- The system is an SAP server; it’s clearly not a cheap thing. So it’s not just a piece of crap, it’s expensive too.
- They have a troubleshooting pdf (!): they have a solution for Safari! But wait, what’s that? User agent spoofing.
- Piece of shit error page (just cancel the auth dialog) with grammatical errors: Bejelentkezés végrehajtva 101 mandanthoz, felhasználóhoz és HU nyelven végrehajtva.
- Client side code is utter garbage: inline in the html, mostly deals with browser detection and it also disables right click on the page. Too bad they never heard of inspectors.
- Routing error, problem triggered inside native code (http_route.c).
- Finally, a cross browser login page (using CSRF) hosted here :)
Posts Tagged ‘rant’
Elmu, shameful solutions by SAP
Sunday, July 25th, 2010
Elmű (Magyar Elektromos Művek, the largest (main) Hungarian Electricity Provider) created a new site not so long ago – until they had their login/password fields on their homepage, everyone was pretty happy, because it worked. A couple of weeks ago they removed it and now the login is a separate page; the only problem here: it doesn’t work on anything, except on Internet Explorer and Hungarian (!) language enabled Firefox.
Let’s examine this a bit closer:
Java verbosity
Thursday, August 20th, 2009I have a massive (butt ugly, huge etc.) XML file, which I want to read into the memory, modify some of the nodes, then save it back into XML. It’s not that I like PHP, because I don’t, just to show how ridiculous things are:
PHP
$doc->save($fileName)
JAVA
private void saveToFile(Document doc, String fileName) {
StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
Transformer transformer;
try {
transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
transformer.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(writer));
writer.close();
String flat = writer.toString();
File f = new File(fileName);
FileWriter fw = new FileWriter(f);
fw.write(flat);
fw.flush();
fw.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
I didn’t write proper exception handling in the above examples of course and I’m sure Java gurus out there can write better and nicer code than me, so let’s say, this is just a useless rant.
Olympic Games Grand Opening, online streaming and Silverlight stress test
Friday, August 8th, 2008I heard that the Olympic games are going to be covered online, using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology
- msn.com, search for the word olympic, we have a teaser article, nothing else; then I realize, the orange bar in the middle is not decoration, but a container, small letters in its side says: plugin content. I click, download Silverlight (v2, Beta 2 or smg. similar, click OK, install, whatever).
- back to the browser: click on Grand Opening, allow popups (you know, popup blocker is on by default on IE7), here we go popup opened, no live feeds starting; we have a schedule, but hey, I want to see the Grand Opening in live (I can on the Hungarian Television’s site, but that’s pretty low bandwidth – anyway, thanks to Carna).
- Click on “Sign up for live olympic video” on the right, oh my, I gotta enter my Zip code. But I’m not American. Try it three times, now I’m locked out for 24 hours. Okay, this sucks, try out the related videos bellow: turns out that I can’t watch anything outside the US. Hmm.
- Open Firefox and see if Silverlight working: the site comes up, but it takes around 5-10 seconds to show the popup blocker window (the yellow bar), Silverlight is not so fast, but let’s allow popups: same message, my IP is blocked. Cool. What a stress test for Silverlight!
- Rai Sport has Silverlight: let’s see if it works, at least they’re European. Voglio guardare il tv, ma non posso, perche ho un “Network Error” (AG_E_NETWORK_ERROR).
- Okay, let’s head over to msn.hu: it turns out that MSN has no Hungarian localized version. It also turns out that msn sports has some static shots (on the Olympic Games) and video.msn.com has some older content (nothing live) but all of them are flash. Also in the what’s hot section in the video menu I have Big Brother intro and some music video, but no games’ related feeds at all.
Addendum:
Let’s try the official site: the video region selector does not work in IE but works in Firefox. On FF the page redirects itself immediately saying I have no cookies (I do have); head back to IE, copy paste the url, and see that the ceremony is over (okay, we watched it on MTV anyways:)) and the embedded video player is made as dumb as possible (on purpose, just examine the code) plus it has a twenty minute viewing restriction. The player has no full screen and lacks essential controls. It’s good that we pay for cable…
Turbo IDE memories and hardware compatibility woes
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008I installed Ruby and looked around what IDE-s are available: while not much, I must say, this whole IDE idea sucks. With opensource at least. Microsoft Visual Studio and MS stuff just works: but I don’t believe in the ultra-flexible wonder-world of Eclipse (or any other opensource crap touting itself as a developer environment, from MonoDevelop to Glade-like madness).
Just take Borland’s Turbo IDEs from the DOS era: they just fucking worked. A couple of megabytes, good syntax highlighting, integrated debugger and a very usable context sensitive help; I think we had no intellisense, but could leave without it. And another thing: they were lightning fast. Now all I have is the instability, slow bloat, and buggy crap – 150mb for an editor that messes up CVS operations, has a buggy help system (you know, html junk in a tooltip), broken code complete, blows up with code validation (you know, half a GB of ram eaten up) and whatnot.
Another thing: while am not a great fan of Vista, the Vista hardware compatibility site is up and working. And it is good. Linux zealots can go and eat their OS (especiall the 64 bit ones): with every new kernel release they have new bugs (just fix your kernel before flaming the living shit out of Foxconn, or learn a bit of a patience (2.6.26 anyone?), will you?) and in the last ten years I couldn’t find a reliable list for Linux hardware compatibility. Linux-drivers.org suck (Google page search; are you kidding?), Ubuntu has a stupid Wiki page for that (hey people, wikis are not the cure for everything); though (Open)Suse is pretty close, there are just too much question marks for me.
UPDATE: Aptana/RadRails default install (you know, press okay, install, okay wherever possible). Hello world rb file, string camelcase method, code completion: FAIL.
Linux desktop speed
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008While I do like the linux desktop, I prefer Fluxbox, yet no matter which window manager I try, the “speed” of the desktop sucks. I have a decent machine with an average (Geforce 8500) video card which should be fast as hell for this, yet when I move windows around, minimize/restore them or just shade ‘em, the lag and the redraw is noticable! AND of course I use the native nvidia binary driver (which I do like, even if it taints the uuh so nice kernel).
Gnome apps are the worst (Firefox and Audacious win hands down), Kde comes in next, while no-dep small tools (like Worker or Nedit for example) are the fastest (no lag). I do understand, that graphics on Linux is not in the kernel itself, but ot be honest, I really don’t care where it is, just make it work. I don’t use icons, I don’t use animations, my taskbar height is always bellow 30px: in 2008 the so called Linux desktop makes me feel I have a slow machine!
Of course I know about compiz, and mostly I think that’s the way to go (pure gl rendering), but compiz has really annoying bugs, not to mention the fact, that, ehm, what I do pretty often, switching tasks, is screwed up big time imho: no matter which taskswitcher plugin I choose, I don’t need a freaking animation, BUT I do need an icon or an iconic representation of the application. If Opera has a little red O sign in the taskbar, then I want the same in the task switcher, not a white small “noname window” icon. And that’s just for switching tasks…