I've got the power

I wonder if the bean counters at Sage can afford an additional letter in their slogan?

Power to ruin your business. Sage

Sounds much more realistic to me.

Development Models

Ken Coar made an interesting post about an alternative development model; Bug Limitation through Optimised Audience Targeting (BLOAT). To paraphrase, it basically uses the magpie approach to control users; that is distracting them with new shiny things, so that they forget whatever the current and past problems are.

Sounds a bit like a lot of Sage software to me. Possibly rather unfair, but given my experiences with it, totally justified. Which is a real shame as it appears to work... for a while.

This is what options are for

Why on earth is it that when you tell Skype that you don't want it to "adjust your sound device settings", you discover that it continues to do so?

This personally causes me an immense number of problems when it decides to do this, as I use Skype to communicate with my colleagues across the internet. Today was the last straw, but all was not lost as 30 seconds of searching has thrown up the answer (google still cuts it for me).

  1. Close Skype if its open.
  2. Open C:\Documents and Settings\\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Skype\YOURSKYPEACCOUNT\Config.xml, with your favourite text editor
  3. Find and edit the existing AGC element and change the 1 to a 0. For Example:
    <AGC>0</AGC>
  4. Add a new AGC element as a child to the Call element; again it should have a value of 0.
  5. Save and close Config.xml.
  6. Open C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Skype\Shared.xml, and add another AGC element as a child to VoiceEng element; again ensure that it has a value of 0.
  7. Restart Skype, and test using the echo123 service.

You should find your recording volume no longer randomly jumps about. Sorry it's only for Windows, but the linux version doesn't seem to give me any problems.... I wonder if its one unified code base?

Sage ACT! support

In general I try to stay away from most Sage software as much as possible, but today we were handed a call with regards to ACT throwing an invalid pointer. We've been told its an error caused by a firewall issue and that we're to check it.

Needless to say, this has left me fuming. An invalid pointer reference occurs when a pointer's value is dereferenced, and whilst changing internal firewall rules MAY sort this, I don't feel its:

  • Appropriate to "fix" problems in this manner,
  • Be accused of essentially being party to causing the problem.

To be technical, one way to create this error is the following example; Take two char pointers (i.e char *p, *q; for this example). Say you do something with p, and q is left uninitialized. When the following is executed: p = q; pointer p will then become uninitialized as well, and any references made to p causes an invalid pointer reference. Hence this is called dereferencing pointers.

Either this error is giving a bad error message (i.e. its telling the user the wrong thing), or the program is poorly written and not checking for invalid pointers on reassignment. Either way, throwing this error message at a user and crashing the program is fucking terrible and shows the poor thinking behind the scenes, especially for a "corporate ready product". I'm fairly sure it's the right error message, and that doing a firewall change, somehow, bizarrely fixes it.

To further piss us off, said ACT! employee has linked to a KB article which requires a login (which we have no access to), and in the view of the customer called us basically fucking idiots because we don't have access to read it. Nice one.

Taking the piss, user-style

There must be a club, or something, for some users who love to just take the piss. Across various companies we support, theres literally hundreds of iTunes directories. Since we don't actually get employed for the companies, we can't just go in and trample on said directories (invasion of privacy, etc.). Today one company gave us the go-ahead to sort out their data. Awesome, and possibly a little silly too. We've moved about 8GB of iTunes data, between about 3 or 4 people. One such user is 4GB of this in total.

Now I know some will cry ignorance, but the main offender has been spoken to about this before. She's pretty much taking the piss now; this is the 3rd time and previously I believe she was taking up at least 10GB herself. If only it was my place to say something...I miss the days where verbal smack-downs could be delivered without fear of being sacked. It was like instagib-ing mentally.

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