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People who say "Ubuntu" when what they mean is "GNOME". People who say "Kubuntu" when what they mean is "KDE". The fact that Ubuntu encourages this by the way they name their ISOs.
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| # ¿ May 9, 2008 20:29 |
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| # ¿ May 25, 2013 14:17 |
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amerrykan posted:OK, as an MS employee I guess I have to defend this -- if you're following a huge thread, who wants to scroll to find the newest reply? ... and there we have the problem. Some people apparently go further than simply negligently wasting everyone's screen space and bandwidth by including ten thousand kilobytes of text inside every email, but they think it's actually a good idea, a feature. This is false. Not deleting useless cruft in email is just as annoying as top posting. In other words, you don't need to scroll down for thirty minutes if there weren't so much useless crap passed around every time someone gave a one line reply. In fact, the vast majority of the time, the newest reply would begin near the top of the screen. quote:Nobody trims threads because it ruins the discussion for people who have dropped out for a day or were added after the trim. So, let me get this straight. Problem: some people don't read their email for a day or two sometimes. Solution: we send the entire loving history of every conversation inside every single loving email. In two thousand and eight, no less.
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| # ¿ May 13, 2008 19:22 |
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Casao posted:Can you tell from my posts that I absolutely despise apps that use non-native widgets for no good reason? Motherfucking yes. Steam, I'm looking at you. In fact, the best thing about it is that it's also slow as rear end. They rewrote list boxes, text boxes, and a bunch of other standard things, and made them run about ten thousand times slower. (This is really noticeable for me at the moment because I'm on a slower system... upgrading will help when I get some extra cash this summer. However, I still think it's pretty inexcusable that what amounts to a game launcher and downloader can take 30 seconds to start up on a gigahertz system.)
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| # ¿ May 15, 2008 20:01 |
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I forgot this: The fact that my current boss makes us use XP Home at work. The fact that he doesn't allow us to use passwords for our Windows accounts in case we decide to leave the company and not give him the password. Double dumb because he's generally a security freak who recommends using the physical switch to turn off your wireless card on our laptops when working at home so that our company is safe from corporate spies (really?) trying to hack in to our home networks to steal our source code  . And triple loving frustrating because XP Home + no passwords = I can't log on to our Ubuntu fileserver using Explorer, and I have to log in via sftp and copy it to local disk if I really want to use it.
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| # ¿ May 19, 2008 17:02 |
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Lum posted:Before trying to access that server: Hey, thanks. I'll give this a try tomorrow (well, in just a few short hours by now...) when I go in to work.
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| # ¿ May 20, 2008 07:38 |
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...! posted:web-based(what the gently caress) Yes, my sentiments exactly. You just made my day with Net Send. Ha! (I'm so, so sorry.)
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| # ¿ May 21, 2008 14:45 |
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Jetsetlemming posted:The problem is that users will start accepting UAC automatically without looking or reading, because the loving thing pops up for nearly EVERYTHING. I don't have Vista either, but this idea is what I hear a lot from the people who bash on UAC. My question is, is UAC any worse than sudo? I use sudo all the time under my Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris boxes. If I still used an XP Pro box regularly, I'd probably try to implement sudowin. If so, I don't see the big deal with UAC (besides perhaps the fact that it's apparently a lot less configurable than sudo), and I don't understand the slashdot hate for it.
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| # ¿ May 21, 2008 17:34 |
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TuxRacer69 posted:I got so pissed off by UAC I turned it off. I'd disagree with this. Changing the time affects all users of a system. Shouldn't it require admin access? For the record, most/all Unix systems also require administrator access to change things like time settings. TuxRacer69 posted:b) It comes up whenever you try to do _anything_ in C:\Program Files. This could be annoying if by "anything" you mean "view and copy files and folders". Is that the case? That would be colossally stupid (for the vast majority of items, anyway). However, if you mean "change files or folders", I think this is correct again... Unix does the same thing here. You can't arbitrarily move stuff into / or /bin - those are for whole-system items, not things that belong to just one user (that's what the home directories are for), or things that just one user maintains (each user can share documents/whatever from their home directory by editing an item's permissions). Are there any problems with UAC that don't boil down to "I think I should have permission to do X"? Or even, are there any permissions that Windows doesn't grant a non-admin user be default that those users should have (maybe something like changing the screen resolution, I don't know, I just picked that one out of my rear end)? Permissions problems in the vein of "I used to be able to copy files to C:\" don't really offend me that much... if a user doesn't need the access, why should they get it? Jetsetlemming posted:Sudo is a conscious thing on the user's part. UAC is an automatic popup cleared just by clicking OK. You're not likely to type in the sudo command to install a spyware or virus unawares. You ARE likely, if you don't know or aren't paying attention, to click OK without looking to closely at the popup. Well, point taken. Users are definitely inundated with stupid pop-up boxes (which are naturally modal and full of unselectable text), which is IMO bad UI design because it teaches them to click the "Get the gently caress out of my way" button. However, as others have noted, it let's you click "OK" without a password only if the account is admin anyway. In other words, it seems that the blame lies with the fact that the default account is Admin, NOT with UAC's handling. It sounds like UAC is doing the correct thing here. (Although, I wonder how much sense that really makes. I mean, if you're going around running malware as admin anyway... well, there's no such thing as software to cure stupidity, after all. Or, the software can just infect an executable file that you DON'T need permission to run, or create a malicious executable and attach it to something more innocuous like a batch job. It doesn't seem to me that this can be of any pragmatic benefit.) Besides, my intent (probably not well stated) was to confirm that UAC would be annoying to me. sudo isn't annoying to me; it seems like the Right Thing. From what ya'll have said, UAC sounds pretty good too. Speaking of which, thanks for the helpful replies.
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| # ¿ May 21, 2008 22:01 |
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Iblys posted:Been using XP on various machines for around 8 years now This seems unlikely. Fake edit: unless you mean betas or something?
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| # ¿ May 21, 2008 22:04 |
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haljordan posted:Also this is somewhat off-topic but my coworkers have spent the last 20 minutes watching year-old YouTube videos and laughing hysterically. "Hey have you seen this Chocolate Rain video?!" Christ. Funny that the PrankDialer.com ad was running as I read this post (it is one of several audio streams you can tell it to play to your prankee).
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| # ¿ May 23, 2008 20:52 |
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scottch posted:If Google ever added an ability to block addresses from showing up in your results, complete with wildcards, I think I'd run to their office and marry whoever was responsible. I know it'll never happen, but could you imagine being able to filter out all those completely useless "review" sites? I have wanted this for such a long loving time. I would never, ever again have to see domains with more than three hyphens, qarchive.org, swik.net, and the infamous ExpertS-exChange.com. The other thing I've wished for is being able to search by page creation (well, OK, page indexing) time. A very large subset of my searches require information from the last 12-36 months, and anything from before that is useless crap. For some people, I imagine that's nearly all of their searches.
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| # ¿ May 29, 2008 14:40 |
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Elected by Dogs posted:experts-exchange is actually sorta okay - use the google cache page (or the real page, forgot which) - and you can scroll ALL THE DAY down. Past the first footer. there are answers. Well, I guess it is sorta okay. If you like reading technical discussions written by 12 year olds on AOL, that is. Seriously, I have used it before, but I don't go there unless my search results turn up nothing otherwise, and usually I try googling harder a few times before actually clicking. It just kinda makes my brain bleed.
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| # ¿ May 29, 2008 23:46 |
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Me too. Unfortunately, they abandoned that URL a few years ago.
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| # ¿ May 30, 2008 00:16 |
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hyperborean posted:I don't understand what is the problem with package managers. I tried Linux for like two weeks and gave up, but that was one thing I had no trouble with whatsoever. I thought the whole setup was completely awesome I really, really wish that there was some sort of alternative for Windows that didn't suck. There is AppUpdater, win-get, FileHippo's thing, and maybe one or two more, and they're all limited by a near-complete lack of software - they seem to have one or two dozen packages that they keep track of, and that's it. There is almost no command line software. And most of them are closed source and/or there is no support for creating your own repository, so you can't fix the problem. Appupdater actually does supposedly allow you to create your own repository, but its website is in  Comic Sans MS . Gah.
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| # ¿ Jun 1, 2008 07:46 |
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Casao posted:Why? I just wish more software would auto-update. OSX has Sparkle framework, a nice library you can add on to any OSX software to add easy and consistant auto-update. I wish Windows had a parallel to this. More things need auto update, but I don't really see any need for a package manager. Because a package manager can enforce things like digital signature validation, even if the autoupdate feature of a given app doesn't. Because I know of zero commandline tools that do autoupdate, and those are what I miss most under Windows. (Incidentally, that may be because the Unixy commandline programs do less per package than a fullon GUI suite. At least, that is the norm for Unixy vs MacOS/Windows/etc design.) That is, like digital signature validation, autoupdate doesn't require every single package that I use to change itself, it only requires the package manager to change in order to add features to every package I use. Because it's easier to search the web, download, and install one application suite - the package manager - and then `apt-get install firefox openoffice.org subversion launchy launchy-calcy perl` than to search the web, download, and install all of those things PLUS their dependencies individually. Also because - and this is personal preference - I think it's pretty annoying to download a (for example) PDF file, open it, and get a retarded modal (!) dialog box with "HAY ACROBAT HAS 47 USELESS UPDATES INSTALL NOW? No? Are you sure?". I think this is more easily handled by a dedicated update facility that, as a bonus, can update everything else on your system in one go. This is triply useful in a situation where an update of one package requires an update of another - in my experience more rare with the Windows software that I use, but it still happens, especially with things like applications and their externally-maintained library dependencies. Finally, because a dedicated update facility would be scriptable in enterprisy environments, and because given a CLI package manager frontend one could update GUI packages remotely without a graphical link or in a commandline script - i.e. `apt-get install wireshark`, which might install both the CLI and GUI versions, so you could use the CLI remotely and the GUI at some later date, over a faster link more suited to remote graphics, or while sitting in front of the machine.
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| # ¿ Jun 3, 2008 02:34 |
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Zombie Dictator posted:That explains everything. Only a developer would create a non-joke post about complaints about Linux being the distribution's fault and not the kernel itself, like anyone runs nothing but a pure kernel-and-driver installation of Linux. My response here isn't intended to be flamebait, just clarification and some information (well, a few opinions thrown in for good measure, but you can take them or leave them). I think what he was saying was that the blame was misplaced, NOT that real people run a kernel and driver Linux. "Linux" is technically / nickpickingly supposed to mean the kernel. Therefore, it's not a very good place to rest the blame. I guess that in a more colloquial sense it might mean "all of the distros put together", which would also be a kind of silly place to rest the blame in this context, since almost all "Linux software" isn't developed by the distros. It also might be "anyone who develops for Linux", though I wouldn't really say that was fair either, since a great deal of "Linux software" is actually "Unix software" or "POSIX software". The first poster didn't say "Ubuntu Linux", therefore I assume that he does NOT mean just the maintainers of his individual distribution (which, IMO, might be the fairest place to rest the blame - after all, they apparently didn't have the software that he needed, thereby prompting him to go seeking it from the source). Not that it doesn't mean this doesn't legitimately piss someone off. If you are annoyed by the fact that a great deal of Unixy software is hard to install on a given Unix system, I think that's totally legit. I am frequently annoyed by this too. (In fact, I'm more annoyed that the vast majority of Unixy software doesn't install on a Windows system, as demonstrated in my above post.) However, I think it's worth mentioning that the package maintainers sometimes do have good reasons for packaging the way they do. I'm no programmer, but it is certainly a huge pain in the rear end to package for every Linux distribution - and not just every distribution, but every version of every distribution - plus the various licensed SysV-derivatives, POSIX implementations (*cough*Microsoft SFU/SUA*cough*) and BSDs that are out there, and besides, there is no good way to handle dependencies outside of a package management system (which introduces all of the stated annoyances with Ubuntu - in particular, that a given bit of software may not be present or may be out of date). Most developers don't have that many machines lying around, or enough disk space/spare CPU cycles to dedicate to virtualizing that many software systems, let alone CPU architectures, let alone the time do do all of that poo poo. Also, it might be relevant there has been a lot of work gone into making packages *supposed* to compile right, on many levels - standards like POSIX, various cross-platform languages, cross-platform libraries for those languages, etc. Hey, it's better than it could be  .But again, not that the situation isn't annoying and frustrating at times. Edit: Gah, I didn't realize this was like two pages ago. vlack fucked around with this message at Jun 3, 2008 around 03:17 |
| # ¿ Jun 3, 2008 03:10 |
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Karanth posted:Linux Software Developers: make your package managers install package files with a double click and entering a sudo password so that an app developer doesn't have to talk to anyone else to offer his software for download/easy install. Make them still check registered repositories for dependencies. Allow package files to specify other repositories for grabbing dependencies and prompt the user to use them and/or register them on the system for you. Register some sort of protocol handler on the system so that clicking a link in your web browser will open a package manager and install software from the repositories without explicitly opening a separate program. If one or more of these things has already been implemented, app developers, start loving using them. I'm pretty sure that all of this is implemented in at least one distro. All of it up to the protocol handler thing is implemented in Ubuntu, as other posters have noted. The protocol handler thing is implemented IIRC in Lindows I MEAN LINSPIRE, but then you'd have to use that poo poo.
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| # ¿ Jun 3, 2008 03:16 |
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Oddhair posted:Ewwww... Motherfucking this. It doesn't seem to be just Outlook that does this, but Visual Studio is particularly bad, and it seems to me that a large number of apps jump to the top when I don't expect them to. If I am toggling back and forth between any two applications with Alt-Tab, a third one pops up that I haven't used in 2 hours at some random point in time. It's infuriating.
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| # ¿ Jun 4, 2008 18:56 |
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Daedalus256 posted:1.Stupid people hate Dell. While I have no bad experience with Dell's build quality, dealing with Dell has been pretty loving annoying for me, from the perspective of home users and home/small business users. At my old job, any time I ordered a Dell, it would say "in stock" or somesuch on the website, and would end up taking 30+ days. It was three separate orders, months or years apart, before I started buying Lenovo. Anecdotal, but it stopped my problem. My friend is a freelance tech support guy, and he loves Dell. When I brought up my issue with them, he repeated it as a feature because it has happened to him twice for his own computer orders, and because it took so long Dell gave him some cool deals or whatever - which was true, he did get a few hundred bucks knocked off of a high end Inspiron, however, getting some money back isn't the same as getting what I ordered when you promised it to me. Dell support is also completely awful. The only support I've had personal experience with that surpasses the complete incompetence of Dell's is Intuit's. I wince every time I think about them. So, while I've never had problems with Dell built quality, I never buy directly from Dell or recommend Dell systems to others because they're such a pain in the rear end. quote:2.Another thing is people who request something completely ridiculous for themselves. This mostly applies to office executives who think their poo poo doesn't stink. What's that? You want me to install a printer? But you CANT LEAVE YOUR loving COMPUTER IN YOUR OFFICE? This, however, I completely related to.
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| # ¿ Jun 12, 2008 17:08 |
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Lenovo hasn't been completely awful about craplet apps, but I have some complaints.
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| # ¿ Jun 12, 2008 19:52 |
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Xenomorph posted:Your Lenovo system only had 7 things in the system tray? Well, no, I meant seven useless things that say "IBM" or "Lenovo" on them. There were a few more useless and even two or three useful things also in the system tray as well. quote:I'd fdisk the entire drive if I knew it wouldn't leave a non-functioning ThinkVantage button on the system. That button somehow triggers the second partition to boot up. If I knew I could change that to do something else, that would be great. I don't know about your system, but the ones I set up accomplished that by hitting Enter (or something... they're not in front of me to check) to select the bootup device/partition. Are you sure you need the ThinkVantage button?
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| # ¿ Jun 13, 2008 14:44 |
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duz posted:I've also had google say that my search term wasn't found on that page but found in links to that page. I think this may be because pages that link to that page use your search term in the link text. It's how you got a search for "miserable failure" linking to the White House or whatever. vlack fucked around with this message at Jun 20, 2008 around 19:43 |
| # ¿ Jun 20, 2008 19:28 |
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brc64 posted:IMAP makes me want to jam rusty nails into my eyes. Maybe it's just Outlook's implementation of it... It is. In fact, Outlook trying to do IMAP is one of the things that pisses me off daily.
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| # ¿ Jul 28, 2008 20:29 |
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Melonhead posted:Doesn't use common controls, therefore, it sucks. This is true. In fact, I may have even posted it a few dozen pages ago. Seriously, I absolutely love Steam. But what. the. gently caress. You needed to implement your own loving listbox? And buttons? The thing that gets me here is, they did a bunch of work for it to suck this much. Some programmer had to spend time to code an rear end duplicate (and probably an incomplete one at that) of built-in Microsoft APIs. Someone on jwz.org posted:Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls. Other Steam gripes: mandatory updates before playing single player games, S.L.O.W.A.S.S.(tm) startup. (Maybe this was a design requirement because the initial UI mockup was in Java?  .)Aside from these things, though, I really love Steam, not the least because Valve has gone out of its way to do things like allow infinite redownloads. Steam rules, but the UI thingy really does have its head up its rear end.
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| # ¿ Nov 25, 2008 05:33 |
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GosuProbe posted:Quite the opposite for me, I'm a Stephan (Steffen) and I get Stephen all the time. Even after I've said it to people. And then corrected them. Ugh, I can never convey my name properly on the phone. My first name is "Micah" (pronounced like the last part of "formica"). Every single loving person I talk to seems to get either "Mike" or "Michael". It's frustrating when I accidentally do my quick-phone-answer "Hello this is Micah, how can I help you?" and they get it wrong, but its infuriating when I do my best to say "Hello this is MicAH" and then wait for a giant long pause - and they still get it wrong. Even worse, my last name starts with L. No one is ever going to hear "Micah Led...", no matter what. They'll always hear "Michael Led...", even when we're not talking over the phone.
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| # ¿ Mar 21, 2009 10:21 |
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Edit: ^^^ Heh, that too.SecretFire posted:In some ways I'd say having a mobile version is being behind the curve. Modern smartphones all either come with decently capable web browsers or can run Opera Mini, and don't really have trouble with most sites as long as they don't have a bunch of flash bullshit or the like. But sometimes the web site is inexcusably lovely. Before version 3 of the Facebook iPhone app, there was version 2, and it sucked. A lot. There was no way at all to view events (not even date/time/location, nothing), for example, and so I had the brilliant idea to go to facebook.com in Mobile Safari. Facebook sees that I'm connecting from an iPhone and redirects me to the iPhone site... where I can't see event information. <sigh>. I scroll to the bottom, tell it no, I want to use the normal site, or the generic mobile site - anything but the iPhone site. It reloads the page, and I'm still on the iPhone site. No matter what link I click, it won't reload me in anything but the iPhone site. gently caress you, Facebook. At least they finally released version 3.
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| # ¿ Oct 14, 2009 19:47 |
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Quote is not edit.
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| # ¿ Oct 14, 2009 19:48 |
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brc64 posted:Is there any Firefox extension that can do something to youtube addresses to let me know what the title of the video is before I click? A nice tooltip-type thing when mousing over the URL would be awesome. If one more person posts a youtube URL with no description, I may well snap. This is especially annoying to me on Twitter, because it's not just a YouTube link with no description, it's a bit.ly link to a YouTube video with no description. I do like the clients (Echofon/Mac does this, at least) that will display the shortened URL in your Twitter timeline, but when you mouse over it gives a tooltip with the un-shortened URL. Then again, that doesn't help with YouTube, so we're back to where we started. It would be helpful if YouTube would generate URLs for their videos like Amazon does with their products. For example, this and this both link to Metroid Fusion for the Gameboy Advance, but the first one includes at least some metadata about what the hell is on the other side of the link.
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| # ¿ Oct 30, 2009 21:33 |
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Elected by Dogs posted:That just seems more misleading considering this works: http://www.amazon.com/Rick-Astley-P.../dp/B00006M3R6/ (you'd think Amazon would check their URLs Hahahaha I didn't realize you could put anything in there. I guess that wouldn't help Rickroll Prevention (tm) at all. (It only costs $90 if you want it "new", which I assume means "new in sealed box". Buying it used it's <$10.)
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| # ¿ Oct 30, 2009 21:55 |
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boo_radley posted:
I figured Midelne was probably talking about this image (NWS), but your results seem more likely.
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| # ¿ Dec 1, 2009 08:19 |
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boo_radley posted:One of our money processes stopped working. I hate it when I do this. I also hate it when I don't do this, but the service fails to start anyway because there was some inane requirement. For example, in FreeBSD you have to have a trailing newline at the end of natd.conf (or at least, this used to be the case), or it would refuse to start. The great thing about that particular case is you can't tell by looking when there is or isn't a newline at the end of the file, and you'd frequently scroll to the bottom to add a port forwarding rule or something, think you were done, and save the file. Oops. 
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2010 19:52 |
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Probably writing to disk stuff that should stay in RAM, and reading from disk stuff that should already be in RAM. Get more RAM. Alternatively, that may be less Windows and more whatever third party shitware you have installed. In the case of the computer immediately to my right, which belongs to a client, the shitware in question is AVG.
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2010 08:53 |
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brc64 posted:The alt text was even better. I had understood (from earlier in this thread, in fact... or maybe it was the other thread, I dunno) that the feeling of fakeness didn't come from high framerates per se, but rather from motion interpolation. If we actually shot video at 60 frames per second, it's not supposed to look fake, right? I could be misunderstanding, though, because I don't see the "soap opera effect" or whatever everyone complains about so much.
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2010 08:57 |
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I'm going to brutally murder the next person that sends me an email with the subject of just "Dude!" and where the content is entirely about work. (My project manager just did this. We are not friends. I have never even seen her outside of work.)
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| # ¿ May 6, 2010 19:17 |
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Fehler posted:And, worst of all: The home/end keys jump to the beginning/end of the document, not of the line! Who the gently caress came up with that? Every time I accidentally press them to select a whole line or something, I jump back to the beginning of the document. The Jobs Way of Doing Things is apparently to press Apple-Left/Right, but this is much more convoluted and doesn't even work in half the programs, including VI. I actually had to change the mapping for home/end in Eclipse manually before I could get any work done. I don't know what the Jobs way of doing things is, but the right way of doing this under Mac OS X is to use C-a and C-e to get to the beginning and end of a line, respectively. This is coopted from Emacs' default keybindings... if I recall correctly, there is also some installable plugin thing that can let you use VI keyboard shortcuts in NSTextField objects, but I can't seem to find it at the moment. (Edit: found it.) I think it is far more annoying that under Windows, they expect me to move my hand over to the home/end keys to get to the beginning or end of a line. What the gently caress. vlack fucked around with this message at Jul 13, 2010 around 21:13 |
| # ¿ Jul 13, 2010 21:11 |
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boo_radley posted:Jesus Christ you just changed my life. ... did you know about two-finger scrolling? Some apps (at least on the Mac OS X side) take advantage of other multitouch things too. In OmniWeb (a web browser) you can go to previous/next tab by three-finger-swiping up/down, which is very useful (and much less work than Safari's silly Command-Shift-{ business). I think Safari can go forward/back with a three-finger swipe right or left, and I think you can zoom in just like you can on an iPhone, with pinching. (Sorry, not in front of my Mac to test these, it's all from memory.)
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| # ¿ Jul 13, 2010 21:22 |
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Billy the Mountain posted:I-MAC This. This is what I come across daily that pisses me off. For the love of gently caress.
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| # ¿ Jul 23, 2010 06:39 |
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My office is full of HORRIBLE DRAMA and it was bad enough at the beginning, but now it's making me look bad and I had no part in it. I've kept meaning to post this, but the longer I wait the longer the story gets... I figured I'd better post it now before it becomes a candidate for NaNoWriMo. To set the stage, I have to explain that I work for a startup part time, that we've been promising our one investor a product Real Soon Now for the past four years, and that about 2 months ago he got sick of this and brought in a project manager who is now actually in charge of everyone here, including the CTO (my boss). This is an important change because, while we've had project managers in the past, they've always had to submit to the CTO and thus not make the sweeping changes that (IMO) we've really needed. Now, when my boss is made subordinate to this new CTO, he apparently fights tooth and nail against everything that he wants to do, even though our investor who is literally 100% of the money behind this place has set him in charge of everything. This all came to a head Haloween weekend when the project manager came in on Friday, turned off the server, and changed the locks. On Saturday the day before Halloween, he calls me, and says that he's changed the locks and wants me to go in and get email working without letting people use the VPN. I have to come on site to do this, but when I leave, I can send email. Yay. A little later the day, I test email from home and it's... not working at all. I spend an hour or two trying to figure out what's wrong, and finally check the DNS, which is... wrong? But nothing that I've done that weekend affects the DNS at all! In fact, our DNS is managed off-site, and I don't even know the password; the only one who does is... the CTO. So, I give him a call, and ask him "Hey, has the DNS info changed this weekend for some reason?" Well, yes, as it turns out, when he couldn't get email Friday night, he drove up to the site and figured out he'd been locked out of the building. This made him mad enough that he signed up for hosting somewhere and CHANGED THE DNS INFO FOR OUR ONLY DOMAIN NAME TO POINT TO HIS NEW HOST. His justification? He doesn't have any other email and he couldn't get to his personal account! So, I ask him to fix it back, which he does, if I can promise to get email working. I let the project manager know what happened, and spend quite a bit of time on the phone the the CTO getting everything fixed. (Also this whole time I've had a freshly sprained ankle, crutches, and party plans for that evening. Thankfully, I do make it to my party, if a bit late. Very thankfully, there was drinking at my party. )On Sunday, the project manager talks to someone else who works here, and tells him that the CTO has been fired. On Monday, the following things are revealed. 1) No one has been fired and we're all given new keys (but why change the locks? Why tell one of us that our boss was fired?) 2) I need to turn the VPN back on (why turn it off in the first place? Apparently our lawyer was concerned about something, but it was never clear to me what he was actually worried about, and we can all work from home again, so...) Ever since then - for the past week and a half - some of my users have had email problems. Most of these users were out of state, and none of them are familiar with computers in any way at all, so troubleshooting them has been a little frustrating. I just did a server migration about 4 weeks ago, and some of them have been complaining of issues since then, and since email works for me on-site and off, I had been treating their problems as unconnected, or possibly relating to the server migration, and trying to fix them one at a time. Until Monday, when I figure out that, depending on location, you'll get different DNS information when you look up my domain name! Time Warner, who is coincidentally my ISP at home and also here at work, gets the right information, so when I've been doing my off-site tests, they're working just as well as my on-site tests, but other ISPs are still - over a week later - seeing DNS information leftovers from when the CTO changed the it to his own private hosting company. That wrong information wasn't even around for 24 hours; I have no idea why some ISPs have retained it so long. So I give our DNS host a call. As it turns out, our configuration has been broken this whole time in a way that my tech support contact couldn't even understand. I still don't know why some sites are seeing the right information and some are seeing the wrong information, but my guess is that they have some type of load balancing setup on their end and when they changed our DNS information back to the way it should be, it only propagated to some of the systems in the load balancing system, or something like that. Last night, they told me it would be fixed by today, but it isn't. Right now, we've just discovered that they can't send us email (because their mail server sees the wrong DNS info), and that the CTO has forgotten the loving password to the loving DNS host. What really frustrates me about this is that despite the statistical unlikeliness of that Rube Goldberg machine of suck, I still look like an idiot for not being able to solve email issues for weeks at a time. Sometimes I feel like the world is out to get me.
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| # ¿ Nov 10, 2010 22:02 |
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poo poo that pisses me off: Email server on a "business class" TWC Internet connection! poo poo that might not piss me off: Hosted Exchange? Does anyone have experience with this? My boss is trying to get his boss to approve spending some money on a server (like a real life server that says "server" on the box it comes in rather than some desktop components in an old case, holy poo poo). My initial thought was to ask for SBS, but if hosted Exchange isn't horrible, I'm tempted to go that route. I think it's particularly cool that it can sync your AD users with the Exchange Online users. drat would it be nice for Internet/power outages that don't happen during business hours to be something I can just ignore!
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| # ¿ Nov 29, 2010 17:47 |
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| # ¿ May 25, 2013 14:17 |
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LakesGuzzler posted:gently caress browser toolbars and notification area icons. Does ANYONE actually like them, even clueless lusers? One client of mine had the Yahoo one installed, and it locked the browser every second or third launch. I uninstalled it for him, and he called me back later to say that he didn't realize how much he relied on it and how important it was. I think he eventually decided it was important enough to deal with browser crashes all the time. Apparently bookmarks just elude some people? He couldn't really articulate what it was that was so valuable.
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| # ¿ Dec 7, 2010 22:22 |
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