr on 10 June, 2019, 01:12:16 pm
Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 June, 2019, 02:28:56 pm
Post by: ian on 12 June, 2019, 08:22:43 pm
Post by: R_nger on 12 June, 2019, 08:27:21 pm
Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.
Yebbut, agile
Post by: Chris S on 12 June, 2019, 08:32:47 pm
Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.
Yebbut, agile
Agile - getting your end-users to do your testing for you since...
Post by: Pingu on 12 June, 2019, 08:39:06 pm
Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.
Yebbut, agile
Agile - getting your end-users to do your testing for you since...
...the invention of the Post-it.
Post by: TheLurker on 13 June, 2019, 05:14:58 pm
Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.When the alternative is TFS give me a well configured installation of Jira & Confluence (along with Git & Sourcesafe) any day.
Post by: ian on 13 June, 2019, 05:17:52 pm
Post by: Zipperhead on 13 June, 2019, 11:59:43 pm
Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.When the alternative is TFS give me a well configured installation of Jira & Confluence (along with Git & Sourcesafe) any day.
A biro nicked from Argos and a couple of sheets of bog paper would be better than TFS.
Post by: ian on 17 June, 2019, 01:33:34 pm
Today, any attempt to drag a row value re-sorts the entire table alphabetically. Uh? No combination of cryptic options suggested by the internet changes this behaviour.
I can only assume the fine minds at MS worked through the weekend on Project Make-ian-Waste-Monday.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 June, 2019, 06:18:17 pm
Post by: Kim on 17 June, 2019, 07:47:20 pm
While on the subject: why, in a sheet containing ~ 160 rows and 8 columns of bog standard text does it search all umpty-gazillion empty cells when I'm looking for a simple string? You'd think it would know.
It wouldn't surprise me if it was converting all the cells to strings before doing the comparison...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 June, 2019, 12:31:29 pm
Post by: ian on 18 June, 2019, 12:54:50 pm
The only fix I know of is to hack it out of the XML – back in the day I had some VBA to adjust the worksheet references based on actual filled cells – or copy the actual data into a new spreadsheet and burn the old version with considerable prejudice.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 June, 2019, 01:31:12 pm
"I see everything twice!"
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 June, 2019, 03:09:04 pm
O tamanho do arquivo foi reduzido de 8,5 MB para 147 KB!
Good afternoon,
The size has been reduced from 8.5 MB to 147 KB!
Post by: ian on 18 June, 2019, 03:11:47 pm
But you won't succeed in actually deleting them.
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 19 June, 2019, 10:31:48 pm
It's an old hangover at work from a previous team mangler and it's got lots of stuff on it.
Except the bloody thing gets corrupted regularly and now we have several copies of notebooks on the same server, with different sizes and modified dates.
I seem to have stupidly volunteered myself to sort this clusterfuck out.
If only we could just scrape everything off it and into something slightly less shit like Sharepoint or OneDrive.
There will be more Bad Swears.
Post by: ian on 20 June, 2019, 09:17:13 am
Post by: ian on 20 June, 2019, 04:09:39 pm
It wasn't like this in Thought Leadership. I had post-it notes and a whiteboard and time to do some actual work rather than record and document stuff that might one day happen.
Post by: TheLurker on 20 June, 2019, 07:17:57 pm
Quote from: ian
Oh, and Jira, SalesForce, Aha, Confluence, Slack, Google Groups, etc. etc. and let's not forget the endless spreadsheets.Console yourself with the happy thought that haven't got TFS as well.
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 20 June, 2019, 10:06:33 pm
I've been using it to suck everything off my lapdog in preparation for getting a new! Improved! Lapdog.
Today I went to look at some model files and now instead of containing all numbers they're full of fucking gibberish like $&!*
Fuckfuckfuck.
I turned the thing off and came home. If it turns out that's happened to a lot of these files I might have to stick 2 pencil up my nose and a pair of underpants on my head.
Also; Lync/skype for business. I used to be able to set my status to 'appear offline'. Why in blue blazes did you get rid of that you bastids?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 July, 2019, 11:31:08 pm
Just fuck off >:(
Post by: ian on 29 July, 2019, 11:58:33 am
Post by: Feanor on 29 July, 2019, 08:53:08 pm
New laptop for elderly pa-in-law, and I brace myself for the usual ripping-out-of-preinstalled-shit.
But it's gotten a whole lot worse than last time I did this.
Go through the initial setup without creating a Microsoft account: This is now harder than ever. The initial steps take you through connecting to the network. Mistake. I had to take down my Wi-Fi to force the thing offline before I got the option to just create a local account. The Airplane mode keys did not work at that point in the install.
Trial version of office 360 - Not in Add / Remove programs, but I expected that. Google tells me how to remove it, with reasonable success.
But here's the nasty thing: I can't install *anything*, because windows is in a special locked-down mode called Windows 10 S. In this mode, you can only install things from the Microsoft Appstore. You can't run any normal installers. To disable S-mode, you need an app from... Yes, you guessed it, The App Store. Which you need a Microsoft account to access!
Now, I have a Microsoft account from when they borged Skype some time back, so I temporarily logged in with my account to get the S-mode disabler.
Which worked.
But then, trying to disentangle my MS Account from the local account on the PC... Jeez!
It really didn't want to forget my MS account login!
Then, trying to install full Office 16 - it blew up because the removal of the trial version was incomplete.
Another round of googling and a bit of registry hackery and finally I'm mostly done.
That was way more painful than it should have been.
Post by: Feanor on 01 August, 2019, 05:30:47 pm
There's no way to have a formula return a result which is NULL, basically the same as a blank cell.
If there's a formula, it must evaluate to something, and that something cannot be the equivalent of an empty cell.
So if a VLOOKUP has unmatched results, you get #N/A. That's fine, and to be expected in a big table.
But I don't want failed lookups to contain #N/A, because that breaks subsequent processing.
<Tappity-tap>
So I wrap the VLOOKUP in IFERROR, and supply a custom value for failed lookups.
I can't supply NULL as a value here.
I can supply Zero, but that gives the Wrong Answers, because Zero is an actual data value and will skew subsequent processing.
I can supply "", and that *looks* like it works.
But it doesn't, because it gives a cell that looks empty, but is not. It contains an empty string, which blows up subsequent processing.
I *really* don't want to have to re-engineer *everything* around this, and wrap all the post processing in protective code to trap the #N/As.
So I have had to resort to a stupid little VBA subroutine which checks over the VLOOKUP cell range and if it contains #N/A does a ActiveCell.clear on it.
What an effing hassle for the want of being able to specify a value something like NULL or Stupid.Excel.Blank!
Post by: Chris S on 01 August, 2019, 06:21:17 pm
Until a Google search finally turned up the ugly truth.
The MySQL .NET data-connector "helpfully" parses char(36) as a GUID, whether you mean it to be one or not. That's just fucking hideous.
Post by: TheLurker on 01 August, 2019, 07:58:57 pm
The MySQL .NET data-connector "helpfully" parses char(36) as a GUID, whether you mean it to be one or not. That's just fucking hideous.Duly noted for future reference, thank you. That is indeed truly fucking hideous. On a par with later versions of M$ .Net Core MVC automatically camel-casing outbound JSON. When will the stupid bastards learn that you don't fuck around with data in transit, just pass it along?
Post by: Diver300 on 04 August, 2019, 07:54:43 pm
Quote
Conversation
Member
01 Aug 2019 19:07
I have tried to put this voucher on to get £10 credit but the payment just says "processing" and it's done that
since this morning.
It says "Order status:
PROCESSING
Aug 1, 2019 10:03:27 AM" and that hasn't changed all day.
The payment has a top-up number of 267631904
My credit still shows £10
Martin from the giffgaff team
02 Aug 2019 13:37
Hi there diver300,
Martin here and I understand you are having an issue with your voucher top up, I appreciate the inconvenience this must be causing you, so let's have a look into this.
I`ve looked at your account and can see that £10 voucher top that you refer to and it is still processing as you say.But I can see the issue here and that is you tried to use this voucher on a sim that has not been used for over 6 months so that account and number has now been cancelled.So what you will need to do first is to add your card details on this account so we can refund that for you and you would then need to set up a brand new account with a new sim from scratch.
You can order a sim by copying and pasting the link below into a browser:
https://www.giffgaff.com/free-sim-cards:
Our sims can take up to 5 working days to reach you but it should arrive by the next business day.
If you wanted to get your sim sooner you can get them at many stores now. Tesco, B&M Bargains, Home Bargains, Pound Shops and I think Asda also do them.
There will be a charge of 99p for the sim but as soon as the sim is activated we will reimburse that 99p back onto your account.
To add your card details just copy and paste the link below into a browser:
http://giffgaff.com/profile/payment-details
I know this can be terribly annoying when this happens but once you get your card details added just get back to us then and we will refund that £10 for you.
I hope this helps and makes things a bit clearer for you but if you have any further queries or questions please do not hesitate to contact our community and you can do this by copying and pasting the link below into a browser:
https://community.giffgaff.com
All the best and take care ,
Martin from the giffgaff team
Member
02 Aug 2019 18:09
Dear Martin,
You said that the SIM has not been used in 6 months. However, it was last used at 11 pm on the 12th June to send data. It was allocated an ip address of 82.132.247.0
Also, I received an email on the 17th June, saying what data I had used in the last month. This is what it said:-
17/6/2019 16:34
Via giffgaff
Membername: xxxxxxxxxx
Phone number: xxxxxxxx5939
We want to make sure you get the best value from us. To help you get the most out of giffgaff, we've summarised your recent usage below.
Your recent usage
Here's a quick summary of what you've used in the past 30 days.
Total MB used 1.84
Mins 0
Texts 0
At that time I had over £10 of credit on the SIM.
Could you please get the SIM running and please don't tell me that it hasn't been used in 6 month when I have an email from giffgaff about 6 weeks ago saying that it was used in the month before that.
Martin from the giffgaff team
02 Aug 2019 18:47
Hi there diver300 ,
Martin here and I have checked your usage for the 12th of June at 11-00pm and I can see no data being used.I have in fact checked your data usage going back to the 1st of May and can see nothing there I`m afraid. I can tell that your this sim is deactivated so as I advised you will have to get a new sim and set up a new account altogether.
I would love for this sim to be active for you so you could go ahead and use it but it has been deactivated for non usage and we will not be able to activate it again .
I hope this helps and take care,
Maertin from the giffgaff team
Post by: barakta on 04 August, 2019, 11:37:14 pm
Post by: matthew on 04 August, 2019, 11:50:52 pm
Excel. Again.
There's no way to have a formula return a result which is NULL, basically the same as a blank cell.
If there's a formula, it must evaluate to something, and that something cannot be the equivalent of an empty cell.
So if a VLOOKUP has unmatched results, you get #N/A. That's fine, and to be expected in a big table.
But I don't want failed lookups to contain #N/A, because that breaks subsequent processing.
<Tappity-tap>
So I wrap the VLOOKUP in IFERROR, and supply a custom value for failed lookups.
I can't supply NULL as a value here.
I can supply Zero, but that gives the Wrong Answers, because Zero is an actual data value and will skew subsequent processing.
I can supply "", and that *looks* like it works.
But it doesn't, because it gives a cell that looks empty, but is not. It contains an empty string, which blows up subsequent processing.
I *really* don't want to have to re-engineer *everything* around this, and wrap all the post processing in protective code to trap the #N/As.
So I have had to resort to a stupid little VBA subroutine which checks over the VLOOKUP cell range and if it contains #N/A does a ActiveCell.clear on it.
What an effing hassle for the want of being able to specify a value something like NULL or Stupid.Excel.Blank!
Feanor, can you return FALSE and trap that in your subsequent analysis? Otherwise I think you have to go into a vba script but that results in deleting the formula from the 'blank' cells which makes recalculating the sheet more involved.
Post by: Feanor on 07 August, 2019, 06:26:27 pm
#include rant.h
Feanor, can you return FALSE and trap that in your subsequent analysis? Otherwise I think you have to go into a vba script but that results in deleting the formula from the 'blank' cells which makes recalculating the sheet more involved.
Yes, those are the issues I have. I *can* return FALSE, but I then have to trap that in the subsequent processing.
I have inherited a bunch of spreadsheets ( Club TT Vet's results on standard ) which do a whole bunch of stuff, but are very manual. I'm chipping away at automating it. Right now, I don't want to dive down the rabbit-hole of the subsequent processing to implement the trapping. In the meantime, I use VBA to take the outputs of the raw VLOOKUP and then write a new column and just point the post-processing to that.
Really, I want to just start from scratch.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 12 August, 2019, 08:21:53 am
Being diligent, I save it lots of times.
Mon, I plug in computer at work. Computer hangs. Nothing responding. Do forced restart.
Open presentation. recovery file. Doesn't look good. Open file . . . looks like it might be ok, save file.
No - that was *friday's* version, with almost no content. Saturday's copy, that I had saved to effing 365 onedrive, is gone. Kaput. Erased from existence. No recovery file. Nothing.
FUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK
Post by: lastant on 12 August, 2019, 02:10:19 pm
Kaput. Erased from existence. No recovery file. Nothing.
Had exactly the same thing happen a few weeks ago - presentation to do ahead of leave...definitely saved, then PowerPoint crashed. Turned on, auto-recovery option is one from days before. Nothing on O365.
Guess it's either save multiple copies (which is just silly) or take screengrabs of slides when happy, which is ludicrous!
Post by: Kim on 12 August, 2019, 03:14:02 pm
Guess it's either save multiple copies (which is just silly) or take screengrabs of slides when happy, which is ludicrous!
Nothing silly about saving multiple copies, as long as it's automated and deduplicated, so it doesn't waste space or require extra thought. So, incremental backups with something like rsync, Time Machine or similar. Or a filesystem that does snapshots for you like ZFS.
But in the absence of that, fucking around with multiple versions would seem worthwhile if the effort required to reproduce the work is non-trivial. Especially if OneDrive isn't to be trusted...
Post by: ian on 12 August, 2019, 03:16:05 pm
Post by: lastant on 12 August, 2019, 05:20:40 pm
Guess it's either save multiple copies (which is just silly) or take screengrabs of slides when happy, which is ludicrous!Nothing silly about saving multiple copies, as long as it's automated and deduplicated, so it doesn't waste space or require extra thought.
Ah, should have reread before hitting send! Yes, totally agree regarding backups (and have just gone through a phase of making sure I have copies of everything important in the cloud and on a drive).
Meant silly in terms of one of the big selling point of O365 is the fact you don’t have to worry about that as it’ll take care of it for you. Appreciate that’s not always the case!
Don’t get me started on the collaborative working that never seems to behave when more than one person is editing the same page!
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 12 August, 2019, 05:33:01 pm
Sadly, when it comes to Office I've been inculcated into jabbing the save icon after every significant task. The autorecovery, in my experience, seldom offers a recovery, automatic or otherwise.I had done multiple saves . . .
As far as I can tell, because my machine went into a hang mode while oneDrive was trying to sync, forceably restarting has caused Once-upon-Drive to do a rollback to the previous sync. That was Friday, so it has erased everything from the weekend.
Post by: Feanor on 12 August, 2019, 05:41:58 pm
This is totally horrible!
I often want to open a spreadsheet, and do a few what-ifs without saving it!
You need to turn off Auto-Sae per-application, but at least you *can* disable it.
Post by: Kim on 12 August, 2019, 05:48:55 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 22 August, 2019, 08:26:06 pm
Half an hour of what was already a very short evening pissed up against wall because instead of being able to just give MrsLurker a spare power brick with a matching rating I had to butcher the DC line to swap an Acer style plug to a Samsung style plug. You're not worth a pint of weasel's piss, not one single one of you.
Post by: Kim on 22 August, 2019, 08:28:38 pm
</ha-ha-only-serious>
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 11 September, 2019, 11:00:12 am
(On my motherboard it is on the side of the main power connector)
Post by: ian on 24 September, 2019, 08:46:50 pm
That's not the rant. The rant is having to have to deal with mobile phone companies, something that I was successfully avoiding (and frankly far better than six years of free data). Honestly, one fucking simple thing and that's my phone number. How the hell am I supposed to know if I've been in accident or might be owed some PPI payback if you don't transfer my number like you said would happen. It may be correct on your records but it's not correct on my phone and that's the important bit. Yes, I can simply edit the phone number on the phone itself but, you know what, it does nothing because I don't think that's how it works. Come on, transferring a phone number on your own systems can't exactly be an edge case.
Post by: Kim on 24 September, 2019, 10:41:56 pm
If it weren't for being Not Excel and therefore largely useless, that might make it better than Excel...
Post by: ian on 25 September, 2019, 09:35:13 am
Post by: ian on 25 September, 2019, 08:51:24 pm
But wait, you need to have received an actual registration letter. And then you can type the long number from the letter onto a form (which you have to print) and hand in. There's probably another form you have to fill in before they send you the letter. It's hard to tell. I'm pretty sure for level 17 of the application process you have to find and use a fax machine, level 31 includes carbon paper, and the final boss level is finding a copy of your medical records on microfiche. What's that? BONUS LEVEL. Battle the Cerberus of reception!
Honestly, all I want to do is book a fucking appointment without hanging on the telephone line at 8.30 a.m. (everyone likes this system says their web page, more fun than a prostate exam).
I may as well just go to the walk-in centre, they might have a GP chained up in the back.
And I bet the fuckers still haven't got a bike rack and will look at me like I've done a big poo in front of them if I turn up with a Brompton.
Post by: Phil W on 25 September, 2019, 09:00:48 pm
Post by: ian on 26 September, 2019, 09:25:56 am
Post by: ian on 29 September, 2019, 11:49:59 am
...
Come on, transferring a phone number on your own systems can't exactly be an edge case.
And over a week and a couple of phone calls later, the solution to this conundrum is to 'go to a store' apparently. How in the merry fuck can transferring a phone number to a new SIM be that much of a challenge?
I really hate call centres, with their solid, impenetrable walls of scripted ignorance, the deep moat of misunderstanding where every explanation will founder and drown. Somewhere in the castle beyond, I know there's someone who can press a magic button and make it all right, but I can't get there, forces are racked against me. Ah, they're pouring boiling oil of foolishness from the battlements again. Is there anything else we can do to help you? someone shouts down. Then attempts to shoot me with an arrow.
Withdraw for another day, this isn't going to be a short siege. Honestly, I think I'm going to need a trebuchet.
Post by: fuaran on 29 September, 2019, 02:08:29 pm
Probably easier to switch to a completely different network....
Come on, transferring a phone number on your own systems can't exactly be an edge case.
And over a week and a couple of phone calls later, the solution to this conundrum is to 'go to a store' apparently. How in the merry fuck can transferring a phone number to a new SIM be that much of a challenge?
They are obliged to give you a PAC, so they should have proper process for this. You can request a PAC by text, no need to speak to any call centres.
Post by: ian on 29 September, 2019, 06:32:44 pm
To be entirely fair, they've been giving me free data for the better part of a decade, so I suspect my details are lost in some kind of purgatory, probably implemented in SAP.
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 29 September, 2019, 06:54:12 pm
All weekend.
It's been quite tense in here.
Post by: hbunnet on 29 September, 2019, 07:07:34 pm
I've been watching Pingu trying to install Ubuntu, that failing, then trying to restore Win 7, that failing, then trying to install Win 10, then nuking it all from orbit before starting again.
All weekend.
It's been quite tense in here.
Hah! I have been updating Windows10 on an old laptop which also boots into Ubuntu.
Every Win10 restart boots into Ubuntu by default and waits for me to change back to Win. I've been at it since Saturday lunchtime.
Post by: Pingu on 29 September, 2019, 08:42:00 pm
I've been watching Pingu trying to install Ubuntu, that failing, then trying to restore Win 7, that failing, then trying to install Win 10, then nuking it all from orbit before starting again.
All weekend.
It's been quite tense in here.
Hah! I have been updating Windows10 on an old laptop which also boots into Ubuntu.
Every Win10 restart boots into Ubuntu by default and waits for me to change back to Win. I've been at it since Saturday lunchtime.
Lapdog nuked from orbit and now running on Win 10. We'll see how long that lasts :-\
Post by: Chris S on 04 October, 2019, 11:30:30 am
c:\users\chriss> nslookup myserver
Server: router.asus.com
Address: 192.168.1.1
Name: myserver
Address: 192.168.1.168
c:\users\chriss> ping myserver
Ping request could not find host myserver.
WHY. THE. FUCK. NOT? YOU JUST TOLD ME ITS FUCKING ADDRESS!!
ETA: Before anyone says - I'm connected to it by IP address over there ----->. It's just DNS being shite as usual.
Post by: Kim on 04 October, 2019, 11:37:07 am
Post by: slope on 06 October, 2019, 06:06:40 pm
So I bought a 2017 27 inch iMac from John Lewis in July 2018, cos they offer a two year warranty at the same price as anyone else reputable?. It was delivered by DPD.
The internal hardrive is now borked. Which happened during the latest Apple software/security update on Friday. The borking has been confirmed after two phone calls with incredibly fast talking Apple support people. I needed two stiff drinks and two lie downs after both.
John Lewis telephone tech support advise to send it back to them (my nearest JL store in Chester, where there just happens to be an official Apple Repair facility) via DPD, and the cost of sending would be refunded to me by JL.
Being that kinda person who retains all original packaging and boxes piled up in his spare bedroom (also bike boxes and wheel rim boxes and tiny little rear deralleur type boxes), I still had what the iMac was delivered in - and by the look of the labels, had probably come all the way from China via another country and possibly 2 John Lewis locations. Even though the packaging didn't give one/me much confidence - I have to accept that cardboard and that vile white stuff, protected MY iMac all the way to ME.
The reason for needing to send it being a) I don't have a car/motor thingy, b) only have some bicycles and two still fit legs, c) cos I live at the bottom of Snowdon and d) cos I can't use public transport (mental health panic issues), even if I wanted lug around a 14kg box of a now duff Apple.
Specifically iMacs are on DPD's prohibited list.
So started an order with DPD just so I could get to their 'online chat' or any faux personal/helpful? communication and get some kinda confirmation about this prohibition.
I was reluctant but willing to accept all risk against loss or damage, as there's no other way am I going to be able to return it without hiring a car (or seeking above and beyond reasonable help from moton friends, regardless the expense would be so far in excess of the circa £17 courier fee)
So DPD 'online chat' person when asked coud I send an iMac accepting all risks, says "no problem". I'm kinda thinking whoa, and asked for confirmation of said 'online chat' person's declaration - pointing out there is some confusion on the DPD website about what's PROHIBITED or just not covered by any indemnity on their behalf.
Then he categorically states NO - you can't send an iMac via DPD. But couldn't explain how they came to deliver it and probably hundreds over the years sold by John Lweis and others.
He then changes tack, and says yes I can book a collection, but if the contents get scanned whilst in their realm, it will be returned to me. He suggested NOT all parcels are scanned for their contents, so it might be fine and get back to John Lewis in Chester.
So my risk has doubled from damage or loss between here and Chester, to it doesn't make it cos it's randomly scanned and possibly damged or lost in its return to me.
I'm thinking i need to wean myslef completely off this crap and go as far off grid as possible, ie run away, and hope my sanity can recover?
Post by: ian on 06 October, 2019, 06:37:18 pm
In other news, EE have given up trying to transfer my number to a new SIM. It's already transferred they claim, though they can't really argue with the fact that my phone thinks it's on a different number. They can't just give me the magic code because it's already happened even though it hasn't. Why don't you just give me a new SIM, I say, since it seems the obvious solution and start the bloody process again. For some reason they seemed reluctant to do this because 'it wouldn't work.' News update. It didn't work, it can't not work less. I may have got a bit ratty at this point because everyone at EE seems a bit bored and not especially competent when it comes to mobile phones, which considering their business, probably isn't a recommendation. So yeah, let's go with new SIM. Oh no, it turns out, they can't because I don't have photo ID, which seems suddenly to be a thing that wasn't a thing when they gave the last SIM two weeks before. But I can do it online, which OK, but you know that you told me to visit a shop, which I'm doing and frankly I can think of more fun things to do on Sunday afternoon.
Anyway, EE, shower of shit. I left before I got seriously annoyed because at the end of the day, it's just a phone number.
Post by: slope on 06 October, 2019, 07:06:33 pm
I don't understand, just ask JL to arrange collection. You don't need packaging or anything else. The point of a warranty is that it's their problem
As far as I can understand (and it's diffucult enough without a fucked up head) ALL the small print, plus after to speaking JL tech support, paid for return to base is only applicable for the first year of the usual manufacture's warranty? This iMac is 15 months old after purchase.
Post by: perpetual dan on 06 October, 2019, 07:20:40 pm
Post by: slope on 06 October, 2019, 07:44:29 pm
Do you have a Waitrose close enough to get it to? I've picked up JL packages from them, so they might conceivably be willing to help - given that DPD aren't.
I suggested that this afternoon to the John Lewis tech support - after informing them of the DPD no-no/questionable no confidence response
Have to wait until tomorrow to talk to the reasonably local Waitrose at Menai Bridge. (30 miles as opposed to 60 miles to Chester) and would still need a friend with a car to help.
But JL tech support, questioned (didn't know) whether the small and obviously separate (kinda) Waitrose was geared up to receive large John Lewis items like 14 kg Apple iMacs?
We shall see?
One can understand JL's (limited) extra year warranty?
And unless one 'purchases' extended warranties which include 'return to base' costs?
I think I'm looking at some considerable expenditure - or try and sell the current HD defective 2017 iMac, to somene willing to take on a DIY HD replacement project in the full knowledge of the issue - and then buy another iMac and hope that lasts more than 2 years?
Post by: perpetual dan on 06 October, 2019, 07:54:07 pm
Post by: ian on 07 October, 2019, 09:37:56 am
Post by: grams on 07 October, 2019, 10:39:35 am
If you’re willing to take the risk, playing dumb and booking the DPD delivery as instructed and seeing what happens would be my plan.
If it is just the hard drive that’s bad, booting it off an external drive or finding a local tech who can replace the internal one would solve the problem.
Post by: ian on 07 October, 2019, 10:55:45 am
If it's genuinely broken and you've effectively paid for the warranty, then use it, I don't see why you'd contemplate a DIY fix.
I'd also question why a software update would bork the hardware, and assuming it's an SSD, then they're generally pretty robust, though if there's spinning rust involved like a fusion drive, then mechanicals do happen. I'd also work through the recovery options before bothering to send it back, it'll redo the updates etc.
Post by: aeolus on 07 October, 2019, 11:30:20 am
I had a similar frustrating experience with a new I phone as I changed provider at the same time (Three) - they said my number had been changed to the sim I obtained from the Three shop - phone not working.
After numerous calls to all the help lines in the total universe with no resolution I noticed that on my contacts page it said your phone number and it was the incorrect one (the one that came with the card) but at the top of the screen was EDIT so I tried it and could then input my correct number.
Bingo it all worked - none of the tech help told me that - obviously to simple to need to mention !!!
Post by: ian on 07 October, 2019, 11:38:24 am
I need to swap the old T-mobile SIM back, and just start the process again. Honestly, I'd tell them to fuck off, but my wife is on EE and she has data to gift me, which makes it a very cheap option.
Post by: Diver300 on 09 October, 2019, 10:21:05 pm
On a completely different connectivity issue, Microchip's PICkit2 hasn't been made for 10 years, and the really useful terminal emulator feature it's got hasn't been carried onto its successors. Now on my new computer, the PICkit2 software keeps crashing, and it refuses to work at all if I've got the USB-c to HDMI converter plugged into the computer. So it looks like I've got to have another USB-serial adaptor and a new PIC programmer, and more cables, just to do what was easy 10 years ago.
Post by: Afasoas on 10 October, 2019, 10:02:22 pm
Despite being born in 2006, Microsoft Windows DHCP Server doesn't support RFC4361. Which means DHCP reservations are broken for anything running modern Linux, unless you hack dhclient on said Linux boxen first. Which is bloody difficult when you want said Linux boxen to network boot, install and configure themselves. And your configuration is designed to take the dynamically assigned IP address and make it static. :facepalm:
Post by: Kim on 10 October, 2019, 10:05:09 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 10 October, 2019, 10:13:12 pm
This completely fails to surprise me, but tbh, anyone using Windows for a DHCP server when there are Linux boxen available was probably in for a world of pain from the outset...
DHCP is AD integrated for the Winboxen. Heterogeneous networks are not uncommon.
Besides which, Windows DHCP Server does HA a more easily and more flexibly than dhcpd. Roundabouts and swings...
Post by: Pingu on 15 October, 2019, 09:14:29 pm
I've been watching Pingu trying to install Ubuntu, that failing, then trying to restore Win 7, that failing, then trying to install Win 10, then nuking it all from orbit before starting again.
All weekend.
It's been quite tense in here.
Hah! I have been updating Windows10 on an old laptop which also boots into Ubuntu.
Every Win10 restart boots into Ubuntu by default and waits for me to change back to Win. I've been at it since Saturday lunchtime.
Lapdog nuked from orbit and now running on Win 10. We'll see how long that lasts :-\
Well, that's been 2 weeks and it's still working, FLW. I employed the technique as described Polar Bear (https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=111515.0), entering the Windows 7 product key that came with this lapdog.
Post by: TheLurker on 16 October, 2019, 09:09:50 pm
Post by: Kim on 16 October, 2019, 09:10:34 pm
Post by: Greenbank on 16 October, 2019, 09:47:31 pm
+++OUT OF CHEESE+++
I used that in something I wrote years ago (2001!).
If end users did something specifically stupid and theoretically impossible it would throw an error that I wasn't to capture logs for easily. I put "If you encounter this problem please contact <email address> with details." and got nothing.
After a while I replaced it with, where is it (dredges code from ancient backup):-
print "Internal error #47 [+++MELON MELON MELON - OUT OF CHEESE ERROR]\n";
and I got the reports I needed within a few days.
Post by: vorsprung on 17 October, 2019, 03:19:23 pm
It's nearly 2020 and still we can't get the basics right.
Despite being born in 2006, Microsoft Windows...
Can't we have a Godwin's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law) for IT problems? If your comment features the phrase "Microsoft" or "Billyware" then basically the world of pain and hurt has a known, accepted and trivially understood cause. So any said complaint, winge, moan etc is invalid due to the billy-mention
Post by: TheLurker on 17 October, 2019, 06:26:28 pm
... So any said complaint, winge, moan etc is invalid due to the billy-mentionYou have a choice. Either let those of us forced to work with or use BillyWare* let off steam here or... be prepared to duck when we take to the clock towers with high powered rifles. :)
*Good name. Will be stolen.
Post by: ian on 24 October, 2019, 04:58:56 pm
No, I didn't.
Then, of course, having finally sorted that shit out while two hundred people twiddle their thumbs, I click share desktop and it highlights and looks peachy. Share away, dear presenter, and off I go.
Except it's not sharing, because it's updated, my Mac is now asking me to authorize the 'new' app to allow it to share screen and keyboard. But I can't see that window, of course, because I'm in presentation mode.
I fucking hate computers.
Post by: pcolbeck on 25 October, 2019, 07:50:18 am
Post by: ian on 25 October, 2019, 09:15:29 am
I'm about 8 years into trying to get my AnyConnect VPN back. If I am asked to fucking reinstall my profiles again (which were never broke, I just needed the bloody 64-bit client, but anyway) I'm going off like a recently kicked Krakatoa.
Post by: ian on 25 October, 2019, 09:54:26 am
I assume JAMF is short for 'jam-filled babbage engine.'
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 October, 2019, 12:29:17 pm
Post by: fuaran on 30 October, 2019, 12:30:38 pm
If you registered a .co.uk domain with them, they will add on a matching .uk domain for free. Except after 2 years when the renewal is due, they charge you £11.99 to renew it, as well as the domain you actually want.
They have agreed to refund it after I complained anyway.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/16/123reg_namesco_uk_domains/
Seems they have gone downhill since the takeover by GoDaddy. Any other decent webhosts/registrars around?
Post by: ian on 30 October, 2019, 01:46:49 pm
Although, after no fewer than two unrequested and unstoppable complete restarts this morning, the VPN is back. A process that involved something called the JAMF Self-Service portal (which mostly seems to exist to randomly restart my computer at inopportune moments, and really if I wanted that, I've have ordered a Windows PC and not a Macbook).
I assume JAMF is short for 'jam-filled babbage engine.'
Rather marvellously, it takes over the update progress. In the Mac-verse, updates lets you choose when to do it. Now. In an hour. Tonight. You know, whenever it's convenient.
Now, it pops up a 'your computer will restart in 5 minutes, please save all your work and log out' with no other option. Which if you're in the middle of a presentation and you're the presenter and it's your computer, this is less than optimal. How amused we were. Ah, but it'll be brief interlude, I say, all frothy with computational optimism.
Anyway, the audience got twenty minutes of crawling progress bar because it was downloading and installing the entire 10.15.1 update, which basically is the entire OS 8.3 GB OS from scratch.
Post by: DaveReading on 30 October, 2019, 02:18:16 pm
123 Reg are a bunch of scammers.
If you registered a .co.uk domain with them, they will add on a matching .uk domain for free. Except after 2 years when the renewal is due, they charge you £11.99 to renew it, as well as the domain you actually want.
They have agreed to refund it after I complained anyway.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/16/123reg_namesco_uk_domains/
Seems they have gone downhill since the takeover by GoDaddy. Any other decent webhosts/registrars around?
If it's any consolation, Easyspace are just as devious - except that they wanted £19.99 to "renew" a "free" .uk domain that I'd never asked for and don't want or need.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 November, 2019, 12:10:58 pm
Me: Onoz! I haz not Internetz! Perhaps it will come back?
(It doesn't; contact ISP)
Them: All looks OK at our end. Must be ur hardware, or ur router configuration! Try factory reset, or other router.
(Tries factory reset, buys new router and installs same)
Me: Onoz! I still haz not Internetz! Perchance it is the string from the router 2 the wall?
(Move router into hall, spend evening tripping over network cable, haz not Internetz)
Me: Iz vanishingly unlikely 2 be mi hardware. Ur move!
(Time passes; it is now Tuesday. Peers at blinkenlights through uncaffeinated blur)
Me: Yay! I haz Internetz!
Them: ...
Bah!
Post by: ian on 05 November, 2019, 09:48:20 pm
As such, I just spent an hour trying to back up my bloody music.
The issue, it turns out, is that for some reason (laffs probs) they turned off smbd's entire-disk-access for the external drive. Which is, of course, where the tunes live. They could have, of course, have given an error message to that effect. But that wouldn't be computer networking now would it? It has to fail for reasons that you can't know, because the plan is, of course, to send you – dear user – scurrying to find both new expletives and a fucking USB stick. It's been like this since time forgot. Screaming people ripping through their desk drawer looking for a bloody floppy.
So instead of simply saying what the problem is, instead why not have it vamoose with a breathy 'the original item can't be found' and a virtual shrug. It can be found because I'm clicking on it. Right there. In the Finder. Click. Click. Click. It can fucking well be found you ephalaladoofus of a computer.
Ironically, the fix was literally to turn it (file sharing) off and back on. Two clicks of a checkbox. Less than a second.
Post by: vorsprung on 06 November, 2019, 10:36:03 pm
123 Reg are a bunch of scammers.
If you registered a .co.uk domain with them, they will add on a matching .uk domain for free. Except after 2 years when the renewal is due, they charge you £11.99 to renew it, as well as the domain you actually want.
They have agreed to refund it after I complained anyway.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/16/123reg_namesco_uk_domains/
Seems they have gone downhill since the takeover by GoDaddy. Any other decent webhosts/registrars around?
haha
No
Post by: Ham on 07 November, 2019, 09:39:43 am
123 Reg are a bunch of scammers.
If you registered a .co.uk domain with them, they will add on a matching .uk domain for free. Except after 2 years when the renewal is due, they charge you £11.99 to renew it, as well as the domain you actually want.
They have agreed to refund it after I complained anyway.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/16/123reg_namesco_uk_domains/
Seems they have gone downhill since the takeover by GoDaddy. Any other decent webhosts/registrars around?
haha
No
Well, not quite.
EVO Hosting were a UK company, now part of Paragon group/TSO Hosts https://www.tsohost.com/
I've used them for years*, and despite a recent shift in emphasis, they still have manned UK support (answered by a techie) 07:00-00:00, which counts for a huge bunch in my book.
Whether they meet your criteria I don't know, but they fit the bill of "decent".
*On checking, 15 years
Post by: fuaran on 07 November, 2019, 10:20:48 am
Post by: grams on 07 November, 2019, 11:24:13 am
Paragon/TSO Host are also owned by GoDaddy now.
Fuck. Back to Joker.com it is then (shame they can't bill in GBP).
Post by: vorsprung on 11 November, 2019, 12:57:53 pm
The macbook won't STFU
Notifications off in the notification centre, Slack told to not notify, other apps with notify off, the volume set to zero, the lid shut, do not distrub settings in the systems preferences "when the display is sleeping", do not disturb is set to 24h a day
It's still making ding noises like it's trying to notify about something
Obviously a Macbook notification is more important than anything else
This generation of Macbook doesn't have an on-off switch for power either. So the only solution is to put it in a sound proof thing. Ie, your suitcase with spare clothes if you are sharing a hotel room with it
Post by: Ham on 11 November, 2019, 02:39:07 pm
Paragon/TSO Host are also owned by GoDaddy now.
Oh bum, I missed that. As yet, hasn't trickled down to their operations, but I'm sure it will.
Post by: Kim on 11 November, 2019, 05:34:26 pm
Post by: Gattopardo on 17 November, 2019, 02:05:49 am
I have been messing around for 13 odd hours, well started at 11ish and have been coming back to it every so often. Have upgraded the OH machine, and her 'work' laptop that a friend donated to her as her school laptop is still dead and never to be fixed by the school IT department.
Post by: Gattopardo on 18 November, 2019, 02:21:11 pm
Post by: ian on 06 December, 2019, 09:11:49 pm
Why fucking duplicate all the stuff I've purchased from Apple in my library? For which the only solution seems to be to go to my purchased history and hide it. Album by album.
One I'm ruler of everything, my mercy will be carefully rationed.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 23 December, 2019, 04:22:01 pm
This turns off the screen when making calls and the phone is held to your face. Now it is faulty - the screen goes off as soon as I try to call and it cuts off the call.
Used to be possible to disable the sensor, but no more, not in later versions of Android. Nothing else wrong with the phone, it is just useless for making phone calls . . .
So I'm kind of forced into getting a new handset. Just because of one sodding sensor. Really bugs me.
Post by: Kim on 23 December, 2019, 09:34:16 pm
I've long thought that Android would greatly benefit from an about:config style setting editor, so we're not at the mercy of whatever the molishers of the particular build thought to include in the GUI.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 24 December, 2019, 10:37:30 am
Could you use a headset? Or hold the phone flat and outwards like the Young People do?Nope, the sensor is borked, so it cuts the screen as soon it thinks I'm making a call. Now also screws up calls.
I've long thought that Android would greatly benefit from an about:config style setting editor, so we're not at the mercy of whatever the molishers of the particular build thought to include in the GUI.
Recent Android updates removed the option to disable the proximity sensor.
Post by: Kim on 12 January, 2020, 05:23:46 pm
Post by: Kim on 14 January, 2020, 01:13:55 am
That isn't the rant.
The rant is that the Netgear USB WiFi dongle (required for notwork access on the 'mature' BHPC laptop) appears to have bricked itself while I was fighting with Excel. It's utterly dead. No error messages (apart from the "cannot access stackoverflow, how are you going to write computer programs now?" in FireFox). No blinkenlights. No inserted-a-USB-device noise. Nothing in lsusb if I plug it into a proper computer. Nothing. ???
Post by: freeflow on 15 January, 2020, 08:02:30 pm
Post by: ian on 06 February, 2020, 09:31:43 am
So I install the update. Takes about five minutes. All good, the version number has incremented. Start to write an email.
YOUR COMPUTER WILL RESTART IN FIVE MINUTES! screams the mothership installed IT nobbler. I just did that, says I.
So 33 minutes later and one incomplete email, I'm still staring at a progress bar. Sigh.
Post by: Ham on 06 February, 2020, 11:56:26 am
https://xkcd.com/2261/
Post by: Tim Hall on 11 February, 2020, 10:15:15 am
Get home, rip CD to flac so I can play it using my Raspberry Pi in the Grand Lounge.
This is SOP and works well.
Copy files to the Big SD card that lives in the car, so I can listen to it whilst tooling up and down the motorways of this fair land.
It works to start with, then craps out, not finding playable files. All the other files are playable.
Remove SD card and put it in my lapdancer.
The newlyt copied files play just fine.
Put it back in the car. No change.
Remove from car, put it in the lapdancer.
Copy the files onto lapdancer.
Delete from card.
Reinsert card into car, so it can reindex.
Back into lapdancer and copy files back onto card.
Back into car, still won't find them.
Listen to Radio 4 instead.
Post by: Kim on 11 February, 2020, 01:23:37 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 11 February, 2020, 02:14:08 pm
Watched a band or two Saturday night and bought a CD off the merch table.
Get home, rip CD to flac so I can play it using my Raspberry Pi in the Grand Lounge.
This is SOP and works well.
Copy files to the Big SD card that lives in the car, so I can listen to it whilst tooling up and down the motorways of this fair land.
It works to start with, then craps out, not finding playable files. All the other files are playable.
Remove SD card and put it in my lapdancer.
The newlyt copied files play just fine.
Put it back in the car. No change.
Remove from car, put it in the lapdancer.
Copy the files onto lapdancer.
Delete from card.
Reinsert card into car, so it can reindex.
Back into lapdancer and copy files back onto card.
Back into car, still won't find them.
Listen to Radio 4 instead.
Filenames that the Car doesn't like? Underscores, spaces, special characters, length of filename including directory or not or some combination of these?
Post by: Feanor on 11 February, 2020, 02:33:21 pm
Try a different SD card.
Post by: Tim Hall on 11 February, 2020, 05:42:41 pm
The different SD card thing sounds a plan, so I'll try it when I get home, which won't be for a couple of days.
Post by: Jaded on 11 February, 2020, 06:10:16 pm
Post by: Tim Hall on 13 February, 2020, 09:05:17 am
(Bit rates etc are as all the other files on the Big Card)
I suspect the Big Card is on its way out.
Post by: Tim Hall on 14 February, 2020, 01:40:53 pm
Put card in car. All works.
It's a puzzle and no mistake.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 16 February, 2020, 01:17:42 pm
Post by: grams on 16 February, 2020, 03:28:01 pm
is to share browser history with the box maker, and bugs and performance will be Apple’s problem.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 16 February, 2020, 05:28:14 pm
Went to another gig last night and picked up a couple more CDs. Ripped them, copied them to the card. Deleted the problem folder from the card. Re copied it.Hmm - when you removed the card from the computer, did you just take it out, or did you eject it (i.e. dismount).
Put card in car. All works.
It's a puzzle and no mistake.
If you don't eject, then it is a lottery whether files are left 'locked' to the computer's OS or not.
Windows is shtty and doesn't care. Other operating systems will detect a locked file and say 'I can't open that'.
Post by: Davef on 16 February, 2020, 06:22:35 pm
All web browsers on iOS are just Safari in a box, so there’s not much point using them unless your goalCan you elaborate ? If I install chrome and then delete the safari binaries from the application folder I believe chrome will carry on working. Various other things will break so I would not recommend doing it but I don’t think chrome depends on safari, but then again I often turn out to be wrong.
is to share browser history with the box maker, and bugs and performance will be Apple’s problem.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Post by: bludger on 16 February, 2020, 06:31:36 pm
I will be resigning myself to using membrane keyboards or X switch ones for the rest of my typing life sadly... Even if I got a place in some super dooper swish swoosh firm I bet my desire for good keyboards would be ignored.
This is a nice segue to my faithful Ducky Blue being on the market. Hoping one of you warriors might like it, it deserves a good home. https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=114900.msg2466803#msg2466803
Post by: philip on 16 February, 2020, 07:11:26 pm
Can you elaborate ?Apple guideline (https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#software-requirements) 2.5.6 states: "apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework". Webkit is the framework used to implement Safari. I believe the requirement is to allow iOS to remain in control even when the app runs downloaded client-side code.
Post by: Davef on 16 February, 2020, 07:14:28 pm
Ah, i saw safari and thought Mac. Once that thought was in my mind I selectively ignored the iOS bit.Can you elaborate ?Apple guideline (https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#software-requirements) 2.5.6 states: "apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework". Webkit is the framework used to implement Safari. I believe the requirement is to allow iOS to remain in control even when the app runs downloaded client-side code.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 16 February, 2020, 08:07:28 pm
Post by: grams on 16 February, 2020, 08:12:52 pm
Can you elaborate ? If I install chrome and then delete the safari binaries from the application folder I believe chrome will carry on working. Various other things will break so I would not recommend doing it but I don’t think chrome depends on safari, but then again I often turn out to be wrong.
I meant specifically on iOS (iPhones and iPads) third party browsers aren’t allowed in the App Store. The things that exist that look like third party browsers (including Chrome) are required to use the built-in browser engine (i.e. Safari) so will have the same functionality/bugs/performance.
On Macs Chrome is a real app with its own Google-developed browser engine* that isn’t dependent on Safari.
(* pedantically it’s a fork of the same engine as Safari)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 February, 2020, 02:29:28 pm
Post by: Feanor on 03 March, 2020, 08:29:15 pm
A while back, I had to code some custom plug-ins for our software product.
(It's extensible with User Apps which can be written in a variety of languages, but it's easiest to use Visual Studio and C# because it directly works with the API.)
This code had to do some Hard Stuff, involving Deep Magic.
Sometimes, one of the Hard Things is not the actual User Code, it's how to implement it properly as a plug-in for the main product.
(You are building DLLs, which need to both implement specific public interfaces which the main product can call into in order to use the plug-in, and also reference the main product API DLLs to be able to Do Stuff. )
I commented the code well, but I also wrote a Word doc describing how to set up the VS project correctly to integrate with our product, including screen-shots and code snippets.
I came to re-use some of those code snippets today, and copy-pasted them back into the new project.
A mess of squiggly red underlines.
"Are you perhaps missing a reference ( dumb_ass) ?" it helpfully asks.
Why, no! I am not. Fuck Off!
WTF?
Turns out Word has mangled the CaSe of everything in the code snippets when I wrote it up.
When I pasted the code snippets into the Word doc, Word decided that the CaSe needed 'fixing', and I never noticed at the time.
Cue half an hour of cursing and fixing it all back up.
I mean, it was everywhere.
From all the "using ThisThing" lines, through to all the class names.
And this ran very deep.
IDatabaseFactory, IDatabase, IWell, ICurveSet.
These things are referenced everywhere, and FuCkEd Up Case is a total PITA.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 March, 2020, 01:14:38 am
Do NOT decide unilaterally to renable the shit monitor speakers and send sound to them instead, because they make BRITISH Sea Power sound like Mickey fucking Mouse. With pneumonia.
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 20 March, 2020, 11:31:14 am
When I update my amd graphics I need to tell windows to use my usb DAC again.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 March, 2020, 12:05:47 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 28 March, 2020, 05:50:20 pm
- Log in
- Open command prompt
- sudo mount -a
- enter password (again)
Linux ready for the mainstream? My shiny metal arse.
1including the bonus more than doubling the speed of my raid1 array by moving it from mdraid to an Adaptec 6405
2for disappointing values of...
Post by: Kim on 28 March, 2020, 05:53:54 pm
How can it be so hard to set up a persistent network share mount on linux? FFS how?
By adding the appropriate line to /etc/fstab
(Any desktop GUI stuff pertaining to network mounts is basically a trap. NFS, while generally more inclined to stay working than CIFS, is basically voodoo to configure and is file permission gotchas all the way down.)
Post by: SoreTween on 28 March, 2020, 06:24:17 pm
By adding the appropriate line to /etc/fstabDefine 'appropriate'. My dumb thinking is if I can 'sudo mount -a' and the mounts connect then the fstab file must be right?
With cifs as I said it works when manually run but did SFA at login. It was set up to use a credentials file and when I read there were bugs with that I'd reached the end of my patience.
With nfs after editing the fstab file and nothing mounted 'sudo mount -a' works just fine but at login it doesn't work. The devices are created (as in they appear under 'devices' in the left pane of caja) but the connection is empty (as in when I open them nothing is listed). I can't umount them because they aren't mounted and I can't mount them because the mount points are in use. Perfect catch 22.
Code: [Select]
<NAS>:/<Share> /home/<user>/<foldername> nfs rw,hard,intr,_netdev 0 0Mrs Tween is used to our network drives being N: & M: on windows, I need it to be as simple to find the network shares. So far she has been patient with my refusal to allow winblows post 7 anywhere near our infrastructure. So far we have been lucky that when I've been away, which is 4 weeks as a time, nothing has failed. She would struggle with the 4 steps in my post above but if something stops working she'd be fine with a text from me in <forrin> that simply said 'reboot it'.
Post by: Kim on 28 March, 2020, 07:02:34 pm
FWIW, the fstab on my desktop has lines like this:
Code: [Select]
servername:/home/kim /mnt/kim nfs defaults,rw,soft,tcp,intr 0 0This gets mounted at boot time (not login time), and caja et al just regard it as part of the filesystem.
I'm wondering if the "_netdev" option is delaying your mount?
I have the user problem of barakta (who used too many Apple products at a formative age) not really understanding that all Linux GUIs are lies, mounting network shares using the MATE tools, drag-and-dropping things from caja into random non-MATE programs and then screaming because it doesn't work. Well of course it doesn't work, it's not actually mounted. It's not $random_program's fault that someone thought it was a good idea to make a file manager that pretends to mount filesystems. (Seriously, what were they thinking? Couldn't it mount them in /media/username or something?)
This is still preferable to Windows, where things tend to be easy to get working, but then break at random.
Post by: barakta on 28 March, 2020, 07:10:17 pm
Post by: Kim on 28 March, 2020, 07:10:53 pm
Thunderbollocks. Is bollocks!
And yet remains superior to the alternatives >:(
Post by: SoreTween on 29 March, 2020, 08:36:00 am
_netdev is supposed to only delay the mount until all networks are connected.
Cheers.
Post by: pcolbeck on 29 March, 2020, 09:15:08 am
Post by: SoreTween on 29 March, 2020, 11:34:21 am
My /home directory is encrypted, that's the penny that dropped reading Kim's fstab this morning. Mount the drives in /mnt and it works :-) They don't show up as devices in Caja that way though which is why I was mounting them under /home. A couple of symbolic links on the desktop solve that.
Thanks again Kim, you are a star.
Re the gotchas all the way down, yep I see that and suspected There May Be Trouble Ahead in going NFS. Files on the NAS saved through nfs belong to <me> <me> rather than NAS groups <500> <users>. I can read such files from windows boxen but they are read only. Not a problem for me as my visits to windows are rare these days but Mrs Tween uses a windows 10 laptop, I shall have to find a way. I can always go back to cifs now I know why mounts that way weren't working but it will irritate me to discard the faster protocol.
Lastly re thunderbollocks, Pegasus Mail works just fine under Wine. Looks positively Neanderthal these days but is still a proper email client that has become able to display HTML rather than everything else I've used that seem to be HTML editors/renderers with a pish poor email back end cludged in.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 March, 2020, 12:51:30 pm
I was once (many years ago) working in the datacentre of a major supermarket when someone accidentally hit the emergency stop button. Once the power was turned back on and everything started to boot up we were privileged to watch the circle jerk of about twenty unix boxes that had been deployed over the years all trying to mount each others filesystems via NFS. Took forever.
'tis fun when someone hits the BRS. One of the tape librarians did it at a former labour camp by stacking the big boxes we used for offsite tape storage three-high instead of the more usual two before pushing them to the airlock. With 20/20 hindsight, The Mgt generated An Edict that the boxes must in future be stacked no more than two-high, and also installed a mollyguard on the BRS.
Because it happened at about 5:15 pm on a weekday it took north of 24 hours to get everything back to working order but, perhaps surprisingly, Dave the Tape Monkey didn't lose his job.
Post by: Greenbank on 29 March, 2020, 12:55:15 pm
Because it happened at about 5:15 pm on a weekday it took north of 24 hours to get everything back to working order but, perhaps surprisingly, Dave the Tape Monkey didn't lose his job.
Reminds me of the Thomas Watson quote:-
Quote
Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?
Post by: Kim on 29 March, 2020, 12:59:51 pm
Re the gotchas all the way down, yep I see that and suspected There May Be Trouble Ahead in going NFS. Files on the NAS saved through nfs belong to <me> <me> rather than NAS groups <500> <users>. I can read such files from windows boxen but they are read only. Not a problem for me as my visits to windows are rare these days but Mrs Tween uses a windows 10 laptop, I shall have to find a way. I can always go back to cifs now I know why mounts that way weren't working but it will irritate me to discard the faster protocol.
There are only two sane ways to use NFS:
a) Where UIDs and GIDs are consistent between boxes. Consistency left as an exercise for the reader.
2) With a (likely read-only) mount exported using all_squash, where ownership doesn't matter.
Otherwise you're in for a world of pain...
Quote
Lastly re thunderbollocks, Pegasus Mail works just fine under Wine. Looks positively Neanderthal these days but is still a proper email client that has become able to display HTML rather than everything else I've used that seem to be HTML editors/renderers with a pish poor email back end cludged in.
The current problem is mostly that Lightning (a perfectly good CalDAV client) got integrated with thunderbollocks, to the detriment of both.
Post by: salar55 on 30 March, 2020, 01:12:04 pm
Post by: ian on 23 April, 2020, 12:46:25 pm
I hate fixing computers.
Post by: Kim on 23 April, 2020, 01:17:48 pm
speed test claims it's consistently doing about 20Mbps with a sub-20ms ping
That doesn't actually tell you anything about the packet loss (unless you can infer something from what the throughput ought to be), which is likely to be the cause of your audio woe.
A more useful test is to leave ping[1] running for a while, and see what the stats look like. Pinging the LAN address of your router will test the WiFi part of the connection without involving the wider internet.
[1] On a Mac, you can open a terminal and type "ping hostname", where hostname is either a hostname or an IP address. It will send a ping once a second and tell you if/when it receives a response. Press <ctrl><c> to stop pinging and get some statistics. The Windows ping works similarly, but defaults to stopping after 3 pings. There will be some command-line parameter for changing that (on *nix it's "-c").
Post by: Davef on 23 April, 2020, 02:41:50 pm
Ping -t on windowsspeed test claims it's consistently doing about 20Mbps with a sub-20ms ping
That doesn't actually tell you anything about the packet loss (unless you can infer something from what the throughput ought to be), which is likely to be the cause of your audio woe.
A more useful test is to leave ping[1] running for a while, and see what the stats look like. Pinging the LAN address of your router will test the WiFi part of the connection without involving the wider internet.
[1] On a Mac, you can open a terminal and type "ping hostname", where hostname is either a hostname or an IP address. It will send a ping once a second and tell you if/when it receives a response. Press <ctrl><c> to stop pinging and get some statistics. The Windows ping works similarly, but defaults to stopping after 3 pings. There will be some command-line parameter for changing that (on *nix it's "-c").
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Post by: ian on 23 April, 2020, 02:58:11 pm
Occasionally it kills the entire connection, and I have to kill the wifi and reconnect.
Post by: neilrj on 23 April, 2020, 06:08:54 pm
That's the odd thing – there's typically 0.0% packet loss (averages around 8ms to the router), the computer CPU isn't maxed out, there's spare memory, but it only happens periodically (so I've not managed to catch the specifics as I'm usually on the call when it goes off). The sound doesn't so much as drop out, it just goes weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeirdddddddd.
Occasionally it kills the entire connection, and I have to kill the wifi and reconnect.
We get dropouts on Skype/Zoom and the only thing that seems to cure it is making sure no other devices are connected by wifi, I assume a phone or tablet checks in for mail/updates/surveillance and just creates a little/large upset. Mind you we only have low bandwidth copper connection.
Post by: Kim on 23 April, 2020, 06:36:23 pm
a) Most consumer routers don't do it
b) Most consumer ISPs don't do it (they want to score well in speed tests, which is mutually exclusive without resorting to Dieselgate tactics, and they would rather you just paid for a fatter pipe)
c) You need to do it on both sides of the bottleneck for full effect (see 'b')
d) Correct shaper configuration is a bit of a black art, though prioritising small packets goes a long way (unless someone's running Bittorrent or similar)
e) Some protocols make it nearly impossible to identify without deep packet inspection: "Oh look, encrypted traffic to AWS on port 443..." What you can't identify, you can't prioritise.
(WiFi suffers from its own fundamental (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_node_problem) problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposed_node_problem). They don't call it the Devil's Radio for nothing.)
Post by: ian on 23 April, 2020, 06:46:59 pm
Post by: matthew on 26 April, 2020, 12:03:29 pm
I've checked two sources, laptop via VGA and desktop via HDMI and it was present on both inputs so definitely the monitor.
However power cycling it has cleared it. Now not sure why or if I trust it.
Post by: Jaded on 26 April, 2020, 12:20:44 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 April, 2020, 10:01:54 pm
Yes, Windows, I know that monitor has built-in speakers. But they're shit. That is why I disabled them in Control Panel. In fact I disabled all the myriad sound options – except one – because they're shit too. Or they don't exist. So please route sounds out of the optical hole in the sound card, so they can travel down the string, into the pleasingly chunky A/V receiver and thence to my ear'oles via the 5:1 squeaker system I bought for that very purpose. You know, like I told you to do when I installed them.
Do NOT decide unilaterally to renable the shit monitor speakers and send sound to them instead, because they make BRITISH Sea Power sound like Mickey fucking Mouse. With pneumonia.
So after behaving flawlessly for a Several of weeks, the sound did it again. No, there haven't been any updates to the picture card software or to Windows since switching it on yesterday. The startup sequence is the same as it ever was, viz. switch on monitor with squeakers, switch on monitor without squeakers, switch on AV receiver, start PC. Only this time with Tangerine Dream sounding like someone small, far away and drunk.
The Internets says it should be possible to disable the wanky monitor squeakers properly by doing Device Manager -> System devices -> High Definition Audio Controller, finding the one associated with the graphics card's PCI address and disabling it. We. Shall. See.
Post by: TheLurker on 28 April, 2020, 07:09:19 pm
S H I T!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 April, 2020, 10:28:58 am
Post by: ian on 29 April, 2020, 11:27:09 am
I might just splurge on one of those mesh things, except I'm probably just opening the door to something else to annoy me. The reason I didn't do this last time was because the Sonos speakers didn't work on it, but they have a boost box now so should use their own network.
Googles 'wifi mesh.' Oh look, you see a million different types and models, all alike. Sigh.
Post by: ScumOfTheRoad on 29 April, 2020, 11:38:16 am
Post by: russellm on 29 April, 2020, 11:39:20 am
I also bought a Deco mesh network setup (to replace the powerline additional access point) and now everything's working well.
Post by: ian on 29 April, 2020, 12:05:51 pm
A kindly donated access point installed upstairs mostly seemed to deliver decent wifi through the rest of the house. Leastways it stopped my wife dialling IT support (me, unfortunately).
I can't actually remember when the conferencing broke, but I suspect I used to simply dial-in (the mothership's latest cost-saving wheeze is internet-only voice).
I blame my office, but the numbers aren't awful and nothing is notably slow (speed test shows my iMac to run at full connection speed, the crappier Macbook at around half that, for some reason it'll never connect to the 5GHz). That said, my wife can use Teams and Webex fine on the same access point, so all I can assume is that it's somehow not good enough, though in some indescribable way.
Ubiquiti seems nice, but a bit overkill for a modest house with two people. I like the TP-Link stuff though buggery knows what the difference is between all the models (the specs of the M4, S4, P9 seem the same, the latter just seems to include a powerline adaptor).
Post by: ian on 29 April, 2020, 06:09:06 pm
Everything has been perfect all day. Not a single hiccough.
Finestre, being the Demon of Such Things and Queen of Hell, is probably one step ahead of me, of course.
Post by: russellm on 29 April, 2020, 08:20:38 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 29 April, 2020, 11:23:49 pm
1st try - My mistake, I bought single rank instead of double.
2nd try - I bought a quality Corsair set of 4x4Gb that is listed on the web site as compatible with my motherboards. Many random system freezes followed by some deep memtest86+ revealed none of the sticks would work error free. They'd often get through 1 memtest cycle then fail on the 2nd or 3rd. Borderline but wrong - returned and refunded.
3rd try - I bought a better quality Corsair matching 2 sets of 2x4Gb, again listed on the Corsair site as compatible with my motherboards. One pair works perfectly and the other wont even POST despite the sets having exactly the same part number. FFS the only difference is the version number. They are clearly completely different parts under the skin despite being sold as the same.
No wonder there's so much Corsair RAM on Ebay, it's shit.
Actually, those are tries 2-4 because try 1 was going direct to Crucial which always works, 16Gb works flawlessly in this machine (same mobo as the one I'm trying to update)1. Very little choice and high prices due to such an old specification, I should have just taken the hit. Unfortunately there's bugger all Crucial RAM on Ebay.
1Yes I have tried the good Crucial RAM in the 'trouble' mobo and the problem Corsair RAM in the 'good' mobo. The results move with the RAM
Post by: ian on 30 April, 2020, 10:24:48 am
That might still point to the Sonos boxes causing the problem - I think they only work on 2.4GHz.
They are, but they have their own network via the Boost box. The Arlo cameras also use their own 2.4 GHz network. The Macbook Pro was always connecting to the wifi 2.4GHz signal even though it was a bit shit. Now it has to connect to the 5GHz which, while a weaker signal, seems to deliver far better performance.
Anyway, it's mostly working other than, of course, my wife's Windows laptop which decided at 9.30am this morning that it really doesn't like the 5GHz connection that every other device in the house is now on. The age-old 'no internet connection' that every ex-Windows user fondly remembers. Something about public networks and she says it randomly barped something about 'certificates.'
No obvious fix that I can be bothered with, so she can use the 2.4 GHz connection.
Let's hope Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, keeps her nefarious focus elsewhere.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 April, 2020, 11:35:18 am
That reminds me a lot of my own home network problems. I'm pretty sure that for me it was the Sonos devices that were causing the problem - what solved it was making sure that none of the Sonos boxes were connected via Ethernet and they were only using WiFi. When they were set to use WiFi and one (or more) was connected via Ethernet, there were two network paths to the router which utterly confused everything.
I also bought a Deco mesh network setup (to replace the powerline additional access point) and now everything's working well.
You'd think the Sonos gadgets would be smart enough to detect the presence of a wired connection and turn off their WiFi if they found one. Even my old eeePC can do that. Or it could before the cover over the Ethernet port broke off.
Post by: ian on 30 April, 2020, 11:48:09 am
That reminds me a lot of my own home network problems. I'm pretty sure that for me it was the Sonos devices that were causing the problem - what solved it was making sure that none of the Sonos boxes were connected via Ethernet and they were only using WiFi. When they were set to use WiFi and one (or more) was connected via Ethernet, there were two network paths to the router which utterly confused everything.
I also bought a Deco mesh network setup (to replace the powerline additional access point) and now everything's working well.
You'd think the Sonos gadgets would be smart enough to detect the presence of a wired connection and turn off their WiFi if they found one. Even my old eeePC can do that. Or it could before the cover over the Ethernet port broke off.
That's not how they work, if you plug one in, it's still trying to wirelessly mesh with any unwired speakers.
I nearly bought one of those Deco systems, but helpfully they were all out of stock. Helpfully, because I might not need one now.
Post by: ian on 01 May, 2020, 05:23:38 pm
I'd mind less, but I don't want to be in most of these bloody meetings in the first place.
Blah, it worked for a day and is now shitworthy again unless I descend to the living room. What the hell is the Asbestos Palace made out of (other than asbestos, obvs)? Did they stuff the cavity walls with lead? Does it even have cavity walls? Is there somekind of hippy stuffing from the 60s era construction methods? How does it filter the wifi rays so they look like they might be adequate, so all the bars are present and correct, but really they're not? It's the big lie, people, the BIG LIE. WIFI PRoGraMS YOuR MiND!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 May, 2020, 06:07:34 pm
Post by: Kim on 01 May, 2020, 06:23:55 pm
Post by: ian on 01 May, 2020, 06:50:57 pm
I may start to spontaneously emit mesh wifi swears soon enough.
*lie, it's WWII big gun platform, but there's one on the other side of the valley**
**lie, I think that one is a firey beacon to warn us when Napoleon is coming.***
***but I figure there's a 5G mast somewhere.
Post by: barakta on 02 May, 2020, 05:37:31 pm
Insewerants has replaced it with an iPhone 7. Which doesn't have a fucking 3.5mm headphone port (which is why Mum never upgraded).
Less said about maternal crazy plans involving "I want a different email address so I don't clutter up new phone with all my grandchildren photos so it won't run out of space" (I am not tech supporting multiple AppleIDs across her multiple iThings, one is hard enough).
Post by: Davef on 02 May, 2020, 06:44:13 pm
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 May, 2020, 07:33:30 pm
Then why the fucking fuck of Fuckhamptonshire are they NOT THE SAME BEFORE AND AFTER SORTING? You useless, cretinous morons >:(
Post by: fuaran on 02 May, 2020, 07:55:14 pm
Microsith, directory listings generated from the command line are in alphabetical order, yes? And sorting a column in Excel using "Sort... A-Z" sorts stuffs into alphabetical order, yes?Depends on what sort of DIR command you used. If you don't specify the sorting, it is not necessarily alphabetical order. Depends on the file system etc. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140304-00/?p=1603
Then why the fucking fuck of Fuckhamptonshire are they NOT THE SAME BEFORE AND AFTER SORTING? You useless, cretinous morons >:(
Use something like this if you want it to be alphabetical.
Code: [Select]
dir /onDon't know about Excel.
The other confusion is Windows Explorer tries to be clever, and uses natural sort order, instead of alphabetical sorting.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 May, 2020, 11:13:24 am
Post by: pcolbeck on 04 May, 2020, 09:24:40 am
Post by: ian on 04 May, 2020, 11:12:18 am
Is truly the best way to initiate this by sending everyone an email with a link embedded in it?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 May, 2020, 12:02:05 pm
- Use FINDSTR to, well, Find a String1 in a bunch of files, outputting to a text file
- Use notepad++ Find & Replace function to rid the text file of unwanted colons and spaces and make the thing tab-separated
- Paste into Excel, copy the column I need back into notepad++
- Use pre-existing notepad++ macros to Do Stuff to text so it stops being a list and starts being something SCIENCE can interpret
- Save, propagate to Certain Folders in the SCIENCE-approved structure, use pre-existing .bat file to update SCIENCE-approved archive and copy to folder where SCIENCE looks for This Sort of Thing
- Run SCIENCE
- Scratch head wondering how the actual fuck the sub-string "t680" has been turned into "t60" during the above
1: which definitely contains correct information because the SCIENCE would have complained much much earlier
Post by: Ham on 04 May, 2020, 12:14:42 pm
I take it Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, does not have Sundays off, unless this is her subtle way of telling me I need to learn a Windows-compatible scripting language.
- Use FINDSTR to, well, Find a String1 in a bunch of files, outputting to a text file
- Use notepad++ Find & Replace function to rid the text file of unwanted colons and spaces and make the thing tab-separated
- Paste into Excel, copy the column I need back into notepad++
- Use pre-existing notepad++ macros to Do Stuff to text so it stops being a list and starts being something SCIENCE can interpret
- Save, propagate to Certain Folders in the SCIENCE-approved structure, use pre-existing .bat file to update SCIENCE-approved archive and copy to folder where SCIENCE looks for This Sort of Thing
- Run SCIENCE
- Scratch head wondering how the actual fuck the sub-string "t680" has been turned into "t60" during the above
1: which definitely contains correct information because the SCIENCE would have complained much much earlier
My money is on Excel choosing to reformat automatically based on the content of your paste. Best to save and then import CSV where you can specify handling of each data field. Oh, and if you only need to use Excel to columnise copy, consider Textpad, which has a block copy mode (and understands regular expressions)
Post by: pcolbeck on 04 May, 2020, 12:38:41 pm
Oh, and if you only need to use Excel to columnise copy, consider Textpad, which has a block copy mode (and understands regular expressions)
Notepad++ already has block copy and regular expressions.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 May, 2020, 12:55:18 pm
Note to self: investigate this block copy malarkey
Post by: Kim on 04 May, 2020, 12:59:50 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 May, 2020, 11:36:30 am
All this excitement seemed to scramble DJ Random's tiny brane, because he started playing stuff in alphabetical order by album artist as opposed to:
Code: [Select]
10 Play first track on list
20 Disappear track once played
30 Add new track to bottom of list
40 GOTO 10
I eventually unearthed a thing in the View menu* which restored his normal behaviour but really, FruitCo, why/how did you change it in the first place?* Not helped by my habit of putting iTunes on the further-away monitor of the two in the Estate Office, so it's almost beyond the reach of the
Post by: Afasoas on 11 May, 2020, 05:54:39 pm
Also, it seems DNS resolution still doesn't work. 5 second pause (depending on which glibc system call was used) in resolving DNS requests because one of the external DNS resolvers was unreachable. Due to a stuck (multiple:notraffic) firewall state.
Post by: DaveReading on 11 May, 2020, 08:38:11 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 11 May, 2020, 08:54:55 pm
It seems in 2020, putting boxes you are happy to have talking both IPv4/IPv6 and boxes you only want to talk IPv4 on the same network is a bad idea. Well, it works in some scenarios and not others.
The network isn't the issue it really doesn't care. If its L2 switches they dont know if its IPv4 or IPv6 they only understand Ethernet. If its L3 switches or routers then they will ignore IPv6 if they aren't configured for it (and visa versa) but if they are configured for bot then they will handle both appropriately.
The issue will be the compute operating systems. If they have both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled they sometimes do dumb things like use IPv6 DNS before trying IPv4 so you have to wait for the timeout before you try IPv4. You cant confuse the network itself by using both.
Post by: Kim on 11 May, 2020, 09:06:11 pm
If they have both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled they sometimes do dumb things like use IPv6 DNS before trying IPv4 so you have to wait for the timeout before you try IPv4.
That isn't dumb, assuming the IPv6 DNS server is working. If it isn't, then it's either an incorrectly configured operating system or a broken DNS server.
Post by: pcolbeck on 12 May, 2020, 07:33:15 am
If they have both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled they sometimes do dumb things like use IPv6 DNS before trying IPv4 so you have to wait for the timeout before you try IPv4.
That isn't dumb, assuming the IPv6 DNS server is working. If it isn't, then it's either an incorrectly configured operating system or a broken DNS server.
Well yes. Its dumb because some O/S come or have come with IPv6 enabled by default (Ubuntu I'm looking at you here) which a lot of users wont think to disable after installation. Corporate OS wonks should know this of course.
Post by: Feanor on 12 May, 2020, 08:19:18 am
Having a network configured such that the network-operator provisioned DNS server happily doles up IPv6 AAAA records whilst at the same time being unable route to those addresses is a broken network configuration.
Of course, I'm assuming that the client device is configured to pick up DNS via DHCP from the network operator, and not hard-coded to a 3-rd party DNS server, which the network operator has no control over, other than to firewall out external DNS lookups.
Post by: Kim on 12 May, 2020, 01:15:25 pm
If a box doesn't have a route to the IPv6 internet, it needs not to think that it does. IPv6 link-local addresses are harmless and possibly even useful, so disabling all IPv6 support on the OS is a poor workaround that actively discourages IPv6 adoption. As ever, it's going to come down to poor IPv6 support in consumer routers and half-arsed implementations by ISPs, and the best way to fix that is to make them better (even if that's just informing the client that the IPv6 internet is unroutable in a timely manner, so you don't have to wait for a timeout).
(IME this timeout problem usually happens when there's a tunnel to the IPv6 internet that doesn't work, like that Teredo thing that was briefly popular.)
Post by: TheLurker on 12 May, 2020, 05:54:12 pm
I have the schemata. Excellent, I think, this'll be a doddle* just identify all the mandatory fields and stuff appropriate data into them. Odd, I think,
Would you be surprised to learn that many of those "optional" elements are anything but? Thought not. So let's a have a big round of applause for Microsoft and their ongoing dedication to providing programmers everywhere with utterly shit and almost totally useless documentation. Fucking idiots.
*Yeah, yeah I know. You'd think I'd have learnt by now, but no; unthinking, blind optimism does kick in in from time to time.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 May, 2020, 11:58:36 am
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 13 May, 2020, 04:42:31 pm
Firstly it would not connect to my pc. A error message told me to reboot my phone (Its a Windows 10 desktop pc)
So I try to connect with my phone. Still cannot connect properly to the fitbit which was still telling me to do the setup.
The app seemed to attach to the Charge 4. It had been paired with the bluetooth and displayed a screen showing my
street and a green button saying gps on. The charge 4 remained on the setup start screen.
Today I removed the bluetooth pairing and deleted the entry for the charge 4 from the app.
Start again this time when I tried to get the app to find the charge 4 it complained I needed to use the app to connect to the charge 4.
So I think new device, perhaps there is new software. So I deleted the app. When the google store and requested fitbit app. Google
Play says requires Android 7 (Nougat). I quickly check the version of android and discover version 6. Oh dear.
So Windows will not connect and the app will not work on my phone.
I do have another android device. So I press the button on my tablet computer. It springs to life and demands to be charged.
I connect the tablet to the wall and download the newer version of the fitbit app. This app connects and announces the charge 4 battery
is flat and and cannot pair properly. This is much further than I have been before. So I put the Charge 4 in its charging cable again.
I delete the bluetooth from the tablet and fitbit app. I rescan a pairing code appears on the Charge 4 I enter it in the app. A proper
error free connection is made. The charge 4 is clearly doing something the pattern on the setup screen is rippling. The app announces
a successful installation of the Charge 4.
Not quite. the Charge 4 is still displaying the www.fitbit.com/setup (tells you to use app and phone) screen and would not swipe past it.
I knew the charge 4 had done something. So I stuck it back in its power cradle. Held the side button for 10 seconds. It vibrates a smilie face appears then blank as it restarts.
This time the time appears and I can select other functions.
Success - Fitbit do not make it easy.
Post by: Feanor on 18 May, 2020, 07:12:44 pm
Because I don't have access to the photocopier / scanner at work right now, I've bought a basic Canon LiDE 400 scanner.
Downloaded the driver / scanning softwre package and tried to install it on the work laptop.
"You need to be logged on as an administrator. Please log out and log back on with an Administrator account."
WTF? I *am* an administrator!
R-click and 'Run as Admin' no better.
Try on my own home PC.
Exactly the same!
And I'm a Domain Admin on that network!
After a *lot* of googling, it turns out it needs to be a *Local* Admin account, a Domain account with local admin rights is not good enough!
WT Absolute F?
So I had to create a temporary local account on the machine to be able to run the installer.
Now, it turns out the downloaded installer is not a full offline installer, it's a stub which connects to their servers to find the latest versions of stuff, as is the annoying way of things these days.
So when you launch the stub installer, and UAC asks for further Admin credentials, you *must* use the same local account credentials you logged in with, not any other Admin credentials eg your domain ones, or you get a cryptic message that it can't connect to their update site.
What a steaming Pile of Poo User Experience.
Post by: TimC on 18 May, 2020, 09:10:33 pm
Post by: Morat on 22 May, 2020, 10:38:54 am
Gah. Canon.
Because I don't have access to the photocopier / scanner at work right now, I've bought a basic Canon LiDE 400 scanner.
Downloaded the driver / scanning softwre package and tried to install it on the work laptop.
"You need to be logged on as an administrator. Please log out and log back on with an Administrator account."
WTF? I *am* an administrator!
R-click and 'Run as Admin' no better.
Try on my own home PC.
Exactly the same!
And I'm a Domain Admin on that network!
After a *lot* of googling, it turns out it needs to be a *Local* Admin account, a Domain account with local admin rights is not good enough!
WT Absolute F?
So I had to create a temporary local account on the machine to be able to run the installer.
Now, it turns out the downloaded installer is not a full offline installer, it's a stub which connects to their servers to find the latest versions of stuff, as is the annoying way of things these days.
So when you launch the stub installer, and UAC asks for further Admin credentials, you *must* use the same local account credentials you logged in with, not any other Admin credentials eg your domain ones, or you get a cryptic message that it can't connect to their update site.
What a steaming Pile of Poo User Experience.
That Local Admin not Domain Admin thing is completely annoying. I can see why MS don't want you to manage an entire network from one set of credentials but sometimes you NEED one login to rule them all for installing stuff like AntiVirus or other agents. You just end up adding a domain account to the local admin group on all machines and you're back to square one.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 May, 2020, 11:18:06 am
/me: I AM the Network Administrator! Get in the fucking sea.
Post by: Chris S on 27 May, 2020, 07:04:06 pm
So this <div> here that's indented here -> </div>
Is that from branchA or HEAD, hmm? Who the fuck can tell? I'll tell you who. FUCKING NOBODY.
Visual Studio is, surprise surprise, no help at all. It actually tries to make HTML sense of <<<<<<<<< and ======== and vomits copiously into the output panel, all manner of spurious errors.
I'm gonna have to manually merge these, and it's going to hurt. Nurse. NURSE!
Post by: ian on 29 May, 2020, 09:19:15 am
Well, there's always a password. Do you have a password? He has pieces of paper with words written on them. They might be passwords. But they''re not working passwords. Also, he only writes in CAPITALS. Hours of shouting out 'b for bingo' and 'no, no t for tango.' Juliet Fucking Bravo.
And Windows, I don't know how it works any more, but it's like the OS the Homer Built, shit is everywhere. Settings here, settings there, the setting you want is nowhere. What is that UX called? Confusion. Focus leaps between windows like it's on meth. You're slavish clicking through dialogue boxes, no idea what they trying to explain, or what you are agreeing to, you just want it to stop.
On his last computer, I had myself as admin and sensible things like that so worst case I could disinfect it of what is quite probably all the malware on the internet. This one was set up by PC World and my sister's boyfriend.
Anyway, I had to give up to do 'more research' which mostly involved a big G&T. You'd think a forgotten password wouldn't be an edge use case.
Post by: Kim on 29 May, 2020, 11:34:22 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 May, 2020, 12:01:06 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 29 May, 2020, 12:07:06 pm
I cannot believe it's taken until the twilight of my... ahem... "career" to discover the absolute fucking ballache that is - multiple merge conflicts in an html file, with massively nested elements. Holy fucking Christ - how... HOW do you make sense of this?
So this <div> here that's indented here -> </div>
Is that from branchA or HEAD, hmm? Who the fuck can tell? I'll tell you who. FUCKING NOBODY.
Visual Studio is, surprise surprise, no help at all. It actually tries to make HTML sense of <<<<<<<<< and ======== and vomits copiously into the output panel, all manner of spurious errors.
I'm gonna have to manually merge these, and it's going to hurt. Nurse. NURSE!
Various text editors can help with this. Atom is a horrible Java cludge bit of software but does have a very nice conflict resolution interface.
Also, "Ha Ha Ha" welcome to my world.
Post by: ian on 29 May, 2020, 12:17:08 pm
The best place for parents' passwords to be stored is in a text file on your computer...
I actually did write his password down (after setting him with something that he could remember). But then they bought a new laptop and it seems it was set up with a PIN. Actually, he's not changed it, the issue seems to be some kind of passive-aggressive 'we're sorry, your PIN isn't available right now.' (And what the actual fuck does that mean?)
It's hard to tell what's happening as I'm hundreds of miles away and their descriptions of what is on the screen are not especially useful so I end up trying to decipher blurry photos. Jesus, get a phone with Facetime or something. I managed to get in with my mother's account but of course, set up a Teamviewer session but of course she's not an admin so I can't do shit. I was just going to set up a new account for him. Generally, nuke it from orbit solutions are preferred.
It's probably cheaper at this point to buy them a couple of tablets and have the laptop dropped into a deep oceanic trench.
Post by: Chris S on 29 May, 2020, 05:31:43 pm
Various text editors can help with this. Atom is a horrible Java cludge bit of software but does have a very nice conflict resolution interface.
Also, "Ha Ha Ha" welcome to my world.
A dual monitor setup helps. In the end I had both branches open in VS on the RH monitor, and the merge on the left and painstakingly merged by hand. It was only half a dozen files - but auto-merging was just a non-starter - it mangled them to all hell. Manual merging is soooo error-prone.
Powers that be: "When will your new build be ready, Chris?"
Me: "At least two days later than I originally said - I need to run every regression test known to man or beast"
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 May, 2020, 06:17:01 pm
O RLY? Then what the actual fuck are these errors caused by:
- your inclusion of no-longer-used wossnames, and
- your utter failure to convert everything to the new method of doing sound, and
- your equally abject lack of updated models WHICH THE GAME CONVERTS FOR YOU
Do you not check the log file, or do you just not care? Idiots.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 01 June, 2020, 04:11:25 pm
Various text editors can help with this. Atom is a horrible Java cludge bit of software but does have a very nice conflict resolution interface.
Also, "Ha Ha Ha" welcome to my world.
A dual monitor setup helps. In the end I had both branches open in VS on the RH monitor, and the merge on the left and painstakingly merged by hand. It was only half a dozen files - but auto-merging was just a non-starter - it mangled them to all hell. Manual merging is soooo error-prone.
Powers that be: "When will your new build be ready, Chris?"
Me: "At least two days later than I originally said - I need to run every regression test known to man or beast"
I'm usually merging by hand.
Doesn't help that most of the department rebases patches from branches, rather than merging. Git history all shot to hell.
Our 'codebase is on the order of thousands of files, with about 30 people making changes.
We live and die by CI and manual inspection of nightly builds (the output is data in xml).
Post by: Greenbank on 01 June, 2020, 07:43:11 pm
We do squash commits to keep the git log relatively clear.
5 developers (although corporate model means literally hundreds of thousands with potential access) and 17,000 files.
It's got the capacity to get messy given our nightly build and autotests run off a specific branch, but I think we should cope with the "new normal" (trying to overuse this phrase as much as possible).
Post by: FifeingEejit on 01 June, 2020, 09:50:07 pm
I cannot believe it's taken until the twilight of my... ahem... "career" to discover the absolute fucking ballache that is - multiple merge conflicts in an html file, with massively nested elements. Holy fucking Christ - how... HOW do you make sense of this?
So this <div> here that's indented here -> </div>
Is that from branchA or HEAD, hmm? Who the fuck can tell? I'll tell you who. FUCKING NOBODY.
Visual Studio is, surprise surprise, no help at all. It actually tries to make HTML sense of <<<<<<<<< and ======== and vomits copiously into the output panel, all manner of spurious errors.
I'm gonna have to manually merge these, and it's going to hurt. Nurse. NURSE!
Ach at least it told you.
The other week someone's work was wiped out by a silent regression merge, only spotted it the other day, I must have had a space on that line or something, except... it doesn't show up on the commit...
We are however using Subversion and Coldfusion CFML...
After that I promptly made up excuses for diving back into the DB, like the data model and queries are shit... I wasn't particularly lying, or making it up.
Which leads onto tonights bit of stupidity... I set up a script to create a shit load* of records in the Dockerized Oracle 19 container for the above mentioned data model so I can piss around with the shit queries and improve them and try different indexing strategies... Laptop battery ran out before it finished :facepalm:
* It was only 1m I asked it for, I suspect my PL/SQL isn't particularly efficient but one boss says everything is urgent and needed yesterday, including the fucking signed off spec which we were meant to get 4 Fridays ago... We're still working to the scratched out one from a meeting with the "business" (read that as being the consultant who's done the political work to get this bit of work done)
The other 3 bosses (line manager, test manager and service manager) are all pretty relaxed about it though.
Post by: SoreTween on 07 June, 2020, 11:05:09 am
My Devolo dLan 500 home end adapter had died. Bollocks.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 07 June, 2020, 12:11:44 pm
Various text editors can help with this. Atom is a horrible Java cludge bit of software but does have a very nice conflict resolution interface.
Also, "Ha Ha Ha" welcome to my world.
A dual monitor setup helps. In the end I had both branches open in VS on the RH monitor, and the merge on the left and painstakingly merged by hand. It was only half a dozen files - but auto-merging was just a non-starter - it mangled them to all hell. Manual merging is soooo error-prone.
Powers that be: "When will your new build be ready, Chris?"
Me: "At least two days later than I originally said - I need to run every regression test known to man or beast"
I'm usually merging by hand.
Doesn't help that most of the department rebases patches from branches, rather than merging. Git history all shot to hell.
Our 'codebase is on the order of thousands of files, with about 30 people making changes.
We live and die by CI and manual inspection of nightly builds (the output is data in xml).
It's called git for a reason :)
We have 50 developers on a single repo (on account of moving the codebase from perforce) of 35,000 files. Manually merging is extremely rare. But we insist everything has to be merged into master, including patches (which are then cherry-picked to the release candidate). Master is locked, nothing gets into it without peer review, which encourages short-lived branches. CI builds run the order of 105 tests a day, none of which require manual inspection of output.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 07 June, 2020, 03:04:41 pm
Various text editors can help with this. Atom is a horrible Java cludge bit of software but does have a very nice conflict resolution interface.
Also, "Ha Ha Ha" welcome to my world.
A dual monitor setup helps. In the end I had both branches open in VS on the RH monitor, and the merge on the left and painstakingly merged by hand. It was only half a dozen files - but auto-merging was just a non-starter - it mangled them to all hell. Manual merging is soooo error-prone.
Powers that be: "When will your new build be ready, Chris?"
Me: "At least two days later than I originally said - I need to run every regression test known to man or beast"
I'm usually merging by hand.
Doesn't help that most of the department rebases patches from branches, rather than merging. Git history all shot to hell.
Our 'codebase is on the order of thousands of files, with about 30 people making changes.
We live and die by CI and manual inspection of nightly builds (the output is data in xml).
It's called git for a reason :)
We have 50 developers on a single repo (on account of moving the codebase from perforce) of 35,000 files. Manually merging is extremely rare. But we insist everything has to be merged into master, including patches (which are then cherry-picked to the release candidate). Master is locked, nothing gets into it without peer review, which encourages short-lived branches. CI builds run the order of 105 tests a day, none of which require manual inspection of output.
That sounds well controlled.
The situation here is not helped by the *number* of repositories; <counts on fingers> Eight.
Eight repos. A chuntering mass of submodules and perl scripts pulling data between them.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 07 June, 2020, 06:51:43 pm
Quote
A chuntering mass of submodules and perl scripts pulling data between them.
The more information you give, MrC, the scarier it sounds :o
Post by: dave r on 12 June, 2020, 10:31:15 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 June, 2020, 10:48:51 am
Code: [Select]
foo: "bar"
andCode: [Select]
foo: "/bar/xyzzy"
are – under different circumstances – legitimate statements, how the blue blazes do you findCode: [Select]
foo: "bar/xyzzy"
in one (or more) of about seventy thousand small ASCII files when the error message that triggered the need to look in the first place DOESN'T FUCKING TELL YOU WHAT IT WAS TRYING TO DO WHEN IT HAPPENED >:(NB: the space after the colon is not mandatory, just to complicate matters further
ETA: and said space can also be a <TAB>, or a combination of spaces and tabs. Aaaaaargh.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 June, 2020, 12:03:03 am
Post by: Vernon on 13 June, 2020, 12:08:36 am
And another thing. What kind of an imbecile cow indents a line with "<SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><TAB>"?One who has taken your carefully untabified source code and edited it in Micro$oft fucking Visual Studio.
Post by: Clare on 13 June, 2020, 12:10:24 am
Post by: Pingu on 13 June, 2020, 12:14:22 am
And another thing. What kind of an imbecile cow indents a line with "<SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><TAB>"?
Some sort of shrubbery gambling? (https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/15/developers-use-spaces-make-money-use-tabs/)
Post by: TheLurker on 13 June, 2020, 08:48:21 am
VS has many and many a fault but ballsed up indenting isn't one of them. That's entirely down to the chump at the controls who has done something stupid with her or his personal settings.And another thing. What kind of an imbecile cow indents a line with "<SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><TAB>"?One who has taken your carefully untabified source code and edited it in Micro$oft fucking Visual Studio.
Post by: Zipperhead on 13 June, 2020, 11:32:21 am
And another thing. What kind of an imbecile cow indents a line with "<SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><TAB>"?
I work in an organisation the seems to have a surfeit of them. Do not even mention dependencies otherwise I will be off on a major sweary rant...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 June, 2020, 06:32:10 pm
VS has many and many a fault but ballsed up indenting isn't one of them. That's entirely down to the chump at the controls who has done something stupid with her or his personal settings.And another thing. What kind of an imbecile cow indents a line with "<SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><SPACE><TAB>"?One who has taken your carefully untabified source code and edited it in Micro$oft fucking Visual Studio.
These particular files have nowt to do with Visual Anything, though, unless there are people out there in the habit of using it as a text editor. Which wouldn't surprise me.
Anyway, I failed to find the offending file after three hours of faffing with various Find'n'Replace tools, so either I did something wrong or it's actually one of the horrible-mashup-of-plain-text-and-hex ones, which is too depressing to contemplate. Also it's intermittent :-\
Post by: rogerzilla on 14 June, 2020, 07:58:13 pm
Apparently MusicBrainz does the same thing (until they sell out too) but RipperX in Linux doesn't seem to understand it. Any ideas? I don't tend to rip stuff in Windows, because it frowns upon such activitiies.
*the hard work was all done free by the community, then the original developer reneged on his promise and sold it, Then the buyers reneged on their promise to keep it free. May they felch goats in hell.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 17 June, 2020, 04:44:36 pm
Apart from those poor sods who work with framemaker, all of our source is text format, edited and built from a Linux cluster.
So, we have the lusers who edit these files in Word, use a random text editor with line endings set to CRLF and don't get me started on their inability to follow the instructions for pushing to Git.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 June, 2020, 06:50:53 pm
- puts tabs, spaces or a mixture thereof at the end of a line, and/or
- inserts blank lines which aren't actually blank because they've got spaces, tabs or a mixture thereof in them
Post by: Kim on 17 June, 2020, 07:36:59 pm
Post by: Jaded on 17 June, 2020, 07:58:10 pm
(it used to watch and say "You appear to be writing a letter" after you'd typed a couple of words)
and if you type two spaces after a punctuation thing should say "Oi!! This not a fecking typewriter!!! We are in the 21st Century now, with proportional fonts and ever-thing."
It you type three or more spaces it should say "Tabs, dear boy/girl/ , TABS!" and convert your spaces to a tab.
Post by: Tim Hall on 17 June, 2020, 09:39:00 pm
And what kind of feckless drooling weapon:Could this be why????
- puts tabs, spaces or a mixture thereof at the end of a line, and/or
- inserts blank lines which aren't actually blank because they've got spaces, tabs or a mixture thereof in them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language))
Unlikely, obvs.
Post by: Pingu on 17 June, 2020, 09:52:57 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 June, 2020, 02:21:16 pm
Notepad++ can remove trailing spaces and other gubbins.
I haz a saved notepad++ macro to do this very thing. Also, I see what you did there ;D
Post by: Lightning Phil on 18 June, 2020, 02:38:39 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 18 June, 2020, 09:23:19 pm
In find and replace on bog standard notepad you can use regular expressions to do the same. Same in word pad etc.
I had a problem, my document had unwanted trailing spaces and and tabs I used a regex.... fill in the punchline. :)
Post by: Feanor on 18 June, 2020, 09:54:10 pm
In find and replace on bog standard notepad you can use regular expressions to do the same. Same in word pad etc.
I had a problem, my document had unwanted trailing spaces and and tabs I used a regex.... fill in the punchline. :)
(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/perl_problems.png)
Post by: fuaran on 24 June, 2020, 11:01:40 am
I am using a separate WAP, the router should just be doing the ethernet/router/modem stuff.
Post by: SoreTween on 25 June, 2020, 10:33:04 am
Do they call it a bug? Do they promise a future firmware update? Do they bollocks. Its just a 'configuration requirement' that you don't use that setting. Not in the docs of course.
Damn things don't pass 802.1q either, that would give me a work-around.
#Coronabonus: Extended return window at big river themed everything vendor.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 June, 2020, 06:57:37 pm
Post by: Kim on 25 June, 2020, 11:10:58 pm
So far I've found:
- Endless (but presumably harmelss) stream of warning messages from asterisk about comfort noise generation packets it doesn't know how to handle. This is new. Did Sipgate change something?
- Copy/paste error in the asterisk dialplan that wasn't actually causing a problem, but might have done in an edge-case failure condition. Fixed.
- Slightly odd list of codecs in the configuration for the Sipgate trunk, which was presumably being automagically worked around by transcoding except...
- My failure to load the dahdi_transcode kernel module after I manually reset everything after the post-powercut SSD saga, causing calls on the analogue extension to be negotiated and then dropped due to mismatch of codecs. Fixed.
Meanwhile:
- Downstairs Snom 300 seems to have developed a random mid-call reboot habit. Barakta thought it was caused by a dodgy lead on the receiver, but we can't reproduce that by wiggling or thumping. Seems unlikely that it's shorting out in a way that could cause a reboot. Maybe it's related to the comfort noise thing? Who knows... Quite annoying, as so far I've considered these phones to be both cheap and (once properly configured) utterly reliable.
I hate phones.
Post by: Kim on 26 June, 2020, 11:23:23 pm
Post by: Diver300 on 05 July, 2020, 09:58:25 am
Two more hours on the phone yesterday to Plusnet to no avail. The Plusnet-supplied BT Openreach modem and the A&A supplied Zyxel router can both get a VSDL connection but neither can authenticate.
Mobile internet costs keep on going up.
Post by: Diver300 on 06 July, 2020, 05:59:08 pm
Now on day 7 of no internet from Plusnet. On day 4 I booked to change to Andrews & Arnold but the change-over is not for another 15 days.On day 7 of no internet from Plusnet, an engineer (well probably a technician) was booked for Tuesday am, 9 days after the internet went down. There is a fee of £65 if there's no fault, or we're not in, or its something we've done or we cancel with less than 24 hours notice.
Two more hours on the phone yesterday to Plusnet to no avail. The Plusnet-supplied BT Openreach modem and the A&A supplied Zyxel router can both get a VSDL connection but neither can authenticate.
Mobile internet costs keep on going up.
On day 8 or no internet, around 14 hours before the engineer is due, the router connected, having not been touched for several hours at least. I was using the laptop for non-internet stuff but it had the ethernet cable plugged in and I received a notification of something from the internet.
Now on hold to see if Plusnet are going to charge me £65 for not giving them 24 hours notice or there not having been a fault, because they can obviously claim that Nothing Changed on day 0, so it can't possibly have changed back just now. I may have to pay the £65 so that I don't have to talk to anyone tomorrow, and so that there's nothing to be messed up.
(I don't know if this is included in rants passim, but about 10 years ago Vodafone said they didn't change anything on their PAYG network, but all of the vehicle tracking units with Vodafone PAYG SIMS stopped working simultaneously. Obviously nothing changed back again six months later when they all started working)
Post by: Diver300 on 06 July, 2020, 06:37:50 pm
Only just over half an hour on the phone and they tell me that the engineers came before the due time, without telling me, so it's all fixed, I hope.Now on day 7 of no internet from Plusnet. On day 4 I booked to change to Andrews & Arnold but the change-over is not for another 15 days.On day 7 of no internet from Plusnet, an engineer (well probably a technician) was booked for Tuesday am, 9 days after the internet went down. There is a fee of £65 if there's no fault, or we're not in, or its something we've done or we cancel with less than 24 hours notice.
Two more hours on the phone yesterday to Plusnet to no avail. The Plusnet-supplied BT Openreach modem and the A&A supplied Zyxel router can both get a VSDL connection but neither can authenticate.
Mobile internet costs keep on going up.
On day 8 or no internet, around 14 hours before the engineer is due, the router connected, having not been touched for several hours at least. I was using the laptop for non-internet stuff but it had the ethernet cable plugged in and I received a notification of something from the internet.
Now on hold to see if Plusnet are going to charge me £65 for not giving them 24 hours notice or there not having been a fault, because they can obviously claim that Nothing Changed on day 0, so it can't possibly have changed back just now. I may have to pay the £65 so that I don't have to talk to anyone tomorrow, and so that there's nothing to be messed up.
(I don't know if this is included in rants passim, but about 10 years ago Vodafone said they didn't change anything on their PAYG network, but all of the vehicle tracking units with Vodafone PAYG SIMS stopped working simultaneously. Obviously nothing changed back again six months later when they all started working)
Post by: SoreTween on 08 July, 2020, 04:37:08 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 09 July, 2020, 11:57:37 am
Post by: Jaded on 09 July, 2020, 02:25:29 pm
An explosive combination, sadly very, very, common, from what I can see.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 July, 2020, 06:22:12 pm
Web sites that prevent you clicking back to leave I hate you. I find it really really annoying.
And ones that won't take "Fuck the fuck off" for an answer when they try to push their poxy notifications at you.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 July, 2020, 08:05:46 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 11 July, 2020, 11:09:05 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 13 July, 2020, 12:36:16 pm
All of a sudden its fixed itself magically.
I hate Windows. When it works its fine but trying to fix it when something goes wrong is a nightmare.
Post by: Kim on 13 July, 2020, 12:40:14 pm
For over a year my work laptop has refuse to open Excel files on first click - threw some weird error - but once Excel was open would open the file on the second try. Months ago I spent ages hunting down a solution, tried registry fixes and all sorts with no result.
All of a sudden its fixed itself magically.
I hate Windows. When it works its fine but trying to fix it when something goes wrong is a nightmare.
It's the way it goes from working to not-working (or, to be fair, vice-versa) without any warning that gets me.
This is why I continue to use Linux. Until Microsoft work out how to make an OS that stays working until you mess with it, Windows won't be ready for the desktop.
Post by: pcolbeck on 13 July, 2020, 12:51:20 pm
For over a year my work laptop has refuse to open Excel files on first click - threw some weird error - but once Excel was open would open the file on the second try. Months ago I spent ages hunting down a solution, tried registry fixes and all sorts with no result.
All of a sudden its fixed itself magically.
I hate Windows. When it works its fine but trying to fix it when something goes wrong is a nightmare.
It's the way it goes from working to not-working (or, to be fair, vice-versa) without any warning that gets me.
This is why I continue to use Linux. Until Microsoft work out how to make an OS that stays working until you mess with it, Windows won't be ready for the desktop.
Me too. Have to use Windows for work though but it runs as a VM on Ubuntu LTS.
Post by: ian on 13 July, 2020, 12:58:00 pm
Which minds me, I have a parental laptop to fix, after two hours and trying to instruct them to change the boot order in the BIOS, I gave up and told them to get my niece to post it to me. NO, NO, DON'T USE THE MOUSE, IT WON'T WORK. F9, TRY NEXT TO F10. DID YOU PRESS ENTER? JUST TELL WHAT YOU SEE ON SCREEN. HOLD ON, YOU'RE IN WINDOWS NOW, WHEN DID I SAY CLICK EXIT? NO, NO, DON'T PRESS 'Y' TO EXIT WITHOUT SAVING...
I may just nuke the lot. I have to somehow crack the administrator password, get in and figure out precise what they've done. As far as the garbled story goes, someone from Microsoft called and they diligently followed his instructions. Honestly, they never do what I bloody tell them.
Plus there's the danger of a browser filled with 'mature' smut. Top tip dad, don't make it your homepage.
Post by: TheLurker on 13 July, 2020, 04:59:23 pm
Quote from: pcolbeck
I hate Windows. ... it ... is a nightmare.Don't mention it, glad to be of service. :)
Post by: Feanor on 13 July, 2020, 05:34:25 pm
Just a stupid 'Windows cannot connect to this network', with no useful explanation of what the problem was.
Re-start windows. Nothing.
Bit of googling brings up posts from over a year ago about TLS 1.2, but it's not that.
'Forget this network'.
Reboot.
Connect to it as a fresh unknown network -> straight in!
Profile must have gotten corrupted somehow, I suppose.
But the lack of diagnostic information is a PITA.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 July, 2020, 06:10:05 pm
- It worked
- You "improved" it
- It doesn't work any more
Post by: ian on 28 July, 2020, 09:13:31 pm
Dearest parents, are there any files on this computer you need? Don't know.
Sigh. Boot it up with Xubuntu live USB, copy across anything that looks like data onto the NAS.
Next reinstall Windows 10. I'm going to need booze for that, aren't I?
Post by: Feanor on 28 July, 2020, 09:31:31 pm
Remove the hard drive, place it aside.
Install a new hard drive, do a clean install.
Connect the old drive ( stick it in a USB caddy, or whatever ) and pick over the bones of the dead carcass for whatever meat may be found at leisure.
And, yes. booze will be required.
Post by: ian on 28 July, 2020, 09:42:27 pm
Dust off. Nuke from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Are you sure?
Yes. Yessity yes yes yes.
It's now 'resetting this PC 1%' It's been that way for a while. Possibly it's erasing the universe. We'll all wake up in the morning with no knowledge of who we are and where our pants went.
I'll go and make dinner.
Post by: philip on 28 July, 2020, 09:52:06 pm
Post by: Feanor on 28 July, 2020, 10:32:12 pm
Then I found something called the Windows Recovery Experience (or something like that). I bashed the RESET button.
Oh dear.
Well, when that experiment has failed, really nuke from orbit with a clean install.
With no Experience required.
Seriously, Mrs Robinson might know a thing or two, but I doubt it's about re-installing windows.
Post by: ian on 29 July, 2020, 09:17:40 am
If you can access the disk from Linux you can simply overwrite and reset the Windows password, you don't need to crack the hash.
Ah, well, I didn't stumble across that option. That said, I was several hours late to password cracking party that featured a top billed performance by 'this doesn't work on Windows 10.'
God, as OS go, it's a mess. It's like every version of Windows has been crashed together in some kind of crushing machine.
Post by: Ham on 29 July, 2020, 09:26:46 am
When you start it up, Windows password recovery (by overwrite) is a matter of pressing a couple of buttons.
Post by: ian on 29 July, 2020, 10:30:45 am
Honestly, it's probably riddled with malware and god-doesn't-want-to-know-what, so nuclear was likely the easiest option. I copied the files anyway (it seems encryption isn't the default on Windows yet), on the off-chance, but even if they do have important stuff they've probably forgotten it. Along with all the passwords. That's going to be my next challenge, what are the passwords to x. Odds are they won't know any of them or I'll have to go through endless line of 'is that a big C or a little C?' My father did write some random words down on pieces of paper, but no notion of what they might apply to. Oh, and he only writes IN CAPITALS.
I'm still unclear what the 'Microsoft Man' on the phone got them to do, or whether it was a simple failed attempt by my father to reset his password.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 July, 2020, 10:44:27 am
Just had a phone call here at Fort Larrington. "This is a call from AM-AH-ZONN concer..." >>> CLICK <<<
Post by: ian on 29 July, 2020, 11:08:07 am
They can't really explain or understand computers. This one was originally set up, I assume, by PC World, but I think they let my sister's boyfriend the Mad Meat Man* lose on it at some point, and he knows less about technology than they do.
Anyway, I'm now admin. My mother has already relieved my father of any means on online purchase since he'll give his card number to anyone who asks. He's always been credulous, forever wandering home with obviously stolen stuff that someone had given or sold to him down the pub. No, no, he said it weren't stolen, he's not like that. Ah, so you bought it off the bloke who's just out of prison then after his most recent of several spells for nicking stuff then. Welcome to my childhood. He once bought home an entire pig (see the footnote).
*he brings my parents big bags of meat, for which they love him, I suspect, far more than me.
Post by: simonp on 29 July, 2020, 02:59:27 pm
Where is my clue bat.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 July, 2020, 11:08:21 pm
That is all.
Post by: ian on 30 July, 2020, 09:22:57 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 August, 2020, 11:40:21 am
“Make it so!”
[Time passes]
“Oh. I cannot update iTunes, because I cannot access C:\Program Files\iTunes!”
“It was alright before you started dicking around with it. I know this because I was using it to listen to musical tunes.”
“Yeah but no but yeah but, look, I'll roll back the install and every little t'ing gonna be alright, innit!”
[MOAR time passes]
“The security on C:\Program Files\iTunes is irreparably b0rked, you anbaric dunderheid! Now I have to use Microsith's System Restore to get back to where I was forty minutes ago.”
[Yet MOAR time passes]
“Right. Every Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia product except Airport has been nuked from orbit, their directories removed and the drive sectors ploughed with salt. I shall download a fresh install of all the required FruitCo Product and all will be well. Won't it?”
“What are you doing? You cannot download iTunes, nor iCloud, from here! Even though this is the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia web shite and they are FruitCo Product. No, go via the Microsith Store, bucket of wank for people who cannot tell their Ethernet from their ear'ole though it undoubtedly be!”
[Even yet MOAR time passes]
Hurrah! I haz a iThings!
Bah! What are the odds I'm going to have to go through the same farce on two more Babbage-Engines? FruitCo, how I hate thee!
Sent from my iPad
Post by: ian on 03 August, 2020, 07:17:53 pm
Your Home edition of Windows 10 doesn't support Remote Desktop.
After 25 years, they're still doing this piecemeal shit. You want to use this computer as anything other than a office fan, I'm afraid you'll need to update to Windows Millenium Visto Pro Home 64 Edition.
The say Linux isn't ready for the Desktop. Another 25 years and Windows might be ready too.
Post by: Feanor on 03 August, 2020, 08:58:18 pm
Just download Teamviewer on his machine.
On their machine, install the Teamviewer Host version. This is the lightweight version that can only be connected onto, ie for the lame users to be supported.
https://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/windows/#:~:text=TeamViewer%20Host%20is%20used%20for,number%20of%20computers%20and%20devices.
Despite how the installation UI appears you do NOT need to create a TeamViewer account for him, there's a wee link to continue without setting up an account.
It's not obvious!
It will generate a connection name, and you make up a password.
On your end, install full teamviewer ( free personal use version ) and connect to their machine using the connection name and password you set up.
Post by: ian on 03 August, 2020, 09:15:08 pm
I remember the good old days of XP Home and Pro. XP Home mostly seemed to exist purely to tell you needed XP Pro.
Post by: Lightning Phil on 03 August, 2020, 10:44:54 pm
It used to be possible to sign out then put the computer in sleep mode. As in your partner is going to use the PC but not immediately. You now can’t do that so have to log back in then put it in sleep mode. Then when partner comes to shut it down complains someone else is still logged in. Rubbish part of the update.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 August, 2020, 11:23:44 pm
Post by: geoff on 07 August, 2020, 12:50:42 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 August, 2020, 08:39:53 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 August, 2020, 11:07:21 pm
Piss.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 August, 2020, 02:14:07 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 August, 2020, 09:04:57 pm
- stuffs that doesn’t work, followed by
- tricksy and potentially dangerous titting about in the registry?
And don't get me started on “Group by” in the “Downloads” wossname. I use this mainly for keeping the install programs for all sorts of stuff, so I want it sorted by name, you fucking chumps. Not by “today”, “yesterday”, “the other week” and “megayonks ago”.
Post by: Feanor on 17 August, 2020, 09:25:02 pm
Microsith has also screwed up mine. Backed up the data disk on the old PC, powered on the new one, restored the backup. Most of the file permissions are b0rked. Whole directory trees are inaccessible. Format drive, mount backup as a disk, copy everything over. This will take at least three hours. Bah.
I've only just noticed this thread, so too late to help, but a bit of info...
On A Windows system with an NTFS filesystem, all the files have an Owner, and also various Permissions for other Users.
This is called the Access Control List, or ACL.
In the situation where you have an existing hard drive containing files from an old windows install, and mount it as a secondary drive in a new windows installation, and then wish to copy files from the old drive to the new, then you will encounter permissions problems.
Because the User on the New System is not the same as the User on the old system, you are regarded as a wrong 'un, and access is denied.
Even if the User Name is the same, that's not good enough.
The User Name is just a 'Pretty' display name.
The actual 'user account' is a long unique ID called an SID.
The SID for user Fred on the new system is not the same as the SID for user Fred on the old one.
In this situation, you need to use your Admin account Fred on the new system to 'take ownership' of the files on the old disk.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 August, 2020, 09:51:48 pm
Microsith has also screwed up mine. Backed up the data disk on the old PC, powered on the new one, restored the backup. Most of the file permissions are b0rked. Whole directory trees are inaccessible. Format drive, mount backup as a disk, copy everything over. This will take at least three hours. Bah.
I've only just noticed this thread, so too late to help, but a bit of info...
On A Windows system with an NTFS filesystem, all the files have an Owner, and also various Permissions for other Users.
This is called the Access Control List, or ACL.
In the situation where you have an existing hard drive containing files from an old windows install, and mount it as a secondary drive in a new windows installation, and then wish to copy files from the old drive to the new, then you will encounter permissions problems.
Because the User on the New System is not the same as the User on the old system, you are regarded as a wrong 'un, and access is denied.
Even if the User Name is the same, that's not good enough.
The User Name is just a 'Pretty' display name.
The actual 'user account' is a long unique ID called an SID.
The SID for user Fred on the new system is not the same as the SID for user Fred on the old one.
In this situation, you need to use your Admin account Fred on the new system to 'take ownership' of the files on the old disk.
I tried that. It still complained bitterly and wouldn’t let me access my photos or music (though it was quite happy with assorted other inconsequential gubbins). But it happily allows me to Do Stuffs with the same files if I copied them from a NAS.
<== Was a VMS BOFH when ACLs first appeared in said OS. Their presence in Windows is thus probably the fault of Dave Cutler.
Post by: Tim Hall on 20 August, 2020, 01:57:37 pm
(a) outsourced tech support
(b) Dropbox for business
(c) Unspecified computery problem for a colleague
(d) over keen use of the delete key buy someone at (a).
Marvel out the messages flashing up on the screen as files get deleted! Just like that bit in Clear and Present Danger when the baddie is covering his tracks with Harrison Ford in the next office. Hollywood OS FTW.
Gasp as the netjbex grinds to a halt
Curse as the netjbex is still running at snail pace this morning as the gazillion files are being restored.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 August, 2020, 03:00:38 pm
Because it doesn’t fucking fit, that's why not >:(
Also, why did the new one object to the extra SSD and hurl me into the BIOS, whence I exited and the box booted just find, complete with all disk present and working? Stupid article.
Post by: Kim on 20 August, 2020, 07:55:37 pm
Just like that bit in Clear and Present Danger when the baddie is covering his tracks with Harrison Ford in the next office.
I generally forgive that one, because non-technical users are that stupid, and because that film contains one of the most realistic[1] attempts to crack a password I've seen Hollywood manage.
(click to show/hide)
Post by: Greenbank on 20 August, 2020, 11:12:16 pm
Post by: ian on 24 August, 2020, 12:18:24 pm
Less than one week after I sent it back to them, he's broken it again. FFS.
Post by: SoreTween on 26 August, 2020, 11:40:57 am
- UPS is dead. I shut everything down during a long powercut on Monday and now the bastard UPS will not switch on.
- Desktop acting wierdly this morning so I rebooted it (old habit, I'm on Mint now) - endless POST cycle. Eventually I figured out the BIOS was corrupt. The flattery was only giving 2.1v but it doesn't entirely stack up as it was only rebooted not power cycled.
- Still wouldn't boot with everything plugged in but would with just keyboard, mouse & screen. By a process of elimination it seems our scanner is dead. There was a very short power cut yesterday, at a guess that's what killed it.
Post by: Ginger Cat on 27 August, 2020, 01:06:19 pm
It wiped out my Outlook and printers- basically it stops ever remembering email passwords and asks for them every time you log in. Then tries to resync the whole account- sometimes it works and sometimes not. Solution- switch email client (if not already done). Printers (especially HP) probably need removing and reinstalling, if you're lucky the printer will be a new-ish one and will reinstall. The client 365 email I have, I had to remove that totally (view via webmail only now).
No doubt I will discover over the next few days some other "features" it has left me with.
A friend who has an IT business confirms these "features" are a characteristic of the update and he's not putting it on his clients' machines until the issues are sorted.
Thankfully my SO is computerate and fixed stuff but I've lost a good day of work due to this.
Grrrrrrrrr.
GC (in growley mood).
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 August, 2020, 04:44:56 pm
The big update for Windows 10 which is out at the moment. Whatever you do, try to avoid installing it.
It wiped out my Outlook and printers- basically it stops ever remembering email passwords and asks for them every time you log in. Then tries to resync the whole account- sometimes it works and sometimes not. Solution- switch email client (if not already done). Printers (especially HP) probably need removing and reinstalling, if you're lucky the printer will be a new-ish one and will reinstall. The client 365 email I have, I had to remove that totally (view via webmail only now).
No doubt I will discover over the next few days some other "features" it has left me with.
A friend who has an IT business confirms these "features" are a characteristic of the update and he's not putting it on his clients' machines until the issues are sorted.
Thankfully my SO is computerate and fixed stuff but I've lost a good day of work due to this.
Grrrrrrrrr.
GC (in growley mood).
See also rants passim about its refusal to mount elderly NAS disk drives as, well, disk drives. Though it's perfectly happy to have them as "network locations" ???
The new box in the Great Hall hasn't got it yet but there were many Bad Swears when the laptop and the Estate Office machines updated.
Post by: TheLurker on 27 August, 2020, 08:20:12 pm
Quote from: Ginger Cat
The big update for Windows 10 which is out at the moment. Whatever you do, try to avoid installing it.If this is release 2004 then banjaxed Credential Manager (https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/08/11/windows-10-may-2020-update-breaks-down-critical-feature/) might be the problem.
It wiped out my Outlook and printers- basically it stops ever remembering email passwords and asks for them every time you log in. Then tries to resync the whole account...
Post by: ian on 04 September, 2020, 01:04:50 pm
I have to replicate a document, so I need to know where some text boxes (I think they're frames in Word-speak) are in the Word document, and how big they are. Is there anything in the everchanging nest of ribbons and menus, the formatting settings, anything at all willing to divulge this information? I gave up trying to count notches on the ruler and printed the bloody thing out and used an actual ruler. Old skool.
Post by: Polar Bear on 04 September, 2020, 01:23:36 pm
The big update for Windows 10 which is out at the moment. Whatever you do, try to avoid installing it.
It wiped out my Outlook and printers- basically it stops ever remembering email passwords and asks for them every time you log in. Then tries to resync the whole account- sometimes it works and sometimes not. Solution- switch email client (if not already done). Printers (especially HP) probably need removing and reinstalling, if you're lucky the printer will be a new-ish one and will reinstall. The client 365 email I have, I had to remove that totally (view via webmail only now).
No doubt I will discover over the next few days some other "features" it has left me with.
A friend who has an IT business confirms these "features" are a characteristic of the update and he's not putting it on his clients' machines until the issues are sorted.
Thankfully my SO is computerate and fixed stuff but I've lost a good day of work due to this.
Grrrrrrrrr.
GC (in growley mood).
See also rants passim about its refusal to mount elderly NAS disk drives as, well, disk drives. Though it's perfectly happy to have them as "network locations" ???
The new box in the Great Hall hasn't got it yet but there were many Bad Swears when the laptop and the Estate Office machines updated.
Quote from: Ginger CatThe big update for Windows 10 which is out at the moment. Whatever you do, try to avoid installing it.If this is release 2004 then banjaxed Credential Manager (https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/08/11/windows-10-may-2020-update-breaks-down-critical-feature/) might be the problem.
It wiped out my Outlook and printers- basically it stops ever remembering email passwords and asks for them every time you log in. Then tries to resync the whole account...
This problem has not affected me at all and I was curious to understand as to why. On reading various articles it seems to imply that if you use a local account as oppose to a Microsoft account which I do, then you will not be affected. I don't use Edge either but I do use Google Chrome which is apparently affected but in fact no issues at all for me.
My reluctance to become enslaved to these $corps may well have been my food fortune this time.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 September, 2020, 05:08:06 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 September, 2020, 08:34:48 pm
Edit: made it go away :thumbsup:
Post by: pcolbeck on 15 September, 2020, 04:48:15 pm
Now I'm going to have to get a cable monkey to run some fibre to another rack so I can move the servers to another pair of switches to keep them connected whilst i nuke the config for both TOR switches from orbit.
SDN is great they said, much easier than using the CLI .....
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 September, 2020, 02:12:26 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 September, 2020, 03:16:55 pm
Post by: citoyen on 29 September, 2020, 03:34:50 pm
Tried logging in with a different account. Same happened.
Tried opening different files. Same happened.
Tried opening in Safari. Worked!
Tried opening in Chrome on a different computer. Worked!
So obviously a problem with this installation of Chrome on this computer. Can't be arse with going through the rigmarole of deleting and reinstalling it right now though.
Searched online for help and apparently this is a known problem that people have been suffering with Chrome going back AT LEAST THREE YEARS. But trying to find any useful advice in Google's help forums is an exercise in chasing your tail.
Working on my deep breathing exercises as an alternative to throwing the computer out the window.
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 29 September, 2020, 11:38:58 pm
Post by: ian on 30 September, 2020, 09:31:24 am
A quick, temporary fix to many of these issues is to use a private/incognito window.
Post by: SoreTween on 30 September, 2020, 09:45:22 am
So far my Google fu has failed to find what is going on and how to switch it back.
I hate Windows 10 so much.
Post by: citoyen on 30 September, 2020, 09:46:55 am
A quick, temporary fix to many of these issues is to use a private/incognito window.
I was going to try that but it seems to be working again today so whatever it was, it was apparently just a temporary glitch. ???
Chrome is so annoying, I really don't know why I continue to use it.
Actually, I do - it's because I'm lazy and can't be bothered to go through the rigmarole of setting up Safari with all my shortcuts and bookmarks. ::-)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 September, 2020, 06:17:09 pm
Bah: Because the big bugger in the Estate Office is also doing its backup at 90 Mb/s >:(
So it’s one of two network switches or the string connecting them :-\
Post by: Diver300 on 02 October, 2020, 11:53:28 am
You managed it a week ago, and for months before. The printer will print from the computer, it'll even run the scanner to pretend that it's a photocopier.
Having turned them all off and back on again, along with the router and the wireless access point, and uninstalled and reinstalled the printer a couple of times, an all I get is "No scanners were detected" while an image on screen is taunting me, as it's a scan of the bit of paper that's been sat in the scanner since I used it last week.
Then I've been told by family that my workaround of using a DSLR camera is wrong. I should have downloaded and used a phone app, because that's "easier". Obviously the fact that I know how to use a DSLR already, means that nothing, but nothing could possibly go wrong with installing an app, finding how to use an app, getting the data to my computer from the app. Or that wrangling all of that could possibly be slower than using the camera that just works as if I haven't wasted enough time on the scanner already.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 October, 2020, 08:53:43 pm
Waaaah! Can't install because Something has fscked the security settings on C:\Program Files\Calibre. System restore.
“System restore did not complete successfully. Microsith has not changed any Stuffs!” Lie. The fscked folder has gone. Reinstall Calibre. Import new bok. Jibble metadata. Send to Kindle. Bok now accessible. Hurrah!
Also the keyboard threw a wobbly halfway through. FFS, it's only 30 years old >:( Picking it up and putting it down again seems to have fixed it ???
* A Song For The Dark Times aka Rebus 23.
Post by: TheLurker on 03 October, 2020, 08:49:34 am
Quote from: Mr Larrington
keyboard threw a wobbly .... Picking it up and putting it down again seems to have fixed it ???It just needed a cuddle.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 October, 2020, 12:03:34 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 October, 2020, 04:01:34 pm
Is it therefore safe to assume that the wretched thing is DOA?
Post by: TheLurker on 05 October, 2020, 09:04:01 pm
Post by: DuncanM on 06 October, 2020, 10:31:27 am
Excel. Nuff sed.Using XLS. It went out of date in 2007. PHE didn't exist in 2007.
Post by: Chris S on 06 October, 2020, 02:55:11 pm
Excel. Nuff sed.Using XLS. It went out of date in 2007. PHE didn't exist in 2007.
We have two clients who are parts of state organisations, and they still run Windows NT servers.
Post by: barakta on 06 October, 2020, 03:04:05 pm
Post by: Greenbank on 06 October, 2020, 03:05:20 pm
There is so much ancient software/hardware out there that is absolutely critical to so much of modern day life running smoothly you really don't want to know.
Blaming a single ancient piece of software entirely misses the point of how IT works in general.
Post by: Polar Bear on 06 October, 2020, 03:17:37 pm
Folk I still know in the business tell me that I would have split my head open many many times banging it against the twin pillars of saving time and money.
If only the morons in charge had even the slightest incling of what they were doing. If we were approaching Y2K now and not 21 years ago I would expect all manner of disaster to befall us.
Post by: citoyen on 06 October, 2020, 03:27:27 pm
There is so much ancient software/hardware out there that is absolutely critical to so much of modern day life running smoothly you really don't want to know.
Yep, just ask the AUK committee...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 October, 2020, 05:57:54 pm
Excel. Nuff sed.Using XLS. It went out of date in 2007. PHE didn't exist in 2007.
In 2007 the French health service, or at least the bit I saw, was still running Windows 95.
Post by: Tim Hall on 06 October, 2020, 10:19:16 pm
Post by: ian on 07 October, 2020, 09:30:07 am
A socially distant colleague had trouble with her network connection and consequent inability to print. She phoned the support company we use who, after trying a several of things, suggested she move desks.
Many years ago, I asked our technical support if it would be possible to print to my home office printer (networked) while connected to the VPN (because it was annoying having to disconnect). After about fifteen tickets and updates, they finally advised me that I would be able to 'print to the office printer.'
Which was true, I can print to the mothership from here and while connected to the VPN, but I don't fancy the better part of a 45 km trip to find out that printer is out of paper. I don't think that's the solution you are looking for, ian.
Never did sort out the VPN issue, but I have two computers and only one of them is on the VPN, so I have to email documents to myself on the other computer (because no LAN innit) to print them. MLIR.
Post by: Greenbank on 07 October, 2020, 10:02:52 am
A socially distant colleague had trouble with her network connection and consequent inability to print. She phoned the support company we use who, after trying a several of things, suggested she move desks.
Reminds me of "We can't send emails more than 500 miles" (http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles)
Post by: Kim on 07 October, 2020, 01:07:07 pm
Many years ago, I asked our technical support if it would be possible to print to my home office printer (networked) while connected to the VPN (because it was annoying having to disconnect). After about fifteen tickets and updates, they finally advised me that I would be able to 'print to the office printer.'
Which was true, I can print to the mothership from here and while connected to the VPN, but I don't fancy the better part of a 45 km trip to find out that printer is out of paper. I don't think that's the solution you are looking for, ian.
Never did sort out the VPN issue, but I have two computers and only one of them is on the VPN, so I have to email documents to myself on the other computer (because no LAN innit) to print them. MLIR.
Given the shitshow[1] of a routing table that barakta's ork laptop ends up with when it's connected to the VPN, it's best not to ask these sorts of questions.
[1] Ork subnets and approximately half the IPv4 internet go down the VPN. Everything else ends up in the bit bucket.
Post by: Greenbank on 07 October, 2020, 01:23:05 pm
But then the rest is an utter shitshow (including several /24 subnets and single IPs of that same /8).
$ netstat -rn | grep vpn_gw_ip | wc -l
137
Post by: ian on 07 October, 2020, 02:37:50 pm
Post by: DuncanM on 08 October, 2020, 12:29:11 pm
Post by: ian on 08 October, 2020, 01:03:21 pm
Of course, for more extensive analyses it's not the tool, it's a bit like pulling a trailer with a car, it works for smaller loads (at the expense of handling and your engine might start to complain), but once the load gets big enough, get a lorry. Otherwise, your towbar falls off. But that's not the fault of Excel (or your car).
As for errors, all it takes a mistake a line of Python or SQL, and you're in the same mess. That's why there needs to be a process and QA on these things.
Post by: Kim on 08 October, 2020, 01:14:21 pm
The only thing worse than people using Excel as a database is people (well, overenthusiastic and insufficiently cynical geeks) writing bespoke applications for a project that might involve at most a couple of hundred records and no automated systems.
The real rot sets in when the task out-grows the tools you started with. Hence the abomination that is PHP (which I reckon is a far worse crime against computer science than spreadsheet abuse).
Post by: FifeingEejit on 08 October, 2020, 05:40:43 pm
Were on Windows 10 with ancient Office 2007 I think, though you could get an office 2013 licence if you needed it, we are now getting various flavours of office 365.
Which Includes power bi iirc.
We've also got an ie8 emulator with the built in ie6 emulator, running annoyingly as default browser... That's due to the amount of commercial software that still needs it. The migration away from ie6 for the in-house bespoke apps was a ballache to do but we did it, the plan for getting off ie8 is to replace the ancient apps because they're running on other ancient platforms like coldfusion and oracle that no sensible person would touch with a barge pole BUT because no one and NSS has worked out a cloud strategy beyond "you should do this" we're targeting sql server and jboss for the replacements... Its at least a step in the right direction...
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: TheLurker on 09 October, 2020, 03:31:25 pm
Quote from: Kim
... using Excel as a database...There was a job advert. in the Health Service Journal in the very early 1990s, no later than 1992, that I wish I had cut out and kept, but I didn't. Never mind, it is seared into the area of my brain marked, "Nooooooooooooo!" It ran (and I both precis and paraphrase), "Wanted: Experienced Excel Database Designer." It got better. The salary was a good £10,000 a year less than what the NHS was paying us "proper" Software & Database types at the time.
From time to time I still wonder, with a shiver, what this "database designer" was wanted for.
Post by: L CC on 09 October, 2020, 04:48:12 pm
And now I write a bunch of un-version controlled spreadsheets for all my team's work processes.
I love excel. No really, I actually do.
Post by: ian on 09 October, 2020, 05:09:48 pm
Sure, I could write a full set of requirements, drop into the queue, assign to a DBA in the next sprint, go through the refinements, and they could build me something, and in two weeks it might be what I want. Or not.
Or I could put it in Excel do a few pivot tables and some lookups and ten minutes later have results.
I wouldn't use it for a production system, of course, and even I did, I wouldn't admit to it.
Post by: Chris S on 09 October, 2020, 07:02:21 pm
And now I write a bunch of un-version controlled spreadsheets for all my team's work processes.
Is it time for me to introduce you to Github?1; version control for the masses.
----------
1 No, not the local Conservative Association club.
Post by: ian on 12 October, 2020, 09:30:33 am
Microsoft, how about a message more informative then Windows cannot connect because the settings don't agree with the network? Which setting? Why aren't setting easily visible in the control panel things called network settings (or whatever it's called)? Why is it filled with gumpf about guest networks and other meaningless crap instead of something, I'd don't know, like connect to wifi? Or network settings where perhaps it could list those settings and put a big red cross next to the one that the cause of the disagreement and an explanatory note? Why do I remember right-clicking on the little widget by the clock? Why are the settings not called setting, but instead called properties? Are properties settings? I mean, what the actual fuck, who designed this shit?
Anyway, the solution simply turned out a case of changing TKIP to AES in the encryption. Windows, why not just say this?
I've no idea why it became a pressing issue this very morning. But I could do without before I've had coffee.
Post by: Tim Hall on 12 October, 2020, 04:38:20 pm
Click "submit"
Message pops up admonishing me that my password needs to be between x and y characters long and contain a special character. Why couldn't they tell me that before? Gits.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 October, 2020, 11:27:57 am
Post by: SoreTween on 13 October, 2020, 12:11:38 pm
Arrggghhhhhhhhhhh! Styles!
Aaaarrrrrrggggghhhhhhhhh! So fsking broken!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 October, 2020, 07:17:19 pm
System then declines to recognise it. Unplug. Replug. Nix. Try a different USB 'ole. Still nowt. Reboot into safe-ish mode*. Nihil. Try yet another USB port. Ooooh, goodie! Disk I: ArjStuffs! Start copying contents of disk “Stuffs” and repair downstairs for pre-prandial drinkie-poos. FFS, Windows, how hard can it be?
* Oh and, moreover, yes, Microsith. It's no good telling you to do arcane things in “Settings” and then select the preferred option using the function keys after the thing restarts iffen the keyboard needs to be plugged into a not-on-the-mobo USB 'ole because the PS2/USB adapter is fat and stout and effectively hogs two of the round-the-back ports if you do. So it dunt work when you boot into Safe Mode. Idiots.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 October, 2020, 01:59:05 pm
Edit: Look, see! An update is available! Pity I can't install it until the running backup has finished. Well, I could kill the running backup, install the update, reboot the PC because Windows Update demands it and then find the update still runs like a two-legged slof. Bah!
Post by: SteveC on 15 October, 2020, 08:36:50 pm
Post by: ian on 16 October, 2020, 10:39:20 am
To be honest, this is work of evil brilliance. There's an error. But we're not going to tell you where. We're not even going to give you a clue. But each and every time you click, we're going to remind you with a dialogue box. It's the dialogue box equivalent of stalking. I expect to wake up at 3.37 am to find it hovering there above the bed. I'll open the fridge and it will be there. And it's basically the FUCK YOU of error messages. Error! Ha! Fuckr! I poke you in the eye!
Trying to fix the error is like wandering through a dark forest of error messages. You go away and get a coffee, it's there, waiting patiently.
Best thing is, Microsoft are never going to fix it. It would divert them from randomly reallocating features between the ribbon and the menu bar, because what everyone really wanted for Christmas was two mutually incompatible user experiences.
You'll notice the theme with my previous post. There's a problem with your wireless internet connection. Ha! I think this is an actual strategy at Microsoft.
Post by: citoyen on 16 October, 2020, 10:44:58 am
To be honest, this is work of evil brilliance. There's an error. But we're not going to tell you where. We're not even going to give you a clue.
"One or more" - we're not even going to tell you how many... could be 1, could be 3, could be 295...
Post by: Kim on 16 October, 2020, 12:30:34 pm
To be honest, this is work of evil brilliance. There's an error. But we're not going to tell you where. We're not even going to give you a clue.
"One or more" - we're not even going to tell you how many... could be 1, could be 3, could be 295...
To be fair, it's hard for the algorithm to continue with the calculation when something's caused it to barf.
Telling you where it got to when it stopped doesn't seem outside the realms of usefulness, though I suspect the vagary is deliberate attempt to reduce stupid questions from people who don't appreciate that just because it got stuck at point $foo doesn't mean the actual error is anywhere nearby.
Excel: A programming language for people in denial that they're programming computers.
Post by: ian on 16 October, 2020, 12:59:20 pm
It's a bit like attempting to run tens of thousands lines of computer code to get the error: Sorry, there's a problem.
(I did fix it, there was one cell reference in a chart to a worksheet that had been deleted – it was fortunately obvious-ish as the legend on the chart had a REF! in it.)
Post by: SoreTween on 23 October, 2020, 08:13:57 am
WTAF have you done to this laptop? It used to be fast and silent, now it is neither. It has 8gb of ram of which 95% is used as soon as I log in. It has 4 awesomely fast cpu cores that keep hitting 50% used as the memory compression kicks in. It has the very latest in SSD tech that hits 100% utilisation when the paging gets up a head of steam. And that's with just Lookout and a couple of chrome/shitpoint tabs open. I can have a slow, satisfying dump in the time it takes to open a 500 page test spec in Turd. PDFing said spec is a 20 minute wait.
Is it the 1909 update whose install status only Heisenberg would grok?1
Is it the yet another security suite that has appeared recently arguing with the others?
Don't know. Don't care. Just FFS do something about this bloody hovercraft that's in danger of setting light to my wooden desk.
1If you look for signs the installation worked, it did. If you look for signs the installation failed, it failed.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 23 October, 2020, 10:36:42 am
I'm on a newer build at home and it's worked as well as ever.
* well except for WSL2 and the docker images we've built not playing nice (that's An action we need to take) and the surupticious VM that I use to support ancient apps that need such an old version of VS and the active IE plugin due to 3rd party PDF tools that had completely died and therefore windows xp, just waiting for the excrement and fan to meet on that one.
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Post by: ian on 23 October, 2020, 11:01:15 am
I assumed it was mostly corporate grok, but really I could make a pot of coffee in the time between pressing on and things stopping pinning. Then go for breakfast while Outlook did its prestidigitations.
Even my aging mothership Macbook Pro does a lot better. Though corporate grokmonkeys got their hands on it and did the usual. So now Safari randomly closes once a day, usually within the first hour. No error message or anything, it seems something in the corporate management framework just shuts it down for no reason whatsoever. That's convenient if you're doing anything that involves Safari (it doesn't affect Chrome though).
And they've overridden the Apple updater, so instead of a cosy 'we'll update your computer while you sleep' from Apple I get the YOUR COMPUTER WILL RESTART IN 5 MINUTES with no option to nudge it back to a time when you're not doing a presentation to 500 people.
Your computer will restart in 23 minutes is not a message you want to see at this point.
At least it's not locked down, as I have developer privileges.
Post by: SoreTween on 23 October, 2020, 11:09:24 am
Was yours updated to 1909 or installed at that? If updated what does it show if you run winver.exe?
I think the update failed, winver still shows 1803 build 17134.1667. I think that should have changed if the update was successful.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 October, 2020, 11:33:49 am
Post by: Feanor on 27 October, 2020, 10:00:22 pm
Yes, you are a GUI on top of some fantastically high-powered maths.
To the point you are an almost non-deterministic system.
I have fed you with 10 1-colour 8-bit greyscale scans of BW photos which have perfectly good photometric consistency.
Plz to be dealing with only the geometry and not messing with the photometry.
You seem to have picked out one image of the 10 to perform horrendous adjustments on which look like a posterised image. Plz to be leaving it alone.
Digging deeper, I've found photometric factors for each image, EV, and Red and Blue Multipliers.
These had been fucked with, and have been forced back to 0,1,1.
But wait, what?
R & B multipliers? Like white balance corrections for a *greyscale image*?
WTF?
Has it not figured out this is a monochrome image we're dealing with?
Anyways, forcing the photometric corrections off has fixed the problem.
Post by: grams on 11 November, 2020, 09:38:54 am
BING BING BING BZZZZZZZ BRRRRRRRRRRRRAPAPAPA BIING BING BING WUP WUP WUP BAZING BAZING BAZING
And so on.
What it actually results in is:
*whispers* Here I am.
Post by: Afasoas on 11 November, 2020, 12:00:40 pm
Please desist.
The cunning plan for turning my old Lenovo IdeaCentre into a slient PC has faltered because there are almost 4 USB style connectors that attach the case to the motherboard with very non-USB-esq pin outs and get this, a ribbon cable that connects into what resembles a PCIe x1 connector. Discovering the pin out for the power button etc looks a destructive process in smashing off the top of the case and examining the PCB.
Post by: iddu on 12 November, 2020, 12:47:15 am
Why do OEMs have to use proprietary connectors when there are STANDARDS?
Please desist.
The cunning plan for turning my old Lenovo IdeaCentre into a slient PC has faltered because there are almost 4 USB style connectors that attach the case to the motherboard with very non-USB-esq pin outs and get this, a ribbon cable that connects into what resembles a PCIe x1 connector. Discovering the pin out for the power button etc looks a destructive process in smashing off the top of the case and examining the PCB.
Have a rummage through https://www.laboneinside.com/?s=ideacentre (https://www.laboneinside.com/?s=ideacentre) for anything useful...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 November, 2020, 01:41:24 am
It was all so much simpler before They “improved” it a couple of updates ago.
Post by: Afasoas on 12 November, 2020, 12:48:12 pm
Why do OEMs have to use proprietary connectors when there are STANDARDS?
Please desist.
The cunning plan for turning my old Lenovo IdeaCentre into a slient PC has faltered because there are almost 4 USB style connectors that attach the case to the motherboard with very non-USB-esq pin outs and get this, a ribbon cable that connects into what resembles a PCIe x1 connector. Discovering the pin out for the power button etc looks a destructive process in smashing off the top of the case and examining the PCB.
Have a rummage through https://www.laboneinside.com/?s=ideacentre (https://www.laboneinside.com/?s=ideacentre) for anything useful...
Thanks for the thought .. sadly nothing there looks too helpful.
I could sell it for more than the price of a new AM4 mobo, Athlon 3000G cpu and an 8GB stick of memory. I guess that's what I'll do?
Post by: FifeingEejit on 12 November, 2020, 02:12:20 pm
The repository was baselines in 2016,we have done no releases since.
Many WTFs are being thrown around just now.
*"common code" yes we have about 20 different informal forks of it but still what's on the 20 different "forks" should match the repo...
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Post by: TheLurker on 12 November, 2020, 02:14:25 pm
Post by: FifeingEejit on 12 November, 2020, 02:33:06 pm
It fecking reeks.
It's not too bad Tbh, other than the reeking that is.
It's part of a variety of legacy apps that are being disposed of at an indeterminate period in the near future, I'm off frdiay/Monday and have conveniently decided to use my protected training time today, someone else can rebaseline while wondering htf this has happened.
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Post by: FifeingEejit on 13 November, 2020, 01:13:43 am
Maybe I should have visited ColdFusion land after all...
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Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 November, 2020, 05:57:39 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 November, 2020, 06:13:38 pm
Post by: Kim on 15 November, 2020, 06:16:19 pm
And another thing. Plz to not be failing to load webby pages, fondleslab, and making me think the internet connection has died on its arse, given that the BHPC's online AGM starts in three-quarters of an hour.
This. Did YACF have a wobbly a few minutes ago?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 November, 2020, 06:18:40 pm
And another thing. Plz to not be failing to load webby pages, fondleslab, and making me think the internet connection has died on its arse, given that the BHPC's online AGM starts in three-quarters of an hour.
This. Did YACF have a wobbly a few minutes ago?
I reckon so, if it happened to you as well. I was in the Coronalurgi thread in POBI when it declined to load the next page. A couple of times. Of course by the time I'd checked the status on the router this place was fine again.
Post by: Kim on 15 November, 2020, 06:21:20 pm
Post by: Feanor on 15 November, 2020, 06:21:54 pm
Ive seen some SMF cant connect to database errors.
Some topics slow to load.
Looks like database gremlins.
Post by: Kim on 15 November, 2020, 06:26:03 pm
She can try out the realtime captioning software she's been testing, for SCIENCE.
Post by: Jaded on 15 November, 2020, 10:30:08 pm
Post by: FifeingEejit on 15 November, 2020, 10:33:13 pm
On a related note, I'm failing to press-gang barakta into joining in with the AGM. I know she isn't a member, can't currently cycle, and is terrified of someone trying to co-opt her as treasurer, but really, those are all rubbish excuses...Having once acted as treasurer for a club I can say that fearing being cooped as treasurer is definitley a valid excuse.
She can try out the realtime captioning software she's been testing, for SCIENCE.
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Post by: Kim on 15 November, 2020, 11:29:53 pm
On a related note, I'm failing to press-gang barakta into joining in with the AGM. I know she isn't a member, can't currently cycle, and is terrified of someone trying to co-opt her as treasurer, but really, those are all rubbish excuses...Having once acted as treasurer for a club I can say that fearing being cooped as treasurer is definitley a valid excuse.
She can try out the realtime captioning software she's been testing, for SCIENCE.
I've been volunteering to audit the ALC's accounts for the last couple of years as a preventative measure against it.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 15 November, 2020, 11:36:39 pm
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Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 November, 2020, 11:59:21 pm
Post by: ian on 16 November, 2020, 09:51:09 am
Can you guess what happened this morning? OK, no bother, I'll use the mothership's self-service software tool to re-install it.
Blessed Finestre, dear mothership, a version from five years ago that's still 32-bit (and thus won't run)? IT Hell Desk, here I come.
Post by: citoyen on 16 November, 2020, 11:13:41 am
Looks like database gremlins.
I assumed someone had forgotten to put 50p in the meter. But good to know it wasn't just me, whatever the cause.
Post by: citoyen on 16 November, 2020, 11:18:25 am
Running out of space on my mothership Macbook...
But were you really running out of space? My rant is that when I installed Big Sur on my laptop the other day, it was telling me I didn't have enough space on the hard drive, even after I'd gone through and removed everything non-essential, emptied the bin etc etc. For example, it claimed I had 13GB worth of shit in my Documents folder, but when I looked, I could barely make the contents add up to 1GB.
Seems to be something to do with how it stores the information from what I can ascertain - it doesn't actually check the contents every time you ask it, so the details could be out of date and you have to wait for it to update itself, whenever that may be.
Also seems to be a glitch in Dropbox that it will claim that files are taking up space on your HD even when you have storage set to cloud only. (Yes, I do know about the option in Dropbox settings to fix this, but it doesn't seem to work reliably.)
Post by: ian on 16 November, 2020, 11:29:13 am
Usually the macOS upgrade installs spawn a load of temporary files (and the download itself is 12GB) – so I imagine you need the better part of 20GB free. I haven't put Big Sur on that machine yet, ironically the reason being that it usually breaks the VPN (which I need).
Post by: citoyen on 16 November, 2020, 11:34:13 am
(and the download itself is 12GB) – so I imagine you need the better part of 20GB free.
It was demanding another 16GB for the installation process even after I'd completed the download. Which is just silly. But since most of the softwares I use are available in the App Store these days, it was easy enough to offload a bunch of them and reinstall post upgrade.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 16 November, 2020, 11:45:48 am
Post by: barakta on 16 November, 2020, 08:37:36 pm
Post by: Feanor on 16 November, 2020, 09:11:45 pm
Since Win7, I don't re-install very often any more.
Usually, it's because I'm swapping a hard drive to something bigger, or an SSD.
Now, my strategy is:
Have all my documents/pictures etc backed up elsewhere. For some things, like thunderbird, I need to take special precautions to ensure I have it's working directory backed up, and know how to restore it to a new install.
Remove all partitions on the disk, and re-install on bare metal.
Add programs only as they become necessary. So I will install Office straight away, and other things I use every day: Filezilla. Garmin Mapsource and all my maps. Notepad++. etc, etc
Other stuff is installed as and when it's needed; I don't try to re-create my old setup from the get-go.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 November, 2020, 11:57:53 pm
Post by: ian on 24 November, 2020, 09:11:40 pm
How hard can it be? On my Mac I click the wifi icon, select the correct phone and, erm, that's that.
It's Windows. Sigh. Come on, Microsoft, it's 20-fucking-20, humans have been using their phones as hotspots for several months at least. Maybe even years. It's got to be an official thing that can be done.
Click the option. The icon goes swirlymungo. Limited connectivity, it eventually bleats one ice-age later. What exactly is limited connectivity? I'll tell you. IT'S ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NO CONNECTIVITY AT ALL. It's a complete absence of connectivity. That's what your version of limited is, you porridge-crammed clungebot. Go on, do you feel lucky, offer to fix it. Go on diagnose and fix my problem. Has this option ever worked, ever? At any point in the history of time?
IT WORKED! It said so and everything. Well drop my giddy aunt on a trampoline. I shall make my words into a sandwich and take them on a picnic right now. I shall compose hymns to the glory of Microsoft's greatest creature. For I am truly blessed.
Admittedly it solved the problem by reconnecting to the house wifi and hoping we wouldn't notice.
Fucking square-wheeled shitwagon.
Post by: barakta on 24 November, 2020, 09:28:15 pm
Windows....
Post by: Kim on 24 November, 2020, 09:32:19 pm
[1] In the seppuku sense.
Post by: citoyen on 24 November, 2020, 09:36:02 pm
Fucking square-wheeled shitwagon.
Insult of the day.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 24 November, 2020, 10:15:20 pm
Moaning and groaning of the wrong sort from the upper deck. What benighted shenanigans can this be? The Lady of the Loft wants to connect to her phone's hotspot as a prelude to The Magical and Smart Electrometering Experience Tomorrow which portends a dark spell of no electricity at all unless we generate our own by running around each other with magnets. Probably around the time I get my mid-morning toast-urgery.<stackoverflow>Oh, when ever I've used it, it just works.</stackoverflow>
How hard can it be? On my Mac I click the wifi icon, select the correct phone and, erm, that's that.
It's Windows. Sigh. Come on, Microsoft, it's 20-fucking-20, humans have been using their phones as hotspots for several months at least. Maybe even years. It's got to be an official thing that can be done.
Click the option. The icon goes swirlymungo. Limited connectivity, it eventually bleats one ice-age later. What exactly is limited connectivity? I'll tell you. IT'S ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NO CONNECTIVITY AT ALL. It's a complete absence of connectivity. That's what your version of limited is, you porridge-crammed clungebot. Go on, do you feel lucky, offer to fix it. Go on diagnose and fix my problem. Has this option ever worked, ever? At any point in the history of time?
IT WORKED! It said so and everything. Well drop my giddy aunt on a trampoline. I shall make my words into a sandwich and take them on a picnic right now. I shall compose hymns to the glory of Microsoft's greatest creature. For I am truly blessed.
Admittedly it solved the problem by reconnecting to the house wifi and hoping we wouldn't notice.
Fucking square-wheeled shitwagon.
That includes the standard microshit stuff on the laptop at the caravan and on the cisco bullshit that struggles with the wired connection at work but is absolutely fine creating a vpn on any wireless network including the one I'm not meant to use in the office because its for patients, of which we have zero... (we also get a signal for eduroam but I don't have a login for that).
Have you tried turning off the house wifi so it can't rry to use that while setting it up?
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Post by: Feanor on 24 November, 2020, 10:21:51 pm
<Twinkly rainbows> Sorry, we can't connect right now!
Well, why not?
Give me some technical details!
<Twinkly rainbows> You don't need to know that! Try again later! Look! Sqrls!
And windows followed that paradigm.
And in fairness, you have complained about technical detail in UIs recently.
Hiding technical details is fine, right up to the point where it isn't.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 25 November, 2020, 12:50:06 am
Also this is going to fuck up the dingy unsigned minidisc driver again isn't it...
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Post by: TimC on 25 November, 2020, 05:46:06 am
Post by: ian on 25 November, 2020, 09:38:39 am
I'd like to place some of the blame for that at Apple's door.
<Twinkly rainbows> Sorry, we can't connect right now!
Well, why not?
Give me some technical details!
<Twinkly rainbows> You don't need to know that! Try again later! Look! Sqrls!
And windows followed that paradigm.
And in fairness, you have complained about technical detail in UIs recently.
Hiding technical details is fine, right up to the point where it isn't.
I'm fine with technical details, just don't throw them in people's faces. Error X458GD Rebound in bumpipes expected at Z758. Give people human-legible errors and hide the specifics under a nerds-only button or in the console where people can watch lines of code scroll and pretend they're computer hackers. Don't disturb me, I'm hacking NASA with machine code. Ha ha ha. (that's an evil hacker laugh, btw).
My bigger gripe with Windows is the troubleshooter which have never worked ever. Would you like Windows to try and fix this problem. Sure, but maybe we – you and me – should agree now that you're not really going to fix it are you?
Anyway, I gave up. I had no wish to spend the rest of my evening doing battle with Windows, a war in which I've yet to see a victory.
Post by: Morat on 25 November, 2020, 10:09:47 am
Post by: Feanor on 25 November, 2020, 10:11:52 am
Post by: Kim on 25 November, 2020, 02:56:39 pm
Anyway, I gave up. I had no wish to spend the rest of my evening doing battle with Windows, a war in which I've yet to see a victory.
The best you can hope for is mutually assured destruction with fdisk...
Post by: ian on 25 November, 2020, 03:07:00 pm
Post by: citoyen on 25 November, 2020, 06:51:06 pm
The most common error is, of course, the "An Error". Users report it all the time.
I like the ones that give you an error code, typically a four-digit number or similar. It has no readily apparent meaning, but at least I can google it for a full and detailed explanation, and even occasionally come up with something I can understand.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 November, 2020, 01:45:03 am
Post by: TheLurker on 26 November, 2020, 06:09:09 am
Quote from: citoyen
Right up to the point where it's Microsoft and they re-use the same one forQuote from: MoratThe most common error is, of course, the "An Error". Users report it all the time.
I like the ones that give you an error code...
Post by: darkpoint on 26 November, 2020, 12:07:50 pm
An error occurred, please inform your system admin
I am the admin, do you want to give me a clue? how many letters?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 November, 2020, 12:42:43 pm
Post by: citoyen on 26 November, 2020, 12:43:37 pm
Right up to the point where it's Microsoft and they re-use the same one fortenshundredsthousands of different faults, especially that all time classic 0x80004005. Which, roughly translated to human, means, "Oh shit. Something went wrong, but we don't know what." There are others, but that one ...
:sick:
Post by: SteveC on 26 November, 2020, 06:28:45 pm
Every manual (and there were loads) had an Appendix A, error messages. A list of the errors, however obscure and unlikely, that the system could generate, along with what to do about them.
Post by: Afasoas on 27 November, 2020, 05:23:07 pm
It's Windows. Sigh. Come on, Microsoft, it's 20-fucking-20, humans have been using their phones as hotspots for several months at least. Maybe even years. It's got to be an official thing that can be done.
Microsoft's Windows usually complains of limited connectivity when:
- No IP address is assigned from a DHCP server
- DNS queries cannot be resolved.
The trouble shooter will try and fix this be effectively restarting the network connection.
And technically it is right; the computer is connected to a network and packets can be emitted. It is essential protocols on top of the physical network that are not working.
Either there is a connectivity problem which means packets are getting lost between the computer and the phone. Or there's a fun VPN/network-filter thing breaking the network stack on windows. Or the phone isn't hot-spotting properly.
The Networking stack in Windows, excepting Vista, is something that does work reasonably well, or at least has broke less often than on the other OSes I've used.
Post by: ian on 27 November, 2020, 06:07:20 pm
But any 'limited' connectivity in practice means no connectivity because they want the internets.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 28 November, 2020, 01:24:05 am
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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Post by: TheLurker on 28 November, 2020, 08:43:28 am
Quote from: FifeingEejit
... 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.
Quote from: FifeingEejit
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.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 28 November, 2020, 10:48:16 am
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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Post by: Pingu on 28 November, 2020, 11:05:22 am
...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.
::-)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 November, 2020, 12:07:17 pm
| 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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
Post by: Kim on 28 November, 2020, 12:09:36 pm
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.
Post by: Chris S on 03 December, 2020, 05:16:07 pm
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 05 December, 2020, 07:27:11 pm
Post by: FifeingEejit on 06 December, 2020, 02:05:52 am
Ooh thst lines up another rant about our operations team, but it's quite a bit older....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.
::-)
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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Post by: TheLurker on 06 December, 2020, 09:29:41 am
Quote from: FifeingEejit
Rant 1.Every IT project, regardless of size, that I ever undertaken. Here, have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. :)
Decision made ....
Rant 5:
... meets spec, the spec says this <copies and pastes spec point>, this is not a bug...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 December, 2020, 06:39:49 pm
Post by: rogerzilla on 07 December, 2020, 09:34:48 am
Post by: nicknack on 07 December, 2020, 11:28:17 am
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.
Post by: citoyen on 07 December, 2020, 11:53:57 am
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.
Post by: ian on 07 December, 2020, 01:31:45 pm
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.
Post by: Afasoas on 07 December, 2020, 11:09:44 pm
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).
Post by: citoyen on 07 December, 2020, 11:28:26 pm
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.
Post by: pcolbeck on 08 December, 2020, 06:29:24 am
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.
Post by: pcolbeck on 08 December, 2020, 06:35:25 am
Then someone in BAU decides it's a good day to take down the remote access systems for maintenance. Boom everyone cut off.
Post by: nicknack on 08 December, 2020, 09:24:53 am
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.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.
Post by: Afasoas on 08 December, 2020, 06:07:02 pm
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 08 December, 2020, 08:07:36 pm
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.
Post by: ian on 08 December, 2020, 08:10:09 pm
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 08 December, 2020, 08:10:49 pm
Post by: ian on 08 December, 2020, 08:23:56 pm
Post by: rafletcher on 08 December, 2020, 08:34:15 pm
You've been using it for years tho.
Me too, at least 20 years. Now, as part of our migration to 365 we’ll have to use the web version :-\
Post by: Afasoas on 09 December, 2020, 12:39:51 am
You've been using it for years tho.
Me too, at least 20 years. Now, as part of our migration to 365 we’ll have to use the web version :-\
The other adult in this household has just been through a similar painful transition. It's as though IT departments don't eat their own dogfood.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 December, 2020, 01:01:38 am
Code: [Select]
texture:[0]
where it’s meant to say
Code: [Select]
texture:[1]
then it will not work :facepalm: Some kind of error message would be nice, chaps, instead of just crashing without so much as a farewell wave.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 09 December, 2020, 01:07:14 am
Ha! Oddly when the structure we worked in had the BA and Dev in near constant communicstion, this sort of problem didn't appear at all.Quote from: FifeingEejitRant 1.Every IT project, regardless of size, that I ever undertaken. Here, have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. :)
Decision made ....
Rant 5:
... meets spec, the spec says this <copies and pastes spec point>, this is not a bug...
There was the time the BA that everyone hated didn't bother to tell me about spec changes and magically expected me to deal with them but...
This project has had the worst of the worst for us, basically exactly why I was looking for anither job this time last year.
if it wasn't for the fact it let's me power down the life support on an ancient system there would be no positives at all for it.
The other side of the coin is the improvements we've been talking about for the last 5 years are finally being lined up,
It'll still have shit like this but part of it is nothing gets dumped directly at developers feet without higher level scrutiny.
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Post by: FifeingEejit on 09 December, 2020, 01:11:57 am
Too right, I've got an E3 licence or whatever it is that gives me full desktop office 365 simply because I'm working in IT.You've been using it for years tho.
Me too, at least 20 years. Now, as part of our migration to 365 we’ll have to use the web version :-\
The other adult in this household has just been through a similar painful transition. It's as though IT departments don't eat their own dogfood.
The Web version of Excel is so cut down I'm not sure the flexi time recording sheets would work.
Some people do seem to like Web Outlook365, and when I looked it didn't seem too bad.
All of the ms web tools I've used have managed to be better than any of the shite Google offer.
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Post by: FifeingEejit on 09 December, 2020, 01:16:57 am
After approximately nineteen hours of fannying around I discovered that if ur file saysTalking of silent errors, in the ~1hr I got to do my own stuff in today (er yesterday), Ive been trying to figure out why the fuck JBoss is injecting null when I ask it for an Entity Manager, everything else is hooked up fine.Code: [Select]texture:[0]
where it’s meant to sayCode: [Select]texture:[1]
then it will not work :facepalm: Some kind of error message would be nice, chaps, instead of just crashing without so much as a farewell wave.
And also why it suppressed the null pointer exception that was being thrown resulting in me dumping a load of logs out (I've not got arquillian set up in the project yet)
Unfortunately the clock ticked over to 1800 just as I found a stackoverflow question that suggests my conditional cdi provider factory is wrong and is bollocking up CDI, but didn't give me an answer as to what I should do to unbollocks it.
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Post by: ian on 09 December, 2020, 09:40:17 am
Too right, I've got an E3 licence or whatever it is that gives me full desktop office 365 simply because I'm working in IT.You've been using it for years tho.
Me too, at least 20 years. Now, as part of our migration to 365 we’ll have to use the web version :-\
The other adult in this household has just been through a similar painful transition. It's as though IT departments don't eat their own dogfood.
The Web version of Excel is so cut down I'm not sure the flexi time recording sheets would work.
Some people do seem to like Web Outlook365, and when I looked it didn't seem too bad.
All of the ms web tools I've used have managed to be better than any of the shite Google offer.
Indeed, don't do battle with the desktop versions of Word or Powerpoint, hit the 'edit in desktop app' button. Outlook just sends and receives mail though. Probably if you use some 'advanced features' like filters and rules and whatever funk Microsoft have ladled into it since I last tried, it'll be a disappointing experience, but it works for me.
The migration of Outlook folders must be a global torture, my wife was yelling down the phone to her IT 'support' the other week about just that. It didn't go well. It might still not be going well.
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 09 December, 2020, 07:28:56 pm
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.
4 days later and I'm still not finished moving these fecking archives over.
And the alternative method I got off Google didn't work, bah.
I had to ask Google for help on how to create a meeting invite from an email on the web version. Honestly I spend so much time dicking about with this stuff instead of working.
And I hear tell that the newco image is coming out so I can look forward to another half day of not being able to do any work at almost no notice. (At least, one of my cow-orkers said she could have it installed 'this afternoon or tomorrow' they can feck right off if they think they can have mine at that short notice.)
Post by: nicknack on 10 December, 2020, 01:44:52 pm
Well, I have now.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.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.
I'm now posting this courtesy of Manjaro. I thought I'd try something non-debian. It's getting there. A bit of grub editing and most of it works. When I first started it up the software update/install worked fine. Now it doesn't do anything at all. Can't even get the relevant apps to start up. More work needed still.
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 11 December, 2020, 03:18:20 pm
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.
4 days later and I'm still not finished moving these fecking archives over.
And the alternative method I got off Google didn't work, bah.
I had to ask Google for help on how to create a meeting invite from an email on the web version. Honestly I spend so much time dicking about with this stuff instead of working.
And I hear tell that the newco image is coming out so I can look forward to another half day of not being able to do any work at almost no notice. (At least, one of my cow-orkers said she could have it installed 'this afternoon or tomorrow' they can feck right off if they think they can have mine at that short notice.)
After all that, IT contacted me at 1230 today and I dropped everything for them. Mainly cos I didn't have much on this afternoon and I figured I'd rather get it out of the way on my terms.
Doesn't seem to be going swimmingly though. Perhaps the 'this is the 1st engineering laptop we've done, hope it goes ok' should have been a warning...
And he said he was having trouble backing up my archive, I told him that was a bust when he started... So it's being nuked from orbit...
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 11 December, 2020, 03:56:25 pm
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 11 December, 2020, 05:43:24 pm
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 14 December, 2020, 06:17:43 pm
Huh funny this has happened to me before. Maybe check next time?
Gaaah!
To add insult to injury the internet has been on the fritz all afternoon rendering Teams unusable. There had been much wailing and gnashing of teeth and I've got a sore face now.
Post by: tiermat on 15 December, 2020, 03:35:57 pm
Quote
Do you all see how difficult it can be to fix an issue if you only get a small amount of info? It can be a bit like having a car, the headlight failing and you take it to the garage. All you say to them though is "Fix it". when you go and collect it they have replaced the exhaust and 3 tyres but the headlight still doesn't work.
Trouble is I suspect it went right over the heads of 6 out of the 7
Post by: FifeingEejit on 16 December, 2020, 12:04:02 am
Me, today, using analogy* to get the lusers to give reasonable fault reports:I managed to reduce the amount of times I have to go back to the other devs when they raise a repository change (ancient subversion and we can't do unstable trunk for support and safety reasons amongst others), replaced the emails saying "can you tell me which repo and what you want the branch to be called" with a form in jira that doesn't let them not enter the details.QuoteDo you all see how difficult it can be to fix an issue if you only get a small amount of info? It can be a bit like having a car, the headlight failing and you take it to the garage. All you say to them though is "Fix it". when you go and collect it they have replaced the exhaust and 3 tyres but the headlight still doesn't work.
Trouble is I suspect it went right over the heads of 6 out of the 7
The time spent fucking around with subversion was one of my selling points for moving to git lab. I'll basically need to do next to fuck all after initial set up of repos.
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Post by: rogerzilla on 18 December, 2020, 11:49:18 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 December, 2020, 12:05:18 pm
Post by: FifeingEejit on 19 December, 2020, 03:07:06 pm
Our broadband drops out regularly around 2000hrs and is usually back by 2001hrs
But oh no not last night, it dropped out at 2100hrs and is still not back.
Unfortunately I'm trying to buy an imperial fuck tonne of stuff to make a house livable and have resorted to using my work lap top via my mobile phone.
This is of course extra pish because it means everything is going through the work VPN and of course I'm having to use a laptop as an actual laptop and not a small form factor desktop.
The only thing going for it is that unlike my mega good (exaggeration) tower PC this ones' got WiFi.
Managed to use 2gb of data last night on the work XMAS stuff which was amusing, I nearly won the quiz despite only doping 3 rounds (I gave them a head start by doing a turbo trainer session later than intended for reasons related to dad suddenly not being able to skive and so buggering off from the new house for an hour [COVID related work])
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 December, 2020, 10:24:08 am
“Soz, but ur Babbage-Engine is not inna state to apply the updated update to ur updates. Plz to poke `Retry’ when u think, based on absolutely no comprehensible information, u wanna try again. Innit*.”
(Pokes “Retry”)
It seems that Slow Dempsey needs to apply some other updates before he can install the update to the update. I wot not the purpose of a “Cumulative Update Preview for .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8” but Microsith seems to regard it as important. I dare say the Beast of Redmond has sound technical reasons for not installing this one alongside all the other guff last night, and also for the curious use of the word “Preview” which suggests that once it’s done it’ll have to be repeated for the actual update, but wha'evs as Bethany (10) might say.
Oh. It didn’t. “Ur up to date” quoth the
(Takes deep breath, clicks “Download and install” link under the words “Feature update to Windows 10, version 20H2”)
Oh, and Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, which one of your black polo neck cleverclogs though it was a good idea to put an “undo” key right next to the fucking space bar?
* NB: if Windows actually did talk like that I'd feel a bit warmer towards it, albeit not much.
Edit: 'kinell, that was quick! 20 minutes from poking the link to having him back up and running. Something must have gone wrong.
Post by: TheLurker on 22 December, 2020, 04:16:49 pm
Quote from: Mr Larrington
....Nah, just the Beast of Redmond messing with your mind.
Edit: 'kinell, that was quick! 20 minutes from poking the link to having him back up and running. Something must have gone wrong.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 December, 2020, 06:29:13 pm
Quote from: Mr Larrington....Nah, just the Beast of Redmond messing with your mind.
Edit: 'kinell, that was quick! 20 minutes from poking the link to having him back up and running. Something must have gone wrong.
I installed it on Adam Boyle too, the media device in the Great Hall. Took a couple of hours, including a Several of reboots ??? Probably because I never got round to installing the previous “Feature Update”.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 December, 2020, 02:29:53 pm
Post by: FifeingEejit on 24 December, 2020, 11:14:50 am
(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20201224/8035627a1c2853f6512850f908b8b93c.jpg)
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: Kim on 24 December, 2020, 01:07:48 pm
Just been given a (partial) keyboard to suit my temprement.
(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20201224/8035627a1c2853f6512850f908b8b93c.jpg)
That reminds me, I was going to molish barakta a "FFS!" button.
Post by: grams on 24 December, 2020, 02:03:27 pm
Just been given a (partial) keyboard to suit my temprement.
(https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20201224/8035627a1c2853f6512850f908b8b93c.jpg)
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
I hope you're saving up for the rest of it, like this:
https://twitter.com/squirmelia/status/1036167421613232131
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 December, 2020, 06:44:10 pm
You fucking halfwits.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 January, 2021, 11:15:04 am
Post by: ian on 12 January, 2021, 03:46:24 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 12 January, 2021, 04:28:49 pm
It may be a terribly first world annoyance, but not being able to print while on the dashed VPN is really making me rather cross.
That's the correct way to do a VPN so far as security goes. Other wise the enterprise is open to a man in the middle attack where your PC is the man in the middle.
A split tunnel where you can access your local LAN as well (and thus print)is often allowed as a compromise (still not brilliant but a reasonable trade of depending on how much risk you think there is). A full split tunnel where you can access the Internet and the VPN is a really bad idea!
Security is always a PITA.
I'm getting a Home Office laptop shortly for a new project, that should be a massive pain in the proverbial.
Post by: ian on 12 January, 2021, 04:48:37 pm
Anyway, I just have to save a PDF to a synchronized folder and then print it from another machine. Oh, the effort. It makes me want to write a strongly worded email to someone, it surely does.
Post by: Kim on 12 January, 2021, 06:03:12 pm
Post by: ian on 12 January, 2021, 06:25:43 pm
It is a rubbishy feature of modern life to accrete data of uncertain vintage, origin, and usage, but there's a compelling need to retain it. Data is like digital herpes, we all have it, and once you have it, you can't get rid of it.
But eventually, you have the great idea to create the back up to end all backups. A pantheon of sorts. A fact encouraged by the giddy capaciousness of modern storage. You can simply toss all that data in there and hear the echo. This takes time and effort.
But in the end, it's there, your backup of backups, your digital Pantheon. All is good. Whatever happens elsewhere, it's there, waiting just in case you find a use.
Until you get the error message midway through the process. Cannot copy whatever. Erm, OK, you had one job dear computer, and you failed. Error -1245585908500234834794809234279834285478347593482090754728. Oh that one.
This is probably a cryptic way of telling me that yes, the disk is fucked. Computers have a really hard time telling you this. OK, sometimes that's it, they just don't work. Other times, it's like the slow decline of a relationship. Bit by bit, things don't work, you find yourself arguing more, until finally one day, you realise it's over and she's taken everything. But I thought we could make it work, you'll yell.
First Aid isn't very helpful, your volume is fine, other than I can't unmount it, so it isn't fine. That's simply superhelpful.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 January, 2021, 06:45:57 pm
After approximately nineteen hours of fannying around I discovered that if ur file saysCode: [Select]texture:[0]
where it’s meant to sayCode: [Select]texture:[1]
then it will not work :facepalm: Some kind of error message would be nice, chaps, instead of just crashing without so much as a farewell wave.
I managed to do this again today but at least fixing it took twenty seconds, most of which was spent in navigating to the offending files.
Post by: ian on 12 January, 2021, 08:16:31 pm
Post by: SteveC on 12 January, 2021, 08:43:02 pm
It's hard enough keeping her happy with the wretched thing without unnecessary changes.
And I can't reinstall it from here as I can't get the CoPilot helper program to load on her machine.
Post by: TimC on 13 January, 2021, 02:27:26 am
Post by: Diver300 on 13 January, 2021, 07:55:35 am
You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally. What you need is another VPN, running over your VPN to tunnel back to your printer... ;DI see a perfect opportunity to accidentally connect the other VPN to someone else's printer, for added hilarity.
Post by: ian on 13 January, 2021, 09:27:25 am
You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally. What you need is another VPN, running over your VPN to tunnel back to your printer... ;DI see a perfect opportunity to accidentally connect the other VPN to someone else's printer, for added hilarity.
Splendidly, I can send it to any printer in the business. Beijing, Philadelphia, Bengaluru, Penang, Auckland, San Francisco, London, you name it. Even Chandler, Arizona.
None of this is especially useful at the moment.
Post by: Greenbank on 13 January, 2021, 09:52:42 am
Unless you want a printer that isn't in the system you don't print to a printer, you just print something to the generic "I wanted it printed".
You then go to a printer and dab your ID badge on a reader and then you select the thing you want from your queue.
Plenty of reasons for doing this, not least of which was to avoid stuff that is printed but never collected. Or confidential stuff that people print and then don't get to the printer quick enough (as it is a 50 yard walk with a couple of doors in the way) before someone else sees what they've printed expecting it to be their own. They could also dispense with the "cover sheet" for each and every printout.
Post by: Pingu on 13 January, 2021, 10:11:14 am
You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally. What you need is another VPN, running over your VPN to tunnel back to your printer... ;DI see a perfect opportunity to accidentally connect the other VPN to someone else's printer, for added hilarity.
Splendidly, I can send it to any printer in the business. Beijing, Philadelphia, Bengaluru, Penang, Auckland, San Francisco, London, you name it. Even Chandler, Arizona.
None of this is especially useful at the moment.
There's always the post.
Post by: Greenbank on 13 January, 2021, 10:23:58 am
You're not thinking fourth-dimensionally. What you need is another VPN, running over your VPN to tunnel back to your printer... ;DI see a perfect opportunity to accidentally connect the other VPN to someone else's printer, for added hilarity.
Splendidly, I can send it to any printer in the business. Beijing, Philadelphia, Bengaluru, Penang, Auckland, San Francisco, London, you name it. Even Chandler, Arizona.
None of this is especially useful at the moment.
There's always the post.
(https://d1yfjw4ro643jd.cloudfront.net/12_2013/278f7d5c-9f56-468c-a563-3c9564a4f2c6.jpg)
Post by: ian on 13 January, 2021, 10:28:32 am
I'm always amused when we have these bi-weekly CEO/senior leadership question time and people ask questions like 'how do I print something?' or similar. I mean, seriously, I don't think he's personally attending to your IT support needs.
[Goes off to find the printer in the CEO's office.]
Post by: Ben T on 13 January, 2021, 02:20:15 pm
I am moving to increasingly store all files in the root of C:\ , or ~/ on my mac, and on my own software projects I'm just storing all files in the one folder. There is literally zero point in storing them in folders based on their category.
Post by: rafletcher on 13 January, 2021, 02:37:57 pm
Our work printer system was much more like I'd expect printers to work.
Unless you want a printer that isn't in the system you don't print to a printer, you just print something to the generic "I wanted it printed".
You then go to a printer and dab your ID badge on a reader and then you select the thing you want from your queue.
Yep, my last place had that, and we're getting it here. Very usefu.
When I was wfh over a cheapy VPN (the expensive one was reserved for higher-ups, we minions got Watchguard) during the first "lockdown", I was just able to add my home printer to the work laptop, and print away. Very useful.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 January, 2021, 06:16:59 pm
Folders and sub-folders, grrr! ::-) why the sodding hell are folders still necessary in today's day and age, where we have umpteen tools to filter and sort the files I'm interested in, and not only that but find files based on their contents?
I am moving to increasingly store all files in the root of C:\ , or ~/ on my mac, and on my own software projects I'm just storing all files in the one folder. There is literally zero point in storing them in folders based on their category.
If I had the 20,000-odd files in my current project in a single folder
- I'd never be able to find anything, and
- I'd need ridiculously long file names to ensure uniqueness, and
- It wouldn’t work
Post by: Kim on 13 January, 2021, 06:24:58 pm
Post by: ian on 13 January, 2021, 06:38:05 pm
Post by: Feanor on 13 January, 2021, 06:44:59 pm
If you are a consultant using software like ours, then every project needs to be quite separate.
You can't have different client's confidential data files all mixed up in one big bucket.
The completed project folder is a deliverable, and may be re-visited in the future.
There's no way this is happening in C:\
Post by: barakta on 13 January, 2021, 07:15:16 pm
Searchers
Folder filers
And forcing people to work in the way that isn't their natural one is annoying and not effective.
I'm a folder filer.
But my new work DO file in an annoying way which I'd not do and at some point I'm going to suggest is changed cos it makes finding stuff require a lookup to identify which folder they're in to start looking.
Post by: Greenbank on 14 January, 2021, 09:37:55 am
The good news is I've got the best of both worlds. I name things properly (which you need to do if you're a searcher as you can't find anything easily if it's not named uniquely or accurately) and they're filed properly (and not just in directories called z, zz, zzz, aaabb, zab, cust_logs, ...)
1. I'm in the process of recovering/consolidating/wiping a load of old hard drives and I'm seeing how I've progressed over the last 20 years...
Post by: L CC on 14 January, 2021, 09:39:50 am
I hate it when other people are inconsistent. This is a constant struggle.
Post by: fimm on 14 January, 2021, 03:46:57 pm
Me: dear colleague, please would assist me in finding out why this thing Does Not Work?
Him: have you tried running it as administrator?
Me: I'm going to look a proper idiot if that works...
Yes, that was the problem...
Post by: tiermat on 15 January, 2021, 10:12:30 am
Bah!
Post by: TheLurker on 15 January, 2021, 11:03:35 am
Quote from: fimm
(This should possibly go in the I'm such an idiot thread...)
Me: dear colleague, please would assist me in finding out why this thing Does Not Work?
Him: have you tried running it as administrator?
Me: I'm going to look a proper idiot if that works...
Yes, that was the problem...
My turn..
Yesterday.
Me: Dear colleague, please would assist me in finding out why this process is unusably slow?
Him: Did you create additional indexes for the tables after you changed the definitions of the PKs?
Me: I'm going to look a proper idiot if that works...
Yes, that was the problem...
Post by: fuaran on 15 January, 2021, 03:01:11 pm
Why are _all_ WiFi TRVs actually Zigbee thus need a bridge? I want to replace units in my house, not add more tat!Zigbee is much lower power consumption than wifi, so should be better battery life.
Bah!
Post by: pcolbeck on 15 January, 2021, 03:09:27 pm
Why are _all_ WiFi TRVs actually Zigbee thus need a bridge? I want to replace units in my house, not add more tat!Zigbee is much lower power consumption than wifi, so should be better battery life.
Bah!
Also Zigbee devices form their own mesh network so the connection between them is more reliable than what could be spotty WiFi coverage.
Post by: tiermat on 15 January, 2021, 04:41:05 pm
Why are _all_ WiFi TRVs actually Zigbee thus need a bridge? I want to replace units in my house, not add more tat!Zigbee is much lower power consumption than wifi, so should be better battery life.
Bah!
Also Zigbee devices form their own mesh network so the connection between them is more reliable than what could be spotty WiFi coverage.
Oh I know _why_ but power consumption is not my concern, just don't want yet another box cluttering up the house.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 January, 2021, 10:45:09 pm
Code: [Select]
Shut Down
andCode: [Select]
Update and Shut Down
then selecting the former should SHUT THE FUCKING MACHINE DOWN WITHOUT APPLYING THE FUCKING UPDATE >:(And the reason I want to do this is because YOUR update has b0rked MY Babbage-Engine, so I want to try various options to sort it out without wasting ten minutes on restart when YOUR update fails again and has to do a system fucking restore. You hopeless skunk-buggering peckerwoods.
Post by: TheLurker on 18 January, 2021, 06:00:32 am
*Nothing show-stopping, but it'll do until Haiku is ready. :)
Post by: DaveReading on 18 January, 2021, 07:54:55 am
Microsith, you terrible warty cockshafts, if you provide the menu optionsCode: [Select]Shut DownandCode: [Select]Update and Shut Downthen selecting the former should SHUT THE FUCKING MACHINE DOWN WITHOUT APPLYING THE FUCKING UPDATE >:(
And the reason I want to do this is because YOUR update has b0rked MY Babbage-Engine, so I want to try various options to sort it out without wasting ten minutes on restart when YOUR update fails again and has to do a system fucking restore. You hopeless skunk-buggering peckerwoods.
Shutdown /s
Post by: ScumOfTheRoad on 18 January, 2021, 08:11:50 am
And this ^ is why I've swapped to Linux. It has all sorts of issues* of its own, but at least I know it won't apply updates behind my back.
Actually, I will correct you there. I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 33. If I shut the lid and then reopen it a few hours later many times it has a status bar warning me not to shut down as an update is being applied. This is new behaviour to me!
I guess there is a file I can edit to alter this behaviour.
Post by: TheLurker on 18 January, 2021, 08:45:43 am
On Mint 20 I get a nice little popup telling me updates are available which fades away if ignore it.
Post by: nicknack on 18 January, 2021, 10:10:30 am
This is one of the issues, you have to qualify everything you say or write about Linux with distro/version/selected UI/phase of the moon. :)Updates aren't an issue on Ubuntu 20 or Manjaro 20 either. Just popups asking if you want them now or later. They rarely take more than a few seconds anyway.
On Mint 20 I get a nice little popup telling me updates are available which fades away if ignore it.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 January, 2021, 11:35:25 am
Microsith, you terrible warty cockshafts, if you provide the menu optionsCode: [Select]Shut DownandCode: [Select]Update and Shut Downthen selecting the former should SHUT THE FUCKING MACHINE DOWN WITHOUT APPLYING THE FUCKING UPDATE >:(
And the reason I want to do this is because YOUR update has b0rked MY Babbage-Engine, so I want to try various options to sort it out without wasting ten minutes on restart when YOUR update fails again and has to do a system fucking restore. You hopeless skunk-buggering peckerwoods.
Shutdown /s
Ta! Didn’t know you could do that; I'll give it a go next time.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 January, 2021, 01:20:19 am
Post by: barakta on 19 January, 2021, 01:35:50 pm
Subrant. Dear IT, Just Tell Me The Fucking Monitor Model Number For The Matte Screens and I will tell you if it flickers or not. You have had this fucking request since early November and I am still using an ergonomically AWFUL setup. It took 8 fucking weeks to get a dock and I only managed at all cos I happened to have another laptop dock which happened to work... Fuck knows what would have happened if I'd not had my own ergo desk and chair!!!
I now have it documented that the ergo is awful... I have advised line manager that I am going to start having to get NARKY in the Equality Act and Reasonable Adjustments cluehammer sense. I checked and my disclosure is absolutely by the fucking book. "IT is busy" "cos pandemic" is no excuse for taking 10 weeks and counting to provide appropriate tech OR a model number so I can RTFM and or order my won... I'm suggesting if IT can't even talk to me (they'll only talk to Boss2 or higher) then I should be permitted to buy my own fucking monitors and they can reimburse me. Two monitors at the same resolution should resolve the windows opening off screen and the inconsistent brightness problem which is giving me headaches.
Post by: Diver300 on 24 January, 2021, 04:44:05 pm
Windows Fax and Scan on Windows 10, and an EPSON ET-2720 printer and scanner, why won't you tossers talk to each other so that I can scan?And it's bloody well doing it again, a week after the last time I used it and it just worked.
You managed it a week ago, and for months before. The printer will print from the computer, it'll even run the scanner to pretend that it's a photocopier.
Having turned them all off and back on again, along with the router and the wireless access point, and uninstalled and reinstalled the printer a couple of times, an all I get is "No scanners were detected" while an image on screen is taunting me, as it's a scan of the bit of paper that's been sat in the scanner since I used it last week.
Then I've been told by family that my workaround of using a DSLR camera is wrong. I should have downloaded and used a phone app, because that's "easier". Obviously the fact that I know how to use a DSLR already, means that nothing, but nothing could possibly go wrong with installing an app, finding how to use an app, getting the data to my computer from the app. Or that wrangling all of that could possibly be slower than using the camera that just works as if I haven't wasted enough time on the scanner already.
How much more mainstream can you get than a Windows PC and an Epson scanner?
Post by: Ben T on 26 January, 2021, 01:04:29 pm
If I had the 20,000-odd files in my current project in a single folder
- I'd never be able to find anything, and
- I'd need ridiculously long file names to ensure uniqueness, and
- It wouldn’t work
Then either your project is too big, or you've got at least one badly named file.
I bet you're the sort that has classes simply called "Data". And boolean variables called "yes".
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 January, 2021, 05:57:53 pm
If I had the 20,000-odd files in my current project in a single folder
- I'd never be able to find anything, and
- I'd need ridiculously long file names to ensure uniqueness, and
- It wouldn’t work
Then either your project is too big, or you've got at least one badly named file.
I bet you're the sort that has classes simply called "Data". And boolean variables called "yes".
Stop being wrong.
Post by: Kim on 26 January, 2021, 06:12:01 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 January, 2021, 07:10:09 pm
Post by: ian on 26 January, 2021, 08:00:11 pm
This seems like a good thread for this: https://twitter.com/shituserstories
Hey, someone has been downloading all my Jira stories.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 January, 2021, 12:03:10 pm
Microsith, you terrible warty cockshafts, if you provide the menu optionsCode: [Select]Shut DownandCode: [Select]Update and Shut Downthen selecting the former should SHUT THE FUCKING MACHINE DOWN WITHOUT APPLYING THE FUCKING UPDATE >:(
And the reason I want to do this is because YOUR update has b0rked MY Babbage-Engine, so I want to try various options to sort it out without wasting ten minutes on restart when YOUR update fails again and has to do a system fucking restore. You hopeless skunk-buggering peckerwoods.
Shutdown /s
Ta! Didn’t know you could do that; I'll give it a go next time.
Update: it appears that if Windows is in a state of restart requiredness then even shutdown from the command line doesn’t stop it from trying to install the wretched thing, so I have now learned to take my Kindle with me when starting the thing back up as it takes quite a while to undo the failed update. Nuking from orbit is looking increasingly like the only solution unless I can persuade the bloody thing to boot in Safe+Network mode, which at the moment I can’t because it doesn’t recognise the keyboard at that point in the startup process. Undignified sub-desk grovelling may be needed to plug cheap and nasty USB keyboard into a port that’s actually on the mofoboard.
Post by: TheLurker on 28 January, 2021, 05:20:25 pm
Post by: DaveReading on 28 January, 2021, 08:54:00 pm
Microsith, you terrible warty cockshafts, if you provide the menu optionsCode: [Select]Shut DownandCode: [Select]Update and Shut Downthen selecting the former should SHUT THE FUCKING MACHINE DOWN WITHOUT APPLYING THE FUCKING UPDATE >:(
And the reason I want to do this is because YOUR update has b0rked MY Babbage-Engine, so I want to try various options to sort it out without wasting ten minutes on restart when YOUR update fails again and has to do a system fucking restore. You hopeless skunk-buggering peckerwoods.
Shutdown /s
Ta! Didn’t know you could do that; I'll give it a go next time.
Update: it appears that if Windows is in a state of restart requiredness then even shutdown from the command line doesn’t stop it from trying to install the wretched thing, so I have now learned to take my Kindle with me when starting the thing back up as it takes quite a while to undo the failed update. Nuking from orbit is looking increasingly like the only solution unless I can persuade the bloody thing to boot in Safe+Network mode, which at the moment I can’t because it doesn’t recognise the keyboard at that point in the startup process. Undignified sub-desk grovelling may be needed to plug cheap and nasty USB keyboard into a port that’s actually on the mofoboard.
Well yes, what I should have said is that the command shuts down without Windows starting to load pending updates, whereas shutting down from the Start menu will insist on applying them.
If you are in the middle of an update at the "reboot needed" stage then you really don't want Windows to skip the next step(s).
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 January, 2021, 09:32:54 pm
Post by: ian on 28 January, 2021, 09:41:47 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 January, 2021, 10:02:24 pm
Post by: ian on 29 January, 2021, 09:27:06 am
Post by: Kim on 29 January, 2021, 12:21:44 pm
Maybe one day Microsoft will work out how to do this stuff properly, and save us all half an hour.
Post by: ian on 29 January, 2021, 12:58:53 pm
I have fond memories of trying to shut down Windows because I had to dash to a meeting or catch a train and seeing the dreaded installing update 1 of 35,657, do not shut down your machine...
I guess MS keep this kind of thing around for nostalgia.
Post by: Kim on 29 January, 2021, 01:07:00 pm
I have fond memories of trying to shut down Windows because I had to dash to a meeting or catch a train and seeing the dreaded installing update 1 of 35,657, do not shut down your machine...
The problem I've found is that the less Windows I use in day-to-day life, the more regular these incidents become. A Windows machine that spends most of its time shut down always needs to install eleventy updates each time you use it.
Post by: Polar Bear on 29 January, 2021, 01:43:20 pm
It's no big deal.
Post by: ian on 29 January, 2021, 01:48:39 pm
That's a tad annoying when it's a complete OS upgrade, you're on a dodgy internet connection (normally for the nocturnal updates, a Mac downloads it ready to go), and in two minutes you're due to present to 750 people.
Post by: TheLurker on 29 January, 2021, 02:56:45 pm
Quote from: Polar Bear
I really don't understand all the fuss about Windows updates. They can be scheduled ....Which is all well and good if *you* control the schedule. My primary work machine is Win10, locked tighter than a gnat's chuff by our (3rd party IT bods, natch), and it is common to get peremptory messages of the form, "Restart your machine now! We* have installed new vital** software and we've already triggered the countdown to automatic restart."
* ...control the horizontal, we control the vertical...
** Contains 99% lie. It's usually just some shitty office product which I use once in every 10th blue moon. Now and again it will be OS patches.
Post by: Kim on 29 January, 2021, 04:19:39 pm
I really don't understand all the fuss about Windows updates. They can be scheduled as oppose to simply happening and they can be delayed even when scheduled.
It's no big deal.
They're reboot-happy and frequently add a massive delay to the startup/shutdown process, rather than happening in the background like they do on other OSes. Murphy's law dictates that this will happen at the least convenient moment, typically when either time or electricity are in short supply.
It's not so much that it's a big deal, as that it's unnecessary.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 January, 2021, 06:10:58 pm
I really don't understand all the fuss about Windows updates. They can be scheduled as oppose to simply happening and they can be delayed even when scheduled.
It's no big deal.
It's no big deal IF THEY WORK. I've had the same update failing to install practically daily for the past Several of weeks. Then it takes an extra 10-15 minutes to roll back before you can use the machine again. And that's on a box full of SSDs and sporting an 8-core i7 running at 4 GHz and 32 GB of RAM. If my laptop was doing it the heat death of the universe would intervene.
And I've never forgiven Microsith for waking my laptop out of hibernation to install a GBFO update over two yoghurt pots and a piece of string somewhere in the arse end of western Ontario, in the days before you could defer updates while you were travelling.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 January, 2021, 01:30:15 am
* a Windows Find And Replace thing, m'lud,
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 February, 2021, 06:00:33 pm
The second time I ran it, it worked as intended ???
Post by: Morat on 06 February, 2021, 12:33:21 pm
I have fond memories of trying to shut down Windows because I had to dash to a meeting or catch a train and seeing the dreaded installing update 1 of 35,657, do not shut down your machine...
The problem I've found is that the less Windows I use in day-to-day life, the more regular these incidents become. A Windows machine that spends most of its time shut down always needs to install eleventy updates each time you use it.
and the network admin's fave - a machine that is used all day but the user hits "remind me later" before shutting down at 1701. At 0908 the user rolls in late, misses the "catchup call (are you here yet)" from their line manager and replies complaining that he/she was in on time but their computer is slow and they need a new one. This is then translated into "IT is shit, why are all our computers out of date" by the time it reaches the grown-ups.
Steps have been taken :/
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 February, 2021, 11:32:40 pm
Post by: ian on 09 February, 2021, 08:00:50 pm
ETA. An engineer has been dispatched. On horseback. From the darkest parts of Faraway. He may arrive within 48 hours. Or not. Now that's the sort of leap-to-it service I pay a premium price for.
Post by: ian on 10 February, 2021, 09:22:27 am
Anyway, it seems some nefarious operative had 'disconnected us at the cab' so service is restored. He then disappeared up the street to do 'the others.'
Post by: Kim on 10 February, 2021, 01:19:52 pm
Anyway, it seems some nefarious operative had 'disconnected us at the cab'
You know when you've been Kellyed. Lift'n'shifts are their speciality. There's a reason AAISP broadband-only lines play a recorded message telling the engineers not to steal the pair...
Post by: tiermat on 18 February, 2021, 07:26:56 am
The night before last we had a power cut (eeek!). Apart from having to go around and reset clocks on microwaves etc, the Mac mini that I use for backups didn't come back. Nor did the Drobo.
The Drobo I sort of fixed by connecting it to my MBP and running diags (still running now, it thinks one of the disks has failed)
To get the mini working again I pulled everything out of it then only plugged in network, video and power
No dice
Spent all day trying different things, all to no avail, it was still dead (the "power connected" led lights up, so the PSU should be good)
I look again this morning, checking all the connectors again and find the power switch above the power connector. I, obviously, previously had pushed the connector in then hit the power button with my chunky fingers. This time, maybe due to the location etc I hadn't, thus thinking it wasn't working.
I feel like a right idiot!
The good thing to come out of this is that I finally upgraded my fileshare box to Fedora 33 and fixed the Samba issues with that, then shared out an external drive to act as a Time Machine.
Post by: Kim on 19 February, 2021, 12:35:12 pm
An option to roll back to the previous known-good state wouldn't be a bad idea, either. I mean, it would be lovely to be able to click a button and wait 5 minutes, but I'd settle for *being able to download old versions from somewhere official*. It's a firewall, FFS, the last thing anyone needs is to be downloading install packages from shady Eastern European websites.
In the end, I decided to put the extra work in, did a fresh install of 2.5.0, proved that it wasn't fundamentally broken, and began the tedious process of iteratively restoring parts of my previous settings until I discovered what was causing the problem (unsurprisingly, the traffic shaper, for those playing along at home). This provided a much-needed opportunity to tidy up the interface order so the primary WAN wasn't on OPT5.
I'm sure I was planning to do something yesterday, too. Possibly involving watching NASA littering Mars with robots.
Minor grumble: apuled.ko doesn't work in the new BSD version, so the blinkenlights are no longer blinking.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 February, 2021, 06:11:03 pm
Thus sprach Nvidia. Click buttons to install. Put windows back where I want them. Start game wot was working fine earlier. Prod “Drive”. Game crashes. Swear. Try again. Game crashes. Swear. Perform “Clean Install”. Disable Nvidia's sound driver thing because it does not communicate with the noises card wot has the amp attached. To it. Start game. Prod “Drive”. Game crashes. Try again. Game crashes. Swear. Download previous version of driver. Uninstall sound driver bit. Try to uninstall USB-C bit. Reboot required. Swear. Reboot. Uninstall USB-C bit. Try to install previous driver. Reboot required. Swear. Reboot. Install previous driver. Start game. Prod “Drive”. Game crashes. Swear. Start game using different profile. Prod “Drive”. All works. Restart game with profile wot fell over, use various things to travel around the virtual world. Prod “Drive”. Drive right past place where game previously crashed. Park up and exit gracefully. Reinstall latest driver. Start game with crashy profile. Prod “Drive”. All OK. Swear.
That's ninety minutes of my life I won’t get back and if I knew who to blame I'd throw them onto the canal tied to Piers “Morgan” Moron, the colossal bellend.
Post by: Kim on 25 February, 2021, 06:21:53 pm
On the plus side, you didn't have to grope around for something with a serial port and release the magic smoke from the Psion 5's wall-wart[1] before realising that that lump under the fettling-desk where your knees are supposed to go is the BHPC's antique babbage-engine with all the 1990s connectors[1] you could wish for.
[1] The Psion was unharmed, thankfuly.
[2] Apart from an Ethernet port that's supported in Windows 10, obviously.
Post by: Morat on 02 March, 2021, 12:01:25 pm
But no. I've given my money to the great god SCAN (who shall not be misspelt) and received nothing in return these past five months. It's not their fault if the world has run out of silicon wafers, or is prioritising REAL fighter jets or baby scaring machines or whatever - but it has been somewhat frustrating during these hours and months of "Do Not Leave Your Domicile" which would have presented the perfect opportunity for pretending to be elsewhere, in VR, soaring above the clouds.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 March, 2021, 05:52:41 pm
(Reboots NAS, watches backup revert to “acceptably sprightly”)
Post by: Kim on 04 March, 2021, 07:31:57 pm
No, Babbage-Devices, taking ten minutes to copy 67 bytes of data across TowersNet is Simply Not On.
What was it doing, spelling them out in hex using a camera from 1996?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 March, 2021, 07:47:55 pm
No, Babbage-Devices, taking ten minutes to copy 67 bytes of data across TowersNet is Simply Not On.
What was it doing, spelling them out in hex using a camera from 1996?
Dunno, but it was doing it very v-e-r-y slowly. Mr Seagate's 5TB NAS is slower than a heavily-drugged slof at the best of times but this was just silly.
Post by: Kim on 17 March, 2021, 09:41:27 pm
(The 5GHz band is fine, but the signal doesn't propagate well enough to cover the whole house.)
Post by: Bledlow on 18 March, 2021, 10:57:25 am
O my band-o-broad hath forsaken me. Wherefore art thou BT? I doth lack optimism.Virgin did something like that to me once. After a week or so, by which time my phone's data allowance was running low despite careful management (I was plugging my PC into my phone for an internet connection for work) I got on telly talking about it to Tom Hepworth in front of my computer. ;D
ETA. An engineer has been dispatched. On horseback. From the darkest parts of Faraway. He may arrive within 48 hours. Or not. Now that's the sort of leap-to-it service I pay a premium price for.
BBC South told Virgin beforehand. I quite enjoyed being grovelled to by Virgin. Problems disappeared with remarkable speed. It also turned out that I qualified for a cheaper package, & for 18 months I got a a special discount as well.
Beeb said they were interested because of something I said, that internet access had become a public utility without which normal life was severely disrupted, e.g. my earnings were dependent on it. This was pre-COVID), btw.
In Virgin's case, there'd been a short-lived technical problem affecting various people in my area, exacerbated by misunderstanding between their help desk & engineers, which led them to confuse that fault with the different (but still on their equipment) technical problem affecting my internet connection. My problem would have disappeared within hours but for their administrative error.
The engineer who fixed my problem explained it.
Post by: Ham on 28 March, 2021, 09:55:31 pm
And. Breathe. Start again, from scratch. Try a jpg export, why, that works perfectly. Try a pdf export, stuffed again. What's that about?
I suffer for my art.
Post by: ian on 31 March, 2021, 06:46:39 pm
OK, register me.
Sure thing, ian, just input the captcha code, let's make sure you're not a robot.
DNTF5
That's wrong, ian.
But it's not.
It is. Let's try choosing a username
[ian inputs a user name]
That's already being used.
[tries another]
Nope
[inputs some string of random text]
Nope. Let's move on, let's try a password. Something simple. Eight letters or more.
[has computer input a strong password]
Your password needs to be eight characters or more, ian.
It's sixteen.
Does it include a number?
No, you didn't ask for a number.
I'm sure we did.
[adds a number]
That's fine, but your userID is taken.
[try another userID]
Your captcha code doesn't match. Why don't you tell me how many fire hydrants are in this picture?
[Scream and batter computer maniacally]
Terms and Conditions must be checked, ian.
Click. Click. Fuckity click.
Your userID is taken, ian. We've told you that. And you password is incorrect. And there's certainly more fire hydrants than that. You're not doing very well are you, ian.
Post by: Davef on 31 March, 2021, 09:10:32 pm
Post by: Kim on 31 March, 2021, 09:13:38 pm
"Prove you're not a robot or a member of the council highway's department by selecting all the photos of rideable cycling infrastructure".
Make it happen, webmonkeys.
Post by: matthew on 06 April, 2021, 10:57:52 am
Edit to update: Booted up, Logged in, longer delay than normal, initiated McAfee scan, nearly 4 hours later the scan is still going.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 April, 2021, 12:48:50 pm
I see you wish to install an iOS update on this 'ere fondleslab. Poking the buttons reveals the news that if I leave it plugged into a supply of voles and connected to a wifi network, the update will install itself automagically overnight.
It didn’t. Nor was your error message at all informative. I hate you. I have just installed it manually. Just works my arse.
kthxbai
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 April, 2021, 01:17:56 pm
Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Post by: Afasoas on 26 April, 2021, 03:00:31 pm
Self you are a stupid idiot. You know about Phishing risks so why did you follow a link purporting to be from Microsoft Office 365 without reading the URL very closely. Fortunately I got suspicious and closed the browser then checked the URL and saw it read "Micrasoft", unfortunately 10 minutes later my laptop showed a blue screen and rebooted. I haven't yet got the courage to log back in until I have spoken to my Work IT helpdesk.
Edit to update: Booted up, Logged in, longer delay than normal, initiated McAfee scan, nearly 4 hours later the scan is still going.
That BSOD could be the result of an attacker obtaining and then terminating a remote shell. I'd report it to your employer and let them deal with it as they see fit. We'd give you a freshly reinstalled laptop and send you on your way, whilst the old one is examined for signs of compromise and then nuked and paved ready for the next person.
Worse to ignore it.
Post by: grams on 02 May, 2021, 10:10:40 am
That's not the rant. The rant is that Internet Recovery downloads and install a fresh copy of Mac OS 10.10 from 2014! And upgrading to a newer version than 10.12 apparently requires a working internal drive to install "firmware", even though I'm booted from and installing on an external hard drive. All of the workarounds online assume access to a working Mac running the newer OS.
(also there's a new line of dickery online where the default response to anyone asking for help is to demand the asker produces an automated system spec report, even when all of the info is in the question. Grrrrr)
Post by: Asterix, the former Gaul. on 06 May, 2021, 03:58:39 am
Quote
Whether a customer or an employee, Amazon treats all people exactly the same: as objects to extract money, time, or labor from. There is a straight line from people peeing in bottles at work to Amazon limiting how you use the cameras you bought with your own money to Jeff Bezos being unimaginably rich in an age of extreme wealth inequality. This is who Amazon is.
It was a comment beneath this article:
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22381356/blink-homebridge-crackdown-amazon-subscriptions
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 May, 2021, 12:32:44 am
Post by: Bledlow on 10 May, 2021, 03:37:34 pm
Related, as I was just discussing the need for CAPTCHAs on the local cycle campaign website, I've just had a brilliant idea:This is one of those rare times when I regret the lack of a like button on this forum
"Prove you're not a robot or a member of the council highway's department by selecting all the photos of rideable cycling infrastructure".
Make it happen, webmonkeys.
Post by: hellymedic on 11 May, 2021, 06:06:45 pm
Why the fuck does your software default to the lowest resolution every time the camera is restarted?
This pricy camera was bought so D could produce good quality videos. They are now a patchwork of different resolutions.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 May, 2021, 06:16:49 pm
“This has nothing whatsoever to do with us” claimed a Logitech spokesdroid. “Have you tried the Gas Board?”
Post by: fd3 on 14 May, 2021, 06:17:05 pm
THIS WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED WITH LINUX!
Post by: Ashaman42 on 14 May, 2021, 07:09:12 pm
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 14 May, 2021, 07:38:18 pm
Post by: Kim on 17 May, 2021, 05:47:22 pm
I reckon there's a good chance that reconnecting the battery might resolve the problem. But I've looked up destructions for getting into the thing, and they're basically a recipe for destroying your fondleslab, starting with the screen.
Bastards.
Post by: Kim on 19 May, 2021, 01:49:24 pm
RTC was wrong, and the battery was at 0%. It's now charging at a more reasonable 850mA (it's old enough that 1A is the max rating).
Either the battery is shagged (it's a circa 2015 design, so on the cusp of batteries becoming decently reliable), or the power management has droid rot and it's gone the way of the Psion Revo.
Post by: matthew on 19 May, 2021, 03:28:22 pm
Self you are a stupid idiot. You know about Phishing risks so why did you follow a link purporting to be from Microsoft Office 365 without reading the URL very closely. Fortunately I got suspicious and closed the browser then checked the URL and saw it read "Micrasoft", unfortunately 10 minutes later my laptop showed a blue screen and rebooted. I haven't yet got the courage to log back in until I have spoken to my Work IT helpdesk.
Edit to update: Booted up, Logged in, longer delay than normal, initiated McAfee scan, nearly 4 hours later the scan is still going.
That BSOD could be the result of an attacker obtaining and then terminating a remote shell. I'd report it to your employer and let them deal with it as they see fit. We'd give you a freshly reinstalled laptop and send you on your way, whilst the old one is examined for signs of compromise and then nuked and paved ready for the next person.
Worse to ignore it.
Employer IT was contacted before I turned the laptop back on and we then ran a full virus and security scan before I connected to anything. Fortunately the security scan came back negative.
Post by: Kim on 20 May, 2021, 12:22:22 am
I just prodded the power button, after a day and a bit of it lying around doing abrickslab impression, and it booted up, all innocent like.
RTC was wrong, and the battery was at 0%. It's now charging at a more reasonable 850mA (it's old enough that 1A is the max rating).
Either the battery is shagged (it's a circa 2015 design, so on the cusp of batteries becoming decently reliable), or the power management has droid rot and it's gone the way of the Psion Revo.
Several hours later, and it's claiming 100% charge after sucking up a reasonable 6.6Ah of electrons. That adds weight to the droid rot theory.
Post by: T42 on 30 May, 2021, 10:26:04 am
What's wrong with these numbskulls?
Post by: philip on 30 May, 2021, 10:40:16 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 June, 2021, 10:59:57 pm
I don't know what that bucket of wank you installed this afternoon was, but a driver update it was not. Randomly changes 64.82% of the video settings, generates so many errors in $GAME'S log file that the usual 2000-odd lines had reached 175,000 before I managed to kill the process and reinstall the previous version.
Don't do it again, you paper-brained fuck-puppies.
Post by: SoreTween on 04 June, 2021, 10:14:05 am
Arghhh!
Post by: Beardy on 05 June, 2021, 08:54:22 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 June, 2021, 09:06:46 am
And another thing. Apps. On fondleslabs. Why do Apple still allow developers to produce Apps that only render properly on iPhones and render only IN PORTRATE on fondleslabs. They should do something about it. >:(
Oh yes. They may have changed since last I looked but BRITISH Airways and Horseybank plc were two egregious offenders. IIRC they imposed their own horrible titchy “keyboard” too, so you kept spilling thungs wring when typing with stubby peasant fingers.
Post by: pcolbeck on 10 June, 2021, 09:24:06 am
Post by: ian on 10 June, 2021, 11:34:04 am
I dunno who set up this system, but to change a word in the bloody help file, I have use stupid software made of poo, integrate it with a GIT repository, and then deploy the change via Jenkins.
FFS. Content management is like, a thing in 2021.
Post by: TheLurker on 10 June, 2021, 05:57:26 pm
Quote from: ian
So to update some help files....Could be worse ...
FFS. Content management is like, a thing in 2021.
(https://i.ibb.co/YyfKcvY/Psalms.jpg)
Punch, 1988
Post by: ian on 10 June, 2021, 07:18:37 pm
Post by: Feanor on 14 June, 2021, 11:56:59 am
Mini-rant 1:New PC comes pre-loaded with subscription Office 365.
You are steered down the road of setting up a Microsoft account, and a subscription.
I don't want this, I want to use a perpetually-licensed version of Office.
Trying to remove Office 365 is like trying to get rid of Japanese Knotweed infestation.
Even after 'removing' it and installing normal Office, on first start-up of Word, you are right back to the 'setting up a Microsoft account, and subscription' one-way corridor, with no side doors.
You really need to rip this bastard out by the roots, and the roots run deep.
There is, however, an Office Removal tool which is claimed to make a 'proper' clean job of the un-install.
Let's give that a go.
Mini-rant 2: Diagnostic tools like this should be stand-alone tools. I detest tools which are just a stub installer, and then require an Internet connection to perform the actual installation. Particularly diagnostic tools, which should not have stupid dependencies on Internet availability.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 14 June, 2021, 03:27:28 pm
I did gripe about it and someone helpfully pointed out that if I wanted a new help system I was the person to ask since implementing one would be my decision.
So whose fault is it that content is treated as a development?
This is actually something I find developers struggle with, the difference between data that makes other data mean something (lookup tables), data that sets up the system for the environment (config but thatvat least with only RDBMS available I can scream and shout that JBoss has a way of configuring environments that's ideal for this to deaf ears) and data produced during production.
Many a review contains the words "test data does not belong in a database migration, you don't want this going live" or "are you sure you want the live system to point at the test demographics Web service when we go live"
Sigh.
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: FifeingEejit on 14 June, 2021, 03:30:04 pm
2 related mini-rants today.SAAS is the future... Unfortunately.
Mini-rant 1:New PC comes pre-loaded with subscription Office 365.
You are steered down the road of setting up a Microsoft account, and a subscription.
I don't want this, I want to use a perpetually-licensed version of Office.
Trying to remove Office 365 is like trying to get rid of Japanese Knotweed infestation.
Even after 'removing' it and installing normal Office, on first start-up of Word, you are right back to the 'setting up a Microsoft account, and subscription' one-way corridor, with no side doors.
You really need to rip this bastard out by the roots, and the roots run deep.
There is, however, an Office Removal tool which is claimed to make a 'proper' clean job of the un-install.
Let's give that a go.
Mini-rant 2: Diagnostic tools like this should be stand-alone tools. I detest tools which are just a stub installer, and then require an Internet connection to perform the actual installation. Particularly diagnostic tools, which should not have stupid dependencies on Internet availability.
I'm fine with subscription Microsoft 365 1Tb one drive and decent tools for about the same cost as Googles shit.
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Post by: TimC on 14 June, 2021, 04:20:22 pm
Post by: FifeingEejit on 14 June, 2021, 05:07:07 pm
Also because we're all doing this testing the teams pings been going all day as various questions reformatted from the desired "what the fuck" are asked.
This sprints been beset with issues that can instantly be pointed back at the fact we have no fucking automation for this system and it needs to go in the fucking bin ASAP.
Thankfully we are also writing its replacement...
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Post by: Beardy on 14 June, 2021, 05:37:08 pm
Post by: Feanor on 14 June, 2021, 09:04:22 pm
I have a 'perpetual licence' version of Office Pro, and having installed it once and registered it to my Microsoft account, Windows recognises it and installs it (after prompting) on all my computers. Each major update of Windows asks if I want to go down the 365 route, but a simple 'no thanks' deals with that.
That's good.
But there are no Microsoft accounts in use here, just the on-site Domain accounts.
The removal tool did a decent enough job, but it was slow.
Then a fresh install of Office 2016 worked fine.
Post by: ian on 14 June, 2021, 09:54:54 pm
And stuff just starting. Teams fires up every time I start. There's no stopping it. It's relentless. It's a fucking virtual machine, why do I want Teams to start on it? No, I don't want to install Edge. Stop. No. I said stop. Shopping mode, what the fuck is shopping mode? Stop it.
Office 365. No, no, no... Link your Microsoft account... Do this? Do that? Surrender your immortal soul. Yes, anything, just stop, OK?
It's no wonder people just install any old shit, they're being trained to hammer OK OK OK OK OK OK OK OK.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 June, 2021, 10:09:14 pm
Post by: FifeingEejit on 14 June, 2021, 10:24:11 pm
Ah, system automation. One system I was primarily and then peripherally involved with for over 12 years never achieved automation or it’s key tasks. The number and diversity of other systems with with it was interconnected in order to perform its core tasks were just too flaky and the addition of not all those systems being under our control meant that automation just proved to challenging. Whether anyone has actually achieved automation since I left the business three years ago I sincerely doubt.Automated testing means writing code that can be automatically tested by a simple algorithm, so functions that basically say whe a + b return c
The code base is a ballal ache of shambolic spaghetti, so shove in a and b' and you'll get some variation between c and z, possibly including the Cyrillic, Greek and minoan alphabet.
There is also... Wait get some tissues... No not for THAT ..... A JS file that's over 4000 lines of code.
Unsurprizingly there's merge problems because everyone's fighting over it.
This has resulted in me uttering "remmeber when I showed you lot all the git merge memes aye well...." we recovered that fuck up that automated regression/unit test g would have caught easily assuming the dev ran it before merging from develop, by digging the branch out of the devs PC and going through the merge manually, oddly enough merges Pfarrern matching has problems with repeating blocks of jquery validstor for jqxwidgets because pattern wise they're all the fucking same and intellij merge tool shouted it in our faces.
I wish that file was a one off but there's plenty of files over 1000 lines in that system and most of them don't seem to get the problem... Possibly mecause im always ranting about it and they switch off when I rant.
Just as well I fucking love a good rant, more sensitive devs might run a mile probably from me right enough...
Still can't belive one of our "stops" in a retrospective was "stop using the concept success and failure" that was not from either a millennial or gen z... Oh no...
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Post by: SoreTween on 14 June, 2021, 10:34:03 pm
While we’re dissing Microsith, what the blue blazes is that weather forecast thing you've stuck in the notification area, Gates? I didn’t ask for it, don’t want it and had to hunt around for quite a long time before figuring out how to make it go away. If I want to know what the weather is doing in sunny E17 I'll look out of the fucking window.Thank you for confirming my suspicions regarding wierd shit afoot on a relatives box today. I suspected Microsith at work but with this relative I never rule out pebkac.
Post by: matthew on 17 June, 2021, 11:25:48 am
While we’re dissing Microsith, what the blue blazes is that weather forecast thing you've stuck in the notification area, Gates? I didn’t ask for it, don’t want it and had to hunt around for quite a long time before figuring out how to make it go away. If I want to know what the weather is doing in sunny E17 I'll look out of the fucking window.
Would you be so kind as to share this information, as it gets worse. I am sat on a corporate network in Berks, but it locates me at head office and gives the weather information for Rochester. :facepalm:
Post by: Pingu on 17 June, 2021, 11:51:07 am
While we’re dissing Microsith, what the blue blazes is that weather forecast thing you've stuck in the notification area, Gates? I didn’t ask for it, don’t want it and had to hunt around for quite a long time before figuring out how to make it go away. If I want to know what the weather is doing in sunny E17 I'll look out of the fucking window.
Would you be so kind as to share this information, as it gets worse. I am sat on a corporate network in Berks, but it locates me at head office and gives the weather information for Rochester. :facepalm:
Right-click on taskbar
News and interests
Turn off
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 June, 2021, 11:55:31 am
At least Microsith had my location right. Most webby SCIENCE tells me I am in Croydon. Not quite as bad as Farcebok thinking I was in York and wanting to buy a tractor, at almost exactly the same time as Zuckerberg was on live television explaining how THE ALGORITHM generates shitverts micro-tailored to a luser's every whim and fancy, but really. Croydon?
Post by: Jaded on 17 June, 2021, 12:04:18 pm
Post by: ian on 17 June, 2021, 12:05:58 pm
Post by: jsabine on 17 June, 2021, 12:14:17 pm
There are many parts of Croydon that could be improved with a tractor.
I think you misspelled bulldozer. Or possibly tactical nuclear device.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 June, 2021, 12:23:00 pm
Post by: ian on 17 June, 2021, 01:32:59 pm
Post by: Bledlow on 17 June, 2021, 01:33:46 pm
No obvious fault with the files (ppt & docx), & transferring between an external HDD & computer worked perfectly.
I presume some obscure fault somewhere. Never encountered it before.
Post by: spesh on 17 June, 2021, 01:41:27 pm
There are many parts of Croydon that could be improved with atractormeteorite impact.
Amended for accuracy.
Post by: ian on 17 June, 2021, 01:56:47 pm
There are many parts of Croydon that could be improved with atractormeteorite impact.
Amended for accuracy.
They were going to drop a Westfield on top of it (I'm not sure they planned to tell everyone first), but I presume that got kiboshed.
There are worse places in London (though probably not to cycle), but they're mostly called Tottenham. The borough of Croydon sprawls quite a ways though, from the grimmer northern badlands (where I used to live, ha) to the more genteel south where it eventually washes up into the jungles of Surrey.
You don't get better public transport fights than on the Croydon Tramlink, not even on night buses.
Post by: Feanor on 17 June, 2021, 02:51:53 pm
WTF should some files sent from Japan for me to check be impossible to copy to a USB stick? Out of 10, six or seven were fine, but I got an error message when trying to copy the others. Same on every USB stick in the house except Naomi's work one, which I didn't try.
No obvious fault with the files (ppt & docx), & transferring between an external HDD & computer worked perfectly.
I presume some obscure fault somewhere. Never encountered it before.
Memory sticks which are failing formatted as FAT32 with no unicode support for Japanese character set, versus some sticks and the external HDD being formatted NTFS which can do unicode filenames?
Or something like that.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 17 June, 2021, 02:56:01 pm
Ninja’d by Pingu…Go to Google maps, don't feed it any other info particularly a Google account as that knows where your phone is, it almost certainly tells you where your is has decided you are.
At least Microsith had my location right. Most webby SCIENCE tells me I am in Croydon. Not quite as bad as Farcebok thinking I was in York and wanting to buy a tractor, at almost exactly the same time as Zuckerberg was on live television explaining how THE ALGORITHM generates shitverts micro-tailored to a luser's every whim and fancy, but really. Croydon?
So on my work PC I'm normally in Glasgow where SWAN meets teh interntez
When we were on N3 iirc it was a usually Manchester.
My parents bt account used to have us in London but last time I looked it was Aiberdeen.
Nothing to do with microsith just IP addresses being shit for determining geographical location when it's the only option available.
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Post by: ian on 17 June, 2021, 02:56:16 pm
WTF should some files sent from Japan for me to check be impossible to copy to a USB stick? Out of 10, six or seven were fine, but I got an error message when trying to copy the others. Same on every USB stick in the house except Naomi's work one, which I didn't try.
No obvious fault with the files (ppt & docx), & transferring between an external HDD & computer worked perfectly.
I presume some obscure fault somewhere. Never encountered it before.
Memory sticks which are failing formatted as FAT32 with no unicode support for Japanese character set, versus some sticks and the external HDD being formatted NTFS which can do unicode filenames?
Or something like that.
Correct, it doesn't (and who knows whether the encodings are even Unicode, there's lots of weird when it comes to double-byte character sets).
Fond memories of dealing with this very problem on, erm, floppy disks. I am getting old.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 17 June, 2021, 02:57:09 pm
Never underestimate what a tractor can do, I mean have you seen what happens to fields when they go in there with a plough? And the road when they leave it?There are many parts of Croydon that could be improved with a tractor.
I think you misspelled bulldozer. Or possibly tactical nuclear device.
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Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 June, 2021, 06:03:27 pm
There are worse places in London (though probably not to cycle), but they're mostly called Tottenham.
Don’t forget Wood Green, the place that makes Edmonton look like Hawaii.
Post by: Jaded on 17 June, 2021, 06:43:36 pm
It sounded nice.
Post by: ian on 17 June, 2021, 07:35:22 pm
Anywhere with Green in the name is bad news. Edmonton Green. It's definitively not very green.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 June, 2021, 08:16:24 pm
Since our local Homebase closed the nearest branch is in Haringey. Whenever I go there, I always think it’ll be quicker to get home via Wood Green. It never is. Plus I have to keep the doors locked and the windows closed so the locals don’t drag me out of the car and barbecue me at the roadside. It's worse than St Louis.
Post by: Bledlow on 17 June, 2021, 08:33:50 pm
A problem with that theory. Yes, the USB sticks are FAT32 (all I've checked) & the external disk is NTFS, & yes, the first batch all had Japanese characters. But most of those with Japanese characters could be copied, read & edited on those sticks without trouble (same for hundreds of others I & Mrs B have copied to & from over the years), & one file of a second batch failed despite none of that batch containing any Japanese. Why would it only affect a few files, all from the same source?WTF should some files sent from Japan for me to check be impossible to copy to a USB stick? Out of 10, six or seven were fine, but I got an error message when trying to copy the others. Same on every USB stick in the house except Naomi's work one, which I didn't try.
No obvious fault with the files (ppt & docx), & transferring between an external HDD & computer worked perfectly.
I presume some obscure fault somewhere. Never encountered it before.
Memory sticks which are failing formatted as FAT32 with no unicode support for Japanese character set, versus some sticks and the external HDD being formatted NTFS which can do unicode filenames?
Or something like that.
Would a straight file copy care about the contents?
Post by: Feanor on 17 June, 2021, 09:01:08 pm
Even a character that appears to be a western character may actually be some unicode character under the hood.
Post by: philip on 17 June, 2021, 09:07:10 pm
Post by: perpetual dan on 17 June, 2021, 11:14:56 pm
Anywhere with Green in the name is bad news. Edmonton Green. It's definitively not very green.
Greenland is a barren land, a land that bears no green...
I spent a ludicrous amount of my day installing stuff. Most frustrating was the library that refused to be seen by pandas. Anything that’s gone from version 0.17 to 4.0 in a year has to be a bit suspect.
Two bear references in a reply to ian. I’m feeling quite pleased with myself now.
Post by: Bledlow on 17 June, 2021, 11:47:24 pm
FAT32 has a couple of limitations: 1) the file size has to be less than 4GB and 2) the length of the filename, and the length of the names of any folders, has to be less than 255 characters.Yes, but none of them affect these files.
It was irritating & puzzling.
Post by: Afasoas on 18 June, 2021, 10:47:12 pm
2 related mini-rants today.
Mini-rant 1:New PC comes pre-loaded with subscription Office 365.
You are steered down the road of setting up a Microsoft account, and a subscription.
I don't want this, I want to use a perpetually-licensed version of Office.
Trying to remove Office 365 is like trying to get rid of Japanese Knotweed infestation.
Even after 'removing' it and installing normal Office, on first start-up of Word, you are right back to the 'setting up a Microsoft account, and subscription' one-way corridor, with no side doors.
You really need to rip this bastard out by the roots, and the roots run deep.
There is, however, an Office Removal tool which is claimed to make a 'proper' clean job of the un-install.
Let's give that a go.
In PowerShell:
Code: [Select]
Get-AppxPackage
Remove-AppxPackage -Package "MicrosoftOrrificeBlahBlah1_1.0.0.0_neutral__8weblahky"
Should work.
Post by: Bledlow on 19 June, 2021, 12:33:23 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 June, 2021, 06:14:28 pm
Now stop it.
Post by: Lightning Phil on 19 June, 2021, 06:47:12 pm
And stuff just starting. Teams fires up every time I start. There's no stopping it. It's relentless. It's a fucking virtual machine, why do I want Teams to start on it? No, I don't want to install Edge. Stop. No. I said stop. Shopping mode, what the fuck is shopping mode? Stop it.
It’s a bit like that sub version of Skype that recently turned up in W10 and is in startup and can’t be stopped. If it did any checks it’d realise my PC has no webcam and no microphone. So fuck off with the video conferencing software starting up every bloody time.
Post by: Kim on 19 June, 2021, 07:17:22 pm
It’s a bit like that sub version of Skype that recently turned up in W10 and is in startup and can’t be stopped. If it did any checks it’d realise my PC has no webcam and no microphone. So fuck off with the video conferencing software starting up every bloody time.
Does Skype still do that evil peer-to-peer thing where it turns your computer (and copious amounts of network bandwidth) into a node to route other people's phone calls? That would explain this behaviour...
Post by: Feanor on 19 June, 2021, 07:31:06 pm
It’s a bit like that sub version of Skype that recently turned up in W10 and is in startup and can’t be stopped. If it did any checks it’d realise my PC has no webcam and no microphone. So fuck off with the video conferencing software starting up every bloody time.
Does Skype still do that evil peer-to-peer thing where it turns your computer (and copious amounts of network bandwidth) into a node to route other people's phone calls? That would explain this behaviour...
Supernodes.
No, when MS bought Skype they changed all that and used their own servers as supernodes.
Post by: Kim on 19 June, 2021, 07:34:21 pm
It’s a bit like that sub version of Skype that recently turned up in W10 and is in startup and can’t be stopped. If it did any checks it’d realise my PC has no webcam and no microphone. So fuck off with the video conferencing software starting up every bloody time.
Does Skype still do that evil peer-to-peer thing where it turns your computer (and copious amounts of network bandwidth) into a node to route other people's phone calls? That would explain this behaviour...
Supernodes.
No, when MS bought Skype they changed all that and used their own servers as supernodes.
I suppose that counts as an improvement. Probably necessary if they ever wanted to make inroads onto corporate networks.
(I never really saw the point in Skype. Its main feature always seemed to be that it was the VOIP thing people had heard of, rather than being actualy good at anything.)
Post by: Bledlow on 21 June, 2021, 11:37:26 am
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 21 June, 2021, 02:10:04 pm
I replied with a strongly worded email comparing the file to the work of a GCSE level intern!
Post by: grams on 26 June, 2021, 04:18:35 pm
Post by: Kim on 28 June, 2021, 10:40:29 pm
The email looks genuine, in as much as it's outsourced to mailjet.com. No phishy links, and it's got the last three digits of my account number[2]. I'm suspicious they're coming via a data centre in north west USAnia, and the filesystem's gone read-only due to the disk array being on fire.
[1] 'Dull' being the optimal state for bank statments.
[2] Interestingly, this is a joint account with barakta OTP, who isn't getting any notifications.
Post by: neilrj on 29 June, 2021, 12:22:59 am
[2] Interestingly, this is a joint account with barakta OTP, who isn't getting any notifications.[/sub]
I get notifications (from HSBC) if I don't used my online credentials to check our joint account, we studiously ignore several reminders and this ends up spawning a paper statement, and as 'recent bank statement' still seems to satisfy ID requirements in many places we let them send one, then toggle account back to paperless, rinse and repeat.
Post by: TimC on 29 June, 2021, 12:06:58 pm
Post by: nuttycyclist on 29 June, 2021, 12:17:12 pm
Post by: Jaded on 29 June, 2021, 12:49:52 pm
Aargh. Trying to upgrade the office computer from 16Gb RAM to 31Gb. Crucial sticks (2x16) delivered, installed - nothing.
2x16 = 32
;D ;D
Thnxbai
Post by: Kim on 29 June, 2021, 12:52:30 pm
Unrelated rant: The VDSL modem became mysteriously wedged at 9:13 this morning (blinkenlights were good, but it wasn't PPPOEing, and the web GUI / SNMP were unresponsive). Barakta didn't notice, and proceeded to attempt an $ork video call at the same time as $other_ork laptop was doing Windows updates, over the fallback cellular connection. The result is best described as 'hearing people's rubbish internet (https://www.bslzone.co.uk/watch/two-deaf-yorkshiremen-in-lockdown)'.
I cycled power, and all is well. Hopefully that was a random act of our-favourite-telco or something, rather than the hardware failing.
Post by: TimC on 29 June, 2021, 01:38:39 pm
Aargh. Trying to upgrade the office computer from 16Gb RAM to 31Gb. Crucial sticks (2x16) delivered, installed - nothing.
2x16 = 32
;D ;D
Thnxbai
Ah - that's the issue! ;D
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 July, 2021, 06:00:23 pm
Fckles!
Edit: It came back after another restart but I don’t think it’s happy. Backing it up again right now just to be on the safe side.
Edit 2: Just ordered a replacement just in case it continues to engage in tomfoolery. Bah!
Edit 3: It’s being delivered by fucking Yodel. Arsebiscuits!
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 06 July, 2021, 10:10:50 pm
Every time I login at work I have to move the cursor 3-4 times in order to get to the correct places.
Post by: barakta on 07 July, 2021, 01:51:53 pm
Post by: FifeingEejit on 07 July, 2021, 01:57:07 pm
Why is it that so much software opens a new window to put in a password or some other data BUT does not put the cursor focus in the box.Dunnoh, we seem to have got round that by forcing every supplier to have to work with imprivata, meaning either you never see the login screen or it dumping your username and password into the wrong window if it doesn't focus like that and thus rejected accreditation.
Every time I login at work I have to move the cursor 3-4 times in order to get to the correct places.
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: ian on 07 July, 2021, 03:45:50 pm
What did IT do the moment he left the building?
That's it, delete it all.
Morons.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 07 July, 2021, 04:01:07 pm
While(employed) {}
Free(employee)
Accounts get destroyed pretty sharp for us, need to make sure shared stuff isn't within the departing account...
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: ian on 07 July, 2021, 04:12:56 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 07 July, 2021, 06:44:40 pm
Malloc(employee)Ah well, there's your solution. Get them to use .Net. Garbage collection *will* be run. Eventually. :)
While(employed) {}
Free(employee)
Accounts get destroyed pretty sharp for us, need to make sure shared stuff isn't within the departing account...
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: ian on 07 July, 2021, 08:14:12 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 07 July, 2021, 10:32:28 pm
Post by: grams on 09 July, 2021, 09:07:35 am
The nerds that make phone apps need to enforce it taking 40 minutes of wibbling panic before initiating any sort of phone call like it did in my day rather than perpetually being a single touch away from making someone else's phone ring.
Just did this again FFS. Basically:
- If you post an Instagram/FB story (first mistake)
- And someone likes or comments on it
- That like shows up as an instant message conversation with them
- The only way to clear the red dot for which is to go into the conversation
- The UI for which has a one touch "force a stranger to stop what they're doing and have a nightmarish awkward video call with you" button in the top corner. Exactly where you're likely to brush it when you put your phone away
FFFS
Post by: TheLurker on 09 July, 2021, 11:21:40 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 July, 2021, 06:02:53 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 July, 2021, 11:17:24 am
Hello? It's an SSD. It does disky Stuffs, quietly. It has no blinkenlights. It does not sing, nor dance, nor does it make the tea, raise and lower Tower Bridge or cross the Stormy North Atlantic by steam power. It's a fucking storage device. If it didn’t work you’d already know about it. It does work. Ask me again in six months time :facepalm:
Post by: Kim on 19 July, 2021, 03:23:46 pm
I was stupid enough to crack the screen by poking at it before backing up contacts and things. Screen's now too fucked to unlock it and mount the filesystem over USB or enable the debugger or anything useful. Div.
I've ripped the battery out for explosion containment reasons. The rest can go in a drawer as spare parts (see below).
Barakta's phone (also Moto G7, about 7 months newer) seems fine.
Post by: Feanor on 20 July, 2021, 08:19:26 pm
When I drop a pin at a location, then generate a link to share this, the link sometimes (randomly!) does not come back to the same place!
I am working on a local project to locate some historical artifacts.
I am providing GPS locations, and various other information, including an OS Maps link.
Bing maps provides an OS maps layer, so I'm using them.
Here's an example of the issue I face ( and it may not reproduce for everyone, it's quite an inconsistent issue ).
Lat/Long extracted from GPS waypoint:
57.138532111421227 -2.094846814870834
(Yes, yes I know that's a sub-atomic precision. Bear with me.)
Go to the Bing maps website: https://www.bing.com/maps/
Switch to OS maps.
Copy-paste the above lat/long into the search box, and hit enter.
You should get a pin dropped on the banks of the river Dee, in Aberdeen.
A pane opens on the left, describing the location.
Fine.
At the top of the Bing page, click More [...], and click the 'Share' option.
On the pane that pops up, there is a link generated, with a 'Copy' button.
Click 'Copy' to copy this to the clipboard.
In my case, I get this link:
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=3897a31c-e6c7-4a89-9262-eb305e5738c2&cp=57.138897~-2.100168&lvl=16&style=s&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027
Now, try to use this link.
Open a new tab in the browser, and paste the link into the navigation bar.
It opens the map to the correct area, but there's no pin.
The information pane on the left describes a random location, ranging from Germany to the US.
By altering the number of decimal places in the lat/long I can get it to work, but it's very inconsistent. Removing 5 or 6 spurious places generally works, but sometimes removing 6 fails, and removing 5 works.
Really a pile of poo.
YOU made the link, YOU should honour it.
Post by: Pingu on 20 July, 2021, 08:42:06 pm
Yep - a pile of poo.
Post by: woollypigs on 20 July, 2021, 08:57:03 pm
Looking like this, is that correct or wrong?
(https://i.imgur.com/vYYGefa.png)
Post by: Feanor on 20 July, 2021, 09:28:31 pm
Perhaps it's an issue where the link was created on the same PC where you then try to view the link.
Perhaps some cookie the website dropped during the link creation fucks up subsequent viewing of the link.
ETA: Yes, it does appear to be cookie-related.
If I click on the link I posted, I get a London-based location.
If I clear cookies for bing.com, I get the correct location.
Ah, no. It's fucked again.
The link I posted above now goes to Bloomberg in the US.
731 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10022
And after closing/reopening chrome, it's correct.
Basically, where the link lands you is totally random based on something I don't know.
Post by: Kim on 21 July, 2021, 05:53:14 pm
My phone (Moto G7) got battery bulge. Possibly due to exposure to that nuclear sky ball thing that we have now.
I was stupid enough to crack the screen by poking at it before backing up contacts and things. Screen's now too fucked to unlock it and mount the filesystem over USB or enable the debugger or anything useful. Div.
New phone obtained. Moto G50. Major differences, apart for the obligatory annoying Android UI redesign, include about a centimetre of height inflation, a physical
It *might* be able to stay connected to a wireless LAN with IPv6 RAs on it, but it's a bit early to tell. Hasn't randomly disconnected yet anyway.
Managed to recover a reasonable amount of my config from previous backups, at least. And worked out how to stop Google Maps from crashing on startup...
Post by: Bledlow on 21 July, 2021, 06:29:53 pm
New phone obtained. Moto G50. Major differences, apart for the obligatory annoying Android UI redesign, include about a centimetre of height inflation, a physicalThat sounds very inconvenient.calculatorgoogle assistant button that doesn't appear to be re-mappable to something useful, and that the second SIM slot shares physical space with the SD card slot, so you can only use one or the other.
Post by: andrew_s on 21 July, 2021, 08:56:29 pm
That's correct.I got "7 Old Ford Road", with a marker, pasting the link into Edge
Perhaps it's an issue where the link was created on the same PC where you then try to view the link.
Perhaps some cookie the website dropped during the link creation fucks up subsequent viewing of the link.
ETA: Yes, it does appear to be cookie-related.
If I click on the link I posted, I get a London-based location.
If I clear cookies for bing.com, I get the correct location.
Ah, no. It's fucked again.
The link I posted above now goes to Bloomberg in the US.
731 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10022
And after closing/reopening chrome, it's correct.
Basically, where the link lands you is totally random based on something I don't know.
Bloomberg LP at 731 Lexington Ave (aberdeen map, no marker) pasting into Chrome
Sussex County Cricket Club (aberdeen map, no marker) pasting into IE
Post by: Feanor on 21 July, 2021, 09:42:54 pm
That's correct.I got "7 Old Ford Road", with a marker, pasting the link into Edge
Perhaps it's an issue where the link was created on the same PC where you then try to view the link.
Perhaps some cookie the website dropped during the link creation fucks up subsequent viewing of the link.
ETA: Yes, it does appear to be cookie-related.
If I click on the link I posted, I get a London-based location.
If I clear cookies for bing.com, I get the correct location.
Ah, no. It's fucked again.
The link I posted above now goes to Bloomberg in the US.
731 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10022
And after closing/reopening chrome, it's correct.
Basically, where the link lands you is totally random based on something I don't know.
Bloomberg LP at 731 Lexington Ave (aberdeen map, no marker) pasting into Chrome
Sussex County Cricket Club (aberdeen map, no marker) pasting into IE
Yep.
What a load of poo.
I'm going to re-do the web links to google maps sat view, and tell people if they want OS maps to paste the lat/long into bing.
The bing links don't persist correctly.
Post by: woollypigs on 21 July, 2021, 10:14:08 pm
Post by: Feanor on 21 July, 2021, 10:19:04 pm
When I do projects like that, sharing point on maps with a wee note attached. I have had great success with https://umap.openstreetmap.fr
Does it have a UK OS Maps layer?
If not, then I'm going to ditch online OS mapping, and simply provide the OS Grid references.
If the users want to see the pins on an OS map, they can copy-paste the lat/long into bing maps themselves.
That works, even if their sharing links don't.
I'll re-work my stuff to provide google sat view links, which is probably more useful anyway.
Post by: Pingu on 21 July, 2021, 10:37:45 pm
Post by: Kim on 21 July, 2021, 10:49:30 pm
Moto G50.
[...]
It *might* be able to stay connected to a wireless LAN with IPv6 RAs on it, but it's a bit early to tell. Hasn't randomly disconnected yet anyway.
Seems promising. Not only does it seem to not randomly disconnect, but it seems to be able to roam between APs without closing sockets. Finally a Moto G with WiFi that isn't broken?
Post by: Feanor on 21 July, 2021, 10:50:59 pm
If you've got grid references then you can link to maps on streetmap.co.uk, e.g. https://www.streetmap.co.uk/map/idld.srf?X=395058&Y=809213&A=Y&Z=115&lm=1
That produced an OS map, centered on the BoD, but with no pin on it.
Anyways, the purpose of this survey is to produce high-resolution GPS co-ords, the OS refs were a secondary output for those that like to work with paper maps.
I am still providing them, just in text form, not on a pretty online OS map.
My online linking is now to google sat view, which is actually more useful for most people who might be looking for these artefacts.
Post by: ian on 22 July, 2021, 09:50:28 am
Fucking IT and it's 'your computer will restart in 5 minutes' – was it that vital the security update ran right now? Again, it's like they know, and trigger these things at the most inopportune moment.
And because they're watching me, it's still saying 13 minutes, two minutes later.
Post by: ian on 22 July, 2021, 05:58:00 pm
Post by: matthew on 23 July, 2021, 09:51:02 am
So I have an old Epson flat bed A4 scanner, still in good working order even if it is probably 20+ years old. It is a SCSI 1 device on a 50 pin centronics connector. Last year I upgraded my desktop PC new motherboard CPU etc. with the intention that I would transfer my old PCI SCSI card across. Here's the Divvery: new motherboard only has PCI Express slots so old SCSI card can't be transferred to the new build. :facepalm:
I finally have gotten around to purchasing a second hand PCI express SCSI card for all of £35, great thinks I, I'll have the scanner working again ready for when I might need to use the expenses system again.
Second Divvery: Only now the new card has a VHDCI connector and the old one was a micro DB50. :facepalm: My old cable won't fit.
And here is the rant. How in the name of all that's Holy can the replacement cable VHDCI - Centronics cost me £40 and more than the card itself? :o
Post by: ian on 23 July, 2021, 10:32:52 am
Our expenses system, like most others these days, supports photographs of a receipt, the app even sorts them out and creates the expense.
Post by: grams on 23 July, 2021, 10:57:52 am
I think you could have bought an entirely new (and better) scanner for less than you're spending on a cable...
Buy? Round here you can’t leave the house without tripping over an abandoned scanner/inkjet printer thingy.
Post by: ian on 23 July, 2021, 10:59:29 am
Post by: matthew on 23 July, 2021, 11:27:15 am
Post by: nuttycyclist on 26 July, 2021, 10:33:45 pm
I have today received an email from $BANK, which paraphrased said "either enable HTML or click this link to read this". I have my client set to text only on purpose to prevent spam links and tracking etc. On reading the 659 lines of HTML code, apparently I will be receiving a new card and all information I need to know will be in the letter it is glued to. The majority of that code was simply to cope with different formatting between different operating systems (and versions thereof) page layout, font decoration, and images for tracking porpoises.
Why oh why oh why couldn't I have had just a single sentence "we're sending you a new card so please read the letter it is glued to"?
The children's school are just as bad, the final full-stop in every email is actually a picture, from the web, with a unique URL so that they know who opens and reads the email. Naturally that domain is blocked on my router so that Mrs Nutty still can read the email on her fondleslab without realising the tracking is removed (<--note lack of full stop.) The school once sent an email asking if communications were being received as a previous email had only been opened by 10% of the audience.
And worst of all is one place I have to book appointments with, whose email comes through in what looks like Office365 markup. I haven't found a way to read it other than via a text editor. Pages of <> <> and other code, just to say "your appointment is booked on xx/yy/zz @ hh:mm with reference qwertyuiop".
I appreciate that data tracking is important to companies, but why on earth are we flooding the internet with pretty formatting and pictures and tracking just for a simple short few lines communication? Especially when so many spam emails come out looking authentic (I've had them in the past purporting to be from reputable companies) but the link behind the pretty fondleslab picture is the dodgy one.
Post by: Kim on 27 July, 2021, 01:23:36 am
I appreciate that data tracking is important to companies, but why on earth are we flooding the internet with pretty formatting and pictures and tracking just for a simple short few lines communication?
Microsoft.
(Remember the good old days when they were the Evil Empire?)
Post by: ian on 27 July, 2021, 09:07:38 pm
Replies at the top still make me angry though. I'm taking that to the grave.
Post by: Jaded on 27 July, 2021, 09:29:33 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 August, 2021, 11:52:19 am
Yes, exactly like that.
The wossname for creating a system restore point has been under “Control Panel… System” since Bloody Stupid Johnson was only an promising amateur liar but all of a sudden clicking that fires you off at right angles to reality and into the demonic ouroboros of Settings, where the option to create a system restore point now isn’t. No, you have to fanny about typing shit into search boxes because Microsith are twats who think their customers have the attention span of the goldfish of urban legend and the memory of a ZX-80.
See also rants passim about the horble Fisher-Price interface in Orifice.
Post by: matthew on 01 August, 2021, 07:43:59 pm
There is a bios update available so I downloaded and flashed the bios. Which bricked the motherboard.
I will be calling the manufacturer tomorrow and see what they say.
Post by: matthew on 06 August, 2021, 10:23:02 pm
I am now at the mercy of waiting on the MSI tech support to respond to my ticket.
Post by: barakta on 07 August, 2021, 05:21:11 pm
Old laptop: "I can't login, I have no internetz *FLOUNCE*"
Me: "Eh? I Just Want to Login, not go online..."
Old laptop: "NOPE! I Require Internetz before I'll login"
Me: "FFS. Notices barely visible network settings option which has almost no contrast from theme colour... Feeds it house wifi deets... *tries to login again*.
Old laptop: "I'll login, but you now have to create a pin"
Me: "I don't want to create a pin, I am logged in, I want to copy files and ditch you... Just Let Me In..."
Old laptop: "NOPE! MAKE PIN NAO!"
Me: "FFS. *makes a random pin"
Old laptop: "NOPE THAT PIN ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH!"
Me: "????!!!" *Clicks on letters and numbers* *tries alphanumeric pin*
Old laptop: "NOPE!" "I'm now going to ignore lots of keypresses at random!"
Me: "FFS FFS FFS JUST LET ME IN!" *turns off letters and numbers* *clicks 'what are password requirements?' button* *is none the wiser* *tries 6 digit number*
Old laptop: "That'll do, I suppose...."
New laptop is pants. It has a "Pentium GOLD!" CPU, which is worse than even an i3 but *sounds* impressive I'm sure. I fear what colleague paid for this laptop... It's barely faster than the 6 year old one...
New laptop mostly only pissed me off half-choking on an update and needing several kicks to make it reboot and recheck and reboot and recheck... And telling Cortina to fuck off a billionty times.
That and I can't install Microshite Office cos it needs ex-colleague's work login AND multifactor auth verification even to just download the fucking thing. So will have to do that with her present.
Post by: Kim on 07 August, 2021, 05:26:36 pm
Post by: barakta on 07 August, 2021, 10:12:13 pm
You do hardware. I do "Fucksake, have to Google how to make Windows work" jobs.
Post by: SoreTween on 08 August, 2021, 01:31:00 pm
Post by: barakta on 08 August, 2021, 03:50:25 pm
Kim is rarely stupid enough to agree to wrangle Windows for people. They assume she knows more than me cos of her computing degree, whereas I've had more general exposure to Windows as an OS... Hence the reduced efforts to "work it out" and "just Google it, it's quicker".
I honestly find Windows increasingly unintuitive. Win XP was consistent and had logical menus. Win 10 hides everything in search and 3 dotses buried umpty levels deep, or you kinda have to go to X settings and then find Y settings from within that. Very Annoying!
Post by: nuttycyclist on 08 August, 2021, 03:51:59 pm
Post by: barakta on 08 August, 2021, 06:18:28 pm
I still do better than the average Luser though. Cycnism and Google are my friend.
Post by: Kim on 08 August, 2021, 09:51:08 pm
Post by: Zipperhead on 08 August, 2021, 09:57:26 pm
But I share Barakta's frustration with getting windows 10 going, I needed to get a new laptop on the wifi, printer/scanner drivers installed and updated - so that on Monday her work IT people can blast it with whatever directory services and other stuff it needs (and it's only a temporary one for the next month).
Microsoft, I just want to get this machine running, I do not want it to be my new best friend, I do not want to have to type in my life history and a bazillion email addresses and passwords just to be able to put it on the fucking wifi.
Post by: Kim on 08 August, 2021, 10:06:42 pm
I start by creating a god mode folder, that helps remind it which way the relationship should be.
*googles*
*tries it*
Woah!
Post by: barakta on 08 August, 2021, 10:18:20 pm
Duly installed on my own win 10 install.
I hadn't remembered printers, must ask ex-colleague what printer she has. I'm thinking of meeting her on campus so we get all the WiFis (local and Eduroam) sorted too.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 August, 2021, 10:33:59 pm
I start by creating a god mode folder, that helps remind it which way the relationship should be.
But I share Barakta's frustration with getting windows 10 going, I needed to get a new laptop on the wifi, printer/scanner drivers installed and updated - so that on Monday her work IT people can blast it with whatever directory services and other stuff it needs (and it's only a temporary one for the next month).
Microsoft, I just want to get this machine running, I do not want it to be my new best friend, I do not want to have to type in my life history and a bazillion email addresses and passwords just to be able to put it on the fucking wifi.
Oh, I say! That looks rather useful. But whether there’s an option buried in there that’ll allow me to install the update that has been consistently defeating Windows* for about nine fucking months…
Sooner or later I fear I'm going to have to bite the wossname, nuke from orbit and reinstall, which will probably require about a week of fannying around to get everything back the way it's supposed to be.
* Page fault in non-paged area. All suggested fixes found thus far on teh Intertubez have not fixed it.
Post by: Pingu on 08 August, 2021, 10:37:58 pm
Post by: nuttycyclist on 08 August, 2021, 10:49:29 pm
My work win10 laptop is $IT_Owned as well. I do have admin rights due to a technicality loophole in job needs. I may investigate this feature.
Fortunately personal kit hasn't been infected with Win10.
Post by: Clare on 09 August, 2021, 11:17:25 am
Hello Clare, what happened to your old one?
It fell from a height.
Into a bucket of petrol.
Which ignited.
So I stamped the fire out with a 2 tonne press.
Post by: woollypigs on 09 August, 2021, 02:14:37 pm
Post by: TimC on 09 August, 2021, 10:38:57 pm
Post by: Jaded on 09 August, 2021, 11:01:02 pm
Dear IS, I need a new laptop.
Hello Clare, what happened to your old one?
It fell from a height.
Into a bucket of petrol.
Which ignited.
So I stamped the fire out with a 2 tonne press.
I have read this a several of times, and loved it more every time. ;D
Post by: matthew on 10 August, 2021, 12:13:38 pm
Quote
Did you check this card on other X570 motherboard before? From your description, it seems to be a compatibility issue, we have checked this device, we are sorry, we have no this card can be tested. And AM4 motherboard cannot support some old PCIe devices now, some older graphics cards and PCIe devices may nt be recognized, we have reflected to AMD before, but AMD did not provide any solutions.
Over looking the appalling English, as given the times of the responses they are not a native english speaker, it appears they are saying the motherboard chipset is not fully supporting back compatibility of the PCIe generations and devices. I thought that was part of the PCIe spec and concept, anything that actually fits the slots should be supported. As if I have access to another PC with an X570 chipset to test the card in to see if it is MSI's implementation or AMDs chipset that is failing to provide back support. ::-)
Post by: barakta on 10 August, 2021, 06:31:58 pm
Hideous and inaccessible piece of shit.
I would like to do an online e-learning thing for work without having to take screenshots and write not-too-bitchy accessibility feedback each and every time...
The element inspector and ability to delete some elements was the only way I got through even part of the course cos there was a bouncing fucking arrow in the 1/3 way down the screen on a banner which COVERED THE CONTENT pointlessly.
Post by: Clare on 10 August, 2021, 07:12:16 pm
Well that's my new thing learned today.
Post by: barakta on 10 August, 2021, 08:57:20 pm
Sadly BlackBoard is also horrific. At Leeds ~2016 it looked like something from 1997.
Canvas which my former employer procured (dodgily) has its faults but turns out to be one of the least-worst of the options... And to be fair a lot of the accessfails did get blatted out of it...
Why o Why can't someone design a VLE that is NOT SHIT!
Post by: hellymedic on 11 August, 2021, 01:56:41 pm
The blog was on Linked In.
Linked In required me to update my browser.
Apple required an OS update to update Safari.
Downloading Big Sur took HOW LONG?
Installing Big Sur took HOW LONG?
I became a progress bar zombie.
It took me over two hours just to read a blog, consisting only of formatted text.
Blogs on Linked In are the fucking pits!
Post by: Jaded on 11 August, 2021, 04:25:42 pm
Post by: Kim on 11 August, 2021, 05:31:48 pm
Post by: hellymedic on 11 August, 2021, 08:43:54 pm
Linked-in is the pits.
Agreed but this was an important medical blog I really wanted to see and could not access otherwise.
Post by: ian on 11 August, 2021, 09:46:24 pm
It still makes marginally more sense the Pinterest, in that a way of presenting sanitised profiles to prospective employers is at least marginally useful, whereas something whose only discernible function is to pollute search engine results is completely inexplicable.
It was useful for me. Do you have a CV? Rummages, finds one from 2004. No, look on LinkedIn.
Other than that, it's a bit of a UX mess, beyond the profiles, god knows what it's supposed to do.
Post by: Jaded on 11 August, 2021, 11:09:46 pm
I go to look and see I am celebrating a work anniversary for a company they left 7 years ago.
Post by: ian on 12 August, 2021, 10:43:39 am
Other than that, it seems a mess of blog-type posts, I guess simply hosting and linking profiles wasn't enough, they wanted more zing. It's not zingy enough for me.
Post by: Pingu on 14 August, 2021, 12:36:12 am
Quote from: A Retailer
Hello Mrs Pingu,
We'd love to hear what you think of our customer service. Please take a moment to answer one simple question below:
How would you rate the support you received?
Good, I'm satisfied
Bad, I'm unsatisfied
Here's a reminder of what your ticket was about:
That was it. The retailer thinks the ticket was about nothing. How should this 'support' be rated I wonder?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 August, 2021, 12:38:11 am
Post by: Pingu on 14 August, 2021, 12:40:10 am
Post by: Kim on 14 August, 2021, 12:41:38 am
How should this 'support' be rated I wonder?
Null stars.
Post by: Pingu on 14 August, 2021, 12:55:29 am
How should this 'support' be rated I wonder?
Null stars.
Not one of the options, but I did say 'should'.
Post by: SoreTween on 15 August, 2021, 10:41:58 am
Code: [Select]
<Win>+r
cmd<enter>
cd Desk<tab><enter>
move file162<tab> C:\temp\here<enter>
exit<enter>
I am not a fast typist. Ok I'm not a slow typist either but really, I'm nowhere near software engineer fast. The latter takes about 15 seconds of which 99.999% is me, the file move is instantaneous (on a human scale). Drag and drop takes about 20 seconds. For Fuck Sake microshit how? How can you make a simple file movement take so long? Stop wasting time drawing a progress dialog, calculating the remaining time, animating the progress etc and just fucking do it!(Core i5 a couple of years old and SSD. The file was 122Kb)
Post by: Pickled Onion on 22 August, 2021, 06:54:40 pm
My new washing machine* supposedly connects to the *internal* WiFi so that it can tell me it’s done if I’m out of range of the annoying beeping. Such as in the garden. Well it’s just done exactly that but I’m on a mountain in Romania and my washing machine definitely isn’t. Ignoring the fact that such behaviour is inherently useless,
(a) How did it do that? Is it phoning home for every action?
(b) How do I tell it to get the fuck off the internet before someone hacks in and sets my house on fire for a laugh?
* Miele, as recommended by denizens OTP. Don’t get me started on the clunkiness of the setup or the app that was written by a five year old and has bugs that make it virtually useless. For eg your washing will be ready in <object=“fix” text=“{0}”> minutes
Post by: Kim on 22 August, 2021, 07:08:45 pm
(a) How did it do that? Is it phoning home for every action?
Sounds like it. Locating and communicating with other devices on a random LAN is a relatively hard problem, and may be impossible if are multiple TCP/IP subnets or WiFi client isolation. Much easier to make something that works (for now) by phoning home.
Quote
(b) How do I tell it to get the fuck off the internet before someone hacks in and sets my house on fire for a laugh?
Separate VLAN for internet-of-shit devices with no routing to the internet. It's the only way to be sure.
Post by: grams on 22 August, 2021, 07:39:10 pm
The other thing is the Apple and Android notification systems are centralised. Most* "app" notifications you see on your phone are being put there not by the app running on your phone but by the app owner's server sending them to Apple or Google which forwards them to your phone. Your phone has a connection open to its maker 24/7 which means it can always receive them.
(* on Apple at least where the "local notification" system is flakey and weird and barely used. Android I think is more variable)
Post by: Clare on 23 August, 2021, 09:17:05 am
Quote
Dear Clare
Yes that is fine, I will order a new laptop for you. The Managed Service team will email you shortly to arrange a time for collection of the new machine. They will also ask you to return the loan machine at the same time, so please make sure that you have backup copies of any data that may be saved on it (the email will give you instructions on which folders to check etc).
Well, that went better than I expected.
Post by: Kim on 23 August, 2021, 01:38:57 pm
The other thing is the Apple and Android notification systems are centralised. Most* "app" notifications you see on your phone are being put there not by the app running on your phone but by the app owner's server sending them to Apple or Google which forwards them to your phone. Your phone has a connection open to its maker 24/7 which means it can always receive them.
(* on Apple at least where the "local notification" system is flakey and weird and barely used. Android I think is more variable)
That sounds like a weird Apple thing, and a frankly ridiculous design decision - connectivity is never 24/7, even in Cupertino, USAnia.
I'm reasonably sure that Android notifications are local ("You have a calendar appointment", "Could not connect to server", "Playing Queen's Greatest Hits" sort of thing all work fine without any network connectivity), though notifications frequently result from an app phoning home to determine that there's something worth generating a notification about ("You have mail", "Someone is better at PE than you on Strava", "Tornado warning!", "Buy $product").
Post by: Pingu on 23 August, 2021, 09:20:40 pm
Post by: grams on 23 August, 2021, 11:27:32 pm
though notifications frequently result from an app phoning home to determine that there's something worth generating a notification about ("You have mail", "Someone is better at PE than you on Strava", "Tornado warning!", "Buy $product").
I believe even on Android notifications like these are typically generated by the app maker’s server, even in cases where they conceivably could be produced by the local app.
(Mail is the exception if the phone is doing the pop/imap itself)
Post by: Kim on 23 August, 2021, 11:40:20 pm
(Admittedly, my app use tends towards the old-school and/or open-source, where such things tend to be eschewed by the developers.)
Post by: geraldc on 24 August, 2021, 12:17:13 am
Fancy new laptop, works with a stylus pen magnetically attaches to the side. Stylus/pen does not get touched for months. Decide that you need to use it to add details to a photo. Can not find pen.
This is not solely limited to microsoft, my street's whatsapp group has had a flurry of lost only to be found again, or incorrect Apple pencil purchases up for sale.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 August, 2021, 12:56:59 am
Some FLACs in the muzak collection have been split across two albums and I can't see why :demon: The album, artist and album artist tags are all the same.
Some brain-damaged third-party software that thinks J Random Database on the intertubes knows better than you? Plex insisted that a Robyn Hitchcock album yclept “Oscar” didn’t exist and therefore all the tracks on it should be appended to the “Luxor” album instead. Even iTunes isn’t that dim…
Post by: Jaded on 24 August, 2021, 07:55:46 am
I shall have to tour the interweb to find a solution, or just put up with the tracks being played in the wrong order, and only if I select all three “albums” before playing.
Actually it isn't shiTunes any more - they split out all the functionality and hid it in other apps.
Post by: Pingu on 24 August, 2021, 09:02:42 am
It's odd that one version of the album has the same track twice and that track also appears on the other version of the album ???
Post by: Pickled Onion on 24 August, 2021, 10:03:11 am
The splitting of albums where there are guest artists on some tracks is incredibly irritating. It’s an Album for Pete’s sake, the maker of it designed it to be played together and in this order! You either have to change the artist or tag it Various Artists, neither of which is correct. Classical music is even worse, movements of the same piece get split up because the soloist is credited, and anyway who looks for music by Random Hungarian Cellist rather than Mozart (found under W of course)? Clearly none of the people designing tagging ever thought anyone would want to play anything other than rock/pop.
Post by: Pingu on 24 August, 2021, 09:43:41 pm
1) Unzipped the files to this lapdog (they'd been downloaded there from Bandcamp)
b) Changed the tags to what I wanted with MP3Tag
iii) Copied the files to the relevant folders on the muzak pooter
D) Renamed the files to my muzak file name system
5) Did a rescan with LMS
Previously the tag changes were done on the muzak pooter.
???
Post by: ian on 26 August, 2021, 11:38:46 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 August, 2021, 12:08:06 pm
- the article you're trying to read is confined to a postage-stamp sized segment, and
- the barrage of shit is so intense that the browser is overwhelmed
Post by: ian on 26 August, 2021, 12:29:39 pm
Yeah, shitty websites, but how about you tell me, dear Safari what you think, and let me make the decision to reload it? Twatbadger.
Post by: grams on 26 August, 2021, 02:51:19 pm
The splitting of albums where there are guest artists on some tracks is incredibly irritating. It’s an Album for Pete’s sake, the maker of it designed it to be played together and in this order! You either have to change the artist or tag it Various Artists, neither of which is correct.
There’s a field called “Album Artist” that exists solely to solve this problem. Set those all to the same thing and you can use the “Artist” tag however you like.
Post by: Tim Hall on 26 August, 2021, 10:23:14 pm
The splitting of albums where there are guest artists on some tracks is incredibly irritating. It’s an Album for Pete’s sake, the maker of it designed it to be played together and in this order! You either have to change the artist or tag it Various Artists, neither of which is correct.
There’s a field called “Album Artist” that exists solely to solve this problem. Set those all to the same thing and you can use the “Artist” tag however you like.
Ooh. That's my Very Useful Thing I learned Today. Thanks.
(heads off to edit lots and lots of tags)
Post by: Jaded on 28 August, 2021, 11:11:40 am
So the only Internets I have is tethered to my phone. Oh well. The good news is that AAISP will send out a new router, but the bad news is that it is a Bank Holiday weekend...
Post by: Diver300 on 28 August, 2021, 06:59:58 pm
Power wobbles tripped a Circuit Breaker. More importantly it fried my router.Power wobbles are far more likely to fry a router power supply than a router.
So the only Internets I have is tethered to my phone. Oh well. The good news is that AAISP will send out a new router, but the bad news is that it is a Bank Holiday weekend...
Power supplies from other routers may well work. As long as the voltage or the other adaptor is the same*, and the current rating is the same or larger (you might get away with a bit smaller) then it's certainly worth a shot.
*Polarity is important as well. Some strange ones have the centre negative, but most have the centre positive.
Post by: Kim on 28 August, 2021, 07:02:09 pm
Post by: Jaded on 28 August, 2021, 07:03:24 pm
I do have a loverly power supply with lots of different plugs and variable power output settings, but haven't had to use it in this instance.
Post by: Kim on 28 August, 2021, 07:10:35 pm
Post by: Jaded on 28 August, 2021, 07:34:07 pm
Post by: Pingu on 01 September, 2021, 10:44:46 pm
Squeezebox Duet, wtf are you? Didn't you get the ruddy memo? Gah >:(
Post by: Jaded on 02 September, 2021, 12:28:08 am
Thanks AAISP
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 September, 2021, 03:12:17 am
Post by: Pickled Onion on 02 September, 2021, 05:42:06 am
...about a hundred thousand directories before it can actually start copying files again >:(
What are you storing, the Gaia star map?
Post by: ian on 02 September, 2021, 09:48:03 am
Post by: Pingu on 02 September, 2021, 11:25:09 am
Moved house. Plugged in router and old-desktop-computer-music-storage-thingummy, and Devil's radio, network and interwebs work immediately. OK, had to reboot the router to get Mrs P's tablet to talk to the interwebs and do Chromecast. Squeezebox Boom powers up and plays said music nae bother.
Squeezebox Duet, wtf are you? Didn't you get the ruddy memo? Gah >:(
It's working now. It goes to show that repeating the same action over and over until you get the desired outcome does work ::-) ???
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 September, 2021, 11:41:44 am
...about a hundred thousand directories before it can actually start copying files again >:(
What are you storing, the Gaia star map?
Deconstructing the data files for SCS Software's truck simulator games gives more than 20000 directories per game. Some of the bigger game mods are of similar complexity. If I were ruthless enough I'd delete the unpacked mods once I've finished fiddling with them, but it's a faff and everyone keeps telling us that “storage is cheap”.
Post by: Feanor on 02 September, 2021, 10:42:13 pm
I am the custodian of the digital estate of my late FiL.
Basically, custodian of his laptop, the files thereon and his e-mails.
I provided the laptop, and did all the set-up a couple of years age when his old one died; and have all the passwords etc.
So the task is delegated to me.
The only thing I needed to do was to take an archive of his e-mails, as he only ever used his ISP (sky) webmail.
Once the sky account is closed, all the webmail will go away.
So my plan is simply to install Thunderbird, connect over IMAP, and sync it all to local storage.
Right.
All the IMAP settings for Sky are easily available on the Internet.
And they are all wrong.
Authentication failures all round.
They say: Username = full sky e-mail address; p/w = your sky ID password.
Sounds reasonable.
But wrong.
I can sign into webmail with these credentials, but not IMAP.
Took several hours of googling to come across a forum post in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet which said:
"Have you tried to create the 'special' 'App Password' on this hidden page?"
WTF is an 'App Password'?
Well, it means 'e-mail App', ie not-webmail.
Yes, indeed. The IMAP password is not the same as the sky ID password used for webmail.
Create this magic password, enter it, and Thunderbirds are Go!
Armed with this knowledge, I now know what's going on.
Sky out-sourced their e-mail operations to Yahoo! some years ago.
The IMAP servers you connect to are not sky, they are Yahoo!
To allow authentication, sky don't want to share their customer passwords with Yahoo!, so they use a thing called OAuth.
Basically, sky users need to use the stupidly-hidden page to generate a 16-character token password which is linked to their account.
Then, their IMAP client needs to supply this as a password to Yahoo!, which will in turn present this token to sky to authenticate the user.
Is this documented anywhere on the sky web-pages?
Is it fuck.
<smiles blankly, and waves arm> Welcome! Just enter your Sky ID Password!
No!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 September, 2021, 12:50:07 am
Post by: Kim on 03 September, 2021, 12:53:27 am
a) In the business of making you view shitverts (Every free webmail provider in existence)
2) In the business of fucking up email with their own proprietary nonsense for fun and profit (Microsoft)
iii) In the business of selling you pushed packets, and therefore keen for you to push as many superfluous ones as possible (Every ISP/telco since RedHotAnt)
IV) Allergic to following RFCs (The authors of Thunderbollocks)
Yahoo! are, however:
† Bastards made of piss
Post by: Feanor on 03 September, 2021, 10:45:39 am
IMAP, again.
Mrs F uses Outhouse on her lapdog to access our home e-mail over IMAP, and has for years.
She recently set up an iThing to do the same.
All fine.
Only just noticed that the Sent Items don't seem to be synchronised between devices.
Why, of course they are not.
They are using different IMAP folder names: Sent Items, Sent Mail, Sent Stuff, Sent Shit.
Why-o-why can't IMAP clients take a look at the folder structure already existing on the server, and make a semi-intelligent guess at the appropriate folder names for things like Sent Stuff and Deleted Crap rather than just dumping a new folder of their own?
All fixed now.
Sigh.
Post by: Kim on 03 September, 2021, 02:37:45 pm
Post by: perpetual dan on 04 September, 2021, 11:41:09 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 September, 2021, 12:18:41 pm
Post by: Pingu on 05 September, 2021, 07:58:52 pm
I start by creating a god mode folder, that helps remind it which way the relationship should be.
Used it in earnest today, cheers Zipperhead :thumbsup: :)
Post by: ian on 10 September, 2021, 02:47:38 pm
This is a public service announcement.
Post by: TheLurker on 10 September, 2021, 03:45:54 pm
Post by: Diver300 on 13 September, 2021, 07:37:01 pm
When you send an email from:- jblogs@company.co.uk<bounce@random.com> that makes most email systems send email replys to the wrong place and makes it more difficult to reply and possibly buy stuff.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 15 September, 2021, 10:08:28 am
Previous company, to update a doc on sharepoint you had to lock, checkout, edit doc, upload new version, check in.
Working with customer on their sharepoint; open a doc in Word (from sharepoint) and it is auto linked so that auto saves update the copy in sharepoint. EVEN IF YOU TRY TO SAVE LOCALLY!
So my edits, that I wanted to be reviewed before sending to customer, weren't saved locally but went automatically to the customer's sharepoint.
Absolute bloody shambles.
Post by: ian on 15 September, 2021, 10:15:35 am
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 15 September, 2021, 11:37:38 am
You have to use the 'save a copy' option to somewhere local. Otherwise, you're just editing the online version in the desktop app. You can't persuade it otherwise.Yeah, I'd done that . .
Post by: ian on 15 September, 2021, 12:43:21 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 September, 2021, 01:08:12 pm
Post by: ian on 16 September, 2021, 01:38:48 pm
By all means stop the syncing and remove access to any cloud-stored files, but really, fucking hiding the local copies of the files? Clungmonkeys.
Post by: ian on 16 September, 2021, 07:21:04 pm
I'm obscurely pleased with myself for remembering the – oh god it's still there – Registry Editor, which seemed to offer the only way to restore God's Own Method of Scrolling to my Magic Mouse.
It's no wonder Finestre is now Hell's CEO, it's truly is a creature of diabolical brilliance.
Post by: Pingu on 16 September, 2021, 11:40:24 pm
Post by: TimC on 17 September, 2021, 07:15:50 am
WoE are you doing to make it crash so much ??? I can't remember the last time Windows crashed for me.
Me neither. I've had hardware crashes, but Windows 10 has generally been excellent - I also use MacOS, and, while it's still (more) seamless if you have a lot of Apple kit, Windows is now just as easy to use. Obviously it can be more complex as it has to be adaptable to so much different hardware, but that hasn't given me any issues. And, as my primary use of computers now is in connection with flight simulator apps, Windows is essential (the FS/games industry has relegated Macs to also-rans).
Post by: Polar Bear on 17 September, 2021, 08:31:38 am
WoE are you doing to make it crash so much ??? I can't remember the last time Windows crashed for me.
Perhaps he's using Windows 98 or something.
I have found Windows to be extremely stable since Windows 7 but then I didn't venture into 8 which was by all accounts a bit of a mare in comparison.
Post by: ian on 17 September, 2021, 09:41:03 am
Plus it doesn't seem to know how to go to sleep, close lid, go away, open lid, and erm, blank screen. There's probably a setting.
It's Windows 10, they wouldn't give me XP, not matter how nice I asked. We do have a typical long-suffering IT guy, oh it was blessed fun seeing him setting up the new starters yesterday. Best entertainment I've had for weeks.
I'm happier now I've made the Magic Mouse magic again and found an HDMI adaptor for the second monitor (it's a super-svelte Dell with only the single USB-C port). Apparently, it's a bunfight to get computers at the moment with the chip shortages (and we're taking on about 100 people this month, so I'm glad they didn't give me one that has been pre-sneezed on).
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 17 September, 2021, 12:06:40 pm
WoE are you doing to make it crash so much ??? I can't remember the last time Windows crashed for me.
Perhaps he's using Windows 98 or something.
I have found Windows to be extremely stable since Windows 7 but then I didn't venture into 8 which was by all accounts a bit of a mare in comparison.
I use Mac at home but Win10 in the hospital and in private. I cannot remember the last time there was a full Win10 crash. Office is pretty good as well but other software can be flaky. We have a audio recording app at the hospital which has to be loaded before the EMR or it simply fails to load.
Post by: Kim on 17 September, 2021, 03:56:31 pm
-I can't find anything, because I haven't used Windows seriously since the XP era.
-Microsoft still haven't worked out how to apply updates quietly in the background, without enforced reboots or prolonged startup times at the least convenient moment.
-Buggy drivers, which are over-represented because they're usually why I'm having to use Windows in the first place.
Performance-wise it seems pretty good, even on crusty hardware like the Official BHPC Jam-Filled Babbage Engine. The aesthetics don't bother me particularly, because I only use Windows for short periods to get a specific job done. The lack of configurability drives barakta bonkers - is it really that difficult to let the user configure the interface colours and fonts, like we've been able to on most things since computers got colour displays?
Post by: ian on 17 September, 2021, 04:15:26 pm
Then Dell decided it wanted to update loads of things too, which I duly agreed to, and they all failed for no apparent reason it felt like disclosing.
There are also exciting things like antivirus and malware checkers that I'll leave to the mothership to maintain.
Start-up is still relatively slow compared to a Mac and I still can't figure out to do a proper close lid sleep and instant restart when you open it. I'm not sure why the Bitlocker thing isn't just integrated like FileVault. It feels a bit less responsive.
Other than that, while I'd prefer a Mac, it's a bit of a muchness these days.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 September, 2021, 05:04:52 pm
Post by: ian on 17 September, 2021, 05:23:26 pm
Post by: Zipperhead on 17 September, 2021, 10:54:57 pm
The only way I reckon I can get W10 to install an update it’s been failing to install for the past ten months is by reinstalling the the whole wretched thing from scratch. Which wouldn’t be so onerous were it not for the dozens of apps that would need to reinstalled, plus the large amount of tweaking required to get the bloody thing the way I want it. Bah!
I believe that I can give you a solution to that. My office PC (as in, the one next to my desk in a far flung place called "the city") was toast. Wouldn't run any updates, programs took 15 seconds to start, those that would even start. I would have been quite happy to go and zap it and load it from scratch, it doesn't run much more than office, superputty and virtualbox, but then I found the solution....
download a windows iso, right click on it to mount it (no need to put it on a usb stick) then run the setup.exe on it. It will ask you if you want to keep your existing software after which apparently it replaces windows in-situ.
At the end it reboots, and will initially give you the welcome screen from a fresh windows installation but all your treasured programs are still installed.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 September, 2021, 12:43:25 am
The only way I reckon I can get W10 to install an update it’s been failing to install for the past ten months is by reinstalling the the whole wretched thing from scratch. Which wouldn’t be so onerous were it not for the dozens of apps that would need to reinstalled, plus the large amount of tweaking required to get the bloody thing the way I want it. Bah!
I believe that I can give you a solution to that. My office PC (as in, the one next to my desk in a far flung place called "the city") was toast. Wouldn't run any updates, programs took 15 seconds to start, those that would even start. I would have been quite happy to go and zap it and load it from scratch, it doesn't run much more than office, superputty and virtualbox, but then I found the solution....
download a windows iso, right click on it to mount it (no need to put it on a usb stick) then run the setup.exe on it. It will ask you if you want to keep your existing software after which apparently it replaces windows in-situ.
At the end it reboots, and will initially give you the welcome screen from a fresh windows installation but all your treasured programs are still installed.
Ooooh, ta! I'll give that a go when I'm back in civilisation. My misbehaving one runs Stuffs normally but keeps bleating about a “page fault in non-paged area” when I try the update; also the usual shutdown options have screwed themselves to Heck and back.
Post by: Auntie Helen on 18 September, 2021, 06:14:51 am
Nothing is working correctly. I cannot copy items from my OneDrive to SharePoint, although my colleague can.
When we try to rename folders it gets very grumpy and gives up.
We seem to have folders with the same name all appearing in the Schnellzugriff (don’t know what it’s called in English) so I can’t easily work out if I’m saving in OneDrive or SharePoint.
Oh, and I have a dual monitor system. I don’t want the taskbar to group windows for apps, I want all 3 open Excel spreadsheets appearing in the taskbar. I have changed the settings and on the right hand monitor I see all 3, on the left hand monitor I just see Excel and have to click on it to then try and work out which tiny image is the spreadsheet I want, although they look the same.
Settings are a joke - scattered around the place. Doesn’t help that it’s in German, of course.
And how I loathe with a passion the Ribbon. Just give me all the icons in small all the time. Everything takes twice as many clicks as with my Mac.
Post by: Kim on 18 September, 2021, 01:10:30 pm
Also, Schnellzugriff is officially a Good Word. (Quick access, I think)
Post by: FifeingEejit on 18 September, 2021, 01:22:40 pm
Updates are still a pain in the rear, it downloaded a bazillion separately this morning (though at least it didn't force me to restart). There might be a better option, I really don't need to know, Apple just package them up and deliver and install about 600 GB of them every othernight while I sleep.The only reason my work PC gets a reboot is because endpoint decide its time to deploy a load of updates, it's always at an i opportune moment because they like to kick it off laterl afternoon when I'm busy and by the time I open it up in the morning from its sleep mode the delay timers run out and it reboots me just as I'm about to dive (almost) straight from the shower into the morning stand up.
Then Dell decided it wanted to update loads of things too, which I duly agreed to, and they all failed for no apparent reason it felt like disclosing.
There are also exciting things like antivirus and malware checkers that I'll leave to the mothership to maintain.
Start-up is still relatively slow compared to a Mac and I still can't figure out to do a proper close lid sleep and instant restart when you open it. I'm not sure why the Bitlocker thing isn't just integrated like FileVault. It feels a bit less responsive.
Other than that, while I'd prefer a Mac, it's a bit of a muchness these days.
I find my home pc's less invasive on reboots if only because microsith control them and thus I can just hit "shutdown and install" when I'm done with it for the night.
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 September, 2021, 01:48:17 pm
I try to have as little to do with MS Office as possible, but it seems to have lost the plot in about 2010. And even that had the hated Ribbon.
Also, Schnellzugriff is officially a Good Word. (Quick access, I think)
There is at least one Product which restores sensible menus to Office 2013 (and possibly other iterations) which is free for non-commercial use. I wouldn’t be without it.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 18 September, 2021, 02:15:44 pm
Windows restore that exists right on your hard drive apparently can do similar.The only way I reckon I can get W10 to install an update it’s been failing to install for the past ten months is by reinstalling the the whole wretched thing from scratch. Which wouldn’t be so onerous were it not for the dozens of apps that would need to reinstalled, plus the large amount of tweaking required to get the bloody thing the way I want it. Bah!
I believe that I can give you a solution to that. My office PC (as in, the one next to my desk in a far flung place called "the city") was toast. Wouldn't run any updates, programs took 15 seconds to start, those that would even start. I would have been quite happy to go and zap it and load it from scratch, it doesn't run much more than office, superputty and virtualbox, but then I found the solution....
download a windows iso, right click on it to mount it (no need to put it on a usb stick) then run the setup.exe on it. It will ask you if you want to keep your existing software after which apparently it replaces windows in-situ.
At the end it reboots, and will initially give you the welcome screen from a fresh windows installation but all your treasured programs are still installed.
Theres a lot of clever and good shit in windozd that no one bothers with because we're all traumatised from the 9x generation of shitness.
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 September, 2021, 11:42:34 pm
Also Microsith leave System Restore turned OFF by default, or at least they did in 2016 when they woke up my laptop from hibernation and tried to install a GBFO update over the world’s slowest hotel Internet connection in Wheretehfuckami, Ontario. The bastards.
Post by: Pingu on 18 September, 2021, 11:42:53 pm
This lapdog which has finally arrived at the correct address (sigh) is stuck trying to install shits
Not best regards
Pingu
Post by: FifeingEejit on 18 September, 2021, 11:44:07 pm
AFAIK Windows Restore depends on the existence of a restore point at the appropriate time and how far back it goes depends on how big the partition it’s been allocated is and also whether the offending update created one in the first place which, in the case of third-party drivers, appears to be a rarity. The available evidence suggests the issue is the fault of a driver update that happened the thick end of a year ago, so I reckon the chance of being able to roll back that far is 2/3 of 80% of not very much. Doubly so since I ent even been able to find out which driver might have done the evil deed.Windows restore isn't just restore points.
Also Microsith leave System Restore turned OFF by default, or at least they did in 2016 when they woke up my laptop from hibernation and tried to install a GBFO update over the world’s slowest hotel Internet connection in Wheretehfuckami, Ontario. The bastards.
Or is it restore and recovery centre
Or recovery center
Or...
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: FifeingEejit on 18 September, 2021, 11:44:44 pm
Dear workWell it sounds like an improvement if you actually have a computer now.
This lapdog which has finally arrived at the correct address (sigh) is stuck trying to install shits
Not best regards
Pingu
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: Pingu on 19 September, 2021, 12:23:22 am
Dear workWell it sounds like an improvement if you actually have a computer now.
This lapdog which has finally arrived at the correct address (sigh) is stuck trying to install shits
Not best regards
Pingu
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
It doesnae do anything thobut. A bit like me really.
They sent a bonny large screen which works dandy with my lapdog :thumbsup:
Post by: Auntie Helen on 19 September, 2021, 06:47:52 am
Can you share its name?I try to have as little to do with MS Office as possible, but it seems to have lost the plot in about 2010. And even that had the hated Ribbon.
Also, Schnellzugriff is officially a Good Word. (Quick access, I think)
There is at least one Product which restores sensible menus to Office 2013 (and possibly other iterations) which is free for non-commercial use. I wouldn’t be without it.
Work are all very nice and friendly so if I whined loudly enough they might let me have it…
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 September, 2021, 10:22:17 am
Post by: ian on 20 September, 2021, 09:20:17 am
Oh well, to IT I go.
Post by: ian on 20 September, 2021, 09:55:02 am
Yes, I have corrupted firmware with my mind. There must be some serious filth in there.
Post by: ian on 20 September, 2021, 11:49:21 am
Level 1 complete. Bonus points 1,000,000. New High Score.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 September, 2021, 03:42:55 pm
I'm running a thing called Classic Office Menu from https://www.addintools.com/, which is not free unless you download a cracked copy from a source of dubious provenance, but I'm pretty sure I've seen another one one which WAS free for personal use.Can you share its name?I try to have as little to do with MS Office as possible, but it seems to have lost the plot in about 2010. And even that had the hated Ribbon.
Also, Schnellzugriff is officially a Good Word. (Quick access, I think)
There is at least one Product which restores sensible menus to Office 2013 (and possibly other iterations) which is free for non-commercial use. I wouldn’t be without it.
Work are all very nice and friendly so if I whined loudly enough they might let me have it…
Edited to unscramble b0rked quote.
Post by: ian on 21 September, 2021, 09:26:30 am
Ready Player One. Level 2.
Post by: Ham on 21 September, 2021, 10:14:19 am
And how I loathe with a passion the Ribbon. Just give me all the icons in small all the time. Everything takes twice as many clicks as with my Mac.
While I sympathise with your sentiment (I am in fact a paid-up user of "classic office menu" of many years standing - I'd advise anyone against using cracked software as these days it is exceedingly likely to have a malware payload) actually, the ribbon isn't as bad as all that and worth getting used to for all the pain involved. There are a couple of tips/tweaks I would add for those who hate the basic MS UI.
In office, the worst aspects of the ribbon can be bypassed by customisation, adding the items you miss from the old way of doing things to the Quick Access Toolbar - by default the top line above the ribbon. Personally the ones I miss are "Format Painter", "Insert Table", "Borders" - you may have your own obviously. The easiest option to do this is to right click on the ribbon, customise, when the option widow appears, choose "Quick Access Toolbar" from the left hand side. Default is to present the "popular commands" that are a subset of all commands (obv). If you need to know what the icon you want on the quick access is called to find it in the list, find it on the ribbon and hover to see the name. Then, as a final twist, you can opt to show the Quick Access Toolbar below the ribbon. Combine that with closing the ribbon and you have all your icon commands on one line. It is hyper unlikely that your common use icons will be more than a line-full.
Then, if like me you loathe the default W10 toolbars with its mess of pinning programs and open windows, you may want to use the old Quicklaunch, which is still available (https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/add-the-quick-launch-bar-to-the-taskbar-in-windows-7/). Then, once you have removed search and Cortana, you can set up a two line toolbar at the bottom of the screen and organise your common programs into a block of, say, 10 or 12 small icons on the left next to the start button and the rest of the space will be your open windows, as ever was in W7.
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 21 September, 2021, 01:06:51 pm
Post by: Auntie Helen on 21 September, 2021, 02:58:42 pm
I am trialling the free software but it doesn’t work with outlook which is the thing that annoys me the most - on loads of ribbon menus you can’t add an attachment, which is something I often want to do. Drives me bonkers. I’ll try the customisation option.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 29 September, 2021, 09:01:45 am
35 years ago I worked mainframes via terminals. You had to be careful not to type too fast, or you'd fill the buffer and lose characters.
With the application of millions of dollars of development, the internet and incredibly powerful chips, Microsoft have recreated that experience.
Post by: ian on 29 September, 2021, 09:27:58 am
Post by: TimC on 29 September, 2021, 12:47:01 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 04 October, 2021, 02:42:38 pm
Firefox has started diverting the new tab search box into the address bar. This, apparently, is copied from Chrome. Not only is it fucking annoying to put the cursor in the middle of the page, start typing and have absolutely nothing appear where you just placed the cursor it is also effing dumb. If you search for anything with a forward slash in it, for example the model number of a malfunctioning Bosch washing machine, firefox assumes it must be a url. Because no string of characters in the history of time has ever included a forward slash and not been a URL has it mozilla?
Morons.
About:config
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar = False
(40% of that setting name makes me want to either puke or beat shit out of someone with a clue by four.)
[Edited to redirect my ire in a more appropriate direction]
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 04 October, 2021, 10:33:33 pm
Post by: BrianI on 04 October, 2021, 10:45:55 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 04 October, 2021, 10:55:24 pm
Good software engineers always test their work. It does what the manager or management software tells them to do. It is a very sad job. Any computer programmer wants to do the best they can on the time their given. User level testing is done by test engineers. The Software Engineers favourite thing is writing correct computer programs. Their job is hated, a horrible contradiction.I apologise. Post edited to hopefully point the finger more correctly
Post by: Morat on 05 October, 2021, 10:23:49 pm
It's 10x the price of the previous solution and the management interface is absolute DogShi$ I really resent finding something that I need and then being told that it's now part of another product and "Click here to start your 1 month free trial".
At least I've found a use for Edge now, because you can only log in as one user per browser and to do anything at all you need to be logged in to loads of separate pages with an admin account.
Apparently, we've now migrated to The Cloud so everything is better.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 October, 2021, 09:49:05 pm
This error message:
Code: [Select]
<ERROR> d:\buildbot\slaves\win_slave\final_build_ets2_141_windows_bin_steam_x64\build\prism\src\p3core\collections\arrays\arrays_base_impl.h(475):
??A?$array_t@M@prism@@QEBAAEBM_K@Z:
Index outside array boundaries.
is Not Useful. I know it's because something is too big for the executable's tiny head-branez, but howzabout you tell us which something is causing it?kthxbai
Cross of E17
Post by: ian on 06 October, 2021, 10:11:48 pm
Still not helpful, is it, Microsoft?
Post by: TheLurker on 08 October, 2021, 03:18:35 pm
Quote from: Mr Larrington
O hai SCS SoftwareI will see your bounds error and raise you, HRESULT, E_FAIL, Unspecified failure, 0x80004005 which is M$ for "Ahhhh fuckit. It's broke, *you* sort it out. " and which occurs far, far too often to be funny.
This error message:Code: [Select]<ERROR> d:\buildbot\slaves\win_slave\final_build_ets2_141_windows_bin_steam_x64\build\prism\src\p3core\collections\arrays\arrays_base_impl.h(475):is Not Useful. I know it's because something is too big for the executable's tiny head-branez, but howzabout you tell us which something is causing it?
??A?$array_t@M@prism@@QEBAAEBM_K@Z:
Index outside array boundaries.
kthxbai
Cross of E17
Post by: SoreTween on 10 October, 2021, 12:35:04 pm
- Create settings such that the user can configure your webmail server to talk to any ip and port. Thus allowing the webmail server and mail server to exist, if the user so desires, on totally separate hardware / lans / etc.
- Use the settings from the mail server assuming the two will be on the same box. Not a great approach but at least allows the ports to be configured.
- hard code localhost:25.
FFS.
Post by: Kim on 11 October, 2021, 12:57:36 pm
No driver. Windows Update can't get one because policy.
Download the driver from HP. Discover its the Windows NT version. Discover HP haven't heard of Windows 10.
Obtain the proper driver from elseweb.
Can't install it because admin privs.
"Never mind, it's a proper printer for grown-ups that speaks Postscript over Ethernet. A generic driver should work."
...unless it's Microsoft's generic driver, it seems; the job arrives at the printer and Windows is happy, but nothing happens apart from blinkenlights.
Try the generic PCL6 driver. That one actually crashes the printer.
Useless.
Post by: Feanor on 11 October, 2021, 01:12:50 pm
It supports win10 in both 32 and 64 bit variants.
I'd advise configuring it in Traditional mode, where you specify IP addresses etc, rather than Dynamic mode where it tries to figure it all out by magic.
Post by: Kim on 11 October, 2021, 03:08:15 pm
For things like the laserjet 4000, you need to download the Universal Print Driver from HP.
It supports win10 in both 32 and 64 bit variants.
I'd advise configuring it in Traditional mode, where you specify IP addresses etc, rather than Dynamic mode where it tries to figure it all out by magic.
Prior experience suggests that one doesn't work, but the Laserjet 4000 specific driver does. But it doesn't matter, because we can't install printer drivers on that machine due to overly restrictive security settings.
Post by: Feanor on 11 October, 2021, 03:20:25 pm
Dunno why its not working for you (assuming you can install it, ofcourse!)
Post by: ian on 11 October, 2021, 04:15:49 pm
Post by: barakta on 11 October, 2021, 04:30:24 pm
Post by: Wombat on 18 October, 2021, 06:14:12 pm
Yes, its fairly old, but it performs its duties well, and is a lovely slender Sony Viao touchscreen skinny flippy foldy thing, and had an NVME SSD in it before such things were commonplace. Its got a 4th generation i5 and 8GB of RAM, 500GB of SSD, so what is the problem?
You insist you will stop support of Win 10 v2004 in December, and that I must update to a newer version of Win 10, but that is what crashes and burns each time. I can't even pause updates, as it says I've reached my pause limit, despite never having paused them. I need the laptop to work, no questions asked, on Thursday, so please just leave it alone, will you?
Bastards!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 October, 2021, 06:24:11 pm
Post by: liam_whippet on 18 October, 2021, 08:48:30 pm
Plan B is to download the Windows Update Assistant from:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10
which will [eventually, like a couple of hours later] get you to May 2021...
I had a very similar Sony Vaio i5 - 12GB RAM, 256 GB SSD; no touchscreen, but a wireless mouse - to sort out last week, and it all came straight in the end.
Good luck!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 October, 2021, 12:50:15 am
Post by: liam_whippet on 19 October, 2021, 09:12:54 am
He can also boost his chances by telling Microsoft to tidy its room first - by going System | Storage, clicking on Temp files, then checking the box to delete Windows Update files. Usually frees up 3GB - 8GB space, which can only be a Good Thing; current record is 17GB of UpdatenKruft ...
Actual driver errors are a different kettle of worms. AllI would say is that I was starting from either 1909 or 2004, and was more than pleasantly surprised to arrive safely and eventually in 21H1 [thus bypassing 20H2 completely]. And it felt like what it was doing behind the scenes was just downloading a humungous iso and running it ...
Post by: Kim on 19 October, 2021, 12:56:58 pm
Having moved a couple of smart things to other VLANs, I've concluded it's not VLAN related. I've now downgraded the UAP firmware to see if that helps.
Devil's radio.
[1] Shoutout to the bathroom light, which I've programmed to come on automatically so I don't have to touch the switch when slopping out.
Post by: grams on 20 October, 2021, 02:11:20 pm
The first thing I tried was retroPi game emulator thingy. It was a setup wizard that says you need to hold down a button on your controller to configure it. This is a Bluetooth pairing screen, I think naively, and proceed to put my controller in discovery mode.
Nothings happens. It turns out you need to connect to Bluetooth first using a command line tool that requires you to type the chuffing MAC address. Still doesn’t work, because my Xbox Series X controller is too new and requires some mysterious package I couldn’t find, and my Wiimote is too old and/or obscure (!) and requires pages of manual config.
The thing is going in a drawer.
Post by: Wombat on 29 October, 2021, 01:13:16 pm
Ah - you have an actual error message, which in Wombat's case he has not got - so he is more likely to update OK ...
He can also boost his chances by telling Microsoft to tidy its room first - by going System | Storage, clicking on Temp files, then checking the box to delete Windows Update files. Usually frees up 3GB - 8GB space, which can only be a Good Thing; current record is 17GB of UpdatenKruft ...
Actual driver errors are a different kettle of worms. AllI would say is that I was starting from either 1909 or 2004, and was more than pleasantly surprised to arrive safely and eventually in 21H1 [thus bypassing 20H2 completely]. And it felt like what it was doing behind the scenes was just downloading a humungous iso and running it ...
I nuked from orbit, in the end. Current version installed, seems happy enough. As the laptop has limited duties, re-populating it with software isn't as much of a ball ache as it could be. It does have one barmy habit, though. As its a flippy thing that can be used as a tablet, it has screen rotate, which previously worked fine. Now however, if I leave screen rotate unlocked, it defaults to being upside down... Hopefully there is a way to tell it which was is up, other than locking screen rotate and setting it each time, but I haven't found it yet.
Post by: Pingu on 30 October, 2021, 07:32:42 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 October, 2021, 12:49:57 am
If you’re going to have locations in Uzbekistan — and why not? — in your fine map product, do you not think it might be a good idea actually to add Uzbekistan to the list of countries, mmm? You know, so the game knows a few trivial items like where to find it, what time zone it's in, how much petril costs, whether DRLs are required, what the speed limits are ect &, moreover, ect?
kthxbai!
Post by: Pickled Onion on 31 October, 2021, 09:18:43 am
But for IOS deciding to use a completely different time zone to what's used by everyone there incredibly not helpful.
Post by: grams on 10 November, 2021, 05:30:35 pm
- Only tell you your email address is already in use *after* you’ve filled out the whole registration form.
- Lose your email address between the registration/login/forgotten password pages
- Have the reset password flow take you to the website rather than the app where you started all this?
- Have multiple domain names and funky password boxes so password managers don’t avoid all of the above?
I guess this web stuff is still new. I’ll give them another twenty years.
Post by: JonBuoy on 11 November, 2021, 07:36:38 am
Last update from them was at 1509 yesterday afternoon and stated '...we expect affected customers to be able to access their Plusnet email account by tomorrow morning.' Well it is now tomorrow morning and it still isn't working >:(
Next update is due at 0800. It had better be good news!
Post by: nicknack on 11 November, 2021, 09:35:56 am
Post by: Kim on 11 November, 2021, 09:55:09 am
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 11 November, 2021, 11:37:23 am
Previous versions of word had a decent search and replace. This included being able to search for special characters, such as line feeds - very handy if you wanted to convert these to a windows CRLF.
I had a stack of text with just LF. Select text, replace LF with 'paragraph marker'.
Two things were wrong. One, the option to just 'replace in selection' has gone (WTF). Two, it replaced the LF with a paragraph marker symbol. Just the paragraph marker character. The moronic engine they are using now literally inserted the character, not the CRLF that the paragraph marker is supposed to represent.
Pathetic. Bug report submitted.
Post by: JonBuoy on 11 November, 2021, 01:02:54 pm
No, you weren't alone. But mine's working again now.
Lucky you!
Mine spluttered into life, spat out a few emails and has now died again >:(
Post by: ian on 11 November, 2021, 01:15:03 pm
Word!
Previous versions of word had a decent search and replace. This included being able to search for special characters, such as line feeds - very handy if you wanted to convert these to a windows CRLF.
I had a stack of text with just LF. Select text, replace LF with 'paragraph marker'.
Two things were wrong. One, the option to just 'replace in selection' has gone (WTF). Two, it replaced the LF with a paragraph marker symbol. Just the paragraph marker character. The moronic engine they are using now literally inserted the character, not the CRLF that the paragraph marker is supposed to represent.
Pathetic. Bug report submitted.
Still works here – you have to use the full-fat Ctrl-H search and replace not the crappy search boxes. Has all the special character and wildcard options, seemed to work here swapping paragraphs for line feeds.
By default, if you do 'replace all,' it seems to do within any selection if you have made one.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 11 November, 2021, 01:50:31 pm
I was in the full fat find and replace window, using the special characters dropdowns.Word!
Previous versions of word had a decent search and replace. This included being able to search for special characters, such as line feeds - very handy if you wanted to convert these to a windows CRLF.
I had a stack of text with just LF. Select text, replace LF with 'paragraph marker'.
Two things were wrong. One, the option to just 'replace in selection' has gone (WTF). Two, it replaced the LF with a paragraph marker symbol. Just the paragraph marker character. The moronic engine they are using now literally inserted the character, not the CRLF that the paragraph marker is supposed to represent.
Pathetic. Bug report submitted.
Still works here – you have to use the full-fat Ctrl-H search and replace not the crappy search boxes. Has all the special character and wildcard options, seemed to work here swapping paragraphs for line feeds.
By default, if you do 'replace all,' it seems to do within any selection if you have made one.
Sounds like it works sometimes but not in all cases. Probably something up with the underlying XML schema.
Post by: Beardy on 12 November, 2021, 10:57:01 am
I’ve just had to go and provide IT support for Dr Beardy (Mrs) because she lost her work again. (She hadn’t, it was just of screen and without the scroll bars she couldn’t get it back again.
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 12 November, 2021, 08:25:03 pm
Social science academics really should not be allowed to ‘design’ spreadsheets and then mandate that their colleagues use them. I don’t care if he’s a Doctor Doctor Doctor, his abilities as an IT ‘guru’ do not match his own perception of the same.
I’ve just had to go and provide IT support for Dr Beardy (Mrs) because she lost her work again. (She hadn’t, it was just of screen and without the scroll bars she couldn’t get it back again.
Design spreadsheets? I will see that and raise you the people who design forms in Word for online completion!
Post by: lissotriton on 13 November, 2021, 12:04:48 am
And still seems to be broken. The SMTP server isn't working anyway.No, you weren't alone. But mine's working again now.
Lucky you!
Mine spluttered into life, spat out a few emails and has now died again >:(
I'm not using the Plusnet email address for receiving anything, but do use the SMTP for sending from a domain name.
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 13 November, 2021, 11:58:44 am
Post by: Tim Hall on 13 November, 2021, 01:05:45 pm
I had a windows update yesterday. When it restarted it wanted to change my web browser. I said no. It wanted me to install some form of office 365. I said no.That reads like a verse of Rehab that didn't make it to the final version.
Post by: Jurek on 13 November, 2021, 01:49:49 pm
I had a windows update yesterday. When it restarted it wanted to change my web browser. I said no. It wanted me to install some form of office 365. I said no.That reads like a verse of Rehab that didn't make it to the final version.
Very good.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 November, 2021, 03:08:57 pm
I had a windows update yesterday. When it restarted it wanted to change my web browser. I said no. It wanted me to install some form of office 365. I said no.
Better get used to that sort of thing. If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what (https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/11/latest_windows_11_build_enforces_edge_links/).
Post by: Pingu on 14 November, 2021, 12:23:51 am
It's like it's channeling exactly what I don't what I want to listen too :demon:
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 November, 2021, 07:34:12 pm
If I click “Do not remind me again” on your wanky pop-up offering a 40% discount on software I do not want, then I mean “Do not hassle me again”, not “Bring back the wanky pop-up a couple of weeks later in the vain hope that Mr Larrington will have forgotten about telling us to fuck off previously”. Got it? You don’t want The BEAR to come to visit your UK offices. His table manners are simply appalling.
kthxbai
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 26 November, 2021, 02:51:51 pm
Specifically, the removal of control over the content and its appearance.
I'm inserting cross-references. I want them to appear like hyperlinks.
Nope, won't do that. They specifically force them to appear like surrounding text. You can't even manually apply the hyperlink character style.
From MS
Quote
As you have noticed, hyperlinked cross-references are not formatted as hyperlinks. This is by design.
Post by: barakta on 26 November, 2021, 03:40:09 pm
I want my hyperlinks to LOOK like links so people know it's a link rather than having to over a mouse over it or guess.
This is going to make people go back to "link here for" in the text which fucks things up for screenreader users.
I do not understand why Microshite has gone SO far backwards in accessibility terms this past few years.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 26 November, 2021, 04:12:36 pm
That's just rude to override what the user wants things to be.
I want my hyperlinks to LOOK like links so people know it's a link rather than having to over a mouse over it or guess.
This is going to make people go back to "link here for" in the text which fucks things up for screenreader users.
I do not understand why Microshite has gone SO far backwards in accessibility terms this past few years.
EXACTLY
You also used to be able to set up cross reference 'styles' that showed heading numbers plus text, or just numbers and so on. That has gone as well.
Post by: barakta on 26 November, 2021, 08:16:12 pm
It's bad enough when I had to do work on a file which I can only access through a browser cos it won't share properly if anyone opens it in Proper Desktop Excel.
I can manage for the odd file, but I strongly prefer to keyboard navigate to save mousing and the more we webbify office, the less I can do that or have quick use shortcuts as I need them so I can make documents green backgrounded with 1 click etc. It's bad enough we're using 1 colleague's OneDrive as a filestore for the team so I can't configure display of hundreds of folders and space is wasted with a "status" field which comes back each time I open a new folder. *swears a lot*
Post by: Kim on 26 November, 2021, 08:33:26 pm
It's bad enough we're using 1 colleague's OneDrive as a filestore for the team
Can't you make them sort that out citing data protection or something?
Post by: barakta on 26 November, 2021, 09:16:22 pm
It's bad enough we're using 1 colleague's OneDrive as a filestore for the team
Can't you make them sort that out citing data protection or something?
You're talking about the place that has no data protection deletion strategy despite having an online and filestore system....
And whose idea of data protection is *WINCE*.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 November, 2021, 06:09:02 pm
Well, I do. But I can’t. Because your poxy cable is too fucking short. And it’s got an RJ
(Wanders off to Google “ RJ
Edit: cable now ordered from the Bay of Thieves. This had better work.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 December, 2021, 06:21:48 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 December, 2021, 06:53:30 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 06 December, 2021, 08:09:52 pm
Listen, Microsoft, if you're going to provide a Mac version of Visual Studio, at least could you actually own a Mac and have a look at how installers normally work on a proper computer. There's a reason I own a Mac and not a thing with Windows installed. On it.
The way everything else works: drag old app to bin (optional), click on installer, done.
Oh no.
MS: I can't install as you have an old version
Me: No I don't, I just deleted it
MS: Yes you do - go to this GitHub site, right click and download a bash script to remove it
Me: That doesn't work, I have Safari, just like every other Mac user
... open text editor, copy-paste script, save, open terminal, chmod -x, execute
Me: It doesn't run, it needs access to something
MS: Hmm. I have no idea.
... googles error message, changes privacy settings, checks script *very* carefully, script runs
MS: OK, I'll install now, but first I need access to your keychain
Me: WTF?
Post by: grams on 20 December, 2021, 01:35:03 pm
Anyway, I’ve finally found a solution: rotate the first page 180 degrees and it prints fine.
** shrug **
Post by: Kim on 20 December, 2021, 01:46:26 pm
No doubt Brother are doing something similar, and there's something in the document it doesn't like. Alas, printers are about as conducive to debugging as Garmin GPS receivers.
Post by: pcolbeck on 20 December, 2021, 04:18:36 pm
I now have to click through a form on the GUI and fill in about 10 pieces of information including IP addresses, VLAN ids and VRFs and repat this 92 times !!!!!
Why cant I just use Postman to squirt it all in from the spreadsheet I am copying it from like with the rest of the fabric config?
Grrr
Post by: pcolbeck on 23 December, 2021, 08:35:50 am
Spent several hours getting the headings in a document to go from unnumbered to correctly numbered (including sub headings).
Post by: ian on 23 December, 2021, 09:23:46 am
Almost every other application for managing words and stuff has styles and formatting sorted and packaged in easy-to-use and intuitive tools and options. But then you have to use Word.
Post by: TheLurker on 23 December, 2021, 10:12:00 am
Quote from: pcolbeck
Why do Microsoft make it so hard to change formatting in Word? ...Dunno. It used to be easy in Word 97 and then they started "improving" it with intellisenesence and using subsequent versions has been, is, an utterly frustrating experience.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 January, 2022, 04:47:07 pm
The only way I reckon I can get W10 to install an update it’s been failing to install for the past ten months is by reinstalling the the whole wretched thing from scratch. Which wouldn’t be so onerous were it not for the dozens of apps that would need to reinstalled, plus the large amount of tweaking required to get the bloody thing the way I want it. Bah!
I believe that I can give you a solution to that. My office PC (as in, the one next to my desk in a far flung place called "the city") was toast. Wouldn't run any updates, programs took 15 seconds to start, those that would even start. I would have been quite happy to go and zap it and load it from scratch, it doesn't run much more than office, superputty and virtualbox, but then I found the solution....
download a windows iso, right click on it to mount it (no need to put it on a usb stick) then run the setup.exe on it. It will ask you if you want to keep your existing software after which apparently it replaces windows in-situ.
At the end it reboots, and will initially give you the welcome screen from a fresh windows installation but all your treasured programs are still installed.
I finally got round to trying this. It didn’t work :'( Now nuking Windows from orbit and starting over coz you can’t run Setup from Safe Mode even if you manage to get into it at all which is tricky when the Babbage-Engine declines to recognise your keyboard chiz.
Edit: also, why the bollocks does it want to use the small monitor over there ==> and not the big one here ^^^^ Bastardos…
Post by: Beardy on 02 January, 2022, 08:22:54 pm
1. Well apart from the occasional foray into trying to help the good doctor when her Babbage engine misbehaved.
2. She finished work on 23/12 and even before her contract of employment ended on 31/12 she was haranguing me to get a job because we needed the money. BUT YOU HAD A WELL PAID JOB I did not reply.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 January, 2022, 08:28:15 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 January, 2022, 01:11:51 am
* Why does everything assume you want to bung your files on the same device as Microsith’s? Why not just fucking ask ???
Post by: woollypigs on 03 January, 2022, 12:32:57 pm
At least now it is much easier to point to another drive.
Post by: Kim on 03 January, 2022, 12:52:46 pm
That and programmers are sloppy, and in the absence of a good means of abstraction, they're faced with the choice of either prompting the user for some configuration, or assuming that the device the OS booted from (or worse, the C: drive) is fine.
Post by: Feanor on 03 January, 2022, 01:29:10 pm
So another disk (or partition) does not in fact require a drive letter.
Actually, it can have both if you like, as per the screenshot below.
In the search box, type 'diskmgmt.msc' to start up the disk management console.
From there, r-click the drive or partition you want to mount, and select the option 'Change Drive Letters and Paths'.
From here, you can assign drive letters, or assign a mount-point.
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51796619503_f33166e0d7_z.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2mV6dpR)
NTFS_Mountpoint (https://flic.kr/p/2mV6dpR) by Ron Lowe (https://www.flickr.com/photos/62966413@N04/), on Flickr
So now, anything I save to C:\CrapIDontWantOnC actually goes to the mounted drive.
Post by: woollypigs on 03 January, 2022, 02:46:08 pm
"right-click any of the default folders (Document, photos etc) and click Properties.
On the Location tab, click Move, and then select the new location for that folder. (If you enter a path that doesn't exist, Windows will offer to create it for you.)
Click OK or Apply and you'll see a prompt asking whether you want to move files from the existing folder to the new location. In general, you should say yes to this request."
Taken from here https://www.windowscentral.com/how-move-default-user-folders-new-drive-windows-10
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 January, 2022, 04:44:49 pm
Edit: fixed that one. Many gigabytes of Stuffs relocated to sensible place :thumbsup:
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 January, 2022, 12:08:28 am
Cue more dicking around in the registry >:(
Post by: SoreTween on 07 January, 2022, 08:21:46 pm
JSON
JSONata
javascript
Sweet baby cheezes. Is it possible to achieve anything useful in these languages?
I've done xslt. And prolog. And I used to be able to read perl, my own >12 moths old or someone else's ;D Proper mindf##k languages. (plus other more normal languages)
Compare and contrast the three j-shitbiscuits with python which despite being an unholy mess of a godawful designed-by-committee disaster undergoing a protracted car crash is almost impossible not to achieve your desired goal with. I mean - a language where a wrongly placed space causes an error? WTAF? Yet you still, with only a couple of 'duh, that was dumb' errors you invariably achieve your goal in about 25% of the lines of code you might have expected.
Code: [Select]
import cluelessnoob.helperfunctions
import magicfunction as worldpeace
while true:
with(myinput):
solve(everything)
And voila, somehow it will.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 January, 2022, 11:43:04 am
I trust your automagical start of Edge on the box upstairs was just an aberration on your part? Edge is not my default browser. Nor is it on the list of Stuffs to start when the box is awakened from its slumbers. So it has no business starting up unless I tell it to. Make sure it doesn’t happen again or there'll be trouble, capeesh.
kthxbai
Post by: TheLurker on 08 January, 2022, 01:09:55 pm
Quote from: Mr Larrington
Edge is not my default browser.It is now. :evil:
Post by: TheLurker on 08 January, 2022, 01:30:43 pm
Quote from: SoreTween
... I mean - a language where a wrongly placed space causes an error?Not often that FORTRAN 77 crops up in this thread. :)
As for JSON, it's not nice, but it's not as bad as some of the truly *appalling* XML I've endured. I am however in complete agreement about Javascript. It's bloody vile
Post by: SoreTween on 10 January, 2022, 12:45:58 pm
Meanwhile....
Software engineers. Again. Well, some software engineers. Specifically, the kind of engineer who thinks it is helpful to contribute incomplete code to an open source project. And by incomplete what I really mean is barely f##king started.
Anyone used rtl_433? Great software, I've been using it to log my oil tank level for years. Recently I switched to using mqtt to get it's output into my database. For reasons not relevant to this story I found I needed to learn about mqtt Quality of Service levels, since rtl_433 does reliable mqtt I looked at the help. Sure enough:
Quote from: Latest release notes
Highlights
Added QoS to MQTT options (#1769)
So I download, build and install and it doesn't work. Since the oil tank only pings a reading every 68 minutes it took me a few days to establish qos=0 or 1 works, qos=2 does nothing. Wireshark confirmed when qos=2 the transaction is incomplete. So I posted a question on github and got an instant answer that totally contradicts the help: rtl_433 doesn't support qos options. So I looked at the pull request (https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433/commit/e3ec350287a79d1c9048849f9c2635186456e755#diff-15c3e6e2f6f7cb2019b5351c19b77cef45ad53a64b9452e1144ae13d3fd95a94). I'm no C coder but even I can see that all the useless, useless brain dead total fuckwit did was introduce the qos option to the command line and add it to the transmit packet. Not the first hint, not so much as a byte written to support the very different flow sequences qos 1 & 2 require. Yeah qos=1 works when there's no packet loss by fluke, qos=2 cannot work. He did a good job of publicising his zero effort contribution, it is documented in:
- README.md
- rtl_433.example.conf
- OPERATION.md
- the man pages
- the --help
You sir are as much use as a chimespanzee's wankstain. And when I'm leading the panzers to whitehall you will be the very first bloodstain on the tracks.
[edit]Temperature units corrected[/edit]
Post by: SoreTween on 10 January, 2022, 06:19:51 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 13 January, 2022, 01:46:44 pm
Edit
After two days of shit connection, struggling to work - and miserably watching netflix in 'pixel mode' last night, MrsC says "I wonder if it my backup program?"
Turns out she set up some (uknown) backup program and left it running. It has been consuming nearly all the Up and Down (why?) bandwidth.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 January, 2022, 08:59:27 pm
I see the big box telling me to log in or sign up you splat all over Stuffs that people link to is now without the little “X” in the corner to make it go away. And Chrome for Fondleslab won't let me edit the url to remove the “mobile.” bit to confuse you into thinking I'm using a Proper Computer.
Off you must fuck.
Post by: rafletcher on 14 January, 2022, 09:30:37 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 January, 2022, 02:52:12 am
This is doubly ironic as I strongly suspect it was Creative's driver update that b0rked it in the first place.
Post by: Ham on 18 January, 2022, 03:17:25 pm
I'm on a corporate mailing list that has been spammily sending out Security, System updates etc notification by the armload each day. Now this is annoying, but what could be more so? When one of the multi thousand people on this corporate list Replies All to say "Take me off this list". And is followed by many others. AND..... the sending system has a "bounce" for replies that - you guessed it - Replies All
I didn't want to send or read any mail today, anyhow.
Post by: woollypigs on 18 January, 2022, 04:31:32 pm
Staff arrived at work, since we had looked at the online news, before arriving at the office. The staff in the Sydney office was telling us, via ICQ, it was circulating. It was at hand if you applied the update that could remove it before you fired up your email.
Which we did and nothing really happened other than sharing news stories how other companies got hit hard.
Then the boss arrived in the Paris office, were I was at the time, and we all got infected emails from him via the various mailing list etc. As you said Ham sooo many middle management people started to hit reply all to tell us that there was a virus and we should be careful.
Until the IT fella found the Boss and unplugged him and a few others that was dumb enough to click
Then the UK office opened up and for some reason they were a wee bit dumber than the Paris office. Which caused our IT fella, the company's top IT guy, unplugged us from the internet and went desk to desk. I'm sure there were a few angry phone calls to the UK.
Then the US office opened ... and our IT fella went ballistic and walked out of the building, after he shut down the company mail server, as he had just managed to control the fall out in the UK and France.
Post by: Ham on 19 January, 2022, 03:41:48 pm
Post by: ian on 19 January, 2022, 04:56:28 pm
Post by: pcolbeck on 19 January, 2022, 05:20:21 pm
Turns out she set up some (uknown) backup program and left it running. It has been consuming nearly all the Up and Down (why?) bandwidth.
Probably running over TCP. For every so many packets sent you get an ack packet back from the other end to say it got those packets. The point being that the application doesn't have to worry about whether the other end is getting the data the underlying network protocol handles it, if the packets aren't acked the sender resends them. Its the "acks" that are filling up the download bandwidth.
A proper TCP implementation has a thing called sliding windows where on a good connection it increases the number of packets it sends before requiring an ack. You can end up sending 50 for 1 ack for example. A bad TCP implementation (Windows 2000 was rubbish I haven't put a sniffer on later versions and it would max out at 3 packets per ack) or drops in the path between you and the device your sending teh file to will result in the window size being small or even 1 packet per ack.
Post by: Kim on 19 January, 2022, 05:31:54 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 January, 2022, 11:38:40 pm
…nothing happens. And all of the suggestions on the Internets for the remediation of this state of affairs have this in common: THEY DON'T FUCKING WORK >:(
Now, the Creative one is probably not that difficult to find and install manually but when you bung the name of the Intel one into a FWSE, the first result is Microsith, specifically a set of pages offering:
- 237 identically-labelled entries, and
- no means of determining which is the one I am supposed to install
Moreover, until they are installed, it would seem that Microsith will not install any other updates it’s discovered in the meantime. Get with the program, O Great Satan Of Redmond, or it'll be time for you and Mr Shovel to get jiggy.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 January, 2022, 08:07:53 pm
That e-mail from Professor Larrington was apparently received at 16:30 yesterday but only now shows up on my devices and yes, it was quite important, actually. The other addresses I use with Thunderbird and iOS Mail work flawlessly, but not you. Just! Fuck! Off! And! Die!
Post by: spesh on 30 January, 2022, 05:20:03 pm
O hai Twitter!
I see the big box telling me to log in or sign up you splat all over Stuffs that people link to is now without the little “X” in the corner to make it go away.
I encountered this for the first time today - I'd get about 5-6 posts down someone's timeline and then get the pop-up you describe. >:(
Mind you, getting shut out like that is more honest of the fuckers and less evil/annoying than what Tw@tter was inflicting on me for the last two weeks.
The "log-in/sign up" pop-up had a "X" button, but clicking on it sent me back back to the previous page on Tw@tter. Yes, I could get round it by opening every tweet in a new tab, but the faffage and time wasted meant hilarity absolutely failed to ensue...
Quote
Off you must fuck.
This, in spades. If the hoofbungling turboclunges are trying to persuade me to sign-up just so I can read the accounts I've bookmarked because they had useful content, they couldn't have been more wrong in how they have gone about it.
Post by: robgul on 04 February, 2022, 09:41:40 am
The taskbar icons (that's the ones on the left at the bottom for frequently used progs etc) don't appear when the machine boots up . . . BUT when I do a Power/Restart they appear - likewise if the power is switched off at the mains and then comes on again the icons appear [I have all the IT stuff on a Hive socket that switches everything off at about 2300 and back on at 0630 to, possibly, save some juice cost. I normally close down the PC at the end of the day but if I don't it boots with the icons]
I've been through about 5 or 6 possibilities suggested by Mr Google's search facility - and no change? It seems that it's a known issue . . . anyone else with the symptoms and a working remedy?
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 04 February, 2022, 10:14:26 am
Post by: Zipperhead on 04 February, 2022, 02:40:41 pm
Post by: Ham on 04 February, 2022, 03:32:10 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 February, 2022, 02:00:04 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 February, 2022, 03:07:43 pm
- Hung while I was down at Fort Larrington for a Several of days, and
- Had to be restarted after a reboot last night, and
- Slowed to an even slower than usual crawl this morning
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 February, 2022, 02:10:22 am
Post by: Kim on 12 February, 2022, 11:26:29 am
Nuke from orbit for the second time in six fucking weeks called for >:( Bollocksbollocksbollocks.
Makes you nostalgic for Windows 98. Almost.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 February, 2022, 12:07:23 pm
Post by: woollypigs on 12 February, 2022, 12:45:40 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 February, 2022, 01:12:36 pm
Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrggggggggh!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 February, 2022, 03:08:41 pm
FFS >:(
Post by: TheLurker on 12 February, 2022, 03:28:02 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 February, 2022, 04:11:35 pm
Longer answer: I know nothing of emulators but suspect the bitsteepfulness of the learning curve would give me more sleepless nights than I can handle, especially coz it’s mostly used for gaming.
Some parts of the Internets suggest it may be a memory thing; replacing the memory will be cheaper than replacing the whole box but it’s still a PITA.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 February, 2022, 10:46:06 pm
* having awoken it from its slumbers for its six-monthly update frenzy.
Post by: TimC on 14 February, 2022, 01:52:46 am
Post by: perpetual dan on 14 February, 2022, 07:40:35 am
Bluddy main desktop has fried its C drive (M2) for the second time. Having to download Win11 again and order a new 1TB M2 drive.I think I’d be wondering about faults or lack of cooling at this point.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 February, 2022, 11:12:51 am
Bah! It is slightly larger than my old b0rked iPad and thus will not fit in its case >:(
* actually it's “Space Grey” and therefore not that shiny at all.
Post by: TimC on 14 February, 2022, 01:09:46 pm
Bluddy main desktop has fried its C drive (M2) for the second time. Having to download Win11 again and order a new 1TB M2 drive.I think I’d be wondering about faults or lack of cooling at this point.
The drive is fine. It was a slightly over-enthusiastic application of a WinZip Utilities Suite clean-up that borked some of the boot files - in a way which Windows couldn't repair (I won't be using that app again!). The vast majority of my stuff is on other drives, so reinstalling Win 11 from a flashdrive is fairly painless, apart from the need to rebuild the registry.
Post by: spesh on 14 February, 2022, 01:46:16 pm
O hai Twitter!
I see the big box telling me to log in or sign up you splat all over Stuffs that people link to is now without the little “X” in the corner to make it go away.
Update: I managed nearly two weeks of avoiding the "Pop-up of Doom" by viewing Twitter timelines in a private window, but the shelf-life of that work-around appears to have expired yesterday, chiz.
As far as reading Tweets goes, I've just had a play with a couple of links recently posted in the Dread Lurgi thread:
WRT: https://twitter.com/JeremyFarrar/status/1492238922604322818?s=20&t=YcCPIpBcunCJi_5WApLgFA
Opening in a private window triggers the "Pop-up of Doom" when I scroll down past "More Tweets".
WRT: https://twitter.com/YouAreLobbyLud/status/1492217374686457856
I could scroll down the thread and replies without any issues, either in a new tab or a private window.
HTH
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 February, 2022, 02:20:53 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 February, 2022, 03:03:44 pm
Look, when I move those messages into that folder it’s because that’s where I want to keep them. So don’t put them back in the fucking Inbox as soon as my back is turned, m'kay?
Kthxbai
Post by: Kim on 14 February, 2022, 04:48:20 pm
Post by: Kim on 16 February, 2022, 09:37:50 pm
ETA: Also, people on forums who don't read properly and reply to "When I configure X, Y doesn't work" with "This is how you configure X"
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 February, 2022, 01:37:59 am
With great trepidation Mr Larrington installs some Intel “check ur drivers” thing, which asks for a restart, which was where the whole thing terminally b0rked itself last time. And Lo! The box restarted, went off to Intel's webby SCIENCE, checked Stuffs and pronounced everything bang up to fucking date >:( Does this make the pending download go away?
No. No, it does not. Sadly the plague will probably prevent me from launching an arson attack on the Beast of Redmond even if I do manage to get to USAnia this year. Bah!
* Answer: they've moved it to the poxy App Store where it doesn’t work unless you’ve installed the DCH version of the driver which Nvidia don’t actually bother to tell you about, the witless dugongs.
Post by: TheLurker on 18 February, 2022, 09:12:21 pm
What do you mean the reply-to address can't be verified? It was fine this morning when I sent an e-mail message. It was fine for the 20 years before this morning. The BCS has not folded its tents and stolen silently away into the night in the last 12 hours so sort it out you bunch of blithering idiots.
It gets better, if you clear the reply-to address in settings, then rather than assuming it ought to use the base yahoo e-mail address it wails that you have to set one. Hopeless.
And is there any help *anywhere* on their many pages that suggests corrective actions you may take? That was a rhetorical question in case you hadn't guessed.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 February, 2022, 09:21:05 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 18 February, 2022, 09:39:32 pm
Having stuck resolutely to the olde style unadorned by bells & whistles web-mail and only enabling the abomination that shall not be named when wishing to send attachments I have found it to be quite adequate. I shouldn't complain too much, after all I don't pay a great deal for it, checks... hmm ah, yes precisely nothing*.
*No cash anyway, heaven only knows what use they make of the drivel that passes for information in the messages I send.
Post by: perpetual dan on 20 February, 2022, 07:13:11 pm
I’ve followed a handful of art and cycling accounts and made one hello world post. No cross over with fb, some with other services. Now they’re doing that creepy thing where they suggest real world friends that you wouldn’t get just from the accounts I’ve followed. Which can fuck off.
And it can fuck off some more because they’ve blocked me from following any more accounts.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 February, 2022, 11:01:17 pm
- tells the commenter that comments are moderated before publication, and
- is well over two years old?
Post by: perpetual dan on 25 February, 2022, 10:19:54 am
Also, when I look at the "whats new" it should tell me what's actually new, not "a software update can include but is not limited to". I know what an update is FFS.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 February, 2022, 06:08:43 pm
Q: What kind of a moron posts a spammy comment to a blog post that:A: No idea, but some slack-witted turbocunt did so this evening to the Automatic Diary ???
- tells the commenter that comments are moderated before publication, and
- is well over two years old?
It gets worse. Some cretin just submitted a comment to a post from 2009 :facepalm:
And another thing: fondleslab, why are you putting tokens in random places in posts to this forum rather than where the fucking cursor is ???
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 March, 2022, 06:12:18 pm
WTF is that all about, eh?
Post by: SoreTween on 05 March, 2022, 08:58:59 am
WTF is that all about, eh?
My guess would be authentication. You've rebuilt the big bugger with the same old username and password but something knows it is a different user. Check the file permissions & groups on the nas first, the new user may have read & write but not execute permission. Otoh it could be something on the winblows box only letting you execute files you've created. That's a world of pain I'm happy to say I can't help with having walked away from microsoft.
A recursive chown any help?
Back in the server 2008 days thanks to a project I was on I got fairly proficient at small domains, group policies, active directory and all that shizzle. I almost converted my home environment to a domain mainly to a) eliminate authentication issues and b) simplify regular password changes1. Transition to server 2012 when it landed would have been ok. But then Windows 8 &
1Fashionable back then.
Post by: CommuteTooFar on 05 March, 2022, 11:23:14 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 March, 2022, 12:38:57 pm
Edit: also there doesn’t appear to be any way of accessing the thing from the command line chiz. The instructions from Seagate are very simple; go to “Services” in the webby interface and poke the button to enable SSH. Which in my case I have not got ???
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 March, 2022, 01:06:49 am
I see you are “Unable to cache model instances”. Would it be asking too much for you to tell me WHICH model instances you are unable to cache, that I might, y'know, try to figure out how to fix it rather than just relying on guesswork?
Kthxbai…
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 April, 2022, 10:44:43 pm
Post by: Kim on 08 April, 2022, 11:14:34 am
Post by: pcolbeck on 08 April, 2022, 05:12:11 pm
Our long-serving Procurve switch appears to have some sort of droid-rot, where it pretends to work but stops switching packets on some of the ports until power-cycled. Bah!
Cisco Catalyst 2900s did that when they were brand new. Took them about two weeks from out the box then they downed tools and just stopped until power cycled. That was very embarrassing for Cisco. I expect the IOS-XE coding gnomes didn't get a bonus that quarter and weren't allowed out until they finished the patch.
Post by: Kim on 08 April, 2022, 05:22:07 pm
Post by: Kim on 09 April, 2022, 02:19:40 pm
Update: It appears to be gremlins. >:(
Post by: ian on 14 April, 2022, 05:59:46 pm
Lordy, the hours on the phone to alternately Singapore and then Ireland sorting out a replacement because I can't be arsed traipsing to a store. To be fair, they offered to replace it without quibble, and I could have simply dropped it.
And probably, after all of this, I will likely drop it. Into a sand-blaster knowing my luck.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 April, 2022, 12:41:39 pm
Post by: ian on 19 April, 2022, 01:01:06 pm
More of a firstworldgrumble really about the pain-in-the-arsery of modernity. I bought a swanky new iPad Air and I was very happy with it except it came with a small scratch near the volume control (which I belatedly noticed but was sure I didn't do and looked like a bit of a tool mark from cutting the holes). Ordinarily, I'm not so precious but I'm usually minded to trade in old devices and they'd knock umpteen pounds off the trade-in and well, it wasn't cheap so I had paid the price of perfection. It's just a phone call innit.
Lordy, the hours on the phone to alternately Singapore and then Ireland sorting out a replacement because I can't be arsed traipsing to a store. To be fair, they offered to replace it without quibble, and I could have simply dropped it.
And probably, after all of this, I will likely drop it. Into a sand-blaster knowing my luck.
In the end, rather than faff with couriers (which I'm not sure was going to happen, given the lack of follow-up email with details), I wandered to the Apple Store and they gave me a new one, no questions asked. Not dropped it yet.
Post by: FifeingEejit on 19 April, 2022, 01:33:08 pm
No amount of faffage with memory and shit will persuade a fresh Windows install on the Estate Office PC to get as far as allowing me into Windows. Our old friend PAGE FAULT IN NON-PAGED AREA again. Time to bite the bullet and get a new one. Bollocksbollocksbollocks >:(If not memory then probably a Mainboard or CPU cache issue
Sent from my BKL-L09 using Tapatalk
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 April, 2022, 02:58:37 pm
Replacement not-a-Crucial SSD ordered for next-day delivery; it’s a metric fuckton cheaper than a new PC and I can always find a use for it if the problem turns out to be summat else.
Edit: It is summat else. All that faffing with very tiny screws and sub-desk grovelling for nowt. Arseburgers. Time for a shop >:(
Post by: lissotriton on 02 May, 2022, 02:29:35 pm
Seems to be a quite common issue with this model (TP-Link TL-SG105). Maybe could replace the PSU, but a decent one would cost about as much as a new switch.
Or any (cheap) switches that can run off USB power? Would mean one less plug required.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 May, 2022, 11:29:13 am
Was that space originally in A, FruitCo? Why, no! No, it was not. So fuck off with your attempt to be “helpful”, because it isn’t helpful if you have to fanny around trying to get rid of the damn' thing with stubby peasant fingers. Just paste what I copied. No more and no less.
Post by: ian on 12 May, 2022, 01:01:59 pm
Checks phone. Really, 45 fucking GB of system clutter? What, are you a teenager? Clean up your shit.
Post by: Kim on 12 May, 2022, 01:35:58 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 May, 2022, 05:30:00 pm
What’s that you say? The laptop doesn’t detect that monitor either? Shuffle Big Monitor out of the way, plug in Small Monitor…
Yay! I haz a Windows :thumbsup: Big Minotaur had better not be b0rked, or there will be harsh language. I haven’t yet installed the turbo nutter bastard video card out of the old one but I would expect the mobo's onboard graphics wossname to be able to talk to it ???
Now, Microsith, I told you that I did not want a trial version of Orifice 365 when doing the initial startup. Why, then, did you decide to install it anyway? Bad Microsith.
Next I have to figure out where to put the disks wot I want to xfer from the old machine. There are three. Of them. How many slots are there in the Thing You Put Disks In? Two. I may have to get creative with the d/s tape again chiz.
Post by: Jaded on 17 May, 2022, 11:23:40 pm
I checked the LaCie website, but quickly realised I needed to check the Seagate one. Result - item under warranty, so sent off...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 May, 2022, 02:24:43 pm
Edit: also there doesn’t appear to be any way of accessing the thing from the command line chiz. The instructions from Seagate are very simple; go to “Services” in the webby interface and poke the button to enable SSH. Which in my case I have not got ???
Hurrah! I haz discovered how to enable ssh on the NAS in question :thumbsup:
Post by: ian on 18 May, 2022, 02:40:44 pm
*some dud file had been created, empty but spanning 138 GB, I presume the index somehow got corrupted though why it couldn't fix it, who knows, so it locked the disk in read-only mode. A most pointless expenditure of £80 earth pounds.
Post by: woollypigs on 18 May, 2022, 03:32:08 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 May, 2022, 05:29:30 pm
Post by: Gattopardo on 18 May, 2022, 11:43:22 pm
Seem to having issues with libre office and pages transfering to gmail.
Post by: Beardy on 19 May, 2022, 05:18:28 pm
fast forward to today, 4 yeats after I left the business, and 2 or so years since they caught up with me and stopped my free broadband. Ive been with Plusnet about two years now, but the recent economy drive has had me looking at what I'm paying. Twice as much as what most providers, INCLUDING Plusnet, are currently offering to charge for the same service! To add insult to financial injury, it would seem that I've lost about 20% of the download speed I used to get and most providers suggest that what I'm now getting what they'd expect. OK, I accept that a new wind of honesty has swept through the industry (Was blown by the regulator) but why would that also alter what I'm now seeing when I do a speed check.
To be fair to Plusnet, they do offer me a new contract at the current rates when I checked on their website. However, they are offering the top tier package with speeds I used to get, though even their speed checker says I can only expect the new lower speeds. Gits!
Oh, and I've also got a similar situation with my mobile contracts, and just to make things especially difficult to compare, nearly all providers offer discounts when you get more than one service from them. sheesh.
I mean, I do know it's complicated, I was often involved in trying to define the systems trying to present this stuff to customers, but it seems they've not got much better since I left.
Post by: ian on 19 May, 2022, 05:23:34 pm
Post by: Jaded on 19 May, 2022, 05:23:59 pm
Seagate SSD gone a bit funny. Couldn't be unmanned from the Mac, and started freezing bits of the OS. No amount of command line stuff, or specialist software would sort it. The files were still accessible.
I checked the LaCie website, but quickly realised I needed to check the Seagate one. Result - item under warranty, so sent off...
And they have dispatched a replacement already!
‘Hob Knob’ the SSD will rise again!!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 May, 2022, 05:41:15 pm
Edit: Dunno whether it was trying a different DP cable or plugging in the one which connects the minotaur's USB ports to the Babbage-Engine, but it's working. Which has saved me a Several of hundred of the BRITONS' pounds :thumbsup:
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 22 May, 2022, 12:53:53 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 May, 2022, 01:10:10 pm
Bah!
Edit: What’s that, Messrs. Western and Digital? You're knocking out 6TB NASen at forty quid off? Get thee behind me, Stan, lest I am tempted to pension off both FATBOY and TUBBYJOHNSON (who has been slower than the Slow Children since day 1)!
Post by: Zipperhead on 27 May, 2022, 05:18:39 pm
No, data light continuously flashes and the big printer manages about 1 page *per minute*
WTaF is going on here?
Post by: woollypigs on 27 May, 2022, 06:09:39 pm
Post by: Kim on 27 May, 2022, 09:06:26 pm
WTaF is going on here?
Printers were sent from hell to make us miserable. (https://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers)
Post by: ian on 27 May, 2022, 09:11:28 pm
Post by: Kim on 27 May, 2022, 09:14:20 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 May, 2022, 12:31:23 pm
Post by: Beardy on 31 May, 2022, 12:56:02 pm
I've been a long time occasional user of Sketchup, and today decided to do some drawing that needed1 3D modelling. So I fired up Sketchup. Well I tried to fire it up. The version you are using on YOUR computer is no longer valid. You can pay us £200 a year to continue to use our software on your computer or you can log on to our computer and do your work there for free as before.
Well, I aint paying £200pa to use a piece of software I might use once or twice a year nd I'm really not happy with using there computer so I guess I need to look for an alternative. I'd be tempted to pay the asking price of £90 to use it on my fondleslab, if it was a one off payment, but again I'm not paying that per annum.
Bastards.
Post by: TimC on 02 June, 2022, 01:01:20 am
Edit. Ah. It might not be any more. clicky (https://www.howtogeek.com/720402/psa-you-can-still-download-the-old-free-version-of-sketchup/). That’s a bummer. I use it every day. Might have to learn Blender properly now!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 June, 2022, 01:11:34 am
Post by: Beardy on 02 June, 2022, 04:12:12 pm
SketchUp Make 2017 is still available and still free.Yes, it complains when you try and use it, then does start but bombs out after 15 minutes or so.
Edit. Ah. It might not be any more. clicky (https://www.howtogeek.com/720402/psa-you-can-still-download-the-old-free-version-of-sketchup/). That’s a bummer. I use it every day. Might have to learn Blender properly now!
Post by: TimC on 03 June, 2022, 10:27:02 am
SketchUp Make 2017 is still available and still free.Yes, it complains when you try and use it, then does start but bombs out after 15 minutes or so.
Edit. Ah. It might not be any more. clicky (https://www.howtogeek.com/720402/psa-you-can-still-download-the-old-free-version-of-sketchup/). That’s a bummer. I use it every day. Might have to learn Blender properly now!
I think that's an issue with something else. SketchUp Make 2017 has been withdrawn from distribution, but it's working perfectly well on all 4 of my computers:
(https://i.imgur.com/yt3FKLT.jpg)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 June, 2022, 11:36:14 am
Code: [Select]
$num(%discnumber%,2)-$num(%track%,2) - %title%
when they should beCode: [Select]
$num(%discnumber%,2)-$num(%track%,2) %title%
This is, of course, Wrong. But if I just rename them then DJ Random will not be able to find them and I would have to tell iTunes where each of them is, which is unutterably tedious. If I remove them from the iTunes library and re-add them their play counts will all be set to zero and DJ Random will play Stuffs he's already played since the last Great Reset, which is also Wrong. So now I have to confect some SCIENCE to assemble a playlist of the files which are:
- Wrong, and
- Have a non-zero play count
Or wait until the next Great Reset, which could be years away chiz.
Bollocksbollocksbollocks >:(
Post by: SoreTween on 10 June, 2022, 04:22:35 pm
Switch on again, almost through the raid bios boot & click, off again. More bad swears but a clue.
One more time switch on, click, off. Hmmmm. I'll give it 20mins.
20 mins later boot into bios & the cpu temp is galloping up through the high 50s & 60s.
That'll be my lovely quiet socket 775 water cooler dead then.
Bollocks bollocks bollocks bollocks bollocks bollocks bollocks bollocks bollocks. Bollocks.
Post by: Feanor on 16 June, 2022, 10:00:27 am
On your vet's standards tables, there's no such time as 0:34:60.
You did just blow up my Evening League vets-on-standard spreadsheet.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 June, 2022, 12:01:39 am
You must, between you, employ a significant proportion of the world’s supply of Clever Buggers so if you could get some of them together to arrange matters such that doing complicated Stuffs in Excel — like typing, copying and pasting, you know, really CPU-bashing things — doesn’t cause iTunes to start behaving like a fucking Dansette on a sailing yot in a Force 9 why, that'd be just swell! FruitCo, I'm looking at you in particular because iThings used not to do this and now it does and the Excel in question is from Office 20-fucking-13.
You useless cretinous morons.
Post by: TheLurker on 23 June, 2022, 08:14:13 pm
Quote from: Mr Larrington
o hai Microsith o hai Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia!The evidence in this thread would rather suggest this is *not* the case. That... or they are employed, but solely to prevent other companies using their talents and they are kept locked away and absolutely forbidden to fix any of the crappy rubbish.
You must, between you, employ a significant proportion of the world’s supply of Clever Buggers...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 June, 2022, 01:53:00 am
If I haz a link to a particular thread on ur forum stored elsewhere, and I paste it into Chrome, please do not return the message “You are not allowed to read posts on this forum” when what has actually happened is that your The Mods have removed the topic on account of it breaking Teh Roolz by asking for Money. Because there is a big fucking difference between a “topic” and a “forum” and you could just have had a 404 which would have made it immediately apparent that the target url wasn’t there any more rather than making me think I'd been booted off the entire forum for Transgressing teh Unwritten Law like wot you really did do to my chum Ciprian. Or something.
You useless cretinous morons.
Kthxbai
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 June, 2022, 03:25:55 pm
Gagh!
Post by: Wombat on 28 June, 2022, 03:18:26 pm
Please stop trying to kill my lovely but aged Sony Vaio laptop!
I shut it down a week or so ago, and waited to be sure the little green light had gone off, so it really was off, but no, I fish it out this morning, because I want to connect my Aftershokz headphones to it, and its as flat as a flat thing that has been steamrollered to deth.
The reason becomes evident when I plug in the charger, it had evidently done a Windows update secretly, which meant it wasn't off at all, it was playing with itself. What benefits did I gain, from eventually getting it fired up with this wondrous new update? The bloody bluetooth was dead, that's what. That's a really useful update, killing the bluetooth, but not as bad as its previous habit of killing the wifi (on a laptop that annoyingly doesn't have an ethernet port, and relies totally on wifi). I eventually re-find device manager, which is harder since control panel was forcefully removed from my clutching fingers, and find it claims not to have bluetooth, and it has several "unknown device" entries. Finding the bluetooth drivers for an 8 yr old laptop is sketchy, but I find a hopeful looking one using the desktop, after having to download a utility that will actually tell me the model number of the laptop (I have nothing with its model number on it), and I try to email the driver to myself to pick up on the laptop. No dice, gmail refuses to send .exe files... rummage for USB stick, take it to laptop, and yes, it actually installs, and actually works! Can I have that hour of my life back please, Microsoft?
Post by: ian on 04 July, 2022, 10:52:16 am
Who seriously designs a system that makes you change your password and then refuses to acknowledge it? I mean, that's a significant fucking fail.
Post by: woollypigs on 04 July, 2022, 10:57:14 am
Post by: ian on 04 July, 2022, 11:02:07 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 July, 2022, 11:19:13 am
* See “Fecking Div” thread.
Post by: ian on 04 July, 2022, 11:36:03 am
Post by: rafletcher on 04 July, 2022, 11:51:49 am
Had to enter characters 1, 2 & 5 from my “memorable wossname” on Horseybank's login page three times just now because the bloody thing kept jumping one character up the drop-down list while I wasn’t concentrating. No wonder I overpaid* them >:(
My wifes login page from TwatWest has a habit of pre-populating the first box of he PIN with Dog knows what, that has to be cleared using the backspace key prior to entry.
Post by: ian on 04 July, 2022, 12:05:44 pm
Oh just fuck off.
Post by: Diver300 on 07 July, 2022, 11:07:24 am
The wireless adaptor in my laptop needed turning off and back on again. Hey, these things happen.
The grumble comes from what I needed to do to turn it off and back on.
Turning airplane mode on and off didn't do it.
Turning the whole computer off and on didn't do it.
It was fixed by disabling and enabling the adaptor in the control panel.
I really don't understand why the computer didn't do that itself when turned off or put into airplane mode.
Post by: Tim Hall on 07 July, 2022, 11:21:51 am
Quote
This booking has been cancelled. If you believe this is an error, please call customer services on
That's the entirity of the message.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 July, 2022, 11:35:20 am
Post by: Diver300 on 27 July, 2022, 09:53:39 pm
It was only on the 10th attempt that the Avast pop-up told me what was going on, and I was then able to whitelist ionos.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 August, 2022, 07:10:07 pm
That e-mail address is a perfectly good one so why does your stupid Premier Inn wifi not allow me to log in? With it? But without an error message or other explanation because that would be too complicated. Enter! Yahoo! Address! And! It! Worked! Straight! Away!
Gits.
Post by: Kim on 08 August, 2022, 07:58:09 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 August, 2022, 08:13:45 pm
Post by: Jaded on 09 August, 2022, 12:16:20 am
Thing about being logged into Premier Inn WiFi is that you can't really tell the difference if you aren't...
This is.
THE.
TRUE.
(PS, sorry for channelling Trust Liz)
Post by: Tim Hall on 16 August, 2022, 10:18:09 am
Formatting dates in Mailmerge shouldn't be that difficult. Really, it shouldn't.
kthxbai
Post by: Wombat on 18 August, 2022, 04:36:54 pm
Setup is fine, I create share, and folders, all OK.
Then I try to copy my media, starting with the music, from the old one to the new.
Windoze only allows me to copy it an album at a time, and there are bloody hundreds of them!
Why can't I drag an entire category such as "blues" across into "music"? So I manually create each frigging folder in the new NAS, then drag each effing album across one at a time. That's today and most of tomorrow spoken for, then...
I gave up on doing it from the old NAS anyway, as its so slow, and I'm doing it from the backup USB3 drive instead.
Next challenge will be getting the Sonos to talk to the new NAS. Wish me luck, I may be gone some time...
Post by: FifeingEejit on 18 August, 2022, 04:40:18 pm
There does seem to be limitations to what you can do on SMB shares in gui
Sent from my IV2201 using Tapatalk
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 August, 2022, 06:04:39 pm
Post by: lissotriton on 18 August, 2022, 06:45:58 pm
Or plug your USB drive into the new NAS, and copy off that.
Post by: Wombat on 19 August, 2022, 07:52:03 pm
All copied over the hard way now, and various SM related issues fought and partially won. The Sonos copped a right strop, and gave me a silly windows related error message, which is daft as neither the Sonos, the NAS, or my Android phone uses Windows. turned out that my oldish Sonos insists on using SMB1, which is frowned upon, but the Synology NAS can be told to do.
In a minute I'll try to see if the TV's android apps can access the photos on it yet, it wouldn't yesterday.
Post by: Pingu on 19 August, 2022, 08:05:12 pm
...turned out that my oldish Sonos insists on using SMB1, which is frowned upon...
That was the problem with seeing a USB drive on our router and it's not even that old :demon:
Post by: Kim on 20 August, 2022, 12:10:57 am
As an... Audax UK member
I want to... repeatedly log into the audax.uk website
So that... I stay logged in to the audax.uk website
Post by: Tim Hall on 21 August, 2022, 09:15:43 pm
Post by: Jurek on 21 August, 2022, 09:37:26 pm
I needed to find out if there was a branch of NatWest bank in $TOWN. Went to the NatWest website and clicked the branch locator. Then got asked to fill in poxy CAPTCA. FFS. I'll find another way.Natwest = Welcome :)
ETA - Everybody should watch Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil' to see why everything has got as fucked up as it has.
Really.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 August, 2022, 09:46:36 pm
Post by: Jurek on 21 August, 2022, 09:51:53 pm
Just had a over-in-the-blink-of-an-eye power cut. Which seems to have killed my router utterly to DETH >:(Merde.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 August, 2022, 10:37:21 pm
Edit: Most of the network disks have come back. Time to investigate the Cupboard o'Stuffs.
Edit 2: The duration of the outage was such that the clock on the microwave is still showing as near as those things ever get to the right time ???
Edit 3: The network disks have disappeared overnight chiz.
Post by: ScumOfTheRoad on 22 August, 2022, 11:39:56 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 August, 2022, 12:07:58 pm
* or so the phone claims
Edit: Kind of made the Bluetooth thing work but Bluetooth DETH Rays seem insufficiently powerful to pass through the coffee table so I have to put the phone somewhere it can’t be used for anything else.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 August, 2022, 12:46:03 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 September, 2022, 10:02:52 pm
np: Deadhead (Acoustic Version) ~ Devin Townsend
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 September, 2022, 05:03:57 pm
• backup of it slowed to a crawl
• Thunderbox – which keeps its data thereon – is playing silly buggers
• the system process appears to be trying to copy a file to it with an average response time > 5000 ms
• Ccleaner doesn’t like trying to empty its Recycle Bin
And so on. Piss!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 September, 2022, 12:24:59 pm
The needle of my Whymeometer is bent around the end stop >:(
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 September, 2022, 10:05:44 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 September, 2022, 06:00:20 pm
Pack it in with the random switching off of message rules, m'kay!
That is all.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 01 October, 2022, 12:37:50 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 10 October, 2022, 01:24:00 pm
pdf-link-checker is a freeware tool that seems to get good reviews.
Blast, can't install on my work linux, because I don't have SU (needed for adding pip etc).
There is a Windows version.
Nearly 2 hours later, I have python and all the prereq installed. Try running it - nope, fails, because it is Python 2 code (not the python 3.6-compatible code it claims).
Start trying to jibble it to python 3, realise I've wasted most of the day on this crap.
Download and use a free trial of some windows software. Takes 5 min to get installed and running.
And this, folks, is why a lot of people don't like open sauce software.
Post by: Pingu on 10 October, 2022, 01:39:50 pm
...And this, folks, is why a lot of people don't like open sauce software.
You probably need an HP machine.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 10 October, 2022, 02:07:04 pm
...And this, folks, is why a lot of people don't like open sauce software.
You probably need an HP machine.
I HAVE AN HP LAPTOP AND IT IS CARP!
Never, ever have I had so much trouble with wifi (and I'm not alone, many fellow employees have same problem).
HP does not go with everything. It is fussy.
Post by: ian on 10 October, 2022, 02:23:44 pm
Post by: philip on 10 October, 2022, 03:10:27 pm
Blast, can't install on my work linux, because I don't have SU (needed for adding pip etc).It is possible to install and run pip without root. Start with https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py, download the script, run
Code: [Select]
python3 get-pip.py as non root and it will setup a pip environment in your home directory.
Post by: Kim on 10 October, 2022, 06:39:11 pm
usually after spending a couple of hours reading various websites, which mostly consisted of people calling other people stupid for asking a question, despite it being 2022, any open source technical forum seems to be 103% male, unhelpfully angry and with the social skills of rocks.
To be fair, many of the sensible non-males tend to use gender-neutral usernames in technical spaces, to side-step the whole not being taken seriously by people with the social skills of rocks thing. I appreciate it doesn't help with the 103% perception, but, you know, we've got stuff to get done too.
Post by: TheLurker on 10 October, 2022, 08:09:53 pm
Quote from: ian
... mostly consisted of people calling other people stupid for asking a question, despite it being 2022, anyBit unfair on rocks, but otherwise a fair summary of the situation.open sourcetechnical forum seems to be 103% male, unhelpfully angry and with the social skills of rocks.
Post by: TheLurker on 14 October, 2022, 08:05:51 pm
I have some dxf files (cut files for a toy aeroplane parts FWIW) which I need to *cough* rationalise as the svg to dxf conversion from Inkscape is almost but not quite exact. The UI for LibreCAD is an unintuitive hot mess, the documentation* isn't much better, and I have now spent several hours trying (and failing) to work out out to resize a rectangle. You'd think given all the drawing packages out there this would be a piece of cake, wouldn't you?
I'd use FreeCAD except... it crashes on any attempt to open a dxf file. Despite it being a supported format. *sigh*
*Yes, it is that bad. You actually have to RTFM to have even the vaguest hope of using it
Post by: Pickled Onion on 14 October, 2022, 09:26:40 pm
Diagnosis: fucked.
Damage: 560 notes.
Prognosis: at least a week in a coma.
It’s just under 2 years old so out of warranty so pursuing the consumer rights angle with 🍏
Post by: ian on 14 October, 2022, 09:41:16 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 14 October, 2022, 10:03:41 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 October, 2022, 11:27:43 am
Also, the “Report Ad” function on the iOS app is b0rked.
Useless workshy twats.
Post by: ian on 18 October, 2022, 02:27:51 pm
OK, it was my fault, I made the mistake of zealously removing Adobe CC, which means I'm forever cursed with four error popups ever time I open an office app bleating about VBA not finding a couple of Adobe components related to PDF creation.
Firstly, VBA can fuck right back to 2004 where it belongs.
Secondly, PDF has been integral to MacOS for about a decade now, it doesn't need Adobe components to create a PDF from Word.
Thirdly, the fucking ribbon which is invoking this shit in the first place, via the Acrobat option that I never wanted. And what was under this ribbon option. One fucking thing: Create PDF. Yes, I needed an entire ribbon for that. You took a travesty of UI design and make it worse.
Fourthly, Office, which won't let me remove the add-in or the ribbon component because it comes back like a fucking zombie every time I reopen the app.
I finally though I'd solve the issue by removing office completely and reinstalling from scratch. Run time error 53, ian, ha ha HA.
Honestly, I feel like going Full Liam on this shit.
Post by: ian on 18 October, 2022, 02:31:35 pm
Unts.
So yeah, I have to create a symbolic link. You made me remember Unix. I feel dirty now.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 18 October, 2022, 02:53:15 pm
Also OneDrive, because in 2022, Microsoft still can't handle the concept of a drive not called C:
Unts.
So yeah, I have to create a symbolic link. You made me remember Unix. I feel dirty now.
Eh? That makes no sense. I have drives C, H, Z, Y on my machine.
Onedrive isn't a drive. It is cloud storage. The latest iteration seems to use Sharepoint under the hood, which is like caterpillar tracks on an F1 car.
Post by: ian on 18 October, 2022, 02:58:32 pm
I just used C: so I could make a cheap unt joke.
Post by: ScumOfTheRoad on 18 October, 2022, 03:06:17 pm
We use OneDrive. You can get a view of the same files in Sharepoint or in Teams. I guess the foundations are, as you say, Sharepoint.
Post by: ian on 18 October, 2022, 03:35:37 pm
I just wanted a nice drag-and-droppable drive between my various computers, à la Dropbox. But I wanted to dump any local storage on the external drive that lives for this stuff. Evidently not possible. No idea why, any other service can use a removable drive.
Anyway, I can survive without it, it's one of those typical MS annoyances that seems designed at source purely to vex, and I'm getting around to returning my Windows laptop to be recycled for some poor sap.
Post by: ian on 19 October, 2022, 10:03:59 am
Eternal damnation for everyone involved in that too.
Post by: ian on 19 October, 2022, 12:24:44 pm
Also, fucking webpages that make you create an account, so you do, and your browser diligently saves your ID and password, and then when you try to log back in a few days later using those saved credentials and 'sorry, this doesn't match our records, check your spelling and try again.'
Eternal damnation for everyone involved in that too.
In the process of trying to check on the order (which should have been despatched but doesn't seem to have been) which needs an account that doesn't work, they did helpfully send me an email to tell me the shoes I've apparently bought are now £20 cheaper. Erm thanks.
Trust me, this stupid internet website thing is never going to catch on.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 October, 2022, 02:48:52 pm
Edit: “This circuit is affected by MSO. The Incident detail is as follows- Incident ID: IMT113364/22, Start Date 19/10/2022 14:30:34 and Estimated Completion Date: 19/10/2022 20:30:34.”
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 October, 2022, 10:37:53 am
Post by: Kim on 20 October, 2022, 11:41:50 am
I have written a Small Shell Script so that next time they decide to have a random 1-second outage, I can remain in bed.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 October, 2022, 11:39:19 pm
Bah: Only 50 hours later than BT's “estimated” time >:(
Post by: Jaded on 22 October, 2022, 12:31:36 am
Combined effort of A&A with their witless LNS falling over during work hours, and pfsense, which has a weird allergy to IPv4 default routes, absolutely ruined my planned lie-in this morning.
I have written a Small Shell Script so that next time they decide to have a random 1-second outage, I can remain in bed.
Either A&A service is having occasional hiccups, or my second recent router from then is parped, or something else...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 October, 2022, 12:53:06 am
Post by: Kim on 22 October, 2022, 12:18:26 pm
Combined effort of A&A with their witless LNS falling over during work hours, and pfsense, which has a weird allergy to IPv4 default routes, absolutely ruined my planned lie-in this morning.
I have written a Small Shell Script so that next time they decide to have a random 1-second outage, I can remain in bed.
Either A&A service is having occasional hiccups, or my second recent router from then is parped, or something else...
Yes, they've been having issues with the witless LNSes (the ones that mostly serve customers on FTTP connections). See the status pages (https://aastatus.net/timeline-view.cgi).
There's also been an ongoing clusterfuck with their Talktalk lines, but I'm not sure of the details as it hasn't affected me.
The pfsense bug is unrelated. It just means that what should be a barely-noticeable 1-second outage occasionally turns into a loss of the IPv4 default route, because reasons (this is allegedly fixed in the next release). Usual symptom is barakta whingeing that twitter is down and she can't access $ork, but the rest of the internet seems fine.
Post by: SoreTween on 24 October, 2022, 06:09:46 pm
Installed supervisor on the pi to kick it off and restart it after failures.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 October, 2022, 06:00:27 pm
* Unless it's the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia's fault, but it doesn’t behave thus when any other stuff is giving the box a hammering.
Post by: aidan.f on 31 October, 2022, 10:13:09 pm
In all the noise and shouting I think I found that the hotspot wi-fi level from the iphone was low from upstairs (where there is just about enough 4G), asking to move the phone downstairs to firstly establish the hotspot connection to the laptop was in this individuals mind entirely illogical...'BUT IT WONT CONNECT DOWNSTAIRS!!' 'I have to take the laptop upstairs, establish the hotspot and then carry the laptop back downstairs!'.. this reads to me as symptomatic of poor wi-fi...
Perhaps I'm missing something and the megafruit corporation of America require an interweb connection to allow a wi-fi tether to be established?
Rather like that modern windows networking annoyance - there is no internet connection so lets disconnect you from the network router you are trying to manage..
Asking questions about the wi-fi signal level indication on the laptop was rebuffed with 'WELL OF COURSE IT'S LOW!' and despite multiple attempts on my part to explain the concepts I was just 'BEING ARSY!'
I do try and apply my brane why, oh why can other people not listen and then apply reason to a problem?
Post by: grams on 31 October, 2022, 11:00:22 pm
You can alternatively switch tethering on from the phone settings without taking the laptop upstairs, although it may not necessarily stay on for long if nothing is connected.
Post by: ian on 01 November, 2022, 09:43:32 am
I may be wrong, but I don't think there's an option to use wifi (not sure why there would be). You can also use a cable.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 01 November, 2022, 09:54:16 am
All of the Android phones I've owned (google, sony and samsung) have used wifi to provide tethering (for clarity, I mean using the phone as a wifi hotspot, effectively the phone is working as a 4G router).
Post by: grams on 01 November, 2022, 09:56:56 am
Post by: ian on 01 November, 2022, 10:49:39 am
I couldn't connect to the vague wifi at Gatwick the other weekend, so I clicked my iPhone in the network pulldown and that was that.
Post by: Kim on 01 November, 2022, 12:16:46 pm
Are you saying that iphones use bluetooth to provide an internet connection to another device such as a laptop? That is a bonkers way of doing things.
Shirley all phones with Bluetooth can do that? Pair it with the computer, configure it as a modem...
Still raises the question of why you'd want to when there's a WiFi tethering option. Possibly to evade tethering detection by manipulating the outbound ports.
Post by: Kim on 01 November, 2022, 12:19:33 pm
What if you don't have wifi? Does it make an ad-hoc network.
Android just becomes an access point, and I'm reasonably sure that iThings do too. Ad-hoc[1] WiFi is poorly supported these days. I bet nobody under the age of 30 has even heard of it.
[1] As opposed to infrastructure mode.
Post by: Diver300 on 01 November, 2022, 12:50:40 pm
Ad-hoc[1] WiFi is poorly supported these days. I bet nobody under the age of 30 has even heard of it.That's nearly as obscure as wired networks without a hub.2
[1] As opposed to infrastructure mode.
[2]Either point to point with ethernet cables or a complete network using coax and 50 Ω
Post by: Kim on 01 November, 2022, 01:23:49 pm
Ad-hoc[1] WiFi is poorly supported these days. I bet nobody under the age of 30 has even heard of it.That's nearly as obscure as wired networks without a hub.2
[1] As opposed to infrastructure mode.
[2]Either point to point with ethernet cables or a complete network using coax and 50 Ω
Point-to-point Ethernet using UTP is alive and well for connecting routers to modems. And possibly even having a bit of a resurgence with industrial kit that speaks wired Ethernet when computers are networked with WiFi by default.
Glad to see the back of 10-base-2, thobut.
Post by: grams on 01 November, 2022, 01:42:39 pm
What if you don't have wifi? Does it make an ad-hoc network. It's all voodoo, I tell you.
It turns itself into a Wi-Fi base station and your Mac connects to that. "Ad Hoc" means no base station and wi-fi devices talking directly to each other, which is proper voodoo.
Turning on the Personal Hotspot feature (from the phone) also advertises the phone as a Bluetooth networking device and as a USB network adapter, so you can also use the hotspot without any sort of Wi-Fi.
Post by: ian on 01 November, 2022, 01:49:14 pm
I confess, I never got the personal hotspot option to work with a Dell. It appeared in the available list but would never connect or even tell me why. There's probably a setting six dialogues and menus in, in the space that is forever Windows NT.
Post by: Afasoas on 20 November, 2022, 01:23:10 pm
I can't get Java webstart to work with whatever old version of TLS/SSL they dish up. And given the last firmware update was 2013, I figure Asus aren't going to solve this problem.
I've no other reason to start changing this hardware - it still all works perfectly. And I can't find anything newer with all the features I'd like (ECC RAM, dual NICs, remote management) that fits remotely within the same power envelope (<24W).
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 November, 2022, 05:59:41 pm
Why, pray, does the PC over there //// allow me to select programs that can send notifications of Stuffs Happening but this one 'ere \\\\ doesn’t even list them in the first place ??? sort it out you muppets!
kthxbai!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 November, 2022, 01:03:41 pm
Gagh!
Post by: Kim on 26 November, 2022, 03:37:57 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 November, 2022, 05:31:50 pm
Post by: Diver300 on 26 November, 2022, 10:46:26 pm
I use a USB-C - HDMI adaptor to connect up the second external monitor, so I have to manage on just the one external monitor connected via HDMI, when I need the PICkit2.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 November, 2022, 11:41:50 pm
Post by: SteveC on 06 December, 2022, 06:37:02 pm
As MrsC currently only has an iPad this is a bit of an issue.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 December, 2022, 07:42:44 pm
It’s great that you have updated your mod in line with the new! IMPROVED!!1! version of the base game. Did you know that the game will automagically create updated versions of .ppd and .pmg files for you, which you can then copy into your mod and make the nasty error messages go away?
Obviously not. In fact, I remain far from convinced that some of you actually look at the log file at all.
FUMMIN!
Post by: barakta on 06 December, 2022, 07:59:17 pm
Clearing the inbox of OtherStuff I remembered Friday's email and thought "will do that now". Looked for emails From:Boss... 2 emails, neither are the one...
. o O ( That's weird )
I check my Archive, deleted and a few other folders = Nothing.
I start actually searching for every email boss has sent me in the last week = Nothing.
I eventually decide I'm going to have to ask Boss to resend, even if that makes her think I'm a disorganised ditz who loses emails...
Message Boss and explain I can't find her email, grovel and ask her to resend it...
Boss replies saying she will. Then replies again saying SHE can't find her copy in her Sent.
Suddenly that changes thing. If Boss's copy has also gone missing, then that's not me being disorganised or crap. That's Techno-Gremlins! Thankfully Boss remembered sending it, and with her copy missing too, she didn't blame me. Boss was able to find the info again and send me a new email.
When new email arrives, I searched my ENTIRE email for student name which is unusual... 1 result, the new email...
I did some googling and found that apparently Exchange can randomly have bugs where it deletes email. FUCKSAKE being gaslighted by my email app. Not what I needed today where I am struggling with organisation and now don't trust the fucking thing.
I know if we report this to IT they'll decide we're lusers and it's our fault... But this definitely wasn't human error.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 December, 2022, 12:47:53 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 January, 2023, 08:33:54 pm
Post by: AuldThumper on 02 February, 2023, 08:43:36 pm
In a quest to reduce the leccy bill the 24/7 retired enterprise server is going off, replaced by a retired enterprise desktop.
The plan:- swap boot and storage disks + video card betwixt old and new, bask in low energy glory......
The reality:- swap everything over. Thumb the power power button, there's a reassuring phut from somewhere. Bask in the relaxing AWOOGA AWOOGA of a pissed off UPS and rejoice that half the non essential kit is dead.....
Post by: ian on 02 February, 2023, 09:49:37 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 February, 2023, 12:44:04 am
Bah: I don’t want to contemplate how many pound-voles thrashing the graphics card for hours on end has cost >:(
Post by: TimC on 03 February, 2023, 10:33:54 am
Post by: Tim Hall on 03 February, 2023, 12:51:25 pm
(It's what I have. I have no DTP package. All I want to do is make labels for my marmalade)
Post by: Kim on 03 February, 2023, 01:06:39 pm
Post by: rr on 04 February, 2023, 12:45:21 am
Why is putting pictures into something using Word so jolly difficult?This is why I was prepared to pay a couple of quid extra for office pro plus. [although I ended up getting it for free, cheap eBay licence that works and then refunded by eBay because they thought it was dodgy] [see also windows 10 enterprise edition]
(It's what I have. I have no DTP package. All I want to do is make labels for my marmalade)
Sent from my motorola edge 20 using Tapatalk
Post by: Mr Larrington on 09 February, 2023, 07:59:51 pm
FruitCo! Sort it out you muppets!
Post by: cygnet on 13 February, 2023, 09:10:22 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 14 February, 2023, 08:01:03 pm
I will decide when I want to install Windows 11, so fuck off with your nagging every time I have to reboot.
Kthxbai!
Post by: Feanor on 14 February, 2023, 08:10:02 pm
Word. Please stop renumbering my sections and paragraphs. >:(
Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
<gasp!>
Good luck with that!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 February, 2023, 08:35:04 pm
When I set your The Product up on the new Estate Office PC I told you to put my Stuffs in D:\Dropbox. And it worked, because Stuffs I've subsequently saved there has shown up in the Dropbox app on for e.g. my fondleslab.
Now, when I tried saving attachments from divers e-mails on said fondleslab to Dropbox, why did they not appear in the appropriate folder on the D drive? Indeed, why did you see fit to create an entirely new Dropbox folder on an entirely different lump of hardware? The C drive is for the OS and programs only, or at least it is on my Windows boxen. You blithering nincomfucks.
Kthxbai
Post by: Kim on 15 February, 2023, 08:39:21 pm
Post by: cygnet on 15 February, 2023, 08:49:45 pm
Word. Please stop renumbering my sections and paragraphs. >:(
Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
<gasp!>
Good luck with that!
3 days. To remove one number from one heading. (While retaining all other numbering in the correct sequence) ::-)
Post by: Pingu on 15 February, 2023, 09:52:54 pm
Word. Please stop renumbering my sections and paragraphs. >:(
Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
<gasp!>
Good luck with that!
3 days. To remove one number from one heading. (While retaining all other numbering in the correct sequence) ::-)
You got off lightly :demon:
Post by: cygnet on 15 February, 2023, 10:43:40 pm
Post by: JellyLegs on 15 February, 2023, 11:20:30 pm
Still, with a name like Dropbox, it was only a matter of time before they were a candidate for the Shite Courier thread.
Personally I haven’t touched them since they kindly dropped my details all over the web in 2012/2016 along with the details of 68 million others. If they can’t keep my username, email address and password secure then I sure as hell don’t trust them with my files. Seems from a quick Google that they were breached again last year so my caution may have been justified.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 16 February, 2023, 10:59:03 am
Why does the installation of, er, you keep dishing out this message:
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52691624347_5696b79b23_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/2ohbmaR)
Thunderbollocks (https://flic.kr/p/2ohbmaR) by Mr Larrington (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_larrington/), on Flickr
on the Estate Office PC but not on the Great Hall one?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 February, 2023, 11:36:55 am
That! E-mail! No! Longer! Exists! On! Yahoo’s! Server! Nor does it exist in any of the Thunderbird installations dotted around the place. So when I tell iOS mail to delete it, delete it. Permanently. Don't keep sneaking the fucking thing back into The Bin a few hours later >:(
Sort it out you muppets!
Post by: rr on 21 February, 2023, 01:46:53 pm
O hai Thunderbollocks!I get that as well, although it then proceeds to download said emails anyway. I suspect it may be an artefact of timing misalignments due to me running thunderbullocks on the SSD but keeping the mail files on the spinning rust.
Why does the installation of, er, you keep dishing out this message:
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52691624347_5696b79b23_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/2ohbmaR)
Thunderbollocks (https://flic.kr/p/2ohbmaR) by Mr Larrington (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_larrington/), on Flickr
on the Estate Office PC but not on the Great Hall one?
Sent from my motorola edge 20 using Tapatalk
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 21 February, 2023, 02:14:22 pm
We use a number of systems, but all feeding into an ixiasoft CCMS.Word. Please stop renumbering my sections and paragraphs. >:(
Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahaha
<gasp!>
Good luck with that!
Multiple people get grumpy about this "why can't I just write something in Word".
Because the pagination, numbering and formatting is sh!te. the only thing word does semi-decently anymore is table column widths.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 21 February, 2023, 05:56:26 pm
O hai Thunderbollocks!I get that as well, although it then proceeds to download said emails anyway. I suspect it may be an artefact of timing misalignments due to me running thunderbullocks on the SSD but keeping the mail files on the spinning rust.
Why does the installation of, er, you keep dishing out this message:
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52691624347_5696b79b23_o.png) (https://flic.kr/p/2ohbmaR)
Thunderbollocks (https://flic.kr/p/2ohbmaR) by Mr Larrington (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_larrington/), on Flickr
on the Estate Office PC but not on the Great Hall one?
Both the program and the mail files are on SSDs on both machines, albeit not on the same SSD in either case.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 February, 2023, 09:09:46 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 02 March, 2023, 01:04:40 pm
Not content with the utterly pointless "Open new tab in Chrome for iOS after you ent used it for a while" nonsense, you also have the "Update" thingie in the top RH corner of your The Product for Windows. Click this and you shut down and restart inna-updated-stylee, yes?
Noes. You have to click a further twice to make it actually do what you told it to do by clicking the "Update" wossname in the first place.
Do you do it on purpose
Post by: Kim on 07 March, 2023, 02:12:47 pm
Makes storing blurry photos of grandchildren as email attachments seem sane.
(Why yes, the MIL is low on disk space...)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 March, 2023, 07:23:27 pm
Would it be too much to ask that, when making a copy of a table in Access, you keep the the fields in the same fucking order? Yes, even if some of them are calculated?
It would, you say?
OK, sorry to have bothered you miserable bastard troglodytes >:(
Kthxbai
Post by: Pingu on 26 March, 2023, 07:35:14 pm
Post by: Polar Bear on 26 March, 2023, 07:54:42 pm
How many times do I have to tell you that I do not wish to upgrade to Windows 11 at this time? Once should be enough, twice is one time too many and six, yes six fucking times is harassment.
Please JFO.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 March, 2023, 08:19:39 pm
Access - eww :sick:
Yes, I know, but some things give me too big a migraine when trying to do them in Excel.
Post by: Kim on 26 March, 2023, 08:36:12 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 03 April, 2023, 04:27:30 pm
Post by: Kim on 07 April, 2023, 06:31:07 pm
*spends a quality ten minutes amending bookings on the Co-Wheels website to account for DST, because their webby SCIENCE doesn't*
*emails info@ to report the problem*
*gets hilarious 'mailbox full' bounce message containing an exception that's the Microsoft equivalent of a numbers station*
*tweets at them that their email is bouncing*
*receives helpful reply to the email that supposedly bounced*
*replies with "BTW, get them to look into why your mailbox is generating bounces while they're at it"*
*gets a bounce for that, too*
Post by: Kim on 08 April, 2023, 10:04:10 pm
*waves RFID card at reader*
*ORANGE ORANGE ORANGE GREEN GREEN GREEN* *conspicuous absence of a central locking clunk*
"Oh, for fuck's sake!" said Kim, the words coming easily through force of habit
*phones out-of-hours number*
*gets recorded message*
*interrupted by a polite geordie*
*explains problem*
"Oh, it's probably the signal luv, let me try putting it through again for you..."
*Is about to question the logic of this, but remembers that 'signal' is Young Person for any kind of network connection*
"...try again now luv?"
*GREEEEEEEN* *ker-clunk!*
*momentarily speechless*
Post by: Kim on 08 April, 2023, 10:06:05 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 April, 2023, 09:11:23 pm
Edit: Oh, you can after all. Why didn’t you tell me that instead of sending me off on a tangent involving append queries which then don’t work ???
Post by: ian on 11 April, 2023, 10:06:19 pm
Of course, any challenge will how have resulted in the complete lockdown our main account, any subsidiary accounts, credit cards, and any and all access to any money we might have. Ah, had we only been Russian oligarchs or Colombian coke merchants, I'm sure we'd be good at this point.
Post by: rogerzilla on 17 April, 2023, 11:04:49 am
Post by: Polar Bear on 17 April, 2023, 11:20:35 am
Anyway, most of the Zoomers are using various flavours of Windows, one is on an Apple Wotsit and two are using Linux on older PC's. Sometimes somebody even joins us using an old android phone.
We have an ongoing strange and amusing quirk: the user of the older Linux machine is presented with various popups and menus when the user of the oldest and lowest spec Windows laptop joins the call. Sometimes he drops from the call completely and struggles to rejoin.
Nobody else is affected and there could be a dozen or more of us on the call but the consequence is amusing mainly because this particular Linux user is a bit of an evangelist who loves to slate micro$haft and fruityco at every opportunity. It is worse for him because his fellow Linux user is unaffected just like the rest of us.
Out of pure curiosity and nothing more, anybody got any ideas why this happens?
Post by: Feanor on 17 April, 2023, 12:01:21 pm
I paid for a genuine Windows 11 DVD but apparently my PC doesn't have TPM 2.0 and it can't be enabled, so it's useless. It is well above minimum specifications otherwise. It would cost about £500 to buy something of very similar spec with TPM.
Use Rufus to create a bootable USB with the various hardware requirements like TPM 2.0 removed:
https://rufus.ie/en/
I'd ignore your DVD and download the ISO directly from MS. The current version of Rufus has an ISO download tool built into it, I think. So you don't need to go search for it.
The only thing you should need from your purchased DVD is the product key.
(I've not done this myself, so YMMV.. My machines don't even have TPM 1, and I don't know if the Rufus bypass method requires a fall-back from 2.0 to at least 1, or if it will work with no TPM at all.)
Post by: matthew on 17 April, 2023, 12:23:02 pm
Last night I spent ~4 hours planning the menu for scout camp, determining the shopping list and getting the prices for the various ingredients from two websites, tabulating the whole thing in Libra Office Calc. I finished at about 22:30 and realised that I needed to save the file before I emailed it to the other leaders who are organising camp. Unfortunately when I went to Save the file libra office crashed and then didn't recover the file on restarting, just a blank spreadsheet. Now the problem could be in the chair as I have become complacent regarding saving due to 365 autosave at work and the crash happened when I first tried to save the document. Or the problem could be in the computer as why would the software crash at save time which surely is the worst possible.
Anyway I'm blaming the software and putting this here because it took a further two hours to regenerate the spreadsheet, I got to bed just before 1am and am therefore dragging my feet through work today.
Post by: rogerzilla on 17 April, 2023, 01:33:37 pm
I researched that workaround and the risk is that MS won't release security patches for non-TPM machines. Essentially it's at their whim whether they fully support "broken" versions.I paid for a genuine Windows 11 DVD but apparently my PC doesn't have TPM 2.0 and it can't be enabled, so it's useless. It is well above minimum specifications otherwise. It would cost about £500 to buy something of very similar spec with TPM.
Use Rufus to create a bootable USB with the various hardware requirements like TPM 2.0 removed:
https://rufus.ie/en/
I'd ignore your DVD and download the ISO directly from MS. The current version of Rufus has an ISO download tool built into it, I think. So you don't need to go search for it.
The only thing you should need from your purchased DVD is the product key.
(I've not done this myself, so YMMV.. My machines don't even have TPM 1, and I don't know if the Rufus bypass method requires a fall-back from 2.0 to at least 1, or if it will work with no TPM at all.)
Post by: PeteB99 on 17 April, 2023, 02:51:59 pm
What next to try?
Post by: Vernon on 17 April, 2023, 08:50:47 pm
Post by: philip on 17 April, 2023, 09:01:07 pm
Time Machine has decided it can't do any backups as my external disk is read only. Disk utility says there's nothing wrong with it, It won't let me change the permissions as the Superuser, Demounting the disk doesn't seem to help and a reboot hasn't either.I'm not a mac user but I would try disk repair on the external disk: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210898
What next to try?
[Update: maybe you already tried that with disk utility]
Post by: philip on 17 April, 2023, 09:04:38 pm
Post by: Bledlow on 17 April, 2023, 10:49:04 pm
I paid for a genuine Windows 11 DVD but apparently my PC doesn't have TPM 2.0 and it can't be enabled, so it's useless. It is well above minimum specifications otherwise. It would cost about £500 to buy something of very similar spec with TPM.I managed to stop the pestering to install Windows 11 on one of our computers (the old one kept for when we both want to do something for which a more than laptop size screen is desirable) by letting it proceed a bit. It very soon said "Oh bugger, can't do it". Yes - that's normal for a modestly specced (but perfectly adequate for what it's used for) PC of that vintage.
Post by: Jaded on 18 April, 2023, 12:27:01 am
Is it possible the "time machine" user can't see the disk as writable? I'm not sure how you'd check this off the top of my head (somewhere in users), but it gives you something to google.
Get info for the disk, and check the ownerships down the bottom of the get info pane
Post by: Mr Larrington on 18 April, 2023, 12:48:25 am
Post by: rogerzilla on 18 April, 2023, 07:38:46 am
Post by: ian on 18 April, 2023, 08:28:36 pm
Time Machine has decided it can't do any backups as my external disk is read only. Disk utility says there's nothing wrong with it, It won't let me change the permissions as the Superuser, Demounting the disk doesn't seem to help and a reboot hasn't either.
What next to try?
This has happened to me before. If I recall, turn Time Machine off in the preferences, then eject the external disk (from the desktop and unplug if it's external), power down your computer, make and drink a cup of tea, restart your computer, reconnect the drive, go back to Time Machine preferences and turn it back on and re-select the drive. This seemed to work for me and seemed to keep all the old backups.
Post by: spesh on 22 April, 2023, 06:08:26 pm
Avast have taken their "Upgrade to the premium version" pestering to a whole new level by making me an offer I can't refuse. Well, there is a way to refuse, which I'll get to in a moment.
Had the "licence is about to expire" notifications, which I don't recall getting a year ago, and quite why one needs to renew/reactivate the free version of an app is beyond me, but hey, this ought to be straightforward enough so I click on the "renew" button and when presented with a choice of Free Antivirus and their "recommended" premium internet security package, I select the free version. So far so good, however, here's where the fun begins...
I then get another pop-up saying, "Thank you for activating Avast Free Antivirus ... We want to thank you with a big, one-time loyalty discount for Avast Premium Security." But there's no option to decline with a "Thanks but no thanks" button - there's just a "Continue with upgrade" button, which then presents me with a choice of subscription options and again, no opt-out button. If that's the way they are going to play it, I don't care how much of a discount they are offering me, I'm refusing on general principle - but the only way to do that is to kill the Avast pop-up via Task Manager.
Doing this makes Avast re-start - and after it's done this, it turns out that
Frankly, Avast can get in the sea. This is more than just annoying, it feels decidedly unethical.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 April, 2023, 06:07:06 pm
DNAMHIKT.
Post by: SoreTween on 29 April, 2023, 09:05:07 am
Today I wanted to do another simple screenshot, crop & paste of 3 images. Having given up on the other options with a sigh I fired up the ultimate sledgehammer to crack this nut - gimp. Screenshot, paste & crop the first image to be the background fine. Take the second screenshot, paste it into another gimp canvas to crop the small area I want. Except that the rectangle select tool doesn't fucking work on a second image. The god of image manipulation programs? My hairy arse. Every time I try to drag the rectangle select it just moves image 2 on it's canvas. Try switching to a different tool & back to rectangle select, still it just grabs image 2 instead of applying the active tool. I have to use Pinta to crop the second image & paste it into canvas 1.
What a pile of shite.
Post by: TheLurker on 29 April, 2023, 09:19:43 am
Quote from: SoreTween
.. Pinta is the closest but that has the ever so slight flaw that it can't print. FFS.Well. I've been using Pinta for several years now and I'd never noticed that. I mainly use it for resizing and cropping photographs of toy aeroplanes for our group's newsletter - which leads me to a simple-ish fix. If you haven't already got it, install Libre Office and paste the images into a document and print that. It's a faff, but it's a hell of a lot simpler than pissing about with complicated graphics tools.
I'd probably just use two instances of Pinta. Crop/resize background in one and then cut and paste the overlay from the second instance then drop the composite into Writer and print from there.
You could use Inkscape cos it's a lot easier to get to grips with than *other* graphics tools and the selection tools work. However.... if you install the appimage, guess what? Yup, appimages can't access the printers so although there is a print option you can't effing use it. What you can do though is export the image to PDF and print the PDF from your favourite PDF viewer. It's how I do plans and plan fragments for the toy aeroplanes.
Post by: perpetual dan on 29 April, 2023, 09:32:41 am
I have to have another rant about the absolutely fucking piss poor provision of simple graphics tools on linux. All I want is an MS paint equivalent, can I find one? Can I bollocks. Pinta is the closest but that has the ever so slight flaw that it can't print. FFS.That’s weird with gimp and selecting. When it’s done that with me it’s usually been a wrong layer selected problem. Though I’m confused by the pasting into a canvas - is that different to opening an image in some subtle way. (I use gimp a fair bit, but have my own little path I take and there’s many things I’ve never touched in it.)
Today I wanted to do another simple screenshot, crop & paste of 3 images. Having given up on the other options with a sigh I fired up the ultimate sledgehammer to crack this nut - gimp. Screenshot, paste & crop the first image to be the background fine. Take the second screenshot, paste it into another gimp canvas to crop the small area I want. Except that the rectangle select tool doesn't fucking work on a second image. The god of image manipulation programs? My hairy arse. Every time I try to drag the rectangle select it just moves image 2 on it's canvas. Try switching to a different tool & back to rectangle select, still it just grabs image 2 instead of applying the active tool. I have to use Pinta to crop the second image & paste it into canvas 1.
What a pile of shite.
I’ve never used pinta, but could you save and then print from image viewer?
Post by: SoreTween on 29 April, 2023, 09:53:47 am
I suppose you could count the two instances of MSPaint as two programs...
Post by: TheLurker on 29 April, 2023, 10:49:16 am
Quote from: SoreTween
... why on earth should I need two programs to do something I could do on Windows 3.11 with free included software?Ah, philosophical questions.
I agree it is a bit of a pain, but for me it's a lesser evil than having to maintain complicated firewalls and other filters to prevent M$ updating *my* machine without my say so and to stop the OS 'phoning home and don't get me started on subscription models for effing word processing software. I quite like the price as well. :)
Post by: chopstick on 29 April, 2023, 01:25:23 pm
I have to have another rant about the absolutely fucking piss poor provision of simple graphics tools on linux. All I want is an MS paint equivalent, can I find one? Can I bollocks. Pinta is the closest but that has the ever so slight flaw that it can't print. FFS.
Today I wanted to do another simple screenshot, crop & paste of 3 images. Having given up on the other options with a sigh I fired up the ultimate sledgehammer to crack this nut - gimp. Screenshot, paste & crop the first image to be the background fine. Take the second screenshot, paste it into another gimp canvas to crop the small area I want. Except that the rectangle select tool doesn't fucking work on a second image. The god of image manipulation programs? My hairy arse. Every time I try to drag the rectangle select it just moves image 2 on it's canvas. Try switching to a different tool & back to rectangle select, still it just grabs image 2 instead of applying the active tool. I have to use Pinta to crop the second image & paste it into canvas 1.
What a pile of shite.
Re Gimp and the rectangular select tool - I might be off the mark but how about Select - None (Shift+CTRL+A) before attempting to use the Select tool?
Post by: Kim on 29 April, 2023, 01:31:29 pm
GIMP has improved a lot over the years, but it's still really difficult to work out how to perform basic editing functions when you only do graphics stuff once in a blue moon. At least the UI doesn't seem to change every time you load it any more.
Post by: ian on 29 April, 2023, 02:28:12 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 April, 2023, 06:03:53 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 30 April, 2023, 12:05:00 pm
I have to have another rant about the absolutely fucking piss poor provision of simple graphics tools on linux. All I want is an MS paint equivalent, can I find one? Can I bollocks. Pinta is the closest but that has the ever so slight flaw that it can't print. FFS.
Today I wanted to do another simple screenshot, crop & paste of 3 images. Having given up on the other options with a sigh I fired up the ultimate sledgehammer to crack this nut - gimp. Screenshot, paste & crop the first image to be the background fine. Take the second screenshot, paste it into another gimp canvas to crop the small area I want. Except that the rectangle select tool doesn't fucking work on a second image. The god of image manipulation programs? My hairy arse. Every time I try to drag the rectangle select it just moves image 2 on it's canvas. Try switching to a different tool & back to rectangle select, still it just grabs image 2 instead of applying the active tool. I have to use Pinta to crop the second image & paste it into canvas 1.
What a pile of shite.
[Unhelpful glib comment] How much did you pay for it?
gimp is open source, so if it doesn't work the way it should, or the way you think is should, simply fix it and open a pull request (https://developer.gimp.org/core/submit-patch/#finding-what-to-fix-or-implement)
Or, if you don't fancy spending a few years learning C programming, you can open a feature request/bug report (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/?label_name%5B%5D=1.%20Bug). Who knows, someone may fix it for you. For free.
Post by: TheLurker on 30 April, 2023, 01:33:09 pm
I just thought to check something. If Image Viewer (it comes with Mint, your distro may vary) is installed then use that to print the composite after you've assembled it in Pinta.
This may be why Pinta doesn't provide a print option, because there are sooo many image viewer utils that do print. No point in re-inventing wheel.
Post by: hubner on 30 April, 2023, 02:17:01 pm
I have to have another rant about the absolutely fucking piss poor provision of simple graphics tools on linux. All I want is an MS paint equivalent, can I find one? Can I bollocks. Pinta is the closest but that has the ever so slight flaw that it can't print. FFS.
Today I wanted to do another simple screenshot, crop & paste of 3 images. Having given up on the other options with a sigh I fired up the ultimate sledgehammer to crack this nut - gimp. Screenshot, paste & crop the first image to be the background fine. Take the second screenshot, paste it into another gimp canvas to crop the small area I want. Except that the rectangle select tool doesn't fucking work on a second image. The god of image manipulation programs? My hairy arse. Every time I try to drag the rectangle select it just moves image 2 on it's canvas. Try switching to a different tool & back to rectangle select, still it just grabs image 2 instead of applying the active tool. I have to use Pinta to crop the second image & paste it into canvas 1.
What a pile of shite.
I've just tried it, it seems to work for me. There's an actual crop tool as well as the rectangle select tool.
Post by: SoreTween on 02 May, 2023, 11:59:16 am
Re Gimp and the rectangular select tool - I might be off the mark but how about Select - None (Shift+CTRL+A) before attempting to use the Select tool?
You do have to select none to be able to use the selection tool but the selection that is selected after paste is not the selection that is cleared by 'Select none' (I tried that) or by Shift+Ctrl+A (did not know that shortcut).
To clear the pasted selection you have to click on the canvas outside the pasted image. Either click outside and then you can select an area entirely within the pasted image or start your selection outside. This I only figured out because upon going back to see if I'd been an idiot the blank canvas I created happened to be bigger than the pasted test image.
If you select all you get a line of black marching ants that looks like the 'paste from cliboard' selection border but isn't. 'Select all' black ants can be cleared by select none, 'paste from clipboard' black ants can only be cleared by clicking a blank area of canvas.
If the above is totally confusing then I've correctly conveyed the experience.
Post by: SoreTween on 03 May, 2023, 12:01:53 pm
I've resisted Faecebook, twitter & all the rest of that shit since the beginning but recently, like in the last two weeks, I caved in & got an FB account. I set up a dedicated yahoo mail account in my own name and to be used for nothing else and then used that to open a FB account. I didn't give them a mobile number because that would instantly tie me to all my less careful friends, acquaintances and colleagues whose phone has been raped by FB over the years. Thousands of them. FB can't positively identify who my friends are, which school I went to, my grandmothers shoe size, which side I dress etc etc. They can't advertise to me because I turned all that shit off in the account. But nor can they monetise me and that hurts them.
So today I find I'm blocked for 'activity that does not follow Community Standards'. The only way to unlock it? Provide a phone number.
Fuck off.
Facebook among other things assume that if person X is interested in predilection Y then all person X's contacts might be too so sell that advertising lead. I really don't want someone assuming I'm into midget porn just because someone I worked with 8 years ago is (I can think of several past colleagues whose nocturnal interests
More seriously my phone number is in the phones belonging to a number of Russian nationals. All seem nice, talented and hard working people with whom I have enjoyed working and sinking some beers. All appear to be as pissed off with Putin as the rest of us but when the western TLAs go looking for Russian sympathisers they'll talk to the big data harvesters first and then make assumptions. I need my UK security clearance.
Fuck off some more FB.
I created the account as my local cycling club uses it. Coincidentally it is the club monthly meeting tonight, I shall be attending :demon:
Post by: Mr Larrington on 03 May, 2023, 05:54:21 pm
If I enter "Scone of stone" complete with quotes into your poxy webby SCIENCE I do not wish to be inundated with results for some lump of Scottish rock that's being hauled down to That London for some twerp's new hat fitting >:(
kthxbai!
Post by: Kim on 08 May, 2023, 02:30:55 pm
I'm a bit late to the party on this one, as until recently the only thing I had with a USB-C port on it was a smartphone, and when you've only got one device with a USB-C connector, you can blissfully convince yourself that they've helpfully solved the most frustrating aspect of USB (ie. that the connector is only the right way up on the third attempt) without making things worse.
But no, they have in fact made things worse.
Now we have a situation where things all use the same connector, which means that previously straightforward stuff like working out who's the host and who's the device (or power source and sink, if it's just charging) are in the hands of software.
Which leads to lots of fun edge cases were a device like a laptop or battery pack might reasonably change roles, and the behaviour is so unclear that people start believing in cargo-cult solutions like turning the connector over or reversing the cable make the difference (apparently some of the time, it's a case of unplugging and re-plugging within some timeout, so you can see how this happens).
Cycleman fell foul of this at the weekend, with a Shiny! New! 30Ah battery pack which was helpfully charging itself from his phone. (Problem solved with an A-C cable, but possibly there might be some invocation to reverse the power flow). Clear as mud.
Barakta and I just spent a quality 5 minutes connecting our phones together with a C-to-C cable to see what happens. It appears to be random.
I've also banged my head against this after buying a panel-mount A-female to C-female adaptor, with the intention of using this in a piece of homebrew hardware based on an Arduino Micro acting as a USB HID. For reasons unclear, when connected to the Official BHPC Jam-Filled Babbage-Engine's USB-C port using a C-to-C cable, nothing happens. This is particularly bemusing, as one of the laptop's main failings is the use of a fiddly little DC jack for charging; the USB-C port can AIUI only operate as a host, so why wouldn't it provide power? No doubt there's some USB-C reason... (I gave up and used a panel mount A-female to B-female adaptor, which is a more robust solution anyway, even if it does tie up another A port on the laptop.)
Post by: Syd on 08 May, 2023, 05:39:31 pm
I have a Mini PC that has it officially unsupported, no TPM, but has been running Windows 11 since not long after it’s release in October 2021. It is still receiving updates.I researched that workaround and the risk is that MS won't release security patches for non-TPM machines. Essentially it's at their whim whether they fully support "broken" versions.I paid for a genuine Windows 11 DVD but apparently my PC doesn't have TPM 2.0 and it can't be enabled, so it's useless. It is well above minimum specifications otherwise. It would cost about £500 to buy something of very similar spec with TPM.
Use Rufus to create a bootable USB with the various hardware requirements like TPM 2.0 removed:
https://rufus.ie/en/
I'd ignore your DVD and download the ISO directly from MS. The current version of Rufus has an ISO download tool built into it, I think. So you don't need to go search for it.
The only thing you should need from your purchased DVD is the product key.
(I've not done this myself, so YMMV.. My machines don't even have TPM 1, and I don't know if the Rufus bypass method requires a fall-back from 2.0 to at least 1, or if it will work with no TPM at all.)
The general consensus is that Microsoft have put out the disclaimer just in case there is ever any technical reason it becomes impossible to update unsupported devices but they will refrain from doing so, if at all possible, to stave off the risk of being accused of generating unnecessary e-waste.
Post by: Kim on 10 May, 2023, 01:14:33 am
Exacerbating this, OpenCV doesn't seem to have any way to access something that might serve as a way to uniquely identify the cameras, so you can forget about hacking around it. I know, it's not their fault that Windows is making things difficult, but it can't be that uncommon for people to want to run an application on a machine with some sort of built-in camera in addition to whatever device they actually want to use.
Disabling the internal camera in Device Manager is the nuclear option, but even that doesn't have the desired effect. Some mysterious device that always returns a blank frame is now getting enumerated...
Fuckit, I'm going to bed.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 May, 2023, 01:33:31 am
Bah!
Post by: Kim on 10 May, 2023, 01:36:03 am
Post by: Feanor on 11 May, 2023, 09:13:43 pm
I paid for a genuine Windows 11 DVD but apparently my PC doesn't have TPM 2.0 and it can't be enabled, so it's useless. It is well above minimum specifications otherwise. It would cost about £500 to buy something of very similar spec with TPM.
Use Rufus to create a bootable USB with the various hardware requirements like TPM 2.0 removed:
https://rufus.ie/en/
I'd ignore your DVD and download the ISO directly from MS. The current version of Rufus has an ISO download tool built into it, I think. So you don't need to go search for it.
The only thing you should need from your purchased DVD is the product key.
(I've not done this myself, so YMMV.. My machines don't even have TPM 1, and I don't know if the Rufus bypass method requires a fall-back from 2.0 to at least 1, or if it will work with no TPM at all.)
So I have just done this myself.
I've installed Win 11 on my elderly Gigabyte EX85-UD5 i7 machine, which has no hint of any kind of TPM.
I did a clean install on a new SSD, to let me roll back to my old win10 install with a simple disk swap.
All went 99% swimmingly.
I'd selected all the options in Rufus to disable all the OOBE crap, and it worked.
It did try to go online and create an MS account, but I'd pulled the network cable, but it did reluctantly let me proceed with a 'limited install', ie a local account not tied to an MS account.
Only issue was the in-box LAN driver for the "Realtec PCIe GbE Family Ethernet controller", which blue-screened when I plugged the network cable in post-install.
An external download of a more current Realtec driver sorted that out.
It auto-activated based on my existing Digital License, ie the MS activation servers recognised the hardware ID and associated Win10 license, and let it pass.
(The Win10 license was automatically authorised, based on a dodgy Win7 install upgrade, but it slipped through the net and got laundered as a good license... )
No further issues, and I have Win 11 running on my legacy hardware.
Post by: Kim on 11 May, 2023, 10:58:46 pm
Only issue was the in-box LAN driver for the "Realtec PCIe GbE Family Ethernet controller", which blue-screened when I plugged the network cable in post-install.
An external download of a more current Realtec driver sorted that out.
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/realtek.html is as relevant today as it was in 1998.
Post by: Kim on 11 May, 2023, 11:02:22 pm
Exacerbating this, OpenCV doesn't seem to have any way to access something that might serve as a way to uniquely identify the cameras, so you can forget about hacking around it.
Reader, I hacked around it: Instead of politely waiting for the right camera to become functional again, I let it play reconnection roulette and pop up an obnoxious dialog box whenever *any* camera disappears to warn the user that making sure the image is still coming from the right one is their problem.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 May, 2023, 01:07:31 am
Post by: Ham on 12 May, 2023, 06:53:31 pm
But, what do you say, this password does not comply? Well, let's see - did I go over 20 characters? Nope, 18. Uppercase? Check. Lowercase? Check. Number? Check. I've even got non-alpha. Still non-compliant, eh? Well, what happens if I take out, maybe the hyphen? Oh look, it works.
Sometimes you wonder how people end up in jobs they can't do.
Post by: Feanor on 12 May, 2023, 07:02:30 pm
"That's not a valid e-mail address!" it says.
Only it is.
Some webdev monkey has decided to make their own definition of what an e-mail address should look like, rather than looking up the actual RFCs which give the chapter and verse.
"Its gorra end with .com, innit?"
Post by: perpetual dan on 02 June, 2023, 08:59:07 pm
I got just such an email yesterday.
Today, it bounces.
I’ve not touched it!
Post by: TheLurker on 03 June, 2023, 07:43:00 pm
Quote from: perpetual dan
I’ve got a domain for some work stuff. The email used to just get forwarded to a different personal account. As far as I remember by 123reg, rather than anything fancy.Yeah, I've got something similar and getting a lot of bounces because lots of ISPs because of "dmarc". Probably security related to stop spoofing and similar, but ICBA to look it up.
I got just such an email yesterday.
Today, it bounces.
I’ve not touched it!
Post by: Feanor on 03 June, 2023, 08:43:55 pm
If you are purchasing from an e-mail host ( or using a free one like gmail ) then they will deal with all of that for you.
If you have a complicated web of forwarding from one domain name to another, then expect it to be difficult. You have multiple providers and you need to understand exactly how an external recipient 'sees' your e-mail. Some providers will be more helpful than others in providing the necessary DNS incantations to be able to send via them.
I host my own e-mail, and it's been hard enough even when I have direct control over all aspects of the mail server.
Post by: perpetual dan on 04 June, 2023, 08:50:38 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 June, 2023, 01:40:10 am
Post by: Tim Hall on 09 June, 2023, 09:30:29 am
Post by: rr on 09 June, 2023, 09:56:56 am
I'm filling in some form or other on an app on my phone. I need to enter a date. A date from ages ago. Hit the box and a useful (FSVO useful) calendar pops up, showing today's date. There is no option to type a date in, only to scroll back, a month at a time by stabbing at the screen. FFSParticularly upsetting when the form is aimed at older people, the field is date of birth and the default is the current day.
On some systems there is a hidden option of pressing the date and choosing year and month.
Post by: rafletcher on 09 June, 2023, 11:56:03 am
Post by: Kim on 09 June, 2023, 01:34:32 pm
It doesn't have to be aimed at us, any form with a DOB requirement is a pain!
Barakta informs me that a significant number of her students can cope with entering exactly 1 (one) date per form, which will be entered in all date-requiring fields, regardless of whether it's asking for their DOB, the date they're filling in the form, or something obtuse like when their course starts.
This is before you worry about Computers or indeed Americans.
Post by: Lightning Phil on 09 June, 2023, 07:22:52 pm
It doesn't have to be aimed at us, any form with a DOB requirement is a pain!
Plus most organisations do not require your DOB.
Post by: perpetual dan on 10 June, 2023, 07:47:13 pm
Very few get my actual date of birth.It doesn't have to be aimed at us, any form with a DOB requirement is a pain!
Plus most organisations do not require your DOB.
Post by: Jaded on 11 June, 2023, 12:45:55 am
Very few get my actual date of birth.It doesn't have to be aimed at us, any form with a DOB requirement is a pain!
Plus most organisations do not require your DOB.
Same here.
I get a lot of birthday congratulations on New Years Day. Wrong age too. 😹
Post by: Feanor on 11 June, 2023, 09:20:26 am
Thing is, the propreitary starlink connectors either end of this cable are massive bulky things which require a hole of almost one inch to pass through.
That might be fine in an USAsian house built mostly of cardboard where you can make such a hole using blunt kitchen utensils, but in a building with double-skin brickwork it's a different matter.
That diameter is beyond anything I have for my SDS, and bigger than I want to drill anyway.
A bit of research shows that the special cable is nothing other than an exterior-grade cat5e shielded twisted pair, and can be cut and spliced using normal network parts and tools, it's just an oddball connector on each end. Wishing to preserve the shield continuity, I go online and find suitable shielded RJ45 plugs and an in-line coupler which will also preserve the continuity. I also needed to get the matching crimp tool. These were VCELiNK brand, because they were available on Amazon for next day delivery. And so I boldly cut the cable.
Never, ever buy these products.
1) They are impossible to make up onto the cable. So you peel back the outer insulation on the cable, exposing the 4 twisted pairs. You then un-twist them, and tease them as straight as you can to remove the wrigglyness in them, then arrange them into the correct order, pinching them in the correct order between thumb and finger. On a regular RJ45, the holes for the wires are at the rear of the plug, and it's easy to pinch the fan of wires into a nice flat straight parallel side-by-side arrangement, with perhaps 3mm of wire ends to poke into the holes of the plug. This is easy. These horrible plugs have the holes deep inside the plug body, perhaps a cm or more, requiring you to pinch the wires about 2cm back from the ends. The wires are too wriggly to remain straight, parallel and in the correct order for that length. It took me close to an hour to get the wires to insert into the holes correctly, without crossing over, bending back, missing a hole in the sequence, putting 2 wires into one hole etc etc.
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52965904114_171dcdc6af_z.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2oGq6Zm)
Starlink cable splice (https://flic.kr/p/2oGq6Zm) by Ron Lowe (https://www.flickr.com/photos/62966413@N04/), on Flickr
2) After winning that battle, I hooked it up and turned it on. Download speed test showing 80-90 Mbps, instead of previous 250ish. Log into the diagnostic screen, and the link between the dish and router has degraded from Gigabit to 100Meg. That's consistent with the 80-90Mbit speedtest: You can't shove 250Mbit down a 100Mbit pipe. After eliminating other things, I decide it must be a bad splice. I chop out the splice totally, leaving a short tail of wire each end for later forensics. I grab a straight cat5e IDC jointing box, and punch down both ends of the cable using a normal Krone tool. Bingo: Gigabit link, and 250Mbit speed test.
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52965759281_4da59a02a8_z.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2oGpmWe)
Starlink cable splice (https://flic.kr/p/2oGpmWe) by Ron Lowe (https://www.flickr.com/photos/62966413@N04/), on Flickr
Forensics: Buzzing out the splice from the wire stubs, I find 3 cores totally open-circuit. One of the blue pair, and both of the brown. I'd crimped these firmly and repeatedly using the manufacturer's own tool, and they had just failed. I've never experienced such BS with a simple network cable ever before.
Post by: Jaded on 12 June, 2023, 10:24:43 pm
WhatsAt you say? I don't have any contacts? How am I getting all these messages then?
Ah. You mean that you haven't got access to my phone contacts. Well, there is a reason for that. You don't need them. You will do linky stuff in the background and make assumptions about me. Assumptions that you will sell. To me and to my contacts.
Never mind. I won't make a WhatsApp group.
Post by: DaveReading on 12 June, 2023, 11:14:43 pm
Post by: Jaded on 12 June, 2023, 11:26:36 pm
They aren’t getting them..
Post by: ian on 13 June, 2023, 09:01:41 pm
Post by: SoreTween on 16 June, 2023, 09:58:46 am
Let me guess why when exporting photos from the walled garden to the real world you:
a) give them random GUID filenames.
ii) set all the file times to the exported time.
3) Set all the EXIF metadata dates to the same exported time.
This makes them impossible to sort into correct order other than by manually renaming them all
It is because:
a) By doing so makes everything look so much better in the walled garden and surely upon seeing this the rest of the fucking world will change the way they work to join the walled garden.
ii) Because you're a bunch of 42 carat steaming thundercunts.
Post by: grams on 16 June, 2023, 10:56:04 am
There’ll be a checkbox somewhere to turn it on.
Post by: Tim Hall on 19 June, 2023, 04:12:03 pm
I use Kodi on a Raspberry Pi to play music and video.
There's a radio plugin which grabs streams from radio.de, so I can listen to thousands of radio stations from aroud the world. In reality I listen to half a doze, if that. Of those, three are BBC stations, (Radio 4, 4 Extra and 6 Music). The BBC have changed the way their streams are delivered so now I get nothing. I contacted radio.de who tell me "Currently, some BBC channels are no longer available". Indeed, I can't get BBC stations viathe radio.de website either.
Presumably it's part of the drive to get everyone to use BBS Sounds, which I do on my phone. This is not the same as playing it througha Big Amplifier with Real Speakers though.
Post by: aidan.f on 19 June, 2023, 10:47:17 pm
Post by: chopstick on 20 June, 2023, 12:20:13 am
Not really a rant, bit above a grumble.
I use Kodi on a Raspberry Pi to play music and video.
There's a radio plugin which grabs streams from radio.de, so I can listen to thousands of radio stations from aroud the world. In reality I listen to half a doze, if that. Of those, three are BBC stations, (Radio 4, 4 Extra and 6 Music). The BBC have changed the way their streams are delivered so now I get nothing. I contacted radio.de who tell me "Currently, some BBC channels are no longer available". Indeed, I can't get BBC stations viathe radio.de website either.
Presumably it's part of the drive to get everyone to use BBS Sounds, which I do on my phone. This is not the same as playing it througha Big Amplifier with Real Speakers though.
I don't know if this is useful or useless to you but the m3u streams as per here (https://steveseear.org/high-quality-bbc-radio-streams/) still work for me, playing them through a media player on my Linux PCs. I understand that they're 320kbps and that that is as good as it gets for BBC radio streaming. I have an old laptop with a USB soundcard putting an optical output to the integrated DAC on my reasonably sized amplifier with Real Speakers (though mostly I just use BBC Sounds via a web browser - which, I believe, is still 320kbps).
Post by: Maverick on 20 June, 2023, 08:54:06 am
1. International feeds that were MP3 streams are being switched off. They are switching to 96kbit AAC streams in HLS containers.
2. UK, Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey streams require an agreement between the BBC and the 3rd party company distributing the streams. The streams require a rolling token to get access, that require server side logic to implement this dynamic token generation.
Post by: Tim Hall on 20 June, 2023, 09:07:32 am
Not really a rant, bit above a grumble.
I use Kodi on a Raspberry Pi to play music and video.
There's a radio plugin which grabs streams from radio.de, so I can listen to thousands of radio stations from aroud the world. In reality I listen to half a doze, if that. Of those, three are BBC stations, (Radio 4, 4 Extra and 6 Music). The BBC have changed the way their streams are delivered so now I get nothing. I contacted radio.de who tell me "Currently, some BBC channels are no longer available". Indeed, I can't get BBC stations viathe radio.de website either.
Presumably it's part of the drive to get everyone to use BBS Sounds, which I do on my phone. This is not the same as playing it througha Big Amplifier with Real Speakers though.
I don't know if this is useful or useless to you but the m3u streams as per here (https://steveseear.org/high-quality-bbc-radio-streams/) still work for me, playing them through a media player on my Linux PCs. I understand that they're 320kbps and that that is as good as it gets for BBC radio streaming. I have an old laptop with a USB soundcard putting an optical output to the integrated DAC on my reasonably sized amplifier with Real Speakers (though mostly I just use BBC Sounds via a web browser - which, I believe, is still 320kbps).
Ah, that does look useful, thanks. This Kodi article suggests I can do some jibbling with m3u files so they get played. https://kodi.wiki/view/Internet_video_and_audio_streams (https://kodi.wiki/view/Internet_video_and_audio_streams)
Post by: Lightning Phil on 20 June, 2023, 09:56:33 am
Post by: Kim on 20 June, 2023, 01:46:19 pm
Post by: Tim Hall on 20 June, 2023, 10:47:34 pm
Plug a phono cable into your real amp and speakers, and then a) there won't be any compression and b) it will actually work.
It will still need a source of some kind, which in my case I do not have.
Or did not have. After a bit of web based research, ssh session into my pi and a spot of text editing I've created three playlists which play the output from the streams that chopstick pointed me at up thread. I've even made them into favouties so I can easily get to them from the Yatse remote control app on my phone.
Phear mi l33t haxxor skillz
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 June, 2023, 11:45:33 pm
It's all got to come apart again. Things have to be moved into different mods. Files have to be copied, edited, munged, processed, jibbled, filtered, Dolbyised and squeezed through a muslin bag. Spreadsheets have to be faffed with to make sure everything is copied to the right place and then sworn at because you typed “trick” instead of “truck”. And it’s T > 33 C up there. And there are sixty-one different containers. And…
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH! >:( >:( >:(
Post by: Kim on 22 June, 2023, 11:47:07 pm
Post by: Diver300 on 27 June, 2023, 09:08:53 pm
Post by: Bledlow on 28 June, 2023, 11:30:33 pm
Plug a phono cable into your real amp and speakers, and then a) there won't be any compression and b) it will actually work.With analogue input from spinning vinyl available via a Rega product. ;D
Post by: Kim on 05 July, 2023, 12:08:37 am
Look, I'm a reasonably technical person. I know more than two programming languages, and can can solder a transistor the right way round without burning my fingers and so on. But if I have to resort to Google to make sense of every unintuitive USB behaviour (this week: Power Delivery, and why it doesn't work in the presence of Anna Daptor) what hope is there for the average user? Especially when the molishers of usefully non-compliant accessories are vague in their specifications.
Post by: R_nger on 05 July, 2023, 08:26:52 am
Dear FruitStuffCo,
Let me guess why when exporting photos from the walled garden to the real world you:
a) give them random GUID filenames.
ii) set all the file times to the exported time.
3) Set all the EXIF metadata dates to the same exported time.
This makes them impossible to sort into correct order other than by manually renaming them all
It is because:
a) By doing so makes everything look so much better in the walled garden and surely upon seeing this the rest of the fucking world will change the way they work to join the walled garden.
ii) Because you're a bunch of 42 carat steaming thundercunts.
I was quite concerned when I read this - but can’t you just “export unmodified originals” from within the photos app ? Or am I missing something
Post by: SoreTween on 05 July, 2023, 12:42:19 pm
I was quite concerned when I read this - but can’t you just “export unmodified originals” from within the photos app ? Or am I missing somethingI don't know, I don't do FruitStuffCo. A colleague took a load of photos at a work site & I ended up with the tedious job of making sense of them after.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 July, 2023, 11:01:14 pm
Post by: rr on 07 July, 2023, 03:45:58 pm
I doubt I am going to renew, anyone got any recommendations for someone to host a couple of domains and a few email accounts, IMAP needed, exchange not wanted?
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 07 July, 2023, 10:41:38 pm
The hey we’re most upset when I pointed out that was their problem and not mine. Oh no they said gmail should know we are trustworthy and should have let it through.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 July, 2023, 11:10:32 pm
Post by: onerousdeporte on 07 July, 2023, 11:27:01 pm
Not really a rant, bit above a grumble.
I use Kodi on a Raspberry Pi to play music and video.
There's a radio plugin which grabs streams from radio.de, so I can listen to thousands of radio stations from aroud the world. In reality I listen to half a doze, if that. Of those, three are BBC stations, (Radio 4, 4 Extra and 6 Music). The BBC have changed the way their streams are delivered so now I get nothing. I contacted radio.de who tell me "Currently, some BBC channels are no longer available". Indeed, I can't get BBC stations viathe radio.de website either.
Presumably it's part of the drive to get everyone to use BBS Sounds, which I do on my phone. This is not the same as playing it througha Big Amplifier with Real Speakers though.
I don't know if this is useful or useless to you but the m3u streams as per here (https://steveseear.org/high-quality-bbc-radio-streams/) still work for me, playing them through a media player on my Linux PCs. I understand that they're 320kbps and that that is as good as it gets for BBC radio streaming. I have an old laptop with a USB soundcard putting an optical output to the integrated DAC on my reasonably sized amplifier with Real Speakers (though mostly I just use BBC Sounds via a web browser - which, I believe, is still 320kbps).
Thought that this was more to do with the data that BBC required to use the service.
Grumble, my chromebook has usb c and no port for headphones so I can't watch stuff on my laptop
Post by: Kim on 08 July, 2023, 07:10:46 am
I have failed to receive several emails from private domains to my gmail account. When I asked what response they had received I was told that the email had been refused by gmail for security concerns.To be fair, gmail have been one of the main perpetrators of embrace-extend-extinguish tactics through overly judicious application of spam filters. Even if you have all the SPF and DKIM stuff, they occasionally deign to chuck things in the bin, seemingly just to make life difficult for smaller server admins.
The hey we’re most upset when I pointed out that was their problem and not mine. Oh no they said gmail should know we are trustworthy and should have let it through.
Ultimately it's your provider that's rejecting legitimate mail. That Google have convinced you this isn't a problem is the big con.
Post by: chopstick on 08 July, 2023, 09:17:48 am
If you check the email header/source data, you might find that this is is the case (or you might even discover another reason). In the case of DMARC failure, it looks something like this (some details changed to keep it anonymous)
dmarc=fail (p=QUARANTINE sp=QUARANTINE dis=QUARANTINE) header.from=anotherforum.org
Received: from host.admin.domain.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
Post by: chopstick on 08 July, 2023, 09:43:40 am
<SNIP>There are adaptors that have USB C male at one end and 3.5mm headphone socket at the other. When I ever replace my phone, I dare say that this is the solution I will have to adopt because I don't want to replace my aged Sennheiser HD-25 headphones (though they're going towards Trigger's Broom status).
Grumble, my chromebook has usb c and no port for headphones so I can't watch stuff on my laptop
Post by: rr on 08 July, 2023, 10:09:31 am
Post by: Feanor on 08 July, 2023, 10:34:01 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 08 July, 2023, 11:21:18 am
(Goes there, does that)
Goes to outfit wot hosts domain.
“Why, yes! Yes, you can easily add DMARC to your outgoing e-mail! Just add it as a TXT record to your DNS wossname!”
This might as well be written in Aramaic. Any further investigation will have to wait until 1 (one) trip to Newport Velodrome, two (2) TdF stages and the BRITISH Grand Prix.
Post by: Kim on 08 July, 2023, 01:17:40 pm
Post by: rafletcher on 08 July, 2023, 02:26:39 pm
<SNIP>There are adaptors that have USB C male at one end and 3.5mm headphone socket at the other. When I ever replace my phone, I dare say that this is the solution I will have to adopt because I don't want to replace my aged Sennheiser HD-25 headphones (though they're going towards Trigger's Broom status).
Grumble, my chromebook has usb c and no port for headphones so I can't watch stuff on my laptop
Indeed this is the solution we adopted for my wife’s iPhone, a lightning to 3.5mm adaptor, so she can continue to use the cheap and readily available earpieces off eBay for her nocturnal listening.
Post by: Feanor on 08 July, 2023, 02:38:18 pm
“Why, yes! Yes, you can easily add DMARC to your outgoing e-mail! Just add it as a TXT record to your DNS wossname!”
This might as well be written in Aramaic. Any further investigation will have to wait until 1 (one) trip to Newport Velodrome, two (2) TdF stages and the BRITISH Grand Prix.
In your DNS wossname, create a record of type TXT, called:
_dmarc.yourdomain.co.uk
Inside the record, enter the following text:
v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:you@yourdomain.co.uk
That's a valid starting point. The contents of the record can be tweeked if necessary.
Here's mine (slightly redacted) for reference:
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53031883323_1bb5e4b75f_z.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2oNfgiV)
dmark1 (https://flic.kr/p/2oNfgiV) by Ron Lowe (https://www.flickr.com/photos/62966413@N04/), on Flickr
Post by: Lightning Phil on 08 July, 2023, 02:40:12 pm
I have failed to receive several emails from private domains to my gmail account. When I asked what response they had received I was told that the email had been refused by gmail for security concerns.
The hey we’re most upset when I pointed out that was their problem and not mine. Oh no they said gmail should know we are trustworthy and should have let it through.
Depends. There is only so much you can do with SPF, DKIM, Dmarc etc, and gmail will still reject the small domains. Where as the original intent of email was that small groups would host their own email, not be in the hands of a few behemoths, who get to decide what’s accepted not based on evidence of spamming but opaque black box rules.
Post by: Feanor on 08 July, 2023, 03:20:05 pm
I have failed to receive several emails from private domains to my gmail account. When I asked what response they had received I was told that the email had been refused by gmail for security concerns.
The hey we’re most upset when I pointed out that was their problem and not mine. Oh no they said gmail should know we are trustworthy and should have let it through.
Depends. There is only so much you can do with SPF, DKIM, Dmarc etc, and gmail will still reject the small domains. Where as the original intent of email was that small groups would host their own email, not be in the hands of a few behemoths, who get to decide what’s accepted not based on evidence of spamming but opaque black box rules.
Hmm, I self-host my e-mail on a server here at home.
I've not had mail rejected by any of the big providers.
I'm on AAISP static addresses, which are not marked as being 'domestic - do not accept mail from these addresses'.
Post by: Kim on 08 July, 2023, 03:33:33 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 July, 2023, 11:51:18 am
Plz to put keyboard back at bottom of screen where it blong, not smack in the middle where I'm trying to type!
Kthxbai!
Edit: fixed it. Though how it ended up “floating” rather than “dock” is a mystery worthy of Hardy Drew And The Nancy Boys, so I'll blame Farcebok as that’s what I was using when it first doned it.
Post by: Kim on 11 July, 2023, 12:03:08 pm
Hardy Drew And The Nancy Boys
I'd read that.
Actually, under Rule 34 there's a good chance that someone's already serialising it on Mastodon.
Post by: Kim on 11 July, 2023, 07:18:44 pm
USB-C. Again. >:(
Look, I'm a reasonably technical person. I know more than two programming languages, and can can solder a transistor the right way round without burning my fingers and so on. But if I have to resort to Google to make sense of every unintuitive USB behaviour (this week: Power Delivery, and why it doesn't work in the presence of Anna Daptor) what hope is there for the average user? Especially when the molishers of usefully non-compliant accessories are vague in their specifications.
Have now, on the third attempt, obtained Anna Daptor that brings the USB-C out to a panel-mount socket without b0rking the power negotiations. Not even if you reverse the polarity, which was where the second attempt would fail. As a bonus, it fit the existing drillings with a minimum of additional filing and no bad swears[1].
The lesson here is that if you ever have reason to use a USB-C extension cable for something, check the small print about Gigabeans and charging standards.
[1] This was reserved for the energy meter which would drop into calibration mode because I happened to be feeding it exactly the wrong number of voles and ants on bootup.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 July, 2023, 01:11:10 am
>:(
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 July, 2023, 01:02:58 pm
“Why, yes! Yes, you can easily add DMARC to your outgoing e-mail! Just add it as a TXT record to your DNS wossname!”
This might as well be written in Aramaic. Any further investigation will have to wait until 1 (one) trip to Newport Velodrome, two (2) TdF stages and the BRITISH Grand Prix.
In your DNS wossname, create a record of type TXT, called:
_dmarc.yourdomain.co.uk
Inside the record, enter the following text:
v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:you@yourdomain.co.uk
That's a valid starting point. The contents of the record can be tweeked if necessary.
Here's mine (slightly redacted) for reference:
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53031883323_1bb5e4b75f_z.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/2oNfgiV)
dmark1 (https://flic.kr/p/2oNfgiV) by Ron Lowe (https://www.flickr.com/photos/62966413@N04/), on Flickr
Tries that, discovers that gmail is complaining about SPF and/or DKIM, not DMARC. There are slightly more comprehensible instructions for adding an SPF wossname (think German rather than Aramaic). We will c, as the entire TdF pelican repeatedly tells us, because
Quote
Please remember that it may take up to 24 hours for your DNS changes to become active.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 July, 2023, 11:37:54 pm
Edit: and it is you, because you’re doing it on the Proper Computer as well.
Post by: Pingu on 13 July, 2023, 11:41:37 pm
...Edit: and it is you, because you’re doing it on the Proper Computer as well.
Bad panda for me too >:(
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 July, 2023, 11:50:11 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 July, 2023, 05:50:25 pm
Plz 2 not change settings after I click “Add All”, thereby removing the fucking subtitles that it took me an ages to figure out how to keep >:(
Kthxbai
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 21 July, 2023, 03:27:08 pm
Started it.
Seemed to be complete
Couldn't get Outlook to work - when it reloaded, the dialog about 'last session closed with items open' message wouldn't go away.
It took SEVEN reboots before things were working again.
While I'm ranting. That bloody stupid windows index program. Absolutely hammers my system, taking hundreds of Mb and up to 50% of CPU. Effing ridiculous.
Post by: ian on 21 July, 2023, 08:54:06 pm
OK, save a copy.
'Microsoft Excel is unable to save this file.'
Don't worry, it's on Sharepoint, there will be a prior version. Right?
Post by: SoreTween on 24 July, 2023, 10:47:28 am
In the shite weather weekend before last there was an unusually long power cut. My UPS ran down which triggered my server to shut down gracefully and my desktop to shut off with no grace at all. Getting the server (serial connected to the UPS) to shut down the desktop is a job still on the todo list. Ho hum.
This resulted in an unbootable desktop, BTRFS parent transid failure which means the disk filing system has errors in it. Potentially a total data loss, poo. A day of careful fettling later I had recovered the data and imaged the drive so I ran a repair which worked, phew. Most stuff is backed up but it would have been inconvenient to lose and inconvenient to have to reinstall.
This morning the server is not responding, BTRFS parent transid failure. No power cuts this weekend, no reason for it to have rebooted, no reason for it to have suffered corruption. WTF?
Post by: SoreTween on 29 July, 2023, 08:04:01 am
Recovered the server disks (and did a fresh backup of _everything_)
Stated reading up on NUT, looks like I can run the client on my NAS so server, desktop & NAS can all gracefully shut down. Didn't get it done yet :(
This morning the kitchen clocks are in blinky blinky mode again, 4th time this month >:( Effing sort it out Western Power.
Server and desktop both off :( :( Both fired up ok :-)
Examining logs it seems the power was only off 07:12 to 07:15 this morning. My UPS claims to have a run time of 1hr 3 mins which is about right for the load and age & capacity of the flatteries. Bollards, more expense.
Do I get another APC SmartUPS & transfer the batteries or go for a new one from another brand? This is the 2nd failed in 11 years.
Post by: MattH on 29 July, 2023, 08:31:37 am
I've tended to stick with APC, though for home I normally buy second hand high high end ones rather than small SOHO, and replace the batteries - which is helped by having a rack to mount them in. I've had two APC failures in the last 20 years or so, both were over a decade old in my ownership and bought second hand, but batteries seem to last about 5 years. The "proper" ones are built to a much higher standard than the little ones - but you say you use SmartUPS rather than BackUPS so are probably on them anyway.
https://secure.ups-trader.co.uk/ is my goto company.
Nowadays I've got three in the house; one powering the entertainment stuff and DECT phone basestation in the living room (avoiding the irritation of a short blip shutting stuff down and losing recordings), one running the server, and one running the rest of my networking kit (router, switches, access points etc.) which is pretty low load compared to the server. Segmenting it means in a long cut the server goes off fairly early as that's the highest load, but the network etc. stay up for hours so I can continue to work and use the internet from laptops during extended outages.
Post by: Kim on 29 July, 2023, 01:23:51 pm
(Similarly, the BHPC owns a small modern(ish) APC unit, which is utterly useless for the use-case of giving you enough time to feed the infernal combustion engine more petril if it conks out mid-race, on account of fussiness about voltage and/or frequency (I didn't have a meter to hand) causing it to run on battery until depleted and then shut down. For added lols, its sole means of communicating with the user is a single unmarked blinkenlight and a beeper, which is insufficient to determine that this is what it's doing without reference to the destructions. I've since molished a sensible redundant power supply for the Box of Winky Lights™ to avoid this problem.)
Anyway, a little later, also courtesy of Mr-Barakta's-Dad, we acquired a Chloride online UPS with a 3kVA rating, which was utterly bulletproof. The original batteries lasted years, as did the ones of half the capacity that I replaced them with. Its only weakness was a proprietary management interface that I couldn't find any specifications for, and being too heavy to lift without pyramid-building tactics.
These days we've got a now-discontinued VFI 1.5kVA rackmount thing that works well, albeit with ridiculous fan monitoring that made replacing the fans with something quieter an issue, and a smaller Salicru unit (chosen entirely on account of its dimensions) protecting the downstairs network stuff.
My conclusion is that you get what you pay for, and that online (dual conversion) UPSen are considerably better engineered than the offline type.
Post by: SoreTween on 31 July, 2023, 10:50:38 am
So I dug out some 50W resistors & found I have a dead cell, voltage is fine under no load but one battery drops instantly to 10V under load. Replacement batteries ordered. In the middle of typing an earlier iteration of this post I had yet another bloody power glitch and I think my server and desktop are both unwell again.
Fuckety poo.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 August, 2023, 12:03:17 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 20 August, 2023, 12:39:06 am
Post by: Kim on 20 August, 2023, 01:14:15 pm
(This post sponsored by Microsoft Windows)
Post by: onerousdeporte on 22 August, 2023, 01:25:23 am
Post by: Woofage on 22 August, 2023, 12:53:04 pm
Post by: ian on 22 August, 2023, 10:01:08 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 August, 2023, 10:08:17 pm
Microsith: just do as you’re fucking told, m'kay >:(
Post by: Woofage on 22 August, 2023, 10:41:57 pm
My wife Chromecasts her New Zealandish aerobicisers from her iPhone to the TV with no hassles. Work those abs, agh agh agh.
Probably not ones streamed from Apple TV though.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 August, 2023, 01:11:52 pm
Your online check-in procedure is a thing of beauty right up to the “get boarding pass” moment, whereupon you enter your e-mail address, tap the button and…
…
…nothing happens. Had to do the whole palaver again from a Proper Computer and print the damn' thing. Mend it.
Kthxbai
Post by: Pickled Onion on 27 August, 2023, 06:44:25 pm
Hmm. Plugged in with a handy USB A to USB C cable it's refusing to draw more than 0.45 of an Ampère. Which is both strange, since my power bank happily draws a whole Amp, but also not very helpful as the lapdog uses up at least 0.05 of an Amp more than that whilst in use.
Post by: MattH on 27 August, 2023, 10:17:59 pm
So in the new house, the internet wasn't live even though Virgin said it should be. Bit the rant bit - this is what the online docs said about the issue:-
Quote
Green power light is flashing and WiFi light is green
This means the Hub is on, but your WiFi isn’t. It’s likely to be a loose connection in your home. Make sure the white cable is plugged firmly into the Hub and at the Virgin Media socket on the wall. If you’re using a splitter, make sure that’s firmly connected, too.
Perhaps it would help if Virgin didn't confuse internet (or WAN) and WiFi? The WiFi is working fine on the hub. Can connect to it, log in and access diagnostics on the hub. No problem at all with WiFi. The problem is that the hub isn't detecting the RF signal on the incoming cable for the internet. So, still may be a loose connection (or in this case more likely that they just haven't turned it on at their end), but definitely NOT a WiFi issue.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 30 August, 2023, 12:23:29 pm
Here is what your “alarm” function is supposed to do:
• at the programmed time, play “Intermission” by Tool to wake me up.
Here is what your “alarm” function is NOT supposed to do:
• play “Intermission” an hour and a half before the programmed time
• not play “Intermission” at the programmed time
It’s not rocket surgery. Sort it out u muppets!
Post by: Kim on 30 August, 2023, 12:33:37 pm
Helped the youngest offspring and friend move home this weekend. Virgin (spit) managed to disconnect their internet at the old house a day early - not ideal as they both work from home.
So in the new house, the internet wasn't live even though Virgin said it should be. Bit the rant bit - this is what the online docs said about the issue:-QuoteGreen power light is flashing and WiFi light is green
This means the Hub is on, but your WiFi isn’t. It’s likely to be a loose connection in your home. Make sure the white cable is plugged firmly into the Hub and at the Virgin Media socket on the wall. If you’re using a splitter, make sure that’s firmly connected, too.
Perhaps it would help if Virgin didn't confuse internet (or WAN) and WiFi? The WiFi is working fine on the hub. Can connect to it, log in and access diagnostics on the hub. No problem at all with WiFi. The problem is that the hub isn't detecting the RF signal on the incoming cable for the internet. So, still may be a loose connection (or in this case more likely that they just haven't turned it on at their end), but definitely NOT a WiFi issue.
They're probably using WiFi in the colloquial 'network connection' sense that most people seem to use these days. I'm not sure if that adds clarity.
(Calling a modem/router/switch/access point device a 'hub' is also confusing, but anyone who knows what a hub is is used to hub meaning something else.)
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 06 September, 2023, 11:22:33 am
Takes everything usable and good in git and chucks it out. Everything hidden behind a bloody stupid gui that is even less intuitive than git's command line commands.
FFS, all I want to do is pull a repo, check which branches exist. Is there a simple way of doing that? Is there fuck.
I could write down every git command an entire Dev team needs to know on a single piece of A4. Github? Who bloody knows.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 06 September, 2023, 01:04:02 pm
Oh and a hub is the thing that goes round the axle.
Post by: Kim on 06 September, 2023, 01:29:17 pm
Post by: SteveC on 06 September, 2023, 06:27:55 pm
Well yes, but a hub is also a layer 1 network device, and every other building in a university.Also seems to be a term for a cafe in certain workplaces (mine and the last place MrsC worked)
Post by: TheLurker on 06 September, 2023, 06:36:49 pm
Quote from: mrcharly-YHT
FFS, all I want to do is pull a repo, check which branches exist. Is there a simple way of doing that? Is there fuck.Atlassian Sourcetree an option for you? I've been using it for 5 or 6 years now and although it is slower than command line git the GUI more than makes up for the few seconds here or there waiting for stuff to refresh.
Post by: Feanor on 06 September, 2023, 07:47:19 pm
I'm using a free version, because I'm only an occasional user.
https://git-fork.com/
Post by: chopstick on 06 September, 2023, 10:06:32 pm
As I recall, my last full-time permanent job used to hold daily team meetings called hub meetings. They decked the office out "google office" style with fake living rooms in the middle of open plan office space - looked liked a mock-up in a department store/Ikea to me. But we weren't allowed to sit down in the meetings. They also had weird American Football stylee work practices, with "scrum masters". Glad I don't work there any more.Well yes, but a hub is also a layer 1 network device, and every other building in a university.Also seems to be a term for a cafe in certain workplaces (mine and the last place MrsC worked)
Post by: ian on 06 September, 2023, 10:12:54 pm
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 07 September, 2023, 07:22:54 am
Quote from: mrcharly-YHTFFS, all I want to do is pull a repo, check which branches exist. Is there a simple way of doing that? Is there fuck.Atlassian Sourcetree an option for you? I've been using it for 5 or 6 years now and although it is slower than command line git the GUI more than makes up for the few seconds here or there waiting for stuff to refresh.
This is a work computer, locked down (although I can install quite a bit of software).
I've discovered that in theory I can set up git locally to talk to git enterprise.
There don't seem to be 'standard working practices' defined here, which bakes my noodle.
Git can be used in lots and lots of ways, it is important for all members of a team to be consistent. In my previous job I was responsible for defining and maintaining the working practices for several git repos.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 September, 2023, 11:31:37 pm
If I am logged in as me why are you telling me you are unable to lo me in to reply to a comment on my blog when I had to be logged into your product or service in order to approve the comment not thirty seconds earlier? Sort it out u muppets!
kthxbai
Post by: Jaded on 11 September, 2023, 11:47:31 pm
Has an internal battery that, when flat, means the NAS will not start up and charge said battery. Apparently the solution is to send the thing back to Drongo to get it replaced, for $xxx. They went bust earlier in the year.
So my choices are to lose the data, or get a PC 5 SATA thingie and some specialist RAID software.
Post by: Woofage on 12 September, 2023, 10:53:22 am
Post by: Jaded on 12 September, 2023, 11:51:16 am
Post by: philip on 12 September, 2023, 07:37:58 pm
https://old.reddit.com/r/drobo/comments/yjdwg4/my_drobos_dead_and_im_so_screwed/iv46w68/
then it appears to be an 18650 and you could probably replace it with something like:
https://cellpacksolutions.co.uk/products/battery-packs/ansmann-standard-li-ion-1s1p-3-7v-3450mah-battery-pack/
(not recommending that particular supplier, just the first that came up when searching)
Post by: Kim on 12 September, 2023, 08:10:17 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 14 September, 2023, 05:41:34 pm
Quote from: mrcharly-YHT
Aye, same with mine. I have just been issued with a new box and it's idle until I can get SourceTree installed. We were shunted from one division to another and SourceTree hasn't, yet, been added to the approved list for the "new" division. I'm letting my line manager chase it, I've got better things to do using the current box.Quote from: TheLurkerThis is a work computer, locked down (although I can install quite a bit of software).Quote from: mrcharly-YHTFFS, all I want to do is pull a repo, check which branches exist. Is there a simple way of doing that? Is there fuck.Atlassian Sourcetree an option for you? I've been using it for 5 or 6 years now and although it is slower than command line git the GUI more than makes up for the few seconds here or there waiting for stuff to refresh.
Post by: mrcharly-YHT on 22 September, 2023, 07:43:09 am
Quote from: mrcharly-YHTAye, same with mine. I have just been issued with a new box and it's idle until I can get SourceTree installed. We were shunted from one division to another and SourceTree hasn't, yet, been added to the approved list for the "new" division. I'm letting my line manager chase it, I've got better things to do using the current box.Quote from: TheLurkerThis is a work computer, locked down (although I can install quite a bit of software).Quote from: mrcharly-YHTFFS, all I want to do is pull a repo, check which branches exist. Is there a simple way of doing that? Is there fuck.Atlassian Sourcetree an option for you? I've been using it for 5 or 6 years now and although it is slower than command line git the GUI more than makes up for the few seconds here or there waiting for stuff to refresh.
I was sort-of wrong. There is a way to use git locally, pulling from gitenterprise.
Wasn't working for me because the system was part way through an email format change. I'd generated a key using the correct email address, but the system hadn't caught up with the change.
Such a relief, working in git once more.
Post by: barakta on 22 September, 2023, 08:25:48 pm
FUCKING INFURIATING.
One of my jobs uses Google as their stuff and it's BROKEN horribly so instead of nicely arranged files that open properly it's been a nasty bodge ALLL fucking week. I've wasted HOURS (unpaid) fighting to get access to every file and there's hundreds.
I am having to download personal data to my local machine to Do My Job in anything like a normally efficient manner cos Google Drive is SO FUCKING SHIT and the normal system is broken.
Apparently this is Google's fault and despite being paying customers, it's taking unacceptably long for Google to FIX IT.
I Am Not Happy.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 04 October, 2023, 07:54:57 pm
Why, no! No, it does not! A pox upon Mozilla, Yahoo! and! all! who! fail! in! her!
Post by: Bledlow on 06 October, 2023, 03:57:32 pm
The two desktops in the house connect just as they did before, both wirelessly & wired. They happily connect with the same cable, plugged into the same socket on the router, as the laptop denies the existence of. I ran Dell's diagnostics & they don't say anything useful. Nor do Microsoft's. I've switched everything off & on again.
This is a new problem for me. Failure to connect has always been for an obvious reason such as borked router, wrong wifi password, etc. I must think, without being paid to do so.
Post by: Bledlow on 06 October, 2023, 04:12:39 pm
[Edit] But it only happened in that tab. Here be gremlins. methinks.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 October, 2023, 07:04:28 pm
- It's not an icon, and
- double-clicking it does fuck all
Post by: Feanor on 11 October, 2023, 08:38:43 pm
Brother, what the fuck is the point of whacking a notification onto my Babbage-Engine telling me to “Double-click this icon to update blah blah” when:Moreover, if you dive through the dozen layers of obfuscatory crap to find the “Check for updates” wossname it says it’s all up to date. Which it isn’t, because I found a printer firmware update released while I was on holibobs and have not installed because I didn’t know about it because your stupid software didn’t tell me it existed sort it out u muppets >:(
- It's not an icon, and
- double-clicking it does fuck all
Under no circumstances install the software package that comes with any consumer-grade printer.
It will probably be on a Cee Dee, be 10 years out-of-date, and install a gigabyte of crapware at the same time.
Do whatever is required to obtain the necessary drivers only.
Post by: Kim on 11 October, 2023, 08:42:32 pm
Under no circumstances install [...] any consumer-grade printer.
FTFY ;D
Though the faffing about it took to get Windows 11 on a friend's laptop to speak to my tame Laserjet 4050 suggests that 'consumer-grade' may also be redundant. I think the mistake we made there was trusting the HP website.
Actually, I've just remembered trying to get it to work on barakta's $ork-1 laptop, which was too locked down to install drivers. Does Windows have a generic lowest-common-denominator Postscript or PCL driver available? Of course it doesn't.
Post by: Feanor on 11 October, 2023, 08:51:23 pm
They are still there, but they are hard to find.
I have to google how to find these settings these days.
Post by: Feanor on 11 October, 2023, 09:22:07 pm
Though the faffing about it took to get Windows 11 on a friend's laptop to speak to my tame Laserjet 4050 suggests that 'consumer-grade' may also be redundant. I think the mistake we made there was trusting the HP website.
Actually, I've just remembered trying to get it to work on barakta's $ork-1 laptop, which was too locked down to install drivers. Does Windows have a generic lowest-common-denominator Postscript or PCL driver available? Of course it doesn't.
So I just installed the drivers for my 4050 on my locked-down work lapdog here.
The level of lock-down may vary.
I started here:
https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-laserjet-4050-printer-series/25475
(wow! that link seems to land at random locations sometimes! Try it again if it does not lead to the driver download page.)
I downloaded the Universal Print Driver for PCL6(64-BIT), V 7.1.0.25570
That got me a file called 'upd-pcl6-x64-7.1.0.25570.exe'.
Running it just self-unzipped into 'c:\HP Universal Print Driver\pcl6-x64-7.1.0.25570', which is what I expected.
Unexpectedly, an HP Universal Printing wizard popped up, and I decided to follow it.
(Normally, I'd expect to manually go through the Windows 'Add A Printer' thing, and then point it to the drivers in this folder.)
Select 'Traditional Mode'.
'Add a printer using an IP Address or hostname'
Device type = TCP/IP Device, enter IP address.
Port Name is set to the same.
Do not select Query Printer...
Select one of the 2 driver options offered: HP Universal Printing PCL 6. I have no idea what the second option is for.
Give it a name.
Let it install.
Post by: Pingu on 11 October, 2023, 10:00:58 pm
It's hard because MS are trying to depreciate the old Control Panel and the UIs which let you actually Do Stuff, (like the Add Printer > IP Device UI), replacing them with dumbed-down phone-UI interfaces which do not expose the settings you need.
They are still there, but they are hard to find.
I have to google how to find these settings these days.
Would God Mode help with this? (We've not had a printer for many years - that's what work is for).
Post by: Kim on 11 October, 2023, 10:13:55 pm
The level of lock-down may vary.
Yeah, this one was *very* locked down, as befits marginally-computer-literate people wrangling special-category data from offsite. IIRC you needed an IT support ticket to add/remove icons from the Desktop...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 11 October, 2023, 11:40:13 pm
Post by: HTFB on 12 October, 2023, 10:41:07 am
an initial period of refusing to communicate with other devices even over a wired notwork said Brother (O Brother, where art thou?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 October, 2023, 10:49:05 am
an initial period of refusing to communicate with other devices even over a wired notwork said Brother (O Brother, where art thou?
The contents of the original installation CD are stored in a directory thusly ^^^^ named on a NAS wossname.
Post by: barakta on 12 October, 2023, 06:40:17 pm
The level of lock-down may vary.
Yeah, this one was *very* locked down, as befits marginally-computer-literate people wrangling special-category data from offsite. IIRC you needed an IT support ticket to add/remove icons from the Desktop...
Our IT is super paranoid about being pwnned. They're so locked-down/paranoid that Estates aren't allowed to have remote control over building lighting and aircon etc cos IT won't allow them to use the software they have and just booted it out without any warning or consultation...
I am forseeing some challenges where we want some infra for accessibility and it being turned down over cybersecurity cos it's whitelist only and I don't know how you get new items whitelisted.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 October, 2023, 07:06:45 pm
This morning you unilaterally decided it was spam. It isn’t sort it out u muppets >:(
Post by: Kim on 12 October, 2023, 08:32:12 pm
I've decided that discretion is the better part of valour, and we'll just go without a duplexer and try not to snap anything else, for that would mean <fx: thunderclap> having to buy a new printer. Which would result in a great many bad swears.
[1] I know how that feels, tbh.
Post by: Feanor on 12 October, 2023, 08:39:09 pm
It paper-jams quite a lot, and also the print density is poor: the blacks are a rather dull grey. Even with a new toner cartridge.
I need to either google for how to fix it, or let it pass into the next life.
But what to replace it with?
Post by: Kim on 12 October, 2023, 08:51:49 pm
Post by: CarlF on 12 October, 2023, 09:31:15 pm
We picked up one of these a couple of years ago for Mrs F's business and it's still seeming like it was a good choice. Reassuringly solid in a manner that's reminiscent of Laserjets of yore. Seems to support the sorts of standards a proper printer should (barring a parallel interface of course). Came with an actual paper manual, even.
Not particularly cheap, but not overpriced for how solid it is.
Canon and Xerox also still appear to make proper printers with models at that sort of level too.
Post by: Afasoas on 12 October, 2023, 10:53:15 pm
Exactly. Barakta suggests that Brother is probably the least-worst printer molishment since HP turned evil. But what are the chances of finding a workhorse laser that speaks Postscript over Ethernet without any Devil's Radio or cloudy shenanigans, and that is likely to last a couple of decades?
FWIW I'm sitting next to an HL-L2370N which sadly does not speak PostScript. But does do PCL (over Ethernet) and appears to just workTM with Linux.
It's not been the source of too much pain with Windows either.
Post by: grams on 12 October, 2023, 11:36:06 pm
Post by: Kim on 12 October, 2023, 11:40:21 pm
Thanks to the fruit company wanting printing to be a thing on iPhones without wanting printer drivers to be a thing on iPhones, almost all vaguely recent networkable printers support AirPrint, which means they support IPP for sending print jobs, and most will accept a PDF, which means you can print to them from basically anything without any proprietary drivers or cloud bollocks.
That's disturbingly sensible. The Mega-Global Fruit Corporation have their moments...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 October, 2023, 12:45:26 am
Exactly. Barakta suggests that Brother is probably the least-worst printer molishment since HP turned evil. But what are the chances of finding a workhorse laser that speaks Postscript over Ethernet without any Devil's Radio or cloudy shenanigans, and that is likely to last a couple of decades?
My Brother does something called “BR-Script3” which is, it sez 'ere, “the Brother version of Postscript”. No doubt it differs from real Postscript in many small but exciting ways. Does Ethernet as well as Stan's Radio.
Post by: Afasoas on 13 October, 2023, 02:33:32 pm
Thanks to the fruit company wanting printing to be a thing on iPhones without wanting printer drivers to be a thing on iPhones, almost all vaguely recent networkable printers support AirPrint, which means they support IPP for sending print jobs, and most will accept a PDF, which means you can print to them from basically anything without any proprietary drivers or cloud bollocks.
That's disturbingly sensible. The Mega-Global Fruit Corporation have their moments...
Microsoft are also heading in this general direction.
Which would I'd welcome with open arms given the print servers and fleet of aging printers that I appear to have become saddled with*.
Knowing Microsoft, they will find some way to make it unworkable.
*Not what I signed up for, but give the £coin they insist on paying me I'm not going to complain too much
Post by: Afasoas on 13 October, 2023, 02:37:12 pm
It's about to turn 40. And it's still sh!te.
Each document is handled as a separate window but dialog boxes as still model across all of them.
The UI is still pants too. It took at least two minutes to work out how to insert a date field. A menu bar with drop down menus for seldom used features makes more sense then icons that open said modal dialog boxes.
LibreOffice Writer FTW.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 17 October, 2023, 08:36:32 pm
What’s with iCloud continually popping up a stupid window telling me nothing interesting or useful and requiring me to click “Close”, that I might be rid of it? Just run it in the background, unseen and silent, like it used to. You bunch of stunned musk-oxen.
Kthxbai
Post by: Beardy on 18 October, 2023, 12:19:10 pm
Dr Beardy is still writing academic tomes with a former colleague and thus still needs to use M$ products. Of course they have moved Office over to the subscription model with O365 a while ago now, but it seems that some wag in the M$ marketing office has decided to force the holdouts on old versions of paid for Office to migrate to newer subscribed versions by withholding security updates. Our aging Mac desktop is now choking on the installed version of PowerPoint and thus we are expected to fork out money for a subscription. Bastards.
ETA
And while I'm ranting about M$, isn't it time the sorted out their install application countdown script. Its been in use for umpteen billionely years and it STILL lies about how long the install is going to take.It's told me 'about 4 minutes for the last thirty or so minutes. >:(
Post by: Kim on 21 October, 2023, 08:16:37 pm
It all went a bit xkcd://349 (https://xkcd.com/349/) and right now I'm considering myself lucky that - thanks to a combination of ZFS and luck - I'm back on 2.6.0 with functional LAN routing and both an IPv4 *and* an IPv6 address on the primary WAN interface at the same time. And all the old bugs.
I've come to the conclusion that PFSense is just really bad when PPPoE is involved, and Netgate don't seem inclined towards fixing it.
Not sure whether OPNSense is any better, or whether I should throw money at the problem with MicroTik or something. Back in the day, I had a usefully modified m0n0wall, but I've decided that I'm now too old for knitting my own routers from shell scripts.
There must be something that Just Works and can cope with IPv6, a couple of WAN interfaces and an assortment of local VLANs with various firewalls between them.
Post by: Peter on 21 October, 2023, 08:27:40 pm
Here's another couple of geniuses at work:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctM_Rvgjfpo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctM_Rvgjfpo)
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 October, 2023, 07:36:56 pm
I know you want me to “upgrade” to your “premium”product by giving you money, but your constant pop-ups are likely to have the opposite fucking effect, viz. cause me consign your not-premium product to the compost heap of history next to Bakelite, foot-operated windscreen washers and Michael X.
Kthxbai
Post by: Feanor on 23 October, 2023, 08:33:19 pm
I've decided that I'm now too old for knitting my own routers from shell scripts.
There must be something that Just Works and can cope with IPv6, a couple of WAN interfaces and an assortment of local VLANs with various firewalls between them.
I got to that point a Several of years ago.
So I just Paid The Man (Rev RAK) for a Firebrick, and let it get on with it.
It's a small single-box thing, and really very configurable.
And I just accept that I may need to adjust my requirements to suit, if I can't configure it exactly how I want.
I've not had to do that, and I've got a fairly non-domestic configuration here.
(And I'm tunnelling my AAISP IP addresses over Starlink for added fun, using AAISP's L2TP facility.
Yay! I pay for 2 ISPs.)
Also it consumes much less power than the small PC stuffed with NICs that it replaced.
Regarding the MicroTik kit, on the AAISP IRC channel, you will often pick up some noise about people knitting their own using the MicroTik routerboard devices, but I've never explored that. I'm at the CBA stage with that.
Post by: Kim on 23 October, 2023, 09:18:12 pm
They also don't treat IPv6 as something optional that should be disabled at the first sign of problems.
(Current pfsense is running on one of those APU2 boards, so is silent and reasonably energy-efficient.)
My setup may be more complicated than the usual domestic WiFi-in-a-box, but it's hardly unusual by the standards of small businesses. I expect that after the obligatory weekend of mucking about, a Firebrick would Just Work.
Post by: barakta on 23 October, 2023, 09:42:56 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 24 October, 2023, 01:03:31 am
At least when lusers were doing this ten years ago I was getting paid to rant at them >:(
Post by: Maverick on 24 October, 2023, 08:59:15 am
My setup may be more complicated than the usual domestic WiFi-in-a-box, but it's hardly unusual by the standards of small businesses. I expect that after the obligatory weekend of mucking about, a Firebrick would Just Work.
+1 for the Firebrick, my current 2700 has been sat in the corner doing it's thing unobtrusively for the past 12 years after Feanor lent me a 105. I keep thinking I'll upgrade but there seems little reason. The software has been regularly updated (and improved) and is so reliable that I let A&A do the updates remotely.
On the other hand I'm in the middle of upgrading the network here which has been a mini nightmare due to modern house construction forcing me to route the cabling down the outside of the house to provide a cabled connection to my AV system.
Post by: Afasoas on 24 October, 2023, 01:03:25 pm
In a quest to repay some of the technical debt I've been accumulating since I got distracted by the intricacies of counting funny-shaped bikes riding in circles, I've spent most of the afternoon failing to upgrade PFSense to 2.7.0.
It all went a bit xkcd://349 (https://xkcd.com/349/) and right now I'm considering myself lucky that - thanks to a combination of ZFS and luck - I'm back on 2.6.0 with functional LAN routing and both an IPv4 *and* an IPv6 address on the primary WAN interface at the same time. And all the old bugs.
I've come to the conclusion that PFSense is just really bad when PPPoE is involved, and Netgate don't seem inclined towards fixing it.
I had a dalliance with OPNsense and it didn't end well. UI lacking helpfulness and validation. I recall raising an issue about it and the devs brushing it off. So I've stuck with pfSense, despite Netgate qualms.
Still running 2.5.2 here; I was waiting for 2.6.1 before upgrading and I see that 2.7.0 is available - so I will upgrade to that during my next free weekend. What is the issue with PPPoE?
Post by: Kim on 24 October, 2023, 01:17:05 pm
What is the issue with PPPoE?
Best summed up as a lack of testing, I think.
In 2.6.0 there's a mildly annoying bug where throughput is counted twice. And if you have IPv6 configured by dhcp6 or SLAAC on more than one interface (which doesn't have to be PPPoE) the multiple instances of dhcp6cd try to bind to the same interface, which doesn't work so well.
In 2.7.0 they appear to have configured dhcp6cd more correctly, but I'm seeing a mystery bug where the WAN interface loses its IPv4 address after a couple of seconds (if configured for *only* IPv4, it works fine). I thought this was cruft in my config file, so spent Sunday configuring a clean install of 2.7.0 from scratch. This worked until it suddenly didn't, with no obvious clues in the log and disabling bits of unrelated configuration (eg. static routes, the DNS resolver) would restore functionality. I concluded that there's probably something subtle and timing-related going on with the various scripts that run when an IP address changes, but by this point I was tired and fed up and generally lacking enthusiasm to debug it.
(Also, searching the internet for answers with broken IPv4 is a special form of frustration.)
I'm assuming that Firebricks can tell whether a PPPoE interface is up using LCP, rather than the bodge of ICMP pinging something at the other end that pfSense et al use. That would seem to offer substantial advantages in terms of implementing failover that actually works.
Post by: Afasoas on 24 October, 2023, 01:35:46 pm
What is the issue with PPPoE?
Best summed up as a lack of testing, I think.
In 2.6.0 there's a mildly annoying bug where throughput is counted twice. And if you have IPv6 configured by dhcp6 or SLAAC on more than one interface (which doesn't have to be PPPoE) the multiple instances of dhcp6cd try to bind to the same interface, which doesn't work so well.
In 2.7.0 they appear to have configured dhcp6cd more correctly, but I'm seeing a mystery bug where the WAN interface loses its IPv4 address after a couple of seconds. I thought this was cruft in my config file, so spent Sunday configuring a clean install of 2.7.0 from scratch. This worked until it suddenly didn't, with no obvious clues in the log and disabling bits of unrelated configuration (eg. static routes, the DNS resolver) would restore functionality. I concluded that there's probably something subtle and timing-related going on with the various scripts that run when an IP address changes, but by this point I was tired and fed up and generally lacking enthusiasm to debug it.
(Also, searching the internet for answers with broken IPv4 is a special form of frustration.)
Ugh. That sounds most frustrating. For as long as I've been using pfSense there's been an array of interesting problems with each .0 release, which is why I've habitually avoided them.
There's not too much IPv6 here. I've experimented with it at various times - each WAN interface has a HE IPv6 GRE tunnel as I don't think either of my ISPs have IPv6 on general availability. There's one vLAN with SLAAC enabled. Another has some static IPv6 configured but I wound up disabling SLAAC after it borked Android devices.
I've also notice Debian Bookworm was released earlier in the year and I still have hosts running Buster. It's about time I started doing some testing with my Ansible configurations and working out what needs to change.
Post by: Kim on 24 October, 2023, 01:44:02 pm
I do have a special IPv4-only VLAN/SSID for whichever buggy old Android we had that couldn't cope with RAs (the more recent ones are fine), which also has 802.11b enabled for testing.
I upgraded our desktops from bullseye to bookworm last week. No drama at all for barakta's. Mine got some mild font-rendering shenanigans, and I had to re-write my script that toggles between monitor speakers and headphones, because the sound system has been completely replaced. Again.
Post by: Beardy on 24 October, 2023, 02:08:24 pm
Someone has been ducking g about with the made of iPhone devils radio stack, either the Cuptino crew or the Oticon lot. My Shiny New hearing aids have made for iPhone devils radio functionality, and up to last week they fairly happily swapped between my phone and fondleslab for audio streaming g with little drama. Occasionally they needed a ‘power recycle’ to facilitate the nice playing, but mostly they worked. This week they are very reluctant to auto switch and need all sorts of fiddling. Bastards.
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 25 October, 2023, 07:00:08 am
Post by: Afasoas on 25 October, 2023, 08:56:15 am
AAISP customer, so IPv6 is normal and ordinary and has been working fine here for years. As such I get a bit resentful when people's default solution to network probems is "disable IPv6".
I do have a special IPv4-only VLAN/SSID for whichever buggy old Android we had that couldn't cope with RAs (the more recent ones are fine), which also has 802.11b enabled for testing.
I upgraded our desktops from bullseye to bookworm last week. No drama at all for barakta's. Mine got some mild font-rendering shenanigans, and I had to re-write my script that toggles between monitor speakers and headphones, because the sound system has been completely replaced. Again.
Dist upgraded the old daily driver laptop to Bookworm last night. The only issue thus far is a change to the location of the NTP config file and some configuration in it which no longer works. The latter had the knock-on effect of breaking Network Manager when it was trying to do DHCP things to the running NTP configuration.
I've got one Android device left which doesn't play nice with IPv6. When that dies, I'll experiment with turning router advertisements back on. I need to set-up some IPv6 VPN gateways and adjust my home-brew Pi-hole equivalent (a set of scripts that periodically update Bind response polizy zones) to also blackhole nefarious/spammy IPv6 lookups.
Post by: Afasoas on 25 October, 2023, 09:02:42 am
Compared to the above knitting, my rant is more of a playground whinge.
Someone has been ducking g about with the made of iPhone devils radio stack, either the Cuptino crew or the Oticon lot. My Shiny New hearing aids have made for iPhone devils radio functionality, and up to last week they fairly happily swapped between my phone and fondleslab for audio streaming g with little drama. Occasionally they needed a ‘power recycle’ to facilitate the nice playing, but mostly they worked. This week they are very reluctant to auto switch and need all sorts of fiddling. Bastards.
Recently acquired a digital audio player which I've been using to stream some music via WiFi. I'm also using Bluetooth headphones. Combining two flavours of devils radio seems to be all kinds of temperamental.
I've resultantly started re-ripping the CD collection, replacing what I'd previously managed to rip - mainly 128kB/s MP3s - with FLAC files.
It was a sad day when Apple dropped the 3.5mm headphone socket from their phones and then everyone blindly followed suit.
Post by: rafletcher on 25 October, 2023, 10:29:36 am
It was a sad day when Apple dropped the 3.5mm headphone socket from their phones and then everyone blindly followed suit.
For the time being my wife uses a lightning to 3.5mm adapter on her iPod. Works flawlessly.
Post by: Kim on 25 October, 2023, 12:41:09 pm
It was a sad day when Apple dropped the 3.5mm headphone socket from their phones and then everyone blindly followed suit.
There seem to be enough people who want one that they're still alive and well in the low-mid spec Android world. It's fairly high on my list of desirable phone features, as I want to use a set of no-nonsense in-ear headphones in an unpredictable way when travelling, and pretty much never the rest of the time. Cynicism about devil's radios aside, I really don't want to have to charge another thing or faff about with dongles when I'm cycle-touring.
Post by: Tim Hall on 25 October, 2023, 12:48:48 pm
Howsumdiver, the $Stuffs stored on it are duplicated on another external drive, hooked up to my Raspberry Pi, and are all present and correct. Hurrah after all.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 25 October, 2023, 02:11:29 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 25 October, 2023, 07:19:52 pm
Latest saga... a clustered database randomly losing nodes, resulting in business essential application falling over. Turns out to be an NTP problem.
NTP clients had zero true chimers and NTP servers with offsets in seconds and jitter also in seconds for their associated NTP servers..
The NTP servers are Windows domain controllers. Virtualised. Turns out they were configured to have their time synced periodically with the hypervisor host. That explains the jitter then!
Policy had been applied to configure the PDC Emulator (root of the domain heirarchy) to synchronize time with external NTP servers. Firewall rules would not allow NTP packets to pass.
Said policy configured the source NTP servers as
Code: [Select]
Type: NoSync. WTAF.NTP has never worked properly in this domain. It must have been like that for years. I'm really surprised this has not caused problems before. Or maybe it has and people have glossed over them.
All resolved now.
If people can't be bothered to test the infrastructure they configure, they have no business pressing buttons.
Post by: SteveC on 25 October, 2023, 07:48:27 pm
ETA: about half an hour later, it behaved properly. Weird. ???
Post by: Feanor on 25 October, 2023, 07:57:34 pm
It's been a week of firefighting.
Latest saga... a clustered database randomly losing nodes, resulting in business essential application falling over. Turns out to be an NTP problem.
NTP clients had zero true chimers and NTP servers with offsets in seconds and jitter also in seconds for their associated NTP servers..
The NTP servers are Windows domain controllers. Virtualised. Turns out they were configured to have their time synced periodically with the hypervisor host. That explains the jitter then!
Policy had been applied to configure the PDC Emulator (root of the domain heirarchy) to synchronize time with external NTP servers. Firewall rules would not allow NTP packets to pass.
Said policy configured the source NTP servers asCode: [Select]Type: NoSync. WTAF.
NTP has never worked properly in this domain. It must have been like that for years. I'm really surprised this has not caused problems before. Or maybe it has and people have glossed over them.
All resolved now.
If people can't be bothered to test the infrastructure they configure, they have no business pressing buttons.
Wow.
Time synchronisation is such a basic requirement for a Windows Domain that I find that astounding.
But MS don't make it easy.
I remember when I was setting up my Homenet Domain many years ago that configuring the Windows Time Service on the PDC was not that obvious.
They had a website called 'The Cable Guy' (might still do) who did tutorials on such stuffs. And I seem to recall that I followed one of his tutorials to get it set up. It involved command-line stuffs and registry editing at that time.
So I'm now synced with an external NTP pool, and this is synced to all the Windows clients and all is good.
But you'd expect IT pros to be somewhat more on the ball than a random home user...
Is it perhaps that the initial configuration when the machines were all physical worked just fine, and then when they virtualised it they just expected everything to just continue to work as before? The problem being introduced by the monkeys brought in to virtualise everythng and scrap the physical servers just hadn't thought everything through?
I've also seen issues with Certificate Authorities being broken by shifting to VMs without anyone considering the implications...
Post by: Afasoas on 25 October, 2023, 10:37:53 pm
It's been a week of firefighting.
Latest saga... a clustered database randomly losing nodes, resulting in business essential application falling over. Turns out to be an NTP problem.
NTP clients had zero true chimers and NTP servers with offsets in seconds and jitter also in seconds for their associated NTP servers..
The NTP servers are Windows domain controllers. Virtualised. Turns out they were configured to have their time synced periodically with the hypervisor host. That explains the jitter then!
Policy had been applied to configure the PDC Emulator (root of the domain heirarchy) to synchronize time with external NTP servers. Firewall rules would not allow NTP packets to pass.
Said policy configured the source NTP servers asCode: [Select]Type: NoSync. WTAF.
NTP has never worked properly in this domain. It must have been like that for years. I'm really surprised this has not caused problems before. Or maybe it has and people have glossed over them.
All resolved now.
If people can't be bothered to test the infrastructure they configure, they have no business pressing buttons.
Wow.
Time synchronisation is such a basic requirement for a Windows Domain that I find that astounding.
But MS don't make it easy.
I remember when I was setting up my Homenet Domain many years ago that configuring the Windows Time Service on the PDC was not that obvious.
They had a website called 'The Cable Guy' (might still do) who did tutorials on such stuffs. And I seem to recall that I followed one of his tutorials to get it set up. It involved command-line stuffs and registry editing at that time.
So I'm now synced with an external NTP pool, and this is synced to all the Windows clients and all is good.
But you'd expect IT pros to be somewhat more on the ball than a random home user...
Is it perhaps that the initial configuration when the machines were all physical worked just fine, and then when they virtualised it they just expected everything to just continue to work as before? The problem being introduced by the monkeys brought in to virtualise everythng and scrap the physical servers just hadn't thought everything through?
I've also seen issues with Certificate Authorities being broken by shifting to VMs without anyone considering the implications...
I was staggered when I saw the offsets and jitter ... I've never seen client associated NTP servers with simultaneously both large positive and large negative offsets.
Windows Domains are, in general, fairly tolerant to time sync discrepancies .. but I come from a background of running clustered applications with reliable time sources being essential.
I would ideally have monitoring in place to detect time drift between PDC and it's external time sources, non-PDC domain controllers and PDC, and then in-turn servers and domain controllers with appropriate alerts setup. I've even jerry rigged up monitoring of network equipment using SNMP. Sadly I don't have time to do anything but put band-aids on things.
And don't mention AD Enterprise CAs.
That was yesterday's battle.
Post by: Kim on 25 October, 2023, 10:50:03 pm
I remember when I was setting up my Homenet Domain many years ago that configuring the Windows Time Service on the PDC was not that obvious.
Windows Time Service is on my list of reasons that Windows still isn't ready for the desktop.
Post by: Afasoas on 26 October, 2023, 10:47:30 am
I remember when I was setting up my Homenet Domain many years ago that configuring the Windows Time Service on the PDC was not that obvious.
Windows Time Service is on my list of reasons that Windows still isn't ready for the desktop.
Quote
Beginning with Windows 10 version 1607 and Windows Server 2016, W32Time can be configured to reach time accuracy of 1 s, 50 ms or 1 ms under certain specified operating conditions.
Courtesy of Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol#Windows_Time)
W32Time is fine for most on modern versions of Windows. If accuracy is vitally important, that necessitates some gentle reconfiguration.
Of course, that's not going to be something the average user is willing/able to do.
I'll never be first in-line to advocate for anyone using a proprietary operating system and neither would I personally use Windows time sources for critical time keeping - but I'd be denying evidence I'd seen if I didn't proffer some sort of defence here. It can certainly be accurate to within 30ms as that's the threshold I'd configured for the monitoring in $oldJob and I suspect in reality that could have been a lot lower.
Post by: Kim on 26 October, 2023, 11:35:35 am
On top of that, not being properly compatible with everyone else's ntp implementations is just rude and annoying.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 October, 2023, 04:04:47 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 26 October, 2023, 05:16:04 pm
And another thing, Mega-Global Database Company of Austin TX, USAnia, you bunch of fucking bozos! If I tell you to install Java in C:\Program Files\Java\jre-1.8 don't put it in C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre-1.8. Because it's not the same fucking directory and putting it where you want it instead of where I told you to put it breaks Stuffs and makes me waste time fucking about with environment variables.
Sounds like you've installed the 32-bit version of Java?
IRRC the installer should just ask for ProgramFiles and get the appropriate answer depending on it's bitness.
If the installer is hard coded, it would be bizarre for the 64-bit version to use C:\Program Files (x86) ... but it's not like that hasn't been seen before.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 October, 2023, 06:16:25 pm
In any case, if the installer asks whether I want to change the install directory and I tell it “Yes and put it HERE” is should do as it’s fucking well told >:(
Post by: Feanor on 26 October, 2023, 07:45:02 pm
It sees a 32 bit installer and silently redirects regardless of what the installer asked for.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 October, 2023, 07:50:44 pm
Edit: also, Java WAS previously installed in Program Files, so it worked before and now doesn’t.
Post by: Feanor on 26 October, 2023, 08:26:48 pm
Other Stuffs which have had Program Files (x86) as the default are happy enough to go in Program Files instead. Also, stop bringing logic into my rant ;)
Edit: also, Java WAS previously installed in Program Files, so it worked before and now doesn’t.
Windows has changed over the years, for security reasons.
For example, many programs stored config information etc in their own Program Files folder.
Later versions of windows blocked programs from writing there, and these programs would have broken.
But Windows tries to fix it under the hood, by silently re-directing such writes to the hidden appdata folder, so the programs still work, believing they are writing to the Program Files folder.
In regard to the Program Files / Program Files(x86), this is a bittiness distinction.
If you are trying to force an install into the Wrong One, I can't see that really being a good idea.
It might be working for you at the moment, but just Gonnae No Dae That, Goannae No?
Post by: Feanor on 26 October, 2023, 08:51:15 pm
And don't mention AD Enterprise CAs.
That was yesterday's battle.
Ah, my Homenet CA is called "Homenet Phoenix III", on account of me fucking up the original, then two subsequent Phoenix re-births...
Post by: Afasoas on 27 October, 2023, 09:59:07 am
And don't mention AD Enterprise CAs.
That was yesterday's battle.
Ah, my Homenet CA is called "Homenet Phoenix III", on account of me fucking up the original, then two subsequent Phoenix re-births...
Running a Windows Enterprise CA at home is a display of unquestionnable commitment.
I do have an OpenSSL CA knocking around but these days I understand the cool kids use a registered domain for their home networks and get a wildcard certificate issued from LetsEncrypt.
Post by: Feanor on 27 October, 2023, 08:24:08 pm
I ended up knowing more about how AD domains worked than the IT staff at my old workplace!
The CA now only provides the cert for the IAS (It's not called that anymore) Radius server to dole up for WiFi clients. I use WPA2 Enterprise.
But I plan to shut that down, and revert to regular WPA authentication, to reduce hassle for visitors.
I will then shut down the domain, and the domain controllers. The only thing I need to do is make sure I can copy over the domain user files to local accounts on the client machines.
I can always just force the ACLs to Change Ownership if necessary.
But that's a bunch of work for Ron.
LateR on.
Post by: Kim on 29 October, 2023, 01:04:35 am
I'll nominate RRDtool, which has excelled itself by handling the time change differently on different graphs with the same x-axis.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 October, 2023, 11:59:58 am
(FUMMS)
Post by: Wombat on 29 October, 2023, 07:14:36 pm
First you pester me about blocking ads on it, despite the only function of the ads being to make damn sure I never buy anything that interrupts my viewing, then today you tell me that I really, really must unblock ads for Youtube or I'll be completely blocked from watching it. So I go to Opera's manage exceptions thing, add Youtube, Opera says its OK, but YouTube still insists I'm using an ad blocker. Yes, I'm using one, but Youtube is permitted, you bunch of thick marmoset felchers! Yes, I've closed and restarted Opera, and I've rebooted the PC, but no, I can't use Youtube... Bastards!
Now what are my chances of actually getting in contact and informing them of their marmoset felching tendencies?
Post by: Pingu on 29 October, 2023, 07:48:42 pm
Effing YouTube!
First you pester me about blocking ads on it, despite the only function of the ads being to make damn sure I never buy anything that interrupts my viewing, then today you tell me that I really, really must unblock ads for Youtube or I'll be completely blocked from watching it. So I go to Opera's manage exceptions thing, add Youtube, Opera says its OK, but YouTube still insists I'm using an ad blocker. Yes, I'm using one, but Youtube is permitted, you bunch of thick marmoset felchers! Yes, I've closed and restarted Opera, and I've rebooted the PC, but no, I can't use Youtube... Bastards!
Now what are my chances of actually getting in contact and informing them of their marmoset felching tendencies?
Me too, also :demon:
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 October, 2023, 09:30:17 pm
O hai Mega-Global Chocolate Manufactury of Mountain View, USAnia!
Please to tell Chrome that there is no need to translate English Wikinaccurate articles about Peru from Spanish to English. Because they’re already in fucking English sort it out u muppets!
Kthxbai!
Post by: Pingu on 30 October, 2023, 12:46:55 am
Post by: Maverick on 30 October, 2023, 08:05:33 am
Post by: chopstick on 30 October, 2023, 08:05:53 am
OK. Youtube. You are now unwatchable. Twats :demon:Is this the adverts? I reckon I was getting one every minute whilst watching a 4 minute video yesterday. Last time I checked, they want £12 or £13 a month to go advert-free - that's considerably more than I pay for advert-free Netflix (despite their price hikes)!
Post by: MattH on 30 October, 2023, 08:43:38 am
I wouldn't mind paying a bit for it, but it's more than any of the premium services.
Post by: rafletcher on 30 October, 2023, 10:36:11 am
Post by: sam on 30 October, 2023, 10:57:34 am
marmoset felching tendencies
(https://i.imgur.com/N418Uhy.jpg) (https://youtu.be/4q-DnUA1KKY)
Perhaps that'll be discussed in his next video.
(https://i.imgur.com/V0BNfNv.jpg)
What to get your marmoset for Christmas.
PS. The RSPCA would like a word (https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/pets/other/primates/marmosets) with the gentleman, and it's not 'felching'.
Post by: Wombat on 30 October, 2023, 02:53:59 pm
I went through this last week. I use Firefox and found turning off the existing ad blocker and installing an extension called Adnauseum restored normal uninterrupted viewing.
This is currently working for me now, on Opera. We shall see, how long for.
I can't help but think that YouTube are shooting themselves in the foot with this...
Apologies to any marmosets offended by my rant.
Post by: chopstick on 30 October, 2023, 04:04:57 pm
I use Ublock Origin on Chrome on my desktop/laptop, that seems to still be working. I'm trying (as in just about to download) Ghostery for my iPad, will see if that works (after I've updated the IOS on it first, via my phone as a hotspot).I've just installed it onto Firefox - haven't had an advert so far after about four videos. Apparently if you use Ublock and have issues, the thing to do is go to settings (from menu bar button for me) - filter lists - 'Purge all caches' followed by 'Update now'.
Post by: sam on 31 October, 2023, 11:51:36 am
I went through this last week. I use Firefox and found turning off the existing ad blocker and installing an extension called Adnauseum restored normal uninterrupted viewing.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou. Haven't even needed to turn off adblock.
Post by: Pingu on 05 November, 2023, 11:36:23 pm
I went through this last week. I use Firefox and found turning off the existing ad blocker and installing an extension called Adnauseum restored normal uninterrupted viewing.
:thumbsup:
Post by: rafletcher on 06 November, 2023, 08:42:30 am
Post by: TheLurker on 07 November, 2023, 11:46:39 am
Another day in paradise and If I had the wherewithal l would scream. Up 'til half eight no probs. Since then? Words, utterly, utterly fail me.
How is one supposed to build *anything* when the tools are so appallingly unstable? You know what? DSM-11, with extra indirection, was far, far better.
Post by: Genosse Brymbo on 07 November, 2023, 12:05:50 pm
Oh for pity's sake; npm, node, javascript, never ending dependencies on heaven alone knows what crappy software, network nonsense. All I need is a cauldron, a newt and some frog limbs and I've got the set.I have bookmarked this reply to read at times when I regret my decision to retire from a work life of computer programming
Quote
How is one supposed to build *anything* when the tools are so appallingly unstable? You know what? DSM-11, with extra indirection, was far, far better.In retirement I have little cause to reminisce about the halcyon days of VAX-11
Chin up, Lurks
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 November, 2023, 12:18:51 pm
Post by: Feanor on 07 November, 2023, 12:23:32 pm
All I need is a cauldron, a newt and some frog limbs
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F9mLUVKXYAAYSgb.jpg)
Post by: spesh on 07 November, 2023, 12:33:42 pm
Oh for pity's sake; npm, node, javascript, never ending dependencies on heaven alone knows what crappy software, network nonsense. All I need is acauldron, a newt and some frog limbsbee hive, a ram's skull and some dried frog pills and I've got the set.
https://www.discworldemporium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/products-2500.jpg ;)
Post by: Kim on 07 November, 2023, 12:50:56 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 07 November, 2023, 05:27:39 pm
Quote from: Genosse Brymbo
In retirement I have little cause to reminisce about the halcyon days of VAX-11PDPs with DSM-11; 11/23, /73 /44 & /84s then VAX-DSM on VAXEN. EVE, TPU & EDT with a sideline in DCL scripts for repetitive stuff cos all programmers are, by definition, lazy.
Quote
Chin up, Lurks*sob* *sniffle* *whimper*
Quote from: spesh
https://www.discworldemporium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/products-2500.jpg+++OUT OF CHEESE++ I could cope with. In fact I would welcome HEX as a replacement for Windows with open arms. :)
For those that care about these things. One of today's problems turned out to be a dependency (several layers down and over which we have precisely *no* control) which had an "s" on the name where no "s" should be. The package is one of those released on a weekly basis and it was published last night. Weekly!? How, when, the fuck do you have time for testing and QA!? I think we know that answer to that one, eh kiddywinks? And if you say "automated unit tests" perhaps you'd care to explain the shagged dependency, hmmm?
Post by: Afasoas on 07 November, 2023, 05:31:43 pm
Quote from: Genosse BrymboIn retirement I have little cause to reminisce about the halcyon days of VAX-11PDPs with DSM-11; 11/23, /73 /44 & /84s then VAX-DSM on VAXEN. EVE, TPU & EDT with a sideline in DCL scripts for repetitive stuff cos all programmers are, by definition, lazy.QuoteChin up, Lurks*sob* *sniffle* *whimper*Quote from: speshhttps://www.discworldemporium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/products-2500.jpg+++OUT OF CHEESE++ I could cope with. In fact I would welcome HEX as a replacement for Windows with open arms. :)
For those that care about these things. One of today's problems turned out to be a dependency (several layers down and over which we have precisely *no* control) which had an "s" on the name where no "s" should be. The package is one of those released on a weekly basis and it was published last night. Weekly!? How, when, the fuck do you have time for testing and QA!? I think we know that answer to that one, eh kiddywinks? And if you say "automated unit tests" perhaps you'd care to explain the shagged dependency, hmmm?
Their pipeline is probably broken so someone thought to just push it out anyway?
Post by: Afasoas on 07 November, 2023, 05:32:57 pm
This might finish me. If it doesn't, I think I might call it a day afterwards and start hunting out another job. Or a new line of work.
Post by: pcolbeck on 10 November, 2023, 12:16:19 pm
I've got the mother and father of all migrations on my hands and I have a feeling it is not going to end well.
This might finish me. If it doesn't, I think I might call it a day afterwards and start hunting out another job. Or a new line of work.
I feel your pain. I'm about 10% in to a migration to SDWAN for hundreds of government sites. Been some corker problems. Luckily most have been resolved now.
Post by: citoyen on 10 November, 2023, 03:34:31 pm
Yes, it is connected to the same network as my computer.
SO WHY THE FUCK IS WINDOWS REFUSING TO ACKNOWLEDGE ITS EXISTENCE? ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!!!
Post by: barakta on 10 November, 2023, 04:11:34 pm
Post by: citoyen on 10 November, 2023, 06:27:42 pm
Post by: Feanor on 10 November, 2023, 06:34:22 pm
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers
Post by: SoreTween on 10 November, 2023, 06:43:22 pm
Anyhoo, I came here to vent so...
Fucking arsey cuntnugget shitface bastardy wankstains at Faecbook.cunts. They've suspended my account again (3rd time? 4th time?). Posted something offensive? Nope. Barely posted anything at all seems to be the crime. Can't tie me to any other devices? Ahhhh tough titty - that's deliberate you turd headed shitgibbons, I only log in to your cesspit from one device. Can't read my phone numbers out of my phone? Oh how my heart bleeds for you you pustules on the rim of a camel's hemorrhoid, that's because I don't have your spyware on my phone. Can't read my browsing history? Boo bastard hoo. That's because I only log in on a desktop browser (opera) that never _ever_ gets used for anything else. Can't tell where I am? Mwahahahaha you squirrel winnet (and thank you Opera VPN). Can't find my phone number in anyone else's phone you... you... (struggling for new invectives now, I give up) devil's buttplug, that's because I've never given that number to anyone. I keep it active only to receive the confirmation texts from you each time you fuckers suspend my fucking account. Can't match my photo that you demand to any others you've hoovered up? Good. Excellent. That'll be because I made an effort to make myself unrecognisable in the one and only photo of me that you will get.
So what have I done wrong on faecbook? Given a shit about my privacy - that's what.
ICBA to
And, breathe.
Post by: sg37409 on 10 November, 2023, 06:52:30 pm
Post by: ian on 10 November, 2023, 09:03:48 pm
Post by: Afasoas on 10 November, 2023, 11:28:08 pm
^True
Anyhoo, I came here to vent so...
Fucking arsey cuntnugget shitface bastardy wankstains at Faecbook.cunts. They've suspended my account again (3rd time? 4th time?). Posted something offensive? Nope. Barely posted anything at all seems to be the crime. Can't tie me to any other devices? Ahhhh tough titty - that's deliberate you turd headed shitgibbons, I only log in to your cesspit from one device. Can't read my phone numbers out of my phone? Oh how my heart bleeds for you you pustules on the rim of a camel's hemorrhoid, that's because I don't have your spyware on my phone. Can't read my browsing history? Boo bastard hoo. That's because I only log in on a desktop browser (opera) that never _ever_ gets used for anything else. Can't tell where I am? Mwahahahaha you squirrel winnet (and thank you Opera VPN). Can't find my phone number in anyone else's phone you... you... (struggling for new invectives now, I give up) devil's buttplug, that's because I've never given that number to anyone. I keep it active only to receive the confirmation texts from you each time you fuckers suspend my fucking account. Can't match my photo that you demand to any others you've hoovered up? Good. Excellent. That'll be because I made an effort to make myself unrecognisable in the one and only photo of me that you will get.
So what have I done wrong on faecbook? Given a shit about my privacy - that's what.
ICBA topenkeyboard a side rant so can we just imagine another 10% of the above for my local cycling club that won't fucking move off fucking faecbook because 'it's easy' and 'what everyone uses' despite the constant and I mean constant complaints from your members about the utter shitness of tying us to faecbook.
And, breathe.
and the other side of the coin is WhatsApp. Also owned by
Post by: SoreTween on 11 November, 2023, 10:56:05 pm
^True
Anyhoo, I came here to vent so...
Fucking arsey cuntnugget shitface bastardy wankstains at Faecbook.cunts. They've suspended my account again (3rd time? 4th time?). Posted something offensive? Nope. Barely posted anything at all seems to be the crime. Can't tie me to any other devices? Ahhhh tough titty - that's deliberate you turd headed shitgibbons, I only log in to your cesspit from one device. Can't read my phone numbers out of my phone? Oh how my heart bleeds for you you pustules on the rim of a camel's hemorrhoid, that's because I don't have your spyware on my phone. Can't read my browsing history? Boo bastard hoo. That's because I only log in on a desktop browser (opera) that never _ever_ gets used for anything else. Can't tell where I am? Mwahahahaha you squirrel winnet (and thank you Opera VPN). Can't find my phone number in anyone else's phone you... you... (struggling for new invectives now, I give up) devil's buttplug, that's because I've never given that number to anyone. I keep it active only to receive the confirmation texts from you each time you fuckers suspend my fucking account. Can't match my photo that you demand to any others you've hoovered up? Good. Excellent. That'll be because I made an effort to make myself unrecognisable in the one and only photo of me that you will get.
So what have I done wrong on faecbook? Given a shit about my privacy - that's what.
ICBA topenkeyboard a side rant so can we just imagine another 10% of the above for my local cycling club that won't fucking move off fucking faecbook because 'it's easy' and 'what everyone uses' despite the constant and I mean constant complaints from your members about the utter shitness of tying us to faecbook.
And, breathe.
Right, I'm back in and this time they may have let slip what my crime is/was. I did not know that to use the cesspit for free you are required to accept cookies. I shall do so in future (since Opera is set to discard all on exit anyway) and see what develops.
Post by: Afasoas on 13 November, 2023, 06:30:10 pm
Thank goodness we found this absolute show stopping problem in a dry-run before it became a disaster, as it seems absolutely impossible to recover the situation in a "nice" way when you are neck deep in the dung.
This latest eposide of "SANs ruin lives" will probably see me awake until 1 AM to keep our ridiculous big bang migration on track, is just the latest example of why I harbour a massive irrational hatred of the things.
Whatever the problem is, a SAN is never the right solution.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 November, 2023, 09:00:58 am
Why! Are! You! So! Fucking! Shite?
Also, laptop! Plz to not disconnect from wifi in the middle of the night.
Post by: Bledlow on 28 November, 2023, 11:03:21 pm
Logged into ISP through phone & their software said "We'll reset your router if you press the button", so I did. Several minutes later (much less than the 20 they threatened) all was well again.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 December, 2023, 12:00:20 am
* /me
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 14 December, 2023, 04:32:33 pm
Post by: rr on 15 December, 2023, 09:25:58 am
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 15 December, 2023, 12:10:07 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 15 December, 2023, 01:44:53 pm
Post by: ian on 16 December, 2023, 01:42:54 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 16 December, 2023, 04:24:00 pm
Post by: Pickled Onion on 17 December, 2023, 06:13:21 pm
It’s basically training you to automatically click ok to any and every dialogue box.
I just bought some new boots. On line. There's a pop-up: Your Order Is Complete! Big button says "Continue". Underneath there is some small grey text: By clicking above, you can join our partner programme for 18 pounds/month and claim your reward.
There's an "X" button in the corner, but it doesn't exit. Nor does the ESC key. Only possible response is to close the browser window (being careful not to press space or enter). FFS this sort of thing should be illegal. Not sure whether to initiate a chargeback now or wait a couple of days and see if the boots turn up, the website looks otherwise legit.
Post by: rafletcher on 18 December, 2023, 04:03:23 pm
Post by: Kim on 20 December, 2023, 08:34:37 pm
So, since you'll never get more sense out of her than that, the machine needs the fdisk treatment, and all her passwords need changing. None of which will happen in a timely manner because anything involving computers is permanently at the bottom of her things-to-do list.
>:( >:( >:( :facepalm:
Post by: Mr Larrington on 22 December, 2023, 12:57:01 pm
Canada uses the metric system. So kindly:
- put "imperial_units: false" in your province/territory definition files, and
- sort your fucking speed limits out
That way I will not be made to run the risk of speeding fines by not crossing the Prairie Provinces of Canada™ at barely above a walking pace.
kthxbai
Post by: Canardly on 22 December, 2023, 07:06:16 pm
Post by: Pingu on 22 December, 2023, 09:20:57 pm
Post by: ian on 23 December, 2023, 11:54:59 am
O hai map mod creators!
Canada uses the metric system. So kindly:That way I will not be made to run the risk of speeding fines by not crossing the Prairie Provinces of Canada™ at barely above a walking pace.
- put "imperial_units: false" in your province/territory definition files, and
- sort your fucking speed limits out
kthxbai
In my experience, Canadians do seem a bit confused, and work more on the theory of metric units than the practice, which is variable. The problem with Canadians is that they're the least suitable people for a place like Canada. But what can you do?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 23 December, 2023, 01:59:29 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 07 January, 2024, 12:36:36 am
Post by: Kim on 08 January, 2024, 12:37:01 pm
Post by: andrewc on 08 January, 2024, 12:39:49 pm
Post by: Kim on 08 January, 2024, 12:49:55 pm
And, in the interests of letting Microsoft off the hook for a bit, she's now swearing about $university departments being so bad at communicating with each other that they don't even share a heating system.
Ah, maybe not: "Why have you saved that in such a stupid distorted fuckwit format?!?"
That's either Acrobat, or timetabling.
ETA: It was timetabling. Unclear if there was PDF involvement.
Post by: barakta on 08 January, 2024, 02:26:25 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 10 January, 2024, 07:58:37 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 January, 2024, 04:47:05 pm
Post by: JonBuoy on 12 January, 2024, 06:31:27 pm
Another day, another fuck-up by Microsith. Update 5034441 is failing. To make it work you have to fanny about increasing the size of the recovery partition. And then you discover it’s an update patching a potential security flaw with Bitlocker WHICH DOESN'T EVEN RUN UNDER THIS VERSION OF FUCKING WINDOWS sort it out u muppets >:(
I had this on Tuesday but unfortunately the error code is unhelpful. I found a plausible-sounding 'solution' somewhere on t'internet that involved stopping various services, renaming a couple of folders as folder.old, restarting the services then restarting the PC. It wouldn't boot. In fact it wouldn't do much at all :(
On Wednesday evening I borrowed a laptop to create a bootable USB but didn't have a spare USB stick that was large enough. Then I had the wonderful idea of using the SD card from my standby Garmin Etrex, copied the maps etc to the borrowed laptop's hard drive, created the bootable ISO-thingy and booted it up to get it to restore Win10. It wouldn't. I eventually managed to persuade it to give me a DOS window and searched for all of the files/folders with the word 'old' in them. There were only three likely ones and I vaguely recognised two of them. The new version of one of them looked OK but the other contained a logfile that ended with an error. In desperation I deleted the folder and renamed the old one to be the current one. To my relief (and surprise) it booted up OK :thumbsup:
This was late on Wednesday evening and when I Googled the update error I saw that loads of people had had it and the general advice seemed to be to leave it and wait for Microsoft to sort their mess out. To cap it all I then deleted the contents of the SD card and copied the map files etc back onto it, replaced it in the Etrex and fired it up. It was OK until it wasn't - part way through booting up it shut down. I then reformated the SD card and copied the files back onto it with the same result. As a last desperate attempt to get it working I deleted a few old map files from it and just left the latest version. To my relief it worked and I was now back where I had been 52 hours earlier...apart from now my laptop has started telling me that one of the batteries 'has failed due to normal wear.' >:(
...and that is how I spent a fair chunk of this week ::-)
Post by: cycleman on 12 January, 2024, 06:36:59 pm
Look, it’s very simple. All I'm trying to do is to create a mod to paint a Kenworth W900 with a 72” sleeper cab dark green with natty yellow go-faster stripes and the words “TRUMP IS A CUNT” written in large friendly letters on the back. It's not rocket surgery and I've done This Sort Of Thing a dozen times before so WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU WORKING >:(Republican computer :demon:
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 January, 2024, 06:45:27 pm
Look, it’s very simple. All I'm trying to do is to create a mod to paint a Kenworth W900 with a 72” sleeper cab dark green with natty yellow go-faster stripes and the words “TRUMP IS A CUNT” written in large friendly letters on the back. It's not rocket surgery and I've done This Sort Of Thing a dozen times before so WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU WORKING >:(Republican computer :demon:
Turns out another mod which applies a different paint job to the same truck – this one endorsing Eleanor of Aquitaine and Rigoberto Uràn – doesn’t appear either. Although it’s there on that profile's existing truck. Meanwhile ones for Freightliner Cascadias are working as expected ???
Post by: barakta on 12 January, 2024, 08:27:55 pm
It happens at random, 3x this week so far. I've managed to get a screenshot of the horrible background and the locked out settings window and will be emailing IT on Monday to ask them to unlock personalisation for me damnit and to stop this happening as an accessibility issue.
I understand we have to block accessibility/personalisation for students come some shitheads set WILD settings on public PCs and run away leaving PC unusable for others till IT revert it (why don't they just revert on reboot?) but staff should have full visual control of our PCs damnit.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 13 January, 2024, 02:47:03 pm
Bethany (13): Huh! I ent no goff!
Post by: citoyen on 22 January, 2024, 11:24:47 am
On further investigation, I'm guessing this is related to MicroFascists replacing 'Classic' Teams with 'New' Teams (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-classic-client-end-of-availability). But that isn't supposed to be happening until March. And our IT admin people haven't made 'New' Teams available yet.
FFS.
I'm making do with the web app for now.
I presume New Teams will be exactly the same as Classic Teams but with all the genuinely useful features removed in favour of whatever "improved user experience" bullshit MS want to convince us we really want but actually have no earthly use for.
Post by: Jaded on 22 January, 2024, 12:37:53 pm
Post by: Kim on 22 January, 2024, 12:42:54 pm
The main benefit of any version of Teams appears to be that you can take part in video chats that have been set up in Teams.
With a secondary benefit for those in the business of selling RAM upgrades.
Post by: citoyen on 22 January, 2024, 03:02:02 pm
The main benefit of any version of Teams appears to be that you can take part in video chats that have been set up in Teams.
Unfortunately, this is precisely why I need it for work.
As far as I can see, the main reason for a new version of Teams is to push all the social media functionality to the fore. I can manage without that, thanks.
I would be very pleased if New Teams no longer had the ability to use it as a file repository but I'm not holding out hope.
This upgrade wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that I have a non-conventional set-up. Most people across the organisation access work servers through a Citrix workspace. But our team need to use Adobe products, which aren't compatible with Citrix (or so we've been told, I don't know if this is the whole truth and nothing but the truth). So we have standalone machines and work outside Citrix, with special privileges set up to access work servers.
I can normally install the apps I need to use without Admin interference but New Teams is blocked. Probably for very good reasons, I'm sure - presumably the same reasons they've blocked the desktop Outlook app (I've always had to use Outlook via the web. Ugh!).
I presume Citrix users will go on using Classic Teams until at least 2047.
Post by: ian on 22 January, 2024, 08:20:27 pm
Post by: HTFB on 22 January, 2024, 08:31:28 pm
I would be very pleased if New Teams no longer had the ability to use it as a file repository but I'm not holding out hope.No such luck. We were being shoved brutally towards using Teams, just before lockdown, because you can have a Sharepoint repository per Team and the monolithic departmental repository was full. The change has, ahem, not entirely helped knowledge retention and management.
Post by: SoreTween on 23 January, 2024, 03:07:46 pm
I presume New Teams will be exactly the same as Classic Teams but with all the genuinely useful features removed in favour of whatever "improved user experience" bullshit MS want to convince us we really want but actually have no earthly use for.Based upon the vastly increased swear quotient of colleagues silly enough to move the slider across to 'new' I'd guess you're spot on.
Post by: TheLurker on 23 January, 2024, 07:23:02 pm
Post by: Kim on 24 January, 2024, 01:29:09 am
Post by: barakta on 24 January, 2024, 01:37:21 am
Windows: "Ha ha, your password is too old, you need to change your password RIGHT NAO and I won't log you in until you do!"
Me: "Fucks sake, I'm not in the mood to think of new passwords, this is rude" *gives it new password* *logs in* next student is 1pm not 1:30 (glad I checked) but means I don't have time to eat and prep. So downgrade to MakeTea.
Me (with tea): Log back in. Load up student stuff for prep. Can't find the join thinger for my meeting in Outlook, find the meeting link another way *clicky* nothing happens. I realise Teams has a whiny message saying "you are not signed in" while showing me most of our team stuff. I log into 3 places, 2 factor auth them. Try opening teams again. I am now late for the appointment. Teams demands 2FA but on receipt of correct code, it just flashes and closes.
Me (increasingly late and pissed off): I email student to apologise and say I'll be late. I reboot the fucking machine.
5 mins later it deigns to let me back in. But I have to log into everything, So many things demand 2FA codes that the system refuses to generate one "you've had too many, timeout". FUCK OFF.
I eventually get into Teams and into my meeting over 10 mins late. A good 15 mins wasted. I haven't got ANY prep, I have to open student records and info while doing the meeting which is stressful and means I'm not as "up on stuff" as I usually am.
I am '-' to asking IT to set the password change with:
1) a fucking reminder first, give us a few days notice
2) don't allow the system to demand a password change at fucking random
This is the IT equivalent of someone walking up to a desk with papers, picking them all up, and hiding them somewhere so I have to look and refind them all.
Infucking furiating and unbelievably rude. Executive function theft of the highest order.
Post by: Auntie Helen on 24 January, 2024, 06:13:45 am
I can confirm that it is as bad as old Teams, only with extra big menu bar icons/buttons, so you can’t see all the icons you want at once, much more complication in trying to personalise the menus for you, because the space is padded out by some automatic Microsoft buttons you cannot remove, even though you will not use them even until the end of time, and of course the other traditional examples of moving things just for the fun of it.
Of course, with a new computer I had to re-organise all my shortcuts and stuff like that, and some things I have not yet managed to do.
Amazingly, I was able to keep the old Outlook because I have hundreds of folders on the left-hand side and the new Outlook spaces them out really really widely which is of course a disaster for me as I already have to scroll down through loads. However, I expect that I will end up with new Outlook by the end of the year, because Microsoft will sneakily do it while I think I’m clicking okay to print something, or something.
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 24 January, 2024, 11:22:09 am
I am '-' to asking IT to set the password change with:That shouldn't even be a demand, it's just basic common sense. And basic politeness.
1) a fucking reminder first, give us a few days notice
2) don't allow the system to demand a password change at fucking random
Post by: MattH on 24 January, 2024, 11:37:33 am
Post by: Jaded on 24 January, 2024, 12:19:46 pm
Post by: barakta on 24 January, 2024, 01:00:49 pm
Every system I've used has had a "your password expires in X days, would you like to change it now?" type prompt when logging in. I wonder if there has been an "incident" where they've decided they need to do an immediate password change?
I've had the "your password needs changing in 5 days" before and this one IS old. I just need a bit of notice. I already log in early after UpdateTuesdays cos the machine invariably demands a reboot and gets less and less stable by the minute till it gets one.
I'm heading for a new machine, I'm constantly CPU-bound at 100%. I know from friends high in IT that Teams is an absolute resource hog which is requiring faster hardware updates cos the computers can't keep up with after 2-3 years which is where I am at.
Post by: citoyen on 24 January, 2024, 05:17:25 pm
I hate the way that Teams tiles things, so you never really get the whole video of someone participating, just bits of them, in a nice square, or other inappropriately shaped tile.
I always find that amusing rather than annoying.
Post by: ian on 24 January, 2024, 07:41:56 pm
This might have been an inconvenience were I not at the time just taking the podium to commence a 45-minute presentation to ~700 people.
Big shout out to the former mothership's IT team for overriding the perfect sensible MacOS software update that will cheerfully do this kind of thing while you sleep with a 'managed service' that deemed an entire OS update had to happen right there and then.
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 24 January, 2024, 08:08:37 pm
Ah. So you had a bit of notice. Five days of notice. That's different then.Every system I've used has had a "your password expires in X days, would you like to change it now?" type prompt when logging in. I wonder if there has been an "incident" where they've decided they need to do an immediate password change?
I've had the "your password needs changing in 5 days" before and this one IS old. I just need a bit of notice. I already log in early after UpdateTuesdays cos the machine invariably demands a reboot and gets less and less stable by the minute till it gets one.
Post by: barakta on 24 January, 2024, 09:12:44 pm
This time, no notice, just the sudden demand during a random logout which we do everytime we leave our desk. So massively disruptive.
Post by: MattH on 24 January, 2024, 10:11:37 pm
I still rejoice at the time my computer declared that it would 'restart in 5 mins' with no option to stop it. Because it wanted to install an entire OS update. That was about 4GB. Over hotel wifi. Hotel conference room wifi. Hotel conference room wifi in Vietnam.
I've had a similar experience, though it was just doing a demonstration to an important potential customer that had taken months to set up rather than standing up at a conference. Got up in the morning, fired up the laptop to check all was OK, it insisted on doing an update. Left it updating whilst I had breakfast, it finally finished as the taxi arrived. But the demonstration was running inside a VM, and the update had broken the networking in VirtualBox. So I had to fix that. The salesman I was with literally guided me to the taxi waiting outside, and dealt with getting us to the customer, and booking us in, whilst I was carrying the open laptop fixing the demo. Got it running just as the customer met us in their reception.
I hate Microsoft.
Post by: chopstick on 24 January, 2024, 10:29:03 pm
We still have to use Sharepoint/OneCloud/Teams for document management/storage but a lot of the staff don't know the difference between this and networked shared drives - and they see any folder in their file browser as a unique physical location (just like it was when they learnt how to use a computer) - and they end up saving a lot of stuff on their local machines because they can't manage the confusion caused by the apparent duplication of folders and files in the "shared areas". I have to admit that when I started the job, I found it confusing and a hurdle to overcome to make sense of it - it needed a long session watching Micro$hit training videos - how do they manage to make them so fecking irritating?
Post by: barakta on 25 January, 2024, 09:32:12 pm
Also, we've discovered with the NewShittierTeams that if the recipient of an invite doesn't accept it, the invite doesn't show up in their calendar. Given this is how we do 90% of student appointments, and most don't accept even if we nag them to, this is A PROBLEM.
Dear Microsoft, Stop Fucking About FFS!
Post by: Mr Larrington on 29 January, 2024, 11:57:29 pm
* Possibly me…
** No idea what this stands for but it’s shorthand for “two full-length trailers connected with a dolly”
*** Places other than Finland, basically
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 February, 2024, 04:52:30 pm
No excuses sort it out u muppets >:(
Post by: FifeingEejit on 06 February, 2024, 05:59:26 pm
Today I had a Teams incoming call where I could hear the speaker say hi but then his sound cut out and the captions weren't picking him up. No idea why, he ended up hanging up and redialing. Not helpful when talking to a stranger and already anxious sounding (him).The tighter integration with outlook is really messing us up too, chose to dismiss the 5 min reminder ha well you're not getting a notification on 0 mins are you... ffs
Also, we've discovered with the NewShittierTeams that if the recipient of an invite doesn't accept it, the invite doesn't show up in their calendar. Given this is how we do 90% of student appointments, and most don't accept even if we nag them to, this is A PROBLEM.
Dear Microsoft, Stop Fucking About FFS!
Sent from my IV2201 using Tapatalk
Post by: barakta on 06 February, 2024, 06:03:12 pm
FUCKSAKE Microsoft. It's like they never see how users use it.
I can't see how to make Teams do multiple reminders which would be handy.
Post by: barakta on 09 February, 2024, 11:58:15 am
It then started doing it after calls when just in a word doc.
I've rebooted twice this morning, losing my concentration on work. I can't face going back to it cos i swear I'll throw the entire laptop out of the window if it does it again.
Feels like it is installing updates which destabilise it. It takes ages with the spinnig balls to shut down and come up again.
This is the computer equivalent of someone picking up papers i am writing on, and throwing them around the room so I have to pick them up, reorganise and work out where I was.
I don't have the mental energy for this today.
Post by: Kim on 09 February, 2024, 03:33:37 pm
Post by: TheLurker on 11 February, 2024, 10:03:01 am
Quote from: Kim
I've said many times, Windows will never be ready for the desktop.Joking aside. It wasn't too bad in the before (subscription model) times when it was possible to pick and choose updates so that you only took the security related ones and could leave the other crap festering on their servers.until they do something about the dreadful update mechanism...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 19 February, 2024, 11:53:29 am
Post by: JonBuoy on 19 February, 2024, 01:08:01 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 February, 2024, 12:47:57 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 27 February, 2024, 06:11:16 pm
Post by: Jaded on 28 February, 2024, 12:36:19 am
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 February, 2024, 12:54:23 am
Post by: woollypigs on 28 February, 2024, 07:45:51 pm
Just create a button, on the "frontpage/homething/orwhateveryoucallitthisweek" that say call and there you can use the option to dial someone in your team, in your address book or the ID# you have been given, wouldn't that be an nice and easy way?
Post by: Kim on 28 February, 2024, 07:49:50 pm
Post by: Feanor on 28 February, 2024, 08:04:57 pm
It's all native now, so that's all in the past.
Post by: Kim on 28 February, 2024, 08:14:18 pm
For those playing along at home:
Code: [Select]
netsh interface ipv6 set global randomizeidentifiers=disabled
netsh interface ipv6 set privacy state=disabled
Post by: Feanor on 28 February, 2024, 08:56:41 pm
From memory, my servers have a manually-configured address ( like 2001:8b0:b7:1::3 ), and also a MAC-based address, and also the seekrit sql address.
The address I publish in external DNS is the manual one, and that's what's allowed in through the firewall.
On connections I make outbound, it will prefer the seekrit sqrl one as the source address.
But yes, if you are making outbound connections from a machine, and want to be able to identify those connections from the target machine, then you'd want to disable that.
Post by: Gattopardo on 10 March, 2024, 08:23:42 pm
Fuck
Post by: Pickled Onion on 10 March, 2024, 08:54:50 pm
I thought it was just a glitch to not see it on the Home Screen on the day I travelled, then a bit disconcerted the next day "your train is at 13:06" ?? oh shit did I buy the wrong ticket and get away with it ?? but the pattern repeated.
My best guess is the leap year. Why do programmers find calendars so hard?
Post by: Feanor on 10 March, 2024, 09:24:33 pm
My electronic orange cardboard has been announcing itself a day late since the beginning of this month.
I thought it was just a glitch to not see it on the Home Screen on the day I travelled, then a bit disconcerted the next day "your train is at 13:06" ?? oh shit did I buy the wrong ticket and get away with it ?? but the pattern repeated.
My best guess is the leap year. Why do programmers find calendars so hard?
Times and dates are actually quite hard.
The problem is people trying to roll their own, when there are perfectly good libraries which can do this stuff properly.
Re-inventing the wheel is a huge problem.
Another example is webforms which require an e-mail address.
The web designer just applies their own idea of what constitutes a valid e-mail address.
With no regard to the RFCs which actually define this.
It's almost like 'if it doesn't end in .gmail.com then it's not valid".
If memory serves me correctly, the owner of AAISP has a valid address of a@e.gg and this was rejected by several webforms.
They don't have to do this.
Post by: Polar Bear on 11 March, 2024, 08:34:46 am
I haven't investigated the necessary fuckwittery required to un-Microsoft myself now that Microsoft has one of my email addresses. I feel slightly violated. 🤔
* It sits beneath the television with the Blu-ray player and we use it primarily for friends and family Zoom calls and I use it as a very large screen PC
Post by: chopstick on 11 March, 2024, 10:32:16 am
Post by: Feanor on 11 March, 2024, 11:21:31 am
During installation of Windows, they do make it very difficult to proceed with the installation without setting up or logging in to a Microsoft account, but is is possible.
But yes, if you want to use their online services like Office 365 or Onedrive, then you will need to be logged in.
I don't use any of these things, and am not logged in to a Microsoft account on my own Win11 machines.
Post by: Kim on 11 March, 2024, 11:24:40 am
During installation of Windows, they do make it very difficult to proceed with the installation without setting up or logging in to a Microsoft account, but is is possible.
You can of course ask Elon Musk for advice on this, as he's been through the process recently :)
When I set up Win11 on the BHPC's jam-filled Babbage engine[1], it was sufficient to deny it an internet connection until everything was set up without a Microsoft account. I think actual command-line-fu may now be required.
[1] Where I also sourced a licence for whatever the last standalone version of MS Office was, the computer having to operate - and run macro-laden Excel files - in The Big Blue Room without an internet connection. We got shafted by Office 365 refusing to run because it hadn't phoned home for weeks on a previous machine.
Post by: Jaded on 11 March, 2024, 12:06:19 pm
Pile of horse manure. 30 minutes of an hour meeting taken up with "Can you hear me?" "I can't get screen sharing to work" "I'll restart the meeting" "I'll restart my Teams".
Post by: Feanor on 11 March, 2024, 12:15:04 pm
That would previously cause it to continue to create a local account, which is the desired effect.
I think it now sulks and refuses to continue till it gets an Internet connection.
The simplest way to work around it is to use the Rufus tool along with the installation ISO to remove this requirement. It pre-tweeks some settings in the ISO before letting the installer run.
Post by: TheLurker on 11 March, 2024, 08:19:28 pm
Quote from: Feanor
The simplest way to work around it is to use the Rufus tool along with the installation ISO to remove this requirement. It pre-tweeks some settings in the ISO before letting the installer run.MrsL needs a new machine. I have not persuaded her of the merits of a Linux box. Any advice on dealing with this on a retailer supplied machine that will come with the festering pile of shite installed gratefully received. "Take off and nuke it from orbit." is, alas, not a viable solution.
Post by: Feanor on 11 March, 2024, 09:20:56 pm
Quote from: FeanorThe simplest way to work around it is to use the Rufus tool along with the installation ISO to remove this requirement. It pre-tweeks some settings in the ISO before letting the installer run.MrsL needs a new machine. I have not persuaded her of the merits of a Linux box. Any advice on dealing with this on a retailer supplied machine that will come with the festering pile of shite installed gratefully received. "Take off and nuke it from orbit." is, alas, not a viable solution.
No, not really.
You either have to work with what you have, or nuke-from-orbit.
The thing about nuke-from-orbit is that the machine will already be licensed, and a windows re-install will pick that up automagically, so that's not a problem.
Post by: liam_whippet on 13 March, 2024, 11:24:52 pm
I've just set up a couple of new Win11 Pro laptops, straight from the box, avoiding Microsoft Accounts [which in my case, I have not got].
When you power it on, it asks to connect to the internet - so let it.
The trick seems to be that when it asks for a MS Account, there's an option below [in smaller letters] saying 'login options' - choose it.
You then want to choose 'School or Workplace'; 'Domain Join' is the same thing.
It asks for the name of the machine - which you can skip.
It asks for your name. My name is fred; my password is fred; my pet's name is fred; I was born in a city called fred; my nickname at school was fred; etc.
It's connected to the internet, so goes off and downloads the latest release of Windows and installs it ...
You can then log on as fred; password fred ..
What I then did was enable the local administrator, who then logged on, killed fred, and installed Office2019 [hint: you have to uninstall 'Office' from the Apps first].
Et voila - new machine, Win11 Pro, Office2019 and not a Microsoft Account in sight.
Hope this helps.
Post by: drossall on 13 March, 2024, 11:44:15 pm
Another example is webforms which require an e-mail address.The RFCs actually leave quite a lot of scope for unclarity. Nearly every algorithm for validating an email address, including those in standard libraries, is wrong. For one thing, the username part can be "anything that the recipient system will accept", and that you can get through various servers around the Internet so that that recipient system gets a chance to accept it. Which leaves quite a lot of latitude for addresses to be acceptable sometimes and not others. Add to that that a lot of the things that some programmers believe they know about email addresses are also wrong, and you get a recipe for confusion.
The web designer just applies their own idea of what constitutes a valid e-mail address.
With no regard to the RFCs which actually define this.
It's almost like 'if it doesn't end in .gmail.com then it's not valid".
If memory serves me correctly, the owner of AAISP has a valid address of a@e.gg and this was rejected by several webforms.
But do no validation, and you're guaranteed a pile of duff email addresses, especially given the number of people who don't seem to know their own addresses, don't realise that (usually) it really, really matters whether you put .com, .co.uk or .org.uk (for example), and so on and so forth.
Post by: TheLurker on 14 March, 2024, 05:17:40 pm
Quote from: liam_whippet
@The Lurker: 'XAIPETE'Σας ευχαριστώ πολύ, 'ειστε πολύ ευγενικός.
Thanks for that, it is a great help. Any idea if that would work for whatever they call the "domestic" version?
Post by: Feanor on 14 March, 2024, 05:30:06 pm
I don't think those options exist in the Home version.
But I've never installed the Home version, so I'm not 100% certain.
Post by: Feanor on 14 March, 2024, 05:35:26 pm
@The Lurker: 'XAIPETE'
I've just set up a couple of new Win11 Pro laptops, straight from the box, avoiding Microsoft Accounts [which in my case, I have not got].
When you power it on, it asks to connect to the internet - so let it.
The trick seems to be that when it asks for a MS Account, there's an option below [in smaller letters] saying 'login options' - choose it.
You then want to choose 'School or Workplace'; 'Domain Join' is the same thing.
It asks for the name of the machine - which you can skip.
It asks for your name. My name is fred; my password is fred; my pet's name is fred; I was born in a city called fred; my nickname at school was fred; etc.
It's connected to the internet, so goes off and downloads the latest release of Windows and installs it ...
You can then log on as fred; password fred ..
What I then did was enable the local administrator, who then logged on, killed fred, and installed Office2019 [hint: you have to uninstall 'Office' from the Apps first].
Et voila - new machine, Win11 Pro, Office2019 and not a Microsoft Account in sight.
Hope this helps.
Out of curiosity, having created a local account (which is the desired outcome here), why did you then log on as Administrator and delete that account? Why did you not log on and use the freshly created local account?
Are you logging on as Administrator for your day to day use?
Post by: liam_whippet on 14 March, 2024, 08:06:24 pm
And for the domain stuff, you need Win 10/11 Pro - which lets you log on without the Microsoft Account. [Win 10/11 Home has to be upgraded to Pro in order to do networking.]
So, if the desired outcome is to avoid having a Microsoft Account, then you need Win 10/11 Pro, not the 'domestic' version; and - yes - there's no need to create an account and delete it, you can just create a 'MrsLurker' account [and she can create any other accounts..]
Apologies for any confusion!
Post by: Feanor on 14 March, 2024, 08:23:47 pm
I've not tried that exact workflow with my Win11 pro.
I presume you can't log into the Domain account in the first instance, during initial setup, because at that point the machine is not a member of the Domain.
Unless there are Domain-joining options exposed at that point?
So you need to make a temp local account, from where you can then join the machine to the Domain using your Domain Admin credentials, and then once that's done, you can use a Domain account, and the temp local account can be binned.
In order to create a local account on Win Home versions, it's been made intentionally harder, indeed almost impossible.
As I've said earlier, the simplest way is to create the bootable USB stick from the downloaded ISO using Rufus, it can adjust the installer defaults on the fly, and allows for the installation without a MS account. It's not 'hacking' anything, it's just exposing supported options which MS don't expose in their Out-Of-Box installer for the Proles with their Home version.
I used this even when installing Win11 pro on my home Domain, and I highly recommend it.
Post by: orienteer on 14 March, 2024, 10:27:38 pm
Post by: barakta on 14 March, 2024, 11:10:16 pm
Post by: Kim on 14 March, 2024, 11:24:35 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 March, 2024, 01:16:50 am
Post by: rr on 15 March, 2024, 10:25:28 am
Post by: chrisbainbridge on 15 March, 2024, 01:16:11 pm
Post by: MattH on 15 March, 2024, 01:18:09 pm
Post by: perpetual dan on 16 March, 2024, 09:50:17 am
Post by: MattH on 18 March, 2024, 03:56:18 pm
https://youshallnotpass.glitch.me/
Post by: fimm on 21 March, 2024, 11:40:39 am
Just for fun, because we've all hit stupid password strength limitations:-Oh <Deity>.
https://youshallnotpass.glitch.me/
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 March, 2024, 01:15:01 am
Post by: Kim on 26 March, 2024, 01:20:28 am
Bloody internet connections been down and back half a dozen times in the last hour sort it out u muppets >:(
The LNSes appear to be experiencing a chaotic era... I've come back up on v.gormless, which can't be a good sign.
https://aastatus.net/42648
The smart money's on unscheduled planned maintenance by our-favourite-telco's network-monkeys...
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 March, 2024, 01:23:58 am
Also, those status e-mails from A&A are not fucking junk, Thunderbollocks. If they were I wouldn’t have set up a rule to move them to the A&A folder, no, I'd have set one up to mark them as read and delete them automatically. You useless workshy anbaric twat.
Post by: Kim on 26 March, 2024, 01:47:00 am
It's just fallen over again. And seems to have landed flat on its face this time... I'm going to get ready for bed and come back and click post.
ETA: Back after about 25 mins. Now chillin' on y.witless
[1] Does it count as a forklift upgrade when the new hardware is a VM?
Post by: Mr Larrington on 26 March, 2024, 10:15:26 am
Post by: SteveC on 27 March, 2024, 08:19:45 pm
And then Mailchimp was playing up, presenting me with a blank screen instead of a list of templates, but at least that has sorted itself now.
I get enough of this sort of hassle during the day, I do not need it in the evenings as well.
Post by: Mr Larrington on 28 March, 2024, 07:57:57 pm
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 April, 2024, 06:01:48 pm
You've disappeared the taskbar icons for a handful of items and I want them back.
Sort it out u muppets
Edit: it would appear that rather than Microsith being the guilty party it's those twunts at the Chocolate Factory. Uninstall Google Drive and reboot and Lo! the icons are back. It's bad enough that they buggered context menus, and now this. Useless fuckers.
Post by: Diver300 on 13 April, 2024, 06:50:24 pm
This was more of a surprise than might be expected as it
Post by: Kim on 13 April, 2024, 08:29:37 pm
Post by: Diver300 on 13 April, 2024, 09:01:34 pm
I suppose technically it was telling you your depth as a boolean...I don't need to spend ££££ on a dive computer to tell me my depth as a boolean, or my tank pressure as a boolean for that matter.
Post by: Pickled Onion on 14 April, 2024, 03:38:57 pm
Garage bod 1 looks under the bonnet, goes out back and gets battery off shelf, while bod 2 types the reg into the computer.
Bod 2: "We need to order it, it'll be in Monday, can you come back?"
The three of us look at the shiny new battery on the counter.
"Ah yes. The computer says we haven't got one, so I can't sell it to you. Come back Monday and we can fit it."
"Can you order it and fit it now?"
"No, the computer won't let me charge you until it arrives."
"But it has arrived - it's right there!"
"No, this battery has never arrived, according to the computer. We have a pallet of batteries that arrived a couple of months ago, but the computer says they didn't, so it won't let us send them back."
Happily, it turns out that when the computer says "no" it can be overridden with a handful of beer tokens.
Post by: Tim Hall on 16 April, 2024, 01:18:47 pm
But no. The
Post by: BrianI on 16 April, 2024, 01:23:26 pm
So I've now ordered a pair of matched 4GB DDR3 memory sticks, which will upgrade the machine to it's maximum of 8GB. Even then Winblows 10 will still run pretty slughishly!
Post by: Kim on 16 April, 2024, 02:05:08 pm
Post by: JonBuoy on 16 April, 2024, 06:32:54 pm
The URL is condensed onto a button on the website but that is where it takes you.
When I click on the link I get taken to a Bing Maps webpage that has Glooston Village Hall etc in the search bar, has found Wilbarston Village Hall and is showing a map of Rockingham. WTF is going on ???
Post by: drossall on 16 April, 2024, 09:19:58 pm
https://www.bing.com/maps?q=Glooston+Village+Hall%2C+Andrew%27s+Ln%2C+Market+Harborough+LE16+8QE
Use that and Bing will append the correct geolocation and give you the expected result.
Or, on your original link, zoom out and the hall is correctly marked - it's just off screen.
Post by: Lightning Phil on 17 April, 2024, 08:49:28 am