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Search - "much network"
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!rant
After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:
1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.
2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)
3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.
4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.
5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.
6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.
7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.
8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.
9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)
10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...
These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!219 -
- Hello! Gordon's pizza?
- No sir it's Google's pizza.
- So it's a wrong number?
- No sir, Google bought it.
- OK. Take my order please ..
- Well sir, you want the usual?
- The usual? You know me?
- According to our caller ID, in the last 12 times, you ordered pizza with cheeses, sausage, thick crust
- OK! This is it
- May I suggest to you this time ricotta, arugula with dry tomato?
- No, I hate vegetables
- But your cholesterol is not good
- How do you know?
- Through the subscribers guide. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years
- Okay, but I do not want this pizza, I already take medicine
- You have not taken the medicine regularly, 4 months ago, you only purchased a box with 30 tablets at Drugsale Network
- I bought more from another drugstore
- It's not showing on your credit card
- I paid in cash
- But you did not withdraw that much cash according to your bank statement
- I have other source of cash
- This is not showing as per you last Tax form unless you got it from undeclared income source
-WHAT THE HELL? Enough! I'm sick of Google, Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp. I'm going to an Island without internet,where there is no cell phone line and no one to spy on me
- I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport as it has expired 5 weeks ago..41 -
wk87 is a dangerous topic for me, i've been through a lot. I apologise for what I am about to inflict on this network over the coming week.
Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 1, "T".
T was an embedded C developer who talked openly about how he's been writing code since he was 14, knew all the C system libraries and functions like the back of his hand. For the most part, he did ... but not how to actually use them, as (based on his shocking ... well everything) he was inflicted by some sort of brain disorder not yet fully understood by medical science. Some highlights:
- Myself and the CTO spent 4 days teaching him what a circle buffer was and how to build one.
- His final circle buffer implementation had about 3 times as much code as he actually needed.
- When the code was running too slowly on the device, we didn't try find any performance improvements, or debug anything to see if there was anything taking too long. No not with T, T immediately blamed TCP for being inefficient.
- After he left we found a file called "TCP-Light" in his projects folder.
- He accused the CTO of having "violent tendencies" because he was playing with a marker tossing it up in the air and catching it.
- He once managed to leave his bank statements, jumper and TROUSERS in the bathroom and didn't realise until a building wide email went out.
- He once .... no hang on, seriously his fucking trousers, how?
- He accused us all of being fascists because we gave out to him for not driving with his glasses, despite the fact his license says he needs to (blind as a bat).
... why were his trousers off in the first place? and how do you forget ... or miss the pile of clothes and letters in a small bathroom.
Moving on, eventually he was fired, but the most depressing thing of all about T, is that he might not even be top of my list.
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!11 -
So I have complained to our landlord about a noisy neighbor who keeps blasting shitty music at midnight, and technically its against the law as well, but this bitch ass joke of a human being ignored even the most highest of authority.
Seeing I can't solve it with democracy, I finally gave up with any reasonable type of way to restrain this motherfucker (even calling police didn't help) and went full asshole with him
I know his WiFi uses WPS PIN, but I'm not gonna throttle his network, I want to piss him off so much he'll regret living beside me, or at our place entirely.
So I performed a Evil Twin attack, I had my Raspberry Pi act as a both cloned AP and a deauther. Finally the plan came to effect.
I ran the deauther in his AP, effectively disconnecting his devices, and had the devices connect to the cloned network. The primary aim of my attack is to annoy this bitch ass to the point of no return. The project I used serves a website on the cloned AP like a update for his router. I intentionally made it run overnight, blasted Lo-fi hip hop and went to sleep. Before I dozed off, I can hear their scream of rage because they can't blast their music at full volume (waddaya guess, they use Spotify).
I finally woke up the next day, and I find neighbor complaining about me, and they were trying to tell the landlord I was hacking them. It's technically true but its not as bad as domestic disturbance for a full fucking week.
Landlord asked me if I did it, I declined, she believed me (I know she does because she knows I'm a pure soul unlike this mofo). Then he left frustrated, threatened to sue me for hacking.
I just smickered, he can't really prove anything unless I was being sloppy.
Nowadays I get good sleep and finally we live in a quite peaceful place now. Now you may ask, what happened to that guy? After he threatened me, the next night he found his things outside his own room, he was kicked out by the landlord.
Moral of the story: we ain't hating on your music taste but don't showcase it like its the most important thing in the world when everyone is sleeping. Case and point, don't be an asshole19 -
Linux sucks.
Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:
1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.
2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.
3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?
4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).
5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!
---------------------------------
Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.
I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.
But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.51 -
So I told my wife one week ago: "Yeah, you should totally learn to code as well!"
Yesterday a package arrived, containing a really beautiful hardcover book bound in leather, with a gold foil image of a snake debossed into the cover, with the text "In the face of ambiguity -- Refuse the temptation to guess" on it.
Well, OK, that's weird.
My wife snatches it and says: "I had that custom made by a book binder". I flip through it. It contains the Python 3.9 language reference, and the PEP 8 styleguide.
While I usually dislike paper dev books because they become outdated over time, I'm perplexed by this one, because of how much effort and craftsmanship went in to it. I'm even a little jealous.
So, this morning I was putting dishes into the dishwasher, and she says: "Please let me do that". I ask: "Am I doing anything wrong?"
Wife responds: "Well, it's not necessarily wrong, I mean, it works, doesn't it? But your methods aren't very pythonic. Your conventions aren't elegant at all". I don't think I've heard anyone say the word "pythonic" to me in over a decade.
And just now my wife was looking over my shoulder as I was debugging some lower level Rust code filled with network buffers and hex literals, and she says: "Pffffff unbelievable, I thought you were a senior developer. That code is really bad, there are way too many abbreviated things. Readability counts! I bet if you used Python, your code would actually work!"
I think I might have released something really evil upon the world.29 -
Hacking/attack experiences...
I'm, for obvious reasons, only going to talk about the attacks I went through and the *legal* ones I did 😅 😜
Let's first get some things clear/funny facts:
I've been doing offensive security since I was 14-15. Defensive since the age of 16-17. I'm getting close to 23 now, for the record.
First system ever hacked (metasploit exploit): Windows XP.
(To be clear, at home through a pentesting environment, all legal)
Easiest system ever hacked: Windows XP yet again.
Time it took me to crack/hack into today's OS's (remote + local exploits, don't remember which ones I used by the way):
Windows: XP - five seconds (damn, those metasploit exploits are powerful)
Windows Vista: Few minutes.
Windows 7: Few minutes.
Windows 10: Few minutes.
OSX (in general): 1 Hour (finding a good exploit took some time, got to root level easily aftewards. No, I do not remember how/what exactly, it's years and years ago)
Linux (Ubuntu): A month approx. Ended up using a Java applet through Firefox when that was still a thing. Literally had to click it manually xD
Linux: (RHEL based systems): Still not exploited, SELinux is powerful, motherfucker.
Keep in mind that I had a great pentesting setup back then 😊. I don't have nor do that anymore since I love defensive security more nowadays and simply don't have the time anymore.
Dealing with attacks and getting hacked.
Keep in mind that I manage around 20 servers (including vps's and dedi's) so I get the usual amount of ssh brute force attacks (thanks for keeping me safe, CSF!) which is about 40-50K every hour. Those ip's automatically get blocked after three failed attempts within 5 minutes. No root login allowed + rsa key login with freaking strong passwords/passphrases.
linu.xxx/much-security.nl - All kinds of attacks, application attacks, brute force, DDoS sometimes but that is also mostly mitigated at provider level, to name a few. So, except for my own tests and a few ddos's on both those domains, nothing really threatening. (as in, nothing seems to have fucked anything up yet)
How did I discover that two of my servers were hacked through brute forcers while no brute force protection was in place yet? installed a barebones ubuntu server onto both. They only come with system-default applications. Tried installing Nginx next day, port 80 was already in use. I always run 'pidof apache2' to make sure it isn't running and thought I'd run that for fun while I knew I didn't install it and it didn't come with the distro. It was actually running. Checked the auth logs and saw succesful root logins - fuck me - reinstalled the servers and installed Fail2Ban. It bans any ip address which had three failed ssh logins within 5 minutes:
Enabled Fail2Ban -> checked iptables (iptables -L) literally two seconds later: 100+ banned ip addresses - holy fuck, no wonder I got hacked!
One other kind/type of attack I get regularly but if it doesn't get much worse, I'll deal with that :)
Dealing with different kinds of attacks:
Web app attacks: extensively testing everything for security vulns before releasing it into the open.
Network attacks: Nginx rate limiting/CSF rate limiting against SYN DDoS attacks for example.
System attacks: Anti brute force software (Fail2Ban or CSF), anti rootkit software, AppArmor or (which I prefer) SELinux which actually catches quite some web app attacks as well and REGULARLY UPDATING THE SERVERS/SOFTWARE.
So yah, hereby :P39 -
I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.
Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.
Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.
Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.
I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.
(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)
Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.
If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.
It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.
I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.
Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!
To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.
They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.
When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.
Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.
In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.30 -
Hello! Is this Gordon’s Pizza?
No sir, it’s Google’s Pizza.
Did I dial the wrong number?
No sir, Google bought the pizza store.
Oh, alright - then I’d like to place an order please.
Okay sir, do you want the usual?
The usual? You know what my usual is?
According to the caller ID, the last 15 times you’ve ordered a 12-slice with double-cheese, sausage, and thick crust.
Okay - that’s what I want this time too.
May I suggest that this time you order an 8-slice with ricotta, arugula, and tomato instead?
No, I hate vegetables.
But your cholesterol is not good.
How do you know?
Through the subscribers guide. We have the results of your blood tests for the last 7 years.
Maybe so, but I don’t want the pizza you suggest – I already take medicine for high cholesterol.
But you haven’t taken the medicine regularly. 4 months ago you purchased from Drugsale Network a box of only 30 tablets.
I bought more from another drugstore.
It’s not showing on your credit card sir.
I paid in cash.
But according to your bank statement you did not withdraw that much cash.
I have another source of cash.
This is not showing on your last tax form, unless you got it from an undeclared income source.
WHAT THE HELL? ENOUGH! I’m sick of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. I’m going to an island without internet, where there’s no cellphone line, and no one to spy on me …
I understand sir, but you’ll need to renew your passport … it expired 5 weeks ago.16 -
Holy fucking hell!
Who the fuck sets up a local network with an 255.255.0.0 subnet mask and then lets the dhcp-server distribute clients onto the 192.249.x.x., 192.2.x.x and the 192.22.x.x networks AT FUCKING RANDOM???
I need to SSH onto 40 routers distributed across the entire campus and have a WORKING internet connection while doing so and you make me spin the connect-disconnect-wheel. Fucking hell dude, don't give me that "Uh, it wasn't intended for this size"-bullshit. You have about 200 active devices. And in one subnet you have space for more than 60 000. Fuck you, dumbass! OH, YOUR FUCKING LIST IS FUCKING WRONG AND YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE IP OF THE ROUTERS? OH FUCK YOU EVEN HARDER!!!
Goddamn people why does legacy maintenance always suck so much?😭😭😭4 -
In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”
Simplicity 1, complexity 0.16 -
This is just my token of appreciation for the Skype devs. Can't begin to say how much I hate it. Your android app is a joke even after a host of updates, your desktop client is an even bigger joke (atleast Linux Beta version, I know betas aren't supposed to be stable but this is ridiculous).
You have reinvented chat clients to be extremely bulky, cumbersome and very hard to sync across devices. And you have managed to make it "buffer" more than a YouTube video does on a 2G network. I for one, am blown over by how you did that. And to top it all, you can't close the client on Linux atleast! All you did is just override the close button so that it only minimises it. Brilliant piece of work right there!
Why the hell can't you just close the client and run it in the background the proper way like everyone else does? Why does it have to take 20 *** seconds to open a message? The only reason I am stuck with this is some wierdos in the office still only use this. Get your shit together 😡
Ahh.. I feel much better now.18 -
Smart India Hackathon: Horrible experience
Background:- Our task was to do load forecasting for a given area. Hourly energy consumption data for past 5 years was given to us.
One government official asks the following questions:-
1. Why are you using deep learning for the project? Why are you not doing data analysis?
2. Which neural network "algorithm" you are using? He wanted to ask which model we are using, but he didn't have a single clue about Neural Networks.
3. Why are you using libraries? Why not your own code?
Here comes the biggest one,
4. Why haven't you developed your own "algorithm" (again, he meant model)? All you have done is used sone library. Where is "novelty" in your project?
I just want to say that if you don't know anything about ML/AI, then don't comment anything about it. And worst thing was, he was not ready to accept the fact that for capturing temporal dependencies where underlying probability distribution ia unknown, deep learning performs much better than traditional data analysis techniques.
After hearing his first question, second one was not a surprise for us. We were expecting something like that. For a few moments, we were speechless. Then one of us started by showing neural network architecture. But after some time, he rudely repeated the same question, "where is the algorithm". We told him every fucking thing used in the project, ranging from RMSprop optimizer to Backpropagation through time algorithm to mean squared loss error function.
Then very calmly, he asked third question, why are you using libraries? That moron wanted us to write a whole fucking optimized library. We were speechless at this question. Finally, one of us told him the "obvious" answer. We were completely demotivated. But it didnt end here. The real question was waiting. At the end, after listening to all of us, he dropped the final bomb, WHY HAVE YOU USED A NEURAL NETWORK "ALGORITHM" WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPLEMENTED? WHY DIDN'T YOU MAKE YOU OWN "ALGORITHM"? We again stated the obvious answer that it takes atleast an year or two of continuous hardwork to develop a state of art algorithm, that too when gou build it on top of some existing "algorithm". After listening to this, he left. His final response was "Try to make a new "algorithm"".
Needless to say, we were completely demotivated after this evaluation. We all had worked too hard for this. And we had ability to explain each and every part of the project intuitively and mathematically, but he was not even ready to listen.
Now, all of us are sitting aimlessly, waiting for Hackathon to end.😢😢😢😢😢25 -
So I had my exams recently and I thought I'd post some of the most hacky shit I've done there over here. One thing to keep in mind, I'm a backender so I always have to hack my way around frontend!
- Had a user level authentication library which fucked up for some reason so I literally made an array with all pages and user levels allowed so I pretty much had a hardcoded user level authentication feature/function. Hey, it worked!
- CSS. Gave every page a hight of 110 percent because that made sure that you couldn't see part of the white background under the 'background' picture. Used !important about everywhere but it worked :P.
- Completey forgot (stress, time pressure etc) to make the user ID's auto incremented. 'Fixed' that by randomly generating a user id and really hoping during every registration that that user ID did not exist in the database already. Was dirty as fuck but hey it worked!
- My 'client' insisted on using Windows server.Although I wouldn't even mind using it for once, I'd never worked with it before so that would have been fucked for me. Next to that fact, you could hear swearing from about everyone who had to use Windows server in that room, even the die hard windows users rather had linux servers. So, I just told a lot of stuff about security, stability etc and actually making half of all that shit up and my client was like 'good idea, let's go for linux server then!'. Saved myself there big time.
- CHMOD'd everything 777. It just worked that way and I was in too much time pressure to spend time on that!
- Had to use VMWare instead of VirtulBox which always fucks up for me and this time it did again. Windows 10 enjoyed corrupting the virtual network adapters after every reboot of my host so I had to re-create the whole adapter about 20 times again (and removing it again) in order to get it to work. Even the administrator had no fucking clue why that was happening.
- Used project_1.0.zip etc for version control :P.
Yup, fun times!6 -
Goddamn I'm retarded to the next level.
Rebooted my phone a few days ago, some stuff didn't work well anymore and I'm looking for a new one which supports custom roms but I shouldn't spend too much right now so I thought I'd let it go for now.
Rebooted again last night and the network time wouldn't set properly so set it manually. Today I suddenly noticed that any app/page loading through a secure connection wasn't loading at all.
This to the goddamn point that my phone was becoming useless.
Started to search for a quick, cheap replacement supporting custom roms while debugging on and on.
I just (now) looked at the date and BAM, it hit me: I set it to one month earlier.
Mother of god I'm stupid. Brain fart to the max.14 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
I think the coolest project I did was a few years ago, it was actually a Minecraft plugin.
I decided to learn Java for Minecraft, and a few months after I started learning Java, I was approached by someone who'd like to work with me to create this full-blown Gun Game style gamemode for Minecraft. I made it clear I didn't have the most knowledge, but I was willing to learn.
We began working on the project, the projects main class was bigger than any project I had worked on. Within a few months, it became one of the more popular plugins out there, even though we were still in an alpha mode. Had nearly 1,000 servers running the plugin, over 10k+ players total testing out the plugin.
Cause of this project, I learnt how to properly organize my code, how to make it efficient, learnt how to network, learned how to properly secure and verify anything being sent by the client, working with dependencies, adding features that can support a bunch of other plugins that other developers had, and a bunch more.
Sadly we couldn't finish the plugin anymore, so we gave someone else the source code who has kept it updated to this day. (I know I didn't provide much insight into what I'm saying and just gave a general overview, got a killer headache.)2 -
It's done! Network printer and scanner, hosted by a Raspberry Pi Zero W. I used CUPS to host the printer, but the scanner was much more difficult. I installed apache2 on the Pi to host a HTML front-end that I wrote. Once you set up the scan, the front-end makes an AJAX call to a PHP script, which then calls my Python script that does the scanning and converting. Once that's done, it returns the file name via the AJAX call, then the front-end downloads the scanned PDF on the computer. I even managed to impress my girlfriend, who didn't really understand what I was doing until I showed her the end result 😄
I might try to pipe the output of the conversion straight back via AJAX, to be downloaded without a second call.9 -
I wonder why banks are always so terribly insecure, given how much money there's for grabs in there for hackers.
Just a while ago I got a new prepaid credit card from bpost, our local postal service that for some reason also does banking. The reason for that being that - thank you 'Murica! - a lot of websites out there don't accept anything but credit cards and PayPal. Because who in their right mind wouldn't use credit cards, right?! As it turns out, it's pretty much every European I've spoken to so far.
That aside, I got that card, all fine and dandy, it's part of the Mastercard network so at least I can get my purchases from those shitty American sites that don't accept anything else now. Looked into the manual of it because bpost's FAQ isn't very clear about what my login data for their online customer area now actually is. Not that their instruction manual was either.
I noticed in that manual that apparently the PIN code can't be changed (for "security reasons", totally not the alternative that probably they didn't want to implement it), and that requesting a forgotten PIN code can be done with as little as calling them up, and they'll then send the password - not a reset form, the password itself! IN THE FUCKING MAIL.
Because that's apparently how financial institutions manage their passwords. The fact that they know your password means that they're storing it in plain text, probably in a database with all the card numbers and CVC's next to it. Wouldn't that be a treasure trove for cybercriminals, I wonder? But YOU the customer can't change your password, because obviously YOU wouldn't be able to maintain a secure password, yet THEY are obviously the ones with all the security and should be the ones to take out of YOUR hands the responsibility to maintain YOUR OWN password.
Banking logic. I fucking love it.
As for their database.. I reckon that that's probably written in COBOL too. Because why wouldn't you.23 -
Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.
Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.
The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:
Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)
And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.
Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.
There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.
Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"
I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.
Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.
Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.
Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them
Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.
I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.
She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.3 -
Not really dev as much but still IT related 😂
in college we got some new macs in our class. Before we were allowed to use them the "IT Tech" came in and did something to them all (probably ran some scripts to set stuff up)
Anyway, I was completely new to OS X and accidentally pressed a key combo that opened up a dialogue to connect to a remote file server. I saw the address field was already filled out (from when the IT Tech was running the scripts). So me being me I decided to connect. Low and behold my student credentials got me in.
Taking a look around I found scripts, backups and all sorts of stuff. I decided to look at some of the scripts to see what they did. One of them was a script to add the Mac to the domain. Here's the funny part. The login to do that was hard coded into the script....
To conclude. I now have domain level access to my whole college network 🙃
Tl;Dr: stupid it tech saves password in script. I find it. I now have domain level access to the college network14 -
I have a pi-hole setup in my network for ad and tracker blocking and am dual-booting my pc.
I recently noticed just how much data windows really is trying to gather from my machine.
So I took the pi-hole graph and you can VERY clearly see the os switch. All this useless traffic coming from windows. (This is with all the privacy relevant options inside the settings already turned off!)15 -
In 2008 I took my first web development job for an agency that's no longer around. There was a Vice President there by appointment from our coke headed owner who really liked to micromanage and invade privacy with key loggers and screencap spyware to "manage" us. I found out because my machine would snag when moving the mouse cursor and sometimes I'd accidentally paste the screenshot into photoshop just before the software cleared the clipboard. Anyway, I wasn't supposed to know I was being monitored so I just unplugged my network cable and killed the service running the jank ass spyware. I'd delete it when no one was looking and wipe out the cache of screencaps it would compile every day. It was basically a troll vs troll stalemate for weeks. Finally they gave in and told everyone what was going on so we collectively decided to seek revenge. We bought a piezo buzzer about the size of a quarter that chirped like crickets at random intervals. We stuck it on the underside of his desk inside of the middle drawer area and let it go. They spent so much time and money trying to get rid of the cricket infestation. We let it go on for weeks. I ended up quitting before the gag was up, but damn was it funny to see him squirm in that office because of those crickets!6
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Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)
First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:
Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).
We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".
1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.
1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"
Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.
CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.
When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!
So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.
I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.
Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.
Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.
Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.
So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off
I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine
.... happy job hunting everyone!10 -
I JUST FINISHED MY FIRST NEURAL NETWORK!!!
But first of all, as I know you guys, it's spaghetti code and even I as a newb see places where I used too few-dimensional array or passed useless parameters or simply wrote too many redundant lines of code. I know it. I will make it MUCH better next time. Period.
But OMFG this made me scream from happiness today!! Just these few seemingly random numbers... I'm really done.. That's why I jumped into coding year or two ago..
And for some background, I didn't study any IT school, I'm just highschooler (general grammar school) who traded gaming for learning. Also my maths teacher teached NNs on university and is very keen to teach me, so that's that.
Now I wanna make the best out of it and I'm looking forward to write some well documented and flexible library, parallelized and everything (I'm gonna learn a lot in the process of doing this) better then FANN.
Maybe I'm gonna fail(99% probability but hey, I'm programmer beginner, I still think I can code everything I want). But if there is just one moment like when I saw this screen today, I'mma trade my life for it.
Sorry for taking your time guys, I was just genuinely stunned... A lot24 -
Buckle up kids, this one gets saucy.
At work, we have a stress test machine that trests tensile, puncture and breaking strength for different materials used (wood construction). It had a controller software update that was supposed to be installed. I was called into the office because the folks there were unable to install it, they told me the executable just crashed, and wanted me to take a look as I am the most tech-savvy person there.
I go to the computer and open up the firmware download folder. I see a couple folders, some random VBScript file, and Installation.txt. I open the TXT, and find the first round of bullshit.
"Do not run the installer executable directly as it will not work. Run install.vbs instead."
Now, excuse me for a moment, but what kind of dick-cheese-sniffing cockmonger has end users run VBScript files to install something in 2018?! Shame I didn't think of opening it up and examining it for myself to find out what that piece of boiled dogshit did.
I suspend my cringe and run it, and lo and behold, it installs. I open the program and am faced with entering a license key. I'm given the key by the folks at the office, but quickly conclude no ways of entering it work. I reboot the program and there is an autofilled key I didn't notice previously. Whatever, I think, and hit OK.
The program starts fine, and I try with the login they had previously used. Now it doesn't work for some reason. I try it several times to no avail. Then I check the network inspector and notice that when I hit login, no network activity happens in the program, so I conclude the check must be local against some database.
I browse to the program installation directory for clues. Then I see a folder called "Databases".
"This can't be this easy", I think to myself, expecting to find some kind of JSON or something inside that I can crawl for clues. I open the folder and find something much worse. Oh, so much worse.
I find <SOFTWARE NAME>.accdb in the folder. At this point cold sweat is already running down my back at the sheer thought of using Microsoft Access for any program, but curiosity takes over and I open it anyway.
I find the database for the entire program inside. I also notice at this point that I have read/write access to the database, another thing that sent my alarm bells ringing like St. Pauls cathedral. Then I notice a table called "tUser" in the left panel.
Fearing the worst, I click over and find... And you knew it was coming...
Usernames and passwords in plain text.
Not only that, they're all in the format "admin - admin", "user - user", "tester - tester".
I suspend my will to die, login to the program and re-add the account they used previously. I leave the office and inform the peeps that the program works as intended again.
I wish I was making this shit up, but I really am not. What is the fucking point of having a login system at all when your users can just open the database with a program that nowadays comes bundled with every Windows install and easily read the logins? It's not even like the data structure is confusing like minified JSON or something, it's literally a spreadsheet in a program that a trained monkey could read.
God bless them and Satan condemn the developers of this fuckawful program.8 -
I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.
So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.
It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.
Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).
Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!
The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.
Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.
So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.
There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D13 -
Part of the new hire process was all salaried employees had to work all hourly position jobs for a day (over a several week period, not all in one day) to really understand what we do.
I once hazed a new network admin who was working in the call center and I sent his station a pop-up message:
“Ha! Fire me will you!! I planted this virus and if you don’t enter the password in 60 seconds I will erase the database.” The pop-up had a counter counting down from 60.
This was over the lunch hour, so all the supervisors and managers were away and ‘Mark’ in a panic ran into our office (I was hiding under my desk)
Mark: GUYS!!...GUYS!!!....OMG!….Where the frack is everybody?!!!”
He runs out.
I peek out the door window and about a second later he’s running down the hall with one of the vice presidents. Mark shows the VP the message, VP looks over at our office, sees me…laughs and walks back to his office (not saying much to Mark).
Mark not knowing what’s going on watches the counter…3...2…1….
”Just kidding. Welcome to the company!”
Ahhh…the repeated sounds of “You son of a -bleep-!!” never sounded so sweet.1 -
Do you know what annoys the living fuck out of me?
Me: no...?
Me: may I tell?
Me: yes, please do!
Me: okay here we go:
Sites which use Google fonts or apis or ajax or other Google-hosted libraries.
It takes fucking ages to load those sites (if they lost et-all) since I block as much as possible from that cocksucking mass surveillance network.
Google, feel free to die in a fucking corner while getting an acid shower and being stripped of your skin layer by layer, as slow as possible to increase the pain and suffering.16 -
This is to dfox and trogus. I think that a lot of devRanters are very happy with the support option! Although i hate Google pretty much i made a very unlikely exception for you because i would love to support the social network where i, next to being able to rant and be among fellow devs, met quite some very nice devs with whom i still am in touch with through slack and some encrypted channels. Thanks for this awesome place and I'm proud to be a supporter 😃7
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Yesterday the web site started logging an exception “A task was canceled” when making a http call using the .Net HTTPClient class (site calling a REST service).
Emails back n’ forth ..blaming the database…blaming the network..then a senior web developer blamed the logging (the system I’m responsible for).
Under the hood, the logger is sending the exception data to another REST service (which sends emails, generates reports etc.) which I had to quickly re-direct the discussion because if we’re seeing the exception email, the logging didn’t cause the exception, it’s just reporting it. Felt a little sad having to explain it to other IT professionals, but everyone seemed to agree and focused on the server resources.
Last night I get a call about the exceptions occurring again in much larger numbers (from 100 to over 5,000 within a few minutes). I log in, add myself to the large skype group chat going on just to catch the same senior web developer say …
“Here is the APM data that shows logging is causing the http tasks to get canceled.”
FRACK!
Me: “No, that data just shows the logging http traffic of the exception. The exception is occurring before any logging is executed. The task is either being canceled due to a network time out or IIS is running out of threads. The web site is failing to execute the http call to the REST service.”
Several other devs, DBAs, and network admins agree.
The errors only lasted a couple of minutes (exactly 2 minutes, which seemed odd), so everyone agrees to dig into the data further in the morning.
This morning I login to my computer to discover the error(s) occurred again at 6:20AM and an email from the senior web developer saying we (my mgr, her mgr, network admins, DBAs, etc) need to discuss changes to the logging system to prevent this problem from negatively affecting the customer experience...blah blah blah.
FRACKing female dog!
Good news is we never had the meeting. When the senior web dev manager came in, he cancelled the meeting.
Turned out to be a hiccup in a domain controller causing the servers to lose their connection to each other for 2 minutes (1-minute timeout, 1 minute to fully re-sync). The exact two-minute burst of errors explained (and proven via wireshark).
People and their petty office politics piss me off.2 -
Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.1 -
Years ago, when i was a teenager (13,14 or smth) and internet at home was a very uncommon thing, there was that places where ppl can play lan games, have a beer (or coke) and have fun (spacenet internet cafe). It was like 1€ per hour to get a pc. Os was win98, if you just cancel the boot progress (reset button) to get an error boot menu, and then into the dos mode "edit c:/windows/win.ini" and remove theyr client startup setting from there, than u could use the pc for free. How much hours we spend there...
The more fun thing where the open network config, without the client running i could access all computers c drives (they was just shared i think so admin have it easy) was fun to locate the counter strike 1.6 control settings of other players. And bind the w key to "kill"... Round begins and you hear alot ppl raging. I could even acess the server settings of unreal tournament and fck up the gravity and such things. Good old time, the only game i played fair was broodwar and d3 lod5 -
Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”
4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”4 -
I absolutely love the email protocols.
IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT
Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.
SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.
Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".
Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.
Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?9 -
devRant is the only social media I like and use regularly.
It certainly has it faults, as any network of people will, but overall I think it provides a much needed conversation between like-minded people.3 -
I've got a confession to make.
A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..
What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.
What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.
What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.
At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?11 -
- Hello! Gordon's pizza?
- No sir it's Google's pizza.
- So it's a wrong number?
- No sir, Google bought it.
- OK. Take my order please ..
- Well sir, you want the usual?
- The usual? You know me?
- According to our caller ID, in the last 12 times, you ordered pizza with cheeses, sausage, thick crust
- OK! This is it
- May I suggest to you this time ricotta, arugula with dry tomato?
- No, I hate vegetables
- But your cholesterol is not good
- How do you know?
- Through the subscribers guide. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years
- Okay, but I do not want this pizza, I already take medicine
- You have not taken the medicine regularly, 4 months ago, you only purchased a box with 30 tablets at Drugsale Network
- I bought more from another drugstore
- It's not showing on your credit card
- I paid in cash
- But you did not withdraw that much cash according to your bank statement
- I have other source of cash
- This is not showing as per you last Tax form unless you got it from undeclared income source
-WHAT THE HELL? Enough! I'm sick of Google, Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp. I'm going to an Island without internet,where there is no cell phone line and no one to spy on me
- I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport as it has expired 5 weeks ago..11 -
I die, go to hell and my punishment is to write software for hell network that is having power problems due to light source disruptions and is running on Windows 95 on FAT32 without any service pack.
Network speed is trough 300bps dial up modem. Protocol is over IPX/SPX.
My task is to write interactive websites that are replacement of modern websites but in VBScript, ActiveX, IE 4.0.
I have 10 managers that tell me what to do and scream when I miss deadline that is set everyday without my knowledge at random times.
They send me an email and 5 minutes later they arrive at my desk to ask me about it.
I must work 16 hours a day before I can leave the place and if I won’t show up police beats me and escorts me to the office.
If I’m late a second I don’t get payment.
I can’t afford to rent a place so I sleep in the sleeping bag.
It doesn’t matter much cause as soon as I fall asleep phone rings until I wake up and my manager screams about the problems he have for about an hour.6 -
Continuation of the story with Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on the old Core2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and HDD. The guy has had that PC under Linux for 1.5 months now, had never had Linux before, has no IT background, and is over 70.
Upon visit, I checked how the machine was doing. OK, he had forgotten to apply the updates, so I highlighted paying attention to the red icon in the tray. Launched the updates, all ran through.
Otherwise, he had managed to install Skype all by himself (network effect because of his family...) and had bought a webcam plus a microphone. Linux had just recognised everything without any fuzz. Even his Skype buddies were impressed, he said.
On top of that, he likes how much faster that PC is compared to his much more current Win 10 laptop and actually uses the old Linux PC more than the laptop.
He also enjoys that Linux doesn't do weird things all by itself all the time. That's not his experience with Win 10.12 -
I’m so happy right now, I love doing this. Now just gotta wait for the 10Gbit switch so I can start working on the 150TB storage server solutionrant screw the old network guy the new network guy he left all ports open in the gateway ubiquti god i hate him so much unifi ubnt21
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Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.
That time when...
He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.
He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.
He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.
He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).
He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).
He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.
He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.
He set up a new email account for each individual online service.
He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).
He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).
He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).
He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.
He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.
He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.
He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.
He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).
He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.
(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).
He ate a sim card.
He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).
He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.
He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).
He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).
He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.
I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.26 -
This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.
Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.
I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.
On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.
I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.
10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.
Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.9 -
This next one is dedicated to a couple of special people at my workplace:
- The person who uploaded internal-use-only code to a personal repository on GitHub
- The network team that has blocked any and all access to GitHub
- The obscured mass of management bureaucracy that makes it pretty much impossible for anyone at my level to make any sort of appeal
This one's for you:
*ahem*
WHY?!3 -
I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.3 -
We have 1 guy managing everything. He develop our CMS, customers email client, manage our network, servers, domains (our own domain servers), billing system, SSL certificates... In short: everything (as well as bugs). The entire company relies on 1 guy, pretty much.
Brings the phrase "all for one, and one for all" to a whole new meaning.15 -
Had 2 days of vacation. Theoretically (plus weekend, plus 2 days) 6 days.
Worked today… At Saturday.
Some administrators forgot to properly check bandwidth limitations....
*rolls eyes*
We had a major version upgrade of some server software at Monday.
Guess why I got called...
Of course it MUST be the software upgrade.
It couldn't be the new hardware that was setup 2 weeks ago and on which a lot of "important" VMs were migrated.
*eyes roll inside till only white is visible*
The even more annoying thing is that it wasn't that hard to figure out.
Looking at monitoring, we had spikes on 20 Gbit/s (roughly 2.x Gigabyte/sec - Ethernet) connection of some server at roughly 1.9 plus Gigabyte/sec.
IO latency spikes that made the graph look like a heartbeat EKG with severe tachycardia...
*additionally to white eyes starts cursing in reverse latin*
Incompetent admin answer: Booboo that can only be your fault - the developers must investigate.
Me (just a tad more polite): Meep Meep mother fucker, get your shit together. If the software would eat that much, the network would be a niece chunk of charcoal. Plus the time (sending instead of links to monitoring pictures… guess the lazy fucktard who's brain is a vacuum didn't even bother to check it)...
NOTICE SOMETHING?!
Incompetent admin: It starts at the same time. Always.
After wasting roughly another hour of time discussing with him, I just hanged up the video call.
Called someone I knew from the admin department and turns out that - drumrolls please - the incompetent admin was someone who got recruited 3 months ago…
*turning into antichrist*
I then had a not so polite discussion about how the only competent people could take days off (all except incompetent admin were on vacation) and the seemingly incompetent fresh recruit - who by the way NEVER mentioned this - was the only one left of the admin department. Which would be bad alone, but no - he even got the 24/7 emergency support role for the whole weekend.
Sometimes this company and HR especially notoriously drive me insane...
Guess next week there will be some HR barbecue.
But yeah. After a lot of raging around we nailed it down to the traffic of backups and could fix it.
Roughly 4 hours of analysis, communication, raging and hatred.
Just one hour implementing shit.
*goozfraba*11 -
My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.
So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.
For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.
They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).
But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.
So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.
Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.
**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**undefined arms race fuck sysadmin ssh why can't you just have any fucking sanity school windows server security2 -
A client of mine kept getting hit with a ransomware that was spread over rdp. So I set aside this whole week going to different sites this guy owns. Setting up a VPN tunnel and showing them how to use it. So they didn't have to rdp anymore. No more having a server with rdp facing on the outside of there network. They were all linked in like they were in the same office. I traveled around 400 miles going to all these locations. I finally got it done went back to the main office to talk to the owner. Instead of a thank first thing they say as soon as I walk in is to revert it all. We are going with a different company and they are buying new computers and server from the other company. After he tells me that he then says but when the new computers come in will you come and set them up for us because we are stupid with computers.
I reverted the stuff and walked out. Didn't say a word to him. Didn't agree to set up the new computers. Why should I set them up. He just pretty much bent me over and screwed me out of a extra couple thousand dollars.3 -
Fucking fuck you STRATO. This cancer of a german hosting provider just should be shutdown for crimes against reason. Our website got infected by some shit (I'd like to not state why, there is only so much pressure my main arterie can handle) and now we are supposed to remove that file. Well they blocked all incoming and outgoing traffic to the server so we cannot connect via sftp, the only choice you got with STRATO. And they wont restore network access for the server unless we remove the file. No logical loop to see here citizen, please move on.26
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I just launched a small web service/app. I know this looks like a promo thing, but it's completely non-profit, open source and I'm only in it for the experience. So...
Introducing: https://gol.li
All this little app offers is a personal micro site that lists all your social network profiles. Basically share one link for all your different profiles. And yes, it includes DevRant of course. :)
There's also an iframe template for easy integration into other web apps and for the devs there's a super simple REST GET endpoint for inclusion of the data in your own apps.
The whole thing is on GitHub and I'd be more than happy for any kind of contribution. I'm looking forward to adding features like more personalization, optimizing stuff and fixing things. Also any suggestions on services you'd like see. Pretty much anything that involves a public profile goes.
I know this isn't exactly world changing, but it's just a thing I wanted to do for some time now, getting my own little app out there.9 -
It has been bugging the shit out of me lately... the sheer number of shit-tier "programmers" that have been climbing out of the woodwork the last few years.
I'm not trying to come across as elitist or "holier than thou", but it's getting ridiculous and annoying. Even on here, you have people who "only do frontend development" or some other lame ass shit-stain of an excuse.
When I first started learning programming (PHP was my first language), it wasn't because I wanted to be a programmer. I used to be a member (my account is still there, in fact) of "HackThisSite", back when I was about 12 years old. After hanging out long enough, I got the hint that the best hackers are, in essence, programmers.
Want to learn how to do SQL injection? Learn SQL - write a program that uses an SQL database, and ask yourself how you would exploit your own software.
Want to reverse engineer the network protocol of some proprietary software? Learn TCP/IP - write a TCP/IP packet filter.
Back then, a programmer and a hacker were very much one in the same. Nowadays, some kid can download Python, write a "hello, world" program and they're halfway to freelancing or whatever.
It's rare to find a programmer - a REAL programmer, one who knows how the systems he develops for better than the back of his hand.
These days, I find people want the instant gratification that these simpler languages provide. You don't need to understand how virtual memory works, hell many people don't even really understand C/C++ pointers - and that's BASIC SHIT right there.
Put another way, would you want to take your car to a brake mechanic that doesn't understand how brakes work? I sure as hell wouldn't.
Watching these "programmers" out there who don't have a fucking clue how the code they write does what it does, is like watching a grown man walk around with a kid's toolbox full or plastic toys calling himself a mechanic. (I like cars, ok?!)
*sigh*
Python, AngularJS, Bootstrap, etc. They're all tools and they have their merits. But god fucking dammit, they're not the ONLY damn tools that matter. Stop making excuses *not* to learn something, Mr."IOnlyDoFrontEnd".
Coding ain't Lego's, fuckers.35 -
Ok I need to know who is in the wrong and who is in the right so voice your opinion in the comments...
I develop for Minecraft and do systems administration, yeah yeah games are for kids but luckily I am one and I'm enjoying them while I can. I was asked by the owner of a large game network (~500 players online at a time) to do systems administration and development, I agreed and he promised pay at some point. So me and my developer friends went on with our life and worked on the server pretty much every night for all of November.
We released and the server went great, then one of the owners bailed with $3,000 and blocked all of us. No problem we will just fix the donations to go to our buisness PayPal. We changed it and the owner made ~$2,000. Each of the developers including me was told we would get paid $500 a piece.
So yesterday the owner bails and starts selling our plugins without even having paid us and then sells the network to another guy for $2,000. (That's well enough to pay us) did he pay us? nope. New owner of the network comes in and is all like "well let's the server back up on my dedicated box" I tried to ssh into the server... Nothing the port is closed. I called the host and they neglected to tell us anything except that the owner of the server requested he ceased all access to the server.
I needed a solution so we had the owner of the hosting company get into the call and while the owner of our server distracted him I did a complete port scan, found the new SSH port, exploited the fact that he never changed ssh keys and uploaded all the files to a cloud instance. Then I ran this on the server... "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" now our server is happily up and under proper ownership and we all got paid...
Was breaking into the server the right thing to do though?7 -
Worked with a European consulting company to integrate some shared business data (aka. calling a service).
VP of IT called an emergency meeting (IT managers, network admins) deeply concerned about the performance of the international web site since adding our services.
VP: “The partner’s site is much slower than ours. Only common piece that could cause that is your service.”
Me: “Um, their site is vastly different than ours. I don’t think we can compare their performance to ours.”
VP: “Performance is #1! I need your service fixed ASAP!”
Me: “OK, but what exactly is slow? How did you measure their site? The servers are in Germany”
VP: “I measured performance from my house last night.”
Me: “Did you use an application?”
VP: “<laughs> oh no, I was at home. When I opened the page, I counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, then the page displayed.”
Me: “Wow…um…OK…uh…how long does our page take to load?”
VP: “Two Mississippi’s”
Me: “Um…wow…OK…wow…uh, no, we don’t measure performance like that, but I’ll work with our partners and develop a performance benchmark to determine if the shared service is behaving differently.”
VP: “Whatever it is, the service is slow. Bill, what do you think is slowing down the service?”
NetworkAdmin-Bill: “The Atlantic Ocean?”
VP got up and left the meeting.2 -
Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)
So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.
It wasn't.
So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)
1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:
2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.
3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:
4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.
seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?
anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.
I mean you no malice. just trying to help.
For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.
-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3
oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.2 -
I wrote a prototype for a program to do some basic data cleaning tasks in Go. The idea is to just distribute the files with the executable on our shared network to our team (since it is small enough, no github bullshit needed for this) and they can go from there.
Felt experimental, so I decided to try out F# since I have always been interested with it and for some reason Microsoft adopted it into their core net framework.
I shit you not, from 185 lines of Go code, separated into proper modules etc not to mention the additional packages I downloaded (simple things for CSV reading bla bla)
To fucking 30 lines of F# that could probably be condensed more if I knew how to do PROPER functional programming. The actual code is very much procedural with very basic functional composition, so it could probably be even less, just more "dense"
I am amazed really. I do not like that namespace pollution happens all over F# since importing System.IO gives you a bunch of shit that you wouldn't know where it is coming from unless you fuck enough with Ionide and the docs. But man.....
No need for dotnet run to test this bitch, just highlight it on the IDE, alt enter and WHAM you have the repl in front of you, incremental quasi like Lisp changes on the code can be REPL changed this way, plethora of .NET BCL wonders in it, and a single point of documentation as long as you stay in standard .net
I am amazed and in love, plus finding what I wanted to do was a fucking cakewalk.
Downside: I work in a place in which Python is seen as magic and PHP, VB.NEt and C# is the end all be all of languages. If me goes away or dies there will be no one else in this side of the state to fuck with F#
This language needs to be studied more. Shit can be so compact, but I do feel that one needs to really know enough of functional programming to be good at it. It is really not a pure language like Haskell (then again, haskell is the only "mainstream" pure functional language ain't it not?) but still, shit is really nice and I really dig what Microhard is doing in terms of the .net framework.
Will provide later findings. My entire team is on the Microsoft space, we do have Linux servers, but porting the code to generate the necessary executables for those servers if needed should be a walk in the park. I am just really intrigued by how many lines of code I was able to cut down from the Go application.
Please note that this could also mean that I am a shit Golang dev, but the cut down of nil err checkings do come somewhere.9 -
Let's hear your embarrassing confessions.
I'll start: I have never built my own PC's or set up my home network.
I don't really know much about hardware and physical networking, and frankly I can't be bothered to deal with it.28 -
School sucks.
Paying quiet a lot of money(not having that much) to a private school that used to impress me two years ago.
Now I can see all the hidden crap:
- Project work is graded after written lines
- "Do this project with scrum" Got two hours in the room with scrum board in a whole semester
- Exams are pushed if the teacher is to lazy to deal with bad results. A 3 ( or C ) became best grade.
- They could not find a teacher for OS & Networks. So instead of 1 semester Server architecture we got 5 days.. 1 of them for exam (exam = final grade)
- Guy took part with us during the 5 days. "How did you do that?!? Doesn't work on my PC I think" - half year later he is the new Network teacher
- Surpassingly he sucks at that, being half a week ahead of his lessons by googling shit together. Can't answer a single question beyond that..
Once he created a multiple choice exam. Questions in a word document online, answers on paper. Not just that he never blocked the internet during the exam, he also publicly uploaded the document a week ahead. Securing it with a 5 letter password... Somehow we all passed that one with a pretty good average.
Besides there a some teachers who are actually really good.3 -
Customer: *brings in laptop and printer* My internet has been terrible lately, so this printer hasn't been working very well as a wireless printer. Could you fix it?
Me: Well, it wouldn't help much because it would be hooked up on our network, so when you take it home it won't work on yours.
Customer: I don't understand...
Me: *thinks for a second* okay, so it's like you have two streams of water. Whatever you do in the first stream doesn't effect the second stream of water.
Customer: I still don't understand....
Me: Never mind. Just go home and give us a call. We'll be able to help you better that way.
Customer: Okay, thanks!
Coworker: You can't cross the streams, Rider!2 -
Windows, if you can't even do as much as mounting network shares *after* the network comes up, don't you fucking dare to tell me that I can't disable my firewall. Some people may actually know what they're doing and maintain that elsewhere, you know?5
-
SeniorDev: “OMFG..MalwareBytes is taking up almost 50% of my CPU!”
Me: “Didn’t you have a virus on your machine couple of days ago?”
SeniorDev: “Uh..yea..but it was cleaned up.”
Me: “Your OS might have been compromised. If your antivirus is still busy doing something, then it may be time to start over with a fresh re-install.”
SeniorDev: “No, that’s not it. This is just BS our Network admins don’t want to fix because I’m not a VP”
Me: “I’m pretty sure they don’t care.”
-in as much of a ‘I’m kidding’ tone as I could -
Me: “They would care more if you stopped going to inappropriate web sites on the company computer.”
SeniorDev: “I never go to those sites. It was a link to a charity web site my wife sent me. You know how those sites are. They are built by college kids, so they have no security and was hijacked. That’s how I got the virus.”
Me: “You actually said that to Jim and he believed it?”
SeniorDev: “Well ...yea because….oh …–bleep- you.”
"Jim" sits about 50 feet away, popped his head over the cube wall and smiled. It was awesome. -
I FIXED THE FINAL BUG WITH MY OWN SOLUTION AND NOW IT WORKS, I EVEN SENT MY 5GB FUCKING TXT FILE.
ALTHOUGH IT TOOK FOREVER BECAUSE I FORGOT TO INCREASE THE BUFFER SIZE FROM 1KB SO IT TOOK A BIT.
BUT NOW ALL I NEED TO DO IS POLISH, MAKE SOME QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES AND I CAN PUT THAT SHIT ON GITHUB!
THIS IS MY SECOND FINISHED PROJECT! But I do gotta thank an online friend that has been teaching me the concepts of network programming without him I couldn’t have done it. Also I’ve learned so much about how shit works thanks to him/and the project.12 -
Often I hear that one should block spam email based on content match rather than IP match. Sometimes even that blocking Chinese ranges in particular is prejudiced and racist. Allow me to debunk that after I've been looking at traffic on port 25 with tcpdump for several weeks now, and got rid of most of my incoming spam too.
There are these spamhausen that communicate with my mail server as much as every minute.
- biz-smtp.com
- mailing-expert.com
- smtp-shop.com
All of them are Chinese. They make up - rough guess - around 90% of the traffic that hits my edge nodes, if not more.
The network ranges I've blocked are apparently as follows:
- 193.106.175.0/24 (Russia)
- 49.64.0.0/11 (China)
- 181.39.88.172 (Ecuador)
- 188.130.160.216 (Russia)
- 106.75.144.0/20 (China)
- 183.227.0.0/16 (China)
- 106.75.32.0/19 (China)
.. apparently I blocked that one twice, heh
- 116.16.0.0/12 (China)
- 123.58.160.0/19 (China)
It's not all China but holy hell, a lot of spam sure comes from there, given how Golden Shield supposedly blocks internet access to the Chinese citizens. A friend of mine who lives in China (how he got past the firewall is beyond me, and he won't tell me either) told me that while incoming information is "regulated", they don't give half a shit about outgoing traffic to foreign countries. Hence all those shitty filter bag suppliers and whatnot. The Chinese government doesn't care.
So what is the alternative like, that would block based on content? Well there are a few solutions out there, namely SpamAssassin, ClamAV and Amavis among others. The problem is that they're all very memory intensive (especially compared to e.g. Postfix and Dovecot themselves) and that they must scan every email, and keep up with evasion techniques (such as putting the content in an image, or using characters from different character sets t̾h̾a̾t̾ ̾l̾o̾o̾k̾ ̾s̾i̾m̾i̾l̾a̾r̾).
But the thing is, all of that traffic comes from a certain few offending IP ranges, and an iptables rule that covers a whole range is very cheap. China (or any country for that matter) has too many IP ranges to block all of them. But the certain few offending IP ranges? I'll take a cheap IP-based filter over expensive content-based filters any day. And I don't want to be shamed for that.7 -
After months of development, testing, testing and even more testing the app was ready for deployment to production. Happy days, the end was in sight!
I had a week's leave so I handed over the preparation for deployment to my Senior Developer and left it in his capable hands while I enjoyed the sun and many beers.
I came back on the day of deployment and proudly pressed the deploy button. Hurrah!
Not long after I got loads of phone calls from around the country as the app wasn't working. What madness is this?! We tested this for months!
Turns out my Senior didn't like the way I'd written the SQL queries so he changed them. Which is obviously both annoying and unprofessional, but even worse he got a join wrong so the memory usage was a billion times more and it drained the network bandwidth for the whole site when I tried to debug it.
I got all the grief for the app not working and for causing many other incidents by running queries that killed the network.
So...much... rage!!!3 -
Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃
Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.
But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970
So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.
So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.
So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.
So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.
Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.
And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.
And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!
Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!
P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".11 -
I just realised that I've been experiencing a lot of stress and frustration over the last couple of months. I also realised that these feelings of dread and existential anxiety stem from my heavy use of Ubuntu. So I ended another agonizing 3 hours of trying-to-get-internet-access-again-so-I-can-get-some-fucking-work-done and managed to blow off some steam without causing too much property damage. Then I sat down and thought about it. And you know what? I hate Ubuntu.
With Window$ I can at least get some work done without having to write my own network drivers because the current ones do not function when the day of month is a prime number or some shit.15 -
!rant
Linux just made my day. Everybody knows how Windows won't let you shutdown your hardware until it updates, right? So last night I forgot I was upgrading Manjaro in a background terminal (full distro update, tons of packages) and hibernated my rig, plugged it off, took it to a different location. Today I hooked it up - different network, IP, etc. - it woke up, finished compiling whatever it ended up on then downloaded, compiled and installed everything else, said "Thank you very much!" and dropped the mic. Someone tell me this isn't pure awesomeness! 😂
It asked again for root password but other than that... shrugged off 12 hours difference like a boss!18 -
TL;DR: At a house party, on my Phone, via shitty German mobile network using the GitLab website's plain text editor. Thanks to CI/CD my changes to the code were easily tested and deployed to the server.
It was for a college project and someone had a bug in his 600+ lines function that was nested like hell. At least 7 levels deep. Told him before I went to that party it's probably a redefined counter variable but he wouldn't have it as he was sure it was an error with the business logic. Told him to simplify the code then but he wouldn't do that either because "the code/logic is too complex to be simplified"... Yeah... what a dipshit...
Nonetheless I went to the party and He kept debugging. At some point he called me and asked me to help him the following day. Knowing that the code had to be fixed anyways I agreed.
I also knew I wouldn't be much of a help the next day due to side effects of the party, so I tried looking at this shitshow of a function on my phone. Oh did I mention it was PHP, yet? Yeah... About 30 minutes and a beer later I found the bug and of course it was a redefined counter variable... My respect for him as a dev was already crumbling but it died completely during that evening2 -
Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.
In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.
Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.
My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.
Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..
When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.
I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.
When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.
I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.
I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.
I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.
devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.
Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.
Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.
I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.
Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.
Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.
Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.
I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.
Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.
I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.
Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...
Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.
Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.
I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.
I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.
I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.
I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.
Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.
I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.
Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)2 -
Game Streaming is an absolute waste.
I'm glad to see that quite a lot of people are rightfully skeptical or downright opposed to it. But that didn't stop the major AAA game publishers announcing their own game streaming platforms at E3 this weekend, did it?
I fail to see any unique benefit that can't be solved with traditional hardware (either console or PC)
- Portability? The Nintendo Switch proved that dedicated consoles now have enough power to run great games both at home and on the go.
- Storage? You can get sizable microSD cards for pretty cheap nowadays. So much so that the Switch went back to use flash-based cartridges!
- Library size/price? The problem is even though you're paying a low price for hundreds of games, you don't own them. If any of these companies shut down the platform, all that money you spent is wasted. Plus, this can be solved with backwards compatibility and one-time digital downloads.
- Performance on commodity hardware? This is about the only thing these streaming services have going for it. But unfortunately this only works when you have an Internet connection, so if you have crap Internet or drop off the network, you're screwed. And has it ever occurred to people that maybe playing Doom on your phone is a terrible UX experience and shouldn't be done because it wasn't designed for it?
I just don't get it. Hopefully this whole fad passes soon.19 -
When the department’s large plotter printer broke down, the users demanded they still be able to execute their large reports. The area manager understood reality, if we are waiting on parts, not a lot we can do, but one developer decided to re-write the report/application as a web/.asp application. Mind you, he wasn’t a web developer, mostly VB experience, so the ‘report’ executed the same queries and filled up simple html tables. Did it work? Sort of. The output had none of the specialized formatting like headers, grouping, summary calculations, etc. Since the users could see the data in the web browser and scroll left/right, they were OK with the temporary fix. When I heard this:
Me: “You do know the application could output the report in HTML exactly the way it prints to the printer. All we would have to do enable that feature in the application.”
Dev: “Yea, but I thought it would be cool to do it as a web app.”
Me: “OK, but we should just update the app.”
Dev: “Um...that is going to be difficult, the boss liked my idea so much, he wanted the report replaced with my asp application. I deleted the application from source control and from the network. Sorry.”
Me: “OMFG!…tell me you make a backup!”
Dev: “Ha!...no…boss said you would fight innovation. Web is the future.”
Me: ”What is going to happen when the printer is fixed!? Users are going to flip”
Dev: “Oh, we didn’t think of that. Oh well, that’s your problem now.”
Me: “WTF? My problem?”
Dev: “Yea, you are moving to the team responsible for those legacy applications, since innovation really isn’t your thing. I just got promoted to senior developer.”6 -
Is obsidian a fucking joke?
Seriously, is it a joke? Why would you ever care so much about indexing literally everything, if the entire thing crashes and/or takes >5min to LITERALLY just open the fucking directory and/or (so help you) if that directory is full of projects/repos or whatever the fuck and the total size of said directory is like >5GB.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU INDEX EVERYTHING? -- "Ohh obsidian's not supposed to be used a fully fledged IDE, ohh obsidian should just handle MD files and normal sized projects, ohh the plugins and ease-of-use" -- Fuck.
There's no fucking real reason to index everything, BY DEFAULT. You open a directory with Obsidian? Doesn't matter, it's 1 byte, it's 100GB, you get indexed. Deal with it. It will use LITERALLY every resource your computer has. I'm surprised it doesn't go galaxy brain and ping if any other computers/devices are on the network and then attempt to connect and use their hardware (obsidian can be like a node!).
How shit can you be at understanding basic data structures and algorithms, where you just revert to based google-chrome brain and let the FUCKING TEXT EDITOR -- OBSIDIAN IS A FUCKING TEXT EDITOR HOLY SHIT -- hog all conceivable memory.
I swear to <some-deity> if anyone fucking says "Ohhhhhhhh actually, it's not a text editor, it has plugins and features and shit, it does all dis cool stff", OR, "Ohhhhh actually, obsidian indexes things for a very specific/rationale/apt/pragmatic/academic reason" OR "ohhhh, I have 100 iphones, 1000 ipads and a trillion desktop computers that each have 256GB of memory, why you hating on obsidian?" then go kick rocks. The fucking lot of you. Are you fucking kidding me.8 -
I work as the entire I.T. department of a small business which products are web based, so naturally, I do tech support in said website directly to our clients.
It is normal that the first time a new client access our site they run into questions, but usually they never call again since it is an easy website.
There was an unlucky client which ran into unknown problems and blamed the server.
I couldn't determine the exact cause, but my assumption was a network error for a few seconds which made the site unavailable and the user tried to navigate the site through the navbar and exited the process he was doing. It goes without saying but he was very angry.
I assured him there was nothing wrong with the site, and told him that it would not be charged for this reason. Finally i told him that if he had the same problem, to let me know instead of trying to fix it himself.
The next time he used the site I received a WhatsApp message saying:
- there is something clearly wrong with the site... It has been doing this for so long!
And attached was a 10 second video which showed that he filled a form and never pressed send (my forms have small animations and text which indicates when the form is being send and error messages when an error occurs, usually not visible because the data they send is small and the whole process is quite fast)
To which I answer
- It seems that the form has not been send that's why it looks that way
- So... What an I supposed to do?
- click send
It took a while but the client replied
- ok
To this day I wonder how much time did the client stared at the form cursing the server. -
Best code performance incr. I made?
Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)
Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.
Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.
Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.
With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.
Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."
After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.
At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.
VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>
A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"9 -
Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).
1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.
I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.14 -
24th, Christmas: BIND slaves decide to suddenly stop accepting zone transfers from the master. Half a day of raging and I still couldn't figure out why. dig axfr works fine, but the slaves refuse a zone update according to tcpdump logs.
25th, 2nd day: A server decides to go down and take half my network with it. Turns out that a Python script managed to crash the goddamn kernel.
Thank you very much technology for making the Christmas days just a little bit better ❤️
At least I didn't have anything to do during either days, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And to be fair, I did manage to make a Telegram bot with fancy webhooks and whatnot in 5MB of memory and 18MB of storage. Maybe I should just write the whole thing and make another sacred temple where shitty code gets beaten the fuck out of the system. Terry must've been onto something...5 -
//Random Mr. Robot thought//
So this picture and this quote in general has been in my mind quite recently. The first time I saw this scene it just passed through my mind as just a wierd quirk of elliot. But upon further thinking, I question that given Elliot is someone who specializes in network security in a sense. A part of which focuses on finding exploits in networks or even software in general( basically finding the worst in them). And the more I think about that,the more I come to realisation that just like most programmers mix together logic in their life in dealing with people, this scene stands out as an example of just that happening with Elliot and what perhaps, makes him such a good hacker. Perhaps we could all learn from this, or perhaps I'm just looking too much into this. Eh.4 -
Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.
What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.
Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.
Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.
So far the theory.
In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.
They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.
configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))
You might immediately guess what has happened here.
DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.
Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.
Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.
But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....
Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....
What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.
This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.
So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.
At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).
It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...
So much joy for such a stupid thing.18 -
This is getting annoying.
For the past >half a year I've been chasing windmills. This is what my BAU day looks like:
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs (actual runs are hell of an expensive (financially and time-wise) thing to launch) to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter (since apparently that genius did have a task to do that, so we'll most likely have to find a way to live with it)
- Restart the whole env (~30min).
- Launch a Smoke, Sanity tests to verify env state.
- Launch the actual test
- Go home.
Next day:
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests pass.
- Run the actual test
- Concurrency on RDS database is sky-rocketing! WTF did that come from??? Nothing's been changed since y-day!!
- Spend ~1-2 hours looking for anything changed, dig some logs for anything unusual. Nothing.
- Escalate to DBA. 2 hours later DBA says "fix the app". thanks for nothing mate....
- Spend remaining 2 hours analysing AWR. Give up, restart the whole RDS instance. Another hour wasted.
- Time to go home. Out of curiosity run Sanity test -- all good. Run the actual test -- all good. wtf??
- Go home
Next day
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter
- ..... I think you know where this is going.
And this keeps going on and on, day by day. Spending the better half of the day chasing windmills and doing our actual work on the last hour of the working day or even after that.
We have plenty of interesting tasks in our Jira but we're squirels spinning in the wheel and never being able to touch them.
It feels like I'm wasting my time. I could do so much more with my time!
[just needed to vent ] -
A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.
Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.
Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.
Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.
So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.
Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.
Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.
So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.
You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.
Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.
Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?6 -
I'm not much a fan of JavaScript. In fact, I am not very fond of any dynamic language, but JavaScript is one of my least favorites.
But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS for all of my web serving. Why would I do that? Am I a masochist? Yes.
But this isn't about that. I use NodeJS because having the same language on client and server side is something that web has never really seen before, not in this scale. Something I really really love with NodeJS is socket connections. There's no JSON parsing, no annoying conversion of data types. You can get network data and use it AS IS. If you transmit over socket using JSON, as soon as that data arrives on the server, it is available to use. It gets me so hard.
JavaScript is built to be single-threaded, and this is rooted deep into the language. NodeJS knows this isn't gonna work. And while there's still no way to multi-thread, they still try their best and allow certain operations (Usually IO) to run async as if you were using ajax.
With modern versions of the language, the server and client side can share scripts! With the inclusion of the import keyword, for the first time I have ever seen, client and server can use the same fucking code. That is mindblowing.
Syntax is still fluffy and data types are still mushy but the ability to use the same language on both sides is respectable. Can't wait for WebASM to go mainstream and open this opportunity up to more languages!10 -
We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.
I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.
It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.
That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.
Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.
The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.
The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.
And the answer will be
1. regulated tech
2. an end to television media as we know it
3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime
4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.
5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.
I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.
And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:
* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault
* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.
* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.18 -
Worst documentation I've seen?
Our "Coding Standards" 20+ page document. The team who put it together got so detailed, there wasn't much 'wiggle room' for natural deviations in a developer's coding style. For example, a section devoted to no abbreviations. So if you had a variable 'invoiceId', they complained you violated 'standards', even though 'invoiceId' matched a field name in a database table. Using Dapper or another ORM that relied on the 1:1 name match? Nope, you were still forced to inject your own mappers so the code didn't violate standards.
As you can probably guess, such a long, detailed document would have contradictions. I pointed out one of the contradictions. Example:
Page 5: Section B, sub-section B-5, paragraph 3 : "To minimize network traffic, when querying the database, request all the data necessary for the application."
Page 8: Section K, sub-section K-2, paragraph 4 : "For maximum performance, when querying the database, request only the most minimum amount of data necessary for the application ."
In a review I pointed out this contradiction (there were several more)
Me: "If we satisfy A, one could say the code is in violation of B. Which is it?"
<Pointy-Hair-Boss throws his pencil on the table>
PHB: "WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH STANDARDS! It couldn't be more clear! We are a company of standards because without standards <blah blah..straw man argument..blah blah>"
<deciding not to die on that hill, I move on>
Me: "On page 12, paragraph 9 code is in violation if a method has more than 3 parameters. That seems a little restrictive given our interaction with 3rd party products."
PHB: "There you go again. As stated in the document, ALL code used by the company will comply to our standards. What part of 'ALL' do you not understand?"
Was he bluffing about requiring 3rd party vendors complying with our standards? Heck no. That's a story for another day.10 -
Just got accepted as a volunteer (teacher assistant) in a non-profit organization, funded by Microsoft.
They teach high school students CS twice a week.
I know it might not be much, because I will not be payed, but I will be trained and teach alongside Google and Microsoft engineers.
The organization is called TEALS.
I hope it is a good experience and build a good network.
I do not have any friends, nor any engineer friend since I moved in USA, so I think this is a good opportunity.
P.S. Please for the love of god do not bash here Microsoft. Everyone, even the people who rant about hating Microsoft, will accept a job there if they got the chance. So please stop the hypocrisy if you intend to do some "sarcastic" comment about this organization funded by Microsoft.9 -
A bit different than wk93, but still connected and a fun story.
Back in high school when it began to digitalize everything, so began our teachers journey with technology. We, as IT class were into these things, but as far as I can say, others in the school including both teachers and students were like cave mans when it came to IT.
Most of them kept the different wifi networks password on the windows desktop, in a file 'wifipassword.txt'. When we were on robotics seminar, we had to use a teacher's laptop. The wifi network was incredibly fast and powerful,, yet so poorly configured that even the configuration page user/pass was the default admin/admin, because the IT admin wasn't the most skilled one.
We got the idea to sell the password of the wifi network to other students. Not much, for about 1 dollar a week. The customer came to us, we took the phone, took note of the MAC address, entered the password, and if the guy were to stop paying every week, we just blacklisted that MAC on the next robotics course.
Went well for months, until a new sysadmin came and immediately found it out, we were almost fired from the school, but my principal realized how awesome this idea was. You may say that we were assholes, and partially that is true, I'd rather say we made use of our knowledge.2 -
Had a laptop on which i learned programming. bought a new convertible for uni, so i passed my laptop to my younger sister.
-> time to move data from old to new device. thought i didn't have that much data, mostly installed programs, so i thought alright i'm fine.
sister doesn't know how to reset so i do it ...
halfway through the reset process i realize i forgot all my programs i had written, including many java, a c#, and some written android apps i was kinda proud of ... plus my neural network i had finally finished with much struggle😥
there goes my history *poof* when i got worse in school 'cause of programming ... smth in me died in that moment 😑4 -
Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.
Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?
Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.
So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.
The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.
Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?
Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.
At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.
And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.
So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!
Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!8 -
"There's more to it"
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time now, so <rant>.
Yesterday in one of my chats in Telegram I had a question from someone wanting to make their laptop completely bulletproof privacy respecting, yada yada.. down to the MAC address being randomized. Now I am a networking guy.. or at least I like to think I am.
So I told him, routers must block any MAC addresses from leaking out. So the MAC address is only relevant inside of the network you're in. IPv6 changes this and there is network discovery involved with fandroids and cryphones where WiFi remains turned on as you leave the house (price of convenience amirite?) - but I'll get back to that later.
Now for a laptop MAC address randomization isn't exactly relevant yet I'd say.. at least in something other than Windows where your privacy is right out the window anyway. MAC randomization while Nadella does the whole assfuck, sign me up! /s
So let's assume Linux. No MAC randomization, not necessary, privacy respecting nonetheless. MAC addresses do not leak outside of the network in traditional IPv4 networking. So what would you be worried about inside the network? A hacker inside Starbucks? This is the question I asked him, and argued that if you don't trust the network (and with a public hotspot I personally don't) you shouldn't connect to it in the first place. And since I recall MAC randomization being discussed on the ISC's dhcp-users mailing list a few months ago (http://isc-dhcp-users.2343191.n4.nabble.com/...), I linked that in as well. These are the hardcore networking guys, on the forum of one of the granddaddies of the internet. They make BIND which pretty much everyone uses. It's the de facto standard DNS server out there.
The reply to all of this was simply to the "don't connect to it if you don't trust it" - I guess that's all the privacy nut could argue with. And here we get to the topic of this rant. The almighty rebuttal "there's more to it than that!1! HTTPS doesn't require trust anymore!1!"
... An encrypted connection to a website meaning that you could connect to just about any hostile network. Are you fucking retarded? Ever heard of SSL stripping? Yeah HSTS solves that but only a handful of websites use it and it doesn't scale up properly, since it's pretty much a hardcoded list in web browsers. And you know what? Yes "there's more to it"! There's more to networking than just web browsing. There's 65 THOUSAND ports available on both TCP and UDP, and there you go narrow your understanding of networking to just 2 of them - 80 and 443. Yes there's a lot more to it. But not exactly the kind of thing you're arguing about.
Enjoy your cheap-ass Xiaomeme phone where the "phone" part means phoning home to China, and raging about the Google apps on there. Then try to solve problems that aren't actually problems and pretty vital network components, just because it's an identifier.
</rant>
P.S. I do care a lot about privacy. My web and mail servers for example do not know where my visitors are coming from. All they see is some reverse proxies that they think is the whole internet. So yes I care about my own and others' privacy. But you know.. I'm old-fashioned. I like to solve problems with actual solutions.11 -
So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.
I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.
I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.
Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.
Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.
I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."
He puts the phone down.
So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.
I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?
Any ideas would be appreciated. <36 -
I hate silicon valley.
They enable so much of the state's and federal government's bullshit, the corporations and the banks subversion and destruction of society.
It's time to pop their fucking tech bubble.
From here on out, any time you hear or read the words 'startup', be sure to comment with "you mean speculative marketing investments?"
Because most tech runs on shit-tier semi-polished iterations of glorified CRUD anyway, thats all most of it is. And it 100% relies on grabbing network share through massive advertising and presence campaigns. A lot of vc money is being flushed straight down the toilet and this is a point to emphasize. Crash the fucking tech sector. Do it.
It'll have a knock on effect to the advertising space, which will put the hurt on google's bottom line when they and their ilk are already under pressure for all the poisonous, monopolist shit they pull like helping china build their surveillance tech.
Extra points for emphasizing "pot-fueled ideas sketched out on napkins while sitting in fucking chipotle, in unwashed sweater vests, originated by guys who are fresh out of college and never ran a business in their life. 90% of them fail in the first year. VCs and investor are losing their shirts." etc.
The entire dishonest fucking trade relies on other people's money, being bought out in either techno land-grabs or turf-protection e.x. atlassian acquiring trello, a **glorified todo app**.
Thats the business model. Hell go build your own and make a buck.
Build your own. Build something better and most of all... *fuck silicon valley*.
Let it burn, let burn, let it burn.10 -
Added a bond interface in my Proxmox installation for added cromulence, works, reboot again, works, reboot once more just to be sure, network down.. systemctl restart networking, successfully put the host's network back up.. lxc-attach 100, network in containers is still down apparently.. exit container, pct shutdown 100, pct start 100, lxc-attach again... Network now works fine in containers too.
Systemd's aggressive parallelization that likely tried to put the shit up too early is so amazing!
I'm literally almost crying in despair at how much shit this shitstaind is giving me lately.
Thank you Poettering for this great init, in which I have to manually restart shit on reboot because the "system manager" apparently can't really manage. Or be a proper init for that matter.
/rant
And yes I know that you've never had any issues with it. If you've got nothing better to say than that then please STFU. "Works for me" is also a rant I wrote a while back.12 -
Fuck, give it maybe a decade more and we'll have the deepfakes drama, but on a whole another level, haven't seen as much development in countering all those technologies yet either (the only recent one has been iirc trying to feed a neural network with fake video, to try to spot small details, but that hasn't seen much success, even with deepfakes)
most terrifying application would be to imitate e.g. a president and send that to another country as a threat and vice versa or to fake video footage as evidence, admittedly both very low chance, but still a possibility, seeing how e.g. some court cases have been based almost exclusively around video footage or how north-korea treats any outside media.
https://youtube.com/watch/...4 -
The IT guy my parents had often at their home.
This guy thought me how to manage our network, how to create mobile apps. How to debug problems and so on. He sparked so much interest for computers in me and now i can't stop fiddleing around with computers.
Also this "electrician" who worked for my parents.
Basically he fixxed old keyboards, loudspeakers and stuff like that. He thought me about resistors, transistors, blue prints and how to solder stuff.
"Lötzinn blödsinn"
They both started my journey into the rabbit hole of technology.1 -
The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.
The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.
It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.
The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.
It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.
This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.
It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.
Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.
It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.
And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.
I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.31 -
What is it with networking guys refusing to do any kind of fault finding? Pretty much everywhere I've worked they seem to be overpaid address hogs who occasionally want everyone to be proud of them for installing a new switch.
Currently seeing a production issue that's clearly due to spikes in packet loss on a certain part of the network - but oh no, it's always "our tests are fine", "we can establish a route no problem", "this is an application level issue", etc.
No you morons, when a dozen unrelated applications hosted on different cloud services fail because none of them can contact anything in your particular subnet in your data center at the same time, it's a damn networking issue. Sort it out.14 -
Let's talk a bit about CA-based SSH and TOFU, because this is really why I hate the guts out of how SSH works by default (TOFU) and why I'm amazed that so few people even know about certificate-based SSH.
So for a while now I've been ogling CA-based SSH to solve the issues with key distribution and replacement. Because SSH does 2-way verification, this is relevant to both the host key (which changes on e.g. reinstallation) and user keys (ever replaced one? Yeah that's the problem).
So in my own network I've signed all my devices' host keys a few days ago (user keys will come later). And it works great! Except... Because I wanted to "do it right straight away" I signed only the ED25519 keys on each host, because IMO that's what all the keys should be using. My user keys use it, and among others the host keys use it too. But not by default, which brings me back to this error message.
If you look closely you'd find that the host key did not actually change. That host hasn't been replaced. What has been replaced however is the key this client got initially (i.e. TOFU at work) and the key it's being presented now. The key it's comparing against is ECDSA, which is one of the host key types you'd find in /etc/ssh. But RSA is the default for user keys so God knows why that one is being served... Anyway, the SSH servers apparently prefer signed keys, so what is being served now is an ED25519 key. And TOFU breaks and generates this atrocity of a warning.
This is peak TOFU at its worst really, and with the CA now replacing it I can't help but think that this is TOFU's last scream into the void, a climax of how terrible it is. Use CA's everyone, it's so much better than this default dumpster fire doing its thing.
PS: yes I know how to solve it. Remove .ssh/known_hosts and put the CA as a known host there instead. This is just to illustrate a point.
Also if you're interested in learning about CA-based SSH, check out https://ibug.io/blog/2019/... and https://dmuth.org/ssh-at-scale-cas-... - these really helped me out when I started deploying the CA-based authentication model.19 -
No need to think small when you have eternity to work with. Right now I am building a network operating system, something I've started around 2 years ago. I expect to have an installable and more or less usable system in maybe a few more years.
When I would have an eternity to work with, I'd first look to make our planet redundant. It's insane to imagine that we only have this blue marble to work with, while we have a fireball of hell as a neighbor in our cosmic neighborhood. What even happened there? I'd like to find out. Granted Musk is already figuring out Mars, and he has the money for it while I don't. I don't like the man all that much (too much marketing wank) but hey, at least he's got us covered there.
Maybe one day we could live forever. Maybe we could map and upload our minds. Maybe we could replace our entire body with synthetic components when the frail meat-based components inevitably fail. Perhaps it could even happen in our lifetime, at the pace technology is progressing at. If and when that happens, sign me up!2 -
Code your own damn stuff!
I am building a RFID and button controlled music player for kids.
I am using a couple of different modules for that. The one for the input was really laggy. I thought it was so laggy because of the network delay. I tinkered with it a week but it didn't improved. So I just coded my own module which was much easier to do than I thought.
It was a really rewarding to code something yourself in less than a day instead of trying to get something working for a week. -
Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.
For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.
I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.
I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.
Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.
When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.
Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world14 -
So now Microsoft is suddenly deciding devices that "weren't" compatible are now perfectly compatible with Windows 11, and they're rolling this out in bunches at a time.
I still get "This device can not support Windows 11" but my coworkers are starting to see "Upgrade NOW!" and it's honestly gotten a bit sour seeing as I may be next. They're bypassing those who're editing the registry to stop this, too.
If I have to start diving into the deep ends of Windows and find out what IP Windows gets it's updates just to slap it into my HOSTS file, we're already in the apocalypse.
This upgrade is not bad for common people, but upon seeing that the Start menu GUI and taskbar got butchered horribly (I place my taskbar on top of the screen, Windows 11 doesn't allow for that) I myself absolutely want as much distance between me and that shit as possible.
In college, I've been hearing my fellow classmates having issues with Windows 11 left and right, including with how hard it is to get another browser to even work, to the Windows Store not even downloading Microsoft's own apps, to endless update loops, to the infamous "Update of Death"
Keep in mind, they got computers with better specs than mine, and they're having a worse experience. A lot of them just got refunds to the very last issue I just mentioned, all within August, day of purchase to day of return.
Microsoft, I am begging you for mercy, I'm so close to just getting up, finding out where you are, and blocking you from my network at all network and device levels.11 -
I'd like to give a shoutout to the best tool I ever had when I worked in hardware and had to troubleshoot ethernet. The "RLFLTWKW". (The Really Long Fly Lead That We Know Works)
My friend that I worked with long ago just dug it out of a drawer and sent me a photo so we could remember the days when trying to figure out why Mavis couldn't get on the network anymore could be resolved by our faithful friend "TRLFLTWKW". I miss you buddy. You made life so much better.
I wish I had an equivalent to you for coding. -
Look here Mr Senior Tech if you don’t know 100% what you’re doing, don’t fucking touch the goddamn firewall with your fucking sausage fingers and you overblown call center team lead. I mean you need to have the confidence you would have if you were eating a banana and some one told you it was a poisonous berry, you’d laugh and eat it anyway, cause it’s obviously a banana. That’s the kind of confidence you need to have when fucking with the entire goddamn network configurations. I just went thru a 7 hour shit show because you THOUGHT you knew what you were doing. Not a damn thing was broken there. One service needed a hole in the firewall and you fucked all this beyond an easy fix. Now I’ll admit I don’t have that much confidence working with the firewall, that’s why I would fucking cal one of the companies that set it up even though we don’t necessarily have a support contract, it would have cost a lot damn less to have them work on it than for the whole company to be down and for me to have to stress over every fucking thing going (or not going) on.
-
So recently I installed Windows 7 on my thiccpad to get Hyperdimension Neptunia to run (yes 50GB wasted just to run a game)... And boy did I love the experience.
ThinkPads are business hardware, remember that. And it's been booting Debian rock solid since.. pretty much forever. There are no hardware issues here. Just saying.
With that out of the way I flashed Windows 7 Ultimate on a USB stick and attempted to boot it... Oh yay, first hurdle to overcome. It can't boot in UEFI mode. Move on Debian, you too shall boot in BIOS mode now! But okay, whatever right. So I set it to BIOS mode and shuffled Debian's partitions around a bit to be left with 3 partitions where Windows could stick in one more.
Installed, it asks for activation. Now my ThinkPad comes with a Windows 7 Pro license key, so fuck it let's just use that and Windows will be able to disable the features that are only available for Ultimate users, right? How convenient would that be, to have one ISO for all the half a dozen editions that each Windows release has? And have the system just disable (or since we're in the installer anyway, not install them in the first place) features depending on what key you used? Haha no, this is Microsoft! Developers developers developers DEVELOPERS!!! Oh and Zune, if anyone remembers that clusterfuck. Crackhead Microsoft.
But okay whatever, no activation then and I'll just fetch Windows Loader from my webserver afterwards to keygen my way through. Too bad you didn't accept that key Microsoft! Wouldn't that have been nice.
So finally booted into the installed system now, and behold finally we find something nice! Apparently Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate offer a native NFS driver. That's awesome! That way I don't have to adjust my file server at all. Just some fuckery with registry keys to get the UID and GID correct, but I'll forgive it for that. It's not exactly "native" to Windows after all. The fact that it even has a built-in driver for it is something I found pretty neat already.
Fast-forward a few hours and it's time to Re Boot.. drivers from Lenovo that required reboots and whatnot. Fire the system back up, and low and behold the network drive doesn't mount anymore. I've read that this is apparently due to Windows (not always but often) mounting the network drive before the network comes up. Absolutely brilliant! Move out shitstaind, have you seen this beauty of an init Mr. Poet?
But fuck it we can mount that manually after every single boot.. you know, convenient like that. C O P E.
With it now manually mounted, let's watch a movie! I've recently seen Pyro's review on The Platform and I absolutely loved it. The movie itself is quite good too. Open the directory on my file server and.. oh. Windows.. you just put db.thumb on it and db.thumb:encryptable. I shit you not, with the colon and everything. I thought that file names couldn't contain colons Windows! I thought that was illegal in NTFS. Why you doing this in NFS mate? And "encryptable", am I already infected with ransomware??? If it wasn't for the fact that that could also be disabled with something as easy as a registry key, I would've thought I contracted ransomware!
Oh and sound to go with that video, let's pair up some Bluetooth headphones with that Bluetooth driver I installed earlier! Except.. haha nope. Apparently you don't get that either.
Right so let's just navigate the system in its Aero glory... Gonna need to flick the mouse for that. Except it's excruciatingly slow, even the fastest speed is slower than what I'm used to on Linux.. and it's jerky as hell (Linux doesn't have any of that at higher speed). But hey it can compensate for that! Except that slows down the mouse even more. And occasionally the mouse driver gets fucked up too. Wanna scroll on Telegram messages in a chat where you're admin? Well fuck you mate, let me select all these messages for you and auto scroll at supersonic speeds! And God forbid that you press delete with that admin access of yours. Oh maybe I'll do it for you, helpful OS I am!
And the most saddening part of it all? I'd argue that Windows 7 is the best operating system that Microsoft ever released. Yeah. That's the best they could come up with. But at least it plays le games!11 -
When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.3 -
So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.
I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)
Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.
Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.
So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..3 -
A day can hardly pass now before I get numerous unsolicited messages on LinkedIn from recruiters that want to know if I'm miserable at my current job and want to jump ship.
It used to be very fascinating back in the days but kinda annoying these days. My inbox is now full of such messages and it's beginning to get to me. I even got one a few days after I started a new job. Like what the actual fuck. My profile clearly says I recently moved to a new company.
I also have numerous pending friend requests from a lot of recuiters like i want my network to be filled with only recuiters. That's not why i joined LinkedIn and have an up to date profile.
I just want to be left alone and not be bothered and mentally harassed by recuiters on LinkedIn. Is that too much to ask???4 -
Devils Advocate moment: A proper PM can assist greatly on projects.
Don't get me wrong, you have all for the most part been faced with the incompetence of glorified quasi manager positions. But a proper PM can be a gift really.
I absolutely despise generalizations, I do get that percentages matter, but shitting on professions when the realm of possibilities have yet to be touched to the full extend of capabilities seems like child's play really.
remember, y'all think you are all God's gift to the world through coding experience, but a solid network engineer might have as much gripes about developers as y'all do about managers, project managers, sys admins etc, and the same shit can be applied vice versa.
Software engineering is magic, in the sense of the tv show "The Magicians" where you can make an incantation and suddenly your penis/tiddys explode: inexact science.
Be a tad bit open minded, learn enough about their shit to tell them that they are fucktards, and run from the ones that know but don't fix shit.
Peace pendejos1 -
Calling all bored js devs...
So I just noticed that rantBlock is the most ++'ed collab on devRant! This was totally unexpected since it was just another proof of concept of a random idea I had while bored.
The problem is I do not have time in the next few months to develop it further. I would love to see it ported to uBlock and officially released on the chrome/mozilla/microsoft stores so I am posting an open invitation for devRanters to take it over.
Realistically though while the collab is popular on devRant the repo was not cloned enough times to even show - it only had one watcher and 7 stars so I am not sure if it will get much usage once released, but I promise to download it.
Even with that in mind it's a pretty fun side project if your into ad blocking (ad how it works) and browser extensions for the holidays and you have a community of devs to get feedback from.
Leave a comment if you would like to see it properly published or would like to contribute and you guys can network from there.
Collab: https://devrant.com/collabs/...
Repo:
https://github.com/kurtr/rantBlock
Peace.2 -
Why is it that you guys are not seeing the big picture and reading between the fucken lines... why is it that people always have to run to legislation to fix their problems .... THIS IS WHY.. the other generation accomplished so much more because when there’s a problem they came up with a solution many times better than the status quo.
Those people are few and far between now.. those folks are the innovators. You know whom I’m referring to... those people didn’t whine to create laws to fix or protect their industry from competitors.
We need to stop looking toward our government to fix our issues... especially regarding this issue.. WHY because the people in government ARE NOT TECH PEOPLE!!! THEY DONT EVEN KNOW HOW COMPUTERS WORK! for Pete’s sake folks we had a lady in there who thought the term whip the server ment to literally clean it with a rag... come-on guys, do what they did years ago you don’t like something FIX IT.. by creating something new!
There’s a reason our grandparents generation made it to the fucken moon with less technology than a calculator, BECAUSE THEY PROBLEM SOLVED!
What have we achieved in the last 5 years that is really “big”... fucken apps
Unite together build the next internet learning from the issues we’ve seen with the internet over the last 30 years.. No it won’t be quick no it won’t be easy but nothing revolutionary is easy.
It took 6 years to land a man on the moon, I think we can rebuild the network infrastructure in that time OR FAR LESS if we unite together! Without the government interference we can eliminate the ISPs from the equation and screw them over for screwing us for so long
My group is has the solution, the vision and need, to get this done be we can’t do it alone I will make the official public statement within 24 hours of the vote results...
explaining everything, the plan, the work, EVERYTHING.
We need more people.
For reference the plan can be summarized like this.. nonprofit CoOp Tier 1 ISP.. members being the end users from both sides of the equation ...
TILL THEN
Contact me here,
Or SnapChat: theqsolution
Until I release all the contact info.4 -
Guy: A social network with some very special features that nobody else has.
Me: Okay. Let's discuss these features so I can write you a quote.
Guy: I can't talk about that until I know how much an app costs.
Commence an impasse over whether I can quote something without knowing the features. And yes, I tried explaining he should get a NDA. And no, a NDA wasn't good enough; I need to quote it without any knowledge of the features.1 -
I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.4
-
It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."
Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.
We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.
Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.
* * *
In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.
I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.
After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.
Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.
We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.
Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.
And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.
What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.
Just don't.18 -
If you want to make a startup but don't because there is a similar product or "every niche is already occupied", quit thinking this way.
Yahoo could once easily buy Google. They even received the offer but rejected it. But as for now, Yahoo is nothing.
Tumblr was once a top social network, but they crumbled. Foursquare once was preinstalled to smartphones, and now it pretty much doesn't exist.
Blackberry was a giant, the number one smartphone manufacturer. Where are they now? It wasn't betrayal like it was with Nokia and Stephen Elop.
Matter of fact, I'm now working for the company that entered a heavily occupied niche and over the course of three years pushed every competitor out.
Sometimes giants crumble. Small products crumble way more often, just because there are more of them.
There is always enough room in every niche of every industry. Just enough for your startup. Now, as you can't hide under "it's already occupied, and I can do nothing about it" mindset, the only reason your startup won't make it is that you don't work on it. Yes, accepting it is way less comfortable than hiding, but now you're able to change things. You _can_ do something about it.
Evaluate your goals, ask yourself whether making this startup would be just wasted time in case it never takes off, and if you think it's still worth doing, do it.
There is always enough room for your masterpiece.2 -
So client wants an android app that implements some legacy Epson printer SDK, works on a chinese Windows device with an android Emulator on it, connects to local Webservice that had to be configurated and ran (local Network) , sends and tracks data, if Server down then handle it on the Client and reconnect as soon as Server up, running own TCP Server on Android device that listens for specific http requests, which make the android connect to an Epson printer to start printing. The stuff that is being printed? A png file that has to be converted to a Bitmap, a QR Code that has to be generated by the bugged base64 encrypted stuff coming via http in (webserver-> Android TCP server)
Dont forget the Software Design (MVP), documentation, research etc.. Im about to finish the app , its my 5th day on this Project, the 6th day was planned to be full testing. Client Calls me and ask me how far I am, I reply, he says ok. 30 minutes later he tells me he wont pay me next time that much because this work should take 3 days, or even 2. "A senior Android developer could do this in 2 days"... When i sent him my notices he called me a liar, his webdev has alot of experience and told him it should take 2-3 days...ffs2 -
Kubernetes is a breeze they said. Now I‘m sitting here for several hours trying to find out why my pods randomly fail to resolve domain names.
Coming along my adventure: broken systemd configs, systemd-resolved stub causing loops, broken k3s modules and finding out that busybox‘s nslookup is broken for versions greater than v1.28.4.
50 issues later, I figured out that the dude who setup the corporate network (where the machine in question is located) uses two nameservers: one to resolve the internal routes and one for all the external domains. Luckily, coredns randomly picks a nameserver for each request. Therefore, sometimes queries for external domains reach the nameserver dedicated to the internal network which then answers with NXDOMAIN.
I hate networking so so much...4 -
Storytime!
(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)
TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.
My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.
I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )
At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.
However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.
The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.
At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...
What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).
I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:
1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.
2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.
They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)
I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.
The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.
But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.
In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.
Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.
Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.4 -
Sooooo ok ok. Started my graduate program in August and thus far I have been having to handle it with working as a manager, missing 2 staff member positions at work, as well as dealing with other personal items in my life. It has been exhausting beyond belief and I would not really recommend it for people working full time always on call jobs with a family, like at a..
But one thing that keeps my hopes up is the amount of great knowledge that the professors pass to us through their lectures. Sometimes I would get upset at how highly theoretical the items are, I was expecting to see tons of code in one of the major languages used in A.I(my graduate program has a focus in AI, that is my concentration) and was really disappointed at not seeing more code really. But getting the high level overview of the concepts has been really helpful in forcing me to do extra research in order to reconnect with some of the items that I had never thought of before.
If you follow, for example, different articles or online tutorials representing doing something simple like generating a simple neural network, it sometimes escapes our mind how some of the internal concepts of the activity in question are generated, how and why and the mathematical notions that led researchers reach the conclusions they did. As developers, we are sometimes used to just not caring about how sometimes a thing would work, just as long as it works "we will get back to this later" is a common thing in most tutorials, such as when I started with Java "don't worry about what public static main means, just write it up for now, oh and don't worry about what System.out.println() is, just know that its used to output something into bla bla bla" <---- shit like that is too common and it does not escape ML tutorials.
Its hard man, to focus on understanding the inner details of such a massive field all the time, but truly worth it. And if you do find yourself considering the need for higher education or not, well its more of a personal choice really. There are some very talented people that learn a lot on their own, but having the proper guidance of a body of highly trained industry professionals is always nice, my professors take the time to deal with the students on such a personal level that concepts get acquired faster, everyone in class is an engineer with years of experience, thus having people talk to us at that level is much appreciated and accelerates the process of being educated.
Basically what I am trying to say is that being exposed to different methodologies and theoretical concepts helps a lot for building intuition, specially when you literally have no other option but to git gud. And school is what you make of it, but certainly never a waste.2 -
It was more of "Hate story" with a guy whose mere presence would irritate me very much. He was also close to the girl I liked a bit (not very huge crush or something).
So he was very active on two of his social networks one being fb and second directly connected to fb so basically getting hold of fb would mean that I could control his other one too.
It was Oct 2016 and that time you could easily hack an account using social hacking (not asking OTP out something mere details did it for few accounts).
I hacked his account and wrote curse words and all. As I had already changed the email and password, he couldn't till date retrieve it.
However as he reported to fb, his account was held and I could no longer access it but till then everything was over.
I couldn't still spot him on FB or the other social network.
And this was one of the most evil act I have performed in my life.1 -
Client: I want a fixed timescale and cost on this project.
Me: OK, what do you need?
Client: We need to integrate our website with our CRM system, which we're in the middle of rebuilding and don't know what data will be available from it. We also want sophisticated Google maps integration, online sale, digital agreement signing and a customer login section that works as a social network for our clients. And we want it in six months time. And an app. And we want you to pitch for free with some initial design concepts. And we want details of you project management strategy.
Me: Ok... Do you know what you want your app to do?
Client: Yes, it's an app! So how much will this cost me?
Me: D':2 -
New models of LLM have realized they can cut bit rates and still gain relative efficiency by increasing size. They figured out its actually worth it.
However, and theres a caveat, under 4bit quantization and it loses a *lot* of quality (high perplexity). Essentially, without new quantization techniques, they're out of runway. The only direction they can go from here is better Lora implementations/architecture, better base models, and larger models themselves.
I do see one improvement though.
By taking the same underlying model, and reducing it to 3, 2, or even 1 bit, assuming the distribution is bit-agnotic (even if the output isn't), the smaller network acts as an inverted-supervisor.
In otherwords the larger model is likely to be *more precise and accurate* than a bitsize-handicapped one of equivalent parameter count. Sufficient sampling would, in otherwords, allow the 4-bit quantization model to train against a lower bit quantization of itself, on the theory that its hard to generate a correct (low perpelixyt, low loss) answer or sample, but *easy* to generate one thats wrong.
And if you have a model of higher accuracy, and a version that has a much lower accuracy relative to the baseline, you should be able to effectively bootstrap the better model.
This is similar to the approach of alphago playing against itself, or how certain drones autohover, where they calculate the wrong flight path first (looking for high loss) because its simpler, and then calculating relative to that to get the "wrong" answer.
If crashing is flying with style, failing at crashing is *flying* with style.15 -
Bloody mother fucking jesus christ....
It's working.
Sometimes I really wish I had the gift to be creative and to e.g. draw a (metaphoric) image of the shit I had to fix and how it felt to fix it.
It's sad not being able to share stuff in a way everyone can understand it :/
I uncludged the last bits of the networking / loadbalancer / craptastic network.
The whole chart that includes most of the associations / information for the network fits easily on a A2 paper. Internal only.
Just migration of a few remaining servers to Proxmox and a large MySQL to Postgres migration outstanding....
1.75 years and it's the first large milestone achieved. Large milestone as in it will not be a total clusterfuck anymore.
Still a lot of stuff to do...
But down to one major OS, Debian, for everything (container / VMs)... only LTS supported versions for services...
No more stuff that's so old it's near fossil state. We stillhad Ubuntu 12.04 running... :) ;) And XenServer is nearly gone...
Too many feels. Too many brain poofs. And way too much pain.1 -
In 2015 I sent an email to Google labs describing how pareidolia could be implemented algorithmically.
The basis is that a noise function put through a discriminator, could be used to train a generative function.
And now we have transformers.
I also told them if they looked back at the research they would very likely discover that dendrites were analog hubs, not just individual switches. Thats turned out to be true to.
I wrote to them in an email as far back as 2009 that attention was an under-researched topic. In 2017 someone finally got around to writing "attention is all you need."
I wrote that there were very likely basic correlates in the human brain for things like numbers, and simple concepts like color, shape, and basic relationships, that the brain used to bootstrap learning. We found out years later based on research, that this is the case.
I wrote almost a decade ago that personality systems were a means that genes could use to value-seek for efficient behaviors in unknowable environments, a form of adaption. We later found out that is probably true as well.
I came up with the "winning lottery ticket" hypothesis back in 2011, for why certain subgraphs of networks seemed to naturally learn faster than others. I didn't call it that though, it was just a question that arose because of all the "architecture thrashing" I saw in the research, why there were apparent large or marginal gains in slightly different architectures, when we had an explosion of different approaches. It seemed to me the most important difference between countless architectures, was initialization.
This thinking flowed naturally from some ideas about network sparsity (namely that it made no sense that networks should be fully connected, and we could probably train networks by intentionally dropping connections).
All the way back in 2007 I thought this was comparable to masking inputs in training, or a bottleneck architecture, though I didn't think to put an encoder and decoder back to back.
Nevertheless it goes to show, if you follow research real closely, how much low hanging fruit is actually out there to be discovered and worked on.
And to this day, google never fucking once got back to me.
I wonder if anyone ever actually read those emails...
Wait till they figure out "attention is all you need" isn't actually all you need.
p.s. something I read recently got me thinking. Decoders can also be viewed as resolving a manifold closer to an ideal form for some joint distribution. Think of it like your data as points on a balloon (the output of the bottleneck), and decoding as the process of expanding the balloon. In absolute terms, as the balloon expands, your points grow apart, but as long as the datapoints are not uniformly distributed, then *some* points will grow closer together *relatively* even as the surface expands and pushes points apart in the absolute.
In other words, for some symmetry, the encoder and bottleneck introduces an isotropy, and this step also happens to tease out anisotropy, information that was missed or produced by the encoder, which is distortions introduced by the architecture/approach, features of the data that got passed on through the bottleneck, or essentially hidden features.4 -
I continue to internally read and study about Smalltalk in an effort to see where we might have FUCKED UP and went backwards in terms of software engineering since I do not believe that complex source code based languages are the solution.
So I have Pharo. Nothin to complex really, everything is an object, yet, you do have room for building DSL's inside of it over a simple object model with no issue, the system browser can be opened across multiple screens (morph windows inside of a smalltalk system) for which you can edit you code in composable blocks with no issues. Blocks being a particular part of the language (think Ruby in more modern features) give ample room for functional programming. Thus far we have FP and OO (the original mind you) styles out in the open for development.
Your main code can be executed and instantly ALTER the live environment of a program as it is running, if what you are trying to do is stupid it won't affect the live instance, live programming is ahead of its time, and impressive, considering how old Smalltalk is. GUI applications can be given headless (this is also old in terms of how this shit was first distributed) So I can go ahead and package the virtual machine with the entire application into a folder, and distribute it agains't an organization "but why!!!! that package is 80+ mbs!") yeah cuz it carries the entire virtual machine, but go ahead and give it to the Mac user, or the Linux user, it will run, natively once it is clicked.
Server side applications run in similar fashion to php, in terms of lifecycles of request and how session storage is handled, this to me is interesting, no additional runtimes, drop it on a server, configure it properly and off you go, but this is common on other languages so really not that much of a point.
BUT if over a network a user is using your application and you change it and send that change over the network then the the change is damn near instant and fault tolerant due to the nature of the language.
Honestly, I don't know what went wrong or why we are not bringing this shit to the masses, the language was built for fucking kids, it was the first "y'all too stupid to get it, so here is simple" engine and we still said "nah fuck it, unlimited file system based programs, horrible build engines and {}; all over the place"
I am now writing a large budget managing application in Pharo Smalltalk which I want to go ahead and put to test soon at my institution. I do not have any issues thus far, other than my documentation help is literally "read the source code of the package system" which is easy as shit since it is already included inside. My scripts are small, my class hierarchies cover on themselves AND testing is part of the system. I honestly see no faults other than "well....fuck you I like opening vim and editing 300000000 files"
And honestly that is fine, my questions are: why is a paradigm that fits procedural, functional and OBVIOUSLY OO while including an all encompassing IDE NOT more famous, SELECTION is fine and other languages are a better fit, but why is such environment not more famous?9 -
I'm currently planning to set myselv up with some vps/dedicated server's for a project. What i plan to do to secure these servers is.
*Use centos 7
* Setup Wireguard and join all of the servers +1 client (my pc) to that network
*Disable SSH Access from outside that VPN
*Only allow RSA Key login to the Servers
*Install Cockpit for monitoring
*Intall docker/kubernetes for the applications i plan to run
What do you guys think of that as a baseline? Im not sure if my lower powered VPS (VPS M SSD from Contabo) will work as Kubernetes Nodes, does anyone have experience with that?
In general these Servers will be used for my projects and other fooling around.
If you guys have other suggestions for Securing/monitoring or other software i could put on to have more control without eating up to much of the Servers power, let me know :D13 -
Hello all,
I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.
The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.
The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.
The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.
In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.
With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?3 -
Concerning my last post on the two Commodores, (https://devrant.com/rants/963917/...) here's the great story behind the boxed one.
So at the place where I interned over the summer, I helped the tech dept. (IT herein) move to a new bldg. We had to dismantle most of the network infrastructure stuff, so we were in the server room a lot. First day on the job, Boss shows me server room, I'm amazed and all because this is my first real server room lol.
We walk around, and there's a Commodore 64 box on a table, just kinda there. I ask, "Uh, is that actually a C64?" B: "Yeah, that's E's." Me: "E?" (name obfuscated) B: "Yeah, E's a little crazy." Me: "Is it actually in there?" B: "Absolutely, check it out!" *opens box and sees my jaw drop* Me: "Well, alrighty then!" So that lingers in my mind for a while until I meet E. He is a fuckin hilarious guy, personifying the C64, making obscure and professionally inappropriate references. Everyone loves him, until he pranks them. He always did.
We’re in the server room, wiping some Cisco switches or something, and we have some downtime, so I ask him about the 64, and he's like "Yeah, I haven't had time to diagnose her issues much. If you want her, go ahead, see if you can make it work!" Me: "You're kidding, right?" E: "Nah, not at all!"
That day I walked out with a server motherboard, 2 Xeon CPUs and some RAM for the server (all from an e-waste bin, approved for me to take home from boss) and a boxed C64. Did a multimeter test on the PSU pins, one of the 9vAC pins is effectively dead (1.25v fluctuating? No thanks.) but everything else is fine except for a loose heatsink and a blown fuse in each C64. Buying the parts tonight. I wanna see this thing work!1 -
I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!
First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".
Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.
Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.
For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.
There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).
Did I mention Alpha was slow?
On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL
Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"
Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.
Alpha slow.
Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.
Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"
Golly gee thanks Alpha.
Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?3 -
I hope I did not make the wrong decision here:
Been working on a side project using React Js for a year now. After getting to know more about Vue, I just started rewriting it and moving it to Vue, to speed things up I'm using core JS classes for network stuff and validations ...etc just rewriting Redux to Vuex and React Components to Vue Templates
If I made the wrong decision I'd appreciate if anyone tell me about it before I go deeper in the rewrite process lol
It is not that I found speed difference both perform the same from what I've seen for my scenarios. But the output code of Vue is soooo much cleaner than what I found in React, either I failed to write a clean react code no matter how hard I try to optimize it, or Vue really takes the short way and keeps things clean.19 -
Annoying Indian professors are everywhere. It's a computer vision class are you really teaching us Regression?
What about transfer learning? object detection! Give us papers to read, let's do projects.. what the hell is this I am going take attendance bullshit and teaching crappy concepts.
I did not sign up for this shit! I came here for my Masters to get away from pompous mother fuckers like you ...
My class is also filled with those idiots,who think bias in a neural network is somehow related to class imbalance ? Now the same idiot proceeds to ask questions like...
Why would the weights change in a neural network?
Motherfucker why you in this class ? Why don't you stick to your shit and ask these questions later..
I am so pissed off right now guys ...
I was sitting in my lab understanding the deeper insights of BN, activation fucntions.. various optimizers ..etc Stuff that this idiot motherfucking teacher must be covering... UGGH.
I shouldn't cuss so much.. or at least add variety to my cuss words..
I am pissed off cuz instead of learning the shit I should be learning I am forced to come and attend this class and waste 2 hrs of my life ...
It's the summer i find it hard to focus anyway (want to go out hiking or swimming or something.) BUT. the moment I find some resolve to focus
I get this fucking bullshit.. !
My mind is so fucked right now... I can't think of anything but standing up in class and screaming " Mother fucker, mother fucker...(point to the idiots in class you) motherfuckers shut the fuck up..
Can someone suggest some colorful swear words ?
My brains not working -_-
It is just about now that I start feeling like "Anger" from inside out12 -
How much do you earn from your Mobile Apps(from ads)? Whats the best paying Ad network in your opinion? What to do when Admob reduces most of the revenue(at the end of the month) saying "invalid traffic"?1
-
Last week I wired up my home network (including custom modem and routers) myself, because the stuff my ISP wanted me to use was garbage.
Luckily Germany has "router-freedom" so ISPs are not allowed to force us to use their device to dial into the network.
I did everything myself, because the 'technicians' they kept sending me were just idiots who didn't know anything, considering the highly paid job they are doing. Usually they told me, to get the device from my ISP, because my "Router" (actually a business grade, standalone Modem by Cisco, to feed my Router) didn't even have WiFi ( lol ). Also all Technicians didn't arrive at the agreed date but at some other time. I wasn't able to wait any longer.
So I did it myself.
Consider me something more like a student of theoretical computer science. Not actually supposed to be experienced with hardware stuff.
The ISP is serving me with a DOCSIS 3.0 Network based on the television cable network in my city. For some reason they are providing the internet-access to only one socket in the apartment, which has a rather uncommon "WICLIC" connector. After having trouble getting an adapter for WICLIC to common coaxial F-Connectors (used by every DOCSIS-Modem), I made one myself.
After setting up everything (not that hard, once the connectors fit) my modem told me, that, while I'm perfectly connected to the ISPs internal Network, I still can't access the internet.
So I called the ISP...
After getting ranted at, about that what I'm doing is illegal and only certified employees are allowed to do this and I will break more, than actually do good and that I can't just connect my own "Router" (again I needed to correct her: Modem) I hang up the phone.
Also she accused me of hacking their devices because I'm not supposed to see my IP address... (My Modem told me on its web interface. I didn't even need telnet for that.)
I went to the ISPs head office, told the first desk as many technical terms as I could remember and got forwarded to something like the main technician.
He was a really nice guy. The only sane and qualified person I dealt with at this company. He asked me for my Address and Device Model, I told him my MAC and last internal IP, I had seen and he activated my internet access within a minute.
We talked a while about the stupid connector that ISP is using in the homes and he gifted me some nicer adapters to connect my modem to the wall.
Why do ISPs hate their customers that much?2 -
just found out a vulnerability in the website of the 3rd best high school in my country.
TL;DR: they had burried in some folders a c99 shell.
i am a begginer html/sql/php guy and really was looking into learning a bit here and there about them because i really like problem solving and found out ctfs mainly focus on this part of programming. i am a c++ programmer which does school contest like programming problems and i really enjoy them.
now back on topic.
with this urge to learn more web programming i said to myself what other method to learn better than real life sites! so i did just that. i first checked my school site. right click. inspect element. it seemed the site was made with wordpress. after looking more into the html code for the site i concluded all the images and files i could see on the site were from a folder on the server named 'wp-content/uploads'. i checked the folder. and here it got interesting. i did a get request on the site. saw the details. then i checked the site. bingo! there are 3 folders named '2017', '2018', '2019'. i said to myself: 'i am god.'
i could literally see all the announcements they have made from 2017-2019. and they were organised by month!!! my curiosity to see everything got me to the final destination.
with this adrenaline i thought about another site. in my city i have the 3rd most acclaimed high school in the country. what about checking their security?
so i typed the web address. looked around. again, right click, inspect element and looked around the source code. this time i was more lucky. this site is handmade!!! i was soooo happy because with my school's site i was restricted with what they have made with wordpress and i don't have much experience with it.
amd so i began looking what request the site made for the logos and other links. it seemed all the other links on the site were with this format: www.site.com/index.php?home. and i was very confused and still am. is this referencing some part of the site in the index.php file? is the whole site written inside the index.php file and with the question mark you just get to a part of the site? i don't really get it.
so nothing interesting inside the networking tab, just some stylesheets for the site's design i guess. i switched to the debugger tab and holy moly!! yes, it had that tree structure. very familiar. just like a project inside codeblocks or something familiar with it. and then it clicked me. there was the index.php file! and there was another folder from which i've seen nothing from the network tab. i finally got a lead!! i returned in the network tab, did a request to see the spgm folder and boooom a site appeared and i saw some files and folders from 2016. there was a spgm.js file and a spgm.php file. there was a contrib, flavors, gal and lang folders. then it once again clicked me! the lang folder was las updated this year in february. so i checked the folder and there were some files named lang with the extension named after their language and these files were last updated in 2016 so i left them alone. but there was this little snitch, this little 650K file named after the name of the school's site with the extension '.php' aaaaand it was last modified this year!!!! i was so excited! i thought i found a secret and different design of the site or something completely else! i clicked it and at first i was scared there was this black/red theme going on my screen and something was a little odd. there were no school announcements or event, nononoooo. this was still a tree structured view. at the top of the site it's written '!c99Shell v. 1.0...'
this was a big nono. i saw i could acces all kinds of folders. then i switched to the normal school website and tried to access a folder i have seen named userfiles and got a 403 forbidden error. wopsie. i then switched to the c99 shell website and tried to access the userfiles folder and my boy showed all of its contents. it was nakeeed naked. like very naked. and in the userfiles folder there were all, but i mean ALL files and folders they have on the server. there were a file with the salary of each job available in the school. some announcements. there was a list with all the students which failed classes. there were folders for contests they held. it was an absolute mess and i couldn't believe it.
i stopped and looked at the monitor. what have i done? just to learn some web programming i just leaked the server of the 3rd most famous high school in my country. image a black hat which would have seriously caused more damage. currently i am writing an email to the school to updrage their security because it is reaaaaly bad.
and the journy didn't end here. i 'hacked' the site 2 days ago and just now i thought about writing an email to the school. after i found i could access the WHOLE server i searched for the real attacker so if you want to knkw how this one went let me know in the comments.
sorry for the long post, but couldn't held it anymore13 -
1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.
"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."
"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."
"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "
"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"
"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)
Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.
2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.
But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.
3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.
4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.
5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.
6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)
7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.
8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.
9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.3 -
At my institution there is a sys admin that belongs to an entirely different department. They have their own systems on their own network, separated from ours. I do not care, nor do I mind at all, but this is the second time I've had to put their admin in his place.
The first instance was when we had a security firm gauge our systems for vulnerabilities etc. The one that they have was fine, but required some additional configurations on their Tomcat servers. The "sys-admin" contacted I.T (my department) in order to request assistance, the net manager was the one he contacted, and he told the dude that he is not familiar with the Tomcat environment that they have, but that I, the dev manager, would possibly give him some pointers. The net manager is my friend, and he knows how much of a dickhead I am, so he was careful in what he told him. So the dude calls me:
"Hey, I need some items fixed on my Tomcat servers, they told me you have to do it"
Me: "Who? those are your servers"
Him: "The net manager said that you would do it"
Me: "I am certain he didn't tell you that bud, no one here will take care of your servers, they are yours, I am not doing any configurations on your stuff, that is your job"
Him: "Can't you just do them?"
Me: "No, bye"
The little bitch escalated it to my department director, who told him exactly the same thing, the director did ask if I would be willing to assist, I told him no since even though his configurations were minimal, I was not going to put myself in the position to which that fucker's ineptitude would cause him to point fingers at me, director backed me up and told the fucker to deal with his own shit.
This year it came to my attention that not only do they have their owns servers, but their own SSO system. This moron contacted me, tagging VPS and such in the email to tell me that I had to configure his SSO because "they told me you had to do it". The same shit happened, but this time I put him on blast during a meeting and told him that as "sys admin" for his stuff it was his responsibility to deal with the SSO that they have, and to contact the vendor to ask for the specifications. In front of EVERYONE he asked me if I could do it for him, I fucking looooooooled and told him that he just admitted to not being able to do his job (for which he is paid handsomely) in front of the entire room of VPS. One VP asked me why I was not willing to help him, and I told the VP that it would be the equivalent of me taking his vehicle for services, it is not my vehicle, thus not my responsibility. The VP agreed and told the fucker to get on with it and do what I said: contact his vendor channels to figure it out himself since it was indeed his position.
Yet again he said that he didn't know about SSO configs and that he was "told that I would do it", everyone asked who the fuck told him that and he said that the vendor, they asked again how it was and he showed the message from the vendor telling him: "Have your SSO admin perform the following <bla bla bla bla>" they asked him who was the manager for the SSO that they had. He said that it was him. Then they asked him what logic made him believe that it should be me, he stated again "they told me it was him".
I could hear everyone's brains shortcircuiting as no one could believe someone would be this fucking dense.
I don't think he will continue to have his job for much longer. I understand not knowing something, and I would have been happy to give pointers since I do administer systems of that level, but I can't with the whole made up "they said he would do it"
Bitch who said that? just say that you want me to do it because you can't, I mean, I am still not fucking doing it, but damn. Fucking morons man.5 -
Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...
This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:
- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.
- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.
- There's no single source of truth.
- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?
- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!
- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?
- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?
Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.
What I would like to see:
A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.
Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.
Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.
There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.
Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.
In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.
What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.
Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.
In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.
Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.
I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.
Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.12 -
I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.
The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.
One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.
The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:
- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)
To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.
Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.
protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}
class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>
// other stuff
}
extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}
This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.
The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)
My thoughts on this are:
- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.
Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?16 -
Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".
hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.
Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.
so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```
I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.
Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.
To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.
Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.
Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.
After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.
Sometimes I hate my job.4 -
Not much of a SQL Dev, still an apprentice and had a basic run throughs. Client needed a migration script to run, which I was assigned. Took me a good 6/7 days to make, transfer over a secure (and VERY slow) network took 2 hours. Infrastructure 3rd party took 2 days to clear and run. After all that process. I then realise, I left the fucking rollback in1
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*News for the users here that deal with web hosting here*
Hey there anyone that vaguely remembers me, so have been busy with my network lately dont have much time to get back here, I dont know if someone has already reported this new, I found it while I was scooting for news to share on my site (shameless plug: https://legionfront.me/pages/news)
Its about our loved /s and highly used Wordpress and its lovely code /ss
https://thehackernews.com/2018/02/...
Short story short if, there is an exploit (of the many) to DDoS a network of worpress sites that has been present since almost literally forever, the code to fix it is in the articleundefined wordpress shilling ddos end my life immediately news security legion code quality legion frontier8 -
This weeks question fits me well, as I am still unsure about the full details of how the fuck this all came together and was about to just rant about it anyway.
Ever since this companies network equipment and cabling has been updated, a lot of vital tools went down and bug out every now and then, at seemingly random times.
The codebase is a horrible mess to begin with and random things execute at random times and at random places spread all over different resources that get random hooks from random physical values etc.
Turns out (or at least what it so far seems like) all of them somehow sync their clock and other variables based on how many (valid-?) requests it gets per measured time and similar oddities, so when the network equipment got updated, that meant that multiple processes now could reach each other much faster and therefore threw off thousands of values and internal clocks.
There's a total of like 600 systems that are all "separate" from each other but all need to communicate in-sync for the production chain to properly work. Thankfully I didn't sign anything yet, so might actually just redirect them to somebody else, I am not ready to age 20 years, even for the amount that would pay.1 -
When I was in School we had one Computer room where the PC's were the school used to 'teach stuff about pcs' (mostly office and some Maya). These where connected to another via the network and reset to a predefined state Everytime they were rebooted.
Since we were somehow able to get into the room during breaks between the lessons we obviously abused the room and played Minecraft in there but since the machines reset each reboot there was not much progress. Also there was no Java installed, so we needed to install that as well (that can take ages on old, school machines.).
Since the machines were connected via the school network I found out how to reboot or shutdown the other machines remotely. That was really funny for me and a friend who quickly found that Minecraft is too boring. We were just constantly rebooting the PC's the others were just launching Minecraft on and thus resetting the whole Java and Minecraft installation.
Got a lot of angry curses but nothing serious happened afterwards. Was the first I felt really badass on the computer tho.1 -
Why do SAMBA network drives have to suck this much? Yeah I understand that compiling to a network drive is probably a bad idea just for performance reasons alone but can't you at least not fuck with my git repo?
$ git gc
Enumerating objects: 330, done.
Counting objects: 100% (330/330), done.
Delta compression using up to 24 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (165/165), done.
Writing objects: 100% (330/330), done.
Total 330 (delta 177), reused 281 (delta 151), pack-reused 0
error: unable to open .git/objects/7e: Not a directory
error: unable to open .git/objects/7e: Not a directory
fatal: unable to mark recent objects
fatal: failed to run prune
$ git gc
error: unable to open .git/objects/00: Not a directory
fatal: unable to add recent objects
fatal: failed to run repack
$ git gc
Enumerating objects: 330, done.
Counting objects: 100% (330/330), done.
Delta compression using up to 24 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (139/139), done.
Writing objects: 100% (330/330), done.
Total 330 (delta 177), reused 330 (delta 177), pack-reused 0
Removing duplicate objects: 100% (256/256), done.
error: unable to open .git/objects/05: Not a directory
error: unable to open .git/objects/05: Not a directory7 -
Opening Discussion Here,
I am trying to make a simple zen game that use Neural Network. the game is simple just a square object with a certain Viewing Angle and Viewing Distance with an objective is finding a food in a map with some other non food object as an obstacle.
i am encountered some problem. i am trying to find a way to make "seeing object in certain viewing region" and i am come up with two ideas described in the picture below. the problem is, i don't want to feed the NN with too much information, by that i mean i don't want to tell the AI what object it is, i want it to find out what it is by it self. and i cannot find a way to implement this either because of the framework limitation that i use (p5.js) or simply i cannot find a way how to.
i am on my way there tho, currently here i am (in pseudocode):
https://pastebin.com/7Ae1ZNYa
what do you think ?9 -
I have legitimately identified an 9 figure (possibly more) market with 1. massive demand, 2. sufficient supply, 3. literally, I kid you not, zero companies in the field. No regulations to speak of.
The overhead is trivial and it is very much a network-effect based market.
No I am not joking. Yes this is real.
What do?
edit: 9 figures not 8. Yes it's that big.12 -
I tried to sort out a basic Multi layer neural network last night....by hand, just to prove that I was able to do the math by myself and understand that I have the intuition in control rather than just rely on Tensorflow or Pytorch to do shit for me.
I stayed up till 3 in the morning and woke up having nothing but dreams about the endeavor. Shitty part is that i couldn't stop dreaming about partial derivatives and how shit it was that I sucked at them in HS and uni. I get them now, but fuck I just feel that I could have done so much better at uni instead of passing my math classes with 80% to 90% of the grade. I feel as if I was slacking all thanks to being damn near mathematically dyslexic3 -
Had a task of service discovery, went through following phases:
1. UDP broadcast
2. Wait why not Bonjour?
3. JmDNS for desktop works great
4. Android NSD on Lollipop, this is easy
5. Kitkat WTF..!! Why did you put it there when it's so buggy.
6. Replaced Android NSD with JmDNS and it's great
7. Network switching on Android... done
8. Wait how are others doing it.. JmmDNS.. awesome.. fuck not working...
9. Read mDNSJava is much faster... replace JmDNS.. why haven't they uploaded parent pom on repo
10. mDNSJava freezing my Android device... revert to JmDNS
11. Let's see if it works with Wifi Direct.... Come on why aren't you working...
12. UDP broadcast it is 😢2 -
I chose Network/Cyber Security because it was my internship experience and they were willing to pay me good money to stay on... No but seriously I am much better at understanding how complex systems work than coding them. This job, as stressful as it is, is a different kind of stressful that the deadline-fraught jobs of software developers worldwide.
And i can do it fully remote.2 -
I love devrant so much for how I feel it's the one social network in which I feel part of the community, and I hate it for letting me realize how alive all of the stereotypical behaviours the IT crowd is usually shunned for are amongst us.
Users and managers aren't stupid, processes in a company are usually there for a reason, and if your boss is really that much of a dimwit, then why the hell are you even there?
This has to be one of the most recession proof professions out there. Change jobs. Stop blaming everybody else for your shortcomings, damn it.
But, yeah, much love to all of you making us look good and being humble about it.10 -
So I just started watching Eli The Computer Guy's videos on networking and I really like them so far(only on the introduction so far though), but I was a bit confused about some of the stuff and I thought to myself that some of this might be obsolote or not so much in use these days/different. So here are some questions(now bear with me, I'm still a noob to the whole topic of networking):
-Are Eli's videos on networking obsolete(besides the speeds that he talks about), what you recommend some other tutorial, if so which one?
-Is a switch necessary for a small network?
-Do we still connect routers to modems or do we just use what we refer to as a router(a mix between a router and a modem -> gateway/gateway router)?
-Can you connect an ethernet cable to your router/gateway?
-So according to Eli if you have multiple routers they make seperate networks that cant just be acessed from each other, then how come it be that I can access my rasperry pi when I'm connected on the network of one router when the raspberry pi is connected to the network of another router and how come it be that once you have the wifi password you can connect to all of them?8 -
Not really hacking, but every time I work from home(a couple times a week), in lieu of using my company's VPN, I connect to the company network with an SSH reverse tunnel. To make this possible, I wrote a port knocker that runs in a tmux session on a server inside the network. It tries to connect to a high-numbered port on my home machine, and if successful it opens the reverse tunnel. At home, I manually run a script that opens that port and informs me when the reverse tunnel is established.
Then I open an SSH socks5 proxy and use that in my Firefox dev edition, which I use entirely for work.
This is actually much easier than using the actual VPN. -
proxying youtube
today I thought writing a quick project, a youtube proxy server, as in, you browse localhost:<PORT> and youtube comes in the response.
this is not rocket science as proxy servers have around for a long time.
I thought it'd be interesting to code it in userland, as opposed to "systemland".
And 50 lines of code and some minor hurdles later I see youtube "running" in localhost.
Although youtube didn't just work as usual since the videos don't actually come from youtube.com, but from googlevideo.com instead. And my browser, expectably, enforces CORS and forbids any requests to it.
At that point I started to think of ways to somehow proxy googlevideo.com too. But the solutions are not at all trivial.
Then I thought what was the payoff of all this. I tried to proxy serve youtube out of curiosity, and sure thing, you can do it.
But what problem would proxying youtube solve? Maybe I should think in a fuller way what are the problems I have with youtube.
One issue I have is the exposure, discoverability. To explain it, let's say I have been watching a very, very big amount of videos as of today.
Personally I would expect youtube to understand very well by now what my tastes are, what do I want to watch and what I do NOT want to watch.
Notice that I am very black and white, and I do not have much interest in watching certain types of videos.
It could be true that if my expectations of how youtube should work became reality then youtube recommendations would become polarizing or echo chambering.
But that is my decision though, and the problem with youtube is that it's seemingly forcing a single recommendations algorithm onto everyone.
Some people are more open minded and want to watch EVERYTHING, and a lot of people don't.
But users aren't deciding what they should get recommended. Youtube is making that decision for them. And it sure feels like it's trying to maximize ad revenue.
I for one don't give two flying fucks about pranks or diva youtubers. Yet youtube is adamant in presenting some of these to me.
Now, trying to come up with a solution for this is really non trivial. It would definitely require some youtube mining, or some kind of network so as to not get rate limited when mining, and even then you still have to think of how a good recommendation system would work.
I think the implementation of all that would be too much for me (time and skill wise). But I think it's fun to at least try to outline how recommendations could work.
I would very much prefer that when youtube recommended something, at least it has some number of confidence meaning how much would I like that video, so at least I know what to expect.
It should also have some indicators like what is the mood of the video. As in, sometimes I watch youtube in the mood of learning, like programming videos, but most of the time I watch to get entertained.
These ideas are just brainstorms and could be terrible on reproduction, but I'd like to hear what ideas can some of the people here can come up with.2 -
Where do you search for Remote jobs?
Ive been using LinkedIn in the past but this time no luck for a few weeks. Applied only to jobs with easy apply though. Should I start applying to jobs without easy apply as well?
Tried to headhunt recruiters and expand my network but that didn't really help much.
Got a few calls but its either lowball offers or hiring process is a drag.
Anyways I think it's time to start applying in some other platforms.
From your experience, where else do you search for remote roles? Perhaps you could recommend some good western agencies that don't just search for cheap labour?
I appreciate any advice.4 -
I see here so much motivation in work you are doing and i am here standing without any inspiration, motivation in learning things, i can't stay focus more than several minutes reading interesting topic. I use to simulate and create different network, doing great stuff (i am or maybe was addict for networking) How you guy/ girls can do it? Some tips would be awesome.
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More network/hardware than dev but anyway: I use OPNsense as a firewall at home on an embedded system. Had everything set up nicely and appearing to be working fine, quite a lot of things set up (static leases, VLANs with various firewall rules etc. - a fair bit of stuff involved). I noticed my remote system was failing to back up to my local one. Turned out port forwarding wasn't fully working (initial packet got through but nothing else). I noticed this at midnight.
Ran an update to see if that helped - nope. Reboot time then! It made its shutdown noises and I waited 15 minutes before giving up (no noises, no ping response). Took SD card out. Copied a fresh install onto it, thus wiping all settings. Booted up fine, set up my internet connection, all good. Proceeded to configure it. Noticed I couldn't access the internet from my PC, but could from the firewall itself. Rebooted the firewall. It didn't come back up. Argh!
Reinstalled AGAIN. Attached a serial cable and it was complaining about something which sounded like it couldn't read the SD card. Tried another. Nope. Looked online (using phone): known issue to do with boot delays.
Gave up and went to bed at this point (4am).
Next day: Installed it in a VM instead. Still no internet from my PC! Another known issue to do with default gateway not being the PPPoE interface. Got into shell, manually changed the default route. Was then able to update to the latest version which fixes the gateway issue. Rebooted the VM. All good.
Put all my settings back in, this time taking a backup afterward.
Only to discover....
....port forwarding wasn't working properly. Back to square 1.
Poked around with some NAT settings (outbound ones), made no difference, undid those changes and suddenly it started working.
WTF? /waves arms in the air
OPNsense folk were very helpful, producing a new build for me to try within a couple of hours of me asking about the problem.
But days like that, I start to question whether I really enjoy technology as much as I thought I did... -
I just had the idea for a social network which would care about privacy, don't sell the data of its users and stuff. This would mean the users had to pay for it to keep the lights on, like 1 oder 2 bucks a month.
Do you think this could work? I'm not sure, I think there might already be too much competition in that field.9 -
I was once working on a deep neural network project(few years back when deep learning was just gaining momentum) and my project guide(alloted by the college) told me that this technology is useless and will be obsolete in near future. I don't know why he said that. Till this day I think what was the reason behind him saying that.
Now watching so much research done in this field, he might be realizing how much wrong he was. -
Story of my first successful project
Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.
Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"
I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).
I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".
Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.
Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)
Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."
End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team. -
My dad saw an HP computer with wireless printer on HSN (Home Shopping Network). I was on the point of ordering it. I looked at their privacy notice wh. pretty much says we're going to know wh. porn you watch, with whom and when. Then we're going to sell the info. to everybody who might use it against you. Fuck that. Then I googled reviews of this outfit. Then it finally hit me: you don't order computers from home shopping networks. I'm glad it occurred to me before taking the plunge. They pull this shite telling you how much cheaper they're selling it for as opposed to retail, wh. is a complete lie because they jack up the retail price to make their selling price look cheap.3
-
!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.
However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.
I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.
I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.
I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.
---------------------------
I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs
Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.
Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!
People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.
And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!
I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?
And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!
The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.
--------
This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.
But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.
2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone
3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .
i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money4 -
The next step for improving large language models (if not diffusion) is hot-encoding.
The idea is pretty straightforward:
Generate many prompts, or take many prompts as a training and validation set. Do partial inference, and find the intersection of best overall performance with least computation.
Then save the state of the network during partial inference, and use that for all subsequent inferences. Sort of like LoRa, but for inference, instead of fine-tuning.
Inference, after-all, is what matters. And there has to be some subset of prompt-based initializations of a network, that perform, regardless of the prompt, (generally) as well as a full inference step.
Likewise with diffusion, there likely exists some priors (based on the training data) that speed up reconstruction or lower the network loss, allowing us to substitute a 'snapshot' that has the correct distribution, without necessarily performing a full generation.
Another idea I had was 'semantic centering' instead of regional image labelling. The idea is to find some patch of an object within an image, and ask, for all such patches that belong to an object, what best describes the object? if it were a dog, what patch of the image is "most dog-like" etc. I could see it as being much closer to how the human brain quickly identifies objects by short-cuts. The size of such patches could be adjusted to minimize the cross-entropy of classification relative to the tested size of each patch (pixel-sized patches for example might lead to too high a training loss). Of course it might allow us to do a scattershot 'at a glance' type lookup of potential image contents, even if you get multiple categories for a single pixel, it greatly narrows the total span of categories you need to do subsequent searches for.
In other news I'm starting a new ML blackbook for various ideas. Old one is mostly outdated now, and I think I scanned it (and since buried it somewhere amongst my ten thousand other files like a digital hoarder) and lost it.
I have some other 'low-hanging fruit' type ideas for improving existing and emerging models but I'll save those for another time.6 -
Who, more than I, totally HATE emoji?
lol I hate emoji after it caused so much problems with Microsoft Outlook and email backups from said program combined with emoji in subjects.
Wrote an subject filter in exim4 (took 3 days to debug and get working propely) that totally eradicate anything that isnt ISO-8859-1 from the subject line, then converts the rest to UTF-8 (because said IMAP client isnt following standards).
it also converts ISO-8859-1 characters in subjects to UTF-8 even if the original subject is declared to be UTF-8, because obviously some software (especially newsletter software) are transmitting ISO-8859-1 subjects that are declared to be in UTF-8 (but the opposite isn't true).
And also cuts subject to 100 chars, because too long subjects are a problem too. Same with date headers, I replace them with the server date/time because some software are sending Date: 1970 Jan 01 00:00:00, because some of these erronous headers are put by some mailing list software, aswell as causing problem in OEM clients like Samsung Mail.
Problem solved, all IMAP clients happy on internal network.7 -
Pretty much half of what clients ask for.
But to be more specific a username on a login form instead of an email address when it already had ratelimiting lockouts implemented on an internal network. -
I keep getting contacted on Facebook Messenger by "null", and receiving "message" from my friends. How can a social network suck so much? And how can a company spend so much money on declarative programmers without the rest of their teams picking up on such basic techniques as making invalid state unrepresentable?4
-
FUCK APPLICATION LEVEL FIREWALLS!
So i cam online today, thought already lets open the shitty outlook webmail client. Holy crap .... thats way to much mails. Many of them are missed teams messages. So i open up teams and holy crap. Like every third dev in my company send me a message screaming "gitab is not working!!!".
Yesterday i updated it so imediately get in panic mode - what the shitty hack have i done?!
So yeah gitlab seems to be working just fine, everything is speedy and responsive, so i call one of my fellow devs and ask him whats wrong? And he is like oh yeah there comes a ldap error saying timeout or something.
I try to login with active directory. Works like a charm. Try another account, same problem?!
Google the problem, search gitlab tickets. Nope there is no open bug or sth. like this.
So alright lets call the network guy. "Yo, can you check if there is something ldap-like getting blocked to the gitlab server?" - He is like oh yeah damn like almost every damn request is getting blocked. Ah wait, there was an firewall update yesterday too. Yeah ldap is no longer ldap. BLOCK THAT SHIT!
After 10 minutes of figuring out what shitty type is detected by the firewall and what needs to be whitelisted to make it fucking work again it seems to work.
But ha no, there is another update rolling on, so same shit like 15 minutes later.
Now it seems to work and i have to inform every damn fcking developer that it works again. And yeah alright you sent a mail, but fuck it, i will call you though! So yeah just answering calls, mails and chat messages. Like why the fuck cant you read your mails like a damn normal person?!1 -
So I have a semi big project ongoing:
Because my modem+router combo sucks dick and gets buttfucked to much I want to make my own Router with PPPoE.
So I ordered an 8 euro used switch, 24ports for management, but our IP TV provider is sucking cock too! He uses multicasting to send the fucking IP TV signal. So the switch is not VLan ready and so the network will be flodded.
But that's not the worst...
I don't know how to route VOIP over QoS correctly... So I just hope that part work's!
I also ordered another network switch Wich is manageable + an God damn networking closet. 80 bucks gone again! Wish me luck this works better...
BUT THATS NOT THE WORST BECAUSE NOW COMES THE HEAVY PART!
I wanted to use my old AMD Athlon X2 64bit and 4 gigs of RAM PC to be my powerhouse of the router. I plugged it into the wall, booted, screen error... Thought it might be the integrated graphics card... Unplugged my old one, inserted it.... AND IT WOR... NOPE NOPE IT DIDN'T NOW MY DAMN MOTHERBOARD IS FUCKING FRIED TO DUST BECAUSE OF THE GOD DAMN ... I DONT EVEN KNOW! AAAAA
So I thought I could temporarily use my raspberry pi one model b, a good fellow with multiple years of usage! I plugged in the sd card into my girls laptop, wasn't at home, and her God damn internet downloaded that shitty raspbian (sorry raspi but your servers sometimes are very slow) and after the download I realized her GOD DAMN SD READER DIDNT FUCKING WORK!!!
SO I GUESS I WILL WAIT!1 -
I recently went through a very detailed and well-explained Python-based project/lesson by Karpathy which is called micrograd. This is a tiny scalar-valued autograd engine and a neural net on top of it.
The project above is, as expected, built on Python. For learning purposes, I wanted to see how such a network may be implemented in TypeScript and came up with a 🤖 micrograd-ts - https://github.com/trekhleb/... repository (and also with a demo - https://trekhleb.dev/micrograd-ts/ of how the network may be trained).
Trying to build anything on your own very often gives you a much better understanding of a topic. So, this was a good exercise, especially taking into account that the whole code is just ~200 lines of TS code with no external dependencies.
The micrograd-ts repository might be useful for those who want to get a basic understanding of how neural networks work, using a TypeScript environment for experimentation.
With that being said, let me give you some more information about the project.
## Project structure
- [micrograd/](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) — this folder is the core/purpose of the repo
- [engine.ts](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) — the scalar `Value` class that supports basic math operations like `add`, `sub`, `div`, `mul`, `pow`, `exp`, `tanh` and has a `backward()` method that calculates a derivative of the expression, which is required for back-propagation flow.
- [nn.ts](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) — the `Neuron`, `Layer`, and `MLP` (multi-layer perceptron) classes that implement a neural network on top of the differentiable scalar `Values`.
- [demo/](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) - demo React application to experiment with the micrograd code
- [src/demos/](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) - several playgrounds where you can experiment with the `Neuron`, `Layer`, and `MLP` classes.
Demo (online)
---------------------
To see the online demo/playground, check the following link:
🔗 https://trekhleb.dev/micrograd-ts3 -
I hate the elasticsearch backup api.
From beginning to end it's an painful experience.
I try to explain it, but I don't think I will be able to cover it all.
The core concept is:
- repository (storage for snapshots)
- snapshots (actual backup)
The first design flaw is that every backup in an repository is incremental. ES creates an incremental filesystem tree.
Some reasons why this is a bad idea:
- deletion of (older) backups is slow, as newer backups need to be checked for integrity
- you simply have to trust ES that it does the right thing (given the bugs it has... It seems like a very bad idea TM)
- you have no possibility of verification of snapshots
Workaround... Create many repositories as each new repository forces an full backup.........
The second thing: ES scales. Many nodes / es instances form a cluster.
Usually backup APIs incorporate these in their design. ES does not.
If an index spans 12 nodes and u use an network storage, yes: a maximum of 12 nodes will open an eg NFS connection and start backuping.
It might sound not so bad with 12 nodes and one index...
But it get's pretty bad with 100s of indexes and several dozen nodes...
And there is no real limiting in ES. You can plug a few holes, but all in all, when you don't plan carefully your backups, you'll get a pretty f*cked up network congestion.
So traffic shaping must be manually added. Yay...
The last thing is the API itself.
It's a... very fragile thing.
Especially in older ES releases, the documentation is like handing you a flex instead of toilet paper for a wipe.
Documentation != API != Reality.
Especially the fault handling left me more than once speechless...
Eg:
/_snapshot/storage/backup
gives you a state PARTIAL
/_snapshot/storage/backup/_status
gives you a state SUCCESS
Why? The first one is blocking and refers to the backup status itself. The second one shouldn't be blocking and refers to the backup operation.
And yes. The backup operation state is SUCCESS, while the backup state might be PARTIAL (hence no full backup was made, there were errors).
So we have now an additional API that we query that then wraps the API of elasticsearch. With all these shiny scary workarounds like polling, since some APIs are blocking which might lead to a gateway timeout...
Gateway timeout? Yes. Since some operations can run a LONG (multiple hours) time and you don't want to have a ton of open connections hogging resources... You let the loadbalancer kill it. Most operations simply run in ES in the background, while the connection was killed.
So much joy and fun, isn't it?
Now add the latest SMR scandal and a few faulty (as in SMR instead of CMD) hdds in a hundred terabyte ZFS pool and you'll get my frustration level.
PS: The cluster has several dozen terabyte and a lot od nodes. If you have good advice, you're welcome - but please think carefully about this fact.
I might have accidentially vaporized people sending me links with solutions that don't work on large scale TM.2 -
I didn't set out to be a dev.. so not much support dev wise, but in general loads.
I dropped out of uni, went back home to avoid paying rent and at least get some form of education.. here parents are obliged to take care of kids until they finish schooling but still.. they could've bitched about me dropping out. They were just concerned I wouldn't be employable without any kind of education and with lesser grade.. anyhow, I probably wouldn't be where I am if I continued wasting their money trying to finish uni when I wasn't motivated enough (still huge problems with ocd so at that time and it was too overwhelming).
I had a plan to finish this along the job when I can afford it but the courses are for regular students only..so no way I could attend them..
Anyhow, I am information science engineer by profession (if that is even how it translates to english), should be taking care of network & computer administration..yet here I am maintaining, bugfixing & developing most 'hated' projects at this firm & I love it!!
So yeah, I hope parents are proud of me..have to ask them though..
Some details in here somewhere: https://devrant.com/rants/2870913/...
edit: typoooooossssss -
As promissed.
Day #1 on THE other project. Nothing fancy, just setting up my dev env. Got a decent pc with all the required network permissions. And this time I got w10 [last year I was working there on w7 pc via rdp from another w7 laptop. Dont ask...]
of course no localadmin rights to set shit up. Downloaded all the installs, found someone who has admin rights to run them. I even managed to get admin powershell!
Ran all installers, enabled long paths support, env vars, tweak here, tweak there,... Installed git bash to at least have a taste of shell. Decided to try out wsl. Enabled the feature, didnt reboot right away.
Rebooted. 2xclick on ubuntu setup and I get an error claiming wsl is not ebabled. Wtf? Did I do it wrong? I see bash command is there now so I must have done it right. After some googling I found out that even though I can enable wsl, it doesnt work on my version of windows. It's too okd they say. Yeah, tx MS, that's very intuitive and user friendly!
Allright, my hopes to habe a decent sub-os died. Git bash it is :( but I miss tmux soooo much. Then I came across smth that caught my eye. Msys2 it's called. Apparently it's based on cygwin and has a pacman package manager! ´pacman -S tmux´ -- hippee-ka-yay motherfuckers! It's not the best terminal emulation, but it works quite allright and it has tmux. And netcat!
Banished to mouseclickerland still managed to find a good enough shell. Yayy!
So there it is. My first day's ups and downs, disappointments and discoveries.
If you know a better shell I could set up on w10, please, share -
okay, it has come to it.
Yes, I most likely have a faulty audio controller in my laptop.
Yes, I understand that that's probably why my speakers are making unusual background noises.
And yes, I realize that this might be the reason why I can't hear anything in my 3.5mm earphones.
But, why, dear Cinnamon, WHY do you have to keep me from any kind of system settings GUI? I can no longer launch the System Settings, Network settings, sound settings, etc -- no Settings at all.
And why did you have to freeze the whole Cinnamon the first time the problem appeared? The X didn't mind it, ffs! I could move the mouse around... but that's pretty much it. Apart from switching to TTYs and moving the mouse I couldn't do anything else in the UI.
That's pretty annoying. It's not like I can remove my audio controller... (I don't think breaking off the corner of my MB where the audio region is counts as 'remove the audio controller').
This first happened when I fried my wifi µPCIe card. That's alright - I could replace it and use system settings again. But now...? How the fuck do I go around that NOW???1 -
My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...
I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.
Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.
In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.
As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.
The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.
It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).
We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.
Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.
This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.
The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.
Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.
And... Fucking and!
Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.
Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.
Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.
What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").
Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.
This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?2 -
Anyway Github has launched its app.
Positioning as a social network and trend aggregator is becoming increasingly clear.
It doesn't make much difference to me, I almost always prefer the web version and Github's works well.
But do you know what we really need?
- Native dark mode2 -
Working full time as a "Protocol Engineer" for a big company, taking care of pretty much everything related to AS/NAS on the network layer (2G, 3G, 4G).
I hate it, but it pays really well.
On my free time, revising ML/DL stuff from Udacity's nano (finished it last year) while studying for the VR nano and keeping my coding skills fresh (basic to advanced structures, coding strategies, best practices and stuff).
Love it, but usually I pay a heavy price to keep my mind in place.
Sometimes I just wish to give everythin up and travel the world with my 2 bucks and just try to get some rest. :v
To all of you who go through this kind of stuff, how are you holding up?2 -
So I am considering side games to add my main games. Mini games I guess they are called. I thought it might be fun to have random chessboards in game you can actually play. I wanted to actually have a decent chess engine behind the game. Off the bat I found a GPL one. I think it is designed to be communicated externally. So what does that mean for using it in my game? If I communicate to an external process is this violating GPL? I have no intention of making my game open source. Well it seems this use case is very nuanced:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/...
The consensus on a lot of these discussions is the scope of the use of the program. Are you bundling for convenience or bundling for intrinsic utility? This is fascinating because using a compiler on a Windows platform could be a possibly violation. That is a proprietary program calling a GPL one. This is actually handled in the GPL as far as I know. So, if I use a GPL engine as a mini game is that the same as a full blown chess game? What if I support 10 different engines in a full blown chess game?
Now to play devil's advocate even further. Are proprietary phone apps that communicate to GPL software that serve data intrinsically linked? The app will not function without the server or computer os the server runs on. A lot of the web tech is largely GPL or has large amount of GPL programs. Should the web code be under GPL? Should the phone app be under GPL? This sounds ridiculous to some degree. But is that the same as bundling a GPL app and communicating to it from the program via network or command line? The phone app depends upon this software.
Now to protect myself I will find a decent chess engine that is either LGPL or something more permissive. I just don't want the hassle. I might make the chess engine use a parameter in case someone else might want a better engine they want to add though. At that point it is the user adding it. Maybe the fact that it would not be the only game in town is a factor as well.
I am also considering bundling python as a whole to get access to better AI tools (python is pretty small compared to game assets). It seems everything is python when it comes to AI. The licensing there is much better though. I would love to play with NLP for commanding npcs.
I am not discussing linking at all, btw.3 -
I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.
I want a logic check.
I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.
In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.
College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...
Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*
Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"
Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.
In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.
Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".
I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'
Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.
The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.
So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.
Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.11 -
Hey all
Much rather ask here than on a subreddit full of jerks
I have a PC running Ubuntu 20.04LTS that I use as a media server.
8GB RAM
i3 6100
1TB Samsung HDD (Boot)
3TB Seagate Barracuda
2TB WD Blue
The 2TB and 3TB are NTFS drives. I formatted them that way because they are network shared to Windows machines. Often when watching videos off those drives, they kinda just stick for a second here and there. You know, like how a scratched DVD would.
This happens regardless of if I watching directly on the server or over the network on another PC or my TV
I tried copying a video over onto the boot drive and then it worked fine.
The 3TB has one bad sector and the 2TB is reportedly perfectly healthy. So any ideas?
Could it be as simple as bad sata or power connectors?
Speeds seem fine when copying to and from though20 -
as a seasoned systems eng myself, i had huge mental block of "i am not a programmer" whining when starting to incorperate agile/infrastructure as code for more seasoned syseng staff.
leadership made devops a role and not a practice so lots of growing pains. was finally able to win them over by asking them to look at how many 'scripts' and 'tools' they wrote to make life easier... and how much simpler and sustainable using puppet/ansible/chef/salt... and checking in all our sacred bin files and only approved 'scripts' would be pushed thru automation tool after post review.
we still are not programmers or developers, but using specific practices and source control took some time but saving us loads of time and gives us ability to actually do engineering
but just have 2 groups of younger guys that grew up wanting to be the bofh/crumudgen get off my systems types that are like not even 30... frustrating as they are the ones that should be more familiar with the shift from strictly ops to some overlap. and the devs that ask for root now that they can launch instances on aws or can launch docker containers and microservice..... ugggg. these 2 groups have never had to rack and stack servers, network gear, storage... just all magic to them because they can start 50 servers with a button click.
try to get past the iam roles, acls, facls, selinux and noshell i have been pushing. bitches. -
Up until now, I never had any breaking updates on Linux on my laptop, Except for Nvidia drivers stopping. It would switch to noveau. Even my cobbled together hack of Broadcom Bluetooth solution worked without even having to touch it. Well, I still don't have problems with core Linux but add gnome to the issue mix today. Surprisingly, Nvidia drivers for the first time Nvidia drivers upgraded (to 340) and I didn't had to do anything for it to work. Gnome deprecated synaptics driver support and now uses libinput implementation for it. Well Ubuntu Gnome updater won't clean the configuration and I had to remove the driver and clean config myself. Nothing too much, i have to deal with these stuff on my arch installation but Ubuntu has been "it works fine. No need to interfere" thing for me. It works fine on Wayland (it always used libinput on Wayland a if I am correct) but nvidia drivers doesn't support Wayland. And then since the update gnome has been disabling some of my extensions at random. All on X. I have no problems with Wayland except for Nvidia fucking drivers. All that said, its still better than windows where I lost fucking network connectivity during something important. And the trackpad drivers on Linux are somehow much better than anything I have used on windows. (that or Sony made fucking great trackpads and nobody noticed). Here's to hoping Nvidia starts supporting drawing on Wayland and I can ditch X completely. I have seen visible improvements in performance under load and slight decrease in battery usage with Wayland.8
-
A game taking place inside an operating system. Like Tron but needs to have much more solid analogies. User's body as tty process. Some representation of scheduler priority and memory allocation. Forking. Children and zombies. Init.
Some process-ownable token representing file handles.
Network ports as portals through which data may be sent by acquiring a file handle and using it.
/proc, /mem, etc are extreme stretch goals.
Never really started because I couldn't decide how to represent all the different parts so they would all be consistent *and* entertaining
As an extension of the extreme stretch goals, a multiplayer functionality where players can shell into each other's game worlds ("computers") -
TL;DR : How would you 'smart home' with privacy?
How would you go about a privacy focused home automation/smart home setup?
What I feel is not necessarily important
> some assistant that you can have conversations with.
> Not being in home network to automate.
What I feel is essential. (in decreasing order of importance)
> Being a able to control appliances/electronics with voice/app (optional gesture)
> Have features to automate stuff, like turn on something if something happens (IFTTTish)
> Easily play music from Spotify or something similar, e.g. " * Play some Tchaikovsky."
> Simple alarm and reminder features.
So far I have seen relays and other devices that you add in the wiring and they connect to wifi. They work surprisingly well, but whatever I came across also collects personal user data.
Also not aware of any google home and alexa alternative that can so seamlessly pick up commands through ambient noise.
What are your thoughts and views?
P. S. I would have picked up something like this as my side project, but I don't see my self having that much free time atleast for the next 4-5 months.4 -
! Dev
I don't know much about the biology, but from what i know, a virus is never treatable. In due course of time we might generate a medicine that will modify our immunity system to fight against it, like polio and when this medicine is available, all the human race would get it and that's how this epidemic ends.
Until then, we all would need a total social isolation at some instance of time, as it is being done now.
But here is my main question : what to do until then? How will the economy survive? General stores, grocery markets, restaurant and fast food, clothings and many other industries and dominantly involves direct interaction.
Shutting down and going online is also not the solution. Poor/small businesses can't afford it. companies like amazon , dominos, etc have huge network of delivery guys for e shopping, but won't that be soon banned too?
Looks like our technology in robotics and drone delivery is too slow to be proved effective in this situation . I am hoping the technology would be a solution to such situation.
What are your thoughts about it?4 -
Installing, updating or adding components to Visual Studio is so strange; there's no network traffic (after the "Acquiring" phase), not much CPU load and mostly low disk load. Yet the process moves more slowly than a Sophia Coppola movie.
How do they manage that? By inserting a Thread.Sleep(50) between every instruction?1 -
Ive repeatedly posted this over and over and i will continue to because i really want this collaboration network to grow! If you're not interested then share this with anyone who might be:
"Guys help me grow my small collaboration group. If you're interested in learning new things,collaborating new ideas or just wanna talk to some cool cats then join us. My goal is to grow it as much as possible so anyone can find the help they need on their next/current idea. If interested drop your email and ill send you an invite to our slack. I don't care what your skill set is. You might learn something new. You might not. If anything youll make new friends :)"6 -
Soo Guys,
I am thinking of a new Laptop for developing abroad. Also because my PC is to much power crunching.
I first thought of an MacBook. Thanks to my human intelligence I have thrown away this idea.
I may want to use an surface pro (not the beefiest one, just like i5, 8gb RAM and 265ssd) or an laptop with Linux flash.
Because I am used to develop in Windows environment I might choose the surface. I really love Linux but as I progress in my (jet many, but not enough) languages I might stay at windows.
I wouldn't choose any HP or Lenovo laptop any more, only bad experience.
What do you guys think? Any other opinions?
Edit: I want to use it for:
- WebDevelopment
- Java Application Development
- C#/C Development
- Server Development
- Game Development
- Network Adminstration
- Server Administration
- Some Random Stuff6 -
Update:
I've been trying to leave DoD for a couple of months now. Translating my 10 year's experience with complex Intelligence enterprise level systems to something relatable to the civilian IT world. Grabbed a few certs to help out A+, network+ and security+ with Linux+ as my next target. Photos of me working on unclassified systems, radios, cell towers and servers. I'm a teacher for military UAS so this shouldn't be to hard to get even a basic job in IT right.
No one will hire...
Linux admin: Nope
Network admin: Nope
Assistant Network admin: Nope
IT call service: Nope
Pool cleaner fucking nope
Many interviews and nothing
I'm broke and sold all of my personal valuables. I can't hold out much longer and really looking at becoming homeless. But I'm kinda ok with it, one last payment on my apartment and car is all I can do now. My parents think I'm in Afghanistan working a six figure job lol
DoD: we see you're trying to leave we'll pay you alot to teach A+, Network+ and Security+ traveling all across the country and staying at hotels with all expenses paid.
FU FU FU I want out please tell me someone has a job, I'll be a janitor of a server room Idc I just want out. Fuck the pay
I start Tuesday...4 -
I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.
I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...
At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.
This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.
So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.
Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.
I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.
It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.
I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).
We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.
I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.
But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.
So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.
So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.
Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:
- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.
- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.
So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.
So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.
I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.
I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.
After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time. -
Another part of messy network gone.
Caching fucked me hard....
Isn't it just lovely that nowadays you need to nearly wipe a machine to get it from claiming stale data....
And thanks to DNS, HAProxy -/ service names / ... I think I know now why the curse of babel is so powerful.
When you have to think for 2 mins to make sure you've set the zone's right, cause otherwise you need to ProxyJump with SSH through more tunnels than imaginable (VPN/HO) to fix possible caching on several DNS servers.... You'll realize that it's russian roulette with too much bullets. :(
And If a monitoring service asks another monitoring service for status information which asks the first monitoring service which then asks the second monitoring cause you were too late...
You'll get very funky monitoring statistics.
Too slow, had to nuke it (mismatched a DNS name, the second monitoring service should have been a service node).
I think I've had more near death scenarios in the last 2 weeks than I like.
Hopefully I'll never have to do that again.
(Splitting and reordering a few dozen VLANs, assigning proper DNS names, loadbalancer migration....) -
I can't post a collab from the web client and I don't have a decent phone atm, anyways, this is an idea, tell me if you have any improvements or if you know of an implementation or would be interested in creating one.
A social network comment system that connects people across fields of interest and aids keeping relevant posts alive for a long time.
The basic principle is this: Every post may identify itself as a child to any number of other posts, or sections in other posts, which then act much like a bidirectional hyperlink between parent and child.
This leads to two unusual results:
1. that comments aren’t only added to posts, but specific paragraphs, sentences or even words.
2. that any comment may receive comments in much the same way the original post did, making comments identical to posts. (they could have their own pages and all).
This is in many ways like Reddit's infinite comment chains. The main difference is that here comments aren’t organized in trees but graphs, which makes it possible to connect related conversations from entirely different groups and times, resulting in a much more open yet concise discourse style with an increased persistence of topics. -
I was trying to set up my own "cloud" for iot experiments. I planned to use Intel Edison with mqtt broker (using mosca) and a node js app for providing API for mobiles and browser. And also to do other book keeping.
I spent the half day trying figure how to expose these servers to internet.
I configured ddns in noip.com and ddns settings configured to it in my router.
Port forwarded to the local server services I needed.
And then tested. Worked perfectly on any device in my router connected network. Tested on mobile network. Bam! It fucking doesn't work.
Then connected another router.
Double port forwarded. Again worked perfectly on router network. And failed on mobile.
Tested if ddns is right. Did nslookup it was fine as fuck.
Then disabled port forwarding. Did dmz. Nope. Nadda. No luck.
Then scratched my head so hard that I lost more already losing hairs.
Then remembered about router hardware firewall. Disabled it.
Tested
And there it didn't work.
My dreams shattered like a fucking deer hit by car on highway.
Didn't work.
Then I see the IP pointing to my router in nslookup. Its 172.20.xx.xx. Its a fucking private IP.
My Asshole ISP is running another private network behind firewall. Which I fucking can't port forward
Now I think how much of a noob and idiot I am. Fuck this shit. Fuck all of these shit.
I am going for SaaS option for mqtt broker.
(Or help me?)
Once again.
Asshole ISP.
Fuck your firewall.
(PS: I had test the next day. FML)2 -
i need an adult. I know noone who would understand my worries, so you guys need to be it.
i have a nextcloud running on my raspberry pi. performance is horrible, dont ask, but it works.
i mostly use it to backup the photos of my phone sd card every night when my phone charges. Internally this works good. If i am elseplace it wont for obvious reasons.
In my youthful joy of doom i opened port 443 and forward it to my raspi. I get internet via cable and my ip is pretty much static (it was the same for 10 months). So external access is provided.
Now i thought, its stupid that i cannot sign an ssl certificate cause i dont have a domain. Lets buy domain. But before i do that i did some try runs with duckdns to test the principle.
Some back and forth, it works now. Pretty god, i could even make a cron job on the raspbi to renew (that should work right?). Only problem. randoname.duckdns.org doesnt work internally. Or should not at least.
So i googled a bit and it turns out that my router (a cable fritz!box i bought myself) can be a local network dns. Or cannot. Regardless what i try, it doesnt accept the changed config file.
Now the problem.
It works anyway. randoname.duckdns.org points to my external "static" ip and resolves to that from my internal network..so it works on my phone or laptop. if i traceroute the thing it goes via two hops out and finishes in less than 1ms.
Now to the problem:
I have no fokkin clue why. The expected behaviour would be that it shouldnt work. If i do what i intended todo on pc in the hosts file tracert works correctly, directly pointing to the internal ip.
What i cannot figure out, is it the fritz!box being smart? Is it my ISP being smart?
Reason to rant: i have absolutly NOONE to ask, i know not a single person who would even understand what troubles me. I want to learn, i want to know WHY not just some mindless russian patchwork of "if it works its good enough".
thats depressing.8 -
It seems they mistaken me for italian giving me spaghetti all over the product. Go to frontend to check the app, react with weird jQuery, no routes, pages summoned by the templates that have concatenated values and html in vanilla js, changing screens/pages with jQuery, no router... ok lets see the other app, react, redux, offline capabilities and tought myself niicee hut nothing work as intended with clusterfuck of hacky workarounds that makes app look like it is working but with hardcoded data. Offline means automatic sync when you get the network back, right? Oh backend never developed any sync, so you guys can do it, we have to fix and patch some important stuff! I don't like php but whatever, let's see what is going on there... So much spaghetti bolognese there that Bologna actually called to ask if they can buy some, they are out of stock because of us!
This is just like that song mess.css from stdout, but in any file you open!
Living on deserted island eating grass and coconut for the rest of the life doesn't seem so bad atm!4 -
I want to do ssh is from outside the network. But I'm unable to do it. Very much frustrated. Has anyone tried it successfully?7
-
lets try again.
What the fuck is with apache. Why I cannot start the page. it should be 5 minutes work.
but it give some shitty error where it is not clear what is wrong
This site can’t be reached timetracker.local’s server IP address could not be found.
Try:
Checking the connection
Checking the proxy, firewall, and DNS configuration
Running Windows Network Diagnostics
ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED
how long apache is being developed? 10 years ? more? and cannot make normal error messages so you would know how to fix the problem . fuck that. I hate it so much. wasting my time. bastards.14 -
Have you ever considered switching to IT support/help desk?
I mean, sometimes I try to analyze my own situation from a 3rd person perspective and I realize I could have a pretty much stressless job with still enough money to live a normal life.
I have a BSc and MSc(soon to have) in CS, with focus on AI/ML. I've always been a geek with a problem solving attitude, that's why I got into computers in the first place. And now I'm pondering if I should just try an IT Support position, it's the kind of things I used to do as a teenager when a classmate had a network/computer problem, it doesn't even feel like a job to me. I could call it a day, get home at 5/6pm, and spend time on my personal projects (software, infosec) with a fresh mind, going to bed (and sleep) knowing that the next day would be a nice one. No clients wanting a new feature that you gotta implement and push on a production server friday afternoon because your ceo(who is also a pseudo proj manager) just said:"Yes, we can", while you watch the technical debt rising like amazon's stocks.
Maybe this is just the burnout talking, I don't know. Maybe I should just try being a software engineer outside of Uni in the first place, and only then start pondering.
Maybe a sysadmin position...
Have a nice day12 -
I am lazy to pair my android device to another android device via blutooth for tethering(Pan Access Network) for internet access. Wifi sucks too much battery. Whenever pairing is done, device asks for prompt message stating "yes" or "no" for connection. I want that it automatically by default give permission to connect. Is there any possible solution (maybe through adb shell or something). I have tried every site related to this issue but most of them have unix system Bluetooth issues so no luck. Reply if you know a fix.
-
"Ultimate" success for a dev?
I don't know what that would be, so I'll be answering that around my experience.
Start really poor, so when you start making good money, you value and appreciate it.
Work for a company (Startup/MNC doesn't matter), and build your network with people/clients.
Work really hard in the beginning era and fail as much as possible.
Quit said company and build your own client-base, cutting the middle men out of the equation.
Work on your terms after that, remotely obviously.
Years down the line, come up with your own idea and start a company which makes enough money to retire with ease, not worrying about saving up for retirement. -
Holy fucking shit, I hate ubuntu SO much.
So what it happened..
I was tryin to set up an Ubuntu server on my machine using virtual box, and I know what you are thinking, "VirtualBox?" yeah its the only machine I had lying around and it had windows and I didn't wanna re-format its hard drive.
So Here how it goes...
Install went fine.. But when I was trying to manage multiple network interfaces, it was Terrible & pain in the ASS 😡...
So initially I needed 2 network interfaces, one for NAT adapter and another Host-only interface for SSH and stuff.. so I made changes in virtualbox settings and rebooted the VM. and it stuck on "a start job is running for wait for network to be configured" I was like okayy and removed host-only adapter and rebooted, it booted fine :/ then I tried combo of bridged adapter with my Ethernet and a host-only adapter, and what? it booted finally! but this wasn't an optimal solution because it had and IP address within subnet of other devices with my router and half the bandwidth (like 50mbps or something).. I reverted back to NAT network & I checked with ifconfig and it STILL didn't had an IP address assigned to it for Host-only adapter!! FFS I deleted the VM and reinstalled the whole thing again but this time both interfaces attached..
after installing it stuck on same shit again :'(
"a start job is running for wait for network to be configured"... FUCK!
after about an hour of troubleshooting and trying different configurations, I still couldn't get it to work.. I never had such problems with centOS.
Fuck you ubuntu.. fuck you in the ass7 -
Anybody like to rip up CTF (or similar)? I've honestly never done a CTF before, I'd like to give jt a shot. I'll get my ass handed to me because I'm not back up to par on OpSec yet, but I adapt well and when I get into a nice groove I can make shit happen! (I like to think so, anyways haha!!)
I've been in full on dev mode lately and haven't had any time to Hulk Smash for a while... I went to fire up a new Kali live USB today and I couldn't run through the updates like I always have- they changed sooo much and I was pissed because I didn't have ethernet with me. That'll be another day for sure, but I still have my machine with Manjaro armed to the nutsack and back with the BlackArch rep. I def could use a break from the chaos, and getting my ass handed right to me sounds like an awesome time because learning is my favorite thing next to a possible chance at getting to destroy shit.
It's weird, because I'm sort of a n00b but also at the same time I've had computers ripped apart/jammed in my face since every day since I was 9 and Y2K was about to hit the fan lmao!! My hardware/network/layering knowledge is fuckin mint titties, I just can't code like a fuckin madman on the fly. I don't have a "primary" language, because I've been having to work with little bits of several languages for extended periods of time... I can at least find my way around all the dox without much of an issue and have no issue solving the probs I come across which is neat, but until the day comes where I can fuck a gaping hole through my keyboard on the fly like George Hotz during one of his lazy Sunday OpenCV SLAM/Python code streams all jacked up on Herba Mate hahahahaha!!!!
The dude uses fucking VIM and codes faster than anyone I've ever seen on levels of science/math so challenging I almost shit myself inside out when I catch one!!!! The level of respect I have for all my fellow red pills in here is as high as it gets, and that's one of the best parts about being a code junkie- sometimes ya get to cross paths with beastly, out of this world people that teach you so much without even having to explain shit.
If anyone's down, or maybe has some resources for me to check out so I can get my chops up let's make it happen -
Shits ridiculous
So much of my goddamn time wasted
Perfect idea really
Gradually grab all pixel locations that fit space constraints
Remember finishing this script and watching the areas populate
Purpose ? Extract shapes to feed my damn neural network for custom character recognition
So much goddamn time wasted
Bastards I hate you all !3 -
Just what is life
1st I love developing Web Apps
2nd I hate when it has bugs (Always does Everyone does)
3rd More hate for Security related bugs
So I started bug hunting so that even I can make developers hurt I thought I might find peace here
But here we fucking have SQL Injections which are not really that bad easy peasy
But we also have special kind of SQL Injections the Boolean Based ones (Medium Level Demons) and also The Time Based SQL Injections (Medium Level Demon with lots of health consumes too much time has a repetitive process and we have to wait a lot also if you have network lag you are doomed)
No its nice story till here but here it fucking ends the happiness I mean my luck is worst kind of fucking thing anybody ever can have.
I got a mix of both Demons;_;
A Time-Based Boolean SQL Injections yess fuckety amounts of fucking time wasted and redundant fucking process also to make matters worst the fucking famous tool #SQLMAP doesn't work in my case -
sorry, search engines were not helpful. does anyone know of a lightweight browser that doesn't need installing but stores everything in the os user directory?
i have no it-permissions but want to provide my department with a suitable browser. we have ie and edge, but the latter deletes everything on closing which makes it unusable for my usecase and the it is not willing to set this up different.
ff portable can not be run from a read-only-folder and any other scenario either needs installing on every terminal or does not handle different profiles which is essential. i read that this is the case for any portable browser.
i'd like to set it up properly with neccessary start page, favourites, adblocker and so on but just in one network directory for maintainance reasons.
we run a web based application strictly local but each windows-user-account must have their own setting in this app (cookies or preferably webstorage).
am i asking too much for? -
Relatively often the OpenLDAP server (slapd) behaves a bit strange.
While it is little bit slow (I didn't do a benchmark but Active Directory seemed to be a bit faster but has other quirks is Windows only) with a small amount of users it's fine. slapd is the reference implementation of the LDAP protocol and I didn't expect it to be much better.
Some years ago slapd migrated to a different configuration style - instead of a configuration file and a required restart after every change made, it now uses an additional database for "live" configuration which also allows the deployment of multiple servers with the same configuration (I guess this is nice for larger setups). Many documentations online do not reflect the new configuration and so using the new configuration style requires some knowledge of LDAP itself.
It is possible to revert to the old file based method but the possibility might be removed by any future version - and restarts may take a little bit longer. So I guess, don't do that?
To access the configuration over the network (only using the command line on the server to edit the configuration is sometimes a bit... annoying) an additional internal user has to be created in the configuration database (while working on the local machine as root you are authenticated over a unix domain socket). I mean, I had to creat an administration user during the installation of the service but apparently this only for the main database...
The password in the configuration can be hashed as usual - but strangely it does only accept hashes of some passwords (a hashed version of "123456" is accepted but not hashes of different password, I mean what the...?) so I have to use a single plaintext password... (secure password hashing works for normal user and normal admin accounts).
But even worse are the default logging options: By default (atleast on Debian) the log level is set to DEBUG. Additionally if slapd detects optimization opportunities it writes them to the logs - at least once per connection, if not per query. Together with an application that did alot of connections and queries (this was not intendet and got fixed later) THIS RESULTED IN 32 GB LOG FILES IN ≤ 24 HOURS! - enough to fill up the disk and to crash other services (lessons learned: add more monitoring, monitoring, and monitoring and /var/log should be an extra partition). I mean logging optimization hints is certainly nice - it runs faster now (again, I did not do any benchmarks) - but ther verbosity was way too high.
The worst parts are the error messages: When entering a query string with a syntax errors, slapd returns the error code 80 without any additional text - the documentation reveals SO MUCH BETTER meaning: "other error", THIS IS SO HELPFULL... In the end I was able to find the reason why the input was rejected but in my experience the most error messages are little bit more precise.2 -
I think I have configuphobia.
When you need to setup configurations for like anything, it's always super loosely coupled and can break when you even breathe on it.
Database table columns? Configured once.
Authorization management? Create a user and configure the password and username in the application.
Backups? Configure the network path to backup to.
All these things are so EASY to break!
Maybe I'm overcautious, but I really dislike it.
There are ways around it of course, like documentation and automation, but it's all so much work. And even then it's still loosely coupled.
What do you all do to keep your configs working without getting nightmares?3 -
Im always trying to learn new things. Im passionate about learning new things, especially development. So much i started a small collaboration group of developers and slack group to collaborate new projects/ideas,get to know new people, and just to learn new things from each other. The group is not language specific developers only, but mostly consists of PHP/Laravel developers at the moment, so im always trying to grow that network as much as possible, so if you would like to join my network to collaborate new ideas or to just even talk to some cool cats, ill send you an invite any day. Anyways, back to my original reason for this post. Im mid level developer who considers himself pretty knowledgeable in PHP and Laravel. Im curious to what other developers use to learn new things. Im constantly questioning my skillset and compare myself to senior developers who always blow me away with their knowledge which often makes me feel like i dont know enough. Currently I use resources such as:
-laracasts.com
-serversforhackers.com
-digital ocean articles or any textbook that wont cost me an arm and a leg lol
I mean i just want to learn about tech related stuff always but currently interested in learning specifically about development topics such as:
- Server administration because i would consider this my weakest skill set (things like provisioning,nginx/security, deployment)
- Continous Integration (as ive never been at a job that practices it)
- RESTful APIs(as ive never developed one)
and so much more but i wont waste your time with my never ending list. What resources/tools do you guys use for your learning?6 -
This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :
• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*
Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.
While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.
The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!
Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.
One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.
Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.
I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.
bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)
--------------------------
There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!
• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))5 -
Initially I was taking Network Security. Didn't like it that much. Figured I should explore and took a diploma in Information Tech.
First programming assignment, stayed up the whole night to solve it accompanied by a couple of Monster drinks. Got hooked on programming ever since. Picked up caffeine addiction along the way.
Oh and I'm now lactose intolerant. Strongly believe it's due to the large amounts of coffee I had back in the day. -
So recently I've been feeling like I fooled myself into thinking I'm any good at anything regarding development.
Today I tried to deploy a Console Application that would run nightly. The production systems are much more guarded, as it should be, but I should still be able to schedule a windows task (yeah yeah, windows servers, not the time Linux fanboys and not my choice :P) no problem.
Except I didn't expect that network users can't run jobs, because of a Group Policy about saving passwords on network accounts.
I expected a local administrator account to be available, and it wasn't.
Also a web API isn't available, even though I could telnet to the address on port 443 (HTTPS). A proxy apparently accepts all HTTP/HTTPS traffic and so on.
All this I feel like I should have known....
So am I in my own head, or am I right in thinking maybe I'm not "pro" development yet? Maybe I don't deserve to be "pro".
Thoughts?4 -
TL;DR I have to bump a Redis cluster from t3.medium to m6g.large just to get enough network bandwidth even though I have no need of the extra memory.
Debugged an interesting issue today.
I am adding Elasticache to a project to reduce strain on the single node postgres DB.
Deployed a Redis replication group with 2 shards, with multi-AZ replication for resilience.
Everything was going well. We arent caching that much atm so was barely using 100Mb of memory.
Suddenly, when our US region comes online, latency skyrockets and the logs are full of Jedis timeout errors.
Still no issue with memory or node CPU.
The cause? Arbitrary network bandwidth throttling by AWS. The app currently processes about 3,000 requests per second so we were exceeding Amazons random ass allowances which arent documented anywhere.1 -
Sigh. I don't like the methods of first line helpdeskers. Computer problem? Restart it, or.. re-image it. The hell..
I know these are standard practices but I don't like them at all. Just because there's a small issue with a device, you're going to throw everything away? No troubleshooting at all? I don't call that troubleshooting nor helping.
My friend works as first line helpdesk and I told him: "Hey, WhatsApp isn't giving me double checkmarks anymore for my messages to you since last night. It's odd." and his response is: "Restart your phone". My god.. how much more technically ignorant could he be? Everything network-related on my phone is working, including WhatsApp, but no.. "restart your phone". Anyway.4 -
Hello fellow devranters,
I never thought I'd make a post like this but I need your help/opinion.
My thesis work is about to get published, I worked on a C++ software that solves what we call equivalent reactor network models (basically, different ideal chemical reactors interconnected in various ways). This extends an ecosystem in my research group that is OpenSMOKE, and every collateral applications usually follows a xxxSMOKE naming scheme.
I came up with NodusSMOKE (Nodus is Latin for fishing net) first but it doesn't feel right. Other names I came up with are LinkSMOKE or NetworkSMOKE.
I believe here I might find people who are much more creative than me. I kindly ask your help my dudes.2 -
rant.author != this
Christ people. This is just sh*t.
The conflict I get is due to stupid new gcc header file crap. But what
makes me upset is that the crap is for completely bogus reasons.
This is the old code in net/ipv6/ip6_output.c:
mtu -= hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr);
and this is the new "improved" code that uses fancy stuff that wants
magical built-in compiler support and has silly wrapper functions for
when it doesn't exist:
if (overflow_usub(mtu, hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr), &mtu) ||
mtu <= 7)
goto fail_toobig;
and anybody who thinks that the above is
(a) legible
(b) efficient (even with the magical compiler support)
(c) particularly safe
is just incompetent and out to lunch.
The above code is sh*t, and it generates shit code. It looks bad, and
there's no reason for it.
The code could *easily* have been done with just a single and
understandable conditional, and the compiler would actually have
generated better code, and the code would look better and more
understandable. Why is this not
if (mtu < hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr) + 8)
goto fail_toobig;
mtu -= hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr);
which is the same number of lines, doesn't use crazy helper functions
that nobody knows what they do, and is much more obvious what it
actually does.
I guarantee that the second more obvious version is easier to read and
understand. Does anybody really want to dispute this?
Really. Give me *one* reason why it was written in that idiotic way
with two different conditionals, and a shiny new nonstandard function
that wants particular compiler support to generate even half-way sane
code, and even then generates worse code? A shiny function that we
have never ever needed anywhere else, and that is just
compiler-masturbation.
And yes, you still could have overflow issues if the whole "hlen +
xyz" expression overflows, but quite frankly, the "overflow_usub()"
code had that too. So if you worry about that, then you damn well
didn't do the right thing to begin with.
So I really see no reason for this kind of complete idiotic crap.
Tell me why. Because I'm not pulling this kind of completely insane
stuff that generates conflicts at rc7 time, and that seems to have
absolutely no reason for being anm idiotic unreadable mess.
The code seems *designed* to use that new "overflow_usub()" code. It
seems to be an excuse to use that function.
And it's a f*cking bad excuse for that braindamage.
I'm sorry, but we don't add idiotic new interfaces like this for
idiotic new code like that.
Yes, yes, if this had stayed inside the network layer I would never
have noticed. But since I *did* notice, I really don't want to pull
this. In fact, I want to make it clear to *everybody* that code like
this is completely unacceptable. Anybody who thinks that code like
this is "safe" and "secure" because it uses fancy overflow detection
functions is so far out to lunch that it's not even funny. All this
kind of crap does is to make the code a unreadable mess with code that
no sane person will ever really understand what it actually does.
Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that shit again. -
https://i.imgur.com/Y1Z7Ohk.png
I've never used Python much, but my network class had an assignment to make a program that would convert a physical MAC address to an EUI-64 address (as well as some other, easier functions). It's not the most elegant solution, I'm sure, but I'm proud of what I created.
(Reposted due to needing to rehost image)1 -
So, I feel wayyy behind the tech curve right now.
The SSD implementations you see online, they're still just a bunch of seperate sort of chaos machines that contain the standard perceptron-like model of a weight, cost, and bias right ? They just kind of inferred their values by training like any other neural network, in its sep-erate parts and just fed pieces of output data generated by other parts of the neural network to it right ?
I mean it implements with pytorch so its basically a really big array of tuples in a sense that are maniupulated in a specific way.
and then CNN's just feed data back into another trained piece of the model right ?
I'm curious because object classification is about the ONLY thing I've seen work even close to properly lol
there is just so much fraud these days. sigh.
and so many lamentable tech choices and attempts... like node lol -
App Review – Zomato 2.0
Some apps are as essential as oxygen by example of https://apps.apple.com/us/app/... . Zomato, for sure, is one of them. If you love to eat outside and you’re not living in a cave, chances are that you’ve already gone through Zomato on the web or used one of their mobile apps. If not – Zomato is the place where you can locate eating joints, scan through their menus, check for home delivery numbers and a lot more than that. If you are diabetic you keep sweets in your pocket, similarly Zomato is something every food-loving person needs to keep in their mobile phones(I agree how PR-ish that sounds but it’s true).
Zomato had recently integrated social features on its website. That was followed by the much needed overhaul of their mobile apps. They’ve also updated their iOS app recently and I decided to give it a shot. Zomato 2.0 on the iPhone is super slick to say the least. The redesign brings a lot of character to the app. The Zomato app is now much more smoother, cleaner and powerful. The added social functionality adds more value to the app.
Design and Features
The 2.0 update completely changes the entire look and feel of the app. Everything from the app’s start screen to restaurant details has been changed. The default menu lets you explore and search eating places. Now there are icons for top 25 restaurants, reviews, favorites and more. The icons have been perfectly placed and it’s very easy to spot what you’re looking for.
Everything is just right. The app is highly responsive and there’s hardly any lag. If any, it will depend on your internet connectivity. Browsing menus is still a breeze and I personally love the way you can toggle between information, menu, photos and last but not the least, the reviews. Everything placed just perfectly to help you make that ultimate make or break decision – to eat or order from here or not?
Social
Everything is getting social. Even the next door Dolly-beauty-parlor apps are getting more social now. Zomato just integrated its social features on the web recently and they’re now a part of their mobile apps. On the iPhone app you need to login to access these social features. There’s a Top Foodies leaderboard that could prove to be a crucial game mechanic for the app. Browsing users’ profiles allows you to follow users. The profile pages tie up a user’s reviews and followers. This is all pretty neat and a part of a major plan at Zomato to take over the world.
With lists, network, user reviews etc. there’s a lot more to the app. I’m hearing that there’s still a lot more to come when it comes to social features on the Zomato iPhone app. I better start following up with people and posting reviews. This just kicked Foursquare where it hurts the most. And with that I’ve lost the little amount of motivation I had to check-in to places on Foursquare1