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Just saw a rant about date formats between the US and every other country and saw this a few years ago. Seems appropriate
26 -
Girl: What's your idea of the perfect date?
Me: dd/mm/yyyy, others formats are confusing
Me: Wait where are you going18 -
Just called Asus for a problem with my router, went to send them my systemlog.txt for analysis
"Oh we don't have an email you can send that to"
Me: "(me calling bullshit) let me talk to the tech team.."
*Get transferred*
"Hello this is the supervisor"
Me: "fml"
"Ya we don't have an email you can send that to, but we can use a different departments verification services to get a file from you, has to be a picture though"
Me: "What? I got a .txt file here, I just want to get it to you, does it really have to be a picture?"
"Has to be a picture or a PDF, we can't take txt files"
Me: "fkin.. srsly? Fine"
I can't believe Asus's system srsly. I think it's for virus protection, but viruses can be embedded in both picture formats and PDF, but not in txt. So wtf is going on lol15 -
She: Do dates make you nervous?
He: Oh yes, especially when the client and server are in different timezones and I need to calculate the difference and they are in different formats and I mean why can’t everyone just use ISO8601, right?
She: Okay never mind bye..........8 -
*tries to convert a Windows drive into btrfs*
*copies the whole 1.4TB of data back from server*
Windows: Wait, you expect me to do more than browsing the Phasebuk and playing games? Over a million files?! No no no, can't do that.
*reboot after BSOD*
Ehm, a hard drive you say? A drive that I just fucked up? What are you talking about? I don't see any hard drive :/
Piece of shit.
Crappy Arch Linux laptop: ah, I see a new hard drive connected here. Limme mount it real quick for ya :3
Me: eh, not now. I want to format it first.
Linux: oh, cool! Your wish is my command <3
*formats hard drive to btrfs*
Me: alright, now please copy all that 1.4TB onto the drive and please don't overheat _/\_
Linux: Gotcha! On your commands sir!
See the difference? The mental communication level? Windows is like talking to an obnoxious grade schooler that just does whatever the fuck they want to. Linux on the other hand is so much more mature and capable. Guess which one I like the most.20 -
To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.
All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.
The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.
Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.
So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.
Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?
The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.
But... the ocean of chaos will never end.
You must learn to swim in it.
All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.
Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.
So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.
You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.
You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.
There is no such thing as clean code.
There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".
Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.
You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.
You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:
"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".24 -
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 -
My new phone will probs arrive tomorrow and me and mates are going on a vacation to Germany next week.
Currently using nearly all bandwidth/ram of one of my dedicated servers to download maps for offline use (OpenStreetMaps) and convert them to formats OsmAnd can use.
No need for google maps ❤️59 -
I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.
Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.
Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.
Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!
I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.
My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.
Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.
Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.
Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.
Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.
"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?
But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?13 -
Although I do give some privacy related advice here and there on here, I'm planning on hiring a server dedicated to devRant regarding privacy/tiny simple tools.
I've got the folloing in mind:
- Host the privacy website
- Put a pi-hole server on it for everyone to use
- Own IP lookup API which would display it in a few data formats.
Any other ideas?74 -
Today was fucking awesome!
I always wanted to do a project in C++ since I've been more of a Java guy for years now.
And today, I finally wrote a full console program in C++! (For windows, it's a .exe)
The purpose of that program is to show if a file has a file lock on it (because of copying for example).
It started as simple as that, but got complicated quickly:
- It needs colors! So I added colors.
- Just a single file? Boring. I need wildcards, so I can put a * for anything in the file name! Jup.
- Just one directory? Boring. I need a recursive directory walk! Got it.
- But wait! There has to be an option to switch between recursive and wildcard/single mode! So I checked if the first argument equals "-r"! Hacky but works.
- Oh uh... that spams a lot now! The purpose was to show locked files, so I need another argument to specify that I only want to see locked files! Damn now it get's hard... I need a Linux-like command line argument parser (this -h and -s "hello" stuff). So I took the opportunity to write one myself! Done.
- Refactoring everything to use my new fancy parser...
- Adding more and more arguments, just because I can:
- "-d" hides "access denied" messages
- "-l" shows only locked files
- "-r" activates recursive directory walk
- "-f" formats everything nicely, basically printf("%-150.150s | %s", filename, locked); a maximum width which get's truncated if too long so everything lines up nicely
- "-h" which of course displays the help page
- "-w file" watches a file, if the file is locked it will refresh every 500ms, if it's still locked nothing happens, if it's unlocked, the program prints "unlocked" in green and exits. And yes, it does have a rotating line (something like this: "-" "\" "|" "/" "-" and so forth...)
That project was just awesome to make. I learn languages fastest if I just do a big project in them, and today, I really learned a lot.
Thank you for reading all this!3 -
Gf: "Why are you such a typist"
Me: "I promise not to buy more keyboards with blue switches..."
Gf: "No, I mean like being racist or sexist, but you discriminate types"
Me: "Uhhh"
Gf: "You are always bitching about how awful date/time types are, with timezones, leap seconds and daylight savings"
Me: Face turns pale, thousand yard stare, vietnam-flashback to when I was writing a calendar scheduling/meeting/matching tool which used 3 databases, with timestamps in different formats, and web frontends for people in offices around the world.
Me, with a soft broken voice: "So?"
Gf: "You've been working on that palette tool this week, and you keep talking about how interesting all these colorspaces, white balances and conversion formulas are"
Me: 🤔5 -
<label>
Name</label>
I don't know what kind of maniac formats their HTML like this. How do you sleep well at night?2 -
Root has a deadline
I've been working on this CCPA ticket for awhile. Admittedly too long, but I'm new to the codebase and it's fucking sprawling. There has also been a lot of back-and-forth on the ticket.
Anyway, I've had a few blockers, such as how mailers work, the legal copy, where to put a admin-facing link to the dashboard, how to build the jira integration (and its creds), etc.
Quite awhile ago I asked Mr. Product, "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" Awesome. Except he didn't. That day came and went without a peep. So, the next day I ask again: "Where should I put the ccpa dashboard link?" To which he responds: "I'll get you the answer today!" And that day comes and goes, too. I ask again, and you guessed it: "I'll get you the answer today." Repeat ad nauseam.
I also asked about the Jira integration and credentials. I got about the same treatment as above, but with a tiwst: they tell me to talk to / continue to bug Mr. H instead. Except Mr. H had been on PTO for weeks. Every time I ask, they keep referring me to him. A little over two weeks later (yesterday), I finally got a response from him. Yay! I was preoccupied with finishing the dashboard (which wasn't in the original ticket for some reason) so I didn't get a chance to look into it yet. After asking his boss three times, Mr. Product also finally (!!!) gave me a response on the link placement today, too! Though not directly: he discussed it with said boss in a group chat that I'm a part of, but never tagged me or told me directly. So, now I know where to put it (I think), but I have no idea how that area of the site is built (it's dynamic based on domain, login, and roles), so adding it will still be difficult.
The best part:
Today during standup, some lady I've only rarely seen before attends the meeting, doesn't say anything until the very end, and then announces that everything must be code-complete by tomorrow for release, and then promptly signs off.
For fuck's sake. I've had blockers on this for weeks, and now I need to finish it by fucking tonight?
I still don't know how to build the mailers (because translations and formats), nor how to actually send emails using them. I don't know how to modify the footer (dynamic, complex), how to add the admin-facing link (dynamic, complex), nor how build a Jira integration (haven't even looked yet). I just got unblocked on two of these fucking today. and it needs to be done and code reviewed by tomorrow?
No bloody way.
Maybe I should go back to my previous job. 😡18 -
i am BEYOND pissed at google.
as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.
when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.
ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.
but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).
so now this screen pops up.
"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.
well, i'll create one. simple enough.
no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.
i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.
i truly hope someone got fired.
so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.
now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'
i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.
google is a fucker.
after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.
i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?
after i press enter, it started.
what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?
i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???
maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.
fuck you google.9 -
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 -
Let me ask you something: why do most people prefer ms word over a simple plain text document when writing a manual. Use Markdown!
You can search and index it (grep, ack, etc)
You don't waste time formatting it.
It's portable over OS.
You only need a simple text editor.
You can export it to other formats, like PDF to print it!
You can use a version control system to version it.
Please! stop using those other formats. Make everyone's life easier.
Same applies when sharing tables. Simple CSV files are enough most of the time.
Thank you!!?!18 -
Ugh, ansible and yml formats. I thought to fix a small issue fast and commit it directly.. but noooo
2 -
🐉
I once wrote a room planning application on unity, to allow people in my company to book meetings using tablets attached to the room doors.
Turns out the c# Datetime object unity uses was highly localized and therefore had a different formats on each different device.
I saved those timestamps into a SQL database and eventually all devices crashed due to having some Datetime format they could not parse.
Had to fully bypass the datetime and reinvent it essentially and had to reset the database.
I think it's needless to say I'm not particularly good in dating.4 -
This feature I'm building requires crossing over to a second application for some actions (fair, this reduces repetition), but the method used for it is kind of ridiculous.
To keep with the existing patterns, I followed suit, and added two PATCH and a DELETE routes, wrappers, and calls. (Typical CRUD + de/reactivate).
But. This freaking halfassed HTTP model doesn't support anything but POST and PUT! wtf. (Also, the various IDs, naming schemes, and required json data/formats differ across view, controller, and endpoints. but whatever?)
Two and a half hours later, and the feature is done and works wonderfully. Four times the functionality of the previous incarnation, and the code is only about 25% longer! haha.
Ahh, I'm complimenting myself again. (but somebody has to, right? 😅)
but really, when i want to get something done i'm actually surprised at how quickly it all comes together. Even when I need to patch API Guy's madness.
(and this time I actually found someone else's code in the mess! It was actually worse!)
I suppose taking a day off yesterday did me some good.1 -
Me: I fucking hate people using proprietary data formats when there is something more than capable already...
Also me: *Spends an hour designing file structure for a proprietary image format* Hmmm... How can we trim even more bytes off this...
(Designing the format to be smaller than a typical PNG and make it easier to load in data programatically)8 -
[YYYY]-[MM]-[DD] or [DD]-[MM]-[YYYY]
Across all dashboards and clients we have in current company you'll find one of the above,
Every developer who ever worked on part of the system have chosen either one..
So it's a total mess,
In an attempt to standard all date formats across all our clients I setup a Slack poll,
And guess which one is winning by more than 2x votes!!
[DD]-[MM]-[YYYY] !!!
And here I thought ISO-8601 is enough reason,
But apparently not!
They say our users are more familiar with the other one,,,
It seems main problem is with the education system of this country,
That's how they were thought in schools,
So... FUCK WORLD'S STANDARDS14 -
Just submitted my first app to the Microsoft Store 🎉🎉
It's a simple offline password manager that also accepts other formats of data such as credit card and personal info.
Made it using WinUI 3. To prevent you from forgetting your master password, each "locker" accepts an unlimited number of passwords. If you forgot one, you can just use a different one. This is my idea to make offline password managers a little less of a hassle.
Can't wait for approval from the store!
26 -
I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.
Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.
But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle
There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.
So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:
Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.
Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.
The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!
The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.
Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.
4 -
I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.
Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')7 -
Give everyone the ability to intuitively grasp the concept of unix timestamps.
No more timezones or DST, no more confusion about formats.7 -
One of the things I have no fucking patience for is bureaucracy. For the last year I've been working for a company I have no problem with, I like the place and I like the people here. Recently I was contacted by another company and offered a better salary to work for them. I was open about it with my boss and we both accorded that I will receive the same salary to stay (It was ok to me since I feel comfortable here), but in order to do that I'll have to sign a new contract. Ok, no big deal. Few days later a HR girl contacts me to send her all the documentation needed to elaborate a contract, and I was like 'You guys already have all my documents, been working here for a year'. But Ok, I tried not to be picky and just sent her everything again. Then she requests online psychometric tests, sends a shitload of formats to fill, like personal references, their company-custom resume format, privacy policies, and many more stupid and irrellevant paperwork nobody should need when a person has been working for you for a year and you want him to stay. I really tried to be patient and do everything the HR girl wanted me to do, but for one reason or other, she kept rejecting the formats I was sending (I had to download, print, sign, scan and resend many of them). We've been wrestling for an entire fucking week over this shit via email and she can't just write a new contract, make me sign it and leave me the fuck alone. The last thing she compained about was a stupid personal reference format I didnt scan with my signature on. This other company wants me to start next monday. I guess the next document I'll be sending her will be my resignation letter.2
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So i was working on ruby gem that wraps the libarchive C library which can be used to read and write archives of many different formats.
I was stuck for few days with a segfault and for the life of me, i couldn't find the problem.
So, i took a break and went to visit my grandparent, grandpa saw me so zoned out. So he was like, whats happening? I was like, "Frakinn program, keeps crashing".
He looked at me and said, "Garbage in Garbage out, Computers don't make mistakes" and went back to finish his game.
Then it him me the FRAKINN Ruby Garbage collector is freeing in-use objects and suddenly everything make sense.
Thank you grandpa :D3 -
Sometimes I feel people underestimate us.
During all my life, people has asked me if I can fix their *any device* because it goes slowly/something doesn't work.
But, of course, for free. Because they think the only thing we do is pushing 3 buttons and everything is done. They think everything solves itself easily.
Then is the fact that we should be able to fix everything always. Even if the hardware is broken. Even if there isn't any way to solve the problem.
I think we deserve a little bit more from society. I don't expect people to understand what we do but at least something better than the guy who formats your computer when it starts to go slow.
(Maybe I'm the only one who feels that way or it's just where I live, idk)2 -
Tomorrow I will be on a long train trip again so here goes!
My last train project is http://jsrant.com and people seem to enjoy it. Every time I am mentioned in a rant related to it people also mention the idea of a similar application but for in the terminal. So I intend to build that tomorrow.
To build the best thing for you I want to ask you some questions:
- What operating system are you running?
- Why (or how) would you like to use a devrant terminal reader?
- Why would you NOT want to use a devrant terminal reader?
- Would your use-case required obfuscated output? (Hiding it from someone)
- If so, what formats do you use on a daily basis or are you most comfortable with?
- Anything else you would like to mention or for me to consider?
I will be developing the larger part of this tomorrow, but the sources will be made available to the public.9 -
Fuck you apple, and fuck your god damn shitty documentation.
Working with NFC enabled passes, their documentation says "payload max is 64 bytes"
What they ACTUALLY fucking mean is 64 ascii characters.
Also, the way they handle date time formats is fucked. They say they support W3C formats (iso) but what they actually mean is, they support a half assed version of a subset of it.
I told their chief engineer over a phone call and his response;
"I agree, our documentation is lacking"... HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING UPDATE IT!
Also, how they handle json is just bad.7 -
Quite happy with myself, I just made a 60 line backup script that takes in a super simple JSON file and backs up your files in multiple formats. Attached to a cron job and boom. 60 line home baked backup solution4
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Server configuration file formats...
some use custom text file
some use ini files,
some use xml..
some use json..
some use yaml..
some use toml..
How many file formats I need to learn!!!9 -
I hate stupid DirectX .x files!!!!
I can't even find a simple camera mesh and I can't use other formats for this shitty project. No forking 3d model editor/converter works properly to convert other formats to it either, and those programs look like gray dogshit too. 😠2 -
I hate it when book publishers of tech books don't have their own DRM-free formats. I then have to go on Amazon and see that the Kindle version is only 10% cheaper than paper. Then I factor in the fact that they probably fucked up the formatting on the ebook. So, I end up just buying the paper one and my office continues to resemble a mad scientist's library.11
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I never thought to I'd say this about an open-source project, but if I wanted to single out an unbeatable case of "Bad Design", and the manifestation of the term "Redundancy Hell", It is definitely Calibre.
Single job: To keep some e-book files + some metadata.
What it does in brief: In a single dir as your library; From metadata stored IN each file; It generates subdirs <author_name>/<title_name>(<some_numerical_id>), copies the e-book file there, generates a jpg cover from the first page and also stores it there, generates an xml file to support legacy e-book formats (but it generates it anyway even for pdfs), which contains all the same metadata for the file, including title, author and href for the cover, and also stores it there. And then, all the same metadata for all books is stored in a metadata.db in the library root folder. I don't know if there is more data stored/used somewhere in a more obfuscated way.
Not too much to ask: Change some author/title/any single field.
What is done: 💩🌋
It is so helpful, it does all the stuff by itself or its plugins; you don't have to touch anything. But it also has this amazing ability to fuck everything up without even being touched. I mean WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING? WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING DESIGN IS THIS? A FUCKING FRACTAL?
Literally, If I had listed all my books on physical papers with a real life pen, It would take me less time that I've already wasted on unfucking the regular disasters. Fuck you and your arrogant responses to issues. -
How deep does the rabbit hole go?
Problem: Convert numpy array containing an audio time series to a .wav file and save on disk
Error 1:
Me: pip install "stupid package"
Console: Can't pip, behind a proxy
Me: Finds workaround after several minutes
Error 2:
Conversion works, but audio file on disk doesn't work
Encoding Error only works with array of ints not floats
BUT I NEED IT TO BE FLOATS
Looks for another library
scikits.audiolab <- should work
Me: pip --proxy=myproxy:port install "this shit"
Command Line *spits back huge error*
Googles error <- You need to install this package with a .whl file
Me: Downloads .whl file <- pip install "filename".whl
Command Line: ERROR: scikits.audiolab-0.11.0-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl is not a supported wheel on this platform.
Googles Error <- Need to see supported file formats
Me: python -c "import pip; print(pip.pep425tags.get_supported())"
Console: AttributeError: module 'pip' has no attribute 'pep425tags'
Googles Error <- Use another command for pip v10
Me: python -c "import pip._internal; print(pip._internal.pep425tags.get_supported())"
Console: complies
Me: pip install "filename".whl
Console: complies
Me: *spends 30 minutes to find directory where I should paste .dll file*
Finds Directory (was hidden btw), pastes file
Me: Runs .py file
Console: from version import version as _version ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'version'
Googles Error <- Fix is: "just comment out the import statement"
Me: HAHAHAHAHAHA
Console: HAHAHAHAHA
Unfortunately this shit still didn't work after two hours of debugging, lmao fuck this7 -
Today I learned about binary encoding formats alternative to JSON such as Google Protocol Butter.
I like these binary formats.
Just thought I would share this here so others would benefit as well (and please share your experience if it is relevant)8 -
I started my actual gig as CTO of construction group (Innovation Hub) a year ago. And it was a hell of a ride, implementing kind of a scrum-ban for project management, XP, peer-reviews, a git-flow, git commit message formats, linters, unit testing, integration tests, etc...
And it's the fun part because with the CIO we had to drive the board to do A LOT of changes in their IT/Innovation drive.
But in one year there is a lot of KPI that went up :
* Deployment: When I arrived it took three stressful days to deploy a new version of one application, once a month. Today we do it every week, and it takes three annoying hours.
* We had no test. NOTHING! Today we have 85% code coverage for the unit test, and automatic integration tests run by our CI server every day.
* We had almost no documentation. Today our code is our documentation (it automatically extracted and versioned).
* We had 0 add value in the use of git. With commit messages as "dev", "asked task", inside jokes and a lot of "fix" and "changes". Today we have a useful git, and we even use it to create our deploy changelogs (and it's only mildly annoying!).
* More important, the team is happy! They get their purpose, see betterment in their tech mastery. They started doing conception, applicative architecture, presentations, having fun.
There is still a LOT of bad things we are still working on, and trying to solve (support workflow and betterment). But seeing what they already did, I'm so proud of my TEAM! I'm a fucking asshole, workaholic, "just do it" kind of guy. But they managed to achieve so much. Fucking PROUD!! -
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 -
Dev Diary Entry #56
Dear diary, the part of the website that allows users to post their own articles - based on an robust rights system - through a rich text editor, is done! It has a revision system and everything. Now to work on a secure way for them to upload images and use these in their articles, as I don't allow links to external images on the site.
Dev Diary Entry #57
Dear diary, today I finally finished the image uploading feature for my website, and I have secured it as well as I can.
First, I check filesize and filetype client-side (for user convenience), then I check the same things serverside, and only allow images in certain formats to be uploaded.
Next, I completely disregard the original filename (and extension) of the image and generate UUIDs for them instead, and use fileinfo/mimetype to determine extension. I then recreate the image serverside, either in original dimensions or downsized if too large, and store the new image (and its thumbnail) in a non-shared, private folder outside the webpage root, inaccessible to other users, and add an image entry in my database that contains the file path, user who uploaded it, all that jazz.
I then serve the image to the users through a server-side script instead of allowing them direct access to the image. Great success. What could possibly go horribly wrong?
Dev Diary Entry #58
Dear diary, I am contemplating scrapping the idea of allowing users to upload images, text, comments or any other contents to the website, since I do not have the capacity to implement the copyright-filter that will probably soon become a requirement in the EU... :(
Wat to do, wat to do...1 -
This is the story of the API documentation.
Which btw I couldn't find on the producent's website anywhere. I had the pdf shared with me by a coworker.
I knew the api was fucked up the moment I looked at endpoint documentation.
GET params? WHERE, ORDERBY etc. Literally make a SQL select in a GET request.
Returned stuff? The whole thing. Not some DTO, you literally get everything you can get.
Eg if you get IP in your response, you get it in several formats: dotted form, as hex, and as int. In 3 different json fields.
Oh, and regarding IP - one would imagine you can use masks or prefixes for subnets, right? Nope. The only param you can use there is the subnet size. So you have to calculate the power of 2 every time you want to make a request.
That's from the endpoint documentation. But what about some general info on the API, before all that?
As I was looking for something, I decided to read that intro and general info about the API.
Okay, so there was a change log between API versions. "removed [endpoint which sounds like correct REST design], please use [this generic thing with SQL-like GETs]"... Several of them.
And there was also this sentence which said that the API is not restful, "it's REST-like". <facepalm>
If it was a bad attempt at REST API, I would let it go. But this sentence clearly showed they knew they did everything wrong. And the changelog showed they didn't stop there, they were actively making it worse.1 -
Why do people still use both curl or wget? There's httpie and it's awesome!
http PUT your-host.com header-name:value parameter=value
Profit!
And it formats the response for json without jq. It will just show binary for binary content and you download by adding the download flag.
Yet why is curl still the default!?4 -
So, I departed for a month long Erasmus in Portugal and got to work for an education related business. From day 1, all my tasks consisted in transcribing data from paper to excel sheets, and then using that data for various different tasks. It became obvious that I wouldn't have had much programming to do by default, so I started creating a series of Python scripts to automate part of my work or aid me in some bothersome areas of it, and what at first seemed a grueling series of boring and repetitive work soon actually became fun. From this point on I challenged myself to make the scripts better and better under as many aspects as possible. I eventually ended up concluding all my daily tasks in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes everyday, as that's the time it took to adapt the scripts to the new document formats of the day :P Jokes aside, this truly proves a point though: small businesses like this one, that very much depend on manual labor for tasks that can easily be automated by 50 lines of code, truly would benefit from a prepared IT and development team, and it shocked me to see how little these guys know, and are even afraid at times, about innovative techniques to speed up work substantially. Truly a great and humbling experience for very young devs like me :)2
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So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.
I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".
But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.
The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".
Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.
It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.
It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.
But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.
THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!
So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.
Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...2 -
Just spent 2-3 hours working on code that's been functional for months, but suddenly stopped working bc an dependency I'd updated decided to change required input/output formats without any documentation whatsoever on those new requirements.
-
Given the Base64 flying around devrant, figured I'd introduce the unknowing to a lovely little tool for dealing with various formats and encodings: CyberChef (online)
https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/
I honestly don't remember how I lived without it. Enjoy!4 -
what it's like when someone doesnt use "mm/dd/yyyy" or "dd/mm/yyyy":
"I need a name for your reservation. It can either be base64 encoded or a sha3 hash"
"Yeah, I'm on my way, how many light years is it past 404th street?"
"Oh, cool, my birthday's coming up, too. How many eons away is it?"9 -
Use that Tab button. It's there for a reason. If you are too lazy to use it then use an IDE that formats the code.
Also learn to comment your code wherever needed and in English. If you don't know where it's needed, Google is your friend if not your senior. -
when KhronosGroup anounced Vulkan back then, they also announced a whole set of software, that can handle all the new formats, that they introduced.
One format in particular peaked my interest recently, which is ktx2. It's an image format, that can be multilayered, and supercompressed, has inline mipmapping, and most importantly: streamed directly to the GPU, without involving the CPU basically at all.
Now here comes the kicker. If i want to use this format (mind you: Vulkan is around for a while now) for creating Skyboxes, there is only a single tool, that can properly convert hdr images to ktx2, and it only works on windows. Oh and there are no binaries, so in every case you have to compile it yourself.
Ah and then i thought, okay what if i then already render the cubemap faces and assemble them by hand into the cubemap, because _some_ ktx tools work on linux, then that should work right? wrong. When assembling it, it turns out, that now it's a 2D image instead of a 2DArray image with one element (which apparently is not the same for skyboxes)
Why is this shit such a pain in the ass?
Like.. I'm currently rendering equirectangular hdr images on my linux machine, then move these (usually 100MB) files over to some windows PC, convert it there into ktx2 cubemaps and then move it back. And everytime i need to do a change on the skybox, i have to repeat this whole nonsense. Ah.. and this tool doesn't even properly work on Windows, like you can't just disable mipmaps or change the filtering, because then the skybox is just black for some reason.
The funniest thing is, at the end of the day, these ktx2 files work on linux, as well as windows, mac and even mobile platform, so there's really no reason, that the conversion tool only works on one of them systems.
But hey, at long last i got them working, and this stuff looks quite nice now 👌2 -
The first time I was able to create a solution to a problem I had.
It wasn't some super-difficult problem, but the code worked, and I got my first jolt of satisfaction in a long, long time. And more importantly, I wrote it with my own two hands.
It was a Slack slash command and it takes a task number, sends it my server that creates a query for our Redmine, formats the returned data and posts it back to Slack. It only took a few hours to implement (mostly because I was unfamiliar with Slack's API), and while only a few people uses it frequently, I still get a small amount of satisfaction whenever someone mentions it. -
Pretty much Python automation on steroids.
https://github.com/konradhalas/...
Dacite is an integral part in it, cause it makes most auto generated API wrappers like Cloudflare API "maintenable".
Getting dicts, converting via Dacite to defined data classes...
Then using TOML to define e.g. output parameters (e.g. list of classes / properties one needs)...
... To export them via Pandas to anything what one needs.
It's just so comfortable.
Definining data classes, sprinkle the API calls and dacite in it, some definition via TOML, done.
Yes, lots of dark vodoo / behind the scenes magic... But ... It removes all this annoying fucked up boilerplate writing that takes ages and makes it frustrating.
As long as the data wrapper (e.g. clousflare API) generates Dicts, its really minutes to get an export working.
If you know the pain of having to deal with multiple accounts, different formats (e.g. different companies)… hours of manual copy pasting to aggregate the data etc.
Then you can maybe understand why I love this so much.
Data classes and dacite makes painful confusing workflows so much nicer and self documenting, I get wet in my pants while writing this. :) -
The feature was to parse a set of fairly complex xml files following a legacy schema. Problem was, the way this was done previously did not conform to the schema so it was a guideline at best, which over the course of many years snowballed into an anarchy where clients would send in whatever and it was continuously updated per case as needed. They wanted to start enforcing their new schema while phasing out the old method.
The good news is that parsing and serialization is very testable, so I rounded up what I could find of example files and got to work. Around the same time I asked our client if they had any more examples of typical cases we need to deal with, and sure enough a couple of days later I receive a zip with hundreds of files. They also point out that I should just disregard the entire old set since they decided to outright cut support for it after all if it makes things simpler. Nice.
I finish the feature in a decent amount of time. All my local tests pass, and the CD tests pass when I push my branches. Once we push to our QA env though and the integration tests run, we get a pass rate of less than 10%.
I spend a couple of days trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually narrow it down to some wires being crossed with the new vs. old xml formats. I'm at a loss. I keep trying to chip away at it until I'm left with a minimal example, and I have one of those lean-back moments where you're just "I don't get it". My tests pass locally, but in the QA environment they fail on the same files.
We're now 3 people around my workstation including the system architect, and I'm demonstrating to the others how baffling and black magic this is. I postulate that maybe something is cached in my local environment and it's not actually testing the new files. I even deleted the old ones.
"Are you sure you deleted the right files?"
"Duh of course -- but let me check..."1 -
Our favorite ticket system blokes are back with a big fat update for their software.
What changed?
All workflows are fucked because everything is somewhere else suddenly!
Half of the features suddenly stopped working!
Variable formats in forms have been changed from {} to [] without reason, migration or warning! Sorry, {Username} ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Half-assed features that don't work half of the time have also been added!
Fucking great!
Who beta tests this shit? Nobody?2 -
Microsoft.Graph has filtering capabilities for dates, which is great.
Format is: "2018-04-12T12:00:00Z"
Doesn't natively support string conversion of a DateTime to match the pattern... Nor does Graph accept any date formats such as the "s" parameter for sortable dates, which goes into milliseconds, etc.
DateTime.ToString("derp");
Sometimes I wish I was a Java Dev.1 -
Unreal Engine + third party library adventures part2:
now we gotta parse everything from unreal formats, to the library formats, than back to unreal again... sigh. Why can't it just use normal data formats like everybody else? I mean, come on, strings, ints, vectors etc. they all have standart libraries. why does unreal need to make their own shiet out of it. Just why...1 -
When I was an apprentice in a small company, ...
my boss told me that his company would never ship release builds, because the "evil optimization option" is responsible for breaking his code.
My first thought was that it wouldn't make any sense at all. The default option for code optimization is always set to zero.
After investigating his code, I found out that he didn't care to properly initialize his variables. The default compiler option for debug builds did implicitly initialize all variables to zero. After that I've confronted him with the fact that implicit null initialization does not conform to the standard of C and C++. He didn't believe me what I was saying and he was questioning my knowledge about C and C++. He refused to fix his code to this day, so he keeps building his libraries and applications always in debug mode.
Bonus fact: He would never build 64-bit applications, because his serialization functions do get incompatible with exisiting file formats. -
Client: We need to support uploading doc, docx, all image formats and PDF to convert and combine everything into a PDF.
Me: lol. No.
No way in hell am I going to try to convert docx to PDF in Java.4 -
Currently making a perfect sudoku webapp / plugin using native JS and html templates where I'm very enthousiast about.
It allows to select multiple cells and then put in a number and all selected have that number. It keeps state of every change, you can do unlimited redo's. Right click or double click someehere removes selection. Not built yet, but it will have a box where you can paste sudoku's you've found on the internet. I just parse 81 times [1-9] with regex. So all formats are supported including noisy ones as long the noise is not numbers. Making your own puzzle is very easy. Art is to make hard ones. I'm generating extra hard puzzles using C threading. For reference: there are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 sudoku puzzles possible and from that I try to resolve the hard ones using simple human logging with brute forcing as fallback until it can use logic again. 30 million attempts to solve per secon. I should at some more logic. I don't do xwing or ywing, bs imho. You have to be a superhuman to spot xwing / ywing possibilities. I think i can imagine a better logic myself. We'll see.
And yes, that's a real screenshot. Puzzle is validated and it found issues. Marked with red font. Green is current selection by user
11 -
That feeling when Linux has better support for image formats... 😂
I've tried to open ARW files on Windows all day, no luck. Works 'out of the box' on my Antergos system.2 -
People who use ambiguous date formats should be left alone in an almost empty sewage tanker with a horny orangutan.3
-
semi dev related(later half)
A common and random thought I have:
A lot of units that humans use are either needlessly arbitrary or based on something weird. Like Fahrenheit. That shit is weird! 0°F is the freezing point of a water and salt solution. What a weird fucking thing to use!
But also, I like Fahrenheit more. Probably because it's what I was raised with and switching is tedious (though I'm trying. I'd like to use metric more), but also because one degree F is a smaller, more precise change. You can describe more accuracy without decimals.
On the other hand I prefer metric for length. Centimeters, and centimeters are way more precise and way less confusing than inches and .... 1/8th inches? Who the fuck decided on 1/8ths?!
Which brings me to my common thought:
If you look at a Unix timestamp, you can approximate somewhat when it happened. Knowing the current timestamp and a few reference points you can see RELATIVELY what a epoch stamp translates to. A few days ago, an hr ago, 2014ish.
This leads me to think that if we actually taught from a young age to think in epoch as a unit (not as a replacement to normal date formats but as a secondary at first) that we could just naturally read epoch time in the same manner we read dates like "28/01/2006 14:24:10 UTC"
In your brain you automatically know how old you were when that timestamp happened. What grade/job and where you lived at the time. What season it was. You know how far into the day it was, a little before lunch (or after or whatever, your time zone will vary). Now try with 1138458250. I can usually get roughly the year, and month if I really think about it, but that's it. And it takes much more effort
I'm sure there's other units we could benefit from but epoch is the one that usually brings this to mind for me.13 -
Recipe for reverse engineering data structures / binary formats:
1℅ understanding the theory.
1℅ expections about what you will find.
3% luck.
45% trial and error.
50℅ persistence.2 -
Randomly one day, out of the blue:
Echelons: You now have Workspace, and it’s a requirement you use it. Make it successful because we paid and are paying a large dollar amount for it, and our competitors have reported success with it. We want email communications companywide eliminated by 50% within the first 60 days.
Management: Ok, excellent! We want to do XYZ.
Echelons: Nope, can’t do any of that.
Management: Ok, how about a, b, and c?
Echelons: Nope, nope, nope.
Management: Alright, let’s try 1,2, and 3.
Echelons: Nope, not possible.
Management: What can we do then? We need further direction at this point.
Echelons: One group for all departments, posts, and attachments only. PDF, .jpeg, .png files only. Everyone in the company must be registered within seven days and using the platform. Only mobile devices allowed.
Management: We have almost 10,000 employees, and the SSO aspect alone could take weeks and months.
Echelons: Insignificant as Facebook said it should be easy to deploy. Also, every post not created by admin will need to be manually approved and done so within 5-10 minutes after its submission 24/7, 365.
Management: Ok, solved. A little shaky, but it’s working. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators?
Echelons: Only 1700 employees have registered; the app has been up 14 days now? What’s wrong? Where’s the engagement? Effective immediately, all members of management must be creating and starting 4 to 7 posts daily, including weekends.
Management: Our registration process with the SSO client isn’t smooth and clean across all devices. We had to implement training to overcome this. Can we increase the number of admins and moderators? Can we make all members of management either administrators or at least moderator? Can we at least turn on live streaming and video formats?
Echelons: No! 10 admin and mods max. Yes to streaming and video.
Echelons: Progress update, please. Include ROI timeline and impactful usage data. This must to pay for itself in the first six months and continue to pay for itself long term, along with showing XYZ company-wide growth quarterly.
Echelons: Hello?
Echelons: Hello?
Having Workplace shoved down your throat has been an interesting experience. Anyone have any exciting ideas or examples to share on what they have utilized with Workplace and increased employee engagement?7 -
Anyone who formats their code manually is a fuck there I said it.
Also stop using a tool that has no contextual understanding of your code. You're wasting more so much fucking time trying to guess shit that an ide would automatically know and doing stuff that an ide would automatically do.4 -
Can we please normalise using JSON bodies for GET requests? Makes life way more easy to just have one uniform way to communicate with API's and having different parameter formats between GET and POST request. I mean, In my opinion it is not logical to do one request with query params and others with data in the request body6
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WHY THE FUCK ARE CODECS STILL A THING?
Have we as a society not moved on and found like the 4/5 "good enough" movie formats. Fucking bullshit needing me to download VLC for the first time in years -.-
AND WHY THE FUCK ARE CODECS ON SALE ON MICROSOFT STORE???? WHAT?9 -
I just spent 2-3 hours writing a python script to make it easier to format solving system of equations through Gaussian elimination easier. It takes a matrix, then allows the user to perform row operations on it, and then it formats every operation done into LaTeX.
Alternatively, I could have spent that time actually working on the assignment it was meant to help me with, and probably finished 3/4 of it.1 -
1. The power you have with it.
With that, I mean solving your own or someone else's issues.
Be it automation, parsing weird formats, or anything else, it can usually be achieved by coding something for the task.
2. The logic (when compared to humans).
Unlike humans, code does what it's told to do. Us humans, well, we often misinterpret things. Code, however, usually has a single meaning.
3. How things can be improved over time.
Finding a way do something faster and implementing it is really satisfying.4 -
I hate those microfucktards!!!!
I have a brand new usb flash with 125GB capacity and ~ 115GiB.
I wanted to install a bootable Windows 10 installation onto the flash and downloaded the fucking recommended windows 10 install tool from the ms fuckpage.
And? This dipshit of a "tool" created the windows installation and partitioned my flash into two partition's. One is 30GB and the other....
90 GB that is not assigned!!!! Fuck you.
I mean....why the hell does this stupid tool formats my flash to fat 32? And why there is no option to use exfat? I'd don't get it.6 -
I had a discussion about SAAS and microtransactions with another dev. They are a little bit younger than me. The trend toward this in games and android apps were discussed. We found that we both avoid software which employs these business models.
We cannot be the only 2 people who avoid products employing these common business models. So I wonder what demographic pays for these services and products? I am to the point that if my kid asks to buy something in a game, I tell them that we will get rid of the game if they keep asking.
The only time I have paid for SAAS is when there is extraordinary perceived value. Quickbooks for small business is one such product (way cheaper than an accountant). Another is the Xbox game pass. So apparently for the game pass I am in the demographic.
Do we not like it because it is new? Or is it a kind of sleazy business tactic? I dunno. I would rather pay up front for most things. I feel like SAAS will be employed in software with proprietary file formats which require a subscription to even get to your data. Vendor lock-in.10 -
This is a question and a rant about my frustrations with an API description. First take a look at this usage information for a library I have been playing with:
https://github.com/avaneev/avir/...
Now my first question: Is it clear as to you what the formats are for the InBuf and OutBuf parameters are?
Now, read his response to people (including me) struggling with determining the format of the buffers for this resize function:
https://github.com/avaneev/avir/...
Does the guy come across as condescending as hell? Am I reading into this? It is like the guy takes every opportunity to find fault with people not understanding the details he didn't put in his API description. I would find it difficult to have to work with someone like this.
The irony about this is the description of his code makes me think it is going to magically create this wonderfully rescaled image preserving details. The result is that a standard bilinear filtering scaling function looks practically the same. I saw no real perceptible improvements of his code over the scaler I tested against. When I adjusted parameters using presets he provided it didn't improve the results and added artifacts I could not accept. His scaler is also at least a magnitude slower than the bilinear version. So the code is pretty much a non-starter for my current project.
Ah well, I appreciate him posting the code and making it a very permissive license. That part is really cool.16 -
*Formats hard drive without backing up important files*
*plays in the background*
https://soundcloud.com/matthew-sill...4 -
Looks like vector drawing applications stopped at bezier curves and don’t want to progress much.
I made a inkscape vector image and I used svg patterns to draw some background, then inkscape stopped responding when I’m trying to open that file on mac.
I tried bunch of other vector drawing apps hoping that at least one know what svg vector patterns are, looks like vector drawing applications use bitmaps for patterns and own formats instead of following svg specification.
I even wanted to pay for illustrator 30$ per month but it can’t do it. It opened my svg file claiming there’s no background there just empty space.
When I open svg image from browser it renders correctly but editing with gui is impossible cause all of those great softwares like illustrator, vectronator, sketch, affinity designer can’t handle vector patterns.
I ended up installing inkscape on old laptop that’s running ubuntu desktop.
Inkscape can do everything I want but I still need to delete not used pattens by editing xml.
At least it handles svg better than others.
Seriously vector image drawing apps suck.10 -
My DEV Story
After reading it, make a favor by ++d
Thought to be a software engineer in future
Learnt Python's basic modules, AI, and some ML
After getting intermediate in python, I started learning Java as my second language but could not do it because of JDK 8. Now don't ask me why.
Then, just stepped into game development with unity and C#, having a basic knowledge of C# with no experience in making a game myself. This is called ignorant.
After getting no success, I started learning PHP and got the chance to make a website having no content ;)
But it cannot meet my requirements
Soon I got content that AdSense regards as no content, no problem
I started learning Flask, a module in python for making web applications.
It took me 1 month to complete my website, which can convert file formats.
The idea for deploying it to the server
Sign Up to DigitalOcean
Domain Name from GoDaddy (I know NameCheap is better but got some offer from it)
Made a VPS for what I have to pay $5/month
Deploy my Flask App using WSGI server
This is the worst dev experience
.
.
.
.
Why in all the tutorial, they only deploy a flask app which displays Hello World only and not anything else
WSGI or UWSGI Server does not give us permission to save any file or make any directory in it
Every time........ERROR
Totally Fucked Up
Finally, it works on localhost with port 80
I know this is not the professional way to host a website but this option was only left.
What can I do
Now, I cannot issue a free SSL certificate through Let's Encrypt because **Error 98 Address Already In Used**
The address was port 80 on which my Flask App was running
Check it out now - www.fileconvertex.com
8 -
So with the current project that I am working on, I'm in charge with creating various base classes, libraries, and helpers. The problem is that the other developers on the team just want to dive straight into developing the API endpoints without designing what the request and response formats should be, let alone decide what the URL structure should be!
So in the middle of their development work, they keep telling me how this and that don't work, or they can't figure out why Laravel is throwing this particular error. It's starting to piss me off that I'm having to do an architect's job whilst also teaching these guys how to use Laravel because they don't bother reading the documentation.
The worst part is that once they've completed their implementation, I'll have to end up fixing it because it's either missing a bunch of business rules, or it doesn't account for any error handling. -
Why the fuck is midnight 00:00 and midday 12:00? Every other hour is the same for Am and Pm in 12 hour time. I can’t find any explanation other than all of humanity being unable to count.
All date/time libraries must encounter this bullshit. There are so many similar levels of bullshit with everything related to time handling. Time zones, stamp formats, minimum intervals overflows are all so fucked.14 -
I have to go through roughly 700 data entries and adjust the system's data accordingly ... by hand.😑
We don't have the tools to automate this reliably, the only available tool, tells you that an error occured and what happened but not where. That would've been kinda helpful...
The problem is that the respective data object of the data entry often contains a phone number, which has to be in a standardized format ... which it is not. Every number is formatted in like 10 variations!? A dozen different separators like spaces, commas, slashes and hyphens. And it must be edited manually 😖
My solution: built a goddamn chrome extension to format the string on click. Done. Saves a few seconds each time and a lot of headache in future. Of course given the correctness of the extension.4 -
So my team started creating an in-house wiki for all information about our products, methods, scrum, documentation etc. From the beginning we had settled on doing everything in English instead of native language just in case we get a foreign student intern or simply a foreign employee... And now it looks to me that nobody but my team leader and I care about it: half of the documents are either fully native (especially from other part of the team who work on a different project, they have probably never gotten the memo of language choice to start with) or the documents are in some weird-ass combination of English-native which is even worse imo.
I really don't understand why my own team doesn't adhere to the decision though: we're all at least reasonably educated and our country focuses heavily on using English as second language so that should be no big barrier. And why would you want inconsistent documents/code?!
And this is not the first time people don't stick to what is decided for things like formats and language... Getting a bit tired of it tbh...5 -
I spent a lot of my time as a little kid playing video games and typing on my old computer. Somehow I found GameMaker (6 or 7, I think) and started pumping out little games with the free version. I didn't like the drag and drop stuff so I learned GML (GameMaker Language).
A few years later someone gave me a PHP book and while I never actually learned anything from it, it did get me interested in learning a real programming language (not GML).
Around this time Minecraft became popular, and with a lot of YouTube videos I got a grasp on Java, and a little C++/C#.
Tinkering around in scripting languages finally lead me to JavaScript which of course introduced me to HTML and CSS.
I loved how quickly a website could me created compared to a compiled program, so I started spending most of my time learning Web Technologies.
And that leads me to where I am today. By this point I've spent over half of my life programing in various languages and formats and I've loved every bit of it! -
Salesforce translation import tool is absolutely useless regarding error messages, when something is wrong with the file. Even if you try to replicate an already correct file, salesforce just tells you that something went wrong and which file formats are accepted ... even when using said format. No hints, no further explanation ... I need more details, WHAT IS WRONG?😠2
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It goes back in college days were,I started developing on Visual Basic for a college project as it was the only option.
As the scope was limited to a standalone application,we we're not allowed to use network.
Building up on the that,the project was to be done in a group of two with SRS and other stuff needed to done.
With my partner having no knowledge about the code,I took my ideas and Incorporated it into my project such as system logs,session tracking,data records,barcode reader,export data in various formats and so on.
The project got large eventually and professor's were curious to see the development of my project.
The project got showcased as the best project by professors and that overall gained my popularity in college and got me a job offer which I rejected in the end -
From the last 3 years, i have accumulated interest and experience in android dev. Not sure about the future, but that's probably where i will be.
But this fact is moot to our 50 year old grumpy professors teaching 1000 year old rusted computer syllabus, who rejected my idea of a video streaming app as major project, simply because i projected it as a social media app, and "everyone is making a social media app, its such an old topic". yeah right sir, its younger than your daughter that fucks in the lobby
Now we are doing a project on file conversions website, a project suggested by my team member and my good friend. its such a shitty topic, there is no resources available, even the research papers are bad , every search points to a shitty site, and i don't know shit about web dev.
Technically i am the team leader, but my team mate won't let me make the project as android native app, because "Brooo, i am going to make a react app that would be completely offline, completely client side, full secure and shitt small" and sometimes "Bro its my idea" .
Well, 1. the whole point of client side is stupid because the 18 mb jsfile isn't going to get downloaded first in the client's cache(or whatever the process is, idk). The top stack overflow answers i saw told me to buy an ec2 instance and run liberoffice commands on it for every request, and that's SERVER SIDE. even if we could, i am sure its going to be bigger than what i would have made in kotlin.
2. what am i supposed to do? look at you coding while make all the ppts and research paper? you are going to use undocumented libs that "just works" , and i am suppose to curate the theory behind this, looking at all the researches of the world?well i guess okay that's a light job since THERE AREN'T ANY.
And we are targetting all types of conversions, nice. from what i know, handbrake.fr: video conversion s/w = 16 mb. photoshop: image conversion s/w=1gb and ms word: doc to pdf/other formats= 500mb.
Plus all those proprietary and undocumented formats, ugh. Thank you ugly ass companies.
Internet is great but web dev has become a whole lot mess. "I am going to build a software that is going to run in your system only using your device's processor" is a desktop/mobile app, not a website -
Aka... How NOT to design a build system.
I must say that the winning award in that category goes without any question to SBT.
SBT is like trying to use a claymore mine to put some nails in a wall. It most likely will work somehow, but the collateral damage is extensive.
If you ask what build tool would possibly do this... It was probably SBT. Rant applies in general, but my arch nemesis is definitely SBT.
Let's start with the simplest thing: The data format you use to store.
Well. Data format. So use sth that can represent data or settings. Do *not* use a programming language, as this can neither be parsed / modified without an foreign interface or using the programming language itself...
Which is painful as fuck for automatisation, scripting and thus CI/CD.
Most important regarding the data format - keep it simple and stupid, yet precise and clean. Do not try to e.g. implement complex types - pain without gain. Plain old objects / structs, arrays, primitive types, simple as that.
No (severely) nested types, no lazy evaluation, just keep it as simple as possible. Build tools are complex enough, no need to feed the nightmare.
Data formats *must* have btw a proper encoding, looking at you Mr. XML. It should be standardized, so no crazy mfucking shit eating dev gets the idea to use whatever encoding they like.
Workflows. You know, things like
- update dependency
- compile stuff
- test run
- ...
Keep. Them. Simple.
Especially regarding settings and multiprojects.
http://lihaoyi.com/post/...
If you want to know how to absolutely never ever do it.
Again - keep. it. simple.
Make stuff configurable, allow the CLI tool used for building to pass this configuration in / allow setting of env variables. As simple as that.
Allow project settings - e.g. like repositories - to be set globally vs project wide.
Not simple are those tools who have...
- more knobs than documentation
- more layers than a wedding cake
- inheritance / merging of settings :(
- CLI and ENV have different names.
- CLI and ENV use different quoting
...
Which brings me to the CLI.
If your build tool has no CLI, it sucks. It just sucks. No discussion. It sucks, hmkay?
If your build tool has a CLI, but...
- it uses undocumented exit codes
- requires absurd or non-quoting (e.g. cannot parse quoted string)
- has unconfigurable logging
- output doesn't allow parsing
- CLI cannot be used for automatisation
It sucks, too... Again, no discussion.
Last point: Plugins and versioning.
I love plugins. And versioning.
Plugins can be a good choice to extend stuff, to scratch some specific itches.
Plugins are NOT an excuse to say: hey, we don't integrate any features or offer plugins by ourselves, go implement your own plugins for that.
That's just absurd.
(precondition: feature makes sense, like e.g. listing dependencies, checking for updates, etc - stuff that most likely anyone wants)
Versioning. Well. Here goes number one award to Node with it's broken concept of just installing multiple versions for the fuck of it.
Another award goes to tools without a locking file.
Another award goes to tools who do not support version ranges.
Yet another award goes to tools who do not support private repositories / mirrors via global configuration - makes fun bombing public mirrors to check for new versions available and getting rate limited to death.
In case someone has read so far and wonders why this rant came to be...
I've implemented a sort of on premise bot for updating dependencies for multiple build tools.
Won't be open sourced, as it is company property - but let me tell ya... Pain and pain are two different things. That was beyond pain.
That was getting your skin peeled off while being set on fire pain.
-.-5 -
Been using a jump drive compiled as NTFS for my sneaker net. I copied some file to it from Ubuntu 18.04. I take to Windows machine and it says there are errors (does this a lot). Usually it works fine. The files I copied are not there. They were downloaded web pages as Windows machine is not on net. I noticed the file names have characters like #, ? and ` in them. So I reformat the jump drive to exFat. I copy the files from Ubuntu plus a bunch of other files. It errors like crazy on stuff that copied fine before with NTFS. Not a solution. So I find an alternate downloader for web pages I want to copy (does not have funky characters in filenames). I reformat back to NTFS on jump drive.
So basically if I want to copy files from my Ubuntu system I am stuck with NTFS and always repairing the filesystem. Yes, all my libraries for exFAT are up to date in Ubuntu.
Is there ever going to be a better way?
When is Windows going to grow up and support ext4?
Why?
Its 2019 and we still have incompatible networks and filesystem formats.7 -
At some point I need to do an older project i've had on hold a while, but it'd require writing my own ROM patch system as a major step in completing it, as i'd need to dynamically patch stuff into older games based on system, which current patch formats don't allow for. (This project will also help me learn a few things I need for yet more projects I've got stashed away, so it needs to happen eventually.)
Now, the interesting part: the patch format. I was debating on whether to use binary data, like IPS/BPS and similar formats do, which would be easier to implement... but if I were to have plaintext patches, you'd be able to not only understand what's happening, but also have things like scripting and conditionals and user-defined options and such. This would be WAY harder to implement, slow as fuck, and require an assembler per-target-system, either external or internal... but it'd be transparent, editable, and hella extendable.
This would all happen after I'm both over my burnout AND done chewing through my current stack of projects and such, of course, but still... which sounds better to you, dear reader?2 -
Dear fucking MicroSoft,
I really like the C# language, but the default System types have some little fucks up.
Like, if the DateTime.ToString() accepts "HH" to display hours with leading 0, WHY THE FUCK DOESN'T TimeSpan.ToString()?
Truly yours,
ZioCain6 -
please i need your advice :)
I need to reform a service that offers legal advice and thus serves around 5000 Microsoft Word legal advice documents for the end user and every year there are 200 more documents created and published and changed manually.
So i had this idea to use a CMS, Git and continuous integration for
- automatic spell checking
- automatic assigning the copy text to translation bureaus, and get translations back.
- version control the texts and translations.
- document generation in multiple formats
- checking the text flow in the document (no overflown text)
- Checking for accessibility for the handy caped
- Deploying it on the Website
Do you think this is feasible? Can something that was made for code also be used to handle copy text documents? In my head this would save so much work but i'm no expert in CI/CD.
Thank you for your advice!8 -
1) Simple, secure and powerful technology for website user interface design which will replace HTML, CSS and JS.
2) Simple and practical technology to be able to utilize HTML for all kinds of documents which will replace paper page based document formats like PDF and Word.
3) One technology for native mobile app development to rule them all. So that it's not necessary to use HTML and JS.1 -
One day in a near but comfortably not too near future, I will start a webdevelopment 3-letter-abbreviation dictionary page, with self-taken photos of Belgian car license plates, and use the alphabetic part for each definition. It's insane how many PSD's, JSX's, PHP's and other technologies and file formats I've seen driving around and can no longer keep it for myself.
To qualify the tech/ format must 1) have been spotted and photographed by me and, 2) be about something related to webdev
If it doesn't take off, I can still create a unique custom CAPTCHA service with the photos :D -
I had a splash of inspiration. I would like to develop a method for analyzing unknown bitstreams of data. The method would involve determining the format of the data by trial and error machine learning algorithms. This would allow determining data types and byte formats and meanings of streams of data. Could be useful in data forensics. I would call the method: heuristic translation machine learning. I am currently developing code that does this. It will be fun to learn about reinforcement algorithms.5
-
my APAP's SD card died and I had a generic 2GB one kicking around unused
>formats as FAT16
>inserts
UNAUTHORIZED CARD
>hmm
>zeroes drive
>forgets to reformat
>inserts
Formatting SD Card... done.
Space available: 1.8GB
Set as Primary Log Storage
>:megathink:
>checks format
>FAT16
>reinserts
UNAUTHORIZED CARD
>wipes MBR/PT
Formatting SD Card... done.
Space available: 1.8GB
Set as Primary Log Storage
and that's the story of how i managed to not need to spend $200 on a proprietary SD card for my APAP2 -
I tried to make some SP using the syntax and formatting that visual studio outputs when making a SSRS report. I thought it was nice.
It formats the code in a standard way and transforms stuff like "join" to "INNER JOIN" and "left join" to "LEFT OUTER JOIN ".
When the team reviewed the code they were like WTF?! This syntax is horrible, it can't be understood. You did this?
*Me with my red face*...
I just said. You know what? I am going to go back to the old school syntax if you prefer. I just thought it was better.
Yeah... You really should go back to old school syntax.
---
Keep in mind that the old school syntax is annoying to me... No formatting at all and basic instructions are not in larger upper case.
Anyway, I thought it was nice tbh. I still think it is. And it is definitely better to me in some way.
What bothers me most is that they want to improve their coding. They say they want to be more standard and it seems every time you want to make a change it's not a good idea because "everything is already written that way". And when you don't make a change, "you should have change it"... Well sorry I was just copying the old style.
Anyways , it's not that important. I do get their point. Sometimes.1 -
I'm creating a bitmap font right now and wanted to automatically generate a image with some text so I can track my progress how it looks. gnome-font-viewer displays it fine, but it'd nothing compared to some real text. Well, how hard can it be?
First attempt: Use ImageMagick to create an image and draw some text. I found a forum post in the ImageMagick forums from 2017 claiming incorrect rendering of BDF fonts, which was promised to be fixed. Yet convert does exactly nothing besides saying “couldn't read font”.
Looking around, there is exactly one tool for the job I'm looking to get done: pbmtext. It works, but doesn't support Unicode. Egh.
Maybe I could write a short script to do it, then? Python's Pillow can import Bitmap fonts (cairo can't). Halfway done I notice it can't deal with anything outside of the character range 0..256.
Using FreeFont directly is out of the question as that seems to be equally much work as creating the font in the first place. I briefly tried SDL, but the font formats it understands are limited.
So how about converting the font then, you ask? Everyone seems to be only concerned about the other way (like OTF to BDF). I tried loading the font into FontForge and exporting an OTF or TTF but couldn't get anything out of it that ImageMagick recognizes as a font.
It seems fucking impossible to render text to an image with an Unicode BDF font in some automated way.
To add insult to injury, my searches containing “bdf” are always interpreted as with “pdf”. I'm not even a Franconian, I can distinguish B and P!4 -
Building a Web dashboard. Stats a day tiles etc.
Boss wants to write sql stored procedures to populate tiles.
Azure dB returns tile list, that maps to angular directive names, use nested angular directive that auto compiles a directive by name, then that directives controller calls a sql query which returns the name of the query to call to receive data, formats the data into charts or lists, builds the tile, places it into a gridster tile array and redirects to new tile pages by UI router state names.
I... I think I have gone too far. What have I done. -
Employer:
What is your idea of "The Perfect Date" ?
Employee (Female Software Developer):
DD/MM/YYYY
Other formats can be confusing really.5 -
Hey guys I am going to finish my 3rd year of Engineering. And I am planning to do a summer intern. I need to create a resume. Can someone suggest me some good tools to create my resume and also the proper formats and everything. Thank you!
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Chromium dev tools and Lighthouse audits sound like a Chrome features marketing campaign, once you proceed beyond basic optimizations and bug fixes, like
use our new image formats, stop shipping old JavaScript to new browsers, provide a source map, use web font preload but only if you use it exactly matching the best case scenario, rewrite your manifest file which used to work just fine etc.
actively encourage people to exclude up to 5% of global website audience?!
"This means that 95% of global web traffic comes from browsers that support the most widely used JavaScript language features from the past 10 years"
https://web.dev/publish-modern-java... -
trying to figure out why this folder is allowing restricted files formats to run, and finding nothing but 'It's a windows folder' what the hell internet DX my school runs windows and it's in that directory children aren't allowed to mess with, of course it's a damn windows folder, but how can I stop them from running viruses accidentally in that folder without causing windows to stop working
Back to god damn research
Thank you for your time -
Working along side another consultant house for a client, we have our shit ready weeks ago for integration testing (as was the deadline) against the other guys. We tell them we are ready, but we need them to be ready too, there are some tricky format things and we basically let them spec it out since they integrate further down the line.
They come _NOW_ way over deadline with change requests in message formats, like MOTHERFUCKER, IM ON MY WEEKEND NOW. We KNEW the client wanted it ready next week, thats why we were ready in time. You are not gonna cost me my weekend.
(is what i wanted to say, the devs on the other team are super nice and just absolutely overloaded with work which i cannot help them with)
One thing is certain, tonight my internet access mysteriously dissappears and wont open until monday morning. Such a shame -
I had to do a modular deduplication project that could read, parse and clean up the data.
The data? Personal information: Name, Surname, phone, address and more.
Imagine the zip code in any of the following formats: ####AA, #### AA. Names with and without dashes. Address with(out) spaces, dashes, underscores etc. as well as typos! Now clean it up, and dedup.
But what files have priority over another? What data is newer? How to process address changes?
Deadline: 2 moths, impossible deadline for a (at the time - 4 years ago - rookie developer)
Anyway, night before the deadline, code was running somewhat (Java) and was able to get a Regexed address cleanup of about 70 - 80%.
My boss comes in to check the progress, sits me down next to him and says: Not good enough, let's do it together tonight, it was 4pm, day normally ends at 5pm.
No thank you, I can't do that. if you don't want this code, then I can't meet your deadline.
bye -
Date pickers!
After several decades of web development and even longer time to experiment with electronic UI on other devices, why is there no consistent best practice and everyone tries reinventing the weel to choose their own set of problems and annoyances?
The root cause, obviously, is using Gregorian calendar and localized display and input format in the first place, so there is no way to make a data unambiguous without a graphical calendar. Who even came up with any of those 9/10/11 formats and why?
So we need to use date pickers and make the users spend several minutes clicking, swiping or scrolling to enter their birthday - past at least one decade - and a booking date - in the near future - using the same interface with the same presets.
But users compare different offers, so they will use different sites, so they will have to handle different date pickers on different sites in a short period of time and carry unnecessary mental load.11 -
Another hours wasted on debugging, on what I hate most about programming: strings!
Don't get me started on C-strings, this abomination from hell. Inefficient, error prone. Memory corruption through off by one errors, BSOD by out of bound access, seen it all. No, it's strings in general. Just untyped junk of data, undocumented formats. Everything has to be parsed back and forth. And this is not limited to our stupid stupid code base, as I read about the security issues of using innerHTML or having to fight CMake again.
So back to the issue this rant is about. CMake like other scripting languages as bash have their peculiarities when dealing with the enemy (i.e. strings), e.g. all the escaping. The thing I fought against was getting CMake's fixup_bundle work on macOS. It was a bit pesky to debug. But in the end it turned out that my file path had one "//" instead of an "/" and the path comparison just did a string comparison without path normalization.
Stop giving us enough string to hang ourselves!12 -
The problem with LibreOffice is that is some respects, you get what you pay for. Like number formats that just get dropped every time you reload a spreadsheet.
Still, it's worth more than the price. Unlike GIMP, where even free is too expensive (used it for a few days, but I admit that spending time on it was my own fault).3 -
So I’ve been recording the same project into dr who bullshit meets the invasion of the body snatchers
If I were sleeping and motivated to finish something some bastardized people would steal it would be so simple to keep progressing through it and it would be contributed allowing people to write their implementations to parse and index Gis formats and integrate a lot of valuable data regarding travel and survivable conditions
Except for all the above mentioned bs which cuts my goddamn motivation down to next to nothing
And no one else seems to see a problem with this across the goddamn board because the pods already sucker their innards out13 -
I wrote a script, modified + tested it and that worked fine 6 months ago. I expected to use it then but didn't but all good so i kept a special branch for my script which generates data from old db, formats it to new db structure and dumps it into a collection. In fact, i ran one of the scripts last month (360 records) and it worked fine. Today, when i need to migrate 14,000 records, script refuses to run. I am ready to fight the universe because wtf.
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While true {
Paste snippet into VS
VS auto-formats on paste
Remember ya told yourself to turn off auto-correct on paste in VS
Deal with it for now
Forget to turn off auto-formats on paste
} -
I am making a personal which is a social network which allows users to edit videos (cutting, changing formats) and post them for others to see.
I am planning to go for
Docker as the infrastructure, but I am just massively confused on where should I host it? Digital Ocean, GCP, Azure, something else?? -
I have to reimplement a couple of complicated OOXML parsers (docx, pptx, vsdx, etc). Actually, I’ve implemented them in Python ~5 years ago but now I have to improve them and add support for nested/embedded formats and some other stuff. As you could expect, none of the OOXML validators are valid themselves, so it's better to have an MS product installed locally, just to get reassured that everything works fine and the parser produces the format that's recognizable by M$.
So I’ve bought a key on eBay (yep, I’m not paying full price for this shit: release valid validators first, bitches; don't make me buy things I don't need). The key is valid, everything is fine. But no, you just cannot have a link to download this fucking installer, no-no-no-no. We won't give you a link until after you enter a key. FEEL DEPENDENT. OBEY.
But I digress. Here's their MANUAL about DOWNLOADING the INSTALLER:
https://support.office.com/en-us/...
So, what's wrong with it? Oh, just a minor misunderstanding. They always give you a link to download an exe-installer. Even if you use Safari.
Why everything is so fucked?2 -
i dug up the undocmented fdisk thing and here it is https://youtu.be/th8wOjigxwU
on DOS 6.22 it just partitions it immediately, on Win98 it updates drive letters and immediately formats it as FAT32 if a partition is defined as being bigger than 2GB
syntax is as follows
FDISK <physical drive number, 0 being unused> /pri:<primary partition size> /ext:<extended partition size> /log:<logical partition size> -
Starting Out In Web Development (again)
The Question
I am looking for some suggestions on tools or frameworks to look into for a hobby project I wanted to try. I have always felt that _time_ is quite interesting so I was going to knock something up to present the current time in a lot of formats (All the ISOs I can find, GPS Time, Week Numbers, Mian Calendars, Metric Time, etc).
My Background
It has been a while since I did anything much with website related bits. Long ago I wrote HTML (4 or XHTML I think) out but hand for simple things. I added a little JavaScript to do a rollover image substitution. At some point I also did some JavaServerPages (JSP).
In the non-web world;
* I am quite good at C & C+
* I am OK with Go, Python, Ruby, BASH
* I can cobble together JavaScript, Java, JSP and a bunch of other things but I will be a bit slow and doing a lot of "online research" to aid me.
-----
Any suggestions are very welcome. Also if you know of similar existing sites I would be interested to see how others have chosen to present things. -
Hi. Me and my friend is working on this major project where we are trying to create a many to many file convertor for a lot of media and file types ( for eg pdf to doc and visa versa, jpg to png , mp4 to flv , or mp4 to gif , whatever the possibilities are )
If anyone has done something like this, then please share your insights : how this is gonna work, what concepts are involved , where to look for this kind of info, etc.
Currently from what i have gathered, it would be almost impossible to convert to a few proprietary formats (like rar, psd or autocad's dwg) but there are still free softwares and websites doing it openly. How so?5 -
Guys!! I'm stuck with a problem in an android app. I want to display video on a VideoViewer. What I really want is to test the software, to see if it can run and display several formats.
The thing is: when I start to play the video file (.mp4 or .3gp) just appears a popup saying "Can't play this video". I don't know what to do. StackOverflow doesn't really help with this, nor any tutorial that I found on Google.
Any tips for a Android newbie?
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