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Whou could be that cruel to his own blood?
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Two hours on the damn phone.
Paypal have sent me emails recently saying my bank rejected payment - at first I assumed they were phishing, but ...
No, paypal has been trying to get money from my account - genuinely, I've bought stuff - via the same method they have been doing for 10 years, a bank direct debit mandate. Only on some requests, they are saying the bank declined it.
So I contact the bank: nope, we have declined nothing, and there is no reason we should.
Paypal: Tbank declined.
Bank: No we didn't.
Paypal: Yes they did. Here's the transaction IDs
Bank: News to us, we never saw 'em.
Paypal: Yes they did.
Bank: No, they never arrived here.
Paypal: Yes they did, and the bank declined them.
Me: Will you please talk to each other and sort this out?
Bank: No. Technical people can't be contacted by phone.
Paypal: No. And you still owe us £20.07.
Me: Fer elephants sake ...
Paypal: We ask 'em for it, they said no.
Bank: No They didn't.
Me: Oh FFS...
Result: I've cancelled the mandate, paid teh £20.07 directly, I'll set up a new one and hope that lot all works.
Why can't these companies have a technical level that can actually look at what is going on and sort them out?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: Why can't these companies have a technical level that can actually look at what is going on and sort them out?
Too much cost for too little benefit for them.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Don't get me started. The company I work decided to do MFA thanks to security issues raised, so I use a desktop machine hardwired internet connection and now have to prove that I work for the company I have to use MFA, problem 1) no direct dial phone number 2) no company mobile. So I have to use my own phone to authenticate I am an employee. See a problem?  A lot of it is due to not being able to find what has gone wrong, why do companies not let you talk to the people who can tell you what is wrong!!
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I suspect that some of it is "there is no-one who knows what is going on". There was someone, but he was downsized in favour of the new bunch who work cheaper (and are fully proficient in the QA and SO coding patterns)
Plus the inevitable "big company" ethos of "it wasn't us, must be them". It would help if you got to speak to the same person each time but that's a huge no-no...
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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As companies approach the size of government, they also approach their efficiency.
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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I suspect they are run by a bunch of Biggus Dickus[^]
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
modified 10-Dec-18 8:42am.
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I have never seen that clip... 
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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why not a credit or even visa/master debit card? Not hard to get these free from any bank you've been with for a while (and if you suspect anything dodgy banks are happy to issue new numbered card on request - avoiding scams is as good for the bank as it is for the customer)
Message Signature
(Click to edit ->)
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Because the expiry date changes every few years, and that means I have to update it. Which is the usual PITA "card confirmation" rubbish which always takes far too long. Set up the DD and it works until you cancel it. And has done for ten years!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: Why can't these companies have a technical level that can actually look at what is going on and sort them out?
Because I don't want PayPal to have access to my bank account, and I don't want my bank to have access to my PayPal account.
They can ask each other for money, but only with my permission, and they don't get to see more than the requests and the money being transferred.
If they were to attempt to access any more information than that, I would close the account that did so.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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So you can't buy happiness with paypal...
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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If you send me your account number and password I can probably get you all fixed up in a few minutes...
Socialism is the Axe Body Spray of political ideologies: It never does what it claims to do, but people too young to know better keep buying it anyway. (Glenn Reynolds)
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@User-12547300
You won on Friday, remember?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I look to left
I look to the right
I look wherever I might
My heart longs for thee
My darling CCC
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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Flickum Bickus
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Greetings. This is the first time I've ever posted here, so I supposed introductions are in order. The name is SawmillTurtle. Sawmill because I used to live on a street with that name, and Turtle because my friends used to say I look like Franklin the Turtle. I don't see the resemblance, but it makes for a good screen name.
For the past few months, I've been writing a program in C# for my landlord that keeps track of her rental properties, accounting and maintenance issues. It's an all-in-one kind of thing. I've been using SharpDevelop because of my intense hatred for any and all things Microsoft. I actively avoid using anything they make, so that means I don't use Visual Studio. A good alternative, some say, would be MonoDevelop but Microsoft owns that, too.
Up until I started on this project, I'd only tinkered with C# while playing with Unity. My IDE of choice was Game Maker because of the ease of use and the speed at which a program can be written using it. You can go ahead and laugh. It's funny. Game Maker is a good tool for learning programming concepts, but once you have it down it is really best to leave it behind you. I thought I could take everything that GM taught me and use it when I made the transition to C#.
Keep laughing. It's still pretty funny.
What I thought I knew going into this project and what I actually knew are two very different things. I've learned so much over the past few months. Looking back at the early sections of the code is like looking at a car with square wheels. Looking over it, I keep going, "Now why did I do that" and "What in the world was I thinking". One of my biggest mistakes-- and I just figured this one out yesterday-- was creating classes and then creating separate forms for those classes. It never occurred to me to make them one and the same.
Take this, for instance:
public void edit(BindingList h)
{
saved=false;
int i=-1;
HouseholdForm editHousehold;
editHousehold=new HouseholdForm(members,householdName,account,
rentOverride,overrideAmount,
dueDate,gracePeriod,penaltyAmount,penaltyDate);
foreach(HouseHold house in h)
if (house.householdName==householdName)
i=h.IndexOf(house);
editHousehold.setHouseholdList(i);
editHousehold.ShowDialog();
if(editHousehold.saveMe)
{
//members.Clear();
members=editHousehold.listOfMembers;
householdName=editHousehold.householdName;
rentOverride=editHousehold.overridedefaultRent;
overrideAmount=editHousehold.oRideAmount;
dueDate=editHousehold.dueDate;
penaltyDate=editHousehold.penaltyDate;
gracePeriod=editHousehold.gracePeriod;
//memberList=editHousehold.members;
saved=true;
}
}
What you are looking at is part of the "Household" class. What this does is take all the necessary variables and pass them as arguments to HouseholdForm. If the user clicks the "Save" button, it passes back "saveMe" as true, which makes the class retrieve the edited values from the form. Then it switches its own "saved" flag, which MainForm uses to determine if it needs to update something.
Do you see how stupid that is?
Would it not have been easier to build the "Household" class as PART of "HouseholdForm"? Then I wouldn't have had to pass a bunch of variables and then retrieve them. Chalk that one up to inexperience. I'm planning a major overhaul where I correct this error, but that is going to be a tedious process. Since the program is functional-- albeit sloppy-- the way it is, my priority is getting my landlord the program she's been waiting for. The first update will include the cleaned up code.
Going into this, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I've had to ask Google a LOT of questions, and most of those have pointed me to Stack Overflow. There have been days I've wanted to rip my hair out, and there have been days where I've had a lot of fun. Today was NOT one of the fun ones. I spent the better part of three hours trying to eliminate a bug that didn't seem to exist at the first, second, third... and hundredth glance.
I found it here, in this section of code:
foreach(bool paid in h.account.payment)
{
int ind=h.account.payment.IndexOf(paid);
double amount=h.account.amountOf[ind];
if (paid)
{
switch(h.account.typeOf[ind])
See, I was creating a DataGridView that displays all households that owe rent. The "HouseHolds" class has a class called "Account", which has several Binding Lists. Like this:
public BindingList<datetime> dateOf=new BindingList<datetime>();
public BindingList<double> amountOf=new BindingList<double>();
public BindingList<string> description=new BindingList<string>();
public BindingList<string> displayName=new BindingList<string>();
public BindingList<bool> payment=new BindingList<bool>();
These lists are all created, edited or erased at the same time. The "payment" Binding List is used to determine is someone OWES rent or is PAYING rent. So in the Switch statement at the top, I was using IndexOf and passing the number. It kept double or triple charging things. Sometimes it wouldn't charge them at all. I figured out that using IndexOf this way was wrong, because it was looking for the first Boolean value that it found in "amountOf" that matched what it received from "payment". Obviously, not a good idea. At one point, the program reported a household as owing over 1800 dollars in back rent. Oops.
So it's been an interesting journey. I think after I finish this, I'm going to try my hand at MonoGame. Eventually I'd like to work my way up to Unity. Maybe next time I'll actually be able to use it without having it go haywire.
First, though, I really need to figure out what casting is, because I have no idea what people are talking about when they mention that.
Thanks for listening.
Hope to talk to all of you very soon.
-Turtle
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If you hate all things microsoft then why are you using C#?
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... and Windows?
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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I can answer both questions at the same time:
My preferred operating system is Linux. Ubuntu, as a matter of fact.
However, she wants me to write a computer program, and it has to run on her OS of choice.
Trust me, if I had a choice, this computer would be wiped and Linux would be on it. Since it belongs to her, I'm stuck with it.
And if I'm writing a program that runs on Windows, what else would I use? I suppose I could use Visual Basic or Visual C++ but-- surprise! -- both Microsoft products.
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SawmillTurtle wrote: Visual C++
There's still some options:
- Java
- C++ (Qt as framework, for example)
Just saying 
I only have a signature in order to let @DalekDave follow my posts.
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SawmillTurtle wrote: And if I'm writing a program that runs on Windows, what else would I use?
I'd suggest Python. You can code it on Ubuntu and use Tk or similar for the UI.
Latest Article - A Concise Overview of Threads
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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