The computing stuff rant thread

[Mr Larrington]

It took me all day to assemble that list.

And I've deleted it.

Permanently.

Tw@

[Zipperhead]

Downloading it song by song worked for some reason.

Strangely, when Apple decide to let Bono lay a turd on my hard drive, there's none of this your network connection has been reset business.

Karma has been to help you. Uniting the themes that are cycling, yacf's favourite (alright, most quoted) newspaper, and the cnut that is Bonio - bonio falls off bike in new york and has surgery

As the comment underneath says "and people say there's no good news in the papers"

[Bledlow]

Good news? It says “a full recovery is expected”.

[Ham]

Oy! Mr Google! You may be very very clever and know all sorts of things and yes, I am a Nexus fanboi, so thanks very much for your lollipop. I'm sure there are all sorts of useful things it does and of course it is your job to make things look different, that doesn't worry me.

But.

For some unknown reason one of the major features you are trumpeting about in the upgrade are the changes to the Lock Screen. How you can have notifications appear and use them to go directly to the feature. How you can swipe one way and get the phone, another way to get the camera and a third way to unlock. WOULD YOU PLEASE LOOK UP THE WORD "LOCK" ON GOOGLE? All I want from a lock screen is to LOCK THE FLAMING THING. Not hard is it? If I wanted more ways to UNLOCK the phone, I wouldn't ask for a LOCK screen I'd ask for a LAUNCH screen. Let me see if there are messages,emails waiting for me if I UNLOCK, great. Maybe even if I've missed a call, but if I lock the screen I really dont want to end up dialing someone with my arse, texting them with my keys or changing the setting beyond recognition, all things that can happen to an unprotected phone. I WANT SAFE PHONES. Trumpet that you useless bunch.

(and before you say you can replace the lock screen, no lock screen I have found is a is simple and as functional as the previous KitKat and before lock screens, any suggestions welcome)

[Mr Larrington]

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

(Flees the Wrath of Ham)

[woollypigs]

I think some manager in the house of G have rushed the release of number 5 and said manager is now busy telling some minions to fix this mess - \o/ for over time!!! There is much moaning about this flavour of lolipop on that there 'tinerweb.

[ian]

Being a sickly creature and as such unwilling to haunt the dank corridors of the mothership, I decide to conduct a round of interviews using 'telepresence'. We have this Cisco video system which seems just the job. Technology to the rescue! Da-da-da-DA!

Except it turns out that 'Cisco Jabber Video' isn't 'Cisco Jabber Video for Telepresence' (obviously). The latter I have no credentials for but I can request them. Which takes 72 hours of Indian call centre shuffling. Super.

[mcshroom]

We are going through a complete computer system replacement because the current one came out of the ark and MS will no longer support it to "improve our employee IT working environment".

While watching an incredibly boring Powerpoint e-learning module, I've just been told that they are migrating us from Lotus Notes to MS Outlook - but haven't worked out how to do some of the important things in outlook so we are keeping notes as well, and will have to do extra steps for common tasks, like booking meetings into people's calendars (book participants in Outlook, room in Notes).

AtoS* have been rolling a new system out for over a year - could they have tried finishing the changes before migrating everyone instead of offering a half finished product?


*need I say more

[rr]

We are going through a complete computer system replacement because the current one came out of the ark and MS will no longer support it to "improve our employee IT working environment".

While watching an incredibly boring Powerpoint e-learning module, I've just been told that they are migrating us from Lotus Notes to MS Outlook - but haven't worked out how to do some of the important things in outlook so we are keeping notes as well, and will have to do extra steps for common tasks, like booking meetings into people's calendars (book participants in Outlook, room in Notes).

AtoS* have been rolling a new system out for over a year - could they have tried finishing the changes before migrating everyone instead of offering a half finished product?


*need I say more

Ditto steria
Break the network every week and spend three days fixing it.

[mrcharly-YHT]

but haven't worked out how to do some of the important things in outlook so we are keeping notes as well, and will have to do extra steps for common tasks, like booking meetings into people's calendars (book participants in Outlook, room in Notes).

Are they truly thick?

This is really easy to to in Outlook.

Oh, sorry, I missed the bit where you said it was ATOS. Yeah, truly thick.

[ian]

It's a tendency of businesses not to invest in training and instead produce some useless Powerpoint. How much time do people spend using these tools? Lots. How much time and money would they save if people knew how to use these tools effectively? It's a math that few businesses do effectively.

[Kim]

I still think barakta's reception desk system deserves some kind of award:

Student appointments are booked in Outlook calendars, which seems to work.  When the student arrives for the appointment, reception staff change the text in the appointment to add a prefix, indicating this.

Which means barakta and her colleagues all have to manually poll the outlook calendar for changes whenever they're expecting a student, rather than get on with some useful work.  Obviously students arriving early will wait in reception until such a time as the relevant member of staff thinks to poll the calendar, even if it would otherwise be convenient to see the student early.

This saves the overworked reception staff time, apparently.  Not sure what it's supposed to achieve for the overworked disability and learning support staff.

[mrcharly-YHT]

That's nuts.

If you alter an Outlook 'meeting', normally Outlook sends an updated meeting request to all participants. This arrives as a new email, pinging up on your desktop. That's standard Outlook behaviour.

[barakta]

Except these aren't meetings, they're items we create in our own calendar.

And we can't just invite 'reception' cos they end up switching between their personal logins and some central counselling legacy login cos no one can set up mailboxes and calendars properly on Exchange cos they're fucking morons. They also wouldn't want about 20 invites x9 for us a week...

I have worked a hack to the manual polling requirement (which doesn't give any notification). Stick a mailto hyperlink with custom To: Subject: Body: content for each colleague which is pasted by us in the body of calendar items when we create the item.

Reception can now either add the prefix and/or Click the Nice Linky which should generate an email from their outlook and click sendy.. This will at least create an alert at our end and we can config our ends to be more annoying if we wish to (aka I can do this for about 9 members of staff)...

Boss is going to take it to admin boss tomorrow - I've created test examples in my calendar for her to demonstrate with.  See if admin boss comes back with something better than "Am I bovvered" although that's a rant for a whole other fucking rant thread.

[ian]

So, the mothership's CRM is Salesforce. It's evil. But hey, as galaxy conquering overlords we had to get some spoil from the annexation of Garglebottolfloxx VI, and that just happened to be Salesforce. They'd be laughing had we not blasted their puny planet into an attractive cloud of radioactive dust. Oh, many souls cried out that day. Most of them aboard the mothership on learning they had a new CRM.

Anyway, Salesforce, or SFDC as the Americans insist on redundantly saying. We have to use it. It doesn't matter if kittens cry at the thought. That's not even my rant. I've come to terms with having to use not one but two (O the humanity!) versions of the damn thing. It's the accretion of security. Not sufficient were passwords. Not even the insistence on passwords like A1x&||78*eF£@$ (see rants passim) is secure enough. Oh no, then we needed machine tokens. Download them. Jump through more hoops. Secure. Oh no. Now it can only be accessed via the VPN with a token and a cryptically unrememberable password that changes everything 15 seconds.

Or it would, except using the VPN pipes our internet traffic through the mothership proxy. Can we guess which website it blocks?

[woollypigs]

When does G figure out that your contacts list in G have nothing to do with the people you have/follow in G+. I do not want 2000+ birthdays and other stuff that I'm not interested in listed in my calendar or have their addresses in my contacts.

[ian]

iTunes. Yes you, you festering pile of bonobo shit. I would like to transfer my shiny songs onto iDevices. You have just the one job and that's it. So why do I have to try three times to get you to even do that rather than sit there for ages saying 'determining tracks to sync' and then another age or three 'waiting to copy items' and then to not bother. Until on the third attempt you do transfer them. Finally, I reach over to unplug and no, you decide that while you are at it you're going to transfer 993 random pieces of cover art. Huh? It was all up-to-date and it's albums that are a million years old. I don't think they redesigned the covers since I last sync'ed the device.

Oh, and thanks for just putting some playlists on my iPhone. I appreciate your judgement is better than mine but when I'm on the train and I pull out my phone and seek my lovingly curated collection of tunes, I might expect said playlist to be there and not still languishing on my computer.

Just the one job, Apple. That's all I ask.

[Mr Larrington]

I learned at my mother's knee that if you want to manage tracks, playlists and so forth on an iThing it is much less of a headache in the long term to do it manually.

[Chris S]

ICBA to rant about this, but I'll have a bit of a whine about it.

A recent upgrade to lubuntu on my laptop rather destabilised things - with daily kernel panics and random lock-ups.

Now the damn thing won't start at all. I got into a bash prompt and was able to run the backup scripts so nowt will be lost (Linux rsync/rsnapshot backups FTW), but it's still a PITA. 

[Chris S]

Hmm... Could be bad news. It won't take a new install of Linux.

Time for a new SSD I think...

[Jaded]

Yo-Semite

Give my printer back, you SFB.

[ian]

I learned at my mother's knee that if you want to manage tracks, playlists and so forth on an iThing it is much less of a headache in the long term to do it manually.

Well, it's fine when it works. Which it mostly does. One placelist has decided not to transfer for no reason that iTunes would like to disclose. Not even a cryptic error 'err -4895467845 error' message nor even the über-'unknown error'. It just doesn't. It seems the people behind iTunes have decided that rather fix the errors they'll just remove the messages. What problem? I don't see no steenkin' problem. Just to double-weird me, the playlist is on my iPad fine. It claims it's on the iPhone too, but it's not actually there when I press playlist.

Also, despite transferring 933 items of cover art, it didn't transfer the art for the new albums I put on the damn iPad. But it did for the iPhone.

It's like the Mighty Huh?

If you first sync doesn't work try again. Then tryⁿ some more.

[Diver300]

Easily.co.uk, just what in heaven's name is wrong with an email address that is of the form:-

[some lower case letters]@[domain that you are hosting]

that you have previously used as the address to send me emails?

I have even tried using a domain that ends .co.uk rather than the slightly more obscure but still been around for 10 years .me.uk and still got told it was invalid.

It does not make using their website easy.

[Mr Larrington]

Windows!

plz to not be disappearing my USB hard drive like that

also why need to "install necessary files on my system" for something that was working fine when I hibernated the Babbage-Engine last night?

kthxbai

[Pickled Onion]

I don't know what email system the council are using, but it appears not to have a "Reply" function. Whenever I get a response from them, they have carefully cut and paste the "From:" address, and written in a new subject. It's across the board, not any particular department, and it does seem to be one of the basic functions any modern email system should possess?

Why is this a rant? Because the "From:" address is not necessarily the same as the "Reply-To:" address, so when I phone up it's no good telling me you've sent me an email if you've sent it somewhere else entirely!