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Search - "finally not crappy"
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Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.
My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.
We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹
Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.
As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.
Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.
Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!
There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.
The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.
The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><
Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.
Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.2 -
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.22 -
Step 1: Run to the store to buy a USB card reader because all of a sudden you have a need to use a 16Mb CF card that was tossed in a junk drawer for 20 years (hoping it still works, of course), but that was the easy part...
Step 2: Realize that the apps - your own - you want to run on your new (old) Casio E-125 PocketPC (to re-live "glory" days) are compiled in ARM format, not MIPS, which is the CPU this device uses, and the installer packages you have FOR YOUR OWN APPS don't include MIPS, only ARM (WHY DID I DO THAT?!), so, the saga REALLY begins...
Step 3: Get a 20-year old OS to install in a Hyper-V VM... find out that basic things like networking don't work by default because the OS is so damn old, so spend hours solving that and other issues to get it to basically run well enough to...
Step 4: Get that OS updated so that it's at least kind/sorta/maybe (but between you and me, not really!) safe online, all without a browser that will work on ANY modern site (oh, and good luck finding a version of Firefox that runs on it - that all took a few hours)...
Step 5: Okay, OS is ready to go, now get 20-year old dev tools that you haven't even seen in that many years working. Oh, do this with a missing CD key and ISO's that weren't archived in a format that's usable today, plus a bunch of missing dependencies because the OS is, again, SO old (a few MORE hours)...
Step 6: Get 20-year old code written in a language you haven't used in probably almost that long to compile, dealing with pathing issues, missing libs, and several other issues, all the while trying to dust off long-dormant knowledge somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of your brain... surprisingly, it all came back to me, more or less, in under an hour, which lead to...
Step 7: FINALLY get it all to work, FINALLY get the code to compile, FINALLY get it transferred to the device (which has no network capabilities, by the way, which is where the card reader and CF card came into play) and re-live the glory of your old, crappy PocketPC apps and games running on the real thing! WOO-HOO!
Step 8: Realize it's 3:30am by the time that's all done and be VERY thankful that you're on vacation this week or work tomorrow would SSUUCCKK!!!!
Step 9. Get called into work the next day for a production issue despite being tired from the night before and an afternoon of errands, lose basically a whole day of vacation (7 hours spent on it) and not actually resolve it by after midnight when you finally say that's enough :(
Talk about your highs and your lows.6 -
Am I a machochistic fuck?
This sunday I had the glorious idea to fix a not-so-recent Wordpress website for a friend.
Imagine an upgrade from 3.3.2 to 4.9.8! (and PHP 5.5.old to 7.2.new
Oh boy. I thought it was impossible, because the site uses a free theme from 2012 and had some other plugins installed.
But what kind of developer am I, if I give up so easily?
I forced XAMPP to run PHP 5.6.stoneage in order to let me debug this thing. After some fixing in different files, I was able to get the admin panel back, disabled some plugins and then overwrote the installation with WP 4.9.8. After firing up the admin panel I had to fix 20 differend PHP files in the plugins.
Finally! After the plugins were updated, all worked again.
Except for the backend part of this free crappy theme. It uses an old version of JQuery UI widgets with custom mods.
I've done enough for today so I let it be like this. I'm not in the mood to load a second JQuery version.4 -
Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".
It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.
13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."
It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).
Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.
Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.
More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.
We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.
A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.
We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.
Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.
Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.
Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.
After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.
More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.
After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.
In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.
About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.
...fuck that's a long read.5 -
VR/AR research.
I used to work as a photographer then got more interested in image processing and that got me into programming.
I somehow just ended up in my current position which is pretty much my dream job. I don't know if I could work as a "normal" programmer. Research projects tend to be extremely hectic and the goal is not to produce a perfect piece of software but to make prototypes to prove a certain concept might work. It is not possible to focus only on single technology and sometimes the technology is not mature at all.
All this means that sometimes this prototype might be a spaghetti code nightmare which works as long as you don't touch anything. But when you get follow up projects you are able to refine the concept and eventually have quite tidy code base.
Currently I'm making projects with Hololens and luckily I have had time to clean up some components from previous projects. It feels quite nice to have working technology and lots of ready made building blocks. I can finally make stable prototypes quite rapidly.
I'll enjoy this situation until some new crappy world changing technology comes along...3 -
IDK man, it took me a while to finally learn iptables and now switch to firewalld? Oh come on. It's not that I'm against learning new things, no. It's just that firewalld looks a bit.. crappy. If I get a server provisioned and run
firewall-cmd --add-port=53/udp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload
and I get my ssh connection killed that's no good news, no sir! I mean come on, how can I rely on a tool this critical when a single line in its config file can make my machine inaccessible. Even better -- this config file is managed by that tool entirely!!! My commands passed all the tool's checks and they worked, but when I wanted to make those commands permanent and reload state from the config -- the tool starts spitting bile and blood and says "fuck off, it's my server now!"
IDK man.. It's just way too fishy. The good ol' iptables works very well and I'm kicking its retard younger brother out of the server.
shoosh you dirty pig firewalld, shoosh!6