Some People Shouldn't Be Allowed to Use a Computer
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We just received an email, with an attached PDF, containing a black & white scan, of a printout, of a screenshot of an error message that was in a copyable text box. W. T. E. :doh: :confused:
Yeah. They forgot the step where they took a picture on a wooden table[^].
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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It was sideways, and quite blurry.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
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Wait a second. So, reverse engineering the process you are saying that they 0. Took a screenshot 1. Printed it. 2. Scanned it to pdf as black and white 3. Then emailed it to you. Look on the bright side, at least they sent it as a pdf instead of a .tiff. :)
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
ryanb31 wrote:
at least they sent it as a pdf instead of a .tiff.
I see that as exactly the opposite. I work with TIFFs everyday (I'm actually working on a library to render them in HTML canvases in my free time, so I'm getting pretty familiar with all the gritty details). PDFs on the other hand, have been the indirect cause of pretty much every bit of stress over the last ~3 weeks (due to a bug in our PDF decoding library that is proving rather difficult to pin down). ;P EDIT: Also, I think they printed it in B&W then scanned it, hard to be sure though.
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ryanb31 wrote:
at least they sent it as a pdf instead of a .tiff.
I see that as exactly the opposite. I work with TIFFs everyday (I'm actually working on a library to render them in HTML canvases in my free time, so I'm getting pretty familiar with all the gritty details). PDFs on the other hand, have been the indirect cause of pretty much every bit of stress over the last ~3 weeks (due to a bug in our PDF decoding library that is proving rather difficult to pin down). ;P EDIT: Also, I think they printed it in B&W then scanned it, hard to be sure though.
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I work with TIFFs everyday
Holy smokes! You are the first person I have ever known of to be using tiffs. I can now cross this off my bucket list. Thanks.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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You're lucky it was a screenshot. I've had error messages sent through where the user's taken a picture of the screen with their phone. X|
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
Richard Deeming wrote:
user's taken a picture of the screen with their phone
Don't knock it. One of the most useful error reports I've received in recent memory included a two minute video taken with the service engineer's phone that demonstrated what the customer was doing to cause the problem. Without the video I wouldn't have had a clue what was going on. With it, it was straightforward to find and fix.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Yeah. They forgot the step where they took a picture on a wooden table[^].
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
WTE?! :confused:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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I work with TIFFs everyday
Holy smokes! You are the first person I have ever known of to be using tiffs. I can now cross this off my bucket list. Thanks.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Well, I work in a program that users often scan documents into, and TIFF has always been well supported by scanners. And there's the fact that it can have multiple pages, making it even better for the task. Add in the extensibility (that we don't make use of), and it's a pretty powerful format without being ridiculously complicated; the spec is around 100 pages IIRC, vs. nearly 700 for PDF v1.3 (I think it's on v1.7 now, so that's probably even longer).
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:laugh: That is funny! At least my customers have figured out the 'Print Screen' key and how to paste into a word doc. It's actually not a bad way to report an error, as the context is usually revealed in the image.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
That really annoys me. Just send me the image, that way I can make it big enough to read, and if you could learn to crop... A screen shot of two large, widescreen monitors reduced to the size of a portrait word doc is impossible to read.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
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That really annoys me. Just send me the image, that way I can make it big enough to read, and if you could learn to crop... A screen shot of two large, widescreen monitors reduced to the size of a portrait word doc is impossible to read.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
ChrisElston wrote:
and if you could learn to crop...
:laugh: Yeah, I tried teaching them Alt+PrntSrn but it was too confusing. I'm just glad I they give me a heads up before calling for a remote or worse yet, starting a remote unannonced, just so they can show me a 'time-run error', as one user called it.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Quote:
I work with TIFFs everyday
Holy smokes! You are the first person I have ever known of to be using tiffs. I can now cross this off my bucket list. Thanks.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
You can cross it off twice! I also work where lots of paper is scanned, and TIFF rules the roost 'round here. Over the years I've written lots of code to do various interesting things with them (mostly because the company I work for has a serious Not Invented Here syndrome). When much of the development work involves manipulating multi-page scans at a low level from many different sources, any sane person* would take TIFF any day of the week over PDF! *not to imply that I fit that description
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We just received an email, with an attached PDF, containing a black & white scan, of a printout, of a screenshot of an error message that was in a copyable text box. W. T. E. :doh: :confused:
I've done that when the underlying window context is important.
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We just received an email, with an attached PDF, containing a black & white scan, of a printout, of a screenshot of an error message that was in a copyable text box. W. T. E. :doh: :confused:
I've had tickets like that before. I had one where someone took a screenshot, then pasted it into Word, then (mystifyingly) took a screenshot of Word and attached that to the ticket. By that point, the original screenshot was shrunk to the point of uselessness. One wonders the thought process behind something like that.
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I've done that when the underlying window context is important.
You've taken a screen shot, printed it out, scanned the print out, embedded it into a PDF, and then emailed it? Screen shots I get, but this was way out there. And it couldn't even simply be the computer had no internet connection and they didn't have a portable storage device either, because this was a web app.
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Well, I work in a program that users often scan documents into, and TIFF has always been well supported by scanners. And there's the fact that it can have multiple pages, making it even better for the task. Add in the extensibility (that we don't make use of), and it's a pretty powerful format without being ridiculously complicated; the spec is around 100 pages IIRC, vs. nearly 700 for PDF v1.3 (I think it's on v1.7 now, so that's probably even longer).
lewax00 wrote:
vs. nearly 700 for PDF v1.3 (I think it's on v1.7 now, so that's probably even longer).
Got a couple of the spec docs sitting around here, PDFReference15_v6.pdf - 1172 pages, 8,975kb (pdfreference12.pdf - 394 pages, 1,478kb) Not exactly the most interesting reading I've had the luck of being tasked with. :^)
"Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin
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You've taken a screen shot, printed it out, scanned the print out, embedded it into a PDF, and then emailed it? Screen shots I get, but this was way out there. And it couldn't even simply be the computer had no internet connection and they didn't have a portable storage device either, because this was a web app.
At least he didn't print it out and Fedex it to you.
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lewax00 wrote:
vs. nearly 700 for PDF v1.3 (I think it's on v1.7 now, so that's probably even longer).
Got a couple of the spec docs sitting around here, PDFReference15_v6.pdf - 1172 pages, 8,975kb (pdfreference12.pdf - 394 pages, 1,478kb) Not exactly the most interesting reading I've had the luck of being tasked with. :^)
"Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin
Yeah, PDF is kind of the bane of my existence right now. On the upside, I figured out how to manually edit the files tripping up the system enough to get them through. Adobe still thinks they're ugly and tries to fix them, but I don't care as long as all the info is preserved and they don't put our PDF library into an infinite loop! :-D The sooner this whole episode is behind me the better.
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Yeah, PDF is kind of the bane of my existence right now. On the upside, I figured out how to manually edit the files tripping up the system enough to get them through. Adobe still thinks they're ugly and tries to fix them, but I don't care as long as all the info is preserved and they don't put our PDF library into an infinite loop! :-D The sooner this whole episode is behind me the better.
Commiserations my friend. I (still) feel your pain a couple of years after the fact. ;P But I do have self-written implementations in c++ and php, so that's kinda nice. Even using the hello-world examples in the docs verbatim, Acrobat 9 Pro still insists on 'fixing' them. :doh: PDF is the only reason the word Adobe ever crosses my mind these days. 1/2 way tempted to look into LaTex, to be honest.
"Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin
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At least he didn't print it out and Fedex it to you.
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At least he didn't print it out and Fedex it to you.
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You can cross it off twice! I also work where lots of paper is scanned, and TIFF rules the roost 'round here. Over the years I've written lots of code to do various interesting things with them (mostly because the company I work for has a serious Not Invented Here syndrome). When much of the development work involves manipulating multi-page scans at a low level from many different sources, any sane person* would take TIFF any day of the week over PDF! *not to imply that I fit that description
The funny part is that today I was researching a bug with the webgrid control we use and getting out of memory error when someone tries to export too much data to tiff format. I was thinking to myself why in the world is .tiff even there. You have answered it. :)
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
