My girlfriends mom asked whether I could fix her coworkers laptop. She claimed that it had viruses installed and laptop is laggy..

So... I got that laptop just now, got home and turned it on. It doesn't have WiFi drivers installed and I do not have any free Ethernet cable right now.

About the lags... Well you won't believe how many custom tool bars and security programs there were. McAffe, AVG, ESET and some Russian made firewall which asks for license key every 5mins.

And she asked me to reinstall windows and keep every file of hers, and she didn't bother to point which files of 300gb of photos/videos/docs are worth keeping and which are not.. HDD is 300GB :A fuck me

P. S. Since it's my first rant I can say ranting helps a lot to calm down

7 am. Dog wants out. I roll out of bed after trying to pretend I am dead.

Walk down the stairs to the side door. Half asleep and notice that the door has daylight shining through on the lock side. Didn't shut it all the way the night before. Walk outside. Dog does his thing. Turn around. Doors locked.

Fuck.

Go for my phone. In the house. Go for my keys. In the house. Fuck. Fuck a duck.

Start checking my windows. One opens a fraction of an inch. Doesn't do me any good. Dog is outside with me. Freezing his ass off. It's like 5 degrees here.

Both of my neighbors don't answer their door. Life flashes before my eyes. Put my dog in my jacket to warm him up. Little 15lb rat terrier. Not made for snow.

He's fine for now. I grab a piece of rebar from my backyard and lever my window a bit more open, busting one of the locks.

And then I yell "ALEXA. OPEN THE FRONT DOOR." The voice of an angel responds. "OK." Whirrr. Click. Door opens. Sweet warmth.

I need a fake rock with a key under it.

Great Sunday.

And here comes the last part of my story so far.
After deploying the domain, configuring PCs, configuring the server, configuring the switch, installing software, checking that the correct settings have been applied, configuring MS Outlook (don't ask) and giving each and every user a d e t a i l e d tutorial on using the PC like a modern human and not as a Homo Erectus, I had to lock my door, put down my phone and disconnect the ship's announcement system's speaker in my room. The reasons?
- No one could use USB storage media, or any storage media. As per security policy I emailed and told them about.
- No one could use the ship's computers to connect to the internet. Again, as per policy.
- No one had any games on their Windows 10 Pro machines. As per policy.
- Everyone had to use a 10-character password, valid for 3 months, with certain restrictions. As per policy.
For reasons mentioned above, I had to (almost) blackmail the CO to draft an order enforcing those policies in writing (I know it's standard procedure for you, but for the military where I am it was a truly alien experience). Also, because I never trusted the users to actually backup their data locally, I had UrBackup clone their entire home folder, and a scheduled task execute a script storing them to the old online drive. Soon it became apparent why: (for every sysadmin this is routine, but this was my first experience)
- People kept deleting their files, whining to me to restore them
- People kept getting locked out because they kept entering their password WRONG for FIVE times IN a ROW because THEY had FORGOTTEN the CAPS lock KEY on. Had to enter three or four times during weekend for that.
- People kept whining about the no-USB policy, despite offering e-mail and shared folders.
The final straw was the updates. The CO insisted that I set the updates to manual because some PCs must not restart on their own. The problem is, some users barely ever checked. One particular user, when I asked him to check and do the updates, claimed he did that yesterday. Meanwhile, on the WSUS console: PC inactive for over 90 days.
I blocked the ship's phone when I got reassigned.
Phiew, finally I got all those off my chest! Thanks, guys. All of the rants so far remind me of one quote from Dave Barry:

Years ago I was an application developer at a medium sized corporation and was also responsible for support for an HR department. This occurred early one morning shortly after I arrived at work.

User: My app doesn't work.
Me: What's wrong with it?
User: I just get a blank screen.
Me: A blank screen? What happens when you hit a key?
User: Nothing.
Me: Do any apps work?
User: No, I just get a blank screen.
Me: Is your monitor on?
User: Yes, I turned it on.

This type of witty banter went on for several minutes when the answer suddenly hit me.

Me: Is your computer turned on?
User: Do I need to turn it on?
Me: Did you turn it off before you went home last night?
User: Yes.
Me: And do you normally turn it on in the morning when you come in?
User: Yes.
Me: Then why didn't you turn it on this morning when you came in?
User: I didn't know I needed to.

It was at this point I heard the programmer over the cubicle wall from me burst out laughing. He had been listening to the conversation and couldn't take it anymore.

The really sad part is that this was not an isolated incident. This kind of stuff occurred on a semi-regular basis with this individual's department.

Da Fuck!?!
Yesterday I found some abnormal activity on my server, someone was trying to brute force my ssh as root since two days! Started raging and installed fail2ban (which automatically bans an IP if it fails to log X times and eventually sends me an email). Woke up this morning to find that a fucking Chinese guy/malware spent the whole night trying to brute Force me!
Fucking cunt! Don't you have any better to do!!
My key is a 32 characters long encrypted key, with the ban he can try 3 passwords /2 hours, good luck brute forcing it you bitch!

Working with a radio chip we selected because it had built-in encryption. Cannot make the encryption work, thus in contact with the manufacturer:
"- I cannot make the encryption work, it's like the chip doesn't want to take a key.
- which key do you use?
- does it matter?
- well yes, you can't just use any key!
- why not?
- you need to get an approved key from us.
- why is that?
- so that your competitors can't read your data!
- ...
- ...
- so the way to get working keys is to get them from you?
- of course!
- keys are 256 bits. Can we potentially use all of them?
- OF COURSE NOT!
- how many can we get from you?
- one! We reserve it from your company.
- are you telling me that all units within a company will need to have the exact same encryption key?
- yes!
- so anyone with our product could eavesdrop another same product?
- well yes, but it's all within your own products.
- ...
- ...
- that's not how encryption is supposed to work.
- but it's safe, your competitors cannot eavesdrop!
- I'm out of here."
(We finally found a satisfactory work-around, but i am still pissed at them)

I work in a company where I'm the only developer, with everyone being designers or marketing or sales. Typically like the scene from Silicon Valley.

Moto was to create a ticket selling website for their products, and make sure they worked as well. It was all fine, until deadlines were discussed. They wanted it done within 2 weeks, the entire backend dashboard, API and front end.

I told them it's almost impossible to do it, but they insisted on it. So, I made a minimal dashboard and told them, I haven't completed a few things, such as if you edit data in one place, it won't reflect in other tables. So, be careful while editing the data.

They nodded their head for everything, yesterday was site launch and 2 hours before that one bastard decided to changed the product names to something "catchy" but failed to change the same in other places.

I had used the name as foreign key, so querying other DBs became a fuck all issue, and eventually API stopped giving any response to front end calls.

I got extremely pissed, and shouted at that dude, for fucking everything up. He said, you're the tech guy and you should've taken all this into account.

I sat and hardcoded all the data into database again, made sure site is live. Once it was live, these guys call a company meeting and fire me saying I was incompetent in handling the stressful situation.

At that moment, I lost my shit and blasted each of those people. The designer started crying since her absurd designs(though great) couldn't be realised in CSS that too within 2 weeks time.

One of the worst experience for working for a company. I could've taken the website down, and told them to buzz off if they'd called, I couldn't get myself to do it, hence ranting here.

I seriously feel, all these tech noob HRs need to get a primer course on how to deal with problems of a programmer before they get to hire one, most of these guys don't know what we're trying to tell in itself.

I find devRant to be the only place where I can get someone to understand the issues that I face, hence ranted.

TL;DR: Coded ticket selling site in 2 weeks. 3 hours to launch, data entry dude fucks up. I clean all the mess, get the site online. Get fired as soon as that happens.

Live long and prosper. Peace.

Storytime!

Manager: Hey fullstackchris, the maps widget on our app stopped working recently...

Dev: (Skeptical, little did he know) Sigh... probably didn't raise quota or something stupid... Logs on to google cloud console to check it out...

Google Dashboard: Your bill.... $5,197 (!!!!!!) Payment method declined (you think?!)

Dev: 😱 WTF!?!?!! (Calls managers) Uh, we have HUGE problem, charges for $5000+ in our google account, did you guys remove the quota limits or not see any limit reached warnings!?

Managers: Uh, we didn't even know that an API could cost money, besides, we never check that email account!

Dev: 🤦‍♂️ yeah obviously you get charged, especially when there have literally been millions of requests. Anyway, the bigger question is where or how our key got leaked. Somewhat started hammering one of the google APIs with one of our keys (Proceeds to hunt for usages of said API key in the codebase)

Dev: (sweating 😰) did I expose an API key somewhere? Man, I hope it's not my fault...

Terminal: grep results in, CMS codebase!

Dev: ah, what do we have here, app.config, seems fine.... wait, why did they expose it to a PUBLIC endpoint?!

Long story short:

The previous consulting goons put our Angular CMS JSON config on a publicly accessible endpoint.

WITH A GOOGLE MAPS API KEY.

JUST CHILLING IN PLAINTEXT.

Though I'm relieved it wasn't my fault, my faith in humanity is still somewhat diminished. 🤷‍♂️

Oh, and it's only Monday. 😎

Cheers!

The Orange Juice Saga ....

I've just come off one of the stupidest calls ever.

Firstly, I am not in tech support, I'm a software developer - read the below with this in mind.

My client called up to say the system I created as been compromised. When he attempts to login, he is logged off his Windows machine.

He'd also apparently taken his PC to ***insert large UK computer superstore here***, who took £100 plus to look at the machine and conclude his needs to buy a new PC.

I remoted into his computer to see WTF was going on.

As he described, visiting my login form did log you out. In fact, whenever you pressed the "L" key you were logged out. Press the "M" key, all windows were minimized. Basically, all Windows hotkeys appeared to be active, without the need to press the Windows key.

Whilst connected to his PC I spent a good 30 minutes checking keyboard settings and came up short.

After asking all the normal questions (has anything changed on your PC, have you installed stuff lately etc.) without any useful answers I got nothing.

I then came across an article stating several presses of the Windows in quick succession will solve the issue.

I got the client to try this, pressed the "L" key (which would have logged me off previously) and the issue was resolved.

Basically, the Windows key was "stuck", which oddly makes your PC kind of useless.

I asked the client if they'd split anything on the keyword whilst working. His exact word were simply lol:

"Oh yer, yesterday, I was trying to drink a glass of orange quickly and split some in the corner of keyboard. I did clean it up quickly though".

Yep, the issue was due to the client spilling orange juice on their keyboard , which in turn made the Windows key stick.

Disaster averted.

A call that started with the client stating I made a system that was easily compromised (i.e. my fault), morphed into a sorry saga of cold drinks.

The client did ask why the ***superstore name*** charged him money for that and recommended a new machine. That is a good question and demonstrated some the questionable tech support practices we see nowadays, even at very large stores.

To be fair to the client, he told me to bill him for half a days work as it was his own fault.

When I'm able to stop myself involuntarily face palming, I'm off for a swim to unwind :)

More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight.

Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well,” says God, “let us see if Jesus has fared any better.”

Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. He stutters, “B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?”

God chuckles, “Everybody knows… Jesus saves.”

My first experience with Swift ended in me infecting myself with a virus (kinda). I wanted to create a macOS app that would listen for a global key event, catch it and then type a word.

During development I set it up to listen for ANY key event and to type "BALLS". So what happened? I compiled the code, everything looked good, I started the app and pressed a key which emitted a key event. The event was caught by my app and it typed "BALLS", just as expected. However, the typing of the word caused a NEW key event to be emitted, which the app also caught. The infinite loop was a fact. FUCK!

I tried closing down XCode but all I could see was "BALLS BALLS BALLS" everywhere. I tried everything I knew but it just kept typing "BALLS". I had to hold down my power button to make it stop.

I finally finished the app (which I named "The Balls App", I kept the word "BALLS"). I solved this issue by only listening for KeyUp and when emitting the "BALLS" word I just used KeyDown.

Juniors are a fun bunch to work with.
Over confident, hero complex of that fresh graduate high, and then thrown in to the real world! Where there hopes and dreams are crushed in minutes when they see what monolithic applications really look like!!

But don't let that overwhelm you, your not going to be changing all of it any time soon, hell some of this code hasn't been touched in 5+ years and still works without fail.

Don't stress about the work load, you can only write 1 line of code at a time anyway, and hell, even seniors make mistakes.

The key about being able to manage this beast is simple, break it! Because the more you break it, the more you'll understand how a project is put together, for better or worse. Learn from the examples in front of you, and learn what not to do in the future 😎

But more importantly, plan your changes, whiteboard the high level logic of what it is you want to add, then whiteboard in the current codebase and determine where to slice this bitch up, then when it all looks well and good, take out your scalpel and slice and dice time.
Don't worry, your changes aren't going to production anytime soon, hell, you'll be lucky to get past the first pull request with this working 100% the first time, and that's a good thing, learn from tour short comings and improve your own knowledge for the next time!

Paypal Rant #3

One day I'll go to Paypal HQ and...
... change all the toilet rolls to face the wrong way
... remap all the semicolons to be the Greek equivalent character
... change all the door signs so they say "pull" instead of "push" and vice versa
... modify all the stairs to have variable heights
... programmatically shuffle the elevator buttons and randomly assign the alarm key to any of the most visited floors
... pour cocoa onto all the keyboards and wipe them off cleanly
... attach clear duct tape over their mouse sensors and insert really weak batteries or mess with their cables

I'll wait a day or two until they experience a sudden shortage of developers, then bombard them with thousands of fake applications from seemingly amazing candidates, then write an AI bot to continue argumentation with HR.

I'll wait another week or so until the company dissolves and with them, all my issues in life.

No need to be overly vulgar this time because you all know the deal. I hate this fucking company. Please Paypal do us all a favor and go fuck yourself.

Buckle up kids, this one gets saucy.

At work, we have a stress test machine that trests tensile, puncture and breaking strength for different materials used (wood construction). It had a controller software update that was supposed to be installed. I was called into the office because the folks there were unable to install it, they told me the executable just crashed, and wanted me to take a look as I am the most tech-savvy person there.

I go to the computer and open up the firmware download folder. I see a couple folders, some random VBScript file, and Installation.txt. I open the TXT, and find the first round of bullshit.

"Do not run the installer executable directly as it will not work. Run install.vbs instead."

Now, excuse me for a moment, but what kind of dick-cheese-sniffing cockmonger has end users run VBScript files to install something in 2018?! Shame I didn't think of opening it up and examining it for myself to find out what that piece of boiled dogshit did.

I suspend my cringe and run it, and lo and behold, it installs. I open the program and am faced with entering a license key. I'm given the key by the folks at the office, but quickly conclude no ways of entering it work. I reboot the program and there is an autofilled key I didn't notice previously. Whatever, I think, and hit OK.

The program starts fine, and I try with the login they had previously used. Now it doesn't work for some reason. I try it several times to no avail. Then I check the network inspector and notice that when I hit login, no network activity happens in the program, so I conclude the check must be local against some database.

I browse to the program installation directory for clues. Then I see a folder called "Databases".

"This can't be this easy", I think to myself, expecting to find some kind of JSON or something inside that I can crawl for clues. I open the folder and find something much worse. Oh, so much worse.

I find <SOFTWARE NAME>.accdb in the folder. At this point cold sweat is already running down my back at the sheer thought of using Microsoft Access for any program, but curiosity takes over and I open it anyway.

I find the database for the entire program inside. I also notice at this point that I have read/write access to the database, another thing that sent my alarm bells ringing like St. Pauls cathedral. Then I notice a table called "tUser" in the left panel.

Fearing the worst, I click over and find... And you knew it was coming...

Usernames and passwords in plain text.

Not only that, they're all in the format "admin - admin", "user - user", "tester - tester".

I suspend my will to die, login to the program and re-add the account they used previously. I leave the office and inform the peeps that the program works as intended again.

I wish I was making this shit up, but I really am not. What is the fucking point of having a login system at all when your users can just open the database with a program that nowadays comes bundled with every Windows install and easily read the logins? It's not even like the data structure is confusing like minified JSON or something, it's literally a spreadsheet in a program that a trained monkey could read.

God bless them and Satan condemn the developers of this fuckawful program.

It goes like this.
I have one final task to solve before starting in a new job at a different company. This guy, which is also a board member in the company in which I'm currently hired, is also an IT consultant and project manager in a fairly large company. This said person is also a key person for me being able to solve this last issue. I send him a complete guide on what he has to do before I can move on and wrap it all up.
First conflict arises because he doesn't follow the guide and tells me something is not working. I kindly inform him why and the response I get is very personal and not kind in any way, telling me and my boss that I am bad at my job and that he will bill us for 1000 USD for the 5 hours he used "debugging" and testing. This should have taken him 30 minutes and I have no idea what he spent those 5 hours doing.
It comes down to that my boss sides with this asshole and tells me that I have to do the task all over and test the system for the 4th time (yes I tested it 3 times beforehand to make sure nothing could go wrong) What my boss and the asshole doesn't know is that my uncle is vice president in the firm the asshole is working for. After kindly reminding this asshat that he has to follow the guide and that I can confirm everything is working, he keeps on attacking me. It's very rare that I fuck up and I have consulted 2 colleagues and got them to test it as well. They found no issues at all. The asshole ignored my request of documentation that something was not working.
I'm so full of being treated as an idiot so I send my uncle the email correspondence with the asshole to confirm that this is not how any of their employees should behave independant of my ability to do my job.
He will speak with this fucker tomorrow at work as first thing in the morning. I'm not proud of the way I went about this, but that was like the last drop, if you know what I mean.
Sorry for the long rant.

With all the people showing off their setup and input devices i thought it's time to show you my keyboard...

Key features:
- mechanical keys
- sturdy af; best for ranting (survived more angry fist strokes than any device should ever receive)
- older than me and outlived 5 (!) mice
- awesome retro look
- would beat a nokia in hunger games
- best code buddy ever (and propably oldest, too)

Hope i'll be able to continue coding on it another 20 years... Someday i may gift it to my grandchildren.

Keyboard not found. Press any key to continue.

How my keyboard evolves:

0. Like any normal man, I started with a cheap standard Qwerty keyboard. As I began learning programming, I wanted something more elegant, so...

1. I've been using layout Dvorak (and then Programmer Dvorak) for like 5 years+ now. Anyone has intention to type on my machine soon gives up or even is blocked by me from the very start. It always takes a couple of minutes to explain to them what's going on here. They think I'm weird. I feel untouchable :)

2. My first mechkey was a 104-key Filco. Time flew by and I wanted my thing to be more compact so I went for a 66% and a TKL.

3. Recently I find out that though my keyboard is not a full-sized, there're yet some keys I've never touched (the bottom right modifiers, scroll lock, etc), so I look for a leaner one: HHKB and its alike but with slight remappings. Now I'm satisfied with the tiny, corners-trimmed keyboard but others look at it and ask how it is even possible to scroll the web page using the thing.

Prob 1: my boss can never type on my keyboard. Sometimes he still grumbles when he cannot correct my fouls right on my machine.

Prob 2: my keyboards at home and at work are not the same and some keymapping cannot applied to one of the two. That's async.

Worst WTF dev experience? The login process from hell to a well-fortified dev environment at a client's site.
I assume a noob admin found a list of security tips and just went like "all of the above!".

You boot a Linux VM, necessary to connect to their VPN. Why necessary? Because 1) their VPN is so restrictive it has no internet access 2) the VPN connection prevents *your local PC* from accessing the internet as well. Coworkers have been seen bringing in their private laptops just to be able to google stuff.
So you connect via Cisco AnyConnect proprietary bullshit. A standard VPN client won't work. Their system sends you a one-time key via SMS as your password.

Once on their VPN, you start a remote desktop session to their internal "hopping server", which is a Windows server. After logging in with your Windows user credentials, you start a Windows Remote Desktop session *on that hopping server* to *another* Windows server, where you login with yet another set of Windows user credentials. For all these logins you have 30 seconds, otherwise back to step 1.
On that server you open a browser to access their JIRA, GitLab, etc or SSH into the actual dev machines - which AGAIN need yet another set of credentials.

So in total: VM -> VPN + RDP inside VM -> RDP #2 -> Browser/SSH/... -> Final system to work on
Input lag of one to multiple seconds. It was fucking unusable.

Now, the servers were very disconnect-happy to prevent anything "fishy" going on. Sitting at my desk at my company, connected to my company's wifi, was apparently fishy enough to kick me out every 5 to 20 minutes. And that meant starting from step 1 inside the VM again. So, never forget to plugin your network cable.

There's a special place in hell for this admin. And if there isn't, I'll PERSONALLY make the devil create one. Even now that I'm not even working on this any more.

*tries to SSH into my laptop to see how that third kernel compilation attempt went*
… From my Windows box.

Windows: aah nope.

"Oh God maybe the bloody HP thing overheated again"
*takes laptop from beneath the desk indent*
… Logs in perfectly. What the hell... Maybe it's SSH service went down?

$ systemctl status sshd
> active (running)

Well.. okay. Can I log in from my phone?

*fires up Termux*
*logs in just fine*

What the fuck... Literally just now I added the laptop's ECDSA key into the WSL known_hosts by trying to log into it, so it can't be blocked by that shitty firewall (come to think of it, did I disable that featureful piece of junk yet? A NAT router * takes care of that shit just fine Redmond certified mofos).. so what is it again.. yet another one of those fucking WanBLowS features?!!

condor@desktop $ nc -vz 192.168.10.30 22
Connection to 192.168.10.30 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!

ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL?!

Fucking Heisen-feature-infested piece of garbage!!! Good for gaming and that's fucking it!

Edit: (*) this assumes that your internal network doesn't have any untrusted hosts. Public networks or home networks from regular users that don't audit their hosts all the time might very well need a firewall to be present on the host itself as well.

Whenever im programming in Python it seems like my finger naturally presses the semicolon key after any statement😂

One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.

On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).

Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.

I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".

Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.

There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.

Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).

You know, I am getting really fucking irate posting them rants about how shitty my job is.

I'm more than fucking competant, but this company is turning me into a blithering, raging, frothing maniac.

I am sitting doing my devOps at the moment. On top of that I am the network admin, the sys admin, the sec admin, the fucking fuck admin (you get the point) and now I am being told to go out and work in the field because "The technician is busy with calls, and doesn't have time". These calls are ALL FUCKING PRINTER CALLS. SET UP USERS TO PRINT AND FUCKING SCAN.

I am not being a shithead by saying no. I have spent the last year or so doing favours for these bastards, I don't get any compensation in any form for it, and it is just making my life hell. The reason I went into devOps is so that I don't have to fucking deal with shit like this. I spent years in the field, and I fucking hated it. I was good at what I did, but I fucking hated it.

Now I am back there. They earn more than i do, those printer techs, but I am doing their fucking work for them. I have even made them simple little fucking scripts so that 90% of their work is done in two clicks.

Fucksakes. Now my motherfucking right shift key doesn't want to operate properly. Been using this keyboard for about 6 years now, and now it decides to fuck out. Fuck.

As standing, I am fucking sick and fucking tired. I am drinking energy drinks and mass amounts of coffee just to stay functional (because I sit up until 12AM trying to get through all my work - everyday of the week). Reported to tech director, doesnt give a single fuck. "Stick around, things will get better".

Yeah, fuck you.

Seriously thinking about freelancing.

Don't know if it pays well though.

any key? why any?

I hate access. I wish I could use literally any other program. But they're not authorized.

I'm the only one working on this, and everything is closed. How the fuck is the object in use somewhere else? And where the fuck did my primary key go???

The key to not get any downvotes in StackOverflow, Is to not post any question

.. for the first time I permanently lost access to one of my GPG keys that were actually in use. No revocation certificates, nothing in the keychains on any of my hosts... Keychain flash drive that got stolen had a copy of both, my fileserver used to have a copy of that flash drive until I deleted it to make room for a filesystem migration, and my laptop used to have one.. until I decommisioned it and shredded its hard drive to be deployed somewhere else...

fuck

I can't sign my git commits anymore, and I can't revoke the key either.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Inspired by the comment I posted on another rant.

My uni decided to be one of those progressive tech schools that start people with Python. Mind you, I had prepared myself with studying as much as I could with math and programming by automating things and similar stuff in our computer when I was at my previous job, so I had a better idea as to what i could expect.

Introduction to computer science and programming with Python or some shit like that was the name of the class, and the instructor was a fat short ugly woman with a horrible attitude AND a phd in math, not comp sci and barely any industrial knowledge of the field.

She gave us the "a lot of you will fail" speech, which to me is code for "I suck and have no clue what I am doing"

One assignment involved, as per the requirements the use of switch cases. Now, unless someo knew came about, Python does not have swio cases. Me and a couple of less newbie like students tried to point out that switch cases were non existent and that her switch case example was in Javascript, not python, curly braces and everything. She told us to make it work.

We thought that she meant using a function with a dictionary and we pass the key and shit, a simple way of emulating the switch case.

NOPE she took points and insisted that she meant the example. We continuously pointed out that her example was in JS and that at the time Python did not have switch cases. The nasty woman laughed out and said that she didn't expect anyone to finish the assignment with full points.

Out of 100 points everyone got a 70. No problem. Wrote a detailed letter to the dean. Dean replied and talked to her (copied her in the email because fuck you bitch) and my grade was pulled up to full mark.

Every other class I had with her she did not question me. Which was only another class on some other shit I can't remember.

Teachers are what make or break a degree program. What make or break the experience, going to college is putting too much faith on people. If you ask me, trade certification, rigorous training is the future of computer science, or any field really. Rather than spending 4+ years studying a whoooole lotta shit for someone to focus on one field and never leave it.

Ten Immutable Laws Of Security

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not solely your computer anymore.
Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to run active content in your website, it's not your website any more.
Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security.
Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy.
Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as its decryption key.
Law #8: An out-of-date antimalware scanner is only marginally better than no scanner at all.
Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn't practically achievable, online or offline.
Law #10: Technology is not a panacea.

I just lost faith in the entire management team of the company I'm working for.

Context: A mid sized company with
- a software engineering departmant consisting of several teams working on a variety of products and projects.
- a project management department with a bunch of project managers that mostly don't know shit about software development or technical details of the products created by engineering.

Project management is unhappy about the fact that software engineering practically never sticks to the plan regarding cost, time and function that was made at the very beginning of the project. Oh really? Since when does waterfall project management work well? As such they worked out a great idea how to improve the situation: They're going to implement *Shopfloor Management*!

Ever heared about Shopfloor Management? Probably not, because it is meant for improving repetitive workflows like assembly line work. In a nutshell it works by collecting key figures, detecting deviation in these numbers and performing targeted optimization of identified problem areas. Of course, there is more to Shopfloor Management, but that refers largely to the way the process just described is to be carried out (using visualisation boards, treating the employee well, let them solve the actual problem instead of management, and so on...). In any case, this process is not useful for highly complex and hard-to-predict workflows like software development.

That's like trying to improve a book author's output by measuring lines of text per day and fixing deviations in observed numbers with a wrench.

Why the hell don't they simply implement something proven like Scrum? Probably because they're affraid of losing control, affraid of self managed employees, affraid of the day everybody realizes that certain management layers are useless overhead that don't help in generating value but only bloat.

Fun times ahead!

It was my first ever hackathon. Initially, I registered with my friend who is a non coder but want to experience the thrill of joining a hackathon. But when we arrived at the event, someone older than us was added to our team because he was solo at that time. Eventually, this old guy (not too old, around his 20s) ( and let’s call him A) and I got close.
We chose the problem where one is tasked to create an ML model that can predict the phenotype of a plant based on genotypic data. Before the event, I didn’t have any background in machine learning, but A was so kind to teach me.
I learned key terms in ML, was able to train different models, and we ended up using my models as the final product. Though the highest accuracy I got for one of my model was 52%, but it didn’t discouraged me.
We didn’t won, however. But it was a great first time experience for me.
Also, he gave me an idea in pitching, because he was also taking MS in Data Science ( I think ) and he had a great background in sales as well, so yeah I got that too.

!rant
!!pride

I tried finding a gem that would give me a nice, simple diff between two hashes, and also report any missing keys between them. (In an effort to reduce the ridiculous number of update api calls sent out at work.)

I found a few gems that give way too complicated diffs, and they're all several hundred lines long. One of them even writes the diff out in freaking html with colors and everything. it's crazy. Several of the simpler ones don't even support nesting, and another only diffs strings. I found a few possibly-okay choices, but their output is crazy long, and they are none too short, either.

Also, only a few of them support missing keys (since hashes in Ruby return `nil` by default for non-defined keys), which would lead to false negatives.

So... I wrote my own.
It supports diffing anything with anything else, and recurses into anything enumerable. It also supports missing keys/indexes, mixed n-level nesting, missing branches, nil vs "nil" with obvious output, comparing mixed types, empty objects, etc. Returns a simple [a,b] diff array for simple objects, or for nested objects: a flat hash with full paths (like "[key][subkey][12][sub-subkey]") as top-level keys and the diff arrays as values. Tiny output. Took 36 lines and a little over an hour.

I'm pretty happy with myself. 😁

My life could get worse, but it's really shitty now.

Suffering from a serious back injury since last year, my health has been not so positieve lately.
It put a toll on my mood, which in turn asked it's price regarding my relationship. Needless to say that did not go well. Already a fe months single but we kept in touch.

Three days ago my back injury returned, and was unable to lead a normal life. Constant pain, coyld not even move in the house. Even going to the toilet was a terrible experience because when you move, you're in a world of pain.

I asked my ex girlfriend to help me, since she was the only one having a key to my house.

When she arrived i hoped to have some moral support and to help me mive around, ensuring i would not injure myself any more.

Instead i received the cold shoulder. When she wanted to help pe up she did it a bit too hard and the pain sheered thrpughout my body. Screaming in pain.

She promptly left, leaving keys behind.

The hardest part is that she just left without me being able to explain clearly why i screamed. She thought i was yelling at her while in reality i was yelling due to the immense pain.

After that i had to cut ties forever. Tabula rasa. So i removed everything that is related to that time and locked it in my vault.

Since then i can hardly focus, my mibd is numb and i cannot think straight. The alcohol and other sedatives are probably also involved, but still i feel my life is a mountain of depressing shit.

Needed to vent. And yes i post this because i have a need for some understanding, yes for now i crave for some attention and some encouraging, supportive words. I'm left With no other options since the person i wanted it from the most has simply left... And the fact i am unable to actually be social outside...

Fuck friends and relationships, right?

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. 

Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, "I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out." 

"Very well," says God, "let us see if Jesus has fared any better." 
Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers. 

Satan is astonished. He stutters, "B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus' program is intact! How did he do it?" 

God chuckles, "Everybody knows... Jesus saves."

I work at a student help desk. I've been asked where the "any" key is located 3 times today. WHY.

TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”

Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.

I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.

I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.

After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”

A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.

Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.

I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.

Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.

My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.

There's this junior I've been training. We gave him a bigger task than we usually do

"How do I link an object in table X with the corresponding object in table Y?"

"How are objects in two tables usually linked? How did you link Y with Z in the first place?"

"Em... Foreign Keys?"

"Yup"

"But there's not foreign key from X to Y."

"Well, create one. You've got full creative freedom over this task."

I sometimes feel like Juniors are either completely careless about past code or overly carefuly with not editing any past code. Frustrating but adorable

My first job was not exactly a job but a freelance project. The guy that I delivered the website to thought that I'd charge money each time I pressed a key on my laptop when we met.
Had to explain to the guy that that's not how it works. That's not how any of it works.

Deleted a servers crontab by executing crontab -r instead of crontab -e (typo mistake)
crontab -r deletes the users crontab without any confirmation and, just to top it off, the e key is located right next to r. WTH
At least we have backups.

Press any key to continue..

I'M BACK TO MY WEBDEV ADVENTURES GUYS! IT TOOK ME LIKE 4 MONTHS TO STOP BEING SO FUCKING DEPRESSED SO I CAN ACTUALLY STAND TO WORK ON IT AGAIN

I learned that the linear gradient looks cool as FUCK. Honestly not too fond of the colors I have right now, but I just wanted to have something there cause I can change it later. The page has evolved a bunch from my original concept.

My original concept was the bar in the middle just being a URL bar and having links on the sides. If I had kept that, it would have taken me a few hours to get done. But as time went on when I was working on it, my idea kept changing. Added the weather (had a forecast for a while but the code was gross and I never looked at the next days anyways, so I got rid of it and kept the current data). I wanted to attempt an RSS reader, but yesterday I was about to start writing the JavaScript to parse the feeds, then decided "nah", ended up making the space into a todo list.

The URL bar changed into a full command bar (writing the functions for the commands now, also used to config smaller things, such as the user@hostname part, maybe colors, weather data for city and API key, etc)....also it can open URLs and subreddits (that part works flawlessly). The bar uses a regex to detect if it's a legit URL (even added shit so I don't need http:// or https://), and if it's not, just search using duckduckgo (maybe I'll add a config option there too for search engines).

At this very moment it doesn't even take a second to fully load. It fetches weather data from openweathermap, parses it, and displays it, then displays the "user" name grabbing a localstorage value.

I'm considering adding a sidebar with links (configurable obviously, I want everything to be dynamic, so someone else could use my page if they wanted), but I'm not too sure about it.

It's not on git yet because I was waiting until I get some shit finished today before I commit. From the picture, I want to know if anyone has any suggestions for it. Also note that I am NOT a designer. I can't design for shit.

Customizing my 88-Key ISO WASD... Any thoughts?

A Bank Account Number is like a public encryption key. Any random person needs it to send me money. Why does it seem like banks treat it as a secret or even use it to confirm my identity? It's literally printed in plain text on every check.

They laugh at me when I'm still using windows batch scripts.

I ask them how to check the cpu architecture within a batch, to check whether administrator rights are present and if not, enabling the default windows admin and create another admin over the default admin. I ask them how they'd set a registry key within a batch...

They don't have any idea...

where's the any key

I just had the most surreal email discussion I think I've ever had...

I spent over two hours going back-and-forth over email with an enterprise DBA, trying to convince them I needed a primary key for a table. They created the table without a primary key (or any unique constraints... or indexes... but that's another discussion). I asked them to add one. Then had to justify why.

If you ever find yourself justifying why you need a primary key on a table in an RDBMS, that's the day you find yourself asking "is this real life?"

I want the last two hours of my life back. And a handful of Advil.

I've been a part of this industry for over two decades, found myself scraping and clawing my way up, recently leaving a high paying position to create my own company; in an attempt to fix the things I feel are severely broken within the ones I've worked for in the past.

Sometimes, we are challenged in ways we never thought we would be. And, it should always result in the improvement of something we never thought would be possible to improve.

There's a certain beauty of hitting a personal impasse. Because it allows you to choose a better path for yourself - which is a key element in accepting and conquering any one of life's many challenges.

So, just remember, we are - by nature - problem solvers. So what the fuck would we do, without a problem to solve?

So I have too many posts for wk110. It's sad. Here we go. I got a bad grade on an assignment for a hello world program in college. How do you write a hello world program that successfully prints hello world and not get 100 percent?

The teacher insisted that we write a console "hello world" program in C++, on windows. If he can't read hello world, you fail. So you must add `system("pause")` at the end so the window stays open. One problem: system() is horribly insecure and im stubborn. I refused to write exactly what he wanted, like everyone else did, because I try to not write code I know is unsafe. So I ended my script with cin.get() which also pauses for input. Unlike pause however it can't be any key, it reads a line, so you must hit enter. This was "unfavorable behavior" and ultimately I got something like a high C, low B grade. Only person to not get 100%

Any thoughts on whether my alternative keyboard layout will lower my risk for wrist pain? I map each key to an Amazon dash button on each edge of a large bookshelf in my office. It's lots of exercise, and I'm almost back up to my old typing speed.

FML

brought my children to the childcare, went home and I am faced with A FUCKING CLOSED DOOR OF MY HOME WITHOUT ANY KEY and MY COMPANY NOTEBOOK, WALLET AND KEYS INSIDE!!! 😬

Mac keyboard and mouse.
Fuck no right mouse button.
Fuck that prolapsed ass key. Why not ctrl or shift instead like any other system?

Do you press any key?

On Monday i have a Skype Interview.
Now i've bought a green screen because i thought that would be fun for showing my design stuff live as a virtual webcam. But this stupid Java 6 SE "Chroma Key Live" programm does not recognise any camera... and it's so ugIy... I hate java gui's.... :-/

Wanna hear a story? The consultancy firm I work for has been hired to work on a WPF project for a big Fashion Industry giant.

We are talking of their most important project yet, the ones the "buyers" use to order them their products globally, for each of the retail stores this Fashion giant has around the world. Do you want to know what I found? Wel, come my sweet summer child.

DB: not even a single foreign key. Impossibile to understand without any priopr working experience on the application. Six "quantity" tables to keep aligned with values that will dictate the quantities to be sent to production (we are talking SKUs here: shoes, bags..)

BE: autogenerated controllers using T4 templates. Inputs directly serialized in headers. Async logging (i.e. await Logger.Error(ex)). Entities returned as response to the front end, no DTOs whatsoever.

WPF: riddled with code behind and third party components (dev express) and Business Logic that should belong to the Business Layer. No real api client, just a highly customized "Rest Helper". No error reporting or dealing with exceptions. Multiple endpoints call to get data that would be combined into one single model which happens to be the one needed by the UI. No save function: a timer checks the components for changes and autosaves them every x seconds. Saving for the most critical part occurring when switching cells or rows, often resulting in race conditions at DB level.

What do you think of this piece of shit?

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

Where is the 'any' key?

In a world of password managers that can generate complex passwords of any length, please for the love of God include why my chosen password was rejected.

Don't decide to truncate the password without informing the user because, and this is key, they won't be able to use your service.
Looking at you GoDaddy.

So I have the new Mac book pro for 8 months now, always thought that the butterfly keyboard issue will never happen to me.

Until three days ago I noticed my space key is kinda sticky.
I have an external monitor so I don’t recall any time I spill water or food directly on the keyboard.

So I made an appointment for a walk in.

BUT this morning, I was like: man, fuck this shit and smashed the space key.

Now it’s fixed.

Good

Get an email from a client, who has been stringing me along for about 6 months, but ringing me up for advice on tonnes of different shit for free. Basically did his original website but his business model has changed to make his existing site irrelevant. Suggested months back doing a simple one pager as a stop gap with key messages. The bastard said no to that "just take it down for now and redirect to my LinkedIn page". He keeps saying we are getting stuff together and we hope to get together in September. However, yesterday he sends an email "we are getting a student in over the summer (not a Dev or designer or anything). Could you recommend any "web builders" so we can get on with the website in August. By that he means those drag and drop fucking pieces of shit website templates full of wysiwyg editors for creating shit typography. I give them free help and guidance and they think that I'm not going to want to smash him in his fucking face for his last email. The cunt.
I have an idea for 'having the last laugh' but I am open to suggestions from some devRanters, all legal of course.
P.S. I post quite a bit here about shitty clients, but I do have a number of really good clients who value my work and experience and have been with me for many years. It's just some that treat the profession with disdain and that they can easily do it themselves if only they had the time. These fuckers then wonder why their businesses fail.

Forms with autofocus. What are your opinions on that?

My boss keeps asking us to always give autofocus to the first input of a form, without any UX study to support it, just his opinion ("I think it makes sense"). I fucking hate it. He says it's nice for keyboard users, but I'm a keyboard user myself and I say that's what the tab key is for. To fucking focus stuff.

It really annoys me to no end when things like this are requested, but it's ok to have buttons, checkboxes, etc without fucking :focus and :active styles. Just :hover is not enough ffs.

And "links" that work with "onclick". Damn how I want to kill anyone that does that.

!dev && rant

Can we talk about banks? Those fuckers! Suposed to keep our money save and be competent... They today gave me the biggest scare of my live and I've run one an update query on a prod db without a where clause! (Okay I knew we had a backup but still pretty scarry moment!)

As a few know, besides being a dev I help to organize a small openair music festival here in Switzerland. The openair was this weekend. Every thing wen't well, until I checked our ebanking account today. There was only 2/3 of the money that should be there. A quick call to the bank and they told me, nope they never received it. As we've thrown it in a secure locker during the night, we didn't receive any receipt or something like that. It took those fuckers 3.5 hours to actually go and check the looker, just to find the remaining money in the corner of it. What the fuck people, can't you open your fucking eyes and not give me a fucking heartatack? I thought you guys are professionals!

Note locker: we get a key to open it from the outside, place our payment during the night, as soon as we close it, it falls inside a vault, so there it's a pay in only system, for lack of a better word, I called it locker.

My heart is still beating like mad, because of them.

The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).

While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.

It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.

I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.

4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.

The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.

One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.

TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.

DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.

Development world is always changing and evolving... It changes before you know it...

So, having the ability to quickly adapt and learn is a must for any Developer... And, this is the one thing that I am sure that everyone knows about or heard about..

But, my advice is quite simple:

"Don't rush into participating in a race, just because everyone else is doing so.

The trick is not to move quickly.. But, to move one step at a time, at the pace in which you are at your most comfortable...

It might seem counterintuitive and a contradiction to what I have said earlier.. But, I hope that by the end of this rant, you will be able to understand my perspective..

This advice is especially useful for people still finding and searching for their place in our world..

Charles Darwin, very wisely understood the philosophy behind 'Survival of the Fittest'..

By 'fittest', he didn't refer to the ones considered to be the strongest or having the most intelligence, but the ones that had mastered the ability to adapt to changing circumstances..

Adaptability is important, but not at the cost of understanding and learning about the fundamental pillars on which this world stands..

Don't rush because when you run, your visions starts to become more narrow.. In your pursuit to reach your goal, you lose the ability to look at the macro details surrounding your goal..

Learning new technology is important, but that doesn't mean that you don't learn about various approaches or how to design a more logical or efficient solution...

Refactoring the code, developing good Testing procedures, learning to interact with your fellow developers are as crucial as learning about the changing trends...

Even, in this ever-changing world, understand that some things will always remain the same, like the adrenaline that course through your veins when you finally solve a long-standing problem...

Curiosity, Discovery and Exploration are the key pillars and hence, when we rush in, we might stop exploring and lose curiosity to discover new and exciting ways to reach our goal..

Or, we might also end up losing the drive that grips us and motivates to continue moving forward inspite of the challenges standing between us and our destination..

And, believe me, once you lose this quality, you might still succeed but the contentment and the satisfaction that you feel will be lost..

And, then, you will remain a developer only through your designation... And, that in my personal opinion, the worst punishment.

I somehow managed to turn on overtype with the insert key.

Welp, guess it's time to get a new laptop. Any recommendations?

Fun fact!

Xiaomi has a restriction where you're only allowed a bootloader unlock key one week after you've requested it. No, not a week after you've bought the phone. Not a week after you created an account and generated so much usage data that it would be stupid to doubt you're a genuine user.
No, you have to wait one week after installing their fucking desktop app and getting past some arbitrary point in the process.

Seriously, how much shit can this company pull with a straight face? At this point they're just sabotaging me, it's not even for any reason.

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

Subaru's Symmetrical AWD is the best thing in the world at the moment. Also, warning: !dev

Tl;dr: I'm getting another RPi3 thanks to awesome engineering.

Got a couple of inches of light snow here, and on my way home I came across a GMC Sierra dually stuck at the bottom of a moderately sized ditch. Naturally, I stopped by in my Forester and offered to tow it out.

With my 20ft tow rope stretched to its full length I was barely touching the road. He signalled that he was ready, and I gunned it. Slowly but surely the truck crawled out of the 6ft deep trench. She crested the hill with much applause (from me and the driver of the truck). As a thanks, he gave me $30.

Looks like I'm gonna get a new Raspberry Pi to play with. I think I'll turn this one into a countertop MAME arcade machine.

And for those of you wondering why I'm praising Symmetrical AWD as opposed to AWD in general, here's a quick lesson in drivetrains:
Most all wheel drive cars power the front wheels most of the time. This saves on fuel economy. The thing is, power is only transmitted to the rear wheels when the front wheels start to lose traction. At that point you're already screwed; only two wheels at any one time are putting useful power to the road.
Symmetrical AWD systems, like you'll find in all Subarus and most performance cars, distribute the vehicle's torque eaqually front-rear at all times. So instead of waiting until the front wheels start slipping, all of the wheels are powered right off the bat.

To make this more devvy: grrrr php, vim is best, I configured the tab key to enter four spaces, js has too many damn frameworks and they're still being pumped out faster than rabbits in a bunny farm.

It is said that the number of programmers doubles every five years with fresh CS, CE, and EE grads. Assuming that's true, then at any one time over half the developer community are novices in the early stages of their career.

My entire life's been spent in software and I've been in it now for about 15 years and I've seen a lot of people make alot of things and I've seen a lot of people fail at alot of things. My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers, the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker doer in one person. It's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete. It's very easy for somebody say "oh, I thought of this three years ago" but usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it. Were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems.

Many people falsely believe that a great idea constitutes 90% of the work. However, there is a significant amount of craftsmanship required to bridge the gap between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous amount of trade-offs that you have to make.

There are certain things you can't make electrons do, certain things you can't make plastic or glass, certain things you can't make factories or robots do. and as you get into all these things, Designing a product involves juggling 5,000 different concepts, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, and exploring new ways to combine them. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, and it's this ongoing process that is the key to successful product development. That process is the "magic"

Fuck everything about Microsoft Dynamics. I'm supposed to use the REST API to make a web front-end. I notice all of the data comes back codified.

null == 0.
boolean true == 100000000
boolean false == 100000001

except sometimes when

boolean false == 100000000
boolean true == 100000001

or other times

string "Yes" == 100000000
string "No" == 100000001
string "Maybe" == 100000003

Hang on. Is the system representing a 1 bit value with base 10 numbers? Did the client set this up like this? Holy crap every number corresponds to a unique record in a table somewhere. That means it only returns numeric values instead of strings and I have to figure out what the number means in the context of the table.

A "key" is user typed? So every time someone starts to make a new record it saves a new "key" without a record? So I can pull a bunch of "0" records if I pull sequentially? So basically I need to see all of the data in Dynamics to have any context at all for what is returned from the Dynamics API? Fuuuuuuuuuu

Watched an action hack movie
Then designed a scenario to sniff around a bank and get the encrypted key and finally extract the key and omg!
I've broke into the bank !!!
But seriously, is it worth trying?
I'm not going to do any thing stupid like even taking a dollar , but is it just the way I thought it is?
Will anything unexpected happen?

Is it wrong to expect some widespread documentation from a $350 billion company to properly document a key part of their upgrade path for a new SDK version? beware any Android devs upgrading from API 3.X to 4.X on the Facebook SDK.......you'll want FacebookSdk.setLegacyTokenUpgradeSupported(true); before your call to initialize.....

Got to scratch of one of three remaining old (14years and counting) design mistakes this week.

Together with a colleague we replaced a 1.5 billion row table that I out of ignorance then designed with a 3 column composite primary key instead of an identity column.

Moving the data while keeping all synchronized (the table gets up towards 2 million new rows and 2 million updates a day while constantly being queried) took 1 week.

Just 2 skeletons left to clean out, any year now ;).

tl;dr Do you think we will any time soon move from editing raw source code? Will IDE or other interfaces allow us to change the code in graphic representation or even through voice?
---

One thing I found funny watching Westworld is how they depicted the "programming" - it is more like swiping on a smartphone, a bit maybe like Tom Cruise's investigations in Minority report. Or giving certain commands and key words by voice.

There was one quote from Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" I could never find again, where he said something along the lines, that back in the seventies or eighties they thought they would soon raise programming languages to such a high level they would use natural language interfaces, and look at us now, still the same "if's".

So I feel uncomfortable without my shell and having tried a graphical programming language once this particular (Labview) seemed clumsy to me at best. But maybe there are a lot of web devs here and it seems with them frameworks you might be able to abstract away a lot of the pesky system programming... so do you feel like moving to some new shiny programming experience or do you think it will stay the same for more decades as the computer is that stupid machine where you have to spill it out instruction by instruction anyways?

That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.

This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.

Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?

So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.

I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.

The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).

Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.

Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/

- A girl asks on FB how to deal with a problem in her Windows computer: the system is asking her to introduce the serial key.

- I comment her the possibility of using Linux in case her use cases are simple enough (web, music, videos).

- First reactions are even enthusiastic, some people who had good experiences join the thread to express their delight with Linux.

- Then a guy arrives to tell us how irresponsible we are, telling a poor girl who does not even know how to introduce the serial key... to use Linux (a super complex system!)

- So I tell the guy that Windows is not simple at all, and that most of the times, people just rely o knowing someone else with higher expertise than them, who always end up paying the price of solving the problems caused by Windows, so the users don't really feel how painful is Windows compared to other systems.

- The girl, who was enthusiastic at first, and seems to be not very bright, to say the least, completely misunderstands my answer. She interprets that I'm insulting the poor guys that act as IT service for free, and calls me a "know-all/smartass" (those words are not even close to their Spanish counterpart on pushing down people who know stuff, we are experts on that there, we didn't loose an empire in the 17th century by respecting the wise ones).

This is, in part, why I stopped helping those dumbasses 18 years ago. I forbid myself to learn anything new about Windows (at user level) so I couldn't help these ungrateful and ignorant people who don't make any effort to learn anything by themselves.

   Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight.
Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.”
“Very well,” says God, “let us see if Jesus has fared any better.”
Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.
Satan is astonished. He stutters, “B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?”
God chuckles, “Everybody knows… Jesus saves.”

I find it funny that as soon as I disable password authentication on my server and enable key auth then all of the bots spamming my server with incorrect login requests instantly stop when they realise that they aren’t getting through any time soon. Also don’t ask why I don’t have Fail2Ban and a firewall set up.

Been getting a lot of troll / clown / clueless (?) comments on my posts recently. Select favorites include:

"Why do you have a login form on your website?" wut
"Why didn't you throw away that API key?" wut
"Why do you even need to access your apps' servers?" wut

There are just SO many amazing devs here who have NEVER had do any of those things, I'm quite literally an idiot and don't know what I'm doing, sorry for my ignorance. I'd forgotten that there is only exactly one way to build software, I wish I'd done it "that" way sooner! Foolish me.

Really not sure if trolls, clowns, or clueless. Don't care. 🤡🤡🤡

Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.

He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.

It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.

Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.

God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.

SOLUTION

We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.

Any feedback conserning this project please?

So about two months ago in my consulting firm I was asked to replace a colleague on a project (node and Angular). The project is only a few months old but it’s already a total clusterfuck. DB is very poorly designed. It’s supposed to be a relational database but there’s not a trace of a foreign key or any key for that matter and I’ve seen joins like tableA.name = tableB.description (seriously, that’s your relation??). The code is a mess with entire blocks of code copied from another project and many parts of the code aren’t even used. He didn’t even bother renaming variables so they would make sense in the context they were shamelessly thrown into. The code is at best poorly typed if not typed at all.

During our dailies I sometimes express my frustration with my other colleagues as I very politely allude to my predecessor’s code as being hard to work with. (They are all “good friends" with him). I always get the same response from my colleagues: "yeah but you’ve gotta understand Billybob was under a lot of pressure. The user stories were not well defined. He didn’t have time to do a proper job". That type of response just makes me boil inside.

Because you think I have time to deal with this shit? You don’t think I’m working with the same client and his user stories that are barely intelligible? How long does it take to write type definitions for parameters going into a function? That’s right, 30 seconds at most? Maybe a minute if it’s a more elaborate object? How much time do you think you’ll save yourself with a properly typed function or better yet an interface? Hard to tell but certainly A LOT MORE than those 30 seconds you lost (no, the 30 seconds you INVESTED) in writing that interface!!!

FUCK people with their excuses! Never tell me you don’t have time to do a proper job! You’ve wasted HOURS of my time just because you were too fucking lazy to type your functions, too lazy to put just a little more thought into designing your tables, too lazy to rename a variable so that it’s name actually makes sense where it’s being used. It’s not because you were short on time. You’re just lazy!
FUCK!!!!!!

So recently I installed Windows 7 on my thiccpad to get Hyperdimension Neptunia to run (yes 50GB wasted just to run a game)... And boy did I love the experience.

ThinkPads are business hardware, remember that. And it's been booting Debian rock solid since.. pretty much forever. There are no hardware issues here. Just saying.

With that out of the way I flashed Windows 7 Ultimate on a USB stick and attempted to boot it... Oh yay, first hurdle to overcome. It can't boot in UEFI mode. Move on Debian, you too shall boot in BIOS mode now! But okay, whatever right. So I set it to BIOS mode and shuffled Debian's partitions around a bit to be left with 3 partitions where Windows could stick in one more.

Installed, it asks for activation. Now my ThinkPad comes with a Windows 7 Pro license key, so fuck it let's just use that and Windows will be able to disable the features that are only available for Ultimate users, right? How convenient would that be, to have one ISO for all the half a dozen editions that each Windows release has? And have the system just disable (or since we're in the installer anyway, not install them in the first place) features depending on what key you used? Haha no, this is Microsoft! Developers developers developers DEVELOPERS!!! Oh and Zune, if anyone remembers that clusterfuck. Crackhead Microsoft.

But okay whatever, no activation then and I'll just fetch Windows Loader from my webserver afterwards to keygen my way through. Too bad you didn't accept that key Microsoft! Wouldn't that have been nice.

So finally booted into the installed system now, and behold finally we find something nice! Apparently Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate offer a native NFS driver. That's awesome! That way I don't have to adjust my file server at all. Just some fuckery with registry keys to get the UID and GID correct, but I'll forgive it for that. It's not exactly "native" to Windows after all. The fact that it even has a built-in driver for it is something I found pretty neat already.

Fast-forward a few hours and it's time to Re Boot.. drivers from Lenovo that required reboots and whatnot. Fire the system back up, and low and behold the network drive doesn't mount anymore. I've read that this is apparently due to Windows (not always but often) mounting the network drive before the network comes up. Absolutely brilliant! Move out shitstaind, have you seen this beauty of an init Mr. Poet?

But fuck it we can mount that manually after every single boot.. you know, convenient like that. C O P E.

With it now manually mounted, let's watch a movie! I've recently seen Pyro's review on The Platform and I absolutely loved it. The movie itself is quite good too. Open the directory on my file server and.. oh. Windows.. you just put db.thumb on it and db.thumb:encryptable. I shit you not, with the colon and everything. I thought that file names couldn't contain colons Windows! I thought that was illegal in NTFS. Why you doing this in NFS mate? And "encryptable", am I already infected with ransomware??? If it wasn't for the fact that that could also be disabled with something as easy as a registry key, I would've thought I contracted ransomware!

Oh and sound to go with that video, let's pair up some Bluetooth headphones with that Bluetooth driver I installed earlier! Except.. haha nope. Apparently you don't get that either.

Right so let's just navigate the system in its Aero glory... Gonna need to flick the mouse for that. Except it's excruciatingly slow, even the fastest speed is slower than what I'm used to on Linux.. and it's jerky as hell (Linux doesn't have any of that at higher speed). But hey it can compensate for that! Except that slows down the mouse even more. And occasionally the mouse driver gets fucked up too. Wanna scroll on Telegram messages in a chat where you're admin? Well fuck you mate, let me select all these messages for you and auto scroll at supersonic speeds! And God forbid that you press delete with that admin access of yours. Oh maybe I'll do it for you, helpful OS I am!

And the most saddening part of it all? I'd argue that Windows 7 is the best operating system that Microsoft ever released. Yeah. That's the best they could come up with. But at least it plays le games!

Protip: proposing a "simple yet beautiful" login form on Bootsnip with absolutely no knowledge of Bootstrap whatsoever, making it not responsive and centering it with hardwritten margins (such as: 'margin-left: 170px'), AND THEN proudly display "theme developed by WhoGives AShit" at the bottom won't make you any publicity at best. At worst, I'm gonna travel to India and won't leave before I erased the code you wrote by smashing your face on the "erase" key.

Any IDE that doesn't go to the end of line when you press the down arrow key on the last line of the file, should be burned with hell fire.

When a bunch of unit tests start failing locally because the AWS secret key got rotated.
oh wait...
THOSE AREN’T UNIT TESTS!!!
Unit tests do not depend on any external system, that includes AWS...
AAARRGHHHHH

For hours I spent my time debugging my code, trying different approach to the same code function. Looking for one simple invisible mistake, that is when I want to make a delete request to the IndexedDB.

The request are fine without running a single error, the success event fires perfectly. But one thing which is unexpected, the object inside IndexedDB did not vanish at all. The data stay the same without any flaws (but how can that be, when the 'delete success' event fired? IT SHOULD BE GONE BY NOW!). No kidding, for hours I debug my code, yet found nothing's wrong!

Until one moment I found out the datatype of key I gave the request are different from the object I wanted to delete, the object has a key of 4 and I gave the request "4". I'm so pissed at this moment making me googled 'developer rant' and found this site.
Really! God Bless 1 !== '1'.

Am I the only developer in existence who's ever dealt with Git on Windows? What a colossal train wreck.

1. Authentication. Since there is no ssh key/git url support on Windows, you have to retype your git credentials Every Stinking Time you push. I thought Git Credential Manager was supposed to save your credentials? And this was impossible over SSH (see below). The previous developer had used an http git URL with his username and password baked in for authentication. I thought that was a horrific idea so I eventually figured out how to use a Bitbucket App password.

2. Permissions errors
In order to commit and push updates, I have to run Git for Windows as Administrator.

3. No SSH for easy git access
Here's where I confess that this is a Windows Server machine running as some form of production. Please don't slaughter me! I am not the server admin.
So, I convinced the server guy to find and install some sort of ssh service for Windows just for the off times we have to make a hot fix in production. (Don't ask, but more common than it should be.)
Sadly, this ssh access is totally useless as the git colors are all messed up, the line wrap length and window size are just weird (seems about 60 characters wide by 25 lines tall) and worse of all I can't commit/push in git via ssh because Permissions. Extremely aggravating.

4. Git on Windows hangs open and locks the index file
Finally, we manage to have Git for Windows hang quite frequently and lock the git index file, meaning that we can't do anything in git (commit, push, pull) without manually quitting these processes from task manager, then browsing to the directory and deleting the .git/index.lock file.

Putting this all together, here's the process for a pull on this production server:
Launch a VNC session to the server. Close multiple popups from different services. Ask Windows to please not "restart to install updates". Launch git for Windows. Run a git pull. If the commits to be pulled involve deleting files, the pull will fail with a permissions error. Realize you forgot to launch as Administrator. Depending on how many files were deleted in the last update, you may need to quit the application and force close the process rather than answer "n" for every "would you like to try again?" file. Relaunch Git as Administrator. Run Git pull. Finally everything works.

At this point, I'd be grateful for any tips, appreciate any sympathy, and understand any hatred. Windows Server is bad. Git on Windows is bad.

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.

Coding chalenge.
So... Spent almost two hours to put this little device to work with the keypad.
The device is a arduino micro, special one that can work as mouse /keyboard or any kind of input on most devices (pc, Android phone,...)
The objective is to make a macro keypad to:
- Fast insert text
- Play sounds in games over voice chat.

Think of it like this, you start a new html file, press one key and all the base code is inserted.

So... Why so long? Tought was the hardware, tought the keypad could be set differently that most, code mistakes...

My error was all here, masked from the debugger by a if:

char keys[ROWS][COLS] = {
{'1','2','3','4'},
{'5','6','7','8'},
{'9','10','11','12'},
{'13','14','15','16'}
};

Easy to figure right? Only saw it after reading all the code twice.

Probably a mathematician. I would be a very different person though, because a key element to my current lifestyle is that I never have to use my mathematical insight to the fullest and therefore I can work despite hangovers from nearly any substances. If I had to be sober to get anything done I'd need a level of self control which is very far from me at the moment.

I've finally found a goldmine of accurate job listings that don't include Windows shit-administration... So I'm thinking of sending out applications to all of them. Problem is, as you might recall from my previous rants, I had a flash drive with my GPG keypair on it stolen from me. I still haven't fully replaced the key (I made another one and published it but I'm not using it yet), and because I'm fairly confident that this flash drive's data has never been used (so likely just plugged into Windows and formatted), it's unlikely that I'm gonna bother rotating all of the contents that were on that flash drive.

That said however, my emails now all have signatures underneath them as follows:
Met vriendelijke groet / Best regards,
[my name]

- My outbound email is usually signed with my private key. If not, please don't hesitate to ask me about it through a different communication platform.

IMPORTANT: My keys have possibly been compromised. An encrypted flash drive on which this GPG keypair was stored has been stolen from me. I'm in the process of phasing out and replacing this key. Please do not use it to encrypt any emails to me anymore.

Not entirely sure whether I should remove or keep that last bit. As a potential employer, would you see this as a red flag (he's got encrypted data stolen from him, wtf that's incompetent), or as a nice thing to know that it was properly disclosed (so no secrecy around potential data breaches)? Both seem equally likely so I'm a bit confused about what I should do.

))| THE BEST AND WORST WAY|((
))| TO DELETE A LINE IN BASH |((

(Think you can do better? Vote
now on your phones!)

WORST: Hold backspace until satisfied
BEST: Using a pen or other pointing device capable of causing semi or permanent damage to your screen, count how many characters the line in question consists of. Write this down on a piece of paper (after all, your terminal is occupied) and using long division, or any other means, divide this number by two, rounding as you please. Press the "right arrow" key as many times as necessary to reach the end of the line. This might be 0 - if so, congratulations, you may skip this step! Once complete, refer to your piece of paper, and taking your newly calculated number, press the "left arrow" key exactly that many times. If you have a short attention span or are worried you will lose count, take a tally or use some other primitive count recording method. Once the key has been pressed the correct number of times, hold down either control key on your keyboard and take a deep breath - there's no going back now (!) - press the "k" key (you should still be holding a control key!) and take a sigh of relief. You're halfway there! If you need a break, take one. When you're ready to finish the task, hold a control key again and take another deep breath. When you are ready to complete the task (don't hold your breath too long!) press the "w" key. Congratulations!! Your line has been deleted!! Some may call you a fucking idiot for not just pressing ctrl-w at the start, but don't listen to those people! They probably delete stuff by accident all the time! Now, take a lie down, and give a moment's silence for the poor poor line you just brutally dissected and murdered.

Think you can do better? Vote now on your phones!

Was just reading some of the OpenVPN scripts to renew a certificate where I forgot to source the vars file first (apparently OpenVPN stores those in a separate file that you always have to source first, and I tend to forget it sometimes).

Reading the revoke-full script that OpenVPN provides, it's just bash so I can read it no problem. But traversing through it and trying to understand it... Horrible! There's a test file in $RT named keys/revoke-test.pem. It's not used anywhere in OpenVPN for anything useful as far as I'm aware. The script however - the script that's running on a production server! - attempts to remove this file. It doesn't exist. Test files do (or at least should) not exist in production. They're not supposed to be there.

It exports empty variables. Some of them are set by the sourced vars file, some aren't. Not entirely sure why it's exporting variables as empty when they're uninitialized, or why it doesn't just unset the ones that are initialized.

And finally it goes ahead and revokes the key file that I'm actually concerned about through regular OpenSSL and verifies it.

Not to mention that the lack of the sourced vars file, which admittedly I should think about in the current status quo, if it *always* needs to be sourced anyway... Why doesn't the script do that itself then? One less thing to go wrong. But hey, proper design?

Gore. I don't have any other words for it.

And before anyone tells me that I should go and fix it if I'm so worried about it. Remember, I am not a developer. That's the job of the developers that made this in the first place.

What retarded way of writing a json feed is this? what the fuck!

Each product in the feed is translatable, but instead of creating a new object in the feed with the translated content, there's an additional field pointing to a language code (this applies to all translateable fields).
Then each translatable field is appended the number which matches the number appended to the language field containing the desired language code.

In addition to that, the keys doesn't have any sensible meaning, but appearently they abide by som obscure "GS1 / GDSN" standard.

So for each "distinct" field I have to look up the definition of that key

If just the language code and the actual value keys was grouped together.. but no, the feed is ordered by the number after the 'D'.

Yeah for being stuck with something that looks like infinite scrolling, because one product object is fucking gigantic.

FUCKING INSANE MANIAC PIECE OF TRASH.
@#%!#€&

I started applying for jobs. As I have over 150 repos on GitHub and 10 years of relevant work experience, the company obviously had trouble validating if I had some basic coding skills. That's why they decided to send me a coding "homework" task to build an app in React Native.

Basically, the task was building an app with 2 screens and one bonus where they indicated "doesn't need a UI". I spent half a day spinning up their project, installing XCode, their specific versions of Ruby, and around half a day building the thing.

Obviously, I wanted to demonstrate my technical skills, so I added a few tests, proper typing, comments, and so on. The project was in a good state, and on the "bonus" screen I quickly added a few components. Since I have a lot of things going on, I capped the amount of time to one day of work. I felt it was good enough to demonstrate I can build something like this.

A few days later, I received a response from the recruiter telling me they wouldn't move forward. She in depth explained that this was because of a missing key property. I did indeed miss one key property on the "bonus" screen, in the part that was not even part of the core task. This was a list of very few static elements, and the entire list only got rerendered when changing routes. Basically in this case, there would not be any visible performance impact.

The recruiter explained in the email that I was missing the eye for detail they need, and that I should "educate" myself more about lists in React. I made one tiny silly mistake in a one-day project, that a linter would've taken out (if this project had one). I've contributed to React Native myself and worked with React for almost 7 years now? Yeah, it's a stupid thing, but what is the point of these types of tasks? I thought this was to demonstrate my skillset, not to be called out on.

Either way, my question here is this: at which point does it become appropriate to send an invoice for the time I wasted on this?

Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?

** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **

PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?

Where's the 'any key??

We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?

Well... It's not all white and black...

As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...

Let me take an example:

Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.

Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.

So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.

A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.

So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.

Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?

Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?

---

Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.

I need to encrypt some large files at rest and then decrypt them immediately prior to processing.

App and files are on a Linux system (CentOS). App is in C. Machine is controlled by a third party.

What encryption libraries would you recommend? And, is there any clever way of managing the decryption key beyond compiling it in the code and doing some basic obfuscation?

Are they fancy obfuscation libraries out there, for example?

And, the reason I'm not going to SO (well, one reason) is that I don't want to have 50 answers that tell me that's it's impossible to 100% protect data on a machine you don't control. This I understand---just looking for "best effort" solution.

I never liked YAML. But lately, I'm starting to dislike it more and more.

I mean, wtf is that?
- digest YAML input -- a valid YAML
- digest JSON input -- a valid YAML

A language that embeds another language.

Can it be any more confusing..?

Sure it can. the
```
script:
- echo "John said: hello there"
```

will fail YAML linter, because, even though I used quotes, yaml sees `echo "John said` as an object key

I think I'm yet to find more nonsense with YAML. And eventually, I'll grow to hate it.

Trying to switch from 2 finger bird-view typing to 10 finger no-view. Fuck this is hard! I'm just veeery slowly getting used to it, although I tend to fall back automatically when I don't focus on it and just want to type in a few characters.
I keep doing several typos and often forget where a key was exactly or confuse the position of some character, even though I typed it fairly often before. Also typing any number or non-alphabetic letter is mostly a wild guess of finger position.
Either I'm a very slow learner or smth's wrong.😪

!devrant.

More like 'relationship' rant.

The following is gonna be kinda crude and not work appropriate just fyi.

First, whats with this trend of 'shave your pussy", and small tits? Shit just a few years ago it was the opposite! Who wants to fuck a women who looks like an undeveloped boy. Give me a good medium pair of knockers and a (slightly) hairy pussy anyday and I'm in heaven.

On that note, all these guys whining and fucking whinging about "fat" women. Like I'm not chasing deathfat women or anything, but come on dudes. If you're gonna demand 'thin beautiful women' put in the fucking work! Just saying it now. Kinda pudgy, not a deal breaker for me. She have a pretty face, looks good in make up? Fuck it, I'll give her the time of day. Don't come at me with "hurrr...fat is unhealthy! Wheres your standards?"

Wheres YOUR fucking standards? Shit, I could take a 'heavy' girl and in a few months time have her trim. Its about the WORK you put in. All these fucking guys, all these fucking guys man, they all want something for nothing and chicks for free. No one wants to put in the fucking EFFORT anymore. I can't name on one hand the number of 'fat ugly chicks' everyone ignored from school (well except for me), who are now bombshells. If I stayed connected with people maybe I'd be with one of em right now, but I just get tired of this attitude that no one invests any time in others any more. It's all about 'me me me'.

Shes fat, maybe only a few extra pounds? Fat and 'not beautiful'? Fucking DO THE WORK and make her beautiful you bitch! Be her coach, like those fucking instagram couples you see sweating it out. Make her sexy. Become sexy, together.
Get her a fucking treadmill. Get her two. And jog together. Make her *feel* sexy.

More importantly get to *know* her. Why does she get out of bed in the morning? What drive her NOT to get out of bed? When does she feel lousy? What makes her feel that way? In addition to all the other shit men should know how to do, you should learn to play doctor phil, because every girl needs one. Women bond by talking, men bond by doing things together. Relationships should involve both.

Jesus fucking christ, this is basic bitch advice, and it annoys me I keep on coming across these spergs that don't fucking get it. Women are not cars you can stick your key in and just go 'vroom'.

They require maintenance, same as anything, any 'relationship' (because really, what are relationships in 2020, with instagram and fucking tinder and antisocial distancing?). You're a *team*, and i don't mean that in an inspirational way. You're a literal team. And far too many people prioritize the well being and success and concern of 'I' over' 'us'.

In short, if she ain't coming, you shouldn't be either. And if you expect her to on-the-regular put sharp objects on her fucking nether regions, don't expect any blowjobs unless you're doing the same thing for yourself!

Ideally you should be doing it to each other.
After all, you're partners. You trust her to put sharp objects near your groin, right?
Aren't relationships supposed to be about mutual trust?

Data representation is one of the most important things in any kind of app you develop. The most common, classic way to do it is to create a class with all the fields you want to transport, for example User(name, lastName). It's simple and explicit, but hell no, in my current company we don't play that kindergarten bullshit, the only way we know how to do things here is full hardcore. Why would anyone write a class to represent a Song, a Playlist or an Album when you can just use a key-> value map for pretty much everything? Need a list of songs? No problem, use a List<Map<String, String>>, OBVIOUSLY each map is a song. Need a list of playlists? Use a List<List<Map<String, String>>>... Oh wait, need to treat a value as a number and all you have are strings? That's what casting is for, dumbass.

No, seriously, this company is great. I'm staying here forever!

Fuck UPS and their API Documentation. Has anyone here ever integrated their API ?
Their API documentation doesn't mention any sandbox or testing accounts.
If I click on their create access key button, it takes me to a form which requires a real payment method and address which seems like it's meant for real stuff not testing.

Trying to use authenticate a JWT token from an Azure service, which apparently needs to use Azure AD Identity services (Microsoft Entra ID, Azure AD B2C, pick your poison). I sent a request to our Azure admin. Two days later, I follow up, "Sorry, I forgot...here you go..."
Sends me a (small) screenshot of the some of the properties+GUIDs I need, hoping I don't mess up, still missing a few values.
Me: "I need the instance url, domain, and client secret."
<hour later>
T: "Sorry, I don't understand what those are."
Me: "The login URL. I assume it's the default, but I can't see what you see. Any shot you can give me at least read permissions so I can see the various properties without having to bother you?"
T: "I don't see any URLs, I'll send you the config json, the values you need should be in there."
<10 minutes later, I get a json file, nothing I needed>
<find screenshots of what I'm looking for, send em to T>
Me: "The Endpoints, what URLs do you see when you click Endpoints?"
<20 minutes later, sends me the list of endpoints, exactly what I'm looking for, but still not authenticating the JWT>
Me: "Still not working. Not getting an error, just that the authentication is failing. Don't know if it's the JWT, am I missing a slash, or what. Any way I can get at least read permissions so I don't have to keep bugging you to see certain values?"
T: "What do you need, exactly?"
Me: "I don't know. I don't know if I'm using the right secret key, I can't verify if I'm using the right client id. I feel like I'm guessing trying to make this work."
T: "What exactly are you trying to get working?"
<explain, again, what I'm trying to do>
T: "That's probably not going to work. We don't allow AD authentication from the outside world."
Me: "Yes we do. Microsoft Teams, Outlook, the remote access services. I can log into those services from home using my AD credentials."
T: "Oh yea, I guess we do. I meant what you are trying to do. Azure doesn't allow outside services to authenticate using a JWT. Sorry."

FRACK FRACK FRACK!!

Whew! Putting the flamethrower away.

Thanks devrant for letting me rant.

#RANT_AHEAD

Almost everyone nowadays uses a PC, Laptop, Smartphone but sadly not even 60% of the total potential of the hardware is being used.
.
And no - you don't require custom cooling to use the whole 100% of the total potential, stock cooling is more than enough.
.
IRL "programmers" these days don't do any fscking effort to optimise their code and give it all up as some kinda shitty "hot patch" - code of their looks disturbing with no security features + optimisation. (wAnBlOwS products remain an example)
.
Even when you're using python you can push your project to limits. Instead of shoving face-size ASCII banners why don't chaps stress test their projects? Oh I forgot the community runs on show-offs and CVs ...

.
Note to Self : Optimisation is the key to integrate Technology with Nature.

DO NOT EXPORT GPG KEYS _TEMPORARILY_ AND ASSUME THAT THEY'LL BE IN THE ORIGINAL LOCATION AFTER EXPORT!

I learnt this lesson the hard way.

I had to use a GPG key from my personal keyring on a different machine ( that I control ). This was a temporary one-time operation so I thought I might be a smart-ass and do the decryption on the fly.

So, the idiotic me directly piped the output : `gpg --export-secret-key | scp ...`. Very cool ( at the time ). Everything worked as expected. I was happy. I went to bed.

In the morning, I had to use the same key on the original machine for the normal purpose I'd use it for and guess what greeted me? - *No secret key*

*me exclaims* : What the actual f**k?!

More than half a day of researching on the internet and various trials-and-errors ( I didn't even do any work for my employer ), I finally gave up trying to retrieve / recover the lost secret key that was never written to a file.

Well, to be fair, it was imported into a temporary keyring on the second machine, but that was deleted immediately after use. Because I *thought* that the original secret key was still in my original keyring.

More idiotic was the fact that I'd been completely ignorant of the option called `--list-secret-keys` even after using GPG for many years now. My test to confirm whether the key was still in place was `--list-keys` which even now lists the user ID. Alas, now without a secret key to do anything meaningful really.

Here I am, with my face in my hands, shaking my head and almost crying.

About a month ago I sorted out some old electronic stuff and found my old laptop from 2011. A 2:nd Gen i7 8gb ram. I replaced it due to several bluescreens a day that later turned out to be caused by a faulty RAM module (was 16Gb back then).
Well, back then it became a backup laptop and went on the shelf and almost forgotten.

I went through all the old files on it and copied them to the NAS, replaced the mechanic drive with cheep SSD.
Used the old Win7 license key to upgrade to win 10 , dust off the fan, and it turned out to be usable.

I have much better computers so I would not use it for anything but today I gave it to my 6 year old nephew so he can start using a computer and build his knowledge. Worse case; If he spills soda on it he'll learn not to do that with the more expensive computers he will use in future.
So win win. I got to get rid of some junk that had been gathering dust for many years by giving my nephew an opportunity to get started with computers.

Finally, the timing: Microsoft announced a few days back that any new upgrade from windows 7&8 to 10 is no longer supported, but that computer still has a valid win 10 license as it was updated a month ago.

Tabs, or No Tabs? I did the same as this commentor 2 years ago. I can code so quick now because of this simple switch. Here's why:

(source, Laracasts.com)

Ben Smith
"I think the most beneficial tip was to do away with tabs. Although it took a while to get used to and on many occasions in the first few days I almost switched them back on, it has done wonders for my workflow.

I find it keeps my brain more engaged with the task at hand due to keeping the editor (and my mind) clutter free. Before when I had to refer to a class, I would have opened it in a new tab and then I might have left it open to make it easier to get to again. This would quickly result in a bar full of tabs and navigation around the editor would become slow and my brain would get bogged down keeping track of what was open and which tab it was in. With the removal of the tab bar I'm now able to keep only the key information in my mind and with the ability to quickly switch between recently opened files, I find I haven't lost any of the speed which I initially thought I might.

In fact this is something I have noticed in all areas of writing code, the more proficient I have become with an editor the better the code I have been writing. Any time spent actually writing your code is time in which your brain is disconnected from the problem you are trying to solve. The quicker you are able to implement your ideas in code, the smaller the disconnect becomes. For example, I have recently been learning how to do unit testing and to do so I have been rewriting an old project with tests included. The ability to so quickly refactor has meant that whereas before I might have taken 30 seconds shuffling code around, now I can spend maybe 5 seconds allowing my mind to focus much better on how best to refactor, not on the actual process of doing so."

jeff_way Mod
"Yeah - it takes a little while to get used to the idea of having no tabs. But, I wouldn't go back at this point. It's all about forcing yourself into a faster workflow. If you keep the tabs and the sidebar open, you won't use the keyboard."

Yesterday and today combined I spent about 8 hours trying to get my PGP / GPG passphrase to work. Absolutely magically, somehow a newline character had gotten into the passphrase. Yes. That's possible. On macOS, that is.

On my Windows machine I have the same fucking private key protected with the same password. Now try and get a non-windows newline character into any Windows password field, be it a command line or some GUI input. WTF! You'll lose a year of your life with every passphrase error while you have the actual passphrase.

So after all these hours trying to hack my own GPG keystore without success, I remembered how the private key got on my Windows machine in the first place: see tags.

Researching a new communication platform (Twilio, Vonage, etc), I started with Plivo. Created an account, they offer from free credits to try out the platform, so I set up a phone number and attempt to use their API, didn't quite work. I contact their support through their online portal (being very detailed about what I'm trying to do and the issue I'm having)
A day later they reply asking "Could you tell us how you are using Plivo and the issue you are having?"
That would be OK, but my question from the online portal was in the body of the email message. My first reply started with "You not reading the <bleep>ing message is my issue right now.", but I copied and pasted the same message. I even included a screenshot of the API I was having a problem with (so they could see what I see).
Next day I'm trying out a different area of their API and there is a banner "Incoming and Outgoing phone calls are disabled on this account. Contact Support blah blah blah"
I thought, OK, its a trial account, they probably want some additional validation before allowing anyone to make phone calls. I jump thru the hoops, next day I receive an email "Thanks for sharing the details with us. I have reached out to the Product Team to assist us with this and I'll share more details with you as soon as they revert."
Revert what? The block? Waited until next day, banner still there, so I replied again. Not another reply until the next day.
"Our internal team analyzed the account details and unfortunately, we would not be able to remove the restrictions from your account."
WTF!? Plivo, we are going to give you *money* and you can't answer my question! I'm not asking for free stuff, not asking for help finding the 'any key', your API is supposed to support XYZ feature and it's not working...OK. We're done.
I try to close the account (has too much of my personal info I don't want these clowns to have) and I get an error 'Unable to close the account'. WTF!

I got the Aero15. Had to send it in because ctrl+alt+shift+s (IntelliJ Preference menu) and some others critical shortcuts weren't working. Got a reply a week later.

"Thank you for using our service. The explained fault isn't actually a fault. If you want to use that button combination simply remap the FN key. Mind you this will disable any FN key combinations."

....

"What about all the other combinations?"

....

"Ok we returned it to the technicians who will do their best to repair it."

....

I await their response. But seriously, for a company that makes GAMING keyboards this is pretty embarrassing. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention.

Let's pick a datepicker for the project. Me: jquery-ui ? Supervisor: No something better.
Jquery-ui: any css selector, standard date format masks (dd/mm/yyyy or mm-dd-yyyy....), Opens if the field is access using Tab key
Something better: only Id selector, custom date format mask ( %d/%m/%Y ...), Tab does not work

Ok, so: I have a macbook for work. And for the most part, I love it. Its a good looking device that has a fast cpu, enough ram to run stuff locally for testing, even multiple services / environments at the same time without getting overly sluggish.

And, the best thing: It isn't Windows. I have a good, working shell (zsh), so I can use all the command line tooling I could wish for, I have a somewhat working package manager and everything.

But there are just some little things I really can't wrap my head around. And since everything is so locked in by Apple, there are no sensible ways to fix those things without having a bunch of extra programs / services running all the time, introducing overhead, configuration for things I neither want nor need, and so on.

First of all, why the hell did you think the normal way of typing "@" on a german iso keyboard is the key combination for closing the currently focused application? I am a daily user of macos for over 2 years now, and I still keep quitting applications regularly, almost every day.

Or, scroll direction: I use a mouse (g pro wireless) and not just the touchpad, but when I am in a meeting or something (or when I take my macbook with me to configure a switch that isn't accessible over the network), I don't want to take the mouse with me, the touchpad is pretty good, it is big, precise and everything. But for some dumb reason, they decided to reverse the scroll direction for the mouse by default, so if you change that to use the mouse like a normal person, it also changes the scroll direction for the touchpad. And, the worst part is: there doesn't seem to be ANY easy way to separate those two settings, or to automatically set the scroll direction when a mouse is connected.

So every time I use my laptop somewhere else, wich also happens regularly, the scroll directions is wrong, which means I have to go into the settings, change it, then change it back when I am at my desk again.

It just doesn't make any sense, stop trying to "know what our customers want", and please, dear Mr. Tim Apple, give your customers the freedom to know for themselves what they want.

Thanks for listening to my TED Talk.

!dev

TL: DR - This year is not good so far.

One important thing that I learned this year is you understand a certain person's importance after they are no more.

My grandfather, whom I've always hated, ignored, made my distance from him, just because he was unfair with me and my mother since my childhood, passed away a few days before. Only then I realized what kind of a fucking idiot I am.

On top of that, 2 of my best friends stop being friends with me, for one I had gone too far with a practical joke and for another, I proposed her.

But 2 months from now I expect things to be left behind, locked away in a closet, and throw away the key.

So, I'll just say this, that acknowledge person while they are here, don't hold any grudge towards any fucking one.

Hi XXXX,

Thanks for speaking to me earlier,

If you could send me the following details we can really get the ball rolling with the recruitment process.

• Any jobs you have applied for or interviewed (I need company name and position)

This stops me re applying you for jobs you’ve already applied for

• Any key elements an employer has to have for you

• A name phone number and position held for references at your current contract.

If we can get these over asap then we can start the ball rolling and get you a new position in the most time effective manner.

Kind Regards,

Brainless Lazy Back-Stabbing Recruiter.

Today, after searching for 4~ hours for a solution to host a little script that would hide a private API key, I discovered Google Apps Script. What a fucking nice service. Seriously, check it out, you may need it some day.

Anyway I don't understand why Google wants to restrict network access from the Firebase functions when a shitty little script hosted on the same servers can run without any restriction in memory or data transfer. It also provides a cache service, I could save my whole photo gallery on it without them even noticing.

I'm feeling burnt due to the lack of direction at my job instead of overwork.
I'm working as a data scientist at a large corporation and have been remote for a little over a year. I'm very savvy at programming and other technical skills but my manager wants me to develop my leadership skills and want me to move to a management role eventually. So he's been kinda "grooming" me to take on more leadership responsibility in the projects I'm currently involved in.

However, to be honest, I'm a little torn about getting more management or leadership responsibilities. I'm an extreme introvert and absolutely abhor meetings and having the same thing to people all the time and this sort of things stresses me out very easily. My manager seems set on pushing me towards pursuing a path towards leadership and just basically assumed that this is what I want out of my career and started putting me in the deep end without asking me what I want.

I really want to voice my honest thoughts about what I really want to do in my career (to be a technical specialist rather than a manager) but I've kinda procrastinated over the past year when he first started "grooming" me for a leadership role and it's my bad that I didn't tell him earlier.

Right now, I'm thrown in the deep end. I'm given a lot of projects without much of any direction and I'm asked to figure out the people I need to reach out to, the types of meetings I need to set with them, the relationships I need to develop both in and out of my department, etc. However, my real passions lie in writing code, fixing bugs, building models, understanding new technologies and applying them to the business, etc.

On paper, I'm involved in a ton of projects and I seem to be a really busy worker. But right now, I'm having a lot of difficulty reaching out and developing relationships with people that I barely have any actual work to do during the day, because I'm constantly waiting for replies from people or for permission or red tape to get some key information or access to a system in order for me to build something like a model or a program for a particular project. I'm spending maybe 1 or 2 hours of my workday actually "working" which is attending meetings, reading emails, etc., reaching out to someone for the n-th time (even though they continue to ignore me), etc. And that's because I'm blocked on all of my projects - I need an essential piece of information, data, or access to a system or server and the person I'm reaching out to to get this isn't responding. I brought this up with my manager and he says he's gonna try to reach out to these people to help me but so far, it doesn't seem like his help has been effective as I'm continuing to wait.

Though I get paid pretty well, I feel guilty logging in to work everyday and doing very little work, not because I'm lazy but because there really isn't much work for me to do because I'm waiting on so much here and I'm at a point where I can't make any progress in any of my projects without the approvals or other critical information that others aren't providing me.

I know I probably should find another job and I'm currently looking but in the meantime, is there anything else that I should be doing at my current job to hopefully make this situation better?

StackOverflow locked my account. I'm hoping someone here might be kind enough to help me with a bash script I'm "bashing" my head with. Actually, it's zsh on MacOS if it makes any difference.

I have an input file. Four lines. No blank lines. Each of the four lines has two strings of text delimited by a tab. Each string on either side of the tab is either one word with no spaces or a bunch of words with spaces. Like this (using <tab> as a placeholder here on Devrant for where the tab actually is)

ABC<tab>DEF
GHI<tab>jkl mno pq
RST<tab>UV
wx<tab>Yz

I need to open and read the file, separate them into key-value pairs, and put them into an array for processing. I have this script to do that:

# Get input arguments
search_string_file="$1"
file_path="$2"

# Read search strings and corresponding names from the file and store in arrays
search_strings=()
search_names=()

# Read search strings and corresponding names from the file and store in arrays
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
echo "Line: $line"
search_string=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'\t' '{print $1}')
name=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'\t' '{print $2}')
search_strings+=("$search_string")
search_names+=("$name")
done < "$search_string_file"

# Debug: Print the entire array of search strings
echo "Search strings array:"
for (( i=0; i<${#search_strings[@]}; i++ )); do
echo "[$i] ${search_strings[$i]} -- ${search_names[$i]}"
done

However, in the output, I get the following:

Line: ABC<tab>DEF
Line: GHI<tab>jkl mno pq
Line: RST<tab>UV
Line: wx<tab>Yz
Search strings array:
[0] --
[1] ABC -- DEF
[2] GHI -- jkl mno pq
[3] RST -- UV

That's it. I seem to be off by one because that last line...

Line: wx<tab>Yz

never gets added to the array. What I need it to be is:

[0] ABC -- DEF
[1] GHI -- jkl mno pq
[2] RST -- UV
[3] wx -- Yz

What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks.

The key to any good relationship is compromise. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce the 2-4-tab alternating space indent style!

if (x) {
somemethod();
}
else if (y)
{
someOtherMethod();
} else {
iDontKnowHowToTabOnAndroidMethod();
}

Rant and opinions wanted. Its a long one.

I have been working on a project for a month and a half. For the first week I was requesting designs that I got about 2 of out of 15. For the next week and a half the designer was on holiday so I couldn't do anything but delivered a few more designs once he got back.

This takes us 2 weeks in already. I have other things to do as well so at the same time I work on support tickets and some bespoke development coming in.

I get given 2 or 3 more designs and can't get anything else out of the designer after waiting a week so I have to design everything myself as I go and build it. Something I have never done before.

We are now 3 and a half weeks in. My boss randomly tells my pm it needs to be demo ready the next day. I work furiously to hack something together. It works but key functionality is missing.

I move house and work from home for a week and a half. I do my best but the project is full of bugs and the CSS is horrible because I didn't know what I was making at any stage. It is therefore CSS rules repeated in IDs everywhere.

My colleagues join me on the project because my boss has decided to try and sell it tomorrow.

They run through it and find all the bugs left from me working furiously to get things done quickly. Things like no search pagination and missing validation.

My boss is now pisses at me because the project is not finished, my colleagues are now all working on it. Throughout it all he knew the designer was not delivering me anything and that I was struggling.

Am I in the wrong for writing shit code that came about because I was coding with no idea of what the finished project should look like? Is he in the wrong for dumping this on me and just letting me get on with it even though he knew there were no designs?

Btw I am just finishing a 1 year internship and before this have never done web dev before.

Discuss.

The most frustrating thing while I edit a file on Github directly is pressing home/end key. They're not related to lines but page.

This is the problem with most of the online textboxes/editor.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there any other shortcut

I have sort of an embarrassing question...

I never learned touch typing, hated it as much as I hated my calligraphy lessons in elementary. Forward a couple of years, I'm a developer and trying to dig deeper into vim seems to require learning touch typing... it has been a struggle to say the least and lowered my speed to a frustrating rate. 😥

I know the arguments for putting the work and learning proper technique but, are there any other arguments out there? I mean, as a developer I find myself using a lot of numbers and symbols which are not totally covered in touch typing curricula, together with a bunch of key combinations...

Idk, maybe I'm just asking for encouragement or different perspectives or unknown advantages about learning touch typing even when you feel fast and confident without it... Thank you guys!

Peers: Set bit 0 to 1 (((W key for movement)))
Host: Gets Bit 0; 0=1; sends signal back to peer for moving peer 1 pixel up
Peers: (Location remains the same?)

Any suggestions on what i'm doing wrong here?

It started when i was about 10 old.
My uncle showed me how to display something in dos-prompt using the echo command in a custom batch-file.
A few commands later, i was able to "program" a flip-book of an ascii ski-driver. Each ascii picture was separated by pressing any key and cls ^^
Aaaaah. Sweet childhood memories!

Later on i used a programming-language for beginners in windows.
This language gave you control of a triangle called "turtle".

My first high-level programming language was Delphi.
Since i had no idea of databases, i created a pseudo database of magic the gathering play-cards. Each card had it's very own windows formular filled up completely with an uncompressed image object displaying the chosen card modally. *sigh*
I scanned each card by using a feed scanner.
Finally, my application consisted of 200 cardimages and forced my PC to swap the required memory from my harddisk.
Boy o boy. I was such a noob! ^^

Over the years i discovered and felt in love with a lot of languages (jsp, java (script), c#, php, ...) and concepts (mvvm, mvc, clean-architecture, tdd, ...)! ;)

I have implemented RESTful API using expressJS, and another React app which will use the API's to fetch data.
I'm getting a problem of Allow-Origin Header.
what's the proper way of calling a API ?

do I use a CORS middleware and allow all origin ('*') and use Api-key as way of check authorization to prevent mis-use. ?
any other tricks ?

Update on my 60% keyboard and (neo)vim journey:

I've been getting much more used to the motions and hand posture required to use vim, but I still don't understand people who use it as their main editor.

I'm still using vanilla nvim, because:
- I am afraid of learning to install plugins
- I want to master the baseline experience before adding more

I enjoy the snappiness, and I feel my keyboard skills further improving, but everything about neovim is disappointing me from the syntax highlighting to the clunky copy/paste to the difficulty of finding code you need.

In VSCode, I can just do ctrl + p to go to any file, f2 to symbol rename, ctrl + shift+ f to do a recursive directory search. These are things offered only by plugins in nvim, but are available out-of-the-box in vscode.

Even saving your file is clunky. I've gotten used to esc + :w, but it's just more keystrokes than ctrl + s.

Sure, my hand is RIGHT in the middle of the keyboard, and key for key, I'm probably writing code faster when I'm in a groove. But there are so many things that are easy in vscode that are difficult in vim that I know that I'm losing time anyways.

HOW I CAUGHT MY CHEATING PARTNER WITH THE HELP OF SOLACE CYBER WORKSTATIONS

Solace Cyber Workstations is a tool designed to help individuals find important information about their partner's online activities without causing any disruption or breach of privacy. This software works by gathering data that is publicly available, allowing users to understand more about their partner's digital presence. It can include social media profiles, public posts, and other online interactions, making it a comprehensive solution for those seeking clarity in their relationships. Using Solace Cyber Workstations is simple and user-friendly. The interface guides users step-by-step through the process of retrieving information. There are no complicated setups or technical skills needed. Once the user inputs the relevant details, the tool quickly navigates the internet to compile the necessary data, ensuring a seamless and efficient process. This ease of use supports individuals in their quest for knowledge about their partner's online life. One of the key features of Solace Cyber Workstations is its commitment to non-intrusiveness. The tool respects privacy and ensures that all information collected is taken from public sources. This means that users can learn more about their partner without violating their privacy or crossing any ethical boundaries. Users can feel comfortable knowing they are not engaging in any harmful or invasive practices while seeking information. Moreover, Solace Cyber Workstations are particularly useful for individuals looking to enhance trust and communication in their relationships. By using this tool, users can clarify any doubts they may have about their partner's online presence. Understanding their partner’s online interactions can lead to more open discussions and strengthen the bond between both individuals, ultimately fostering a healthier environment for the relationship. In conclusion, Solace Cyber Workstations provides a reliable and respectful way to learn about a partner's online life. Its user-friendly interface and non-intrusive methods make it an ideal choice for those who want to ensure transparency while maintaining ethical standards. By utilizing this tool, users can promote understanding and trust in their relationships, which is essential for long-term success. Send a W h a t s A pp D M via: +1 2 4 0 7 4 3 7 6 8 9

Thanks.

When you commit a more readable README on GitHub to a non native English speaker sends you an email a day later asking for help why his self-signed certificate isn't trusted by his browser or his other computers.

The project he's working on is to sniff Wi-Fi packets that are encrypted through a MiTM attack. I've now stopped following this project and moved on.

Has anyone else had any stupid questions from debs which were about the key purpose of their project and how to go about it?

So excited about my project !
It's about securing file transfer within local network.
Clients are android devices and there is a linux system as a server which handles file and public key transfer between clients .

Any idea about making it cooler ?

It's funny when a girl says where's the "any" key to start a game it's found cute and when a guy does the same and it's like here should crawl back into his mother's womb and rethink his life decisions.

Opinions please.

I want to share a small model in my iOS app. Now on android I'd do with with ViewModelProviders, but on iOS I'm going with SharedDataContainer which is basically a singleton class that store key value data.

Is there any better approach? Data will not be bigger than 10 list items with guid (key) and int (value)

However; when I have big data I do cache on disk or hello OOM exceptions (or whatever they call that bitch on iOS)

I've been wondering about renting a new VPS to get all my websites sorted out again. I am tired of shared hosting and I am able to manage it as I've been in the past.

With so many great people here, I was trying to put together some of the best practices and resources on how to handle the setup and configuration of a new machine, and I hope this post may help someone while trying to gather the best know-how in the comments. Don't be scared by the lengthy post, please.

The following tips are mainly from @Condor, @Noob, @Linuxxx and some other were gathered in the webz. Thanks for @Linux for recommending me Vultr VPS. I would appreciate further feedback from the community on how to improve this and/or change anything that may seem incorrect or should be done in better way.

1. Clean install CentOS 7 or Ubuntu (I am used to both, do you recommend more? Why?)
2. Install existing updates
3. Disable root login
4. Disable password for ssh
5. RSA key login with strong passwords/passphrases
6. Set correct locale and correct timezone (if different from default)
7. Close all ports
8. Disable and delete unneeded services
9. Install CSF
10. Install knockd (is it worth it at all? Isn't it security through obscurity?)
11. Install Fail2Ban (worth to install side by side with CSF? If not, why?)
12. Install ufw firewall (or keep with CSF/Fail2Ban? Why?)
13. Install rkhunter
14. Install anti-rootkit software (side by side with rkhunter?) (SELinux or AppArmor? Why?)
15. Enable Nginx/CSF rate limiting against SYN attacks
16. For a server to be public, is an IDS / IPS recommended? If so, which and why?
17. Log Injection Attacks in Application Layer - I should keep an eye on them. Is there any tool to help scanning?

If I want to have a server that serves multiple websites, would you add/change anything to the following?
18. Install Docker and manage separate instances with a Dockerfile powered base image with the following? Or should I keep all the servers in one main installation?
19. Install Nginx
20. Install PHP-FPM
21. Install PHP7
22. Install Memcached
23. Install MariaDB
24. Install phpMyAdmin (On specific port? Any recommendations here?)

I am sorry if this is somewhat lengthy, but I hope it may get better and be a good starting guide for a new server setup (eventually become a repo). Feel free to contribute in the comments.

I once was working on my family's business during summer and was doing something on the laptop that was there (according to the owner, it was in a "good shape" - oh my god that laptop nearly gave me cancer: an old Toshiba, running W10, with half the F keys not working - specially F5. I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT F5 OH MY GOD -, and also the ➡ key (arrow keys). It was bought in a flea market and some IT guy, a friend of the owner, repaired it a bit and installed the OS because a laptop that old ran WinXP or Win Vista for sure) when suddenly it died on me.
I rebooted the thing and right before the time it should be showing the windows logo, the screen froze (on a black screen with some text) and it started to beep. Loudly. A loud continuous beep. I turned it off and on some times after that, seeing if turning it off and on did something (as it seems to work LoL) and it continued with the beeping. After a quick search I found out that that was a common problem with Toshibas that old, and that I needed to press F2 (that key worked thank god) when the black screen with the text showed up (I don't remember what was written there, it were some booting instructions, I think).
It worked. Great. Now the N key doesn't work when I press it. Greeeeeeeaaaaaat. Also it seemed that, when I opened the start menu, it would automatically write "nnnnnnnn(...)" without me pressing any key (pressing any key would make it stop though, maybe it was stuck).
Then I told the owner not to turn it off, because the laptop would start beeping and such (and I know he'd panic about it).
From then on I think it went off for good and now he's been using his own Toshiba, that runs Vista and is slow as all hell.
Moral of the story: he should have been used his crappy PC from the beginning, at least all its keys work

(Note: watching him type hurts my soul. When one is used to use both hands to type, and is fast-ish on the keyboard and uses tabs to change fields, watching someone type with only one hand every 2" or so and using the mouse to change fields hurts. So much time wasted 😭)

Crypto. I've seen some horrible RC4 thrown around and heard of 3DES also being used, but luckily didn't lay my eyes upon it.
Now to my current crypto adventure.
Rule no.1: Never roll your own crypto.
They said.
So let's encrypt a file for upload. OK, there doesn't seem to be a clear standard, but ya'know combine asymmetric cipher to crypt the key with a symmetric. Should be easy. Take RSA and whatnot from some libraries. But let's obfuscate it a bit so nobody can reuse it. - Until today I thought the crypto was alright, but then there was something off. On two layers there were added hashes, timestamps or length fields, which enlarges the data to encrypt. Now it doesn't add up any more: Through padding and hash verification RSA from OpenSSL throws an error, because the data is too long (about 240 bytes possible, but 264 pumped in). Probably the lib used just didn't notify, silently truncating stuff or resorting to other means. Still investigation needed. - but apart from that: why the fuck add own hash verification, with weak non-cryptographic hashes(!) if the chosen RSA variant already has that with SHA-256. Why this sick generation of key material with some md5 artistic stunts - is there no cryptographically safe random source on Windows? Why directly pump some structs (with no padding and magic numbers) into the file? Just so it's a bit more fucked up?
Thanks, that worked.

TLDR: Being taken of my assigned dev tasks to do a basic word mail merge.

Why am I doing a word mail merge again?

Oh yeah because the business are that used to oh well if it's more than two clicks IT will do it. The only bit that would be considered hard (using that word loosely) is the address block.

No totally not mad that you had me write a mail merge for dip shits guide which isn't being used. No totally not pissed that you now want me to drop everything I'm doing for this basic task.

The fucks can't even pull the right data. Here's the data for the mail merge. Great your missing some key bits. The fucking addresses and names of the people.

I think what's pissing me off the most is I'm not being technically challenged at all and any chance I get to do something that would be is taken away to do something basic you learn in school.

Anyone here believes that good habits are the key to be a better programmer (write friendly code, learn something new, plan before code etc)

Any thoughts-suggestions?

Optimization concepts/patterns or instances?

For pattern its gotta be any time i can take a O(n^2) and turn it into O(n) or literally anything better than O(n^2).

Instance would probably be the time that we took an api method that returned a json list made up of dictionaries CSV-style and changed it into a dictionary with the uid as the key and the other info as key-value pairs in a sub-dictionary. So instead of:

[
{
"Name": name,
"Info":info
}
]

We now return:

{
name:
{
"Info": info
}
}

Which can, if done right, make your runtime O(1), which i love.

!Rant

TL;DR - Getting married can lead to installing life malware.

MARRIAGE SOFTWARE....

A young husband wrote this to a Systems Analyst -
(Marriage Software Div);

Dear Systems Analyst,

I am desperate for some help! I recently upgraded my program from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that the new program began unexpected Child Processing and also took up a lot of space and valuable resources. This wasn't mentioned in the product brochure.

In addition Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during systems initialization and then it monitors all other system activities.

Applications such as "Boys' Night out 2.5" and "Golf 5.3" no longer run, and crashes the system whenever selected.

Attempting to operate selected "Soccer 6.3" always fails and "Shopping 7.1" runs instead.

I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background whilst attempting to run any of my favorite applications. Be it online or offline.
.
I am thinking of going back to "Girlfriend 7.0", but uninstall doesn't work on this program. Can you please help?

.... The Systems Analyst replied:

Dear Customer,
This is a very common problem resulting from a basic misunderstanding of the functions of the Wife 1.0 program.

Many customers upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 thinking that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITY AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM.

Actually, Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM designed by its Creator to run everything on your current platform.
You are unlikely to be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0, as Wife 1.0 was not designed to do this and it is impossible to uninstall, delete or purge the program files from the System once it is installed.

Some people have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but have ended up with even more problems. (See Manual under Alimony/Child Support and Solicitors' Fees).

Having Wife 1.0 installed, I recommend you keep it Installed and deal with the difficulties as best as you can.

When any faults or problems occur, whatever you think has caused them, you must run the.........
C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE Program and avoid attempting to use the *Esc-Key for it will freeze the entire system.

It may be necessary to run C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE a number of times, and eventually hope that the operating system will return to normal.

Wife 1.0, although a very high maintenance programme, can be very rewarding.

To get the most out of it, consider buying additional Software such as "Flowers 2.0" and "Chocolates 5.0" or "HUGS\ KISSES 6.0" or "TENDERNESS\ UNDERSTANDING 10.0" or "even Eating Out Without the Kids 7.2.1" (if Child processing has already started).

DO NOT under any circumstances install "Secretary 2.1" (Short Skirt Version) or "One Nightstand 3.2" (Any Mood Version), as this is not a supported Application for Wife 1.0 and the system will almost certainly CRASH.

BEST WISHES!

Yours,"
Systems Analyst.
-----------------------------------------------
I'm not sure if this is a repost - if it is I apologise, but it's too good not to share.

I hate group project so much.

I yet again successfully stirred up a big drama in my project group. For project, I proposed a CDN cache system for a post only database server. Super simple. I wanted to see what ideas other people come up with. So I said I am not good at the content and the idea is dumb. Oh man, what a horrible mistake. One group member wants to build a chat app with distributed storage. We implemented get/put for a terribly designed key value store and now they want to build a freaking chat app on top of a more stupid kV store using golang standard lib. I don't think any of those fools understand the challenges that comes with the distributed storage.

I sent a video explaining part of crdt. "That's way too complicated. Why are you making everything complicated."

Those fools leave too much details for course stuff's interpretation and says

"course stuff will only grade the project according to the proposal. It's in the project description".

I asked why don't they just take baby steps and just go with their underlying terribly designed kV store.

"Messaging app is more interesting and designing kV store with generic API is just as difficult"

😂 Fucking egos

Then I successfully pissed off all group members with relatively respectful words then pissed off myself and joined another group.

This happened to me sometime back.

I want to try out a WordPress plugin in my local machine before installing on a production server. It is an Ubuntu machine. Downloaded and installed Xampp, then setup WordPress with MySQL. Now tried uploading the plugin zip file, it throws some permission error, asking to fix permissions or use FTP. I thought of just chmod 777 recursively for the WordPress directory to fix this easily.

Ran the command, looks like it is hung. Terminated using Ctrl+C and then ran the same command. Again it is taking much time. It should not take so much time to recursively change the permission of just a WordPress directory. Thought something was wrong. Before I realized the damage is already done.

Looks like I ran the command

sudo chmod -R 777 /

instead of

sudo chmod -R 777 ./

Fuck, I missed a dot in the command and it is changing permissions of everything in my machine. Saw the System monitor, CPU usage spiked to 100%. I can't close or open any program. Force shutdown the machine using the power key. It didn't boot again. Recovery mode didn't help. Looks like there is no easy way to restore back from this damage. Most of the files I need are backed up in the cloud, still, need a few more personal files so that I can format and reinstall Ubuntu. Realised I have Windows in dual booting. Boot into Windows and used some ext4 reader to recover the files, formatted and reinstalled the OS. Took a few hours to get back to my previous setup.

Lesson Learned: Don't use sudo unnecessarily.
Double check the command while executing.
Running a wrong command with root permission can fuckup your entire machine.

Watch an "Introduction" video about it, or read the docs/blogs on why and where to use this particular tech. If you find it useful, then get your head down and work. Watch every YouTube video, read company docs, read random blogs, read FAQs. Honestly, any source you can get your hands on.
And never forget to write more code than you read.
Consistency and hard work is the only key.
I still remember when I was first getting introduced to front end, I didn't sleep for 3 straight days and was studying all that I could.

How the hell do you interrupt a download in Sublime FTP???!!! Any obvious hot key such as Ctrl+C doesn't work, and there's not a word about how to interrupt an operation in the docs of Sublime FTP.

I created a custom interface for an LMS that allows students to see their marks even if they haven't been 'shared' yet by their teachers. This is all done without accessing any unauthorized apis, as the LMS always returns all student marks and then hides the ones with a False 'shared' key. School administration caught me, so I've now shut it down. I have a meeting with the deans tomorrow. Any advice? (Again, this is all done using existing methods found within this LMS)

I am new to Ubuntu or any Linux OS and have been hearing a few good things about them.

So few days ago I decided to try out the Ubuntu 17.10, after which I installed Gnome Tweak Tool to customize the look and feel. After installing some themes and applying them I found the whitish bar appear as you can see in the photo I attached. I do not like it (hated it also when I used Windows). Please how do I make this go away as I have googled alot about it but cant get anything helpful.

I also have the issue of my Windows button not performing any shortcut task as before like showing the desktop screen (this now happens when I click the Windows buttton + A key)

Thank you all

Is it just me who thinks that the "insert" key is the most useless and annoying key piece?

It's beside backpack, I accidentally press it. I really haven't found any uses for it so far...

!rant
If you want to resize and move windows without any hassle (with pressed ALT key) in windows? Just like in linux? Then check out AltDrag.

Wish someone had told me this sooner 😅