The programmer and the interns part 2.

We will discuss numerous events that happened over the past week or so.

Case 0:
We had our weekly engineering meeting. The interns were invited as well.
We hold meetings in the generic, big, corporate meeting rooms with a huge table in the middle.
There were more than enough chairs for everyone yet the most motivated and awkward intern (let's call him Simon) chose to stand, cause "it's cool man, I always stand". At this point we all know that he probably read about Agile stand up meetings and is confusing it with this one. Otherwise he's simply trying to stand out from the rest. (See what I did there?)
Anyway the meeting has started way later than planned (what a surprise) and took much longer than Simon expected. Everybody is sitting and listening to the CTO while occasionally glancing at the weird looking intern standing awkwardly and refusing to sit because it would make his original intentions pointless. He even tried to nod whith a serious face and his hands crossed when the CTO said something and looked at his general direction. The meeting was about a hour and a half long but with the delay it was at least 2.5 hours.
At the end Simon was so exhausted that he fell asleep on the office puff, was forgotten and locked inside. 3 hours later when I was home I received a call from him with his sleepy-trying-to-sound-awake voice telling the news. Lucky there's a 24/7 Noc team that could rescue him.

Case 1:
An intern who was late on his Linux test connected to every test VM (should I remind you that each one has a personal VM but they share passwords for their roots?) and tried to reset it with "sleep 10s; shutdown -h now".
He took down all 13 of those so I had to turn them on and switch passwords again.

Case 2:
One of the interns didn't do any of his training chores. Apparently he forgot what he was told to use, ignored all online documentation and used Windows CMD with Linux commands for almost a week already.

Case 3:
Simon uses Vim to write all text possible. Even mails, he then selects all and copies into the mail body. He spent half a day on a homework task I gave them. He wrote everything inside one text file using Vim. When he was done he saved the file and quit the editor. He then said "Oh shit! I've forgot to sign my name!". I explicitly told him that theres absolutely no need for that because I see which mail the file was sent from. He said "I don't even need a program for that!" and gave a couple of strokes on the keyboard.
Later I received an email from him with a .txt attachment. When I opened it the only text that was inside was "by Simon ;)".
I logged to his machine and checked the last command ran on the file:
echo "by Simon ;)" > linuxtasks.txt

Case 4:
The girl here uses a MacBook. She keeps getting confused with the terminal windows and rebooting her own machine instead of the remote VM.

Case 5:
Haven't checked yet how this happened but one of the interns deleted the gui from his local Centos.

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Manager on the meeting room suddenly talking to me:
Coffe2Code, share your screen please to show us the progress.

Me: *minifies all windows fastly and plugs the laptop to the big screen *

Manager : we start with documentation, open the world file that you sent to me.

Me: *opens word*
Word: *freezing on my CV that I was editing for another job application*

Me: ...
Manager: ...

Word: oh everyone seen the CV? cool here your document

Receives email from warranty guy in work.

Warranty: "Hi, see attached scan in PDF form.
I normally fill the boxes in manually, scan as pdf to myself and then email it on to the higher ups, but they now say they need it in excel form from now on! Can you convert it for me?"

Me: "It looks like your scan's quality isn't good enough for a convert to excel.
Where do you get the original form?
Is it from a website?"

Warranty: "Hang on and ill send you an email with the file and give you a call"

*receives email and a phone call"

Warranty:
"There you go. Theres an excel sheet in that email. what do i do?"

Me: "So.... just so I understand the question... you just fill in this excel sheet, scan as pdf and send it on... but they want it sent as an excel form and not a pdf?"

"Yes."

"So.... Could you not just fill in the excel sheet and email it to them?"

"What do you mean?"

"....fill in the excel sheet as normal, and go to file, share and email... send the original one on."

"And what would that do?"

"...you... you'd be sending the form as an excel sheet, as requested??"

Warranty: *silence for 10 seconds* Oh, i see now. I get you! You're a genius! Well done for figuring it out. Thanks a million!!"

O.O

Fucking intern.

While I was working next to her a couple weeks back, she spent half her time on social media, playing Candy Crush, or talking with her friend. She also left early almost every day.

I had given her a project to do (object crud + ui), and helped her through it. She made pretty abysmal progress in a week. I ended up finishing it for her by rewriting basically all of her code (every single line except some function names, lone `end` or `}` statements, a few var declarations, blank lines, plus a couple of comments she copied over from my code).

This week I gave her a super easy project to do. It amounts to copying four files (which I listed), rename a few things to be Y instead of X, and insert two lines of code (which I provided) to hook it up. Everything after that just works. It should have taken her ... okay, maybe a few hours because she's slow and new to the language. but it would have taken me five to ten minutes, plus five minutes of testing.

She has spent THREE FUCKING DAYS ON THIS AND SHE'S STILL NOT DONE. SHE'S BLOODY USELESS!

She has kept not pulling changes and complaining that things are broken. Despite me telling her every time I push changes that affect her work (on. my. branch. ergh!)

She keeps not reading or not understanding even the simplest of things. I feel like MojoJojo every time I talk to her because of how often I repeat myself and say the same things again and again.

Now she's extremely confused about migrations. She keeps trying to revert a drop_table migration that she just wrote so she can re-create the table differently. Instead of, you know, just reverting back to her migration that creates the table. it's one migration further.

Migrations are bloody simple. they're one-step changes to the database, run in order. if you want to make a change to something you did a few steps back, you roll back those migrations, edit your shit, and run them again. so bloody difficult!

`rails db:rollback && rails db:rollback`
Edit file
`rails db:migrate`
So. hard.

I explained this to her very simply, gave her the commands to copy/paste, ... and she still can't figure it out. She's fucking useless.

It took me ten minutes to walk her though it on a screen share. TEN FREAKING MINUTES.

She hasn't finished a damned fucking thing in three weeks. She's also taking interview calls while working on this, so I know she totally doesn't care.

... Just.
Fucking hell.

USELESS FUCKING PEOPLE!

First off I dont mind what OS you are using. This rant isnt about the OS but about hypocrisy for some of the users. Secondly Im sorry for typos, I typed it on my phone while waking up.

People are calling Windows spyware, so they are using Linux or MacOS. Even though I disagree with the term spyware I would be fine with that if you weren't a hypocrite.

How many of the people who use Linux and call windows spyware uses Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitter once in a while? I highly doubt you if you say you don't.

A few years back Ive tried to live without anything of google, this also meant blocking YouTube, their trackers an javascript libraries.
Not much of the internet still works if you block google servers.
Google is everywhere and always collects data.

Facebook and twitter also collects data about you. Everyone who has your number in their phone will share it with Whatsapp and google so they can build up a profile. Even if you dont block it.

What I am telling you is that its impossible to avoid being tracked by these companies (including MS).

Every company I mentioned here has a profile on you, if you want it or not.

So let's check which of these companies tries to follow European laws.
Google gets fine after fine but doesnt really try to avoid it.
It looks like Apple, MS, Facebook and Twitter are doing it better on this.

But if you check the European law every European citizen is allowed to request their complete profile collected by a company. And that means complete and not the public part you volunteered to give away.

So I tried it out.
Google didnt want to give it, apple didnt want to give it, Facebook didnt want to give it and Twitter doesnt want to give it.

The hypocrisy is becoming clesr with the following. I did get my complete profile from MS. It was a messy PDF file which crashed most PDF readers.
It contained a list of people I know and how I know them. It contained MS accounts I had in the past and my hobbies. (and quite a lot more)

So from these big companies MS is the only one following the European Law.

So yes they do collect data, but they are open in what they collect.

And Im not saying here that Microsoft is great just because they follow the law.

You can have your own opinion about this and do with it what you want. I just wanted to share some, maybe alternative, facts.

And again this isn't an OS rant or whatever. I dont mind what you do, but I do mind hypocrisy.

A wild Darwin Award nominee appears.

Background: Admins report that a legacy nightly update process isn't working. Ticket actually states problem is obviously in "the codes."

Scene: Meeting with about 20 people to triage the issue (blamestorming)

"Senior" Admin: "update process not working, the file is not present"
Moi: "which file?"
SAdmin: "file that is in ticket, EPN-1003"
Moi: "..." *grumbles, plans murder, opens ticket*
...
Moi: "The config dotfile is missing?"
SAdmin: "Yes, file no there. Can you fix?"
Moi: "Engineers don't have access to the production system. Please share your screen"
SAdmin: "ok"
*time passes, screen appears*
Moi: "ls the configuration dir"
SAdmin: *fails in bash* > ls

*computer prints*
> ls
_.legacyjobrc

Moi: *sees issues, blood pressure rises* "Please run list all long"
SAdmin: *fails in bash, again* > ls ?
Moi: *shakes* "ls -la"
SAdmin: *shonorable mention* > ls -la

*computer prints*
> ls -la
total 1300
drwxrwxrwx- 18 SAdmin {Today} -- _.legacyjobrc

Moi: "Why did you rename the config file?"
SAdmin: "Nothing changed"
Moi: "... are you sure?"
SAdmin: "No, changed nothing."
Moi: "Is the job running as your account for some reason?"
SAdmin: "No, job is root"
Moi: *shares screenshot of previous ls* This suggests your account was likely used to rename the dotfile, did you share your account with anyone?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because could not see"
Moi: *heavy seething* so, just to make sure I understand, you renamed a dotfile because you couldn't see it in the terminal with ls?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because it was not visible, now is visible"
Moi: "and then you filed a ticket because the application stopped working after you renamed the configuration file? You didn't think there might be a correlation between those two things?"
SAdmin: "yes, it no work"
Interjecting Director: "How did no one catch this? Why were there no checks, and why is there no user interface to configure this application? When I was writing applications I cared about quality"
Moi: *heavy seething*
IDjit: "Well? Anyone? How are we going to fix this"
Moi: "The administrative team will need to rename the file back to its original name"
IDjit: "can't the engineering team do this?!"
Moi: "We could, but it's corporate policy that we have no access to those environments"
IDjit: "Ok, what caused this issue in the first place? How did it get this way?!"

TFW you think you've hit the bottom of idiocy barrel, and the director says, "hold my mango lassi."

Hello {Project}, my old friend. I've come to debug you again
Because the scope is softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was developing
And the misery that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence...

In restless dreams I debugged alone
Narrow file of cobbled code
‘Neath the halo of a desk lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of git checkin
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand bugs and maybe more
People coding without asking
People coding without listening
People writing code that they never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Fools, said I, you do not know
{Project} like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the kludgy app they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence

!rant

I was in a hostel in my high school days.. I was studying commerce back then. Hostel days were the first time I ever used Wi-Fi. But it sucked big time. I'm barely got 5-10Kbps. It was mainly due to overcrowding and download accelerators.

So, I decided to do something about it. After doing some research, I discovered NetCut. And it did help me for my purposes to some extent. But it wasn't enough. I soon discovered that my floor shared the bandwidth with another floor in the hostel, and the only way I could get the 1Mbps was to go to that floor and use NetCut. That was riskier and I was lazy enough to convince myself look for a better solution rather than go to that floor every time I wanted to download something.

My hostel used Netgear's routers back then. I decided to find some way to get into those. I tried the default "admin" and "password", but my hostel's network admin knew better than that. I didn't give up. After searching all night (literally) about how to get into that router, I stumbled upon a blog that gave a brief info about "telnetenable" utility which could be used to access the router from command line. At that time, I knew nothing about telnet or command line. In the beginning I just couldn't get it to work. Then I figured I had to enable telnet from Windows settings. I did that and got a step further. I was now able to get into the router's shell by using default superuser login. But I didn’t know how to get the web access credentials from there. After googling some and a bit of trial and error, I got comfortable using cd, ls and cat commands. I hoped that some file in the router would have the web access credentials stored in cleartext. I spent the next hour just using cat to read every file. Luckily, I stumbled upon NVRAM which is used to store all config details of router. I went through all the output from cat (it was a lot of output) and discovered http_user and http_passwd. I tried that in the web interface and when it worked, my happiness knew no bounds. I literally ran across the floor screaming and shouting.

I knew nothing about hiding my tracks and soon my hostel’s admin found out I was tampering with the router's settings. But I was more than happy to share my discovery with him.

This experience planted a seed inside me and I went on to become the admin next year and eventually switch careers.

So that’s the story of how I met bash.
Thanks for reading!

So the new mass surveillance law will be going into effect from the 1st of January.

Of course, since I'm very keen on my security/privacy, I'm going to implement some precautions.

- A few vps's connecting to tor, i2p and VPN provider so that I can always use a secure connection.

- Setup anti tracker/ads/etc etc shit on the VPS's. Probably through DnsMasq and the hosts file.

- Use Tor browser by default. I've tried this for a while now and damn, the tor network has become way faster than only even a year ago! Some pages literally only take a few seconds to load.

- Wipe my laptop, encrypt the harddrive and at least put QubesOS on it together with probably a few other systems.

- Ungoogle my new phone, use it with VPN by default.

- Get rid of all non encrypted communication services. I think that only leaves me with a few account removals because I haven't chatted unencrypted for nearly a fucking year now.

If anyone has any more ideas, please share!

Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.

If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.

First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)

So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.

What the fuck, Dell.

As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?

Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.

Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.

VS Code is pretty good, though.

First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:

So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.

Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.

Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.

For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.

Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.

Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.

I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?

Working in the IT Department is just funny man. Sometimes I wonder if I'm dumb, too smart to answer these dumb questions or these clients are just asking questions they already have answers to that I don't.

Client: Hey, can you please give X access to Y's Dropbox? He gets error saying he doesn't have access to the file.

Me: Uhh, you have to share a link to the specific file you want to share with X. Then only he can access it.

Client: Can you send him the link?

Me: Uhhhh, what link?

Client: The link to the file.

Me: Who created the file you want to share?

Client: My boss did. And he wants me to send the link to X. But I don't have the link so he said to check with IT.

Me (in my mind): WTF!!!!

Me: Ok, ask your boss to share the link to the file he created with you then you can send it to Y. He can also send it to Y directly himself. IT doesn't have and has no idea of what file your boss created. Only your boss knows.

Client: Ok, hold on let me check with him..

Client gets back on the phone.. "he said he deleted the file".

Me: Well, there's no file to share here.

Client: Can you find it?

Me: Call Dropbox.

Client: do you have his number?

Me: Who?

Client: Dropbox..

At this point I started laughing.. 😂😂😂🤣🤣

Me: Dropbox is a company.

Client: Ok, thank you. I'll call Dropbox.

At this point, I'm wondering. If this client thought Dropbox was person, then what did she mean by her initial question? 🤔

Can this be real life? This happened less than an hour ago, and going home now still confused about this whole situation. 😂😂

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

Friend : What about a place where you can share images ?
Me : Instagram !
Friend : chatting ?
Me : whatsapp, messenger, etc
Friend : file sharing
Me : Dropbox
Friend : sharing videos ?
Me : youtube
Friend : mail with all above features
Me : google
Friend : I hate my life

Don't cha just love it when you download your "native" desktop application to host a meeting, only to find out its actually a wrapper around a browser?

How did I find out? Well I innocently tried to drag and drop an image to share, only to have the browser open and render that file instead of uploading it, killing the application it was running behind it, closing the meeting for everyone on it ... and not even be able to access a back button to re-open the session.

viva la hybrid!

Anyone here put Easter eggs in their code, and care to share examples?

I made a custom script to rotate a log file once a day in my program. So at the bottom of the roll I added a nice little print. See attached.

I have been gone a while. Sorry. Workplace no longer allows phones on the lab and I work exclusively in the lab. Anyway here is a thing that pissed me off:

Systems Engineer (SE) 1 : 😐 So we have this file from the customer.
Me: 😑 Neat.
SE1: 😐 It passes on our system.
Me: 😑 *see prior*
Inner Me (IM): 🙄 is it taught in systems engineer school to talk one sentence at a time? It sounds exhausting.
SE1: but when we test it on your system, it fails. And we share the same algorithms.
Me: 😮 neat.
IM: 😮neat, 😥 wait what the fuck?
Me: 😎 I will totally look into that . . .
IM: 😨 . . . Thing that is absolutely not supposed to happen.

*Le me tracking down the thing and fixing it. Total work time 30 hours*

Me: 😃 So I found the problem and fixed it. All that needs to happen is for review board to approve the issue ticket.
SE1: 😀 cool. What was the problem?
Me: 😌 simple. See, if the user kicked off a rerun of the algorithm, we took your inputs, processed them, and put them in the algorithm. However, we erroneously subtracted 1 twice, where you only subtract 1 once.
SE1: 🙂 makes sense to me, since an erroneous minus 1 only effects 0.0001% of cases.

*le into review board*

Me: 😐 . . . so in conclusion this only happens in 0.0001% of cases. It has never affected a field test and if this user had followed the user training this would never have been revealed.
SE2: 🤨 So you're saying this has been in the software for how long?
Me: 😐 6 years. Literally the lifespan of this product.
SE2: 🤨 How do you know it's not fielded?
Me: 😐 It is fielded.
SE2: 🤨 how do you know that this problem hasn't been seen in the field?
Me: 😐 it hasn't been seen in 6 years?
IM: 😡 see literally all of the goddamn words I have said this entire fucking meeting!!!
SE2: 😐 I would like to see an analysis of this to see if it is getting sent to the final files.
Me: 🙄 it is if they rerun the algorithm from our product. It's a total rerun, output included. It's just never been a problem til this one super edge case that should have been thrown out anyway.
SE2: 🤨 I would still like to have SE3 run an analysis.
Me: 🙄 k.
IM: 😡 FUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOU

*SE3 run analysis*

SE3: 😐 getting the same results that Me is seeing.
Me: 😒 see? I do my due diligence.
SE2: 😐 Can you run that analysis on this file again that is somehow different, plus these 5 unrelated files?
SE3: 😎 sure. What's your program's account so I can bill it?
IM: 😍 did you ever knooooow that your my heeeerooooooo.

*SE3 runs analysis*

SE3: 😐 only the case that was broken is breaking.
SE2: 😐 Good.
IM: 🤬🤬🤬🤐 . . . 🤯WHY!?!?
Me: 😠 Why?
SE2: 😑 Because it confirms my thoughts. Me, I am inviting you to this algorithm meeting we have.
Me/IM: 😑/😡 what . . . the fuck?

*in algorithm meeting*

Me: 😑 *recaps all of the above* we subtract 1 one too many times from a number that spans from 10000 to -10000.
Software people/my boss/SE1/SE3: 🤔 makes sense.
SE2:🤨 I have slides that have an analysis of what Me just said. They will only take an hour to get through.
Me: 😑 that's cool but you need to give me your program's account number, because this has been fixed in our baseline for a week and at this point you're the only program that still cares. Actually I need the account to charge for the last couple times you interrupted me for some bullshit.

*we are let go.*

And this is how I spent 40+ useless hours against a program that is currently overrunning for no reason 🤣🤣🤣

Moral: never involve math guys in arithmetic situations. And if you ever feel like you're wasting your time, at least waste someone else's money.

Today I found my sister take a photo of her laptop screen with ms word open to share her class report which is just pure text file

(I am an entry-inter-intermediate level dev)
P = Person

P:Hey Can you build me a POS system for free?

Me: Yea whatever. (because... immediate family member)

P:Ok Great.

Me: *starts working on it.. almost done with inventory control and layouts in one night*

P: When will it be done? and I need it in a full screen window not a browser!!

Me: Soon..and I have not worked in ASP yet. So it will be a full screen browser app.

P: Aww you cant do it fast? You are not skilled enough??? Poor you, you are not good enough. I can do it in a few hours. Just write a C program which stores entries in a txt file. I dont want sql shes-que-el on my system. You dont want to use .txt because it will be harder for you. Poor you.. no skill.

Me: *raging to a level where i turn into kryptonium and burn superman to death but still keeping my calm* You will get it when you get it. Period

Inner Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF. IM DOING THIS FOR FREE SO THAT IT HELPS YOU OUT. NAGGING ME WONT HELP YOUR CAUSE ONE BIT. GO FUCKING LEARN HOW TO CODE YOURSELF AND MAKE IT YOURSELF OR BUY IT FOR A FUCK TON OF UNJUSTIFIED MONEY. IM GIVING YOU A BEAUTIFUL LAYOUT, GREAT APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE USING LARAVEL AND GREAT DATABASE DESIGN WHICH WOULD BE SCALABLE AND PRODUCE MEANINGFUL REPORTS. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PREFER A .TXT FILE OVER A WELL DESIGNED DATABASE. WOULD YOU FUCKING OPEN THAT HAMSTER CAGE OF A BRAIN OF YOURS WITH A KNIFE OR A SCREWDRIVER?
IF ITS THAT EASY FOR YOU GO FUCKING DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP BOTHERING ME. I AM TAKING MY TIME OUT FROM FREELANCING TO HELP YOU OUT. I COULD BE SPENDING THIS TIME ON OTHER PROJECTS WHICH WOULD GET ME SOMEWHERE. THE ONLY FUCKING REASON IM DOING IT BECAUSE I MIGHT BE ABLE TO RESELL THE POS (PIECE OF SHIT) TO OTHER PEOPLE IN FUTURE AND MAKE MY SHARE OF UNJUSTIFIED SHIT TON OF MONEY.

Is it illegal to upload a malware(worm) written in python to GitHub? I'm serious :)

I've written a worm which I want to share with my friends (and possible future viewers). My intent is to share my experience. So that they can learn from it. What they are doing with it afterwards, shouldn't be my problem, I guess. (I will put a disclaimer warning in the Readme file of course)

Been looking for a part time game dev job to pass the time during summer break, got a reply from a guy.

This part came up some time in the middle of our conversation:

Me: So, do you have a version control system in place?

Him: Excuse me, a what?

Me: A Version control system, like Git.

Him: Ow, what's that?

Me: It is a way to host projects in a more productive way for two or more people. It allows us to share our work more easily and work on the same file without overwriting and losing data.

Him: Ow, like Dropbox?

He was developing the game solo thus far and no idea such thing existed.
:/

Hello {Project}, my old friend. I've come to debug you again
Because the scope is softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was developing
And the misery that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence...

In restless dreams I debugged alone
Narrow file of cobbled code
‘Neath the halo of a desk lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of git checkin
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand bugs and maybe more
People coding without asking
People coding without listening
People writing code that they never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Fools, said I, you do not know
{Project} like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the kludgy app they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence

<-- Found in my documents, no clue where it's from

We have a ver crappy Internet connection at my office (I believe it's 100Mb/s for 50 people to share), so when somebody starts downloading a big file they pretty much hijack all the available bandwidth and fuck up everybody else.

Now, we have ONE, just ONE SINGLE FUCKING COMPUTER RUNNING FUCKING WINDOWS 10 AND EVERY WEEK IT FUCKS UP THE ENTIRE OFFICE'S INTERNET CONNECTION WITH ITS STUPID FUCKING UNCANCELLABLE MANDATORY UPDATES.
FUCK YOU MICROSOFT.

Share your VS Code installed extensions here.
Mine is: Alignment, Better Comments, change-case, Colonize, CSS Peek, DotENV, File Utils, GitLens (my favorite!), Gulp Snippets, JS-CSS-HTML Formatter, Laravel 5 Snippets, Laravel Blade Snippets, Material Icon Theme, npm Intellisense, Numbered Bookmarks, Path Intellisense, PHP Debug, PHP DocBlocker, PHP Intelephense, PHP IntelliSense, Prettify JSON, Quokka.js, snippet-creator, Vetur.

Feels like there are redundant extensions here that I need to uninstall.
Happy Friday and Cheers! Excited for Infinity War movie! 😎

What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.

I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.

So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.

So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.

After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.

Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.

TLDR: Small family owned finance business woes as the “you-do-everything-now” network/sysadmin intern

Friday my boss, who is currently traveling in Vegas (hmmm), sends me an email asking me to punch a hole in our firewall so he can access our locally hosted Jira server that we use for time logging/task management.

Because of our lack of proper documentation I have to refer to my half completed network map and rely on some acrobatic cable tracing to discover that we use a SonicWall physical firewall. I then realize asking around that I don’t have access to the management interface because no one knows the password.

Using some lucky guesses and documentation I discover on a file share from four years ago, I piece together the username and password to log in only to discover that the enterprise support subscription is two years expired. The pretty and useful interface that I’m expecting has been deactivated and instead of a nice overview of firewall access rules the only thing I can access is an arcane table of network rules using abbreviated notation and five year old custom made objects representing our internal network.

An hour and a half later I have a solid understanding of SonicWallOS, its firewall rules, and our particular configuration and I’m able to direct external traffic from the right port to our internal server running Jira. I even configure a HIDS on the Jira server and throw up an iptables firewall quickly since the machine is now connected to the outside world.

After seeing how many access rules our firewall has, as a precaution I decide to run a quick nmap scan to see what our network looks like to an attacker.

The output doesn’t stop scrolling for a minute. Final count we have 38 ports wide open with a GOLDMINE of information from every web, DNS, and public server flooding my terminal. Our local domain controller has ports directly connected to the Internet. Several un-updated Windows Server 2008 machines with confidential business information have IIS 7.0 running connected directly to the internet (versions with confirmed remote code execution vulnerabilities). I’ve got my work cut out for me.

It looks like someone’s idea of allowing remote access to the office at some point was “port forward everything” instead of setting up a VPN. I learn the owners close personal friend did all their IT until 4 years ago, when the professional documentation stops. He retired and they’ve only invested in low cost students (like me!) to fill the gap. Some kid who port forwarded his home router for League at some point was like “let’s do that with production servers!”

At this point my boss emails me to see what I’ve done. I spit him back a link to use our Jira server. He sends me a reply “You haven’t logged any work in Jira, what have you been doing?”

Facepalm.

Please allow me to share my thoughts since I can't totally outrage my frustration because we have this so-called fasting to control our anger towards a person we currently disagree with.

A letter from your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner to my young, chubby, smart and clever colleague:

Please do cooperate in times of live editing from the FTP since CTO is not and will never be going to appreciate version control since CTO is too tired for giving a shit and just want deliverables be delivered as fuck perfectly regardless of the resources that we have.

As you know, I tolerated you for not getting the freedom of live editing as what you've experienced from your previous team lead. All I ask of you is to get fresh file from FTP whenever we touch the same file because firstly, God knows how frustrating it is how your hard work is going to be replaced and be gone as much as I do. Secondly, I don't want you to experience how pain in the ass could this be in the long run, and lastly, I don't want any hard feelings to be wasted just because of this.

P.S. I'm too shy to send this to you because I don't want to hurt your feelings and don't want to sound too seriouz and feel old. I also hope we share the same telepathic understanding so we can agree with each other.

Your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner,
xoxo ❤️

(thinking of stating my first name) 😂

My friend a backend dev who manages a little UI by using bootstrap themes. One Saturday he calls me up says "Dude, I need your help, we had a demo and the CEO decides to demo the project to prospective people on Internet Explorer. It looked alright on Chrome but the whole UI has gone haywire on IE. Need your help asap. Join me on screen share". I checkout his HTML code and find a file where the link tag is inside the body tag. I ask him to move that into head tag as in wherever the master template is, I tell him to change the doctype, add responsive meta tags, and even after all these, it just doesn't render bootstraps media queries. After beating my head for around 15mins, I see a drop-down caret in IE's inspector with 7 besides it, someone had set the compatibility mode to IE7. Why in the world would someone set an IE11 to IE7.
My friend heaved a sigh of relief and walked to his boss to show that he isn't a bad developer, his boss is just a bad user.

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

Only touching the topic slightly:

In my school time we had a windows domain where everyone would login to on every computer. You also had a small private storage accessible as network share that would be mapped to a drive letter so everyone could find it. The whole folder containing the private subfolders of everyone was shared so you could see all names but they were only accessible to the owner.

At some point, though, I tried opening them again but this time I could see the contents. That was quite unexpected so I tried reading some generic file which also worked without problems. Even the write command went through successfully. Beginning to grasp the severity of the misconfiguration I verified with other userfolders and even borrowed the account of someone else.

Skipping the "report a problem" form, which would have been read at at least in the next couple hours but I figured this was too serious, I went straight to the admin and told him what I found. You can't believe how quickly he ran off to the admin room to have a look/fix the permissions.

Me: We need to allow the team in the newly acquired subsidiary to access our docker image repositories.
Sec Guy: Why?
Me: So they can run our very expensive AI models that we have prepared onto container images.
Sec Guy: There is a ban on sharing cloud resources with the acquired companies.
Me: So how we're supposed to share artifacts?!?
Sec Guy: Can't you just email them the docker files?
Me: Those images contain expensively trained AI models. You can't rebuild it from the docker files.
Sec Guy: Can't you email the images themselves?
Me: Those are a few gigabytes each. Won't fit in an email and won't even fit the Google drive / onedrive / Dropbox single file size limit.
Sec Guy: Can't you store them in a object storage like S3/GCS/Azure storage?
Me: Sure
Proceed to do that.
Can't give access to the storage for shit.
Call the sec guy
Me: I need to share this cloud storage directory.
Sec Guy (with aparent amnesia): Why?
Me: I just told you! So they can access our AI docker images!
Sec Guy: There is a ban on sharing cloud resources with the acquired companies.
Me: Goes insane

Is there a law or something that you must attempt several alternative methods before the sec people will realize that they are the problem?!?! I mean, frankly, one can get an executable artifact by fucking email and run it but can't pull it from a private docker registry? Why the fuck would their call it "security"?

Most useless feature:

Once we had to create a Learning Manager System to a small university. One of the (useful) features was a "file system" to people upload, organize and share documents (like a Google Drive prototype). This was the "student portfolio".

However, we had to create a page to act as a "cover" to it, that should allow the student to change the background, add exactly 2 images, and up to 9 "post-its". The image shows the notebook of our client while he was thanking us praising it as the greatest innovation of the decade.

The post-its was kinda nice, but what's the point of those images??

Anyway... On the same meeting of that picture the client asked us to include a "canvas" on that same page, so people could draw whatever they want. The words used was "just like [MS] Paint".

We postponed it, hoping he would forget about it, but on the end of the project he was still asking about it.

I found a lib that did the job and integrated with the project, but I also included a long comment for the next devs saying that I'm sorry they would have to support such thing 😅

The client loved but we never knew anyone that really used that Paint

Let's share information! Communicate! How do we do it? Via email!

You got question? Send an emai!
You want to share some excel? Send an email!
Not sure who to ask? Send the email to everyone!
Have a 100 message long email thread and then need some help? Send the whole fucking thread to me and just add "what do'ya think?"!
Send some attachment in email and then 2 weeks later refer to it saying "but I sent the file to you!"? Well surely I can remember your special email from the hundreds of email I get every week.

I did complain to the mangers that why the hell do we have these mega-email-threads? Why do you send all the meaningles release notes to the whole company? The anwer is simple: all information needes to be transparent and if you don't need the info, then just don't read the email!

And fuck you, you CEO wanna-be who sends seasonal greetings through his secretary and thinks anyone gives a shit.

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

So at the old job, i needed support for an issue relating to Amazon S3. We used a third party Python plugin for sending files to our buckets, but had some pretty severe performance issues when trying a 2-way sync.
Naturally, I sought help on StackOverflow, and was asked to share my config. Without much thought, I pasted the config file.
Next comment made me aware that our API id and key was listed in this config (pretty rediculous to keep such private info in the same file as configuration, but oh well).
I edited my question and removed the keys, and did not think about the fact that revisions are stored.

Two weeks later, my boss asks me if I know why the Amazon bill is for 25.000$ when it used to be <100$ 😳

I've never been so scared in my life. Luckily, Amazon was nice enough to waive the entire fee, and I leaned a little about protecting vital information

First it was the "set up WampServer so the client can use our database", to which I told her we should use an embedded database, to which she told me to do.

Then the "Just give the client a .jar file and install the JRE in his laptop" to wich I told her we can make a native installer, to which she fucking assigned to me.

Then the whole fucked up management thing with no design whatsoever and the "we don't need version control".

To just a few hours earlier, when she got mad because I set up a Slack for us to exchange information easily, she told me she was already mad because I shared the project by Google Drive and that she worked in security and knows the risk... AND AT THE SAME TIME, she uses Gmail to share the project.. BRILLIANT !

Most succesful project was around this time last year.

A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.

The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.

Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).

The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.

It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.

It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.

So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.

So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.

My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".

The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.

(Dev)Life in the past 12 hours

Oh boy have the last 12 hours been a roller coaster ride for me. Noob me decided to "compile" AoSP for my device to get a taste of how custom ROMs are built from source. Overall it was fun but the errors were a very good excercise for googling, SO. Couple stuff I learnt ( possibly useful for anyone who comes here )
* The shebang line ( #!/usr/bin/env python ) on my system translated to Python 3.7 environment instead of the expected Python 2.7. Best solution I think to avoid confusion is to create a python 2.7 environment and source it.
* Get your trees right. A jar file called WfdCommon.jar ( apparently known as wifi-display common ) was the cause of several hours of hunting the fault. My vendor tree somehow didn't have this file so dex2oat was borking out like mad. I'm still amazed how I figured this one out almost by myself. ( Basically I had to check every file included in the boot class path, and find the odd one )
* I wasted a lot of time in finding the right files to change version numbers and all. Maybe I didn't search XDA properly for a guide ?

Overall it was a fun experience. Also if anyone's experienced in this area could you share resources to learn more about custom ROM development? Specifically on the tweaking part where you mix features from different ROMs to make a great ROM ( like AoSP extended or Pixel Experience ). All I could find were on the zips and not on sources.

!rant

I used to doubt the usefulness of regex, until now.
I'm new to web dev, and downloaded a sample website to make a project with, but all the sources of images came as src="images/image.jpg", and for some reason I couldn't make it work, the only way that I found that could work to me was creating a static folder inside my app folder, declaring in the start of the document a {% load static %} and referring the image source as {% static 'images/image.jpg' %} in the html file, I kinda get what this is doing, but why it's the only way that works, it's beyond me.

Great! Now I can start the development server and see the website in its full glory!!! Then I realized: I had to edit the sources of every image and every reference to css and js in 5 html files to it work properly, and come on, do all that by hand?

Then regex came to mind, never had used it, never knew how to use it properly, after some web research I found if I did a find/replace with ([a-z]\w+\/[a-z,-]+\.[a-z]+{1,2}) and {% static '$1' %}, all the work I had to do, was resumed to a single click of replace all.

Man, I love doing what I do, and I love you guys/gals, never tough I would ever find a place in which I could share this kind of thing!

For the last 20 years, there's one thing I've not been able to do reliably:

Share a folder on a windows computer.

Why the fuck can I write /etc/smb.conf from scratch with a blindfold on and make it securely work from all client devices including auth & acl, but when I rightclick and share on windows it's either playing hide and seek on the network (is it hiding behind //hostname/share? No? Maybe in the bushes behind the IP addresses?), or it's protected by mysterious logins requiring you to sacrifice two kittens a day.

Yes, finally it works! One windows update later... aaaand it's gone.

JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING CONF AND A MAN PAGE, MICROSOFT. I DON'T CARE THAT YOU'RE ORALLY PLEASING ALL THESE MALWARE RIDDEN GUISLUTS ON THE SIDE, JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING TEXT FILE TO STORE AND EDIT.

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

When you're developing it's very well advised to run your software locally in an environment as much as possible matching the real environment.

So for example, if you're running linux on production then you also run it locally to run your code.

Here's where people need to shut the fuck up:

No, mac is not good for linux development. Not unless portability is already a concern that you have and even then it might be counter productive. So many times when people say this, portability isn't not a concern. What runs on servers is up to them.

If your servers are going to be centos, then you develop with centos. Not with debian, gentoo, ubuntu, maxosx, etc.

Even different linux distros are a headache for portability when it's just to support a few desktops for development so don't think that macosx is going to cut it. It might not be as radical a difference as between windows and linux traditionally is but it's still not good for "linux" development. I don't think people making that statement really know what linux is now how different distributions work.

What you use for your graphical operating system doesn't matter to much but when you run your code then there's a simple solution.

Another thing people need to shut up about. It's not docker, unless you're already in Linux where docker is one of many options such as chroot or lxc.

This question always comes up, how do you developer for linux in windows? No it's not docker it's virtual machine.

It's that simple. You download the ISO for the distro you want and then install it on a VM. What does docker for windows do? It runs a linux VM that runs docker.

This may come as a great shock to developers around the world but it is possible to run linux in a VM and then any linux application your want including docker.

Another option is to shove a box in the corner, install what you need on it, share the file system and have people use that to run their code. It really is that easy.

First time working with designers so maybe someone else can share their experiences. I was expecting all the images/logos to use in the app, but I got an illustrator file containing all mockups. Are they expecting that I extract each image from the mockups? They didn't even use multiple layers...

long time listener, first time caller. I love designers. seriously. I love getting a nice juicy Figma file and not knowing how the heck I'm going to do half the wild stuff in it, but it's beautiful, so I'll figure it out. Go ahead, send it to the client. But designers who learn how to use something like Elementor or one of those crappy kitchen-sink themes, call themselves developers, and win work with clients I share with them. I'm the one fixing everything when that crap breaks. I would never in a million years present myself as a designer, even though I know I know a damn sight more about design than they do about dev. I get it, everyone needs to make a buck, but every time this happens it makes me sick to my stomach. We're on the same team. I always, ALWAYS, go to the mat for good design. Why don't more designers have an equal amount of respect for us? Design phase always goes over deadlines and we always have to pick up the slack to make the hard launch date. Well, now I'm just rambling.

So today I found a file share containing some super super sensitive information accessible to what I think was our entire user base (6,500 users) if you knew the server name and had an interest in nosing around.

I reported it to our head of IT and heard nothing after, although 5 mins after reporting I could no longer access...

I suspect the infrastructure lead is going to be a dick (because his one of them awkward non team player kind of guys) and not thank me for preventing our company from being in national news papers... but try to spin it on why am I nosing around his servers in the first place..

I actually feel 50/50 about if I should of told or not.. but on flip side, I guess the access logs of me listing the files as I flick through to confirm my suspicions would of caused s bigger headache.

Fucking useless infrastructure engineers!

My God is map development insane. I had no idea.

For starters did you know there are a hundred different satellite map providers?

Just kidding, it's more than that.

Second there appears to be tens of thousands of people whos *entire* job is either analyzing map data, or making maps.
Hell this must be some people's whole *existence*. I am humbled.

I just got done grabbing basic land cover data for a neoscav style game spanning the u.s., when I came across the MRLC land cover data set.

One file was 17GB in size.

Worked out to 1px = 30 meters in their data set. I just need it at a one mile resolution, so I need it in 54px chunks, which I'll have to average, or find medians on, or do some sort of reduction.

Ecoregions.appspot.com actually has a pretty good data set but that's still manual. I ran it through gale and theres actually imperceptible thin line borders that share a separate *shade* of their region colors with the region itself, so I ran it through a mosaic effect, to remove the vast bulk of extraneous border colors, but I'll still have to hand remove the oceans if I go with image sources.

It's not that I havent done things involved like that before, naturally I'm insane. It's just involved.

The reason for editing out the oceans is because the oceans contain a metric boatload of shades of blue.
If I'm converting pixels to tiles, I have to break it down to one color per tile.
With the oceans, the boundary between the ocean and shore (not to mention depth information on the continental shelf) ends up sharing colors when I do a palette reduction, so that's a no-go. Of course I could build the palette bu hand, from sampling the map, and then just measure the distance of each sampled rgb color to that of every color in the palette, to see what color it primarily belongs to, but as it stands ecoregions coloring of the regions has some of them *really close* in rgb value as it is.

Now what I also could do is write a script to parse the shape files, construct polygons in sdl or love2d, and save it to a surface with simplified colors, and output that to bmp.

It's perfectly doable, but technically I'm on savings and supposed to be calling companies right now to see if I can get hired instead of being a bum :P

the worst project I've ever worked on was a BIOS update utility for the desktop techs at work. They wanted a tool to open that would let them know when there's a BIOS update and install it for them. The problem was the file share that held the BIOS updates had no naming convention, Dell doesn't name all BIOS updates with Axx, people would fat finger the BIOS password and model numbers for the computers was a pain to match against the file share. After at least 800 lines of C# code I give it to them. A couple months go by and I still see them going machine to machine upgrading BIOSes in labs even though my tool does it to a lab silently with a switch... hhhhhh.

I'm ashamed of it, but I want to share my tifu-story:
My colleague asked me if I could rename his windows user name because he married and changed his last name. I changed it in the Active Directory, but he got some problems when he wants to log on. On every startup his old name appears. Simpliest task. Let me google that.
Easy going, let me just change this registry entry. Reboot. Old behaviour. Okay, I changed some of the other entries. Reboot. Yeah, his new name appears. But wait a moment. Windows just nulled his entire user profile and deleted all the data. "oh, haha you have a backup, right?" - "no, I saved everything on the desktop, all my work is gone!"
But at the end, the boss was mad at HIM, because he doesn't used the file server or any backup system.

i am not a smart man

How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts

Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.

About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.

Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?

Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.

What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.

So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.

Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???

Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.

So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.

So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.

But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.

Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.

Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.

Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.

so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.

So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.

I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.

FUCK FUCK FUCK Windows share feature
just fuck it !
and fuck the people who made it!!!44

ok calm mode on

I had to copy a 30 gb file from my computer to my sister's one, and since the largest pendrive I have is 8gb, and I'm just lazy to split the file into parts, I thought it would be a great idea to copy it over LAN. (tldr: it's not)

First attempt:
Right click on file and share it with everyone = fail
Enable network discovery in sharing settings = still fail
Ohh, right, I just forgot it, disable firewall, it usually solves everything = still fail (2)
Google the problem and try every possible solution = still fking fail

Second attempt:
Ok, when last time I had the same problem, I made a homegroup and it worked.
Let's enable it on my Win10 = it's missing
After some googling: "We removed the home group feature from Windows 10, because why not and we would be fired if the change log was empty."
Ok, fuck it.

Third attempt:
Download a portable FTP server.
Enable it.
Create an account.
It works.

A programme I have to maintain (and not allowed to optimise or change):

1) read input from serial connection
2) store data in MySQL database
3) every day convert to CSV
4) store on Windows file share
5) process CSV in access 2000
6) store in MsSQL database

When it was first developed, I said to te developer to store it straight from serial to MsSQL but out boss wanted it to follow the above spec.

He has now left and I have to maintain it

This semester, we have a lecture called IT Security by a guy, who absolutely know his subject.
Nevertheless, he wanted to show us that sha256 is broken by an existing collision. (Google that, fellow ranters!)
There are two pdf files by google researchers, that show the caption „SHAttered“ both on different backgrounds, although they give the same SHA-hash.
He then tried to share us these two files by moodle and wondered, why he uploaded the same file twice.
Guess what happened? The moodle backend checks new uploaded files for their ... hash ... and then decides, weather to upload or the file is already existing. So, it did just a new symlink to the old file.
Ironic, that an exercise, that should show us sha collision failures on sha collision 😃

I was copying data from a failing zfs drive with rsync and I noticed that it spent a long time on the file ~/.local/share/Baloo/index

du -h index showed a 500ish MB file which didn't seem large enough to take this long.

I recalled that du shows disk usage, not file size and since I was using zfs compression they could be quite different.

so I added -A for apparent size:

du -hA index and it comes back with 1.7E

The file was 1.7 exabytes...

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

So I live in the middle of nowhere and therefore I have a very limited choice of different ISPs. The short version of the choices is a fast but very limited in data size or one that works 99% of the time (I'll talk about the 1% later) but doesn't have limits on downloads. So I obviously chose the second one.
It works pretty great most of the time and I don't have any problems usually... The problem with "usually" is that the 1% of the time it doesn't work is all it needs to frustrate me. I could be downloading a massive file and around 70% the Internet decides to disconnect. It wouldn't really be a big deal if it wouldn't cause the file to get corrupted.
My point is that if you're going to share a big file, don't upload it to mega, mediafire, dropbox or anything like that. Just use torrents. They work way better for big files.

Sooo many fucking visual and functional glitches in iOS!

Just had my Files app stuck on a file preview. Couldn’t scroll, close or share the file. Closed the app, restarted the app, opened it again with no luck.

Had to offload and reinstate the app to get it working.

Apple is making sure that I go back to Android for my next phone.

To think that such an expensive phone has so many UI/UX glitches is infuriating! I like the overall aesthetics of iOS but these glitches/bugs/whatever-the-fucks are just plain frustrating.

MORE WEBDEV ADVENTURES

Took a break for a while due to personal stuff. Just got a job (have to get a stupid work permit from school first to actually be able to work tho), had some shit happen with two close friends that now hate me. Right now I'm upset about something that another really good friend did. So I've been doing some webdev to distract myself for a bit.

So I'm turning my URL bar that I had into a little command bar. It'll be what I use to configure stuff along with URLS and shit. I was building a little config menu that I really hated doing, was just becoming too much of a mess. Currently changing the look of it just a bit, then I'm gonna work on the functionality of it later.

Made my weather divs dynamically generated. Turned like 65 lines in the HTML file to ~20 lines of JavaScript that makes that ~65 lines. And it turns out that it doesn't really affect the loading time at all, which was my original worry. My next task for that is to save the weather predictions so the script doesn't have to grab a whole 14kb file every reload (I know, that part's a little bad). The entire page with the icons and all comes out to ~30kb so far. The icons make up about half of that, but they'll never all be in use because only 5 are on screen at any time and there are 7 total. Plus the fact that one may be in use multiple times (like this very moment actually).

Then I want to have an RSS reader which I've been putting off for a while now. Trying to get everything else done before I do that.

At this very moment, the page takes about 1.4 seconds to load. I'm trying to avoid putting anything I don't need in it. Like I'm using vanilla everything. No frameworks or anything. But that's just my personal preference.

I'll make sure to share it with you guys when I have everything built and functional. I've had a lot of interruptions while doing this. My personal life tends to get in the way of shit I try to do, because I let it get to me.

Anyways I'm just rambling at this point. I fucking love you guys

Some people are just inherently retards and there's nothing that can be done about it.

So this intern of mine (not really an intern because she is older than me but new to the field so whatever), is driving me nuts.

There's a file on cloud, she was given to refer during the initial training.

The current link is no longer accessible because whoever the fuck owned it has left or revoked the access.

So I ask her if she has a copy of the file because I want to refer it.

She replies saying:
"Can you share anither link, the current links shows some error"

Holy freaking lord. The keyword in my request was COPY. Why on this sweet sunny earth I'd ask you if the link worked and file was available!!!!

And she couldn't even comprehend that the error is about access. Just says SOME error.

I'll be spending next 2.5 hours reviewing her 1 week of work submissions (which has been ongoing since 3+ weeks now and should have taken 3 hours to finish).

This has got nothing to do with anyone's gender but all about my experience with them.

Fellow Freelancers, can you recommend a platform you use to track and share project progress with your clients?

What do you typically use to keep clients updated about project status? There a Fancy SaaS solution or do you use a simple excel file??

Would like some ideas and recos!

Substantive post / question time!

So I'm working on this project that isn't a disaster but very much suffered from a lack of planning (both on my part and others).

This is a feature that involves all sorts of ways to view and manipulate some records and various records and so forth... I mean what isn't that really?

I think everyone tried but we didn't realize how many details there would be and how much we would need to (well I demand we do) share code across pieces and how that would slow us up when we realize feature A needs to do X, Y, Z and ... well obviously that means feature B has to also...

I'm not really upset about this, it's progressing and I'm learning. I'm writing it all now so it's under control, but...

I want to be able to display, visually where we are as far as each component of this project

- Component A
- Description:
- Component A does things you don't want to.
- Has features:
- Can blow up things in a good way.
- Produces flowers and honey on demand
- Missing features:
- Doesn't take out the trash.

And so on for component B, C, D, Z.

Right now I'm just using a plain old document file to write up a status / progress type thing now.

We use Teamwork to manage tasks, but I kinda hate it. It's similar to the above example in being able to bust out lists... but they're not connected in any way. All the details are lost on these bullet items as they're limited to one line when you look at everything ....

It's the classic case of a tool that shows lists ... but doesn't promote or allow for showing any connections between them...

And really the problem with this project is that we built little bits and features here, and little bits there from the outside in and ... really we should have built it from the top down where we had to face a lot of questions earlier.

Anyway does anyone know of anything that has project type management / status / progress stuff that is VISUALLY helpful .. not just a bunch of lists and progress bars?

I know I didn't word this well but I'm open to even wrong answers....

Ok bois it's IDE / Text Editor time again.

I have had my fair share of usage with VSCode and i have been using VIM for over a year now.

With Vim i miss intellisense, class lookups etc.

VSCode doesn't provide the macro abilities i like in VIM and also doesn't support every edge case of file (giant files for instance).

Now i am at a certain dilemma. Do i use VSCode? Vim?

I am seriously considering trying emacs, but i don't know much about it.

What is your take on this?
Please respect each others choice, i don't want another fucking IDE religion war

Today i chartered new realms for me.

I created a new hyper-v vm on the company windows servers and added a 5th instance to it, but instead of running another windows server i installed an ubuntu 18.04 (cause i am a bit familiar with debian from my raspberry pi)

we have two servers, one which runs the 4 vms and a replica. I first had the new vm on the main server but it occured me to move it instead to the unusued replica machine. That kinda worked..i did a planned failover but the main server isnt configured to be the replica..and even when activating that it didnt work. This is weird.

For the moment i ignored that and proceeded to install nginx, mariadb and php 7.2..basically the lemp stack. I managed to setup nginx and a static ip adress for the machine (which was different from how i remembered it to do (in 18.04 its not done with the network conf but a yaml file).

in the end i added two different virtual servers, one for actual use and one for dev stuff (with phpmyadmin running for instance), listening on port 80 and some random other port.

as a test i brought a mediawiki onto the Port 80 server and it worked.

on monday i have to figure out how to implement the wildcard certificate i have for our company domain (internal dns simply routes intranet.company.com to the local server vm)

i am mighty proud cause all my experience with linux was with a raspberry pi so far and i am fairly certain i did it right and without shortcuts this time. (unlike my raspberry experience)

just wanted to share

(i also sweated a lot of blood when editing the hyper v settings as i did not set up the server in the first place)

((i also installed xrdp and a mate desktop, but i am less proud of that, but sometimes seeing folders graphically helps me))

have a bash alias for easily connecting to raspberry pi
share same aliases file with raspberry pi for ease of use
ssh to raspberrypi
forget about it and try ssh again
realize what i am doing
from pi@raspberrypi to pi@raspberrypi
sshception

I'm developing an app based on user stories and stuff. The business team used Trello to share them with the devs. Everytime they changed a comma, they'd upload a new file. We got to the point where a simple 1 page story had like 15 versions..
So a couple of days ago I suggested my project's PO she could use Confluence for that, I explained her the benefits like how it'd be easier to track changes and the best part: no 30 effing word files.

I checked it today and turns out she started using, but instead of writing stories on pages, she just downloaded everything from Trello and uploaded the documents there 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Does anybody use Freelancer.com? I'm currently in an argument with their support chat minion about how private or not-private the project's contents are AFTER the project is awarded. She's telling me that both awarded and unawarded projects are completely exposed to the public Internet, sensitive file attachments, chats, everything, unless one upgrades to Private status. If one doesn't like that, she says, one can always delete one's project for only $5. Does anyone else have experience to share in this regard? I find this incredible.

Any web developers care to share their file structure when breaking css / pre processed styles into modules? Want to organize but I don’t want to over-do it.

I figured I would share my Capstone from this semester with a community that might be interested. An eclipse plugin that was developed in our lab is able to implicitly track developer eye gazes as they work in an IDE (eclipse in this case). Before I began work on it, source code, bug reports, and stack overflow documents could be tracked with all of the data on said documents being extracted. For example, if source code is being tracked, everything from the file name and class/method name down to statement types are collected. The tracking isn't on still images. Since it's within an IDE, you can open multiple files, scroll, and modify -- all while tracking is collecting accurate data based on the (x, y) gaze coordinate and the handler assigned to the type of document/file being viewed.

My job was to extend this functionality to track gazes on UML class diagram documents. This means I had to gather data at the highest level: the class/connection being looked at, down to the lowest level: members/methods, their types and containing classes.

Being new to Java's EMF, GEF, and eclipse plugin development, I had a bit of a learning curve. Anyways here is the poster of the functionality I added. 🙃

Not much of a rant haha.

So I found about a possible freelance job I could do. I messaged the person and they asked me to show them some of my work. I went into my dusty wamp server folder to use one of my projects there as an example or w/e. It being old and all and me having not updated anything in the last 2 years, there was a lot of bugs I had to fix. So I did that. I had to change some links and whatnot. Then I tried running the site again and that was where I met the biggest hurdle. None of the user generated pages worked because I used a .htaccess file to vanity the website links (is that a word? No? Well it is now). So I went back into the folder to check the .htaccess file to see if I could fix the issue. Lo and behold the file was empty

I had lost the fucking .htaccess. Now I'm stuck and saying fuck it because I can't be arsed to go through each file and change the links mostly bc I forgot the structure of the links ontop of the other stuff I had in the htaccess file. And yeah ik I'm just being lazy but I'm really just having one of those days

So yeah that's how my day went. Just thought I'd share

This was in 2001 on a legacy AIX core ops server. I got tired of waiting hours for the last page of a print job to debug totals. So, I added a print menu option to print it to an HTML file on a share served up by a wab server and send me the email link. Took two years to catch on but when it did, we eliminated all nightly print jobs and took the paper budget down by 90%. All because I was too lazy to keep reloading my desk jet with paper to debug reports and I forgot to take it off the menu.

I just finally took time to look at creating symbolic links for node modules and package and package lock json files all from a boilerplate code for my frontend projects,

I saved over 15gb of disk space,

my SSD is 40gb so that's fair

now I have all my node modules for frontend projects in a separate container and node modules for backend projects in a separate container

I still havent figured out how to trim down my package.json file before pushing because there'll be some unused libraries.

for now any direct changes I make to the package and package lock json files will be reflected in the the symlinked directory and them reflect over all projects that share it

I have to be careful here

That moment when you are so impressed about someone or something and interested and want to talk about it but you dont know how to even string two sentances about it even after you just spoke to someone that got you interested in it.

Time to spend a few hours getting the lingo down but in short, using python to make a FE to allow users to create a Hermes config file that will be used on Kubernetes to set up clusters of servers on aws to run their version of our platform. My mind is so rekt and i thank the Devops guys for this needed break from the FE where i normally reside. I love working with people that are not only good but enjoy what they do. They make me a better developer myself 👏

This is one of the many vast reasons i love what i do and having a place to share with more like-minded induviduals like yourself, im grateful.

Thabks for reading and hope you have or had a great day. Keep up the good work all and stay focused 👌

Hey, Do you think it's common to get an interview take-home test like this...

Write a Python script that:- Downloads the Equity bhavcopy zip from the above page- Extracts and parses the CSV file in it- Writes the records into Redis into appropriate data structures(Fields: code, name, open, high, low, close)
Write a simple CherryPy python web application that:- Renders an HTML5 + CSS3 page that lists the top 10 stock entries from the Redis DB in a table- Has a searchbox that lets you search the entries by the 'name' field in Redis and renders it in a table- Make the page look nice!

Commit the code to Github. Host the application on AWS or Heroku or a similar provider and share both the links.

Protip: If you're using a tiling window manager, you can detach the file browser on the left of any Jetbrians IDE.

This way you can switch to it using the shortcuts you're used to from the WM, as well as resize it very easily.
Also this way if you are not using the integrated terminal of the IDE, you can have the file browser span the full height of your screen, while the terminal and the IDE share the hight on the right.

Disclaimer: I don't know if this is common knowledge, I'm sorry if it is, but I was completely shocked that I missed this feature for years.

Had to deploy from pre-dev to dev. Had to move through manually copying of files zipping and bluetooth according to the design spec document.

When move in attempt to build met countless of fails. Files go missing.
- No automated Tool to push to dev env.
the ide would load for hours, just the refresh the project.

Not to mention that pc is running on a 2.5 inch mechanical drive

So i actually build an app. To automate that draunting task. To help me copy all the file that are required into a package.

Copying 140 files manually for a design spec. Depends on how many java file listed. Just by copying manually would kill me

My co-workers that utilize my app. Wish to help them ease their task. Complain instead. (I shouldn't had share the app)

The feeling of getting blame stinks. Despite able to copy out all the files. When copy into another system. The ide in the system to deploy. Can't pick up some files.

Client uses CVS, tells me stories about how awful their new acquisition is because they don't use source control at all, only building off a file share...

Points for trying I guess?

Hi all,

I was just wondering if anyone knows of a software that does for files on a server what dropbox does for files in the cloud. A search interface, moving files around, copy pasting etc..

I'm just using nginx's autoindex at the moment with an authentication layer but I was hoping to get a nice gui with search capabilities and copy paste, potentially share file, etc..

Kind regards and keep on hacking.

Hi guys, If you are front end dev (especially react dev) please read this and share your thoughts.
I recently started with react.js. But I didn't like the idea of nesting components. I know this is too early to talk about it. I'm not halfway through tutorials. But I'm loosing motivation to learn react.js
This never happened to me. I learned few frameworks in past. Django and codeigniter. They follow MVC/MVT architecture. And writing code in it looks cleaner and simpler.
In react JSX is confusing at first. You have to read same line twice or thrice to understand. I'm not saying JSX is bad, but it's not readable enough.

In early lessons I learnt that in react everything is component. And every component comes under one root component. Don't you guys think this well get messy for large application. You are dealing with number of nested components from one file into another.

I'm not against react. But the way react is forcing you to write code, is not something I enjoy. Let me know your thoughts. Maybe I'll get some kinda booster to continue react.

I started looking into building my Android app but wanted to see if I could get a refresher on a few things. The starter template for the Nav Layout isn't exactly functional.

So first question is anyone know any resources like an actually functioning demo project.

Also I need DB access but want to open any db file given the *.db path and the DAO should be persistent, share across all fragments/activities. What would be the best design, way of doing that in Android though.

I don't think you can pass the object between activities but what about fragments. I'm thinking the main app opens the DB and then can pass a DAO Interface to all the fragments to use?

Does anybody know how to configure eclipse to run in same way as vs code remote( I am kind fan of it) runs?
I tried remote option in eclipse i.e RSE but it looks more like file BROWSER than remote development .
FYI, I have a multi module maven/grade projects. I know I can use vs code for that as well but due to some limitations I want to use eclipse. I have a windows host and have to do development in vm or ec2 and I want to avoid booting in GUI mode.

If it's possible and you know a document which can help me or share the steps with me, it 2ould be very helpful.

Hello devRant!
Google is coming up with all useless answers so...

I have several module pages in AspX. A lot of them share the same variables that they each instantiate on load of that page like:

Var SaveText = <%=Lan.SaveText%>;

But if I put those into a javascript file to share it, instantiation fails because the <%=%>-values only work within the AspX page.

Is there really no way around this except putting it in the master page (which I really don't want to for other reasons)

Hi. Me and my friend is working on this major project where we are trying to create a many to many file convertor for a lot of media and file types ( for eg pdf to doc and visa versa, jpg to png , mp4 to flv , or mp4 to gif , whatever the possibilities are )

If anyone has done something like this, then please share your insights : how this is gonna work, what concepts are involved , where to look for this kind of info, etc.
Currently from what i have gathered, it would be almost impossible to convert to a few proprietary formats (like rar, psd or autocad's dwg) but there are still free softwares and websites doing it openly. How so?

i wonder... when I'm using Share-it to share the apk file of my android project, it is always failed to install to the mobile that i'd shared. you guys encounter that?

I've been working on an extremely intermittent bug for the past week in my project that occurs during a stress testing between a PC based server and an embedded device that share files. When the crash happens, I analyze what happened by looking at a file as a result of an fwrite, look at a diff of it, look at the packets etc. For the past 3 days I had been lead to believe there was a bug in stdio.h's fwrite due to a file being written looking like it was truncated in the diff, but the packets telling a different story (X bytes sent to be written, on the result I report X bytes written). Today I noticed that there was either a bug or an issue in the diffing algorithm that led me to think my code was the issue. I spent 3 fucking days trying to figure why fwrite was truncating and lieing about its result when my diff tool was the culprit. FML.