WTF Bites
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MySQL/MariaDB is such a braindead POS.
Latest discovery: should you have the ludicrous idea of creating a separate file system for databases, InnoDB log and temp files each, have fun syncing the cluster!mariabackup, instead of looking for databases in the system catalog and leaving it at that, assumes every subdirectory in its data dir must contain a database. Includinglost+found. And it promptly shits all over itself because it can't read that
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syncing the cluster
So you are playing with Galera in addition to plain MariaDB? Yeah, it's crap.
I tried to get it working about two years ago for some project. It worked fine-ish while the the cluster was running. But the infrastructure at customer (it's a big company, but so big that they can't even find what they can get internal support for) was a bit weird and while they wanted a cluster, they also wanted it to survive a complete shutdown of the datacentre. And, well, the recovery from complete shutdown is manual.
You run a script on each node to find which ones are up-to-date (have the highest number of last transaction), then start that first with option to recover, and start the rest. It can be scripted, and I did, but why the hell don't they do it automatically (you tell it the list of hosts in the cluster, so it knows when all have reported their state)?
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syncing the cluster
So you are playing with Galera in addition to plain MariaDB? Yeah, it's crap.
I tried to get it working about two years ago for some project. It worked fine-ish while the the cluster was running. But the infrastructure at customer (it's a big company, but so big that they can't even find what they can get internal support for) was a bit weird and while they wanted a cluster, they also wanted it to survive a complete shutdown of the datacentre. And, well, the recovery from complete shutdown is manual.
We have about a dozen clusters between 3 and 5 nodes already, previously all MySQL, now changing to MariaDB. Whole DC shutdown isn't much of a concern, it's just unlikely enough to justify a bit of manual work. But you're right, I don't see why the nodes couldn't hash that out among themselves.
Actually the whole Galera installation simply seems to be what sucks least. There's one Orrable installation (ironically the only non-clustered one, as that's the one thing they purportedly do right) in the company; it's crippled to way fewer cores than the hardware has for license reasons and it would be just prohibitively expensive to run multiple of these all over the place. And as far as I've seen, PostgreSQL clustering is also a crock of WTF.
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syncing the cluster
So you are playing with Galera in addition to plain MariaDB? Yeah, it's crap.
I tried to get it working about two years ago for some project. It worked fine-ish while the the cluster was running. But the infrastructure at customer (it's a big company, but so big that they can't even find what they can get internal support for) was a bit weird and while they wanted a cluster, they also wanted it to survive a complete shutdown of the datacentre. And, well, the recovery from complete shutdown is manual.
We have about a dozen clusters between 3 and 5 nodes already, previously all MySQL, now changing to MariaDB. Whole DC shutdown isn't much of a concern, it's just unlikely enough to justify a bit of manual work. But you're right, I don't see why the nodes couldn't hash that out among themselves.
The setup I did was basically
from the start. The customer wanted “HA”, without knowing what it means or why they want it (big company, >130,000 employees, so typical), so we did Kubernetes deployment (for the app itself it was a good move, it streamlines the installation a lot). But they didn't have a managed MariaDB, so we slapped it into the cluster—and that basically requires the thing to be automatic.There was some talk about switching to squeal-server, because they only had that or Oracle managed, but finally somehow they got approval to use AWS (I was surprised it got approved—for their security paranoia is not a disease but realism because they are the kind of company that is a target of industrial espionage.
Actually the whole Galera installation simply seems to be what sucks least. There's one Orrable installation (ironically the only non-clustered one, as that's the one thing they purportedly do right) in the company; it's crippled to way fewer cores than the hardware has for license reasons and it would be just prohibitively expensive to run multiple of these all over the place. And as far as I've seen, PostgreSQL clustering is also a crock of WTF.
There are way too many ways to cluster PostgreSQL.
But in general, clustering databases is complicated like an onion threshing machine, so it's kind of expected to be pain the bum.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in WTF Bites:
It's religious preschool, not conservative preschool.
In many parts of the world, there's a substantive correlation.
In the US, which insofar as I'm aware is the only place that uses the term "preschool," it's not a good correlation at all. There are prominent Christian denominations whose teachings emphasize the parts of Christ's teachings that line up with what The Left teaches. Some of those denominations run preschools.
Serious question: do any of these actually endorse creationism and disapprove evolution?
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in WTF Bites:
It's religious preschool, not conservative preschool.
In many parts of the world, there's a substantive correlation.
In the US, which insofar as I'm aware is the only place that uses the term "preschool," it's not a good correlation at all. There are prominent Christian denominations whose teachings emphasize the parts of Christ's teachings that line up with what The Left teaches. Some of those denominations run preschools.
Serious question: do any of these actually endorse creationism and disapprove evolution?
Maybe some do. I'm not super clear on exactly what the differences are between the Mainline Protestant denominations.
I'm also skeptical that that's what happened here. Many parts of Christianity (including mine, the Catholic Church) understand the Creation story in Genesis to be a metaphor. The part about "this is a metaphor" doesn't necessarily make it into the lesson plan for a three year old.
I've seen people be upset at any mention of "teaching the Bible" at all, so I'm entirely willing to believe that the kind of person who posts on Reddit isn't interested in the diner points of "their religion's" Biblical interpretation.
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Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in WTF Bites:
the kind of person who posts on Reddit isn't interested in the diner points of "their religion's" Biblical interpretation.
Yeah. I'm not the kind of person who posts on Reddit, but unless the church's kitchen is entirely gluten-free, I'm not interested. It's too risky for me; even if a particular item has no gluten-containing ingredients, the risk of cross-contamination is too high.
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My favorite thing is when there are configuration strings, but the code somehow depends on the exact value of the configuration string not changing.
This breadcrumb component finds the URL for the store from configuration, but breaks if the URL doesn't contain "store" (which it doesn't, now). Better, it has apparently changed before, too, because there's already a hard-coded replacement from "oldstore" to "newstore" (anonymized).
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Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
I wonder if there's a macro in there which fires when pasting. Macros are disabled? Whoops, paste too.
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We'd like this value to be configurable from the control panel, not hard-coded. Luckily, you can just decorate the code properties with an attribute to load values from the configuration!
OK, but how will the configuration get set in each environment? Easy, it gets packaged as XML and pushed along with the code package!
OK, but how does the XML for the configuration get generated? Easy, it gets generated from the attributes decorating the properties in the code!
tl;dr: You can't put the values in the code. You have to put the values in the configuration (which gets the values from the XML (which gets the values from the code))).
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Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
I wonder if there's a macro in there which fires when pasting. Macros are disabled? Whoops, paste too.
Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
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Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
I wonder if there's a macro in there which fires when pasting. Macros are disabled? Whoops, paste too.
Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
Reminds me of my "clever" hack (committed over a decade ago) where I "integrated" two systems by replacing all the tables of app A with views to app B, with
instead oftriggers to translate between.One had a hierarchy and the other was flat, so there was a fair bit of logic to deal with that.
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Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
I wonder if there's a macro in there which fires when pasting. Macros are disabled? Whoops, paste too.
Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
Reminds me of my "clever" hack (committed over a decade ago) where I "integrated" two systems by replacing all the tables of app A with views to app B, with
instead oftriggers to translate between.One had a hierarchy and the other was flat, so there was a fair bit of logic to deal with that.
-10y: I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million DBAs cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced.
-10y: Ah, what the hell, full speed ahead!
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Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
I wonder if there's a macro in there which fires when pasting. Macros are disabled? Whoops, paste too.
Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
Reminds me of my "clever" hack (committed over a decade ago) where I "integrated" two systems by replacing all the tables of app A with views to app B, with
instead oftriggers to translate between.One had a hierarchy and the other was flat, so there was a fair bit of logic to deal with that.
-10y: I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million DBAs cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced.
-10y: Ah, what the hell, full speed ahead!Well, the sales guy of our design agency sold the client a fully integrated CMS and eCommerce package (2 completely different products with no relationship to each other), and asked a single junior developer to implement it in a couple weeks.
The sales guy got a huge commission. I think the agency eventually got hit with a lawsuit.
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If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
When a document is deemed "unsafe" by Word, it opens in a limited preview mode (which means you can't modify anything) until you acknowledge the warning. Usually it tells you explicitly that, but maybe the macro warning got priority over it (which would be stupid, but...).
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Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
I wonder if there's a macro in there which fires when pasting. Macros are disabled? Whoops, paste too.
Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
Probably depends on the clipboard format. Text, no problem! SuperDuperWordFormat: Macros please!
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
When a document is deemed "unsafe" by Word, it opens in a limited preview mode (which means you can't modify anything) until you acknowledge the warning. Usually it tells you explicitly that, but maybe the macro warning got priority over it (which would be stupid, but...).
This usually happens because of this:
Clicking 'Unblock' and applying fixes all sorts of weird shit.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
When a document is deemed "unsafe" by Word, it opens in a limited preview mode (which means you can't modify anything) until you acknowledge the warning. Usually it tells you explicitly that, but maybe the macro warning got priority over it (which would be stupid, but...).
No, I could modify it just fine. If it had been in read-only mode I'd have noticed that immediately, Duh! I could manually transcribe text from one document to the other, but I couldn't paste into this document.
After years of security problems with their retarded macros, they really shouldn't train the user to just click "enable macros anyway because otherwise primitive functions every program from the 80s had don't work anymore". If anything, there being a buggy macro preventing pasting when enabled would make a whole lot more sense than pasting not working when macros are disabled.
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Neat, two
s in a row.First, Android apparently suffers from reverse-Scunthorpe, because searching for "at&t" doesn't find "myAT&T" (presumably because of the lack of a word boundary).
Then, once I launched myAT&T it prompted me to do 2 factor authentication, but it presented me with a broken form that wouldn't actually submit (despite having two identical submit buttons, neither worked). So I restarted the app, same broken 2FA form. Restarted it the third time, and... No 2FA required this time! I'm logged in without it.
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. If you enable
macrosprinting then suddenly pasting works again.Methinks it was simply terrible at telling you it opened the document in "I'm just viewing only" mode, which also disables printing for raisins.
Edit: Nevermind.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
which also disables printing for raisins.
I am cursed with knowledge why it makes sense.
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Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
I wonder if there's a macro in there which fires when pasting. Macros are disabled? Whoops, paste too.
Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
I'd actually guess that "macros are disabled" really means "you can't do anything meaningful with this copy of this document."
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
which also disables printing for raisins.
I am cursed with knowledge why it makes sense.
Isn't it something dumb like printer commands are Turing complete?
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@error this, plus printer drivers being notorious for how buggy they are, so feeding them with semi-arbitrary input is security vulnerabilities galore. And like most old software, half of MS Office code dates back to times when security wasn't treated seriously.
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Android apparently suffers from reverse-Scunthorpe, because searching for "at&t" doesn't find "myAT&T"
Or forward-Scunthorpe. "AT&T" is a four-letter word.
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Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
The Jeff Atwood school of document creation
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it prompted me to do 2 factor authentication, but it presented me with a broken form that wouldn't actually submit (despite having two identical submit buttons, neither worked). So I restarted the app, same broken 2FA form. Restarted it the third time, and... No 2FA required this time! I'm logged in without it.
So it worked after Two Failed Attempts.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
I wonder if there's a macro in there which fires when pasting. Macros are disabled? Whoops, paste too.
Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
I'd actually guess that "macros are disabled" really means "you can't do anything meaningful with this copy of this document."
Except, of course, manually type in and format all the shit I tried to paste. And, you know, the kind of editing (sans pasting) that you’d expect from a word processor that’s not just a bad IDE for VB.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
Cross-posting here because this is really dumb:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Trying to use MS Word to create a document. Have two Word windows open, one with the template from which I'm creating the new document, one with a previous document from which I intended to copy some parts that are the same. This should be simple: select text, copy, move to cursor to other window, paste.
Except nothing happens!! Stupid Word doesn't paste anything. Try pasting into Notepad and it works. Try copying some random stuff from the target document into itself, also doesn't work. Paste is simply broken.
How do you fuck this up?!?After having manually typed a lot of redundant shit into that I got frustrated and tried restarting Word, which of course didn't help. But after second time restarting it, I had an epiphany. Word was showing me a banner at the top:
SECURITY WARNING Macros have been disabled Enable Content
Which of course earlier I had dismissed, because why the fuck does this document have macros to begin with? I don't want/need any of that. But that was my big mistake. If you enable macros then suddenly pasting works again. What the actual Fuck?!
I wonder if there's a macro in there which fires when pasting. Macros are disabled? Whoops, paste too.
Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
I'd actually guess that "macros are disabled" really means "you can't do anything meaningful with this copy of this document."
Except, of course, manually type in and format all the shit I tried to paste. And, you know, the kind of editing (sans pasting) that you’d expect from a word processor that’s not just a bad IDE for VB.
I've gotten it into states where I could type and do stuff, but saving it wouldn't let me overwrite that same document (had to save it as something different). Generally I've taken "macros disabled" as "functionally read only, at least this copy anyway".
And since you can have certain actions run on paste (ie auto-format on paste), it makes some kind of
sense. Still a , but a different one.
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@Benjamin-Hall in a sane world, running without macros enabled would mean it works as if these macros didn’t even exist in the first place and just behave like a functioning word processor instead of a programming environment. Meaning that “certain actions run on paste” is exactly the kind of thing which I don’t care about and shouldn’t matter with macros disabled.
But alas, that’s not Microsoft’s world it seems.
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And like most old software, half of MS Office code dates back to times when security wasn't treated
seriously.
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And like most old software, half of MS Office code dates back to times when security wasn't
treated seriously.
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And like most
oldsoftware,half of MS Office code dates back to times whensecurity wasn'ttreated seriously.
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And like most old software, halfof MS Office code datesback to times whensecurity wasn't treated seriously.
'd that for you
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@Benjamin-Hall in a sane world, running without macros enabled would mean it works as if these macros didn’t even exist in the first place and just behave like a functioning word processor instead of a programming environment. Meaning that “certain actions run on paste” is exactly the kind of thing which I don’t care about and shouldn’t matter with macros disabled.
That would be fine for people like us.
But enterprise users would open a document which actually needs to run a macro on pasting, not notice the "macros have been disabled" banner, then complain to support that "it doesn't work!!!".
And Office is all about enterprise users.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
But enterprise users would open a document which actually needs to run a macro on pasting, not notice the "macros have been disabled" banner, then complain to support that "it doesn't work!!!".
But by having pasting disabled, they complain to support "it doesn't work!!!" anyway.
You can see users are the problem
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@Benjamin-Hall in a sane world, running without macros enabled would mean it works as if these macros didn’t even exist in the first place and just behave like a functioning word processor instead of a programming environment. Meaning that “certain actions run on paste” is exactly the kind of thing which I don’t care about and shouldn’t matter with macros disabled.
That would be fine for people like us.
But enterprise users would open a document which actually needs to run a macro on pasting, not notice the "macros have been disabled" banner, then complain to support that "it doesn't work!!!".
And Office is all about enterprise users.
’d already, but how is this preferable to FUCKING PASTING DOESN’T WORK?!
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At least, it makes the problem immediately evident. If it allowed pasting without running the macros, any document using macros for input validation would accept invalid inputs silently.
I'm not saying it's not annoying, I'm saying there is some logic to it.
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Or they implemented paste as a macro in the document.
Reminds me of my "clever" hack (committed over a decade ago) where I "integrated" two systems by replacing all the tables of app A with views to app B, with
instead oftriggers to translate between.
If I didn't know your sense of humor I'd be afraid I'd run into our Jira guy.
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@error this, plus printer drivers being notorious for how buggy they are, so feeding them with semi-arbitrary input is security vulnerabilities galore. And like most old software, half of MS Office code dates back to times when security wasn't treated seriously.
But it's not feeding them semi-arbitrary input. Word is doing the formatting—and it's already done it on screen, so if there is a problem, it's been triggered already—and should only emit fairly simple PDF by virtue of not knowing how to emit more complex one. At this point it's just runs of letters at positions, graphic primitives and raster images.
… I suppose Word actually uses a separate renderer for print, which is
, but given we know the first version was a death-march, bug-driven project and that there is probably sill a lot of code from back then…
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@error this, plus printer drivers being notorious for how buggy they are, so feeding them with semi-arbitrary input is security vulnerabilities galore. And like most old software, half of MS Office code dates back to times when security wasn't treated seriously.
But it's not feeding them semi-arbitrary input. Word is doing the formatting
Word doing the formatting is part of the problem. Buggy text processor + buggy printer drivers + absolute control of input file = much exploiting.
and it's already done it on screen, so if there is a problem, it's been triggered already
You assume printing works the same way that drawing pixels on screen does. It doesn't. Not even close. Especially in legacy software like MS Word. PostScript is helluva drug.
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TIL:
Q and X don't have small-caps variants in Unicode
… actually Q was added in 2018 while there still does not seem to be any “LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL X”. I am also surprised how the codes are all over the place. Probably the earlier added ones come from legacy codes, but why in the name of Sideways Athena would the legacy codes have just some small-caps?
It comes from this post:
There seems to be a basic assumption of ASCII identifiers. Hey, this
ain't the eighties!Let's have us an XᴍʟHᴛᴛᴘRequest. Absolutely clear with no scope for
misunderstanding in either direction: Gᴄ; Rᴄ; Aʀᴄ; SimpleHᴛᴛᴘServer.Monospace font support is a little poor, but I'm sure they'll fix that
up once the desire is demonstrated.Q and X don't have small-caps variants in Unicode, so acronyms will be
banned from having a Q or an X in the middle.but that was obviously made as a joke, so that's not a WTF.
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@Bulb why are there small-caps letters to begin with? You don't encode bold italics as a separate unicode character either, as far as I can tell.
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@topspin I don't know that they should be separate Unicode characters, but fonts, good ones at least, do have separate bold/italic variants, rather than programmatically slanting the letters or making the strokes thicker
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Yes, but even with that reasoning, there would be no reason to include small caps since they're not graphically different from normal caps.
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@topspin I don't know that they should be separate Unicode characters, but fonts, good ones at least, do have separate bold/italic variants, rather than programmatically slanting the letters or making the strokes thicker
But Unicode isn’t fonts. At least I thought, but it seems nobody can agree with what should or shouldn’t be represented by Unicode. (6 billion flavors of poop aside)
