The computing stuff rant thread

[Afasoas]

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...

This is why we don't (a) let people use full fat desktop softwares which in turn means that we don't have to (b) encrypt laptops.

[Pickled Onion]

This is why we don't (a) let people use full fat desktop softwares which in turn means that we don't have to (b) encrypt laptops.

Neither do we, so when I had the same problem last week - can't log in via RDP from laptop - it was fixed in ten minutes. The only reason it took so long was (a) can't raise a ticket from the phone app; followed by (ii) helldesk claiming they can't reach me by phone. That's right, my desk phone which doesn't forward to my mobile until I'm logged in 

[Pickled Onion]

This is why we don't (a) let people use full fat desktop softwares which in turn means that we don't have to (b) encrypt laptops.

Neither do we, so when I had the same problem last week - can't log in via RDP from laptop due to bungled desktop win10 upgrade - it was fixed in ten minutes. The only reason it took so long was (a) can't raise a ticket from the phone app; followed by (ii) helldesk claiming they can't reach me by phone. That's right, my desk phone which doesn't forward to my mobile until I'm logged in 

[TheLurker]

...(a) can't raise a ticket from the phone app; followed by (ii) helldesk claiming they can't reach me by phone. That's right, my desk phone which doesn't forward to my mobile until I'm logged in

Yes.  We don't have "proper" telephones anymore either.  Headsets and Skype.  All lovely* while it works, but, especially, when things go wrong absolutely no bloody use to man nor beast.

Lurk.

*May contain traces of Lie**.  The call quality is invariably like listening to a congregation of pissed Daleks inside a corrugated tin shed in a hailstorm.

**All rights reserved. Mr. Larrington.

[Mr Larrington]

Full Disclosure: I stole the "traces of Lie" thing from Alistair "Scaryduck" Coleman.

[Mr Larrington]

Those writhing mugglefucks at the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia have seen to it that the Puffin browser for iOS will shut down on July 1st.  Now I need to find another one that works similarly quickly.

[rr]

Just reported to the hell desk that my phone won't allow me to connect to --- the hell desk.

Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

[Mr Larrington]

NAS: that backup has been running for five and a half hours and you reckon it'll be another hour before it's done.  It's supposed to take about two hours, so why are you slurping the data at a rate to make a slow loris look like a greyhound?  Could it be, perchance, last week's firmware update?

[ian]

Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.

[R_nger]

Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.

Yebbut, agile

[Chris S]

Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.

Yebbut, agile

Agile - getting your end-users to do your testing for you since...

[Pingu]

Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.

Yebbut, agile

Agile - getting your end-users to do your testing for you since...

...the invention of the Post-it.

[TheLurker]

Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.

When the alternative is TFS give me a well configured installation of Jira & Confluence (along with Git & Sourcesafe) any day.

[ian]

My favourite thing so far about agile is that it isn't.

[Zipperhead]

Jira and Confluence. It's like they've successfully weaponised UX.

When the alternative is TFS give me a well configured installation of Jira & Confluence (along with Git & Sourcesafe) any day.

A biro nicked from Argos and a couple of sheets of bog paper would be better than TFS.

[ian]

Excel again. Friday and every day before, I could drag things around in a pivot table (because I have a couple of items at the top of the list) just fine.

Today, any attempt to drag a row value re-sorts the entire table alphabetically. Uh? No combination of cryptic options suggested by the internet changes this behaviour.

I can only assume the fine minds at MS worked through the weekend on Project Make-ian-Waste-Monday.

[Mr Larrington]

While on the subject: why, in a sheet containing ~ 160 rows and 8 columns of bog standard text does it search all umpty-gazillion empty cells when I'm looking for a simple string?  You'd think it would know.

[Kim]

While on the subject: why, in a sheet containing ~ 160 rows and 8 columns of bog standard text does it search all umpty-gazillion empty cells when I'm looking for a simple string?  You'd think it would know.

It wouldn't surprise me if it was converting all the cells to strings before doing the comparison...

[Mr Larrington]

There's something funny about that particular sheet - it takes ten times longer to load than it ought to - and one day I'll go through it cell by cell and find out why.  Right after this paint has dried and I've become fluent in Portuguese.

[ian]

There's a known issue where Excel acquires the delusion that the many blank rows at the bottom of a worksheet are in fact filled. It's the spreadsheet equivalent of dark matter. It's only detectable by the creeping lassitude of any function or formula and the fact that your simple file now occupies 45MB.

The only fix I know of is to hack it out of the XML – back in the day I had some VBA to adjust the worksheet references based on actual filled cells – or copy the actual data into a new spreadsheet and burn the old version with considerable prejudice.

[Mr Larrington]

The latter seems the easier course, albeit that all my pleasing formatting will need to be copied too.

"I see everything twice!"

[Mr Larrington]

Boa tarde,

O tamanho do arquivo foi reduzido de 8,5 MB para 147 KB!

Good afternoon,

The size has been reduced from 8.5 MB to 147 KB!

[ian]

You can detect this phenomenon via the scroll bar, which lets you go on forever. You can try selecting all these blank lines and hitting delete.

But you won't succeed in actually deleting them.

[Mrs Pingu]

MS Onenote. Just ugh.
It's an old hangover at work from a previous team mangler and it's got lots of stuff on it.
Except the bloody thing gets corrupted regularly and now we have several copies of notebooks on the same server, with different sizes and modified dates.
I seem to have stupidly volunteered myself to sort this clusterfuck out.

If only we could just scrape everything off it and into something slightly less shit like Sharepoint or OneDrive.

There will be more Bad Swears.

[ian]

We appear to use OneNote, SharePoint, OneDrive, Confluence, Hive and TheOtherPlacesWhereStuffCantBeFound.