The minor rants thread.

Rhywden

With .NET 4.6 you also need to disable "Compile with NET Native tool chain" or it will take even longer than before :)

Rhywden

So, today was my first lesson in a subject called "Data Handling". It's mainly centered around MS Office.

Yes, I'll be teaching the poor slobs how to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint properly. No, that wasn't my idea. But rest assured, I'll also go over the limits of said programs, as in: "If your Excel file is 20 MB big, consists of 20 Tables and a metric shitton of nested functions and macros, then this was a bad idea."

This is not the WTF, though.

No, as this is a new batch of pupils, they still need their login information. The basic functionality is actually nifty: You enable the "New User Sign-On" for the room in the supervisor tool. Everyone logs in with "New User" and then is greeted by a form wherein they can enter their basic details and choose a password. The supervisor tool allows me to see their progress and override their entries, if needed. Only after I have judged everything correct the user entries become committed, with their usernames being automatically determined by the FirstLetterOfFirstnamePlusCompleteLastname algorithm.

That's the idea, at least, how it was provided to me by another teacher (I had not known about this process until 10 minutes before the lesson...)

In practice, they were able to enter their information and then it got stuck on "Confirming Data" on their end. In my tool, a single pupil popped up (with their info marked "incomplete", mind). So, over the next hour we tried several things:

restarting the process
restarting the process in waves
restarting the process for just one pupil
rebooting their PCs
rebooting my PC
waving torches and pitchforks in IT's general direction

Nada. That's when I pulled up the user's manual for the software (not that this was included in the software itself, had to find and download it first) and discovered that there was also the possibility of manual entry by the admin (i.e. me), a bit hidden away.

Pulled up the form, entered the data for the first pupil, tabbed to the username textbox and...

... was greeted by "Internal Error 1539". Clicked "OK", entered the username myself, clicked commit and done.

I guess the username algorithm barfed, either didn't throw a proper exception or the exception was not caught properly, and there was no kind of timeout or feedback. Good job, guys.

Bonus: When I told the other teacher about this error, he said: "I had summoned IT for just this very error yesterday, the guy worked on the PCs for three hours and told me he fixed it!"
BonusBonus: The semi-public WLAN is borked again.
BonusBonus²: The Office2013 licenses on my laptops have not been entered properly.
BonusBonus³: I cannot mount ISOs on some of my laptops.
BonusBonus⁴: IT managed to bork the USB mounting process - for 50% of USB drives the driver gets installed but the device never pops up in the Explorer.

Scarlet_Manuka

Discourse wasn't involved with this somehow, was it?

loose

TIL

In a medical emergency I would rather have no mobile phone, than a Windows Phone.

As least with not having a phone, you could die with only the trauma and distress directly related to that medical emergency. With a windows phone, you could die with the additional trauma and distress of knowing you could of been saved as you try to make a call to the emergency services.

It's not that my windows phone knew I was having a medical emergency, just that it choose that particular time to exhibit one of its quaint feature quirks. Like taking its time to respond to "touches", and then interpreting the inevitable frantic stabs as a request to open an App that takes forever to load. Thereby causing any other action to be completely ignored until you eventually switch away / shut that down. When you do open the phone app, the fuzzy logic behind "fat finger syndrome" gets it consistently wrong. Do you know how long it takes to terminate a call so that you can try and redial?

boomzilla

@loose said:

Do you know how long it takes to terminate a call so that you can try and redial?

How many reboots did it require?

loose

None that I witnessed, but then my attention was elsewhere

Magus

That sounds normal on the horrible, months old insiders version of W10M I'm running, but nothing like what I remember from 8.1.

loose

Does not the brain have a fantastic mechanism for dealing with bad memoires?

Yamikuronue

I called 911 from my android phone with no trouble, but it then put itself into "emergency callback mode".

What's the first thing you want to do upon being told the police are on their way? For me, it's text my loved ones to let them know I'm safe but running late. Oops, can't do that in emergency callback mode.

wtf.

Rhywden

Sounds more like you have problems with the hardware. I'm on my second Windows Phone now and never have run across an issue like that.

I have run across my previous Android phones randomly rebooting, though.

loose

I know what I experienced. I have a reasonable idea of what was happening, because it happens on my Windows 8.1 desktop PC. Actually, I have experienced similar on just about every PC I have had and I strongly suspect everybody else has, but just not noticed or considered and issue (i.e it is accepted behaviour). Sometimes it is "App" specific but the fundamental issues is: You click or touch something and nothing happens immediately (as is normal expectation) or at all. But it is not a behaviour you want in an emergency.

Have you ever had a dream where you need to switch a light on, but no matter how many times you flick the switch, it don't come on? Then you run through the house and none of the other light switch work. Or is that just me.

On the plus side, I rarely, if ever (and only then by mutual humorous agreement) say "told you so".

dkf

@loose said:

Have you ever had a dream where you need to switch a light on, but no matter how many times you flick the switch, it don't come on? Then you run through the house and none of the other light switch work. Or is that just me.

Pro-tip: that's called waking up during a power cut.

Yamikuronue

Today's [Tales from the trenches][1]:

Imagine, if you will, a student. A college student. A college student who spends 7 years in a terrible state economy attending school to learn how to make games. A college student who goes through 7 years without being told of any internships that might help give him a better chance of getting into his dream job. A college student who learns how to make games and has the time of his life for 7 years.

A college graduate who finds himself unable to get a job making games because he doesn’t have any professional experience. A college graduate unable to get a job outside of the industry because he is too damn specialized and is thus lacking in other areas.

(Emphasis mine)

I'm sorry, what the fuck? Did you sit on your ass for seven years waiting for your teachers to just hand you a job? I'd have more sympathy if it read "applied for internships but never got one due to competition", because at least you're putting out some goddamn effort. Jesus wept.

"Oh boo hoo, I spent seven years learning programming and design, but it's not like I could get a job as a designer or a programmer, I'm too specialized!". LEARN SOMETHING. It's not that fucking hard! You think the fresh entry-level programmers straight out of school know WTF they're doing? Nope, they learn on the job. You'd know that if you ever fucking interned! Go to a contracting agency, take any programming job they offer you, and figure your shit out.

Tales from the Trenches has gotten worse the more it branches out. I loved the WTF-y stories of QA, it was a nice compliment to WTFy programming stories here, but damn, they're taking any old whiner nowadays.
[1]: http://trenchescomic.com/tales/post/the-futile-struggle

accalia

@Yamikuronue said:

they're taking any old whiner nowadays.

the quality of websites is going down hill...

why i remember when there was this website that posted curious perversions of technology, i think it was called The Daily WTF , actually had stories that were well thought out, insightful and actually contained perversions of technology, instead of what we get these days which are articles about sloppy coding standards, bad bosses, lazy developers and/or "programming challenges"

Why back in my day we had proper WTFs, the sort that would actually make you shout "WHAT THE FUCK?!" out loud, at the office, in front of all your coworkers, and your boss too!

we also didn't have these fancy new things... whadda ya callem... smartphones! didn't have them! when we wanted to talk to someone we had to get up and walk over to their desk to talk to them, and if they weren't at their desk we called these things called pagers and left our phone number on it so they would call us back shortly, except when they didn't in which case we paged them again until they did call us back.

and we had to walk to work too! and it was up hill too! we put in 10 hour days, with no lunch or coffee breaks! then we had to walk home, which was also up hill, except this time it was snowing as well.

OI! YOU YOUNG FUCKERS GET OFF MY LAWN! IF I CATCH YOU I WILL GIVE YOU SUCH A SMACKING WITH MY CANE SO I WILL!

loose

, but I wasn't going to say anything

accalia

neither was I, but then the idea to do that rant hit me and i could barely stop giggling long enough to write it!

loose

@accalia said:

and we had to walk to work too! and it was up hill too! we put in 10 hour days, with no lunch or coffee breaks! then we had to walk home, which was also up hill, except this time it was snowing as well.

Metaphysical (right word?) Translation:

Uphill to work - We go to work with high hopes and expectations, to "elevate" our souls.
Uphill to home - We go home to lift ourselves out of the pit of despair that work really is

Rhywden

@loose said:

I know what I experienced. I have a reasonable idea of what was happening, because it happens on my Windows 8.1 desktop PC. Actually, I have experienced similar on just about every PC I have had and I strongly suspect everybody else has, but just not noticed or considered and issue (i.e it is accepted behaviour). Sometimes it is "App" specific but the fundamental issues is: You click or touch something and nothing happens immediately (as is normal expectation) or at all. But it is not a behaviour you want in an emergency.

Have you ever had a dream where you need to switch a light on, but no matter how many times you flick the switch, it don't come on? Then you run through the house and none of the other light switch work. Or is that just me.

On the plus side, I rarely, if ever (and only then by mutual humorous agreement) say "told you so".

This is not an OS specific behaviour, though, and I've had it happen to me on feature and dumb phones as well.

accalia

GAH!

Chrome puts the user tab thing there next to the buttons. that's fine, whatever

TeamViewer put their share window thing there, over the chrome one and there's no way to move it or say "FUCK OFF! I DON"T DO PRESENTATIONS FROM THIS COMPUTER AS IT HAS FAR TOO MANY SCREENS FOR EFFECTIVE PRESENTATIONS!"

/me breathes into a brown paper bag for a minute or so.

ah. that's better..... i just had to say it is all.

loopback0

You can disable that for specific applications or entirely... well, you could, I assume you still can.

accalia

@loopback0 said:

You can disable that for specific applications or entirely... well, you could, I assume you still can.

do you remember where you found that option, because i couldn't find it and it's driving me batty

loopback0

I don't have it installed now.

Try the advanced options, look for QuickShare or QuickConnect.

edit: A Google suggests it's QuickConnect.
http://www.rizonesoft.com/remove-the-teamviewer-quickconnect-title-bar-button/

accalia

HORRAY! it's gone!

thanks kind stranger!

FrostCat

@accalia said:

OI! YOU YOUNG FUCKERS GET OFF MY LAWN! IF I CATCH YOU I WILL GIVE YOU SUCH A SMACKING WITH MY CANE SO I WILL!

I believe this is yours:

Rhywden

Okay, just to keep you from being entertained, another boring rant about my adventures with XAML and Windows 10 UWP.

So, I found a relatively easy solution to the whole "ListBox SelectedItems is read-only". It involves deriving a new class from ListBox and creating a custom binding to the IsSelected property of a ListBoxItem.

This, of course, means that my ItemTemplate now needs ListBoxItems instead of, say, a simple TextBlock. Okay, due to different dimensions, this messed up my layout for a short while, no biggie. But there's a small problem.

If you hit the text inside the ListBoxItem, the item does not get selected. It lights up, sure, so it does detect the click/touch/whatever event but it does not select the item. It only selects the item when I click/touch the empty parts of the ListBoxItem

But it gets better: I also have ComboBoxes and I was interested if they showed this behaviour as well. Now, the expected behaviour is this: You click on the ComboBox and you get a dropdown. Another click and you selected the item you clicked.

Now, if your ComboBox has an ItemTemplate involving ComboBoxItems, then:
a) Clicks on the ComboBox do nothing if there isn't a preselected item.
b) You have to hit the (small) arrow indicating a dropdown
c) Hitting items in the dropdown does nothing

How do you fuck this up? If you're not supposed to use a ComboBoxItem inside a Template for a ComboBox (as the name of the freaking thing suggests you do!) then why is there no warning?

If you're using a TextBlock in the ItemTemplate, then everything works as expected.

Magus

It sounds like you're really going to a lot of effort templating things. I mean, I template things on occasion, and it typically works. But I don't usually feel the need to.

As for why the comboboxitem is treating you that way, those are most likely generated automatically around your items, and handle all the events, so if you template them and don't handle all the same events, it's expected that clicking on things won't work. But you can template those if you want, and there may even be good reasons to do so.

Rhywden

If you have an ItemSource binding, you also need a template.

Because otherwise you'll only see a box with the content: Object<object>

Magus

That depends on what you want to display. If all you want is some text, there's usually a DisplayMemberPath property, or you'd use a converter. If you want a full-on control, your best option is indeed a template.

HardwareGeek

Minor rant: Why does Steam say, "LAST PLAYED Today," when it hasn't even finished installing the game, yet?

Arantor

I wondered this too.

blakeyrat

Because:

Steam is implemented by dumbshits
When you install a new game, they want it to appear at the top of the "recent games" list, and the only way they can figure out how to manage that is to fudge you having "played" the game for zero seconds.

anonymous234

How can LibreOffice/OpenOffice STILL be so goddamn bad?

MS Office document support. I understand that it's not their fault, and that Microsoft formats are a clusterfuck of compatibility hacks. But come on, it's still at the point when it can't even get font sizes right for most documents I receive. Just like it was 5 years ago. How hard can it be to figure out one number? Google Docs can actually do it.
The interface. I can't quite point out what's wrong with it, it seems to be... everything. Like how it hasn't changed at all in 12 years. It still feels like an early proof of concept. I can't even think of any innovation they've made. Have they not been receiving any funding?

We're at a point where we have two good, free, web-based office suites, even more mobile suites, but no desktop-based ones.

Office programs in general are a mess.

blakeyrat

No, you must be wrong. Remember how all the problems with it were due to Oracle, and as soon as they fork it to LibreOffice all the problems will be solved in like a month and a half? Remember how great they all said it was going to be?

Did they at least get rid of the JVM dependency? That alone would be a huge improvement.

HardwareGeek

Just called the Employment Security Department with a question about my unemployment insurance. Had to wait through a long spiel about the benefits of direct deposit vs. paper checks, not just once, but twice, in both English and Spanish, before I could even start navigating through their menu system to try (unsuccessfully, so far) to get to a human.

Polygeekery

No luck with just hitting the 0 over and over again until it fails out to a human?

Lorne Kates

@blakeyrat said:

No, you must be wrong. Remember how all the problems with it were due to Oracle, and as soon as they fork it to LibreOffice all the problems will be solved in like a month and a half? Remember how great they all said it was going to be?

I remember them saying how they're working on a totes awesome new UI interface sidebar. So it worked out exactly as I thought it would.

Meanwhile:

Open Excel.
Put some numbers in Column A, rows 1, 2 and 3.
In a new cell add formula =SUM(A:A).
Add more numbers in A4, A5, A6.
Look at your sum! Magic!

Now open Sheets or Cal or whatever the fuck.
2) Put some numbers in Column A, rows 1, 2 and 3.
3) In a new cell add formula =SUM(A:A).

OH SHIT SON ERROR THAT ISN'T A VALID FORMULA!

Fine, let's change it to =SUM(A1:A5), because who would ever need more that 5 rows. (or 999 or whatever arbitrary number)

Add more numbers in A4, A5, A6.
Look at your sum! IT IS WRONG BECAUSE A6.

Filed under: I used some flavor of OO for a year before giving up. I wanted to like it. I really did.

HardwareGeek

Honestly, I didn't try that, because I didn't want to have to start over again if it didn't work. The system, once you get to it, starts with 1 for English, then enter your SSN so that if you ever get to a human, they'll have your record in front of them, then some stuff I don't remember, then 9 for all other questions, then "We are experiencing high call volumes. Press 1 to have us call you back at <the number you called from> or <stuff I didn't listen to to have us call you back at another number>." Still waiting for the callback.

FrostCat

@HardwareGeek said:

enter your SSN so that if you ever get to a human, they'll have your record in front of them

...who will ask you to repeat the number, of course.

In my experience, your best bet is to call them the instant office hours start in the morning, and even then expect a long wait time.

HardwareGeek

@FrostCat said:

who will ask you to repeat the number, of course.

Of course.

@FrostCat said:

call them the instant office hours start

I intended to do that but I was busy, um, on here.

blakeyrat

@Polygeekery said:

No luck with just hitting the 0 over and over again until it fails out to a human?

I don't remember if HardwareGeek was one of the Washingtonians on this forum, but I seem to recall he is.

In any case, I can confirm that there are zero humans working in the Washington State unemployment office.

HardwareGeek

I meant to add that I got the callback almost as soon as I submitted the previous post. It turns out I do have to tell them about pulling money out of my retirement savings, and they will withhold money from my payment because of it, but the estimate the guy gave me for the amount they'll withhold is trivial — it will definitely cost the state a lot more to process than the amount they'll save by not paying me. Even at minimum wage, the time somebody will have to spend on the phone with me next week will be as much as the amount they will deduct from my payment.

HardwareGeek

@blakeyrat said:

I don't remember if HardwareGeek was one of the Washingtonians on this forum, but I seem to recall he is.

Yes, we're almost next-door neighbors. Well, not quite, but if the city named in the whois record for your domain is accurate, we live within about 10 miles, or so, of each other.

Polygeekery

@blakeyrat said:

In any case, I can confirm that there are zero humans working in the Washington State unemployment office.

Just gremlins and shmoo?

blakeyrat

@Polygeekery said:

Just gremlins and shmoo?

You can send email to an email address. About 3 weeks later, something comes back, but it obviously isn't from a human because it inevitably has nothing to do with the question you asked.

Although they kind of do their job. Because the sheer annoyance of having to deal with them to get the money I'm legally owed was so difficult, no other factor encouraged me more to find another job.