Slashdot Mirror
Ridiculous Software Bug Workarounds?
theodp writes "Ever get a workaround for a bug from a vendor that's so rigoddamndiculous that there has to be a clueless MBA or an ornery developer behind it? For example, Microsoft once instructed users to wiggle their mouse continuously for several minutes if they wanted to see their Oracle data make it into Excel (yes, it worked!). And more recently, frustrated HP customers were instructed to use non-HP printers as their default printer if they don't want Microsoft Office 2007 to crash (was this demoed in The Mojave Experiment?). Any other candidates for the Lame Workaround Hall of Fame?"
HP and Microsoft repeatedly suggest re-installing the operating system to cure a network configuration issue.
urban dictionary = idiots making up words.
At 27 years old I am now an old fart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Biggest work around? I'd say having to use windows to do my job.
A profiler was crashing when I tried to find bottlenecks in my code. The support rep. told me I should turn off optimization.
Whomever invented that term (rigoddamndiculous) deserves to be ruthlessly beaten in public. Sure it sounds inhumane, but we do need to set an example.
but it was back in the days of Windows 95. I was working in software Localisation for a Lotus Notes product. We had several machines working in the test lab based on ghost images, so they were all pretty much identical.
One of the machines kept dying on us during the test phase, but none of the others did. Very confusing, for about a day. Until we realised that the machine which was crashing had an audio CD in the drive. (Not playing, not in Explorer. Just present in the drive.)
We verified it by swapping the audio cd into other machines, and running the same tests. Invariably, the machine with the CD in, crashed when we tried to perform task "x" in Lotus Notes.
It was escalated up, as I recall. And we eventually got a note back saying "Don't put CD's in the CD-Rom drives."
I still remember it (as a recent graduate) as my first exposure to management-style thinking.
Double click on a document. Word sits there for what seems like hours saying something like "Connecting to default printer. Press ESC to stop" so you give up and press ESC and start editing the document. Word promptly crashes. The workaround - set the default printer to Microsoft XPS and select the printer manually when you need it and wait the eternity it takes to communicate with the network printer. And sometimes it crashes again. WTF?
IIRC, a few GNU encryption programs do the same thing while collecting entropy, and yell at you if you don't wiggle enough.
In March, the Google Docs team introduced the Drawings feature. Now you can create drawings, schematics etc. in your Google Docs document. Now when you want to print your doc, or export it to some other format than HTML, then you get a nice error message.
If you want to export or print, the workaround for the last three months has been... not to use drawings in your documents! Great feature!
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Oh yes:
We run a database-oriented app in a number of branches. It's so flaky that runtime errors are a daily occurrence.
The devs' response to reports of errors is usually:
a) Defrag the disk.
b) Stop the users typing so fast.
Seriously!
AT&ROFLMAO
Yesterday a friend was frustrated with some ways PHP casts and compares values. Such as PHP would compare hexadecimal numbers in strings, but can cast only decimal, "0" == false, and apparently nan == nan on some compilers, and so on. His solution? A 150-line equals() method which uses the casting rules of Python and the coercion rules of JavaScript. At first he said it's just a joke experiment, but today when I asked him he said he might use it...
Funny, I've had people tell me to reinstall the new Linux(here, uBuntu) updated set instead of updating it.
Maybe I'm a bad luck magnet, but last time I tried to update it pulverized X.
With apologies to Staples:
"That Was Fun!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If they want the depression back, they can have it.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Lotus Domino server installations (circa 2000) would complete at about four to five times their "normal" speed if someone just sat there moving the mouse around whilst the install wizard was copying files. Go figure.
I'd suggest trying the hates-software website at we.hates-software.com, but the software crapped out over a year ago and the guy running the site can't be arsed tracking down the no doubt obscure bug in Mariachi and fixing it. Since all of the users are too busy hating software they have to work with to fix software they're not actually responsible for, it's probably never going to get fixed, which is hateful but somehow satisfying, in a kind of Zen way.
I quite like the workaround that's always given for content management systems that can't strip out the humongous amount of invisible HTML cruft that comes with text that's copied to the clipboard from MS Word or Outlook.
Content editor: "Hey, why is the formatting of this page completely borked? And why can't I use the CMS's editor to fix the borkage?"
Me: "Where did you get the original text from?"
Content editor: "I copied it from a Word doc that somebody sent me. I just pasted that in. It was just plain text..."
Me: "I see. Well, delete the page and start again. This time, copy the stuff from Word, then open Notepad, past the text from Word into Notepad, then copy/paste into the CMS from there instead."
Content editor: "Oooh, voodoo!"
Me: "Indeed."
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Microsoft recommends increasing your system stability by leaving your scanners not plugged in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzFUcDKC64E
I remember when Microsoft put a crappy 32-bit front-end on MS-DOS 7.0 to make it more useful. It completely sucked. It hogged memory and crashed all the time. Luckily you could boot directly into DOS to avoid the GUI and get real work done.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I used to have a network with windows NT 3.51 box and several 95 workstations.
Several times an hour I would see on the NT box a log error saying "An unexpected error has occurred on virtual circuit X."
NT 3.51 came with an online ref book you could use to look up things like that. When looking up the error code the page only said something like:
"If you expected this error ignore it."
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
speaking of HP printers, especially the networked ones, why is it that the network driver is 350 megs in size? I had to download two of those damn things, even after using a custom install option, to remove as much of the cruft as possible I still installed some 700 megs of drivers for two printers, and a scanner.
Guess what happens when the drivers get corrupted. you have to manually uninstall the registry settings and deleted all files manually in order to reinstall the drivers or they won't work.
HP decent printers, Software coded by monkey banging on keyboards.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Profiling has to be done with same flags enabled as for the production code. Otherwise the result will be meaningless.
Just thought of another one:
Many years back I was working as a freelancer developing the training material for a customer service app.
The agents input customer details, the app identified the nearest call-out contractor, sent the contractor a text message, started the clock ticking and updated the log.
Unfortunately, the devs used their own GUI and in the top row the 'submit' button was right next to 'form clear' and call centre staff kept clicking the wrong button, erasing the customer details and having to ask for them all again. This did not go down well with customers who'd called due to a domestic emergency (plumbing etc.)
I suggested that the workflow through the form meant that the agents would be better served by a submit button at the bottom.
The response to my submission: "Can't see a need to move the button during this development cycle - agents to be told to stop clicking the wrong button."
AT&ROFLMAO
Gah.
There's one program I have to use that's got some awesomely evil rules for what HTML is allowed in pasted text. It also uses one of those hacks to let you edit HTML in a text box as rich text. Combining these two features means that whenever you edit text on anything but IE, even if you don't need to use the rich text feature, it won't accept the text because it contains a non-allowed tag.
What's the tag?
<body>
seems like an obvious feature it should have shipped with. A product called Offline Review for a medical imaging device for a cancer treatment system. The problem: it shipped before the "offline" part was implemented. Recommended workaround: have the physician available to review the image during the treatment rather than on his own time. Yeah, because physicians can stop having clinical hours so that they can watch each treatment that therapists' do, and oh yeah patients from the same doc have to be secheduled at different times to allow for this. Nice.
The program Solaris Skunk Werks (A Battletech mech-maker program) currently has this annoying bug (or triggers an annoying bug in Java) that makes Drag and Drop functionality not only crash, but lock up X11, to the extent that I have to magic-Sysreq out if I forget and accidentally drag something.
What's worse is, the button for allocating items to slots stays grayed out if there's only one item. So, essentially, I have to either put two of everything on a Mech, or else reboot in Windows just to use a stupid roleplaying accessory.
Well I agree HP makes nice printers, I just don't see how they make them so hard to install on the Windows platform. Usally you have use there automatic Printer driver installer which takes 2 hours to run, it tries to find the printer N times every time failing and then the 1 time it finds the printer is connected the install freezes.
I helped a guy with an HP printer and it seems they install crap to check the ink status and give you "helpful" messages about it. I recommend installing the drivers through the add printer interface, that way you avoid the extra bloatware.
When you used a computer as a time clock (running the client software and using a card swiper, instead of buying the special timeclock hardware), the licensing system on the "server" (which had to be logged in to run, as it wasn't a service but a running process) would lose track of a particular computer's license if more than one computer was running the timeclock client - and issue a new one the next time the client was run.
So, if you had purchased 15 licenses and were running 2 or more clocks (but less than the 15 you were supposedly allowed), you'd run out of licenses after a couple of days, even with light use.
After working for a month or so with the company to resolve the issue, what was their long term solution?
Give us a code that would give us "unlimited" (or somewhere in the area of 32,000 licenses).
After several years (like 8 or so) and much griping from me to switch to something else, we're still using the software, actually (but with only one swipe station, and only for our student workers in our biggest department), but will supposedly switch to something hosted and web based "soon".
I talk about stuff.
I guess many would be aware of the case of the 500-mile email. An office was not able to send emails to places which were physically located at a distance greater than 500 miles from the office! Entire story and the logic behind it can be read here - http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
The worst workaround I got was a while back with old Canon inkjet printers. I think it was with the BJC-250.
Sometime the printer would got stuck and there was no way to make it print. The led would be orange and even unplugging it would not work.
We had a whole bunch of these and they were under warranty. When we called tech support. The told us this:
Please disconnect every wire from the printer. Take the printer over your head and balance it from left to right 4 times. Put back everything ant test.
And it worked every time we did that ! The printer unstuck and began to print again.
It was really a hardware bug because we could reproduce it on each of thoses printers !
So, I gave my girlfriend a wacom tablet a few years back, and she notices they have a deal to get an half price upgrade from photoshop element to full photoshop CS4 by using her bundled serial number. That sounds like a good deal, photoshop CS4 for 300$...
So, go through the registration process, download photoshop from the site, it asks for the serial of the software we're upgrading from. Doesn't work. After going back and forth through support (who keep saying we don't qualify for the upgrade even though we do), they finally give us the "workaround".
You have to hit a bunch of keys at the same time to make a code pop on the screen, give the code to the support agent, who then give you another code, which you input in the "secret" box, which activates photoshop. And that will have to be done every damn time we reinstall even though we have a legitimate copy we purchased.. Oh yeah, great copy protection you have there, Mr. Adobe.
Makes me want to pirate the damn thing...
How about Ubisoft and RB6 Vegas? Remember that their fix around a big DRM issue was basically to install a no-cd crack by Reloaded? They just took the crack, renamed it, and then released as an official patch.
Software problem: The autorun vulnerability in Windows only fails for CD drives.
Hardware solution: Make a flash drive with an extra partition that presents itself as a CD drive to the OS.
Fixed that for you.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
This was a memorable bug: it cost my company a whole day of a senior Oracle DBA just to discover that if you wanted to go further on the magnificent Oracle installer, you add to make sure the "Num Lock" key was disabled. The look on his face when I came with the workaround was ... priceless ...
We labeled 3000 free handout CD roms "Apple Mac only" when we discovered that there was a windows virus on all of them. Clever huh?
These weren't official ones. I developed them on my own.
The tape recorder was notoriously difficult to get the data to load right. Some tapes, saved on a different recorder, would require special tricks to get the readout "within specs".
One, I had to mute audio in the TV set to which the Atari was hooked up. I guess electromagnetic interference from the speaker was a problem. :)
On another, I'd have to hold the label with key functions on the recorder. The label was metal and connected to the recorder ground. By holding it, I was providing extra grounding that reduced the noise just enough to get the game to load. Luckily that one took only like 5 minutes to load
The best one was copied from a floppy. The copy was good, but there was no 'loader' program and the game was too big to fit with a copier to copy it to a different tape, and recorded from the beginning of the tape, no room to save the loader. The solution was to take a random different tape with a generic loader, start loading it, then after counting 6 "beeps" QUICKLY remove it and put the right tape in - the timeout tolerance was like 2-3s, so you really had to hurry.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
where BSOD = big screw of death... I was serving under the Army, and in our office we had a 8086 PC who had a sistematic HD failure. It was finally solved when the technician found a memo from the PC manufacturer, recommending to install the HD in the PC case using shorter screws. The screws enclosed with the HD actually caused friction against the HD head mount, and this eventually fried the HD motor. The very same PC producer issued an installation sheet for adding a 8087 math coprocessor. If one followed the instructions, the 8087 would ended up installed at reverse in the coprocessor socket, causing its immediate failure. Needless to say, the manufacturer went belly-up a few years later.
Rule of Slashdot #42:
Never engage in the Operating System war, it is the one thing next to first posts that will definitely get you modded down.
Oh, 9.04 was crap and everybody knows it. At least on the Intel driver front, and that's just for starters.
They said that about 8.10, and 8.04.
Windows 95 and 98 (and probably the first NT/2000 versions) had a famous bug, which was that the computer was unstable after 49.7 days.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.9430.16
49.7 days corresponds to 2^32 milliseconds.
What was recommended was to reboot your computer more frequently, not very bad for uptime records.
Let's note that I still have similar bugs on my laptop, where IIS tends to be unresponsive when I put the computer in standby mode two or three days consecutively.
I've destroyed X when I tried upgrading Ubuntu (i think it was from gutsy to intrepid). Unfortunately, I'm relatively new to Linux and couldn't get anything useful from the forums to fix it and I had no clue how to do it on my own, so I had to do a complete reinstall as well.
I had an older version of Word and I wanted to make an A3 document - but my printer only supported A4.
You're lucky in that you appear to live in a locale that uses ISO 216 (A-series) paper sizes. ISO paper, unlike the U.S. letter series, has a nice mathematical definition: all sizes are the same aspect ratio of sqrt(2):1, and each size has twice the area and sqrt(2) times the length and width of the size below it. So make your document on A4 and print it on A3 at 141%.
My Mom's HP all-in-one printer installs a service that does some sort of polling looking for the printer. Another bit of the software starts this service every few seconds and then the service shuts itself down. This activity completely obliterates the System Event log in a few hours. Adding to the stupid, when the printer is connected to the computer, this service uses huge amounts of resources.
Oh, and when they first shipped this service, it was configured with a blank DACL (this is a severe local privilege escalation hole); the patch, rather than setting some sane defaults, sets up an ACL that denies all access, preventing even an administrator account from stopping or editing the service. Fixing this requires either editing a binary registry entry or establishing a 'local system' shell ('at 11:41 /interactive cmd' as an administrator, where 11:41 is the future) and then editing the entry (separating local system from administrator mostly protects administrators from themselves).
I suppose the fact that a blank DACL is very different from a default DACL is a bad thing, and the fact that world deny works is a pain in the ass (and is not overridden by subsequent entries), but it is also pretty clear that whoever wrote that service was a moron.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Maybe I'm a bad luck magnet, but last time I tried to update it pulverized X.
Hence the recommendation to reinstall.
Linux isn't really designed to handle big updates. Small and frequent, yes, but don't even think about lagging more than 3 versions behind on any given package. Before you flame me, I've had this experience on many different distros over the last five years, and GoboLinux was just about the only one shielded from the breakage by cleanly separating versions, and keeping the old one.
I remember being new to Linux and the wonderful errors I use to get. It's funny when you come to Linux from a Windows enviroment and you see how just one package can bring down the system.
It's a good learning experiance to see how the system needs to interact properly and once you see how a system works in and out you never really seem to never go back.
Do you have any idea how hard random data is to collect?
If your PC has a sound card, an entropy gathering service can hash the microphone input and derive at least 1 high-quality random bit per sample from ADC dither noise alone. So that's 96 kbps for a typical 48 kHz stereo ADC.
Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, ok not really, but in the late 80s, Sun had a problem with some of their hard drives. When they would park they heads they would stick and you couldn't unpark them. Sun's solution was to tell you to HIT the computer. They even sent us a letter showing you where on the "pizza box" enclosure one would strike.
These days it is Linux that's full of these:
- 802.11n panics kernel, so use only g
- Certain USB drives panic
- Use gnome network manager in KDE because the plasmoid does not work on encrypted networks
- Find beta drivers because HDMI does not work on official release
- Use kwin in gnome because compiz does not refresh window contents... Even with the "workaround" turned on.
The list goes on forever.
After upgrading a server, we watched a client verify the server through his daily application. The client entered data and clicked on submit, the next screen appeared instantly. "This is not possible" said the client "it takes about two seconds to submit data to the database"!
"But the new server is much faster!" we said. It didn't matter, the client refused to believe the data was really submitted.
We held a meeting about this 'problem'. One developer suggested to add a two second 'do nothing' loop to the submit button.
So we patched the server and asked the client to verify again. He entered data, clicked 'submit' and was very happy to have his two second delay back! "Now it works..." he said "...now the data is entering the database!".
We admitted our fault (knowing very well that all we added was a two second delay).
cheers
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
I used to manage Digital UNIX (later called Tru64) systems for a large, now bankrupt, telecom back around the turn of the millennium. The filesystem used, AdvFS, was pretty cool and advanced for the time but under the version of the OS we were running we found that free space would shrink at a faster rate than used space would grow. I had filesystems report full even though a df would show only 60% used.
It turned out that when small files were deleted all of the space wouldn't become free. My customer wrote thousands upon thousands of 150-200 byte files a day and deleted just as many. The entire team and my customer agreed this was clearly a bug.
When brought up with Compaq (who had recently aquired Digital) the technical rep investigated and reported "this is not a bug, the code is being executed exactly how it's written." Seriously, this was his response. I would have been more amused if he seriously argued it was a "feature."
I never could get a definition of what a "bug" really was from him. I became rather infuriated when he reported to me that this issue was "fixed" in the latest major release of the OS. If there was no bug, why was it fixed?
I never got a straight answer and was left on my own to find my own work-around which involved inserting a new volume into the filesystem thus growing it and then deleting an old volume. When this was done to all volumes in the filesystem, the problem was resolved for a few more months. This was an incredibly labor intensive and, as far as I'm concerned, incredibly risky to move data around like that on a hot system with insane uptime requirements. There was also a massive performance hit while this was happening and my customer's application was already VERY IO intensive.
I'm still just as angry about that conversation with the rep today as I was back then.
Often users are advised to just backup their home directory and do a clean format (I like Ubuntu, don't get me wrong, but let's call a spade a spade here: This is a problem which many linux developers and ubuntu community members seem to gloss over, from what I've seen).
It's typically simpler to have /home on a separate partition for workstations.
Then you can install whatever system you want.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I'm sorry, sir. I'm anuspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctious to have
caused you such pericombobulations
It's better to just reinstall, but it's not something that is technically required. I personally reinstall just so that I don't have to worry about inconsistencies popping up latter because I changed a few settings.
Well, that and the fact that an upgrade is a good time to dispose of software that's just sitting there, and a lot less work than trying to track down unused dependencies after you remove said programs.
Problems upgrading ubuntu? How are you doing it? I've upgraded via the alternative CD and also over the web on several machines over the last few years without any problems. Sheesh. My 73yo Dad upgrades the system himself without dramas. Either you're running hardware with hit-and-miss support, or you're doing something weird...
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Because they come with so much crap you don't need. I've had HP driver setup program completely fail to run before. Using 7zip (highly recommend) extracting the files from the .exe is easy, and allows you to use Windows own driver installation procedure (eg, from Add New Printer or from Device Manager etc) to point to just the directory where the driver .inf file is in, which will install a much smaller amount of stuff that's needed than the full .exe will. I find this gets around a load of driver installation problems. I generally do the same with all kinds of hardware (eg, display drivers). Also saves your systray getting totally cluttered with branding icons and increases bootup speed.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
"WinXP has issues connecting to Win98 SMB printers via TCP or NetBEUI when connected to a DOS6 network running LANtastic. It would take about 15 minutes to find the printer and about 10 minutes to send a small document. There was no problem browsing the network, though."
So what, in the end, did the one person to ever have this problem do about it? Sorry! Couldn't help myself.
Ubuntu's update system is definitely lacking. If you put /home on a separate partition though you can do a fresh install without losing your data or settings. I've done this several times, and never had a worse problem than an occasional program complaining of an outdated config file.
A complete reinstall takes maybe 20-30 minutes, and since you keep all your settings, all you'll need to do is use apt-get to reinstall whatever non default programs you use and you'll be ready to go.
-1 pedantic
As an official old fart for real, the silliest I ever encountered was technically a hardware bug. Not sure you youngins can relate being raised on surface mount technology, but on the Apple III the sockets on the motherboard were defective so the chips would slowly work loose and the machine would stop working. Apple's official solution ran along the lines of "Unplug the machine. Lift about six to eight inches off the table holding it level and let go." The fall and sudden stop at the end hopefully would cause the chips to reseat themselves. I used to have the actual service notice they sent out with those instructions but lost it in a move. Then there was the Ethernet card that would occasionally stop working. This is back in the Thin/Thin coax days, 10-base5 and 10-base2 for those of you with 802.3 fixations. The vendor's (long since out of business and forgotten for obvious reasons) solution was to have you remove the terminator from the cable for at least 5 minutes. That of course would bring the entire network segment down during that time, just the sort of thing you want to do in the data center with all the servers. Rebooting at least would only effect the one host, but that was "not recommended" by the vendor.
I really love my MAC, I've completely switched over after using PCs since early dos days.
Lately I've been trying to install parallels so I can run a few Windows games.
Parallels struggles for a while, then says that there are "unmovable files" and that I need to back up my hard disk and re-install OS-X!
After looking into it, The problem is that the mac drive is fragmented and the mac has no way to defragment some system files (the file in question appears to be the latest OS upgrade which seems to be kept inside it's original file).
So, I looked around for defragmenting programs, but nearly every reference is either Apple or Apple fanboys telling you that the mac doesn't need defragmenting.
Well, I guess it's true, the mac does NOT need defragmenting, just the occasional wipe and re-install!
I'm not really disagreeing with the concepts here--the OS does self-defragment to a degree, the file IS a system file and shouldn't be movable, etc. What I hate is the damn arrogance, every reply to a post on defragmenting was along the lines of "Man are you STUPID, MACs don't need defragmenting! That's so PC" (and yet apple itself recommending a re-install to force a defragment when it is needed).
Makes me hate this cult I appear to be a member of.
In a Microsoft text editing product with a long document, click and hold with the mouse and drag down below the bottom of the text field to select more than one page of text. It doesn't work. If you want it to select with any speed you have to wiggle the mouse back and forth.
Argh, I hate this. Why is it that so many programs make copying the formatting when pasting the default? In my experience, it's almost never what I want. Now, granted, I'm a programmer, so I'm normally much more concerned with the content of the text than its appearance. But even when I am created a formatted document, 9 out of 10 times I want the pasted text to confirm to the formatting I'm already using, rather than creating an ugly mismatched clash of styles.
I'm not wholesale against copying formatting, but it shouldn't be the default option. Unfortunately, it's often much more difficult (e.g. 3-4 clicks deep through a menu option) or impossible (falling back to the aforementioned copy-through-notepad hack) to paste without styling.