Go, Drosophila, Go

[filkertom]

Thanks to the vagaries of algorithms, a famous text on flies was briefly listed on Amazon for $23,698,655.93 (+$3.99 shipping).

Gotta love computers -- they don't do what you want, only what you tell them.

What's your latest twitchy software story? I've got a problem with USB drives not being recognized (I think it's a glitchy cable), and -- after several tries in the past -- my Win7x64 has finally recognized ASIO4ALL.

Comments

[wingus.livejournal.com]

Had some issues with YouTube lately - it would switch to a higher level of HD when I maximized the screen, but not immediately. It'd do it after I switched and settled in to being comfy in watching the video. Also the buffer bar did not work right - it would pop up as fully loaded every time, so I had no clue how much the videos were loading.

The HD change was a new setting that I turned off, and deleting YouTube cookies fixed the buffer bar issue.

[dwimmerlaik.livejournal.com]

Ha! Since I work in a Drosophila lab, I'll have to tell my boss about this.

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

I love my iPod, but iTunes hates me. No, hate is not strong enough. Someone created iTunes specifically to make digital music management hell for me. :)

[mimiheart.livejournal.com]

I think at that price, shipping should be free. I'm just saying...

[jannyblue.livejournal.com]

Only recent "twitchy" software issue for me is the "pocket dials" I got yesterday... though my GPS did crap out in the way back from Baltimore, so I had to go from memory and signs. (Fortunately, I know how to do this)

Though I worry I've jinxed myself now by saying that. :-)

[caligogreywings.livejournal.com]

I cannot shut down my computer from Windows. It just restarts. I have to hold the button down to make it shut off. No idea except that possibly it's wired wrong.

[kengr]

The other day I used the local tansit district's route planner to plan a bus trip to arrive somewhere by a specific time.

I've used this in the past and often gotten warnings that the algorithm could occasionally produce odd routing when you used the arrive by option instead of the default "depart after".

Well that day I found out what they were talking about.

The first option was to take the #71 (nearest bus to me) to the #72 and get off a block from the destination.

The second was to take the #71 in the oppossite direction of the first option, to the #15, and get off a block from the destination (it's right at the point the #15 and #72 cross).

The third option. Oh my. It had me take the #71 in the same direction as the first option. But go *past* the #72 to a transit center about a mile further along. Then take the #71 *back* to the #72. Then take the #72 in the direction *away* from the destination, ride to the end of the line and then back to the destination.

Oh yeah, the "arrive by" time was 7pm. The first two options had me catch the bus at 6:20 & 6:24. The third had me catching it at 3:49!!!!

[his-spiffyness.livejournal.com]

Sometime back on one of the map sites, somebody mentioned a bug about traveling between two points within the United Kingdom.

To get from point A to point B, you had to take a ferry to Denmark, travel through Sweden, ferry through the Netherlands, and travel through Belgium and France before taking another ferry back to England and finally getting to point B.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I wrote a program once, on the insistence of a manager, which was supposed to analyse a multi-dozen-thousand list of internal corporate IP addresses and DNS names and make sure the numbers matched the naming conventions, and output mismatches for the attention of the networking team.

Of course they didn't give me the official naming conventions.

I had the brainstorm to read in the list of IP/name pairs and run a "closest match" on them. This would let me automatically build sets of matching data, and I could then use the derived rules to project what the results should be, run a check between those and the actual data, and highlight any discrepancies.

It had the advantage that I didn't need to hardcode any actual naming convention rules - the program should automatically derive them from the correct 99% of the data.

Well, it sort of worked.

The data went in. The program ground away to itself, testing and trying combinations of match rules and making notes of which rules had the most 'hits' in the raw data. Then it went through again and spat out the data which didn't match those rules.

Except that the data it spat out was for IP/name combos which were actually correct.

No, I hadn't coded the tests backwards. It's just that closest-match process only works if the raw data fed into it follows the desired rules more than 50% of the time. It doesn't work when the company network hosts are 75% incorrectly named in the first place.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

I've had twitchy software... and then there's twitchy hardware.

A dud of a gaming laptop from Sager (a rebranded Compal) had USB ports that would short out. Plug in wrong, bZZT! Sorry whole subsystem gone.

I ended up buying a monster Asus gaming laptop a month later (after Anthrocon). This past month, I bought the proper Asus laptop, which is working rather well. The Sager? Stripped for parts and recycled.

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

This one was a weirdie. It seems that, when Win XP gets a string of errors reading from a CD or DVD disk, it downgrades the drive from optimal DMA status to the slow, horrible PIO status so it can read "slower." But it never recovers. You have to run a little script and reboot your computer to reset it. I lucked into a web site that explains it: http://winhlp.com/node/10

The most common cause for this happening is a dirty or scratched CD or DVD disk. Which happens to a lot of disks, no matter what care we give them.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

My Android recently updated itself to 2.2, and then Weatherbug Elite got itself into a force-close state... the app would initialize and immediately crash. Hmmm.... Market -> Check for up.. wait, it already tells me there's updates! goooooood. Updated four apps, and all is shiny. But jeez. Whatever WB was doing musta been really version-specific, in a Very Bad Way.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I cannot install the M1 vst because the stupid key dongle doesn't work. I spent money for this?

[smparadox.livejournal.com]

Funny, Drosophilia is thw word I used to derive my latest password at work...

[peachtales.livejournal.com]

My laptop has decided it doesn't think it has a dvd drive anymore, and also will no longer recognize any external attached. It's really driving me nuts.