The computing stuff rant thread

[Kim]

Yeahbut if Windows had it's way, you'd have to reboot for the updated mouse cursor position to take effect.

[Mr Larrington]

Look, you pissweasels, I don't want to know that a file was modified "last week".  I want the date and time.

That is all.

[Feanor]

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....

[David Martin]

My experience with NTserver or whatever it was (the machine was nicknamed Yo-yo and not because it was tasty with a mint core) was that thinking about such things did't require a reboot from the operator, the machine was perfectly capable of spontaneously rebooting itself - about as stable as a pigsty.

[Afasoas]

Photoshop CC 2014 is really slow.
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.

[Wombat]

OCZ, may you rot in hell, for ever.

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...

[Woofage]

Firefox, stop being such a resource hog.


system_monitor.jpg by pencyclist, on Flickr

See the change between 20-30s? That's when FF shut down.

[Vince]

The Joy of mailing lists

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 

ETA: Even better, people have put read receipts on them!

[Mr Larrington]

See also people who reply to a mailing list digest message (which says in big friendly letters at the top "please do not include the the entire digest in your reply) with a one-line response to a message that has quoted the entire digest.  And append the entire digest to their one-line reply.

Top-posted, natch...

[Woofage]

I'm reminded of a marketing bod who sent a large powerpoint file to everyone in the company. This was at least a dozen years ago so mail servers didn't have the cheap disk space they have now. Cue much groaning of said mail servers as 200 or so copies of said large file filled every available bit of storage it had. Good job I wasn't the IT manager as I would have Had Words.

[Mr Larrington]

Back when I toiled in the service of the Evil Squirrels in the Nut Mines, the marketroids decided it would be a good idea to send out an e-mail to a list of addresses they had bought.

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

[TheLurker]

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!

[TheLurker]

Look, you pissweasels, I don't want to know that a file was modified "last week".  I want the date and time.

That is all.

Hie thee to the Command window (as administrator for preference).
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.

[Pickled Onion]

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).

[TheLurker]

...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 fairly
small file.

Time / 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.

....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.

[Mr Larrington]

Look, you pissweasels, I don't want to know that a file was modified "last week".  I want the date and time.

That is all.

Hie thee to the Command window (as administrator for preference).
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.

[Pickled Onion]

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.

[woollypigs]

Fecking laptop threw the ball out of the pram.

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!

[Feanor]

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

[perpetual dan]

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.

[Mr Larrington]

HOW MANY FUCKING TIMES DO I HAVE TO TAP A FUCKING LINK ON THIS THING BEFORE IT ACTUALLY TAKES NOTICE

And no, the link briefly changing colour doesn't count.

[perpetual dan]

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?

[Mr Larrington]

It may be that there is some blindingly obvious way of reconfiguring Microsith Office Home & Stewed Ant 2013 such that the repulsive pastel colours can be replaced with something that more nearly resembles a serious piece of software rather than the nursery in Tarquin & Jocasta's little slice of Holland Park.  However the Beast of Redmond should note that my annual trip to USAnia will be longer than usual this year, so I will have more time to hunt you down.  And on finding you, you'll be asked politely to step into the bucket of wet cement prior to becoming closely acquainted with Puget Sound.

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.

[TheLurker]

I will see your naff M$ Fisher-Price colour scheme with the, "Where the bloody hell have you hidden it!?" monochrome idiocy that is Visual Studio 2012 and raise you one TF400898 which kept me very very unpleasantly unamused for a very large part of Thursday.

[Mr Larrington]

"Where the hell have you hidden it?" is a given for a new release.  It took me about a week to find the "Home" button on one release of Firefox; they moved it from the left of the toolbar, where "Home" buttons had lived since Pre-Cambrian versions of Netscape, to the right.

This version of Chrome doesn't have one at all.  Make of that what you wil.