lapisnev

Don't squeeze me, I fart

Things that make you go 🤌. Weird computer stuff. Artist and general creative type. Occasionally funny. Gentoo on main. I play rhythm games!

Inkscape Monofur font Cohost PLUS!

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Gravis made a post a few weeks ago (that I can't find now lmao) that explained how GIMP separating the Save (which saves to native XCF format) and Export (which saves to JPEG, PNG, et cetera) functions and then not providing hints to the user that they've opened the wrong dialog is user hostile, could have been avoided, and could easily be fixed now.

I woke up my Windows 10 machine and Microsoft Outlook got stuck repeatedly asking for the password to my Microsoft Outlook email account. The one Microsoft provides. That is specially supported in Outlook. The account type that should always be working because Microsoft made Outlook. That Outlook account. Kuzco's poison.

Anyway, I went to sign out and back in. When you do this Outlook wants to be restarted. OK, fine... It shows a little yellow banner at the top of the screen telling you so. In every other program that shows a little banner at the top of the screen asking you to do something, you can click it and it does it. So I clicked it.

It opened the support website in Firefox (THIS button respects your default browser?!) and explained to me why I should restart Outlook. Outlook is begging and pleading me to be restarted. It cannot restart itself. I already clicked a button that showed intent to restart. Just restart. Why can't you restart? You restart yourself for major feature minor security updates all the time. Please restart.


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in reply to @lapisnev's post:

I spent a few years working tech support for companies, and fixing outlook issues was always under my purview.

It's possibly the most over-engineered piece of software for what it needs to do I've ever seen. It's amazing how many ways it can break.

i did not see this 9 months ago but i've just seen it now, so: the reason this happens is because microsoft decided to get on the fucking SSO train, one of the worst antipatterns in computing history. you probably know what it is but, at my last job i saw about 20 different implementations of it, and every single one had the same problem: any time something triggers an authentication dialog, the host app SCREEEEEEEEECHES to a halt, throws its hands up, and will not speak to the user again until the SSO server comes back and gives it the thumbs up.

naturally the way 100% of app devs handle this is to treat that exchange as a complete black box, treat all non-success responses as an implicit 'the user entered the wrong creds', and then refuse to test it in any way because "well that's not our thing so it's none of our business." the auth routine goes into a tight loop: it does testForAuth(), that method checks and goes "oh you have SSO," calls GetSSOAuth(), and when that returns false, the loop just goes testForAuth() again and you can never escape it.

obviously it's completely fucking stupid for outlook to treat it's own goddamn! server as a "single sign on provider," but of course, we have to remember that Azure SSO is a "product", it was a "launch", it was "released", people "care" that it "exists", and thus the outlook team was told "no, fuck you, we don't care that you already have fully refined code for handling this, you have to rip it all out and replace it with our emptyheaded GetSSOAuth() routine" and the outlook team responded by sighing, slamming it into the app in the simplest way possible, and then going home and getting drunk

never forget that capitalism isn't working for anyone. not even the people driving the train like where it's going.