Posts by Ian 31

Re: It's still going on

Had a similar problem with a social services application I used to support. Database was Oracle, ASCII (I think) character set. Users would copy and paste from various other applications, Word, Excel, whatever. Application would happily swallow whatever was copy pasted in, and then throw an unhandled error when you tried to retrieve that particular form because it contained what ASCII considered as control characters. Took a while to work out what was going on but earned me a lot of brownie points when I twigged and could fix the offending form generally within 30 minutes of being aware of the problem. Honestly, it was frequently a 5 minute job but never let the end users know it's easy. Supplier took 24 hours to fix such issues, their long term fix was to suggest we upgraded, at considerable expense, to their latest and greatest rewrite of the application. We did consider that, but it went nowhere, partly because their 'expert' didn't understand that their application when running on a Solaris box, pointing at a database on another Solaris box, didn't need, and in fact probably couldn't, map to the C:\ drive.

Look at your keyboard, I is next to O. Fat fingers, nothing Freudian.

Re: Medical dictionaries

For the last few years we've used G-Suite which allows the use of organisational word filters for email. Some genius in senior management decided that this would be a good idea and paid for a 3rd party supplied 'block list' to ensure bad words wouldn't be allowed. Brilliant. I work supporting social services case management systems in local government. Blocking an email that contains the phrase 'he said he wanted me to suck his <male chicken> in an attachment to an email titled 'Urgent, required for court proceedings tomorrow morning' regarding a potential child sexual exploitation situation is really not a good idea.

Re: CSV?

That's not a problem with csv, that's a problem with Excel. More accurately, it's a problem with the sort of idiot who thinks Excel is the answer to all their IT issues.

Fireball the bastard

Then tuck in.

Seconded.

Other than that, just go Margaret. Please.

None of that tinned crap thank you.

If ours are anything to go by it would have to be chicken, prawns, mince beef or melon.

Yes melon.

We worry about Lenny sometimes.

Pride Comes Before A Fall......

I quote,

'is also very easily worked around for those of us who neither make mistokes'

Damn fine work Pete, you can take your foot out of your mouth now.