The computing stuff rant thread

[Mr Larrington]

Barclays fucking Bank.  I go through the nine million steps required to log into your poxy online banking so it should be pretty obvious to you that I am either:

• me, or
• a l33t h@xx0r

Now, how to close my accounts?  Print, sign and post the form.  That's really fucking secure, isn't it?  What's to stop me from getting a printed form from A.N.Other and closing a third party's account and diverting all the proceeds to my SEEKRIT account in Schnibbleland, eh?  You deserve the scorn and opprobrium heaped upon the heads of the scummiest and most chiselling of your trade.

[Kim]

As far as I can tell from pressing random buttons and googling, Android appears to lack a hotkey for opening the notifications window thinger from a physical keyboard.  WTF?

[mrcharly-YHT]

Android is designed for touchscreen input.

That's a bit frustrating, at times.

[Kim]

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.

[Afasoas]

Ubuntu how I hate thee.

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.

[ian]

Sixty five updates on. Sixty five updates off.

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.

[TheLurker]

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.

[Mr Larrington]

Apparently one can punch the keyboard of certain Dell laptops in such a way that the display goes spooey, thereby obliging one's BigCo to provide a replacement that doesn't require triplicate orders carved on a marble slab before it will deign to perform complicated tasks like running Windows and connecting to the Intertubes.  I provide no guarantee that this will work with:

• other Dell models, or
• other laptop brands, or
• other BigCos

[woollypigs]

Why is it easy to install a program on one machine, but a trip to hell and back on another? For feck sake they they are both debian ...

[Mr Larrington]

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.

[TheLurker]

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*

[Mr Larrington]

Apparently you can defer updates if you have the upmarket versions of W10 but if you're stuck with the Home version you can only do it by telling Windows you're on a metered intertubes connection and that only works if you use wifi   No, I don't understand why two machines talking to World+Dog through the same router are treated differently either

[Feanor]

Junior's PC suffered HDD corruption which rendered it unbootable.

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 ):


slow_file_transfer by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

<edit>
And now we're onto some bigger files, and the speed has picked up.
Here's task manager right now:


slow_fast by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

[Feanor]

Well, so after an xkcd-612 compliant mass file transfer...



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.

[David Martin]

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.

[pcolbeck]

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.

[David Martin]

Is that where good old fashioned tar cf - * | ssh -c user@remote (cd dir; tar xf -)  works fine as it is one big file..?

[Mr Larrington]

I doned something similar with ~150 GB of mp3s in a .7z file the other day which worked out a lot quicker than copying a Several of tens of thousands of files directly.

[pcolbeck]

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.

[Wombat]

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.

[Mr Larrington]

I'm with the doc on this one - while my Sony phone has thus far resisted the temptation to set up its own social network from which us squishy types are excluded, it is so full of pre-installed, lopsided and unremovable crap that it started complaining about running out of space when I'd only had it a month.  This nanny-knows-best behaviours should be Strongly Depracated as it leads inexorably either to Microsoft or Skynet.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai, BRITISH Airways!  Personally, I think it would be reasonable to assume that as I have logged into your webby SCIENCE with, like, my e-mail address and password an' t'ing it's actually me.  And furthermore that because my passport doesn't expire until 2022 its number is unlikely to have changed.  Could you not just present me with a screen and ask "have any of these details changed?" instead of making me enter the whole fucking lot again?

And then some bastards made of piss had bagsied all the seats by the emergency exit

[Wombat]

Sony, sort yer bleedin' website out!

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!

[woollypigs]

Ah how I have missed thee - Micky$oft minutes.

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.

[Pickled Onion]

Sometimes I wonder whether some people who design websites understand how the internet works.

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)

Thank you for your query, I have forwarded it to the relevant department