Great Moments in Computer Programming

AArdvark · Post by **AArdvark** » Mon Aug 27, 2012 2:18 am

What else would the programmers and software engineers over at Yahoo have to do all day if they looked at each other and said: 'Hey, It works just fine, we don't need to change anything".

The mentality of: 'it's never finished' and: 'If you're not moving forward you're falling behind' are big motivating forces.
Hell, I don't even use Yahoo cause I think the searches are skewed somehow (maybe it's just me) It just feels weird.

THE
FEELS WEIRD
AARDVARK

RetroRomper · Post by **RetroRomper** » Mon Aug 27, 2012 2:00 pm

My local community College uses a web suite called Black Board for online classes and this semester, they paid the 600k or so to upgrade to the newest version. The most glaring "upgrades" were the switch to a Vista, overly rounded and bubblegum styled theme and a different method of loading discussion boards.

In the previous version, you could just click a + button in a threaded conversation and obviously the replies would instantly appear. Now where the responses would normally be, a "Loading Thread" message appears with a 3 - 5 second time delay and during this phase, freezes my browser and routinely breaks the formatting of the thread in the process.

Kudos to Black Board for breaking functionality that has existed in a mature, evolved, and stable state for the past decade.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Aug 27, 2012 3:22 pm

But do you wish them all dead? I wish them all dead.

RetroRomper · Post by **RetroRomper** » Sun Sep 16, 2012 12:14 am

I wish them all dead, as they also fucked up a function you'd expect any program designed after 1995 to have - the ability to preserve formatting from a word doc.

Long story short, I was marked down major points for a discussion board post because the automatic formatting breaks horribly when I copy and paste from the document to the message board. Professor said afterwards that "you should have edited and properly formatted it," because I did do this and the god damn software refused to do anything wild such as...

1) Allow indentions.
2) Page breaks
3) Center text
4) Sane line by line formatting
5) Bullet points.

When a piece of kit such from 2001 (such as the version of phpBB this website runs on) is vastly superior to the crap a multi-billion dollar company tries to reinvent, someone needs to die.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Oct 03, 2012 10:25 pm

I have a widescreen monitor.

I have been trying for 20 minutes to figure out a way to make Open Office be full screen, but only display one page.

(Without having the text go clear from one side of the monitor to the other.)

Every single fucking Word Processing project need to kill all their developers after three years. Either they'll have it 100% finished by then and everything else just makes shit worse or they were never going to get it right to begin with.

I can not BELIEVE how much it angers me when Word Processor programmers keep fucking with a project that is FINISHED. This is my #1 computer-based pet peeve for at least 20 years now.

RetroRomper · Post by **RetroRomper** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 1:59 pm

OpenOffice automatically opens to two side by side pages when I enable full screen mode. All fine and dandy, except my widescreen is in portrait view and so the text becomes horribly squished or off screen (OpenOffice goes into two page mode on my widescreen as well which is just as annoying... Why am I being forced to track the position of a cursor over the electronic equivalent of Asia?)

For non-academic writing, I now use a minimalist text program called FocusWriter (http://gottcode.org/focuswriter/) because the last thing that I should have to do, is have to fiddle with .ini settings when I'm ready to express myself. The program isn't appropriate for multi-tasking though (unless you have two or three monitors) but for a quick bit of prose, it works.

AArdvark · Post by **AArdvark** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 3:53 pm

That's a good point. The best word processing program I have used so far is Wordpad in Windows 98.

Scary, huh.

THE
AINT BROKE
AARDVARK

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Fri Oct 05, 2012 10:53 pm

This little problem has a happy ending. For the last while, I've been copying my IF work-in-progress's transcripts to word processor programs since I've been having a block writing descriptions and responses and wanted to get into more of a writer mode. My transcripts have all of the current responses, and I wanted to replace old responses with ones in a different colored text to easily tell the difference between the old and the new.

Needless to say, no matter what program I used (Google Docs, LibreOffice, AbiWord) and no matter how much I played with styles and this and that, there's just no way to "lock on" to a style or color and keep it wherever you click around on the document. I was pretty annoyed with this.

Luckily, today, my brother pointed me to the "track changes" feature that is common to many word processors, it seems (works just fine under LibreOffice). Basically, it just treats everything you type like an editing note, giving it its own color.

Google Docs doesn't seem to have it, but its commenting feature seems to work well enough for the same purposes.

RetroR · Post by **RetroR** » Sat Oct 06, 2012 12:21 am

Am I the only person here who uses Notepad++ for both programming and word processing?

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Sat Oct 06, 2012 12:01 pm

For my main programming, Notepad++ frustrates me with how my favorite features, if supported by plugin at all, are just really poorly supported. Plus, it doesn't really like Hugo's wacky line/block commenting syntax. Still, with the nice fonts and all, I can see why it might be appealing.

I use EditPlus for most of my Hugo coding, but instead of using that for everything, I also loaded gedit up with wiki code clips for my offline wiki-page-writing, and as often as not, I'll edit regular text files with Notepad.

I usually use AbiWord for word processing, just because it's lightweight and good enough for my purposes, but I'll sometimes change that up with LibreOffice or Google Docs.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sun Jul 07, 2013 11:56 pm

I went 36 hours without logging into Facebook. Facebook freaked the fuck out and sent me an e-mail telling me that I have notices waiting for me.

The single best scene in The Social Network is when the two dudes are HACKING HARD to get this coveted job at Facebook. Because only hardcore computer programmers and hackers could ever work there. It's definitely not a fucking mildew-riddled sponge soaking up the dumbest fucking cretins in the entire field of computers.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue Jan 14, 2014 8:01 pm

I really hate how the touchpad on a laptop acts as a mouse click when pressed. It's fucking retarded, pointless (there's an actual button RIGHT NEXT TO IT) and impossible to figure out how to disable.

Last night, playing Wasteland on the laptop, my fingers brushed the fucking touchpad to act as a click. While a menu with a shop keeper was up. While in "sell" mode. On my M19.

I played two hours to get enough cash to buy stuff and lost it all because I sold the M19 and had to buy it back at twice the price. Fuck laptops.

The Happiness Engine · Thu Jan 16, 2014 6:51 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I went 36 hours without logging into Facebook. Facebook freaked the fuck out and sent me an e-mail telling me that I have notices waiting for me.

EVERY fucking time I go on a trip (and don't bring my laptop, because it's a fucking VACATION) Facebook freaks the fuck out and emails me every fucking day asking if I'd like to friend some people and telling me how much fun my e-friends are having sitting indoors and staring at their computer screens.

And then I go the fuck outside, and drink in public like an ADULT.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Jul 17, 2014 7:22 am

I used to get eBay searches sent to my email account. Some dickhead is trying to sell a stupid "Wacko" poster for the arcade game "Wacko" and has polluted my search so I went to turn them all off.

eBay didn't screw up the process. But th--

OK, this is what they call deleting a search. This is their option for it.

"Unfollow search."

"UNFOLLOW search."

Not "Stop this search" or "End this search" or "Delete this search."

UNFOLLOW THE FUCKEN SEARCH.

That is the single most desperate and pathetic decision by a marketing trog I've ever seen in my life.

Anyway. While I was there, I saw an item I always wanted, so I tweet on it. I also saw that my feedklout had gone up, which was definitely not ratchet.

Garth's Equipment Shop · Thu Jul 17, 2014 8:22 pm

What I hate most about facebook is having "likes" but not "dislikes" or "hates". I want so fucking bad to dislike and hate so many people and things on facebook. I think if I spent as much time on it as so many others do I'd end up with so much pent up rage I'd end up climbing a clock tower. Isn't the ability to vent and to express disapproval or "air our grievances" (yes I listened to the latest Don Rogers Show) a significant part of social interaction? You would think something that calls itself a social network would have that base covered.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Nov 20, 2014 10:55 pm

So for the first time in my life, I am extremely busy at work. I'm going to have to start putting in 12 hour days to keep up. Or work weekends. I don't care, this company has taken care of me more in 4 months than every other place combined.

That said, there's some frustrating things that just suck the day away.

I use the query tool in pgadmin every day. Two days ago I went to do a query and the query tool... didn't load. Window didn't come up. It hung. It was grayed out. It was dead.

I've had debates about how much I hate that modern computer programs don't stay in one directory, but instead spill their shit like kraken tendrils all over the file system. *I could not delete whatever log file pgadmin was using that was fucking it up.*

Evidence indicated that it ... was trying to load bad query history or some shit. Okay!

"Okay!" -- the Bridge Tender

But I need to be able to delete that file. And don't get me started on deleting apps from a Mac.

That's what I had to do. After an hour. I had to delete pgadmin 3 and then reinstall it, and I lost all my saved servers.

So that's one hour I'll never get back. It's really frustrating when shit like this appears in necessary applications.

The Happiness Engine · Sat Nov 22, 2014 11:11 am

OK, I'm REALLY late on mentioning this but I've been pretty angry about it for awhile:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/31 ... r_support/

If I go to the Google homepage, I get served the old version of the site. If I search for something, the results show up in the current look. However, if I then try and type something into the search box again, Google search doesn't work at all. I have to go back to the homepage every time to do a new search.

"Thanks for the reports. I want to assure you this isn't a bug, it's working as intended," said a Google worker going by the name nealem. She added: We’re continually making improvements to Search, so we can only provide limited support for some outdated browsers. We encourage everyone to make the free upgrade to modern browsers - they’re more secure and provide a better web experience overall.

What. The. Fuck. "Oh yeah, our website works fine in your browser, but we decided to look at the agent string and INTENTIONALLY BREAK OUR WEBSITE because HOW FUCKING DARE you not use Chrome and allow us to steal behavioral data however we want!"

The unmitigated gall. "We are so secure in our monopoly that we will shit in your mouths if you do not bend over and enrich us."

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Sat Nov 22, 2014 12:52 pm

It amazes me when things like Google only work "in some browsers." Google should be a static page with one text input box and one button. It should load on Netscape Navigator and Lynx.

It's like when people have to upgrade their computer because Microsoft Office is running too slowly. A word processor and a spreadsheet running too slowly on a computer that does a zillion processes a second. As ICJ would say, nnnnnnggggghhhhh!

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Nov 22, 2014 2:19 pm

"Thanks for the reports. I want to assure you this isn't a bug, it's working as intended," said a Google worker going by the name nealem.

No, it's a bug, asshole.

Over the years I've had a few friends and acquaintances apply to Google and not get the job. They are exactly the kind of people that every company should want.

The fact that Google isn't letting those people through, but letting wastes of space like "nealem" through says a lot about the company.

A certain kind of developer thinks that the definition of a bug is unintended consequences or unexplained actions. It's not. You can intentionally make your app die every sixty seconds. It still means it's buggy as shit.

RetroRomper · Post by **RetroRomper** » Tue Nov 25, 2014 2:16 pm

Nealem is probably just a contractor manning one of the phone banks scattered around the campus, given a script to read and told to constantly reinforce the company line.