The computing stuff rant thread

[rafletcher]

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 

[Afasoas]

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.

[Mr Larrington]

After approximately nineteen hours of fannying around I discovered that if ur file says

Code: [Select]

        texture:[0]

where it’s meant to say

Code: [Select]

        texture:[1]

then it will not work   Some kind of error message would be nice, chaps, instead of just crashing without so much as a farewell wave.

[FifeingEejit]

Rant 1.
Decision made ....

Rant 5:
... meets spec, the spec says this <copies and pastes spec point>, this is not a bug...

Every IT project, regardless of size, that I ever undertaken.  Here, have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. 

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.
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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[FifeingEejit]

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.

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.
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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[FifeingEejit]

After approximately nineteen hours of fannying around I discovered that if ur file says

Code: [Select]

        texture:[0]

where it’s meant to say

Code: [Select]

        texture:[1]

then it will not work   Some kind of error message would be nice, chaps, instead of just crashing without so much as a farewell wave.

Talking 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.
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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[ian]

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.

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.
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.

[Mrs Pingu]

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.)

[nicknack]

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.

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.

Well, I have now.

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.

[Mrs Pingu]

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...

[Mrs Pingu]

Oh god, it's all going horribly wrong...

[Mrs Pingu]

2-3 hours my arse. I could have done without that last thing on a Friday..

[Mrs Pingu]

Got in this morning to find I had no browser bookmarks. The folder IT chap created on Friday to store my bookmarks was there bug there was nothing in it. "OneDrive must not have uploaded it before I wiped the laptop".
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.

[tiermat]

Me, today, using analogy* to get the lusers to give reasonable fault reports:

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

[FifeingEejit]

Me, today, using analogy* to get the lusers to give reasonable fault reports:

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

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.

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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[rogerzilla]

Microsoft.  Excel is not an "app", as this laptop is not a mobile phone.  It's an application.  God, it's like your dad pretending to be down with the kids.

[Mr Larrington]

AMD!  If NVIDIA can update its software without requiring a reboot then you should be able to as well.  Get with the program, cavemen

[FifeingEejit]

Openfuckingreach...

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])

[Mr Larrington]

So, fuck, yeah, Slow Dempsey is left to reboot himself in the still watches of the night after applying five months of updates and appears to have updated without issues, apart from all that wank about Microsith Edge on startup.  You'd better not have changed the default browser, Billy Boy, or your screams will be audible by the crew of the ISS.  But soft!  What is this?  A “cumulative update” for the update?  OK, get on with it.

“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 raven slow one, without installing the updated update for last night’s update.

(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.

[TheLurker]

....
Edit: 'kinell, that was quick!  20 minutes from poking the link to having him back up and running.  Something must have gone wrong.

Nah, just the Beast of Redmond messing with your mind.

[Mr Larrington]

....
Edit: 'kinell, that was quick!  20 minutes from poking the link to having him back up and running.  Something must have gone wrong.

Nah, just the Beast of Redmond messing with your mind.

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”.

[Mr Larrington]

Decided I can no longer live with the frequent speed plummets of everything in the Cupboard-o-Networks so am “improving” the route taken by the cable.  Saw, hammer, chisel, screwdrivers (assorted), removal and refitting of a couple of doors, measuring the cable to discover it's about 6m longer than it needs to be and contains a couple of seriously squished bits and swear and swear and swear and order a flat one from the Bay of Thieves and hope that reinstalling the damaged one with fewer horrid bends and squishing will work in the meantime and swear more.

[FifeingEejit]

Just been given a (partial) keyboard to suit my temprement.



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[Kim]

Just been given a (partial) keyboard to suit my temprement.

That reminds me, I was going to molish barakta a "FFS!" button.

[grams]

Just been given a (partial) keyboard to suit my temprement.



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I hope you're saving up for the rest of it, like this:
https://twitter.com/squirmelia/status/1036167421613232131