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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for December 15th, 2022

Solved: trouble trying to create a new Microsoft Account looping back to the image/audio puzzle after solving it. Solution: use Firefox.

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/12/15

Message: "Please solve the puzzle so we know you're not a robot."I had trouble creating a Microsoft Account (so I could hand out on-line Office Licenses to users) where each time after solving the image or audio puzzle, it would shortly display a success, then loop back to the puzzle.

So I wrote a [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App as I got stuck even before trying to add a Microsoft Account on any on m’y devices Windows 11 or Windows 10. It started with

[Wayback/Archive] Hi @MicrosoftHelps, I have a different problem. When creating an account using Edge on Windows 10 (latest version of both; no plugins; Microsoft Defender in default settings), solving the puzzle loops back to “Please solve the puzzle so we know you’re not a robot.”

The odd thing is that it did not work in either Edge or Chrome (both based on Chromium which uses the Blink browser engine) even in the anonymous/private browsing mode (InPrivate for Edge or Incognito Mode for Chrome).

Even Firefox had trouble, despite it being based on a totally different Gecko browser engine: after solving the puzzle it would continue but instead of displaying success, it showed an error page (the error page also occurred in the Firefox Private Browsing mode):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Office, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

xahteiwi.eu – Meaningless Metrics, Treacherous Targets

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/12/15

Food for thought:

[Wayback] xahteiwi.eu – Meaningless Metrics, Treacherous Targets

A common feature of organizations in the software technology industry (but certainly not only in that industry) is their fixation on metrics, measurements, and quantifiers. I understand that this is frequently done and advocated for in the spirit of making management more objective, less arbitrary, more scientific, and perhaps fairer. But since they say that the road to hell is often paved with good intentions, here’s a quick summary of what we know about about the undesirable side effects of such an approach.

Basically, when the metric becomes the goal, it will not reliably measure the underlying figures any more.

By [Archive] Florian Haas on Twitter: “I wrote something long-ish on metrics over the weekend. I’m pretty certain this won’t go unchallenged, as people tend to have strong opinions on this. 🙂 “.

Via [Archive] Kristian Köhntopp on Twitter: “In writing this, @xahteiwi had probably done more for the advancement of SRE as a practice than one hundred conference talks could do. Thanks for that.… “.

–jeroen

Posted in About, Agile, Development, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

 
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