The computing stuff rant thread

[Pickled Onion]

Advent of Code. I thought it might be good to do it in dotnet 6 as it was officially released a few weeks ago...

Listen, Microsoft, if you're going to provide a Mac version of Visual Studio, at least could you actually own a Mac and have a look at how installers normally work on a proper computer. There's a reason I own a Mac and not a thing with Windows installed. On it.

The way everything else works: drag old app to bin (optional), click on installer, done.

Oh no.
MS: I can't install as you have an old version
Me: No I don't, I just deleted it
MS: Yes you do - go to this GitHub site, right click and download a bash script to remove it
Me: That doesn't work, I have Safari, just like every other Mac user
... open text editor, copy-paste script, save, open terminal, chmod -x, execute
Me: It doesn't run, it needs access to something
MS: Hmm. I have no idea.
... googles error message, changes privacy settings, checks script *very* carefully, script runs
MS: OK, I'll install now, but first I need access to your keychain
Me: WTF?

[grams]

Stupid Brother Wi-Fi printer refuses to print certain documents. Data light comes on, things whirr, but no printing, just goes back to being “ready”. No amount of rebooting or resetting will fix it. Printing the same document from a different computer has the same result.

Anyway, I’ve finally found a solution: rotate the first page 180 degrees and it prints fine.

** shrug **

[Kim]

That happens occasionally with Postscript/PCL, which are effectively programming languages for telling the printer how to draw a page (the driver doesn't just send bitmaps of whole pages to the printer, as you might expect).  Entirely possible for the program to fail to run or fill up the available memory and crash or whatever, which on a good day results in the job mysteriously failing to produce output, and on a bad day wastes dozens of pages printing gobbledegook before you realise what's going on and stop it.

No doubt Brother are doing something similar, and there's something in the document it doesn't like.  Alas, printers are about as conducive to debugging as Garmin GPS receivers.

[pcolbeck]

Cisco you provide a nice API for configuring fabrics with DCNM. Why the hell is the service node configuration not exposed in the API?
I now have to click through a form on the GUI and fill in about 10 pieces of information including IP addresses, VLAN ids and VRFs and repat this 92 times !!!!!
Why cant I just use Postman to squirt it all in from the spreadsheet I am copying it from like with the rest of the fabric config?

Grrr

[pcolbeck]

Why do Microsoft make it so hard to change formatting in Word ? Its like some kind of black art.
Spent several hours getting the headings in a document to go from unnumbered to correctly numbered (including sub headings).

[ian]

It's all part of their plan to make sure the world continues to format documents by hammering away at the space bar and tab button.

Almost every other application for managing words and stuff has styles and formatting sorted and packaged in easy-to-use and intuitive tools and options. But then you have to use Word.

[TheLurker]

Why do Microsoft make it so hard to change formatting in Word? ...

Dunno.  It used to be easy in Word 97 and then they started "improving" it with intellisenesence and using subsequent versions has been, is, an utterly frustrating experience.

[Mr Larrington]

The only way I reckon I can get W10 to install an update it’s been failing to install for the past ten months is by reinstalling the the whole wretched thing from scratch.  Which wouldn’t be so onerous were it not for the dozens of apps that would need to reinstalled, plus the large amount of tweaking required to get the bloody thing the way I want it.  Bah!

I believe that I can give you a solution to that. My office PC (as in, the one next to my desk in a far flung place called "the city") was toast. Wouldn't run any updates, programs took 15 seconds to start, those that would even start. I would have been quite happy to go and zap it and load it from scratch, it doesn't run much more than office, superputty and virtualbox, but then I found the solution....

download a windows iso, right click on it to mount it (no need to put it on a usb stick) then run the setup.exe on it. It will ask you if you want to keep your existing software after which apparently it replaces windows in-situ.

At the end it reboots, and will initially give you the welcome screen from a fresh windows installation but all your treasured programs are still installed.

I finally got round to trying this.  It didn’t work   Now nuking Windows from orbit and starting over coz you can’t run Setup from Safe Mode even if you manage to get into it at all which is tricky when the Babbage-Engine declines to recognise your keyboard chiz.

Edit: also, why the bollocks does it want to use the small monitor over there ==> and not the big one here ^^^^  Bastardos…

[Beardy]

I’ve been away from M$ software for a little over three years now¹ and none of the above is much encouragement for me to want to return. This may be difficult if I decide to fire up my Project Management career now that Dr Beardy (Mrs) has retired²


1. Well apart from the occasional foray into trying to help the good doctor when her Babbage engine misbehaved.

2. She finished work on 23/12 and even before her contract of employment ended on 31/12 she was haranguing me to get a job because we needed the money. BUT YOU HAD A WELL PAID JOB I did not reply.

[Mr Larrington]

I haz a Windows   Installing Windows itself was pretty quick, once I'd persuaded it not to BSOD and recognise the hardware.  Installing the rest of the software will take a bit longer

[Mr Larrington]

Frustration, thy name is Dropbox!  Did I tell you to bung the files on the C drive*?  Why, no!  No, I did not!  There’s a perfectly good directory just there ==> D:\Dropbox, with all the Dropbox files.  In it.  So I moved them and then moved them again and spent an age twatting about with file permishes to get rid of the old one and I hate everybody.  But at least I ent had a BSOD since dinner time.

* Why does everything assume you want to bung your files on the same device as Microsith’s?  Why not just fucking ask

[woollypigs]

Yup never got around that either. Why store your files on a drive where the OS lives. Especially back when windows went blue screen so often as it did. Even just a different partition.

At least now it is much easier to point to another drive.

[Kim]

I suspect half the problem is that Windows, and the DOS that came before it, is very invested in disks as the basis of its filesystem model.  You don't get this rubbish on OSes that use logical devices or a unix-style monolithic filesystem to work out where to put things.  (You get other problems instead, of course.)

That and programmers are sloppy, and in the absence of a good means of abstraction, they're faced with the choice of either prompting the user for some configuration, or assuming that the device the OS booted from (or worse, the C: drive) is fine.

[Feanor]

A little-known fact is that windows does allow you to mount a volume UNIX-style to a mount-point directory on the root (C:) drive.
So another disk (or partition) does not in fact require a drive letter.
Actually, it can have both if you like, as per the screenshot below.

In the search box, type 'diskmgmt.msc' to start up the disk management console.
From there, r-click the drive or partition you want to mount, and select the option 'Change Drive Letters and Paths'.
From here, you can assign drive letters, or assign a mount-point.


NTFS_Mountpoint by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

So now, anything I save to C:\CrapIDontWantOnC actually goes to the mounted drive.

[woollypigs]

I did this :

"right-click any of the default folders (Document, photos etc) and click Properties.
On the Location tab, click Move, and then select the new location for that folder. (If you enter a path that doesn't exist, Windows will offer to create it for you.)
Click OK or Apply and you'll see a prompt asking whether you want to move files from the existing folder to the new location. In general, you should say yes to this request."

Taken from here https://www.windowscentral.com/how-move-default-user-folders-new-drive-windows-10

[Mr Larrington]

Though there are programs out there that get mardy if you move it from C: to D:, because Stupid.

Edit: fixed that one.  Many gigabytes of Stuffs relocated to sensible place

[Mr Larrington]

No, Microsith, you might very well be convinced that the .mat file extension is so intimately associated with Access that you won’t let me change it, but it ent.  At least, not on my Babbage-Engine.

Cue more dicking around in the registry

[SoreTween]

I'm struggling to decide which is the bigger pile of utter programmers self-wank:
JSON
JSONata
javascript

Sweet baby cheezes.  Is it possible to achieve anything useful in these languages?
I've done xslt.  And prolog.  And I used to be able to read perl, my own >12 moths old or someone else's    Proper mindf##k languages.  (plus other more normal languages)

Compare and contrast the three j-shitbiscuits with python which despite being an unholy mess of a godawful designed-by-committee disaster undergoing a protracted car crash is almost impossible not to achieve your desired goal with.  I mean - a language where a wrongly placed space causes an error?  WTAF?  Yet you still, with only a couple of 'duh, that was dumb' errors you invariably achieve your goal in about 25% of the lines of code you might have expected.

Code: [Select]

import cluelessnoob.helperfunctions
import magicfunction as worldpeace

while true:
  with(myinput):
    solve(everything)

And voila, somehow it will.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Microsith (yes, it's them again)

I trust your automagical start of Edge on the box upstairs was just an aberration on your part?  Edge is not my default browser.  Nor is it on the list of Stuffs to start when the box is awakened from its slumbers.  So it has no business starting up unless I tell it to.  Make sure it doesn’t happen again or there'll be trouble, capeesh.

kthxbai

[TheLurker]

Edge is not my default browser.

It is now. 

[TheLurker]

... I mean - a language where a wrongly placed space causes an error?

Not often that FORTRAN 77 crops up in this thread.

As for JSON, it's not nice, but it's not as bad as some of the truly *appalling* XML I've endured.  I am however in complete agreement about Javascript.  It's bloody vile

[SoreTween]

I am warming to JSON.  Slightly.  I'm around 50K about now.

Meanwhile....
Software engineers.  Again.  Well, some software engineers.  Specifically, the kind of engineer who thinks it is helpful to contribute incomplete code to an open source project.  And by incomplete what I really mean is barely f##king started.
Anyone used rtl_433?  Great software, I've been using it to log my oil tank level for years.  Recently I switched to using mqtt to get it's output into my database.  For reasons not relevant to this story I found I needed to learn about mqtt Quality of Service levels, since rtl_433 does reliable mqtt I looked at the help.  Sure enough:

Highlights
    Added QoS to MQTT options (#1769)

So I download, build and install and it doesn't work.  Since the oil tank only pings a reading every 68 minutes it took me a few days to establish qos=0 or 1 works, qos=2 does nothing.  Wireshark confirmed when qos=2 the transaction is incomplete.  So I posted a question on github and got an instant answer that totally contradicts the help: rtl_433 doesn't support qos options.  So I looked at the pull request.  I'm no C coder but even I can see that all the useless, useless brain dead total fuckwit did was introduce the qos option to the command line and add it to the transmit packet.  Not the first hint, not so much as a byte written to support the very different flow sequences qos 1 & 2 require.  Yeah qos=1 works when there's no packet loss by fluke, qos=2 cannot work.  He did a good job of publicising his zero effort contribution, it is documented in:

• README.md
• rtl_433.example.conf
• OPERATION.md
• the man pages
• the --help

Nowhere does it say that this option does absolutely diddly fucking squat.
You sir are as much use as a chimespanzee's wankstain.  And when I'm leading the panzers to whitehall you will be the very first bloodstain on the tracks.

[edit]Temperature units corrected[/edit]

[SoreTween]

Well, I've learned something.  I succeeded in learning an amount about mqtt qos, enough that I can wireshark it and understand the flow.  I was also sufficiently motivated by the shoddy submission to an otherwise great project to learn how to do a github pull request removing the command line option from all the help files.  Time will tell how the project owner feels about my pr.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Internet speeds - are they generally a bit stuffed today?

Edit

After two days of shit connection, struggling to work - and miserably watching netflix in 'pixel mode' last night, MrsC says "I wonder if it my backup program?"

Turns out she set up some (uknown) backup program and left it running. It has been consuming nearly all the Up and Down (why?) bandwidth.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Twitter!

I see the big box telling me to log in or sign up you splat all over Stuffs that people link to is now without the little “X” in the corner to make it go away.  And Chrome for Fondleslab won't let me edit the url to remove the “mobile.” bit to confuse you into thinking I'm using a Proper Computer.

Off you must fuck.