The computing stuff rant thread

[T42]

Photoshop is bloody pushy these days.  Takes an age to open but if you try to do something else in the meantime it keeps pushing itself to the top of the z-order and taking over the screen. This morning it did all that and then brought up a dialogue about "How likely are you to recommend Photoshop to a friend". Fuxk off, Thomas Knoll.

[ian]

Mac programs are usually well-behaved in this respect. But I had my rant about Adobe and Microsoft not doing things in Mac-sensible ways (of which this behaviour is one). Along with full screen, using dictionaries, etc. etc.

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.

[Mr Larrington]

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!

[ian]

Yes, it's annoying because they changed it. You'd cmd-grab a corner and drag away, and content and frame would resize as the Lord saw fit. And all was good. It's how they did it in Caxton's time.

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.

[Feanor]

*sigh*.
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.

[Feanor]

New HDD transported home in my cycling jersey pocket, and installed.
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!

[Feanor]

So webmail is restored, and this time I took the time to correctly configure SELinux rather than just disabling it!
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.

[Kim]

webmail sanity

Oxymoron.

[Feanor]

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.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Our organisation uses a (widely used open source toolkit) for documentation generation and I maintain the generation tool plugins.

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.

[Afasoas]

I've had to re-join Facebook because I'm working with a group of people who don't understand that not everyone wants to be on Facebook.
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.

[perpetual dan]

Yes, I have two accounts (neither of which I use much). They quickly drew dots between them for me to click "add friend" on. The lack of use may be connected to this.

[Biggsy]

It's so disconcerting just how much Facebook knows about me

Which reminds me to get round to watching What Facebook Knows About You

[Kim]

Samsung, just stop it with the fruity ambitions and stick to what you're good at! [Improvised explosive devices? - Ed]

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, 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!}

[Zipperhead]

Hewlett-Packard, once upon a time you made quality equipment. Now you're a bunch of fucking morons. Which donkey felching designer thought that the top of the PC case was a good place to put the power switch?

[TheLurker]

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.  ....

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.

[Biggsy]

Whereas I'm keen to update.  I find more to like than hate with each new version.

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.

[Kim]

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?   

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.}

[Biggsy]

I use Buttons Remapper to open the notifications panel from a physical keyboard.

[Kim]

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.   

[Biggsy]

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.

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.

[Pickled Onion]

I have just spent a frustrating day trying to work out why the software we are porting to a new environment was throwing up timeout exceptions. Made frustrating by the multiple levels of indirection, Inversion of Control "magic", and delving into ancient ORMs for which there is no source to step into.

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>
}
#endif
Grrr.  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.

[Kim]

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!

[Ben T]

Really irritates me that whenever you download a program nowadays you invariably discover that you haven't actually downloaded the program, but a very small program whose sole job it is to download the actual program.
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.

[Mr Larrington]

Mr W Digital, when I click the wossname to reboot¹ your otherwise fine NAS gizmo, I should be obliged if you would reboot the damn' thing and not just pretend you've rebooted it.  Because when I log back into the admin page and you tell me "Uptime: 7d 4h 22m" it makes me think that you're as truthful as a Tory election broadcast.

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.