A thread about bugs in a piece of software, demonstrates a bug in the same software. Irony levels exceeding critical parameters...
Best posts made by The_Assimilator
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RE: Genuinely Useful Bug Reports
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RE: Here's a shocker: Eclipse-based Aptana Studio sucks shit!
I'm with blakey 100% on this one. SHGetKnownFolderPath() has been around for almost half a decade and has been Microsoft's recommended way for retrieving special directory paths ever since its release. The fact that an application isn't using it is flat out inexcusable. (What's even less excusable is the fact that Java doesn't use this call and a bug regarding this was filed FOUR YEARS AGO and is still unfixed! How difficult is it for Sun to put in special-case logic for System.getProperty("user.home") to do a native call to SHGetKnownFolderPath if the OS is Windows? I reckon Oracle got ripped off.)
Granted, this is something Java should do, but if the Eclipse developers actually cared about not fucking their users in the ass, they would've written a one-method JNI DLL that calls SHGetKnownFolderPath and bundled said DLL with the Windows binaries only. Not rocket science - they would have a (less un-) happy user, they wouldn't have an extra bug report to deal with, and they wouldn't have their software being ridiculed on a well-known site dedicated to said ridiculing.
As for bug reports, I'd rather have a fleshed-out, well-explained, screenshotted, slightly sarcastic bug report than one with absolutely no information except "hay i luv yor app but it breaks when i poop on it"; blakey's reports are what most developers can only dream of. If I was a maintainer of an OSS project and had to dredge through 500 spurious/useless bug reports to find a single meaningful one, I wouldn't bother either, and that's why so many "minor" OSS bugs go unnoticed/unfixed. (Not blaming OSS devs here, I just wish that most users weren't tools... ideal world.)
Finally, if people hating me gets them to write better software, then they should hate me more, reputation be damned. (Although it's rather sad if pride in their own work doesn't cause them to strive to write better software anyway.)
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RE: Genuinely Useful Bug Reports
[b]Bug:[/b] Discourse hijacks Ctrl+F
[b]Expected:[/b] Discourse leaves browser keyboard shortcuts the fuck alone
[b]Actual:[/b] As per bugFirst rule of web UI design: don't fuck with browser default behaviour, ever, under any circumstance. You guys created this infinite scrolling monster, you find elegant ways of making it work with web browsers. Hijacking Ctrl+F to sidestep this problem isn't elegant in any way shape or form, in fact it's probably the dirtiest, sloppiest, laziest hack I can think of.
Do not. Fuck with. My browser keyboard shortcuts.
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RE: Self-WTF: Identity crysis
At least you didn't have event handlers on the setters that eventually ended up firing the setters.
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RE: Badges!!
No, I think it has to be assigned by @blakeyrat.
Agreed. blakey is the only one who can bestow this badge, mikeTheLiar is merely the current bestowee, and blakey can reassign the badge at any time. However anyone upon whom this badge is ever bestowed gets an additional, permanent badge to indicate for time immemorial (or until we get tired of Shitcourse) that they were, at some point, The Worst Of The Worst.
I think we also need a "Made a More Retarded Post than Ben L" badge. I'm not sure if this one would ever be granted though.
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RE: Poll: How long do you sleep everyday?
I would guess that they're too cold to care.
If by "cold" you mean "murdered to death by Stalin" then yes.
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RE: Gimp 2.7.2 Splash Screen
@blakeyrat said:
EDIT: I swear I made a thread on an earlier GIMP splash screen, that featured their mutant creature painting a nude of itself... and was extremely disturbing... but I can't for the life of me find the thread, and neither can Google. So shrug.
I think I can safely say this is the first time I'm glad that Google has failed.
Also I was under the impression that the Linux crowd was trying to get more of their software adopted by the mainstream. YEAH GOOD JOB ON THAT ONE GUYS, keep doing what you're doing and I'm sure your marketshare is just going to explode next year. (Just like it's been going to do for the past decade amirite?)
Man, it's got to the stage where we don't even need to make jokes about Linux... its devs are doing that for us.
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RE: 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
You're doing it wrong. No, it doesn't matter how you're doing it. You're almost certainly not doing it the way Discourse is designed for you to use it; therefore, you're wrong.</sarcasm>
If it comes to a toss-up between being wrong on 1 forum I frequent, versus every forum but 1, guess which side I'm going to pick. I don't have a beef with Discourse the concept, but I do have a beef with software that forces you to do things differently - as opposed to giving you the [i]option[/i] of doing things in a different way, or reverting to the way you're comfortable with. It's even more onerous if the software forces you to do things differently for no apparent rhyme or reason except because its creators decided the current way is wrong.
I could continue, but this has all been beaten to death multiple times already and management has made it clear they aren't willing to address these concerns, which is a shame, but there you have it.
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RE: Gimp 2.7.2 Splash Screen
@vleer said:
1. When did the Gimp devs start stealing furry porn from Deviant Art?
I thought it was obvious they were the ones responsible for creating most of it. If they were actually spending most of their time coding, do you think their app would have a splash screen like that?
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RE: The software circles of hell: Java, NetBeans, Maven, Tomcat, and about 50,000 vaguely-named Java libraries
@ubersoldat said:
you know that you don't have to redeploy a war when editing static content, right. I think, from your last comment, that your company has no clue about any of the tools you're using. Your Maven build process is broken. Subversion, don't get me started. Tomcat 404 is because your WAR is broken. Saying that Tomcat is a piece of crap shows your real ignorance. That's not bad, you probably are used to a walled MS environment and being in a strange land makes you feel uncomfortable and angry.
blakey and I are used to an MS environment where the tools actually work. When tools don't work, like in Java land, we get uncomfortable and angry for good reason.
@Seahen said:
Try Eclipse.
The IDE that has no project file so you have no idea what to check into your source control? And that randomly breaks your project when you check it out? And that crashes without any error messages when it can't load your project for whatever reason? Yeah.
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RE: Reverse functional programming
@morbiuswilters said:
So.. Go is a replacement for C, but without the primary reason people use C: the vast, vast base of existing libraries and code. That's like giving me a replacement for my car that lacks an engine, 4 wheels or seating for more than 1 person.
Why did anybody make time creating this? Think of all the ditches these programmers could have dug if they weren't wasting time on this shit. Think of all of the boulders they could move from one pile to another pile, and then back again. They could work to calculate Pi to a billion places by hand. Shit, they could have played computer Solitaire. Anything seems like a better use of time and effort than creating yet another, marginal, hardly-used language that's not better at anything than existing languages.
Oh morbs, how we've missed your concise analyses. blakey's good, but your critiques just have something special about them.
As for C, I wouldn't say the specification is poor, just intentionally vague and leaves everything up to the compiler implementer. Then you get two compilers that implement the same poorly-defined feature in ways that make cross-compilation impossible. So you add a preprocessor to the language to provide compile guards and OH GOD KILL ME NOW
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RE: Go screwed over the indie game Haunts
Correction: extremely poor decisions screwed over the indie game Haunted.
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RE: What is the bigger WTF... the FCC, or Oracle?
@morbiuswilters said:
@boomzilla said:
What a fascinatingly WTF way to try to post images. I wonder what the tinyurl folks would say about that?
I like too that Firefox is happy to follow those redirects to the gates of Hell, but Chrome just casts a condescending, sideways glance, like the redirects are a guy in a pink shirt and cowboy boots who is taking a shit in the punch bowl.
Best part of Chrome is "This web page is not available" when you right-click -> "Open image in new tab" on those suckas.
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RE: Do it my way or leave it
@ronin said:
My colleague decided that there had to be a better way, and in fact the other company already had a powerful, well-tested web-service API.
The interface to that API was nearly finished when the manager got wind that the implementors hadn't stuck to her concept.Let me tell you what your colleague should have done:
- Before writing any code, get in contact with someone (preferably as senior as possible) from the other company, who is responsible for their web API.
- Explain to them the business manager's solution versus your solution, and get them to agree that your solution is better.
- Get the business manager (BM) to email his/her "solution" to the web API guy at the other company. If the BM won't do it because of reasons, make a fuss about him/her being an impediment to the project until s/he does. It's vital that the BM's "solution" comes directly from him/her and is not transcribed by you - that way the BM can't accuse you of distorting facts later. Also make sure as many senior people as possible in your company are CC'd on this email.
Web API guy at the other company rejects BM's "solution" because it doesn't use the web API. You send your solution to that person, s/he approves it and communicates back to your company (including all the higher-ups previously CC'd) that this is what they want to go with.
At this point, the BM no longer has a leg to stand on. The other company has flat-out rejected her solution and accepted your colleague's. The BM has to go along with the hive mind; if s/he protests, s/he's the problem. There's no-one else to blame - certainly not you, who suggested the solution that seems to work best for both parties, and prevented any friction with the other company.
- Implement your solution.
- ???
- Profit, hopefully.
Unfortunately, in a corporate world, you gotta play the politics. It's distasteful, it's time-wasting, and it's downright infantile, but if you know how to play it right, you can generally come up with a watertight defense against anyone trying to shoot your solution down. The only way to beat the system is to play it better than everyone else.
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RE: A pre-emptive "Fuck You" to Mozilla
@barfoo said:
@blakeyrat said:
Git is unusable.
Clearly, then, miracles are happening every day by the millions, as people all over the world do the impossible by using git. You do understand the difference between "I am unable to do x" and "x is impossible," don't you?1. "define:unusable" = not fit to be used
2. "define:unable" = lacking the skill, means, or opportunity to do something
3. "define:impossible" = not able to occur, exist, or be done1 and 3 are not the same thing. blakey knows this, you do not. Perhaps you should stop using them and regress to a caveman-level existence in front of a terminal running git? It seems like that would be more your speed.
As a bonus, instead of wasting your time posting on internet forums, you could maybe wank yourself to death while watching the flickering cursor. I'd call that a win for humankind.
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I hate Eclipse, Adobe, JBoss, and everything related to Java.
We "inherited" an Adobe Flex application from another vendor. Nevermind that none of us have worked with Flex before, the point is we're cheap(er than the other vendor) and we can learn, can't we? (client) OF COURSE THEY CAN (our management)
So the other vendor's dev comes to do handover, which basically amounts to giving one of our team's senior devs, P a development VM with the source, IDE etc. on it. Our dev makes sure the VM works, and the other vendor fucks off into the sunset.
Come the following week and we need to do changes on the just-handed-over app. The other senior dev on my team, A, gets tasked with doing the changes. After he's completed his work, he tries testing the application. It compiles just fine... but it won't deploy to JBoss. It breaks every time. After he's wasted a few hours on this, he pulls me in. I can't get any further either.
So A and myself grill P, the dev who got the handover, and it turns out he didn't try running the app... he just made sure it compiles. We restrain ourselves from murdering him, and instead contact the vendor who did the handover. They can't help us, because, um, they've actually never needed to deploy this app either, haha.
WHAT.
Yep, it turns out the "changes" they did to the app were merely running SQL scripts on the DB. (Before you ask, no, that won't work for what we need to do.) The app itself hasn't been redeployed since before the vendor inherited this application (2+ years) from a PREVIOUS vendor... who was also fired for being too expensive, and incidentally are no longer talking to our client or anyone who works with them.
Hence A and myself spent the better part of last week trying to get this app to work. We tried different Java versions, we tried different Flex versions, we tried different JBoss versions, we tried different Eclipse versions. Hell, we tried updating the JAR that is deployed to the production environment with only our changes! The only thing that changes is the way the app crashes.
So I'd like to give a big FUCK YOU to JBoss (for giving completely useless exception stack traces when things break), Adobe (for integrating their shitty Flex dev tools into Eclipse: the shittiest IDE ever created), Eclipse (for being as much fun to work in as putting your dick against a belt sander), Maven (for being an unnecessarily complex and convoluted way to write build scripts that may or may not work), and of course, to Java for being the foundation of fecal matter that this whole towering edifice of shit is built upon. At this point I hate everything Java-related and hope that anyone who willingly uses Java and its associated technologies dies of ebola.
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RE: 🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
Using NSF supercomputers to mine bitcoins.
Of course they only figure this out AFTER he's mined $18k of BTC. I'm surprised they didn't lay criminal charges against the guy.
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How about a longer line length in posts?
[b]Bug:[/b] Posts on a screen that's 1920 pixels wide are only 713 pixels in width, wasting valuable real estate
[b]Expected:[/b] Available space is used to display the maximum amount of content possible
[b]Actual:[/b] Massive white borders on the left and right of the page that take up nearly two-thirds of the screenIt's 2014, last time I checked we can have different stylesheets for mobile devices and desktop machines. If you tell me you can't or won't, I will cut you. If you give me any other "reason" for wasting my screen space, I will cut you.
You fix, I no cut. Simple? Simple. We good? Good.
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RE: How about a longer line length in posts?
If you install this user style it won't be white space anymore.
Hey look, Shitcourse broke quoting again. WHERE ARE YOUR ITALICS NOW?
You are not seriously suggesting lines that go the entire width of your monitor?
No, I'm not. What I am suggesting is that instead of Discourse being dumb and only using 30% of my monitor's width, it becomes less dumb and uses something like 60%. I know I could do this with dumb CSS hacks, but I really don't want to do dumb CSS hacks to make dumb software less dumb.
Even dumber, the reply textarea + reply preview textarea together are wider than the content. Even even dumber, hiding the reply preview makes the reply textarea wider than the page content. This thing isn't even consistently dumb, WHY.
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RE: Badges!!
I dunno, are "Worst of the Worst" and "Worst Man on Earth" mutually exclusive? Because the latter could be a subset of the former.
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RE: Closed Poll: How do you feel about Discourse on TDWTF?
Personally I don't care either way. It's like anal warts, one day they arrive and there's nothing you can do except either accept their existence and move on or get angry about something you can't do much about.
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The simplest solution to a problem (that shouldn't exist)
We have an ASP.NET MVC website built on top of a 15-year-old MSSQL database. Because of the way the business processes on the database are setup, there's a once-a-month job that has to run; during this time, nothing is allowed to touch the database. Since the website is supposed to be up 24/7/365, this is a problem. The "solution" arrived at by my esteemed colleagues (one of whom is our company's technical director) is: fix the DB job to not be retarded.
... HA! Just kidding, actually the solution is "take the parts of the website that touch the DB down, for however long it takes the DB job to run, then bring them back online". This is WTF #1.
So the 24/7/365 website becomes "24/7/365 except for that one bit of time every month" and I have to implement the code to take it offline and bring it back online. My solution: add a rewrite rule to the web.config that sends all DB-touching page traffic to a "sorry we're closed" page; and disable said rule. When our Windows service (that currently exists, and runs on the same box) starts the DB job, it modifies the web.config to enable the rewrite rule. When the job finishes, the service re-disables the rewrite rule, and all is peachy. (This web.config modifying is all done programmatically via the Microsoft.Web.Administration APIs - no fudging around with XML parsing.)
The technical director wants something on every affected controller on the website that checks "is the DB job running, if so, serve up the "sorry we're closed" page, else serve up the ordinary page". Not only does this require the website code to change (which requires a redeploy and hence downtime), it also ensures that the database gets hit on EVERY PAGE LOAD, regardless of whether the job is running or not. His argument is that my approach will hose any currently active sessions in progress, but when I reminded him that that's KIND OF THE POINT SO THAT THE DB DOESN'T GET TOUCHED and HEY YOUR SOLUTION WILL HAVE THE EXACT SAME EFFECT, he went quiet. Nonetheless, he wants his solution implemented, which - in my opinion - is WTF #2.
Am I correct in categorizing these decisions as WTFs, or am I the WTF here?
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RE: Guaging Knowledge via the Ternary Operator
@tgape said:
What can you do in the face of THAT?
Easy - laugh and put the phone down. Insulting their competence is optional but recommended.
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RE: Not so instantly
@blakeyrat said:
@RaceProUK said:
Load balancing and/or choosing the mirror closest to you,
They could just use one of the thousands of content delivery networks that do this automatically with no user interaction.
@RaceProUK said:
while allowing you to override the choice.
That's such an open source-ism. Nobody gives a flying crap about overriding the choice of what server to download from. Seriously, who is that anal?
"Oh, it gave me a download server in Oregon, but that one time I was in Oregon that ice cream shop totally ripped me off by giving me the wrong change, so I'm going to switch to this download server in Idaho instead!!!"
Normal people only care about one thing: does the server work? And guess what, all those services I mentioned above will exclude broken servers for you automatically.
There's a slim but non-zero probability that they're *so* clueless about usability that they think customers actually prefer that arrangement. Since they've demonstrated their cluelessness about usability on virtually every other page on the site. My favorite is how, after you navigate deep into the site, then find out you have to log in to do what you want, the login screen directs you back to the *homepage* instead of the page you came from. And trying to upload an image into a project's bug tracker is such an nightmarish exercise in frustration I either don't even bother to report bugs involving visual quirks, or just link them to the image on my own server and hope they aren't dicks about it not being in the bug tracker.
There might be a large "we've always done it that way" factor, too, where they implemented this retarded system back in 1998 when nobody had anything better, and they've just never changed it because they're lazy.
But the real answer is, they do it to shove more advertising in your face.
Sourceforge is written and maintained by Linux geeks. Linux is possibly the worst OS on Earth when it comes to usability. Hence, I fail to see why you're surprised that using Sourceforge is painful.
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RE: Here's a shocker: Eclipse-based Aptana Studio sucks shit!
@blakeyrat said:
* Aptana needs Git for its "scripting and terminal features" to function.
I always thought git was for version control...
@blakeyrat said:
.eclipse? Wrong way of making files invisible. File shouldn't be invisible on its own anyway, it should be in AppData/Roaming, which is invisible. Wrong.
I think they did that to keep project structures consistent between Linux and Windows so that (theoretically) you can just copy your source tree to another computer with a different OS and it would just work. (I'm probably talking outta my ass here, but there has to be some rational reason for doing it this way... right?) However, being too damn lazy to mark the .eclipse folder as hidden under Windows is plain inexcusable.
Thanks for taking the time to file those bugs, even though the guy you're corresponding to seems to be a dick. Bitching at you for posting to TDWTF when the product is, undeniably, a WTF... way to foster contribution there.