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Journal Cyberdyne's Journal: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr 14

Journal by Cyberdyne
(This rant brought to you by a chunk of my life wasted trying to achieve something in Excel which should have been trivial, but was needlessly complicated by Microsoft's use of defective bacteria to write software.)

You might think a search and replace function was trivial. Indeed, I'm sure that even the non-programmers among us could figure it out given a good book or two and a few hours to experiment. However, that is why you aren't working for Microsoft, developing infuriating paperclips...

Yep, that's right. The lobotomized ass-spawn who brought us such masterpieces of user-friendly software as MS Bob and That Infernal Paperclip managed to screw up one of the most basic text manipulation functions, "Replace". Try it on a cell too large, you're hit with "Formula too large." Never mind that it is text, with no formula in sight. Never mind that Excel allows manual editing (plus saving, loading, importing and exporting) of this data just fine. Never mind that OpenOffice's spreadsheet component manages it just fine. *snarl*. Where would I like to go today? Well, how about a trip a decade into the future, by which time hopefully Microsoft have managed to recruit somebody with programming skills good enough to pass at least a high school beginners' programming exam?

Never one to be outdone by Microsoft, the Novell DHCP server decides this would be a good day to start disabling DHCP allocations. Time to retire that particular bug collection, I think.

Finally, to crown it all, I find out a guy from my old school (a couple of years below me) died yesterday. Can anything else find a way to go wrong before bed?

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  • Where would I like to go today? Well, how about a trip a decade into the future, by which time hopefully Microsoft have managed to recruit somebody with programming skills good enough to pass at least a high school beginners' programming exam?

    How about an enlightened future where no one calls any Office products a "Standard?" Makes me blood boil.

    Dr. Cujo prescribes a wee dram for you before bed.

    • How about an enlightened future where no one calls any Office products a "Standard?" Makes me blood boil.

      I just tell myself it's "standard" as in "lowest common denominator". On the other hand, some of the crap I've had to deploy in the last few weeks actually makes Office look OK...

      One of my side-projects at the moment is building an automated Windows installation, complete with 3-4Gb of software: Office, AutoCAD, the Netware and GroupWise clients, McAfee antivirus, all the hotfixes, a couple of other

  • you have a typo in your subject line... you forgot:

    'r'

    there.

    okay... time for bed. no really... go to bed. now... before its too late.
  • I would not tempt fate by asking "Can anything else find a way to go wrong before bed?" You might get an interesting answer.
  • Can anything else find a way to go wrong before bed?

    I'd try to avoid touching my genitals. :)
  • Never mind that OpenOffice's spreadsheet component manages it just fine.

    Just a quick recommendation. Try gnumeric [gnome.org]. While OO.o may have a reasonable word processor, its spreadsheet sucks horribly, and gnumeric is many years ahead. This may change in the future (Novell have just hired the lead gnumeric developer to work on OO.o Calc), but for now, it's the best spreadsheet around for most things.

  • Set up a cron job to unload dhcpsrvr daily, and load it a minute later. At 3:00 A.M., it should go unnoticed. Turn off the audit log, unless you can afford for the reload to take five minutes or more....

    At a BrainShare Meet the Experts Night, I wanted to ask about a thorny DHCP server problem I had. It was the only question they couldn't answer that night, because the development team was in India....

    • Set up a cron job to unload dhcpsrvr daily, and load it a minute later. At 3:00 A.M., it should go unnoticed. Turn off the audit log, unless you can afford for the reload to take five minutes or more....

      Erm... daily?! We already do that hourly for other reasons - but that's no help when it's wrongly flagging entries as "unauthorized". Is there some way to remove this status? The tool we have at the moment doesn't allow that, except by manually deleting and re-creating the entry from scratch (then waiting

      • The only way I know that entry gets flagged as unauthorized is when you have "ping the address first" set on. Sure you don't have someone else running their own DHCP server, handing out addresses in your range? We had that once. Back then, our switching fabric was smart enough to let us place the user's MAC address in the "timeout" VLAN - no matter where he plugged in, his traffic went nowhere. We don't yet have that today, but I think we have plans to get there.

        • The only way I know that entry gets flagged as unauthorized is when you have "ping the address first" set on. Sure you don't have someone else running their own DHCP server, handing out addresses in your range?

          Pretty sure - I'd see the ARP packets if someone else had taken the IP address. To complicate matters, the DHCP server in question is on another subnet in another building, run by my old team...

          We had that once. Back then, our switching fabric was smart enough to let us place the user's MAC addres

  • Possibly a useless suggestion - but have you tried Perl's Spreadsheet::Excel modules? Considering Excel is proprietary and the format isn't documented, Spreadsheet::Excel is fantastic. Used it for many things that would have otherwise caused terrible insanity.
    • Possibly a useless suggestion - but have you tried Perl's Spreadsheet::Excel modules? Considering Excel is proprietary and the format isn't documented, Spreadsheet::Excel is fantastic. Used it for many things that would have otherwise caused terrible insanity.

      Openoffice did what I needed to get done pretty quickly and well, but I'll take a look. I had been afraid I'd have to build something around the Apache Java code for handling Office files - which to extract a trivial list of (number,text) tuples woul

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