WTF Bites

dkf

@cvi One is insufficient for that find!

dcon

In the VK_NV_ray_tracing spec:
=== Issues

1) Are there issues?

*RESOLVED*: Yes.

Literal LOL. Caused coworker walk over and LOL also.

kazitor

This page is a little too tall to fit on my screen. I'll take a screenshot with Firefox's "Take a Screenshot" tool then.

So it just dumps the navbar at the top of the next screen, huh? Guess I'll resort to a grossly-enlarged "Responsive Design Mode" screenshot next time.

I wonder what happens when the screen gets really tall…

Nope, just at the bottom.

Tsaukpaetra

@kazitor said in WTF Bites:

just at the bottom.

I really have to wonder what it's doing to accomplish this effect...

kazitor

@Tsaukpaetra Got it. I have to scroll to the bottom to press the "copy" button; the navbar doesn't also appear at the top.

Polygeekery

This morning we were getting frantic calls from a client because their internet was completely down. Comcast said that the extreme low temperatures were basically the cause. The client was freaking out about all of this. My wonder was why the hell they were working in the first place. Without divulging exactly what they do, I can tell you that literally no one was going to be using their services today.

So it ends up that he is going to send everyone to work from home. (Good idea. That is what you should have done this morning so they did not have to go to work when it is -15F.)

Just now we started getting calls and tickets because people cannot connect to the VPN...

Gribnit

@Polygeekery Looks like somebody is gonna have to go outside today...

TimeBandit

@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:

Just now we started getting calls and tickets because people cannot connect to the VPN...

Polygeekery

@Gribnit said in WTF Bites:

@Polygeekery Looks like somebody is gonna have to go outside today...

No.

Polygeekery

@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:

@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:

Just now we started getting calls and tickets because people cannot connect to the VPN...

Basically.

This shit is all JFM to them.

dcon

@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:

Just now we started getting calls and tickets because people cannot connect to the VPN...

Duh. The pipes are frozen. (Please. Let there be a tech support person that actually said that to a customer somewhere...)

cvi

In today's episode of "Random Windows Reboots": Windows reboots while installing some stuff (a SDK). The results are less than stellar. Zero warning, at least from what I saw. Wtf.

dcon

@cvi said in WTF Bites:

In today's episode of "Random Windows Reboots": Windows reboots while installing some stuff (a SDK). The results are less than stellar. Zero warning, at least from what I saw. Wtf.

While installing? Or that installer is a and did the reboot itself.

cvi

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

While installing? Or that installer is a and did the reboot itself.

Yeah, while installing. I first suspected the installer too, but (a) the installation clearly ended up incomplete, and (b) the second time around there was no reboot. So, now, my main suspect is Windows itself.

dcon

@cvi said in WTF Bites:

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

While installing? Or that installer is a and did the reboot itself.

Yeah, while installing. I first suspected the installer too, but (a) the installation clearly ended up incomplete, and (b) the second time around there was no reboot. So, now, my main suspect is Windows itself.

Due to (a), this looks like it belongs in the new Win10WTF thread!

loopback0

@cvi said in WTF Bites:

So, now, my main suspect is Windows itself.

It would have gotten away with it if not for meddling users...

cvi

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

Due to (a), this looks like it belongs in the new Win10WTF thread!

Uh, what thread?

*checks*

Ok. Maybe. But at this point: . Also, no screenshots and the second time around the install succeeded (so no repo).

Besides, this thread is fine.

brie

@kazitor said in WTF Bites:

So it just dumps the navbar at the top of the next screen, huh?

No, that's where the navbar is - when you take the screenshot. It's at the top of your viewport.

If you want the navbar to be at the top of the page, scroll all the way up, so that the navbar is at the top of the page.

dcon

Everything is a phone. Sigh.

https://app.hero.jobs/j/7f7UrJhPd4/Software-Engineer-DNN-Co-Design-

(The other WTF: recruiters. What is so hard about "I'm looking for a Windows position. Not Linux.")

pie_flavor

Tsaukpaetra

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

Everything is a phone. Sigh.

A very large phone.

Leaving feedback:

I expect nothing to change.

Atazhaia

So Google has introduced a new feature in mobile Chrome for easier reading of websites I guess. It works very well.

It repeats the leading image and text infinitely! Scrolling down will just keep loading the same content over and over. Awesome work!

TimeBandit

@Atazhaia said in WTF Bites:

It repeats the leading image and text infinitely! Scrolling down will just keep loading the same content over and over.

In case you missed it the first few hundred times

HardwareGeek

@Atazhaia And it renders the text as gibberish.

HardwareGeek

@HardwareGeek It seems someone doesn't appreciate my humor, such as it is.

Lorne Kates

@PJH said in WTF Bites:

@mott555 said in WTF Bites:

@boomzilla This is the Internet. Dick shapes make everything better.

Just ask Slack.

The thing is, before designing that new logo, Richard (the head of Slack's design team) asked his co-worker for suggestions about how it should look.

Richard didn't realize his co-worker was visually impaired, so he just misinterpreted his co-worker's answer.

"I can not see, Dick."

Gąska

@Lorne-Kates

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9c_KttvQPU

Lorne Kates

@topspin said in WTF Bites:

I'm going with fucked up rich text to plain text conversion.

I'm going with speech-to-text being used by a very aggressive uptalker.

aitap

Do you know those small, application-specific, absolutely not general purpose scripting languages? The kind that had probably started as application macros storage format and later had been forcibly evolved (or, perhaps, accidentally discovered) to be Turing-complete, suffering a lot of mutations in the process. And even if, years later, everyone would agree in retrospect that using Tcl or Lua or something else *designed* to be an embedded scripting language would have been better, the books are already written, the customers are already accustomed and all bugs are now features that someone had used at least once. Let's talk about one of those.

My scientific advisor told me that he wants some zoomable and pannable plots. I'm not blaming him: there are situations in life when even a publication-quality plot is still just a picture (and the plots I've been doing in R are admittedly lacking in quality); also, I guess that being a scientific advisor to a grad student entitles you to offloading the job of loading text files with numbers inside into a plotting program onto the same grad student. In fact, he was quite specific. He told me that I could use any plotting application I want as long as it quacks like Origin. (Not to be confused with Origin.)

A younger me would have thought that it's a great time to introduce my scientific advisor to the wonderful world of free cross-platform scientific plotting applications, but after discounting Gnuplot, QtGrace, Octave and R as not Origin-like enough all you have left is QtiPlot and SciDAVis, and something tells that he still wouldn't like them even if there was a way to magically export a bunch of data from R in their native format without writing a converter first.

Instead, I launched Origin and tried to import a bunch of text files and plot them all in various ways. Indeed, there was a lot of files I had prepared and some of the aspects of the importing process are tedious. For example, the text importing function is called "import ASCII", and of course there is no "text encoding" option. To get Cyrillic characters to display properly, you need to ensure that the file is encoded in CP-1251, import it, then set the font to Arial CYR. I've heard that it's been fixed in 2018 version - at the cost of file format incompatibility, of course - but some of us are still stuck with Origin 8.something, released in 2009 or 2011.

Of course, I want to automate the process, and, of course, there is such a feature, called LabTalk. So I thought: It's a programming language. I am a programmer. What could possibly go wrong?

LabTalk looks like a confusing cross of different syntax conventions, reminding me of C, Visual Basic, DOS batch files, AutoHotKey, and even INI.

First, there are fairly obvious functions that just work as you'd expect with no surprises:

function double dGeoMean(dataset ds)
{
    double dG = ds[1]; 
    for(int ii = 2 ; ii <= ds.GetSize() ; ii++)
        dG *= ds[ii]; // All values in dataset multiplied together
    return exp(ln(dG)/ds.GetSize());
}

No WTF to see here. Move along. Except...
What did LabTalk have before functions, implemented in Origin 8.6 SR0 (2011)? Sections.

[Main]
run.section(, output, "Hello World" from LabTalk);
[output]
type "%1 %2 %3";
// outputs: Hello World from LabTalk

With sections, you are allowed up to 5 string parameters to be substituted in the program text. Passing numbers by value is implemented by something akin to Makefile string substitution.

In addition to normal, easily recognisable functions, and less familiar sections, there are X-Functions. Here's how you call them:

newbook s:=1;
impASC options.sparklines:=0 
options.FileStruct.DateFormat:="yyyy'-'MM'-'dd"
options.Hdr.MainHdrLns:=19
options.Hdr.AutoSubHdr:=0
options.Hdr.SubHdrLns:=1
options.Hdr.Units:=0;

newbook s:=1; is a X-Function call that creates a new Excel-like Book window with spreadsheets inside. Everything between impASC and ; is another one that imports a text file in the newly created spreadsheet. There are no variables in the example above.

If you are calling an X-Function and forgot to specify an option, don't worry: most X-Functions usually default to a convenient global variable like fname$, where one X-Function would write the location of the file and another one would get it from. So you can write stuff like

string fname$="%YUSGDP.txt";
url$="https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/GDP.txt";
web2file;

or even

dlgFile;
impASC;

and not even think about parameters.

Notice the dollars in string variables? You are lucky to have them, because until Origin 8.0 (2007) all you had were 26 "string registers", with 14 of them occupied by Origin itself. And since anything in LabTalk can be a string if syntax allows it, they had to add the awkward $ to distinguish string variables from string literals.

Error handing in LabTalk is... varying. Sometimes I would get a light-red floating error window telling me that I had screwed up my parameters for impASC, then I would compare the online documentation with local documentation and find crucial differences (like, parameters are named differently) - but at least the cause and location of the error is clear. Other times, the execution of the script would just stop with no observable effects. What happened? Did I forget a dollar somewhere? Was the file I wanted to import ~~bad~~non-conforming to parameters specified? Who knows.

Then there's straight bugs:

[read_factors]
// parameter: full path to a directory
string dir$ = "%1";
// create a new Book with the same name as the directory
newbook name := dir.GetFileName()$;
// import a file I know exists
impASC fname := dir$ + "\sample.txt" /* other options */ ;
// execution silently stops when I enter impASC

Eventually, after trying a lot of different stuff, I printed the value of dir$ + "\sample.txt". Before the GetFileName()$ call it was exactly what I expected (despite the single backslash). After dir.GetFileName()$ a piece in the middle of dir$ is replaced by a space. I didn't find anything about that in the manual. Am I hallucinating?

And the sad part is, I haven't even started making the plots. LabTalk has a very advanced syntax for specifying which data you want plotted or otherwise interacted with. I can't wait to start building those strings from parts, knowing that some sheet names have been silently changed by Origin because they didn't conform to something.

It might sound overly harsh, but I haven't had this much frustration from working with a new language since I tried C for the first time, knowing only Perl5 and Octave back then.

Lorne Kates

@sloosecannon said in WTF Bites:

WAIT @boomzilla talking about his smartphone? I smell lies and deception!

He upgraded from a phone that was always open to one that was SMART enough to be open or closed.

ae0468c0-9753-4b76-b958-753345668154-93944325-old-cell-phone.jpg

UPGRADE

77f55f66-f6a1-4a09-a1d8-947ba2296918-1309060622-motorola-i412-the-cheap-basic-flip-phone-2.png

pie_flavor

@aitap said in WTF Bites:

Do you know those small, application-specific, absolutely not general purpose scripting languages? The kind that had probably started as application macros storage format and later had been forcibly evolved (or, perhaps, accidentally discovered) to be Turing-complete, suffering a lot of mutations in the process. And even if, years later, everyone would agree in retrospect that using Tcl or Lua or something else designed to be an embedded scripting language would have been better, the books are already written, the customers are already accustomed and all bugs are now features that someone had used at least once.

MPS: The Domain-Specific Language Creator by JetBrains

Use the MPS platform to create your own domain-specific language that speaks to your business needs.

Gąska

@pie_flavor now we can produce new horrible scripting languages faster than ever before!

pie_flavor

@Gąska except their ability to be horrible is very limited, because of MPS's projectional nature.

Bulb

@pie_flavor Wow, a new incarnation of the ancient idea of making programming simple enough to allow non-programmers do it. Sorry, no, programming remains programming and requires at least some programming skill no matter how “simple” (usually the “simple” forms are awfully complex) you make it.

JetBrains makes crap anyway. No reason to give a damn anyway.

pie_flavor

@Bulb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sRS1dwCotw

Gąska

@pie_flavor Blakey is that you?

pie_flavor

@Gąska MPS is simultaneously everything Blakey wants and everything Blakey hates at once. I made sure to point that out the first time I posted it here.

topspin

@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:

@Gąska MPS is simultaneously everything Blakey wants and everything Blakey hates at once.

But you repeat yourself.

dkf

@aitap said in WTF Bites:

And even if, years later, everyone would agree in retrospect that using Tcl or Lua or something else designed to be an embedded scripting language would have been better

Tcl for one was designed that way because the original author was fed up with making a different shitty application-specific language for every EDA tool he was making. (We know this for sure: it's on the record.) It was only afterwards that he learned that it also worked as a general programming language and that people could usefully make whole applications in it directly.

HardwareGeek

@dkf said in WTF Bites:

Tcl for one was designed that way because the original author was fed up with making a different shitty application-specific language for every EDA tool he was making. (We know this for sure: it's on the record.)

I knew it's used as the scripting language for many EDA tools (although my exposure to it in that context consists mainly of saving the tool's current configuration, which results in a Tcl script to recreate that configuration, then editing it to strip out the irrelevant stuff), but I didn't know that's what it was designed for.

Zecc

@LB_ said in WTF Bites:

I present to you: the Steam Self Updater

Similar thing just happened to me, except it showed as a Windows 7 titlebar, including program icon, title, minimize, restore, and close buttons. Clicking the restore or program icons did nothing, but right-clicking brought the context menu, from which I was able to restore the window to its normal state.

pie_flavor

@Zecc Holy shit I would have missed this post had you not quoted it. I had this problem several times over and I think it was @anotherusername who gave me a homemade program to diagnose it, and I never could. It was Steam this whole time?

Zecc

@aitap said in WTF Bites:

It might sound overly harsh, but I haven't had this much frustration from working with a new language since I tried C for the first time, knowing only Perl5 and Octave back then.

You felt frustrated with C after you experienced Perl?

Zecc

@Lorne-Kates I miss clam-shell phones.

izzion

Received an ad this morning for "Bose Frames"

Sunglasses, with speakers in them

Zerosquare

@izzion: "You don't want to look like a douchebag. You want to sound like one as well."

Atazhaia

Hmm... Something doesn't look quite right here...

loopback0

@Atazhaia said in WTF Bites:

Hmm... Something doesn't look quite right here...

Edge isn't in the Recycle Bin?

topspin

@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:

@Atazhaia said in WTF Bites:

Hmm... Something doesn't look quite right here...

Edge isn't in the Recycle Bin?

I expected @TimeBandit to beat you to that.

Tsaukpaetra

Someone loves their auto-censorship plugin.