In every version of it Outlook I've used, it stands out as being terrible at dealing with email in general (aside from the various exploits just from opening malformed emails). It's got rules that cancel themselves because the computer just woke from sleep and isn't connected to the internet (and therefore the rules are "invalid") to having a hojillion different sources of email addresses, none of them configurable or editable (Seriously, why can't I fix a misspelling in an email once it's been saved wherever the hell it gets saved?). Autocompletion of email addresses is a complete clusterfuck. I had to delete a customer from my contact list completely and start over because her email address changed and when I edited her contact, her record refused to come up when I'm sending an email (Doesn't come up when I type, doesn't come up in the contact list when I press the "To" button, but if I write her email by hand and choose "Look Up Outlook Contact" bam there she is complete with name and company information)

If it weren't for Exchange, I'd have ditched this shit long ago. Sadly, it's still the best I've got at dealing with scheduling meetings (at least as long as they're in our own time zone).

So years ago I needed a backup drive for my home computer after the last backup drive up and died on me, so I was possessed by idiocy and decided to get one of those external RAID blocks with two drives in it, RAID-1. Worked fine for years, now it's got a red blinking light on it and doesn't show up to the system anymore.

This is one of those things where foresight would have said "Hey, why are you spending 3x as much on drives when you're going to be stuck with a box with one red light to tell you there is a problem and no way to find out what the problem is". Hindsight says I'm an idiot.

At least it's just a backup.

Maybe next I'll get a LTO drive for a few thousand bucks for shits and giggles. Of course we had one of those at work that ate a tape. Better get two and take redundant backups...

God damn where do I get a fucking ftp server that can run a command after an upload without preaching to me about how insecure yadda yadda yadda. I'm not running a goddamned anonymous ftp site (and even if I was, MAYBE I'd like to have a virus scanner run on whatever bullshit goes in and out!)

Currently using ProFTPd because mod_sftp appears to be the only way to get an sftp server with virtual users on Linux without using OpenSSH+PAM voodoo. mod_exec runs programs on every single little command EXCEPT the completion of an upload because fuck you. The documentation suggests logging to a FIFO and writing a program to read lines from the FIFO and acting on each line of the log. Great, only two problems: 1) proftpd shits itself if nothing is listening to the FIFO which means the listening program has to immediately reopen the socket when logrotate restarts proftpd 2) proftpd's xferlog format can't be changed and rather than doing any sane quoting, replaces spaces in filenames with underscores because fuck you.

I just spent 4 hours doing onsite customer training for a customer of ours who is transitioning from an ancient terminal-based software to our software. These customers had therefore bought all new laptops with all new Windows 8 to replace their old terminals. The decision to use laptops had been made because 1) the network infrastructure in place currently ran the terminals which were actually win95 computers plugged into a local network and using telnet to reach the server so wireless was necessary until the old equipment could be removed and 2) the computers running the old system needed to stay there until after the training was complete and they were ready to switch.

I estimate 30 minutes of that time was spent unfucking shit that went wrong when people who had never seen a GUI or used a touchpad in their life had their palms brush the touchpad and trigger random win8 gestures, opening the charms bar, opening bing, opening the start screen, and in at least one case, somehow closing the program window (or was it open somewhere but alt-tab no longer works in windows 8? Damned if I know!)

For the next round of training tomorrow I plan on disabling the gestures. Easy peasy, just a few SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig registry entries to change. And they say Windows 8 isn't ready for the desktop!

My wife and I enjoy watching the Chinese mini-series "A Taste of China." How clearly I can recall the English narration, spoken in a deep baritone voice and with a strong, but easy to understand, Chinese accent. The narrator's voice, style, and cadence are all very professional -- the only problem with this memory is that it is totally false.

My wife and I were watching the series online on YouTube with our daughter and she asked me to get something from the kitchen. There had been a pause in the narration and while I was in the kitchen it began again. This time though there was no pleasant Chinese accented English, but unintelligible Mandarin. I was startled for a second, then remembered I had been reading subtitles. I returned to the table and continued watching the program. As I sat I was aware I was listening to Mandarin and I was reading subtitles, but the second I reached into my memory to recall what had just happened the English narration returned.

If I had not had this realization and had you asked me a year from now had I watched the series I would have been convinced I had listened to an English dubbed version. This may not seem like a false memory in the traditional sense, I had merely converted the subtitles into an easier to remember and integrate English narrative, but it illustrates how malleable our memories are. My unconscious mind knows I do not know Mandarin and yet I remember words of the narration. I don't believe it was merely being lazy, but resolving the paradox by inventing the remembered narrator's voice.

Sometimes our perception of an event is in conflict with what seems to be fact. Rather than flag the contradiction it seems our memory will often edit the memory to be whatever our subconscious feels to be the most likely internally consistent explanation. None of this is news. However just like 90% of all drivers think they are in the top 10% of safe drivers, most of us believe our memory of events to be superior to those around us. We are startled when our recollections differ and often assume malice or ulterior motives in those who misremember what we remember.

We probably all know someone who either thinks they are never wrong or have a far more altruistic explanation for some past behavior that on the surface seemed quite self-serving or selfish. We intuitively believe their memories are false (which they probably are). We then give ourselves a mental pat on the back for not living in such a self-deluded state. Obviously our own memories are as infallible and as unyielding at the Rock of Gibraltar. The only trouble is that everyone's memory is fallible -- memories are in constant reedit. Evolution didn't evolve memory to be accurate, evolution evolved memory to be useful. Memory is therefore a repository of non-contradictory facts (also non-contradictory as we perceive or wish our personality to be). As new facts become evident, old memories are revised to fit with the facts. Sometimes this can even make them more accurate, say looking at an old photograph and remembering more accurately the Members Only jacket you use to own (a fact your stylish new self may have edited out).

Unfortunately our desire to be part of a clan or to please others can be the motivation to reedit the facts in our memory. We know that lying is wrong, but if our memory is in conflict with what allows us to have what we want, then memory is often what needs to be changed.

I think it would be the truly rare individual whose head isn't full of false memories. The best we can do is to be aware that memories are not the concrete remembrance of past that they seem. Evolution has probably installed a chalkboard in our head not a printing press. Be cautious of believing only what you see on the board.

Customer: Your website is broken, I can't log into it

Me: What exactly do you mean?

Customer: I decided to work from home and when I go to your website it gives me this list of things so I clicked on the first one and it gives me an error when I go there

Me: It sounds like you put the address into google and clicked on someone else's site.

Customer: Well, what search engine am I supposed to use?

At this point, I was about to say "well, lady, whichever search engine that links to the actual website when you type www.foo.com into it" but then I realized the answer was "none of them". After all, how would you get people to click on your ads if you took them where they really intended to go?

I explained to her about Ctrl-L and pressing it before typing in a website. I think she got it.

Tonight's task is to manually categorize a rather flat tree structure in SQL (currently two levels only) by reading the top level entry and assigning it and its children to a category. On a lark I gave this a shot:

update tree set category=1 where 5 in (id,parent);

and it worked in PostgreSQL.

Why? Because I'm sitting here reading the list of top-level entries in one window while using psql in the other and pressing up to edit the previous query. Before I tried that I had

update tree set category=1 where id=4 or parent=4

so I'd have to retype TWO numbers instead of just one.

Today's rage divides evenly between:

1. people who type site addresses into the search box instead of the address bar
2. gotomeeting.com for not putting "join a meeting" link on their search engine landing pages

That's 15 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Windows Media Player is a flaming pile of shit.

Trying to copy notes from a webinar, and every time I press the pause button in WMP the video keeps playing for another couple of seconds. When you add to this the fact that it takes WMP a couple of seconds before it will start the video again when I'm trying to click on the bar to seek, the tooltip on the bar is "Seek" rather than the time it's going to jump to when I click it, and the fact that there's no x0.5 or x2 or any other speed control but a jerky skiptastic fast forward button, it all adds up to an enormous hassle.

This is turning a task that SHOULD have taken a bit more than 30 minutes (the length of the video) into something I've spent the whole morning on. Good going folks!

After failing to get it to work in MPC or VLC, I managed to get it working in mplayer, but apparently it's only seekable to the nearest 5 minutes or so in there, which probably means that the g2m4 codec put next to no keyframes in the video. But at least mplayer has speed control so I can cover the ground I've already covered quickly, and when I press the space bar it stops immediately.

UI Elements that only operate when the stars are properly aligned annoy the hell out of me. Especially when they do something I want to do on a regular basis. All those grayed out menu items with no hints as to how to activate them are one thing, at least you know there's something there you can use, but sometimes there's things that make absolutely no sense at all...

If you're using the current Chrome, right click the reload button. OK, now open the developer console (Ctrl+Shift+J). Right click the reload button again. An option to dump cache and reload! Pretty cool, eh?

I don't even know what the fuck inspired me to try right clicking the reload button in the first place...

On the Democrat side, I expect to see more "adjustments" in the jobless rate. On November 7th, we'll be back to 9%.

On the Republican side, I expect to see more refineries have mysterious fires, power outages, and pipeline closures. On November 7th, they'll all suddenly be fixed.

A story shows up about "underappreciated scifi writers" and I have mod points.

So I'm restricting myself to using overrated and underrated, because for once they are on topic :-D

Only the Slashdot frontpage will be accessible tonight between 23:00 and 23:15 EDT while maintenance is occurring.

"... Once maintenance is complete, the Slashdot frontpage will no longer be accessible."

(Interesting. When I preview this, the blockquote tags are ignored. Oh well, I'll add an i tag so it blockquotes anyway)

There's some ugly drama surrounding the collapse of 38 Studios. That has caused baseball's Curt Schilling to walk away from video games and publicly state that it will end up costing him his fortune. Everyone is in a very bad position right now. 38 Studio's top creditor is the state of Rhode Island. Aside from some stranger assets, there is a partially finished MMO called Project Copernicus as well as the source code and artwork for Kingdoms of Amular. So why doesn't Rhode Island seize this source code and artwork? They could auction it or, better yet, give it to the people who paid for it.

Now we all know this isn't going to happen. The source code will be shelved and it is unlikely it ever contribute to society ever again. The people who coded it have been fired and have moved on to the next thing in their lives while the bankruptcy proceedings play out in the news. But if I fail to repay a loan on a car, repossession services come to take the car. If a studio gets $75 million from a state to make a video game, where are the state's repo men to reclaim the video game?

The current situation is unavoidably bad for everyone involved. Schilling is blaming the governor, developers are moving for the second time in two years, gamers are missing out on the sequel to Amular and money is missing everywhere. But most notably each resident of Rhode Island has paid $75 to the video game industry and will likely never see it returned to their pockets. A coworker who thoroughly enjoys the game said that it's RI's fault for investing in such a fickle and risky industry. Maybe he's right? But the game is reasonably entertaining.

So what could a state do with source code and artwork? The obvious thought would be to auction it off and recoup losses. But what company wants to buy up those assets for more than a pittance compared to the loan? The game didn't sell as well as they thought it would, your developers would have to learn thousands of lines of new code, the artists that could expand the art in the same style are thrown to the wind and there's already a polished title out there. To me, the obvious solution would be to instead package Amular and Copernicus (at least the PC versions) as learning software for high schools and universities in RI. Art students could work on reskinning it, developers could work on just getting it built and Rhode Island would at least be able to show its residents something for which they had paid.

Furthermore if RI really wanted to recoup its losses, they could likely make several million back with a Kickstarter project to open source everything from 38 Studios. The only people who might not like this idea are those in the games industry who claim the MMO and RPG markets are already thoroughly saturated. Perhaps the current publisher and those with distribution contracts of Amular would object. But those executives have already taken the citizens of RI and Curt Schilling for a ride so why should RI care? The only downside would be a massive influx of Amular clones on the PSN, XBLA and PC fronts. But this is an opportunity for gamers, Rhode Islanders and open source in general to expand and set precedence that when a company folds all that hard work and late nights with Mountain Dew and pizza should not be wasted and shelved.

You can tell me that this will never happen -- not with Amular, Copernicus or any of the thousands of titles from failed development studios -- because you're right. It hasn't ever happened and it most likely will not. But Rhode Islanders paid for these titles and the repo men should arrive and bring that back for Rhode Island to decide what to do with it. At least those that have paid for it should be able to decide if what their hard earned money paid for should sit collecting dust or live in immortality.

Print document, spooler crashes. Document cannot be removed from queue because spooler is not running.

Reboot computer. Document in queue immediately tries to print, spooler crashes.

Solution: Turn off printer, reboot computer. Delete document from queue. Turn on printer.

You'd think that critical infrastructure like the print spooler would be a bit more robust. Or at least be able to detect that it is repeatedly crashing on a single document and ask the user if they'd like to cancel the offending print job. Or make cancelling print jobs not dependent on the spooler service. Also, apparently user permission to manage print queues does not extend to restarting the print service itself.

Aside: You know how when you say a word over and over it starts to sound funny? Apparently Chrome gets the same way too... it didn't start highlighting "spooler" as a misspelled word until I wrote it about 5 times.