So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

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" };

The Top 20 replies by programmers when their programs do not work:

20. "That's weird..."
19. "It's never done that before."
18. "It worked yesterday."
17. "How is that possible?"
16. "It must be a hardware problem."
15. "What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?"
14. "There is something funky in your data."
13. "I haven't touched that module in weeks!"
12. "You must have the wrong version."
11. "It's just some unlucky coincidence."
10. "I can't test everything!"
9. "THIS can't be the source of THAT."
8. "It works, but it hasn't been tested."
7. "Somebody must have changed my code."
6. "Did you check for a virus on your system?"
5. "Even though it doesn't work, how does it feel?
4. "You can't use that version on your system."
3. "Why do you want to do it that way?"
2. "Where were you when the program blew up?"

And the Number One reply by programmers when their programs don't work:

1. "It works on my machine."

Pc wouldn't boot. Went to the service center.
The guy at the shop : what's the problem?
Me : pc won't boot, just starts beeping
The guy : I see. It could be a hardware or a software problem.
Me : (trying to keep a straight face) oh?
Him : oh yes... It's always either a software or a hardware problem.
Me : thanks I guess?

WTF Python!!! "Master" and "Slave" perfectly convey the concept. In the English language many words have different meanings based on their context. It's plainly obvious that no allusion to human slavery is meant in the context of software or hardware module relationships. I don't even think it is problematic. The real problem seems to be the people who are taking terms outside their intended space. Why are we linking a scar on human history to terminologies explaining technical relationships?

Then lets also ban 0 and 1 because it can offends non-binary peoples!

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

1. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

2. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.

3. A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content.

4. Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC

5. Why do they call it hyper text?
Too much JAVA.

6. Why was the JavaScript developer sad?
Because he didn't Node how to Express himself

7. In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

8. Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they can't C#

9. What do you call 8 hobbits?
A hobbyte

10. Why did the developer go broke?
Because he used up all his cache

11. Why did the geek add body { padding-top: 1000px; } to his Facebook profile?
He wanted to keep a low profile.

12. An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer, alcohol

13. I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

14. 8 bytes walk into a bar, the bartenders asks "What will it be?"
One of them says, "Make us a double."

15. Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"
The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."

16. These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

17. "Knock, knock. Who's there?"
very long pause...
"Java."

18. If you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.

19. There's a band called 1023MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

20. There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

>>> print(whoSaid("OlderFriend"))
About 20ish years ago I was working in IT, and it was about around this time where CD-Roms were hitting the stores and becoming the newest craze. However, Microsoft did not write the drivers correctly for this new hardware.

In a nutshell, the driver would be installed and the user would lose the sound to their speaker.

How did this happen? By altering the way the interrupts worked on the computer. At the time there only existed a few unreserved IRQs or Interrupt ReQuests. The installer package would redirect IRQ 5 which is "User Selectable (Sound Cards)" to work with the CD-Rom. This was fine and all unless you wanted to listen to your speakers.

I had come up with a clever hack through rewriting a config file that would be run during bootup. So at the time of boot up IRQ 5 would be dedicated to the sound card, and IRQ7 (which was usually for the Lpt1 Printer) would be dedicated to the CD-Rom. This worked.
And because I was IT at the time, I would get a lot of calls for fixing this problem.

So, as you can imagine, I've gotten **really** good at doing this. I didn't even need to be at a computer to walk someone through the problem.

I receive a call one day, it was a problem with the CD-Rom and sound card. I walk him through the problem and he reboots his computer. I could hear him on the other side jumping with joy when he was able to put in his music CD and hear sound coming from the speakers.

He asks me, how in the hell did you figure this out!? You're a fucking Genius!

And I said, It's not rocket science it's just a computer.

There was a long pause of silence.

Uhhh... Hello? Did I say something wrong?

Sir, I work at NASA I deal with Rocket Science on a daily basis.

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."

How many devs does it take to fix a light bulb?
None, it's a hardware problem.

I can get absolutely dead pissed by the fact that a FUCKING 1800 euro laptop can't do a fucking basic thing like connecting to a bloody WiFi ap?

so why, you wonder? oh no, the problem isn't the fucking hardware. IT'S THIS DEAD BEAT PIECE OF SHIT CALLED WINDOWS. mfw when it runs fine under Linux, BUT WE CANT HAVE NICE THINGS CAN WE ADOBE?!?

How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

None, it's a hardware problem!

Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?

This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.

Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.

Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.

Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.

React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.

Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.

There is no technology on Earth that speaks worse of Microsoft than is this crap. Nothing they ever made (not even Comic Sans) is as bad as Sharepoint.

No proper editor. Everything is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. To run it you need a state-of-the-art server. There is no way to make the UI modern, as Sharepoint itself is built upon 1995 era HTML. Tables in tables in tables in tables in tables. And even if you do a web part that's readable, it will be wrapped in shit and presented to the client anyway.
It's so easy to break too. Most of the time I was just watching why the fuck it didn't work. Huge problem with caching as well. Deploying any change requires 10 minutes of manual labor.

I get why companies want to use it. Out of the box it's got quite a few very nice features, and aside from the problems setting it up, and hardware requirements, it works decently well.

But I won't come near it unless I'm paid 100$ per hour or starving to death.

How many programmers dose it take to change a lightblub?

None, it's a hardware problem.

Q: How many developers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None, it's a hardware problem.

Do you know when you think "Oh that doesn't look too hard. I bet I can do it in no time"?
That is how I felt when I saw the DIY 3D printer kit Anet A8. It's only 150€ on gearbest so that is pretty cheap.
The reviews said it takes about 3 - 4 hours to build and I though "Ok I am a computer specialist and engineer so 3h sounds reasonable".
When I bought it from gearbest the first problems started: 5 days after the estimated shipping date the packet was still not on its way. After I fucked the support up, it finally arrived 3 weeks after the estimated date.
When I took the first look, everything seemed to be fine except for some small scratches but for that price that is not a problem.
So I started to build the printer at about 14:00 and even if some random sites in the manual were in Chinese I felt confident to get it done in a view hours.
And then it started to get really fucked. The first problem was that 2 screws were unusable and I had to use my own screws instead. The next problem was that the manual was just in the wrong fucking order at some points and I had to reverse multiple steps to get it right.
But the most fucked up thing: There should have been 2 threaded rods with a length of 345mm but the rods had a length of 310mm which was nowhere listed in the parts list. So I had to go buy some aluminium rods to fill the gap temporary so that I can at least go on with the build before getting a replacement. And I could go on and on and with the problems but the point is, it is now 19:30 which is about 5.5 hours after I started and I am still not fucking done with this.

So what have I learned?
Cheap Chinese hardware is good, but only as long as you don't have to assemble that shit yourself.

My colleague and I have 12 years of college and 10 years of experience between us. Can't figure out how to connect a fucking phone headset.

Today a few friends got together and built my gfs new computer. I just watched because.... I'm a hardware n00b :p

Anyways, it took them about 2 hours building all the stuff together and now we're done installing Windows from via disc. The problem is, it's 2015 windows. So we're updating.
And it already takes more time to update windows than building the actual computer.

Nice!

(Btw that's me in the background, super [not] comfy codepen-ing)

I fucking love HP.

Why, you may ask, given that I've ranted about their crap so many times now? Great question!

I love HP because every time I go to town on their hardware because yet again it got me infuriated somehow, I don't feel bad about it afterwards. Instead I feel oddly satisfied, liberated from another piece of crap from them. And besides, usually it's their or Acer's shitty hardware that gets me worked up anyway.

That said, fuck you HP. Filthy Microsucking pieces of shit.

.. anyway. I've just went around disassembling an old vacuum cleaner this morning, to liberate its 800W single phase AC motor. I'll probably have to underrun it with a step-down transformer but at e.g. 200VAC it should probably work no problem 🙂

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)

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

Migrated to SharePoint 2016 which included Reporting Services, and trying to fix a bug in the reporting services scheduler, I created a report (aka, copied an existing one) 'A Klingon Walks Into a Bar', so it would first in the list and distinct enough so the QA testers would (hopefully) leave it alone.

The PM for the project calls me.
PM: "What is this Klingon report? It looks like a copy of the daily inventory report"
Me: "It is. The reporting service job keeps crashing on certain reports that have daily execution schedules."
PM: "I need you to delete it"
Me: "What? Why? The report is on the dev sharepoint site. I named the report so it was unique and be at the top of the list so I can find it easily."
PM: "The name doesn't conform to our standards and it's confusing the testers."
Me: "The testers? You mean Dan, you, and Heather?"
PM: "Yes, smartass. Can you name the report something like daily inventory report 2, or something else?"
Me: "I could, but since this is in development, no. You've already proofed out the upgrade. You're waiting on me to fix this sharepoint bug. Why do you care what I do on this server? It's going away after the upgrade."
PM: "Yea, about that. We like having the server. It gives us a place to test reports. Would really appreciate it if you would rename or delete that report."
Me: "A test sharepoint reporting services server out of scope, so no, we're not keeping it."
PM: "Having a server just for us would be nice."
Me: "$10,000 nice? We're kinda fudging on the licensing now. If we're keeping it, we will be required to be in compliance. That's a server license, sharepoint license, sql server license, and the dedicated hardware. We talked about that, remember?"
PM: "Why is keeping that report so important to you? I don't want to explain to a VP what a Klingon is."
Me: "I'm not keeping the report or moving it to production. When I figure out the problem, I'll delete the report. OK?"
PM: "I would prefer you delete the report before a VP sees it."
Me: "Why would a VP be looking? They probably have better things to do."
PM: "Jeff wants to see our progress, I'll have to him the site, and he'll see the report."
Me: "OK? You tell Jeff it's a report I'm working on, I'll explain what a Klingon is, Jeff will call me a nerd, and we all move on."
PM: "I'm not comfortable with this upgrade."
Me: "What does that mean?"
PM: "I asked for something simple and I can't be responsible for the consequences. I'll be documenting this situation as a 'no-go' for deployment"
Me: "Oookaayyy?"

I figured out the bug, deleted the 'Klingon' report, and the PM couldn't do anything to delay the deployment.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.

Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.

Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.

One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.

Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)

VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).

Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.

Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.

The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.

Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.

About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.

MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"

Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.

WTF!

I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.

She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)

MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."

Sometimes I feel people underestimate us.

During all my life, people has asked me if I can fix their *any device* because it goes slowly/something doesn't work.

But, of course, for free. Because they think the only thing we do is pushing 3 buttons and everything is done. They think everything solves itself easily.

Then is the fact that we should be able to fix everything always. Even if the hardware is broken. Even if there isn't any way to solve the problem.

I think we deserve a little bit more from society. I don't expect people to understand what we do but at least something better than the guy who formats your computer when it starts to go slow.

(Maybe I'm the only one who feels that way or it's just where I live, idk)

Damn maintenance windows. I mean, I get that the SaaS product my boyfriend works on can't go out in the middle of the day. But he just spent weeks on a business trip, with an absolutely mad sleep schedule because he's redesigning their data center (or something. Don't ask me, it's a hardware problem...) and now he's finally coming home today and I'm super excited but all he's going to want to do this weekend is sleep. Even though I'd love to spend Sunday going to this yearly event, or finally getting another round of DnD in (everyone else in the group is available). But nope. Bloody all-hours work is taking away his (and thus my) weekend too.

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.

You'll be surprised, but it's Microsoft for me.
When I started out, windows(95, yes I'm old, thanks for noticing) was the shit for me and I was quite a fanboy of it.
However, when a friend of mine introduced me to Linux, I quickly changed my mind because so many small things were way better. Then, when Vista came out, I switched completely.
That, on its own, was an adventure, but that's another rant for another time(Me and my pal were the only Linux users in the town we lived in, so without online shopping, perusing the local hardware vendors was like meeting a Neolithic tribe. It's definitely rantworthy on its own, if only for nostalgia).
The more I learned about Free Software and what Corporations could do with their power, the more I came to despise the companies I used to advocate for.
Now, it's 2018 and people bitch about what Facebook, Microsoft and their equally evil buddies do. Yet, 2013, when PRISM hit the fan, they once again ran to their arms instead of fixing the problem properly. That's about when I lost the last bit of respect for people.
And now I'm sitting here playing the world's tiniest open source violin, singing "won't get fooled again" by The Who.

So, first time ranting, sorry if I mess anything up.
When I first started my current job and got introduced to the system we were coding in, something seemed a little fishy to me. Didn't like the system anyway, but at least the language is a compiler language, so it runs quite quickly, right?
In theory, yeah. If the lead dev liked the IDE that came with it. But he has to REALLY fucking hate it, because rather than using it, he codes in plaintext. No syntax highlighting, no auto-indent, nothing. And he's built the entire damn system around doing that. Sadly the compiler is only integrated into the IDE, so what do we do there? Copy the code from the plaintext file to the IDE to compile it there? No no, why would you. The language has a function you can use to compile some code at runtime.
And so he does. Every. Single. Fucking. Script. There's a single main script that runs and finds the correct textfile to then runtime-compile and execute. So we effectively made a compiler language into a massively unoptimized interpreter lang.
I even mentioned that this might be a problem, but I was completely dismissed, so at that point it's not my problem anymore and I have then switched to a different system anyway.
Couple weeks later I heard the same guy complaining that the scripts were running almost the whole night so we'd probably need some better hardware or something.
Well if only there was a really obvious solution that would improve the performance by probably about a factor of 20 or so...

This is why I hate Windows:

For about a month now, I've been learning/working on salesforce, so my Macbook was enough for me.
Today there was a bug in something I built in iur Python backend, and since it has a dependency on windows, I booted the old guy up.

And this is what I see. For about 1.5 hours this went on.

Then it started, but system consuming 100% disk and 80+% CPU. Can't do a thing.

And when zoom finally opened (for a quick meet), the camera turned on halfway down the meeting, and then the system restarted on it's own.

Old man showing that same screen again for more than 30 minutes.

Since I have dual boot on this one, I hard-shutdown it using power button, and now boot into ubuntu 20. This works so beautifully (although it froze for about 5 seconds before popping up the updates panel, something I CHOSE to keep enabled). I try going back to Windows, and it's hell again.

Here I am now trying to set up a ec2 instance and setup the app source there so that I can debug with RDP.

And yeah, Component Object Model is a motherfucking bitch. Person who invented it should die. People who build apps leveraging this should die. Business leaders who say "Hey this app (built with COM) can solve the problem easily, so use this" should die choking on their own phallus. And developers like me who keep using this because "the last guy did this" should die too.

Microsoft and it's products are the death of sane people.

Fucking Gates. Its the same damn hardware.

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

None, it's a hardware problem.

Q: How many developers does it take to change a lightbulb? 💡

A: None. It's a hardware problem. 👩‍💻

for your next edition of "TI's constantly been smoking crack since the 80s and has no intention of ever stopping":

the TI-8x calculators have a hardware buffer and an OS-provided buffer for screen data, effectively being an "immediate" buffer in hardware, to be displayed next VBlank, and a "slower" buffer, being what's copied to the "immediate" buffer when the OS decides it's time to update the screen. All well and good, maybe a little weirdly done but all in all makes sense. (You can even define a third buffer in RAM if you need to triple-buffer your shit.)

The problem arises when you use TI-BASIC and try to draw to the screen:
If you do something like, say, draw a circle, you'll notice that it's visibly drawn to the screen one pixel at a time. However, looking through what bits of the SDK I can find, the OS' "draw circle" assembly routine *doesn't update the immediate buffer!*

This means that, in TI-BASIC, the "draw circle" routine doesn't use the ACTUAL circle-drawing routine the OS provides, but instead individually calculates and plots a pixel, then updates the hardware buffer (an ENTIRE 768 bytes are copied EVERY TIME) and waits for VBlank to pass before repeating for the next one. In other words, it's deliberately slow as fuck.

Why? All the drawing commands, outside of like 2 or 3, do this. Why would you deliberately slow down the process of drawing to the screen on a system that you KNEW would be popular for people to code on???

I learnt something from every single project I made, but this one... it was really different, new language, new library, new hardware.

Problem:
there's an infopoint in a place, that was really hard to use (ball mouse over a monitor)

Solution:
make the screen be touch.

Developing the solution:
- after a bit of research I find out there's a library/project called OpenCV
- there are example programs that detect hands written in C++ (which I know) and Python (which I don't know)
- the whole infopoint works on a raspberry PI, with raspbian (I'm not new to linux, but it's somehow different, plus tons of customization)

So I spend like 3 weeks trying to understand how to make it work, at first, the webcam was on the TV and you could move the mouse just by shaking your hand, but it didn't work too well, so we tried making the webcam look at the screen and then calculate the differences between "no-hands" and "user-hand", but should have been calibrated, wasn't too precise... dropped solution.

put the webcam 30cm above the screen, let it just analyse a few centimeters of sight from the screen and it worked flawlessly, BUT it could just recognise the horizontal axis => had to rework the infopoint UI to make it dumb-easy

It all finally worked, I learnt python, openCV, a bit of photography

Then hated it all and decided to never do that again

Okay, Google. Stop this.

I'm very upset. Drive applications have gotten slower and slower over time on every single browser that isn't chromium based. This isn't their fault. You can't make your application, that tons of institutions pay for, gradually slower on every browser that's not yours. This never used to be a problem, and now it affects everyone *but you*. It's highly suspicious given your track record with YouTube. Hidden div over the video to prevent hardware optimization. What the hell?

You used to be the only big 4 company I had some trust left in. Over the last few months, I've lost it.

My job environment is either fucked up or am too young to understand what a job life is.
I was hired to intern for a startup having 2 main bosses/founders . one of them is mostly administrative and comes to office daily. He sets some tasks and i have to complete them, as soon as possible or sometimes till a deadline. He has little knowledge about the complexity of wotk so usually he says "just complete it as soon as possible so we could release it" but we haven't pushed any updates since i joined (of course i have completed some tasks, but they are just not pushed to the release version)

The other one , as i ranted previously is a completely different story.I think he is an elder bro or senior of the other boss,but he is just a superman: dealing with the distributers, commanding the hardware ppl, discussing with the othr boss, handling the server and most importantly the guy who wrote all the code i am working on. So he comes extremely rarely(1 or 2 days / week) , tries to communicate with me , but is immediately diverted by some other call/person and goes away.

The problem is : am feeling a little helpless. They give me tasks and i start working on them with excitement .( I don't believe myself to be a terrible beginner: i have been learning/working on android development for past 1 year, i know my things. And even if i don't, i know how to search/debug and produce results) . So as usual, i start and try to apply my skills / search for things i don't / try to understand his large,overwhelming and confusing codebase and at the end am stuck at some point where i don't understand what to do next. Sometimes its a bug which doesn't seems to fix, sometimes its a thing thats in the codebase but i couldn't find or sometimes it's just something i couldn't seem to understand why isn't it working. At that time, I only wish that boss to be here and look at what and how i have done, if its a correct approch and how can we together take it to completion (or simply wtf am i doing wrong, see my shit and tell me) .

But again, the tech boss is busy or wouldn't have time to understand my problem in our short , incomplete meetings. But he or the nontech boss will definitely have the time to ask the sttus of project and pressurise for the "deadline" .

Like today, i was so stuck at this fucking one line error that i couldn't detect that i just messaged him that am leaving for home 3 hours early. He came running and for the first time in history gave me a complete undisturbed time. It was such a small mistake, but i wasn't able to catch on my own. But when i told him, he immediately caught , changed a single line and the code started to work.

I am feeling irritated. Is this all a correct environment?

(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.

Am I the only one with sore thumbs from using a phone and typing at work all day? Everyone talks about their phone and features it should have but I'm just like "hardware ain't shit if you're going to break your hands using it"

I think it's a tall people with big hands problem.

When I was younger I had a decision to go into hardware or software. I chose software and have loved it.

Recentily I just spent 5 hours trying install a Linux distro on an old server. I made no progress.

I made the right decision. Hardware freaking sucks! You spend hours working on outdated pieces of crap and find that to fix your problem you need to sell you kidney to finance your project. Not to mention you have to wait for literally everything! It's like gradel builds everywhere! Want to install a new distro on your USB? Bam, 5min gone. Want to boot into bios and change one setting? BAM! more time wasted...

A note to the sysadmins out there: thank you. I love you. I am so happy you do this kind of work so I don't have to.

!rant
How many Programmers Does it take to Change a Light Bulb?
.
.
.
.
.
None - It's a Hardware Problem

Hardware Developing.

My current school project where I build a gps thief lock for my moped had me realized one thing. I don't want to go into Hardware Developing. The first problem took me about 4 months until I finally gave up and solved it differently. And this goes on and on and on. You fixed something and the next day it doesn't work anymore for some reason. I never had this problem when coding. It's fun to do stuff with electronics but coding is just way more rewarding. Anyone else had the same experience?

Q: How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: None. It's a hardware problem.

I wonder if you guys can help, nobody else seems to.

Nine months ago I packed my desktop away because I had to move.
I then turned it on a few weeks ago and noticed a curious problem: the audio and video stutters.
I don't know why this happens.

I tried booting into Linux, and didn't see any stuttering. I went back over to windows and updated all the drivers, but nothing worked.
Last night I did a full system wipe, and re-installed windows without leaving any of the old files.

The error still persists.

I have no clue what might be wrong with the computer.
For all I know it's the hardware that's failing, but I don't have any idea which component in the system is leading to this strange behaviour.

Maybe you guys know enough to shed some light on this?

How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

None, it's a hardware problem!

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.

VPN noob here .... if anybody can help
Thanks..
It's showing it has full signal strength but does not connect to any, and the red 'X' is always there, is it a hardware problem ?

grrrr

last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure

my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks

so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao

walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt

got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.

walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe

so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator

yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?

... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...

fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT

I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch

i'm currently working on a FOSS project with 2 friends and try to do some kind of VHDL (virtual hardware description language) code generator in javascript
the more i think about the structure i need to build, the possible combinations, the automation of describing all components, yada yada yada, the more i get this feeling it's becoming an NP problem ... or at least a very big algorithm😅😐
let alone the problem of saving the whole goddamn code in files downloadable by the client via javascript🙄
heard of nodejs that supports file handling, might try that🤔

How mamy programmers does it take to change a light bulb ?? None!! It's a hardware problem!!! Old one but best one :D

It's a hardware problem... Between the chair and the keyboard

How many programmers do you need to change a light bulb?

No one, it's a hardware problem!

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.

Someone said that I should optimize the performance of a website. In fact, the problem was the hardware specs and they still want me to optimize the UI. I have less dependencies, no weird event loops and a JSON that is twice as big because the guys at the backend said they're too lazy to optimize it.

So... It's either they upgrade the specs or blame the guys who made the api response.

My most hated term BY FAR is "In theory". It's a lousy-ass, weak excuse for not doing shit properly while distancing yourself from the problem. Short guide: "in theory" may be used prior to or following a statement in which you have little or no confidence in.

The web server shouldn't reach the database server "in theory", it fucking does or doesn't. The SQL cluster shouldn't "in theory" fail over to a working server in case of a hardware fault. Fuck off with your irresponsibility, man up and do things properly. This is the real world, not a sandbox for your shitty dorm room code

Okay, so because my desktop has an APU (AMD A8-3850) and a dedicated GPU (AMD R9 380) in it, and i'm finally getting a (small, probably 240GB because budget) SSD for it, what Linux distro should I use? I'm planning on doing libvirt passthrough for Windows using my APU because fuck running it as a main anymore, it breaks too often. As far as I can tell, my options are as such, family-wise:

- Debian kernel: amdgpu doesn't like that I have an APU and GPU and refuses to see a screen (yes, even after all the Xorg configs and xrandr bullshit and kernel flags and...)

- RHEL: a lot of Red Hat-based distros (mainly Fedora) have packages that are broken out-of-repo and out-of-box recently, but maybe it'll like my hardware? (It's been a few Fedora releases since I last tried it, is this fixed? CentOS has such old packages that it's not even worth bothering with for my needs.)

- Arch kernel: go fuck yourself, i don't wanna take 1000 hours to get it running for a week, nor would the updates be any better than Windows' current problem (or even more so, as slightly more often than not Windows' broken updates just add annoyances and don't hose the system.)

did I miss any?

Guys i have a damn problem with my friends laptop (yes i don't like doing it, but have no choice)
I can't intall on this laptop any windows (good for me, but not for friend) beck use of blue screen A5 or sometimes B7.
I read about this and it might be bios, but it's updated. I can't see any hardware dmg.
Linux work perfect :(

Have you idea what to do?

I don't understand those rants about problems that can be fixed by just googling some keywords..or even the slightly harder ones where you could just tinker with the device for a bit and get closer to a solution/workaround... i mean if it's not a hardware problem then it can clearly have a solution.
my reasons:
1- you use your knowledge for good
2- you learn something new
3- you don't let the tech guys get bothered by small tedious problems

Q: How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. It's a hardware problem.

Why i got the message 'Input/Output Error" when mounting /dev/mmcblk0p2....
Nothing crashed till i just booted twice to enter different systems Android and MeeGo (via Ubiboot).And when i powered off my Android and tried to boot into MeeGo, it said "Boot OS/kernel selection failed! \n Please run a maintance boot"

I already ran a maintance boot...
And i entered Ubiboot's Telnet (low battery), found that /dev/mmcblk0p2 failed to mount with an error "Input/Output error", but i dd'd this partition (copy data into a file), everything was fine...
And after that, my phone turned into blank...

So can anybody tell me how to fix this? It's not like a hardware problem, i think there's something wrong with the data in the partition, like the header...