string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };

Oh the joy of helping elders with their computers..

...

Client: My computer is broken.

*Me expecting some kind of hardware issue*

Me: In what way is it broken? Are you able to start the computer?

Client: Yes. I can read Windows and then there's a login. It works fine but then It's broken.

*me standing next to client while client struggles to type password*

...

*5 minutes and a coffee brake later*

/* the client is finally able to figure out the password.. What a suprise! A note in the drawers containing all passwords.. */

Me: I'm sorry but I can't see any problems so far. You are supposed to be welcomed by your desktop *points at screen*. In what way is it broken?

Client: It's not the same as before. *now the client points at the screen*. Here. There used to be a picture here. It took me to <site>. Now It's not there. Something has changed.

*realizing that the client has lost his shortcut and wants a new one*

Oh the joy of helping elders with their computers.

Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?

Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.

Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)

Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.

Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.

After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.

Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

I live in an apartment building that has about 20 floors. About once every month, I'm either waiting for the elevator or in it, and the floor indicator display flashes "14" very quickly no matter what floor the elevator is actually on. Whenever this occurs, it's always 14 that gets shown.

This has made me think about what this bug looks like and if it will ever be fixed. Will they ever update the firmware in the elevators? Is it a software issue? It could also be a hardware problem. Either way, every time it happens I think about it and if this bug will ever be fixed.

I've decided to call it the "phantom floor 14 bug."

I'm a f****** idiot. Wifi adapter stopped working, I rebooted. I reinstall my distro. I look up for a replacement card. I troubleshoot the issue in software.

Finally someone says something one of the fourms.

I hit Fn + F2

It fucking works!!! The hardware was disabled by accident when I tried to open tty2.

FUCK!!!

Came to work and there ware my boss and CEO waiting there next to my place.

"Hey, you remember that you mentioned yesterday that you had a break through and the thing is finally starting to do something? We have few journalist downstairs can we show them a demo in like five minutes?"

"Ok, give me five minutes and don't click here and there otherwise it blows up."

My boss came back from presentation after ten minutes that it doesn't work, after little investigation turns out to be hw issue, replaced hardware went to the conference room and it worked.

Crazy deadlines? No, just another day at work.

Windows troubleshooting:
- Works on my system, therefore it's not an issue.
- Must be a hardware error.
- Obviously it's just cheap hardware.
- Have you tried turning it off and on again?
- Here's some obscure error code that leads nowhere.
- Have you tried "sfc /scannow"?
AS IF SFC IS A FUCKING SILVER BULLET!!!
- Our Indian support chap from answers.microsoft.com will help you.

RRRREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Solution: quietly weep and reinstall your system.

Linux troubleshooting:
- There are good quality log files.
- You can run the program from the command-line and read both stdout and stderr from it.
- You can usually run the program with high verbosity options to help you track down the error.
- Even daemons can have their commands spawned from a dedicated shell, to see why they failed.
- Usually it's a configuration error and you can easily edit the configuration file.
- More often than not, the program will tell you why it failed.

Solution: usually easy to find.

I fucking love Windows. Because you know, it's so easy to troubleshoot and the support is so great!!!

Windows 10 source code apparently leaked!

The main.c file is short tho and unchanged since 95(it's just run in parallel) so I'mma just paste it here:

void WinMain(int nCmdArgs){
static int userDisgust = 5; //he/she booted up Win10 so 5 to begin with

Time time = Time.time;
while(!crashed){
Time time2 = Time.time;
if(time + 3600 < time2){
ApplyUpdate();
sleep(500000); //users can stretch, have a tea and overall be healthier, happier and better part of society
if(restartNecessary){
Restart();
}
Restart(); // just in case
}
SendUserData();
SendMoreUserData();

for(int i = 1; i < 99+1; i++){
RunUserApps();
UninstallUnnecessaryApps(); // keeps blacklist of apps that John and I don't like
AnnoyUser(); // added a function that slows the computer down significantly and reduces lifespan of the hardware so it's not just a short term gain
if(shouldRepeat){
//break; -- this caused some issue in one special case and we don't know why so we'll just omit it and add a fancy button elsewhere
}
userDisgust++;
}
if(userDisgust >= 2147483647) { //mission finished
Crash();
crashed = true;
}
}
String error = Windows.GetFullErrorMessage();
error.cat(Windows.GetRegistersDump());
error.cat(Windows.GetErrorCode());
error.cat(Windows.GetStackTrace());

error.erase(); // so that it doesn't occupy any space and allows the error to be resolved more quickly, release major optimization Update
BSOD(_T("We're sorry :/"));
}

*gets countless amounts of shit with Windows because of my "nonstandard use"*
WanBLowS fanbois: "Cheap hardware!! Hardware error!! Unstable drivers!!! Can't be anything else, this OS is rock solid."

I really wish that I had your ignorance. I know when I see a shitty OS in front of me. And mind you, it actually ran Linux a while back.. just that I couldn't use my Nvidia GPU in it and had to compile a kernel with all of that crap excluded to make it work decently.. fuck Nvidia. And you know what, it actually did run fucking rock solid!!! But over time I lost the config and X.org doesn't like my dualhead setup all that much, especially the ultrawide display.

So, how about we address this issue for what it is already. THE OS FUCKING SUCKS!!!

Coffee machine isn't working.

Well were developers it's a hardware issue.

Let's call IT

So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.

Linux desktop fanboys: proprietary hardware support is a huge issue in all major Linux distros. It is the fault of the hardware companies.

Also Linux desktop fanboys: hardware issues are the fault of the beginner/novice end user.

Windows/mac users: *installs any component they want and has it work flawlessly without even having to read a single word from the manual*

Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

Always back up your data.

I came to my computer earlier today to find it on my Linux login screen. This could only mean one thing: something went horribly wrong.

Let me explain.

I have my BIOS set up to boot into Windows automatically. The exception is a reboot or something horrible happens and the computer crashes. Then, it boots me into Linux. Due to a hardware issue I never looked into, I have to be present to push F1 to allow the computer to start. The fact that it rebooted successfully, without me present, into *Linux*, could only mean one thing:

My primary hard drive died and was no longer bootable.

The warning was the BIOS telling me the drive was likely to fail ("Device Error" doesn't really tell me anything to be fair).

The massive wave of panic hit me.

I rebooted in hopes of reviving the drive. No dice.

I rebooted again. The drive appeared.

Let's see how much data I can recover from it before I can no longer mount it. Hopefully, I can come out of this relatively unscathed.

The drive in question is a 10 year old 1.5 TB Seagate drive that came with the computer. It served me well.

Press F to pay respects I guess.

On the bright side, I'll be getting an SSD as a replacement (probably a Samsung EVO).

5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux

This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.

"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out

#### DENIAL #####

No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!

w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.

Wifi connection failed

wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi

Wifi connection failed

#### ANGER #####

the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.

wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!

ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.

#### BARGAINING #####

Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.

rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.

So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying

#### DEPRESSION #####

The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...

#### ACCEPTANCE #####

But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.

I must reboot.

#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...

rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm

*WiFi Connected*

YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!

Linux is the best!

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:

Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)

Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.

Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)

Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.

Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.

Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.

Welp.

well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)

*WanBLowS shits itself as usual in BSOD*
FEATUREFUL FUCKING JOKE OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM..!!!! How about you do the only thing that you're good at - casual shit like letting me watch a fucking anime! - and do it properly?! Yes there's an rsync from btrfs to btrfs going on in the background - because yes I fucking detest your joke of a filesystem called NTFS!! Should that even matter?! ONE FUCKING JOB!!!

Meanwhile my tablet, a fucking €120 cheapie!! It can stay up and running - stable! - for fucking weeks in a row, only taken down by me forgetting to charge the bloody thing every few days. But yeah it's gotta be a hardware issue, it's gotta be an obscure setup. NO IT'S A FUCKING CRAPTACULAR SHIT OS!!! If only those Microshit certified enganeers would write a goddamn line of DECENT CODE!!!

(As for anyone who doesn't know already that I've tried countless times to convert this turd to Linux.. It's an Intel + Nvidia GPU hybrid and it doesn't even boot a Linux live session. Believe me, I've tried.)

A classmate's earphones once stopped working, I went to go look at it. After a bit of tinkering, I said, "The speakers on these are toast, you'll need a new pair." Then, some random kid grabbed the tablet mind you, and not the earphones, played in the settings, and said "Fixed." I then told them, "This is a hardware issue, not a software issue." What's worse? Some people said "So, software and hardware are the same thing."
Mississippi is just full of computer Illiterates.

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 :')

!rant
Medium long story about POP!_OS

TL;DR : A true K.I.S.S. OS. Very well designed UI. In general suitable for everyone. Any distro-hoppers MUST try out. If your current OS is already heavily customized to your needs, DON'T bother with POP. (Read till the end if you are on toilet, nothing to lose)

Backstory : I am never a fanboy of anything although I am loyal to the tools I use daily. So OS is also something I picked and use to meet my needs except when I was a student. My first linux experience was about a decade ago with ubuntu. Have tried almost all kinds of light-weight and minimal distros after that (lubuntu, arch, mint, puppylinux, fedora, centos and others I forgot) during my student years.

I like all things minimal. ("Keep It Simple Stupid" is my email signature.) When I started working, Windows became the sole OS I use since it met my needs better than others. Except that one time when I tried Elementary. Although I found it a good OS, it didn't get installed as a dual-boot. I don't find Elementary minimal. It is one of well designed OSs but I still think it can be improved. (Plus I had this weird feeling that it is similar to Mac OS)

At the start of this year, Widows alone was not enough for my needs. Decided to look for a minimal linux distro. My old i7 ASUS has 8GB RAM and roughly 250GB free storage. So I am not that worried about hardware requirements. My main struggle is downloading stuffs. (Few of you guys must know by now the speed of my internet LOL.) Well, even if I had a good speed, I will still look for minimal distro as first priority. So I went with minimal ubuntu image and xubuntu environment. Although I do not like the UI design, it is acceptable. Through out the years, I have configured it to suit my needs and currently pretty happy with it.

Thoughts on POP!_OS : To me, it is literally like meeting a young girl who is perfect for my life. She has the perfect body, beautiful face, amazing appearance and good manners. And she is young, of course there is a lack of experience issue. But it can be taught and she has a very high chance to become a wonderful lady if she continues like this. Only crap is I already have someone and in a committed relationship. So I could not go any further than introduction. I do save her contact and will keep in touch with her online. You know? Things change. Things always change somehow.

So my father has to deal with some vendors providing niche hardware and software solutions for a single department in the company.

Once the hardware finishes its work and transfers results to the managing PC, the PC has to upload those results to the server on the internet. The problem is that if no one's working with that setup for a few minutes the software in the PC can no longer communicate with the server.

Naturally, since idle time is in the equation, I thought of SO_KEEPALIVE (or whatever it's called in Windows). Wireshark confirms the absence of keepalive packets. However, the app doesn't seem to have any means to enable it... Hence the need to work with support guys.

One would expect the support to be professional, experts considering anything related to the app.

One would NOT expect to receive a call: "Hey, look, I was doing some googling on the internet... You might be right, enabling KA might help with the issue. We were discussing with our engineers and we tried to find some application that could enable KA on your computer. We couldn't find anything, but we believe that's the way to go. So give it a try and try to find some app on the internet that enables KA for our proprietary application". // everything in Lithuanian ofc.

I mean...seriously...?
I was startled to hear this suggestion. Since I expected them to be experts I assumed there's something IDK about Windows sockets -- could Windows enable KA globally, by-default? Did not find such a thing. Could Windows allow application A to control application B's socket options? Frankly, I'm too afraid to even look for this. I dislike Windows already. If this turned out to be true I'd probably become an anti-windows evangelist.

Best Hardware support team.
I hope every one of you got such team.

My keyboard was not working properly.
programmer's most used special character ; is auto typing anywhere that is obviously keyboard issue so I called H/W support team.

me: *explained above problem.*
supporter : Ya we know that issue ,YOUR HARD DRIVE IS CORRUPTED. We have 2 option
1) either we can formate your system.
2) We have to change hard drive.
Me thinking : *devrant stuff found*
Me: that is really sad part. How many time you solved such problem?
S: This is my first time in this company ,previously I solved such issue more than 10 time.
Me: you really look smart.
S: thank you,any how I will resolved this issue today.
Me: today I am going earlier but yes we will meet on monday. thank you for quick response.

## Building my own router

IT HAS ALREADY PAID OFF!!!!!

So I (with my fam) have evacuated from the capital of Lithuania into a distant place - much smaller, where average age is prolly >30 or even >40 years. I live in a village now. In a house with very good neighbours. In fact these neighbours own that house :D

Back to the point.

So these neighbours used to share their wifi (w/ internet) between the two houses. They have the line, the mian router has quite a strong antenna and that other house has 2 repeaters: 1 on the outside wall and another one -- indoors. Sepeaters are connected sequentially, i.e. the indoors one is repeating the outdoors one. ikr....?

The first day was alright. We settled in, got everything set up wifi-wise. Peachy.

The second day repeaters refused to issue a DHCP IP. That's something, right? Alright, nvm - I don't mind setting up static IPs. In fact I prefer them over the DHCP magic!

And by the noon both repeaters were connectable but neither of them could provide internet connection... We that sucks! I restarted both of them a few times, neighbours restarted their main router -- still no luck.

Here comes my router [God am I happy with this purchase and the whole idea of a customized router!!! Thanks @hakx20!].

I brought it outside, plugged it in. Connected to it through it's hotspot, used nmcli to connect to neighbours' main router with an internal wifi card (that shitty mPCIe operating in USB mode. yes, the same one, manufactured in 2003. Yes, in g mode.). A couple of iptables rules for traffic forwarding et voila! I have built my own repeater! And tomorrow I can WFH w/o any issues.

Yes, hardware routers are faster and easier to maintain. Yes, hardware routers are cheaper and usually have nicer bells and whistles. But when hardware fails you and the last thing you want is going to the public (shop), soldering rod won't help you. A software solution becomes the easiest to set up, considering you know how to.

Boi am I so happy about my purchase! CentOS router FTW!

P.S. even though we've fled the city we are responsible citizens and we've self-quarantined ourselves for the 14 days period. No local person any closer than 10 meters for the whole period until we're cleared. Being away from the city gives us sooo much freedom! Especialy now, when cities are shitting bricks in fear.

So the group announced a merge of several systems into my platform. Growing it from 5000 sites to 75000. Lead time of a year, time enough to build it properly, finish the split of the current monolith into microservices, make it fast.

Suddenly, they reduced the time to three months, no explanation given. Solution is to keep the current PHP shit pile, but "scale" it using magic hardware or something. Oh and add 258 features, including things like "intuitive navigation" and "progressive web app" which some junior PM wannabe got off wikipedia or something.

And my boss has bent over to these morons and basically said yes, instead of informing them that this is a fool's errand.

Fuck em. I've said that they're nuts, and if they force the issue, I will resign. And my team probably will too.

But first I will take an inconveniently timed holiday.

Me: "Omg, I'm so not sorry you didn't get a response to your 2:00am text sent to my private phone number about that super duper not important thing that a four year old could solve... but my girlfriend gave me a wrist band thingy that puts my phone on silent whenever it thinks I'm sleeping."

Product Owner: "And you can't set it up properly!? Your title says `señor software engineer` for god's sake!"

Me: "Yeah, it does. This is a hardware issue, though."

...is what I told her and she bought it. 🤷‍♂️

I hate IT managers, how on earth some become ant form of manager is beyond myself.

I have a server with a hardware firewall. A client, based in the UK, with French offices is saying the server blocking their new French IP. I white-listed their IP address, still no luck.

That was a week ago.

After 4 international phone calls and nearly 30 emails I resolved the "issue".

Their so called "IT Manager" sent over the wrong IP. Instead of it starting with 46.* he sent over an IP starting 42.*, which was in fact being correctly blocked.

Suffice to say I charged the client a lot of money for the wasted time and international rate calls.

I'm a fan of Linux, and have used many distros (arch, ubuntu, debian, fedora, mint, centos, rhl) and many desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, xfce, Enlightenment) before asking this question.

But every single one of these desktop environments always have felt slow to respond in some cases, where I click something and it doesn't open/close immediately, or i double click something but it fails to open or select something. basically I'm not confident my actions on the GUI will have guaranteed, quick responses within reasonable time. I've never ever had this issue with Microsoft OSes (keeping aside the many badly coded softwares which hang or crash). I'm not talking about specific softwares, this is just general usage of opening settings and using the file manager, window menus.

I'm pretty sure my hardware is not the issue. I've run everything on the same rig. And this has always kept me from fully committing myself to a Linux distro. But I can never be sure about display drivers, as they're not identical. But the issues in Linux has been noted by me for many years. So I doubt it's the drivers either.

Is there anybody who agrees with me and know why Linux is the way it is like that, or is this just me facing this annoyance?

Lately I'm running into quite some negative atmosphere in meetings. Raise your hand if you think we all should improve our soft skills.

For example, we had a meeting with our client the other day. It was supposed to be only with the two most senior guys in the team and a couple of the less senior (just because one of us knows better the maths of it and the other one knows better about the limitations of the hardware), but in the end some other team members also joined.

In this meeting, we wanted to discuss an issue that had to be fixed. Quite a complex one. The main speaker from the clients, even though also technical, was having a hard time trying to explain properly to us what the issue was about. He was doing quite well, but it was complex enough. Well, one of the guys in my team kept interrupting him to ask very detailed questions (that would not help us understand it better, not until we got first the big picture). When I say "interrupting" I mean that the guy would half shout a question in the middle of a word from the client.

The client was patient and tried to answer, but our nice guy would keep answering back in a "gosh you really don't have a clue" tone.

We muted our microphone and one of the senior Devs asked the guy to please let them conduct the meeting, and that if he had such questions, he could mute the micro and ask them to us, so we knew we might have to ask about that.

Good. We unmute the microphone and 2 minutes after, our star guy goes in again and he even directs his question to someone else than who was talking (from the client).

Client gets pissed - I mean, I taught 12-16 year old teenagers for years and I don't think I would have hold it together for as long as the client did - and from then on all the meeting went in a really negative tone. Ending up with a call from the client to our senior guy to finish explaining in private the thing.

Well, our friend the interrupting guy not only got amazingly mad at the senior guy that (in private and constructively) gave him some advice on this kind of meetings. No, he also ended up spiraling into a close to insulting chain of emails towards the client -with his and our colleagues in copy- when he needed some specification.

Interrupting guy is 35yo and has been working with clients quite long. Our HR department still doesn't think we all should get communication workshops or something

This MOTHERFUCKER was hiding from me for three FUCKING DAYS now! All the damn time I had corrupt display memory cause of it!

Context: CS and DC were accidentally swapped on the PCB! Not a hardware issue thou. The pins can be remapped in software.

Fellow Deviants, I need your help in understanding the importance of C++

Okay, I need to clarify a few things:

I am not a beginner or a newbie who has just entered this community...

I have been using C++ for some time and in fact, it was the language which introduced me to the world of programming... Before, I switched to Java, since I found it much better for application development...

I already know about the obvious arguments given in favour of C/C++ like how it is a much more faster and memory efficient than other languages...

But, at the same time, C/C++ exposes us and doesn't protect us from ourselves.. I hope that you understand what I mean to say..

And, I guess that it is a fair tradeoff for the kind of power and control that these languages (C/C++) provide us..

And, I also agree with the fact that it is an language that ideally suits our need, if we wish to deal with compilers, graphics, OS, etc, in the future...

But, what I really want to ask here is:

In this age and times, when hardware has advanced so much, where technically, memory efficiency or execution speeds no longer is the topmost priority... These were the reasons for which C/C++ was initially created...

In today's time, human concept of time matters more and hence, syntactical less complicated languages like Java or Python are much more preferred, especially for domains like application development or data sciences...

So, is continuing with C++, an endeavour worth sticking with in the future or is it not required...

I am talking about this issue since I am in a dilemma about the use of C++ in the future...

I would be grateful if we could talk about keeping AI, Machine Learning or Algorithms Optimisation in mind... Since, these are the fields in which I am interested in...

I know that my question could have been posted in a better way.. But, considering the chaos that is present in my mind, regarding this question doesn't allow me to do so...

Any kind of suggestion or thoughts would be welcome and much appreciated...

P.S: I currently use C++ only for competitive programming or challenges...

In This Rant: A mildly satisfying piece of mind story.

Using code to prove yourself right is a hell of a drug.

A few weeks ago I whipped up a tiny program that downloads configs from hardware we manage. Since the vendor's API documentation is hidden behind a pay wall, my method of extraction is different. It results in bigger files, but testing showed it to still be valid.

Enter today. Interns at work downloaded a config to load onto a spare machine and it won't work.

"TheCapeGreek, your configs don't work"

I was confused since I tested the files when I built it and it worked. I am also currently fleshing out that download utility's features so the fear that I've been wasting the past 2 weeks on improvements is looming.

Last 15 minutes of the day and nothing else to do so I figured I might as well whip up a string comparer. The smaller file's content is scattered in the big file so a direct diff won't work.

Code it all, quick hardcoded proof of concept code, bit it got the job done. I was right, my bigger file is still correct!

Turns out the issue was with the machine they were configuring. They found this out before I finished my test code, so I'm off the hook already, but it was good to have piece of mind haha!

Numbers implementation in so many freaking languages!!!

Lack of naming consistency, and meaning.
And yes, setImmediate and setTimeout 0...

But the biggest feature issue is that people can code without thinking!!! There should be some hardware security to impede stupid fucks from committing code...

You know, I've really been thinking about renouncing my love for Microsoft's products. I got into the tech world through them, so their stuff was all I really knew. It's like a non-dev growing up using Mac and iPhone. You don't really know what other hardware and software can do (especially since Microsoft is now acting a LOT like Apple nowadays). Ever since they killed Windows Phone, I started seeing past the rose-colored glasses. They've annoyed me with one slip-up after the next. The only things that have kept me tied to them are my Windows Insider membership, and their developer platform. Now that I've seen things like Fuchsia and Linux, I realize that the way Microsoft is going about technology is painful to developers and consumers alike, and this is now beginning to hurt their bottom line. I'm sick of it.

The issue is that if I leave the Microsoft platform, I will have no time to waste. I spent the last 2 yeas cozying up to them, and now I will need to find other platforms, languages, and utilities to build a portfolio from. This also means that I will despise pretty much every major tech company for different reasons (Apple for locked-down hardware, Microsoft for locked-down software, Google for it's monopolistic actions and its unfair policies and terms, Amazon for its invasiveness, etc). If things get worse, I'll probably end up going to Linux and joining the open-source community. The only worry I have is what I'll do for a career. I'm almost halfway to getting an Associates in Computer Science, but where do I go from there? Can't make a living open-source (unless I get patrons, which is unlikely), will probably abandon my dream of joining Microsoft or Google, and I don't currently specialize in any particular area of development yet. I want to spend my life dealing with tech and software. But right now, I've got next to no plans. I've got a lot of thinking to do...

Ok, a customer came to us saying he had a product that is just randomly rebooting. It sure must be a software issue.

I got the task and worked my way through ~10k lines of assembly code (8085 processor on board) Weeks go by, i tested every single god damn funktion they had, analyzed every vector they put in, finding NOTHING...

Meanwhile the hardware department analyzed and tested some possible culprits on the product for me. I had NO idea what the problem could be...

Then hardware department said: oh, they forgot a resistor on the FUCKIN RESET PIN OF THE PROCESSOR!!!!!

fml...

(Warning: This rant includes nonsense, nightposting, unstructured thoughts, a dissenting opinion, and a purposeless, stupid joke in the beginning. Reader discretion is advised.)

honestly the whole "ARM solves every x86 problem!" thing doesn't seem to work out in my head:

- Not all ARM chips are the same, nor are they perfectly compatible with each other. This could lead to issues for consumers, for developers or both. There are toolchains that work with almost all of them... though endianness is still an issue, and you KNOW there's not gonna be an enforced standard. (These toolchains also don't do the best job on optimization.)

- ARM has a lot of interesting features. Not a lot of them have been rigorously checked for security, as they aren't as common as x86 CPUs. That's a nightmare on its own.

- ARM or Thumb? I can already see some large company is going to INSIST AND ENFORCE everything used internally to 100% be a specific mode for some bullshit reason. That's already not fun on a higher level, i.e. what software can be used for dev work, etc.

- Backwards compatibility. Most companies either over-embrace change and nothing is guaranteed to work at any given time, or become so set in their ways they're still pulling Amigas and 386 machines out of their teeth to this day. The latter seems to be a larger portion of companies from what I see when people have issues working with said company, so x86 carryover is going to be required that is both relatively flawless AND fairly fast, which isn't really doable.

- The awkward adjustment period. Dear fuck, if you thought early UEFI and GPT implementations were rough, how do you think changing the hardware model will go? We don't even have a standard for the new model yet! What will we keep? What will we replace? What ARM version will we use? All the hardware we use is so dependent on knowing exactly what other hardware will do that changing out the processor has a high likelihood of not being enough.

I'm just waiting for another clusterfuck of multiple non-standard branching sets of PCs to happen over this. I know it has a decent chance of happening, we can't follow standards very well even now, and it's been 30+ years since they were widely accepted.

You cannot completely delete a windows service, as long as the services panel is open. The service stays undead and prevents any reinstallation until the services panel is closed.

Thanks Microsoft.
Separation of GUI and business logic does not apply here, because it's kernel logic, right?

But at least you're consistents, there is a similar issue with not installing USB drivers if the new hardware dialog is open.

One of our servers had a disk fail this week. Luckily it's 1 of 3 in a RAID5 array. And, luckily, it was our mostly-dev box and didn't have any production stuff on it, except for some support things. We scheduled a disk replacement with the hosting company, took everything down, waited. Somebody at the hosting company apparently didn't know we'd scheduled the replacement, saw the machine was down, and brought it up again. Sigh. Finally they did the replacement, got it back up, but now we're seeing an ethernet port flapping, suggested they have someone go in and make sure all the jacks are fully seated, maybe one got loose when they were doing the disk switch. Bureacracy reared up again and we got the boilerplate "if there's a hardware issue suspected please boot into rescue mode and run the tests"... sigh...

I feel like distro-hopping again.

I was thinking of trying Gentoo (Arch is too mainstream, meh), but I came across an article on FreeBSD and realized that I'd never tried a BSD.

Any of you use BSD as a desktop OS? If so, which one? The laptop I'll be running it on is about four years old now, and there's no nVuDiA shit there, so hardware compatibility shouldn't be an issue.

Holy mother of butts. Two weeks. Two weeks I've been on and off trying to get hardware rendering to work in xorg on a laptop with an integrated nvidia hybrid gpu.

I know the workarounds and it's what I've been using otherwise. Nouveau without power management or forced software rendering works fine. I also know it's a known issue, this is just me going "but what the hell, it HAS to be possible".

The kicker is that using nvidias official tools will immediately break it and overwrite your xorg.conf with an invalid configuration.

I've never bought an nvidia gpu but all my work laptops have had them. Every time i set one up I can't resist giving this another shot, but I always hit a brick wall where everything is set up right but launching X produces a black screen where I can't even launch a new tty or kill the current one. I assume it's the power management tripping over itself.

The first time I tried getting this to work was about 3 or 4 years ago on a different laptop and distro. It's not a stretch to say that it would be better if nvidia just took down their drivers for now to save everyone's time.

Okay then, ex-android user there.

It started with Xperia TX - it was flagship Sony phone back then. It blew my mind when I touched it for the first time. You know, exploring android for the first time in my life was amazing.

It ran just well for about a year. Then it started to fall apart. I need to clarify that I kept it non-rooted, full stock. I'm not into that customization things.

At first, I noticed significant lags. They were everywhere. The longer I used smartphone, the more lags I encountered. I did factory reset, but lags haven't gone anywhere.

Year 2. Front camera stopped working. Battery became unreliable as fuck, going down to 40% and then instantly to zero. What?

Year 3. Camera broke. It refused to start, just giving me "Camera is not available" error.

I tried factory reset again. It helped at first, but month have passed and all that issues came back. And it also became sluggish as fuck.

Got Meizu m3s year ago. The exact same story. Long story short, in one year I got this:
1. Black spots on every picture I take. Much likely a matrix issue.
2. Camera also became slow as fuck, requiring about 10 seconds to even start.
3. Vertical stripes all along the screen. I never dropped my phone, it just appeared once and became brighter and brighter every day I used the phone.
4. Two huge yellow spots on screen. I think it happened because phone's cpu heat up the screen and it broke.

But the most important thing is that fucking lags chased me in every app, they were everywhere. Fucking tiny-ass lags. And they're not going anywhere, they're become more and more significant with time.

Don't say me about oneplus, samsungs and other top android phones. They are conceptually the same, the only different thing is hardware.

That's why I switched. IPhone has its downsides, but it's silky smooth. And my friend's iPhone 4 (not s) feels just as smooth as my brand new se.

I'm not going to jailbreak it. I don't need customizing the hell out of it.

I just needed quick and reliable phone, and SE seems to be exactly what I wanted.

Peace to android folks tho✌️

Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.

But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.

I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.

This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??

So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.

He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."

"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."

me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."

Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."

"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."

"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."

"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."

"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."

"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"

Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average

Customer complains about an issue after a software update. The head of department himself tested the update and got an error message.

Me looking at the logs. Ok, that's an issue, but based on hardware failure, customer should fix his hardware, no relation to the new software.
But surprisingly close to the software update, which piques my curiosity.

Me looking at older logs ... same issue. EVERY FUCKING DAY. For months. The corresponding error message only appears if a user is logged on, so quite a few people have seen it. Obviously nobody cared. Maybe we just ditch error messages, it'll save lots of work.

I give software support to Rugged handhelds in a company and everyday some IT support moron comes to me with a crazy request. The day just started and...

IT Tech: "Hello, C, can you improve the touchscreen sensibility? It's not so responsive and sometimes we have to click more than one time to something work"

**breath in**

Me: "That's ok, the rugged ones that you have are very old, besides they have resistive screen, so your fingers won't do a good job"

IT Tech: "THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX IT? I guess I'll open a ticket for you to study more calmly about the issue"

**NGGGGGGGGGHHHH**

Me: "If it's not a software thing, I can't do that, I don't have hardware skills, I guess you'll have to call our provider about that, but, before you do something, try to recalibrate your handhelds, the majority of the users don't do that at the system's start and the touch experience really can become a mess"

IT Tech: "Hmmm, I'll try that, otherwise I'll back to you, thanks!"

OMFGGGGG

I am open to suggestions of a magic batch file/ .NET CF 2.0 software that will turn their handhelds into a Galaxy S6 touch experience. THANKS!

Fk you Google!

My Samsung note 10 screen went dead near a week ago... it's a secondary line so waiting for parts wasn't the end of the world.

Ofc the screen (curved and incl a fingerprint reader thatd be a major pain to not replace) was integrated to the whole front half... back panel glued, battery, glued immensely and with all other parts out, about 6mm space only at the bottom to get a tool in to pry it out.

New screen (off brand) ~200... all genuine parts amazon refurb ~230... figured id have some extra hardware for idk what... i like hardware and can write drivers so why not.

Figured id save a bit of time and avoid other potentially damaged (water) components to just swap out the mobo unit that had my storage.

Put it back together, first checked that my sim was recognised since this carrier required extraneous info when registering the dev... worked fine... fingerprint worked fine, brave browser too...

Then i open chrome. It tells me im offline... weird cuz i was literally in a discord call. My wifi says connected to the internet (not that i wouldn't have known the second there was a network issue... i have all our servers here and a /28 block... ofc i have everything scripted and connected to alert any dev i have, anywhere i am, the moment something strange happens).

Apparently google doesnt like the new daughter board(i dislike the naming scheme... its weird to me)... so anything that is controlled by google aside from the google account that is linked to non-google reliant apps like this... just hangs as if loading and/or says im offline.

I know... itll only take me about the 5-10m it took to type this rant but ffs google... why dont you even have an error message as to what your issue is... or the simple ability to let me log in and be like 'yup it's me, here's your dumb 2fa and a 3rd via text cuz you're extra paranoid yet dont actually lock the account or dev in any way!'

I think it's a toss up if google actually knows that it's doing this or they just have some giant glitch that showed up a couple times in testing and was resolved via the methods of my great grama- "just smack it or kick it a few times while swearing at it in polish. Like reaaaally yelling. Always worked for me! If not, find a fall guy."

okay just had a mind blown moment.

there are never 'technical errors'

everything is human error.

because at some point, a human started/caused whatever went wrong.

whether it was the fact that a human didn't account for something or made bad code, or made bad hardware,

every tech issue is a human one.

:/

!rant

I always hear stories about someone hearing one of our developer friends is a developer and assumes that means they know everything about computers. Hell, I've had it happen to me before (usually the common "oh I have an app idea that's better than facebook! you just have to build it")

A big one I hear if someone asking a developer that has only worked with software to help fix a hardware issue or build a computer. Personally, I'd prefer if someone asked me about a hardware issue (except printers, fuck printers) or to build a computer for them. I've been called a rare breed for knowing about an equal amount about computer hardware and software.

I'd much rather do some physical work building a computer (as simple as a hello world program, a lot of it is putting shit where it fits) than build an entire website or program for someone. But I mean, I might actually know hardware a bit better than I know software, and that's just me. (Obviously never do anything for free when you could be paid for it)

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

...

none, it's a hardware issue

My OnePlus 5' fingerprint scanner stopped working after lunch today. After a few test, found that it was a hardware issue. Fuck.

Now I have to open my phone like a pleb. I have to close and reopen the phone to open new apps.

A friend of mine who wants to learn about Linux has a stronger will than me, as I think installing Linux in 2020 is gonna break me but he's still stoked as shit. I'm fucking serious. He asked me to install several distros, in order of interest (because they all fucking failed, because of fucking course they did) on a USB HDD he was using just for this.

We tried, in order:

Arch: initramfs wiped his Windows HDD when it crashed. IDFK how, but it zeroed the top 32KB of the drive. It wasn't even the right HDD...

Linux Mint: nvidia drivers refused to see his GPU after install. No matter what we did. Live media saw it fine until it was installed on the external drive, too.

Debian: Installer couldn't see the external HDD, ever. No matter what we did. It had a /dev entry, lsblk and fdisk saw it, I could format and mount it, but the installer crashed when it refreshed the device list when it was present. Every goddamn time.

Fedora: Installer broke halfway through as an executable (or 70) were corrupted, but the disc matched the ISO and the ISO sums correctly, so this is apparently how it was packed and shipped.

CentOS: Refused to boot. Just entirely. GRUB would go to load the kernel and it'd hang.

All ISOs and discs were verified as matching provided sums using MD5 and SHA256. How the fuck is Linux so fucking hard to get working on older hardware in 2020? Worked great in 2008, worked great in 2018, why is 2020 such a goddamn issue?

How many developers does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. It's a hardware issue

Spent a day debugging low volume of audio record
Just now found a cause of issue
And it was
*drums*
Hardware fault
Mic in my OP5T is nearly dead after I dropped it recently
For fucks sake, why I didn't tested it in the first place

Can someone help me?
I want to program games, (2d & 3d) I have made games in clickteam and RPG Maker, but I want to program them. My biggest issue is my hardware. I have a not so powerful notebook, and I don't have Wifi. So online installers are off the table. (Nono, visual studio.) Syntax, I like clean, easy to read syntax, and I would like an active community. Any suggestions?

So basically I am the computer guy in my office. If there is any hardware or software related problem, I am the guy who fix it or try to fix it in my own time.

Little bit of more backstory. Two month ago we got react native project from a client. My boss asked me if I want to do that project. he knew that I don't know react native but I want to learn it. So I said yes. I have worked over 12 hours per day to work on that project while learning react native ( I committed the final version to git today.)

Yesterday there was a meeting in our office about project deadlines and issue with current work and stuff. In that meeting one guy asked (this guy had personal beef with me) in rude way like why I am taking parts of pc and given other people. ( If there is any hardware issue, I use other parts from pc which are not currently in use. So basically a simpe resource allocation.)

I knew it was a targeted questio toward me but before I say anything, All people took his side. (I did all those repair after taking permission from my boss, so he did not take that question seriously.)

I spend lots of time fixing those problem so people work does not stop and this is the thank you I got in return. I did this over one and half year. Right now I am asking my self if I continue the work or not.

Note: I wrote this whole thing to get my anger out of me. Sorry for typos. I am little bit drunk and I am not good with English.

It drives me nuts when people compare iPhones to Samsung, not realizing that Samsung did not invent Android, nor are they the only phone manufacturer or Android OS distributor.

If you're comparing iOS to Android, that's one thing. Or if you are comparing iPhone's hardware to a specific Samsung phone's hardware, I get it. Heck, I'm cool if you compare the iPhone X to the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, because they're similar in price. But don't say that Apple is better than Samsung when you mean you have an issue with Android, or your battery life on your $300 Android device wasn't as good as your $700 iPhone. Apples to oranges guys! It's like comparing Visual Studio 2015 to Python.

I don't care who is right or which is better. At least know what you're comparing!

Thanks.

More network/hardware than dev but anyway: I use OPNsense as a firewall at home on an embedded system. Had everything set up nicely and appearing to be working fine, quite a lot of things set up (static leases, VLANs with various firewall rules etc. - a fair bit of stuff involved). I noticed my remote system was failing to back up to my local one. Turned out port forwarding wasn't fully working (initial packet got through but nothing else). I noticed this at midnight.

Ran an update to see if that helped - nope. Reboot time then! It made its shutdown noises and I waited 15 minutes before giving up (no noises, no ping response). Took SD card out. Copied a fresh install onto it, thus wiping all settings. Booted up fine, set up my internet connection, all good. Proceeded to configure it. Noticed I couldn't access the internet from my PC, but could from the firewall itself. Rebooted the firewall. It didn't come back up. Argh!

Reinstalled AGAIN. Attached a serial cable and it was complaining about something which sounded like it couldn't read the SD card. Tried another. Nope. Looked online (using phone): known issue to do with boot delays.

Gave up and went to bed at this point (4am).

Next day: Installed it in a VM instead. Still no internet from my PC! Another known issue to do with default gateway not being the PPPoE interface. Got into shell, manually changed the default route. Was then able to update to the latest version which fixes the gateway issue. Rebooted the VM. All good.

Put all my settings back in, this time taking a backup afterward.

Only to discover....

....port forwarding wasn't working properly. Back to square 1.

Poked around with some NAT settings (outbound ones), made no difference, undid those changes and suddenly it started working.

WTF? /waves arms in the air

OPNsense folk were very helpful, producing a new build for me to try within a couple of hours of me asking about the problem.

But days like that, I start to question whether I really enjoy technology as much as I thought I did...

I'm opening a case against Lenovo due to their bad warranty support. It's been over a month and a half since I reported an issue with my ThinkPad and they still haven't fixed it. The laptop was bought in September, the case opened in October and in December I still have a faulty screen with which I can't no longer work because it was frying my eyes. Note that this machine has a Warranty Extension for 3 years Onsite next business day repair.

TL;DR if you own a ThinkPad, pray that it doesn't have any hardware issues. If you're thinking about buying one, DON'T!

My favourite bug fix was actually IT based and it was the first time my Eastern European, critical of my skills, family not only praised me but claimed that I was smarter than them.

My grandfather had changed from a telecom to a VOIP device for his landline. For some reason after installation, he could hear the other person on the line but they couldn't hear him. Me and my mother were away during this time so they called in the other family IT guy. This guy is no joke, he's one of the top in his company and makes a sweet six figures and lives in a mansion.

So he started looking things up, googling forum, etc. Couldn't find anything. Started calling the tech support and tried to deduce what it was and their tech support had never heard of such a problem. He takes his lunch breaks to help out my gramps. Keeps escalating, escalating and nothing. His conclusion is that they need to send him a new VoIP stick and they're not giving it to him. At this point, he's so frustrated that he screams at my grandfather to go back to paying 60 bucks a month for landline and to stop bothering him.

At this time me and my mother return and they have concluded that they need a new stick. My mom is great at intimidating people into free stuff so she and I go over to do so. At this point everyone is convinced of the problem and even I don't think I could fix it. But I decide to check if that's the case because I don't want my gramps to get a new stick and it still doesn't work.

I go through the typical forum hunting and there's Nada on the problem. I look at the stick and all the lights seem to be working, no error lights. And I wonder maybe the problem is not the stick, because usually you can't do anything at all if the hardware is broken. So I start thinking, maybe my gramps accidentally muted his handset while talking or something dumb like that. That wasn't it.

Then I decided to see if the problem was recreated on the other handsets. I tried one out and my mom could hear me but I couldn't hear her. What?! That's different! It was the opposite with the other phone. I conclude that it's working and there's something up with the handsets. So I go and do a reset on all of the handsets to make sure.

Lo and behold, the problem is fixed. It took me 25 minutes to solve. That guy gave up after a week of trying. My mom who assumed my IT skills were on par with other kids and nothing special had finally seen me up against an opponent, and not any opponent, a six figure high ranking IT specialist. And I didn't even use any secret, complex software knowledge that wasn't accessible to her or any other normal user.

That's when she finally said that I was smarter than her, that I just used my common sense. She would've needed some kind of prompting, hint or direction to solve the issue but I did it without any.

It was a very satisfying bug to fix.

Customer: It doesn't do what we wanted it to do, we have this issue, this particular usecase doean't work because you didn't use the patch we sent you. Please use it!

Me: I used most of it, I just fixed few broken parts and dropped part handling the hardware you realized you don't have and I just retested this particular usecase and it works!

It seems like very version of Ubuntu I use at work has jank. Ubuntu 18.04 would have file managers that just die. After locking/unlocking the screen it would move windows between monitors. One window would seemingly cause other windows to have discoloration and I would see phantom objects text overlaid with what looks like transparency. This was all Gnome. Lots of little quirks that I just got used to.

Now I am running 22.04 and while a lot of jank went away I am getting new jank. Every once in a while if I move a window or bring a window up after hiding the window. The window will oversize across the screen like I zoomed in. Noticing this with Firefox. It goes back to normal size real quick. But it is kind of wild. Jank that stayed is my external monitor I have attached through hdmi takes its sweet time to reactivate after being asleep. This might actually be a weird hardware issue. This is also Gnome.

I just find it wild that this jank is there and we are like: "Oh well. At least it ain't MS Windows jank..."

I'm calling you out, Asus, fix your absolutely shitty piece of software or I'm never buying a motherboard from you again.

A little explanation: my PC woke up from sleep like this. On another occasion before I could take the screenshot, the CPU was sitting almost idle at 45 degrees C. The CPU fan senses that it has to spin up, but never actually does so.

I've had the opposite thing before - a case fan spinning up not wanting to spin down even if the temps are fine - which is preferable because it only causes a little bit of noise. But this here could potentially cause damage to the CPU if I put some load on it without looking at the temperature. I've partly remedied the issue by writing a batch script that kills and resets the fan control service and is triggered by Task Scheduler on resume from sleep - a thing every average Joe should do, right?

It's a shame for top-notch hardware to have to go together with such crappy piece of software. This is the X99 Sabertooth that cost me 450 EUR originally.

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

Bought a laptop off my friend for $100 so he can get rid of it since he no longer uses it, and he can use the money to get more fans for his desktop to help that with it's overheating issue.

I took it home and for some reason didn't want to turn it on immediately. i decided to first take it apart and see if there's any internal issues just in case. As soon as the back cover is off I see that 1 out of the three segments on the lithium ion battery expanded. yep gonna order a new one of that tomorrow. I'm not the most hardware savvy but I'm pretty sure an expanded battery can cause an explosion

Ok, so my laptop just shut itself down out of the blue while I was working. That's nice.
Just *click* dead. Not even a BSOD or anything. The *click* being the sound of the hdd stopping.

I thought it was a linux-related issue, but this time I was on windows, so it might be a hardware issue I guess...

TFW your favorite headphones goes mute on one ear and wiggling the cable occasionally makes it work a while. I guess I could fix it, but it's a hardware issue =)

First issue with Manjaro. I am not sure when it begun, but now, every single time linux uses the SWAP file, the entire system stays unresponsive, freezing (not even the mouse moves), so I need to wait until it finishes using the SWAP to be able to use it again.

I have 16GB RAM and I was not noticing that, but for some reason, Chromium started to use a little bit of the SWAP when the Hardware Acceleration were turned on and the mouses started to stop moving for a few ms/seconds.

So I tried it out: opened a VM with 8GB RAM and done, my PC were frozen for about 10 minutes, until I were able to use it again.

When I turn on the swap file, everything works fine again, even the VM. It does not matters with the SWAP is on a SSD or not.

I have Manjaro KDE on my Acer Predator Helios 300 (dual boot with W10, unfortunately, because games/some programs needed).
I want to try another distro.

Is Fedora a good choice ? Is there any potential issue or things I should look out for ?

Do you know a good distro that runs fine on that hardware ? I'm just curious here.

Any tip before I backup my home ?

I put the / on my SSD and the /home on my HDD. Any reason why I shouldn't keep it that way ?

Thank you :-) !

Anybody like to rip up CTF (or similar)? I've honestly never done a CTF before, I'd like to give jt a shot. I'll get my ass handed to me because I'm not back up to par on OpSec yet, but I adapt well and when I get into a nice groove I can make shit happen! (I like to think so, anyways haha!!)
I've been in full on dev mode lately and haven't had any time to Hulk Smash for a while... I went to fire up a new Kali live USB today and I couldn't run through the updates like I always have- they changed sooo much and I was pissed because I didn't have ethernet with me. That'll be another day for sure, but I still have my machine with Manjaro armed to the nutsack and back with the BlackArch rep. I def could use a break from the chaos, and getting my ass handed right to me sounds like an awesome time because learning is my favorite thing next to a possible chance at getting to destroy shit.
It's weird, because I'm sort of a n00b but also at the same time I've had computers ripped apart/jammed in my face since every day since I was 9 and Y2K was about to hit the fan lmao!! My hardware/network/layering knowledge is fuckin mint titties, I just can't code like a fuckin madman on the fly. I don't have a "primary" language, because I've been having to work with little bits of several languages for extended periods of time... I can at least find my way around all the dox without much of an issue and have no issue solving the probs I come across which is neat, but until the day comes where I can fuck a gaping hole through my keyboard on the fly like George Hotz during one of his lazy Sunday OpenCV SLAM/Python code streams all jacked up on Herba Mate hahahahaha!!!!
The dude uses fucking VIM and codes faster than anyone I've ever seen on levels of science/math so challenging I almost shit myself inside out when I catch one!!!! The level of respect I have for all my fellow red pills in here is as high as it gets, and that's one of the best parts about being a code junkie- sometimes ya get to cross paths with beastly, out of this world people that teach you so much without even having to explain shit.
If anyone's down, or maybe has some resources for me to check out so I can get my chops up let's make it happen

TL;DR: Embedded software guy needs to create a multi-instance sandbox environment in Jenkins for testing and not sure what good solutions are out there. Looking for suggestions.

So at work, we have these really cool integration tests that validate our system for flight safety. What's not so cool is that due to factors outside of my control, each test has to be run serially and the entire test suite can take many many hours. This is mostly due to a hardware limitation (not enough physical NICs), but there are other SW factors as well.

What I would like to do is somehow be able to wrap up all the resources into a neat little package and then deploy that package into some kind of virtual environment that can be instantiated on a Jenkins job. The NIC issue would be replaced with a virtual one and *theoretically* I should be able to spawn as many instances of this virtual environment as my CPU and RAM can handle. In short, I want to pseudo parallelize our test suite and drive down our testing time. Somehow I would need to be able to control this entire thing from a script of some sort.

Does anyone know of something out there that would satisfy these kinds of requirements? Double internet points if it's open source.

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

So I've been using Duet on my iPad Pro for a couple years now (lets me use it as an external monitor via Lightning cable) and without issue. Shit, I've been quite happy with it. Then the other day, whilst hooked up to my work laptop, there was a power fluctuation that caused my laptop to stop sending power to connected devices. Which is fine - I have it plugged into a surge protector so these fluctuations shouldn't matter. After a few seconds the laptop resumed normal operation and my connected devices were up and running again.

But the iPad Pro, for some reason, went into an infinite boot loop sequence. It reboots, gets to the white Apple logo, then reboots again.

In the end, after putting the iPad into recovery mode and running Apple's update in iTunes (as they recommend), it proceeds to wipe all my data. Without warning. I lost more than a couple of years of notes, illustrations and photos. All in one fucking swoop.

To be clear, you get 2 options in iTunes when performing a device update:

1. UPDATE - will not mess with your data, will just update the OS (in this case iPadOS)
2. RESTORE - will delete everything, basically a factory reset

I clicked UPDATE. After the first attempt, it still kept bootlooping. So I did it again, I made sure I clicked UPDATE because I had not yet backed up my data. It then proceeds to do a RESTORE even though I clicked UPDATE.

Why, Apple? WHY.

After a solemn weekend lamenting my lost data, I've come a conclusion: fuck you Apple for designing very shitty software. I mean, why can't I access my device data over a cabled connection in the event I can't boot into the OS? If you need some form of authentication to keep out thieves, surely the mutltiple times you ask me to log in with my Apple ID on iTunes upon connecting the damn thing is more than sufficient?! You keep spouting that you have a secure boot chain and shit, surely it can verify a legitimate user using authenticated hardware without having to boot into the device OS?

And on the subject of backing up my data, you really only have 2 manual options here. Either (a) open iTunes, select your device, select the installed app, then selectively download the files onto my system; or (b) do a full device backup. Neither of those procedures is time-efficient nor straightforward. And if you want to do option b wirelessly, it can only be on iCloud. Which is bullshit. And you can't even access the files in the device backup - you can only get to them by restoring to your device. Even MORE bullshit.

Conversely, on my Android phone I can automate backups of individual apps, directories or files to my cloud provider of choice, or even to an external microSD card. I can schedule when the backups happen. I can access my files ANYTIME.

I got the iPad Pro because I wanted the best drawing experience, and Apple Pencil at the time was really the best you could get. But I see now it's not worth compromise of having shitty software. I mean, It's already 2021 but these dated piles of excrement that are iOS and iPadOS still act like it's 2011; they need to be seriously reviewed and re-engineered, because eventually they're going to end up as nothing but all UI fluff to hide these extremely glaring problems.

Ok, this is a weird one....
My main pc is a laptop running windows 10.
Recently it started doing this odd thing: sometimes when i click shutdown it shutdowns... And then turn back on by itself !!
Since i turn it on when i get back home and then shut it down when i go too sleep the first times it happened i thought that i pressed the restart button since they are close (and a few times it really happened) but since then i started beeing careful when clicking and yes, it turns on by itself wtf.
But this doesn't happen always so maybe it's a software bug (Does possession count as software issue ?) , if it was an hardware issue I'd expect it to happen always.
But since is not a major issue i keep forgetting of googling it.
Probably it's just a winzozz bug or it's the start of the AI uprising.... Who knows..

!rant
My home pc has developed a sudden issue and wont boot up anymore.

Stays stuck on the POST phase and am unable to get into BIOS , just stuck with a big asus logo and a message to press
F2 or Delete to get into BIOS but the system seems frozen as the keyboard lights are on but unresponsive while the
Mobo reads an error code A2
( the manual claims that to be an IDE error although am using only SATA)

Unplugging all usb doesnt change anything.

Unplugging all other sata ssd ,hdd and disk drives except the os drive changes nothing.

Unplugging the os drive results in the system complaining about no bootmgr
(As expected), that allows me to at least look at the BIOS but there doesnt seem to be anything wrong or out of the ordinary..

Booting from a live cd works fine

Booted from a pc boot repair tool and plugged in the os drive into one of the hot swappable sata ports shows me the all the files still there and accessible , check disk revealed nothing wrong. Can't plug in the os drive pre boot as that locks everything up again)

Tried to boot with a windows cd then do a start up repair but plugging in the os drive into the hot swappable sata doesn't work since windows can't see the drive.

Tried to swap the os drive with another one of exact same model filled witb random files resulted in no boot mgr error as expected

Struggled a whole weekend to fix it but alas no progress
Ah and the OS drive's warranty ran out 2 weeks ago 😑

Mobo asus p9x79 deluxe
Os ssd samsung 840 250 gb
No changes in hardware for the last year
Or so
No BIOS changes in over a year

I did notice some odd files like 0002Found
On the os drive when i was using the boot repair live cd tool, will bring the drive to
The office where i can get my hands on an ssd sata to usb caddy and take a snapshot of The files there for you guys to see.

Any ideas ? 😞

!long_rant
So, my previous rant was one of the most liked rant for me so far, in which I simply stated I am moving to Ubuntu.
I feel ashamed to say that I am moving back to Windows(for now at least).
The reason is not Ubuntu, I actually found it lovely. Its my friggin laptop. While there are many other problems, but the biggest is that the wifi adapter's range has fallen drastically in linux. On Windows it was working fine, I also checked Kali and tails(live) and both show the same issue. My router was literally 3 meters away and this shitty laptop couldn't connect. Since, it connects on Windows properly, its obviously a driver problem, the shitty creators haven't released an API for linux devs. Now, I have tried a lot of suggestions from SO but if I can't find a solution I will either have to arrange another laptop or simply go back to that always updating OS. There is another problem, the graphics card is not even being recognized. No idea how shitty hardare this laptop has.
Btw its an HP ac110tx.
Tell you what, I recently bought it from Paytm and thought its an i7 5gen processor with a graphics card for a reasonable price, what can go wrong. This is the issue. Hardware was shitty. I hate this laptop. If I had the money I wouldn't think twice before dumping this laptop on ebay/quickr. But, we are struggling devs(at least I am), don't have a big amount coming soon.
Very depressed and angry!

Need help/advise: 💻 Anyone's experience with Linux on MacBooks - I've had a lot of tried, including Arch, Ubuntu, Cent and probably more I can't remember.

🔴The issue is always the Desktop manager / UI / Window manager: either it's too 👹 ugly, or too heavy(read Ubuntu default).

Want to find the ultimate compromise with reasonable support for hardware, yet with high usability.

Things like multi-touch gestures are a bonus🔥(I know there's extra bins I can install for that)

I don't mind something more to configure, but would rather stick with apt-get and similar rather than having to manually build everything 😉

As you probably understood by now - I need something close to MacOS yet Linux based 😎

Guys please tell me a good linux distro ? Which provides the most suite suiteable dev env and I can play on all linux stuff there as well? I'm new to linux have tried elementry os didn't liked it was full of bugs.
Have just started installing ubuntu and its setup is crashing on my machine.. I have core i3 dell inspiron don't know if os's setp are causing issue or this laptop's hardware sucks

Obviously the top item on the table is NN, the "end users" from both sides of the connection on the net are for the saving it, and the middlemen that only own the "cables" want it to be repealed.

We have the solution to end this issue forever. It wont be easy, nor will it be fast.. unless certain "entities" team with us in secrecy. (There's a reason why certain "entities" have stayed silent regarding NN, due to agreements to not get involved due to the risk of backlash. AND if NN is repealed Those Entities cannot fix the problem as their hands are tied to continue to provide content to the end users.) Read between the lines you will understand it will all make sense later.

I will make The Official Public Statement within 24 hours of the FCC Vote. That statement will be how to get involved, help, get us jump started in your area, funding, the ENTIRE details of the plan, goals, and timeline. AS WELL as how to contact us. This will take time and we are not a magic solution that will fix the problem overnight.

We are however THE solution to the underlying problem with ISPs of today. We have been researching for quite a while and digging deep into the entities that have caused us to get where we are now. The further you go digging into 'THEM' the more pissed off you become as you truly realize whats going on and has been on among the ISPs its MUCH deeper than you are being told.

OUR solution will remove all of "them" from the equation completely as well as being faster, and cheaper than the Tier 1 as you wont be paying for the connection or speed, you would be paying for the hardware/overhead cost. AND we will be bringing you closer to the content providers than EVER before.

AND we will be the only solution capable for competing in the current Tier1 Monopoly zones, I promise you they cannot match our plan's price, IF they did it would be only as a loss leader and NOT a sustainable long term solution for those competing with us at are for-profit....

In order for our solution to work, and to keep the internet service non-bias, well non-bias from OUR members :) this will need to be a collective effort, focused one clearly defined vision. WE WILL AND WE MUST ALL set "profits" aside on this as profits in selling nothing other "connection" to the internet has gotten us in the mess we are in now. AND YES we realize profits help maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, BUT that isn't true in this case...Overhead from our view includes those anticipated costs.

Smaller ISPs will need to make a decision, give up profits, become one with us, and be apart of the mission OR they will be left to suffer at the mercy of the ISPs above them setting the cost of bandwidth eventually leading to their demise.

This will happen because we wont be bound by the T1s .... WE would be the "Tier 0" that doesn't exist ;)

This sounds crazy, impossible, BUT its not, it will work WILL happen, regardless of the FCC's vote. as if the FCC choices to keep NN, its only a matter of time till the big lawyers of the ISPs find some loophole, or lobby enough to bring us back to this.

Legistlation is NOT the solution its just a band-aid fix as the cancer continues to grow within.

PLEASE understand that

Until the vote is made, and we release what we are doing, stay put, hang in, it will all be explained later, we are the only true solution.

BIG-ISPs WILL REGRET WHAT THEY HAVE DONE!

What needs to be understood by all is with net neutrality inplace the ability to compete aginst the Tier 1s directly over customers and reinvent the internet to lower or remove costs completely, increase speeds AND expand to underserved/unserved communities ITS NOT POSSIBLE WITH NN

NN REPEAL is the only way to the fixing the problem for good... yes the For profit BIG ISPs will benefit but not forever.. as repealing it opens the doors for outside the box big picture innovators to come in and offer something different, the big ISPs have clearly over looked this small detail being the possibility of a “NonProfit CoOp TIER 1 ISP” entering into the game thru end users and businesses working together as one entity to defeat them... THE FOR PROFIT ISPs over looked this because they are blinded by the profit potential of NN Repeal, never did they consider our option as a possible outcome because no one has attempted it....

We will unite as one

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