More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

rolleyes posted:

But since Windows won't allow you to format a harddrive as UDF (would it recognise one formatted as such? Interesting experiment) that makes it not interoperable in practice. I guess I've answered my own question: Microsoft has no interest in promoting a cross-platform filesystem, so we don't have one. They came up with crappy ExFAT to 'solve' that problem which, so far as I know, is supported by... Windows and that's it.

It's supported by Mac OS X!

Where supported means that if you create an exFAT drive in OS X, it will not work in Windows.

Works the other way around though.

:v:

# ¿ Nov 3, 2013 12:50

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 22:51

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

WhoNeedsAName posted:

Pissed me off: Getting chewed out by a director because our office internet connection stopped working which "must be an IT issue, there's no other reason for it" only for the accounts department to admit they'd forgotten to pay the invoice and our ISP had cut us off.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/16/what_happened_when_we_paid_bt_late/

Think it would have been disconnected if this happened?

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 01:35

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Ah, yes, jQuery UI, the premier UI framework for jQuery.

Cost me and a colleague two days worth of debugging, because of a modal and z-index issues, where issue means one line of CSS.

ffs.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2013 11:38

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

hirvox posted:

For most of this week, we've been going through the WSDLs for the customer's SAP. There are only three data types: Strings, decimals and bytes. And to submit changes, you first need to request the entire data structure. Why? Because when you submit it back, anything that is missing is deleted from SAP. And the kicker? The system has no conflict detection and does not use any kind of locking.

Oh well. At least my vacation starts today. I have more than enough opportunities to worry more about it in two weeks.

This. Exactly this.

I'm currently integrating something like this at work, the SOAP endpoint appears to be VB.net based (gently caress yeah!?) and it also has no locking and concurrency.
And even worse, there can be at any time, three different sets of data, all of which has to be manually verified and merged by some poor sod working in the donations department - did I mention that they probably paid a company a fuckton of money to produce this? And no it's not SAP, but it's just as bad:

User1 on website
User1 on SOAP relay (wtf?)
User1 on main DB

There's not even a simple way of telling the web application (how else do you call a shitload of PHP scripts) that things have changed on the Main DB or SOAP relay. And if you didn't get what I meant by SOAP relay, they have a public facing database and internal database, all changes from the public and internal databases are somehow merged between once every hour and a day. I believe their current setup is 4 hours?

Another glorious thing is that each data type, that's date, string, int, etc has differing definitions of null (or xsi:nil if you're that way inclined).
I can't remember the exact values, but I'll give you an example - these values are valid via SOAP too!

date: 4th of July 2002, 02:04:05
int: -0.0000003213123123

Oh, and each SOAP request takes 25 seconds, whereas the POST is instant. 'the gently caress?

# ¿ Dec 29, 2013 12:14

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

I'm the poo poo that pisses me off.

I made a nice little export script that gets PHP code, sticks it through ioncube encoder and does other things to it involving ownership.
Little did I know that ioncube needed a new licence, exited without creating a destination folder, and then did some poo poo to /*.

Thankfully the server that I managed to gently caress up is CentOS so it should be pretty easy to repair, plus as an added bonus I managed to break Plesk.

Thankfully I managed to stop the script whilst it was iterating through /proc (thank gently caress for errors, eh) but that now meant that pretty much everything everywhere else is now root:root above /proc...

# ¿ Jan 2, 2014 13:36

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

evol262 posted:

Two lessons:

Check exit codes
Don't run scripts as root

Unfortunately it has to be run as root, as it sets various other permissions.

This is perhaps the only time that I hadn't checked an exit code before going onto another item in the list... :<

fake edit: HDD's getting re-imaged with last night's backup. Only will take 12 hours!
actual edit: The server's our test environment, no real biggie. I'm still pissed off though, seeing as it isn't a server I own...

Westie fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Jan 2, 2014

# ¿ Jan 2, 2014 15:19

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

guppy posted:

I would have serious reservations about hiring a developer who didn't write this as a loop

I wouldn't.

You're saving CPU cycles here!

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 21:38

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Talking of money, apparently I'm paid 46% less than the average rate for someone in my role.

I don't have a degree in my subject, but still...

:psyduck:

# ¿ Jan 12, 2014 23:35

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Volmarias posted:

Time to and exaggerate your current pay.

Ah, yes, talking of that, I know a guy who's now working for Google because he wrote in detail about ~~WebKit~~ Blink nightlies, lol.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2014 08:44

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

I'd say the latter.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2014 14:25

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Pissing me off today: Clients and lovely third party software.

Four phone calls between me and client, all because the clients don't know how to properly communicate and use the software some other company sold them - when they sit next to each other and have the same phone line.

And now, to them, I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of this third party software, because I've seen a two minute video of it in action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qC73mL4ZFo - what I want to shout down the phone.

Westie fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jan 27, 2014

# ¿ Jan 27, 2014 22:13

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

sfwarlock posted:

Out of 5 laptops I downgraded to 8.1 from 8, 4 had serious problems, of which 2 didn't even boot. So I said gently caress it and upgraded them to 7.

And yes, I have my ups and downs straight.

Windows 8.1 is a lot better than W8.0.

Apart from the fact they changed the default Start Screen background images. gently caress you.
Apart from the fact that My Computer is now loving useless unless you do some reg poo poo. gently caress you.
Apart from the fact that Intel display drivers are loving broken. gently caress Intel.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2014 08:21

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

nitrogen posted:

Somebody pinch me.

One of the project managers from The Mothership is...

(god I can't believe i'm about to actually type this)

One of the project managers is managing a project adequately. She's asking questions to accurately predict a timeline, instead of just trying to determine one by fiat.

She is setting expectations for the client that needs something pretty urgently. These expectations are adequate and based in reality.

You're a liar.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2014 17:49

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

nitrogen posted:

No man, I'm serious.

Customer just askd her (and us) during a call. "When is X going to get done?"

Her response?

"I don't know, when are you going to sign the contract? As soon as you sign the contract, it'll be 21 business days from that point."

This woman says "scope creep" more often than Jay from Clerks says 'gently caress'. This is awesome.

I had a project manager just like that.

He was shown the door for some unknown reason.

stubblyhead posted:

I don't think my continued employment is riding on this terrible project being successful. I'm well regarded by my team and management, and I've shown a lot of ability to get poo poo done where others have not. One guy who was attached to this project before me is still with the company, and the other is not, though I believe he left of his own volition. I think deep down everyone knows it's going belly up, but there's some heads buried in the sand about the whole thing. And the most frustrating thing about it is that the technical aspect of the project is loving dead simple, it's satisfying all their internal procedures that's killing us (combined with their piss poor communication skills). For example, they use Remedy for their ticketing, and I was having a bitch of a time creating change requests with the web services. I had all the required fields formatted correctly as near as I could tell, but I'd get an empty response tag from my request (still getting a 200 http status though ). I send the XML I'm using to their dev to see if she can spot what I'm doing wrong. It takes like three weeks to get any reply whatsoever, and then I still have to compare what I was doing to the working XML she sent me back to find my mistake. I had put "CREATE" in the Action tag instead of "Create". Close to a month to work out what should have taken an hour tops with someone who knew what was up.

I'm currently integrating some third party donation platform into my employer's CMS system thingy.

Part of it was dealing with SOAP, so, as expected, total mindfuck.

99.9% of the system has some sort of quasi-consistency when it comes to naming conventions.

This quasi-consistent naming convention is all and well when 99% of the SOAP thing is written 'likethis', but the 1% of the thing I actually want to use, and was created especially for the project that I'm working on is in 'camelCase'.

It's bloody annoying when I send an e-mail to them saying 'welp an error!' but it turns out to be capitalisation issues.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2014 22:06

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Pissing me off: Amazon.

Worthless piece of poo poo API imaginable.

Edit: For you folks that have absolutely no idea how bad it is, there's no real way to grab your data back from Amazon. It's almost like they're forcing us to end up on the Amazon site with their shittiness.

Westie fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Feb 7, 2014

# ¿ Feb 7, 2014 16:15

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Negromancer posted:

huh? Are you trying to pull data from S3 or something? While AWS might not have the best docs for their API's, its not as bad as a lot of other companys that I've dealt with. Best bet is to use the ruby SDK, as that seems to be what they update most often.

I've worked with S3 before, that's perfectly fine.

My problem is with that special snowflake that is Amazon Marketplace Web Services.

So... part of my project at work is to link up products that are in my local database to those that are in Amazon. We can't pull in all the product data, so we can't sync products. All we can do regarding orders is just link some ASIN to our SKU and hope that orders are picked up.

Oh, do you have more than 400 or so orders since the the last time you requested orders?

Well... you can't download them. Sorry!

Do you want to download a list of orders? Sorry, not in real time, you have to constantly ping Amazon to see if it feels like it's ready to give you outdated sales data. That's right, you can only retrieve order info on orders older than... 90 minutes.

And the best part - there is one product lookup API method - it's completely loving different to the product import API.

I've spent three days sweating over this piece of poo poo solution now. It's almost like someone's homework assignment was to make Amazon, and one of the criteria for it was to make it as awkward as possible to use.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2014 00:40

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

dennyk posted:

That ain't old, son. When your company hosts paying customer accounts and critical internal systems today on servers (and OSes) that were manufactured when years still began with "19", then you're allowed to bitch about old hardware. Hell, your fancy new stuff there probably even has USB ports and everything.

I hope that decade has a '9' in it somewhere.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2014 07:37

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Potato Alley posted:

It sure does, he said it began with "19". There's a nine right there son.

VAX4LYFE

I meant 19X0, like uh, 1990 or something.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2014 12:04

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Pudgygiant posted:

Crazy rear end question but... have you emailed them? If you're a large enough customer they'll bend over backwards for you.

I think their monthly turnover is about �8-10k, and Amazon isn't even their main marketplace. Think the MWS team will budge at least one degree backwards?

# ¿ Feb 9, 2014 20:37

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

SolTerrasa posted:

Former AWS employee here. I'm reasonably confident that yes, they will. Or, I guess, more accurately, I'm reasonably confident that you'll get a SEV4 (ranking 1 - 5; SEV1 wakes up Jeff Bezos at 2 AM, SEV5 might get handed to an intern next summer) or higher ticket in the system. But the odds are good that if you don't email them, nothing at all will change. Give it a shot, you've got almost nothing to lose.

I'll have to look into this! Does it matter that it's the European version of MWS, IE, the one without a developer sandbox (lol)?

# ¿ Feb 9, 2014 23:52

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

nitrogen posted:

Glad to be an inspiration!

As a vender of sorts myself, the issue I have is that some of the vendors appear to be faceless corporate entities that won't budge despite you asking politely, giving them suggestions how to improve stuff, etc.
Most of the vendors I've dealt with have been really co-operative and basically made my life easy.

I imagined that because of Amazon's size and the lack of support on the MWS forums - there's pretty much only one user (not staff) that regularly responds to 'questions' on those forums - I guessed that it was one of those faceless corporate entities. The lack of a sandbox is a well known issue and is banded about those forums quote often, usually in the form of 'how do I test', quickly followed by a 'you can't/do it on live', so :sigh:

.

I might post a defect notice over lunch - saying that it's breaking ~~production~~ staging or whatever.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2014 10:36

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

dogstile posted:

Does he get paid for lunch break? If not, then :lol:

# ¿ Feb 10, 2014 14:37

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

I just get Wonga and invitations to teacher interviews.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2014 21:53

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

dogstile posted:

Update: A total of 10 people have been laid off for smoking outside of work/on their lunch break. Some had been working here for years. What the gently caress, why hasn't this guy been taken to the cleaners sooner?

More importantly, why are you still there?

Not suggesting that you're a smoker, though.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2014 17:02

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

dogstile posted:

Since this was my first real job I wanted to wait it out until six months before looking but i'm just about to hit the five month mark

# ¿ Feb 11, 2014 17:45

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

The golden rule is not to ignore IE, unless, it's versions 8 and prior.

To be honest, if they managed to gently caress up a site on IE9..11, then well done.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2014 20:10

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

dogstile posted:

if i'm a minute or two late signing onto the phones then they actually dock it off my annual leave, meaning that yes, I had 7 hours 58 minutes worth of leave I could take and they expected me to come in for the two minutes. I wasn't allowed a full day off.

Re-read that quote lol, and I don't think that they they can stop you if you demand two minutes unpaid leave.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2014 21:52

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

dogstile posted:

So I had gotten arranged a raise. Thats good, i don't mind getting paid a little bit more while looking for a new place. The problem is that it's a bonus, not a raise. The bonus is only if I don't take a single day off for any reason in a month. This means that if I got my raise of �3000 which I asked for, if I took a single day off for sickness or any other reason, i'd lose �250's worth of wages for that month. When I originally met with him to discuss it he said that there was a �40 bonus a month and the rest would be in salary increase.

Yeah, no. I have a meeting in two hours. gently caress this guy. Desperately need to

E: I have no idea if this belongs in the ticket thread or the pissed off thread, but i'm loving furious so its here for now.

Both.

A lovely response+closure to your ticket came in, and you were pissed off about it.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2014 14:22

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Ynglaur posted:

I think we have a new thread title: More poo poo that pisses you off: gently caress living on London, I'd rather work with printers.

Mods! Please!

# ¿ Feb 14, 2014 14:27

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

You may remember me as the person who was moaning about the shittiness that is Amazon.

Amazon, I forgive you. I want to kiss your feet.

eBay however can go and royally gently caress itself. eBay is the only organisation that I know of that wants people to pay �45 to get two support tickets. Not even three. Two.
What the gently caress is the deal there, eh?

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 16:55

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

ookiimarukochan posted:

They've seen Apple's pricing. That said, Apple actually refund you if you can prove it's their fuckup.

eBay will refund credits too, if it's their fault. Did I mention credits?

If you report an issue via live chat then you're hosed. Bye bye half an hour in credits!

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 18:13

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Ynglaur posted:

Pissing me off: I ask for a simple definition of one term in the context of a process. I get a 20 page PDF in reply. It does not even provide an answer.

Read: they don't know either

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 20:05

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Alereon posted:

I supported a customer that used an IVR system, rather than license a functional voice recognition system with fuzzy matching, the audio was piped live to reps in Malaysia who didn't speak English, but were supposed to type phonetically the sounds they heard and a text search would match the correct result and play it to the customer.

What? A Mechanical Turk... for voice?! How much would that cost?

# ¿ Feb 27, 2014 23:13

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Zamujasa posted:

1. You will have to provide your password for the migration utility. As mentioned, this will be for a batch process. You have my word that we will not use these credentials to enter anyone�s account.

The powers that be require that there's a XLSX file, full of people's e-mail passwords for work e-mail.

Every time they change the password, I change it to something else.

I'm paranoid like that, see.

If anything, they should be giving you a password to put in.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2014 20:52

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

So I'm having yet more problems with that amazing service that is Amazon.

Usually, when you have a bunch of XSDs, you would expect them to have some decent validation data - if X is supplied, then Y is must be within these valid constraints, which, as far as I recall, is possible.

This, however, is what I'm dealt with:

XML code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" elementFormDefault="qualified">
    <xsd:include schemaLocation="amzn-base.xsd"/>
    <xsd:element name="OrderFulfillment">
        <xsd:complexType>
            <xsd:sequence>
                <xsd:choice>
                    <xsd:element ref="AmazonOrderID"/>
                    <xsd:element ref="MerchantOrderID"/>
                </xsd:choice>
                <xsd:element name="MerchantFulfillmentID" type="IDNumber" minOccurs="0"/>
                <xsd:element name="FulfillmentDate" type="xsd:dateTime"/>
                <xsd:element name="FulfillmentData" minOccurs="0">
                    <xsd:complexType>
                        <xsd:sequence>
                            <xsd:choice>
                                <xsd:element ref="CarrierCode"/>
                                <xsd:element name="CarrierName" type="String"/>
                            </xsd:choice>
                            <xsd:element name="ShippingMethod" type="String" minOccurs="0"/>
                            <xsd:element name="ShipperTrackingNumber" type="String" minOccurs="0"/>
                        </xsd:sequence>
                    </xsd:complexType>
                </xsd:element>
                <xsd:element name="Item" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
                    <xsd:complexType>
                        <xsd:sequence>
                            <xsd:choice>
                                <xsd:element ref="AmazonOrderItemCode"/>
                                <xsd:element ref="MerchantOrderItemID"/>
                            </xsd:choice>
                            <xsd:element name="MerchantFulfillmentItemID" type="IDNumber" minOccurs="0"/>
                            <xsd:element name="Quantity" type="xsd:positiveInteger" minOccurs="0"/>
                        </xsd:sequence>
                    </xsd:complexType>
                </xsd:element>
            </xsd:sequence>
        </xsd:complexType>
    </xsd:element>
</xsd:schema>

No other real documentation about what fields are required in which scenario.

Doesn't help matters much when all I get for an error is 'We are unable to process the XML feed because one or more items are invalid. Please re-submit the feed.' when it doesn't really point out what is invalid there. That's asking too much, right? :sigh:

Now to write a "nice" ticket to the friendly Amazon folks - at least I don't have to pay $75 for a ticket to talk to some person with a computer.

(This one topic is raising my blood pressure, lol)

# ¿ Mar 5, 2014 11:43

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Baby Town Frolics posted:

"Please treat this with the urge"

I take it they don't mind if you have the urge to throw them out of windows?

# ¿ Mar 9, 2014 17:44

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Prosthetic_Mind posted:

Honestly, compared to a lot of chat protocols AIM isn't that bad. You can even run encryption on top of it!

One of the companies a friend of mine worked at was still using IRC. I think it really depends on what you're using it for.

IRC can also be encrypted.

*shrug*

# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 21:13

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Volmarias posted:

I just got my new SSD in the mail (Samsung 840 EVO).

My first thought when I opened the package it was mailed in was "wait, did I just get the support CD by accident?"

My next thought upon opening the box was "How does all of this documentation fit in here? Did I just get the CD?"

My thought upon seeing the actual drive was "oh heck, I bought a laptop drive by accident, didn't I?"

My thought upon seeing the documentation that showed using the drive via USB to back up data was "oh heck, I got an external drive, didn't I?"

My thought upon reading further and showing the drive getting screwed into a bay slot platter was "... oh. "

So I guess what I'm saying is that I haven't really purchased a hard drive in a long time.

I'm ashamed. :allears:

I thought everyone knew that pretty much all SSDs are in laptop form factor.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2014 00:36

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Lord Dudeguy posted:

More poo poo that pisses you off: My boss said I don't scream enough

Mods! Please!

# ¿ Mar 24, 2014 20:29

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 22:51

Westie: May 30, 2013; Baboon Simulator

Sweevo posted:

I thought it was international law that default signatures had to be 40 lines of unenforceable legal bullshit, a 2MB BMP of the company logo, and links the the webpage where they describe their ISO9001 certification.

Yeah, I thought this too.

So I decided to kill that concept!

Most of the folks have the "this e-mail is confidential" poo poo, whereas I usually have references to Nineteen Eighty-Four, pizza, random topics that are at the time of sending the e-mail newsworthy (currently PRISM based) and the obligatory "please delete this e-mail if you're not the intended recipient" followed by pretty much "no one cares what you do, it's e-mail"

Apparently people in work read my signature before the actual content in the e-mail.

I've had also the tree webding, followed by "think of the environment before you breathe".
This managed to spread to 3 new employees, who thought it was a good idea to copy blindly people's signatures.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2014 17:55

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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