If I did not have to use this application form...



  • ... I'd donate one of my kidneys. But then, I do have to use it. And thus was subjected to a slew of "What were they thinking?", "Were they thinking?" and "What is this I don't even".

    Okay, the web application form basically consists of two different screens: The overview, naming the different areas like: "Personal Info", "List of previous jobs" and so on. And the screen(s) with the actual questions themselves.

    First WTF: Instead of using stuff like radio buttons, check boxes or, god forbid, drop down menus, they're telling you to "enter 'male' if you're male and 'female' if you're female". This trend continues throughout the whole questionnaire.

    Second WTF: On the bottom are two buttons named 'save' and 'continue'. 'Save' does not seem to do anything (there's no feedback of any kind) and 'continue' does not continue to the next question screen but to the overview. After completing the whole form I then found out that you have to press 'save' first and then 'continue' or whatever you entered is lost. Good grief. Obviously no one ever considered to combine the two features... like every other webform out there actually does.

    Third WTF: The 'saving' only goes for the summary page, though. If you go into any screen you previously visited, none of your entries are visible - which means that correcting an error means: Going into the summary page, detecting the error, back to the overview and then into the screen, reentering everything (sans the mistake, of course!).

    While we're speaking of errors, if you enter something invalid, like 'malr' instead of 'male', the page displays "A catastrophic error happened!" - but does not indicate what the error actually is.

    Last step consists of: Submitting the form and receiving a PDF. Said PDF does not have the file ending ".pdf" though, but ".aspx". Visual Studio was not happy about a PDF file masquerading as an aspx (to my defense: it was late and I wasn't thinking). Opening the file with vim determined, however, that it was indeed a PDF. Renamed it, printed it and tomorrow I'll send it to them by snail mail as they demanded...



  •  Let me gues: You do have to use it.

     

    Yeah, that's what they must have been thinking too.


  • Garbage Person

    @Rhywden said:

    Visual Studio was not happy about a PDF file masquerading as an aspx (to my defense: it was late and I wasn't thinking). Opening the file with vim determined, however
    What the fuck?



  • You're using UltiPro too?



  • I got $5 on "government agency."



  • @Weng said:

    @Rhywden said:

    Visual Studio was not happy about a PDF file masquerading as an aspx (to my defense: it was late and I wasn't thinking). Opening the file with vim determined, however
    What the fuck?

    My guess is that the file extension of aspx caused Visual Studio to act as the default file handler, but then it choked on it. He used vim to see the first few bytes, and since it started with "%PDF", it was obvious that this was a PDF file.



    BTW, this is exactly why I do this type of thing as an HTTPHandler instead of using an aspx page that screws with the content type.



  • @Jaime said:

    @Weng said:

    @Rhywden said:

    Visual Studio was not happy about a PDF file masquerading as an aspx (to my defense: it was late and I wasn't thinking). Opening the file with vim determined, however
    What the fuck?

    My guess is that the file extension of aspx caused Visual Studio to act as the default file handler, but then it choked on it. He used vim to see the first few bytes, and since it started with "%PDF", it was obvious that this was a PDF file.



    BTW, this is exactly why I do this type of thing as an HTTPHandler instead of using an aspx page that screws with the content type.


    I think the wtf is a computer with both Visual Sudio and vim installed alongside each other.



  • @Rhywden said:

    Last step consists of: Submitting the form and receiving a PDF. Said PDF does not have the file ending ".pdf" though, but ".aspx". Visual Studio was not happy about a PDF file masquerading as an aspx (to my defense: it was late and I wasn't thinking). Opening the file with vim determined, however, that it was indeed a PDF. Renamed it, printed it and tomorrow I'll send it to them by snail mail as they demanded...
     

    Got the ol' wooden table all polished up, have you?



  • @Lord abletran said:

    I think the wtf is a computer with both Visual Sudio and vim installed alongside each other.

    Why? Vim does not have a compiler (so he has Visual Studio) and Visual Studio does not have a text editor (so he has Vim).

    (really, there are lots of things that you can do easily in Vim if you know it while trying to do it in Visual Studio would take ungodly amount of clicking if it was possible at all)



  • Well, the answer is easy. The form was obviously built by people who've never built web apps before. Or any apps. Or have a single bit of sanity left in their brains.



  • @Bulb said:

    Vim does not have a compiler (so he has Visual Studio) and Visual Studio does not have a text editor (so he has Vim).

    fry_notsureif.jpg

    @Bulb said:

    (really, there are lots of things that you can do easily in Vim if you know it while trying to do it in Visual Studio would take ungodly amount of clicking if it was possible at all)

    Ah, alright, just really stupid.

    Untrollingly though, I do believe that you can do amazing and weird stuff in vim if you know dozens of obscure commands by heart, I'm just not sure if that's worth it. The best argument I've heard for vim was something like "For example, if your boss wants you to only print the fifth paragraph on the third page, in Word you'll have to scroll down counting the pages, and then count out the fifth paragraphs; then you have to carefully select it all with the mouse which takes, like, forever, right click, click "copy", then open a new Word instance, right click again, click "paste", then click file and then print. In vim, you only have to type :k:pg3p5 (command completely made up in my head, I don't know shit about vim) and you're done." I don't know if the person who said that was a troll or not, but it was enough for me to never try vim, because apparently it turns you into a total idiot who thinks an obscure command is always superior to a visual process you can understand, no matter who's the user.



  • @Bulb said:

    Why? Vim does not have a compiler (so he has Visual Studio) and Visual Studio does not have a text editor (so he has Vim).

    (really, there are lots of things that you can do easily in Vim if you know it while trying to do it in Visual Studio would take ungodly amount of clicking if it was possible at all)

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/110477/anyone-know-of-any-free-open-source-vi-integration-for-visual-studio ?

     

    Nice sig, derula.

     



  • @Zecc said:

    Nice sig, derula.

    The HTML is pretty messed up because it all had to fit in 256 characters. I'm surprised it even works in more than one browser (though it looks notably worse in KHTML, Webkit and IE than it does in Gecko; it seems to break report and quick reply buttons everywhere except Firefox and Chrome, maybe I can fix that...).

    Edit: Weird, it doesn't break report and quick reply in my local test page.



  • @Lord abletran said:


    I think the wtf is a computer with both Visual Sudio and vim installed alongside each other.

    The machine I'm sitting on is my private computer, which is a bit of a hodgepodge concerning development tools.
    VisualStudio I got for free due to Dreamspark (and took a look at C#), Eclipse is around as well (wanted to take a look at Android development), Aptana is installed for Rails, then I switched to vim because Aptana annoyed me and now I use RubyMine for Rails development. vim is what I now use when I want to take a quick peek into a text file or make some quick changes where I don't need the likes of IntelliJ.

    Clearer now?



  • @Rhywden said:

    vim is what I now use when I want to take a quick peek into a text file or make some quick changes where I don't need the likes of IntelliJ.

    I know I like vi/vim/gvim: sometimes I reach for commands such as J (join the next line to this one) or ddP (swap current line with the one above) or d$ (delete the rest of the line) or dw (delete rest of word) or A (append to the end of the current line) when using other editors. The second time I ever used vi was in 1998 on a DEC Unix machine which didn't have an Escape key. The workaround was to press F10 and get a beep. In 2002 I had a linux machine called brio because it was a dictionary.com word of the day and one of the synonyms was "vim". :)



  • @Rhywden said:

    @Lord abletran said:

    I think the wtf is a computer with both Visual Sudio and vim installed alongside each other.

    The machine I'm sitting on is my private computer, which is a bit of a hodgepodge concerning development tools.
    VisualStudio I got for free due to Dreamspark (and took a look at C#), Eclipse is around as well (wanted to take a look at Android development), Aptana is installed for Rails, then I switched to vim because Aptana annoyed me and now I use RubyMine for Rails development. vim is what I now use when I want to take a quick peek into a text file or make some quick changes where I don't need the likes of IntelliJ.

    Clearer now?

    So in other words, you use a hammer to drive nails, a screwdriver to drive screws, and a saw to cut things (right tool for the right job). No wonder everyone here thinks you're weird.



  • @Master Chief said:

    So in other words, you use a hammer to drive nails, a screwdriver to drive screws, and a saw to cut things (right tool for the right job). No wonder everyone here thinks you're weird.

    Vim is never the right tool.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Vim is never the right tool.
    Real men use ed or what?



  • @derula said:

    Well, the answer is easy. The form was obviously built by people who've never built web apps before. Or any apps. Or have a single bit of sanity left in their brains.

    I just got through talking to a developer that made very similar mistakes.  He did the aspx filename download thing, and a variation of the Save/Continue thing.  He seems to have zero ability to look at his own creation and say "this is really hard to use, I'd better fix it".  I think when a developer builds something like this, they just get used to how it works and tune out the fact that it isn't sane.


  •  @Rhywden said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Vim is never the right tool.
    Real men use ed or what?

     

    REAL Real Men use COPY CON.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @SQLDave said:

     @Rhywden said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Vim is never the right tool.
    Real men use ed or what?

     

    REAL Real Men use COPY CON.

     

    [b]REAL[/b] REAL Real Men use bare drive plates and a very, very tiny magnet



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @SQLDave said:

     @Rhywden said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Vim is never the right tool.
    Real men use ed or what?

     

    REAL Real Men use COPY CON.

     

    REAL REAL Real Men use bare drive plates and a very, very tiny magnet

     

    Oh, we used to DREAM of havin' a magnet. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill manually flipping bits on a metal plate, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

     



  •  Real men use edlin.



  • @Rhywden said:

    Real men use ed or what?
    I did use a combination of sed and cat on a machine that only had vim installed.



  • @Rhywden said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Vim is never the right tool.
    Real men use ed or what?

    I do prefer ed over vim.

    I do complain about it, but that's because I'm used to MudOS ed, which's quite a bit more comfortable.



    Btw, is it considered wimpy to prefer to run something like "2,2s@/opt/app/bin/@/opt/bin/@" instead of retyping the whole line?



  • @Rhywden said:

    While we're speaking of errors, if you enter something invalid, like 'malr' instead of 'male', the page displays "A catastrophic error happened!" - but does not indicate what the error actually is.

    But what about the actual malr-gendered users!?



  • @derula said:

    The best argument I've heard for vim was something like "For example, if your boss wants you to only print the fifth paragraph on the third page, in Word you'll have to scroll down counting the pages drag the scrollbar until the tooltip shows page five, and then count out the fifth paragraphs; then you have to carefully select it all with the mouse which takes, like, forever triple click on the desired paragraph, right click, click "copy", then open a new Word instance, right click again, click "paste", then click file and then print the selection. In vim, you only have to type :k:pg3p5 (command completely made up in my head, I don't know shit about vim) and you're done then refill paper and start over because you printed five copies of the wrong paragraph."

    FTFY



  • @fatbull said:

    Filed under: I could be wrong, but I don't think so

    'cause it's a jungle out there.



  • @derula said:

    "...print the fifth paragraph on the third page, [...] In vim, you only have to type :k:pg3p5 (command completely made up in my head, I don't know shit about vim) and you're done."

    In the interest of completeness, here are 3 real Vim commands to do that:



    3<font color=blue><PageDown></font>4}V}:hardcopy



    or



    Select the text with your mouse and click File->Print.



    or if you're in a hurry



    Just click File->Print straight away and have the intern scissor out the right paragraph and fax it to your boss.



  • @superjer said:

    Just click File->Print straight away and have the intern scissor out the right paragraph and fax it to your boss.

    The fax machine jammed on the scissored paper, so the intern had to take a photo of it on a wooden table...



  • @superjer said:

    Just click File->Print straight away and have the intern scissor out the right paragraph and fax it to your boss.

    I lol'ed.



  • I don't think Word vs Vim is a very good comparison for why not to use Vim. Word is typically used for WYSIWYG editing of documents with pretty fonts and colors and Vim is typically used for coding and scripting and basic non-formatted text document editing. I don't think I've ever found myself flipping a coin to decide if I should use Word or Vim to edit something, it's usually pretty obvious which is the right tool.

    But to your point of using mouse vs. obscure commands, for me at least, the reason is ergonomics. Using a mouse for extended periods of time can be quite uncomfortable for me so using applications where the same functions can be accomplished by using a few keystrokes is preferable.



  • @error_NoError said:

    I don't think Word vs Vim is a very good comparison for why not to use Vim. Word is typically used for WYSIWYG editing of documents with pretty fonts and colors and Vim is typically used for coding and scripting and basic non-formatted text document editing. I don't think I've ever found myself flipping a coin to decide if I should use Word or Vim to edit something, it's usually pretty obvious which is the right tool.

    But to your point of using mouse vs. obscure commands, for me at least, the reason is ergonomics. Using a mouse for extended periods of time can be quite uncomfortable for me so using applications where the same functions can be accomplished by using a few keystrokes is preferable.

     

    You are serious. :|

     

    Look, regardless of whether or not you can work with vim and find it comfortable, it's still a frontrunner in pioneering the 100ft greased stone-wall learning curve: you cannot operate it unless you look up in the manual how to type text.



  • @error_NoError said:

    I don't think Word vs Vim is a very good comparison for why not to use Vim. Word is typically used for WYSIWYG editing of documents with pretty fonts and colors and Vim is typically used for coding and scripting and basic non-formatted text document editing.

    Well, that dude whose quote I referring to was trying to explain why in his view Word is always superior to vim.

    @error_NoError said:

    Using a mouse for extended periods of time can be quite uncomfortable for me so using applications where the same functions can be accomplished by using a few keystrokes is preferable.

    I would say that might be a matter of habit. I remember that I used to use Alt-Tab a lot, as the main way to switch between apps. I haven't used it in years now, and don't miss it either.



  • You know who uses vi? Crime investigators.

     

    1st and 2nd Detectives:  [looking attentively at a photograph of a dead body in a hotel room.]

    1st Detective:  Zoom in there under the bed.

    2nd Detective:  [sound of 2 key-presses]

    1st Detective:  Enhance.

    2nd Detective:  [sound of one key-press (note: in some versions of the software, enhancing is automatic)]
    It's a golden cufflink!

    1st Detective:  Who makes these cufflinks?

    2nd Detective:  [sound of 3 to 5 key-presses]
    [Pictures of different models of cufflinks flash on the left side of the screen, names and addresses of manufacturers on the right side, too fast to read]

    Ten manufacturers in this area alone...
    [two extra key-presses]
    ...but only one of them is owned by a highschool friend of one of our vics.

    1st Detective, while straightning back and leaning towards the door:  We've got you now!

    [Cuts to commercial break]



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    @Rhywden said:

    While we're speaking of errors, if you enter something invalid, like 'malr' instead of 'male', the page displays "A catastrophic error happened!" - but does not indicate what the error actually is.

    But what about the actual malr-gendered users!?

     

    I recommend reading some nice facts about determining a gender...

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Zecc said:

    You know who uses vi? Crime investigators.

     

    ...detectives solve a crime...

    They're totally doing it wrong. It would be so much easier with a VB GUI.


  • @flop said:

    I recommend reading some nice facts about determining a gender...
     

    From that link:

    but the point is that it was deployed without understanding its full effects.

    I guess that the effect was ye typickal "unknown unknown". :\



  • @boomzilla said:

    They're totally doing it wrong. It would be so much easier with a VB GUI interface [FTFY].
    What? No!

    That's only for tracking the IP address of real-time website posts.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Zecc said:

    @boomzilla said:

    They're totally doing it wrong. It would be so much easier with a VB GUI interface [FTFY].
    What? No!

    That's only for tracking the IP address of real-time website posts.

    The ones coming from the 462.643.432.0/24 subnet?


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