Archive for the ‘WTF’ Category

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Snow Leopard’s “Disk Utility” can’t create encrypted image

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

Two months or so I ordered the Snow Leopard DVD for my Macbook Pro. Finally I had the time to perform the upgrade from Leopard. Before actually doing so, I tried to create a disk image of my current Leopard installation. So I booted the Snow Leopard DVD and ran “Disk Utility” from it. Because the target of that disk image was an external hard drive shared by my team, I wanted to create an encrypted image.

Regardless of whether I selected “128-Bit AES” or “256-Bit AES” as an encryption method, I immediately received the following error message on screen:

Unable to create "Macintosh HD.dmg" (Cannot allocate memory)

What is this trying to tell me? No space on hard drive? Impossible, since the external hard drive is a 2 TB empty drive. Moreover, “memory” usually refers to “main memory”, or “RAM.” So is Disk Utility actually trying to read the whole 200 GB hard drive into the RAM, then encrypting it, and then creating the disk image from it?! I can’t believe that anyone would be that stupid to design a disk imaging program like this…

I finally changed the image format to “Compressed”, and presto, it worked!

Anyway, why, oh why is it so hard to generate “user friendly” error messages? And why does this happen under Mac OS X of all operating systems, supposedly being the “user friendliest” OS in the universe?

This is not the first time I receive such useless error messages in OS X. Hey Apple, care to finally make your homework???

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Posted in Computers, Mac, Uncategorized, WTF | 5 Comments »

Vista picture “Web Publishing” regression

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

I just tried to upload some hundreds of vacation photos from Windows Vista to our gallery which I’m hosting on my own root server. It turned out that this would be a not-so-simple task… :-(

Previously, using Windows XP, this would be as simple as

  1. invoking the “Web Publishing Wizard” from the “Folder Tasks” pane,
  2. clicking “Publish this folder to the web”,
  3. optionally selecting a target size for resizing (a copy of!) the photos before you upload them, and finally
  4. clicking “Finish” to start the upload.

Not so anymore with Vista!

(more…)

Posted in Windows, WTF | 3 Comments »

Dell to mislead customers, no compensation, no excuse

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

My cousin ordered a Dell monitor SX2210, a 21.5″ 16:9 model with a webcam, dual mike-array, FullHD resolution, HDMI connector, and (supposedly) speakers built in.

Getting the webcam working was a no-brainer, but strangely I had massive problems getting the internal speakers running.

After fiddling around for a while with the soundcard’s internal settings under Windoze XP (which I thought might have been incorrect, altho the old monitor’s speakers were working well,) I had the idea to connect my iPod to check whether the speakers are working at all — duh! No sound output at all. :-(

So obviously the speakers were broken. Consequently, we called Dell to inquire about this. And now comes the unbelievable…

(more…)

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Posted in Computers, WTF | No Comments »

DPD-Paketdienst-Zumutung: Zustellung an falsche Person

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

Meine Frau rief mich gestern mit vor Wut bebender Stimme (so habe ich sie bisher sehr selten erlebt!) im Büro an, um sich bei mir über den Paketdienst DPD zu beschweren.

Was war geschehen?

Durch eine Versandmitteilung wussten wir, dass an diesem Tag ein Paket an uns geliefert werden sollte. Meine Frau hatte sich schon sehr auf das Paket gefreut und blieb daher den ganzen Tag zu Hause, um ja nicht die Zustellung zu verpassen.

Als nachmittags das Paket immer noch nicht zugestellt worden war, ging sie zum Briefkasten um nachzuschauen, ob dort eine Mitteilung des Paketdienstes hinterlassen wurde. Und in der Tat fand sie eine solche vor — allerdings war diese offensichtlich nicht vom DPD-Zusteller dort hinterlassen worden, sondern von einer uns unbekannten Familie, die etwa 300 m von uns entfernt in der selben Straße wohnt.

Die Nachricht besagte, dass wir das Paket bei ihnen oder einer anderen Familie — mit dem selben Nachnamen wir wir! — bei ihnen im Haus abholen könnten.

Wie ist das zu erklären? (more…)

Posted in deutsch, WTF | 4 Comments »

Microsoft installs Firefox extension without approval

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

I just had a very unpleasant experience when I noticed a suspicious Firefox extension in my wife’s XP account, called “Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant.” I immediately blaimed her for installing possibly malicious software, but she insisted it wasn’t her who did it. So I googled for this extension, and had to apologize to her afterwards…

It turned out that this is an extension Microsoft installs into Firefox when you install Microsoft .NET — and of course they don’t even ask whether to install it or not.

Here‘s some simple instructions of how to get rid of this shit… And here some more info…

Gaaawd how I hate Microsoft for these dirty tricks… :-(

Posted in Computers, WTF | 1 Comment »

MBP: Internal keyboard and trackpad lock-up

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

I just had another annoying problem with my MacBook Pro 4.1, running Mac OS X 10.5.6.

I left the machine unattended for like 10 minutes or so, and when I came back the screensaver was active. Sliding a finger over the trackpad wouldn’t produce the log-on dialog, nor would pressing keys on the internal keyboard. The machine was not crashed, however, since the screensaver animation was still running. What was even more strange is that the “Power on/off” button would work — when I shortly pressed it, the log-on prompt would appear.

Fortunately my view fell upon an external USB mouse, which I immediately tried. Voilà! I could move the mouse pointer with the external mouse, but the trackpad and internal keyboard were still dead.

I then attached an external keyboard, and that one also worked.

Back in Mac OS X I stopped all running applications, and restarted the MBP. Afterwards, all was fine again.

What the heck is this??? I thought Mac OS X was famous for its stability and reliability?! Is that what makes it “superior to Windoze” (according to a considerable fraction of Mac users)???

Posted in Computers, Mac, WTF | No Comments »

Gallery2 not in Debian 5.0?!

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

When I upgraded to Debian 5.0 lately I noticed that there is no Gallery2 package anymore in Lenny. So I asked the Debian maintainer about this.

Here’s what he replied:

Gallery 2 is not available in Lenny due to large amount of differences between the previous version and 2.3-1 from unstable. The release team and I decided not to include Gallery 2 in stable due to this disruptive change late in the release process. The gallery2 package from sid can be installed via pinning.

WTF?! :-(

Posted in Linux, Uncategorized, WTF | 2 Comments »

“Burn VIDEO_TS folder to DVD” nightmare

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I had a VIDEO_TS folder with VOB files that I wanted to burn to a DVD in order to be able to play it on our DVD player.

The first step was to create an ISO image. This can be done with a tool that comes with MacOS. Open a terminal and enter the following:

hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name "<volume name>" -o /target/image.iso \
    /path/to/parent/folder/

Make sure you specify the folder that contains the VIDEO_TS folder as the source folder in the above command line. Parallel to the VIDEO_TS folder you should also have an (empty) AUDIO_TS folder. Also make sure that there is no .DS_Store file (remove from terminal if present.) And note that the above is one logical line (the \ is a line break).

So, how do you write the ISO file to a DVD? (more…)

Posted in Mac, WTF | 2 Comments »

Sinnfreie Geschäftsmails…

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Während meines Urlaubs erhielt ich von einem großen und bekannten deutschen Domainanbieter folgende Mail (Auszug):

Wie Ihnen sicher bereits aufgefallen ist, haben wir die für den 14.07.2008 angekündigte Lastschrift der Rechnung <XY> bisher nicht durchgeführt. Durch die Umstellung auf eine neue Finanzbuchhaltungs-Software haben sich die Lastschriften im Monat Juli leider verzögert, so dass wir den Betrag von 0,00 Euro erst zum 08.08.2008 einziehen werden.

Diese Nachricht hätte man sich nun wirklich sparen können — ein kleiner Test, ob die Rechnungssumme größer Null ist, hätte den Zweck schon erfüllt.

Wer selber solche oder ähnliche Nachrichten erhalten hat ist herzlich eingeladen, sie hier (in anonymisierter Form) zu posten!

Posted in Computers, deutsch, WTF | No Comments »

Cisco’s VPN Client is crap…

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

I suddenly had a problem on my Mac that I couldn’t start the VPN client anymore — “Error 51″ was the only thing I received.

Google pointed me to this site where I found some very helpful advice.

Thanks!

Tags:,
Posted in Mac, WTF | 6 Comments »

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