The computing stuff rant thread

[Kim]

Java.  Signed bytes.  I've said it before and I'll say it again:  Whoever thought that was a good idea should be locked away in a padded room without any networking or hardware to do IO with.  They probably already are.

[David Martin]

You have signed ints, surely a signed byte is just a rather short signed int.

[Kim]

You have signed ints, surely a signed byte is just a rather short signed int.

Indeed.  Which is fine until you need to exchange data with the rest of the world, where bytes are traditionally used in the unsigned flavour.  Cue lots of fucking about subtracting 128 or using ints and bitwise ORing with 0xFF or whatever every time you interact with some sort of byte stream.

The logic is supposedly that all number formats being signed is consistent and therefore simpler.   

[Feanor]

I don't like the sound of a type called Signed Byte.
Byte to me means an 8-bit quantity, without any interpretation being put on it.

Int, Long Int, Short Int etc apply interpretation to the bits; they say things like "This is in twos compliment. Interpret the MSB as a Sign bit."
If you want to use an 8-bit quantity with a sign bit, call it something like a 'Very Short Int'.

[Kim]

I don't like the sound of a type called Signed Byte.

They just call it 'byte'.  It's signed, like all the other types in Java.   

If you want to use an 8-bit quantity with a sign bit, call it something like a 'Very Short Int'.

Quite.

[Wombat]

Adobe, WTF have you done to Lightroom with your bloody "update".  I know that those of us who bought it outright, didn't get the whole thing, which is a scummy enough trick, but now entire civilisations can develop, flourish, last for millennia, and then die out before you finish doing anything!  I was concerned when Tony Northrup said it was now slower, and I'm starting to investigate Capture One as an alternative, but I haven't got time to learn a new programme now.  I've got another 300 photos to edit tonight, and having to wait at least ten seconds to open each one after I've done the previous one is just not on.  My PC is a 4770K i7, with SSDs, and 32Gb of RAM, so hardly a slouch.

So Adobe, far from what I was considering, i.e. subscribing to CC, I think purchasing Capture One Pro is now in order, especially as its cheaper for Sony users.

Gits!

[ian]

If someone emails you a document in a zip file attachment in Outlook don't double click to open it and promptly forget you've not saved a copy. Don't then spend a couple of hours editing it before absently clicking 'save'.  Because it's still in zip archive and attached to an email.

This is a lesson I learned yesterday. It's somewhere in an impenetrable and unsearchable Bermuda Triangle of temporary files. Possibly. It proved easier to redo the work that persuade Windows to cough it back up.

[billplumtree]

Adobe, WTF have you done to Lightroom with your bloody "update".  I know that those of us who bought it outright, didn't get the whole thing, which is a scummy enough trick, but now entire civilisations can develop, flourish, last for millennia, and then die out before you finish doing anything!

I feel your pain.  The two most helpful suggestions seem to be (i) turn off GPU acceleration and (ii) increase the cache size.

[ian]

Even though I get Creative Suite under the ever bountiful auspices of the mothership, I pretty much only use InDesign these days and for home use I've moved to Affinity Designer and Photo. They don't have the feature set of Illustrator and Photoshop (which have a fifteen-odd year head start, I started with Illustrator 2.0 and Pagemaker 1.0 back in the day), but they're functional and fast. I'm dead set against subscription software tbh.

[Wombat]

Adobe, WTF have you done to Lightroom with your bloody "update".  I know that those of us who bought it outright, didn't get the whole thing, which is a scummy enough trick, but now entire civilisations can develop, flourish, last for millennia, and then die out before you finish doing anything!

I feel your pain.  The two most helpful suggestions seem to be (i) turn off GPU acceleration and (ii) increase the cache size.

'tis done, so lets see how we get on.  As it was, the cache size was 1GB, so I upped it to 3GB, but I can't actually see why it can't be a lot bigger than that.  I'm wondering if buying a serious graphics card to replace the (perfectly adequate) onboard graphics card which will do 4K video OK, would help?  It would have to be a fairly silent one, as I've got a real downer on noisy PCs! 

Already it seems slightly better, (I've done about 20 photos since I did it) but we shall see.

[mrcharly-YHT]

*($%!$%!! !£$%!£$% !£$%!£$% systems

I'm working with over complex crap.

Either it is 'very powerful open source' (ie it can do anything as long as you can code it yourself) or proprietary editors/tools for working with the OP crap. On friday I hit weird issues. After much effing and blinding I have a workaround - the bloody expensive proprietary tools can't parse a relative address properly. So the document maps have to be in the root of the tree. FFS.

[Kim]

It appears that in recent versions of OSX the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia have ditched their FruitTalk File Protocol in favour of SMB, on account of being more secure.  Except for Time Machine backups, where it remains as a lucrative source of incompatibility.

[TheLurker]

On Thursday morning I decided it would be an opportune time to apply update 3 for Visual Studio 15.

As of 11 this morning I still haven't got an updated VS-15. Now I haven't even got a usable VS-15 install.

I also find that restore points weren't re-enabled the last time Support restored my machine after a (surprise, surprise) screwed up VS-15 install so I can't even roll back to a usable installation.

Roll on death.

[Afasoas]

Reminds me of the pain deploying VS 2015 upd1/upd2/probably upd3 next week via Desired State Configuration.
At least we work in a way where by the developers machines are reimaged on a regular basis so this type of thing isn't in fact very painful at all.

[T42]

Wife bought me a Fitbit Scourge Surge. Have restarted Windoze at least 5 times as it tries to find its dongle (zip stuck), tries to connect, tries to update device drivers, tries to update the goddamn device, tries to find Lord Lucan, the Holy Bloody Gruel and Harrison Ford's acting ability. I didn't want the bloody plastic thing to start with, I love my 1980s Seiko Chrono. 

[T42]

And its wretched rubbery surface catches on my sleeves. It's like wearing a door wedge.

[ian]

About a week or so back the mothership discovered Windows updates.

There's a lot of them.

Every closedown and start is now imperilled with the 'do not switch off your machine' as a couple of hundred download and install every bloody day.

[T42]

^^^ Oh aye. A year or so back we had a lightning strike about 100 yds away which fried our router and zapped the missus's UPS, so now when there is a storm approaching we close everything down and unplug.  Of course, this is the moment when Windoze decides to install updates, so we sit there biting our nails, watching the sky darken and waiting for the bang...

[TheLurker]

T42 -
If you're still running Win7 or earlier you do, of course, have Windoze Update set to, "I'll bloody well tell you when I want updates now piss off and stop bothering me!" Don't you?

The other thing you can do is head to Control Panel / Services and set the Windows Update Service to manual start rather than automatic (at boot)*.  Then, when it's _convenient for you_ , go to the Windows Update front end (I usually just type Windows Update in the start menu) and click the "Check for Updates" button / link and it'll toddle off and do its stuff, starting the update service as it does so.

After it's done this it will leave the service running but you can (if it's installed anything you will _have_ to) restart the machine and it will be switched off again. Or you can go to Control Panel / Services and switch it off manually**


*Control Panel /  Services
Find Windows Update in the long, long, _long_ list, right click, properties, and set  the startup type to manual.

**Control Panel /  Services
Find Windows Update, right click, select "Stop".

Ian, sorry chum you're on yer own. If it's a work machine I expect it's locked down tight to stop such unauthorized shenanegins. Then again if it isn't....

[ian]

The mothership controls it – it's not just me, they've evidently just remembered that Windows has updates and enabled them in the group policy or whatever they call it these days.

I'd drop the bloody thing off the balcony if I didn't fear it'd make a hole in the driveway as we can get Macs now (waiting for my three year replacement cycle to come up).

[Afasoas]

Re-installing MAC OS X on a MacBook following HDD failure is a PITA when it's just too old to support the web install (except via firmware update which can't be done without an OS) and you don't have access to the Apple Store on another iMac/MacBook.

[ian]

You can pop the MacOS installer on a bootable USB.

Now the Windows updates are starting to undo themselves in a parade of attempted post-shutdown restarts. Delights!

[Afasoas]

You can pop the MacOS installer on a bootable USB.

You need a fruityThing to download the installer and create a bootable USB.
I did find a reputable looking download of ElCapitan which I ISO'd up using dmg2iso and then dd'd onto a USB stick but the MacBook's boot manager thing (Opt +R) didn't recognise it, even though Linux recognised the disk as having a HFS partition. I suspect this is the result of a Hackingtosh arm's race.

Fortunately I've arranged access to another FruityThing.

[T42]

Dear Adobe, thanks ever so for updating my copy of Bridge, but did you have to toss my f*cking settings out to do it?

[SoreTween]

Oh FFS.  No wonder the wifi at my digs craps out, just got around to downloading a stumbler.  There's 8 naffworks visible from here and 4 are on the same channel including both networks in this building.  He's a Dr.  Specialising in signal processors

He has unfortunately (in this scenario) switched off config over wifi and I don't have a lan cable with me.  No I can't ask him to sort it, they're never here.