UI Bites

Arantor

@Tsaukpaetra is that IE Mode?

Either that or something designed to look pretty close to it when the server isn’t sending their own 404.

But since this looks suspiciously like a vendor crapware browser window, it could easily be an IE mode window intercepting a 404 and using an almost IE11 404 page for shits and giggles.

It is not just a UI bite, but a healthy sized WTF bite too, whatever the actual reality.

Tsaukpaetra

@loopback0 said in UI Bites:

@Tsaukpaetra is that IE Mode?

Embedded IE, yes, that's still a thing as mentioned elsewhere.

loopback0

@Tsaukpaetra oh embedded IE. I'm not sure if that's better or worse.

inb4

Bulb

@Tsaukpaetra said in UI Bites:

@loopback0 said in UI Bites:

@Tsaukpaetra is that IE Mode?

Embedded IE, yes, that's still a thing as mentioned elsewhere.

I recently mentioned it, and it was this very piece of crapware where I saw it.

I had the dubious pleasure of using that “thing”, with the added complication that I had to log in with a different account that the one I was logged into windows (because I was connecting to a customer network), but the Microsoft login dialog won't ask you which account unless you've used more than one—but because this is IE and not Edge, I haven't used the customer account in it. That's how I found it is indeed IE webview (eventually I found a way to back from the login error to get the needed prompt).

@Arantor said in UI Bites:

But since this looks suspiciously like a vendor crapware browser window, it could easily be an IE mode window intercepting a 404 and using an almost IE11 404 page for shits and giggles.

The whole login process is implemented in a webview. It has to be. It is OAuth2 / OpenID Connect and that requires a web view—as a way to allow different identity providers to use different authentication methods and second fucktors.

It kinda makes this aspect not a (I do not imply there are no other s in that äpp). The client needs a webview to run the login process in, and the authors wanted it to work even on old versions of Windows—so they could either bundle one, bloating up the package, or use the old library that is available even on old windows. Choosing the old library makes sense in that context.

BernieTheBernie

I did something really bad today. After switching my machine on this morning and reading one article in Nature, I left it alone. For several hours. And guess what my computer did?
TaskManager just showed me:

Fortunately, my ISP removed the 100 GB per month limit at no extra charge last year - otherwise I would not be able to read WDTWTF ofr the next few millenia.

dkf

@BernieTheBernie I like how you got a special exemption from the Laws of Physics to enable that to happen.

BernieTheBernie

@dkf Maybe because I disabled Windows Updates on that machine, and because I was not looking...

Zerosquare

That's irresponsible. What's gonna happen if there's an update to the laws of physics?!

BernieTheBernie

@Zerosquare The Laws of Physics were encoded long ago in FORTRAN libraries. No updates required.

Gern_Blaanston

@Zerosquare said in UI Bites:

That's irresponsible. What's gonna happen if there's an update to the laws of physics?!

Maybe that's what happened. Maybe the latest update to the laws of physics is 18,446,744,073,709,550,286 bytes.

I think I'm going to need a bigger hard drive.

BernieTheBernie

A few months ago, I applied for a job at %company%. Today I received an email from them telling me that they still have my data, and would delete them in 2 weeks. But I may extend that for another couple of years by clicking blah blah blah.
Noting unusual, GDPR crap.
But the subject line of the email was more interesting:

Deine Bewerbung als %jobTitle%

LaoC

Nice try, OVH, but could I interest you in [% $TemplateSystem %] written in {{ .language_of_the_day }} that will be so much easier than your current <shit>?

Gern_Blaanston

Every now and then I will encounter a retarded website that only works properly with Chrome, so for those instances I use Brave as my chrome-ish browser. It works OK and doesn't suck any more or less than any other browser.

But then today I noticed something. I wanted to re-size the browser window and make it a little taller, so I did what I've done with every program since forever, grab the top of the window and drag it up to make it a little taller.

Except, I can't grab the top of the window. I can grab the sides or the bottom, but I can't grab the top of the browser window.

I eventually discovered that I grab one of the top corners and re-size the window that way. But still ... How/why do you even do something like that?

Gern_Blaanston

@BernieTheBernie said in UI Bites:

A few months ago, I applied for a job at %company%. Today I received an email from them telling me that they still have my data, and would delete them in 2 weeks. But I may extend that for another couple of years by clicking blah blah blah.
Noting unusual, GDPR crap.
But the subject line of the email was more interesting:

Deine Bewerbung als %jobTitle%

%funnyComment%

BernieTheBernie

@Gern_Blaanston said in UI Bites:

How/why do you even do something like that?

DESIGN

topspin

@Gern_Blaanston said in UI Bites:

But still ... How/why do you even do something like that?

How?
Magic says: Hiding the window borders, painting your own, and fucking up WM_NCHITTEST.

Why?
Because somebody got a nice bonus for it.

ixvedeusi

@topspin

Raymond Chen, 2006: The Quick Launch bar and Favorites menu belong to the user.
Microsoft, 2024:

topspin

@ixvedeusi that's not just 2024. Microsoft has both deeply schizophrenic divisions and always acted as Rules for Thee, Not for Me. So much so that pointing it out anytime MS breaks those rules themselves is against Raymond's blog ground rules.

Arantor

@topspin said in UI Bites:

@Gern_Blaanston said in UI Bites:

But still ... How/why do you even do something like that?

How?
Magic says: Hiding the window borders, painting your own, and fucking up WM_NCHITTEST.

Why?
Because somebody got a nice bonus for it.

Another instance of Brendan Eich Knows What’s Best For The World? (The man behind JavaScript.)

BernieTheBernie

@topspin

Many people use the notification area to provide quick access to a running program

I know one such guy: Fritz (you may remember him from ). And he enforced that crap on all machines - he used his domain administrator privileges to do so.

dcon

@topspin said in UI Bites:

@Gern_Blaanston said in UI Bites:

But still ... How/why do you even do something like that?

How?
Magic says: Hiding the window borders, painting your own, and fucking up WM_NCHITTEST.

At a previous company, they kept pushing us to do that. We finally got them to back down (and roll the change back) when we pointed out that we were constantly fixing various bugs with it ("Look, it's costing us a lot of money" - then they listened). Who would have guessed that the borders look different based on themes and Windows versions!

Arantor

The manual for Semantic Mediawiki sucks donkey balls. For so many reasons.

But today's comes courtesy of some fucking genius web designer.

So I'm reading the manual to see if this thing will help me with something I'm working on, and I realise this particular help page has some loading it's doing.

Those three grey bars are animated. It's a nice little animation.

It's also moving the entire fucking sidebar up and down +/- 5 pixels.

Zerosquare

Contains 25% of the Daily Recommended Dose of Jellypotato.

dcon

@Arantor said in UI Bites:

It's also moving the entire fucking sidebar up and down +/- 5 pixels.

Obviously a bug. It should be

BernieTheBernie

As mentioned else where, I wanted to create a chart based on values from a database table, and have a tooltip be shown when hovering with the mouse over it, like with an image map. Eventually I decided to use the Svg.Net library. It comes with virtually 0 usable documentation (there may be some autogenerated documentation from class and function annotations, but what can you do with that?).
I found out that I can take an existing svg text, and create a SvgDocument from that:

string svg = "<svg>\r\n<text x=\"10\" y=\"120\">543</text>\r\n</svg>";
SvgDocument doc = SvgDocument.FromSvg<SvgDocument>(svg);

And then analyse doc in the Locals window of the debugger, especially its Children property recursively. It took me often faaar tooo loonnngg to arrive where I wanted to get to...

Anyways, now I can generate such a chart (though with some minor optical glitches):

Yeah, that mouse hovering also works.
In Edge.
It fails in Firefox.

For that tootip, the svg document contains many rectangles with a nested title element (the latter contains the text to be shown). If I set the stroke property to transparent, it works fine in Edge.
If I set it to white, um, well, it works, too... Even in Firefox, but now the guide lines are hidden behind the white rectangles (they were added to the document earlier on).

Web programming is real fun.

Vault_Dweller

@BernieTheBernie said in UI Bites:

I decided to use the Svg.Net library. It comes with virtually 0 usable documentation

I'd be interested to know what your selection criteria was. Documentation obviously wasn't one of them.

BernieTheBernie

@Vault_Dweller What other Svg libraries for .Net do you know? And how recent are they - 2005?

dkf

@BernieTheBernie Would you rather have one that is old but documented and works, or one that some idiot keeps on hacking around with and where the documentation is basically "you got the source code, right?"

BernieTheBernie

@dkf said in UI Bites:

old but documented and works

in NetScape 4.76?

BernieTheBernie

Have I already told you how much I love our wonderful Excel?
I have a biiigggg spread sheet with data from my biking tours. Lots of data, like total ODO reading, day kilometers, pedalling power, pedaling speed, muscle energy expenditure, battery energy expenditure, etc. And then charts are generated in a different sheet.
Of course, some data cells are empty: when I stayed at home. For line charts, I set the drawing option to "connect data points" for such cases, that is the line does not get interrupted. Works for data where the value is entered manually.
But...
... it fails when the value is calculated. And a "" in a formula like =WENN(E2<>0; RUNDEN(H2/E2;1);"") (btw, localized key words are another fun ) generate filled cells and are interpreted as 0.

Google told me a solution: create an error, e.g. with NA().
Of course, that failed. And you can guess the reason, can't you?
It is localized, too.
In German Excel, I have to use NV() instead.
Great!
Worx!
And no add a a conditional formatting for hiding errors. Btw, it is done by setting the font color to white in case of error, as the Microsoft Documentation tells us.

Can I simply use =RUNDEN(H2/E2;1) instead? That would also generate an error.
No, that fails, too: it is treated like 0 in the chart.

Gurth

@BernieTheBernie said in UI Bites:

create an error, e.g. with NA().
Of course, that failed. And you can guess the reason, can't you?
It is localized, too.
In German Excel, I have to use NV() instead.

And Excel gives you no indication that what you’ve typed isn’t recognised as a keyword as you entered it?

Arantor

@BernieTheBernie you have no idea how much I sympathise with your pain.

Bulb

This
Is
The
Current
CAPTCHA
At
GitHub

Yes, you have to answer TWENTY of them.

Whom should I shoot?

Arantor

@Bulb dafuq is that shit? Do they really have such a serious bot problem to necessitate that, while also going “we have so many users, we can afford to piss some of them off”?

ixvedeusi

@Arantor said in UI Bites:

@Bulb dafuq is that shit?

That next generation AI ain't gonna train itself.

And GitHub has encrusted itself so deeply into all SW dev processes by now that pissing off users really isn't much of an issue.

Bulb

Also, GitHub has been owned by Microsoft for, what, over 5 years now, and Microsoft tells everybody to use GitHub for code hosting, but it still does not federate with MS365 accounts. .

… at least I found somewhere that by using a ‘work’ Microsoft e-mail the accounts will connect, but they ain't doing that.

LaoC

@Bulb said in UI Bites:

Also, GitHub has been owned by Microsoft for, what, over 5 years now, and Microsoft tells everybody to use GitHub for code hosting, but it still does not federate with MS365 accounts. .

I guess BingBang left them a bit reluctant.

dkf

@Bulb said in UI Bites:

… at least I found somewhere that by using a ‘work’ Microsoft e-mail the accounts will connect, but they ain't doing that.

It might only work with organisations that have enterprise accounts.

Bulb

@dkf Well, I am … supposed to join such organization, so we are probably doing something wrong. Because I was invited into the organization that does belong to an enterprise, but I still don't see the enterprise anywhere despite seeing the organization, and I can't change the account to an enterprise one or something.

dkf

@Bulb said in UI Bites:

@dkf Well, I am … supposed to join such organization, so we are probably doing something wrong. Because I was invited into the organization that does belong to an enterprise, but I still don't see the enterprise anywhere despite seeing the organization, and I can't change the account to an enterprise one or something.

I'm not quite sure how to set up an enterprise account, but it probably involves contacting Github customer services. Not all enterprise licenses require a fee, FWIW, but they're not exactly self-service to get going. Once that's done, organisations can be joined to the enterprise (which involves an invitation being sent out by the enterprise admin and accepted by an organisation admin); this is the step I've seen.

For personal accounts, it might depend on having your verified email address correspond to the enterprise's domain?

Bulb

@dkf In my case the enterprise and organization are already set up (and I believe there is a self-service for setting up an enterprise now). And I have an Entra/M364 account that is supposed to go with it. So I created an account with that e-mail and accepted the invitation to the organization, but the account didn't connect.

And I don't know whether I should have done something else, or whether I was sent the wrong type of invitation or whether it simply doesn't work because glucose.