Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Modems


A month ago I was writing software for a bloody modem that didn't want to behave and I thought I was pissed off. Hah. A month ago I didn't know what pissed off really meant...

Somehow I've let myself get talked into writing the software for a complete piece of shite, yet again involving a cellular modem that doesn't want to behave, and I'm utterly sick of the whole fucking process. This project was sold to me as being a small change to an existing product, something that would only take a couple of days to do, whereas it actually turns out to be a major change with all sorts of dire consequences and awkward problems for the software to overcome. There's no way on earth I'd have agreed to do this if I hadn't been comprehensively mislead about what was going to be involved. The hardware is horrible, the modem is horrible and I'm really not in the fucking mood to wade through this sort of unreliable crap again.

What really pisses me off is that I'm now having to turn away other designs in order to make time for this joke, and I know it's not got a cat in hell's chance of ever working properly. I feel like I'm pouring my life down the fucking drain...

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Accents


A friend of mine was nearly sacked last week for having his wife phone him at work to say she was stuck in traffic.

"Huh?" I hear you ask - "how does that work?"

Well, you need a few particular circumstances. First you have to work for an American company. Second, said company needs to have a system where phone calls to your works phone are automatically run through speech recognition software which turns them into e-mails and sends them out to you, and thirdly your wife needs to have an accent which causes American speech recognition software to think "stuck in" is really "fucking"... i.e. no particular accent whatsoever.

Add to that mix a company policy where emails containing swearwords get flagged up and sent to all and sundry and you're, um, fu... in the deep, ah, well, you're completely, um. Whatever.

The part I find most amazing is not that the software fu-umbled the words, but that they think he's responsible for the language used (or not as it happens) by someone who called him... And that's from people who appear to have declared war on the wrong country because they can't tell the difference between Iran and Iraq.

Sheesh.

Friday, April 25, 2008

Programmers (again, again...)

Quote of the day:

"In my darker moments I think I could print out some of my source code, eat the listing, digest it and then shit something which would have more programming competence than most of the programmers I've met... The rest of the time I think that any sort of roughage would do"

I wasn't in a good mood. After a week long battle with some anonymous programmer's bugs in a modem, or in the network, whatever, I find myself moving onto the next project and guess what that involves? Chasing problems with another fucking modem.




"Quick - blow your raspberry!"

"Thhhuuruurruurrrppp... ThuuUUUUuUuUURRRRRPPPP! THHHURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPHHH!"

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Orange GPRS

I'm going to start swearing in a minute, read no further if the phrase "[expletive deleted]" offends you... Oh, sorry, too late.

For the last week I've been running round in circles trying to sort out the problems we've been having with GPRS modems on a design that had to be working for an exhibition - the usual last minute panic sort of thing. I finished the software for this project last Thursday and it was working well. I tested it a few times on Thursday morning without problems, then, just before I was due to pass it over to the customer that afternoon it stopped making GPRS connections. Since then I've had embarrassing meeting with them, spent all day at their site trying to find out what the fucking problem was, had to write support for a completely different type of packet radio carrier so that they could demonstrate the product and generally been stressed to fuck and made to look like a complete amateur.

On Friday we asked Orange technical support if they knew of any reason why their GPRS enabled SIMs should stop working, and they said no. Nor did the modem supplier, who looked at our setup strings, etc, and couldn't see what we were doing wrong.

Today I find out that Orange rolled out a change to their network software on Thursday afternoon, and guess what? We were the first, but other people are now reporting that their GPRS modems no longer work with Orange sims...

So, thanks Orange, you stupid, useless [expletive deleted]. I feel like killing someone. It's bad enough that they break GPRS, but there is no fucking excuse whatsoever for denying that they knew what could have caused the problem.

The last week has been hell. I'm so pissed off with these arseholes I can't really express it.



On mature reflection I removed the term [expletive deleted] and replaced it with [expletive deleted]... Oh, poot.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

PIGO

Programmers Involved; Garbage Out

Says it all, really.