WTF Bites
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@sloosecannon Converting line endings. Since notepad still does not understand newline-only line endings, viewing a unix text file on windows will result in all text being shown as one line. Classic mac files (carriage return only) will give similar problems.
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@timebandit It is also still the only non-formatted-text editor guaranteed to be present on any windows PC.
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It is also still the only non-formatted-text editor guaranteed to be present on any windows PC.
And it isn't quite the garbage can fire that it used to be back when it could only handle files a few kilobytes long.
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@kt_ I was going for a cheap-shot at and the typical answer to user comments, not really caring about the issue at hand, TBH...
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@timebandit It is also still the only non-formatted-text editor guaranteed to be present on any windows PC.
is Micro-Soft waiting to improve that POS ?
They should just buy Notepad++ if they're too lazy to improve Notepad
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WTF?
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@yamikuronue Tag or branch not pushed?
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@yamikuronue said in WTF Bites:
WTF?
Someone used "feature" where they needed to put a possibly abbreviated commit checksum ID string?
ETA: or apparently connection issues can cause arbitrary incomprehensible git errors?
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@timebandit Why does Notepad even need improving? It's a basic no-frills text editor, and its job is to be a basic no-frills text editor.
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Tag or branch not pushed?
But this is inside Bamboo. This is Bamboo talking to Bitbucket Server. I have no idea how it bungled the git command?
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@raceprouk they did fix the "bush hid the facts" bug, and raised the file limit, but not handling Unixoid EOL is a PITA.
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@raceprouk said in WTF Bites:
@timebandit Why does Notepad even need improving? It's a basic no-frills text editor, and its job is to be a basic no-frills text editor.
To make it, at least, understand different line endings
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@sloosecannon said in WTF Bites:
@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
@sloosecannon said in WTF Bites:
The best part of that is that it's remarkably easy to detect binary files. Like, just look for
NUL
s in the file, you'll get 99% of them! Then it doesn't matter how it's configured.I have a better way. Is it stored on a binary-based storage device? Yes? It's a binary file. There is literally no justification, ever, for modifying the contents of a file, because you ass-umpted that it was an ASCII file and it contained characters that you thought ASCII files shouldn't have. Unless you created the file, you don't know shit about it. Every file is a binary file. Done.
That's also true - what even are the benefits of text vs binary transfer modes? Is there any reason to transfer as text?
If you can find a server that uses EBCDIC encoding, and you want to transfer an ASCII text file onto it using FTP, it'll automatically
corrupttranslate it from ASCII to EBCDIC, and vice versa for transferring an EBCDIC file from the server to your PC.Yes, it translates line endings, but line endings are a legacy clusterfuck, and at this point in the game anything that doesn't recognize all types of line endings is and TR.
Basically, if you cannot create files using whatever tool you need to use, transfer them in a byte-for-byte fashion, and then have the target software read them properly, then something is very, horribly wrong.
@timebandit It is also still the only non-formatted-text editor guaranteed to be present on any windows PC.
WordPad.
No, not for editing them. (WTF, man. Why would you even suggest that?)
I mean that you open the file in WordPad once, save it, close it, and then you can open it in Notepad. Unlike Notepad, WordPad recognizes non-Windows line breaks, and it converts them to Windows line breaks, so Notepad won't have an aneurysm when it opens the file.
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Basically, FileZilla defaults to treating files without extension as ASCII files, therefore it strips CR, therefore it corrupts binary files.
FileZilla?
But it gets better. There's an 8-year old bug report for this:
Withy the first comment being "hurr durr, works for me, E_WONT_FIX".
Then the guy reporting responded and the dev replied against "hurr durr, files in /bin are managed by package manager, User shouldn't copy them, hurr durr, I only transfer text files, E_FUCK_YOU_WONT_FIX".
FUCK YOU TOO, FILEZILLA!
Fucking sigh now I'm going to have to get my corner of WtfCorp to change FTP clients.
@Arantor has once recommended WinSCP. I've been using it for a year and a half now and it's really great. ;)
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not handling Unixoid EOL is a PITA
@timebandit said in WTF Bites:
To make it, at least, understand different line endings
An issue for maybe 0.01% of all Windows users. Hardly worth wasting time over, since almost all of them will already know about and use Notepad++ and other tools anyway.
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@raceprouk said in WTF Bites:
Hardly worth wasting time over
You're right. They better waste that time improving the ads in Win10 start menu
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But at least .LOG still works
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@raceprouk it's still shitty and broken. Line endings are an easily-solved problem. Even if they just made it automagically convert them to Windows-style on load, that would be an acceptable solution to the vast majority of people who just want to open this text file that they got and not have it look like clown vomit. There's no justification for putting a shitty, broken text editor in Windows.
/blakeyrant
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
I mean that you open the file in WordPad once, save it, close it, and then you can open it in Notepad. Unlike Notepad, WordPad recognizes non-Windows line breaks, and it converts them to Windows line breaks, so Notepad won't have an aneurysm when it opens the file.
Or copy into WordPad, copy back into Notepad.
Or use the PowerShell one-liner:
sc file.txt ((type file.txt) -Replace "`n", "`r`n")
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connection issuesusing git can cause arbitrary incomprehensible git errors
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@raceprouk said in WTF Bites:
@timebandit Why does Notepad even need improving? It's a basic no-frills text editor, and its job is to be a basic no-frills text editor.
It still has that bug where saving with word wrap enabled adds corrupt line endings in the view. Thankfully they aren't present in the file saved, but it still causes problems for users copying from notepad.
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@kt_ Yeah, but actually getting people to do things is hard
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@kt_ Yeah, but actually getting people to do things is hard
If they don't do stuff, they can't screw anything up!
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Incidentally, I have come to the conclusion that there is literally no reason ever to let an FTP client transfer anything in ASCII mode. Binary all the things. Transliteration of text files is not the job of a file transfer utility.
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Incidentally, I have come to the conclusion that there is literally no reason ever to let an FTP client transfer anything in ASCII mode. Binary all the things. Transliteration of text files is not the job of a file transfer utility.
Truer words are very rarely said.
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Appropriate.
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Anyway, @raceprouk was looking up why FTP has a text mode, and she found this from RFC 959:
Data is transferred from a storage device in the sending host to a
storage device in the receiving host. Often it is necessary to
perform certain transformations on the data because data storage
representations in the two systems are different. For example,
NVT-ASCII has different data storage representations in different
systems. DEC TOPS-20s's generally store NVT-ASCII as five 7-bit
ASCII characters, left-justified in a 36-bit word. IBM Mainframe's
store NVT-ASCII as 8-bit EBCDIC codes. Multics stores NVT-ASCII
as four 9-bit characters in a 36-bit word. It is desirable to
convert characters into the standard NVT-ASCII representation when
transmitting text between dissimilar systems. The sending and
receiving sites would have to perform the necessary
transformations between the standard representation and their
internal representations.Basically, there's a text mode because FTP was created when there were about 56348972065894368743096523487265874982.5 different incompatible ways of storing text.
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@raceprouk said in WTF Bites:
56348972065894368743096523487265874982.5 different incompatible ways of storing text
I'm really curious about the .5 way
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@raceprouk my co workers have been heard to announce that they've never worked with anyone as hairy as me
"giggity: ?
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@timebandit said in WTF Bites:
@raceprouk said in WTF Bites:
56348972065894368743096523487265874982.5 different incompatible ways of storing text
I'm really curious about the .5 way
The upper halves of the 8-bit ASCII extensions, I believe.
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
There's no justification for putting a shitty, broken text editor in Windows.
At this point, I would not be surprised if actually no one has ever looked at Notepad's code for years. It probably lives in some "legacy apps" folder of their build farm (or whatever they use), gets automatically compiled with every new version of Windows without any changes because it's so fucking simple that there is nothing that can break inside it, and all the developers that ever looked at its source code have retired or died.
The day the automatic compilation will fail will be the day someone will look at it, and decide to throw everything away and replace it by any of a gazillion of existing replacements (probably some NodeJS monstruosity built from some embedding of Edge, that will require a network connection to the cloud, and with ads).
But it still won't be able to correctly read EoLs.
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FUCK YOU TOO, FILEZILLA!
That issue thread is infuriating.
Fuck you filezilla.
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All ftp clients are just @filezilla alts
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It is also still the only non-formatted-text editor guaranteed to be present on any windows PC.
And it isn't quite the garbage can fire that it used to be back when it could only handle files a few kilobytes long.
Yeah! Now it can handle files a few megabytes long!
But only due to faster processors making it not completely horrendous.
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At this point, I would not be surprised if actually no one has ever looked at Notepad's code for years
That was true 20 years ago
They did eventually find the original author. He quit to become a teacher
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At a social event some years later, I met him again and asked about the transition from software > development manager to high school science teacher.
His response: "You'd be surprised how many of the skills transfer."
Some guy in the comments said:
Heck, I used to capture escaped monkeys (true!) for a living and now I design programming languages; you'd be surprised at how many of the skills transfer.
A word of advice: if you're ever in a meeting with someone who gets hostile, just pin their arms behind their back with one hand and hold their teeth away from anything you don't want bitten while you open the cage with the other hand. Then toss them towards the cage in one smooth motion; they'll totally go for hiding in the cage, at which point, you've got 'em.
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At this point, I would not be surprised if actually no one has ever looked at Notepad's code for years
That was true 20 years ago
If the comments in that post are to be trusted, Notepad dates back to... 1983!
(slightly doubtful since Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, although '83 could very well be the start development date... I expect it would still have been under development -- or at least under the eye of the developer, who apparently was in the company until the mid-90's -- for a few more years, in that case)
So we may very well have here a piece of code that has not been changed for the past 30 years or so.
Well, not quite so in fact, since we know that they fixed the "Bush hide the facts" bug in the mid 2000' (and the wiki page explicitly says that Notepad itself was fixed, not the underlying library that had the bug).
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I remember creating a new C++ windows app project in VS at some point and getting basically a fully functioning notepad clone.
There's not wanting to cannibalize your office products, I get that, but at this point, Notepad is just ridiculous.
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@cartman82 it was never designed to protect against cannibalism but like Solitaire etc be a demonstration of what the software could do.
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The CEO is about to start a presentation, and only then does she realize the product she is about to demo isn't prepared.
AGAIN.
No one on the tech side was notified this was about to happen.
AGAIN.
Que the usual scrambling to get everything ready, while she's vamping in front of the crowd.
AGAIN.
Additional WTF:
Coworker: I have uploaded a new image, but the "Save" button is still disabled!
Me: Shit! They fucked up change detection. Type a space into the title field to trigger it.
Coworker: It works! Image saved.
Me: Great! I need to fix this pronto.
Boss: Yes! Make it add space automatically!
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@timebandit said in WTF Bites:
I find it amusing they didn't label the little velcro cable tie keeping his right pantleg from getting caught in the chain.
That's what's great about my new bike - it has a plastic housing around the chain. Thus your trousers don't get caught in the chain and you also don't have to think about dirt on the chain.
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@cartman82 said in WTF Bites:
I remember creating a new C++ windows app project in VS at some point and getting basically a fully functioning notepad clone.
There's not wanting to cannibalize your office products, I get that, but at this point, Notepad is just ridiculous.
Metapad does a decent job at being a fully functioning Notepad clone.
Metapad is a small, fast and completely free text editor for Windows (95/98/NT/XP/Vista/7) with similar features to Microsoft Notepad but with many extra (and rather useful) features. It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepad's features and much, much more.
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It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepad's features and much, much more.
Given Notepad's feature list is "Create and edit text files", that's not a big challenge
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@anotherusername
Metapad used Harden!Your text file became uneditable!
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Incidentally, I have come to the conclusion that there is literally no reason ever to let an FTP client transfer anything in ASCII mode.
It used to be useful when dealing with file listings (yes, they use the same mechanism) but the whole of FTP is just awful.
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@raceprouk said in WTF Bites:
It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepad's features and much, much more.
Given Notepad's feature list is "Create and edit text files", that's not a big challenge
No, but packing all the extra features into 1 extra KB is...
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That would be nice on my SP4. Like every second time I take it out of my bag after a few days and want to turn it on it just gives me the "no battery"-icon.
Norepro. Sounds like some application is misbehaving? Connected standby works pretty well here...
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@cartman82 said in WTF Bites:
The CEO is about to start a presentation, and only then does she realize the product she is about to demo isn't prepared.
AGAIN.
No one on the tech side was notified this was about to happen.
AGAIN.
Que the usual scrambling to get everything ready, while she's vamping in front of the crowd.
AGAIN.
Additional WTF:
Coworker: I have uploaded a new image, but the "Save" button is still disabled!
Me: Shit! They fucked up change detection. Type a space into the title field to trigger it.
Coworker: It works! Image saved.
Me: Great! I need to fix this pronto.
Boss: Yes! Make it add space automatically!I hate those fields. Along with password fields that don't let you paste.