Lazy. Lazy. LAZY!

I hate the combination of lazy and stupid. You don't have to be especially bright but at least don't combine stupidity with laziness, otherwise you're just useless and a burden to anyone you work with. I don't know what frontend thinks their scope of work is but I'm tired of these people acting like users saying shit like, "Oh no, backend threw an error. Oh no, there is an error."

Just because backend threw an error doesn't mean backend has to change shit on their side. Also, I don't have to debug this shit before you even check the request you're sending. I can't write code to read your mind or guess what you're trying to do. If it's not in the request, it's not in the fucking request. If the request is wrong, the request is fucking wrong. Every time I check these errors, I don't find anything wrong with the backend code. It's always when I test through the user interface that I find out you're sending the wrong request. It's either something is there that shouldn't be there or vice versa.

But that's just too much work for you, isn't it? The next time you report anything, I'll just look to confirm it's not a backend problem and not respond to you or give you my findings. I'm tired of telling you to check the request 'cause even when you look at it, you can't seem to use basic logic on how anything in it can be wrong. It's right fucking there, man.

"I click button, button is pressed, uuuhhh, frontend OK. Backend not." *drools and scratches balls*

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

It’s actually pretty neat. I constantly suffer from impostor syndrome, so I always have keep learning to keep up the facade.

i’m so tired of people who are developers that go to every new popular social media platform and try to teach others to code. god fucking dammit. what could possibly going through these people’s minds? do they really think people who want to learn to code think “i want to learn to code so bad. i should scroll mindlessly through instagram/tiktok until i find someone teaching how to code”?

god, if you’d ever uploaded code to tiktok or instagram to teach others to code, you’re a fucking idiot.

About three weeks ago, I was fed up with the stinking resource hogging pile of moribund horse shit that is Visual Studio, fuck you a million times up the ass, so I began looking at alternatives.

And then last week I realized I actually fucking hate every single IDE I've ever tried, so let's just get mingw and batch the SHIT out of everything. Time to further embrace my inner console rat.

Ah, but much as I love batch scripts, a lot of this would be much easier if I could code it in python. Well, wait a mother fucking minute, I actually CAN do just that. Let's make a module and call it from the terminal, and if I need to do anything in C or C++ I already know how to call an exe or dll from py so it's not a problem at all.

I know people who would call this a futile attempt at reinventing the wheel, but guess what? I'm now sitting on a system that automates all of my shit exactly the way I want it to, no extra steps, and no goblin up every last fucking byte of RAM. Goddammit, I should've done this years ago.

What are the cons? Eh, there's hardcoded folder structure rules so that I don't have to go insane just to read a fucking project. Also it's just you and the terminal, and all the commands are in a language you've never even fucking heard of because I invented it. Then the only one that actually bothers me, it only works on fucking windows so I'll have to write a GNU version at some point. But what the heck, right? It's for ME. CUSTOM TAILORED. PERSONAL USE ONLY.

Not gonna lie, I feel like I coded the fucking cure for cancer. This shit does away with nearly every last annoyance I had to put up with for years of my life, the setup is easy as all fuck, and I did it with my brains and some blog reads. Some nastier bits where frustrating to write yeah, but it's all been well worth it.

I'm now off to drinking a beer and waving my prick around to celebrate this meager achievent.

Am I weird for not liking Whiskey?

It just kinda tastes... bad. Everybody is taking about notes of vanilla, undertones of strawberry, BITCH where. It tastes like weird with alcohol. And the alcohol part isn't really the problem. I'd much rather drink straight up vodka. Yes it tastes like drain cleaner but at least it doesn't have this weird ass taste to it. I actually quite like vodka. I just don't get whiskey

How most people really learn

NEVER maintain multiple release branches as a maintainer, period.

Given enough PRs, nobody, not even god-tier maintainers, is able to keep track of all commits and the whole context/story behind it.

Remember that people ALWAYS PR against your master and nobody even cares about your whatever-named-next-branch buried deep inside your feature branches.

Please make it easy for others if you want actual contributions.

What do you do when you are bored?
Normal People: I watch some movie while eating some food.
Haxk20: I mainline phones B)

(Yes i was bored and mainlined another phone :) )

Boss is boss.

Switched to a light theme, made everything pink, and picked out a very motivational wallpaper:)

We have an API which returns 600 MB of JSON.

Because client "Wants to see everything first and then apply filters, just like Excel".

FML
Edit and ofc thier laptops with core i3 and 4GB of ram can't even process that.

web components are the best components

If all the 24 years of my life have taught me anything, it’s that I am not at all good at time management.

That’s why I am always stressed. And I hate that I just can’t seem to make it better. Short motivational bursts are good, but I need a permanent solution!

Why would I strive to be productive if 90% of my work consists of me waiting for approvals, access, credentials, attending meetings about meetings?

When someone asks a group question on Slack along the lines of "Did anyone...?" I sometimes respond with

!me

meaning, NOT me. But, then I realized old admins like myself sometimes call a ! a "bang" so

!me

becomes "bang me"

which could get me into trouble with HR

Should a CTO be responsible for the technological vision and strategy, and know what the product architecture and infrastructure looks like?

We currently have a person as a CTO who seems to have none of this handled, and instead he seems to rely on senior developers, and ops people, to provide the information, including vision for the future. These people can't effectively do anything to drive the product in that direction, because other people are responsible for resources and prioritization.

So in my org, as far as I can see, senior engineers and normal engineers do about the same amount of work, and the senior engineer is useful at PBRs for bringing up tech points that other engineers might not know about due to lack of experience. Is this a common thing across the whole software business? In terms of responsibilities, I’m seeing pretty much the same amount, don’t wanna sound arrogant here but we never task work etc based on seniority which I like but just want to know if it’s common

Why the hell does it take twice as long to compile my software project under MSVC and Windows 10 compared to a GCC on a Linux *virtual machine* running inside the same Windows 10?!?

daily random fact...