Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Friday, October 18, 2002
15:36 - Windows Moment of Zen	(top)
Well, actually, "hour of rage" would be more accurate. I spent the better part of an hour putting together a spreadsheet in Excel, using a template I'd constructed whose purpose was to allow our team to write test plans and then save them as comma-separated-value files, which they could then import into the web-based test-plan database using an integrated script. After the spreadsheet was completely done, with all the text immaculately formatted and all the sort-ordering the way I wanted it, with the cell formatting all perfect, the section divisions aligned properly, and everything all ready to go... I went and clicked the "save" icon. ... 'Scuse me? I click it again. "Document not saved." I cannot believe my eyes, yet they are not in the habit of deceiving me. This application, this piece of software, is flatly refusing a command. "Please save the file." "NO." No explanation; no excuses. "I don't have to explain myself. I have better things to do than obey your pitiful commands, human." Okay... maybe I'll "Save As", and export it as a CSV directly. "Save As", I click. it gives me a dialog about how this will cause the sheet to lose formatting. Fine, I know that. I click OK... and then, er... nothing. I check the Desktop. Nothing. I try everywhere. I can't save on my remotely mounted Mac. I can't save on the central server. I can't save on my own local bloody Desktop. Out of disk space, perhaps? C: 14.8 GB Free. Hokay, no, that's hardly likely. Excel files are REALLY HY))00GE LOOLOLOL!!!11`, but not that huge. Interestingly, the filename as reported in the Excel window's title bar keeps changing to whatever I've tried to save it as, regardless of whether it's been successful or not. And each time I bring up the "Save As" dialog, the filename has a different extension and presentation. Sometimes it's got quotes around it. Sometimes it's got .xls at the end, sometimes it's got .csv. Either way, it seemingly has no bearing on the format of the file as I requested it to be saved. Not that there was any output file in the first place. "Reboot the machine," suggest co-workers. Yuh-huh. After an hour's worth of work, I'm not going to simply reboot and have to type all this crap back in. But the options are looking fewer and fewer. Finally I try opening up a completely new spreadsheet, copying the data from the first sheet, pasting it into the new one. This loses all the formatting, but at least most of the data gets transferred okay. And I try saving, and... lo and behold, it works. A reboot and another half-hour's worth of reformatting work later, and finally it's ready to go. And it happily lets me save the file this time, without any indication of its earlier mood swing. "Oh, I'm innocent as the day is long! You wouldn't wanna hit lil' ol' me, now?" Sometimes people in the company wonder why our team has been writing our own infrastructural tools for QA progress management, test-plan tracking, document archival, bug management, and so on. "Why don't you just use stuff like Excel and Project and Word?" Because I like my software to work, thank you very much. We've written our own database software so we don't have to put up with this garbage. And when two or three guys in a company-- whose job descriptions don't even include toolsmithing-- can write more reliable software for a purpose like this than Microsoft has been peddling for twenty years, the fact that this answer isn't self-evident makes me weep for the future of humanity. This crap doesn't even trap end-of-line characters when you save as CSV. Christ.