WTF Bites
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Just imagine the G-Code. -shudders-
Dunno. Being able to have a router execute gcode to make it stab people on the other end in the face sounds just about right for today.
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@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
Guess what this advertisement advertises.
Beer
It does look like there's a sausage above the fire... (good thing I just had lunch!)
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Just imagine the G-Code. -shudders-
Dunno. Being able to have a router execute gcode to make it stab people on the other end in the face sounds just about right for today.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Don't get me wrong, I get it, we Americans have a really hard time understanding or pronouncing Indian names. I still roll my eyes every time I hear the names.
I used to think the same but having worked with a few Indians, it's not always for us English speakers, it's sometimes because they've got a common name and/or it's got 17 syllables so they shorten it or pick something different which they even use with other Indians.
On a not unrelated topic if you speak to someone in a Fillipino call centre then, well, any strange names are usually their actual names.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
User submits ticket this morning. Says internet is down entirely. We send someone over immediately. Large office, lots of users, big impact so a high priority.
Turns out user managed to disconnect himself from wifi. User is one of the most technologically illiterate people we have ever run across.
TRWTF: This user also has among his primary job duties such things as running CNC plasma cutters and routers, 3D printers, CNC metal brakes, etc. He works in prototyping.
Either he is totally shit at his job or we have some weird idiot savant of CNC going on here.
Most machinist I've worked with viewed computers with a healthy amount of suspicion, and were generally pretty bad at using them, apart from CNC wizardry.
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Guess what this advertisement advertises.
Something to do with weight loss/fat removal?
"Look at the studly man hiding behind this chunk of blubber!"
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WTF of my day: So, the city of Hamburg decided to buy some licenses for a web-based mathematics training tool and offered those to all math teachers in Hamburg. That includes me (not a "real" math teacher but you know how ... difficult the math that I teach actually is.)
So, I create my class. First thing I note: There's no mass import. Each pupil has to be added by hand - or I could send them a file by email with the accounts I'd like to create.
What is good, however: I don't need to provide real names. As long as I myself know who's who, that's enough for them.
Secondly: I then have to call them (or email) that I'd like to have my account upgraded to a proper license. Okay, fair enough. That's when I discover, however, that every time I add a new pupil (or a class) I then have to call them again so that they can unlock said pupil (or class). I have to do that every time I add someone. There actually isn't a "real" teacher's account.
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@topspin Let's call it a first mockup. For communicating the design. Or something.
Filed under: Procrastination
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
But.... I need.... To know....
Prologue/i Need To Know – 04:48
— Frank Wildhorn - Topic@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
User submits ticket this morning. Says internet is down entirely. We send someone over immediately. Large office, lots of users, big impact so a high priority.
Turns out user managed to disconnect himself from wifi. User is one of the most technologically illiterate people we have ever run across.Hope you charged them an arm and a leg.
Not quite the same "emergency feeling", but went to client site today because they weren't able to boot any of our application servers and were dead in the water.
Turns out they installed the wrong version of one of the third party dependencies. They have no idea where they got that version as the software disc we sent them did have the right version.
Their PM is going to be pretty annoyed at billable hours being spent on a mistake like that.
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How much do you wanna bet this isn't fixed until 19.5.3?
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
I once read an article that Indian callcenter people have fun with picking out their names. They pick ones from pop culture. Burt (Reynolds), Clint (Eastwood), John (Wayne, among others), etc. I presume this woman watched Frozen before she chose hers.
Quite a few years ago we had some colleagues from China come around. To avoid dealing with our poor pronunciation of their normal names (Europeans have really hard time correctly distinguishing the tones—Chinese on the other hand have hard time distinguishing voiced and unvoiced consonants), so they chose English ones: Christine, Echo (?) and Roc (???).
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Quite a few years ago we had some colleagues from China come around. To avoid dealing with our poor pronunciation of their normal names (Europeans have really hard time correctly distinguishing the tones—Chinese on the other hand have hard time distinguishing voiced and unvoiced consonants), so they chose English ones: Christine, Echo (?) and Roc (???).
We had Double Wang as a supplier. Along with quite a few Sunny's.
Edit: I used to know a guy from HK who went by Rocky. His reasoning was that the movies were cool. Can't argue with that!
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@Cursorkeys said in WTF Bites:
@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
A Layer 3 router that is configured by CNC
Just imagine the G-Code. -shudders-
G28 X0 Z0
Balls! I've just smashed an /8 off the corner of my networkYour network was too big anyway.
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@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
Guess what this advertisement advertises.
Beer
It says "suplement diety", so yes.
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@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
Guess what this advertisement advertises.
Beer
It does look like there's a sausage above the fire... (good thing I just had lunch!)
The bun in the oven has a bit too much yeast.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
On a not unrelated topic if you speak to someone in a Fillipino call centre then, well, any strange names are usually their actual names.
When I lived there, the head of the Catholic church in the country was called Cardinal Sin. Instant win.
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@topspin Let's call it a first mockup. For communicating the design. Or something.
Filed under: Procrastination
Looks like the master's level of the first Resident Evil game.
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@Cursorkeys said in WTF Bites:
We had Double Wang as a supplier. Along with quite a few Sunny's.
One of my former students was the female equivalent, Miaoumiaou.
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How much do you wanna bet this isn't fixed until 19.5.3?
My notification panel thingy gets spammed with "A Java update is available. Click or tap here to update." But when I click on the notification, it dismisses it without updating Java.
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So the tonneau cover on my truck got destroyed in a windstorm. I bought a new one online, installed it, and about a week later its latch snapped (made of plastic). I went to the manufacturer's website to see if I can get a replacement part under warranty, and the "Send Us A Message" link takes me to some web application that requires a Facebook login. Great. I don't have Facebook.
Then I notice a link at the bottom of the login form that says "Don't have Facebook?" Sweet. They do accommodate the weirdos like me.
I clicked the link, and it sent me to Facebook's "Create an Account" form.
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That's a special kind of evil.
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@mott555 That's easy. Right click. SHUT THE FUCK UP.
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@Gąska My Polish isn't great but I think "suplement diety" sounds like it means "enterprise grade networking equipment"
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
I once read an article that Indian callcenter people have fun with picking out their names. They pick ones from pop culture. Burt (Reynolds), Clint (Eastwood), John (Wayne, among others), etc. I presume this woman watched Frozen before she chose hers.
"Hello, this is Daenerys from Microsoft and we've detected a virus on your computer"
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
I once read an article that Indian callcenter people have fun with picking out their names. They pick ones from pop culture. Burt (Reynolds), Clint (Eastwood), John (Wayne, among others), etc. I presume this woman watched Frozen before she chose hers.
"Hello, this is Daenerys from Microsoft and we've detected a virus on your computer"
Time to burn this motherfucker down, eh?
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@hungrier after having recently read an article about popular black names, I've had to use Google to understand the joke.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
popular black names
U-a? La-a?
Punkin?
Steve Harvey Grand Finale - Family Feud – 07:12
— stephano8374
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Punkin?
Temptress?
Is your name your destiny?
Mo’Nique deservedly walked off with the Oscar for best supporting actress last night for her performance in the movie ‘Precious’. As the world now knows by now, Precious is based on the novel ‘Push…
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Is your name your destiny?
This reminds me of a quote from RFC 1178 - Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from August 1990):
While computers aren't quite analogous to people, their names
are. Nobody expects to learn much about a person by their
name. Just because a person is named "Don" doesn't mean he is
the ruler of the world
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
I once read an article that Indian callcenter people have fun with picking out their names. They pick ones from pop culture. Burt (Reynolds), Clint (Eastwood), John (Wayne, among others), etc. I presume this woman watched Frozen before she chose hers.
If it isn't made up on the spot:
slumdog cc – [00:24..01:07] 01:07
— Freda Caudron
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@dcon
It's been saved in their downloads folder since they last changed computers.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Punkin?
Temptress?
Mo’Nique deservedly walked off with the Oscar for best supporting actress last night for her performance in the movie ‘Precious’. As the world now knows by now, Precious is based on the novel ‘Push…
Is this for real? (emphasis mine)
As an example, of the 454 girls named Precious in the 1990s, 431 were black. Of the 319 Shanices, 310 were black. There were also 228 babies named Unique, and 1 each of Uneek, Uneque, and Uneqqee.
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the children of movie stars rejoice in names such as Lourdes, Banjo, Pilot Inspektor, Moxie CrimeFighter, Audio Science and Prince Michael II.
They might be thinking of Lourdes Maria, Madonna's daughter, there.
It's a common name, just not an American one.I have no excuse for the others (although Prince Michael II is relatively pedestrian compared to the others).
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Punkin?
Temptress?
Mo’Nique deservedly walked off with the Oscar for best supporting actress last night for her performance in the movie ‘Precious’. As the world now knows by now, Precious is based on the novel ‘Push…
Is this for real? (emphasis mine)
As an example, of the 454 girls named Precious in the 1990s, 431 were black. Of the 319 Shanices, 310 were black. There were also 228 babies named Unique, and 1 each of Uneek, Uneque, and Uneqqee.
You apparently do not live around or associate with many black people.
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Is this for real? (emphasis mine)
You should look up some 19th century presbyterian male names…
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As an example, of the 454 girls named Precious in the 1990s, 431 were black. Of the 319 Shanices, 310 were black. There were also 228 babies named Unique, and 1 each of Uneek, Uneque, and Uneqqee.
These people need to learn about GUIDs.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
As an example, of the 454 girls named Precious in the 1990s, 431 were black. Of the 319 Shanices, 310 were black. There were also 228 babies named Unique, and 1 each of Uneek, Uneque, and Uneqqee.
These people need to learn about GUIDs.
Can I change my username here to {bc63f8d0-b9c6-4571-a09c-a1cd4cd11e74}? Paging @PJH and @ben_lubar.
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Can I change my username here to {bc63f8d0-b9c6-4571-a09c-a1cd4cd11e74}? Paging @PJH and @ben_lubar.
Don't look at me.
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Can I change my username here to {bc63f8d0-b9c6-4571-a09c-a1cd4cd11e74}? Paging @PJH and @ben_lubar.
Don't look at me.
Huh. I was expecting either
or 
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Huh. I was expecting either
or How about?:
Don't look at me.
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@Zecc Yes, I suppose mooning is also an appropriate response to my request.
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Today's episode of Blame the Tool, featuring: Python, FTDI, a library written by niche hardware vendor in 2007, MSVC, and libusb.
One of my colleagues is an undergrad. He is not interested in programming per se, but as an exchange student he took a course in "Python for physics". The result is that he can produce somewhat convoluted iPython notebooks with sometimes questionable software development practices, but the problem gets solved and he never repeats mistakes. This story is not about his code.A few months ago he needed to control some motorised stages from his scripts, while vendor's code was all mostly .NET or LabView. The vendor had also supplied a 300-page PDF describing the protocol that the stages spoke over a virtual serial port. This has been one of the best protocol descriptions I've ever seen and about the only time I could write a bunch of code without even touching the hardware, then plug it in and have the code work on first try. The only problem was actually establishing the communication.
You see, the motorized stages used an FTDI chip. On Windows, FTDI chips can work in two different modes: either the driver provides a COM port for your application to work with as with any other serial port, or there is only the "direct (D2XX) interface" which you can only use with a DLL from FTDI. The motorized stage vendor had apparently chosen the latter option. They also patched the driver and changed the USB PID, so the virtual serial port drivers we got from the official FTDI website refused to work. (At the time we couldn't find any "virtual serial port" FTDI drivers on the motorized stage vendor website, but later I heard a rumour that they exist. Whatever.)
The official D2XX Python module exists, but seems unmaintained. We found PyFtdi but couldn't get it to work. After some frantic and not very systematic searching we found pylibftdi and couldn't get it working either until we realized that the libraries employ
libusbandlibusbon Windows requires speciallibusbdrivers. Fuck you, Windows, why does it have to be so complicated? Then we found Zadig and finally made some progress. I provided a few examples of how to format device commands to the student, he implemented the rest of it, got the project done in time, and all went well.There also was talk about controlling our laser from Python. The laser vendor only gave us a DLL written in Delphi circa 2007 and a C++ header for it. I investigated using SWIG to create a Python wrapper for it, but there was no immediate need for it and I had much more pressing stuff to do, so it remained unfinished.
Fast forward to a few days ago, when the student approaches me with a strangely unreadable expression on his face. He wants to "engrave" a certain bitmap on a specially purchased metal plate using the lab laser and motorized stages. He clearly realises that it could be done better for a modest price in a shop using a different kind of laser better suited for engraving; the point is doing it "with his own hands". He remembers that I had some code to control the laser from Python; can he please have it? On his desktop I see a few copies of the same picture, stored in different formats and opened in different programs. The picture is of a smiling female face. Oh, and the deadline is tomorrow morning; he regrets not getting the idea earlier and is ready to spend all night in the lab if he has to, but he needs that code.
I roll my sleeves and install on a virtual machine (he uses Windows; my primary OS is Debian) the same version (for reproducibility, I say to myself) of Anaconda that he uses.
python setup.py buildasks me forMSVC 14.0. I locate the Visual Studio downloads and get told that I have to log in before I can download older MSVC versions. Fuck that! Fortunately, latest Build Tools installer offers MSVC 14.0 among other things, so it turns out I don't have to get yet another stupid account. Unfortunately, it still takes some time to download a few gigabytes of stuff and install them. Some time passes.After the installation is finished, I try to build the module again. After I get the
setup.pyinvocation to link against external library right (I actually have almost no real experience with Python) and produce a correct*.libfile (the one shipped by vendor caused "unresolved external symbol" errors despite being found by the linker), I get this:1>LINK : fatal error LNK1158: cannot run 'rc.exe'Fuck you, Microsoft! Why would your
linkcallrcwhich may not be installed? Fuck you, Python! Why would you need a resource compiler to build a damned DLL? (I'm still not sure who's more guilty, so fuck them both.)Cursory web search tells me that
rc.exeis just plain missing from newer Windows 10 SDKs but could be found in older SDK versions. I make a misguided attempt to install an older Windows 10 SDK which wastes time but does not help at all. Somehow I notice a "Windows XP compatibility something (not recommended)" among the stuff available to install; it is also said to contain the Windows 7 SDK. I copyrc.exeandrcdll.dllover into Windows 10 SDK because there is no time to find out howpython setup.pyinvokesvcvarsall.batand have it choose the correct SDK version; the module compiles and even links, so I type:> python >>> import lsctrl ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.Okay, wait, let me place the DLL in the correct place,
> python >>> import lsctrl ImportError: DLL load failed: %1 is not a valid Win32 applicationAnd the magnitude of my own folly was revealed to me in a blinding flash... Of course, my Anaconda installation was 64-bit while the DLL was 32-bit all along. I should have thought of it before.
Should the student grab a copy of 32-bit Anaconda (yet another long download) and install all his modules again? I remembered the exact steps that led us to success with
pylibftdibeing not very well defined and probably hard to repeat. Time was ticking, I was not feeling exactly well (I later found out that I had a 37.7℃ fever), I kept making mistakes.For my other colleague who gets to support our legacy machine I had previously written a C++ library to control the motorized stages. (Officially supported drivers and apps don't work on anything older than Windows 7, but there is a
libusbdriver for Windows 2003, so I based the library on libftdi). Again, there had been no immediate interest in it (just a long-term "we will need it in an unspecified amount of time later"), so the library was just a bunch of methods that I had tested on my laptop.I grab a copy of someone's helpfully provided libftdi build for windows (Building one myself seems like a huge undertaking because of multiple levels of dependencies and probably non-trivial patches required to get it working together. Fuck dependencies!) and throw together a program that uses my library to talk to the motorized stages and vendor's library to talk to the laser. I curse and try different compiler and linker flags and somehow manage to compile everything into a program with two visible different versions of
libgcc(and probablylibstdc++too) in it (one of them is the dependency of my own code and another is required bylibftdibuild).Around this time we notice that USB-RS232 converter that we had planned to use with the laser is busted (it shows an error in the Device Manager no matter what we do), so a separate expedition is mounted to a lab previously belonging to a colleague who died a few years ago because someone remembers him having a working converter. I don't participate in it; I have code to fix.
The code doesn't work, and the only thing
libftdican tell me is(-4, "usb_open() failed"). Fuck you,libftdi, why couldn't you be more specific? I guess it's my fault in trusting so much in cross-compilation that I cannot run code on my machine and I cannot debug the code on the student's machine. I get increasingly desperate and try random stuff that doesn't help until a realisation hits me that the two libraries don't have to share the address space if the universe doesn't want them to.UNIX way, right? One small program for one small purpose? I throw away all FTDI-related code and only leave calls to vendor laser library: initialize, switch on/off, deinitialize, close port. It compiles and works. I show
os.systemto the student, he incorporates it in his own code and we witness the creation of the ablation craters forming the first few lines of the bitmap. Then he notes that the bitmap is mirrored and gets back to fixing his code. I wish him luck and shuffle over to home where I take my temperature and get a nasty surprise.There is no real ending; we didn't discuss that ever again.
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Why would you need a resource compiler to build a damned DLL?
Because that's where the version number comes from - the VERSIONINFO resource.
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Can I change my username here to {bc63f8d0-b9c6-4571-a09c-a1cd4cd11e74}? Paging @PJH and @ben_lubar.
Don't look at me.
Huh. I was expecting either
or He can't do anything about that. You need @boomzilla or @ben_lubar.
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@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Can I change my username here to {bc63f8d0-b9c6-4571-a09c-a1cd4cd11e74}? Paging @PJH and @ben_lubar.
Don't look at me.
Huh. I was expecting either
or He can't do anything about that. You need @boomzilla or @ben_lubar.
It shouldn't matter who I ask, because everyone's a @boomzilla alt anyways.
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Why would you need a resource compiler to build a damned DLL?
Because that's where the version number comes from - the VERSIONINFO resource.
So in other words the quickest fix would have been dropping
notepad.exein there and renaming it torc.exe. It wouldn’t have embedded the VERSIONINFO, but who cares.
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a colleague who died a few years ago because someone remembers him having a working converter
Damn, you guys are aggressive when it comes to acquiring converters.
(I had to re-read to make sure this was not what you meant)
