Sorry, I don't do innuendos unless they're obscure. I'm out.
Posts made by Shoreline
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RE: Insert dick joke here
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RE: Double Negatives
@KarenM said:
So let's see: the telemarketers effectively unioned the list of current members AND the list/s of people they shouldn't be ringing, in such a way that the names appeared in their list at least 15 times. Bad SQL structure anyone?
I think it's a bit of an assumption that they're organised enough to be using a database. Not sure how they got the current members when they should have the ex-members either.
For truly high-technology, one would need a printed, photocopied list of ex-members from an excel spreadsheet (exported from a database where it's stored in JSONed XML format), photographed on a wooden table, pasted into a zipped word document and delivered by courier to the telemarketers in a USB drive for security reasons.
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RE: Duplication of effort
@dhromed said:
@Shoreline said:
You live under bridges and you left the darkspear tribe because you didn't think they were provocative enough.
Have you read Ftrain?
I have now! Looks like some kind of US political satire.
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RE: Installing Installation Manager with the Installation Manager installer
Yo dawg, I heard you like Installation Manager...
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RE: Duplication of effort
@spamcourt said:
I wonder why people use jQuery, with all overhead, in cases where standard JavaSccript is enough.
Because you're clearly a troll, that's why. You live under bridges and you left the darkspear tribe because you didn't think they were provocative enough.
You know what? I'll keep an open mind. I'll assume there are cases somewhere out there where people have javascripts which don't want to interact with the DOM in any way (or at least barely at all). I know advertising code likes to avoid jQuery because of overhead (I like to stay away from advertising code... it's nearly always a minefield). You can document dot write that to the bank.
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RE: Schrodinger's Server
@snoofle said:
After some digging, the whole "glitch" turned out to be caused by an end user at the client who forgot his new password and couldn't log in, so he bucked it up the chain that he couldn't log in, and the folks above assumed our stuff was down and bitched up the chain.
Idiots.
I was actually expecting the story to be "they thought it was down, they acted as if it was down, it wasn't down" before this part.
This reminds me of a case when I was working at Massive Insurance Co. Somebody had reported malware on a server and the top guys ordered all the sites to be shut down. I don't remember the details, but I remember we certainly didn't need to shut down all the websites to be shut down to protect the users or fix the real problem (which might have involved real malware).
Yeah... your story is better.
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RE: Representative bill
@pjt33 said:
@Ronald said:
So what, you had an outstanding credit.
I think the point is that the outstanding credit wasn't used to pay off the previous bill's total, which it cancelled exactly.If so, the reasoning may be something to do with interest or tax. I tried spending a year dead for tax reasons once. Didn't get much done.
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RE: My Pet Peeve: Maximum Length Passwords
@dhromed said:
@Shoreline said:
The sentences and words which would reduce empathy in passwords do not exist in my passwords
So would you say that your passphrases are always very kind and understanding?
"I can't guess you!"
"It's ok, you were never meant to. You made a good attempt though!" -
RE: My Pet Peeve: Maximum Length Passwords
@morbiuswilters said:
...you only need to remember a single master password. Having to remember a thousand passwords would be a nightmare and only means you're going to do something stupid along the way.
That's a fantastic idea! Now, who do we trust with all those master passwords? I say the government - they haven't done anything suspicious lately. Maybe Google.
@morbiuswilters said:
Second, you only get good entropy from using words if you use random generation and you accept the very first result it gives you. If you try to reorganize the words to make something more memorable, you're reducing entropy (which is why you shouldn't be trying to make that shit memorable in the first place..)
I understand your concerns. In the age-old security vs convenience debate, you're leaning towards security.
As one in favour of more characters, let me put this to you: The sentences and words which would (as you quite rightly explain) reduce empathy in passwords do not exist in my passwords. I mis-invent or deliberately underspell words, and the sentences do not ways all proper grandma make. I would like to submit that without some kind of social engineering/mentalism/shoulder-spying, a machine will have problems predicting these patterns specific to the individual (give it five years, I guess). Especially with today's nauseatingly creative spelling and grammar.
I'm taking a risk bringing you this information. Right now Derren Brown is saying "Aha! And I bet I can guess where Shoreline banks!".
@morbiuswilters said:
Third, if you're going to use random password generation, then you get far better entropy per-character by using random characters ([A-Za-z0-9] works fine) than words. Twenty characters is the max you'd ever need--that means when you run into sites with a maximum length of 20 characters, you're actually getting the best security you can hope for, instead of dicking around with random words. Security needs to be practical and the xkcd method ignores a lot of legitimate concerns.
Fine. You get the government or Google to log you in and I'll stick with making up words. First one to get cracked is a rotten egg.
@morbiuswilters said:
In short: you're taking security advice from a guy who draws a shitty webcomic. This may not be the wisest course of action.
@Shoreline said:
I only know the basics of password/session security, but as I understand it, passwords are hashed into a 32-character string. Why then, can I not get an extra 12 characters in my password?
You apparently don't even know the basics. A 32-character string seems to imply MD5, which nobody should be using any more. Also, the length of the hash output has absolutely nothing to do with the length of the input. MD5 is 32 characters (well, hex digits) whether the input is 1 character or 1 million.
However, bcrypt, which is the recommended way to store passwords, does have a maximum password size of 55 bytes, but you really don't need more than that.
What I do know is that every time I look into a new database password field I see a password field of 32 characters. This was not my choice and I may have revealed in the past that I've not been working with the best software, so maybe this is more of an omen regarding the progress of my education. I'll make a note of this new-fangled Bee-Crypt you speak of.
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RE: The Phantom Dialog
@CodeNinja said:
Oh god I just figured it out...
The remote application can -also- throw up the dialog, although it's actually a different dialog written in Managed C++, not C# like the control app, it just looks identical.
Yeah, time for a beer.I was going to say, it sounds like a case of the wrong code. An identical dialog box though... and you think you've seen it all, then you see a guy eat his own head.
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My Pet Peeve: Maximum Length Passwords
Perhaps having subscribed to the XKCD philosophy on passwords, I am often mildly concerned for my safety when confronted with the following:
I am referring to the password's maximum length of 20 characters.
I only know the basics of password/session security, but as I understand it, passwords are hashed into a 32-character string. Why then, can I not get an extra 12 characters in my password?
This particular example comes out of ProcessMaker, which already looks to me to be a deadline-induced regurgitation - at least it has a single standard. When I am told a maximum length but that it must contain a number, an upper-case character, a lower-case character, and the batman symbol, feel a new level of hypocrisy is being achieved. "You can make it secure, but not too secure!". Did I check the box saying "You have my consent to perform logical fallacio on me"? I think not.
Correct me if I'm wrong in my assertions, but otherwise, in the interests of naming and shaming, I would be very interested in starting a rumour that certain banks or
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RE: World class pedantic dickweedery
@morbiuswilters said:
You have to feel a bit bad for the people who earnestly believe in global warming--who think the Earth is in peril--and who have pinned their hopes on these fuck-ups.
You can't deny climate change is happening. It's 14 Celsius outside while only 6 months ago it was 20 degrees lower. Imagine what 25 years will bring.
I like to think of myself as the porn star of logical fallacio.
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RE: Mymessages.wireless.att.com
@joe.edwards said:
OK, I'm receiving harassing SMS messages, and looking for ways to block this person without paying a $5/mo service charge.
Telephones have been around longer than the internet. We can figure out how to filter spam email, but you have to spend money or jump through hoops to filter out spam phone numbers. I do not understand this.
I have a home phone. Unless it rings, cuts off, then rings again, I assume it's a spam caller, because unless my housemate is expecting a call, it's a robot or somebody looking for someone I've never heard of.
This doesn't happen often enough to be a problem, but if I was getting a call from a robot every 5 minutes, I would have to disconnect my phone, thus losing half the use of my phone.
Are you at least able to make the handset text tone silent when the harasser's number texts your phone?
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RE: The new management is kicking a**
@TGV said:
@snoofle said:
The CTO fired him on the spot.
Without telling him first that he would be fired if he didn't comply? Cause that would be quite a WTF, IMO.Not sure I agree with that. With the top dog telling you your new priorities, and every other dog in between in the room with you, you accept your new priorities. Exceptions to this include critical paths, in which case he needed to communicate "I need to complete Y to be able to do X". Otherwise it was pretty obvious he was going to lose his job, as if he's not doing what he's paid to do, why is he being paid?
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RE: Representative LIIIIAAAAAAAARGHGHGG
@mikeTheLiar said:
@dhromed said:
function writevacancies(){
writeVacancies();
}<font face="Lucida Console" size="2"> function writeVacancies() { writevacancies(); } </font>
Filed under: writeVacines()
FTFY:
function writeVaccines() { return (function writeVacines() { return (function writeVacancies() { writevacancies(); }()); }()); }
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RE: Representative line: int gender
I don't see the WTF here, this looks like a forward-thinking developer.
- What if humans genetically modify new genders? We must be prepared for all possibilities.
- The number of whitespace lines between pieces of code has grown over the years. This is just adapting to the future.
- If the hash were not taken for this, how would we assign a value? Do we just arbitrarily assign a number to the first genders that come up? Maybe 0 for male and 1 for female? Isn't that sexist?
Am I correct the language automatically casts to integer, or is the hash code returned already of an integer value? I'm just curious because the syntax looks common to many languages (though I would guess at Java).
So to answer your question I don't know. :P
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RE: Neckbeards Exposed!
@Lorne Kates said:
@Shoreline said:
My official position is that I now condone sexually offensive humour until people grow a spine pair about it.
Inappropriately fixed that for you.
I'm taking offense. I'm taking it to between our lawns to stop your dog shitting on mine. I'm also doing it professionally.
@Cassidy said:
yeah, I bit...
It's cool. I've had my shots.
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RE: Neckbeards Exposed!
I'm actually very uncomfortable with people entertaining the idea that making dirty jokes about hardware is wrong.
Overall, my view of the situation is:
- The neckbeards did nothing wrong. Or at least nothing recorded to be wrong in these posts.
- The professional offendee screwed up her own life and made herself unhappy by her own hand, so that situation resolves itself.
- One of the neckbeards got fired either for some other reason or because one of their superiors was unreasonable (maybe they will post about it on this site).
Now for some troll-baiting.
My PM asked me to take a backup of the database and make sure there's a record somewhere, so I took a dump on the server and left a log. It's now backed-up.
My official position is that I now condone sexually offensive humour until people grow a spine about it.
Perhaps a better start to this thread would be "Holy crap! This woman is insane!"
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RE: Representative line: should not happen - report
@mt@ilovefactory.com said:
There is also something called a return value which might be of usage here :}
Personally I'd much rather see an exception for a case commented 'should not happen'.
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RE: "Our field was removed"
@KrakenLover said:
If you ever want to do SugarCRM development/customization, you might want to talk to someone who actually does SugarCRM development.
I think you're right. At my current job it's merely difficult or impossible to do the exciting things we want to do. At my previous job, somebody before our time had performed experimental surgery on the instance of SugarCRM's guts. The result was that it wouldn't even do fundamental things it was supposed to do (e.g. reliable custom modules created through the studio). The IT team obviously looked bad when it failed, which it did all the time, so we were at the mercy of SugarCRM or it's dodgy, modified, non-upgrade-safe guts.
In one customisation, I found fields were being auto-calculated in javascript with timeout events, rather than keyboard events. That alone put me four hours behind schedule trying to find why my code wouldn't work sometimes, and why I could only reproduce the issue when I ran alert boxes.
I always thought the Lovecraft table-top RPG had a lame sanity system where if you failed at "You see some intestines, roll your sanity." you lost sanity, making it harder to pass the next one. Having used SugarCRM, I began to believe.
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RE: Neckbeards Exposed!
@bridget99 said:
I've been a participant in enough rational discourse to know that this approach gets things wrong about as often as the old, purely superstition-based approach did.
No you haven't. You have either experienced what you thought was rational and wasn't, or you failed to properly understand what was going on, or you are lying. I could flip a coin and derive as much truth as a superstition. If I flip it a thousand times, I will get a more accurate view of what the coin flip returns. Unfortunately the human brain doesn't handle statistics well. This is an obstacle to be overcome, not a flaw to be disguised as a merit.
@_leonardo_ said:
She said: "I believe reason, and rational discourse, to be profoundly overrated in today's society."
I agree with that statement. As evidence: the society which tries to fix complex chronic diseases with a single "silver bullet" pill, or a meeting where things which cannot be expressed on a 'powerpoint' slide basically cannot be communicated.
Again this is not an example of scientific thinking. Business and meetings are often flooded with individual egos, which result in this forum. It is not rational discourse, it is politics. The extent of rationale is "I will have more money if I keep lying." Do NOT get these things confused.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect to change anyone's mind, but I will certainly set the scene for people to make themselves look dumber.
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RE: Neckbeards Exposed!
So... what were the actual jokes?
I ask because delivery is a factor contributing to the actual level of humour. For example, the following would only be amusing as an in-joke in modern times:
- Left: Lol. Forking repos.
- Right: Lol. Big Dongles.
- Both: Lol.
Obviously pretty dull. Particularly if you're interested in hearing whatever is being said at the front. I remember in school being bored with the frequent use of innuendo for humour, and that says something because I'll laugh at anything. On the other hand, perhaps they were at least trying for wit:
- Monocled-left: ...and so in realising that the dongle software was somewhat bloated, I issued a pull request such that I could issue the upgrade of my own design.
- Monocled-right: Do I quite understand correctly that you attempted to 'pull' based on your claims of a 'bloated dongle'?
- Monocled-left: Oh my, I hadn't thought of that! I should have forked the repo while I was at it.
- Monocled-right: Quite so. Rollicking good laugh.
Ok, so obviously this never happened because neither of them is wearing a monocle. I guess they could ask the guy next them to borrow his glasses and jury-rig something.
The point is we will never know what really happened, because Adria never quoted the actual jokes, or took a recording. We can only assume she's upset because these guys were meant to be comedians, but weren't.
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RE: "Our field was removed"
@KrakenLover said:
SugarCRM by any chance?
Yup. :)
Interestingly, I got a call from my boss today along the lines of "we're probably starting from scratch without SugarCRM".
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"Our field was removed"
I returned to work from the Annual Frist Convention (FristCon) to find an email (with the various normal senior people CC'd) in my inbox from a company we outsource to stating that their current round of software issues are caused by a field being removed from our software.
So to the background: We customise a 3rd-party CRM for InsuraCorp. They have some call-centre requirements, which we have outsourced to a company called SailorDemon who customises their vaguely suitable product to the specific requirements of InsuraCorp. Their product, for these purposes is called MethodCreator. One of the requirements is that they require access to the database of our CRM, so that they can import the data into MethodCreator, and they need to log in using an admin account to avoid using up licenses. If you log into the CRM as an admin, you may add modules and fields, which adds tables and fields to the database.
At this point, you just about have enough information to guess what happens next. It's ok, I won't make you guess.
Spoilers: Having received the email and investigated the issue, it turns out they added a field to the production environment without telling me. Surprise, when I deployed some relevant code files, the fields I didn't know existed and as such were not in the code repo, the test system or my dev system were overwritten and disappeared.
If it's not clear, I do not see myself as accountable for this as I do not expect to have to check the state of the production code every time I want to deploy, and if someone is going to make changes to OUR system they should tell us they're doing so.
While silly, this circumstance is for me an open/shut case: ask them about the field, restore it, resolved. A minor annoyance. Obviously I asked them to let me know when a new field is being created in the future. However, apart from great latency, there is an oddity in the way the mouth of SailorDemon conveys information, resulting in earlier conversations such as this:
- Me: The import option does not exist, so I can't import.
- Mouth of SailorDemon: Yes it does.
- Me: *Checking a second time to make sure* Here is a screenshot of the import option not existing.
- Mouth of SailorDemon: Yes it does. Just click the import option.
- Me: ...
- Mouth of SailorDemon: It turns out your permissions were not set up for you to see the import option.
- Me: ... Right.
In my opinion, failing to even acknowledge a screenshot implied that he is using stalling tactics. Presumably they just take so long to get back to us because they're incompetent and trying (failing) desperately to hide it.
They did eventually send me the details of the fields which needed restoration, but the next few messages from him (CC'ing other parties) included paraphrases of "our field was removed", forcing me to respond with "tell me when you want to add new fields". I could be using that time to be productive instead of writing defensive messages as diplomatically as possible.
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RE: Outsourcing the Outsourcing
The dev company will realise that the task is a bit bigger than they can handle and outsource to a specialist company, who tends to hire contractors.
Outsourception?
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RE: Negative Count
@DumbByAssociation said:
From our code base... x is a List...
<font face="Lucida Console" size="2"> if (x == null || x.Count <= 0) </font>What the hell was going through the developer's mind when they wrote that? *head-desk*
@GoatRider said:
Defensive programming.
This is not the WTF you are looking for.
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RE: Cool password bro
@configurator said:
"Heh, cool, I like your WiFi password!"
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RE: 1. It's a long, you fool! 2. No, it's an int! 3. Goto 1
@TGV said:
@blakeyrat said:
Hey look a misogynist, who would have guessed.
Hey look, a nerd without girl friend!Hey look: popcorn! munchmunchmunch
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RE: The SLA
Legal issues aside, this leaves him wide open to snide comments.
"This thing never goes down."
"Like the data center.""I signed off this document."
"Will it make us feel better? Because the last time you signed something it didn't even do that."And of course:
"I hear the data center goes down more often than your wife."It might seem bitchy, but if they're going to lie to you without remorse, you shouldn't have to feel remorse when bitching about their lies.
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RE: The SLA
Give the OP a break guys, handling awkward human beings who use manipulations like lies or aggression is not straightforward. If it was, nobody would be telling lies.
Also, everyone knows that the punishment for knowingly signing a fraudulent SLA for purely deceptive purposes is beheading, due to an unrepealed law from Edward VI. He passed the law when a leper tried to bet him something and grab his hand to shake on it without permission, claiming it was legally binding. Interestingly, the same law was used to indirectly save the president's daughter from illness. It's probably on wikipedia.
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RE: Odd definition of "Bottom"
@boomzilla said:
Well, it's better than assColumn.
@Cassidy said:
clbuttic!
I think they meant to write 'colon' instead of 'column'. Easy mistake.
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RE: Loading all data
@configurator said:
PM says: I'm not sure this change is necessary. Revert it.
@configurator said:I eventually rewrote it to work the slow way. Then I got a bug report that nothing works at all (because they didn't wait for the data to load). PM allowed me to revert back to the good code, but was angry that I didn't do it correctly in the first place.
Document everything he says by email, or whatever. If he gives you instructions verbally, email him to confirm what he's said. The aim is to have proof when he tries to make you accountable for his mistakes again (which he will).
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RE: Why are the Resistance winning at Ingress?
@Helix said:
i have not heard on ingress before and despite some reading up i feel so old and frankly like a blakeyrat I STILL HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT THIS IS ABOUT
Lol. It is an unusual computer game. It's one of those new fangled augmented-reality type things (a bit like orienteering, but with more cyberpunk) with two teams: cowboys and indians... no wait sorry Resistance and Enlightened. There's also some plot. It's potentially MMO, but it's still in closed beta, so it's currently just MO. As I understand it, the idea is to promote G+ and maybe some 3rd-party marketing.
@DaveK said:
Repeating the same steps and expecting different results is often reasonable, because not all processes are deterministic.
Give me an example. If it's running a program, I put it to you that in running the program again, the machine (including the program) is in a different state, and therefore it is not a repeat of the same steps.
Certainly in this case no new inputs seem to be added (except for the part I'm complaining about).
@blakeyrat said:
I'm guessing Shoreline ain't much better at communication than the guy he's bitching about, heh. He probably writes all the manuals at Snoofle's place.
They paid me money to stop.
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Why are the Resistance winning at Ingress?
I believe the answer is revealed in this Google+ post.
To explain (for linkophobes), one of the players set up a private group for the Enlightened. The steps to recruit for the group securely are (understandably) rather involved, as the system is not integrated with any of the game software, so mostly security is handled using various screenshots. It's not a great system, but it's the only one available.
However, the post is a word for word copy of the 'about' section in the community page, and the post starts with the description of the instructions as 'simple'. Personally I think this is unhelpful and at the same time disrespectful. He could have posted something which boiled down to "Many people are having trouble with this. The following people are missing certain steps. There's more but I don't have time to list them all right now." That would have been useful.
So, my two WTFs:
- Refusing to acknowledge that the instructions are rather involved.
- Repeating exactly the same steps and expecting different results, as though that is not the definition of insanity.
Luckily he seems to have been replaced by somebody communicative and helpful. I'm still annoyed about it though.
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RE: Why should I close my HTML tags?
@JimLahey said:
in FF the text gets bigger the more you scroll down. Arty.
It's not getting bigger.
It's getting closer.
HTML5, bitches!
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RE: Work email on phone
I'm assuming this is an app. I'd be uncomfortable with those permissions as well. It sounds as though the app is designed for work phone (so the admin can junk the phone if it's stolen for security purposes).
Perhaps there is a personal phone version.
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RE: If this is how you write your SQL, I don't want to work there
It's their way of saying "personality is not a dump stat".
As for "salary ASC", what happened to being valued based on correlation with your requested salary?
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RE: If this is how you write your SQL, I don't want to work there
@dhromed said:
"salary ASC" is a nice touch.
Yeah but they left out "team player", "goal oriented" and "hit the ground running".
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RE: Quota Exceeded
TRWTF is under-funded schools. Poor IT seems to be a staple. I went to a sixth form where the computing teacher was against people using email. How else was I supposed to communicate with my friend who had left the sixth form for another college?
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RE: Dead Code?
@OzPeter said:
@TheRider said:
....I deleted the loop, replaced the references to the loop counter variable with zero, and proceeded with my work.
And that work included testing the change?I think we're supposed to assume he's checked for size 0 and tested his solution. The code gives me a sense of unusually tight deadlines or inexperience.
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RE: SQL injection: I didn't know you could do that!
Jump ship before it sinks? It doesn't hurt to update your CV and start getting in touch with agencies (although the number of phone calls might get annoying... first world problems).
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RE: What is a test server?
@powerlord said:
You couldn't just do a reverse merge back to the old version?
Something about the way he'd copied over the code made it much less straightforward than that - I think his merge had conflicted with it. Otherwise yes, that's how I'd usually handle mistakes.
@TheCPUWizard said:
1) use proper security to prevent "accidental" pushes.
I strongly agree. In this case, we had an in-house web interface with a dropdown list "test, production". In my opinion, this was not the biggest problem though, and was easy to resolve (reverse-merge mentioned by powerlord).
@TheCPUWizard said:
2) Grow a backbone.
Again strongly agree. My backbone wasn't in great condition due to being treated generally badly for a while, and I was paranoid and insane at the time. That was some years ago though and I'm no longer so frightened of getting into a fight with management if they're going to do something dumb. I have anecdotes of that, but I'll save them for another time.
@Cad Delworth said:
As Cassidy said, if your line manager approves ("Yeah, you'd better do that VIP thing right now.") then it is THEIR potential problem later, not yours. It's also likely to be mentioned in reports at some level, so you'll be golden.
I call this game "follow the accountability". I don't know if there's a better name for it (please enlighten me, and not Ingress style), and it's not the same as the blame game, which is more about pointing fingers where you can get away with it. You can't win at it, but you can try to lose less than everyone else.
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RE: What is a test server?
I worked for a large company doing mostly front-end web development. Their subversion system was, in my opinion, pretty good, but complex to pick up the first time, and I was one of a fleet of developers hired on contract to work with this. Before I go on a rant I would like to say that I generally liked the people and I consider this to be the place where my life really started, having spent 2.5 years previously in a relative hell, but anyway.
The system was as such:
- Take a branch of production, named after a feature-number given by lotus notes (I hear bad things about it, but in this case it was not the WTF).
- Every change made is committed to the branch. Your dev environment folder is switched into that branch.
- When finished, commit into the branch and merge the branch with the test branch to view in the test environment for someone else (e.g. author of the feature) to sign off.
- If wrong, go back to dev, commit into branch, merge into test again.
- If signed off, merge into production.
Every new contractor accidentally merged their dev branch into production when they intended to merge it into test at least once, which was quite easy to do. This was easy to fix - reverse merge.
The part I found baffling was when experienced people seemed to think they were above said protocol:
Case 1:
Long story short, I merged into test, told the 'customer' (I use quotes because they were in-house) it was ready for sign-off, and did something else. They messaged me back "It's not there...". I checked (indeed it wasn't). I checked svn and one of my colleagues has deliberately undone it. After some time investigating why they had deliberately copied over my code, it turned out they just thought it didn't look right, without consulting the feature request to find out why it was there, instead of checking svn for the feature number and questioning me. I spent two days undoing the damage he had done and redoing my code all over again (this was more investigation of people than development of code). He probably wasted 16 company man hours and 2 of my hours in the process. So TRWTF is that once I spotted what he had done I didn't simply assign it to him with a message to the 'customer' (CC'ing him) saying "My colleague wishes to negotiate this feature, I'll let you two decide what's going on.".
Case 2:
Long story short, another colleague had named a development branch after the filesystem being altered, as though that information wasn't already redundant while the feature number was missing altogether. TRWTF is that I didn't just politely say to my team leader in the next scrum "He broke protocol so it took me a long time to find anything."
Case 3:
On some Friday, somebody of rank close to CEO asked for item X, I developed, requested sign off, got it signed off, it went live, fine. Later I got a message "we want to change Y in X". There should be a new feature request if it's gone live, and we're supposed to have a 5-day SLA, but whatever, I was dealing with a much higher rank. Implement Y, merge dev into test, request sign off, get sign off, merge into production. Repeat three or four times that day. I got none of my other work done because constantly being taken off what I'm doing to focus on this takes up time. Why they couldn't test it in the test environment I don't know. Ultimately I don't think I spent much of my own time on it so it wasn't too bad. The following Monday one of my colleagues made some comment along the lines of "cor look at all the stuff Shoreline hasn't done". Fortunately before I thought to commit assault the team leader mentioned I had a bad day Friday. More mildly annoying than a WTF.
Case 4:
Busy day. Did some work from a feature request. Requested sign-off. Customer requested something out of scope to be done urgently. They should sign this off and make a new feature request but whatever. I did it and requested sign off. They requested something else out of scope, I did that and requested sign off. They requested a third scope-external item. Maybe my need to concentrate on what I was doing made me too terse to write the message more diplomatically, but my message in response said I had other things to work on and therefore we have an SLA. The response back came from their manager complaining about this and CC'ing various higher ranks, and using the phrase "do your job". TRWTF is how strongly I regret not standing up for myself and explaining SLA, concentration span, how they're wasting time, and how it looks like they're not doing their job properly, instead of just giving in. Maybe I just wanted it to go away so that I could get on with my work on what was already a busy day, maybe I lacked self-confidence from the 2.5 years I spent in relative hell.
So no real advice, just some rants.
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RE: An incident
Lol. Splendid!
@Weng said:
A lesser person would spin it as "I found a moneymaking opportunity for the company" on their performance review.
Not sure I agree with 'lesser person', but I would be inclined to agree that a person forced to work with lesser (perhaps just dishonest) people might take the opportunity to spin it that way. This is especially worth keeping in mind if any attempt is made to bite you on the arse with it: "They screwed up, we scored more cash because of it."
I agree with your assessment: "delicious". :)
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RE: An incident
I'm interested to hear more about the accountability/cashflow situation. At a guess the customer pays you, but you only get money if you can interpret the file properly (which, in this case, you couldn't), so I'm guessing that either meant you couldn't charge them or you couldn't do something else with that data which somebody else pays you for, or you need the data for auditing.
There was a question in there somewhere.
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RE: An incident
Sales guys never seem to be the sharpest spoons in the blender.
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RE: The Skyrim Mod Model
Sounds like you need to put the skyrim code into subversion.
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RE: In case of error, crash server.
I'm on your side in general, but specifically for:
@daveime said:
I'm not sure how we could have budgeted time to iron out a bug that only manifested itself in response to a corruption issue after 2 years operation ...
It reminds me of a situation I found myself dealing with more than once in one of my previous companies. We fixed a large number of issues during the time I was there to do with environmental development and deployment (it started out that we had a test and production environment on the same server with no version control). I am specifically reminded of a situation where I had developed a cronned script which started outputting errors on the production environment (after it was made separate from the testing environment) but not the test system. Since the result was that it generated all its data but did not kick off the next script to generate the rest of the data, we added a cron job to kick off the next script. The next day the first script kicked off its next script as it was designed to, and the cron kicked off that script as well, slowing down the server and corrupting the data.
It turned out the mass of data on the production environment was causing it to run out of memory (my senior had told me to program it a certain way to make it faster, or at least executable in a reasonable time, and I didn't feel like I had the right not to follow instructions of my senior). I'd like to say we modified the design of the script, but my senior simply expanded the amount of memory available. I got told I should be testing things more carefully (by somebody less technical, of course). At least the problem never occurred again.
It's quite a tangent from your issue, as we had access to our code, and I knew its structure, but it was more typical than it should have been for things not to work on the production environment despite working in the test environment, so we may as well have budgeted time for it.mod: fixed linebreaks –dh