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related, but odd copium; https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/12/office-software-workday-hr quote:Your office software is not the problem – you are Is written as the user is at fault, but is actually targeting the manager, but not for the obvious reason of choosing poo poo software, but being a user-error of the operator configuring the product because they pay them too low salary. 🤷🏻♀️
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May 13, 2024 03:58
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i work as a clinical scientist for a mid-sized hospital in the uk. i'm not formally trained as a programmer, i've just written passable python / powershell / c# software for long enough i picked some stuff up. a lot of the laboratory information management systems (lims) - the software that sit between the analysers sipping on tubes of blood and the more doctor-facing systems that handle patient charts and whatnot - are fossils, accessed predominantly via vt100 terminal emulator and running on IBM mainframes held together with spit and prayer. most of the companies (or successors) managing these creaking codebases also no longer want to support them (or can't, because the greybeards who know how to write in pick or MUMPS or whatever are literally dying out) every successor product, now as a shiny desktop application, is worse, and the worst of the lot is winpath. winpath is marketed by clinisys, a company staffed exclusively by clowns, who produce the most sloppily-coded, cut-price garbage i've ever had the displeasure of having to spend years of my life performing user acceptance testing for, at two different jobs now. of course, every hospital is switching to them because they're the lowest bidder. (side note: we can't have autohotkey for our user acceptance testing because we're a hospital and IT is cautious of basically everything, but i was allowed to* roll my own keyboard/mouse automation software. in powershell, because until recently i wasn't allowed to install python and now it's too much work to port it back to python.) * did it anyway and had our project manager bulldoze access for me afterwards they've broken all their workflows. everyone is trained on the keystrokes from the end-of-life product that are used to search a patient history, authorise a sample, swap over to the point of care testing module - none of that works in the new software; they didn't even bother just sticking a textbox at the bottom of the screen and running a couple subroutines to adapt the old commands to the new software. i could probably fill a whole rant thread with the various bullshit i've put up with, but i'll constrain myself to the most recent items: the transfusion module approves issuing the wrong blood type for patients, something that can literally kill them when the transfused blood and the patient's actual blood type try to destroy each other. there are no hotfixes for a dead patient, you bastards the security flaw i reported a year ago at previous job is still there, they have changed exactly nothing after I found credentials from a different hospital lying around the server. good job baking that into your master build. their audit trail for tracking the system's configuration is poo poo, limited to "user X edited config item y" as far as i know. so i run a local git repo to track the system's configuration myself - since the config it's basically a bunch of tables i can just copy/paste out as plaintext. (the existence of git surprised the clinisys product specialist at a previous job, whom i caught in a teams call comparing the production and test environment configs, by pasting them side by side into excel). this helps me pinpoint little things like for example "someone changed the reference range for potassium and now the system won't tell us someone's heart is about to stop" or "they forgot to copy/paste their garbage logic rule syntax correctly so we can't perform any cancer screenings, sorry" today i notice a load of tests that previously had authorisation queue limits of (low, high) 0,0 have been set to 2, 1. i email the product specialist, and they respond quote:Auth limits changed from Lo 0 and Hi 0 to Lo 2 Hi 1, a result of exactly 0 has been found not to fail. we spend taxpayer money on this thing, you presumably have a qa department, and you can't recognise the number 0 Lunar Suite fucked around with this message at 15:29 on May 13, 2024 |
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May 13, 2024 13:15
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i feel better about the lims my company uses now
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May 13, 2024 14:06
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quote:Hi [Lunar Suite], i get you're a peon who just gets to write out the config files and is shovelled into a chair as a warm body with little to zero training, but also do not patronize me sorry, i meant "I think you'll find I have sufficient Subject-Matter Expertise to determine the application of several unintuitive, undocumented steps to address a design oversight does in fact constitute a workaround" Captain Foo posted:i feel better about the lims my company uses now
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May 13, 2024 15:26
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Lunar Suite posted:i get you're a peon who just gets to write out the config files and is shovelled into a chair as a warm body with little to zero training, but also do not patronize me none of the above
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May 13, 2024 15:34
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akadajet posted:I've never used electron or whatever, op. Seems like it's a really heavy-handed way to make a desktop app. electron apps are just websites pretending to be executables
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May 13, 2024 23:11
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hosed up if true
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May 13, 2024 23:12
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Lunar Suite posted:i work as a clinical scientist for a mid-sized hospital in the uk. i'm not formally trained as a programmer, i've just written passable python / powershell / c# software for long enough i picked some stuff up. more likely a minicomputer, and one that can be emulated easily and confidently at 10x performance of the original on a $10 WiFi router these days at that, with software that was probably (at least originally) provided with source since that sort of thing would happen with lots of customizable mini software quote:most of the companies (or successors) managing these creaking codebases also no longer want to support them (or can't, because the greybeards who know how to write in pick or MUMPS or whatever are literally dying out) only because they either won’t pay people to learn or were historically awful about suing ex-employees who didn’t entirely switch fields after their employment is over (which will soon no longer be a thing in the US) most of this stuff actually had excellent educational material available when new, at least some of which is preserved, so those old systems that worked could theoretically be maintained indefinitely and refined by professionals for whatever new requirements come along user-side cost-cutting has worked at least as hard as tech industry neophilia to destroy things given the promising start
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May 14, 2024 09:11
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eschaton posted:I’ve been working on the same large desktop application in mostly Objective-C for nearly 20 years, and was part of the team that created its current overall architecture 
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May 14, 2024 10:28
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eschaton posted:more likely a minicomputer, and one that can be emulated easily and confidently at 10x performance of the original on a $10 WiFi router these days at that, with software that was probably (at least originally) provided with source since that sort of thing would happen with lots of customizable mini software that's interesting to know, thanks! eschaton posted:most of this stuff actually had excellent educational material available when new, at least some of which is preserved, so those old systems that worked could theoretically be maintained indefinitely and refined by professionals for whatever new requirements come along i mean, i was able to pick some of it up by googling the manuals / loving about. our current lims runs on pick; everything in pick is a string and if you do arithmetic it just strips out all non-numeric characters and goes ahead and does it. it's weird but it can be learned. the vendors really just want to be shot of it to sell us their new product. the new product is also a) worse b) easier to maintain for them, c) in the loving cloud for no reason other than "we can charge the customer for maintenance uhhhh i mean the customer doesn't have to do maintenance" because that's what you want as a hospital: critical infrastructure running in some datacenter elsewhere, where you can't control the servers or software and since you're not the client they don't tell you poo poo today's fun fact about winpath: each blood test has a "function" associated with it, which describes what additional processes to perform. this is stuff like "limit access to users with security level above X" or "Lock Editing of Result"; there are about 30 options that are configured via the GUI with a bunch of tickboxes and dropdowns. but it's stored as a text string; clicking "Only display if Authorised" adds "ª" to the string. Said string is further "[...] limited to 10 bytes. This is stored as dynamic, alphanumeric data which preserves memory usage." ...i hate clinisys
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May 14, 2024 11:32
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everything I’ve heard about medical software makes it sound like the absolute worst, and the vendors have no intent of actually improving it
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May 14, 2024 16:46
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otoh most of what ive heard about maintaining legacy stuff has been a mix of idiots going "this'll all be trivial with the right js framework, and by luck the perfect one just came out last week!" and another kind of idiot going "we simply can't find people to work on this" while offering an 80% rate because it's old tech when actually they should offer 120% because it is old tech. in notable first-hand knowledge: cobol is not hard, and paying a small premium finding people to do it is fairly easy (and almost certainly turns out better than whatever you're imagining doing).
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May 14, 2024 16:54
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EMRs are ERPs but doctors design them instead of managers
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May 14, 2024 16:55
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Lunar Suite posted:that's interesting to know, thanks! pick is named after dick pick
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May 14, 2024 17:26
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Cybernetic Vermin posted:in notable first-hand knowledge: cobol is not hard, and paying a small premium finding people to do it is fairly easy (and almost certainly turns out better than whatever you're imagining doing).
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May 14, 2024 17:30
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Captain Foo posted:pick is named after dick pick and dates are stored as days since december 31 1973, because that's the year his daughter was born  hey lunar how's the clinisys thing going   it took one loving grep run e: i reported how i got this data to the vendor some time ago; got an urgent phone call from one of their security people, showed my working and submitted documentation on how i did it... im glad to see they did exactly nothing about it. Lunar Suite fucked around with this message at 15:24 on May 15, 2024 |
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May 15, 2024 15:08
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found more hardcoded creds in their admin tools (which they left lying around on the server) they change the default password when the build goes from user acceptance testing to live, right? they change the default password when the build goes live, right?
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May 23, 2024 14:19
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Ocean of Milk posted:I once wrote a like 20 line autohotkey script which massconverts xlsx to pdf by actually running excel and using the builtin save-as-pdf functionality. My brother uses it for generating invoices. He told me to start selling it lol. This sounds stupid but I know someone who took a consulting gig at ms and was paid to do this + other equally silly things, except with PowerShell instead of ahk.
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May 23, 2024 15:26
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Cybernetic Vermin posted:otoh most of what ive heard about maintaining legacy stuff has been a mix of idiots going "this'll all be trivial with the right js framework, and by luck the perfect one just came out last week!" and another kind of idiot going "we simply can't find people to work on this" while offering an 80% rate because it's old tech when actually they should offer 120% because it is old tech. I worked at a place that had a mainframe and will never get away from it. The developers were senior in all it's meanings but most of them made jr developer rates and had careers weirdly confined to the tri county area. Even though the mainframe was very expensive I think, at least some part of their decision to double down over and over on outdated tech was that the labor for it was so drat cheap. There was a window of time when they could have hired some super senior guys who are all about 10 years from retirement work on porting everything over but instead they tasked some director level guy with learning Java from a book and doing it, he failed at the learn Java step and then everyone pretended it would be all good because they could probably hire someone like me a little later in their career. Cept nobody like me had any reason to stick around for the lovely pay. One day they'll run out of people to make their poo poo go and then IBM will offer up it's migration services where entire careers worth of RPG and COBOL are ported over to Java with the barest minimum of care required to bill the customer. I sometimes wonder about those devs though, imagine graduating CS from a perfectly respectable college in like 1989 and taking a mainframe job at a nearby company completely derailing your career, getting passed up by the tech boom but still denied raises when the bubble popped and having nearly useless skills by the time the market recovered. Imagine being that guy making it all the way to retirement and not even cracking 80k/yr once in your whole career. Oh yeah but sure "learn COBOL, you'll be able to name your price", been hearing that since I was a young man.
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May 23, 2024 15:54
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Internet Old One posted:This sounds stupid but I know someone who took a consulting gig at ms and was paid to do this + other equally silly things, except with PowerShell instead of ahk. powershell isn't so bad once you get over it (or make it stop) quietly assigning $null to nonexistent variables / function output rather than breaking. Set-StrictMode -Version 3.0 is your friend.
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May 23, 2024 16:05
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Ugh, PowerShell is so pathetic, especially since there is almost zero advantage to the fact that it uses POSIX shell syntax since none of the tools are equivalently named or optioned. The only real utility to the syntax is I/O redirection. DCL was right there, just as capable, and fully regular in how command parameter and qualifiers behave such that you can even provide interactive online help for them and offer a simple API to run a command line with history, completion, help, etc. with a custom set of commands. In fact, being regular in the way it is would make adding things like I/O redirection with similar syntax to sh to DCL pretty straightforward! Of course, when you have real variables, structured file I/O APIs, and process & queue control APIs, you may not actually want that any more…
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May 24, 2024 09:30
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eschaton posted:Ugh, PowerShell is so pathetic, especially since there is almost zero advantage to the fact that it uses POSIX shell syntax since none of the tools are equivalently named or optioned. The only real utility to the syntax is I/O redirection. Remove-Post
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May 27, 2024 05:46
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would be better spelled as DELETE /POST *.*;*
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May 27, 2024 06:00
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