@Weng I have however see a blind person walking out of the bathroom run into a can put there by someone who moved it there from it's usual place.
antonrojo
@antonrojo
Best posts made by antonrojo
Latest posts made by antonrojo
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RE: After reading some UX stuff on Medium
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New blogger account: count the WTFs
WTF I found on Blogger's new account page increasing WTF-ness (www.blogger.com, click on 'Create a Blog')
- Have to reenter passwords when page refreshes (okay, that's probably a feature)
- unreadable captchas. nothing like being a human and failing a Turing test. WTF does this say?
- no button to generate a new captcha. you need to reload, and enter your passwords again
- click on the handicapped button and you hear a bunch of unrelated characters (like being visually impaired isn't bad enough, blogger has to make fun of you too)
- Have to reenter passwords when page refreshes (okay, that's probably a feature)
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RE: I am driving this bus over you.
Witness the power of whitespace:
Back in 2001 I was working as a web developer for a .com company. We were in the middle the .bomb and knew we were in a daily struggle to make the company successful. We had a good business plan, collecting taxes for cities and counties. Ultimately the business failed because of too much thinking out of the box. The company hired a high dollar publicity firm to attempt to get mentions in newspaper and magazine articles but refused to spend any money on real advertising.
I was developing the tax collecting application for (LARGE_POPULATION_STATE) but kept getting pulled off the project to fix bugs for (LOW_POPULATION_STATE). This put the large application behind schedule by weeks.
We had a conference call with elected officials on the progress of the large state. I was a fly on the wall during the meeting, I was not introduced and I never spoke up. When the project manager told the state officials the project was delayed they pressed for why. His immediate response was, the "resource" assigned to it was just falling behind. I was the "resource" they were referring to.
It got worse, It was immediately suggested that the resource should be replaced because they were missing deadlines. The project manager assured them that the resource was working as hard as he could (me) and that things would be taken care of. That was not good enough, one of the elected officials said, "I know Mr.DotComBusinessOwner personally, I will call him and take care of the resource problem."
The call ended on the happy note of 'you do what you need to do'. Immediately after the call I asked the project manager why he didn't tell them the truth that I had been pulled from from their project and that I was not working on it full time. He explained that is just not how real business was handled and that we could not indicate to them anything less than them being the most important project we had.
I then asked if he was gong to Mr.DotComBusinessOwner and explain to him the real situation before he received the phone call from the state officials.
His reply, "I can't do that, I have also been telling him that you were working full time on the project. I have to cover my own ass, sorry!"
I bit my tongue and plotted my exit. I quit with no notice one week before the large state project was scheduled to go live. To my knowledge it never went live as the company went into bankruptcy about two months later. -
RE: Your page is too big and you can't have it back (Oracle Portal wtf)
For readers using TDWTF for technical help (good luck with that): the solution to this problem is to view the properties of the 'locked' packages. This will list the source code for the file you cannot open.
Editing through Toad will get around the varchar2 limitation nerdydeeds mentioned. -
RE: You can't do any better than that?
A cite from some research on the 'when to merge' question (the only study I could find after a quick search):
"If you can do it without slowing down very much, that allows the driver who's entering to enter at a higher speed," Davis said. "If they have to crawl along waiting for an opening, they slow down the other vehicles on the freeway."
Makes sense: more space means it is easier to merge safely and at a high speed. Another study I saw (too lazy to look it up) had the same somewhat non-intuitive findings regarding whether it is faster in general if cars drive close together (tailgate) or have a lot of space. Though adding car lengths between cars lengthens the line of cars, again, they found that traffic moves faster.As long as the early-merge cars move at more than twice the average speed of cars that need to stop to let late-mergers in, merging early is better--in my experience this is the case since once driver slamming on the brakes for one late merger stops a long line of cars. Same with tailgating: all it takes is one minor fenderbender and traffic backs up for miles, ruining any speed gain that tailgating might provide.
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RE: FileMaker Pro exports a string field as a number
I read that too quickly--that approach is indefensible. From a guide on porting from Filemaker files: "ODBC and SQL have come relatively late to FileMaker". It sounds like they haven't gotten around to creating a decent ODBC driver.
Apparently, it takes some extra ODBC programming, at least according to MySQL's painful porting process:
Perl DBD::ODBC module reads data from FileMaker
Lots of ODBC junk here<lots of="" odbc="" junk="">
$mysql_sth->bind_param( 1,$rowdata[0],SQL_INTEGER); # asset_id - integer column
$mysql_sth->bind_param( 2,$rowdata[1],SQL_VARCHAR); # model - varchar column</lots>
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RE: FileMaker Pro exports a string field as a number
I think you are 100% correct about the guessing. SAS uses a very similar approach and you literally set an option called GUESSINGROWS when using the lazy option to import a file.
Based on my experience with Filemaker, I would say the WTF in your case is that it uses the guessing approach (which can be a legitimate solution to some problems) but does not provide the user with a method to configure or disable the option.
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Your page is too big and you can't have it back (Oracle Portal wtf)
This error occurs with dynamic pages (a type of portlet which uses plsql to generate HTML) more than 32k:
WWV-0180: <font size="-1">Took exception. Cause: You are editing a dynamic page that contains more than 32K of HTML code. Action: Avoid writing more than 32K of HTML code</font>
The fun part is that Oracle Portal does not allow the page to be edited after that. So if you weren't making backups or using versioning, it's time to start over. Believe it or not, Oracle, sometimes its okay to have web pages with more than 32k of HTML code.
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RE: Colorado DMV wtf's in the news
The newspaper has a WTF of their own: a large portion of their article criticized Avanade, yet there are no quotes from any of the consulting companies or even the obligatory 'they did not comment on the story'. It sounds like the Colorado DMV played a significant role in the project failure as well through conflicting designs, etc.
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RE: Java? something else?
You might try Java Web Start, which will allow you to run a desktop app with file permissions. I just finished writing one using Netbeans and found it easy to write though there only seems to be automatic deployment for Sun Server.
These got me started:
www.netbeans.org/kb/articles/matisse-jaws.html#_1_3
java.sun.com/products/javawebstart/