The minor rants thread.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Tsaukpaetra said in The minor rants thread.:

    Eh, this was actually part of a longer document about string-safety in form submissions.
    (ノಥ益ಥ)ノ ┻━┻

    Someone changed the symbols so it no longer looks quite right...

    0_1474840648483_upload-64bde7b6-9a14-4c9e-ba26-313ab01b3acc



  • @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    @PleegWat said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Rhywden 2 simple physical knobs was too complicated for them?

    That's actually what we had in our original control panel. I'm also not quite sure what warranted this rather complicated "solution".

    I am confused. You were in Hamburg, Germany ?

    Each time i read your stories I think this is a 3rd word thing, where
    a) things are given to private administration because "they are more efficient"
    b) contracts are given to $gob_friends
    c) no effective control on what they deliver vs what they are supposed to do
    d) when the cow has no more milk / situation is unsustainable / elections / 'company has to put some money because the thing is falling into pieces', end the contract, with at most a slap in the whilst.
    e) return to gov administration, which assume any technical / monetary debts
    d) optional: subcontract the same bastards to do concrete repairs
    e) optional: if the gob expertise in admin has vanished, contract highly paid, albeit unexperienced, consultants to help


  • BINNED

    @cabrito said in The minor rants thread.:

    I am confused.

    I don't get where your confusion is coming from ... you perfectly describe the real Germany ... not the fake, humorless version ...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @cabrito said in The minor rants thread.:

    contract highly paid, albeit unexperienced, consultants to help

    The contracting firm has one experienced person who turns up while they're negotiating the contract. You pay the rates for getting them. You actually get some noob hired off the street who knows less than your own staff does now despite the fact that your staff know they're not experts (because the experts you had are now working for the consulting company and making out like a bandit).



  • @dkf we are not doing exactly that, but at times, it feels close. It's pissing me off so much when it happens.



  • Oracle, can't do this:

    SELECT
     MyFunc(column1)
    , MyFunc2(column2)
    , *  
    FROM myview MV
    INNER JOIN myotherview MOV ON MV.ID = MOV.FOREIGN_KEY
    

    Something like this works fine in MSSQL. It is really annoying, I am just trying to see that I am calling the right function in an adhoc query, while working out what data I need.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @lucas1 said in The minor rants thread.:

    Oracle, can't do this:

    Add table aliases:

    SELECT
     MyFunc(column1)
    , MyFunc2(column2)
    , mv.*  , mov.*
    FROM myview MV
    INNER JOIN myotherview MOV ON MV.ID = MOV.FOREIGN_KEY
    

  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @cartman82 said in The minor rants thread.:

    we are not doing exactly that

    I was talking about stuff that we do. :headdesk:



  • The Internet of Shit has reached my apartment complex's laundry room! I can now log in online to see if any washers or dryers are available instead of spending 20 seconds to walk to the laundry room and checking manually! Also I can pay by QR Code though I don't even know what that means.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @mott555 said in The minor rants thread.:

    The Internet of Shit has reached my apartment complex's laundry room! I can now log in online to see if any washers or dryers are available instead of spending 20 seconds to walk to the laundry room and checking manually!

    Except the data probably isn't real-time, because that would be difficult. So instead you look, see a machine is available. Except there's a 15 minute delay because of synchronization issues. So you get there to find all the machines taken.

    @mott555 said in The minor rants thread.:

    Also I can pay by QR Code though I don't even know what that means.

    Print out @ben_lubar 's avatar, roll it up, and stuff it into the coin slot.



  • @boomzilla That works, but * means everything. So just show all columns. MSSQL the same query would work fine.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @lucas1 I just like to anger people by giving unsolicited advice for the lulz.

    The I Hate Oracle Category is :arrows:



  • Soooo, today I was once again subjected to the mystical land of Bullshit Bingo. I know I'm a teacher, but I now know exactly how you guys feel when a pointy-haired boss rhapsodizes about some business buzzwords he's enamored with and wants those implemented now.

    Those guys exist in paedagogics as well.

    Background: My school deals with older students (think highschool to college level) and also has an orientation towards business (in fact, one path teaches business economics and political economy, among the more mundane mathematics, languages and science).
    All the schools of this kind in Hamburg are connected through a software platform based on Sharepoint.

    This platform (at least at our school, though I suspect there are several others as well or I wouldn't be writing this) is used as a glorified file repository, think "Dropbox with tags and full-text search" (though I think the latter one is doable in Dropbox now as well).

    I'm one of the guys responsible for administrating this thing (it's a weird hybrid of "I'm allowed to change anything on our page!" and "I'm not allowed to make changes to users" (though I could)). As such, we have regular meetings where we talk about upcoming updates, stuff that needs to be done and so on.

    My other meetings (be that about technical stuff or paedagogics) are usually very directed: We have an agenda, largely stick to it, identify problems and create solutions (or at least, attempts thereof).

    Those meetings? They oscillate rapidly and randomly between attention to tiniest details of interest to only one person (of 20 present), discussions about the state of the union and the head-honcho preaching about his concept of Knowledge Sharing (that's a paedagogics term, people!)

    Last time before today, we even had a guy talk 90 minutes about the structure/organization of his LAN/VLAN/VPN and everything connected with it (down to a Google maps screenshot detailing where the fiber connecting the buildings was buried). For me that was absolutely boring because a) I already know all this stuff and b) it basically amounted to the equivalent of "This is how we built our house! This is the first stone we set! But before that we had to dig a hole! And then the roof! Don't forget the roof, people! But the foundation is equally important!")
    That's for me, though. About 80% of the other people present were laymen when it came to actual hardware and thus everything the guy waffled on about flew right over their heads.

    The state of the union usually devolves into lamentations about how noone uses the platform beyond filesharing which then naturally leads into another speech on how to spread the idea of knowledge sharing.
    Those speeches usually occur three to four times during the meeting, with me not bringing out the German Paedagogics Bullshit Bingo only due to the fact that half his words are English for some reason. This lead my colleague to suspect that he was actually coming from the economics side of social sciences. Which he vehemently denied, he is a graduate of Waldorf.

    Which doesn't really improve matters, to be honest. Among quite a number of teachers, the name "Waldorf" evokes associations like "Homeopathy", "Social Justice Warriors" and such.

    It also always gets me how those people (the ones proclaiming to be about teaching and stuff) are the ones whose meetings and advanced education courses are the most boring - I mean, we get beat up over the head if we force our pupils to do the same stuff (like listening to us droning on about a topic) for than 15 minutes. Because the human attention span is usually exhausted at roughly 20 minutes and thus we usually try to switch up things a bit during a lesson.
    Those guys? 90 minutes of the most inane stuff without end. It calls to mind this short scene from "Meet the Medic" from TF2 where the medic opens the fridge to grab a new heart, with the spy's head hidden behind the heart pleading: "Kill me!" - with the doc's obvious answer: "Later."

    But today I snapped (at least a bit). It was five minutes to closing and they were already starting to ponder the meaning of life again. Which is when my colleague delivered the first blow (a left hook, if you will) by asking him if he was from economics. After he had vehemently denied such allegations and looked like he would pick up the thread from before (and not immediately arrive at 42), I then asked if we could postpone the transcendental discussions to next time and, since I was from the scientific area, if we also could be provided with some more tangible ways to tackle education's problems (uppercut!)

    After which another guy had the last sentence by giving us an example on why shared knowledge is oh-so important. I'm quoting from memory here:

    "Well, y'know, if there's a guy organizing a trip to Japan, that's very specific and individual knowledge which can't be easily shared. Because he gets all this specific knowledge about the trip. That would be bad. But if there was another guy organizing another trip to Japan, he could benefit from this knowledge! That would be good. Otherwise he couldn't. That would be bad."

    Yes. This is the "level of knowledge" I'm dealing with here.

    Argh. Kill me.


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    Among quite a number of teachers, the name "Waldorf" evokes associations like "Homeopathy", "Social Justice Warriors" and such.



  • @masonwheeler If only it was that amusing...



  • @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    Knowledge Sharing

    Sounds like they need SSDS!



  • Citrix desktop.

    Most of dev work I am doing is on a Citrix desktop because of "reasons".

    I have Oracle SQL Server and some other basic tools on the local machine which is where I do all the real work before cutting and pasting into this dreadful Delphi application.

    Every so often (2 or 3 times an hour) Citrix decides for whatever reason it need to take window focus. Locks up for a minute or two while it does it, then resizes the window to something larger than the current screen.


  • BINNED

    @lucas1 said in The minor rants thread.:

    Citrix desktop.

    :eek:

    I have Oracle SQL Server

    :eek:


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    The state of the union usually devolves into lamentations about how noone uses the platform beyond filesharing

    It's Sharepoint. Filesharing is about all it can do. Well, theoretically it can do more but it's usually considered vital to turn those extra things off because of the potential impact on the database. God forbid that users might do something that actually makes use of the database!

    I was looking for the image to illustrate how frustrated this makes me feel, but I totally failed. Instead, I found this:

    0_1475066606328_upload-42c7bdb6-c1e0-4008-a58a-753120703c6a

    The world needs more “Explosipunch!” when faced with Sharepoint…


  • BINNED

    @dkf
    It's beter then
    0_1475075499327_upload-8f7d90ca-e85b-41b5-97db-d7f89105b94b



  • @Luhmann
    An hour after I posted my frustrations we had a meeting with a regular dev/admin. She is in her early 50s. She obviously kinda drifted job wise into a dev / admin role on this horrific delphi app we are customizing through basically programming in text boxes (the delphi is executed I think via Eval, but without de-compiling the app I can't be sure) .

    If she drifted into a proper dev role she would be fantastic I reckon. She does some basic admin on the application and how she thinks about doing everything is soo logical. She does some basic dev but it is better than some of the developers and she keeps on saying "I don't have the training you do".

    I was very impressed to say the least on her knowledge and accuracy if nothing else.

    EDIT: We had another Lady who has excellent Domain knowledge and in meetings she is telling us "no it needs to be more like this if you can". She was apologizing because she thought she was being brutal on us. We kept on telling her "this is what we need to know, so tell us everything that is wrong so we can fix it".


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @lucas1 said in The minor rants thread.:

    We kept on telling her "this is what we need to know, so tell us everything that is wrong in a manner we can understand or get translated to something we can understand so we can fix it".

    FTFY. All too often I get to handle requests like, "This number is wrong." and that's the body of the detail.


  • Impossible Mission - B



  • @Tsaukpaetra She was quite clear what was wrong, and just said very very clearly and it was a total breath of fresh air tbh. I have a lot of respect for her domain knowledge and she knows how the application works from a user's view.

    She is also doing a lot of critical thinking without knowing she is doing it. If that makes sense. She says stuff like "Well why would you fill all that in, if it is already in the database, why not pull it in from what we already have". That sort of thing.


  • ♿ (Parody)



  • @boomzilla I dunno how it works, I will cut and paste a screenshot of the horrific editor tomorrow.

    I am assuming it does an eval because it has a section for method vars, and then a separate section for code that uses the vars. Looking at the delphi syntax it looks like it is just concatenating them both into a script that gets run when a form loads.


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @boomzilla Those are third-party scripting solutions, which is a very different beast from eval.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @masonwheeler said in The minor rants thread.:

    @boomzilla Those are third-party scripting solutions, which is a very different beast from eval.

    But it meets the definition of what @lucas1 seems to be talking about.


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @boomzilla Possibly...



  • @masonwheeler Maybe. I said I dunno how it works. I can use standard delphi to program. But it appears to me it is being concatenated and being evaled at runtime.

    This is my Scenario:

    I am writing delphi in a delphi application. That is run in a delphi application. The code I believe is being stored in an oracle database. Forms are loaded dynamically. I believe this is happening:

    1. I add code to a form (so hide stuff, auto populate, populate tables etc).
    2. I syntax check it, through their crappy editor.
    3. I run it (the form) and there are errors on things like types etc.
    4. Find those problems.
    5. Assuming I fix them things run fine, without the application I am coding in restarting.

    That suggests to me that it is doing

    eval ( scriptStringOfDelphi )
    

    Somewhere in the application.

    EDIT: mostly clarity.

    I've never used delphi, or any of the RAD studio stuff and I honestly just know how to set form values in the applications. It is a boring job.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @lucas1 said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Tsaukpaetra She was quite clear what was wrong, and just said very very clearly and it was a total breath of fresh air tbh. I have a lot of respect for her domain knowledge and she knows how the application works from a user's view.

    She is also doing a lot of critical thinking without knowing she is doing it. If that makes sense. She says stuff like "Well why would you fill all that in, if it is already in the database, why not pull it in from what we already have". That sort of thing.

    It's too bad you already have her, we need more people like her here...



  • Miracast. Of all the ways to stream video, why did people have to go with this one?

    First, it works over a WiFi-Direct connection, and only that. Meaning that you can't use it at all over a wired connection (e.g. most desktop computers). WTF? 🤦

    Second, it only seems to connect like half of the time at best. It has like a full second of lag. Streaming from my Android phone to Windows always shows huge black bars even when the orientation matches.

    And the Android connection interface is terrible, and for some reason it completely avoids using the term "Miracast" (or any other specific standard), maybe because of trademark issues. It just says "wireless displays", which is completely meaningless without specifying what standard it uses. That's the fucking point of standards! It's like having a device that can play VHS or Betamax cassettes but doesn't say which.



  • @anonymous234 Weird. Save for the lag, I found it to be quite reliable.

    I was even quite impressed when a moronic design decision on how to lay cables/connectors forced me to have the Miracast receiver way back at the side of the stage while the actual sending device was about 10 meters away from the receiver. Worked without a hitch.

    I'm also using it to project live experiments onto my Smartboard projector so I don't have a throng of 25 pupils standing around a little table (with half of them then seeing next to nothing). Works just fine as well.

    I can't use Chromecast for the single reason that our WLAN at school is configured thus that you can't "see" the other devices.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    I can't use Chromecast for the single reason that our WLAN at school is configured thus that you can't "see" the other devices.

    I thought they fixed it so if you weren't connected you could still use it?

    Or perhaps an uber-cheap pocket router?



  • @Tsaukpaetra said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    I can't use Chromecast for the single reason that our WLAN at school is configured thus that you can't "see" the other devices.

    I thought they fixed it so if you weren't connected you could still use it?

    Or perhaps an uber-cheap pocket router?

    Naw, you still at least need to be connected to the Internet. And our school's WLAN either uses a captive portal (for BYOD) or certificates'n'stuff for the school's equipment. Neither will work with a Chromecast, to my knowledge.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Tsaukpaetra said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    I can't use Chromecast for the single reason that our WLAN at school is configured thus that you can't "see" the other devices.

    I thought they fixed it so if you weren't connected you could still use it?

    Or perhaps an uber-cheap pocket router?

    Naw, you still at least need to be connected to the Internet. And our school's WLAN either uses a captive portal (for BYOD) or certificates'n'stuff for the school's equipment. Neither will work with a Chromecast, to my knowledge.

    Ah, so attach a portable router to the captive portal thing, do the auth so it's (kinda) open, then attach the chromecast to that?



  • @Tsaukpaetra Why go through all that trouble when Miracast works out of the box? :)


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    Miracast works out of the box?

    Does it though? :trollface:



  • @Tsaukpaetra said in The minor rants thread.:

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    Miracast works out of the box?

    Does it though? :trollface:

    Well, it certainly doesn't work in the box.


  • BINNED

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    it certainly doesn't work in the box.

    Are you sure? You can't be sure until you open the box



  • So. Pupils. I'm really not sure what is going on here and if I'm suffering from "Git off mah lawn!" syndrome but the two schools I'm at seem to have a problem with basic math skills, logic and stuff like that.

    Which makes teaching Physics wonderful because it's kind of the foundation I have to build upon.

    It's kind of telling if about 30% is not even able to use a simple formula without accidents.

    Just seen today - the formula for the magnetic field density of an air filled coil: B = mu_o * n * I / l. This formula is written directly below the question. Which is:

    Calculate the magnetic field density for an air filled coil with 23000 windings, length of 10 cm and a current of 1.5 A

    What do I see written down as an answer (units left out for sake of clarity)?

    B = 4 pi *10^-7 * 1,5 * 10 / 23000

    What am I supposed to make of this?

    Oh, and they're whining sometimes: "This is too hard!" or even better: "We don't know what you're asking for!"

    Just for shits'n'giggles I included two actual practice tasks in the exam, two we did just the week before. I didn't even tweak any numbers.

    Can you say: Abysmal?

    Gah.

    Oh, the exam included a multiple choice part where one of the questions was:

    The magnetic field lines are showing in which direction? a) North to south b) South to North c) North to North

    The follow up then asked them to actually draw field lines for a schema of a permanent magnet.

    Some actually managed to select "North to South" as an answer and then draw field lines going from North To North.



  • @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    It's kind of telling if about 30% is not even able to use a simple formula without accidents.

    Maybe you should allow restroom breaks.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    Today, I spent a whole hour trying to get a Makefile which makes extensive use of stuff like abspath to work in a directory containing spaces, until I found this bug:

    Seriously, just go fuck yourselves, GNU make developers. It's 2016 and apparently it's okay to ship software that cannot possibly be used if your current working directory contains a space in its path.



  • @asdf

    Severity: 2 - Minor

    Right.


  • FoxDev

    @Rhywden said in The minor rants thread.:

    @asdf

    Severity: 2 - Minor

    Right.

    It's no surprise a GNU project rates issues most noticed on Windows as 'Minor', because Windows is 'teh evulz az Satanz' according to the Grand Prophet Of GNU. That, and it's rare to have paths with spaces in on Linux machines (IMLE, YMMV).

    Also, 14 years, and there's no fix? It's almost as if they don't want to fix it...


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @RaceProUK said in The minor rants thread.:

    That, and it's rare to have paths with spaces in on Linux machines (IMLE, YMMV).

    Most directory names in my home have spaces and other special characters in them, including my "programming projects" folder. Because I want to give them useful names, and because it's great to find shitty shell scripts and make sure your own shell scripts are bug-free.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @asdf said in The minor rants thread.:

    programming projects

    The linux way would be to call that prj


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @Jaloopa said in The minor rants thread.:

    The linuxGNU retard way would be to call that prj

    </Blakey>


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @Jaloopa said in The minor rants thread.:

    @asdf said in The minor rants thread.:

    programming projects

    The linux way would be to call that prj

    Nah, it'd be called src.


  • FoxDev

    @Dreikin It'd be prj for the entire project, and under it, src, bin, dist, res, and cfg. Bcs fll wrds r 2 lng 4 Lnx ppl.


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