I hate the new Teams. It's showing a distracting red icon in the activity bar when someone's sent a chat. Then, when clicking the chat icon in Teams you'd expect it to take me there so I could reset the chat and make it stop showing that irritating red notification in the activity bar. But NO, nothing happens when clicking the chat icon. Useless UX to say the least! This is one of the main reasons why I never use Teams for chatting, and I only open the application for meetings and then immediately shut it down. How come Microsoft, that's been around for so fucking long, still haven't learnt to design consistent, user-friendly and distraction-free applications? I think the answer is: They don't give a shit.

At first, you're just a baby who cries and poops.
You outgrow the baby clothes, the crib and the stroller.
Then, you're just a child who plays, runs around and starts school.
You grow tired of your toys and are no longer allowed in the ballpit.
Then, you're just a teenager who curses, sulks and defies your parents.
You grow tired of teen music, stow your stuff away and move out.
Then, you're just a student who finally gets to drive a car and vote, but has no money.
You get a job, a place of your own, start dating and fall in love.
Then you're just a noob at everything you do; new at work, newly in love; feeling your way through life.
You have children and no longer have time to spare for anything else.
Then, you're just a parent taking parental leaves, attend parent-teacher meetings and neglect your friends.
You're no longer welcome in the children's games, or even to talk to them.
Then, you're just an "old fart" or "bitch" who's only good when you give them dough.
You help the children move out, you retire and have grandchildren.
Then, you're just a senior citizen who talks about nothing but your grandchildren and go window shopping outside the pharmacy.
You're hearing and vision get impaired, you get ailments and lose your memory as well as your intellect.
Then, you're just dead.

So, at what stage of life are you really somebody?

Microsoft have recently announced two things that are related to each other:
1. Windows 11 will be equipped with a built-in Copilot that will "see" everything the user does and store it locally (at least so they say).
2. A new PC, redesigned from ground up with AI in mind, called CoPilot+ PC, will be released in June.

I'm not sure if any of this is good news. It's disturbing enough that MS Word interfers with my work by displaying "friendly" pop ups about how Copilot can assist me. And there seems to be no way of turning the damn thing off. I don't want to use Word anymore, but at work I'm forced to use Microsoft's shitty office applications. So now I'm resorting to WordPad, which has a much cleaner interface and hasn't yet been infected with M$ Artificial Idiot CockPilot.

The other day when my family and I went to the beach, I met an old friend whom I hadn't seen since 2013. We hardly recognised each other. He brought to my attention that my hair had turned grey! 😮 I was imagining it was still black, but at a closer look it's more like salt & pepper or even beyond... 🤨 I thought I was immune to aging. Hence, the update of my profile avatar, to give an honest picture of my present appearance.

Bloody ColdFusion. I hate it so much. Not only is it an inferior language. Also, every update breaks something. Adobe should have sticked with developing graphics packages like Photoshop and Illustrator, because they really suck at everything else.

User having a problem with a page in a web application : -...I'm attaching a screenshot of what it looks like.
Me: - Some scripts seem to be cached so you might need to reload the page.
User: - Now that I reloaded the page for the third time it seems to work. Then I tried another case and then it gives me the same response as in the previously attached screenshot.
Me: - Was it in a separate Firefox window?
User: - What do you mean by a separate Firefox Window?

Different professions really speak different languages.

User: - I'm seeing a redcircle with a white dash.
Me: - What is a "redcircle with a white dash".
User: - It's like a stop sign.

I hope I won't meet this user on a one-way street.

Outlook is quite bad. There's no way to enable week numbers in the week view. And once you accidentally decline an occurrence of an recurrent event, there's no way to get it back, without having to trouble the meeting organizer to resend the request, or create the event manually yourself. In addition, Outlook is ugly and I strongly dislike how the calendar and inbox are combined in the same application. To me, e-mail and calendar are two completely different things, and there should be a way to open the calendar separately, without the distraction of any incoming e-mail.

User: - The application throws an errror message.

Me: - The error message is caused by a minor bug that doesn't affect functionality, though. This is an old solution that is in the pipe to be redesigned from scratch. As this function is rarely used, perhaps you can live with this cosmetic bug for a couple more months?

User (one week later): - I haven't got any answer from you. How is this issue proceeding?

If you don't get the joke, the joke's probably on you.

Our project manager is a past-retirement-age consultant who prefers to communicate the old-fashioned way, which is to physically pop in to my office asking questions about stuff that isn't even urgent and could easily be dealt with in jira or by e-mail FFS. Way to go disrupting a dev, break my flow and deprive me of my joy of working! He even says it himself: "May I disturb?" My answer is "No, but now that you already did, spit it out!" He's a nice and funny guy, I give him that. But I don't like this particular behaviour of his. I've complained to him directly and also to my boss, but to no avail. This is where devRant comes in, to let the steam out. Anyway, if I have it my way, we will definitely *not* be hiring the same consultant for our next project.

Outlook irritates the heck out of me with its distracting notification bar that's recently begun popping up almost every time I start the god damn shitty application. What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable this annoying crap. Our support technicians are unable to solve it, so I wrote feedback to Microsoft. I don't think they are ever going to answer, though. They haven't even responded to another problem with Outlook that I reported nine months ago! Microsoft are reallly inconsistent, to say the least. Some of their products, like Visual Studio, VS Code and Microsoft Flight Simulator, are excellent! But, more mainstream software, like MS Office and Outlook, suck. Windows (I'm using Windows 10) is so so. It works alright if you know your ways with the registry editor. The same goes for the support. If you're lucky, you can get hold of a real, flesh-and-blood person who patiently guides you through the cumbersome process of, for example purchasing and installing Minecraft (believe me, it isn't easy, took almost an hour for the support person to solve. Creds to him). Sometimes, like when activating an old Windows license, you get to talk to a bot and that, surprisingly, works very well too. However, if you report any bug or feedback to Microsoft through an application's help section, you 'll never hear from them. They just ignore it.

Roblox seem to believe that you can actually send texts to landline phones. At least the landline is prefix is the only choice for phone verifications when living in the Åland Islands. I've brought this problem to Roblox's attention a year ago and they promised to fix it. Then I've reminded them a couple of times during the past year. Each time, they respond with stupid AI (Artificial Idiocy) generated answers, prompt me to send screenshots and once even screen captured videos. The follow-up answers I get just prove what I've been thinking for a year now, that Roblox don't give a shit about their users. Fuck it, it's a crappy platform anyway and I'm probably better off moving on to Unreal Engine.

Viva Insights is the worst malware from Microsoft so far. Spent a good two hours finding out how to get rid of events called "Tid för fokusering" (time for focus) that kept popping up in the Outlook Calendar, just to find out that you don't configure that shit in Outlook anymore, but in Teams. Go figure.

What's SAP?
Piece of shit if you ask me.
Their Crystal Reports is so user-hostile it makes me want to throw up all over the keyboard.

Surveyor

Adobe Cloud got my computer messed up and it couldn't even be uninstalled! I got so p-o I went to the registry and nuked anything containing the word "adobe" in it. Pheeew, what a relief! Like taking a real good dump! My computer both starts and runs faster now, and without popups requesting me to log in to Adobe Cloud.

Stack Overflow is a great resource for all sorts of programming hints and tips, information and...sadly, desinformation. But if you want to comment on something someone's said you need 50 reputation points. How to achieve that when you need rep points to do anything that could earn you rep points? It's a catch 22 for newcomers that are like totally excluded from any discussions at SO which is more sort of a read-only community to me. This is where devRant shines. Anyone can rant about anything and comment on anyone's rant. Some rants and comments are stupid, and some are great. In the end of the day, freedom of speech is a great thing.

My LG WineSmart just became a very stupid, uselesss piece of shit. Firstly, it decided to upgrade itself - in the middle of a phone call! So, the phone itself considered its crappy upgrade more important than my phone call that was abruptly interrupted by the upgrade! WTF!? LG, seriously? Secondly, ever since the upgrade, the so called "Priority Mode" is totally broken. It's supposed to buzz only on phone calls from favourites, i.e. the mum of children and only her, but now it lets all calls through, so any idiot can call and disturb at any time! This phone doesn't have a silent mode neither, so now it has to be switched off at all times, except when I really need to use it, actually making the phone almost completely useless. LG, what utter stupid crap have you created?! What's your thoughts behind this, if any?

HUZZA!!! The devRant web app is upgraded. I love it! :D

In the old days "hacking" was used for just about any coding, or "computer programming" as it was called back then. There was even a programming magazine called "Hacker", which had nothing to do with the "malevolous programming" that the word "hacker" has become to mean.

F-word with three consecutive U-letters! SQL Management Studio just crashed, just when I had finished a nice script, that I hadn't of course saved yet. I must say SQL Management Studio hardly ever crashes, can't even remember the last time that happened before this. Wonder if it has anything to do with the plugin SQL Complete that I installed just recently? SQL Complete also has the annoying habit of displaying a popup every time SQL Management Studio is started, with a delay just long enough so you have already got started with something when you're interrupted by that popup. No, I'm not going to upgrade a piece of software that behaves maliciously!

Stupid HTML checkboxes! It's always annoyed me that you can't just set checked to true or false, but have to remove the property altogether to uncheck a checkbox. Better still would be if you'd only need to set the value to 1 or 0, and the checked or not would sort out automatically. Yes, there are frameworks to handle it, I know. But if checkboxes had been designed right from start, a framework or any sort of special cases would not be needed. You've got love HTML, but things like this make it ugly.

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

I see a pattern with Notepad++. Every time you update it, it becomes more unstable.

Devrant has become so boring. It used to be actual devs who shared their annoyments as well as joyful moments in their professional life.

Now it's one of two things, a) jokes/gems/utter nonsense, or b) students complaining about their classes/teachers/parents.

There seems to be a limit how large a php array can be. There's nothing mentioned about this in any documentation I can find, and binging/googling on the problem doesn't give me any help. I am so frustrated right now! Well, to hell with php anyway. This is definitely my last battle with it.

Don't trust [VIEW_DEFINITION] in [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[VIEWS]! It gets truncated at 4000 characters. According to Microsoft, it should be NULL when exceeding 4000 chars. Not true!

Drinking beer. Yes, seriously. I especially remember one Friday afternoon in the late 90s when I was still a trainee at a major Swedish telecom company. I had been working on a test application which gave visual output in the shape of dots teeming around on the screen, each one of which represented a network node. Then my colleagues and I had an afterwork at a nearby bar. After a few pints, when the others went home, I returned to the office and, in an inspired mood, made a few modifications to the test app so that you from each client could control one of the dots with the keyboard, basically turning the app into a multiplayer game. Over time I improved it further with some sprites and the possibility to shoot at each other. We had great fun while performing tests :D

"Your connection is not secure". It is too! The certificate is valid to 2019, and in Chrome it's no problem. Stupid Firefox!