well that was insightful.

nixcraft being nixcraft.

i share your rant bro. (well, not actually because i don't use apple :D)

from the comic series "saturday morning breakfast cereal".

behold! wk21 "it's like facebook but..." rants are coming.

the new fanboy corner on my room wall :)

Yesterday, my girlfriend caught a virus. There were 5+ running programs, in program files, program files x86, system32, basically everywhere. The virus modified chrome, firefox, edge (and even installed a false uc browser assuming we had one), there are many entries at startup programs, also running daemons, once you kill one of them, the others detect it and replicate their killed fellows. Tried to run a linux live usb disk for a cleanup, but the computer hibernates instead of shutdown, making modifications on disk risky.

I spent hours trying to suppress the processes, do a manual cleanup and antivirus search. It looked all cleaned up, then I reinstalled chrome, and now it switches its homepage everytime I open it, it also injects batch arguments to desktop link forum chrome (deleting it manually does not help, it comes back). I'm a linux guy, and in a few hours, I hated windows more than ever.

If anybody knows the authors, I *really* want to meet them. I promise I'm not going to punch them, but kneel down, bow my head in respect, and say "teach me master."

i rant that i live in a dictatorship with an idiot president who bans whatsapp and facebook to prevent protests (in reaction to having arrested opposition party members of parliament), and github (yes, github) to prevent the spread of a minister's leaked e-mails. now the government is seriously considering shutting down vpn services to prevent by-passing the bans.

on the other hand, it's a nice time and place to continue ms studies on ad-hoc networks - that is of course if i can avoid being arrested or killed before i even start my thesis.

I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

that feeling when your new toys from aliexpress get delivered earlier than expected... i feel so happy unpacking those sensors, capacitors, heat sinks, microchips, breadboards and all. i feel like i have a geeky shopping addiction, i probably won't have the time to play with them from all the work and other personal projects, but still i hoarded enough electronics to invade the world with a drone army in case i have a few weeks me-time.

'yes' in linux shell has become my favourite command when i discovered it. it has a careless touch to it, like "yeah whatever just do the thing".

also, i like glutMainLoop. a saw doll inside my head says "let the game begin!" each time i type this function.

What's the best tool you didn't know you were missing, but could not work without it now

packet received. thanks for all the fishes.

oh what a fine young mkfs. thank you my dear, have a nice day yourself.

maybe it's time feature is added for devrant simple community dev projects. there could be games, parody websites, you name it. projects could be hosted on github, and indexed at a "projects" tab here on devrant, so we can choose something and start rolling with our pals from devrant when we get bored at work :) @dfox (inspired by rant from @Notebookdeviant)

So many programming ideas, but so little free time🙁

didn't anyone go for the "#define true false" joke? i didn't actually see it in action, but it would be a pretty harsh one.

This is an anti-rant...

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

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

i found this beauty on diaspora (in tribute to the comic artist frank franzetta)

p.s.: i asked the artist if i can use it here, but got no replies. i hope it won't be a problem for him/her.

!rant

Today I finally found a randomly appearing bug that prevented our nightly backup on our production servers! Finally!
Now I can go to sleep in peace.

"rose" of alphonse mucha is my favourite desktop item for the time. she watches over me as i code at home.

We are currently refactoring our application in order to use multiple languages. The application startet 1997 and later it supported 2 fix languages. So it's one defined language or the other, this was used in uncountable places. Now a team of 6 developers has to refactor all the code of the last 20 years, where labels are used and an old translator was magically used out of nowhere..
Turns out it's a ton of work to get the software ready for really multiple language support.

!rant
Today I found a huge performance bug of a coworker which brought our production servers to the limit.
Some heavy calculations were made 3 times when visiting some special pages... Instead of eg. 5 seconds the load needed 15 seconds.😮
So happy that the servers will run smooth again!

I am insecure about using graphical user interfaces. E.g. IDEs, COTS systems, cloud tools, and ERPs. If I don't know what is happening inside the box I don't feel like I know what I'm doing.

in the workplace, i have no access to internet, am not admin to my own computer and am not allowed to install anything (due to security reasons). i also happen to have quite some spare time so i'm writing nokia's good old snake game in visual studio and opengl so i can amuse myself both coding and playing. in a way, company pushes creativity and productivity even for slacking.

That feeling when you fixing bugs in production and add another one that's even worse, so now your getting about 300 error mails for a bug which was 10 seconds online...

!rant
I finally published my first open source project. A package for calculation a geohash of a geolocation for pharo smalltalk.
I know that most of the users don't know smalltalk but it's the best OOP you can code with. And geohash is such a great algorithm. Lovely combination

So, working on real multi language support today I was searching for countries and country-codes. Yes this one is easy peasy. Also easy if you want every countryname in your supported languages.
But why is there no source for the states or provinces translated in every language. It's so hard to find...
Anyone knows a source for it? Is it worth to create a project for such translations?

this is a repost organization post. each time you are going to post a classical joke, please find it from items below, and write as comment, the number of the repost. and people will give you ++'s to your comments as if you actually reposted the post. also, feel free to make additions to the list. syntax is:

"(n): [repost context]" for a new item (please do not mess with the order)

"-- [n]: [personal comment]" for simulating the repost.

here we go:

(0): the comic strip about rescuing princesses in different languages.

(1): in case of fire git commit, git push, leave the building.

(2): wanna hear a udp joke? i don't care if you get it.

(3): that joke about java devs wearing glasses because they can't c#.

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

An example repost:

-- 0: omg princess lol :)))

my 4th gen. amazon kindle has been one of my favorite work buddies so far. i spend most of my midday breaks with it, kept me pretty good company so far.

If you want the ridiculous behavior “required” by POSIX, you must set the environment variable ‘POSIXLY_CORRECT’ (which was originally going to be named ‘POSIX_ME_HARDER’).

You just read a line from GNU's official coding standard document :D

i got a dev!rant nostress ball, because i didn't have any serious rants and used the app for fun purposes.

edit: do you think maybe it can also help in debugging, although it's nothing close to being a duck.

rust anyone? i am a c++ person, and it caught my attention as having an oopish-but-actually-functional new programming paradigm whatever... also (don't know if it's just mozilla's successful marketing) i had the impression that people see it as the new whiz kid in town. do you recommend indulging in it for the sake of trying something new?

unigine sim engine has the worst documentation i've ever seen. it was written in bad english, occasionally did not follow a word convention (i.e. functions doing analogous work used different keywords), most items were just reiterations of function names (made up example for clarification: getAngularVelocity(): gets angular velocity...). i had to use it for my first ever job, and had to learn in from scratch, mostly by trial and error. it's been months since i switched jobs, and they were rolling a version 2 when i left, i hope they improved on their docs.

Went to girlfriends family. Tablet not functional (screen doesn't work anymore), laptop stayed at home.
So smartphone is my only connection to Internet.
I would like to code something so much...
I think I've now read every rant here...

does anybody here use diaspora*? for those who don't, it's a free (as in freedom) social network and protocol thereof, and it employs a decentralized, distributed approach. you can choose a "pod" to store your data, and search for people and content inter-podly. as a decentralization/distribution/foss enthusiast, i love the project and check regularly, but sometimes i get the feeling that i'm all by myself there, as i have no friends yet and all the content i see is just my followed keywords. (so befriend me, maybe? :D)

on a 5 day rock festival vacation... a band with songs i barely know is on and i'm a bit high... there's a cool set of animations playing at the stage background and i spent the whole concert trying to figure how i could write each animation in opengl. i'll give them a shot back home, if i don't forget.

When you’re rebuilding a major project and find a CoTS solution that you didn’t think to look for when starting the project 2 years ago...

Well, lessons learned in a lot of ways here...

i want to find the person who proposed to force mtp in android for file transfers, and bash them in the head with a plush android toy till they're knocked unconscious.

all i want is to make a file transfer between my phone and my computer, and rather than plugging my phone's usb, i find it easier to set up an ftp server over local network. and when that doesn't work, i might as well hexdump the file, and copy it char-by-char manually, than use mtp.

i just learnt how much clearcase sucks the hard way. i always used git for personal projects and am used to finding a simple solution to any problem at most one stackoverflow away, i just messed up my local repo, and experienced people could not manage to undo it. i mean come on, this is a f**king versioning software, how hard can it be to delete everything local and re-pull from remote without messing up configuration files? either clearcase has some serious design shortcomings for my understanding of a versioning software, or it is so overly complicated that nobody actually knows how to revert this mistake.

trying to make a live usb disk. i took shots at random combinations from 2 usb sticks, 2 oses, different tools or technics on each os... each failed with a different outcome. then i realized i should have kept a failure matrix so that i don't try the same combinations, or can trace the roots of the problem.

each time i need to build a live disk, a part of me dies inside.

Work email conversation with a COTS app support tech:

Tech: Could you provide me the following from Sql Server? (instructions followed)

Me: I am not the DBA, but I've sent them the request.

Tech: Could you send me the following from Sql Server while we wait? (Instructions followed)

Me: As I said, I don't have permissions to access what you want.

Tech: Oh, I see now, you most likely don't have proper access to be able to retrieve the information.

Me: ..yeah. Thanks.

i've been using debian with xfce for 2 years, and i'm now planning to migrate to arch with xmonad for some freshness. i'm reluctantly peeking out of my comfort zone and sniffing like a cat, any tips appreciated.

SIEM: Security Information and Event Management system

Within a SIEM there is usually a reporting, alerting, and learning framework wherein you perform investigations and threat hunting. Our SIEM is connected to our data lake through a glorified elastic backend.

Today we were figuring out how to get dynamic data that we store in our SIEM to show up in the regular data lake presentation layer. All the solutions only half worked or had barriers to progress that seemed larger than the proposed solution.

So now we're going with the proposed solution: send static data back into the data lake in order to pull it out on the normal frontend with all the enriched info. We're basically turning this thing into a damn feedback loop.

I hate designing solutions within the confines of COTS products.

Oh man, why is there no good api for ocr in PDFs? Once you are searching for this kind you will only find some kind of tesseract.
Why doesn't have Amazon an api for this???

anybody else has a "polish notation fetish"? i never actually learned lisp, but since i first saw its style, i find writing functions like "+ 1 2" instead of "1 + 2" both aesthetically and functionally more appealing. i think the infix notation is just being kept because of well-established habits.

Is SAT>IP already dead? I try to find a reliable SAT>IP server (COTS) but it seems there are only 5 different options available and all are at least 2 years or older. Should I go with TVheadend instead?