The computing stuff rant thread

[ian]

I knew about it, but haven't seen it for years, assumed it had gone away in favour of the many new and exciting ways dates in Excel can illuminate my working day.

[ian]

Oh, Excel rants.

Because I've had to design a series of dashboards in Excel, I've been especially sweary of late.

They'd still not fixed the issue with broken fonts in PDFs generated from Excel (and possibly other components). This means you have to open the PDF in a suitable editing application and reset the tracking and occasionally manually respace. Apparently, it's a known issue. Fonts contain all the information needed to maintain spacing, there's no need or benefit to poorly re-engineer this in a way that is effectively broken.

Charts that randomly change size a bit. I have regular components of a defined size. I've put this size into the format fields. Please don't convert 9cm to 8.68cm when I'm not looking.

And the one that got me the other day. I'd set up a complicated formula, but the cell was wrong. I scratched my head. Pressed the calculate button etc. Still wrong. Then I nudged the mouse and cause the screen to scroll. Well, Excel had calculated the field correctly, it just evidently hadn't told the screen. Sigh.

It'll all get ported to Tableau Server and Angular shortly. I'm sure that'll give me something new to rant about.

[ian]

Another Microsoft one – now I've sinned enough to be forced to use Calibri (which is proving to be a lot worse than I thought, the flabby hinting and curiously abyssal leading are just the start) I discovered that at some point the Office installation process had installed multiple versions of all core fonts, so there's a (new version) copy in /Library/Fonts and a older version in /Library/Microsoft/Fonts. Of course, InDesign then throws up an error about missing fonts (unfixable because there's two, though it doesn't do anything as simple as say 'hey, there's two of these, which one should I use?' it simply claims the font doesn't exist). So I have to delete the c2010 Microsoft copy in favour of the c2018 version and then fix all the documents that use the old version (everything on my iMac) to use the newer version.

Sigh.

[barakta]

Ugh!

[ian]

Well, if you opt to remove Office 2011, it removes the old /Microsoft/Fonts folder and replaces them with the newer versions of the fonts in the main /Font folder. Which also, if I recall, broke any Adobe file that used the old, now removed fonts, though it was relatively simple to let InDesign substitute the now missing fonts with the actual ones.

You can now guess what happens if you opt to keep both versions of Office.

[Feanor]

When I'm King of the World, you lot have it coming to you.

There will be four fonts.

One With Serifs;
One Without;
One mono-spaced;
and Comic Sans, just because it will annoy you.

Jeezus, that will just fix all of this nonsense right away.
GIRUY.

[ian]

I'm a font nerd though, and proper fonts are an art, people forget the elegance of well-done typography (the irony of course, is that if it's really done well you don't, by definition, notice it). I got to see the original Johnson (from the Underground) woodblock type the other weekend. That made me curiously happy. The digital age is a lot less romantic, though the same rules should apply, even if they're too often not applied.

[CommuteTooFar]

I'm a font nerd

No your not.  If you were you would be able know that the product of a typesetting foundry is a 'fount'.  In English a font is a bowl found in church to christen babies.

[Genosse Brymbo]

I'm a font nerd

No your not.  If you were you would be able know that the product of a typesetting foundry is a 'fount'.  In English a font is a bowl found in church to christen babies.

A bit of a grammar/vocabulary pot/kettle there 

[ian]

I'm a font nerd

No your not.  If you were you would be able know that the product of a typesetting foundry is a 'fount'.  In English a font is a bowl found in church to christen babies.

No one has called a font a ‘fount’ since about 1928. It’s a bit of an affectation these days.

[Mr Larrington]

In other news, the latest version of iTunes slows playback down to a c-r-a-a-a-w-l if you're also doing something CPU-intensive like creating large zip files, which I do quite a lot.  Nice one, FruitCo.

[CommuteTooFar]

I'm a font nerd

No your not.  If you were you would be able know that the product of a typesetting foundry is a 'fount'.  In English a font is a bowl found in church to christen babies.

No one has called a font a ‘fount’ since about 1928. It’s a bit of an affectation these days.

I worked at an electronic typesetter in the early 80's.  Monotype and Linotype UK used the British spelling.  The U-less font only arrived with the semi-professional american products such as PageMaker and Apple LaserWriter and office productivity programs. Note that Americans omit the U from many words such as colour.

[Kim]

And for those of us who had DTP of some kind around since shortly after the point we graduated from writing with pencils, 'font' is a de-facto computer word, and therefore American spelling is preferred for sanity reasons.  I'd not come across the 'fount' spelling before, but if encountering it out of context I'd assume that was what Brits baptise babies in.

(I know the correct spelling is 'typeface'.   )

[ian]

Really, Americans omit the 'u' from many words, that seems so laborious.

I grew up with Pagemaker and Quark Xpress. While I know 'fount' is a thing, in my entire working career I've never seen it used in preference to font. Lucretia My Reflexion, and all that.

[pcolbeck]

My Samsung S8 updated last night and now it beeps every time I press a (virtual) key. How annoying. I'll have to find out where the option to turn that off is in the setup.

[Kim]

Barakta's locked out of her work laptop because her account expired due to manglement oversight (IT have now re-inspired it), and the full disk encryption tool won't let her log in.  The solution to this appears to be to log in, so the encryption utility can access the notwork and update its account profiles.   

(It's not so much the architectural headache that this represents - anything else would compromise the security - but the complete lack of advanced warning.)

[barakta]

I should clarify that logging in requires a colleague or IT with appropriate access to the encrypted user group settings and possibly FROM the wired network...

I am PEED off, cos IT services told me when I phoned (yes, phoned, fucking telephones) that the laptop would work fine. Neither Kim or I believed them!

I work remotely 50 miles away and 2 hours travel time away... I am not due in the office until Wednesday. I have reports due in today/Monday which I cannot access before presumably Wednesday.  I can do 1 piece of work which came in via email IF I download it to my non encrypted Windows install which I am allowed to do IF my laptop is unavailable but...

[Jaded]

And for those of us who had DTP of some kind around since shortly after the point we graduated from writing with pencils, 'font' is a de-facto computer word, and therefore American spelling is preferred for sanity reasons.  I'd not come across the 'fount' spelling before, but if encountering it out of context I'd assume that was what Brits baptise babies in.

(I know the correct spelling is 'typeface'.   )

Is it a bit like programme vs program?

[Kim]

Garmins and their magic now-you-see-it-now-you-don't filesystem.  WTF?

I thought I'd failed to save yesterday's 10 minute race (I had to jump off the bike, save the track^[1] then leg it to the timing hut in order to wrangle CrossMgr), but on a hunch I rebooted the eTrex a couple of times this morning, and there it is!


_{[1] Which is fiddly at the best of times, even when you're not shaking and your glasses are covered in grit.}

[Feanor]

I once had a ride vanish from an Edge unit.

Examining the filesystem with utilities showed that the file was there, but marked as deleted.
A quick un-delete and and was well.

[Kim]

My phone is stuck in a "Moto App Launcher keeps stopping" loop.  I think I'm going to have to factory reset from recovery, as you only get a fraction of a second to interract with it in the time it takes between tapping "close app" and the error message popping up again.   

This is karmic retribution for the Garmin, isn't it?

[Kim]

My phone is stuck in a "Moto App Launcher keeps stopping" loop.  I think I'm going to have to factory reset from recovery, as you only get a fraction of a second to interract with it in the time it takes between tapping "close app" and the error message popping up again.   

This is karmic retribution for the Garmin, isn't it?

Factory reset the bastard, which seems to have solved the problem (touch wood).  Followed by the obligatory wasted couple of hours re-configuring all your stuff again.  Came up against some weird problem with K9 whereby it wouldn't connect to the IMAP server from the pile-of-poo IPv4-only VLAN for buggy androids, but worked fine on the normal WiFi network, and over 4G.  Eventually realised that it had somehow got fail2banned, because the pile-of-poo subnet wasn't in the whitelist.

I think I'm just bad at computers.

[Jaded]

Nah, you are just too good at computers.

Most other people would look at it, say “It’s Donald” and buy a new one, whilst accepting the loss of everything (photos, calendars, addresses, emails etc.) as acceptable collateral damage.

[ian]

Excel, it's great that you've found a problem with cell or range in my workbook. It's less great that that's the limit of your precision in helping me identify this error.

(Ironically, I know what the error is, which Excel created when I copied a worksheet with defined dynamic ranges in it – you end up with one named range but two definitions, one refers to the original, the second to the new workshop you copied. For giggles there's no way to actually reconcile this without recreating two ranges and then fixing everything that uses them, or alternatively ignore the error and it seems to curiously continue to work as anticipated.)

[ian]

It turns out that you can have two identically named ranges, you just can't tell them apart, but you can refer to them by the name of the worksheet they're in. If you know what worksheet they're in. The definition will change depend on which worksheet you try to edit the named range in.

Well, that's cleared things up.

It's certainly encouraged me to start reading through the pile of data analyst CVs.