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Admin
Admin
Unix is like a lawn mower. It is great for when you want to do the same operation to 100,000 blades of grass. However, if you don't know what you're doing, and you aren't careful, you can cut off your own toes.
Windows is like a fingernail clipper. It is very easy to figure out how to clip that first blade of grass. If you only ever do one, you're fine. But if you ever want to scale up... well try mowing your lawn with a nail clipper and you'll understand why Unix people hate the hell out of everything from a certain glitzy but clueless vendor.
Admin
Right, plenty of systems, like Unix, implement functionality in a library etc. and are still bat-shit crazy.
Just not as barking mad as Windows.
Admin
I wouldnt think twice about firing the developer in question. Even thinking about running excel on the server... And he kind of cheated the task to fulfill the requirement that business logic should be reusable. His implementation clearly is not reusable at all. And he must be aware that he cheated. No mercy for him!
Admin
You've either never used Unix, or you're insane. Not that there's anything wrong with either possibility.
Admin
I think (sort of related) that MS's biggest mistake has been trying to accomodate the dumb user. The more a system is designed for dumb people, the dumber your userbase becomes.
Admittedly, UNIX can be a little too unforgiving for home users (sometimes it would be nice if "rm" had some failsafe - either prompting the user or having a temporary Recycle Bin type thing) - although I think the GUI interfaces for it (which I'm guessing is the less technical people would use) have those sort of measures in place....
The one that has caught me out many, many, many, many times on UNIX (to the point where I aliased the commands) was crontab -r (for some reason I have "r" in my head as READ not REMOVE)....
Admin
Really, I think one of the biggest mistakes of Linux developers is joining the dumb-it-down stampede to the point where people expect it to play games and imitate their familiar GUI, candy-coated-bug for bug.
Admin
Admin
This. Also, you forgot lots and lots of eye-candy.
To be honest, I want to visit every KDE developer and kick thier face in.
Admin
My surly and pessimistic side predicts that this scenario would play out differently. Instead of being called out for their ineptitude, management will throw the admins and developers under the bus for "allowing" such a security hole to exist.
Prove me wrong, kind sir...
Admin
You didn't hear me say that makes it any easier.
Admin
In the project I'm currently working on, there is a component for which I've managed to preserve the designation Custom Role Assignment Package. It's one of the few things about the project that makes me happy.
Admin
Admin
Admin
This brings memories. Decade ago I was working for a company which abused Lotus Notes into performing unimaginable things. We had a set of "web applications" which was total mess of lotus forms printing HTML full of IFRAMEs and Javascript. A big "colorizing" function (as we called it) was triggered from onLoad(), scanned the html and changed the look of fields, buttons and many other objects. Validations were all also done by Javascript on the client browser, by which I mean IE only. And of course, there was a button which triggered a Loutsscript Agent running on the Domino server, which summoned up some data, invoked the Excel (yes, installed on the server), filled the data in, saved XLS into a temp directory and then attached the XLS to the LotusNotes document the user was working with. I remember having long argument with my boss about the "IE only", he literally swore that it will never be ran on anything else than IE. Recently, an ex-colleague told me that few months after I left he was assigned to make it work with Firefox. Yeah. He said wanted to kill me.
Admin
And those of us who have experienced it know that TRWTF beyond all other WTFs is when a simple Excel formula/macro that some business person spent years on (yes, that juxtaposition of simple and years is deliberate) somehow becomes enterprise critical because their clueless colleagues have come to depend on it.
Admin
The client side has Excel. You need to implement, on the server side, the notion of a spreadsheet, possibly multiple worksheets, as a DAG and the formulae as relationships between them, and get these formulae to recalculate when the data changes.
Not trivial to do.
Admin
This would make a great scenario for advertising MS SharePoint Server with Excel Services -- they allow you to do exactly this (drive calculations through Excel) in a somewhat more sensible manner.
Admin
Well I don't know what happened, exactly. I mean, I put the spreadsheet on the server like we discussed, but then the server immediately crashed. Next, everybody started calling in saying that their spreadsheets wouldn't open -- every computer, every spreadsheet! They were all just getting a pop-up that said "license violation". I've heard the software vendors have crazy new ways to "validate" your "genuine" software but I never heard of this before.
No, I haven't tried deleting the spreadsheet from the server.
You really think so?
OK... how about now?
Excel is working again? And you're sure you didn't do anything different? Wow. Ask someone near you to try a spreadsheet. Yeah? OK then I guess we're good.
Great idea, by the way, deleting the spreadsheet from the server. I'm going to tell all the techies I know about your insightful solution.
Admin
Admin
I have this all the time.
We have a system which generates a cover sheet in Word for every document that needs to be transmitted to our clients. In the background it starts a process on a "special server" - actually a box on the server room floor running WinXP professional. It opens Word and "prints" the cover sheet to PDF and then attaches it to the document using antiquated PDF freeware. Then the resulting file magically appears in the user's %temp% folder and that then has to be dragged and dropped into our document management system.
It only takes some joker to use a font that isn't installed on the "special server" to make Word popup with a message and then nobody can make files for clients until they get hold of me to log into the remote server and click okay.
Or someone makes their file read only.
Or adjusts the print margins.
Or uses any non-Latin encoding.
Etc etc.
Admin
Or do you mean plain Dos style optimistic undeleting, i.e. if nothing happened to overwrite a sector it may work? Slightly better than nothing, but these days I'd rather have something more deterministic to rely on.
Admin
Admin
Yeah, if only the entirety of Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 was "available free", you might have a point.
Pain-free, transparent running of complex Excel code written in VBA, which might use COM automation to drive instances of Word, Access, or other non-Microsoft software?
Pivot tables and pivot charts, with data slicers, and the ability to store more than 1 million rows of data underlying the table INSIDE the Excel file?
Native consumption of OLAP cubes/SQL Analysis Services cubes by a pivot table?
While free alternatives to Excel can do a lot for a lot of customers, don't make the mistake of thinking that everything Excel can do is "available free". It's not.
Addendum (2012-11-14 12:54):
Admin
function process_the_crap ($box1,$box2,$box3,$box4,$box5) { return $box1 * box2 ($box3 - abs(box4)) more fictional math; }
I think thats TRWTF.
Admin
I don't know exactly how the Volume Licenses work for companies, but does it actually need to be physically installed on the workstation to be licensed?
Admin
Shhhhhh! Don't correct him! The more people who believe what he said, the fewer systems will be created like the one in the story.
Admin
Admin
Mark Antony: "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones".
Admin
I dont know exactly how its done but I have a program where one of the files is a .cs file that gets compiled at run-time and can be edited by the user.
Admin
I dont know exactly how its done but I have a program where one of the files is a .cs file that gets compiled at run-time and can be edited by the user.
Admin
Most of the time it's well-behaved: setting Application.DisplayAlerts to False suppresses the overwhelming majority of modal dialogs. However, I just recently stumbled across a corner case where this doesn't work.
Turns out that, if (1) your VBA code populates a cell with a formula, and (2) the formula points to another workbook, and (3) the target workbook is password-protected, you will always get a modal dialog asking you to enter a password. This is true even if you've set Application.DisplayAlerts to False. There is no way of suppressing it. The behaviour is of course completely undocumented.
(The background here is that the client had a financial reporting workbook with c. 100,000 distinct references to data in other workbooks, and they wanted to centralise all of those into a single sheet for easier update and auditing. The solution involved writing about 1/3 of a full Excel formula parser, and getting to grips with the fact that, for references like 'MyWorkbook.xlsx'!MyObject, it's impossible to tell whether MyObject is a worksheet or a global named range without looking it up. Happy days.)
I vaguely recall also having problems with COM add-ins throwing modals, but it's probably not fair to expect Excel to be able to suppress those.