CIPWTTKT&GC 0x30 - Racing to the thread post limit
999 replies, posted
When I see "doesn't work" for an email, I assume lacks any access.
When I see "my email doesn't work", at this point I assume "I opened Edge instead of Chrome without noticing, why doesn't it remember my password anymore?"
Or possibly "the internet is down".
Or, in one case, "my keyboard is broken".
Man this reminds me of one of my current tasks in work.
One of the places we manage got new antivirus licenses and each computer needs to be reinstalled manually with a reboot via Teamviewer. I'm stuck only on two computers now because every time I call them, they either don't pick up their phone, tell me to give them up to 30 minutes to finish their work and just deadass turn off their phones for a hour and turn off their phones too. And then they complain it takes a month to do something simple as installing an antivirus on computers.
I relate to this post too much.
I can honestly say the only users worse than the ones that never reboot their PCs, are the ones that shut their computers off at the end of the day. Then complain that they have to wait for the computer to start up and run updates. Bitch please, the computer does that automagically at 3 in the morning if you left it on like most users.
You saved the company $10, out of the like 10k electric bill.
So today, I got called in to fix a problem in The Old System. I now bring you ACTUAL CONTENT: a Computer Illiterate Person who Thought They Knew Things well enough to program a reports system. The CIPWTTKT responsible for this code is quite fortunately no longer with the company. But I know his address and should America ever decide The Purge is a good idea, I will be paying him a visit.
The Old System, as you can imagine by the name, is a piece of shit. Not just PHP, but most of it is PHP 4, although later ported to 5. Buggy as hell, slow as fuck, and ugly as sin.
The problem identified was "the graphs aren't paginating right", and surprisingly, the user error analysis was spot-on. We have a little-used feature in the report-generation system where we can show a little pie chart of the results of each test. Most customers don't use it, because the relevant information is the absolute number of the results and not the percentage makeup, but pretty colored graphs make some people happy.
The report layout was pretty bad and could only fit four graphs per page. Page one would work right - four charts, two by two. Page two would not - you'd get five charts, one at the bottom cut off so that only the title was really visible. And then the charts would go on to page three.
After a few missteps looking down completely wrong code paths, I identified the code responsible. I will abbreviate it from the ~500 lines it actually took, and use actual variable names.
if ($display_pie_charts && count($pie_charts > 0)){
$PDF->AddPage();
$i = 1;
foreach ($pie_charts as $chart){
if ($i == 5 || $i == 10){
$PDF->AddPage();
}
$PDF->DrawChart(/* bunch of params you don't need to know about */);
$i++;
}
}
Note the multitude of sins that surely damn the original coder to Programming Hell. First, indexing off 1 instead of 0. Second, hard-coding to start a new page on specific numbers instead of any sort of arithmetic - this code would never produce more than three pages, even with hundreds of tests (no customer of ours that uses graphs has ever done that many, but we've had customers do thousands on a single job).
Most importantly, though, HE GOT THE MATH WRONG. Page one should have graph 1, 2, 3, and 4. Page two should have graph 5, 6, 7, and 8. So page three needs to start on graph 9, not graph 10. Five plus four equals nine, not ten.
The offending conditional was replaced with "if ( ($i-1) % 4 == 0 && $i > 1)", because I did not want to refactor this whole thing, just make it work well enough to tide us over until The New System can be deployed. The New System is basically ready, but business keeps booming and it is a horribly bad idea to migrate to a new system while everyone is slammed with work. Which is how I have enough time to sit on Facepunch all day - we've got features that were planned for New System 2.0 already finished.
It gets worse. There is a similar system to display bar graphs, which seem to fit three onto a single page (though nobody can tell for sure).
if ($i == 1 || $i == 4 || $i == 7 || $i == 10){
Yeah, Purge Night can't come soon enough.
Boss finally got tired of hearing me rage everyday about how slow our work computers were and told me "$2500, build 5 new machine parts lists, send them to me. I'll have us new computers one way or the other by the end of the month."
So I whip up a parts list, about $425 per rig running on a Ryzen 2200g, 16GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD. Nothing fancy, but exactly what we need.
He takes those parts lists, goes to IT and sits down with the director and says "I need all 12 computers in my department replace with the new rigs running windows 10 and NVME SSD's (had to teach him what that was) by the end of the month or I order this, we build it, and you have to image it and maintain it." IT director just goes "Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..." and hands him a computer to replace our oldest one. My boss then makes him order the other 10 with him sitting right there so we could be sure it was getting done and wouldn't get told "Oh you guys are 200th on the list, we'll get to you by next summer."
So we've got some of these coming now to replace our aging machines that we've had to order our own RAM for and that are running on 5400 rpm drives.
https://i.imgur.com/hkiNz64.png
It's a Thinkcenter M710q. Again, nothing fancy, but so much better.
How does someone know that an unmanaged network switch is reaching end of its life? Like, right now mine started making a loud whining noise when I pulled out a patch cable and stopped when I plugged it back in.
Also, since I don't have public IPv4 address, is it possible to do some kind of Linux/Mikrotik VPN voodo networking magic to serve my home server's web content on a reverse proxy running on a cheap VPS? I doubt that I'll be able to obtain a static IPv4 address from my ISP as a non-corporate/business customer.
I think a lot of people used to use DynDNS, but these days depending on where your DNS records are actually hosted, you could probably write a script to do that for you for much cheaper. You'd really just need to grab your public IP (should be easy) periodically, then push that into your A record.
You could run a VPS (Some will let you use your own OS, so you could install Mikrotik CHR or some other VM-friendly router OS like PFsense) with a VPN tunnel going to your home router. You would put some NAT rules on your VPS to NAT them to your LAN IP as normal.
When I move, I'll probably get a gigabit connection from Bell Canada which will only have dynamic IPs. My setup would be pretty similar, except it will be to an ESXI box I have colocated with Mikrotik CHR running as the "gateway". I already have a VPN connection between my home Mikrotik router to manage other VMs on the ESXI LAN, so it would be a single NAT rule to have a device on my home LAN respond on the ESXI server's IP.
Oh my god this lady is actually insane.
She's needed to "urgently sign" a PDF document and for three days whatever reason needs Adobe Acrobat Pro to do it.
She has been told three times she needs a software request form, and three times has refused to fill it out.
How the fuck is this person a federal manager.
I love these people that desperately need help but won't move a finger to make it happen. Makes my blood boil
Erm, so I had a supernatural encounter last night or something.
When we moved in, I set up my home office desk so that I'd have my work computer on one end of the table, and a normal workspace with a desk lamp on the other side.
I plugged in the desk lamp and stuck the bulb from the room's light fixture into it, as we replaced the fixture with a brigher, cooler LED bulb.
The bulb never worked in the lamp; it was a cheap $10 lamp from Target so I guessed it died in the move.
Well, at some point in the middle of the night, the bulb had turned on. I must have left the switch on, but you couldn't tell since it's one of the twist switches without any markings or anything. I woke up at 2 in the morning to my wife smacking me panicked. I got up, turned it off, and went to bed.
Why did it take it 4 months to turn on?
the chinese government finally turned on the camera
Also guys, Im setting up a media server to play to my TV. I currently have a spare pc that had an i5 3570 in it that will hopefully be able to run 4k plex? If not then 1080p. Or is there any better alternative to plex?
Also looking for a download manager/media server software that will schedule downloads, can use vpns and hopefully switch inactive hdds off.
Any help will be great.
If that CPU has to transcode then not a chance for 4k. If it doesn't have to transcode then you're fine.
IIRC most UHD stuff (4k fire stick, UHD bluray players) can play 4k HEVC directly without transcoding.
You can always buy a cheap graphics card and use hardware transcoding though.
Thanks for the info man. Would it be possible to automatically transcode after a download so it's not in real time while playing then? I'm looking to send the video to plex on my TV and I have no idea what codecs it can play.
So when my old SSD died, it had on it a licensed copy of a special radio programming software that I paid $120 for. Apparently, the manufacturer's policy is that they will not reissue licenses under any circumstances. And since I can't access the license manager on the original computer to deactivate it, I have to buy the same exact software again.
Thanks Kenwood.
I'm having a similar experience with a friend wanting to build a gaming PC. He's set on getting the newest i9 despite not planning on doing any workstation stuff. When I asked him why not just go with a Ryzen if you want a bunch of threads he said "because Shroud uses Intel".
This is actually a bit of a problem for AMD; almost every popular streamer is either paid to use Intel or has them provided by their sponsor, so whenever anybody mentions AMD they get shot down. They have an image problem in the Twitch community.
The main issue is that, simply, Core is better at gaming than Zen. Intel 14nm++++ can also clock higher (plus design decisions like nanowire thickness for power delivery lines).
But for consumers, the real question is: are you going to overclock? Are you going to spend $120+ on cooling? And way more for the same number of cores?
For what percentage of gaming performance? Will you also be getting a GPU that is actually going to not be the bottleneck?
The answer to most of these, is just to AMD, unless money no issue, and you want to play CS:GO at 400+ FPS at 1024X768.
Also AMD is sponsoring teams these days, the issue is the first one (the Halo effect is super strong) and that Intel has infinitely deep pockets.
Or just go with a prebuilt AMD that comes with a 2080 ti and its very affor--
https://i.imgur.com/BqhivHj.png
Well... they're wrong.
https://i.imgur.com/Xv90aUT.png
Doesn't help when that fucking graphics card is $1500. Fuck off Nvidia.
It's a supply issue. MSRP is $999 or something. I'd argue it's still worth the cost if you're a 4k gamer, because SLI on a 1080 ti would be $1600 based on the current prices. And sure, you would get faster FPS but only a few games can actually use SLI these days and the 2080 ti has deep learning and ray tracing.
But then again, ray tracing is probably going to come with a huge performance loss.
1440p @ 144Hz > 4K at 60Hz
Maybe. It depends on the display size and pixel density.
After seeing how small 1080p and 1440p are in window mode on 4k though..
Largely depends on what you're doing (gaming/media consumption/casual browsing/etc vs actual productivity stuff) but I mostly agree.
let's add fuel to this fire
VA > IPS
AMOLED>IPS
Except for that burn-in thing.
I actually have the taskbar burned into my VA panel.
I don't know how.
But it's there.
I recently went from a 60Hz IPS panel to a 144Hz VA panel and I haven't had an issue with ghosting. Maybe if it isnt a gaymen focused monitor it could be.
I'm the computer illiterate in this story. What is a good way to transfer files from one windows machine to another over the same lan that require fiddling around with homegroups or leave me open to vulnerabilities? I got a ton of stuff to transfer and using my flash drive so many times makes me feel like I'm bailing out a canoe with a dixie cup.
Mine certainly does.
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