241–250 of 289 posts
The music for our call waiting at my first job, was an old Windows machine blasting music in our server room with a phone on speaker... You ever wonder why music on clal waiting sounds so fuzzy?
Which I guess means you had to be super silent when doing physical hardware maintenance?
The other day a former colleague pinged me with a screenshot from one of our secondary RADIUS servers, asking if he could remove my former user account from a bit of Perl code (we used Radiator). That ‘if’ block exempted me, the CEO and the CMO from traffic limits (which at the time would forcibly disconnect you) and make sure we had 24/7 access (I had set it up during testing because they kept calling us to remove t…
Hm, 10 years at 200KB/day (about average for a Dilbert strip) would come out to 730000KB or 713MB. That seems rather quaint compared to the ~50GB git repo we have :)
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wut. why did you do this? why didn't you just handle all of it in the frontend? jspdf makes PDFs in browser.
I would have loved to, but one of the sticking points was that the label file had to be serialized, saved, and later interpolated with data from a bunch of different records, which is why I used svg over canvas, wrote my own editor, etc. jsPDF seems great for imperatively generating a pdf, but not for editing/loading template files. Plus, since the pdf generation had to happen server side, I would have needed a headl…
this is exactly my question: why did the pdf generation need to be server side?
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Glad to see confirmation of using a rubber band to fix an IBM mainframe. Been there done that, but the story is so loony I wondered if anyone would believe me. http://laughtonelectronics.com/oldsite/comm_mfg/commercial_i...
Love that you've updated your page with a reference to this discussion already :-)
In the 2016 HN thread "Strange bug workarounds" I posted a much gnarlier problem (and oddball solution): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12485921
Every minute of every host on the private cloud ...
... but I have come upon many strange problems in various EMC products so that does not surprise me a lot.
I did some work for a major Australian Federal government department. They had a very secure environment and couldn’t (well, wouldn’t) allow webservices or anything else of that nature between themselves and other government departments. However, they did allow for email. Luckily the ITSM system I had took incoming and outgoing email. They had a stored procedure “hook” for email. I reimplemented the SLA functionality…
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I would have loved to, but one of the sticking points was that the label file had to be serialized, saved, and later interpolated with data from a bunch of different records, which is why I used svg over canvas, wrote my own editor, etc. jsPDF seems great for imperatively generating a pdf, but not for editing/loading template files. Plus, since the pdf generation had to happen server side, I would have needed a headl…
>Plus, since the pdf generation had to happen server side this is exactly my question: why did the pdf generation need to be server side?
We certainly could do the work on the client, but they're making this request in a context where neither the label nor the libraries need to be loaded; in fact, in our server-side implementation, it could be done with a single api call. Doing it all client side would strongly couple the client to the technology.
Also, we re-used this api in two applications, one of which never loaded the editor (along with its dependencies).
TLDR; a weird hack was better than violating separation of conerns.
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I created a whole project for this! https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db Since you can also hook a Google Form to a spreadsheet, you can do surprisingly advanced things over there.
Not to detract from this project, buy this is a good opportunity to mention Apps Script. You can do all sorts of interesting things between a form, spreadsheet, and other services including your own. Nobody seems to use it, but internally we do all sorts of gloriously hacky workflows with it. You can easily script forms/sheets/calendar/Gmail together to create pretty much anything you need. I use it to send daily ema…
From a quick overview it seems like if you need serious work with spreadsheets/GDocs then App Scripts is a good choice. However drive-db is more like a (very) quick way of putting a Spreadsheet into your Node.js backend as an array/db. I purposefully didn't even allow edit since that'd require API keys from users and defeat the quick part of it.
Right after WinXP came out, I was a sys/win admin at a manufacturing co. Their ERP system was an old VB app that sat on a share drive and everyone opened the same .exe from their respective workstations. The app required a ton of scheduled database and ERP tasks (it used a legacy flat-file db), so the vendor wrapped them all up in a secondary executable that was effectively a non-headless (headful?) daemon (this was…
I looked up ERP software in google images. Holy poor UX, Batman! There's a great market opportunity there for something that doesn't spew out everything at once onscreen.
The less information you have per screen/interaction, the more you lock users into a specific way of doing things. Business software users tend to optimise for what works for them. The worst UX experiments I’ve conducted in enterprise software involved low information density screens, showing users just what they told me they needed to see. User expectations in this space are so nuanced - better to favour more information and a high learning curve vs easier to user but less flexible software.
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The original comment says "they just weren't anywhere in the code that humans could see." Where would you and the comment in a situation like that one? I don't have anything against generated code but it should be visible and, as you said, it should be crystal clear where it come from
I think in this instance it's also a matter of tools. Visual Studio/Visual Assist would have been able to find the class definition, and that's where the comment would go. For cscope it's a matter of configuration, which should be auto-generated by the build tool. If the class is being used, then the definition has got to be somewhere, hopefully in a header. It's simply a file that is included somewhere. And it will…