"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

During a random school project.

Me: *Explains why team members idea is bad*

Team member: *Im going to do it like this anyways.*

Me: *add explaination of why idea is bad to git commit log.*

1 week later: some parts of the project dont work like they are suppost to.

Team member: *dude can you help me bla bla....(encounters issue i mentioned regarding his idea)*

Me: *no, i've already got too much on my plate. please, sort it out yourself....*

At the presentation

Teacher: *ask question about problem*

Team member: *tries to blame the problem on me....*

Me: *shows git commit log to teacher*

Me: *passing grade*

Team member: *failing grade*

Justice served.

Conversation today...

Guy: "Hey I need a real quick script to pull some values out of an XML document...is that possible?"

Me: "Uh...yeah that's pretty simple if that's all it has to do."

Guy: "Ok excellent I'll send you some files and documentation."

Me: "Ok so is this like a one time use thing or do you need to parse multiple of these?"

Guy: "Actually it needs to run all the time, on this specific PC, watch directories for any files that are added, then generate a XLSX files of the values, and also log information to a database. Etc"

Me: "Oh that adds quite a bit of complexity from what you originally said. It's going to take more time."

Guy: "But you said it was easy."

Well fuck you...

I changed my Wi-Fi name to Syntax Error and made some changes to the configuration. I wanted to disable the admin page at the 2.4Ghz connection, but I got kicked out at 5Ghz as well. So I couldn't log in anymore and resetting the router didn't helped.

So I called the ISP if they can restore it to factory settings, but the guy on the phone didn't understand a thing I said. He said to me: "Sir I don't exactly understand what u say, but I can see an Syntax Error. Do you want me to fix it." And I laughed and I laughed.. I told him that's the Wi-Fi name but ofcourse he didn't got the joke. I called again and got someone else on the phone. He's resetting the router in a one minute call.

Had some fun this morning.

Dumbest feature request was to hide log out button so that people do not leave the website 😂

Sent an email out in work informing everyone that we had pushed updates out to all Windows PC's.

Got the following phone call 10 minutes later:

"Hi, I can't log into the banking account app on my iPhone. Did you do something to it with your updates?"

"Nope. They were PC updates."

"Well, I'm sorry but you're wrong. It must be you! It was working yesterday."

"Again, it's not us. What's the error message you're getting on your app?"

"Invalid password"

".....then could it just be that you're entering an invalid password?"

"No, I know the password. I only changed it yesterday!"

"So it was working before you changed the password?"

"That's what i said!
I'm telling you, it's your updates."

"Okay but before we go 'troubleshoot' it, how about ringing your bank firs-"

"Oh look, it doesn't matter if you don't want to help, I don't have time for this!
I'll ring your boss and he'll uninstall the updates for me and fix the app." *hangs up*

6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.

4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.

7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.

7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.

7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.

7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.

7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.

7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood

7:41am - found it.

7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.

8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.

8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.

8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.

8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.

8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.

8:12am - got on devRant.

More like the most obvious thing I accidentally left OUT of an application without thinking about it.

"application seems advanced/cool/working! Oh by the way how do I log out?"

😐😮😧😅😰😭

Not mine but an error message in a game when you're trying to logout:

"You're currently not logged in. Please log in to log out."

Logically valid though

My experience with Adobe...
(I recently moved to Canada)

Me: I want to give you money. (Tries to pay with Canadian card)

Adobe: Sorry, you have a US account, you must use a US card.

Me: Okay, what are my options to pay with my Canadian card?

Adobe: We have to delete your US account and create a Canadian one.

Me: Okay... Why can't you just switch the country from US to Canada on my account?

Adobe: *bullcrap response*

Me: Okay, delete it and transfer everything.

*Kicks me out of the chat.
*I log back in. Try to reconnect to customer service chat.

Adobe: AdobeID unable to participate in chat.

*I'm 30 minutes into this ordeal

Me: (to myself) I could literally torrent this program in 5 minutes 🤔

Lesson: if a company wants people to not torrent their software make it easier for a willing fucking customer to buy your software!

Since the chat doesn't work anymore, I called customer service and am still on hold.... 😤😤😤

Why does the internet have borders?

Dev: Ok issue fixed, you just need to log out and back in again on your end to receive the fix

User: It’s still not working

Dev: Did you log out and in again?

User: No why would I want to do that?

Dev: It’ll reset your locally saved login information which is causing the issue

User: I thought you said the issue was fixed?

Dev: On our end yes, we just need you to reset your end in order to receive the fixed version

User: Look I have been dealing with this issue for 6 months. Fixing bugs are your responsibility. I have too much to do, you have to get this fixed. *click*.

Dev: Yeah you submitted the bug ticket yesterday night though

Email from users manager later that day: <User> is saying you are refusing to fix this bug. This is unacceptable. Fix it or else I will escalate this. Also there are other bugs we noticed today too, fixing them is absolutely critical!

Dev: …

Dev: What other bugs did you notice?

*no response for 2 weeks and then:

User: Hey you can close this ticket, the issue seems to have resolved itself.

Dev: ….muppet.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

Me: *uses google chrome*
Parents: Stop, log out of everything, you're hogging up the internet, omg
Me: *unplugs computer*
Parents: *their computer still not working* You downloaded a virus to our wifi you're grounded for a month

Clicking on Logout Button.
..
.
.
Getting a message...
"your session is expired you need to log in again to perform this action"

hmm... should I log in again to perform log out :)

Waaaay too many but let's go with this one for now.

At my previous job there was a web application which was generating about 1gb of log data a second. Server was full and the 'fullstack engineers' we called had zero clue about backend stuff and couldn't fix it.

Me and another engineer worked our asses off to figure this out but eventually the logging stopped and it went back to normal.

Great, right?

For that moment. I was the on-call server engineer and at like 3am I got called awake because this shit was happening again.
Sleep drunk with my phone I ssh'd into the server, not sure about what to do at first but then suddenly: let's chattr the goddamn log file...

$ chattr +i /var/log/logfile

Bam, worked, done, back to sleep.

(this comment + param marks the file in a way that it can only be read until the mark is removed, so you can't write to it or move it or remove it or whatever)

"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"

1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.

Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?

Holy fuck, this is starting to work!

Problem: I am highly anti google/facebook/few others and I'd rather null route those DNS requests.
The problem is that the pihole only can blacklist domains or wildcard domains but not words. So if Google would come up with a new name for some of their domains, I'd be fucked because I can't filter out the word Google through the pihole.

Today I fucking found the solution (still a work in progress but a PoC is nearly working):
Compiled a program which can monitor DNS queries/requests and logs them to a file.
Have a php (yes I write most of my cli tools in php) script tailing the log file and gathering the requested domains from it.
Then I can see if the domain contains the substring which I don't like (google as word for example) and echo it to the end of my hosts file with 0.0.0.0 in front of it if that's the case.

Holy fuck this seems to be working! 😍

Bossman freaks out over every little thing (ironically unless it's important).

Bossman also just set our papertrail 500 filter to forward him a copy of every "critical alert."

Fuck me.

He has zero technical knowledge and zero reading comprehension. He literally forwarded one and said "This has one lots of info in it. explain it to me." (It was a log usage notification. in plain English. It had maybe three numbers in it.)

There's lots of useless "500"s in the list we don't care about. API Guy used the finer as a debugging alert system, and peppered his logs with "500 internal hey look at this." In fact, none of the 500s were even interesting; all but one was spam.

All day I've been tending to freakouts and accusations of me not doing anything. Ugh.

Once I applied for a Java position and they sent me a a online test, user and password. When I first tried to log in, it gave me an java exception. I lost hours trying to figure out the exception , thinking it was the test :/

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

Colleagues sharing passwords.That was a big fat NO when I was a sysadmin - and for a good reason. But now, since I'm closer to development, it feels like no one really cares about the passwords. If I tell my colleague I'll take 10 minutes more because I can't log in, he OFFERS me his credentials. And sends them over saying "in case you need it". [the next day the same colleague was complaining his account is locked out. Oh, wonders! How on Earth...!]

But seriously, password sharing is a serious problem. I would fire the person on spot if I caught him sharing his credentials! This is the 8th deadly sin! IDC if they are for non-prod. Most people reuse their passwords in multiple systems, and even non-prod envs can bring the prod down! Or worse - install a trojan.

!security

(Less a rant; more just annoyance)

The codebase at work has a public-facing admin login page. It isn't linked anywhere, so you must know the url to log in. It doesn't rate-limit you, or prevent attempts after `n` failures.

The passwords aren't stored in cleartext, thankfully. But reality isn't too much better: they're salted with an arbitrary string and MD5'd. The salt is pretty easy to guess. It's literally the company name + "Admin" 🙄

Admin passwords are also stored (hashed) in the seeds.rb file; fortunately on a private repo. (Depressingly, the database creds are stored in plain text in their own config file, but that's another project for another day.)

I'm going to rip out all of the authentication cruft and replace it with a proper bcrypt approach, temporary lockouts, rate limiting, and maybe with some clientside hashing, too, for added transport security.

But it's friday, so I must unfortunately wait. :<

This tiny project is awesome. Thanks to @JoshBent (who partly got it from another repo as well) for providing a basic DNS server with hardcoded blacklisting functionality and thanks to @PerfectAsshole for correcting my mysql syntax I was stuck on for way too long.

I've now got this fucker to read blacklisted words from a redis list into an array which checks every requested domain to see if it matches. If yes, it proxies it through to another DNS server and if not, it'll log the requested domain to a mysql database and prints is as blocked onto the terminal.

If the domain matches any host from a service known to be integrated within a mass surveillance network, it also prints this out to thy terminal.

It's working yay! Gonna keep working on it today.

Overheard a phone call between the Senior Network Engineer and a contracted Printer-company at 9am this morning. Photocopier was giving a 'functional error' message on-screen and not printing;

N.E:
I logged this call last
Thursday afternoon. Thats 1.5 days of the photocopier not working on our busiest site! Where's the engineer??
.... yes, that's the error message.
Yes, i can log into it, you should have the IP address from the call.
Yes, it's obviously pinging too.
Yes.... we've power-cycled the printer multiple times...
yes, tried that too...
yes, I've unplugged the network cable as well... left it for 15 minutes.
... sorry. What?
What did you say?
Are you f***ing kidding me?
Would you also like me to rub the side of the f***ing machine, and say a prayer while I'm at it??
*takes a deep breath*
Fine, I'll do that but when it doesn't work, i want someone out on the site before lunchtime today!
*slams phone down angrily*

N.E to me as he stomps out of the office;
He wants me to get the user to unplug the network cable and do a power cycle. How the f**k is that going to help? Idiots! Don't know why we have a contract with them, i could do a better job!!!

*comes back into office 5 minutes later*

Me: did it fix it?
NE: yeah. Damn.
*leaves room again to make apologetic phonecall*

The following just happened in the bus:

A woman took a beautiful Enpora flip phone from 2008 out of her pocket. While she did that a small yellow paper fell on the ground. My eyes pointed at the paper and I saw multiple usernames, passwords and codes on it.

I didn't even hesitate and tapped on her shoulder and gave it back.

She was frightened! Couldn't thank me enough and told me how important it was to have that with her. She said she couldn't remember all her passwords and that if she would've lost it, she didn't know how to log in and unlock her phone anymore.

I gladly told her that it wasn't very safe but ofcourse I understoot that it can be hard to remember everything.

Also I almost told her that she could start using a password manager but with a flipphone you can't use that of course ;)

!dev I'd just helped a client cut over to a new fiber connection and then left for Vegas, about 2 days into the trip my wife and I decided to hit a breakfast spot that had bottomless mimosa's, which was of course a claim we had to test.

As we are walking(stumbling) out of the restaurant I get a call that the connection has crashed and the entire car dealership is unable to sell cars, which they tell me is important functionality.

So I make it up to my room and break out the laptop, luckily the mgmt interfaces are still available externally so I'm able to log in and then have the fun challenge of 1) not falling off of my chair 2) not accidentally making a change that kills what connection I have in and 3) fixing their actual issue.

Took me almost an hour to find a simple OSPF issue but at least got them working and happy. However by that time I was beginning to sober up, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen while day-drinking and ended up basically causing me to be be hung-over for the rest of the night, including my wifes friends wedding, which she wasn't thrilled about...

The moral of this story is to make sure to NOT stop drinking while dealing with unexpected production impacting events.

Someone just rang the IT Helpdesk moaning that outlook wasn't syncing his mail and it was because the brand new laptop he's just gotten is crap.

So first, the guy on the helpdesk asked to log into the users laptop to look at outlook.
He apparently isn't at his laptop and doesn't have time for anyone to log in!
Wtf lol
So he rings back 10 mins later when at his laptop but wont let the helpdesk log in as he has 'confidential' documents open.

Wtf, close them, why are you ringing us to look at your laptop if you won't let us log on?? lol

So helpdesk was like ok, just check cat cable is plugged in, check wifi is off, do a send/receive etc. and the user's like yes, they're all okay!

Helpdesk tells him to reboot his pc. He does so.
Doesn't resolve it.
Skip forward another 10 painful minutes while the helpdesk guy is pulling his hair out checking everything in the background, and all looks fine.

User then says "should i also turn off my iPhone?"
Helpdesk: 'No, outlook is just on your laptop'.
User: 'No *assured laugh* its on my phone too. I get emails there too'
Helpdesk: 'No, you use the generic 'Mail' app on your phone. Outlook is a separate app. We don't use it.'
User: 'But you're not listening, regardless of the app name, that's my problem, mail's not working on my phone'.
Helpdesk: '.....so why didn't you say so 20 minutes ago when i asked to log into ur laptop?'

User: 'Didn't think it was relevant. Laptop was fine. Assumed you'd know'.

...........

Why.

Why???

Why.

Shockingly, a phone restart fixed it. The user couldn't remember the last time he'd turned the thing off.

So I did a rookie mistake this week. Connected a webapp for a client using Nginx and installed the SSL cert for the site. I decided to activate the firewall of the server because hey security. All was well. Went home feeling like I am the shit.

Next day I find out I can't log in to the server over ssh. Only to find out that I had forgotten to allow SSH through the firewall.

I had basically locked myself out of the server. 😞

Very specific and annoying situation here:

- Working on a machine learning project with other people
- I'm on Linux, they use Windows
- We code in python
- We generally use vscode for development, and its python extension

I implement some basic neural networks with tensorflow, and add a bunch of logging for it. I test it on my machine and it works fine.
But, my group mates report that "after a few seconds the entire client hangs".
Apparently it only happens on Windows?
We start debugging the hell out of the code I implemented, added 20 log messages and sat there for a solid hour.

Until I make one very odd realization: the issue doesn't happen when I run the script in my terminal, instead of vscode with the debugger. So I try different debug settings, using an external terminal instead of vscode's built in debug console seems to fix it too.
And I make another observation: In the debug console, some messages don't seem to appear at all, while the external terminal shows them just fine.

So, turns out, that printing an epsilon character: “ε” (U+03B5), causes the entire thing to hang up.

It's the year 2020 and somehow we still can't do unicode.
I'm so done, what on earth.

The reason why I changed my username ( I'll just be honest here )

I was working on a website. I noticed that entries were submitting yesterday but today new entries were not showing up on database. It was like my database refused to insert new rows but there was no new error in log. I kept trying for almost half an hour, read all the answers on stackoverflow, read docs, tried different methods. Nothing worked. I was fucked up. Completely fucked up.

In frustration, I just stared my database for 10 mins without a single blink, and then I noticed this thing 'showing 25 out of 78 rows'
(-_-)
I clicked on 'show all'

AAAAAAND

I felt retarded.

Okay I can give an excuse that last time I saw a database was a year ago, but still.. how retarded you need to be to not see this FUCKIN 'SHOW ALL' when it is on the TOP of the FUCKIN TABLE!!

Me: Yes! I'm finally ready to upload my first Android app to PlayStore, im so excited!!

Google: Make sure to remove all the Log calls from your code.

Me: *Finds out that there's no way Android studio can make it for you*
FUUUUUUUU**

Interviewer: Here is the interview challenge. Tell me what the expected output is. You have 5 minutes.

** 100 line class with 4 async methods that contain if/thens nested 4 layers deep that call each other and log things to the console

Dev: Ok wow this is a bit of a maze to work through but I’ll try my best.

** 1 minute later of reading through the code

Interviewer: One minute has elapsed. There is now 4 minutes remaining.

Dev: Actually could you please not interject with time updates like that while I’m reading code? It makes the challenge harder than necessary. Just letting me know when the time is up would be fine.

Interviewer: Ok.

** ~2 minutes later trying to comb through this spaghetti mess

Interviewer: What do you think are you getting close to figuring it out?

Dev: …

*Notices that SMPlayer takes a lot of the iGPU and CPU*
*Relaunches SMPlayer to use dedicated Nvidia GPU*
> I don't really want to play videos anymore when running on this card.
> MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
(that last one is an actual log btw)

Alright, got it. I bought this fucking PC just for its fucking "powerful" GPU. It already locked me into using WanBLowS on that piece of garbage. Yet now that NvuDiA piece of garbage is gonna act worse than a fucking paperweight?! Seriously?!!

FUCK YOU NVIDIA!!! Linus Torvalds called your shitty cards shit on Linux.. I call it shit on every fucking OS out there!!! MOTHERFUCKERS!!!

My parents are real sticklers for who is allowed to be on Netflix. They only let people on when they are present, and they never click 'save password'.

Me being a poor college student and desperate for the Netflix password, created a fake website for one of my parents to sign into.

How did I do this? I created my own localhost server with a backend database for the password to go to. I then copied the Netflix home screen and log in and asked them to log me into their account.

They said I can be on for one hour, and then they were signing me out.

I agreed to these terms.

As a small twist, I had also copied the no internet tab from Chrome for the page to redirect to. Knowing that once they logged in they would be expecting the main UI.

They logged in and then waited for the page to load. I, of course, put in a delay for the page to load and then displayed the no internet tab. They were confused and asked me to refresh, still nothing. I asked them if the router was out, and they went to check.

While they were away I quickly switched back to the real Netflix website and yelled back saying I got it working again. They came back over and saw that it was asking for a password again. They signed in and saw the main homepage and none were the wiser that day.

Once they left I checked inside the DB and found the plaintext password they typed in... The damn password was so simple, I cursed myself for not having figured it out sooner. No matter, I had my parents Netflix password.

So you're probably wondering how they didn't see the URL above and think something was off?

I pressed F11 and fullscreened my entire browser. They did ask, and I simply replied with, I don't like seeing all the crap up above when I'm streaming. No further questions, perhaps I was lucky.

Getting real fucking sick of shitty websites excessive security measures!

1. Username
2. Password
3. Captcha
4. Mandatory 2FA

We don't recognize your IP, please log into your email, click the link, get redirected and complete steps 1-4 again! Also the site will time out in 10 minutes if you aren't actively using it. Have a nice day!

Go fuck yourself.

1. Refactor shitty code because it is hard to maintain
2. Rant about how can someone write a code like that
3. Check commit log to see who is the person to blame
4. Found out that's me

In the old days switching accounts was as simple as logging out and logging in

Now, logging out redirects you to 20 different pages, doesn't redirect you to the original page, and sometimes it doesn't even log you out

Not a rant but it's Friday and thought people could use a laugh.

When I was a teen we used AOL and for those who don't know, it was a test of patience to log on. It had to dial in, actually connect, and then you hoped it wouldn't disconnect for whatever reason. Just getting it to connect would take 30 min or more some days. After you were logged in you would get an audio of *Ding Ding*, followed by "Welcome!" and if you had email, "You've got mail!"

So, I decided to play a prank on my dad by swapping the Welcome sound file with the Goodbye sound file. He was waiting for a long time to connect, getting so frustrated. Then it finally does and he hears:

*Ding Ding*
"Goodbye!"

And loses it. Then he notices he is still online and calms down, confused.

I told him about it later but my brother and I got a good laugh out of it.

So, I was going to complain about JS being finicky and not making a damned bit of sense, but it turns out that it wasn't JS's fault. Not entirely, anyway. It was the halfassed JS minifier middleware (written by the legendary dev himself) that was breaking the JS while writing it to the page.

The original problem:
My code worked. I removed some comments. Big ol' block of //'s. And suddenly $() isn't a function. But if I call $(); at the top, it all works!

It turns out the "minifier" caused JS to think my code was chaining off the previous JS line in the rendering pipeline instead of being a separate statement. so all it really needed was a `;` at the start. What threw me, though, was the last line of the previous blob of (non-minified) JS was a comment, so it should be a separate statement, right?

But as it turns out...

```
console
// JS really is finicky.
.log('Sigh.');
```

The gym I go to has an app for user's to scan a QR code when they arrive and it has multiple HUGE issues.

This app shows the credit card info used for the direct debit without anything being redacted.

When the gym is signing up someone they give them a password so they can login, not too bad except the password is always the person's first name with the first letter capitalised.

This gets worse when you figure out that their is no way to change the password given to you AT ALL.

And just to top it all off, when you click the "Forgot Password" link on the login screen, the app just sends you an email with your password (your first name) in plain text.

The app also doesn't log you out or notify you if your login is used on a different device.

So I have tested this with 2 of my friends that go to the same gym and, with only knowing their email and first name (which I could have gotten from their email if I didn't know them), I can get into their app and see their credit card info without them being any the wiser.

I just had to print out some bills for a colleague.
Nothing too bad you say?

Well.. She doesn't seem to care about security or privacy at all.
I opened the website of her email provider at my computer and moved away from the keyboard, so she could log in.
But instead she told me her email and password... In an office with some other colleagues... Multiple times and wrote it onto a piece of paper that the later left on my table.
After that I should look through her inbox to find the bills.
(Yup, I know a lot more about her now)
After finding and printing out her bills, she just thanked me and walked out of the office, because hey, why should I log out of her account?

It's nice that she trusts me... But that was a bit too much...

Me: Hey Steve why are you working at this workstation today?

Steve: Cause I broke my computer and the one next to my computer, and this one is taking so long to sign in.

Me: It's probably just taking long because it's talking to the other two to find out if it should log you in.

Steve: Oh dear, can it still talk to the one I turned off?

thought I'd type:netstat -atn on my server and the result was a bit scary, found a Russian IP address with state of: FIN_WAIT1
Either Fail2ban was closing his connection or that dude was able to access my server :/

Checked /var/log/auth.log
and found this for his IP: Failed password for root from ----- port 37635 ssh2

I hope I'm still safe :)

Instantly disable password login and make it only SSH
but now I need to carry my SSH keys or else I'm blocked out lol

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

Well, i have a few stories i would like to share with you :)

My neighbour asked me to fix her webcam.
I told her: But I am a programmer, not a repair service .

Next time my neighbour forgot her Skype password. Se asked me to hack it for her.
I told her: But I am a programmer, not a hacker.

My sister asked me to help her out in her program, because of some bug. Well, she is in the other part of the Country. But, i said, lets give it a try.
Well, it turned out to be some kind of mechanical remote scanner, with needed that exact same remote locally.
I told her: But I am a programmer, not a fictional remote signal scanner repairer.

My grandpa asked me, to copy his old gmail emails into his new laptop.
Well, i told him to log in. He logged in. Than i told him: It is done :D

Thanks for reading it :)

Installed Miami Street earlier today.. some random free Shaftgame.
Late at night now, I figured "let's try this out".

> Logging in...
*crashes*

*goes to the settings for this crap game*
> *crashes*

Fucking worthless piece of Microshit.. yet another data collection hook that REQUIRES your shit to log in just to fucking work? Fucking Shaftfuckers, 5GB of internet traffic I spent on this?! Just to see it be a worthless data-hungry paperweight?!! Luckily my residential connection is unmetered and has some decent speeds.. but still, FUCK YOU MICROSHAFT!!!

Coincidentally, keyboard input completely broke when I wanted to do a minor edit to the drafted rant. Microshit can't even design a decent keyboard driver anymore, huh.. I DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO REWRITE THIS SHIT FOR A SECOND TIME, FUCKING REDMOND MICROCUNTSUCKERS!!!!

Life Before the Computer

An application was for employment
A program was a TV show
A cursor used profanity
A keyboard was a piano!

Memory was something that you lost with age
A CD was a bank account
And if you had a 3-inch floppy
You hoped nobody found out!

Compress was something you did to garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you unzipped anything in public
You'd be in jail for awhile!

Log on was adding wood to a fire
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a backup happened to your commode!

Cut - you did with a pocket knife
Paste you did with glue
A web was a spider's home
And a virus was the flu!

I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper
And the memory in my head
I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash
But when it happens they wish they were dead!

That moment when you had a good weekend and it is Monday again.

You log in to your work PC and see 15 emails... There goes my Monday again.

And 12 of those turn out to be congratulations on the recent release 😥

Me - Wants to transfer chat history.

App: "Log in to the new device and scan this QR Code to start transfer."

Me - Logs in on new device.

App: "Oh, a new device logged in? Let's log you out from your old device. It's not like this feature you are trying to use specifically requires 2 devices to be logged on at the same time while I literally don't allow multiple devices to be logged on at the same time. You're welcome."

Let's play a game!

The first person to figure out the password to this account before April 7th will get two sets of devRant stickers for free!

When you've got the password, log in to this account and @mention yourself to prove that you solved it!

Here are your clues:
7 4 12 e 8 18 5

7d 76 64 7a 42 5a 36 7d 3d 4b 36 7f 5b 40 3f 47 44 3d 6d 54 46 6a 61 4b 42 79 53 36 5e 75 5f 38 5c 4a 3d 60 42 55 6d 72 76 36 54 4a 2a

When I see two fields, one for username and one for password, I expect I can fill them out immediately subsequently with only a tab in between. While typing my password I DON'T want to get sent to a page where I can enter my password only: I was entering it already! Sometimes I even make it until I pressed the enter key that was supposed to log me in, but then I'm kindly requested to reenter my password. At that moment I not-so-kindly think: FUCK YOU Microsoft, you should know better. Even when logging into Visual Studio for fack sake

I watched today one of our devs working in Windows with a Docker Environment.

I think I'm pretty insensitive regarding pain, horror and morbid stuff.

But damn. I really needed to turn off the stream or else I'd walk to the company and rip his fucking workstation out of the server rack to put it out of his misery...

Errors? ignore them....

Weird python messages? Ignore them...

wild copy pasta between notepad++ containing shell commands and a git bash... Per mouse context. Yes. Move the cursor, mark the text, right click, copy, go to terminal, right click, paste.

Understanding of whats happening. Zero. Like literal zero.

He was wondering why there were strange characters when he pasted log output in a text file...

My question: How do you think colored text works in a terminal environment?
was answered by : "Don't know, never thought about it. But don't think this has something to do with the weird characters?"

I don't wanna talk about the rest.

Retarded humanity can please kindly kill itself so the intelligent above average nice people can live in peace...

The meeting was 2 hours. I drank 5 bottles of beer after it in1 hour and I'm please to announce I'm forgetting large parts of what has happened.

Cheers.

Can you log out of Facebook and LinkedIn? Cool. That'll be £50 please.

<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”

It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.

Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.

Commas.
I fix one display, and another breaks.

Now I’m getting “$$1002.99” and can’t figure out why. Where is this popup coming from? Where does the encrypted URL point to? What does this ajax call do? Where does the amount go? When does it change? Why is it a string now? Where does the total get defined? How far down the rabbit hole do I need to go?

Short short version:

I found something to try fixing. I made some changes, forced a crash to inspect, and… Joy! My log stopped updating. How long have I been debugging on stale data?

Skipping a long debugging session…

I discover a suspect instance var in a suspect method, and… i have no freaking clue where it’s being defined. It’s used in the class, but never defined in it. Oh, and the name is pretty generic, so searching for it is even more fun.

Just.
Qxfrfjkalstf.

WHO WRITES THIS CRAP?!
AND WHY DO PEOPLE CALL THEM “LEGENDS”? Like, really. That’s the word they use. “Legends.” I still can’t believe it.

My tablet is lying on a table 2m away from me and I have to install a new app.. but I don't want to get out of my couch ffs! And I haven't configured dropbear in it yet, and neither do I have adb over TCP/IP. Well fuck it then. My desktop with BlueStacks.. hah, it's running fucking WanBLowS. No remote access there. Too much to ask of that certified pile of crap.

But the point is.. moar remotes, moar better 😋 anything to not have to stand up, taught by my ability to log into a server in Italy from the comfort of my couch. SSH and the sysadmin trade sure is nothing short of amazing ♥️

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

I sometimes forget to close the tab to my bank's website. I flip back to it, hours, or even days later. As soon as the tab becomes active the "You'll be logged out in 60 second" timer starts ticking. Literally, days after I logged in, I can click "Stay logged in" and it works!

Their session timeout logic is all fucking Javascript based!? Don't they log out the session server-side at some point? How the fuck is my session still valid 2 days after initial login?

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

So we have an API that my team is supposed send messages to in a fire and forget kind of style.

We are dependent on it. If it fails there is some annoying manual labor involved to clean that mess up. (If it even can be cleaned up, as sometimes it is also time-sensitive.)

Yet once in a while, that endpoint just crashes by letting the request vanish. No response, no error, nothing, it is just gone.

Digging through the log files of that API nothing pops up. Yet then I realize the size of the log files. About ~30GB on good old plain text log files.

It turns out that that API has taken the LOG EVERYTHING approach so much too heart that it logs to the point of its own death.

Is circular logging such a bleeding edge technology? It's not like there are external solutions for it like loggly or kibana. But oh, one might have to pay for them. Just dump it to the disk :/

This is again a combination of developers thinking "I don't need to care about space! It's cheap!" and managers thinking "100 GB should be enough for that server cluster. Let's restrict its HDD to 100GB, save some money!"

And then, here I stand trying to keep my sanity :/

WTF, Google?! Get your shit together!! No one wants another GUI disaster makeover which leads us from bad to worse.

Every time I log into g+ or gmail, the whole flippin GUI has changed.. OK, it might be just my taste for simplicity, but I do not think a 'better GUI' should make you feel like an ape trying to code.. :\

If people with programming skills can't use it 'out of the box' & without googling stuff like "where did you hid the new email button", how the f do other people who are IT inept supposed to use it!? OR is it just me?! If it's just me, I'll shut up and love the new GUI.. otherwise: juck!!

#itSucksToBeOnTheOtherSideOfTheCode :\

Microsoft Teams can burn.

Who the fuck thought it would be an excellent workflow, when you want to COLLABORATE IN TEAMS between users in different domains, that each sorry bastard needs to manually log in to a second Teams tenant and loose all the context from their main Teams tenant !?

On random occasions the fucking authentication token expires. I send messages to my team mate in another domain. Three days later I am pissed off because they don't answer. It turns out their authentication token has expired so when they are on their main tenant they don't get any notifications before they manually log in to our tenant as a guest. HOW FUCKING GREAT IS THAT AS A NOTIFICATION SYSTEM ??!

Would it be that fucking difficult to maintain a notification bar with all tenants and note with an exclamation mark or something REALLY FUCKING SIMPLE to hint about an expired token ? It's not like this is magic, Slack does it already.

FUCK !

ALMOST HALF AN HOUR SPENT TRYING TO LOG INTO MY FUCKING RASPBERRY PI OVER SSH.

you know what the problem is?

I’m not gonna tell you because I want you to feel the agony too.

> be me
> want to set up a nextcloud instance on pi to play with
> boot up
> ssh pi
*enter password*
*password incorrect*
^tries like 60 more times with different things
> pulls HDMI out of PC
> connect to pi direct
*please login*
*enter password*
Hackerman_voice_im_in.mp3
Wtf.xml
> check the logs
>try login from phone
Fuckyou.jpg
>Tries resetting password
Fuckyou-final.jpg
>tried logging into other pi
Fuckyou-final2.jpg
>*wtf’s harder*
Andthenithitme.png
>type @ sign
Pi: “
> OHHHHHHH

We work in an office where we must lock our computer screens because our screens may have confidential information on them, plus you could do things as the person without taking any blame (ie sending an email).
Anyways anytime someone forgets to lock their screen we always prank them pretty hard. The greatest thing we ever did was in our latest release we had our managers buy us drinks at the pub. Well our managers left to go to the pub and one of them forgot to lock their computers. So we downloaded an image of the blue screen of death and made it full screen, unplugged his mouse and keyboard for added effect, and locked his computer. He came in the next Monday and couldn't log in because his keyboard wouldn't work. He actually called IT to bring him a new keyboard and mouse... then he unlocked his computer and freaked out with the IT guy because there was the blue screen of death. Needless to say he got a brand new computer as well as a new mouse and keyboard.

I'd call it a win win?

To all you fuckers out there giving bad app rating because some shit does not work on your shitty phone and you are to fucking lazy to report the bug via the fucking "send log to dev"-button that pops up with the exception.
Go fuck yourself.
And to all the user whose bugs I fixed and did not change their Bad rating - fuck you too.
And oh.. The fucktards that did not even install the app and give a Bad rating because i am your competitor - guess what...fuck you.

This begs for a rant... [too bad I can't post actual screenshots :/ ]

Me: He k8s team! We're having trouble with our k8s cluster. After scaling up and running h/c and Sanity tests environment was confirmed as Healthy and Stable. But once we'd started our load tests k8s cluster went out for a walk: most of the replicas got stoped and restarted and I cannot find in events' log WHY that happened. Could you please have a look?

k8s team [india]: Hello, thank you for reaching out to k8s support. We will check and let you know.

Me: Oh, you're welcome! I'll be just sitting here quietly and eagerly waiting for your reply. TIA! :slightly_smiling_face:

<5 minutes later>

k8s team India: Hi. Could you give me a list of replicas that were failing?

Me: I gave you a Grafana link with a timeframe filter. Look there -- almost all apps show instability at k8s layer. For instance APP_1 and APP_2 were OK. But APP_3, APP_4 and APP_5 were crashing all over the place

k8s team India: ok I will check.

<My shift has ended. k8s team works in different timezone. I've opened up Slack this morning>

k8s team India: HI. APP_1 and APP_2 are fine. I don't even see any errors from logs, no restarts. All response codes are 200.

Me: 🤦‍♂️ .... Man, isn't that what I've said? ... 🤦‍♂️

The one who made the preferences on the Netflix App for Apple TV deserves a medal. I clicked on the Preferences option in the sidebar to explore the preferences. But the only two options in the so called preferences where to log out or to go back. Well, that was an incredible waste of 10 seconds.

Hey Citrix:

FUCK YOU.

Learn to make an accessible log in page you fucks.

Maybe instead of vague fucking "you're user name and password is wrong" say things like "your account is locked because we somehow decided we don't like your password anymore. . . . without telling you"

Fucking 2 hours of my day wasted trying to log into my company's VM because first it wouldn't take my password (that I've had for over a month and doesn't expire for another month) over and over again. I changed it, logged in. Got up to do something that'd take less than 5 minutes. And OF COURSE the people who set up the VM made them log you out if you're gone for more than 3 minutes (fuck that guy too). Come back to a log in screen and it won't accept my new password.

Change it again. Except this time it won't accept my new password because it's "like my old password." It is in that it uses the alphabet and numbers, but it's also different in that those alphanumeric characters are LITERALLY DIFFERENT IN EVERY PLACE. I finally get it to accept a new password.

I'm also loving the whole "answer these security questions that literally anyone who does minimal research on you can answer" before I get to change my password. Yeah. Because finding my mother's maiden name or the city I was born in is so fucking hard. Literally impossible to find out what my Dad's dad's name is. Shit like that isn't publically available. Nope. Why the fuck are we still using "security" questions?

I log into Citrix again. And it takes me to . . . the log in for Citrix.

There is no word in elvish, entish or the tongues of men for this stupidity.

Fuck Citrix. Fuck the people behind the password manager (Aviator or something like that), and fuck whatever administrator setting turns my computer off due to inactivity in such a stupid short amount of time. 10 minutes, 15 minutes, that'd be fine. But it's more like 3 or 5, like wtf.

> worst coding procrastination story

worst and best at the same time:

If you wait long enough things might resolve themselves.

My team inherited an ancient site. Hosted on an old host that the org wanted to kill, using an old log service the org wanted to kill.

A ticket was written in 2021 to migrate that site's hosting and logging to the new services our org started using.

My team kept avoiding it since it was a cheap unimportant site.

in 2023 we were about to finally take action - then we hear "Turns out the new hosting platform and logging platform are way too expensive - I know all of you have migrated to these new services but you gotta revert and go back the old ones til we figure this out"

We didn't have to do squat.

Problem solved by procrastinating ✅

Enough is enough! I can't do it anymore!

...

alias pm='python manage.py'
alias ga='git add .'
alias gc='git commit -a'
alias gi='git init && touch .gitignore && printf ".idea \n venv \n node_modules \n out \n *.iml \n *.log \n build \n target" > .gitignore'
alias gp='git push'
alias gps='git push --set-upstream origin master'
alias gr='git remote add origin'

...

Much better :D

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

LabVIEW.

Because WHY THE ACTUAL FUCK should you want to use a visual programming language in a professional environment and pay for it.

(Other than: the manufacturer of your measurement device/power supply/electronic load/etc. has already provided a LabVIEW module so you just have, you know, 'click' your program together and be done.

No, we won't give you the documentation on how to do it properly without that piece of crap or even give you code snippets.

(If you don't feel the urge to shoot yourself in the foot, you have obviously too much time on your hands and could simply be reading the interface definitions for that particular interface. At least it's standardized, d'uh.)

Oh, and you want a lightweight application? Here comes the runtime environment! A big clunky ... thing you'll need now to start up even a simple measure-and-log-data-thing.

Well, OK, it works for the occasional Measure-and-Log-Thing. If you don't need the data too fast.

If you want to do something a bit more complex, knock yourself out, but don't ask me to debug it for you afterwards because that colourful entanglement of wires and connections and blocks is a DAMN HUGE MESS and trying to understand how it works feels like defusing a bomb in a shitty action movie.)

Never again.

Remember the post about bruce's constant?(4.5099806905005)

Well apparently theres a convergent series for it found all the way back in 2015.

Apparently its an actual thing. Which connects e to the square root of this series.

And it converges on (bruce-1)**0.5.
I confirmed it myself.

The two people who found the series that converges are N. J. A. Sloane and Hiroaki Yamanouchi

Thank you Sloane and Hiroaki!

The actual formula is a series of embedded square roots with the repeating numbers 1,4,2,8,5,7
like so...
sqrt(1+sqrt(4+sqrt(2+sqrt(8+sqrt...

What this means is you can find e using this series.

All you do is run the series, raise by a power of 2, add 1, calculate J and K like so

J = log(2, 1.333333333333333) / log(2, 2)
K = log(2, 1.333333333333333) / log(2, 3)

then calculate (J+K)-(bruce-1)
and out pops our buddy e:
2.7182818284591317

I guess I bullshitted myself for so long, that I didn't believe people like scor when they said they legit witnessed by math skills grow.

Or maybe a blind squirrel occasionally DOES find a nut.

Pretty cool find either way.

The MS Teams SDK is bullshit. It's so half baked and comes with instructions like "you'll probably want a better implementation for production, good luck cause you'll have to write it yourself."

Oh and don't forget to cache your installations in a file called "notifications.json"

Deploying will create 2 app registrations (OIDC) and about 6 resources in Azure... But "you'll probably want to log to app insights in production"... So I hope you're very familiar with Bicep cause you'll have to figure out how to add that to your template properly and there are about 7 Bicep files to decipher and it doesn't create an app insights out of the box.

Probably written by an intern.

Another rant about my school: the default password system.
Each student's username is FirstnameLastname, and the same applies to teachers. The passwords assigned are <First initial><Last initial> for students, and the same for teachers with "teacher" appended to the end. As students, we figured out this system pretty quickly, and we were able to log into the computer system as any teacher who we knew had requested an account. (Teacher accounts had unfiltered Internet access, student accounts did not).
I now teach in this school, where they recently got Google Classrooms accounts for each teacher during Covid. The accounts use the same naming/password scheme! I somehow doubt the teachers replace their passwords, so any student clever enough to figure out the system can log into their Google for Education account.

The OSX Sierra update was like 10GB and took 75 minutes + two restarts to install which is bizarre because I can install Ubuntu in like 3 minutes.

Though I think it spent most of its time iterating every.single.god.damned.thing in /usr/local decided whether it needed to be moved out of the way

They don’t even give you a log of what’s going on now - just a progress bar.

There's a lotta memes about Google spazzing out whenever you log into a new device, but Fitbit is even worse lol

I not only get a notification that my Fitbit's battery is low, I also get a fucking email about it.

Like y'all chill out. I know it's low.

I'm sure this can be disabled somewhere, but I'mma probably get a new watch soon so I'm too lazy to deal with it

I'm four months in my new job and I've done 5 days worth of coding. There aren't much projects coming to our office nowadays so I'm being paid just to log my hours.

Any of the ranters here have any small project ideas I can make to pass the time?

I've literally run out of things to make.

I gave you a chance, Nvidia. It could have been a good thing, but no. You are still crap. About two years ago, my son's graphics card (an Nvidia) died, so I thought, I'll give him my nice Radeon card, and got myself a new card. For some reason, reason failed me, and I got a GTX 1070. It's been a nice enough card, and worked well. And then the last driver update happened. Fallout 4 started to CTD before it even booted to the main menu. Me, not thinking (again) thought it was a mod, so I uninstalled and deleted and reinstalled again, with all 120 mods. Nope. Still crashing. Then I noticed, as the game booted, the fans started to ramp up, and I could tell exactly when it would crash be the sound of fans. I was expecting the computer to taxi out the room. Rolled the driver update back to the last one that worked. Now I can log in again, and things are mostly stable. Still crashes, but not as bad, probably due to reloading the mods and missing something. When the RX 3080 hits the market, bye bye Nvidia. You haven't changed a bit over the years. We're through.

TL;DR - the doctor is a lazy cunt and I hope he steps on a lego.

We’ve got a user authentication portal for all the users in our network. Well, we have it set to where you can only have two active log ins on two different machines, anything else will give the error message “you need to log out elsewhere” or whatever it is...
This god damn doctor has been told to log out several times and still calls us to ask why it’s “not working”.

I just received a call because the lazy cock sucker didn’t want to walk from the clinic to the hospital to sign out, are you fucking kidding me you lazy fucking ass hole? It’s not my job to be your mother fucking slave dude, get the fuck up and do it yourself!

I’ll take a lot of shit from anyone but when you refuse to retain the information to preform your job and want someone else to do it because you’re too fucking lazy, that’s when we’ve got problems.

I hope you step on a fucking LEGO.

I’m heavily medicated so if this doesn’t make sense I... don’t care.

The school I work at was supposed to implement a new attendance-tracking system. It required teachers to log in to the system using the laptop in each classroom, and mark the attendance.
Oh, and by the way, the same system would be used to track grades.
How would they be sure nobody could get into the system? One student from each class would be chosen to be sure the system is logged out when the teacher leaves!
Thank God they haven't started using this system yet.

Devrant doesnt log you out on one platform when you change your password on other platforms

Had an internet/network outage and the web site started logging thousands of errors and I see they purposely created a custom exception class just to avoid/get around our standard logging+data gathering (on SqlExceptions, we gather+log all the necessary details to Splunk so our DBAs can troubleshoot the problem).

If we didn't already know what the problem was, WTF would anyone do with 'There was a SQL exception, Query'? OK, what was the exception? A timeout? A syntax error? Value out of range? What was the target server? Which database? Our web developers live in a different world. I don't understand em.

So I just recently joined stackoverflow. Spent some time time and decided I should log out considering I logged in at work. Could not find the fucking logout/sign out button. Even after googling. Had to go to the source code and find the logout link which is hidden in the page.

Looks like it's the new vim.

>Installed a new graphics card (thanks santa <3)
>Boots into Ubuntu
>Try to SSH. No route to device.
>Log in locally. "Failed to start raise network interfaces"
>ok.
>find out that installing graphics card renamed enp2s0 to enp3s0.
>ok.

So this one day I'm at work and the manager peaks into my office and just says "can you check that platform X is building, pretty much done just a basic bug check" (this bloke had negative 1 technical experience)

I'm not sure what he means, the whole thing is built in Java and I know nothing about that...

I log in the platform on dev server, sure enough it seems to work, charts are drawn, no errors, then I try to log out; this button does nothing...

I don't bother telling the manager, I just go to the dev who's a friend of mine and tell him about it.

A week later, manager jumps in the room all excited "we're launching this product tomorrow, mind checking again?"

Sure, I log in, ... There's no log out button, it's gone... I ask the dev.

"Yeah I fixed it, it's gone now!"

I can't figure out how to get in contact with Firefox to figure out why every time i log into a website i need for work on Nightly, it states that my username or password aren't on record, and i have to change my password (even when switching browsers). Only started after their last update today, and now that I'm testing other sites, it's multiple sites, but not all.

Ideas? help?

How to psych-out a machine learning algorithm:

> Use a platform for 10 years
> Never like, comment, or give it any inkling of your preferences
> Like one random video
> Never log in again

When a coworker repeatedly alters GIT to include log files that only break the shit out of everything. That's fine, I like reverting production on a daily basis.

Thanks 1,000,000 John.
Enjoy your cocktails while I lay under the vending machine, you piece of shit.

People don't seem to know how to properly do print-debugging, so here's a simple guide:

1. A log of "aaaaaa" or "got here" isn't as helpful as you think when ALL OF THEM ARE THE FUCKING SAME. You put a descriptive label or copy verbatim the conditional statement. This saves time matching statements, allows one to watch multiple branches at once, and allows others to understand and help faster when dragged in to help.
2. When trying to see where code fucks up, before each line, paste said line into a proper print statement for your language. If there's, say, a function call or some shit, have it output something like "functionCall(varA=<varA contents>,varB=<varB contents);" Most normal lines should be like this too, but it's especially helpful for calls and comparisons.
If need be, add return values after if they're not shown in another print statement later.
This allows for a trail of execution AND the line that fucks up will be the last in the log, making finding it easier when dealing with hangs and such.
3. Putting something unique like "DEBUG: " or something in front of all statements ensures you can just search for them to ensure you're not rolling one out to production. It also separates debug output from normal output at a glance, making digging through logs faster.

Me as a sysadmin, and the devs approach with this:
hey "Linux", they network is stupid, the firewall is blocking the trafic from server1 to server2, pls fix.

The servers are on the same subnet with no firewall, so I log in to the servers and find out that their programs is not running.

This is something I deal with every day

TL;DR: Google asked me to PROVIDE a phone number to verify connection from a new device, on the said device.

Yesterdayto log into my work Google account from my personal laptop to check emails, calendars update and so on. I opened up a private navigation window, went to Google sign-in page, entered my credentials, all is well.

Google then decided to "verify it's me" and prompted me to PROVIDE a phone number (work account without work phone means no phone number set up) so that they can send a verification code to the number I just provided to make sure the connection is legit.

Didn't want to do that, clicked "use another method" and got asked to fill the last password I remember, which would be my current password thanks to my trusty password manager. After submitting, I'm prompted with an error saying I have to contact my admin to reset my password because they can't log me in with my CURRENT password.

I ain't gonna do that, so went back to login page, provided my phone number, got the code, filled in the code, next thing I know I'm browsing through my emails.

What the duck? Could have been anybody giving any phone number. So much for extra security.

Also don't care that they have my phone number, the issue is more about the way used to obtain it: locking me out of my account and having no other way of logging in.

Who knew SQL Server Report Manager didn’t have a log off / sign out button when you log in via the web browser?

I didn’t until I tried to test someone’s new credentials and realised I couldn’t log out of my administrator account. MS doesn’t ship it in the box apparently. Because that’s clearly not a useful piece of functionality to have. Except, some people have developed their own hacks to get around it......

Wtf.. mind blown

So our HR have recently started to enforce arrival/departure time while also giving us a room for freedom (we can be at work from 7:30 till 9:00 and leave accordingly from 4:30-6:00)
So 2 weeks ago my manager asked me why on a date I didn't checkout/checkin, I looked out in my vacation log and sure enough it was a day off. I said to myself maybe be ause this day was requested last year they didn't remember it no problem
Anyway fast forward to today and my manager asked me why on the 25th of January I left (early) at 1?
What? I don't remember leaving early except for one day last week (Feb 7-personal reasons and was requested days before)
So i check my vacation log to see if I forgot something and i see that Jan 25 is a Saturday. We don't work on Saturdays! I go and check with my manager telling him that.
Then it hits me. I checked my taxi app and on Sat Jan 25 I had a ride at 1:22 AM!! from work to home. Yes i remembered that on that day I had to stay late for a project
WTF HR??!
Sorry for the long post

>Be client
>Have an issue with incredibly slow webpage load time
>Blame memcache issues

So... I look into the problem. Yes, the page either loads up fast, or times out. So, into the logs I go. Webserver is fine (except the timeout), PHP though... Error log is fine (just notices), but slow log shows the issue is the database (of course... its always the database... ugh)

So, checking the database, there is one ugly query that seems to be an issue. 5 joins and a huge where condition.

So I run EXPLAIN on the query and... Proceed to bang my head against the wall.

OF COURSE ITS SLOW YOU FU******, NONE OF YOUR TABLES HAVE ANY INDEXES.

What do they expect when the database has to always go down the whole table and do everything in memory, until it runs out and has to dump it all on disk and work with it there.

Ugh... Some clients...

If your site only supports alpha numeric characters in my password. You should tell me that when I reset my password rather than just killing the special characters out of the string and submitting my password like that. I spent 15 minutes trying to log in before I gave up and reset it to something simple.

Also, you should let me use special characters in my password, it's 2017.

Saturday 9.00 AM. I was sleeping, my colleague (on holiday) sent me a text: "We got a problem on our system, probably we ran out of space". I checked the log and found out that several cron jobs failed due to not enough space on the disk. I started deleting some unnecessary logs (we're paranoid) and ended up to squeeze the vm like a lemon to save some space. Sent an email to the sysadmin, "We got to add more space ASAP, users are getting 500 errror for almost everything". Silence. I thought to myself: "Until monday we're safe..". I did a df (96%) and sent a screen to the sysadmin, just to be sure that we understood each other. Finally monday comes, nobody worries about the issue. At noon I literally takled the guy of IT dept. "Yeah, we read your email. I think the sysadmin didn't take you seriously". "Why? Which part of 'we're running out of space' isn't serious?!!!". "He just told me that we have unlimited space on that vm". Unlimited space...sure.... "Right.....the disk is at 96%, buuuuut if he said so No news to worry. Don't call me if everything burns. Have a good day!!!"

A colleague just hit his computer with a C++ textbook and shouted a verse that easily would have been bleeped out on TV. All this because he could not log into Windows.
Microsoft need not worry, they seem to have fixed any loophole for such bruteforce login attempts ;-)

You asked for it--here it is.

It was a regular day in November--I was taking my dog out for a walk. We were walking past an elementary school when my dog started barking at a rock. I went to have a closer look at the rock when suddenly it vanished into thin air. "How strange" I quietly thought to myself, called out to my dog and carried on walking.

The next day at around the same time, at the very same place--next to the elementary school, my dog started barking at a log which lied in the exact same spot as the rock had occupied the day before. I did the same as I had done a day earlier--walked up to the log to check it out, but it vanished into thin air. We kept on walking.

The third day I decided we'd pick another route. This day, nothing interesting happened.

The fourth day went the same as the third.

The fifth day, went the same as the fourth.

On the sixth day, God was almost done with his works, for that reason we celebrated by going to the movies--me and my dog. To be fair, the only interesting thing that happened on that day was the movie, which was shit.

On the eight day when I got out of my bed I fell, broke my neck and died. And that's when I ate my code to make it shorter.

I'm a web dev who decided to take a shot at mobile development (My first mobile app mind you). I'm writing a mobile app and one of it's features is communicating to my server via websockets.

So I write the code, click to send the data and my server doesn't receive it. Fuck. I check why. I log everything. Nothing.
I spend several of hours and I'm exhausted by this point so i call one of our mobile developers to help me. Turns out my emulator didn't have a WiFi module. FUCK.

Alright so I compile it to an apk and install it on my phone. I popped open a terminal and started my local node server.

I click on the mobile app...

NOTHING LOGS. FUUUUUUCK.

And this is the best part.
Apparently I deleted the console.dir call from my server that executed when it received some data from an emitter.

I only thought of this last night at 2am so I got up and checked. Yep. Kill me.

Recently I flashed Android 9 (Pie) on my Nexus, but to this day I still haven't logged into Google from it. One reason is because I don't know my password and I didn't git clone my password store yet (where it's contained). Another reason is because I want to reclaim my privacy and not be a data battery for a Matrix of convenience that feeds itself with my personal information. Eh, it sorta works out I guess. Yalp is an amazing alternative to the Play Store, and even offers its own shadow accounts to use along with Google Play.

One problem though, while I've noticed that I could log in with my own account to get all my premium apps (couple hundred euros worth, so not easy to just discard) it apparently violates Google Play's ToS to do so from a third-party app. So I'm a bit hesitant to do that. Do you know of any viable alternative way to preserve my privacy yet install, keep and have validated those premium apps? I could download them from e.g. BlueStacks and export the apk's, but that'd be tedious and wouldn't be able to get those apps validated on my phone unless I log into Google there as well (which kinda defeats the purpose). Any suggestions?

Following on from my school having terrible passwords. Turns out they stored all our passwords in plain text somewhere - so some script kiddie (Do you even need to be a script kiddie to find this - probably not, but the guy who did this was a script kiddie) could just remote log me out twice, log in as me, be a twat, and have a conversation in Notepad.

We have a badly out of shape but functional product , the result of a "if its not broke don't fix it" mentality. The only thing manangement cares is our next release and making meetings to plan other meetings...

Now comes the time of the security Audit (PCI)...

Manager : oh noooo the audit will fix this issue, quickkk fix it !

Us : welllll its a lengthy process but doable, we just gotta do a,b,c,d,e . Part a is essentially what we need the rest are refactoring bits of the system to support part a since the performance would be shit otherwise

Manager: can you do part a before the audit starts ?

Us: yep.

Manager: do it . Oh and pop those other issues on JIRA so we can track em

Audit completed....

Manager: so we got through ok?

Us : 👍 yep

Manager: okayy, take those other issues..... and stick em at the bottom of the back log...

Us : huh ? *suspicious faces*..... okay but performance is gonna be poor with the system as it is cuz of part A....

Manager: yeaaahhh * troll face* ....about that.... roll it back and stick that too at the bottom of the log. We got to focus our next release. Lemme schedule a meeting for that 😊

Us : faceplam

So I was helping my friend debug her code.
A portion of text was not being displayed. We put log statements everywhere. Cross checked every line of code. We had almost started to lose it.
And then we found out that she had accidentally set the text color to white in the XML layout.
Just another one of those days.

I am about to do the unthinkable.
I am going to a place no dev wants to go.
I am about to take an unhinged decision everyone would warn me against.
I am about to cause a change to my future, whether good or bad I guess I'll find out.

But what I do know, is YOLO.

I'm deploying to production on Friday just half an hour before I log off for the day and come back on Monday.

Wish me luck. I'm gonna need it.

The Windows SDK was failing to install because the version of vcredist was newer then it needed.

The setup simply failed without saying anything about that. I had to see the log and find out that vcredist failed to installed with error code 5100 and find that out from Google how to fix that.

Why is MS like this? Why not just say that your vcredist version is too new for this program? Just unistall it and it will be fixed?

I just wasted 2 hours behind this. If my work never needed it I would never even think about using this.

Ask me about that one time a motherfucking LOG STATEMENT caused the code to not work properly, breaking both the Test and QA environments, but failed in a way that made it maddening to figure out (in conjunction with the cloud-based hosting environment and the abomination that is centralized logging, which just makes EVERYTHING more difficult).

Actually, DON'T ask me about it, because it was today, it wasted most of my day, and I'm still salty as fuck about it.

I don't pay much attention to my local file system when developing-- that's what my operating system and IDE are for. ...So I've thought, at least.

Today, my code didn't compile. I'd been noticing some pesky 'running out of memory' notifications, and mostly brushed them aside. I've spent the last hour deleting various log files and defragging the drive.

TL;DR my first vps got hacked, the attacker flooded my server log when I successfully discovered and removed him so I couldn't use my server anymore because the log was taking up all the space on the server.

The first Linux VPN I ever had (when I was a noob and had just started with vServers and Linux in general, obviously) got hacked within 2 moths since I got it.
As I didn't knew much about securing a Linux server, I made all these "rookie" mistakes: having ssh on port 22, allowing root access via ssh, no key auth...

So, the server got hacked without me even noticing. Some time later, I received a mail from my hoster who said "hello, someone (probably you) is running portscans from your server" of which I had no idea... So I looked in the logs, and BAM, "successful root login" from an IP address which wasn't me.

After I found out the server got hacked, I reinstalled the whole server, changed the port and activated key auth and installed fail2ban.
Some days later, when I finally configured everything the way I wanted, I observed I couldn't do anything with that server anymore. Found out there was absolutely no space on the server. Made a scan to find files to delete and found a logfile. The ssh logfile. I took up a freaking 95 GB of space (of a total of 100gb on the server). Turned out the guy who broke into my server got upset I discovered him and bruteforced the shit out of my server flooding the logs with failed login attempts...

I guess I learnt how to properly secure a server from this attack 💪

When my mom died in 2014, I was shocked to find that her profile on Facebook was suddenly changed to “memorial” mode and therefore I was no longer able to log into it. (If you’re tempted to tell me I’m dumb for using it, I don’t disagree, but save it for another thread...she and I kept in touch over FB because it was easier for her to manage.)

I think it was triggered by their monitoring of things and seeing keywords like “funeral” and “passed away” associated with her account, then having a person on their end change its status. Or something like that.

What I hadn’t known about (or I would have used it) was the legacy contact setting where she could have set me as the contact so I’d have at least a little access and control. But because of their strict policies, I’m forever locked out.

I get why they need to do this (to avoid fraud and impersonations) but the fact that there are zero documents or proofs I, as the executor of her estate, can provide that Facebook will accept to make an exception seems unnecessarily severe.

Anyone else experience this? Known workarounds?

oh FFS my university pissed me off so bad right now that I had to wait 20 min to cool down to be able to write a rant about it...

so, one of the university department offer an email address which is the official university approved email for student packs like jetbrain's. I wanted to renew my jetbrains subscription, but for that I have to get a verification email on that address..
But since the only time I use it is this annual renewal I dont know the webmail's url..
So I search for it on the department pages, services and its nowhere to be found. Finaly I found it on a student maintained wiki page.
I try to log in.. no luck. try another password, still not it. Try all of the passwords that I remember using in the previous 3 year and no luck.
well fck it the password change is managed by a website where I can log in with a different method, so I change the password and try to log in again.
No fcking luck! And at this point I bashed my head against the wall because I found out that the password change takes them about 1 or 2 hours... hours! wtf...

Just found this gem:

<a href="..." onclick="if (! confirm("Are you sure you want to log out?")) return false;">Log out</a>

Listened for about a half-hour yesterday to DevA ‘beat down’ DevB writing a console app for trying out a proof-of-concept idea he had.

DevB: “What’s the URL of the development server?”
DevA: “Why? What are you doing?”
DevB: “I’m needing to throw some messages to it so I can capture data for something I’m working on.”
DevA: “How are you calling the service?”
DevB: “I wrote a console app”
- you could almost hear the eye roll -
DevA: “A console app? Why in the world would you write a console app?”
DevB: “Oh..um..no reason. I just need log some test data for something I’m playing around with. How should I do it?”
DevA: “If it’s test data, you should have wrote a unit test. You see, unit tests …”
- yammer on and on for about 5 minutes about the virtues of unit tests…never really explaining anything -
DevB: “Yea, I’m not needing to test the result or anything. I just need to log some data.”
DevA: “Then you should use a unit test for that, not a console app. With a unit test, you’ll be able to validate the data. That’s what unit tests are for. Microsoft should have never put in console apps in Visual Studio. It just leads to bad coding practices.”
DevB: “Um…I don’t care. It’s a console app because I just need data…thanks anyway”

Today, DevC was talking to DevA

DevC: “Charlie is testing the order module, but there isn’t any test data. Do you still have the data generating script?”
DevA: “Oh yea, I’ll send him my console app that populates the database.”

It was all I could do from screaming “You stupid –bleep-er!! What the f–bleep-ck was all that yesterday?!”, but none of my business. Better to devrant about it than start a fight.

I love software. Seriously, I love it. /s

Transmission is given a bad torrent (which, given that it's a torrent service, you'd expect it handles quite robustly) and completely fucks up. Like, really badly. It doesn't respond to RPC anymore, systemd has to resort to sending it a SIGKILL to get it off the process tree, and the web interface.. yeah. Nothing.

It doesn't log by default, so fine I'll add that to the systemd unit and restart it with debugging options enabled.

# systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl daemon-reexec

Turns out that /var/log/transmission.log can't be written to by my Transmission user. Well shit. Change that to /home/condor/transmission.log.

# systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl daemon-reexec
# systemctl restart transmission-daemon

*blood starts to reach its boiling point*

Still logs in the wrong fucking location. Systemd, I told you to log over there. I did everything I could to make you steaming pile of shit reload that fucking config. What's the fucking problem!?

*about 15 minutes of fighting systemd*
Finally! It spits out a log in the right location! Thank you Transmission and systemd for finally doing your fucking jobs. So a bad torrent it is, hmm...

*removes torrent from .config/transmission/torrents*
Transmission: *still fucking shits itself on that ostensibly removed torrent*

That's it. BEGONE!!!

Oh and don't get me started on the fact that apparently a service needs some 400MB of memory. Channeling your inner Chrome Transmission?

One of our customers wants our mobile app to log out the user after 15 minutes of inactivity because of SeCuRiTy…

Why? The phones protect the apps with their hardware encryption from any malicious access.
And we are not dealing with super sensitive data here like some banking app or so.

Why do some people want to have bad UX for no reason?

Bittrex is "amazing"...

I had lost my 2FA a long time ago (as my phone fried) and missed the account ferification deadline which caused my account to get disabled. Off we go to support!

0. Nothing to rant about at this point. I just created an account in their zendesk, logged in and logged a ticket to reset my 2FA and reactivate my account. They asked me for info, I provided it to them and got my 2FA disabled. Hooray!

1. I then asked to reenable my account. They sent me a link to restart the verification process. I open up that link and log in. I'm asked to upload some photos. I select requested photos from my galery and hit [UPLOAD]. An error pops up saying that smth wrong happened and I need to reload that site and reupload my photos. After page refresh they are telling me they are validating my uploaded info (w/o any way to resubmit my info, which, according to the error seen below, was not successfully submitted in the first place)...

2. So I reach out to the support guy again. Guess what he replies! He says he's sorry but he cannot help me any more and I need to create a NEW ACCOUNT in their support site with the same email <???!!!???>

3. I try to log in to the support portal and my access no longer works. MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DELETED! WTF!!!

4. I do as I'm told and create a new acc with the same email. Now I can log back in. So I'm raising a new ticket saying I still cannot finish my verification process due to the same error. It looks like it's going to be a fun ride with them so I can't wait to see what they'll reply.

Canoncal.. buddy.. pal..

We need to talk about the content on the server image's login screen.

Now, I get that lots of developers will use the server image out of a desire to keep their environments minimal.. but at the same time, is the same server image that will be deployed on thousands of VMs all over the world really the place to be talking about "great IDEs available on Ubuntu" complete with smiley faces?

I'm dead serious I log in and there are fifty seven lines of crap on the screen. I don't need links to your docs or support pages, I definitely don't need cutesy links to "hey look at this cool stuff you can do on Ubuntu!", and I absolutely don't need advertisements for your paid services.

This is some of the tackiest stuff I've seen outside of Gitlab shilling for GKE in the paid enterprise version.

Stuff like this turns actual users off. Sysadmins, the ones who are going to be seeing this stuff since it's visible on SSH shells only do not care about your cutesy IDE advertising.

Grow up.

I've been using keepass for everything and just recently I've just come to realization of just how hard it is to get into my accounts now that I've done this.

Literally, I'm useless if i don't have a computer to get my passwords. (I know it's for android too, but i need the database)

I was trying to log into my spotify, but I couldn't remember my password. Then I thought, oh i know i'll just log into facebook and do it that way.

LOL JK you don't know the password
Fuck... what about my email???
LOL NOPE!

Seriously if i was held at gun point and told to log into anything I'd be dead. I've literally secured myself out of my own accounts...

I guess if there is any silver lining, it's that no-one, and I mean 'no-one' is getting into my accounts any time soon.

I have a question for all you Linux pros:

My son's PC runs on Linux Mint. We wants to switch to the Pantheon desktop so we installed it (I think). I can't work out how to actually switch to it, though.

We don't have an option when we log out.

On a related note, we switched to Linux from Ubuntu because his old machine couldn't handle Ubuntu's resource requirements. I'm curious whether vanilla Debian would perform better?

(No, I probably won't switch to Arch, that's a little too much for my limited Linux capabilities).

I don't understand why someone who's totally sane and careful could forget to turn off MySQL general log over Christmas vacation. Of course Disk out of space caused us down time :/

The best/worst code comments you have ever seen?

Mine:

//Upload didn't work, have to react:
system.println('no result');

//$Message gives out a message in the compiler log.
{$Message Hint 'Feed the cat'}

//Not really needed

//Closed source - Why even comments?

//Looks like bullshit, but it has to be done this way.

//This one's really fucked up.

//If it crashes, click again.

asm JMP START end; //because no goto XP

catch {
//shit happens
}

//OMG!!! And this works???

asm
...
mov [0], 0 //uh, maybe there is a better way of throw an exception
...
mov [0], 0 //still a strange way to notify of an error

// this makes it exiting -- in other words: unstable !!!!!

//Paranoic - can't happen, but I trust no one.

else {
//please no -.-
sleep(0);
}

//wuppdi

for (int i = random(500); i < 1000 + random(500 + random(250)); i++)
{
// Do crap, so its harder to decompile
}

//This job would be great if it wasn't for the f**king customers.

//TODO: place this peace of code somewhere else...

// Beware of bugs in the code above; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

{$IFDEF VER93}
//Good luck
{$DEFINE VER9x}
{$ENDIF}

//THIS SHIT IS LEAKING! SOMEONE FIX IT! :)

/* no comment */

!dev but tech related...

Got a device configured in a location that is fairly far away from me. It operates only through a cloud service specifically for these devices, with one of the most unreliable web interfaces and smartphone apps I have ever used.

I email my issues to the tech support who don't seem to understand the problems and can't fathom the difference between "reset settings" and "restart device".

Eventually they need to log in to my account to find out whats wrong. I explicitly state that under no circumstances should any settings be changed.

Today I find that the device has been removed from the cloud account. I physically must be near it to register it on the account again. Tech support don't seem to know what happened and the best explanation is that it is "a glitch". They have no way to add it back themselves. I have to travel to the device.

Funny how this happened after I let them access the account...

I have been debugging for like hours trying to figure out the cause an unknown bug spoiling my UI by making my elements overlap.
I'm working on a Unit Converter that takes kWh and then converts to mWh. (Logical Conversion: 1000 kWh = 1 mWh).
Just an easy shit i thought, using Javascript I just passed the dynamically generated kWh value to a function that takes maximum of 6 chars and multiply it by 0.001 to get the required result but this was where my problem started. All values came out as expected until my App hits a particular value (8575) and outputs a very long set of String (8.575000000000001), i couldn't figure the cause of this until i checked my console log and found the culprit value, and then i change the calculation logic from multiply by 0.001 to divide by 1000 and it came out as expected (8.575)

My question is that;
Is my math logically wrong or is this another Javascript Calculation setback?

So today was interesting.

I had to extract the domain from an email address and compare the domain to a hard coded whitelist, nothing difficult, fuck takes 2 min really.

Except the project starts throwing 500 errors for no god damn reason, like seriously, I double check syntax, nope looks fine, run pho's syntax checker on the file
# php -l /path/to/file.php

Nope says it's all good.
Checks error log on server -> no log

OoooooooooKay then.

Comments out the few lines, saves, errors gone.

remove comments, error comes back.

Do this a few times, and magically the fucking thing stops throwing errors, now I haven't actually changed anything, and I know this project is so fragile I don't know how it stays running at times but fuck me this is a painful joke.

As a webmail user, I want to be logged out automatically without any reasonable reason, to be able to read your notice that I have forgotten to log out, once I log in again.

Please delete your browser cache.

Wtf is up with this shit?
Maybe I'm just having a streak of bad luck, but in recent days, I ran into this particular issue time and time again.
First with one of our own products - the user appearently not always was shown the newest version due to stuff being cached in the browser.
Fair enough, we had our web-dev find a solution to that, which he did. Until this is rolled out, the only resolution is to clear the browser cache.

I also ran into this same issue on multiple other fronts. For example, there's a remote connection to one of our clients I had to establish via browser. The backend was a bit unresponsive, and somehow I ended up in a situation where my login was rejected. The only solution? Clear your browser cache.

Then we have confluence and jira in the company. Same issue. All of a sudden, I could no longer log in. Worked fine in another browser.
Delete your browser cache.

Is it just that most frontend developers out there are incompetent at what they do or is this stuff broken by design? I don't recall having to clear my browser cache very frequently - in fact, I'm pretty sure I haven't done it for years on one of my PCs at home. What changed?

Ah well, maybe it was just a streak of bad luck. But still ...
/Rant

Been on winter holiday for 3 days. Went to log in to my work laptop to clear out email - took me 20 minutes to remember my domain password.

Getting old sucks, kids.

A service had/has been logging hundreds of errors in the development environment and I reached out to the owning process mgr that the error was occurring and perhaps a good opportunity to log additional data to help troubleshoot the issue if the problem ever made its way to production. He responded saying the error was related to a new feature they weren't going to implement in the backing dev database (TL;DR), and they know it works in production (my spidey sense goes off).
They deployed the changes to production this morning and immediately starting throwing errors (same error I sent)
Mgr messaged me a little while ago "Did you make any changes to the documentation service? We're getting this error .."

50% sure someone misspelled something in a config, but only thing they are logging is 'Unable to parse document'. Nothing that indicates an issue with the service they're using.

Fucking dialog box with only one choice... “Stay Connected” what the hell did you even give me this choice for? What if I wanted to log out? Why prompt at all?

Fuck all authentication everywhere all the time. Fuck your passwords. Fuck your fingerprints. Fuck your rolling key fob. Fuck your aws secrets. Fuck your docker secrets. Fuck your oauth. Fuck your /etc/passwd. Fuck your groups. Fuck chmod and fuck chown and definitely fuck Kerberos. Fuck Saml. Fuck duo mobile. Fuck rotating pins. Fuck axiad. Fuck selinux. Fuck your fill out this form to get role based access. Fuck it doesn’t work because you can’t log in. Fuck it.

GIT LOG VERSION 110
---------------
a9c2934 I don't believe it
fb8d2e6 I am Root. We are Root.
6be9078 FINALLY FIXED THE FUCKING BUG IN THE CODE, DO NOT EVER EVER FUCK ME AGAIN YOU MARON
3d08a88 THIS IS THE FUCKING WORKING VERSION
013faed THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR, GO TO A PREVIOUS COMMIT
af5d013 We'll figure it out on Monday
49e238b de-misunderestimating
a40351b happy monday _ bleh _
a5f345d Fixed unnecessary bug.
485a26a pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
c4fcbde s/import/include/

Its amazing how many people call themselves programmers yet cannot figure out the usefulness of print/log statements. 🤦‍♂️

Very eventful day, please see enclosed several smaller rants.

===================

My college's systems are shit and not only do they use HTTP for everything, even the stores and financial aid purchase system, they have homebrew JS shit for PGP site encryption (nifty...), but they exchange the PRIVATE KEYS instead of the public keys. Over HTTP. Not even HTTPS. Also if you log in more than 10 times in 24 hours it's supposed to lock you out of your account until you call... except it locks EVERYONE out. Found this out when on campus, trying to get my textbooks, when suddenly everyone had login lockouts because i'm a "paranoid bastard" and "afraid of idiot college students" for not telling a PUBLIC PC to remember the one password (enforced by password auto-sync across all their shit, not ideal, no) guarding my SUPER-SENSITIVE FINANCIAL AND ACADEMIC DATA... among the other hundreds of issues this college has. I now see why this college is the only one I can afford...

===================

Can't pass-through raw DVD drive access to VMs as VM managers crash when I try (yes, even QEMU...) so i've gotta install Windows on a shitty 80GB laptop HDD for literally one quick project. On the bright side, if my theory proves correct, you'll no longer need modchips for PS2s.

===================

Found a couple odd lines in my xscreensaver config:

GetViewPortIsFullOfLies:False
nice: 10
pointerHysteresis: 10

the first 2 I can't seem to figure out what do, and the last taught me a new word. Fun!

===================

that's it, it's over, why are you still here

I was thinking about how I implement login functionality, and realised I have no clue how I came up with it so decided to ask if it was a good way to do things.

Basically, client logs in, username/email and pass are sent to server.

Server salts and hashes password and checks it against the one in the database for that user.

If its correct, send the client the user ID and the user token. (User id could be username, or a number, it depends)

When that client makes a request, the request must contain the ID and token.

The server checks that the ID and token combo are correct, and because the ID is linked to the user we know who it is and can complete the request.

Usually I make the token a random string of 16 or 32 chars, each account has their own token, and it may be stored in the browser so they stay logged in. I also normally add a "log out everywhere" button, which essentially just generates a new token to overrides the current one, making any previously saved tokens invalid.

Going for an interview with them asking me to open console on their laptop and type a 1 liner in JavaScript that will make an array with indices being numeric values 1-20. Their machine doesnt want to work and never wanted to log in... So i do the following:

1.Pull out my phone
2.Open Thermux
3.Ask for wifi password
4.Install node on my phone and write the below attached code

Needless to say. I actually feel good about myself, i got the job and a good offer and the network password...

Fucking fuck shit monkeycocksucking gargling wtf!

I was getting some stuff done in my accounting software and it bugged me that the fields were dark and the fonts as well, thus seeing fucking shit. This was clearly a bad choice of a gtk3 dark theme, thus i switched to the fucking default adwaita, suddenly gnome session crashes.
Ok, i just log out and log back in.
Logout.... Nothing happens.... Ctrl-alt-backspace , nothing happens (and i knew i enabled that in the settings)
Ok let's do it a bit more forceful and restart the display manager... Gdm starts... I insert my credentials... It fucking crashes.

WTF!!!

I desperately try to debug it, xsession error msg'es? Nope. Something in /var/log/messages? Nope. Something, anything at all, nope sherlock nopedinope!

About to go batshit crazy, purging and reinstalling all of gnome, thibking that, what ever setting lust have broke it, it will be fixed now.

No fucking fuck desktop!!!

I lost my nerve and replaced gdm with lightdm, and i finally, after three hours wasted on my machine, i get my gnome desktop back... But in a state of mess! Extensions don't work and make it crash again, user themes? Nope, go fuck yourself with plain default.

I'm really losing my shit, business is almost non-existant, and now ly FUCKING desktop refuses to work like i want to. Everything is fucking broken to shits !!

I'm gon a go to my gf, and relax a little, at least i still have a working laptop.

Question is, for how long???

Fml

Developer just emailed our team a complaint that our logging assembly was resulting in their poor test coverage and they sent a change request to give them the ability to mock the underlying log provider (ex. from the event log to ‘something else’).

Looked at their tests, and they are testing whether or not the .Log was executed (on an exception, if the .Log method was not executed, the test failed), which seemed a bit worthless because we’ve already got coverage in our unit tests.
We had a meeting to discuss the issue.
Me: “I’m OK with changing the logging code if it’s necessary, but I want to understand why.”
DevA: “Logging errors is crucial to the database transaction. If someone removes the logging, the tests should fail.”
Me: “If someone removes the error logging on purpose, then they likely have an agenda and will remove the test validation too. It wouldn’t be an accident.”
DevA: “That’s not my problem. They will have to deal with HR.”
Me: “We purposely prevented someone from intercepting the logging just for that purpose. Your test code already covers the business rule, testing the logging seems out of place. That would like writing a test to make sure the System.IO.File.ReadAllText actually reads all the text from a file. You kinda assume a few smart Microsoft engineers already wrote tests for that.”
DevA: “Yea, I guess that would be silly.”

Got cc’ed an email a little bit ago from DevA to his boss..
“We’re not going to be able to change logging assembly. This may have some impact on our overall test coverage as those lines of code will not get testing coverage. You will have to let the DevMgr know we will not meet our test coverage goals.”

WTF!

I needed to log in on a website in someone else's pc and didn't know the password by heart. I thought I'd log into chrome, if I log out later, what could go wrong right?

Apparently, a lot. It facking merged my bookmarks, history and passwords with hers! And she had shitloads of them! It took me facking hours to clean up the mess chrome created. I trust her, but I still didn't want her to have my passwords etc.

Omg I'm never logging into chrome again elsewhere, what a frustrating facking waste of time

I came home about 1am and saw a bug in a small (unpaid...) project that had to do with timezones (see some earlier rants). Fixed it, got to bed.
A few days later I realized that a feature I implemented before was gone. Going through the git log I found out it was me in that night who removed it, by accident I suppose.
Not the end of the world but I was quite intrigued by my own drunk ability to remove a feature that had nothing to to with what I was doing and not even noticing it.

I have an issue with my Laravel routing. Can you help me out, @bittersweet?

I have a custom "/home" route called "/admin" and I set the protected property in the LoginController:

$redirectTo = "/admin";

And it works fine, if I log in from guest. But when I navigate to "/login" as auth-user it still redirects me to "/home".

What the fuck is this? What do I have to change to make this work? Who has to be fucked? Is it possible to solve this without sacrificing a virgin at bloodmoon? And why are Platypus so fucking ugly?

Ever have one of those moments where you're running a service you built to update about a decade worth of police records, realize about halfway through that you fucked the loop and you're copying data from the first record onto every other record, and then just really wish that you had checked things better in test before running this on the prod server?

I'm sure the only reason I'm still here is because the audit log contained the original values and I'm good at pulling data out of it.

I am working in a speciffic engineering team. We are using tools the company has bought and has separate teams administrating them.

Tool X is malfunctioning, throwing server-side errors (some .dlls are mentioned in the err msg)

Me: XAdmin team, there are some suspicious errors and I cannot achieve desired results using tool X

XAdmin: Let me see
XAdmin: I have checked a few forums and could not find a solution. Please log a vendor case

Me: *wat........*
Me: Vendor will most likely require some techical info, some licencing info. How do I go about that?

XAdmin: reach out to the vendor, they will schedule a call. Forward that call to me

Me: *wat............*
Me: *for shits and giggles, register a bogus account at vendor site, try to log the SR*
Me: XAdmin, while logging a SR I am asked for licencing info. What is the aaa, bbb, ccc info of your licence?

XAdmin: *crickets mating*

wtf buddy... How can you call yourself Admin of tool X and ask your customers to log vendor cases for you.....? WTF are YOU there for then??

I'm still WTFed. Like wtf....

EDIT: the guy I was talking to is XAdmins' team lead

Why do all my programming revelations happen whilst I'm curling a log out on the throne

Phone meeting with the makers of a program the company uses regularly:

Me: "so I believe you received the list of problems we have run into recently, can you walk us through how to make the changes necessary to fix them?"

them: "we see none of these errors"

me: "that's impossible, we had all of them yesterday, they crashed a few servers"

*checks version number on program, it's different*

me: "hold on one second"

*checks computer log, they were logged in this morning before I came in*

I figured out they received the list, fixed it, and then turned to us and said we didn't know what we were talking about because none of the errors were there, because they wanted to look superior.

Fuck those guys.

Fuck XCode! -
Yesterday I had the stupid idea to rename an icon file. Checked that XCode was building the application still fine. Ran it over the build server: Failed, complaining about the old missing icon file! Checked again and again, but there was no friggin' reference to the old file in the whole repo.
Log in to the machine clear the build folder and try to build the component again. Bang still same error and the references to no longer existing files reappear.
Turns out XCode was caching those references somewhere in the home directory as "DerivedData" and after deleting those, I could build again... but why on earth are you building a cache if you cannot properly invalidate it? Just to waste our time?
(@xcodesucks)

I like my log messages to indicate automatically where in the code something happened, so that I can easily identify where a message originated from while tracking down problems.

In C/C++ this is nice and easy - write a logging routine, wrap it in macros for the different log levels and have that automatically output __FILE__, __LINE__ etc.

I wanted to do something similar in NodeJS, as I'd found myself manually writing the file name in the log message and then splitting functionality out into new files and it became a mess.

The only way I found to be able to do this was to create an "Error" object and access the "stack" member of it. This is a string containing a stack backtrace, suitable for writing to console/file. I just wanted the filename/line/routine.

So I ended up splitting the string into lines, then for each of the lines, trimming the surrounding spaces (or tabs?), and parsing them to see if the stack entry is inside my logger module. The first entry outside of that module must therefore be the thing that called it, so I then parse out the routine or object and method, filename and line number.

It's a lot of clumsy work but the output is pretty neat. I just wish it were simpler!

How come something works absolutely perfectly in dev but not in prod?
I was making a desktop app in election js and everything is working perfectly. No problem at all. But then I create the installer/distributable and nothing shows on the screen. And out of curiosity, I wanted to see the error log and it shows an unknown error, I didn't even know from what thing the error is being generated. And after I fixed that, another problem came with Asana Api. I mean, if it's a public API, why do you have to block it with cors? I hate cors!
And after all of it, there's more to it. I mean, why can't you just show the errors in dev?

Here's a little challenge for you!

I will buy a devduck for the first person to figure out the password to this account before april 16th.

If you figure it out, simply log in to this account and @mention yourself to prove that you did it.

Here are some clues to help you out:

57 85 22 15
14 3 47 10
34 18 98 45
12 52 50 6

&

TUVMRU5DT0xJQSAx

I figured out why FS2020 crashed all the time.

One day when I was just casually playing FS2020, I bluescreened with a watchdog violation. For some reason this corrupted a DLL which was part of my graphics driver which is not required for the output to come out of course. The DLL is “atidxx64.dll”.

Somehow, this went unnoticed.

After digging into the extremely well-hidden crash log I found out that it accuses this DLL file, dug up on it and I saw that it is made by AMD.

Reinstalled the drivers and now it works fine.

FUCK MY LIFE I REDOWNLOADED THIS 95GB SIMULATOR 4 TIMES BEFORE DIVING INTO THIS

I'm not a beefy dude, But I consider myself as a terminator 🔫 because when I find a BUG I fucking console log the shit out of it !

God I fucking hate macs.
I got a mac at work. I tried to install ubuntu, with rather questionable results (unfortunately, I expected that) - so I tried to get mac work for me the way I like a system to work. I needed to download slack, simple enough, right? Ha, you wish. It's gotta be done through Apple store, so I went to create an Apple ID inside the Apple Store form. And, well, it just errored out on the submission. Great start. I went then to the settings and created an account there, great success, went back to Apple Store. Unfortunately being logged in at the system level doesn't mean you are logged in to the store. So, I went to log in to the store, simple enough, right? No, nothing's simple with Apple. After logging in I got a message that the Apple ID has not yet been used with Apple Store and that I need to review the account's setting. So, I click the "review" button and... I'm presented with a log in form. Yep, a perfect log in loop. I can't log in because I can't review the account but I can't review the account because I can't log in. Fun :)

You can't just go to the web admin panel for your account to review it for Apple Store, that would too be too easy. After a bit of searching I've found an answer on StackOverflow. You need to log in to iTunes. Through a fucking MUSIC APP. To install a free application from the store you need to log in to a music app. Yes, we're all mad here.

Then, after finding out that to be able to use side buttons on my mouse I need an app that I need to manually restart every time I restart the machine and that I need to have an app to fucking transfer files from an android I need another fucking app, because reading a storage of a linux-based system would be too standards compliant - something in me broke. I found out that installing windows on a mac is officially supported.

Supported doesn't mean that it's easy. I tried to install it trying different solutions from SO, but each time I would get an error that Windows couldn't modify the boot partition. Turns out that even wiping the drive and reinstalling OSX doesn't remove residual files on a boot partition and Windows installer is not allowed to modify them. It took me hunting into some shady looking site to actually find this answer. I have no fucking idea how long it all took me, but, finally, great success, Windows, WSL, side buttons working, I can even install slack from an installer. I just wish I could have those hours of my life back.

My high school computer labs all had Macs and SSO for the students. I found out that they had remote login enabled on all of them.
Using CSSHX, I could log in to every computer in a room simultaneously, turn the volume all the way up, and make them sing.
I never tried any privilege escalation, so my capabilities were basically limited to that.
Still fun as hell to freak out everyone in a room all at once.

I already wrote this story in the comments to some other rant, still it's pretty funny.

So, i was modding my wii u by messing with system files, the only way to do this is to run an homebrew that hosts an ftp server so you can connect with your pc, the thing is, this server was not protected and allowed anonymous login, not an issue if you have a firewall.
BUT i had this console in the DMZ on the router for online play.
~You can see where this is going~
While doing stuff from my pc i started seeing a lot of entries on the console's log and i didn't understand why, i thought filezilla was doing some shit so i closed it but the log was still going, then i realized and quickly shut the server down.
Then i disabled the DMZ and went back to check what happened (unfortunately the log was only shown on screen and not saved, by closing the server i lost it) so looks like the attacker uploaded a lot of files with random names in pretty much every folder.
Due to the random names, I don't know which are system files and which attacker's files so i just kept them there. And today they should still be there.

--Random thinking--
What if the attacker also stole some files, he was hoping to get photos or valuable documents, but just got the console's system files and he thought something along the lines of "wtf is even this".
Also, how likely is that an ip scanner script gets to my ip in the 5 minutes i run the server, and (on the attacker side) how likely is to hack a server just to find out that's a wii u (the least successful console in the last generation)...

Moral of the story: double check your firewall if you are going to run an unprotected server.
That's it, stay safe :P