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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nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

myron cope posted:

I'm not saying it's right, but I basically assume all users are lying to me.

"yeah, I've rebooted three times before calling and it didn't help"

*checks uptime, at 15 days*

He definitely turned the monitor off and back on!

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 18:16

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:55

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Dick Trauma posted:

After almost a full month of phone and in-person interviews and last-minute reference madness the HR VP just called to offer me the job I've been chasing. She wound up insisting on talking to my old CEO and I decided to go with it, contacting him first to prep him. She says he gave me a fantastic, detailed recommendation which helps balance out the stupid bullshit his company put me through.

I start Monday. Sr. Vice President of I.T. with my first six-figure salary, a large increase over my last position. Better late than never! I will put what I've learned at the last job into play here. Now my plan is to try and educate myself on the things that could help keep me at this level for the next part of my career, like project management. At 48 (even a young-looking 48) I have to make sure what I offer is in keeping with what employers expect of someone of my age and experience.

Thank you all for listening to literally years worth of employment drama. I can't tell you how many times it's helped keep me on an even keel, and it's partially responsible for how quickly I bounced back from my flame-out at the last place. I feel much better positioned to deal with this next job due to all the advice I've received.

YES.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2015 20:06

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Oracle.

Oracle pisses me off.

How does anyone think a workflow like this is a good idea?
Log onto website, launch Java application from website, enter stuff into Java application, have it send you an email with an attached file, go back into a different part of the website, upload data file and specify some magic parameters on how to parse it (the data format delivered by the Java application by email isn't parseable by any of the default options), have the website deliver you a magical Excel file with an embedded macro and XML embedded in a cell, the macro runs and parses the XML and uses that to launch an Internet Explorer window embedded in Excel, some weird magic happens between Javascript, serverside and Excel, and another temporary/unnamed Excel file is spawned which contains yet more macromagickery, which will proceed to download further data from the web service and then present that.
Of course all that Excel macro magic is heavily dependent on Excel version, IE version, Excel configuration, IE configuration, and possibly more things I can't imagine, and it breaks in the most impossible to debug ways.

gently caress enterprise applications.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 19:02

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Agree that FileMaker can be just fine, for some kinds of database needs. Making a system for maintaining a collection of records is easy. Where it begins failing is when you want to make any kind of aggregation for reporting or analysis, that appeared difficult to impossible. I think the version I've used was 9, and there wasn't any facility for doing real SQL.

# ¿ May 6, 2015 22:40

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

wolrah posted:

I have a few customers who will happily press the "system-down emergency" button in our after-hours IVR to bug an on-call technician at 9 PM on a Sunday because they forgot their voicemail password, but if their internet goes down and takes their entire phone system in the middle of the business day with it they'll just email me from whatever random personal account they have on their phone and hope for the best. And of course the subject of the email is always "Phones" so most modern email clients stack it with the 10,000 other times they did that as if it's one conversation.

Do you have an SLA on what systems/classes of failures are supported on the emergency hotline?
Ask for their name, then tell them you cannot support their request and you may have to report them for abuse of the hotline.
If that flies with your org.

# ¿ May 8, 2015 15:31

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

We've also got birds at my work!

That's definitely poo poo pissing everyone off. Those gulls spend all day screaming.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 10:18

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

22 Eargesplitten posted:

Also using GOTOs is very frowned upon these days.

Machine code does not have blocks, it's completely flat. Most real-hardware instruction set architectures (ISAs) don't even define such as thing as a procedure/function, you can "call function" to absolutely anywhere in memory.
Typical ISAs have a couple different "jump" (goto) instructions: Unconditional jump, jump if register is zero, jump if register is nonzero, jump if previous instruction resulted in an overflow, etc.
"GOTO is evil" only applies to high level languages.

With the Intel x86 ISA you also have the fun property of variable length instructions: Some instructions take a single byte to encode, some take two, I think some take upwards 5 or more bytes to encode. The result is that the same sequence of bytes can mean something entirely different if you jump into the middle of an instruction. If you craft your code carefully, you can have two entirely valid blocks of code "overlap" that way.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2015 08:15

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Bob Morales posted:

A vendor sent us some firmware updates.

They are text files, with 1 byte in hex on each line.

Why not just put it in a binary file?

To avoid getting blocked by email/other AV filters?

# ¿ Jul 10, 2015 15:24

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Our call center agent front-end runs off a web UI, on a server that requires HTTPS. The certificates are self-signed, for the wrong hostnames, using algorithms blacklisted by Firefox. The UI is glitchy in every other browser than Firefox.
Apparently replacing the certs is a major problem.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2015 08:16

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Sefal posted:

But now that I am hired. I'm afraid i will dissapoint them. When i encounter a new problem. I just google it and find the solution and why it happened so i can try to prevent it. But everyone else just looks at the problem and they know what steps to take.

Also known as "Impostor Syndrome" - you think you're unskilled when you in fact have strong skills.

Being able to identify a problem, use relevant terms to look it up in a reference library (Google), find relevant solutions and filter out irrelevant information, then applying the solution. Those are important skills that far from everyone is capable of.
You will eventually remember some facts etc., so you won't have to look things up all the time. The same way you'll be using a dictionary more often when you haven't learned a language well.

Keep doing what you're doing, your colleagues likely aren't seeing any of the "faults" you think you have. Just remember that there is more knowledge out there than any one person can keep in their mind, and referencing others' knowledge is a skill.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2015 13:06

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Skandranon posted:

Probably panicked like in above picture, and higher level thinking went out the window.

Or the idea that changes seen are straight up irreversible.

My first experience with tech support was when I was 8 or so, 1992 or 1992. I was toying around with DOSSHELL on my parent's IBM. Some time before I had read about having a boot diskette being an important recovery tool, in case something goes wrong with a computer. And I had prepared one!

It just happened that DOSSHELL froze hard, at least sufficiently hard that I couldn't get it to live again, and I had the thought: Ooh, if I turn off the computer now I'll definitely need that boot disk. So turn off PC, plop in boot disk, turn back on, and what happens?

pre:

Enter current date: 
Enter current time: 
A>_

Well gently caress! The computer forgot the date and time, the prompt is all wrong, and I can't start Windows either now! Computer broken!

Call IBM's support. The suggestion is obviously to just remove the diskette and reboot, and everything works as it should.
Crisis averted.

The knowledge I was missing, was that first, a boot disk is not necessary for most normal crashes, second that a computer can boot in many ways and they don't necessarily reflect on each other, and lastly that a boot disk usually needs something more than just FORMAT A: /S on it, to be useful.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 19:21

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Basically nothing gets blocked here. Yay!

On the other hand, this loving UI.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2015 07:51

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

A few months ago I made a database in Access 2013 to replace an Excel project that was running out of control and impossible to do any sort of reporting on. Access is poo poo, but it's still better than Excel at being a database.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2015 15:48

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Dick Trauma posted:

EDIT: Ha! My boss just sent me an email that she'd like to see another cost/benefits analysis. I'm going to make something without any costs. It's going to be a list of what they wanted matched up against where my proposal satisfies those requirements. I'll use lots of green shading to indicate how they'll get all these things plus trimmings like centralized instant messaging, screensharing, etc. Curious to see what happens.

Cost of not doing.
Benefit of doing.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2015 10:54

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Ynglaur posted:

Pissing me off: leaders who assume that every project ~~team member~~ resource is an easily replaced cog in a gearbox. No, a new manager is not going to be productive to "get you over a hump" for 3 weeks. This is a multi-year program. He'll need 3 weeks just to come up to speed. No, I cannot simply surge on <application> developers to reduce a 4-week timeline to 4/n. New people will take 2 weeks just to fully understand the configuration. Your company will take 2 weeks just to get them network access.

With lead time, yes, additional people can help tremendously. If you bring on a person with a kneejerk, though, all you get is kicked in the teeth.

Buy a couple copies of The Mythical Man-Machine Month and passive-aggressively leave them in christmas socks on said leaders' office doors.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 21:22

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Migishu posted:

Things pissing me off: Videos recorded on Macs.

I need to convert a video that was recorded on a Mac from .mov to a format that plays in WMP, or works in HTML5 using IE. Why? Because we are big important business peoples who need to use IE and WMP because other tools are not supported in our environment.

In every single conversion test I've done using Handbrake or Adobe Premiere, it works perfectly in Chrome, VLC, and MPC, but not in IE WMP

I'm at a loss on how to get this loving thing working.

I don't have access to the Mac it was even recorded on because it was done by some trainer guy not on my site. I don't know how to contact the trainer guy to have him convert it to a non-lovely non-mac format either.

Funny part is, MOV is almost the same as MP4. The MP4 container format is based on the MOV format, with some uncommon features cut out, so theoretically you could simply rename the file.

If Microsoft's H.264 codec won't parse whatever your transcoder outputs, chance is you're using an unsupported level or profile. Check that.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2015 23:27

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

If the time it takes to type in your commands/scripts is significant, even with PowerShell's long/verbose names, you need to work on your typing technique.

I've been working on a few internal tools in PS recently, and definitely appreciate the verbose verb-noun commands. It makes it simpler to write understandable code, and I feel it also helps my own design considerations.

I also find it highly preferable to the ancient Unix tradition of installing tools with exceedingly generic names into /usr/bin, such as "convert" or "testparm". (From respectively ImageMagick and Samba. First does all kinds of image file filtering, latter sanity checks one particular configuration.)

# ¿ Dec 9, 2015 23:01

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

ChickenOfTomorrow posted:

HR never tells me when people leave so their accounts aren't disabled. I'm trying to get them to set up the payroll system to email me when someone is terminated but the HR dude seems more interested in picking his nose.

We recently implemented Microsoft Identity Manager, it integrates with our HR system, so employees that are terminated or leave, automatically are disabled. Helpdesk still gets an override button for this, either force account open, or force disabled. Works very well, in fact.
(Before implementing MIM this way, there were several hundred "ghost" accounts.)

# ¿ Dec 14, 2015 22:59

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Forever pissing me off: Internal applications requiring ancient versions of IE. And Java.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2015 14:50

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

baquerd posted:

Relying on customers to input unique numbers is a bad idea. What if two customers choose the same number?

It sounds to me like this is the "customer's reference" field, i.e. only supposed to be unique per customer. So accounting can link the foreign invoice to their own purchase order. Which is why the customer is supposed to supply it.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2016 15:06

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Bob Morales posted:

Oh man, this gets better. I got a helpdesk request asking to 'automate daily task list backups in Outlook'. I told them I wasn't going to do it.

"Hey you know that thing you told us not to do because you had all these reasons? We did it anyway and need some backup hacked up for it! lol can you do it tomorrow?"

Get on it.

code:

Add-Type -AssemblyName "Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook"
$ol = New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application
$ns = $ol.GetNamespace("MAPI")

$tasks = $ns.GetDefaultFolder([Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlDefaultFolders]::olFolderTasks).Items
$tasks | select ConversationTopic,Body,StartDate | write-csv -path "\\server\tasks\backup.csv"

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 10:33

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Jeoh posted:

Better to use Get-MailboxFolder on the server and make the backups there than to depend on a scheduled task on the client.

Even better to tell them to gently caress off and use Project for this. Or whatever other project management tool they'd like to use that isn't Outlook.

Can Exchange export Task items to CSV files? Didn't think so.
Really dumb requirements spec that will cause endless trouble if implemented as-is, and they won't budge on it. Hand them the shovel to dig their own grave and get blamed for it, or refuse to implement it and get canned? Bob Morales sure has great options.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 17:30

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Inspector_666 posted:

Right but if the HP device can't accept a subnet mask or gateway address then how the gently caress is it supposed to communicate with anything? You can't give a thing just an IP address.

Sure you can. Just send out an ARP request for whatever IP you want to talk to, and if that isn't on the local subnet, well sucks, no ARP response and no connection for you.
Heck, you might even be able to just send only Ethernet broadcast frames and not even do ARP.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2016 08:39

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Driver package for "HP Conferencing Keyboard":
1 MB program to capture keys and control LEDs
49 MB .NET Framework installer

# ¿ Mar 4, 2016 13:46

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Walked posted:

Boss and I have a regular meeting at 1:30 every Tuesday.

I'm losing my mind. I always get there at exactly 1:30, and he's never back to his desk. I normally check back every 3-5min until about 1:45 or so, when I call it a wash because I have many things to tend to.

Every time, somewhere between 1:50 and 2:15 he'll stroll into my office and be like "so are we meeting or not?"

I dont know, gently caress, maybe look at your calendar or try to remember the same meeting we have literally every week

Leave a post-it on the middle of his screen every time you check his desk and he's not there. "Arrived at 1:30 for meeting, $boss not present. -Walked" "Arrived at 1:35 for meeting, $boss not present. -Walked" etc
If he doesn't explode, maybe he'll figure it out.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 20:33

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Thanks Ants posted:

Wasn't the malware loaded in by a piece of hardware by Windows, so your custom image counted for gently caress all?

Yep, the firmware straight up replaced a file in \Windows\System32 with their own version, that would then proceed to install more stuff when the machine booted. They were infecting your system before any user code got to run at all.

I guess maybe full disk encryption could defeat it...

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 18:08

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

From what I've read so far, it sounds similar to what coLinux is already doing, but probably better integrated. Maybe inspiration is half that and half Cygwin.

Or perhaps rather, SFU/SUA/Interix but not horribly crippled.

nielsm fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Mar 30, 2016

# ¿ Mar 30, 2016 19:45

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Ubuntu GNU/NT

I do want to know how much Linux code is in there, and how much is a reimplementation of the syscall interface.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2016 20:05

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

stubblyhead posted:

They can clear out, but the danishes stay.

What? Choke to death on your fake-rear end poo poo pastries or something while I enjoy some proper morgenbr�d. I'll have a proper sweet tebirkes with butter any time!

# ¿ Apr 18, 2016 16:07

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Tab8715 posted:

On another note, is Microsoft ever going to address MAX_PATH? With OneDrive and the continuation of communication between Windows and Linux I don't see how this can continue to last.

The logistics of a proper fix for MAX_PATH is insane, you have 30 years worth of software with hard buffer length assumptions.
The kernel does support very long paths and applications can use them, but need to call the API differently. Good library support for that would go 80% of the way to make new applications support arbitrary path lengths, but old software and 3rd-party libraries would still have all the problems.

# ¿ May 4, 2016 10:37

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

My colleague was talking, completely seriously, about his side job as an exorcist and healer. Ugh.

# ¿ May 27, 2016 10:26

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

If you aren't a network person and you don't have a written troubleshooting instruction on the network gear, then yeah flipping random switches is not something you should do.

# ¿ May 28, 2016 15:53

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

FogHelmut posted:

Why do I have to clear my browser cache? It's 2016, I do not have a slow or limited connection. My browser shouldn't be caching anything.

The servers may have a slow connection, relative to the amount of clients served, and we still haven't invented FTL communications so roundtrip times will often also matter.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 15:19

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Erwin posted:

Yeah, I hate when people touch my monitors. Which makes me a hypocrite, because I find myself doing it to other people's monitors. I don't know where I picked up this habit, but it's me, I'm the terrible person.

When I need to point at a monitor I touch with my fingernail. That's okay isn't it??
E: Hand flipped so my palm is away from the screen.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2016 19:42

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

MrMoo posted:

Use six Fast Ethernet media converters to daisy chain all the switches together using coax Ethernet. Almost.

Cannot beat using a single cat-5e cable for two cat-3 connections to save money. Runs perfect in single line tests, the amount of line noise when both are active is impressive.

Just punch two cables into the same Ethernet jack, you don't need any fancy hardware for that. Instant daisy-chaining!

# ¿ Jul 18, 2016 20:32

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Our place has multiple free coffee vending machines, with choice of various brews, and some even offer fresh ground coffee. There is also a large selection of tea bags.
I can only imagine the entire office would go on strike if that was taken away.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 14:53

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

flosofl posted:

Eh. It's colored, flavored bubbly water with a small amount of caffeine at that point.

I mean yeah, it's a lot, but it's not like sucking down liters of HFCS water like regular soda. Of course, there's a study or two that says diet drinks trigger appetite but not satiation, but eating like a pig is a whole other issue.

The "bubbly" part can definitely be a problem, though. Carbonation actually raises the acidity of the drink, which can damage the teeth, and possibly also affect digestion in general.

There's also some claims that artificial sweeteners can affect metabolism in strange ways, but I have no idea how true that it. (Personally I can't stand the aftertaste of aspartame.)

# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 20:06

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

pixaal posted:

Pissing me off: Adding a 32bit driver for a new printer in TYOOL2016 (okay its 6 months old now).

We have one god drat XP machine left, and it has some equipment that the vendor wont support driver wise above XP, and a new model is coming out next year that will support windows 10 (current "new"model cutoff is win 7 gently caress you 8, oh and we have 8 and no 7 licenses). They need access the god drat printer from that computer for some new process a customer wants.

I hate you XP, and I hate you 32bit both of these things should have died 5 years ago.

Does there really not exist some really dumb proxy printer driver, where the client computer just produces standard PostScript or PCL, and sends it off to the printserver which then has a real driver?
Heck you could probably even implement it as a PDF printer driver, which automatically just dumps the PDF into a network share with a random name, and then a server picks it up and prints it.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2016 22:17

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Today's crypto virus: ZEPTO.

Of course discovered shortly before everyone leaves for the day.
Well, it's reported and escalated, not my problem from here.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 14:57

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:55

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

I was trying to give some Exchange permissions to a user. My usual script seems to fail, it doesn't show the permission as applied.

So after investigating, it turns out that, because the user's SAMAccountName is a prefix of the name of a built-in security principal, Exchange for some reason selected the security principal instead of the user account?!
The only way to get it working was to specify the user in the old-style DOMAIN\USER form, none of DN, AD-path, GUID or UPN accepted.
Piece of poo poo, Exchange.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 13:24

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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