• (cs) in reply to Digitalbath
    Digitalbath:
    she wasted maybe 5 minutes of this guy's time tops?

    Instead of wasting 30 of her own seconds...

  • (cs) in reply to masklinn
    masklinn:
    Digitalbath:
    she wasted maybe 5 minutes of this guy's time tops?

    Instead of wasting 30 of her own seconds...

    Granted, but that wasn't really my point...

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to Digitalbath

    Well, if a developer came to me and asked me something that is so basic as scrolling right, yes, I would question their competence. Developers are by definition, understood to be computer literate, so basics like scroll bars are assumed. If code disappears off the right hand side, I would expect a developer to know about this.

    The VSS "corruption" could be investigated by someone in two ways - does it still work? If the code works and checks in and out of VSS correctly, well, it's obviously not corrupted. A diff of the project against your local copy will also verify this - after all, if the filenames were truncated, they won't diff against what you have. A developer is assumed to know about source control, and the concepts behind it. Sure VSS is different from CVS, but it only takes a 10 minute tutorial to get up to speed on how to do basic tasks on VSS.

    However, a developer doesn't necessarily have competence in coffee-making (I don't drink coffee). An office administrator though, I expect will have to know how to work the coffee machine. Just like an accountant ought to be able to work a calculator (or spreadsheet). There are skills that are assumed merely by one's position. Everytime I have to make an international call I have to look up how because well, I don't make many calls. Within North America it's easy, but try calling the UK or elsewhere out of the blue.

    Then again... I've came across many "it doesn't work" scenarios where the root cause was, well, it was unplugged.

    captcha: captcha (really!)

  • (cs) in reply to Cynic
    Anonymous:
    Satanicpuppy:
    Anonymous:
    As this isn't really much of a WTF... I would like to suggest a new conversation topic and direct everyone's attention to the new "Beanbag Girl", if your attention wasn't there already.

    Or we could share stories of similar dumb goofups that we've made.



    Meh, maybe I'm old fashioned, but I still prefer foosball girl. WTF is a "Top quality foam bead" anyway. There are levels of quality for foam beads?


    You wouldn't get far with Beanbag girl anyway.

    Sure, you might get to second base one night at a party, after she's drunk half a bottle of Vodka. You'd think you actually had a chance. Especially after you discover that she works for an Airline, and invites you to spend a week with her on tropical Langkawi, 'cause she can get real cheap tickets.

    But then the deal will fall through because all the tickets are sold out, and you will end up travelling up the coast by train with kids running up and down the aisle all night and them vomiting all over everything. And when you get there you end up spending the week on the couch because it she will say that it was just the alcohol talking 'that night' and she only wants to be friends. breathing faster

    So you will spend a couple of months as friends and discover that she answers her mobile phone in the middle of movies and that no amount of make-up can cover bad-breath. And 'friends' really shouldn't be that needy or get pissed off when you stop calling them. Or invite you up to their apartments late at night. And despite everything you will still feel as stupid as George from Seinfield did, when he turned down the 'coffee', when you tell her that you "really don't need to borrow an umbrella".

    But you move on, you move upwards, and just when you think you've found something else - SHE will ask YOU out, and you'll say 'no', you will actually say no, and she will turn into a CRAZY psycho DEMON freak and plunge your already punctured confidence into a bottomless pit of black, tar-like despair. Your entire life will shatter, will pop like a bubble, and you'll wish you had never crawled away from the inky-green glow of that Wyse50 terminal you used to play Nethack on when you were 6 years old.

    So yeah. The moral of the story is, don't kid yourself.



    Half a bottle of vodka? Round home and never go back to that particular stadium again.

    sincerely,
    Richard Nixon

  • (cs) in reply to Digitalbath
    Digitalbath:

    GoatCheez:
    Anonymous:
    GoatCheez:
    I'm confused. In the second paragrah, it is stated:


    Being the de facto VSS administrator (since nobody else had a clue how it worked), I probed a little, and discovered that apparently the filenames of all the checked-in files were truncated.  All of them -- every single file.

    ...

    ...
    ...
    ...


    I'm confused About the second paragraph too. Like VSS administrator is a position - even a de facto one. <font size="1">(and what's with de facto being two words? If we adopt a word or phrase into English, why can't we Englishise it proper like? - defacto....   anyway...)</font>

    Being a VSS administrator is like being a chedar cheese aeronautical engineer. You're an expert in something that's never going to work properly, and may just have unpleasant side effects for anyone who tries to use it.

    BTW, as for the foosball vs. beanbag girl thing (now that I can see them without the corporate firewall/proxy), I personally prefer "Class Action Man".... hang on, wait a minute..... WTF?!?
  • Fred Flinstone (unregistered)

    Boo!  Hiss!

  • Your Name (unregistered) in reply to marvin_rabbit
    Anonymous:
    Satanicpuppy:
    Anonymous:
    As this isn't really much of a WTF... I would like to suggest a new conversation topic and direct everyone's attention to the new "Beanbag Girl", if your attention wasn't there already.

    Or we could share stories of similar dumb goofups that we've made.



    Meh, maybe I'm old fashioned, but I still prefer foosball girl. WTF is a "Top quality foam bead" anyway. There are levels of quality for foam beads?


    You wouldn't get far with Beanbag girl anyway.

    Sure, you might get to second base one night at a party, after she's drunk half a bottle of Vodka. You'd think you actually had a chance. Especially after you discover that she works for an Airline, and invites you to spend a week with her on tropical Langkawi, 'cause she can get real cheap tickets.

    But then the deal will fall through because all the tickets are sold out, and you will end up travelling up the coast by train with kids running up and down the aisle all night and them vomiting all over everything. And when you get there you end up spending the week on the couch because it she will say that it was just the alcohol talking 'that night' and she only wants to be friends. breathing faster

    So you will spend a couple of months as friends and discover that she answers her mobile phone in the middle of movies and that no amount of make-up can cover bad-breath. And 'friends' really shouldn't be that needy or get pissed off when you stop calling them. Or invite you up to their apartments late at night. And despite everything you will still feel as stupid as George from Seinfield did, when he turned down the 'coffee', when you tell her that you "really don't need to borrow an umbrella".

    But you move on, you move upwards, and just when you think you've found something else - SHE will ask YOU out, and you'll say 'no', you will actually say no, and she will turn into a CRAZY psycho DEMON freak and plunge your already punctured confidence into a bottomless pit of black, tar-like despair. Your entire life will shatter, will pop like a bubble, and you'll wish you had never crawled away from the inky-green glow of that Wyse50 terminal you used to play Nethack on when you were 6 years old.

    So yeah. The moral of the story is, don't kid yourself.



    Hah, I bet you'd rather hang out with class action suit guy!

  • (cs) in reply to Worf
    Anonymous:
    Well, if a developer came to me and asked me something that is so basic as scrolling right, yes, I would question their competence. Developers are by definition, understood to be computer literate, so basics like scroll bars are assumed. If code disappears off the right hand side, I would expect a developer to know about this.

    The VSS "corruption" could be investigated by someone in two ways - does it still work? If the code works and checks in and out of VSS correctly, well, it's obviously not corrupted. A diff of the project against your local copy will also verify this - after all, if the filenames were truncated, they won't diff against what you have. A developer is assumed to know about source control, and the concepts behind it. Sure VSS is different from CVS, but it only takes a 10 minute tutorial to get up to speed on how to do basic tasks on VSS.

    However, a developer doesn't necessarily have competence in coffee-making (I don't drink coffee). An office administrator though, I expect will have to know how to work the coffee machine. Just like an accountant ought to be able to work a calculator (or spreadsheet). There are skills that are assumed merely by one's position. Everytime I have to make an international call I have to look up how because well, I don't make many calls. Within North America it's easy, but try calling the UK or elsewhere out of the blue.

    Then again... I've came across many "it doesn't work" scenarios where the root cause was, well, it was unplugged.

    captcha: captcha (really!)


    True.  And many times the interface of the (whatever) isn't very intuitive to someone who doesn't use it all the time.  I'm pretty good with computer hardware but have been occasionally totally humbled by copy machines.

    Along the same lines as the original WTF, there's a "feature" in Windows that always bothered me but only recently have I seen it cause the problem that I long expected.  I'm surprised it took so long, actually.  A couple weeks ago a customer's secretary tried to email me a zipfile.  Our mail server refuses messages that contain certain attachments, but at least they have it configured to tell me so.  I got a nice message that says "Someone tried to send you this but we blocked it because...".  I wrote her back to ask her to rename the file to *.zippy.  That's all our mail server needs to not recognize the attachment as bad.

    Soon after, I get another "blocked" message from the server.  She tried to send me a file called "myfile.zippy.zip".  I realized immediately why that was so, do you guys?  Also, have any of you run into this stupid problem yet?  I blame windows rather than the poor secretary, but that only makes it stupider, IMO.

  • (cs) in reply to jetcitywoman

    jetcitywoman:

    Soon after, I get another "blocked" message from the server.  She tried to send me a file called "myfile.zippy.zip".  I realized immediately why that was so, do you guys?  Also, have any of you run into this stupid problem yet?  I blame windows rather than the poor secretary, but that only makes it stupider, IMO.

    WTF!?!? What kind of stupid software uses the extension to figure out a file's type?

  • (cs) in reply to Some Idiot
    Some Idiot:

    jetcitywoman:

    Soon after, I get another "blocked" message from the server.  She tried to send me a file called "myfile.zippy.zip".  I realized immediately why that was so, do you guys?  Also, have any of you run into this stupid problem yet?  I blame windows rather than the poor secretary, but that only makes it stupider, IMO.

    WTF!?!? What kind of stupid software uses the extension to figure out a file's type?



    Ha!  Wrong!  The WTF I was referring to wasn't the fact that Windows uses the extension to figure out the file type.  It was the fact that it HIDES the extension, and average-joe users are clueless about it.  In fact, I think this is the default setting right out of the shrinkwrap.  Even WTFier is that it does that to desktop icons as well as files in Explorer.  So when you try to rename a file, you're actually only changing the name and not the extension part of the name.  Thus her file got named "myfile.zippy.zip".

    I had to reply and describe how to choose Folder Options in Explorer and uncheck the "hide extensions for known file types" and THEN rename the file and send it to me.  And of course, she felt stupid when she really shouldn't have.

  • (cs) in reply to jetcitywoman
    jetcitywoman:
    Some Idiot:

    jetcitywoman:

    Soon after, I get another "blocked" message from the server.  She tried to send me a file called "myfile.zippy.zip".  I realized immediately why that was so, do you guys?  Also, have any of you run into this stupid problem yet?  I blame windows rather than the poor secretary, but that only makes it stupider, IMO.

    WTF!?!? What kind of stupid software uses the extension to figure out a file's type?



    Ha!  Wrong!  The WTF I was referring to wasn't the fact that Windows uses the extension to figure out the file type.  It was the fact that it HIDES the extension, and average-joe users are clueless about it.  In fact, I think this is the default setting right out of the shrinkwrap.  Even WTFier is that it does that to desktop icons as well as files in Explorer.  So when you try to rename a file, you're actually only changing the name and not the extension part of the name.  Thus her file got named "myfile.zippy.zip".

    I had to reply and describe how to choose Folder Options in Explorer and uncheck the "hide extensions for known file types" and THEN rename the file and send it to me.  And of course, she felt stupid when she really shouldn't have.

    Ha Ha! Wrongy wrong wrong of the wrong wrongs! The WTF that I was referring to and the WTF that you were referring to is essentially the same WTF. Windows needs the extension to figure out the file type, but the average user is too stupid to use a computer with a dot and three characters after every file name, at least according to whoever makes the usability decisions, so they hide the extension by default.

    If Windows didn't need the extension, there could be no hiding it, save making a link with an extension to hide the fact that a file has no extension. The attachment would be blocked regardless of it's name, which would clearly be preferable in this case.

  • (cs)

    I love it how VSS 2005 crops the messages in the log pane horizontally at about 800 pixels, no matter how wide you make the main window.  And when you use the horizontal scroll bar, the cropped text is scrolled offscreen.  WTF?

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