I FINALLY DID IT!! I landed a job!! I'm going to be a firmware engineer!! Woohoo!! 😁
It only took half a year, but I finally got one, and purely off my own merit. It feels damn good when you get the job with no references or connections, just your own skills.
After a highly successful on-site technical/whiteboard interview, I was 90% confident I'd get it. The fact that my job search is finally over, is such a fucking relief. Good riddance to endless interview prep, applications & rejections.
I start on Monday. Goodbye freedom >.<

The Raspberry Pi is the most fun toy I've bought in ages. And this is coming from a guy who has 700+ games in his steam library, with dozens of midi equipment lying around.

DAMN IT JUST SEND ME SOME FLOWERS

Started a new job yesterday, and rather than making my partner work to pick up hints I have said explicitly a few times that I want him to send me flowers at work, because

1) Yay flowers!
2) Displays dominance over other women at work because it demonstrates I have a caring partner
3) Did I mention pretty flowers?
4) Let's the dudes at work know I'm in a relationship so that means we can all just focus on being colleagues

FFS I even sent a link to a site that does local same day delivery for no extra charge, and pointed out the three bouquet styles I like best. So easy.

But he has yet to send me any.

And as I'm filling out the W-4, learning that I have to pay an extra $10k in taxes, because we eloped a week ago and apparently that's what happens when two high earners file jointly and it's making me want to rant because THE COST OF FLOWERS IS INSIGNIFICANT TO MY TAX BURDEN SO SEND ME THE DAMN FLOWERS.

(and yes technically it's "our" tax burden and yes the money spent on a bouquet would only add to our shared house expenses but I don't care; I'm generally anti flower but there's a time and a place and this is the time and the place)

And if he sends them late in the week, a significant portion of their prime blooming time will be during the weekend which is just wasteful so ugh.

</rant>

tl;dr read the whole thing you lazy goat-molesting arse.

People. It's unpopular opinion time!
Windows is brilliant.
There. I said it.

Why? Because it has the balance of user-friendliness and customisability that is great for most workloads. Its enormous user- and developer- base allow almost anything you want to be done on it.

For instance, a few years ago I hooked up a MIDI synth pad to my PC and found an obscure program to use MIDI events as macros. I did not have to write any code, compile anything or any crap like that. (If you're a developer then you'll have no problem with that kind of thing, but not everyone's an über-technical nerd like you. Deal with it.)

I don't like Windows. But it's still brilliant for most people. All you Linux fan- boys/girls/helicopters are right to advocate it, but it will never expand its market share to more than the percentage of people who are developers, (unless it turns into a corporate enterprise (which it probably won't)). It has its flaws, but most of them will never affect the average end user. OK? Thanks.

Anti-rant, finally gota PHPhant as a 'pet'. <3 LOL. Going to replace my trusted rubberduck companion with this.

!rant

So, I imagine this little prank is about as old as graphical OS interfaces, but anyways.. Now and then I will take a screenshot of someone's desktop, set that image as their wallpaper, then hide all their icons, make their taskbar (or plural for Linux) to the smallest possible size, and wait for them to try use their PC.

One day a few years back, I tried to catch my mom with this trick, but although it was still pretty epic, it did not happen quite as I expected.

Suffice to say with her knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, she actually used her laptop for about an hour before she noticed none of the taskbar buttons were working.

Yay for trying to prank people who actually know how to use a computer. Lol.

#rant

Instead of receiving a motivation in 2018, my boss decided to go anti mainstream and started with demotivation speech.

He started with how good we were last year even when he wasn't around. Well done team! But after that, it went downhill.

We were asked to work even harder, we got new policy (no unpaid leave, no paid overtime, minimum 40 hours working, etc) which some of them make sense and some don't, a specifically set break time (apparently to shut down smokers for smoking at random times), and warning for not being punctual.

And pay rise only after end of financial year.

To make it worse, we are not allowed to take naps or watch youtube on our desk on our breaks.

I seriously wonder what happened during his Christmas NY break. I'm not an entrepreneur so I have no idea if that is a right way to run a company or if Australia government just created new law. But surely I know this is when I say "New year, new company"

Suddenly, alot of anti MacOS rant has appeared!
I Love it

!!anti-rant

Between this amazing community and Commit Strip I feel so much better about the failures I have. At first I was sure I want just terrible at my job but knowing everyone comes across errors and messes up, it's made me fall in love with developing again.

Thank you all!

!rant For my uni project I have been developing a anti ransom-ware price of software which had a main purpose of damage limitation/containment in a business environment.

Some course mates were critising it saying yeah when is ransom ware ever really looked at these days, (they developed a chat app), then the news struck about the Nhs hack and now my Lecturer can't get enough of the project and suddenly the marks for real world application seem to be in my favour 🤘

Again not a rant, just a nice feeling after spending so long on my work.

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

!rant

Symantec anti virus flagged Windows Defender Definition as untrustworthy lol

Anti Rant: Is it just me or are Google Play app updates rolling out really fast... Like i have published some updates recently and they have been live in under 10 mins.

Looks like Google got their act together!

Me: IE7 sucks and should no more be supported in 2018.
Dev: NO IE7 IS THE BEST BROWSER EVER IN THE UNIVERSE FUCK YOU!!
Same Dev in another Rant: Fuck I hate IE and Microsoft!!!

One question guys: what's up with always trying to find a way to be anti, no matter what? Even if what you defend totally opposes your view. Is this something like a new trend or is this like the new cool now?

So recently I did a lot of research into the internals of Computers and CPUs.
And i'd like to share a result of mine.

First of all, take some time to look at the code down below. You see two assembler codes and two command lines.

The Assembler code is designed to test how the instructions "enter" and "leave" compare to manually doing what they are shortened to.

Enter and leave create a new Stackframe: this means, that they create a new temporary stack. The stack is where local variables are put to by the compiler. On the right side, you can see how I create my own stack by using

push rbp
mov rbp, rsp
sub rsp, 0

(I won't get into details behind why that works).

Okay. Why is this even relevant?
Well: there is the assumption that enter and leave are very slow. This is due to raw numbers:
In some paper I saw ( I couldn't find the link, i'm sorry), enter was said to use up 12 CPU cycles, while the manual stacking would require 3 (push + mov + sub => 1 + 1 + 1).

When I compile an empty function, I get pretty much what you'd expect just from the raw numbers of CPU cycles.

HOWEVER, then I add the dummy code in the middle:

mov eax, 123
add eax, 123543
mov ebx, 234
div ebx

and magically - both sides have the same result.

Why????

For one thing, there is CPU prefetching. This is the CPU loading in ram before its done executing the current instruction (this is how anti-debugger code works, btw. Might make another rant on that). Then there is the fact that the CPU usually starts work on the next instruction while the current instruction is processing IFF the register currently involved isnt involved in the next instruction (that would cause a lot of synchronisation problems). Now notice, that the CPU can't do any of that when manually entering and leaving. It can only start doing the mov eax, 1234 while performing the sub rsp, 0.

----------------

NOW: notice that the code on the right didn't take any precautions like making sure that the stack is big enough. If you sub too much stack at once, the stack will be exhausted, thats what we call a stack overflow. enter implements checks for that, and emits an interrupt if there is a SO (take this with a grain of salt, I couldn't find a resource backing this up). There are another type of checks I don't fully get (stack level checks) so I'd rather not make a fool of myself by writing about them.

Because of all those reasons I think that compilers should start using enter and leave again.

========

This post showed very well that bare numbers can often mislead.

anti-rant incoming:
a big thanks to dfox and trogus for making this app, and ofc to the wonderfully whacky and awesome community here!
My job situation has been difficult lately, and this app helped me tremendously with coping.
So: thanks everyone!
// anti rant over, enjoy your day! ( or don't, who am I to tell you what to do) 🙃

It's a Friday morning I'm tired as hell after a hard week. trying to plough through all my work earphones in, music really loud. Sales guy in the office tries to talk to me i didn't hear him as my earphones were in he then says "you need to turn your music down or turn it off if you can't hear us" he said this in this serious tone. *music gets louder* to drown his noise out.

"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
-Bjarne Stroustrup

If someone complains about a framework, or language, or OS, or device, it means it is at least worth using enough to discover its flaws.
In a world of imperfection and chaos, isn't that enough?

Rant on anti devs.

I helped my friend crack a fairly simple hackerank. The questionnaire was basic JavaScript questions and little on CSS selectors nth child. The test is finished in half hour instead of 75 mins.

5 months later. He calls again and ask if he can get the question solutions (code snippets). I didn't have those but curious why he needed it. He says he wants to put that solutions to Github. So would look on resume. This is not even a project just code snippet with a for loop. He just wants any codebase to upload to his profile.

My ears are bleeding. It makes me sad that some people had to do Masters in computer science purely out of societal pressure. Just because software development is booming field a lot of folks who are not genuinely interested in development are being forced into the industry.

antirant:

IT FREAKIN' WORKS!

love when that happens.
dont breathe too hard.
have a nice day.

Personal update:
So i have been to psychiatrist few days ago. I got a prescription for anti depression drugs and today is the 4th day of my therapy. I feel a bit better. At least i can sleep can focus on things. Unfourtanetly mentaly i dont feel better. That rant that i wrote before didnt help me neither (i deleted it). That drug that im taking has a shit ton of possible side effects uncluding anger. My massive untrust to people dosent help neither.

To anybody who didnt read the previous rant. I have meet a classmate that had a idea for a android app. I have fought he is one of that bad, stupid kind. I was wrong i said bad things to him but eventualy i helped him by showing where he can get help with the app.

I shouldnt have responded to him in the first place. Now i feel bad. I have no idea how you are going to respond im scared. I prejudged him but im now sorry. I have no idea how my life is going to go.

I also have tried applying for a awesome C# internship, perfect for a student: paid and might get experience in C#. I have send them 2 emails on the address that they gave me during open days (where i had talked with HR and devs personaly about their job) and i got no responce since last month...

Finals for the first semester are closing in as well. I dont know if im going to pass or not. And that is the worst thing i have to worry about now.

Anti-rant: I love my text editors and ide's: sublime, brackets, pycharm. Nano. What do you use?

What the f*ck Microsoft, you made me go trough whole shitton of troubles just to play a music into microphone so I can play music in VRChat while pulseaudio in Linux can redirect the audio without any hassle. You total piece of shit!

Our PM just send a mail to our team, that after testing the latest extension we made to the project, he could not find a single issue or bug (usually there are some minor UI problems or some edge case bugs we did not think about or know existed)
and what a incredibly great job we did, and he also forwarded the mail to all our managers up the hierarchy right under the CEO.
The appreciation is a nice change to the self-hatred I feel while coding

An anti-rant: I just made some code and out of nowhere it suddenly had an awesome feature that I didn't even program. No, not a euphemism for "bug", an actual feature.

Here's the story: A few months ago I made a shortcut for "System.out.println(…)" called "print(…)". Then I developed it further to also print arrays as "[1,2,3]", lists as "{1,2,3}", work with nested arrays and lists and accept multiple arguments.
Today I wanted to expand the list printing feature, which previously only worked for ArrayLists, to all types of List. That caused a few problems, but eventually I got it to work. Then I also wanted to expand it to all instances of Collection. As a first step, I replaced the two references to "List" with "Collection" and magically, no error message. So I tested it with this code:

HashMap<Integer, String> map = new HashMap<>();
map.put(1, "1");
map.put(2, "");
map.put(3, "a");
print(map);

And magic happened! The output was:

{1=1, 2=, 3=a}

That's awesome! I didn't even think yet about how I wanted to display key-value pairs, but Java already gave me the perfect solution. Now the next puzzle is where the space after the comma comes from, because I didn't program that in either.

I feel a bit like a character in "The subtle knife", who writes a barebones program to communicate with sentient elementary particles (believe me, it makes sense in context) and suddenly there's text alignment on the left and right, without that character having programmed any alignment.

This is an anti-rant...

I had a problematic arch-dwm setup which i've been struggling with for a looong time, and when i thought i still needed quite some time to solve all issues, yesterday i somehow managed to hit the right solutions for each problem in a single evening. My setup is now in its most stable and usable state ever, and rsynced to a flash drive. I am no longer forced to use windows for my daily needs.

Praise be to holy gnu and holy tux! Do you think maybe i should sacrifice some electronics for the souls of st. ritchie, st. thompson, st. stallman and st. torvalds?

You know it's a damn good day at work when you show up and they tell you to go break into the sheriff's department computers.

Windows got upgraded to creators update.

Ever since it has updated, the battery life has decreased drastically, laptop used to last around 8.5 hours of daily usage, now its down to 3.

WTF, man.

I know surface has got its pro's, but shit, 5 hours of battery loss is no joke and certainly a big task to achieve.

Not a rant, I need advice on something.

There is this game that I used to play as a kid, a PC game. It's an indie game, very unpopular, but I really liked it back then and I think it would probably be successful on the mobile platform.

So, I tried to contact the guy who made it to ask him if he would make a mobile version but had no success, he didn't reply the email and I couldn't find him anywhere else (twitter, facebook, linkedin). I found a github page with his name but his last contribution was in feb/2015.

The game is REALLY old, the installer executable dates 2004.

So I was thinking that perhaps I could remake the game myself and launch it, maybe with different levels, etc, but giving credits to the guy who originally made it. And I'd include ads somewhere to get a little income for myself.

Question is, would it be anti-ethical of me to do it? I mean, the guy who made the game doesn't seems to care for it anymore since there were no more mentions of it anywhere, and the last version is 1.01.

I just wanted advice from you guys, I'd be really glad to see the game running on mobile because it was a fun part of my childhood.

Slight rant.

Guys which fucken anti-virus do you recommend for free, which doesn't throw around with ads like crazy?😵

I know this might kinda start a war and some of you want me to use linux.
Sadly, win10 is a must.😛

Girlfriend managed to catch some encryption fuck-up..
I made her use sophos home before, but it seems like sophos isn't self-acting enough..

I hope you have some ideas..

!rant

Showing a php and dual-boot guy the anti-php and anti-window posts might be an intentional algorithm. We never know. 💀

!rant

Is there any alternative to socket.io that doesn't need to expose a server ip directly to any client, needing to set up a full nginx anti ddos/auth config and more?

There is the live-ajax way that requests progress, but it feels more like a hack each time. (especially if the site should be able to handle multiple tabs with different progress)

I thought maybe some framework has live requests inbuilt to update content from a server worker model. (without exposing the server ip)

Anti rant

When u hit ur 16hrs a day of work and you feel satisfied.

Long image, but worth it...

ahh . . . now THIS is how you Friday!

I dunno if this is a rant or an anti-rant, but for some reason, Assembly and low-level development hardly ever tick me off. It absolutely dumbfounds me how what many regard as the most frustrating and difficult ways of programming a binary digital computers is just so enjoyable. I spend hours per day teaching myself C and GNU Assembly and how it works with little actually getting done. It just rarely gets frustrating enough to rant about. Ladies and gentlemen I think I have found my calling!

I feel that sometimes using the principles of DRY is just overkill and serves as an incubator for over engineering something that could be really simple. Something's are just going to be used once and never again...

This is not a anti structure rant just a thought.

The sense of coolness when learning a new technology and after a while you get the thing done you wanted to use this new tech for 😁

I saw a rant/post yesterday about a helpful website for designpatterns, anti patterns etc. The problem is, I can't find the link now. FML.
Can anyone help please?

The new dev wants to be my best friend. I already have one.