More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Bob Morales posted:

Instead of using Microsoft Visio, which I've used for years and is kind of the standard diagram/flowchart program, I'm forced to use SmartDraw, which my boss bought because it was $199 instead of $299 for Visio. Cheap gently caress.

Bonus points for having to RDP into a Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM running Windows XP because he only wants to buy one license and there are like 20 people who use it. UUUGGGGHHH

LibreOffice supports Visio files pretty well now too.

Unsurprisingly SmartDraw does not have a book license, the same as Visio, your boss is breaking the license agreement and needs purchase one for every user that accesses the software.

http://www.smartdraw.com/support/smartdraw-perpetual-license.pdf

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 20:47

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 00:56

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Bob Morales posted:

This is the same guy who gives me the 3rd degree if I try using any free software (Like Linux etc)

So he doesn't want to pay a lot of money for software and doesn't want it free either, what's the foaming at the mouth response to the latter?

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 21:47

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

As in a vanity vlog because they cannot be bothered to type?

I can imagine many desktop reports would actually be better with a screen recording.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2013 17:18

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

anthonypants posted:

That's a nice UX horror.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2013 00:33

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

the spyder posted:

192 1.5tb Seagate consumer grade drives and is split in to two mirrored pools.

Nice, assuming this isn't video what is taking up TBs of space?

# ¿ Oct 12, 2013 16:27

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

The Third Man posted:

This is what I get for mindlessly copy-pasting commands from the install guide

Pretty much every article, blog, support page for iptables is terrible. Least worst so far has been Arch Wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Simple_Stateful_Firewall

Complete failure to describe forwarding rules well though.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2013 01:34

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

door.jar posted:

Found a consumer grade 4 disk ReadyNAS just hanging out in our network closet today. No idea who put it there and what it is used for as no one in IT knows anything about it. What's the bet it'll be "affecting production" at some point in the next 2 weeks to 2 years.

Probably should check the download manager through the web interface, although then again you might not want to know :gonk:

# ¿ Dec 6, 2013 13:30

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

That hiring managers and recruiters are oblivious to the typical wide range of $40-150k is amazing. Spending hours on the phone for the interviewer to only be shocked at the end is depressing after the fifth time: I'm not even asking for an amount, just mentioning the present income.

The dangers of looking for interesting jobs it would seem.

MrMoo fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Dec 23, 2013

# ¿ Dec 23, 2013 18:41

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

mAlfunkti0n posted:

oh it's OK, it's JUST LIKE physical except you can have AS MANY CPUS AND AS MUCH RAM AS YOU WANT.

That's more of a dumb feature of VMware.

quote:

People auto provisioning servers with 16 virtual CPUs and 64GB of ram

I do this, then scale back when its not needed as with a big cloud of servers this makes the most expedient time to deployment in bespoke configurations.

quote:

better performance with 1-2 CPUs (rather than 16) they say "well, we want 16 anyways!".

I get this a lot as I build a pre-sales environment where each machine is doing pretty much nothing, hence scaling back afterwards. However these are all multi-million dollar monstrosities and performance is largely irrelevant.

However I follow linode's blog and they assign full host socket? cores to each machine instead of limiting to 1-2 on smaller configurations. I wish they publish the numbers but I go with the hypothesis is that this is the most optimum process scheduler configuration. Otherwise your guest OS and host OS can be competing on where to execute and that is just dumb.

VMware vCloud is dumb as balls as you can allocate 128 cores, 1TB system memory and have absolutely no indication of what the host hardware actually supports. This particular environment has three profiles: basic, balanced, optimised, the latter just randomly crashes out assigning more than 32GB: its some weird over-commit scheme that ultimately gets Windows to reject applications requesting more than the host can provide. The balanced scheme runs 64GB hosts without issue though, so no idea what is underneath.

Actually the most annoying thing is disk. If it's your own environment you can overcommit disk and randomly assign everyone terabytes. In a service hosted environment the hosting organisation gets the benefit of over-commit and the users get shafted with the physical model. VMware vCloud extends this pain by not exposing the functionality to shrink or expand volumes: which is staring you in the face with a vSphere client. All my users have no clue how much space they want so I prefer blankly assigning 256GB and shrinking afterwards. In RHEL this is really easy with LVM and ext4 as long as you can bring the volume off line. In Windows Server it is more tedious and you have to convert everything to dynamic volumes but is still ultimately possible.

MrMoo fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Dec 26, 2013

# ¿ Dec 26, 2013 23:33

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Saikonate posted:

Your post and the one you're replying to make me ever more certain that the decision to use SOAP in the first place is a symptom of being terrible at software. (Not just because the APIs people design seem to be universally horrible, I think it's a wretched, massively inefficient, over-designed piece of poo poo to begin with)

I just love the way the Java Glassfish WSDL-import tools include a rather complicated system to hack and ostensibly fix broken WSDL declarations.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2013 20:41

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

I love when job postings say "please include the salary of your last three jobs" as proof of employment.

I saw it this week for determining compensation, my last job was self-employed so I put $30k.

I was more amused at having to list lifetime lines-of-code per language written.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 18:58

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Depends, my current job started at $50k and doubled up, in the end they even added another $20k above that. Salary determination is voodoo, bonus is definitely a crap shoot. It certainly helps to have niche domain knowledge.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 21:44

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Volmarias posted:

It is definitely a silly thing, but I'm curious how seriously they take it, and whether it's there to weed out "Expert" Java devs who have written upwards of 1000 lines.

My Java experience is pretty much a 1,000 line program 200 times, and most of that is with one proprietary API (TIBCO RV). I'm looking forward to the telephone interview.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2014 21:28

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Have you seen the OpenVPN support forums? It's the other extreme of "how do i do computer?"

OpenVPN and per-client LZO compression is a great example of the documentation and support completely failing. I'd love to know why they don't just add LZ4 compression and fix the configuration and negotiation.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2014 20:27

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Caged posted:

21c is a perfectly acceptable temperature. Anyone who thinks it's cold should wear a jumper.

Apparently 66F / 19C are good temperatures to encourage fat burning:

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25849628

# ¿ Jan 29, 2014 00:08

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Ynglaur posted:

PMs who have zero technical skills also drive me up the wall backwards and make my head rotate 360 degrees. I'm probably too far in the opposite direction, and need to better control my urge to dive into a configuration and just Fix The drat Thing, but it still amazes me how many PMs in IT can't even be troubled to so much as look at a log file to try to understand something.

Don't get me wrong: I'm fine if they're not an expert, but at least demonstrate some interest in the technology being implemented. If not, why are you an IT PM? Why not go PM something else, in some corporate function that interests you?

This is presumably why Google hires technical project managers and expects same level of technical knowledge as the engineers.

Looking forward to the interview in a couple weeks time :v:

# ¿ Feb 3, 2014 21:54

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Not too surprising for old developers but rather amusing for large companies with a gigantic hard on for Windows servers.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2014 02:40

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Bob Morales posted:

I'm so sick of getting the guy who keep signing up for poo poo thinking his email address is 'bobmorales@gmail.com', when I have 'bob.morales@gmail.com' (not my real name).

As dots are ignored in gmail, and you can add anything you want after a +, e.g. b.o.b.mo.r.a.les+booty@gmail.com, surely its really easy to filter out someone else using your address but in a different form?

MrMoo fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Feb 13, 2014

# ¿ Feb 13, 2014 14:31

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Bob Morales posted:

"Our users aren't smart enough to zoom and we don't want to confuse them, they have been doing their jobs this way for..."

Buy them a bigger monitor :v:

# ¿ Feb 17, 2014 17:38

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Urit posted:

Okay, now be a developer and commit to timelines and a project management methodology.

By definition only the project manager needs to abide by their domain methodology.

I'm looking forward to a Google technical project manager interview, the only interesting material in regards to project management I could find was from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/project/en/gb/policies-delay.aspx

Which I summarize as "PMP's and project management are hokey".

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 00:11

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Cenodoxus posted:

It would be nice to see a true DevOps approach sprout at my workplace though, so next time I encounter a developer going "LALALALALA gently caress YOU HAVE MORE DOWNTIME" I can forward all my angry client emails and phone calls to them.

I think its a core component of a developer role and in my office all developers are on call for their work. If you don't you're just a programmer.

There's an interesting venn diagram of developer, devops, and site reliability engineer though.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 01:04

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

I think my current title is "Solutions Architect / Project Manager", I think Googles went a bit Peter Principle and thought I'll be a better TPM than dev. I pretty much do everything from PM, architect, dev, QA, CJ, networking, ops, docs, training, data visualisation, analytics, DB admin, etc. No one else wants this job really.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 18:40

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

The number of companies who are too lazy to update to Windows 7 APIs for language and region settings. Windows is clearly set to English, yet:

Only registered members can see post attachments!

# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 22:16

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Use a snapshot to create a consistent state for say a tape backup.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2014 18:50

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

There is a great TV documentary about salesmen and their cars in the UK a long time ago. One salesman was caught shouting out to his manager "the important difference between a GT and a GTi is the 'i'". The reason for Ford having so many crappy cars at $500 differences so salesmen could be ranked by car model.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2014 18:42

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

jammyozzy posted:

We have something similar going on where I work. Workstations with dual Xeons, at minimum 32GB of RAM saddled to massive, almost empty mechanical drives and a 100MBit LAN. Once everything's in memory they zip along but holy poo poo opening 2 programs or a large file from the network shares where everything is saved? Painful.

Yesterday someone tried to copy 195GB through Windows file copy over 100mb daisy chained through a Cisco IP phone.

After an hour they gave up and used an external HDD.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2014 16:02

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

What's the deal with Symantec PKI? It seems a method for a company to cheap out on CA fees. Not excited about installing Symantec software so found a way to install it in a burner VM, export the alleged "non-exportable" private key with certificate and installed on main OS. mimikatz2 for anyone interested, totally undocumented of course.

code:

privilege::debug
crypto::cng
crypto::capi
crypto::certificates /systemstore:CERT_SYSTEM_STORE_CURRENT_USER /store:My /export

# ¿ Apr 30, 2014 02:42

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

I was wondering if it was going to be returned to Fry's after that.

# ¿ May 3, 2014 22:21

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Friend a nearby business, offer to pay 60% of their bill and use an airMAX device back to your office.

# ¿ May 14, 2014 21:01

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Xae posted:

Business Team: Hey Xae, can you take a look at why this database is so slow? This database is mission critical and costing the company a lot of money to have it so slow.
Me: Sure thing Bob, let me take a look...
Me: "Hey um.. it looks like you're running a 20 TB database an out of warranty 5 year old box with 4 cores,16 GB for RAM and only a single 100Mbit connection to the SAN."
Business Team: We can't afford a change in hardware.
Me: Well, you've got 10TB of data your reports can't see, you should stop loading/updating it. And look at purging it from the database.
Business Team: We can't afford a change in software.

The answer should then be "You can't afford a fast database."

Laughing at my current dev server with 16GB on a single 400Mhz DIMM, it takes 80ms to access a single loving tick of data in a time series database. I can process an entire days worth of data in 20ms on my budget VM, production hardware is in microseconds.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2014 21:13

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

MC Fruit Stripe posted:

Yeah or it's prohibitively expensive. Did they just mean ensure the computer has a static IP on their home network?

I have a department that asked for my home IP address and bizarrely assumed it was static, for remote desktop into an Amazon VPC environment. It's bogus security, RDP already offers certificate based security, and it's really easy to setup VPN access these days. OpenVPN AS is pretty sweet with its web login interface.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2014 01:28

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

luminalflux posted:

Some concepts don't exist at all in Salt that I feel should be there, like the fact that you need to specify each group of attributes you want salt-mine

The majority of Salt concepts seem completely independently designed and have limited correlation. What sucks is the limited resources for using the different types to do basic tasks.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 02:45

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Something like 30 Bloomberg desktop engineers all left at once and now work for Thomson Rooters. Everyone still laughs that after what must be 20+ years Bloomberg still cannot deliver a stable reliable data feed to clients that works outside their desktop app.

Their jobs sound interesting but I've turned away nearly 20 recruiters already pushing their many, many open positions.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 23:45

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

I finally added an email filter to junk anything with "urgent" in the subject ...

Senior Desktop Design Consultant posted:

subject: *URGENT* Feedback (Rate Your Experience) Required by All Platform Services team members on /support/ portal

Feedback Required on/before Monday 18th August

Hi All,

You MUST deliver feedback on our support/ portal as soon as possible � it will take you 1 second � just click on the golden stars (as many as you see fit ☺) and let�s try and push it in the right direction.

Thanks in advance for your urgent attention and kind understanding in this matter.

Best regards,

Here�s some good advice for out-of-office response messages too: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28786117

# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 00:29

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

The Electronaut posted:

Company I'm at uses Jive. Seems OK.

We have an Amazon hosted Jive that is so terrible compared with Yammer it is almost actively encouraging not to communicate. It is functional as a poor Sharepoint as a document store alternative though.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2014 02:06

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

skooma512 posted:

Wireless.

I have to support a location 100 miles away. Their internet is all wireless and it all sucks. Can't VNC as easily, especially since I have to through a VPN AND a server to do it. I lost connection to two computers I was working on.

For Windows use RDPv8 and set UDP mode. For Unix boxes use mosh for disconnected operation. Also make the VPN UDP based. Should perform fault recovery faster and more transparently. I do this for a site the other side of the planet.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2014 09:32

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

ConfusedUs posted:

One of our guys chose F) today for a big client. Overwrote 2000 detailed CAD drawings with old versions.

And for some reason he didn't restore yesterday's backup to bring the files back. Instead he said "whoops nothing I can do" and went home.

The customer is super pissed. Rightfully so.

I just don't understand how anyone could do this.

Minimum wage CJ or "consultant", not thinking or caring is pretty much standard practice. I hear similar from IBM contractors constantly: for example pulling all the cables out of a managed layer 3 switch, saying the ports are noted, then proceeding to reinsert cables into random ports and not understanding the problem when nothing comes back up, then goes home.

It's more a management problem not well noted in the West, in Asia it is common not to ask questions or to raise concerns so you have to put checks in place to constantly verify and check that staff understand and follow a reasonable and well defined behavior.

MrMoo fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Sep 6, 2014

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 04:13

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

ConfusedUs posted:

Oh I totally know this. I just don't understand. Even when I was a l1 helldesk guy I gave more of a poo poo than this.

Maybe that's why I'm not a low level helpdesk guy anymore, and he still is.

Classic "jobs worth", in for the paycheck not a profession. Pretty much like C++ developers who haven't heard of C++11 let alone C++14: explicitly to the extent of ignoring things that make your job easier because then you would not be busy and can be fired.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 05:04

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Super Slash posted:

On that note, I don't get why people print out their work related E-mails; Like... it's right there on the screen, for what reason do you need a paper copy of a new client notification?

That's much like the argument against desktop mail clients versus webmail. Search and any form of navigation has always been significantly faster in webmail unless you are on some pigeon based Internet.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2014 23:28

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 00:56

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

jim truds posted:

email has been down for certain users for 4 days now. If they're in the office they can't connect, over VPN they can. Network team is in a pissing contest to avoid work.

I'm at 2 months now waiting for a network guy in India to fix multicast on a switch in Texas. Last update was the tedious "when was it last working" question, it is the first switch in the entire company I have found that doesn't support multicast. All our core products use multicast, it isn't that new and different.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2014 21:11

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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