Category: Rant

Yet another reason why Lotus Notes is not my favourite software program

I asked one of my bosses why I wasn’t invited to a certain meeting. He said he did, but it was declined. A few years ago I got tired of the constant stream of meeting invites, modifications, and cancellations, I set it to automatically accept any meeting invitation, so this was a bit of a surprise. So I went into the highly intiutive Actions->Tools->Preferences menu, only to be greeted by a popup saying

Availability Problem
Your availability time range is invalid, please correct.

and when I clicked on “Ok”, I got another popup

Cannot locate field

and when you click on “Ok” on that one, a third popup

Notes Error – Cannot locate field

Going into “Calendar & To Do”->Scheduling on that dialog subjects you to many more of these triple threat popups, like every time you attempt to edit one of your availability times. My availability was set to 4am to 5pm, which seemed a bit over-zealous to me. But I couldn’t edit them, and I couldn’t save the Preferences dialog, either.

I found this page on IBM’s support site for Notes, but none of the complicated options actually did anything except subject me to more of those triplet popups.

Then I found another unofficial page where somebody said to turn on Saturday and Sunday availability, edit their available times, save it, then come back in and turn off Saturday and Sunday availability. Sure enough, Sunday’s availability was set to go past midnight, and when I set that to “11:30 AM – 11:31 AM” and saved it, the problem went away. And then I was able to set my weekday availability to a more reasonable time as well.

Thanks very much Notes. Rot in hell.

Update: I just figured out why his meeting notice was declined: He had it scheduled to repeat every Tuesday and Thursday, and Notes is smart enough to see that there is a conflict (22 November is a company holiday) but dumb enough that it rejects all instances of the meeting instead of just one. And why did it allow him to create the meeting then? Sheesh, what a piece of shit.

Ok, I’m confused

I’m trying to find a way to put a nice formatted table in my Google Web Toolkit application, and I was looking at gwt-advanced-table – Google Code. The code comes with no documentation, just an example that took a lot of wrangling to get it to work. And is going to take even move wrangling to get it to work in my demo.

But the problem is that we want to avoid viral licenses in the code we use. And since this isn’t packaged up as a nifty jar, its code will mingle in with ours. Our company lawyers have cleared a few open source licenses, but obviously not the General Public Virus. One they haven’t cleared yet is the Mozilla Source License. So I look at the Google Code Page for this code, and there at the top right is the banner “License: Mozilla Public License 1.1”. But down at the bottom (and in comments in the code), it just says “License: Freeware”.

So which is it?

MRI’ll Do Whatever You Want If You Let Me Out Of Here

On Monday night, I was supposed to have an MRI on my elbow. However, once they got me in the tube and took a series, they said that my elbow was too close to the edge of the tube and they couldn’t get a good image. So I was scheduled this morning for an “Open MRI”.

An Open MRI is a gigantic upright cylinder that looks like a Mayan ruin with a slot in the side that they slide you into like a pizza into an oven. There’s barely enough room for them to slide you into this slot – later on I discovered that I could get my good hand up to my face, but only just. But before they slid me in, they put your arm into a ring that is plugged into the device – I suspect that’s some sort of focusing magnet. The tech said “I need to open your elbow up”, and so she put me into an extremely uncomfortable position, and then put weights on my hands and arm to keep it in that position and filled the space in the ring with cushions “so you don’t move too much if you start spasming”. I should have taken the hint and left immediately.

Anyway, after they peg you down in this uncomfortable position, they said “ok, this is a 2 minute series”, and you hear some thumping and whirring noises and then some pulsating noises. Then it stops and before you can say “can I have a second?” they say “ok, this is a 2 and a half minute series” and it starts making noises again. Each series got progressively longer until the last one, but because there was no time to flex my arm in the interim my elbow was getting more and more painful, my hand was going numb, and my upper arm muscles were spasming after about the second series. Before the 4 minute one, I yelled out begging for a break, but they either don’t hear you or don’t care. By the end of it, I was crying. I tried pinching myself or biting my lip or anything to distract me from the pain in my elbow, but nothing worked. By the end of the 4.5 minute one I was ready to tell them anything they wanted to hear. By the end of the 5 minute one I was ready to swear there wasn’t anything wrong with my elbow any more, or ever if that would make them happier, so we might as well stop right now.

But it’s over now, and I might regain the use of that arm in a few hours. I hope it was worth it.

A Rant About Splash Screens

(This might look familiar to some people)

Can somebody please shoot all the asshole software designers who make a splash screen that remains on top even if you switch to another application while it’s loading? I don’t want to fucking see the fucking credits for your software every time it loads, fuckers. I especially don’t want to see it blocking my view of what I’m working on in the interminable time it takes you to load your software. Adobe, I’m looking right at you.

Oh Google, you are so devoid of any semblance of clue

As I wrote about in Rants and Revelations » Hey, Google, Google still hasn’t reimbursed me for my hotel, cab and food while I was in New York City. Today, I discovered why. Evidently when one of their recruiters leaves them, instead of arranging some sort of orderly transfer of her unfinished work to somebody else, they just throw all her email into the garbage and mark any mail that she hasn’t dealt with “Return to Sender” and send it back. I got my reciepts back, over a month and a half after I sent them, which means that undoubtedly they fished them out of her inbox rather than just refusing them at the front door. So I wrote to the only other recruiter there I have been in contact with, and he gave me the name of a third recruiter that I need to send all my stuff to, including the claim form that I’d emailed to the first recruiter on July 21st.

You know, if their tech departments were run as well as their recruiting organization, Microsoft could stop worrying about them.