The computing stuff rant thread

[mrcharly-YHT]

I see your <SPACE><TAB> and give you line endings.

Apart from those poor sods who work with framemaker, all of our source is text format, edited and built from a Linux cluster.

So, we have the lusers who edit these files in Word, use a random text editor with line endings set to CRLF and don't get me started on their inability to follow the instructions for pushing to Git.

[Mr Larrington]

And what kind of feckless drooling weapon:

• puts tabs, spaces or a mixture thereof at the end of a line, and/or
• inserts blank lines which aren't actually blank because they've got spaces, tabs or a mixture thereof in them

[Kim]

That usually happens organically as people edit things, but I expect someone (Crowley?) has worked out a way to automate the process.

[Jaded]

OK, it's not a coding thing, but I always thought that Word should watch for multiple spaces

(it used to watch and say "You appear to be writing a letter" after you'd typed a couple of words)

and if you type two spaces after a punctuation thing should say "Oi!! This not a fecking typewriter!!! We are in the 21st Century now, with proportional fonts and ever-thing."

It you type three or more spaces it should say "Tabs, dear boy/girl/ , TABS!" and convert your spaces to a tab.

[Tim Hall]

And what kind of feckless drooling weapon:

• puts tabs, spaces or a mixture thereof at the end of a line, and/or
• inserts blank lines which aren't actually blank because they've got spaces, tabs or a mixture thereof in them

Could this be why?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)

Unlikely, obvs.

[Pingu]

Notepad++ can remove trailing spaces and other gubbins.               

[Mr Larrington]

Notepad++ can remove trailing spaces and other gubbins.               

I haz a saved notepad++ macro to do this very thing.  Also, I see what you did there

[Lightning Phil]

In find and replace on bog standard notepad you can use regular expressions to do the same. Same in word pad etc.

[TheLurker]

In find and replace on bog standard notepad you can use regular expressions to do the same. Same in word pad etc.

I had a problem, my document had unwanted trailing spaces and and tabs I used a regex....  fill in the punchline. 

[Feanor]

In find and replace on bog standard notepad you can use regular expressions to do the same. Same in word pad etc.

I had a problem, my document had unwanted trailing spaces and and tabs I used a regex....  fill in the punchline. 

[fuaran]

Why is Zoom crashing my router (TP-Link)? It has been pretty stable for months, then crashes/resets within 10 minutes of starting a Zoom meeting.
I am using a separate WAP, the router should just be doing the ethernet/router/modem stuff.

[SoreTween]

Devolo technical support have confirmed that their powerline adapters wifi doesn't work if you specify a fixed IP for the LAN interface.  Why the actual f##k would you design in a configuration option that renders the unit into a brick?
Do they call it a bug?  Do they promise a future firmware update?  Do they bollocks.  Its just a 'configuration requirement' that you don't use that setting.  Not in the docs of course.

Damn things don't pass 802.1q either, that would give me a work-around.

#Coronabonus: Extended return window at big river themed everything vendor.

[Mr Larrington]

No, BBC Londonton "News", a major outage for Virgin Media's infrastructure in the southwest of London's famous London has not left thousands of customers unable to work from home because they are "without wifi".  How many times do you clods have to be told that wifi != internet?

[Kim]

Major outbreak of gremlins in our phones, which I really can't be arsed with in the heat.

So far I've found:
- Endless (but presumably harmelss) stream of warning messages from asterisk about comfort noise generation packets it doesn't know how to handle.  This is new.  Did Sipgate change something?
- Copy/paste error in the asterisk dialplan that wasn't actually causing a problem, but might have done in an edge-case failure condition.  Fixed.
- Slightly odd list of codecs in the configuration for the Sipgate trunk, which was presumably being automagically worked around by transcoding except...
- My failure to load the dahdi_transcode kernel module after I manually reset everything after the post-powercut SSD saga, causing calls on the analogue extension to be negotiated and then dropped due to mismatch of codecs.  Fixed.

Meanwhile:
- Downstairs Snom 300 seems to have developed a random mid-call reboot habit.  Barakta thought it was caused by a dodgy lead on the receiver, but we can't reproduce that by wiggling or thumping.  Seems unlikely that it's shorting out in a way that could cause a reboot.  Maybe it's related to the comfort noise thing?  Who knows...  Quite annoying, as so far I've considered these phones to be both cheap and (once properly configured) utterly reliable.

I hate phones.

[Kim]

Update to the above:  12 minute call while I was out earlier.  No evidence of comfort noise warnings in the log.  Nothing untoward happened.  Perhaps Sipgate have un-changed something?

[Diver300]

Now on day 7 of no internet from Plusnet. On day 4 I booked to change to Andrews & Arnold but the change-over is not for another 15 days.

Two more hours on the phone yesterday to Plusnet to no avail. The Plusnet-supplied BT Openreach modem and the A&A supplied Zyxel router can both get a VSDL connection but neither can authenticate.

Mobile internet costs keep on going up.

[Diver300]

Now on day 7 of no internet from Plusnet. On day 4 I booked to change to Andrews & Arnold but the change-over is not for another 15 days.

Two more hours on the phone yesterday to Plusnet to no avail. The Plusnet-supplied BT Openreach modem and the A&A supplied Zyxel router can both get a VSDL connection but neither can authenticate.

Mobile internet costs keep on going up.

On day 7 of no internet from Plusnet, an engineer (well probably a technician) was booked for Tuesday am, 9 days after the internet went down. There is a fee of £65 if there's no fault, or we're not in, or its something we've done or we cancel with less than 24 hours notice.

On day 8 or no internet, around 14 hours before the engineer is due, the router connected, having not been touched for several hours at least. I was using the laptop for non-internet stuff but it had the ethernet cable plugged in and I received a notification of something from the internet.

Now on hold to see if Plusnet are going to charge me £65 for not giving them 24 hours notice or there not having been a fault, because they can obviously claim that Nothing Changed on day 0, so it can't possibly have changed back just now. I may have to pay the £65 so that I don't have to talk to anyone tomorrow, and so that there's nothing to be messed up.

(I don't know if this is included in rants passim, but about 10 years ago Vodafone said they didn't change anything on their PAYG network, but all of the vehicle tracking units with Vodafone PAYG SIMS stopped working simultaneously. Obviously nothing changed back again six months later when they all started working)

[Diver300]

Now on day 7 of no internet from Plusnet. On day 4 I booked to change to Andrews & Arnold but the change-over is not for another 15 days.

Two more hours on the phone yesterday to Plusnet to no avail. The Plusnet-supplied BT Openreach modem and the A&A supplied Zyxel router can both get a VSDL connection but neither can authenticate.

Mobile internet costs keep on going up.

On day 7 of no internet from Plusnet, an engineer (well probably a technician) was booked for Tuesday am, 9 days after the internet went down. There is a fee of £65 if there's no fault, or we're not in, or its something we've done or we cancel with less than 24 hours notice.

On day 8 or no internet, around 14 hours before the engineer is due, the router connected, having not been touched for several hours at least. I was using the laptop for non-internet stuff but it had the ethernet cable plugged in and I received a notification of something from the internet.

Now on hold to see if Plusnet are going to charge me £65 for not giving them 24 hours notice or there not having been a fault, because they can obviously claim that Nothing Changed on day 0, so it can't possibly have changed back just now. I may have to pay the £65 so that I don't have to talk to anyone tomorrow, and so that there's nothing to be messed up.

(I don't know if this is included in rants passim, but about 10 years ago Vodafone said they didn't change anything on their PAYG network, but all of the vehicle tracking units with Vodafone PAYG SIMS stopped working simultaneously. Obviously nothing changed back again six months later when they all started working)

Only just over half an hour on the phone and they tell me that the engineers came before the due time, without telling me, so it's all fixed, I hope.

[SoreTween]

Bored bored bored bored bored of hitting Alt+Enter in LibreOffice Calc and the wrong thing happening.

[pcolbeck]

Web sites that prevent you clicking back to leave I hate you. I find it really really annoying. 

[Jaded]

Microsoft Word. And people that don't know how to use it.

An explosive combination, sadly very, very, common, from what I can see.

[Mr Larrington]

Web sites that prevent you clicking back to leave I hate you. I find it really really annoying.

And ones that won't take "Fuck the fuck off" for an answer when they try to push their poxy notifications at you.

[Mr Larrington]

No, Microsith, I do not want to open get_iPlayer's Web PVR interface with Edge.  Nor do I want to open it with IE, or search your crappy Store for another app.  I want to open it with my default browser, which IS NOT YOUR FUCKING PRODUCT.  Open it with Chrome like you used to before the last update, you oozing leprous pustules.

[TheLurker]

There are times when, despite the *many* disadvantages of being stuck with an out of date, unsupported Windows OS that it still looks like a far better option than moving to Windows X.  How dismal is that?

[pcolbeck]

For over a year my work laptop has refuse to open Excel files on first click - threw some weird error - but once Excel was open would open the file on the second try. Months ago I spent ages hunting down a solution, tried registry fixes and all sorts with no result.
All of a sudden its fixed itself magically.
I hate Windows. When it works its fine but trying to fix it when something goes wrong is a nightmare.