Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

A sidebar.
Literally just a sidebar.
And yes, this was in Hell.

Its code was spread across at least 40 files, and it used a bunch of freaking global variables to unfurl accordion sections, hide other sections/items, highlight the active item, etc. These were set (and unset!) in controller actions, so if you didn’t unset one, it remained open and highlighted until another action unset it.

Some of the global variable checks (and permissions checks) were done in the individual views, some outside of the `render` statements that include them. Some of them inherited variables from the parent, some from the controller, some from globals. Getting a view to work was trial and error. Oh, and some had their own inline css, some used css classes.

Subsections were separate views, so were some individual items, both sometimes rendered using shared templates, and all of the views and templates had the exact. same. filename. (They were located in different directories, and thus located automagically via implicit relative paths.) So, it was a virtually endless parade of`render partial => “sidebar”`. Which file does that point to? Good luck figuring it out!

Also, comments in several places said adding a new section required a database migration. I never did figure out why.

Anyway, I discovered this because I had an innocuous-sounding ticket to rearrange the sidebar, group some sections/items under different permissions, move some items to another menu, and nest some others differently.

It took me two bloody weeks, and this was when I was extremely productive every day.

Afterward, I was so disgusted by it that I took a day and removed every trace of the sidebar I could find, and rewrote it. I defined the sidebar in a hash, and wrote a simple recursive builder to generate the markup. It supported optional icons, n-level nesting, automatic highlighting of the current item and all parent nodes, compound and inherited permissions, wrapping of long names, hover and unfurl animations, etc. Took me a couple hundred lines of Ruby at the most, plus about the same of css.

Felt so good to remove that blight.

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

I wrote a VBA script for a manufacturing plant. It made a quote, ran a nesting program, generated a dwg file, placed tool paths, created the work order and material part count, and finally out put to the cnc machine. It worked great it reduced a 10hr process to about 20min. So they cut my hours to less than 20 a week. I quit on "Bosses Day" to start my own company.

I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.

A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available

Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.

getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.

Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D

Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)

At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.

Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.

I'm a TA myself and just yesterday wanted to defend my fellow TAs and CS/IT teachers from some of the rants here. Of course not all of the rants are but I found a few quite unfair towards us and I can fully understand a TA getting confused and tired after 5-7 hours of helping and wrapping your head around some of the harder problems the students run into.

However, I'm also a student myself and right now I'm fucking fed up with the shit my supervisor gives me regularly .. So let the rant flow!
(disclaimer: the following text uses “you” to address the rant recipient. So, dear reader, don't feel offended)

First of, why do you fucking care when and especially where I'm working on your project when you know I'm only working part time since I'm usually tutoring students by daylight. Having me come in after my TA shift to work on your project instead of letting me go home, get some rest and food, and start working with a fresh head is neither helping you nor very productive. Also, if you want me to be productive and use your fucking tools to get going faster you better not make me fucking debug your fucking tools. For instance, I don't even have the same first name so all your fucking paths are invalid on my fucking machine! Also, I get that your machine is more powerful than mine and I don't really care about it as long as you don't fucking push convoluted messy timing sensitive scripts and make me search for the correct values on my machine. And, if a file your script is trying to delete is not there aborting is not an valid exception handling!

And don't get me started on the scripts that actually do some work besides setting up your fucking toolchain!

Xcode storyboards

I can't do it justice by explaining how many times having the entire UI flow in one file has helped me.

Even for unexpected stuff, like an Android dev joining the team and needing to know the workflow of login / registration -> print screen the storyboard.

Manager asking for all the different possible paths through the app -> print screen the storyboard(s).

And then live rendering of custom components to be able to see them while playing with alignments.

While it has its bugs, and could have a few more features, it's too useful to ignore.

I know many iOS devs don't like it, and that's fine because I don't like them either and I don't hire them ;-)

Beware: Here lies a cautionary tale about shared hosting, backups, and -goes without saying- WordPress.

1. Got a call from a client saying their site presented an issue with a third-party add-on. The vendor asked us to grant him access to our staging copy.

2. Their staging copy, apparently, never got duplicated correctly because, for security reasons, their in-house dev changed the name of the wp-content folder. That broke their staging algo. So no staging site.

3. In order to recreate the staging site, we had to reset everything back to WP defaults. Including, for some reason, absolute paths inside the database. A huge fucking database. Because WordPress.

4. Made the changes directly in a downloaded sql file. Shared hosting, obviously, had an upload limit smaller to the actual database.

5. Spent half an hour trying to upload table by table to no avail.

6. In-house uploads a new, fixed database with the help of the shared hosting provider.

7. Database has the wrong path. Again.

8. In-house performs massive Find and Replace through phpMyAdmin on the production server.

9. Obviously, MySQL crashes instantly and the site gets blocked for over 3 hours for exceeding shared hosting limits.

10. Hosting provider refuses to accept this was caused by such a stupid act and says site needs to be checked because queries are too slow.

11. We are gouging our eyeballs as we see an in-house vs. hosting fight unfold. So we decide to watch a whole Netflix documentary in between.

12. Finally, the hosting folds and enables access to the site, which is obvi not working because, you know, wrong paths.

13. Documentary finishes. We log in again, click restore from backup. Go to bed. Client phones to bless us. Client’s in-house dev probably looking for a cardboard box to pack his stuff first thing in the morning. \_(ツ)_/¯

Okay ... Windows, I really tried to be nice, but that's it. You get off my ssd right now ...

Just got the error: "filename is too long - unable to delete file" (full name incl. path)

Seriously, WHY?
I mean, sure ... Long file paths/names are a thing and this is why there are limitations. I am totally fine with it!
But Why the hell allows windows you to create those files if it is unable to delete these files later ...
I don't get it. Maybe I am just hit my head to hard as a child and someone may enlighten me ...

PS: windows was running in a VM to give it a real serious try after years on Linux

¡rant|rant

Nice to do some refactoring of the whole data access layer of our core logistics software, let me tell an story.

The project is around 80k lines of code, with a lot of integrations with an ERP system and an sql database.

The ERP system is old, shitty api for it also, only static methods through an wrapper to an c++ library

imagine an order table.

To access an order, you would first need to open the database by calling Api.Open(...file paths) (yes, it's an fucking flat file type database)

Now the database is open, now you would open the orders table with method Api.Table(int tableId) and in return you would get an integer value, the pointer.

Now for the actual order. first you need to search for it by setting the search parameter to the column ID of the order number while checking all calls for some BS error code

Api.SetInt(int pointer, int column, int query Value)
Then call the find method.

Api.Find(int pointer)

Then to top this shitcake of an api of: if it doesn't find your shit it will use the "close enough" method of search.

And now to read a singe string 😑

First you will look in the outdated and incorrect documentation given to you from the devil himself and look for the column ID to find the length of the column.

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

Now you call the Api.GetStr(int pointer, int column, ref string emptyString, int length)

Now you have passed your poor string to the api's demon orgy by reference.

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

Now keep in mind to repeat these steps for all 300+ columns in the order table.

News from the creators: SQL server? yes, sql is good so everything will be better?

Now imagine the poor developers that got tasked to convert this shitcake to use a MS SQL server, that they did.

Now I can honestly say that I found the best SQL server benchmark tool. This sucker creams out just above ~105K sql statements per second on peak and ~15K per second for 1.5 second to read an order. 1.5 second to read less than 4 fucking kilobytes!

Right at that moment I released that our software would grind to an fucking halt before even thinking about starting it. And that me & myself and I would be tasked to fix it.

4 months later and two weeks until functional beta, here I am. We created our own api with the SQL server 😀

And the outcome of all this...

Fixes bugs older than a year, Forces rewriting part of code base. Forces removal of dirty fixes. allows proper unit and integration testing and even database testing with snapshot feature.

The whole ERP system could be replaced with ~10 lines of code (provided same relational structure) on the application while adding it to our own API library.

Best part is probably the performance improvements 😀. Up to 4500 times faster and 60 times less memory usage also with only managed memory.

I was just going over some projects I need to transfer to others team members and was reminded of all the utility apps I created. Particularly on that covers Windows paths to Linux....

Or basically path.Replace("\\","/") in a GUI.

I actually use it a lot whenever I hardcode a file path in Java for testing or make some partial path Linux compliant.

I think it saves me a lot of time but I'm the only person I think that creates these apps... basically for anything I find myself repeating often... Even these simple things.

Am I weird? Or just good at identifying things that can be outsourced? And outsourcing them?

Can't git push
because of an "access denied" error message
because I didn't set up my key file properly (with right paths, right format and so on)
because I'm working from my home laptop device
because I'm in home office
because Corona
..but..
I can connect to my work computer where git is set up properly but also I
can't git push
because I can't "cd" into the project path
because the samba mount point is messed up
because I don't reboot my machine to fix it
because I can't enter my password
because it does have a full hard drive encryption and the password screen shows up before the network services are started.

Other peoples' code... (in C++)
I am finding what some people consider good code is not as described. I found a class that provides strings. Great it gives me paths and stuff. I incorporated it in a new project.

segfaults

Hmmm, it must have an init function... It does, but not in the class. It has a friended init function:
friend init_function(). If this function is not created and called external to the class then the class will segfault...

okay...

I implement this. I use code from another project that implements this correctly. The friend class allows the private constructor to be called to create the main instance of the class. So its a fucking cryptic ass singleton. I look at this class. It uses a macro to decide what to function call in the class. The class already has function names for each call it needs to make. The class is literally a string lookup table. I vow to redo this shitty code, someday...

I start to wonder what other fragile code I will find. Not long later I keep getting errors on malloc. Like any malloc that is called results in a segfault. The malloc is not at fault though. I run valgrind and find a websocket library is returning an object a different size than the header file describes.

WTF...

Somebody has left an old ass highly modified definition of the websocket header in a location in that I include headers (partly my fault). I eliminate that from my include path. All is well, everything behaves. I will be making sure this fucking header is not used and it is going to die. Wasted a bunch of time.

Lessons learned: some code is just fucked and don't leave old ass shit you tried laying around.

Well I just found a security issue with my company's website thats potentially been there for YEARS

You can just fucjing bypass the login screen and access any file. You do have to know the filename and path from the site root. But I doubt that matters to anyone willing to try hard enough. I'm sure there's tools to find the paths

Especially since the files names are fucking predictable 🙄 😒

I was trying out flutter because why the fuck not. I made a plan for an application the downloads an Osu!-beatmap file and extracts the infos relevant for an external music player (like background, the song file, title and so on)

So I designed a basic database scheme and decided to include the files into the database. 3 hours into development it hit me...

HOW THE FUCK IS THE EXTERNAL MUSIC PLAYER SUPPOSED TO GET THE AUDIO FILES WHEN THEY ARE IN MY DATABASE!

Guess I'll just have to replace the files with absolute paths instead. 😒

Ugh... some people...

Just left the office early because of the toxic climate. That one infamous collegue is basically unable to communicate without being a narcissistic 5-year-old and was arguing whether we should write a test (I was going to write the test) that would need a single additional branch in the build system.

(The test was for a parser and it should test whether it can handle absolute paths. A simple regression test with a file and an expected output. Because absolute paths are different for every platform and user, the files to be parsed would have to be generated with appropriate paths before the tests were run. Well that would require one single python script and a single line in the script that runs the script and DONE)

Well that guy was unable to focus on his own work and started an argument about whether that test was necessary.
Even though I still think it is necessary, it might have been a reasonable argument if he would have acted more agreeable. But he was saying the feature was useless anyways "everyone will use relative paths only anyways" and "because noone here cares a ratass about maintaining the tests it will all fall on me again" ..

Wtf was this guys problem, I (CAPS) was going to write the stupid test and since when do we not write tests in order to better maintain our product? I get that he worries that the test environment will get more messy, but thats better than having the product code go messy or unfunctional! And c'mon guys, how are absolute paths a redundant feature...

This may be obvious, but debugging is all about input / algorithm / output. If there's something wrong, it's one of the three. Work with the method of elimination. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not.

I'll give you an example from my situation:

I wanted to play an old DOS game on my modern PC and so I used DosBox. I made an iso from the original CD, mounted it, referred to it in the game's mount settings and launched the game.

Then, after I had saved the game and I tried to load it again, the game would say: "Could not read/write savegame". And so I thought something was amuck with my mount settings and I started fiddling with those, but it only made it worse and it gave me more (cryptic) errors.
The next approach was to save a new game and load that one. Nope, same problem.
Finally I decided to follow a DosBox tutorial for the game and load the game again.. same problem. So I think hmm.. my algorithm is correct.. my output is wrong.. so then my input must be wrong. So I decided to save the game again with these new and correct settings and low and behold, it finally loaded.

One thing to note was that when it failed to load the savegame, it was because it had done a partial save because due to incorrect mount settings it couldn't figure out all the right config folders/files/paths and my savegame ended up being corrupt with 80% of the files having 0 Bytes, which was suspicious. That usually means a file became corrupt.

And then it hit me.. if the game says: "Could not read/write", that doesn't mean the same as "Could not access the file/folder". It could access it, it just couldn't parse it. And of course.. the 'write' part of the message indicates that it messed up in writing, causing it to misread. Sometimes you really have to think about it..

Anyway, input, algorithm, output. :)

Who the f*** add file paths like that????

A common walkthrough with Laravel deployment:
1.) Error 403
2.) Internal server error 🤔
3.) bad require paths in index.php....
4.) Whooops something went wrong.. What?.... Look at log file with 2MB size
5.) View not found

You can find so many tutorials, learning paths for C#, C++, python, angular, jss, java, etc.
But literally none for batch file programming (if that's even what it's called) so little documentation on cmd.exe and writing .bat files :'(

Can someone please please help?
Just point me in the right direction?

inb4 google it

Asp seems to actually have feelings.

Today I tried to get an asp page to run for company stuff. Ok fair enough I load apache and all the modules required for it to run on Ubuntu. Everything went fine and nothing complained what a great start!
Let's create a directory called /var/www/html/astrash ( I wanted to be fun ok? ) and created a sample index.asp file and configured the paths etc accordingly.
So I went to my beloved browser and typed in localhost/astrash/index.asp
Guess what happened? Right. I could only download the file.
Tried to change several things and Googled a bit but the things I tried didn't work.
So I figured let's create the directory /var/www/html/asp and an index.asp to go along. Same content. Same owner same access bits.
Went to localhost/index.asp and I saw the sample page!
I laughed my ass off at this actually thinking asp knew that I was a dick in naming the folder like that 😂

PS: yes I know it's probably a misconfiguration but it's funny nonetheless

Colleague trying to create a Visual Studio project and getting the error message that the file path name is too long. (Raging noises of agony)

Me laughing inside because I was facing the same issue a few days ago.

Now I am using VS on mac. Still a pile of crap but at least no issues with file paths anymore 😔

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

Does anyone know how to solve the 'Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token <' error? It's on the first line <!DOCTYPE html>, I've even tried deleting that line, but got the same error on <html>.

I've been looking for answers for a while now, and nothing works for me! I know as soon as I post this, I'll get the answer immediately tho.

All the other pages work fine, with no errors and no warnings, all the js/css/whatever files are called in the same file which is shared by all the pages (app.blade.php).

The only 404 errors I'm getting are from the images, but I've tried deleting the img paths and still get the same error. I'm also getting 404 on the images on app.blade.php but those are working fine on the other pages, so I don't think that's it.

The controller was basically copy/paste from another project. I've tried dd($product) and looks fine.

Long story, short: everything looks fine and I'm going crazy. Anyone know what it could be?

So typescript 4.5 beta is out .... holy moly what did those guys smoke?  🧐🤨🤪

They keep adding stuff on top, that nobody needs. But they don't fix the stuff that is broken (like emitting broken prefix-paths ...🤦)

Imho, they should focus on the overall development experience, make it easy an consistent to setup a proper multi-module project with linter, auto-formatter, folder structure, file naming.

And please fix this ugly #private fields - just ignore this mess of a spec and emit TS private fields as #private fields. That's the only logical way. Everything else is BS.

For the love of god developers/programmers, don’t put version numbers to your softwares file paths!

It’s the worst when you have to configure permissions and rules, then the folder path changes in every update!

Another hours wasted on debugging, on what I hate most about programming: strings!

Don't get me started on C-strings, this abomination from hell. Inefficient, error prone. Memory corruption through off by one errors, BSOD by out of bound access, seen it all. No, it's strings in general. Just untyped junk of data, undocumented formats. Everything has to be parsed back and forth. And this is not limited to our stupid stupid code base, as I read about the security issues of using innerHTML or having to fight CMake again.

So back to the issue this rant is about. CMake like other scripting languages as bash have their peculiarities when dealing with the enemy (i.e. strings), e.g. all the escaping. The thing I fought against was getting CMake's fixup_bundle work on macOS. It was a bit pesky to debug. But in the end it turned out that my file path had one "//" instead of an "/" and the path comparison just did a string comparison without path normalization.

Stop giving us enough string to hang ourselves!

what is wrong with android storage access hierarchy?All i want to do is to make a file explorer app which could show user a list of all the files on their device and memory card(if available), but its been days and i cannot find a proper way for that.

I checked all the Environment class methods and context.getFileDir()/other methods of ContextCompat , but they either point to emulated storage or the app's folder, but not the sd card. I have scratched my head and pulled all my hairs out researching a lot deep into this area, but found nothing. The only thing that works sometime is the hardcoded paths( eg new File("/sdcard") ) , but that looks like a terrible hack and i know its not good.

I have also read briefly about Storage Access Framework, but i don't think that's what I want. From what i know, SAF works in the following manner : user opens my app>>clicks on a button>>my app fires an intent to SAF>> SAF opens its own UI>>user selects 1 or multiple file>> and my app recieves those file uris. THAT'S A FILE PICKER, AND I DON'T WANT THAT.

I want the user to see a list of his files in my app only. Because if not, then what's the point of my app with the title "File explorer"?

So I was building opencv some time back.
Nice enough package, like most python linked packages I'm finding though I know you can use it via c and its meant to be but why would you want to ? .. it contains a whole bunch of half finished crap that is actually useful in part including the capacity to tear apart video files and manipulate frames one at a time and then rewrite them back to a file. about the only lib that's easy to use that I saw that does that. hell I can even compose my own video frames. also the only other lib I saw that does that thus far.

so...

I post a bug, because of FUCKING CMAKE NOT WORKING. not conforming with the well thought out build environment that most GNU style c packages use.

you know like when you need an upstream source package to build the code, or a downgraded package to build the code and don't want to fuck up your host environment so you have to specify a bunch of lib paths and the like so that ld and gcc work correctly etc etc etc from your custom build location and so you can later use these same values to find the compiled lib and build software against it.

fucker closes my ticket saying i hijacked the c environment................

no.

its because cmake sucks.

they're using and i don't know why a module specifically written to find libtiff.

specifically written but doesn't find the only source on my system that provides tiff which my env variables point directly to !!!!

lazy fucking cocksuckers !

I want to code a solution this issue.
something that translates ac files and am files and cmakelists into something intelligent and easy to follow that doesn't sacrifice the flexibility of make and gnu shit and unfucks cmake based projects !

To hell with this auto path rewrite VS Code, when I rename a file you find all files and rewrite the imports, but now you did it wrong

and I have a huge mess to pick, I have no idea how you did this but you wrote long paths which don't make sense

why did you put node_modules in-front of all my imports when I moved a folder which has nothing to do with node modules