I know they said they were doing work from 17th to 22nd July, but I still can’t log in. It just errors and throws me out. What a total frickin’ disaster. Who would use Salesfrickinforce for a tech community 
Anybody else use it?
Or there is no plausible explanation for how bad it is.
So it’s working now for me, and hopefully others who were affected.
It’s weird, because I’ve only been signed up there for a couple of weeks, and I was reading announcements and discussions there about how bad the forum *used* to be, when it used some sort of Microsoft software, and how proud they were of the new Jive system, but then I gather Jive got bought out and its future was uncertain. However there seem to have been some issues with the latest move, and I think being ‘offline’ for 5 days is, well, it’s a pretty rough switchover I’d say (actually, there was just a small announcement at the top about being under maintenance between 17th to 22nd July, during which time it would refuse to accept your password), followed by certificate errors towards the end of the 5 days, and since then, I’ve had this single-sign-on failure, which they’ve just fixed for me by updating my record somehow.
Or there is no plausible explanation for how bad it is.
Yep
ST is probably very much like Microchip: software challenged.
I once observed a discussion by a few ST software guys who complained about how complex and difficult it is for them to get it going on ESP8266. The same guy bragged about his vital role in writing ST’s standard peripheral library – it must have been the I2C module, I suppose, 
To see how a large corporation can fail so miserably on such an important element of its product chain is simply amazing.
Atollic TrueStudio
and now TouchGFX!
I just bought a Chinese designed and made, Android head-unit, (Rockchip PX5) , for my car (to replace the very dated Radio / CD changer unit), and I found out the head unit uses a STM32F4x as its “MCU” which handles the interfacing between Android and the car.
(I’m not sure why they needed to use a F4x.. I think perhaps because it seems to do some audio processing)
The firmware doesn’t seem to be encrypted, so some enterprising people have been messing around with the audio processing tables – but I don’t have time to disassemble it and see what it does…
And I’ve noticed STM32’s in a lot of other products from China.
[dannyf – Thu Jul 26, 2018 2:02 pm] –
and how proud they were of the new Jive system
…To see how a large corporation can fail so miserably on such an important element of its product chain is simply amazing.
Not really for us ex-insiders that have worked and (managed) such initiatives. Large corporations manage from the ledger sheet; capital software, capital hardware, steady-state expenses, and initiative expenses. The employee coders are stuck in long-term business unit related initiatives where any change is laboriously discussed in never-ending meetings. Changes are tested in smaller test-groups, business units own roll-out schedule, and IT simply provides bill-back services. These environments are typically hosted on big-name hardware and separate hardware is provided for development, unit testing, system testing, pre-production, and production. Then there is also hardware allocated for disaster recovery. Change is slow, like evolution.
Separately identified initiatives that have a short development life are often thrown into the all-expense development category; that is, the software to be developed is not a capital expenditure even though the hardware platform may be capital. Often, the hosted environment are simply virtual machines running on IT owned hardware which is depreciated on a standard depreciation schedule. For these initiatives, contract programmers (often “preferred” vendor provided) do coding and they may be on-site or off in some distant part of the internet and managed virtually (Agile PM is often the methodology.)
The quality of the product developed by geographically distributed, non-employees can be of good quality or poor quality. Failure in the arena rarely ruins one’s career unless something goes massively wrong; a security issue or system hacked and data exposed. Otherwise, Directors of these project will summarize the failure as immature technologies, integration issues, non-capable middleware … the list of excuses is a long one. Bottomline is that some VP wanted something and communicated to a project director that s/he has a new project and a finite budget… go forth and make it happen.
A company as large as SM is expected to have an above average website and forums, but the reality is that such things are not central to selling silicon which is the real business. So a few developers do not get the answers they want or answers as timely as they expect. But developers from companies that could potentially generate millions of units of sales have “special inroads” into technical support: often support contracts or sometimes including onsite support resources to assist in working through difficult early designs and prototypes. These cross-company alliances tend to last a long time, so future projects using the same hardware and the same engineering teams tend to run smoother and issues become more of referring to past solutions.
Ray
I find the vendor forums that expect engineers to answer other engineers problems a serious shirking of responsibility. I guess it is a reasonable approach if you have a bunch of dopes like us asking stupid questions but actually spending very little money on the product. The official ST people on the forum who respond usually just say ‘I’ll let the team know this is a problem’. I don’t have experience getting support from them as a fortune 500 customer. However, I’d expect those people get a dedicated resource that answers any questions they have.
I find forums like stm32duino.com to be a much better venue for actually getting answers in spite of the fact that most of us know nothing
[Rick Kimball – Fri Jul 27, 2018 1:53 pm] –
Honestly, have you ever got an answer to a question you asked on the ST communities? The only reason I ever posted there was to submit errors with their software. And in all honestly, it takes years from the time you identify an issue until it is resolved. I’m still waiting for them to fix the problem I identified in 2015 and they said they would fix.I find the vendor forums that expect engineers to answer other engineers problems a serious shirking of responsibility. I guess it is a reasonable approach if you have a bunch of dopes like us asking stupid questions but actually spending very little money on the product. The official ST people on the forum who respond usually just say ‘I’ll let the team know this is a problem’. I don’t have experience getting support from them as a fortune 500 customer. However, I’d expect those people get a dedicated resource that answers any questions they have.
I find forums like stm32duino.com to be a much better venue for actually getting answers in spite of the fact that most of us know nothing
I got a good answer to a query about the GFXMMU LUT on the L4+ that’s used for non-square displays. You configure a LUT of ‘visible’ pixels, i.e. those which aren’t masked or chopped off to make the circular display. The GFXMMU then doesn’t store/utilise the FB ram in those areas – and returns dummy data when requested for anything from those areas. So it creates a screen shape mask in the framebuffer.
The guy gave me a good hint.. I knocked up a rough LUT as an octagon, rather than trying to understand proper maths.
[Rick Kimball – Fri Jul 27, 2018 2:13 pm] –
Well you are lucky then. Could it be that they guy had read the application note for this problem?
I already read the application note, which states that the panel manufacturer will supply the LUT. My question was whether the panel manufacturer really had to supply it.
That was not the point anyway.
Sadly, now that I’m logged in the forum site seems severely troubled. To me it is useless. For grins, I searched your problem with GFXMMU and found a link to your post. Of course now that they have switched their forum software all that great information is lost to history. It wasn’t cached on google and because the forum software urls are all different it is inaccessible. When will the web guys at these big companies get the fact that changing all your URL without providing a redirect is just dumb, especially for a forum you hope people will search before they ask.
[carl0s – Fri Jul 27, 2018 2:16 pm] –
That was not the point anyway.
I got your point. I guess I shouldn’t have diverted sorry.
[Rick Kimball – Fri Jul 27, 2018 2:22 pm] –[carl0s – Fri Jul 27, 2018 2:16 pm] –
That was not the point anyway.I got your point. I guess I shouldn’t have diverted sorry.
Well it’s the first and last lines of each row that it says the panel manufacturer supplies. I was at the point of counting pixels under the microscope. I was too tired to go back to school and learn about Pi stuff…
[Rick Kimball – Fri Jul 27, 2018 2:21 pm] –
On a related note, I had the same problem as you. Based on your successful result, I submitted a trouble ticket on my forum account and they actually fixed it. Thanks! I referenced your post here as my problem.Sadly, now that I’m logged in the forum site seems severely troubled. To me it is useless. For grins, I searched your problem with GFXMMU and found a link to your post. Of course now that they have switched their forum software all that great information is lost to history. It wasn’t cached on google and because the forum software urls are all different it is inaccessible. When will the web guys at these big companies get the fact that changing all your URL without providing a redirect is just dumb, especially for a forum you hope people will search before they ask.
Yeah it is pretty disastrous (for incoming links / search traffic)
That’s why they shouldn’t have used a proprietary system that could/would get bought out or have its license changed in the first place. Now they are in bed with another big corporate (Salesforce).
I logged in to the new community and when I found the actual discussion side of it (Q&A I think, rather than Commmunities, on the top nav bar), it looked OK. I was worried at first when I was seeing the mish-mash that is the Communities bit.
I see Clive answered your problem. ST should just pay him to answer questions
{edit} I was actually thinking of ‘Clive Turvey (Clive1)’ {/edit}
[Rick Kimball – Fri Jul 27, 2018 2:42 pm] –
I guess I’m not your normal ST forum user, I always found the ST forum search limiting, so in general I searched their forum using google and I was pretty happy. However, in this new forum I was able to find your post quickly using their built-in search feature. I guess I just need to switch gears and adapt to their new software.I see Clive answered your problem. ST should just pay him to answer questions
Yeah he does seem to be the no1 helper on there!!
I see the thread now too – it’s a bit weird – the posts aren’t in the correct order. the “it works!!” with photos should be after me saying “i’m going to try the octagon right now..”
[Rick Kimball – Fri Jul 27, 2018 3:00 pm] –
This podcast talking about the ST forum offers some good insight on how to become an ace at debugging your own problems like Clive 1
I’m gonna tune into that when I get home tonight
any ST employee thinking that thing should be used by ST holds gazillion NXP stock.
[Rick Kimball – Fri Jul 27, 2018 3:00 pm] –
This podcast talking about the ST forum offers some good insight on how to become an ace at debugging your own problems like Clive 1
1:12:00 onwards is a real eye opener huh 
[Rick Kimball – Sat Jul 28, 2018 1:29 am] –
They aren’t using MS Sharepoint any more. They used jive for a but. I don’t know what they are using now. This podcast is from 3 years ago.
It was sharepoint was it?
They’ve just moved to Salesforce communities. For at least a whole day (Sunday 22nd July) the site was presenting an invalid SSL certificate whose domain/subject names were *.salesforce.com and similar.
Can’t wait for Q4 2018.
when you open up the page, top 2/3 of the screen is for some non-critical information.
i hope ST gets paid loads of money to use this software.
vBulletin, phpBB, whatever else.
it’s a discussion forum. stick to basics. They’re all trying to get too clever with the community kudos aspect. Mind you the Asterisk forums are like that, but not so bad. They use Discourse, which is free and open source too.. https://community.asterisk.org/
take me back to the BBS days
telnet://bbs.masturbationstationbbs.com
