The computing stuff rant thread

[Gattopardo]

After several times of being unplugged and or dropped and thrown.  Now it no longer works.  All that happens is the flashing amber light.

[TheLurker]

After several times of being unplugged and or dropped and thrown.  Now it no longer works.  All that happens is the flashing amber light.

For most computer hardware I'd say that's probably for the best.

[Chris S]

Timezones.

Arrrrghhhhhh!!! 

[Kim]

Timezones.

Arrrrghhhhhh!!! 

I feel your pain.  Anyone who hasn't can play along at home by watching this:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/-5wpm-gesOY&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/-5wpm-gesOY&rel=1</a>
https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY

[Cudzoziemiec]

I didn't know about the West Bank. But all of it's known to someone and there must be some people who know it all. It kind of shows to my mind that time, or rather the numbering and labelling of time, is like language. There are multiple ways of identifying a particular time, but whatever you call it, it's the same time. Or rather, for some purposes it's the same time, for some it's not. Because of seasons and stuff.

Anyway, why would you want to know how many seconds ago a historical event happened?

[Kim]

Anyway, why would you want to know how many seconds ago a historical event happened?

Starter for ten:  Sorting a list.

[Cudzoziemiec]

If the events in the list are affected by the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, as he mentioned, then it's rather unlikely they could be dated to the second.

[Diver300]

Of course, all of that works perfectly if, and unfortunately, that is a big "if", everyone else sticks to the rules.

I had written some code to work out if text message A was sent before or after text message B. Now text messages are timestamped according to the local time, plus a marker to say how many quarter hours that time is before or after GMT. Even sticking to UK based idiots, when the clocks changed to summer time, some of the computers involved in timestamping the text messages had their clocks moved forward without being told that they were no longer on GMT. The result was that text messages sent though that box were timestamped effectively 1 hour in the future, so in order to send a text from another box that was seen as later, we had to wait an hour.

Of course it was a waste of time contacting the owners of said box. As far as they were concerned, texts were sent and that was all that mattered.

The coding was tedious as well. The offset from GMT could take a text over midnight, either way, and therefore over a month end either way, and a year end either way. The variable month length had to be allowed for. A lot of coding went into working all that out, even with leap years being ignored. It was all in assembly code on a PIC.

[Chris S]

To be fair, on this occasion - I was merely trying to resolve a cron string in UTC that had been defined on a browser in a local timezone. Turned out it wasn't that hard, but ANY interaction with timezones as a developer, involves at least two hours of  single stepping code, and muttering "What the actual FUCK?! I did NOT tell you to do that!".

Managed to wrestle the beast into submission eventually. Well, until the first defect report, anyway.

[Diver300]

Further time-related computing rant.

gmmktime is supposed to produce a Unix timestamp from a GMT time and date. Only it works from local time and converts back to GMT. I found that gmmktime was an hour out for a couple of hours after the clocks changed.

[Kim]

If the events in the list are affected by the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, as he mentioned, then it's rather unlikely they could be dated to the second.

You'd be surprised how often that sort of thing crops up in astronomy, where they like to express things in heliocentric Julian time in order to - I kid you not - make the maths easier.

(Astronomers, in particular, shouldn't be allowed to write date conversion code.  The results can be a shining example of how you can write Fortran in any language.)

[SteveC]

I did work with someone who wanted to represent time as a real, so a quarter past eight would be 8.15 (yet, .15 not .25). He 'only' wanted to do this to see if a given time was earlier or later than another. The rest of the team eventually persuaded him not to do it, but I'm sure he didn't really believe why.

[Kim]

I expect he thought decimal time would be silly...

[Greenbank]

gmmktime is supposed to produce a Unix timestamp from a GMT time and date. Only it works from local time and converts back to GMT. I found that gmmktime was an hour out for a couple of hours after the clocks changed.

Without an indication of the timezone there's an hour when the clocks go back where a specific time could be either before the clocks changed or after the clocks changed, e.g.

Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:00
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:01
...
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:59:58
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:59:59
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:00
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:01
...
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:59:58
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:59:59
Sunday, 29 October 2017, 02:00:00

With a time of "Sunday, 29 October 2017, 01:00:00" there's no way to know whether it is the first one or the second one.

[Mr Larrington]

I once had a request from a luser asking for a particular job to be run five working days before month end.  Month end being something of a movable feast, not least because of, well, movable feasts.  So after a lot of head-scratching and consulting the Internets an' t'ing I produced some SCIENCE that could work out when five working days before month end actually was, and understood leap years, and was even Y3K compliant.  Then the luser decided he didn't need it after all.

So I killed him, and then had an ice cream.

[mrcharly-YHT]

When I was a Senior IBM BOFH, we used to have to shut down the <bigcorp> IBM mainframes for two hours when the clocks when forward/back. It was the only way to avoid completely screwing multiple databases and ending up with a BA-level fuckup.
Since a complete reboot took multiple hours of work, this was no small enterprise.

Amazingly, there was not a reboot book. It was all in the operator's heads. Which jobs to bring up and which order. FFS. Sometimes someone would forget to start something at the right time and there would be much stress as it would be restarted.

[T42]

Fuckwad RSI/URSSAF (extortion branch of social security) obliges Mrs. T to do her 2016 revenue declaration on line, deadline 9th June. Except that it's not on the usual server I use for everything else, and when I set her up an account on the one they impose it takes me through the usual sort of rigmarole and then tells me I'll receive a one-time connection code by mail within the next two weeks. Then I receive an email confirmation email, and when I click the link I find out their server has gone down in the meantime. Fuckwads.

[Gattopardo]

After several times of being unplugged and or dropped and thrown.  Now it no longer works.  All that happens is the flashing amber light.

For most computer hardware I'd say that's probably for the best.

Some peoplehave temper tantrums and take it out on the hard ware.

[ian]

ADP Freedom. I'm sure I've done this before but it's travelling back to the Internet c1998. I just want a fucking payslip. I mean, really, in 2017 it only supports Inter-fucking-net Explorer. The helpful advice is 'to install IE'.

On a fucking Mac. Morons. Why not provide a fucking Win 3.1 executable why you are it? I hope everyone responsible endures an utterly terrible freak high pressure hot raspberry jam anal sphincter-related incident.

[Mr Larrington]

Nice one, SCS Software, for slipping in that change without, y'know, actually telling anyone or anything, thereby causing a gazillion errors in my nice clean log file.  Now more than ever I need a PC scripting language that can do simple reading, writing and jibbling with text files while more nearly resembling English than line noise.  Any recommendations?

[ian]

Ha, made my wife do it on her PC. She said several of the bad words and as she's from Essex, well, they're not the sort of words that would ever grace the lips of a more refined lady. And you try telling her that. Pulling a white stiletto heel out of your forehead hurts.

Amazon Music ate my Taylor Swift playlist. Bah! That was carefully curated and took me an entire 5 minutes to recreate thus delaying our special Friday music hour.

[Gattopardo]

Ah power jacks...what would cause a power jack to overheat?

So along with flat cmos batteries I am now resoldering power jacks to two different computers.  Tempted to desolder the connectors from old laptops...but that maybe a problem.  Why do I get myself in to these situations?

[freeflow]

CustomXMLParts (In word accessed by VBA).  Plenty of examples in MS online documentation.  But non of them work.........


Helpfully, if you set a default namespace Word will quite happily add prefixes to *some* of your tags but demand that you prefix all tags with the prefix before you can access them.

[Biggsy]

Ah power jacks...what would cause a power jack to overheat?

Excessive charging current or the jack not being rated for the power.  Both seem unlikely to me.  A short circuit could cause meltdown, but the power supply should trip before that.

The failed laptop power sockets I've seen, I've just put down to mechanical weakness or abuse, although I have noticed power plugs being rather warm in use.

[Kim]

Ah power jacks...what would cause a power jack to overheat?

Excessive charging current or the jack not being rated for the power.  Both seem unlikely to me.  A short circuit could cause meltdown, but the power supply should trip before that.

Crappy contact somewhere increasing the resistance and therefore power dissipated as heat.  May be the contacts themselves, the solder joints the the board or a fraying wire.  I'm guessing the solder joints.