Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "at least it's friday."
-
Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"
Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"
Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"
Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."
Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."
Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"
Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."
Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."
Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"
Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."
Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."
Cprn: - "Please do?"
Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"
Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."
Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."
Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."
Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."
Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."
Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."
Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"
Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."
Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."
Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."
Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"
Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."
Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"
Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."24 -
OH MY GOD
WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??
At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.
Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.
I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!
YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!
Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?
And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!
It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!
Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.
OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.13 -
micromanager: "Quick and easy win! Please have this done in 2-3 days to start repairing your reputation"
ticket: "Scrap this gem, and implement your own external service wrapper using the new and vastly different Slack API!"
slack: "New API? Give me bearer tokens! Don't use that legacy url crap, wth"
prev dev: "Yeah idk what a bearer token is. Have the same url instead, and try writing it down so you don't forget it?"
Slack admin: "I can't give you access to the slack integration test app, even though it's for exactly this and three others have access already, including your (micro)manager."
Slack: "You can also <a>create a new slack app</a>!" -- link logs me into slack chat instead. After searching and finding a link elsewhere: doesn't let me.
Slack admin: "You want a new test slack app instead? Sure, build it the same as before so it isn't abuseable. No? Okay, plan a presentation for it and bring security along for a meeting on Friday and I'll think about it. I'm in some planning meetings until then."
asdfjkagel.
This job is endless delays, plus getting yelled at over the endless delays.
At least I can start on the code while I wait. Can't test anything for at least a week, though. =/17 -
Are you reading your own email?! Do you even comprehend what you just wrote?!
At least it's Friday. Happy Friday everyone!1 -
I think I nailed it.
I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.
It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.
Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.
Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.
They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.
Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.
Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.
I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀10 -
Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃
Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.
But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970
So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.
So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.
So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.
So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.
Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.
And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.
And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!
Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!
P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".11 -
!dev && rant
What's people's problem with Wikipedia.
Earlier this week I told my cleaning lady about how Black Friday was so pointless this year, and apparently it's the first thing she heard about Black Friday (she's in her late 30's and a mother of 2, go figure). Not only that but she believed that it occurred every end of the month because someone else told her so. She said it would make sense because it's close to everyone's payday.
So I go and look up some information about Black Friday for her. All the DDG results somehow shit or cluttered by marketing wank.. your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, appended Wikipedia to get some reasonably good information quick. And that looked for all the world like that was the case. Apparently it's got to do with American Thanksgiving.. who knew?
She still didn't believe it. "But that's Wikipedia..." So she looked it up on her own phone on some random local site.. it confirmed that indeed it occurs once a year. Well, confirmed to the extent that there was "2017", "2018" and "2019" on the page... Yeah.
Finally she believed it. At least she didn't double down on it anymore. But seriously.. you're gonna take the words of one random person over a medium that's constantly being improved under the many eyes principle?
"People can edit Wikipedia so therefore it's bad"
I really don't get people...18 -
In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.
Well, no need for those notes any longer.
I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".
I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.
We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.
I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.
It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.
Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.
Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.5 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
Not been a good day so far:
1. Woke up to my Synology in a 'Volume crashed' state. Tried to contact support via web page; support web page not loading.
2. Ancient software at work stops working. As the last remaining C++ dev, I gotta troubleshoot. Original developer wrote test program...in VB6.
3. Server config file changed, but all the admins swear up and down nobody's made any changes.
4. Client calls account rep and wants to know about our security policies, so he schedules a meeting with me and client and forgets to mention until he's emailing me asking where the hell I am. From the tone of the conversation between the rep and the client, it's clear that somehow I'm to blame for being late.
Sigh.
Well, hey, at least it's Friday, right? Right?1 -
That moment when you make a suggestion. But client ignores you, and you end up building what they want.
Then an asshole comes along and presents the thing that you suggested, and has the balls to say they made it. When you can clearly see that it's the prototype you made!
At least it's Friday...1 -
I still hang out with my friends that I have known since we're in elementary school. The whole gang just had dinner and beer at a pub last night. We usually hang out on Friday or Saturday night. Then sometimes on weekends at someone's place cooking meals, playing games etc.
I also hang out with my gf at least one day a week. The activities are *censored*.
Apart from that, the rest of my life is work life.
I won't say my life is very good but I can't say it's terrible. 🤔1 -
I just found out last Friday that my team collegues (all of them are team leads) are suffering from depression or the so called burn out syndrom. I guess it's my boss' fault. He never gives clear jobs, changes his mind from day to day, we have to manage unclear responsibilities and the baddest thing is that we think that our boss is too stressed out himself.
Do you have any advice for me how we as team could solve that besides changing employer? One thing to mention is, that my boss likes to hear himself talking. That makes it even harder for a guy like myself who is more or less introverted to come up with good arguments which are not overheard or overtalked immediately. What are your feedback strategies to your own boss, how do you bring such stuff on the table?
I fear that when nothing happens, my company will suffer very hard when the whole product engineering departement will fall apart (¼ of the whole company and is responsible for engineering and maintaining of internal services and managed services for our customers).
Well at least it was worth writing about it, maybe my subconcious mind will come up with a brilliant idea itself in the near future in some asynchronous way. But you might be the one with that valuable input, then don't hesitate to share, it will be welcome.4 -
Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.
Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.
Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.
Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.
I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.
NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.
Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.
11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.
11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.
11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."
Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.
11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"
BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT
Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.
The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.
There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.
Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.
Rant over. -
My workplace has been forcing me to work everyday for almost a month now. I've been working at least 8-10 hours from Saturday to Thursday, and 2-3 hours on Friday as well. I'm so exhausted. I can't sleep properly. All I do is work. I have no time left to do things that I want to enjoy. I tried coding today but I'm too exhausted to do it. I was literally at 0 productivity today. I hate seeing my computer now. I don't know how to overcome this especially during the current lockdown situation. The work I do is not valued or appreciated and it's mentally breaking me honestly. I don't know what I want anymore. For sure another job but I need at least a temporary fix till the lockdown is over.
For those who know me or read through my profile, yup it's the same company. The reason I haven't left them even after all this is because this is a really tough time for me financially and I have no other sources of income and right now at my place there are no job opportunities. So the only option is to continue with the existing work place.6 -
After 5 frustrating days, I have my laptop running again. Just in time for a data structures and algorithms exam.
TL;DR: driver issues aren't fun.
It all started on Friday, after the creators update. I was doing notes on lectures, and Windows crashed. I thought not much of it, it was just a "random" crash. I'd gotten a similar crash before, but I didn't think anything of it. This time was different, again it was my touchpad drivers that caused the issue, but this time a restart didn't work. I couldn't boot into Windows. I had to roll back to the last recovery point, effectively undoing the update.
This was fine, and fixed the issue, until Windows automatically updated my touchpad again, after me previously changing the driver. Another restart later and I couldn't boot. Time to roll back to recovery, right? Wrong. My drive had somehow, corrupt most of the Windows files.
And so, starts the journey of dismantling my laptop, changing the hard drive and putting it back together, a process that took 3 days due to not having the correct tools originally, and a late delivery.
(I could have rolled back to my backup system image, but that was before the creators update, and would have essentially postponed the issues I was having)
Finally, I managed to get Windows loaded from boot media (thankfully, they seem to tie your Windows licence to your account now) and am currently in the process of regaining all my lost files (which I have to pull from a system image, so it's a lot of digging through compressed files).
On a positive note, things are running well, and the faster hard drive (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) is a nice upgrade. And the touchpad drivers (the same one that kept crashing) haven't caused any problems since.
Now at least, I can get back to programming :D1 -
Interesting...
On Friday, I was playing with the ChatGPT integration in DBeaver. I was using the DBeaver sample SQLite database. This database has a couple of tables, among them Album and Artist, where Album has a foreign key into Artist.
So, I asked it:
"give me a query that lists all albums from artists who's name starts with s"
The query I got back was:
SELECT * FROM Album
Uhh, okay.
But then, I noticed that I wrote "who's" instead of 'whose', which would be proper grammatically. So, I changed that, and then I got this query:
SELECT * FROM Album WHERE ArtistId IN (SELECT ArtistId FROM Artist WHERE Name LIKE 'S%');
Hooray, that works! I'm not sure it's the best way to write the query... I might have written:
SELECT * FROM album a, artist r WHERE a.artistid=r.artistid AND r.name LIKE 'S%'
...I'd have to check to see if one performs better than the other, and consider which syntax I find clearer, but that's a separate issue, it's just nice to see a working, reasonable query generated because that's the point, after all.
But I found it interesting that such a minor error would cause it to not work, that's my main point.
Interestingly, it seems to have learned: I just tried the same thing, and I got the right query either way. So that's pretty cool.
It's a pretty neat feature and I can see some legitimate value in it. I'm pretty good writing SQL myself... I've managed to write some truly hideously complex queries over the years... but there are definitely instances I can recall where the query didn't seem obvious at the start, and having an AI that can MAYBE produce something that is AT LEAST a starting point is definitely something I can get onboard with.9 -
So I decided to install a third OS on my laptop and oh boy, I never thought I'd have to deal with so many issues!
First, I had to make space for the new OS, so I did the only feasible thing - Shrunk a windows partition (Used for gaming only), then installed the third OS into it. (For clarification, one OS was Windows, the second Debian for work and the new one was Kali for a course at school about security and ethical hacking)
Well... After I installed and tried out that the Kali worked... My Debian began to make problems. It would hang for almost a minute during start as it tried to mount a (for some reason) no longer existing Swap partition.
After it gave up and I found out... I, fortunately, fixed it after just a bit of googling. At least I learned to repack the ramfs.
It worked all fine and dandy... Only... My Debian now shared the swap with Kali.
Few weeks forward, last friday, I tried to boot up Kali at class... Only for it to... Stop at a black screen, weird.
Some minor detective work later, I found out nothing was... Wrong really.
But... For some mysterious reason, my complete GDM just.... No longer worked.
One LightDM and XFCE instal later (Thanks god that at least TTY still worked fine), it finally worked again, and this time, I booted back into Debian, shrunk the Kali partition a little more and dedicated it's own swap there. Setting and resetting everything, and finally had a working triple-boot laptop...
My only question is... Why?
Does sharing Swap really affect the system so much, besides hibernation ofc.3 -
iAPPLIED CS UNIVERSITY, DAY 1 (2018-09-24)
11:00 UTC+3: Arrived at the secretary's office to complete my registration. I met quite some people; I forgot the names of some. I spent some time over there, so I took the 13:00 class instead of the 11:00 one. It's still early, so we pick whichever we want.
13:00: Procedural Programming at the Computer's lab. The computers were running Windows 8.1! 😱 I might connect to my laptop via RDP. It would be very cool. The course was about C, but the first time was just an introduction. We are going to use Code::Blocks. We were also explained the (HTTP only) web platform in which we are logged in via our passwords and submit our assignments. The professor was very nice, but this day at least was very boring. I was watching CodeMinkey cartoons, trying to solve AdLitterams.
18:00: Back for Applied Mathematics I. At the same computer lab. No lesson did happen, because we have to s learn theory stuff first (every Friday I think). Back to home.
Tommorrow is going to be a hard day...:wq1 -
Friday
> Mister IHateForALiving, we have an automated procedure which downloads files from a website. You should update it and use the new webservice instead.
Sounds cool, just send me the documentation
> Oh yeah, have this example of a request
... Dude, this thing has 10 parameters. None of them are named, and 7 of them are actually nulled. How do I fill this thing?
> IDK
Oh, ehm... Let's ask the client then!
> NONONONO, we told the client this update was live at least 3 months ago, we can't begin asking questions now
Ouch. How much time do I have to make sense of this mess?
> The new supplier should take charge by the end of the month, I'd like this to be live by Tuesday
Needless to say, it's not going well, but that ain't none of my business1 -
So I started a new job. The software is totally proprietary, and honestly pretty outside of my specialty.
And I fucking hate how every time I ask a question someone laughs.
I'm sure they're trying to keep the tone light but after a while it just pisses me off.
Don't make me feel guilty for trying to get assimilated.2 -
I can't wait for the release of Snips Air sometime in 2019 so that I can stop using my Google home. It's not even the privacy concern that bugs me, it's the stupid shit like alarm management. To preface, I've had a Google home since late last year and since I got it the alarms have been nothing but trouble. More than half the time when I ask it when my next alarm is, it will respond with "You have an alarm for Friday at 7pm that is going off right now" (At the time of this response it was Tuesday). Then snoozing sometimes just doesn't work, I told it to snooze for 10 minutes, it worked just fine. Then today I made the mistake of asking it to snooze a second time which responded with "Sure, snoozing for 5 minutes", I wake up 45 minutes later, and ask "Hey Google, when's my next alarm?", it responds "You have an alarm today for 7:00 snoozed until 7:15". I have an exam today so luckily I didn't sleep in too late but againg this isn't the first occurence. To prevent this I normally just have a backup alarm on my phone and the one on my phone will wake me up in case something happens. On top of that though I've had rarer cases where it will delete all my alarms and I'll have to go command by command reminding of each alarm. That's just alarms though, I also have it control several IoT devices, and me having to use IFTTT requires the utmost precision in my phrasing otherwise it won't understand ( although this issue is mainly due to how the assistant service trigger on IFTTT is configured ). It still does much better than Siri ( at least my home can set alarms unlike my mac ), I have yet to try Alexa though. Of course my last problem is the hotword, saying "Hey Google" is much better than "Ok Google" but it's still excessive when I have to repeat it for each individual command. This is why I'm so excited for snips air, a set of devices that look pretty great, hackable, and as a bonus much more private that the current options. I realize that I could get a dev kit or set up snips on a pi but the dev kit isn't exactly visually appealing and I doubt I could get something that looks or functions half decent on the pi.1
-
FUCKING SHIT, I HATE THIS
Does anyone have problems with axios?
I've been trying to make this work for at least 1 hour. If I use Postman, it works alright, but using axios messes it up.
Practically what happens it's that Django does not picks the foreign keys, it loads all the fields except those two.
I've been like fucking crazy trying to understand what's going on but to no avail... I want to die, it's friday and this stupid thing is delaying me more than it should3