The computing stuff rant thread

[woollypigs]

Dear printer imp why have you decided to stop printing colour? But still report that there is plenty ink in the box? Could that be linked the new shade of green that the inside of the printer now has as a décor? You bloody well eat the paper I'm feeding you, not throw a stroppy fit and say there isn't any paper in the tray, when I have accepted defeat and want to print in B&W!

[Diver300]

Software for reflashing 'tronics through the serial port, why on earth won't you work on the Windows 7 machine that you were perfectly happy with last week?  I've even checked that the USB to serial adapter is working.

I had to boot up the XP box that was recently retired, only to find that the window of the reflashing software is now on a non-existent screen, and it doesn't respond to Alt-space etc. I then had to recommission the DVI card to give it a screen off to the right, just so I could drag it back to the main screen. And it runs slower on the XP machine than it ran on Windows 7.

Grrrrr.

[Kim]

I had to boot up the XP box that was recently retired, only to find that the window of the reflashing software is now on a non-existent screen, and it doesn't respond to Alt-space etc. I then had to recommission the DVI card to give it a screen off to the right, just so I could drag it back to the main screen.

That happened to me once.  On Windows 98.  About 16 years ago.  When monitors were a lot heavier and harder to come by.

[Feanor]

I have a ( probably un-necessary ) dislike of USB to serial adapters.
I much prefer a 'proper' COM port.

This is due to some nasty USB serial port devices I bought some years back, just about the time 'real' COM ports were disappearing from lapdogs.
I had many needs to get a console onto many devices: Cisco WAPs and the like.

The shitty USB-COM drivers would grab a new COM port number every time they were plugged in!
They would see a registry entry from last time they were there as COM5, and so become COM6, and so on.
This required me to change the COM port number on the Terminal Emulator each time.
And then when it got to COM256, it just asploded, requiring registry hackery to make it forget about the old COM ports.

Yuck and double-yuck.

[Kim]

I have a ( probably un-necessary ) dislike of USB to serial adapters.
I much prefer a 'proper' COM port.

No, that's perfectly rational.  Most of them don't work properly for anything that's bit-bashing the handshake lines, and then there's all the usual fun and games with Windows enumerating USB devices described above.  Linux is marginally better in that you can at least beat them into submission with udev rules.

A Mac presumably asks "What's a serial port?" 

[David Martin]

Macs play sensible games with device names. /dev/tty.usbabc123xyz or some such. Reproducible and quite usable.

[Biggsy]

Reminds me of USB to parallel adapter troubles.  The drivers were probably written by the same muppets.

[aidan.f]

FDTI are good  if  you need serial to USB - loads of support and  you can  flash devices with  the  same  UID so two or more  will be allocated  the  same  port number - although probably not a good idea to try to use them at the  same  time.  Also this ..

Ignore Hardware Serial Number Registry Editor Utility
This is a free utility that is used for editing the registry to ensure the serial number descriptor of each FTDI device is ignored during driver installation. This feature ensures any FTDI device connected to a USB port is given the same COM port number.

[Diver300]

I would agree with all of the above about USB to serial adaptors.

However.....

as USB can't interrupt the processor, it has to wait for the processor to ask it if it has any data, USB to serial adaptors have to have reasonable sizes of buffers, so if data is arriving really fast, they can work better / load up the processor less as the data arrives in big chunks, not stupid 8 byte chunks that take so much more processing per byte.

[Feanor]

Windows text selection: you suck.

Trying to select a block of text to copy/paste is un-necessarily hard.
Windows is forever trying to second-guess what I want to select.

"Oh, he's selected most of this word! He must want all the word! And the space beyond! And probably the whole sentence, or paragraph!  Oh, woah, hold on... he's going back! Let's de-select everything I auto-selected, and everything he selected too!  Let's start selecting in the reverse direction from some random point in the incorrect selection!"

And so on and so forth.
WTF can't it just butt out with it's useless auto-selection algorithm, and let *me* decide what I want to select.

Also, sometimes I want to just copy/paste the text, not the attributes / formatting.
That can be difficult too, because the paste option may or may not contain options to paste text only.
So I have resort to nonsense like paste into notepad to strip out the crap, then re-copy/paste into the final destination.

Bah.

[Biggsy]

Get a "copy as plain text" extension for your web browser.  Though I appreciate that doesn't help when you're not on the web!

[Afasoas]

When selecting text, quite often use cursor keys. Although not always that useful when selecting text from a web page.

ctrl+shift+v will paste text without formatting in some applications.
I think ctrl+shift+v in Chrome might even copy text without formatting, but don't quote me on that. As Biggsy said, there's probably a plug-in.

[tiermat]

Notepad++ is your friend here....

[Feanor]

None of the copy-pasting in question was from web browsers.
Just general windows apps.

Oh, I use notepad++ on all my machines.
But it shouldn't be necessary to use any text editor as a go-between to cut-n-paste!
Will experiment with the Ctrl-Shift-V, thanks for the suggestion.

Still doesn't help with the auto-selection nonsense tho.
Not sure if that's app-specific behaviour, or if it's inherited from Windows itself.

[David Martin]

The joys of our VLE when copy/pasting from microsoft is that it embeds all the XML as text but doesn't show you that. Just sends really nastygram emails that are confusing and horrible.

[barakta]

Surely that was "joys of VLE...." and nothing more needed to be said.  Which VLE have you been suckered with?

[David Martin]

We have Blackboard, with additional Campus Pack goodness. For most things it works tolerably well. Except on the latest IE on our new student desktop which breaks badly. Needless to say all the launch icons start it in IE.

[CommuteTooFar]

Damn it I thought I had fixed that bug yesterday.  Today same test, its back.

[Mr Larrington]

Little Green Viper Software Development LLC, your update has made your app worse.  It's not as if it was complicated in the first place.

[Pingu]

Still doesn't help with the auto-selection nonsense tho.
Not sure if that's app-specific behaviour, or if it's inherited from Windows itself.

Had this in an app today. Ended up typing what I wanted 

[barakta]

LOL at IE launch and then incompatible!  That will be the VLE team not talking to the people who do the student images on the public PCs team at a guess.  I know our image-IT-bod well and she is always getting fucked over by idiots not consulting with her before expecting StuffTM.

We have Canvas, no one else seems to use it, it's less bad than WebCT apparently, but that's not saying much cos WebCT had got quite out of date... 

[David Martin]

Must SPANG the IT guys - their update to one of my apps seems to have reverted to starting up in inaccessible directories again.

..d

[barakta]

Network: Kindly load!  Can't do my frigging job if I can't get to my students' records.  FFS. 

[ian]

Dear mothership, when sending out an email about certificates to the entire crew, don't assume that people know the difference between encryption and authentication, or even know they have or need any kind of certificate. Don't assume they know what a certificate is. Don't then waffle on in the instructions about S/MIME and MDMs and spool giant instruction list full of IF you have this THEN do that ELSE logical constructions. How about a diagram, and informative video, that kind of thing?

I'd mind less, but people assume that just because I know a soupçon of stuff about the damn machines they can ask me (anything is preferable to visiting the IT folks in the Basement of Perpetual Scowls where the conversation is limited to 'submit a ticket'), and that's only because I hang out with Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, who frequently snarls 'why you don't you turn it off and back on.' You should hear that in Enochian. It can break windows.

Ah, step 34, 'if email is not received, turn your device off and then on.'

[Mr Larrington]

Dear Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia

I know that this fondleslab has no SIM installed.  It has never had a SIM installed.  So there is no need to tell me, on what appears to be an hourly basis, that there is no SIM installed.

Now fuck off.