Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2013-02-05 10:20 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2013-02-05 10:20 pm
Entry tags:
long day
Oh, work.
So That Blessed Program at work is going from version Kippered Shark to Freshly Milked Llama (or equivalent), and Llama does fix a lot of the problems from Kipper. My team, in our hopeful yet masochistic spirit, have decided to request to board the first few canoes over the Freshly Milked Llama upgrade waterfall.
This morning, I optimistically signed up for a two hour online-and-teleconference course in all things llama-milk related.
I made it in vaguely when the teleconference started (10). It was just two people brave enough to take the plunge; that, or everybody else is self-taught know-it-alls. As it happened, I already knew most of the content, though there were a few things that surprised me.
I had been running out of bugs to file in Kippered Shark. My first week or so with Llama have been ... enlightening.
I have a technical workplace. Most of the people who use this thing at all, who are the deeply technical type likely to find the weird bugs, have it jam-crammed sideways into clients that don't touch most of the features I use on a daily basis. This means that I am in the very small intersection between "use it directly" and "technical enough to explain what's going on and report the circumstances necessary to duplicate, to the correct team", with the bonus intersection of "isn't too busy doing Deeply Meaningful Other Things" -- and my team has a habit of taking advantage and saying "Azz, Kipper did something strange, file a bug if you can; I have Important Things To Do, see you later!"
* Something that was supposed to transfer between versions seamlessly didn't; the temporary crude fix is to copy the contents and create a new one.
* Regardless of the version, the server has been throwing 502s at the users like beads at a Mardi Gras parade, and us all without shirts.
* There are some keyboard commands to do things. One of those operations is moving stuff. Kipper remembered the last move location on keyboard command. Llama remembers last move location on button-driven menu. Llama's sudden amnesia on the keyboard shortcut is concerning (and a side effect from an intentional change).
* The select-all checkbox got hidden inside a setting somewhere. More concerningly, I don't remember the bit in the "okay, do we have a leaky faucet?" test where select-all was an operation that needed doing. Quote D here on fucking unnecessary settings. (It was, in fact, opt-in.)
* The myriad array of ever-changing server-side plugins are opt-out, and change on basically a daily basis.
* A three-times-is-no-longer-coincidence display issue where an unhandled item appears, and then displays as unhandled (no matter what operations are done to it, and I have done all of them that I can think of) until the thing is physically restarted. It's uncanny.
* In the troubleshooting for the above, I had to turn off all my plugins. I couldn't turn off one of them, because another feature was depending on the plugin. Not a second plugin feature, but a feature in the main board. I had to re-check the plugin in question, save, go back in, uncheck the feature (and save, and go back in) and only *then* could I uncheck that last plugin. (This should never happen. If one feature depends on another feature, either they should both be main features, both be plugins, or have the more senior of the dependency stack be the main feature.)
* Much to my anguish, I haven't been able to pin down the circumstances under which the weird display issue happens enough to reliably reproduce it, though I'm pretty sure it involves performing certain operations at the identical moment when an unhandled item appears in that view. (Possibly with alert noises on.)
* I'm using another browser for the web app to see if it happens there too.
* Over the course of the training, I opened the web app in a ridiculously thin window to try and splitscreen with the training (both to keep an eye on my queue and to follow along in my own account). It was thus that I discovered a really freaking weird issue with horizontal scroll.
* (insert hastily-grabbed grilled cheese sandwich, and then refreshing meeting with manager, complete with praise about my handling of the toilet problem, and several more llama problems.)
* 502s have become so common that they don't really faze me anymore. Now, trying to assign a ticket to four co-workers and running into a rejection error that I've never seen before? That's freaky, and leads to terrors shaped like "DID THEY CAN THAT PERSON OH NOOOOOOO MY FRIIIIEND".
* (insert break to deliver chocolate to a particularly hard-hit team here.)
* Keyboard navigation up and down my queue is flaky; it's supposed to remember which direction I was going (up or down), but when I move items out of my queue, it loses track of this (going one direction). (One Direction is better as a boyband than in my queue. I do not want it there.)
* While trying to beat some sense out of the keyboard navigation problem, I noticed that the scrollbar thing was only on some messages, and tried to figure out the common factor.
* Thanks to my grandmanager's somewhat dodgy app habits, I figured it out --
* -- but it's *only* in the queue view; search view doesn't have the same issues.
* also if you try to squinch the window any smaller than the toolbar, it doesn't behave (and doesn't show you the rightmost buttons). This is sadly a far more universal problem.
* (insert jubilant trip to crow about troubleshooting skills outstripping the help desk to one of the cupcakers.)
* Another one of the cupcakers noticed a problem where a mobile version was retaining incorrect information. (And he shared it with me, bless his heart, because I'm the one who yells about these things. To the point where he asked me, "So what is it that you do on the Kipper team?" and was surprised to learn that I'm minion for an entirely other department, just the one who gets tasked to handle all the Kipper/Llama related problems.)
* My grandmanager does things to all the programs he touches. He managed to get a possibly-un-duplicatable display issue which I secretly suspect is related to unwise use of the touchpad scroll feature, but wouldn't have the first idea how to go about making it happen again. (One of the engineers asked me to duplicate it. I wish I could, sir, I wish I could. I don't even have an artist's conception of the screen-trainwreck.)
* Some tickets are not showing assignment-accepted status. This is a problem. Others are. Fuck if I know what the common factor is.
* Mass-selection works, right? But if you mass-select stuff and then label your whole selection with one label, the label takes -- but the display for the selection takes on a really, really funky aspect, with an entirely internally consistent logic that delights while it simultaneously confuses the fuck out of me.
* The common factor I thought might be it for the missing assignment-accepted isn't actually it.
* Apparently I should actually file tickets for some of the enhancements I thought of while attempting to test all of the above problems, because dumping it in the forum won't guarantee that someone files them, and I'm clearly an adult who can be trusted to file her own feature requests. Despite my general exhaustion, and my growing desire to swear at the next person who mentions llamas, milk, or FUCKING SHARKS in my general vicinity for the next three months.
By the time I ran the numbers on my time at work, I'd hit eight (after having taken out the trips to gossip with friends) and I had to run off before I went into overtime. I feel slightly beaten despite workrave.
I think I've had Llama for four of my workdays. There are at least 12 ticketable problems in that list, and that's only what I've run into while I was trying to get other stuff done. Llama-humping christ.
That being said? Llama is so much better than Kippered Shark. It's night and day.
So That Blessed Program at work is going from version Kippered Shark to Freshly Milked Llama (or equivalent), and Llama does fix a lot of the problems from Kipper. My team, in our hopeful yet masochistic spirit, have decided to request to board the first few canoes over the Freshly Milked Llama upgrade waterfall.
This morning, I optimistically signed up for a two hour online-and-teleconference course in all things llama-milk related.
I made it in vaguely when the teleconference started (10). It was just two people brave enough to take the plunge; that, or everybody else is self-taught know-it-alls. As it happened, I already knew most of the content, though there were a few things that surprised me.
I had been running out of bugs to file in Kippered Shark. My first week or so with Llama have been ... enlightening.
I have a technical workplace. Most of the people who use this thing at all, who are the deeply technical type likely to find the weird bugs, have it jam-crammed sideways into clients that don't touch most of the features I use on a daily basis. This means that I am in the very small intersection between "use it directly" and "technical enough to explain what's going on and report the circumstances necessary to duplicate, to the correct team", with the bonus intersection of "isn't too busy doing Deeply Meaningful Other Things" -- and my team has a habit of taking advantage and saying "Azz, Kipper did something strange, file a bug if you can; I have Important Things To Do, see you later!"
* Something that was supposed to transfer between versions seamlessly didn't; the temporary crude fix is to copy the contents and create a new one.
* Regardless of the version, the server has been throwing 502s at the users like beads at a Mardi Gras parade, and us all without shirts.
* There are some keyboard commands to do things. One of those operations is moving stuff. Kipper remembered the last move location on keyboard command. Llama remembers last move location on button-driven menu. Llama's sudden amnesia on the keyboard shortcut is concerning (and a side effect from an intentional change).
* The select-all checkbox got hidden inside a setting somewhere. More concerningly, I don't remember the bit in the "okay, do we have a leaky faucet?" test where select-all was an operation that needed doing. Quote D here on fucking unnecessary settings. (It was, in fact, opt-in.)
* The myriad array of ever-changing server-side plugins are opt-out, and change on basically a daily basis.
* A three-times-is-no-longer-coincidence display issue where an unhandled item appears, and then displays as unhandled (no matter what operations are done to it, and I have done all of them that I can think of) until the thing is physically restarted. It's uncanny.
* In the troubleshooting for the above, I had to turn off all my plugins. I couldn't turn off one of them, because another feature was depending on the plugin. Not a second plugin feature, but a feature in the main board. I had to re-check the plugin in question, save, go back in, uncheck the feature (and save, and go back in) and only *then* could I uncheck that last plugin. (This should never happen. If one feature depends on another feature, either they should both be main features, both be plugins, or have the more senior of the dependency stack be the main feature.)
* Much to my anguish, I haven't been able to pin down the circumstances under which the weird display issue happens enough to reliably reproduce it, though I'm pretty sure it involves performing certain operations at the identical moment when an unhandled item appears in that view. (Possibly with alert noises on.)
* I'm using another browser for the web app to see if it happens there too.
* Over the course of the training, I opened the web app in a ridiculously thin window to try and splitscreen with the training (both to keep an eye on my queue and to follow along in my own account). It was thus that I discovered a really freaking weird issue with horizontal scroll.
* (insert hastily-grabbed grilled cheese sandwich, and then refreshing meeting with manager, complete with praise about my handling of the toilet problem, and several more llama problems.)
* 502s have become so common that they don't really faze me anymore. Now, trying to assign a ticket to four co-workers and running into a rejection error that I've never seen before? That's freaky, and leads to terrors shaped like "DID THEY CAN THAT PERSON OH NOOOOOOO MY FRIIIIEND".
* (insert break to deliver chocolate to a particularly hard-hit team here.)
* Keyboard navigation up and down my queue is flaky; it's supposed to remember which direction I was going (up or down), but when I move items out of my queue, it loses track of this (going one direction). (One Direction is better as a boyband than in my queue. I do not want it there.)
* While trying to beat some sense out of the keyboard navigation problem, I noticed that the scrollbar thing was only on some messages, and tried to figure out the common factor.
* Thanks to my grandmanager's somewhat dodgy app habits, I figured it out --
* -- but it's *only* in the queue view; search view doesn't have the same issues.
* also if you try to squinch the window any smaller than the toolbar, it doesn't behave (and doesn't show you the rightmost buttons). This is sadly a far more universal problem.
* (insert jubilant trip to crow about troubleshooting skills outstripping the help desk to one of the cupcakers.)
* Another one of the cupcakers noticed a problem where a mobile version was retaining incorrect information. (And he shared it with me, bless his heart, because I'm the one who yells about these things. To the point where he asked me, "So what is it that you do on the Kipper team?" and was surprised to learn that I'm minion for an entirely other department, just the one who gets tasked to handle all the Kipper/Llama related problems.)
* My grandmanager does things to all the programs he touches. He managed to get a possibly-un-duplicatable display issue which I secretly suspect is related to unwise use of the touchpad scroll feature, but wouldn't have the first idea how to go about making it happen again. (One of the engineers asked me to duplicate it. I wish I could, sir, I wish I could. I don't even have an artist's conception of the screen-trainwreck.)
* Some tickets are not showing assignment-accepted status. This is a problem. Others are. Fuck if I know what the common factor is.
* Mass-selection works, right? But if you mass-select stuff and then label your whole selection with one label, the label takes -- but the display for the selection takes on a really, really funky aspect, with an entirely internally consistent logic that delights while it simultaneously confuses the fuck out of me.
* The common factor I thought might be it for the missing assignment-accepted isn't actually it.
* Apparently I should actually file tickets for some of the enhancements I thought of while attempting to test all of the above problems, because dumping it in the forum won't guarantee that someone files them, and I'm clearly an adult who can be trusted to file her own feature requests. Despite my general exhaustion, and my growing desire to swear at the next person who mentions llamas, milk, or FUCKING SHARKS in my general vicinity for the next three months.
By the time I ran the numbers on my time at work, I'd hit eight (after having taken out the trips to gossip with friends) and I had to run off before I went into overtime. I feel slightly beaten despite workrave.
I think I've had Llama for four of my workdays. There are at least 12 ticketable problems in that list, and that's only what I've run into while I was trying to get other stuff done. Llama-humping christ.
That being said? Llama is so much better than Kippered Shark. It's night and day.
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*hits the following sentence*
I optimistically signed up for a two hour online-and-teleconference
course in all things llama-milk related
*brain screeeeeeches to a halt, tries rebooting*
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There are in fact actual version numbers and code names that are used, but I'm being a bit vague as Google sees all, knows all, forgives nothing.
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None of these are actually showstopping. I could in fact work around basically everything but the 502s, and if this week's primary tasks were more urgent, I'd have been taking notes on the things I ran into but pushing on through.
Things have got better since they brought in the actual designer, who was not around for Kipper, but has to deal with the fallout from Kipper.
I have yet to encounter anything that I considered an actual security bug, which is reassuring to me.
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I seem to be the very rare user who both does things that will break the system, and can report back on what exactly was done, and what kind of broken behavior.
Have I recommended to you From the Office of Admiral Desplains, which is by a Vorkosigan-reading, developer friend of mine?
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I would have thought the automated tests would include "Try to do something that cannot be done, though it sounds plausible" to check and make sure that it doors not, in fact, try to do something that it cannot.
The recommendation was new and quite funny, despite not having read any of the Vorkosigan novels. And far too familiar, in that I could recall one of my users fitting each of the statements.
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The Kipper/Llama team is theoretically responsible for a lot of its own ... stuff, including bug-finding, testing, and the like.
My team is the master "but people can *use* that, right?" companywide.
Me: administrative assistant, primarily attached to the researchers.
My job on paper: copy, calendar-wrangle, fetch, carry, email, schedule, nab conference rooms, screen participants, do data entry, order office supplies, random internal admin tasks, and occasionally manifest peppermint lattes.
My job in reality also includes: report anything encountered with internal applications in the course of regular work, attempt to duplicate any bugs found before reporting if possible, and handle any weirdness turned up by the team as if I'd found it myself, to allow them to get on with their days.
Bug reports and I are just *really good friends* by now.
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Guess how I feel about the new Llama Look. I have a Retina Mac and it manages to be heachache-inducingly not quite sharp.
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I just saw someone in the forums complaining at people who have turned off the fucking ticker, claiming that this is how news happens.
I counter-counter complained, because the ticker is more distracting than ten thousand people walking past my cube just within my range of vision, because at least *they* don't intermittently have important things to say, so I can actually try to tune them out and maybe ask for one of those sunshade things. I will live without Llama news if it doesn't drive me batty with unnecessary motion in my range of vision.
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