General

What is it with cell phones anyway. It's primary function, while I admit is not a function I do that frequently compared to other things, it can't do all that well. I mean calls but I don't mean hard to hear connections and dropped calls. Those are problems too however just the mechanism of placing the call...

First off - never make a fucking phone dialing app that is incapable of accepted a paste of a phone number!!! You'd think that'd be a no brainer but way too many phone dialers do not allow paste. So you find a number in a web page or an email or you put it in a file - whatever. You select the phone number and you go to the phone app and want to paste it in. There's no paste. Stupid phone!

Secondly you would think that a phone application would be, oh, I don't know.... RESPONSIVE PERHAPS. Many play back those button tones we all know and love. But most phones can't keep up with even the slowest of typists. How hard is this to sense the button was pushed and immediately (I mean right away, with out hesitation - IMMEDITATELY!!! - did I say immediately?) play the fucking tone and be ready for the next button push. Come on folks, this is not rocket science nor is this a lot of work that the phone needs to do in order to accomplish this minor fucking miracle - yet on both Windows Mobile based phones and now my Android based phone this constantly happens. Is it hardware related? Again, how much hardware is needed?!? My old land line never seemed to have an issue accomplishing this task - why can't my $$$ phone do it?!? Write the damn phone app in assembler and make it (and the tones for that matter) memory resident so you have no excuses WRT speed! Really is this too much to ask?!?

And another thing about phones - why is it that the most common things I do require push and hold in order to work. Not just phones, sometimes accessories. For example, my Bluetooth headset of choice (Sony Ericson HBH-980) has a recessed power button and you must hold for a few seconds to turn on. Now I understand the concept of requiring such a delay to distinguish between a real turn on/off event and an inadvertent one but trust me you would not be inadvertently hitting this power button.

And why is it that I must always wrestle with Bluetooth to get it to work right. My BT headset can handle both "Media audio" (from the media player) and "Phone audio" from say and incoming all. Why the distinction? I don't care. Just call it audio. You don't know how many time I try to connect my BT headset and only the phone audio gets connected. No media audio. So I try to connect again. No go. Try powering off the BT headset and back on. Nope. Try turning off BT on the phone and back on No go. Then the phone hangs. Bluetooth is the only thing that seems to have the power to hang my phone, requiring me to open the case and yank the battery in order to reboot!

And then when listening to Bluetooth often I'll get gaps of silence, especially when starting a new song or podcast, as if it needs to buffer stuff or whatever. It's real annoying. Why is Bluetooth so hard, flunky and trouble ridden?!?

Posted by Andrew DeFaria at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK so I've moved up to Seattle and need to get my business and personal bank accounts all settled in. So I stopped into my local Wells Fargo branch to introduce myself. He said he could save me some money but unfortunately I need to get new accounts. With the new accounts come plain old boring cards. I had personalized my cards before. Now I have new plain cards I need to reactivate, only to have to re-personalize them again!

So I go to activate one of them and they ask for my 17 gillion digit card number then the last 4 numbers of my business checking account number. Well I don't know that so I need to go to the Wells Fargo bank site to get that. While I'm doing that it keeps saying "Sorry I didn't get that" and eventually I exceed my limit of retries. Hey I was just trying to get to your slow web site!!!.

Of course I'm dumped into the tech support queue where some ditzy blonde answers the phone. She tells me that she'll need to have my full business account number. I tell her I don't have that. I only have the last 4 because that's all your web page gives me. Normally I have to open up statement to get the full account number but I can't do that because this account is too new and doesn't have any statements. "Well you could just look at your checks..." to which I quickly interject "Listen sweetheart I haven't used checks in 18 years!". Then she tells me that she could help me but I'd need to give not one, nor two, nor even three but four forms of identification in order for her to help me! I told her that in no way would I be comfortable with that because everybody knows you don't achieve real security until after 20 forms of ID are presented and hung up!

OK stop and think here for a second... Why can the automated phone system validate me with just the mere last four digits of my account number, which is probably pretty damn easy to obtain, but the human needs the whole account number and/or 4 forms of ID?!?

Bottom line: Since I'm now at the web site I hang up on the dtiz and simply go back around and punch in my 4 digits and I'm validated. Stupid is as stupid does - and I ain't stupid - but I do see it all the time!

Posted by Andrew DeFaria at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many IT departments run long running and intensive processes on the various PCs throughout their organizations. For example, virus scanners (are evil but that's another rant), defragmentation and disk cleanup stuff. Is it really too much to ask for them to put such background tasks in the LOW PRIORITY QUEUE!!!. Do they know what the low priority queue even is or that it exists? I have yet to see anybody, other than myself, think ahead far enough to say "Gee this would interrupt interactive performance. I know! I'll put this in the low priority queue instead of being rude". I wonder what the thought process is for the IT guys or even if there is a thought process...

And then processes spawned from the original process go in the normal queue, so even if you put the first process in the low queue, the next process pops out in the normal queue. The correct way to do this is to have the original process, the parent process, in the low queue and have it insure any children created are also in the low queue!

Posted by Andrew DeFaria at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This seems to be the trend now a days in Corporate IT. Is it just Windows related? I don't know. It used to be that you could rely on DNS. Now you can't. Case in point - people hear talk about a machine known as "seacase". Others use the name usseacase. Whicih is correct? Well an educated guess would be they are one in the same and a DNS alias exists between them. IOW seacase is just a "pretty" name for usseacase.

Now I used to be that you could verify that with DNS, in particular you could use nslookup to find each of the names and see they have the same IP address. But more and more, Corporate IT DNS stuff is screwed up, perhaps in the name of security, such that they don't always resolve:

So we can look that one up but we can't lookup the other:

However ping works! And verifies that this is the same machine. So why doesn't DNS know about this?

Another pet peave of mine is people using either IP addresses instead of names (Do you refer to your friends by their cell phone numbers?) or using fully qualified machine names all the time when you don't need to...

Posted by Andrew DeFaria at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why do people do the following: A user is having difficulty performing a task so they submit a ticket. Attached there's a zip file that contains a Word document of 5 pages, 4 of which are entire desktop screen shots showing each steps in it's huge glory taking up tons of space where screen shot 4 has the error dialog that I need! Further, page 5 has the textual representation, which is really all I needed and is copy and pastable!

Now before you say "Well they didn't know and they were trying to be helpful providing you with all the information" consider this: What the hell was the zip file for? There was only 1 file in it. Why zip it? "Well Andy, you hard ass, at least they are saving space because the zip file will compress it". Well then, riddle me this batman, why then capture the entire damn screen probably in the wasteful bmp format! And if you just wished to send me a bunch of screen captures why didn't you put only those in a zip file instead of having to call Word - and all it's inefficiencies - into play?

The end result is that they do it in the most inefficient and complicated way they can find!

Posted by Andrew DeFaria at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do people think at all how they come off to other people? Case in point - I want to set my Unix password but for some reason they've disabled the passwd(1) command. Off to the help desk it is for me! Apparently I have not paid enough penance.

So the conversation goes as follows:

Aside from the atrocious English spelling and grammar of this supposed College educated support tech... First off, why's he explaining my problem back to me? I know my problem - I'm not stupid.

Secondly, maybe ya should come to the party prepared! I mean the problem here is simple - a user simply wants to set his password. Have you read the trouble ticket? Do you understand the issues involve? Great then contact the user. But here clearly he state "please give me one minute" - Then clearly takes several! Shouldn't he have the solution in hand?

Posted by Andrew DeFaria at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The reluctance to use HTML in email (and news groups for that matter) is astonishing! Instead people insist on using plain text and inevitably paste long links that break due to stupid clients badly wrapping the URL. For example:

Note: "^M" included to indicate where the line wrap occurs as this blog software will wrap it differently

Email clients then linkify the first part (http://gisclarifyweb.somewhere.com/eSupport/eSupportjsp/MenuSystem/CaseViewMS.j) but fail to include the second part (sp?casenum=G03519757) resulting in the link not working and making the recipient have to do the work of piecing the URL back together. And with some humongous URLs (and you've seen them) this can be quite an effort. Move this to your small cell phone in a bumping bus ride and this is next to impossible!

So this has spawned an entire industry most notably tinyurl.com and friends. But why? Why not instead simple think up a meaning few words to describe the link and make a proper anchor href. For example, the above is talking about a Clarity case number of G03519757. So that should be the link text. Viola you have G03519757. This magic is achieved in Thunderbird - my mailer of choice - simply by highlighting the link text, typing Ctrl-L for link and pasting in the proper URL (In Outlock you select Insert: Hyperlink). There! You're done. Was that that hard? You've not only made it much easier on the receiver of your email by providing a simple - and attractive - link that will not break by being wrapped by any email client capable of rendering HTML (i.e. most of them) and for any incapable, they'll see the link in all its ugly glory and improper and broken wrapping they they must be accustomed to by now anyway!

So why don't people do this regularly? I'm not sure but my guesses run neck and neck between lazy and ignorant. What's your guess?

Posted by Andrew DeFaria at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)