Author Topic: The computing stuff rant thread (Read 405991 times)

Beardy · « **Reply #1600 on:** 26 February, 2018, 08:07:56 am »

Quote from: SoreTween on 25 February, 2018, 12:51:51 pm

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

Two Kingston 32Gb cards hit exactly 10 MB/s so the replacements will be Kingston and will not be coming from Amazon.

If they don't meet the stated standard the returns window is irrelevant surely.

SoreTween · « **Reply #1601 on:** 01 March, 2018, 07:44:44 pm »

~~Open~~ Libre Office doesn't get any less shit does it. Still can't run a stupendously simple VBA macro. Still feck all of use in the help files. Online forums still dens of looking-down-nose uber geeks.

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]

TheLurker · « **Reply #1602 on:** 01 March, 2018, 08:26:29 pm »

I'm not sure I've got the energy to rant about this, but it is rant worthy...

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.

TheLurker · « **Reply #1603 on:** 08 March, 2018, 07:49:40 pm »

Another starring turn from Microsoft or... Left Hand I'd like you to meet Right Hand.

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 ~~years~~decades. The OS is happy with this, I'm happy with this. All is sunshine, roses and lollipops. Can you hear the ominous music? No? Oh. Well humour me and pretend you can.

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.

Beardy · « **Reply #1604 on:** 09 March, 2018, 11:10:49 am »

Quote from: TheLurker on 08 March, 2018, 07:49:40 pm

Another starring turn from Microsoft or... Left Hand I'd like you to meet Right Hand.

Because Windows File Exploder is pants ...
<snnnnip>

A classic case of How many M$ engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None, M$ just redefine darkness as the standard!

SoreTween · « **Reply #1605 on:** 09 March, 2018, 06:51:30 pm »

In a not dissimilar vein I do wish Microsoft would sort out Shitepoint so that it can handle files with an & symbol in the name. Or perhaps save the text of the new item I've created and just not take the attachment it doesn't like. Or at least give a meaningful error message? No, barfing with a nondescript database type store error and losing everything is the Microsoft way.

Kim · « **Reply #1606 on:** 02 April, 2018, 04:22:54 pm »

I hate mobile phones, or more specifically, the fact that the software for mobile phones is either developed 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.

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.

Kim · « **Reply #1607 on:** 02 April, 2018, 04:30:13 pm »

Supplemental rant: It's two thousand and fucking eighteen, isn't it? See, I've lost track. This is exactly the sort of reason I need my computing devices to fucking work properly.

TheLurker · « **Reply #1608 on:** 02 April, 2018, 04:37:36 pm »

Quote from: Kim on 02 April, 2018, 04:22:54 pm

~~I hate mobile phones, or more specifically, the fact that the~~ All software ~~for mobile phones~~ is ~~either~~ developed 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.

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.

Kim · « **Reply #1609 on:** 02 April, 2018, 04:41:23 pm »

There an extra special level of illiteracy when it's mobile phones though. Got a problem with a real computer, and you can generally pose your question to google (sometimes with a -ubuntu to weed out the dross) and get an answer from the project mailing list or find someone on stackoverflow who's had a similar problem, with suggestions of varying degrees of helpfulness. When it's mobile phones you always end up on some garish web forum where any scraps of insight are drowned in a wave of illiterate dudebros posting cargo-cult solutions.

TheLurker · « **Reply #1610 on:** 02 April, 2018, 05:10:18 pm »

Quote from: Kim on 02 April, 2018, 04:41:23 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*

tiermat · « **Reply #1611 on:** 16 April, 2018, 03:29:12 pm »

Windows...

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!

David Martin · « **Reply #1612 on:** 23 April, 2018, 04:05:24 pm »

TurnItIn, that ubiquitous (for those in HE) assignment application platform for marking, feedback. plagiarism detection and LOSING THE MARKS AND COMMENTS YOU PUT IN PRIOR TO GOING ON HOLIDAY. Arsebadgers. That will be 3 days of marking I have to redo when I am already up to my eyeballs and it is well overdue. Thank you so much. Why is so much education software absolute crap?

barakta · « **Reply #1613 on:** 23 April, 2018, 04:31:02 pm »

Urgh... Turnitin, not accessible to many disabled academics either and barely accessible to disabled students.

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!

David Martin · « **Reply #1614 on:** 23 April, 2018, 04:42:42 pm »

It does save as it goes, usually. And I thought it had. Hence my surprise upon return to find stuff not there.

barakta · « **Reply #1615 on:** 23 April, 2018, 05:59:08 pm »

Yeuch, how sickening!

#AllSoftwareSucks

Kim · « **Reply #1616 on:** 07 May, 2018, 01:18:49 pm »

We found barakta a monitor with a matte screen and no backlight PWM flicker! (BenQ BL2411PT for those playing along at home.)

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?

SoreTween · « **Reply #1617 on:** 09 May, 2018, 10:31:04 pm »

I'm sorry for the length of this but it left me speechless.

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.

Tim Hall · « **Reply #1618 on:** 15 May, 2018, 12:57:07 pm »

New abode, new wireless network.

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.

TheLurker · « **Reply #1619 on:** 16 May, 2018, 07:52:17 pm »

Grumble:
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.

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #1620 on:** 17 May, 2018, 07:02:46 pm »

Yahoo! Please! Stop! Dicking! Around! With! Your! Mail! And! Making! Thunderbird! Not! Work!

An hour or so of fannying around to sort that one out, you berks. Cut it out.

Chris S · « **Reply #1621 on:** 17 May, 2018, 07:28:10 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.

Pickled Onion · « **Reply #1622 on:** 17 May, 2018, 09:04:52 pm »

Quote from: TheLurker on 16 May, 2018, 07:52:17 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?

woollypigs · « **Reply #1623 on:** 17 May, 2018, 09:27:40 pm »

Quote from: Chris S on 17 May, 2018, 07:28:10 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.

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.

Chris S · « **Reply #1624 on:** 17 May, 2018, 09:32:17 pm »

Quote from: TheLurker on 16 May, 2018, 07:52:17 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.